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True Beauty

I recently had an interesting talk with my sister-in-law’s niece at a family dinner. She had just come back from six months of traveling in Europe, Africa, and Asia. I asked her what she had learned most from her trip.

Her answer took me by surprise—she said what she learned most was about her relationship with her own body and image. When I asked what she meant, she said she had always been obsessed with how she looked. When traveling around to other cultures, she noticed that teenage girls and women around the world were not as concerned about their looks as women are in America. She started to realize the superficiality of this obsession.

Lean In by Going Within

As Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg continues to inspire spirited debate in the media over her book Lean In, which she describes as a “sort of feminist manifesto,” I can’t help but think of an early feminist meeting I attended in the 70s at Illinois State University. Young women were speaking about equality in the workplace, and suddenly the room grew quiet as a mother holding her baby in her arms stood up and said, “I don’t understand why we are wanting to succeed in a man’s world. Isn’t the point that we want to change that world to become something better?”

According to Sandberg, women can’t change the world until they are equally represented in places of power. She says it this way: “Today in the United States and the developed world, women are better off than ever before. But the blunt truth is that men still run the world. While women continue to outpace men in educational achievement, we have ceased making real progress at the top of any industry. . . . This means that when it comes to making the decisions that most affect our world, our voices are not heard equally.”

Proof of Heaven and A Panorama of Possibilities

I first heard about ‘near death experiences’ in the late 1970’s when I was home from college on vacation. It was a term not yet in vogue. My dad was watching an interview on PBS with a middle-aged woman whose voice and demeanor expressed intelligence, groundedness, and compassion—someone with integrity. She was describing an extraordinary experience that happened while she temporarily died, of immense bliss, expansion, unconditional love. Whereas she had been doubtful about the existence of consciousness beyond this life, her inner journey gave an absolute certainty that human consciousness DOES exist beyond this material life. As a result, this woman dedicated her life to uplifting those who faced terminal illness, or had lost loved ones, by sharing her life-altering experience.

I was riveted by her account. I soon read Life After Life by Raymond Moody,an early pioneer in ‘Near Death Experience’ research. Since then, thousands of stories have been shared. Dr. Eben Alexander’s book, A Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, has recently captured attention internationally. While in coma with a sudden illness that shut down key functional areas of his brain, he undergoes a ‘journey’ within consciousness that broke open his limited understanding that life is restricted to the material world. He enters a vast, magnificent world of beautiful sounds and sights and unsurpassed joy. His awareness went further into an essential ‘Core’ in which he was immersed in limitless, unconditional love and total knowledge. He experienced unity with the Divine and everyone and everything in the universe.

TM Offers Relief for PTSD, Homelessness of Female Vets

As the number of women in the military increases, the number of returning female vets who end up homeless is also soaring. According to a recent NY Times article by Patricia Leigh Brown, of those veterans staying in homeless shelters, 10 percent were women in 2011, up from 7.5 percent in 2009. In California, where one fourth of our nation’s veterans live, there has been a 50 percent increase in homeless women since 2009.

While homelessness among male veterans often results from PTSD and drug usage, women vets face additional challenges. Sadly, the path of many women from active duty to homelessness starts with military sexual abuse, resulting in severe PTSD and a downward spiral into drug usage, joblessness and homelessness, the article reports. Other issues specific to women increase the chances of homelessness—the higher percentage of women who are single parents, for instance.

TM Can Help Reduce Sugar Cravings

If you’ve been reaching for the cookie jar when you feel stressed, you might want to reconsider. Sugar and diabetes have been strongly linked in a recent study published in the journal PLoS One. Researchers studied the rate of diabetes in over 175 countries in the past decade, and found that increased sugar rates are correlated with higher rates of diabetes. The conclusion of the study: being overweight doesn’t cause diabetes—eating sugar does.

“The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s,” Mark Bittman, author of Food Matters, stated in his NY Times online column, The Opinionator.

Mother’s Day: Mother is at Home

My mother passed away when I was seventeen. But my memories, photos, and the stories my father told me all remind me of who she was to me and what it meant—and still means—to have her influence in my life. More than all of that, I have learned who she was to me by who I am.

My mother was educated and had a career but her nature remained foremost that of a nurturer. She was a cuddler, a sympathizer, an enthusiastic playmate, and a good listener. In my presence, she was always patient, kind, and warmhearted with everyone. Something about her made me feel more than safe and loved—something gave me a sense that no matter what was happening or where I was, my mother was there to support me.

Transcendental Meditation Practice Alleviating ADHD in Caribbean Schools

Rock Hill Herald Online NEW YORK, Aug. 23, 2013 — /PRNewswire-iReach/ — Select schools throughout the Caribbean island of Dominica have begun to employ the Transcendental Meditation® technique as a stress-management tool to help students reduce symptoms of