Vital Elders

Heart Seeds, a Message From the Ancestors

Heart Seeds, a Message From the Ancestors is a loving, heartfelt and wise offering for the people of the world. Powerful, transformative, and beautifully written, this book will appeal both to seasoned spiritual seekers and novices, to individuals pursuing personal growth and to business leaders searching for deeper understanding and a better way. The profound and timeless stories—and lessons—the book conveys have implications for individuals, families, organizations, and nations.

Heart Seeds draws on an authentic spiritual framework with enduring philosophical lessons that have been passed orally across continents and through the centuries. Dedicated to remembering our relatedness and what is needed to come together as a people on the planet, the book stimulates the reader’s remembrance of being part of a whole, human family.

Buy at amazon.co.uk

Buy at amazon.com

21 Ways to Stay in the Peace

I don't know about you, but slipping out of peace is something I find easy to do!

So anything that helps me understand how I do this and what's needed to help me stay in peace is a real bonus. I found these 21 Ways to Stay in Peace and think they give a tremendous overview of a wide range of techniques and practices.

However, like most of the help in this area, it's simple but not easy.

What do you find helps you stay in peace?

How do you let go of attachments?

If you are a grandparent like me, I suspect you’ve also had strong views about how children, particularly your grandchildren, should be brought up.

As I write the words ‘your’ and ‘should’ I realise that these are attachments and they can be very dangerous for me. If I am not careful they lead me to behave in ways that create conflict.

I’ve been reflecting on this as I read these words from Eckhart Tolle:

"How do you let go of attachments to things? don't even try. It's impossible.

Attachments to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them"

I know I am attached when I have a strong emotional reaction to something that happens or to something someone says. Usually behind the attachment is a belief that I hold and may not even be aware of.

I think that when Tolle talks about ‘no longer seek to find yourself in them’ he is talking about the belief. This is the part of me that I find in the attachment. When I discover the belief, I can examine it and choose whether it’s a belief I want to hold or not.

When I let go of the belief then whatever happened or was said that previously triggered the emotion loses its power. It just is as it is.

When I appreciate how much my daughter and her partner love and care for their children then any beliefs I have about knowing how to do it better just ‘drops away’. I realise that I have to give them the space to do what they feel is best and not to struggle with my attachments. I have just to learn to be the best grandfather I can be.

Man's Achievement in Context?

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.”

Douglas Adams

I suspect the dolphins were closer to the truth!

Breathing for Inner Peace

I was at my doctors recently for a minor surgery to have a small growth removed off my face (no, not my nose!). I knew this was likely to disturb my inner peace so I used a way of slow breathing that I learned a while ago from a presentation I saw about the effect that even mild stress has on our heart rate.

The presenter wired a woman volunteer up so we could see her heartbeat monitored on the screen. When her heartbeat settled down the presenter announced that he was going to ask her to count backwards from a 100 in threes. Immediately he said this her heartbeat jumped through the roof but she was not aware of it.

It not being aware of our heart rate that can be a real challenge for us because when our heartbeat goes up like that the front part of our brain, the neo-cortex, shuts down and we lose our capacity to think straight. Have you ever tried to speak when confronted with a challenging situation only to find a lot of gobbledegook comes out of your mouth? Most of us have at some time and this is the effect of our front brain disconnecting itself.

So the solution that works for me it to breathe slowly – about a count of six to breathe in and the same out again. It was so effective that the doctor asked me twice if I was alright as I lay there with my eyes closed, aware of what was going on, but still in a world of my own.

How do you maintain your inner peace? Do click on Comments below and let us know.

We can’t stop war

We can’t stop war but we can cultivate inner peace.

Have you noticed how difficult it is to stop anything?

War, that is fighting between countries and groups, seems to proliferate irrespective of the activity of stop war or stop the war campaigns.

We have a war against drugs but, if anything, the problem is getting worse not better.

We want to stop cutting down the rain forests because we ‘know’ they are the lungs of the planet but we can’t make a lot of difference even when we ‘know’ that we are endangering our survival as a species.

I put know in quotes because the Chinese have a saying: ‘to know and not to do, is not to know’. For me this speaks to the difference between ‘head knowing’ which does not lead to action, and ‘heart knowing’ that does produce action.

The First Peace

"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Taka (the Great Spirit), and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. 

"This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is known that true peace, which, as I have often said, is within the souls of men."
 

Black Elk - Oglala Sioux 

A Critical Time

"Every world religion has taught us, in one way or another, that we are responsible for the circumstances occurring in our lives. What we send out through our thoughts, words, actions and feelings returns to us. This is true whether we are focusing our attention on hate or love, poverty or abundance, disease or health, war or peace.

"There is a grassroots awakening taking place, and literally millions of people all over the world are genuinely striving to create lives of joy, peace, abundance, health and comfort for themselves and their loved ones. The vast majority of the six and one-half billion people evolving on Earth want the same thing. They want to know that their families are safe and that they can provide food, shelter, security, health care, education and comfort for their loved ones."

From A Critical Time for the USA and Mother Earth by Patricia Diane Cota-Robles http://www.eraofpeace.org

We aim to do what we can to foster the 'grass roots' awakening by creating Councils of Peace to begin to connect the millions of individuals, groups and organisations who are on this journey. See our Invitation.

Invitation

We are part of an international group that is planning the launch of the World Foundation for the Discipline of Peace. The founders of the Foundation, WindEagle and RainbowHawk, are Elders and Keepers of a body of timeless wisdom tools and practices that have their roots in the Mayan and pre-Mayan cultures, and that teach us how to live in peace and harmony with ourselves and with each other.

We see that the opposite of war is not peace but vigilance, and that it takes more intention and energy to create peace than it does to wage war. We understand, as reflected in other spiritual traditions, the need for inner peace before we can achieve world peace.

The key aims of the Foundation are twofold...

Indigenous Science in the Modern World

The last few years have seen a re-assessment of the knowledge held by the indigenous peoples of the world, and a desire to understand traditional ways of life and the wisdom they contain.  One of the most exciting possibilities to emerge from this revival is a synthesis, a real dialogue between ancient and contemporary modes of knowledge.  The following article is one such contribution to that synthesis.  It is adapted from a talk between Jane Carroll of Beshara magazine and Pamela Colorado, founder of the World Indigenous Science Network (WISN).

"My thought concerning indigenous science first came to me while I was completing my doctoral dissertation in 1977.  At that time I was having great difficulty communicating with my doctoral committee.  I had excellent instruction and a thorough curriculum, but I just could not communicate in the way that was expected.  One day I was sitting in my apartment in Cambridge, and it came to me that it was not just that, as Native people, we look at life differently. Even the way we come to knowledge and present that knowledge is totally different from the Western way.  Then I heard myself say out loud: "It's almost as if we have a science of our own!"  And as soon as I thought it, or heard myself say it, I realized that is what needs to be said, because up until that time it was only the West which "had science.""