Walking along St. Nick’s Avenue in Harlem with Shawn Hayes of HealthCorps – Shawn spotted this intriguing entrance. The sign reads “Promise Land” – one wondered was a “d” dropped off the Promise or what? It looked as thought it could be the entrance to a magic portal – admittedly unprepossessing but perhaps that was to deter the cynical, those with lost innocence or the faint-hearted?

We strolled along chatting with the enthusiasm of schoolboys, Shawn, as well as being an academic, knows a lot about construction and was fascinated by the ornate workmanship of the buildings we passed by, e.g. the hand carved in sandstone around a doorway and explained how it was done, with a template as a guide. We passed the apartment building where Coleman Hawkins lived, nondescript and hardly worth a second glance, unlike the Hawk, who walked through the streets of Harlem, a giant among men, a god amongst mere mortals. This is the land of aristocracy, the Duke (Ellington), his main residence for Mrs E and the little E’s, just by the A train subway, and it’s not hard to imagine the crowd or twenty or so disciples in the street listening as Bud Powell practiced piano in his first floor apartment – Sonny Rollins, colossus of the tenor sax, used to travel all the way from Brooklyn just to hear the great genius, mostly still unrecognized even now seventy years later, Bud, with the impossibly long fingers who could sight read anything, who’s influences ranged from the the great classical composers, to the modernists, Schoenberg etc, not to mention every genre of jazz.

And before we leave the Hawk, listen to his multi-million selling hit single Body and Soul where he doesn’t, apart from the first line, articulate the melody once in the three minutes or so that the take lasts – can you imagine that happening today? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q7J4PgrRsY

Sean and I talked about innocence and the power of innocence. Yeats’ The Second Coming sprung to mind:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned – how well does that sum of what we see in public high schools across the nation? Alice Maples, the HealthCorps coordinator from Manual Arts HS in Los Angeles was saying only this morning how you could see on the faces of some students the process of the loss of innocence over the course of a couple of months. What a tragedy, unremarked, unnoticed, unmentioned by the candidates in the race to be the nominee to challenge Obama in the November election.

Surely the big unasked question in our media, on our TV screens is this. Which of these men, if any, are fit to step into the shoes of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt? And surely Yeats was right, the best, if we can locate them lack conviction whereas the passionate intensity of the inadequate, the deceitful, at the moment, in this day and age, wins the day.

Let’s go through the unprepossessing door to the Promised Land, or even the Promise Land if by that we promise to stand up for what’s right. Let’s stand up for our convictions.

And here’s Alexander Hamilton’s house in it’s new location, it’s third since it was first constructed in Harlem. He built it as a retreat from the hustle and bustle of life in the lower part of the island and it took an hour and a half by carriage to get to it, located as it was on a high hill with clean air and countryside all around. In the background you can see one of the towers of CUNY, built in 1910 from the schist dug out while excavating the tunnels that would be the NY subway system. Gothic beauty, if you like that sort of thing, and I do, CUNY, the working class Harvard.

Hamilton too, was an all-time great, a man who fought at Fort George in the Revolutionary War against the British, who almost single-handedly created the economic system in the USA that prevails to this day, a man who almost certainly would have been president had he not perished after a duel at Weehauken, NJ with Aaron Burr, who himself later became vice President but whose popularity never recovered having killed the much loved Hamilton.

Before this stroll, at 7.45 am in WestSide HS, on the final day of the HealthCorps PD course, there was an obvious problem. We’d demonstrated over two previous days meditating in thoughtless awareness and balancing the left and right energy channels. What to do about the third technique – how to demonstrate that in a meaningful way to the fifty plus people in the room?

Spontaneity always wins the day. Remembered Tom McGarry’s comment, “If you had a choice, would you like me to describe in detail why the pizza I’m holding is the greatest pizza ever made or would you like to try a slice?”

Ninety nine, point nine percent would prefer to try a slice. That being so, how come most of us, me included until brought up sharp by the following, insist on describing it?

A couple of years ago, when there were few enough coordinators to fit into a small classroom (now we overflow the large music room which is also a recording studio), on my first meeting with HealthCorps coordinators, I began by referring to a chart and describing the subtle system within the human body. Sarkis Kalashian, then a new coordinator, asked a serious of excellent, perceptive and difficult to answer questions, which had the entire group, me included, thinking in overdrive. Eventually I got around to leading the meditation and afterwards, Sarkis grinned at me and said, “If you’d started by just letting us experience this, I probably wouldn’t have asked any questions!”

