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Contemplate More, React Less

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The writer’s life is by definition contemplative.

I have a book due at the end of next year, plus I’m about to do a regular twice-a-month column for a magazine. So it’s time to get my writer’s hat back onto my head.

The writer and activist inhabit different parts of the brain, yet in my case they feed off each other. I’m out there doing things I have written about, and I write about things that I learned because I’m out there doing them. I don’t think Americans do enough just sitting around doing nothing – and I’m not kidding.

The word contemplative shouldn’t only apply to some special retreat we go to. It should apply, I think, to a part of each day. We should “contemplate” more, so we’d react less. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said “every problem in the world can be traced to man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

That’s why we’re mindless in places where we should be mindful. We’re lured to the periphery of things by so much false data, so much illusion and deception of the mortal ego, when all we have to do sometimes is simply sit there and come home to ourselves.

Stop spinning. Center. Gaze at a flower. Pray for peace. Be real with yourself.

It’s a blessing in disguise perhaps that we can’t do quite as much running around these days. Sometimes we’re like chickens running around with our heads chopped off, doing but hardly being.

And now, with the quarantine, there’s a lot less doing and perhaps there will be a lot more actual being. We need that, because we need a reset. We need to turn off our minds and turn them on again. So just “be” today.

More than anything else, just be. I will if you will.

The world could be a quieter place for all of us, and that would be good…

Resisting Hopelessness

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Today we are called to resist hopelessness.

It would be easy to slip into hopelessness now, to resign ourselves to the idea that the concentrated assaults on everything from the planet to our democracy have succeeded to such a degree that it’s no longer possible to stop them.

Yet it is exactly that hopelessness we must resist now, even more than we must resist the forces that seem so intent on bringing us down. Our hopelessness is only called for if in fact miracles are not possible, and because they are, there is no cause for hopelessness.

Hope springs eternal because life springs eternal, and life abounds with possibility. We have within us the capacity to change things, but only if we are willing to change ourselves. We have written the human story that now unfolds in front of us, and the only way we can change the story is if we are willing to rewrite it.

We wrote the story of a country that had everything, was given everything, was blessed beyond comprehension and yet chose to sell our souls to the highest dollar. We wrote the story of a country that put economics before love, sales before ethics, and our government on the bidding block. We wrote the story of a country that has treated the earth with lack of reverence, democracy as though we could take it for granted, and justice as though it only mattered if the issue was applying it to ourselves.

We wrote that story, and now we can write another one. But we can only do that if we are willing to recognize that all of us, to some degree, have been co-creators of the one we have now, atone for our heartlessness to each other and our arrogance before our Creator, and get to work on cleaning up this mess and re-creating the world.

Hope is a moral imperative, and cynicism is just an excuse for not helping. We have no choice but to recreate our civilization.

I know many of us feel the urgency of this moment, the radicalism at the heart of what we’re being called to do. For it is not incremental, it is a-historic; jumping out of the timeline of what is to be expected, off the scale in the amount of light it calls forth as much as political and weather storms are off the scale in terms of darkness.

This new world cannot be forced, any more than it can be rationally calculated; it can only be invoked into expression by the deepest kind of reverance. Invocation is the priest and priestess’ task, and that is what all of us are being called to be right now.

When I was a little girl, I used to ask God what I was supposed to be when I grew up. I would always see the word “priest,” but I thought it was weird…obviously impossible, because Jews don’t have priests. Then I grew up to realize that indeed they did in the Old Testament, and even more importantly, that the priest is anyone who invokes into expression the unlimited possibilities that emerge from the field of ultimate Reality. All of us are recruits for the new priesthood, no matter what we do, needed to invoke into expression the unlimited possibilities inherent in the Mind of God. Yet they remain un-manifest until we have the courage to invoke them.

Like ancient priestesses at Delphi, let us summon all our powers of multi-dimensional knowing, emerge from the narrow and shallow casing of a mechanistic worldview, throw off the chains of a rationalistic approach to life, and remember we are co-creators of our future. We are not victims here; we’re merely reaping what we’ve sowed. And we can sow anew. We are here to create the good, the true, and the beautiful, and anything less than that is short of our purpose and our mission in this life.

Each of us is endowed with an internal guidance system, and if we ask within what we’re to do, we will be guided. We will be told what to do and we will be told how to do it. We will be led to each other and we will collaborate in miraculous ways. We will dwell within the golden Light of a higher kind of knowing. We will know, and we will do.

SPOTLIGHT ON…Candidates to Watch

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Marianne Endorses

If we want a visionary government then we have to support visionary candidates.

