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Natural Awakenings Atlanta

Five Years

Apr 01, 2022 06:00AM ● By Paul Chen
Five years. It’s so very hard to believe. With this issue, I celebrate my fifth anniversary of stewarding the Atlanta franchise of Natural Awakenings. 

To say the last five years have been historic is beyond understatement. I took ownership of Natural Awakenings Atlanta three days before a new administration took over in Washington. The ensuing chaos failed to prepare us for 2020, a year like no other, when the entire world faced a lethal threat, and America fell into an even deeper divide because of it. The one thing that usually unites us—a committed and deadly common enemy—accomplished the opposite. 

If one consumed only mainstream media over the last five years or immersed oneself in social media at length, it would be impossible to conclude that anything positive happened at all. And yet people were writing about an emerging age of greater consciousness, more love and increasing harmony among the peoples of the world.

This proves an eternal truth: Minds create realities. At a time when one person’s fake news is another person’s reality, humanity might have inadvertently discovered together—in the most separate way possible—that everything we experience and feel is solely and purely a function of ourselves. It has not one thing to do with what is outside ourselves. 

Looking Back


I describe Natural Awakenings as “Atlanta’s premier magazine focused on holistic health and conscious evolution.” In my first Letter from the Publisher in April 2017, I wrote: “My intention and mission as a publisher is to connect you who are awakening in Atlanta to the information, resources, opportunities and people that can assist you on your path and accelerate your progress.” To these ends, the magazine has remained true. 

While a significant portion of our editorial comes from our corporate office, I believe our Atlanta staff produces the most innovative and engaging editorial of any franchise. Holistic health is at our core, and we’ve published extensively on energy healing and Ayurveda. Our most popular cover ever featured four Black women promoting a Black & vegan lifestyle. The single most-read article on our website since April 2017 is the lead article of our energy healing special section of April 2019. We’ve also written about local practitioners and invited them to write so we could showcase their expertise and show you how to enhance and maintain health, how to address specific health issues, and how to think about and understand alternative healing within the context of mainstream American medicine. 

But fulfilling our capacity for love, compassion and connection is just as important to us. To that end, we’ve produced articles on the Enneagram, written about the importance of taking retreats, explored healing the trauma of slavery and, most recently, issued a special section on life coaching. After all, this magazine exists for one reason only: to help you become the best version of yourself. 

The most outstanding work we’ve done to raise collective consciousness is to write about yoga. Of course, we write about the physical benefits of this ancient practice, but even the casual observer will note that our primary perspective of yoga is as spiritual science. Yoga, after all, means “union,” and it refers to the union of individual consciousness with Universal Consciousness. Many of our monthly articles on yoga topics speak to the spiritual side of this vast subject.

How Have You Changed? 


I truly and sincerely hope that you, dear reader, have made notable strides in becoming your best self. As publisher of this magazine, I take the task of personal evolution seriously; it would be difficult to be taken seriously by readers and advertisers if I were to champion the cause in mere words. 

So I’d like to share a few of the most important insights I’ve been fortunate enough to learn these past five years. 

  • I am not an “angry person”—someone who always has anger within—but I am afflicted by the delusion of hate. A delusion in the Buddhist sense is a temporary condition, like rainy weather. Practice can and will mitigate anger, and because of practice, I have been able to significantly reduce my violent and vitriolic response to injustice.
  • A recent insight: One cannot truly change for the better if one does not fully accept and love oneself. 
  • One key to accelerating change is to identify ourselves not with our limited human form but with that aspect of ourselves that is infinite, eternal and divine. Call it Christ consciousness, Buddha nature, whatever. Just as tomorrow’s sports heroes imagine themselves scoring the decisive points of a world championship, we need to see ourselves as the saints who love unconditionally, forgive readily, forbear the insults and assaults of enemies, and turn the other cheek. 
  • Given the world in which we live—stressors of everyday life in abundance, environmental toxins everywhere, the poisonous Standard American Diet found on nearly every street corner—self-care is essential and must be approached proactively. Forty-five percent of Americans suffer from chronic disease—heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, arthritis and more—which never appears overnight. Most of these conditions take years to develop. Bottom line: Just because you’re asymptomatic does not mean you’re well.
  • Pranayama practices—breathing exercises—are essential to spiritual development. They refine the nervous system and balance the chakras, both of which are necessary to progress. 
  • Love is everything. And fear is its opponent. 

I conclude this anniversary letter with how I opened my first letter, which was with a well-known quotation from Ram Dass. While I am privileged to publish insightful and meaningful content to help readers grow, I am also well aware that we are all in this together. We are all of one nature, of one creator, of one field of being. Therefore, “when all is said and done, we’re all just walking each other home.” ❧

Publisher of Natural Awakenings Atlanta since 2017, Paul Chen’s professional background includes strategic planning, marketing management and qualitative research. He practices Mahayana Buddhism and kriya yoga. Contact him at [email protected]
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