Baby Boomer Commune Stories

Although the adventures in this book happened nearly forty-four years ago, they serve as record and reminder of the Baby Boomer legacy to American history. 

Our generation woke up America from the slumbering 1950’s and all that preceded, to the electric flower power of the 1960’s, and everything happening thereafter. 

The only thing not out of the closet is Death and reverence for our elders. 

The Baby Boomers have stories they may be afraid to tell. I hope these stories stir memories needing expression in journal or memoir, painting or sculpture. Perhaps your story can be shared around a fuel efficient wood stove with trusted friends on a long winter’s night.

This book is a steal on Kindle! 99 cents! Steal This Book!!

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Find God Within- Podcast 221

I am presently writing a market analysis for my book, Prayer Prescriptions: 14 Spiritual Remedies For Long Lasting Health.

The first draft is done.

I don’t really understand what took me so long to get this particular book published. But the time has come. No matter how you look at it, it will be published, to be safe, this year. 

It is my flagship Prayer Prescription book. I like the sound of that. Midwife Bonnie said this to me the other night, and I loved the sound of it.

What are you sitting on which you aren’t sharing with the world? Don’t die with your music inside of you, as Wayne Dyer always says. 

Concentrate. Focus. Meditate. Pray.

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Nighty Night Shift

Working the night shift, as I have, has been a wonderful exercise in letting go of Circadian Rhythms and creating my own rhythm. By changing my perspective in this way, the night has become my familiar, a kind of safe haven in the routine of life.

Night shift has the unusual capacity, as far as nursing goes, to create a camaraderie of helpers who pitch in and get the job done efficiently.

Nights in our Labor and Delivery unit was where the action was sans administration, or ancillary staff or even doctors who for the most part, try and get some sleep.
The nurses are the people who must pull it all together and so, we do.
We were not permitted to sleep and disciplinary action was taken if someone in authority, who as I said, was not generally anywhere to be found, found one of us dozing.

I wrote another article about the one second power nap which is an art and a skill.
Generally, I place my left hand on my forehead and lean over my chart with pen poised as if ready to make a carefully thought out note. The sleep that takes place is deep and sometimes a vivid dream fleetingly coincides with reality.

Sometimes I speak silently to my dead father or mother who appear lucidly during this brief moment of rest. It’s always surprising to see them and I welcome their ephemeral presence.

As the night gives way to the early morning hours, we all get a little silly. Someone breaks into a prolonged giggle and a contagion overtakes the rest of us.
Barriers break down. Vulnerabilities surface.

For instance, if a doctor was rude to one of us, I always found myself calling that person an “idiot” when at any other time of day, I would show respectful constraint.  After all, the so called idiot was undoubtedly punch drunk from lack of sleep, too.

The moment that required the most of any of us was the change of shift report.
Many times, the people coming on were not happy about something. Here the night shift/day shift dichotomy surfaces. Let’s face it, night shifters have more fun. We are gleeful, childlike and somewhat drunk from lack of sleep.

The day shifters are often glum and yes, resentful because we are leaving and they are not?

Because we are uncontrolled in our hilarity?

Because we get paid at least $1.50 more an hour?

Because we are about to experience the full cyclic beauty of the day at hand?

No matter why. Suffice to say, the vibrations at change of shift are a blip in an otherwise glorious night and day. If I don’t have to return to work, I sleep deeply a few hours and arise in a full throttle goofing off mood. I hang out with my dogs.

I write to my Internet friends who are involved in Internet Marketing, as I am. Often we give one another advice as to how to proceed with our various projects.
I’ll do a little cleaning and a few loads of wash, or weeding or mowing or gardening.
Or I’ll write a few hours. The pen is mightier than the sword.

The most important ingredient to all of this is pure and unadulterated fun: Fun in the full glory of the present moment. Fun in the practice of the various spiritual disciplines I know for daily ritual throughout day and night.

Meditation makes it possible to sleep less so I practice that twice a day, in this post meditation era.

Night shift has allowed me to take my Internet Business to the next level, which seems to be revolving around the business of book writing, radio show hosting, podcasting, blogging and promoting.

I could not do this working a day shift nursing job because the “time” simply isn’t available as it magically is now.

Night shift has opened my mind to new possibilities. I only began to start working this shift two years after I turned 50. For most of my life I kept in synch with most of the people of the world, all of us marching in step with one another and the so called Circadian Rhythm that science tells us we dare not impede.

Science also tells us that night shifters have twice the breast cancer rate as day shifters.

I say the opposite is true, for me.

I love working nights. I love the rhythm of the night when I work or have the night off.

I love my one second power naps! I love the moon in all of her phases, the crickets in late summer, the trees in all the seasonal stages.

When I lived a day shift kind of existence, my mind was closed to all the creative potential of my own mind.

Night shift opened the window of dormant capabilities and allowed the music of the soul to come alive.

