Tag Archives: Love

A River Of Change and You are Part of It

Christmas image

 

“We can’t be afraid of change. You may feel very secure in the pond that you are in, but if you never venture out of it, you will never know that there is such a thing as an ocean, a sea. Holding onto something that is good for you now, may be the very reason why you don’t have something better.”
― C. JoyBell C.

I ventured out of my pond over a year ago.  I put my tiny boat in a new river and made a commitment to stay in and see every inch of where this river was taking me. I have lived on the road for now over 14 months and have loved every minute.   And from that deep commitment, that letting go of everything that was familiar, I not only discovered a passion in this life, but a purpose that uses every part of who I am. A discovery about my work in the world that looked nothing like I had imagined yet embodied everything I love: Children, Giving, Film, Music, Travel and Collaboration.

My partnership with Richard Gannaway, AOMusic and Arcturian Gate has not only “re-seeded” my life with a new kind of hope, a bigger version of myself and a certainty that love is why we are all here, but it has allowed me to meet people all over the world, reach out to children in need and enroll countless others in expressing their own talents and gifts in aligning with us on the journey of Music married to Cause.

This year we established our non-profit agency, AO Foundation International.  Through our music, our connection with children and their families who live in hardship around the world, we are giving back to these children who make our music what it is and we are aligning with several other non-profits who give generously to helping those in need.  As AO becomes the only group to give 100% of our profits to helping the world, we embark on an entirely new paradigm.

This Christmas season is amplified by the ending of the Mayan Calendar.  This is a time which increases the potential for love and unity around the world.  I have been watching and posting on Facebook this week and see a surge of hope, love and gratitude flowing far more freely today.  Each of us are being called to use our energy with intention and focus on giving, gratitude and love.  And energy can be working with your hands, making music, feeding people who need our help and giving of our financial resources.

We are establishing and developing all the channels for giving with our new 501c3.   And now we can offer all of you who give to AO through our foundation, a tax deduction that can benefit you as your generous support financially will launch rockets of love into the lives of so many.  We are rapidly building a financial village who make our work happen.

And AO Foundation International is needing to create an impeccable infrastructure and needs financial help to put this vessel of love into the ocean of causes to make sharing and giving the reason our music exists.  Please help us during this amazing time by donating to our new endeavor.   Not only will you receive a useful tax deduction, but we will send you our new album just about to be released in 2013.

Simply contact us through our website www.aofi.org and use the “Donate Button”.  Or contact me at mayachristobel@gmail.com. Your financial support is greatly needed and appreciated.

AO starts the new year with a brand new album that is destined for another Grammy Nomination and beginning a fully funded Documentary series and live performance in Italy.  We are eager for you to join our family, follow us on this amazing journey and participate in ways you are inspired.  Look for updates as all our work of love manifests.  What a time we live in!

Hugging the world

 

Fierce Compassion

little girl from Sandy Hook

 

FIERCE COMPASSION

DEC 16, 2012

“Fierce compassion is motivated by the awareness of someone’s suffering and it addresses it by looking at the root cause of it. When we come from this place, we understand that we sometimes need to cause discomfort in the service of growth.”

Charlie Glickman

In the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred book of the Hindus, Lord Krishna says to Arjuna, “Plunge into the heat of the battle and keep your heart at the lotus feet of the Lord”.  And perhaps when Christ turned over the moneychanger’s tables in the Temple and called them Vipers and Hypocrites he did so from a place of inner calm.  I am challenged this week to find this precarious place between outrage and love in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

I have been moved to write allot these past few days. Not enough can be felt and not enough can be said.  I am a person who does not watch TV, the news, subscribe to a newspaper, or watch the nightly shooting reports and the death toll around the world.  I am aware.  I know what is happening.  Yet, there are moments I do allow the news to break into my life as in the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The night before these Connecticut families dropped their children off at school, having packed little lunches, Avengers book-bags and smooched the cheeks of their sandy haired boy or brown eyed girl who was a part of the fabric of each parents hearts, I could not sleep.  I awoke agitated at 2am and feeling what I have come to privately call “a disturbance in the force”.  I feel this way with seismic activity a-la John Travolta in Phenomenon.  And when there is a natural disaster or impeding catastrophe I am activated.  Call it telepathy, or maybe call it precognition it doesn’t matter.  It is how I personally know that we ARE all connected…to everything.

That next morning I saw on my Facebook page a post about Adam Lanza and 26 people who were dead because of him.  Some part of me knew I wanted and needed to allow this story into me.  So, I found the photos of grieving parents, of the 6 year old children with light in their eyes, of the dedicated teachers who died hiding the children in their care.  I learned the name and age of each child as the day went on and then read about the 29 year old teacher who hid her class of children in cabinets, only to be shot and killed herself.

This teacher was the age of my oldest daughter, Sasha.  At that moment it all became real.  I became each parent and each of the tiny children were my children playing in sandboxes.  I could see my daughters being dropped off at Toddy Pond School in Northern Maine.  This massacre was firmly on my doorstep of my heart.

And then the psychologist in me read several outstanding writings about mental illness and the young boy who did the unthinkable.  The unthinkable!  And Adam became every other lost boy I know, every other disturbed youth who is buried under the weight of a culture that has purposefully created apathy, self-hatred, taught our young men and women that killing for the country is patriotism and heroic and who have abandoned those who have a label of ‘mental illness’ to the care of our drug culture only to make a profit from another’s despair.  It is not Adam Lanza who was insane, it is our entire culture who created him.

This story of Sandy Hook is deeply personal and deeply Universal, igniting a possible awareness that Adam Lanza is a symptom of something much more important.  Our culture wants to slap him and his family with a label of mental illness while all the while, decade after decade, hiding from the reality of spiritual illness, heart sickness, soul loss and emptiness that goes hand in hand with a culture that has lost our way entirely.  We are not asking the right questions.  We are not even looking most of the time until the “unthinkable” moves in next door.

This horrific moment in our shameful history as a culture is a wake up call to stop seeing “the other” as the bad guy.  The collective apathy, the military industrial machine and the lack of a social and moral consciousness is the real “bad guy” here.  It is not about Adam being “sick” or raised by parents who did not understand him.  The death of these children, men and women is a collective issue.  A collective responsibility.

Then, I stumbled on one woman’s letter to President Obama.  Her voice sliced through the debris of confusion we all feel, to poignantly identify that the children of Sandy Hook, of Palestine or Pakistan are the same children with parents grieving and all faceless to most of us.   This one mother rips at the truth that violence is out of control on our planet and points out that much of that violence is created by our governing bodies and then carried out by a thousand young ‘Adam Lanzas’ who have been supplied with a gun by our country who, in the name of freedom, then kill women, children and entire families just like Adam Lanza did.

She says.

“Mr. President, where is your “overwhelming grief”, tears, and words for THOSE children whose lives were violently cut short and continue to be cut short in Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, etc., via weapons supplied and paid for with American tax dollars? Do you not feel “overwhelming grief”, or have any tears or words for THOSE children? Is it because THOSE children are not “THESE children”, “our children” aka AMERICAN children? Are THOSE children not worthy of our overwhelming grief, tears, words, or their future?

