Guy Spiro: Salle, I usually like to start by asking people to briefly tell their story.

Salle Redfield: I grew up with two academic parents that were both English professors. I always saw them writing and I had a desire to write, but I put it aside and went the traditional, corporate route, working at a university for awhile. I went through my first marriage and met James three years later. We ended up self-publishing the Celestine Prophecy and we started lecturing together. I was leading meditations. Time Warner audio books was just forming and they came to one of our events in New York . They heard me lead a meditation and offered me a contract the next day. Since then, I have been lecturing and leading meditations and creating books and tapes. Three years ago I decided to become certified as a life coach. I really like working one-on-one with people.

GS: What kind of metaphysical readings and studying did you do before meeting up with Jim?

SR: I was involved with A Course in Miracles group and I attended several Unity Churches.

GS: I have a great respect for the writings of Charles Fillmore [co-founder of the Unity movement]. You have to allow for the times he lived and wrote in, but the core of the Jesus teachings is there.

SR: Exactly, have you ever been to the Unity Village ?

GS: I have not been to the Village yet. Jeanne has.

SR: What a lovely feeling. We lectured there. But I was definitely involved with other mediation groups. I read Yogananda, Richard Bach, the standard books that you read at that age and in those times. I was more into A Course in Miracles.

GS: One of my favorite lines from the Course is, “The voice of God is as loud as your willingness to listen.” That’s good stuff.

SR: It certainly is.

GS: Tell us about your Global Prayer Project.

SR: It is a gathering, a teleconference that we have every other Tuesday night, and the purpose for me is two-fold. Number one is so that we can come together and experience the power of prayer and how it can influence our own lives and the lives of those around the world. Number two is so that we know that we are not alone in the world, I think one of my greatest missions now is to show people that they are not alone in their beliefs and in their desires for a better world and better life for everyone.

GS: I think the concept of people coming together globally and praying and meditating for peace is very, very important. I really believe that we ended the Cold War, using this exact spiritual technology.

SR: The Harmonic Convergence, yes.

GS: The first big event was John Randolph Price’s World Instant of Cooperation in ’83. There were other events leading up to The Harmonic Convergence in ’87, more efforts following that and in ’89, the Berlin Wall fell down. A critical mass of light was generated and it just rose up and struck down the Cold War and that huge dark thought-form of nuclear annihilation that had loomed so large in mass consciousness.

SR: I certainly hope that the prayers of our group and lots of other groups that are coming together are going to eventually make some big shifts.

GS: It is inevitable. I am actually involved in organizing one myself. When the second airplane hit the building, one of my first reactions was, “Well, at least the global prayer and meditation events will start up again.” It was funny, the Cold War ended and the Berlin wall fell down and everyone pretty much went, “Cool, no more cold war, what’s on TV?”

SR: Well, that in addition to how do I raise my children now, let’s get back to that, because there were so many different things going on at that time. There were children, there was family, there was making a living. One thing that I do want to say about the Global Prayer Project is that we really do come together and join our energetic selves and then we take that energy and at some point in the phone call, James and I encourage everyone to pull that energy into their communities, into their homes, into their bodies, so that they know when they take a deep breath every morning, that we are still there with them. I love the concept of being joined together in the highest for each other.

     Some of the emails that I get from people who participate in the call say what I am hoping for, that they feel less alone in the world. It has made them much more conscientious when driving down the highway. That person that they might want to get out of their way may be someone that they’ve been praying with, or who is desperately needing their prayers. And also, when they go into, say, the bank or a restaurant, they are much more conscientious of the individuals there.

GS: Another way that it is so valuable is that there are a lot of people who are very interested and involved in these kinds of things, but are fairly isolated. Some of us live in large urban areas where there are a lot more people to get together with, but some people are out there by themselves.

SR: Absolutely. We just spoke with Dannion and Kathryn Brinkley last night, and Dannion was saying that one of the things he hears the most, as he travels around the world, is people asking, “Are we the only ones who believe this way?” We hear that as well.

GS: But the truth is that there are more and more all the time.

SR: It is just about finding your way to connect. I know the internet has really made our world much smaller and given us the ability to find each other.

GS: This project is one of the most important things for you at this point. What is the process like? People log-on online and do the phone connection?

