Up Close and Personal: One of the better ways to see the real Bali is by diving right in - in this case a leisurely stroll through the island’s stunning blanket of verdant ricefields, through where this trio of tourists are meandering with their local guide. Tour companies here have increasingly gone off the beaten track in recent years to offer experiences to tourists other than the traditional attractions. Treks also offer a chance to meet and view villagers up close - as well as working off the excesses of the night before.

SEMINYAK ~ What is happiness? Being able to create what you want? Being able to appreciate and enjoy what you have? Or somewhere in between? Program yourself to be happy, here.

Two lady tourists came to see me, feeling unhappy and frustrated, each wanting to conceive a child yet having difficulty. As we explored their subconscious fears and beliefs in a transformational healing session, we discovered the main root of the problem was simply the belief:  I am having difficulty in conceiving. Our truth creates our reality so this was creating the problem.  Interestingly, difficulty in conceiving isn’t just about having babies – it also relates to our ability to conceive of things – to imagine them as being possible and thus to create them. The ladies were having a lot of trouble imagining themselves with babies – instead focusing on difficulties and costs. If you have trouble imagining your life the way you would like it to be, or creating what you want, then embrace the belief using the process below.

Fear of Loss

Another fear which can prevent you creating what you want is when your inner child fears “I’m afraid of being taken away.” You will fear losing things, or being depleted, which can stop you before you’ve even started creating, and also, you may fear “I’m afraid of my child being taken away,” which causes the fear of losing one’s creations (so again, it is hard to begin creating).

Stephen, a client from Belgium, came to me feeling unhappy about his purpose in life. It transpired he had two conflicting beliefs: I must have a purpose (because we all deserve one, of course) and I must have no purpose (i.e. I must be purposeless and useless - which he had decided as a result of a comment from his mother). These conflicting beliefs cancel each other out and together form the feeling purposeless-ness. To overcome this, simply embrace it using this belief process:

Say aloud:

I choose to believe/feel purposelessness

I love myself when I believe/feel purposelessness and I embrace it and I surrender.

Relax and drink water.

Positively Happy Beliefs

Program yourself for happiness with these. As you embrace the negative belief below, this installs the opposite, positive belief in yourself. You only need do it once.

I must not be perfectly happy, healthy and loved

I must not be grateful for all I have and am

I will not enjoy and appreciate what I have

I must not/may not be loving myself really

I may not be happy and I must have to pay for it

I’m afraid of contentment

Happy/Unhappy Logic

Here is a common subconscious mind mix-up. See if it is true for you: Feelings are not real. Only real things have value. Therefore feelings are not valuable. I feel stupid when I’m not valuable. So I will feel stupid whenever I have feelings. Happiness is just a feeling. Therefore happiness is stupid. I don’t want to feel stupid and not valuable. Therefore I must not really want to feel happy.

Healing Mood Swings

I have discovered that mood swings can be caused by conditional beliefs – a stream of connected beliefs or feelings that kick in when a certain condition is met. For example, if you subconsciously believe “I must be useless on my own,” then as soon as you are on your own, you will feel, inexplicably, useless. You may not realize that the aloneness is what has triggered the feelings of uselessness and wonder why you feel so awful. This we label a mood swing, but it’s just subconscious programming. You are programmed to feel useless when alone. As we know, subconsciously, how to fix the problem (don’t be alone), we may grab a relationship to make ourselves feel okay. But if we could just discover and release this inner programming, we could take a bit more time choosing a suitable relationship, and enjoy being alone.

By the way, the cause of this belief is usually an overbearing parent - who also believed the same thing - who clung to you as a child, needing you, and projected their uselessness onto you. In families, we pass on our beliefs through our behavior. Collectively, as “soul groups,” we work on overcoming them together in time. A group effort. In families, we also pass on the tendency to develop the diseases that relate to certain beliefs. The belief comes first, then the illness. We carry our beliefs with us, into our next lifetime and we often incarnate back into the same family, hence the illusion of inherited diseases. Actually, it’s the beliefs we bring that cause the disease to occur.

In computer programming terms, a conditional statement is where two things are linked together. This is how the logic looks:

If (condition A) = true, then (condition B).

