Gaia Community: Bryan's Blog

Second Hand News

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:34:28 GMT

Today we bought a bike for our daughter Zoe, who just turned 15. My first stop was Craigslist, where I found a gem of a find - a Raleigh Sprite 5 speed Cruiser. Turns out it was an ad posted by Re-Cycle, the Minneapolis based second hand bike shop. (www.re-cycle.com).

This works out very well for us because for openers we don't have to spend so much cash on a bike. And since we bought from a shop we can trust we know that it has been tuned up and is ready to ride. Turns out this was sold on consignment, and it's nice to know that we won't have to invest anything more into the bike for awhile.

On a deeper level, we get to reuse a perfectly good bike rather than use our resources on having a new one built from scratch (while saving the landfill a big hunk of metal and rubber). I think it's important that we make smarter choices on what we do with our resources and I try to contribute to that any way I can. And plus I am frugal by nature and always enjoy a deal!

In any case, for those in Minneapolis, check out Re-Cycle at 2327 Hennepin Ave in Uptown. In addition there are shops all over the U.S. as well. The owner and employees are extremely helpful and it's a nice, open, clean shop.

Tags: bike, spend less, frugal, recycle, reuse

The Decade of Global Transformation and the New American Evolutio

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 01:43:35 GMT

Interesting article on

The Decade of Global Transformation and the New American Evolution
March 13, 2009

by Curtis Lang

To view this online go to:

http://www.satyacenter.com/decade-of-global-transformation

I

Tags: Globalization, Economic Climate, Satya Center, Curtis Lang

Money

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:32:37 GMT

Money, it's a hit.
Dont give me that do goody good bullshit. Pink Floyd

I am fascinated with money. I have been for some time. I am curious about our monetary system and am always striving to learn more. I'm not talking about what they teach in Economics 101, rather some deeper questions.

Through my exploration I've learned a few basic things about our monetary structure. One that really stands out is that in order for our economy to grow, it is inherent that we go into further debt. There's no way around it, it's the way the system is set up. Think about it - every time new money is introduced into the market it does so with a price, called interest. In other words, whoever is in "control" of money, automatically collects this commission, whether it is 2%, 5%, 10% or 20%. And there is no good or service that is exchanged as part of this transaction, rather it is just a cost.

What happens, over the course of time, is that this "interest" starts to add up. So while there are always individual winners and losers in the marketplace, on the whole the market loses. It has to if it grows. There's no way around it. The more the economy grows, the higher the debt gets. The better we do, the more we owe. Strange, isn't it?

Until at some point this interest (which always leads to debt since there is no good or service exchanged) reaches a tipping point, and an "adjustment" is necessary. An adjustment is when those who hold the purse strings decide to collect this debt and reel in their interest (thus taking the money out of the marketplace and bringing the economic commerce to a slow down or halt). They can then count it, bless it, thank us for all of our hard work, and, if we're lucky, sell it back to us, with interest of course, pat us on our heads and send us off to make more debt.

It's a cycle that continues and continues. So we can go out and meditate on money (ala ‘The Secret') all we want. And maybe we'll accumulate lots and lots of it. But while we accumulate, someone else will be filing for bankruptcy. It has to be that way, the way we are set up. There has to losers. Someone, after all, has to pay the interest.

The farther along I follow the truth about our monetary system, the stronger the stench becomes. I don't know who is at the top of this pyramid (and isn't this really the ultimate pyramid scheme?), and I don't know how many are really in the know to this manipulation. My guess is the higher you are in the pyramid, while you may, too, smell the rat, you may be less inclined to ask questions.

On the surface, we in the West are perceived winners in this game. After all, just take a look at our gifts. Most have a roof over their heads, food on the table, a cell phone, a car or two, cable tv, etc. But it is not the economy that brought us these gifts. It's not capitalism. It is hard work, ingenuity, and evolution that got us where we are today.

Every generation we have new innovations, we are more efficient, we are smarter and we are healthier. And every generation we acquire more debt.

Used to be one working adult in the average family could provide contemporary needs, now we need two. And that's a stretch. How can this be?

Our marketplace is holding us back. Our marketplace is sucking our energy.

But we are scared. Scared to ask tough questions. Scared to rock the boat. Because an overhaul of the economic system will create uncertainty. We do have a lot to lose. There would be a lot of unknowns. This is all true.

So instead we go along with the program.

More information:

http://www.freewebs.com/whosemoney/whatismoneyreform.htm

http://www.michaelsharp.org/ebooks/rocketguide.pdf

Bryan Bertsch is a Meditation Coach and Energy Healer in Minneapolis, MN. Visit him online at http://www.bryanbertsch.com/.

Tags: money, debt, interest, the secret, economics, marketplace, capitalism

War on Terror Comes to Abrupt End??

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:55:36 GMT

I just read a headline on MSN.com that said the U.S. "War on Terror" is coming to a quick end under President Obama. Is this for real?

(see: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28807952/)

I have been a huge fan of Obama since waking up from a lifetime of political slumber, oh, about 6 months ago when Obama really started making headlines. And this guy just keeps getting better and better.

The War on Terror had no chance. Just like the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs and the War on Cancer; it was doomed to fail. Wars tend to focus on the problem, instead of solutions. Obama, so far, is about thinking forward.

What a shock from the Bush Administration! (I lament that exactly 1/3 of my life has been lived under the "Bush Administration," whether it was Sr. or Jr.) Where we once were led by fear and we are now led by hope. When I used to watch Bush speak I could literally feel the energy being sucked from me, I am now filled with inspiration watching Obama. Where there was darkness there is now light.

And it's bright.

Obama's inaugural speech was brilliant. He was honest, forthright, inspiring and intelligent. Being American actually means something to me now. I take a look at my community and ask, "What can I do to serve?" I feel a sense of cooperation and "we're all in this together," instead of "every man for himself."

Obama has opened a space for us to call out injustice, to speak the truth, to challenge what we feel is wrong. He is taking a hard stand for what he believes. I do not sense any BS about him, either. He is showing us grace and humility - and he is strong.

Is this really our American leader?

I am excited and feel renewed. But it also means I have work to do. No more excuses. No more feelings of, ‘what will it matter anyway?'

It's time to get busy. And I am thrilled to get started!!

Tags: obama, war on terror, hope, justice, america

On giving...and letting go

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:14:34 GMT

As we were putting out treats for Santa Claus this year, with my wife Davianne, and sons Aaron (7) and Forest (5) we decided to leave a note of thanks as well. Later, Aaron came out with his Panda Bear, a favorite stuffed animal of his, requesting we also leave this for Santa Claus. I thought that was a sweet gesture, but I had mixed feelings as Panda was one of my childhhood friends that I had passed down to Aaron. He has seen me through many emotional moments growing up.

As I was tucking Aaron and Forest in for bed, Aaron clarified that Panda was not for Santa, but for Santa to pass along to another child during his nightly travels across the planet. So as hard as it was for me to let go of Panda, I decided this was a very sweet gesture indeed. When we woke we found a note from Santa thanking us for the treats and thanking Aaron for giving up Panda - he knew "just the child for him."

We will be dropping Panda off at a local thrift store - not the one we frequent, just in case. And I know that Panda will offer some lucky child a tremendous gift and I, like Aaron am happy and honored to share that this season.

