2021 Walden Award Honorees

In the September 2021 issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine, Walden Award honoree Anita Moorjani explores the nature of empathy with writer Julie Mierau.

Moorjani says, “We must learn to see empathy as a strength,” as juxtaposed with the classic model of a strong leader, someone who is headstrong and stubborn, someone who demands compliance.

How do we bring our empathetic behavior to the fore of our problems, to our world in peril? Her answer: “Speak your truth. Open the door for a whole new way of being. Set in motion the shift our planet needs to heal and survive.”

All 2021 Walden Awards honorees are listed below. For more information, visit Unity.org/Walden.

What Is Empathy?

According to Greater Good magazine, the word empathy describes a range of experiences, although it typically is defined as the ability to sense other people’s emotions. Further, empathy describes the ability to imagine what others are thinking or feeling.

“Contemporary researchers often differentiate between two types of empathy,” the magazine says. They are “affective empathy,” referring to the sensations and feelings we get from other's emotions; and “cognitive empathy,” by which we identify and understand other people's emotions.

Scientists speculate that some aspects of empathy can be traced to “mirror neurons,” described as “cells in the brain that fire when we observe someone else perform an action in much the same way that they would fire if we performed that action ourselves.”

Learn more about the nature of empathy at https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/empathy/definition or by watching a conversation about empathy between Paul Ekman and Edwin Rutsch at www.YouTube.com/watch?v=3i1QFv_PtqM.

Meditation to Unify with Divine Presence

By Ernest Holmes

Let us be certain, as we listen quietly and reverently to the Spirit, that each is making this meditation personal as we say:

I know the Divine Spirit is operating through me now. I know I am not limited by anything that has happened or by anything that is now happening. I am aware that the Truth is making me free from any belief in want, lack or limitation. I have a feeling of security and of ability to do anything that I should do.

I am entering into an entirely new set of conditions and circumstances. That which has no limit is flowing through my consciousness into action. I am guided by the same Intelligence and inspired by the same Imagination that scatters the moonbeams across the waves and holds the forces of nature in Its grasp.

I have a calm, inward conviction of my union with good, my oneness with God. I have complete confidence that the God who is always with me is able and willing to direct everything I do, to control my affairs, to lead me into the pathway of peace and happiness. I free myself from every sense of condemnation, either against myself or others. I lose every sense of animosity. I now understand there is a Principle and a Presence in every person, gradually drawing each into the Kingdom of Good.

I know the Kingdom of God is at hand, and I am resolved to enter into this Kingdom, to possess it and to let it possess me.