Charlie Todd: The shared experience of absurdity | Video on TED.com.
You’d have to be humorless not to enjoy this video! Thanks, Keith Fail, for sharing.
Charlie Todd: The shared experience of absurdity | Video on TED.com
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Author Archives: MaryAnn Reynolds
Save a life: free CPR app for smart phones
Yesterday I got certified in CPR and first aid as part of my training to become a massage therapist.
I’ve been certified several times in the past. It’s gotten simpler as doctors learned more about what really works and refined the curriculum. It’s pretty damn simple now.
These days, the real value of CPR is to keep someone’s heart going until you can use a defibrillator on them. About 70% of the time, an AED saves a life.
There’s a free smart phone app called “handsonlycpr” that you can install. Even if you’re not trained in CPR, if you see someone collapse, and they’re not responsive and not breathing, this little app will help you dial 911, and then it will show you where to push and tell you how often with a beep.
If you’re giving CPR and aren’t sure how fast to push, here’s all you need to keep the rhythm. May this song get stuck in your head at exactly the right time!
Hot buttons, EFT, and self-compassion
Ever get a whiff of your own craziness, the things you do or say that are less than kind? I did today. I caught it myself — I see myself writing that like I caught some kind of fish. Yeah, a stinky fish.
In an attempt to be thoughtful, I actually was thoughtless. When I perceived that, I felt so remorseful my heart ached.
Then I found this quote from Tricycle Daily Dharma in my inbox. I’d saved it for several weeks, not knowing why.
We all have personal sensitivities—“hot buttons”—that are evoked in close relationships. Mindfulness practice helps us to identify them and disengage from our habitual reactions, so that we can reconnect with our partners. We can mindfully address recurring problems with a simple four-step technique: (1) Feel the emotional pain of disconnection, (2) Accept that the pain is a natural and healthy sign of disconnection, and the need to make a change, (3) Compassionately explore the personal issues or beliefs being evoked within yourself, (4) Trust that a skillful response will arise at the right moment. – Christopher Germer, “Getting Along”
I want to add step 2.5 to the above. If you are feeling the pain, and you know there’s a need to make a change but the feeling is so sticky, you can’t detach enough to explore your issues, you can do the Emotional Freedom Technique (several times if needed) to reduce the pain enough to get to step 3. It helps us feeling types move on.
In step 3, I discovered that I projected something onto another that was really about me. I’m looking at a big owie in my life head on.
I’m not to step 4 yet but it feels good to just know it’s there waiting, whatever the outcome. All I can do is trust.
Dalai Lama quote: “Kindness is society”
Just encountered this quote by Jeffrey Hopkins, professor of Tibetan Studies at the University of Virginia and interpreter for the Dalai Lama for 10 years:
During a lecture while I was interpreting for the Dalai Lama, he said in what seemed to me to be broken English, “Kindness is society.” I wasn’t smart enough to think he was saying kindness is society. I thought he meant kindness is important to society; kindness is vital to society; but he was saying that kindness is so important that we cannot have society without it. Society is impossible without it. Thus, kindness IS society; society IS kindness. Without concern for other people it’s impossible to have society.
Do something kind for another person today.
Steve Jobs’s Real Genius | The New Yorker
Steve Jobs’s Real Genius : The New Yorker.
I’ve posted several stories about Steve Jobs. Well, I’m typing this on my MacBook Air while my iPhone is charging. His life had an impact on mine.
Some of the qualities I admired about Steve were his open admission to having taken LSD and how that experience shaped him (name another CEO who’s gone public with that information!), his practice of Zen, and his love of good design.
Here, Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, The Tipping Point, Outliers) writes about Jobs’ dark side — his perfectionism — and puts his gift into historical context.
The Biology of Meditation. | elephant journal
The Biology of Meditation. | elephant journal.
Lisa Wimberger provides a Cliff’s Notes version of the book Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment, by David Perlmutter and Alberto Villoldo.
Excerpt:
Stress, trauma and the health perils associated with those states all begin and get perpetuated in the limbic brain, which is comprised of the hippocampus, hypothalamus and amygdala. These are responsible for making our emotional connections outside of logic, taking snapshots of life, creating our dream state experiences, turning on our fight-or-flight response, and storing and delivering emotional information independent of time. The limbic system cannot discern past, present, or future — each “picture” it accesses is experienced by the body as though it’s current.