Liam O'Mara

US House, CA-42

Mike Broihier

US Senate, KY

Eva Putzova

US House, AZ-01

Mark Robin Wilt

US House, NY-25

Mckayla Wilkes

US House, MD-05

Michael Owens

US House, GA-13

Julie Oliver

US House, TX-25

Rebecca Parson

US House, WA-06

Tom Winter

US House, MT-AL

Betsy Sweet

US Senate, ME

J.D. Scholten

US House, IA-04

Shahid Buttar

US House, CA-12

Tomas Ramos

US House, NY-15

Mike Siegel

US House, TX-10

David Kim

US House, CA-34

Tom Guild

US House, OK-05

Jim Harper

US House, IN-01

Nabilah Islam

US House, GA-07

Lauren Ashcraft

US House, NY-12

Hector Oseguera

US House, NJ-08

Shaniyat Chowdhury

US House, NY-05

Teresa Tomlinson

US Senate, GA

Andrew Romanoff

US Senate, CO

Lisa Ring

US House, GA-01

A Global Family

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I have been acutely aware for many years that we take so much for granted. Maybe it’s partly because my parents took me traveling as a child, and I saw then what deep poverty looks like.

One of the reasons I ran for president was because I felt people were oddly lacking in the sense of urgency that I feel is appropriate for these times.

Well they’re not lacking it now!

All the talk about trees and animals in China, the lack of medical and economic preparedness in the United States – so many ways in which our lack of reverence for people and animals and planet underlie the crisis we are living through now.

But already you can see the forces of healing at work, not just in the immune systems of the people who are recovering, but in the heroism of the doctors and nurses, and the compassion people are showing in so many different ways.

We are one big global family now. I hope you’ll participate in the global minute of prayer on Sundays and spread the word to everyone you know.

We need a miracle now. We need a few of them. And they “occur naturally as expressions of love.”

Books to Blow. Your. Mind.

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METAHUMAN: Unleashing your Infinite Potential by Deepak Chopra

Wow. Not to put too fine a point on it, but reading this book was so…meta; like looking inside to explain what’s inside to define what’s inside. It takes you both inside and outside of yourself at the same time, in an extraordinary way. METAHUMAN is a blueprint for finding our way out of the confines of thinking we have been conditioned to remain within, in order to find the true source of awareness. ‘The awareness of any experience is not the experience.’ The experience, by the way, can be our whole lives. The constructs we have created to help us navigate human existence aren’t inherently bad, they just aren’t the full story. The fuller story is that there is no story, that it’s infinitely expanding. ‘Human potential is infinite,’ Deepak says in this book, ‘because consciousness has no boundaries.’ We can’t explain it like he can — go buy the book.

Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals by Rachel Hollis

So this was kind of hard to read. Not hard because it wasn’t fantastic, but hard because it makes you realize how often you settle for less than you really want. We all know the ways in which the ‘what ifs‘ can eat us alive later on, looking back. But Rachel Hollis shows a new way to engage with the ‘what ifs‘ — before, looking forward. ‘A dream always starts with a question,’ she says, ‘and the question is always some form of What if…’ By outlining excuses to let go of, behaviors to adopt, and skills to acquire, this book gives us so many necessary tools to dream and achieve without either limiting anyone else, or apologizing for what we want.

The Testaments: The Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Thank goodness they made The Handmaid’s Tale into a television series. This is rarely said so emphatically (especially when talking about another book!), but if they hadn’t, Margaret Atwood might never have given us the necessary follow-up to her seminal 1985 novel. For those of you who haven’t read The Handmaid’s Taleit’s too difficult to sum up here. But it is a powerful and provocative dystopian tale of the subjugation of women within the rise of a theocratic patriarchal society. It is also incredibly prescient in many ways, however tempered. The Testaments is equally compelling and powerful, set 15 years after the end of its prequel. It explores the ways in which the past doesn’t always remain in the past, but the conviction of our beliefs in what the future could hold are the most powerful thing we have.

Super Attractor: Methods for Manifesting a Life Beyond Your Wildest Dreams by Gabby Bernstein

Everyone is a Super Attractor — you just have to claim the power. This is the first major ‘wow’ moment in a book full of them. In her latest book, Gabby Bernstein helps you learn how to manifest a life beyond your wildest dreams (well, you probably could have guessed that, it says so right on the cover). But even though you know what you’re about to read, you’re not prepared for how brilliant it is and how easy her tools are to grasp. With super attractor mantras, advice on how to do less and attract more, help remaining in alignment with the universe, personal stories to guide and enlighten you, and much more, this book is a must-read!

