The McMindfulness Craze: The Shadow Side of the Mindfulness Revolution (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) In case we had any doubt after watching Anderson Cooper on "60 Minutes," mindfulness is the new yoga - and we are in the midst of a mindfulness revolution. It's been embraced by celebrities, business leaders, politicians and athletes; and recommended by doctors, clergy, psychotherapists and prison wardens. Apps and bestselling books touting the benefits of meditation proliferate. Google "mindfulness" and you'll get over 24 million hits. It's not surprising that with unbridled enthusiasm about mindfulness come exaggerated claims and problems that are eclipsed. Backlash was inevitable. Buddhists have also pushed back, arguing that the mindfulness vogue has divorced meditation from its grounding in traditional Buddhist teachings. But focusing on these problems with the McMindfulness craze obscures a more profound one - meditation neglects meaning. I'm both a psychoanalyst and a long-time student - and now a teacher - of meditation.
Stress Management During Job Search | CAREERwise Education When you're searching for a job, you almost always have other issues begging for your attention. Stress builds up when you don't deal with issues. Keep your job search on track by paying attention to all aspects of your health. Get organized. Source: Creative Job Search, Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.
4 Things You Can Do to Cheer Up, According to Neuroscience For everyone, there are times when a dark cloud just seems to be following you around. You may not even even know why. While we don’t mean to minimize the value of medication for those who experience this on a daily basis, UCLA neuroscientist Alex Korb, author of The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time, has some insights that might just get you back on the sunny side. It’s all got to do with neuroscience. Getting Your Brain’s Attention Your brain has some unhelpful ideas of its own on how to feel good. According to Korb, “Despite their differences, pride, shame, and guilt all activate similar neural circuits, including the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, and the nucleus accumbens. A similar thing may be going if you just can’t seem to stop worrying. So the obvious question is how you can take positive control of this destructive little dance? He-Who-Actually-Must-Be-Named So, okay, you’re still down.
About francais & italiano Our vision is of a future where the wellbeing of people and communities improves year on year and wellbeing inequalities are reduced.We believe that improving wellbeing should be the ultimate objective of policy and community action.Our mission is to develop and share robust, accessible and useful evidence that governments, businesses, communities and people can use to improve wellbeing across the UK.Our approach is independent, evidence based, collaborative, practical, open and iterative. → What’s happening now? → What can I do? About the Centre The Prime Minister has announced that, together with the Economic and Social Research Council and Public Health England , the government is funding a What Works centre dedicated to understanding what national and local governments, along with voluntary and business partners, can do to increase wellbeing. The Centre has commissioned a research synthesis of what works, and secondary data analysis, initially in three areas: The team
In Defense of Being Average There’s this guy. World-renowned billionaire. Tech genius. Inventor and entrepreneur. Athletic and talented and handsome with a jaw so chiseled it looks like Zeus came down from Olympus and carved the fucker himself. This guy’s got a small fleet of sports cars, a few yachts, and when he’s not giving millions of dollars to charities, he’s changing out supermodel girlfriends like other people change their socks. This guy’s smile can melt the damn room. This man is, you guessed it, Bruce Wayne. It’s an interesting facet of human nature that we seem to have a need to come up with these sort of fictional heroes that embody perfection and everything we wish we could be. And today, we have comic book superheroes. I don’t think I’m exactly shaking up the field of psychology by suggesting that, as humans, we have a need to conjure up these heroes to help us cope with our own feelings of powerlessness. Behind the Curve Everything in life is a trade-off. This here is called a bell curve.
How to Begin Each Day: A Recipe for Unshakable Sanity and Inner Peace from Marcus Aurelius “Take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself,” the wise and wonderful Parker Palmer counseled the young in his superb Naropa Unviersity commencement address. Only by accepting our own interior contradictions and dualities, he argued, are we liberated to put the shadow’s power in service of the good in the exterior world. This seems like a particularly timely message, urgently needed in a culture intolerant of duality, where we hasten to polarize everything into good and bad, unfailingly placing ourselves in the former category and the Other — whether their otherness is manifested in race, gender, orientation, or sports team preference — in the latter. And yet the message is a timeless one, most piercingly articulated two millennia earlier in the writings of Marcus Aurelius — the last of Ancient Rome’s Five Good Emperors and one of the most influential Stoic philosophers.
