When we dare to be Powerful

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Rod's World

When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid or not – Audre Lorde

I read this quote this morning in my friends Thea Westra’s book Time for my Life 365 Stepping Stones, 2843 Life Power Boosters at your fingertips http://www.timeformylife.com. i think this is one of the best daily empowerment books on the market. A page for each day of the year that has a coaching, an action, a challenge, a quote, a clearing, a question and an affirmation on it, it never goes out of date because its not year based but day to day based. The quote called to me powerfully and never having heard of Audre Lorde I googled her.

Audre was a Caribbean-American writer, radical feminist, womanist, mother, lesbian and civil rights activists who believed our life mission is to speak our truth as this is what has let the world get into the situation it has today. Audre died in 1992 but her words are more relevant today than when written. I came across this rather lengthy quote but it is brilliant in its perception –

“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.”

I began to ask each time: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, “disappeared” or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”

These inspiring words point me towards a call for us all to be in action, saying that its all too hard and not speaking your truth to avoid confrontation will not get it done. We will end up with more and more right wing governments who are driven by warmongers, coal barons, media moguls who have lost touch with the hearts of the people they are meant to serve. They will lock babies and children up in the name of keeping their counties safe, they will let major companies get away without paying taxes and let homelessness run rampant.

So should we take to the streets, only if you believe in it. Each of us has a different vision or passion that gets us up in the morning inspired to face the day. Mine is to have Love and Respect for All, Everyone included be the world paradigm. I’ve started implementing it through my open Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/Interulturalism and this blog. I’ve met people further down the path – Mastin Kipp with his http://www.The dailyLove.com, Danielle La Porte with her inspirational workbook The Desire Map http://www.daniellelaporte.com and Jeffrey Slayter with his Free Humanity movement -http://www.jeffreyslayter.com, each of them has a huge vision that they can speak in an elevator speech and then if you want to know more there is always the opportunity. They all are not silent and speak their truth, I’m getting better at it.

Namaste my friends until next time

Do you make enough requests?

Posted on October 27, 2014 by Rod's World

I have a promise to myself to write a blog every two days but missed out on it as I attended the Free Humanity weekend seminar led by Jeffrey Slayter http://www.jeffreyslayter.com on the recommendation of my friends Miroslav, Belinda, Paras and Mari who had spent the last few months travelling up to Byron Bay to do his courses. Free Humanity was coincidentally free so I instantly had concerns about background selling as I has spent 10 years attending Landmark Forum introductions that were also free.

I hopped on my Electric bike and rode down to Carlton and was surprised by the fact that I knew about a quarter of the crowd, friends from previous events Miroslav and co. had run, showing the faith we have in them, they are such beautiful people after all. After milling around and catching up with some of them we entered the room. Jeff spent an hour or so creating the space for him to led the weekend speaking of his background and his desire for the world to be free for humanity.

Having done this Jeff then moved on to the purpose of the weekend, to free each of us up to be the best we can be in every area of our lives. He made a statement that probably a lot of us had spent years working on our spiritual sides but had not spent a lot of time on learning how to value ourselves and make money from our knowledge. I know for me that this is true and for a lot of people I know in the spiritual field. How were we meant to shift this and be adept in all arenas? Well what occurred over the next two days was not what I expected.

Jeff had us look at areas in our lives where we are focussing on one thing which has put us out of balance with the other side of it, for me it was educating myself in the spiritual world and not focussing on my financial wellbeing. Each of us had our own version of it and Jeff was highly skilled at getting us see what yours was. We would meditate during each session to help clear our minds as health was one of the premises Jeff believes is important in living a vibrant life.

We also created our calling, This includes who you are going to be, what you are going to do, what you will have out of it and what emotion will it generate. Mine is –

I’m going to transform the world conversation to Love and Respect for All, Everyone Included.

