Aug 14, 2010 
Sophie Madeleine tries to record a song but is interrupted . . .
A video featuring ukulele players from all over the globe!
Do yourself and the world a favor: align your life with your passion
Browsing the archives for the Video category
No Comments rt Vonnegut wrote some wonderful short stories. This was how he went about it.
While physical discipline in writing is important, meditation and yoga fall by the wayside during periods of intense creativity.
The Lyrics
By Tanya Davis
If you are at first lonely, be patient.
If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were you weren’t okay with it, then just wait.
You’ll find its fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.
We can start with the acceptable places:
• the bathroom
• the coffee shop
• the library
Where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books, you’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.
There is also the gym, if you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you can put headphones in.
There’s public transportation because we all gotta go places.
And there’s prayer and meditation, no one will think less if you’re hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.
Start simple.
Things you may have previously avoided based on avoid being principles.
The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by “chow downers”, employees who only have an hour and their spouse work across town, and so they, like you, will be alone.
Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.
When you are comfortable with “eat lunch and run”, take yourself out to dinner, a restaurant with linen and silver wear. You’re no less an intriguing a person when you are eating solo desert and cleaning the whip cream from the dish with your finger. In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.
Go to the movies. Where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.
And then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you.
Stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s watching because they are probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely move to beats, is after-all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating. And beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things. Down your back, like a brook of blessings.
Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you.
Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, there are always statues to talk to.
And benches made for sitting gives strangers a shared existence if only for a minute and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversation you get in by sitting alone on benches, might have never happened had you not been there by yourself.
Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after awhile nobody is dating them. But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it. You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company. But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts some essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those sappy slogans from pre-school over to high school groaning, we’re tokens for holding the lonely at bay. Cause if you’re happy in your head, and solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.
It’s okay if no one believes like you, all experiences unique, no one has the same synapses can’t think like you, for this we are elite, keeps things interesting, life’s magic things munch?, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, the community is not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.
Take silence and respect it.
If you have an art that needs practice stop neglecting it.
If your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.
You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.
If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.
There is heat in freezing, be a testament.
There are very specific things people can do each day that are proven to increase happiness.
Tal Ben Shahar gives several practical happiness tips, including changing your calendar, buying a notebook, and changing your approach to car parking.
Question: What can people do each day to be happier?
Tal Ben-Shahar: The first thing to do to become happier, paradoxically, is to accept painful emotions, to accept them as a part of being alive. You know, there are two kinds of people who don’t experience painful emotions such as anxiety or disappointment, sadness, envy; two kinds of people who don’t experience these painful emotions. They are the psychopaths and the dead. So if we experience painful emotions at time, it’s actually a good sign. It means that we’re not a psychopath and we’re alive. The paradox is that when we give ourselves the permission to be human, the permission to experience the full gamut of human emotion. We open ourselves up to positive emotions as well.
Question: Are there specific things people can do?
Tal Ben-Shahar: Then I think — yeah. Some specific examples, exactly. The number one predictor of well-being of happiness is time, quality time, we spend with our family, friends, people we care about and who care about us. In our modern world, unfortunately this quality time is erroding. A very good predictor of well-being is what psychologist Tim Kasser calls time affluence. Time affluence is the thing that we have time to sit down and chat with our friends while — not while being on the phone at the same time or text messaging at the same time, being with that person. This is a better predictor.
Physical exercise contributes a great deal to happiness; in fact, there is research showing that regular exercise, three times a week for 30 to 40 minutes of aerobic exercise, could be jogging or walking or aerobics or dancing, three times a week of 30 to 40 minutes of exercise is equivalent to some of our most powerful psychiatric drugs in dealing with depression or sadness or anxiety. We’ve become a sedentary culture where we park our car next to our workplace or take the train and we don’t walk like our fore parents used to. Thousands of years ago our fore parents walked an average of eight miles a day. How far do we walk today? Well it depends on where we park our car. And we pay a high price for it because we weren’t made to be to sedentary. We were made to be physically active.
Question: How can we cultivate gratitude?
Tal Ben-Shahar: There are treasures of happiness all around us and within us. The problem is that we only appreciate them when something terrible happens. Usually when we become sick, we appreciate our health. When we lose someone dear to us, we appreciate our life. And we don’t need to wait. If we cultivate the habit of gratitude we can significantly increase our levels of happiness. So, for example, research by Robert **** and Mike McAuliffe shows that people who keep a gratitude journal, who each night before going to sleep write at least five things for which they are grateful, big things or little things, are happier, more optimistic, more successful, more likely to achieve their goals, physically healthier; it actually strengthens our immune system, and are more generous and benevolent toward others. This is an intervention that takes three minutes a day with significant positive ramifications.
Question: What happiness techniques are particularly important in today’s world?
Tal Ben-Shahar: Okay. Sorry. One of the most important things that we can do in our modern world is to simplify, to do less rather than more. The problem is that we try and cram more and more things into less and less time, and we pay a price. We pay a price in terms of the quality of the work that we do. We also pay a price in terms of the quality of relationships that we enjoy. So doing less — for example, switching our phone off for three hours when we get home, or not responding to every e-mail as it arrives, having what I call e-mail-free zones — these little things, simplifying our lives even slightly, can make a significant difference to our productivity as well as happiness.
Recorded on: September 23, 2009
From: BigThink.com
Douglas Adams was the best-selling British author and satirist who created The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this talk at UCSB recorded shortly before his death, Adams shares hilarious accounts of some of the apparently absurd lifestyles of the world’s creatures, and gleans from them extraordinary perceptions about the future of humanity.
Dr. Bob Paeglow is a big-hearted doctor who makes no salary. He treats his patience for little or nothing. He tells Steve Hartman that he wanted to make a difference and is not doing it for the money.
Chaos and the Orienting Response: A neuropsychologcially predicated model of why you might be Christ
Chaos and the Orienting Response: A neuropsychologcially predicated model of why you might be Christ by Jordan Peterson
University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson gives a fascinating talk on the metaphysics which underlie both religious narrative and human cognition.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
