by Jennifer Burden | Jun 22, 2016 | 2016, Heartfulness, Meditation, World Voice
Join us — moms, dads, friends, and all humans welcome! — on Wednesday, June 22nd, at 12pm EST for a Heartfulness Meditation session for world peace to celebrate our launch to World Moms Network! World Mom, Judith will be our meditative guide.
First, she will have us close our eyes and talk us through a simple relaxation (the relaxation includes taking some deep breaths, focusing on relaxing the body parts she names, etc.). Next, we will meditate in silence, focusing on a white light in our hearts for about 15 minutes. Once the time is up, Judith will gently ask us to open our eyes.
If your mind roams, gently bring it back to the white light at your heart’s center. You can focus on your heart organ to the left of your chest or your body’s heart center in the middle of your chest.
During the meditation, Judith will mute everyone’s line to prevent disturbances (think planes overhead, doorbells and phones ringing, bosses walking in, kids fighting, etc.)
If you happen to join the session while it is already in progress, just get yourself into a comfortable, seated position and close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. If you are joining while Judith is silent, then please focus on your heart in silence and mute your line.
We will be using Zoom for the session. You can join in by video with the following link from your computer or mobile phone or call in by telephone (phone charges may apply).
**You will need to download Zoom — if you click on the link, it will take you through it — it only takes a few minutes to download, so hop on a few minutes beforehand, if possible!
Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://zoom.us/j/5520725621
Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll): 16465588656,5520725621# or 14086380968,5520725621#
Or Telephone:
Dial: +1 646 558 8656 (US Toll) or +1 408 638 0968 (US Toll)
Meeting ID: 552 072 5621
International numbers available
We hope you can join us in this very special event that incorporates World Moms Network’s vision statement:
- We envision a world of peace and equality, born through our common ground of motherhood.
Space is limited to the first 50 attendees! (We have yet to fill up a session though!) See you at 12pm EST!
Jennifer Burden is the Founder and CEO of World Moms Network, an award winning website on global motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. World Moms Network writes from over 30 countries, has over 70 contributors and was listed by Forbes as one of the “Best 100 Websites for Women”, named a “must read” by The New York Times, and was recommended by The Times of India.
She was also invited to Uganda to view UNICEF’s family health programs with Shot@Life and was previously named a “Global Influencer Fellow” and “Social Media Fellow” by the UN Foundation. Jennifer was invited to the White House twice, including as a nominated "Changemaker" for the State of the World Women Summit. She also participated in the One Campaign’s first AYA Summit on the topic of women and girl empowerment and organized and spoke on an international panel at the World Bank in Washington, DC on the importance of a universal education for all girls. Her writing has been featured by Baby Center, Huffington Post, ONE.org, the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life, and The Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists.” She is currently a candidate in Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the Executive Masters of Public Affairs program, where she hopes to further her study of global policies affecting women and girls.
Jennifer can be found on Twitter @JenniferBurden.
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by Jennifer Burden | Jan 27, 2015 | 2015, Health, Vaccines, World Voice
Today was a landmark day for funding for the GAVI Alliance, which provides life-saving vaccinations for children around the globe. Over $7 billion US Dollars was pledged to GAVI, with the UK and the US leading the way. A group of our contributors have been working with Shot@Life, the ONE Campaign and RESULTS to put pressure on the U.S. government to fund GAVI. World Mom, Cindy Levin, also on the Board of RESULTS, is celebrating the lives that will be saved with this funding with her daughters in Missouri, USA. Read her reaction, as well as that of her daughters’, on her blog, The Anti Poverty Mom.
And World Mom, Michelle Pannell, writes from the UK about the momentous funding to save lives. It was a spiritual reminder for her on why she continues to write. Read her post at Mummy From the Heart.
In Missouri, USA, World Mom and activist, Cindy Levin, and her daughters celebrate the importance of pledged funding to the GAVI Alliance for global vaccination programs for children.
Michelle Pannell in Ethiopia advocating for world poverty with the ONE Campaign in 2012.
Thank you for your hard work, Cindy, Michelle and fellow World Moms!!
This is an original post to World Moms Blog.
Photo credit to Cindy Levin.
Jennifer Burden is the Founder and CEO of World Moms Network, an award winning website on global motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. World Moms Network writes from over 30 countries, has over 70 contributors and was listed by Forbes as one of the “Best 100 Websites for Women”, named a “must read” by The New York Times, and was recommended by The Times of India.
She was also invited to Uganda to view UNICEF’s family health programs with Shot@Life and was previously named a “Global Influencer Fellow” and “Social Media Fellow” by the UN Foundation. Jennifer was invited to the White House twice, including as a nominated "Changemaker" for the State of the World Women Summit. She also participated in the One Campaign’s first AYA Summit on the topic of women and girl empowerment and organized and spoke on an international panel at the World Bank in Washington, DC on the importance of a universal education for all girls. Her writing has been featured by Baby Center, Huffington Post, ONE.org, the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life, and The Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists.” She is currently a candidate in Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the Executive Masters of Public Affairs program, where she hopes to further her study of global policies affecting women and girls.
Jennifer can be found on Twitter @JenniferBurden.
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by Sophie Walker (UK) | Sep 18, 2013 | 2013, Being Thankful, Competition, Health, Inspirational, International, Life Lesson, Sophie Walker, Sports, UK, Uncategorized, Womanhood, Women's Rights, World Events, World Motherhood
Hurrah for Diana Nyad!
