Live Life!

Dear Friends,

If you are on my Facebook page, you probably notice that I post over and over again, "Live Life." So many people go through life on auto-pilot ... really not stopping to enjoy their journey. Life is a blink in time. Time truly goes by quickly. It does not wait for us to catch up.

Those on the other side constantly tell me to let their loved ones know that life is to be enjoyed, and to be truly lived. They tell me that the 'simple things' are those that are the most memorable ... a walk by the seashore, time spent eating with family and friends, the smell of a new born baby or of the first flowers blooming in spring, walking through fields of lavender, or staring up at a star-filled night and dreaming.

This is your life ... what are you doing to make it enjoyable and worthwhile?

Yesterday, a very dear middle-aged woman came to me and told me she is searching for what her legacy will be. The spirit world told her to slow down and not worry. Her legacy is being created with every step she takes and every smile she gives. We are creating our legacy every moment of every day. Don't take that for granted.

Below is an article entitled "Dare to Live." After reading it, ask yourself if you are truly living or just existing.

I hope you live... I wish you the best of life.

Anna

Awaken Your Soul

A Shamanic Retreat

Facilitated by

Anna L. Raimondi

Saturday, March 19, 2016

9:30am - 4:00pm

Open Sky Yoga

95 Cross Highway

Redding, Connecticut

You are invited to join Anna, and other like-minded people, on a journey using the techniques and spiritual practices of the Native American Indians to discover your personal purpose, your highest vision and to embrace it with courage and confidence. Transform your fears, limiting beliefs and old thought patterns as you align yourself with Spirit and hear what the universe desires in order for you to be happy.

Together we will build a medicine wheel, journey to meet our power animals and spirit guides, invite our lost soul fragments that has left us due to trauma and pain to come back to us as we connect to mother earth and all creation.

No previous experience or knowledge involving Shamanistic practices is necessary.

This retreat is designed for deep holistic alignment with your body, emotions, soul essence, and mind. It is for those who want to learn and remember not only who they truly are but how to take that realization and live their lives from the Truth of their Being. The experience will allow each participant to heal and move forward in life using tools to maintain resilience from the inside out, including mind, body, heart and soul.

A full agenda of the retreat will be disseminated one week prior to the retreat.

Cost: $250 (lunch is included)

Please send payment to:

Anna L. Raimondi

TranquilSpirit LLC

PO Box 553

Georgetown, CT 06829

or via Paypal.com pay to tranquilspiritct@aol.com

Opening Up to Your Intuitive Self

Facilitated by

Anna L. Raimondi

September 16 - 18, 2016

Garrison Institute

Rt. 9D at Glenclyffe

Garrison, NY 10524

You are gifted with psychic ability. This retreat will give you the tools to recognize it and utilize this wonderful innate gift. By learning how to connect with this ability, you will feel empowered, connected, and fully relaxed - no matter your surroundings or your environment.

Throughout this weekend, Anna will guide you and teach you to hear, feel and open up your "third eye" to your intuition. You will be able to practice on others as your soul awakens to this inborn ability. Anna will help each person connect to their souls for the answers they seek. This retreat is experiential and each person will have the opportunity to use the pendulum, cards, experience reading others by touch, meditation and holding objects. Among other things, each person will:

Enhance their intuition and insight
Connect with spirit guides
Learn how to use protection during spiritual exploration
Gain answers to deep questions

Retreat Cost:

The cost is per person and includes tuition, meals and accommodations.

Single Room: $750 per person

Double Room: $675 per person

Please mail payment to:

Tranquil Spirit LLC

PO Box 553

Georgetown, CT 06829

Schedule of Payment:

50% deposit is required to hold your space. Please remit your deposit as soon as possible as space is limited.

Final Payment due by .

Deposit refund schedule:

Your deposit is 100% refundable if cancellation is more than 120 days before the the first day of the retreat.

50% refundable if cancellation for any reason is 90 to 119 days before the first day of the retreat.

Non-refundable if cancellation for any reason is less than 89 days before the first day of the retreat.

There are no exceptions to the above.

The Garrison Institute

The Garrison Institute is located in Garrison, New York in a former Capuchin monastery overlooking the Hudson River. It is situated on the beautiful 95-acre Glenclyffe property, formerly the estate of Hamilton Fish, Governor of New York and later Secretary of State under President Grant.

One of the Garrison Institute's primary goals is to create a hospitable environment for our guests. We can offer a place of refuge where people can withdraw from the business of their daily life. Accommodations are simple and quiet with enough space to breathe, rest and meditate. The tranquil, park-like setting, the gardens, the gazebo on a bluff by the river, and the many walking paths together create a natural setting for contemplation. The Garrison Institute property is connected to the Hudson River trail system and the Appalachian Trail.

The Garrison Institute is located directly off Route 9D in Garrison, New York, in Putnam County. The venue is 50 miles north of New York City and approximately 30 minutes from the city of Poughkeepsie, New York. Major highways nearby include Interstate 84, Route 9, the Palisades Parkway and the Taconic State Parkway. They offer on-site parking for those who will arrive by car.

Dare to Live

by Arnaud Desjardins

One day, as I was answering a question on the subject of death, the following words came to me: "You are not afraid of death, you are afraid of life." Thinking over that response, I realized how true it was. Our fear of death is all the greater when we have not dared to live. In fact, if you stop fearing life, you can no longer fear death because you will have discovered within yourself what life really is. (Not your own life, but the unique and universal life that nourishes us.) And it becomes obvious that such life is independent of birth and death.

