Happiness ~ One Positive Word by One Positive Word. Your words pack power. Your words can heal, your words can wound. Your words can be the cause of happiness or the cause of suffering. It’s easy to go about your day with little thought to the words you express because you’re busy, busy, busy. Often, words will tumble out of one’s mouth impulsively in response to what you hear, see, think or feel. If you don’t take control of your speech, however, it may take control over you. According to research in the area of neuroscience, negative speech can change neural pathways in a person’s brain and the expression of positive words that express kindness can help build a happier brain. Therefore, if you truly want to be happy and to make others happy too, take charge of your words. Here are four ways of speaking to avoid at all costs if happiness is your aim. Lying Lying makes you untrustworthy, unreliable, and unpredictable. Instead: Be honest and truthful, but not to a painful point. Encouraging Discord Instead: Be a peacemaker.
Harsh Speech. Free Stuff – Ellen Bard. How you can create Inbox Zero, no matter how many emails current in your inbox. I have a confession to make. I’m an inbox zero-er. Don’t hate me. I was with a friend recently and we were talking about productivity, lists, time management, and all those other topics over which to while away a lunchtime. And she asked me how many emails I had in my inbox. I said, usually zero, but sometimes as many as 10. After she’d picked herself up off the floor, and prevented herself from smacking me round the head, she asked me to talk her through my system, and then asked if I’d written about it. I haven’t always had a zero inbox.
And then I read Getting Things Done, which changed the way I organised my work and life, and started a gradual shift towards inbox zero at home and at work. I promise you, you can also get to Inbox Zero. You need two things: a simple system and a little time invested up front to get on top of the current situation. Time invested up front – get on top of the current situation A simple system Having a system is critical. Inbox zero – it can be done! 4 Habits to Help You Get Through the Worst Times of Your Life.
Some of life’s best lessons are learned through the worst times. ~ Ani DiFranco Living doesn’t always comes easy. Life can seem like a series of losses. Loss of loved ones. Lost possibilities. Lost relationships. I lost my brother this week and it hurt. Loss is part of being alive and when things come crashing down around you, and you find yourself going through your worst times, you’ll need strong habits to fall back on. I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with habits that would help me to not totally fall apart when the worst times rolled around. Here’s some of the things I’ve learned and I encourage you to remember that in your greatest struggles you will discover a strength you didn’t know you had. 1.
You might lose your good health, you might lose your job, lose a loved one, go through difficulties with others, be involved in divorce but if you stay connected to your inner self, however bowed you are, you won’t be broken. 2. 3. I sometimes fall prey to this. 4. P.S. Love Elle. How to Worry Less. Southeast Asia is always teeming with Western backpackers, and there’s a silent competition among them to appear the most relaxed. You can get an idea of who’s been “in country” for some time based on how unfazed they appear in sketchy situations. Something that rattles you on the first day in Bangkok—a taxi ignoring a red light, a housecat bedding down beneath your table in a restaurant, a motorcycle using the sidewalk to sneak past a traffic jam—seems mundane a week later. So when you’re on an overcrowded boat that seems as if it’s about to capsize with every wave, some of your fellow passengers can appear almost supernaturally relaxed.
It’s hard to know who’s truly at ease in the tumult, and who’s trying to look like they are. But you know that some of them really have achieved a Keith-Richards-like level of easygoingness, because you start to see it happening to you. There are two major problems with waiting for these moments before you let yourself relax: That’s it. New? Start Here - Uncaged Human. If you’re new here it can be a lot to try to digest all of the posts published to date. To make things easier, I’ve compiled the “greatest hits” for you on one page. These cover the fundamentals of what the uncaging movement is all about.
If you’re looking for programs and gear I recommend, check out the resources for epic movement page. If you’re looking for more intensive help, one-on-one, check out my coaching page. Without further ado, here are the most popular posts to date: How to Reverse the Damage of Sitting and Human Domestication How I Went From a Stiff Board to a Supple Beast in 10 Months How to Move Like a Hero: The Daily Practice The Ultimate Guide to Superhuman Movement How the Old World of Fitness Died (and the new era of moving heroically) The 30 Day Primal Squat Challenge How to do the Deep, Flat-Footed Squat If you have a request for a topic you haven’t seen covered, let me know and there’s a good chance I’ll create an article or video on it.
Resources for Epic Movement - Uncaged Human. Every uncaged human needs a little help on their journey to baddassity. These are some of the programs and tools that have helped me most along my journey. I encourage you to explore them and decide what works best for you. Full disclosure: Some of these resources are free, and some aren’t.
Those that are paid resources are affiliate products or services, meaning if you buy them, I get a commission at no extra cost to you. Please know that I have personal experience with all of the following resources, which is why I recommend them. Becoming a flexible beast, even if you’re not a flexible person (like me) I’ll be honest, I was never naturally flexible. But then something weird happened, I focused on flexibility, really worked at it and would you look at that, I made some pretty damn good progress. Here’s how I used Focused Flexibility from GMB to go from a stiff board to a supple beast. Click here to learn about focused flexibility.
Upper body strength with the gymnastics rings Podcasts. How to Reverse the Damage of Sitting and Human Domestication - Uncaged Human. Note: This is a follow-up to this post about how injury can be your friend. It’s easy to put off the debt incurred from not moving. You don’t feel it now so you keep your head hunched and plug away. You’ll move your body later. If you do this long enough, “later” will come crashing down on you in the form of herniated discs, knee replacements and loss of basic human function.
