We all feel for the horrible natural disaster continuing to unfold in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s hard to remain positive when so much damage is being done. A sense of powerlessness can take over. But for some, innovative solutions to difficult problems are what they do best.

Take this next story:

By Katherine Gustafson for Tonic.com

As our newest oil spill seeps toward the Louisiana coast, it’s natural to wonder whether there are any out-of-the-box ways to clean up the mess. Is rubbing animals with dish detergent the best we can do?

Looking to the Philippines, we found our answer: human hair. In 2006, the country’s worst-ever oil spill prompted an unusual program in the country’s prisons. Thousands of Philippine inmates had their heads and chests harvested for hair to be used in the clean-up effort. The hair was combined with feathers to create a spongy material that would soak up the more than 50,000 gallons of industrial fuel that had leaked from a sunken tanker off the central island of Guimaras.

The method was also used in San Francisco, when hair mats were employed to clean up the Cosco Busan spill of 2007, which resulted when a cargo ship hit the base of the Bay Bridge and let loose some 58,000 gallons of oil. Lisa Gautier, director of a nonprofit called Matter of Trust, donated 1,000 “oil spill hair mats” she had made for the San Francisco Department of the Environment to absorb motor oil spills.

Once the hair mats, which are size of doormats and feel like Brillo pads, had absorbed all the oil they could, oyster mushrooms were cultivated on the mats to absorb the oil and turn the oily hair into nontoxic compost within 12 weeks, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Mycologist and author Paul Stamets donated $10,000 worth of oyster mushrooms to the cause.

So could hair and mushrooms work in the gulf? Yes, indeed. Lisa Gautier is at it again and wants your hair to the help with the clean-up effort. Find out how to donate your excess locks here.

Source: Gimundo

With Earth Day a few days behind us, I wanted to share with with you this particularly powerful piece by Corbyn Hightower of Daily Good that really showcases what one family can do to make a difference.

Earth Day has always been my favorite holiday as a parent. I am known for my Scrooge-like tendencies in regards to the big Hallmark-card occasions, and only attempt to quell that predisposition for the sake of my children.

Well, the younger ones don’t care anyway, and I’m probably responding to guilty feelings based on grandparent expectations. I resist those. I resist the sense of obligation to get gifts and most of all to buy the decorations, trinkets, and crappy treats. Earth Day suits me because all that garbage is an anathema to the spirit of the holiday itself.

Earth Day is a time when my kids can feel proud of our family for the lifestyle that we’ve recently chosen. We went to a festival the other day (arriving on bikes after a four-mile ride) and the kids got an opportunity to say, “We don’t drive a car at all, anymore.”

And people exclaim, smile, share kindnesses, and it feels good. Not just like our fortunes have taken a turn for the worse. I look at what our days lately entail, and it’s nice that we can go a really long time without any money changing hands. It’s gardening season, and even my four-year-old is turning the soil and doing real work.

We are trying to keep ourselves strictly budgeted, even after the cash influx from the car sale. We need to stretch as far as we can, until we can get the younger ones into childcare, or otherwise free me up to contribute to the family finances. I have been thinking of putting together an environmentally-friendly housecleaning business, something I can do on the weekends, perhaps. I picture lugging my vacuum, assorted essential oils, baking soda, lemons and vinegar in my bike trailer, and I like that vision.

Recently, my husband has been fixing our appliances rather than chucking them when they break. We have this cool old fan that we bought at a garage sale for a dollar–heavy as an anvil and covered in grease and dust. We rebuilt it piece-by-piece, and buffed it to a shine and now it hums like a Cadillac. That’s it, pictured left.

Now when you buy a fan, an iron, a toaster, they’re made of lightweight plastic and meant to be thrown away when they stop working. But here’s my husband fixing an iron. Imagine that, fixing it instead of just tossing it in the garbage:

Our needs are modest, our overhead has been lowered, and life has become about simple, sustainable pleasures. Also about the work required in a life without the little luxuries. I don’t have to step out of the rat race; the only rats I deal with are in our basement, and it seems the neighborhood cats have taken care of those.

It’s been a beautiful spring, and we are learning how to do this. Today I pedaled up a steep hill with my babies in the trailer, and I could feel my strong legs carrying the load.