I will do this via Social Media through the FaceBook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/Interulturalism/ and my blog I am an Interculturalist at http://www.Rodwill1707.com and having Intercultural Centres set up in every Local community in Australia for cultures to educate each other about the best they are.

I will travel to the six major energy points in the world, have a home in Australia and Costa Rica and I will have a soulmate to share my life with

The emotion this invokes in me is Bliss.

We also did breath work to release our fears from where they were entrapped in our bodies. The person I did this with laughed through the entire process so was obviously releasing something.

So to the final teaching and the reason behind the title of this blog. Requesting versus selling. Jeff intimated that requesting and asking are the two most powerful actions you can take, and that why a lot of us had little money was that we did not request closure for our services and did not value them highly enough. He requested that we learn to sell what we had to offer people and to build vehicles that expressed our talents and spiritual nature. That we not sell out and not do what we love doing. Working a full time job and part time dreams quickly becomes working your full-time dreams but you will never access this if you don’t give it a go. We all have plenty of experiences to teach others or we would not have been at the seminar so he implored us to get out there and start requesting.

Jeff has lots of other courses that cost money and yes he requested we enrol in them, I will when I get out of the financial situation my stories have kept me in.

Namaste till next time my friends.

Do you Mean to Kill Them?

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Rod's World

My carbon footprint in getting around is fairly low, Walking , Pushbike and Public Transport. I used to ride a motor bike for a few years but had an accident whilst drunk driving and lost my license for two years and never got it back.

On my journey around our fair city of Melbourne I cannot but notice the laziness of the general public in disposing of rubbish. It is discarded everywhere but in the receptacles provided it would seem. Cigarette packets and cigarette butts , junk food containers and alcohol bottles seem to make up the majority of it pointing towards a certain kind of person being the main contributor to this malaise.

And what does this have to do with the cutie in the picture above, she is an albatross who lives on Midway Island. Fleetwood Mac in the 60’s wrote a magnificent instrumental about these birds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAefTj7GXwQ, they have survived happily on the Island for many years or have they. Where is Midway Island you ask, heres a map to give you an idea.

It s in the middle of the pacific island thousand and thousands of kilometres from the nearest land but this cute picture does not tell the harrowing tale of what is occurring on Midway Island these days. I attended the Sustainable Living Festival last year with my friend Kavisha and happened to be in BMW edge when there was a speaker by the name of Chris Jordan set down to speak. I forget the name of his talk but after being transfixed by the content not the subject matter. Chris is an American photographer with an interest in Environmental issues and had been producing a documentary about the albatrosses on Midway Island for the past few years.

Why he has been doing this is because we have been killing them with plastic. Adult albatrosses have been feeding their young with plastic gleaned from the ocean all those kilometres away and they are dying in their thousands. Here is a link to Chris sharing about the documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M9t2fm__K0. The only way the plastic gets in the ocean is because we as a race are too lazy to carry our rubbish with us to the nearest bin or to our homes to dispose of it in our own bins and it is washed into the ocean. Next time you are tempted to throw something away because there is no where to put it think of this image.

On my way walking to work or the market I have begun picking up rubbish as I come to it on the footpath knowing it will always be there because we are unthinking when it comes to the costs of dropping rubbish. I hope this little rant makes a few of you think.

Namaste until next time, my friends

Live better, Help often, Wonder More!!

Posted on October 18, 2014 by Rod's World

With a lot of my blogs I sit at my table in my kitchen and look around the room, How I choose The Sunday Assembly as my subject was that I was reading the article I got for us through my friend Paula, she is sub editor of the Northern leader newspapers in Melbourne Australia and they are always looking for an interesting article http://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/central/abbotsfords-sunday-assembly-gathers-atheists-and-others-into-the-fold/story-fngnvlpt-1227092995319?nk=9e95699130ce2590a780890578c00898 I thought that we at the Sunday Assembly were one and she agreed.

