I've been wanting to see the documentary "Challenging Impossibility" (2011) for a long time, and all of a sudden, it was there, visible in the search results.

"Challenging Impossibility", directed by Sanjay Rawal and Natabara Rollosson, portrays spiritual master Sri Chinmoy, who changed the perceptions of what most of us think the human body is able to achieve, when he accomplished several feats of strength after having started weightlifting at the age of 54.

Due to domain restrictions, you have to watch the full documentary here.

Watch the trailer:

Featured image: Poster via Pilgrimage of the Heart Yoga.

Artist Erykah Badu is interviewed by Origin Magazine about a number of things such as motherhood, family, food and spirituality:

Breathing is my way of life. As a vocalist, just as a person who’s main focus is evolving, breathing—that’s my meditation. I enjoy yoga classes. I walk in meditation. I dance. I’m a ballerina. Modern jazz and tap. But I would love to get into a good yoga class if I can stay focused and breathe. I love the connection I have with myself every time I take a yoga class. It’s a very nice remembering, remembering the parts of me. You know what I mean?

But I walk and breathe in meditation. Another meditation I do: when I walk I count my steps, so I’m really in the here and right now. Another meditation I do is try to stay out of my mind as long as I can, as an exercise, so I don’t believe everything I think. I do many different things. Many different exercises that keep me focused.

Image credit: The images of Erykah come from the Givenchy spring 2014 campaign shoot by Mert and Marcus.

Claire Hoffman has written about her meeting with Eckhart Tolle back in 2008. Some things in the article might surprise you, e.g. the authors tensed encounter with Tolle´s wife. It´s a balanced article with a very good ending. Food for thought! I have a copy of Tolle´s book myself, and find it true to try to stay mindful often, but I also think it´s easy to get lost in teachings like this and setting the bar a little too high sometimes, we´re only human after all:

Lying in bed with my new baby girl here in 2013, I’ve thought about that caveat of Tolle’s. As if he had foretold it, I’m a totally different person than I was five years ago, with a totally different life. My Now can’t possibly be the Now of 2008. It’s my responsibility to think about the future and the past as I help create a history for two little girls. It’s my job to worry about unseen danger and to think ahead for them and try to guide them toward their destinies.

I hope that we will all someday look back at 2008 (the peak of the Tolle phenomenon) as also the last gasp of a culture seeking to live unencumbered by lessons of the past or repercussions for the future. I don’t hold Tolle personally responsible for his phenomenon, but I do think his spiritual message, while well-intentioned, might have inadvertently provided the cover for an unhealthy, unbridled Now. I heard Ray Kurzweil on the radio the other day predicting that in a few short decades devices like Google Glass would disappear and simply be programmed molecules flowing through our blood streams, flowing into our brains. With that as the potential future, how can we think the answer is to focus on the present?

Like anyone, I dedicate much of my life to the pursuit of happiness, of self-realization, or whatever you want to call it. But these days, I’ve grown weary of Tolle’s message and all the conflict that comes with it. As sentient beings living in a complex and increasingly fucked-up world, how can we possibly tell ourselves that being present is the end-all?

As I said goodbye to Tolle that day, he seemed to sense I wasn’t entirely convinced. He reassured me that letting go of thought doesn’t mean becoming a puddle of a person. “I believe there’s a vast intelligence beyond the human brain,” he said. “The important thing is not to get trapped in this little instrument for which intelligence expresses itself, but to be consciously connected with that. Consciousness itself underlies everything.” As he talked, I found myself momentarily soothed, hypnotized. He told me there are black holes inside of everyone, and that there was one inside of me. He told me the universe told him to take this interview and that what I was going to write would be profound. As I walked to the door he stopped and gave me a polite hug that suddenly felt important. His dog rollicked at our feet. I walked away, and for a while, didn’t think anything at all.

I never wrote Tolle’s story. I came home to a largely blank notebook, devoid of any real notes or analysis. Being in the Now had rendered me impotent.

Featured image: Eckhart Tolle photographed by Kevin Steele via Spirituality & Health.

Spent some time with my wife earlier today sitting by the city water canal. The water is such a calming element, could sit there for hours. This short article written by Dulma Altan gives you some suggestions about how to incorporate nature into your daily life.

