AILAM ANIT
moc.semiTMO ;elytsefiL suoicsnoC a eviL ot woh ni erom nraeL dna etisbeW ruO nO goL
HEART WIDE OPEN
November A Issue
CONTENTS • OMTIMES
Table of Contents
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Tina Malia Exhilarating Interview With Tina Malia By Kara Johnstad
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94 122
The Health Benefits of Citrus Caviar By Dr. Paul Haider
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Have You Had a Hugging Dream?
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Creating a New Way of Being
62
The Power of Detachment
By John Holland
By Judi Lynch
By Andrew Pacholyk MS L. Ac
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April B EDITION
68
Badass to Buddha: When Contemplation leads to Rehabilitation
74
The Healing Power of Storytelling
82
Why a Narcissist Can Never Be Happy
90
The Most Important Thing that You Forgot
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OMTIMES | APRIL B
Table of Contents 94 98 102 106 116 122 128
Karma, Dharma, Destiny and Free Will, Oh My! Is it Possible to Transmute Bad Karma? Living Intuitively: The Key to Intuition
Sister Jaguar's Journey Embracing Evolutionary Education Grief and the Forgotten Art of Saying Goodbye
The Year of Living Deeply
H EAR T Wide Open
Interview with Tina Malia By Kara Johnstad
Tina Malia is a visionary musical artist. Her sonic creations span sacred chant, world, dream pop, and folk music genres. A prolific singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, and sound engineer, Malia expresses her radiant inner landscape through song. Omtimes.com
Tina’s mother, a renowned concert pianist and opera singer from South Korea, was the driving force in Tina’s classical musical education. It was her father, however, who bought her a guitar when she turned 15 and encouraged her to follow her musical passions. Tina Malia all-encompassing musical and spiritual perspective has led her to the studio and live performance with a vast array of iconic artists including Kenny Loggins, India. Arie, Bonnie Raitt, Bassnectar, Deva Premal and Miten, Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul & Mary) Peter Kater and Joanne Shenandoah I am delighted to have with me in the studio the prolific singer-songwriter Tina Malia. A visionary musical artist, Tina expresses her radiant inner landscape through song, and her sonic creations span sacred chant, world, dream pop, and folk music genres. Tina is a beloved pioneer in a growing community of people around the world dedicated to residing in harmony with the Earth and expressing it through art, health, education, and music. So
welcome, Tina, and thank you so much for taking time to deepen the conversation on voice and vibrational healing.
Kara Johnstad: Would you like to share with us something from your childhood, a memory, which role did music play while you were a kid growing up? Was it a natural thing to be in the field of music? Tina Malia: Music was my whole world as a child. My mother was a concert pianist, so I lived and breathed music from the time I was in the womb, considerably. My mom would practice the piano seven hours a day. I love telling this story because it’s my first memory on planet earth; I liked to be in my car seat which of course would make me a perfect candidate for traveling musicians my whole life. She would put me in my car seat underneath the grand piano, that is how I got babysat, and she would practice for hours and hours. I would hear all these songs, and I still remember them in detail, note by note, these concertos that she would practice. So, Music has always been my Omtimes.com
“There is a variety of citrus fruit called “finger limes” that have the texture of caviar and many great health benefits including being
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full of vitamin C and lots of antioxidants, B vitamins for good mood, potassium cardiovascular health, and they help with inflammation and much more.” Where They Grow - Finger Limes grow in Australia and California and are not genetically altered but are natural fruits that grow and contain caviar-like beads that burst with lemon/lime flavor. Flavor - They taste like a cross between a lemon and a lime juice, also, are slightly tart. Finger limes look cucumbers with a dark outer skin when cutting lengthwise in half the inner caviar jewels can be scooped out and enjoyed in so many ways. The seeds pop in your mouth like caviar eggs thus giving the fruit a fascinating texture. Varieties - There are many different types of finger limes, some contain seeds that are red in color, others are black, and still others are green, pink, and even purple. However, they all have that great distinctive
lemon/lime flavor with subtle differences. Cancer - And studies show that eating citrus like kumquats and finger limes can lower our risk of coming down with mouth, stomach, and throat cancer by 50%. Antioxidants - Citrus like finger limes can improve wound healing, help prevent and reduce the severity of colds and flues. Because of the great antioxidants in finger limes, they help prevent cancer and lower the risk of cardiovascular disease and arthritis. Vitamin C - Citrus like finger limes contain most of our daily dietary vitamin C. And B vitamins that are important for energy and for boosting our metabolism, also for keeping away depression. Polyphenols - Citrus like finger limes contain polyphenols like green tea, plus beta-carotene for a healthy immune system, and even great zeaxanthin, and Omtimes.com
