Dear Lion,

August is an exciting month for me. My birthday is the 13th.

To celebrate, I’ve ordered something special, and I want to share it with you: a meteor shower! The annual Perseid meteor shower will peak on August 12th, with up to 20 or more shooting stars per hour. You can find out more about meteors and how to see them at www.stardate.org . Take your loved ones out of the city and into nature with blankets and goodies, and lie on your back, opening your heart to the sky. Let the delight of shooting stars remind you of your greatest joys.

Next month, September 21st through 24th, Anodea Judith and I offer our most powerful course: Manifestation through the Chakras: Turning Your Dreams Into Realities.

This potent 3½-day course teaches you the process of taking any idea, dream, desire, or vision and turning it into a successful reality.

If you’ve been trying to make your dreams come true, but have gotten stuck somewhere along the way, this course is for you.

The downward channel of cosmic energy, called Bhukti (which means “enjoyment” in Sanskrit), flows down from earth to sky, into your crown chakra (7th) and down to your base chakra (1st), condensing and becoming more solid at every stage. This movement allows you to create what you want so you can enjoy your life! However, because of our our early childhood wounds or our accumulated mental habits, the flow of energy can get stuck, stopped or derailed anywhere along the path of manifestation.

When life's inevitable obstacles, barriers, and difficulties happen, we tend to respond the same way to them, over and over. We know what we want, but we're frustrated by our inability to get it. Something "always happens" that prevents us from achieving our goal. Sometimes, we can't even decide what the goal should be.

In our workshop, we teach specific methods and practices to help you clarify your goals, get unstuck, free the flow of your energy, and move forward toward your goals. You learn how to actively, consciously create what you want in your life, whether it's business success, a delightful and loving relationship, physical healing, or financial security. Our students have reported many miracles from applying this powerful technology. These techniques will help you manifest your dream-come- true life, and will serve you throughout your life.

The location is our beautiful home in San Rafael, California. The dates are Thursday evening through Sunday afternoon, September 21st through 24th. (We offer it again November 16th through 19th.) The cost is $495, and we offer a money-back guarantee: You will be more than 100% satisfied, or we will refund your entire fee. If you want to manifest your dreams, sign up for this power-packed workshop.

For more information, or to sign up, click here: here

In a recent interview, I was asked about my daily practice. I realized that I had never spoken or written about the meditation I use to start my day.

I created the 5 Elements Meditation as a synthesis of many teachings and experiences. I love how it makes me feel. It expands my awareness to include everything around me, reminds me how wonderful life is, and helps me recognize my ultimate oneness with the world. I share it here for the first time, and hope that you find it enlightening. It works best when done first thing in the morning, just after waking up.

To jump to the exercise, click HERE.

Website Recommendations

Here are a few of my favorite websites. I encourage you tocheck them out and make use of them:

Shift in Action is a terrific website community sponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Each month, the site offers interviews, articles, tele-seminars, recordings, and news and information from science, spirituality, and consciousness research. The cost to join IONS as a Shift Member is only $10 per month. You’ll get weekly tele-seminars with people on the cutting edge of thinking about our world. These seminars are easily worth more than the membership fee. You can listen to more than 100 interviews already on the site with luminaries such as scientist Dean Radin, physicist Brian Swimme, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. There are also community connection tools that allow you to communicate with like-minded friends from around the world. Check out Shift in Action at: www.shiftinaction.com.

You’ve probably heard of MySpace.com, populated by millions of kids who share their messy youthful enthusiasm and egoic self-absorption. There's another site that is tailored for us "cultural creatives," spiritually aware adults, political change agents, artists, environmentalists, and conscious businesspeople. Zaadz.com allows us to share our messy enthusiasm and more mature self-absorption. You can connect with some of the most interesting people on the planet, and who knows? You might find love as well as good conversation. My friend Stephen Dinan called it “The emerging social networking powerhouse for the conscious change space.”

Enlightenment.com is the brainchild of Jordan Gruber, an early consciousness explorer and friend of many years. He offers a wide variety of articles, blogs, exercises, and reviews of products and paths to enlightenment. Jordan created the first audio CD interview with luminary philosopher Ken Wilber, which I also recommend highly.

If you have favorite websites you'd like to share, please email me. Sharing resources is one of the ways we can build a new civilization from within the old one. Information resources, unlike physical resources, don't get depleted as we use them. They actually increase in value and usefulness.

Movie Recommendations

I love watching movies, especially ones that blow my mind or expand my consciousness. Here are two of my favorites:

Waking Life may be one of the most unusual films every made. The producer employed 12 different rotoscope animators (live action turned into cartoon-like paintings) who each put their own artistic spin on segments of this unusual tale. The story involves a young man who is experiencing difficulty with reality – because it keeps changing (sound familiar?). He seems to be continually waking up from a dream, but each time he awakens, it turns out to be just another dream segment. He has conversations with brilliant people who talk to him about philosophy, quantum physics, reality, dreaming, and human psychology. There are musicians, dancers, bums, and strangers, each of whom seems to have a piece to the puzzle. Not everyone will like it, but watch it carefully, and be amazed. A brilliant film.

MirrorMask is another dream-like live action with animation of intense artistry and vision. The story involves a young girl who grows up in a circus owned by her parents, and all she wants to do is run away to the real world. She is an artist, and like most teenagers, she hates her life. Her mother’s sudden illness and a strange turn of events sweeps her into a fantastic, stark world -- the one that she has been drawing. The beauty in her world is being destroyed by an Evil Feminine Force, whom she must battle by solving riddles, escaping danger, finding a hidden key and a missing princess. Fascinating and absorbing, this movie takes the internal struggle between good and evil to new depths. It is an ultramodern science fiction dreamscape of extraordinary strangeness and beauty.

Feedback on my Previous Newsletter

and a little humor...

Thank you to those who sent feedback and praise about my first issue of Everyday Awakening. I wasn't able to answer everyone personally, but I truly appreciated your contact and feedback. I wrote this for all my friends who pointed out my errors and mistakes:

Seven Reasons why “Infinite” was spelled “Infinate” on my newsletter masthead:

1) "Infinate" is a contraction of “innate” and “infinite,” demonstrating that our infinite nature is innate to every aspect of ourselves. 2) I misspell words just to see if people are paying attention. 3) My graphics guy did it. He can’t spell worth a dam. 4) I insert misspellings intentionally for those people who enjoy finding errors and pointing them out. 5) It’s that pesky Shadow again. Whenever I suppress the dark side, it comes up and bites me in the butt. 6) How rude of you to point out that I’m human! 7) I’m responsible. I made a mistake. God, I’m sorry! I’ll never do it again!

I was thoroughly embarrassed by this typo, and appreciate all who pointed out my errors with such poignancy, gentleness, and compassion.

And speaking of literature:

A college English class was given an assignment to write a short story. They were told that the story must contain as few words as possible, and include three themes: 1) Religion; 2) Sexuality; and 3) Mystery.

This was the only short story that received an A+ in the entire class:

"Good God, I'm pregnant. I wonder who did it."

Endarkenment: The Top 40 Ways To Make Yourself Miserable

(Humor, sort of...)

I have spent much of my life making myself unhappy, and I learned long ago how to share my misery with others. I interviewed hundreds of miserable people and asked them to share their most prized misery secrets and techniques. This Top 40 list is a compilation of the best ways to make yourself miserable -- and bring along everyone with you... To read the rest of this article (yes, it's humor, but it might sound a little familiar...), click HERE.