In the greater scheme of things there are no laws but within a biological matrix there are limitations of accomodation, pressure, adaptability based on genetics, experience and training. Below the timetable are universal laws that rule our existence.
Laws are formed by the influence of families, communities, societies, countries and they are subject to interpretation and change. The influences we subject ourselves to, often without questioning them, mediate our behaviour. if you grew up in a community with an strong honour culture you believe what you feel or think is real and in many ways may dishonour others with different influences or views.
Someone coming to adulthood in a more liberal climate may will have a different world view to someone raised in a war torn country or time.
You cannot change others you can only change yourself to be less reactive to disagreeable events or people and become responsive.
Yoga is not all about postures and great bodies. Yoga is the evolution of consciousness, creating space, peace or stillness within so you can experience your reality with less reactivity and judgement and maybe just may be subject your self to universal laws rather than local influences.

Universal Laws of Thermodynamics
1. The 1st law.  Energy is neither created or destroyed, it only changes from one form to another. The Law of
the Conservation of Energy.
2. The 2nd Law. All things have a tendency to move towards lower states of equilibrium, rather than high states of equilibrium. All atoms and molecules tends towards randomness rather than order and this randomness increases over time.  The Law of Entropy.
3. The 3rd law is the Law of Absolute Zero, which states that as energy decreases the change in energy also decreases.
Newtons laws of motion.
1. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
2. The relationship between an object’s mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma. Acceleration and force are vectors (as indicated by their symbols being displayed in slant boldfont); in this law the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector.
3. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Regards and love Maggi.
If you want something you’ve never had before, do something you’ve never done before.
Maggi Nimmo

Cambodia
Web: www.magginimmo.com
E-mail: maggi@magginimmo.com
Mobile Cambodia: +855(0)10348601

So, let’s do 2018. I was felled by some sort of viral load over the new year and that is why the classes are starting this week and not a week ago. I would like to thank all the people who came to my assistance as I struggled to hold my head up. Getting ill, feeling below par, having an acute injury, dealing with a chronic condition all need a different approach.
In general, a few general principles can be applied to illness in general. Nutritional improvements, clean organic food, sufficient rest, initial gentle movement, exercise and asking for help. The most important thing is to let go of  the need to appear strong and let your family, friends and professional therapist or healers help you.
I’m not sure that I have really let you know my qualifications and skills so to that end here is a list of therapies available from me:
– Homoeopathy, an amazing technique of gentle natural medicine made from natural substances, that augment and speed up the process of healing on the deeper levels of your body’s blueprint.
– Orthobionomy a technique described by the phrase “release by positioning.” The technique is gentle and can be applied during movement therapy, yoga,  pilates or during remedial massage.
– Sacro-Cranial Therapy a process of adjusting and improving the flow of fluids and position of facial bones, abdominal organs, nerve conduction and joint function. It is wonderful to resolve the effects of mental and physical trauma anywhere in your body. This technique often improves your facial structure, appearance and general health.
– The Bowen Technique, now this is amazing, a soft tissue manipulation that alters pain pathways, neural conduction and gives almost instant pain relief after acute or chronic trauma .
– Hypno-therapy is an effective therapeutic tool in the continuing processes we put ourselves through to remain calm, find equilibrium and deal with long term change.
– Pre and Post Natal Therapy and Movement. I love working with mums to be and mums. It is such a transition time. As you may realize i teach classes at Samata Sa on Tuesdays at 10:30am but small numbers and working hours have made me aware that each mum to be needs to have individual times and therapies taught so the pre and post natal classes are on but you need to book in, ring or text to 010348601.
– Yoga Therapy. I have been teaching and practicing yoga for 40 years. In that time I have practiced many forms of Hatha Yoga and as I age the deep importance of going back to first principles asserts itself. The purpose of yoga is to still the movements of the mind. As a result I have combined the practices of deep relaxation (yoga nidra) and healing practices (Kriyas) to create somatic (body) awareness and mental clarity and calm.
– Pilates is a wonderful tool in movement therapy and helps create tensile strength in your body.
– Foundation Training is a strong movement technique to alleviate your back pain, improve your posture, create a strong core and improve your general athleticism. I love this technique and often combine it into my yoga and pilates sessions.
– Reiki. I am a Reiki master so I can transmit and teach the basic of healing Reiki technique to students. Level 1 self healing and Level 2 healing others and distance healing .
My classes are suitable for all ages. I teach general classes here and any advanced students will be given individual tuition towards more integrated movement, breath and meditation practices.
In general private therapy sessions run for an hour and cost $50.00. I am offering a series of 5 weekly treatments for $200.00. It gives me a change to really help effect change in your body and spirit.
Individual training sessions in movement therapy (yoga/pilates) and individual Reiki sessions cost $35.00 each or $280.00 for 10 weekly sessions.
Maggi Nimmo

