February A 2017
Cover Story
Relationships
24
78
Zoe Wild - One Light Global
Health & Healing 38 42
Raise the Bar on Love The Healing Power of Nature
Spirituality 48 52
Your Life, Your Choice Of Rivers and Resource
OM Living 60 64 68 72
Feng Shui Relationship Scenarios Sting: How I Started Writing Songs again. Program Spotlight International Yoga Festival OMTimes Radio Spotlight Linda Joy
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5 Ways For Single People To Have More Love On Valentine's Day Marriage: Must Every Conflict Get Resolved?
Personal Growth 90
Transforming: From Challenged to Fully Enabled
World Vision 96
How to use Compassion to Promote Peace in the World
ZOË WILD: ONE LIGHT GLOBAL
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She exchanged her precious air miles that she had spent years saving for a ticket to Lesbos, Greece, where she was immediately thrown into the chaos of thousands of refugees arriving nightly on an island of 80,000 permanent residents. Amidst the most appalling circumstances, she worked tirelessly with other volunteers to assist, support and provide for the sick, the bereaved, the disenfranchised and the homeless, raising money from home, from family, friends and her Facebook community to help those who needed it most. When she returned home, Zoe Wild’s life had changed. Zoë Wild is a former Buddhist Nun, an interfaith Minister, Life Coach, and Meditation Teacher. Zoe Wild tell us about her experiences and the meditation practice that not only gave her the impetus to make that lifechanging decision to go to Greece but also to found One Light Global, a nonprofit organization which is evolving the way in which we approach humanitarian crises around the world. SANDIE SEDGBEER: Zoe, watching that video clearly had a massive impact on you, but did you have any idea of what you were going to find when you flew into Lesbos?
ZOË WILD: I had no idea. In fact, when I first saw the video I just knew that I had to do something. As you so beautifully said, I knew there was no way I could go on living in my integrity while this was happening and doing nothing. I had no
idea what to do, which is I think the place where most people stop. So, I prayed and meditated, and the next day I woke up, and I opened my computer, and I went on Facebook, and the first post I saw was someone saying they were going over there. I did not even know that you could go, so I contacted them and discovered that people were desperately needed on the island. So, I spent my air miles on getting the ticket, and I went over there. I thought that it might be picking up trash on the beach. I had no idea what they would let someone like me do who is unaffiliated, and what the conditions would be because the EU and Turkey had continued to make agreements and then let them go. So, it was completely shocking to me when I landed, and 1,000-2,000 refugees were arriving every single day on these little rafts and risking their lives and their children’s lives, and there were hardly any people there meeting them, helping them in any way. From the moment, I arrived, for the first two weeks, I slept literally one or two hours a night and just would be on the beaches all night guiding boats in with other volunteers; just ordinary people from mainly Europe but all over the world. During the day at the refugee camp, all day, just helping people. In every two feet, there would be someone
Raise the Bar on Love by Alan Cohen
Loving in Its Highest Form Every February, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I explore loving relationships. Many of us have faced challenges
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in relationships, and we struggle with how to create truly rewarding connections. We search for our soulmate, wrestle with friendships, and dread going home to see our relatives. At some point, it dawns on us that “this cannot be the way I was born to live.” Then we get serious about creating relationships that work. If we are sincere, that will happen. At the end of a visit to a town where I used to live, I was on my way to return a rental car. I stopped at a gas station to fill up, but could not find the lever to open the gas cap. So I decided to just return the car half-full. Along the way, I discovered the lever and stopped at a gas station near the rental car return. While filling up, I saw a friend of mine at the next pump. He is a sincere, ecologically-minded guy who has been running for county council for years, and was up for election once again. We shared a hug and schmoozed for a few minutes.
I told him, “I can’t vote for you now that I’ve moved, but if I could I would surely get behind you.” A big smile lit up his face and he answered, “That’s worth a lot of votes right there.” As I drove away, I marveled at the synchronicity of meeting my friend. If I had found the gas cap lever at the first station, I would have missed that encounter. I like to think that the universe had set up that meeting. A deeper wisdom was behind the apparent error, leading to a moment of rewarding connection. Life is always guiding to be with the people we belong with, if we are open to follow internal guidance and external signs.
