New Moon Manifestations

How to want for nothing yet manifest everything. Dropping resistance and knowing deep within that it’s already yours. You’ve come to this place equipped with ancestral wisdom at your core. Walk in your truth and allow yourself to simply be. 🌚✨💫 #meditation #divinefemine #manifest #wisdom #truth #healing #community #solidarity

Stepping Into Self-Love

Stepping Into Self-Love: Meditating on self-love gives one permission to get real and vulnerable with yourSelf. Sitting with one’s thoughts and feelings, rather than pushing them away, is itself an act of love. When you focus on your heart during meditation, you are able to create a compassionate space from which you can feel, without judgment, whatever it is that needs to be felt. During this time you are not beating yourSelf up about whatever you think you did wrong or however you think “I can’t measure up.” You are simply allowing yourSelf to be human. #meditate #divinefeminine #selflove 💞✨

Sacred Intuition: Connecting to your Higher Self

On a deep intuitive level, when you create and take part in simple ritual and ceremony – just as easy as lighting a candle for yourself or another – your divine feminine essence is ignited.

This is where the fearful mind and hardened places in the psyche begin to melt and soften into the energy of the heart. Sacred rituals have been used as a bridge between earth and spirit for eons. From lighting a candle before you meditate and pray, to orchestrating a ceremonial circle involving many people, any kind of sacred ritual is an intentional statement to your Higher Self that you are invoking an ancient, timeless connection of mind, body and spirit. Be sure to join our weekly Women’s Wellness Meditation Circles beginning May 2018!! IG: @iamearthnyc 🙏✨ #meditation #divinefeminine #community #NYC

Children’s Mindfulness Meditation Workshop: The Little Om NYC Launching May 2018!!

Children’s Mindfulness Meditation Workshop: Deliberately focusing attention to the present moment, without judgment to the experience that unfolds. Essentially, attending to the present moment and the feelings that arise, without resistance to those feelings, and specifically teaching children to be aware of the ways they are thinking and feeling in that specific moment. This can help build strategies to deal with past difficulties, future anxieties, and resilience when the current moment is stressful. Various forms of mindfulness meditation such as breath awareness, body scan exercises, walking, and yoga. These practices can help improve students’ self-monitoring of behavior, emotions, and sensations which will help them become aware and responsible for their actions and corresponding emotions. This can also be particularly helpful for students coming from high-stress homes. Stay tuned to The Little Om NYC launching May 2018!! IG: @thelittleomnyc #meditation #mindfulness #community #NYC

REBTEL: The power of the Sun

  
In the last few years, the rise of Nigeria’s economy to become the largest in Africa has often been heralded for overcoming numerous systemic obstacles but there remains one obstacle which many believe holds the country back: a chronic shortage of power supply.

With about 90 million Nigerians living without power, citizens are forced to live on expensively maintained generator sets. The effect of the lack of electricity is significant as it continues to hamper economic growth and hurts investor confidence. However a partnership between the World Bank, International Financial Corporation as well as local banks and energy firms in Nigeria could help assuage the pressing issue.

The Lighting Africa Project, as it has been tagged, will focus on helping to develop a private sector that will provide electricity, using solar power, to up to a million households in Nigeria. The project will target households without access to the national grid in rural communities over the next five years.

To make this happen, the World Bank will play a key role as it will provide low-interest financing for investors and energy firms involved in the partnership. One of the major goals of the project is to reduce the heavy dependence on kerosene lamps and gasoline-powered generators which pose various health and environmental risks.

A better bet

Exploring solar energy could be a more realistic option to fix some of Nigeria’s power issues since building new national grids could cost billions of dollars. In the long-term, alternative clean energy will also help the country meet its ambitious plan to down emissions by as much as 45% by 2030 as part of the landmark climate change deal reached in Paris last week.
In line with this, Nigeria recently announced a ban on low-cost generators citing health risks caused by emissions and fire hazards. It also stepped up its national renewable energy program through an agreement with the United Kingdom in October.

A similar trend is visible across most of the continent as the African Union recently announced a $20 billion investment in renewable energy over the next decade. One example of a viable private sector solar model is M-Kopa in Kenya where the pay-as-you-go solution already reaches 275,000 households with plan to reach serve one million homes in East Africa by 2017.

The Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit

  
The Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit is a majority women group of rangers, founded by Transfrontier Africa to protect the Olifants West Region of Balule Nature Reserve, part of Greater Kruger National Park in South Africa. The area where the Black Mambas operate is a free-range savannah ecosystem with open borders to the Kruger National Park. The highly endangered Black Rhino and also the endangered white rhino are strongly represented in the area.

Since the unit went into operation in 2013, the number of rhinos lost to poaching has plummeted, snaring and illegal bush-meat incidents have been reduced by 75 per cent, and nine poacher incursions have been detected, leading to the arrests of the offenders. The 26 unarmed members of the unit conduct foot-patrols, observations, vehicle checks and, road blocks, as well as educating their peers on the importance of conservation and gathering intelligence from their communities.
Restoring dignity and self-worth, and empowering communities to play their part, is a crucial component of efforts to combat the illegal wildlife trade across the globe, and the Black Mambas are an outstanding example of success. Their brave actions are sending the message to others in South Africa and beyond that communities themselves can prevent the illegal wildlife trade—which threatens not only iconic species such as rhino and elephants, but puts money in the hands of criminal gangs, thus increasing insecurity, and threatens livelihoods.

Thank you for reading!

Brazil’s Doce River: The Dead River 


​Samarco Mineiracoes, a 50-50 joint venture between Australia’s BHP Billiton and Brazil’s Vale, operates an iron ore mine in Mariana, in the Brazilian south-eastern state of Minas Gerais where three dams used to hold millions of cubic metres of tailings, or mining waste. One of the dams, its second largest, burst on November 5, unleashing 62 million cubic metres of sludge into the Doce River at about 70km/h. It destroyed the town of Bento Rodrigues, killing at least 13 people (12 are still missing), displaced thousands of others, affected water supplies to an estimated 250,000 people and killed fish stocks along 600 kilometres of river in two states.
Last week, the mud arrived at the river mouth in Espirito Santo state on Brazil’s Atlantic coast, endangering protected marine species and polluting beaches at important tourist destinations. Indigenous people from the Krenac​ ethnic group have also been affected, with 126 families of the riverside Atora tribe accusing the company of destroying their sacred river. “A lot of people think the river is just water and fish. For us the river is a source of survival and culture. Now the river is dead,” Atora chief Leomir Cecílio de Souza told media outlet UOL.