Spirituality & Health Magazine

MAY/JUNE 2015SpiritualityHealth.com

Vision Quests Made Easy Walk & Talk Therapy

Plant by the Moon?Make a Difference Abroad

PALEO’S MORE ECO THAN VEGAN?

DAYS OF

SILENCE10

Tools for Inner Alignment

Embrace Your StressHEAL YOUR HEART • PROTECT YOUR FAMILY • EVEN CURE PTSD

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The Upside of StressThe stress response is your best ally during difficult moments—a resource to rely on rather than an enemy to vanquish.

BY KELLY MCGONIGAL, PhD

Why Go Paleo?One doctor’s story of finding better health through our oldest diet.

BY DEBORAH GORDON, MD

21 Days to Your Vision QuestGet ready for the least expensive, most healing, most enlightening 48 hours you may ever experience.

BY ALBERTO VILLOLDO, PhD

Your Body Knows the AnswerAn Interview with David Rome on “Felt Sense.”

BY SAM MOWE

may / june 2015

FEATURES

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ON THE COVERCover artist: Penelope Dullaghan

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8 Editor’s Note 10 Contributors 12 Talk to Us 14 Five Questions

David Helvarg

64 ToolboxTools for Inner Alignment

66 Reviews 74 The Commons

When the Gunman Walked into My Church

88 Your AssignmentSurprise Yourself with a “Nested Meditation”

INNER & OUTER WORLDS

COLUMNISTS

DEPARTMENTS

22 Inner Life10 Days of silence; Planting by the moon; Less rushed than ever?

28 PracticeKabbalah and yoga; Random acts of poetry

32 Healthy BodyWalk & Talk therapy;Fighting cancer with singing bowls

36 RelationshipsTravel in (better) time with your mate; Pushed out of the nest

40 BiosphereReal suffering of that free- range chicken

81 Close to the GroundTwo WordsBY GERI LARKIN

85 The Heart of MoneyShould I Take a Volunteer Vacation?BY PAUL SUTHERLAND

17 Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual TravelerHow Do I Afford a Pilgrimage?BY RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO

77 Care of the SoulSpiritual DisordersBY THOMAS MOORE

Exclusively Online

Find these web extras at SpiritualityHealth.com

14

34New Podcast Essential Conversations with Rabbi RamiTune in every Friday as Rabbi Rami chats with spiritual teachers, health experts, authors, and more from the pages of Spirituality & Health including editor in chief Steve Kiesling, spiritualityhealth.com/podcasts

Dialogues on End-of-Life CareThis Q&A series explores ideas on end-of-life care—from slow medicine to reestablishing death as sacred. Author Katy Butler (above), palliative care doctor Ira Byock, and more offer their insight. spiritualityhealth.com/dialogues

Balance with Ayurveda Suffering from depression or can’t control your anger? Treat mental, emo-tional, and physical imbalances with ayurveda. spiritualityhealth.com/ayurvedabalance

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EDITOR IN CHIEF Stephen Kiesling ART DIRECTOR Sandra Salamony REVIEWS EDITOR Kalia Kelmenson COPYEDITOR Sophie Howard PROOFREADER Mark Rhynsburger CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Janet Aschkenasy, Carol Deppe, Jason Drwal,

Bilge Ebiri, Deborah Gordon, MD, Joy Hosey, John Malkin, Kelly McGonigal, PhD, Sam Mowe, Damon Orion, Daksha Patel, Sheri Reda, Alizah Salario, Rabbi Benjamin Shalva, Alberto Villoldo, PhD, Kathryn Drury Wagner, Leigh Weinraub

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Inspired by this issue, my son Tim and I drove into the Oregon outback, the high desert east of Bend that was once a paleo

paradise. We went to see Fort Rock Cave, where archaeologists discovered 10,000-year-old san-dals. Nowadays, you have to take a guided tour, and we were out of season. But we learned that the area is full of caves and spent the afternoon exploring a line of paleo condos.

Many of the caves were carved by the wave action of large lakes that teemed with fish and waterfowl. Fresh game was always within easy reach, which is why the ancient people chose this place. Then the climate changed, the lakes became fossil beds, and the people moved on. A hundred years ago, the U.S. government gave away the land as 160-acre homesteads. Farmers rushed into the desert and slowly starved out. Today, thanks to deeper wells, alfalfa grows in places but the local food supply consists mainly of cattle and elk. Small wonder Paleo magazine is published in Bend.

So what do I tell my son about how to eat—and because eating is our fundamental connection to the earth—how to live? That’s a tough one. Ingrid Newkirk, president of PETA, believes there is suffering in every bite of free-range chicken, and the only humane meat is a veggie burger. (page 40) Newkirk believes she is saving the world, one vegan at a time. Meanwhile, Deborah Gordon, MD, believes that people are healthier eating like our paleo ancestors. She says our planet is healthier, too. (46)

Who’s right? I tell Tim he has to figure that out for himself—and that decision should take

TIM

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FROM THE EDITOR

a long time and deep listening. A good start is a 48-hour vision quest, ideally set up by a wise and experienced shaman like Alberto Villoldo, PhD. (54) I also think Tim should “go paleo” for six weeks—and vegan, too—perhaps while checking out the practice of Felt Sense to better tune into what his body is experiencing. (58) He should also experience a 10-day silent retreat by the Art of Living Foundation. (22) Like climbing a high mountain: he should do it because it’s there.

What will Tim decide from all this? Who knows? Much of what we “know” about how to live is like “planting by the moon,” a fine-sounding notion that probably has or had useful consequences for someone, somewhere, but may be exactly wrong right here and right now. (24)

The quiet times may teach Tim that stress can be more fun and healthy. (42) Or not. I just hope he learns that “Right Action” (81) means eating what’s put in front of him. Or not.

Stephen Kieslingeditor in chief

[email protected]

Exploring paleo condos in the Oregon outback.




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Kelly McGonigal, PhD, is a health psy-chologist and award-winning lecturer at Stanford University who is passionate about translating cutting-edge research from psychology, neuroscience, and medicine into practical strategies for health, happiness, and success. Her books include The Willpower Instinct and Yoga for Pain Relief. Her new book is The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You and How to Get Good at It. Read an excerpt on page 42. kellymcgonigal.com

Carol Deppe, PhD, is a freelance plant breeder who earned her doctorate in biology from Harvard and specializes in developing public-domain crops for organic growing conditions, sustainable agriculture, and human survival for the next thousand years. Her latest gardening book is The Tao of Vegetable Gardening: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity. Read an excerpt from the book about “Planting by the Moon” on page 24. caroldeppe.com

Penelope Dullaghan describes herself as a “health nut” who brews kombucha, makes lots of fermented veggies, and does Thai massage for fun on the side. Professionally, she’s an award-winning illustrator who began her career work-ing in advertising as an art director. She has worked with a wide variety of clients worldwide and has been recognized by Communication Arts, CA Typography, and Print magazine. Penny lives in India-napolis with her husband and daughter. penelopeillustration.com.

Alberto Villoldo, PhD, is a medical anthropologist and psychologist who studied the shamanic healing practices of the Amazon and the Andes for more than 25 years. He is the founder of the Four Winds Society, which teaches the philoso-phy and practice of energy medicine, and director of the Center for Energy Medicine at Los Lobos, Chile. His latest book, One Spirit Medicine, merges the heal-ing traditions of the Peruvian shamans with modern scientific breakthroughs. Read a short adaptation on page 54. Thefourwinds.com

Leigh Weinraub rose from being one of America’s top junior tennis players to coaching Northwestern University Tennis Team into the nation’s top three. After earning her masters in psychology from Northwestern, Leigh went on to build a thriving private practice as an action-based therapist using her innovative Walk and Talk Therapy. (Page 32) Today, she also has a line of fitness apparel— M by Mind in Motion— that carries a message to “unlock your inner strength to become your own greatest champion.” getyourmindinmotion.com

Deborah Gordon, MD, has worked in a variety of medical settings, including pri-vate practice, emergency medicine, out-patient clinics, and as the medical director for the first Migrant Farmworker Clinic in southern Oregon. She studied and taught classical homeopathy at the Hahnemann College of Homeopathy in California, and has managed an integrative medical prac-tice in Ashland, Oregon, since 1992. Read about her decision to go Paleo on page 46. DrDeborahMD.com.

CONTRIBUTORS




artists

FictionRachel Bone

Sofia BarãoWater (page 58), Air (60), Fire (62)watercolorsofia-barao.com

Josh BererTravel Tickets (page 30)pen and ink calligraphy of Arabic poem joshberer.com, arabiccalligrapher.com

Laura BergerThe Best Is Yet to Come (page 42),

Keep the Good Things Close (44),

Let’s Wrap Up Together (45)gouache & acrylic on wood panellauraberger.com, laura-berger.tumblr.com

Rachel BoneFiction (page 88)gouache and inkrachelbone.com, redprairiepress.com

Kelly Rae BurnsTotal Eclipse (page 74)gouache and graphite on paperkellyraeburns.com

Olga CuttellFour Moons (page 24)watercoloroladesign.ca, oladesign.etsy.com

Penelope DullaghanElephant Strength (cover)watercolor, acrylic and digitalpenelopedullaghan.com

Mali FischerUntitled (page 22)pen and ink with watercolormalifischer.com

Lisa GolightlyCaught in the Waves (page 37)acrylic on canvaslisagolightlyart.com, kikiandpolly.etsy.com

June MoonStar of David Mandala (page 29)junemoon.com

Ryan PeltierRoom 0 (page 26)digital illustration rpeli.com, lowlandsavages.com

Elena RayTibetan Singing Bowl (page 34)

mixed media elenaray.com

Lily ShihFrench Bulldog and Red Shoes (page 21)photographyLilyShihPhoto.etsy.com

Amy Alice Thompson White Moths (page 39), S ee Your

West: Yosemite (55), See Your West:

Apache Trail (56)mixed mediaamyalice.com

Sarah WaltonOld Ladies and Dogs (page 32)embroidery/textile sewsarahwalton.com, SewSarahWalton.etsy.com

may / june 2015 spiritualityhealth.com 11



talk to us by mail: Spirituality & Health, 123 W. Front Street, Suite 2B, Traverse City, MI 49684

by email: [email protected]; facebook.com/spirithealthmag; twitter.com/spirithealthmag.Include your name, city, state, and phone number when possible. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

TALK TO US

Global Wellness DayI saw the article about the June 13 Global Wellness Day inspired by Belgin Aksoy. What a great idea! As a Soulular Fitness Coach, I plan to offer a free workshop on that day. (Soulular Fitness uses the arts to obtain and maintain optimum wellness by giving people per-mission to authentically self-express in a safe environment.)

We should make this a Global Wellness Week—wrapping it up with the All We Need Is Love Worldwide Community Concerts, on June 20th. This concert commemorates the debut of the Beatles’ song “All You Need Is Love,” which aired during the first international satellite broadcast that went all around the world on June 25, 1967. We are commemorating the event and encouraging communities all over the world to coordinate their own local concerts on the same day, with the same theme of love. The ultimate mission is to Liberate Love all over the planet.

—Andrea Lyle, RN

The Spa at Sacred Grounds in Ephraim, Wisconsin, will be celebrating Global Wellness Day with a free daylong Yoga Festival on Saturday, June 13th. Cindy Conlon, RYT300, will teach four dif-ferent yoga classes throughout the day. Morning classes focus on energy, endurance, balance, and strength, and afternoon classes focus on flex-ibility, relaxation, breath work, and mindfulness. The festival starts at 8:30 a.m. and ends at 4:00 p.m. Details at treeoflifeyogastudio.net.

—Diane Ludwigsen, Owner The Spa at Sacred Grounds

40 Years of Healing MusicI have used Steven Halpern’s music—in particular, Chakra Suite—for different reasons over the past 28 years. Twenty-five years ago I played it to my then unborn child with a small cassette player held to my belly. After his birth, whenever my son was upset or crying, all I had to do was put that music on and he immediately calmed down. I use Chakra Suite and Deep Theta to calm down my clients and myself now. What a blessing Halpern and his music are to so many. Ten Grammys wouldn’t even begin to cover it. Thanks so much for giving credit to such an amazing and cre-ative presence!

—Susane Amick

Chasing Happiness?I wanted to respond to the article on “Chasing Happiness.” I am not a psychologist and have no extensive degrees, nor have I done any kind of study. But what I have discovered, purely accidentally, is that a practice of questioning and awareness, with a

complete surrender to the self, is key to changing the makeup of life. Hap-piness is not something one aims for, but something one evolves into. There is no need to want or desire, simply to spring into life with the glory of being alive. This evolution is a practice of surrender and succumbing to the self—it is not a question of direction, but leaps wholeheartedly without a thought of outcome.

—Kim Snyder

More on the Dalai Lama’s SoulThe Dalai Lama has touched the hearts and minds of so many non-Tibetans around the world. I think I would have to add myself to the mix and take some responsibility for creating the collec-tive consciousness that is or isn’t ready for the next Dalai Lama.

—Ariel Bleth

Does his soul belong to his people? How can an infinite entity belong to a mortal entity? His Holiness’s body does not own him. His soul is himself answering to the Source and is one with the Source. It seems to me that His Holiness fears that he will become like Kwan Yin: destined to stay on earth, never being able to achieve Nirvana.

—Robert Payne

. . . a practice of questioning and awareness, with a complete surrender to the self, is key to changing the makeup of life.




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David Helvarg organizes other seaweed rebels through his organization the Blue Frontier

Campaign. His new memoir Saved by the Sea:

A Love Story with Fish will be published this spring.

1. What’s one fact everyone should know about the state

of our oceans?Ninety percent of the heat we’re generating by burning fossil fuels is being absorbed by the ocean, which as a result, is becoming warmer, more acidic, and less hospitable to the diversity of life that lives within in and along its coasts (in-cluding humans).

2. With all the devastation that’s happened, what keeps you hopeful that we can turn

it around?I’m more frustrated than despairing, because we know what the solutions are. Stop killing fish and they tend to grow back. Don’t produce 100 million metric tons of disposable plastic ev-ery year, and it won’t end up choking turtles or concentrating toxins through the food web. What we lack is not solutions, but the political will to scale them up faster than the problems.

3. You have done everything from writing, speaking, filming—even happy hour events.

What has been the most effective way to persuade minds and hearts?You protect the things you love. I talk about how the ocean has been a source of wonder, thrills, and solace in my life and other lives and people relate because, as JFK said, “We all come from the sea.” I try and give people the tools to protect or restore the places along the shore or offshore that mean the most to them—be they divers, surfers, sailors, or simply beach walkers who stand by a coastal sunset and share in the awe and wonder.

4. Is there a place that’s particularly special to you?

The 1,100 miles of California coastline is my favorite small piece of our blue planet, including a particular Northern California tide pool where I shared a first kiss with a woman who would become a great partner in my ocean and outdoor life adventures before she crossed over the bar.

5. What can our readers do today to turn the tide?

Be a seaweed (marine grassroots) activist. Read my book 50 Ways to Save the Ocean. Generally, what’s good for the ocean also tends to be good for your health, pocketbook, or sense of well-being. Go to www.bluefront.org and look through our Blue Movement Directory of some 1,500 ocean protection groups. Pick one and get in touch. Become a change maker, but don’t forget to also get wet.

—ALMA TASSI

Questions for

5David

Helvarg

SCOTT FIELDER




with

Essential Conversations

Rabbi Ramı

Tune in every Friday as Rabbi Rami interviews spiritual teachers, health experts, authors and more from the pages of Spirituality & Health.

presents

SpiritualityHealth.com/podcasts

Guests Include:Stephen Kiesling, editor

in chief of Spirituality & Health

Allan Lokos, author of Through the Flames

Christophe Cognet, director of Because I Was a Painter

Lissa Rankin, author of The Fear Cure

Damien Echols, author of Yours for Eternity



Q

Author and teacher RABBI

RAMI SHAPIRO has been called “one of the

best bridges of Eastern and Western wisdom.” His newest

book is Embracing the Divine Feminine.

How Do I Afford to Make a Pilgrimage?

My grown daughters are both drug addicts. I continually bail them out of jail and send them off to rehab, but nothing works, and I’m destined for the poorhouse. Why is God punishing me this way?It’s your daughters’ actions that land them in jail, and your actions that are sending you to the poorhouse; God has nothing to do with it. We suffer when our adult children make harmful choices, but we suffer more when we try to save them from themselves. The person you need to take care of is you. Let your children deal with the con-sequences of their actions. Ask them, “What are you going to do to help your-self?” not “What can I do to help you?”

My best friend is Muslim and I’m Jewish. We’ve never had a problem, but I read on a website that it’s the obligation of every Muslim to “fight, defeat, and annihilate the Jews until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth.” I’m outraged by this, and yet afraid to talk with her about it. What should I do?This quotation is from a 2009 radio address delivered by Egyptian Imam Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub, and it should outrage every good-hearted and right-minded person regardless of religion. So give your friend the oppor-tunity to demonstrate her outrage, good-heartedness, and right-minded-ness. If she admits to planning your murder, excuse yourself immediately. I suspect, however, a more constructive conversation will take place.

ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE FOR THE SPIRITUAL TRAVELERRABBI RAMI SHAPIRO

I long to go on a pilgrimage, but lack the funds to do so. Any suggestions?My understanding of pilgrimage comes from Genesis 12:1–3, where we are called to walk (lech) to our truest self (lecha) by walking away from all that conditions and defines us. We are not told where to go, only that when we arrive, when we are free of isms and ideolo-gies, we are to be “a blessing to all the families of the earth.” This is the true destination of all authentic pilgrimage: not a site made holy by belief, but a state of mind and heart made holy by the lives we live. As expensive as a visit to a sacred shrine may be, the price of true pilgrimage is greater still: costing you everything that pre-vents you from being the blessing you can become.




