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The Paradoxes of Healing

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July 7, 2022

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The Paradoxes of Healing

When you’re happy, relaxed, and free of stress, the body can accomplish amazing, even miraculous, feats of self-repair.

– Lissa Rankin –

The Paradoxes of Healing

Lissa Rankin, MD, describes herself as a skeptic. She is a Western-trained ob-gyn, linear thinker, and evidence-informed scientist. In the same breath, however, she also describes herself as a mystic an open-hearted, spiritually alive, empathic healer who has witnessed countless miracles of healing and has also experienced them firsthand herself. What follows is an excerpt from her book, “Sacred Medicine: A Doctor’s Quest to Unravel the Mysteries of Healing.” { read more }

Be The Change

Join this Saturday’s Awakin Call with Lissa Rankin! More details and RSVP info here. { more }

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Anatomy of a Wave: A Triptych

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July 6, 2022

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Anatomy of a Wave: A Triptych

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it’s always our self we find in the sea.

– e.e. cummings –

Anatomy of a Wave: A Triptych

“We like to imagine –in our humanness– waves as traveling water bodies. But that isn’t quite accurate. Waves are kinetic energy from vibrating water particles interacting through seawater. The particles move perpendicularly back and forth to create energy, the water forms a circular motion in relation to the seafloor and wind, an orbital rotation is born. The water itself doesn’t travel very far at all. The wave is not a body of water. Waves bear energy, not water, across the sea. When we look out at waves coming toward us on the shore, we imagine they are coming to us. We long for it, I think. Sometimes I wonder if our longing is memory. A desire to return to that breathable aquamarine past.” More in this evocative essay from Orion Magazine. { read more }

Be The Change

For more inspiration, check out this interview with Betsy Damon, “Living Water.” { more }

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Mozart’s Starling

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July 5, 2022

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Mozart's Starling

We lie in the lap of an immense intelligence.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson –

Mozart’s Starling

“When beginning a new writing project, naturalist and author Lyanda Lynn Haupt takes her research seriously. For her book, Mozart’s Starling, Haupt dutifully traveled to Austria, to see Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birthplace and the famed composer’s grave. But then she took one big step further. Because her book is inspired by the little-known fact that Mozart kept a pet starling, Haupt decided to adopt one of her own. She rescued a 5-day-old nestling, named it Carmen and embarked on an adventure — the likes of which she never could have imagined.” { read more }

Be The Change

Check out this beautiful article on ‘The Transfixing Beauty of Starling Murmurations.’ { more }

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Sweeping My Heart

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InnerNet Weekly: Inspirations from ServiceSpace.org
Sweeping My Heart
by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

[Listen to Audio!]

2509.jpgFor me, a dark-skinned person of African descent, cleaning the temple as Zen practice felt inappropriate and uncomfortable when I was at the beginning of my training. When you are an older black woman and a young white man tells you how to mop the floor during work period, the experience is akin to being a maid or a reminder of slavery. Ordinary temple work is the kind of labor often relegated in this country to folks of color and poor people. It is work that can ensure a lower rank in society. […]

For those who suffer from internalized “isms” like racism and sexism, to be humbled by spiritual practice is counter to their task of wellness and healing from dehumanization. If anything, they are looking to emerge from the place of submission. They are looking for a place to speak rather than be silent, to communicate the suffering of all “isms” being played out while sweeping the temple’s floor.

Yet, I stayed with Zen practice, doing the mundane, and years later I scrubbed the toilets when I was head student, in order, they say, to remain humble. The more I bowed, the more I scrubbed. Eventually, I felt my ancestors moving my body, back and forth. They told me this work was good. I was skeptical.

Me: “Really? I don’t need this.”

Ancestors: “Exactly. You feel you have become better than us.”

Me: “I went to school because you said education was the best thing for black people. I got a Ph.D. so I don’t need to do what black folks have always done.”

Ancestors: “Your pride is no good to us. Your degree is no good to us. We need your heart to be healed. Don’t let intellect take the place of love. You must love more.”

I swept longer, breathing, listening, crying. This is true, I say to myself.

Me: “But I worked so hard not to be oppressed as you were. I worked for justice. I prayed. I ate well. I did good deeds most of my life.”

Ancestors: “We need more than that from you. We don’t need you to be a good Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, follower of African Orishas, or whatever. We need you to remember the dust from which you came. We need you to remember a time before things went crazy, when they sold Africans like us. There was something before. It is still hidden from you. Find it. Keep sweeping—not to clean but to see and hear where your heart is blocked from what we see for you. We put you in a place where you would be bothered enough to change.”

Today when I clean the temple, I know it is my ancestors calling. I know that the memory within me of their existence as slaves is being understood and transformed. I know that temple cleaning is the motion arising from sitting meditation, not history repeating itself.

If I am fortunate enough to be offered a chance to sweep, it is a profound time with my own heart—to use the broom as a ritual connecting this life and the lives of those in my past. I am not replicating what my ancestors did as slaves. On the contrary, they have brought me to this moment.

About the Author: Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is an author, visual artist, drummer, and Zen Buddhist priest. Excerpt above from this essay.