Tags: holiday gifting, gratitude, sharing, letting go

"Personal Development for Smart People" Review

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 03:26:01 GMT

Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina is a book that I enjoy and recommend to friends and clients. There are many useful tools; some new, some already tried, that can help anyone move through self barriers and succeed in creating the life they want to live.

From a broad perspective, the books seems like a model Mr. Pavlina created from his vast amounts of information and articles on his website, http://www.stevepavlina.com/; an outline both for himself and his audience. My wife first stumbled upon his work on various internet searches and has shared with me some of his articles. Before reading the book, however, I was for the most part not very familiar with his work.

The foundation of the book is the three pillars Steve labels TRUTH, LOVE and POWER. These three virtues create INTELLIGENCE. I am so moved by this model that I have a created a triangle in my office with Truth, Love and Power written at the three angles and Intelligence in the center. It is a great reminder throughout my day to be true, to love and to harness my power.

He then weaves the concepts of Oneness, Authority and Courage with this foundation and applies these qualities to habits, career, money, health, relationships and spirituality.

I really enjoy working with these concepts in my everyday life - it has especially helped me in relations to my career (and challenges me to take my next step as a healer/teacher/storyteller) and my relationship with money. One of his early exercises has the reader rank their career in different ways and it is quite an eye opener when Steve shows you what your rankings really mean. I won't spoil it, but it is quite enlightening!

In the chapter on Money, it gives me yet another concept of money and its function and I think Steve hits the nail on the head. It has taken me years to unravel old beliefs and feelings surrounding money, and Steve offers a great perspective that helps me connect with money in a simple, non-judgmental, healthy way that I will continue to practice. I also really appreciate the difference he lays out between "personal value" and "social value" and how this relates to earning potential. But most importantly he helps me align with ways to earn more money while staying focused on what I am contributing to the World. This is very important to me and what I have been working on both individually and instilling in my family. "What gifts do I have to share," and "How can I contribute?" are questions I encourage us to ask frequently. Steve's book gives great tools and ideas of how to bring these answers into reality.

I also enjoyed the section on Health, another area that I am very focused on. Steve and I agree that health starts at the cellular level moving through the individual level which contributes to community and finally onward to universal health. Too many self help leaders forget about the importance of health - in diet, exercise, emotions, beliefs and spirit. It all relates and is all essential to individual and societal evolution.

What the book lacked, for me, was that strong heartfelt "Aha;" that whole body buzz I get when I really connect to a spiritual truth. The book felt "heady" at times, and Steve definitely focuses contribution in the form of external action. This obviously fits his personality as someone who over-achieved academically and often succeeded in some outrageous action-oriented goals - many of which he shares and some which are not only inspirational but help move me out of old, comfortable patterns and encourages taking on a new challenge - and others that border on insane. (I say that in the kindest way; one of my teachers points out that the line between enlightenment and insanity can be very thin at times.) Steve is big on the "30 day challenge" as a way of finding out your personal truth about a habit or action plan. A great approach in my opinion.

There is a section that applies his principles to Spirituality, which is exactly the missed point. Spirituality breathes through all the other principles - and could be applied as such. Heart, Love and Presence are all talked about, but it most often takes the back seat to raw action. This works for some, I am sure, and that "action" piece is definitely something I could implement more of personally. But action in and of itself is not necessarily the barometer for contribution.

All in all, I enjoyed Personal Development for Smart People and will continue to recommend the work. Thank you, Steve, for putting your work out there. We will all benefit from it!

Bryan Bertsch is a Meditation Coach and Energy Healer. Visit him online at http://www.bryanbertsch.com/. Bryan practices TRUTH, LOVE and POWER in all that he does.

Tags: steve pavlina, personal development for smart people, book review

No More Show

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:43:38 GMT

Over the last eight months my wife and I decided to be more laissez-faire when it came to our three children's (ages 14, 7 and 5) television and computer screen time. While we still were very selective in what they were watching/playing, we let them choose, for the most part, when and how long they could participate. Our hope was that given the free range to choose their activities, they would find their own balance. After nine months of this experiment, we decided it wasn't going the way we hoped.

We found that watching show and noodling around on the internet trumped most activities, especially any that involved creative expression. The kids just rarely got flat-out bored, which we have found can be a necessary precursor to a creative breakthrough. It was always just easier to go be entertained.

Last week we pulled the plug on the computer and idiot box. Besides some very weak protests (almost just like they were going through the motions) the kids have responded better than I ever imagined. In addition to strict guidelines for the kids, my wife and I have also agreed to limit our laptop surfing adventures. Our goal is to create more harmonious experiences as a family, and become ‘creators' rather than ‘consumers', ‘doers' rather than ‘watchers.'

Over the weekend the boys joined me in meal preparation on a couple of occasions and it was a great experience; one that never would have happened if they could go veg in front of the computer if given the choice. On Saturday evening the whole family was in the kitchen creating dinner, and not only was it great fun, but the kids ate (and enjoyed) some food that they would normally complain about! It's amazing that when they help with the prep how much more they're likely to want to try it and even enjoy it.

Last night the whole family gathered in front of the fire and had a blast creating picture cut-out collage puppets. This was my wife's idea. We gathered a stack of old magazines, several scissors, some cardboard, popsicle sticks and glue. We cut out fun pictures, glued them to the cardboard and pasted a stick on them. It was a great way to spend time together and the creations were incredible! The boys lost interest first, but enjoyed the fire nonetheless. And it's a project that we'll continue, perhaps creating some plays to go with our new props.

My heart is open thinking about this - such a wonderful alternative to me and my wife surfing the internet for an hour after dinner while the kids watched a show or played computer before bedtime story. And this was just one evening. I can't wait to find what other activities we come up with moving forward. I envision a lot of stories, more art projects and lots of games.

Tags: family activities, media, art, creative expression

A Day Off

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:25:10 GMT

I took the day off from work today. It is a cool, rainy day, which isn't so bad since I have a bike commute of over 16 miles round trip to and from work. I have masterfully chosen these wet days to miss work since I began biking in June.

One of the blessings of this day is just plainly taking myself out of my normal routine. It offers a fresh perspective and insights that I normally miss.

We began home schooling our children (ages 14, 7 and 5) last January so this fall was our first transition from "summer break." (Our version of home schooling is very unstructured so the difference between pre and post Labor Day is minute.) In any case, we have all felt the shift in energy from Summer to Autumn.

I was so grateful this morning to spend time with my kids, leisurly doing some arithmetic with my boys in the morning and cooking some homemade hashbrowns and eggs for lunch. My wife Davianne and daughter Zoe joined in on the feast - a quiet, relaxing meal that we never would have been able to share had the kids been in school. It was magical!

The boys go to a great "after school" program at Linden Hills Park where they hang out with about 15 other kids from Kindergarten to 8th grade, playing games, doing art, cooking etc, leaving me with a wonderful afternoon to enjoy with my wife.

I have many things to be grateful for this Autumn...great food to eat, a warm home and plenty of firewood to enjoy over the next few months. I have a healthy family, a job that supports us and a great healing and teaching practice.

It's nice to feel this and use it during times of stress or disconnection. A great day off indeed!