I’m preparing to travel to several holy sites. What books should I bring?While you might read a general introduction to the sites you are visiting, I wouldn’t take any books with me. The purpose of pilgrimage is to free the mind, not to burden it further. If you fill your head with someone else’s ideas and experi-ences you will have no room for your own, and if you have no room for your own, there’s no point in making this journey in the first place.

I believe that God is goodness and love, yet I see evil and hatred everywhere. How do I trust a God who tolerates the ungodly?Your problem with God comes from your definition of God: because you believe God is goodness and love, you struggle with why God toler-ates evil and hate. I believe God is reality, the dance of opposites: good/evil, love/hate, light/dark, on/off, up/down, front/back, yin/yang (Isaiah 45:7). Trusting God means accepting the good and bad that come from God (Job 2:10), and learning how to navigate what is as it is, and not as you would like it to be (Ecclesiastes 3).

I watch a lot of television, and it seems that the shows I watch are conditioning me to fear and even hate Muslims. What can I do to resist this insidious manipulation?We humans are evolutionarily con-ditioned to fear the stranger, and then socially conditioned to direct that fear at whomever our society demonizes as the stranger. For some the fearsome stranger is the Muslim, for others the Jew, and for still others the African American. We are never at a loss for people to

fear and demonize. My suggestion is threefold: First, pay attention to how media is manipulating you. Second, counter that manipulation by building bridges to and friend-ships with the “stranger.” Third, watch less television.

We raised our daughter as a devout Catholic, yet she’s engaged to an Atheist. I worry about his ethics. How can a person be good without God?Would you worry any less if your daughter married an Orthodox Jew, or devout Muslim, Mormon, or devotee of Krishna? Each of these men seeks to be good according to the dictates of his God, but their understandings of God and good may differ drastically from your own. Believing in God is no guaran-tee that he will believe like you.

Regarding morality, the differ-ence between atheists and believers

ONE FOR THE ROADMy husband of 15 years has suddenly become a super Orthodox Jew. He wants me to convert (again!) according to his new standard, to shave my head, wear a wig, and live the life of a devout Orthodox Jewish woman. I love him and want to support him, but this just isn’t me, or my kids. Should I leave him?

Share your responses at spiritualityhealth.com/one-for-the-road.

is that atheists have to work out their moral stance for themselves, while believers adopt the norms of their religion. Given that religions are quite capable of doing evil in the name of God, I would prefer a son-in-law who thinks for himself rather than one who surrenders his moral responsibility to the will of the group, regardless of which group this may be.

Can all religions be true?Because religions make compet-ing and often mutually exclusive truth claims, they can’t all be true, though they could all be false. For me the question isn’t one of truth or falsehood, but of justice and com-passion. Any religion that teaches me how to be more just and kind is worthy of my time and effort. In this regard there is no need to limit yourself to one religion; I learn from them all. S&H

ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE FOR THE SPIRITUAL TRAVELERRABBI RAMI SHAPIRO

Your problem with God comes from your definition of God: because you believe God

is goodness and love, you struggle with why God tolerates evil and hate.




“An engrossing study of shamanism and how it relates to psychology and everyday life. A unique blending of two very powerful tools.”

–Lynn AndrewsNY Times bestselling author of the “Medicine Woman” Series.

“…a rich guide to shedding old limiting stories and dreaming a new world into being.”

–Alberto VilloldoAuthor of “Shaman, Healer, Sage”

“Change Your Story, Change Your Life can help anyone break free of old agreements

that no longer serve them and dream a new story.”–Don Miguel Ruiz

Author of “The Four Agreements”



Find out in Spirituality & Health magazine’s special publication The 2015 Soul/Body Connection

Why Choose Compassıon?

ON NEWSSTANDS OR ORDER NOW AT SPIRITUALITYHEALTH.COM



French Bulldog and Red ShoesLily Shih

INNER+OUTER WORLDS

We cannot solve our problems wearing the

same shoes we wore in creating them.

—LEIGH WEINRAUB

«


inner life // practice // healthy body // relationships // biosphere



I Have Just Returned from 10 Days of Silence. . .

The silence was a prerequisite for the meditation I was to do—vipas-sana—a technique of moment-to-moment self-observation that was practiced by the Buddha and is now offered in nearly every country of the world by groups like the Art of Living Foundation (artofliving.org) and dhamma.org. What it is supposed to do is to allow people “to see things as they really are.” This you do by observ-ing what happens to you during the silence. Whatever you experience, the key is not to react; you simply observe the feeling.

The first meditation session of the day started at 4:30 a.m. with an hour of “strong determination,” which meant I was not supposed to move my body—at all. Not in response to any sensation that I felt on my body, pleasant or unpleasant. I was to sit completely still and let any sensation arise, observe it, and let it pass. As I sat in strong deter-mination, my knees ached, I had pins and needles in my foot, my legs were numb, my lower back hurt, my neck was strained, and my nose itched, then my cheek, then my ears—and through it all, I was supposed to remain com-pletely still. I was not to give in to any sensation that I felt. I was to stop being a slave to my mind and instead learn mastery of my mind.

The hunger and tiredness, from minimal food and sleep, were easy compared to the three hours of strong

I woke up at 4:00 a.m., meditated for 11 hours, and ate my last meal of the

day at 11:00 a.m.—for 10 days. Where to begin?

WELL, THE NOBLE SILENCE, as it is called, started at 7:00 p.m. We gave up our books, magazines, iPods, and phones. The men and women were sepa-rated, and all forms of communication were strictly forbidden. No talking, laughing, reading, writing, gesturing, not even smiling. There was also no payment and no commitment. I would live on the charity of others.

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ART OF LIVING

Untitled Mali Fischer«




determination each day. A good many times I reacted. That is the nature of reaction. But on my fourth day, I did not scratch the itch on my nose or stretch my leg, not even just a little. I didn’t move my neck from side to side to ease the strain. I just sat from moment to moment, for what I have to say was the longest hour of my life.

I longed for that hour to be over—desperate for the chanting to start. Chanting indicated that we had only five minutes left. Just bring on the chanting. Then something hap-pened. As I observed the sensations of my body, they began to pass, without my doing a single thing. Even as I write this, I am amazed how it all just passed, without any effort on my part. I did nothing, and the discomfort went. I actually laughed. How could this be? My knees stopped aching, the numbness in my legs vanished, the itching on my face came and went, my lower back felt fine. It was as if I had just sat down to meditate, and I could have done another hour easily. Amazing. Every sensation arose, only to pass, without a reaction.

As the days wore on, times in my life when I had reacted with anger, sadness, hurt, or despair floated to the surface of my mind. The people and the situations that had caused me such pain appeared faded and distant. What I saw was that the pain came from my own reactions, not from the person or circumstance. I actually witnessed this for the first time. I was not in denial or pretending that what I had felt was not real for me. I observed the experience. This enabled me to detach myself from the reaction. I was no longer really interested in the reaction, but rather in the process of self-observation.

I had thought that having my past experiences surface would be pain-ful or difficult to deal with. They were not. I felt detached. I was observing the feelings that I had felt—and for the first time I could see that I had a choice, in everything. I could always choose. This was my greatest discov-ery, and one that could change my life. I mean really change my life.

—DAKSHA PATEL




Planting By the Moon DOES IT HELP TO BE ABLE TO SEE YOUR SEEDS?

I WAS ONCE at a dinner at the home of Mushroom (Alan Kapuler) with a number of other avid gardeners. Mushroom was off in the kitchen cook-ing. Someone asked, “Hey, what does everyone think about planting by the moon?” Everyone except me weighed in on the subject. Most were in favor of the idea of planting by the moon, some vociferously, though none seemed to actually be practicing it. And even those who wanted to believe in plant-ing by the moon did not agree as to when you would actually end up plant-ing anything. After the conversation ran down and there had been a short pause, someone turned to me and asked me explicitly: “Carol, do you plant by the moon?”

“I plant by the sun,” I said. “It’s easier to plant when you can see the seeds.”

After everyone finished laughing, I elaborated. In the Willamette Valley we can often plant the first planting of peas in February, for example. It requires watching for the break in the weather. There is usually only one such break of a few days in February. Miss it, and your next opportunity might be delayed a month or two. I watch for weather that dries up the ground a little and is a little warmer, not for phases of the moon. If I had to have the phases of the moon right too, I would almost never be able to make that first planting.

After I expounded thus, Mushroom came back from the kitchen. So the question was put to him. Did he plant by the moon? His response was as prosaic as mine.

“I plant when I have time,” Mushroom said. There’s a lot do in spring, he elaborated. There is soil preparation, putting out irrigation lines, planting, and tending trans-plants in the greenhouse. When the weather is right and the soil is pre-pared and he has the time, he plants.

In our region I think the practical weather limitations are so great that even if planting by the moon actually helped some, it still would not be prac-tical. We need to plant when weather permits, given that it doesn’t most

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BIODYNAMIC

Four MoonsOlga Cuttell«




of the time. I think this is why even the people who would like to believe in planting by the moon here in the Willamette Valley by and large have never actually done so. Instead, they watch the weather longingly in spring, just like I do, and scurry out and dig or till, and plant on exactly the same days I do, whatever the moon is up to.

Do crops grow better—even just a bit better—if planted according to some phase in the moon, given equal weather (which would not normally happen)? We can’t actually do a con-trolled experiment with two different phases of the moon at the same time to find out. Alternate experimental approaches are possible, but are diffi-cult. All we can do easily is to note that many expert gardeners don’t worry about the moon and have glorious

gardens. And that, at least around here, those who support the idea of planting by the moon are not actually doing so.

Sometimes, however, agricultural beliefs work but for reasons different than the believer imagines. And often the beliefs work only in some regions but get passed along and applied out-side their region of relevance. Let me imagine planting potatoes somewhere else that did not have such wet condi-tions in spring. Let me imagine a soil that dries up in spring and is suitable for planting potatoes most of the time for a couple of months in spring. In such a situation, it might be easy to procrastinate and put off planting the potatoes week by week until it is too late for an optimal crop. In that situ-ation, if I believed that the potatoes

should be planted on a particular magic day or at a particular phase of the moon, this might help ensure that the potato crop got planted in a timely fashion. So the false belief could lead to more successful potato crops, even if the potatoes themselves did not actually care.

Non-knowing can be uncomfort-able. I think we would often rather imagine we know, understand, and can influence something than admit that we neither understand nor can control it. So we develop beliefs and rituals that may be contrary to fact. Many people add unnecessary work that may sometimes be counterproductive, get-ting in the way of observation or look-ing for real solutions. There is much to be said for learning to be comfortable with non-knowing. —CAROL DEPPE

If I had to have the phases of the moon right too, I would almost never be able to make that first planting.

This excerpt is from The Tao of Vegetable Gardening, by Carol Deppe (Chelsea Green Publishing), and is used with permission of the publisher.

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More Are Less Rushed Than EverSo maybe the real problem is not feeling stressed enough?

A RECENT STUDY by social psychologist John Robinson, a professor at the University of Maryland, reviewed national surveys from 1965 to 2010 (ironically, the latest such data available) and found startling results.

Despite all the TV ads aimed at the overwhelmed housewife, books on time management, and devices for the incurable multitasker, only 25 percent of Americans reported feeling rushed all the time, the lowest number since the 1970s.

Robinson also looked at happiness and found something else unexpected. The happiest people in the study were not just feeling rushed (a well-documented finding); in addi-tion to that, they said they always had something to do with their free time. Not knowing what to do with your free time, Robinson says “[is] a psychological state which indicates that I don’t really have something useful to do with my time.” Although the study wasn’t designed to explain why these people were happier, it does suggest that just having large amount of free time is no longer the path to happiness.

When it comes to being rushed, Judy Wajcman, author of Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism, says our expectations may be part of the prob-lem. Professor Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, says we complain that cell phones, social media, and technology rob us of control of our time, but the fault lies in ourselves not our technology: “All of us [are] colluding in this crazy practice where we think we have to

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answer something quickly.”Being rushed, however, has also become a badge of honor.

Wajcman says, “If you are important now, you always have too much to do. Slowness is seen as a very negative thing.” Unlimited availability at work, especially in upper-level managers and those in the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley, is the new norm. Things weren’t always this way. Wajcman points out that enjoying frequent leisure activities was once the privilege and the hallmark of the aristocracy. Today, such people would be labeled as self-indulgent.

Not knowing what to do with your free time, Robinson says “[is] a

psychological state which indicates that I don’t really have something

useful to do with my time.”




Even in family life, dedication has become just as important as in busi-ness. Despite what your parents told you about the good old days, Wajcman says, “mothers and fathers are spend-ing more quality time with their kids than ever before—but people just don’t want to believe it.”

Hoko Karnegis, a Soto Zen Inter-national Teacher, says the wisdom of Buddhism, which addresses the roots of suffering, can inform our modern dilemma of time pressure.

First, we must realize that our expectations of how we use time are just that— expectations. Karnegis says, “Sometimes we believe we’re separate from time and we can create this adversarial relationship with it. There isn’t enough of it and I can’t get this thing done . . . Our adversarial relationship with time is an illusion.” Once we see time as this thing that we can control, we begin to evaluate, judge, and criticize our use of it.

Karnegis isn’t saying that we should ignore how we use time. “It’s not that we shouldn’t look carefully at what we’re doing,” Karnegis says. “Sometimes we need to take some skillful action. But can we do that with-out labeling this as a good thing or a bad thing?” At its heart, Karnegis sug-gests that we do something much more involved and deeper than just learning time management. We must learn to recognize and let go of our judgments about how we use time; for example, that failing to do something efficiently, quickly, or on the first try means we should feel frustrated or disappointed.

Busy people, as Professor Robin-son’s research discovered, can still be happy—maybe happier than most. As Laurie Stunz, a 59-year-old research scientist at the University of Iowa, recognizes, “There’s just so much I can pack into a day . . . and I just have to deal with that. ” When it comes down to it, finding a way to deal with work, parenting, or other time pressures isn’t about finding the right tool but about finding the right attitude. —JASON DRWAL

Download your FREE E-book, Journey of a Soul at www.msia.org/info/sh

To request a print copy, contact [email protected] or (800) 899-2665




The Practice of Kaballah and YogaA WAY TO BRING BODY AND MIND AND CULTURES TOGETHER

TODAY’S KABALLAH TYPICALLY happens from the neck up. Most students of this ancient Jewish mysticism sit on their butts and study. Eyes squint at translations, brains strain through mystic theory, tongues cluck with questions.

entwine these traditions? Did they ever even meet? Or is this kaballah/yoga blend another manifestation of today’s salad-bar approach to wisdom traditions? Well, I’m not the first rabbi to teach yoga, but it’s part of the salad bar that I came to on my own.

Initially, I blended kaballah and yoga to improve my yoga practice. I had begun to notice that, on different days, I brought dramatically differ-ent qualities to the mat. One day, my analytical mind might be firing on all cylinders while my imaginative, intui-tive brain hid beneath the covers. The following day, I’d step onto the mat and discover the reverse. Or, during one session, I’d feel easygoing and buoyant, yet lacking in focus. The next session, I’d feel the reverse.

This internal ebb and flow reminded me of a kaballahistic teach-ing. God created reality, taught the kaballahists, by refracting divine energy through 10 different channels called sefirot. When God’s unified energy poured into these 10 chan-nels, the energy transformed into 10

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MYSTICAL BLENDS

spiritual emanations: being (keter in Hebrew); inspiration (khokhma); understanding (bina); kindness (khesed); strength (gevurah); beauty (tiferet); achievement (netzakh); acceptance (hod); foundation (yesod), and manifestation (malkhut).

Every aspect of reality—as well as every human being—contains dif-ferent portions and combinations of these 10 sefirot. Some of us, for exam-ple, may operate with abundant kind-ness, yet very little strength. Others of us possess tremendous strength but have trouble tempering this strength with kindness.

The unique combination of sefirot within us can change. Strong indi-viduals who lack kindness, or kind individuals who lack strength, can shift the scales. Many kaballahists employ spiritual practice—medita-tion, prayer, scriptural study, song and dance—to awaken dormant sefirot. With every chanted psalm, with every circle dance, kaballahists can work to gradually improve their spiritual alignment.

Could the practice of yoga per-form a similar function? Could my sweating and stretching on the mat not only align my spine but align my sefirot, as well? I started exploring. When I stepped on the mat, wanting to rock the perfect pose, my sefirah of achievement everabundant, I would adjust my mindset, focusing less on achievement and more on acceptance. As I practiced acceptance on the mat, I began to practice acceptance off the mat, too. I navigated the rest of my day with greater acceptance of the people and situations I encountered. I moved through my life with greater accep-tance of myself. Sure enough, this kaballahyoga blend was helping me grow. —RABBI BENJAMIN SHALVA

Today’s yoga typically happens from the neck down. Most practi-tioners of this ancient Hindu mysti-cism roll out their mats and stretch. Muscles burn, joints compress, lungs expand, hearts pound.

It wasn’t always this way. Kaballahists used to dance. They’d

wander through the woods, ecstati-cally incanting midnight prayers. They’d gather on Sabbath Eve, clasp-ing hands and spinning beneath the stars. Ancient kaballahists served the Creator with their bodies, from the soles of their feet to their yarmulke-capped heads. They danced to know God through their blood and bones.

Yogis used to sit. They’d spend life-times in meditation, working to weave the brain’s animalistic, limbic struc-tures with their more sophisticated frontal lobes. Yogis revered the power of the mind. They stretched not to look good, but to prepare their spines and limbs for long hours of contemplation.