Today, after a few minutes in thoughtless awareness, we balanced our left and right channels, then meditated another ten minutes or so.

After we opened our eyes, I asked the group why I’d started each day by asking us to silently say inside “Please take away my stress, please make me fearless”. No one hazarded a guess and I explained that it was because with this group, of which of course, I was a part, I could feel a strong tingling on both pinkies. I explained that the third stage, which admittedly very few students are yet at, by which you can decode on your fingertips information and relate it to the subtle energy centres that are place in the spinal column. I cautioned the group that it’s good to be skeptical, for the domain of the 19th century snake oil salesmen is alive and well and making money out of suckers in the 21st century, but that if, like everything else in Sahaja meditation, if they put it to the test, they’ll prove its efficacy to themselves.

Austin Cromartie, coordinator in Riverdale Academy in the Bronx rounded things off nicely by saying that he had congenital blood pressure and had to take medication to control it, and that since he’d started meditating regularly, the dosage had been reduced and he felt the overall benefits of this form of meditation.

I kid you not, I was in Westmed Health Groups offices the other day and the seat on the right is the new single seat size to accommodate the knock on effect of the epidemic that’s with us now. Indeed, as I took the BX7 bus from Riverdale to the A train at W207 last night, I sat in a three seat row with a large lady in the middle seat of such proportions that I couldn’t squeeze in to the seat on either side of her. How much will this cost just to refit the buses, the planes, let alone the health costs of coping with the illness and early death of these poor souls.

HealthCorps and the efforts their valiant coordinators are making is something the nation should be focussing on right now.

See what Dr Oz said in New York this week on HealthCorps Peer Group Mentoring Approach:

  Dr. Oz spoke about HealthCorps on Thursday in New York City.

When he’s not operating on patients, hosting a talk show or authoring books, Dr. Mehmet Oz devotes his time to his charity, HealthCorps, a Peace Corps-like program that sends college grads into high schools to mentor students on health and well-being. We spoke with Dr. Oz at a reception celebrating Evamor water’s partnership with HealthCorps, which will fund his mentoring program in additional schools across the U.S.

Why is peer-to-peer mentoring the right approach to take to teach kids about their health?
Well, part of it is because I have kids. I was asked by their school to give a talk to them once about 10 years ago, and they seemed sort of bored but I gave the talk anyway. The next day, as I got to the hospital, I had probably a dozen phone calls from corporate executives, lawyers [and] other doctors saying their kids had come home that night and had told them things like “If you have a piece of bread, it’s like having a candy bar.” And it began a process in my mind: If we can get these kids to talk with each other in a way that makes it cool to push back against your parents, they’ll do it. I’m not the one to deliver that message, but I can get college kids to do it. I was working a lot with Timmy Shriver and Maria Shriver, and their father, Sargent, started the Peace Corps, so I put the two experiences together. I said, “You know what? We can create an organization where we use the same kind of enthusiastic energy that young college graduates have, put them back in schools around the country and allow for that unique experience when a 21-year-old talks to a 17-year-old.” I’m not the right person to deliver the message, but I can give the 21-year-old the information they need to make it happen. That was the foundation of the concept. And I think the best way of scaling a program, inexpensively building it and touching a lot of lives — mentoring is the way to go. These volunteers are able to go out and do a lot of good. And they only do it for a couple years — they go off to med school or whatever they want to do in life — but it gives them two years of really great experience and it gives us two years of their service, which is hugely valuable.

What are your goals for the program, and what are you doing to reach them?

I want to have HealthCorps schools in every major city in America, and I want to have them in every state. We may not be in every school, and I think one of the things we’re learning is that we can develop [the] best practices from the many schools we’re in that other schools can adopt and begin to use in their own programs. We’re gonna call it HealthCorps University. So either you’ll have one of my volunteers in your school who will teach your kids about health,  and [for] anybody else, health teachers can take the syllabus and use it on their own. It’s written in a way that’s very accessible to high schoolers, and it’s free, so it takes away a lot of the obstacles to implementing it.

