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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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23 May 2022
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3 Simple Habits That Can Protect Your Brain From Cognitive Decline

You might think that the impact of aging on the brain is something you can’t do much about. After all, isn’t it an inevitability?

To an extent, as we may not be able to rewind the clock and change our levels of higher education or intelligence (both factors that delay the onset of symptoms of aging). But adopting specific lifestyle behaviors – whether you’re in your thirties or late forties – can have a tangible effect on how well you age. Even in your fifties and beyond, activities like learning a new language or musical instrument, taking part in aerobic exercise, and developing meaningful social relationships can do wonders for your brain. There’s no question that when we compromise on looking after ourselves, our aging minds pick up the tab.

The Aging Process and Cognitive Decline

Over time, there is a build-up of toxins such as tau proteins and beta-amyloid plaques in the brain that correlate to the aging process and associated cognitive decline. Although this is a natural part of growing older, many factors can exacerbate it. Stress, neurotoxins such as alcohol and lack of (quality and quantity) sleep can speed up the process.

Neuroplasticity – the function that allows the brain to change and develop in our lifetime – has three mechanisms: synaptic connection, myelination, and neurogenesis. The key to resilient aging is improving neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons. Neurogenesis happens far more in babies and children than adults. A 2018 study by researchers at Columbia University shows that in adults, this type of neuroplastic activity occurs in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that lays down memories. This makes sense as we respond to and store new experiences every day, and cement them during sleep. The more we can experience new things, activities, people, places, and emotions, the more likely we are to encourage neurogenesis.

With all this in mind, we can come up with a three-point plan to encourage “resilient aging” by activating neurogenesis in the brain:

  • Get your heart rate up

Aerobic exercise such as running or brisk walking has a potentially massive impact on neurogenesis. A 2016 rat study found that endurance exercise was most effective in increasing neurogenesis. It wins out over HIIT sessions and resistance training, although doing a variety of exercise also has its benefits.

Aim to do aerobic exercise for 150 minutes per week, and choose the gym, the park, or natural landscape over busy roads to avoid compromising brain-derived neurotrophic factor production (BDNF), a growth factor that encourages neurogenesis that aerobic exercise can boost. However, exercising in polluted areas decreases production.

If exercising alone isn’t your thing, consider taking up a team sport or one with a social element like table tennis. Exposure to social interaction can also increase the neurogenesis, and in many instances, doing so lets you practice your hand-eye coordination, which research has suggested leads to structural changes in the brain that may relate to a range of cognitive benefit. This combination of coordination and socializing has been shown to increase brain thickness in the parts of the cortex related to social/emotional welfare, which is crucial as we age.

  • Change your eating patterns

Evidence shows that calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and time-restricted eating encourage neurogenesis in humans. In rodent studies, intermittent fasting has been found to improve cognitive function and brain structure, and reduce symptoms of metabolic disorders such as diabetes. Reducing refined sugar will help reduce oxidative damage to brain cells, too, and we know that increased oxidative damage has been linked with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Twenty-four hour water-only fasts have also been proven to increase longevity and encourage neurogenesis.

Try any of the following, after checking with your doctor:

  • 24-hour water-only fast once a month
  •  Reducing your calorie intake by 50%-60% on two non-consecutive days of the week for two to three months or on an ongoing basis
  • Reducing calories by 20% every day for two weeks. You can do this three to four times a year
  • Eating only between 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., or 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. as a general rule

  • Prioritize sleep

Sleep helps promote the brain’s neural “cleaning” glymphatic system, which flushes out the build-up of age-related toxins in the brain (the tau proteins and beta amyloid plaques mentioned above). When people are sleep-deprived, we see evidence of memory deficits, and if you miss a whole night of sleep, research proves that it impacts IQ. Aim for seven to nine hours, and nap if it suits you. Our need to sleep decreases as we age.

Of course, there are individual exceptions, but having consistent sleep times and making sure you’re getting sufficient quality and length of sleep supports brain resilience over time. So how do you know if you’re getting enough? If you naturally wake up at the same time on weekends that you have to during the week, you probably are. If you need to lie-in or take long naps, you’re probably not. Try practicing mindfulness or yoga nidra before bed at night, a guided breath-based meditation that has been shown in studies to improve sleep quality. There are plenty of recordings online if you want to experience it.

Pick any of the above that work for you and build it up until it becomes a habit, then move onto the next one and so on. You might find that by the end of the year, you’ll feel even healthier, more energized, and motivated than you do now, even as you turn another year older.

 

 

Original article here

18 May 2022
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The Secret to a Meaningful Life is Simpler Than You Think

 

Some people seem to spend their whole lives dissatisfied, in search of a purpose. But philosopher Iddo Landau suggests that all of us have everything we need for a meaningful existence.

According to Landau, a philosophy professor at Haifa University in Israel and author of the 2017 book Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, people are mistaken when they feel their lives are meaningless. The error is based on their failure to recognize what does matter, instead becoming overly focused on what they believe is missing from their existence. He writes in The Philosopher’s Magazine:

To my surprise, most of the people with whom I have talked about the meaning of life have told me that they did not think that their lives were meaningful enough. Many even presented their lives as outright meaningless. But I have often found the reasons my interlocutors gave for their views problematic. Many, I thought, did not pose relevant questions that might have changed their views, or take the actions that might have improved their condition. (Some of them, after our discussions, agreed with me.) Most of the people who complained about life’s meaninglessness even found it difficult to explain what they took the notion to mean.

In other words, Landau thinks that people who feel purposeless actually misunderstand what meaning is. He is among many thinkers over the ages who’ve wrestled with the difficult question, “What is a meaningful life? 

The Question of Meaning

Philosophers’ answers to this question are numerous and varied, and practical to different degrees. The 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, said the question itself was meaningless because in the midst of living, we’re in no position to discern whether our lives matter, and stepping outside of the process of existence to answer is impossible.

Those who do think meaning can be discerned, however, fall into four groups, according to Thaddeus Metz, writing in the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy. Some are god-centered and believe only a deity can provide purpose. Others ascribe to a soul-centered view, thinking something of us must continue beyond our lives, an essence after physical existence, which gives life meaning. Then there are two camps of “naturalists” seeking meaning in a purely physical world as known by science, who fall into “subjectivist” and “objectivist” categories.

The two naturalist camps are split over whether the human mind makes meaning or these conditions are absolute and universal. Objectivists argue that there are absolute truths that have value, though they may not agree on what they are. For example, some say that creativity offers purpose, while others believe that virtue, or a moral life, confers meaning.

Subjectivists—Landau among them—think that those views are too narrow. If meaning happens through cognition, then it could come from any number of sources. “It seems to most in the field not only that creativity and morality are independent sources of meaning, but also that there are sources in addition to these two. For just a few examples, consider making an intellectual discovery, rearing children with love, playing music, and developing superior athletic ability,” Metz proposes.

For subjectivists, depending on who and where we are at any given point, the value of any given activity varies. Life is meaningful, they say, but its value is made by us in our minds, and subject to change over time. Landau argues that meaning is essentially a sense of worth which we may all derive in a different way—from relationships, creativity, accomplishment in a given field, or generosity, among other possibilities.

Reframing Your Mindset

For those who feel purposeless, Landau suggests a reframing is in order. He writes, “A meaningful life is one in which there is a sufficient number of aspects of sufficient value, and a meaningless life is one in which there is not a sufficient number of aspects of sufficient value.”

Basically, he’s saying meaning is like an equation—add or subtract value variables, and you get more or less meaning. So, say you feel purposeless because you’re not as accomplished in your profession as you dreamed of being. You could theoretically derive meaning from other endeavors, like relationships, volunteer work, travel, or creative activities, to name just a few. It may also be that the things you already do really are meaningful, and that you’re not valuing them sufficiently because you’re focused on a single factor for value.

He points to the example of existentialist psychologist Viktor Frankl, who survived imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps in World War II and went on to write a book, Man in Search of Meaning. Frankl’s purpose, his will to live despite imprisonment in the harshest conditions, came from his desire to write about the experience afterward. Frankl noted, too, that others who survived the camps had a specific purpose—they were determined to see their families after the war or to help other prisoners live, maintaining a sense of humanity.

Landau argues that anyone who believes life can be meaningless also assumes the importance of value. In other words, if you think life can be meaningless, then you believe that there is such a thing as value. You’re not neutral on the topic. As such, we can also increase or decrease the value of our lives with practice, effort, action, and thought. “I can ruin or build friendships, upgrade or downgrade my health, and practice or neglect my German. It would be surprising if in this particular sphere of value, the meaning of life, things were different from how they are in all the other spheres,” he writes.

