Between the Cracks: A blog by Albert Clayton Gaulden

Global Prayer Project
Prayer, Meditation & Discussion 
with James & Salle Redfield

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Tuesday, July 1
8-9 pm Eastern/US

click here to convert to your local time

Accessible via Live Teleconference & Webcast
- see below -

If you can’t join us, please hold a supportive prayer vision for the world at that time…

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This week’s prayer visualization
Tensions are escalating in the Middle East. Iran continues to posture for the destruction of Isreal and many in the west are calling for a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear program. Our prayer initiative will focus on all parties involved and visualize that leaders will emerge who can find a way toward a peaceful resolution. Also, as usual, we will focus on the needs of our participants, sending a prayer visualization for all those experiencing grief, conflicts, illness, or just a need for clarity about a decision, to move toward peace.

Follow-up discussion
Is war and violence ever a correct response to conflict? When will we end wars?

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Our twice-monthly gatherings have been making a powerful difference, both in people’s individual lives and the world at large. Many of you have written us saying that the energy generated from this network of spiritually-minded participants is “indescribable,” and we look forward to continuing this healing circle of focused prayer. Like all prayer experience devoted to helping others, many participants have felt the results in their own bodies and received guidance for their own lives.

Research tells us that the more people praying together, the more powerful the prayer and the greater the level of energy felt by the participants. We invite you to join the largest regular prayer network in the world. If you would like to take an active role in maintaining a circle of positive intention across the globe, while going deeper and heightening your own spirituality, join us on Tuesday, July 1.

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US & CANADA
Tuesday, July 1
8 pm New York 
5 pm Los Angeles

AUSTRALIA
Wednesday, July 2
10 am Sydney

EUROPE
Wednesday, July 2
1 am London

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Teleconference:
Call 212/461-5860 OR 646/519-5860
Caller ID: 6999#

The phone line will open at 7:55pm EDT. Call the number above and follow the directions. Once you are connected to the call, please say your name and where you are from, and then press *6 to mute yourself so the noise level will be kept to a minimum. Each participant will be responsible for their own long-distance phone charges.

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Let’s see how large we can grow, and how much difference we can make…

Blessings,
James Redfield
Salle Merrill Redfield

EXTENDING PRAYER FIELDS
For centuries, religious scriptures, poems, and philosophies have pointed to a latent power of mind within all of us that mysteriously helps to affect what occurs in the future. We are now finding that this prayer power is a field of intention, which moves out from us and can be extended and strengthened, especially when we connect with others in a common vision.
The Eleventh Insight

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The Internet news sites have headlines about President Bush’s welcoming remarks to Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in the Oval Office. The quotation makes us want to cringe.”And I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the — of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House”. (Laughter.)

First, let’s set the record straight. The Executive Chef at the White House is a woman named Cristeta Comerford. She was selected after a 10 month search and has no doubt earned her title and her longevity in the job. She is both the first woman and the first Filipino to hold the position. It is not a question of whether or not she deserves recognition.

The problem with the comment is that it displays the tin ear that our President has about what, when and how to say something that is appropriate. We expect the word salad at the beginning of the sentence; that’s old hat. What makes us cringe or, in this case, nervously laugh, is how little attention this man pays to anything that is not directly in front of his face. Filipino-Americans have been artists, authors, poets, politicians, athletes and Medal of Honor recipients. They have lived in this country since the middle of the 18th century. One would think that someone at the White House would slip Mr. Bush a list of 3 -5 prominent people that he might reference along with his chef. It would have been a small act, a gracious act, but one that would have communicated respect.

But our President has turned into an easy target, a piñata for us all to take a whack at for anything from the war to the economy to health care and on and on. It’s almost too easy to cringe at what he says because most of us have come to the conclusion that much of what he says is at best ill informed or at worst a total misrepresentation of the facts. The real question for us all is how he came to be in the White House for eight years.

The easy answer is that we put him there. Not having voted for him doesn’t get any of us off the hook. He’s there because the majority of us voted for him the second time and the rest of us weren’t energized enough to oppose him. He is what we wanted and perhaps he is what we needed.

