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.

‎”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.

Just saw this on Facebook – lovely photo – happy holidays to one and all.

Looked at this modest little pad in Jupiter Florida tonight, but it’s somewhat too modest and the living room was a tad small – would have had to fit the orchestra in sideways – so I think I’ll pass on it.

Seen in Jupiter, Florida where the annual snowfall is zero.

At University Heights HS in the Bronx, this morning Alan and Lioudmila Wherry and Anand Medina, taught just over 100 students and teachers to meditate. The school counsellor, Hanitizia O’Neill, said she was amazed that the Sahaja Meditation stall was one of the most popular and more so at some of the students who meditated so readily, willingly and well.

One young man, Effie, a boxer, said he couldn’t meditate, he’d tried and it just didn’t work for him. We sat him down, and within a couple of minutes he couldn’t believe how calm and confident he felt. Alan discussed boxing with him and mentioned some techniques he’d learned when he was young, later confirmed by the then world featherweight champion Barry McGuigan, aka the Clones Cyclone. Effie left our stall in bliss, and a couple of minutes later, out of the corner of his eye, Alan saw him whip in a left hook to the body of another student at the point Alan had mentioned. Effie’s opponent went down like a bag of cement. Effie came running over, gloved hands raised above his head beaming “It works. It works!” Whether he meant the meditation, the left hook to the body of both was unclear. Let’s hope it was a bit of both.

One teacher said later, in surprise at some of the students who meditated so easily and so well:

“You don’t know until you know it.”

At LEPS in lower Manhattan, Angela Miller and Rina Frymer showed about 40 students at a health fair there how to meditate. Rina says:

“We had about 40 kids who came to us, most of them went nicely into meditation. A lot of them hardly speak English. That’s when Angela came in and explained to them in Chinese. It was a good experience. We gave them details of the website so they can learn more meditation.”

Angela said:

“Thanks for assigning the school to me. The students were wonderful. They had invited themselves to sit down at the booth and waited for us to attend to them. One boy meditated all by himself for ten minutes. A girl came back just to chat. Rina and I had lunch together afterwards – and many thanks to her for making the day perfect.”

Joan Burress reports:

At South Shore HS in Brooklyn, Coordinator, CK, and his huge posse of Health Corps tee shirted respectful, tireless students organized an informative fun fair. About fifty students learned to meditate through Roni Eldridge, Tina  Chau, and Joan Burress,  amist reggae, salsa, Zumba, push-ups, races, and  some of the most powerfully delicious vegetarian food that made us giggle with satisfaction!

At Aviation HS in Queens, NY, three teachers and staff members, and wise, personable Health Corps Coordinator, Cynthia Mafla meditated with Rosie  Nagpaul, Roni  Eldridge and Joan  Burress  in our first session of  of the day all gave favorable reports, said they intended to continue at home, and meditate again with us next Thursday.

Then came some epic good news!  Two students came to meditate for our second session, and in chatting afterwards, casually mentioned that they meditate each morning with their student group, Robotics, which totals 100 in number, all take turns leading Sahaj as led by former Health Corps Coordinator extraordinaire, Erica Rodas, and, “Though we already know the results will prove positive, we will do an experiment next semester with two student groups, one will meditate together each morning, the other will not, then when the semester ends we  will determine any difference in grades as a result of the regular practice of Sahaj!”

Ms Erica McClanahan, HealthCorps coordinator, reports on Sahaja Meditation in Wings Academy in the Bronx

I was sitting in the library and one of my students JoHan was also working on the computer next to me. JoHan was a student that admitted in front of his peers that meditation was helping him to do better in school due to the fact that he was better able to concentrate on his homework. So I proceeded to ask him how his practice was going, he said that it was going good and that he had led a meditation with a drama group. I asked him excitedly what happened!? He said that it was a group of 8 and the teacher had asked him if he knew how to lead it and he said yes. After he led the meditation one of the other students in the group said he felt the energy coming from the top of his head and he described how the shared a bonding moment because he had felt the same when he first done the meditation. I was happy to know that students are sharing their experience with others and bringing them this gift of thoughtless awareness.