If your heart had a voice, what would it say? Would it speak vibrantly, wildly and freely? Or would your heart’s voice be timid, weak and faint? The heart center, also known as the 4th chakra in Eastern philosophy, is a storehouse of intelligence and insight. If you haven’t yet developed a way to listen, live and speak from the power of your heart, it’s time.

The heart has long been dismissed as a “sentimental” or “emotional” center, empty of viable decision-making power or effective leadership, and definitely not to be relied on for practical living. This, however, is a modern myth that ancient cultures and mystics directly opposed in their traditional practices. Ancient cultures placed the heart at the very center of the most important choices needing to be made.

Current day research by the Institute of HeartMath (IHM), an internationally recognized nonprofit research and education organization, shows that the heart literally has a brain. IHM reports that there are at least “forty thousand neurons in the heart—as many as are found in various sub-cortical centers of the brain.” Our hearts literally have their own thinking capacity.

What does this mean to you and me? It means that learning to hear the voice of our hearts is a practical, powerful skill, and one which can lead to improved decision making, improved communication, increased energy levels and an overall healthier state of being. This will take some training and practice.

5 Principles to Discover the Voice of your Heart:

Principle One: Your heart is an intelligent guiding power.
The Heart’s Code, a book by PhD Paul Pearsall, shares the incredible story of an 8-year-old girl who had received a heart transplant from a 10-year-old girl who was murdered. After the surgery, the heart recipient had repeated nightmares. She would wake screaming, her dreams filled with images and information about the man who had murdered her donor. As the scenes repeated themselves nightly the information couldn’t be ignored. The details were taken to the police who then apprehended the perpetrator. Everything the heart transplant recipient reported was accurate. This true story exemplifies the heart’s profound understanding and knowing. The heart is highly intelligent. Acknowledge it.

Principle Two: Your heart has a distinct voice.
If you traveled to France, French lessons would be in order. To travel the world following your heart, you must learn to interpret the language of the heart. While the brain sees life as something to be conquered, controlled and managed, the heart sees the universe as supportive, flowing and synchronous. If something doesn’t work out the way the mind pictured it, resistance and frustration often ensue. The heart lives in flow and trust of something bigger at hand. If things don’t go the way the mind wants them to, which often they won’t, the heart embraces the situation as perfect for what it is. To hear the heart voice, you must discern between “mental chatter” and “heart whispers”. The heart speaks fluidly through intuitive feelings and gentle promptings. To hear the heart voice you need to still your mind. Meditation is key. If you feel fragmented, confused or scattered, you are likely in your mind, not in your heart.

Principle Three: Your heart values all life experiences through inclusivity.
Inclusivity is the ability to include all of your life experiences as valuable aspects of your growth, purpose and learning. While you wouldn’t want a rattlesnake in your bed, a rattlesnake plays an important role in the natural eco-system; it has value. While the mind will the judge the rattlesnake as bad and a thing to get rid of, the heart will put it in its proper place, out of the bed into the desert. So, too, does the heart approach life experiences; they all have their place and time. The mind judges; judgment leads to separation, and what you separate from you eventually attract. For example, if you dislike an attribute of a romantic partner and judge it as bad, unconsciously you are energizing it. Instead of judging, the heart utilizes inclusivity and discernment. If you were a victim of trauma as a child, the experience remains a valuable part of who you become in the world; there is wisdom and value in your willingness and ability to feel and heal the experience. The mind will judge your experience as bad and wish it had never happened, but this may be the very experience that leads you to become, for instance, a remarkable healer.

Principle Four: Your heart is a master problem solver.
Physiologically, the heart is the quickest and most important organ to activate our creativity and best thinking. By managing the rate at which the heart beats through breathing patterns, the heart literally induces the “relaxed” nervous system, which in turn reflexively causes the proper amount of blood flow to be shunted to the organs and brain for health, vitality and clarity. The mind rides on the coat tails of the breath. A steady breath equals a steady mind. Learn to breath evenly and deeply during your inhalations and exhalations. By implementing this simple practice, the heart acts as a master biological oscillator pulling the body into a state of coherence where optimum thinking occurs. In the same way that a symphony requires all instruments to play in tune and on time, the heart is the conductor orchestrating our emotions and mental states to operate in harmony.

