When we come to see depression not as the enemy but as an expression of struggle, the epidemic will likely subside as we come to honor the integrity of our human spirit. We do not ordinarily grow without engaging struggle. So the irony is that by medicating our symptoms with psychotropic medication, we ensure continued stagnation, for the struggle is never resolved toward a breakthrough; it is merely placated.
My thesis is, therefore, twofold: Much of what we call depression is a typical life struggle around loss, fear and grave situational issues that have become clinicalized for profit. Yet, there also lies a deeper despair that accompanies living an incoherent life, as a stranger in a strange land. What I am strongly asserting is that depression, and anxiety for that matter, are the most likely outcomes of living in and with the unmerciful and misguided constraints of a tired and destructive worldview. Our constructed reality is for many people depressive and anxiety inducing. Feeling as such ironically suggests that many depressed people are merely mirroring the affects of a somewhat incongruous, if not insane way of living, fostered by the society itself. In effect, the way that we are living is producing tragic results.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Would You Like to Be the Partner I Want You to Be?
Releasing the need to defend yourself – and subsequently abdicating the silliness of right or wrong – really enables a more reflective consideration of the changes being requested, or perhaps demanded, by your partner. If the modification sought would assist in your personal growth, then you should embrace it. It’s a win-win. You’ll grow and perhaps improve the energy of your relationship. While it’s disappointing if this doesn’t happen, you’ve still at least moved forward in your self-actualization. To that extent, you are removing yourself from being the problem. Should you find yourself in this position, you may discover that the old battle masked deeper underlying issues that may now arise.
The conflict over change, although often substantive, is at times simply a safe, if not frustrating, way to express hostility. You might ask your partner or spouse, “If I make the changes you’re asking for, will you feel the way you’d like to feel about me?” This question may reveal whether there are deeper issues – usually emotional – that need to break through and enter the discussion.
Much of our defensiveness surrounding others’ impositions that we change has to do with our own sense of self and identity. “There’s nothing wrong with me” is a revealing statement, in that it demonstrates an insecure and fragile ego. It’s not a question of whether there’s something wrong with you as much as it’s about whether you’re seeking to evolve further and please your partner – provided that you’re not acting from fear or inauthenticity. There is a direct correlation between one’s openness to change and their self-esteem. If your self-worth feels tentative, you’re more likely to defend against change. On a differing note, though, people should never simply succumb to the demands of others if they are coming from an angry or controlling energy.
Relationship success requires quieting your defensiveness and developing a resilience founded upon the healthy spirit of a co-operative alliance. If you try to be the best you can be for the other, and remain genuine and true to your own growth, you can accurately say you are doing everything you can to make your relationship prosper.
http://blog.melschwartz.com/2012/03/16/is-our-society-manufacturing-depressed-people/#more-506
The conflict over change, although often substantive, is at times simply a safe, if not frustrating, way to express hostility. You might ask your partner or spouse, “If I make the changes you’re asking for, will you feel the way you’d like to feel about me?” This question may reveal whether there are deeper issues – usually emotional – that need to break through and enter the discussion.
Much of our defensiveness surrounding others’ impositions that we change has to do with our own sense of self and identity. “There’s nothing wrong with me” is a revealing statement, in that it demonstrates an insecure and fragile ego. It’s not a question of whether there’s something wrong with you as much as it’s about whether you’re seeking to evolve further and please your partner – provided that you’re not acting from fear or inauthenticity. There is a direct correlation between one’s openness to change and their self-esteem. If your self-worth feels tentative, you’re more likely to defend against change. On a differing note, though, people should never simply succumb to the demands of others if they are coming from an angry or controlling energy.
Relationship success requires quieting your defensiveness and developing a resilience founded upon the healthy spirit of a co-operative alliance. If you try to be the best you can be for the other, and remain genuine and true to your own growth, you can accurately say you are doing everything you can to make your relationship prosper.
http://blog.melschwartz.com/2012/03/16/is-our-society-manufacturing-depressed-people/#more-506
I’ll Be Happy When…
The ultimate source of happiness lies in the quality of your thoughts. Our thoughts are our most intimate relationship and will impact our lives far more than our relationships with others. In fact, our relations with others are, to an extent, but a reflection of the quality of our own thoughts.
What we seek “out there” is but the icing on the cake. Genuine and sustainable happiness is derived from a healthy and nurturing relationship with yourself. Nothing and no one can take that away from you. Devote your attention to your authentic well being and happiness will emerge.
Happiness comes from being present in the moment and feeling a sense of harmony and contentment not in a conditional way that something else has to happen. Just living and enjoying the present.
http://blog.melschwartz.com/2012/02/09/ill-be-happy-when/#more-487
What we seek “out there” is but the icing on the cake. Genuine and sustainable happiness is derived from a healthy and nurturing relationship with yourself. Nothing and no one can take that away from you. Devote your attention to your authentic well being and happiness will emerge.
Happiness comes from being present in the moment and feeling a sense of harmony and contentment not in a conditional way that something else has to happen. Just living and enjoying the present.
http://blog.melschwartz.com/2012/02/09/ill-be-happy-when/#more-487
"We cannot be fully loved if we are not fully known."
.........
"which leaves us with a decision to make. We can either hide and protect ourselves, ensuring that although we won't be loved, we definitely wont be hurt; or we can go with something a bit more daring. We can choose another way to live — a way to live and breathe and love that’s wild and audacious.
...
We can choose to have the courage to be imperfect—to be authentic—letting go of who we think we should be and allowing people to really see who we are in the places we prefer to keep hidden.
Vulnerability is choosing the daring hope that someone will see us and know us and choose to love us because of what they see—not for the show or for our perfectly styled hair."
.........
"which leaves us with a decision to make. We can either hide and protect ourselves, ensuring that although we won't be loved, we definitely wont be hurt; or we can go with something a bit more daring. We can choose another way to live — a way to live and breathe and love that’s wild and audacious.
...
We can choose to have the courage to be imperfect—to be authentic—letting go of who we think we should be and allowing people to really see who we are in the places we prefer to keep hidden.
Vulnerability is choosing the daring hope that someone will see us and know us and choose to love us because of what they see—not for the show or for our perfectly styled hair."
Seek and you shall find. Whatever you're looking for, even if it's not there. change your focus and physiology.
The brain's like a computer- ask it a question, you get an answer. Ask it a lousy question, get a lousy answer.
"The most powerful to control your focus is through the use of QUESTIONS." -Anthony Robbins
The brain's like a computer- ask it a question, you get an answer. Ask it a lousy question, get a lousy answer.
"The most powerful to control your focus is through the use of QUESTIONS." -Anthony Robbins
On Depression
"Emotions don't come to us, we go to them."
I need to understand my emotional patterns, the needs they meet within me, and how to make a conscious choice about the emotions I want to experience in life and in my relationship.
Three molders of meaning:
~Physiology & Posture
~Mental Focus
~Language
Feeling trapped in your emotions?
Breaking through to make life meaningful: changing the three molders of meaning
I need to understand my emotional patterns, the needs they meet within me, and how to make a conscious choice about the emotions I want to experience in life and in my relationship.
Three molders of meaning:
~Physiology & Posture
~Mental Focus
~Language
Feeling trapped in your emotions?
Breaking through to make life meaningful: changing the three molders of meaning
Who Am I?
This question - asked so often - suggests that there is actually a plausible answer. Almost as if our being were a fixed thing. People who ask this sort of question are typically struggling with their identity and are searching for a core sense of themselves. The irony is that the more you seek to identify who you are, the more fragile you are likely to feel about yourself. There may be an inverse correlation between the question being asked and the ease with which you experience your life. The emphasis shouldn't be on discovering who you are (what is buried beneath) but on facilitating the emergence of what you'd like to experience.
Our identity should be seen as an ongoing process. Rather than a static snapshot, we should embrace a flowing sense of self, whereby we are perpetually re-framing, re-organizing, re-thinking and re-considering ourselves. How different would life be if rather than asking who am I, we contemplated how we'd like to engage life?
A sense of inadequacy often informs the question around "Who am I?" As people engage the deepening complexity of understanding themselves, they would fare much better to devote themselves to the unfolding process of life. Witnessing our thoughts, not reacting out of old habit, and becoming present enable us to better craft our lives. As such, the identity that we seek fires the wave of life, enriched by the flow.
Imagine that you've been in prison for twenty years, incarcerated since the age of eighteen. You literally have no adult life experience outside of the penitentiary. Your sense of self is tragically limited. You might ask yourself, "Who am I? This would likely provoke a fragile sense of self that paradoxically might leave you most apprehensive about your imminent release. You'd hardly choose to remain imprisoned until you could find your identity. You'd have to permit that new sense of self to flow from your new experiences.
I have worked with people who have been married more or less for their entire adult lives. Upon divorce they are often confronted with a distressing thought. They claim that they don't know who they are. More to the point, they may not know who they are as a single, autonomous adult, not partnered. After all, how could they? Rather than remaining mired in fear, you'd need to summon up a sense of wonder and adventure. There is a new sense of self waiting to be born. You get to re-craft yourself along the way.
At the other end of the identity continuum are those who claim to know themselves so well. This other extreme also signifies a fragility about one's identity. To know yourself so well leaves no room for growth. Even more, it suggests a deep vulnerability that is being defended against - as if it were too dangerous to take a closer look.
It makes perfect sense to seek a deeper sense of self. To become intimately aware of your thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears is obviously advisable. The key is to engage your sense of self as malleable, more like a willow tree than a sturdy oak. The willow is flexible and survives the storm as it bends with the wind, whereas the more rigid oak is more likely to crack.
The universe purportedly exists in a state of flowing potential. And it is essential to understand that we are indeed part of that universe. The goal then is to access that potential, keeping the parts of our identity that continue to serve us well and shedding the old, habitual pieces that constrain us. This process is known as positive disintegration. This permits us to find balance between the extremes previously discussed and enter into a relationship with self that commits to our personal evolution.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shift-mind/201006/who-am-i
Our identity should be seen as an ongoing process. Rather than a static snapshot, we should embrace a flowing sense of self, whereby we are perpetually re-framing, re-organizing, re-thinking and re-considering ourselves. How different would life be if rather than asking who am I, we contemplated how we'd like to engage life?
A sense of inadequacy often informs the question around "Who am I?" As people engage the deepening complexity of understanding themselves, they would fare much better to devote themselves to the unfolding process of life. Witnessing our thoughts, not reacting out of old habit, and becoming present enable us to better craft our lives. As such, the identity that we seek fires the wave of life, enriched by the flow.
Imagine that you've been in prison for twenty years, incarcerated since the age of eighteen. You literally have no adult life experience outside of the penitentiary. Your sense of self is tragically limited. You might ask yourself, "Who am I? This would likely provoke a fragile sense of self that paradoxically might leave you most apprehensive about your imminent release. You'd hardly choose to remain imprisoned until you could find your identity. You'd have to permit that new sense of self to flow from your new experiences.
I have worked with people who have been married more or less for their entire adult lives. Upon divorce they are often confronted with a distressing thought. They claim that they don't know who they are. More to the point, they may not know who they are as a single, autonomous adult, not partnered. After all, how could they? Rather than remaining mired in fear, you'd need to summon up a sense of wonder and adventure. There is a new sense of self waiting to be born. You get to re-craft yourself along the way.
At the other end of the identity continuum are those who claim to know themselves so well. This other extreme also signifies a fragility about one's identity. To know yourself so well leaves no room for growth. Even more, it suggests a deep vulnerability that is being defended against - as if it were too dangerous to take a closer look.
It makes perfect sense to seek a deeper sense of self. To become intimately aware of your thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears is obviously advisable. The key is to engage your sense of self as malleable, more like a willow tree than a sturdy oak. The willow is flexible and survives the storm as it bends with the wind, whereas the more rigid oak is more likely to crack.
