Voting As an Act of Resistance: Why Voter Engagement Might Be the Most Important Thing You Do This Year

By Brenda Murphree

When voters are informed about issues and candidates, and when even a small number of sporadic voters are mobilized to vote, that difference has the power to shift elections. Why do eligible voters not vote? All the reasons you’d expect.… simply talking with low-likelihood voters about voting, while providing straightforward information people need in order to vote, increases the likelihood that they will actually cast a ballot. They’ve talked with someone who believes their voice matters. They’ve connected the act of voting to issues that matter to them. And they’ve gotten helpful info they didn’t have before, about voter ID, sample ballots, early voting, mail-in voting, and more….

Reciprocity and Reflection: Using Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for Inner Awareness

By Kameron Kurtz

If Spirit asks us to pay attention, we owe it to ourselves to use every tool available to see clearly. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for interpretation might not feel like an act of faith at first. That’s fine. Faith can be reinforced by knowledge, and knowledge comes from testing tools that actually work…

When Is the Right Time to Have a Mediumship Session?

By Annie Larson

The decision to have a mediumship session is a personal choice, influenced by various factors surrounding grief, emotional readiness, cultural and religious views, beliefs about the afterlife, communication preferences, and criteria for selecting an appropriate medium and setting. Here’s how understanding all these elements can help individuals determine the most appropriate time to see a medium….

Yoga Without a Single Beginning: Listening for Truth in a Tradition Shaped By Movement, Memory and Power

By Anjali Sunita

Yoga does not arrive with a birth certificate. It comes to us without a single point of origin, without a founding moment that can be neatly named or owned. Instead, Yoga appears the way breath does — emerging, disappearing, changing shape depending on the body, culture, and time that receives it. Its history is not a straight line but a river system, fed by many tributaries, shaped by land, people, and exchange. To study Yoga’s past is to learn how to listen across centuries of movement, remembering and forgetting. Yoga’s history is an ongoing conversation that, like all conversations, includes dynamics of power….

Spring 2026: Engagement — Understanding Yourself and Others

By Misty Kuceris

During the Spring 2026 quarter there are two important events you’ll experience: the Total Lunar Eclipse on March 3, which will be visible, weather permitting, in the DMV; and Uranus entering the sign of Gemini on April 25. This ingress into a new sign indicates a shift of energies over the next seven years that focuses on your relationships with individuals in your community as well as continued technological advances that change how you communicate both locally and globally….

Five Ways to Integrate Reiki and Astrology

By Ally Ayala

Astrology and Reiki both explore our relationship to the universe in their own ways. Reiki works with the universal life force energy — the vital essence that animates all living things — while astrology studies the cosmic rhythms that shape our inner and outer worlds. Both remind us everything is energy and we are never separate from the greater flow of life….

Understanding Brain Health Amid Midlife and High Stress

By Helena Amos, M.Ac., L.Ac., Euro. Physician

Brain health refers to the brain’s ability to function optimally across cognitive, emotional, metabolic, and neurological domains, while remaining resilient against stress, hormonal transitions, inflammation, vascular changes, toxins, and neurodegeneration. It is not defined by the absence of disease, but by clarity of thought, emotional stability, restorative sleep, adaptability, and sustained mental vitality across life stages. For women navigating perimenopause, menopause, and post-menopause — often while managing demanding careers, caregiving roles, and chronic stress — brain health requires a targeted, preventive, systems-based approach….

Compassion Fatigue and the Case for Energy Hygiene

By Jennie Sikes

The term compassion fatigue has existed for more than thirty years, yet it entered mainstream awareness with surprising speed after 2020. Its rise was not accidental. The collective experience of mass trauma, caregiving overload, and prolonged uncertainty collided with a cultural shift that made emotional labor and mental health part of everyday conversation. Caregivers spoke more openly about exhaustion. Therapy language migrated from clinical spaces to social media feeds. What had once been unnamed suddenly had a vocabulary….

