Wellness Journeys

10/13/2026

Yes, we cover a wide range of subjects. Isn't that what an educational charity should do?

Today I'm going to tell you about God's wife: Asherah.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are monotheistic religions. But they did not start out that way. Judaism emerged from older religions which were layered and full of divine beings and spirits.

If you think about it, the commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me” only makes sense if other gods were believed to exist.

Then there’s Psalm 82 that talks about a divine council, with Yahweh judging other gods.

And to get to the point of this post, archeologists found inscriptions that mention “Yahweh and his Asherah.” There is strong evidence that of a period in early Israelite religion when some understood Asherah as Yahweh’s consort (wife).

Let’s travel back to the 2nd millennium BCE, in texts that predated ancient Hebrew. Asherah first appears as Athirat, the wife of El, and mother of 70 gods.

Her worship spread through Canaan, Phoenicia, and Syria where she was associated with fertility, creation, and sacred trees.
In the seventies, archeologists excavated a small religious site on the Sinai Peninsula called Kuntillet Ajrud. It was a remote Iron Age site dating back to the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. They found inscriptions on large storage jars, plaster walls, and objects that read: “Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah” and “Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah.”

Asherah is mentioned 40 times in the old testament and, as one can guess, the translators have really done a “job on her.” The original Hebrew word asherah refers both to the deity and her cult symbol, but later theological reforms flattened her out as she became “grove,” “wooden pole,” “idol,” or “image.”

The religion and layers of deities inherited by the Israelites was slowly distilled into worshiping their one god, Yahweh and over time the others faded from memory, and, of course, were expurgated from the texts. Though, a very thorough examination of early biblical texts uncovers other gods.

To really understand Asherah, we must look at the oldest texts centuries before the earliest biblical writings.

We know about her from Ugaritic tablets discovered in 1928 by a farmer digging in his field in northwest Syria, accidentally discovering an ancient tomb.

French excavators found ancient clay tablets that reference Asherah as the wife of El, creator of all the deities. She rules over the seas, is the symbol of fertility, is divine council, the queen mother figure, stabilizing cosmic order. The root of her name carries meanings of uprightness, blessings, and prosperity. She embodies the idea of flourishing, especially in agriculture, but also in social circles. And finally she is associated with sacred trees, with groves and wooden cult objects.

As monotheism hardened, Asherah was stripped of her identity as a goddess and redefined as a mere “pole;” a relic of worship practices that reformers sought to erase.

10/13/2026

Like James Baldwin, Pinter has diagnosed the American condition: a nation that tells itself a story so comforting that it becomes dangerous.

On October 13, 2005, Harold Pinter received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his controversial Nobel lecture, he stated the following:

“I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

“It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

“The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

“What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any?”

10/10/2026

As you might know, we are a charity, an educational charity. As you might already know, charities are not supposed to get involved in politics. Neither are churches, but we seem to overlook that.

As an educational charity, we can teach about political movements, history, current state of affairs, and how they relate to history. We can also talk about the future. As a student of quantum physics, I know that there are multitudes of paths to our future, but as a student of history, I can show you the possibilities.

There are those who say: "They're voting against their own self interests." These people don't realize that not all self interests start in someone wallet, bank account, or credit card.

There's this thing called, Identity Politics and I'd like to introduce it to all our readers.

https://wellnessjourneys.org/2026/10/09/identity-politics/

10/08/2026

I don't call anti-vaxxers stupid. I'll let their doctors and funeral directors do that.

The U.S. is enduring its worst year for measles since 1991. Since the beginning of last year, large outbreaks have been reported in several states, including Texas, Utah, South Carolina and, now, Pennsylvania.

10/06/2026

Fresh Views of the Cosmos

Today, the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Francis Halzen for his pioneering work on high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. Halzen is a Belgian-born physicist, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. Neutrinos are the least understood of the 17 fundamental particles known to exist. They nearly always move through matter as if it isn’t there. So massive detectors are required to capture and study their exceedingly rare collisions with atoms.
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How it works: IceCube is the world’s largest neutrino detector. Engineers built it by using hot water jets to bore giant, milelong holes vertically into the ice and then lowered strings hooked up with thousands of cameras down into the holes. When a high-energy neutrino is produced by a distant black hole and then comes streaming through Earth, it’ll very rarely hit an ice molecule and produce a flash of light that the cameras can detect.
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Why it matters: IceCube gave humankind a fresh glimpse of the cosmos when it came online in 2010. Unlike most telescopes across the globe that gather starlight, this unique observatory sees the universe via ghostly messengers called neutrinos. Combining the two has improved our understanding of some of the most distant and violent physical processes in the cosmos.
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From the archive: Halzen wrote about the IceCube experiment for Scientific American in 2015, a few years after the project had successfully detected two neutrinos carrying more than 1,000 times the energy of the most energetic neutrino ever produced by an accelerator on Earth.

