Odyssey Magazine

Self-reflection can be defined as “meditation or serious thought about one's actions and motives.” For me, autumn is always a time of reflection. As the leaves begin to change colour, the days get shorter, leaves fall away and colder nights start to appear; these all are the signs of a new change in the circle of nature: Nature that follows its seasonal patterns. Businesses face these circular patterns and need to reflect, scale and emerge with new life. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit writes about embracing change by getting lost; how we need to leave a door open for the unknown, despite the discomfort. She states: “People look into the future and expect that the forces of the present will unfold in a coherent and predictable way, but any…

Wholeness means the state of forming a complete and harmonious whole. When you integrate your dark and light, you are able to sense your wholeness and attain balance. Dark is not negative and light is not positive – it's like yin and yang, day and night. Light and dark are simply two polarities of the same energy. You are life force-energy, you are already whole and the reason you are making this journey is for the experience of embracing this wholeness through coming to a balance from a state of ‘created’ imbalance. In eastern teachings the only way you can know wholeness is to know imbalance. Autumn prepares us to reflect and thereby enables us to and release that which no longer serves our journey to wholeness. This autumn, integrate your dark and…

He shared how they would open the front of my face to remove the egg-size benign fibrous dysplasia tumour. If we didn't remove it, I would go blind. Then he asked, “Is that okay, Colleen? Can we do this?” Pulling him aside, my mother questioned why he was giving me the details and asking my permission, “She's only four.” “She's my patient,” he replied, “Even at four, she has every right to make this decision.” I said yes to the surgery because I felt I'd seen enough to trust him with my life and would have done anything to be free of the monster-making tumour we called my bump. I said yes, with the hope of freedom. Freedom from the gasping of adults, the wrinkled-nosed pointing from children and the intrusive “What's wrong with your…

Near-death experiences across cultures The findings discussed up to this point have been gathered from western accounts. If the near-death experience (NDE) is a truly universal human experience, it should occur in all cultures. What about near-death experiences in non-western cultures? Although comparatively few studies have involved non-western subjects, enough data has been gathered in order to make some comparisons and to find out to what extent these experiences are culture bound. China In 1976 an earthquake struck Tangshan, China. Eleven years later, two physicians, Feng Zhi-ying and Liu Jianxun, interviewed eighty-one survivors and found that 40 per cent reported near-death experiences. Compared to western accounts, this is an unusually large percentage, but we must remember that this sample was not randomly chosen and that all the subjects were victims of a single…

I never believed in depression or any mental illness and was convinced it was all in the mind, and that your mind has the ability to conquer anything. In fact, when my late brother, Barak showed signs of depression and started taking meds I never believed in it. That was until I experienced my first depressive episode a couple years later. It was 2002 and I had just moved to New York City. I didn't have any formal job but went from helping at a film festival to packing shoes in Astoria Queens. As long as I was living my dream in the greatest city in the world, I didn't care what job I had. About a year later in 2003 I had a full-time job as a receptionist at an…

“There is something bigger and deeper and incredibly beautiful about this place, and it just brings me back and I keep bringing other people back. Martha Beck Dr Martha Beck is a best-selling American author, life coach and speaker whom Oprah Winfrey rates as “one of the smartest women I know”. She also makes a point of coming to South Africa every year to host personal development retreats that raise funds for rural education, having fallen completely in love with the country and its people. “In Africa, I feel safe in my soul,” says Martha, who is one of the best-known life coaches in the United States and whose latest book, The Way of Integrity: Finding a Path to Your True Self, was an instant New York Times best-seller. Not only does her…