As a parent, not only do I feel overwhelming grief for those children whose lives were cut short in yesterday’s tragedy, I also feel overwhelming grief, GUILT, and SHAME for every single child whose life has been cut short via the American military–industrial–congressional complex.

Mr. President, every single child … NO MATTER THEIR LOCATION … is our child. So, please spare me your selective, manipulative, hypocritical emotion. Not only is it embarrassing, but the overwhelming grief, guilt, and shame every American should feel for any child’s life that has been cut short is already more than any of us can bear.”

~ Robin Rantamaki

Robin Rantamaki is using a voice that we all could cultivate.  A clearly outraged voice rooted in a love and compassion for life that together creates Fierce Compassion.  In my worldview this is what the Great Mother is all about. Where is the collective cry of all mothers on this planet who have the power to stop the insanity, the death and destruction and preserve life?

This moment in our history requires that, I for one, develop two things: Courage and a willingness to speak and act with fierce compassion.  The ingredient that is essential is personal action.  Speaking up and out.  Stopping my support of the mass illusion that the American Dream is just that.  Refusing to stand behind anything or anyone that strips any person in our world of the right to live.  This is being brave in my book.  This is how brave I must become willing to be in every action I take.

We are a culture that hides from the truth. We hide in our TV’s, we hide in our houses, we hide at the mall, and we hide in our video games and our inability to speak to our neighbors.  Adam Lanza has driven me out of my comfort zone and out into the street.  The only place for me to start is with my words.  My first action is my willingness to send out this post, then to sink firmly into the center of my heart and create a fiercely loving stance from which to live.

We are all abuzz about the end of the Mayan Calendar on Friday of this week.  We hear voices of doom and some immanent cataclysm:  Earth Changes, the Collapse of the Economy, the return of Jesus, the disclosure of life on other planets.  The cataclysm is here. Right Now! The end of what we know about a civilized life has just been destroyed by the truth behind these killings.  The anticipated and hoped for ascension of human kind and the waking up of humanity is here now in how each one of us chooses to ..or not… choose to respond to what is all around us.  There is no earthquake that is any bigger than what just happened at Sandy Hook.  If we are not shaken to the core then we are asleep.

 

A Case for Greatness

We live in a world where speaking to someone’s Greatness is infrequent.  Most often we speak to what is wrong, what is incomplete, aggravating, and problematic in a person.  Praise and appreciation fall between the cracks of relationship usually rendering the basic pallet of connection one of working it out, putting up with, overlooking or simply, reactive confrontation when we get overwhelmed.

The basic ingredient that can change the tide in any relationship is honesty:  Speaking the truth, first with yourself and then with the other. The first question is “Why am I not telling the truth?  What am I afraid of and what do I think the outcome will be if I keep choosing to withhold my feelings or thoughts and observations?”

Yet, in our new age culture where tolerance is far more desired than confrontation, we have gone to the other side of the equation.  Tolerance tends to end up looking like skirting the issue, having sympathy for the plight of a friend, when many times it is really fear of confrontation that drives our silence and in-authenticity.  So we call it “Tolerance”.  That is a kind of lie that we feed.

There is a middle ground that we rarely find ease at identifying and then live out in our relationships:  A combination of Empathy and one of Fierce Truth Telling.  The question is for most of us, how to tell the honest truth from the heart in a way that speaks to the appreciation for and the greatness of the person we care about, instead of how they have failed?”  This is the essential and necessary shift we all need to make in all our relationships, both to self and others, and in the larger Shift that is happening on our planet.

As the paradigm of power shifts incrementally from a patriarchal model to a more balanced form of Power, which now includes the feminine skill of empowering through intuition, instinct and empathy, we are challenged to re-write the common ways in which we approach all of our relationships.  It is way past time, to eliminate all the dysfunctional forms of relationship with other people and with ourselves no matter what we imagine the risk to be. The cost of not doing this is far greater than the perceived risk.

There is a long list of habits that we learned from our parents, our government, our culture, our church and an even larger list that is fed from unspoken fears: Namely, that if we are ruthlessly loving, we will be rejected and unloved in return.  How many of us have become expert at ways of being in relationship or business that in fact never helps us achieve what we want, which is connection, love, power, creativity, full expression of self and harmony?  How many ways of undermining the success of relationship do I practice without consciously thinking?

*  Withholding the truth because I believe the person cannot handle it?

*  Withholding my feelings because I don’t want a conflict or to be rejected or in many cases loose the little bit I have or think I need from that person?

*  Telling myself that I cannot say the truth because I need something from that person that they will take away if they do not like what I say?  I then settle for something that is incomplete, dysfunctional and dishonest. I fall out of integrity with myself.

*  Rationalization is the biggest lie that we use to protect ourselves.  We tell ourselves that it is better that the person does not know the truth because they will be hurt, offended or will not be able to handle the truth, so “I will protect them from those feelings because I love them”.  This is the root of becoming an enabler:  Allowing the person to continue to be or do things in ways that alienate and create problems for themselves and for others and not speaking to the power and greatness in them, but to their weakness instead.  By doing this we never allow for the possibility of change and growth and everything becomes stagnant.  Not only the flow of love in the relationship but the flow of money and resources.  A kind of energetic constipation where nothing is moving takes over.

The minute we conform to someone’s dysfunction, adapt to it, and accommodate even for selfish reasons, we have supported limitation and dysfunction instead of health and vibrancy in the person we are with.  And have you noticed that we then feel less vibrant ourselves, more constrained and unhappy? In other words, we strip the person of the possibility to grow into the person they are capable of being and strip ourselves of a life of integrity that only brings ill health.

When we do this the toxicity of Resentment and Bitterness worms its way into the groundwater of each person in the equation.   We do not foster greatness in ourselves or in the other.  We live in a model based in fears and limitation.  Therefore, the outcome of ANY relationship, whether it is a love relationship, a friendship or a business partnership, will reflect the energy going into it; namely, limitation and lack of greatness, stagnancy of feelings and of resources.  As within, so without.

A model for a new paradigm in relationship or business must be based on not only honesty at all costs which is rooted in holding the vision for a persons greatness and for their own ability to learn and change, but also for our capacity to rise above the adaptation to weakness model and firmly plant ourselves in the vision of who we are capable of being and who the person is capable of becoming.

We do not hold with respect, a persons inherent Greatness, if we allow a friend, lover, parent, husband, wife or colleague to become defined by their limitations or blind spots.  And, we do not live in our own Greatness if we are not willing to risk living in total honesty and fierce loving.

Who is your Neighbor?

WHO IS YOUR NEIGHBOR?

NOV 23, 2012

heart world

I was rushing to a meeting with a new strategic planner and felt a little unprepared.  I’m a bit of a stickler for getting places on time.  I threw my briefcase into the car with some bottled water and tried to stay under the speed limit, since here in Point Roberts, Washington there is one policeman, known as Officer Slick, who has little to do but give tickets for tiny offenses.  He is Point Roberts onlypoliceman.

I pulled up to the four-way and turned onto Gulf Road, making sure I came to my full stops at every stop sign, one of Officer Slick’s pet peeves. It was raining cats and dogs as it frequently does here in the Pacific Northwest.  I glanced at the clock.  I was just going to make it to my meeting.