The universe purportedly exists in a state of flowing potential. And it is essential to understand that we are indeed part of that universe. The goal then is to access that potential, keeping the parts of our identity that continue to serve us well and shedding the old, habitual pieces that constrain us. This process is known as positive disintegration. This permits us to find balance between the extremes previously discussed and enter into a relationship with self that commits to our personal evolution.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shift-mind/201006/who-am-i
spot-on. my self-esteem
How high is your self-esteem?
You have scored 61.
What your scoring means
You have quite good self-esteem on the whole. But you sometimes fail to believe in yourself enough. Remember you are a special and unique person. Many people with your score feel confident in what they do for a living and get a lot of affirmation from that. It's important however, to feel good about who you are, not just about what you do. Have a think about this.
http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/interactive/interactivetests/selfesteem.php?postBack=true&radiobutton1=3&radiobutton2=3&radiobutton3=3&radiobutton4=3&radiobutton5=4&radiobutton6=2&radiobutton7=4&radiobutton8=3&radiobutton9=2&radiobutton10=2&radiobutton11=4&radiobutton12=4&radiobutton13=4&radiobutton14=2&radiobutton15=2&radiobutton16=3&radiobutton17=3&radiobutton18=4&radiobutton19=4&radiobutton20=2
You have scored 61.
What your scoring means
You have quite good self-esteem on the whole. But you sometimes fail to believe in yourself enough. Remember you are a special and unique person. Many people with your score feel confident in what they do for a living and get a lot of affirmation from that. It's important however, to feel good about who you are, not just about what you do. Have a think about this.
http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/interactive/interactivetests/selfesteem.php?postBack=true&radiobutton1=3&radiobutton2=3&radiobutton3=3&radiobutton4=3&radiobutton5=4&radiobutton6=2&radiobutton7=4&radiobutton8=3&radiobutton9=2&radiobutton10=2&radiobutton11=4&radiobutton12=4&radiobutton13=4&radiobutton14=2&radiobutton15=2&radiobutton16=3&radiobutton17=3&radiobutton18=4&radiobutton19=4&radiobutton20=2
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
"It always gets better"
As part of my renewed positivity, I have recently adopted this phrase. Yet, I am wondering the situations in which it does not cover. When it won't get better. To say this phrase is to exert a privilege that might not apply to all, making it universally meaningless. And when we say it to a friend in America, perhaps with many opportunities and securities, things will get better. But what about those who are poor? Addicted? Continuously unemployed? Continuously poor? Continuously oppressed? Genetically disadvantaged? How much hope is there for everyone not just the privileged?
Wednesday, Jan 30, 2013
~Such a fantastic morning. Golly do I love taking them thoughtfully and meaningfully. Thoughts of him set me on the path for a day full of perspective, meaning, and drive.
How your love affects me
How your love affects me
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Peak experiences
Peak experiences are transient moments of self-actualization.
-Maslow, 1971, p. 48
Human beings do not realise the extent to which their own sense of defeat prevents them from doing things they could do perfectly well. The peak experience induces the recognition that your own powers are far greater than you imagined them.
-Colin Wilson
-Maslow, 1971, p. 48
Human beings do not realise the extent to which their own sense of defeat prevents them from doing things they could do perfectly well. The peak experience induces the recognition that your own powers are far greater than you imagined them.
-Colin Wilson
Identify triggers to low self-esteem. We personalize stressful events (e.g., criticism) by inferring a negative meaning about ourselves. A self-defeating action often follows. Each event can, instead, be a chance to learn about ourselves, if we face our fear of doing so and the negative beliefs about ourselves that sustain the negative meanings.
Slow down personalizing. Target personalizing to slow impulsive responses. You can begin to interfere with these automatic overreactions by using relaxation and stress management techniques. These techniques are directed at self-soothing the arousal. This allows us to interrupt the otherwise inevitable automatic reaction and put into play a way to begin to face the unacknowledged fears at the root of low self-esteem.
Acknowledge reaction. Verbalize, “Here I go again (describe action, feeling, thought) . . . ” Actively do something with the awareness rather than passively note it. The result is to slow the impulse and give ourselves a choice about how we want to respond.
Choose response. Hold self-defeating impulses. Act in a self-caring and effective way. By choosing to act in a more functional way, we take a step toward facing our fears.
Accept impulse. Be able to state the benefit (e.g., protection) of overreaction. We won’t be able to do this at first, but as we become more effective, we will begin to appreciate what our self-defeating impulse had been doing for us.
Develop skills. We can provide for our own safety, engender hope, tolerate confusion, and raise self-esteem by learning and using these essential life skills:
--Experience feelings. “Feel” feelings in your body and identify your needs. When we do not respect our feelings, we are left to rely on what others want and believe.
--Optional thinking. End either/or thinking. Think in “shades of gray” and learn to reframe meanings. By giving ourselves options, we open ourselves to new possibilities about how to think about our dilemmas.
--Detachment. End all abuse; say “no” to misrepresentations and assumptions. By maintaining personal boundaries, we discourage abuse by others and assert our separateness.
--Assertion. Voice what you see, feel, and want by making “I” statements. By expressing our thoughts, feelings, and desires in a direct and honest manner, we show that we are in charge of our lives.
--Receptivity. End self-absorption; listen to others’ words and meanings to restate them. In this way, we act with awareness of our contribution to events as well as empathize with the needs of others.
Slow down personalizing. Target personalizing to slow impulsive responses. You can begin to interfere with these automatic overreactions by using relaxation and stress management techniques. These techniques are directed at self-soothing the arousal. This allows us to interrupt the otherwise inevitable automatic reaction and put into play a way to begin to face the unacknowledged fears at the root of low self-esteem.
Acknowledge reaction. Verbalize, “Here I go again (describe action, feeling, thought) . . . ” Actively do something with the awareness rather than passively note it. The result is to slow the impulse and give ourselves a choice about how we want to respond.
Choose response. Hold self-defeating impulses. Act in a self-caring and effective way. By choosing to act in a more functional way, we take a step toward facing our fears.
Accept impulse. Be able to state the benefit (e.g., protection) of overreaction. We won’t be able to do this at first, but as we become more effective, we will begin to appreciate what our self-defeating impulse had been doing for us.
Develop skills. We can provide for our own safety, engender hope, tolerate confusion, and raise self-esteem by learning and using these essential life skills:
--Experience feelings. “Feel” feelings in your body and identify your needs. When we do not respect our feelings, we are left to rely on what others want and believe.
--Optional thinking. End either/or thinking. Think in “shades of gray” and learn to reframe meanings. By giving ourselves options, we open ourselves to new possibilities about how to think about our dilemmas.
--Detachment. End all abuse; say “no” to misrepresentations and assumptions. By maintaining personal boundaries, we discourage abuse by others and assert our separateness.
--Assertion. Voice what you see, feel, and want by making “I” statements. By expressing our thoughts, feelings, and desires in a direct and honest manner, we show that we are in charge of our lives.
--Receptivity. End self-absorption; listen to others’ words and meanings to restate them. In this way, we act with awareness of our contribution to events as well as empathize with the needs of others.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Leave It. Change It. Accept It.
Leave it.
Can you LEAVE the situation or walk away from the person that is the cause of anger frustration? You need to weigh it up and gauge what is going to be best for YOU.
If you can’t leave the situation, well then, this leads us to the next step…
Change it.
Go on then, make a CHANGE to improve the outcome. If you are frustrated by the slow driver in front of you, instead of tailing them and beeping like a lunatic perhaps take a different route?
If you are stuck and change is impossible then this brings us to the final step. Which is no longer a question but a confirmation of the ONLY path left…
Accept it.
You can’t leave it, you’ve also decided you can’t change it. So it’s time. Unclench your jaw, soften into the idea and ACCEPT. Begin to embrace all that is the cause of your fear, annoyance and discomfort and see what happens next…
When you begin to slow down, take a deep breath and accept you start to realize that you were your own worst enemy.
It only became a problem once you objected to it. During hard times, you can’t (unfortunately) go back in time and undo what’s been done, but you can accept the current situation and approach it from a totally different perspective. One that allows you more peace despite the chaos, pain and frustration.
Take a deep breath, and accept.
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-7538/leave-it-change-it-accept-it-how-eckhart-tolle-changed-my-life.html
Can you LEAVE the situation or walk away from the person that is the cause of anger frustration? You need to weigh it up and gauge what is going to be best for YOU.
If you can’t leave the situation, well then, this leads us to the next step…
Change it.
Go on then, make a CHANGE to improve the outcome. If you are frustrated by the slow driver in front of you, instead of tailing them and beeping like a lunatic perhaps take a different route?
If you are stuck and change is impossible then this brings us to the final step. Which is no longer a question but a confirmation of the ONLY path left…
Accept it.
You can’t leave it, you’ve also decided you can’t change it. So it’s time. Unclench your jaw, soften into the idea and ACCEPT. Begin to embrace all that is the cause of your fear, annoyance and discomfort and see what happens next…
When you begin to slow down, take a deep breath and accept you start to realize that you were your own worst enemy.
It only became a problem once you objected to it. During hard times, you can’t (unfortunately) go back in time and undo what’s been done, but you can accept the current situation and approach it from a totally different perspective. One that allows you more peace despite the chaos, pain and frustration.
Take a deep breath, and accept.
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-7538/leave-it-change-it-accept-it-how-eckhart-tolle-changed-my-life.html
It’s not just a marketing ploy on the part of cereal companies: breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Think about it: your body has just spent (ideally) eight hours sleeping, and your last meal was probably a few hours before bedtime. You’ve had no food or water in almost 12 hours. You’re dehydrated, your blood sugar is low, and as a result, you have no energy. By skipping breakfast in favor of a snooze or getting the kids out the door in time for you to pick up coffee, you’re sabotaging your healthy eating efforts. By the time lunch rolls around, you’re ravenous and more likely to reach for larger portions and unhealthy foods.
Harvard researchers found that kids who skipped breakfast were twice as likely to be depressed, four times more prone to anxiety, and 30 percent more likely to be hyperactive. When those kids started eating breakfast regularly, their levels of depression, anxiety, and hyperactivity all decreased.
Harvard researchers found that kids who skipped breakfast were twice as likely to be depressed, four times more prone to anxiety, and 30 percent more likely to be hyperactive. When those kids started eating breakfast regularly, their levels of depression, anxiety, and hyperactivity all decreased.
--Exercise is self-healing. Imagine sitting indoors on a nice day watching television. But you also feel tired, maybe even depressed. So you get up, turn off the TV, and go for a walk. It might be hard at first, but the longer you walk, the better and more energized you start to feel. Mood-lifting chemicals in your brain start to circulate. Your heart strengthens. Your metabolism revs up. And these effects continue for at least 48 hours afterward. You have actually begun to self-heal!
--Sleep is self-healing. A good night’s sleep helps your body regenerate. When you wake up in the morning, you’ll feel refreshed.
--Hugs are self-healing. Anyone who knows me knows that I believe in hugs. Have you ever had anyone say to you, “Hey, do you need a hug?” Then they hug you, and you just feel better. There’s power in a hug. Science has verified that the simple act of reaching out and hugging another person slows heart rate, reduces blood pressure, and even accelerates recovery from an illness. All that in a simple hug!
http://drfabmancini.com/320/helpyourbodyheal/
--Sleep is self-healing. A good night’s sleep helps your body regenerate. When you wake up in the morning, you’ll feel refreshed.
--Hugs are self-healing. Anyone who knows me knows that I believe in hugs. Have you ever had anyone say to you, “Hey, do you need a hug?” Then they hug you, and you just feel better. There’s power in a hug. Science has verified that the simple act of reaching out and hugging another person slows heart rate, reduces blood pressure, and even accelerates recovery from an illness. All that in a simple hug!
http://drfabmancini.com/320/helpyourbodyheal/
Eat for enlightenment
In every morsel of food you eat, there’s an infinite, yet patterned, timeless cosmic order of waves of pulsating electrons that spiral in and out of existence, which have a profound impact on your body and on your life.
