Pioneer of Possibility GRAHAM HANCOCK

SARA VANCEHelps YouFix Your

Fats

MIKE IAMELE Says Enough’s Enough

Knocking on Heaven’s Door with Manhattan Medium THOMAS JOHN

only better Vol. 2

For Superior Health, Greater Perspective, and Peaceful Living

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the second volume of You Only Better. We’ve got a lot in store for you.

In Knocking on Heaven’s Door, meet Manhattan Medium Thomas John, who talks about his life, how he became aware of his abilities, and how he’s been shaped by them.

An essay by Pioneer of Possibility Graham Hancock from his newly released The Divine Spark acquaints us with altered states of consciousness. There’s a lot to learn about exploring the realm of the supernatural through the use of psychedelics. Graham’s essay gives you a taste of this im-portant (and likely to be controversial) new book. And there’s more: Joel and Michelle Levey share a mindfulness practice in a Five-Part Harmony column that’s sure to put you right; Sara Vance helps us fix our fats in Holy Holistics; Mike Iamele challenges us to create success on our own terms in Heads-Up; and Kami McBride offers healing recipes in A Seat at the Table. Check out the Greener Pastures column: John Robbins, author of The Food Revolution, Diet for a New America, No Happy Cows, and other important books, sits down for a Q&A with Bill McKibben of 350.org, originally published in Voices of the Food Revolution. And, in Embrace Your Inner Monster, Sarah Christensen Fu doesn’t hold back on the wild and wicked characteristics of those born under the Aries and Taurus zodiac signs. We’d love to hear from you. Send us suggestions for stories we should publish. Tell us about folks we should recognize who are giving back in wonderful ways. Send us your favorite inspirational quote for being “you only better.” Reach us at youonlybetter@rwwbooks.com. Better is… better. We’re in this together.

L E T T E R F RO M T H E E D I TO R

Bonni Hamilton, Editor

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W H AT ’ S I N S I D E

only better!

Jan Johnson Publisher Emerita

Bonni Hamilton Editor

Jim Warner Design Director

Nicole Deneka Digital Coordinator

You Only Better is developed and distributed by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.65 Parker Street, Suite 7, Newburyport, MA 01950

665 Third Street, Suite 400, San Francisco, CA 94107800-423-7087

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C O N T E N T S

4. Knocking on Heaven’s Door An Interview with Thomas John, author of Never Argue with a Dead Person

8. Pioneers of Possibility Graham Hancock leads the charge on the latest thinking about consciousness

11. Five-Part Harmony A mindfulness practice from Joel and Michelle Levey

13. Holy Holistics Sara Vance helps you fix your fats; some are actually your friends

16. Heads-Up Mike Iamele challenges you to create success on your own terms

20. Greener PasturesJohn Robbins in conversation with Bill McKibben

26. A Seat at the TableRecipes from The Herbal Kitchen

28. Embrace Your Inner Monster The truth behind Aries and Taurus

31. Ignite the LightJanet Conner helps us infuse our spirit with high spiritual ideas

32. After Midnight The Banshees by D.R. McAnally, Jr.

37. Random Acts of Kindness

Throughout the issue you will find Madcap Musings featuring excerpts from Flash Wisdom: A Curated Collection of Mind-Blowing, Perspective-Chang-ing Quotes by Russ Kick, creator of the New York Times bestselling Graphic Canon series.

Thomas John

(aka Manhattan Medium) is

one of the most popular psychic mediums

in the U.S. He has wowed audiences across

the world with his impressively accurate

messages from “the other side,” hosting

sold-out events such as A Night with Spirit

and Dinner with the Dead. In this

interview he talks about his special

abilities and how they have

shaped him.

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K N O CK I N G O N H E AV E N ’ S D O O R INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS JOHN

5

Q: When did you realize you could re-ally help people with this ability?

A: I went to college, at the University of Chicago, and I ma-jored in psychology and human develop-ment. I really wanted to be a therapist. I ended up going to Yale Hospital and took a two-year internship. I was working on a project with people who have borderline personality disorder. I was doing interviews and brain scans. A lot of those people had traumas in their life, and I started to get images of things, and I would realize that for people coming in for their interview, we would ask, “How many times were you raped? Where were your parents?” And I already knew the things they were tell-ing me before they got there.

I realized I have this ability to help people and bring closure to their lives in a certain way. Maybe it’s not the end-all and be-all, but it does help people with grief. It does help people to get guid-ance in their life, and I don’t necessarily need to have 10 years of graduate school to do that. I can just focus on what my God-given gift really is. I told my parents about it, and they were relatively supportive. I saw a couple of advisers myself, and all of them said, “if you feel you can help people, you should.”

Q: Does it take a lot of mental strain to do what you do?

A: It does. I have to prepare, like any-body else. I feel that it shouldn’t be some-thing taken lightly. I can see the entertain-ment value in it, and I try to bring a funny or lighthearted edge to

it, depending on the mood. But it is some-thing I take seriously. And because I’m empathic, I feel a lot of things through my body. So even getting some of those sensa-tions, it can be a lot.

Q: How are you able to distinguish a genuine psychic vision or visitation from your imagination?

A: I get into the flow of things. What I notice is that I just push out all my other thoughts – It’s almost like the thought before the thought. So as long as I don’t think about it too much … to me, it’s very natural. It’s like the process of go-ing into the shower. I get in a zone. There’s certain things you can do naturally, but when you think about it too much, you can’t. I’ve come to a place where I just trust the infor-mation.

Q: So it’s like you’re driving a very famil-iar route … you don’t think about what you’re doing. It’s a kind of hypnotic state.

A: Exactly. And I form agreements with the people I work with — the deceased people and my angels and spirit guides – so I often don’t even retain the information, because that would be really chaotic for me. So I just come in from a different place. I don’t judge the information. I just come from a place of acceptance and trust from it.

Q: Can you tell if someone else has these abilities when they walk into a room?

A: Sometimes, if I’m supposed to. I have had that hap-pen before, especially if people come for a private reading, and

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ask about that. It’s also something that can be, to a certain extent, a little bit taught. I do believe that it’s just like the piano. I’m sure Beethoven must have just had a gift he was born with. I don’t think that he did that from piano lessons. But can you learn to play the piano and practice and practice and become quite good. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be Beethoven. So I think that’s the thing with psychic abilities. I think everybody has a little intuition. To be really exceptional is another level.

Unfortunately, there’s not a plethora of psy-chics and clairvoyants that are truly excep-tional, but there are people that are very gifted. Then there are some that are some-what gifted, and then there are charlatans who aren’t gifted at all and tell people they are gifted.

Q: Has this whole experience made you a more religious person than you were before?

A: I’ve always been religious; I’ve always been spiritual and connected with God.

So I wouldn’t say more or less. It’s confirmed a lot of things for me. Religion is always an interesting thing with me, because I get a lot of people that are reli-gious who are against me, which I always think is an odd thing, because I feel like I’m trying to prove what

they believe in.

Q: Can you connect with your own de-ceased loved ones?

A: I can have an awareness of them,

some more than oth-ers, and I do get visits from them. I would say that I can, but I really don’t like to. I love to go and get messages on my own, and there are a couple people that I trust to do that. But I wouldn’t say I’m real gung-ho about that.

Q: How should someone prepare for a psychic reading with you?

A: I think it’s im-portant to be as open

as possible, and to not have expectations, and to not be rushed. I’ve had people who are eating food, or this and that – you need to not be distracted. But I would say the big thing is to not have expectations. Who knows who’s going tocome through?

Q: It seems like you have a really unique way of doing readings —it’s like cards, but you’re also meditating on it, as I saw you with your pen. Tell us about your specific kind of psychic-ness and how you came about it.

A: Well, I started seeing spirits when I was three or four years old, and then I got away from it and then I came back to it. When I came back to it, I just started do-ing card readings. I didn’t like Tarot cards though, because they were one-dimensional and I didn’t really con-nect with them. Then I started to see spirits again so I changed my methods using auto-matic writing, etc.

