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Six Simple
Steps for Regaining Balance Now
As in any traumatic experience, when left unattended these can eventually create chronic illness, pain, and disease on emotional, mental, and physiological levels. There are immediate remedies that can be implemented to rapidly facilitate healing on an individual basis. Healing not only assures future health and well-being, it also restores balance in our lives, allowing us to be of greater assistance to those around us and to our community and world at large.
Cleansing
the Doors of Perception
Eating Thankfully
— Anyway
From Deafness
to Dharma
StarWatch
Believing
Is Seeing
Peace Pilgrim:
Synchronicity
on the Beach
What Is the
Mind?
It’s
All in the Gratitude
For several months after the holidays in 1996, I had the feeling that I was not fulfilling my soul’s purpose. I felt empty and unfulfilled. I felt as though I was in a trance, wandering aimlessly each day. Perhaps, I thought to myself, if I meditate more often, Spirit would guide me to find my way, to find that inner peace. I was continuously searching. I read books, took yoga lessons, participated in spiritual retreats, and so on. Yet even after all these things, I was still looking for something to fill the void. What am I looking for? Why does my heart feel so empty? These questions lingered for many days. Then, one night, I had a dream of a small child, about nine years old, standing on a stage, lecturing or reciting (I’m not sure which). I was the only audience.
Resonating
with Your Career A career, like everything else in life, is filled with choices — choices that will take you down energy-rich paths, and choices that lead to paths that will sap your energy dry. Work can be a vibrant, vitalizing force in your life, a conduit for the energy that comes from following your natural path, but first you have to make the choices that will lead you there.
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Shock. Terror. Disbelief. People around
the globe are experiencing these reactions to the tragic events
of September 11. As the reality of our world situation begins
to settle in, these initial responses may give way to tremendous
grief, trauma, fear, phobias, anger, the desire for revenge,
and senses of vulnerability, loss, and helplessness.
Some of our greatest icons and rogue thinkers
of the ’60s sat on the stage, gray-haired and bent, two
in wheelchairs, one with a cane. Age and infirmity had not dampened
their fire and counterculture ways of thinking, however. Ram
Dass (right), Ralph Metzner, Huston Smith, Robert Anton Wilson,
and Stanislov Grof are grateful for the mind-expanding experiences
their drug days afforded them, and they say so in their talks
and writings. Each in his own way credits hallucinogenic drugs
with providing the first stage in "cleansing the doors of
perception," influencing the direction and focus of the
rest of his life.
My psyche is still being ravaged by the
September attacks. I already live under siege mentality on a
daily basis, and now worst-case scenarios play through my head
alongside whether or not to take a long bath. I feel a new, raw
sense of my own mortality, and everything has changed —
for the better! In one bold stroke, I’ve been forced to
rethink where my energy was going and how I was moving through
time. It was an almost instantaneous moment of "aha."
Have you, too, remembered to move more slowly on the earth, to
be more aware of its great and transient beauty? This Thanksgiving,
I’m grateful just to feel grateful. How precious life is!
In 1972, shortly
after the birth of my first child, a mysterious reaction cut
the blood supply to all the nerves in my inner ear that affect
hearing and balance. This loss has been my life’s greatest
burden and its greatest gift. Like a Zen koan, silence was my
riddle and I had to understand it by exploring its deepest roots.
For the first few weeks, all I could do was lie in bed with my
eyes closed, completely isolated. If I opened my eyes, the world
would swirl dizzily by my sickbed in nauseating spirals.
By adding the
universal year 2001 (2+0+0+1=3) to the 11th month of November,
we come up with the vibration of 14/5. The 5 month is a time
for synthesizing all of the knowledge and experiences you’ve
acquired over the last four months. Look to see what you have
been learning and how this information may fit into a larger
system of knowledge that you can then disseminate to others.
The 5 month also signifies greater participation and possibilities
in any media-related business: writing, speaking, teaching, or
promotion. It can also represent disruption, chaos, and change,
so it is good to do whatever you can to ground and center yourself
this month.
Thank
goodness for metaphysics. Without it, I might still be a vice
president in the computer industry. Not a bad place to be, granted,
but a better place is where I am now: doing whatever I want to
do, when I want to do it. Without metaphysics I wouldn’t
have created the financial wherewithal — for starters, a
million bucks — to live such a life. But my new existence
didn’t come from surface knowledge; it came from study and
application. It came from understanding how the mind creates
reality, and the role beliefs play in that creation process.
The events of
September 11 have triggered, for many in this country and even
around the planet, tremendous emotion, upheaval, and soul searching.
Whether we view the fall of the World Trade Center as the wrongdoings
of crazed madmen, retribution for past actions of the United
States government, reaping of the fruits of individual or collective
karma, or as an opportunity for great compassion, love, and transformation,
many of us continue to search for answers. We, and most of those
we know and read about, simply cannot wrap our minds around such
vast suffering. How do we grasp the gamut of emotions —
the terror, heartbreak, and despair — along with the valor
and outpouring of generosity and selflessness?
I walked
the beach, glad to be away from it all. The ten days following
September 11 had been filled with intense emotion and many hours
of prayers, in circle and alone. I considered canceling my retreat
at La Push on the Olympic Peninsula, but the women who had signed
up held strong in their desire to go. We all knew that it is
healing to be on the beach, and we were hungry for it. There
is something about the crashing of the surf and the rolling of
the stones, in and out, that rock one in a field of sacred nurturing.
The pull of the tides, the setting of the sun and moon, the cloud
formations, the star canopy, the sparkling water, the awakening
of a new day, the calling of the birds, the spirit of the land,
and the Ancestors: all of these contribute to the calming, heart-opening
experience of this ocean shore.
I was recently
listening to a radio talk show on which a psychotherapist was
saying that ninety percent of illness starts in the mind. The
interviewer asked him to define what he meant by "mind,"
and the therapist replied that he meant "soul." However,
he did not offer any more explanation. It seems that in Western
science, religious thought, and modern culture, there is a great
deal of confusion about the mind. What exactly is it? What is
the nature of consciousness? What is this ethereal thing that
determines our experiences and reality?
I am
sure all of you have heard it many times: "be grateful for
all that you have." Each time we hear these words, we nod
our heads in agreement. "True," we say to ourselves,
"I have much to be thankful for." We hear and say these
words, but they have no meaning. In truth, none of us really
knows how to be grateful. Further, we do not know how to receive
gratefully.