A Message From Michael
“It is vitally important that you learn to trust your own inner guidance once more. A loving and grateful heart purifies the consciousness, and creates tranquility and peace of mind. It develops into a constant State of Being and not just an occasional practice.”
Equal Pay Day
Today is Equal Pay Day, 24 hours dedicated to challenging the unequal payment and treatment of women in the US workforce. Whether in Hollywood, sports, or business women are consistently paid less than men for doing the same work. That’s why leaders across industries are calling for equality on our paycheck and beyond.
Join us this week by sharing the inspiring quotes on our blog and showing your support of equal pay. Together we can challenge systems of injustices so that everyone, regardless of gender, can fulfill their human potential.
Sister Giant Announced for 2015: Creating a New American Politics
I am beyond thrilled to announce Marianne Williamson’s next SISTER GIANT Conference, to be held March 28-29, 2015, Live in Los Angeles as well as Livestreamed.
This year’s theme, Awakening Our Conscience, Restoring our Democracy, will feature a Saturday night keynote address by Senator Bernie Sanders, as well as talks and discussions with former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Lisa Bloom, Thom Hartmann, Elizabeth Kucinich, Cenk Uygur and others.
Issues covered this year include Getting Money Out of Politics/ Overturning Citizens United; Corruption of Our Food Supply/ Regenerative Agriculture; Race, Mass Incarceration and the Drug War; Turning a World at War into a World at Peace; and Creating a New American Politics.
SISTER GIANT fosters a political conversation based on conscience and compassion. As a citizen, activist, candidate or prospective candidate, please join us for a unique experience in opening your heart and expanding your mind.
Marianne says, “SISTER GIANT is a gathering not to be missed. We’re going to rock it this year as we have rocked it before.” Please help spread the word.
Like a Girl and One Bold Choice
It was interesting to watch the commercials change during the course of the Super Bowl from empowerment to degradation. However, I am choosing to focus on the positive. Here are a few of my favorites.
#LikeAGirl
#OneBoldChoice
“If you see life in a negative light a lot of things can happen and you can go down the wrong path. But if you can see positivity and sort of blossom into an opportunity to where you wouldn’t even fathom where you can end up.” DeMarcus Ware – pro football player and dad.
Top 5 Laws That Changed the Lives of Women in 2014
The Women’s Foundation of California is an organization working toward a just and equitable California, in which all people and communities, in every region of the state, thrive. As 2014 draws to a close, here are the Foundation’s top five laws they helped pass.
FIVE: Our Women’s Policy Institute fellows helped pass the Healthy Baby Act, which will help over 3,000 pregnant women every year have healthier pregnancies and births. Importantly, it will benefit women facing domestic violence because abuse often starts or escalates during pregnancy.
FOUR: We joined the movement to pass a groundbreaking civil rights law: Now, thousands of women and men who had served their sentences will qualify for food stamps and basic cash assistance. Instead of turning its back to their suffering, our social services system will now help them rebuild their lives.
THREE: Our Women’s Policy Institute fellows helped pass an important law that limits the number of students who are suspended or expelled for the so-called willful defiance. This offense was used disproportionately to discipline and expel minority students.
TWO: We helped pass Proposition 47, which will improve the lives of thousands of women who had been incarcerated for non-violent, low-level offenses. After serving their misdemeanor sentences, the women will be better poised to apply for work and housing and mother their children with dignity and pride.
ONE: The Domestic Worker Bill of Rights went into effect on January 1, 2014. Now 100,000 domestic workers, a majority of them women, will finally start earning overtime pay. Our grant partner Mujeres Unidas y Activas worked for seven years and through two vetoes to pass this bill. We take pride in knowing that our Women’s Policy Institute trained these women and gave them the skills and the resources they needed to make this great victory possible.
Help them keep up the good work and make a gift of any size today. All donations will be pooled together and will go to the same place—toward changing the lives of low-income women in California. They are only $12,000 short of making their 2014 goal, and we have until midnight, December 31st to help them achieve it. Give what you can today.
Creating a Counterforce to the World’s Despair
From my mentor, Marianne Williamson. This is my heart…
Gravity exists on many levels, both physical and emotional. There is a force in the universe that literally weighs things down.
