Great River T’ai Chi will offer a free class “T’ai Chi Practice for Spring Health” to share some simple approaches to better health. The class will be held Sunday, March 14, from 6-7 p.m. at 1940 Hennepin Avenue South, Minneapolis. Continuing classes begin Sunday, March 21, 6-7 p.m.

T’ai Chi has been shown to lower blood pressure, improve balance, and decrease stress-and just as many people use it to enhance their practice of other sports such as golf. Its slow, flowing movements increase coordination, mind-body focus, precision of movement, and calm. T’ai chi is also the perfect exercise-it can satisfy those looking for a physically challenging workout that builds leg strength, coordination, and focus, as well as those looking for a gentler, low-impact, safe, and relaxing routine.

Great River T’ai Chi Ch’uan, which has just celebrated its 30th anniversary, is one of the oldest t’ai chi schools in the Midwest. Founded in 1979, instructors Barbara Davis and Cheryl Powers have taught at the University of Minnesota, Macalester College, Concordia College, Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Mankato State University, and at many other schools and corporations. Great River instructors have presented at many national and international t’ai chi events including the International Taijiquan Forum in Nashville last July, and World Tai Chi Day events every April.

T’ai chi has its origins as a Chinese martial art that began at least two hundred years ago. Its full name “t’ai chi ch’uan” (pronounced tie-gee-chwan, also written as “taijiquan”) means “t’ai chi boxing.” It grew rapidly from being a private, family-held fighting tradition to a widely practiced health exercise. Nowadays, its picturesque moves can be seen in early morning practitioners who gather in China’s parks in the early morning to cultivate the “qi” (ch’i), the life energy.

For more information, contact Great River T’ai Chi Ch’uan at 612.822.5760 or visit www.taijiquanjournal.com/greatrivertaichi/

“The idea of Spirit River came to me as a place of community where practitioners of the metaphysical arts and artisans have a venue to showcase and market their talents, and to provide a crossroads for the spiritual community and the general public alike,” Pierson said.

Spring events include professional psychic medium Alison James offering her popular Spirit Gallery from 10 a.m. to Noon, followed by a Psychic Fair from 1-5 p.m. on the second Saturday of each month. Lodestone Dynamics will present an “Aura & Chakras” workshop from 3-5:30 p.m. on April 10. And Val Medeiros and Chris Tonnar will present Mediumship and Deep Trance Channeling at Spirit River on March 20 and April 17, from 1-4 p.m. on both days.

Upcoming classes include: “Yoga,” “Intuitive Mastery Circles,” “QiGong,” “Psychism in 3D: Discovery, Direction & Development” and “Palmistry.” Book clubs, networking groups and others will be gathering at Spirit River.

For more information, call Spirit River at 763.208.9279, visit www.spirit-river.org or www.facebook.com/spiritrivergallery, or email events@spirit-river.org.

Participants will enjoy a day full of relaxation, learning, rejuvenation and exploring with local practitioners and organizations that connect the mind, body and spirit. Organizations such as St. Catherine University, U of M Center for Spirituality and Healing, Mayo Health System, Northwestern Health Sciences University and others will offer expert speakers, interactive workshops and experiential treatments.

“People often say holistic healing is too ‘out there,’ but that’s because they’ve never experienced it,” says Pamela LaBelle, founding director of Restore. “Come to the event, ask questions, meet practitioners and people who have benefited from healing practices. Then form an opinion on what may be right for you. Our mission is to empower individuals to have a voice in their overall health care.”

The team behind Restore has more than 30 years experience producing events, and many are graduates of St. Catherine University’s Masters of Holistic Health Studies program.

For additional information or to purchase tickets, visit RestoreHealing.com or visit Twitter.com/RestoreHealing or the Facebook fan page for lively conversation.

Spirit Spectacular Show
BROOKLYN CENTER, MN – Spirit Spectacular Show – a metaphysical expo featuring eight keynote speakers, 24 educational workshops, a silent auction benefitting The Pet Project, 50 exhibitors and much more – takes place from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, March 27, and from 10 am. to 5 p.m. Sunday, March 28, at Crowne Plaza Hotel, 2200 Freeway Blvd., in Brooklyn Center. Admission is $5 for one day, $8 for the weekend. Keynote speakers are $22 in advance and $25 at the door.

The Keynote speakers are: Rita Louise, Ph.D. (“Tapping into your Intuition” and “Ghosts, Spirits & All that goes Bump in the Night”); Kathryn Harwig (“Intuitive Advantage”); Troy Parkinson (“Psychic Medium Gallery”); Sid Korpi (“Pet Loss: Receiving the Gifts that Only Grieving Can Give”); Joann Bruhn (“The Gift Within Grief & The Power of Harmony”); Carole J. Hyder (“The Four Faces of Money: Financial Feng Shui”); and Dr. Brenda Schaeffer (“Is It Love or Addiction?”). Exhibitors include: Animal communicators, Nutrition, Henna, Grief Guidance Human & Animal, Psychics, Ghosts, Feng Shui, Tarot, Mediums, Dowsing, Massage, GLBT Spirit, Jewelry, Kids, Herbs, Green Home, Crystals, Oxygen Bar, Pet Nutrition & Care, Healthy Sexuality, Meditation, Shamanism and much more.

For more information, visit www.spiritspectacularshows.com. For tickets, go to www.brownpapertickets.com. Call 612.724.1020.

“By Women For Women” weekend retreat
WILLARD, WI – Women from across Wisconsin and Minnesota will be gathering at the Christine Center in Willard on March 5-7 to celebrate the creative and spiritual energy of women as they honor International Women’s Day. Area women are invited to attend the retreat and may come alone, with a group of friends, or with their mothers, daughters or grandmothers. The “By Women For Women” is a registration-free weekend retreat where women donate their time to share their creative talents with other women. This year’s program includes a variety of workshops from dance and meditation to writing and creating garden stepping-stones. Women are invited to attend any or all workshops. There is also time for relaxation, saunas, walks in nature and conversation with other women.

The Christine Center has presented this annual event for the past eight years as a way to celebrate International Women’s Day.

“Women need to celebrate their achievements,” said Sister Cecy Corcon, FSPA of the Christine Center. “Coming together and meeting women who want to share their learning is exciting and gives us all a lift. Traveling together we will find liberation for all women. Women in solidarity with women around the world, recognizing that we’ve come a long way.”

There is no charge to attend the workshops; the only cost is for meals and lodging. Call 715.267.7507 to register or for more information. You may also visit the center’s website at www.ehristinecenter.org.

Since 1980, the Christine Center has been a sanctuary for spiritual deepening and global transformation in the lineage of St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi and embraces persons of all spiritual paths in a natural sanctuary. Today, it remains grounded in the Catholic commitment to dialogue and respect for all faith traditions. The Center bears the Franciscan hallmarks of simplicity, welcoming hospitality, and love for nature. Hidden off the highways of central Wisconsin, the Christine Center is a natural sanctuary of woodland, ponds, and meadows. The Center is designed to deepen spiritual practice is solitary quiet.

The Deep Feminine [Lightsmith interview, February 2010] – there it is, right in front of me, moving up from the unconscious. I have been going to Lightsmith for years and now the Deep Feminine. On a mental level, this sounds like using my intuition – the feminine side of me as a man that I know I have, OK! But what if the deep feminine is not a concept of the mind? What if it is something else? What if I get to know the deep feminine through an a-ha moment?

The teachings say that the deep dark feminine is unseen, unknown and not “in form.” The way the masculine works with it is to trust the unknown and unseen, even though it is invisible.

What if the feminine appears “in form” by informing the masculine and trusting that its information will be followed?

I was awakened to this the other day as I was preparing to cut up carrots for cooking. I reached into my 10-pound bag to pull out the carrots. I grabbed a handful and placed them on the table. I reached in again to get some more to add to the first handful.

I proceeded to cut them up in the food processor and realized that, again, I had too many carrots to cook and store. I had been telling myself that I was going to find a way to not repeat this experience and grab the right amount the first time.

I then realized that I had grabbed the right amount the first time – but added more to it. With this first handful, I was informed by the feminine in a physical way, just grabbing exactly what I needed.

I had noticed this in passing but had overridden the feminine with my mind and had taken the action of grabbing the next handful. I may have described taking the second handful as a “mindless” act, but the mind is so quick and the decision so automatic that I hadn’t realized until now that I overridden the feminine with the mind.

The mind would say, “How could the body know without measuring? That is just nonsense!” Well, it’s not logical, but it would have worked if I had followed the feminine. This experience illustrates how subtle and simple it all is. I will be relaxing my mind and tuning in more after this.

If they are to work well together, the masculine and feminine are to honor and respect each other. Life would be a lot easier and more efficient. Well, at least the right amount of carrots would be prepared.

Huh? It’s not really what I wanted to hear when I was having a hard time just staying awake! But I could see the wisdom of it. I know that when my home is in disarray, I feel on edge and just a bit off. What is outside of us tends to reflect our inner world – and mine wasn’t feeling very well. Not that I am a neat freak by any means, but there is a certain level of order in my home. When things are piling up or I haven’t dusted or vacuumed for a while, I can feel it. It’s like a subtle drain on my energy.

It’s been that way since I moved in. My house has actually spoken to me frequently, from the first time I walked in and was looking for the light switch (“She’s here!! She’s here!!!!) to fixing it up a bit (“Are you going to take care of me?”). Yes, I heard my house actually speaking to me.

I understood how the energy of placing objects and flow affects your space before, when I lived in an apartment, but when I bought the house this knowledge was really in the forefront. I have been very conscious of where I put things and what colors I use. I went so far as to read up on Feng Shui and apply some of those concepts. But to me, it’s more than a study in energy or a science of placement.

My home is sacred to me. I treat it that way and it nourishes me. I run my healing practice out of my home, so it is vitally important that the energy is nurturing and relaxing for my clients and for myself. They say your body is your temple and I treat it as such, but it is important to house it in a sacred way, as well.

One of the ways I do that is to have altar areas in my home. Altars are places where you arrange stones, bits of nature, art, what have you, to hold or manifest certain energies in your life. We all do that naturally, I think. But I also think we get stuck in how we think things need to be or look in our homes. We all know people who haven’t moved anything in their homes for decades. That’s fine if it is serving you, but I submit that energy needs to move. It can be very beneficial to all parts of our lives to re-think our living spaces.

When I was trying to shift the energy in my bedroom, I rearranged the altar. That one had been set up months prior, and what I had intended to manifest in my life with it had come into my life. So I took it apart and listened to my guidance on how things should look now, given what was going on. The shift in energy in my room was palpable. From that night forward, I slept better and my health began returning. As I gradually cleaned up, straightened and rearranged my home, I could feel new energy building and I felt better by the minute.

I believe we all need to take a look at areas in our lives that are not serving us anymore – including our homes. What changes could you make to make changes in your life?

My very first clients, Sherrie and Scott, are a perfect example. They were struggling to sell their home, which had been on the market for a year with no offers. They had already reduced the price several times. It was a lovely family home where they were raising their five adorable children. They had already purchased another property that Scott was fixing up. They were paying two mortgages, which was challenging both their finances and their nerves. Their Realtor contacted me to assess the situation and make recommendations.

I started with an initial tour of the home and immediately noticed a series of red flags. First, the master bedroom was an addition to the main house. In Feng Shui, this can indicate difficulties in their relationship working for the best interests of the entire family. Next, in the far right corner of the property (the partnership area) there was an enormous garage; the energetic pull between this structure and the main house could indicate a strain on the couple’s relationship. And most importantly, the master bedroom lacked life with no living plants, personal pictures, or colorful artwork, creating further questions about the cohesiveness of the couple. I suspected their focus was not on their relationship and they may not be on the same page about the move, contributing to the problems they were having selling the house.

I made some general suggestions to improve the energy flow in the home: creating a focal point in each room, adding rugs to conversation areas for grounding, and rearranging furniture to create a more welcoming atmosphere. This set the stage for the real work. I next explained to Sherrie that they were in the driver’s seat. The house could be staged beautifully, priced right for the market and expertly marketed by their Realtor, but if they didn’t want it to sell, for any reason, it wouldn’t sell.

I next asked Sherrie how supportive she was of the move, and she responded with tears. She loved her house and although she recognized the need to move, this was where they had created a family, where there was room to play, where she had tangible memories. Her reticence to move had dawned after putting their house up for sale. She was afraid of what life in the new house would be like and didn’t have the heart to tell her husband, who was now working around the clock to make two mortgage payments and remodel the new home. Sherrie realized she was holding back the process and, hence, the tears.

I gave Sherrie a list of action steps. First, she needed to write a letter to their current home thanking it for all the fabulous memories, with the goal of seeing if she could release the house, say good-bye. Next she needed to honestly share her feelings to her husband so they could become a team, pursuing the same desires. This process would require that Sherrie face her fears and be more open, but it was time. I assured her that it is human nature to hang on to what we have, if we think it is better than what is coming. I asked Sherrie, “Is there something you could get excited about regarding living in the new house?” She didn’t know.

The consultation was over, but as I left the phone rang. It was a call to set-up a showing on their house. The energy was already starting to move. Within three days, Sherrie wrote her letter, talked with her husband, and found something to get excited about – picking out tile for the new master bath. Their house sold in less than a week without further reducing the price, and Sherrie and Scott became a team pointed in the same direction.

Putting off clearing the clutter that has accumulated over the past year? Plagued with the tedious task of finding a home for items stacked in the corners?

Many books detail these ideas, but they lack motivation and easy ideas to get the job done. Color motivates and makes stored items quick and easy to identify.

Sure, place Christmas decorations in red bins and Halloween scaries in orange, but expand beyond the obvious and use traditional-color associations to have items organized and festive all year long.

Take a tip from nature, as red flowers pop out of the Earth and say, “Get started!” with their assertive presence. Red commands attention to spring into action. Download favorite invigorating “red” music into your iPod to get your motor running. Put on a red shirt and rock your way through getting organized.

I’ve studied the meaning of colors and their influence on the body and emotions for more than 20 years. I’ve presented color workshops worldwide and taught color classes for many professional design associations, such as American Society of Interior Designers. I am an expert on color, design and home organization and can offer many motivating ideas to colorfully get your home or office in order.

For example:

• Store all your active items, such as exercise mats, hand weights, balancing ball, sports equipment, bike shorts and exercise bands in red containers. Find a red sports band or bandana to help motivate exercise, too.
• Items for arts and crafts, paints and brushes, glue, house-fixing tools, picture hooks, hammers and extra cleaning supplies are best stored or labeled in orange, the color of creativity and physical appreciation.
• The other colors of Spring, such as yellow, green, blue and violet, have traditional representations (handed down through time since ancient Egypt) and can make clearing clutter and staying organized fun.

Here’s an easy, healthy organizing tip: By assigning one of the seven rainbow colors for each day, I even organize my vitamins in colored, clear-plastic boxes that look like jewels to remember to take them! It also saves so much time by not having to open up the bottles every day.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones who has been witness to its emergence into Western daylight. I can say I’ve seen it grow from a little-known, little-respected piece of knowledge (folklore even) to a formidable concept used by kids in junior high and heads of state. Here in this country, it’s no longer considered a superstitious fad bound toward the same fate as pet rocks, go-go boots, mood rings and polyester suits. Feng Shui is here to stay.

An Optimal Place
From an over-arching perspective, Feng Shui today still holds true to its original concept. Just as ancient masters of geomancy would look for the perfect piece of property for someone who wanted to set up their home, today’s consultants do the same thing with a modern twist. Rather than trudge through fields and over hills to capture the perfect site from a topography standpoint, now we try to influence the direction the house faces, confined by the limitations of the developer and the predetermined lot shape. Instead of arranging for a specific date to raise the main beam of the house, now we try to assure that the center of the space is open and accessible. In both cases, the goal is to provide an optimal place where the occupants will thrive.

However, indicative of its innate vitality, Feng Shui continues to evolve, develop and adjust. Those serious students of the art of placement have been inspired by its principles to expand its message. Now there is jewelry created with specific Feng Shui intentions. Greeting cards and purses are available relating to specific aspects or qualities. Scarves and candles can be counted among some of the offshoot products, along with essential oils, flower arrangements and chocolates. There are two published books that connect Feng Shui to cats and a book on getting a Feng Shui haircut. There’s also a Feng Shui cookbook. I will admit that I bought Feng Shui crackers at the store recently. I’m still a little confused about how they’re “feng shui,” but they tasted good. It’s obvious Feng Shui isn’t just for houses anymore.