Tags: home school, day off, perspective

Balkan Beat Box

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:18:37 GMT

Last night my wife and I celebrated my birthday by going to see the Balkan Beat Box at The Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis (http://www.thecedar.org/). What a fantastic evening!

Balkan Beat Box is led by two Israeli born New Yorkers who bring a Mediterranean base to a very eclectic sound, with hints of reggae, disco, rap and rock. The music (and dancing) is as intoxicating as it is healing. I have not had so much fun or been moved by music since my days following Phish.

http://www.balkanbeatbox.com/

The band brings the whole audience together in movement and sound and the experience was magical to say the least. Balkan Beat Box consciously moves to heal the separation between the world and the Middle East and preaches to end our following of our leaders and to choose "not to play the game"(of war.) And woven through those messages is an invitation to move and party and let it all hang out.

My experience was very deep. The hypnotizing rhythms and tribal drum beats easily put me into an altered state of healing and release. The shamans were present as the crowd danced the night away. I felt a major release and a rebirth as I was present with my 36^th anniversary of my travels to this planet.

In my Interfaith Ministry Healing Ordination Program we are currently studying sound and movement as a form of healing, which really helped me open up to the larger essence of the sacred space that Balkan Beat Box creates. I am inspired to use this in my healing practice and create more ways for group healings using music and dance.

The seed was planted last night. I look forward to seeing where it leads.

Tags: Balkan Beat Box, music, healing, shamans, dance, esoteric dance

Summer Sun

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:16:42 GMT

My two boys (age 6 and 5) are both blessed with my wife's skin - tans easily and rarely burns. We have not used any sun block on them the last two years, and they are in the sun a lot. For one, we are not afraid of the sun, as many have you believe. But we also question whether putting pharmaceutical chemicals on the skin does more harm than good (or any good at all) - especially over the long haul.

An interesting thing happened this summer. Our youngest son, Forest, often goes without a shirt while playing outside. But lately, he'll put on a long sleeve shirt or even choose to swim with a shirt on. The more I thought about this it occurred to me that he is intuitively taking care of himself. Because we do not make every decision for him he is taking that responsibility on his own. He holds no judgment or belief (the sun is bad/always protect yourself), he just senses, on his own, that he may need protection.

This is a good thing to keep in mind in raising my children; holding a space for them to self regulate. There are so many fears we pass onto our children, beliefs we have been sold at one time or another. If I make every decision for my children's protection, how will they ever learn to tune into what their bodies really need?

Tags: sun, summer, raising children, sunblock, intuition, children

Blue Diamond

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:35:07 GMT

On my ride into work today Rush danced through my head. So inspired by Red Barchetta, I wrote this:

My Honda died a bit ago, didn't know what to do

I searched Craiglist to replace, then put it to rest

Meanwhile I hopped on Old Blue and hit the road two wheels

Straight to the Greenway where my white haired uncle rode

Hop on my bike

Strap on my helmet and hit the road

Ride like wind,

As the breeze caresses my face

Deep in my Heart

My high self preserved for me, an old machine

For a millenium

To keep it as bright has been its dearest dream

I strip away the old beliefs, that hides a shining soul

A brilliant coalescent light from a better, varnished time

I take a breath, filling every cell, responding with a ROAR

Tires hitting pavement I commit my weekly crime...

Wind in my hair-

Shifting and drifting-

Mantras flowing-

Adrenaline Surge

Well leathered skin

Hot blood in my vessel

The scented country air

Sunlight on skin

The beauty of landscape

Every nerve aware

Suddenly ahead of me, just around the bend

I see a dream, my highest self, smiling ear to ear

I click in gear, pick up my pace, to meet me in my prime

Go gleaming through the valley in this timeless race

Ride like the wind

Straining the limits of man and soul

Laughing out loud

With hope and awe, I've got a grandiose plan

At the one lane bridge

I meet myself now

At the riverside

Race back to my home

To dream with the stars

At the fireside...

Tags:

In your view, what life stage is the human family in?

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:05:42 GMT

I would put the Western culture at about 9 or 10. I would say that we're still in the sandbox mentality of fighting for what is "mine", polarizing the genders, and always wanting more, more, more.

I think we are on the brink of moving into our teens, part of which is moving away from the black and white/right and wrong/good versus evil and becoming aware of the complexities of life.

But we first need to go through some form of initiation to enter into teenage land; an initation I don't think we've experienced but perhaps the movement into the Aquarian Age, and the evolution from "competitive culture" to "cooperative culture" will be that initation that boosts us into our teens.

I have faith and believe in the process. Onward!

Tags: QaR, human race, humanity, developing, adulthood, childhood, life

A Biker's Tale

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:49:37 GMT

Also seen here:

http://www.startribune.com/local/west/23911034.html?location_refer=$urlTrackSectionName

A couple weeks ago our second vehicle died. We had gotten a lot out of our '91 Honda Civic and were probably on borrowed time. It was a great opportunity for me and my wife to practice moving gracefully with this unexpected turn, rather than focus on frustration or helplessness. We are working hard to pay off some old debt, and we just created a pretty aggressive 13 month plan to erase our credit card debt - so it was tempting to move into a negative reaction. I reminded myself that something positive will be found by this experience, if I just pay attention.

A couple days before the car stopped running I had rode my bike to work for the first time. It's an 8 mile stretch from Minneapolis to Minnetonka, and it's mostly on a beatuiful bike path well off the road. Yet still, I had made many excuses as to why I wouldn't commit to this means of transportation consistently; how will I carry my lunch to and from work, what if I sweat too much, what if it rains...and on and on. Plus there is a stretch on Shady Oak Road with no path and a tiny shoulder which is quite dangerous.

Well, being with only one car I decided to figure out the bike routine, at least temporarily. Carrying my lunch was a minor detail, it's not that hot in the morning, plus I figured out our office building has a shower that I can use if need be. It rarely rains during the actual commute (but I did use the gas money I've saved over the last two weeks to invest in a nice rain jacket for such occasions). And, once I committed to biking, I found alternate routes to get to work and I now have less than 1 mile on the actual road. The rest is bike paths, including a path that leads right up to my office, which I found just last Wednesday. I connect with it in Hopkins and it's a beautiful stretch in the woods way away from traffic.

This whole experience has become an incredible gift for me and my wife. She has been inspired to bike to her job, her yoga class, and some light grocery shopping to the co-op and Trader Joe's. Some days we don't even bother getting into our one car. As a matter of fact, we had a conversation about how we could be without any vehicles! This would be inconvenient here in Minneapolis during the winter, but we are planning a move to Asheville, NC in the next 18 months and it would probably work just fine in the milder climate.

And let me tell you, that was a most liberating conversation! Being without a vehicle; no car payments, no insurance, no gas, no maintenance. Use the money saved to rent a car on such occasion you want to get away for a weekend, invest in your bike and pay the pennies it takes to ride the bus. It has given me a whole new perspective.

So now I am biking 80 miles a week, I am in nature for at least an hour and a half five days a week, and I feel great!

We're on the fence about whether we'll want a second car during the winter (I almost wrote "need a second car,") but we figure we have a few months to figure that out. Meanwhile, we're saving about $150/month on gas, we'll be dropping our insurance and I'm about to sell the Honda for $325 on Craigslist. Just like that we are ahead on our debt paying plan!