That rejuvenation you feel after a weekend trip to a national park? That’s your body rejoicing. Does gardening in your backyard leaves you a little more refreshed and grounded? Then perhaps tending the soil is, on some level, your body’s way of healing itself. Its intelligence always knows what serves your being best, and those impulses you get—to go hiking, surfing, gardening, or bird watching—are manifestations of that inherent wisdom.

Featured image: Shows a waterfall in Norway named The Seven Sisters via All That Is Interesting.

The English healer and author Matthew Manning is interviewed in British GQ. A good and lenghty down to earth interview with a healer I also have never heard of before:

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Manning is that you - in all likelihood - have never heard of him. He lives in a secluded cottage on Exmoor with his partner, Sarah, and emerges to perform healing sessions twice weekly at a local clinic. Unlike many who simulate then flaunt the kind of powers that have been ascribed to Manning, he does not exploit his reputation in pursuit of great wealth. In the mid-Seventies, after Frost first persuaded him to appear on television, in a special edition of The Frost Interview, Manning, at 19, was featured in every major newspaper on either side of the Atlantic. But fame, he came to realise, never quite suited him. This is the first interview Matthew Manning has given for more than ten years.

He might live within commuting distance of Britain's crystal-gazing capital - Totnes, in Devon - but Manning, 58, is a down-to-earth sort of person; he enjoys a glass of white wine, likes rock'n'roll and, after he collects me in his 4x4 at Bodmin station, he negotiates the tight country lanes with robust expertise. You wouldn't necessarily assume, were you to bump into him in a bar, that this is a man who, on the evidence of multiple tests conducted under rigorous scientific conditions, appears to be able to kill cancer cells with the power of thought.

"The last time we met," I remind Manning, "I asked you to place your hands over me, as you would in a routine healing session. I can still remember the heat; you must have been a foot away and yet it felt like standing far too close to a two-kilowatt electric fire. This was coming through two layers of clothing and it was on the edge of being painful. Do you feel that heat when you're working?

"Sometimes," he says. On one particular occasion, a male patient passed out from the intense -sensation of burning. No faith or belief, Manning insists, is required on the part of his subject. Healing can even work on dogs. "The only way I can describe the feeling," he says, "is that I am channelling some kind of unconditional love."

Related:

• Matthew Manning - 'My Healing Journey' - Interview by Iain McNay (video)
• Lecture by Matthew Manning (video)

I've now seen the documentary film The Phenomenon Bruno Groening - On the tracks of the "Miracle Healer". It's a well made documentary. It's full of information, fascinating contemporary witness interviews and reenacted events.

The documentary is divided into three parts. It took 9 years to produce 5 hours of film. More than 2000 extras were involved, e.g. to reenact the famous events in Traberhof where mass healings took place. It's subtitled in 30 languages and the options for the voice track are German, English, French, Croatian, Polish, Russian and Spanish.

It is undeniably a fascinating documentary that I highly recommend!

You order the documentary from Grete Häusler Verlag. Currently, there´s no digital option to choose from. Together with the DVD, I ordered a booklet of 36 pages, The Teaching of Bruno Gröning (Introductory Set), with an introductory CD included. Here you´ll get information about how to do "einstellen" and read about, among other things, eye witness reports from Bruno Groening's life and success reports of today.

A while ago, I ordered the documentary The Phenomenon Bruno Groening - On the track of the " Miracle Healer ". It´s about the german healer Bruno Groening (1906 - 1959) and all the miraculous healings he brought about.

The basic message of the teachings of Bruno Groening is that there is a higher power available to assist and help people. Bruno speaks about a healing stream which originates directly from this higher power, and by putting ourselves in contact and tune in to the healing stream we can stay healthy and be healed of diseases. The technique for doing so is called "einstellen" which is the german word for tuning in. I´m not completely unfamiliar with this process since I´m a Reiki practitioner, however, I´m unsure whether practitioners of Bruno Groening use handpositions as we do in Reiki.

Related reading:

• Christiane Northrup, Feminine Mystic
• Bruno Gröning Stiftung