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Spirit is the spark that ignites the generator of the Soul and flows naturally through ‘streaming consciousness,’ a frequency that exists outside the body, non-locally – and beyond time and death. Louise shares how she has learned to yield to her timeless Spirit that moves her through difficult moments and to unexpected joy.
  Louise had the gift of ‘sight’ since childhood and began her spiritual quest following the loss of her parents in her late teens and early adulthood. While exploring ways to refine her abilities and use them effectively to empower others, she approached physicists with questions, seeking answers to better understand how she’s able to see clairvoyantly beyond the illusions of death and linear time. She was gathering some interesting information when a few special individuals came forward to caution her, ‘You do not need physics or science to define your work! Let it stand alone!'” They were the late Willis Harman, Gary Zukav, Peter Russell, and Dr. Larry Dossey.
  Louise delights in discovering new, innovative ways to empower clients and help apprentices access their own intuitive abilities. She and her husband recently moved to Santa Fe, and she loves sharing the story of how they met, a tale she feels is wonderfully metaphysically instructive!
  Louise Hauck is an author and ‘Time-traveling’ Intuitive Spiritual Counselor. Learn more about her work at www.louisehauck.com.

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  Celeste Yacoboni is passionate about bringing people together to experience the sacred in their daily lives. In her book How Do You Pray? She asks 129 religious leaders, spiritual guides, healers, activists & other lovers of humanity to share their prayers. It’s been a fascinating journey since she woke up with the vision and followed it, opening her home to what became known as “prayershares” where people of all religions and spiritual traditions came together to experience each others’ prayers and rituals. This book encourages the reader to contemplate the intention of prayer in their own life.
  This is the 10 year Anniversary of How Do You Pray? and Celeste is still asking! Read more

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  Gail recently cleaned her garage, providing the opportunity to reflect on the many risks, rewards, losses and heartbreaks of a 50 year professional career and the lessons learned. Now she celebrates how listening to her soul—often reluctantly!—instead of operating primarily from strategy has created an unusual but fulfilling path.  Her listening for what’s next continues in her 79th year.
  Gail Larsen serves a global clientele through her Transformational Speaking Immersions in Santa Fe and her Online Academy.  Her book Transformational Speaking: If You Want to Change the World, Tell a Better Story (Random House/Brilliance Audio) was described by Fast Company as “transforming your relationship to your voice via the deepest stirrings of your soul.”  More at www.realspeaking.com.

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The two recipients of this year’s scholarships, will speak to us about what receiving the scholarship means to them and how it will support their educational journeys.
Justin Garcia is a native New Mexican and a recent graduate of New Mexico Highlands University with a BA in social work. As an intern at Gerard’s house, he experienced the joys of supporting young people in their grief journeys after losing a loved one. He decided to continue working with children and young adults experiencing trauma and loss. He has been accepted into the Advanced Standing program at NM Highlands which will enable him to get a master’s degree in one year instead of two. The scholarship is greatly appreciated and will enable him to pay for summer classes toward that end.
Raimy Engel is a student in Southwestern College’s Counseling and Art Therapy MA program. She is presently co-facilitating an adult grief group at Gerard’s House and interning as a student therapist at the Santa Fe Adult Detention Facility. Society labels those caught up in our justice system as criminals and with that label comes stigma and shame. She feels passionately that justice-involved people deserve the same care and regard as anyone else. There is much work to be done to improve societal attitudes and systems so people have safe and supportive places to go upon release. She is grateful for the scholarship which will be applied toward her coursework at Southwestern College.
Nicole Maes-Gonzales is the Executive Director of Gerard’s House and has been instrumental in helping to identify this year’s scholarship recipients.