I am inspired. Inspired to be more self sufficient. Inspired to live in a smaller community in downtown. Inspired to spend less. Inspired to waste less. Inspired to be more connected.

Tags: bike, bike riding, asheville, minneapolis, debt, inspiration, small community, spend less, commitment, greenway

State of Economy

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:47:13 GMT

Here's an interesting article I came across from Harper's Magazine:

You can view it here:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908

The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash:

By Eric Janszen

A financial bubble¹1. I will use the familiar term "bubble" as a shorthand, but note that it confuses cause with effect. A better, if ungainly, descriptor would be "asset-price hyperinflation"-the huge spike in asset prices that results from a perverse self-reinforcing belief system, a fog that clouds the judgment of all but the most aware participants in the market. Asset hyperinflation starts at a certain stage of market development under just the right conditions. The bubble is the result of that financial madness, seen only when the fog rolls away. is a market aberration manufactured by government, finance, and industry, a shared speculative hallucination and then a crash, followed by depression. Bubbles were once very rare-one every hundred years or so was enough to motivate politicians, bearing the post-bubble ire of their newly destitute citizenry, to enact legislation that would prevent subsequent occurrences. After the dust settled from the 1720 crash of the South Sea Bubble, for instance, British Parliament passed the Bubble Act to forbid "raising or pretending to raise a transferable stock." For a century this law did much to prevent the formation of new speculative swellings.

Nowadays we barely pause between such bouts of insanity. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitiztion, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours.

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

Such transformations do not take place overnight. After World War I, Wall Street wrote checks to finance new companies that were trying to turn wartime inventions, such as refrigeration and radio, into consumer products. The consumers of the rising middle class were ready to buy but lacked funds, so the banking system accommodated them with new forms of credit, notably the installment plan. Following a brief recession in 1921, federal policy accommodated progress by keeping interest rates below the rate of inflation. Pundits hailed a "new era" of prosperity until Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929.

The crash, the Great Depression, and World War II were a brutal education for government, academia, corporate America, Wall Street, and the press. For the next sixty years, that chastened generation managed to keep the fog of false hopes and bad credit at bay. Economist John Maynard Keynes emerged as the pied piper of a new school of economics that promised continuous economic growth without end. Keynes's doctrine: When a business cycle peaks and starts its downward slide, one must increase federal spending, cut

taxes, and lower short-term interest rates to increase the money supply and expand credit. The demand stimulated by deficit spending and cheap money will thereby prevent a recession. In 1932 this set of economic gambits was dubbed "reflation."

The first Keynesian reflation was botched. To be fair, it was perhaps impractical under the gold standard, for by the time the Federal Reserve made its attempt to ameliorate matters, debt was already out of control.²2. Historians argue whether the Federal Reserve and Congress did enough soon enough to slow the rate of debt liquidation at the time. Most agree that once the inflation rate turned negative, monetary stimulus via short-term interest-rate management was ineffective, since the Fed could not lower short-term rates below zero percent. The Bank of Japan found itself in a similar predicament sixty years later. Banks failed, credit contracted, and GDP shrank. The economy was running in reverse and refused to respond to Keynesian inducements. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called in gold and repriced it, hoping to test Keynes's theory that monetary inflation stimulates demand. The economy began to expand. But it was World War II that brought real recovery, as a highly effective, demand-generating, deficit-and-debt-financed public-works project for the United States. The war did what a flawed application of Keynes's theories could not.

A few weeks after D-Day, the allies met at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to determine the future of the international monetary system. It wasn't much of a negotiation. Western economies were in ruins, and the international monetary system had been in disarray since the start of the Great Depression. The United States, now the dominant economic and military power, successfully pushed to peg the currencies of member nations to the dollar and to make dollars redeemable in American gold.

Americans could now spend as wisely or foolishly as our government policy decreed and, regardless of the needs of other nations holding dollars as reserves, print as many dollars as desired. But by the second quarter of 1971, the U.S. balance of merchandise trade had run up a deficit of $3.8 billion (adjusted for inflation)-an admittedly tiny sum compared with the deficit of $204 billion in the second quarter of 2007, but until that time the United States had run only surpluses. Members of the Bretton Woods system, most famously French President General Charles de Gaulle, worried that the United States intended to repay the money borrowed to cover its trade gap with depreciated dollars. Opposed to the exercise of such "exorbitant privilege," de Gaulle demanded payment in gold. With the balance of payments so greatly out of balance, newly elected President Richard Nixon faced a run on the U.S. gold supply, and his solution was novel: unilaterally end the U.S. legal obligation to redeem dollars with gold; in other words, default.

More than a decade of economic and financial-market chaos followed, as the dollar remained the international currency but traded without an absolute measure of value. Inflation rose not just in the United States but around the world, grinding down the worth of many securities and brokerage firms. The Federal Reserve pushed interest rates into double digits, setting off two global recessions, and new international standards and methods for measuring inflation and floating exchange rates were established to replace the gold standard. After 1975, the United States would never again post an annual merchandise trade surplus. Such high-value, finished-goods-producing industries as steel and automobiles were no longer dominant. The new economy belonged to finance, insurance, and real estate-FIRE.

FIRE is a credit-financed, asset-price-inflation machine organized around one tenet: that the value of one's assets, which used to fluctuate in response to the business cycle and the financial markets, now goes in only one direction, up, with no more than occasional short-term reversals. With FIRE leading the way, the United States, free of the international gold standard's limitations, now had great flexibility to finance its deficits with its own currency. This was "exorbitant privilege" on steroids. Massive external debts built up as trade partners to the United States, especially the oil-producing nations and Japan, balanced their trade surpluses with the purchase of U.S. financial assets.³3. The motivation was in part political: the Saudis, Japanese, and Taiwanese hold a great portion of U.S. debt; not coincidentally, these nations receive military protection from the United States. The process of financing our deficit with private and public foreign funds became self-reinforcing, for if any of the largest holders of our debt reduced their holdings, the trade value of the dollar would fall-and with that, the value of their remaining holdings would be decreased. Worse, if not enough U.S. financial assets were purchased, the United States would be less able to finance its imports. It's the old rule about bank debt, applied to international deficit finance: if you owe the banks $3 billion, the bank owns you. But if you owe the banks $10 trillion, you own the banks.

The FIRE sector's power grew unchecked as the old manufacturing economy declined. The root of the 1920s bubble, it was believed, had been the conflicts of interest among banks and securities firms, but in the 1990s, under the leadership of Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve, banking and securities markets were deregulated. In 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which regulated banks and markets, was repealed, while a servile federal interest-rate policy helped move things along. As FIRE rose in power, so did a new generation of politicians, bankers, economists, and journalists willing to invent creative justifications for the system, as well as for the projects- ranging from the housing bubble to the Iraq war- that it financed. The high-water mark of such truckling might be the publication of the Cato Institute report "America's Record Trade Deficit: A Symbol of Strength." Freedom had become slavery; persistent deficits had become economic power.

The bubble machine often starts with a new invention or discovery. The Mosaic graphical Web browser, released in 1993, began to transform the Internet into a set of linked pages. Suddenly websites were easy to create and even easier to consume. Industry lobbyists stepped in, pushing for deregulation and special tax incentives. By 1995, the Internet had been thrown open to the profiteers; four years later a sales-tax moratorium was issued, opening the floodgates for e-commerce. Such legislation does not cause a bubble, but no bubble has ever occurred in its absence.

