We strolled through and enjoyed almost countless examples of ART SET TO THE PAGE, including many books created ENTIRELY BY HAND — really something to behold in this age of robots and AI.
In the main hall we met dynamic creators, eager to share their unique products. Among them were Mitsuki Nakamura — from Japan, based for over two years in Western Germany — who writes, illustrates and binds amazing books for children! (Instagram: minyazou_ )
And we met Lisa Reiter ( https://lisareiter.com/ ) a student of Vienna’s University of Applied Arts (where my wife graduated in the 1989). We bought a creative book that includes several pages with added samples of the materials described in the short narratives, and semi-transparent printed pages that pull you through to the subject behind! (She created it along with Flores Paul, Laura Josic, Lena Heinschink, Michelle Schäfer, Chiara Mizaikoff, David Carol Fedders, Arina Nekliudova, Yevheniia Pavlova, Marie Filippovits, Tutku Kocabaş, Lutzz Bog-Lārk, Johann Thorell, Johanna Pianka, project-leader Katrin Hornek and others)
Head of the University’s paper and book making studio, Beatrix Mapalagama ( https://www.papierwespe.at/de/beatrix-mapalagama/beatrix-mapalagama/ ) a professional colleague of my wife, showed us around her impressive domain upstairs. To feel all the textures with your own fingers and understand the processes is an unforgettable experience! What goes on in the Studio: ‘Book Art involves design concepts and realisation in line with material requirements, including traditional bookbinding techniques, as well as free and applied objects in paper and bookbinding materials, involving folding and embossing. Packaging design and papier-mâché (especially for students from the Fine Arts and Handicrafts Teaching disciplines) are also dealt with.’
We had a wonderful evening last Saturday when Brigitte’s dream to combine Indian/Yogi culture at her public art presentations finally started:
(with hopefully many more to come!)
Grand opening, 17 August 2024, at the *Gallery Eichgraben in Lower Austria: Exhibition ARTFUSION — Contemporary artists Brigitte Saugstad and Wolfgang Denk with dance performance by Aradhana Tomashevskyi accompanied by Edward Saugstad on handpan — Introduction by art historian Carl Aigner, “It is very important that we deepen our life experience by learning to understand various cultures and their collective significance.”
(*original century-old Art Nouveau village hall)
The evening began with the most dramatic summer storm in our village!⚡️⛈️⚡️
liverish: adjective • unhappy and bad-tempered (cooling the liver improves it ☺️)
There once was a mouse from Cabella Who was quite a miser’bl’ fella’. He fell in the River, Jumped out all a’shiver, And found that he’d healed his liver!
Dear Friend! ☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎ We hope you’re still enjoying the bounties of pure, joyful Spirit, and we wish you unlimited access to all That now for Christmas🎄 and in the new, adventurous year. It’s one-for-all and all-for-one from here on in!
Lots of love, Ed&Brigitte💗 ⛲︎⛲︎⛲︎⛲︎⛲︎⛲︎⛲︎⛲︎
As you’ve probably noticed, time seems to fly by faster and faster. So Winter just started, and that means Spring and Summer are JUST AROUND THE CORNER🌞. Here’s some appropriate music by Ed to get you ready for the next season’s spirit:
When I turned fifteen, half-a-century ago TODAY🎈 — back in the era of Rock’n’Roll🎸 — this is how I thought I would look now! (Rock-Star saving the World with MUSIC🎶 … didn’t quite work out that way😉)
Here’s a new melody/rythmn I played spontaneously in morning meditation today (and some top music stars talking about thoughtless-awareness and the cool-breeze)
Georgio Pilla, Italian art critic ~Austrian artist Brigitte Saugstad~ (Venice, 16 January 2008)
“This artist, this charming signorina, is here to present her ceramic work. These pieces are art in its purest form. She takes nature and transforms it into art. That alone should give you an idea of her intellectual and comprehensive capacity. But she doesnʼt rest there. She also wants to give us the feeling of joy in form, and so these pieces were created, beautiful, sometimes white, sometimes colorful, a little darker a little lighter. And when she concentrates on her favorite sport, she gives us the ice princesses, where the body weight defies gravity. As you can see, the skaters are quite robust, but their whole being, the whole body, their physical form turns to poetry in her hands. They simply float in the air, there is no weight, only music and dance, only pleasure in contact with the frozen earth or lifting up and away from it. These ice dancers, when they are in the air, appear to be flying. It looks like there is no weight holding them down. She was able to feel this and express it in these wonderful works of art. Look at these figures that float towards the sky. It is truly an expression of joy, an expression of happiness, and much more.
Nature is expressed in these beautiful spheres, which are made up of nothing but little field flowers. Look at the wonderful forms that remind me of seashells and the waves, the song the ocean sings. We are looking at pure art; we are in the hands of an artist. Out of a handful of earth, out of a handful of clay, life is created, because these figures are alive. They live in her and, as they are here in front of us, they should also live in us now and in the future. We should feel the joy and the lightness of heart that she has given us today.”