Email: maggi@magginimmo.com
Web address: https://magginimmo.com
Mobile Cambodia: +85510348601

The days I travel on the Sydney trains I usually enjoy. I have supplies, a bag with a novel, a fine black felt tipped pen and a small notebook. Yep I know it’s a bit, no, a lot, old school, but even though my bag also carries a with more memory that I will ever possess, I do not make notes in it or use the online diary supplied in the software, for that I have, this year, a blue paper diary.

I was set up on the train, feet planted resisting the ever present urge to cross my legs, bag on my lap and my book open on it. A young man sat down heavily beside me, so heavily I bounced up as he plonked down. The people piled on, some with suitcases; some with phones glued a few inches from their irradiated brains.

I was reading a book about the American civil war, the story of one preacher, his battles with himself and the course of the war. I looked up, a tall man was glaring in my direction. I thought, thank the gods this carriage is so crowded, why is he so angry? I realized that he was glaring at the plonker next to me. The glarer was a tall haughty looking man perhaps from Pakistan while the lad next to me was perhaps from Northern India, he was well dressed in dark grey and black.

I started to get interested as I was almost in the glarer’s direct gaze and that stream of attention was venomous. I looked at the men, one was definitely arrogant, angry and self-righteous, the other young thing sitting next to me was good looking surly, nervous and entitled.

The entitled one noticed the looks from Mr. Arrogance, and said, ”What do you think you’re looking at?”

“Do you know how many women you pushed aside to get to that seat?”
“How dare you speak to me like that!”

At this stage Master Entitled surged to his feet and faced up to Mr. Arrogance.

“What else have you gotta say arse hole?”

I could see the women in the carriage cringing, the inevitability of collateral damage looking good.

I let out a roar, a primal scream, a protest across the ages against the fear warring parties create. I would have none of it. Then I said in a voice designed to freeze dry balls, ”You sit down, and you shut up.”

They both had to be ordered twice, for gods sake. Master. Entitled came at me with his standard reply to challenge,” You can’t speak to me like that.”
“I have and I just did, sit the fuck down. You are both way outta line.”

Master Entitled sat down. Mr. Arrogance stood still looking, well still looking arrogant.

A few stops on Master Entitled rose and stood just a little too close to Mr. Arrogance meanwhile I glared at them both in turn, and Master Entitled left without incident or damage to himself or others.

Mr. Arrogance immediately attempted to justify his behavior to me. He started by saying, “Thank you for diffusing that situation.”

I mimed a zip-it sign, but he continued saying the man had pushed past many people to get to the seat and crime of crimes had pushed him, “And I hate to be touched.”

For heavens sake wars have been started for less and the two men, mirrors of each other, are like so many people fixed in their beliefs about how the world ought to be. They can’t see the self in the other, their standard reactions being anger, territorialism and aggression.

As Mr. Arrogance was leaving the train another guy appeared and he started to recruit this balding hipster on his team, and Mr. Hipster flexed his mental muscle and thoughtfully said, “Yeah man I wouda done the same thing.”

Mr. Arrogance left his hubris unaffected, having potentially with his hostility endangered the physical safety of fellow passengers, the very women he claimed to be defending.

“Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the most arrogant of all?”

This image has noting to do with the text just necessarily silly.

“For your own safety do not run at closing doors.” Not that I thought that was a good idea, in fact, it had never occurred to me, but there I stood and a disembodied voice at the local train station piped that through the air waves after announcing the arrival and departure of various commuter trains. The punters around me in this non peak time were far from launching themselves at anything. The mums in burkas pushing prams, the diminutive Chinese women carrying plastic bags of vegetables, the surly man who’s eyes were glued to his phone screen, the elderly man with his metal walking stick and the others trickling in and out of the station. There were no door runners in this motley crew.