For a life to be valuable, or meaningful, it needn’t be unique. Believing that specialness is tied to meaning is another mistake many people make, in Landau’s view. This misconception, he believes, “leads some people to unnecessarily see their lives as insufficiently meaningful and to miss ways of enhancing meaning in life.”

He notes too that things change all the time: We move, meet new people, have fresh experiences, encounter new ideas, and age. As we change, our values transform, and so does our sense of purpose, which we must continually work on.

You Are, Therefore You Matter 

Some might protest that Landau’s being simplistic. Surely there must be more to existence than simply assigning a value to what we already have and thinking differently if we fail to recognize purpose in our lives.

In fact, there are even less complex approaches to meaningfulness. In Philosophy Now, Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London in the UK, provides an extremely simple answer: “The meaning of life is not being dead.”

While that may sound coy, many philosophers offer similar responses, although few as pithy. Philosopher Richard Taylor proposes that efforts and accomplishments aren’t what make life matter, writing in the 1970 book Good and Evil, “the day was sufficient to itself, and so was the life.” In other words, because we live, life matters.

It can be disconcerting, perhaps, to have such an easy answer. And detractors might argue that nothing can matter, given the immensity of the universe and the brevity of our lives. But this assumes our purpose is fixed, rigid and assigned externally, and not flexible or a product of the mind.

The Question is the Answer

There are other approaches, too. Casey Woodling, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, proposes in Philosophy Now that the question of meaningfulness itself offers an answer. “What makes a human life have meaning or significance is not the mere living of a life, but reflecting on the living of a life,” he writes.

Pursuing ends and goals—fitness, family, financial success, academic accomplishment—is all fine and good, yet that’s not really meaningful, in Woodling’s view. Reflecting on why we pursue those goals is significant, however. By taking a reflective perspective, significance itself accrues. “This comes close to Socrates’ famous saying that the unexamined life is not worth living,” Woodling writes, “I would venture to say that the unexamined life has no meaning.”

Mystery is Meaning

In the Eastern philosophical tradition, there’s yet another simple answer to the difficult question of life’s meaning—a response that can’t be articulated exactly, but is sensed through deep observation of nature. The sixth-century Chinese sage Lao Tzu—who is said to have dictated the Tao Te Ching before escaping civilization for solitude in the mountains—believed the universe supplies our value.

Like Woodling, he would argue that goals are insignificant, and that accomplishments are not what makes our lives matter. But unlike Woodling, he suggests meaning comes from being a product of the world itself. No effort is necessary.

Instead of reflection, Lao Tzu proposes a deep understanding of the essence of existence, which is mysterious. We, like rivers and trees, are part of “the way,” which is made of everything and makes everything and cannot ever truly be known or spoken of. From this perspective, life isn’t comprehensible, but it is inherently meaningful—whatever position we occupy in society, however little or much we may do.

Life matters because we exist within and among living things, as part of an enduring and incomprehensible chain of existence. Sometimes life is brutal, he writes, but meaning is derived from perseverance. The Tao says, “One who persists is a person of purpose.”

 

Original post here

08 May 2022
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State Of The Planet Update: “Alice in Wonderingland”

 

Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

Alice replied, rather shyly, “I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present-at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!”

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I am not myself, you see.”

 

– Alice in Wonderland

 

 

 

Are things feeling a bit ‘odd’ to you of late? Has your dream life picked up considerably, but you can’t make heads or tails about what they might mean? Felt spacey, light-headed, or dizzy, or like you’re walking in a dream or a starring in a cartoon. Maybe you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, and are wondering around in Wonderland? Well, that’s the psychic and astrological space between the eclipse that just occurred on April 30th, and the one coming up on May 16th. It’s also being amped up in other ways, which I’ll get to momentarily.

Another thing about the space we’re currently traveling through isn’t something else to be wary of, or apprehensive about. Despite the headlines, or the gossip, not all that is happening on our planet is a cause for concern or over-reaction. If some of my previous articles have put you on high alert about certain aspects of the current situation we are experiencing or witnessing, I have not shared from a place of trying to create fear or anxiety, but from a place of love and a desire to inform and empower you.

We are all changing and being changed at such an accelerated pace that some disorientation is perfectly normal. Considering the level and intensity of the times we are living through, inside a predominantly digital environment, it will affect our perceptions and our assumptions or judgments about those perceptions. This is the nature of digital…it is binary, and either something is on or off, 0 or 1, left or right, up or down, right or wrong.

There isn’t very much room or latitude for both/and, or neutrality. Hence all the polarization and atomization of our cultures. Many of our institutional structures are founded on the dualistic model, and it has permeated human consciousness ever since the beginnings of “civilization”. Prior to that, our orientations were predominantly inclusive. Our ancestors weren’t striving for unity, they were already living it to a certain degree. They intuitively understood their place within the fabric of Nature and the heavens. They had no illusions about the intimate interplay between the elements, the environment and themselves. They accepted all of it as something they were part and parcel of.

Since those long-forgotten times, history has happened, and we have lost some very precious aspects of our humanity. As a result, we created religions and other spiritual systems with rules to try understanding the world around us and come to grips with the main 5 questions before all of humanity – who am I, why am I here, where am I, what do I do with this, and what does it all mean? Being orphaned from our original primordial consciousness has divorced us from knowing and thrown us into bicameral confusion via the dualistic mind. We are predominantly mental creatures these days, and our intuitive and instinctual natures are either dormant, suppressed or extremely subservient to the orientation we have to the mind created self. The digital age has not only accelerated our propensity to living in a disembodied state almost 24/7, but it has also influenced human consciousness into a desire to emulate or merge with technology itself. From where I sit, this situation is unsustainable and an evolutionary dead end.

The astrology of our times is mirroring this situation back to us, hoping that we’ll catch on and connect the dots before we are totally subsumed into a trance-like hive mind. The event of the partial Solar Eclipse on 30th of April introduced us to some encouraging energies and laid out before us some challenges as well. Uranus conjunct the Sun-Moon at 10 Taurus, along with a conjunction of Jupiter, Venus, and Mars in the late degrees of Pisces, has emphasized our dissociative state of awareness while at the same time trying to awaken us to our predicament of being orphaned from our true and natural sentient state of beingness. Hence the dreamy sort of stumbling around effect some of you may be encountering. However, as I mentioned earlier, the astrology is merely reflecting an existing situation. The causative factors are numerous and are triggered and amplified by the transiting aspects in astrology.

Factor 1: The Schumann Resonance has been off the charts since April 29th. This is most likely in response to the series of X-Class flares our star has been generating off and on since mid-April.

Factor 2: Geomagnetic storms are more frequent. (See Solar activity)

Factor 3: Collective or consensus reality – the dominator culture is ramping things up on several fronts locally and globally: the situation in the Ukraine, hyper-inflationary policies and hidden price-gouging putting downward pressure on the middle class and poor. The Oil Giants are currently celebrating bumper profits in the 1st fiscal quarter of 2022. Celebrity distractions (Heard-Depp hearings), and politics as usual round out the list.

Factor 4: The pandemic mentality hasn’t gone away entirely, while at the same time a growing body of evidence is pointing out that the responses to the whole thing may be making things worse many times over. In the U.K. the highest number of new cases called Covid-19 (or one of the variants) are among those who have received both jabs plus one and even two boosters.

The Merry Month of May has plenty of activation points to cover, so here’s the menu:

May 10th – Mercury turns stationary retrograde at 4 degrees and 51 minutes of Gemini Time: 12:48pm BST. Please, please, please, back up your data on all your digital devices well ahead of the 10th.

May 11th – Jupiter ingress into Aries at 00:44am BST

May 13th – The Sun conjuncts the North Node at 22 degrees of Taurus

May 16th – Full Moon Total Lunar Eclipse at 25 degrees of Taurus, conjunct the Lunar Nodes at 22 Taurus. Chiron and Venus are conjunct at 14 plus of Aries, Mars is conjunct Neptune at 23 plus degrees of Pisces, and Saturn at 24 Aquarius is still square to the Lunar Nodes.

All of the above is a significant chronology to be sure, but the main event is the bookend eclipse on May 16th. This completes, or rather initiates, the first eclipse pattern for 2022.

In a nutshell this Lunar Eclipse will set the tone for the next six months or so. Taurus-Scorpio is about security and acquisition mixed with desire and power, around food, shelter, sex, money, and VALUES!  Uranus is too far away from this eclipse to add much to it, but he’s already had his input back on April 30th. I’d look for this eclipse to bring more to the light of awareness about how we are all being conned out of our humanity by the promises of a shiny new utopia that openly states that, “we will own nothing and be happy.” That quote is from Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum’s stated goal to digitize humanity and our institutions into a global control grid.

