Mindfulness, Meditation and Creativity - FREE Videos

My Fall class Mindfulness, Meditation and Creativity features a lot of resources for generating lower blood pressure and stress chemicals that strip YEARS from our lives.  The content has to wait for the launch in September, but here are some previews.....

Seeking beta testers for all the new Fall classes....

Are You Sick of the Valentine Hoopla? A view that might surprise you.....

You Choose: What Does Valentine’s Day MEAN – Mindless Commercial Holiday or Deeply Meaningful Reminder Day?

What do you really believe about Valentine’s Day, right now? 

Some of my clients don’t celebrate.  There is a continuum from those who brush it off as a concocted, artificial, commercial sham, an excuse for everyone in a relationship to be guilted into gifts and expensive dinners, to the other extreme of a mellow “Let those who want to buy chocolate, do so.  It’s not harming anyone.”  Are you somewhere on that continuum?  

Others celebrate, and again there is a continuum of what is being celebrated.  At one end of the rainbow are the “We need a romance holiday, to help us remember that romance is what started us on the road to bills, diapers and trash pickup day.” And at the other end of the Let’s Celebrate are the people who are celebrating love, not romance.

I’m in the Celebrate Love camp.  In modern US culture, romance is what we mean we say “love,” but the word has a much broader definition.  That opening of the heart that is love encompasses how we cherish our favorite family, the brothers and sisters of the heart that our deep friendships become, the animals who enrich our souls and extend our healthy lifespan.  Our heart-opening is what makes us human.  Our caring for each other, those we know deeply and those of our community and nation whom we don’t know but who are beset with illness or troubles, is what ennobles our existence.  After all, every mammal species finds food, raises young and tries to stay alive.  Caring only for oneself means nothing.  Love for others, human and otherwise, known to us and unknown but in need, is our legacy from our 10,000 generations of ancestors and our gift to the future.  I think that enormous component of our humanity deserves at least one holiday – don’t you?

Can you celebrate Valentine’s Day as the holiday that belongs to every heart that knows and practices love? 

www.soaringdragon.biz

The Nurturing of Life

Digging Deeper Into the Terror Attacks, A Brilliant, Simple Explanation for American Disengagement

What We Miss When We Jump….

One of the key teachings of all the wisdom traditions concerns the dangers of jumping to conclusions on the basis of inadequate information.  Our limbic systems, bless them, never, ever think that they have inadequate information.  What we call a capacity for critical thinking is merely a limbic system that has been trained to stop, loop in the prefrontal cortex, and then and only then step lightly to a not-deeply-held conclusion.  Everyone who has taken the training with me is glad they did. 

I’ve felt for some time that the answer to “why didn’t Americans get emotionally involved with the East African embassy bombings?” wasn’t simple racism.  I knew that the knee-jerk “they’re all racists” explanation for why there hasn’t been a Je suis Ankara movement to complement the solidarity Americans felt with Parisians after the terrorist attack, was missing a core truth.  But simply knowing that someone else is engaging in simplistic thinking isn’t the same as being brilliant oneself. 

Then I read an article in APU Insider [In Homeland Security contributor Sylvia Longmire] that supplied the brilliant missing link. [I got my 2nd MA at APUS, great school.]  The reason why Americans are emotionally wrought about Paris is because we either have been there, someone close to us has been there and connected us to it vicariously or we dream of going there (mostly because – again – it is someplace that others we know have been).  Few Americans have been to, or wish they could go to, Dar es Salaam or Ankara.  Psych research clearly shows that a huge part of emotional connection is familiarity.  When something is just a point on a map, we humans don’t feel connected.  But places that feel “familiar,” we care about.  [Advertisers understand this: even if you rationally don’t want to, your limbic system, where decisions are made, feels more positive about products you have heard about repeatedly.  The familiar has a positive vibe to it.]  

** My earlier post misattributed the brilliant idea.  Pls forgive my error.

Sign up for a FREE Getting Unstuck session with powerful coach and transformation guide Victoria C. Leo, at www.soaringdragon.biz

Soar With Dragons to Genuine Joy (part 2)

In the first part of this exploration, I recommended learning new things, exploring creating things and slowing down to the point where you can actually experience the world you live in.  Today I want to look at some examples of joy that came to me like a bolt from the heavens - unplanned, unexpected and amazing.

It was almost two decades ago, and a Russian colleague was visiting Silicon Valley to share best practices on the use of technology in education.  At that time, I was director of a university extension program in network management. [Too true.  Before I saw the light and switched to healing minds and bodies, I used to teach network engineering.  My first published book, by Prentice-Hall was titled Networking and Data Communications and was the first readable tutorial on LAN technology ever published.  For your homework assignment, research how long ago that was and DON’T TELL ANYONE!]

I was in a major-league funk, not whining about anything, just much more subdued than usual, in a serious crisis of confidence.  He noticed that I wasn’t my usual sunny self, nagged me to tell him why, and I gave him the 20-words-or-less version of What Wasn’t Working in My Life.  I’ll never forget his words, because they not only brought me out of my funk, they have sustained me for two decades.  He said, “Remember: you are the beloved child of God.”

Not so extraordinary, you say?  Well, consider this: I don’t think he believes in God.  I know I don’t and never did.  While I’m a very spiritual and religious person, my faith doesn’t have a First Cause (God/Creator being).  The universe follows laws and arose however Stephen Hawking and his colleagues say it does and did.  We Buddhists don’t care.  Religion is about ethics, conscience, love, honor, transcendence and the meaning of our human lives, all the things that chemistry and physics and biology can’t create experiments to study.  But what my colleague was saying wasn’t about the simplistic definition of God as creator being.  He meant God as a word that equals “the spirit of love that animates the universe,” which the Upanishads, humanity oldest literature, says is the axis that all matter revolves around.  Every faith I’ve ever studied sees that three-letter word as denoting a concept or an energy, not an actual being.  What he was really saying was “Victoria, it’s just a trough in the overall arc of a good person’s life.  The universe still rotates on an axis of pure love.  See that.  Don’t forget it.”

Seeing to the heart of what he was communicating transformed my whole conceptualization of what my life was about and what my response to the latest life-insult [a serious health issue] should be.

Fast forward to two years ago, when I was spending four days above the Arctic Circle in mid-winter, and it was every bit as icy cold from 10PM to 5AM as you are envisioning – times twelve.  The auroras were glorious; I could feel those magnetic fields resonating in my soul.  They danced their sparkling dance across a sky blazing with starlight. 

I noticed a Japanese woman who was traveling alone and reached out to try to share the experience, but her English was poor and I wasn’t pronouncing my 7 words of Japanese correctly.  So I held her hand, shared some reiki, and crocheted her a scarf, with reiki symbols in them, so they would continue to create a channel through me to her even after we all went on our ways.  So few words.  But the channel was profound.  We stayed in touch, she continued to study English.  Today, she is marvelously fluent, I’ve learned to pronounce better and we are doing wonderful spiritual healing work together. [If you can read Japanese, find Wami Amami online and sign up to work with her.]

We can find joy, we can find wisdom and we can find deep connection with unfamiliar words and with no words at all.  Joy can flow down like a mighty river into our unsuspecting souls, if we open ourselves to it.  I hope you will.

Bio: Victoria Leo offers both science-based and spiritual solutions that really work! Visit www.soaringdragon.biz and choose the program that will transform your life.  You deserve to soar with dragons! Victoria’s Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies welcomes you, as does her blog SoaringDragoninJapan.blogspot.com. You can find her books on Amazon or at your local bookseller.