A Spiritual Side to Tattoos and Piercings? At the age of 20, I went to see Fakir Musafar give a talk and demonstration in Dallas. It was there that I first learned of some of the ancient rituals surrounding body modification. I saw suspensions and an ancient Sun Dance whereby a cage of arrows was strategically positioned on the torso of a seeker who then danced and flailed his body about to the sound of a beating drum as the...

Sure, body piercing has become mainstream. It has even grown beyond what most of us thought it would, with the impact of celebrity piercings and the face of modern fashion aesthetics both giving the industry a great push in the right direction. But have we forgotten what it can mean to wear jewelry? For example, getting pierced used to imply that one would have superior sexual prowess, have achieved a higher state of enlightenment, or...

Should you wear jewelry in your visible piercings to a job interview? The answer is ambiguous – Take it on a case by case basis, and use common sense. Some corporate environments frown upon anything that might distract or possibly offend others. There is still somewhat of a stigma that accompanies piercings and tattoos in the corporate world, so anything other than the traditional single ear piercing can be seen as unprofessional....

Of all the ways we have to mark the body in our wide-ranging western cultures, scarification has a few people quite shocked, and understandably so. Pictures of flesh chiseled off the body would have anyone thinking of what they had for breakfast. But, as you can tell from the images below, the results can be quite striking. Scarification is either cutting repeatedly with a scalpel or by “strike branding,” which is much...

Our brains, it seems, are able to push us in certain directions. The brain used to be thought of as a passive switchboard, activated only when stimulated by our external senses. Now we know that each signal imposes on a background of ongoing activity, is modified by this activity, and in turn modifies it. Studies have shown that there are critical periods of development during which an injection of certain hormones in minute amounts can...