SEPTE M B E R 20 1 1
THE
UNDERSTAND EDITION
EDITOR’S NOTE Understanding. To understand. Understandable. Just what do these terms mean in the everyday life of Lightworkers such as ourselves? To me, I know when I understand myself, others or a snippet of life itself because a state of peaceful calm washes over me; I feel certainty, wholeness and a deep sense of heightened perspective on my soul and its incarnation. A oneness with all. These moments are rare, yet I have also learned that the more I practise being open to understanding, the more frequent they become. And this feels blissful. As someone who was born curious, I have a need to understand. Sometimes this need causes me pain, because I struggle to let go of situations, people or experiences unless I can “get my head around them�. But more often than not, I am grateful for my need to dig deeper and explore the intricacies of our unique being and time on the planet. I love to adventure, and the quest for understanding is certainly one of those! Each individual has a threshold of understanding at which they feel they can rest easily. For some - scientists such as Einstein, perhaps - their desire to make sense of x, y and z knows no bounds. They keep seeking, and so ultimately they find. For others, they are at peace with what they have, no questions asked. Wherever you are on the spectrum, embrace the understanding of life thus far, and know that many more opportunities await in the days ahead. May you discover all you wish to understand, and understand all you discover. Love and light
Rachel Willis Editor Rachel@LightworkerMag.com
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CONTENTS FEATURES
COLUMNISTS
REGULARS
07
31
45
The Soul’s Journey Part III
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The Bond
17
Decoding The Cosmic Plan...
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Rewiring The Soul: Finding The Possible Self
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Connecting With Each Of The Realms Part I
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Discover Your Hidden Memory And Find The Real You
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Under The Spotlight
03
Glow with Health & Wellbeing
33
Lightworker in Training
35
Lightworker Challenge
37
Studying at the University of Life
39
The Authenticity Diary
41
Moments of Light
Once Upon A Time...
47
Stars And Planets
51
Paulo Coelho
53
Lightworker Loves...
54
Words Of Wisdom
55
The List
56
Featured Lightworker
CONTRIBUTORS FLAVIA-KATE PETERS
LUCY CASLON
Gabriella Kortsch
Flavia-Kate played the part of Louisa Von Trapp in the Sound of Music at the age of 13 and then Liesl (Sixteen Going on Seventeen) when she was 26 years old, passed all the major professional tap dancing examinations, and taught herself to swim - which she did in an instance - at five years old.
Lucy can walk on the ‘knuckles’ of her feet, her biggest fear is knocking her teeth out, and she turned down the chance to be in a promotional video for an up and coming band, to go out for dinner with a friend (who she never saw again) - the new band turned out to be Muse.
Gabriella has lived in six countries (Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Spain, USA, Mexico), was diagnosed with cancer in 2006, used her thoughts and feelings to deal with it, and is now 100% cancerfree, and had drinks with Liz Taylor in the 70’s in Houston, lunched with Sean Connery in the 80’s in Spain (to be fair, Micheline, his wife, was also there), swam with Guns ‘n Roses in Cancun & chatted with Julio Iglesias and Stevie Tyler in the 90’s in Miami.
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FEATUR
RES
The Soul’s Journey Part III LORRAINE FLAHERTY
The Bond LYNNE MCTAGGART
Decoding The Cosmic Plan... zoe hind
Rewiring The Soul: Finding The Possible Self GABRIELLA KORTSCH, Ph.D.
Connecting With Each Of The Realms Part I FLAVIA-KATE PETERS
Discover Your Hidden Memory And Find The Real You DR MENIS YOUSRY
Under The Spotlight HENRY CUMMING
FEATURES Understanding The Soul’s Journey Part III BY LORRAINE FLAHERTY “A single moment of understanding can flood a whole life with meaning.” Anon At one time or another, have we not all felt the desire to understand what our life purpose really is? Have you ever felt as though there was something that you were meant to be doing but you couldn’t quite put your finger on it? Have you ever found yourself going round and round in circles because you had just too many choices? Have you ever had a flash of inspiration or an idea that would change your life and make a difference to the world - only to find that in the light of a new day it seems too hard; or you think of all the reasons why it won’t work; the energy you needed to pursue it draining away as you talk yourself out of it? Do you sometimes wish that you had a crystal ball so that you could see into the future, to help you make the right decisions in your life? Or would you like to find a way of testing out whether these ideas would work - without investing your time and energy and money? Well now there is a way that you can… Future life progression enables you to explore the future in a way that is safe, practical and easy to do.
How does it work? Actually, it is very simple process that more and more people are starting to employ; whether as individuals or large corporations. If you stop for a moment and think about it, you can get a pretty good idea of where your life will take you if you carry on travelling on the same path you are on now. If you stay in the same job, living in the same place and remaining in the same relationship - you don’t have to be a psychic to predict where you will end up. If things are working and you are happy with where you are going then there may be no need to change, perhaps you may wish to make a few minor adjustments to help to create an even better life for yourself, but for those who are not happy, not completely satisfied with what they have, then there may be questions that need to be answered. Many people never really take time out to stop and think about where their choices will lead them and, as a result, never create a definite plan for their life; choosing the goals that are important to them. This can be a dangerous thing. It means that they get caught up in the dreams and the goals of the people around them: family, peers, significant others.
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BIOG Lorraine is a personal development coach, using the tools of Hypnotherapy, NLP, Past Life Regression, Future Life Progression and the Life Between Lives to help people reach their full potential. She is a director of the Past and Future Life Society and is committed to bringing these techniques and the benefits they provide into greater public awareness. She also teaches Clinical Hypnosis to medical students and midwives at schools and universities all over the country, including Oxford and Cambridge. Her first book ‘Past Lives: Adventures through Time and Space’ will be out later this year.
CONTACT www.lorraineflaherty.com
In my time teaching at medical schools it was astounding just how many of the students had no real interest in medicine; the dream of being a doctor belonged to their parents and, with no real thought of what they wanted for themselves, they went along with it for an easy life. Seven years training is a long time to commit to something that you have no passion for. It is no wonder many in that field are not as enthusiastic about helping others as they might be if their job was their true passion. So having a clear idea of who you are, what you want, what your passion is and where your skills lie is hugely important. How many live their lives in quiet frustration; dreams of another life just below the surface? Many of my clients come to see me at points in their lives where they feel the need for a change; where they are no longer happy or satisfied and they want to understand more about themselves and what is possible for them in the future. The easiest way for them to find out is to explore their future life whilst in the state of hypnosis. Once they get access to their subconscious mind - the part of the mind which stores all the information about them; their successes, their failures, their strengths and weaknesses; information that is not always easy to access when in the waking conscious state - it is very easy for them to see where life will take them if they stay on the same path. Generally they float out five or ten years into the future, although they can choose any time frame that best works for them. Once they see what their current choices will mean - whether to do with their lifestyle, career, financial situation, relationships or new projects they may be thinking of starting, they can decide how much of this they are really happy with - anything that works they get to keep, anything that doesn’t work they have the wisdom to change. The next part of the process is taking them into an alternative view of the future where they have already made some changes; this can be something they have been curious about or perhaps something they had not even thought of. I had one client who was struggling with her job, she was incredibly organised and conscientious, but had great difficulty saying no to anyone, including her partner who gave her very little help around the home, even though they both worked the same long hours. She found that her workload was increasing by the day, she was exhausted and felt very overwhelmed by how much others expected of her. She knew that something had to change but was not sure how to go about it. As she floated into her most probable future she saw that she had married her partner, they had moved to the country and she had two small children. He worked in the City and commuted every day, which meant only spending time with the children at weekends as they were already in bed by the time he got home and not yet up when he had to leave. They were living in a comfortable house and she was able to juggle her time around the children, running the home and maintaining her part time job. She was comfortable but felt a little stretched. As I took her into her alternative future she found herself in the same house, same children, only this time she had more time on her hands. She had recognised her talents in the workplace and as a result had a much better job. This meant that she had more money and had employed someone to help with the house and the children. She felt much more empowered in this life although was not sure that she liked the idea of someone else spending so much time with her children. They did get to have nice
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FEATURES holidays and so there was more quality time as a family.
Exploring the best The next part of the session involves taking people into their most fabulous future, the one that is available to them if they make the most of all of their skills and talents; talents that may be dormant; that they may not even realise they have, as they have been buried away and untapped. They are also instructed to tap into a future where they have utilised all of the opportunities that are available to them; that they may not yet see. For my client it was a huge revelation, she saw herself in a much bigger house. This time she and her husband were working together; in all ways; keeping the house and running a business, something that she had often thought about but had never believed was possible. They worked from home most of the time and were able to schedule their hours around the children, meaning much more quality time as a family. When I asked her what had changed in order for this to be a possibility she laughed and said “I started saying ‘No’, I recognised how good I am at running things, whether my home or my job and decided to use those skills to create my own business.” Then she laughed and said “The first thing that changed was that I told my partner in no uncertain terms that he was to start helping out with the cooking and the cleaning and the ironing, and he said he only let me do it all because he was afraid that I would think he was not good enough at it. I see now that I am a bit of a perfectionist and would rather do things myself than them not be perfect; time to let that one go.” When she came out of the trance she was very excited, having stepped into that life for that short time she had experienced how good it felt to be in control of her life; to have her own business, a better relationship with her partner and her future children; all because she was able to see that her inability to say ‘No’ at times was holding her back.
Having a full understanding of who you are destined to be in this life is invaluable, but have you ever wondered who you will be in your next life? More will be revealed in the next edition…
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She left determined to implement the changes. I saw her a few months later and she looked and sounded like a different person, no longer stressed and exhausted. She had spoken with her boss and insisted that her workload be reduced. He agreed without question, not wanting to lose her. She spoke with her partner, who had turned out to be very willing to help out more; he had expressed surprise that she hadn’t spoken up sooner. She was amazed to discover that he had been planning to speak to her about moving out of London and he became really excited about the idea of getting married, starting a family and setting up a business together. She enrolled herself on a part time business management course so that when they were ready to go she would have all the skills she needed to make her business a success. She told me that once she had experienced this version of the future there was nothing that would stop her from having it. What is really wonderful is that even though my clients see these events years off in the future, once the seed has been planted, the time frame often shifts and they find things happening far sooner than they thought. So, if you have ever felt that you would enjoy a more enlightened view of the future, this process could be for you. Once you have stepped into a life full of potential, why would you settle for anything less?
FEATURES The Bond BY LYNNE MCTAGGART We sense that we have reached the end of something. Since the millennium, commentators of every variety have been trying to get a handle on the collective significance of the continuous crises besetting us in modern times: banking crises, terrorist crises, sovereign debt crises, climate-change crises, energy crises, food crises, ecological crises, man-made and otherwise. “The world as we know it is going down,” a Wall Street broker told reporters in September 2008, after Lehman Brothers collapsed and Morgan Stanley threatened to follow suit. It is the “end of capitalism as we know it,” declared the film-maker Michael Moore when the American auto giant General Motors filed for bankruptcy. It is the end of our dependence on fossil fuel, announced President Barack Obama, about the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion. It is the end of nature, wrote Bill McKibben in his book of the same name. It is the end of oil, wrote the journalist Paul Roberts in his book of the same name. It is the end of food because it is the end of oil, declared Roberts in his follow-up book. For those who take stock in the Mayan Long Count calendar and the apocalyptic significance of 2012, it is the beginning of the end of the world. But the crises we face on many fronts are symptomatic of a deeper problem, with more potential repercussions than those of any single cataclysmic event. They are simply a measure of the vast disparity between our definition of ourselves and our truest essence. For hundreds of years we have acted against nature by ignoring our essential connectedness and defining ourselves as separate from our world. We’ve reached the point where we can no longer live according to this false view of who we really are. What’s ending is the story we’ve been told up until now about who we are and how we’re supposed to live – and in this ending lies the only path to a better future. In this book, I have an audacious mission: to revolutionize the way you live your life. This book is going to rewrite the scientific story you’ve been told about who you are, because the current version has reduced us to our lowest common denominator. At this very moment you live contrary to your truest nature. I hope to help you to recapture your birthright, which has been sabotaged not only by modern society but, more fundamentally, by modern science. I wish to wake you up to who you really are, to do nothing less than to return to you your authentic self. The leitmotif of our present story is the hero up against it all. We take it for granted that our life’s journey is meant to be a struggle. Consequently we remain constantly vigilant, poised to wrestle with every behemoth – at home, at work, among our acquaintances and friends – that strays across our path. No matter how pleasant our lives, the vast majority of us maintain a stance of operating contra mundi, with every encounter some sort of battle to be fought: against the co-workers who seek to usurp our jobs or promotions, or the students who raise the bell curve against which we are judged; against the people who take our seat on the train, the shops that overcharge us, the neighbours who have a Mercedes when we drive a Volvo, and even the husband or wife who has the temerity to insist on maintaining an opinion that is different from ours.
