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Category Archives: Soul
Wisdom and silences broken
Sent to me by a spiritual sister, Krupa:
“Where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibilities to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them… there are so many silences to be broken…”-Audre Lorde
This image I created a few years back when we first discussed the Beijing Olympics and human rights around the world. It still rings true now. I ask you, in your comments, to please help us break new silences, not people.
Madre Grande, part 1
It’s been two weeks now and I’m still not sure how to talk about the AMO trip to Madre Grande in Dulzura, CA. For those of you who haven’t followed our work, Amoration team members have been heading down to MG since 2004 for meditation retreats and art/music gatherings at this theosophical monastery near the Mexican border. In the fires that ravaged Southern California this fall most of Dulzura was burnt including half of the land that Madre Grande owns high atop a rocky mountain.
We will return again….soon. We were able to rebuild little bits and help support a vital community hard-hit by disaster. You can do this too….every little bit helps! Whether fire, flood or other damage we all need someone to reach out and help us out at some point in our lives. Some of the AMO supporters already donated hoses and shower heads to rebuild the lost water systems!
Photos and more details will be posted soon….for now visit http://www.madregrande.org/fire to see more of this land and the many buildings and residences the monks lost at MG.
This photo is one of many taken by Mario and Tracey, two monks living on the property and now working to rebuild and remove the burnt remains. They are one family among many, thousands who lost homes and lives. In upcoming blogs we’ll tell you more about Burners without Borders, the Bjurts, Madre Grande and the AMO team that helped them. We’ll even tell you more about the amazing Manzanita and how you can own a piece of Madre Grande to carry this magical place with you always.
Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, be thankful. It goes up very quickly when the time comes.
A dreambuilder amongst the hungry
My home and city has been in hibernation mode for the last few weeks. Outside there’s a strike on somewhere, a mile or two in any direction people in shirts are yelling at other people in different colored shirts. As a new media writer I should care about the future of my industry…..I’ve registered a script with WGA but I’ve never owned it as my union any more than the AMPTP collusion table makes sense to me. The writing rules have never fully applied to my work, mostly shorts and live campaigns. After four years in this town it shouldn’t seem so foreign, the idea that people like to get around tables and yell at each other for power over the creative artists who work with them, but here we are again. Collusion meet fraction, break the creative individual to bits and pieces!
It seems we need a new system, one where all of the major players are not allowed to sit at one table and fix prices across the industry. Many of the most talented creators move into other careers because they are not handsomely paid and often not highly respected for long hours of dedicated work in media production. Some are not even credited at the end of the film! My husband and many of our good friends are the people who toil behind the scenes on your favorite films and shows and some sit at home for a tense 8 week+ holiday season without paychecks. Others are out temping anywhere with work. Who’s getting rich here?
We still work, we still create, quite a few writers have now developed a new script thanks to a few weeks off without a boring series to call home. It’s a brutal process, losing faith in one’s career….but as a writer and producer I cannot see another way to shift our minds and hearts. We do not do this work because we get rich and famous. We create because we MUST create; the drive to build new worlds is so intense for this city that we start to spin when our blinded focus is taken away. We realize that in our worldbuilding dreams we forgot to create a better solution for ourselves in this reality.
Imagine what would happen if half of New York City suddenly found work stopped indefinitely. What would the city look like?
Our cities are still going strong but there’s a worry in the air this holiday season that is not going to encourage the rest of your fine folks to shop and consume yourselves dry. Hollywood is going broke fast baby and you’re gonna feel it soon too. The series are drying up or finished, the movies are wrapping and everyone’s looking around for the next big idea. I haven’t told most of them that it’s sitting on my desk, but to be honest it is worth far more in this world to KNOW AND TRUST the people you work with. We’ve been offered contracts with studios and angels and have turned them down; we only want the right partners for the coming years ahead. The next few years may not be easy for most of us but we have a great world to build with our audience that brings the hope we need to balance our fear.
So I ask you friends….What Would Jesus Buy? Would he buy the lies, the zeitgeist, the story of stuff?
