Rethink, Reimagine, and Reinvent Your Life

Taking the Ochre Path by Australian artist John Scott

I woke up this morning from a dream that I couldn’t remember, but these words were imprinted on my mind, "Rethink, re-imagine, and reinvent your life!"

I wanted to write about this and post it with an appropriate piece of art, so I looked through my files and found one that I intuitively thought would go well with the words in my dream. I chose the above piece by Australian artist John Scott titled “Taking the Ochre Path,” knowing nothing about the artist. I had found the piece intriguing awhile back, and copied it to my photo file from somewhere on the web. It seemed to go perfectly with my dream message on a deeper level than could be articulated in words. I found it so inspiring that I wanted to know more about the artist, so I pulled up an interview of John Scott at Lisa M Harrison.com and discovered that Scott had a Near Death Experience (NDE) 20 years ago that "fundamentally changed" his whole life! The interview in which he talks about this re-visioning of his own life was posted the night before I woke up with the message to rethink, reimagine, and reinvent my life. Wow! No wonder I felt drawn to his art.

I found another meaningful coincidence in the information Scott brought back from his NDE that connected it to a book I am currently reading to my granddaughter titled Emir’s Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers by Jane Roberts. In the NDE, Scott saw how stones and trees and flowers and bugs and all things have consciousness and communicate with one another and with the rest of the world, including human beings if we are willing to focus and listen in new ways. In Robert’s charming children’s story, the protagonist, Emir, goes to the land of the gods and meets the god of insects and the god of toads and the god of the sky and some earth gods and goddesses. They talk to him about how every species has its own god/creator with whom they communicate and how every species has its own language that humans can tap into if they are open to other ways of knowing.

Many things that John Scott says in his interview resonate with things I’m thinking about and processing in my own life. Like self-forgiveness. According to Scott, he saw in his NDE the power of self-love and how it allows us to move forward and stop stunting our capabilities out of guilt and self-punishment. I was thinking about how to go about forgiving myself for mistakes of the past this morning before listening to Scott’s interview, and how I need to move on and quit berating myself, because it is just stunting my growth as an individual on so many fronts. I began to think that with all the support I’d been receiving in the form of synchronicity, I was ready to begin that journey!

And as fate would have it, another friend – not knowing about my dream message or my intention to follow its advice - sent me a link today that led me to find this quote from David H. Rosen in his Foreword to Jungian therapist James Hollis’s book titled The Archetypal Imagination, “With the power of the archetypal imagination available to all of us, we are invited to summon courage to take on the world anew, to relinquish outmoded identities and defenses, and to risk a radical re-imagining of the larger possibilities of the world and of the self.”

Here is the link to the interview Lisa Harrison did with John Scott if you're interested: http://lucas2012infos.wordpress.com/tag/john-scott-australian-artist-and-researcher/

A Cluster of Synchronicities Around the Idea of Self-Knowledge

A few weeks ago, I Woke-up with these words in my head: “As long as you have self-knowledge, you don’t need much else.”

Later that morning, while going through some of my old journals, I opened one at random to an entry having to do with Pramila Jayapal’s story about the matrilineal village in India where she was born titled A Pilgrimage to India: A Woman Revisits Her Homeland. Jayapal writes about her birth village as having good drinking water, higher wages, good education and how all these contributed to a higher standard of living. But the most important thing, in her opinion, was a pervasive  “Knowledge of self and realizing one’s place in the world (universe).” She explains that out of self-knowledge one develops gifts and makes contributions to society through self-expressions, thus benefiting all.

Last week, I was reading a book I’d started, Gurdjieff; An Introduction to His Life and Ideas by John Shirley, and came to this passage: ”But if it can happen, if self-knowledge can change people, then isn’t it a vibrant ray of light in a dark, brutal world?”

That same day, I 'happened' across the words of the seer Edgar Cayce in an Association for Research and Enlightenment update, ” For the beginning of knowledge is to know self and self’s relationship to God, then the relationship to the fellow man, then material knowledge so any entity, any soul, may become valuable, worth while, aggressively advancing in success” ~ 1249-1.

And yet another meaningful coincidence occurred today that helped to underscore the meaning of self-knowledge and pull all the information in this post together in my mind: coming across Carol Tavris's Wall Street Journal book review of social psychologist Jerome Kagan's latest book, Psychology's Ghosts. In the review, titled "Society and Its Discontents," Tavris writes:

"Many people will tell you that having many friends, a fortune or freedom is essential to happiness, but Mr. Kagan believes they are wrong. 'A fundamental requirement for feelings of serenity and satisfaction,' Mr. Kagan says, is 'commitment to a few unquestioned ethical beliefs' and the confidence that one lives in a community and country that promote justice and fair play." 

We have a long way to go to bring our culture back to a country that promotes ethics, justice, and fair play if information on the nightly news - both mainstream and alternative - is any indication of the sad state of affairs we now find ourselves in. But, I do believe, as more of us follow a path of inner-directed self knowledge we will, in the words of Primila Jayapal, develop gifts and make contributions to society through our unique self-expressions, that will help remedy the mess we are in and ultimately benefit all.

Ciao,

Jenna 

The Mind/Body Connection

Several years ago, my sister-in-law Becky was in Madison, Wisconsin as a witness in a trial for the company she then worked for. Between trial sessions, she avidly read the book “Meditation as Medicine: Activate the Power of Your Natural Healing” by Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D. and Cameraon Stauth. Becky found the book to be a fascinating read about the mind/body connection and the promotion of healing through what the author calls “Medical Meditation.” It is Dr. Khalsa's belief, backed by the research he presents to the reader, that Medical Meditation is a more powerful tool than regular meditation in healing because of the practitioner's combined use of meditation, postures, mudras, mantras, and breath work - all explained thoroughly in the book.