Q: What is auto-matic writing, what are these cards, and how would you define clairvoyance?

and her mom, but they couldn’t find her sister, and today her sister came through. It was very special, her whole consciousness shifted. And then I’ve just had weird things happen. I had a woman who came once and her husband was com-ing through, but he wasn’t dead and she said, ” This is bizarre because my husband is not dead.” But it was all stuff that went with him. And then she left and called a week later and said, “My hus-band was dead. He had died while I was going to this reading.”

Q: What’s the dif-ference between a psy-chic and a medium?

A: A psychic fore-tells the future and answers your specific questions. A medium connects you with messages from your deceased loved ones.

Q: What’s your book Never Argue with a Dead Person all about?

A: It’s all based on stories from my life as a 29-year-old psychic medium living in the Big Apple. Every story has three main charac-ters — a dead person,

A: Well, these are oracle cards, so they’re kind of like Tarot cards, but they’re a little bit easier to read. Tarot cards are a little esoteric so they have like, a hanging man or demon. Mine are like mental conflicts, so you can pretty much understand what that one means. But I sometimes interpret the colors. Some-body asked about their career and I pulled Fertility and that means growth. If somebody asks, “Am I going to have a baby?” and I pull Fertility, that means you’re going to have a baby.

So, there’s a level of in-terpretation and then I’m sort of simultane-ously writing. Some-times I see things and get guided. It’s a whole process.

Q: Could you give me a spectacular story that’s happened inside the office?

A: I think closure is huge for people. I just had a woman this morning who — her sister died 20 years ago, her husband shot her — she told me that she’s been to mediums and she couldn’t find her, and they always got her grandmother

someone who knew the dead person, and me, the medium. Some are fun, some heart-warming, some sad and moving, but all illuminate the connec-tion we have to those that are passed away, and how love is a con-tinuous, and endless cycle that continues even from beyond.

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W MADCAP MUSINGS ON WELL-BEING

The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison. –ANN WIGMORE

Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It’s no coincidence we call them “deadlines.” –TOM ROBBINS

I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim. –FRIDA KAHLO

Never Argue with a Dead PersonThomas John • Hampton Roads PublishingeISBN: 9781612833392

P I O N E E R S O F P O S S I B I L I T Y

Bestselling author Graham Hancock

explores the magic and mystery

of consciousness.

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I took LSD once in my twenties, at the Windsor Free Festival in England in 1974, and had a fantastic, exciting, energizing twelve-hour trip in a parallel reality. When my normal, everyday consciousness returned—and it did so quite abruptly, like a door slamming—I felt grateful for such a wonderful experience but so much in awe of its power that I doubted if I would ever want to embrace it again. Sup-pose things had gone the other way? Suppose instead of an exciting medieval Otherworld through which I had been allowed to travel like a knight-errant, I had been ushered into some hell realm for twelve hours? How would I have handled that? Would I have handled it at all?

It was not until I reached my fifties and began work on my book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind that I decided to confront the psychic challenges of major hallu-cinogens again. In order to research my subject properly, and to know what I was talking about when I spoke of altered states of consciousness, I drank Ayahuasca with shamans in the Ama-zon and self-experimented with DMT, psilocy-bin, and the African visionary drug known as Iboga—“the plant that enables men to see the dead.”

The extraordinary experiences I went through convinced me that David Lewis-Williams is right and that visionary states of this sort, brought on by the accidental discovery of plant psychedelics, did indeed provide the inspira-tion for ancient cave and rock art traditions all around the world. Lewis-Williams is also right to insist that it is to

the proper examination of such altered states of consciousness that we should turn if we wish to discover the source of the first spiritual ideas ever entertained by our ancestors.It was precisely at this point, however, that I began to part company with Lewis-Williams and his theory. Whatever the cave artists saw in their trances, and no matter how devoutly they may have believed that what they were seeing was real, the South African professor is ada-mant that the entire inspiration for 25,000 years of Upper Paleolithic cave paintings reduces to nothing more than the fevered illusions of dis-turbed brain chemistry—i.e., to hallucinations. In his scientific universe, there is simply no room, or need, for the supernatural, no space for any kind of Otherworld, and no possibility that intelligent nonphysical entities could exist.

I found I couldn’t leave the matter there, with the inspiration for cave art and the birth of religion neatly accounted for by disturbed brain chemistry, with the earliest spiritual insights of mankind rendered down to mere epiphenom-ena of strictly biological processes, with the sub-lime thus efficiently reduced to the ridiculous. To have established the role of hallucinations as the inspiration for cave art is one thing—and David Lewis-Williams, in my opinion, has suc-cessfully done that. But to understand what hal-lucinations really are, and what part they play in the overall spectrum of human experience and behaviour, is another thing altogether, and neither Lewis-Williams nor any other scientist can yet claim to possess such knowledge, or to be anywhere near acquiring it. Gifted and expe-rienced shamans the world over really do know more—much more—than they do. So if we were

TERRA INCOGNITA

9

smart, we would listen to what the shamans have to say about the true character and com-plexity of reality instead of basking mindlessly in the overweening one-dimensional arrogance of the Western technological mind-set.

Because I had been shaken to the core by my experiences with Ayahuasca and Iboga, I decided to take my investigation further and to explore the extraordinary possibility that science is unwilling even to consider and that David Lewis-Williams dismisses out of hand. This is the possibility that the Amazonian and African psychedelics had obliged me to confront face-to-face—and that shamans contend with on a daily basis—the possibility that the “spirit world” and its inhabitants are real, that super-natural powers and nonphysical beings do exist, and that human consciousness may, under cer-tain special circumstances, be liberated from the body and enabled to interact with and perhaps even learn from these “spirits.” In short, did our ancestors experience their great evolution-ary leap forward of the last 40,000 years not just because of the beneficial social and organisa-tional by-products of shamanism but because they were literally helped, taught, prompted, and inspired by supernatural agents? Could the “supernaturals” first depicted in the painted caves and rock shelters—and still accessible to us today in altered states of consciousness—be the ancient teachers of mankind? Could it be they who first ushered us into the full birthright of our humanity? And could it be that human evolution is not just the “blind,” “meaningless,” “natural” process that Darwin identified, but something else, more purposive and intelligent, that we have barely even begun to understand?

If so, then we demonise altered states of con-sciousness at our peril, and rather than sending our fellow humans to prison for seeking them out, we should encourage, reward, and support them as the true explorers and adventurers of our time. I have brought together this series of essays in The Divine Spark, written by research-ers and activists in the field of consciousness whose work I respect, as a contribution to this exploration of terra incognita.

Graham Hancock leads the charge in The Divine Spark, a collection of the latest thinking on consciousness with a particular focus on the use of psychedelics to open up the realm of the supernatural. Leading minds and radical think-ers including Dennis McKenna, Rick Doblin,

Alex Grey, Russell Brand, Rick Strassman, and more illuminate the topic like never before.

“ I H A D B E E N S H A K E N TO T H E CO R E BY

M Y E X P E R I E N C E S W I T H AYA H UA S C A A N D I B O G A”

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The Divine SparkGraham Hancock • Disinformation Books eISBN: 9781609259723

F I V E - PA RT H A R M O N Y

The Benefits of Mindfulness

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power

of joy we see into the heart of things.

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The rigor, objectivity, and insight gained through the practice of mindfulness have drawn thousands of scientists, psychologists, and researchers to this practice in recent decades; hundreds of studies have been launched to

document the health and performance benefits of mindfulness meditation. Among the most well-known of these is the Mindfulness Insti-tute at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, founded by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. When compared with the many problems

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The Divine SparkGraham Hancock • Disinformation Books eISBN: 9781609259723

When compared with the many problems caused by mindlessly living our lives, mindfulness helps us to:

Improve focus, concentration, and precision.Enhance the quality of communications and relationships.Heighten the clarity of our thinking and intentions.Improve efficiency and safety.Deepen peace of mind and sense of flow.Master stress.Deepen insight and intuitive wisdom.Awaken more authenticity, heart, soul, and caring in our lives and work.Increase resilience to change.Strengthen faith and self-confidence.