I am in the burbs of Sydney brandishing my Opal travel card at touch screens and tapping my debit card at various retail counters. My head is heavy today as if I have a hangover, it’s probably a post travel thing, all night plane travel can have strange effects, almost hallucinatory. Well, frankly the effects, if they are effects, are at times alarming but mostly amusing. Small details  take on an odd importance. The hands of a fellow traveler, long restless fingers with chipped nails drumming on the plastic seat cover get to be sinister and malevolently annoying after five minutes. I concentrate on the passing scenes, factories, cars, little tiny people crossing roads anything to not look at the hands and the slightly asymmetrical  face sitting across the train from me. Yep, I’m tired and really annoyed at myself and Australian Government agencies who lost some of my documents resulting in my being in Australia to remedy their mistake.

I travelled from Cambodia partly because it is so hot there, at the moment, and I though Sydney would be a pleasant break in the bosom of my family. Yet I am restless, unoccupied and unsure about the dates of my return. I haven’t managed to feel really healthy, you know, vibrant and motivated in Oz yet. The day looms before me a humid and mild sunny offering at my feet. I’m waiting for a document to be delivered I’m waiting for inspiration to exercise my body and find a way to clear my head.

I stretch into yoga forms and contract hard to anchor myself into the ground, I follow a proscribed formula of movements and yes the head clears but I can’t bring myself to face the inane announcements and smile-less ambulatory movements of the local shopping centre, perhaps I will run at a door that’s closing and see what happens.

There are massive storm fronts from China wondering down the east coast of the S.E. Asian peninsular and crossing Vietnam laden with rain, the north east monsoons.
The storms are erratic and uncharacteristically unpredictable. This morning a storm from the east erupted over Phnom Penh at 5:00am, the lightening flared and even with the curtains drawn the room I was sleeping in lit up, the windows rattled with thunder. I love a storm, I love the rain and I love the cool winds that keep the sky heavy with clouds and the temperatures down.

The barometric changes bounced about and my ears almost popped with the pressure changes. My joints cracked with the release of nitrogen as I stretched in bed still blinded by the white flare of light, ouch my knee felt stiff and my back cramped. The dawn came with the sound of rain drumming and the unholy roar of distant thunder.

It is winter, Cambodians walk about in hoodies and long sleeves and it’s still hot, go figure. Today I went to a walking meditation and as I walked I felt like a sweaty thief tip toeing about, it was only later that I realized I’d held my back stiff, as if I was on high alert, like a thief in a strange house. Somewhere inside me I realized that I often feel like an outsider, one of my greatest teachers said to me, “If you want to lead an extraordinary life do the opposite to the common man.“ Be alert, do not get into habitual behaviour that dulls your mind and lulls you into a sense of permanence, this too will change.

The air was cool and moisture laden at the coffee shop. I sat and felt.

The rain came last night hard and soothing and still this morning the early light was accompanied by the drumming and dripping. My sheets felt silky. I stretched out luxuriating in the awareness that I didn’t have to get up for ages. I lay flat relaxing and gently formed spinal waves to lengthen my back and felt the rain sounds circulating through my body.
I have felt in the past that there are dead bits in my body, mainly in the posterior breathing apparatus, and today I could feel the muscles flaring with the inbreathe and staying wide as I exhaled. My left leg seemed to have disappeared and I felt into the place where I thought it might be and finally felt the warmth of blood and the slight tingle of circulation.
The rain stopped and my legs carried me happily to the coffee shop. A leaf fell into my lap, an old brown leathery leaf. I left the open leaf in my lap and drank coffee and water.
I looked at my lap about 10 minutes later, the leaf had curled up. Completely cut off from its source of life, its sap, it closed into itself. I thought about my leg and how it had not felt attached or even a part of my body. If I had ignored my non-leg it might have withered a bit, died a little. I was conscious of its defection to the land of Morpheus. It wasn’t numb, it just wasn’t anything.
I searched for it and found my leg and now it aches a little but the leg and hip feel open and free, if a tad uncomfortable. Maybe that is the price I pay, for now, for ignoring the drying of the sap, the dying of the light, at least in my leg. As I get older death gets more imminent. Death means to be cut off from the processes of life, maybe we take another energy form, maybe we don’t. As I looked at the curling leaf I stood and stretched my leg and opened to the moist air, to the forces of life to the process of my breath, my first and last contact with life. The inhale stimulates and drives expansion, the exhale sedates and allows contraction always the duality.