So, in this example, we have If alone = true, then useless also = true.  Other common examples (yours may be different, even conflicting):

Fat = Stupid

Old = Ugly and Unattractive

Intelligent = Shrewish

Mother = Old, unsexy

Young = Foolish

Spiritual = unsexy

Hot = Sexy (hence wild tropical holidays)

Dark = Afraid (hence racism – we project our fear of the dark onto those with dark skins)

Dirty = Common

You can’t have one without the other. So, in the above examples, if something triggers you feeling foolish, you will also feel young (hence, you may subconsciously enjoy feeling foolish, as it makes you feel young). If you feel stupid, you may start eating (so you also become fat). If something triggers “oldness,” you will suddenly feel unattractive, (and any other feelings you have linked to “unattractive”) and so on. It’s a chain reaction. We have whole strings of these conditions, things we have inadvertently linked which don’t necessarily belong together and cause whole baskets of feelings. Hence mood swings and “illogical” feelings, depressions and moods, once something hits the trigger.

Try this to discover what some of your conditional links are:

Relax, breathe and imagine you are sitting at a card table in a bridge school with lots of other people – all the readers of this column. You are playing cards with an elf with big pointy ears and a pointy nose. He has a Happy Families pack, with brightly colored illustrations that he is turning over in front of you. Together you are discussing the cards, choosing, sorting and grouping them, putting them in piles. Continue to play with the cards, working with the elf, arranging them for as long as you want. Swap a few cards with neighbors if you need to. When ready, thank the elf and shake his hand. He takes a sharp pencil from behind his ear, licks it, smiles and ticks a number of green boxes on a white score card for you, giving you a record of what you have just done. You take the card to the register, where it is run through a machine with green lights on which staples it with a receipt.  When ready, gently return with the card and reflect on what you have just discovered.

Fear of Confrontation

A common fear which can keep you stuck in situations which are expensive emotionally and physically is fear of confrontation. It can keep you from asking for what you want and block your happiness. Embrace the belief: “I must avoid confrontation at any cost” to clear it.

Beliefs:

Purposelessness (embrace the word)

Suffering must be my new purpose in life

I’m having difficulty conceiving

I’m afraid of being taken away

I’m afraid of losing my child

I must avoid confrontation at any cost

I’m afraid when I confront, it’s all goes downhill

Intangible things have no value

Relax, breathe and find yourself sitting in a flower garden with a wizard, at a card table. He shows his wide sleeves are empty, then makes magical passes over some large playing cards with a magic wand.  You watch him effortlessly manipulating the cards in the air. Then he nods and invites you to pull a card from the deck. You choose a card and place it face up on the table. The figure on the card animates as you watch. The wizard lays some more cards besides and they all begin to move and interact. Watch the playing card figures for a while. The wizard then blows into his fist and produces something. Continue to watch as long as you wish. The Wizard gives you a gift, and you thank him and say goodbye. When ready, gently return to the room.

My healing music is now available at Cozy for you to try (address below). It evokes the Theta healing brainwave pattern. I’d love to hear your feedback on how you found this, or any topic of interest to you – win a CD if your query is answered here.

 (Names and details mentioned have been changed to protect identities.)

NEXT ISSUE:  Inner Child Healing

Jelila is an international healer and intuitive guide who practices in Asia and Australia. She is now in Bali, offering inspiring transformational coaching, healing, and workshops. Try/buy Jelila’s healing music at Cozy: Jl. Sunset Blok A/3, North Simpang Siur, near Kuta roundabout. Tel: 0361 766762. If you have a question you would like answered in this column, write to Jelila at jelila@thebalitimes.com. www.jelila.com. Bali Tel:  +62 (0) 81 239 43354.

SEMINYAK ~ With ultra-luxurious villa complexes and resorts alongside the ocean serving as a backdrop, jaded Jl. Seminyak Raya and surrounding areas are getting a much-needed facelift – in the form of private enterprise and a seemingly unceasing local and foreign desire for cutting-edge property on what has repeatedly been voted the world’s most popular island destination.

Read entire article… »

By Beverly Beyette

Los Angeles Times

THE RED CENTER, Australia ~ Ten days, one wallaby, no kangaroos.

My fantasy - adorable ‘roos galumphing around every bush in the Outback - was just that.

Camels - wild ones, at that - were another matter. About 60,000 of the feral beasts roam the Outback that unfolded outside the picture window of my train compartment.

I had come to Australia to ride the Ghan, the legendary train that bisects the country, traveling from Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north. It’s sometimes called the “Hundred Year Dream”; the last track was laid just two years ago, capping nearly a century of struggle to connect one end of this great emptiness to the other.

