Pray The Devil Back To Hell

Peace to Liberia

If one film could show the power that a group of concerned mothers, sisters, strong beautiful women could do, this film would be it. Watching the film from the beginning and seeing the death, destruction and blood is heartbreaking. I found myself watching this film thinking, would I be brave enough? How could my heart survive watching such atrocities, how am I surviving watching them on the screen? What if these people were my family members? In fact, they are. Just because I was born of my mother, who is a single person, I am related to all human beings. All human beings are my family, the warlords in the film, the victims. We are all family and yet this violence is possible for us to commit... If it seems to me to be so unfathomable that I would be capable of committing such atrocities, how is it possible for another person to?

When studying yoga, a teacher named Rama presented to our class. She had used the yoga sutras (to read the yoga sutras go here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/yogasutr.htm) to resolve international conflicts and promote peace. Ahimsa (non-violence) has always been a huge yama that I have tried to follow. It breaks my heart to see so much war in the world yet this film highlights what Rama talked about as possible, to bring peace through love. These women brought love out into the streets and they were willing to die for love and for peace. I don't think there is anything more beautiful than that.

Ram Dass is one amazing man. After watching a documentary on his life and his situation now living in a wheel chair, it is easy to feel a deep compassion and love for this man. Bringing Eastern spirituality and thought to the West, Ram Dass tried to tell us to "Be Here Now". His book is hilarious and holds deep truths inside of it's pages. The present moment is all the exists and all that ever exists. Sure, we have heard this teaching one million times "be in the present moment, be mindful." What is different about Ram Dass's teachings is that they are so simple yet because of their humor and love, they hit deeply in the center of the heart. The world is a complicated, sometimes horribly ugly and sometimes incredibly beautiful place that we all experience very differently. Yet one thing remains, we live moment to moment. No one can predict the future, there is no perfection (as much as we hold ourselves to it) and what truly matters is that we believe we deserve to be happy and that we find happiness in each moment. Just us, in our solitude, finding deep peace within our hearts. Even when the world is suffering or better yet, because the world is suffering, we must find peace. Once we find peace inside of our selves, we can help others find theirs and "walk each other home".

Changing the world

Thought for Food

This video highlights a very important point, not all education is created equal. Some of the most brilliant, amazing philosophers I have ever met were Mexican and Guatemalan dishwashers at a grocery store. I have heard more wisdom from people without a college degree than with one. This does not mean college is worthless but it is not the only road towards being a "learned" person. The education system requires that we take another person's thoughts (professor) as an authority and sometimes we forget that we should be questioning everything, even what this authority figure seems to know. Just because someone has some letters at the end of their name does not make them more educated or more knowledgeable than the homeless person sleeping down the street. Wisdom is something learned from the world (classroom or no classroom), each person you meet is your teacher.

The sad story of Chosŏn (The land of the morning calm)

Today by Ku Sang
Today again I meet a day, a well of mystery.
Like a drop of that river extends to
a spring of a valley and then to
the faraway blue sea, for this day
the past, the future, and the present are one.
So does my today extend to eternity,
and right now I am living the eternity.
So, starting from today, I should live
eternity, not after I die,
and should live a life that deserves eternity.
I should live the life of a poor heart.
I should live the life of an empty heart.

(Ku Sang was a very popular Korean poet)

 What often get's left out when we hear news about North Korea is the famine which is ravishing the country to the point that people are eating their own children because they are so hungry. This starvation means that even more people will be trying to cross the border between North Korea and China. China still employs a strict policy of sending back the people who cross over "illegally", not giving them assilum or letting them go to South Korea. People forced to return to North Korea face being placed in prison camps which have been described as death camps. 

This issue has been happening now for such a long time. The faces of the families sent back and their stories are heartbreaking. Sending love and kindness to the victims and families stuck in North Korea until this brutal regime is a start to bring our awareness to this issue. All people are our family and I hope we will find some way to help our sisters and brothers in North Korea.

This type of suffering really gives me a reality check. Here I am pondering what next to do with my life (my graduation puja from yoga school was yesterday) and I am forgetting just how lucky I am, how blessed my life has been so far. I have never had to worry about where food is coming from or if I will have a warm place to sleep. It hurts to think about this descrepancy between me and the 40,000 children who die each day from starvation. Why me? Why was I chosen to live with this luck, this blind luck which I don't deserve more than anyone else. For my birthday recently, I received a very beautiful gift from my mother. It was the book Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh. I used it today with a Eating Disorder patient and I found myself reading in out on a pier during my lunch break. I was touched by the mindfulness practices in each chapter and I wanted to share some wisdom from this book when looking at our food placed in front of us and thinking about how truly blessed we are.

"Before each meal, we can join palms in mindfulness and think about the children who do not have enough to eat. Doing so will help us maintain mindfulness of our good fortune, and perhaps one day we will find ways to do something to help change the system of injustice that exists in the world." (pg 109) 

Awomen. Amen.

An almost ending...

The things that wake you up

It is so easy to live in fear and close ourselves off from the world. Sure the world is a messy place and we don't get out alive. Should we reject this? How can we reject the natural order of life? Singing over the bones means finding our "wild woman" deep inside, it means singing over the dead things and bringing them into life. It means owning up to our true, wild, beautiful, big, taking up spaceness as a woman and as a person. "A healthy woman is much like a wolf: Robust, loyal, roving. Yet, separation from this wildish nature causes a woman's personality to become meager, thin, ghostly, spectral." (Women who run with the wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD) To live life courageously and lovingly, facing what is the scariness is what feeds the wolf woman and kills the meek in her. I could have died that day but I didn't. No I lived and smiled all the rest of that day because I was alive, alive, alive. Life and death are not separate, I met with death that day. Death is part of life and life is part of death. Embracing death, embracing the unknown is becoming one with it and therefore destroying it. When you become one with the scariness, the unknown that you are fearful of, you conquer fear and merge with everything and you become/have always been, everything. Once you are everything and see yourself in everything, helping someone else is like helping yourself. Social Work, volunteering, loving people, giving of yourself, becomes like drinking water and both your thirst and your neighbors is quenched. Life is so rich, wonderful and mysterious. This video is a reminder of my brush with death and the mark it left.
 
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”

Alan Watts

Namaste,

Danielle