We have a track record now in being able to calm kids down – see attached*, a survey of 260 students at a high school in Tampa, FL after only one exposure to Sahaja Meditation. We teach this without charge and in the TriState area here in New York, the results in difficult high schools is most encouraging. Interestingly, in nearly every high school we go into, irrespective of situation or circumstance, the students are full of stress and insecurity.

Best wishes and thanks for your interest.

* can’t upload a PDF to this blog

One student in Florida said of his experience, ” It saved someone from being punched in the face.”

This week is the final week of an intensive four week training program for the new HealthCorps coordinators and part of this was two mini HealthCorps health fairs in the Edward A. Reynolds West Side High School in Manhattan.

Tuesday saw a terrific fair, everything was beautifully thought out and executed. Students came in from summer school classes in small groups, each carrying a card that got them extra credits if they attended each of the stalls in the school gymnasium and had the stall operators sign their card. Normally, we have to go out and corral them in to meditate, but here they came to us under their own steam.

The hall was decorated with bunting and palm trees from different colored paper, and some seasonal lights added to the festive atmosphere.

Something like 50 students learned how to mediate using Sahaja Meditation and in addition, the Dean, and a couple of teachers tried it too. Nicole, the gym teacher and assistant Dean, said she’d like to invite us for a regular Sahaja Meditation meeting for a group of teachers/students/parents who meet as a support group for the students.

It’s always surprising at just how easily students take to Sahaja Meditation and today was no exception. One young fellow, Ruben, a real cool dude, didn’t want to try it at first and even the thought of only five minutes didn’t work for him. But try it he did, (with two buddies) and he was astonished at how he felt and he said he’d definitely meditate at home, a comment echoed by many.

Another cool customer, a student with locks, and a hairstyle of some distinction, sat very quietly and at the end, announced, “I got it! I got it! I feel like I’m flying. The Dean brought three or four young students and commented “I feel good!” (echoes of James Brown)

Afterwards, Joan Burress had lunch with a buddy from her first year in college,  a man who is now the Dean of Jersey City University, who also teaches psychology. Joan gave him Self-realization in the restaurant and he reported “A different kind of calm”. He runs a summer camp for disadvantaged inner-city students from 12 to 17 in upstate New York and he invited Joan to come up next year and run a Sahaja Meditation program there.

Working with HealthCorps coordinators is such fun, a privilege and a pleasure, and swaying palm trees in Manhattan always works for this writer….

Stewart Schaefer, a coordinator from a school in Houston, Texas, was saying that as a young teenager, he was short, fat, red-haired and he couldn’t say the letter R properly. He’s now about 6’ 5”, has a terrific sense of humor and a burning desire to be a doctor, said he became a member of HealthCorps because he wanted a second chance to be cool in High School! He notes that anyone who’s an impressive functioning adult has mostly had some kind of adversity to become the person they now are. He really likes Sahaj Meditation and sees it as important in what he offers his students.

Josh, from Rochester, NY and about to start working in a high school at Cliffside Park, New jersey, said he’s looking forward to the opportunity, probably for the only time in his life, to be a hippy for the next two years, doing pretty well what he likes, and (he didn’t use the phrase himself) changing young lives one at a time.

“You must be the change you want to see in the world”. Mahatma Gandhi

———————————————————————————————————————————-Today, Thursday, a different group of coordinators organized a health fair, and again some 50 students learned to meditate. Normally, we find that on average, about 70% are interested, however in these two events, 90% + of the students participating said they really liked it. One young man approached his buddies and said that he enjoyed the meditation more than any other activity on offer.

Garima, a college student from California who is interning in New York for the summer, and an experienced Sahaja Meditator came to this, her very first health fair and she said:

“Within the first five minutes of meditating with the students at West Side High, I felt relieved of all the pre-existing exhaustion within me. The environment where we were giving realization that morning was what most yogis would consider the least conducive for meditating – students were running and dancing around our stall and music was blasting in the surrounding areas. There would be the periodic random scream or popping balloon. But when I began to meditate with the students, I realized that we were all able to enter that state of silent meditation as easily as if we were at home. In fact, it even felt a little easier.

The hour or so that we spent meditating with the students at West Side High was so enjoyable. I loved observing and listening to the comments from each of the students, and seeing many of their faces relieved and satisfied after they got their self-realization and could experience the meditation. What amazed me was how sensitive many of the students already were to their own subtle energy and how quite a few of them expressed a genuine interest in Sahaja Meditation, even though this event was for them a mandatory health program. A few students were so moved by their experience that they said they would come to the weekly meditation meetings on 34^th street. One memorable student – a spirited young black man, who had a do-rag around his head and sagging pants – was so enthusiastic about his experience, that he immediately brought his friend to our stall. Another young woman who got her realization opened up her eyes and said “Wow. I needed this.” She mentioned how much emotional turmoil she faces in her life and how she will start meditating regularly to overcome that.

The method by which we gave realization to these students was even simpler than I expected it would be. All that we asked the students to do was to bring their attention to a few parts of their body, which were referred to in everyday terms and an absence of jargon – i.e. the center of your chest, the center of your forehead, etc. There was no waving of hands, no saying affirmations out loud, no confusing words. And no explanation needed to be given before we meditated. Whenever I felt a catch in anyone, I would simply put my attention there and silently say the respective mantra to remove it. (I found myself often saying the mantra for center heart.) Everything was so simple, yet effective. I was amazed at how strongly I could feel their subtle energy on my own Sahasrara and hands and how easily the subtle energy of the students would come up.