So many suffer when confronted with the rigors of night shift’s truth on the body, mind and spirit. But it truly has been a gift for me.

To all the other nurses who also love it: I salute you and have an eternal bond with all of you.

Blessings also to the day shift for keeping the wheels of commerce turning.

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Who Am I- Podcast 220

Yesterday, my podcast was about our upcoming meditation workshop, which I will put the link at the bottom of the page.
I was doing some research today on Ramana Maharshi, who brought the “Who Am I” process to the West.

He had an awakening by way of a near death experience. 

This is what today’s podcast is all about.

Yesterday’s blog post.

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Oneness Through Love- Podcast 219

My husband Tom and I are teaching a meditation workshop August 22 and 23 called Opening To Oneness Through Love.
Where: Unitarian Church of Lancaster 538 West Chestnut Street Lancaster, PA
When: Saturday, August 22, from 8:30 to 4:30

            Sunday, August 23, from 1:00 to 5:30
Cost: A donation will be collected at the conclusion of the workshop
This workshop is based on the Who Am I Process, a technique based upon the teachings of the Indian Sage, Ramana Maharshi, and further developed by Leonard Laskow, MD. The mission is to experience the Unmanifest Realm, or the Loving Field, by taming the intellectual Process.

Admission is by reservation only, space is limited. Contact Kate Loving Shenk 717-299-9887, by August 19.

Please specify your preference of a chair or meditation cushion. Chairs will be provided, bring your own cushion, if you have one. Jen Carter will have cushions there for sale.

A brown bag lunch is suggested for Saturday. This will allow us to go deeper into the exercise, without regrounding from a time out for lunch.

This workshop is being taught by Tom Harner, and Kate Loving Shenk RN BSN, both members of the congregation. You do not have to be a member to take the workshop. No previous experience, is necessary, but we ask you to come with an open mind.

Tom is a Certified Holoenergetics Practitioner. In addition to his studies with Leonard Laskow, he has studied Meditation with Tulku Thondop Rinpoche, and Sufi Gazing with Will Johnson.

Kate Loving Shenk RN BSN is a full time nurse for over three decades as well as a podcaster, blogger, radio show host and published author.

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The Light Of The World-Podcast 218

I just came out of a meditation this evening and received some disturbing news. I was upset for split-second until I realized–hey I just meditated for an hour and I’m going to ruin it with freaking out over something I cannot do one thing about?

This time of my life is now called the post meditation era. As soon as I tuned into my innermost self, I realized this situation would be remedied by someone other than myself. in all cases, there is little to do, except Pray, which is a powerful act of Love.

Sandra Bland- the Texas police force just ruled her death as a suicide.
There will be hell to pay, and my meditation self will have to observe the shit storm as it evolves.

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Tune In With Inner Work – Podcast 117

Today’s podcast is a commentary on the radio show I did with Diana Lang on Kate Loving and the Collective Wisdom. I am so glad to be back to meditation. I have been an on-again off-again meditator for 35 years. Now I know it’s best to do it every day no matter what. So it is.

This is what today’s podcast is all about. I sent out my manuscript for Prayer Prescriptions: 14 Spiritual Remedies For Long-Lasting Health in the mail for a Living Now Book Award completion. Or shall I call it– cooperation? 

That is what the picture is about on the blog today.

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Diana Lang: Just Meditate

I just got off my blog talk radio show with Diana Lang, meditator per excellence!
Is anyone hooked up to Sound Cloud? Diana has hundreds of meditation sessions there which I just subscribed to, and so can you!

There is no way to meditation: Meditation is the way.

I am convinced! I am almost healed of my anxiety disorder in just a week of meditation, although I’ve been an off and on meditator since the mid 70’s. I became an initiate of Kriya Yoga through Self Realization Fellowship, in the mid 1990’s. That is what you’d call many stages of lessons over a year’s time, to finally get to the crown jewel- Kriya.

Diana is of another meditation school–just do it, any time, anywhere, everyday. 
She is awesome! I am her new fan.

Listen in!!

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Love and Success- Podcast 216

This is the Henry David Thoreau quote I paraphrased on today’s podcast! 
Listen in!!

“There must be the generating force of Love behind every effort destined to be successful.” Henry David Thoreau. 

And more Thoreau quotes on Nature- Mother Nature, that is!