In our Western culture, the challenge is the belief that we’re separate from the world around us. In our dash for technology, we’ve forgotten that we’re connected with a living, pulsating universe—a universe that sings with life and resonates with spirit. This idea that we exist independently from our environment is an illusion; for in truth, there’s nothing out there that is not you. Our ancient ancestors throughout the world understood this. Their worldview was that none of us exists separate from the entirety of the world. The understanding that you’re not separate from the energy of your food (or the world around you) allows you to step into the realm in which everything has consciousness, including your food. You then discover how to interface with the soul of the meals that you eat . . . which can be a profound and majestic experience.
http://healyourlife.com/author-denise-linn/2013/01/lifeshelp/get-healthy/eat-for-enlightenment
In our Western culture, the challenge is the belief that we’re separate from the world around us. In our dash for technology, we’ve forgotten that we’re connected with a living, pulsating universe—a universe that sings with life and resonates with spirit. This idea that we exist independently from our environment is an illusion; for in truth, there’s nothing out there that is not you. Our ancient ancestors throughout the world understood this. Their worldview was that none of us exists separate from the entirety of the world. The understanding that you’re not separate from the energy of your food (or the world around you) allows you to step into the realm in which everything has consciousness, including your food. You then discover how to interface with the soul of the meals that you eat . . . which can be a profound and majestic experience.
http://healyourlife.com/author-denise-linn/2013/01/lifeshelp/get-healthy/eat-for-enlightenment
I love slow, inspiring mornings
When you wake up in the morning, spend a few minutes reciting an affirmation like this: "I am so grateful for the kind and generous people in my life! Everyone is so supportive and nurturing and I feel blessed to be surrounded by so many great people."
Really allow yourself to get into the feelings of gratitude for the great people in your life. Stay with these feelings for several minutes, letting them soak into your mind and heart.
Then, as you go about your daily routine, imagine flowing a strong feeling of love and gratitude toward everyone you encounter. You can do this with both people you know and strangers. Find something appreciative to say to the people you know. You might compliment your co-worker on her problem-solving skills, or tell your friend you enjoy his sense of humor. Make it a genuine compliment without expecting anything in return.
Really allow yourself to get into the feelings of gratitude for the great people in your life. Stay with these feelings for several minutes, letting them soak into your mind and heart.
Then, as you go about your daily routine, imagine flowing a strong feeling of love and gratitude toward everyone you encounter. You can do this with both people you know and strangers. Find something appreciative to say to the people you know. You might compliment your co-worker on her problem-solving skills, or tell your friend you enjoy his sense of humor. Make it a genuine compliment without expecting anything in return.
Dream Big
Anything you desire to change on the outside must first be changed internally. The physical transformation happens later. Start by dreaming it up. Seeing the vision inside is the most important part and has to happen first.
As you create a goal, first understand what the destination looks like in your mind. Using all of your senses, flesh out every aspect of what will happen in your imagination. How does it look, smell, and taste? What sounds do you hear? What do you hear people saying? What do you say when you’ve made it? How does it make you feel to have made your dream come true?
Make this vision real by putting it plainly in front of you every single day, and then work on the next big question: What’s getting in the way?
http://healyourlife.com/author-james-p-nicolai-md/2013/01/lifeshelp/success-and-abundance/dream-big
As you create a goal, first understand what the destination looks like in your mind. Using all of your senses, flesh out every aspect of what will happen in your imagination. How does it look, smell, and taste? What sounds do you hear? What do you hear people saying? What do you say when you’ve made it? How does it make you feel to have made your dream come true?
Make this vision real by putting it plainly in front of you every single day, and then work on the next big question: What’s getting in the way?
http://healyourlife.com/author-james-p-nicolai-md/2013/01/lifeshelp/success-and-abundance/dream-big
A little morning healing
“There’s a force out there that wants us to live our dreams. We just have to get over, under, or through all of the walls we create.” - Dr Jim Nicolai
“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.” ― Voltaire
“The more we think we are a certain way, the more we become that way. ” – Loretta LaRoche
“Our nightly dreams reveal these unconscious patterns so that we can become aware of the underlying mental and emotional causes of situations we want to improve, heal, or eliminate.”
“Who you are, is something much grander that what you see when you look in the mirror.” – David R Hamilton PhD
“Have regular conversations with your subconscious—remind it that you don’t want to go through life on automatic pilot.” – Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
“All health begins with how we perceive ourselves and our bodies.” – Dr. Christiane Northrup
“How you start your day sets in motion a pattern of thinking that determines your experiences all day long.” – Cheryl Richardson
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science.” – Albert Einstein
“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.” ― Voltaire
“The more we think we are a certain way, the more we become that way. ” – Loretta LaRoche
“Our nightly dreams reveal these unconscious patterns so that we can become aware of the underlying mental and emotional causes of situations we want to improve, heal, or eliminate.”
“Who you are, is something much grander that what you see when you look in the mirror.” – David R Hamilton PhD
“Have regular conversations with your subconscious—remind it that you don’t want to go through life on automatic pilot.” – Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
“All health begins with how we perceive ourselves and our bodies.” – Dr. Christiane Northrup
“How you start your day sets in motion a pattern of thinking that determines your experiences all day long.” – Cheryl Richardson
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science.” – Albert Einstein
1/27/13 reflective nonworkingmood
EVERYTHING'S FINE…
On the surface
I wish people would get how certain things are so much more serious than they treat them
Suicidal thoughts
Daylong ills
Spirit broken
Family broken
Financial status: broke
Stomach: Empty
Except for the drugs and alcohol
And sugar
Caffeine,
Other forms of self-medication
Be aware
Take signals seriously
Take your effect seriously
Instead of being the needle that breaks the camel’s back
Be the missing brick that stabilizes the structure
On the surface
I wish people would get how certain things are so much more serious than they treat them
Suicidal thoughts
Daylong ills
Spirit broken
Family broken
Financial status: broke
Stomach: Empty
Except for the drugs and alcohol
And sugar
Caffeine,
Other forms of self-medication
Be aware
Take signals seriously
Take your effect seriously
Instead of being the needle that breaks the camel’s back
Be the missing brick that stabilizes the structure
Sunday, January 27, 2013
When you have a problem you simply need to set a goal, decide on steps that will help you reach that goal, and then get to work. But you can’t always make feeling better an actionable step. Sometimes it is important to simply allow yourself to feel bad.
By being curious about our emotions rather than reactive, we will be better equipped to manage unpleasant feelings.
By accepting your emotions, you are essentially saying, “This is not that bad.” And this is the truth. Negative emotions are unpleasant, but they aren’t the end of the world. In fact, as humans, we often learn and grow the most during difficult times. When we accept negative emotions, they lose their destructive power.
This is not to say that you should never take steps to improve your mood. The point is to remain open to your negative emotions and to view them as an opportunity to learn. If, however, negative emotions are omni-present, over-intrusive, continually perplexing, or unbearably severe, then perhaps it is time to consider seeking some professional help in learning how to manage them. We can commit ourselves to working with our problems to create better lives for ourselves.
By being curious about our emotions rather than reactive, we will be better equipped to manage unpleasant feelings.
By accepting your emotions, you are essentially saying, “This is not that bad.” And this is the truth. Negative emotions are unpleasant, but they aren’t the end of the world. In fact, as humans, we often learn and grow the most during difficult times. When we accept negative emotions, they lose their destructive power.
This is not to say that you should never take steps to improve your mood. The point is to remain open to your negative emotions and to view them as an opportunity to learn. If, however, negative emotions are omni-present, over-intrusive, continually perplexing, or unbearably severe, then perhaps it is time to consider seeking some professional help in learning how to manage them. We can commit ourselves to working with our problems to create better lives for ourselves.
"And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing...a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods."
~Aldous Huxley, 1959
~Aldous Huxley, 1959
Friday, January 25, 2013
there are more difficult things in life than learning how to process being in love. not only is being in love with another ground-breaking, thats a surprise. but the greater pill to swallow, meal to chew, and digest is that someone is in love with me. now i love myself, i have to accept so does somebody else.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Hanging out with friends for...?
Enhancing the state of mind
--> again and again ---> profound transformation
--> again and again ---> profound transformation
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET TODAY ABOUT...
Being an introvert. I thought I was an extrovert, but once I got out of a house living with friends (after three years). After cutting down from social outings and involvements, and after spending so much time with myself, I realized what brought me joy. I realized who I am. And though no one is 100% one or the other, I am certainly more of an introvert- with social skills. I love spending time alone. I love being with myself. I love reflecting. I love being away from social distortions of my true self. I love building myself up and being true to myself. And though I am now still in the strengthening process, I enjoy hanging out with selective friends who make me want to be better; who support me in who I am; who make me feel great; and whom I have an equal exchange of friendship with. I am happy alone. I am happy with friends so close who do not pull me from myself, but who are such a part of me so that when I'm with them, we are with ourselves at the same time. I am learning to embrace all the parts of me. Currently, the part that is introverted- that is true to my personality.
Embracing and loving myself
Embracing and loving myself
"the good person must be a self-lover, since he will both help himself and benefit others by performing fine actions. But the vicious person must not love himself, since he will harm both himself and his neighbours by following his base feelings." (1169a12–15)
Aristotle also holds, though, that, as Hughes puts it: "[t]he only ultimately justifiable reason for doing anything is that acting in that way will contribute to a fulfilled life."[6] Thus acts of philia might seem to be essentially egoistic, performed apparently to help others, but in fact intended to increase the agent's happiness. This, however, confuses the nature of the action with its motivation; the good person doesn't perform an action to help a friend because it will give her fulfillment; she performs it in order to help the friend, and in performing it makes both her friend and herself happy. The action is thus good both in itself and for the effect it has on the agent's happiness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philia
Aristotle also holds, though, that, as Hughes puts it: "[t]he only ultimately justifiable reason for doing anything is that acting in that way will contribute to a fulfilled life."[6] Thus acts of philia might seem to be essentially egoistic, performed apparently to help others, but in fact intended to increase the agent's happiness. This, however, confuses the nature of the action with its motivation; the good person doesn't perform an action to help a friend because it will give her fulfillment; she performs it in order to help the friend, and in performing it makes both her friend and herself happy. The action is thus good both in itself and for the effect it has on the agent's happiness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philia
Monday, January 21, 2013
10 musicians that Martin Luther King, Jr. might have liked
1. Alicia Keys: Since bursting on the scene in with Songs in A Minor, Alicia Keys has blessed us with some of the most prolific love ballads of all-time. Her cover of Bob Marley’s "Redemption Song" at the Staying Alive concert was one of the most moving performances in modern-music history.
2. Marvin Sapp: This record-breaking gospel recording artist continues to spread the message of God’s love and mercy. With two cross over hits, "The Best In Me" and "Never Would of Made It," Marvin Sapp’s inspirational melody has helped him to become the all-time highest charting gospel artist in Billboard history.
3. Nas: Crowned as the greatest lyricist of all-time by CNN, Nasir Jones is proof that hip-hop is not dead. With thought-provoking songs like "I Can," "Poison," and "Black President," Nas continues to teach lessons of empowerment and liberation to this lost generation of music lovers.
4. Lupe Fiasco: Controversial, outspoken, and introspective are a few words that describe the Chi-town native. Although he hasn’t had the same amount of commercial success as his comrade Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco continues to garner critical success while staying involved as a political activist.
5. Mary,Mary: The gospel-duo-turned-reality-TV-stars are nominated for another Grammy for their song "Go Get It." Their blend of uptempo “church music” bridges the gap between the old and new.