Let Joel and Michelle Levey, authors of Mindfulness, Meditation, and Mind Fitness help bring your body, mind,

and spirit back into alignment in just five

minutes with this exercise:

CONCENTRATION WITH A NATURAL OBJECTMany of us have touched a state of deep concentration during times in nature. Watching the sunrise, sitting by a flowing stream, gazing upon a flower, a cloud, or raindrops on a still pool, our minds become clear, quiet, and deep. The chirp of crickets, the sound of breaking waves, or a babbling brook wash away our agita-tion and leave us calm and collected.

1. Select a natural object or process.

2. Attend to it wholeheartedly.

3. Open yourself to let it come into you, and receive its light, sound, vibration, and life into yourself.

4. Open your heart and mind to embrace and be pervaded by it.

5. As you watch, listen, or feel this natural phenomenon, enter into a deep, quiet com-munion with it. Allow its essential nature and hidden qualities to reveal themselves intuitively.

Mindfulness Is the Perfect Antidote to the Stresses of Modern Life

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Mindfulness, Meditation, and Mind FitnessJoel and Michelle Levey • Conari PresseISBN: 9781609259969

H O LY H O L I ST I C S

F I XYO U R FATS !

FAT IS NOT A FOUR-LETTER WORD. For the past few decades, fats have been demonized. Many of us have had the erroneous messages pounded into our heads: “Fat makes us fat.” “Fats promote heart disease.” “Low-fat is healthy.” “Saturated fats and cholesterol clog up arteries. ” We all dutifully ran out to buy low- and no-fat foods, gobbling them up with relish because, “They have no fat, so they won’t make me fat, right?” I bought it hook, line, and sinker, too. I remember eating reduced-fat cookies, fat-free yo-gurts, and skim milk with everyone else!

Healthy Fats Are Critical to a Perfect Metabolism

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But it turns out that fat is not the enemy. In fact, fat is our friend. Fat is critical for a healthy metabolism because it stabilizes our blood sugar, nourishes cell membranes, boosts satiety, improves nutrient absorption, and so much more. Fat-free foods are by definition processed, and often when the fat is removed, it is replaced with sugar, corn syrup solids, and other ingredients that are terrible for us. Even when fat is removed from foods without sugars being added back (such as with skim milk), the percentage of sugar and our glycemic response goes up, which means that reduced and non-fat foods impact our blood sugar more than full-fat foods like whole milk. Research is confirming that reduced-fat foods are not better for us. Without sufficient healthy fats our hunger hor-mones can go haywire.

THE FRENCH PARADOXMeanwhile over in France, they have enjoyed pâté, quiche, and liberally used butter and crème fraiche. The French in general are a healthy weight. This has been commonly re-ferred to as “the French Paradox,” because based on our knowledge at the time, a low-fat diet was supposedly better for our weight and health. It turns out that it really isn’t a paradox at all: the French had it right all along. Eating a high-quality diet with healthy fats is probably one of the key reasons that the French don’t tend to struggle with weight gain.

The real truth is that healthy fats do not make you fat. In fact, it is almost impossible to be a healthy weight unless you get enough healthy fat in your daily diet.

FATS ARE ESSENTIAL FOR LIFE! If you are trying to avoid fats, it is not surpris-ing that you might be craving them. Fats are essential for life! Critical for healthy hormones, fats (lipids) help us to feel satiated and keep our moods and blood sugar stable. Fats and choles-terol make up about 60 percent of the structure of our brains and are also found in our skin, hair, cells, and blood. They play an important role in our cellular structure and functioning, as well as regulation of our hormones and me-tabolism, brain function, nutrient absorption, reproductive health, vision/eye health, skin, heart health, and more.

But wait: before you run to the store and buy up a bunch of ice cream, cakes, and pies with abandon, realize that not all fats are the same.

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The Perfect Metabolism PlanSara Vance • Conari PresseISBN: 9781609259747

Not All Fats Are Created Equal

Saturated fats are highly stable, which means they are less likely to get damaged, oxidized, or go rancid. Even when cooked at medium to high heats, most saturated fats tend to re-main stable. This is an important advantage, as consuming damaged and rancid fats can be very harmful to our health. Saturated fats also provide needed stability to our cells. Animal fats such as butter and lard contain between 40 and 60 percent saturation, which interest-ingly enough very closely matches the profile of human cells, which are about 50 percent satu-rated, too. Ghee (clarified butter) is one of the best cooking oils, because it is stable up to 485 degrees and very healing to the digestion. Look for grass-fed or pasture-raised butter, because it contains conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), linked to a reduction in body fat accumulation. Up to 90 percent saturated, coconut oil is a very unique fat with amazing properties for our me-tabolism and overall health.

Unsaturated fats provide flexibility to our cellular structure. There are two types of unsaturated fats:

• Monounsaturated fats are liquid at room temperature and also fairly stable, which means that, like saturated fats, they are less likely to become damaged. Olives and avocados contain a high amount of monounsaturated fatty acids. Extra virgin olive oil is stable at low to medium temperatures, so it is best used on raw foods or at low to medium heats. Virgin olive oil is stable under 420 degrees. Avocado oil has one of the highest smoking points of all fats, so it can be used for high-heat cooking (up to 500 degrees), but it also is a wonderfully versatile oil to be used raw, such as in dressings and pestos.

•Polyunsaturated fats are also liquid at room temperature even when refrigerated, which is

one reason they are often used in salad dress-ings. Because polyunsaturated fats are unstable, just the processing and bottling of polyunsatu-rated fats can cause them to become damaged or rancid because of the high heats involved. Another way they can become damaged is dur-ing cooking, especially at high heats. So if you do choose to use a polyunsaturated oil, select the expeller-pressed variety, which means nei-ther heat nor chemicals were used to extract the oil (also called cold-pressed).

One group of polyunsaturated fats—the ome-gas—are considered “essential fatty acids” because they must be obtained from the diet:

• Omega-3 fats are found in fatty fish, some nuts, seeds, algae, grass-fed meats, and pastured chicken eggs. Omega-3s reduce inflammation in the body. • Omega-6 fats are abundant in the American diet because they are found in polyunsaturated vegetables oils and products made with them. Conventionally raised animal proteins (“feedlot farmed”) also have higher concentrations of omega-6s than omega-3s, which makes them more inflammatory. Omega-6s increase inflam-mation.

• Having the right balance of omega fatty acids is important for preventing inflammation: we should be getting a 1:3 ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s in our diets. But because most pro-cessed foods are made with oils that are high in omega-6s (i.e., cheap soy, cottonseed, or vegetable oils), we are often taking in closer to a 1:20 ratio. This sets us up for chronic inflam-mation.

Lastly, avoid trans fats like the plague!

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The Perfect Metabolism PlanSara Vance • Conari PresseISBN: 9781609259747

H E A D S - U P

Mike Iamele, a smart, savvy young voice in wellness covers a

hot topic among young entrepreneurs, providing a battle

cry to determine success on their own terms.

BUY YOURSELF A PAIR OF ROSE-COLORED GLASSES

Years ago, my good friend Kate told me a college story of her own. She had a pair of pink and red Aviator sunglasses. She called them her rose-colored glasses. And they

were magical. When she put them on, the world changed. She was confident. She was charismatic. And she could only see the positive in the world.

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W ith her sunglasses, Kate could approach any guy in the bar. She was wittier and more courageous than anyone else around. No one could say a bad thing about her; it’d just roll off her shoulders. Because she was cool. She was a bad ass with her magical sunglasses.

People were nicer to her when she wore her sunglasses. Good luck always seemed to fall into her lap. Bad things hardly ever happened to her. And, above all, she always felt successful. Whether she was busting out some sweet moves on a sweaty dance floor or rocking it at a game of horseshoes, she always felt successful. In her rose-colored glasses.

I always laughed at that story. How silly it was that a pair of sunglasses could suddenly change her and how she saw the world. That some-thing as simple as a new lens could completely change her life.

