SoulTending.com

The founder and chairman of the Virgin Group and the Governor of California are both set on saving the planet. So is the six year old mega hit “American Idol”. In “Idol Gives Back”, a historic, two-night special TV event that aired on April 24 and 25, will save and change the lives of children and young people in extreme poverty in both the USA and Africa. So far they have collected over $70 million and are still going. Even the president, Mr. And Mrs. Bush, felt inclined to send a video message to the American Idol viewers and thank them for their generosity and kindness.

Now if only he would not waste billions of dollars every day in a war that was started illegally. The good thing about 9/11 and the war is, that there are that many people less, who will pollute the planet. But let’s not get sarcastic and harden ourselves, neither to what’s going on nor to the fact that we are in a big mess.

Not only has our meddling in other countries made us an even bigger target for hatred. But by choosing to send our young minds to a war that will not have any victors, we gambled with way too many lives. A whole generation has lost their innocence. Atrocities that Americans inflict on the so called enemies are going to cost us all dearly. The VA already is overwhelmed with the amount of Veterans who are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. They are in no way equipped to deal with the new and daunting task of healing the minds of the people we sent into war.

I guess the good thing about this war is that it is waking us all up. It is getting harder to find anyone in the US who is not personally affected by this war. Sure there are those that make America the land of the beautiful. The men and women who do not want to get bothered and drown themselves in partying, going on shopping sprees and scheduling the next botox injection and boob, nose or butt job.

However, it does get more and more difficult to adopt the three monkey aditude of: don’t see, don’t hear and don’t talk. Thanks to Bono from U2 “Red” products are in all the fancy stores. Dedicated to giving part of the proceeds to fight poverty. Famous and accomplished people are stepping up and making a statement. Athletes unite, Rockstars are flying to Africa and sending heart wrenching videos of starved kids back. Bill Gates, Richard Branson and other big money and business people have causes they rally for.

What about the rich and famous who don’t care? Let’s look at the poster child of the spoiled-rotten, self-absorbed, consumer generation: Paris Hilton. She is the perfect mirror for the USA. She is the personification of what is wrong with our society. She is the born princess of America. Her status as the “it” girl is unchallenged. She is the role model for so many teenage girls.

The USA as well is not in its infancy but being a misbehaved, on the loose teenager without parental guidance. As for Miss Paris Hilton, I do believe that she will jump on the bandwagon and in time dedicate herself to a cause that is bigger than her own person. She will also inspire all of her groupies to do the same, simply because it is the next big thing and the hip thing to do.

As for the government: I find hope in the ex-terminator and Governor of California who proofs that the term conscientious government is no longer an oxymoron. Yes we are driven by money, but what happens, when the people behind the big money are changing their focus? Money will guide our future. Luckily, the ones who have it also seem to possess values like gratitude, compassion, clear vision and charity.

What will our country look like when the ones in political power also adapt their practices, become conscientious and choose the values of gratitude, compassion, clear vision and charity? Now that would be a country to be proud of.

Let’s demand that we use our position in the world to make peace not war, to be the solution to the problem and not the cause of it, to end hunger, poverty and ensure that the young minds get the education they deserve and inherit a safe and well kept environment.

Let’s show the world that we have grown up, that we are taking responsibility for our mistakes and had a serious change of heart. This way we all can stand up tall and proudly declare: “I am an American” without getting booed at by the rest of the world, but cheered on as we cheer them on, to together save our planet and our own souls.

Absolutely! Welcome to the most extreme attempt to control the sale and use of dietary supplements ever seen. This past December, the FDA put a document on its web site titled “Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration.” This document is open to public comments until April 30, 2007 - just a few days from now.

• Do we already have a health care system that is unaffordable and becoming a major social problem for the US?
• Do we need to compound the injury by adding more regulations and restrictions?
• Do we want to enslave people even more to be part of the failing medical system?

Or

• Do we stop the course of dependency?
• Do we stop meddling in areas where the public can be self sufficient and take charge of their own lives if left alone?
• Do we empower our people or do we give power to a select few, who are already lining their pockets?

Modern medicine is still in its infancy compared to the history of the human race. Who needs complementary and alternative medicine to be regulated? The drug company, the doctors and the health care system do, not the people. What the people need, is easy access to complementary and alternative medicine products. So that they can keep taking care of themselves as they have for hundreds of years. Keep big business and government out of self care. Stop meddling and interfering in the health aspects that work and focus instead on regulating the outrageous price margins that the Pharma industry puts on its drugs. Keep medicine affordable and accessible at all cost to avoid a complete collapse of the health care system once and for all.

