Since my post about Amma, the Hugging Saint, I have had quite a bit of activity in the comments section. For the longest time I simply moderated all my comments to deal with spam. This, however, can take up a lot of time when people are getting into heated discussions over controversial gurus.

I also found the comments were getting confusing, because quite a lot of people were posting as "anonymous" and this was not accurately reflecting the diversity (or sometimes lack thereof) in the posters.

So I've changed the comments set-up here in a variety of ways:

1. People must register for an account to post comments. This will probably reduce the number of commenters unfortunately, but it's the only way to distinguish one commenter from another. You can still be anonymous, you just need to pick a screen name for yourself.

2. Once you have registered, unless it's a special topic or topic I've closed, you can post to your heart's content without needing to wait for me to moderate - with the caveat that I reserve the right to delete or edit your comments or ban you if you become a pain in the neck. Example: I had one commenter on the thread who started out somewhat "OK" and then ended up going off on some seriously crazy tangents such as accusing me of hating Jews (huh???). That person has been banned from the website.

3. The Amma comments are now being directed to the following forum, where you are welcome to create your own topics:

http://feelgoodgirl.com/forum/261

You'll see I have a separate topic on Reiki criticism: One of the ways Amma supporters seem to try to undermine my opinion of her is to attack my affiliation with Reiki energy healing. I'm just going to warn you that if you go off on that tangent, I'm an Aries, and healing or no, will respond strongly! :-)

PS I hope that people who feel they need to get their stories out about these sensitive subjects pertaining to gurus will still feel they can do so here even with a registered account - I will retain no personal info other than IP address and whatever email you choose to use in registration.