Friday, 31 May 2019

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest by Helena Moncrieff




With the exception of berries and other very small fruits, most of what we put on our tables in Canada originates from somewhere else.  Plums, pears, peaches and even the lunch bag staple sweet apple are not native to this country.



More than 860,000 pedestrians pass through Yonge and Dundas every day.



Samuel de Champlain planted apples in Quebec early in the 1600s.



More than two hundred small fruits are native to Canada.  That might sound like plenty, but most don't appear in our pantries.



Indigenous people used silver buffaloberries to flavour, as the name suggests, buffalo meat.



The gingko is considered a living fossil because it has remained unchanged (the only member of its genus, family and order) since before the time of the dinosaurs.



Japan is home to a tree-climbing school and has led the way in using trees for a lot of therapy.  Through a Tree Climbing Japan program called TreeHab, a 57-year-old woman left her wheelchair in 2001 and became the first paraplegic person in the world to climb 78 metres up a Sequoia tree.



Forest bathing can activate human natural killer cells, a part of the immune system that works against cancer.



A few days ago, I picked up a pint box of blueberries from the large farmers market at Halifax's seaport. It's the oldest continuous market of its kind in North America, established by Royal decree in 1750.



The number of cars in Canada went from roughly 1.5 million in 1945 to 2.6 million in 1950.



The growth of fast and processed foods from the '60s on, while convenient, fed food illiteracy.  What's followed is a jump in type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.


Thursday, 30 May 2019

Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope & Recovery in a Violent World by Richard F Mollica







The questions are: what traumatic events have happened? How are your body and mind repairing the injuries sustained from those events?  What have you done in your daily life to help yourself recover?  What justice do you require from society to support your personal healing?





We create our own reality, and often there is more than one to choose from.





It took many years for me to go from the simple question “How healthy do you feel?” to “What can we do together to make you healthy again?





Healing begins with a choice.





Sometimes self-healing is buried so deep within a person’s hopelessness and despair that it is impossible for the trauma sufferer to feel its existence.





While every human being lives and operates in a social world that can be hurtful, cruel, and violent, this same world can bring about salvation, joy, and nurturance.





Eliminating suffering is not enough in any trauma case.  The goal must also be to re-establish a life of pleasure and joy, an extremely difficult prospect.





Our fear of the violated remains strong. Overcoming this fear and moving forward depends upon the universal human capacity for empathy.  This ability for interconnectedness allows us to assist others as they move into new and hopefully better worlds.  Empathy allows us to see that some traumatized people need to talk, others to deny, and still others to be relieved by medication.





The concept of self-healing demands a shift away from emphasizing illness and damage to appreciating natural healing processes.

Wednesday, 29 May 2019

The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership by Fred Kofman






Meaning has two major components: making sense of life (cognition) and having a sense of purpose (motivation).



Leadership is not a position; it is a process.



It's tempting to appear as a "victim" to duck from responsibility and to avoid embarrassment, but the price of an excuse is high.



Response-ability is the foundation of transcendent leadership.



If you want to be the captain of your business and your life, you must accept full responsibility, accountability, and ownership for everything that happens in it.



I define response-ability as the ability to choose one's response to a situation.



Responsibility is not about assuming guilt.  You are not responsible for your circumstances; you are response-able in the face of your circumstances.



Besides disempowering us from acting appropriately in the face of reality, the victim story prevents us from learning.



Unless you recognize your contribution to a bad situation, you won't be able to change that situation.



Decisions are worthless unless they turn into commitments, but commitments are worthless unless they are made, kept, and honored with integrity.



Any time you know what you should do but can't bring yourself to do it, it is a sign that your ego is trying to defend itself.



Each of us has his or her favorite reactive behaviors, which we use to assuage our ego's anxiety about not being good enough.  The key to defusing such a reaction is to look deeply at whatever primal and childish interpretation is driving the fear of potential failure, judgment, embarrassment, or rejection.



Tuesday, 28 May 2019

Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life by Thich Nhat Hanh




If a child smiles, if an adult smiles, that is very important.


We must practice in a way that removes the barrier between practice and non-practice.


When you understand, you cannot help but love.


To create a good community, we first have to transform ourselves into a good element of the community.


