May A 2018
Cover Story 24
John Pavlovitz - A Bigger Table
Health & Wellness 40 44
How to Apply the 5 Principles of Reiki Using Abalone to Calm Emotions
Spirituality 48
When Not to Be Present in the Moment
OM Living 56 62 68 72 76 80
Mantras for Depression, Anxiety, and Protection Feng Shui and the Garden A Really Strict Teacher Ratatouille Remy Style How to Design a Neighborhood for Happiness The Ultimate Wealth Mantra You Haven’t Heard Of
Relationships 88 94
Who Marries An Extreme Narcissist ? 10 Essential Facts About True Love
Metaphysics
100 How to Build a Special Altar at Home 106 Haunted - A Visual Essay 112 Why Do We Have Déjà vu
Personal Growth
118 Practice the 7 Attitudes that Bring Happiness
World Vision
124 How to Tell People You Are a Vegan
Books
130 A Bigger Table
JOHN PAVLOVITZ Â Interview by Sylvia Henderson
19
FOOD NOTES | SEPTEMBER 2020
A Bigger TableBuilding Messy, Authentic and Hopeful Spiritual Community
Today our interviewee is a pastor, a writer and an activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. In the past four years, his blog, Stuff That Needs to be Said, has reached a diverse, worldwide audience. His name is John Pavlovitz, and he is a 20-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry. John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice, both inside and outside of faithbased communities. In his book A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic and Hopeful Spiritual Community, John Pavlovitz says courage and kindness are evident as he fearlessly speaks directly into the heart of heated issues that Christian communities have publicly and privately wrestled with for decades regarding LGBTQ inclusion, gender equality, racial tensions and global concerns.
John's is a voice that is unique. A voice that cries out to the Christian community to put an end to exclusion, bigotry, divisiveness, and fear. A voice that longs to see churches emulate unconditional love and demonstrate wholehearted acceptance of everyone with compassion and radical hospitality, total authenticity, messy diversity and create agenda-free spiritual communities that leaves no one left out. John Pavlovitz: Thank you so much. It's a thrill to get the invitation. Sylvia Henderson: For those who are not familiar with you and aren't sure what your mission is and, can you tell us about yourself and your spiritual journey?
OMTIMES | MAY 2018
Reiki:
The 5 Principles Attunements
How to apply the 5 Principles of Reiki Mikao Usui, the founder of Reiki, was an admirer of the literary works of Emperor Meiji. While in the process of developing his Reiki system, Usui summarized some of the emperor’s works into a set of ethical principles, which later became known as the Five Reiki Precepts from the Buddhist teachings (against killing, thievery,
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sexual misconduct, lying, and intemperance). It is common for many Reiki teachers and practitioners to abide by these five precepts, or principles. 1. Just for today – I will not be angry Anger is the feeling we experience when events in our world are not going according to our plans. Anger is one
of the most common and destructive delusions affecting our minds. Because it is based on an exaggeration, anger is an expression of our belief system and how we defend it. It’s as if we have an inner idea of how things, events, and people should be for us. When we get angry and either feel frustrated or try to change them, we tend to give away our power! Many of us remain a victim to our tempers all of our lives. In essence, anger is the feeling we get when we want to control the world around us. According to Japanese and Chinese traditions, anger is most prevalent in the Spring. It is considered the emotion of Spring. Although we can and do experience anger at any time or season, it is Spring when we are most easily angered. This is believed to be due to the changes of light and dark and the balance between them. It is very important to identify the actual cause of whatever unhappiness we feel. If we are forever blaming our difficulties on others, this is a sure sign that there are still many problems and faults within our own mind.