Until I realized that a lens is all we’ve got. On any given day, we encounter trillions of ex-periences. Everything from having a conversa-tion with your friend to tying your shoes counts. But we’ve got to make sense of it all. We’ve got to put it together into some form that we can understand. So we develop a story—a story about our lives.

You could go to work, have a stressful meeting, get stuck in traffic on your way home, and get rear-ended and have to deal with insurance. You might call that a bad day. If it happens often enough, you might call that a bad life. Or you could be grateful for having a well-paying job, meetings that challenge you, transportation to and from work, and not having been hurt in an accident. Same exact circumstances, different story. And it’s all about the lens you’re wearing.

We come at life with a whole series of biases, past experiences, and preconceived notions. We start looking for experiences to validate what we already believe, rather than going into experi-ences fresh and new. With all of the theories

and beliefs and new information out there, we have to pre-determine the way we see the world, or else it would just be overwhelming. We need to create a filter that’s going to help us interpret life. We need to create a lens.

Take the news for example. How many people do you know who will only watch either Fox News or MSNBC? We want our news to be framed in a particular way that makes sense to us. Otherwise, we’d have to throw out our entire belief system and start from scratch. And that’s terrifying. How could we possibly make sense of the world if we didn’t have some lens to look at it through?

But that’s all it is. A lens. A perspective. A view-point on how things are going in your life. You could choose to see everything that’s going on with you as success or as failure. You could choose to see your job as a life-sucking waste-land or a place that provides you with money. You could see your unemployment as a death sentence or as an opportunity to figure out your next move.

On their own, none of these mean a heck of a lot. You’ve got to apply your filter to make sense of them. And, if your lens isn’t working out too well for you, pick up another pair.

We construct our meaning of the world through the stories we tell ourselves. If we don’t like what’s going on in our lives, we just have to change the story. If we don’t feel successful yet, we just have to put on a new pair of glasses. We just have to look at our lives from a new perspective. We just have to see the world with fresh eyes.

We’ve got the ability—we’ve all got the ability—to wear magical sunglasses. At any moment, we can put on the proverbial shades and suddenly become invincible. We can start embracing free-dom. We can start reveling in our successes. We can savor and enjoy every little moment. All we have to do is give ourselves permission.

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CHALLENGES

H E A D S - U P

“You’re theonly person who can decide how

much success you deserve. You get

to decide just how successful you’ll

let yourself be.”

I. The aspect that can never be filled is where you have a hole in your bucket. It’s an area in which you are not satisfied with your-self. No matter what comes into your life, you either don’t accept it or don’t appreciate it because you don’t think that you deserve it.

II. Instead of looking outside of yourself to fill the bucket up with more stuff, look inside to plug that hole. How can you learn to be happy and satisfied with yourself as you are in this very mo-ment? If the problem is your love life, then maybe you need to start taking yourself out on romantic self-

1. Think about your life as a whole. What as-pects never seem to be fulfilled? No matter how hard you try, you can never satisfy that part of your life. Maybe your love life is MIA. Or may-be you seem to be struggling financially. Maybe you’ve always battled with your weight. Or you lack confidence in yourself.

dates to show yourself just how much you’re worth. If the problem is your financial life, then maybe you need to hire a finance coach or talk to an accoun-tant about how to get your affairs in order. When you start plug-ging the holes in your bucket, you allow yourself to be satisfied with what you’ve got and set yourself up to attract more.

2. On a piece of paper, write down how much money you currently make per year. Now, under it, be honest with yourself and write down exactly how much money you think you deserve to make per year. Look at that number and sit with it. How does it feel?

I. Finally, double the number that you think you deserve. How does that feel? What emotions come up? Do you think you deserve it? Double it again. What comes up now? Is there excitement? Fear? Doubt? Is there a little voice in the back of your mind?

“It’s your life, so why would you live it on anyone else’s

terms?”

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Success is not achieved at a certain milestone;

it is lived in individual moments. If we want to be successful,

we need to choose success in each and every moment.

3. Write out all the events that happened to you today. Jot down everything from hitting the snooze button in the morning to the long com-mute home at night. Throw it all down there on paper. This is your story of your day. This is how you see your life.

I. Now put on your rose-colored glasses. Give yourself permis-sion to see your life in a new light. How would you retell the same story with the same facts to make it successful? Did you get to go to a job where you made good money? Did you get to see family or friends? Did you work on something you were passionate about? Did you have a special moment?

II. Notice how the same facts can tell a very different story, depending on how you look at it.

4. Give yourself permission to savor moments of success this week. It can be anything that you define as successful. You could have a moment to catch the sunset on your commute home from work. You could make a sale and decide to take yourself out for an ice cream. You could surprise your loved one with a special present just be-cause you’ve successfully stayed together this long.

I. Instead of planning ahead and plotting your next move, give yourself permission to just be in the moment. Allow yourself to feel the success of this moment.

“Success isn’t something

you achieve. It’s something

you live. It’s the way you see the

world.”

19

Enough AlreadyMike Iamele • Conari PresseISBN: 9781609259945

G R E E N E R PA ST U R E S

John Robbins in Conversation with Bill McKibben

B ill McKibben is the founder of 350.org, which has become the biggest grassroots cli-mate campaign on the planet. Described by The Boston Globe as “ probably the most important environmentalist” in the United States, Bill literally wrote the first popular book on global warming, The End of Nature. And he has since authored another dozen powerful books includ-ing Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Why does Bill think climate change might be the greatest threat to the survival of the modern world? If this concerns you, chew on this: Cows impact our climate more than cars. What’s the most climate-friendly diet?

JOHN ROBBINS: You have been fighting global warming now for nearly a quarter century. Dur-ing this time, as you have often pointed out, both the scale and the pace of the peril have increased substantially. Yet our politicians have mostly ignored the increasingly overwhelming scientific consensus. What kind of future are we entering?

BILL MCKIBBEN: When I wrote The End of Nature in 1989, we knew most of what we need-ed to know about climate change. We knew that when you burned coal, gas, and oil, you put carbon in the atmosphere. We knew that the molecular structure of carbon trapped heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. The only thing we didn’t know was how hard and fast this was going to pinch. The story of the past twenty years is that it is pinching harder and faster than we would have expected. So far we have raised the temperature of the earth about 1

degree. We are trapping about three-quarters of a watt of extra solar energy per square meter of the earth’s surface. These numbers are not huge, and we wouldn’t have thought twenty years ago that they would lead to huge results, but the earth was more finely balanced than we real-ized.

We are moving into a new and profoundly altered future. There is 40 percent less sea ice in the Arctic in the summer; the oceans are about 30 percent more acid; and the atmosphere holds a staggering amount more water, which is lead-ing to more drought and more floods. We are at the beginning of the climate change era. There is much worse to come unless we get our act together quickly, but already the damage is far greater than we would have imagined twenty years ago.

The best science would seem to indicate that while we can no longer stop global warming, we still have a small window in order to prevent it from getting completely out of control. That small window is closing and that is why I be-lieve that we are in an emergency.

JOHN ROBBINS: Nature is immensely powerful. It seems that we are unleashing potentially un-stoppable planetary forces.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Yes, we are unleashing very strong forces like droughts and floods. The ex-pectation is that rapid climate change will drive to extinction a huge percentage of the species on this planet—perhaps the same kind of per-centage that we have seen in past geological epochs, only when huge asteroids struck the

20

The greatest threat to the survival of civilization as we know it.

21

earth. In this case, of course, the asteroid is us, and the frustrating part is that we don’t need to do it. We know much of what we need to know to avert this. We are just not doing it, because it is in the strong financial interest of a small group of human beings to keep us on our pres-ent course.

JOHN ROBBINS: With so much at stake, is there some inertia that keeps us from doing the right thing?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Sure. The fossil fuel industry is by far the most profitable industry on the planet. That provides an enormous incentive to keep with where we are going, at least for the small group of people who benefit immensely from it. Of course in our political systems it doesn’t take much of that money spread around to delay and forestall action. For 20 years in the United States, we have had a perfect bipartisan record of accomplishing nothing on climate change. We are not behaving logically. For the moment, our big brain isn’t working very well, at least on a kind-of-species scale.