What does balance mean to you? To me, it means recognizing the various aspects of yourself and tending to each one of them. It means that work needs play and seriousness needs laughter. It means allowing the negative sides of you to exist, sometimes right along side the positive parts.

Here’s what balance means to others:

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving”~ Albert Einstein

“The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.” ~ Albert Einstein

“Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.” ~ Barbara De Angelis

“Prosperity is no just scale; adversity is the only balance to weigh friends.” ~ Plutarch

“Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There’s no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves” ~ Frank Herbert

“A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life.” ~ William Arthur Ward

“The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.” ~ Euripides

(above) Akeem Stephenson, a graduate of PACT's LifePlan coaching program, cautions others about his past transgressions.

I recently went to a rotary event in my neighborhood. While I had heard the term before, I had no idea what they actually did. Then I came across this great story and realized they do quite a lot!

The PACT Urban Peace Program, launched by Toronto-area Rotarians Dan Cornacchia and David Lockett in 2000, brings the teenagers, their victims, and local residents together to talk about the crimes and craft restitution plans. The program is modelled on a conflict-resolution technique used in Australian Aboriginal communities.

“Violence is a learned behaviour,” Cornacchia says. “By helping children today, we can stop the cycle of violence.”

Founding members of the Rotary Club of Parkdale-High Park, Cornacchia and Lockett opened the Redwood, a shelter for abused women and children, in 1993. That work inspired them to tackle the growing problem of urban violence. PACT (Participation, Acknowledgement, Commitment, and Transformation) helps more than 500 teens a year. Along with the mediation program, it offers vocational training and life coaching for teens who have been charged under the Youth Criminal Justice Act as well as for at-risk youth, such as those living in homeless shelters.

Visit the website below to learn more about “rotary power”.

Source: Rotary.org

Recently Steve Jobs gave the 2005 Stanford University Commencement Address. He relayed three stories to his audience which seemed rather simple on some levels but had far-reaching implications. Watch it online at the link above or read below for an excerpt from Psychology Today:

The first story he told was about dropping out of Reed College. More exactly, he stopped paying tuition for classes he didn’t like but stayed on campus, dropping in on classes he did like. One of these was a calligraphy class. The relevance of this chance event is in front of me as I write this blog entry and in front of you as you read it: different fonts for computer text and proportional spacing, innovations introduced by Jobs years later that made the first Macintosh computer the apple of so many people’s eye. The point? Jobs told his audience to connect the dots in life, appreciating that you cannot do so looking forward. You can only do so when looking back. And you need faith - optimism? - that someday the dots will connect.

The second story he told was about getting fired from Apple Computers, the company that he had co-founded. Talk about coupling insult with injury! But hurt and dismayed though he was, Jobs realized that he still loved what he was doing, so he kept doing it. He founded Pixar. He founded NeXT, which was then acquired by Apple, and you know the rest of the story. The point? Find something that you love to do, because “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

The third story was about his experience with pancreatic cancer, which made his own mortality more than an abstraction. According to Jobs, “Death is very likely the single best invention of life” because it allows you to sidestep the trap of thinking you have something to lose. The point? Jobs reported that he often asks himself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” When the answer is no for too many days in a row, he knows he needs to change something.

This story gives new meaning to women reaching new heights…quite literally!

Congress is awarding the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor, to members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a civilian branch of the Army Air Force. Fewer than 300 of the 1,100 survive. Relatives of those who have died or could not attend will also get medals.

When Jean Springer (above) joined, “it was kind of a lark,” she says. She had been taking flying lessons. “It was patriotic. And boring at home. I loved flying.”

The WASP was created to allow more male pilots to go to the war front.

Prohibited from flying in combat, the female pilots transported military personnel, towed targets for gunnery practice and shuttled planes from factories to bases.

They flew every military plane model flown in the war.

“Sometimes the guys who gave us weather predictions in the morning when we left weren’t particularly accurate,” Springer says. “In snowstorms, it was scary.”

Yet no military honors were granted to the 38 women who were killed during service to the program.

In December 1944, as the war was ending and male pilots were coming home, the program was disbanded.

“One day I came back from a flight,” says Doris Nathan, 93, of Kalamazoo, Mich. “And the commanding officer said, ‘I just got orders to tell you to get off the base by tomorrow morning.’ ”

Some of the women kept flying as instructors in Florida or bush pilots in Alaska, says Albert “Chig” Lewis, a Washington lawyer and founding member of Wingtip to Wingtip, an association that promotes the fliers’ legacy. His mother was a WASP. Others raised families and accepted that most of the nation didn’t know what they’d done.