When I teach kaballah and yoga together, students ask: Did the kaballahists and yogis of old ever

Some of us, for example, may operate with abundant kindness, yet very little strength. Others of us possess tremendous strength but have

trouble tempering this strength with kindness.28 spiritualityhealth.com may / june 2015



Balance Your Sefirot During Your AsanasAccording to kaballah, we possess 10 sefirot, 10 spiritual qualities: being (keter); inspiration (khokhma); understanding (bina); kindness (khesed); strength (gevurah); beauty (tiferet); achievement (netzakh); acceptance (hod); foundation (yesod); and manifestation (malkhut).

Kaballah yoga allows us to develop and balance these sefirot. The next time you step on a yoga mat, try these explorations:

•Being (keter) To explore the quality of being, begin and end your yoga practice in stillness. Standing, sitting, or lying down, explore what it feels like to just be, without movement or manifestation, without posture or purpose. When we develop our capacity of being without doing, we develop the sefirah of being within.

•Inspiration (khokhma) To explore inspiration, choose a word, a mantra, to repeat throughout your practice. Choose a word that inspires you to become your best self on the mat. Especially if you feel confused or frustrated during practice, center your-self with this word. Through a mantra, we get to know the sefirah of inspiration.

•Beauty (tiferet) The kaballahists defined beauty as a balance of kindness (khesed)

and strength (gevurah). To explore beauty on the mat, practice moving in and out of postures with a blend of kindness and strength, compassion and discipline, grace and power. Anytime you sense kindness overshadowing strength or strength prevailing over kindness, work to restore balance between the two. As we discover the balance of kindness and strength, we discover the sefirah of beauty within.

Star of DavidJune Moon

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Random Acts of PoetryHOW TO TURN ANY ORDINARY TREE INTO A POET-TREE

NATURE, THEY SAY, abhors a vacuum—which may be why we fill the space between us with communications of all kinds. During busy times, we email, post, text, and tweet and are surprised when we look up and see a flesh-and-blood face. Poetry posts are a way to combine human connection and a connection with nature. They are like those real-estate signs that hold listing sheets, except that instead of listings, they hold and display poems, quotes, or words of wisdom. They range in complexity from imitation trail markers to unprotected pages attached to trees, which turns trees into—yes—poet-trees.

SIMPLE CEREMONIES

PREPARATION Find a quote or a poem that honors nature and may inspire human beings. Print it out or copy it by hand and live with it for a week to make sure it speaks to you in a variety of moods. Then consider the kind of experience you want to offer.

• Do you want to post a single page that people come to see, or a product people can take with them? Will your posting be ephemeral—designed to wear away over time—or encased in a permanent or semipermanent home?

• Make sure that laws or regulations permit you to post materials in your chosen spot. Your own driveway or lawn may be the best spot for a posting; city and parkland kiosks can work, too.

THE POST Set an intention, post your material, then become the first reader to read the post aloud. Let the sound steep the area with good intentions.

THE CLOSING Ceremonies and rituals are all about making words and intentions come alive. By posting them to share with friends and strangers alike, you invite ceremony and an appreciation for nature into everyone’s life, and you contribute to a truly social form of media. —SHERI REDA

From Life-Cycle Ceremonies: A Handbook for Your Whole Life, a new ebook from the Celebrant Foundation.

MATERIALS • Materials for posting, such as a length of string or a prebuilt box • Statement, wish, quote, or poem honoring nature • Tree or lamppost • Unbleached paper

Travel Tickets Arabic calligraphy

Josh Berer«

Travel TicketsThe day I’m killed,my killer, rifling through my pockets,will find travel tickets:One to peace,one to the fields and the rain,and oneto the conscience of humankind.

Dear killer of mine, I beg you:Do not stay and waste them.Take them, use them.I beg you to travel.

—Samih al-Qasim(Translated by A.Z. Foreman)




A Thomas Merton Centenary Pilgrimage Retreat

Join Jonathan Montaldo, Merton scholar, author, editor, retreat and pilgrimage leader, Marianne Hieb, RSM, artist, retreat and spiritual director, and Helen Owens, OSF, wellness educator and integrative nurse coach, for eight days in Assisi, Italy.

We explore together the songs of creation and of friendship through the lens of the spirituality of St. Francis and its confluence with themes from Thomas Merton, in the sacred landscape of their spirit and legacy.

This retreat and intensive is a Merton Centenary Event; a gathering to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of Thomas Merton, monk and mystic, and to spend contemplative time in the land of one of his many spiritual influences.

Core themes will weave through our time together. Elements of our pilgrimage include: the Retreat/Intensive program, a dedicated meeting room, daily retreat prayer, presentations on the day's theme, a late afternoon group gathering, and evening prayer. A half-day visit to sacred Franciscan sites is also included.

Our daily schedule is characterized by spaciousness. Group gatherings will be balanced by time in the late morning and afternoon to wander, exploring the streets and the vistas, the great basilicas and the simple alleyways of Assisi.

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at the Blacktail Ranch in Wolf Creek, Montanaexploring inner & outer wilderness

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the almighty chair. Outside, we talk face to face, footstep to footstep, in the open air of possibilities.

Since that first walk, I’ve noticed that when my clients are walking through a park they might be telling me about painful events like a divorce or a job loss, but somehow they still felt good. Physiology is working in their favor, and they don’t seem so stuck in their story. The solutions you come to while in motion are different than the ones you think

Awakening to Walk & Talk TherapyWE CANNOT SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS WEARING THE SAME SHOES WE WORE IN CREATING THEM.

I REMEMBER THE MOMENT it hit me. It was your typi-cal 10-degree windy, wintry day in Chicago, and I was sitting in my pimped-out therapy office with a client, surrounded by the perfect Eames chairs, a cozy security blanket, and two inconspicuously placed clocks. My client was in the middle of a story she’d told me 20 times before, sitting with her shoulders hunched in defeat and her foot twitching with angst, and all of a sudden I felt I would suffocate in the stuffy, airless room. That’s when I heard myself blurting, “Grab your coat. We’re going for a walk.”

My client was shocked, and it was cold, but almost as soon as we hit the street, she came unstuck, and I knew with every cell inside of me that my chosen profession was no longer “talk therapy” but “walk and talk therapy.” That combina-tion really has the power to unlock human potential.

When you are outside and moving, you burn calories, your endorphins spike, and you feel the sensory bliss of being outside. You’re constantly passing new scenery, which helps you think creatively. Your self-consciousness dissipates with each step. Walking also encourages people to come up with their own solutions, because the therapist and client become a team of equals rather than one of them sitting there in

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INSIGHT

Everyone talks about physical toning, but we need emotional

toning as well, a way to give the mind a rest from busywork and raise our body-centered energy.

Old Ladies and Dogs Sarah Walton

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of while sitting still. They tend to be more real-world, and—maybe because they’re born out of action—easier to put into action.

I’ve now walked and talked with thousands of people, both at Miraval Resort & Spa in Tucson, and with clients across the country as part of the work I do with my company, Mind in Motion (Getyourmindinmotion.com). Each walk has been a catalyst for change, whether the client is an over-stressed CEO, an empty-nest couple seeking to reconnect, or someone trying to understand the deeper issues behind their weight problems or strug-gling to let go of a painful divorce.

I also encourage my clients to bring in physical activity when they need to have a challenging discussion, whether it’s a personal relationship or a business meeting. Sure, there’s a time and a place for stillness: I wouldn’t advise someone who had just suffered the death of a loved one to get up and walk it out. But it’s amaz-ing how many problems can be solved through the combination of nature, motion, and human connection.

This isn’t about working out, which is a different type of activity with a different goal, but rather about sustaining a level of movement that’s steady and calming. Everyone talks about physical toning, but we need emotional toning as well, a way to give the mind a rest from busywork and raise our body-centered energy. In talk therapy, the law of inertia works against us—the longer we sit there feeling stuck, the more stuck we get. But in walk and talk therapy, the law of inertia begins to work in our favor, for motion, once created, sustains itself.

Our bodies instinctively know how to self-heal, and if we give them half a chance, they can heal our minds as well. —LEAH WEINRAUB

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Fighting Cancer with Singing Bowls and Yogic ChantsTHE BOWLS BRING ME INTO MY BODY AND MAKE ME FEEL THAT I AM PART OF THIS INFINITE UNIVERSE.

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UPDATE

BACK IN 2003, I wrote a story for this magazine on the remarkable healing and pain relief made possible with the chanting of age-old scripture and sounds like Om, and through drinking in the tones of crystal or metal singing bowls.

The article described a “smiling and energetic” Marisa Harris, who had been diagnosed five years earlier with stage-four pancreatic cancer, the final stage of a disease that kills nearly all its victims. A top New York oncologist had given her nine months to live. Chemotherapy, he said, would do her no good. And yet, Harris is still alive and well, and as vivacious as ever. She works as a Certified Master Life and Health Coach and a Life Mastery Consultant, accred-ited by the Center for Mind-Body Medicine. In her practice, she taps into many of the tools that she believes saved her life—includ-ing singing bowls, chants, and lifestyle changes.

Harris credits Mitchell Gaynor, MD, an assistant clinical professor of medi-cine at Weill-Cornell Medical Center in New York, and the founder of Gaynor Integrative Oncology, with helping her combine the heal-ing powers of mind and medicine. For years now, Dr. Gaynor has

treated cancer patients to traditional Western and alterna-tive techniques with a sound arsenal, including translucent crystal bowls, as well as metal Himalayan bowls, nature sounds, Sanskrit yoga chants, and affirmations such as “infi-nite love,” “infinite wisdom,” and “infinite beauty.”

“I grew up with the belief that cancer was a death sen-tence,” reflects Harris. “The music and chanting created this enormous space where there were so many possibili-ties.” Harris eventually decided to go ahead with chemother-apy, but also began a multifaceted regimen that included nutrition and changes in her dealings with her husband and children.

“Today, when I play the bowls, it has the effect of not only calming me but bring-ing me into my body and making me feel that I am part of this infinite universe,” says Harris. For clients, she finds, “The sound of the bowls are one of the most effective ways of changing a very narrow and constricted way of seeing yourself and seeing life to one that is expansive and filled with infinite possibilities.” In her Manhattan office, she keeps a crystal bowl “right under a photo-graph of Mitch.”

Tibetan Singing BowlElena Ray«




Gaynor, meanwhile, has expanded his ancient sound healing methods with a series of CDs that he calls Crystal Sonic Therapy (CST). The specially mixed crystal bowl tones—as well as nature sounds, drums, and chants—are said to put an individual into immediate relaxation.

“On every track,” explains Gaynor, “the frequency of the crystal bowls differs significantly in terms of what’s heard in each ear—which creates a relaxation response in the brain that can be measured by multiple different modalities including heart rate vari-ability and skin resistance.” Gaynor adds, “Just as the food you put in your body also effects the neurotransmit-ters in your brain such as dopamine, serotonin, and epinephrine, so do sound frequencies. Both affect how we experience stress as well as inner peace in our day-to-day lives.”

After Gaynor appeared on The Dr. Oz Show touting the Crystal Sonic Therapy concept in July, 2013, the response was so great that five of his CDs designed to encourage relaxation, concentration, and sleep made up half of the Billboard Top 10 listings after the broadcast.

Gaynor believes that crystal vibra-tions do more than relax patients and improve sleep (both of which are criti-cally important when fighting cancer). Back in 2003, he told me that the sound affects the disrhythmic motion found in cancer cells. When you place water in one of Gaynor’s singing bowls and draw a baton around the rim, the harmony that results turns the liquid into “beautiful shapes like snow-flakes,” he says. With the use of certain sounds, the same harmonious trans-formation can occur within the cells of the human body. Research to figure out how all this works continues; meanwhile Gaynor’s methods have healed numerous individuals who were not expected to survive by incorporat-ing singing bowls and chants, as well as chemotherapy and other Western methods. –JANET ASCHKENASY




How to Travel in (Better) Time with Your MateTHE STORY OF HOW YOU MET REVEALS THE FUTURE OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP.

HERE’S A SIMPLE QUESTION I ask each of my new clients: “Tell me about how you met—the early days of relating when you realized your partner was someone you wanted to spend a whole lot more time getting to know better.”

When I asked Paul and Laura this question, their energy immediately shifted. Laura blushed, and they both visibly softened and squirmed as they looked at each other warmly. This, of course, is a positive sign. If either one had stiffened or looked away, I would know that the road ahead would be filled with potholes.

THE PASTScience now substantiates what most of us know to be true: Heightened emotions affect how well we will remember events. The more something matters to us, the more apt we are to catalog it for future reference. As neuroscientist Rebecca Todd notes, “We call this ‘emotionally enhanced vividness,’ and it is like the flash of a flashbulb that illumi-nates an event as it’s captured for memory.”

The good news is that we can use our positive memories to replicate the delightful feelings of our honeymoon period simply by putting our attention on them. Just like Paul and Laura, retelling “the delightful story of how we met” deepens the neural pathway of that memory and influences our current feelings toward our partner. A poignant example of this phenomenon occurred with my mother-in-law who died a few years ago. Her favorite memory was when she was “just sweet sixteen” and met the dashing navy pilot who was to become her husband for over 60 years. She told this story regularly, and the gleam in her eyes never dimmed.

Of course, the inverse is also true. If what you remember is how your spouse got drunk and hit on your best friend, or you can’t really remember your first dates at all, chances are you have undercurrents of dissatisfaction or distrust in your relationship. My advice: If you want your relationship to flourish, put even more attention on creating positive memories now—and cement them in the retelling.

SIMPLE MAGIC

INNER+OUTER WORLDS

relationships

THE FUTUREA favorite pastime with my husband is imagining future exploits together. During the cold, gray days of January, you will find us sitting next to a fireplace plotting out our summer camping adventures. Anticipating future activities bonds us and builds excitement. Whether we are contem-plating moving my elderly mother nearer to us or buying a new house, we take time to “toss”—sharing our ideas and

Do-Overs: Change the Past, Influence the FutureDo you ever wish that, after getting triggered with your partner, you could push “rewind” and have a second chance to respond to the same situation? Well, you can! Simply take a breath, center yourself, and tune into what you wish you had said— instead of the knee-jerk response you gave. Then ask your part-ner, “May I have a do-over?” If your partner agrees, go back to the moment in time where your communication went awry, and do it over with the presence and awareness now available to you. Be sure to “rewind” yourself physically, as well. For example, if you were walking in the door when you made your fate-ful, unconscious remark, then go back and walk through the door again.

Many coaching practices are designed to help create new awareness and deepen pres-ence. A do-over is a playful way to help heal the past and encourage new neural pathways for the future.




feelings about our potential future. If the future event poses challenges, we have the opportunity to prepare ourselves and unite in our intention. When focusing on fun, it’s a grand twofer: In addition to the eventual sat-isfaction we’ll derive from the actual event, we also get to parlay our future plan into pleasure now, simply by put-ting our attention on it.

Couples who enjoy collaborating on future projects tend to feel secure in

Caught in the WavesLisa Golightly

«

The good news is that we can use our positive memories to replicate the delightful feelings of our honeymoon period simply by

putting our attention on them.

their partnership. Visioning together naturally supposes a shared future, one that we are actively nurturing. True collaboration involves several important interpersonal skills: listen-ing with curiosity; sharing candidly; accepting another’s influence; and making clear agreements. It also can bring up control issues—with an opportunity to heal them.

—JOY HOSEY

THE UPSIDE OF STRESSKELLY MCGONIGAL, PH.D.

Author of the international bestseller The Willpower Instinct

Watch the TED Talk

Available in hardcover, eBook, and audio

A groundbreaking new book that

overturns long-held beliefs about stress.

“ Kelly McGonigal powerfully teaches us how to transform the suff ering of misguided stress into a meaningful and thriving life.” —DANIEL J. SIEGEL, M.D., author of Mindsight and Brainstorm

“ Th e message that stress can actually convey health benefi ts is important and needs to be heard. Th is thoughtful analysis on the role of mindset will prompt you to re-think your relationship with stress, and help you realize its benefi ts.” —ANDREW WEIL, M.D., author of Spontaneous Happiness




I STARED IN DISBELIEF at the email. Golden Bridge was closing? I would need to use up my classes before the end of the month? Whoa. I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach.

Golden Bridge Yoga Center had been a beacon in our Hollywood neighborhood, anchored by the legendary Kundalini teacher Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa. It was my church, my temple, my spiritual navel. When I went to a sadhana (daily practice), I always left feeling joyful and calm. The building itself was glorious, too, with high ceilings, exposed brick, and Moroccan lamps. But the rent was high, and Gurmukh is on the road teaching 300 days a year. So this beloved studio was shuttered, and in the days and months that followed, I felt surprisingly bereft. Judging from the conversations I’ve had, my fellow yogis were just as stunned and saddened. It turns out that the loss of a spiritual center can be a very similar experience to the death of a loved one.

“There can be an enormous sense of loss,” says Dr. Chris-tine Pohl, professor of Christian ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary and author of the book Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us. “There can be a sense of betrayal, like ‘We were going to do this together, and now we’re not.’ That’s a wrenching feeling. Sometimes there is anger; certainly there’s disappointment. There’s a loss of a shared history and a loss of a shared future.”

Pohl says she has seen these emotions bubble up in many communities, especially in small, rural churches. “The church may get smaller and smaller until it’s unsus-tainable. Six or eight people might be left, but they are still resistant to closing the church. People have a long history with a place.”

In Judaism, there’s a notion, makom kavuh, that a person should have a fixed place to pray, explains Rabbi Rona Shapiro, of Congregation B’nai Jacob in Woodbridge, Conn. “Anyone who engages in a regular spiritual place experiences that. People sit in the same spot in the synagogue, week after week. ‘I want to pray in the same

place.’ When you are displaced, that center is pulled out from under you.”

Shapiro should know. She helped steer a former congre-gation in Cleveland through a difficult merger in 2011. That temple was clearly struggling. “There was a week when the lights were out, the heat was off,” she says. She and a com-mittee began speaking with other nearby synagogues and wound up merging with a temple that was less than a mile away. Still, it wasn’t easy on the 225 families involved.

