Tag archives: meditation
What’s that? You’re wondering what a column on spirituality is doing featuring an item on singing? A sensible query, to be sure, and while the answer could be a smarmy “Anything is spiritual if that’s your vantage point,” the inCourage Chorus truly takes a heart-based, spirit-invoking approach to vocalizing with melody, rhythm, and harmony in […]
On Monday morning, exactly half a year since the debris flow devastated Montecito and destroyed lives and lifestyles, La Casa de Maria posted an update to its website about the ongoing recovery efforts. The retreat center located just below the San Ysidro Ranch was hard hit by the January 9 mudslide, as nine of its […]
Tenzin Gyatso, otherwise known as His Holiness the Great 14th Dalai Lama, has made several visits to Santa Barbara to offer his inspired messages of peace and hope for the world. Formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama at age 2, he assumed full duties at 15 in 1950 after the People’s Republic of China’s […]
Nearly everyone has a relationship they’d like to, ahem, adjust, perhaps wrangling with a romantic partner, sorting out sibling situations, still feeling frustration over family foibles, or maybe handling conflict with a co-worker. But transforming relationships starts with making changes in ourselves, says Crystal Stokes, who has offered transpersonal/spiritual psychology and coaching in Santa Barbara […]
Meditation is much more than mindfulness, and a deeper state a more readily available through the body, says Timothy Tillman, M.A., CHT, a now Santa Barbara-based Somatic and Hakomi therapist who also leads weekly meditation gatherings at both a yurt at his Mission Canyon home and at Yoga Soup. Tillman – who is also a […]
Grief is a given in this life and a natural part of the human experience, but many people refuse to allow themselves to dive fully into their sadness, and definitely not in public. Yet many other cultures throughout time have processed grief in community; its expression is a casualty of our modern times. Alexis Slutzky […]
Peace Sticks seems like a super-simple concept – participants toss a pair of sticks back and forth with a partner. And that’s exactly how it started with Shane and Evan Rilling, the Ojai-based brothers who created the practice. “It came to us on a hike more than a decade ago, when we picked up some […]
As the one-year anniversary of the Thomas Fire and Montecito debris flow approach, we’re imagining there will be several local events to commemorate the milestones of the twin tragedies. Ojai, which was hit early and hard by the fire, as the village’s Community Healing Sanctuary – a collaborative group that has hosted such events as […]
Anyone who has attended any of Lisa Citore‘s Anima offerings of Women’s Ritual Theater is aware of the solid mind-body-spirit connection exemplified by the self-described “pleasure activist,” writer, sex educator, and healer brings to her work, whether in the field of performance art or sacred sexuality workshops, or anything between. But for the last several […]
The Spiritualist Church of The Comforter of Santa Barbara has roots that date back more than 125 years to its charter in Summerland in 1891, when it served as the focal point of a small community developed as a summer camp for the newly founded Spiritualist Organization. The church had to relocate when the 101 […]
Back in February, I had promised I would write about my experiences at my first-ever silent retreat early that month at Sunburst Sanctuary. But at first, trying to put into words what was almost exclusively a sensory and spiritual experience felt profoundly unsatisfying, perhaps alsmost profane. Then time goes by, life resumes, challenges arise, columns […]
Yemaya Renuka Duby moved to Santa Barbara only last year, but the somatic therapy practitioner-health and lifestyle coach brought with her a wealth a experience. Duby is a 25-year veteran of the Rosen Method – a psychosomatic system integrating body, emotional, and mental experiences in releasing unconscious patterns of behavior – who trained directly under […]
It was early last spring, just over a year ago, that Mark Ruskin published his second book of poetry, On Love’s Path ~ New Versions of Rumi, Kabir & Hafiz, in which he intuitively interprets the words of the great mystic poets through his own heart as a Chinese medicine healer. As with his first […]
H.E. Sakya Dagmola returns to Santa Barbara for a weekend retreat “The Essential Meaning of Ngondro, Preliminary Practices in Tibetan Buddhism”, this weekend April 14-15. Dagmola, who is a senior teacher and acting head Lama of Sakya Monastery of Tibetan Buddhism in Seattle – which was one of the first dharma centers in the West […]
Making money and living a conscious life are not mortal enemies. So suggests May McCarthy, who over the last 35 years has founded and grown seven profitable companies, in a variety of industries including fashion retail, telecommunications, healthcare software, and capital equipment, that employs 250 people and bring in more than $100 million in annual […]
The beginning of Bonnie and David Paul‘s The Freedom to Choose Project came more or less out of the blue 15 years ago when the couple were on the faculty in spiritual psychology at the University of Santa Monica. An inmate at a California prison who had been inspired by a story she read in […]
Nearly all the spiritual traditional and psychological systems suggest that suffering comes from how we interpret our experiences. Life is always going to have painful moments – but it’s what we make them mean that determines our level of inner happiness on anguish. There are many paths that aim to help humans alleviate the symptoms […]
The second Monday of December, at the height of the smoke and ash filling the air from the Thomas Fire, I donned my N95 mask and headed down to Yoga Soup for “The Big Sing”, the final session of the initial inCourage Community Chorus classes led by Britta Gudmunson and Ben Gould. It was quite […]
Sunburst Sanctuary scheduled its popular annual silent meditation retreat long before the flames and flood afflicted Montecito and environs. And while our chatter-filled minds make it seem like staying quiet for a weekend could be cause for anxiety, perhaps quiet contemplation in the community is the perfect elixir for these challenging circumstances. Whatever the impetus, […]
Like all of us in the Montecito/greater Santa Barbara area, I have had a lot of personal reactions to the Montecito mudslide disaster coming on the heels of the Thomas Fire, from numbness to grief to fear to hopefulness and even gratitude. The latter came mostly last weekend in the wake of the community coming […]