Just as yoga and acupuncture fought their way through mainstream resistance to become widely accepted, Feng Shui is following a similar path. Today there’s a yoga studio on every corner, I’m happy to say. Perhaps in the near future there will be a Feng Shui consultant in every real estate office, in every architectural firm, in every interior design studio and wellness center. A developer wouldn’t stick a shovel in the ground without consulting their Feng Shui consultant. City planners wouldn’t raze a building without heeding advice from their resident expert. Insurance companies are starting to cover the cost of acupuncture treatments, seeing the benefits of having a patient heal quickly and with fewer complications. I hold out hope that the day will come when Feng Shui appointments by a qualified consultant will also be part of the insurance package, understanding that if a patient’s environment supports a quick recovery, there will be a shorter convalescence and it will be less expensive medically.

Growing Interest by Men
One of the biggest changes I’ve seen in the Feng Shui landscape is the growing interest by men. Originally in China, those geomantic experts were and still continue to be mainly men; however, the majority of their clients were mainly women. Up until recently, in the U.S. and Europe, most of the Feng Shui experts have been women with the majority of their clients still being women.

There’s a lot of speculation about why women are so taken by Feng Shui. Perhaps it is due to the intuitive component – women are, by nature, more intuitive than men, so they resonate to its concepts. Perhaps it is because Feng Shui is typically confined to the interior of the home – women are usually in charge of their home’s décor, so they would take charge of any changes that could occur there. Perhaps women have a need to create a safe nest for their family, so they resonate to the qualities Feng Shui can bring to their home.

All that said, I’ve seen a distinct change in the role men are playing in the world of Feng Shui. In many of my consultations, the husband or male partner not only takes an active part, but is commonly the one to initiate the appointment. It isn’t just the wife or female who is leading the project. Single males, as well, are seeing the benefit at home and at work, without any prodding from a girlfriend, wife or mother.

It helps that the concept of Feng Shui is becoming widely accepted on most societal tiers. It helps that businesses dependent on Asian investments are required to use a Feng Shui consultant, whether in the U.S. or in Asia. It helps that there’s no longer a stigma for a man to drop the fierce warrior image and connect to a softer side. Men are no longer afraid to say they don’t feel good in a space, or they don’t like the color, or the flow of a room is troublesome. They are now realizing the importance of space and how it can affect their quality of life.

Sacred Space is the Goal
Feng Shui has surpassed the scientific level of geomancy and reached a level where sacred space is the goal. A lot of clients share with me that they didn’t realize how personal the concept could become. The appointment addressed the physical, but also the spiritual side of their home. As Feng Shui consultants, we walk gently and speak carefully in someone’s space, for it is not only the reflection of their current life situation, but it can act as the vessel for what could be. Feng Shui takes the mundane of the current moment and elevates it to a cosmic clock, where all things are possible and where inspiration and empowerment are found.

I can’t help but wonder what some of those original geomancers would say about all the changes if they could see us now. I would like to imagine they would feel gratified that their work has adapted itself to a different culture, taken on new meaning for a new time, and lent itself to countless and varied possibilities.

It may be in a new and improved form, yet Feng Shui is still subscribing to its true nature of wind and water – flow, movement, and adaptability.

Other underlying energetic conditions also have an impact. Homes may contain residual influences from long illnesses, death, divorce, family discord, abuse, financial difficulties, robbery, traumatic events and more. Ley lines, power lines, TV and radio towers, ghosts, and unacknowledged energies in the earth may affect you. For some, because it has become familiar, these influences are not noticed until their effect is removed by the clearing work. One way to notice is to be aware of how you feel when you enter a place after being away for a while.

In space clearing, just as in working with personal energy field clearing, there are two steps – first, removing energy blocks and drains, and second, enhancing energy flow. I work with the Ancient Energies of the Land to gain their cooperation and support for those living or working there. This enhances energy flow and brings sweetness to the experience of being in that place.

I recently helped a client clear her townhome. She first called me because of a persistent electrical problem. For several months, the front hallway light had only worked intermittently, and then stopped working altogether. The fixture had been replaced and a master electrician had determined that the wiring was in very good shape and could find no cause for what was happening.

I found that a painting stored near the light was causing the disturbance. It carried the energy of someone’s illness. My client took the steps I suggested to appropriately neutralize and destroy the painting, and the light has worked fine ever since.

She had neighbors who were unconsciously pulling in her energy, and she had unknowingly placed many of her books along the common wall to protect herself. She was feeling overwhelmed by all the books and tapes, but she was having difficulty getting rid of them. I went through the books and intuitively determined which ones to let go of and which ones to keep. She always had the right to take some back, which at times she did. She appreciated the ease and simplicity of the process when I did the choosing.

Next, we placed crystals in the basement to set up an energetic wall between her and her current neighbor. Then we removed some of the items in the living room that carried old energy and no longer supported her current energetic state. Some furniture pieces and art work were released. Then we hung art work she already owned that was reflective of where her soul wanted her to go, and we rearranged the furniture. She felt so good about her “new” living room that she arranged a birthday party for herself in her newly created space.

“This has been a real transformation,” she said, “and it has given me a new sense of freedom, not only in my home but in my life! Well worth the effort and focus.”

Another client had been “haunted” by her brother dying in a distant country and she was not able to travel to see him before his death. His ghost was present in her home due to unresolved family religious conflicts. In the process of releasing his ghost, these issues were resolved, along with the client’s guilt about her brother.

After another client’s home was hit by a tornado, the daughter had difficulty getting to sleep and had occasional nightmares. The family said they felt “quite discombobulated.” After I remotely reintegrated the original and rebuilt parts of the house, the daughter was able to sleep. The family also reported feeling grounded again.

Making room for change and simplicity really assists in bringing in the new energies. I honor all who are willing to do the work.

She promptly began talking to me about Feng Shui and its impact on attracting love. I wasn’t familiar with Feng Shui, but the idea that physical objects and space either encourage or trap energy made sense to me.

She told me that I should move my bed out from the wall so my future partner could get to his side of the bed. She talked about pairing up objects like candles and getting rid of solitary items or images.

I was intrigued, so I purchased the book Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, by Karen Kingston. She writes, “…By changing your home, you also change the possibilities in your own life. Removing the obstacles to the harmonious flow of energy in your living environment creates more harmony in your life and the space for wonderful new opportunities to come to you.”

At the time, my bed was a futon mattress on a piece of plywood on top of five cinder blocks. I was able to store a dozen or so boxes of items underneath the bed and thought it was a great idea. One of the first Feng Shui clearing tasks I undertook was to clear out all of the stuff under my bed.

I had boxes of things dating back to elementary school. I found my Campfire Girl beads, stuffed animals, Dr. Seuss books. There were tons of photographs, letters, diaries. Lots of stuff I hadn’t paid any attention to in years. Eventually, the dozen boxes turned into one that I stored in the closet. As I let go of old things, I felt lighter, more energized and hopeful regarding my life and my future love.

Karen Kingston writes about a frequent occurrence in her consultations with educated people having difficulty finding a love partner. “…I find that in the relationships corner of the house or the relationships corner of a much-used room in the house, there is a large bookcase stuffed full of old books…because in actual fact their primary relationship is with their books! By moving the bookcase or at least clearing some space in the bookshelves, it creates room for new interests and relationships in their lives.”

I can’t say I met my beloved immediately after I cleared my clutter, but it was an important step in my process. In addition to the material stuff, I also had to let go of my own interfering beliefs, fears and habits. I met my husband three years later.

A final quote from Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui says, “Love and fear cannot exist in the same space, so everything you are holding onto through fear is blocking you having more love in your life; clearing it allows more love to start pouring in.”

Stephen Co’s miraculous ascension into the world as one of its foremost energy healers began with a loss of patience. His wife had fallen and broken her hip, and doctors told her it would be at least three months before she could put any weight on it. He and his wife were frustrated with the prognosis.

He told the doctor, “That’s way too long,” and he began looking for other options. By chance, someone mentioned Pranic Healing, but the engineer by trade – and Southern Baptist by faith – was hesitant.

“I took the class and I started working on her, and within two and a half weeks, she could walk,” Stephen Co said in a telephone interview with The Edge. “I was just baffled. She could walk. And then every time we went to the doctor, they said the bone was healing faster than they had ever seen before. They didn’t know why. I was not about to tell them about the healing, because they would think I was crazy.

“After about five weeks, I remember my wife ran across the room, and that was the end of me doubting. At that time, I was very skeptical, emotionally and mentally and spiritually. I was not open to it at all, but I followed the protocol, step by step.”

That was the beginning of Stephen Co’s transformation from engineer to energy healing teacher. His healing teacher, Grand Master Choa Kok Sui, the world’s foremost authority and founder of Pranic Healing®, inspired him to leave the Philippines, where had been living, and go to the United States to teach what he had learned. The rest is history. Stephen is now referred worldwide as Master Co, and he has spoken to thousands of people and has trained many in the art of Pranic Healing, including doctors, nurses and those who already practice other forms of integrative healing. He and Dr. Eric Robins wrote the book, Your Hands Can Heal You.

“What I want to get across is, if I can do this – having been emotionally, mentally and spiritually not open to it, open to just helping people – I think anybody can learn this.”

Master Co returns to the Twin Cities to teach classes on Pranic Healing on March 23 and 24, and a weekend intensive healing seminar on April 17-18.

He spoke with The Edge to explain that the so-called “miracles” of Pranic Healing are actually the result of subtle laws of energy, nature’s response to the conscious direction of our life force energy (chi or prana) in a form of healing that has evolved in the East for thousands of years. He says all human beings are born with the incredible power to consciously, purposefully direct their life force energy, and that he trains and empowers people to tap into their own latent ability.

Let’s start with the very foundation of what you do, and I think that’s the understanding that all life is energy.
Every particle of existence is made of energy, and this energy has different vibrations. In the Hindu tradition, it is called prana. The Chinese call it chi, and the Japanese call it ki. Different cultures have their own name for it, but essentially what I do is called Pranic healing. It was developed by my teacher, Grand Master Choa Kok Sui, into a very simple, but systematized healing modality that I can teach anyone in a very short time – how to harness this life force to heal themselves, their loved ones, and make their life better.

How does Pranic healing work?
First you have to understand that the energetic anatomy – which consists of the chakras (the energy centers) the meridians and the aura – are mediums for this prana to go into the physical body. When people are sick, different parts of this energy anatomy are blocked, the flow is not there and the physical organs are not getting the fresh energy they need for the body to repair itself. People can get this fresh energy from the food, from the air, from the ground.

When a person comes in for healing, the first thing we do is we scan to feel the different imbalances of energy. Then we begin cleansing. We spend about 50 to 75 percent of the healing session cleansing and removing blockages of energy. Most of the time, for back pain, headaches, something like an upset stomach, that cleansing alone gives the person so much relief that they think they are already improving, but that is just part of it.

After a thorough cleansing, the healer does deep breathing and meditation to bring energy into the system and project it to the client. We call this energizing. And then we stabilize the energy so it does not leak out. What people do not realize is that when you give energy to the client, the body can only absorb so much energy in a short amount of time. A lot of energy is waiting to go in. We tell people after a session not to shower for 12 to 24 hours to give that energy time to be absorbed. We also stabilize the energy using the color blue, and then we teach the client some forms of self-healing and meditation. We want to make sure each client goes home with certain skills to help speed up the healing.

In a very simplistic way, people can get a sense of what you do by looking at the body as just a vessel for energy, and that this energy is always moving in and out of the body, but sometimes that movement of energy becomes blocked.
Absolutely. This life force is not ours. It is in the universe. As you said, you are a vessel, or you are a machine, that pumps the energy in, pumps the energy out. As long as that energy is flowing freely, the body has good health.

What mechanism pumps the energy in and out of the body?
The mechanism behind it is the chakras, energy centers that act like spinning wheels. Just imagine they are propellers that spin in both directions. When they spin clockwise, looking at them from the front of the body, they are absorbing this prana, or life force energy. When they are spinning counter-clockwise, they are releasing this life force energy.

When you go to an acupuncturist, the way they pull the needle is based on this very simple principle. If they want to put energy into your body, they pull the needle clockwise. If they want to take the energy out – if you have too much energy or a blockage – they pull it counterclockwise, because all the acupuncture points are the locations of chakras. Chakras are distributed all over your body. Traditionally, it is known that there are seven major chakras, but actually there are 11 major chakras and hundreds of smaller ones.

My teacher noticed that every ailment actually has a unique set of energy centers that malfunction. A person who has asthma, compared to somebody who has menstrual cramps, will have a different set of chakras affected, because a different set of physical organs are affected. The reason anybody can learn this is because as long as you can follow a recipe, you can heal with Pranic Healing. By following the given steps for a given ailment, you give the body the ability to release the blockages, and you give the body the ability to absorb the life force it needs. The body now has fuel to repair itself.

Is Pranic healing ideal for some health conditions and not as effective for others? How does it work on chronic conditions?
I remember when Dr. Eric Robins, co-author of the book, Your Hands Can Heal You, told me that as a medical doctor, his definition of a chronic condition is when body is not healing itself. No matter how many drugs you use or how much surgery you do, you are just doing a bandage job, because the body is not repairing itself. Chronic cases respond very well to Pranic Healing, because after you remove the blockages and you give the body enough energy, the body can now go back to its restorative mode. For example, we notice asthma and respiratory illness respond very quickly. Something else that responds very well is back pain, because it is not always physical. Often it is due to anger and resentment. These negative emotions block the flow of life force energy. If you clean these blockages, most people will feel an instant relief. In general, all ailments are due to some form of energetic imbalance that has manifested, so we do our best.

How involved is the training to learn Pranic Healing?
It depends on how far you want to take it. For most people who want to work on back pain, headache and common ailments, those who want to learn how to work on people with anger and resentment, the first level class is enough. Then, for people who want to learn more, want to really get into it, there is an advanced class where you start using colors.

This involves matching the color – or the frequency – with what the body needs to repair itself. For example, if somebody has menstrual cramps or somebody has constipation, the body is lacking what is called orange prana, or orange energy, in the lower part of the body. In the first level class, we give this client white light. White light is like going to a general practitioner. The body will simply extract the orange energy from the white to do what it needs to. The body will get the energy it needs. Advanced classes are like going to a specialist. We know what color the body needs, so we give it to the body directly, and the healing time is usually cut in half.

We also offer more advanced class for those who want to go into phobias and addictions, in the pranic psychotherapy classes. Depending on how far you want to take it, the teachings are there.

For those people who are not able to come and see you, what can you recommend that they do each day to help balance and cleanse their energy field?
We encourage everyone to come to the introductory class, and we will show them, step by step, how to do this themselves. In addition to that, on our website [Yourhandscanhealyou.com] we also have a free, self-healing meditation CD in MP3 form that you can download. We call it the “One Finger Healing Technique” – press play, do the meditation. The meditation includes breathing exercises to purify the chakras. If you do it every day, or even three times a week, it helps you to remove anger, remove negativity, activate your heart and allow your crown chakra to bring down more spiritual energy. That alone keeps you strong and keeps you energetically clean.

And for those who cannot come to the class for whatever reason, they can read the book and join our e-mail list. We send out videos for group meditations. We do self-cleansing, guiding them through it step by step. In this day and age, with the information flowing as it is, nobody really has an excuse not to have access to any of these teachings.

What is the biggest message you want to share with the public?
Everybody has the ability to heal. All you have to do is to have the heart to help yourself and help other people.

In this seven-part article series I will address the pervasive spiritual hunger in our world, offer avenues for assuaging that ache, and outline steps to take toward psycho-spiritual freedom, authentic sacredness and profound connection. Several parts will include insights about theories, prophecies and predictions associated with the date Dec. 21, 2012. However, prior to addressing the popular topic of 2012, it is imperative that we first examine the design and framework of our current earth reality. For it is from within this framework that all theories, prophecies and predictions emerge.

We are in the midst of a spiritual renaissance. This reawakening includes the instantaneous availability of voluminous quantities of information through various media vehicles. Over the past sixty years, ordinary people have reported paranormal experiences with unparalleled frequency and inquisitive fervor. These accounts describe such phenomena as repeated intuitive hunches, ESP, astral projection, flashes of light, near-death and out-of-body experiences, angelic visitations and interventions, incidences of spontaneous automatic writing and channeling, UFO sightings, unprompted past-life recall, the appearance of crop circles, spirit photography, glimpses of intricate worlds, telekinesis, and telepathy, etc. Since the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, metaphysics has indeed gone mainstream and doorways have opened that invite us to reevaluate our previous perspectives on the nature of divinity, our origins, purpose and power.