If we were truly peaceful inside and had our mind under control, difficult people or circumstances would not be able to disturb this peace, and so we would feel no compulsion to blame anyone or regard them as our enemy. To someone who has subdued his or her mind and eradicated the last trace of anger, all beings are friends. Attunement Meditation: Walking 2. Just for today – I will not worry Worry can only serve you well if you worry and recognize that a plan of action is needed, in a stressful situation and then you act on it. Sympathy and nurturing are traits that make up our personality, but excessive worry becomes a state of restlessness and agitation, producing mental uneasiness, foreshadowing, anxiety, and painful uncertainty. The “what if” syndrome is a constant pattern that is played out in the mind of someone who worries too much. The emotional aspect of earth can carry a deep sense of emptiness. This tends to make worry or Omtimes.com
When Not to Be Present in the Moment by Carl Greer, PhD, PsyD Learning to be present in the moment is an admirable goal. When we are fully focused on what is happening in the present moment, feel gratitude for all we have right now and make better
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decisions. However, there are times when you should aspire not to present in the moment. Letting your mind wander to the past and future can help you to achieve your goals and experience self-understanding, selfacceptance, and self-love. It’s true that reminiscing about the past, thinking of the good old days when you were younger and more fit, accomplished, admired, or respected might make you melancholy, especially if you have regrets. Maybe listening to the music of your past gives you bittersweet pleasure as you think about the joy you had and the pleasures that may never come again. But what if you could recapture aspects of the self you were when those songs were popular, when you felt the possibilities for your life were boundless? Imagine yourself as you are today, standing next to the self you once were, sharing each others’ energy,
emotions, and wisdom. Imagine you could bring with you the excitement yet keep your wisdom, gained through experience. What if you could regain much of what you lost or left behind? If your mind wanders to the future, do you tell yourself you shouldn’t daydream, that you should be realistic? Maybe you should not be so quick to stop your mind from pondering the possibilities of what might be. Or perhaps you think about what lies ahead and become anxious. Do you worry about what you might lose or how you ight suffer, or do you see opportunities for joy, growth, and new experiences? Do you every just let yourself daydream about a future that would bring excitement and joy to an arid life that you are currently living? Do you believe that a much better future is possible for you? Memories can be sustaining and remind us that we have
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Feng Shui and the Garden by Kartar Diamond
The branch of Feng Shui which concerns itself with the natural landscape is often called “Form School” or “Landscape School.”
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Reasons for paying attention to a garden or a home’s exteriors: 1. To make sure that the house is adequately protected from harsher elements (like wind and rain) 2. To enhance the energies of a house 3. To shore up or help maintain the good energies which flow around a structure 4. To create an extension of the house and its functions. Reason #1 When you have a house that is perched at the very top if a hill, it can be vulnerable to high force winds. What is needed is an armchair like landscape where there can be walls, hedges, and/or trees to protect the house from having too much wind whip around it. As well, if you had a house at the very bottom of a hill, it could be vulnerable
to flooding so the landscape would need to help divert or shield the house from an onslaught of excessive water drainage. There always needs to be a balance. For instance, a house that has too many trees and casts a chronic shadow on the house could make the house very dark, and the occupants will get depressed. At the same time, a house without any vegetation around it will feel desolate, and there could even be a circumstance of too much sun beating down on it. So, Feng Shui for the landscape is critical in creating the balance of yin and yang aspects. Reason #2 Enhancing the energies inside a house by doing something on the outside is confirmation that the two spaces work together. They influence each other. If you had a pool
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A Really Strict Teacher by Kaya & Christiane Muller
A mother of 6 children shared with us the experience and signs she receives with her children – a family that is learning to live in angelic conscience every second of their life. Omtimes.com
Here is one of their life experiences: “One evening, after the children had gone to bed, I heard someone crying. I went up to the room the crying was coming from, and there I found my daughter Clara awake and in tears.
The evening is a good time to share deeply about life with my eldest child, my 9-yearold daughter; it’s when she leaves her sometimes overintense emissivity aside and becomes receptive and listens attentively to symbolic stories and teachings. Hence parts of her unconscious resurface, and they are magnificent tools to help her grow up well.
That evening, it was an incident that had occurred in her computer class during the day that had resurfaced and was upsetting her. She explained to me that she had made a mistake: instead of entering the school address, she had entered her home address, which had blocked her computer and she hadn’t been able to connect to the school network. She told me she hadn’t dared tell the teacher because he was really strict. Together we simply took the time to analyze the resonance there was what had happened to help her understand why she was crying so much.
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Who Marries An Extreme Narcissist? By Marcia Sirota, MD.
Recently, it was Family Day, and I got to thinking about all the different types of families there are singleparent families, blended families, LGBTQ families, mixed-race families, multi-faith families. The family that I’m most interested in these days is that of the extreme narcissist. I’ll follow this post with one about the children of extreme narcissists. Right now, I want to focus on their spouse.
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What makes a person marry an extreme narcissist? What makes this person stay with the narcissist, perhaps for years? How does the spouse feel in such a marriage? What personality traits might be shared by the spouses of extreme narcissists?
