Niners win in a tough one over a spirited Raiders team, in overtime, in Las Vegas, on New Year’s Day!! WOW! Not perfect by any means but it’s not always perfect and it doesn’t have to be. You never get style points, only matters if it is a win or not, and this one was and now Niners riding a 9-game win streak. Close out regular season holding the 2nd seed with a possibility of earning a bye and the #1 seed if Eagles would fall to Giants. Seems unlikely but it is the NFL and ANYONE, can beat ANYONE on ANY given Sunday. Let’s play it and see what happens. A bye would be nice!    We close out the HPP regular season this week with a person who has become a mentor and good friend of mine, Ralph Steele. Ralph is a licensed therapist, Vietnam veteran, and a meditation teacher grounded in the Buddhist tradition, with a specialty in working with trauma. He has been teaching meditation and leading retreats since 1987 and is the Guiding Teacher at the Life Transitions Meditation Center in Santa Fe, NM. Some of you who participate in our MVP mindfulness courses will recognize him as one of our co-instructors.    Ralph spent his early years in South Carolina where his father was killed in the early 50’s by Klan members when he was 4 years old. He and his mom made their way to Japan where he attended high school. This is where he was introduced to meditation and martial arts.  After graduation he enlisted in the US Army at the height of the Vietnam War. He spent 18 months deployed serving as a door gunner on a helicopter. His experiences in the Army, in combat and with the Army itself, are very powerful, as are his stories on how mindfulness and meditation helped him.  After the Army he went to school earning a BA in Humanistic Psychology and an MA in Family therapy. He ran a meditation-based trauma clinic for 32+ years, and in there he left and spent a year training and serving as a monk in the Buddhist monasteries in Burma and Thailand. He wrote a book entitled Tending the Fire: Through War and the Path of Meditation. He later began breaking the race barrier in US meditation circles leading retreats for people of color. His most recent project is a 3-day meditation retreat exclusively for veterans to be held in Albuquerque NM in October of 2023. More on that to be released soon.   Thank you to all of you for your support over the past year(s). We really appreciate it. We are excited to be sharing these conversations with veterans and the organizations that support them. We will continue to offer support through meditation and mindfulness courses and invite all of you to enter 2023 mindful and being present in the moment, choosing each day who you want to be and how you want to show up. Together we can do anything!!  Love, peace, and kindness!!  With love,