We have been riding waves of repeated opportunities for rapid spiritual awakening.

Nevertheless, we hunger for a clear, resounding experience of truth and a palpable, visceral connection to our authentic selves and all of creation. Some of us are stuck in seas of emotional paralysis; some wander in deserts of spiritual bewilderment; some are engulfed in overwhelm generated from an imbalanced focus on material acquisitions; and others are inundated by the grip of alienation shaped by distorted versions of power and success.

With so many conditions shaping our conscious minds – cultural norms, ethnic origins, language and symbol systems, religious traditions and practices, stages of emotional development and integration as well as the range of any individual’s level of trust, openness and belief – where do we go for relief, revelation and deliverance? Religions encourage us to supplicate ourselves to please lords and gods, to appeal for what we want, atone for our sins, and plead for forgiveness. Some self-help systems weave spiritual tenets, business principles, motivational speaking techniques with aspects of quantum physics for the purpose of equipping people with the tools needed to increase their accomplishments and attract to them the life they desire, while a number of new age philosophies promote enduring our circumstances because of their misrepresentation of karmic debt or earth school lessons.

Meanwhile, our hunger for truth, freedom, sacredness and connection disturbs and drives us. Many of us intuit that substantial aspects of core truths about humanity are shrouded in some kind of conspiratorial mystery and are, therefore, unavailable to us.

As part of our experience of earth life, each of us has uttered – in whispers of despair or groans of anguish – one or more of these searching questions: Where did I come from? What is my purpose? Who is my creator? What is the nature of divinity? What are the origins of our current earth reality? What do I believe? Whom do I trust? How can I recognize threads of truth? Some of us have mused as to why there is a veil that shrouds our conscious knowing and dilutes our desire for self-sourcing and co-creative spiritual freedom?

Fables passed down speak of the time in our mother’s wombs when the veil doesn’t exist and during which we remember all the wisdom of the universe. But many of these tales end by narrating that at birth our Guardian Angel gives us a sharp blow that causes us to forget everything we’ve learned! So, somehow, we arrive in an incarnational experience unable to remember the truth about our celestial origin and clueless about what we came here to do. In short, we are programmed to forget. After eons of forgetting, we believe it is our nature to forget. We forget to the extent that we forget that we’ve forgotten.

Among the questions that most need asking include: Who designed this scenario and why? Who is invested in us entering our 3-D incarnational Earth experience having forgotten the truth about our origins, stripped of our essence raiments? With the designer of this scenario at the helm, our sense about our true nature is reduced to a dim light haphazardly flickering as we journey though duress-dominated wastelands, governed by invisible Being(s) to whom we are taught to defer.

The veil is not as mysterious as it is portrayed; rather it is a function of diminished perception born of an imprinted belief in our unworthiness. These factors, coupled with the portrayal of God as either a religious relic or a spiritual senior officer, have left us spiritually impoverished.

Clearly, a paradigm shift is upon us.

My use of the term “paradigm” is synonymous with an established way of being according to traditional standards, patterns or precedents that one follows. Paradigm shifts are characterized by leaps in understanding and expansions in consciousness, whereby profound evolutionary changes take place. Paradigm shifts have occurred in civilizations like Pangaea, Lemuria, Atlantis, Sumeria, Egypt, the Indus Valley, Peru, Chaco Canyon, etc.

All paradigm shifts challenge us to awaken to the fact that there is a difference between belief and truth and to overthrow previous assumptions that don’t contribute to evolution. And all paradigm shifts are evidence that assumptions can be overthrown. In fact, history verifies that what once seemed impossible not only found its way into the mainstream, but also acquired impeccable credentials.

We’ve become accustomed to feeling anxious and rigid in the face of change and, therefore, we tend to hold onto familiar beliefs. But familiar beliefs reinforce the repetition of patterns, and this paradigm shift summons us to accept that we cannot afford to remain stuck in repetitious patterns. Because of this directive, the first place to go in our quest to satiate our hunger for psycho-spiritual freedom, authentic sacredness and profound connection is truth. Truth is revelation and deliverance. However, to reveal truth, we must first be willing to accept that fundamental information about the design and framework of our current Earth existence is veiled.

In part two of this series, to uncover the veiled truths about this design and framework and obtain answers to questions as “Is there something wrong with the way in which current Earth existence is designed,” I will reference the film, The Matrix, written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, and work with it as a modern myth. In part three of this series, I will address the question, “Who designed the current Earth reality scenario and why?”

Unveiling truth is our right and our responsibility. The truth will deliver us; to be delivered is to be released, liberated and infused with glory. And glory means to rise.

Christians have been taught they must accept the violent account of Jesus’ demise in order to call themselves Christians. Many Christians claimed it was a spiritual experience to watch the hideously, violent portrayal of the crucifixion in Mel Gibson’s The Passion. Apparently, watching Jesus being tortured showed them just how much he really loved them!

Wow. Do we really have to buy this “Friday the 13th” version of Jesus’ life? No, we don’t. We don’t have to “buy” anything unless we know its our truth. If people are inspired by a beaten, bleeding, suffering Jesus, they have their right to that belief. Incredibly, people choose to believe the over-dramatized torture when it doesn’t even exist in the King James Bible. One gospel doesn’t even mention it, and the other three have conflicting stories.

Four accounts of Jesus’ life are not enough to tell his complete story. Where are the other disciples? Why aren’t they in the Bible? They aren’t there because none of them mention Jesus’ death. Their account of his life doesn’t follow the rules adopted in the Counsel of Nicea in 325 AD, when the Roman Emperor, Constantine, convened an assembly of Christian Bishops to decide what Christians were allowed to believe.

What if the “authorized” Bible lied? Can you choose not to believe? If you can’t feel the truth, then you don’t have to believe it. You have a right, and perhaps a responsibility to your soul, to turn away from the orthodox version of Jesus’ life that was politically forced into existence. Bart Ehrman, a renowned scholar of Christian history, states in his book Misquoting Jesus, that there are thousands of translation errors in the orthodox Bible, the proclaimed “Word of God.” That fact alone gives us the freedom to question if what we have been told is the only “Truth.”

What if you can choose your belief about Jesus? What if he really came here to teach us that we had the potential to evolve into a magnificent soul with magnificent potential? What if he came here to teach us that we “are” Gods?

If you had the right to choose your Jesus, without ridicule or fear, would you see him hanging on a cross, or would you see him laughing and smiling, slapping you on the back, or holding you in his arms? Would you choose a suffering Jesus if indeed he didn’t come here to die for your sins?

“Keyology,” which is the study of diverse spiritual principals, the foundation of the philosophy of Key to Life Center, fosters spiritual empowerment through diverse spiritual knowledge. We’ve spent years studying the origins of the orthodox Bible, and every other teaching about Jesus we can find. Are they all accurate? No. Are they all the truth? No. Years of study have inspired us to believe Jesus’ purpose is to help us resurrect the God consciousness within. When we truly honor his diverse spiritual teachings, we will manifest the life we were meant to live.

We live in an incredible time; a time when the lost teachings of Jesus are finally starting to surface. If we will thoughtfully explore everything we can, we will find an answer as to which belief is right for us. Our Jesus is a multifaceted spiritual being that taught many diverse spiritual principles.

Christianity isn’t the only path to our spiritual salvation. It’s just “a” path.

Jesus himself would tell you to embrace whatever path leads you to your highest truth, not out of fear, but out of inspiration. Following what is called the “Third Voice,” or the voice of your soul, will lead you to your greatest spiritual wisdom — and that will lead you to your destiny.

Learn to quickly flush stress out after a hectic day. Experience Tibetan Power Breathing to quadruple your energy level in less than 10 minutes. Stop negative people from draining your energy. Activate your heart and crown chakras to flood your bodies with Divine Love, peace and bliss.

His Twin Cities events are:

• March 23 – “Experience the Power of the ‘I Am’ Nature Within You,” an event that will help you personally access the tremendous love, light and power within each of us. This class will take place at 7 p.m. at Unity South Church, 7950 1st Ave. S., Bloomington. For directions or more information, call 952.884.6656. A $20 love donation for Untiy South is suggested.
• March 24 – “Experience The Energy of Your Own Life Force,” a class in which Master Co will teach powerful and effective techniques to harness your life force energy, emphasizing that we have the power to heal ourselves and work with our own energy to create the peace we desire. This event will be at 7 p.m. at Unity Christ Church, 4000 Golden Valley Rd., Golden Valley. For directions or more information, call 763.521.4793 or email office@unitychristchurch.org. A $10 love donation for Unity Christ Church is suggested.
• April 17 & 18 – Weekend Intensive Training by Master Co, who will teach the basic science of energy healing, beginning at 9 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For more details on location and registration, visit Yourhandscanhealyou.com.

Master Stephen Co is a senior disciple and personal student of Grandmaster Choa Kok Sui, the founder of Pranic Healing. He and his wife, Daphne, started the first Pranic Healing center outside of the Philippines, the U.S. Pranic Healing Center/American Institute of Asian Studies, LLC, in Chino, California, to promote and teach Pranic Healing the United States.

Master Co is a internationally renowned lecturer, trainer and practitioner of Pranic Healing, who has taught the art of healing and human energy studies to thousands of students in the United States. His introductory lectures are thought-provoking, often compelling individuals who are not health practitioners to embark on learning Pranic Healing techniques to improve their lives. His students include hundreds of physicians, nurses, dentists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, social workers, psychologists and alternative healthcare practitioners.

Over the past ten years Master Co has introduced Pranic Healing into the medical community through his students who have offered classes at medical teaching centers, while he himself has shared Pranic Healing at numerous hospitals, including Kaiser Permanente and Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. His prowess as a healer and teacher has garnered him appearances on “Hard Copy,” and Los Angeles television stations NBC-4, KABC-7, KTLA-5 and KTTV-9, KCBS-2, as well as the popular “Mark and Brian Show” on Los Angeles morning radio station KLOS.

His unique expertise comes from his experience as an engineer, successful businessman, lecturer, healer and parent, as well as through his practice of Arhatic Yoga® and martial arts.

Chinese Medicine – also known as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Oriental Medicine – describes a form of medicine that incorporates acupuncture, herbal therapy, bodywork, and nutritional and lifestyle counseling. It is a medical system that has diagnosed, treated and prevented disease for more than 3,000 years. It includes a range of traditional medicine practices originating in China. Although well accepted in the mainstream of medical care throughout East Asia, it is considered an alternative medical system in much of the Western world.

Chinese Medicine is a holistic approach to treatment that seeks to restore harmony and balance in the body. It is largely based on the philosophical concept that the human body is a small universe with a set of complete and sophisticated interconnected systems, and that those systems usually work in balance to maintain the healthy function of the human body. Clinical diagnosis and treatment in Chinese Medicine are mainly based on the yin-yang and five elements theories. These theories apply the phenomena and laws of nature to the study of the physiological activities and pathological changes of the human body and its interrelationships. One of the most important things assessed during the diagnostic process in Chinese medicine is the flow of qi (pronounced “chee”) in the meridians. Qi is the energy of all physiological, emotional and spiritual activity within our bodies. It circulates throughout the body in a system of channels and collaterals (known collectively as meridians).

This system of medicine has a unique model of the body, notably concerned with the meridian system. Unlike the Western anatomical model, which divides the physical body into parts, the Chinese model is more concerned with function. Thus, the TCM spleen is not a specific piece of flesh, but an aspect of function related to transformation and transportation within the body, and of the mental functions of thinking and studying.

Typical Chinese Medicine therapies include:

• Acupuncture – For good health, qi must be balanced throughout the body. When that energy flow is excessive, deficient or blocked, your health is disrupted and you can become ill or feel pain. Hair-thin, disposable needles are inserted into specific points along defined meridians to redirect the flow of qi and return the body to balance. During the past 25 years, acupuncture has become increasingly popular in the United States as an alternative to traditional Western medicine for a wide variety of conditions. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) lists 41 diseases, including allergies, asthma, digestive disorders, respiratory ailments and various types of pain, which acupuncture may alleviate. A growing trend in sports medicine is the use of acupuncture to relieve the swelling and pain of joint injuries in professional and amateur athletes. Acupuncture is being widely practiced by thousands of physicians, dentists, acupuncturists and other practitioners for relief or prevention of pain and for various other health conditions. According to the 2007 National Health Interview Survey, an estimated 3.1 million U.S. adults and 150,000 children had used acupuncture in the previous year.
• Herbal medicine – Chinese herbs are seen as supplements that can strengthen you and re-harmonize imbalances in the body. More than 250 Chinese herbs are commonly used. Rather than being prescribed individually, single herbs are combined into formulas designed to adapt to the specific needs of individual patients. Unlike Western herbalism, Chinese herbal medicine uses many animal, mineral and mineraloid remedies, and it also uses more products from marine sources. The National Institutes of Health is now sponsoring research on Chinese herbs and other TCM techniques for treating conditions ranging from osteoarthritis of the knee to irritable bowel syndrome. “Adding herbs to acupuncture treatments can add additional benefits in reinforcing therapeutic results for acute and severe problems,” says Mei Wang, Ph.D., TCMD, L.Ac, who specializes in herbal medicine in the Twin Cities. “For example, it will decrease the chance of needing to use antibiotics for infections. Also, patients may find that it helps in relieving chronic problems, and that taking herbs daily will help in balancing their body.” Herbs can be taken as needed and won’t cause negative side effects, such as drowsiness.
• Massage – A variety of massage practices are a part of Chinese Medicine. Cupping consists of using glass cups on the skin as a form of reverse-pressure massage. Tui na is a form of massage similar to acupressure. It is typically administered with the patient fully clothed, without the application of oils.
• Moxibustion – “Moxa” is often used in conjunction with acupuncture. It involves the burning of Chinese herbs to warm the body and increase circulation.
• Diet – Chinese medicine includes theories related to the function various types of food play in the body. A balanced diet, which leads to health, is when the five functional flavors are in balance. To balance a body that is diseased, certain foods and herbs are prescribed to restore balance to the body.
• Exercise & Relaxation – Qigong exercises – such as T’ai chi, standing meditation and other Chinese martial arts – often are prescribed to promote body movement, as well as breathing and relaxation.

Traditional Chinese Medicine addresses the full range of human illness. While best known for treating chronic illnesses such as asthma, allergies, headaches, high blood pressure, gallbladder disease, lupus, diabetes and gynecological disorders, TCM also treats acute, infectious illness. Vast research is continuously being pursued in a wide range of TCM applications and reported on in scores of medical journals published around the world.

Dr. Jinming Yue, TCMD, L.Ac., a Twin Cities specialist who helps with pain management, emotional disorders, seasonal allergies and irritable bowel syndrome, says common ailments that are treated using Chinese medicine include emotional disorders, weight reduction and control, smoking cessation, infertility and seasonal allergies. “The benefit is that there are no side effects to be concerned about, and there is no recovery time from the treatment. This ancient art considers and balances the disease and the body at the same time.”

There are two business models for acupuncture in the United States. The most familiar consists of receiving acupuncture in a room by yourself on a massage table, and costs are anywhere from $50-100 per treatment. Some insurance covers acupuncture, but most insurance companies have very limited conditions that they will cover. To make acupuncture more affordable, Lisa Rohleder developed the community acupuncture business model three years ago. There are now 11 Community Acupuncture clinics in the Twin Cities, one in Duluth, and one in Winona, MN, and Spring Valley, WI, and an estimated 300 clinics in the United States, several in Canada and one in Israel. There is an organization in Great Britain that promotes a model similar to the Community Acupuncture clinics (www.acmac.net). Acupuncturists find that this business model, with a much higher volume of patients, gives them vastly more experience, and patients like it because they are able to recline with needles for up to an hour or more and report getting better results.

There are a number of schools throughout the nation that teach Chinese Medicine. The principal ones in the Upper Midwest are: Minnesota College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Bloomington, MN; American Academy of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine in Roseville, MN; and Midwest College of Oriental Medicine
Master of Science in Oriental Medicine in Racine, WI.

According to legend, the origins of traditional Chinese medicine are traced back to Fu Xi and Shen Nong, who were believed to be early tribal leaders. Fu Xi was a cultural hero who developed the trigrams of Yi Jing (I Ching) or Book of Changes. Ancient texts record that “Fu Xi drew the eight trigrams, and created nine needles.” Shen Nong, the legendary emperor who lived 5,000 years ago, is hailed as the “Divine Cultivator”/”Divine Farmer” by the Chinese people. He is attributed as the founder of herbal medicine. To determine the nature of different herbal medicines, Shen Nong sampled various kinds of plants, ingesting them himself for to test and analyze their individual effects. According to the ancient texts, Shen Nong tasted a hundred herbs, including 70 toxic substances in a single day, in order to eliminate people’s pain from illness. As there were no written records, it is said that the discoveries of Shen Nong were passed down verbally from generation to generation.