Creating a New Way of Being by Judi Lynch
Awakenings come in all shapes, kinds, and sizes. Through life-changing events, spiritual quests and a myriad of different reasons we move to a new level of existence Omtimes.com
through new and evolved eyes. Our visions may be broad; our lives trying to catch up, leaving us feeling “stuck” in the middle without a plan in forwarding motion. Creating a vision of how we see ourselves and what we want to accomplish in life can be the first step to manifesting the new. Reaching a goal or a plateau can help us feel purposeful and successful, but it helps always to have a dream to realize for the future, too. It could be to take a trip of a lifetime, start a charity, start an animal rescue, get physically healthier or getting a specialized degree for a new profession. These ideas and wishes can be realized with planning, visualizing, and taking action with the ability to keep moving forward no matter what “seems” to be in our way. Creation starts in the heart and soul of the mind. If we can see signs that emotionally, mentally and physically things need to change it’s a sound message not to wait any longer.
Too many times we can let the little “voices” of negativity creep in. Either through our thoughts or the words or actions of others, we can let one negative fact about our dream crush our spirit. We can also get too comfortable with the way things are in life and feel anxiety about change even when we know it can bring us joy. One of the most amazing things we can do for ourselves is to hang out with people who bring us light, encouragement, and acceptance. An unhappy soul can smash your ideas faster than a falling hammer. It takes some courage to rise above what others are unable to see or comprehend. The attitude we adopt comes from deep inside. We can become lost in childhood memories of ourselves and critical of our true abilities when we let the past overwhelm who we are now. The way we define ourselves changes as we age and mature. If we have been living with hope, health and promise it is much easier to make the metamorphosis into Omtimes.com
The Power of Detachment
(excerpt from Andrew’s new book, Lead Us To A Place ~ your spiritual journey through life’s seasons)
When you hear the word, you may think of a Buddhist monk, leaving all his worldly possessions behind and climbing the lonely mountain to live in complete solitude for the rest of his days. Detachment
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or non-attachment is freedom from “things.” These are things our EGO feels are important to us. Non-attachment is a fully engaged connection to our life through the act of being more conscious or mindful about ourselves. It is the selfrealization of the truth about reality. Detachment is not about distancing yourself, but more about understanding the true significance of life so that we better connect to it. By learning to understand that your consciousness cannot be affected by things you hold on to, this gives you a better sense of what holds you back. The concept had alluded me for a long time. The understanding that I had to “give up” all that I worked for seemed unfathomable to me. I know through all my religious studies that Buddha taught “with attachment comes suffering. Relinquish the delusion and ignorance that fuel both the attachment/clinging and the aversion/hatred that makes life so unsatisfying, and you will find peace (Nirvana).” In his teachings, Jesus expressed to us through the book of Corinthians, “As we look not to the things
that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. ” My Hindu yoga teacher would often say, “let go the realm of material things, for, in time, they will bring you nothing but dissatisfaction.” Through my meditation practice, I have come to realize that starting with the things I cannot control, are the first things to detach. For I have no voice in their outcome, therefore, holding on to them has no purpose and can never serve me. A friend of mine always travels. On her journeys, she must take with her at least three suitcases. She drags them through airports, waits for them to come through on airport baggage belts and hustles them through the streets of whatever city she has landed in. She “needs” every bag. One day, her luggage was lost in transit, and she arrived at her destination with nothing, but her little carry-on bag and the clothes on her back. For two weeks she waited and waited Omtimes.com
From Badass to Buddha:
When Contemplation leads to Rehabilitation
Dr. Miguel Farias & Dr. Catherine Wikholm discuss the mentality of prisoners, as well as those who work in prisons. After speaking with various prison staff, the authors surprised to discover that many of them don’t believe that the prisoners are capable of real change. The concept of a prison cell as an ashram is an idea that captures the imagination, and the paradox of finding spiritual freedom through the loss of Omtimes.com
physical freedom is intriguing. Might there actually be truth in this unusual idea – can daily yogic sun salutations and deep breathing really make convicted rapists and murderers less violent and impulsive? While it’s unlikely that yoga and meditation could replace traditional rehabilitative approaches, it seems possible that they may have a unique ability to reach prisoners on a different level: to make them feel more at peace, and more valued and connected.