Consider this:
A very successful man has a large apartment in the city and several houses in the country in several different countries. He wants for nothing and devotes little thought to how he is blessed and how he accumulates his wealth. One day he walks out the front door of his building, begins to cross the street and is hit by a bus. Severely injured, he is taken to a hospital where he lies in traction for the better part of the year. As he lays there, in pain a good deal of the time, he evaluates his life. At the end of the year he leaves the hospital with a new awareness, a new set of values and a determination to define himself by something other than how much he has accumulated.

Was getting hit by the bus a good thing?

There are precious few of us who welcome misery and shame into our lives. The scriptures and the metaphysics may tell us that embracing pain it is the path to salvation and enlightenment, but not a lot of us are signing up for that – or so we think.

The fact is that we did sign up for it and we are in the latter stages of understanding what we chose. We can howl at the moon and beat our breasts and rend our clothing; it may be cathartic but it won’t accomplish much. Identifying what we don’t want may be useful, but nothing really changes until we do the work of being clear on what we do want.

From that perspective, Bush has been a necessary and important step in the rebirth of the promise of America. Without him we would not see who we have become and without him we would not recognize who we can be again.

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George Will was on NPR (National Public Radio) one night last week when I was searching the dial to fill an evening when the New York Mets were not playing baseball (and therefore not losing) and I was in need of some background conversation. Mr. Will, for those of you not in the United States, is a conservative columnist and a regular on a Sunday talk show. He is a well groomed fellow who wears wire rimmed glasses and a bow ties and he speaks with a certainty that I associate with my grandfather. It’s a very comforting certainty, almost narcotic in its effect.Mr. Will believes in the marketplace. It is, in his opinion, the panacea for all ailments. The US automobile industry is suffering because it should – it makes lousy cars that no one wants to buy. Oil prices reflect demand – drill more, increase supply and the price will go down. There is something very absolute in his views. Simply behave in the manner he proscribes and all will be well. All will be well if you look down from 50,000 feet, but on the ground things don’t seem to operate with the seductive simplicity that Mr. Will insists on.

When we think of the market most of us think about the stock market. Putting the latest index prices for the exchanges in New York, Tokyo, London and Frankfurt on one’s home page is a simple matter and our spirits can be dashed or buoyed by the red or black numbers that we see. Unfortunately, as we have discovered in fits and starts over the past year, the stock exchanges are really no longer the place where most trading occurs. There are unregulated markets for “structured financial products” which include mortgage backed securities, insurance on those securities and a whole range of other derivative instruments. The face value of these instruments dwarfs the value (several times over) of all the stocks and bonds traded on the regulated financial markets.

The unraveling of this system of derivatives is ongoing and it might be reasonable to assume that Mr. Will would instruct us not to be circumspect in our definition of the market. He might tell us that the credit squeeze, the foreclosures and the unemployment resulting from the financial losses in seemingly tangential treasury functions of corporations is but an example of the marketplace working its magic, regulated or not. Here the simplicity of the concept begins to get tangled up in human suffering but life is tough. You get what you pay for. The market is the great leveler of man’s folly.

No doubt that the competitive attitude required to play in the capitalist system has generated tremendous advances in the standard of living and the ability for humans to live in hope and see a brighter future. While that future seems increasingly in question the issue is not whether the market works but whether or not we have evolved as human beings since the 18th century. Commerce is but one part of our lives. Many cultures embrace that idea and incorporate relationships, family, art, science and religion or spirituality and give them equal or greater importance. We here in the United States tend to look askance at those folks. They ought to stop hanging around and get to work.

This idea that the lives of people, their aspirations, health and wellbeing had no value in commerce was informally codified in the United States in the early 90″s when virtually all corporations broke the social contract and subsequent legislation allowed them to terminate anyone and everyone for any or no reason at all. This ability to reduce or expand “headcount” without having to deal with external agencies or mandatory severance made us more nimble and efficient. The problem with all this, however, is that employees quickly understood the game and began to see their current employment as a place to build a resume in anticipation of the next job. Identification with the company and the strategy has fractured along with all of the built in risk management attributes that were so valuable when employees were valuable. Most theft these days occurs inside companies, not from external 3rd parties.