We will also be asked to examine our acquired values and dig deeper to find our true values…those ones that our ancestors held as sacred: love, empathy, embodied living, compassion, cooperation, mutual respect, and a universal recognition of the oneness of all Life, a Life with Divine origination.

What may thwart or distort this will be the Mars-Neptune conjunction in Pisces. More distortion of the truth, or facts…take your pick. Twisting realities to suit a narrow agenda. Obliterating information and data crucial to personal or collective decision-making via censorship and state security public relations statements. Think the “memory hole” from Orwell’s book “1984”.  You may be told that something you saw somewhere, no matter how briefly, never existed in the first place. With everything and everyone logged into the “cloud”, making data disappear is a relatively easy affair. More celebrity dramas or entertainment distractions will proliferate. Meanwhile the Saturn effect on the Nodes will provide a backdrop of the same “you need to do what everyone else is doing for the good of all” messaging. Maybe Covid restrictions will resurface. We’ll see.

The buffer will be provided by Chiron meeting Venus in Aries. Chiron in Aries is symbolic of the right of being an individual…an individuated and unique being, and that this a divine birth right that no other can abrogate or take away from you, unless you acquiesce to it being done. Imagine a lone individual standing up to collective power, and you get the idea. The “Tank Man” photo from the time of the democracy movement in China that brought on the tragedy of the massacre at Tiananmen Square in Beijing comes to mind. One person, standing in front of a line of battle tanks, and refusing to move out of the way, is a compelling example of the symbology of Chiron’s transit through Aries. Adding Venus into the mix only amplifies the message to embrace and love our uniqueness and individuality, and everyone else’s right to the same thoroughly and totally.

 

This configuration of Venus-Chiron will help us to understand the meaning of the sudden reversal, or intended reversal, of the controversial “Roe versus Wade” Supreme Court ruling in a preliminary brief that was leaked earlier this week. This intended revelation has galvanized women to speak out against the ongoing efforts of the patriarchal forces to claw back women’s rights, and everyone’s divine right of sovereignty and choice in all matters, including what you allow or don’t allow to happen with one’s body.

With the Nodes in Scorpio-Taurus, one can also see the interplay of the issues about fertility, sexual preferences, childbearing, motherhood, and childrearing coming up at this juncture. Is there a war on women? Of course, there has been…for millennia. Also, a war on our biology and sexuality. The heritage and user’s manual for the conservative patriarchal mindset is rooted in the Judeo-Christian doctrines. Those belief systems originated with A.I. Not the A.I. of Silicon Valley fame, the alien A.I. that helped to foster the monotheistic father-God religions. This scenario is clearly delineated in the Gnostic gospels, known as the Nag Hammadi Codices. It is plain to see that these issues have become politicized over the past 30-40 years. Politics and religion do not have carte blanche to impose anything on anyone that does not align with the inner values of the individual. Venus-Chiron will be about self-knowledge and self-love.

It now appears to be a war on humanity itself, or at the very least, the organic version of us. The original organic human being is seen by transhumanists as messy, imperfect, and fatally flawed…and prone to illness and death. This perception is birthed and fostered by A.I. (artificial intelligence), and with our culture becoming ever more ensconced in a digital framework it will only hasten the demise of our species, as we have known it.

In summary, I feel this eclipse cycle will usher in a resurgence of individual willpower, a will to not just resist an imposed order from the past, but to work in concert with a wider global awareness that if we can stand up for ourselves adequately, we can work in cooperation with others more effectively. The gaps are widening in many areas of our human family, and it will be necessary to remember that differences of opinion of mindset does not obviate the reality of our inherent oneness or divine origins.

Love, a realistic love, based on the timeless spiritual values of respect for the choices and sovereignty of others, also includes the knowing that we are the author(ity) in our lives. As such, the agendas of others cannot include domination of the “other”, in any form. The time of centralized authority is already past, but the progenitors of it have refused to acknowledge it and continue to pursue an insane course of activity. In other words, respect others’ choices, but do not allow other’s choices to take a higher priority than that. Don’t betray yourself or your values out of fear or obligation.

Which brings us full circle to the subject line of this blog, Alice’s conversation with the Caterpillar. No matter how selfish it might feel to your or my ego, completely accepting and celebrating Who We Are, as we are right now, is essential. Once we realize that knowing we relax into trusting ourselves, and our own guidance. All deeper knowing comes from this step towards caring for the Self unconditionally. This is the crux of becoming self-actualized, and it is the primary purpose of our life’s journey, both here and beyond. For example, you could choose to realize that judging yourself about your flaws is not a productive strategy for joy and inner peace. Difficulty in accepting the bits we judge as wrong in ourselves is made a thousand times worse by accepting the judgment of others, or an outer authority, as valid. This is the origin of guilt and shame…an outer authority declaring your fatal flaws, your original sins, and us believing it!

Between now and the bookend Eclipse of May 16th, take some steps to loving the totality of you, just as you are in this moment. Doing mirror work is a useful tool for such an exploration. Conscious deep breathwork is another. One of my favourites is long walks in Nature, where I can breathe deeply into my body and feel the walls between myself, my form and the outer natural world dissolve. It’s an “always on” love affair…with Nature. Allow Her in. This is the message of the North Node in Taurus too…to honour the Mother inside each one of us.

We have never been alone, and never will be. What an adventure!

 

About the Author:

Isaac George is an internationally recognized intuitive mentor/coach, evolutionary astrologer, conscious channel, self-published author and musician. After a life-altering spontaneous kundalini awakening in 1994 he explored various healing modalities, including hypnotherapy and Reiki. In 1998 he began spontaneously channeling Archangel Ariel and other dimensional intelligences.

Originally from the United States, Isaac currently resides in the UK and offers Spiritual Mentoring sessions and programs and Evolutionary Astrology consultations.

 

20 Apr 2022
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To Save a Forest, Look to the Women

Sara Inés Lara, leader of Colombia-based bird conservation organization Fundación ProAves, got her first taste of conservation’s potential more than 30 years ago. She grew up in one of the most biodiverse places in the world, seeking refuge in the forests, mountains, and pools of the Andes. Then, in 1998, she learned about the yellow-eared parrot.

It was once a common bird near her hometown and across the Colombian Andes, but its population had dwindled to a flock of 81 individuals. Captivated by the fate of the little bird, she abandoned her career as a civil engineer and, along with British ornithologist and her now-husband Paul Salaman and a group of other conservationists, founded ProAves to protect it.

With the help of nearby communities, especially local women, the group successfully fought for an end to the logging of wax palms—the bird’s nesting and feeding site—and hunting of the parrot for sport. The yellow-eared parrot was adopted as a regional emblem. Soon, the population started growing rapidly. Today, there are more than 2,800 individuals, and a couple of years ago, a flock of two dozen parrots was spotted near Lara’s hometown.

It was a huge win, and it taught Lara an important lesson: Women are instrumental in conservation. Women often feel the adverse effects of environmental degradation hardest, and their participation in ProAves’ work quickly demonstrated that they were essential to the success of community-based conservation projects. In many rural communities in Colombia, women are responsible for meeting their families’ most basic needs from nature, including water, firewood, and food—all of which become increasingly difficult as the environment suffers. But the women she encountered needed support, too.

“Many of the women I met were exhausted from childbearing, they did not have any food to feed their children, and they were desperate to have access to family planning,” says Lara.

In 2004, Lara founded Women for Conservation to increase access to public health, family planning, economic opportunities, and environmental conservation. The nonprofit organization aims to build the health of the communities bordering nature reserves, so they can be more economically independent and better able to protect their local environment. The organization runs workshops and trainings, ranging from environmental education to sustainable livelihoods and family planning, for women in 10 communities. It became independent of ProAves in late 2019, and reports that it has since directly reached more than 2,200 people, mostly women and young girls.

Women for Conservation also teaches women to produce wildlife-friendly artisan crafts to replace dependence on cattle ranching and prevent deforestation. In Puerto Pinzón, for example, as part of a broader project to protect the blue-billed curassow, the organization taught women to collect tagua nuts, the seeds of palm trees that are known as “vegetable ivory,” and to produce jewelry that they can sell on the market. Women for Conservation also encouraged the local community to ban hunting, use fuel-efficient stoves to decrease deforestation, and start a tree nursery.

Women for Conservation also runs workshops aimed at training women for careers in conservation and ecotourism.

Ninfa Estella Carinialli was the first woman forest ranger trained and sponsored by Women for Conservation and ProAves. She obtained the International Ranger Award from the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2021, and she works in the Águila Harpía ProAves Reserve, which is located in the eastern Colombian state of Guainía.