Suddenly there he was.  Al, a very old man in a green wool sweater shuffling down the road.  He seemed to barely move and was soaked by the driving rain.  “Should I stop?”  I glanced at the clock and kept driving, seeing that it was straight up 11am.  But, there was that feeling in my heart that I have often, making it impossible for me to continue.  I spun around doing an illegal U-Turn, hoping that officer Slick was nowhere in sight.  I pulled up next the man who had not even made it three feet since I past him.  I rolled down the window and asked if I could take him somewhere.  He was disoriented.  Maybe he couldn’t hear me correctly or maybe he was not used to being helped.  I pushed open the door and asked him to get in out of the rain.

He could barely close the front door behind him and sat slumped in the passenger seat.  His wool sweater smelled of a dog or maybe a wet horse. “Where are you going on a day like this?” I said, smiling.  He took a moment to look over my car and then answered, “Food for Isabella?”  Was she his wife?  His friend, I wondered.  He was shivering as I pulled back into the street.  “Are you going to the Marketplace?”  “Yep, she woke me up this morning and said she was hungry”.  How could that be? I thought.  “Is Isabella you wife?”  Al turned and smiled.  “No, miss, she’s my cat.”

This man looked in his late eighties or early nineties, worn out by a life I knew nothing about.  He then started to talk about what a friend she was to him and the best cat he had ever had. I pulled up to the Marketplace and said I would wait for him and then take him home.  I called my strategic planner and said I would be…quite late.  So much for strategically planning my day down to the hour.

Twenty minutes later there was no Al I sight.  I got out and dashed into the store only to find that he was lost somewhere between the cat food and the Skippy peanut butter.  I helped him find the last item on his list:  Gator Aid.  Checkout took forever since in this man’s life everything moves at a snails pace.  I taped into my deep reservoir of patience and finally got him in the car with packages and all.

He talked of his cat and then tried to remember what street he lived on.  We had to backtrack a little and then he pointed to his house.  The classic home of a recluse, a person who barely subsists, even though when you look at the house you know it used to be something special at one time.  There was a broken down truck in the driveway since they took away his drivers license he said.  An old skiff for fishing in the front yard that looked like it had been there since I was born.  All the drapes were pulled tight and held in place at the windowsill with pieces of firewood.  I worried that he heated with wood.

We got him out of the car with my umbrella, packages almost too heavy for him, yet he insisted on carrying them himself.  Then a thank you.  Then a sideways smile.  Then he disappeared to the back of the house and was gone.

I sat in my car for a moment nearly having forgotten I had an agenda.  All I could think of was Al.  His life.  His devotion to walking in the rain for cat food and his love of his dear Isabella.  All I could think of was his living alone and in dire need of what most of us take for granted.  I was no longer in a hurry.

This past year I have aligned my life with a cause to help children in crisis situations who have no parent, no food, and no shelter. Children who have lived through the unthinkable like the earthquake in Haiti or the Tsunami in Japan.  I left thirty years as a psychologist to pursue a larger passion.  It is very important to me to be living from the center of what I believe I was called here to do.  Helping children have their basic needs met and helping others open their hearts to people they may not know is now my work.  And, yet, Al lives right down the street and he is in dire need too.  Al needs food and help.  Al needs love.  All is my neighbor.

I don’t need to go to Haiti or Osaka to look right outside my window to see loneliness or need.  In fact I wonder if the nightly news of chronic devastation, war and poverty desensitizes us to recognizing who lives on our own street when we watch nightly crisis and dramas around the globe?  How many houses do we pass with overgrown yards, drapes pulled and old people shuffling out to try to bend down to pick up a newspaper?  How many homeless people could have a square meal and tell me their story, if I were to simply stop ‘strategically planning’ my day and take the time to take them for a lunch?

If I woke up every day expecting to witness something around me, some person, some animal, some situation that could use my attention, my dollar, my car, my excess and be better for it…I would be better for it. Our world would be better for it is we each committed to this action of love.  Millions of people would be helped in a single day.   My question to every human and to myself is this:  Why don’t we all live like this all the time?  What will it take for all of us to start?  Who is the Al in your life?

From Hollywood to The Garbage Dumps

AOMusic aligns with causes around the world who are devoted to helping children.  We work with SoleHope and HavServe to help crisis ridden areas.  But here is one man I want to meet and work with. Scott Nesson.   He is someone who can shine a light for all of us on what it means to follow your heart.  This is an article from the Christian Science Monitor.

Christian Science Monitor

Scott Neeson left Hollywood to save children rooting in Cambodia’s garbage dumps  He sold his mansion, Porsche, and yacht and set off for Cambodia to provide food, shelter, and education to destitute children.

 Neeson’s final epiphany came one day in June 2004. The high-powered Hollywood executive stood, ankle deep in trash, at the sprawling landfill of Stung Meanchey, a poor shantytown in Cambodia‘s capital

Scott, a former head of 20th Century Fox International, cares for more than 1,000 Cambodian children and their families.

In a haze of toxic fumes and burning waste, swarms ofPhnom Penh‘s most destitute were rooting through refuse, jostling for scraps of recyclables in newly dumped loads of rubbish. They earned 4,000 riel ($1) a day – if they were lucky.

Many of the garbage sorters were young children. Covered in filthy rags, they were scruffy, sickly, and sad.

Clasped to Mr. Neeson’s ear was his cellphone. Calling the movie mogul from a US airport, a Hollywood superstar’s agent was complaining bitterly about inadequate in-flight entertainment on a private jet thatSony Pictures Entertainment, where Neeson was head of overseas theatrical releases, had provided for his client.

Neeson overheard the actor griping in the background. ” ‘My life wasn’t meant to be this difficult.’ Those were his exact words,” Neeson says. “I was standing there in that humid, stinking garbage dump with children sick with typhoid, and this guy was refusing to get on a Gulfstream IV because he couldn’t find a specific item onboard,” he recalls. “If I ever wanted validation I was doing the right thing, this was it.”

Doing the right thing meant turning his back on a successful career in the movie business, with his $1 million salary. Instead, he would dedicate himself full time to a new mission: to save hundreds of the poorest children in one of the world’s poorest countries.

Much to everyone’s surprise, within months the Australian native, who as president of 20th Century Fox International had overseen the global success of block-busters like “Titanic,” “Braveheart,” and “Die Another Day,” quit Hollywood. He sold his mansion inLos Angeles and held a garage sale for “all the useless stuff I owned.” He sold off his Porsche and yacht, too.

His sole focus would now be his charity, the Cambodian Children’s Fund, which he had set up the previous year after coming face to face, while on vacation in Cambodia, with children living at the garbage dump.

“The perks in Hollywood were good – limos, private jets, gorgeous girlfriends, going to the Academy Awards,” says Neeson, an affable man with careworn features and a toothy smile. “But it’s not about what lifestyle I’d enjoy more when I can make life better for hundreds of children.”

He sits at his desk barefoot, Cambodian-style, in white canvas pants and a T-shirt. At times he even sounds like a Buddhist monk. “You’ve got to take the ego out of it,” he says. “One person’s self-indulgence versus the needs of hundreds of children, that’s the moral equation.”

