Cruise Travel Close To Home From The West Coast
Cruise travel from ports close to home is what passengers want now. In almost all of the cruise reviews, cruise travelers have expressed concern with long airline trips to distant lands. Now they want to cruise from ports that are close to home to enjoy a less stressful cruise vacation. The cruise lines have caught on to this trend and are now positioning their ships up and down the United States East and West Coasts and along the Gulf of Mexico. Let's explore the ports of embarkation on the West Coast starting in Southern California at the port of San Diego and go northward.
If you can take the time before or after your cruise travel, spend some extra time in San Diego. The city of San Diego is blessed with year round warm weather and seventy miles of Pacific Coastline. There are many activities to enjoy while in the city. They have a first class, world famous zoo in Balboa park. At old Town State Historic park learn about the history of California. Near the downtown area there are 15 excellent museums and gorgeous gardens.
A little further up north is Long Beach just 20 miles south of Los Angeles. Here is where the Queen Mary retired to in 1967 and is permanently docked serving as a Hotel. With more 12,000 sea creatures the aquarium is a delightful spot to spend a couple of hours.
If you plan to take your cruise vacation out of Los Angeles there are plenty of sights to see. A pre or post cruise package from the cruise lines will allow you to see the many cultural centers or drive by the star studded neighborhoods of Malibu, Bel Air and Hollywood. Be sure to see Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Chinatown and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. visit funky Venice Beach and dine in the many excellent restaurants. And don't forget to at least window shop on Rodeo Drive.
The dazzling Golden Gate Bridge will be what you sail under on you cruise vacation from San Francisco. Many cruise reviews have mentioned this city as one of the favorites from which to start a cruise. You may opt to take a side trip to the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma Valleys for a day. While in San Francisco check out Fisherman's Wharf, or take a cable car ride through the city. In this city there are numerous excellent restaurants. There is a ferry that will take you over to Alcatraz Island for a glimpse into the life of the prisoners.
Perhaps you have chosen Seattle, Washington as your embarkation port. The lovely Puget Sound area is rich with history of the maritime industries. The Olympic Mountains will leave you feeling awed when viewed from the Space Needle that is 607 feet high. For fun don't miss the Pike street Market for fresh seafood and produce. There are many fleets of sport fishing boats for fishing or for whale watching.
Even further up the coast you are now in Alaskan territory. Fairbanks, which was once a booming mining town, is the entrance to Alaska's interior. If you stay here for a day or two try a really Alaskan adventure and go dog sledding. Maybe you would like to pan for gold, another part of Alaska's history. If you want to see the Northern Lights plan your cruise vacation for late August or early September.
Choosing a cruise vacation out of Whitter, Alaska will allow you to go whale watching, and look for sea lions and bald eagles. This is a small quaint town that really lets you feel what Alaska is all about.
You will fly into Anchorage for departure from Seward, Alaska. Try to stay a few days to explore the riches Anchorage has to offer. There is the beautiful Denali National park, where Mt. McKinney offers spectacular scenery. In Seward you can take a cruise to the Kenai Fjords as a day trip.
Any of these cruise ports will make a great start for your cruise vacation. So when planning any cruise travel pick a port that's close to home and leave some time for exploring the town of embarkation.
Happy Cruising
Copyright © Mary Hanna, All Rights Reserved.
This article may be distributed freely on your website and in your ezines, as long as this entire article, copyright notice, links and the resource box are unchanged.
Mary Hanna has traveled the world by Air and Ship while writing eBooks, software reviews and Practical Articles on Internet Marketing, Cruising, Gardening and Cooking. visit her websites at: http://www.CruiseGold.com http://www.CruiseTravelDirectory.com and http://www.CruisingTips.com
Mary Hanna has traveled the world by Air and Ship while writing eBooks, software reviews and Practical Articles on Internet Marketing, Cruising, Gardening and Cooking. visit her websites at: http://www.CruiseGold.com http://www.CruiseTravelDirectory.com and http://www.CruisingTips.com
Yoga New York Intro Lessons
Holding The Space - The Power of Positive Mantra to Change
I went to this acting workshop once and the guys running it were real guys of faith. All of them working actors. They spoke of having a positive attitude among many other concepts for being successful in such an erratic profession as acting. I noticed one guy, whenever you asked him how he was, he'd say: "I'm blessed, brother." However, the look in his eyes was fear, like he didn't believe it, but rather he was hoping somehow it would be true as soon as possible. Even with his apparent success, he was there with his partners giving this workshop to remind himself of all the things that were working in his life. You could tell he believed them all, but the look in his eyes was fear-- as though he didn't actually feel it. What he was doing was holding the space with his mantra: "I'm blessed, brother."
