Dancing into Stillness

There is nothing in all creation so like God as stillness.
– Meister Eckhart

Dear Friends,

Sometimes I just have to stop, reflect, regenerate and find stillness in my life! My perpetual busyness leads to a sort of scattered franticness that leaves me breathless, multi-tasking, ungrateful, unfocused and exhausted. So on this summer solstice I gave myself, and everyone else, a gift of a week of silence, fasting, and meditative prayer. For the first 3 days I had a serious case of monkey mind… I walked, meditated, danced, prayed and slept around the clock. On the fourth day I slowed down and entered into a sort of Divine bliss, spacious awareness and a sense of being connected to all life. Perhaps it was hunger, but looking back there was much more going on. I wanted to share some of the thoughts and insights I took away with me, knowing that they are not the experience, but perhaps they can be useful to you in your explorations into stillness and the great mystery.

The mind is incessantly looking for not only food for thought; it is looking for food for its identity, its sense of self. This is how the ego comes into existence and continuously re-creates itself.
– Eckhart Tolle

Read the entire letter from Michael here.

Upcoming Events

September 18th: Save this for a weekend of dance, camping and fun in Nevada County. More to follow...

Moving Meditation News

The South Yuba Club is closed this Sunday, but we will be there rocking our socks off in celebration of the ultimate freedom – the freedom to be our most authentic self – and celebrate our connection with all life. Stillness meditation music starts at 9:30am.

5Rhythms of Gabrielle Roth in her own words

Each of us is a moving center, a space of divine mystery. And though we spend most of our time on the surface in the daily details of ordinary existence, most us hunger to connect to this space within, to break through to ecstatic states of consciousness, to be swept away.

As a young dancer, I made the transition from the world of steps and structures to the world of transformation and trance by exposure to live drumming. The beats, the patterns, the rhythms kept calling me deeper and deeper into trance. These dances took me from the edge of myself to the moving center. And from there, I began to discover a more essential me.

Being young, wild, and free, it didn’t dawn on me that in order to go into these deep ecstatic places, I would have to be willing to transform absolutely everything that got in my way. That included every form of inertia known to us: the physical inertia of tight and stressed muscles; the emotional baggage of depressed, repressed feelings; the mental baggage of dogmas, attitudes, and philosophies. In other words, I’d have to let it all go—everything.

To read the full article, click here.

New Podcasts

Click here to view the Podcasts page, and to listen to the following podcasts:

William Powers: Living A Meaningful Life
William Powers has worked for over a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, Washington, D.C., and Native North America. His essays and commentaries on global issues have appeared in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, and on National Public Radio. He is the author of numerous books including the soon to be released, 12x12 about living off the grid and simplifying life. www.williampowersbooks.com

Kevin Griffin: One Breath at a Time
Kevin Griffin is an author, teacher and lecturer based in the SF Bay area. He teachers “Dharma and Recovery” at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and is the co-founder of the Buddhist Recovery Network, an international organization that serves people in the recovery community through training, treatment and research. www.kevingriffin.net

Melanie Lenart, Ph.D: Life in the Hothouse: How a Living Planet Survives Climate Change
An award-winning journalist, Melanie Lenart, Ph.D., is an environmental scientist and writer specializing in climate change and forests. As a scientist, she studied forest dynamics in China, Colorado, and Puerto Rico, where she lived during two major hurricanes. She was involved in an Arizona agricultural experiment testing how plants responded to elevated levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas responsible for the ongoing warming of the planet. www.u.arizona.edu/~mlenart/index.php

Book of the Month

The Real Wealth of Nations, by Riane Eisler

The Real Wealth of Nations tackles the dismal science of economics, and proves conclusively that it deserve that description. She wrestles conventional “wisdom” to the ground, challenging the assumptions that have supported the practice of business and economic policy for the last two centuries, since Adam Smith’s original Wealth of Nations. Instead, Eisler prescribes a “caring economics” that assumes the obvious—people really matter. As she argues, “the real wealth of nations consists of the contributions of people and our natural environment.”