Monday, 27 May 2019

The Leader's Way: The Art of Making the Right Decisions in Our Careers, Our Companies, and the World at Large by the 14th Dalai Lama and Laurens Van Den Muyzenberg





The leaders have the ability to look at an issue from many perspectives and, based on that expanded view, make the right decisions.  They have a calm, collected, and concentrated mind, undisturbed by negative thoughts and emotions, trained and focused.  And true leadership recognizes the inevitability of change, the need for a sense of universal responsibility, and the importance of combining an economic system with moral values. That is the leader's way.



Making the right decisions depends on taking the Right View, which leads to the Right Action.  Taking the Right View involves what the Dalai Lama refers to as "a calm, collected, and concentrated mind", one that is peaceful, undisturbed by negative thoughts and emotions, trained and focused.



You cannot improve your mind if you do not think the right way.  Thinking the right way means making sure that every action is based on the right intention and the right motivation.



If your mind is influenced by anger, jealousy, fear, or lack of self-confidence, you become disturbed and inefficient; you cannot see reality.



The concept of impermanence teaches us that every goal is a moving target.



A humble leader listens to others.  He or she values input from employees, even if it is bad news, and humility is marked by an ability to admit mistakes.




Unwholesome tendencies -- such as distraction, carelessness, thoughtlessness, and forgetfulness -- result in suffering and harm.



Worry is a waster of energy, however.  It does not solve anything.  To get rid of worry is not easy.  But meditating on the uselessness of it and dropping the emotion as soon as it manifests itself (without violently suppressing it) eventually will lead to equanimity. 



Reaching perfection is beyond the capabilities of almost everyone; therefore, the main point is to aim for steady progress.



The Buddhist method for making calm and collected decisions involves asking ourselves four questions:  1. What is the reality and is it a problem? 2. What is the cause of the problem? 3. What do I want to achieve? 4. How can I arrive at the goal?



"Insight that leads to spiritual freedom" refers to an understanding that wealth can increase and decrease for reasons a person cannot control.  There is nothing wrong with being happy when wealth increases, but it is wrong to become unhappy when it decreases.



"When people are overwhelmed and in pain through suffering, they are incapable of understanding religious teaching".  Buddha



Profits are a condition for survival, but their purpose is to make a contribution to the well-being of society at large. 



Wealth need not come at the expense of others.



Leadership that acknowledges universal responsibility is the real key to overcoming the world's problems.

Saturday, 25 May 2019

Meditation and Its Practices: A Definitive Guide to Techniques and Traditions of Meditation in Yoga and Vedanta by Swami Adiswarananda





PART THREE



In the state of meditation, one becomes videha, or detached from body-consciousness.  It is the only direct way to separate the soul from the bondages of body and mind.  






Direct realization is like seeing a country with our own eyes, rather than hearing about it from others or reading about it in books or newspapers. 



Ordinarily we perceive everything through the prism of our mind with its built-in predispositions.



The way to attain direct realization is the repeated practice of meditation.  Practice is required to convert intellectual conviction into spiritual realization.



Spiritual illumination has its manifestation on the mental level in the form of poise, peace, naturalness, serenity, stability of emotions, conservation of energy, and a capacity to bear the frustrations of life.



A degree of emotional maturity is necessary so that we can develop an adequate reserve of mental energy for use in finding creative solutions to the problems of life.



Many people think that meditation is a process of passive reflection or just letting things happen, but actually it a conscious process of guiding the mind by oneself. In meditation, it is the alertness of the mind that matters most, not the length of time devoted.



A mantra is a specific combination of letters or words which has hidden within it a mysterious power to bring about certain results on being used in a particular manner.




The sun, the visible luminary in the sky, is the representation of the Supreme Godhead. 




The Yoga system is based upon the idea that the inner Self, which is Pure Consciousness, remains covered by successive layers of ignorance consisting of attachments and aversions. 




Mind and matter, according to Yoga, are not two separate entities.




Our body is nothing but solidified mind.



Spiritual advancement is to be determined not by what the seeker feels occasionally and temporarily, but by what he is, naturally and spontaneously.

Friday, 24 May 2019

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King





Most of us think that history is the past.  It's not.  History is the stories we tell about the past.  That's all it is. Stories.




In 1598, what is now New Mexico, Juan de Onate and his troops killed over eight hundred Acoma and cut off the left foot of every man over the age of twenty-five.




North America has had a long association with Native people, but despite the history that the two groups have shared, North America no longer sees Indians.  What it sees are war bonnets, beaded shirts, fringed deerskin dresses, loincloths, headbands, feathered lances, tomahawks, moccasins, face paint, and bone chokers.




