The most important practice for preventing war is to stay in touch with what is refreshing, healing, and joyful inside us and around us. If we practice walking mindfully, being in touch with the Earth, the air, the trees, and ourselves, we can heal ourselves, and our entire society will also be healed. If the whole nation would practice watering seeds of joy and peace and not just seeds of anger and violence, the elements of war in all of us will be transformed.

We must prepare ourselves, whether we have one minute, ten years, or one thousand years. If we don’t have time, there is no use in discussing peace, because you cannot practice peace without time. If you have one minute, please use that minute to breathe in and out calmly and plant the seeds of peace and understanding in yourself. If you have ten years, please use the ten years to prevent the next war. If you have one thousand years, please use the time to prevent the destruction of our planet.

Just by your way of looking at things and doing things, you influence others. Approach everyone with love and patience, and try to water the positive seeds in them. We have to help each other, being skillful, kind, and understanding. Blaming and arguing never help.

In the practice of mindfulness, we nurture the ability to see deeply into the nature of things and people, and the fruit is insight, understanding, and love.

—Thich Nhat Hanh, 1991

to make me less afraid, more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;

to live,
so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
—Dawna Markova

Pg 14, When things Fall apart, Pema Chodron

if I am only for myself, what am I?

and if not now, when?

-from Common Sense

working in your calling is half praying

Emerson says more

do your work and you shall reinforce yourself

Grandpa Gene says

be yourself all through the year and it will be well

Stolen from a homemade postcard

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

From The Essential Rumi

What do you think is most important?

In Demian, a favored novel of mine, German Nobel Prize winner, Herman Hesse gives his take on what’s important:

“At this point a sharp realization burned within me: each man has his ‘function’ but none which he can choose himself, define, or perform as he pleases. It was wrong to desire new gods, completely wrong to want to provide the world with something. An enlightened man had but one duty–to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.” p 107

“I did not exist to write poems, to preach or to paint, neither I nor anyone else. All of that was incidental. Each man had only one genuine vocation–to find the way to himself. He might end up as poet or madman, as prophet or criminal–that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny–not an arbitrary one–and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.

“The new vision rose up before me… glimpsed a hundred times, possibly even expressed before, but now experienced for the first time by me. I was an experiment on the part of Nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task was to allow this game on the part of primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. That or nothing!

Then he remembers something Pistorius said: “I must always have things around me that I feel are beautiful and sacred, organ music, and mysteries, symbols and myths. I need and cannot forgo them. That is my weakness.”

Pistorious says he knows he should not need such things, but he is unable to live without them. He is afraid of standing “so naked and alone.” Pistorious says, “Someone who seeks nothing but his on fate no longer has any companions.. but actually that is the path one should follow.” Then he tells Sinclair never to allow himself to become a revolutionary or a martyr, because then he will not be free, instead he will, in effect, be enslaved by his desires to change the world. p 109

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this excerpt.

Excerpt from Luna Yoga

In matrifocal cultures, women are honored and seen as the Goddess. The power of their fertility, both to give birth and to green the Earth, as evidenced in their ability to menstruate, is respected and held sacred. Menstrual blood has been used through the ages as an Earth fertilizer par excellence. During planting season, women would plant the seeds and then fertilize the ground with their menstrual blood. The menstrual cycle is seen as creatively powerful, giving birth not only to children but all nourishment.

During the time of bleeding women’s ability to dream, have visions and attain altered states of consciousness is strong. When moontime visions are sought, answers come, whether of pottery patterns, or the location of herds of food animals, or solutions to social problems.

For thousands of years the blood mysteries of women were an important part of the life of most human societies. The rituals that women create for their own well-being, to protect and nurture their extreme psychic sensitivity and power during menstruation and menopause, childbirth and puberty, serve all of society, not only the individual woman. About 5000 years ago, this changed in many places, most notably Europe. There, matrifocal wisdom has been repressed, and the special menstrual/menopausal/fertility rituals that once nourished all have been calcified into rules and taboos and used to create shame that separates women from their own power and the power of the blood mysteries.

Today, many doctors and researchers see the menstrual cycle as unnecessary. Though some scientists theorize that there may be a relationship between the higher life expectancy of women and our reproductive cycles (because we constantly renew our organism through menstruation), some view women’s monthly bleeding as decadent.

A naturopath, for instance, states that if women were to eat raw foods exclusively, they wouldn’t need this “purification process,” and G. Breuer, a medical doctor, asks in a German journal of natural science (Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau, October, 1981), Is Menstruation Contrary to Nature? The gynecologist Fritz Beller writes in the German magazine Die Zeit (issue 6, 1985), “I consider attempts to prevent menstruation completely as meaningful, because I believe that the monthly cycle is one of the few errors of nature.”

And women, too, come to think of their powerful bleeding time as an error, if for no other reason than that they are “irregular”-that is, they don’t menstruate every 28 days. But studies done in the United States, Australia, Great Britain and France show only 18 to 27 percent of all women of childbearing age having a “regular period” every 28 days. About three-quarters of all women have their own individual cycles with varying lengths between periods and fluctuating durations of the periods. When a standard is applied to something as individual and personally unique as the menstrual cycle, then women’s health suffers, as in the notion that 75 percent of women menstruate irregularly.

Repression of women’s menstrual power literally hurts women. Experts in women’s health care, such as Christiane Northrup, M.D. and Susun Weed, say that the overwhelming majority of reproductive/menstrual/menopausal problems are a direct result of patriarchal disempowerment of women’s mysteries.

A study done on the influence of religion on women’s menstrual well-being showed that women who were most likely to suffer from menstrual pain and problems were the ones whose religion told them they were unclean or that they had to be submissive to men. (In one religion women are denied communion when having their period.) Women with the smallest percentage of menstrual problems belonged to churches where women can become priests or even bishops.
Then there are the conscious or unconscious messages from our mothers or other females in our environment. How did we experience our menarche, the first blood? What examples of the menstrual cycle did we experience as we were growing up? Were we taught that the fluctuations of our bodies make us more adaptable and resistant? Or were we told we had the “curse.” No wonder we feel conflict about our cycles and try to deny our very beingness as women.

Women’s menstrual and reproductive problems often begin during periods of stress. One cause of the stress is the conflict of being female in a male-oriented, male-dominated society where there are few positive views of the feminine and little support of the female cycle. In many cultures women are highly revered, but also avoided because of their relationship to blood, which is seen as a symbol for life and death. In the past, blood mysteries were seen as the divine power of women; they formed the basis of religious rites which we enact even today in some cultures. The power of woman-say the Native Americans-lies in her ability to give life and to use this creativity in different ways. Patriarchal societies, however view women’s blood mysteries as a threat to their power, and have suppressed woman and their knowledge of their menstrual power.