They were disturbed, Shapiro says. “Their home was going, even though I was the rabbi and trying to frame it as ‘we’re still going to be together and this will be good for us.’ For many people it was a good thing, because the other synagogue was falling apart. But some people felt like what they had—which was sweet and precious and had been built with their hands—was all vanishing. They were right when they said it was never going to be the same again. But that’s true of life, isn’t it?”

MOVING ONBuilding new relationships, connections, and community takes time, says Pohl. Congregation members are not just attached to a place, but also to a leader. “They locate a deep sense of trust with their pastor,” she says. “It’s not easy to

Pushed Out of the NestTHE SURPRISING CHALLENGE WHEN YOUR SPIRITUAL HOME CLOSES

FLIGHT RISK

INNER+OUTER WORLDS

relationships

How My Spiritual Training Moved to My iPhone “A train you could ride, at speed, across the countryside, was my own secret spiritual place, because it was window to a world outside, but a thoughtful one, a reflective one,” says Bob Zenk, a writer and narrator based in Seattle. “If I needed to open my soul and find the spirit of me at my most alive, I would buy a ticket on a train.” But transportation changed, the American landscape changed, and it’s hard for Zenk to find that train Zen anymore.

“My spiritual place was a moving place, and it moved away,” he says. He’s come up with a novel solution: He listens to the “Sleep on a Train” recording on his iPhone, set to repeat, whenever he needs comfort, solitude, or rest.

practice




shift those feelings until that new pastor has proved themselves trust-worthy. That can take years.”

Some people are afraid to try a new spiritual experience for fear of being hurt, much in the same way a person might be afraid to date again after being widowed. But for Marlene Passaro, who had been the executive director at Golden Bridge, time was of the essence in establishing a new community. “It was difficult to see people in so much pain,” she says. “I thought of my very first Kundalini classe and how it had saved my life and I thought, ‘I have to keep this

White MothsAmy Alice Thompson

«

flame lit! This can’t wait. It has to be now, like this week.’”

She and several partners who she knew via Golden Bridge immediately started a new studio, Daily Love Yoga, and now have a roster of teachers and a week’s schedule of classes and workshops, all in the same Hollywood neighborhood she so loves. “I knew that the closing of Golden Bridge was an opportunity for transformation,” she says. “There was never a choice.”

The faithful are flexible, says Rabbi Shapiro. “It’s not that we can’t rees-tablish. We’re like birds. We make new nests.” —KATHRYN DRURY WAGNER




INNER+OUTER WORLDS

biosphere

The Real Suffering of That Free-Range ChickenAN INTERVIEW WITH PETA PRESIDENT INGRID NEWKIRK

Spiritual people tend to think that they’re compassionate and caring, and I think that they are. But there seems to be a disconnect about the suffering of animals. How do you connect people so that when they stick their fork into a free-range chicken, they feel the suffering behind each bite?I understand the disconnect because I grew up eating animals. I think most people who think they’re eating “humane” meat have obvious compassion, but I urge them to think more deeply about the fact that you can’t trust the label. Truly humane meat is soy meat. It’s tempeh meat. It’s lentil loaf. It’s things that are made without stealing from animals and killing animals. Humane meat is falsely labeled. It’s less cruel, or slightly less cruel meat. That’s the accurate label—with the emphasis on slightly.

Most compassionate people couldn’t watch the slaughter process, which isn’t even covered by that label. Most couldn’t bear to see inside a pig transport truck, where, in winter, the pigs are frozen to the sides because they have flesh like ours. If there’s rain coming through, or sleet, or snow, their skin actually gets stuck to the interior metal, and they have to be peeled off when they reach their destination. Most people couldn’t bear even the stench which animals like chickens have to live in on farms that bear the label “humane meat.” I appeal to the compassion in people who have gone so far as to think that they’re doing something good, when really, they’re still contributing to an absolutely needless and hor-rific torture, torment, mutilation, and fear in animals who have every bit as much feeling as we do.

So part of it is allowing them to connect with the suffering that’s probably going on, and really looking deeply at that—and that’s hard.It’s always about empathy, isn’t it? It’s to put yourself in another’s place. There were times when a white person couldn’t imagine putting themselves in a black person’s place, or a man couldn’t imagine thinking that a woman’s feelings really mattered. Now is the time for us to put our-selves in the place of these other individuals who have emo-tions and feelings, just like ours. They’re the same.

FOOD FIGHT

I was just at the TED Conference in Rio, where Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, the happiest man in the world, spoke about empathy. But at the dinner, there was meat. People don’t connect it to suffering. Some years ago, I was invited to speak at a peace conference in Palestine, and I was the only person talking about includ-ing the other animals. The first night of the conference, in Bethlehem, there was a dinner, and they served lamb shank. This is in Bethlehem: the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world, and all that. They accommodated my friends and me with a vegan meal, but that was a special request.

CO

UR

TES

Y O

F P

ETA




During the conference, there were speakers who had suffered all sorts of horrors: they had been in prison, been injured, or had family members killed. And almost to a person, at the end of their talk, each one said, basically, “Please. Respect me. I’m a human being.” So when my turn came, at the end of my talk, I thought, this is just too perfect. I said, “Please, it has to go beyond respecting human beings. It’s not, ‘respect me because I’m a woman,’ or ‘respect me because I’m a Muslim.’ It’s ‘respect me because I’m a living being, meaning, I feel.’”

In war, often we try to train the troops to consider the enemy subhuman to make it easier to kill. Maybe in some ways, we’re sort of doing the same thing with animals. Oh, precisely. Absolutely. If we thought of them as like us, how could we possibly stick a fork in them and chew on their flesh, and steal the milk meant for their babies?

Tell me more about the film Cowspiracy.Well, Cowspiracy is fabulous, because it does what we have been doing for years, only in movie form. We have offered to pay for meals at banquets for environmental groups if they would go vegetarian. We have pushed the United Nations’ report showing that all our forms of transportation put

together don’t equal the harm to the environment caused by animal agriculture. We chased Al Gore around when he came out with his wonderful film, Inconvenient Truth, to say, “Al, we understand your family produces Angus Beef, but we cannot avoid the inconvenient truth that going vegan is the most important thing you can do for the planet.” We used to have a billboard saying, “Al, too chicken to go vegan?” Or vegetarian. Of course, he now is vegan, like Bill Clinton.

Cowspiracy actually goes and sits down with the heads of environmental groups and with local governments that are working on water conservation, for example, and says, What about animal agriculture? They all skirt the issue. They all avoid the question. They say, “Our donors or our consumers aren’t ready for that.” Well, if they’re not ready for that, then maybe when the floodwaters rise, and the storms increase, and they can’t talk to their grandchildren because they can’t fly anywhere . . . Cowspiracy is great, and we are arranging showings of it in various places.

I have the beginning of this quote that somebody said. “Why should I worry about future generations? What have they done for me?”

—PAUL SUTHERLAND




The stress response is your best ally during difficult moments—a resource to rely on rather than an enemy to vanquish.

The Upside

Stress of



The Best Is Yet to ComeLaura Berger«

In the late 1990s, an unusual experiment took place in the trauma center of a hospital in Akron, Ohio. Patients who had just survived a major car or motorcycle accident were asked to pee into a cup. These urine samples were part of a study on posttraumatic stress disorder

(PTSD). The researchers wanted to know: Can you predict who develops PTSD based on their level of stress hormones immediately after the trauma?

One month after their accidents, nine of the 55 patients were diagnosed with PTSD. They had flashbacks and nightmares. They tried to avoid reminders of the accident by not driving, staying off highways, or refusing to talk about what happened. Yet 46 patients were not suffering in the same way. These more resilient patients had a different post-accident pee profile than the patients who developed PTSD. They had higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.

improve quality of life six months after surgery. Stress hor-mones have even become a supplement to traditional psy-chotherapy. Taking a dose of stress hormones right before a therapy session improves the effectiveness of treatment for anxiety and phobias.

RISING TO THE CHALLENGEAs the renowned Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon first observed, a fight-or-flight stress response starts when your sympathetic nervous system kicks in. To make you more alert and ready to act, the sympathetic nervous system begins to direct your whole body to mobilize energy. Your liver dumps fats and sugars into your bloodstream for fuel. Your breathing deepens, to deliver more oxygen to your heart. Your heart rate speeds up to deliver the oxygen, fat, and sugar to your muscles and brain. Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol help your muscles and brain take in and use that energy more efficiently. In all of these ways, your stress response gets you ready to face whatever chal-lenges lie in front of you.

When this part of the stress response kicks in, it can give you extraordinary physical abilities. There are countless news reports of so-called “hysterical strength” attributed to stress, including the story of two teenage girls in Lebanon, Oregon, who raised a 3,000-pound tractor off their father, trapped underneath. “I don’t know how I lifted it, it was just so heavy,” one of the girls told reporters. “But we just did it.” Many people have this kind of experience during stress:

BY KELLY MCGONIGAL, PhD

Cortisol and adrenaline are part of what scientists call the stress response, a set of biological changes that help you cope with stressful situations. Stress affects many systems of your body, from your cardiovascular system to your nervous system. Although the purpose of these changes is to help you, the stress response, like stress more generally, is more feared than appreciated. Most people view the stress response as a toxic state to be minimized, but the reality is not so bleak. In many ways, the stress response is your best ally during difficult moments—a resource to rely on rather than an enemy to vanquish.

The study of accident survivors at the Akron, Ohio, trauma center was just the first of several studies show-ing that a stronger physical stress response predicts better long-term recovery from a traumatic event. In fact, one of the most promising new therapies to prevent or treat PTSD is administering doses of stress hormones. For example, a case report in the American Journal of Psychiatry describes how stress hormones reversed posttraumatic stress disorder in a 50-year-old man who had survived a terrorist attack five years earlier. After taking 10 milligrams of cortisol a day for three months, his PTSD symptoms decreased to the point that he no longer became extremely distressed when he thought about the attack. Physicians have also begun to administer stress hormones to patients about to undergo traumatic surgery. Among high-risk cardiac surgery patients, this approach has been shown to reduce the time in intensive care, minimize traumatic stress symptoms, and




They don’t how they found the strength or courage to act. But when it matters most, their bodies gave them the energy and will to do what was necessary.

The energy you get from stress doesn’t just help your body act; it also fires up your brain. Adrenaline wakes up your senses. Your pupils dilate to let in more light, and your hearing sharpens. The brain processes what you perceive more quickly. Mind-wandering stops, and less important priorities drop away. Stress can create a state of concentrated atten-tion, one that gives you access to more informa-tion about your physical environment.

You also get a moti-vation boost from a chemical cocktail of endorphins, adrenaline, testosterone, and dopamine. This side of the stress response is one reason some people enjoy stress–it provides a bit of a rush. Together, these chemicals increase your sense of confidence and power. They make you more willing to pursue your goals and approach whatever is triggering the flood of feel-good chemicals. Some scientists call this the “excite-and-delight” side of stress. It’s been observed both in skydivers falling out of planes and people falling in love. If you get a thrill out of watching a close game or rushing to beat a deadline, you know this side of stress.

When your survival is on the line, these biological changes come on strong, and you may find yourself having a classic fight-or-flight response. But when the stressful situation is less threatening, the brain and body shifts into a different state: a challenge response. Like a fight-or-flight response, a challenge response gives you energy and helps you perform under pressure. Your heart rate still rises, adrenaline spikes, and your muscles and brain get more fuel. The feel-good chemicals surge. But in a few important ways, it differs from a fight-or-flight response. You feel focused but not fearful. You also release a different ratio of stress hormones, including higher levels of DHEA, which helps you recover and learn from stress.

People who report being in a flow state—a highly enjoyable state of being completely absorbed in what you are doing—show clear signs of a challenge response. Artists, athletes, surgeons, video gamers, and musicians all show this kind of stress response when engaged in their craft or skill. Contrary to what many people expect, top performers in these fields aren’t physiologically calm under pressure—they have strong chal-lenges responses. The stress response gives them access to their mental and physical resources, and the result is increased confidence, enhanced concentration, and peak performance.

ENCOURAGING CONNECTIONYour stress response doesn’t just give you energy. In many circumstances, it motivates you to connect with others. This side of stress is primarily driven by the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin has gotten a lot of hype as the “love molecule” and the “cuddle hormone” because it’s released from your pitu-itary gland when you hug someone. But oxytocin is a much more complex neurohormone that fine-tunes your brain’s social instincts. Oxytocin’s primary function is to build and strengthen social bonds, which is why it’s released during breastfeeding, sex, and hugs. Elevated levels of oxytocin make you want to connect with others. It creates a craving for social contact, be it through touch, a text message, or a shared beer. Oxytocin also makes your brain better able to notice and understand what other people are thinking and feeling. It enhances your empathy and your intuition. When levels of oxytocin are high, you’re more likely to trust and help the people you care about. Oxytocin even amplifies the warm glow you get from caring for others, by making the brain’s reward centers more responsive to social connection.

But oxytocin isn’t just about social connection. It’s also a chemical of courage. Oxytocin dampens the fear response in your brain, suppressing the instinct to freeze or flee. This

Stress hormones can . . .

13 Reasons

1. Concentrate your attention

2. Increase your confidence

3. Improve your physical strength

4. Enable you to see better

5. Enable you to hear better

6. Help during traumatic surgery

7. Improve treatment for anxiety

8. Protect against posttraumatic stress disorder

9. Make you more social

10. Help you protect your family

11. Create the experience of flow

12. Protect your heart

13. Make you feel great

Stress to Love

Keep the Good Things CloseLaura Berger

«




hormone doesn’t just make you want a hug. It also makes you brave.

Sounds like a good hormone, right? Some people have even suggested we snort it to become better versions of ourselves. You can actually buy oxytocin inhalers online. But oxytocin is as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. During stress, your pituitary gland releases oxytocin to motivate social connec-tion. That means stress can help you be this “better” version of yourself, no snorting required.

When oxytocin is released as part of the stress response, it’s encouraging you to connect with your support network. It also strengthens your most important relationships by making you more responsive to others. Scientists refer to this as a tend-and-befriend response. Unlike the fight-or-flight response, which is primarily about self-survival, a tend-and-befriend response motivates you to protect the people and communities you care about. And, importantly, it gives you the courage to do so.

When all you want is to talk to a friend or a loved one, that’s the stress response encourag-ing you to seek support. When something bad happens, and you think about your kids, your pets, your family and friends—that’s the stress response, encouraging you to protect your tribe. When somebody does something unfair, and you want to defend your team, your company, or your community, that’s all part of this prosocial stress response.

PROTECTING YOUR HEARTOxytocin has one more surprise benefit: This so-called love hormone is actually good for cardiovascular health. Your heart has special receptors for oxytocin, and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and repair from any micro-damage. When your stress response includes oxytocin, stress can literally strengthen your heart. Quite different from the message we usually hear, that stress will give you a heart attack! There is such a thing as a stress-induced heart attack, typically triggered by a massive adrenaline surge, but not every stress response damages your heart. In fact, one of the most provocative studies I’ve seen found that stressing out rats before inducing a heart attack actu-ally protected them from heart damage. When researchers gave the rats a drug that blocked oxytocin release, stress no longer protected their hearts. This study hints at one of the most surprising sides of stress. Your stress response

has a built-in mechanism for resilience—one that motivates you to care for others, while strengthening your physical heart.

Kelly McGonigal, PhD, is a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University, and a leading expert in the new field of “science help.” She is passionate about translating cutting-edge research from psychology, neuroscience, and medicine into practical strategies for health, happiness, and personal success. Adapted from The Upside of Stress, to be published by Hay House this month.

Let’s Wrap Up TogetherLaura Berger

«

Oxytocin’s primary function

is to build and strengthen

social bonds, which is why it’s released during

breastfeeding, sex, and hugs—

and during extreme stress.




One Doctor’s Story

Why Go




I never expected to become a doctor. I did well at school, and my successes led me down various paths, none of which suited

me. I made the decision not to accept a law school admission with the dubious rationale, “If I died on the last day of law school, I would have lived my last three years full of regret.” Although many people would say the same of medical school, my experience was quite the opposite. From the beginning of premed (squeezed into 15 months with other post-BA students at UC Berkeley) to the last day of my training (UC San Francisco School of Medicine and subsequent Family Practice Residency), I enjoyed the process. I am no masochist and moaned as much as anyone, but I loved the subject matter and the company. I spent my days and nights with committed and passion-ate people engaged in becoming the best physi-cians possible.

BY DEBORAH GORDON, MD

Thirteen thousand years ago, the Oregon out-back east of Bend was a paleo paradise where the ancestors of today’s Modoc and Klamath Indians lived in caves along the banks of large lakes and feasted on fish, waterfowl, and game.

OREGON HISTORICAL SOCIETY, #ORHI 94226

Paleo?




I had great faith in wholesome food, suitable exercise, and a connection to nature as reservoirs of health. They worked for me.

They just didn’t work so well with many of my patients.

DIDN’T ALL PALEOLITHIC PEOPLE DIE BEFORE THEY TURNED 30?

Although the average age

of death for our ancestors

was 25 years of age, for

those who survived child-

birth and childhood (60

to 70 percent of people),

mortality overall can be

traced in a U-shaped curve.

If you survived to 15, you

could expect a reasonable

life span. Mortality rates

started to increase at

40, reaching significance

for most from 60 to 75.

Those who lived past the

age of 60 died without the

ravages of tooth decay

(more important than you

may think!), heart disease,

cancer, or arthritis. Most

deaths occurred due to

injury and infection.