Carinialli’s first few years as a forest guard were hard. “My son drowned and my husband passed away from COVID,” she remembers. But, as it had with Lara, the forest proved a refuge. “I felt a deep sadness, but I am thankful for the memories I have with them, and for the opportunity to work in conservation, which makes me happy and fills me with peace.”

Overcoming Myths and Barriers

One of the most important—and sensitive—tasks Women for Conservation has taken on is a focus on reproduction and family planning in local communities. Lara initially had to deal with pushback from local communities. “When we started talking about family planning, we had a couple of incidents where women were severely beaten up for participating in our workshops,” she says. “I learned in a hard way that we need to present women’s empowerment not as a threat, but as a benefit for the family.”

In partnership with the reproductive and family health organization Profamilia, Women for Conservation organizes reproductive health workshops and provides family planning services. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the organization reports it has facilitated 360 contraceptive implants and 27 surgical procedures, including tubal ligations and vasectomies.

The ability to plan pregnancies becomes vital for women and girls when they can’t depend on the natural environment for basic survival needs, says Kelly Donado, who organizes logistics for the family planning brigades at Women for Conservation.

“When there’s ever-less food, jobs, and water, it scares me to think of bringing more babies into the world,” she says. “What kind of situation are we bringing them into? When girls have unplanned pregnancies, they cannot be adequate carers, and often, they’re not able to provide for their babies.”

Donado is leading a campaign in Zona Bananera, a municipality of Santa Marta, which suffers from water scarcity due to diversion for banana and palm growing. Her sister is a local nurse and has offered her home as a center for the clinics and workshops, as there are no medical clinics in the area. Ana Marquis, an 18-year-old from the area, is one of those who participated and decided to get a contraceptive implant.

“It lets me decide when to have my children,” she says in Spanish. She lost two pregnancies in recent years. “Right now, I’m looking after myself so that I can study and not have to worry about getting pregnant.”

In February 2022, Women for Conservation provided 72 women in Zona Bananera with contraceptive implants, in addition to offering cancer screenings, follow-ups, and reproductive education workshops. By the time the group’s representatives returned in March for checkups, more than 190 women and girls had added their names to the waiting list. Men also began requesting contraception from Women for Conservation, which resulted in the first vasectomy procedures in the Zona Bananera region in February 2022.

“Family planning has myriad social, economic, and environmental benefits: It improves the livelihoods and well-being of people and the planet and relieves population pressures on the natural environment, as well as on food production and water scarcity,” says Catriona Spaven-Donn, the Empower to Plan project coordinator for the British charity Population Matters, which supports Women for Conservation.

While Women for Conservation has made significant progress destigmatizing family planning, resistance remains. Marquis says her family forbid her from getting the implant until she was 18, as they have for her 16-year-old sister.

Some families believe that denying teenagers access to contraceptive resources will prevent them from engaging in sexual activity, a belief that has been widely debunked.

Women for Conservation also faced resistance from its peers in the environmental world. Lara remembers other conservation leaders telling her that working with women was nice, but it was not a priority. Whenever she spoke about the link between a growing population, increasing poverty, and environmental impacts, she was told to avoid talking about population.

That’s a trend in recent decades among development, environmental, and reproductive rights community groups. The focus is instead on sexual and reproductive health, choice, and rights of individuals, rather than addressing demographic factors.

“In the past, people wasted a lot of time stereotyping our planetary crises, asking whether the main problem is population or consumption,” says Phoebe Barnard, professor of global change science and futures at the University of Washington, and founding director of the global Stable Planet Alliance, which aims to stabilize and reduce consumption and global population. “Well, of course, it’s not either–or. It’s both. Investing in women’s education, leadership, and opportunities remains a really powerful way to bring benefits not only for women, but for families and children, nature, and the future of our whole civilization.”

Still, even the issues of reproductive health and women’s rights can be difficult to raise among poor, rural Colombian women living in communities where maternity and a large number of children are often viewed positively, and where men may feel a loss of control over women’s sexuality when women use modern contraceptives. In such contexts, contraception is sometimes seen as undermining the traditional gender roles and the stability of the couple and is therefore not trusted or not used.

What’s clear is the close tie between women’s empowerment and environmental outcomes. Recent research found that 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. The U.N. made gender equality an integral part of its Sustainable Development Goals, from equal access to education to family planning.

That link has pushed Women for Conservation beyond family planning to providing basic services to ensure Colombian women are healthy and safe. Breast cancer is the most diagnosed form of cancer in Colombia, so last year, the NGO started providing mammograms and training women on how to conduct a self breast exam. With a drastic increase in calls to domestic violence hotlines during the pandemic, Lara has also started leading workshops and education on the subject.

 

 

Original article here

 

 

 

 

13 Apr 2022
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45 Mind-Boggling Facts About Dreams

 

Whether you remember it or not, you dream every night. Sometimes they’re happy, other times sad, often bizarre, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get a sexy dream once in a while.

They’re a normal part of sleep — something we spend one-third of our life doing. While experts are still divided on what our dreams mean, research has given us some very eye-opening information about dreams.

Here are 45 surprising facts about dreams, ranging from interesting to the stuff of nightmares.

How We Dream 

REM is the sweet spot

Our most vivid dreams happen during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which happens in short episodes throughout the night about 90 to 120 minutes apart.

Morning is better

Longer dreams occur in the morning hours.

Weekends help you remember

You’re more likely to remember your dreams on weekends or days when you sleep in, because each episode of REM sleep is longer than the last.

Your muscles are paralyzed

Most of your muscles become paralyzed during REM sleep to prevent you from acting out your dreams.

Pictures are most common

We dream mostly in pictures, with the majority of dreams being mainly visual with little sound or movement.

Recurring dreams have themes

Recurring dreams in children are mostly about:

  • confrontations with animals or monsters
  • physical aggressions
  • falling
  • being chased

We don’t all dream in color

Around 12 percent of people dream in black and white.

What We Dream

Strange is normal

Many of our dreams are strange because the part of the brain responsible for making sense of things shuts down during dreaming.

Our day informs our dreams

Most of our dreams are linked to thoughts or events from the previous day or two.

Faces are familiar

You likely only dream about faces you’ve already seen in person or on TV, according to Stanford University.

Low stress means happy dreams

You’re more likely to have pleasant dreams if you’re experiencing low stress and feel satisfied in your real life.

Sex Dreams

Not everything is what it seems

Morning wood has nothing to do with sexy dreams or stimulation. Nocturnal penile tumescence causes men to have three to five erections every night, some lasting 30 minutes.

Women can have wet dreams

Men aren’t the only ones who have wet dreams. Women can release vaginal secretions from arousal and even orgasm when having a sexual dream.

Sex dreams aren’t that common

Approximately 4 percent of men and women’s dreams are about sex, according to research.

Sex dreams are usually about one thing

Most sex-related dreams are about intercourse.

Sleep position matters

You’re more likely to dream about sex if you sleep face-down.

This might also make you dream about other things

Sleeping face-down isn’t just associated with more sex dreams, but also dreams about:

  • being locked up
  • hand tools
  • being naked
  • being smothered and unable to breathe
  • swimming

Men dream about variety

Men dream of sex with multiple partners two times more than women.

Women dream about celebrities

Women are twice as likely to have sex dreams about public figures compared to men.

Sleep sex is real

Sleep sex, also called sexsomnia, is a sleep disorder much like sleep walking, except instead of walking, a person engages in sexual behavior like masturbation or intercourse while asleep.

Nightmares And Other Scary Stuff

Kids have more nightmares

Nightmares usually begin between the ages of 3 and 6, and decrease after the age of 10.

Women are more prone to scary dreams

Women have more nightmares than men during their teen and adult years.

Nightmares occur at a similar time at night

Nightmares occur most frequently in the last third of the night.

You could have a condition

If you have recurring nightmares that happen often enough and are distressing enough to impact your ability to function, you may have a condition called nightmare disorder.

Sleep paralysis is a thing

Around 8 percent of the general population experiences sleep paralysis, which is the inability to move when you’re in a state between sleep and wake.

Your feelings come out in dreams

For example, you’re more likely to experience negative dreams about a lost loved one if you’re suffering from post-traumatic symptoms, guilt, or blame over their death.

The holidays can be rough

Grief dreams, which are dreams about deceased loved ones, are more common during the holidays.

Night terrors can be frightening

Night terrors are episodes of intense fear, screaming, and even running around or acting aggressive while asleep.

Children have them more frequently

Almost 40 percent of children have night terrors, though most outgrow them by their teens.

Adults can still have them

Around 3 percent of adults have night terrors.