So the best way to talk about Sunday Assembly is to tell Rod’s story as too how he became involved. I have a friend that I admire greatly, the always feisty Catherine Deveny read her great stuff at http://www.catherinedeveny.com/ who posted about this thing called Sunday Assembly and if you weren’t doing anything at 11 a.m. on a Sunday you should go along, so I did. I didn’t know about Atheism and no God as I’m a bit of a Deepak and Wayne fan and travel the spiritualist path and replace God with Gaia to make it okay when that word that reminds one of the Sunday School horrors rears its ugly head.

So I went along not knowing what to expect, to my surprise there were all age groups with a smattering of people wearing Atheist paraphernalia gathered in this hall in South Melbourne all waiting expectantly, The Dev came on and lead us singing one of the three songs that you do at the assembly. It was I come from a Land down Under and the next minute we were doing a Conga Line, Catherine has the ability to take you from point A to point Z very quickly. The speaker at this assembly was Ezra Bix https://www.facebook.com/ezrabix and he spoke on Wonder, one of the three premises of Sunday Assembly.

So a little bit of a history re how Sunday Assembly came about.

The Sunday Assembly started on a car journey to Bath when two comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans , realised that they wanted to do something that had all the best bits of church, but without the religion, and awesome pop songs.

The first version of this was in January 6th 2013, and though they weren’t expecting many people, the entire place was full. At the next Assembly there were 300. Then they had to go to two services a day. And then it went viral.

Now there are 28 Assemblies across the world (check here to find one near you), and it looks like there’ll be 100 by the end of 2014. It is the most exciting thing in the world.

People across the world were drawn to our simple values, clear message and excellent mission.

We are a godless congregation that celebrates of life.
We have an awesome motto: Live Better, Help Often and Wonder More.
A super mission: to try to help everyone find and fulfil their full potential.
An awesome vision: a godless congregation in every town city, or village that wants one.

We are dedicated to helping the people that attend, and the folk in the wider community, to make the most of this one life that we know we have. We harness fun and joy and wonder to build communities and to help others.

So who do we have speak at The Assemblies, wide and varied from asylum seekers who had made it to professors who spoke about the statistics of happiness. A few of my favourites, Frazer Kirkman on Mindfulness http://frazerk.net/ Trevor Young on having your own brand in the world of Social Media http://www.trevoryoung.me/, and the comedian Ben McKenzie http://labcoatman.com.au/ at the inspirational and very humorous talk on What would Doctor Who Do.

This month we have Dick Gross ex St. Kilda Mayor speaking about Ritual and a naming ceremony for one of our members new borns, its on the 26th October at 11 a.m. Its called The Grand Hello : A secular ceremony at the Collingwood Senior Citizens Hall behind Collingwood Town Hall in Hoddle Street. http://www.meetup.com/SundayAssemblyMelbourne/events/207136642/

Last of all we cannot forget our musicians who donate their time so lovingly, for two oof the past three months Tom Carty http://tomcarty.com/bio has been our resident musican Tom has an awesome project in mind, Busking for swags, he will pick a specific time and gather people together and when he has the money for a sway for a homeless person, about 70 bucks he will give it to the person.

Unfortunately I cannot make it but go along, bring your cake and have a great sing, be inspired and tell your friends.

Namaste till next time , my friends

Why do another Freeking Workshop?

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Rod's World

What you seek is seeking you – Rumi.

I have begun doing workshops after a five year break. I had reached the point where I seemed to not be receiving any benefits from spending my hard earned readies on another course I would probably use what I had learnt from it for a month or two and then go back to the old me I knew and loved/loathed depending on the day and my mood.

The last five years could be called traumatic in my life. I l lost my job of seventeen years, pensioned out never to work again, I had to move out of the house I had shared for over ten years and live alone, I hadn’t been in a relationship for ten years, generally you could say it included many nights of the dark soul. As Rumi states what you seek , seeks you and I had shown very little responsibility in any of these areas for a long, long time.