But the practice of medicine has not always been so satisfying, and I understand why physician burnout is such a serious problem. Most physicians who leave their practice leave medicine altogether, find greater satisfaction elsewhere, and often earn more money. My frustration with medicine stemmed from disillusionment: I missed the camaraderie of medical training, and I was disappointed in my practice. I had hoped to develop great skills at preventive medicine: to help people adopt healthy life-styles and to avoid pharmaceuticals as much as possible. I remember one pharmacology professor who told our class, “All these drugs have side effects. Use them as a last resort.” If I had realized how rare that sentiment was, I would have asked for his autograph.

I can claim full flower-child status: from offering flowers into the rifles of National Guard troops in Berkeley, to months spent living on communes in the Pacific Northwest, to working as the medical direc-tor of a farmworker clinic. I was late to learn yoga, but relied instead on backpacking to find calm in the midst of a hurried medical life. I had great faith in wholesome food, suitable exercise, and a connection to nature as reservoirs of health. They worked for me. They just didn’t work so well with many of my patients.

When I advise a patient on lifestyle inter-ventions for medical problems, I prioritize what is most likely to help. A smoker needs to stop smoking, that’s an easy first prior-ity. A sedentary depressive will benefit as much from walking with a therapist as from talking with one. Stress reduction has a proven track record, whether it’s walking with friends, getting a dog, or learning to meditate. But the elephant in the room for lifestyle interventions has always been diet: What do I tell my patients to eat? I knew in my heart that eating right was the most important health practice. Food is our way of interacting with the world, of ingesting the world. What to eat, how to eat, and how well it nourishes us have been uncomfortable mysteries in my mind.

Conventional medical wisdom advises us to eat a diet based on whole grains, adding in lots of fruits and vegetables (considered equivalent), dairy, and protein in the form of fish and chicken. Red meat is a delicacy right up there with dessert: not too often. Fat is a no-no, and its elimination should surely lead one to a slim figure, normal blood pressure, and a long life. This approach actually works for some when taken to an extreme. Dean Ornish, MD, a clinical professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, has reversed heart disease with an extremely low fat, vegan diet and multiple lifestyle interventions includ-ing walking, yoga, and meditation. Medicare covers enrollment in Dr. Ornish’s program as a medical treatment.

So it seemed logical to cut fat, and I dutifully advised my high-cholesterol and overweight patients to drink skim milk and skimp on the butter. But as logical as it was, fat reduction never actually helped my patients lower their body fat or blood choles-terol. Despite my advice (or perhaps because of it!) my patients didn’t lose fat. I was just about to hang up the nutritional part of my shingle when my world changed.

A BREAD AND BUTTER AWAKENINGI remember sneaking pats of butter as a child, and I still loved it. But I had come to believe butter was bad for all of us, so I was shocked when I gave my seven-year-old a buttered slice of whole-grain bread and she returned to the kitchen having using the bread as a spoon, not a food item. She had no interest in the bread. She just wanted more butter. The image stuck in my head because at some level I trusted my daughter’s instincts, and also because I was beginning to believe the conventional medical wisdom was wrong.

Over time, three influential voices emerged to change my understanding of diet and health, a change that brought me back to the committed and passionate explora-tion that made me love my medical training. After so many years of practicing medicine, I felt like I was coming home.




I RESPECT THE VEGAN POSITION, BUT...

The paleo people moved on when the climate changed and the lakes became high desert. The area around Fort Rock became one of America’s richest fossil beds.

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It seems increasingly clear that ecosystems work better with natural (or at least well-designed) predator/prey systems rather than by leaving either one out of the equation. For example, reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone Park in 1995 dramatically improved the health of not just the other animals but the vegetation and even the rivers (watch “How Wolves Change Rivers” on YouTube). At the other end of the spectrum, reintroducing buffalo, cattle, and goats onto land not suit-able for farming has been shown to help sequester carbon in the soil, encourage plant growth, and allow for better water retention. That

scenario is being used to restore the prairies of Africa and parts of this country as well. Of course, natural predators of buffalo and goats include human beings. So the question becomes: do we improve the overall health of the world by no longer being predators or by becoming more consci-entious predators? I think the health data support the latter.

As a physician I am ethi-cally bound to warn vegans that they will jeopardize their own health unless they supplement wisely. The same goes for vegetarians, who have to be very careful about zinc and B12 and the fat-soluble vitamins. The

need for supplements con-cerns me because at every age people have considered themselves wiser than their bodies—and often wiser than the earth. Fortunately, the human body and the earth have proven amazingly resilient, so we can make a range of suboptimal deci-sions and still get by. That said, I believe the Paleo ideal has proven to be healthiest for the body and, by exten-sion, for the planet. Keep in mind that Paleo includes insects, which for the billions of humans are necessary for survival.

Personally, I think vegan ethical arguments are well intentioned but don’t hold up in practice. I might

kill one cow a year to eat beef while countless small rodents are killed in the rais-ing of row crops. Ironically, fewer sentient beings are killed when we choose to eat larger animals than when we rely on crops. We need to treat our “prey” animals better, but that’s a different discussion.

The New York Times held a contest to answer the question, “Why eat meat?” that was judged by vegans. My favorite answer: If we destroy this planet and move to Mars, the cows will be left behind unless we take them to raise for food.




The first voice was Weston Price, DDS, a dentist who founded what would become the research section of the American Dental Association. Dr. Price traveled the world studying the diets and nutrition of vari-ous cultures and published Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in 1939. He argued that aspects of the modern Western diet (particularly flour, sugar, and modern processed vegetable fats) cause nutritional deficiencies that are a cause of many dental issues and health problems. In 1999 the Weston A. Price Foundation began promot-ing the lessons gleaned from Dr. Price’s global travels, and I started to pay attention.

The next voice was the Harvard-educated science writer Gary Taubes, an investigative journalist who has made a name by uncov-ering bad science. In 2008, he published Good Calories, Bad Calories, challenging the conventional understanding of obesity and weight loss and shifting the focus from the excess calories in fat to the hormonal effects of carbohydrates.

The third voice was Robb Wolf, who pub-lished The Paleo Solution in 2010, suggest-ing that applying evolutionary principles can help us regain the health that so many modern Americans have largely lost. Wolf is neither a doctor nor a scientist. Instead, Wolf suffers from celiac disease, and the catalyst for his exploration was the simple fact that a conventional diet was killing him.

Thanks to these three men, my medical world has become filled with intelligent, passionate people looking for new answers about optimizing health, and being the best they can be. These three pioneers have had a large share of both adulation and attack. Here’s the bread and butter of their argument.

FIRST THE BUTTERDr. Price discovered that a nutritional cofac-tor in butter benefits the immune system, as well as bone and dental health. He didn’t identify the cofactor, but we now know it to be vitamin K2, the vitamin thought responsible for directing the calcium in your

bloodstream to where you want it, rather than to the lining of your blood vessels.

Then Taubes traced the physiological consequences of consuming butter across populations, what is famously known as the “French Paradox” because the French con-sume more butter and cream than we do and yet have far less heart disease.

Finally, Wolf demonstrates one of the misunderstood principles of Paleo by eating butter. Paleo principles suggest eliminating all dairy for four to six weeks, as a modern food with which our species did not evolve. But he also believes you should resume eating foods that you tolerate. So if butter works for you, you’ll know it and you can eat it.

NOW THE BREAD Price reported that traditional societies ate grains that had sprouted and were often fer-mented (sourdough). Such grains were both digestible and non-allergenic—and quite different from the grains used in our typical foods today.

Next, Taubes charted the great increase in carbohydrate consumption that pre-ceded the obesity and disease epidemics of the Pima Indians, who transitioned from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to “civilization” in our federal reservation system. In other words, Taubes found that it wasn’t butter that made the Pima fat and diabetic, but modern wheat products.

Finally came Wolf’s descriptions of the effects of modern wheat, which are not suit-able for polite print. Celiac disease is rare and serious and would cause anyone to loathe wheat, but research in the world of Paleo, notably conducted by Alessio Fasano, MD, a gastroenterologist and Chair of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, has elucidated the mechanism by which wheat is toxic for many people—not just celiac sufferers.

Personally, I loved whole-grain bread. It had always been one of the top three foods I’d want to have on a desert island, and I didn’t believe it caused me any ill effects. So I dragged my feet about doing a six-week Paleo trial. After all, I wasn’t sick.

YOUR SIX-WEEK TRIALPrepare yourself: mentally and in your kitchen. Get rid of forbidden foods and stock up on allowed favorites. Start keeping a journal about your mental clarity, emotional state, and sleep quality.

Pick a date and measure yourself. I suggest waist circumference rather than weight. You also may want to check your blood lipids.

For six weeks, do your very best to avoid grains, legumes, and dairy. Plan ahead for social occasions: warn everyone or eat first.

Review your journal and remeasure yourself. Any changes?

What now seems clear is that the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago increased our food security but

decreased our food diversity and nutrient density.

BOOKS OF INTERESTNutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston A. Price, DDS

Good Calories, Bad Calories and its more readable sequel, Why We Get Fat, both by award-winning science writer Gary Taubes

The Big Fat Surprise, by Nina Teicholz, on the base-less evolution of our fear of dietary fat.

The Paleo Solution, by Robb Wolf

The Paleo Cure, by Chris Kresser; details on how to individualize an ancestral approach for your own health situation.




A PALEO DAY6:30 Wake with the first light of dawn and slowly get up, move around, and maybe have a nice cup of hot water with lemon juice.

7:30 Breakfast of bacon (or smoked salmon), sautéed greens, and lightly fried eggs. Tea or coffee with cream or blended with butter.

8:30 Spend some time outside to help pattern sleep habits. On days at the computer, set a timer so every hour you remind yourself to get up, stretch, or walk about for 5 minutes. Drink water to satisfy your thirst, especially if you had a caffeinated morning beverage.

1:00 Lunch is leftover dinner: ideally meat, a non-starchy vegetable, and a salad. If your morning exercise was vigorous, a starchy vegetable is great. Butter, salad dressing, avocadoes all encouraged.

1:30 If you crave a snack during the afternoon, an ounce of dark choc-olate (75% or higher) or some nuts will get you to dinner. Remember that water.

6:30 Dinner is protein, starchy vegetables, and leafy greens, cooked or raw. If you find yourself at a restaurant, order lightly grilled meat or fish and ask that extra vegetables be substituted for pasta.

7:30 All screens off and soon start winding down for bed, turning down the houselights, stretch, read, and hang out with your loved ones.

9:30 Good night!

Final Tip: Paleo people enjoyed greater nutrient diversity and a health-ier gut than we have. Do your part by enjoying a wide variety of foods, include all colors in your plate’s palate, and eat your nutritious food to satiety, saving treats for that small space remaining after you’re truly satisfied.

Or was I? Let’s just say that my first six weeks without grains made the air around me consistently more fragrant, my abdomen mysteriously silent, my belts all notched a little tighter, and I didn’t even miss the bread! After that, I dove into the Paleo world—and gradually brought my patients with me.

And it is with my patients that I have seen the most benefit in the reversal of medi-cal problems. Prescriptions and outsized clothes were discarded, digestion and fibromyalgia pains improved, allergies and headaches resolved. The response is not 100 percent, nor is the compliance: It is not easy to change a lifestyle that might seem to depend on morning buttered toast and fruit. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that it works.

PALEO IS NOT A DIETThe point of studying the Paleo lifestyle is to figure out what made our ancestors strong enough to survive for two and a half million years without agriculture (not to mention without refrigeration, central heating, and doctors). What have we gained since then? What have we lost?

What now seems clear is that the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago increased our food security but decreased our food diversity and nutrient density. We created

About 100 years ago the land around Fort Rock was given away in 160-acre homesteads. Farmers rushed in and slowly starved out. Now, with deeper wells, a hardy few make a living on cattle and alfalfa.

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cultures that nourish our minds, but there is evidence that we grew shorter on average and developed more cavities in our teeth. Farm life enabled women to have more chil-dren, but childbirth became more hazardous because maternal bone structures became smaller. Overall, these tradeoffs worked to our advantage—but these are tradeoffs we no longer have to make, if we choose not to.

So my Paleo prescription suggests that for six weeks you look back to your roots before the advent of agriculture—and see how that works for the modern you. Like your ancestors, you should know where your food comes from, which ideally means farm-ers’ markets. For that period you eliminate grains, legumes (including peanuts), and dairy from your diet. (Butter is an excep-tion, since there is so little dairy protein in butter.) One thing I can guarantee is that you will feel different at the end of six weeks. Pay attention to the changes, and reintroduce foods one at a time, noting their effects. Maybe you’ll never reintroduce gluten, espe-cially if you have digestive, autoimmune, or skin problems. Maybe you will.

Before you start grumbling that life sounds not worth living, consider what you will be encouraged to eat:

Meats from animals raised on pasture, with a superior nutritional content and less environmental hazard than conventionally raised animals.

Vegetables, lots of vegetables, of all different kinds.

Fruit, yes, but think of fruit as dessert, not as a staple like vegetables.

And yes, butter, tea, coffee, avocado, even dark chocolate is fine.

Alcohol is okay too, with clear non-grain alcohols or wines preferred. Beer, sadly, is made from grains and is off the list.

If you worry about the health hazards attributed to red meat and fat, the Paleo diet has been tested against both a standard diabetic regime and the Mediterranean diet, and Paleo prevailed in improving the mark-ers for diabetes and cardiovascular health, as well as weight and well-being. I suggest you test this for yourself before and after your six-week trial.

THE PALEO LIFESTYLEThe Paleo exercise prescription is fairly simple: move around a lot, sprint occa-sionally and lift heavy things. That daily five-mile run or two-mile swim is not nec-essary, and for many people not helpful, so long as you build movement into your lifestyle. Efficient exercise paired with a grain-free and perhaps dairy-free diet bal-ances body composition, strength, agility, and aerobic conditioning for modern people just as it did for preagricultural people.

The Paleo sleep prescription also works in the bedroom. Have you ever noticed how well you sleep when you’re camping, and you go to bed and get up with the sun? There is evidence that abundant evening light (particularly that light emanating from computer or tablet screens) fools our brain into thinking it is morning and therefore turning off its usual nighttime melatonin production. Sleep in the dark and wake without an alarm as often as possible.

In the end, what I love most about Paleo is the feeling of belonging to a giant, heterogeneous, and very intention-ally living tribe. Every Paleo blogger has some familiarity with the current medi-cal literature, and every Paleo physician has charted his or her own lipids and has experimented with finding the Paleo exercise program they will most enjoy. People I barely know tell me what wonder-ful changes Paleo living has made in their lives, and patients I’ve struggled with for years tell me they now have their lives back.

I think we all share a deep respect for the incredible complexity that is health and disease, and we are all pioneers and scientists, looking for our own individual truths amid a sea of conflicting data. We’re opinionated and passionate, but I think we all agree on the most basic Paleo prescription: the need to choose your food wisely, to stop, to laugh, to take a nap, and to play.

Deborah Gordon, MD, has worked in a variety of medical settings, including private practice, emergency medicine, outpatient clinics, and as the medical director for the first Migrant Farmworker Clinic in southern Oregon.

PALEO VS. MS

Perhaps the most exciting

Paleo intervention to gain

public attention has been

the work of Dr. Terry Wahls,

who reversed her own

progressive (and therefore

considered irreversible)

multiple sclerosis. She is

hosting her second set of

clinical trials in which MS

patients follow her protocol,

which includes a Paleo diet

(valuable to point out that

Paleo in general is suitable

for omnivores or vegetar-

ians, although Dr. Wahls

recommends the omnivore

path), as well as specified

stress reduction and exer-

cise. For more information

on the interventions she

recommends, see The Wahls

Protocol by Terry Wahls, MD.




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See Your West: YosemiteAmy Alice Thompson

«

Shamans have always known that deepening our connection to Spirit, the creative force that we are all a part of, is the ultimate medicine for

the soul, the mind, and the body. A solitary retreat called a vision quest can bring a person back from the lunacy of the

modern world to an understanding of his or her true nature and the creative consciousness of the universe. During a vision quest,

the seeker sits alone quietly outdoors, having left behind daily com-forts of shelter, food, and support from others. The goal is to enter into

communion with nature and Spirit, which can recharge, replenish, and enlighten you with wisdom beyond the grasp of your analytical mind. The

challenge of the vision quest is to surrender your sense of control and make yourself vulnerable and available. This simple practice is not easy, because vul-

nerability and loss of control are two of the things we fear most in life. We all have a dozen reasons why we can’t go off into the woods to do a vision

quest: not enough money, not enough time, too many obligations. But the clarity and strength you will receive from doing a two-day vision quest in nature will more than

make up for the sacrifice of convenience and comfort. So a good time to get started is right this moment: three weeks before the start of your vision quest!

BY ALBERTO VILLOLDO, PhD

GET READY FOR THE LEAST-EXPENSIVE, MOST-HEALING, MOST-ENLIGHTENING 48 HOURS YOU MAY EVER EXPERIENCE

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~Your Preparation~SATISFY YOUR PERSONAL SAFETY CONCERNSFasting for two or three days is perfectly safe for people in good health. In fact, new research shows that fasting awak-ens the body’s self-repair systems and stimulates production of stem cells in the brain and every organ in your body (see box on page 57). That said, if you are diabetic, taking medi-cation, or dealing with illness, talk to your physician about accommodations you may need to make. Do not put yourself in physical danger. Your vision quest could take place on the grounds of a retreat center or a wilderness lodge.

PRIME YOUR BRAIN WITH A CLEANSING DIETEliminate all processed carbohydrates from your diet, including sugars, breads, and any wheat products. Start (tomorrow morning!) with green juice and healthy fats and proteins (save the fresh fruit until later in the morn-ing). Doing this for three weeks will begin repairing your gut from the damage caused by gluten and will prime your brain for an experience of heightened consciousness.