Eating late isn’t helpful

Eating before bed makes nightmares more likely, because it increases your metabolism, signaling your brain to be more active.

Medications play a role

Certain medications, such as antidepressants and narcotics, increase the frequency of nightmares.

Negative emotions take a toll

Confusion, disgust, sadness, and guilt are more often the driving force behind nightmares than fear, according to research.

Random Cool Facts

We all see things

Blind people see images in their dreams.

Fido dreams, too

Everyone dreams, including pets.

We are forgetful

People forget 95 to 99 percent of their dreams.

We dream a lot

People over the age of 10 have at least four to six dreams every night.

We may be prophetic

Some believe dreams can predict the future, though there isn’t enough evidence to prove it.

We dwell on the negative

Negative dreams are more common than positive ones.

You may be able to control your dreams

You may be able to learn to control your dreams by using techniques for lucid dreaming.

Sleep talking usually isn’t nice

Swearing is a common occurrence in sleep talking, according to a 2017 study.

Sudden muscle spasms aren’t your imagination

Hypnic jerks are strong, sudden jolts, or the feeling of falling that occurs just as you’re falling asleep.

This may cause falling sensations

Hypnic jerks may be the cause of dreams about falling, which is one of the most common dream themes.

Tooth dreams could have a bigger meaning

Dreams about your teeth falling out may be caused by undiagnosed dental irritation, like bruxism, rather than a premonition of death like old folklore suggests.

By far the most mind-boggling fact of all

Though they’ve been trying to figure it out since the beginning of time, researchers don’t know why we dream or what purpose it serves, if any.

 

The Psychology Of Dreams

Everyone, at one time or another, has wondered what their dreams mean.

Dreaming is the most extensively studied cognitive state. While some experts believe that dreams have no meaning and serve no function, others believe that our dreams do mean something.

A number of theories exist on what dreams mean, some of the more recognized theories include:

  • Psychoanalytic theory.In this theory, dreams are believed to represent unconscious desires, wish fulfillment, and personal conflicts. Dreams give us a way to act out unconscious desires in the safety of an unreal setting, because acting them out in reality would be unacceptable.
  • Activation-synthesis theory.Popularized in the 1970s, this theory suggests that dreams are just a byproduct of your brain trying to process random signals from your limbic system, which is involved in your memories, emotions, and sensations.
  • Continual activation theory.This is the idea that our brains are continuously storing memories, even when we’re asleep. It suggests our dreams provide a place to hold our memories while they make the transition from our short-term memory to our long-term memory.

These barely begin to scratch the surface of dream interpretation theories. Here are some other interesting theories on the meaning of dreams:

  • Dreams are threat simulations that help prepare you when faced with threats in real life.
  • Dreams are your brain’s way of collecting and clearing out useless information from the day to make room for new information the next day.
  • Dreaming goes back to an evolutionary defense mechanism of playing dead to fool enemies. This explains why our bodies are paralyzed while dreaming, but our minds remain highly active.

 

The Bottom Line

Experts may not have any concrete answers as to why we dream and what function dreams serve.

What we do know is that everyone dreams, and even our really strange dreams are perfectly normal.

 

About the Author:

Adrienne Santos-Longhurst is a freelance writer and author who has written extensively on all things health and lifestyle for more than a decade.

 

 

Original article here

 

01 Apr 2022
Comments: 0

Stop Thinking Like A Machine

 

April Fool’s Day, and a New Moon in Aries. This lunation is joined by Mercury and Chiron.Time to get real…on a lot of levels! Real with ourselves, our previous sacrosanct beliefs, our self-invented or culture-created identities, all that covers over or covers up the real you. Chiron in Aries is FOR the individuation of Spirit into Matter and advocates and supports how the divine is expressed and actuated in every precious one of us. In other words, our self-talk (Mercury) will need to constellate around Chiron (healing the wound) and any feelings we have about being not enough, not good enough, or any perception we still may hold that our very being isn’t okay, just at it is in its most divine natural state. However, the warrior aspect of Aries is in the grip of the Sun and the Moon, which are both luminaries.

The Sun represents the Core Identity beyond ego and the Moon primordial emotions and intuition. The energy of this about not acquiescing to any attempt to diminish your spiritual and human Self, to guard against absorption into some binary-oriented digitally defined hive mentality. A New Moon in Aries conjunct Mercury (let’s talk about it…a lot!) and Chiron (time to heal and re-integrate) is the perfect metaphor for this essay. Hang in there, this will take some time.

Everything is frequency and frequency is everything. That is not only a spiritual truth, it is echoed by quantum physics and bioenergetics investigators. The electromagnetic spectrum is a way we have devised to measure certain invisible and visible scales of frequency. The visible spectrum, where our five senses operate and what our conscious minds and bodies are accustomed to, is a miniscule fraction of the overall electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum is graduated based on shortest to longest wavelength, and highest to lowest frequency.

Artificially generated electrical technologies operate within our environment on varying wavelengths and varying cyclic frequencies. One example is A.C. or alternating current. It pulses up and down through wiring, changing polarity 60 cycles per second, using a carrier of 110 to 115 Volts AC. That is the standard in most countries around the planet, but all of Europe and certain other parts of the world use a 50hz cycle at 220-240 Volts AC. Electrical induction motors convert A.C. to D.C. or direct current by using a field effect created with polarized magnets in a coil. All standard electrical wiring and electrical appliances generate a field effect, residual electrical energy that surrounds and interpenetrates the atmosphere around it. For house electrical wiring running on a 60hz, 110VAC circuit, that creates a typical around field around 12 inches in diameter. It extends beyond the insulation around the wire into free space…and goes through gypsum board (drywall) like a hot knife through butter.

Around 1840 the first wired telegraph technologies were introduced. This was a quantum development in our experience and that of the Planet. Up until then, all life on Earth lived in a natural bath of low-level electromagnetic fields that the planet’s core generates, and which extends out to the ionosphere. Lightning discharges aren’t just a by-product of meteorological conditions in the atmosphere. They are an integral part of the natural bio-EMF that Mother Earth uses to nurture and sustain itself and all life forms on the planet.

The advent of electricity introduced in the form of a communications network was not just novel, it would revolutionize our planetary civilization. Little did we realize at the time how it would impact human consciousness or human health. The Christian mystic and founder of the Waldorf Schools, Rudolf Steiner, had many things to say about artificial electricity and the human soul and spiritual life.

However, in the late 18th century some intrepid doctors did experiment with using electrical charges on patients to see if it would improve or worsen certain health conditions. The bulk of the history about those experiments can be found in the groundbreaking research book, “The Invisible Rainbow,” by Arthur Firstenberg. I leave it to you to do your own research into the early experiments with electrical fields and human biology.

One noteworthy experiment in the middle of the 19th century bears repeating here and is oddly synchronistic with the rollout of the telegraph systems in the United States and Europe. In 1839 a fellow named Andrew Crosse accidentally stumbled onto a surprising discovery with electricity and crystalline structures. What he did was to create a new life form, which he dubbed the Acari Insects. An electrical voltage applied for an extended period to certain solutions containing crystals. The result was shocking…he created tiny little animated insect-like forms that seemed somewhat sentient.

To create life out of nothing but some silicon-based elements and electricity has long been forgotten, but as you will see in the blogs that I will write following this one, Mr. Crosse’s discovery is pivotal to understanding a great many of the predicaments facing humanity right now. I am referring here to the Archons, as revealed in the book “Not In His Image” by John Lamb Lash.

Following the proliferation of wired telegraph and phone systems, another trend began to develop. Illnesses once thought to be rare became more commonplace. Odd epidemics came and went. One stated statistic from the 1870’s is that heart ailments became more widespread. Before 1840 heart failure or heart disease was the 26th leading cause of death, right behind accidental drowning. By the end of the 19th century, a rash of chronic illnesses cropped up. Some of these smaller epidemics and illnesses were attributable to the movement of larger parts of the populations of Europe and the Americas into crowded cities and into factory work. Conditions became dire, and most of the common ailments were due to poor sanitation (bacteriological), poor diet, heavy drinking and smoking, and a lack of ventilation in the crowded tenements and factory floors. At least that is what most doctors believed, and some of the problems were caused by these factors. However, everything is connected, as we now know, and more than one cause can contribute to ill health.

During these times the views of Louis Pasteur and Dr. Antoine Bechamp came into heated confrontation with one other. Pasteur maintained the new epidemics were caused by microorganisms, or viruses (literal translation — poisons). Bechamp claimed that they were the result of unsanitary living conditions of the times — contaminated water supplies, bad waste management, poor diet, etc. The debate went quiet after Pasteur’s death, with most western medical authorities aligning with his theories. The French medical authorities probed Pasteur’s legacy and found most of his findings were based on prejudicial opinions and thin on facts and proof. Many of his experiment’s results were found to be fraudulent. On Pasteur’s deathbed he declared Bechamp’s Terrain theory as everything and his own theory “as nothing.”

