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I should probably have posted this a few months ago, but delaying a thought can easily lead into a few months. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed running Urban Mystic but it takes up too much time and doesn’t pay enough of the bills. So this year I’m spending my time on business ventures, specifically Africa on Paper and The Typesetter. Both are great businesses I’d like more established.

I’m going to hold on the blog and website for Urban Mystic for now. Who know what the future will yield.

DFV Front Cover

The image we have of Godde plays a significant role not only in our religion but also in our spirituality. Christians predominantly picture Godde as male and masculine … which often results in a curtailing of women’s gifting, those they’re born with and those the Spirit imparts, and their career opportunities in professional ministry. Yet, biblically speaking, both men and women were created in the image of Godde. As such, Godde is fully masculine and fully feminine. In keeping with the Genesis narrative both Testaments feature women in ways that are culturally progressive–often placing women on parr with men. The Bible therefore stands as an ongoing corrective to the way situational texts, especially Paul’s writing, gets used in culturally regressive ways today.

This Study Bible is being created by a small team of men and women. A number of translations have embraced gender-inclusive language in reference to generic persons (to replace to generic masculine). The Divine Feminine Version or DFV is, however, the first translation of the New Testament to go beyond this and feature only feminine language in reference to Godde.

For those looking to explore the Feminine in Godde, and therewith transform their own spirituality, this text is a must! Head on over to http://godde.wordpress.com to grab a copy of the PDF. A print-on-demand version will soon be available too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

This year is opening up with a ton of work for The Typesetter and Africa on Paper. Projects for the first quarter of 2011 are going to monopolize my time, so Urban Mystic will be quiet on the blogging front. I’m moving up to Johannesburg for the first half of the year, so Urban Mystic is like to be dormant, at least in Cape Town, as far as groups and courses go.

Hopefully we can reconnect and reconvene around the middle of the year.

www.sxc.hu

I’m finally reconnected again! This means I should be back to posting regularly.

In the meantime I’m discovering that half my brain lives on the internet along with half my community. Yikes that scary!

Gateway/Door

Though meditation varies from person to person, context to context, and tradition to tradition people unanimously agree that this simple practice serves as a gateway to deeper spiritual experience.

• A western secularist may use meditation to attain a state of deep mental and emotional clarity, brining back deeper insight into living a stress and pain free life
• A Hindu mystic may use meditation to attain Self-Realisation, bringing back the insight into how connected everything is
• A Buddhist mystic may use meditation to view and reach out to Emptiness, bringing back insight into the conditional nature of everything
• A Christian mystic may use meditation to gaze lovingly into Godde, bringing back insight into living a life centered around love for Godde and other persons who are the image of Godde

As such meditation may be considered a spiritual technology enabling personal experience with the object, source or goal of our respective faiths. By understanding how others use meditation the range of spiritual experience, insight and wisdom for living available to us is broadened exponentially.

The notion of mindfulness is borrowed from Buddhism, where the “calm awareness of one’s body functions, feelings, content of consciousness, or consciousness itself” is key (reference). In mindfulness meditation one focuses the mind on the present, most often taking the time to observe our breathing. The goal is to do this non-judgementally, simply observing and embracing the present as it is.

To benefit from mindfulness meditation you’ll have to make it a regular part of your practice of meditation. Set aside three ten-minute appointments a week on your schedule for a month, say on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. Set a timer and use those ten minutes to:

1. Take a comfortable seated position, whether cross-legged on the ground or open-legged on a chair.
2. Try to keep your mind from drifting to remembering and analyzing past events or from drifting to the future, whether particular events or specific concerns.
3. Become aware of your breathing. Without controlling it, simply observe your in-breath and out-breath along with the way the breath feels coming in and going out of your nostrils. Observe the rising and falling of your belly and the expanding and contracting of your chest. Simply appreciate being present.
4. When thoughts, hopes, fears, expectations, memories, etc. intrude simply take note of them. Don’t judge them, don’t analyze them, simply embrace them as they are. Observe them and use your breathing as an anchor to bring you back to the present.
5. When you find yourself getting dragged away by your thoughts, don’t judge yourself. Gently return to the present, embracing the simplicity of breathing as your anchor. If your able, gain a third-person perspective on these intrusions and observe them, non-judgementally, seeing where they come from and where they go.