As I walked out of the high school, I already started assessing how I could change my approach to giving realization to people, especially at the weekly meetings that are held at my university during the school year. My experience at the Health Corps event gave me faith in a fact that I often forget – that self-realization can be given anywhere, to anyone, and in any situation. That too, in the most simple of ways. All pre-existing ideas that I had about how to ‘effectively’ give realization, what meditative environment to create, and the types of people who will take more easily to meditation were dissolved after going to this Health Corps event.

Right after the Health Fair I had to go back to work for five hours. For the first time in weeks, I felt as if nothing in this draining city and in my workplace could bring me down. I was so energized by meditating with those students that during the course of the day, I felt my kundalini magnetically being drawn to my Sahasrara numerous times.

———————————————————————————————————————————–

One young student said “I was stressed when I came in here, but now I’m not worried about nothing”.

The Thursday health fair set even new and higher standards, black and gold were the color palette used, the coordinators all wore black and there were black silhouettes on the walls, and black balloons and gold balloons were everywhere.

This years new coordinators are just as amazing as their predecessors. Can such a group of young people really bring about fundamental change in the health of the nation’s young people?  There’s no doubt about it.

I walked over and from a distance of some 20 feet, used the SoundHound app on my iPhone to record the track, and it was Aventura’s Hermanita and Romeo Skit (live) from the album K.O.B. live. I asked the young man in the car, if my iPhone had picked up the track correctly and confirmed that it had. He said that Aventura were “like the Beatles” and told me that they were born in the Bronx in Dominican Republic families.

When I related the story to Alexei, my 25 year old son, he said, let me guess …… was it Aventura? Wikipedia says they were “self-taught and determined to break into the music industry, Aventura made their big break in 1999, with the hopes of breaking Dominican bachata music out from its traditional base and fuse it withmodern popular sounds like hip hop and R&B.” I hear reggae there too.

I laid out $20 for their album K.O.B. live on Amazon and it sounds great value for money.

Check them out.

March 8, 2010, 6:05 PM

Why So Many Superheroes Are Drawn to New York

By PETER GUTIERREZ

Courtesy of DC Comics

Cover of “New York World’s Fair Comics,” 1939-40. Slide Show

There’s a cool-sounding panel in Midtown Tuesday evening on New York City as character, inspiration and player in the universe of superhero comics. It’s called “New York, the Super-City.” We asked the moderator, Peter Gutiérrez, to pick a few images and say a few words.

Would there be superheroes without skyscrapers? For that matter, would superheroes as we know them even exist without New York?

The 20th-century big city, with its soaring spires, shadowy tunnels, huge crowds and towering suspension bridges, was a perfect incubator and backdrop for a new kind of archetypal adventurer who combined traits of the the warrior, demigod, frontiersman and rationalist crime fighter. What New Yorkers might take for granted, though, is the extent to which their particular hometown has been instrumental in creating the comic book superhero.

SUPERHEROES OF NEW YORK

A look back at the superheroes who have taken the city in a single bound.

• Slide Show

Even beyond its physical architecture, New York City provided a perfect setting for superheroic exploits. As a financial center, its concentration of wealth could act as a powerful magnet for bigger-than-life criminals. As a global city, it was ripe for international intrigue. And as a fashion mecca and a famously tolerant place, it established a social environment in which saviors of humankind dressed in flamboyant homemade costumes could go about their business.

Yet New York’s central role in the superhero universe owes at least as much to its concentration of major comic book publishers. DC Comics and its forerunners, the publishers of Superman, were based here, which may help explain how New York insinuated itself into comics that ostensibly had a more generic “American” feel.

Gotham City, of course, was always a thinly veiled version of New York. So was Central City, stomping grounds of The Spirit, a non-superpowered but influential character created by a native Brooklynite, Will Eisner. Indeed, in their earliest appearances, both Batman (1939) and The Spirit (1940) were set in New York. Later, the locations were fictionalized to court a wider audience, but when the Caped Crusader or Denny Colt scrambled over rooftops or stalked shadowy alleyways, it was with a decidedly New York flair, romantic and hard-boiled at the same time.

In the Marvel comics of the ’60s, the city (and its environs) became a kind of nonstop action fest, with the Fantastic Four headquartered in Midtown, Spider-Man hailing from Queens, and Tony Stark (of Iron Man fame) launching missiles from Long Island.

Really, though, it’s those downtown canyons and dizzying heights that are inseparable from the concept of a superhero. In fact, one might claim that the superhero has altered the relationship to urban space itself — at least among comic book fans. After all, don’t skyscrapers now reside differently in our imaginations thanks to all those the awe-inspiring human figures that swing and leap from them without fear?

“New York, the Super-City”: panel discussion with Danny Fingeroth, Gene Kanenberg Jr., Frank Tieri, Billy Tucci and Peter Gutiérrez. Tuesday, 6:30 p.m., New York Center for Independent Publishing, 20 West 44th Street. Sponsored by GraphicNovelReporter.Com, New York Comic Con, and Midtown Comics. Tickets $15, $10 for members, $5 for students. For more information: contact@nycip.org or (212) 764-7021.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

Student A – “I found the meditation soothing to the mind and the soul”

Student B – “It was peaceful and relaxing – I’d like to sign up”.

Student C – “I feel really peaceful.”

Student D – “I feel calm, relaxed, at peace with myself”.

Student E – “I got my attention focused, it was great – I’m going to do it at home.”

Student F – “I felt really peaceful by meditating – yeah!”

I felt really peaceful by meditating – yeah