Our culture offers little help in coping with and overcoming the enormous personal, social, and economic changes that are occurring around us and within our lives. Finding Yourself in Transition explores the spiritual opportunities inherent in life's changes and helps us discover how to use them as a gateway to greater personal and spiritual growth.
Now available for the first time—more than 50 years after it was written—is the memoir of Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915–62), the British doctor and Buddhist monastic novice chiefly known to scholars of sex, gender, and sexuality for his pioneering transition from female to male between 1939 and 1949, and for his groundbreaking 1946 book Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. Here at last is Dillon/Jivaka’s extraordinary life story told in his own words. Out of the Ordinary captures Dillon/Jivaka’s various journeys—to Oxford, into medicine, across the world by ship—within the major narratives of his gender and religious journeys. Moving chronologically, Dillon/Jivaka begins with his childhood in Folkestone, England, where he was raised by his spinster aunts, and tells of his days at Oxford immersed in theology, classics, and rowing. He recounts his hormonal transition while working as an auto mechanic and fire watcher during World War II and his surgical transition under Sir Harold Gillies while Dillon himself attended medical school. He details his worldwide travel as a ship’s surgeon in the British Merchant Navy with extensive commentary on his interactions with colonial and postcolonial subjects, followed by his “outing” by the British press while he was serving aboard The City of Bath. Out of the Ordinary is not only a salient record of an early sex transition but also a unique account of religious conversion in the mid–twentieth century. Dillon/Jivaka chronicles his gradual shift from Anglican Christianity to the esoteric spiritual systems of George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky to Theravada and finally Mahayana Buddhism. He concludes his memoir with the contested circumstances of his Buddhist monastic ordination in India and Tibet. Ultimately, while Dillon/Jivaka died before becoming a monk, his novice ordination was significant: It made him the first white European man to be ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Out of the Ordinary is a landmark publication that sets free a distinct voice from the history of the transgender movement.
Lynn V. Andrews takes the reader with her as she goes on inward journeys with the help of the Sisterhood of the Shields, and relates the stories of others. Join her as she is initiated into the Sisterhood and creates her own shield, which will show her the nature of her spiritual path (Spirit Woman). Follow her to the Yucatan, where the medicine wheel leads her, and she is faced with the terrifying reality of the butterfly tree (Jaguar Woman). Enter the Dreamtime with her, where she emerges in medieval England as Catherine, and encounters the Grandmother, who offers to show Andrews how to make her life one of goodness, power, adventure, and love (The Woman of Wyrrd). Not all these stories describe the author's own spiritual experiences. Meet Sin Coraz?n, an initiate into the Sisterhood, whose husband abandons her. She nearly succumbs to her inner dark power and unleashes her rage on men and the Sisterhood (Dark Sister). Andrews also writes about the elder women of the Sisterhood: their loves, their lives, their losses (Tree of Dreams). Andrews shows us how to channel our own spiritual and intellectual energy and balance the need for love with the desire for power (Love and Power). She takes the reader on numerous spiritual journeys that inevitably uplift.
"Kryon speaks of new human empowerment and says that we all meta-phorically "stood in line" to be here on the planet at this particular time. Can we really become different? Can we actually create our own reality or heal ourselves? Absolutely!"
Paramahansa Yogananda and some of his foremost disciples provide heart-satisfying explanations for our most challenging questions -- shedding a clarifying light on personal and global concerns. Each chapter offers understanding, reassurance, and guidance for the turbulent times in which we live. With acute insight, A World in Transition shows how we can use the power of meditation and prayer for world peace, and effect lasting spiritual transformation for ourselves, our communities, and our planet. By identifying the universal principles and world cycles that influence the evolution of civilizations and individuals, the authors help us develop those life skills we will need to chart our course in the times ahead.
Spiritual seekers everywhere know it: the world is changing rapidly. The old rules don’t apply. The more open we are to guidance the more guidance will come to us. The guidance in this book teaches us how to recognize the interdimensional energies in our 3D world. As governments shift, economies are pruned, and systems fail, here are hopeful instructions for how celebrate the failure of the old as it makes way for the new, how to balance our energy and that of the planet, and how to meet the future which is now.
We are on the threshold of the great transition, when our planet will go from being a world of trials and expiations to one of regeneration. This transition has been part of the heavenly plan for a long time; thus, it will not occur in an obvious manner, overnight, as if by magic, but as a slow, gradual, yet undelayable transformation. Natural tragedies, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 - the subject of our considerations in this book - are part of this process because they are meant to make humankind progress more quickly by expunging criminal spirits - those unamenable to order and to moral and spiritual evolution, which can no longer be delayed. Those spirits will spend an amount of time on other worlds, learning the laws of Love and of the Good until they are fit to return to our planet to make their contribution to the progress of humankind. In this extraordinary book, our dear readers will learn about the mechanisms and lofty reasons for the planetary transition in favor of pressing and necessary changes that promote respect for laws, ethics and nature, transforming men and women into complete beings who are conscious of their duties to God, themselves and others.