Legend says that, as a result of a dialogue with his physician Qibo, the Yellow Emperor Huang-di (2697-2597 BCE) composed The Huangdi Neijing (Inner Cannon of Huangdi), which often is mistranslated as Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine. Modern scholars believe, however, that the text was compiled from ancient sources by a scholar living between 800 and 200 BCE. Nonetheless, this oldest medical textbook in the world documents the primary foundation for the theories of Chinese medicine, summarizing and systemizing the previous experience of treatment and theories of medicine.

Zhang Zhongjing (150-219 CE), the most famous of China’s ancient herbal doctors, lived during the Eastern Han dynasty. He was one of the most eminent Chinese physicians. He established medication principles and summarized the medicinal experience up until that time. He wrote a masterful discourse on how to treat epidemic infectious diseases causing fevers prevalent during his era. His book, Treatise on Febrile Diseases, is still used as a standard reference work for traditional Chinese medicine, including moxibustion, needling and herbal medicine. Hua Tuo (140-208 AD) was the first of the Taoist physicians. He developed/invented the use of anesthesia called Mafei San, and furthered the limited Chinese knowledge of anatomy. He was the first person who used narcotic drugs in the world and his skill in this field was ahead of the West by 1,700 years.

During the Middle Ages, Emperor Gaozong (649-683) commissioned a scholarly compilation that documented 833 medicinal substances taken from stones, minerals, metals, plants, herbs, animals, vegetables, fruits and cereal crops. The scholar-official Su Song (1020-1101) systematically categorized herbs and minerals according to their pharmaceutical uses. Li Shizhen, (1518-1593) was one of the greatest physician and pharmacologist of the Ming dynasty. His major contribution to medicine was his epic book Ben Cao Gang-mu (The Compendium of Materia Medica). The text contains 1.9 million Chinese characters and details more than 1,800 drugs, including 1,100 illustrations and 11,000 prescriptions, as well as record of 1,094 herbs, detailing their type, form, flavor, nature and application in treatment.

The Revolution of 1911 saw the beginning of the People’s Republic of China. During this time China developed a desire to modernize, and its people began to turn to Western medicine. The government of the time proposed the abolishment of traditional Chinese medicine and took measures to stop its development and use. In 1928 the Communist party of China was formed, under the leadership of Chairman Mao and in 1949 the Communist party came to power. As there was very little or no medical services at the time, the new communist government encouraged the use of traditional Chinese remedies because they were cheap, acceptable to the Chinese, and used the skills already available in the countryside. Unfortunately, Chinese medicine, as a reflection of traditional Chinese culture, underwent a period of extreme hardship during the Cultural Revolution. From 1966 to 1976, traditional doctors were purged from the schools, hospitals and clinics, and many of the old practitioners were jailed or killed. In 1979, the National Association for Chinese Medicine was established, and many of the traditional texts were edited and republished.

Schools of Chinese medicine first appeared in the U.S. during the 1970s. It was not until the 1980s that a major expansion of this field took place, stimulated by new legislative bills licensing acupuncture as a health profession in numerous states and the opening of China, allowing visits to study Chinese medicine. In 1980, the World Health Organization released a list of 43 types of pathologies, which can be effectively treated with acupuncture. There are now approximately 900 students graduating from professional Oriental medical schools each year, with licensing for qualified practitioners now available in 36 states and in the District of Columbia. There are more than 12,000 active acupuncture practices in this country.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, AHealthyMe.com, www.purifymind.com, Institute for Traditional Medicine,

A TCM practitioner will ask you questions about your emotional and mental life, as well as your physical symptoms. Knowing whether you are indecisive or have an explosive temper may help him determine what type of gallbladder trouble you’re having, for example. He or she may also take your pulse several times, once for each internal organ, and check the color and texture of your tongue, and then craft a customized treatment designed to enhance your overall health, rather than zeroing in on an infection or injury.

In most cases, your practitioner will use acupuncture to stimulate certain points along your body’s energy meridians to bring your qi (“chee” or life force energy) back into balance. But he might also apply small mounds of burning herbs (a technique called moxibustion) or suction cups (cupping), or use deep tissue massage. Then he may prescribe a combination of herbs and other ingredients designed to correct whatever imbalances he thinks are causing your troubles. Typically, you’ll brew these herbs into a strong-tasting tea, or they may come in pill or extract form. Finally, your practitioner may recommend that you try practicing Qigong or T’ai Chi – slow, gentle martial arts that combine breathing, movement, and meditation to balance and strengthen your qi.

The philosophy of Traditional Chinese Medicine is preventive in nature and views the practice of waiting to treat a disease until the symptoms are full-blown as being similar to “digging a well after one has become thirsty.” In compliance with this, TCM makes a point of educating the patient with regard to lifestyle so that the patient can assist in his or her own therapeutic process. The TCM practitioner educates the patient about diet, exercise, stress management, rest and relaxation.

As Traditional Chinese Medicine views the human body as a reflection of the natural world – the part containing the whole – the TCM doctor thinks and speaks in analogies with nature. The flows of energy and fluids in the body are spoken of as channels and rivers, seas and reservoirs. A diagnosis might describe the body in terms of the elements – wind, heat, cold, dryness, dampness. Despite this poetic language, TCM is not a folk medicine, but a professional discipline based on a complete system of thought.

The terms yin and yang are used by the TCM practitioner to describe the various opposing physical conditions of the body. These terms stem from a basic Chinese concept describing the interdependence and relationship of opposites. Much as hot cannot be understood or defined without first having experienced cold, yin cannot exist without its opposite yang, and yang cannot exist without yin. Together, the two complementary poles form a whole.

During your first visit for acupuncture, the practitioner may ask you at length about your health condition, lifestyle and behavior. The practitioner will want to obtain a complete picture of your treatment needs and behaviors that may contribute to your condition. Inform the acupuncturist about all treatments or medications you are taking and all medical conditions you have.

Acupuncture needles are metallic, solid and hair thin. People experience acupuncture differently, but most feel no or minimal pain as the needles are inserted. Some people feel energized by treatment, while others feel relaxed. Improper needle placement, movement of the patient or a defect in the needle can cause soreness and pain during treatment. This is why it is important to seek treatment from a qualified acupuncture practitioner. Treatment may take place over a period of several weeks or more.

Community Acupuncture clinics consist of rooms with recliners, soft music, soft lighting and sleeping patients. Needles are placed in lower arms and lower legs, ears and head. Charges for treatment are from $15 -$40 per treatment, with an additional $10-15 for the first visit. The patient decides what is affordable for them to pay. Since it often takes five to 20 treatments to resolve an issue, many more people find this type of acupuncture affordable and successful.

Larry and Grace Gilmer have been receiving acupuncture treatments for more than a decade, and both have found great relief from the treatments. Larry suffers from trigeminal neuralgia, a condition of the nerve responsible for most facial sensation, and Grace from scoliosis, an abnormal curvature or rotation of the spine. Both conditions cause intense pain, and Larry in particular was struggling to control that pain. The Gilmers’ daughter eventually suggested that Larry try acupuncture, so they looked into the treatments.

“Western medicine wasn’t controlling the pain for Larry’s trigeminal neuralgia,” explains Grace. “So we spoke with his neurologist and he thought it would be okay to try acupuncture.”

Larry started the treatments, and surprising to him, acupuncture did something that Western medicine was unable to do – make the intense pain go away. After witnessing the improvement, Grace decided to try acupuncture in hopes of relieving the pain of her scoliosis. The treatments helped her pain, as well.

“Oriental medicine is very interesting,” Grace says. “It focuses on the entire body. If you have trouble sleeping, they will work on that; if you have pain or headaches, they’ll work on that. It covers a multitude of ailments.”

“They look beyond your main complaints, and look at how the rest of your body is functioning,” Larry says. “They find out how you are, and treat your whole body.

Most Chinese people in China do not see traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine as being in conflict. In cases of emergency and crisis situations, there is generally no reluctance in using conventional Western medicine. At the same time, belief in Chinese medicine remains strong in the area of maintaining health.

As a simple example, you see a Western doctor if you have acute appendicitis, but you exercise or take Chinese herbs to keep your body healthy enough to prevent appendicitis, or to recover more quickly from the surgery. Very few practitioners of Western medicine in China reject traditional Chinese medicine, and most doctors in China will use some elements of Chinese medicine in their own practice. A degree of integration between Chinese and Western medicine also exists in China. For instance, at the Shanghai cancer hospital, a patient may be seen by a multidisciplinary team and be treated concurrently with radiation surgery, Western drugs and a traditional herbal formula.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, AHealthyMe.com, www.purifymind.com, Institute for Traditional Medicine, Northwestern Health Sciences University, Ann Mongeau, L.Ac., R.N., www.online-ambulance.com

My first lesson from the Universe came to me at the age of 6. My Shetland pony, Trixie was enjoying her oats. I decided to get on her back and enjoy that moment with her. I had no bridle or halter, but I easily stepped on the fence and sat on her back as I had done so many times. I can still feel that stillness with Trixie and that sense of love and harmony, if only for a moment. It felt so familiar, like I had been at that place before.

Then a thought rushed over my mind of her running with me to the end of the pasture and of me screaming for her to stop but she wouldn’t. I could get hurt and I could not stop her. At that moment, she took off at a full gallop. The other horses were at the end of the 60-acre pasture and I felt her little legs running for them. I held on to her mane, crying in fear. We finally reached the horses and I slid off. Why, oh why, had she done that to me? Although I rode horses until I left for college and still ride horses when given the chance, I have never forgotten the fear that I felt that day when my trust and innocence was lost.

While in college and during my first 10 years of married life after college, animals – especially horses and dogs – were not of my realm. I was a business person, utilizing my mind in a capitalist society. My dear husband and I went backpacking and camping every chance we had, but our little peaceful home life was not to be disrupted by the chores and mundane demands of animals. Neither horse nor dog was to be a part of our clan.

At our 10-year anniversary, that utopian world ended when intuition and a desire beyond our control brought Jasmine into our life. A wiry haired mixed breed pup with unknown lineage but eyes that melted my soul consumed our very existence. We both had this need to make sure everything was done right. She was in training and on the best food. I took classes, decided to start an apprentice program under a dog trainer because taking a class once a week was not enough. Jasmine needed her education in being a good dog constantly, and I needed the reassurance I was doing everything right.

Oh, those insecurities were to ruin me. If only she could learn to roll over. Why, oh why, was her little tail tucked all of the time? What is wrong with her?

Then one day, I looked at her and she looked at me and we recognized ourselves in each other. My mind was quiet on this day, for in the stillness her thoughts became my own. She told me not to try to dominate her and control her every move, for she is here to teach me to let go and trust nature again. And Jasmine told me that Trixie, my shetland pony, had not forsaken me; she had only done my bidding when that vision of her taking me to the end of the pasture as I screamed in terror came into my mind. “Trixie and you were so connected in that time of quiet. She could only do as your mind had asked.”

A revelation came over me in that stillness. Jasmine was here to teach me, as all dogs are, like all living creatures and nature itself. I looked at her and her eyes softened and her tail raised from its tucked position. Love poured out from me, and Jasmine said to me, “Embrace that love, as that is what the Universe wants you to experience. That stillness abounds within us all if we can only quiet the background to hear.”

We acquire more mojo when we choose those activities that are healthy, balanced and blissful. Below are five simple, yet effective, mojo boosters to help you out of the recession rut:

1. Be good to yourself. One of the most important steps you can take to boost your mojo is to adopt a rigorous plan for self-care. This includes choosing the highest quality fuel to run on. Choose healthy foods to eat, avoid eating too many empty (albeit comforting) sugary foods and simple carbs. Get outside at least once a day to breathe in one of nature’s biggest mojo boosters: Oxygen! Also, don’t be shy when it comes to getting those forty winks over the weekend, soaking in a tub, or getting a massage. Take care of your body so it will take care of you.
2. Be playful. When is the last time you’ve seen a child without energy? It rarely happens! Most children have one agenda item on their list: have fun. They revel in the act of creating, exploring and playing. Their days fly by, and they never want to take a nap or go to bed for fear that they will miss something wonderful. We can learn something from these smaller teachers by incorporating a little more play into our lives. Break out the board games, dance around the living room, or even make snow angels in the back yard!
3. Be mindful. Our mojo gets sapped when our minds endlessly jump from task to task, or more precisely, obsess over problem after problem. Our computers need to be turned off every once in a while to function optimally, and our minds are no different. Take some time to mentally defrag through the act of meditation. You will be surprised how much more energized you feel after letting your brain rest for a bit. Once you have incorporated periods of silence into your life, you can begin to add other mindful activities, such as creative visualization or clearing your space through decluttering and other feng shui techniques.
4. Be present. A major obstacle to maximizing one’s mojo is the all-too-common practice of regretting the past or fretting over the future. We wallow in previous so-called failures or fear the absolute worst of what may happen instead of living joyfully in the moment. We don’t know what the future holds, and it is a waste of valuable time and mojo to try to control it. The best way to remain firmly planted in the present is to increase your awareness. Place your hand on your heart. What do you feel? Look around. What do you see? Our lives are rich beyond measure when we take the time to be fully present.
5. Be grateful. Expressing gratitude is like receiving a shot of adrenaline. When we are grateful for what we already have – a home, a family, love, health, food and shelter – we instantly get a boost of mojo that can help us through the tough times. Think about starting and ending each day with a “gratitude rant.” Before you get out of bed or before you shut off the light, mentally rattle off all of the fabulous things in your life. Take note of the gifts contained within the challenges of the day.

Even though it sometimes seems like our energy is dependent on the status of the market, the messages from the media or the balance in our bank accounts, we can break that pattern by making these simple mojo-boosting choices over and over again, day after day, minute by minute. Decide today to become a powerful, creative force overflowing with some serious mojo!

The Center for Spirituality & Healing (CSH) at the University of Minnesota is a pioneering leader and resource in complementary healing practices, with a mission to transform the health care industry through educating health professionals and students, collaborating with innovative community partners, conducting rigorous scientific research and empowering consumers. The center opened in 1995, and its goal today remains the same as it did then: to transform health care.

Eighty percent of the health professionals in the state are educated at the University of Minnesota. As part of the University, CSH is in a unique position to utilize cross-disciplinary faculty from twelve academic units, bringing together diverse offerings and approaches to health care education.

In 1999, they launched a graduate minor in complementary therapies and healing practices with a few courses and 32 students. Today, 500 students each semester are choosing from a palette of more than 40 course offerings. The graduate minor continues, and is joined by additional options of post-baccalaureate graduate certificates and continuing education options.

The graduate program has led to some exciting partnerships. For example, the course on Optimal Healing Environments draws both architecture/design students, as well as health professional students. CSH continues to see students from all parts of the university enroll in their courses, ranking them among the largest graduate programs on campus. Yet amazingly, some people in the university system still do not know they exist.

The overall belief in integrative medicine coursework at the University of Minnesota is that all graduates – physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other health professionals – should acquire enough knowledge about integrative approaches to communicate with patients about the practices they are using, as well as to develop the skills to work effectively within an interdisciplinary team that includes a wide range of practitioners.

Health coaching
As a leader in reforming health care, since 2005 CSH has offered educational programming in Health Coaching, a fairly new health-care approach that has evolved over the last decade. It uses general coaching principles and practices that have proven successful to help individuals achieve change in health beliefs and behaviors.

Dr. Karen Lawson, program director for Health Coaching at the University of Minnesota, is a collaborating pioneer in the defining and development of national credentialing in this new field. She says health coaching is a new health profession that is poised to make significant contributions to health care reform efforts.

For decades, health care has focused on providing the right information. Unfortunately, while information is important, it alone does not lead to behavior change. The Health Coach trained with a specific skill set and understanding of behavior change and integrative health options can act as the link between the other health care providers and the client. Through a holistic perspective, the Health Coach is able to assist the client in taking charge of their own health. For example, a client comes in to quit smoking. A Health Coach would provide an overview of issues that may be at the core of why the client smokes in the first place. By identifying core issues, increasing client awareness and supporting the client in developing his or her own plan, there is a higher success rate for changing behaviors.