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FEATURES This idea that we operate against the world has its origin in our basic understanding that this self of ours, the thing we call I, exists as a separate entity, a unique creation of genetic code that lives apart from everything else out there.
BIOG Lynne McTaggart is one of the preeminent spokespersons on consciousness, the new physics and the science of spirituality, and the award-winning author of six books, including The Intention Experiment, which has been published in eighteen languages. She is also co-executive director of two publishing companies, which publish some of the world’s most respected health and spiritual newsletters, including What Doctors Don’t Tell You and Living the Field. She lives in London.
CONTACT www.lynnemctaggart.com www.thebond.info
The most enduring statement we make about the human condition, the central fact of our existence, is our solitude, our sense of separation from the world. We regard as self-evident that we exist as self-contained, isolated beings, living out our individual dramas, while everything else – other atoms and other cells, other living things, the land masses, the planets, even the air we breathe – exists as something distinct and wholly separate. Although we begin life from the uniting of two entities, from there on in, science tells us, we are essentially on our own. The world is the irrefutable other, carrying on impassively with or without us. Our hearts, we believe, beat finally and painfully alone. This paradigm of competitive individualism offers us a view of life as a heroic struggle for dominion over hostile elements and a share of strictly limited resources. There’s not enough out there, and others may be fitter than we are, so we have to do our damnedest to get hold of it first. A multitude of influences – religious, political, economic, scientific, and philosophical – writes the story that we live by. Nevertheless, most of the big ideas we have about the universe and what it is to be human derive from three revolutions: the Scientific Revolution, or the Age of Enlightenment, and the two Industrial Revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which transformed the cultural and socio-economic conditions of the West into our modern developed world. These movements largely created the modern sense of our own individuality by drastically altering our vision of the universe from a harmonious, benevolent, and interconnected whole to an amalgam of separate and unrelated things, competing with each other for survival. The Scientific Revolution launched a relentless march toward atomization, as scientists believed they could understand the whole of the universe by studying its individual components. With the publication of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics, described a universe in which all matter was thought to move according to certain fixed laws within three-dimensional time and geometrical space. Newton’s laws of motion and gravity depict the universe essentially as a machine, a vast clockwork of separate parts that can always be relied upon to follow predictable behaviour. Once Newtonian laws demonstrated that the trajectory of virtually everything, from single objects to the motion of the planets, could be reduced to a mathematical equation, the world came to be viewed as dependably mechanistic. Newtonian laws also demonstrated that things exist independently of each other, complete in themselves, with their own inviolate boundaries. We ended with the hairs on our skin, at which point the rest of the universe began. The French philosopher René Descartes wrote of man’s essential separation from his universe in a philosophy that banished any kind of holistic intelligence from nature and portrayed matter as mechanistic and corpuscular. Even our material bodies lay outside our conscious selves: one more well-oiled and highly dependable machine.
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The Newtonian paradigm of world-as-machine was further reinforced with the arrival of the most influential machine of all: the steam engine. Steam and the development of machine tools not only transformed the production of food, fuel, heating, manufacturing, and transport; they also profoundly affected human beings by separating them from the natural world. In every way life was broken down into regular sequences. Work was now dictated by an assembly line, and workers became one more cog in the wheel of production. Time was parcelled out in minutes, and not through the seasons of planting and harvest, and marked through the punching of a clock. The vast majority of people working in factories no longer followed the rhythms of nature, but the rhythms of the machine. The Second Industrial Revolution, in the nineteenth century, introduced modern technology with the advent of steel and petroleum manufacturing and led to the rise of a middle class, which in turn paved the way for modern capitalism and the promotion of the individual and his interests. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 and considered one of the founding philosophies of economic theory, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith argued that the “invisible hand” of the market, created by natural supply and demand, and competition between self-interested individuals would naturally best serve society as a whole. He famously believed that we do best for others by giving way to this fundamentally selfish nature of ours and looking out for Number One: “By pursuing his own interest, [the individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he intends to promote it.” Undoubtedly the scientific discovery with the most pervasive hand in our current worldview is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. When assembling his ideas for On the Origin of Species, the young Darwin was profoundly influenced by the concerns of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus on population explosion and limited natural resources. Darwin concluded that, since there wasn’t enough to go around, life must evolve through what he termed a “struggle for existence”. “As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive,” Darwin wrote in Origin, “there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.” Darwin was at pains to note that his catchphrase “struggle for existence ”was not literal but highly elastic, encompassing everything from the search of tree roots for water to the reliance of a pack of animals on each other. It was actually the British philosopher Herbert Spencer who first coined the term “survival of the fittest”, after an enthusiastic reading of On the Origin of Species; after some persuasion Darwin accepted the term,4 eventually adding the subtitle: Or The Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Malthus had provided Darwin with a central metaphor to explain the mechanism behind nature’s drive to propagate and thrive, and as an inadvertent consequence, Darwin unleashed upon the world a metaphor that came to represent the human experience: life as war. An individual or population thrives only at another one’s expense. Despite Darwin’s liberal use of the term, almost immediately the narrower meaning of the metaphor stuck, offering a scientific framework for all the various burgeoning social and economic movements of the day. Most subsequent interpretations of Darwin’s work, even in his lifetime, promoted a vision of all aspects of life as a battle over scarce resources, in which only the toughest and most single-minded survived.
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FEATURES The English biologist Thomas Huxley, the Richard Dawkins of his day, dubbed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his role as Darwin’s vociferous mouthpiece, generously extended the view of dog- eat-dog competition in his belief that it was responsible for the evolution of culture, ideas, and even the human mind. Huxley was convinced that it was in the natural order for human beings to put their own interests above all others. Thanks to newly invented telegraphic cables and advances in printmaking, the wider interpretation of Darwin’s theory quickly swept across the globe. “Survival of the fittest” was a perfect fit with Smith’s brand of enlightened competition in the marketplace, but besides Western capitalism, the theory of natural selection was also used to justify the Chinese revolution and the “whitening” of Latin American indigenous culture with European stock. Writers such as the Russian-born Ayn Rand used fiction as thinly disguised polemic to applaud the process whereby each of us attempts to gulp the biggest breath of a strictly limited amount of oxygen. The metaphoric representation of life as a race to the finish line has been used as intellectual justification for most aspects of modern industrialized society, which regards competition as society’s perfect shake-down mechanism, separating out the economically, politically, and socially weak from the strong. The winners have a right to winnertakes-all because the human race as a whole would benefit from it. The final important influence on our modern scientific definition of ourselves occurred in 1953, when the molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick claimed to have unlocked the “secret of life” by unravelling deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the genetic coding in the nucleus of every cell. Thereafter many scientists came to believe that within the coiled double helix lay every individual’s lifelong blueprint. Each of our cells, equipped with a full pack of genes, would live out its preprogrammed future, while we were held hostage by our genetic destiny, powerless to do anything other than observe the drama unfolding. As with every other kind of matter, the human being had also been atomized – reduced, in a sense, to a mathematical equation. Modern-day interpreters of Darwin, the neo-Darwinists, have woven competition and struggle into the latest theories of our biological make-up by proposing that every part of us acts selfishly in order to survive; our genes – even our ideas – are engaged in competition with other gene pools and thoughts for domination and longevity.7 Indeed some scientists invest genes with the power to control every aspect of our lives, considering the body an accidental by-product of a greater evolutionary endeavour. Modern evolutionary theory has removed any vestigial sense of moral design or beneficence from the natural world: nature has no stake in cooperation or partnership, but only likes winners, of any sort. The vision of a purposeful and harmonious whole has been replaced with blind evolutionary force, in which human beings no longer play a conscious part. Many psychologists argue that competitiveness is hardwired within us, a natural biological urge as inherent as our basic urge to survive. After we stop fighting over food, water, shelter, and mates, the theory goes, we begin competing over more ephemeral prizes: power, status, and, most recently, fame. Consequently for more than 300 years our worldview has been shaped by a story that describes isolated beings competing for survival on a lonely planet in an indifferent uni-
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verse. Life as defined by modern science is essentially predatory, self-serving, and solitary. These metaphors – the mechanistic view of the universe, the “red in tooth and claw” sense of ourselves – have seeped into our consciousness to permeate our every day. Our paradigm for living today has been built upon the premise that competition is the essential calling card of existence. Every modern recipe in our lives has been drawn from our interpretation of life as individual and solitary struggle, with every-man-for-himself competition an inherent part of the business of living. Our entire Western economic model is built on the notion that competition in a free-market economy is essential to drive excellence and prosperity. In our relationships we extol our inherent right to individual happiness and self-expression above all else. We educate our young by encouraging them to compete and excel over their peers. The currency of most modern twocars-in-every-garage neighbourhoods is comparison and one-upmanship. The world, as Woody Allen once put it, “is one big cafeteria”. The individualistic, winner-take-all zeitgeist of modern times is to blame for many of the crises we presently face in our society, particularly the excesses of the financial sector, with its insistence on a bigger and better profit every year, at any cost. Before being jailed for his part in the energy company Enron’s vast array of fraudulent activities, CEO Jeffrey Skilling bragged that his favourite book was neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, and he periodically fired the entirety of those of his workforce achieving the bottom 10 per cent results as a means of improving the overall “fitness” of the herd. This mindset is responsible for the raft of deceit that now goes on in every sector of society, from the 50 per cent of college students known to cheat in exams to corporate cheating, even in sectors designed for the public interest. Up to three-quarters of all published research on pharmaceutical drugs in the medical literature is now believed to be ghostwritten by public relations firms hired by drug companies, with serious and even potentially fatal side effects routinely concealed. The danger inherent in our current worldview is apparent in the ways that it has been taken to its extreme conclusion and used as a justifying principle for sociopathic behaviour, from mass murder during the Third Reich and the eugenics of the twentieth century, to modern ethnic cleansing and serial murder. Eric Harris, for instance, was sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Natural Selection” on 20 April 1999, when he and Dylan Klebolt, armed with propane bombs, assorted Molotov cocktails, an Intratec TEC-DC9 blowback-operated semi-automatic handgun, a Hi-point 995 Carbine semiautomatic pistol, a Savage 67-H pump-action shotgun, and a Stevens 311D double-barrel sawn-off shotgun, sauntered into Columbine High School and opened fire. Although our Newtonian vantage point has afforded us technological mastery over our lives, the worldwide collapse of our global economic model in 2008, the current ecological crises, the threatened shortages of water and food, and the exhaustion of petroleum sources all expose the extreme limitations of this mindset, which now threatens our planet with extinction. On a personal level it has left most of us with a distinctly hollow feeling, as though something profound – our very humanity – has been trampled on in our daily wrestle with the world. We urgently need a new story to live by. For the past 15 years, ever since I began pondering the meaning of cutting-edge discov-