The fliers were already trying to gain recognition as military veterans in 1976 when the Air Force announced that “for the first time ever” it would teach women to fly military airplanes, says Kate Landdeck, an associate professor of history at Texas Woman’s University who is writing a book about WASPs and their lives after the war.

“They realized their Air Force had forgotten about them,” Landdeck says.

In 1977, after a “huge effort in Congress” and with the help of Sen. Barry Goldwater, who had flown with WASPs during the war, the women were recognized as military personnel and given partial veterans benefits.

“They get to go to VA hospitals, and they get that flag on the coffin,” she says. “That’s the most important thing to them.” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, co-sponsored the bill to honor the women with the medal.

“These women have yet to receive the recognition they deserve,” Hutchison says.

Source: USA Today

That’s right - after years of debating and in-house feuding, the United States of America has passed a healthcare reform:

The US House of Representatives has narrowly voted to pass a landmark healthcare reform bill at the heart of President Barack Obama’s agenda.

Under the legislation, health insurance will be extended to nearly all Americans, imposes new taxes on the wealthy and bars restrictive insurance practices such as refusing to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.

They represent the biggest change in the US healthcare system since the creation in the 1960s of Medicare, the government-run scheme for Americans aged 65 or over.

President Barack Obama:

“It’s a victory for the American people.”

Damn straight.

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and senior staff, react in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as the House passes the health care reform bill, March 21, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Source: BBC News

Sometimes we hang on to pain so dearly, it begins to define us. We don’t know what we’d do without it. We get used to it, like an old, moth-worn blanket that never really keeps us warm.

This week, we offer up quotes on letting go:

“True love doesn’t have a happy ending, because true love never ends. Letting go is one way of saying I love you.”

“Letting go doesn’t mean giving up, but rather accepting that there are things that cannot be.”

“There are things that we never want to let go of, people we never want to leave behind. But keep in mind that letting go isn’t the end of the world, it’s the beginning of a new life.”

“When you become good at the art of letting sufferings go, then you’ll come to realize what you were dragging around with you. And for that, no one else other than you was responsible.” Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

“It’s all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.” Mick Jagger

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.” Jim Morrison

“Some people think it's holding on that makes one strong- sometimes it's letting go.”

Image Source: TheEnvisage

It’s easy to feel daunted by the idea of forgiveness. We all have people or situations we’ve needed to forgive and sometimes, it can feel next to impossible. It can seem to take years sometimes - even a lifetime.

Radical forgiveness is an idea developed by author Collin Toppin. It doesn’t take a lifetime. As a matter of fact, it can take minutes. One premise? That we simply entertain the idea that the problematic person or situation entered into our life for a reason. We don’t even have to believe it. This alone starts a ripple effect that breaks the hold of hurt and anger.
Here’s a little more about radical forgiveness:

Radical Forgiveness is easy and instantaneous because it is a shift in perception that allows you to understand that, in truth, looked at from the perspective of the spiritual ‘big picture,’ nothing wrong ever happened.

What brings about such a radical shift in perception - especially in situations where one feels very vicitimized and hurt? Surprisingly, it requires only a willingness to accept the possibility that life is not simply a series of random and haphazard events but is, in fact, the unfoldment of a Divine plan that is unfolding for us exactly how it needs to unfold for our spiritual growth.

In other words, every event, however pleasant or unpleasant, has been called forth by a Higher Aspect of ourselves that knows exactly what we need for our own healing. When we live more out of that idea than the victim story, life begins to work perfectly.

So how do we get there? Well, lack of forgiveness is nothing more than stuck energy, caused by past judgments, criticisms, blame and resentments. The way forward is use tools or processes that help us release that stuck energy, raise our vibration and become the loving beings we have the potential to be.

THE PROCESS OF RADICAL FORGIVENESS

In my workshops, I help people to shift the energy and move into Radical Forgiveness by basically following these five steps:

1. Tell the Story: You must begin from where you are. You are a spiritual being having a human experience that involves emotional experiences. We make it up that emotions are undesirable and wrong, so when we get upset about something we make up a ‘victim’s story’ and blame others for our unhappiness. Having that story heard and witnessed is the first step to letting it go. Likewise, the first step in releasing victimhood is to own it fully. So, in this step, you tell your story, and it is honored as your truth in the moment.