On the walls of his office, next to movie posters signed by Hollywood stars, are before-and-after pictures of Cambodian children. Each pair tells a Cinderella story: A little ragamuffin, standing or squatting in rubbish, transforms in a later shot into a beaming, healthy child in a crisp school uniform.

Neeson has more than 1,300 sets of such pictures; that’s how many children his charity looks after. Every one of the children, the Australian humanitarian stresses, he knows by sight, and most of them by name. “You go through a certain journey with them,” he says. Houy and Heang were among the first who started that journey with him in 2004. Abandoned by their parents, the two sisters, now 17 and 18, lived at the dump in a makeshift tent. “We felt sick and had no shoes. Our feet hurt,” Houy recalls in the fluent English she’s learned. “We’d never seen a foreigner,” Heang adds. “He asked us, ‘Do you want to study?’ “

Today the sisters are about to graduate from high school. They want to go on to college.

Neeson maintains four residential homes around town for more than 500 other deprived children and is building another. He operates after-school programs and vocational training centers. He’s built day cares and nurseries. His charity provides some 500 children with three meals a day and runs a bakery where disadvantaged youths learn marketable skills while making nutrient-rich pastry for the poorest kids. It pays for well over 1,000 children’s schooling and organizes sightseeing trips and sports days for them. “I drive the staff crazy,” says Neeson, who employs more than 300 locals, many of them former scavengers. “If I come up with a plan, I want to see it implemented within 48 hours. If I see a need, I want to do something about it. You don’t want to see suffering prolonged.”

He sees plenty of both need and suffering.

After decades of genocide and civil war, millions of Cambodians live in abject poverty. Many children are chronically malnourished, and many never even finish primary school. On a late afternoon, as garbage pickers begin to return to their squalid dwellings of plastic sheets, tarpaulins, and plywood, Neeson sets out on his daily “Pied Piper routine.” Navigating a muddy path, pocked with fetid puddles and strewn with trash, which winds among clusters of derelict shacks and mounds of garbage, he picks his way around a squatters’ community. Everywhere he goes, children dash up to him with cries of “Papa! Papa!” They leap into his arms, pull at his shirt, cling to his arms, wrap themselves around his legs. “Hey, champ!” he greets a boy who clambers up on him. “He needs a dentist so badly,” he notes, referring to the boy’s rotten teeth. His charity offers free health care and dental services to the children and their parents.

In 2007 Neeson won the Harvard School of Public Health‘s Q Prize, an award created by music legend Quincy Jones. In June he was named “a hero of philanthropy” by Forbes magazine. (“Well, I finally made it into Forbes,” he quips. “But no ‘World’s Richest’ list for me.”) When Neeson spots certain kids, he hands them their portraits from a sheaf of newly printed photographs he carries around. “I want them to have mementoes of themselves when they grow up and leave all this behind,” he explains. They give him their latest drawings in return.

He stops at a windowless cinder-block shanty inhabited by a mother and her three teenage daughters. The bare walls are adorned with Neeson’s portraits of the girls in school beside their framed Best Student awards.

“I’m so proud of my children,” says Um Somalin, a garment factory worker who earns $2 a day. “Mr. Scott has done wonders for them.” Neeson rescued one girl from being trafficked, another from domestic servitude, and the mother from a rubber plantation, after he had come across the youngest girl living alone at the dump. “We always bring the family back together,” he says. “We help everyone so no one slips through the cracks.” The need is great: Life here can be unforgiving. “This girl has an abusive father. This one here fell into a fire when she was 6. That guy got shot. That one there lost an arm in an accident,” Neeson says, reeling off details.

Then, flashlight in hand, he doubles back down another path – and steps into what seems like a different world. Behind a high-security fence, children sit in neat rows in brightly painted classrooms, learning English and math in evening classes. Others play on computers in an air-conditioned room.

Until recently, the site where Neeson’s new school now stands was a garbage dump. “When I started working for him, I was surprised how much he does for the children,” says Chek Sarath, one of his helpers. “He places their well-being above his own.” Neeson stops by young children who have their eyes glued to a Disney cartoon playing from a DVD. “I miss a lot about Hollywood,” Neeson muses. “I miss Sundays playing paddle tennis on the beach with friends and taking the boat out to the islands.

“Sundays here, I’m down at the garbage dump. But I’m really happy.”

 • Learn more about Scott Neeson’s work atwww.cambodianchildrensfund.org.

Visit us at http://www.aomusic.com

 

 

The Seed of Truth

 

A Seed Planted

It has been one year since I sold most of what I own and drove away from Tulsa Oklahoma.  I had been called there to help my mother die.  Four years later, my time was done in Oklahoma and I asked a question. “Now…what makes me happy”.  Then I turned the corner into my sixties.  For the first time in nearly forty years I had no children at home, no husband, no clients to care for.  I just had me.  And my two cats Hazel and Snow.

The question of what makes me happy was new.  It was asked in a new spirit with the emphasis on ME.  What makes ME happy.  I had spent decades organizing my answers around the ‘whole’ of my life.  My happiness was always intertwined with my daughters, or the man I loved, my mother and family and the concern I had for my clients who entrusted me with their stories and their care.

There had been little time to truly know what my own seed of happiness was.  So, I set out for one year to discover the answer.  Not by making a list of what made me happy, but to have an experience of “being happy”.  What became quickly obvious was that I was surprised by happiness.  I never went out looking for it or trying to create happy moments.  Happiness found me.  And in unexpected ways.

And what also became a life lesson was discovering that the way happiness found me was because I slowed down every aspect of my life and made room for happiness to come in.  The art of allowing my life to flow and simply following the current has been the gift of this past year.  Our society is focused on doing, on making, on busily trying to get our life to look like our vision.  This presupposes that we are the only one to make or break our own possible happiness.  That boot-strap mentality locks us out of the experience of being part of the mystery, of the divine, of a destiny that has a design and pattern to discover.  It creates isolation.

Allowing life to move us has at the center this divine mystery of a perfect design. But allowing is a relational word.  Allowing does not mean I do nothing.  Allowing means I hold the vision, embody the energy and move my feet and then the dance begins and my partner is Spirit, God, the Universe, and Love.

I did do one important thing before I put the carrier on top of my Nissan and drove away toward the East Coast:  I set an intention.  A strong intention.  I sat up late into the night and wrote my vision for my life.  I soaked it in, knowing that somehow I had captured on paper a glimpse of a life I would love and then I tucked the writing into my Tarot Bag.  The vision was filled with joyful ideas of being closer and working with my daughters in a business, of being surrounded by music, living in nature, writing for film and seeing myself succeed with my writing.  I wrote of being in a common community with like-minded people, increasing my health and prosperity and being with children in my work.  Then I drove to Asheville, North Carolina.

Now, one year later I am astonished.  When I arrived in North Carolina to spend a short time with my daughter I ran into a problem renewing my driver’s license.  This problem still persists and even baffles congressman Perlmutter in Denver.  No one seems to know how to solve my lack of ‘drivability’.  The loss of easy mobility left me stranded in North Carolina longer than expected.  So, I went to a workshop on manifestation and then two days later met Richard Gannaway from AOMusic through a Craigslist ad of all things.  Four hours later my life rearranged.