I think the answer is since we can’t compete in money with these guys, we have got to find oth-er currencies to work in. Those include building movements, big movements of people that will demand political change. Of course they also include making what changes we can on a local level, building institutions and structures for the world that will come after fossil fuels. We have to act on the personal level. We need to act on the community level. We need to act on the national and global level.

JOHN ROBBINS: Is it frustrating to live with the awareness that you carry, and yet to see the complete lack of a meaningful response to a predicament that is increasingly dire?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Yes, I think at this point it is pretty clear that if left to its own devices, the system won’t produce change, so we can’t leave it to its own devices. We’ve got to try and push it. I founded 350.org with seven college students in 2008. We had no money. It’s become by far the biggest grassroots global climate campaign. We

BILL MCKIBBEN

22

operate now in every country on earth except North Korea. We are beginning to have some successes. We had a huge campaign in fighting against the Keystone Pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta. Big oil has done its best to push it through. But in 2011 the President denied the permit, and that is because 1,253 people went to jail during what was the biggest civil disobe-dience action in 30 years on any issue in this country. It is because 800,000 people in a single day sent messages to the Senate. It is because people showed up to ring the White House five deep in people. It is because we mobilized a movement. We are going to have to do that over and over and over again.

JOHN ROBBINS: A lot is said about the role of young people in social change movements, but I think elders also have an important role. It’s older people who have the perspective of time, who know that generations come and go, and who know that there are long-term consequenc-es.

JOHN ROBBINS

23

BILL MCKIBBEN: Sure, and right now if you are 21, getting an arrest record is probably not the best thing in the world. One of the few advantages of growing older is after a certain point, what the hell are they going to do to you?

JOHN ROBBINS: I think that the situation is so confusing for people sometimes because of the way the oil companies fund denial, fund confu-sion, and fund this ridiculous refusal to confront reality. Do you get sick of it?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Yeah, I do. But I am very heart-ened to watch people begin to come together all around the world. Some of our strongest move-ments around climate change are in places that have done nothing to cause the problem. You can take countries like Bangladesh, where you can hardly even measure how much carbon the country emits. Yet even in Bangladesh, there are people who are willing to take a real role on these issues. I always figure if they can do it, I best get to it also.

JOHN ROBBINS: What about the role of agricul-ture and food production? Eating more locally grown food reduces the carbon footprint of our diets, and so does eating more organic foods because synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are almost entirely made from oil and natural gas. Getting more of our protein from plants is an-other great step.

BILL MCKIBBEN: You are exactly right. Eating lower on the food chain helps.

JOHN ROBBINS: Remarkably, all of these steps to a more climate-friendly diet are also steps to a healthier diet.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Well remarkably or maybe not remarkably. It is my experience that things that are good in one dimension are often good in many, and things that are bad in one dimension are often damaging in many.

JOHN ROBBINS: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report Livestock’s Long Shadow found that 18 percent of the entire world’s greenhouse gas emissions stem from livestock production. That is more than the amount attributable to all the cars, trucks, air-planes, and other modes of transportation on earth.

Other research has found the figure to be even higher. World Bank scientists writing in the journal World Watch put the figure above 50 percent. Their analysis was based on the reality that about a quarter of the world’s landmass is used for grazing livestock, and about a third of all arable land is used to grow animal feed. They believe that the reforestation of land currently being used in livestock production would be the fastest and most economical way to dramatically reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Food is a huge part of the picture, as one would expect since food is a big part of our lives. Of course cutting down forests in or-der to get more pastureland is a major factor. So is the methane belched from the animals them-selves, and the energy it takes to ship perishable food around the world, and on and on.

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Wake up, outgrow denial, and confront the consequences of our fossil fuel orgy.

JOHN ROBBINS: Cattle produce a tremendous amount of methane. The process as you know is technically called eructation, although people call it belching. Belching may sound humorous, but it is not a laughing matter. It is one of the largest drivers of climate change.

BILL MCKIBBEN: In recent years some scientists have begun to ask a different set of questions. There were more hoofed mammals on this continent 300 years ago than there are now, if you add up all the bison and antelope and things. They were busy belching too. The ques-tion is why weren’t they causing the same kind of problem? The early evidence seems to be that when you have animals eating grass and moving around all the time the way that wolves used to very effectively do, their hoof action and the constant deposition of manure creates extremely healthy soils. Farmers are beginning to learn on a very local, small-scale level, which would be the only way to do it, how to mimic some of that.

There is a sort of growing movement of carbon farmers. These are people trying to improve the soil, and showing that you can grow topsoil much more quickly than we used to think was possible. There are lots and lots of possibilities here, most of which boil down to getting agri-culture back on a reasonable scale.

We spent the past 150 years moving people off the farm. At the moment in America there are twice as many prisoners as there are farmers. The result is that we have replaced all that hu-man knowledge and labor with oil, with cheap

energy, and we’ve got to reverse that trend. We are never going to go back to 50 percent farmers, but we should be moving a little bit in that direction. I’ve got to tell you, the best new statistic I have heard in a very long time came from the USDA. Last year they reported that for the first time in about a century and a half, there were more farms in America instead of fewer. That is extremely good news. It points us in a new direction.

JOHN ROBBINS: May that direction grow.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Amen!

JOHN ROBBINS: It takes an average of nine to twelve pounds of grain or soybeans to produce one pound of feedlot beef. Do you think there is any possible defense for industrial animal agriculture?

BILL MCKIBBEN: None whatsoever. Things that are terrible in one aspect are often terrible in others. In order to have feedlot agriculture, you have to grow all that corn to feed animals, which is a highly fuel intensive process. It is clearly an inhumane and unpleasant life for the animal. Once you get that beef, unlike grass-fed beef, it has a much different nutritional profile. Feedlot meat is not good for you and it is frankly too cheap, so we eat too much of it—to our detri-ment. If we are going to eat meat, it makes far more sense to have locally raised animals, which will be more expensive because you have to pay someone to go out and move the animals around and pay attention to them. Then we will learn to eat meat the way that most cultures in

25

the world do, as almost a kind of condiment instead of a great big honking slab.

JOHN ROBBINS: James Lovelock has said that if we gave up eating beef we would have 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now, but he is also convinced that humanity has not evolved sufficiently to make the changes that would be needed to avert disaster. When you listen to him and others who feel we may have already passed the point of no return, what do you think and how do you feel?

BILL MCKIBBEN: We face some very depressing reports, and Jim Lovelock shouldn’t be taken lightly. He has a strong intuitive sense, and was the first proponent of the Gaia Theory to describe how the world works. It makes sense to listen carefully.

JOHN ROBBINS: I see a tendency to retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest. Do we still have the potential of fashioning an effective global response?

BILL MCKIBBEN: There are times when I think that this really is a test to find out whether that big brain of ours was a good adaptation or not. Maybe it depends whether it is connected to a big enough heart.

I don’t think we know the outcome of this. I think if you were a betting person you might bet that we are going to lose, because we have been losing so far. But I think it is not a bet that you are allowed to make. You’ve got to get up in the morning and figure out what you can do to change the odds quickly.

One thing that I think we are beginning to get across is who the radicals in this scenario are. They are not us. What I want is a world a little bit like the one I was born into. That is a pretty conservative notion. The radicals work at oil, coal, and gas companies. They are willing to al-ter the chemical composition of the atmosphere. That is the most radical thing anybody ever came up with.

JOHN ROBBINS: You are asking people to wake

up, to outgrow denial, to confront the conse-quences of our fossil fuel orgy. What kind of a response are you finding on a global level?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Most of the people that we work with around the world at 350.org are poor, black, brown, Asian, and young, because that is what most of the world is made up of. I had always heard people say, “Oh, environmentalism is something for rich white people. If you didn’t know where your next meal was coming from you wouldn’t be an environmentalist.” It just turns out not to be true. This is a global fight and people on whom the future is bearing down hardest are often the most engaged.