As a writer, producer, artist and most of all as a friend, I encourage you to be conscious with all that you are, all that you purchase. Every dollar is a decision, an investment in an object or idea. What do your decisions say about your highest self?
Images featured here by (David McNew/Getty Images) and (King5.com). I am not down there yelling at the gates.
Defining Love
Over the next few months we will archive years of writing on love, connection and bondedness here at the Amoration wordpress. Together we explore the words and you are welcome to add to this blog by writing to Evonne @ Amoration and asking for a password to join the Amoration writers.
Many people ask Why Amoration?
The English language is terribly stiff and lacking when it comes to terms and words to express love in the many forms we understand. This limited view of love causes social issues to worsen and communication gaps to widen as people around the world learn to share important pieces of their lives with one another. No longer is the American world just made across the globe….we are created by all that we consume, imported from around the world and encapsulated in this blog, one voice among many.
So let’s look at Spanish instead. From About.com:
How many ways can you say “love” in Spanish? Here are some of the most important ways, but there are others. In the lists of “love” as a noun or verb you will find alternative translations in parentheses following the Spanish word. In the list of phrases, the parentheses indicate the English phrases that include “love.”
“Love” as a noun
- afición (enthusiasm): Tiene afición por las cosas de su tierra. She has a love for the things of her land.
- amado (sweetheart)
- amante (sweetheart)
- amistad (friendship)
- amor (pure love, romantic love)
- caridad (charity): Si yo hablase lenguas humanas y angélicas, y no tengo caridad ….If I speak in tongues of humans and angels, and have not love ….
- cariño/a (sweetheart):
- cero (score in tennis): Cero a cero. Love all.
- pasión (passion, not necessarily romantic): Tiene una pasión por vivir, una pasión por saber. He has a love of living, a love of knowledge.
- querido (sweetheart)
- recuerdos (regards): Mándale recuerdos míos. Send him my love.
“Love” as a verb
- amar (to love, to love romantically): Te amo. I love you.
- encantar (indicating strong like): Me encanto escribir. I love to write.
- gustar mucho (indicating strong like): Me gusta mucho este sofá. I love this sofa.
- querer (to love romantically, to want): Te quiero. I love you.
Phrases using “love”
- amarío (love affair)
- amor a primera vista (love at first sight)
- amor mío (my love)
- aventura amorosa (love affair)
- canción de amor (love song)
- carta amatoria (love letter)
- carta de amor (love letter)
- enamorarse (to fall in love with): Me enamoré de una bruja. I fell in love with a witch.
- estar enamorado (to be in love): Estoy enamorada de él. I am in love with him.
- flechazo (love at first sight): Fue flechazo. It was love a first sight.
- love story (historia de amor)
- love token (prenda de amor)
- hacer el amor (to make love)
- lance de amor (love affair)
- me quiere, no me quiere (she loves me, she loves me not)
- mi amor (my love)
- no se llevan bien (there is no love lost between them)
- no se tienen ningún aprecio (there is no love lost between them)
- periquito (love bird or parakeet)
- por el amor de (for the love of): Por el amor de una rosa, el jardinero es servidor de mil espinas. For the love of a rose, the gardener is the servant of a thousand thorns.
- por nada del mundo (not for love nor money)
- por pura afición (for the pure love of it, just for the love of it): Toca el piano por pura afición. She plays the piano just for the love of it.
- relaciones sexuales (love making)
- vida sexual (love live)
Roots
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Foundation of Amoration
Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides (quoted by copyright from Council on Spiritual Practices)
[Preamble] People have long sought to enrich their lives and to awaken to their full natures through spiritual practices including prayer, meditation, mind-body disciplines, service, ritual, community liturgy, holy-day and seasonal observances, and rites of passage. “Primary religious practices” are those intended, or especially likely, to bring about exceptional states of consciousness such as the direct experience of the divine, of cosmic unity, or of boundless awareness.
In any community, there are some who feel called to assist others along spiritual paths, and who are known as ministers, rabbis, pastors, curanderas, shamans, priests, or other titles. We call such people ‘guides’: those experienced in some practice, familiar with the terrain, and who act to facilitate the spiritual practices of others. A guide need not claim exclusive or definitive knowledge of the terrain.
