Sunday, October 11, 2020
Thursday, October 08, 2020
Wednesday, October 07, 2020
Monday, September 28, 2020
Adventures in Meditation
Like a lot of people of my generation, my first exposure to meditation was through Zen. Following the instructions of the teacher, I sat on a cushion with my spine straight and a downward focus. I following the rhythm of my breathing and returned to the breath whenever thoughts intruded. Practicing Zen proved OK for awhile, but after awhile I began to crave something more. It didn’t take me long to learn that there were as many forms of meditation or spiritual exercise as there were physical exercises. One example involves the manner and direction of breathing. Focusing downward towards the solar plexus, results in grounding or a focus on the practical. Focusing on the heart stimulates compassion. Focusing upward tends to open up intuition. Adding other elements, such as visualization, mantra and breathing in a circular fashion – all of these produce different results. This Wednesday, September 30th, we’ll learn and practice two distinctly different forms of meditation: tonglen, which helps the practitioner awaken compassion; and a form of Tantric meditation, which encourages the practitioner to experience the sacredness of all of life. We’ll also learn the Ignatian practice of the Examin, that invites us to find the movement of the Spirit in all the people and events of our day. The Spiritual Practice Exploration will be held at 7-10 pm ET on Wednesday September 30th (check your time zone here). To register or learn more about the facilitators, visit the event page.
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Ready for an Adventure in Meditation? ✨ Wednesday, Sept. 30 7-10 pm: https://bit.ly/spirit-practice
Saturday, September 26, 2020
Friday, September 25, 2020
Into the Mystic
Author Paul Corson had two out-of-body experiences that have shaped his view of the world.
Now 86, he’s now on a mission to share what he’s leaned.
His principal vehicle is his new book, Regaining Paradise: Forming a New Worldview, Knowing God and Journeying into Eternity, "a guided journey into self-knowledge, identity, empowerment, and sublime understanding that will open the mind’s eye.“
But this podcast isn’t really a review of the book
Instead it’s a conversation with two individuals who share a mystical way of being in the world.
The two discuss the nature of miracles, the relationship between spiritual substance and the material world, and Corson’s born-again experience.
"The human experience… is a flat out veritable, literal miracle. , Once you realize that you’re a miracle, that you’re never going to die, it’s kind of changes things. You’re not running to buy that new car because you have all this time in the world. You know that you’re going to be living in eternity,” Corson said.
Based in Memphis, Tennessee, Corson is a former pharmacist who established a protocol for the treatment of HIV/AIDs. He received the 2000 Philadelphia Hero Award for his contributions in support of AIDs survivors.
Links:
- Paul’s website
- Sacred Inclusion Network
- Sacred Inclusion Network's Facebook Group
- Sacred Inclusion Network's YouTube Channel
- Like the podcast? Support us on Patreon!
Check out the Diversity and Spirituality’s newest podcast
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Wednesday, September 23, 2020
Thursday, September 10, 2020
Friday, August 21, 2020
"Differently Abled" - The Sara Minkara Story
Don’t think of Sara Minkara as a disabled person. Think of her as “differently-abled.”
Social activist, speaker, and a winner of multiple awards, the founder of the advocacy organization Empowerment for Integration (ETI) has never let used her absence of vision of an excuse or crutch. The slew of honors she’s achieved are evidence of her accomplishments. Her awards and fellowships include the Clinton Global Initiative Outstanding Commitment Award, Forbes “30 Under 30” and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology IDEAS Global Challenge Award.
When Sara lost her sight at age seven, her mother had two options. “She has one option of wallowing in our misery and really feeling bad for herself and her kids…But she took the other path and the path of,believing in God’s will and saying there is a purpose behind this. "She said ‘I’m not going to listen to the outside world of what the world thinks about disability… I’m going to just focus on home and make sure our kids go to school and live a very much – I’m not gonna say 'normal life’ – but a full life, an integrated life and mainstream life.”
