Maria Shriver and His Holiness By mughes | October 12th, 2006
I was invited to the California Governor and First Ladies Conference. I saw the speaker line-up and couldn’t pass it up. And that was before that I saw that His Holiness, the Dalai Lama was going to be there.
I was so impressed by Maria Shriver! She put together an amazing line-up: Arnold (protestors too), Martha Stewart, Anna Quindlen, Tyra Banks, Fergy (I never liked her before, but she was amazing!), Phyllis George, Karen Hughes, Elle MacPherson, Suze Orman, Tim Russert (wow, I had no idea, I really want to read his book now), plus a whole bunch of powerful corporate women too.
Maria Shriver was a fantastic speaker. Which is a lot more than I can say about Martha Stewart! Martha showed us a PowerPoint of her houses and all their special decorations. Whoopee. Anna Quindlen needs Toastmasters. She read her whole speech. You can’t see me right now, but my eyes are crossing.
Maria was personable, authentic, funny and inspirational. Her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of JFK, was there. They had an obvious bond. She joked about her mother staying “on her”.
It is such a breath of fresh air in this atmosphere of religion in government to have an open-minded perspective. Maria personally went to India to talk HH into coming to California.
His Holiness, as one can expect, was very inspiring. But who knew he would be hilarious? Maria introduced him by saying his values: compassion, happiness, joy and love. Which explains his stand-up routine. He was silly! Halfway through the talk he produced a red visor from out of nowhere and put it on. Maria joked with him about it and he said that it helped him because the lights were so hot. The Dalai Lama in a visor!
But he is the Dalai Lama, after all and he did have some wisdom to impart.
He told us that to forgive, we must learn to separate the action from the person. Reject the act itself, but show the person love. The action is unacceptable but the person is lovable. We must show warmheartedness to all individuals.
His Holiness told us that women can become powerful leaders. But first we must learn that we cannot be leaders in the way that men are leaders. We’ve been trying incorrectly to follow the model initiated by men. Women have to learn how to balance our thinking selves and our hearts.
His Holiness ended his talk with the suggestion that our system of education is missing one component. We must learn to impart warmheartedness. He suggested secular moral teachings. We must accept all religious beliefs and even people without.
HH rocks.
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wow. i’m sorry i missed that. thanks for the recap.
That’s so suprizing about Martha, you would have thought that post prison, Martha’s PR Staff would have preformed a complete personality make-over… After watching Martha Inc. The story about Martha, played by Cybil Shepard, I learned that when she wrote her first cook book, years ago, it took her forever to find her voice… I wonder about Martha today, and have mixed feelings towards her, but after hearing about your first hand account of the event you attended… I’m left wondering if she’s just jaded by everything she’s gone through, and has just given up the ghost so to speak.