Movement:
Sit in chair in rest position. Breathe normally, focus on your spleen, and start the spleen healing sound movements. As you inhale, slowly raise hands and place index and middle finger of both hands at the bottom left of breastbone. Press gently and look straight ahead, eyes level. In this position, exhale and make the spleen healing sound. Release excess wet, sticky, heavy energy and gas from your spleen. Let go of all worry and negative thoughts.

Breathe normally and slowly return hands to lap with your palms up, (rest position). Breathe naturally and be aware of your spleen. Close your eyes and breathe into your spleen, bright yellow-gold light. Visualize this light radiating from, around and through your spleen. With each outward breath, silently make the spleen healing sound and release all worries. With each inward breath, feel compassion and good will for yourself and others. Feel the connection to your mouth and flesh. Continue this process for a few moments. Open your eyes and start the spleen healing sound movements again. Repeat exercise as needed.

TRIPLE BURNER

Sound XI Exhale through tight smile, tongue behind lower teeth.

Movement: (No movement is related to Triple Burner. It is internal.)

This last exercise is done best lying on your back with legs extended and hands at your sides. Breathe normally and relax. Inhale and feel your body expand. As you exhale, make the Triple Burner healing sound and visualize a large soft roller or gentle loving hands rolling over your body from your shoulders to the top of your thighs, pressing out any negative feelings. Breathe normally and bring your mind back to the starting position.

Relax, inhale and feel your body expand with wonderful glowing health. With each outward breath, silently make the Triple Burner healing sound and feel the roller gently press, releasing all unhealthy Qi energy from your body.

Feel light, clean, refreshed and free. Repeat exercise as needed. When you are finished, remain in resting position, relaxed and breathing normally. Keep your eyes closed and allow your being to feel cleansed whole and healed.

Feel renewed and in harmony with your deeper self and the universe. Feel strong, free and at peace. Light radiates from within you. When you feel you have reached your best healthy state, slowly rise and bring with you all that you have gained, to every part of your life. Live well.

So where do romantic relationships fit in? As everyone married or dating knows, long-term relationships need constant attention. After work, between social obligations, when the kids are asleep: when can couples spend time together?

Exercise may be the answer.

Sharing an interest in physical fitness can improve or increase the quality time you spend with your significant other. And in addition to providing all the proven benefits of regular exercise, working out as a couple can increase motivation, add spice to a routine exercise schedule, and create intimacy. Watching your partner’s skin glisten with sweat as he or she pumps out those last few reps isn’t exactly a turn-off.

Long-term relationships benefit from the by-products of regular exercise, of course, but including your partner in the actual fitness experience can produce more extensive results.

It begins with Orientation. Freshmen girls are systematically petrified into being wary of all men as potential rapists. The freshmen boys are lectured sternly on consent laws in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Eighteen-year-olds of both sexes are showered with condoms, lubricants, and dental dams; they are shown how to use them and how to dispose of them. And all of this occurs under the banner of “safety.”

I don’t know about you, but nothing kills passion or intimacy for me more than having it thrown in my face five times a day.

Amherst College went co-ed in 1976. As a result, almost every Amherst student lives on a hall with the opposite sex, and most of us are forced to use co-ed bathrooms, a fact you won’t find in the viewbook.

These co-ed living arrangements are the single greatest inhibitor to dating at Amherst. There is an unwritten law that you do not “hook up” with a floormate—that’s “floorcest.” And you’re discouraged from dating anyone in your dorm—that’s “dormcest.” But the housing office, in its infinite wisdom, has more than likely put you in a dorm with the people you’d most to want to date—all the noisy night owls in one dorm, all the offbeat neatniks in another.

In addition to sharing a hall (sometimes a suite) and a bathroom with the boys, Amherst students eat in one dining hall, on one meal plan. In short, there is nowhere to hide from a relationship gone awry.

This feeling pervades many discussions on dating. “How can I go on a date with him?” A girl asks nervously. “I’ll have to get cereal next to him the morning after.” Strangely enough, this rationale doesn’t stop girls from going out, getting drunk, having sex with a stranger, and then facing the embarrassing post-hookup cereal line the next day.

Feminists, with their battle cry for infiltration of every aspect of male life, have removed any mystery from themselves or their opposites. That is what once made dating a special and sacred rite—you didn’t know what your girlfriend looked like in the morning, or, if you did, it was because you were very lucky. A potential Amherst boyfriend doesn’t rest easy knowing that 20 other men know what his girlfriend sings in the shower.

So we don’t date. We hook up with a host of strangers or hole up with one nice boy, fling ourselves off the precipice of self-respect or fling ourselves into the isolation of monogamous long-term dating. It seems there is no middle ground.

And yet …

And yet there is a growing awareness among women—mostly women who own the 6-part A&E Pride & Prejudice—that something is Not Right with this situation. And though they may agree with feminist rhetoric in the classrooms, they cannot support it in their bathrooms or their bedrooms, for that matter.

Some small part of them clings to everything they have been taught to despise. It’s the part that warms, slightly, when a man holds the door open; it’s the part that grows wistful looking at bridal magazines. This awareness feeds off the vulgarity of the second wave feminists, whose passionate activism and bra-burning in the 1960s gave way to tenured professorships, unkempt graying hair and frumpy clothes. Their words now ring false and hollow.

These women must be brought out from the temples of Gloria Steinem; they must be coaxed into putting down their pins and signs, which they wave to fit in.

I hope that this groundswell, once initiated, will spread like wildfire over the campuses of this country, burning out all the cancerous rot that results from feminist meddling. And, when the fires have consumed the last WAGS department, the light from the dying embers will shine on men and women. And wouldn’t it be neat if we emerged from the ashes, simply holding hands?