As she relates in this podcast, Minkara never set out to become a full-time advocate. “I was a math and econ major. I’m an introvert. So I had a plan of doing a PhD.” But as a sophomore at Wesleyan College, she applied for a grant from the Clinton Foundation to run an inclusive summer camp in Tripoli, Lebanon, the home of her parents. “It turned out to be impactful not only for the kids, not only for the parents in the community, but for myself, she said.
In this podcast, Minkara describes the set of circumstances that caused her to found ETI, , how people stigmatize blind people, and how anyone can be an advocate for disabled people.
Links:
- Empowerment through Integration
- ETI’s Ambassadors of Inclusion program
- Sara Minkara’s site
- Sacred Inclusion Network
- Sacred Inclusion Network's Facebook Group
- Sacred Inclusion Network's YouTube Channel
- Like the podcast? Support us on Patreon!
Check out the Diversity and Spirituality’s newest podcast
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Wednesday, August 12, 2020
"Touching the Jaguar"
Author, activist and renegade economist John Perkins traces his journey from Peace Corps volunteer to co-founding the Pachamama Alliance, a non-profit devoted to establishing a world future generations will want to inherit.
Best known for his best-selling book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, Perkins describes how his life was irrevocably changed when a Shuar shaman in the Amazon jungle healed his life-threatening fever. “He healed me by helping me change my perception…and he demanded as payment for having healed me that I become his apprentice.”
Having graduated from business school before joining the Peace Corps, Perkins didn’t see a future in becoming a shaman. So instead, he became an economist and, eventually, chief economist of a major consulting company.
His job was to “identify countries that had resources our corporations coveted… and then convince that country that it should accept huge loans from the World Bank or other organizations” to pay for costly infrastructure projects.
It took him awhile, but eventually it dawned on him that the game was rigged.
The result of the countries taking out loans was not “increasing the prosperity of the people…(but) increasing the prosperity of the rich families in the country, as well as our corporations. But in fact, the people were suffering because money was diverted from health education and other social services to pay the interest on the loans.”
In this podcast, Perkins describes the common denominator of what he learned from his first shaman teacher and his work as an economist: that perceptions shape reality. Where once a shaman helped shift his view of the conditions he found threatening as a young Peace Corps volunteer, he later was also able to use data to persuade heads of countries to borrow large sums of money to pay for infrastructure projects.
The shaman he worked with taught him about the process he calls “touching the Jaguar,” the key to shifting perceptions and the title of his new book.
“‘Touching the Jaguar’ means that we identify the things that are holding us back: our barriers, our fears…When we touch that Jaguar, we receive energy from the Jaguar or wisdom or creativity that allows us to change our perception. And when we change our perception, we then can take new actions that change reality.”
That desire to positively shift perceptions is part of the origin story of the Pachamama Alliance, which Perkins, Bill and Lynn Twist founded in 1995.
The three and a team of others had traveled to the rain forest at the invitation of the Achuar, an indigenous Amazonian community.
“They came to me and asked me, 'will you help us touch the Jaguar? Help us reach out and join forces with the people we most fear – you and your people. Help us create a partnership and alliance with the people we most fear so that we can help you change your dream, and we can all work together to change the this terribly destructive dream of the modern world that’s creating a death economy.”
In this podcast, Perkins explains what he means by “the death economy.” He also gives a simple five-part series of questions that anyone can ask themselves to help them more easily get in touch with and actualize their purpose.
Perkins’ latest book is Touching the Jaguar: Transforming Fear Into Action To Change Your Life And The World.
Links:
- John Perkin’s site
- Pachamama Alliance
- Pachamama Alliance Global Commons (open community site)
- Sacred Inclusion Network
- Sacred Inclusion Network’s Facebook Group
- Sacred Inclusion Network's YouTube Channel
- Like the podcast? Support us on Patreon!
Check out the Diversity and Spirituality’s newest podcast
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Friday, August 07, 2020
Wednesday, July 15, 2020
Friday, June 19, 2020
On Mask-Wearing and Masculinity
In thinking about Wendy William’s Saturday session on Embracing the Divine Masculine, I’ve been reflecting on its opposite: toxic masculinity. How, I’m curious to know, does toxic masculinity manifest during this pandemic moment?