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FEATURES eries in physics and other branches of science, I have been struck by how much of scientific theory, and consequently our model of the way things work, is currently going up in smoke. With every new finding in the sciences, yet another cherished notion we hold about ourselves is overturned. An entirely new scientific story is emerging that challenges many of our Newtonian and Darwinian assumptions, including our most basic premise: the sense of things as separate entities in competition for survival. The latest evidence from quantum physics offers the extraordinary possibility that all of life exists in a dynamic relationship of cooperation. Quantum physicists now recognize that the universe is not a collection of separate things jostling around in empty space. All matter exists in a vast quantum web of connection, and a living thing at its most elemental is an energy system involved in a constant transfer of information with its environment. Rather than a cluster of individual, self-contained atoms and molecules, objects and living beings are now more properly understood as dynamic and protean processes, in which parts of one thing and parts of another continuously trade places. This revolution is not confined to physics. Extraordinary new discoveries in biology and the social sciences have profoundly altered our view of the relationship between living things and their environment. Frontier biologists, psychologists, and sociologists have all found evidence that individuals are far less individual than we thought they were. Between the smallest particles of our being, between our body and our environment, between ourselves and all of the people with whom we are in contact, between every member of every societal cluster, there is a Bond – a connection so integral and profound that there is no longer a clear demarcation between the end of one thing and the beginning of another. The world essentially operates, not through the activity of individual things, but in the connection between them – in a sense, in the space between things. The most essential aspect of life is not the isolated thing, whether a subatomic particle or fully-fledged living being. It is the relationship itself: the inseparable, irreducible Bond. This connection – the space in between – holds the key to the life of every organism, from subatomic particles to large-scale societies, and also the key to our viable future. These discoveries suggest that the idea of the individual as an individual thing distinct from other things is a fallacy. There is nothing – from our subatomic molecules to our entire being – that we can define with any certainty as a wholly separate body that can be isolated and ring-fenced. The “individual” is only the sum of an infinite number of inexactly defined parts, and the parts as we currently understand them are shifting and transforming at every moment. In every way individual things live life inextricably attached and bonded to an “other”. Nature’s most basic impulse is not a struggle for dominion but a constant and irrepressible drive for wholeness. These new revelations from the frontiers of science represent a reversal of the process of atomization that began with the Age of Enlightenment. The new story that is being written around the globe adds up to the beginning of a recovery of our holistic view of ourselves as inextricably bound to everything we see around us. These discoveries hold not only vast implications about how we choose to define ourselves, but also vast implications about how we ought to live our lives. They suggest that all our societal creations, invested as they are in competition and individuality, run counter to our most fundamental being – that a drive for cooperation and partnership,
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not dominance, is fundamental to the physics of life and the biological make-up of all living things. They imply that most of us in the developed world are not living in harmony with our true nature. That we are constantly affecting and being affected by all matter in a constant and ever-evolving Bond demands a drastic change in the way we relate to ourselves and all other living things. We need some new rules to live by. We need another way to be. This book offers a new metaphor to live by. It rejects the central tenet of orthodox science: that matter, even subatomic matter, exists in isolation and is complete in itself. It suggests that the dance of life is not a solo, but a duet – that every part of you connects to an essential and irreducible Bond. It acknowledges that each of us is so tightly interconnected with our world that we can only hope to live authentically when we live by a very different story. We need to adopt a new definition of what it means to be human. We need to look at our universe with a fresh pair of eyes. Applying these new discoveries to every aspect of our lives requires nothing less than making ourselves anew. The Bond ultimately posits an alternative future in which a new paradigm for living in partnership and connection replaces the metaphor of battle. I hope to offer you an entirely new vision of yourself and your place in the world, not as its master or its competitor, but as its cooperative partner. That new vision starts with the understanding – shocking in the breadth of its implications – that nothing in the world is separate. In fact in the most basic sense there is no such thing as a thing. Extract from The Bond…
Connecting through the space between us. The Bond Published by Hay House 5th September 2011 £12.99
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FEATURES Decoding The Cosmic Plan... BY ZOE HIND The amazing thing about Astrology is that we are being given guidance at each step of the way to help our souls transcend through a massive dimensional shift. Each chart holds a message, and a mission, should we choose to accept it... especially for our collective consciousness at the Full Moons, Solstices and Equinox points. Never before have I seen such clear direction, and the beauty is that we are not given more than we can handle, if we tackle the task at hand. Decoding the cosmic messages and their powerful meaning is a pleasure and a blessing. We can all do this. Astrology is no longer the domain of the few. The planets are vibrating through all of us, all the time, and as the Earth’s atmosphere and the density of our bodies get thinner and lighter, we are all able to tune into and feel these resonances for ourselves. Universal flow knows only perfect timing and we are being shown where the stepping stones lie, so that by looking at the recent and approaching chart messages, we can see what needs to be done now in order to reach the next level. We are still within the influential tensions of the recent Grand Cross configuration, which asked us to look deeply inside ourselves. Mars in Cancer (outrage, community) opposition to Pluto in Capricorn (power, establishment) brought anger up from the depths for cleansing. Uranus in Aries is revolutionizing our way of thinking. Rebellion and breaking down old structures is the norm for this planet, and as it now forms a square to Pluto, the civil unrest and ensuing people’s rights that began at the conjunction of these two mighty planets in the late sixties is now being tested and carried forwards.
Zoe is running an astrological rebalancing workshop where you can work with and discover the dynamics of your own birth chart. 24th September in Camden, London.
When Venus linked with the Sun, Moon and Mercury Retrograde in outspoken Leo, consumer businesses were targeted with fires and looting, social media came under attack, but the real issue raised was that the youth have no guidance when society’s leaders – government and industry - display such staggering feats of greed and corruption with no accountability. Sovereign Leo leads from the heart. Saturn seeks to rebalance the legal, media and education systems demanding discipline and responsibility from the top down. Thus begins a long-term clean-up campaign. On August 13th the Aquarius Full Moon conjunct Neptune reminds us to be our true essence. Change happens from the inside. Aquarius IS universal flow, unconditional love and self-reliance. The spiritual warrior is here to show us that there is a new dimensional way of being. This involves the complete breakthrough from old emotional patterns that have become shackles and dead weight to the soul’s essential expression. Neptune and Chiron urge us to take the lessons seriously, to apply what we have learnt
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BIOG Zoe works with your own unique birth chart and compares it with the positions of the planets today, revealing and explaining the windows of opportunity that are opening up around you and how to make the most of your time. Her insights help to give you a better understanding of yourself, your purpose, your loved ones, your talents and the best timing for effortless success in all areas of your life. Zoe also provides full chart interpretation services as well as running classes and workshops.
CONTACT zoehind7@gmail.com www.astrozo.com
for deep and lasting healing and not to fall into victim conditioning so that we repeat the same painful scenarios. Gentle and reflective Neptune is the higher self we should listen to. Elevating above the murky waters of human need, she draws us up to greater heights with dignity and grace and opens the door to a more empowered way of being. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, not the other way round. The choice is clear. Step up to a new level of interacting and relating in full conscience; we need to love ourselves before we can ask for the love and respect of others. Astrological perspective on relationships... The Sun now passes through the sign of Virgo, from late August up to the Autumn Equinox on 21st September. Virgo is the higher expression of Mercury and our desire to gain clarity and organise our thoughts is strong at this time. Virgo has the keen perspective of the hawk. Viewing all situations from above, the Virgo in all of us desires to OVERstand. But where Virgo is driven by the mind, for relationships INNERstanding is what really needs to take place. (The word Understand derives from the original Interstand). As we approach the Equinox, the planetary alignments and Mayan cosmological wisdom are showing a need for radical inner recalibration. The Sun representing masculine dynamic power balances with the Moon’s feminine receptive energy as day and night hours reach equal levels. The Sun passes into Libra - the sign of relationships - and the cosmic forces call us to bring into balance our own masculine and feminine energies: to honour the sacred union. Entering into the darkest days of the year, we prepare psychologically to journey into our inner space to cleanse and nurture our essential being in preparation for the next active cycle of life the following Spring. We now have the courage to see where blocks may reside and adjustments can be made in order to live in harmony with ourselves, others and the Universe. So what is relationship? It’s certainly not what we have been led to believe. In a cosmic awareness where everything is an interconnected field of vibration, there is no separation and there can be no loneliness. As within, so without... when we resonate in alignment with our true vibration, we experience a deep sense of well being and effortlessly attract mutually beneficial relationships. Acting as giant transmitters/receivers, when we love ourselves, we emit and attract beings at the highest frequency to us. With the perspective of Virgo, if we can change our matrix programming now - once and for all - we need not suffer the delusion of corrupt ‘love’ anymore. Higher love is the motto of Aquarius, it’s time to put it into practice. To affinity and beyond...!
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FEATURES Rewiring The Soul: Finding The Possible Self BY GABRIELLA KORTSCH, PH.D. Introduction A Marriage of Psyche and Soul Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them – every day begin the task anew. St. Francis de Sales This book was written for you. It’s no accident that you picked it up or decided to buy it. There are no coincidences and the fact that you are holding this book in your hands simply means that you have now come to a place where you can begin, should you so decide, to apply its information. Lest you are put off by its deceptive simplicity, each chapter contains, in distilled and synthesized form, teachings that will allow you to live a life filled with well-being and satisfaction that in most cases can only be understood after many years of searching. Often the ways by which I came to understand the information were very roundabout, and included not only experiential living where I took my share of emotional risks, but also a pursuit of knowledge and understanding that took me down many intellectual, academic and professional paths. Much joy but also heartache, pain and many tears went into what I’ve extracted into the essence of this book and I offer it from the bottom of my heart and with much love so that you, the reader, may apply it in order to make your own life rich, abundant, and filled with love, joy, peace, harmony, and inner freedom. An extensive appendix and bibliography have been included with information about books, authors, films, videos, documentaries, and websites that have played an important role in bringing me to the place of understanding at which I currently find myself, for the reader interested in pursuing some of those paths, or even just for the curious reader who wants to compare my wandering with his or her own path. Whether what meant much to me coincides with your own steps towards growth and understanding is less important than the recognition that ultimately all roads truly do lead to Rome. Each chapter can stand on its own, and can be read as such, and therefore it is not necessary to go through the book in chronological order. Many of the most important and key pieces of information that this book contains are repeated over and over again in different words and in different chapters, with slightly different twists, because they are all so interlocked. What affects one part of this soul we are trying to rewire in order to get closer to the place we intended ourselves to arrive at when we decided to come here, affects all others, and the method by which you achieve this merging with one part of your soul, automatically affects the other parts. This is the way I know how to do it. It is – by no means – the only way.
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BIOG Gabriella Kortsch, PhD, Rewiring the Soul, is a practicing psychotherapist who works with an international clientele in Marbella, Spain using an integral focus on body, mind and soul. She has published a newsletter in English and Spanish since 2004, facilitates monthly workshops and broadcast a weekly radio show both locally in Spain, as well as on the internet for seven years.
CONTACT www.advancedpersonal therapy.com www.rewiringthesoul.com
Throughout this book the path to resolving everyday life and its problems while simultaneously converging with the inner quest for connection with the soul is signposted. This process allows life to take on a revolutionary new meaning: resolving personal and interpersonal issues while keeping the inner connection to the soul in mind leads to unprecedented growth that is simply not possible if psycho-emotional matters and spiritual concerns are not combined. Only to grow psychologically and emotionally is not enough. And only to grow spiritually is not enough either. All three dimensions need to be developed in order to realize your full potential. If you are willing to assume total responsibility for the self and to start what is an on-going journey, you will quickly begin to glimpse the first fruits of the ultimate goal: inner well-being, freedom, peace, harmony and joy. This book sets out the pathway to self-mastery and self-discovery and walking that pathway will be the most exciting adventure of your life. The main principle upon which this entire book is based, is the fact that if we do not begin our way back to our soul – our true core - within ourselves, from the smallest corners of our selves outward, in order to bring ourselves and our lives to a place where we are truly well, where we can love ourselves and then emanate this love outward, then we will not reach the goal, because we will have started the process from the outside in. If you want to play pro basketball, you are going to have to start by learning how to dribble. If you want to be a cordon bleu chef, you’ll have to learn how to separate eggs. And if you want to find your way back to your soul, you’ll have to learn how to love yourself, recognizing that this “self” that you are learning how to love is your inner essence, your soul, and learning how to love yourself is the foundation of each of the chapters of this book. Learning how to love yourself is a fundamentally underlying principle of all that follows, and conversely, all that follows is built on loving yourself. By loving yourself, all the other issues this book addresses can be resolved, and by loving yourself, your life will flow in ways you can now only imagine. If you resonate with the talk about soul in this book, then you are in the right place. But if you find the talk about soul distressing, off-putting, ludicrous, or nonsensical, you may nevertheless find that there is so much other, more psycho-emotional material you resonate with, that the talk about soul is peripheral enough that you can allow it to rest on the sidelines and nurture yourself with all the other parts. It is understandable if you feel uncomfortable with talk about the soul because our society does not often take us there – although for those who are observant, it is happening more and more in books, films, documentaries – even in some weekly television series. But if you are uneasy with such talk, and yet feel pulled to continue with the book, think of the soul as your intuition, as the voice that sometimes speaks to you, and that you – probably – most often do not listen to. Think of it as a part of yourself that you have not yet discovered: that you have not yet become acquainted with. Extract from Rewiring the Soul: Finding the Possible Self. Available as paperback and e-book for Kindle and Kindle applications.