Principle Five: The heart seeks collaboration.
The self-improvement industry is built upon individuals developing a strong sense of self and becoming the best “I” you can be. The heart movement is about accepting who you are and becoming the best “us” you can be. Where competition and greed are underlying currents in our modern day marketplace, collaboration and connection are the way the heart thrives. The heart doesn’t care about perfection or idolatry. It cares about embracing the duality of humanness and transforming separation into unity. The heart doesn’t need to stand out. It needs to stand in alignment.

Anastasia, Vedic mystic and humanitarian genius, believes our answers to happiness lie in our ability to take back our Motherland. She believes that as each of us feel a sense of belonging and kinship to the land our hearts, minds and souls will heal. I believe she is correct. Anastasia offers solutions that are sustainable, achievable and practical. Her vision and our action will change the planet as we know it today. To read the Anastasia Book Series go to Ringing Cedars Publishing Website. “The Ringing Cedars Series has been translated into over 20 languages and already sold over 10 million copies, with no advertising except word of mouth! The purity and power in her words is provoking an outpouring of joy and hope in people from all walks of life.”

Discover, in the poetically and purposefully vision written below, a beautiful solution for ourselves as a humanity living connected to the Earth. If you feel inspired, after reading, you may also want to sign this vision as a petition.

To: United Nations

Excellency Ban Ki-moon
Secretary-General
United Nations
New York, New York

Your Excellency:

We, the undersigned, represent a movement of over eleven million voices strong. This is the growing number of people world-wide who are joining a brilliant “green” movement originating from Russia. We are all people who have become inspired and convinced of the urgent need for government supported development of family-size sustainably farmed land-plots, ideally located in eco-village settlements in every nation on earth. Robert Muller, Assistant Secretary General to the United Nations for many decades, said with great forethought: “The world of sovereign nations is in disarray. The Earth, our vital air, waters, nature, vegetation and many species which it took millions of years to form, our climate are in jeopardy. All this will end in a global disaster without precedent, if we do not react with urgency, vision and audacity.” At the time, Dr. Muller implored the General Assembly of heads of states to “remain in session day and night if necessary, until we give birth to a new political system for our miraculous planet and our sacred human family.” We, the undersigned, implore you with the same urgency, because we are convinced that this new political system will be generated easily and safely in the form of wide-spread, internationally blossoming eco-systems, renewing themselves one hectare, one eco-village, one society at a time – and at great speed.

You yourself, Your Excellency, along with Prince Charles, sent written word recently to the assembly of Terra Madre and Slow Food advocates who met last Fall in Italy emphasizing “the importance of traditional farming knowledge in finding a sustainable solution to the global food crisis.” And you let them know that “the global food crisis requires a comprehensive and coordinated global response….This is why I have created a high-level task force, bringing together the UN, donor countries, civil society and the private sector in a ‘global partnership for food.'” With your address, you were hoping to support small farmers and see that new technologies be adopted along with modern farming methods, which would “attract more young people to farming, especially in urban areas of the world.”

We feel so very excited to have a Secretary General such as yourself, Your Excellency, with the deep wisdom that our beautiful Earth needs to prevent such a “global disaster without precedent”, as Dr. Muller warned.

We have at hand simple yet highly intelligent, proven plans for action which can be implemented immediately all over the world, promptly healing our bleeding Earth and providing healthy food substances for its people; people who range from being concerned, hungry and even starving, depending upon the economic conditions of their home-nations.

Loosely embraced by the name “Ringing Cedars of Russia”, this rapidly growing, world-wide movement shares one vision: the creation of ecological settlements ideally consisting of one hectare sized family-plots of land. While there are also many ideas for sustainable living for city dwellers (notably the Transition Town movement), our appeal to you and the General Assembly is for the following:

There is much unused land, ranging from very fertile to presumably unusable, marginal, even arid land. And there are precedents for the governments of many nations having provided such land to families practically free of charge for the development of family-sized plots for micro-farmed family domains. (One hectare is ideally suited to feed a family in any climate and on any soil.) Russia’s Dacha Gardens; Germany’s Schrebergaerten and America’s Victory Gardens all represent examples where a nation’s people retained their ability to feed themselves, their family and neighbors through economic hardship and thereby stabilized the economy and viability of their entire country while providing an atmosphere of hope, pride and belonging.

The granting of such land-tracts must include guidelines for changing rigid local zoning and use-permit laws to facilitate the swift creation of such food-plots, ideally as part of eco-type settlements. Visual materials (such as DVDs of the Rodnoe Settlement in Russia; or Australia’s “Greening the Desert” film and Sepp Holzer’s Permaculture DVDs) are available to effectively introduce these simple yet profound concepts to the General Assembly. All three sets of materials represent and confirm the conviction that “we can grow a food-garden anywhere”. This includes salinity stressed, arid desert lands which can regenerate within months with intelligent perma and polyculture installations. Indeed, these installations can provide training for more people to teach these methods even as they go along recovering land for family food-gardens, effectively multiplying the blessings of such an approach to national and world-healing.

