My new book, a novel, “Leela’s Gift” has been released. In fact it can be viewed at http://lulu.com/spotlight/JLevine1. It will soon be (early August) available at amazon.com and many online venues where book are sold as well as in book stores (remember www.indiebound.org and independent book stores). “Leela’s Gift” is the story of a luminous inner spiritual  journey. It is set in New York and high in the Himalayas near Darjeeling in northern India. The novel uncovers archetypal and highly relevant spiritual teachings. East meet west in Leela. The book offers teachings on meditation and yoga,  practical paths to freedom from the often dispiriting and desperate quality of our contemporary lives. The novel intertwines Leela’s journey with modern philosophy  and primal wisdom and is infused with some of the inner teachings of Buddhism and the Enneagram. “Leela’s Gift” tells a story as old as the human heart.

Tags: ashram, Children, consciousness, creativity, cyberspace, Darjeeling, Desert Fathers, E-types, Enneagram, fiction, Leela's Gift, meditation, mind structure, Mind-training, Plato, rebirth, relationships, Sufi, teacher, Universal Forms, Vedic origins, www.janetlevine.com, yoga

Stress is pervasive in our lives. Therefore it is not a question of how to avoid stress, but rather how to deal with stress. Stress does not lessen as you grow older, it simply takes different forms. Here are two examples. The high school juniors I teach are stressed because academically this is the year that will decide which college they will enter in 2011. So many students apply early action or early decision to college that junior year grades largely become the arbiter of their acceptance letters. They also need to bolster their school resume and try to maintain and juggle impossible schedules of sport, music, drama, publications and extra curricula clubs and activities with at least one having a community service component. Stress cuts into sleep, and down time is fast becoming an endangered species if it is not already one.

At the other end of the spectrum are the elderly. Some like my mother, who three years ago, in her mid-eighties, suffered a stroke, has been fortunate to receive excellent medical care and now lives in an assisted living facility where she is well looked after. Her stress is caused by her inability to communicate, as she would like, due to her stroke-induced brain damage, her frailty (she is in a wheel chair), the loss of control of every aspect of her life, as well as her sense of impending death. The vast majority of elderly people are not so fortunate and spend their last years in poverty, deprivation and with a frustrated acceptance of their reduced quality of life. This causes them and their loved ones enormous stress.

We live in stressful times. Recent college graduates struggle to find jobs, middle-aged workers who have been laid off struggle to find jobs and some way to fulfill their responsibilities to their families. We are stressed about war in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change, and how and when will the struggling world economy recover. And the list goes on.

Some strategies to deal with stress:

Physical – eat right, exercise, try to get enough sleep, build in recreation and down time. Maybe take a yoga class, and learn how to meditate. Breathe deeply.

Emotional – make the effort to stay connected with family and friends. If you live alone think about acquiring a pet. Prioritize a list of what satisfies you emotionally—music, movies, bowling, carpentry—and make the time to treat yourself and indulge in what gives you pleasure.

Psychological—don’t try to push through the commitments you have regardless of your health. Take a day off when you feel sick, learn that tomorrow is another day and you will have time to complete your tasks. Seek a balance between home life, work or school life, and your time for your private self, life.

Remind yourself that this is the one life you have to live. Be passionate. Your life is happening now, this is not a rehearsal.

Tags: adolescents, Children, colleges, consciousness, creativity, E-model, E-types, Enneagram, Generation E, Janet Levine, meditation, Mind-training, Parenting, relationships, stress, www.janetlevine.com

We are in that mode again. Either already back at school, or anticipating the change from the summer months to the academic year. This is true for students, teachers, parents and anyone who is involved in any way in the educational system. Come the inevitable cycling of the seasons from summer to fall and we all experience an inner realization of the echoing internal shift of energy. If you are a teacher, as I am, no matter how many years you have been teaching–in fact the longer your teaching career–the more easily able you are to recognize the subtle internal signs of the approaching transition.

This blog could be, but is not about the ways different personalities react to transitions, it is about transitions themselves. Our entire lives are about transitions. We are in the womb, and then we transition to being alive in this physical reality. We breathe, we are alive, and then one day we stop breathing and we are no longer alive. This is the greatest mystery; we are no longer here. While we are here we live in a realm of duality. Every meeting implies a parting. We are born to our parents, but sooner or later we will be parted from them. And before that final parting there are many other transitional meetings and partings–friends, long-term loving relationships, career changes, moving year by year from grade school to college and even graduate school. We all go through so many transitions, even those from awakening in the morning and returning to sleep at night.

Transitions, the way we view them, and the energy we create around them are vitally important for us to understand if we are to live our lives more steadily in a way that can lead to stability, less reactivity and more inner spaciousness allowing us to be proactive and not at the whim of life’s changing patterns.

1) The only constant in our lives is change. Think about this, it is often a startling idea when you first hear it. Minute-by-minute, day-by-day, month- by-month, year-by-year, we change. We grow older, we learn more, we adapt our lives to our own expectations and the reality of those expectations. Medical research tells us that physically every cell in our bodies is changed every seven years. It makes sense then to grapple with ideas of transitions and change.

2) If the only constant is change, then all we have is each passing nano-second. In that moment try to be present to yourself, to the people around you, and to your current situation and  environment. Try and be fully present to every moment; avoid future-tripping,  or looking back with regret and nostalgia. This state of mind sounds so simple and yet is so hard to achieve. Staying present in the moment is among the greatest mind-training challenges you will ever undertake.

Have a meaningful and aware transition to this fall.

Tags: adolescents, Children, colleges, consciousness, creativity, cyberspace, E-model, E-types, education, Enneagram, Generation E, high school, Janet Levine, janetlevine.com, meditation, Parenting, Parents, teacher, Triads Personality Inventory, www.janetlevine.com