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Sweeping My Heart
How do you relate to the notion of the sweeping practice being really about finding where the heart is blocked? Can you share a personal story of a time you went beyond your accomplishments and remembered the dust from which you came? What helps you be profoundly with your heart?
+Jagdish+P+Dave wrote: How do I see the realty, the truth, depends on the quality of my lenses. Seeeing the reality blurred by the dust of isms like racism , sexism, classism and religionism causes and sustains our blindnes…
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Zainika Jagasia: Mumbai’s Inspiring 19-Year-Old Model & Baker

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July 4, 2022

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Zainika Jagasia: Mumbai's Inspiring 19-Year-Old Model & Baker

What if we all could reach our potential and make our contribution to the world? That would create more abundance, solve humanity’s problems faster, and make the world better for everyone.

– Guy Bieber –

Zainika Jagasia: Mumbai’s Inspiring 19-Year-Old Model & Baker

“Zainika Jagasia’s mother, Reshma Jagasia, says she had a gut feeling throughout her pregnancy that ‘there was something wrong’. “It was almost like my child was talking to me all the time,” she told The Quint. She stayed conscious during her C-section surgery and when the baby was born, the doctors confirmed that she had Down syndrome. The ever-supportive parents then spent 8 to 10 hours a day with their child in occupational, physical and speech therapy when Zainika was just months old.” Zainika is now a part-time model and full-time baker with a thriving social media following. More on her inspiring journey here. { read more }

Be The Change

Check out this utterly captivating short film on Zainika and her family, “Shining Against the Odds.” { more }

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Letters from Two Gardens

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July 3, 2022

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Letters from Two Gardens

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

– May Sarton –

Letters from Two Gardens

“In the late July swelter and dragonfly buzz of summer, poets Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay began a correspondence of poems — sent the old-fashioned way, through the mail. Aimee wrote from her flower garden in Fredonia, New York, Ross from his fruit and vegetable garden in Bloomington, Indiana. Here, then, is how they made sense and record of a full year in their respective gardens. “It is our hope that some of the pleasure and anxiety of tending these gardens — which is to say, tending to ourselves, our relationships, our earth — comes through in these poems,” says Ross. Theres bounty, yes. But there’s loss and sorrow too: like a garden, like a life.” { read more }

Be The Change

In his “Book of Delights,”Ross Gay shares a series of daily essays on the things that delight him. You can learn more about it here. { more }

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The Divided Brain

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July 2, 2022

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The Divided Brain

The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.

– Iain McGilchrist –

The Divided Brain

In this RSA produced video, the world of today is explained by Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar. He came to prominence after the publication of his book The Master and His Emissary, subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. The words of McGilchrist, and the illustrative and clever graphics accompanying the audio, describe how the two hemispheres of the brain operate and affect the way we interact with and see the world. He says that modern culture has developed a machine model of the brain that relies heavily on our left hemisphere and determines our perception of reality. While the rational perceptions of the left hemisphere offer much that is helpful and needed, the tendency is to sacrifice the intuitive and feeling experience of the right hemisphere – which limits our ability to relate humanely with others. We are not, of course, machines but we have been educated to think this rigidly rational and narrow focused view of life is how we should function to succeed in the world. In fact, we need both the broad intuitive focus and the narrow rational focus offered by the two hemispheres of the brain, otherwise we become lopsided and out of balance, lacking in empathy and appreciation for the subtle and beautiful aspects of reality that may be outside of rational explanation or experience. As humans, we do violence to ourselves in the way that we split off from our intuitive and feeling selves and overvalue our rational minds. In fact, the balancing of the brains perceptions offers hope for both a rational and feeling society that would be better for all. { read more }

Be The Change

Try to listen to the wholeness of yourself in a situation today-both the rational and the intuitive parts of yourself. Notice how multilayered our perception of reality can be and honor the value that a “whole brain” perception can offer.

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Three Hours of Free Time in Berkeley

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July 1, 2022

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Three Hours of Free Time in Berkeley

But the beauty is in the walking – we are betrayed by destinations.

– Gwyn Thomas –

Three Hours of Free Time in Berkeley

“Moving on, I began to notice feelings I’d never had as I walked past shops. The smaller ones, especially, touched me. Each spoke of someone throwing in on life, taking the chance of starting a business–a living drama, invisible, but present just behind the facades of each passing storefront. Life was right there–all the time, I realized. What kept me from being present to it?” { read more }

Be The Change

Sometime when you’re ready for a small adventure, as an experiment, go for a walk with nothing else to do but walk. Give yourself an hour or more. See if you can let the sights and sounds in. See if you can find your body while you’re walking. Don’t try to force anything. Let thoughts quiet down at their own speed — nothing to accomplish…

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Returning to the Whole

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June 30, 2022

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Returning to the Whole

We must become accountable to our time, our earth, our species, our people, and our loved ones, from the inside out.

– Adrienne Maree Brown –

Returning to the Whole

“What time is it on the clock of the world?” My mentor Grace Lee Boggs used to ask this question all the time, to anyone who came to visit and learn with her, in any meeting she attended, or speech she gave. She wanted us–her students, comrades, and community– to keep a wide, long lens about our work. To remember, all of the time, that this moment is not the only moment. Human development moves in these massive cycles and phases, and there are always agents of change who ideate and practice and push and grow those shifts. She reminded us that there are changes available to us that are distinct to this time, and she urged us to be present to the opportunities that are current. She knew that we are not individuals simply living these solitary lives in a vacuum; we are the cells of our time-body, the collective physical body of this moment, interacting with each other and the earth and technology in ways that will create an age.” { read more }

Be The Change

Take a moment to reflect on how and where accountability manifests in your own life.

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