While boarding the plane to go home to Michigan, Becky noticed a person’s feet approximately 10 people in front of her in the aisle. They were covered by nothing more than socks and sandals. This seemed a bit odd to her, considering that the temperature outside was reaching a scant 16 degrees Fahrenheit. She moved up with her gaze and saw that the person wearing the sandals had a shaved head and was wearing a robe-type garment of red, orange, and gold and that his arm on one side was bare. Ah, she thought to herself, This must be a Buddhist monk. He isn't freezing to death, so he must surely know something about the mind/body connection! By now, my sister-in-law was very excited and made a vow to herself to talk to this person about some of the concepts about which she was reading as well as get his point of view on how Medical Meditation specifically affects the healing response. Becky has been interested for some time now in the mind/body connection, in part because of an on-going health challenge that a loved one in her life has been facing. As she made her way up the aisle, she envisioned herself asking the person seated next to the monk if she could exchange seats to be able to discuss with him all that was on her mind.

But when she got to her own seat, Becky got a pleasant surprise. Who should be sitting directly in her assigned seat but the same monk she had hoped to get a chance to talk with! She didn’t dare ask him to move, and just took the seat next to him.

At this point, the synchronicities just keep piling up, because he turned out to be no ordinary Buddhist monk. He was one, Matthieu Ricard, French interpreter for the Dalai Lama and a recognized expert on the mind/body connection in his own right. He had been in Madison at the invitation of the University of Wisconsin as part of a research experiment to measure the effects of meditation and prayer on healing. He told Becky that westerners do not fully understand the importance of the mind/body connection that eastern cultures take for granted. Of specific importance, from his perspective, are the Placebo Effect and the positive effect of prayer on healing. 

So, did Becky find out that a cutting-edge practice like Medical Meditation has the power - when practiced faithfully - to heal all of our diseases all of the time? Obviously, not. While Medical Meditation does activate the healing force  to a great degree and has been known to heal and reverse physical disease in many documented cases, we each have a destiny and personal path to walk in this life. Also, as Dr. Khalsa also explains in his book, healing can happen on many levels besides the physical.

However, I do resonate to the thoughts that Mathieu Ricard wrote in his blog dated May, 08, 2011 and titled, “How Can Meditation Help us to Learn Resilience in Times of Crisis?”:

“Meditation, or more accurately mind training, helps to cultivate the inner resources that give us confidence to deal with the ups and downs of life. These inner resources include inner freedom that makes us less vulnerable to ever-changing outer conditions. Here, inner freedom means being free from the influence of automatic mental processes that lead to animosity, obsession, envy, and other mental toxins that undermine our well being.”

In case you are interested in finding out more information about Matthieu Ricard and the Dalai Lama's affiliation with the “Mind and Life Institute,” an organization that continues to promote the findings of the effects of the mind and spirit on healing and wholeness, Mr. Ricard gave Becky the link to the institute’s website. It is www.mindandlife.org. 

The above information adds another thread to this already rich tapestry, as I bring my daughter Julie in to the scenario. Julie does volunteer grant writing for an organization called Mindfulness Schools that offers mindfulness meditation training to elementary school children in the Oakland, California schools. As I was telling her about her Aunt Becky’s synchronicity with Matthieu Ricard on the plane in Wisconsin and his affiliation with the Mind and Life Institute, I discovered that Julie, too, had heard - just recently - about the same organization. It turns out that someone at Mindfulness Schools had commented to her on the research being done at both the Mind and Life Institute and the University of Wisconsin on the positive physical, mental, and emotional effects of  mindfulness meditation on children!

I'm telling you, it never ceases to amaze me how we are all so connected on so many more levels than we can ever imagine...

Ciao until the next time,

Jenna

Who Needs the Internet When You Have Synchronicity?

This morning, my daughter, Julie, and I were showing my four-year old granddaughter, Serene, a map of the world and how to find North, South, East, and West directions. Somehow, the conversation got around to heading West from San Francisco where we live to arrive in the East—in Asia. Then, we explained to Serene how it was the explorer Columbus’ plan to sail west from Europe and eventually arrive in Asia as well, and that he knew he could do this because he understood that the earth is round. But we weren’t quite sure where exactly Columbus first landed. Julie thought the West Indies, and that sounded logical to me. Funny, we didn’t think to look it up on the Internet like we do everything else.

Later in the day, I was pulling books off the bookshelf—an ongoing task to sort which books I want to keep and which to give away when we move to our new house in a few months. This time, I pulled three books to check out: At a Journal Workshop by Ira Progoff, The Intuitive Way by Penny Pierce, and a book I wasn’t familiar with (maybe my daughter’s, I thought, or one I had bought that I haven’t read yet) titled Memory of Fire: Genesis by Eduardo Galeano.

As I continued browsing at random to see which books ‘spoke’ special words enticing me to keep them, I opened Galeano’s book to the exact page that gave a description of the place where Christopher Columbus first landed in 1492: a place the indigenous peoples of the area called Guanahani in the Bahamas! I had no idea what the book was even about before opening it to that page at random, nor have I ever heard of the little known island of Guanahani! But even more interesting to me than information about the linear progression of Columbus’ expedition, is Galeano’s ability to delve through interesting narrative into the darker implications of Columbus’ intrusions on the New World as well as what the blurb calls his gift to present the reader with a “unified history of the Western Hemisphere.”  

I am blown away by the immediacy with which the answer to our question about Columbus came back to us and enthralled by Galeano’s writing in general. The book is a keeper!

Ciao,

Jenna