Deep down, the extreme narcissist feels inadequate and insecure. As a result, they’re tremendously touchy and easily insulted. They need to surround themselves with fawning acolytes who are constantly building them up.
An extreme narcissist is a person characterized by a complete lack of empathy for other people. They feel superior to others and see people as either enabling them to get what they want or preventing them from getting what they want.
The extreme narcissist needs to be admired and adored. They can’t tolerate being questioned or challenged. Their spouse, therefore, must always coddle them and must never, ever make them feel bad about themselves in any way.
The extreme narcissist is incapable of love. They can pretend, but it’s never real. They use people, but they don’t care about them. The extreme narcissist might enjoy what another person does for them, but they’re unable to value this person or form a meaningful attachment to them.
The extreme narcissist who has wealth or power will seek out a spouse who makes them look good to others; someone who’ll boost their fragile ego. They want a spouse who’ll give them a strategic advantage in their social or business dealings. They’ll marry someone who’s attractive, wealthy or wellconnected. Better yet, all of the above.
To the extreme narcissist, everyone is expendable. People are interchangeable, depending on the narcissist’s needs at the moment. To be in a personal relationship with an extreme narcissist is to never be loved for oneself.
The extreme narcissist tends to go through spouses like they go through any of their other possessions. They’ll get what they need from their spouse and then trade them in for a Omtimes.com
10 essential facts about true love By Ascending hearts
True love still is the definitive goal of many people. The desire of true love is reinforced by our culture, which has long taught us that
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the love of another person is the only thing that can save us, make us whole and able to enjoy real happiness.
partners of our dreams, we must first work on ourselves to become the model of what we want to attract.
Encouraged by this passionate belief, we set high standards and many ideas of how true love is in our vision.
2. Set healthy limits
However, not everything is simple. If we want to find real and true love, we must be ready to accept some essential truths about love and the search for it.
Below are 10 essential truths about the quest for real love:
It is essential to set boundaries, but wise and healthy boundaries. For example, your partner wanting to spend time with your friends is not a reason for discussions and crises. We all have, or should have, lives beyond our relationships. Recognize your partner’s needs and accept them, and make sure he/she does the same.
1. To find the right person, you first need to be the right person
3. Without healthy communication, there is no real love.
We need to be the kind of person we want to have in our lives. It is unfair and wrong to want a committed partner if you run away from all responsibilities in your life, for instance. To achieve the
Silence has no place in mature and healthy relationships. It is through communication that we organize our relationships, communicate our needs, desires, and mutual goals.
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How to Build a Special Altar at Home By Shakti World
In a period where people of various religions and beliefs are more comfortable in expressing their connection with the divine forces, having an altar at home had become increasingly common, and
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even those who consider themselves without religion embrace their spiritual side. According to different belief systems, there may be a more suitable place to build your altar, but the important thing is to keep in mind the meaning it should have for the house and all its residents. The altar should be the greatest connection to the spiritual world, where angels, spirits of light and deities will transmit and deposit their energies to emanate and envelop the home. MAKE YOUR OWN ALTAR IN YOUR HOUSE The altar can be made up using many different spiritual symbols; some more present as candles, bells, incense, water, flowers, images of saints and gods, single texts and books; everything that can symbolize your spiritual connection with the divine realms and make beautiful and intimate this special place of the house. The Feng Shui term used for
such a special refuge is the “Guá” or the Guá of spirituality, of knowledge or of wisdom, referring to the place of the house destined to the studies, the search of the wisdom and spirituality. The place should be reserved for distractions and noise. Some elements usually present as plants are not there for nothing. According to scholars, the energy of this Gua should have the activation linked to the earth and the colors as blue, purple and lilac. To make your own altar at home, you will not need so many elements, nor to be very specific in your preparations. The altar may be displayed on a shelf, or on a special table, or even on a reserved part of a shelf. Adorn the space with towels and items that refer to your spirituality. IMAGES: PHOTOS AND SMALL SCULPTURES The images of saints and gods, master’s and gurus will tell a lot about the branch of
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Why Do We Have Déjà vu? By Humanity Healing
Déjà vu is a French expression, which means “already seen, “It is commonly used to indicate a phenomenon that happens in the brain. The term was used for the first time by Emile Boirac, a researcher of psychological phenomena.