SR: People can log-on online, definitely, we are live streaming. But also they can call into a bridge line or a teleconference line. The beauty of the teleconference line is that people can say hello. Someone will say, “This is Joe from Africa or this is Mary from Australia and this is so-and-so from Iceland .” It is really lovely to know who we are connecting with at the beginning of the call. Of course you can’t hear everyone. People are talking over each other, but you do get an essence. And then at the end, we get to say good night or good day to each other and many people will say, “I love you. Thank you.” We don’t know each other physically. We have never met face to face, yet there is this beautiful connection. Hearing these voices is like hearing the angels say goodnight.

GS: What is the meditative process like? Can you describe what you do?

SR: We do two meditations. The first one is about everyone who is on the call or who is listening on the internet coming together energetically. We visualize light within our bodies and becoming light beings, and then we begin to notice how our energy bumps up against someone to the left and to the right in the circle and across the circle. We create this metaphysical circle together. Then we put planet Earth together in the circle and we surround it with our love and our light and our highest intention. We might spotlight a particular region. Towards the end of the call, we do a second prayer/meditation where we have people energetically move into the center of the circle and we always start with people who are in grief. I think when we are grieving, we are the most vulnerable and we need the most support. Then we will ask people who are not feeling well, physically or emotionally, to go into the center. We take time, having each group go into the center to feel that love and support.

GS: Very nice, and you lead this meditation?

SR: I do primarily lead it, but James also contributes to the meditative part, and he will always pick a topic to talk about outside the meditations during the time.

GS: Excellent. How long does the whole process last?

SR: One hour.

GS: Great work, Salle. What else is important to you right now? Obviously, the movie?

SR: Definitely, definitely. So much of our lives has been about promoting the movie, putting together the movie, producing the movie and now we’re in the phase, or I am in the phase, where I can talk with people about what they’ve gotten from the movie. It is like my child is out in the world. I’ve done my part and he/she is out there now. There is less and less focus on actually doing the mechanics, now it is just encouraging people to talk about it and share it with their friends. The other thing that is very important to me is my life coaching practice.

GS: Talk about that a little.

SR: The website is http://salleredfield.com. I’m really into working with people and helping them to develop what they want to do next with their lives. I have certainly been in places in my life where I have been very stuck, and it seems that working with a life coach was the number one thing that pulled me out of that. Now I am very much in the place where we have done a good bit of our past work and we are really moving forward, creating or co-creating the most exciting, fulfilling life.

GS: How would you describe a coaching scenario?

SR: It is about someone coming in and saying, “This is where I am in my life right now. I have a lot of the things that society says I am supposed to, yet why do I feel empty? My children are still young, I’m doing my best, but why am I not happy?” We begin to reconcile the fire within. That is what we work together to do, and I’ll sit with him or her, and we work as long as it takes to really discover where they maybe took a crossroad instead of staying on the heart’s desire path. We look realistically at how can one implement this new desire in the current life? Many people have children and can’t pick up and go to an ashram. They can’t suddenly shift careers, but maybe they can get a little essence of that in their lives. If there are women that want children but couldn’t have children, how else can they mother? How else can they nurture? Where do we go from here?

GS: What is cutting edge for you now? What are you learning?

SR: How much alike we are and how individual we really think we are, when so many of our thoughts are similar. That’s why comedians are successful. They are giving you jokes that have an underlying meaning that we all understand. Of course we have individual passions and purpose and we love our children in a unique way, but yet humanity is so much alike.

GS: We’d be better off focusing on our commonalities more than our differences.

SR: You are right.

GS: Have you had to deal with any sort of sense of being overshadowed by Jim or any of that?

SR: In the early days, I certainly had to work on that, and not allow myself to go in that place. Fortunately, my books and tapes came out pretty quickly and James never, ever tried to overshadow me. He is really good about that.

GS: What will you and James be doing at the Celebrate Your Life conference here in June?

SR: We are going to do what we do in the Global Prayer Project. The second lecture is actually all about those who are interested coming together live to do what we do in the teleconference.

GS: Do you have any last words here for our readers?

SR: I would probably go back to the concept of having faith that we are not alone. There are a lot of us who want the sense of community. We’re building that in our lives. I can walk into a store in Chicago and feel at home because my humanity is bumping up against the humanity of everyone else there, and a certain level of kindness. I would like to know that I can go to Rome , for instance, and do the same thing and that the cultural differences don’t matter. It’s about humanity. That’s my ultimate dream for this planet.

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Salle Redfield and James Redfield will be appearing at Celebrate Your Life, June 22-24 in Chicago, see the advertisement in this issue or visit www.CelebrateYourLife.org for details, and at a day long workshop on Sunday, May 20, at Infinty Foundation, Highland Park, www.infinityfoundation.org.

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