City of Girls: A Novel by Elizabeth Gilbert

Who didn’t love Eat, Pray, Love? There is a reason it was so universally successful, so easily devoured by millions. You didn’t need to be a woman to get it, you just needed to be human and recognize the power — and scary nature — of starting completely anew. Right, so City of Girls isn’t Eat, Pray, Love. It might seem easy, frivolous, provocative, evocative, naughty, fun on the face of it. But it’s so much more than that. In many ways, it’s actually the opposite. The main character is a round one, both protagonist and antagonist, at once the breezy raconteur and the foil, the anti-north star. This book is so good mainly for all the reasons you don’t expect it to be, and leaves you wondering if you’re satisfied, needing to think about how you feel.

Everything is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo

Everything is Figureoutable is well-written, funny, pragmatic, insightful and inspiring. It’s easy to understand and internalize because the central message is just so clear — and right there on the cover. In order to achieve our goals, live our dreams, solve any problem, we first need to remember that there isn’t anything that isn’t doable; we just how to figure out how to do it. You’re completely unstoppable when you have boundless optimism, and this book helps you get there. In this book, you learn new habits, how to overcome your fears, eliminate success-blocking excuses, and the secrets to lasting success. Marie Forleo knows what she’s talking about, and frankly it’s silly not to run, buy the book, and listen to her wisdom.

Girls Solving the World’s Environmental Problems.

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‘Who run the world? Girls.’ But seriously, even if you’re not listening to Beyonce on repeat, it’s hard not to see how women are really stepping up to take care of our planet at the moment. We have been particularly inspired by these three women doing so much to tackle our environmental crises recently.

We can’t imagine anyone doesn’t know the name Greta Thunberg, but still. The Swedish teen environmental activist and Asperger’s advocate has been doing more than her fare share for our planet since she was 11 years old. She started at home, urging and helping her family to lower their carbon footprint. At 15 she started the now-worldwide school strike movement Fridays for Future. ‘The Greta Effect’ has led to the doubling of environmental children’s books in just one year, the establishment of the Climate Emergency Fund, and significant changes in the EU’s environmental budget. She tells it like it is, urging us all to look at the scientific realities of the perils our planet is facing. Speaking at the European Parliament and Davos for the World Economic Forum, in front of the US House of Representatives Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and to world leaders at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit (to name but a few), this girl is leading the charge. To learn more, well, Google her. But you can also read a collection of her speeches in her book No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. What an inspiration.

Lucy Hughes, a 23-year-old student at the University of Sussex, has just won the 2019 James Dyson Award. Why? Because she’s developed something called MarinaTex, a biodegradable bioplastic made from red algae and waste products from the fishing industry. Billions of tons of plastic have been produced in recent decades. Packaging and single-use plastics are omnipresent and damaging to our environment. 91% of plastic isn’t recycled, and it takes over 400 years for plastic to degrade. A study published by the World Economic Forum found that at the current rate, by 2050 our oceans will have more plastic waste –pound for pound — than fish. Lucy Hughes has solved the problem of both single-use plastics and inefficient waste streams by harnessing fish offcuts to create a unique plastic alternative, MarinaTex. BRAVO, LUCY! We can’t wait to see what you does next!

Too many of us overthink what the word ‘activist’ means. Not all of us are going to take to the streets on the world stage to advocate for the changes we want to see in the world. But that doesn’t mean we can’t help effectuate those changes in other ways. Zoe Berkery, a Vice President at clean energy investment firm CleanCapital, is responsible for the management and optimization of CleanCapital’s clean energy assets and assists with operations and investor relations. While it might not sound initially like activism, what she’s actually done is what so many of us wish we could — find ways to effectuate the changes we want to see in the world (environmental and otherwise) in the best way we each individually know how. For Zoe, this is through business. Now that’s incredibly inspiring. Click here to learn more from Zoe, and make sure to become a member of The Williamson Institute to listen to her On the Sofa with us very soon!

 

Practical (alright, quick and easy) Wellness.

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It's too hard to stay healthy.

It is not too hard to stay healthy, it just seems that way sometimes. You know how to start…a healthy body starts with a healthy mind. Every single day needs to begin with some silence, a moment for yourself. This could be a long guided meditation, or it might just mean a full minute with your eyes closed to center you for the day ahead. Grounding yourself in this way ensures you will be more available to show up for yourself in healthier ways in the day ahead. You might find that you do, in fact, have time to go to the gym. You might find yourself picking the healthier option at lunch. Either way, you’ll be ready to go.