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It is a word also used in the manuals of neurology, psychology, and biology, assuming several meanings. However, there are different dubious theories, such as those of past lives, supernatural appearances, and common sense, that appear to mystify the phenomenon. So Déjà vu is when we feel something for the first time, and we have the sensation of having already seen or experienced that sensation before, or rather, it is a replay of some scene or moment, but that never happened. Déjà vu arises when a specific memory, for some unknown reason, goes to memory in the long run, without passing through the memory in the short term. Some scientists believe that this phenomenon is triggered by a neurochemical action in the brain, which is not connected to any past experience. Freud’s explanations help us understand Déjà vu, he states: “All phenomena within the psyche are determined, that
is, as long as we investigate, we will find the cause of associations. External phenomena, on the other hand, are a mixture of other causes and accidents. In other words, what happens outside of us will not necessarily mean anything. “ These assumptions confirm the explanation that Déjà vu manifests itself in a psychological reaction to the transmission of ideas that we have been in those places before, that we have already seen those people, but not knowing for sure where, how and when we live in such a situation. Freud sums up: “In succinct terms, Déjà vu’s feeling corresponds to the memory of an unconscious fantasy.” Thus, psychoanalysis understands that Déjà Vu is that content which is felt by consciousness, which is an unconscious content that, at another moment, passed through knowledge in a dream or in daily fantasy. Because of repression, content is no longer available to knowledge, except when it happens.
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Practice the 7 attitudes that Bring Happiness By Cathedral of the soul
Happiness is not only the result of a great project or a long-term achievement. From meditating to organizing your bed for bedtime, there are many things that can facilitate your everyday happiness. Omtimes.com
According to the book “The Myths of Happiness�, by the Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, from the University of California, one of the most common misunderstandings on the Happiness subject is to link it to
the arrival of some life event such as a marriage, children, or a new job. Looking for long-term satisfaction relaying on a dependence on an external factor, however, is not something healthy, according to her studies. But How about starting to be happy now? The first thing one has to do is ask ‘what makes me happy?’. Is it to dance? Is it going out to have coffee with friends? The self-inquiry must be constant. People who do not question themselves frequently do not know what’s important to them. It is common to observe the behavior of others, but we forget that it is necessary to observe ourselves, to know ourselves better as we grow and change. Happiness is not anything that is sought after but is something within each one of us. Simple things such as saying thank you, for example, is one of the small everyday attitudes that improves the quality of interpersonal relationships – and the possibility of daily
satisfaction. According to research published in May 2012, in the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,” a simple ‘thank you’ between couples can make the spouse feel appreciated by their partner, thereby making their commitment stronger and their relationship more pleasurable. The long-lasting effect of gratitude goes further. It not only improves the quality of life but also affects society and positively influencing all kind of relationships. When showing gentleness and gratitude, we receive kindness in exchange, awakening good will and managing to reach people more deeply. Express yourself To exteriorize what you feel is also a necessary measure to be maximize happiness. “Tell people what you feel: if you love, tell them, if you are grateful, let them know. Use words of generosity, of kindness, with gentleness. It is true that sometimes we may not be on our best of days. When this happens, it does not mean that you can discharge Omtimes.com
How to Tell People You Are a Vegan By Olivia Ryan
How hard is it to be a vegan in a non-vegan environment? I mean, it’s easy when we have our online tribe, right? We give each other tips and hints, and constant support
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that makes us confident that we made the right choice. In non-vegan surroundings, however, it’s hard being the different one. N For me, for instance, no one in my family is a vegan. When we get together for lunch, they can’t stop telling me I have to start eating something. My aunts are the worst. The most common comment that I get is this one: “It’s no wonder why you’re dizzy all the time.” The truth is, my blood work was just fine for five years now. These people are convinced that others are not healthy just because they are not eating the way they want them to eat. When we get together for lunch with my colleagues from Aussie Writings, the
same situation occurs. These are some of the most common questions I get: “So you’ll have just a salad?” “How can you drink that green thing?” “Why won’t you have a piece of my birthday cake?” Saying that I’m a vegan is not a problem for me. However, I often found myself saying: “Sorry, I’m vegan.” Wait, what am I sorry for? I’m not sorry for being vegan. Why should I even apologize for it? This brings us to a major point: we should stop apologizing for being vegan! Be proud of that choice, and there’s nothing wrong with that. First of All, Understand Where Their Comments Are
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