Sanctuary Newletter Sept 6, 2012
Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described below as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one’s emotions.
Buzz terms for this or similar mental states include: to be in the moment, present, in the zone, on a roll, wired in, in the groove, on fire, in tune, centered, or singularly focused.” – Wikipedia
Dear Sanctuary NYC Friends,
This month of September our themes are Flow and Abundance.
We will be dancing with the energies and interconnectedness of these very complementary concepts, even as we honor the day of September 11, and enter our Season for Interfaith, Intercultural Harmony.
In talking about abundance, we learn from every sacred path that the Universe is vast, bountiful and that we are heirs to this “kingdom.” The Bible says, “It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” So what is this Kingdom anyway? The Kingdom is a full connectedness to our true nature. It is both present tense and eternal. It is the quantum field and the collective unconscious. It is the flow of substance that is our life force. And it is ever present, vast, as close as our heartbeat and as distant as the farthest star, and in it, there is no lack. This kingdom is what the legendary Rev. Ike meant when he said, “You can go to the ocean with a thimble or you can go to the ocean with a bucket.” The “ocean” is all about giving and you decide what your capacity is for allowing more abundance in your life.
It seems stranger and stranger to me that the teaching of Jesus have been so thoroughly obscured by the imposition of hierarchical doctrine and institutional madness. His teachings are all about gaining access to our true nature as perfect, whole and complete. Jesus made it plain that our true nature is not only an integrated whole, but that the world needs all of our gifts. He addresses this in the book of Matthew by teaching that YOU are the LIGHT of the world. He warns that if we put our LIGHT under a bushel, nobody will see it. And we were born to BE our LIGHT. And the world needs our Light.
We look forward to seeing you this Sunday at 2pm for a journey of healing and transformation in observance of the 11th anniversary of the World Trade Center incident which has come to be called just 9/11. There is something called “Anniversary Syndrome”. Even when we may not be consciously aware of the significance of a certain date, our body and psyche often are aware of it. On the anniversary of the loss of a loved one for instance, we may find ourselves feeling sad or thinking about that person and wondering why, only to discover that our deeper sense of knowing is speaking to us.
It is surely this way with a world tragedy like 9/11. We have a collective Anniversary Syndrome, and our opportunity during a time of shared memory, is to travel together to find the thread out of the underworld of our own grief, and into the light of a new day.
This Sunday, September 9th, through ritual and music and remembering and celebration, we will be taking a wonderful next step together toward healing
Come join us.
Get into the flow.
We love to see your face.
You are the blessing,
Peace and abundant blessings,
Rev. Jane
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects –Herman Melville
On Sunday I found myself flicking past the ‘God’ channels as their message of hell, damnation and intolerance doesn’t nourish me, when all of a sudden I had cause to stop the remote. The pastor on this particular channel was holding a bottle of water in his hand and said that, “It costs about $1 and we’re suppose to drink between 6 – 8 of them a day, but yet there are some places in the world where they can’t even drink one bottle a day! Imagine if just for one day that everyone on earth had one bottle that would cost seven billion dollars! Just to have one bottle for
that one day…”
It’s startling to think that the earth is covered by 70% water of which only 3% is fresh water and of that, a percentage is frozen in glaciers. Here in the
21st century women all over the world spend 200 million hours a day, that’s 4
hours daily per woman, collecting water for their families, often from polluted
sources and then carrying it in a 40 pound jerry can on their backs risking
assault and or injury along the way. This lost productivity is greater
than the combined hours worked in a week by employees of Walmart, UPS,
McDonalds, IBM, Target and Kroger!
A child dies every 20 seconds from water related illness, 3 would of died by
the time you’ve read this far! and 180 after only one hour so imagine, depending
how fast or slow you read, how many would of died by the time you finished
reading this newsletter? This amounts to 4,100 deaths a day! In addition it’s
estimated that malnutrition due to dirty water, inadequate sanitation, and
hygiene leads to death in an additional 2,350 children under five each day!
Lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills children at a rate equivalent
of a jumbo jet crashing every four hours! 3.575 million people die each year from a water related disease that is equal to the entire city of Los Angeles. Nearly all of these deaths occur in the developing world.
884 million people lack access to clean water, that’s almost three times the
amount of the US population. Lack of sanitation is the world’s biggest cause of
infection. Approx 1.2 billion people on this planet have no facilities to ensure
hygienic separation of humans from their own waste. Half of the hospital beds in
the world are occupied by patients suffering from diseases associated with a
lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.
The good news is that it is estimated that nearly 10% of the global disease
burden could be reduced through improving water, sanitation, hygiene and proper
water resource management. Those who lack access to water are not equally poor, nearly 66% live on less than $2 a day and 33% live on less than $1 a day. Needless to say that in the developed world income is high and the cost of the water is low, whilst the opposite is true in the developing countries.
This week the Social Change Committee would like to suggest that you try one of the following: Give the cost of a bottle of water – which is more than some
people earn in a day, or slightly more challenging; do a water fast for a day
and give what you would have spent on food, and donate the proceeds to one of
the charities listed below. Together, we will be grateful for having tap water, be
more conscious and appreciative when using water while showering, washing up or drinking. If at any time you have an opportunity to be near water take a moment to
extend a prayer of thanks or blessing for it.
Water is a wonderful medium for carrying the energy and vibrations of words and thoughts. Check out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAvzsjcBtx8&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Or read the book The Hidden Messages in Water by Dr Masaru Emoto.
Some well established Water Charities to donate to include:
Waterforpeople.org
Charitywater.org
Water.org
Thank you for saying YES – YES to CHANGE, YES to EQUALITY, YES to JUSTICE and YES to INCLUSIVITY, locally and globally. YES to ourselves. YES to our
community. YES to the earth. All it takes is one YES! Size doesn’t matter
every YES counts!”
Until From my heart to yours,
Blessings Always,
Rev Ingrid
Introducing …
Sanctuary 411
The what’s up, what’s new and don’t miss segment of our weekly newsletter.
If you want to know about the happenings at Sanctuary, this is the place to look!
*The Raffle!
**Our 1st anniversary Gala!
***Salons!
****Classes!
*Don’t miss your chance to win 5-7 days in a timeshare condo almost anywhere in the world! Pick up your Sanctuary NYC raffle tickets and start selling! The drawing is set for October 14 so hurry down to Sanctuary to pick up some tickets to sell and buy a few of your own. The fabulous prizes include a helicopter tour of NYC, an Ipad, a designer haircut, just to name a few! If you hurry, you can even sell some by mail to your friends and family who live out of the area. They can win too!
**The first anniversary Sanctuary NYC Gala is November 10! We will be joined by some very special guests to celebrate our first year together. So save the date and get your finest threads ready for this. A good time is promised to all!
***Please join us on Monday, September 10 for our latest salon. The topic will be Sexuality and Spirituality, lead by Rev. Dr. Jane Galloway and Rev. DeShannon Bowens, MS. There will be music by renowned jazz musician Graham Haynes as well as some refreshment – all for a minimum donation of $35. Space is limited so make your reservation right away. Contact Marie: Marie@SanctuaryNYC.org
****4 weeks that could change your life! Thursday, 9/13, 9/20. 9/27, 10/4, 7-9:30pm
Rev. John Elliott (New Thought/Ancient Wisdom) brings us:
Intention, Intuition, Inspiration.
Each one of us has been given the gifts to realize our own potential. When we ‘re in alignment with our true natures, we have clarity of intention, aided by inspiration and intuition, to fulfill our deepest desires. We reveal more joy, creativity, abundance and more of our God given qualities. When we are centered in the balance of our physical presence and our spiritual selves, there simply are no limitations.
Sign up now! Contact Marie@SanctuaryNYC.org
Have a fabulous week!
Wishing you Light, Love and Laughter,
Rev Karen