Things started to get very interesting around the time of the sinking of the Titanic, and the drumbeat of the coming war in Europe. The advent of the first wireless version of the telegraph and rudimentary radar units for the war effort in Europe came into being between 1916 and 1917.  U.S. Army bases in Kansas and Massachusetts started to train recruits in these new technologies. Barely 7 months later, the 20th Century’s first major pandemic erupted in Camp Funston in Kansas. The misnamed “Spanish Flu” pandemic started March 4th, 1918 and lasted until April of 1920. During that time an estimated 30-50 million people perished. Some estimates went as high as 100 million, but that figure was never verifiable. The planet’s population was estimated at 1.7 billion at the time it broke out. Towards the end of the pandemic, U.S. Army and Navy doctors carried out experiments to determine how the “flu” was transmitted from one human to another, and they simply couldn’t do it!

Again, I recommend obtaining and reading “The Invisible Rainbow” to understand the correlation and chronologies between the rollout of various electronic technologies, acute and chronic illnesses, and epidemics. Another very important piece of the puzzle is this post on the HHS (Health and Human Services) website in the USA. One of the authors is Dr. Anthony Fauci. You remember him, the one advocating wearing two masks and everyone must get 4 jabs? Right.

We are a long way from proving any of these correlations between electricity and illness, at least from the governmental side or the scientific side of things anyway. To date the telecoms industry and the Federal Communications Commission have done everything in their power to actively ignore or thwart any attempts to initiate serious scientific inquiry into the matter of how perhaps our digital environment is impacting our health, and in turn our livelihoods, the planetary ecosystem, and our sanity.

The philosopher Erich Fromm pondered the question about why humans are so easily hypnotized by technology and want to emulate the qualities of synthetic intelligence and logic. In one of his observations about modern societies he mentions a form of “low-grade chronic schizophrenia” that can be a pathological, though difficult to detect, characteristic of a large group of people. If millions of people share the same sickness, according to Fromm, they feel a certain strength in numbers which reassures them of being perfectly healthy. Group narcissism, therefore, is a pathology that is not only difficult for the afflicted multitude to detect, but as it progresses, its detection becomes increasingly unlikely. Does any of that sound familiar? It should, as we’ve been living in such a state for quite a long period of time, especially so since the spring of 2020.

The following quote is from an essay from a fellow by the name of De Marco:

“The dream of the individual that his life could run automatically like an efficient machine, has begun to assume the proportions of a corporate nightmare in which automation unleashes its suffocating powers of standardization, over-regimentation, and depersonalization. Arthur Miller’s trenchant remark that we live in an “air-conditioned nightmare,” implies the unhappy co-existence of technological progress and spiritual regress. Like real nightmares, it takes place within a profound collective sleep therefore offering little chance of discovering either its cause or its cure. Technology can have an anaesthetic effect on man, dulling his moral consciousness and his capacity to enter fundamental, meditative thinking.”

The esteemed medical publication, The British Medicine Journal (BMJ, which has just published a critique of the entire basis for modern medical diagnosis and procedures. In their article “The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine”, they illustrate how dependent the medical establishment has become on Big Tech’s reworking of health via the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma and Big Tech is their model, and if allowed to continue would only harden into concrete the idea of playing God with nature and genomics, and continue viewing the functioning human body as just another inferior technology, prone to malfunctioning and death. The body is too inefficient a vehicle for an age in which all is measured according to one’s value as a resource, or how productive or non-productive that resource is.

Whether we recognize it or not very few individuals (by percentage) on this world have resisted the temptation to be completely seduced by the spiritual canonizing of technology as the primarily solution to the human condition itself, as well as all we have miscreated during the past 500 years. Whether we realize it or not, many of us are parroting ideas and perspectives being populated across social media, the major media organizations or the culture-modifying engines of commerce and technology. We are being changed, altered, anesthetized, and atomized by an invisible onslaught that by the day is increasingly difficult to detect, escape, or live without. If we continue to give our consent to such a thing we risk losing that last inch or so of our divinely imagined humanity that we are systematically being separated from.

To not think like a machine, to reorient ourselves to the essence of who we are, will take effort and a few sacrifices along the way. It will require self-directed inquiry, research, decision-making and action. It won’t be easy, but when we create common ground through dialog and empathy and share resources and knowledge, there will be strong hope for creating a different vision to the one being offered.

What is on offer? To live in the “meta”? To achieve immortality through cybernetic means and to become dependent on a centralized vision of how the world should be ordered? So it would seem, but this is being promoted by those who have already acceded their humanity to the machine. That is the agenda of A.I., synthetic intelligence, to turn us into IT. This is exactly described by the Gnostic author John Lash as the agenda of the Archons (synthetic sentient hyper-dimensional entities), to morph humans into something akin to themselves. Perhaps the writers of Star Trek Next Generation were being given the script about the Borg Collective from some angelic source and shown how imperative it was to resist the forced assimilation of human consciousness by a soulless force.

Some of you use digital tech for your livelihood, or as an adjunct to your career. I rely on my laptop and a smart phone to arrange and conduct sessions for my clients, and I use a powerful desktop system for audio production. I take precautions though.  All my gear have disks of Shungite attached to them, the densest form of natural carbon on the planet. It shields away radiation from my body.  Because I have dry eye syndrome, I need to take frequent breaks from the computers/phone just to rest my eyes. I try not to scroll, and spend mere minutes on social media per day, and only on my desktop work PC. The artificial light from the screens on handheld and stationary devices hypnotizes our minds, suppressing left-brain critical faculties. We then absorb data without discretion.

Isn’t it ironic that in order for me to share with others about the hazards of digital life, I  must use this very medium to communicate about it? There must be a way to create a new type of communications network globally without the Internet. Telepathy, our natural intranet? Well, it is an idea.

If you wish to get to grips with your electronics in the home and on your person, then a strong will, clear awareness, and actively implementing safeguards to your health and your mind will be essential. Try to not be in front a screen for more than an hour continuously before taking a break. Change the positive ions you pick up from electronics, along with the brain fog, by walking in nature, or sitting with your back against a tree, or lying by a flowing stream. Get effective protection devices to minimize the radiation from all devices in your home. Reduce your T.V. viewing time or get rid of the box altogether. Turn off your routers at night, and your phones, and minimize using any Wi-Fi in the home. Instead, try to run Ethernet LAN cables from the back of the router to the device you want to hook up. They now have Ethernet adapters for smartphones as well.

Another clue of how A.I. is taking more and more of our attention and time is how many times a day we are asked to confirm our identity to some bot on a website, even after we have entered the correct password. Another clue I discovered is when the bank I deal with removed access to my online banking directly from a computer unless I had their app on my smartphone so they could send a 2Factor Authentication code…for every single visit. Everything is now dictated to us by a virtual boss in the meta.

If you’re getting tired of the drudge of it all, then there is only one option. Opting out and going off grid. That may become a necessity as the new digital currency systems are rolled out, making all transactions trackable and not as anonymous as we are told. Everything will be stored in your digital I.D., and I do mean everything. Social credit systems are coming to the West courtesy of China’s experiment with it, and that is the stated agenda in the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset”. It is possible to create a parallel economy, and it’s been done before, back before the 20th Century. The nightmarish artwork to the right was created by an A.I. program. It exemplifies everything that John Lash ascribes to Archontic consciousness…chaos is the agenda (link below). Is this what we truly want our lives to be ensconced in?

The Internet was a much friendlier place to explore when it first appeared, but even now very few folks realize that it was created by a military think-tank known as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a branch of the U.S. government. So was Google. This information is readily available online if you know where how to search for it. Patent filings is one way to do this.

If we could come together and offer a different vision and narrative of what would be the way to use electricity and digital technologies in a non-violent, non-invasive, health-neutral and human and Nature friendly way, then I would be all for it. However, that simply isn’t possible in the current climate, with so many billions and trillions of profits still to be made by its progenitors.

I do not by any means wish to eliminate or marginalize all forms of technology. That is impossible. The simple tools and implements for gardening are, for example, a type of technology.  Quite a bit of the amazing music and art we experience now is created using digital methods (I employ these tools in music production for example). Some medical procedures are greatly enhanced by the use of computers and micro-optics. I would certainly miss listening to my favorite music on a high fidelity sound system. However, to become overly reliant on these forms and elevate them over Nature is the danger here, and I haven’t yet even addressed the immense environmental damage our energy demands and footprint has had in order to just keep all the tech humming along.