If you learned economics as I did—imperfectly and with little enthusiasm—you may dimly recall talk of capital, which was paramount, and the widgets that lots of capital permits us to produce. We were assumed to be excited about the prospect of turning out lots of widgets. After all, making lots of widgets is the only way to make big profits, which in turn allows us to accumulate lots more capital, and later, produce more widgets. It was never clear to me where people fit into this scheme, except as “labor,” which is little more than a commodity like iron, coal, or oil.

Eisler’s “caring economics” draws upon two themes that are emerging among the critics of contemporary economic theory and practice. On one hand, her approach owes a great deal to advocates of “full-cost pricing”—most recognizable among them environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken and European business leader Stephan Schmidheiny—who recognize that natural capital has fundamental to our economic wellbeing, and that the destruction of the environment imposes great costs on society. Like these visionaries, Eisler wants to factor such value and costs into a rational economic theory.

On the other hand, Eisler pulls from other feminist thinkers, who have long argued that caregiving—or, as it is traditionally mislabeled, “women’s work”—is the foundation upon which all economic activity rests. Caregiving and the “productive work” of traditional economics should be given equal weight. Eisler’s contribution is to weave the environmental and feminist values into a cohesive approach—an economic theory that comes as close to the Native American ideal as contemporary society can manage: Every action must be considered in terms of its impact on the next seven generations.

The Real Wealth of Nations sets forth “six foundations for a caring economic system.”

1) A “full-spectrum economic map,” which encompasses the household, unpaid, natural, and illegal economies, as well as the traditional market and government economies;
2) a set of cultural beliefs and institutions that value caring and caregiving, shifting the reigning social paradigm from one of domination to partnership;
3) caring economic rules, policies, and practices for business and government that meet basic human needs, direct technological developments to life-sustaining applications, and consider effects on future generations;
4) inclusive and accurate economic indicators that reject benchmarks like the GDP, which grows larger with every massive oil spill and every bomb and bullet used up in war;
5) partnerships between economic and social structures that don’t result in the concentration of economic assets and power at the top; and
6) an evolving economic theory of what Eisler calls “partnerism”, human interaction that goes beyond capitalism and socialism to recognize the essential economic value of caring for ourselves, others, and nature.

Yes, most of this territory has been covered by others. But Eisler’s art—her wisdom—lies in her ability to integrate learning from many disciplines, and translate her vision of the future into vivid prose that awakens our sense of possibility. It’s no accident that such an insightful synthesis has come from a social scientist who is unrestricted by the boundaries of a single discipline. Eisler’s venture into the realms of economics, sociology, history, political science, and other fields underlines the value of interdisciplinary inquiry in an era when so many of our best and brightest minds are peering obsessively into the minute. If the world is to be saved, salvation will come from people like Eisler, who have made it their business to think outside the proverbial box. Let’s hope Eisler’s wisdom finds its way into the decision-making circles in government and business before it’s too late.
(taken from Mal Warwick review)

NOTE: Riane Eisler will be on Conversations July 27th at 1pm. You can listen live by going to KVMR.org

Articles

Book Bytes: Raising Water Productivity to Increase Food Security

With water shortages constraining food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity over the last half-century. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, it is not surprising that 70 percent of world water use is devoted to irrigation. Thus, raising irrigation efficiency is central to raising water productivity overall.

Data on the efficiency of surface of water projects—that is, dams that deliver water to farmers through a network of canals—show that crop usage of irrigation water never reaches 100 percent simply because some irrigation water evaporates, some percolates downward, and some runs off. Water policy analysts Sandra Postel and Amy Vickers found that “surface water irrigation efficiency ranges between 25 and 40 percent in India, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand; between 40 and 45 percent in Malaysia and Morocco; and between 50 and 60 percent in Israel, Japan, and Taiwan.”

To read the full article, click here.