Besides teaching Health Coaching at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Lawson is collaborating with several local organizations, including third-party payers, employee benefits companies, corporations, and health and fitness centers. A number of these innovative companies are working with The Center for Spirituality & Healing on research, staff skills development, internship training and the development of health coaching within their organizations. Further information on Health Coaching educational opportunities can be found at www.csh.umn.edu/healthcoaching/home.html.

Other community clinical collaborations involving CSH include partnerships in sustainable health care with Hennepin Integrative Health Services on education, research and integrated programs. CSH also is involved with developing integrative clinical models of health care such as those at Woodwinds Hospital and Anna Westin House.

Research and outreach
The Center for Spirituality & Healing is actively involved with basic science, clinical trials and health services research. In 2004, the National Institute of Health (NIH) designated CSH as one of three Developmental Centers for Research in Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the nation, and to date, CSH conducts NIH-funded, evidence-based research. For more detailed information, go to www.csh.umn.edu, and find all of the research documents, past and ongoing.

In celebration of the Center’s 15-year anniversary, the center has launched a new website, “Taking Charge of Your Health” (www.TakingCharge.csh.umn.edu), a free, interactive tool designed to help consumers create a healthy lifestyle, navigate the health care system and explore healing practices. In addition to the website, CSH produces programs, workshops and lectures geared to the general public. For example, the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction series is a partnership program with the Mayo Clinic. It is offered by the Center on the University campus, in corporate settings, at The Marsh and other local facilities. Details on this program and many others may be found on the CSH website.

The Center of Spirituality & Healing continues to lead the way in educating the next generation of medical professionals, exploring new approaches for health through research and clinical models, as well as trying to assist people in assuming more personal responsibility for their health, health care and well-being. Focusing on health and well-being is a fundamental part of a new health care system, and consumers have the power of demand, which is critical to the development of integrative medicine in our existing system.

The more often a doctor hears that clients want access to complementary therapies, the more curious and willing they are to be educated. Case in point, the office of Alternative Medicine was started in Washington, D.C., in 1993 as a result of the largest letter writing campaign in the nation’s history, a grassroots demand for a change in health care. So, keep asking your doctor for what you want to assist in your healing. Your voice makes a difference.

University of Minnesota Center for Spirituality & Healing is located at the Academic Health Center Mayo Memorial Building, 420 Delaware St. S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455. For more information, visit www.csh.umn.edu or call 612.624.9459.

And millions of people are also finding that these programs don’t work. And if they do work, the effects are temporary. Why? Because the lessons of these programs are incomplete and totally out of order. They skip the important steps, the elements of personal and spiritual transformation that are necessary to provide a solid foundation to build upon.

Most “Law of Attraction” techniques do not require any kind of accountability and therefore they do not work.

One great truth of the law of abundance is this: We cannot manifest something that is not in the best interest of the world around us. We do not live in a vacuum. We live on a planet with almost seven billion other people. To manifest everything that we desire, we must learn how to live in harmony with the bigger picture, and find our own place in God’s plan as a member of the human family. Of course, becoming aligned with our own spiritual nature and destiny will likely change the specifics of what it is we truly desire, making it that much easier to attain.

Essence of Transformation
What we are reaching for here is something that endures in our lives. That is the essence of transformation. Before manifesting abundance, we must dig down into the deepest recesses of our hearts and souls. We must examine our beliefs about ourselves, about a Higher Power (whatever we choose to call it – God, Spirit, the Universe, the Goddess, Divine Intelligence) – and about our fellow human beings. Because it is in understanding the synergy of those relationships – that we are all connected and must work together – that we will find dramatic results. It is not enough to know what we want. You must also know why we want it, and what we will do once we have it! All of those elements impact the world around us, and therefore must be considered.

The real secret to changing our lives dramatically and permanently is service: service to something that is greater than us, whether that is God, our community, the planet or its people. And it is not until we embrace our place in a world of seven billion people, and make a commitment to better this world, that we will gain access to our own personal – and lasting – abundance.

Jesus did, indeed, say “Ask and it is given, knock and it is opened to you.” But that phrase has been misinterpreted and taken out of context in a way that diminishes its ultimate power. Unfortunately, those who quote the “Ask and it is given” verse for the purposes of instant manifestation rarely discuss it in the context that Jesus, our master teacher, presented it. The passages that precede “Ask and it is given” contain extensive instructions for living a good and responsible life first, so that we may then “ask” – and subsequently “receive” – as a reward for living in harmony with God’s plan.

There is extraordinarily good news here, even if it takes a little more work to find it than we may have originally been led to believe. Jesus was giving us the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe through perfecting our souls and answering to God. He did teach us that we can manifest everything we need and want in our lives – if we follow the rules set out for us. And he also gave us the tools to use for that purpose: It can all be found within the fifty or so words that make up the Lord’s Prayer.

Living a Perfect Life
In my own journey as a writer and researcher, I came across an amazing prayer practice that was taught by a Christian sect in France during the Middle Ages. For these medieval Christians, the Lord’s Prayer was not only the cornerstone of their faith; it was the guidebook to living a perfect life.

They understood that every word of the prayer was carefully considered by Jesus, and given to us as a loving and careful instruction for building our faith while living a joyous life through God. I began to work through this prayer as a spiritual practice in the medieval manner, which breaks the prayer down into seven lessons about life: Faith, Surrender, Service, Abundance, Forgiveness, Overcoming and Love – in that order. The results were astounding and immediate. My faith was strengthened and my life transformed in ways I could never have imagined prior to learning how to live through this prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer is now, as it was when Jesus lived, the incorruptible formula for personal and global transformation. But the lessons must be accomplished in order or they do not work.

Only after working through the first three lessons found in the prayer – Faith, Surrender and Service – will the request for Abundance be effective. We cannot have effortless abundance unless we earn it – and it is earned through getting clear on our faith, surrendering our ego and embracing our place as a member of the global human community through a commitment to service.

There is a reason that abundance is the fourth teaching, and not the first. Putting abundance first is similar to sending a teenager into a master’s or doctoral program, before he completed basic college courses. The student is simply not ready and doesn’t have the foundation necessary to master the more complex teachings to come. Manifestation programs that tell us to skip directly to asking for whatever we want are not only misleading, they actually set back our spiritual growth and make it much harder for us to find enduring abundance.

While this prayer was first taught by Jesus Christ, one does not have to be a practicing Christian to use it. One of the more revolutionary aspects of Jesus’ life was that he did not discriminate in his teachings, and preached that the kingdom of God was for everyone. Jesus found everyone worthy as he recognized us all as his family under God. Thus, there is a pure, universal nature to this prayer and the practice that accompanies it. It is essentially non-denominational, and I have shared this approach to friends from Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and even pagan backgrounds.

In Jesus’ time, his words inspired people who lived amidst great chaos and disillusionment. In the 21st century, we find ourselves in trying circumstances of perhaps a similar nature: war, famine, genocide, crime, economic collapse and corruption fill the headlines of our newspapers. Jesus provided a tool of grace for his own embattled world and he provided one for us in our time. The Lord’s Prayer is timeless, and yet it has as much application now, if not more, than it had when it was first spoken in Galilee and Jerusalem.

The Lord’s Prayer is our instruction manual for creating heaven on earth, and while the prayer is only a few lines long, the layers of meaning within it could fill volumes. The greatest of the medieval minds knew how to find that meaning, and they have left that gift to us as their legacy, in the stone of their cathedrals and in the memory of their teachings.

There is no mystery here, no secret. Jesus literally shouted from a mountaintop the only magic words we will ever need, to live a life of perfect joy and unlimited abundance!

Two thousand years later, isn’t it finally time that we listened?

I recall my excitement, thinking what a wonderful world it will be, knowing that these brave crusaders were blazing a trail before me, their radical new views and opinions becoming a reality. And at that young age, I recognized I would be the first generation to reap the benefits of their efforts. I felt blessed to be born in such an historic time.

Wow, was I wrong.

Often I ask myself, where have all the flower children gone? Where are the young men and women who fought for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Where are the people who burned flags, bras and draft cards, who marched on college campuses and on Washington, D.C., so their voices could be heard? I find it hard to believe the thoughts and values they fought so valiantly for have disappeared and are only a fond memory of a golden age gone by.

Over the past few months, this point has become painfully obvious. As I work with clients and talk with friends, I hear the sound of hopelessness in their voices. They watch as gas and food prices soar. They gaze in disbelief as senseless violence escalates. They stand by helplessly as their jobs are moved overseas and their personal freedoms are taken away one by one. In the end, they are left feeling impotent, because they are unable to control the path their lives are taking and feel powerless to change it.

It’s interesting, because on an individual basis, all we want is to be happy, healthy and live our lives in integrity. We want to know that we will have a job to go to on Monday. We want to be able to feed our children, breathe the air around us, drink the water and step outside our homes. Instead we have become increasingly alienated by the harsh reality of our world, a reality that creates conflicts between how things are and how we would like them to be. We end up feeling dissatisfied and give up all hope of a better, simpler life.

Hopelessness is a hard emotion to experience – one we have embraced at some point in our lives. It seems to happen just before we hit rock bottom, when we can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel or when life seems futile and we just want to give up. It is a natural part of the human condition.

Over the last six months, the feeling of hopelessness has become overwhelming for many of us. Every time we turn around, there’s a crisis. Someone we love dies, we lose our job or our child falls ill. After the situation we are facing is handled, it isn’t long before another challenge steps into our lives and once more the drama begins anew. With this unrelenting pressure, we are left feeling tired and disillusioned – transforming the most optimistic person into a pessimist.

Today, the pressures being experienced are not only coming from our personal lives, but also from a much larger community – the world of big business and the political arena. As we watch what is going on in the world, we may think, “What can I do to change or affect what is going on?” Unfortunately, in our state of hopelessness, the answer we receive is “nothing.”

Because we believe our lone voice will never be heard, we end up conceding to the futility of fighting the establishment. And in our sea of inner disquiet, we realize that we are being coerced into accepting a system that does not support us and the greater good of society. It is from this perspective that we surrender our power and feel we are unable to bring about change.

It is said that it is always the darkest before the dawn. For many of us, the truth is that we cannot even see the light at the end of the tunnel. We are living in the midst of darkness, hoping and praying for even the faintest glimmer of light to emerge. And while this period in human history may not be fun, there are many blessings that will come from it.

The good news is that hopelessness causes us to go within. It forces us to reflect and evaluate our lives. It provides us the opportunity to uncover steps necessary to alter our life course. As a result, we find a strength which helps to build our inner resolve and restore our faith.

We also have to realize that we are not alone. There are countless millions who are feeling trapped, hopeless and at the end of their rope. What the “Powers That Be” don’t realize is that it is only a matter of time before they push us far enough into a corner that we will have no choice but to take a stand. When that happens, it won’t matter what they say or want us to do. When we determine enough is enough the strength of our unity as a whole will make a difference and a change will begin on all levels.

So for all of us, the sick, the tired, the forlorn, remember: It’s just a matter of time. Things can’t keep going the way they are. Change is inevitable. Whether today, tomorrow or next year, we must let the light shine into our darkened tunnels to lift the veil of hopelessness and despair. With this newfound sense of hope, we will be able to walk peacefully through the darkest of night. We will find through our renewed courage, fortitude and sense of self that we will be able to create a world of change.

Dr. Rita Louise will present “Tapping Into Your Intuition” at 10 a.m. Saturday, March 27, and “Ghosts, Spirits & All That Goes Bump In The Night” at 1 p.m. Sunday, March 28, as a keynote speaker at Spirit Spectacular Show at Crowne Plaza Minneapolis North Hotel, 2200 Freeway Blvd., Brooklyn Center, MN. Visit www.spiritspectacularshows.com or tickets at www.brownpapertickets.com. Call 1.800.838.3006.

As a culture, we usually talk about grief in relation to death, but it is much more than that. Grief can start the moment you think something unpleasant might happen to you or is happening to you now. While experiencing this myself and with clients, it became so apparent that because grief may have already begun just with the thought that something may be lost, why not address it now? Even if the loss is or isn’t certain, the grief associated with it is still present.

To address this issue, I created a process called “Pre-Grief: Gateway to Grace.” By walking through the imagined loss prior to the event, while neutralizing the energy associated with it, it brings you to a higher state of grace when and if that event actually occurs. And, if it doesn’t occur, you have relieved the pain of the grief associated with the “not knowing” part of you that delves into the emotions of grief anyway.

This process can be done as soon as you have a thought about it and/or during the process of the cycle of grief.

Examples of pre-grief
Although not all-inclusive, the following are some examples of when pre-grief may arise, whether or not the perceived events are terminal or imminent: You or a loved one was just diagnosed with cancer or illness; your pet has an illness or old age is taking its toll; layoffs at work are pending and you might lose your job; your marriage isn’t going well or you are in the process of divorce; a friendship or relationship is not working out the way you had wished; your personal or career status may be affected by something; your sense of safety, family structure and dynamics may be changing; or stress and worry about the future in general.

It only has to be imagined for the grief to begin.

Grief is a normal process, but it doesn’t have to be painful or continue for long periods of time. It can be processed ahead of time. We’ve been told that you have to mourn for a certain length of time after the event to justify the loss or to express your loyalty to a person. I have come to find out this is absolutely NOT true after using this Pre-Grief process with myself and my clients.

Within ten months starting in 2006, I lost a pet of 13 years, my sister and best friend, my other beloved pet of 21 years, and my mother. I used the Pre-Grief process with my beloved pet and mother and I had no grief afterward, just a sense of completion and joy. In fact, as I sat with my mother as she was leaving, I was able to see my father and sister along with angels come and greet her. It was one of many mountain top experiences I’ve enjoyed throughout my life – and I may have missed it if I had not done the pre-grieving. With my sister, who died suddenly, I used this process immediately and the deep and painful grief was totally gone within two weeks, permanently.

I thank them all now, as their transitioning served a valuable lesson in creating this process. My heart is filled with joy every time I think of them.

Peace and clarity
Clients with whom I have used the Pre-Grief process seem to go through an event or loss with much more grace, understanding and compassion – and even joy. It brings them to a place of peace and clarity so the decisions they may need to make are more clear and easier to put in place. If an event or loss they imagine doesn’t happen, it allowed them the opportunity to live without grief, pain, stress and worry of waiting and not knowing.

What is so beautiful about the process is that it is fast, efficient and effective. No drugs, needles or traditional talk therapy are needed. Most people only need one to three sessions to relieve their pre-grief or grief, which is a whole lot better than being in that state for months or even years.

How do you know you are grieving? It shows up in so many ways, but here are some symptoms: Life has just stopped, no emotion, no movement forward, obsessively recalling the past over and over again, deep love pain, don’t want to bring up the issue, feeling that it’s not fair, apathy, why bother or what’s the point, extreme sadness, don’t want to do anything, afraid of failure or success, loss of future dreams, anxiousness or anxiety, physical issues that don’t seem to go away even with proper care, denial, anger, mind racing, intrusive thoughts, depression or despair, and sleep disturbances.

Grief isn’t bad. And it is compounded when it affects your life on a day-to-day basis. Pre-Grief truly is the Gateway to Grace, a more joyful and peaceful existence while living everyday life.

It is not the Darkness that is evil.

I feel that we initially feared the Dark due to the fact that there were creatures that were more aware and sensitive than us, that lurked at night. We became light and fire worshippers, because we felt safe during the times of day and fire – to the point where we would point to the sky for our salvation. In so many religions, we have a rising and dying Sun/Son. It is the mythology of our time that is shifting.

In releasing my social and cultural mythology and personal history, I have found true freedom. I am no longer afraid of the dark. I can see in the dark. I am more sensitive and aware and in touch with my primal essence. We seem to forget that we are animals. Many humans believe that their salvation is beyond the human condition – to ascend and be something else and go somewhere else while never coming close to mastering the self. This mastery, in and of itself, is glory sublime.

We come out of The Nothing – The Darkness – and return thus, and all that is and is not is within us. The planets are like our molecules yet, inside and around all of it, Darkness. We are made up of it. It is the potential field that we sit in and emanate from. Science tells us that 96 percent of the Universe is Darkness/Nothing/Void, and 4 percent is what we call Everything. Do the math.

I understand that death is scary. I understand that we all have monsters inside. I understand the nature of fear. Yet, these are the very things that we should approach and come to understand, as opposed to becoming so blinded by “The Light.” There are things going on inside that, at times, need our immediate attention. In the Dark, you find rest, stillness and peace. It is your mind that creates the scary things, the things that go bump in the night and cause a fright.

I say bump back! Open the closet, look under the bed, and look in the mirror – for there is your fear!