6. M.I.A.: The London-bred singer and philanthropist is a revolutionary in every sense of the word. Named by Esquire magazine as one of the most influential people of the 21st century, M.I.A. continues to be the voice of the oppressed world-wide.
7. Dead Prez: The revolutionary but gangsta duo of Stic Man and M1 have been blessing us with their socially conscious lyrics for over a decade. Their lyrics, which focus on Pan Africanism and cultural awareness, have failed to land them crossover success – but this group is still bigger than hip-hop.
8. Damon “Jr. Gong” Marley: Being the son of reggae legend Bob Marley, Damon “Jr. Gong” Marley's only choice is to carry the baton into the 21st century. In 2010, Jr. Gong hooked up Nas to create a conscious collaboration called Distant Relatives. Proceeds for the album were to be used to build a school in Congo, Africa.
9. Talib Kweli: With a new album called Prisoner of Concious set to be released this year, Talib Kweli will more than likely deliver another album that is filled with thought provoking and heartfelt lyrics.
10. Common: Though this rapper should have been on the top of our list, in the book it says the last shall be first and the first shall be last.
Bonus: Macklemore: The rap phenomenom has taken the Billboard charts by storm with his latest single “Thrift Shop” and has even received a cosign from Ellen Degeneres. I’m not sure what MLK Jr.’s stance would be on same sex marriage, but he would probably support any artist that demands equality for all and one that has spent time working with incarcerated youth.
2. Marvin Sapp: This record-breaking gospel recording artist continues to spread the message of God’s love and mercy. With two cross over hits, "The Best In Me" and "Never Would of Made It," Marvin Sapp’s inspirational melody has helped him to become the all-time highest charting gospel artist in Billboard history.
3. Nas: Crowned as the greatest lyricist of all-time by CNN, Nasir Jones is proof that hip-hop is not dead. With thought-provoking songs like "I Can," "Poison," and "Black President," Nas continues to teach lessons of empowerment and liberation to this lost generation of music lovers.
4. Lupe Fiasco: Controversial, outspoken, and introspective are a few words that describe the Chi-town native. Although he hasn’t had the same amount of commercial success as his comrade Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco continues to garner critical success while staying involved as a political activist.
5. Mary,Mary: The gospel-duo-turned-reality-TV-stars are nominated for another Grammy for their song "Go Get It." Their blend of uptempo “church music” bridges the gap between the old and new.
6. M.I.A.: The London-bred singer and philanthropist is a revolutionary in every sense of the word. Named by Esquire magazine as one of the most influential people of the 21st century, M.I.A. continues to be the voice of the oppressed world-wide.
7. Dead Prez: The revolutionary but gangsta duo of Stic Man and M1 have been blessing us with their socially conscious lyrics for over a decade. Their lyrics, which focus on Pan Africanism and cultural awareness, have failed to land them crossover success – but this group is still bigger than hip-hop.
8. Damon “Jr. Gong” Marley: Being the son of reggae legend Bob Marley, Damon “Jr. Gong” Marley's only choice is to carry the baton into the 21st century. In 2010, Jr. Gong hooked up Nas to create a conscious collaboration called Distant Relatives. Proceeds for the album were to be used to build a school in Congo, Africa.
9. Talib Kweli: With a new album called Prisoner of Concious set to be released this year, Talib Kweli will more than likely deliver another album that is filled with thought provoking and heartfelt lyrics.
10. Common: Though this rapper should have been on the top of our list, in the book it says the last shall be first and the first shall be last.
Bonus: Macklemore: The rap phenomenom has taken the Billboard charts by storm with his latest single “Thrift Shop” and has even received a cosign from Ellen Degeneres. I’m not sure what MLK Jr.’s stance would be on same sex marriage, but he would probably support any artist that demands equality for all and one that has spent time working with incarcerated youth.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2013
Change in this country can be painfully slow, and stirred only by individuals like the incredible man that is Martin Luther King, Jr. To make progress, we need strong and committed individuals. Some are going to have to be willing to die, out on the front-lines of difficulties, facing hatred and an opposition to justice and change. Because of this man's life, we have a better America. Remembering you today, you will continue to be blessed in our memory for being a freedom fighter.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Why Dating in Paris Isn't Black and White
Interracial relationships in America are very different than those abroad, and Ebony's arts and culture editor, Miles Marshall Lewis, reflects on his time in Paris and what he learned about their cultural intersection.
"Thoughts about mixed couples are different in the U.S.," I explained once the performances finished. "Black women look at Black guys choosing White girls and think they have a problem with blackness, or they're scared of Black women, or they think they're too good for sisters."
What makes the real difference is that we're growing up together, so we're going to learn the other person's culture, and maybe enjoy the person for who they are."
http://www.theroot.com/buzz/why-dating-paris-isnt-black-and-white
"Thoughts about mixed couples are different in the U.S.," I explained once the performances finished. "Black women look at Black guys choosing White girls and think they have a problem with blackness, or they're scared of Black women, or they think they're too good for sisters."
What makes the real difference is that we're growing up together, so we're going to learn the other person's culture, and maybe enjoy the person for who they are."
http://www.theroot.com/buzz/why-dating-paris-isnt-black-and-white
Emotional intimacy
Emotional intimacy can be expressed in verbal and non-verbal communication. The degree of comfort, effectiveness and mutual experience of closeness might indicate emotional intimacy between individuals. Intimate communication is both expressed (e.g. talking) and implied (e.g. friends sitting close on a park bench in silence). Emotional intimacy depends primarily on trust, as well as the nature of the relationship and the culture in which it is observed. Depending on the background and conventions of the participants, emotional intimacy might involve disclosing thoughts, feelings and emotions in order to reach an understanding, offer mutual support or build a sense of community. Or it might involve sharing a duty, without commentary.
deep person
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
Psalms 1:1-3
Deep people meditate on what matters most
Deep people know what matters to them. Underneath their job or their friendships or their hobbies lie their values – the things that are most important to them.
Deep people don’t just arrive at these values willy nilly. They don’t simply regurgitate what their parents or their professor or their pastor or some author says, although they do consider their advice.
Deep people earnestly try to understand how the world works, and carefully consider how they orient live their lives in light of that reality.
Deep people are clear on their non-negotiables. They plant themselves next to the water rather than moving with the current. They train themselves to filter decisions and actions through their values. They earn respect and a reputation for integrity because their decisions are consistent.
Deep people are not distracted
Deep people know what they’re trying to do. They don’t let the opinions of others get to them. Their values, and not the changing whims of the crowd, dictate their goals and their steps.
Deep people take council, but are picky about who they listen to. They recognize that the world is full of people who will, with the best of intentions, suggest courses of action that will steer them from their goals and undermine their values.
Deep people ignore scoffers. They know that if they’re doing something worthwhile they will get ridiculed and insulted. They realize that just because someone is loud doesn’t mean they are right.
Deep people understand that life isn’t usually about deciding between good things and bad things, but between good things and best things.
Deep people cultivate strong roots
Deep people cultivate roots that serve them in good times and bad. When success comes their way, they remain grounded and humble. They know that their success is the result of hard work, and are proud of their achievements. But they don’t cling to them – they recognize that their achievements are not who they are, and they aren’t a substitute for their character.
Deep people also know that when adversity comes, they won’t be shaken. Their roots go deep and keep them from being tossed this way and that. Even though the world around them may be crumbling, they have an underground reservoir of strength to draw from.
Deep people communicate confidence and maturity because they can handle problems. They don’t pout or rationalize or give up when things don’t go their way.
Deep people are able to share in other people’s burdens. When friends and loved ones with shallow roots encounter suffering or trouble, deep people are able to provide wise council. They know the right word to say at the right time, know when to admonish and when to build up.
Deep people understand that life has seasons
Deep people recognize that they won’t always be “yielding fruit”. They have seasons in their lives. Daily seasons, weekly seasons, monthly seasons, annual seasons.
Deep people have learned how to deliberately order their lives in a way that recognizes their seasons. They know when to engage in activity and when to rest. They know when they can be available to others and when they should be alone. (Now is the season I am being alone). They are fully present at work but understand when it’s time to put work down.
Are you deep?
Deep people certainly embody more than these traits, but they do not embody less.
Let us resolve to become deep people. People rooted in our values, who live lives consistent with what we believe. People who remain grounded and peaceful in good times and bad. People who can be counted on for advice, encouragement or wisdom.
To be people whose leaves does not wither.
http://www.sean-johnson.com/2011/08/30/how-to-become-a-deep-person/
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
Psalms 1:1-3
Deep people meditate on what matters most
Deep people know what matters to them. Underneath their job or their friendships or their hobbies lie their values – the things that are most important to them.
Deep people don’t just arrive at these values willy nilly. They don’t simply regurgitate what their parents or their professor or their pastor or some author says, although they do consider their advice.
Deep people earnestly try to understand how the world works, and carefully consider how they orient live their lives in light of that reality.
Deep people are clear on their non-negotiables. They plant themselves next to the water rather than moving with the current. They train themselves to filter decisions and actions through their values. They earn respect and a reputation for integrity because their decisions are consistent.
Deep people are not distracted
Deep people know what they’re trying to do. They don’t let the opinions of others get to them. Their values, and not the changing whims of the crowd, dictate their goals and their steps.
Deep people take council, but are picky about who they listen to. They recognize that the world is full of people who will, with the best of intentions, suggest courses of action that will steer them from their goals and undermine their values.
Deep people ignore scoffers. They know that if they’re doing something worthwhile they will get ridiculed and insulted. They realize that just because someone is loud doesn’t mean they are right.
Deep people understand that life isn’t usually about deciding between good things and bad things, but between good things and best things.
Deep people cultivate strong roots
Deep people cultivate roots that serve them in good times and bad. When success comes their way, they remain grounded and humble. They know that their success is the result of hard work, and are proud of their achievements. But they don’t cling to them – they recognize that their achievements are not who they are, and they aren’t a substitute for their character.
Deep people also know that when adversity comes, they won’t be shaken. Their roots go deep and keep them from being tossed this way and that. Even though the world around them may be crumbling, they have an underground reservoir of strength to draw from.
Deep people communicate confidence and maturity because they can handle problems. They don’t pout or rationalize or give up when things don’t go their way.
Deep people are able to share in other people’s burdens. When friends and loved ones with shallow roots encounter suffering or trouble, deep people are able to provide wise council. They know the right word to say at the right time, know when to admonish and when to build up.
Deep people understand that life has seasons
Deep people recognize that they won’t always be “yielding fruit”. They have seasons in their lives. Daily seasons, weekly seasons, monthly seasons, annual seasons.
Deep people have learned how to deliberately order their lives in a way that recognizes their seasons. They know when to engage in activity and when to rest. They know when they can be available to others and when they should be alone. (Now is the season I am being alone). They are fully present at work but understand when it’s time to put work down.
Are you deep?
Deep people certainly embody more than these traits, but they do not embody less.
Let us resolve to become deep people. People rooted in our values, who live lives consistent with what we believe. People who remain grounded and peaceful in good times and bad. People who can be counted on for advice, encouragement or wisdom.
To be people whose leaves does not wither.
http://www.sean-johnson.com/2011/08/30/how-to-become-a-deep-person/
Yin Yoga
So what exactly is Yin yoga? It is a more meditative approach with a physical focus much deeper than Yang like practices. Here the practitioner is trying to access the deeper tissues such as the connective tissue and fascia and many of the postures focus on areas that encompass a joint (hips, sacrum, spine). As one ages flexibility in the joints decreases and Yin yoga is a wonderful way to maintain that flexibility, something that for many don’t seem to be too concerned about until they notice it is gone.