I had a front-row seat to the Internet-stock mania of the late 1990s as managing director of Osborn Capital, a "seed stage" venture-capital firm founded by Jeffrey Osborn,⁴4. Venture-capital firms are defined by when, not where, they place their investments; a "seed stage" firm usually puts the first money into very young firms and takes an active role in that investment. Jeffrey Osborn was a senior executive at commercial Internet provider UUNet before and after the legislation passed. Prior to the legislation, bookings were less than $4 million a year; a few years later they were greater than $2 billion. with positions on the boards of more than half a dozen technology companies. I observed otherwise rational men and women fall under the influence of a fast-flowing and, it was widely believed, risk-free flood of money. Logic and historical precedent were pushed aside. I remember a managing partner of one firm telling me with certainty that if the company in which we'd invested failed, at least it had "hard assets," meaning the notoriously depreciation-prone computer equipment the company had received in exchange for stock. A year after the bubble collapsed, of course, the market was flooded with such hard assets.

Deregulation had built the church, and seed money was needed to grow the flock. The mechanics of financing vary with each bubble, but what matters is that the system be able to support astronomical flows of funds and generate trillions of dollars' worth of new securities. For the Internet, the seed money came from venture capital. At first, Internet startups were merely one part of a spectrum of enterprise-software and other technology industries into which venture capitalists put their money. Then a few startups like Netscape went public, netting massive returns. Such liquidity events came faster and faster. A loop was formed: profits from IPO investments poured back into new venture funds, then into new start-ups, then back out again as IPOs, with the original investment multiplied many times over, then finally back into new venture-capital funds.

The media stood by cheering, carrying breathless profiles of wunderkinder in their early twenties who had just made their first hundred million dollars; business publications grew thick with advertisements. The media barely questioned the fine points of the new theology. Skeptics were occasionally interviewed by journalists, but in general the public was exposed to constant reiterations of the one true faith. Government stood back-after all, there was little incentive for lawmakers to intervene. Members of Congress, who influence the agencies that oversee market-regulation functions, have never been unfriendly to windfall tax revenues, and the FIRE sector has very deep pockets. According to the donation-tracking website opensecrets.org, FIRE gave $146 million in political donations for the 2008 election cycle alone, and since 1990 more than $1.9 billion-nearly double what lawyers and lobbyists have donated, and more than triple the donations from organized labor.

Part of my job was to watch for the end-time, to maximize gains and guard the firm against sudden losses when the bubble finally popped. In March 2000, the signal arrived. One of our companies was investigating the timing of an IPO; the management team was hoping for April 2000. The representatives of one of the investment banks we talked to gave us a surprisingly specific recommendation that ran counter to advice offered by banks during the IPO-driven cycle of the preceding five years: they warned the company not to go public in April. We took the advice in the context of other indicators as a clear sign of a top, and over the next few months we liquidated stocks in public companies that we held as a result of earlier IPOs. Shortly thereafter, millions of investors with unrealized gains in mutual funds sold stock to raise enough cash to pay taxes on their capital gains. The mass selling set off a panic, and the bubble popped.

In a bubble, fictitious value⁵5. Fictitious value is the delta between historical-trend growth and growth brought on by asset hyperinflation. As an anonymous South Sea Bubble pamphleteer explained: "One added to one, by any rules of vulgar arithmetic, will never make three and a half; consequently, all the fictitious value must be a loss to some persons or other, first or last. The only way to prevent it to oneself must be to sell out betimes, and so let the Devil take the hindmost." goes away when market participants lose faith in the religion-when their false beliefs are destroyed as quickly as they had been formed. Since the early 1980s, the free-market orthodoxy of the Chicago School has driven policy on the upward slope of an economic boom, but we're all Keynesians on the way down: rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, tax cuts by Congress, deficit spending, and dollar depreciation are deployed in heroic proportions.

The technology industry represents only a small fraction of the U.S. economy, but the effects of layoffs, cutbacks, and the collapsing stock market rippled through the economy and produced a brief national recession in the early part of 2001, despite a concerted effort by the Federal Reserve and Congress to avoid it. This left in its wake a crucial dilemma: how to counter the loss of that $7 trillion in fictitious value built up during the bubble.

The Internet boom had been a matter of abstract electrons and monetized eyeballs-castles in the sky translated into rising share prices. The new boom was in McMansions on the ground-wood and nails, granite countertops. The price-inflation process was traditional as well: there was way too much mortgage money chasing not enough housing. At the bubble's peak, $12 trillion in fictitious value had been created, a sum greater even than the national debt.

Total market value: Real estate. Actual market value from "Federal Reserve Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States." Historical trend from Robert J. Schiller, Irrational Exuberance.

We certainly should have known better. Historically, the price of American homes has risen at a rate similar to the annual rate of inflation. As the Yale economist Robert Shiller has pointed out, since 1890, discounting the housing boom after World War II, that rate has been about 3.3 percent. Why, then, did housing prices suddenly begin to hyperinflate? Changes in the reserve requirements of U.S. banks, and the creation in 1994 of special "sweep" accounts, which link commercial checking and investment accounts, allowed banks greater liquidity-which meant that they could offer more credit. This was the formative stage of the bubble. Then, from 2001 to 2002, in the wake of the dot-com crash, the Federal Reserve Funds Rate was reduced from 6 percent to 1.24 percent, leading to similar cuts in the London Interbank Offered Rate that banks use to set some adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) rates. These drastically lowered ARM rates meant that in the United States the monthly cost of a mortgage on a $500,000 home fell to roughly the monthly cost of a mortgage on a $250,000 home purchased two years earlier. Demand skyrocketed, though home builders would need years to gear up their production.

With more credit available than there was housing stock, prices predictably, and rapidly, rose. All that was needed for hypergrowth was a supply of new capital. For the Internet boom this money had been provided by the IPO system and the venture capitalists; for the housing bubble, starting around 2003, it came from securitized debt.

To "securitize" is to make a new security out of a pool of existing bonds, bringing together similar financial instruments, like loans or mortgages, in order to create something more predictable, less risk-laden, than the sum of its parts. Many such "pass-thru" securities, backed by mortgages, were set up to allow banks to serve almost purely as middlemen, so that if a few homeowners defaulted but the rest continued to pay, the bank that sold the security would itself suffer little-or at least far less than if it held the mortgages directly. In theory, risks that used to concentrate on a bank's balance sheet had been safely spread far and wide across the financial markets among well-financed and experienced institutional investors.⁶6.

As happens with most bubbles, a perfectly good idea is taken to an extreme. In the case of the housing bubble, the new securitized debt product that drove the final stage-which has come to be known as the "subprime meltdown"-was the collateralized debt obligation (CDO). A CDO is a class of instrument called a credit derivative; specifically, a derivative of a pool of asset-backed securities. Parts of pools of asset-backed securities that were, for example, rated at a moderately high risk of default-junk grade, such as BB-were modeled, packaged into CDOs, and rated at lower risk-investment grades, such as AAA. These were used to finance the more creative mortgages-stated-income or "liar loans"-which we now hear are not quite living up to the issuers' hopes.

