How to Choose a Type of Mindfulness Meditation Many beginner meditators, myself included, start out with a mindful breathing meditation: one breath in, one breath out, the mind wanders, you bring it back. Armed with an app guiding me through this meditation, I practiced dutifully for several months—but eventually I fell off the wagon. It just stopped feeling right for me. I didn’t know there were other types of meditation to try. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute recruited more than 200 adults in Germany who hadn’t meditated before to participate in a nine-month mindfulness training. Breathing meditation: A practice where you focus your attention on the sensations of breathing. The program was split into three three-month modules, with breathing meditation and body scan taught together. Participants had been split into three groups, one of which learned only lovingkindness meditation (my personal favorite) for three months.
Notes on Giving Away my First $100,000 For my 42nd birthday, Mrs. MM let me give away all this money. Here’s a little quiz: Suppose you are living an extremely happy life – all your material needs and wants are met, and there is still money to spare. a) Try to think of even more stuff you could buy for yourself with that extra money? b) Try to find more efficient things to do with the surplus? For many people, this might seem like a trick question. I mean sure, you might already have a Honda, but you obviously still want a Tesla, right? For me, the point of full satisfaction is also pretty high – not just basic food but fancy stuff from around the world. Since I hit my consumption ceiling a little earlier than a proper rich person, I have been thinking about option (b) above for a number of years now. Effective Altruism is an attempt to answer one simple question: where can our surplus money do the largest amount of good? Watch: Peter Singer’s moving TED Talk explaining the ideas behind Effective Altruism in about 17 minutes.
Canal+ changes direction to reverse decline September 20, 2016 Canal+ is cutting the price of its premium channel, introducing subscriptions with no fixed commitment and abandoning the practice of controlling the subscriptions sold by ISPs – enabling the latter to market its channels as part of a bundled offering – in a concerted drive to reverse the decline in its domestic base and increase pay TV penetration. Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada told French daily Le Figaro that the pay TV broadcaster would offer its premium channel for €20 a month – as against the current €40 – for viewing online, on tablets and on smartphones without an ongoing commitment as part of its plan to extend its base and appeal to younger consumers. Saada said that Canal+ would propose a more “modular and more accessible” offering in October based on genres such as cinema, sport and kids content to appeal to individual tastes. Saada also told Le Figaro that Canal+ would introduce a new “ultra-sophisticated” set-top box early in 2017.
Mindfulness has lost its Buddhist roots, and it may not be doing you good Mindfulness as a psychological aid is very much in fashion. Recent reports on the latest finding suggested that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is as effective as anti-depressants in preventing the relapse of recurrent depression. While the authors of the paper interpreted their results in a slightly less positive light, stating that (contrary to their hypothesis) mindfulness was no more effective than medication, the meaning inferred by many in the media was that mindfulness was superior to medication. Mindfulness is a technique extracted from Buddhism where one tries to notice present thoughts, feeling and sensations without judgement. We don’t know how it works Mindfulness has been sold to us and we are buying it. The few available meta-analyses report moderate evidence that meditation affects us in various ways, such as reducing anxiety and increasing positive emotions. Yet we still can’t be sure what the active ingredient is. Side effects And here we come to an important point.
Buddhism and Mantras: The Concept of Fate in Buddhism Fate is often said to prevail in everyone's life in many different religions in the world. Also known as "God's Will" or "Heaven-will", it is believed to be predestined by an omnipotent creator or universal force and is not up to an individual to control his/her own fate. What Buddhism says of Fate? Fate in Buddhism, is but a wrong view. Our life and its event are not controlled by an external force (e.g. From a Buddhist perspective, a person's life and events is and will never be the result of a powerful God etc. Events in life is also subjected to the uprisings and ceasations of many conditions, where without some conditions, things would not have happened in a particular way. It would be a mistake to blame an entity (e.g. a God) for all unfortunate events in a person's life. As such, why can your destiny be predicted accurately through divination or fortune telling? In China, the concept of "Destiny" (命运）is viewed as an important aspect of people's live. How can i change my Destiny?
A future without screens – Medium How VR is rapidly changing the way we interact with technology It’s unfortunate to think, but you probably know the nooks and crannies of Facebook better than your childhood bedroom. Our adoption of technology into our daily routine has turned what used to be a stroll to the end of the driveway to pick up the paper, to a roll to the edge of the bed and a groggy press of a button. But just as the shift towards the digital world of social media and screens was a huge depart from newspapers and post-dinner radio shows, this ‘new normal’ is on the brink of another seismic shift. If technologists and futurists are at all right, very soon we’ll have retreated from the end of the driveway, to the edge of the bed, to a pair of goggles. The online world we’ve become so comfortable with is moving from separate screens to virtual space — a change that’s about more than just how technology looks, but how we actually interact with it. How will we interact with this new dimension?