CHOOSE AN AWE-INSPIRING PLACE TO CAMPWhen you are in nature, you are better able to realize your oneness with all creation as you feel her rhythms and energy—and recent research suggests that the experience of awe is a natural anti-inflammatory. Ideally, that means you will do your vision quest in a natural area, deep in the virgin forest or woods, or in the desert. If you will need permission or a reservation to camp, start that process. If possible, print a picture of the area and set it atop your sup-plies as a daily reminder of your upcoming quest.

SET OUT YOUR SUPPLIESYou’ll need a sleeping bag, perhaps a tent, and clothing suitable for the climate. You’ll also need two to three gal-lons of water to last you two days, an emergency supply of chocolate, nuts, and dried fruit, and a few plastic garbage bags for disposing of solid waste. You should bring a jour-nal and pens and perhaps colored pencils or crayons to record dreams, memories, and strong feelings that arise. Bring your cell phone to leave in your car or nearby in case of emergency.

~Your Vision Quest~INFORM SOMEONEAt least one person needs to know exactly where you are going to be and for how long. If you are in a park, inform the ranger. Check in with that person before you start your quest and as soon as you finish.

SET YOUR SPACEBe sure your place is beautiful, safe, and sufficiently secluded so you won’t be interrupted. Hide your emergency chocolate and cell phone. Finally, draw a circle about 20 feet in diameter around where you will stay for the next two days. You will step outside your circle only to relieve yourself nearby.

ACCEPT THAT YOU WILL GET HUNGRYYour stomach will start growling. Often, the growling will be louder in your head than in your stomach --especially if you didn’t prime your brain with the cleansing diet. Let your stomach’s growling cue you to observe how untamed and fearful your mind can be. Along with hunger pangs, you will most likely experience mood swings, low energy, and irrita-bility during the first day or so of fasting due to the detoxifi-cation process you are starting.

LISTEN TO YOUR BODYIf at any time you feel dizzy or sick, break your fast with the chocolate, nuts, and dried fruit. Knowing food is just a few yards away will make it harder to maintain your fast, but you

Safe Places to SitIf you are not comfortable venturing into the woods by yourself, here a few places that would be happy to help.

Heart Path Journeys MauiMaui, Hawaii808-243-7284sacredmauiretreats.com

Providence Spirituality & Conference CenterSaint Mary-of-the-Woods, [email protected]

See Your West: Apache TrailAmy Alice Thompson

«56 spiritualityhealth.com may / june 2015



can use the opportunity to observe the irrational despera-tion of your primitive limbic brain, which is concerned only with survival. You are surviving! For your more evolved brain to fully awaken, you have to quiet the limbic brain that likes to have three sugar-rich meals a day.

STAY HYDRATEDDrink at least four quarts of water a day, closer to six quarts a day if you will be in a hot, arid place. Drink enough so that your urine remains a pale yellow.

MEDITATEAs much as you can, pay attention to your breath and to your experience in the present moment. If your mind wanders, recognize that boredom is a sign that you are getting close to the state of contemplation you want to be in. The boredom and restlessness will pass.

PRAYGive thanks for the beauty around you and for every breath you take. Give thanks for your safety, for a body that is work-ing just as it should, and for the embrace of nature. Practice praying with your heart and not with your head.

REMAIN OPEN TO EXPERIENCELeave behind any notions of what you “should” experience. You may feel a shift in consciousness early on the first day, or not until you are ready to end your vision quest. Your experience may be intense and life-changing; it may be gen-tler, yet still powerful. You may see symbols in your mind’s eye, experience an inner knowing that you can’t explain, or hear the voice of Spirit. The experience of oneness is differ-ent for everyone. You may feel bored and think that noth-ing’s happening, only to have your awareness shift suddenly as a sense of oneness overcomes you.

GIVE THANKSWhen you end your vision quest, thank the earth and Spirit for communing with you and supporting you. Pick up any trash and erase your circle. Leave no trace. Check in with the ranger and/or your special someone. Leave in peace and gratitude for the experience.

Alberto Villoldo, PhD, is the author of the best-selling Shaman, Healer, Sage and coauthor with David Perlmutter, MD, of Power Up Your Brain. This article is adapted from One Spirit Medicine, which is being published this month by Hay House.

FAST IN AN AWESOME PLACE TO WAKE UP STEM CELLS AND REDUCE INFLAMMATION

Last June, researchers from the University of Southern

California reported in the journal Cell Stem Cell that fasting

for two to four days “not only protects against immune

system damage—a major side effect of chemotherapy—but

also induces immune system regeneration, shifting stem

cells from a dormant state to a state of self-renewal.”

As Valter Longo, PhD, director of the USC Longevity

Institute, explains, “When you starve, the system tries to

save energy, and one of the things it can do to save energy

is to recycle a lot of the immune cells that are not needed,

especially those that may be damaged. What we started

noticing in both our human work and in our animal work is

that the white blood cell count goes down with prolonged

fasting. Then when you re-feed, the blood cells come back

. . . We could not predict that prolonged fasting would have

such a remarkable effect in promoting stem cell-based

regeneration . . . ”

According to the USC report, “The study has major

implications for healthier aging, in which immune system

decline contributes to increased susceptibility to disease

as people age . . . The research also has implications for

chemotherapy tolerance and for those with a wide range

of immune system deficiencies, including autoimmunity

disorders.”

In another report, published in the journal Emotion,

researchers at UC Berkeley found that awe-inspiring experi-

ences may lead to reduced inflammation in the body. The

researchers asked more than 200 young adults, on any

given day, to report on their levels of various positive emo-

tions—amusement, awe, compassion, contentment, joy,

love, and pride—and discovered that those who experienced

more of these emotions had the lowest levels of pro-inflam-

matory cytokines, specifically levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6).

While this finding is not particularly surprising—who

needs science to confirm that feeling good emotionally is

good for your health?—it is unique. Previous research has

tended to focus on how negative emotions are related to

increased inflammation and poor health outcomes, while

this is one of the first studies to support the connection of

positive emotions and good health. —S&H

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Natural Super-Healing




WaterSofia Barão

«YourBody

An Interview with David RomeKnows the Answer




In 1971, after Harvard and the Peace Corps, David Rome discovered Buddhism at a retreat at Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery and Tibetan Centre in Scotland, a center cofounded by the singular Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Shortly thereafter, he served for nine years as Trungpa’s private secretary. After practic-ing Buddhist meditation for 26 years, Rome discovered psychologist Eugene Gendlin’s book Focusing at a used bookstore in Vermont. Ever since, Rome has been engaged in combining Gendlin’s work on the “felt sense” and his self-actualization technique called “Focusing,” together with the Buddhist practice of mindfulness.

Rome’s first book, Your Body Knows the Answer: Using Your Felt Sense to Solve Problems, Effect Change, and Liberate Creativity, was recently published.

BY SAM MOWE

What is the felt sense? It’s a particular kind of inner, bodily felt experience that mostly goes on below the radar of our normal consciousness. But it is extremely important because it is really the way that the body is holding our lives, holding the situations of our lives. It’s the body’s knowledge, the body’s wisdom, about our situation.

Although the body is nonconceptual, it actually knows a great deal more than our conceptual minds do. The felt sense tends to start out vague, unclear, or kind of transient. But if we can bring a gentle, friendly, inquisitive attention to it, then it can become clearer or come into focus, which is why the practice is called Focusing. Once the felt sense is clearly present, we can really get insight, fresh information, and fresh energy from it that we can’t get from just thinking about things.

Is the felt sense the same thing as a “gut feeling”? It is, and it isn’t. In a way it is, but “gut feeling” is a less pre-cise term. That’s part of the difficulty in describing it.

You’ve described it as a broken heart, butterflies, a chill going up your spine. These are sort of the more common expressions of the felt sense. Is that right?

Well, those are examples of when it really breaks through, when you can’t help but be aware of it. You’re about to go in and talk to 200 people, and you feel these butterflies in your stomach. So in that case, you do have access to it. The

important point there is that it’s something that has a physi-cal kind of feeling to it. It’s not as physical as if somebody poured hot coffee on you, or if you have a pulled muscle, yet it’s bodily. You feel it. You sense it.

It is about the situation that you’re in. You don’t just randomly get butterflies in your stomach. That is about the fact that you’re about to go on stage and address 200 people, or whatever it is. And it’s not something that you have much choice about. You would prefer not to have the butterflies, but it’s happening at a bodily level and deeper than what you can choose to do consciously—or turn on or turn off con-sciously. But the one thing that you can do, and this is what Focusing is all about, is to actually welcome and be with that sensation, even if it’s unpleasant or anxiety-making.

I gave those examples because they are familiar situ-ations for most people. But when we’re working with felt sense, it’s mostly at a more subtle level, where it doesn’t on its own break through into everyday consciousness.

It can be located anywhere in the body? Yes, but it’s generally in the torso region. That’s where we look for it, not in the head and not in the limbs. The torso is the part of our body where most of our feelings come from, where feelings are felt—the heart, the breathing, digestion. The felt sense is not literally those processes, but that whole part of the body; that inner space of the torso, the trunk, is a very sensitive space that responds to whatever is happening in our lives, whether we are noticing it or not.




Since it is bodily, does exercise or healthy eating have an effect on how it expresses itself? Well, they might change what felt sense you experience, but the felt sense is always there. Often when you encoun-ter a felt sense, it gives you information about what is not so healthy or what is not working so well in your life. That makes it a very valuable way to work with habitual patterns or stuck places or fears or relationship issues, and so forth. On the more positive side, it can also be the source of tre-mendous creativity.

Can you give me a specific example of how the felt sense might help you solve a problem? I wonder what that process looks like. Say you’re arguing with your partner a lot in a relationship, how might you use the felt sense for figuring out the best course of action?That’s a good question. In the heat of the moment, or the arousal of the moment, you may not be able to do very much except to notice what the inner feel is. That gives you some space or some choice about it, instead of just being triggered and getting angrier or more sarcastic, or whatever it might be. You get some space there.

And then once you’re on your own, when you can take more time and go deeper, you could ask inside yourself, “Well, what was that really about? What was getting to me so much about that situation?” It’s not what your partner is doing to you, but it’s asking: “How does it feel to me? And why is that? What’s behind that? Does that connect with other aspects of my life or my childhood?” So you’re putting it in a much larger context. And that’s the nature of the body.

It is holding your whole life, all of your experience. And it’s holding it in a holistic way. Usually we think we’re just oper-ating in specific situations, but that’s rarely true. We bring our whole life experience to whatever the situation is.

If I were to get good at accessing the felt sense, what’s the next step?

Once the felt sense is really present and stable, it kind of has its own personality. At this point, you can enter into a dialogue with it that I call “empathic inquiry,” and actually pose questions. You can ask, “So what in my life brings this kind of feeling?” And the important thing is that you’re not answering from your head, but you’re just waiting; you’re kind of letting the question hang out there to see if some-thing comes in a more intuitive way from the felt sense itself.

Or this question: “What is this place needing? What is it wanting?” And you pause. You just wait. Or, “What is it fear-ing? What is it afraid of?”

I think I have somewhat of a better sense of the felt sense than when we started this conversation. And now I’m not really sure I see it as bodily. I mean, it’s in the body, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with, say, how much you’re practicing yoga, necessarily. That’s right. It’s an aspect of feeling. That’s why it’s called felt sense. For some people, it’s more literally physical, and for others less so. But you find it in the body. You have to bring awareness to your nonconceptual, inner-felt experience.

AirSofia Barão

«

There’s me over here, and there’s that feeling over there,

but I’m not identified with it.




So it’s not necessarily something that you are strength-ening. You can strengthen your ability to access it, but it’s not necessarily going to get less uncomfortable the more you practice. You’re not necessarily going to make your felt senses more pleasant.No. You want to let it be there however it is, pleasant or unpleasant or neutral, and often, because we are work-ing with challenges or problems or emotions in our lives, the felt sense will have an uncomfortable feel to it. Sometimes there can be very powerful, deep feelings of sadness or shame or guilt, and the way those emotions actually feel in the body. One of the things you learn in Focusing is how to find the right distance from your own inner experience. If you’re too distant from it, then you kind of bring it closer; but if you’re the kind of person who gets flooded with emotion or overwhelmed or kind of collapses into the feeling, then you learn to step back a bit and have a little more objectivity toward it. There’s me over here, and there’s that feeling over there, but I’m not identified with it.

We live in a left-brain-obsessed culture—language and rationality. What do we lose when we aren’t cultivating the emotional, intuitive aspect of ourselves? We lose contact with who we really are. We lose contact with what is really going on in our lives. As long as we’re in language or thinking—which is very powerful, but it’s symbolic—it’s never the experience itself. It’s only a description of the experience. In felt sensing or Focusing, we’re trying to get back to the original experience.

Would we be better off as a species with better body consciousness?

Yes, the body doesn’t lie, whereas the conceptual mind often departs from reality.

I can imagine a situation in which I’m very in tune with myself, my intuition. And I might even trust that. But we live in a wider world that’s going to respond to us in certain ways. And maybe even if we feel like we should do a certain thing, we might also think that we can’t trust the wider context in which we find ourselves. That’s why we don’t follow our intuition. True, but that sense of mistrust will already be included in the felt sense. The felt sense is a holistic understanding of all aspects of the situation. That is the point. You are working with all sides of the issue. You can recognize and acknowledge the

Simple Steps to Grounded Aware Presence

We begin to explore the felt sense by creating a gap in our habitual patterns of physical, psychological, and mental activity. This gap is empty of specific content, yet not empty of awareness. It is simply awareness itself—open and receptive, conscious without needing any object to be con-scious of. It is a state of Grounded Aware Presence (GAP).

In addition to being the preparatory step in finding the felt sense, GAP is a place we can always return to in ourselves. Think of it as a trustworthy, neutral home base you can come back to anytime you feel out of balance, pre-occupied, or confused.

Start by stretching your limbs, wiggling your toes, even loosening up your whole body with a refreshing shake-out. Then, find a comfortable seated position and simply become aware of your body. Sense its position, weight, and inner space.

When you feel ready, center your attention at your base, your seat, where your body is supported by whatever you are sitting on. Feel the weight of your whole body and how it is planted on the earth. Trusting yourself to the earth’s solid-ity, let your body really settle and be at ease. Appreciate the simplicity of being bodily present, here and now. Say the word “Grounded” softly to yourself.

Next, bring your attention to the head region. Close your eyes, or lower your gaze. Concentrate your awareness on your sense of hearing. Be open and sensitive to any sound from the environment, especially the kinds of background noise that we usually don’t notice at all. You can note sounds with a simple mental label—“bird singing,” “traffic noise,” “refrig-erator hum,” but try not to enter into a discursive thought process. At the same, try to notice the larger quality of silence that surrounds whatever you hear from moment to moment. Sense the whole space around you, extending even beyond

the walls and what you can see from where you sit. Experience the vast, panoramic quality of aware-ness. Say to yourself softly, “Aware.”

Now move your attention into the center of your chest, place your hand over your heart, and experi-ence the quality of Presence. You are simply here, alive, breathing, feeling, experiencing your basic existence. It is happening right now, at this very moment. Softly repeat the word “Present.”

Finally, let your attention encompass your whole body and repeat to yourself: “Grounded Aware Presence.” Rest there for a few seconds. Then, gently open your eyes, raise your gaze, and extend your Grounded Aware Presence to include the environ-ment around you.

RICK CUMMINGS

“GAP” for the Felt Sense




part of you that says, “Okay, so if I go off and do this thing, my God, I’m going to lose my job. People are going to think I’m crazy. I won’t have a livelihood.” Then you spend some time with those fears.

One of the questions often asked is, “What’s the worst part of this whole thing?” Then you can ask, “Where are those fears coming from? What are they based in?” Because those are the kinds of thoughts and feelings that really limit our freedom of motion, the open dimension of what our life could be, or how we could grow and develop. There are lots of those kinds of fears or obstacles, and we do have to pay attention to them. But many of them are kind of out of date. They’re our patterns from childhood, and when we really spend time with them, we discover that maybe it’s not as scary as it seems—or maybe there’s another way of looking at this situation so that it does become workable.

Are you suggesting that rational thinking should not play a primary role in my decision-making process? Or that ratio-nal thinking and bodily knowing should work hand in hand?

The latter, but in order to get the right balance, we need to bring body-knowing to the fore.

It seems to me that Focusing is a very difficult practice compared with other contemplative methods. I got a sense of it while you were walking me through it, but I feel like I just touched the tip of the iceberg. If someone teaches you basic mindfulness techniques, for example, you sort of get it immediately. It seems like Focusing would take some work. I think that’s right. Rather than difficult, I would say that it’s subtle and kind of unexpected. In mindfulness, you have a very simple, clear instruction to begin with, and you just

follow that instruction. It can also bring you to unexpected places, but the technique is very simple. Focusing is some-thing that isn’t really in our common vocabulary or in our skill set, it’s something different that we’re trying to learn. This is why Focusing, although many people around the world make a regular practice of it and find it very powerful, is not nearly as broadly known as it could be and as it really should be. It is because it’s not so easy to get. Some people get it quickly; for others, it can take a long time.

It seems that if it’s something that’s in the body, and it’s something we all have, it would be something that other tra-ditions talk about. Are they, perhaps, using different words? Yes, I think so, at least to some extent. I studied with Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, and he had a concept that he called “first thought.” It actually became the title to one of his poetry books, First Thought Best Thought. But he didn’t mean just the first thing that pops into your mind, which is how it’s often understood. I think that first thought is more like the nonconceptual felt source. It was in the context of creativity, of creating art, that Trungpa was talking about first thought. It is the deeper place from which creative expression and novelty arise. So that’s a different kind of language for felt sense.

It can show up in many different ways. On the one hand, it’s a universal human capacity, and children have it very naturally. But on the other hand, because of the way our culture operates, you also have to cultivate it in a deliberate way, just like mindfulness. Then you grow your ability to access the felt sense, and you learn to trust it more.

