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?

On December 21 at Cliffiside Park HS New Jersey, Janan Arslan led a small group teaching students the simple, but effective technique of Sahaja Meditation. Back in September, in the same school, a health fair was attended by Dr. Mehmet Oz, the heart surgeon, TV personality and founder of HealthCorps. Janan says over one hundred students learned the technique and experienced meditation for the first time.

And Joan Burress reports from Long Island City, New York: All went well at Aviation High School today, December 15.  We had crowds meditating while standing in large groups, (mostly 5 or 6 students), or sitting on the lunch benches, or on the chairs behind our table, and  even while waiting their turn to meditate in  …………….you guessed it ……….. groups.  Cynthia and one of her student helpers came over several times to say how well the meditation was going, and how much the students said they liked it.  Some student comments to us were, “I feel relaxed,  I feel like I was out of this world some place, good, calm, better, and wow” !   The student Cynthia assigned to stay at our table and assist us, Jose, was given his self realization, after which he watched us lead other people for a short period of  time as he handed out our, “How to Meditate at Home”, cards, then without any prompting from us,  felt comfortable enough to start leading meditation on his own to waiting students.  And he was successful.

Roni Eldridge, Tina Chau and Joan Burress estimate about 250 students experienced Sahaja Mediation through coordinator Cynthia Mafla’s well attended HealthCorps Fair!

Juan in cool mode

Juan Brea recently had two open heart surgeries, and between the two, he had to take prescription drugs to keep his heart rate in check. The problem was that the drugs took 30 minutes to take effect. On one occasion, when his heart rate was 174 bpm he took the medicine but then meditated using the techniques of Sahaja Meditation – immediately his heart rate came down to 87 bpm. Juan said, “Now I believe”.

Juan at Newport Beach CA with Dr. Oz

Yesterday in Wings Academy was a mixture of progress and in one case, of getting nowhere fast. It began well, the atmosphere in Ms Butler’s class was different to the usual, this time quiet, respectful, reflective, and the students meditated better than before. One young man is meditating successfully at home – a breakthrough.

Mr. Montefiore’s class managed five minutes of silence again, he’s as surprised as us.

But Mr. Felix’s two art classes meditate beautifully, as does Ms Housen’s two classes – and Johan Reyes, the first student to lead a meditation in Wings, said that he’s teaching his mother and his sister to meditate at home, and his school work continues to improve.

I asked the students in Mr. Felix’s art class where I might find great art in the Bronx, a young woman asked for clarification, what sort of art was I talking about? Any sort was the answer. None of them knew, many referred me to Manhattan, where it’s to be found in abundance. Mr. Felix said it’s to be found around the corner, graffiti of Jesus in a gas station on the East Tremont Road – here’s a detail for your delectation.

Ms Klein’s class again refused to be quiet, one annoys the other, if they try to meditate one or more of them disturbs the rest. One young women asked me if I enjoyed coming to the class. “Not a lot”, was my reply. She asked if I didn’t like them and I told her I like them well enough as people but that I didn’t enjoy coming to their class. As we came out I said to Ms Mac that maybe we should pack in coming to this class as we’re getting nowhere. When I told Lioudmila, she said that we should bring them into one of Mr. Felix’s classes and let them see how well other students can meditate. What a brilliant idea? Why didn’t I see the possibility?

Why do aphorisms do nothing to change the behavior of those who read them and inwardly digest them? Because we can’t access them when we need them? This is a question I’ve pondered over the years. I used to devour them when I was in my twenties and thirties, thought that imbibing them would help me, but it didn’t happen. Moreover, once when Barry Cunningham, the man who first signed up the first Harry Potter for something like 1500 pounds, once said something mind-blowingly stunning to me and I asked him where he’d heard it. His reply, surprise in his voice, was, “from you.” I swear when he said it, I’d never, ever heard it before, indeed can’t remember it now. But it just goes to show how inaccessible these things are? But the wonderful Jeffrey Fennelly, in West Side HS, this morning added more to the insight, he observed that not only do aphorisms do not produce change in those who read them, but they mostly make us feel bad, guilty, inadequate when we read them because we know deep down we can’t make use of them when we most need them. Jeffrey went on to say that he thinks why the New Age failed, i.e. the hundreds of millions of books published in the last thirty years produced no discernible change for the better in the population at large, because they didn’t tackle or articulate “the dark side” of the human personality.

But aphorisms or not, dark side or not, there’s no question in the minds of the students, teachers and HealthCorps coordinators that Sahaja Meditation works, produces discernible results, even if they don’t understand why.

Lioudmila came this morning and while Alan Wherry led the meditation, one young man steadfastly refused to participate. She focussed her attention on him, said the mantra for the back agyna, and his eyes shut immediately and he went into meditation. How’s that?