This intimate practice of yoga requires students to be ready to get intimate with the self, with feelings, sensations, and emotions, something of which I have noticed can be easy to avoid in a fast paced yoga practice. Yin yoga is often used in programs that deal with addictions, eating disorders, anxiety and deep pain or trauma. For me my first experience with yoga was when I was knee deep in an eating disorder. Not familiar with the difference in practices I did notice that yoga helped me, and I often equate my practice to saving my life. Now that being said, several years later I stumbled across Yin yoga and found that the recovery process I had been going through apparently needed some more work and WOW did Yin point that out to me. I often struggled with being alone, sitting with feelings and sensations (something addicts struggle with) and found it challenging to face myself and the rawness of what I was doing and who I was in that moment. This concept in practice, allowed me a greater mental stability something much of which is a benefit of meditation, basically “learning to sit still.”
Many find immediate benefits like more open hips, a more relaxed body and centered mind.
Some of the benefits of Yin yoga are:
Calming and balancing to the mind and body
Regulates energy in the body
Increases mobility in the body, especially the joints and hips
Lowering of stress levels (no one needs that)
Greater stamina
Better lubrication and protection of joints
More flexibility in joints & connective tissue
Release of fascia throughout the body
Help with TMJ and migraines
Deeper Relaxation
A great coping for anxiety and stress
Better ability to sit for meditation
Ultimately you will have a better Yang practice
I really do believe that if you incorporate a little of both will create a more well-rounded practice as well as a better-rounded version of the awesome you!
Yin yoga as taught me to truly be still, to really come face to face with myself, even more than my past practice has; and because of this I am now able to bring what Yin has taught me into my more Yang like practices and ultimately my life as a whole.
Yin yoga teaches you how to really listen, you don’t get the opportunity to go in and out, jump around and find a distracted version of stillness within your practice. Yin is such a great compliment to other styles and your own personal life, because it brings long periods of time in an uncomfortable position, which then asks you to learn to “be” to “accept what is” in that given moment. Something we can all benefit from daily. For me, I did not know how to be in my own company, I did not like to feel or be or anything that required me to have an emotion. There is something so deep about Yin that will tap into a part of you in a way only unique to Yin. And for me a healthy Yin practice has poured over into a healthier Yang practice and a healthier life as a whole. And I wish that for everyone.
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-5037/Yin-Yoga-101-What-You-Need-to-Know.html
This intimate practice of yoga requires students to be ready to get intimate with the self, with feelings, sensations, and emotions, something of which I have noticed can be easy to avoid in a fast paced yoga practice. Yin yoga is often used in programs that deal with addictions, eating disorders, anxiety and deep pain or trauma. For me my first experience with yoga was when I was knee deep in an eating disorder. Not familiar with the difference in practices I did notice that yoga helped me, and I often equate my practice to saving my life. Now that being said, several years later I stumbled across Yin yoga and found that the recovery process I had been going through apparently needed some more work and WOW did Yin point that out to me. I often struggled with being alone, sitting with feelings and sensations (something addicts struggle with) and found it challenging to face myself and the rawness of what I was doing and who I was in that moment. This concept in practice, allowed me a greater mental stability something much of which is a benefit of meditation, basically “learning to sit still.”
Many find immediate benefits like more open hips, a more relaxed body and centered mind.
Some of the benefits of Yin yoga are:
Calming and balancing to the mind and body
Regulates energy in the body
Increases mobility in the body, especially the joints and hips
Lowering of stress levels (no one needs that)
Greater stamina
Better lubrication and protection of joints
More flexibility in joints & connective tissue
Release of fascia throughout the body
Help with TMJ and migraines
Deeper Relaxation
A great coping for anxiety and stress
Better ability to sit for meditation
Ultimately you will have a better Yang practice
I really do believe that if you incorporate a little of both will create a more well-rounded practice as well as a better-rounded version of the awesome you!
Yin yoga as taught me to truly be still, to really come face to face with myself, even more than my past practice has; and because of this I am now able to bring what Yin has taught me into my more Yang like practices and ultimately my life as a whole.
Yin yoga teaches you how to really listen, you don’t get the opportunity to go in and out, jump around and find a distracted version of stillness within your practice. Yin is such a great compliment to other styles and your own personal life, because it brings long periods of time in an uncomfortable position, which then asks you to learn to “be” to “accept what is” in that given moment. Something we can all benefit from daily. For me, I did not know how to be in my own company, I did not like to feel or be or anything that required me to have an emotion. There is something so deep about Yin that will tap into a part of you in a way only unique to Yin. And for me a healthy Yin practice has poured over into a healthier Yang practice and a healthier life as a whole. And I wish that for everyone.
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-5037/Yin-Yoga-101-What-You-Need-to-Know.html
How to Hack Your Brain
With a few simple tricks, you can exploit your brain's innate functionality to change just about anything about yourself.
most of what you consider part of your identity is a product of influence.
We have a tendency to think that change is difficult, but it's really just a matter of changing your influence.
While everything stored in your recent memory may not be immediately accessible, all you really need to bring something up is a trigger word.
This is a list of words synonymous with or related to ambition. It's designed to be read aloud to put you in a more ambitious mindset, focusing your thoughts and priming your brain to react ambitiously when these words, or portions of these words, come up later in your day.
-drive
-do
-go
-make
-objective
-important
-create
-commitment
-purpose
-enthusiasm
-eager
-motivation
For more reading on priming, and a look at some really interesting studies, don't forget to check out the references for this article.
Using Your Emotions
If you've ever found yourself making out-of-character decisions based on your emotional state—such as binging on ice cream after a breakup—you know how easily your feelings can overtake your actions. Rather than letting your emotions lead you towards poor judgment and irrational behavior, however, you can learn to compensate for different emotional states and to fabricate emotions to alter your mood. In order to do that you need to, simply put, get in touch with your feelings. The idea isn't so much to cry into a pillow about your wasted childhood, but understand what you're feeling when you're feeling it, what the root cause is, and what you can do about it. We're going to take a look at how you can dissect your emotional state to use it to your advantage, and also look at how you can fabricate emotion to change how you're feeling.
Make Yourself Uncomfortable
Your emotions aren't in full force if you're not really doing anything, so you need to put yourself in uncomfortable situations in order to bring them out. This doesn't mean you should make yourself feel horrible, but that you should go out and do things that you might resist because you're worried about the downsides. Meeting new people is something that makes most people uncomfortable, and it's a great place to start, especially if it's a first date. Try new things that scare you. If you notice you're glued to the couch and don't want to get up, do the opposite. Spend time with people you don't like. Go to a movie you're sure you'll hate. Your experiences won't always be pleasant, but they should incite emotion that you can later analyze and better understand.
Keep Track of How You Feel
Like an abbreviated diary, every time you have an emotional reaction to something, write it down. You don't need much detail, but just a sentence or two noting the emotion you're experiencing and the (possible) cause. For example, I get extremely irritable when I'm hungry. I will lose my temper far more easily when I'm hungry, so whenever I notice myself thinking irrational (and sometimes hateful) things, I always remind myself that I'm just hungry, I'll eat in a minute, and the "asshole" who accidentally missed the garbage can and didn't notice is mostly a result of my frustrated stomach. Until I started to pay attention, I never really noticed that I was a jerk whenever I was hungry. Instead, I just thought I was a jerk. This is a simple example, but the point is this: pay attention to how you feel and the other issues currently present, and you'll find it much easier to manage your negative emotions.
These expressions do surface from genuine emotion, so repeating them can actually make you feel happier/sadder/angrier/etc. through repetition. If you need to change your mood and your mindset, the ability to fake it ‘til you make it is very, very useful.
Always be healthy first before playing mind tricks- taking care of your body and your mind.
http://lifehacker.com/5747213/how-to-hack-your-brain#references
most of what you consider part of your identity is a product of influence.
We have a tendency to think that change is difficult, but it's really just a matter of changing your influence.
While everything stored in your recent memory may not be immediately accessible, all you really need to bring something up is a trigger word.
This is a list of words synonymous with or related to ambition. It's designed to be read aloud to put you in a more ambitious mindset, focusing your thoughts and priming your brain to react ambitiously when these words, or portions of these words, come up later in your day.
-drive
-do
-go
-make
-objective
-important
-create
-commitment
-purpose
-enthusiasm
-eager
-motivation
For more reading on priming, and a look at some really interesting studies, don't forget to check out the references for this article.
Using Your Emotions
If you've ever found yourself making out-of-character decisions based on your emotional state—such as binging on ice cream after a breakup—you know how easily your feelings can overtake your actions. Rather than letting your emotions lead you towards poor judgment and irrational behavior, however, you can learn to compensate for different emotional states and to fabricate emotions to alter your mood. In order to do that you need to, simply put, get in touch with your feelings. The idea isn't so much to cry into a pillow about your wasted childhood, but understand what you're feeling when you're feeling it, what the root cause is, and what you can do about it. We're going to take a look at how you can dissect your emotional state to use it to your advantage, and also look at how you can fabricate emotion to change how you're feeling.
Make Yourself Uncomfortable
Your emotions aren't in full force if you're not really doing anything, so you need to put yourself in uncomfortable situations in order to bring them out. This doesn't mean you should make yourself feel horrible, but that you should go out and do things that you might resist because you're worried about the downsides. Meeting new people is something that makes most people uncomfortable, and it's a great place to start, especially if it's a first date. Try new things that scare you. If you notice you're glued to the couch and don't want to get up, do the opposite. Spend time with people you don't like. Go to a movie you're sure you'll hate. Your experiences won't always be pleasant, but they should incite emotion that you can later analyze and better understand.
Keep Track of How You Feel
Like an abbreviated diary, every time you have an emotional reaction to something, write it down. You don't need much detail, but just a sentence or two noting the emotion you're experiencing and the (possible) cause. For example, I get extremely irritable when I'm hungry. I will lose my temper far more easily when I'm hungry, so whenever I notice myself thinking irrational (and sometimes hateful) things, I always remind myself that I'm just hungry, I'll eat in a minute, and the "asshole" who accidentally missed the garbage can and didn't notice is mostly a result of my frustrated stomach. Until I started to pay attention, I never really noticed that I was a jerk whenever I was hungry. Instead, I just thought I was a jerk. This is a simple example, but the point is this: pay attention to how you feel and the other issues currently present, and you'll find it much easier to manage your negative emotions.
These expressions do surface from genuine emotion, so repeating them can actually make you feel happier/sadder/angrier/etc. through repetition. If you need to change your mood and your mindset, the ability to fake it ‘til you make it is very, very useful.
Always be healthy first before playing mind tricks- taking care of your body and your mind.
http://lifehacker.com/5747213/how-to-hack-your-brain#references
songs that are ME
1. Soundtrack to the Struggle, Lowkey
2. Doin' it Again, The Roots
3. Strange Fruit Remix, Fashawn
4. Life as a Shorty, Fashawn
5. Boy Meets World, Fashawn
6. Gold, Common
7. Never Never, SBTRKT
8. Daughter, Nas
9. The Vent, Big K.R.I.T.
10. Neon Cathedral, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
11. Never Mess with Sunday, Yppah
12. Hold You Down, Childish Gambino
2. Doin' it Again, The Roots
3. Strange Fruit Remix, Fashawn
4. Life as a Shorty, Fashawn
5. Boy Meets World, Fashawn
6. Gold, Common
7. Never Never, SBTRKT
8. Daughter, Nas
9. The Vent, Big K.R.I.T.
10. Neon Cathedral, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
11. Never Mess with Sunday, Yppah
12. Hold You Down, Childish Gambino
From the quietly confident doctor whose advice we rely on, to the charismatic confidence of an inspiring speaker, self-confident people have qualities that everyone admires.
Self-confidence is extremely important in almost every aspect of our lives, yet so many people struggle to find it. Sadly, this can be a vicious circle: People who lack self-confidence can find it difficult to become successful.
After all, most people are reluctant to back a project that's being pitched by someone who was nervous, fumbling, and overly apologetic.