Not Loving: Putting Up with the Pain We must not settle for less-than-rewarding relationships. Any form of enmity, conflict, or abuse is not life’s intention for us. Yet, we put up with pain because we believe we cannot do better. But we can and we will. Omtimes.com
Your Life, Your Choice by John Holland
Life Choices and Making Better Ones
how you respond when these events occur.
Wherever you are right now, at this precise time in your life, you’re there because you took yourself there. Yes, it’s all about you! Every decision you’ve made brought you to this very point. I believe that some events in your life are fated to happen, but you have free will. You have the choice to determine what you do and
As a soul, you’re an accumulation of all your experiences that are taking place now, as well as those from the past. The choices that you make with respect to these experiences shape the quality of how you’re going to live your life. There are many different roads you may decide to take on your soul’s journey.
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When your soul incarnates here in the physical world, its predestined voyage will bring you from point A to point B. It’s always your choice to pick the route that you want to travel, which will also determine how fast you get there. You may take a quick, direct route from point A to point B, or you might meander through different side roads, experiencing all that life has to offer as you take your time getting to your soul’s ultimate destination. Sometimes other people can influence or accelerate our course or throw us off it altogether. We often tend to listen to others, especially when we trust them. They love to tell us what they think is the preferred direction we should be going in.
Seeking Advice to Make Better Choices If you’re going to seek advice, please do your homework and seek out someone who is best equipped to help you make the most informed decisions. If you receive feedback from someone who’s less qualified and it’s not the best advice, it’s easy to blame the person. But, in reality,
it was your choice to listen to that individual’s opinion. Ultimately, everything really does come down to the simple premise that you’re held accountable for the conditions around you. Blaming others takes away from your soul’s energy, and when you assume responsibility for your decisions and your life, your soul can’t help but become empowered. As a soul, you’re quite capable of manifesting your own reality and your own future. You need to be more conscious of your feelings (negative or positive), thoughts, beliefs, and actions . . . it all matters. When you take on the responsibility for being more aware, you’ll feel a sense of empowerment in the knowledge that you can change whatever you want in your life. Once you understand that you have free will and choice, it puts your soul firmly in the driver’s seat to decide which direction you want to take. Every choice determines if you’re going to be moving closer or farther away from your purpose. Omtimes.com
Relationship Scenarios at Home and Work Feng Shui addresses non-obvious relationship scenarios that you have with your own physical space.
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Where you live and where you work teems with energy, which some people call “qi.” This energy, therefore, is supporting you or undermining you. One goal in Feng Shui is to enhance the energy which already supports you. It may also diminish the energy which could be sabotaging you. Once your relationship with your own physical space at home or work is more in balance, then it will make real life relationship scenarios with other people more harmonious. This is a critical point: in Feng Shui, we are actually tinkering with an unseen magnetic field. Thus, trained consultants recommend ways to change its influence on occupants. We are not just changing our attitude or how we use the space.
The Effects of Energies Where You Live and Work You can think of your own home or work space like
a radio station that both transmits and receives signals. The trickle-down effect is that your own “feng shui” environment will influence the quality and quantity of your relationships with others. This includes everyone--family members, co-workers, pets, and friends. In fact, people in the West have been seeking out Feng Shui advice for a lot of reasons, but one of the top reasons has been to attract more love and romance. As a classically trained practitioner, I have seen over and over that your physical environment really does influence love, romance and other types of relationship scenarios, personal or professional. Most of this energy or influence is not obvious to the naked eye. As an example, in the Flying Star School of Feng Shui, we can predict which houses might steer a couple toward divorce or other houses which attract a lot of sexual activity, just by knowing when the house was built and what direction it is facing! These are actually coordinates of space-time theory!
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5 Ways for Single People to Have More Love on Valentine’s Day by Marcia Sirota MD.
Valentine’s Day is upon us and if you’re single, it can also be a painful reminder that there’s no one in your life to buy you flowers, take you out for dinner, give you a foot rub, or bring you breakfast in
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bed (for now). For many single people, however, Valentine’s Day is something best ignored, or perhaps self-medicated with ice cream, alcohol, or a binge of their favorite Netflix series. It can be a time to be angry and frustrated about past, unsuccessful relationships; to wonder how you’ve arrived at another Valentine’s Day without a date, or to feel sorry for yourself for being alone.
Creative Ways to Have More Love You can spend the day feeling lousy; however, you can get creative and find a way to enjoy the day. There are five things that single people everywhere can do to bring more love into their lives on Valentine’s Day. If you are single, it is also all about being more loving to yourself, and to others.