The U.S. mortgage crisis has been labeled a "subprime mortgage crisis," but subprime mortgages were only a sideshow that appeared late, as the housing-bubble credit machine ran out of creditworthy borrowers. The main event was the hyperinflation of home prices. Risks are embedded in price and lurk as defaults. Even after the faith that supported a bubble recedes, false beliefs continue to obscure cause and effect as the crisis unfolds.

Consider the chemical industry of forty years ago, back when such pollutants as PCBs were dumped into the air and water with little or no regulation. For years, the mantra of the industry was "the solution to pollution is dilution." Mixing toxins with vast quantities of air and water was supposed to neutralize them. Many decades later, with our plagues of hermaphrodite frogs, poisoned ground water, and mysterious cancers, the mistake in that logic is plain. Modern bankers, however, have carried this mistake into the world of finance. As more and more loans with a high risk of default were made from the late 1990s to the summer of 2007, the shared level of credit risk increased throughout the global financial system.

Think of that enormous risk as ecomonic poison. In theory, those risk pollutants have been diluted in the oceanic vastness of the world's debt markets; thanks to the magic of securitization, they are made nontoxic and so pose no systemic risk. In reality, credit pollutants pose the same kind of threat to our economy as chemical toxins do to our environment. Like their chemical counterparts, they tend to concentrate in the weakest and most vulnerable parts of the financial system, and that's where the toxic effects show up first: the subprime mortgage market collapse is essentially the Love Canal of our ongoing risk-pollution disaster.

Read the front page of any business publication today and you can see the mess bubbling up. In the United States, Merrill Lynch took a $7.9 billion hit from its mortgage investments and experienced its first quarterly loss since 2001; Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, along with many other U.S. banks, have all suffered major losses. The Royal Bank of

Scotland Group was forced to write down $3 billion on credit-related securities and leveraged loans, and Japan's Norinchukin Bank suffered $357 million in subprime-related losses in the six months prior to September 2007. Even more of this pollution will become manifest as home prices continue to fall.

The metaphor is not lost on those touched by debt pollution. In December 2007, Chip Mason of Legg Mason, one of the world's largest money managers, said that the U.S. Treasury should put $20 billion into a "structured investment vehicles superfund" to boost investor confidence.

As more and more risk pollution rises to the surface, credit will continue to contract, and the FIRE economy-which depends on the free flow of credit-will experience its first near-death experience since the sector rose to power in the early 1980s. Because all asset hyperinflations revert to the mean, we can expect housing prices to decline roughly 38 percent from their peak as they return to something closer to the historical rate of monetary inflation. If the rate of decline stabilizes at between 6 and 7 percent each year, the correction has about six years to go before things stabilize, leaving the FIRE economy in need of $12 trillion. Where will that money be found?

Bubbles are to the industries that host them what clear-cutting is to forest management. After several years of recession, the affected industry will eventually grow back, but slowly-the NASDAQ, for example, at 5,048 in March 2000, had recovered only half of its peak value going into 2007. When those trillions of dollars first die and go to money heaven, the whole economy grieves.

The housing bubble has left us in dire shape, worse than after the technology-stock bubble, when the Federal Reserve Funds Rate was 6 percent, the dollar was at a multi-decade peak, the federal government was running a surplus, and tax rates were relatively high, making reflation-interest-rate cuts, dollar depreciation, increased government spending, and tax cuts-relatively painless. Now the Funds Rate is only 4.5 percent, the dollar is at multi-decade lows, the federal budget is in deficit, and tax cuts are still in effect. The chronic trade deficit, the sudden depreciation of our currency, and the lack of foreign buyers willing to purchase its debt will require the United States government to print new money simply to fund its own operations and pay its 22 million employees.

Our economy is in serious trouble. Both the production-consumption sector and the FIRE sector know that a debt-deflation Armageddon is nigh, and both are praying for a timely miracle, a new bubble to keep the economy from slipping into a depression.

We have learned that the industry in any given bubble must support hundreds or thousands of separate firms financed by not billions but trillions of dollars in new securities that Wall Street will create and sell. Like housing in the late 1990s, this sector of the economy must already be formed and growing even as the previous bubble deflates. For those investing in that sector, legislation guaranteeing favorable tax treatment, along with other protections and advantages for investors, should already be in place or under review. Finally, the industry must be popular, its name on the lips of government policymakers and journalists. It should be familiar to those who watch television news or read newspapers.

There are a number of plausible candidates for the next bubble, but only a few meet all the criteria. Health care must expand to meet the needs of the aging baby boomers, but there is as yet no enabling government legislation to make way for a health-care bubble; the same holds true of the pharmaceutical industry, which could hyperinflate only if the Food and Drug Administration was gutted of its power. A second technology boom-under the rubric "Web 2.0"-is based on improvements to existing technology rather than any new discovery. The capital-intensive biotechnology industry will not inflate, as it requires too much specialized intelligence.

There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar, and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes, such as liquefied hydrogen from water. Indeed, the next bubble is already being branded. Wired magazine, returning to its roots in boosterism, put ethanol on the cover of its October 2007 issue, advising its readers to forget oil; NBC had a "Green Week" in November 2007, with themed shows beating away at an ecological message and Al Gore making a guest appearance on the sitcom 30 Rock. Improbably, Gore threatens to become the poster boy for the new new new economy: he has joined the legendary venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which assisted at the births of Amazon.com and Google, to oversee the "climate change solutions group," thus providing a massive dose of Nobel Prize-winning credibility that will be most useful when its first alternative-energy investments are taken public before a credulous mob. Other ventures-Lazard Capital Markets, Generation Investment Management, Nth Power, EnerTech Capital, and Battery Ventures-are funding an array of startups working on improvements to solar cells, to biofuels production, to batteries, to "energy management" software, and so on.

The candidates for the 2008 presidential election, notably Obama, Clinton, Romney, and McCain, now invoke "energy security" in their stump speeches and on their websites. Previously, "energy independence" was more common, and perhaps this change in terminology is a hint that a portion of the Homeland Security budget will be allocated for alternative energy, a potential boon for startups and for FIRE.

More valuable than campaign rhetoric, however, is legislation. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, a massive bill known to morning commuters for extending daylight savings time, contained provisions guaranteeing loans for alternative-energy businesses, including nuclear-power technology. The bill authorizes $200 million annually for clean-coal initiatives, repeals the current 160-acre cap on coal leases, offers subsidies for wind energy and other alternative-energy producers, and promises $50 million annually, over the life of the bill, for a biomass grant program.

Loan guarantees for "innovative technologies" such as advanced nuclear-reactor designs are also at hand; a kindler, gentler nuclear industry appears to be imminent. The Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act has been extended through 2025; the secretary of energy was ordered to implement the 2001 nuclear power "roadmap," and $1.25 billion was set aside by the Department of Energy to develop a nuclear reactor that will generate both electricity and hydrogen. The future of transportation may be neither solar- nor ethanol-powered but instead rely on numerous small nuclear power plants generating electricity and, for local transportation, hydrogen. At the state and local levels, related bills have been passed or are under consideration.