Practice Run before the students arrive!

Mark Taylor writes:

The exemplary Hannah Cohen and her team did a first-class job of setting up and organizing and caring for everyone, complete with snacks and “thank you bags” containing pedometers and other goodies.

Sahaja Meditation was part of the Healthcorps Highway to Health Fair on Saturday, June 4, 2011. The fair was held outside, at North Bergen Park, right next to a lake.

The people we met were all open and friendly. It felt like instant friendships were being created as we touched the bliss of meditation together. There were a few students from North Bergen High School, sometimes with their parents, but mostly we met the general public. Even when there wasn’t a shared language, through hand gestures we were able to meditate with everyone who wanted to try it. Guessing by how many chairs were filled and how often new people tried the meditation, about 60 to 70 people experienced Sahaja Meditation. We met some deep souls, and experienced a lot of silent meditation.

Roni shows how it's done

Also, some HealthCorps volunteers and one coordinator sat with us for a while. Mark played frisbee with a few Healthcorps people, too. The weather was perfect, and our location, under a tree across from a lake, was ideal.

We were Roni, Mark, Ramakrishna, Lavanya, and, at the very end, Neha. Ramakrishna and Lavanya from Edison, NJ. were happy to see how simple, straightforward and effective the “HealthCorps approach” to Sahaja Meditation is. I sit facing the people, and tell them four things (put your hands on your lap, then put your right hand on your head and then above your head, now close your eyes) without any introduction or explanation. They’ve seen our sign and they want to meditate, so I go right into it. With every person on Saturday, the silence and peace of Sahasrara was achieved immediately. We sat near the people and just stayed in meditation with them, not disturbing their enjoyment. A few sat for over ten minutes in complete “thoughtless awareness”.

Volunteers who came to help from Edison NJ

Alternative headline:

Ms Fishstrom Changes McDonalds

dateline 2010 – location: the fair suburb of East Flatbush, Brooklyn. On the school website of Kurt Hahn Expeditionary High School, there’s a video of Sarah Fishstrom valiantly setting forth, a latter day, one woman Lewis and Clarke, to discover what health fare is available as opposed to that on offer from the ubiquitous McDonalds, and, sure enough, within a quarter mile of the school and directly across the street from Ronald (you can get meat from 50 different cows in one of our burgers) McD, there’s a Karibbean Fast Food store.

Moreover, when she ventures inside, she point out to her student charges, a plethora of healthy alternatives to what’s on offer across the street.

Fast forward to 2011: location: the same.

Press Release:

McDonald’s introduces whole grains, fruit for breakfast

Fruit & Maple Oatmeal is McDonald’s first new breakfast offering since 2008. It delivers 2 of the 3 recommended daily servings for whole grains (32 grams) and half a cup of fruit (quarter of a day’s recommended intake) and is available all day.

Customers can choose whether to order the oatmeal — topped with cranberries, apples and raisins — with or without brown sugar. The dish has 290 calories per serving (260 without the sugar) and is a good source of fiber and vitamin C.

McDonald’s serves more than 26 million customers daily.

Sahaja Meditation in the Park

Adriana shows the young how it's done

Altogether now....

Margartia encouraging people to give it a shot

This little guy, all of two years old, meditated nicely for at least ten minutes

And the benefits can also be for the yet to be born

The young find it particularly easy

Natasha Eziquiel-Shriro, ably assisted by a team of HealthCorps coordinators and students from Monroe H.S. in the South Bronx, organized a terrific fair in the lovely Soundview Park.

The lovely Bronx River flows into Long Island Sound at this point, a river in which a breeding pair of beavers, have recently taken up residence, a sign of improving water quality.

The Sahaja Meditation Latino Crew turned out in force to help the mainly Spanish speaking residents to try out and to enjoy Sahaja Meditation. What a team! Mary (Mangala) Ellis, originally from Colombia, led the crew and during the course of the afternoon, some 60 people of all ages and cultures experienced first hand, the joys of meditation.

Of course, it doesn’t always come easy, and the sight of a 15 year old girl in deep meditation while her Mom was saying “I can’t do this, my head is full of thoughts” was a poignant reminder that our children, in general, find it easier to go into deep meditation than do their parents.

It’s often thought that two year olds cannot meditate too well, yet the little guy on his sister’s knee, sat in tranquil silence for at least ten minutes, and he just want’s that keen to remove his hand from the top of his head! He knew what he had, and he didn’t want to let go of it.

And finally, Ms Melissa Garcia of New York City Parks Department wrote to say, “Thank you very much.  The meditation was one of our most popular activities so thank you very much for participating and we would love to see you there more often.” That this was so was directly because of the love and energy of our Hispanic ladies who put so much into this event.