The Roots of Compassion

Sheikh Jamal Rahman
Yes! Magazine

As a young adult I was fascinated by a verse in the Tao Te Ching: “Compassionate towards yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.” If I desired peace in the world around me, the verse implied, I should start by practicing compassion for myself, thereby unleashing a healing energy that would help reconcile divisions with the people I encountered. Ever since I was first graced with this insight, I have tried to cultivate an awareness that any difficulty I have with another is a reflection of the relationship I have with myself—and, conversely, the more peaceful I am with myself, the more peaceful I am with those around me.

To read the full article, click here.

How Many Energy-Efficient Light Bulbs Does It Take to Close 705 Coal Plants?

The lighting sector is on the edge of a spectacular revolution, a shift from the century-old, inefficient incandescent light bulb to far more efficient technologies. Perhaps the quickest, most profitable way to reduce electricity use worldwide—thus cutting carbon emissions—is simply to change light bulbs.

The first advance in this field came with compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). Replacing old-fashioned inefficient incandescent bulbs that are still widely used today with new CFLs can reduce the electricity used for lighting by three fourths. Over its lifetime, each standard (13 watt) CFL will reduce electricity bills by roughly $30. And though a CFL may cost twice as much as an incandescent, it lasts 10 times as long. Each one reduces energy use compared with an incandescent by the equivalent of 200 pounds of coal over its lifetime. For perspective, the energy saved by replacing a 100-watt incandescent bulb with an equivalent CFL over its lifetime is sufficient to drive a Toyota Prius hybrid car from New York to San Francisco.

To read the full article, click here.

Eco-Economy Indicators: Global Temperature

The first decade of the twenty-first century was the hottest since recordkeeping began in 1880. With an average global temperature of 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.1 degrees Fahrenheit), this decade was 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than any previous decade. The year 2005 was the hottest on record, while 2007 and 2009 tied for second hottest. In fact, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record occurred in the past decade.

To read the full article, click here.

The Inner and Outer of the Gulf Oil Deluge: Questions and a Prayer

I have noticed that there are significant numbers of people praying and meditating about the deluge of oil spilling into the Gulf. Marianne Williamson and a host of others have been tweeting about meditating everyday at noon and making this a global effort. But what is the content of those prayers? Are we sending love to all species and to the human communities affected? Are we expressing inner concern? Are we looking for miraculous clean-up? Are we looking for remorse by those responsible? Are we looking for remorse in ourselves for the way we live? Are we looking for transformative insight? Are we practicing deep non-judgmental detachment? Are we intending the healing of the waters? Are we healing our own despair? Are we channeling moral outrage into a wave-form in consciousness which will bring our gas guzzling greed to an end? Are we seeing in those prayers what we have to do to change the story?

I know some people think it is quite old-fashioned to actually have content to your prayers. But here is my prayer for the Gulf:

Forgive me, all life forms of the Gulf, and all exquisitely unique and diverse sentient beings. I have colluded in your poisoning. Forgive me people of the Gulf I saw it coming; saw the ruin that would befall you, but I did nothing effective to stop it. I said a lot over the years but did not really transform my words into creative enactments of moral imagination or sacred activism to end our dependence on fossil fuels. Forgive me beautiful waters of the Gulf and the ocean, I am one of those so called civilized ones who is addicted to fuels and all of the plundering and destruction of Nature which that addiction causes. I know that this is the way the human species "evolved" to date: by overlooking our rapacious appetite for machine-driven luxury. I know I am part of the blindness and distraction that seduces us into participating as a species in the destruction of the collective habitat of all life on this jewel of a planet. Other species do not destroy the very habitat needed for their survival....

To read the full article, click here (PDF).

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Dear Friends,
For the past four years I have been funding Conversations, The Well of Light and other associated projects out of my own pocket and fund raising events. In order to keep this newsletter coming and keep moving towards syndicating Conversations we need your help. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution if you enjoy receiving our monthly newsletter or listening to Conversations.