JOHN ROBBINS: There are things we can do by ourselves and close to home, but one of them is not going to be solving global warming. If we are going to do that, it is going to require politi-cal action, which means organizing. It means being with your neighbors and with people all around the world in order to make a collective difference. That is hard and the political system is not a fun place to hang out, but it is what we are called to do. It is our challenge the way that the Civil Rights Movement was the challenge in our parents’ time and in our grandparents’ time they had to go off and fight Hitler. That wasn’t

much fun either. But it’s time for us to do what we need to do. It’s time to grow up.

BILL MCKIBBEN: There you go.

Voices of the Food RevolutionJohn Robbins and Ocean Robbins • Conari PresseISBN: 978-1-60925-868-9

Pumpkin seeds are a healthy addition to the invigo-rating ingredients in pesto. Pumpkin seeds are a rich source of minerals including iron, magnesium, and zinc. They contain healthful omega-3 oils that feed the brain and promote overall wellness.

INGREDIENTS¾ cup (180 ml) olive oil

2 cups (60 g) arugula/rocket½ cup (15 g) fresh parsley

½ cup (45 g) dry-packed chopped sun-dried tomatoes¼ cup (24 g) fresh thyme

½ cup (69 g) pumpkin seeds3 garlic cloves

2 teaspoons (10 ml) balsamic vinegar½ teaspoon (3 g) salt

Arugula-Pumpkin Seed Pesto

METHODPut the olive oil, garlic, and green leafy herbs into a food processor.Blend until you have a smooth paste.Add handfuls of other ingredients a little at a time until everything is completely blended.Put into a lidded jar and store in the refrigerator for up to one week.

26

A S E AT AT T H E TA B L E

The Herbal KitchenKami McBride • Conari PresseISBN: 9781609252939

INGREDIENTS1 cup (240 ml) olive oil

1 teaspoon (5 ml) vodka 3 tablespoons (18 g) powdered chives

1 teaspoon (2 g) powdered mustard seed1 teaspoon (2 g) powdered ginger1 teaspoon (1 g) powdered bay leaf

Energizer Oil

METHOD1. Powder dried herbs in the blender or purchase them powdered. 2. Put herbs in a bowl and stir in the vodka. Mash and stir the alcohol into the herbs until all the clumps are worked out. Rehydrating the herbs with vodka enhances the extraction of medicinal properties and savory flavors. 3. Put a sealing lid on the bowl and let rehydrating herbs sit for 30 minutes. 4. Put the rehydrated herbs and olive oil in a blender. (Another option is to add the herbs and olive oil to a regular-size sterilized glass Mason jar and screw the blender base to the mouth of the jar. The jar can be inverted and used in lieu of the blender pitcher.) 5. Blend herbs and oil together for 5 to 10 minutes, or for as long as the blender doesn’t get too hot. If the blender starts to smell or smoke at any time, stop the blender and let it cool down completely. Once the blender is cool, blend oil and herbs together for 5 to 10 minutes until blender becomes warm. 6. Pour oil mixture into a sterilized glass Mason jar (or if blended in jar, remove blender blade and screw on jar lid) and let sit for two weeks. Then your oil is ready to use. 7. When making oil with dried herbs, it is not necessary to strain the herbs from the oil. 8. Once you have used the oil, pour the remaining oily dried herbs into a marinade.

Rub cold, tired feet with this stimulating oil, or use it to make a

savory marinade. ❤ ❤❤❤

W MADCAP MUSINGS ON LOVE

A kind of light spread out from her.

And everything changed color.

And the world opened out. And

a day was good to awaken to. And

there were no limits to anything.

And the people of the world were

good and handsome. And I was not

afraid any more.

—John Steinbeck

Love requires the utmost

vulnerability. We equip someone

with freshly sharpened knives; strip

naked; then invite him to stand

close. What could be scarier?

—Diane Ackerman

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The Herbal KitchenKami McBride • Conari PresseISBN: 9781609252939

ADVERSE ARIESMarch 20 to April 19

E M B R AC E YO U R I N N E R M O N ST E R

Aries is the boss of it all, or at least the Ram’s strut makes it clear that he or she thinks they own the joint. What is it about Aries that makes them so confident? Is it their natural-born intellect—um, yeah, no, not so much. Aries, just like the powerful, muscular man-sheep that represents them in the cosmic zodiac, have way more brawn than brains. Their handy horns and blind, dumb ambition open doors for them that they could otherwise never have figured out how to work. Aries will just keep at it, battering down obstacles—left, right, and center—until they meet their goals.

It’s not that Aries are sociopaths or anything like that, it’s just that they really don’t care about other people very deeply. They can still oper-ate within a family unit, and show up to birth-day parties and ballet recitals, but the only real charge they get is from locking horns with the world and getting their destiny on track. They want to climb every mountain, ford every stream,

find every rainbow… you get the picture. Ari-ans need to find their own way in the world and deeply resent anyone who tries to make things easier for them. If there’s a choice between a clear-cut hiking trail and a wooded-over, lesser-traveled path, it’s pretty damn obvious which one the Aries is going to take.

Aries, you don’t tolerate any social funny-business. If someone uses the word “can’t” you might literally lose your mind. You rarely put something off, but when you do, it’s because you’re calculating your plan of attack. When oth-er people put something off, it’s because they’re complete lazy asses—and you’ll tell them that to their face. You don’t have a problem playing the “bad guy” and laying down the law. It seems as though you would not be invited to happy hour very often, but for some reason people like

to have you around. Your swagger makes everyone else feel just a tad cooler.

Don’t be too flattered, though. They all talk about you be-

hind your back.

28

TRAGIC TAURUSApril 20 to May 20

Tragic Tauruses should be royalty in the Middle Ages. Their idea of a good time is to sit back with a giant, roasted turkey leg and a huge goblet of wine, talk boisterously with friends and family, lounge around in velvet robes, and maybe even get some servant to pop ripe, juicy grapes into his or her mouth. If anyone argues with their decisions, Taurus could just have him or her beheaded on the spot for sport. Unfor-tunately, there’s not much room for royalty in today’s technology-based world, so modern-day Tauruses just end up bossing their families around while they sit together at the table eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. The fact remains, how-ever, that Tauruses consider themselves to be the kings and queens of their households and work-places—all ways must be Taurus’s way.

Taureans love the physical world around them. They can actually get overwhelmed in places like Yankee Candle or Bath & Body Works. Even Bed Bath & Beyond can be a little too much—who knew towels and bedspreads came in so many

textures? They might tear up a little bit when the beauty of an orange-and-blue fall sky hits them full-on. While it can be touching to see the sensitive side of Tragic Taurus, it’s usually best to keep them away from very shiny things. Taurus’s fatal flaws stem from their desire to control the things around them. They can have a major temper when they’re challenged by their own personal limitations, or by their partner. They will rage against friction and can throw themselves off course with their tantrums. Of course, some Taureans are less assertive than others, and this anger can come in the form of a prolonged silent treatment. Their complete pig-headedness can be a major problem both at home and at work. On top of this, the Tauri people really like to relax, almost to the point of total laziness. While they take pride in doing what they say they’re going to do, they may not commit to very many things that interfere with

their lounging.

The truth is that each sign has its own terrible qualities and its own fatal flaws. In this issue we look at Aries and Taurus—both are pretty darned

bossy. Aries generally use force to get their way instead of the itty-bitty bits of brain they have in their head. While Taurus dislikes change so much

that he or she is completely unwilling to listen to a significant other.

