In my work, I get to see the underbelly of our social order: the patterns of unhappiness and hardship which we suffer alone, but which are shared by others in epidemic proportions. These are the disorders of society which breed widespread personal unhappiness.

James Hillman, Jungian analyst, alludes to just such a societal disorder when he comments that one of the hardest things which he has to treat is his clients’ schedules. Hillman notes that their schedules are their defenses against change. Said another way, your personal organizer is your defense. Your to-do list is your personal tyrant. Your busyness is your soul’s captor. We haven’t the time to allow into our lives the changes that would be a salve to our souls.

Another expression of this societal disorder is a profoundly unhappy friend who regularly works 60 to 80 hour weeks. When asked why she doesn’t refuse to work such hours, she replies, “I can’t.” She’s is afraid of losing her job, although she is losing her soul. She notes her company’s informal motto is “excellence through anxiety.” I kid you not. It reminds me of another person who mentioned his company’s informal motto is “excellence through paranoia.” Read more »

Imagine you’re playing a card game. A very unusual card game. Matter of fact, it’s a game you play every day. It’s called, “Life”. Every day, you’re dealt the cards of your life situation. Every day the same other player wins. Here’s today’s play.

The cards are dealt: today’s life situation.

The first player throws out a judgment. “It shouldn’t be like this!”

The next player tosses in an expectation. “I’m disappointed.”

The third player slams down an argument. Read more »

I work with many intelligent people. Despite their intelligence, often they are stymied by dilemmas with which they have struggled in thought – often for a very long time. Occasionally I may remark, “With your obvious intelligence and with all your thinking about this, if you haven’t yet arrived at answer, perhaps it might be because you’ve been searching for your answer in the wrong place.”

Such dilemmas remind me of the crazy wisdom teacher, Nasruddin, an Islamic character whose humorous exploits are spiritual teachings with many depths of meaning. Let me paraphrase one of my favorite Nasruddin stories, for it may suggest an answer to such getting stuck. Read more »

Summer construction, noisy neighbors, fax machines, laughing children, or the refrigerator’s hum: wherever we find ourselves, we are usually surrounded by some sort of sound. As an Intuitive Life Coach, I find that most people underestimate the degree to which life’s “soundtrack” affects our lives. People make vision boards for the Law of Attraction, using words as affirmations but rarely tuning into the primal power of sound itself.

This is a major untapped resource! Background awareness drops directly into the subconscious, thereby reprogramming us from the inside out. Whether you consider yourself a visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner, you can use the power of sound to amplify desired improvements in your life. In some ways, sacred sound can “do the work for you” by raising your vibration even as you focus on other things. Effortless action? Sounds good to me! Read more »

Sacred artist Manny Neuzil creates earthy, elegant and deeply meaningful jewelry with stone cairns, Tibetan mala beads and natural turquoise wheels.

Of her work Manny says:

I am repeatedly drawn to stones and other elements that inspire me to create jewelry that is a bit unrefined, beautifully irregular and suggestive of the spiritual.

Some of the elements I am most drawn to are organic and unrefined stones, ancient pieces, Tibetan mala beads, and ethnic additions. I prefer to use creative elements that are not too many steps removed from the earth…imperfectly perfect.

Her materials have stories to tell as well as cultural and spiritual significance.

Cairns have been used for centuries as path markers and landmarks. My cairns are inspired by such stacks and the power of suggestion and guidance from within and without that is ever available to us.

The Mala beads that I use are salvaged from the remains of old Tibetan Prayer Malas. I love

wondering where they’ve been, whose hands have smoothed and softened them, moving over them in prayer and meditation, counting off mantras.

The turquoise is natural and irregularly cut and is quite complex, full of so many other types of stone that I can’t begin to explain it’s effect. Each wheel bead is completely unique and unlike the next. Each one is a small, rich and complete masterpiece that both surprises and delights me.

For more about her process and materials, and to view additional pieces visit Manny’s page in our Sacred Art Gallery.

If you will be in northwestern Oregon this weekend join sacred artist and Touchstones contributor Mara Berendt Friedman at the Rose Spring Center for the Healing Arts in Hillsboro for Passion!!!Flower Sacred Art Playshop on Saturday June 19th.

Bring family and friends for a shared potluck dinner, guided meditation and drumming. A collection of Mara’s paintings and drawings celebrating the Beauty of Woman can also be seen on display at Rose Spring Center from Saturday June 19th through August 31st. For more details visit http://touchstonesofthesacred.com/artists/mara-berendt-friedman.

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This year marks Cerro Pedernal Heritage Association’s 3rd annual Arts Tour.