Looking to Have More Love on Valentine’s Day? So, here are the five ways you
can bring more love into your life on Valentine’s Day: 1 Spend time connecting to your inner child. Give this child within you all the affirmation, validation and nurturing it desires. The inner child is a part of your psyche that can also benefit tremendously from any love and validation that you send its way. 2. Do nice things for yourself... ...like going for a walk-in nature, getting a massage or cooking a delicious, nutritious meal. Just because there’s no-one else there to do nice things for you, it doesn’t mean that these things are unavailable. 3. Be kind to strangers. Sharing a smile, a kind word, or a helpful gesture with someone at the store, on the bus or in the street will create loving feelings within you. Expressing kindness to
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Transforming from Challenged to Fully Enabled by Nickolas Martin
Overcoming Significant Challenges is Inspiring Stories of people overcoming significant personal challenges in their lives continue to inspire many of us.
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Some are born with a disability impacting their ability to see, hear, attend, read or learn. Some encountered life events which tore them apart physically or emotionally due to neglect, abuse, or a lifethreatening event. While still others have succumbed to the influence of drugs or alcohol to create distance from their pain and misery. Many eventually responded to these challenges by not just surviving, but thriving. They and their stories are a tremendous inspiration. They reflect empowered, enabled people whose challenges no longer disabled them.
The Spiritual Story of Transformation At the center of this enablement is often a “spiritual story.” Frequently, this story begins when people have done any of the following: “hit the bottom”, realize they have been lying to themselves and others, recognize how much they are getting in their way, or opening to receiving the help of others-in this case God.
From the perspective of Ego, Spirit & You, this transformation occurs when people start becoming more connected to their Divine essence. The Love, Life and Energy-God Is within them becomes progressively more immediate and available to them. As the story continues they started looking beyond the “boundaries” of their challenge and toward the “opportunities” of their abilities.
Redefining One’s Self Amid the Challenge Accompanying this transformation is the resolution of egoic issues of power (a sense of intense weakness involving the challenge they face), flexibility (a rigid way of looking at the challenge they face), or vulnerability (being consumed by fear in their efforts to meet the challenge they face). They stop allowing their challenge to disempower them. They do not approach their challenge with limiting thoughts, or let fear consume them. No longer do they allow the challenge to define them and what they know of themselves-only the human portion of themselves.
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How to Use Compassion to Promote Peace in the World by Diane Wing, M.A.
An Optimistic View in a World of Hate With each new year comes hope that humanity learns from its mistakes of the previous year and that things are bound to get better. The optimistic view is to believe that all people Omtimes.com
have at least a glimmer of light within them. Yet, the incidents of hate crimes, abuse, animal cruelty, shootings, terrorism, and bullying continue. The recent news story about Chicago teens who tormented a special needs classmate
brought this forward once again. Their mistreatment of a fellow student who thought they were his friends and their live streaming of the incident showed a blatant disregard for another person’s welfare. It showed an insensitivity to what this abuse would do to him long-term, to his family, and to those viewing their terrible act online. The cold hearts of the perpetrators reflect the biting cold of winter.
Hate Fueled by a Lack of Compassion and Connectedness This type of behavior is directly related to a lack of compassion, empathy, and connectedness. More and more people seek to connect with technology rather than with each other. Disdain and disgust toward fellow human beings buries the idea of understanding or basic kindness. In the process of becoming more technologically connected, we have lost our sensitivity toward others. Whether it is due to parents focusing on their devices rather than on the children or because technology is used as a babysitter, there is less connecting and more aggression.
Google this topic to see the myriad studies conducted in the United States and abroad. They concur in that technology and/ or a lack of attachment and bonds between parents and children can create detrimental behavioral patterns.
What the Studies Show About Behavior According to the book, Virtual Child: The Terrifying Truth about What Technology is Doing to our Children by Cris Rowan, one-in-six children has a diagnosed mental illness. This manifests with child aggression and unmanageable behavior increasingly the norm. Sutton Trust did a study that showed that “infants under three years of age who don’t form strong bonds with their mothers or fathers are more likely to be aggressive, defiant, and hyperactive as adults. These bonds, or secure attachments, are formed through early parental care, such as picking up a child when he or she cries or holding and reassuring a child.” * What does this do to our society as a whole? It increases the number of young people acting Omtimes.com
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