Blend New Traditions with Old
to Celebrate the New Year

Throughout history, New Year’s Day has been celebrated as a festival of rebirth and a time of reflection. We all have traditions surrounding ringing in the New Year. Some of us share a kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Some place coins outside the door on New Year’s Eve and then bring them inside on New Year’s Day, thereby ensuring financial success. Some eat certain foods, like black-eyed peas, which are supposed to bring luck.

Many make resolutions, frequently around common ideas for making our lives happier, more successful, healthier and less stressful in the year to come.

Traditions change from one culture to the next, and some may make interesting additions to your own New Year’s celebration.

• The English believe that the first guest for the year would bring them fortune.
• The Chinese celebrate by painting the front door of a house red, which symbolizes happiness and good fortune.
• Brazilians believe lentils signify wealth and prosperity, so they serve foods made with lentils on New Year’s Day.
• In Puerto Rico, people throw buckets of water out their windows to clean out the old year.

For more on New Year’s traditions from other countries, cultures and religions, visit www.123newyear.com/newyear-traditions/

All You Need Is Love

Imagine what might happen if Ernest Holmes were to have a conversation with John Lennon. Temple Hayes explores how that conversation might unfold in our December issue. Here’s a look at just one part of it.

Holmes: To understand life you must understand you belong to the universe in which you live, you are one with the Creative Genius in back of this vast array of ceaseless motion, this original flow of life. You are as much a part of it as the sun, the earth and the air.

Lennon: Things aren’t out of our control. I still believe in love, peace. I still believe in positive thinking. While there’s life, there’s hope.

Read the entire conversation in the December issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine

SOLD Explores Human Trafficking of Children

The International Labor Organization estimates more than 20 million people around the globe are enslaved today. More than 5.5 million of these are children, forced into sex and labor slavery. ECPAT International estimates that 1.8 million children are trafficked each year in sexual slavery, and the global average age of such a child is 13, the same as Lakshmi in SOLD.

SOLD, the movie, will have its national release on January 10, 2017. It is based on a novel of the same name by Patricia McCormick, published in 2006, that recounts the story of a Lakshmi, a girl from Nepal sold into sexual slavery in India. Watch a trailer for the move here www.youtube.com/watch?v=UruazVETP0w and find out more at www.soldthemovie.com.

For additional information about how you can help prevent human trafficking, contact the Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking, a national organization headquartered in Denver. More information can be found at www.combathumantrafficking.org.

Affirming the Divine Presence
by Ernest Holmes

We have been given the ability to initiate a new chain of causation. There is but One Mind and we use it. The laws of nature are universal, but our use of them is individual and personal. Our thought is operated on by a universal Creativity that is infinite in Its capacity to accomplish. Thus, in taking thought we do not force anything; we merely decide what thought to follow, knowing that the result is automatic.

Everything is continually being re-created. Spirit is forever making all things new. Today is the time to prove to ourselves that It knows how to bring the right things to pass for us. Let us confidently affirm the Divine Presence and actually believe that It is guiding us as we consciously bring a problem we are facing into our thought, not as a problem, but as though we were receiving the answer, saying:

I believe that Divine Intelligence, which is the Mind of God, is guiding, guarding and directing my thoughts and actions…. I am open to new ideas, new hopes and new aspirations….

Great peace and joy come over me as I accept this answer from the Giver of all Life.

This is an excerpt of the January 1 entry in “365: Science of Mind,” written by spiritual visionary Dr. Ernest Holmes.