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by Claudia Horwitz
Like many people, my life has been shaped by a quest. In the mythic tale of the hero's journey, we leave the world we know because we sense there is something lacking in our experience. And we hope that whatever we find will be radical and new and that it will have the potential to bring great changes to the world we left. There are wondrous precedents for this journey...
Meditation and Creativity Three A.M. Though I’m lying in bed next to my zonked-out girlfriend with my eyes nearly closed, I’m wide awake. Or maybe I should say wide aware. This year, in addition to sitting meditation, I’ve started meditating in bed before and during sleep. I use simple practices focused on breathing in order to move my awareness to a place where I witness events (internal, external, physical, cerebral, et cetera) without identifying with them.
I was born into a deeply religious family. My father was an itinerant preacher and we traveled across the country offering our service to rural communities. My father would preach, my mother would sing, and my brothers and I would perform puppet shows to entertain the young ones. My early life lessons were to respect my elders and to offer myself to the greater good.
Most people tend to identify themselves within fairly narrow categories—a nationality, a race, a religion—which leads to conflicts, a stunting of imagination and potential. The wider our sense of identity, the more likely we will be able to experience our connection to the Universe. If a lost child who knew nothing of her background and had been raised by an indifferent family suddenly discovered that she was the direct descendant of an illustrious house traceable back many centuries, her sense of identity would expand momentously even before anything else changed. The discovery of our own cosmic genealogies may have a similar expansive effect. We humans are luminous, stardust beings.Adidas Yeezy shoes