For some Live Indians, being invisible is annoying enough, but being inauthentic is crushing.  If it will help, I'm willing to apologize for the antenna on that house in Acoma.  I've already shaved off my moustache, so that should no longer be an issue.  If I didn't live in the middle of a city, I'd have a horse.  Maybe two.  I sing with a drum group.  I've been to sweats. I have friends on a number of reservations and reserves around North America.  I'm diabetic.  If you can think of something else I can do to help myself, let me know.




For Native people, the distinction between Dead Indians and Live Indians is almost impossible to maintain.  But North America doesn't have this problem.  All it has to do is hold the two Indians up to the light.  Dead Indians are dignified, noble, silent, suitably garbed.  And dead.  Live Indians are invisible, unruly, disappointing.  And breathing.  One is a romantic reminder of a heroic but fictional past.  The other is simply an unpleasant, contemporary surprise. 




A great many people in North America believe that Canada and the United States, in a moment of inexplicable generosity, gave treaty rights to Native people as a gift.  Of course, anyone familiar with the history of Indians in North America knows that Native people paid for every treaty right, and in some cases, paid more than once.




A 1914 [Indian Act] amendment required Legal Indians to get official permission before appearing in Aboriginal costume in any dance, show, exhibition, stampede, or pageant.




Indian-White relations were originally constructed around the concerns of commerce -- the fur trade being a prime example -- and military alliances.  In these matters, Native peoples understood themselves to be sovereign, independent nations, and in early land and treaty negotiations, they were treated as such. 




For 250 years, Whites and Indians had fought as enemies, had fought as allies, had made peace, had broken the peace, and had fought each other again.  But when Great Britain, France, and the newly formed United States sat down in 1783 to hammer out details of the Treaty of Paris that would officially end the American Revolution, Native people, who had fought alongside both England and the colonies, were neither invited to the negotiations nor mentioned in the treaty itself.




Francis Jennings, in his book The Invasion of America, called Christianity a “conquest religion.”  I suspect this description is true of most religions.  I can’t think of one that could be termed a “seduction religion” where converts are lured in by the beauty of the doctrine and the generosity of the practice.  Maybe Buddhism.  Certainly not Christianity.




Missionary work in the New World was war. Christianity, in all its varieties,  has always been a stakeholder in the business of assimilation.




By the late nineteenth century, the Indian Problem was still a problem.  Yes, Indians had been defeated militarily.  Yes, most of the tribes had been safely locked up on reservations and reserves.  Yes, Indians were dying off in satisfying numbers from disease and starvation.  Yes, all of this was encouraging.  But, at the same time, Indians were still being Indians.  How could this happen?




The hope for Native peoples was that, with a little training and a push in the right direction, they would become contributing members of White North America.  This was not to be a compromise between cultures.  It was to be a unilateral surrender.  Indians were to give up what they had and what they believed, in exchange for what Whites had and believed. 




Canada is, according to Canada, a just society. 




In 1850, attendance at residential schools became compulsory for all children from the ages of six to fifteen.  There was no opting out.  Non-compliance by parents was punishable by prison terms.  Children were forcibly removed from their homes and kept at the schools. 




No one knows for sure how many Native children wound up at residential schools in the United States.  Canada reckons their own numbers at about 150,000, so the tally for America would have been considerably higher.  But for the children who did find themselves there, the schools were, in all ways, a death trap.  Children were stripped of their cultures and their languages.  Up to 50 percent of them lost their lives to disease, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse --- 50 percent.  One in two.  If residential schools had been a virulent disease, they would have been in the same category as smallpox and Ebola.  By contrast, the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed millions worldwide, had a mortality rate of only 10 to 20 percent.




Democracy has to be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.




Thank goodness that the past is the past, and today is today.  We’d much rather be appreciated than hunted, though we do need to understand that each time our new political friends drop by, they will want another and larger piece of our pie, and that they will keep coming back until there is little left but crumbs on a plate.  After all, it’s Indian pie and we don’t need that much.




What remains distressing is that much of what passes for public and political discourse on the future of Native people is a discourse of anger, anger that Native people are still here and still a “problem” for White North America, anger that we have something non-Natives don’t have, anger that after all the years of training, after all the years of having assimilation beaten into us, we still prefer to remain Cree and Comanche, Seminole and Salish, Haida and Hopi, Blackfoot and Bellacoola.




