In the swirling static of your frantic moments, you may forget who you are. Step back, take a deep breath and know that you are always right where you need to be. ~ Creator

When you begin to live your life from a place of unconditional love and acceptance, you are using your divine spark to recognize and connect with the divine spark of others. You will be supporting a wonderful network of love and unity, while still leaving room for yourself and others to grow and bloom however is perfect for each individual. Simply put, it is the path to celebrating your sameness, and your uniqueness, with love and acceptance for all. ~Archangel Gabriel

John C. Cannon, Mongabay
Waking Times

As nations invest billions in extraction development, forests may suffer big losses.

Many of the minerals that enable our technology, back the value of our economies (or did at one time), and power our cities can be found in Africa. And yet the continent still remains something of an untapped resource, as the vast majority of mineral extraction occurs elsewhere. A new report published by a team of scientists from James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, documents a surging tide of foreign interest in mining in Africa and cautions that the sector’s unchecked development and expansion could devastate the environment. 

In a “call to arms” for conservation biologists, NGOs, and governments to guide this investment to both encourage economic development and safeguard natural habitat, author Bill Laurance and his colleagues catalogue known...

A sign directs visitors and patients to the St. Luke’s Rodale Institute Organic Farm, adjacent to the hospital. Photo credit: Bill Noll

Coach Mark Smallwood, EcoWatch
Waking Times

In 431 B.C. Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”

More than 2500 years later, we are inundated with advertisements boasting the latest, greatest cure-all super drug. From a young age, we learn that it doesn’t matter how or what we eat, there is a quick fix around the corner for whatever ails us—whether we’re obese, have high bloo...

HJ: Sometimes it feels like our mind has a life and mind of its own and has no interest in calming down and playing by our rules despite out best intentions and efforts to get it to do so.  In these moments, it’s helpful to have a set of practices and techniques to help you ‘get things under control’.

The irony is that sometimes it’s that very attempt to control things that is the problem.  Fighting what is happening only perpetuates the frustration.  It is by detaching and practicing mindfulness that we can let go and watch the situation resolve itself…  In this way we paradoxically get things under control once and for all…

- Truth

How to Slow a Racing Mind

By Charles A. Francis | Mindfulness Meditation Institute

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Do you ever find it difficult to slow down your mind? For some of us, a racing mind is a serious problem. When we’re agitated, we have no control over our mind, and it becomes extremely difficult to meditate.

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Stephanie Marohn with Malidoma Patrice Somé
Waking Times

The Shamanic View of Mental Illness

In the shamanic view, mental illness signals “the birth of a healer,” explains Malidoma Patrice Somé. Thus, mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, spiritual crises, and need to be regarded as such to aid the healer in being born.

What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm. “Mental disorder, behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field,” says Dr. Somé. These disturbances result when the person does not get assistance in dealing with the presence of the energy from the spirit realm.

One of the things Dr. Somé encountered when he first came to the United States in 1980 for graduate study was how this country deals with mental illness. When a fellow student was sent to a mental institute due to “nervous depression,” Dr. Somé went to visit him.

It is understandable that the concept of opposites in the world has earned a shady reputation. Sides are taken because of opposites. Opposites are conducive to weighing, and weighing is judging. Of course, appraisal is part of life in the world.
 
There is someone everywhere in the world asking: “Is this a good bride for me? Is this bridge safe to go over? Is this paint wet or dry?” Endless are the questions, and uncertainty rides the range.
 
In the world, there is sickness, and there is health. Wealth and poverty. Fat and thin. War and peace. Harmony and strife. Gain and loss. Good guy. Bad guy. Which is which may depend upon which side you are on or who is telling the story or retelling it.  
 
I have said that in everything, there is good. Even in contrast, there is good. There is good in everything.
 
No one I know on Earth has been without heartache. There is a general acceptance of suffering. Everyone knows what suffering is. It needs no explanation. Furthermore, there are ranges of suffering and various shades of light cast upon suffering. There is big, and there is little, and there are moments of suffering obviated. No one I know on Earth is beyond the pale of suffering. No one I know, when it comes to suffering, says: “Huh? What’s that?”
 
Even to the concept of suffering, there is something of value. When you take the tight shoe off, there is a sigh of relief.