A computer cannot replicate the experience of your beloved pet on your lap, or licking your face. It cannot replicate human touch or feeling. It cannot perform energy healing or give you a massage. And it sure cannot help you to become self-realized.  All forms of artificial intelligence can only mimic the analog world, but they cannot create anything new. Therein lies our challenge and a clue about our divine gifts and heritage – to be able to experience feelings, imagine things, and then to create them.

One current perception about the Covid-19 event is that it has split humanity into two camps or factions. There are many other factions or splintering that have been underway before 2020, but the events of the past two years has created deeper gaps than any political divide. However, this is nothing compared to the choice now before us.

Compliance with the inorganic, or non-compliance in favour of remaining organic? That is the next boundary point ahead. It is symbolized by the conjunction of Jupiter and Neptune in Pisces on April 12th 2022. This meeting is only 11 days away, and it last occurred in 1856 and won’t occur again until 2188. This is an opportunity to initiate something new and oriented according to organic principles…that the superior living technology that All That Is emanates continuously throughout Nature and within all of us. Beware of imitations and counter-mimicry, and avoid thinking like a machine. Artificial anything is an evolutionary dead end.

Choose the real.

 

About the Author:

Isaac George is an internationally recognized intuitive mentor/coach, evolutionary astrologer, conscious channel, self-published author and musician. After a life-altering spontaneous kundalini awakening in 1994 he explored various healing modalities, including hypnotherapy and Reiki. In 1998 he began spontaneously channeling Archangel Ariel and other dimensional intelligences.

Originally from the United States, Isaac currently resides in the UK and offers Spiritual Mentoring sessions and programs and Evolutionary Astrology consultations.

 

 

28 Mar 2022
Comments: 0

How To Forgive Someone Who Isn’t Sorry

Forgiveness is often viewed as the “happily ever after” ending in a story of wrongdoing or injustice. Someone enacts harm, the typical arc goes, but eventually sees the error of their ways and offers a heartfelt apology. “Can you ever forgive me?” Then you, the hurt person, are faced with a choice: Show them mercy — granting yourself peace in the process — or hold a grudge forever. The choice is yours, and it’s one many of us assume starts with remorse and a plea for grace.

It’s reasonable to expect an apology when you’re the one who has been hurt or betrayed. But that’s not how it works in practice. In fact, therapist Harriet Lerner writes in her book Why Won’t You Apologize?: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts the worse the offense, the more difficult it can be to get an apology from the person who harmed you. In those instances, Lerner writes, “Their shame leads to denial and self-deception that overrides their ability to orient toward reality.” And beyond this, there are other reasons you might be unable to get the apology you deserve. Maybe the other person isn’t aware of the harm they did to you, or they’ve disappeared, making contact impossible, or they’ve died.

Unfortunately, that puts you in a tough spot. How do you forgive someone who isn’t all that sorry, or who you can’t actually engage with?

To answer this question, we spoke to two experts: Robert Enright, a professor of education psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison and a leader in the scientific study of forgiveness, and Laura Davis, the author of several books about estrangement and reconciliation, including The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story. Both have worked extensively with people who have experienced serious personal injustice, including survivors of child sexual abuse and gender-based violence. Enright and Davis say that forgiving someone who is unrepentant is absolutely possible; here’s how to approach it.

Expand your view of what forgiveness is

In some ways, it’s easier to define forgiveness by what it isn’t. “Forgiveness is not excusing what the other did; that behavior was wrong, is wrong, and will always be wrong,” Enright says.

Both Enright and Davis say that forgiveness exists separately from reconciliation, and also from accountability — which is why forgiving someone doesn’t require an apology or even their participation. “Reconciliation is a negotiation strategy between two or more people trying to make their way back together to mutual trust,” explains Enright, whereas forgiveness is a one-way endeavor. Put another way: Forgiveness might be a step on the path to reconciliation, but you don’t have to traverse the full route if you’d prefer not to.

Enright also points out that while forgiveness is separate from accountability, it’s not at odds with seeking justice. “Many people think it’s either/or, rather than both,” he says. Forgiving someone can help you take a more clear-eyed approach to justice because you’re no longer, as he put it, “seething with rage.”

Perhaps most importantly, forgiveness doesn’t require you to pretend the hurt didn’t happen, to forgive and forget, or to ever speak to the person again. “When you forgive someone, it doesn’t mean you have to have any kind of ongoing relationship with them,” Davis says. “It’s an internal shift, where you’re no longer carrying the wound in the same way.”

Enright defines forgiveness as a moral virtue. Moral virtues (like kindness, honesty, and patience) are typically focused on how they benefit others; these are things you do primarily for another person’s sake, regardless of whether or not they have “earned” it.

“Forgiveness is a special kind of moral virtue that always and without exception occurs when the other person has been unfair to you,” Enright says. “When that person is unfair to you and you willingly choose to forgive — it’s not forced upon you — you are basically good to the one who was not good to you. You’re deliberately trying to get rid of the resentment and offer goodness of some kind: respect, kindness, anything that is good for the other person.”

Think of forgiveness as something you’re doing primarily for yourself

Because forgiveness is defined as offering goodness to another person, it can be hard, mentally, to want to get there — after all, you were the one who was wronged, so why do you have to now give them something? But it can be helpful to consider that you don’t have to literally give them anything, or even tell them you forgive them. Forgiveness doesn’t have to exist anywhere outside of you.

“Forgiveness is what we call a paradox,” Enright says. “It appears to be a contradiction but is not. It looks like you as the forgiver are doing all of the giving, and the other is doing all of the getting.” That mindset, he says, overlooks all of the benefits that you as the forgiver will likely experience. According to Enright’s research (which includes several meta-analyses of other forgiveness studies), people who have gone through the process of forgiving someone experience “characteristically, a reduction in the clinical variables of anger, anxiety, and depression, and increase in self-esteem and hope for the future.”

“Forgiveness is my safety valve against the kind of toxic anger that could kill me,” Enright says. “Waiting for the apology is to misunderstand your free will, and it’s to misunderstand the medicine that is forgiveness, that you should be able to take freely, whatever you want.”

Once you remove reconciliation as a goal, it’s easier to see how forgiveness will benefit you as much as — if not more than — the other person, giving you an opportunity to fully cut your mental connection to them. “Forgiveness begins to help you sever that connection so that you can be free,” Davis says. “I think it’s essential for people to eventually let go of their anger, their rage, their hurt, so that they can move on in their own lives.”

Don’t let fear of “losing” stand in the way of forgiving someone

Being willing to let go of the anger and hurt can be one of the hardest aspects of forgiving someone, especially someone who isn’t sorry or who hasn’t apologized. In these instances, it can sometimes feel like your wound is all you have: It serves as proof that an awful thing happened to you and really was as terrible as it felt. Forgiving someone, then, can feel like you’re capitulating — like you’re acquiescing to their view of events, when you know in your heart they did something wrong.

Enright says it’s reasonable to want to tend to your anger when someone has hurt you. “You can hang on to anger for a short time because it shows you’re a person of worth and dignity, and no one should treat you this way,” he says. “But then my question would be, if you hang on to that anger, what is it doing to you? Yes, it will empower you for a while. But characteristically over time, it brings us down with fatigue, rumination, becoming far more pessimistic in life.”

There’s real work involved in forgiving, and it takes time

Enright has studied forgiveness extensively. He says his research group at the University of Wisconsin Madison was the first to publish a scientific study on forgiveness, in 1989; in 1993, they became the first to publish a scientific study of forgiveness therapy. Their research has led to the development of a step-by-step process for forgiveness, which can happen in therapy (ideally with someone who is trained in forgiveness therapy), or through a self-guided process using his workbook.

He says that forgiving someone via this process happens in four major phases.

1) The uncovering phase. The person who has been treated unfairly focuses on the effects of the injustice in their life. These effects might be things like monetary costs, lost time, ongoing anxiety, depression, anger, sleep problems, or a more pessimistic worldview. In a lot of instances, Enright says, people don’t even realize how much the injustice is still impacting their life.

In this stage, you’re also asked to think about what solutions you’ve already tried for these problems and the extent to which they’ve led to meaningful improvements or change. “We say, ‘If nothing satisfying has worked, how about trying forgiveness?’” Enright says.

2) The decision phase. This is where you’ll determine whether you want to try to forgive the person who hurt you. And the answer might be no! Maybe it’s too soon and the pain is too fresh, or you just know you’re not ready to let go of the anger. That’s okay; this is a process you can always return to, and, eventually, you might find that you want to forgive.