* * *

Declaration in support of immediate creation and promotion of sustainable family-plot permaculture land development:

We, the undersigned, are supporting the vision of acquiring parcels of land, one hectare in size, for the purpose of setting up Family Domains to build a more perfect living environment for ourselves and our families. There, food and forest gardens can be planted in accordance with careful permaculture planning and healthy seeds, so that we can grow food such as fruit, berries, nuts, vegetable crops and might include such additions as ponds stocked with fish, bee colonies or farm animals.

As practical experience has shown, the creation of such Family Domains, though developed in different nations and climates, is capable in the very near future of solving the food and living problems of many nations. Ecovillages and agricultural cooperatives around large and small cities that are able to provide the urban population with ecologically pure plant products have proven to be very viable, immediate solutions to the planet-wide problem of availability of wholesome, affordable foods.

There is no doubt that a world-wide food crisis is looming, such as sharp, significant and continuing increases in the price of food products along with poor availability. Political, scientific and economic sources of information confirm these difficulties in countries all over the world. The World Agrarian Report IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development) is a recently published 2000-page international report which was gathered during a meeting of approximately 400 independent individuals and groups from various social sectors, such as science, research, politics, business, agriculture and consumer protection. It offers advice of a very similar sort as is advocated herewith. Also represented at that world gathering were institutions such as the FAOs, World Bank, UNEP, UNESCO, WHO, UNDP, GEF.

It should be an intolerable fact to any intelligent individual or government to know that from thousands to up to tens of millions of hectares, and even larger numbers in acreage, depending upon the size of the country in question, remain uncultivated and are overgrown with weeds while up to 40\% or more of food-stuffs – very often of poor quality – are imported from foreign countries at great waste of resources, while compromising the economies and viability of such countries. This includes, of course, the destruction of vitally important rainforests and therefore, imperils our entire planet. No polite words, but only terms such as “stupid” or “criminally immoral” can adequately describe what is going on in the world regarding certain agricultural approaches including the resulting, totally unnecessary starvation of innocent people in Third World countries.

This unacceptable travesty also affects a large percentage of the world’s farmers who are practically enslaved to giant, heartless corporations due to the competitive struggle with which such agriculture is maintained along with the pressure tactics employed by such inhuman corporate entities. Struggling for profit with large agricultural farming approaches forces farmers to use pesticides and herbicides, grow harmful, genetically modified products via unhealthy mono-cultures, and endanger the lives of millions of people and indeed, the viability of our entire planet. And short-sighted actions such as infusions of cash into agriculture have not changed the situation for the better in any nation, but only aggravate it, as the core problems are never addressed.

While we believe it counter-productive to accuse governments or individuals, the fact that many countries are standing at the brink of great social upheavals demands immediate action. We believe that in such a situation, it is necessary that each individual or family make concrete commitments toward self-reliability and individual sustainability in the most immediate future. But they need help from their respective governments with appropriate legislation.

We posit that a fundamentally new and universally applicable global vision for another way of life for all of Earth’s families is of vital and urgent importance. We have several guiding paradigms available, including the aforementioned Ringing Cedars vision for global healing, so as to be able to proceed immediately. There are already several hundred eco-villages flourishing all over the planet and 300 eco-villages in various stages of planning and development which apply the Ringing Cedars ideas for Family Domains. For instance, hundreds of families, having each obtained a hectare of land, are already building their own domains, domains in which children are being born and raised now in a more perfect ecological environment in specific areas in Russia, with many more emerging in other countries.
We, the undersigned, respectfully request that Your Excellency, bearer of the highest office of the United Nations, kindly join us in this urgent quest and realistic vision by assembling the relevant UN agencies to proactively pursue the possibility of realistic global healing, one hectare, one eco-village, one nation at a time. First and foremost, we need your powerful support toward the development of official positions and recommendations for the world-wide creation of hectare-size sustainable family-plots for food and forest gardens in all nations.

Please accept our gratitude for your attention to this important request to create a world which will work for everyone – Now.

Our appreciation goes to all individuals who have helped with the gathering of the initial information for this letter: www.ringingcedarsofrussia.com and www.spaceoflovemagazine.com.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned

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