Supporting this alternative-energy bubble will be a boom in infrastructure-transportation and communications systems, water, and power. In its 2005 report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers called for $1.6 trillion to be spent over five years to bring the United States back up to code, giving America a grade of "D." Decades of neglect have put us trillions of dollars away from an "A." After last August's bridge collapse in Minnesota, it took only a week for libertarian Robert Poole, director of transportation studies for the Reason Foundation, to renew the call for "highway public-private partnerships funded by tolls," and for Hillary Clinton to put forth a multibillion-dollar "Rebuild America" plan.

Of course, alternative energy and the improvement of our infrastructure are both necessary for our national well-being; and therein lies the danger: hyperinflations, in the long run, are always destructive. Since the 1970s, U.S. dependence on foreign energy supplies has become a major economic and security liability, and our superannuated roadways are the nation's circulatory system. Without the efficient transit of gasoline-powered trucks laden with goods across our highways there would be no Wal-Mart, no other big-box stores, no morning FedEx deliveries. Without "energy security" and repairs to our "crumbling infrastructure," our very competitiveness is at stake. Luckily, Al Gore will be making principled venture capital investments on our behalf.

The next bubble must be large enough to recover the losses from the housing bubble collapse. How bad will it be? Some rough calculations⁷7. To create these valuations, I first examined the necessary market capitalization of existing companies; then, using the technology and housing bubbles as precedents, I estimated the number of companies needed to support the bubble. The model assumes the existence of nascent credit products that will eventually be deployed to fund the hyperinflation. While the range of error in this prediction is obviously huge, the antecedents-and more important, the necessity-for the bubble remain.: the gross market value of all enterprises needed to develop hydroelectric power, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, wind farms, solar power, and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell technology-and the infrastructure to support it-is somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion; assuming the bubble can get started, the hyperinflated fictitious value could add another $12 trillion. In a hyperinflation, infrastructure upgrades will accelerate, with plenty of opportunity for big government contractors fleeing the declining market in Iraq. Thus, we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver "energy security." When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. FIRE, meanwhile, will already be engineering its next opportunity. Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence.

Eric Janszen is the founder and president of iTulip, Inc. He formerly served as managing director of the venture firm Osborn Capital, CEO of AutoCell, Inc. and Bluesocket, Inc., and entrepreneur-in-residence for Trident Capital.

Tags: Market Bubble, Economy

A Message to Share

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:07:33 GMT

Wolf Cry
by Sharon McErlane

Two days ago I was awakened in the early morning hours with this message: "Call your tribe." I am not an indigenous person so the word 'tribe' coming at me like this is a bit startling. However, working with the Great Council of the Grandmothers who have come to return the earth to balance, and working with the teaching and helping spirits of the upper and lower world have taught me to sit loose in the saddle and let myself go where I am being guided.

It was Wolf, the great teacher, who was speaking. "Call your tribe," he said again. "Call them and tell them the time is NOW! They are needed!" he emphasized. " More people are needed to do the work of holding the Net of Light at this time," he said. "Tell them to call on the Net of Light and take their place on it. Ask them to then hold it and cast the Net further and further. Wherever there is suffering on earth and where there are people who long to serve, but don't know how-cast the Net of Light," he said.

"Tell everyone you know," he said, "and write an article calling people to the Net of Light." When the spirits speak to me like this, I listen. The Net of Light is called by different names. Web of Light, Grid of Light, Indra's Net, Net of Life and Net of Light are a few. They all, however, refer to the same thing. The Great Council of the Grandmothers say, "This is the Net of Light that will hold the earth during the times of change that are now upon you."

Book: ("A Call to Power: the Grandmothers Speak" by Sharon McErlane)

A few weeks ago the Grandmothers said, "In addition to casting the Net of Light wherever there is suffering on the earth, begin now to also cast to people who are disturbed by the rise of negativity on earth and want to help in some way. Many of them have no spiritual path to follow," they said. " They cannot relate to organized religion and they have not found a way that speaks to their heart. We ask you to cast the Net of Light to them now," they said, "so the Net can take them to their path." When Wolf woke me in the middle of the night he was basically repeating what the Grandmothers had said, except that his message was much more urgent, ("Tell them that the time is NOW!")

It is my experience that the Grandmothers and the helping spirits do not mess around and they ask that now we not mess around either. They are asking for our help. You can think of the Net as a lighted fishnet that covers the earth, holds it from above, from below and at the same time penetrates the body of the planet as well as the body of everything that lives here on earth. The Net is lit by the jewel of the heart of each person who holds it; it is held in selfless service. The Grandmothers urge us to "Go forward now and take your place on the Net of Light. Somewhere where two strands come together is a place that will feel just right for you. Walk forward now and take your place.

Hold this place on the Net and let the Net hold you. You hold and you are held in light," they say. At this point there are thousands of people working with the Net of Light through the Grandmothers network as well as seventy Grandmothers groups focused on spreading their message in different countries of the world. The Grandmothers say, "From this place on the Net of Light, cast now to those who do not know that they too are held in light. Cast to those who are suffering and also to those who wish to help with this work but who have not had a way to access the healing, love of the Net of Light. We ask you to do this for yourself," they say, "and for everything that lives. And as you work with the Net of Light," they add, "you will become a walking blessing upon the earth. "We bless you.

Both the Grandmothers' website: www.grandmothersspeak.com , and 'A Call to Power: the Grandmothers Speak' give a more detailed explanation of the Net of Light.

We have been asked to get this message to as many people as possible, so if you have suggestions as to where we might post this (magazines, newsletters, etc.), please get back to me. Also please forward to people who would resonate with this urgent message. I salute the beauty/power within you,

Sharon

Tags: Wolf Cry, Net of Light, Web of Light, Grid of Light, Grid

Contact

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:37:38 GMT

Today I had an incredible experience. I was at my day job standing in the warehouse when very suddenly a wave of energy overcame me. I lost my balance, felt very woozy (just for a moment) and was left with a feeling of euphoria, which was very intense for just a moment, then slowly evaporated like a light mist. It was one of the those timeless moments that was filled with complete awareness and loads of information, but like a dream, and like that mist it seemed to evaporate before I could grasp it.

I realized it was my higher self coming in for an update. Over the last several years I have committed to many layers of my healing and evolving - including a daily meditation practice, yoga, eating very well and practicing mindfulness. This journey is filled with peaks and valleys, and lately I have felt very disconnected from spirit, especially this last winter and spring. Diligence in my practice has allowed my higher self to be in different spaces, sometimes very far from my physical body and this world. "We" have agreed to this. The downside of this is that I can feel very alone and isolated at times. The upside is moments like these, and the gems I receive through tales of these travels.

Like many, I have felt very disorientated, scattered and generally frazzled as of late. I feel like there is so much to be done, so many great opportunites and so many places I want to be. I have clear goals, but have had a hard time focusing too much on the space between where I am and where I want to be that it has left me always thirsty for something; never satisfied.

This moment today reminded me that things can change in an instant. It reminded me to focus on my breath and gratitude when feeling this thirst. It reminded me that there is a lot more happening that I can ever be aware of, and that's okay.

What was really neat about the experience is that I suddenly had energy and inspiration to speak my truth in many ways. I have clear ideas that I want to share with my bosses (without the fear of being rejected). I have something I want to share with a co-worker, and another inspiration to share with an old friend who is struggling (without the lethargy that sometimes accompanies having talks such as these). I am enjoying more and more the ability to use this higher energy in everyday, practical ways.

