My friend David Mackenzie inspired me to offer you this invitation:
Please print this newsletter. It is meant to be held in your hand.

In the Native American shamanic tradition, there’s a way that a teacher chooses the students who come to learn the art of plant medicine. “Here’s your first test,” says the teacher. “Go and find as many sacred plants as you can in the next hour and bring them back to me.”
If the student walks away to look for them, the teacher knows he or she is not ready to begin the apprenticeship. The ones who are chosen do not move. They stand where they are, and look for the plants that live right under their feet.

There is a lot of talk about gratitude these days, a lot of talk about learning to appreciate what is right under our feet. People all over the place are awakening to the power of gratitude, not just as a warm fuzzy feeling, but as a liberating and transforming force in their lives. Who could deny that gratitude is good thing? It’s easy to talk about it, easy to think about it-quite a bit harder to walk the gratitude walk in a genuine and sustained way.

A few years ago I came to a place where I realized how conditional my gratitude was. I could feel gratitude for things that pleased and delighted me- not for the times when I was stuck in between a rock and a hard place.  I could only appreciate those times in retrospect, after I had gleaned the hard- won wisdom out of the pain and struggle.

I found myself becoming more and more curious about how it would be to be grateful for it all, for every single moment of my life-nothing left out.  It was one of those questions that wouldn’t go away. It just kept drilling down into my heart, into the moments when I was deep into resisting what was going on. It drilled into the annoying little moments: “How would it feel to be grateful for this parking ticket?” and the big ones, “How can I be grateful for losing a chunk of my investments?”

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·Freedom and Truth-2 core aspects of love
The nature of love is that it gives total freedom to the other person. This does not mean that they can do whatever they want, when they want. This is a very immature understanding of freedom.
The kind of freedom we are speaking of respects their basic human rights:
Their right to keep private whatever they want to
Their right to speak or remain silent.
Their right to take their own space when they need to-ie leave the room , even when you are wanting to engage them in conversation
Their right to go out and spend time with friends, without having to report back to you.

· Building trust-another key aspect of love
Every time we promise something, or make an agreement with our partner, and do not come through, we erode the space of trust between us. Healing broken trust can sometimes take a long time, but the process is very simple:
Do not make a single promise that you do not intend to keep.
And be sure that both you and your partner are clear about the specific nature of the promise or agreement.
For example, don’t just say you will call. Specify the day and time.

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It was a lovely afternoon, so invigorating, so celebratory, so nourishing.
Naida Hyde-Nov. 06

It was wonderful to spend the day with you.  It was my and Amy’s Christmas gift to one another - time together- and was well worth it.
Kiersten Packham-Dec. 06

The spiritual training and teaching I have been engaged in for most of my life comes from the ‘non-dual’ teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism. I notice that most people’s eyes go a bit glassy when I mention the word ‘non-dual.’ It’s a difficult concept to grasp with the mind, because the mind functions in the field of polarity, of opposites.  I’ve found the simplest way to approach the non-dual understanding is to invite people to let go of their ‘either/or’ thinking.  Non-dual is more like both/and.  Either/or thinking is black and white thinking. AA calls it ‘stinkin’ thinkin’, because it leads to pain, suffering and confusion. Why? Because it divides our world and our experience up into opposites that oppose one another. And this opposition exists only in our conditioned mind. When we confine ourselves to a world that exists only in our minds, we run into trouble.

I began to contemplate this many years ago in India, after having a conversation with my teacher one day. We were standing on a mountain road, looking down at the great river Vyas, roaring through our valley. I was asking him to help me deal with a situation in my life. “I can’t help you in that way,” he told me, “that’s not the way human beings are. What you are now calling your greatest strength, will one day be your greatest weakness. And what you call your greatest weakness, you will recognize as your greatest strength.” I was stunned by that, and spent many years exploring the depth of it. But it wasn’t until I left India that it really came home to me. Then I started to hear it everywhere: “ Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don’t divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation.”
- Moshe Feldenkrais

It was like waking up from a dream, realizing that I had been living in a black and white world. At first it was confusing and frightening to leave that world behind. Then I began to appreciate the depth, complexity and richness of life when I was not putting everything into those boxes of human/divine, good/bad, strong/weak, matter/spirit. In the non-dual understanding, your true nature is something that embraces everything as it is. As long as we live in a world of polarities, we cling to one side and try and push the other side away. Life becomes an endless struggle.

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Tell me, does the night fall because it wants to,

Or because it has to?

It’s the same thing.

It may be risky for the bud to blossom, but what

the heck else is a bud going to do?

You may think you’re able to hold yourself back

from blossoming,

hold yourself in the bud.

But your blossoming is as inevitable as the night falling

And as wanted.

Jillian Harvey, Dec. 2. 06