Personal and Environmental Wellness

Updated on July 3, 2009

Several years ago, I was fortunate to meet a lady named Deborah at a fasting clinic in northern California. I had several conversations with Deborah over the course of a year, and what I remember most is that her kindness was amazingly genuine - the feeling for me was that she had done a lot of inner work to identify the life principles that she strove to live by.

For the past several days, my wife Margaret and I have been going through our home, room by room, and de-cluttering like mad.

Though we've never been ones to accumulate a bunch of knick knacks or expensive toys, with two little boys demanding most of our attention over the past few years, we recently realized that a serious spring cleaning job was in order.

Over the past couple of years, I've had dozens of people recommend The Secret, a popular self-help book on the law of attraction. I have yet to read this book, but my understanding is that "the secret" boils down to this: we should continuously focus our thoughts on everything we want in life, as we tend to manifest what we regularly think about.

Most people would probably agree with the idea that visualizing a desired outcome is just one important step to manifesting that outcome. Visualizing all day long and not doing anything to realize one's hopes just doesn't inspire confidence, at least not for the masses.

Updated on December 15, 2008

If you're wracking your brain to come up with ideas for gifts that can give for a lifetime, I hope that the following suggestions come in handy.

Gifts for Children

Note from Ben Kim: If you live in a country that allows thimerosal to be included in vaccines, and you're not aware of the dangers of injecting thimerosal into human tissue, please take a few minutes to view the following video and article on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s coverage of the link between mercury in vaccines and autism.

Updated on October 11, 2008.

After reading the responses to the article Should Parents Spank Their Children?, some of which support spanking, it occurred to me that perhaps many parents just don’t know how else to influence their children’s behaviour. Some parents feel that spanking is the best way to teach their children not to misbehave. Some parents feel that everything else has failed and so, having run out of other options, they turn to spanking. If you are a parent, especially one who would like to begin learning about alternatives to spanking, please consider the following points.

In February of 2008, we started a fund raising campaign for a special, not-for-profit organization called Operation Shanti. Located in Mysore, India, the folks who run Operation Shanti are dedicated to empowering the poorest and neediest children and elderly people in their area.

As reported in our first update following the launch of our campaign, our readers responded spectacularly, surpassing our goal within a week.

This article was originally published in March of 2007.

I'm grateful that my recent blog entry on the documentary Earthlings generated widespread interest (more than 12,000 unique views within 48 hours of its posting), and that it caused many of our readers to consider the impact that all of our daily food and lifestyle choices have on other living creatures.

This article was originally published in March, 2007.

It is with sadness that I write this blog entry. I just finished watching a documentary called Earthlings that contains the most abominable acts of cruelty towards animals that I have ever seen.

If you haven't yet come across the following video that captures the reunion between Christian the lion and his adoptive parents, John Rendall and Ace Bourke, I encourage you to have a look here: