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Men on a Mission
Howdy from Houston,
“I had a case of the vapors,” as we say in the South. The scent of sweet lavender oil mingled with pungent garlic. The lavender soothed the fire ant bites around my wrist; the garlic smell came from stomping the wild onion plants carpeting the old cemetery. Sweat trickled into my eyes and my thighs were singing a song from all the stooping and lifting.
I live in one of Houston’s “charming” neighborhoods. This abandoned cemetery, down the street from us on West Dallas, contains the graves of over 6000 people, mostly former slaves. After the War Between the States, many freed slaves headed to Texas. Back then, the Antioch Baptist Church was center stage in the black community of Houston's thriving Fourth Ward. They opened the College Memorial Park Cemetery in 1896; across the street from Houston Central College for Negroes.
The Antioch Baptist Church and the College are ancient history, bulldozed long ago in this modern city of glass, and the old cemetery is in dire shape; overgrown, many tumbled headstones, fallen trees, with a massive hive of honey bees swarming in the back. Today’s a work day at the neglected site. Reverend Robertson and his Bethel Missionary Baptist Church adopted the old cemetery. Joining Reverend “Bob,” I’m here with a The New Warriors; a group that train’s men to lead powerful lives of service. Rounding out our ragtag work force are volunteers from the Montrose and River Oaks Civic groups and about twenty young men on juvenile probation.
Reverend Robertson opens the day with a prayer. New Warrior and wise elder, Luis Batista, offers a Native American prayer to Father Sky, Mother Earth, and the spirits of the ancestors. Saws roar, laughter rings, sweat mingles with the occasional ant bite, trash piles up waiting for the city dumpster. In a few short hours an overgrown eye-sore reclaims a spot of its historic dignity. I’m reminded of the power of service—volunteering to work for something greater than myself—and the joy of being with other like hearted folks. I think about the freed slaves who came to Houston for a new beginning, a new life full of promise. I came to this town 28 years ago, as much running from my too-wild past and with high hopes of my own. Houston’s been “berry, berry’ good to me.
All in all it’s a good day. And I get to enjoy the fruits of our community labor every time I drive this way on West Dallas. I also remember that I stand on the shoulders of all the ancestors who came before me and make my life possible.
Be Brilliant!
ALan Davidson
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Men on a Mission: (from left) Bruce Anderson, Lamont Grogan, Reverend Robertson,
Tom Hopwood, and Jim Giulian |
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The Healing Potential of Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness;
an interview with Stanislav Grof
Stanislav Grof, author of The Holotropic Mind
Free teleclass: Tuesday April 29th at 8 PM CDT/ 6 PM PDT
(The call is recorded for future playback/link sent to all who register)
Stan will share with us:
- Inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness and accessing the healing potential of the psyche
- non-drug methods for deep psycho-spiritual work
- Brain and Body in consciousness,
- Your Inner Healer ,
- transpersonal experiences,
- what are spiritual emergencies,
- Holotropic Breathwork.
Stanislav Grof, M.D., is one of our great pioneers in consciousness and a leading figure in transpersonal psychology. Born in Czechoslovakia, he came of age as an atheist in a Communist country, and was trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst. In 1954, Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland sent a sample of newly-developed, LSD to the lab where Grof worked, with a request that they study it and report back their findings.
Grof's experience with LSD caused him to substantially reconfigure his worldview. Since that time, he has devoted his professional life to the exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness, first with psychedelic substances and later with non-pharmacological means.
For years, he performed legal, government-sponsored research with psychedelics, exploring ways to utilize these substances in a psychotherapeutic setting. His book LSD Psychotherapy grew out of his work. He is a former Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and is the author of over ninety professional articles and six books, including The Adventure of Self-Discovery and Beyond the Brain, and The Holotropic Mind. With his wife Christina, he co-authored The Stormy Search for the Self, and co-edited Spiritual Emergency.
His current work focuses on the use of non-drug methods for deep psycho-spiritual work. Stan and Christina Grof have developed a method called Holotropic Breathwork, which employs specialized breathing techniques, in conjunction with music designed to evoke deeper states.
Register for the teleclass:
http://www.throughyourbody.com/Grof.html
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Meditation: the #1 Skill for Healing World Crisis
By Alan Davidson
http://www.ThroughYourBody.com
© Alan Davidson- All Rights reserved
Shrieking wind punched the tent. The anchor ropes strained against the storm’s power. Hurricane force gusts threatened to turn the tent’s panels in to a sail. Dr. Lonnie Thompson felt the adrenaline flushing his muscles. He had pitched camp near a mountain cliff atop Huascaran, Peru's highest peak. At 22,200 feet, it dominated the northern skyline of the Andes’ “White Range” (Cordillera Blanca). Many consider it to be the most beautiful mountain in the world. It wasn’t feeling very pretty that night. Fierce gusts battered his only protection from what climbers call the "death zone," the environment above 18,000 feet. Thompson was used to the dangers of working at this extreme elevation; dangers that included altitude sickness with horrendous headaches, difficulty breathing, frostbite, avalanches, and (during the day) searing heat from the sun. And now add being blown off the mountain by the wind.
A crack signaled the anchor ties snapping under the strain. Fiberglass poles kept the tent panels upright, turning them into sails. Unmoored from the icy ridge, the wind pushed the tent toward the cliff edge. Inside the now teetering tent-raft, Lonnie scrambled into action. He grabbed his ice ax and jammed it through the floor of his tent; barely stopping his plunge to icy death below. Dr. Thompson is our, “closest living thing to an Indiana Jones.” Trekking through the Andes, the Himalayas and beyond, he has risked blood clots and temporary blindness in the name of science. His driving goal: preserving 100,000 years of weather history coded deep in the planet's fast-melting glaciers. "No scientist has taken bigger risks to track ancient weather patterns and help us understand the anomaly of current climate trends," says Al Gore.
Dr. Lonnie Thompson
Lonnie Thompson is a towering figure in the world of climatology. With his dramatic, low-budget, seat-of-the-pants trips to the glaciers of Africa, China and South America, he’s led expeditions from the Andes to Kilimanjaro, to drill for ice cores, frozen time capsules that lock in air, dust, and pollution of climates past, and offer solid (literally ice solid) evidence of the human impact on our environment. Thompson has now spent more time in the “death zone” than almost anyone alive. Once seen as an eccentric who had a wild idea about studying the ice near the planet's equator, he's now acknowledged to be a visionary in the field.
What has Dr. Thompson found? Global warming is real. A recent core sample from the Dasuopu glacier in Tibet reveals the last 50 years to be the warmest of the last 9,000. Thompson has found that the ice is melting at a rapid rate at some sites. At the Quelccaya glacier in Peru, a lake now exists that was not there in 1974 when Thompson first visited. In some areas, the ice is retreating about a foot a day, he said. "Those glaciers -- they're really a bank account," he said. "They have stored water resources over thousands of years."
Dr. Thompson, a professor at Ohio State University, said: "It doesn't matter if you're in the Himalayas, South America, or Africa. The system is changing." The main way that warming is likely to affect mankind, scientists say, is through changes in the balance of water as liquid, vapor and ice. “A change of nine or ten degrees [of the Earth’s temperature] would almost certainly cause widespread catastrophe,” writes Mark Bowen in Thin Air, a treatise on global climate changes and Thompson’s high altitude adventures.
In the short run, the melting could unleash sudden floods and avalanches as it overwhelms lakes and stream beds. In the long run, though, these long-frozen sources of water will run dry. Generally, agriculture is expected to die out in arid subtropical areas like the eastern Mediterranean and southern Africa, while flourishing in northern climates — like the North American wheat belt — as more rain and longer growing seasons boost crops. But climate experts say that even there, rain is more likely to fall as field-scouring torrents. Government scientists have already measured a significant rise in downpour-style storms in the United States over the last 100 years.