Richard handed me two of his Grammy nominated albums.  Driving home I slipped them into the CD player in my car and headed down the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was raining. My first big surprise was about to occur.  I started weeping, pulled off the road and nearly one hour later had finished listening to’ And Love Rages On’, with the windows fogged and motor still idling.

The weeping was a direct message from my soul to me.  Weeping with joy validates the moment I am in as sacred, as important, as inspired.  In that moment something redirected in me and pointed me back to Richard and AOMusic.  My mind said “this is crazy”, “this wasn’t on the agenda!”, “WHAT are you DOING?”.  I kept driving. Now one year later I am a partner with Richard and AO and proceeding with a vision for a film series that is inspiring great interest.  I am immeasurably happy.

That one surprise by the side of the road…of joy…love…creativity…happiness has led to me back to digging out that piece of paper I put into my Tarot Bag just a year ago.  I re-read my hopes and dreams.  I smile when I realize that almost everything I envisioned is in my life right now:  I work with children who sing, I am surrounded by music, my daughter Jessie and I work together on a project she helped to shoot in Nepal, I write for film, have gone to film school, live part time in two amazing natural environments, Asheville and the Pacific North West.   I have a community of inspired, creative, loving co-workers and friends.  I have a new kind of partner of the heart with Richard Gannaway.  I have been prosperous and happy and healthier. All because I opened to the possibilities, allowed for my life to move with serendipity, coincidence and intuition.

The art of navigating life this way has been the largest learning in my lifetime.  And now as our holiday season begins I have a new question.  Not about what makes me happy, or what’s next.  But a question about where is home?  Having been nomadic for over a year now it is time to find ….home.  And finding home is never possible until each of us feels entirely at home in the self.  This year of SELF discovery has brought me to a new way of thinking about home.  Home is the space that is a sacred anchor for our soul to live out our purpose for being here.  Finding home is my next adventure. Or better yet!  I will let home find me.

 

 

From Tulsa to Kathmandu

 

I left for my “Year as a Gypsy” on September 2, 2011.  As that year comes to a close my life has opened.  By shedding my beliefs about what I “thought” might make me happy in life and asking a new question about “what would bring me joy”, I made some bold new moves.  After selling most of my belongings, letting go of my house, my man, my dog and my attachment to any outcome, I packed my car and drove off.  First stop, Asheville, North Carolina.

My blog, www.the-gypsy-life.com has chronicled what can only be described as a “surprising” year.  I had thoughts of writing full time, landed a screenplay writing job, re-invented myself with a new website www.mayalunachristobel.com and felt the stars aligning in what I believed was my destiny.  And then I learned a very important saying first hand and right between the eyes:  “How do you make the Gods laugh?  By telling them your plans”.  It was simply a few weeks into my adventure that I threw the blueprints out and adopted the only thing I knew to do:  Navigate by intuition …one day at a time.

So, here I am, many stories later, still no driver’s license, but well traveled, well cared for, well fed, well loved and inspired beyond anything I could imagine.  And after just one short year I have found that my heart is happiest singing, participating in a music company that has children at the center of everything, and creating opportunity for myself and as many others as possible to live their dreams.  How could I have known any of this before taking the leap?

Today, August 18th, one of those dreams is being realized for a group of young people who just landed in Kathmandu, Nepal.  I took a leap of faith and decided to produce a short film of recording children in Chitwan, Nepal, singing songs composed by my partner, Richard Gannaway and AOMUSIC. By reaching for my dream as a filmmaker, four amazing young people are reaching for theirs.  Paying it forward is not just about money, or gifting someone, but is also about what happens when I say yes to a vision from the heart…it expands to include so many other people who get a chance to do the same.  Physics of the Heart.

It is the height of the monsoon season in Nepal.  This “Dream Team” is made up of my daughter Jessie, who with her Canon 5D will be interviewing the village, the children and the team as, come rain and more rain, the children learn to sing.  Her photography will be part of a campaign for a documentary series.  Then there is Rob who is from Asheville and a yoga/slack line teacher as well as musician par-excellence who will be recording the children.  Josh is the “Yoda” of this entourage.  Josh has been living in India and has a story to share that will both curl your hair and make you stand up an applaud the tenacity of spirit in this young man.  Josh is a musician and teacher of music to children all over the globe.  And lastly is Karan, from Mumbai, India who is going to film the entire journey of AO in Nepal.  He has filmed numerous documentaries and brings so much to this unfolding story of AOMUSIC as we trek to where children are in need and hear the songs of their undaunted hearts.

So in these next ten days I will post a short story every day from Nepal to give you a window into the courage, the creativity and the spirit of those on this trip, the people of Nepal, my own unfolding in this process that has not been without obstacles, all in the hope that just one person might find their own heart on fire for change, for reaching for your dream and for helping those who need you most when you do.

As for me and coming to the close of a year on the road?  The Gypsy Life has become the life I choose from this moment forward. There is no other way to live for me.

 

AOMUSIC Meets Hollywood

Nepal Monastery

AOMUSIC had gotten the attention of Hollywood. The story of this is amazing. As many of you know, we were invited to trek to Nepal and record some children for our new album to be released Feb. 2013. And word spread in Nepal that we were coming, people heard the beauty of the music and the message of love that is AO and suddenly we got an invitation to come to visit the sacred Caves of Maratika and record. This is an arduous trip, yet this ancient site houses a majority of sacred Buddhist teachings.

This pilgrimage to the holy Caves of Maratika is in Halesi.  Maratika Cave and Monastery is located south east of Mount Everest and was the retreat of Mahadeva while he was in hiding.  For both Hindus and Buddhists it is one of their most famous pilgrimage centers.  Here is a note we received from the Monastery:

“Regarding Maratika:  We have now a project to reconstruct our Maratika Monastery as it is falling a part also this year’s earthquake has made little problem. For this project many buddhist high masters including H.H. Dalai Lama has written the supporting letter for this project.”

So, now we can help give back to them through the sale of the album and help their project because of their generous invitation. So our trip expanded and we were planning to go in the monsoon season, with swollen rivers and nighttime hikes for hours.

Suddenly another email. We were invited for an unprecedented trek to Solukhumbu Monastery.  A rugged overland passage.  Here is the proposal from our contact there, and their historical invitation. It reads,

“O yes i have some new idea for you or AO music, since you are in Nepal.
When you are in Nepal you can take your crew to my teacher’s monastery in Solukhumbu, which is the most beautiful place, it is like Tibet,  where now more than six hundred monks and nuns doing prayer every day, i think that make a great experience for AO.  My Guru His Holiness Trulshik Rinpoche who is also the main guru of HH Dalai lama has recently passed away, after many months praying here in Nepal, his precious Kudung, which is his enlighten body, is now in his Monastery Solukhumbu. If you are planning than i can organize a trip and  guide to accompany with you i really think it will be good for AO music since we see that AO will be beneficial for so many people. For that sense that place HH Monastery is the most powerful place, if you are targeting music and chanting with visual beauty.”

So as you can see there is not only a story about the dedication of AO to bring World Music a new voice for change, involving children all over the globe, but our reach now can be educational and inspiring with this trek to Nepal and beyond.

AO trains and records children, most of whom are living in extraordinary circumstances. These children have never been in choirs before and are from the poorest of the surrounding villages.  They will be singing about love, light and our world for the first time, in a harmonically creative language.  This is a signature for AO, that the language cuts across all boundaries and languages and creates a universal, harmonically pure vibration.  You will see the effects of this on the faces of all the children of AO.

AO have been astonished at how these requests open new doors for changing the hearts of people. “But how could we fund this in such a short time?” we asked. Then a phone call.

“This should be a documentary” he said. And before we knew it a dozen interested film people, PBS producers, Independent directors, videographers and Bollywood interest just flooded in. Without effort. An amazing gift for the simple act of holding the vision. One song at a time, one child at a time and one dollar at a time.  One person said that this is a “Dream’Gig” and AOMUSIC has a big dream: To allow for the change needed on the planet to be both initiated by the light of children and the musical purity that is AO. Then to give back to as many children in need as is possible. Why? Because the children hold our future in their hands.

We are now going to Nepal in August to complete our original vision of recording the children of Chitwon and finishing the album and we have given the month of November over to returning to Nepal for all three treks, this time with a film crew and substantial funding.

And what I can say about living in the flow is that the Universe knows when Spirit is at the heart of life and gives such abundant support and love that it takes my breath away.
The project is cooking, growing sea legs, gaining funding and can be the single greatest help to advancing the causes of these children by creating both life changing music AND now creating a visual reference for spirit at work on a suffering planet.

We still need your help to get to the children in Nepal in August and want to have everyone who can give a tax deductible donation to make this trip a reality, become part of our team as we make this documentary. We will be looking for those who want to participate as associate producers or even carry our bags. As I will continue to say, It Takes a Village to Create Change. And Richard Gannaway and I have been the first to “move our feet” to fund the vision. We have used our own resources to make it thus far and I have given up coffee, time to even take a shower and Richard has given up vacations and sleep.  But we cannot move to the next level of the vision alone.

Please visit us at our Kickstarter page   http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/933732314/ao-music?ref=live.   For only $10 you can receive our Last Album,” And Love Rages On” which was shortlisted for the Grammys this past year. This trip takes $10,000 in support.  We are nearly one third there and have less than two weeks left to generate the funds or if we are short our goal even $10, we lose all our dedicated funding.

You can Donate tax deductible contributions on our AO website at  http://www.aomusic.com/ao/blog/wordpress/   and join us on the adventure. Please see the gifts we will give back to you for helping us get this first leg of the trip to Nepal accomplished.

And if you simply cannot push a button and donate $10, $50, $100 then do us the next best favor please.  Send an email to 5 friends.  Tell someone how interesting this project is and point them to all our YouTube videos or my website.  Your spreading the word and sending an email to friends is worth it’s weight in gold.

And get to know each of us at AO on my website at:   http://www.mayalunachristobel.com/heartbeat/

Blessings and thank you, Maya

The Whole Nine Yards

Ah, once again it is Mother’s day.  A day that we do one of a few things.  We love our mother down to our toes and thank her for life!  Or, we reluctantly send a card or flowers out of obligation or guilt  because we are still hurt that she has disappointed us as our mother.

But for many we don’t do anything.  An action sometimes born out of the wounds of childhood and an act of resentment.  But, none the less, this time every year we make a choice on how we approach Mother’s day. Each year we have one Hallmark moment to do it differently.  To change course and create what it is we truly want.

I am approaching the year anniversary of my Mother dying.  The anniversary of my leaving Oklahoma after years of being a caretaker for my mother.  Those years changed me.  Changed my resentment to joy  and in the end was a singular time of coming to terms with who my mother really is , which has everything to do with who I am today.  My mother  is me.  I am my mother and in loving her I love myself.  Not an easy task for many of us. Certainly not for me.

And I found a piece of writing I want to share with you about my struggle toward forgiving her and allowing myself to be human in the process of my life with her and in the time of her dying. I look back on those days before she died and am grateful for the painful, agonizing, heart wrenching, lovely, sweet time I had with her.  I hope you find this writing a catalyst to seeing your own mother more clearly and embracing a path of forgiveness and love. But most of all that you will do something different this Mother’s Day…something truer to your own nature of love, more giving, more spacious, and more of exactly what you have always wanted from your mother.

“I hold my breath with my mother. I remember not breathing in her presence as a child. Waiting to be criticized in all the details of life and not seen in any of the large ways I occupy myself. These patterns persist as I live in her presence and she perpetuates all the old ways I was with her as my mother. Being in a caretaker role is very confusing for the child in me and the adult in her who is feeling much more like a child these days. I cannot see her as this child for how strong her controlling and fearful personality is in every moment. I cannot find the child in me that is not wounded either. And yet in my spiritual journey this is what I called for in being her daughter and she my mother. I called for a time when I would reverse roles and I would behave toward her as she behaved toward me when I was young. I detest my own behavior because I am being just like she was with me. If I persist in this role with her I will no longer be able to stay here and I will need to deal with the guilt of failing myself and her in this endeavor.

That is one story. The other story is that she is simply a soul searching for herself and unable to find her own connection to spirit and is in a panic that time is running out. She has looked to me for that guidance and I refuse to give that to her out of anger and resentment. She is disappointed in the fact that I have not helped her in this way. This is a past life story between us when I were once her priest and did not give her a time of confession before she died, letting her die feeling alienated from God. The pain of that was unbearable for her and as her priest in this other life I carried the guilt of failing her. This karmic story is trying to be healed in this arrangement as I live with her. I cannot be her priest but I do have the power to extend forgiveness to her in this life from my own heart, releasing her to go on and in doing so end the karmic nature of our relationship and alleviating the guilt I have for not having “saved” her in this other life.

This is a very difficult confluence of energies trying to iron themselves out and I struggle with the depth of this problem. But I must understand that in this arrangement that I chose and she chose, that there is grace for the asking. That I can simply not expect myself to be her savior, but I can release myself and forgive myself for being human, for letting her down, for letting myself down and I do not have to do this perfectly. Can I give myself that? The right to be imperfect? The right for my mother to be imperfect? Can I just let go of my ancient need to be loved by my mother and simply learn to love myself?  Even if I do not do this commitment as well as I had expected? I can walk away. I can choose myself. I can also finish this time with grace and with a kind of simplicity, treating her as I would a lost child that cannot find her way…just like me. Pointing her back to herself by being myself fully. That is all this is really about. Not about caretaking at all but about being myself. Fully flawed and imperfect and joyful and loving and angry and sad. All of it …all the messy whole nine yards of being human. The real story is about the humility of being human and in that realization I am truly divine and my mother is the divine. Ahhh the paradox of it all!

A Change of Heart

Finally I bought the book, HeartMath.  I have known about this amazing institute that has studied the energetic effects, the health changing experiences and the power of the heart.  You have heard me say over and over that one of the most untapped resources for changing our lives and our world is the energy of the heart.  That the electromagnetic field of the heart is far larger than our mind.  And we walk around every day holding this energy in the center of our being.  This one organ is responsible if we live or die.  And yet most of us do not take any time to even consider the heart unless we have heartburn or a heart attack or our heart is breaking.  Cultivating a deep awareness of the heart energy we possess and then responsibly building that energy with our children, our lovers, our friends and with ourselves could be the one way we could make our biggest contribution to changing our world. This is a wonderful article.  I don’t usually reprint other writing but why reinvent the wheel?  Enjoy, learn and then practice.  And the amazing drawing below if one my daughter Jessie Felix did.  Amazing! Blessings, Maya

A change of heart changes everything

A California institute demonstrates how people can actually make their heart beat in a healthier way. Through its research, the Institute of HeartMath proves that health starts with love, and that love can reduce stress. It is a method that is used by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and more than 100 organizations–from global corporations to hospitals to government agencies and schools. This simple method is changing the world. A report from Boulder Creek, California. Jurriaan Kamp | June 2005 issue All you need is love, sang John Lennon. True, according to most people. The only challenge: how do you create love? A quite startlingly simple answer was found to that question in the redwood forests of Boulder Creek, California, south of San Francisco. Since 1991, the Institute of HeartMath has generated a large body of convincing scientific evidence that it is indeed possible to create love. HeartMath’s research shows that emotions work much faster, and are more powerful, than thoughts. And that—when it comes to the human body—the heart is much more important than the brain to overall health and well-being—even cognitive function—than anyone but poets believed. Its dominance inside the body is now clearly demonstrated. Thinking clearly with your brain is useful. But feeling positively from your heart provides an amazing boost to health and creativity.
Briefly re-experiencing a cherished memory creates synchronization in your heart rhythm in mere seconds. This increases the release of healthy, energizing hormones, while at the same time decreasing levels of damaging stress hormones, at the same time your immune system is strengthened, blood pressure decreases … and health and focus increase. Using a simple prescription that consists of a number of exercises that anyone can do anywhere in a few minutes—the details are coming shortly—HeartMath is successfully battling the greatest threat to health, happiness and peace in this world: stress. Stress is the plague of our time, an epidemic that is spreading rapidly. The World Health Organization (WHO) raised the alarm 20 years ago, but things have only gotten worse. Every day some one million Americans fail to come to work due to stress. The European Union estimated in 2000 that the annual price tag of stress, in the form of healthcare costs and lost productivity, amounts to some three to four percent of the EU’s gross domestic product. Stress is one of the most important causes of high blood pressure, which afflicts one in three adults in Europe and North America and is the cause of many serious illnesses such as heart disease and stroke. Stress also lies at the basis of depression and burnout. “The good news is that the negative effects of stress can be effectively countered more easily than people might imagine. This leads to better performance in every aspect of life. It is therefore a smart strategy for every organization to tackle this source of excessive costs and human strain,” according to HeartMath’s president and CEO Bruce Cryer. That insight has now permeated many companies and institutions. Managers are sent to stress seminars. Yoga lessons are offered at company headquarters. And there are even companies that encourage their employees to take vacations. But these measures aren’t very effective as long as stress continues to permeate the corporate culture. The sense of relief from a yoga lesson or a weekend at the beach is often lost during the first chat with a frustrated colleague at the coffee machine. A successful anti-stress strategy provides results precisely at the moment the stress is experienced. This is what HeartMath does, which is why its client list now includes such leading companies as Hewlett Packard, Shell, Unilever, Cisco Systems, and Boeing. HeartMath was established in 1991 by Doc Lew Childre. Childre had made a name for himself as a researcher and advisor to companies and scientific institutions. With the founding of HeartMath, he embarked on his mission to demonstrate that the heart was central to human health, success and fulfillment. While HeartMath’s techniques emphasize the importance of emotional self-management, HeartMath is no new age phenomenon.
It is a research institute that in the space of nearly 15 years has published a large body of scientific research in established and respected publications such as the Harvard Business Review and the American Journal of Cardiology. Those publications support HeartMath’s central aim of presenting revolutionary scientific discoveries in a solid, “bullet proof” way. It has demonstrated significant cost savings for healthcare organizations struggling with staff turnover, and has shown significant health benefits in an array of studies covering congestive heart failure, diabetes, asthma, and hypertension. As Cryer says, “HeartMath is not based simply on belief. There are proven physiological reactions in how emotion, heart and brain interact.” In other words: HeartMath’s work is kept scrupulously free of the obvious potential for opportunism. Which is admirable given that financing and survival issues have presented tricky challenges for the organization through the years. HeartMath’s location reflects this cautious strategy. The institute is located in a group of buildings on a lovely retreat-like setting in Boulder Creek, a town that is nearly impossible to find among the tall trees of the ancient Californian forests. Stress and Boulder Creek have little to do with one another, I realize, following a drive through the pouring rain. And yet the decision to locate HeartMath here was not so odd. Forty-five minutes down the road is a well-known hotbed of this “modern plague:” Silicon Valley. Research director Rollin McCraty is in his office—a simple study with a huge window looking out over a wooded slope—working on one of HeartMath’s latest initiatives: a computer-driven experiment that shows how the heart reacts more quickly to external stimuli than the brain (see box). HeartMath programs utilize an innovative biofeedback system—developed by founder Doc Childre—whereby your finger or ear is hooked up to a sensor that shows the heart’s activity on a computer screen. The feedback is not a precondition for the result of the HeartMath exercises, but seeing your heart rhythms live on a computer screen makes it easier to convince critics of the favourable effect of positive feelings. Measuring internal feelings using modern instruments is not new in itself. For example, with the help of the electroencephalogram (EEG), it has been proven that meditating yogis produce completely different brain waves than—say—stock traders on Wall Street. But HeartMath’s heart-driven method extends much further than relaxation through meditation. McCraty notes, “Meditation is mainly geared towards consciously separating yourself from the reality around you.