So, what the hell is movement debt and why is it the most important thing you’re not thinking about? Allow me to explain… We’re all familiar with sleep debt. If you don’t sleep enough one night, you’ll feel it, but generally you can still get by. Movement debt works the same way. If you don’t move much for a day, you’ll feel the stiffness and tension, but you can usually shrug it off and barrel through. You might wake up after a great night of sleep, yet your body begins pleading for movement by way the way your joints feel: “get moving, I need to articulate or I’m going to calcify!”
But what do most of us do? Standing? How to Be At Home Wherever You Are | Cauldrons and Cupcakes. “Home wasn’t a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.” ~ Sarah Dessen, What Happened to Goodbye Did you read my post about the energies of October? Here’s a snippet of what I wrote: “October is a month for nestling and cocooning.
After the post went up I was flooded with emails and messages from people who are not living at home right now, or who travel a lot, or for whatever other reason are feeling displaced. Your October post brought tears to my eyes because I just moved to xxxxxx last week and feel anything but a sense of home and belonging. Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling. If you travel a lot make a small grab bag of a few significant items.
Give yourself time to acclimatise to wherever you are. Like this: Like Loading... 5 of the best reasons to exercise (getting healthy isn't one) - Jacki Hayes. Welcome. If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed so you don't miss my next post. Thanks for visiting! For years, exercise has been branded as a way to lose weight. But as the body-acceptance movement gained ground and eating disorders increased, many organizations began pushing a new message. Exercise for your health. Seems like a healthier alternative (pun intended). Yet, women over the age of 50 are among the most sedentary in the United States, and as they age, their activity level only decreases. We would think that health and longevity would be effective motivators for exercise as we age, but the numbers show that a concern for health just isn’t enough.
If health isn’t our answer to the motivation problem, what is? Motivation and goals Let’s start by understanding goals. Theories behind goals state that we are motivated to change our behaviors when our current experience or state of being doesn’t match our desires. There exists a hierarchy to our goals. Yes, it can. Courage. New Articles. My 2015 love list: tools, books, music, projects & people that I love and recommend. Once a year or so, I release a new “love list”: A collection of time- and sanity-saving tools, service providers that I heartily recommend, books that have inspired me, groovy music, and more.
Here’s my list for 2015. All my current favs. If you’re a writer, creative freelancer, business owner, or simply someone who enjoys discovering new tools to help your workday flow more productively, this list is for you. Enjoy! – Freshbooks. . – AWeber. . – Spotify. . – Gumroad. . – Unroll.me. . – Paul Jarvis designed my current website and he is a consummate pro. . – I’ve done several photo shoots with Danielle Cohen and she is just… divine. . – Looking for a professional copywriter / ghostwriter / word-wrangler? – Looking for someone to do proofreading, research, manage projects, and generally just make your digital life easier? – Die Empty left a powerful imprint on my heart.
. – I love podcasts! Caramels from Quin. That’s a wrap! Are You In Survival Mode For No Good Reason? | Cauldrons and Cupcakes. “Oh! That gentleness! How far more potent is it than force!” ~ Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre Most of us are used to pushing, to working hard, to gritting our teeth and carrying on. If there is a crisis in your life, that is often the only thing to be done. But sometimes, it seems that we become used to living as though all of our life is a crisis. Friends, that’s not a great plan. When we constantly push ourselves, and stress ourselves, we begin to alter our body’s chemistry. If you are genuinely in crisis, with an abnormal amount of stress due to external conditions and circumstances, I wish you well and I pray for you the strength to get through these times the best that you can.
But if your whole life looks like a crisis, and you’re tired to the bones, numb from the grind of it all – maybe it’s time to change something. When we get to that place we stop making good decisions and default to auto-pilot. Simplify. Life is not always easy. Like this: Like Loading... Dani Shapiro | Archive for Moments of Being. A number of years ago, I was seated next to a literary agent — not my own — at a dinner party. At some point during our conversation, she asked every writer’s favorite question: what are you working on? As it happened, I had recently begun working on a memoir. No one was more surprised by this development than I. My previous two books had been novels, and I had been waiting for the next novel to materialize, as a glimmer, a glimpse of something urgent in my imagination. The agent sat back in her chair and looked stricken, as if somehow my news affected her personally. “But you can’t! The agent went so far as to call one of the editors who was interested in my new book to tell her she thought I — along with my actual agent — was making a mistake.
This stayed with me, haunted me, while I wrote Devotion. When Devotion eventually was published, it turned out that my fears – along with my dinner companion’s dismay – had been unfounded. My students stared at me. On Protecting Your Instrument | Dani Shapiro. I’m back on the chaise. I’ve just finished with the last full week of teaching I’ll be doing until March.
All summer long, I’ve wondered what this moment would feel like. I have no flights scheduled, no dates on my calendar (except for a few small weekend retreats like this one and this one) and a real swath of time stretched out before me. A magic carpet, rolled out, ready for me to step onto it with the intention of finishing a draft of my new book. Today is the day. The fluffy white dog is lying by my feet. I’m wearing the world’s most comfortable sweatpants, a favorite yoga tee shirt, and a ratty cardigan. Ah, yes. Inside my head, all is chaos. In Still Writing, I quote a list of instructions for writers left by the poet Jane Kenyon: Protect your time. I think of this as protecting my instrument – and yours.