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Blessings,
michael

Upcoming Shows on Conversations

July 6th
Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D
Ecologist, author, and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized authority on the environment links to cancer and human health. Steingraber’s highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment presents cancer as a human rights issue. She is also the author of Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, explores the intimate ecology of motherhood and was the central figure in the movie Living Downstream. steingraber.com

July 13th
Jeremy Rifkin: The Empathic Civilization
Jeremy Rifkin is the founder and president of the Foundation On Economic Trends and creator of the Third Industrial Revolution. He is an American economist, writer, public speaker and activist who seeks to shape public policy in the United States, the European Union, and around the world. He is the bestselling author of 16 books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His latest book is The Empathic Civilization: Rethinking human Nature in the Biosphere Era. www.foet.org

July 20th
James William Gibson: Re-enchanted World: A New Kinship With Nature
James William Gibson is the author of Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America and The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. A frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and winner of multiple grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim, Gibson is a professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach. www.jameswilliamgibson.com

July 27th
Riane Eisler: Caring Economics
Riane Eisler is internationally known for The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (2007) — hailed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking and by Gloria Steinem as revolutionary. Her earlier bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987) is in 23 foreign editions. www.partnershipway.org

August 3rd
J. Kirk Boyd: Creating a social order based upon human rights
Dr. John Kirk Boyd is a lawyer, professor, and Executive Director of the 2048 Project at the U.C. Berkeley law school. In addition, the author has argued at every level of court, including the United States Supreme Court. He teaches International Human Rights, Civil Rights, International Law, Free Speech, and Constitutional Law at the University of California. www.2048.berkeley.edu

Conversations airs every Tuesday at 1pm PST on KVMR.
For current shows or more information go to www.AreWeListening.net

Videos

RSA Animate - The Empathic Civilisation

Inner Wave Dance by Gabrielle Roth

KarmaTube: Sakena Yacoobi - Serving Afghanistan

Welcome Video for Building Conscious Community

The other debt crisis: Climate debt

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Well of Light Seva Team

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
— Mohandas K. Gandhi

Seva is selfless service to a cause you believe will benefit others. It is the willingness to perform any task for a greater cause without prospect of recognition or reward.

Well of Light has many opportunities to serve our community. If you would like to participate on the Well of Light Seva Team please call Michael Stone @ 530.477.7757 or email michael@welloflight.com

"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."
- Albert Schweitzer

Poetry Corner

When there is deep abundance
there is nowhere to abide.
There is nowhere to rest
or grasp onto
and yet there is rest

The sky abides
yet it never rests.
Neither can we say that
the sky is not always at rest.
We talk about the sky
as if it were something
as if it actually exists -
and yet we cannot say that
the sky does not exist.
The sky is nothing but
coming and going.

Everything is perfectly spontaneous.
The coming and going arise mutually
instantaneously.
If the true I is asleep
you will miss the point entirely
and you will continue to dwell
in the world of opposites.

So see the two as one
and the one as empty
and be liberated
within the world of duality.

At first it seems
as if begoing follows becoming.
But look even closer
and you will see
that there are only
flashes of lightning
illuminating the empty sky.

Life and death
becoming and begoing
are only words.
In order to save your life
you must see that you die
instantaneously
moment to moment
instant to instant.

Now where are you going to abide?
And where are you not abiding already?

Indeed there is nowhere
to rest your head
and there is nothing but rest.
So let go of all ideas
about permanence and impermanence
about cause and effect
and about no cause and no effect.
All such notions are dualistic concepts.

The Truth of what you are
is completely beyond all duality
and all notions of non-duality,
and yet it includes duality
and non-duality alike.
Like an ocean
that is both waves and stillness
and yet un-definable
as waves or stillness.

The truth of being
cannot be grasped by ideas
or experiences.
Both waves and stillness
are the manifest activity
or your own self.
But self cannot be defined
by its activity
nor by its non-activity.
The truth is
all-transcendent
ungraspable, all-inclusive
and closer than your own skin.

A single thought about it
obscures its essence.
The perfume of true life
is right in your nose.
There is nothing you can do
to perceive it
and yet you must do something.
I say:
Rest and be taken.
Rest and be taken.

– Adyashanti

Sabbath Poem I

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
And the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
The day turns, the trees move.

– Wendell Berry