Sisters woman leads peace meditation

Promoting world peace through meditation is the mission of ordained spiritual humanist minister Terri Daniel.

Daniel, who is currently building a home in Sisters, officiated at a Group Meditation for World Peace last Thursday at the Old Stone Church in Bend.

About 50 people, several of whom are Sisters residents, participated.

Sisters musicians Katie Cavanaugh and Lynn Woodward sang a composition about peace.

"It was a ceremony that I learned at a spiritual retreat last year from a man named Ken Harsh," said Daniel.

Daniel asked participants to visualize places on Earth where there is suffering and strife, "war-torn countries, poverty, hunger." Then, she asked each person to send "healing light to those places." She also asked participants to visualize an elected official in Washington or a businessman on Wall Street and pass this "light energy" onto them.

"We cover them with light. This is a way of metaphysically raising the vibrations around the world," she said.

"Fifty people in Bend, Oregon doing this is not going to stop the war," she said. "But five million people doing this every day will."

People placed toy soldiers on a map in Iraq and then took them out of Iraq and placed them back in America to symbolize bringing troops home.

"Every little thing that we did with these maps was a symbolic gesture of putting our own attention on peace for the world," Daniel said.

Participants put hearts and flowers and a plastic sun on Washington D.C. to help the government "see the light." They placed a string of beads around the Gulf of Mexico to symbolize helping the people who are still suffering from hurricane Katrina and around the Indian Ocean to symbolize people recovering from the tsunami. They placed little fishes on the polar icecap to symbolize protecting it from melting.

After the symbolic healing ceremony, participants held hands and engaged in a three-minute silent meditation, after which Mariah Crawford, a spiritual teacher from Redmond, officiated in a gratitude blessing.

"After that we played some very upbeat music and danced ... and celebrated," said Daniel.

"You can march. You can write letters to Congress. You can lobby. You can do all those things, and that's all good," said Daniel. "But it is my belief that unless you also work for peace on a spiritual or ... metaphysical level, nothing is going to change."