29

Excerpted from Bad Birthdays: The Truth Behind Your Crappy Sun Sign by Sarah Christensen Fu. Learn more about the quirks, oddities, and unpleasantries that char-acterize your unlucky sign like who you should be dating, who you should be ditching, the worst jobs (or the ones you won’t screw up), stars of your sign, and more. Hampton Roads PublishingeISBN: 9781612833323

your incompatibility rating

ARIES’ INCOMPATIBIL IT Y RATING

ARIES—this is how two tribes end up going to war.TAURUS—you want to command the world; they want to own it.GEMINI—they swear loyalty, but are on a mission from the enemy.CANCER—you want to find the final frontier; they insist that you take a packed lunch.LEO—you’ll let them be king, if you can drive the tanks.VIRGO—secretly love clearing up all your mess and rubble.LIBRA—will sap your strength with luxury, then betray you.SCORPIO—effective double act: noisy, violent bad cop and menacingly silent bad cop.SAGITTARIUS—they outclass you in the reckless daredevil stakes.CAPRICORN—they control your war chest and ration the bullets.AQUARIUS—always have a superior chess strategy.PISCES—slavishly ready to play soldiers to get your approval, but only pack a water pistol.

TAURUS’ INCOMPATIBIL IT Y RATING

ARIES—is that a suit of lights in their wardrobe, or are they just pleased to see you?TAURUS—irresistible meets immovable: cliché of the Titans.GEMINI—they dance around you flapping red rags until you snap.CANCER—they scuttle sideways when you charge at them.LEO—impoverished royalty trying to ally with bourgeois money.VIRGO—OK they’re neat, but they don’t do neat in the way you have always done neat.LIBRA—all style; you can only deal with substance.SCORPIO—they can outstare you; you can outsit them.SAGITTARIUS—sudden action and loud noises always spoil your digestion.CAPRICORN—they have more bank accounts than you.AQUARIUS—think it’s an insult to call you a materialist.PISCES—they sink their fishy little hooks into your wallet.

Incompatibility ratings courtesy of Darkside Zodiac by Stella Hyde.

30

I am not your teacher. I say this to shift atten-tion away from me and onto the teachers who know you best—your life, your soul, your big divine Self, and your loving inner voice. In ad-dition, I recommend you spend time with the words of masters and mystics across time. They know the way to the One. You can do that in a simple, inexpensive way by choosing a book or sacred text and reading just a bit from it every day. And I do mean just a bit. A few lines, a paragraph, one verse—that’s really all you need to, or want to, absorb in one sitting. In the pres-ence of a great soul, you will find you simply can’t turn the page; you are compelled to stop and slowly digest the words.

There’s a beautiful book on how to read this way, Lectio Divina by Christine Valters Paintner. Paintner is a Benedictine Oblate who follows the practice of lectio divina—“divine reading”—as described by St. Benedict, the sixth-century founder of Western monasticism. The practice has four consecutive actions: first, read the words for understanding; second, listen for deeper meaning; third, repeat the words aloud to savor the text; and finally, rest in the stillness. The practice of reading this way has ancient roots in the Jewish practice of haggadah, repeat-ing a passage softly until it is learned by heart. The Qur’an, which has been passed down orally for centuries, has been memorized this way. And in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, a mantra or sacred utterance is repeated aloud, over and over, releasing layers of mystical il-lumination with each repetition. If you’d like to know more about this approach to divine read-ing, I highly recommend Lectio Divina.

Here’s how I read mystical poetry or a sacred text or the work of a master teacher:

I G N I T E T H E L I G H T

Infuse Your Spirit with High Spiritual IdeasAn Exercise from Janet Conner

1. Read slowly. Don’t rush. One page may be more than enough.

2. When you come across a sentence or phrase or word that knocks on your heart, stop and reread it. If it feels important, underline or highlight or somehow mark the page so you can find it again.

3. Look up from the book and speak the words aloud several times as you stare off in space. Don’t try to figure out any meaning; just listen to the words.

4. Just sit in the silence, staring off into space. After your attention naturally returns to normal, you might go back to the page and make sure you underlined the phrase. (I also write the page number and a word or two about what I read on the inside of the book’s front cover. That way, when I want to find a particular idea or sentence again, I can simply glance at the inside cover.)

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Soul VowsJanet Conner • Conari PresseISBN: 9781609259716

The Banshee A F T E R M I D N I G H T

32

A lthough the Irish have the reputation of being grossly superstitious, they are not a whit more so than the peasantry of England, France, or Germany, nor scarcely as much addicted to superstitious beliefs and fancies as the lower class of Scottish Highlanders. The Irish imagi-nation is, however, so lively as to endow the legends of the Emerald Isle with an individual-ity not possessed by those of most other nations, while the Irish command of language presents the creatures of Hibernian fancy in a garb so vividly real and yet so fantastically original as to make an impression sometimes exceedingly startling.

Of the creations of the Irish imagination, some are humorous, some grotesque, and some awe-inspiring even to sublimity, and chief among the last class is “the weird-wailing Banshee, that sings by night her mournful cry,” giving notice to the family she attends that one of its members is soon to be called to the spirit world. The name of this dreaded attendant is variously pronounced, as Banshee, Banshi, and Benshee, being translated by different scholars, the Fe-male Fairy, the Woman of Peace, the Lady of Death, the Angel of Death, the White Lady of Sorrow, the Nymph of the Air, and the Spirit of the Air. The Banshee is quite distinct from the Fearshee or Shifra, the Man of Peace, the latter bringing good tidings and singing a joyful lay near the house when unexpected good fortune is to befall any or all its inmates.

The Banshee is really a disembodied soul, that of one who, in life, was strongly attached to the family, or who had good reason to hate all its

members. Thus, in different instances, the Ban-shee’s song may be inspired by opposite mo-tives. When the Banshee loves those whom she calls, the song is a low, soft chant, giving notice, indeed, of the close proximity of the angel of death, but with a tenderness of tone that reas-sures the one destined to die and comforts the survivors; rather a welcome than a warning, and having in its tones a thrill of exultation, as though the messenger spirit were bringing glad tidings to him summoned to join the waiting throng of his ancestors. If, during her lifetime, the Banshee was an enemy of the family, the cry is the scream of a fiend, howling with demoniac delight over the coming death-agony of another of her foes.

In some parts of Ireland there exists a belief that the spirits of the dead are not taken from earth, nor do they lose all their former inter-est in earthly affairs, but enjoy the happiness of the saved, or suffer the punishment imposed for their sins, in the neighborhood of the scenes among which they lived while clothed in flesh and blood. At particular crises in the affairs of mortals, these disenthralled spirits sometimes display joy or grief in such a manner as to at-tract the attention of living men and women. At weddings they are frequently unseen guests; at funerals they are always present; and some-times, at both weddings and funerals, their presence is recognized by aerial voices or mys-terious music known to be of unearthly origin. The spirits of the good wander with the living as guardian angels, but the spirits of the bad are restrained in their action, and compelled to do penance at or near the places where their crimes were committed. Some are chained at

D.R. MCANALLY JR.

The Banshee

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the bottoms of the lakes, others buried under ground, others confined in mountain gorges; some hang on the sides of precipices, others are transfixed on the tree-tops, while others haunt the homes of their ancestors, all waiting till the penance has been endured and the hour of release arrives. The Castle of Dunseverick, in Antrim, is believed to be still inhabited by the spirit of a chief, who there atones for a horrid crime, while the castles of Dunluce, of Magrath, and many others are similarly peopled by the wicked dead. In the Abbey of Clare, the ghost of a sinful abbot walks and will continue to do so until his sin has been atoned for by the prayers he unceasingly mutters in his tireless march up and down the aisles of the ruined nave.

The Banshee is of the spirits who look with in-terested eyes on earthly doings; and, deeply attached to the old families, or, on the con-trary, regarding all their members with a hatred beyond that known to mortals, lingers about their dwellings to soften or to aggravate the sorrow of the approaching death. The Banshee attends only the old fami-lies, and though their descendants, through misfortune, may be brought down from high estate to the ranks of peasant-tenants, she never leaves nor forgets them till the last member has been gathered to his fathers in the churchyard. The MacCarthys, Magraths, O’Neills, O’Rileys, O’Sullivans, O’Reardons, O’Flahertys, and almost all other old families of Ireland, have Banshees, though many representatives of these names are in abject poverty.