"In the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god." [John, 1:1]
The word starts with you. Everything is a vibration. Go back to elementary science: all matter is energy and energy is neither created nor destroyed, it simply changes into and out of form by virtue of its vibrational frequency. You don't have to be a mad philosopher or astrophysicist to get this stuff either, you just have to look around you, closely. It's everywhere in nature. So it is, so it shall be. When you speak The Word you vibrate that word's symbolic meaning within your being, in the present moment. So staying positive and saying ""I'm blessed" is certainly better than saying, "I'm screwed, I'm gonna die a fiery death."
Unfortunately if you're in the habit of being negative, the latter might seem more true and easier to resonate with in the moment and that's what people generally do. Being negative then becomes a habit. Talking about failure, especially joking about failure is a way of hedging one's bets and avoiding the pain of defeat. If you expect hard knocks and you joke about it, when it comes you're not as hurt by having had faith and hoped for better. It's a real half-assed way to go and it invites the failure in because you're giving power to failure by being self-deprecating. It's that law of attraction that's become so popular with the movie, The Secret that's all the rage now. What you put your attention on grows: what you focus your thoughts on is what you will magnetically attract into your life.
The thing is, the creative energy is neutral. You and the creative potential of the universe are one. You can call it God or whatever you need to call it to grab on to it. It's there for you to do what you will with it. You've got this mind, given as a gift to you, to direct the light of your soul. You've got free will to create the habits that will attract to you success and prosperity and more importantly a sense of inner peace and it is all begins created with The Word. When the thousands of thoughts that flick through your mind at the blink of an eye flutter by your inner lens you can choose to grab on to any one, or several of those passing thoughts. As soon as you grab on to a thought and you react to it with emotion you start a chain reaction of creation. Backed by emotion thought moves one to speak The Word and hence your reality is created.
Let's say you have to give a speech and you're terrified of public speaking. Your mind is racing, your negative mind is feeding you worst case scenarios and what you grab onto the worst of them and become emotional about it. Then you likely express that fear. You speak some words in relation to it-- expressing your fears to those close to you. All the while your giving more and more power to what you don't want-- to get up and bomb in front of an audience. Thus you keep your reality in place by the habit of your thoughts. Hopefully, you have the balance of the positive mind, telling you that it's going to be okay, telling you how prepared you are or that you're doing it for a higher purpose, driving you to then create a more positive stream of thoughts to act on. Want to see this type of "space holding" in action? Watch professional sports. The athletes pump themselves up for game day and seal their minds as best they can against defeat. What they're doing is holding the space for the win.
So let's go back a moment. Millions of thoughts, you grab one or a chain of them and project these thoughts backed by emotion. Then you speak The Word. These are the elements of how you project your reality. Remember, the mind projects the light of your soul. Human broken down into it's roots, "Hue" and "Man" are as follows: Hue meaning light, Man meaning mind-- light-mind. A human is the light (of the soul) projected with the help of the mind in the present moment. So "holding the space" simply means maintaining the present moment by virtue of your thoughts and words and deeds. Very simply it is how you are projecting in each moment. We all do it , constantly. Mothers and Fathers hold the space for their families. Friends hold the space for each other. It's whatever you're doing to keep your present reality in place. Think of a mother watching silently over her children as they play. She might go about the house, working unnoticed, making the home peaceful and perfect. All the while, her thoughts and intentions are on her children's safety and well-being. With her sixth sense, she's listening for sounds that might indicate the children are in need of something or facing danger. This is holding the space.