Religion and Spirituality are notorious for blaming negativity and evil on Darkness, giving it a bad rap. But as I have said, look at where the true evil emanates. How can you tell children that they are safe and then make them subject to rape? How can we all be at war over the same God? How can spiritual leaders subject their followers to death and unhealthy situations? None of this has anything to do with Darkness. It happens in “The Light.” It is there where evil lies – in plain sight!

Sheep are constantly being misled by “The Light” shining overhead. The Lord is returning on this date, the world is ending on this date, the Mothership is coming on this date. There is something better on the other side, so just follow “The Light.”

Darkness is not a culprit and there is no evil in there, because there is nothing and no one to feed on. Nothing exists in the Darkness; it is the only thing that does. Listen for the night to rise and realize the power of the shift. Move into, through and beyond your fear and feel the power of it. In the depth of self are all of the answers that we seek and all that we could ever be: free.

I have found truth in the Darkness because it never had anything to say; it is untainted…absent. In this, I have found peace. No war, hunger, pestilence, fear. Just me sitting here, in it, disappearing…clearing. Listening to and hearing…Nothing.

If I could share this with the world, I would – but alas, no one can hear what isn’t being said unless they themselves have found it. So if there was something I would share it would be this…shhhhhhh.

What would Love Say?
“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” — Meister Eckhart

What would Love do?
Live in a state of gratitude this month and see what transpires. Make “thank you” a large part of your vocabulary.

Meditation for Love:
Sit in a quiet space and light a candle. Close your eyes and place your hand against your heart and breathe in and out for several minutes. Feel Love breathing through you. Begin to say thank you over and over. Without thinking about what you are grateful for, just repeat the phrase and feel gratitude growing inside your heart.

Stephen Co is a internationally renowned lecturer, trainer and practitioner of Pranic Healing, who has taught the art of healing and human energy studies to thousands of students in the United States. His introductory lectures are thought-provoking, often compelling individuals who are not health practitioners to embark on learning Pranic Healing techniques to improve their lives. His students include hundreds of physicians, nurses, dentists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, social workers, psychologists and alternative health-care practitioners.

A senior disciple and personal student of Grandmaster Choa Kok Sui, the founder of Pranic Healing, Master Stephen Co and his wife, Daphne, started the first Pranic Healing center outside of the Philippines, the U.S. Pranic Healing Center/American Institute of Asian Studies, LLC, in Chino, CA, to promote and teach Pranic Healing in the United States.

He and Dr. Eric Robins wrote the book, Your Hands Can Heal You.

“What I want to get across is, if I can do this – having been emotionally, mentally and spiritually not open to it, open to just helping people – I think anybody can learn this,” Master Co said in an interview with The Edge. He returns to the Twin Cities to teach classes on Pranic Healing on March 23 and 24, and a weekend intensive healing seminar on April 17-18..

He spoke with The Edge to explain that the so-called “miracles” of Pranic Healing are actually the result of subtle laws of energy, nature’s response to the conscious direction of our life force energy (chi or prana) in a form of healing that has evolved in the East for thousands of years. He says all human beings are born with the incredible power to consciously, purposefully direct their life force energy, and that he trains and empowers people to tap into their own latent ability.

So Pranic Healing works with other forms of healing, like emotional or spiritual healing or other imbalances that are not directly related to physical ailments?
Absolutely. In fact, if a person really wants to experience the effect of healing energy, what we do in our demonstration classes is encourage you to feel the stress and whatever you come into the class with. Then we do about five minutes of self-cleaning, and most people feel that a lot of that negative emotion is gone. All we do in this case are simple sweeping movements. The interesting thing about negative emotions or an emotional problem, compared to a physical problem, is that the energy is still very subtle. It is not fully manifested.

It hasn’t anchored into the body yet.
Exactly. It is as if it is still in vapor form and has not yet turned into water or ice. It is still in a very simple form. Since we use energy, breathing, meditation and visualization, we are working on all energy, whether it is still in the aura or has become blocked in the body. In the case of emotional healing, it is easier to feel it and pull it out. That’s why people are amazed and say, “I walked in really stressed and angry, but when we did this technique on ourselves I just feel like I don’t feel it anymore. I know what it is, but it doesn’t have that emotional bite.”

Something else that responds very well to Pranic Healing is what are called spiritual emergencies. Some people experience a lot of emotional pain, and even physical pain, but when they go to see a doctor or a psychologist, they can’t find anything wrong, because the problem is not physical, and it is not really emotional. It is a block in the flow of Divine energy coming down into the chakras from above the body, and it is the block in the flow of kundalini energy going up into the body from the earth. Pranic healing techniques will pinpoint where the blockages are by doing a very deep and thorough cleansing. Most people within a few minutes will say, “Oh, I suddenly feel like something is moving.” The body is a self-repairing entity. As that flow increases, the body starts to get better.

What type of recognition is Pranic Healing receiving from the medical community?
As you know, more people statistically are turning to alternative medicine. When Dr. Robins did the research for our book, we found that there are a lot of medical doctors who are what you would call “closet healers.” They practice medicine, but on the side they also teach people how to use herbs, how to use breathing exercises, hypnosis and visualization. On our website, you can see a series of specials CBS News did when we taught Pranic Healing to medical doctors in Kaiser Permanente Hospital here in Southern California.

We have found doctors who are open to it, but they cannot outwardly practice Pranic Healing side-by-side with their medicine. What they do for patients who are open to it is suggest, “Oh, by the way, instead of just jogging, why don’t you do some breathing exercise, too,” and if patients are open to it, they will do healing right in the clinic, just some sweeping movements to remove the blocks.

Pranic Healing’s introduction into Western medicine is still in its infant stage right now.

Aren’t some of these ideas already a part of our culture?
Oh, definitely. A lot of old wives’ tales or home remedies actually are based on using energy. Even in the Catholic tradition, what you call holy water is essentially water and salt and the priest’s blessing on it. In Pranic Healing classes, we have buckets of salt and water, and when people do healing that’s what we throw the dirty energy to. People will say, “Hey, I do that in my Native American tradition” or “In my Jewish tradition, we do the ceremonial cleansing that you are teaching, a salt water bath,” and so on.

What are the greatest misconceptions people have about what you do?
Number one is that healing can only be done miraculously. A lot of people think healing is only done by God. Healing is essentially using natural laws that God has made available to us. All we have to do is learn these natural laws. When you produce an unexpected healing, for the common person it’s a miracle, but for you who understand it, it is not a miracle. It is an application of natural laws.

Another misconception is that you have to be born with a special skill to help people with healing. That is absolutely not true. Anybody can learn to heal, even somebody like me who was very skeptical and not open to it, by following simple, step-by-step instructions.

Please see Master Stephen Co’s website at Yourhandscanhealyou.com for articles, news, videos online and details of his events.

Photo courtesy of Yann | Wikimédia France

I really believe that sometimes the Universe decides you are not moving fast enough toward a goal and decides to intervene. Maybe you are in a dead-end job or a dead-end relationship. Maybe life has become stagnant in some other way. Then all of a sudden, something occurs to completely shift your reality. You get laid off or fired. Your relationship ends. You get the idea. 

On September 11, 1999, I got married. That fall, I bought my Geo Prism. Two years later, when the Twin Towers collapsed on our anniversary, I thought, “Well, this doesn’t bode well.” It didn’t. Two years after that, we got divorced. That fall, my Geo Prism, with its failed transmission, was towed away. The magic day it was towed away? September 11. I couldn’t have planned it that way if I wanted to. I thought it was appropriate since it was my “marriage car.” I also thought the circle was complete.

Well, much has happened in my life over the last seven years since that day, including my union with my wonderful partner. But healing needs to happen on many levels. And apparently, when you need a little push in the right direction, the feng shui “Forces” come in and do their work. 

A few years ago, on September 11, 2007, I parked my car – a sporty, little, red Pontiac Grand Am that I purchased after the Prism died – in front of my shop and healing center, Sacred Rearrangements, on Lyndale Avenue. I was not normally there on that day, but I had a business lunch meeting. My partner Keith picked me up and we went off to our favorite restaurant to sip chai and talk business. When we returned two hours later, Keith pulled into the back alley. In my peripheral vision, I caught a glimpse of my ‘99 Pontiac.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” is all I could say. Keith reminded me to breathe, the word that was ironically embroidered on the shirt I was wearing.

“My car, what happened to my car?”

We walked up to the Grand Am, which I had affectionately named “Marcello” years earlier. It was completely totaled. The bumper was smashed all the way into the back tires. The back end was gone; well, it was there, but it was just taking up a lot less space. The front end was crunched. Only one door could be opened. I was thankful that I was nowhere near the car when it happened. 

I believe cars represent the movement in our life. Years after my divorce, I believe I needed a lesson in moving forward to the next level. I believe that fate has a way of feng shui’ing important things out of your life for a reason.

Here it was – another September 11th – and the “coincidence” was not lost on me. If the Prism was my “marriage car,” then the Grand Am was definitely my “divorce car.” And it was time for me to be “over” my divorce years. I thought I was. The universe didn’t. Note to self: the Universe always wins. 

About 2,500 years ago, the Buddha sat down under a tree and made the commitment to sit in that very spot until he became enlightened. After a while, Mara came to the Buddha to tempt him away from his quest for enlightenment.

In this story, Mara is seen as the personification of influences that entrap our minds, frustrating our efforts at cultivating clarity, equanimity and mindfulness.

Mara set about attempting to draw the Buddha from his task, and each time the Buddha resisted Mara, the greater the temptations became. The first was an army of fearful demons and beasts who, upon their assault, became powerless, their weapons losing their points and turning into flowers. The second was a bevy of beautiful women intent on seduction, but the Buddha easily turned them away. The last attempt consisted of Mara challenging the right of the Buddha to the boddhisatva’s seat, claiming that he had done all that Buddha had done, calling upon his minions as witness. The Buddha merely touched the earth in response.

You see, as each of the temptations toward distraction is thwarted, they become more irresistible. They begin with fear and proceed to the temptations of pleasure. The last attempt at derailing the clear mind is the most tempting of all. It is an appeal to pride, and an assault on human insecurity. The touching of the earth was the Buddha’s way of calling on the earth as witness to the truth of his experiences. A less confrontational way of dealing with a challenge to one’s capabilities has yet to be invented.

In it, we can find the clues to deciphering distraction, determining when an experience that appears as a genuine gift of insight, a glimpse of clarity, or a window into an improved understanding has merit. Sometimes that which feels good can be growing experiences, but so often they are cleverly disguised hindrances. We are all gifted in the art of self-delusion.

Fear can be a powerful motivator for checking out from our present circumstances. It can provide a litany of demons and armed foes that we can use to dissuade us from making decisions that are uncomfortable or cause us to challenge our assumptions. Most of these enemies are those of our own imagination, and, as in the story, by facing them calmly, allowing the emotional charge associated with them to dissipate, we become fearless and they become powerless over us. Fear has its place, but cultivating self-consciousness about its validity is crucial.

To call the next set of enticements the temptations of the “flesh” would be obvious, but it’s more; it’s about the distractions of the world at large. Yes, there’s food and sex and comfort, but also there are the elements of the everyday that can occupy us, taking us out of being present.

Planning, worrying, remembering and obsessing are all distractions that tempt us away from the goal of being completely present. They take us into a past that’s gone, and a future that doesn’t exist. This is the temptation of distraction. Distraction can look like fantasies or like your to-do list, one diverting and pleasurable and the other giving the illusion of achievement or progress. Neither is inherently bad, yet neither is beneficial when it takes us away from what’s important and right in front of us right now.

The most enticing draw from a state of openness and equanimity is our ego. It is the need to prove our worthiness, competence and accomplishments, to oneself and others. It is the voice that justifies our actions because they reinforce our beliefs, or when we intrude into the choices of others, believing we know best. The fear of ego-death provides great motivation to develop rationalizations for our behaviors.

This is the last, great temptation. Only by being vigilant can we fully live. You see, Mara is with us always.

Or have you been taught to believe that life isn’t perfect? Have you been taught to see what is missing in life rather than to recognize what you have?

You may have been taught that you are not good enough. You are guilty. You are a sinner. You are greedy. You are ruining the planet. These messages have been passed down from one generation to the next. Your parents, grandparents, ministers and anyone whom you have put in a position of authority have shared these messages. Your imperfections have been thrown at you. False messages have been filtered into your psyche. They have helped solidify the belief that you are not perfect. Because you lack perfection, you therefore cannot be content.

The advertising industry depends on and perpetuates this message of imperfection. Products appeal to the masses by telling you how you can be thinner, better looking, smell great and have healthier skin and hair. Without buying the particular products being offered, you are lacking and therefore imperfect. Lack of status, lack of happiness, lack of beauty – you name it. The messages being conveyed are:

You are not good enough.

You do not have enough.

You do not do enough.

You will be happier when….

You would be happier if only….

How often do you ingest these messages? You hear them on the radio, watch them on television and read them in newspapers and magazines. You see them on billboards, bus stops and park benches. The bigger the city, the more the ad industry preys.

Even when you don’t pay much attention to these ads, the subliminal, subconscious effect is apparent. Your brain becomes aware of the ads on some level. And if the product is slightly practical, the message lingers: I could use that. My life would be better if I had that.

The messages are a subtle and consistent reminder that you are living in a scarcity mentality. Many of them leave you feeling competitive or jealous, dwelling on your self-proclaimed imperfections and leave you feeling depressed.

The messages you have collected from your family, religion, society and advertising have combined to program you to believe you are lacking perfection, which makes you doubt your inherent knowledge. These messages have become your beliefs, whether you are aware of them or not. Many people have unconscious sabotaging beliefs such as: Life is hard. Life is not fair. There is never enough time or money. You can never be too rich or too thin.

This can lead to fear that keeps you unsatisfied – scared that if you communicate your needs directly you will be rejected and in a worse situation. In reality, however, this is seldom the case.

What would happen if everything in your life and your mindset shifted and you found contentment?

Take some time and get everything working perfectly in one area of your life. Make it something very significant, like contentment in your job, your home, in your relationships or your health. See how long it is before you can find something wrong again. Because you have been taught that life is hard and unfair, you will likely find ways to create this for yourself.

People become addicted to drama, misery and unhappiness. It doesn’t matter if it’s a bad marriage, career, friendship or a lack of time, money, love or health. There’s an unhealthy comfort in staying with what is not working rather than step into the unknown or deal with the problem at hand. People have learned to attach to drama, misery and the box that they’ve put themselves into just as children remain attached to their tattered baby blankets. The most phenomenal person or circumstance could be just around the corner, but nobody ever makes that turn. If you never release your familiar agony, it’s impossible to discover unfamiliar bliss.

Many believe that things could always be better. Living in joy requires striving for contentment as it stands now.

This doesn’t mean you should be complacent and settle for what is less than ideal. Instead, be active in seeking contentment. Move away from complaint and misery. Still your mind by embracing silence and stillness. Determine what you need to be content and manifest it. And along the way, no matter what stage you are at, recognize the good things in life. There are many forces working together for your happiness.

It is up to you to make it your reality.

I see nothing, and Ghandi will not budge. I ask him what he sees, and he doesn’t look up at me. He stares ahead, motionless. We wait for minutes, and in my impatience, I pick him up, carry him down the path and then put him down. Whatever it was is gone, and Ghandi walks on as if nothing happened, and proceeds to sniff a nearby ribbon of yellow snow.

Our shared experience in the park each day is worth more to me than I can put into words. It’s more than just being outside stretching our bones and breathing fresh air. It’s about being present.

On this Tuesday evening at Lake Harriet Spiritual Community, during a discussion about awakening into now, I hear that every species of being on the planet is naturally awake, present to this now moment, except humankind. I think about my walks with Ghandi and then I compare that with the rest of my day, so entrenched in my mind as I put this magazine together and simultaneously worry about paying the bills this month.

I hear the speaker, Leonard Jacobson (author of Journey into Now), say that 99.27 percent of all humans spend their lives in a state of unconsciousness, lost in the mind, “in a world of the remembered past and the imagined future,” a world of thought, opinion, ideas, imagination and belief. He says waking up is as simple as looking at a flower, or a tree – that everything is inviting us to to awaken from our minds, inviting us to presence.

My mind returns to that “remembered past,” reflecting on when I feel most alive, walking with Ghandi in the park, with a silent mind and an open heart. And then, with a subtle shift of perspective, I look at the flower on the end table next to Leonard, and I return to presence.

This teaching – helping us to become aware of when we are not present, and to become aware of what takes us out of presence – is a true gift, but it is a far cry from the way we were taught to live our lives, in the world of the mind, filled with judgment and a sense that I am right so you must be wrong.