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.
  — “Walking”

I have a room all to myself; it is nature.
  — Journal, 3 January 1853

Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life.
  — “Natural History of Massachusetts”

Nature would not appear so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use for everything.
  — Journal, 11 August 1853

Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.
  — “Natural History of Massachusetts”

I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, — tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it.
  — Walden
I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.
  — “Walking”

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!
  — Journal, 6 May 1851

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. if this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose al hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.
  — Journal, 3 January 1853

Nature has left nothing to the mercy of man.
  — Journal, 22 March 1861

Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.
  — “A Walk to Wachusett”

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.
  — Journal, February 1851

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.
  — “Walking”

Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?
  — The Maine Woods

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his sense still.
  — Walden

We, too, are out, obeying the same law with all nature. Not less important are the observers of the birds than the birds themselves.
  — Journal, 20 March 1858

When I find a new and rare plant in Concord I seem to think it has but just sprung up here — that is is, and not I am, the newcomer — while it has grown here for ages before I was born.
  — Journal, 2 September 1856

If any part of nature excites our pity, it is for ourselves we grieve, for there is eternal health and beauty. We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. Standing at the right angle, we are dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow. Beauty and music are not mere traits and exceptions. They are the rule and character. It is the exception that we see and hear.
  — Journal, 11 December 1855

I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest.
  — Journal, 16 November 1850

There is no law so strong which a little gladness may not transgress. Pile up your books, the records of sadness, your saws and your laws. Nature is glad outside, and her merry worms within will ere long topple them down.
  — Journal, 3 January 1853

How happens it we reverence the stones which fall from another planet, and not the stones which belong to this — another globe, not this — heaven, and not earth? Are not the stones in Hodge’s wall as good as the aerolite at Mecca? Is not our broad back-door-stone as good as any corner-stone in heaven.
  — Journal, 30 August 1856

After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined, and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and course. A hard, insensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rock, whose hearts are comparatively soft.
  — Journal, 15 November 1853

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health! The discipline of the schools or of business can never impart such serenity to the mind.
  — Journal, 6 May 1851

A Note on the Text: Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906)

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Prayer Prescription Manifesto-Podcast 215

1) Prayer Prescriptions are yours, if you want them.
2) Prayer Prescriptions are a way to individualize 

prayer in your life.
3) Prayer Prescriptions automatically link you to your higher power.
4) Prayer Prescriptions open you to your inner truth.
5) Prayer Prescriptions allow you to see all sides of a person’s suffering.
6) Prayer Prescriptions open you to your own multi dimensional reality.
7) Prayer Prescriptions develop the compassion and kindness muscle.
8) Prayer Prescriptions develop higher knowledge of other worlds.
9) Prayer Prescriptions develop your consciousness of all that is possible in your life.
10) Prayer Prescriptions help to develop your power of intuition and ES P.
11) Prayer Prescriptions help you formulate new dreams and ideals.
12) Prayer Prescriptions strengthen your imagination.
13) Prayer Prescriptions help strengthen endless creativity.
14 ) Prayer Prescriptions help to facilitate flow in your projects.
15) Prayer Prescriptions hone your ability to create.
16) Prayer Prescriptions help you become more awake and aware in every day life.
17) Prayer Prescriptions tune you into rhythms of consciousness.
18) Prayer Prescriptions quiet mood swings.
19) Prayer Prescriptions tune you into what your body needs to be healthy.
20) Prayer Prescriptions strengthens and maintains your psychic center.
21) Prayer Prescriptions help you experience peace of mind.
22) Prayer Prescriptions tune you into mother nature.
23) Prayer Prescriptions bring you closer to animals.
24) Prayer Prescriptions open your heart in love.
25) Prayer Prescriptions create a caring, giving and generous spirit.
26) Prayer Prescriptions help extend love with no conditions, expectations or boundaries.
27) Prayer Prescriptions help to give without expectation to get or to change another person.
28) Prayer Prescriptions help to foster forgiveness of self and others.

29) Prayer Prescriptions help you to develop your magical, creative self.
30) Prayer Prescriptions help you realize anything and everything is possible.
31) Prayer Prescriptions tune us into our previously suppressed feelings.
32) Prayer Prescriptions help us to relax and enjoy life.
33) Prayer Prescriptions help you to accept compliments.
34) Prayer Prescriptions hope you to receive gifts with a loving gratitude.
35) Prayer Prescriptions tune you into an attitude of gratitude.
36) Prayer Prescriptions link gratitude with Grace.
37) Prayer Prescriptions link you to the present moment.
38) Prayer Prescriptions connect you to inner happiness devoid of outer limits or expectations.
39) Prayer Prescriptions allow you to let go of what you thought other people did to you.
40) Prayer Prescriptions lead away from harmful gossip.
41) Prayer Prescriptions help us to correct our misperceptions.
42) Prayer Prescriptions allow attachment to outcome melt into the ethers.
43) Prayer Prescriptions allow you to let go of guilt or innocence.
44) Prayer Prescriptions allow you to drop judgement of other people.
45) Prayer Prescriptions helps you drop the perception that the world is the cause of your happiness or unhappiness.
46) Prayer Prescriptions help us to consistently control our inner world by choosing the thoughts, affirmations and dreams we want to have in our minds and hearts.
47) Prayer Prescriptions show any form of upset is a fearful thought.
48) Prayer Prescriptions help heal chronic pain by showing how to forgive and let go of grievances.
49) Prayer Prescriptions help to replace fear with Love.

50) Prayer Prescriptions help to let go of belief systems that no longer work for you.

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