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Power Your Life for 2020

What is your image of your future? For that matter, what is your idea of yourself right now: your self-esteem? As a child of an emotionally abusive unhappy mother, for decades I had chronically low self-esteem. Nearly everything my mother noticed about me was met with disapproval so I began seriously hiding. I shared nothing. I stuffed my feelings as best I could. When this became both painful and nearly impossible, I drank. I drank too much. My liver isn’t strong enough for that to go on very long. I found myself in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. At one AA meeting, another attendee shared that she realized that she had low self-esteem and she’d started to address this in various ways. I recognized immediately that this was my problem too. When did we stop dreaming? Not the dreaming that bridges deep sleep and waking but imagining while you are awake. In the book  Oh, the Places You’ll Go”  Dr. Seuss says, You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can s
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Love and Joy -- Not Just for Christmas

Love and joy empower success. My father was a commercial artist. When I was between 3 and 5 years old, artists actually drew the pictures in advertisements. That’s what my dad did. He had an art studio in our home. One day, when he had a free lance assignment to work on, he set me up in the studio with some brown paper, a paintbrush and some gold paint and let me play. I was around 3. I swished the paint around and then stopped.  Cherub My little 3-year-old mind saw that I’d accidentally made a picture that looked like the face of a cherub, a baby angel. I stopped  it to my father. He got very excited. He thought he had an artistic genius for a daughter. That’s what inspired my lifetime of practical art education. My father began teaching me but my mother didn’t want him overpowering my style, whatever it might be, so he searched for instruction outside our home. When I was 13 years old, I sold my first portrait. It was done in pastel and showed a younger

The Open Heart

Arinna Weisman              Have you ever freely given away something you value?  Arinna Weissman, a teacher at a nearby Buddhist meditation center, told us about a gift she gave.  When she was teaching in a center in Massachusetts, one of the staff was diagnosed with breast cancer.  One day the woman left the center to go for treatment and surgery.  Arinna had a teddy bear which had traveled everywhere around the world with her for almost 20 years. Without thinking about it beforehand, when the staff member came to say good-bye, Arinna gave her the beloved teddy bear and said she hoped that it would comfort the woman as she moved through her treatment and healing.         Arinna asked us if we could remember a time when we freely gave, not necessarily money, but something important to us.  Did we remember how it felt?  Did we remember the wide open expansive feeling? Arinna wanted us to stay with that feeling for a few minutes of silence. For me the remembered feeling mad

Are Empathy and Compassion "Natural"?

One bonobo comforts another.              Frans De Waal is a scientist who studies bonobos and chimpanzees, animals that are most like human beings.  He noticed some natural behaviors  that seemed to show that these animals had empathy and a sense of fairness.  Empathy means the ability to identify with another and imagine what the other feels.  The picture showing a bonobo comforting another with a hug suggests that one animal feels empathy for pain or disappointment the other felt.               De Waal conducted experiments that seem to prove that bonobos and chimps show empathy and fairness.  Apparently, grapes are highly prized by both kinds of animals.  If two bonobos are both given grapes, they are happy but if only one gets a grape and the other gets a cucumber, the one with the cucumber gets angry. They stay angry until they get a grape too.  This is interpreted as a sense of fairness. The bonobos are self-centered. Chimps are able to sacrifice until fairness is esta

Red Rose Petal Facial Masque @ Vedika Global

Today at the Vedika Global monthly sangha, I was given a free facial mask with fresh rose petals from founder Shunyaji's rose bush. Shunya asked for someone who had problems with redness on the face and I raised my hand. The rose paste was ... made of macerated red rose petals, coconut oil, and raw milk that had been boiled and cooled. It felt cold when applied to my face. Ghee was put around my eyes and rose petals placed over that. Since I had a nasty itchy rash at my right elbow, I asked if they would please put some of the masque material on that too and they obliged. The masque was not allowed to dry out.    As I relaxed with the rose petal paste on my face and arm, I became more and more calm and felt that the usually outgoing energy of pitta (fire) dosha (constitution) resolved and that the energy rooted itself within me. Afterward, everyone told me that my skin looked very refreshed. It was a most luxurious experience.   Online I notice that it costs $65 for

Getting to Know Fear

 Fear: Panic  Fear, other people’s fear, is what I have thought keeps them from volunteering in the prison ministry: fear of becoming a victim of a crime.   A little bit of my own fear enabled me to be cautious in designing how the ministry worked.   Even the worst things about us have some good to offer. In the past six months I’ve been exploring darker aspects of my mind.   Darker means that which leads me to darkness, to blindness, that enmeshes me in not knowing the truth.   It started as an intention to do this, via SoulCollage ® .   That is an enjoyable, intuitive art activity through which you create a pack of cards with your own collages on them. It was developed by Seena Frost who has studied and practiced Jungian analysis and also theology.   She had originally been using Tarot cards   with her clients to help them easily open the treasure chest of their own minds (or spirits) themselves, to access their own wisdom.   At some point she must have decided that folks

First Day of Freedom

Last week, as I was telling Christian how Salman's first day of freedom had gone, Christian said that he wished I'd write these things down, that it might help him. Christian is a new intern in the Freedom Ministry, the prison outreach program at Oakland Center for Spiritual Living.   I had the inspiration of Amma who has made her life a continual demonstration of unconditional love.   Not only does she hug all who come to her but also she has inspired the founding and continuation of so many humanitarian projects that it takes at least an hour just to mention and briefly describe them all. I proceed with some humility to discover things to do that harm no one and to continually evaluate what has been tried.     I am always available to learn from others who have been doing work like this for some time, indeed from anyone with a good idea and a willingness to help make it happen. In my life in American culture activism, usually entailed deciding who the bad guys are and wh