Bo Lozoff summarizes the aim of organizations that teach contemplative techniques to prisoners worldwide when he says that we should ‘allow for transformation, not merely rehabilitation’. In other words, the change that charities such as his and the PPT seek to encourage goes far beyond the cessation of offending behavior; we are talking about a radical change in worldview. The PPT’s current director Sam Settle describes this transformation as ‘the forgetting of one’s self as one lives – the forgetting of me’. In essence, moving from focusing on oneself as a separate individual to seeing oneself as part of a larger whole. Whether or not we share these ideas about the possibility of the transformation of convicted criminals – from sinner to saint, from ‘monster’ to Buddha – on a theoretical and anecdotal level, there does seem to be reason to think that yoga and meditation can bring about positive personal change in prisoners. The institution of home For many who have lived in prisons from an early age, the prospect of going outside is daunting. I once worked with a
prisoner, ‘John’, who was serving his tenth prison sentence at the age of only 21 years old. He attended every session of the offending behavior program I was facilitating, only to – in the final session – suddenly become aggressive and disruptive to the point where he had to be removed from the group. Talking to him afterwards, trying to understand why he had sabotaged something that could have helped him towards securing an earlier release date, he admitted he was scared of being released. ‘There is nothing for me outside,’ he said, visibly upset. When John was a young child, one of his parents murdered the other; he went on to spend the rest of his childhood in numerous short-term foster-care placements. Angry and distrusting of people, he would repeatedly run away from them. He committed his first offence aged ten and received his first custodial sentence aged fifteen. The frequency of his impulsive crimes meant that he had spent the majority of the past six years behind bars. There were no family or friends waiting for him on the outside. The uncertainty of how to build a meaningful life, alone, in the ‘real Omtimes.com
The Healing Power of Storytelling by Jayita Bhattacharjee
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Too often, we wear a smiling sadness outside, while the world knows nothing about it. As we seek solace to find a way back to ourselves, we run from place to place. Let’s take a moment to stop running, to
stop wandering, and come back to the beauty of words, the words that arise from the heart. As the seasons of life take us to some of the brutal battles that we once faced and fought, not every battle fought is won. Some are lost. Some leave us crumbled for decades. The call comes to rising, as “the years are still left to live”--whispers the words rising from the heart. As we live in the faster lanes of life, and at times, wonder— have we lost the spirit of living in the real sense of the word, there we search for the feeling that is lost, has died probably years back in the relentless racing, chasing, purchasing, competing and finally heaving a sigh of relief—that we are living life. Having that illusory feeling, in silence, we often go back to a place where we know something’s still missing. Moreover, this knowledge comes from a feeling of a consuming void. So, what we think, relieved us once, finally put us in a cycle of devastating emptiness. One
that ultimately comes to chase us till the very end. Moreover, then begins our search. As we continue to search, there comes the healing power of telling our story, owning up to it, and admitting, it is ours, to begin. As the words fall of our souls, and we tell our story heard and witnessed by others, we feel heard and felt. All along, while we kept the song unsung, the words unsaid, suddenly they release in the air. Moreover, as the world hears it, a calmness descends on us. It becomes a moment of silent recognition where words said by a heart are words received by another heart. That is the moment of a silent honor. Where something gave is taken with grace and thankfulness. To Us, it becomes a moment of healing. That silent hearing by others gives us joy beyond words. It becomes a moment when the God in you recognizes God in me. We know deep down, we have felt each other, we
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Why a Narcissist Can Never Be Happy Marcia Sirota, MD.
