Soweto Red Shoes

In 2004, I traveled to South Africa to participate in a spiritual healing campaign organized by South African friends who are also meditators, teachers and healers of the Sacred Merkaba Techniques. They arranged for us to visit preschools, high schools, community centers, AIDS centers for children and a hospital in the townships in and around Jo'burg, like Soweto, Alexandria, Randfontein and north to Thabazimbi, where the Tswana tribe resides, to offer spiritual energy healing and toys to the children. AIDS is pandemic in South Africa, especially in the communities we were visiting, and we never knew whether the children we offered healing and donated stuffed animals to, hugged or held actually had the disease. Nerve racking and incredibly, expansively touching all at once.

So on this day, we went to Soweto to a preschool. The children were VERY excited because representatives from JP Morgan South Africa had just been there to give the school a donation of enough money to heat the classrooms in the winter. Even more important to the little ones, they brought soda and TWO cakes. So we skipped the spiritual healing that day. My friends had already left the room and I was talking to the teacher, who speaks 7-8 languages, as he helped a child put on his shoes after naptime on little mats.

A girl came up to me (maybe 5 years old), holding an even smaller girl's hand and a pair of tiny red shoes. I sat down on the cold concrete floor and carefully put on the baby's shoes, focused only on the two girls. Then I looked up. Seated on their knees in front of me, all the rest of the children (30 of them) sat in a V-shaped wedge, each holding their shoes out for me to put on. I wanted to put on every pair, pay attention to every child, but was called away right then to leave. We paused between the classroom and the car and the children came running out. Four stopped next to me to hold my hand and hang onto my legs. My heart melts now, just thinking of it, the hunger of those children for a touch, and the feel of those red shoes in my hand.

Joyful Meditation

Every morning when I wake up, I meditate. What I practice daily since I learned it in 2000 is a combination of prayer and meditation. I would consider myself more spiritual than religious although I have friends in many countries, practicing many religions. I can learn something from anyone who follows a path of light. There is no one right way, in my opinion. This road just suits me and as spiritual healing for others became part of it, more and more. I came to it partly because my father was dying of cancer and I longed for a non-medical way to ease his pain. THAT didn't work because he was never open to it but I was hooked from the start.

Some mornings, I've been so worried in the night that my jaw aches from grinding my teeth, bruxism, they call it. In my meditation, love flows down to me and through me from Mother Father Creator God until I am completely filled to overflowing. In the enormity of love, there is no room to be afraid. I am lightheaded and lighthearted with relief. I begin thinking about others, instead of just myself, my husband, family, friends, colleagues and community. I remember solutions to problems that I had forgotten.

Focused outside my own problems and concerns, I glow with the light of being even more fully who I am. I have a vision of what can be beyond what is in this moment. I yearn and move to the reality I am dreaming and begin to realize it. I am buffered by my meditation so events of the day, angry words, ugly sights or sounds, unhappy feelings, have to get through all that love to get to me. And if I forgive happenings, people or events as they occur, they don't stick to me and repeat over and over until I release them. Love and forgiveness are the cornerstone techniques that have changed my life these last eight years. I am grateful. What a gift!

Who Am I This Time?

Hi, my name is Alison and I am in my late 40s. I live with my husband, David, on the top floor of a 3-story tenement walk-up building in East Harlem in NYC. He is a fantastic artist of portraits, landscapes, cityscapes and flowers. One of my favorite activities when we travel is to sit behind him reading when he paints and look up from time to time to see a stroke of paint, a misty image, into a full-blown recognizable picture. The smell of oil paint makes me happy.

I love working but I am easily bored so I do best when I am juggling many projects and running my own businesses. Currently, I work for an advertising firm doing freelance proofreading. I've been freelancing now for over 10 years, legal, publishing, medical advertising and, for the last 4 years, advertising. When I am in a job for too long, I start to feel caged, like I might just die. Being in a J O B feels like the least safe action in the world to me. Especially right now in NYC with Wall Street firms collapsing right down the street.

I enjoy visiting with family and friends, travel in the US and internationally, reading, art, daily meditation, learning new things, singing, sailing, skiing, Maine. I believe, one of the values from my childhood, in giving back of time and money so I tutor and lead a book group for the East Harlem School at Exodus House (EHS - 8 years) and have worked on 135th Street in Harlem with Habitat for Humanity. I give what I can, depending on my means, to EHS, Global Action Project, Accion International, Heifer Project, the Nature Conservancy and the Island Institute.

Oh yeah, "Who am I this time?" comes from a Kurt Vonnegut story in Welcome to the Monkey House about the roles we play as individuals and in community.