Counting down to the countdown...

Tick tick tick - I never feel so aware of time as when I realize there's something time specific I want to say on this blog and right now is one of those times. From Nosara beach in Costa Rica on retreat with my teacher Shiva Rea, hanging with a bunch of amazing people from around the world, I've been thinking lots about all the little breakthrough moments that have made my year a little brighter than it might have been otherwise. While I'm sure lots of you write gratitude lists - after all, even Oprah writes and advocates gratitude lists - in honor of the kind of year and decade I'm hoping to have, this post is dedicated to those breakthrough moments...may there be many, many more.

1. Teaching 300 NYPD officers to meditate
2. Peacefully ending an unhealthy relationship
3. Getting a puppy after YEARS of wanting one (yes, this is perhaps related to #2)
4. Spending a week on a lake with no visitors, no TV, no radio - just silence
5. Learning to drive a motorbike
6. Winning clients on national and global levels
7. Leading workshops for Harvard Business Review
8. Growing my hair beneath my shouders for the first time since college
9. Learning to surf (related 100% to being in Costa Rica this week but not represented at all accurately by the amazing photo above)
and (after a year that if it were a song it would be sung to the blues including all the maladies we've all been reading about in the headlines this year)...
10. Recovering my belief in possibility and deep love for this very brief pageant we call life.

Thanks for giving me a place to share this, internet world, and thanks to whomever is reading this for following the journey.

Peace Keeper

In 1993 there was a study conducted to measure the effectiveness of meditation in lowering the HRA (homicides, rapes and assaults) crime rate in Washington DC. The results: a 48% drop...in a direct quote from that report:

"Based on the results of the study, the steady state gain (long-term effect) associated with a permanent group of 4,000 participants in the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs was calculated as a 48% reduction in HRA crimes in the District of Columbia."



What can you do to change the world? Based on the findings of that study, it's not a bad idea to just sit there. But I mean REALLY just sit. There.



Or in the case of one humble everyday guy in New York City, remember that the world you have to change is the one within you. You may not be able to read the writing in that photo above, but it says "Peace in me, Peace in the world." The amazing thing isn't just that this ordinary guy took the time to draw this reminder on a little white board in his office. Let's face it, many of us do have little reminders of our greatest selves at work. What is so completely fantastic is that this little white board is sitting on his desk in a cubicle in the middle of what is the heart of the offices of the world's finest police force.




This humble everyday guy, a police officer, father and local-grown Queens boy, not only had the inspiration to draw this and the courage to put it on his desk in plain view of the officers with whom he works, but when asked what made a meditator and guy with the word "sangha" in his email address join the police force, you know what he says? "When the last government job I had ended, I asked myself 'what would be the ultimate place where I can serve?'".

What a yogi.