What I find most inspiring is that this teaching of presence is done with a gentle hand. There is no “have to” or “must.” It is about relaxing into what is. And I think relaxing is truly a message for these times. We perceive stress everywhere, don’t we? In response, we are pushing and forcing and collapsing under the weight of all of that effort. It’s time to be present.

Most people believe we have many emotions, but we learn from Principle Six that there are two basic emotions, love and fear. The closer you can come to identifying your emotions as love or fear, the closer you are to determining which emotion is driving you.

Fear is a very powerful fuel, but love is a much more powerful emotion. If fifty people are love based, they can cancel 5,000 fear-based people.

Fear affects your whole life and is the cause of the majority of health problems. One of the secrets to a happy and healthy life is to have no fear. With your mind free of fear, you have additional time and energy to devote to your life’s missions.

You can master your emotions, but you must first acknowledge that you are capable of doing so. Most of us have been taught that we are not in control of our emotions, so we say, “This person has made me so angry,” as opposed to “I choose to be angry because this person has said this.” It’s a minor but very important distinction. Realize that no one can force you – and no thing can force you – to feel a fear-based emotion.

Many people are more comfortable being angry than they are of being fearful, believing that anger has power. But anger is a fear emotion. When you are angry, there is always fear of something. When you use anger, it’s wise to say, “I know that anger is a fear emotion, and I can choose to be fearful, but at least I can acknowledge that that is what it is.”

Hate is a fear emotion. When we say we hate a person or thing, we are saying in some fashion, “I am afraid of something having to do with this person or thing.” To solve hate in our society, it is important for each of us as individuals and as a society to ask, “What is it I am afraid of?” By determining what you are afraid of, you can address it.

Depression is a fear emotion – fear you have lost something, will lose something, or something will not return to you. Anxiety also is a fear emotion. In this case, we often can’t put a name to our specific fear.

Circumstances can elicit sadness. Sadness and emptiness never serve a higher purpose. All higher purposes are aided by love and joy. When you are feeling sad, first ask, “Is there anything I can do to change the circumstance? If not, is there a way I can feel joy and live in this position?” There is a positive way to view all things.

How do you get over fear? First acknowledge that it exists. Don’t see it as something other than fear. When you say you are nervous or apprehensive, you are fearful. There are many fear emotions and they can highly motivate and drive your thought process, but usually with a large cost to you.

The Light Collective says, “If we were to leave you with one suggestion, it would be that every day you are presented with numerous opportunities to make choices. The greatest gift that your planet has is free will, emotion and choices. So today, as in all days, you will have a choice to respond in a love-based or a fear-based fashion. Each time you choose to respond and to act in a love-based fashion, you are changing the world. You are more powerful than you can ever imagine, and we thank you for this, as you are aiding our species and all species that are based on love.”

It’s the reference that keeps shifting around, like trying to define smoke. Years ago, our reference was to things external. Addiction was a problem with a substance, a bad relationship was a problem with a person, and one’s spirituality was defined by which religion was chosen. Educational structures created a cultural mold, institutions of health care dictated the fixes for our bodies, and monetary systems defined our value to society. We were told who we were, and we lived according to whatever story we bought into. Beliefs, after all, cover a lot more territory than just discussions about God.

Our visions for a different future surfaced in the 1960s when consciousness began opening after a brutal series of 20th century wars that culminated in a blast radiating the planet. The seeds of a new field were planted, but we still made our issues about “the man” – a dualistic term used to describe whatever we thought held power over us. It took us until the 1980s to realize that we were the man as we finally began to include ourselves in the equation of our experiences.

That’s when many of us in the transformer generation began the challenging tasks of disassembling structures in consciousness that were no longer to hold power over our lives. Most of us didn’t understand that’s what we were doing, of course. Mostly we found ourselves in some form of crisis or therapy, unraveling the bindings of co-dependencies and other distortions grown in duality. It was in those disassembling processes that we began the transformative shift in earnest, and I will admit to being quite dang happy to have made it out the other side. My body grew tired, but my soul feels less bound than ever.

Still, all that personal work was only a phase of a bigger story – and now we move on.

During this past decade we have gone even deeper into the core of our beings, now realizing that this is a profound moment in the journey of consciousness. What I speak of is not about a person becoming conscious, but a momentous turning-point in the evolution of consciousness, itself. What I speak of is the matrix within which we exist and our existence within it, the whole of which is rapidly morphing into something not previously known in creation. I acknowledge the assumption in that last sentence, but I sense that the Universe doesn’t do repeats.

The current focus and our on-going process for 2010 is an alchemical fusion, merging the material and the spiritual into a new form. So, how do we describe the beings born of fusion and without separation of spirit and matter? I don’t know, but since it’s happening within our experience, I expect we’ll come up with something. Then again, “God” is merging within us to experience creation, so don’t expect much in the way of definition. If we can’t define ourselves now, I’m not expecting to have words for an expanded version of same.

Writers and teachers often use a metaphor to communicate what is beyond words to describe. Metaphors work because they reference a common experience to which we can relate. They’re like shortcuts to a level of knowing. At other times, we just repeat a belief or somebody else’s explanation when it has become presented so often that it is accepted as truth. Both techniques have limitations going forward. A lack of common experience can make metaphors ineffective, and repeating something previously repeated carries no assurance of authenticity. Plus, I am weary of platitudes and I prefer to stay as current as I can in sharing my views.

As our bodies and the earth continue to shift, events of de-creation will likely get more press than those of re-creation. My focus, however, is on our current process of fusion and eventual emergence as creator within creation.

The story is quickly growing larger, feelings are going deeper and I’m becoming convinced there are not enough superlatives in the English vocabulary to add appropriate flourish to the discussion. So, I am left with continual re-arrangement of common words to articulate what I can. Or, perhaps we need to create some new vocabulary. Our attempts may not become as ubiquitous as Google or as curious as mouse potato or soul patch, but there could be satisfaction in adding to the English lexicon before language finally goes completely out of style.

I’m open to confabulation.

We are lost in false power, which is the cause of all the abuse throughout history and all the abuse in the world today. As an inherent part of our awakening, we must discover the true nature of power.

At a deep and sometimes unconscious level, we feel powerless. This usually stems from childhood, when we were not allowed to truly be ourselves, and we had to comply with the will of our parents. In a sense, our innate sense of power was taken from us. It is not our parent’s fault. The same thing happened to them and it is simply handed down, generation to generation.

We seek to escape this feeling of powerlessness by feeling powerful, but if the power we feel is in relationship to others, then it is false power.

If I need to feel better, stronger or more successful, then I am pursuing false power, and it will always be at someone’s expense. For every winner, there is a loser. Whenever the power we feel is in relationship to others, it is false power, and sooner or later it will lead to abuse. Humanity has been lost in false power, almost from the beginning of time, and our history is overflowing with examples of abuse. Our society is built upon a foundation of false power. False power plays into our relationships in so many ways. False power leads to war, famine, exploitation and the abuse of our environment, children, women, animals and so much more.

For humanity to survive, we must awaken to true power. True power has no relationship with another. It arises from the center of your Being. It arises from an inner source, an inner font of infinite love, wisdom, strength and power. It is your very life force. When true power arises within you, the feeling of powerlessness from your past will simply dissolve. You will feel free. You will feel empowered to be yourself and express yourself freely and without limitations, and it has nothing to do with anyone else. There is no sense of being stronger or better than anyone else. There is no need to be stronger or better than anyone else, because you feel empowered from within.

With true power there is no possibility of abuse of others.

True power can only arise when we are fully and fundamentally established in Presence. When we are present, we open into that inner source of true power. As long as we remain lost in the mind, functioning as egos, we will continue in false power and the abuse will remain.

At a more personal level, there is another reason for the abuse.

We have been conditioned to avoid painful feelings. This conditioning began in early childhood. We learned to repress feelings like hurt, pain and anger. One of the strategies we have developed to avoid feeling the pain repressed within us is to inflict the pain on others. It is a strategy of avoidance that is widespread and appears in our lives in so many ways. It is another primary cause of abuse in our world. This can often occur in the relationship between parent and child, where the parent passes on the pain from their own childhood to their children, and it all occurs at an unconscious level as a part of this strategy of avoidance. In other words, parents do to their children what was done to them.

Most abusers were abused. It has been revealed that almost all serial killers experienced terrible abuse in their childhood, and all the pain, anger and rage remained repressed within them.

If we are to overcome abuse, there will have to be a revolution in how we deal with our feelings and emotions. We can no longer afford to repress our feelings. We must feel and experience our feelings fully, but always responsibly, and this revolution must permeate every aspect of our lives and reach our children from the day of birth, if not from the day of conception.

We must come into right relationship with our feelings. We must awaken into true power.

Only then will we end this never-ending cycle of abuse.

Submit questions to author and teacher Leonard Jacobson for guidance on the path of presence by email to info@leonardjacobson.com, or mail your questions to: The Edge, Ask Leonard, P.O. Box 25543, Woodbury, MN 55125. Include your name and mailing address. If your letter is selected for publication, you will receive a copy of the author’s latest book, Journey Into Now.

“Where is it, father?” the sons pleaded. But it was too late. Their father was gone.

Soon after his passing, the sons set to the field, trying to unearth the treasure. For many days the sons desperately worked pick and shovel, digging everywhere in search of their promised legacy. Eventually they turned over every inch of the field, but alas, no treasure was to be found. Finally, dejected and discouraged, they gave up their search and returned to their families and vocations.

The next year the farm yielded its greatest harvest ever.

This parable yields a lesson richer than the treasure the sons so fervently sought: The fortune their father hinted at was not a magical boon that would transform the sons’ lives in one glorious instant. The treasure was the untapped potential of the field, capable of yielding riches to the family if they worked with the materials and natural potential before them. The power of the treasure lay not at the end of the rainbow, but in the journey toward it.

I hear people talking about waiting for their big break; or for Oprah to hold up their book on television; or to win the lottery. Certainly these events would be wonderful if they occurred, but if you sit on your duff waiting for a record producer, Oprah or a lottery number to save you, you may wait for a very long time and miss the wonder and gifts of the journey. Wisdom-guided action and integrity build success far more substantially than a magic pill.

The apparent goal of a journey is simply the carrot the universe dangles before you to call you to the adventure and learn the lessons the journey yields. Martin Büber declared, “All journeys have destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

If you think about most of the things you have striven for, you will realize that the lessons you learned in the process of striving were far more powerful and long-lasting than the material object at the end of the trail. While you sought for a soulmate, you may or may not have ended up with that person; but the self-knowledge you gained and the growth you experienced in the search ran far deeper than the form of the person you sought. Or perhaps you worked hard for a financial or career success. You may or may not have attained your goal, but what happened to you along the way made a far greater difference in your life than the specific goal itself. Then, when you obtained the car, house, or promotion, you were satisfied for a moment, but sooner or later you set your sights on the next achievement. Something inside you recognizes that the power of stretching to achieve something yields you more value than the something itself.

We are a quick-fix oriented culture. We want lots of stuff and we want it now. What we often leave out of the equation, however, is that we would prefer stuff that works. We want computer printers that last longer than a year, a job we can grow into a passionate career, and a soulmate we can love for a lifetime. Because we often sacrifice integrity for expedience, the art of quality engineering, true craftsmanship and meaningful relationships is shrinking to the domain of a dedicated few.

When I visited Japan, my friend Koichi told me that the oldest company in Japan – and the world – is 800 years old. The company is an architectural firm that specializes in building temples and pagodas. The company, Koichi explained, does not use nails in their construction. Instead, they make a series of tabs on the ends of wooden pieces and fit them together. Over eight centuries, when there have been earthquakes, this company’s structures, including five-story pagodas, have stood firm while buildings around them crumbled.

If you want a life that stands while others crumble, pay more attention to how you till the field than finding the buried treasure. The real treasure, you see, is buried within you. If you are going to mine anything, mine the gifts you already own. Don’t wait for a soulmate, talent scout or Oprah to put you on the map. You are already on the map, but if you are holding it upside down, you won’t recognize and claim your true domain.

It’s a wonderful thing when people or events come along to change our life. But you must do your inner homework and own those changes by right of consciousness. Otherwise the boons that arrive will disappear as fast as they came. But if you have tilled your field with love, care, and integrity, the harvest will be bountiful and you will have plenty for yourself and many others.

Aries (Mar. 21-Apr. 19)…The biggest challenge in manifesting abundance is to hold fast to thoughts and feelings of what you do want in the future while enduring what you don’t want in the present. Use the first half of the month to practice this skill; you’ll be amazed by how life opens up to you after the 15th.

Taurus (Apr. 20-May 20)…Life is pushing you to look at how you block yourself from getting what you want by unconsciously acting out your parents’ unresolved emotional dramas. Becoming aware of this self-sabotaging behavior is key to success in both business and relationships. The spiritual community supports you like never before, so connect, connect, connect.

Gemini (May 21-June 20)…The Pisces New Moon on March 15 heralds unexpected – and maybe even unprecedented – career opportunities. What beliefs about money do you need to let go of to finally open up to your abundance? Life unfolds more and more beautifully as you learn to communicate from the heart rather than just scoring points for cleverness.

Cancer (June 21-July 22)…The Cosmos is offering you wisdom this month, and wisdom is the only true security to be found in this life. The first part of wisdom is recognizing that life is like a wheel – sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down. If you can accept this when the wheel is swinging low, you’re set for life. FYI: Money should finally start to improve after Mars goes direct mid-month.

Leo (July 23-Aug. 22)…Cultivate a patient attitude this month. As soon as Spring hits, you’re going to feel your energy, optimism and ambition come roaring back. In the meantime, focus on cultivating community. You’re exceptionally lucky this year, and your best luck comes from uniting with like-minded people in pursuit of a visionary goal.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)…One of the major secrets to manifesting the ideal relationship (whether for business, friendship, or romance) is asking for what you really want on a soul level. You’ve got out-of-this-world good fortune in your relationship area this month, so what’s holding you back? Fear of getting what you want? Or feeling you should want something different? As soon as you figure that out, you can start attracting the ideal partners.

Libra (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)…Make relationship awareness your secret watchword this month. Remember that with Saturn in your sign, your mission this year is to take full responsibility for yourself. Sacred warriors don’t waste their power trying to please others; they know that personal integrity is the key to all goodness.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 21)…It’s better to keep your ambition in check until after the equinox, when your ruling planet Mars returns to direct motion. You’ll see much better career options open up later in the spring anyway. What Life really wants you to do now is develop a creative approach to life. As Kerouac said, “Life is Art or Sex; it’s either that, or die.”

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)…With your ruling planet Jupiter in your 4th House, use the first half of the month to meditate, ground yourself and get your home in order. Once the Sun moves into fellow fire sign Aries on the 20th, you’ll be swept up in a blast of enthusiasm, so firm up your foundations first. Remember that a tree can only grow as high as its roots are firmly planted.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)…You are exceptionally supported in identifying and releasing negative thought patterns that block you from manifesting your destiny. Be a vigilant witness to your own thoughts and words; each time you become aware of a negative thought loop, you weaken its power over you. Take a two-week sabbatical from the “news” and instead consciously fill your mind with positive messages.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)…You’ll always be ahead of your time, and there have been periods where you suffered financially simply because there weren’t many jobs tailored to futuristic visionaries. But the world is evolving at hyper-speed and it’s so important to make your peace with the past and open yourself to receive financial abundance. Use the New Moon on the 15th to set your intention.

At the same time, our societies have grown so complex and riddled with conflict that we are also living under more stress and chaos now than at any previous time in our history.

As I see it, the great flowering of human ingenuity, creativity and the development of the truly astonishing technology in which we are engaged today, along with the amazing abundance of our beautiful Mother Earth, have put all of possibility at our fingertips…including the possibility of creating technological and social catastrophes from which human beings, like much of life as we know it, might never recover.

Along with great accomplishment comes equally great responsibility, and it is the enormity of the responsibilities before us that is causing much of the chaos and confusion under which we are living. There is also tremendous uncertainty in our world, and while nothing in life is ever guaranteed, the kinds of uncertainty we have created in our lives are antithetical to a consciousness of our own well-being.

We are literally standing at a crossroads in human existence unlike anything we have ever faced before. The decisions we make and the directions we choose at this crossroads will affect the direction of life on earth perhaps forever, because of the technology we possess.

