Two Books That Changed My Life

Many books have changed my life, but for this post I decided to go back to the very first book that changed my life followed by how it was connected to the second book that changed my life.

The year was 1972. I was working in the office at the University of Wisconsin Kenosha Campus. For a Christmas present, one of the professors gave me a book, almost with an apology. The book was Let’s Have Healthy Children by Adele Davis. He said, “You make think this is an odd book for me to give you, but you are a young mother and my wife and I feel that the information in this book will give you the tools to help you as a parent raise your children to be as healthy as possible. I thanked him for the book and immediately put it on my bookshelf and never looked at it again.

Fast forward four years to 1976. I had just given birth to my second child and as I had done with my first child, I had decided to breast feed. A question occurred to me, “I wonder if there is a way I can make my breast milk healthier for my baby.” I thought about that book I had put on the shelf many years ago, took it down and read it from cover to cover. To say the information in that book changed my life would be an understatement. As a result of reading that book I literally threw away every processed food I had in the house, I started a food coop with several other women so that we could purchase organic food directly from farmers, I started giving talks at our local library about cooking with natural foods and was hired by the local vocational school to teach classes in natural food cooking. I also read every other book that Adele David wrote including Let’s Eat Right to keep Fit, Let’s Get Well, Let’s Stay Healthy.

A few years later I was gifted with another book by a friend who said that this book had changed her life and she thought I would resonate with it. The book was A World Beyond by Ruth Montgomery. That book also changed my life as it opened me up to my spiritual nature and as a result I quit my corporate job, opened a healing center and started on my conscious spiritual path. Like the Adele Davis books, I purchased and read every one of Ruth Montgomery’s books and know that I would have never met Victor had I not read those books. In one of her books she mentioned that she had a mentor but she couldn’t reveal her name because the mentor was a well-known scientific expert and that her association with the spiritual realm might diminish her reputation as a scientist. In her last book, Ruth Montgomery wrote that her mentor had died so now she was able to reveal her name. It was Adele Davis.

Honestly, when I read that I had to put the book down and take it all in. The two authors who had the most influence in changing my life were connected! I treasure my collection of both these authors' books.

The Color of Reiki Love

A friend and I were recently talking about how Reiki can be used to help plants survive and thrive. It reminded me of how I had used Reiki on a newly planted tree in my front yard that was showing no signs of thriving. Here's a 1 minute video I made documenting the effects of Reiki on my now stunning tree that graces me with its beauty every day:

The Futility of Waging War

I love this quote by life-long pacifist Jeanette Rankin, the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress and the only woman from Montana to ever have been elected.

The idea of war has always puzzled me, even as a small child.  I can remember hearing adults talking about WWII and I would wonder why men had to fight one another.  Why couldn’t they just settle their differences by talking it out instead of fighting.  But then, I was just a child, and of course, couldn’t possibly understand the adult concept of war.

The Vietnam war was heating up when I was in my early 20s. Again, I found myself wondering why so many young men, men my age, were being drafted and sent to fight a war that seemed to me to be insane.  My husband’s draft number was going to be called, so he decided to enlist in the Air Force.  I was relieved when he was stationed at a base in northern Maine for two years and then sent to Japan for two years before being honorably discharged.

I’m trying to remember a period in my lifetime that we weren’t engaged in some kind of war and for the life of me, I can’t think of any.  Did we “win” any of those wars?  Did ANYBODY win any of those wars?  What would “winning” look like anyway, with dead and wounded on both sides.  It’s just as Jeannette Rankin states: “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”  What will it take for the human species to understand the futility of war and make a different choice?  It will take a change of consciousness — a consciousness that “only love prevails.”

Please consider joining the Only Love Prevails World Peace Experiment, an experiment aimed at achieving peace through a shift in consciousness.