May 8, 2017

What's Happening This Week at SpiritualityandPractice.com
Editor's Picks
Directed by James Gray

While mapping the border between Bolivia and Brazil, Major Percy Fawcett faces one hardship and setback after another but learns of an ancient indigenous city lost in the dense jungle. He fearlessly sets out to confirm its existence, in a mesmerizing quest reminiscent of other films about explorers.
 
Directed by James Ponsoldt

Mae Holland feels she's landed in heaven as she starts a new "customer experience" job at the Circle, a phenomenally successful, prestigious tech company. But she soon becomes unnerved by the company's omnipresent surveillance, an issue also raised by other films about spying and surveillance.
 
Practices   

By David Kundtz 
"Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature," wrote Henry David Thoreau. But how can we cultivate such a degree of openness? Kundtz offers the helpful suggestion of choosing an image that to you symbolizes receptivity.
 

"Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence." We can still take this Nobel Prize laureate up on his offer. His 1913 Literature award for Gitanjali represented only a small slice of all that he gave to the world.
More Practices: Daniel Berrigan's Birthday
E-Courses   

A new e-course by Drew Leder   
May 1 - 26, 2017

So far, we've looked at how breath is a hinge -- between the conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, self and other -- and at metaphors of breath, like being "breathless" with awe. We have so much left to explore in the many dimensions of this dynamic e-course! Won't you please join us? Read more and sign up here:
 www.SpiritualityandPractice.com/TheMiracleofBreath 
A new e-course by James Kullander     
May 1 - 26, 2017

In a nutshell, here's what we've looked at so far: Solitude offers us unequaled opportunities to become who we are born to be, to find our own innate and individual traits and preferences. It can help us depart from what renowned theologian Paul Tillich called the "pain of being alone" and enjoy "the glory of being alone." We have so much still to discuss and would love to have you with us! Read more and sign up here:
www.SpiritualityandPractice.com/Solitude2017 
Films
Directed by Joseph Cedar

Norman, a New York "fixer," seeks to advance his causes and yearns for his own little place in the elitist realm of the nation's power brokers. Even though his attempted deals make for an odd map of real and imagined connections, he proves to be a genuine believer in doing all he can to help others.

More Films: Sacred, Bang: the Bert Barnes Story, Harold and Lilian, The Promise, A Woman's Life
DVDs
Directed by Michael Dudok de Wit

This creative animated film follows the adventures of an island castaway who captures a large red turtle. She shapeshifts into a woman who has an agenda that turns out to be very appealing to both of them.
More DVDs: La La Land, The Daughter, Disturbing the Peace, A Dog's Purpose, I Am Not Your Negro, The Salesman
Books   

The Five Invitations
By Frank Ostaseki

Ostaseski bequeaths to us a reverent and incredibly deep meditation about what death can teach us about living life to the fullest.

More Books: Days of Awe and Wonder, The Death of Expertise, Llewellyn's Little Book of Chakras, The Mystery of Sleep, The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi  
Arts   

By Gunilla Norris and Toinette Lippe

This gorgeous daybook reveals the same attention to beauty and artistic design that we've seen in Norris and Lippe's prior collaborations. Each two-page spread -- one for each week in the year -- opens with a poem, haiku, or quote by Norris keyed to the season. Most are illustrated with brush paintings of hummingbirds. What a lovely Mother's Day gift this would make!
Quotes   

By Frederic Brussat and Patricia Campbell Carlson

What is the road to wisdom and how do we follow it? This collection of quotations explores the many dimensions of this invaluable quality. 

 
Teachers   


Rick Hanson's writings, interviews, and videos bring you the latest on neuroscience research, spiritual practices to train the brain, and ways to increase your happiness and overcome the brain's negativity bias.
From Our Wisdom Archive   


There are many ways to help children preserve their natural tendency towards reverence. One is to draw their attention to books like these, evoking wonder and awe and offering alternatives to bullying, ecological degradation, and other challenges.
 
A Thought to Carry with You  

In his extraordinary book And There Was Light, French author and political activist Jacques Lusseyran describes nuances to our sense of touch that most of us can barely imagine. Totally blind after an accident when he was seven years old, Lusseyran discovered that usually eyes only skim the surface of things: "All they require are a few scattered points, since they can bridge the gap in a flash. They 'half see' more than they see, and they never weigh. They are satisfied with appearances, and for them the world glows and slides by, but lacks substance."

But our sense of touch goes much further. Lusseyran describes how his hands -- left on their own without assistance from his eyes -- were able to approach objects from multiple directions, each finger acting independently, making themselves heavy or light, moving without interruption. Objects, even stones, he discovered, do not stay fixed; "they vibrate and tremble." When his fingers approached a thing "in sympathetic vibration" with it, he could instantly recognize it.

Still more important, when he pressed on an object, he found that the object answered. "Being blind I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found that they came to meet me instead. ... This means an end of living in front of things and a beginning of living with them. ... You cannot keep your hands from loving what they have really felt, moving continually, bearing down and finally detaching themselves, the last perhaps the most significant motion of all."

This week, find an opportunity to experiment with truly meeting things through touch, "tuning in on them and allowing the current they hold to connect with [your] own." Let your eyes be open or closed, whichever allows you to enter this experience more fully. Drink in the increased sense of dwelling in a fully inhabiting the world that this practice brings you.
 
Blessings, 
Your Spirituality & Practice Team 
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat 
Patricia Campbell Carlson 
Darren Polito