How to Post to the Sharing Forums

It's easy to post to the Sharing Forums at SpiritualityandPractice.com.

• First, you either create a new account or login to the account you already have (created when you signed up for an e-course or purchased one of the DVDs).

• Take a few minutes and fill out a profile so that people viewing your posts can know a little bit about you. Do this by clicking on "Update My Profile" from the right column of your account page or "My Profile" from the very top of the page.

• Pick a display name to show online with your posts — you can use your first name, full name, or any nickname you want. Also indicate your geographical location.

• Upload an "avatar" — a photo of yourself, a picture of something that is meaningful to you, even a photo of your pet! Don't worry about sizing the photo; our system will do that; simply browse to where you have stored the picture on your computer and hit enter. If you don't want to have a special avatar, the system will display one of our default avatars.

• Especially if you plan to participate in the Private Practice Circles, we encourage you to also complete the "Expanded Profile" — checking and listing your interests, favorite practices, teachers, movies, books, and more.

• Choose the level of privacy you want for the information in your Expanded Profile: Public, Private Practice Circles Only, or Private. See the explanations of what these mean at the bottom of the Profile page.

• Once you are logged in, go to the S&P Community area (from the navigation bar) and click on one of the topics. You'll see a description of the kinds of conversation encouraged in that thread. Some topics have more than one thread.

• To post, scroll down the page until you come to the box for "Post a Message." The "Subject" you enter will appear in bold above your message. You can use both italic and bold within your message, and you can "Preview" it. When you are finished, click on "Post."

• If you would like to reply to someone else's note and quote a portion of it, go to that note and click on "Quote." The other note will appear at the top of the message box. Edit out any parts of the quote that you do not need to reference in your own post. At the front of the quote, it should say: [Quote="name of person you're quoting"] and at the end of the quote it should say: [/quote]

• A cautionary note: There are a couple ways you could lose a post on this system. Say you are writing a post and you decide to doublecheck something on another page. When you click to a new page and come back, your post will be gone.

Sometimes, if you are writing a long post, or typing very slowly, your session will time out, and you will find that you have to login again. In the meantime, your post will have disappeared. You can avoid this by checking the box that says "Keep me logged in on this computer" when you sign in. This is recommended for convenience anyway, as long as you are the only one using your computer.

Remember, too, that if you make a mistake, or click to that other page after you post and then want to make a change, all you have to do it click on "Edit" and you can change your post.

That's it! Enjoy the Sharing Forums!

P.S. The Private Practice Circles work the same way but are restricted to people who have subscribed to one or our e-courses or intensives."