Sam Mowe is a Zen practitioner, former editor of Tricycle, and frequent contributor to S&H.

FireSofia Barão

«

The felt sense is a holistic understanding of all aspects of the situation. That

is thepoint.




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writes Alana. “I hope we can listen to each other with open hearts and begin to under-stand the passion for God that dwells deep in each of our hearts.” Let’s hope this type of healing dialogue spreads from family to family, and from nation to nation.

—KATHRYN DRURY WAGNER

A Fearless HeartHow the Courage to Be Compassionate Can Transform Our LivesBy Thupten Jinpa, PhDHUDSON STREET PRESS

CHARLES DARWIN’S ideas have often been used to portray humans as fundamentally selfish, with competition serving as our evolution-ary drive. When we subscribe to this view of human nature, it only makes sense to see those around us as rivals and to treat them aggressively, fearfully, and distrustfully. In his new book, A Fearless Heart: How the Courage to Be Compassionate Can Transform Our Lives, Thupten Jinpa tells us a different

story about ourselves. He writes, “Today, there is a growing recog-nition even within science that the selfish view of human nature is simplistic.”

In the same way that science was employed to help mindful-ness catch on in the West, Jinpa uses findings from the field of contemplative science—which

studies the effects of contemplative practices like meditation on health, emotional regula-tion, and more—to make the case that we are “social creatures endowed with instincts for

NEW UNDERSTANDINGThese illuminating choices from S&H bring you fresh perspectives from which to explore.

Undivided A Muslim Daughter, Her Christian Mother, Their Path to PeaceBy Patricia Raybon and Alana Raybon THOMAS NELSON

A MUSLIM, A CHRISTIAN, and a lapsed Catholic walk into a book review . . . For millennia, religious differences have been a font for humor and reflection, as well as a trigger for tension and war. But what if those tensions are within your own family, and the war turns out to be with yourself? In the enlightening nonfiction book Undivided, a mother and daughter try to bridge the chasm that was created when one of them converted to Islam. Patricia Raybon, who is a Christian, is an award-winning author who has written about faith for the New York Times and Newsweek. Her daughter, Alana Raybon, is a teacher who became a Muslim in her early 20s. In an honest, intimate glimpse into their family’s dynamic, they write back and forth to each other, each struggling: Alana, to explain her decision to join a religion that “filled my heart with truth”; and Patricia, to accept what to her feels like a dangerous abandonment. They are both angry and exhausted, but after the years of hurt and irritation, they have emerged to finally address their conflict head-on. While the book is the story of one family, it certainly calls to mind the larger issue of how much con-fusion and mistrust can exist between people of differing religions. If it’s this hard for two intelligent, spiritual, loving souls to connect, how can entire communities be expected to?

“I hope we can listen to each other, and come to terms with each other’s beliefs,”

REVIEWSbooks // music // film

IT ONLY MAKES SENSE TO

SEE THOSE AROUND US AS

RIVALS AND TO TREAT THEM

AGGRESSIVELY, FEARFULLY,

AND DISTRUSTFULLY




compassion and kindness.” He tells us that these instincts can be cultivated to help us attain mental and emotional well-being, achieve our goals, and create a more compas-sionate world.

In addition to using insights from science and Western psychology, Jinpa, who has been the English translator of the Dalai Lama for more than 30 years, makes his case by drawing on his religious training as a Buddhist monk. However, as a skilled translator working at the interface of two very different cultures, Jinpa speaks to us primarily in the rational, scientific, results-driven language we can understand. —SAM MOWE

Brain MakerThe Power of Gut Microbes to Heal and Protect Your Brain—For Life By David Perlmutter, MDLITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

THE GUT HOUSES an internal compass, but could it also hold the key to health?

In Brain Maker, Dr. David Perlmutter makes a strong case for the genius of the gut. He proposes that our bel-lies—more accurately, the inflammation and negative bacteria found within them—have a profound influence on depression, Alzheimer’s, and other brain-related ailments. According to Perlmutter, the gut and brain are deeply intertwined, and skyrocketing rates of obesity and autism are directly related to a Western diet high in sugars and carbohydrates that throw the delicate balance of intestinal bacteria out of whack.

If Perlmutter’s first book, Grain Brain, was a taste of how gluten and sugar influence mental functioning, then Brain Maker is a seven-course meal. It details how the health of the microbiome, or the complex stew of intestinal bacteria, is influenced by everything from breast milk to artificial sweeteners. Cutting-edge research and historical back-ground on the evolution of gut bacteria make it easier to, er, digest this dramatic shift away from the germ theory para-digm, with its focus on external causes of disease. Nurturing the gut via dietary changes (curb sugar and gluten, but coffee and wine are still allowed!), probiotic treatments, and fecal microbial transplants (a procedure known to dramatically alter intestinal health) make change practical and possible.

Perlmutter doesn’t just illuminate one connection between mental health and the microbiome, but rather reveals the endless pathways between the two. A “sick” gut can wreak havoc on the health of the brain, and vice versa. Grain Brain offers a remarkable reframing of the mind-body connection. —ALIZAH SALARIO

Death Makes Life PossibleRevolutionary Insights on Living, Dying, and the Continuation of ConsciousnessBy Marilyn Schlitz, PhDSOUNDS TRUE

IN HIS INTRODUCTION to this companion to the documentary film of the same name, Deepak Chopra divides the world into two camps: those who believe that mind arises in the brain and that consciousness ceases when the brain dies; and those who believe that mind exists independently, and thus can have an afterlife. Author and social anthropologist Marilyn Schlitz has the good intention of increasing our awareness of other worldviews on this topic and of offering ways to improve our relationship with death, but it seems unlikely that this book will change the minds of the former camp. It contains little that would surprise those who might have read an average near-death memoir or spiritual self-help book.

The author writes in often-repeated generalizations, and though the subtitle promises revolutionary insights, the conclusions are often commonplace: that illness or acci-dents can prompt transformational experiences; that living a full life makes us less afraid of death. “Religious beliefs often shape our views of death and what happens after,” reads one all-too-typical sentence. “It can take hard work to transform yourself, but in the end it is worth it,” reads another.

It’s only in a few quotes from some of the many scientists, gurus, and healers that Schlitz has interviewed that the book takes on a more vivid personality, as when philosopher Sam Keen notes, “Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroy-ing evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles—my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your

immortality project.” As Schlitz notes, Keen wrote a foreword to the 1997 edition of anthropolo-gist Ernest Becker’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death—an altogether more challenging, thought-provoking meditation on how we humans try to reject—or transcend—our mortality. —GABRIEL COHEN

ACCORDING TO PERLMUTTER,

THE GUT AND BRAIN ARE

DEEPLY INTERTWINED




REVIEWS // musicRising AppalachiaWider Circles RISING APPALACHIA

A FEW YEARS AGO a friend emailed me the music video for Sunu by Rising Appalachia. The simple and earthy song had a playful feeling and the colorful images of stilt walk-ers, forest aerial dancers, and white-clad yoginis kept my attention. The sights and sounds appeared as a tribal, do-it-yourself circus moving to a more connected world.

Wider Circles is the newest release from Rising Appalachia, continuing their powerful blending of folk, blues, global percussion, and social justice led by vocalist sisters Leah and Chloe Smith. Biko Casini brings in the drums and percussion and David Brown lays down guitar and double bass.

At 19, Leah began a five-year travel that took her around the world including India, Hawaii, and Mexico, where she worked with the Zapatistas. Her travel writing later morphed naturally into songs and by 2005, Appalachia Rising was born when their first album was recorded in a single day, titled simply Leah and Chloe. Five albums later, the group has toured Europe, Central America, India, and

14,000 miles across the U.S., playing at diverse spots like the School of the Americas Vigil, Naropa Institute, Burning Man, and the New Orleans Fringe Festival.

The inviting songs of Wider Circles focus on community, gratitude, and healing. With banjo, fiddle, percussion, and guitars setting the stage, the sweet harmonies of the Smith sisters stir a positive vision where maybe, just maybe, the human family will heal wounds, tune in to mother nature, and dance in the streets, mountains and bayous.

—JOHN MALKIN

The Fourth LightNiyazSIX DEGREE RECORDS

LED BY VOCALIST Azam Ali and multi-instrumentalist Loga R. Torkian, the Iranian-American group Niyaz crafts an exquisite braid of traditional Middle Eastern folk music, trance electronica, and Sufi poetry. Thanks in part to renowned producer Damian Taylor (Bjork, The Killers, Gotye, Arcade Fire), the electronic elements are fairly subdued on the group’s latest release, adding a tasteful touch of modernity to the band’s rich, exotic sound.

Like Niyaz’s three previous record-ings, The Fourth Light uses the works of a noted Sufi poet as the basis for many of its lyrics. In this case, the featured wordsmith is eighth-century mystic Rabia Al Basri, Sufism’s first female poet and the creator of that religion’s principle of Divine Love. Sold into slavery at an early age, Al Basri even-tually rose to the status of Muslim saint, thus becoming an icon of female liberation.

The themes of gender equality and women’s rights surface again and again on The Fourth Light. The lyrics

of “Aurat” are based on a pro-feminine empowerment poem written by India’s Kaifi Azmi in the 1940s, while the electronic percussion on this album is a feminist statement in itself: by programming all of the beats, Ali has stepped into a role usually occupied by men.

Every Niyaz album to date has contained traditional folk songs of oppressed Middle Eastern minor-ity groups. Five of the band’s latest offerings are adapta-tions of such tunes from various parts of Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Serious themes aside, Niyaz’s seductive, entrancing music is just as likely to move listeners to dance as it is to inspire thoughts of social change. —DAMON ORION

L

.




Deuter Reiki Hands of LoveNEW EARTH RECORDS

REIKI HANDS OF LOVE is a sensitive, melodic journey wonderfully designed for a connected mind-body expe-rience. From the opening piano notes and sweeping synth of “Morning Light Silhouettes” to the final ambient vocals of “Free Forever,” this gentle hour of sweet music is fluid, calming, and clear.

A follow up to Reiki Hands of Light, this new album is the work of new age master musician Deuter, who is also a Reiki practitioner in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Peaceful and calming sounds have been the center of his prolific career, resulting in over 60 albums since 1970.

German-born Deuter enlivens and enriches this album by including a variety of instruments that he’s continued to add to his repertoire, including shakuhachi, drums, cello, koto, sitar, santoor, Tibetan singing bowls, and keyboards. Simple melodies rest atop ambient soundscapes that inspire a relaxed state of open receptiveness. Songs like

“Cloud Surfing” and “Unknown Doors” are ideal for massage, Reiki, and other healing arts. Fittingly, this para-graph was chosen by Deuter to appear in the liner notes for Reiki Hands of Love: “The secret of health for both mind

and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.” Relax and enjoy. —JM

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REVIEWS // filmThe Human ExperimentDirected by Don Hardy and Dana NachmanKTFFILMS

THE “EXPERIMENT” referred to in the title of this documen-tary is the inadvertent one we’re all living in, thanks to the thousands of untested chemicals that have made it into our everyday lives. Narrated by Sean Penn, the film explores how the rise in any number of ailments—from cancer to infertility to developmental disorders—has coincided with the increase in different, potentially toxic chemicals in everything from furniture to flatware to clothing. It also weaves together the stories of numerous people—scientists, activists, ordinary folks—trying to fight back against the corporations and moneyed interests that often derail regula-tion efforts.

This is scary stuff, and the film effectively lays out the cold hard numbers—the alarming rise in breast cancer among women and men, for example, or the shocking rise in autism over the past two decades. It also captures real human moments, such as a young, childless couple find-ing out that yet another fertilization procedure has failed. But sometimes The Human Experiment’s attempt at a

comprehensive portrait keeps it from being as effective as it could be: There are so many figures to cover, so many nooks and crannies, so many different chemicals and so many differ-ent ailments. This is part of the film’s point, of course—all these things are connected—but it’s also hard not to feel at times like we’re being whipsawed through names, talking heads, data points, acronyms. It’s an effective movie for those of us in the choir. But the film’s stylistic limitations might keep it from breaking out more widely. —BILGE EBIRI

We Are the GiantDirected by Greg BarkerMUSIC BOX FILMS

GREG BARKER’S documentary about the Arab Spring has a subtle conceit at its heart. It follows three differ-ent stories of activists: In the first, a young, Libyan-American former Boy Scout joins the revolt against the Gaddafi regime, while his father tries (and fails) to convince him to come home to the U.S.; in the second story, two men try to organize a nonviolent resistance to the Assad regime in Syria, only to find that the govern-ment’s ghastly retaliation results in the deaths of fellow activists and plunges the country into a brutal civil war; in the third, two sisters from Bahrain join their human rights activ-ist father in protesting that country’s monarchist regime. Barker takes these three disparate stories from three different countries—each of which currently has a different outcome politically—and tries to find common threads, showing how the attempt at

nonviolent resistance is constantly in conflict with the immediate needs of revolution. Barker also creates ani-mated interstitials made up of histori-cal footage and famous quotes about revolution from people like Lenin, Che Guevara, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Stalin, and others.

It shouldn’t work, but it does. True, in a lot of these cases nonviolent resis-tance doesn’t seem to have succeeded. But Barker succeeds in creating a living, breathing thing: a film whose different elements are in constant conversation with each other, quite appropriate for a story whose overall outcome is far from certain yet. (Where will the Arab Spring be five years from now? Ten years?) And his film is full of indelible, heartbreaking images from the frontlines, as protesters are shot by police, entire city blocks are destroyed by rocket fire, and tanks make their

way through completely devastated cities. Nonviolence isn’t easy, the film seems to say—but sometimes its failure is just as important as its successes. —BE




Because I Was a PainterDirected by Christophe CognetUNIFRANCE FILMS

CHRISTOPHE COGNET’S quiet, almost experimental documentary asks that eternal question, “Can an artistic depiction of the worst thing imagin-able still be considered ‘beautiful’?” The film explores artwork created of the Holocaust by artists who lived it first-hand, utilizing interviews and readings from memoirs not just to portray their experiences and their work, but also to reveal their feelings about the work itself. Needless to say, there are different perspectives on the matter: For some, the art brought beauty to the unimagina-ble; for some, there was a kind of tragic, terrible beauty in what they actually depicted; for others, however, beauty could never be found in such places. As if to present the viewers with a similar choice, Cognet also often shows—in gorgeous, wide-screen photography—these concentration camps as they are today, trying to find a kind

of solemn, meditative grace in them.The film is beautiful, of course, and

by that very fact it seems to answer its question. But it’s trying to do more than that: In all of these cases, there’s a sense of art working at its high-est level, trying to grapple with the most profound of experiences. In the end, one wonders if the question isn’t whether beauty can be found amid such horror, but whether humanity

can be found there. And the answer to that is a resound-ing yes. Even for those who reject the idea of beauty in this context, there’s a humanity—and, yes, a beauty—in their very rejection. All of these stories speak to our ability to transcend even the most unspeakable horror. —BE

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Wheel of Healing with Ayurveda Using the time-tested methods of Ayurveda, Michelle Fondin offers an easy guide to a healthy lifestyle. This truly holistic approach consid-ers not just diet, exercise and genetics but also relationships, life purpose, past experiences, environmental health, and financial stress.

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Nine Jewels of NightA profoundly moving account of theologian and spiritual teacher Beverly Lanzetta’s conversion beyond the boundaries of established religions to the one reality at the heart of all religions, and to a singular path of contemplation. “The most forthright and authentic autobiography of one person’s spiritual journey I have ever read … Beautiful and moving.”

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Spirituality&Health Marketplace

Saint Teresa of Ávila is Alive!Guided Footsteps follows a labyrinthine path through one woman’s mysterious and mystical journey toward wholeness. In 2015, the 500th anniversary of her birth, discover how Teresa’s spirit lives on in the heart of a present-day woman. Reading her story promises to inspire and revitalize your own spiritual journey.

guided-footsteps.comAvailable at amazon.com

BOOKS

Autobiography of a YogiAs seen in the new documentary film, AWAKE: The Life of Yogananda

Paramahansa Yogananda’s life story is a spiritual journey of love and enlighten-ment that has inspired millions. Long considered a classic, this book reveals the unifying truths behind Eastern and Western religious traditions, and introduces Kriya Yoga meditation as a tool for personal transformation.

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The Magic Still ContinuesAn insight into the author’s transformation and into the other simple folks whose lives were touched by Shirdi Sai Baba. Baba loved everyone unconditionally, without any distinction of any kind. Through simple words and incidents, he allowed people to experience the joys of a spiritual life bringing hope and meaning to their mundane lives of trials and tribulation.

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Bicycling Home, My Journey to Find GodA Journey of Discovery and Transformation

Along with cross-country bicycle trips and competi-tions, the author also traveled countless inner miles in her spiritual quest to find herself, and to find God. This is an inspiring story of mystery, adventure, and love. 30 color photos. Visit her website to read Chapter 1. (Also the author of Across America on the Yellow Brick Road.)

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“Each of us should know our own mind; you should become your own psychologist.”This is definitely possible; every human being has the ability to understand his or her own mind. Lama Yeshe’s books, and many teachings by other great Buddhist lamas, are available on our website for FREE.

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BOOKS



When the Gunman Walked Into My ChurchIN LATE 1989, like many college-age kids with a spirit of adventure, I traveled during a gap semester to Guatemala to immerse myself in the Spanish lan-guage. I was enchanted by the architecture, the blend of cultures, and Tikal, the jungle where George Lucas filmed part of Star Wars. I moved about with ordinary precautions and felt carefree about the rigors of travel.

I soon located a church affiliated with the church I had grown up attending, and made my way there for the Sunday service. Afterward, I stayed for the normal happy hubbub of handshakes and chatter, gradually drifting out into the hallway.

