Dig deep within yourself, for there is a fountain of goodness ever ready to flow if you will keep digging.
- Marcus Aurelius
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are truly adjusted to each other. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.
- Twelfth Night
‘The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too.’ - Vincent Van Gogh
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.’
- Albert Einstein Appreciate the importance of valuing and taking good care of your physical AND mental AND emotional health and well-being. YOU matter.
Mindfulness has been depicted in the media primarily as a tool:
- to hone attention,
- to cultivate sensory awareness, and
- to keep us in the present moment.
Developing these tools takes effort and determination, but why is it we can sometimes be mindful without really even trying? Perhaps we were naturally mindful at points in life before we ever learned what mindfulness was. Maybe we feel naturally connected, present, and at ease in nature. Or we become mindful while talking authentically with a friend, or in the midst of music, art, or athletic activity. Mindfulness is not only a meditation technique, but also a state of being. This state is available to anyone; it is a natural human capacity. Mindfulness practice, as a tool, is tremendously helpful to cultivate this awareness, and the state can arise at any moment. Mindfulness is also connected to a set of powerful outcomes: happiness, emotional regulation, compassion, altruism, and kindness. We encourage you to attend an array of offerings to cultivate the moment-to-moment awareness, which is the foundation of our practice. Link: https://www.uclahealth.org/marc/default.cfm
SERENITY PRAYER ADAPTED FOR ADD God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; The insight to prioritize wisely what I want to change; The patience to resist trying to control everything I could, had I the energy and time; The courage and skill to change the things I have chosen to change; And the wisdom to know the differences among all these. - Dr. Edward Hallowell
My daily struggle is to understand what is important, to my situation, in the constant barrage of information on the Internet. What can and should be ignored? Is my purpose to seek distraction, novelty and entertainment? Or is the goal and purpose to my Net Surfing to gain valuable knowledge? What do I hope to accomplish?
“There are things that attract human attention, and there is often a huge gap between what is important and what is attractive and interesting."
- Yuval Noah Harari
And Donald Trump has not helped make being informed easy with all his mixed messages.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
The email from the boy began: “Did anything inspire you
to create Hallelujah?"
Later that same winter day the reply arrived: “I wanted to stand with those who clearly see God’s holy broken world
for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it.
You don’t always get what you want. You’re not always up for the
challenge. But in this case — it was given to me. For which I am deeply
grateful.”
The
question came from the author's son, who was preparing to present the hymn to his fifth-grade class. The boy required a
clarification about its meaning. The answer came from the author of the
song, Leonard Cohen.
Cohen lived in a weather of wisdom, which he created by seeking it rather
than by finding it. He swam in beauty, because in its transience he
aspired to discern a glimpse of eternity.
There was always a trace of
philosophy in his sensuality.
He managed to combine a sense of absurdity
with a sense of significance, a genuine feat.
He was a friend
of melancholy but an enemy of gloom, and a
renegade enamored of tradition.
Leonard
was, above all, in his music and in his poems and in his tone of life,
the lyrical advocate of the finite and the flawed.
Leonard
sang always as a sinner. He refused to describe sin as a failure or a
disqualification. Sin was a condition of life.
“Even though it all went wrong/
I’ll stand before the Lord of song/ With nothing on my tongue but
Hallelujah!”
The
singer’s faults do not expel him from the divine presence. Instead they
confer a mortal integrity upon his exclamation of praise.
He is the
inadequate man, the lowly man, the hurt man who has given hurt,
insisting modestly but stubbornly upon his right to a sacred exaltation.
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
He once
told an interviewer that those words were the closest he came to a
credo.
The teaching could not be more plain: fix the crack, lose the
light.
Here is a passage on frivolity by a great rabbi
in Prague at the end of the 16th century:
“Man was born for toil, since
his perfection is always being actualized but is never actual,” he
observed in an essay on frivolity. “And insofar as he attains
perfection, something is missing in him. In
such a being, perfection is a shortcoming and a lack.”
Leonard Cohen
was the poet laureate of the lack, the psalmist of the privation, who
made imperfection gorgeous.
A sense of purpose in life also gives you this considerable advantage:
"People with a sense of purpose in life have a lower risk of death and cardiovascular disease."
The conclusions come from over 136,000 people who took part in 10 different studies.
Participants in the studies were mostly from the US and Japan.
The US studies asked people:
how useful they felt to others,
about their sense of purpose, and
the meaning they got out of life.
The Japanese studies asked people about ‘ikigai’ or whether their life was worth living. The participants, whose average age was 67, were tracked for around 7 years.
During that time almost 20,000 died. But, amongst those with a strong sense of purpose or high ‘ikigai’, the risk of death was one-fifth lower.
Despite the link between sense of purpose and health being so intuitive, scientists are not sure of the mechanism.
Sense of purpose is likely to improve health by strengthening the body against stress.
It is also likely to be linked to healthier behaviours.
Dr. Alan Rozanski, one of the study’s authors, said:
“Of note, having a strong sense of life purpose has long
been postulated to be an important dimension of life, providing people
with a sense of vitality motivation and resilience.
Nevertheless, the medical implications of living with a high or low
sense of life purpose have only recently caught the attention of
investigators.
The current findings are important because they may open up new
potential interventions for helping people to promote their health and
sense of well-being.”
William James was interested in mindfulness and attention:
“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui [master of himself] if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.”
William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, p. 424 (Harper Torchbooks, 1961)
Read this quote about how Merzenich thinks about his brain's decline.
"I want to put my brain to the best possible use as long as it is possible."
"Science tells us that a key to sustaining and growing our neurological abilities is seriousness of purpose. I am old enough to have retired, but shall not withdraw to a life of comfort and ease because I know that the brain slowly dies when nothing that it does matters to it. ... understand that what sustains your brain sustains you. You need to continue to work at things that support your brain's health now, and continue to work in ways that support it out to the end of your time on Earth."
My Blogs have been like a second hard drive to me.
My Blogs have been used as a second hard drive, in case of crashes in equipment. Google is a safe place to store information collected while surfing the WWW. If any content does not seem to adhere to Creative Commons Rules and you want it removed, please contact me to have it removed from the blog. Everything is true to the best of my knowledge.
Jennifer believes we live in the garden of Eden and I believe that we are destroying it. Our saving grace is within ourselves, our faith, and our mindfulness. We need to make a conscious effort to respect and preserve all life.
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