Earth has suffered from one crisis or another since someone started telling stories around the campfire. But what is the world’s #1 worst crisis: destroying our environment, wars and their “collateral damage,” crushing and dehumanizing poverty, sex and slave traffic of our young girls?
Shockingly, the #1 crisis facing our world today is none-of-the-above; Yep. That’s right. Our #1 crisis is really the LACK of human development in the world. We’ll get to remedy in just a minute. Every crisis mentioned above is a symptom of poor our human development. We hate, fight, abuse each other, and the planet we live on because we have yet to grow up.
Human growth falls into three broad levels: Selfish, Care, and Cosmic Care.
The SELFISH level means a healthy Self-Care; or not—and often the case these days. Our basic human needs are healthy bodies--good food, clean water and air--and safety, shelter, and security. The “Dark Side of Selfish,”as it stands 1.3 billion people live on less than a dollar a day and 850 million people do not get enough to eat every day. 350 million kids go to sleep hungry every night.
The CARE level means caring for each other—a real sense of love, belonging, and self respect. Most of the people in our developed nations are at this level. “Dark Side of Care”—There were 180,000 deliberate murders in the world last year; 660, 020 domestic rapes—this number does not include war rapes. In the U.S. alone 16% of children are physically abused and 9% are sexually abused—that’s almost 1 out of ten children. And these numbers say more about the quality of police care throughout the world and a victim/witness’s will to report a crime. We have a lot of growing up to do.
COSMIC CARE means caring for all things—our fellow human beings, our animal friends, the planet, and universe we live in…and a real integration of all three levels of growth. Even with the vast wealth and technological progress found in the world, only 3% of our entire world’s population lives at a COSMIC CARE level of growth. So how do we grow up, with more and more people peaking into a COSMIC CARE level, you ask? Well for my money, mastering our Five Vital IQs—healing and integrating body, heart, mind, choice, and spirit are a necessity.
But there’s one exercise that is statistically proven to boost human growth…Meditation. Yep, that’s right. Sitting quiet and still every day, pretty much guarantees growing up. It doesn’t even matter what kind of meditation, just the sitting, whether it’s watching your breath, scanning the sensations of your body, chanting, praying, or concentration. They all work to raise our level of growth.
Ken Wilber, the creator of Integral Theory, believes that 10% of the world’s people living at COSMIC CARE level will create a tipping point of consciousness; a shifting that will radically change our world and the all the crisis that threaten us today: human cruelty, war, environmental destruction, and the incredible imbalance of wealth will all shift, as our consciousness does. As we grow each of these problems will heal. (Other, more complex problems will surely arise—but to the work at hand).
Ken Wilber, author of Integral Vision
There are literally thousands of ways to meditate in the vast history of our world’s traditions. Here’s one of my favorites.
Sensational Body Meditation
The key to this meditation is simple: you focus on the sensations of your body as you sit; the sensation of pressure, temperature, vibration, and pain/pleasure. Then there’s always your five senses: taste, hearing, smell, or touch (I prefer to meditate with my eyes closed). When you notice yourself thinking, which you will (it’s what the mind is designed to do), gently return your attention to any of the sensations of your body. The skill of meditation is to consistently focus our attention in the present. The sensations of our body always happen in the present moment. When we focus our attention to those sensations we automatically tune to the present moment.
- Sit comfortably cross-legged on the floor with your spine straight. Placing a cushion just under your sitz bones (the bones of your pelvis you actually sit on) lifts your spine. It helps you to sit in peace and quiet. Turn off all the distractions you can—telephones, TV, music, kids. Gently close your eyes.
- Turn your attention to your feet and sense everything you can. Feel any pressure from the ground, your socks? Sense your skin and the feel of air or fabric on it. Do you have a sense of temperature? Of vibration? When you notice yourself thinking, gently bring your attention back to your body.
