Drums in the Boardroom A few hundred years ago, in the wilds and deserts and rocky hill places of America, indigenous people would go into the wilderness in search of visions and direction in their lives and to understand their spiritual selves. Nowadays, you are as likely to meet a group of senior business executives around the campfire on a wilderness quest to touch their creativity, build stronger relationships, and seek insights into the vision, philosophy, and future direction of the company they work for.
Turning Your Computer into a Prayer Wheel I think it might be possible to turn your home or office computer into a prayer wheel. I got this idea from old documentary films I’d seen about Tibet and the prayer wheels of Lhasa. I’m sure you know the ones I mean: those prayer wheels in the public square, which anyone can come and turn so that they repeat Padmasambhava’s ancient mantra, OM MANE PADME HUM.
A Physicist Speaks on Life After Death:
April Is Growth, Expansion, and Green
StarWatch
Playing By Heart
The Way of Inner Silence
This mysterious word can be translated as "inner tranquility" or "inner silence," and a complex psychological teaching and set of practices has grown up around it, involving some of the great figures of Eastern Christianity such as St. Gregory Palamas, John Cassian, and many others. Hesychasm is a quality of conscious presence that combines constant inner awareness and prayer with deep stillness. It requires a profound self-knowledge, attentiveness to each breath of the body, and commitment to the reality of the sacred at the heart of life. A synthesis of this teaching can be found in a revered book known as The Philokalia (translated as "Love of Beauty" or "Love of the Good"), which is central to Orthodox spirituality.
Transforming Depression
Assisi
Your Sacred Soul Mission
Your soul mission is like a corporate mission statement. It is the statement of your life purpose. A soul mission contains sacred covenants. Covenants are binding and solemn agreements that were forged between lifetimes. They are a series of commitments to carry out your soul mission.
Peace, Inside and Out
|
As a young man, Dr. Friedbert Karger took an interest in parapsychological phenomena and their underlying laws. It was on the basis of this interest and his academic excellence that he received, in 1959, the National Scholarship for Talented Students Award in Munich, Germany, where he was born and educated. He was awarded this opportunity for the study and research of distinguishing the relationship between normal physical phenomena and paraphysical phenomena.
This month we are held in the expansive embrace of spring. Everywhere, growth is moving upward and outward, covered by a delicious green mantle. Relief! We’ve made it through the dark time! Rock plants and bulbs explode with color in gardens everywhere. Trees and shrubs are pruned; perennials are ready to be divided. A flush of wild greens, chickweed, dandelion, and nettle are being enjoyed as the new lettuces emerge. These constant rhythmic patterns hold us like children if we give ourselves to their comforting presence.
By adding the universal year 2001 (2+0+0+1=3) to the 4th month of April, we come up with the vibration of 7. The 7 month is about taking the time to tune in to what has meaning in your life. It is a time for inner reflection, contemplation, and rest. Use this month to tap into what has meaning for you through art, meditation, being close to nature, and, if possible, retreat time. Look to see how you can create a harmonious balance between alone time for expanding your insights and creativity and practical accomplishment.
Twelve kids sit in a circle on the floor, their rapt attention focused on the big bear of a man who’s come to play with them. O. Fred Donaldson introduces himself and speaks briefly about his experiences playing with children and wild animals over the past 27 years. "Have you ever played with a lion?" one boy asks. "Yes," Fred replies, and tells about how in the middle of play a lioness once had his whole head in her jaws. "I think she was testing me, and some instinct told me to just relax my whole body completely. As soon as I did, she set me down — very gently." Twelve mouths gape open. "Now I hope you won’t try playing with lions," he says, "but I would like to play with each of you."
Few Western people know that the idea of "inner silence" is at the heart of the earliest expressions of Christian practice and faith. This way of being has a name that has yet to be uncovered in our part of the world. The Greek word hesychia has been a fundamental spiritual practice in the traditions of Eastern Orthodox Christianity going back to the first centuries after the appearance of Jesus in the hill country of Judea.
Depression significantly affects close to twenty percent of the population in the Northwest, and touches the lives of uncounted family members and friends. Yet we tend to stigmatize depression. We want to ignore it or wish it away. We see it as a problem, a condition, a disease. We either suffer through it or manage it. Seldom do we use depression, benefit from it, or value its gifts. Working with depression in my own life and with my clients, I treat it differently.
Assisi occupies a luminous realm between heaven and earth, floating above central Italy's sun-washed Umbrian plain on a deep green shoulder of Monte Subasio. The ancient walled town is a perfect destination for a pilgrim, its ocher walls anchored by the famous Basilica of Saint Francis to the west, and crowned by the stone battlements of a fourth-century castle, La Rocca Maggiore. The town's houses cascade across the slope washed in the colors of a faded Tintoretto, each the hue of a different rose: pink, cream, red, yellow, blush.
Your soul mission defines the reason you are incarnated. It is the culmination of all of your collected karmic experiences and wisdom. It is that ultimate goal that compels you to be the most moral, ethical person you can be. It challenges you to clean up yourself and your life and to use your gifts.
As a child, I saw auras. Not the huge colorful ones that many describe, simply a vague color surrounding people here and there, but enough so that I asked why people were different colors. My mother, painfully aware of the racial tensions in the area where we lived, tended to dismiss my questions and send me from the room. Eventually I was taken to get glasses, which taught me that I shouldn’t say or do anything that others weren’t already saying or doing.