My heart had been yelling at me to get out of my government job at Centrelink for about 5 years and I took no notice going down the I have a secure job route, this manifested itself as mental Illness and four hospitalisations over the five year period. The house I was living in I shared with a drug addicted alcoholic and I must shamefully say I took on a lot of his practices in these areas. In relationships I had decided they weren’t worth the trouble they created cutting myself off from the possibility of love in my life. What I was teaching myself over these years was that being irresponsible and not listening to your heart has costs and they would continue as long as I kept acting in that manner.

This behaviour continued in my new one bedroom apartment or should one say flat as it was a 1950’s double brick structure in Preston. I was the king of take away food and the greatest lender of videos from the local video store, yes they still exist in the Northern suburbs of Melbourne. I also slept up to twelve hours a day. This went on for about a year and a half when I made a decision in the face of all the things that made up my life at the time. I went along to a Colombian film night at a place called the Darebin Intercultural Centre, I had decided it was O.K. to go as it was at six in the evening. It was a mixture of many different cultures attending and for some reason that I did not know at the time but I sense it was my heart screaming at me, grab the opportunity I asked did they have volunteer positions. Inaam, my now inspirational leader said yes even though they did not have any at the time and two months later after police checks etc. I was ensconced in the place.

Where do you know that all cultures are welcome to teach other cultures about the best they have to offer, this is what we do at the centre , link to us on https://www.facebook.com/DarebinInterculturalCentre?ref=hl. I was sitting at my desk one day when a statement passed through my thoughts Love and respect for All, No one left out, which we recently changed to Love and respect for All, Everyone Included as it is more inclusive as the word suggests. I feel in love with the ethos of Interculturalism and had found my passion at 59 years of age. I was still sleeping lots of hours and eating crap food but transformed this after attending a daggy Healthy Eating seminar put on by the local council two months later. I woke up next day at six o’clock threw out all my take away menus and joined my local organic food coop and have not eaten junk food since. The food coop was part of an environmental organisation i had belonged to when I was trying to fix myself up CERES environment park, its contact is http://www.ceresfairfood.org.au/ .

Having changed how I related to life this gave me the opportunity to begin to see what was out there in regard to transformational workshops that fitted into my somewhat meagre budget. The first I took on came out of left field. I saw that my old mate Sun was having one of his Kirtan gigs that I used to attend and there was a thing called Kundalini dance as well. As I used to dance before my hiatus in life I decided to go. The women leading the dance fascinated and scared me all in the one moment with her openness and freedom to move across the dance floor. I enrolled in her dance series as there was a payment plan. You dance your chakras through the series and when we got to dance blindfolded during the heart chakra session this was my first major breakthrough and one of the most massive heart opening I have had occur in my ilife. http://www.kundalinidance.com/

it was also during this series that I got to attend my next major transformational workshop Rainbow Bridge 13;13:13 and discover the amazing work of Tanishka Tantrika. We had to dance and focus on a project that would stretch us. Nemone has told me about this retreat up in Byron the following month that I would like. having $50 in the bank I danced to the possibility of going not knowing how. The fourth email I read that night was the six month payment plan so off I went not knowing what to expect. Over the 8 days of the retreat I got to marry myself and make powerful vows to live by, own my position as an elder in life and generally fall in love with myself. Check out Tanishka’s work at http://www.starofishtar.com

Having started to believe in myself and let go of what no longer serves me I am in the space to choose what workshops I believe will empower me. I have done two Own Your Fuck workshops to deal with my sexuality issues led by Miroslav and Belinda http://www.facebook.com/events/1546442818829919/?fref=ts a surprise workshop at an International Day of Peace event I attended were Emeli promised to get us see what it was that stops us living our dreams, Seems I have to stop running away. Emeli can be contacted at http://www.emelipaulo.com/ – she’s very real. I the did Connecting with Your Tribe to deal with the issues of being twice as old as all the people i was meeting. Led by Michele this is a fantastic look at the within and the without of your life, hence the business name https:// http://www.withinwithout.com.au, To discover what my career could be I did Get Paid Doing what you Love workshop with Charmaine and Miroslav, seems I’m a blogger and an author, contact on https://www.facebook.com/events/561276124006388/?ref_dashboard_filter=calendar&source=1 and lastly the work of Arion Light through Thrive to seek support in writing my book that I have had in me for 4 years http://activationschool.com/thrive-2/, I get a support call every week day now.