10/06/2026

What Lakota elders did with pain they could not say out loud.

1. The ritual was called “Wičháȟpi Wóyute”, star feeding.
Lakota healers used it for those who lost loved ones or survived violence.

The person didn’t talk about the trauma. They fed it.

They’d gather stones representing the pain, then carry them to a river and release them one by one while speaking the memory out loud to the water.

The final stone was kept as a reminder that grief was witnessed, not erased.

2. The practice was banned by missionaries in the 1800s as “primitive superstition.”

The neuroscience explanation is plausible: The idea that physical action + verbalization engages both hemispheres of the brain is consistent with modern somatic trauma therapy (similar to EMDR, bilateral stimulation, ritualized release).

Contemporary trauma practitioners have incorporated “Star Feeding” as a somatic grief‑release protocol, especially for intergenerational trauma.

They've found the physical act of releasing objects while verbalizing trauma engages both hemispheres of the brain, something talk therapy alone doesn’t achieve.

The viral version of this talks about peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins research, but that claim has never been verified.

Results after 6 sessions:

• PTSD symptom reduction: 73%
• Intrusive thoughts decreased by 81%
• Emotional regulation improved 6x faster than traditional therapy

3. The protocol (modern adaptation):
• Gather small objects (stones, paper, anything tangible)
• Each object represents one painful memory or feeling
• Go to a natural setting (river, ocean, forest)
• Hold each object, speak the memory out loud
• Release it physically (throw it, bury it, burn it)
• Keep one object as a witness

The act of physical release signals to the brain that the memory has been processed.

4. Therapy organizations pushed back hard.
One psychologist association called it:
“Unscientific and potentially harmful.”
But the data showed otherwise.

The modern therapy model profits from long term treatment.

A ritual that works in 6 sessions disrupts a multi billion dollar industry.

5. Try it with one painful memory.
Lakota healers said:
“The wound that’s held grows. The wound that’s released heals.”
Your brain doesn’t need endless analysis.

It needs a signal that the pain has been acknowledged and can be released.

Most people are still carrying stones from decades ago.

10/06/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1HZNsPUDhX/

09/30/2026

We are an educational charity. We've taught everything from health and wellness to the Quran.

Today we're giving you a history lesson. Not your normal history lesson about all the freaking wars we've fought. (Did you know that in our 250 year history we've had about 30 years of peace?)

This is the history of film; of the three comic geniuses of the silent era and their transition to sound, how they survived, faired, and prospered. And the moments of genius they've left us.

A Bit of Film HistoryDavidSeptember 30, 2026Miscellaneous A good part of my life was spent studying literature. Age has interfered with my ability to read books, so now I’m a cinephile, and being unable to stop learning, I’ve become a bit of a film historian. In the seventies, I discovered that ...

09/29/2026

We are an educational charity. The subjects we've taught range from health, to art, to AI.

I am a scientist. When people hear "scientist" they immediately think "research scientist." And though I have performed controlled trials, I started out in the seventies as a science teacher, teaching water biology, conservation, pollution, climate change, meteorology, and field astronomy.

Science teaching is foundational to science, because every scientist had a teacher.

Now I'm going to teach you about something that seems to drive some people nuts. The first thing they do is ask you to define "woman" and then ask you how you make a man into a woman.

What we know about s*xuality today is very, very different from what we knew about s*xuality in the sixties and seventies. In fact, in the seventies, the University of Minnesota was fertilizing rabbit eggs with table salt. The product was a "super female," or one with an ### chromosome. [Don't look this up...I was in vet med back then and none of this was published out of that division.]

Transphobia is caused by ignorance. Chromosomes don't determine gender identity. There is no "trans" gene. Brain development influences identity, so please read and share and let's end the hate and ignorance.

P.S. About those rabbit egg studies:

The famous “rabbit eggs fertilized with table salt” story goes back to Gregory Pincus in the 1930s, not the 1970s. Pincus reported artificially activating rabbit ova using saline (salt solution), producing what was described at the time as “fatherless” rabbits. Contemporary reporting even called one a rabbit “whose father was a solution of ordinary table salt.”

There were numerous genuine rabbit-egg IVF experiments in the 1970s, which may be what you're remembering. For example, Seitz, Brackett & Mastroianni published successful in-vitro fertilization of rabbit ova in 1970, with 81% of 143 ova fertilized and subsequent development to a live birth.

And there was a particularly interesting 1979 study by Yanagimachi and colleagues involving rabbit eggs kept in high-concentration salt solution. It was specifically studying whether the eggs' protective zona pellucida retained its biological properties after salt treatment.

Actual research shows that s*x is anything but binary

09/27/2026