How can parents get involved?
The most important thing for parents to do is to get their kids to either use the website and the content on it or, more importantly, talk to their school systems about whether they can have a HealthCorps program there. What makes the school systems great is the teachers and the parents collaborating. We have wonderful programs that we have started primarily because parents went to schools and said, “I see this program, I want to have it.” And then [they] find some kind of a hybrid program that’s affordable and works.

This morning, for day two of the HealthCorps Professional Development Training, Alan Wherry led the fifty plus team of new and old coordinators, head office and the management team in a 7.45 am meditation. Today, for the benefit of the new batch of coordinators, he explained and demonstrated two of the three techniques we teach students in high schools thanks to invitations from HealthCorps coordinators. Stage One, being able to be in thoughtless awareness i.e. being in the present. Stage Two, being able to assess the state of the subtle energy channels in the spine and correcting imbalances – so after a couple of minutes meditation, we balanced the left and right channels then completed the meditation.

Alan then spoke briefly about how meditation inculcates many of the core HealthCorps values for example, respect. You cannot respect others unless you respect yourself and meditation enables one to go deep inside and reach the core of our being. When you touch that, self respect automatically follows. Mental resilience? Well of course there are many ways to develop this quality, but in a work experience going back 43 years, meditation gives you the inner toughness to keep trying until you succeed.

Alan finished by saying that anything of value requires effort and practice to learn, and meditation is no different in this regard. The miracle is that so many students get it so easily, but to become a master of the three techniques needs effort and practice. Professionalism he noted, by definition, is doing your best work when you don’t feel like it.

This morning saw the beginning of the latest HeatlhCorps PD program which will run for three days in New York. At each of the days, the program begins at 7.45 am with a 15 minute Sahaja Meditation. There are now 53 coordinators, including about 11 attending for the first time, from the Bay area and Seattle. None of these people had ever meditated before.

We began with a show of hands.

How many think that meditation is either of no interest to them, or, a complete waste of time? About three people raised their hands.

How many are open-minded to the possibilities of meditation but haven’t as yet reached a clear cut opinion? About half the group raised their hands.

How many know from their own personal experience and from what they’ve seen from students, that Sahaja Meditation is a valuable practice? The rest of the group raised their hands, including Juan Brea, the COO of HealthCorps and Dr. Shawn Hayes from Sacramento CA, the new director of education and research.

Right now, HealthCorps will double to around 100 coordinators within a year and that’ll be it. They can’t see how their peer-mentoring program which sets out to deal with childhood obesity can grow bigger than that. There are 26,000 public high schools and it isn’t possible or practical to cover them all with this program.

Did you know that at the current rates in the growth of childhood obesity, the ensuing costs will bankrupt the USA? That’s the scale of the epidemic we are facing.

However, a HealthCorps university will be started too, which will produce a curriculum, serious academic research programs and the expertise that will enable any school to run their own HealthCorps program. As things stand, Sahaja Meditation will be part of this.

HealthCorps are partnering with any group or institution that shares their common goals and are now talking to 300 such bodies.

What are the core values of HealthCorps?

Professionalism

Respect

Trust

Mental resilience

Team play

Balance

Sustainability

it’s worth noting how many of these will be developed through the practice of Sahaja Meditation.

In the break between presentations, several coordinators came up to say hello. Joe Blasher from Portland, Oregon, because we have no one in Portland who’s free to participate in HealthCorps activity, has been running his own Sahaja Meditation programs and his students love it. Adler Dorvilus from Miami, Florida was full of praise for Louisa Upadhya, Peter Simone and one other yogi who’s names he couldn’t recall, who recently ran a Sahaja stall in a high traffic area of a busy health fair. Adler said it’s quite a tough school  and his students loved Sahaj and our three people, and were incredibly impressed by Peter, who is a martial arts professional. And, at Aviation HS in LIC, New York, unbeknown to any of us, 140 students have been meditating in one of the school clubs as a result of programs run there by Joan Burress. The CFO of HealthCorps, Fernando, asked for details of the W34st meeting because he wants to start attending programs there.