It’s Friday evening and after a fairly easy day in the hot air of Phnom Penh I have succumbed to the lure of a horizontal surface. I am counting the ways of senility, waking and  forgetting to shake my towel results in ant bites, hmmmmm. Reading a book on early onset Alzheimer’s has led me to lie in bed, sit in cafes and generally concern myself with attempting to remember things, recent things, like the names of actors in various films, the author of the book I’m reading, the whereabouts of small countries in Africa, the location of my glasses. The book “Still Alice” by Lisa Genova, has been made into a film with Juliette Moore and Alec Baldwin, I so wanted to write Alec Guinness, you know the guy who played Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars (1977) and a prince in Lawrence of Arabia. Now those memories run deep but ask me if I can remember yesterdays lunch, hmmmmm again.

“Still Alice” is a novel written by a neuroscientist about a devastating hereditary disease, early onset Alzheimers, and the gradual stripping away of the layers of memory, personality, language and relationships, all the things that we think of as generally making up significant aspects of ourselves. Word games, music, exercise, sports, good diet, hydration, warm communication and relationships all serve to give us meaning and train our bodies and minds all useless against this disease. It is a poignant and compelling read, thoughtful and strangely, a real page turner, even though I kinda knew the ending.

There is a branch of science called Biocentrism Robert Lanser talks about it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI_F4nOKDSM
Biocentrism suggests that everything we believe about reality is really not quite true and that reality is a continual construction brought about by the play of consciousness and energy. Sound something that a mystic might say, well guys get with the program science has finally stuck a toe into the waters of ecstatic awareness and quantum insight. As consciousness expands so does our world view, the opposite is most likely also true.

It’s the short term and luminous flow of now that percolate through my reality illuminating a moment. Like a water feature suddenly being turned off, and the quiet descending like a cool silk sheet or thoughts that are big enough stick to the memory creases of my mind, “The universe is probably expanding because all the information gathered from the myriad experiences of diverse living things needs more storage. God has a storage problem, and a dust problem, like any house wife.”

I caught a Tuk Tuk to the Orussay market today. A haven for those who lust after cheap clothes and roll upon roll of materials. Patterns, cottons, polyesters, velvets colours and the heat. A wizened women and I swapped heat gestures I attempted to say “Ktaw khlang nass.” It’s very hot. Now English take place mostly on the bottom of your mouth most words finish with the tongue on the bottom palate, where as Khmer all takes place at the roof of your mouth, its very nasal, with lots of diphthongeee double tones that are hard to hear let alone repeat.

The cloth seller’s mother or aunt or whatever she was, looked at me with the blank stare of incomprehension and then as I fanned she smiled and nodded. She said the phrase back to me, and then I to her, a crowd was gathering to watch this piece of performance language, I kl-anged and held the long vowel, howls of laughter, a chorus now corrected me and when they were satisfied I could say “Ktaw khlang nasa,” the laughter trickled to a finish the old aunty started to cough from laughing so much and there we were in a hot cloth stall me slapping her on the back and attempting to gather my purchases and find my horizontal moment.

Things are getting strange in my world. Conversation overheard today:
“That Tracy is really getting herself together, no more vomit in her hair.”
“Yeah she’s really changed her look.”
“I wonder if she’ll be able to keep going, she really pushes herself.”
“I’m never sure about her.”
Let me put this in context. Two, barely out of adolescence, American girls with the grating voices of east coasters. I don’t think they realised how loud their conversation was. I was feeling delicate and needed AC and quiet so I moved but could still hear their snippets.
“Why do you think he took her off the road?”
“It must be a compulsion with him.” Giggles
“Does your father know?”
“Noooooo, the last time I saw him he looked at me and barked fist floor.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, then he said oh, hi Lisa, looked me straight in the face and said first floor. I said…Charming.”
“Bizarre.”

