Proud to collect and bless 175 gift bags for the needy and forgotten

Thanks to the generosity of many, many people, we have had the opportunity to package and bless 175 gift "stockings" for the forgotten, poor and needy for Christmas.

Yes, 175! Most packages were delivered  to the Women's Resource Center, Bethany Apartments, SAFE Haven, SAFE Passage and HALO on Monday, with the last of the stockings going to Southern Oaks Girls School and Focus On Community tomorrow. Any late-arriving donations will be delivered to HALO, the local homeless shelter, which we understand is bulging at this very moment with 66 men and 57 women and children.

Here's a picture of most of the group who put it all together at Lake House Health & Learning Center on Saturday, adding their blessings of love, strength, health, protection, friendship, prosperity and more:

Donations came from members and friends of the Olympia Brown Unitarian Univeralist Church, the CNH Campus Connection, Lake House Health & Learning Center and many generous community members who read about our project in the Racine Journal Times.

We are also pleased to have collected more than 60 pounds of food to the Racine Food Bank, collected during the recent Lake House presentation of “Practical Application of Spiritual Principles -- Making The Universal Laws Work in Everyday Life” on Dec. 1.

We'll continue to collect food for the Racine Food Bank until Dec. 23. Please call (262) 633-2645 before dropping off donations.

Blessing Of The Gifts blesses everyone for the holidays

Every year for the past eight years, I’ve joined friends, church members, colleagues and others who have participated in a program that we call Blessing Of The Gifts.

Like many other organizations in our community, we collect various simple gifts for the forgotten, poor and needy in our community.

There’s more. After the donations are sorted and packaged, we mound them in the center of the room in a great big pile and give the packages our blessing – all the goodness and love and strength that we can muster.

The gifts, after all, are only a token. It is the love that we send that’s important. At this time of year, we all want to feel as if we have something valuable to give and can make a difference in our world. When we do, it feels good.

This idea – that charity has wellness benefits – is beginning to be documented. A recent Canadian study found said spending as little as $5 on others helped change mood and feelings about self. For instance, staff who got bonuses and spent some of the extra money on others were happier than those who spent their bonuses on themselves, the research found.

The gifts will be sorted, packaged and blessed at a special program from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, Dec. 5, at Lake House Health & Learning Center, 932 Lake Ave. All are welcome to participate; please bring donation for the project or a donation of non-perishable food for the Racine Food Bank, if you are able. (The picture is a sample of just a few of the gifts that have been donated, with one bow-decorated "stocking.")

Co-creators of this project include members for the Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church, corporate people at CNH Campus Connection, clients and visitors to Lake House Health & Learning Center and friends, family and neighbors. I’ve been told by several people that this annual event – we are now in our eighth year – has become a meaningful part of their holiday.

When each donation bag and box arrives, it feels like a mini-Christmas. I open the bags and find treasures. I am sure that I get as much excitement from opening the donations as the recipients do.

If you’d like to contribute, or start your own project, these are the kinds of gifts we accept:

Toiletries, hotel and regular sizes

Cards, stationery, stamps

Journals and calendars

Bookmarks

Socks, slippers and scarves

Journals

Small gifts

Plastic net bags

Yarn

The gifts are packaged in recycled plastic net bags -- the kind that are used for citrus fruits and onions -- that are used as "stockings" and distributed to the Southern Oaks Girls School, HALO, Women's Resource Center, Bethany Apartments, Focus On Community, SAFE Passage and SAFE Haven before Christmas.

Spiritual ideas, real life, gratitude and other universal laws

Markus Kasunich, a spiritual healer from Laguna Hills, Calif., visited Lake House Health & Learning Center on Tuesday to speak about his personal spiritual journey and spiritual ideas and their applications to everyday life.

The title of the presentation of this kindred spirit who was the topic of  a previous blog: “Practical Application of Spiritual Principles -- Making The Universal Laws Work in Everyday Life.”

Kasunich’s story is compelling. He grew up in Canada and suffered abuse as a young person. He tried to numb his feelings with drugs and alcohol and later became a seeker of learning and personal understanding, first at a three-year college of alternative health in Montreal, Quebec, where he learned energy healing and other approaches.

He became disillusioned with some of the so-called “new age” trappings that he found in many people and places and ventured alone into the deep forests in the wilds of rural Canada – where he quipped that American draft dodgers still live – to find his purpose in life.

Getting very physically ill after several months, he returned to civilianization to quickly stumble across the name of a master teacher at an ashram in California.

Though the past 10 years he has studied and learned from a number of teachers of mind, body and spirit approaches, including Reiki, cranialsacral therapy, pressure point therapy and energy work, among others. He spoke of one teacher whom he desperately wanted to study with; the teacher said he would take Kasunich a learner only if he agreed first to take baths every day for three weeks.

Kasunich didn’t understand, or even like, the assignment, but he gamely gave it a try. The first day he sat grumpily in the bathtub, watching the clock. On the next day, he decided to make the experience more interesting, adding a sprinkling of bath salts. Next time, he put on music he enjoyed and relaxed and listened. On another day, he added candles, slowly realizing that the teacher’s lesson focused on the importance of caring for and nurturing the self.

During Tuesday night’s informal presentation at Lake House, participants asked his views about after-death experiences, reincarnation and other spiritual questions that have been debated for centuries.

Kasunich asked instead, “What do you think?” and “What do you believe?” Rather than handing over a line of dogma, he encouraged each person present to walk on his or her own spiritual path and discover what is “right” for them.

Here’s quick snapshot of his gifts to the group:

Gratitude is a powerful prayer in itself.

Be grateful for misfortunes in life – the illness that you have, the spouse who left, the fender-bender car accident – as all carry important life lessons.

Identify the “fear filters” that keep you stuck and paralyzed.

Practice self care. Keep in mind that “self care” means self-nurturing and is different than “self-indulging.”

Study with and learn from many teachers – not just one – each may have a different way of communicating important ideals in a way that you can hear and integrate.