I have a friend in Minneapolis, his name is Dale and he has a lot of energy. His secret is naps. Now research is beginning to show that Dale is right, naps work. Here is a video about taking naps and breaks.
Take A Break
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Masters and Disasters in Relationships
We live in a wonderful age of information. With just a little bit of commitment we can find brilliant answers to so many of our questions. The videos below are from my favorite relationship researcher John Gottmann, he has been researching the causes of relationship success and failure for decades. If both people in a relationship wanted success, he has the tools available in books and videos. These videos are great.
Spring Arrives
Spring arrived today signaling a change, we are cycling again.
To experience love is to experience giving from within. That experience is something that we recognize and can easily distinguish it from taking, and from wanting. Given freely, love is a testimony to the fact we’re not hollow or empty inside, but contain a spark of creative spirit.
Henry Reed
Memories, Emotions, and Reality
For days since having a dream I have contemplated the importance of memories. Here’s the dream:
We are what we remember,
Choose what to remember,
Remember what makes you feel good, happy, joyful, magical and transcendental.
And you become your memories.
In true scynchronistic fashion I can across an article on the web citing new scientific studies confirming “Human Emotion Shapes Physical Reality”
Here is the link
New Research Shocks Scientists: Human Emotion Physically Shapes Reality!
Mind Mind Mind
I happened across this video and found it very stimulating.
Her story of disease and discovery is quite wonderful.
I hope you find it helpful. It confirms the power of the subconscious mind and the intent of our conscious mind to find an answer.
So Simple
So many of us want to be better and better. I have for a long time desired to be an “enlightened” person. I’m not sure exactly what that means since knowing something has to come from experiencing it fully. I’ve suspected that being enlightened is a state of mind that includes being loving, kind, compassionate, caring, giving, receiving, joy, peace, helping, serving and so much more along these lines. Of the many positive words in the English language love seems to be the most powerful. So, what feedback or metric lets you know you are on that path? That you are loving? How do we know?
Well, I’m reading a book a friend suggested and in that book I found the simplest of means to discern whether we are in a loving state or not. Here it is! Is your energy towards others positive? Is your energy toward yourself positive? If it is you are expressing love. Oh I know this maybe too simple. But it only relies on taking note of your feelings. A great mystic once said that our emotions are our soul in action, our essence, and perhaps that is so. If it is so, then it is really easy to gauge whether we are expressing love in the moment. Are you feeling a positive energy toward yourself and others?
Blessings,
Rick
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In my early thirties in the sarcophagus of the great pyramid. There is no place like this on earth. Ginger Duke and I spent 16 hours alone there in 1984.
I’ve been meditating on and off since my mid twenties. I see it as one of three things most important to our growth as souls in the space/time continuum. Now we have a Harvard study that says meditation regrows our brain. Regrowing the brain is man amazing discovery.
Study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program (as well as a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology) stated that meditation practitioners aren’t just feeling better. They are literally undergoing changes in brain structure that create the associated sustained boosts in positive and relaxed feelings.
Here is a link: http://simplecapacity.com/2015/12/harvard-mri-study-meditation-rebuilds-your-brains-gray-matter/
Imposter
Have you ever felt like an imposter? Most people do at times in their lives. I know I have experienced being trusted to do something that I have learned either in school or on my own and thinking, “who am I to be doing this?” Well, eventually we accept that we really do know how to do the things we do. But what about the new things? What about our work?
“What holds us back from being more confident at work is often a sense that we are fundamentally different from those who succeed.
Too often we leave the possibility of success to others, as we believe our own negative self talk and see our own flaws so clearly. This gives way to the “imposter” syndrome, where we incorrectly believe others to be perfect and ourselves to be lacking.
We know ourselves from the inside, but we know others from the outside, from a narrower and more edited source of information. We suffer – needlessly – from this negative belief we are an imposter, and a fraud.”
This is a self esteem issue and this video below is a clever and succinct explanation with added good advice.
Here is the link to the web page where I discovered this. You might like this website.
Jealousy and Envy
There is a woman, Teal Swan, and she has a wealth of knowledge she shares. This video is has a point of view about jealousy and envy that is really interesting.
I summarize her view this way: Envy is the emotion we experience when we have an extreme desire for something someone has that you don’t think you can have and believing you are not worthy of it. Jealousy is the emotion we feel when we are afraid of losing something of great value to us. So, on occurs when we want to keep what we have and the other occurs when we want to get what we don’t have. In both cases we are in fear. This is a form of lack.
“Don’t set your mind on things you don’t possess…but count the blessings you actually possess and think how much you would desire them if they weren’t already yours.”
Marcus Aurelius
Jealousy and envy exist when we are in lack and see ourselves as separate from all others. If, in fact, we are all one, then anything anyone else has or gains is already part of us. Its the ego concerned with a threat.
Jealousy a precious thing your going to lose.
Envy, what precious thing do you not have and want?
What do you believe you lack? Make a list of how many ways you do have that thing in your life. Or, think of a person who has significantly less than you do in your area of lack and imagine how that person would feel looking at your life.
Jealousy and envy are very powerful in that they tell us precisely what we want and what we need.
In relationships jealousy often arises because of a third party threat and we do what we can to eliminate the threat to our connection with someone. We feel unincluded. Better to use the feeling to deepen our connection with our partner and ourselves.
Jealousy happens to all of us at sometime. Soothe yourself by accepting it is okay to feel the way you feel. Now look at your beliefs, feeling this way means there is a painful part in you connected to this feeling. Emotions are connected to your thoughts. Thoughts create emotions.
My Musings on Ideals
My tattered 11 x 17″ ideals page
I have often thought of ideals as a means to determine what choice to make when presented more than one choice. However, recent events have made it clear to me that though sometimes that is effective sometimes it isn’t. I am having to make a choice amongst alternatives and as I read my ideals I realize there isn’t any one alternative inherently better than the other. So how to make a choice?
Perhaps the answer lies in imagining which direction allows the greater expression of your ideals. A means of understanding this better would be to imagine two polarities. One polarity is the mob nature of crime syndicates versus the nature of working at a flower shop. If your ideal is love, then the flower shop is a much better choice than the mob.
So, I am looking at my spiritual, mental, and physical ideals and asking myself, which choice allows the greater expression of my ideals. Maybe this is how it’s supposed to work when the alternatives are relatively equal. Maybe it is like planting in the most nurturing soil, which will allow for the healthiest plant?