We’re living in an era of narcissism. Narcissists are being elected to the highest levels of government, both here in Ontario and the United States. Too many of us are being taken in by the self-delusional confidence of these narcissists, believing that it represents competence when all it demonstrates is the grandiosity of an over-inflated ego.
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There are many traits that narcissists have in common: an inflated sense of selfimportance; extreme overentitlement; a profound lack of empathy; the tendency to view others as merely a means to an end; the capacity for profound insensitivity and cruelty. Narcissists are users and abusers, plain and simple. They’re bullies and con artists, manipulators and oppressors. They’re blowhards and charmers, smiling at us one minute and cutting our throat the next. We might be conned into thinking that there’s substance behind all their grandiose posturing, but the narcissist is an empty shell, driven by a fierce and undying need to fill a gnawing sense of emptiness deep within. A powerful inner need for gratification drives the narcissist. They mistakenly believe that this gratification will come through the exercise of power and influence and the accumulation of money and possessions.
The narcissist will fight to accumulate more money and more stuff; to wield more power and influence; to bend more people to their will, but it will never be enough. The narcissist doesn’t understand that more and more of the wrong solution doesn’t eventually make it the right solution. The narcissist would be a fascinating psychological case-study and a truly tragic figure, were they not so exceedingly dangerous, both on the personal and the political front. They will stop at nothing to get what they want, but they’re doomed never to find satisfaction because their behavior can never lead to happiness or fulfillment. The truth is that nothing can make a narcissist happy, because their agenda of dominance, exploitation, and oppression creates an everexpanding chasm within their soul. The narcissist can take pleasure in the exercise of power and the subjugation of others, but they can’t feel happiness from any source.
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The Most Important Thing that you Forgot! In the beginning, there was a song. The song was beautiful – like invisible colors painting the sky in a translucent and uplifting way. The song sang to itself: all day and all night.
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Alas, the song got bored after many repeats of its song-beauty, so it experimented with different tunes. At first, there were little variations in the melody, rhythm, and harmony. The next thing you know, there were sweeping musical changes. The songs seemed to take on a life of their own. Songs that were similar enjoyed each other’s company and formed groups. The songgroups created genres, creating happy music, exhilarating feelings, and peaceful energies. The songs played with each other – like duets & bands, exchanging notes and echoing the feelings found in the music. The creativity continued. Ideas were pushed and stretched. Each new step was a daring new sound! Finally, sad songs were born, something that never happened when they were All One. They even morphed into nasty sounds and songs.
The songs forgot they were One-Song, a universe. They identified with their last song-creation only. After a while, they got tired of singing altogether and tried exchanging energies – similar to talking. Before you know it, they forgot their songs, because they forgot to sing. Without their songs, their energies became heavy and sticky, eventually transferring into dense matter. At first, the conscious song-energy occupied minerals and rocks, and eons later, plants and ultimately animals, and finally the beautiful songs evolved into the souls of man. The songs-of-theuniverse now occupied physical bodies. They desired to experience the pleasures of touching, tasting, sex and more. They became trapped in their “bodies.” The soul-song made their physical bodies happy and healthy. Without their soul’s song, their bodies became
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Is it Possible to Transmute Bad Karma? By Humanity Healing
Almost everyone has heard of karma or the Laws of Karma, but what the vast majority of people do not know is that it is possible to transmute it, or at least to get rid of its negative side.
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Negative karma may have been constructed by actions that did not help illuminate your spirit. Instead, they may have brought pain and suffering not only to ourselves but to others. Those attitudes may have been realized in previous lives and have caused us to accumulate negativity to our life karma. WHAT IS A RITUAL OF TRANSMUTATION?
By achieving the transmutation of karma, many of the difficulties we face today on the physical level can be fully transformed into positivity as we are bringing Light, the Divine Truth into our lives. The removal of negative energy can resolve Family, financial, and professional conflicts. HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO MAKE A TRANSMUTTING RITUAL? The Karma Ritual of Healing and Transmutation can be performed by yourself at any time of the year and needs concentration in search of good energies.