- Move your attention to your calves, hips and thighs. Sense the weight of your body pressing on the floor. Sense your skin and the feel of air or fabric on it. Do you have a sense of temperature? Of vibration? When you begin thinking, gently return your attention to your body.
- Move your attention to your belly. Soften your belly. Let your muscles and guts relax. Sense your skin and the feel of air or fabric on it. Do you have a sense of temperature? Of vibration? When you notice yourself thinking, gently return your attention to your body.
- Move your attention to your back. Sense the muscles and bones that hold you erect as you sit. If there is tension or pain in your back turn your attention to it and take a deep breath. Direct your breath to the tension. The movement and attention of your breath may soften that tension. Sense your skin and the feel of air or fabric on it. Do you have a sense of temperature? Of vibration? When you notice yourself thinking, gently bring your attention back to your body.
- Move your attention to your breath. Notice the rising and falling of your chest. Sense the air moving in and out of your chest. Sense your skin and the feel of air or fabric on it. Do you have a sense of temperature? Of vibration? When you notice yourself thinking, gently bring your attention back to your body.
- Move your attention to your neck and head. Sense the movement of air across your upper lip as you breathe. Feel the movement of air through your nose and throat. Notice any aromas or tastes you have. Sense your skin and hair. Do you have a sense of temperature? Of vibration? When you notice yourself thinking, gently bring your attention back to your body.
- Return to the sensations of your feet and move back up your body to the head and neck. Initially sit for twenty minutes. As you are comfortable, increase your sitting time by ten-minute increments until you can sit for one hour.
Kioka Kneeling in Namaste, from Body Brilliance
Commit to yourself and a meditation program. It’s best to start with something you can do consistently, like every day for ten minutes. Build from there. You can add more minutes to your sitting, or add another round of ten minutes (say one in the morning, one at night). There’s lot’s of good advice on how to start and sustain a mediation practice. The most important thing to me is “Just do it.” Find the groove that works for you. You’ll feel better, focus your mind, and choose better. And the world needs your Cosmic Care.
Be brilliant!
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Dr. Randy Pausch, professor at Carnegie Melon, dying of pancreatic cancer, speaking "only to his three kids," offers last lecture on a Happy Lief and achieving dreams:
http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=ithct48cqw
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The subtitle of this book, Unlocking the secrets of climate in the world's highest mountains, succinctly sums up what this book is about. Bowen successfully weaves together adventure and science. For any of you out there who have done a lot of field work, you will like it. There are many anecdotes about working and surviving in the field, ranging from humorous to tragic. I tend to like stories about adventurers who are also scientists (rather than people going through hardships just to do it).
Lonnie Thompson, a climate scientist at Ohio State University, and an assortment of others from his research team are the main 'characters' in this story. For decades, Lonnie and his team have been drilling and studying cores from high alpine ice sheets, including Peru (Quelccaya), Bolivia (Sajama), Tanzania (Kiliminjaro), and Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (Dunde). An interesting aspect of this story is how in the 1970s and 80s the paleoclimate community more-or-less regarded alpine cores, especially from low latitudes, as useless to climate reconstruction.
Everyone believed all the answers were in the big continental ice caps near the poles (Greenland and Antarctica). The results from Thompson's work showed that these ice caps have records going back maybe not has far as the continental ice sheets but much farther than had been postulated (100,000 years). Furthermore, the climatic fluctuations that are recorded in these lower-latitude archives have important implications for weather patterns that the polar records just cannot address. Bowen also includes great sections on the history of climate and paleoclimate science interspersed with the narrative of the ice coring work of Thompson's team.
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discovering archtype energies
an exihibition of photographic images
by Luis C. Smith
Opening reception Satruday April 19th, 4-6 PM
Hungry's Gallery
2356 Rice Blvd.
Houston, TX 77005
show runs April 19th through May 19th
www.hungrysgallery.com
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