Treaties, after all, were not vehicles for protecting land or even sharing land.  They were vehicles for acquiring land.  Almost without fail, throughout the history of North America, every time Indians signed a treaty with Whites, Indians lost land. 




I know that this sort of rhetoric – “our relationship with the earth” – sounds worn out and corny, but that’s not the fault of Native people.  Phrases such as “Mother Earth”, “in harmony with nature”, and “seven generations” have been kidnapped by White North America and stripped of their power.

Thursday, 23 May 2019

Jack Canfield's Key to Living the Law of Attraction by Jack Canfield and D D Watkins







"Abundance is not something we acquire.  It is something we tune into.  There’s no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love.  There is only a scarcity of resolve to make it happen”. Wayne Dyer




When you are “against” something, you are actually recreating it.  You are creating more of the very thing that you want to eliminate! If you are “antiwar”, think again.  The operative word here is “war”, and that is exactly what you will get more of.  A better choice would be “propeace”. 




Start paying attention to where your attention is going.

Wednesday, 22 May 2019

Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul by Robert Moss




The Iroquois say matter-of-factly that the dreamworld is the Real World (they call our waking existence the Shadow World or surface world).




The Iroquois teach that it is the responsibility of caring people in a caring society to gather around dreamers and help them unfold their dreams and search them to identify the wishes of the soul and the soul's purpose -- and then to take action to honor the soul's intent.




If we are not living from our souls, our lives lose magic and vitality.  Part of our soul may even go away, leaving a hole in our being.




Beings from the spirit world are constantly seeking to communicate with us in the dreamscape, which offers and open frontier for contract between humans and the more than human.




Life continues after physical death, in other dimensions and in other vehicles of consciousness.




Truth comes with goose bumps.




It is possible, as some Iroquois traditionalists believe, that we dream everything before it happens, even if we are amnesiac about what we experience in night dreams.




By learning to maintain consciousness within the dreamworld, we may also be able to travel purposefully through the dreamgates of cosmic consciousness and communicate with other dreamers in either the past or the future.




Beings from the spirit world are constantly seeking to communicate with us in the dreamscape.




Here, in Native tradition, we find a fundamental understanding that is largely missing from Western analysis: that dreaming can be a source of vital energy, and that dreams can be transformers, allowing us to tap into a universal, inexhaustible source of authentic power.

Tuesday, 21 May 2019

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance By Angela Duckworth






Our potential is one thing, what we do with it is quite another.




Why do we assume that it is our talent, rather than our effort, that will decide where we end up in the very long run? 




As much as talent counts, effort counts twice.




"Greatness is doable.  Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable." Dan Chambliss




Mythologizing natural talent lets us all off the hook.  It lets us relax into the status quo. 




Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort.




Talent -- how fast we improve in skill -- absolutely matters.  But effort factors into the calculations twice, not once.  Effort builds skill.  At the very same time, effort makes skill productive.




Those who struggle early may learn it better.




Skill is not the same thing as achievement. … Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential.  Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn't. 




Enthusiasm is common.  Endurance is rare.




Passion as a compass -- that thing that takes you sometime to build, tinker with, and finally get right, and that then guides you on your long and winding road to where, ultimately, you want to be. 




At his magazine [The New Yorker], "contract cartoonists", who have dramatically better odds of getting published than anyone else, collectively submit about five hundred cartoons every week.  In a given issue, there is only room, on average, for about seventeen of them. 





By getting better, each kid inadvertently enriched the learning environment for the kids he or she was playing against.  The one thing makes you better at basketball is playing with kids who are just a little more skilled.




Grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity. 




Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.




Even the most accomplished of experts start out as unserious beginners.




Novelty for the beginner comes in one form, and novelty for the expert in another. For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn't been encountered before.  For the expert, novelty is nuance.




Rather than focus on what they already to well, experts strive to improve specific weaknesses. 




Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming.  They'd rather show the highlights of what they've become. 




At its core, the idea of purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves.




"So much of sticking with things is believing you can do it.  That belief comes from self-worth, and that comes from how others have made us feel in our lives." Francesca Martinez




Following through on our commitments while we grow up both requires grit and, at the same time, builds it.




There are fewer Finns in the world than New Yorkers.




"Success is never final; failure is never fatal.  It's courage that counts".  John Wooden