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Time to act!
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If left undone, supplements might become so tightly regulated that you would have to get a doctor’s prescription to use them.

Of all the times to raise our voices, none is more important than this time.

You can find the full text of the FDA document at this link:

http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/06d-0480-gld0001.pdf

And you can use this link to submit your comments:

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/oc/dockets/comments/COMMENTSMain.CFM?EC_DOCUMENT_ID=1451&SUBTYP=CONTINUE&CID=&AGENCY=FDA

In addition, we also need to let our representatives in Washington know that we strongly resist this attack on our healthcare freedom. You can find the names and e-mail addresses for your congressmen at this web site: congress.org.

This is part I of the series:

Emotions, Behaviors and our Kids

In the first 16 years of my life I experienced repeated molestations from various different sources and directions. Being the polite, nice girl I never learned to speak up. I never learned to set boundaries. I never learned that I could share my misery with a caring adult, who listens and doesn’t judge. So I internalized it all. I withdrew and became even more shy. Since I never experienced any adults around me empathizing with my feelings and validating them, I too started to discount them and even started telling myself that the molestation was not really that bad, that I didn’t really get hurt and worst of all that I was safe.

So it is no wonder that 20 years later, when I hear a caregiver say to my 2 year old: “Oh don’t cry, it is nothing.” I go out there and teach her about empathy. I tell her that in our parenting style we are doing something that is called empathy. “It is about validating his feelings.” I then proceeded by asking my child who was still crying in my arms: ”Did you hurt yourself? Where are you hurting? You must feel shocked that this happened. Are you still crying because you feel upset that you fell?”

If the emphasis of parenting is on validating what is going on for everybody involved and less on politeness and being a nice girl or a good boy, our relationships would look way different. We would have learned to set appropriate boundaries. Say “Yes” when we mean yes and “No” when we mean no. We would have learned the skill of feeling into any given situation and person and the willingness to understand life as they see it. We would have learned that we matter and that we can make a difference. In the old style of parenting we are left to feel different, not part of, me versus the rest of the world, alienated from our truth and full of inner struggle between what we think we should do and what we want to do.

I am now healing the thought patterns of the effects of my upbringing. I am a lucky one. We all are. There is so much more information out and readily available. The subconscious mind of our species is realizing more about the subtleties of existence at a rapid pace. This means that we do not have to be bound to the past as much as just the generation before us was. With this gift comes also a responsibility. We owe it to our selves, to the generations before and after us, to do as much as we can to stop the perpetuation of hurt.

Every one of us is so unique, so stopping the perpetuation of hurt means different things to each one of us. The way I believe I serve the best is to continually search to uncover old patterns of behavior and thought that don’t serve me anymore. I do this by engaging into what I am passionate about: Writing, dancing, singing, drawing, organizing, being creative, teaching, loving, serving and following my bliss.

I am happy and proud of my past. It made me the person I am. I do not regret anything. I know that I and everybody around me did the best we knew. Life is a dance and we are the prima ballerina as well as the stage hand, the make up artist, the seamstress, the choreographer, the chorus girls, the audience, the light and sound engineers. My dance with life made me more caring, courageous, deep, graceful, passionate, powerful and certainly stronger.

Your Life, unplugged

All over the house your appliances are using energy even when you’re not using them. There’s even a name for this money-draining phenomenon: Phantom Load.

The Environmental Defense Organization estimates that the power we waste costs Americans $1 billion a year. And it’s fueling the climate-altering greenhouse effect that is wrecking our planet. All those little things, like leaving your cell-phone charger plugged in when not in use, add up. The easy fix: Keep everything from your TV to your toaster connected to a power strip switched to “off” until you are actually using the appliance.

From “Parents” Magazine March 2007

The war on shopping bags
Plastics of evil
San Francisco

San Francisco swaps polyethylene for potato starch

“This day has been long in coming,” declared Ross Mirkarimi on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall this week, flanked by compost bins and boxes of re-usable cloth bags. “We can take the steps to make our economy just a little more soulful. Karma is with us.” The city he helps govern, in short, is ridding itself of the plastic shopping bag.

And quite right, too. They get caught in trees (hence the epithet “witches’ knickers”), take hundreds of years to decompose and push up demand for oil, used to make plastics. Outlawing plastic bags in San Francisco alone will reduce oil consumption by nearly 800,000 gallons a year, the city reckons. Less than 5% of the 100 billion bags thrown away by Americans each year are recycled.

