The Four Mantras of True Presence. When you love someone, you have to be truly present for him or for her. A ten-year-old boy I know was asked by his father what he wanted for his birthday, and he didn’t know how to answer. His father is quite wealthy and could afford to buy almost anything he might want. But the young man only said, “Daddy, I want you!” His father is too busy – he has no time for his wife or his children. To demonstrate true love, we have to make ourselves available.
If that father learns to breathe in and out consciously and be present for his son, he can say, “My son, I am really here for you.” The greatest gift we can make to others is our true presence. When you are concentrated – mind and body together – you produce your true presence, and anything you say is a mantra. 1st mantra: “Darling, I am here for you.” It does not have to be in Sanskrit or Tibetan. “Darling, I am here for you” 2nd mantra: “I know you are there, and I am very happy.”
These mantras can be practiced in our daily life Home-coming. When we're Triggered: How to Stop Reacting Defensively. Get elephant's newsletter Every single moment you live—awake and aware inside your life—is another tiny (or huge) opportunity for healing, even your moments on Facebook. I recently opened up a discussion about this topic in one of my favorite healing groups on Facebook. In a virtual room full of healers and people doing healing work, you’re bound to get a treasure chest of ideas, information, opinion and experience.
It turned out as awesome as I had imagined, until I was triggered—big time. Awareness opens the door for curiosity, perspective and shift—the very things you need to change your thoughts and your life. Being a warrior inside my own life has meant looking at the things that trigger me, anger and frustrate me, wound me, hurt me and depress me. “Without awareness there is no choice.” ~ John F. My teacher’s quote floats around my notebooks and my brain, constantly asking me to go deeper. I sat at my computer, reading the comment from my colleague and allowing myself to feel three. When We Judge a Person Harshly With a Label or Dismissal, We Kill the Human Being Inside of Them. By Tim Hjersted / filmsforaction.org No person or group of people is ever one thing. Inside each of us are a thousand diverse aspects - evolving dimensions.
So when we judge a person, cut off our hearts from them with a label or dismissal, we are killing the human being inside of them. We are interacting with a 2D image, a distortion which hides their full humanity. "He's so ____. " In truth, most of our life revolves around images like these. As J Krishnamurti asks in Freedom From the Known, "Have you ever experimented with looking at an objective thing like a tree without any of the associations, any of the knowledge you have acquired about it, without any prejudice, any judgment, any words forming a screen between you and the tree and preventing you from seeing it as it actually is?
In the same way, with each person in your life, I hope you will see them with complete attention. I realize this is more difficult than it sounds. This isn't always the case, of course. I want to break free.
Grief. Jackson Pollock on Art, Labels, and Morality, Shortly Before His Death. In 1957, writer, public intellectual, lifelong art aficionado, and self-described “aging anthologist” Selden Rodman collected several dozen of his informal, lively, amusing, and insightful interviews with iconic artists and architects — including Frank Lloyd Wright, Willem de Kooning, and Saul Steinberg — in Conversations with Artists (public library). Among the conversations is one with Jackson Pollock — beloved artist and son of one particularly great dad — which took place eight weeks before Pollock, driving under the influence of alcohol, crashed in his Oldsmobile convertible into a tree and died.
But on that June evening in 1956, Rodman bumped into a tipsy Pollock en route to a dive bar party following the opening of Willem de Kooning’s show at the Sidney Janis Gallery. When Rodman, tipsy as well, runs into Pollock near Astor Place, the painter suddenly reaches out, grabs the runt of a nearby tree, and weaves into an oddly philosophical meditation: It’s a different age we live in. Anthropology of the Brain: Consciousness, Culture, and Free Will. Anthropology of the Brain: Consciousness, Culture, and Free Will In this unique exploration of the mysteries of the human brain, Roger Bartra shows that consciousness is a phenomenon that occurs not only in the mind but also in an external network, a symbolic system.
He argues that the symbolic systems created by humans in art, language, in cooking or in dress, are the key to understanding human consciousness. Placing culture at the center of his analysis, Bartra brings together findings from anthropology and cognitive science and offers an original vision of the continuity between the brain and its symbolic environment. The book is essential reading for neurologists, cognitive scientists, and anthropologists alike. Read About Giorgio Bertini Research Professor. This entry was posted in Anthropology, Brains, Consciousness, Cultural brain, Culture, Social brain, Symbolic environment and tagged anthropology, brain, consciousness, cultural brain, culture, social brain, symbolic environment. The Nature of the Self: Experimental Philosopher Joshua Knobe on How We Know Who We Are.