Are these the last workshops I will do, not really, Emeli is doing a series of workshops called RAW – there are no limits, so I will be going along to check out what areas in my life I have been setting small limits http://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/raw-there-are-no-limits-tickets-13594765309,

Namaste to next time my Friends

Surviving Earth

Posted on October 12, 2014 by Rod's World

Will the earth survive the human race? Of course it will, the earth is millions of years old and we have been here for nano seconds of that time. The question that is more relevant is will the human race survive earth? In the time since agriculture and capitalism joined and took over from growing your own food we have seen the need for four earths for humanity to survive in the amount of energy that it uses, I was not going crazy just showing you how many planets we need and its growing expediently, the world population has grown from 2 billion 120 years ago to 7.5 billion and is expected to grow to 10 billion by 2050.

We have the technology to end the use of Fossil fuels as our main energy suppliers but do not have the where with all to do it as the major energy companies spend millions of dollars to fight any reasonable campaigns that eschew this. 98% of scientific evidence points to the need to end the damage that fossil fuels are causing but the companies that make billions of dollars from its use drag out the 2% who are guns for sale and their cronies in the capitalist ideology driven governments around the world buy into it, an example is the extreme policies of the current Australian government in approving more and more coal mines in the name of job creation.

There is currently an argument going on in the city I live in Melbourne, Australia about building a 6.5 kilometre link road that will cost 5 billion dollars. Up to a third of space in cities around the world is taken up by roads and car parks and building more freeways has never resolved the issue of grid lock it has just added more localities for it to occur. I pass over a freeway on my way to work and cannot help be frustrated by the fact that most cars are single occupancy. I can remember the carpooling that went on amongst kids parents when taking them to various sporting events as they grew up, why can this not be legislated as compulsory if governments are serious about providing solutions for the traffic chaos on our roads. Its probably to much like community building for them and the afore mentioned oil companies would not want their profits cut. How much public transport infrastructure can you build for 5 billion dollars, quite a lot I would think.

A solution to the fossil fuel conundrum is the use of alternative fuelled vehicles that are becoming more prevalent with the electric driven vehicle being the most prevalent. The ones being released are top end of the market but a talk I was at last night there was mention of being able to convert for as little as $7,000. The emission from cars is only 7% of the total of emissions on the planet so this helps but I believe we must focus on solar power to generate household energy use which is up to 50% in western countries.

I cannot understand how new houses are allowed to be built without solar panels being a required part of the construction. Australia has gone from 30,000 to 1 million users with a 20 year period. I remember reading an article recently about a state in America who made it compulsory to be connected to the grid, obviously this is influence from the fossil fuel companies fighting their last desperate battles against the march towards alternative energy, which when is becoming cheaper, is clean, efficient and in the end after several years free.

I watched the excellent documentary Surviving Earth http://www.survivingearthmovie.com/ last night at CERES environmental park, a living example of what is possible if like minded people take action together http://www.ceres.org.au/ and what inspired me most about it was the use of Bindi Irwin as one of the spokes persons. Bindi stated that she had grown up knowing that her generation could make a difference , quite different to the time when children were not expected to have opinions, sit there and be quite and do what they were told to do. I believe this generation will take the actions that are required to save the planet. In the film it also talked about having a new generation of political leaders, I see this as a definite requirement.

Namaste to next time, my friends.