By Lissa Rankin MD

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

To expose our wounds to people we care about – the icky stuff, the ego stuff, the personal growth edges we’re working on that we haven’t yet mastered – is super vulnerable. Letting others see our “big ugly tails” (hat tip to my dear friend Amy Ahlers, who has seen my big ugly tail and trusted me enough to let me see hers) tends to trigger all our core fears of rejection and abandonment, of withdrawal of love.

But to bear witness to someone’s wound is a privilege and an opportunity to deepen the relationship beyond the idealistic views we might have of each other into the real truth of both our light and our shadows.

By Daniel Gustafsson

Guest Writer For Wake Up World

A study of natural medicinal plants and their potential for treatment of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, ALS and other neuro-degenerative diseases.

This article is the culmination of six years work, having studied ethnobotanical medicine and the field of neuro-disease, making connections between the two in the search for something viable in terms of an alternative treatment option for ALS – amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and similar neuro-degenerative conditions.

Mae Chan, Prevent Disease
Waking Times

From our environment, to our food, medicine and lifestyle, we are surrounded by things that depress our immune system. Knowing the culprits can make a big difference in how long and how often you encounter illness.

1. Sugar

Sucrose suppresses the immune system, leads to weight gain and leaches precious minerals from your body. Even in small amounts, sugar is detrimental to your health. Eating or drinking 100 grams (8 tbsp.) of sugar, the equivalent of about two cans of soda, can reduce the ability of white blood cells to kill germs by forty percent...

Llewelllyn Vaughan-Lee, Global Oneness Project
Waking Times

The signs of a growing ecological crisis are becoming more and more clear: global warming, acidification of the oceans, the massive depletion of species. Weather patterns are increasingly unstable as our ecosystem becomes out of balance–a direct result of our materialistic, fossil fuel driven culture. We are destroying our own ecosystem, the same finely balanced system that sustains us. And we seem unable to take the measures that are needed to slow down this accelerating disaster–our politicians putting short-term economic growth before any long-term ecological considerations.

Sadly, even the concept of “sustainability” has been co-opted by our culture. Sustainability no longer refers to upholding the viability of our ecosystem, its biodiversity and beauty, its wilderness and wonder, but to the very materialistic culture that is destroying it. This attitude reveals that above all, we want to sustain our energy-intensive, resource-depleting life style, whose very demands are damaging our planet. “Environmentalism is no longer about how to save the environment. It has instead become about how we in the developed world can save our lifestyle.”

Appreciation is the one aspect that will water and grow your relationships and ensure that everyone feels honoured for their unique contributions and beingness. People will naturally want to do their best if they feel efforts are noticed and celebrated by others. Why not spend the day looking for things to appreciate in others and letting them know what you find? ~Archangel Gabriel

Anna Hunt, Staff Writer
Waking Times

In the famous Fibonacci sequence, each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two. It begins with 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and continues so on. When you take two successive numbers in this sequence, their ratio is very close to 1.618, which is called the golden ratio. The Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio are present in many parts of the natural world including the shape of plants, human and animal bodies, weather patterns, and even galaxies. It is said that they govern order in the natural world.

Now, researchers from South Africa claim that the golden ratio can be seen in the topology of space-time, giving the argument that the ratio keeps the entire Universe in order.

Dr. Jan Boeyens at the University of Pretoria and Dr. Francis Thackeray of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa have researched the many ways that the golden ratio can be seen ‘related not only to aspects of mathematics but also to physics, chemistry, biology and the topology of space-time.’ The researchers believe that geometric shapes found in the natural world throughout the Universe ultimately succumb to the same mathematical property of 1.618.

Daniel Dowling, Contributor
Waking Times

In the wake of all the headlines emerging from institutional racism, I’d like to address the topic of racism as one of the many symptoms of ignorance to be balanced by compassion and knowledge, and how hate crime train wrecks are employed to turn all our heads while the real news goes unnoticed.

There are so many heads of the evil hydra that radiate from imbalance, and just as soon as one is decapitated through force, 3 more spring forth to command attention to the imbalance within. Racism is one of the most pernicious heads of this beast, but there is no amount of information that can cure it, and no amount of force that can deter it, for it will resurrect in greater strength unless and until it is balanced by love. If we finally address racism because it has reared its ugly head and we want it to go away, then we live externally, and the imbalance remains, albeit in quietus after the riots have quelled. The fuel of this mythical monster from which problematic heads, like racism, stem is fear, and fear is contrived and suspended by ignorance, and with all of the information that we have, to say nothing of the conscience embedded within us all, ignorance is a choice.

Whatever is bothering you, you do not have to be bothered with it. You are a responsible person, yet you do not have to aggravate or even suffer to the degree you have. Did someone tell you that you have to? Perhaps you were taught that you were to pay a penance for being alive, and the penance was to be called suffering or a bad headache, or non-stop aggravating thoughts, or dreams unfulfilled.

You just don’t have to do suffering anymore. You may think you have no choice, yet you do have choice. It’s your choice. In this world, choices are not always either/or as you may have thought. You may have thought that your choice is this one or that one, that your choices are limited to two. There could be many other choices as well that you have not considered and perhaps may not want to consider. You may see only the two black and white choices and go no further. You see happy or unhappy and no in between. Maybe you can be like a dial and be medium happy.

Maybe you like to suffer. If you suffer and you really don’t have to, then it must be a choice you make. You may be innocent, and still you have choice. If you want a way out of a maze, you have to find it. You do. You have to go for it. Maybe you have to be creative and think anew.

There are possibilities right in front of you that sometimes you don’t see. Perhaps you can think of such times and wonder how you didn’t think of this new alternative before?