Although I was in medical school, I figured I’d just do research and never actually practice. I had watched my aunt and uncle, who were both medical doctors, lead a life that I just wasn’t interested in. They were on call constantly, they had to leave every Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner, and it looked like a lousy way to live.
Then we had our first Ob/Gyn rotation. When the other medical students and I gathered to watch our first delivery, I was so moved I began to cry—I thought I was going to fall down on the floor sobbing. Luckily, I had been in the culture of medicine long enough to know that I didn’t want to be seen as a crying woman who loses it, especially when we were one of the first classes that included a significant number of women.
One of the medical students hadn’t clamped the umbilical cord properly, and it became a mini fire hose, spurting blood all over the room. (more…)
You will find your ideal career when you strike the right balance between intuition and intellect, and learn to distinguish the call of your spirit from the often misguided urgings of your ego.
Ultimately, you must follow your heart. Listen closely and you will find that it beats in concert with the heart of all creation.
When you are truly aligned with spirit and you truly long to do meaningful work, the world is in need of whatever it is you feel you need to do.
Every dream, no matter how insignificant it may sound to others, is sacred. Give yourself to it fully and you will live with peace and purpose for the rest of your days. (more…)
A week ago, I was eating dinner at Ecopolitan, the raw-food restaurant in Minneapolis that I frequent frequently. Ecopolitan is the kind of place where diners feel comfortable starting conversations with each other. A couple of young women at a nearby table began asking me about the raw-food diet. It’s nice to see young people interested in eating right, so I asked how old they were. One said twenty, the other said twenty-seven.
They asked me how old I was. I paused, then asked them how old they thought I looked. One guessed twenty-nine, the other guessed thirty. Considering that my daughter will be thirty in a few months, and that I’ll turn fifty-two a couple weeks after that, I couldn’t help laughing. Sure, that was nice to hear, but twenty-nine is pushing it. Most people guess that I’m in my mid-to-late thirties.
People have asked me what the secret is to looking young. In my view, (more…)
Jason McElwain, a senior at Greece Athena High School in New York, was the student manager for the school’s basketball team when coach Jim Johnson called his name in the final game of the year with 4:19 left to play. It was the first and only game J-Mac would ever play in.
The crowd went wild, holding up photo-signs of Jason’s face. Jason, you see, is autistic. And what happened over the final 4:19 of that game was nothing short of magical. If J-Mac’s story doesn’t inspire you, nothing will.
Here is a look at the aftermath of Jason’s heroics, narrated by Tom Rinaldi, who also narrated the first video. (more…)
When I interviewed Joan Borysenko for my book, Sixty Seconds: One Moment Changes Everything. I asked her to tell me about her experience at her mother’s bedside the night she died. Here is an excerpt from that profoundly moving story:
Not long after that, we started the countdown because she was getting weaker and weaker. In the middle of the night, my twenty-year-old son, Justin, and I were sitting by her bed meditating when I suddenly had a very profound, very realistic vision. I was a pregnant mother giving birth, but I was also the baby being born. Throughout the vision I was perfectly lucid, and I was in my regular state of consciousness as well. I thought, How remarkable. I’m in two bodies and I’m conscious of being in both. And it occurred to me that that’s what the consciousness of God is, and that it’s present in every human being. Then my consciousness switched totally into the baby being born, and I found myself coming down a long dark tunnel and out into the light. Once I was in the light, I saw my entire relationship with my mother unveiled on an infinite number of layers. (more…)
It was past midnight on a Saturday night when I left a party at a friend’s house. I was driving an old car—I think it was a 1967 Impala—because I had just moved to Los Angeles and I had no money. The gas gauge on the dashboard didn’t work so I had to go by mileage to estimate how much gas I had left. Sure enough, on my way home at one in the morning, I ran out of gas. Thank God it was at a busy intersection in Hollywood and there was a gas station right on the corner. I walked over to the station and they filled up a gas can for me.
Like a lot of older cars, the gas tank was under the license plate so I went around to the back of the car and kneeled down to open it. That’s when I found out that the gas can they had given me was leaking. Still, I was trying to make it work when, suddenly, I noticed an older man with snow-white hair standing to my right. I remember that he had very sweet eyes. He said, “You must go back to the service station and get another gas can right away.” (more…)
We then visited a castle in San Damiano just outside of Assisi—the home of the convent St. Francis had set up for St. Clare, the first female admitted into the Franciscan order. Our plan was to walk up to the third level to see the place where St. Clare had died. A young man named John Graybill was the first one up the stairs and I was right behind him. John was twenty-two years old and weighed nearly two hundred pounds with his leg braces on, which he wore because, as he said, his body—not he—had muscular dystrophy. When we got up eight or nine steps, the staircase started to narrow and John realized to his dismay that he couldn’t go any further—he couldn’t extend his legs to the left or to the right, which is the only way he could manage to climb a flight of stairs. He turned to me and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t go back down the steps because of all the people in line and I can’t go up because I can’t move my legs.” I immediately said, “Why don’t you get on my back and I’ll carry you?”