In case you’d like to hear Edward talk spontaneously about Creativity for a few minutes (from the SY Cabella Camp!) …
PUBLIC ONLINE INTERVIEW IN CHINA First video: “How do you keep the inspiration flowing continuously and bring forth the new ones in your artistic works? Have you ever felt the inspiration exhausted? Can you share the secret of persisting in creation for decades?”
Second video (scroll down): “Modern people’s creations can easily be displayed, for example, when they are posted on the Internet, they can easily receive affirmation and cyber attacks. For a creator, being criticized may hurt his creativity. How can he protect it?”
The abdominal chakra is the second chakra of the subtle system. In the body, this chakra provides the energy needed for the liver, spleen, pancreas, intestines and cerebral cortex to function properly. It expresses creativity and execution. This is a very important chakra: it creates all our desires on the left side, while the right channel starts at the location of the abdominal chakra. The main quality of this chakra is creativity, but this chakra also produces fat cells which, upon reaching the brain, are converted into an energy supply that helps the brain to think and process all the information it receives.
The Trait of the Abdominal Chakra is “Creativity” The origin of all creativity is Love. Without Love, there is no creativity. When Kundalini nourishes this center, people become very creative. All great creative work has vibrations. All works of art that vibrate are held together by time. All work without vibrations is destroyed by nature and forgotten over time.
—Ten Days of Yoga—
(IMAGES – Brigitte Saugstad artworks)
She (Kundalini/Saraswati) teaches us through nature: listen to the sounds of birds, the gurgling of a creek or the thunderous roar of a waterfall, the rustling of the wind over the leaves or the forceful blowing of a canyon.
Look at the many greens in the garden, look at the sky, look at her paintings in the clouds. How many colors she uses when the sun rises over the sea or when the sun sets, enjoy her creations.
The origin of all creativity is love. Without love, there is no creativity. She holds a veena on which she plays the most beautiful music to inspire everyone.
Not only did she teach us beautiful music, but she taught us how to dance, talk, sing, write books, paint, and build. When we meditate, she exposes us to all the knowledge we can grasp.
Yesterday my wife and I felt a deep peace filling our nervous systems and I heard the same from friends in various parts of the world. There is definitely a general change of frequency taking place on Earth which is fine tuning, but also exposing embedded corruptions, individually and collectively. For over forty years I’ve been advising others to develop subtly by meditating (long before most doctors discovered its usefulness).
Please take a few minutes a day for this. The only way out of all this mess created by human beings is in-and-up. Otherwise the shaking and quaking is going to be experienced more and more intensely, and the roots of the chaos in us cannot be replaced by harmony.
An artist’s depiction of possibly the first historical mention (Bible) of the cool breeze https://wemeditate.com/subtle-system/kundalini (“Wind of the Holy Spirit”) and flowing waves of light (“Tongues of Flames”) above the heads of Self-realized human beings:
There are two main reasons for the present Chaos, in which all corruptions are being exposed:
For all good people to turn to their Spirit for ultimate fulfillment;
And for already balanced, sensitive and dynamic persons to develop their power of Witnessing. Simple. Keep your mind clear and your heart brimming with love.
We all seem to be climbing a great mountain, some slower, some quicker. Up here near the summit we discover that we are free from the bindings of our egos, conditionings and physical bodies — that we exist permanently above and beyond these limitations. In Rhonda Byrne’s new book, The Greatest Secret, I was happy to hear that deep experiences I’ve been having for almost forty years, through the teachings of Shri Mataji and the practice of Sahaja Yoga meditation, are becoming mainstream. This isn’t because of mass media, but because human beings are asking the right questions and feeling reality within themselves. But I find that this new book, although it beautifully describes thoughtless-awareness and natural detachment from internal and external complications, is missing much of the detail that so many of us have experienced through daily, actual meditation. Among the most prominent phenomena is the amazing ‘cool breeze’ that flows in our central nervous systems when human beings attain joyful equilibrium. Also missing are the details of the workings of our subtle-systems of energy centers and channels, and the benevolent Kundalini energy in our spines.
Of course, the highest priority is the deep, silent meditation itself, a natural, essential state that should be achieved by all. But The Greatest Secret is only a glimpse through the window of enlightenment. Just sayin’. https://wemeditate.co
• Meditators showed around 7% more grey matter, the largest published difference between healthy groups.
• As grey matter decreases with age and with most mental illnesses, this difference throughout the brain is associated with a younger and healthier brain.
• The grey matter difference was more marked in areas related to the control of attention and emotions.
An investigation on the influence of mental silence in the human brain has just been published in the magazine Plos One. The article is entitled: “Larger whole brain grey matter associated with long-term Sahaja Yoga Meditation: a detailed area by area comparison”. The original text is available at the following link:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237552
It is said that, for more than forty thousand years, human beings have a language that allows us to communicate with precision, that language is reproduced within our brain as thoughts without interruption. When negative thoughts are repeated in vicious cycles, our mental health can be affected with issues such as stress, anxiety or depression.
Today there is plenty of scientific literature that shows that being with the attention in the present moment, in the here and now, is beneficial for our psyche and our general health. Unfortunately, thoughts take us out of the present moment and to stop the thoughts for a long time is not easy, especially when we are not doing tasks that demands much attention.