Spiritual practices, and especially primary religious practices, carry risks. Therefore, when an individual chooses to practice with the assistance of a guide, both take on special responsibilities. The Council on Spiritual Practices proposes the following Code of Ethics for those who serve as spiritual guides.
- [Intention] Spiritual guides are to practice and serve in ways that cultivate awareness, empathy, and wisdom.
- [Serving Society] Spiritual practices are to be designed and conducted in ways that respect the common good, with due regard for public safety, health, and order. Because the increased awareness gained from spiritual practices can catalyze desire for personal and social change, guides shall use special care to help direct the energies of those they serve, as well as their own, in responsible ways that reflect a loving regard for all life.
- [Serving Individuals] Spiritual guides shall respect and seek to preserve the autonomy and dignity of each person. Participation in any primary religious practice must be voluntary and based on prior disclosure and consent given individually by each participant while in an ordinary state of consciousness. Disclosure shall include, at a minimum, discussion of any elements of the practice that could reasonably be seen as presenting physical or psychological risks. In particular, participants must be warned that primary religious experience can be difficult and dramatically transformative.Guides shall make reasonable preparations to protect each participant’s health and safety during spiritual practices and in the periods of vulnerability that may follow. Limits on the behaviors of participants and facilitators are to be made clear and agreed upon in advance of any session. Appropriate customs of confidentiality are to be established and honored.
- [Competence] Spiritual guides shall assist with only those practices for which they are qualified by personal experience and by training or education.
- [Integrity] Spiritual guides shall strive to be aware of how their own belief systems, values, needs, and limitations affect their work. During primary religious practices, participants may be especially open to suggestion, manipulation, and exploitation; therefore, guides pledge to protect participants and not to allow anyone to use that vulnerability in ways that harm participants or others.
- [Quiet Presence] To help safeguard against the harmful consequences of personal and organizational ambition, spiritual communities are usually better allowed to grow through attraction rather than active promotion.
- [Not for Profit] Spiritual practices are to be conducted in the spirit of service. Spiritual guides shall strive to accommodate participants without regard to their ability to pay or make donations.
- [Tolerance] Spiritual guides shall practice openness and respect towards people whose beliefs are in apparent contradiction to their own.
- [Peer Review] Each guide shall seek the counsel of other guides to help ensure the wholesomeness of his or her practices and shall offer counsel when there is need.
This draft for public comment was released 10 August 2001. The current version is available on the Internet at http://www.csp.org.
Copyright © 1995 – 2001 Council on Spiritual Practices
Permission is given to reprint this Code, provided that the text is reproduced complete and verbatim, including the and this notice of limited permission to reprint.
Thanks to Formless Mountain for the graphic.
Personal Passion
Elucidate my friends! Holden @ GiveWell challenged us this week to speak from the heart and get to the core of why we support our primary cause. This is your AMO Challenge for the week….write your own blog post explaining your contribution to the Giving Carnival and link your blog back to Holden.
Why Do You Do What You Do?
My friend Tony Deifell asks it this way…wdydwyd? When he asked me a few years ago back when Omidyar Network was young, I considered love to be the renewable resource that could move us beyond our complex problems; love is the gift within all of us that must be held as primary for all other solutions and opportunities to arise. What I was seeing back in 2005 was a fundamental closedness and hardness within us towards the world, many layers of walls and boundaries set in place to keep away the pain and fear thrust upon us by unfriendly fire.LOVE is still my primary cause, it’s the root of the Amoration inquiry. But has my pursuit of wisdom through love brought greater or less impact in the lives of others around me?
There are certain things our avatars cannot fully do for us. For the past few years I have grown deeply quiet, speaking more through blogs and threads than through direct hand and eye contact. DIRECT CARE AND TOUCH is what we need now more than any other gift we can give to one another. As much as we need to plug in, we also need to feel the flow that we share with others as a direct current, a circuit formed every time we invest in each other.
Every motion we make in this world is an investment.
Our lives are full of practices that bring us closer to the world or away from it.
To be honest, right now I feel deeply wrong at some level, a bridge with little land to anchor in.