2. Feel the Feelings: Here you are encouraged to feel the feelings. It is the vital step that many so-called spiritual people want to leave out thinking that they shouldn’t have ‘negative’ feelings. That’s denial and misses the crucial point that the feelings is where the authentic power is and that our strength, in fact, lies in our vulnerability and our willingness to show up as fully human. You cannot heal what you don’t feel. When people access their pain, this is the beginning of their healing.

But this is not necessarily digging up the past. In fact, doing so is not necessary at all. Whatever is upsetting you now represents the past and following the feelings (the energy), as they are occurring while you tell your story, automatically heals the past pain. It is not even necessary to know what the original pain was. That’s why I say that Radical Forgiveness requires no therapy.

3. Collapse the Story: This takes the power out of the victim story you made up. The Navajo Indians had a ceremony for doing this. Anyone with a grievance could come to the circle three times to tell their story, and they would be heard. On the fourth occasion everyone would turn their backs. “Enough already! Your story is just a story. There’s no real truth to it - it is just an illusion. We have heard it three times and we no longer wish to give it power. Let it go and then let yourself move towards what is really true.”

4. Do a Radical Forgiveness Reframe: Here we replace the ‘illusionary’ story with another story - the Radical Forgiveness ‘story.’ This one says that what appeared to have happened, far from being a tragedy, was in fact exactly what we wanted to experience and was in that sense, absolutely perfect.

This is often very difficult to accept, but the good thing is it does not require you see WHY it is perfect, or that you must GET the lesson involved. It is nearly always beyond our ability to comprehend anyway, so it’s a waste of time trying to figure it out.

Willingness is all that is required You just have to be willing to open to the idea that there is a gift in it somewhere, and then choose peace. It really is that simple. When we get used to thinking this way, it’s amazing how simple and easy life becomes. It’s so freeing to stop resisting (judging) life and surrender to what wants to naturally occur. Life with Radical Forgiveness can be very sweet.

5. Integration: After you have allowed yourself to be willing to see the perfection in the situation, it is necessary to integrate that change at the cellular level. That means integrating it into the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies so it becomes a part of who you are. It’s like saving what you have done on the computer to the hard drive. Only then will it become permanent. I find that breathwork is the best way to integrate this work and I seldom ever do a Radical Forgiveness workshop without what I call a ‘Satori’ breath session. Other ways to integrate is through speaking affirmations, walking, doing forgiveness worksheets, ritual and ceremony.

The Olympics have been going on a long, LONG time. Our collection of quotes includes the new and the very old!

“So you wish to conquer in the Olympic games, my friend? And I too, by the Gods, and a fine thing it would be! But first mark the conditions and the consequences, and then set to work. You will have to put yourself under discipline; to eat by rule, to avoid cakes and sweetmeats; to take exercise at the appointed hour whether you like it or no, in cold and heat; to abstain from cold drinks and from wine at your will; in a word, to give yourself over to the trainer as to a physician. Then in the conflict itself you are likely enough to dislocate your wrist or twist your ankle, to swallow a great deal of dust, or to be severely -thrashed, and, after all these things, to be defeated.”

~ Epictetus (Greek philosopher associated with the Stoics, AD 55-c.135)
The greatest memory for me of the 1984 Olympics was not the individual honors, but standing on the podium with my teammates to receive our team gold medal.

~ Mitch Gaylord (American gymnast, 1984 Summer Olympics)

The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.

~Pierre de Coubertin (founder of modern Olympic Games)

The Olympics have been with the world since 776 B.C., and have only been interrupted by war, especially in the modern era.

~ Bill Toomey (American decathlete, 1968 Summer Olympics)

Perhaps I don’t give the impression that I’m hurting on the track. But that is because I am animated by an interior force which covers my suffering.

~ Noureddine Morceli (Algerian athlete, 1996 Summer Olympics)

Maria Nafpliotou, in the role of an ancient Greek high priestess, lights a torch from the Olympic Flame during the handing over ceremony for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics at the Panathenian marble stadium in Athens on October 29, 2009. (ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images) #