‘I have nothing in my fridge!’ ‘I don’t have time — I’ll have to get a sandwich on the way home.’ ‘I’ll just have that microwaveable meal.’ We all say these things to ourselves at one time or another, and when we are busy and stressed we actually use it as an excuse not to do the very thing we need to go to handle the stress — take care of ourselves. Challenge yourself to stay ahead of your busy schedule and keep quick, easy, healthy options in your house. You might not always have time or the ability to cook an organic, gourmet meal. But it’s not hard to keep healthy non-perishables in your fridge. It sounds so simple — because it is! 

I have nothing in my fridge!

Three Things to Always Have in the House

One of these healthy canned or frozen options:

Canned kidney beans

Canned Chickpeas

Frozen Peas

Olive oil

Garlic

Anything canned or frozen often seems ‘unhealthy,’ and of course we all want to eat as much fresh food as we can. But for those of us on the go, and especially those of us who constantly think ‘I don’t have time to go food shopping,’ the alternative to not having healthy non-perishables in the house can often be just ordering that take-away food instead. So give yourself a break, and try to work with what you can do.

If you don’t have time, a fresh dip can be a wonderful way of getting healthy nutrition into your body. Kidney beans, chickpeas and peas are all excellent sources of nutrients and fiber (which apparently none of us get enough of!).

Easy Dips:

  1. can of chickpeas or kidney beans, drained and rinsed OR 1 small pack frozen peas, left to thaw for 15 minutes
  2. 10 glugs of olive oil (go crazy — if you want a creamier texture, add more)
  3. two cloves of garlic, chopped
  4. salt to taste
  5. blend everything together for 30 seconds
  6. enjoy!

If you have extra fresh stuff in the house, add it in! Mint or fresh yogurt is a wonderful addition to a pea dip, while fresh chilies is great for chickpea hummus; and if you have some fresh lime, add it into your kidney bean dip! The point is, you don’t HAVE to have anything else to still give your body what it needs.

5 Tips for Mindful mornings

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In the craziness of life today — amidst the hectic commutes and constantly buzzing phone, expanding responsibilities and a twenty-four-hour news cycle – it is not always easy to be present. But to be mindful, to actively center yourself in the present, is more important than ever before. It’s not always easy, or rather, often it doesn’t seem easy. Like any skill, mindfulness has to be learned, practiced, and honed with intention. Every morning is another opportunity to practice mindfulness.

1. Breathe.
It might sound silly, but learning how to breathe properly, how to focus on your lungs filling with air, is one of the most important parts of being mindful. Throughout the day, as any number of stressors might come at you, taking a moment to focus on your breathing is the most fundamental way of staying in that present moment and giving yourself the best chance of working through whatever roadblocks seem to have been put in your way. Practice taking five deep breaths first thing when you wake up in the morning, before you’ve even gotten out of bed. This will ground your morning.

2. Do something for yourself.
We all have different morning routines. For some it’s that first cup of coffee, for others it’s a breakfast bowl outside in the fresh air. Some want to work out before doing anything else, while others want to listen to the radio. Whatever little ritual you have, whatever little morsel of you time that you need in the morning, it is important that you make space for it. Giving yourself what you need increases the likelihood that you can show up for the world around you in the way you need to on any given day.

3. Get organized.
What do you have to do today? Contrary to what you might think, sometimes being present actually means thinking ahead. If you do not give yourself a framework from within which to work, you run the risk of being busy but not productive, stressed but not efficient. You do not want to waste energy, and if you are too exhausted and feel as if you are simply treading water, you are not going to be able to be mindful. So set yourself up with a plan for the day, and give yourself the best chance of success even when curveballs come your way.

4. Meditate.
So now that your morning is fully underway, it’s time to get centered again before going out into the world. You’ve practiced your breathing and you’ve done something for yourself. You’ve gotten organized and you’ve put on your clothes and have gathered your work for the day. But the time (even if it’s only twenty minutes) between when you woke up and when you are walking out the door can still be stressful in itself. So make yourself breathe and focus your mind just before you start your day properly. And remember – you are never too busy to do this! If you are running late, even thirty seconds can make all the difference.

5. Prepare to be flexible.
You’re going out into the world now. The day ahead is full of infinite possibilities, it is true, but things won’t always go smoothly. Remember your morning mindfulness training whenever you feel yourself focusing too much on the problem but not the solution. You might have to be flexible. You might have to recalibrate. But if you stay present, it will be okay. Remember, just breathe – in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out.