We have a great time moving others into AMO Action Dances, PeaceTiles project workshop, OYA and Sugar Arts there are missing pieces, ways that I have not been able to successfully bridge in my community. Serving on my local neighborhood council has been a trial by fire and I’m not made for long meetings in hard chairs. At heart I want to be home, creating, mentoring and working with others to amplify and spotlight their dreams in development.
Admitting imperfection in love gives me room to grow
There are so many things I would like to change about myself…first on the list is my weariness with the homelessness and displacement so common in our world (and on my doorstep!). It is inhumane how we allow so many people to suffer right in front of us without care or compassion. I do this every day, pass a homeless person without offering them food or anything that can help them. When I think of 10,000 people here, another 70,000 ejected from another refugee camp in Darfur forced to close by the Sudanese government….how can we let our people die right in front of our eyes in silence, without a tear? Have we lost all touch with ourselves?
Sometimes it saddens me that two decades of love inquiry has not moved me past these fundamental fears. I still feel every emotion in the book and struggle with the silly ideas and presuppositions that my culture tries to thrust upon me. Inundated with messages on beauty, fear and imperfection as airbrushed fantasy….here is my ocean to bridge, the walkway to a reality where you are beautiful no matter what is going on at surface level. I strive to give room for these passions to grow into fruitful endeavors, large and small. Every movement, every moment.
Each of us has a glow to share….we choose how to let that out, how to share it with others and use it to power the lives we manifest. Love is the access point, the opening to life and energy in movement. I do not know if it will change the world, nor would I make such presumptions or claim to know The Path to Transformation….I know one path, my own, the smiles I see and eyes I look into every day. Making that decision to look into others eyes is the first step for me in an endless process of reaching out and holding those around me, no matter what background, cause or party they support. I want to be more for you, and for me too.
There’s nothing too big, too impossible. We specialize in dreambuilding and love creating new visions for the future. I feel so blessed to live this life of creative pursuit yet want to do much more with this space, with you. Help me help you grow by telling me here what you need most and how we can help you create more love throughout your circles.
There are doors
So many of life’s mysteries cannot be talked about in a blog, or often even in person….you can look into my eyes and see them but I cannot tell you how to get there directly. To know this space you must go there yourself and open those doors.
Tonight I let myself slip into the spaces where manipulation becomes power, both over self and others….I watched two films, first The Notorious Bettie Page and then Fire Walk With Me. So many similarities, strong women seeking truth and finding so many people who will tear them apart for a moment of gratification. I’ve known this too, the rough splintered doors that are forced upon us. Walking back through into some form of sanity I find solace neither in Bettie’s salvation nor in Laura’s death. There must be another door.
I’ve always appreciated David Lynch for his elucidation of mystery, showing the twisted path of the subconscious that binds us to things we barely understand. So much of life is caught in this netherspace where logic no longer will guide us home. Meeting Lynch in person and watching him speak there’s a clear sense that he channels his work from some other place; the black lodge of his unconscious is alive and well on celluloid. He understands all too clearly the relationship between those open doors and the drugs that often take us there….cigarettes, cocaine, alcohol, caffeine, GHB. Dangerous doors.
Bettie Page made far more sense to me, a woman deeply caught by her convictions, full of life and yet so innocent. The innocence of Donna in juxtaposition…..there’s a tenderness that Lynch did not want to destroy, and rightly so. Certain doors do not need to be opened.
The fight inside me no longer plagues on and yet there’s a recognition of those doors that I do not want to open again. I have seen the demons. They are not so big and bad, they are only bad actors with makeup. Such is life, we are all those actors in some way, and we choose what doors we want to open in this long and silly journey. Watching these women lose their innocence there’s a deep sadness….but also great joy. I do not know where the joy comes from but I still seek that door, not knowing what lies behind it.
killing the desire for pain
perhaps i am possessed
running around in circles
until the ground wears away
around my tired ankles
this is no life for a lover
of graceful tree branches
and singing brooks
somewhere there is space
for contemplation
imagination
rejuvenation
my lost inspiration
found somewhere inside
the unexpected self