Some men, opines Jessica Valenti in a recent piece in Medium, equate mask-wearing as somehow appearing weak, i.e. not masculine. It’s interesting that three of the worst-hit countries in this pandemic are also afflicted with heads of state preoccupied with meeting the terms of machismo—Bolsanaro, Putin, and Trump, all of whom disdain the wearing of masks. “Appearing to play it safe contradicts a core principle of masculinity: show no weakness,” said Peter Glick, in a recent article in the Guardian. Glick is a scientist who has co-authored research on how so-called “masculinity contest culture” poisons work environments. Bolsanaro, Putin, and Trump are leaders who have built brands as strongmen offering maverick solutions, and want to be seen as recovery presidents sweeping the illness aside, even if the virus has other ideas. So what is the Divine Masculine? Here’s a description of this quality by Isabela, the proprietor of the Sacred Light Alchemy. “This is the energy that unites the world in love, peace, and personal authority, allowing all beings and all things to have a seat at the round table of oneness. It is the man that gives his coat for a person in need, it is the care of a woman for a relative or a neighbor." On the other hand, toxic masculinity, Williams says below, is rooted in fear, which in term results in controlling behavior.We’ll explore the nature of what she calls Divine Masculinity and Divine Femininity in some detail during Saturday’s 11am ET online community exploration, the details of which are here.
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Friday, June 12, 2020
Embracing the Divine Masculine
As someone who’s been involved in what-Wikipedia-calls the mythopoetic men’s movement for a number of years, I’ll admit I was initially taken aback to hear a woman talk about many of the same themes I’ve repeatedly heard “woke” men talk about .
But I quickly realized that Wendy C. Williams, the guest host of the upcoming Embracing the Divine Masculine upcoming event, approaches male issues from a different perspective than I’d heard before. The online community exploration will be held on June 20th at 11 am ET.
In a video podcast interview I recorded with her recently, she expanded on her view that men are as much victims of toxic masculinity as women.
“As a society, we’ve put men in a box that says in order to be masculine, you have about four acceptable emotional states,” she said.“It is highly acceptable for you to be angry. It is acceptable for you to be neutral and not positive. It is acceptable for you to be happy for short periods of time and for really good reasons. And it’s acceptable for you to be sad for very short periods of time, and only for very good reasons. "Other than that, you’re not allowed to express yourself and if you do, you are then called derogatory terms related to the feminine by both men and women.”
She also believes that both men and women have a role in helping each other evolve towards embodying mature and divine aspects of masculinity and femininity. The
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Tuesday, June 09, 2020
Digital Disruptor: The Internet's Impact on Religion and Spirituality
Digital culture is transforming religious practice in multiple ways, says Texas A&M Professor of Communication Heidi A. Campbell.
“Scholars of religion are finding that people practice ‘lived religion.’ They may say, 'I’m Jewish’ or 'I’m Christian,” but they draw on multiple sources to define what they mean. Religion is more personalized in a digital age,“ Campbell says.
How people define religious authority is also changing. Although pastors, imams and rabbis hold authority in their traditions because of of their theological knowledge, a new type of "algorithmic authority” has emerged, Campbell says.
“Involvement online builds this kind of authority… It’s the number of 'likes’ you have on your posts, it’s the number of followers you have or how many people link to your content. All of this gives a sense of authority and validity…that’s gained not from religious knowledge, but technological fluency,” she says.
The internet, Campbell says, “allows people to create their own tribe."
Although people may have roots in a traditional congregation, they can explore their particular interests in an online global community. "There can find online global connections that kind of feed their souls, whereas they couldn’t do this before” in pre-internet days.
A major contributor to the study of digital religion, Campbell is the author of Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture. She is the Founding Director of the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies. She is currently studying the phenomena of internet memes and how these memes shape religions perceptions.
Links:
- Campbell’s Wikipedia page
- The Internet challenges and empowers religious institutions (article)
- Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies
- Sacred Inclusion Network
- Sacred Inclusion Network’s Facebook Group
- Sacred Inclusion Network’s YouTube Channel
- Like the podcast? Support us on Patreon!
Check out the Diversity and Spirituality’s newest podcast
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