• Sacred Contracts

    January 2017 Book of the Month New York Times bestselling author and medical intuitive Caroline Myss has found that when people don’t understand their purpose in life the result can be depression, anxiety, fatigue, and eventually physical illness—in short, a spiritual malaise of epidemic proportions. Myss’s experience of working with people led her to develop an insightful and ingenious process for deciphering your own Sacred Contract—or higher purpose—using a new theory of archetypes that builds on the works of Jung, Plato, and many other contemporary thinkers. Read More

  • Think on These Things

    August 2016 Book of the Month You know when someone gives you a book and insists on you reading it and then it sits on your book shelf for weeks, months or even years? Well… this is one of those books on my shelf. I looked at it yesterday as I was weeding out the books I would take to my local used book store, and I did what I often like to do, which is to open to a random page and read the first sentence I find. Here’s what it said: “The moment you criticize, you are not in relationship, you already have a barrier between yourself and them; but if you merely observe, then you will have a direct relationship with people and with things. If you can…

  • The Tenth Insight

    April 2016 Book of the Month A couple years ago I posted The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield as one of my favorite books. It was in fact the book that helped bring Molly and I together in my first sociology course with her. The Tenth Insight, also by James Redfield, is the sequel to The Celestine Prophecy and another great read as we enter spring. “In this exciting sequel to The Celestine Prophecy, in a rich setting of cathedral forests, wooded streams, and majestic waterfalls, your adventure in search of THE TENTH INSIGHT unfolds. It is a trip that will take you through portals into other dimensions…to memories of past experiences and other centuries…to the moment before our conception and the birth vision we all experience…to the passage of death…

  • Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

    January 2016 Book of the Month Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa “In this modern spiritual classic, the Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa highlights the commonest pitfall to which every aspirant on the spiritual path falls prey: what he calls spiritual materialism. The universal tendency, he shows, is to see spirituality as a process of self-improvement―the impulse to develop and refine the ego when the ego is, by nature, essentially empty. “The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use,” he said, “even spirituality.” His incisive, compassionate teachings serve to wake us up from this trick we all play on ourselves, and to offer us a far brighter reality: the true and joyous liberation that inevitably involves letting go of the self rather than working to improve…

  • Introducing the Cutting Room Floor

    A common discussion among filmmakers is the ratio between the total duration of footage created for possible use in a project and that which actually appears in its final cut. This is known as the “shooting ratio”. Truth is, sometimes the best stuff ends up getting cut – random jokes, funny accidents, things that are just too intimate to share with a large audience… We thought it might be fun to share some “lost” conversations from our transcripts. So, we’ve created a whole new blog category, “Cutting Room Floor”. We hope you love reading them as much as we loathed cutting them from the Tuning the Student Mind film!

  • The Spiritual Regeneration Movement

    It was in Madras, Tamil Nadu in 1958 that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi founded the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. It was his goal to bring transcendental meditation (TM) to the masses in an effort to redirect the course of humanity. Maharishi was a man of peace dedicated to teaching individuals a direct way to reach the silence that lies within all men and women.  There is no doubt that individuals come to meditation through a multitude of doors. In fact, I have a friend who insists she came in the “cocktail party door”. Seriously, she felt inspired by the social conversation surrounding the “cool” factor of meditation. I learned TM because my mother told me to. It’s true. I had no great reason, no great calling and certainly no expectations. I innocently found myself learning TM at a time when no…

  • Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer

    November 2013 Book of the Month Lisby Mayor’s book, Extraordinary Knowing, opens with a spell-binding story about a lost harp, a disappointed child, a skeptical mother and the psychic who made sense of it all. The incredible experience recounted in the first pages of Mayor’s book completely shifted Mayor’s perceptions of the world around her. A well respected scientist, Lisby Mayor found herself in the unique position of feeling utterly confounded by the nature of her experience. For the first time in her life, there seemed to be no rational explanation for the events she witnessed. Lucky for us – her experience upended her perceptions of the world around her and shifted the focus of her research in profound ways. Perhaps, one of the most frustrating aspects of contemporary life is the slow pace at which science keeps…