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FEATURES Connecting With Each Of The Realms Part I - The Mermaids Realm BY FLAVIA-KATE PETERS Have you ever felt a great connection with magical beings such as faeries, elves, mermaids, leprachauns and angels? Perhaps you are petite and willowy and have been likened to a faery, or often wear greens and browns and prefer to be in nature. Maybe you can’t help but rescue animals or people, putting them first before yourself. If you feel or look differently to others in this way then chances are that you have spent other lifetimes in the celestial or elemental realms.
BIOG Flavia Kate Peters is widely regarded as the UK’s Angel and Faery advocate. Flavia Kate is a natural spiritual healer and clairvoyant who offers angel guidance & healing sessions. She also gives workshops and talks at events such as Mind Body Spirit Festival, Tree of Life and many more throughout the year. As a successful writer, she is a regular columnist for FAE Magazine and her teachings and stories are featured in magazines & books including The Wonder of Unicorns by Diana Cooper. Flavia Kate has been a guest on TV chat shows as well as for BBC Radio. Her meditation CD ‘Away with the Fairies!’ was an instant hit for people of all ages. She is a singer with the band Daughters Of Gaia and and regularly performs throughout the UK with band founder Barbara Meiklejohn Free as a duo called ‘Heaven and Earth’. You can follow Flavia Kate’s
events diary at www. angel-lights.co.uk and contact her at mail@ angel-lights.co.uk
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There are many people who are indeed incarnated elemental and angelic beings who have come, at this critical time, to help heal the planet and its inhabitants. Once we have discovered the identity of our spiritual realm of origin we can understand our behaviours, personality and where we are coming from (or come from, even!) It is then that we can focus on our natural traits and strengths to use the gifts that we will find are naturally within us, to help and heal in many ways. Over the next four editions of Lightworker Magazine, I shall be guiding you through powerful visualisation meditations to enable you to realise which, and to connect you with the realm you are from. Meditation is a wonderful tool that gives us access to different dimensions and this month I am taking you to the ocean to connect with the Mermaids… Mermaids are the guardian angels of the Seas, empowering goddesses of the waters. Their task is to look after and nurture the plants, encouraging them to grow, and to protect the fish and all other creatures within the waters. Mermaids are magical beings who can manifest their desires in an instant. All they have to do is visualise what they want and it is theirs in an instant. This is how they heal plants and creatures, by seeing them as ‘whole’ in their mind’s eye, and it is done. The mermaids’ magic is deep and nurturing, and can answer our wishes to anything requiring abundance, prosperity and affairs of the heart. They are waiting to reveal our own inner mermaid, so that we can rein in the power, the magic and manifestation abilities that are waiting to surface. You may have been a mermaid if you are drawn to the sea or if you are a natural swimmer. Perhaps you wear your hair long and love to brush it. Incarnated mermaids tend to drink a lot of water and often suffer from cold hands and feet and are generally cold, even in warm weather. Many feel a connection with the ancient civilisations of Atlantis or Lemuria. Mermaids tend to have hourglass figures, and not forgetting mermen who are often trim and athletic, sporting long locks too. So dive right in and stir the siren within you, to uncover your own hidden treasure...
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FEATURES Discover Your Hidden Memory And Find The Real You BY DR MENIS YOUSRY The core of how we come to know ourselves hinges on the perfect dance between our deep inner world of feelings and our outer actions. The mysterious discord between these two worlds – our actions and how we intend to act – is interwoven with waves of inner processes that colour our emotions and affect our decision-making and actions; they can be the making or the breaking of us.
We are the reflections of our beliefs Each one of us wants to have health, wealth, good relationships and happiness. Many teachers and books speak about our potential to achieve anything that we want in life. Even though we might believe them – consciously and intellectually – we can find ourselves disappointed to observe that we still don’t get everything we want out of life and carry on struggling to achieve our dreams. It can be even more frustrating to observe that our communications, relationships and interactions with others do not match our honest intentions and what we deeply desire. We have all experienced in our communications with people how, on many occasions, we do not say the things that we meant to say at the time. Later on, this can lead to selfdoubt, as we realize that we were correct in our thoughts but were unable to act, even though we knew deep down what we really wanted to say or do. How many times do we say to ourselves that we will never do something again but then we do it again? How many times do we explode or react adversely and then regret what we have said? Even if, at the time, we know that we aren’t doing or saying the right thing, we go ahead and do it anyway. How many times have we ignored our inner voice? How many times have we reacted in a way that makes us dislike ourselves? We could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that we are made up of many parts; that is, there is a conflict between how we see the world and others, and our reactions to the experiences we face in everyday life with our relationships with people. Our responses to our experiences don’t meet up to our personal reality. It is this mystery that discovering your hidden memories can help you to unfold.
Our first programming The first step is to begin to see that the programming we receive early on in our lives can hinder changes that we want to make later on. Often we can’t understand why we are getting negative results and failing to fulfil our full potential. In addition, we may fall into the trap of blaming our lack of achievement on others, or put it down to bad luck or mere circumstances, without realizing that we are the creators of the results we achieve (or don’t). The fact is that we actually sabotage ourselves due to our unconscious opposing beliefs that contradict what we really want. Dwelling in our deep unconscious there is a weight of time and tradition urging us in a particular direction. The conscious mind may, to some extent, control and guide
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itself in the present, but in the unconscious mind our unsolved problems, compulsions, superstitions and fears are lying in wait, throbbing and urging, dictating our feelings and, therefore, our behaviour. These things can bring about the very opposite of our conscious desires and dreams. This mystery lies in the unknown void between our actions and what we intend to do. The core of how we come to know ourselves hinges on the perfect dance between our deep inner world of feelings and our outer actions. The mysterious discord between these two worlds – our actions and what we intend to do – is interwoven with waves of inner processes that colour our emotions and affect our decision-making and actions; they can be the making or the breaking of us. Our journey begins by making the connection between our thoughts and deep unconscious feelings. Our feelings are the main focus here because they are the energy that drives our behaviour. By exploring all these limitations we can discover how to create more effective ways of living and getting what we want out of life.
The conflict between intention and action Let us start by exploring when the conflict between our intentions and actions begins, using the notion of the conscious and the subconscious mind in relation to our experiences in life. Our life is a reflection of our subconscious mind. By looking into this mirror we will see that the reason we cannot achieve the things we want is that we carry models and beliefs that our subconscious won’t allow us to. It is widely accepted that consciousness falls into two parts: first, our conscious mind now – we can call this our essence (which we could also call our heart or our inner voice, and this is who we are) – and second, our personality, which we use to present ourselves to the world. Many people think that personality is who they actually are but the challenge we face in life is that we are born into a family and carry our family’s beliefs and culture, as well as the thoughts and feelings of past generations. Consequently, our personality has been developed and shaped by other people’s lives as well as by our own life experiences, education, culture, parents and family. These two dimensions of our consciousness can be in conflict, as our intentions don’t often conform to what is expected of us and how we should behave. Even though we continue to learn and grow until the last day of our lives, it is widely accepted that most human conditioning, which makes us who we are, occurs during the early years of life. This conditioning can either help us to achieve or fail to reach our goals and dreams in adult life. The first relationship you have is with your parents, in particular your mother, and this relationship forms the model for your relationships throughout the rest of your life. The mother represents the gateway for life; before we were born we experienced the mother’s world and emotions. The very first moment the mother sees her child, she sets the tone of life for that child. The early bond between a mother and her child releases the mother’s store of conscious and unconscious memory and the depths of her inner world. In this way, the mother shapes the structure of her child’s social brain. The father too, by his attachment and interactions with his child, reveals his unconscious beliefs and values in the way he deals with and contributes to creating his child’s reality. The parents’ ability to be responsive and nurturing has an impact on the child’s self-image and social interactions throughout the rest of his or her life.
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FEATURES Our first training BIOG Dr Menis Yousry is the founder and facilitator of the Essence Foundation. He was born and grew up in Cairo, settling in London in 1974. A family & systemic psychotherapist and psychologist, he has worked with tens of thousands of people worldwide, designing and facilitating highly practical, experiential self-development courses. Dr Yousry left his post as a senior family therapist with the NHS after 15 years in order to focus completely on bringing his work to a wider audience through the Essence Foundation. In his work Dr Yousry draws on his experience in the fields of human potential, social change, culture, psychology, art, psychotherapy, spirituality and academic research into memory, brain studies and biology. Dr Menis Yousry is the founder and facilitator of the Essence Foundation. He was born and grew up in Cairo, settling in London in 1974. A family & systemic psychotherapist and psychologist, he has worked with tens of thousands of people worldwide, designing and facilitating highly practical, experiential self-development courses. Dr Yousry left...
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In The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, Dr Thomas Verny MD, with John Kelly, explains that the womb is the first experience that we have of the world and it is the first home the unborn child experiences. If the womb environment is affected by emotions of anxiety or even rejection within the mother, then the child first experiences the world as an unfriendly place. In cases where the mother wanted to have an abortion, has a conflict with her partner or experiences any other recurring difficult emotions during pregnancy, the child’s home may feel unsafe. Even if, for example, the mother had an abortion on a previous occasion and is unable to rid herself of the guilt, then these feelings may also be transmitted to her unborn child. Past experiences that create a pattern of negative feelings about the pregnancy may also impact on her unborn child; just as the baby is constantly taking nutrients and oxygen from her blood, so the baby also feeds on her emotions. Dr Dominick Purport, editor of the Brain Research Journal, supports this theory and states that awareness begins before we are born. Between 28 and 32 weeks, the brain circuit begins to form and the unborn baby can tune into the thoughts and dreams of the mother. It is theorized that the mother’s thoughts and feelings while pregnant can etch themselves so deeply on the child’s psyche that they can remain throughout their lives. These feelings define and shape the child’s emotional life and may create threats, which are engraved on the mind of the unborn child. It can take a great deal of work on oneself to change such effects. Dr Verny theorizes that unborn children anticipate what the new world will be like based on their very first experiences. If the unborn child feels unsafe early in their development, then they establish unconscious expectations that the world is going to be the same as the one they experienced in the womb. The child is predisposed to a certain personality in the way they relate to others. Life on the outside can be much harder if our womb experience was not a friendly one. The unborn child’s emotional, intellectual and neuro-logical capacities aren’t fully developed and so these experiences may be at feeling level only. While brain connections and circuits may not affect personality, they are extremely sensitive to malfunctions and inconsistencies. Dr Verny also states that feelings such as love and rejection affect the unborn from an early age. As the baby’s brain matures, primitive sensations and feelings grow into more complex feelings, thought states and later into ideas. If there are already inconsistencies in the mother’s life, often they also continue after the birth and the baby is already predisposed to such vulnerabilities.
Second stage training From birth we are trained by other people (usually our parents) on how to live. They train us in the same way they themselves were trained, as they think it is the best way. This is because their aim is for us to survive in this world as best we can, according to the dictates of their conscious and subconscious (hidden) worlds. They train us about how to live and how to react and interact, so that our personality becomes a form of protection developed outside us in order to enable us to deal with the world. Our personality is therefore shaped by our perceptions and the reactions we accumulate,
...his post as a senior family therapist with the NHS after 15 years in order to focus completely on bringing his work to a wider audience through the Essence Foundation. In his work Dr Yousry draws on his experience in the fields of human potential, social change, culture, psychology, art, psychotherapy, spirituality and academic research into memory, brain studies and biology.
