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Posts tagged ‘change your mind’

Oct 30

Outsmarting Our Primitive Responses to Fear

What scares you? Terrorism? Climate change? Snakes? Germs?

Whether it makes you buy a handgun or hand sanitizer, an electric car or an electric fence, fear drives much of human behavior. And it’s not just fear of physical harm that makes us want to hide under the covers. The twin fears of intimacy and rejection, for example, shape many of our social interactions.

Scientists say fear and its companion — the fight, flight or freeze response — can save us when faced with imminent physical harm.

This served us well when we were cave dwellers, under constant threat from marauding wild animals or invading warrior tribes. But it can often get in our way in modern life.

Read more . . .

Aug 2

Using Hypnosis to Gain More Control over Your Illness

Great article by Lesley Alderman in NY Times Health section April 15, 2011:

Using Hypnosis to Gain More Control Over Your Illness

KIRSTEN RITCHIE, 44, is no stranger to surgery — nearly 20 years ago, doctors removed four tumors from her brain. She remembers the operation and its aftermath as “horrific . . .”

Jul 17

The Morality of Meditation

Check out this very interesting article in the New York Times Sunday Review by David DeSteno on July 5, 2013:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/opinion/sunday/the-morality-of-meditation.html?ref=opinion&_r=2&

Oct 17

Charles Caleb Colton

October 17, 2012

There is an elasticity in the human mind, capable of bearing much, but which will not show itself, until a certain weight of affliction be put upon it; its powers may be compared to those vehicles whose springs are so contrived that they get on smoothly enough when loaded, but jolt confoundedly when they have nothing to bear.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon

 

Sep 25

Einstein Knows What He’s Talking About

September 25

“Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them.” – Albert Einstein

Sep 24

Meet Sara on YouTube

Sep 12

Hypnotized: Photo by John Penwarden

A Great Shining

September 12

As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full, and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one draws away a hand, beholds a great shining of the inner worlds.

– Rabbi Nachmann of Bratzlav

 

Sep 5

Basic Human Contact

September 5

Basic human contact – the meeting of eyes, the exchanging of words – is to the psyche what oxygen is to the brain. If you’re feeling abandoned by the world, interact with anyone you can. – Martha Beck

Questions to spark discussion:

Do you think our modern world is heading toward less and less human contact? Why is this so? What are we afraid of? Why are we afraid of each other?

Happy thinking,

Sara

 

Aug 14

Photo of a beautiful sunset over mountains

Making Decisions

August 15, 2012

Make more decisions in every day. Because a decision is a summoning of life. That’s why a little chaos is good for you, because often you don’t make a decision until you get yourself in a jam. And then, in the middle of the jam, you make a decision, but that decision summons Life Force. Have you ever been in a place where you couldn’t quite make up your mind and you just felt sort of limp? “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” And then you decided, and you felt alive again. We want you to know that you’ll never get it done. So don’t approach this from, “I gotta get on this,” because you’re not ever going to get it done, anyway. And the other thing we want you to know is, you cannot get it wrong. So, make a decision. Let it flow. – Abraham Hicks

Aug 6

Only Feelings?

August 8, 2012

From Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s How to Solve Our Human Problems (p. 42)

Normally our need to escape from unpleasant feelings is so urgent that we do not give ourselves the time to discover where these feelings actually come from. Suppose that someone we have helped responds with ingratitude, or that our partner fails to return our affection, or that a colleague or boss continuously tries to belittle us and undermine our confidence. These things hurt, and our instinctive reaction is to try immediately to escape the painful feelings in our mind by becoming defensive, blaming the other person, retaliating, or simply hardening our heart. Unfortunately, by reacting so quickly we do not give ourselves the time to see what is actually going on in our mind. In reality, the painful feelings that arise on such occasions are not intolerable. They are only feelings, a few moments of bad weather in the mind, with no power to cause us any lasting harm. There is no need to take them so seriously. We are just one person among countless living beings, and a few moments of unpleasant feeling arising in the mind of just one person is no great catastrophe.

Just as there is room in the sky for a thunderstorm, so there is room in the vast space of our mind for a few painful feelings; and just as a storm has no power to destroy the sky, so unpleasant feelings have no power to destroy our mind. When painful feelings arise in our mind, there is no need to panic; we can patiently accept them, experience them, and investigate their nature and where they come from.

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