The Flame of Transmutation should be triggered for healing and the search for the positivity of karma. I also knew how the Violet Flame, being an aspect of the Seventh Ray of the Holy Spirit, is a Sacred Fire that will be used to reach karmic elimination. Moreover, you can only attain this state by practicing the Law of Forgiveness and Living through it.
You must light a violet-colored candle every day for three weeks in a row. This candle will be an offering to Saint Germain, to the Seventh Ray of the Holy Spirit - to Healing, and karmic transmutation.
The success of The Karmic transmutation depends greatly on our dedication and engagement in spirituality. Transmutation process can be triggered by anyone who wants to be free from negative karma.
After lighting the candle, focus on the Flame of Transmutation, the Violet Flame. Internalize the Flame of Transmutation and its extension through all your past lives and your current life.
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Embracing Evolutionary Education by Crystal Presence
“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” –Albert Einstein Evolutionary Education is a living process driven by inspiration, curiosity and
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passion. To make the changes that we want to see in our world, we need to shift the way we think, feel and behave. As parents and teachers, we are role modelling by what we do, not what we say. We must transform our outdated methods of educating by letting go of trying to shape our children by having them memorizing facts and defining them through standardized testing. What if we restore their freedom with a new context of evolutionary education? Education as a living process? In his groundbreaking book, The Future of Children, Phillip Moore makes it clear that “in order to navigate this next evolutionary passage where we mature into self-intelligent co-creators, we need to shift our views” about education. Free ourselves from an addictive culture while cultivating the confidence to be part of the resolution in making our planet thrive. Asking ourselves the question; “What is the nature of experiencing an evolutionary education that brings out the best in everyone and our planet?” We can bring forth a new
evolutionary education by… • Knowing that love is fundamental to who we are. Feeling that we belong in an environment of loving kindness. Knowing we are loved and connected as we explore our place in the web of life. • Exploring and discovering the miracle of play. The sacred territory where children can open their minds to merge and blend the real with the unreal, from invisible playmates to adventures that are outside time and logic. • Being in the natural world as much as possible. The natural world provides the complexity and depth, the variety and challenges that foster intricate neural pathway development. In her mesmerizing book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer takes us on a beautiful journey with an interconnection of all life. Children who learn this interconnection and fall in love with the natural world will protect, defend Omtimes.com
Grief and the Forgotten Art of Saying Goodbye By Cathedral of the Soul
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No one taught us to understand the laws of suffering or how to face the demanding situations caused by sudden grief. What usually happens is that the pain of losing someone we love comes almost always in an unexpected way, which means that something can surprisingly brake inside our hearts.
To deal with this learning curve can be the most challenging process we may have to deal with during our lifetime. No one is immune to losses; mourning is something we will all suffer at some point: losing a family member, breaking an active relationship, or the simple fact of maturing involves going through different levels of suffering. The complicated thing about each of these forms of mourning is that none of us get along well with suffering. We do not know how to administer it, it overflows us and sometimes even destroys us. Why and How to do this? Is there perhaps a magic formula that makes us immune to separation, emptiness, the unfathomable abyss of that hand we no longer hold? Not at all. As experts explain, each person will have to find his way to face their mourning process, where to find relief, the integrity, and ability to stand up again. The importance of knowing
oneself vulnerable Emotional maturity is to know how to advance through losses, to cultivate detachment and in a way, to conceive difficulties as learning experiences. It’s difficult; we know that. One can read many things about sadness, can even respond to what a therapist tells you, what your friends or relatives ask you, in order to convey support. However, whatever the level of suffering, any loss is a challenge that one must face alone. No one will cry for us; no one will rearrange our thoughts a feeling and relieve our pain. It is a task of ours that requires time, and which requires above all, to understand that we are not as strong as we thought. That we are as vulnerable as a feather carried by the wind. Is it bad? Is vulnerability a bad thing? By no means is our true strength in our vulnerability. Stop for a moment to think about this: if you resist, if you refuse to acknowledge that you feel hurt, that your life has Omtimes.com
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