During the rest of the day, whenever you find yourself getting emotional or stressed return to that feeling of mindfulness by simply becoming present. Use your breathing as an anchor to return you to the present. Take note of how your thinking and feeling shifts when doing so.

The more you practice mindfulness meditation the greater potential you have for remaining in the present.

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Urban Mystic uses a variety of meditation techniques as the foundation for an urban spirituality. We focus on those who consider themselves spiritual not religious, who’re interested in pursuing their spiritual journey but want to do so without the pressure to convert to an established faith such as Buddhism, Hinduism or Christianity.

I’ve been working on a post on the benefits of meditation. There’s a lot of scientific research and subjective responses covering the benefits. Rather than re-inventing a post I luckily came across a post by another who put together 100 Benefits of Meditation.* This is over at www.ineedmotivation.com and you may want to visit them and read the complete article there.

Physiological benefits:

1- It lowers oxygen consumption.
2- It decreases respiratory rate.
3- It increases blood flow and slows the heart rate.
4- Increases exercise tolerance.
5- Leads to a deeper level of physical relaxation.
6- Good for people with high blood pressure.
7- Reduces anxiety attacks by lowering the levels of blood lactate.
8- Decreases muscle tension
9- Helps in chronic diseases like allergies, arthritis etc.
10- Reduces Pre-menstrual Syndrome symptoms.
11- Helps in post-operative healing.
12- Enhances the immune system.
13- Reduces activity of viruses and emotional distress
14- Enhances energy, strength and vigour.
15- Helps with weight loss
16- Reduction of free radicals, less tissue damage
17- Higher skin resistance
18- Drop in cholesterol levels, lowers risk of cardiovascular disease.
19- Improved flow of air to the lungs resulting in easier breathing.
20- Decreases the aging process.
21- Higher levels of DHEAS (Dehydroepiandrosterone)
22- prevented, slowed or controlled pain of chronic diseases
23- Makes you sweat less
24- Cure headaches & migraines
25- Greater Orderliness of Brain Functioning
26- Reduced Need for Medical Care
27- Less energy wasted
28- More inclined to sports, activities
29- Significant relief from asthma
30- improved performance in athletic events
31- Normalizes to your ideal weight
32- harmonizes our endocrine system
33- relaxes our nervous system
34- produce lasting beneficial changes in brain electrical activity
35- Cure infertility (the stresses of infertility can interfere with the release of hormones that regulate ovulation).

Psychological benefits:
36- Builds self-confidence.
37- Increases serotonin level, influences mood and behaviour.
38- Resolve phobias & fears
39- Helps control own thoughts
40- Helps with focus & concentration
41- Increase creativity
42- Increased brain wave coherence.
43- Improved learning ability and memory.
44- Increased feelings of vitality and rejuvenation.
45- Increased emotional stability.
46- improved relationships
47- Mind ages at slower rate
48- Easier to remove bad habits
49- Develops intuition
50- Increased Productivity
51- Improved relations at home & at work
52- Able to see the larger picture in a given situation
53- Helps ignore petty issues
54- Increased ability to solve complex problems
55- Purifies your character
56- Develop will power
57- greater communication between the two brain hemispheres
58- react more quickly and more effectively to a stressful event.
59- increases one’s perceptual ability and motor performance
60- higher intelligence growth rate
61- Increased job satisfaction
62- increase in the capacity for intimate contact with loved ones
63- decrease in potential mental illness
64- Better, more sociable behaviour
65- Less aggressiveness
66- Helps in quitting smoking, alcohol addiction
67- Reduces need and dependency on drugs, pills & pharmaceuticals
68- Need less sleep to recover from sleep deprivation
69- Require less time to fall asleep, helps cure insomnia
70- Increases sense of responsibility
71- Reduces road rage
72- Decrease in restless thinking
73- Decreased tendency to worry
74- Increases listening skills and empathy
75- Helps make more accurate judgements
76- Greater tolerance
77- Gives composure to act in considered & constructive ways
78- Grows a stable, more balanced personality
79- Develops emotional maturity