CONTACT www.essence-foundation. com
and develops from early childhood, as well as in response to our many experiences along the way. Thus, it is this part of us upon which our personal identity is constructed. Such a construct continues to be helped – and hindered – by the demands of others; for example, the people who bring us up and the society to which we belong. This same personality develops by attracting similar experiences that eventually reinforce the memories and beliefs that caused it to come into being in the first place. Over the years, as this reactive dynamic grows and evolves beyond the original role of protecting us, we find that it has developed a life of its own. This kind of personality is actually a powerful network of unconscious attitudes and patterns of behaviour, which can dominate almost every aspect of our lives. The consequences, therefore, are behaviours that run contrary to who we really are and what our intentions are. This is especially true of intentions that are lodged deep in our essence (our subconscious) and which we keep on trying to carry out. In addition, it can often be the case that these behaviours actually have supported us in many ways and brought about a lot of our success in later life. There is much pressure put upon us from the outside world, because those who raised us put pressure upon us in the same way as they experienced at the hands of their parents. In addition, we have become the same as them because we involuntarily copy them as a result of the training they have given us. This may cause a clash between our intention and what we achieve in life. In order to resolve this clash we need greater understanding of the two parts of our consciousness – our subconscious and our conscious. The subconscious mind houses our powerful beliefs and perceptions. When we become adults, we function using basic assumptions and sets of reflex actions but we often are not able to identify them. These assumptions result from our experiences in our past and the influences of our parents, culture and religion. Of course, these assumptions have a huge impact on our lives. They are manifested every day in the ways that we react to each moment and event. Such reactions are the main cause of the conflict between our intention, coming from the conscious mind, and our actions, originating from our subconscious mind. Our essence is our consciousness now. It is highly creative, evolving with life and creating endless dreams and aspirations. Whenever we lose our centre or focus, however, the conscious mind is hijacked by the subconscious. This produces reactions and results that contradict our conscious intentions. Because the majority of our consciousness is subconscious, that means we react unconsciously most of time. So, how can we learn to live consciously?
This book is an exploration in human consciousness; how to change who we think we are and how to become who we really are.
Extract from his book…
Published by Hay House 15th September 2011, £10.99. Also available as an e-book.
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FEATURES Under The Spotlight HENRY CUMMING Henry is a natural born psychic as well as a very powerful natural healer for both people and animals alike. Known for being very ‘down to earth’ and refreshingly normal, in this interview Henry introduces his gifts and helps us to better understand animals – how to communicate with them, heal them, and help them to pass over. www.henrycumming.com
Click here to listen to Henry’s fascinating chat with Rachel.
Mind Body Spirit Winter Festival The iconic Mind Body Spirit Festival celebrates its 35th birthday this year. To mark this special occasion the organisers are hosting a new three day London event – The Mind Body Spirit Winter Festival at the Royal Horticultural Halls, Victoria, from 11th to 13th November 2011 (10am - 7pm daily). Commencing on the 11.11.11, this is a rare opportunity to expand your consciousness by commemorating this auspicious date at the Festival’s live global intention ceremony (starts 10.15am). Facilitated on stage by leading holistic experts, energy workers and musicians from across the world, this will truly be a day to remember. In remembrance of its earlier years, this Festival will introduce a vintage retro feel with a particular emphasis on the healing arts. From across the globe, a whole new-line of fascinating speakers will deliver inspiring workshops that lean towards the expansion of consciousness, unlocking ancient mysteries, and techniques to facilitate the manifestation of your desires. Energetic dance, musical concerts and rhythmic lively performances offer continuous free entertainment from the live stage area. Free sound healings can be experienced in the new MBS Sound Healing Oasis and over 100 exhibitors provide the opportunity to meet therapists, sample free healings or shop from a wide range of from natural products, crystal jewellery, psychic readings, and much, much more. www.mindbodyspirit.co.uk or call 0207 371 9191 for advance ticket purchase and full programme details. Henry Cummings will be hosting an Animal Healing with Your Guides workshop at the Festival on Saturday 12th November 4pm - 7pm. (£18.00 + Festival entrance ticket) Join Henry for this comprehensive introduction to animal healing. Learn to see and feel animals’ energy and gain clear insights into their state of being. Meet your animal guides and strengthen your connection with them to become a more intuitive and effective animal healer.
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SEPTEMBER Thursday 8th September 7.30pm - EveningService of Mediumship at Bloxham Spiritualist Church Friday 9th September 7.30-9pm - An uplifting demonstration of Mediumship in Greenwich Saturday 10th September 7pm - A Special Evening of Mediumship at Basingstoke Spiritualist Spiritualist Church Tuesday 13th September - Animal Healing sessions in Crowborough Wednesday 14th September - Sessions at The College of Psychic Studies, Sth Kensington Thursday 15th September - Sessions at Violet Hill Studios St Johns Wood Thursday 15th September 7.30pm - Eveningdemonstration of Mediumship at Falling Feathers Angel Sanctuary Eltham Thursday 22nd September Sessions at Violet Hill Studios St Johns Wood Thursday 22nd September 7.30pm - Demonstration of Mediumship at Fulham Spiritualist Church Saturday 24th September - Evening Special Demonstration at Rochester Square Spiritualist Temple, Camden Sunday 25th September 10-5pm ‘Improving your connection to Spirit’ workshop Greenwich Wednesday 28th September - sessions at The College of Psychic Studies South Kensington Thursday 29th September - sessions at Violet Hill Studio St Johns Wood Friday 30th September 7.30-9pm Evening talk on ‘The Essenes’ in Greenwich
OCTOBER Sunday 2nd October 6.30pm - EveningDemonstration of Mediumship Rochester Square, Camden Monday 3- 11th October - Tour of Ireland Wednesday 12th October - sessions at The College of Psychic Studies Thursday 13th October - Charifty Event with Keith Charles and Celia Watson, Maidstone, Kent Saturday 22nd October Charity Psycathon Finchley Spiritualist Church Sunday 23rd October 6.30pm - Divine Service Finchley Spiritualist Church Wednesday 26th October - sessions at The College of Psychic Studies Thursday 27th October - sessions at Violet Hill Studio, St Johns Wood Friday 28th October 7-8.30pm An evening of Mediumship at The College of Psychic Studies
NOVEMBER Thursday 3rd November 7.30pm - An evening of Mediumship at Bloxham Spiritualist Church Wednesday 9th November - sessions at The College of Psychic Studies, Sth Kensington Thursday 10th November - sessions at Violet Hill Studio, St Johns Wood Saturday 12th November 4-7pm - Mind Body Spirit Exhibition London, Animal Healing with your Guides
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COLU
Glow With Health And Wellbeing STU GATHERUM
Lightworker In Training HETTA ROGERS
Lightworker Challenge KAY GILLARD
Studying At The University Of Life ELIZABETH VILLANI
The Authenticity Diary MELANIE DIAMOND
Moments Of Light TOM EVANS
UMNISTS
KN OW health Understanding By Stu Gatherum Stu is a passionate and focused Strength and Conditioning specialist who is committed to delivering outstanding results in fitness, nutrition and total health and wellness.
CONTACT STU www.stugatherum.com Twitter: @stugatherum +44 7816 240137
Hi folks, welcome back to Lightworker as we call time on our Tenacity month and enter the month of Understanding. Now this can open up many avenues to explore, and as the Fitness Guy I want to talk about your exercise regime and the reasons you perform certain exercises and such like. You see, understanding your programme is the key to successfully following it. I get asked all the time - usually from young guys - how to add muscle to their arms/chest/back/shoulders. One of my immediate responses is ‘train your legs’. Sounds counterproductive I know, but performing exercises for major muscle groups releases a lot of ‘pro-muscle’ hormones. Having these coursing around the body in high volumes aids in muscle growth all over your body. Another thing is ‘how do I lose body fat?’ I have to use the elliptical, right? Not so. While any cardiovascular exercise will expend calories and, at first, be enough to lose a couple pounds, after a while this stagnates. My answer: interval training and circuit-style weights. Interval training causes a large ‘oxygen debt’. That debt, the same as any overdraft situation, needs to be repaid in due course. The damage caused takes hours (depending on the intensity) to correct. This raises your metabolism for a long period following exercise. As a bonus, your heart and lungs become stronger as a result of having to work harder so become a lot more efficient. This also helps you to lose more body fat while not exercising, plus work harder still at the gym. The circuit-style weight training, simply put, exercises your muscles so that they don’t waste. If you only ever perform cardiovascular exercise when you go to the gym the muscles tend to be sacrificed in a ‘use it or lose it’
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GLOW WITH HEALTH AND WELLBEING situation. Exercising then, carries two benefits: 1. It allows you to keep hold of them and enhance appearance 2. It raises your metabolic rate allowing you to burn more body fat as a result If you are unsure about any of the above you should speak to your trainer at the gym. Start to ask questions when they do a programme revision for you. A lot of times people receive generic programmes in these situations as they show very little interest or prior knowledge. It is easier for the instructor to go along with the preconceived ideas you have than alter your mindset about things. Make sure you ask the questions and challenge their understanding. It is important you have the right programme for your goals. Until next month guys. Have a great month!
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KN OW education Understand By HETTA ROGERS Hetta’s background is in Art History and Literature. After spending seven years training to be and working as a lawyer, she left all that behind to go travelling, but has now returned to the bright lights of London to work in the communications industry.
CONTACT HETTA hetta@lightworkermag. com
A question for you: what would you do if the one person in the world with whom you want to share everything – love, friendship, thoughts, challenges, or even triumphs – is no longer, and can’t be, there? In my case, the answer has been to distract myself with other things – wonderful friends, adventures, but principally, would you believe, with books. It’s a blessing in disguise, almost, but I have started reading infinitely more than I did several months ago. I find myself devouring books at break neck speed whenever I find a quiet moment – on the tube, sitting in the sun, before I go to sleep and in those sporadic moments of why-can’t-I-sleep-at-four-o’clock-in-the-morning.
Around the world and back again In this last month only, fictionally speaking, I have been transported to war-torn Kabul in the 1980s and to Pakistan in 2001, spent the latter part of the 1990s in Alaska, lived through twenty St Swithin’s Days in London, Greece, Edinburgh and Yorkshire, made journeys from Oklahoma to California during The Great Depression; I have spent a lazy summer in Surrey in the 1930s and walked through northern France during the Second World War and I have witnessed the greatest of love stories in sweltering Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1960s. And all of this without leaving the city in which I live.
Big girls don’t cry I have stayed up until the early hours desperate to finish one book so I know that all ended well; I have taken days to finish another, dreading reaching the final chapter, and have been left feeling bereft that it had come to an end (for me, this is always the sign of a good novel). And I have been standing on a crowded tube train when suddenly, having read that a main character had died unexpectedly, I could no longer see the words on the page. Big, hot tears had filled my eyes, brought on by a wave of injustice and sadness that someone I had grown to care about so very deeply was gone. I realise I risk sounding slightly unhinged in confessing to weeping on public transport (silently, of course) and over a fictitious character, too, but I wanted to share this because I’m certain some people will relate to it. Pure and simple: I like a good story. I like characters who possess strength and substance; who learn valuable life lessons. I like reading about life’s intricate journeys; about the triumph of love over fear and truth over deceit. I like happy endings.
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LIGHTWORKER IN TRAINING I like understanding people more clearly by reading about human connection and about the exploration of emotion. Most of all - and this is the most pertinent part of my experience - I like reading in order to understand me. William Hazlitt put it beautifully: “Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.”
