Healing the Cycle of Sex Slavery

Imagining the abuse heaped on victims of sex slavery challenges our very humanity. Those who survive are brutalized physically and psychologically, having suffered overwhelming trauma and unimaginable horror. In addition to overcoming their physical abuse, they must also deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, societal stigmatization and a lack of skills needed to earn a living.

An estimated 80 percent of the world’s sex slaves are in India, Nepal and Pakistan. The iRest India & Nepal Project provides an effective research-based protocol that assists healing from trauma and violence. The program also provides survivors with vocational skills, as they can teach other survivors once they complete the program.

Over the course of the coming five years, an estimated 300,000 survivors will benefit in India, Nepal, Pakistan and elsewhere. The iRest Program, modeled after iRest’s work with V.A. patients in the United States, is offered to survivors at no expense to them.

If you would like to be part of this solution, you can help fund a sustainable model of health and vocational skills building. For more information on how you can assist, visit www.courageousgirls.org/IndiaNepalProject.

If you or your group would like to take action, consider showing “SOLD: The Movie,” and raise funds for this initiative. Download the award-winning powerfully inspiring film www.soldthemovie.com or download the trailer https://vimeo.com/154121326. For more information on how to host a screening and get more involved, visit http://www.soldthemovie.com/mobilization-deck/.

Filmmakers Change an Industry

As consciousness concepts become more mainstream in our culture, industries that provide content and context in our lives respond. We see cultural creatives — artists, writers, filmmakers, entrepreneurs — creating a catalyst for change.

According to Danette Wolpert, executive director of the Illuminate Film Festival, “The movement is very much alive and has a home. Each year, cultural creatives gather at Illuminate’s Conscious Film Convergence to brainstorm new strategies for collaboration to increase the quality, quantity and availability of conscious cinema around the globe.

 “Magic unfolds when you have the right people in the room.”

Where until recently movie studios and executives were unlikely to reach out to the mind-body-spirit consciousness market, new data show this market is expanding, creating a profitable avenue for consciousness messaging. “The tide is shifting,” Wolpert says, “from the grassroots level up to the studios. If the creators keep creating, and the watchers keep watching, we’ll ultimately find ourselves in a kinder, wiser, more peaceful world.”

For more about how the industry is adapting, see “Conscious Filmmakers Change an Industry” in the May 2017 of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine. For information or to attend the Illuminate Film Festival, visit www.IlluminateFilmFestival.com. The festival takes place May 31 - June 4 in Sedona, Arizona.

A Celebration of Mothers

From ancient times to today, cultures celebrate mothers and motherhood with specific holidays. “Mothering Sunday,” an early Christian festival, may be the precedent of our modern Mother’s Day. Mothering Sunday was celebrated in parts of Europe and the United Kingdom as a time when the faithful returned to their “mother church” for special services.

The American version of Mother’s Day began in 1908 and became an official holiday in 1914.

To learn more about the history of the holiday, visit http://www.history.com/topics/holidays/mothers-day.

The Study of Life
—Ernest Holmes

Science is the knowledge of facts based upon some proven principle. The scientific investigation of anything is, of necessity, a cold-blooded proposition. We speak about knowing, about science being absolute knowledge; science is absolute knowledge, in so far as the facts of science are demonstrable. …

Let us, then approach the Science of Mind with awe, but not with fear; with a truly humble spirit, but not with any sense that we are unworthy, and certainly with no superstition.

Let us approach it normally, happily, willing to accept it, glad to experiment with it, believing that as a result of our efforts we shall derive this great good — a better understanding of the natural laws of Life as they apply to the individual and his relationship to the universal scheme of things.

The Science of Mind, then, is the study of life and the nature of the laws of thought; the conception that we live in a spiritual Universe; that God is in, through, around and for us. There is nothing supernatural anywhere, on any plane; that which today seems to us supernatural, after it is understood will be found spontaneously natural.

Excerpted from “The Science of Mind” by visionary Ernest Holmes.