If you are in New Mexico head over this weekend to support the work of local traditional and contemporary New Mexico artists including Touchstones contributor Jan West. Directions and more details about the event are available at http://www.pedernalheritage.org/

Jan took the photograph at right while sitting before dawn in Ghost House where Georgia O’Keeffe lived during her first year in New Mexico.  O’Keefe continued to live in near by Abiquiu, New Mexico and in her second house on the Ghost Ranch property, until she had to move to Santa Fe near the end of her life.

A fun story Jan tells about this photograph: I befriended a dear and spectacular story teller named Tio Manzanarez.  Tio was Georgia O’keeffe’s personal assistant for about 13 years starting at age 13.  I sent him this image as a greeting card last summer and without blinking an eye, he said, “Ansel Adams used to play the piano for Miss O’keeffe in that room.”

Liz Alpert believes that through the creation of beautiful healing jewelry she will inspire others on their path towards healing of mind, body and soul.

Since the age of six, Liz has been drawn to jewelry making.  Combining powerful energies emanating from the gemstones, along with her expert background in graphic design, results in unique creations of spiritual jewelry.

Every piece in her line is intended to bring joy, love, happiness and empowerment!

For the past several decades, Liz has been a practitioner and teacher of several healing modalities including Reiki, Reconnective Healing, and Quantum Entrainment.

Working from her Sedona, Arizona home Liz practices Distance Healing using these modalities often resulting in dramatic sessions that help to remove long standing blockages within individuals.

To see more of Liz’s breathtaking sacred jewelry visit her page in our Sacred Art Gallery.

The light. The dark. All of you.

We all have a light side comprised of our beauty, our strengths. And there’s the stuff we hide–our humanity, if you will. We are practiced at hiding our dark side, living only half ourselves, and wondering why we feel slightly numb. This is a loss of power. It can eat away at us if we don’t recognize it.

Restoring Power brings the light and dark sides onto equal ground. So that we live in wholeness, we engage authentically and powerfully. …So that we bring to life ALL OF YOU.

Stagnation is hell, isn’t it?

Real power isn’t forced. How much of your life are you forcing? Pushing against it, hating the effort, numbing out. Are you getting as far as you’d like in the direction you are pushing?

from restoringpower.com

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Touchstones sponsor Regina Perata is a coach, speaker and therapist who works with clients one-on-one by phone and in person. For those in the Portland, OR area check out her groups and retreats, including the juicy sounding Restoring Power Organic Retreat coming up at Hidden Lake July 10 and 11.

It’s too easy to identify with “being busy” – don’t we all use this phrase at least daily?  When we say this what do we really mean?

We feel we have too much to do and our experience of life is overwhelmed by activities, thoughts, and limited perceptions about time. Often what we need is a spacious moment to step back from all the things we are busy with and come home to ourselves.

One way to create a beautiful spacious moment for yourself is to mindfully cultivate an eye for beauty. It is all around us and I find it’s one of the best ways to cut through the buzzing tunnel vision of “I’m too busy”. We all have varying tolerances for the usual demands of daily life. When we pay attention to the things that stress us out as well as the things that soothe and relax us we are one step closer to joy; we are making space for it in our lives.

Take a Beauty Break

The joy that I experience in nature is tremendously nourishing. After several hours at my computer my favorite break-time ritual is to stretch my body while a pot of tea steeps. I take a fragrant, steaming mug into my garden and walk slowly with wide open senses visiting all the plants and creatures that inhabit this patch of land with me. I delight in the wild tangle of nature that grows along the periphery of my slightly-less-wild flower and vegetable beds and return to my work with more focus and creativity.

Beauty is a breath of fresh air that sweeps open the door to possibility. Surrounding ourselves with sacred art or listening to sacred music is another way to cut through the narrow-eyed gaze of “busyness” and connect with the timeless flow of being.

How do you connect to beauty?

Whatever it is that inspires you, settles your heart, and captures your imagination is a good place to start.

This past Friday, my sweet Little Lhasa Apso rescue dog, only eight weeks old, left this world.  My granddaughter Samantha had named her Padu, which means “puffball” in Tibetan.  Of course, she had to have a Tibetan name, given that she was, indeed, of Tibetan origin.

We’d been looking for the right dog for over a year when Sami discovered this breed and fell in love with a Lhasa Apso that she met while vacationing with my daughter.  “It’s the perfect dog!  You love Tibet and all the people there and it will remind you of being there”.  All true, so ahead we forged looking for a rescue site that had a Lhasa Apso.   Sami sent off an e-mail to a large rescue site in California and the next day I got a response stating that, yes, there was a rescued Lhasa Apso mom that had just had puppies, one of them female.  It seemed so easy and right.  We had found our baby!

We couldn’t get her until the first week of July, and I just couldn’t wait that long to see her.  So last Wednesday off my friend Eileen and I went to make the eight hour drive to meet her.  Read more »