All told, the trip takes 48 hours. It is rugged and it is real, an antidote to too-well-trod territories.

My 1,850-mile adventure, from which I detoured in the middle, began at Keswick station in Adelaide, South Australia, on a Sunday in August. Just before our 5:15pm departure, the Ghan crew, decked in red, white and blue, lined up on the platform and delivered a spirited “All aboard!”

The first surprise was my compartment. This was Gold Kangaroo Service, the top of three classes on the train, but my single redefined “compact.” With the bed lowered, the door wouldn’t fully open. The cabin had a tiny closet and a sink that folded into the wall. By day, though, I had a comfortable seat from which to gaze out the window.

The Ghan does not offer luxury sleeping accommodation. The cars date from the 60s and 70s and look it. (I sneaked a peek into a Red Kangaroo cabin, the next class down, and it was even smaller.) This journey is about adventure, not luxury, although our crew - 21 attending to 220 passengers - was top-notch.

As I settled in, trying to stash the large suitcase that I should have checked, we rolled out of Adelaide, passing squat brick bungalows and graffiti-covered warehouses.

First on the passengers’ agenda was to choose a seating - sunset (6:30pm) or moonlight (8:30) - in the Stuart Restaurant, the nicely appointed maroon-and-gold diner. I chose the late seating. Before dinner, travelers gathered in the Gold Kangaroo lounge to sip free champagne and socialize.

Dinner in the diner was a happy surprise. Tables were laid with proper cloths, and we were served a three-course meal - choice of beef, duck, fish or vegetarian - cooked onboard.

When it was time to retire, I wondered whether I would be able to sleep. As the train chugged toward Alice Springs on the standard-gauge track, laid in the 1980s, it swayed a lot. Still, lulled by the motion, I easily nodded off.

At 5am, I sat up, opened my blind and gazed at a sky full of crystal-clear stars. An hour later, the faintest pink glow crept over the desert, and I could make out scrubby trees. Just as our attendant brought coffee (instant), a blindingly bright sun popped over the horizon.

I propped myself up on my pillows, snuggling under the red comforter, and watched great stretches of nothingness, just red dirt and, now and then, a few cattle.

Later, as we ate breakfast, the Ghan crossed into the Northern Territory. I shared a table with a couple from Victoria; I was the only Yank among Aussies and Kiwis. My tablemates were barley farmers for whom this holiday was a break from double trouble: drought and an infestation of crop-damaging white snails.

Hours passed quickly. From the audio history of the Ghan and the Great Southern Railway piped into my room, I learned that the first steam train pulled out of Adelaide on August 4, 1929, carrying supplies and 100 passengers to Stuart, now Alice Springs. The trip took two days, about twice as long as it does now, and was frequently the victim of Mother Nature’s wrath.

The old Ghan, the narrator said, was “rich in folklore but poor in timekeeping, but few guests on this train are interested in speed records.”

That’s true. The Ghan makes the two-day trip at an average speed of 53 miles per hour; a flight from Adelaide to Darwin is less than four hours. But that’s not the point.

In this stretch of Australia, its nature is nothingness. North of Adelaide, the Ghan leaves behind most of Australia’s population. The land is flat, punctuated only with shrubs that have adapted to the mercilessly arid climate, and its vastness is mesmerizing.

Around noon on our second day, the Ghan pulled into the little station at Alice Springs, known here as “The Alice.”

Alice Springs is a modern town of about 30,000 people and is bisected by the Todd River, which is almost always dry.

The Alice has a Ghan museum and a few other attractions to keep visitors occupied for a day. In pedestrian-friendly Todd Mall, restaurants dish up camel burgers, and shops sell Aboriginal art, didgeridoos and boomerangs. At the reptile center, I came face to face with an inland taipan. Eyeing me from behind glass, it looked like a harmless khaki-colored loop. But it is said to be the most venomous snake in the world.

That’s the only vile creature I discovered in Alice Springs, where I stopped off for a few days to explore nearby Uluru (Ayers Rock) and Kings Canyon before continuing north to Darwin.

I had booked my hotels and tours with Voyages, an Australian travel company, and my trip was glitch-free. I spent my first night at Voyage’s Alice Springs Resort, a perfectly OK if not exciting upscale motel a short walk from the town center.