A crossroads is a place of enormous power. It is a place of power precisely because it is a place where choices must be made and acted upon. Thoughts are energy forms, and what we think creates energy. When we stand at a crossroads and evaluate our options, make our decisions, we begin generating energy. As we act to implement those decisions, we generate more energy. Energy is power, just as power is made up of energy. So when you stand at a crossroads, you have within your reach a tremendous amount of power and energy to carry you forward as you choose the path you are going to take, so long as you make a decision and move to act on it. Otherwise, you simply stop growing and moving in life. You become stagnant.

Think about this whenever you feel stuck. Are you at a crossroads in your life where changes need to be made? The need for change is what brings you to a crossroads in the first place. Once you are there, it is time to make and act upon some very important decisions for your life. While it is imperative to take the time to look at your options carefully and make your decisions wisely, the longer you put off facing and making important decisions, the more your energy is going to be drained. So use the energy that exists when you arrive at the crossroads to move yourself forward onto the pathway that best works for you.

The dynamics of energy are truly amazing, for energy creates energy in the never-ending spiral of life in this universe. The simple act of making decisions generates energy. Then you use that energy to begin acting on your decisions. As you do that, you create more energy. The more you get done, the more energy you create. That is why businesspeople like to say, “If you want to get something done, give it to a busy person.”

There is a catch, however, in the way you generate and use energy. If you are coming into the crossroads as a victim, as one who expects everyone else to make and carry out your decisions for you, you are bringing into the crossroads only negative energy. Negative energy has the ability to create tremendous force in the universe, there is no doubt about that. It is the darkness that defines the light.

The possibilities that exist through negative energy, however, are very limited. They are limited by the sheer weight of negativity, which feeds only on other negativity. Using negative energy isn’t going to get you out of a difficult place at all; it’s only going to get you more deeply into it. Using the energy of negative thinking, which can make you feel very powerful and important for a moment, isn’t going to get you anywhere near the center of the crossroads where the power and energy of all of creation exist. In fact, it’s going to drain you of whatever positive energy you have left, for negative energy is completely devoid of the power of creativity.

Creativity is one of the most powerful forces of all. Creativity is the child of love. Love is of the Great Spirit, and it is the most powerful force in all of existence. Creative energy comes from the very life force, itself.

It is a great privilege to be born at this particular time in human history. The decisions that you make when you stand at the crossroads of your own life and the energies that you use to create and reflect out into the world as you move forward on your chosen pathway are going to have a huge impact on the entire world around you. That is because our very world, itself, is standing at a crossroads. It is a crossroads we all must face. We absolutely cannot allow anyone else to make these next major decisions for our world, any more than we will let anyone make our important decisions for us.

We are not victims; in fact, the psychology of victimhood, the mentality that says, “It’s not my fault, so take care of me, regardless of the cost to others,” is part of the old paradigm of negativity that has brought us to this crossroads amid so much havoc and destruction. We can choose to stay rooted in this victimization, and the results will not be pretty.

Or we can choose, individually, one by one until we number every person on earth, to say, “I am responsible. I am responsible for holding up my own dream for a better life, and I am responsible for holding up my own dream for a better world.” It is when you take responsibility for your life that you really begin to move through the crossroads in very dynamic and exciting ways.

This is the vision that I have for our world, that we will move through this crossroads leaving the negativity and victimization of the old way behind us as we reach for all of the light, all of the creativity, all of beauty and joy and power that is the love of the Great Spirit. Reach for the very life force, itself, to guide you into a future of harmony and oneness with all of life. To me, there is no other way.

Tilikum is a 12,000-pound orca (killer whale) who is currently in confinement at SeaWorld in Orlando, swimming laps in small pools and performing tricks for humans in exchange for seafood treats. On Wednesday, Tilikum grabbed SeaWorld employee Dawn Brancheau, 40, by the ponytail and pulled her underwater at Shamu Stadium. Brancheau died from “multiple traumatic injuries and drowning,” according to CNN’s source, the Orange County Sheriff’s office.

Tilikum has been linked to two prior homicides – a trainer at a Victoria, British Columbia, marine park in 1991, and a man in 1999 who “was the apparent victim of Tilikum’s horseplay” at SeaWorld.

An orca can travel easily 100 nautical miles every day, and to put them in a pool where they swim around in circles continually, and kept away from their families, “takes a toll on their brains,” said Jim Borrowman, who has worked with whales for 30 years and runs Stubbs Island Whale Watching on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

“‘Neurotic’ is the word that we’ve used, and I sense that that’s probably what’s happening,” he said. “Perhaps that’s what drives some of these issues.”

According to the CNN report, orcas are dangerous in captivity because of their massive size. Spectators at the scene of the Brancheau murder say the whales were not behaving – that “they weren’t following instructions,” Lori Miller, SeaWorld visitor, said.

“It’s probably reasonable to suspect that something going on amongst the whales themselves may have triggered the frustration,” said Dr. Jeffrey Ventre, who worked at SeaWorld for 8 years and had been a senior trainer there, on the same level as Brancheau. But, he added, it is “impossible to speculate what triggered the aggression.”

“The SeaWorld system is the best of all seaquaria in the world, but if I was an orca, that would be the last place I’d want to live,” he said. “They are in what is essentially an acoustically dead cement pond, compared to the vibrancy of the ocean.”

There you have it. What more needs to be said? This is clearly a case in which an innocent being was captured off the coast of Iceland in November 1983. The inmate has been moved from site to site while being held in captivity against his will – in an environment that totally isolates him from his family and community. It prevents the inmate from moving around comfortably and following innate migrational patterns as the seasons change each year. It would be the same as a species with a higher intelligence than humans capturing a man living in isolation in Alaska and putting him in a secluded cell for the rest of his life, occassionally coercing him with procreative drugs to breed with other captive female humans and, on the hour, opening up a screen so the paying public could watch him do sit-ups or random IQ tests in exchange for hamburgers.

The CNN report cites authorities who question the value of releasing all killer whales into the wild. They say the once-captive killer whales may kill humans in kayaks, or not survive in the wild. And meanwhile, they still have to find a safe way to feed the captive Tilikum 300 pounds of fish each day, administer medication “and perform other daily tasks with the animal.”

Tilikum is also part of an artificial insemination program, which means someone has to roll him over and extract sperm from him.

My reading of this case leads me to the only conscious decision of releasing all whales and dolphins – and perhaps other species – from human captivity. Let the sea aquariums go out of business and let marine life rejoin their families and communities. Past experience has proven that humans are not the most advanced beings on the planet:

Annette Eckis Godsey, the victim of a 1972 incident, had to have 200 stitches from the waist down when a killer whale attacked her at the aquarium where she worked, she said on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” She said she didn’t know why it happened, but “heard later that no one had ever ridden the whale without a wet suit, and no women had ever ridden the whale.”

Arguments will be made that we’re only dealing with a “stupid animal,” and that saving human life should be at the forefront of concern. I beg to differ. Whales have more complex brains compared to humans, with an additional fourth lobe compared to three in all other mammals, and humans don’t even know what that fourth lobe does. Whales also are highly social beings with the ability to communicate with each over vast distances of ocean. Scientists say they can solve problems and use tools, exhibit joy and grief, and they live in complex societies.

And one more testimonial: Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society notes, “I happen to measure intelligence by the ability to live in harmony with the natural world. By this criteria, whales are far more intelligent than we are.”

Read actor and producer Fisher Stevens’ perspective here

Wired magazine details what a Canadian company has called the “largest thought-controlled computing installation,” a process by which people can use their brainwaves to control the lights at three major landmarks in Canada.

“When people put on the headsets and find themselves increasing the brightness of the lights by just thinking about it, you can almost see their brains explode,” says Trevor Coleman, chief operating officer for InteraXon, the company that has created this installation.

The exhibit will be set up for two weeks at Toronto’s CN Tower, Ottawa’s Parliament Buildings and Niagara Falls. Two chairs will be placed near each site, and visitors will be asked to put on a headset.

“The headsets have an external probe that touches the wearer’s forehead to measure the baseline brain activity. The chairs are rigged to offer tactile feedback as users enter the desired brain state.

The headset measures the brain’s electrical output and reacts to alpha waves, associated with relaxation, and beta waves, which indicate concentration.

As users relax or focus their thoughts, the computer sends a message to the site they are viewing. InteraXon’s software translates users’ thoughts to commands that will change the lighting display.

For instance, by concentrating, users can make the lights at the CN Tower spin faster or change the brightness of the lights at Niagara Falls.

Guests to Canada during this month’s Olympic Games may be blown away by this remarkable feat. Or, perhaps they will merely take it in stride, reflecting that these baby steps of harnessing our alpha and beta waves are just the beginning of our collective acknowledgment of the incredible power that intuition and intention play in our everyday lives. It will be the dawn of a new day when humankind takes for granted that we are all innately intuitive and finds ways to do more than spin or brighten lights at tourist sites.

Watch CNN’s accompanying video:

Through their organization known as Lightsmith, birthed in 1994 here in the Twin Cities, these two have consistently shared the information they have learned and lived each step of the way, and they have guided like-minded seekers who have sought ways to step into that new living field of consciousness. They are not interested in learning how to exist within — or even fix — the crumbling state of duality, because they know that it is evolving into something new — that we are all evolving, deep down at the very core of our body’s energetic structure. Their only option, they suggest, is to choose to move to a new state of being.

Michele Mayama is a gifted channel who is deeply connected to the consciousness of the planet, the Earth Mother. The latest information reveals that we have reached a crucial period in which it is no longer effective to continue visualizing and astro-projecting upward, out of our bodies. The key to the present Lightsmith work is the fusion of spiritual energies above, and the deep feminine energy below, in our bodies. Michele and Chris recently spoke about this deep feminine energy during an interview conducted at the Lightsmith office in St. Paul, MN.

Are groups participating in your Fusion Weekends doing work for the collective? Each group is doing something different when they come together?
Michele: I think so. They touch into their own personal processes, but they also are assisting the collective process. Perhaps they are creating some sort of pathway or map for others on the collective level to tune into. These shifts in the structures of consciousness start to go out and others pick them up and realize, “Oh, this is the next step here.”

Chris: We’re really becoming new beings, and it’s not just an information change or a software change. There is a hardware change, a body change, a physical change, a material change, and a change to the whole matrix of matter. When you bring Spirit and fuse it in matter, it creates something new that has not been before and that we haven’t experienced before. We have no reference for it because it’s new. What does it feel like to have bliss in the body?

Michele: The first stage is a sense of no drama, no fear. You start to realize that you don’t have the response you used to have to the things that used to be very triggering or anxiety producing, or worry producing. You notice, “I’m not doing that. It’s gone.” And there’s a subtle feeling of calmness, or peace, or serenity, or okayness, however you want to put it, that permeates experience all the time, including the dreams. That’s first. Then you expand the repertoire of what feeling and experience from Spirit is embodied.

Chris: As we enter 2010, we feel less affected by many things that we used to feel affected by. It’s partly preparatory for the next phase. It has to be sequential; after all, we are doing this in an evolutionary way. If we are now going to open levels of the unconscious, I think it’s nice to not feel we have to be affected in the same way. We can now be conscious enough to go, “Oh, there’s that,” and we can feel it release, but it doesn’t have to stimulate an old fear response. And that leads us to the next place. Pretty soon you find yourself being quite a different person beyond any of the buzz words that people talk about — oneness or peace on earth. But along the way to have that kind of an experience, you become a different person. You can’t stay within the matrix of duality and be truly blissful and peaceful.

When we become that as individuals, then that’s what we will experience in the world.
Michele: And create. There is this large intelligence that permeates this living new field, what some people call the new Earth. We are part of that and formed by it. We begin to synchronize within this field, which is synchronizing us and orchestrating the larger creation process. And yet, we are all individual. We are not losing our individuality. In some respects, this process enhances our individuality. We get to be more of us, more truly who we are, more truly fulfilled. If we are a creative person, that gets more fully enhanced and more fully activated as this fusion proceeds, and then we are synchronized in this larger, collective experience of creation. Then we create new forms, new things, new ways.

There is a large group of young people who are kind of bringing the possibilities in with them. The new kids plug right into this field. They are all equipped inside for creating the new, for bringing the new ideas into consciousness and into some form. In our generation, we were the transformers. We did the work — the shift work. I might have had a different word for that at the time.

Chris: Sounds like “shift.”

Michele: We did that work and then we birthed the next generation to come after us to kind of clean up, fill in and bring the new possibilities through.

Those who have long been on the spiritual path are used to having things to do, practices. What do you recommend for them? How should they approach this deep feminine rising in terms of their everyday lives and how they can help integrate that process? Or maybe it’s not a doing, but more of a “being” process.
Michele: Right. It’s less of a doing and more of a paying attention to what you are experiencing. I work with many people who continue to do things because they think they should. They are in relationship and they don’t know how to not give their energy over to somebody else, because they are in extreme need all the time. I’m just using examples, but inside they feel resistance, they feel pain, they lose energy and they feel exhausted. They feel things. They have experience and they overrule that with their “shoulds,” or they overrule it with their minds.

The new way is to become fully honest, fully aligned with what you feel inside. Notice it. What do you sense and what are you feeling? What is this bringing to you? The simplest thing is just to say, “Okay, what is it that has energy and what doesn’t? What has life and what doesn’t?” And so you realign with that and you align your choices with it. If your body is consistently breaking down with aches, pain and issues are going on, then your unconscious is trying to tell you something. What is it? What’s your body saying? Bring the love. That’s what I do. I just bring love to those places so that you can be present with yourself and be present with what’s there.

We have so much fear of our own body. We think, “If I don’t go to the doctor, what is going to happen to me?” Well, pay attention. Something is trying to get your attention. Acknowledge what you feel. That’s step number one. As you acknowledge, the emotion moves, falls out, releases, and you start to get an awareness of what would be in alignment for you.

It doesn’t sound spiritual, but it’s Presence. Spirit really is about presence; presence here, presence with, presence within. Without agenda, without overruling, without judgment — unconditional presence. If we can start to be present with ourselves in those places in our own experience that are lifting us to consciousness, we will open the gifts within our own being, and we will open the gifts within the large feminine, the larger life, the living field. We will open and receive and manifest everything.

Manifestation is part of this fusion experience. We are here to manifest who we truly are within the larger whole.

Chris: What we don’t want to do is to continue to manifest our experience from our unconscious place, which has been mostly a painful experience, because it’s all denied stuff and repressed stuff. And so we act out. We have experiences that keep trying to get us conscious of those things. Now we get to really dump all of that, jettison that level and to move into the position of being a conscious creator. Duality splits the conscious and the unconscious. Moving out of duality means you have to purge that unconscious. Everything must now be conscious — and life steers it.

What practice can you do? Feel what serves your deeper essence. Is what you are doing based on a suggestion that someone else has said you should do, or is this something that serves you in really discovering who you are and enhancing your own ability to receive? Listening is the first part of the feminine, creation process. If you can’t receive and you can’t listen, and you are not focused that direction and you’re not clearing out what’s in the way of that, then you don’t create anymore. You can have all the information in the world, but if you don’t have this connection back to life and to the feminine, you will not be able to create in the new experience.

Michele: My hope is that more people will start to have a sense of taking responsibility for their own experience, rather than projecting or blaming it on someone else. Taking responsibility for your diet. Taking responsibility for your own emotional state by going to a therapist. I see that starting to take place. Even medical people are starting to talk more about diet and people’s personal responsibility, rather than just coming to us to fix these problems that you have created, right? So, there’s a subtle shift of the larger collective level. I think those of us who have more experience doing this will be the coaches and the guides and the writers, and the people who will put this next possible level of personal responsibility into the collective.

Chris: This process is evolutionary. It’s revolutionary. It’s ongoing. It’s eternal. It never ends. Think back to the 1980s when those of us who are the Baby Boomers were starting to do therapy. All of a sudden there was a huge, important book about co-dependency. It just popped up from somebody who had a lot of experiences in her life and she wrote about it. Suddenly a lot of people are going, “Oh, I recognize that!” You can go to almost any year or any phase of evolution and look at what’s had an effect like that. That’s consciousness bringing it forth, and I think in the next couple of years, that will happen again.

As we sit here talking with you, it’s some amount of work to try to translate into words that people can read what the feminine is about, because it is not about words. We are just trying to speak to minds to say, “Hey, look, there is another place to turn to look and maybe pay attention there.” But the next thing to help the masses will come along. It always does. The Secret came along, and although that isn’t what we teach about, it did start to give people the idea that what they are experiencing is not separate from who they are, and if you take that to another level, it starts to become more conscious. The place we part ways with that teaching is that we don’t see it as the mind directing us around, using the mind to steer energy around. We see life being the creator.