In order to counter gravity in the physical body, we physically exercise to develop strong muscles. Emotionally and spiritually, things work the same way. We nullify the effects of emotional gravity through accumulated repetitions of positive thoughts. Where the world says things like, “This can never happen,” we repeat to ourselves that with God, all things are possible.
Strong physical muscles give us the power to navigate the external world more effectively, while strong spiritual muscles give us the power to navigate the internal world. With physical musculature, we gain the power to move; with internal musculature, we gain the power to sit still, to be nonreactive, to be centered and calm and wise.
There are many meditative practices, from Transcendental Meditation to completing the workbook A Course in Miracles to others that are rooted in traditions like the Christian, Jewish, Buddhist faiths and so forth. What is important to note is that meditation is more than mere deep relaxation. We don’t just feel relaxed after meditation. Brain scans have proven an actual shift in brain-wave patterns. The religious call to a “new mind” is not just a metaphor; it is a call to become our more peaceful, creative and productive self.
With the modern world having become so frantic, it is easy to become as frenetic as the world around us. The problem with that, though, is that without calm, there is no wisdom, no impulse control and no real peace of mind. We’re more likely to become emotionally reactive and unclear in our thinking. Without deep peace of mind, we cannot be the people we are capable of being, and we cannot live the lives we are capable of living.
The power of meditation is of little use if only understood intellectually. When this spiritual exercise is built into our everyday, practical lifestyle, it becomes utterly transformative. It’s not enough just to know how important healthy food and exercise are; we must actually eat well and exercise regularly to enjoy the benefits of those habits. So, it’s not enough to just know the power of prayer and/or meditation; we must practice these rituals, through daily devotion.
We routinely wake up in the morning and take a bath or shower, because we don’t want to take yesterday’s dirt on our body into the new day. Yet unless we pray, meditate, do inspirational readings or some other practice of spiritual alignment in the morning, we take yesterday’s burdens on our mind into the new day. Are body and soul not equally important?
We find excuses for why we’re not doing our spiritual exercise, just like we find excuses for not doing our physical exercise. But, in both cases, once we start doing our exercises, we start to crave their continuance. Often, people say they don’t have the time to meditate; but, in fact, meditation slows time. Time, in the words of Albert Einstein, is “an illusion of consciousness.” Shallow thinking literally speeds up our experience of time, while deep and peaceful thinking slows it down. We inhabit time more effectively when our mind and heart are clear.
Such a world view is like a mental filter, leading us to experience the world through a lens of love instead of fear. Fear is the thinking that dominates the world, but love is who we really are. Grounding ourselves each day in a deep remembrance of who we really are, we actualize the spiritual power that lies latent within all of us. We were created to love, and in loving we are fulfilling the purpose of our lives. With every thought we think, we either extend love or project fear into the world. Taking a few simple principles and applying them to our daily lives lifts us above the turmoil of the world:
Ask every morning of your God: “Where would you have me go? What would you have me do? What would you have me say, and to whom?”
Before you go into work, into a meeting, into a party or into any situation at all, consciously blast everyone who is going to be there with love. Just as light casts out darkness, so does love cast out fear. You can’t send love to someone and, at the same time, worry about what they will think about you, fear what’s going to happen or succumb to controlling, judgmental or manipulative thoughts. The presence of love literally casts out neurotic, fear-based thoughts.
As you go through the day, anywhere you might be, look at someone’s face and silently say to them, “The love in me salutes the love in you.” I defy you to do this for two minutes each day and not become happier.
No one needs to be reminded today that we are in need of a counterforce to the world’s despair. All the hatred and unnecessary suffering that have gripped our planet are a challenge to our species to evolve and grow—to become who we are capable of being, so we can rise up with greater power and behave with greater wisdom. 
When any of us does this individually, our lives transform. And when we do it collectively, our planet will transform. Love will not just heal your life or mine. Love will heal the world.
The Representation Project: Rewrite the Story
Teaching our children Media Literacy Tools is an important cause to me. Studies show that American youth today consume more than eleven hours of media a day, and what they see in that media is an overwhelming norm of objectified or hypersexualized women. This misrepresentation has long-term effects. For example, after reading a beauty magazine for only three minutes, 75% of teenage girls feel depressed, guilty, and shameful. With Miss Representation Curriculum 2.0 – designed to engage and activate young people in new ways – The Representation Project hopes to create a real pattern interruption to change behavior and expand what is possible for young women and girls. Check out their website to find out how you can help be part of the solution. Or click here to donate today and give the gift of media literacy curriculum, discussion guides, and educational tools to students, parents, coaches, caregivers, and mentors.