Early the next morning, a comfortable bus operated by AAT Kings picked me up for the 289-mile drive to Uluru. The trip included a stop at Mount Ebenezer Roadhouse, where Aborigines from the nearby Imanpa community operate a cafe and a gallery selling native art.

Dreamtime

We had our first glimpse of the monolith from the bus. From a distance, it looked like one big, smooth hunk of sandstone; on a walking tour around the base, I could see that it has giant pockmarks, caves and black streaks from rain.

Uluru - the restored Aboriginal name for Ayers Rock - is a symbol of the country’s changing politics. In October 1985, the rock and the land - the 311,000-acre Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park on which it sits - were returned to the Anangu people, who, in turn, leased it to the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service for 99 years.

Although climbing the 1,143-foot rock is popular, the Aborigines discourage this, because it is, for them, a spiritual place. At the nearby Kata Tjuta Cultural Center there’s a “sorry book” with letters from people who took pieces of the rock but returned them after having bad luck.

Except for camping, options for staying overnight near Uluru are limited to the ultra-deluxe Longitude 131(degrees) or Ayers Rock Resort, where there are four hotels, one apartment complex, numerous restaurants, a few shops and a visitors center. Voyages owns and operates them all.

You can choose from a variety of tours, as diverse as riding a camel or riding a Harley. I skipped the Hog and chose the sunset camel trek (AUS$75), where I met the unfortunate Leo, whose gelding apparently was fumbled and presumably accounted for what was said to be his erratic temperament. I went from slightly fearful to fond of Leo by the time our little caravan paused to watch the sun’s setting rays dance on Kata Tjuta, the cluster of 36 red rock domes formerly called the Olgas.

The next morning, it was still dark and cold when I joined a small group for the Desert Awakenings tour ($101). A four-wheel-drive vehicle took us down bush tracks into the desert. We climbed a dune to a lookout where a welcome fire crackled.

We ate damper, an Australian bread cooked over the open fire, and fried egg sandwiches as we watched the sunrise.

Wined and Dined

The piece de resistance was still to come. That evening at sunset, the Sounds of Silence tour ($114) took us to a desert clearing where we listened to the low-pitched music of an Aboriginal didgeridoo. We sipped Champagne and drank in the view of Uluru.

The touted “gourmet buffet” included barramundi (a local fish), kangaroo, emu and crocodile and was pretty awful, but the wine was fine and the candle-lighted tables were elegant. After dinner, a stargazer gave us an armchair tour of the stars and constellations.

After that bit of heaven, I visited another: Longitude 131(degrees), a luxury “camp” with 15 tents that are tents in name only. They have canopy ceilings, but the similarity ends there, because they also have air conditioning, mini bars, posh bathrooms and a wall of windows with unobstructed views. There’s also a small swimming pool.

At its elegantly low-key Dune House, guests share communal gourmet meals. The tab: $706 per person per night for a double, $1,146 for a single, two-night minimum, with meals. Included are tours, which are timed to protect guests from sightseeing hoi polloi.

I finished out my two nights at Ayers Rock Resort and then took an AAT Kings bus the 190 miles to Watarrka National Park and Kings Canyon.

You can take the leisurely 1.2-mile Kings Creek Walk (my choice) or the more demanding 3.7-mile Kings Canyon Rim Walk, but in either case, you must not leave without seeing the lovely canyon with its towering sandstone walls. It’s peaceful, but it’s a long drive with little to see on the way. Accommodation at Voyage’s Kings Canyon Resort is basic, the restaurants pricey and the flies horrendous.

I took a bus back to the Alice the next day and, after an overnight, reboarded the Ghan to Darwin. Smaller train, same amenities. I ate and slept well and was awakened early by our steward, Georgina, tapping on my door and announcing, “Brekkie!” She had brought a box breakfast because we would be arriving early in the town of Katherine, “where the Outback meets the tropics.”

This part of the trip was smoother, partly because this section of track was newer. The scenery, too, is different. We saw palm trees and mangoes and, on the way to Nitmiluk (Katherine) Gorge for a river cruise, a wallaby.

Our open-sided boat sailed through the gorge to a landing where we hiked over rocks and sand dunes to a second jetty to board another boat taking us deeper into the gorge. We saw no crocodiles but were told that rangers regularly make “croc spots” by helicopter.

Darwin loomed in the distance as the Ghan trip wound down. I had fulfilled my wish to do the land Down Under by train and was still amazed at how Australia’s huge piece of nothing could be quite something, even if I never saw that ‘roo.