The Reciprocal Dance of Staying Healed

By Taniesha Garrison, Ed.M.

Our culture glorifies the breakthrough moment: the rupture, the revelation, the ensuing rapture. But the phase that comes after — the one where you figure out how to integrate practices to sustain the change — gets far less airtime. There are no dramatic before-and-after photos for the work of anchoring insight into everyday life. No viral testimonials about the Tuesday morning you chose presence over autopilot. Yet the actual healing lives in the reciprocal work of sustaining….

Have You Forgotten to Remember? Three Reasons Memory Matters

By Carol Burbank

It’s a strange time, isn’t it? It’s as if the whole country is afflicted with a puzzling dementia, marked by confusion, anxiety and fear. Memory itself seems to have become untrustworthy, and as a result we grasp at shadows, finding “certainties” that dissolve even as we tighten our grip. What is the remedy for forgetting to remember ourselves as whole souls in a complex world? I believe renewed connection to authentic memories can be restorative again, a way out of personal and cultural crisis and back into community. Here are three reasons to actively reconnect with our memories in these stressful times….

Embodied Knowing in the Garden

By Taylor Logsdon

For millennia, our ancestors relied on their senses, honed through experience and by dependence on land and living things for daily sustenance. Though largely forgotten in our culture, this way of knowing remains part of our inheritance: a body that recognizes healthy ecosystems and the conditions that support them….

Update on Virginia Recreational Cannabis Market

By LJ Dawson, The Outlaw Report

Virginia lawmakers have introduced House Bill 642 in the 2026 legislative session to establish a legal framework for adult-use cannabis retail sales, including a clear earliest possible launch date for the regulated marketplace. Under the bill, retail marijuana sales in the Commonwealth may not occur prior to November 1, 2026, marking a target date for the potential start of lawful commercial cannabis transactions if the legislation is enacted and signed into law….

Invasive Language: How We Label Plants Says More About Us Than Them

By Kathy Jentz

Has the language we use around plants that come from elsewhere ever bothered you? It sure has been on my mind in these fraught times with all the tension about “others” in “our country.” For the past few decades, I have been extremely uncomfortable with the terms we use for native versus exotic plants. This issue goes beyond being politically correct. The language we use defines our world around us and shapes our views of it. If a plant is called a weed, then that is how we see it. If instead of Milkweed, we called it Butterfly Flower, you see how that changes things….

What Am I to Do With My Fear? My Grief? My Anger?

By Therisia “Trish” Hall

Have you ever felt totally out of control? Or as if you were possessed by some external force, only to discover the force was actually inside you? At times, emotions can feel like being sucked into a vacuum — one that swirls everything in its path with no regard for what remains standing. Emotions are powerful. They can cripple or empower. They can paralyze or energize. And during times of upheaval — when what once felt safe and predictable has been overturned — we may forget we hold within us the capacity to redirect that force. We can transmute emotional chaos into purposeful energy. We can pause, ask, How am I to serve? — and then listen for what wants to emerge through us….

Evolutionary Groups: A New Frontier in Human Connection, by Patricia Pfost and Anne Altvater

Review By Dahlia Rose

The world at large is growing increasingly distant and yet digitally close. Our ability to relate to one another is being fragmented by differing ideologies, belief systems, and socioeconomic divides, and in many ways, we are slowly losing the ability to truly relate to and deeply see one another. It is strange to consider that, as far as we have come as a species, we are now having to consciously reintroduce what connection means. Yet this is precisely what Evolutionary Groups: A New Frontier in Human Connection offers….

Welcoming Spring With Ritual and Creativity

By Jazmine Jenné Williams

Spring, in its recalibration, is not as deliberate as summer, yet more forgiving than winter. It knows it must take its time in arriving, as it is the midwife, ushering in the wisdom winter has given. Spring Equinox reminds us we can always begin again, and we can do so steadily. As we welcome the Spring Equinox, let us observe how it arrives in our bodies, using a simple ritual for attunement and creative practices to nurture the energy of this time….