The sweet serenity of words I write this monthly column for Lightworker Magazine because I love the process of thoughts and ideas taking shape in words; sometimes it takes a while for the ideas to form, but I know they are there: all it takes is patience and a willingness to look a little further. One day when the time feels right – perhaps even soon – I hope to write a novel. I am still waiting for the flash of inspiration to allow me to see it begin to take shape. In putting together this month’s article, I have come to realise that to express oneself in writing in any media – be it in a novel, poem, essay, commentary, blog, email or letter – is to share something very personal. In doing so, we say: here; here is something I have written and I would like for you to read it. To tell a story with words, whether that story is based on true events or conjured from the depths of human imagination, and for it to be read by another is to open one’s heart and soul for others to see. The printed word offers such a great deal to a reader - the opportunity for thought, for interpretation, for inspiration, for analysis, for debate. As Christopher Morley wrote so splendidly: “Lord! when you sell a man a book you don’t sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.”
This book will change your life Interpretation is very personal and, quite often, the thoughts, feelings, theories and tales we read will not resonate with every reader; nor might they have been intended by the author. But that is part of the joy - understanding that we are all different; understanding what it is we enjoy; understanding what speaks to us most clearly. An old cliché, perhaps, but life is very similar to a good book: filled with characters, some of whom appear only briefly, some of whom stay until the final page; fundamentally enlightening - filled with lessons and intricate journeys of discovery; packed full of love; and, most of all, completely unique.
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KN OW relationship Understand Your Soul Purpose By KAY GILLARD Kay Gillard is a shamanic healer and teacher based in South East London. She takes clients in person and at distance, working to restore the true authentic self to power. Kay currently teaches and gives talks throughout the south of England as well as working as a writer and broadcaster.
CONTACT KAY w w w. s t a r f i r e a l c h e m y. co.uk www.kaygillard.com
I have thought long and hard about how to best talk about the issue of understanding in our relationships. How important it is for us to be with a significant other who understands us, our approach to life and everything in it as lightworkers. And how it is essential for us to try to understand the people we are in relationships with – how understanding the underlying reasons behind their behaviour can allow us to be more compassionate, even when we don’t agree with them. But I was reminded that the most important relationship we have is our relationship with our own selves. Before we can hope to effectively have relationships with the rest of the world, it is essential that we understand ourselves.
How do you understand your soul? As a lightworker, what is it that defines your understanding of yourself? Is it the roles you play, the spiritual path you walk, the people who love you… all of the above? Many lightworkers feel that they came here to raise awareness, to heal, to give support, to wake people up to their true nature and the nature of our beautiful planet. Our own dear Melanie Diamond describes Indigos and Crystals, for example, as coming to this world with a sense of mission. Do you understand yourself in this way, as a soul who has come here with a purpose? Understanding your soul purpose is particularly important to those of us on a spiritual path. We don’t wake up, go about our day, go to sleep, do it all again the next day until we die, without thinking about the greater why. All lightworkers are shining, spiritual beings and we know there is a reason behind our incarnation here at this time. Understanding those reasons is essential, not only to help satisfy our spiritual quest but also to bring us happiness in our day-to-day lives.
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LIGHTWORKER CHALLENGE Understanding your service I have found that soul purpose has a duality to it that I didn’t always appreciate. Many of us understand ourselves and our reason for being here in terms of the work we have to do. That was certainly my own perspective on it, and of course it is important. Do you understand your lightwork? You have been born with natural gifts; a way of being that comes naturally to you. These natural talents hold the clues to the work that you have chosen to do in the world in this lifetime. I call this aspect of soul purpose ‘service’. I am a priestess by nature, and shamanism is at the core of my being. The ability to move in and out of non-ordinary reality comes naturally, so does healing, and most of all the ability to share those skills with people, getting them excited enough about it to change their lives. Although I work hard to put this message out into the world, the work itself it not hard for me. Any training I have done is just remembering things I already knew, it’s as though I successfully learned it in another life and this time around I came to help people change and heal, through shamanism and spirituality. I understand that this is my service.
Understanding your lessons Shamanism and healing are both paths of service. To be a priestess is also a path of service. It is therefore unsurprising that I am so focused on that aspect of my life. I realised recently that I had been neglecting the other side of the soul purpose duality. Knowing what you are here to do for others is only half the story, there is another question we must ask if we are truly to understand ourselves: what am I here to learn?
service is the same, you know you need to do it, you love it, you can’t not do it. You understand and embrace it as who you are. Lessons are different. When we chose to incarnate, we chose something that we really need to learn this time around. My lesson is not to explore shamanism and healing – that is a natural part of my being, it is easy for me. How silly to choose a lesson that we have successfully learned before! No, we must understand that our lesson is something that we do not already know. I’ll share a little about mine: it’s ‘real world’ stuff. Channel enlightened beings through trance possession? Sure! Journey to another realm to communicate with supernatural creatures? I’m your girl. I function very well in non-ordinary reality. But ordinary reality – oh, that’s another matter. Keeping on top of paperwork, making wise financial decisions, being fully in control of my every day life? It’s the biggest challenge ever. Living as a creative, spiritual person and being strong and grounded in the real world is my lesson. I don’t like it. Why didn’t I pick something easier, something I know how to do? Of course, that’s the point. To truly understand your place in the world and your soul purpose, try looking at this duality. Love what you are here to do, revel in your service, it is what your soul is comfortable in and loves to do. Try to love your lessons too. Understand that you chose to come here to learn this and created the best life situation to learn it in. Have gratitude for you perspective too, and hope that next time around too you are blessed with such understanding of who you are and why you are here.
Remember that the service you are here to perform draws on your natural abilities. The world’s greatest artists and musicians came here to bring beauty into the world. For them to have incarnated as rubbish painters, or with no innate musicality, would be absurd. Like a lot of us, they showed early signs of their gifts. They were born with innate talents, as though they already knew how to play, how to sculpt – they were predisposed to performing this service in the world. It came easily, in the sense that the drive, passion and talent was already present. Your
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KN OW adventure Understand The World’s Awakening By ELIZABETH VILLANI Elizabeth, the author of “Awakening”, o-books, 2010. An expert on positivity, coach and Reiki Master, a startling mystical experience in 2008 revealed to her the reality of humanity. She now writes to support our awakening. She is also the founder of www.fundsforjoy.com a non-profit organisation aiming to bring joy to every corner of the globe.
CONTACT ELIZABETH www.elizabethvillani.net
Each month we are publishing an extract from “Awakening” to support you in your Light work. Understanding the world’s awakening gives us clues to our own and with the energies accelerating it’s time that we all joined in.
The World’s Awakening At this point in world history, in human history, it is vital that this message becomes alive now. Not only for the few who have undergone a spiritual journey to date but to all of us. Every single person who walks with their feet on this ground. The world is changing. The economic crisis that has swept the globe in recent years gives us a joyful opportunity to change the way that we live and work forever. Capitalism of the highest order has ruled society and dictated our evolution but it has also held us back and made us miserable, at least those of us who don’t earn millions running a bank! This economic change can be seen as a prompt for social and psychological advancement beyond all comprehension. It doesn’t matter where you live in the world, what colour or creed that you are, the story is the same. The world is changing. We can either fight it or embrace it. We all feel the same sense of frustration and the nagging pull of deep dissatisfaction. We read books, watch TV programmes and dream about a better way of life and yet no one source has been able to provide us with the answer. A nagging frustration, for no real reason, pulls us down and we, in turn, either search for the answer or pretend that it doesn’t exist. The world is reflecting this with a movement of heart and soul attention whilst at the same time providing mostly electrical human diversion to cloak the soul. This world is a magical ball of energy. It is geared up to support human nature and to react to it. In his pioneering work on earth chakras, Robert Coon identified the seven earth chakras as being located in six locations around the world. The chakras are energy centres which maintain our vitality and emotional, physical and spiritual health. Holistic practitioners work with our own personal chakras to maintain our health and well-being. If our chakras are closed or out of balance, so are we and this can lead to ill health. The earth chakras then are the energy centres that drive the emotional, physical and spiritual health of the earth. Who looks after the world chakras? Their health is
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STUDYING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LIFE directly linked to the people around them. Us. We coexist with the earth and just as the earth is affected by us through the chakras, we are affected by it, through the health of the earth chakras. In the first half of 2009 terrible fires ravaged South Eastern Australia. Australia is the Solar Plexus of the world; the world’s confidence and self-esteem. Fire is burning away at the guts of the earth, destroying lives and homes. We are fuelled by fear. Our economies are collapsing. I used a pendulum to look at the world chakras that Robert identified. The Solar Plexus of the earth has closed. The 2nd Chakra in South America is open. The world’s heart chakra in England is closed. The throat Chakra in Egypt is closed. The third eye is closed, also in the UK at present, and finally the crown chakra in Tibet is closed. The base chakra in the US at Mount Shasta is opening. This is good. It brings grounded hope to the world. A sense of place. Family. History. Ancestry. The second Chakra at Lake Titicaca is open, bringing fun to the world Awakening the belief in you and a sense of togetherness and procreation.
must learn to live in harmony with them. The world needs healing. We need healing. This is our planet. Our world. Our responsibility. Up until now healing the world has been for the pop stars, Hollywood actors and world leaders. For us our only ability has been by doing our bit to save the environment. Now is the time to see that if we heal ourselves we will heal all around us; our people, our land, our hearts and our earth. It all starts with you... In order to be happy and healthy and live the life that you want you need to embrace your awakening and remember to learn the lessons that you came here to live. The problem is that most of us are so caught up with the doing and achieving of material life that we have no sense of this bigger picture. We know there is something missing because we can feel it but we are so caught up in ourselves that we never open up to it.
For the heart Chakra to be closed along with the third eye in the UK is no surprise to me. As a nation the British have a recent history of resolving conflict and bringing gentle diplomacy. A hearts and minds style. Living in the UK I can understand why the heart centre has closed. The UK is caught up with materialism, money and fear. There has been a shift away from love to protection. The balance has gone. The country is on the defensive and social problems have reached epidemic proportions. The third eye is about acting on intuition. Who in the UK does? Not many in the greatness of the population. The nation is too busy doing... and collecting. Communication in the world stems from Egypt. Interesting that some see this place as magical and spiritual. Archaeology and Egyptian history have highlighted that Egypt is the place where spiritual teachers taught the ancient souls of 3000 - 5000 years ago the world lessons for communication. It’s closed.
“Awakening” is published by o-books £7.99/$12.95 You can walk through your own awakening face to face with Elizabeth by watching her free wake up programme here.
Finally, the Crown Chakra in Tibet, closed. Our spiritual connection with whatever is out there, is off. We are affected by the chakras and them by us and we
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KNOW living Understand The Un-Understandable By MelANIE DIAMOND Melanie is a passionate advocator of the Indigo cause. She wants to speak out to help and inspire other Indigo adults to become aware of who they are. Mel is a Reiki healer and teacher, sound healer, writer, singer, neo-pagan and a student of the shamanic arts.
CONTACT MELANIE www.indigohealing.co.uk Twitter - @Indigo_Healing Facebook
So does anyone else feel as if they’ve been trying to build castles on sand lately? Or that trying to hold on to anything you ‘know’ is like trying to hold onto water? Yup, me too. Core beliefs are being shaken up and things we thought we understood are subject to questioning. Understanding helps. When you understand yourself, those around you and the path you’re on, it makes life a lot smoother. The challenge this year has bought with it is the rate at which things change and evolve. You seem to reach an understanding of something, then before you realise it, it changes or becomes irrelevant and you feel as if you’ve been tricked or thwarted by the Universe and its cunning - the tricksy little monkey. Of course, there are no tricks involved here, it is simply the rate of knots at which energy moves through this year. Remember that back in January we all talked about momentum, and how things were going to change rapidly... and then change again? Well here we are, we are living the dream, walking the walk and talking the talk. I know a lot of us are having trouble with the concept of ‘understanding’ right now because everything we thought we understood and knew to be true has changed. Not just this but also the speeds involved and the shock and upheaval it can cause - the goal posts of our comfort zones are always moving. It’s a real challenge to understand what’s going on at the moment. It’s like when you walk into a room with confidence only to trip over your own feet, then get up and find you’re in a house of mirrors disconcerting, liable to give you a headache and possibly painful! A situation that most of us would rather avoid yet many of us are finding ourselves within, whether we like it or not... metaphorically speaking of course.