JAKARTA ~ Environmental watchdog Greenpeace has protested the government’s plans to auction permits to log old forests in Kalimantan and Papua, home to a rich variety of plant and animal life.

Within two weeks, forest lands in 16 locations, including Papua, Kalimantan on Borneo island and on the islands of Sulawesi, Maluku and Sumatra, will be offered for bids.

“More than one million hectares of forest lands, or twice the size of Bali, will be offered on the chopping block.

“Instead of taking drastic measures to reverse the destruction of our remaining forests, the Forestry Ministry is hell-bent on issuing new permits to the highest bidders,” Greenpeace Southeast Asia campaigner Hapsoro said in a statement on Wednesday.

Greenpeace activists dressed as rich entrepreneurs threw sacks of “money” at other protestors acting as forestry officials in a mock auction of Indonesia’s forests in front of the ministry’s office in Jakarta.

Indonesia loses about 2.8 million hectares of forests each year — among the highest rates in the world.

Conservationists and scientists say deforestation reduces the capacity of the ecosystem to regulate the water and also leads to soil erosion and landslides.

Flash floods and landslides in the north of Sumatra that killed 100 and displaced more than 400,000 people in December were blamed on deforestation.

Indonesia has lost more than 72 percent of its intact ancient forest areas, according to Greenpeace.

Kalimantan and Papua have some of the last areas of Indonesian rainforest and are home to a rich variety of plant and animal life, with new discoveries being made on an almost monthly basis.

SAN FRANCISCO ~ Yahoo said this week its 2006 profits plunged by more than half from the prior year even as revenues rose from the internet search giant’s newly revamped advertising platform.

Yahoo posted net income of US$268.7 million, or 19 cents per share, in its 2006 fourth quarter, sharply lower than a year ago.

Yahoo had benefited in 2005 from investments and its final quarter of that year resulted in net income of $683 million, or 46 cents per share.

The company said 2006 fourth-quarter revenue rose to $1.702 billion, up 13 percent from a year ago.

For the full year, the company posted a profit of slightly more than $751 million, sharply lower than the $1.896 billion reported for 2005.

Yahoo’s stock price climbed more that five percent in after-hours trading on investor hopes that the company’s reorganization last year and the new Project Panama ad platform boded well for its future.

“I believe the future opportunities for Yahoo and the industry as a whole are bigger than ever,” Yahoo chief executive Terry Semel said during a conference call with analysts to discuss the earnings report.

“We reshaped our organization to capture these opportunities. I am convinced we are on the right path.”

Semel said all of Yahoo’s US advertisers would be switched to the Project Panama ad platform by April and that it would then be rolled out worldwide, beginning in Japan.

A new formula to prioritize placement of advertisements on search results pages, based on keywords, quality and bid price, will be launched by Yahoo on February 5, he said.

“We expect to see the revenue impact of the new ad system and ranking model to begin in the second quarter and gain momentum through 2007 and beyond,” he said.

“You will see ongoing innovation and development of next-generation advertising on and off the Yahoo network.”

Semel told analysts that Yahoo had been wooing users with features such as personal finance and food websites and expanding Yahoo Answers, “the largest collection of human knowledge on the web.”

Yahoo acquisitions last year included Bix.com, a website for online talent contests, and mybloglog, a service that lets visitors to websites leave information about themselves.

DENPASAR ~ Reflecting both cultures’ similarities, a new Indian cultural center is due to open here soon, after the local government provided a 629-square-meter plot of land for the project.

The Bali administration’s commitment to provide the land was outlined in an agreement signed by Indian Ambassador to Indonesia Navrekha Sharma and Bali Governor Dewa Beratha here on Monday, state news agency Antara reported.

Sound bilateral relations between Indonesia and India could be improved further in the future, the ambassador said.

“The cooperation which could be further intensified includes tourism, culture and education,” said the envoy.

The center in Bali will be the second of its kind in Indonesia, the first located in Jakarta.

A temporary Indian Cultural Center was set up in Bali in January 2004, in a rented building, said Antara.

Dr. Somvir, coordinator of the new permanent Indian cultural center in Bali, said it would hold regular art and cultural activities, such as traditional Indian dance courses and yoga training courses with trainers from India.

The cultural center would also be equipped with a library, he said.

Governor Beratha hailed the plan to intensify cooperation, noting that both Bali and India had unique cultures and predominantly Hindu populations.