Last weekend at the Baha’i School in Kota Tinggi I went to a workshop on virtues and discovered that I needed the virtue of trusting more, especially trusting in God. So I am reflecting on it here to see what it means. When I was teaching ethics classes in Brazil, I used to do a …
Debby and I just returned from the Singapore Baha’i Summer/Winter School in Kota Tinggi in the south of Malaysia at an eco resort called Kota Rainforest Resort. The chief organizer said you can call it winter or summer because if you know this part of the world, there is really no difference. They asked me …
Flying into Kuala Lumpur after my third trip to Bali, the plane makes it final glide. It is nearly midnight with one more hour’s taxi ride home. My mind drifts in and out of sleep on the well lit freeways of KL mostly in remembrance of a week in paradise. Paradise is a cliche in …
Earlier this week I had a dream that goes to the heart of what my blog is all about and what the book I am writing is hoping to communicate that really truly radical change is an evolutionary process of working hard every single day to change my life for the better. In the dream …
During the last week or two I have several challenges in my work about getting photos taken and then downloaded for applications and printing. One of the interesting things that is happening is that the school has a very expensive camera so that events can be recorded and used in the yearbook. Recently, when I …
I was very inspired when I read my daughter’s blog about sorting beans with Olee, our grandson the other day. See http://hoogliart.wordpress.com. I think Maria Montessori was one of the first educator’s to see how organization of space really gives children a great deal of freedom to play and explore. Yesterday, I had the great …
First of all it should be clear from my recent post that God, according to the Baha’i Writings, is neither a man nor a woman but transcendent above all names and attributes. However, I am fascinated by the idea that God was once a woman and then became a man. Who is God as a …
When I was in Canada this summer visiting my family in Vancouver including my three wonderful grandchildren, my two daughters introduced me to Facebook, which is an internet based service designed to help people from all over the world to connect with each other. Yesterday something really great happened by using Facebook. I wrote to …
I am not sure if many people have reflected on this question on where God is, so I decided to throw out a few thoughts to share some of my observations. What I have observed is that the location of God seems to move around according to the cultural context. In the Judeo-Christian culture that …
In my last post I was writing about a 5 year old boy whose primary presenting negative emotion is frustration. Frustration is what you feel when you are trying to accomplish something, but you are not making the progress you were hoping. It is different than disappointment which is feeling you get after the experience …
One of my little addictions is watching war documentaries on various history channels. I have seen a lot of people die on TV. I think it has to do with the fact that I am always trying to do new things that require facing the enemy of tradition. Today, I watched a show about World …
When I first began teaching in 1975 there was a huge counter movement to what I had been studying at one of the most progressive schools of education for that time period, the University of North Dakota. The counter movement was called “Back to Basics” which capitalized on the mistakes of the progressive movements so …
Warning to North Americans and Europeans: This posting may create some negative side effects to your cultural selves. This morning I did something interesting. I actually listened to my own advice. I had invited a few colleagues from other schools to a planning meeting to schedule games and other sports events. The meeting was to …
There were a lot of workshops in the 1970s when I was first introduced to much of the self help literacy about the importance of time management because it was the thinking in those days that how you manage your time has a lot to do with accomplishing what you want in your life. Time …
Last April my wife and traveled to Vietnam. So here I am in the middle of Hanoi about 9 am in the morning faced with the challenge of crossing a busy street with 2 million motorcycles and no traffic lights. This could possibly be a North American’s worst nightmare because in the U.S. pedestrians have …
Isn’t it interesting that we use the word dream both for when we dream of doing something in the future and also for the stories that we receive while we are sleeping? They are not all that different. Many people love the waking dream of flying off to many different countries. When I am flying …
Last night I dreamt that I was downtown at a movie theatre with my wife. While I was trying to choose what to watch, I got separated from her because she went to the washroom. The longer the dream went on, the more it became apparent that the choices were really bad, mostly horror type …
My mother turned 86 this year. By all accounts you would think that her life would be on the downswing. Not so. After having painted in oils for a number of years, followed by the less forgiving medium of watercolors, she recently began the most difficult of them all, Chinese brush painting. It requires a …
One of the great aspects of the dream world is its interesting way of dealing with time. You can be asleep in your bed and within a very short span of time travel to several different countries. While we are wake, we are governed by the clock that is determined by the earth’s journey around …
One of the activities I often do when I do a dream meeting is to place out a number of virtue cards on a table where each person chooses the one that is most needed in their life right now such as courage, honesty, determination, love, joy, or patience to name a few. I always …
Whenever I do a dream meeting some people inevitable want to call me very intuitive, but most of my work has very little to do with intuition. Intuition is the feeling I get when I know I should proceed in a certain direction, but I don’t have the conscious knowledge of why yet. This is …
There are 3 things that I look for when I am listening to a dream especially my own, the actual story or content of the dream, the structure of the dream which is like the syntax, and the feelings that accompany dreams. In almost every dream meeting that I have done in various parts of …
Last night I dreamt that my son-in-laws and I were behind the lines in pre-World War 2 Germany doing undercover work against the Nazis. At every turn we were nearly brutally murdered, but somehow we managed to escape only to find more threats more numerously as the dream progressed. When I awoke from the dream, …
Yesterday while our family was hiking in Lynn Canyon with our three grandchildren, I received some really great lessons about life. It was obvious to Chris, my son-in-law, and I that the purpose of the trip was to get to Lynn Canyon as fast as possible in our cars and get to the end of …
There is a prayer in the Baha’i writings that many Baha’is use often. The last line says, “Thou are more friend to me than I am to myself.” This prayer deals with the anxiety of an uncertain future and the ability to embrace it. When I read the prayer and meditate on its implications, it …
Olee was born in November, 2005. He is my second grandson. About 2 weeks after he was born I started teaching 5 and 6 years olds wall climbing at my school for the very first time. I was learning just as much as they were especially about how to use all 4 limbs on the …
Diego is my youngest grandson, 18 months. He is my inspiration in every way by the way he lives his life. Whatever Diego does, that is what I am going to start doing. I have begun training for another marathon and realize that his training regime is much better than any I have read in …
This year I am celebrating the 10 anniversary of the first time that I was ever fired from a job. I was a small child in the 1950s when loyalty was still a value in society. I still tend to believe too much in the leadership and stay too long in organizations because I still …
The big problem with guilt is that it makes you loyal for too long to something you should have left a long time ago. While I am a baby boomer by birth, in recent years I have come to admire more and more how generation X operates because the “boomers” keep looking for good leaders …
There is a huge secret to all transformation work which I have yet to find in the literature. Behind every negative emotion like anger, envy, grief, shame, or guilt is another feeling. It is always the fear of being excluded in one form or another. It turns out that the most importance competency for human …
Richard Hastings is an expert in change work and dream work and author of Dreams for Peace. He is a Baha'i and currently lives in Vancouver, BC. Read more...
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