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THE AUTHENTICITY DIARY Changing changes Let’s use me as an example here; so many positive things have come my way this year, already such as opportunities, and new and valuable friendships. It’s been an awesome year - life was taking shape nicely and I had an idea of what it was I was doing with my life, a plan that I was pretty pleased with. But the Universe says ‘Ha! I/we have other ideas’ and now I find myself throwing out my own ‘rule’ book and reassessing everything I thought was along my true path. The rug has well and truly been pulled out from under me; I am in the House of Mirrors and it’s a funky place to be! But it’s really OK. I understand that this was the theme of the year, but I didn’t expect it to look like this; I have to abandon my old plan and allow the new one to come in - a plan that is not a plan. So it’s out with the old and in with the new. To tell the truth I am also relieved, because I’ve spent the past few months feeling as if something was missing from the ‘grand plan’; something wasn’t right, everything I knew was not enough and it instigated a deep personal struggle that has caused me some head and heartaches, add to that some deep resistance issues coming to the surface. Frankly, I’m exhausted! Can I have a week off please? No?
Have the courage to release anything that is holding you back. You know what these things are... • I say it again - go with the flow. Such a little statement with such a broad implication. So if you, like me, are in the House of Mirrors, we must do our best to understand that life at the moment is testing all of us for a reason. It’s the Universe’s grand plan.
Dear Readers, this will be my last column for Lightworker Magazine. I’m making space for new things to come in - new projects and new directions. I’ve loved being part of the Lightworker family since the launch of the magazine, and have no doubt that it will continue to shine very brightly! Love and Indigo Light to all. Mel x
Anyway, here are some things that have helped me cope with this slightly insane period. Some are reminders of what we already know, but reminders never hurt: • Ground and Centre - always!!! • Don’t allow fear-based reactions to delay projects get them going and allow them to change and evolve. Go with the flow. Understand that they also may have a limited shelf life, but that this is OK and they still serve a purpose during that time. You will learn things that will be valuable. • Listen to your intuition - project forward and see how you feel about the changes that are knocking on your door. If you feel good, excited or in any way positive, follow that feeling. I am doing this now (and always) and it makes the changes a lot easier to instigate. • You may have been resisting making some big changes.
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KN OW source Overstanding By TOM EVANS Tom Evans is an author, seer, healer and karmic mentor. His latest book, The Art and Science of Light Bulb Moments is all about the mechanisms by which you can tune into this wonderful source of guidance that is freely available to us all.
CONTACT TOM www.tomevans.co Tom has written a free ebook called Goals of Learning which you can download without even giving your email address away here.
Words are wonderful constructs. They allow us to swap and communicate our thoughts either verbally, in song or by the written (or typed) word. They can educate, entertain and illuminate or, if wrongly chosen, annoy, anger or sadden. The construction of an individual word can hold intrinsic additional content or its root meaning might be corrupted on hidden by years of ’chinese whispers’.
For example, the word inspiration both conveys the concept of ideas but also alludes to the oft-missed connection between the breath and thought itself. Conversely, the word palindrome - although a brilliant word - kind of lets itself down somewhat. It describes a word or phrase that is spelt the same when written forwards or backwards, like ’kayak’ or “Madam, I’m Adam”. So why isn’t it a palindrome itself? That would linguistically brilliant. Come to thing of it, when applied to language especially, shouldn’t that be ’forewords’ and ’backwords’. Similarly, the lovely word onomatopoeia onomatopoeic like ’cuckoo’ or ’crack’.
isn’t
The word understanding, although well meaning, also is a bit of a disappointment when you think about it. The reason being is that it implies that when you comprehend
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MOMENTS OF LIGHT something that that thing is somehow above you and you under it. A much better word would be ’overstanding’ which implicitly means you are above the very thing that you are supposed to ’understand’. It is one of the many plays on words common in the Rastafari Language. Here, it is ’overstood’ that the idea cannot be superior to its creator. The Rastafari philosophy asserts that every man, woman and child are equal - this is the concept behind the term ’I-n-I’. The individual who is receiving the information is equal to the communicator of the information and superior to the idea being communicated. So we should not ’understand’ or stand under an idea; when you absorb and correctly perceive an idea, you ’overstand’ it. Rastafari is full of such linguistic richness. For example, the movement is always mind-full of a continual (I-tinual) remembrance of the struggle for emancipation. Similarly, a concept is called an ’I-cept’. The language is also rich in humour with ’politricks’ replacing the word ’politics’. ’Everliving’ replaces ’everlasting’, implying and conveying the immortality of the soul. It is most commonly used in the phrase “I and I is Everliving, Everfaithful, Eversure. Ras Tafari.” ’I man’ is the inner person within each Rastafari believer. ’Irator’ replaces ’creator’, and ’Iration’ replaces ’creation’. These are subtle yet deep concepts that science, and some religions, are only just getting their heads around. Implicit in these words is the description of how consciousness creates reality and not the other way around. Once this is fully embraced as a concept, the so-called Laws of Physics will add up and all that missing Dark Energy will appear from behind and under our noses. When we take the time to analyse and think about what words really mean, we can make huge leaps in our ’overstanding’. Each year the Concise Oxford English Dictionary brings in a set of new words - and gets rid of some others. Just last month the rather trivial ’mankini’ as popularised by Borat made it in, as did the ’retweet’. Perhaps it is time both scholars and speakers of the dynamic and rich language we call English under-took a more comprehensive overhaul. After all, you don’t over-took or under-haul anything, do you?
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REGULAR
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Once Upon A Time... LUCY CASLON
Stars And Planets ZOE HIND
The Warrior Of The Light PAULO COELHO
Lightworker Loves CONCH PRESS, THE HEALING TRUST, BE HAPPY
Words Of Wisdom The List Top 20 WORDS PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND
Featured Lightworker MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
REGULARS Once Upon A Time... BY LUCY CASLON
BIOG I was born in London and went to school in Sussex. I studied History at Royal Holloway University graduating in 2003. I worked for charity for three years before going to Africa. It was my time there that prompted me to found Msizi Africa in 2007. I have run the charity ever since.
CONTACT www.msiziafrica.org.uk www.bmycharity.com/ msiziafrica is our donate online website
I worked in the charity sector for three years after graduating from university. I enjoyed my job but wasn’t fulfilled – I raised money but didn’t see the beneficiaries and wanted to be hands-on. I love travelling, and was sitting in the kitchen at work one day looking at a map of the world on the wall. I realised – stupid as it sounds – that Africa is such a huge place to have never seen any of it. That day I booked a truck trip round 12 countries over two months. I handed in my notice immediately and flew to Africa two months later, it was June 2006. The minute I got there I fell in love with it. The heat, the dirt, the overcrowding and jostling in market places, the animals. And the children. Every day we got off the truck to set up a trestle table to make lunch. We all had to muck in and help, but I was a magnet for local children who saw the truck coming and would come and see what they could get to eat. If there was a group of small children hiding behind a tree watching us prepare food, I’d look up and see them – once I made eye contact with them and saw their sweet little faces I couldn’t eat until I’d given them something. It became a joke amongst the others on the truck who I relieved of their plates halfway through eating, making ‘doggy bags’ for the children. I also realised having a two month holiday wouldn’t look good on my CV, so decided - not entirely unselfishly - to work at an orphanage to ‘tick’ the volunteering box. I’m honest if nothing else! I travelled through East, Central and Southern Africa and finished my trip in Cape Town after two months making friends on a packed truck racing through the major sites of 12 incredible countries. I never sat still or had a moment to myself. A week later, after a short flight and a 3-hour car journey, I was dropped off at an orphanage in Lesotho and told to get stuck in. I would have done, but the children ignored me. I felt incredibly isolated in the middle of nowhere. I quickly realised I was going to have to make my own ‘work’ there, so I set about using my fundraising experience to try and secure food, clothes and financial donations from local businesses. It was obvious to see the children
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needed so much. After a few days, the children realised I was there to stay and they warmed to me – one little boy in particular. Morapeli was 3 years old and had HIV. He never left my side and was – and still is – ‘my’ little boy. The letters I wrote asking for support didn’t bring in much. I realized that if I wanted the children to eat better food – all they had was maize meal and cabbage, day in day out – I had to buy it myself. I did. The children’s diet improved, and after six months I left the orphanage with a 9-month supply of food after securing donations from friends and family back home. I then realised I had to keep this up! I founded a charity to support this new diet that had such a positive impact on the children. I managed this around my job – I didn’t go back to working in the charity sector because I didn’t want to run a charity at the same time as working for one. I took a job as a PA, which was awful, mind numbing and not what I wanted to do, but it paid the bills and I could get out at 5pm. I worked on the charity late into the evening and over the weekends, and this was way too much to take on. I had no time to see my friends, but I’d promised that I wouldn’t let the kids down and had to face this mammoth task alone. My housemates got fed up with me – I was glued to my computer. After 18 months of this I realised that whilst I had a great charity, there was more money to be made, more ways I could help my kids, but I didn’t have the time to do this. I needed someone to pay my salary to run the charity full time. In almost perfect timing, I read about The Vodafone Foundation’s World of Difference competition – they were going to pay 4 people in the UK to work for a charity of their choice full time for a year. I applied and won. It meant that I could give up my job and work on the charity. The first thing I did was to fly to Africa and find more projects – which I did. I went from caring for 50 orphans to 400, and then over time have taken on 600 more. Having time to run the charity as a job means that we have been able to raise more money and reach more children. When the Vodafone Foundation year ended, one of my corporate supporters agreed to pay my salary for the next year. They have extended this until next summer. Since then, time has flown – we’ve been in magazines, newspapers, short listed for awards, won new fundraising
partnerships and most importantly, the children are well. We’ve had ups and downs – one of our little girls at the orphanage died in April 2010 and one of our project partners died in December 2009, which prompted me to climb Kilimanjaro in his memory, raising £45,000 for the charity specifically aimed at his project. Last summer Louisa came to the charity to help as an intern and I quickly realised that she was worth her weight in gold. I wanted to hold onto her and managed, luckily, to find a salary to keep her, and she has become an essential and very valued part of our team. My job takes me to Africa two or three times a year and it’s always incredible to see the children – even when work is stressful, I just think back to the children – especially Morapeli who is now 8 – and that gets me through!
Msizi Africa’s Mission Statement - Msizi Africa gives children in Africa access to nutritious food and shelter. Whether they’re in orphanages, child headed households or on the street, we ensure they receive nutritious meals every day and live in safe, clean and comfortable surroundings. This complements the wider work of our project partners who aim to improve the lives of the children in their care through education, vocational opportunities, and rehabilitation.
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REGULARS Stars And Planets BY ZOE HIND
The secret to life is good timing.
By tuning into the energy of the planets we can all live more harmonious lives. Every month I will be choosing a reader question to answer, so email your enquiries about Astrology to astrology@lightworkermag.com
Fire signs in the second house can sometimes overcompensate with proud and showy displays of self that hide deeper insecurities.
Reader question – THE SECOND HOUSE
Air signs fare the best here, if they can realise, with self analysis and a little detachment, that what really matters is their beliefs and not those of others.
What does the Second House represent?
The Second House is the section of your chart that sits just under the First House at the 7-8pm position. The opposite 8th house of other people, their This House is largely concerned with self-esteem opinions and values can impact at times on our self and values. esteem, reflected back to us through judgement and criticism; they can provide some of the most difficult As the soul begins to realise its own existence, challenges to our stability and core beliefs. physical belongings and a sense of belonging in the family unit - me and mine - begins to develop. Know thyself is the lesson of the second house. Whichever Zodiac signs fall entirely or partly in the second house will have a large influence on our selfunderstanding and where we place value in Life. Most harmful emotional programming can be traced back to this fundamental house where the young self seeks to find answers in the outside world and fear and separation are realised. Those with water signs in the second house can often feel these frequencies the deepest and need to show themselves much love and nurture in adult years to override painful childhood experiences. Earth signs can be a stronger breed but may fall into consumerism as a substitute for early abandonment, lack or rejection.
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VIRGO
The Sun, Moon, Venus and Mercury all pass through your sign with Chiron and Neptune opposite in Pisces. When you include Jupiter and Pluto in fellow earth signs, most of the planets are active for you right now. So what to do with all this energy? Do the right thing. It may not be the easiest path but alignment and core strength will steer you straight down the middle path and show you that self-mastery is the quickest route to living a blessed and empowered life.
SCORPIO
LIBRA
If August brought a few surprise revelations and realisations out of nowhere, September is the month to assimilate what you have learnt and recalibrate emotionally. The Autumn Equinox is your time. Balance and harmony, especially in relationships is where you excel. Can you help others to find calm after the summer’s heat begins to cool off? Your friendly advice and empathetic approach will be highly valued.
SAGITTARIUS
The astrological climate is much better fitted to your temperament this month with many planets in earth and water signs. The Virgo New Moon is in your house of friends and sociability and the Pisces Full Moon in your house of creativity and love. Jupiter in Taurus continues to boost your relationships. With all this energy in your favour, plus Pluto returning to direct motion, this is your time to show the world what you are made of. You have the power and presence to make turn a vision into reality.
Emotion is energy in motion. If you know how you would like to feel, put your attention to your heart’s desires; feel them and watch as the Universe aligns. You ruling planet Jupiter forms a grand trine with Pluto and with Mercury, Sun, Moon and Venus at times through this month. You have everything to play for. Fortune favours you if you stay true to what matters most. This month is as big as you dare to be.
CAPRICORN
Aquarius Neptune retrogrades back into Aquarius for the rest of the year, while mighty Jupiter clears debris from your past. Both of these aspects are calling to you to recreate yourself; to really know yourself as you are today. We often live in the past or the future and give out our energies to others. All these activities are forms of distraction and self-neglect. We now know that in order to be of best possible service, we need to nurture and cherish ourselves first. Be higher selfish and watch the world reform around you.
For the last 6 months you have had Mars, the planet of dynamism, moving through your personal houses and showing you where work needs to be done internally to create more solid foundations to build upon. Now, as Mars passes into your social sectors, you are about to be shown through interactions with others, how the new you is being received. The world reflects you back to you. If there is any antagonism or discord around you, go within first to see where you are attracting these lessons and assess their true meaning.
PISCES
Much activity in your opposite sign of Virgo shows you that relationships are a mirror of your inner world. Selective mental weeding now brings a new modality of believing where harmony and balance in replace pain and resistance. Mars’ fire can warm or burn and as this powerful planet transits your house of love all month, you get to choose where to put your intensity for your greatest good. Purification is the middle ground and that which gets burnt away will leave space for new and better shoots to grow.
TAURUS
If you imagine you are watching your life unfold as a film where you are the star, every day, every encounter and every feeling is enhanced with a greater presence. Of all the signs, you know best how to enjoy the moment. Simple pleasures hold deeper joy and healing than potential outcomes. Live, love and be happy. Your energy is magnetic, attractive and there for you to own. Create your world how you want it to be.
CANCER
Mars moves through Cancer and deep inside you may feel a burning desire for change. This is a great month to collect yourself and tune into your own personal power. If you feel you give too much away to others or that you are regularly misunderstood, now is the time to retreat and build up your personal reserves. Saturn continues to restructure your core beliefs and show you where your strengths lie.
ARIES
It has been an active summer and you are happiest when you are in the thick of it. As we head towards the rebalancing energies of the Autumn Equinox, it is how we feel inside that guides us to create long and lasting change. Take some time to reflect on all that has happened with friends and relationships recently as the messages will be missed if you are too busy to assimilate their deeper meaning. Feel into your soul’s desire and simplify your outer world to allow the love to flow more freely.
GEMINI
Mercury Retrograde in Leo would be best spent in internal contemplation as it moves through your sector of communication and stirs up all manner of interesting interactions. The holographic universe theory teaches that we create all that happens on the outside, from the inside as a projection. Look and listen now to those around you and ask yourself ‘how am I creating this?’ Things will make more sense this way than trying to fix or convince others from a rational standpoint.
LEO
Why does compromise always sound so negative? To promise together can be a beautiful thing. You are building strong bonds with all around you when you can meet them half way. A sacred union occurs when we love ourselves and can use this empowerment to live without defences and fear. Venus continues to bless your sign with a warm heart and a brave soul. Be kind and you will receive back tenfold.
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REGULARS Virgo Climate The Sun passes through the Zodiac sign of Virgo from 24th August to 23rd September. The symbol for Virgo is the Virgin but I prefer to see her as the Abundant Earth Mother, Gaia, Goddess of the Harvest. During the harvest period teamwork and efficiency were required to bring in the crops within a certain window of weather BIOG and then allocation skills were needed to share the bounty fairly, saving some for Zoe works with your medicine and putting some in storage before planting for the next season. Virgo own unique birth chart is the higher expression of Mercury. Those born under the Virgo Sun are therefore and compares it with the said to be hard working, precise, practical and environmentally connected. positions of the planets today, revealing and explaining the windows of opportunity that are opening up around you and how to make the most of your time. Her insights help to give you a better understanding of yourself, your purpose, your loved ones, your talents and the best timing for effortless success in all areas of your life. Zoe also provides full chart interpretation services as well as running classes and workshops.
CONTACT ZOE +44 7984 825928 www.astrozo.com
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New Moon – 29th August - 5 degrees Virgo The Sun and the Moon are joined by Venus in Virgo and form a grand trine in the earth signs with Jupiter in Taurus and Pluto in Capricorn. As the seasons begin to change and we approach the harvest/planting time, this earth trine is a productive ally. The cycle of life leads us to spiral upwards rather than going round and round in circles. Chiron reminds us to nourish our inner selves instead of getting fatigued by external affairs. Full Moon – 12th September – 19 degrees Pisces All is safely gathered in and we pause in gratitude and for the abundance we receive. This is a sociable time to share good fortune with friends and family. Pisces is the last sign of the Zodiac and knows the importance of reflecting upon all that has gone before and releasing old ways before we step over the Equinox into a new season.
VISION Nothing becomes reality that is not envisioned. Create your vision, put it on paper, see it emerge into your world. Including: - Bruce Nixon envisioning a new world - Jacky Newcomb shares her angel stories - Flavia-Kate Peters helps you meet your soul group with the next guided meditation‌
Available from 3rd October at lightworkermag.com!
Next Month’s Edition 50
REGULARS Warrior Of The Light The City BY PAULO COELHO I stroll through the big city like I have strolled through so many other big cities in this world, and I see the same scenes; a man walking and talking on his cell phone, a boy running to catch the bus, a mother pushing a stroller, a young couple kissing in a park, kids playing football in a vacant lot, churches, traffic lights, billboards. I stand waiting with a group of people to cross the street and glance at the monuments that always show great men deep in thought, bearing the world on their shoulders.
CONTACT PAULO www.warriorofthelight. com/eng Twitter: @paulocoelho
I stroll through the big city where I do not speak the language, but what difference does that make? In big cities, nobody talks to anybody, everybody is so immersed in their problems, always in a hurry. Whether they are sitting in the square or waiting for the bus, anyone who approaches is seen as a threat. Strangers are suspect, we are taught that since we are children, and we remember it for the rest of our lives. No matter how miserable or lonely these people are or however much they need to share the joy of a victory or some suffocating sadness, it is better and safer to remain silent. Even so, I go up to someone, regardless of the fact that we do not speak a common language. I try a second person, then a third, until a man who seems to be in a hurry, like all the others, answers the question I want to ask, the answer to which I can almost always guess. “Who is this street named after?” I ask. “I haven’t the least idea. Are you lost?” I explain that I know where my hotel is and thank him. I wouldn’t know the answer to my question regarding many of the streets in my own hometown either. The glory of the world is transitory, as Paul said in one of his epistles. I stroll through the city, which is more than ten thousand kilometers from my own apartment, but whose only difference is the view of the sea. In everything else, both cities resemble one another and I wonder what I have been doing for nearly two months away from home. I decided to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela with a 90-day trip, traveling in whatever direction the wind carried me, accepting some professional engagements because that would protect me from the temptation that at this very moment seizes me with tremendous power; to go home. Have I made the wrong decision, have I been too radical? I make my way back to the hotel, once more I will pack my bags, say goodbye again to my friends, go through all the security controls at the airport and move on to another big city where all the same things await me.
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I go into my room, turn on the computer and visit the blog that I created for this trip. My readers send their comments, and one of them seems to have guessed what I have been feeling today, because he tells the following story: “Once upon a time, there was a poor but very brave man called Ali. He worked for Ammar, a rich old merchant. One winter’s night Ammar said, “Nobody can spend a night like this on top of the mountain without a blanket or food. But you need money, and if you can manage to do that you will receive a great reward. If you don’t, you will work for thirty days without pay”. Ali answered,“Tomorrow I shall do this test.” But when he left the shop, he saw that a really icy wind was blowing and became scared, so he decided to ask his best friend, Aydi, if it was crazy of him to accept that bet. After reflecting a while, Aydi answered, “I shall help you. Tomorrow, when you are at the top of the mountain, look ahead. I will be on the top of the mountain next to yours, where I will spend the whole night with a bonfire lit for you. You look at the fire and think about our friendship, that will keep you warm. You will manage, and later on I shall ask you something in return.” Ali won the test, got the money, and went to his friend’s house, “You told me you wanted some payment.” Aydi grabbed him by the shoulders, ”Yes, but it isn’t money. Promise that if at any time a cold wind passes through my life, you will light the fire of friendship for me.” The reader ends his comment on the blog saying “wherever you may be at this moment, thanks for having paid us a visit. When you decide to come back to our country, the fire of friendship will always be lit for you”. And although the loneliness of the journey is still here in my soul, now I have a better understanding of what I am doing here.
Warrior of the Light, a www.paulocoelho.com.br publication
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REGULARS LIGHTWORKER
LOV E S CONCH PRESS Conch Press is dedicated to raising consciousness by sending vibrational messages of empowerment, to help Lightworkers live to their full potential. Their books follow the ethos to ‘live, love, learn and enlighten’, and each inspires its readers with every page.
THE HEALING TRUST The Healing Trust is a pan-denominational organisation and the largest and oldest membership organisation of Spiritual Healers in the UK. Founded in 1954, they strive to raise the standards and awareness of healing in the UK and overseas.
BE HAPPY BY ROBERT HOLDEN Encapsulating Dr. Holden’s world famous techniques, this book shows you how to stop chasing happiness and start enjoying your life as it happens – a lesson for us all!
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REGULARS WORDS OF WISDOM
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. Albert Einstein Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. Maya Angelou I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying. Oscar Wilde Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach. Aristotle
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REGULARS THE LIST
TOP 20 WORDS WE DONT UNDERSTAND 1. panegyric 2. immiscible 3. Manichaean 4. inveighs 5. crepuscular 6. legerdemain 7. churlish 8. risible 9. anathema 10. recognizance 11. omerta 12. superannuated 13. perfidy 14. hauteur 15. samizdat 16. avuncular 17. inchoate 18. duplicitous 19. perfunctory 20. dyspeptic Source: New York Times
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REGULARS Featured Lightworker MARIANNE WILLIAMSON Inspire
www.marianne.com
Marianne Williamson is most well known as an author and lecturer, but she is also the founder of inspirational Project Angel Food, a meals-on-wheels program that serves homebound people with AIDS in the Los Angeles area. Her passion and drive to make a difference comes from the belief that, “In every community there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart there is the power to do it.”
Challenge Marianne is also a spiritual activist and founder of The Peace Alliance, a grass roots campaign supporting legislation currently before Congress to establish a United States Department of Peace. With the intention that “the spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts”, she is a strong leader for the light.
Educate As an author, Marianne has published ten books, including four New York Times Number 1 bestsellers. Her most publicised book is ‘Return To Love’, which brought the famous “Our Deepest Fear…” paragraph to the world, and she lives by the ethic that “Success means we go to sleep at night knowing that our talents and abilities were used in a way that served others.”
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