So far, none of the new coordinators have asked for our help in schools, hardly surprising given they’ve never previously had exposure to Sahaja meditation and hopefully that will now change. However, there is a noticeable decline in the overall requests coming in for regular meditation activity. This will not be helped by the fact that dues to lack of numbers we are now turning down requests for help, for example, Joan and Roni Eldridge are going to Brazil for three weeks and no one can step in here in New York to run the program in Jamaica, Queens.

Let’s hope more of us will be able to step up to the plate, after all, in addition to going deeper, what else can we do better than spreading Sahaj?

Over the years, most of us have pondered on questions such as these. There are no absolute answers of course, but when we listen to people we respect and learn from, we pick up pointers that are helpful. For example, my guitar teacher, Rob Sbar, once said that when you listen to a great guitarist, you can remember bits of what he played a week later.

That rang a bell. I can remember clearly fragments of concerts I heard in London in the later 60s, early 70s, by Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, the Reverend Gary Davis.

The same is true of any great works of art in my experience. For example, seeing a painting of William Blake, seeing a Mozart opera or, in my case, when I was a little boy, listening to my Dad recite chunks of Shakespeare in our living room in Belfast, a coal fire burning in the grate. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, the good if oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.” The impact of those words on a six year old has never left me.

This was true for me of reading The Legend of Dagad Trikon by Grégoire de Kalbermatten. And let me be upfront, I am the editor and publisher of this book.

There are many parts of the book that will never leave me. For example, when some of the main characters enter the Bardo, that place between the living and the dead, through the Elephant rock at Delphi in Greece. As they go deeper and deeper, they encounter vast caverns, dimly lit, and covered with unimaginable riches, diamonds, jeweled crowns, orbs, sceptres, precious stone of every hue and color. And amongst all this wealth, strewn as junk on the cavern floors, snake-like creatures condemned to slither for all eternity through this litter. These creatures are the souls of those who lived a life of greed and avarice while alive on Earth. What an image.

And if you can’t get to Delphi, but if you chance to be in Ireland, visit Newgrange in the Boyne valley and see the oldest man-made building in Europe, made 1000 years before the pyramids at Giza. And not the kundalini spirals on the walls, in groups of three.

Here’s what Margaret Merga from Tasmania, Australia said about The Legend of Dagad Trikon

“This is one of those rare books like the masterwork of C.S. Lewis, which draws you in and allows you to participate with the protagonists on their amazing journey. Having heard such great things about the book from friends, I had very high expectations and I wasn’t disappointed. It was so enjoyable to be swept into such a “reality’. Please let there be a sequel!”

A little bird has told me that a sequel is underway.

www.dagadtrikon.com

http://www.dagadtrikon.com/

Thomas Huxley, English naturalist, said that this view was the equal to anything he’d seen in the Himalyas. Well I don’t know about that, not having seen the Himalayas, but from everything I’ve read, seen by way of photos and film, it’s hard to understand what was going through Thomas’ head at the time.

But the New Jersey Pallisades, sheer cliffs of grey basalt, rising from the Hudson River, are spectacular as they are, without the need of comparison to anything anywhere else. They are what they are.

In the early morning, the rising sun paints them orange as here.

Glorious.

Over the holidays we drove from New York to Florida – or rather I did. My wife has too much sense to want to drive, so I’m grateful she hasn’t bought me a chauffeur’s cap. Do you think it was possible to buy healthy food anywhere on or just off the Interstate? Apart from baked potatoes in Wendy’s, the answer is no. What about the law of supply and demand? Does no one want to buy healthy food along the 1300 miles of road? Apparently not. Where are the fresh vegetables? Go somewhere else, but where?

When I went to see Dr. Richard Morel, our esteemed primary care physician, he was talking about the difference between portion size between when he was boy and now. You can see it in the diagram above. Whereas the average now is about 1600 calories – and most of us need about 2000 in an entire day, twenty years ago, the portion size for the same crap food was only 693 calories.

And when they tell you that the market self-regulates, ask them where’s that reflected in the fool on offer on the i95.

And in the run up to the GOP nominations, in all the discussions you’ll hear from the potential candidates from President, have you heard a mention of the fact that one in three homeless people in the USA are children? If not, ask them, or your Congressman or Senator, why not?

A sad way to start the New Year? Yes, if that were all, but it isn’t and here are some comments from students who meditated at Wings Academy today at 180st in the Bronx:

“Meditation is a good way to forget and wash away what’s bothering me.”