You can’t make this stuff up and here is another staged bit of stuff that has serious ramifications and is very funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MubunsD-7g

On a more weird science note an experiment by Australian scientists has proven that what happens to particles in the past is only decided when they are observed and measured in the future. Until such time, reality is just an abstraction.
http://m.digitaljournal.com/science/experiment-shows-future-events-decide-what-happens-in-the-past/article/434829

So just as I thought it couldn’t get any weirder last night I dried my face and managed to get covered in tiny ants. Ants predictably, not only like honey, they like warm damp towels. A few spots around my eyes turned into a major closure, and the sharp little bites inflicted on me on all my soft places, and let me there are more of those than I’d like, turned into red itchy welts. Sleep, I did not. Today I walked about doing my stuff in sunglasses and covered up, to stop me slapping and scratching my legs and arms.

I decided to have a salad for lunch, and thought, as I listened to the above conversation, noting the dialogue as it was uttered, that I needed to wash my brain with some sort of cleansing balm. The salad came, I moved tables and ate the fish and greens thinking about the size of the immense universe so large it approaches infinity and the tiny expressions of life that make up the minutest parts of existence, so small they approach zero. And here I am sitting in the light spectrum a shadow of both. The lettuce crunched in my mouth, the avocado seemed tasty and smooth as usual. So, despite my weirdness, reality was an agreed upon café and each and each one of us was looking at the the room from a different place.

I wonder what the Yankee girls thought of the sunglassed blotchy woman with the humongous salad? A French man with a very entitled swagger asked for something, gesturing without eye contact or any pretence of courtesy. The waiter and I exchanged a look, our faces passive but a gleam in the waiter’s eye connected with me, and that moment was decided moments or eons before or after  was one of bemused amusement at the vicissitudes of men rather than an offended sweep of eyes heavenward in an equally possible response of judgemental disgust.

My body was wrapping itself around the salad with its mustard dressing, the hot strong coffee, challenging my liver, my welts abating and reality became manageable for a second. Then the heat of Phnom Penh and the dark interior of a Tuk Tuk whisked me away to my third shower and a brisk towel flapping exercise purging the devils and exposing my need for sleep and oblivion.

It rained last night, a noisy rhythmic, tropical deluge drumming the rooftops and slapping the leaves into a fever. The moon hidden behind a lead sky has passed its delirious fullness and I was, at last still, and listening reaching into the sounds that make patterns and chaotic abstractions. I listening to the rain and heard its dark energy, the world filling with potential. The week before had a stripped bare rawness to it, people under stress revealing personality or personas that weren’t coherent with the shining face of day to day.

There is often a Pollyanna bent to peoples’ inclinations, where cognitive dissonance or denial of what is in front of them occurs. The dance of life lurches on around us and we play our parts surprising no one. Creative and brave acts are disregarded so we plough on in the mud. Why is it so difficult to treat ourselves as if we mattered? We mutter inside our heads a dialogue of criticism while exonerating the world.

A century ago a shadow was born, the unconscious that vast resource we all carry, our raw potential ignored. We tell ourselves we are good, okay at best, all the while guarding jealously the muttering doubts we have about ourselves, but the shadow will out and there it is in the grotesque that is the US Republican nominee, in Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s ruthless president, in the new British conservative PM Theresa May, in the corruption and rapacious avarice of SE Asian Governments, in Syrian atrocities. The shadow is out.

I had a dream, I was in a room lined with books, like a lawyers office. There was a presence in the room. I couldn’t see it so I asked, “Who are you?” The presence answered,”I am God.”
I asked, “What the fuck are you doing in my dream?” The presence answered, “I am the writer, the director and the audience. As a writer I like a happy ending and as an audience I like to surprise myself.”

The air this morning is saturated with moisture and cool, I’ve been listening to the music of Krom (Christopher Minko, Sophia Chamroeun and Sopheak Chamroeun) a Delta Blues group, based in Cambodia and at present nominated for a Grammy. They are the first group to be nominated from Cambodia. It gives me pause that such music captures a poignant longing in my soul for us to care for each other and as I listened to the evocative sounds of rain and to the music of Krom the shadow lifted and I realised the muttering critic was still.
https://www.youtube.com/user/themekongsessions