Culture & Media articles:

Escape to the Land of Enchantment

Skiing, Sustainability & Santa Fe By Abigail Lewis The room is subdued at 7:55am. People are milling about the Hotel St. Bernard dining room chatting softy, sipping coffee. Suddenly the quiet is broken by the sound of a brass bell being vigorously rung, and an elfin man radiating warmth on this chilly mountain morning announces […]

Film: Dreaming Heaven

Directed by Dana Walden and Straw Weisman Dreaming Heaven follows the real-life journey of a group of people through a matrix of temples and plazas in the Mexican ruins of Teotihuacán. Their tumultuous physical, spiritual and emotional path—narrated in the film by Mila Maren as the Angel of Death—opens them to a whole new world. […]

Film: Awakening World

Directed by Sebastian Siegel The current trend in documentary filmmaking of interviewing luminaries in the “conscious living” field for their opinion or expertise on one thing or another has become a bit tired. However, in Awakening World, director/writer Sebastian Siegel drew from a much more diverse group, most of whom would not be considered expert […]

CD—Internal: Music for Dissolving

Right to the Heart Jamie Catto & Alex Forster This evocative collaboration between Jamie Catto and Alex Forster reflects our deepest emotions—sadness and ecstasy, fear and courage—and the unchanging space in which they swirl. A compelling combination of electronic and organic world music, Internal brings us a powerful complement for movement or body-based practices. Catto […]

Is Prancer a Boy or a Girl?

“’Twas the Night Before Christmas” never mentions the sex of Santa’s eight tiny reindeer By Linda Raedisch Thanks to the names given them by Clement Moore*, not to mention the work of Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass, we tend to think of the eight tiny reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh as males, but the females of […]

Film: A Place at the Table

Directed by Kristi Jacobson & Lori Silverbush It’s difficult to understand how 50 million people—one in six Americans—can be food insecure in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. The reasons are complex, and perpetuated by our farm policy. Farm subsidies started during the Great Depression, before agribusiness took over our food system, and were intended […]

Book—The Spiritual Life of Water

Were water actually what hydrologists deem it to be—a chemically inert substance—then a long time ago there would already have been no water and no life on this Earth. I regard water as the blood of the earth. Its internal process, while not identical to that of our blood, is nonetheless very similar. It is […]

Music as Medicine with Deva Premal & Miten

The cellular vibration of Deva Premal & Miten By Jessica Arconti “Music is a form of medicine and meditation music is the ultimate elixir,” says Deva Premal, a German-born musician who performs her spiritual chants with audiences all over the world. “Singing has a strong healing power. Deep breathing changes our cells with the vibration […]

Film: Touchy Feely

Written & directed by Lynn Shelton Review by Abigail Lewis It’s wonderful to see a mainstream film like Touchy Feely embrace an alternative healing modality, and an important step to its broader acceptance as a valid health care option. Happily, Reiki practitioner Bronwyn, in an aptly understated performance by Allison Janney, is presented as a […]