“Meditation really helps calm me down and it is very soothing.”

“Meditation relaxes me.”

Before we began, 20% said they were stressed – afterwards 6%.

Onwards and upwards.

Mickey is 11 and his poem won first prize across all ages in his school in Surrey, UK. I really like it, it’s got strong images and it gives the reader a warm glow, that’s not easy to achieve. From a proud Granddad:

The harsh of winter approaches through time

Christmas time is with us in December

We share our stories and we share our rhymes

And warmness flows through like a hot ember

Giving and taking is what we do now

The festive spirit is back within us

The snow falls down again, and the trucks plough

Putting up the tree we all make a fuss.

Rush Christmas shopping for your family

They say it is the thought that matters most

Put the presents under the Christmas tree

Christmas morning, “Want a slice of hot toast?”

I love Christmas time it is so warming

Giving and getting, family morning.

Saw this in a sari shop in Jackson Heights, New York. You can see the validity of the intent, who would want balls of chewed up gum on their beautiful silk saris, especially if you’re trying to sell them? But, as is often the case, good intentions fail at the execution stage. The difference between doing it and not doing it is – doing it.

Me? I have to lose 30 lbs and exercise five days a week. How will I fare? How long can I keep it up?

Visited WestSide HS yesterday on W102 and Amsterdam. I really wasn’t feeling like it, and on the way there was thinking “What on earth am I going to say to these students to try to help them improve their experience of meditation?” At my age, I’ve been around the block a few times and you learn to surrender to spontaneity. As a last resort I could always use Nicole Riley’s dictum to her students “Fake it till you make it”.

None of this proved necessary. Esther, the arts teacher opened the Family Group by asking everyone to share what they did for their holidays and she did it brilliantly, every student, no matter how reluctant at the outset, said something.

We went straight into the Sahaja meditation. I asked them to close their eyes (three teachers and about twenty students). Most did – I keep mine open and made a joke to the few with their eyes still open that I’m the MNYPD – they got it, and for those of you outside this great and fair city – the Meditation New York Police Department. A few more closed their eyes. About sixteen were meditating, and, par for the course, one young man was spreadeagled in apparent sleep across his desk.

We began at the heart, attention in the center of the chest and we said, “Please take away my stress, please make me fearless”. In the pause that followed, I explained the reason we usually start here is that I can feel on both my pinkies a strong tingling, every week, and that this indicates a problem with our group, on a subtle level with this spiritual center. A teacher and a couple of students involuntarily nodded to show that they could feel this too.

Then attention was moved to the center of the forehead and the explanation offered that tingling on both ring fingers indicated that we had a similar problem here to, at least on a subtle level. We duly said, “I forgive everyone and I forgive myself.”

Finally, we meditated at the tops of our heads, at Sahasrara for a few minutes and one could feel that most of us were in deep meditation.

Afterwards we discussed just how powerful forgiveness was, and Esther told a story of her sister that illustrated this beautifully. One young man, Cory, who before the break was interested in a book I had published on the IRA called Provos, by Peter Taylor, had researched it online over the holidays, and I told a story about a man I knew in Belfast, who was eaten up inside by hatred and for whom forgiveness was never on his agenda. We had a great discussion about the power that forgiveness confers on us and for those who doubt it, it was suggested that the next time someone does us wrong, let’s forgive, as an experiment and see how it feels.

America is a country that has tried, more than any other, to make its citizens free – by its Constitution, and although we have a long way to go, we still lead the world in this regard. But, we aren’t free, we are slaves of our desires and our opinions.

A vital step on the road to individual freedom is forgiveness.

‎”At the time of Kundalini awakening the attention completely recedes from sex. One becomes like a child, and in this respect the Freudian concept of sex is completely refuted by Sahaja Yoga. A baby does not suck his fingers according to sexual drive, but according to which chakra is obstructed. The spontaneous perceptibility of the vibratory environment becomes obvious in the case of born realized children. Christ said that one has to be a child to enter the Kingdom of God and H.H. Mataji’s advisers are children. She calls them the vice chancellors of the Sahaja Yoga University.”

page 199 – read more from The Advent by Gregoire de Kalbermatten – available in paperback at US$14.95 from  www.daisyamerica.com or from Amazon.com.