But I had forgotten a couple of things—I forgot that I was sixty years old, and I also forgot that I had serious ligament and cartilage damage in my knees that required surgery. (more…)
When you are ready to know your life’s purpose, it will reveal itself by taking up residence in your conscious mind. As Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung explained:
From the beginning, I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security and though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me.
I’ve talked to many writers, artists and other “creative” types who have experienced the call of destiny just as I have. It’s almost as if an unseen guide is nudging you constantly, persistently, unceasingly. Whether you write, paint, sing, dance or create or perform in any way, the next project is always calling your name. There is no escaping it.
I’ve had people tell me that this “calling” I talk about is a figment of my imagination, that I created it because it’s something I wanted to do. All I can say is: (more…)
Every intercessory prayer you offer adds that much more love and healing energy to the consciousness of the individual you are praying for. In Healing Words, Reinventing Medicine, and other books, Dr. Larry Dossey, who has spent years researching the relationship between prayer and healing, cites numerous scientific studies that strongly support the power of prayer.
Indeed, an intercessory prayer, when uttered with loving intention and unbroken attention, may mean the difference between life and death. Yet there are so many factors in play—the recipient’s karmic debts, sacred contracts, and will to live, to name a few—that your prayer may not appear to affect the ultimate outcome.
Forgiveness is ultimately a selfish act, requiring you to free your imprisoned spirit and reclaim your power. If you do not forgive, you are bound to the person who injured you as surely as if you were handcuffed to him.
Forgiveness is ultimately a selfless act, requiring you to look through God’s eyes and not your own. Then, instead of judging others, you will be adding much-needed loving energy to the collective consciousness.
“Forgiveness” is a loaded word that may anger those who have endured great wrongs. Indeed, anyone with an ounce of empathy can appreciate how difficult it must be to forgive the unforgivable.
Substituting the word “release” for “forgiveness” short-circuits the emotional charge and reframes the act as a blessing that the injured party bestows on herself rather than one bestowed on her antagonist. (more…)
Spiritual unions are timeless. When two minds, hearts, and souls are connected through divine romance, all they are to each other is fully expressed in the present moment.
They trust each other with their lives and view their relationship as an opportunity to serve one another.
As selfishness gives way to selflessness, love grows and deepens in ways that ego would have you believe are not possible.
If one is in need of comfort or protection, their beloved is at their side in a heartbeat. If she is grieving the loss of a friendship, he does not offer solutions, he just listens. If the world deems him a (more…)
If your happiness depends on achieving your goals precisely as you have envisioned, on events consistently unfolding according to your wishes, or on other people doing exactly what you want them to do, you are condemning yourself to a lifetime of misery.
When you insist that you have total control over circumstances beyond your control, you are announcing to the universe that you know better than God what is best for you.
Detaching from outcomes does not mean that you are apathetic and unmotivated. Quite the contrary: detachment means that you care deeply, but from an objective, enlightened perspective. (more…)
I was aware of Faith, the amazing two-legged walking dog, but I didn’t know anything about her. So I enjoyed reading the following behind-the-scenes story in the May 2007 issue of Guideposts.
Faith’s owner, Jude Stringfellow of Edmond, Oklahoma, was going through a traumatic divorce at the time Faith came into her life. She wrote a book, With A Little Faith, that chronicles her family’s—and Faith’s—struggle and ultimate triumph.
FAITH IN ACTION
That afternoon there was the usual mid-week mayhem. My two daughters were making a ruckus in the living room. I was in the kitchen, taking a break from job hunting and rustling up dinner. The front door slammed. That meant Reuben, my 17-year-old, was home. “Mom!” he called. (more…)
Two years ago, I interviewed nearly a dozen eighty- and ninety-somethings who were still putting in a full day’s work. The article was for Twin Cities Businessmagazine.
My favorite interviewee was Minneapolis architect Ralph Rapson, who had designed numerous Twin Cities landmarks, including the original Guthrie Theater. Ralph was 92 and still working every day at his small architectural firm alongside his son, Toby, and grandson, Lane.
All the people I interviewed continued to find meaning and purpose in their work. I love this quote from 84-year-old Leonard Parker, whose instructor in a 1949 architectural class at MIT in Boston was none other than Ralph Rapson:
When you’re in a field of endeavor that requires creative input that leads to satisfying resolutions, how can you get tired of that? Every day is a new day.
I was especially touched by Ralph’s devotion to not only his work but to his late wife. Here is how I ended the introduction to the article: (more…)
Despite his childhood spent in orphanages and foster homes, Dr. Dyer, who has a doctorate in counseling psychotherapy, has overcome many obstacles to make his dreams come true. Today he spends much of his time showing others how to do the same. For more information, go to drwaynedyer.com.
The headline on the ad promoting your seminar is, “There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem,” which is also the title of your new book. I’m reminded of H. L. Mencken’s quote, ‘For every difficult and complex problem, there is a solution that is easy, simple and wrong.’ How does one begin the process of finding the right solution, the spiritual solution to a problem? Well, I think one does it by recognizing that problems are only things that exist because of the way we process our lives and everything that happens in our world. We need to learn to (more…)
Triumph of the Spirit 