Articles by José Stevens

Stubbornness is one of the two main dragons or obstacles for 2008 (along with self-destructiveness) and therefore it is good to understand how it operates in our current times. Stubbornness is both personal and global and influences almost everything, being a favorite strategy of the false personality to maintain control.

Must we get old and decrepit? Is getting old and grey honorable or is it just a drag? Is youth all its cracked up to be? Where are we headed?

Just about everything in our experience has positive poles and negative poles, something that determines whether those experiences are enjoyable, satisfying, and joyful or painful and disconnecting. Positive and negative poles impact roles, goals, attitudes, modes, centers, levels of perception, needs, and values.

Lena and I returned from Peru just a week ago, so these observations can best be described as preliminary and have yet to be integrated over the next weeks and months. Nevertheless I feel compelled to write about the journey because it has been so extraordinary, mysterious, and life changing.

“The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, an Australian television producer, has become a runaway best seller along with the DVD by the same name. You know something is making a splash when it manifests in a five-page article in Newsweek magazine.

In late January 2007 I traveled to Ecuador to give a keynote address and provide private sessions to a woman’s leadership conference in the capital city of Quito.

In October 1998, I had the unique opportunity to go to the Australian Outback to visit a group of Australian Aborigines from the Pitjantjatjara tribe. These are people who have been particularly willing to dialogue with white folks and share their culture and stories to a degree.

While fire has more to do with purification, cleansing and transformation, wind has more to do with sweeping in the new, opening to receive, carrying away the old, and energizing with power.

In our last article we wrote at length about the collective dream that has enveloped the planet and how that dream in many ways has become a nightmare for people everywhere. We talked about how the collective dream functions like a forest fire sucking up everything in its path to feed itself and continue on…