Jared Blumenfeld, head of the city’s environment department, says the ban will reduce litter and the cost of clearing it: sending a worker out to pull bags from trees costs up to $150 a time. And the recycled-paper and compostable bags that must be used from now on – made from corn starch and potato starch – will help to shift food waste from landfill to compost bins. People would do a lot more composting, he says, if they had biodegradable bags to help them. He expects the move to bring San Francisco’s overall recycling rate – at 69% more than twice New York’s – to close to 80%.

Other cities may now follow suit. Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Oakland and, naturally, Berkeley are exploring similar moves. There is some talk of restrictions or a tax in New York. The plastic-bag lobby fought hard to stop a ban in San Francisco precisely because it feared that defeat there would start a nationwide trend.

This is one area of greenery where California cannot claim to be the global leader. In Taiwan and Ireland, you pay for plastic bags. They have been banned already in Rwanda, Bhutan, Bangladesh (where they cause flooding by blocking drains), South Africa (where distributing them can land you in jail) and Mumbai. Paris will join the list at the end of this year, the rest of France in 2010. But bags are only the start: much more landfill is taken up with packaging. Now that would be some good karma.

Read in “The Economist” March 31st 2007

For as long as space endures
and for as long as living beings remain
until then may I too abide
to dispel the misery of the world.

By Shantideva

By Geshe Langri Thangpa

By thinking of all sentient beings
As more precious than a wish-fulfilling jewel
For accomplishing the highest aim,
I will always hold them dear.

Whenever I’m in the company of others,
I will regard myself as the lowest among all,
And from the depths of my heart
Cherish others as supreme.

In my every action, I will watch my mind,
And the moment destructive emotions arise,
I will confront them strongly and avert them,
Since they will hurt both me and others.

Whenever I see ill-natured people,
Or those overwhelmed by heavy misdeeds or suffering,
I will cherish them as something rare,
As though I’d found a priceless treasure.

Whenever someone out of envy
Does me wrong by attacking or belittling me,
I will take defeat upon myself,
And give the victory to others.

Even when someone I have helped,
Or in whom I have placed great hopes
Mistreats me very unjustly,
I will view that person as a true spiritual teacher.

In brief, directly or indirectly,
I will offer help and happiness to all my mothers,
And secretly take upon myself
All their hurt and suffering.

I will learn to keep all these practices
Untainted by thoughts of the eight worldly concerns.
May I recognize all things as like illusions,
And, without attachment, gain freedom from bondage.

I read the following paragraph on a bottle of extra virgin organic olive oil and resonated with it. The interconnectedness of everything that exists, is nicely put into these few words. Each sentence could be deliberated upon for a whole chapter. Yet what it all boils down to is, that we, each of us, do matter. The choices we make on a daily and even hourly basis do create ripple effects. We can either choose to work with nature and the planet or against it. We can choose to create a sustainable future or one of extinction. It’s all up to each one of us and the day-to-day choices we make. Here is what that label said:

“When you buy Organic Foods, you help keep the Earth’s air and water free from pesticides and chemical fertilizers. You help preserve a piece of the Earth’s past for future generations. You help support small entrepreneurial farmers who are committed to building the living soils of their farmland and the living souls of their employees. You help lay the groundwork for agricultural diversity that has always been the backbone of cultural individuality. You help make the commitment to renewal that sustains the Earth’s ability to nurture life. And you help others embrace the gratifying taste that can come not only from eating good foods, but also from doing good things. When you buy Organic Foods, you make a conscious choice to eat well and to treat the Earth well. Thank you for making that choice.”

www.napavalleynaturals.com

“The soul, according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is a self-aware ethereal substance particular to a unique living being. In these traditions the soul is thought to incorporate the inner essence of each living being, and to be the true basis for sentience. In distinction to spirit which may or may not be eternal, souls are usually (but not always as explained below) considered to be immortal and to pre-exist their incarnation in flesh.

The concept of the soul has strong links with notions of an afterlife, but opinions may vary wildly, even within a given religion, as to what may happen to the soul after the death of the body. Many within these religions and philosophies see the soul as immaterial, while others consider it to possibly have a material component, and some have even tried to establish the mass (weight) of the soul.

However, atheism and other non-religious philosophies, do not accept the existence of a soul.”
From the encyclopedia at wikipedia.org

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
Where there is darkness, light,
Where there is sadness, joy.

O divine master, grant that I may
Not so much seek.
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226)