“The fate of the world depends on the Selves of human beings,” pioneering educator Annemarie Roeper wrote in her meditation on how poorly we understand the self. Indeed, while philosophers may argue that the self is a toxic illusion and psychologists may insist that it’s forever changing, we tend to float through life anchored by a firm conviction that the self is our sole constant companion. But when psychologist David DeSteno asks “Can the present you trust the future you?” In his fantastic exploration of the psychology of trust, the question leaves us — at least, leaves me — suddenly paralyzed with the realization that the future self is in many ways fundamentally different from the present self. Our emotions and beliefs and ideals are constantly evolving — Anaïs Nin put it perfectly: “I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles… My real self is unknown.” — and even biologically, most cells in the our bodies are completely renewed every seven years.
The Self-Acceptance Project. What's Your MBTI Personality Type? Enrich Your Life Through Self-Discovery. Get elephant's newsletter The first time I heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test (MBTI), it was because my husband had to take this assessment at work. Actually, many work places use this assessment due to its accuracy and easy-testing method. Learning about the personality types of people you work with (or socialize with or live with) can help with productive communication and a general better understanding of those who surround you.
Also, for some people, it can help them get in touch with their own feelings, thoughts and the reasons behind some of their own actions. Take the test here and then read on to learn briefly about the 16 different personality types. To completely understand this test, and your results, it’s best to have knowledge of the theory that it’s based on, which is Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types. Essentially, Jung proposed the existence of two dichotomous pairs of cognitive functions: the “rational” (judging) functions: thinking and feeling Relephant: PL 015: The Power of Mirrors – Take A Look At What You Are Missing | Practice Life. Podcast: Play in new window | Download In order to change, we need to be able to see what needs to change. However, we cannot see directly into what we most need to change. But we can see this indirectly. How? By looking into people who irritate us — “our mirrors.”
The Skinny The greatest lever we have to effect change is to change ourselves. Stephen Covey – The Eight HabitRonald Heifetz – Adaptive LeadershipOtto Scharmer – Theory U In Episode 13, we talked about self-deception. Do you see the rub? On the one hand, our only real way to effect true, sustainable change is to change ourselves.Yet on the other hand, our ego, which for most of us runs the show, doesn’t believe we need to change. And this is why most people will not change–the blind spot our ego creates trumps our desire to change. But it doesn’t have to go that way. The Mirror Principle Through Quotations There is not a lot of “authoritative literature” to cite on The Mirror Principle (that we have come across, anyway). 1. 2. 1. Which Character Strengths Are Most Predictive of Well-Being? - Beautiful Minds - Scientific American Blog Network. In 2004, Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman came out with Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification.
This volume was a significant contribution to psychology, a sort of antidote to the DSM's focus on mental illness, and an important reminder to psychologists that humans aren't only full of illness. Humans also have a lot of character. The book laid out the following 24 character strengths: In his book Flourish, Martin Seligman, the founder of the field of positive psychology (and my boss), argued that the five fundamental elements of well-being are: The main tenet of the field of positive psychology is that the path to well-being lies in nurturing your highest strengths. But one big question remains: Which character strengths are most predictive of well-being? So I did the analysis. As it turns out, all five elements of PERMA were very strongly correlated with each other. The top three character strengths that were most strongly correlated with well-being were: Ask better Questions: Algorithms for everyone! I finish my series of 5 community rules, 4 principles of engagement, 3 approaches that work, 2 ½ change caveats, with One Ask.
My one ask is: Ask Better Questions. 1. Local-level practitioners should be using our 5 community rules. For example, when you go to see a GP, they should be asking about your social connections. Do you have any? 2. This could be using something like our 5 community rules to ensure that new policies don’t negatively affect someone’s social contact availability, doesn’t harm the already vulnerable, makes people feel more part of a community and not less. 3. Introducing… Algorithms for Good! Algorithms for Good? Algorithms are everywhere. My question is: what would ‘Algorithms for Good’ look like? Algorithms are basically rules of thumb, scaled up; they are “a process or a set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.”
Via My offer: So what questions might we ask? My Ask: Ruth Chang: How to make hard choices. What Is Philosophy For? A Beautiful Animated Manifesto for Undoing Our Unwisdom, Cultivating Our Character, and Gaining Perspective. Young vs. Old, Male vs. Female, Intuition vs. Intellect: Susan Sontag on How the Stereotypes and Polarities of Culture Imprison Us. Isabel Allende: Tales of passion. I Am Cow, Hear Me Moo: A Charming Illustrated Ode to Courage and Confidence. By Maria Popova Why true heroism feeds on humility. Courage, Seth Godin reminded us in his spectacular conversation with Debbie Millman about vulnerability, is about “dancing with the fear” — not about making the fear ago away. “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs,” Joan Didion memorably wrote.