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How the current crises on the planet are the birth pangs of the third turning in human consciousness.
  Ananda Forest was born George Emery Vaillant in Boston in 1959.  He went to Andover, Oberlin and Yale Law School and later taught English at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn.  In 1994, he left the city for upstate New York where he worked as a carpenter and mechanic and started seriously following his bliss.  
  For the next twenty-five years, he worked as a carpenter, but never stopped teaching: twelve years guiding students of shamanism at Spirit Hollow, the nature and spirituality center he co-founded, and the last thirteen years and counting as an adjunct instructor of anthropology, history, and mythology at the Community College of Vermont.    He lives with his wife, iishana Artra, in northern New Mexico.

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I am an Advanced Consultant, Trainer, and Educator in dementia care. I live in Santa Fe and offer monthly educational support classes to families and professional carers who want to improve the way they connect with people who live with dementia and their caregivers. My motto is “The Relationship is Everything”.
A quote from Dr. Kenneth Carder: “When it comes to dementia, the tragedy is not that they’re forgetting, but that they’re forgotten.”
I lead a conversation at The Celebration about the definition of ‘spiritual community’ and what that means for those of us dealing with dementia at home, in the work place, out on the street, in a spiritual setting or within ourselves.

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In Delaney’s early 2000’s, at the end of an 8 year confirmation in a United Church, each young person was asked to write a “Statement of Faith” to be shared with the wider congregation. There was a requirement to quote or reference the Bible twice. If recalling correctly, Delaney made one reference… to Doubtful Thomas.
After a later humbling welcome into Lakota practices, 4 years at Naropa University, 10 years in the film industry in a city where she couldn’t find soul but could find the impact of its absence, and no more familiarity with the Bible now then she had then, Delaney still identifies as half researcher and half spiritual; a curious skeptic, determined to understand what she knows to be true.
What does she know to be true today? 1. Her hard current professional pivot is back to the social sciences and ritual arts, 2. she doesn’t experience the human emotion of awe to be transcendent but rather Earthbound, and 3. she is steadfast to understand what is possible out of awe to address the United States’ meaning crisis.

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In two months, I turn 75. For 3/4 of that time, I lived enclosed in a hard, nearly impenetrable shell. I thought it was protecting me. Instead, it was the barrier to my discovering happiness. The shell formed to protect me from the people who adopted me and my three siblings. The woman didn’t want children. We lived in shame, silence, and despair. By the time I was in college, I had no way to let others in. It was always safest to be alone.
In this talk, I cover the moments of shell cracking such as meeting and marrying Ken Wilber and the subsequent awareness that I did have a good brain and that I was expected to use it. But the shell was stubborn and kept trying to reseal. I share the shattering of that shell, the discovery of happiness and most importantly, how I am sustaining it.
Amy has been a manager of a bookstore, a restaurant, a national barbecue society, a buyer and seller of real estate, sole owner of an organizing business, a lover of martinis, watching other people cook, a therapist and a volunteer coordinator.

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I became an attorney at a young, impressionable age, during the height of the War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement. As an attorney with the Washington, D.C. Neighborhood Legal Services and thereafter as a Clinical Education professor at the UT law school, my passion for justice was manifested by bringing Federal cases on behalf of the oppressed. In time my focus shifted to Family Law, where I enthusiastically embraced the jury system as the mode to best determine the parent who should have primary custody of the child in a divorce procedure.
It wasn’t until a particularly painful custody case, which began in 1996, where because of the notoriety of my client I spent hours alone with him, sharing his pain as he went through several years of agonizing hearings, depositions and trial, that I came to the realization that the only way to bring peace to a family, a community, a nation, and our planet, was to sit at a table together to resolve issues through mediation. It is the most powerful weapon for peace, and has transformed my view of life, relationships and honoring different perspectives.

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In my talk I share about some of my journey for the past 8 years through darkness and back into the light! I share through stories, reflection, humor and celebration of who God calls us to be and become. Currently, I am no longer staying in care facilities, and am creating a life here in Santa Fe, experiencing life and love like never before!As a native Texan, I’m so thrilled that I heard and followed the call to the Land of Enchantment!