PLEASE READ THIS AND BE WELL

Preventing infection with H1N1

Dr. Vinay Goyal is an MBBS,DRM,DNB (Intensivist and Thyroid
specialist), having clinical experience of over 20 years.

The following message given by him; I feel it makes a lot of sense and is
important for all to know.

The only portals of entry are the nostrils and mouth/throat. In a
global epidemic of this nature, it’s almost impossible not coming into
contact with H1N1 in spite of all precautions. Contact with H1N1 is not
so much of a problem as proliferation is.

While you are still healthy and not showing any symptoms of H1N1
infection, in order to prevent proliferation, aggravation of symptoms and
development of secondary infections, some very simple steps, not fully
highlighted in most official communications, can be practiced (instead of
focusing on how to stock N95 or Tamiflu):

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Miles Davis, the great jazz musician, used to say to his quartet: “Practice in your rooms if you like, but don’t bring that stuff to this stage. This is about being in the moment.”

Working with these obstacles to our natural creativity is a key part of The Alchemy of Writing process

Obstacles to Creativity

Fear of Failure--learn to bow to failure. It’s inevitable.

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Numerology Readings

In person and by phone

Live your life in a spirit of openness, confidence, and determination.

In many of the ancient, indigenous traditions, the fall was understood to be the beginning of the year. As the harvest comes in, and we receive what we have sown, what has flourished and blossomed begins to return to the root. A whole new cycle of life begins.

New beginnings are an exciting time, and they are also full of challenges. An essential part of every beginning is the process of clearing and completion, coming to terms with old patterns and ways of being that are ready to be released, so that we have a wide open space for something new.

The Chinese sages called this part of life, ‘Difficulty at the Beginning,’ and compared it to the energy and vitality that a tender young shoot needs when it first pierces through the seed, or a young chick when it pecks its way out of the egg. It’s not necessary to do this all by yourself. That’s why autumn is an optimal time for personal coaching sessions and numerology readings

You can learn to stop ‘tolerating’ what is no longer working for you, and open to new ways to being and moving in the world. A reading helps you to understand your human conditioning, to look at yourself and your life with compassion and clarity. It gives you a wider view, an understanding about the cycles of your life. It also allows you to open to the nature of your natural gifts and deepest resources.

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I am sending you this Introduction to the upcoming Alchemy of Writing retreat at Mountain Waters in Nelson. First of all, if you have already done a retreat with me, I want to let you know that every 'Alchemy of Writing' workshop or retreat is different. The process itself is alive, growing, and evolving, and so are you! Writing is like life-unpredictable, wild, and full of mystery.

In order to help you prepare for this retreat, I’d like to make it clear that this way of writing is not at all geared to producing a specific result. That may or may not happen, but it not why we are coming together on retreat. We are going to explore what it is like to open to the unknown, and write from that place, without any idea of preference about where that carries us.

This approach to writing is a spiritual practice, in the sense that we are working, moment to moment, with the nature of our conditioned mind. This mind avoids, judges, manipulates and controls. There is nothing wrong with any of these things, they are just what arise for us as human beings, again and again. At the retreat, we will be resting in the space of presence, and learning how to trust our creative energy to carry us beyond these conditioned impulses.

You can ask yourself these questions, as you prepare for the retreat: Am I willing to receive whatever comes, as I write?  Am I willing to inquire, and then sit without knowing, as something emerges? Am I willing to go below the stream of my thinking, and write from my heart, from my body and from this place of not knowing? Am I willing to let go of the ideas I have about who I am, and listen to new dimensions of my being express themselves?

The more you can rest in this openness, the more the river of creativity, love, and wisdom can flow through you.

Dear friends
I’m just sending this out to those of you who might have known of the work and teachings of John Daido Loori, the Zen teacher, who passed away very recently.

It’s amazing to me how much we can receive from someone without ever having met them in person.

John Daido was a great lover of nature, and of creativity, and he taught me much, especially about listening to the invisible transmission of rivers and mountains. He asked us all to love the earth, to care for this beautiful earth, with a sense of indivisibility.

In Buddhist scriptures they speak of prajna paramita, the perfection of wisdom, as crossing the river: “Go, go, hurry, cross over to the other side.”

John Daido invited us to understand that crossing over in many ways: “We can understand the other shore as being none other than this shore. We can also understand that the other shore crosses over to us...”

In our work in Radiant Mind and The NDTT, it feels like the crossing over has happened, and that it continues to happen, and that the other shore crosses over to us in each moment....all of the above!

with love
Shayla

This is a favourite poem of mine...it demonstrates the innate capacity of our authentic being to completely open to a moment, or a few moments, and allow those moments to carry us into the mystery of life itself.

Arrivals

Imagine the confines of a long grey corridor
just before immigration at Washington Dulles
airport. Imagine two Ethiopian women amid
a sea of familiar international plastic blandness,
entering America for the first time. Think of
their undulating multi-colored turbans raised
atop graceful heads, transforming us,
a grey line of travelers behind them, into followers
and mendicants, mere drab, impatient, moneyed
and perplexed attendants to their bright,
excited, chattered arrival.
Imagine a sharp plexi-gass turn left and suddenly
before them, in biblical astonishment, like a vertical
red sea churning, like the waters barring Moses from
The Promised Land, like Jacob standing before the ladder,
a moving escalator, a mode of rising, a form of ascension,
a way to go up they’d never seen before, its steel grey
interlocking invitation on and up to who knows what,
bringing them and everyone behind them, to a bemused,
complete, and utter standstill.
So that you saw it for the first time as they saw it
and for what it was, a grated river of lifting steel,
and involuntary, moving ascension into who knows what.
An incredible surprise. And you knew, even through
your tiredness, why it made them raise their hands
to their mouths, why it made them give low breathy
screams of surprise and delighted terror. You saw it
as they saw it, a staircase of invisible interlocking
beckoning hands asking them to rise up
independent of their history, their legs or their wills.
And we stopped as we knew we had to now
and watched the first delighted be-turbaned
woman put a sandaled foot on the flat grey
plain at the foot of the moving stair and sure
enough quickly withdraw it with a strangled scream,
leaving her sandal to ascend strangely without her
into heaven, into America, into her new life.

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Oct. 18.09
Lifeletter #39

Divine Unease

There seems to be a kind of inner restlessness, a divine unease, bubbling up in all kinds of people these days, in relation to their work.

“I used to be okay with this job,” they say, “but now, it just doesn’t feel quite right. I feel like I should be doing something else, something different.”

“What do you want to do?” I ask

“I don’t know. That’s the hardest part. I just can’t imagine what it could be...I’d just like to participate in something, be a part of something, and be of benefit.”

“Ah yes,” I say, “that’s it, isn’t it? There’s something deep in the heart, something totally natural and uncontrived, that wants to fully participate in life, and be of benefit.”

“Yes,” they reply. “I can feel it, and it doesn’t go away. But what is it? I really don’t know.”

It amazes me how easily we can feel that not knowing is a terrible problem. We interpret it as a closed door, a sign of something wrong. That’s how we’ve been trained, almost all of us--to think that knowing is good, and that not knowing will get us into trouble. When we believe this perception, we create suffering for ourselves. We reject what we actually have, which is the space of not knowing. And when we reject what we have we do not empower ourselves. The only way to empower ourselves, to treat ourselves well, to respect ourselves, is to work with what we have.

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