Westerners commonly consider life to be the opposite of death, but Orientals consider birth to be the opposite of death. For them, life expresses itself through a movement of perpetual change: an uninterrupted play of death and birth. Many spiritual paths share this conviction. My own "guru," Swami Prajnanpad, gave simple examples to illustrate this: the birth of the child is the death of the baby; the birth of the adolescent is the death of the child.

Daring to live means daring to die at each moment. But it also means daring to be born; daring to pass through important stages in life where the person you used to be dies, in order to make room for someone with a new view of the world (assuming that there are various levels before the ultimate level of Awakening). It is a case of being more and more aware that each moment you are born and you die, you die and you are reborn.

To put it simply, daring to live also means no longer having the slightest fear of what we feel. I am sure that many of you agree with me, especially those who have begun to discover what lies within their own unconscious. You are afraid of what you bear inside because you cannot fully count on yourself; you know from experience that you tend to get yourself into situations which you end up bitterly regretting. But you are also afraid of what you carry inside because each of you, as a child, has experienced situations where the way you expressed yourself was brutally contradicted. Your joy of living, high spirits or fervor led to catastrophe when you found yourself being severely reprimanded for something you had been so happily doing.

Perhaps through therapy you had the chance to re-experience how bewildered you were to see your parents overcome with anger, when you had been having so much fun cutting up the best curtains in the house with a big pair of scissors. I once used the shoes of everyone in my family for boats in the bathtub. My parents didn't have much money at the time and there weren't very many shoes in the closet, but there were enough for me to float. Although that sounds quite harmless, it was an incident I re-experienced with tragic intensity between my mother's despair, my father's severity, and my own shattered happiness. I couldn't understand why something that had been such fun had upset my mother so much. She was convinced that all the shoes in the house were completely ruined.

It often turns out that something which was a small incident in the eyes of the parents was actually a terrible event in the eyes of the child we once were. A fear of what we are capable of very quickly takes hold of us. From then on, unless our parents are particularly careful, we ourselves start to smother our own life force. We start repressing our vital impulses. Then, as both psychology and self-observation show us, our discovery of the sexual world often takes place in an atmosphere of uneasiness, misunderstanding, and a certain guilt that accompanies childish masturbation. The urges which arise in us during adolescence, which cannot always be satisfied as we would wish, leave us troubled and lost. We no longer completely accept the very powerful life force or libido within us. Hence, in a world of increasingly free moral standards, where there are enormous possibilities for self-expression and many opportunities to travel, the majority of you no longer dare to live fully. And once you no longer completely assume the life force within you, you begin to fear death. But the fear of death is an illusion; do not be bothered by the fear of dying. What is really important is to free yourself from the fear to live.

There are two faces to this fear of living: one is the fear of what is inside us; the other is the fear of concrete situations and of the consequences they can bring about. Very quickly, our fear of living turns into a fear of suffering. We feel that it is better to live less, so as to suffer less. Look inside yourself; see what is there; ask yourself if this is how you feel. Private interviews and group meetings with those who come here to our center have shown me how true this is. You are afraid to live because to live means to take the risk of suffering. This fear is rooted in past experience, which showed you that the more you lived, the more unhappy you became. Not only because your enthusiasm may have led you to put shoes into the bathtub but because when you fell in love at the age of eighteen, you ended up suffering so much. Consequently, a certain decision tends to surge up inside sometimes unconsciously, sometimes quite consciously I don't want to suffer like that any more." Now that is a very fine decision to make but it leads to another one which is totally false, "so I will never love again" or "so I will never put myself into dangerous situations again." The fact is you must realize that if you commit yourself to the path of knowledge, if you want to gradually pierce the secret of suffering, it is essential to take the risk of living and of suffering.

Your childhood vitality and perhaps even your exuberance often brought about rebuke. You heard statements like, "You shouldn't do that!" or "How dare you do that!" And so this vitality or exuberance became associated with value judgments. Spiritual teachings also seem to greatly condemn the richness of life; they recommend asceticism, austerity, renouncing the world, going into monasteries or hermits' caves and to top it all off, "death to oneself" or "the death of the ego." I personally was quite surprised to see an austere man like Swami Prajnanpad insist so strongly on the importance of daring to live, laying oneself open and rolling with the punches. It did not seem to go along with my understanding of Hindu spirituality. Yet there is a real risk here, one that I barely escaped on numerous occasions. It consists in trying to camouflage one's fear of living behind noble but untrue words. And so you fight against a feeling of suffocation in relation to your desire to lead a vast and full life, one rich in experience. We run the risk of deluding ourselves by turning our spiritual ideals into an excuse for our fear to live.

Arnand Desjardins, formerly a well known film-maker, is an eminent French spiritual teacher, widely respected in his own country as the author of numerous books on spiritual life.

Please "like" my page Anna L. Raimondi on Facebook. It is important that I have a social media presence for all the things I would like to do in 2016. Appointments can be booked from that page by clicking the scheduling button on the left side of the page. I am counting on you!!!

As a reminder, I have a cancellation page on Facebook called "Anna Raimondi - Cancellations." Please sign up for that page if you would like an appointment sooner than your scheduled reading.