I first heard this term "holding the space" in the kundalini yoga community. It's a natural progression when you understand how yogi's work. They discipline themselves through yoga and meditation until their power over the mind gives them the control of their reality. Not bad for the price of admission, I'd say. So everywhere I went these yogis were talking about holding the space and quite honestly it annoyed me. It seemed like hippy buzzwords to me and very often, like my aforementioned acting friend, we can sometimes use buzzwords in a knee-jerk fashion. After hearing the term "holding the space" enough times, I realized it really meant something more than its apparent buzz. It means controlling your present reality by first holding the mental space and then choosing which thoughts you will project, and then back with emotion and ultimately by speaking the word, sparking the process of manifestation.
You can't control time but you can affect the space which you occupy within that time continuum. That is how we are on this earth in a nutshell. We're occupying space within time. When I was growing up, if someone was a real mope, we'd call them "a waste of space." It comes down to how you occupy or "hold the space" in each moment. Since everything comes down to a vibration, a frequency, you have a choice with that vibration: whether to go higher or lower.
What my acting friend knew was that by using a mantra he was seeding his mind with the vibration he wished to create: living a blessed life. The more you repeat a mantra the more it vibrates within you and changes your mind's vibration--The Word in action within the mind. Yogi Bhajan has often been quoted as saying, "fake it until you make it." Essentially that means hold the space in your mind by first by believing it even if the outer picture is in conflict with what you yet desire to create. Mantra helps with this tremendously. In the practice of kundalini yoga we use many sacred mantras whose mere vibrations are like a telephone numbers to many different sacred elements of the universe. These high powered vibrations serve to clear all the subconscious crap that gets in the way of what you wish to project and thus create. Any mantra spoken from the gut, backed with belief and emotion will do the trick. The idea is to seed the mind for change.
"We must become the change we wish to see." --Mahatma Ghandi
When your mind changes, you change. When you change, what you project changes. When what you project changes, what you experience changes-- and this becomes what you see in front of you.
Holding the space means keeping your focus on your intention until the picture outside created, maintained and then held to your satisfaction. Many people feel out of control because they don't have the strength of mind to hold the space that they want to experience. Everything is everything. Keeping the physical body strong and the mind clear, strengthening the mind with disciplined meditation and using mantras to reinforce positive affirmations are all tools one can use to hold the space they desire in their lives.
What kind of space are you holding in your life?
Patrick Lacho is an IKYTA certified yoga instructor and writer based in Los angeles. He teaches a yoga bootcamp http://www.ybc40.com, which takes students through a forty day transformation using yoga, meditation and sound. More articles and discussion about yoga, philosophy, spirituality and more can be found on the website.
G Yoga Mat Bags
The Game of Golf
The Beginning
The origin of golf is open to debate as to being Chinese, Dutch or Scottish. However, modern golf is considered to be a Scottish invention, as the game was mentioned in two 15th century laws prohibiting the playing of the game of gowf. Every game of golf is based on playing a number of holes in a given order. Lots of people think that golf is the most boring televised sport there is, but I think it's because they don't really understand everything that goes into it. The good news is golf is very popular.
The Game
golf is one of the few ball games that does not use a fixed, standardised playing field or area; defined in the Rules of golf as "playing a ball with a club from the teeing ground into the hole by a stroke or successive strokes in accordance with the Rules. Every game of golf is based on playing a number of holes in a given order. The game is won by the party that wins more holes than the other. When the game is tied after the predetermined number of holes have been played, it may be continued until one side takes a one-hole lead, and thereupon immediately wins by one hole. The 2 main formulas used in the game are stroke play (also known as brutto or medal) and match play. The Stroke play formula is an individual way of playing the game as you are competing against the par of the course. The match play formula is a game during which two players play against each other.
A players handicap determines the quality of their game, making a player with a lower handicap better than one with a higher handicap. However, in practice, motivated and ambitious high handicap players strive to lower their handicaps and thus the current official one they show on their cards might not be their real current level, which consequently might put them in a favourable position when playing 'net' formula games.
Summary
Golf is played professionally in many different countries. Golf is clearly a game that is accessible to all people (provided you can pay the green fees). Golf is a mind game more than anything else. Filled with inspirational stories about the great players, great courses and great tournaments, GOLF IS A GAME OF CONFIDENCE encourages golfers, no matter what their level, to reach new heights in their games and their lives. Golf is the worlds most rewarding sport.
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