Yoga includes many different techniques, among which meditation (Dhayana in classical yoga) plays a leading role. The first yoga treatise, “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali”, mentions that “yoga is the suppression of the modifications of the mind.” In ancient yoga a higher state of consciousness has been described, called “Nirvichara Samadhi”, which can be translated as “mental silence” or “thoughtless awareness”. In this state, the mind is calm, with a feeling of inner bliss, and with the attention focused on the present moment. Sahaja Yoga Meditation puts into practice the goals of classical Yoga to achieve the state of Nirvichara or mental silence.
Researchers led by Professor Sergio Elías Hernández from the University of La Laguna in Tenerife (ULL), in collaboration with scientists from King’s College London University, Jaume I University of Castellón and Sermas of Madrid, have been exploring for more than ten years the benefits of the state of mental silence on the human brain.
The study was carried out at the ULL MRI scanner, where the researchers recorded the brain anatomy of 23 meditator volunteers, experts in Sahaja Yoga meditation, and 23 non-meditating volunteers. Both groups were made up of healthy volunteers and both groups did not differ in age, educational level, ethnicity, proportion of men and women, etc.
To better understand this study, we must mention that the brain tissue is classified, according to its appearance, into three types: grey matter, made up of neuronal bodies and interconnections, (dark grey in resonance images); the white matter, formed by nerve fibers or long connections between distant areas, (light grey in the resonance images), and the cerebrospinal fluid or watery substance that fills the interior voids and serves as protection and transport of chemical substances.
The study of brain anatomy showed that meditators had, on average, 7% more grey matter in the whole brain. This type of comparison of the grey matter of the brain has been made in recent years among other groups in: athletes, musicians, taxi drivers, Buddhists, mindfulness meditators, etc. In these cases, the analyses showed that the group studied had local differences, greater grey matter, in brain areas associated with their specific practice, but the difference was never in the whole brain as it is the case with mental silence. The difference of 7% larger grey matter is especially significant if one takes into account that our brain loses between 0.15% and 0.3% of grey matter per year and small differences in grey matter can mark whether or not we keep intact our cognitive functions. It should be also noted that diseases, typical of the elderly, such as Alzheimer’s, senile dementia or Parkinson’s are also associated with loss of grey matter.
An advance of this study was published in the same journal Plos One in 2016, but the available methodology did not allow a detailed study to be made to see how the grey matter differences were distributed in the different areas of the brain. Given the uniqueness of the group differences observed throughout the whole brain, the researchers had to develop a specific statistical method (ad- hoc) to be able to evaluate these differences, area by area. Of all the brain areas, the grey matter difference was significantly larger in meditators in the right temporal lobe, an area associated with emotions, and in both frontal lobes, areas associated with cognitive and emotional self-control functions.
Study authors: Sergio Elías Hernándeza*, Roberto Dortab, José Sueroc, Alfonso Barros-Loscertalesd, José Luis González-Morae, Katya Rubiaf
a: Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.
b: Departamento de Matemáticas, Estadística e Investigación Operativa, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.
c: Centro de Salud Jazmín, Sermas, Madrid, Spain. d: Departamento de Psycología, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain. e: Departamento de Fisiología, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain f: Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College, Londres, UK.
*Author for more information: Email: sehdez@ull.edu.es
Two weeks before May 5, 1982, I learned how to meditate (really meditate, in thoughtless awareness, feeling the benevolent effects of my very own kundalini energy in me). Now Sahaja Yoga is celebrating 50 years of establishing global transformation, from a time when meditation was viewed as an esoteric hobby, to the present when it’s recommended worldwide by health experts for its universal balancing and integrative effects.
How time flies. Today it’s been half-a-century since that crucial sprouting that’s since risen into this majestic tree. Then, for me, it was still a 12-year-old sapling that has gradually lifted me into reality.
It’s so peaceful and fulfilling up here. Thank You, Shri Mataji, and everyone that has dedicated their lives to establishing this essential metamorphosis. 🦋🌳
We’re about to enter the decade that history books will remember as the one that ushered in the END OF KALI YUGA, the Age of Darkness.
As we find ourselves moving more and more beyond duality we will soon discover all the precious treasures in ourselves and others.
So, HO-HO-HO! HOLD on to your hat and enjoy the sleigh ride 🛷
HAPPY NEW AGE! 😁 (Optimism is contagious 😉)
Lots of love💗
Edward and Brigitte
🌈🌹
Year 2020 will be the last one of the age of materialism…
✨“The biggest and grandest alignment comes on December 21, 2020 when Jupiter joins Saturn in what’s referred to as the great conjunction. “✨
✨“These grand conjunctions come every 20 years, but this meeting has extra gravitas. It marks the end of a 200-year cycle of unions in earth signs that’s brought the age of materialism, banking, capitalism and corporations.”✨
✨“December 2020 kicks off a new 200-year cycle of unions in air signs. What that will bring isn’t entirely clear yet, but early indications are that thought, philosophy and truth will prevail. This is going to be a big shift.”✨
(from us and our new ‘Family’!)
Self-Help 