In a few short weeks she has overturned long-established ideas about age and ability and strength and given us all a reason to keep swimming.
Nyad, in case you’ve been looking the other way, is the 64-year-old woman who recently became the first person to swim the 110 miles from Cuba to the U.S. without a shark cage, taking almost 53 hours.
This would be a marathon effort at any time, but when you consider that it was her fifth attempt over some forty years; that she had to wear a mask to protect her from jellyfish stings; that she took in so much sea water it caused her to vomit constantly for almost all of that 53 hours; that she arrived finally with face and lips swollen from sun and sea water – well, then her achievement, and her insistence not to be deflected from her aim, would seem to reflect almost superhuman levels of endurance.
The word endurance does not typically bring to mind 64-year-old women. In our culture, it is often used to describe young men – runners, rowers and cyclists at the peak of their profession or pushy capitalists doing extreme sports to fill that adrenaline void when Wall Street is closed.
Google “Endurance” and up come pictures of young, lean, tanned male muscle in a celebration of machismo as traditional now as images of mustachioed weight-lifters once were in Victorian times.
The same web search also shows sepia-tinged photographs of the tall-masted Victorian adventure ship christened Endurance, on which British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton set off for Antarctic expeditions in the last century. (Twenty-first century sailor Ellen MacArthur’s solo circumnavigation of the globe strangely does not feature.)
Nonetheless, I think many women, hearing Nyad’s achievement, will have given a little nod, and maybe a small smile, of understanding. Many more will never hear of her, yet understand without discussion the will that kept Nyad going.
Though they may not be sports fanatics, or travelers with a yen for the toughest destinations, many women set their own personal standards of endurance in their day-to-day existences.
Their marathon may consist of walking for hours to find water and food in conditions of extreme poverty and hunger. Their endurance training may consist of watching their children die for the lack of a cheap vaccine. Their 53-hour record may be for the time worked within a dangerous and miserably uncomfortable factory, to earn a tiny amount with which a family can just about be supported.
For the luckier ones, endurance may just mean a bleak commute, juggling the needs of employers and families and ever-mounting bills. It may mean keeping smiling when a child is in pain, it may mean getting up for the fifth time in one night to attend to small, fevered offspring while knowing that big important morning meeting is looming. It may mean getting over the disappointment when that male colleague got that promotion. It may mean an ability to keep walking with head high when the cat calls keep coming.
Endurance can mean many things. Diana Nyad has reminded us that it is not an exclusively male domain. Already crowds of cynics are assembling to cast doubt on Nyad’s achievement, wondering how an old woman could have completed that swim in that time. Clearly her next endurance test lies just ahead.
But whatever the outcome, she has broadened the parameters of what the will to keep going looks like. And that is no small feat, either.
This is an original post to World Moms Blog from our writer in the UK and mother of four, Sophie.
The image used in this post is credited to Alan Cleaver. It holds a Flickr Creative Commons attribution license.
Writer, mother, runner: Sophie works for an international news agency and has written about economics, politics, trade, war, diplomacy and finance from datelines as diverse as Paris, Washington, Hong Kong, Kabul, Baghdad and Islamabad. She now lives in London with her husband, two daughters and two step-sons.
Sophie's elder daughter Grace was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome several years ago. Grace is a bright, artistic girl who nonetheless struggles to fit into a world she often finds hard to understand. Sophie and Grace have come across great kindness but more often been shocked by how little people know and understand about autism and by how difficult it is to get Grace the help she needs.
Sophie writes about Grace’s daily challenges, and those of the grueling training regimes she sets herself to run long-distance events in order to raise awareness and funds for Britain’s National Autistic Society so that Grace and children like her can blossom. Her book "Grace Under Pressure: Going The Distance as an Asperger's Mum" was published by Little, Brown (Piatkus) in 2012. Her blog is called Grace Under Pressure.
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by Angela Y (USA) | Mar 5, 2012 | Childhood, Education, Motherhood, Preschool, USA, World Motherhood
In an ideal world, your children leave the house in the morning with their backpacks on and walk down the street to school or to the corner of your street and get picked-up by the school bus. That is how it works (almost) everywhere in United States. Everywhere, that is, except in San Francisco, CA.
A number of years back, San Francisco tried to diversify schools by creating an assignment system in order to give disadvantaged children better options. What it did was make a mess out of the system, and now they are trying to take steps to clean it up. In the midst of this mess, middle-income families, like myself, began to flee the city for neighboring counties where you go to the school where you live – as you should!
But we just don’t want to leave – if we don’t have to. So this year I am playing the school lottery game! The most talked about game in the city – if you have a school aged son or daughter. (more…)
Angela Y. is in her mid-thirties and attempting to raise her two daughters (big girl, R, 3 years; little girl, M, 1 year) with her husband in San Francisco, CA. After spending ten years climbing the corporate ladder, she traded it all in to be a stay-at-home mom! Her perspective of raising a child in the city is definitely different from those who have been city dwellers all their lives, as she grew up in rural Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA) surrounded by her extended family.
Angela Y. and her husband are on their own on the west coast of the United States — the only family help they receive is when someone comes for a visit. But, the lifestyle in San Francisco is like no other for them, so there, they stay! This exercise conscious mom is easily recognized, especially when she is riding around her husband-built bike with two seats on the back. And, when she’s not hanging out with the girls, you can find Angela Y. in the kitchen. She loves to cook for her family, especially dessert, and then eats some herself when no one is looking! Sneaky, mom!
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