ANGELS OR DEVILS?

Living Life from the Gray area!
By Shirley Moulton - Founder, The ACADEMi of Life, NYC


I recently read an interview with filmmaker Lee Daniels in which he talked about living life from the gray area and I quote: "Even the most evil person was somebody's baby at one time. And that's where life is lived. I've never been that comfortable with black and white."

His statement resonated deeply since I have always known that we all are imperfect beings full of ‘paradox and contradiction’ capable of unspeakable acts through words and deeds. The realization and acceptance of this ‘knowing’ is very freeing. It allows me to embrace my dark and light natures. It allows me to live a more authentic and courageous life. It allows me to forgive myself and others when mistakes are made. It allows me to be less judgmental and more accepting of myself and others. It allows me to be more compassionate and kind. It allows me to be a better human being.

As the year ends, I somehow feel that the acceptance of this very simply belief is the path to sanity and a happier life. But I would be remiss if I did not remain hopeful that sometime in the future, humans will evolve to ‘beings’ who will consistently choose to act and respond based on their ‘light’ nature…I remain confident in the eventual victory of good over evil.

WORLD MEDITATION DAY

Making the world a better place, one breath at a time
By Shirley Moulton - Founder, The ACADEMi of Life, NYC


Meditation is enjoying a renewed surge of popularity, penetrating the public consciousness as never before…it’s mainstream.
So what is meditation? “Meditation is a discipline that prepares one to engage in the world with greater accuracy, flexibility, and authenticity. It is not a quick fix but a discipline that, when cultivated, can provide ongoing and powerful support for the practice of a fulfilling life.”

Meditative practices are being taken up in corporate America (Google, Apple, AOL, Saatchi & Saatchi, Raytheon, Deutche Bank, Hughes Aircraft, Target, Cargill, Aetna, Genentech, General Mills) and is being declared as a 21st century management tool. McKinsey Managing Partner Michael Rennie, an avid meditator, who has studied the beneficial effects of meditation in corporations, heads the McKinsey’s Performance Leadership Program which uses meditation practices to release the desire for authenticity, dignity and real human connection within a critical mass of individuals in a given organization. Corporations are realizing that after arranging meditation classes for their staff, they have reduced stress levels, are less irritable, more focused, more productive, happier overall and have sharpened intuition.

Meditation is also being taught at YMCAs, hospitals (a foundation run by Donna Karan, donated $850,000 to NYC’s Beth Israel Medical Center to test whether meditation and yoga can enhance the traditional medical treatments for cancer), the military, in medicine to make doctors better, at Harvard Law School to help law students become better negotiators and in public schools to reduce the stress levels of students (the goal of the David Lynch Foundation, is to bring meditation to one million schoolchildren in the classroom).

When we meditate we create stillness. Stillness is where inspiration, creativity and solutions to problems are found. The more we practice meditation we are able to move beyond our active minds and emotions and discover great depths of lasting peace, contentment and serenity…the joy of being. From this place of joy we are able to create “fields of grace” allowing our interactions with others to be more loving, compassionate, authentic and fulfilling. With time, we become better people and the world becomes a better place.

So, to bring lasting peace and love to our world, we declare 11/11/11 World Meditation Day and at 11:11 am/pm on that day for 11 minutes, our goal is to have 1.1 million people meditating to either the Joy Of Being meditation http://bit.ly/lKjcm or any other meditation of your choosing. Eleven minutes of pure bliss. Let’s begin the practice today on 11/11/09 and start to build our meditation community and we will do it again on 11/11/10 until we get to our big day: 11/11/11.

Join our meditation community and movement on Facebook at http://bit.ly/67xaqB

Detachment

I recently gave a speech titled “How to find peace in the midst of the chaos-A Personal Journey of Transformation” and shared the process of identifying, examining and resolving personal painful childhood experiences. A friend who was in the audience later remarked that what she loved about the speech was my ability to relate my painful stories from a place of detachment.

For a moment, I questioned whether I was being inauthentic by being detached and immediately recalled a poem by Rumi, called the Guest House:

GUEST HOUSE
This being human is a guesthouse.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep your house
Empty of its furniture,
Still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
For some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
Meet them at the door laughing,
And invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent
As a guide from beyond.

We each have our painful stories and can either choose to see them as “guests”, as impermanent experiences to be understood and discarded or choose to see them as permanent memories of who we are.

I now realize that I have always chosen to see my painful stories as impermanent so they become transformative not crippling. So during my speech I was able to share them from a place of detachment, because they were simply my “valuable guests” who will eventually leave.

9/11 Remembered: Conversation with a Kid

Today I picked up my 8 yr old great-nephew from his school which is close to Ground Zero, to take him to soccer practice. Since it rained all day in New York City, soccer practice was cancelled. We made our way to my apartment and our conversation was a bit about his day at school and a lot about 9/11. He wanted to watch “something” about 9/11 on TV, so we surfed the channels and found great programming on the history channel. I realized that he was only eight months when 9/11 happened and did not fully understand the details.

For the first time he realized the planes were regular passenger planes with ordinary people like him, he thought they were kamikaze pilots flying those planes (he had recently done a project on World War 11). He then wondered why people would intentionally fly planes into the W.T.C buildings. My response was measured but honest. He got a bit sad, looked me directly in the eyes and asked; did any children die?

I quickly responded no, but there was a little voice in my head questioning the response. At that moment, at that time, the pain on his face did not allow me to share my doubt about the answer. Later that evening my research confirmed that in fact seven children had lost their lives traveling on those planes on that day. Someday I will tell him the truth about those children, but not today.

Soul Musings

Nicholas Kristof’s opinion titled How to Recharge Your Soul, in the August 9th issue of the New York Times states “in the same way you recharge your BlackBerry from time to time, you should also recharge your soul – by spending part of August disconnected from the Web and reconnected with the universe.” Is Kristof saying that if you recharge your soul you will be reconnected to the universe? So, is the soul a direct connection to the universe?

This caught my attention because I had just seen the movie Cold Souls by Sophie Barthes in which souls were extracted and stored on Roosevelt Island. When one of the owners of a soul died, the soul disappeared. So is this what happens to the soul when we die? It disappears!

But where is this soul of ours anyway? Recent books by Jill Bolte, Ph.D. a brain scientist and Keith Black, MD a master brain surgeon and quotes by Descartes and Plato made me conclude that the soul is probably in the brain….funny thing, I always thought it was in the heart.

One final musing…can the soul of a man be damaged by his mother at age three, yet he becomes the richest man in the world? Warren Buffet’s recent biography details his suffering at the hands of his mother, her tirades were constant and “she never stopped until both children “just folded,” says Warren, weeping helplessly.” By the time he was three years old…”it couldn't be put back together”, he says, for him or his sister….
”The damage to their souls was done.” Wow, sounds like you can make a lot of money with a damaged soul…is this a perquisite for being successful on Wall Street?

I agree with Kristof, regardless of where it is, where it goes after death or how badly damaged it is ...recharge it anyway by connecting to the universe. Go take a walk!