"Mindfulness" isn't a life hack — Quartz Mindfulness—the practice of cultivating awareness and presence—is the business buzz word. Touted as a wellbeing panacea, mindfulness training has been adopted by American institutions of all kinds, from corporations to prisons, schools, and hospitals. Writer Ruth Whippman, author of America the Anxious, blames the mindfulness craze for contributing to national anxiety. She told Quartz that corporations are using these wellbeing programs to distract from serious systemic issues, like long hours, low pay, and no health insurance or vacations. World Health Organization data shows the US is by far the most anxious nation, and Whippman discovered personally when she moved to Silicon Valley from London in 2011 that the national preoccupation with happiness has the ironic effect of making Americans uniquely miserable. There are lots of genuine reasons why life can bring anxiety. She started studying the $11-billion-a-year self-help industry and has been writing about it ever since.
Werner Herzog: 'My fake selves have some unifying sensory organ' | Film The man sitting opposite could be a pugnacious newcomer pitching for a job. He lays out his credentials just in case I don’t know and recounts scenes from his films which I already know off by heart. He claims he performs a magic with cinema which no one else can. They should put him in a straitjacket, his work is that wild. Building to a climax, he says: “I want to throw my arm around your shoulder and take you to the realm of complete poetry and fantasy.” It’s tempting to cast Werner Herzog as the last of cinema’s old-style swashbucklers; the sort of intrepid adventurer who makes movies in the way other men might go prospecting for gold or sail off in search of the Northwest Passage. His latest documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, sends Herzog travelling to the lawless frontier of the virtual world. Off camera, too, the man has an authoritative snap that verges on the comic. Herzog insists he has nothing against the internet, per se. “Yes,” he says.
On a testé « Allo », l’application de messagerie de Google dopée à l’intelligence artificielle LE MONDE | • Mis à jour le | Par Morgane Tual WhatsApp, Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Twitter… Alors que nous croulons sous les applications de messageries – sans compter les textos –, Google vient, mercredi 21 septembre, d’en sortir une nouvelle, baptisée « Allo ». Pour se démarquer de ses nombreuses concurrentes (parmi lesquelles un de ses propres produits, à savoir Hangouts) Google mise sur l’intelligence artificielle. Cette dernière, appelée « Assistant », s’invite dans les conversations de l’utilisateur, pour lui faciliter la tâche en lui proposant des réponses toutes faites - uniquement en anglais pour l’instant, mais d’autres langues devraient suivre. « Je ne sais pas combien d’aéroports il y a à Berlin », dit par exemple votre interlocuteur. Lire aussi : Google crée une voix presque humaine Suggestions d’informations Mais Assistant peut aussi devenir un interlocuteur à part, avec lequel vous pouvez échanger dans Allo. - « Qui est le PDG de Facebook ?
Healing Your Mother (or Father) Wound | Dharma Wisdom If you choose to follow the path of meditation, you are likely to encounter what are sometimes referred to as your "karmic knots"-those physical and emotional traumas you have accumulated throughout your lifetime. For instance, when you sit in meditation for a lengthy period, physical tensions in your body caused by stress or old injuries may manifest as a stabbing pain between the shoulder blades, an aching neck, or throbbing legs. Similarly, all your unfinished psychological issues will appear either as physical pain or other body sensations, intense emotions, voices, or as disturbing images that arise seemingly from nowhere. There is no way to avoid these experiences, nor should you. By allowing these sensations and emotions full expression while mindfully paying attention to them, you become free of them. The release of these knots can be described as an unwinding that allows the difficult experience to complete itself. Yoga of the Mother Wound The Four Functions of Mothering
Questions about ex-BCI scientist may cast doubt on convictions Dozens, if not hundreds, of criminal convictions in Ohio could be in jeopardy because a longtime forensic scientist at the state crime lab now stands accused of slanting evidence to help cops and prosecutors build their cases. The credibility of G. Michele Yezzo, who worked at the Ohio attorney general’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation for more than three decades, has been challenged in two cases in which men were convicted of aggravated murder. One has been freed from prison because of her now-suspect work. A review of her personnel records by The Dispatch shows that colleagues and supervisors raised questions about Yezzo time and again while she tested evidence and testified in an uncounted number of murder, rape and other criminal cases in the state. >> Scientist’s work records show litany of problems but praise from cops >> Timeline: Forensic Scientist's career DeWine said they found no issues with her work. Forensic scientists quit because of her erratic behavior. Grave doubts