On the other hand, you might be persuaded by someone who speaks clearly, who holds his or her head high, who answers questions assuredly, and who readily admits when he or she does not know something.
Self-confident people inspire confidence in others: their audience, their peers, their bosses, their customers, and their friends. And gaining the confidence of others is one of the key ways in which a self-confident person finds success.
The good news is that self-confidence really can be learned and built on. And, whether you’re working on your own self-confidence or building the confidence of people around you, it’s well-worth the effort!
http://www.mindtools.com/selfconf.html
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Friday, January 18, 2013
How to Stay Grounded in Challenging Times
How to Stay Grounded in Challenging Times
By M. Chia & D. Saxer in Management on November 15th, 2009 / No Comments
These are challenging times, with vast economic, environmental, and spiritual changes. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with stress, worry, or depression – to feel out of control, ungrounded. Staying grounded is our safest and most effective strategy for coping with today’s challenges and finding positive solutions.
Grounding is the kinesthetic sense of being fully present in our body and our environment, moment by moment. It’s the continual flow and integration of sensory, emotional and mental stimuli. Like a sturdy tree, we bend and sway in a storm, but we’re rooted in our core.
A lack of grounding comes from an imbalance in our energy and our body. We feel uneasy, confused, unsettled. Unless it’s corrected, insufficient grounding can make us accident-prone. It can also escalate and cause physical and mental problems. We’ll discuss some of these later.
So how do we stay grounded in the midst of chaos? For thousands of years, Chinese Chi Kung (Qigong) has provided practical techniques for strengthening our grounding. Here are nine immediate ways to improve grounding. These and additional ways are covered in our new book, EMOTIONAL WISDOM: Daily Tools for Transforming Anger, Depression, and Fear,
1. Feel and accept all your emotions; they’re valuable messages from your soul. The positive, joyful emotions tell us we’re doing great. The painful ones tell us we’re out of balance, some situation needs improving, and the painful emotion needs transforming. If it’s not transformed, and it persists, that emotion will embed itself in our body, causing malfunction and eventually, disease.
There are Six Healing Sounds that dramatically transform painful emotions. Here’s how to do one of them, which is called the Relaxation or Sleep Sound. Lie down. Close your eyes and inhale deeply through your nose, inflating your abdomen, which also inflates your chest. Slowly exhale as you say the sound HEEEEE, deflating your chest, then your abdomen, and then, sending the sound down your whole body, into the earth. Rest and breathe naturally; your temperature will even out. Repeat the whole procedure until relaxed or, if you wish, until you fall asleep.
2. Eat three nutritious, organic meals daily, with green vegetables, some raw foods, some fermented foods. Eat foods with a variety of beautiful colors and delicious tastes. Give thanks for each meal, chew thoroughly, and mix each mouthful with saliva. Carefully shopping for and preparing your own food will improve both your grounding and your nutrition.
3. Emphasize earth element foods: beans and whole grains (pre-soaked overnight; soak water discarded), yellow and orange foods, foods grown in the ground.
4. Avoid addictive stimulants: coffee, chocolate, alcoholic drinks. Avoid cane sugar; substitute a little organic raw honey or 100% maple syrup.
5. Soak your feet in warm water. Massage them vigorously with oil or lotion, especially the toes and kidney point, which is located between the two balls of the foot.
6. If you meditate, do not leave energy in your head or heart. End every kind of meditation with this safe method of energy collection: Place the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth. With both palms together, rub your abdomen in circles. Women, circle counter-clockwise (when looking down at abdomen) for 36 times; then clockwise for 24 times. Men, circle clockwise 36 times; then counter-clockwise 24 times. Repeat if you’re still feeling spacey.
7. Slow down – get in touch with your own natural rhythms in your spiritual practice and in daily life. Pushing yourself to receive a higher energy than your body is ready to assimilate can cause severe runaway energy. This is especially true of doing spiritual sexual practices without first clearing emotions and balancing the body.
8. Exercise moderately, daily. Walk in nature. As you walk, connect to the earth with every step: roll each foot from heel, to side, to balls, to toes.
9. Grow a garden or plants. Adopt a pet. Use your unique gifts to help kids, seniors or animals in need. Some meditation methods create an ungrounded energy imbalance by cultivating universal or heaven energy, and ignoring or negating body and earth energies. The fundamental safeguard of the Universal Healing Tao System is that our practices are always grounded in our bodies, and connected to the earth.
At every level, we exercise moderately, transform our painful emotions, circulate our chi (life force energy) to balance yin and yang, and store chi in our navel area, as in #6 above. Our Basic courses heal and fortify our body and emotions before advancing to sexual energy practices, and then, to higher energies. Even at the higher levels, we continue our daily grounding practices including transforming painful emotions.
Earlier, we mentioned that being continually ungrounded can lead to physical and mental difficulties. It can make us accident-prone. It can escalate into uncontrolled, runaway energy (sometimes called “kundalini syndrome”), that causes occasional headaches, dizziness, disorientation, or mild heat sensations in the spine or heart.
More severe runaway energy shows up as very hot or very cold energy rushing up the spine, heat or pressure in the head, fainting, localized pain, frequent insomnia, or frequent diarrhea or constipation. The most extreme forms of runaway energy cause an inability to function at all, or as mental illness.
Of course, if you have these severe or extreme symptoms, have them checked medically, to rule out physical or emotional disorders. Note that chi kung literature and the experiences of our students report that western medications do not heal severe runaway energy. We advise you to contact a Universal Healing Tao Certified Instructor, or other skilled spiritual teacher or counselor, who has successfully worked with healing runaway energy.
We hope our suggestions will help you to meet the challenges and unprecedented opportunities ahead by staying firmly grounded. Have a marvelous journey, nourished and balanced by Earth’s Yin and Heaven’s Yang!
By M. Chia & D. Saxer in Management on November 15th, 2009 / No Comments
These are challenging times, with vast economic, environmental, and spiritual changes. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with stress, worry, or depression – to feel out of control, ungrounded. Staying grounded is our safest and most effective strategy for coping with today’s challenges and finding positive solutions.
Grounding is the kinesthetic sense of being fully present in our body and our environment, moment by moment. It’s the continual flow and integration of sensory, emotional and mental stimuli. Like a sturdy tree, we bend and sway in a storm, but we’re rooted in our core.
A lack of grounding comes from an imbalance in our energy and our body. We feel uneasy, confused, unsettled. Unless it’s corrected, insufficient grounding can make us accident-prone. It can also escalate and cause physical and mental problems. We’ll discuss some of these later.
So how do we stay grounded in the midst of chaos? For thousands of years, Chinese Chi Kung (Qigong) has provided practical techniques for strengthening our grounding. Here are nine immediate ways to improve grounding. These and additional ways are covered in our new book, EMOTIONAL WISDOM: Daily Tools for Transforming Anger, Depression, and Fear,
1. Feel and accept all your emotions; they’re valuable messages from your soul. The positive, joyful emotions tell us we’re doing great. The painful ones tell us we’re out of balance, some situation needs improving, and the painful emotion needs transforming. If it’s not transformed, and it persists, that emotion will embed itself in our body, causing malfunction and eventually, disease.
There are Six Healing Sounds that dramatically transform painful emotions. Here’s how to do one of them, which is called the Relaxation or Sleep Sound. Lie down. Close your eyes and inhale deeply through your nose, inflating your abdomen, which also inflates your chest. Slowly exhale as you say the sound HEEEEE, deflating your chest, then your abdomen, and then, sending the sound down your whole body, into the earth. Rest and breathe naturally; your temperature will even out. Repeat the whole procedure until relaxed or, if you wish, until you fall asleep.
2. Eat three nutritious, organic meals daily, with green vegetables, some raw foods, some fermented foods. Eat foods with a variety of beautiful colors and delicious tastes. Give thanks for each meal, chew thoroughly, and mix each mouthful with saliva. Carefully shopping for and preparing your own food will improve both your grounding and your nutrition.
3. Emphasize earth element foods: beans and whole grains (pre-soaked overnight; soak water discarded), yellow and orange foods, foods grown in the ground.
4. Avoid addictive stimulants: coffee, chocolate, alcoholic drinks. Avoid cane sugar; substitute a little organic raw honey or 100% maple syrup.
5. Soak your feet in warm water. Massage them vigorously with oil or lotion, especially the toes and kidney point, which is located between the two balls of the foot.
6. If you meditate, do not leave energy in your head or heart. End every kind of meditation with this safe method of energy collection: Place the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth. With both palms together, rub your abdomen in circles. Women, circle counter-clockwise (when looking down at abdomen) for 36 times; then clockwise for 24 times. Men, circle clockwise 36 times; then counter-clockwise 24 times. Repeat if you’re still feeling spacey.
7. Slow down – get in touch with your own natural rhythms in your spiritual practice and in daily life. Pushing yourself to receive a higher energy than your body is ready to assimilate can cause severe runaway energy. This is especially true of doing spiritual sexual practices without first clearing emotions and balancing the body.
8. Exercise moderately, daily. Walk in nature. As you walk, connect to the earth with every step: roll each foot from heel, to side, to balls, to toes.
9. Grow a garden or plants. Adopt a pet. Use your unique gifts to help kids, seniors or animals in need. Some meditation methods create an ungrounded energy imbalance by cultivating universal or heaven energy, and ignoring or negating body and earth energies. The fundamental safeguard of the Universal Healing Tao System is that our practices are always grounded in our bodies, and connected to the earth.
At every level, we exercise moderately, transform our painful emotions, circulate our chi (life force energy) to balance yin and yang, and store chi in our navel area, as in #6 above. Our Basic courses heal and fortify our body and emotions before advancing to sexual energy practices, and then, to higher energies. Even at the higher levels, we continue our daily grounding practices including transforming painful emotions.
Earlier, we mentioned that being continually ungrounded can lead to physical and mental difficulties. It can make us accident-prone. It can escalate into uncontrolled, runaway energy (sometimes called “kundalini syndrome”), that causes occasional headaches, dizziness, disorientation, or mild heat sensations in the spine or heart.
More severe runaway energy shows up as very hot or very cold energy rushing up the spine, heat or pressure in the head, fainting, localized pain, frequent insomnia, or frequent diarrhea or constipation. The most extreme forms of runaway energy cause an inability to function at all, or as mental illness.
Of course, if you have these severe or extreme symptoms, have them checked medically, to rule out physical or emotional disorders. Note that chi kung literature and the experiences of our students report that western medications do not heal severe runaway energy. We advise you to contact a Universal Healing Tao Certified Instructor, or other skilled spiritual teacher or counselor, who has successfully worked with healing runaway energy.
We hope our suggestions will help you to meet the challenges and unprecedented opportunities ahead by staying firmly grounded. Have a marvelous journey, nourished and balanced by Earth’s Yin and Heaven’s Yang!
7 Ways To Stay Grounded by Staying Organized
Think about the last time you were all over the place, full of a free floating anxiety, bouncing from one task to another, reacting to people and situations emotionally in a way you later regretted. I’ve learned that when I feel like that I have become ungrounded, disconnected from my center, from my knowing that I am OK and all is well.
How do I get back to my center? How do I ground myself? Staying grounded requires daily attention and effort. Here are some of the ways you can stay grounded:
Make your bed every day. Creating order and peacefulness in the bedroom settles the energies in that space and those good energies affect the rest of the house and you.
Clean up your kitchen every day. Having a clean and orderly kitchen calms the part of the house most associated with nurturance and comfort, also calming you.
Have morning and evening routines that are made up of activities of self-care, like bathing, exercising, tending to pets, straightening up. Tending yourself is a powerful way to ground and center yourself.
Sort your mail daily to make yourself aware of tasks that need to be done and bills that need to be paid. Knowing your reality is more calming than the anxiety produced by not knowing.