And yet, with our Pavlovian voraciousness for constant positive reinforcement, we hang our self-respect on external validation all too often and keep ourselves small by people-pleasing, afraid of what others might think. It’s a toxic habit of mind and spirit that starts early and rarely relents, which is what makes I Am Cow, Hear Me Moo! (public library) especially wonderful — a lovely illustrated parable of courage, confidence, and what happens when we construct our identity around how others perceive us.
Miraculously, her friends are there, having spent hours wandering through the woods lost. Donating = Loving. Aamer Rahman (Fear of a Brown Planet) - Reverse Racism. Burnout: Experiences & Advice | Plan to Thrive. The concluding questions of our ‘activist health and wellbeing survey’ focused on one of the biggest barriers to sustaining activism: burnout. This is the final post in this series. Defining burnout Burnout can be defined in a number of ways, activist-trauma.net uses this definition; Burnout is a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion caused by long-term involvement in situations that are emotionally demanding.
Burnout makes you a less effective activist, and it can adversely affect those around you and the organizations we work within. While burning out is part of a process of growth and involvement and is often accepted as a by-product of activism, we can work to support ourselves and others so we are more effective and healthy. Burnout is the way your body and heart communicate your limits to you, and it is important to listen to and respect that. A massive 71% of our respondents had experienced or were experiencing burnout at the time of writing. Major contributors “1. 2. 3. Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Living the Questions. A Spiritual Response to the Ecological Crisis | Spiritual Ecology. What a Shaman Sees in A Mental Hospital. In the shamanic view, mental illness signals “the birth of a healer,” explains Malidoma Patrice Somé. Thus, mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, spiritual crises, and need to be regarded as such to aid the healer in being born.
What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm. “Mental disorder, behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field,” says Dr. Somé. These disturbances result when the person does not get assistance in dealing with the presence of the energy from the spirit realm. One of the things Dr. “I was so shocked. On the mental ward, Dr Somé saw a lot of “beings” hanging around the patients, “entities” that are invisible to most people but that shamans and psychics are able to see. Dr. Dr. "You Teach People How to Treat You" Why We Lie : TED Radio Hour. Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The long reach of reason.
The Unaddressed Business of Filling Our Souls: Mood Science and the Evolutionary Origins of Depression. By Maria Popova What language and symbolism have to do with mood and how light exposure and sleep shape our mental health. “Depression is a disorder of the ‘I,’ failing in your own eyes relative to your goals,” legendary psychologist Martin Seligman observed in his essential treatise on learned optimism.
But such a definition of depression, while true, appears somehow insufficient, overlooking the multitude of excruciating physical and psychological realities of the disease beyond the sense of personal failure. Perhaps William Styron came closer in his haunting memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, where he wrote of “depression’s dark wood,” “its inexplicable agony,” and the grueling struggle of those afflicted by it who spend their lives trying to trudge “upward and outward out of hell’s black depths.” Because depression is so unpleasant and so impairing, it may be difficult to imagine that there might be another way of thinking about it; something this bad must be a disease.
Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World. In the Summer of 1995, a young graduate student in anthropology at UCLA named Joe Henrich traveled to Peru to carry out some fieldwork among the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin. The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families. For sustenance, they relied on local game and produce from small-scale farming.
They shared with their kin but rarely traded with outside groups. While the setting was fairly typical for an anthropologist, Henrich’s research was not. The test that Henrich introduced to the Machiguenga was called the ultimatum game. Among the Machiguenga, word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money. When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. “Yes,” Henrich said. The 13 Best Books of 2013: The Definitive Annual Reading List of Overall Favorites. Givers, Takers, and Matchers: The Surprising Social Science of Success.
Habit Change. Intuition. Out of Character: The Psychology of Good and Evil. Responding to Anger. Irrationality. Connection. Anxiety. Emotion. Trust. Empathy. Music, the mind, and medicine: A Q&A with Robert Gupta. Eight Things I Learned from Pain. Eleanor Longden: The voices in my head | Talk Video. Psychologists: Getting Liberals to Agree Really is Like Herding Cats. Jonathan Haidt: The moral roots of liberals and conservatives.