Stories

Sharing is a vital aspect of community building. By uniting isolated neighbors into caring networks, sharing has the capacity to create communities of people who understand that their greatest source of abundance is in their shared, human assets. Parents who struggle alone to provide for their families, for example, can collaborate with neighbors for reliable, quality childcare, teen mentoring with local seniors, meal and ride sharing. Key to community building, however, is good governance and decision-making processes. Being a long-committed community-builder, I am excited to describe a highly effective governance system that enables communities to be thriving contexts of caring, collaborative relationships.

Living Well Community & Care Home

From the outside, Living Well Care Home looks like a regular older home in the neighborhood. Even walking in, you’d never know it is a holistic, 15-room, Level III, residential care and assisted living facility for elders.

Located in Bristol, Vermont since 2004, Living Well emphasizes organic nutrition, whole life care and sustainability. They are the first nonprofit health care facility in the country to use Dynamic Governance (DG), a style of management based on co-creative input from all levels of the organization – including residents.

In just four years, they started receiving national and international recognition.

Just five days before I was scheduled to leave for a month-long healing and seminar tour of Europe, my husband called from work and asked me to pick him up—he wasn’t feeling well.

I struggled not to panic as he described stroke-like symptoms of losing function in his hand and leg. 
I rushed out the door and within twenty minutes we were on our way to the emergency room. With one hand on the steering wheel and one hand on him, I calmed myself by going into a familiar healing state.

Enhancing Western Medicine
Once we were in the emergency room, an MRI test was quickly scheduled to scan his brain. The medical team asked Bill repeatedly if he was claustrophobic—the test involved a forty-minute wait in a narrow tube—and he said it wouldn’t be a problem. But once in the MRI, he panicked almost immediately and couldn’t go through with it.

This article is an experiment in miracle-making. It’s an invitation to suspend disbelief, let your mind be boggled, and have an experience of reality beyond what you think you know for certain.

Miracles are more readily found in the slightly unsettling territory of paradox than on familiar ground so, if you’re game, let the experiment begin right now by imagining the earth shifting just a bit underfoot and that nothing you see is what it appears to be.

The more of this article you read, the more deeply you will enter into a miracle-making experiment. Modern science is demonstrating that we can’t change our minds without affecting the world around us and, as easily as reading these words, your mind, and your world, are changing. If it’s your will, you will become a miracle-maker. And if you’re feeling excited, it’s already begun.

Connecting to the Miracle of Oneness

Collaborative Relationships:
Living Outside the Box of the Single-Family Home
By resident Gaya Erlandson, PhD

When the CBS filming crew arrived on Tuesday morning December 14, at 9:30, I had no idea of what to expect, or that they’d stay until 6:30 PM.

Producer Jeanine Ibrahim had called from NY just three weeks before interested in doing a 5-minute piece on ‘Golden Girls’ – women age 45 and over, living together under one roof. Our community at Lotus Lodge, while never limited to women only, at the time fit the bill.

Initial Interviews
Jeanine took the time to call and talk with each of the four (of the five) of us well before they filmed, starting with me. “Yes, we are all quite independent, each with our own jobs and schedule, our own bank accounts, our own food and our own private room, much like the Golden Girls TV show.

In June of 1997, I swallowed every prescription in the medicine cabinet (there were quite a few) and chased them down with tequila – after drinking all day with a “friend.” In the wee hours of the morning, wearing only a tee shirt and my underwear, I dragged my blankie and curled up on the railroad tracks out in the woods to die.

Somehow someone found me and I was rushed to the hospital and stomach pumped. I spent two days in progressive care and then four days in the ward where they take all sharp objects and shoelaces away and have only one handle on the door – on the other side.

For years I could not recall anything about that event but awareness began leaking into my consciousness. Now I know that I was crying out to and was praying for help like I had never prayed before - desperately, and from the depths of my soul.

Fast Forward to 2008

The universe was trying to tell me something. But all I heard was noise–the commotion that was coming from across the street. My neighbor was demolishing his driveway. He was breaking old pavement into pieces with a jackhammer; I could feel the vibration in every room of my house.

There was no escaping the sound of reconstruction. No matter where I went, it followed me. Leaving home was not an option. My husband had taken our only car to run errands.

This was not the quiet Saturday I had planned. I couldn’t read my book or write in my journal. I couldn’t meditate or take a peaceful walk around the block. All I could do was take aspirin and pray for the noise to stop.

The project continued for hours; the noise was relentless. At one point my head was pounding, so I sat on the basement stairs, closed my eyes and made myself breathe. While I was covering my ears with my hands, thoughts surfaced out of nowhere. Maybe I’m hearing this noise for a reason.

As of October 23, 2009, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to inundate us with chilling swine flu tales: 46 states report a swine flu outbreak; 20,000 hospitalized with the Swine Flu since April; 1000 swine flu deaths in the US alone. In response, President Obama declared the Swine Flu outbreak a national emergency.

Chilling facts but There's Other Information

Behind this statistical mask, the pharmaceuticals tout their latest miracle drug to combat this enemy. In turn, our government urges and even demands our participation in a massive inoculation.

Panicked, many of us respond in fear. Due to this, people across the country wait in line to receive the swine flu vaccine. In Los Angeles County, according to Dr. Jonathan E. Fielding, the county's director of public health, the county clinics vaccinate about 300 people an hour.

Given this information, what would Buddha do?

We landed late in the evening and yet it was hot. A dry heat hugged me when I stepped off of the plane and first touched her. I know now why Africa is called the "Motherland".

I first truly felt her about 12 hours after we landed. She moved so slowly and deeply and anciently. I felt the vibration reach through me and touch a place within and deeper than my bones...a place I had not yet consciously visited in this lifetime. She felt more like the Great Great Ancient Primal Grandmother to me as I allowed myself to experience her.

This was not the vibration of Mother Earth that I was used to feeling in the mountains of North Carolina or at the edge of the ocean or even in the western US. This was deeper than the deepest resonance I had known.

She worked diligently in my bones the entire time and birthed my energetic and physical systems from new depths. Frequencies I had not yet experienced burst forth from beneath my flesh and moved through me.

Ancient Memories

Dowsing: A Path to Enlightenment — by Joey Korn

When most people think of dowsing, they think of an old-timer using a forked tree branch to find a place to drill for underground water. That's what I used to think too. Now I see dowsing as a powerful tool for self-exploration, for understanding the natural forces of the Universe, and for working knowingly with the Divine and with Nature in our lives.

I learned to dowse in 1986 from a kindly old gentleman who helped me find our septic tank with a pair of cut up coat hangers. He had fashioned them into L-shaped wires (that's why they're called L-rods) and he walked with the long parts pointing ahead of him, using the short parts as handles.

Dowsing for Objects