Keep paper in no more than two main locations, for example, the kitchen and the home office. Avoid allowing paper to spread throughout the house. When it spreads, its negative energy pollutes whatever area it is in. Paper is usually associated with some kind of task that needs to be done, like deciding whether you need the paper or not, or deciding where the paper should go next. When you see it all over the place it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the message it is sending, “You need to do something!” When you are feeling overwhelmed your are not centered.
Maintain order by putting things away all the time. Avoid the temptation to just drop things. It takes much more energy to pick them up than it does to drop them. When items are just dropped they have a negative, chaotic energy that is anything but grounding. And, dropped things attract more dropped things!
Do at least one 5 minute cleanup per day. Either start or end your day with a quick cleanup. Put things away, move things to the part of the house where they belong, straighten your papers, throw out trash. Take that time to restore order to your space. One of the first things I do when I’m thrown off center by some bad news or a difficult situation is to establish order in my home. Some would call my behavior compulsive. I call it grounding!
As I wrote the above list it occurred to me that all my recommendations are the same recommendations I make to people who want to learn how to stay more organized. So, staying organized in your physical space is a great way to stay grounded!
Joan Borysenco, Ph.D, author of Inner Peace for Busy People writes of the benefits of being grounded, centered, “When I’m centered it’s easier to respond to people, to catch the nuances of their attention, and to let inspiration flow through me. Thinking of myself as an instrument that life plays, rather than the source of the melody, has helped me be a better juggler. The instrument needs to be cleaned and polished, treated with care. When I’m in balance, the unbalanced hodgepodge of things on the to-do list are accomplished more effectively.”
Treat yourself with care and stay grounded by committing to maintaining an organized space. That way when you are confronted with one of life’s challenges you can handle it from a place of clarity and calmness, centered and able to access your inner wisdom.
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/7-ways-to-stay-grounded-by-staying-organized.html
How do I get back to my center? How do I ground myself? Staying grounded requires daily attention and effort. Here are some of the ways you can stay grounded:
Make your bed every day. Creating order and peacefulness in the bedroom settles the energies in that space and those good energies affect the rest of the house and you.
Clean up your kitchen every day. Having a clean and orderly kitchen calms the part of the house most associated with nurturance and comfort, also calming you.
Have morning and evening routines that are made up of activities of self-care, like bathing, exercising, tending to pets, straightening up. Tending yourself is a powerful way to ground and center yourself.
Sort your mail daily to make yourself aware of tasks that need to be done and bills that need to be paid. Knowing your reality is more calming than the anxiety produced by not knowing.
Keep paper in no more than two main locations, for example, the kitchen and the home office. Avoid allowing paper to spread throughout the house. When it spreads, its negative energy pollutes whatever area it is in. Paper is usually associated with some kind of task that needs to be done, like deciding whether you need the paper or not, or deciding where the paper should go next. When you see it all over the place it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the message it is sending, “You need to do something!” When you are feeling overwhelmed your are not centered.
Maintain order by putting things away all the time. Avoid the temptation to just drop things. It takes much more energy to pick them up than it does to drop them. When items are just dropped they have a negative, chaotic energy that is anything but grounding. And, dropped things attract more dropped things!
Do at least one 5 minute cleanup per day. Either start or end your day with a quick cleanup. Put things away, move things to the part of the house where they belong, straighten your papers, throw out trash. Take that time to restore order to your space. One of the first things I do when I’m thrown off center by some bad news or a difficult situation is to establish order in my home. Some would call my behavior compulsive. I call it grounding!
As I wrote the above list it occurred to me that all my recommendations are the same recommendations I make to people who want to learn how to stay more organized. So, staying organized in your physical space is a great way to stay grounded!
Joan Borysenco, Ph.D, author of Inner Peace for Busy People writes of the benefits of being grounded, centered, “When I’m centered it’s easier to respond to people, to catch the nuances of their attention, and to let inspiration flow through me. Thinking of myself as an instrument that life plays, rather than the source of the melody, has helped me be a better juggler. The instrument needs to be cleaned and polished, treated with care. When I’m in balance, the unbalanced hodgepodge of things on the to-do list are accomplished more effectively.”
Treat yourself with care and stay grounded by committing to maintaining an organized space. That way when you are confronted with one of life’s challenges you can handle it from a place of clarity and calmness, centered and able to access your inner wisdom.
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/7-ways-to-stay-grounded-by-staying-organized.html
Grounded
Here are some very important things to help keep you grounded:
1. Get all of the rest you need every night. Nourishing your body, mind and soul with blissful hours of sleep can do a world a wonders. You think better, have more energy and can get good things done.
2. Clear your work space so that positive and new energy can flow through and around you. Spend a few minutes each day to keep it clean (or creatively organized).
3. Disconnect for an hour or two every day. Go outside, sit in the sun, take a deep breath and a good look around you. Meditate. Be in the moment.
4. Spend quality time with family and friends. Make a connection with someone, listen to their story. Laugh. There is nothing like a good laugh to bring you back to earth.
5. Re-evaluate when needed. Sometimes sticking to the plan or schedule is not the right thing to do. Step away when needed, come back with fresh eyes and see what needs to stay or go. Some of those really great ideas need time to ripen. Set them aside. The really good ones will be waiting for you.
6. Practice gratitude for all that you have. Be thankful for the good and even the bad (usually there is a valuable lesson). Do this daily!
7. Be super kind to yourself. Nurture your heart, your soul, your body. Eat nutrients rich foods with occasional treats –chew mindfully. Read good books, listen to good music, pamper yourself and give yourself a few compliments every day.
http://yourheartmakesadifference.com/2012/03/a-world-of-possibility-and-staying-grounded-by-regina-lord/
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Vienna Journal, Part 3: Honesty Check
"This poster caught my eye, as we walked down a street in one of Vienna’s younger, hipper districts, which had only really flourished from funky to cool in the last five years or so. I couldn’t figure our what it was about, so I asked my hosts, Sigrid and Astrid (Austrian women really do have great names). Turns out the place offers a free service where you can bring your drugs to have them checked out and tested. Tested for what, you ask? Well, to see if they are what you think are of course. Yup, if you’re not sure about that ecstasy your cousin hooked you up with last week in Amsterdam, you can bring it in for free analysis, in the hopes that people knowing what they’re taking will prevent overdoses, or worse.
Red results mean you’ve got rat poison in your cocaine. Yellow means it’s OK, but you didn’t get the good stuff. And white means you’re all clear.
Controversial? In our county, sure. It’s right up there with needle exchange programs for a topic that people are bound to feel strongly about. But Europe has always been more open about the fact that people will take drugs whether they’re legal or not, and about endorsing an approach that tries to keep more people safe, however possible. I’m not saying this is the best way to go, but topics like this remind me a little of that saying “If you can’t change your mind, are you sure you still have one?” By the way, how’s our war on drugs going? I haven’t been paying attention, what with all the other wars we’re fighting."
http://blog.nau.com/2007/09/
Monday, January 14, 2013
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Baked Vegetable Chips
Ingredients:
Mixed root vegetables, thinly sliced (You may want to peel some vegetables, such as beets, but with most, if you normally like eating the peels, you can leave them on.)
Olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
Any herbs you have on hand (optional)
Instructions:
Toss the vegetable slices in the oil and seasonings. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and a single layer of veggie chips. Bake at 275 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 minutes, then flip the slices and bake another 15 minutes. Check the chips every few minutes, until they are crispy but not burnt. Serve warm or cool.
Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/relish/baked-vegetable-chips-zb0z1201zalt.aspx#ixzz2HpiplyF7
VEGAN BANANA PANCAKES
1 cup flour
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
dash cinnamon
2/3 cup nondairy milk (I use soy)
1/2 banana, very ripe and mashed
1 teaspoon vanilla
Friday, January 11, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Friends carrying me through a rough time..
Dolores-
And remember you're turning it all around started with you.
Janelle-
We were created for community. We aren't meant to life alone.
And remember you're turning it all around started with you.
Janelle-
We were created for community. We aren't meant to life alone.
Vik, A Good Friend
Running and reading... Will Smith
It's in words somewhere out there.
It's not easy being strong. It's easy to be depressed and give up, but only the strong are successful.
It's in words somewhere out there.
It's not easy being strong. It's easy to be depressed and give up, but only the strong are successful.
To Overcome the Situation
Focus on your passions
Listen to good music
Caffeine- a necessity
Put your mind to work
Feel and be supported
Share the love
Listen to good music
Caffeine- a necessity
Put your mind to work
Feel and be supported
Share the love
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
TFA in Detroit
I am officially a new corps member in Detroit! Right now it's a bit difficult to get out of the pain my throbbing head, twitching left eye, stress-fractured foot, and pulled muscle behind my right knee, but I'll just say I am excited. I need some time to rest and process, and when healthy enough, to celebrate.
A new chapter has officially just begun.
The future is now.
Love,
Jess
A new chapter has officially just begun.
The future is now.
Love,
Jess
Sunday, January 6, 2013
The Meaning of Life is a cultural treasure in its entirety, and the screen does the stunning photographs no justice — do grab yourself an analog copy.
Zadie Smith
When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/19/zadie-smith-10-rules-of-writing/
AMAZING
“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”
The Daily Routines of Famous Writers
by Maria Popova
“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s recently published daily routine made we wonder how other beloved writers organized their days. So I pored through various old diaries and interviews — many from the fantastic Paris Review archives — and culled a handful of writing routines from some of my favorite authors. Enjoy.
Ray Bradbury, a lifelong proponent of working with joy and an avid champion of public libraries, playfully defies the question of routines in this 2010 interview:
My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.
[…]
I can work anywhere. I wrote in bedrooms and living rooms when I was growing up with my parents and my brother in a small house in Los Angeles. I worked on my typewriter in the living room, with the radio and my mother and dad and brother all talking at the same time. Later on, when I wanted to write Fahrenheit 451, I went up to UCLA and found a basement typing room where, if you inserted ten cents into the typewriter, you could buy thirty minutes of typing time.
Joan Didion creates for herself a kind of incubation period for ideas, articulated in this 1968 interview:
I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don’t have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.
E. B. White, in the same fantastic interview that gave us his timeless insight on the role and responsibility of the writer, notes his relationship with sound and ends on a note echoing Tchaikovsky on work ethic:
I never listen to music when I’m working. I haven’t that kind of attentiveness, and I wouldn’t like it at all. On the other hand, I’m able to work fairly well among ordinary distractions. My house has a living room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it is a passageway to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. There’s a lot of traffic. But it’s a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room to write in, despite the carnival that is going on all around me. A girl pushing a carpet sweeper under my typewriter table has never annoyed me particularly, nor has it taken my mind off my work, unless the girl was unusually pretty or unusually clumsy. My wife, thank God, has never been protective of me, as, I am told, the wives of some writers are. In consequence, the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man — they make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.
Photograph by Tom Palumbo, 1956
Jack Kerouac describes his rituals and superstitions in 1968:
I had a ritual once of lighting a candle and writing by its light and blowing it out when I was done for the night … also kneeling and praying before starting (I got that from a French movie about George Frideric Handel) … but now I simply hate to write. My superstition? I’m beginning to suspect the full moon. Also I’m hung up on the number nine though I’m told a Piscean like myself should stick to number seven; but I try to do nine touchdowns a day, that is, I stand on my head in the bathroom, on a slipper, and touch the floor nine times with my toe tips, while balanced. This is incidentally more than yoga, it’s an athletic feat, I mean imagine calling me ‘unbalanced’ after that. Frankly I do feel that my mind is going. So another ‘ritual’ as you call it, is to pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity and my energy so I can help my family: that being my paralyzed mother, and my wife, and the ever-present kitties. Okay?
He then adds a few thought on the best time and place for writing:
The desk in the room, near the bed, with a good light, midnight till dawn, a drink when you get tired, preferably at home, but if you have no home, make a home out of your hotel room or motel room or pad: peace.