Spiritual benefits:
80- Helps keep things in perspective
81- Provides peace of mind, happiness
82- Helps you discover your purpose
83- Increased self-actualization.
84- Increased compassion
85- Growing wisdom
86- Deeper understanding of yourself and others
87- Brings body, mind, spirit in harmony
88- Deeper Level of spiritual relaxation
89- Increased acceptance of oneself
90- helps learn forgiveness
91- Changes attitude toward life
92- Creates a deeper relationship with your God
93- Attain enlightenment
94- greater inner-directedness
95- Helps living in the present moment
96- Creates a widening, deepening capacity for love
97- Discovery of the power and consciousness beyond the ego
98- Experience an inner sense of “Assurance or Knowingness”
99- Experience a sense of “Oneness”
100- Increases the synchronicity in your life

Meditation is also completely FREE! It requires no special equipment, and is not complicated to learn. It can be practiced anywhere, at any given moment, and it is not time consuming (15-20 min. per day is good). Best of all, meditation has NO negative side effects. Bottom line, there is nothing but positive to be gained from it! With such a huge list of benefits, the question you should ask yourself is, “why am I not meditating yet?”

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* I have tried to ask the author for permission but the contact form is buggy. So, I’ve left them a comment and will see how they respond. I’ll update this note and article based on how they feel about my reproducing their content.

Flyer for Regular Meditation

Meditation is a private activity, but practicing it together with others offers a number of benefits. Some benefits include:

• Assistance: Wisdom is to be shared. Anyone who hits an internal block when meditating experiences a significant hindrance to their personal development. Connecting with others gives you the opportunity to learn from another’s experience, contribute to their experience, or encourage someone in their practice.
• Connections: Sharing our story with others is an integral part of being human. We don’t journey alone or practice meditation simply for own benefit. Practicing meditation with others helps overcome any tendency to become overly introspective and self-absorbed, which ultimately stunts our spiritual development.
• Enrichment: Exposure to different approaches to meditation and styles of facilitation will enrich your practice as you gain a broader perspective.

The first Sunday of every month we’ll facilitate a guided meditation session. For this series, from September to December, we’ll draw strongly on Stephen Bodian’s guided meditations found on the iPhone apps by Mental Workout LLC. I’ve reviewed these apps in a previous post.

Modernisation

Those seeking to be spiritual not religious need to re-appropriate and re-imagine faith, distinguishing it from belief and religion.

Every nation, and almost every people group, has been significantly changed by modernization. The West modernized, secularized and globalized which resulted in:

1. A generation that no longer believed in traditional Western religion but continued to practice it
2. A second generation, one that neither believed nor practiced
3. A third generation, rejecting the “empty religion” (beliefs and practices devoid of corresponding personal experience) of their forebears and enabled, through education and technology, to visit and explore other places (notably the East and Africa) in search of true and authentic spirituality (where people actually experienced, through their traditions and practices, what they believed).

However, as Africa and the East have likewise modernized, secularized and globalized the same trend has taken place there. Where westerners could easily trade in their religion and culture for another now those very same peoples are doing the same.

Today we see the same trend:

1. When someone dresses like a traditional Hindu at home . . . but changes their clothes and behaviour to identify with Western culture and trends on the train to school
2. When someone undergoes circumcision and rites of passage and visits the Sangoma at home . . . but receives a Western education, pursues a Western career, and abandons the Sangoma for the doctor
3. When someone romanticizes Primal Spirituality . . . but abuses peyote recreationally and holds nothing in common with the rest of Native American Indian spirituality or heritage
4. When someone practices Yoga . . . but reduces it to a set of exercises alone and defines that as spirituality

Rather than critiquing religion these examples illustrate that no religion has been left untouched by modernization, secularization and globalization. In the first example one lives two lives – one traditional and the other Western. In the second, one trades in one culture for another. In the third, one begins to appropriate elements of other cultures and faith traditions. In the fourth, one appropriates and redefines another cultures practice.

All 3 Actively Search

We are way past a romantic infatuation with Eastern and Primal spirituality. Many people, especially those who through parenting or choice are religiously unaffiliated still experience a stirring within them, the need to live by higher standards or experience deeper meaning in life. They’re challenged, from within, to develop their spirituality. In the past one could simply change allegiance, adopt a new culture and faith. Now one can’t do that and still maintain integrity. There’s a need to re-define, re-appropriate, and re-imagine what faith means.

We’ve moved past religion as something we simple receive from our forebears. We’re now faced with a mutual cross-pollination of religion and culture. People from every culture are now on similar footing, no longer able to simply receive their religions as handed down and equally needing to actively search after meaning, truth and something worthy of their ultimate commitment. To do so we need to revisit what faith means.