The song of the Banshee is commonly heard a day or two before the death of which it gives notice, though instances are cited of the song at the beginning of a course of conduct or line of

undertaking that resulted fatally. Thus, in Kerry, a young girl engaged herself to a youth, and at the moment her promise of marriage was given, both heard the low, sad wail above their heads. The young man deserted her, she diedof a broken heart, and the night before her death, the Banshee’s song, loud and clear, was heard outside the window of her mother’s cottage. One of the O’Flahertys, of Galway, marched out of his castle with his men on a foray, and, as his troops filed through the gate-way, the Banshee was heard high above the

towers of the fortress. The next night she sang again, and was heard no more for a month, when his wife heard the wail under her window, and on the following day his followers brought back his corpse. One of the O’Neills of Shane Cas-tle, in Antrim, heard the Banshee as he started on a journey before daybreak, and was ac-cidentally killed some time after, but while on the same journey.

The wail most fre-quently comes at night, although cases are

cited of Banshees singing during the daytime, and the song is often inaudible to all save the one for whom the warning is intended. This, however, is not general, the death notice be-ing for the family rather than for the doomed individual. The spirit is generally alone, though rarely several are heard singing in chorus. A lady of the O’Flaherty family, greatly beloved for her social qualities, benevolence, and pi-ety, was, some years ago, taken ill at the family mansion near Galway, though no uneasiness was felt on her account, as her ailment seemed nothing more than a slight cold. After she had remained indoors for a day or two several of her acquaintances came to her room to enliven her imprisonment, and while the little party were merrily chatting, strange sounds were heard

34

and all trembled and turned pale as they recog-nized the singing of a chorus of Banshees. The lady’s ailment developed into pleurisy, and she died in a few days, the chorus being again heard in a sweet, plaintive requiem as the spirit was leaving her body. The honor of being warned by more than one Banshee is, however, very great, and comes only to the purest of the pure.

The “hateful Banshee” is much dreaded by members of a family against which she has enmity. A noble Irish family, whose name is still familiar in Mayo, is attended by a Banshee of this description. This Banshee is the spirit of a young girl deceived and afterwards mur-dered by a former head of the family. With her dying breath she cursed her murderer, and promised she would at-tend him and his forev-er. Many years passed, the chieftain reformed his ways, and his youth-ful crime was almost forgotten even by him-self, when, one night, he and his family were seated by the fire, and suddenly the most hor-rid shrieks were heard outside the castle walls. All ran out, but saw nothing. During the night the screams continued as though the castle were besieged by demons, and the unhappy man recognized, in the cry of the Banshee, the voice of the young girl he had murdered. The next night he was assassinated by one of his fol-lowers, when again the wild, unearthly screams of the spirit were heard, exulting over his fate. Since that night, the “hateful Banshee” has never failed to notify the family, with shrill cries of re-vengeful gladness, when the time of one of their number had arrived.

Banshees are not often seen, but those that have made themselves visible differ as much in personal appearance as in the character of their

cries. The “friendly Banshee” is a young and beautiful female spirit, with pale face, regular, well-formed features, hair sometimes coal black, sometimes golden; eyes blue, brown, or black. Her long, white drapery falls below her feet as she floats in the air, chanting her weird warn-ing, lifting her hands as if in pitying tenderness bestowing a benediction on the soul she sum-mons to the invisible world. The “hateful Ban-shee” is a horrible hag, with angry, distorted features; maledictions are written in every line of her wrinkled face, and her outstretched

arms call down curses on the doomed mem-ber of the hated race. Though generally the only intimation of the presence of the Ban-shee is her cry, a notable instance of the contrary exists in the family of the O’Reardons, to the doomed member of which the Banshee always appears in the shape of an exceedingly beautiful woman, who sings a song so sweetly solemn as to reconcile him to his approaching fate.

The prophetic spirit does not follow members of a family who go to a foreign land, but should death overtake them abroad, she gives notice of the misfortune to those at home. When the Duke of Wellington died, the Banshee was heard wailing round the house of his ancestors, and during the Napo-leonic campaigns, she frequently notified Irish families of the death in battle of Irish officers and soldiers. The night before the battle of the Boyne several Banshees were heard singing in the air over the Irish camp, the truth of their prophecy being verified by the death-roll of the next day.

How the Banshee is able to obtain early and accurate information from foreign parts of the death in battle of Irish soldiers is yet undecided

The night before the battle of the Boyne several

Banshees were heard singing in the air over the Irish camp,

the truth of their prophecy being verified by the

death-roll of the next day.

35

One of the best known Irish ghosts is the banshee (bean sidhe), a harbinger of death. The name means “woman of the mounds” or “female fairy.” Sir Walter Scott said, “The distinction of a Banshee is only allowed to families of the pure Milesian stock, and is never as-cribed to any descendant of the proudest Norman or the boldest Saxon who followed the banner of Earl Strongbow, much less to adventurers of later dates who have obtained settlements in the Green Isle.” He would have one believe, therefore, that only the purest, oldest, and highest born of the Irish are ever visited by a banshee. Certainly the O’Rourkes, O’Brians, O’Malleys, and the O’Donnals—all great families—have been visited by the banshee over several generations.

—Raymond Buckland, from The Weiser Field Guide to GhostseISBN: 9781609250843

in Hibernian mystical circles. Some believe that there are, in addition to the two kinds already mentioned, “silent Banshees,” who act as at-tendants to the members of old families, one to each member; that these silent spirits follow and observe, bringing back intelligence to the family Banshee at home, who then, at the prop-er seasons, sings her dolorous strain. A partial confirmation of this theory is seen in the fact that the Banshee has given notice at the family seat in Ireland of deaths in battles fought in ev-ery part of the world. From North America, the West Indies, Africa, Australia, India, China; from every point to which Irish regiments have fol-lowed the roll of the British drums, news of the prospective shedding of Irish blood has been brought home, and the slaughter preceded by a Banshee wail outside the ancestral windows. But it is due to the reader to state, that this silent Banshee theory is by no means well or generally received, the burden of evidence going to show that there are only two kinds of Banshees, and that, in a supernatural way, they know the im-mediate future of those in whom they are inter-ested, not being obliged to leave Ireland for the purpose of obtaining their information.

Such is the wild Banshee, once to be heard in every part of Ireland, and formerly believed in so devoutly that to express a doubt of her existence was little less than blasphemy. Now,

however, as she attends only the old families and does not change to the new, with the disap-pearance of many noble Irish names during the last half century have gone also their Banshees, until in only a few retired districts of the west coast is the dreaded spirit still found, while in most parts of the island she has become only a superstition, and from the majesty of a death-boding angel, is rapidly sinking to a level with

the Fairy, the Lepre-chawn and the Pooka; the subject for tales to amuse the idle and terrify the young.

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Banshees, Werewolves, Vampires, and Other Creatures of the NightVarla Ventura • Weiser BookseISBN: 9781609259112

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development. My friend had obviously done his research; he found out that willows grew quickly, easily, and with a great spreading root system that drinks up lots of water, which would stabilize the creek bank. When I met him at the creek, he had a huge bundle of willow branches in his arms. We spent most of the day planting these willow sprigs up and down the endangered curve.

Many years later, I was home visiting and found myself walking down by that creek. Where we spent that afternoon is now a beautiful idyllic bend with a long curving row of large graceful willows bending out over the water.

Shade at a Magic ShowWhen I was twelve years old, I ended up in a Shri-ner’s hospital in a full body cast, lying flat on my back for six months. I was surrounded by wonderful people doing everything they could to help me. One particularSunday we had a scheduled picnic outdoors, and all the kids were brought outside for hamburgers, hot dogs, and a magic show. My bed was wheeled outside, but by time the magic show was about to start I found myself staring right into the sun, forcing me to close my eyes. Sud-denly the sun seemed to disappear, and I opened my eyes to find a Shriner purposefully standing in a position that completely blocked the sun and still allowed me to see the stage. He stood there for the entire hour of the show—directly in line with the sun and shading his eyes with his hand. This happened many years ago, but I have never for-gotten what that man did to allow a little girl to witness the magic of magic and the magic of kindness.

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Banshees, Werewolves, Vampires, and Other Creatures of the NightVarla Ventura • Weiser BookseISBN: 9781609259112