We have come to believe in our society that acquisition of knowledge is the hallmark of an intelligent, accomplished person. We strive to better ourselves by taking in more information, learning more skills, processing more facts, assimilating more content, and applying more of what we know.

We are better...

After reading my post on Grace last week (along with the string of blog comments that followed), a friend dashed me a quick note. Her email read something like this: "Don't let 'em get you down. Keep standing up for the light!"

Now, I'm well aware that the...

"Gracefulness has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul," wrote British essayist William Hazlitt. If gracefulness is the outer expression, then perhaps grace itself is the source of the inner light.

I have been reflecting recently on the notion of Grace. Nearly every...

As astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, completed his Apollo 14 mission and returned home toward our big blue earth, he experienced a sudden and radical epiphany. Trained in all the disciplines appropriate for space exploration -- physics, engineering, orbital mechanics -- nothing could have...

Have you ever wanted to change someone? A parent, spouse, child, lover, co-worker, or friend? If they just behaved a little differently, or responded to you more lovingly, you could be happier. Their shortcomings are so obvious, you think, there must be a way to change them.

What may...

Following from last week's post on the role of sacred sound in various spiritual traditions, I'd like to delve deeper into the ancient yogic science of sound and mantra. Capturing the essence of mantra (without oversimplifying) is a worthy undertaking, given the volumes of scriptures and thousands of pages...

If you've ever sat quietly and noticed the gentle whisper of your own breath...

If you've then listened deeper, finding the soft cadence of your heartbeat...

And if you've then gone even deeper, dropping into the resonant stillness of your innermost being, you might have heard it...

...the subtle,...

Following an afternoon of family mayhem and mother's day celebration (which included a lively crew of great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers and their various husbands, children and pets), I felt drawn to write a post honoring the universal energy which animates us all - the Divine Mother - who compassionately conceived the...

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness." Faith is a seed of infinite potential. Faith holds all possibilities within it. Yet, what does faith mean in our modern age of reason?

Faith seems not quite natural to the...

In previous posts, I've written about the possibility of liberating ourselves from the confines of personal identity - the conditioning borrowed from our tribe, caste, race, religion, gender, ideology, political party or other affiliations which make us smaller than the whole.

Politically speaking, I was raised in a moderately...

At a core level, somewhere beyond our religious ideology and distinctions, the Pope's visit has stirred something sacred. It has stirred our faith. It has sparked a little hope in the human heart, a sense of possibility and connectedness, a hint of excitement and celebration.

During his American tour,...

I recently watched a short clip of Oprah describing a magical moment in her redwood grove. She had visited this place in her garden a hundred times before, but this day was different. On this day she released the word "tree" from her mind and entered the grove with full...

"Transformation doesn't require going to the mountain top," shares Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Ph.D., co-author of Living Deeply and researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. "Something as mundane as road rage, for instance, is the seed for a moment of compassion."

Schlitz and her colleagues ((Vieten and Amorok) have...

Have you ever had a situation where you wanted to love someone freely but you couldn't? For whatever reason you felt constricted or tight? Your heart longed to forgive, or to release, or to spontaneously become available to a higher energy... but there you sat, stuck and closed?

I've...

This is the final post in the series "7 Principles for Consciously Creating Your Life". Previous posts covered Living in the Now, Entering the Divine Mind, Summoning Pure Desire, Interrupting Old Patterns, The Ecstasy of Asking and Relax & Let it Go.

"There...

This post is sixth in the series "7 Principles for Consciously Creating Your Life". Previous posts covered Living in the Now, Entering the Divine Mind, Summoning Pure Desire, Interrupting Old Patterns and The Ecstasy of Asking.

I'm writing this week's post from India. While...

This post is fifth in the series "7 Principles for Consciously Creating Your Life" on cultivating a life of joy, prosperity and abundance. Previous posts covered Living in the Now, Entering the Divine Mind, Summoning Pure Desire, and Interrupting Old Patterns of Thought.

You may...

This post is fourth in the series "7 Principles for Consciously Creating Your Life" on cultivating a life of joy, prosperity and abundance. Previous posts covered Living in the Now, Entering the Divine Mind, and Summoning Pure Desire.

For those of you who've been following this...

This post is third in the series "7 Principles for Consciously Creating Your Life" on cultivating a life of joy, prosperity and abundance. The first two posts covered Principle #1: Live in the Now and Principle #2: Enter the Divine Mind.

Last week several readers commented on...

This post is second in the series "7 Principles for Consciously Creating Your Life" on cultivating a life of joy, prosperity and abundance.

Some of you may have seen the popular, Oprah-acclaimed movie The Secret which claims to reveal a closely guarded ancient secret - that you are a...