Thousands of Iceland residents are offering sanctuary to Syrian refugees.

In the midst of the Syrian crisis, Iceland recently announced it was willing to help with the growing humanitarian disaster by providing sanctuary for Syrian refugees. 50, to be exact.

In the country of about 330,000 people, such an offer wasn’t received as particularly heartfelt or overwhelming, especially considering that an estimated 9 million Syrians have fled their homes since the outbreak of civil war in March 2011.

By John Holland

Many of us know people who when they’ve reached a certain age, find themselves stuck in the mind-set that they’ll remain single for the rest of their lives. All too often you’ll hear them say: “I’m too old,” or “It’s too late, I’m not going to meet anyone now.” The same goes for people who feel that a promotion has passed them by, or it’s too late in life to start something new. Many people fall victim to this self-limiting belief or subscribe to this form of societal programming. I love the quote by George Eliot: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” This article’s message is: It’s never too late and you are never too old!

A few weeks ago, I was lecturing on one of my favorite topics, the power of the soul. I was in the process of explaining how your soul attracts what it needs and desires, when a woman raised her hand and said that she’d been thinking about the artwork she did when she was younger. She felt that synchronicity was playing its hand in guiding her to go back to the art she so loved to create.

The meaning of life is… This.

I’m not pulling your leg.

This right here – What’s happening right now – This is the meaning of life.

But…

What about helping others?

What about love?

What about growing as a person?

Those things will never happen outside of now. They are part of this. So is reading this article, biting your lip, and that itch you have juuuust about now.

Have you ever noticed that many commercial cleaning products come with a fine print that reads something like, “hazardous to humans and domestic animals”? Though what we want is a product that will kill germs and make our windows, dishes, sinks, toilets, and floors sparkle, what we don’t want is to harm ourselves, our loved ones, or the environment. And it’s scary to think we’re spraying and scrubbing the space we call home with toxins that could be doing more harm than good.

With chemicals currently being used daily in our society and making up an astonishing 96 percent of products and materials in America, it’s hard to believe that little regard is being given to their effects. But the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was passed in 1976, hasn’t been updated since day one. So as for those cleaning products? They’re basically untested and unregulated.

And to put the result of this into perspective, traces of about 300 pollutants, including chemicals used for household cleaning, have been found present in newborns’ umbilical cords, while the most common chemicals we use in our everyday lives have been found to cause a variety of illnesses, cancers, and developmental disorders.

By Lia Love
Guest Writer for Wake Up World

‘You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing start.’ ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Many of us seem to be zooming in our evolutionary trajectory, and yet we are still experiencing emotional issues and feelings of fear, inadequacy and gut-level confusion. In this process of awakening, we arrive at certain points where it seems we are perched on a razor’s edge of ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’. This knowing and not knowing simultaneously, and the space between the two, is the thing that is keeping us confused and unbalanced.

It is like being in a bardo — the Tibetan word for the space within a space, the space between breaths, the intermediate space. We hang there, suspended in limbo with a big question mark, an unease at being somewhere so different and new that there is a natural instinct to just freeze, to check it out slowly and stealthily before taking the next breath, the next step. And the next thing to do, to be and to feel, is not obvious. Not at all.

By Sayer Ji
Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

A concerning new study finds that most of the breast milk samples tested contained artificial sweeteners. Why has this never been discovered until now and what are the implications to our most vulnerable populations?

Expanding on these findings, an article soon to be published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health on the presence of synthetic sweeteners in breast milk is bound to upset the apple cart when it comes to assessing the toxicological risk of these chemicals to breastfed infants.

In previous articles we have reported extensively on the dangers of artificial sweeteners, especially aspartame and sucralose (aka Splenda), whose presence in tens of thousands of consumer products make exposure to them commonplace. Despite their present day low-risk regulatory status, we have found highly concerning research that these compounds contribute to a wide range of health conditions, which include but are not limited to:

“Nothing in the world can bother you as much as your own mind, I tell you. In fact, others seem to be bothering you, but it is not others, it is your own mind.” ~ Sri Ravi Shankar

Our minds are probably the most powerful tool that we could ever own. In fact, our entire life is dependent upon our thoughts about it. Whether or not we have a good life, a mediocre life, or a terrible life is not so much contingent on the actual circumstances of our lives, but in our thoughts pertaining to the circumstances.

For example, two people can be watching the exact same movie, one person can focus on the bad acting of one of the characters and let that ruin the entire movie for them, while the other one is focused on the amazing music soundtrack and appreciates the costumes and set design. Both people experienced the exact same movie but only one enjoyed themselves. Such is our lives. And yes, it is true that no two people will have the same experience about the movie, but the principal still works the same.