That has totally different physical consequences than our approach, which is geared towards actively adding positive energy to a particular situation.” To measure the heart’s reaction to particular events, HeartMath uses a relatively new concept—one that is currently a hot item in mainstream medicine—as an indicator of a healthily functioning body: heart rate variability (HRV). Research conducted 10 years ago by Dr Andrew Armour of Dalhouse University in Halifax, Canada showed that the heart has its own neural network–in essence, a little brain. HRV—the rhythm of the time period between two heartbeats—plays a key role in that network. It has now been demonstrated that the heart sends signals to the brain and the hormonal system via nerves which carry the heart rhythm patterns. It doesn’t matter so much how many times a heart beats per minute; it’s the rhythm of the heartbeat that counts. Childre, McCraty and HeartMath’s research team have discovered that certain patterns in the heart rhythm correspond to a particular emotional state. McCraty explains, “With every heartbeat, information is supplied that affects our emotions, our physical health and the quality of our lives.” This means that feelings of compassion, love, care and appreciation produce a smoothly rolling—HeartMath calls it “coherent”—heart rhythm, while feelings of anger, frustration, fear and danger emit a jagged and capricious—”incoherent”—image. But this is more than a statistical difference. HeartMath’s research shows that a different heart rhythm leads to other chemical and electrical–even neurological–reactions in the body. Simply put: when people experience love, they not only feel happy and joyful, but they also produce, for example, more DHEA, the hormone that prevents aging, and gives us feelings of youthful vitality. Not surprisingly, a synthetic form of the hormone is currently sold in pill form at drugstores and health food stores. At the same time, the production of damaging stress hormones like cortisol is reduced. High levels of cortisol have been associated with Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, depression and fatigue. By contrast, a “loving body” absorbs less cholesterol, thereby preventing arteries from clogging while boosting production of immunoglobulin A, an important biochemical that boosts immune function. In addition, blood pressure stabilizes. McCraty links this effect to problems many organizations face: “There is a clear connection between healthcare costs and blood pressure levels. When your blood pressure falls, so do visits to the doctor…” And so HeartMath concludes that love is both an emotional and a physical state: positive feelings—like love—generate health. The reverse is also true. Someone who is angry produces less DHEA and more cortisol. And so on. HeartMath’s slogan—a change of heart changes everything—pretty much sums it up. But how do you “change your heart?”
According to HeartMath research, it is much simpler than it looks. McCraty says, “If you consciously shift your attention to a positive emotion, like appreciation or care, or if you allow your thoughts to return to the feeling of a cherished memory, your heart rhythm changes immediately.” This phenomenon continues to astonish the some 25,000 people who attend HeartMath courses each year. Initially, HeartMath utilized expensive medical equipment to measure and display the heart rhythm. But since 2000 HeartMath has offered a “do-it-yourself” equivalent: the Freeze-Framer, an award-winning computer program with an innovative sensor that anyone can install in their computer at home or at work. So far, HeartMath has sold more than 30,000 of these systems. The first time I start up the Freeze-Framer at home and attach the sensor to my finger, a freakish pattern appears on my computer screen (see image). My heart rhythm is all wild peaks and valleys or—in HeartMath jargon—an “incoherent pattern.” I then perform my prescribed exercise. I shift my thoughts to the area around my heart, I visualize that I’m breathing in through my heart and out through my solar plexus (the energy point under the breastbone, above the belly button). I remember a sweet memory with my daughter. I feel the warmth of our contact at that moment… and I see the graph on the computer screen change. The exercise, which I’ve only been doing for a couple of minutes, is quick and effective. The volatile peaks change into rolling hills on my screen. My incoherent heart rhythm has synchronized into a coherent rhythm. And what I can’t see on the line of the graph, but know—from HeartMath research—is that my body is now functioning in a more healthy and wholesome way. The research is convincing. A group of managers from Motorola attended a HeartMath workshop and were tested six months later on the results of their daily exercises. One-quarter of the managers had high blood pressure at the start of the project. After six months, they all had normal blood pressure levels. In another study with Hewlett-Packard managers, the average blood pressure fell from 138/86 to 128/80. This large an improvement is comparable to the effect of losing nearly 20 kilos (44 pounds). A recent study of employees at the food and household products multinational Unilever shows that the production of the favourable hormone DHEA increased by an average of 50 percent after six months of HeartMath exercises and rose to 90 percent after nine months.
The exercises also work for people with chronic diseases. For example, diabetes patients who performed a total of one hour of HeartMath exercises every week for six months scored significantly better on a number of health aspects crucial to them. Another HeartMath study indicates that the savings on health care costs and absenteeism can run up to $ 700 U.S. (540 euros) per employee a year. For a company with 1,000 employees, that would mean a savings of $ 700,000 U.S. (540,000 euros) a year. The fact the exercises are so easy may well be the most promising aspect of the HeartMath system. Bruce Cryer notes, “Time pressure is continually increasing. No matter how good a program might be for them, many people simply don’t take the time to invest in their emotional and physical health every day. People want exercises to take virtually no time, but to yield results. That’s the strength of our approach. You can learn the techniques in five minutes and get positive results if you do them a few times a day for 30 seconds. When you’re on your way to your next meeting, for example. Or when you start up your computer. Or sitting at a stoplight. Or waiting to make a phone call. Or before starting to check your e-mails. By making the techniques simple and quick, you can integrate them into your daily schedule without having to drastically change your life.” Regularly using the Freeze-Framer is particularly helpful in recognizing stress patterns. You gain insight into your own behaviour and the effect of that behaviour on your health. In that respect, the Freeze-Framer works like a thermometer: you get to the point where you don’t need to take your temperature any more to know you have a fever. As a result, it becomes ever easier to quickly correct the experience of stress. Cryer says, “HeartMath’s aim is to eliminate stress. Of course we can’t eliminate stressful events from our lives, but we can change our physiological and emotional response to them. The goal is to teach you to recognize which circumstances create stress so you can change your reaction to those situations. For example, practising a HeartMath technique helps you not to curse if someone cuts you off on the highway, but to react differently. And the most important result is that no damaging stress hormones are released in your body and no damaging comments come out of your mouth that could make the situation much worse.” Is HeartMath the only effective answer to stress? Clearly not. Every walk on the beach is beneficial. The same goes for an enjoyable concert. And for experiences of friendship and love. There are also other promising initiatives with a comparable focus. Ode previously reported on the work of the Italian Amedeo Maffei (see Ode, June 2002) as well as the computer game Wild Divine (see Ode, April 2004). And there are other projects geared towards synchronising the heart and brain rhythms to stimulate favourable biochemical and electrical processes in our bodies. But the strength of HeartMath lies in the convincing evidence of the effectiveness of the exercises and their simplicity. And its approach takes into account the sense of time pressure continually experienced by the stressed target group. Less stress and more health is, of course, enough of a recommendation for following HeartMath’s system. But there’s more: studies show that the electromagnetic field of the heart (which is created by the heart’s electrical system, or electrocardiogram) can be measured from between two and three metres from the body. HeartMath has discovered that if someone has a coherent heart rhythm, it has a demonstrably positive effect on other people in close proximity to him or her (and the reverse is also true). Just think about how you feel in the presence of someone who is appreciative or caring, compared to being close to someone angry or frustrated. That is: if your own heart rhythm is coherent, there is a greater chance that your environment will also behave coherently. That is: the health of your environment starts with your own health. That is: changing the world starts with you. Cryer notes how, “A lot of people feel powerless. Climate change. Poverty. War. Terrorism. There are so many things we could fear in the world.
So where do you start as an individual, when the size of the problems seem so daunting? It is important to know that you can have a demonstrably positive effect on the world. We can change the world, starting with ourselves.” That enthusiasm is behind all the solid research done by HeartMath. This vision also explains why the Institute never opted for quick fixes, but instead preferred building steady proof of concept. Cryer concludes, “It is our mission to help the world change, by helping people change. The root of most of our world’s problems is a lack of emotional management, a lack of understanding, care, respect and compassion. Most organizations and governments are fairly dysfunctional, because their leaders lack skills to manage themselves emotionally, let alone be an example for others to follow. That dysfunction damages the planet every day. We offer tools that are needed to eradicate major challenges and problems and to prevent wrongs.” Those tools help the heart to make love. All you need is love, John Lennon sang. It’s as simple as that.