I am still buzzing as I write this. I am still feeling the effects of this contact. I am so grateful to have my cup filled and know that this will keep me energized for a long time - even through the pain and discomfort that sometimes accompanies my growth.

I share this for those who are feeling stuck and wayward - and for myself. And to remind myself that lows accompany the highs of the human experience, especially for those that focus on their spirtual awakening.

Tags: contact, awakening, higher self, evolution, intuition

More Re-Progamming

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:16:14 GMT

As a part of my reprogramming my whole being towards health, wellness and enlightenment I have been focusing on everyday phrases that I have latched onto throughout my life. Currently I'm working on the phrase, "I am sick and tired of _____________." I don't even know where I got this one from, a teacher perhaps, but I catch myself mockingly saying it a lot. But I'm changing that. I'm replacing it with, "I am healthy and awake and __________.

For instance I may come across some dirty clothes from my son on the floor. When that old phrase comes up I replace it with, "I am healthy and awake and I want Aaron to pick up his damn clothes!"

Or my daughter might have left some dirty dishes on the counter. Again, "I am healthy and awake and wish Zoe would clean up after herself!"

It's a fun process and takes a negative situation and turns it around...a little bit anyway.

Tags: sick and tired, healthy, and awake, affirmations, programming

Faith: A Trinity in Healing?

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:00:55 GMT

In my Interfaith Ministry class yesterday we spoke much on the topic of faith. All of the great healers and masters speak of the importance of faith in any healing. Trusting and believing is a pre-requiste to healing.

Jesus speaks much about faith - and in our discussion we spoke of the many forms this takes. Rather than just one meaning, one of my classmates suggested perhaps that faith is a trinity. As I contemplated that I felt an opening. I offered that that trinity could be faith of the healer, that of the person being healed and the Great Mystery/Divine.

In my healing practice, I notice the shift in power when both my client and I are open and aligned with the Cosmos. Faith, then, is seen as opening that space for healing - or even holding that space for the potential for healing. As I further contemplated this it made even more sense in that even sometimes when I have worked with a client and we are both open to the magic, nothing happens. Or rather, what we focues our intent on doesn't align. And that is where the Divine steps in. Perhaps it just wasn't what was supposed to be. Perhaps there is still a lesson to be learned before that energy is shifted. Sometimes it is not up to us to understand - after all that is part of the Great Mystery.

This was a fun process - creating a new paradigm for 'faith.' I felt a tremendous shift.

Of course as I have continued to process this it has opened more perspectives, and will continue to do so. Another classmate, an older and wiser one amongst us, offered that faith doesn't even need to be present in the one being healed. Sometimes a friend can offer that. I have seen that, too, when someone brings another to see me. Sometimes the person being brought does not believe - but the friend does, and is able to hold that space.

For me thinking in these terms changed my idea a faith from a static, one dimensional notion, to a dynamic, ever moving puzzle. It requires motion and alignment and trying new things. It's never the same. But somewhere, deep inside, there is a vibration of faith. And I feel like I am closer to it. Today.

Ah, the magic of faith.

Tags: faith, trinity, healing, divine, mystery

Summer Solstice Universal Healing Tao Event!

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 22:19:14 GMT

Mantak Chia's Universal Healing Tao

Chi Kids Incorporated

Midwest Universal Healing Tao Institute

Present:

Summer Solstice Meditation Workshop

Drum Jam

Friday - Sunday: June 20, 21, & 22

________________________

Ancient Taoist Secrets Revealed!

Taoist Yoga - Tai Chi - Taoist Sexual Energy Work

Transformational Chi Kung Meditation

A team of Universal Healing Tao instructors is gathering in Minneapolis to teach at this spectacular event!

Author of the famed Multi-Orgasmic Man and Taoist Master Mantak Chia brought the amazing Universal Healing Tao system of natural health to America and is continuing to search for instructors and practitioners to carry the lineage. Join over ½ dozen of his favorite teachers for 3 days and learn Tai Chi, Taoist yoga, Sexual Energy Practice, and Chi Kung meditation.

Workshop endorsed by Midwest Universal Healing Tao Institute (MUHTI), Universal Healing Tao, and Master Mantak Chia. Portions of the proceeds go to Midwest Universal Healing Tao Institute, a school of gentle higher learning, opening in 2009.

Don't miss this opportunity to meet interesting people and learn to heal from within!

http://www.midwestuniversaltao.com/

This three day event includes a one day Healing Chi Kung and Chi Nei Tsang clinic, Evening Seminar, and a Community Drumming and Dance Event.

Pricing:
Evening Seminar - $75
Workshop*** - $450
Drum Jam - $20
Chi Nei Tsang (energetic abdominal massage) - $50

***Workshop price includes: Chi Nei Tsang treatment, admission to Evening Seminar, Workshop & Solstice Drum Jam, and course materials!

Register for Workshop by June 1, 2008 and receive a free Summer Solstice T-shirt (a $15 value).

Please wear comfortable clothing that allows for movement and stretching.
Bring water or juice (no glass), pen and paper.

Tags: Universal Healing Tao, Healing Tao, Universal Tao, Midwest Universal Healing Tao

Downloading New Programs

http://bryanbertsch.gaia.com — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:29:15 GMT

Yesterday our tech support specialist was out of work and we needed to send out some hand held modems that needed tiny SIM cards to be inserted and programmed. I took on the duties and caught myself impatiently trying to get it done in the soonest possible manner. It was a tedious process that involved unscrewing tiny screws from the modem, taking a smaller screwdriver to press a tiny button that opened the SIM card tray, inserting the SIM card (about the size of my pinky fingernail) into the tray and putting the modem back together, plugging the modem in, putting on an antenna and connecting it to a PC where I activated the unit through an online portal. I was working on two at a time and confusing the issue a bit before a wave of presence came over me.

I decided I could have fun with this and do some energy work in the process. For each SIM card remaining I chose an attribute I wished to "download" into my etheric "modem." For instance, one was to "Speak My Truth," another was to "Open My Heart," another was to "Move Through Life with Grace and Strength." I had about 20 downloads to complete and was surprised that I could always think of a new way of being to download.

I would focus on the attribute while I opened the modem and held the SIM card, while I carefully placed the SIM card into the tray and while connecting the modem to the PC, antenna and power supply. Each modem took about 90 seconds to "write," once it was set up during which I closed my eyes and imagined that SIM card being inserted in my etheric body. I breathed into my energy centers and imagined Cosmic light filling my body and holding the new download in place.

Once I began this process I was sorry I only had 20 or so left! It changed my whole experience and was pretty fun.

Interestingly, one of the last ones I did was to "Stand in my Power and Be Heard". I have been working specifically on this and have had some struggles with it in very recent interactions. When I downloaded this SIM card into the modem there was an error. So I tried the process again. Same result. Once more, same result. Finally I had to reset the modem and tried a final time. It worked! It was very fitting that this one took several tries and I was just about ready to give up and call the modem a dud. I was pleasantly surprised (and happy with my patient persistence) when it finally activated. I also knew that the energetic processing I was doing through this menial task was working.

Tags: download software energy healing presence at work