Fasting and/or a low-calorie diet, antioxidants, voluntary exercise, and meditation are key ways to turn down the limbic brain.
About meditation, she says…
…it is found that those who meditate or enter states of trance have increased blood flow to their pre-frontal cortex (PFC). This area of the brain is the executive decision maker, but is not quite the same as the neo-cortex “logic” mind. The PFC is activated on EKGs during states of compassion, inspiration, motivation and love. It has the ability to project and envision a future reward. It is the part of the brain responsible for motivating us to attain our goals and dreams. Blood flow to the PFC decreases when blood flow to the limbic brain increases.
10 things I love about massage
- Almost everyone loves massage and bodywork. It feels good and is nourishing to the body, mind, heart, and spirit.
- Caring touch, the basis of massage therapy, is probably the most ancient method of promoting well-being that human beings have used on each other.
- It’s the front line of health care. Massage therapists spend more time with their clients than most other health care providers.
- Your massage therapist gets to know you well. He or she may help you with alignment, posture, pain, emotional, breathing, self-worth, self-knowledge, and many more issues.
- If 90 percent of doctor visits are stress-related, why not just skip the doctor and get a massage? It is one of the healthiest ways to reduce stress that exists.
- There is no end to the methods of massage: Swedish, sports, deep, shiatsu, and more. Then there are branches: Rolfing, Trager, cranio-sacral, and more. A massage therapist can focus on mastering one method or practice several. Adventurous recipients can have a field day trying them all!
- Massage marries art and skill. Massage therapists have learned skills using specific methods and can also artfully mix and match techniques to meet your body’s needs.
- Studying massage includes studies in geeky subject matter, like anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, pathology. Massage therapists use both their right and left brains when learning and giving massage.
- It’s one of the top 50 careers of 2011, according to US News and World Report. It’s expected to keep growing over the next decade.
- Massage by itself is great, and it partners well with changework. Say you’ve been struggling with an issue and have a breakthrough of some sort. You feel it in your body, right? Massage helps you integrate it more deeply, literally embodying the change.
Best Careers 2011: Massage Therapist | US News and World Report
Best Careers 2011: Massage Therapist – US News and World Report.
Massage therapy is considered one of the 50 best careers of 2011, according to US News and World Report, and it is expected to have strong growth over the next decade.
The Yoga of Protest. | elephant journal
The Yoga of Protest. | elephant journal.
Here’s a yogic take on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Excerpt:
In the midst of all this muddle, a yogic concept called ananda popped into my head. Ananda is Sanskrit; it is one of the highest purposes of Anusara Yoga, and can be translated as deep joy, deep expressiveness, or bliss. It can also be understood as “loving acceptance of what is.”
It hurts to think about practicing this idea in relation to what the Occupy Wall Street protesters are pointing at. It hurts to think about lovingly accepting the deep dysfunction and suffering that is occurring in this world. If I imagine doing that, my heart feels like it might stretch and break. Yet it is what the mystics call for us to do, to love what is hurting us, to empathize with our torturers. Not blindly, naively or passively, but powerfully, radiantly and compassionately.
All of us, 99% and 1%, need to be loved. We need to be seen in our wholeness. Our suffering, yes, our greatness.
Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough | AlterNet
Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough | | AlterNet.
It is important to read this for an expanded idea of what the Occupy movement is about.
Believe it or not, it’s about love and being part of the 100%. It’s a revolution in consciousness.
The author is Charles Eisenstein. You can find his website at http://www.ascentofhumanity.blogspot.com. He has made his book, The Ascent of Humanity, available online. You can pay what you wish.
Thanks to Bryan Williams for sharing this link on Facebook.
We look to a different kind of revolution. At risk of revealing the stars in my eyes, let me call it a revolution of love.
What else but love would motivate any person to abandon the quest to maximize rational self-interest? Love, the felt experience of connection to other beings, contradicts the laws of economics as we know them. Ultimately, we want to create a money system, and an economy, that is the ally not the enemy of love. We don’t want to forever fight the money power to create good in the world; we want to change the money power so that we don’t need to fight it. I will not in this essay describe my vision — one of many — of a money system aligned with the good in all of us. I will only say that such a shift can only happen atop an even deeper shift, a transformation of human consciousness. Happily, just such a transformation is underway today.
There’s more, lots more. Read it.
The Well: bodymindheartspirit 