Learning the fundamentals

of emergency preparedness

Then one of the members quietly and firmly said, “You need to come back into the auditorium, now!” He ushered us in, and soon we were seated in a circle. It slowly but sharply

«THE COMMONS

Total EclipseKelly Rae Burns




If You Have a Minute…Pray, meditate, or practice affirmations in front of a mirror to become centered and quiet.

If You Have an Hour…Take time to establish your personal emergency checklist and figure out what to do if something goes haywire. Your goal is to be a center of calm in any storm.

If You Have a Month…Establish a daily practice—whether of prayer or medita-tion—and let it become your center. It takes 21 days to develop a new habit. Make a consistent effort. You’ll thank yourself.

If You Have One Hundred Dollars…Donate to a nonprofit that is dedi-cated to building understanding, such as the Euphrates Institute, which holds hope for peace in the Middle East (euphrates.org).

WHAT YOU CAN DO

dawned on me that we were in an emergency. A man had walked into the church with a gun, and claimed to have grenades in his bag. He told us not to call the police, or he would start shoot-ing. The entire congregation had been taken hostage.

Church was a place I had long associated with prayer and comfort, drawing great strength in that com-munity, and in learning life lessons from the Bible. While this was not a story I had studied, we were all in prayer mode, and our first response was quiet alertness, not hysteria. One church member, a young mother, assumed the role of negotiator, and there was rapid give-and-take between her and the man with hate streaming out of his eyes. He knew that Christian churches take up a collection at each meeting, and he appeared willing to kill us to get it.

I don’t know how long we sat there. I do know that we were each digging deep within ourselves to help in what-ever way we could. For the most part, that meant keeping quiet and still. But it also meant praying. At one point our negotiator invited all of us to join in praying the Lord’s Prayer aloud. Padre Nuestro, que estás en los Cielos . . . I prayed in earnest, slipping beyond the boundary of my mother tongue, deep

into the realm of the heart. The con-cepts in that prayer provided comfort. It was something bigger than us, and it had influence in our lives, especially at that moment.

The dialogue continued, and with it, the hatred eased out of the man’s eyes. He departed the church, not with money, but with church litera-ture. With a flood of tears of relief, our negotiator grabbed her baby and insisted that we all leave the premises at once.

Over 25 years have passed since that Sunday in Guatemala, but I still occasionally find myself mulling over the details—and becoming even more grateful for having developed a sturdy habit of prayer. At some point, I came to realize that what I learned that day underpinned in my work in emergency

preparedness and international security, fighting against nuclear proliferation. As I moved in circles of increasing influence, I maintained the knowledge that I had seen prayer lead to a favorable outcome for all involved.

Today, I meditate. I pray. These and similar habits can give each of us the presence of mind to influence the out-come of each moment of the day, what-ever crosses our paths. A person might be able to take your body hostage. But you retain entire control of your mind if you develop habits that strengthen your relationship with your thoughts.

—MEGGEN WATT PETERSEN

Meggen Watt Petersen worked for two decades to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and now lends her calm presence to the inner workings of this magazine.

Safety comes from practical application of emergency preparedness, from forming habits that instill clarity of thought and action, and from presence of mind. Calm presence of mind enables you to become a force for good, for a beneficial outcome to emergency situations. It instills a knowing that instantly kicks into gear, whether from a sudden illness, a natural disaster, or any disruption of the normal routine. If you have a well-established habit that brings inner calm, you can turn to it, rely upon it, and have a significantly different experience than an inflam-matory reaction might bring. “Cooler heads will prevail” is a favored turn of words. Find your particular path to having one of those “cooler heads.”




Spiritual DisordersEVERY MENTAL HEALTH worker knows about the DSM-V, a manual for defining disorders for the health system. It’s like a dictionary in which every psychological problem imaginable has a precise definition and a number. For years I’ve consid-ered creating my own DSM-I of soul disorders, beginning with the wish to be normal, to be like everyone else—a soul-directed life moves us toward our individuality. I’m also thinking of a DSM-I of spirituality disorders. In case you have a problem that I include in this spiritual manual, a tendency to be too serious about certain things, know that I do this in a playful way. I will probably never publish my DSM-I.

Let’s look at some possible listings for the spirituality manual:

101.1 A tendency toward literalism. Maybe because religion for so long has emphasized belief and has confused theological stories with historical fact, even modern spiritual people have to watch out for any tendency to be too literal. Life changes overnight when you begin to appreciate the value of narrative, poetics, mythology, and imagery, when you discover that they take you deeper and put you on firmer ground than any literal, factual approach.

102.6 Finding pleasure in making moralistic judgments. Spiritual people of all stripes tend to judge others who don’t think the way they do. I have to watch out for this one, myself. Moralism starts with the feeling that you know what is right and wrong, based on your tradition or a book or a teacher. You expect others to follow your own simple system. I see this disorder as an emotional defense against really being moral, going through the sweaty process of sorting out values and subtle issues buried in ethical decisions.

110.7 An ingrained habit of gullibility. We spiritual people find it easy to believe in almost anything. Just look at any catalogue from a spiritual growth center and you will see what I mean. This long-standing tendency toward being gullible may come from a related disorder (11.7), a habit of not thinking things through, related to yet another disorder (116.9), not reading excellent sources, or (116.9a), just not reading.

121.2 The wish to escape from life’s complexity. Life is always challenging, complex, and shifting, on the move. It’s difficult to figure it all out and keep up

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with it. What a relief to find some simplifying system to make it all easier.

125.6 A carefully cultivated rosy picture of reality. You can quickly judge a spiritual approach by the way it treats the shadow side of life. Any effort to fend off the dark side, our tendency toward evil and immorality, and not see it in ourselves, is a form of delusion, spiritual delusion.

133.8 Finding comfort in one’s own group rather than identify-ing with the world community. In spiritual circles there is a lot of talk about community, but often it sounds more like a closed, defen-sive group. For a local community to be something other than a clique, it requires two things: truly individual members and a view-point that extends beyond itself, embracing the “other.”

144.2 Spiritual narcissism. For all our talk about community and service, we may easily see spiritual practice as a form of self-improve-ment. We may overlook the needs of the world or may fail to realize that an open heart is the best way to becoming an evolved person.

151.11 Anxiety about sexuality. Because spirituality aims high and beyond, it can interfere with our intimate physical and emotional lives. We may think of spirituality and ethics as controlling our sexu-ality rather than finding its joyful fulfillment.

166.66 Fixation in an earlier spiritual period of life. When your spirituality is alive and vital, it’s on the move. It changes and, one

hopes, matures. Yet we all have elements that are stuck in earlier times in life. It’s helpful to revisit those times and explore them until they no longer hinder the full unfolding of your spirituality.

This is just a preview of what could be a long DSM-I covering your spiritual experience. It’s not just for the fundamentalist and traditional approaches but also the most recent and sophisticated spiritualities. I see this as a good checklist for myself. You can add your own items. I’ll remember to leave some blank pages. The idea is not to be negative and overly criti-cal, but to reflect on your practice so it remains alive, intelligent, and joyful. S&H

Life is always challenging, complex, and shifting, on the move. It’s difficult to figure it all out

and keep up with it. What a relief to find some simplifying system to make it all easier.




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When Peace Rainsby Marie FlanneryThis simple story carries

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Two Words WHEN IT WAS TIME to step down from my role as the guiding teacher of Still Point Zen Buddhist Temple some 10 years ago, I spent a long time fussing about what my final dharma talk would be. I knew it needed to be directed toward Koho Vince Anila, who was about to step into the role. At the same time I wanted to leave something behind for the sangha members—a secret super-power—if I could. So I fussed. I would bolt awake in the middle of the night for weeks with full paragraphs of advice in my head, mostly about all the ways we can pay better attention to what gen-erosity looks like in the new century, until I ended up with about 12 pages of aphorisms that were at best only OK.

On the morning of Koho’s trans-mission ceremony all this changed. I suddenly realized that two simple words would give him, and them, all the superpowers they needed. The words? Right action. In Buddhism right action is a bit of a tricky concept. It grows out of a faith that—in every moment—there is an exact response that is the correct response to whatever situation we find ourselves in. It moves the moment forward in a way that introduces more peace, openness, and happiness into the lives of everyone involved. This action most often comes in the form of words spoken. Anyone who has been offered an unexpected sincere apology knows how power-ful it feels. Right action can also be something that we do without words, like grabbing a little kid right off her tricycle just as she’s about to hurl her-self into traffic. Even a look can be right action. Not long ago I watched a vet tech taking a sick dog out of his owner’s arms. Pausing, she looked at the man with such empathy that he broke down and wept in her arms. They both knew the dog was dying.

Right action pops up all the time in the ancient Buddhist teachings, the Pali Canon. In one story, an old female ascetic known for her clever tongue and quick wit shows up at Buddha’s camp to show off. Buddha’s right-hand monk, Sariputtra, takes her up on her challenge to a debate. After answering her first volley he tells her he has only a single question for her.

Okay, she responds. Ask away.“One—what is that?”She is so stumped that she asks to

become a follower of Buddha’s teach-ings. He agrees to her request, telling her to remember that a single phrase

GERI LARKIN is spending the summer hosting friends from the

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that brings peace is better than a thousand words of every other kind.

He was describing right action. The thing is, right action sounds too simple for its own good. To really work, two things are needed. The first goes back to Sariputtra’s question. We can’t be outsiders. Whatever situation we’re in, we need to really be in it—mind and body. We can’t be the mom ready to spew advice or the mate ready to pounce with new relationship rules that promise to make this partner-ship everything the storybooks promise. We can’t be teachers springing a lesson on a student too exhausted to even hear our words or adult children writing up a list of all the reasons why our elderly parents need to move out of their houses without putting ourselves in their shoes. These all have too much “other,” and in right action

there is simply no “other” role.We know this. Letting go of

the “other” role takes time and patience. But the superpower can’t work otherwise. So, for example, I have learned, slowly, slowly, to think back to how I felt when my daughter was a toddler and I was running on no sleep before I open my mouth to offer what I think is excellent advice about the raising of her two-year-old. The result: on good days I don’t open my mouth. On not so good days I open my mouth, mea culpa times a gazil-lion, and then I apologize. Habits die hard.

The second thing that right action needs to work is a pause. At first this feels a little weird

because it feels off-rhythm. When we find ourselves in a situation calling for right action (and that’s all situations—I’m just saying) we need to have enough humility to wait for the right action response to surface. For most of us this hap-pens after the flash of an almighty ego needing to be correct, all knowing, or dismissive. If we pause right there, behind that initial response will be the one the situa-tion needs—and it will probably be surprising. For me, “I can’t” comes to mind, and “I don’t know.” In this moment of heartfelt responsive-ness something I can only describe as holy happens. A moment of peace. Of love. Of healing. Of a world rejoicing. S&H

In this moment of heartfelt responsiveness something I can only describe as holy happens.

A moment of peace. Of love. Of healing. Of a world rejoicing.

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PAUL SUTHERLAND is

chief investment officer of the FIM Group and founder

of the Utopia Foundation, which sends volunteers

around the globe through utopiavolunteers.org.

Should I Take a Volunteer Vacation?

I need a vacation, and I’m happy to spend my hard-earned money someplace that needs it. But my husband wants to try a “volunteer” vacation. He says working to help desperate people will feel better than lying on the beach. I think we’ll be providing free (unskilled!) labor to a place with already high unemployment. I’d feel better by overtipping. What do you think?

Paul Sutherland: The great UCLA coach John Wooden said, “Anything you do for someone that they could do for themselves takes away from that person.” So I understand your reluctance to provide “free” labor. I also think it is important that you and your husband are clear about your own intentions. If you are really going to volunteer, you should commit to three things.

1. Commit to help2. Commit with an intention not to create dependency or replace local labor.3. Commit 100 percent, 24/7.

If you’re helping people in someplace cool like Kathmandu, South Africa, Nairobi, or Guatemala, and you also want to trek in the Himalayas, go on a safari, or see Guatemala’s Lake Atitlán, do it after or before your service. There are real needs in each of these wonderful places, and you will doubly “earn” your vacation through your volunteering. It may be the best vacation you’ve ever had. I know this as the chairman of Utopia Foundation: we send volunteers to all these places (utopiavolunteers.org).

At first, I wanted to call our volunteer-ing program “Baby Huggers” because I wanted to send our volunteers to orphan-ages to rock and hug babies. I’ve been to enough orphanages to know that if you help out at an orphanage, you will be providing a much-needed service—wherever you go. You cannot spoil a baby by giving it food, shelter, love, and nurturing. You are not hurting a baby by teaching English and basic skills to the aunties and other caregivers. You are only helping.

In Africa, for example, the combined effects of AIDS, war, famine, indiffer-ence, and other calamities have created a situation where there is often no sister or brother, grandmother or grandfather to take on the burden of raising the child of a mother who died in childbirth. And many of the childbirth deaths happen because no one taught the community safe birthing practices. So let’s suppose you teach English, or teach English speakers to read—perhaps a future mother and her kin will read a book that guides them to healthy birthing, healthy child rearing, and healthy living prac-tices. That’s a wonderful service.

Many organizations now specialize in vacation voluntourism, and many are just in the business of placing people in expe-riences—often called “volunteer experi-ence.” This is a feel-good thing and can look good on a résumé, but the programs often fall short of any real help—and they can hurt by creating dependency,

THE HEART OF MONEYPAUL SUTHERLAND




enabling unhealthy behaviors, or dis-placing locals. So if you’re thinking of providing unskilled manual labor like painting a building, or counting green fishes, or chasing turtles into the sea, I would ask yourself if you really are helping. You want to leave the people and place you work better off for your having been there. It is also nice to end up feeling as though your time, energy, and expense was a good deal—better than just sending a check to the charity.

There is plenty of need. If you are a teacher, early childhood specialist, doctor, veterinarian, nurse, health practitioner, carpenter, engineer, yoga instructor, artist, musician, skilled in computers, or a craftsperson, your skills are needed. The key is finding the right organization that needs your skills.

It pained me when I met a pediatri-cian who went on a weeklong mission trip to build a school and came back

with calluses. He had replaced local labor instead of doctoring to the local needs. When I was chairman of Safe Passage, a organization that works with children who get their sustenance from a Guatemalan dump, people showed up from 100 miles away when we got a doctor to come to our school. Our visiting doctors would go home exhausted but fulfilled.

A friend of mine just came back from a week in South Africa, where she volunteered with the local staff of a rural health clinic. She used her computer and organizational skills to create a simple patient informa-tion system, so that when the clinic sends someone to the hospital they can print out the patient’s history to show the admissions people. The system also enabled the woman running the

clinic to apply for government grants because she now has documentation for her patients. She actually wept when she started using the system—it will change the course of the clinic’s destiny. One week can make a huge difference.

I believe that providing altruistic, loving service to others who are most in need will do you more good and make you happier than going on any meditation retreat, reading every dharma book ever written, or visit-ing every spiritual site on our earth. I suggest you and your husband put your résumés together, find a good fit for your skills, and try a week, month, or a year in a place you’re more likely to come home from with diarrhea and itchy hair than a suntan. I will guarantee that you will smile when you tell your friends how you spent your time off from work. I also am sure your worldview and the way you relate to the world will be transformed. S&H

To ask Paul a question, email him directly at paul@

spiritualityhealth.com.

T H E D E F I N I T I V E G U I D ETO T H E A F T E R L I F E

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S.C.O.P.E. YOUR MEDITATION

S: Show up with a pad of paper and a pen or pencil.

C: Calm your body, mind, and spirit with a few minutes of deep breathing.

O: Observe your inner and outer world. Make note on paper of inner thoughts or feelings or outer percep-tions (sights, sounds, smells). Let the flow be free.

P: Play with one or more of the lines you wrote down in the step above. See if you can add another line that shifts the meaning in a surprising way. If not, rework the first line or choose another one to play with. Keep playing your way from stanza to stanza.

E: Enjoy what shows up.

ONE OF THE MORE INGENIOUS tools we’ve found for reframing a tough situa-tion—or simply having fun with words—is a process that psychologist Kevin Anderson calls nested meditation. It began when Kevin’s father refused the five-times-daily dialysis that would prolong his life, and Kevin wept to his brother, “How can this suffering be?” His brother replied, “It’s a gift.” Kevin contemplated the answer and then wrote:

How can this suffering be?

How can this suffering be a gift?

How can this suffering be a gift? Rip it open.

How can this suffering be a gift? Rip it open, and the heart floods with compassion.

Kevin realized he was on to something: “A way to move, in a few words, from sur-face observations or feelings into deeper layers of experience.” So he came up with a

strict format that he detailed in a collection of meditations called Divinity in Disguise, which won an S&H Best Spiritual Book Award.

Each stanza after the opening line begins with the words from the prior stanza in the exact order and with the same spellings and line breaks. Part of the magic feeling the nested form evokes is seeing the exact words take us to such dif-ferent places as the next line is added.

There’s no need for every stanza to connect logically to the one before or after. Each stanza may be its own separate meditation, as is apparent if you pause for a breath or two between stanzas.

We are all one.

We are all one step from the edge.

We are all one step from the edge of the annihilation.

We are all one step from the edge of the annihilation of all hatred.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

«Share Your

Meditation

Email your best nested

meditation to editors@

spiritualityhealth.com

We’ll print our favorites in

the July/August issue.

FictionRachel Bone

Surprise Yourself with a Nested Meditation




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July 10–12

Tara Brach shows you how to access the sanctuary of wisdom and peace within

July 3–5

Byron Katie teaches The Work—four questions to shift stressful beliefs and change your life

July 12–17

Panache Desai takes you on a journey to awaken your authentic soul signature

July 3–5

Les Stroud from Survivorman guides you to deepen your spiritual connection to the earth

June 19–21

Paul Williams and Tracey Jackson share a method for living in gratitude and trust

July 24–26

Brian Weiss helps you discover the power of past-life memories



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