Hard times often results in a reevaluation of what is important and what is not. The market, whose only metric is profit, has defined what is valuable for the past three decades. We have an opportunity to think that through again.

I suppose Mr. Will and I do share something in common; a love of baseball and the manner in which it is a metaphor for American life. The game seems to embody every aspect of our culture. There is cheating and stealing and there are umpires who can’t seem to see a foul pole or a strike zone. There are also acrobatic catches, clutch hitting and tremendous heart and determination, individually and collectively. We Americans are all those things and we seem to gyrate back and forth between the good and the ugly in a wave that has greater amplitude in their expression than in most other countries. But there is a growing sense that we might be on the verge of fixing some things.

I believe Mr. Will’s team is the St. Louis Cardinals. They aren’t doing so well either.

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 By Sarah McLean

Eckhart Tolle, author of A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, says that stress can be defined as wanting the present moment to be different than it is. Dr. Dr. David Simon, co-director of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Southern California, agrees. He says that stress is caused by anything getting in the way of our desires.

Want a parking space and can’t find one? Stress. Too much to do and not enough time? Stress. Want the perfect relationship and don’t think you have it? Stress…..

We can’t escape it, so what is the best way to deal with the stress we face every day? One antidote to the effects of stress is to practice meditation, but it isn’t always the most appropriate way to deal with stress in the moment you feel it: you might be at a meeting, or driving….. So what to do?

Stress activates our sympathetic nervous system, which sets off the flight or flight psycho-physiological response. This response increases our heart rate, raises our blood pressure and changes our breathing pattern. One way to take control of the effects of the stress response is to physically change our breath.

When people are stressed, they tend to take rapid shallow breaths or even forget to breathe at all. Once you realize your breath has changed in this way, you can literally stop the stress response by taking some slow deep breaths. Deep breaths send a signal to your mind and body that it is time to relax. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and slows you way down. And you can do this anywhere and anytime.

The deep breath, of course, replenishes the oxygen, just in case you were holding your breath due to a stressful situation. And there is more. When you stop putting your attention on the stressful stimulus in the outside world and redirect your attention to your body and feel the sensation of breathing deeply, it will help you slow down and relax.

With your awareness on your body, you might notice other areas where stress is creating a physical response, and then put your attention on those. Maybe your jaw is clenched, you are scowling, or your shoulders are up around your ears. When you’re busy reacting to stress, you tend to be unaware of your body and its needs.

Bringing your awareness to your body also helps you to bring your attention to the present moment. When you are in the present moment, you can respond more mindfully to whatever the stressful situation is instead of worrying about the future or agonizing over the past.

There is an aspect of yoga (yoga refers to the union of mind, body, spirit and environment), which uses the breath, it is a practice called pranayama.

This practice is based on the idea that prana (sometimes called chi or ki or life force energy) and the mind exert an influence on each other. By working with the breath through the practice of pranayama, the restlessness of the mind and the effects of stress are easily controlled.

There are a variety of practices in the yoga of breath. Some people practice pranayama alone or as a preparation for meditation.

Here is one example. It is the slow and steady breath practice. It is simple and you can try it now:

1. Scan your body and let yourself get comfortable where you are.

2. Relax your face and shoulders. Don’t hold in your tummy.

3. Take a deep, slow inhale, breathing through your nose.

4. Feel the breath as it enters the nostrils, travels down your throat and expands your lungs and your belly…

5. Let it out just as slowly, then, do it again, noticing your chest drop and your stomach contract a bit.

6. Do this 5 – 6 times with your eyes open or closed.

7. Return to your normal breathing, feeling more centered, and more relaxed.

This is one of the easiest ways to quickly find more balance, especially when driving or sitting in front of your computer. Reminding yourself every once in a while to stop, take a break, and take some deep breaths.

Recently featured in the NY Times and quickly becoming recognized as the face of mainstream meditation, Sarah McLean makes meditation accessible to everyone. Sarah is a frequent guest on KTVK’s “Your Life A-Z” and is a sought-after presenter on the subject of meditation, stress-reduction and self awareness.  She can be reached at meditate@esedona.net, 928.204.0067 or visit her web site at http://www.sedonameditation.com/.

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