Susan Sontag resolves in her diary in 1977, adding to her collected wisdom on writing:
Starting tomorrow — if not today:
I will get up every morning no later than eight. (Can break this rule once a week.)
I will have lunch only with Roger [Straus]. (‘No, I don’t go out for lunch.’ Can break this rule once every two weeks.)
I will write in the Notebook every day. (Model: Lichtenberg’s Waste Books.)
I will tell people not to call in the morning, or not answer the phone.
I will try to confine my reading to the evening. (I read too much — as an escape from writing.)
I will answer letters once a week. (Friday? — I have to go to the hospital anyway.)
Then, in a Paris Review interview nearly two decades later, she details her routine:
I write with a felt-tip pen, or sometimes a pencil, on yellow or white legal pads, that fetish of American writers. I like the slowness of writing by hand. Then I type it up and scrawl all over that. And keep on retyping it, each time making corrections both by hand and directly on the typewriter, until I don’t see how to make it any better. Up to five years ago, that was it. Since then there is a computer in my life. After the second or third draft it goes into the computer, so I don’t retype the whole manuscript anymore, but continue to revise by hand on a succession of hard-copy drafts from the computer.
[…]
I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It’s a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I’m too interested in many other things.
In 1932, under a section titled Daily Routine, Henry Miller footnotes his 11 commandments of writing with this wonderful blueprint for productivity, inspiration, and mental health:
MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.
If in fine fettle, write.
AFTERNOONS:
Work of section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.
EVENINGS:
See friends. Read in cafés.
Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.
Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.
Paint if empty or tired.
Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.
Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.
In this 1965 interview, Simone de Beauvoir contributes to dispelling the “tortured-genius” myth of writing:
I’m always in a hurry to get going, though in general I dislike starting the day. I first have tea and then, at about ten o’clock, I get under way and work until one. Then I see my friends and after that, at five o’clock, I go back to work and continue until nine. I have no difficulty in picking up the thread in the afternoon. When you leave, I’ll read the paper or perhaps go shopping. Most often it’s a pleasure to work.
[…]
If the work is going well, I spend a quarter or half an hour reading what I wrote the day before, and I make a few corrections. Then I continue from there. In order to pick up the thread I have to read what I’ve done.
Ernest Hemingway, who famously wrote standing (“Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.”), approaches his craft with equal parts poeticism and pragmatism:
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
Don DeLillo tells The Paris Review in 1993:
I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle — it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours. Back into book time, which is transparent — you don’t know it’s passing. No snack food or coffee. No cigarettes — I stopped smoking a long time ago. The space is clear, the house is quiet. A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary. To break the spell I look at a photograph of Borges, a great picture sent to me by the Irish writer Colm Tóín. The face of Borges against a dark background — Borges fierce, blind, his nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks painted; he’s like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of steely rapture. I’ve read Borges of course, although not nearly all of it, and I don’t know anything about the way he worked — but the photograph shows us a writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So I’ve tried to make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.
Productivity maniac Benjamin Franklin had a formidably rigorous daily routine:
Image by Nick Bilton
Haruki Murakami shares the mind-body connection noted by some of history’s famous creators:
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
William Gibson tells the Paris Review in 2011:
When I’m writing a book I get up at seven. I check my e-mail and do Internet ablutions, as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pilates and am back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolutely nothing is happening, I’ll give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, generally, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.
[…]
As I move through the book it becomes more demanding. At the beginning, I have a five-day workweek, and each day is roughly ten to five, with a break for lunch and a nap. At the very end, it’s a seven-day week, and it could be a twelve-hour day.
Toward the end of a book, the state of composition feels like a complex, chemically altered state that will go away if I don’t continue to give it what it needs. What it needs is simply to write all the time. Downtime other than simply sleeping becomes problematic. I’m always glad to see the back of that.
Maya Angelou shares her day with Paris Review in 1990:
I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop — I’m a serious cook — and pretend to be normal. I play sane — Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them — fifty acceptable pages — it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.
Anaïs Nin simply notes, in a 1941 parenthetical comment, in the third volume of her diaries:
I write my stories in the morning, my diary at night.
She then adds in the fifth volume, in 1948.
I write every day. … I do my best work in the morning.
Lastly, the Kurt Vonnegut routine that inspired this omnibus, recorded in a letter to his wife in 1965:
In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. I’m just as glad they haven’t consulted me about the tiresome details. What they have worked out is this: I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach of prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and sit-ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not. Last night, time and my body decided to take me to the movies. I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.
For more wisdom from beloved authors, complement with Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story, Joy Williams on why writers write, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/20/daily-routines-writers/
The Daily Routines of Famous Writers
by Maria Popova
“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s recently published daily routine made we wonder how other beloved writers organized their days. So I pored through various old diaries and interviews — many from the fantastic Paris Review archives — and culled a handful of writing routines from some of my favorite authors. Enjoy.
Ray Bradbury, a lifelong proponent of working with joy and an avid champion of public libraries, playfully defies the question of routines in this 2010 interview:
My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.
[…]
I can work anywhere. I wrote in bedrooms and living rooms when I was growing up with my parents and my brother in a small house in Los Angeles. I worked on my typewriter in the living room, with the radio and my mother and dad and brother all talking at the same time. Later on, when I wanted to write Fahrenheit 451, I went up to UCLA and found a basement typing room where, if you inserted ten cents into the typewriter, you could buy thirty minutes of typing time.
Joan Didion creates for herself a kind of incubation period for ideas, articulated in this 1968 interview:
I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don’t have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.
E. B. White, in the same fantastic interview that gave us his timeless insight on the role and responsibility of the writer, notes his relationship with sound and ends on a note echoing Tchaikovsky on work ethic:
I never listen to music when I’m working. I haven’t that kind of attentiveness, and I wouldn’t like it at all. On the other hand, I’m able to work fairly well among ordinary distractions. My house has a living room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it is a passageway to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. There’s a lot of traffic. But it’s a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room to write in, despite the carnival that is going on all around me. A girl pushing a carpet sweeper under my typewriter table has never annoyed me particularly, nor has it taken my mind off my work, unless the girl was unusually pretty or unusually clumsy. My wife, thank God, has never been protective of me, as, I am told, the wives of some writers are. In consequence, the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man — they make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.
Photograph by Tom Palumbo, 1956
Jack Kerouac describes his rituals and superstitions in 1968:
I had a ritual once of lighting a candle and writing by its light and blowing it out when I was done for the night … also kneeling and praying before starting (I got that from a French movie about George Frideric Handel) … but now I simply hate to write. My superstition? I’m beginning to suspect the full moon. Also I’m hung up on the number nine though I’m told a Piscean like myself should stick to number seven; but I try to do nine touchdowns a day, that is, I stand on my head in the bathroom, on a slipper, and touch the floor nine times with my toe tips, while balanced. This is incidentally more than yoga, it’s an athletic feat, I mean imagine calling me ‘unbalanced’ after that. Frankly I do feel that my mind is going. So another ‘ritual’ as you call it, is to pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity and my energy so I can help my family: that being my paralyzed mother, and my wife, and the ever-present kitties. Okay?
He then adds a few thought on the best time and place for writing:
The desk in the room, near the bed, with a good light, midnight till dawn, a drink when you get tired, preferably at home, but if you have no home, make a home out of your hotel room or motel room or pad: peace.
Susan Sontag resolves in her diary in 1977, adding to her collected wisdom on writing:
Starting tomorrow — if not today:
I will get up every morning no later than eight. (Can break this rule once a week.)
I will have lunch only with Roger [Straus]. (‘No, I don’t go out for lunch.’ Can break this rule once every two weeks.)
I will write in the Notebook every day. (Model: Lichtenberg’s Waste Books.)
I will tell people not to call in the morning, or not answer the phone.
I will try to confine my reading to the evening. (I read too much — as an escape from writing.)
I will answer letters once a week. (Friday? — I have to go to the hospital anyway.)
Then, in a Paris Review interview nearly two decades later, she details her routine:
I write with a felt-tip pen, or sometimes a pencil, on yellow or white legal pads, that fetish of American writers. I like the slowness of writing by hand. Then I type it up and scrawl all over that. And keep on retyping it, each time making corrections both by hand and directly on the typewriter, until I don’t see how to make it any better. Up to five years ago, that was it. Since then there is a computer in my life. After the second or third draft it goes into the computer, so I don’t retype the whole manuscript anymore, but continue to revise by hand on a succession of hard-copy drafts from the computer.
[…]
I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It’s a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I’m too interested in many other things.
In 1932, under a section titled Daily Routine, Henry Miller footnotes his 11 commandments of writing with this wonderful blueprint for productivity, inspiration, and mental health:
MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.
If in fine fettle, write.
AFTERNOONS:
Work of section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.
EVENINGS:
See friends. Read in cafés.
Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.
Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.
Paint if empty or tired.
Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.
Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.
In this 1965 interview, Simone de Beauvoir contributes to dispelling the “tortured-genius” myth of writing:
I’m always in a hurry to get going, though in general I dislike starting the day. I first have tea and then, at about ten o’clock, I get under way and work until one. Then I see my friends and after that, at five o’clock, I go back to work and continue until nine. I have no difficulty in picking up the thread in the afternoon. When you leave, I’ll read the paper or perhaps go shopping. Most often it’s a pleasure to work.
[…]
If the work is going well, I spend a quarter or half an hour reading what I wrote the day before, and I make a few corrections. Then I continue from there. In order to pick up the thread I have to read what I’ve done.
Ernest Hemingway, who famously wrote standing (“Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.”), approaches his craft with equal parts poeticism and pragmatism:
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
Don DeLillo tells The Paris Review in 1993:
I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle — it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours. Back into book time, which is transparent — you don’t know it’s passing. No snack food or coffee. No cigarettes — I stopped smoking a long time ago. The space is clear, the house is quiet. A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary. To break the spell I look at a photograph of Borges, a great picture sent to me by the Irish writer Colm Tóín. The face of Borges against a dark background — Borges fierce, blind, his nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks painted; he’s like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of steely rapture. I’ve read Borges of course, although not nearly all of it, and I don’t know anything about the way he worked — but the photograph shows us a writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So I’ve tried to make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.
Productivity maniac Benjamin Franklin had a formidably rigorous daily routine:
Image by Nick Bilton
Haruki Murakami shares the mind-body connection noted by some of history’s famous creators:
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
William Gibson tells the Paris Review in 2011:
When I’m writing a book I get up at seven. I check my e-mail and do Internet ablutions, as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pilates and am back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolutely nothing is happening, I’ll give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, generally, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.
[…]
As I move through the book it becomes more demanding. At the beginning, I have a five-day workweek, and each day is roughly ten to five, with a break for lunch and a nap. At the very end, it’s a seven-day week, and it could be a twelve-hour day.
Toward the end of a book, the state of composition feels like a complex, chemically altered state that will go away if I don’t continue to give it what it needs. What it needs is simply to write all the time. Downtime other than simply sleeping becomes problematic. I’m always glad to see the back of that.
Maya Angelou shares her day with Paris Review in 1990:
I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop — I’m a serious cook — and pretend to be normal. I play sane — Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them — fifty acceptable pages — it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.
Anaïs Nin simply notes, in a 1941 parenthetical comment, in the third volume of her diaries:
I write my stories in the morning, my diary at night.
She then adds in the fifth volume, in 1948.
I write every day. … I do my best work in the morning.
Lastly, the Kurt Vonnegut routine that inspired this omnibus, recorded in a letter to his wife in 1965:
In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. I’m just as glad they haven’t consulted me about the tiresome details. What they have worked out is this: I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach of prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and sit-ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not. Last night, time and my body decided to take me to the movies. I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.
For more wisdom from beloved authors, complement with Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story, Joy Williams on why writers write, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/20/daily-routines-writers/
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