A Non-Conformist's Guide to Success in a Conformist World, Bryan Caplan I've been a non-conformist for as long as I can remember. "All the other kids love sports" never seemed like a good reason why I should feel - or pretend to feel - the same way. "None of the other adults are wearing shorts and flip-flops" never seemed like a good reason why I should make myself uncomfortable. It wasn't mere elitism on my part. "All the other Princeton economists take general equilibrium models seriously" was no more compelling to me than "All the other teens want their own car." Non-conformism at my intensity rarely allows real-world success. Some of it's luck - especially the luck of being in the right place at the right time to meet the right people. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
Energy and Calm: Brain Breaks and Focused-Attention Practices When presented with new material, standards, and complicated topics, we need to be focused and calm as we approach our assignments. We can use brain breaks and focused-attention practices to positively impact our emotional states and learning. They refocus our neural circuitry with either stimulating or quieting practices that generate increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, where problem solving and emotional regulation occur. Brain Breaks A brain break is a short period of time when we change up the dull routine of incoming information that arrives via predictable, tedious, well-worn roadways. Our brains are wired for novelty. When we take a brain break, it refreshes our thinking and helps us discover another solution to a problem or see a situation through a different lens. 1. I always carry a bag of household objects containing markers, scrap paper, and anything that one would find in a junk drawer -- for example, a can opener or a pair of shoelaces. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 1.
Beyond environment: falling back in love with Mother Earth | Guardian Sustainable Business Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has been practising meditation and mindfulness for 70 years and radiates an extraordinary sense of calm and peace. This is a man who on a fundamental level walks his talk, and whom Buddhists revere as a Bodhisattva; seeking the highest level of being in order to help others. Ever since being caught up in the horrors of the Vietnam war, the 86-year-old monk has committed his life to reconciling conflict and in 1967 Martin Luther King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, saying "his ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity." So it seems only natural that in recent years he has turned his attention towards not only addressing peoples' disharmonious relationships with each other, but also with the planet on which all our lives depend. Move beyond concept of the "environment" Change is possible only if there is a recognition that people and planet are ultimately one and the same. "We want to be connected.
The Famous Wheel Of Emotions Can Determine Who You Are (Quiz) - by Brandilyn Collin Scroll Down to the end of the article for the quiz Randy Ingermanson once said that people read books because they want to have an emotional experience. While that’s certainly true of “Twilight”, I think it holds true for all books. Ironically, even though we’ve all experienced many, many emotions throughout our lives, few humans are experts. But where to begin? Many lists of emotions have been generated, yet no matter how much they overlap, they never quite converge. So, how can emotions be classified so that we better understand them, and understanding them better use them in our writings? Joy vs SadnessTrust vs DisgustFear vs AngerSurprise vs Anticipation He also visualized this list as a wheel of sorts, referred to by some as Plutchik’s Flower: Author: Ivan Akira Source: Wikimedia Commons License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Analogous to a color wheel, variations in color intensity correspond to variations in emotional intensity. Loading...
Psych Pedia: The Science of Happiness: Why complaining is literally killing you. By Steven Parton, From CuriousApes.com Sometimes in life, all the experience and knowledge simmering around in that ol’ consciousness of ours combines itself in a way that suddenly causes the cerebral clockwork to click into place, and in this fluid flow of thought we find an epiphany rising to the surface. One such point for me came in my junior year at University. It changed the way I viewed the world forever as it catapulted me out of the last of my angsty, melancholic youth and onto a path of ever-increasing bliss. Sounds like I’m verging on feeding you some new-agey, mumbo-jumbo, doesn’t it? Well, bear with me, because I assure you the point here is to add some logical evidence to the ol’ cliches, to give you what I would consider my Science of Happiness. At the time of this personal discovery, I was pursuing a double-major in Computer Science and Psychology. 1. Your thoughts reshape your brain, and thus are changing a physical construct of reality. 2. 3. 4. But it’s not bullshit. 5.
What it Really Means to Hold Space for Someone When my Mom was dying, my siblings and I gathered to be with her in her final days. None of us knew anything about supporting someone in her transition out of this life into the next, but we were pretty sure we wanted to keep her at home, so we did. While we supported Mom, we were, in turn, supported by a gifted palliative care nurse, Ann, who came every few days to care for Mom and to talk to us about what we could expect in the coming days. The author with her mother “Take your time,” she said. Ann gave us an incredible gift in those final days. In the two years since then, I’ve often thought about Ann and the important role she played in our lives. The work that Ann did can be defined by a term that’s become common in some of the circles in which I work. Learning to hold space for others What does it mean to “hold space” for someone else? Sometimes we find ourselves holding space for people while they hold space for others. Understanding the essence of holding space for others 1. 2. 3.
How to Make Anxiety Work for You, Not Against You “Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.” ~Jean Vanier I got fired from my job, my boyfriend left me, and my father died in one day. In reality, my career was going super well, I didn’t have a boyfriend, and my father was amazingly healthy, but what I did have was something I call an ultra amazing imagination, where I would make up fascinating stories about things that could happen and worry about them. I met my now BFF anxiety when I was about ten years old. I didn’t understand why she was telling me this. Rationally I knew it wasn’t true. Anxiety took the liberty of moving into my room and accompanied me through my teenage years and twenties. The more I ignored her, the more she dug her dirt-filled, jagged nails deep into my bare skin. There was nothing I could do to escape her. Besides, I had grown used to the feeling of having knots in my stomach every day and the sleepless, nightmare-filled nights. There had to be another way. These things helped immensely.