The Power of Peace
On January 18, 2011 he convinced 12 men – some former gang members serving life sentences – to take the Seven Steps of Peace Pledge based on principles of non-violence and peace (see attached for pledge) for 40 days and journal about it. They were sworn to secrecy, but the word spread like wildfire in the prison anyway because their behavior was so different. Other men became curious and inmates began to talk about the 40 Days of Peace. Instead of being labeled as ‘weak’, these men gained a new kind of respect among the prison population. More inmates at Hays State Prison underwent the program and the prison violence dropped to it’s lowest point ever with so many men living The Power of Peace program. Additionally, men getting out of the system were going back to their old neighborhood and exerting positive change, becoming the ‘anti-virus’ to gang warfare and setting examples to command respect in a different way in some of the roughest parts of cities around the nation.
Whether someone is a tough kid from an inner city school, or a college-prep kid living in the suburbs, it no longer matters — this is not a rich or poor, black, white, Hispanic issue – because believing in the power of peace is a common bond that we all share — and now POPP is collectively putting that belief into action. Their 40 Days to Freedom is a seven step program designed to create a “new normal” for teens and their community. The Power of Peace Project changes what “cool” looks like — the bully is no longer cool, now the peacemaker is. Bullies and victims of bullying learn about peace, non-violence and conflict resolution — seeking first to understand, finding common ground, walking a mile in another’s shows, learning to pause before responding, and learning to express what they are feeling – even to their parents!To raise $10,000 in 30 days, which will allow us to sponsor 100 teens in our Power of Peace Program. As little as $100 takes one teen through our Ten Week Inspired Straight training course. The result: a decline in bullying, truancy, expulsion, alcohol/drug use, disciplinary reports, and dropout. POPP teen participants/graduates see an increase in healthy behavior, attendance, good grades, productivity, and positive attitude. Dreams are born, gifts are uncovered, and young minds come alive! Please click the link below, watch a short clip and donate (no amount is too small). The impact you make will last a lifetime with these kids.
Please consider donating to this impactful, non-profit organization and SHARE this with family, friends, even your enemies, to inspire them to bring about PEACE – one person at a time.Global Learning XPRIZE & Roddenberry Foundation Team Up
The Roddenberry Foundation contributes $100,000 to the Global Learning XPRIZE Indiegogo campaign!
The Roddenberry Foundation, founded by Rod Roddenberry, son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, inspires efforts that create and expand new frontiers for the benefit of humanity. It funds innovative solutions to critical global issues in the areas of science and technology, the environment, education and humanitarian advances.
Rod creates a short video to share his passion for innovation and the Global Learning XPRIZE:
The wonderful contribution from the Roddenberry Foundation has inspired us to seek new frontiers and raise our overall goal for the rest of the 14 day campaign to $750,000.
Raising this extra money will provide an opportunity for us to take this innovative learning technology to even more kids in more parts of the world, and put further community collaboration tooling and infrastructure in place to build this global movement to end the chronic lack of literacy in the world.
We need your help!
To achieve our stretch goal of $750,000 we need your help to help spread the word and raise awareness of the campaign!
Here are five things you can do today to help:
- Contribute! – a great place to start is to buy one of our awesome perks. Scroll up to find out more!
- Join the Community – come and meet the new XPRIZE community at http://forum.xprize.org and share ideas, brainstorm, and collaborate around new projects.
- Show Your Pride – go and download the Street Team Kit and use the images and avatars in there to change your profile picture and banner on your favorite social media networks (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Google+).
- Put Posters up in Your Community – go and download the Street Team Kit, print the posters out and put them up in your local coffee shops, universities, colleges, schools, and elsewhere!
- Organize a Local Event – create a local event to share the Global Learning XPRIZE. Fortunately we have a video on our Get Involved page that explains how you can do this, and we have a presentation deck with notes ready for you to use!
Visit the ‘Global Learning XPRIZE’ campaign.
Comment on or view this announcement here.
Respond directly to the campaign owner here.
Help spread the word about the campaign!
queen of connection | Shelby L. Phillips 