It’s also important to be sure you’re attempting to forgive because you want to, not because you’re being pressured into it by, say, friends or family who are tired of having to navigate the fallout and just want everyone involved to move on. “We have to be drawn to the idea of forgiveness ourselves, and never be coerced into it,” Enright says.

If you decide you want to work toward forgiveness, Enright says the next step is a homework assignment: Try to do no harm to the person who wronged you. You don’t have to feel positively about them, but you should try your best not to disparage them, and don’t seek revenge. If even that feels impossible, you might not be ready to forgive them yet.

3) The work phase. At this point, you’ll aim to broaden your narrative about the other person and develop empathy for them. So you might think about how they were raised, what difficult things happened in their life that led them to this point, and the ways in which that person is vulnerable. “You widen the story,” Enright says. “As you start telling that story to yourself, over and over, we see a little bit of empathy, a little tiny bit of compassion, a little bit of softening of the heart. That takes time, and definitely can’t be engineered through therapy; it has to emerge.”

The next part of the work phase, Enright says, is “standing in the pain.” He says one way to do this is to think of your pain on a scale of 1–10, and to visualize that amount of pain in a heavy sack that you are holding on your back. “Acknowledge that it’s there, be aware of it, and stay with it,” Enright says. “Don’t try to run away from it. Don’t try to take anything out of it. Just let it be. What we find is, when people do that, that sack tends to shrink. As I deliberately say yes to the pain and stand in it, the pain begins to lessen.” He says that this part of the process can also help you rebuild self-esteem because it’s a reminder of what you’re capable of.

4) The discovery phase. This is when you’ll reflect on the meaning you’ve found in your life from this experience. “What we tend to find a lot of times is people become much more attuned to the wounds within other people,” Enright says. You may realize that you’ve become more patient with strangers, or less judgmental of coworkers or friends, because you have a newfound understanding of how they might also be struggling.

Going through this might also have made you feel more connected to other people, as you realize you’re not alone in the injustice you suffered. Or it may have given you a sense of purpose by inspiring you to help others who might have experienced something similar, or who are at risk of being wronged in the same way you were.

Don’t be too hard on yourself if you’re struggling to forgive someone

Being ready to forgive someone who hurt you takes time, as does the work of forgiving them. It’s impossible to know when — or if — you’ll ever be ready. If now doesn’t seem to be the time, that’s okay. “We’re in relationships with many people over the course of a whole lifetime,” Davis says. “Things can shift in surprising and sometimes dramatic ways just with the passage of time.” Many of the people she’s interviewed have spoken about their feelings changing when they entered a different life stage; for example, a person who isn’t ready to forgive a parent might start to see the situation differently after they have kids of their own. (It can also have the opposite effect, making them feel even more hurt by their parent’s behavior.)

“These things evolve over a lifetime,” she says. “If you had told me when I was in my late 20s and deeply estranged from my mother that I would end up taking care of her at the end of her life, I would have looked at you like you were completely crazy. Yet that’s what I chose and wanted to do.”

“I think that forgiveness is something that comes at the end of a long process of healing,” Davis says. “In my personal experience, it was a gift. I didn’t see it as the end goal of resolving an injury. I did my own work, and naturally, feelings of forgiveness arose.”

 

 

Original post here

 

 

23 Mar 2022
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How to Turn Off Harmful Stress Like a Switch

Let’s play a game of “would you rather.”

 

Would you rather speak in front of 500 people for an hour or be stuck in an elevator with your ex?

Would you rather get a cavity drilled or be forced to take a four-hour Zumba class?

Would you rather lose your car keys before work or lose your internet connection before an online meeting?

 

None of these options are good, but they all have something in common: they invoke stress.

What stresses you out? How do you deal with that dreaded feeling? And did you know there’s a bulletproof method for disarming stress?

Where Does Stress Come From?

Stress is defined as “mental or emotional strain resulting from adverse or demanding circumstances.” We’ve all felt it, but where does stress come from?

Stress comes from the future, but not in the Marty McFly way.

Humans are unique in our capacity to predict what might happen next. We rely on our amazing ability to anticipate the future better than any other animal, and this ability is a feature of our unusual intelligence.

Unlike other animals, which (as far as we know) react solely to what’s going on in their environment, humans can imagine entire realities in our heads. These alternate realities make us act in all sorts of strange ways. For instance, while zebras will run from the sound of a lion in the brush, humans will stampede at the start of a Black Friday sale, imagining the deals we’ll miss if we don’t elbow our way through.

While imagining the future motivates us to pursue what we want, it also comes with a cost. All that thinking about what might happen next is stressful.

Does that mean humans are doomed to lives of constant stress? Does our ability to imagine many futures mean we’re destined to feel constant emotional strain?

Not necessarily.

You’ve no doubt heard the story of Viktor Frankl, the inspiring psychiatrist who survived imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. He observed firsthand the profound difference between his fellow prisoners who lost hope—and soon died—compared with those who found a purpose. Focusing on that purpose allowed them to take back some measure of psychological control. The difference was literally life and death.

What if I told you that same powerful difference in focus and mindset is impacting you right now?

You’re about to learn how to create a real-life forcefield against the stress you face every day.

Viktor Frankl knew something science would later verify: perception can mediate the effects of stress. In other words, two people faced with exactly the same stressful situation can have very different physical and emotional reactions. How does that happen? To answer that question, let’s take a look at some fascinating research about the power of feeling in control.

The Power of Control 

A classic study of two rats reveals an important insight about the role control plays in the experience of stress. The two rats are in separate cages connected to the same electrical circuit. The circuit administers random shocks through the metal floor of their cage. One rat has a lever in its cage that enables it to turn off the shocks while the other rat does not.

The rat with the lever in its cage is called “the executive rat,” because it has control. It has the power to turn off the electric current flowing through the cage. The rat with no control is called the “subordinate rat.”

When the experiment begins, both the executive rat and the subordinate rat show signs of stress, indicated by a sudden surge of the stress hormone, cortisol. Then, something interesting happens. The executive rat’s stress levels drop back to normal, while the subordinate rat’s stress remains high. Why? In a word, control.

The executive rat has discovered that it can turn off the stressful stimulus (the random shocks) by pressing the lever in its cage. For the executive rat, it’s as if the physiological effects of its stressful situation have been turned off completely. In contrast, the subordinate rat’s health steadily declines due to the stress, leading to secondary effects including a suppressed immune system.

Here’s what’s happening. The electrical shock is the stressor, and both rats experience exactly the same amount of that stressful stimulus. Yet one rat feels in control of the stress. He can turn it off at will. On a psychological level, this makes all the difference. Let’s consider why that’s the case, and what it means for our ability to cope with the daily stress we all face in the human rat race.

Psychological Immunity to Stress 

The stress we experience is based on our perception of what’s going to happen next. If we anticipate a threatening situation, our body releases stress hormones to prepare us to face the threat.

But if we believe we have control over a threatening stimulus, then we don’t need to prepare for that threat in the same way. We don’t need to be on full alert with the fight-or-flight response gearing us up for survival. How can we regain a sense of control when faced with stress and uncertainty?

Let’s return to the story of Viktor Frankl. Faced with unimaginable hardship, he had no idea how long the torment would continue. There was no guarantee of rescue, and many of his companions died of starvation, illness, or worse. What did he do differently to cope with the stress?

He changed the focus of his attention. Frankl searched for meaning and purpose in the smallest daily actions, like caring for a friend or saving a scrap of string that might be useful later. He also found long-term meaning and purpose in the idea of survival itself. He reminded himself continuously that surviving this hardship would be meaningful to his family and friends. They needed him to come back to them alive.

This change in focus—from the many uncontrollable aspects of life to the few controllable ones—can have a profound effect. That’s because our perception of reality is, to a large extent, created by the focus of our attention.

Are you facing the stress of an uncertain future? If so, it helps to focus on what you can control. Sometimes that means bringing the finish line closer by setting goals for today or this week instead of trying to figure out what you’ll do if you lose your job three months from now. Sometimes, it means making a list of 10 ways you can stay connected with friends and choosing the best one to put into action.

Our human tendency is to focus on threats and problems. For the sake of our emotional wellness, it makes sense to modify that automatic tendency. You can’t control the stressors that come your way, but you can influence the focus of your own attention. That’s why we recommend you focus on the things that give you back a feeling of control.

Want another tool to combat stress? Counterintuitively, one of the best things we can add to your toolbelt is an entirely different belief about stress—one befriending it instead of battling against it.

The Power of Your Beliefs 

In her TED talk, psychologist Dr. Kelly McGonigal revealed an important insight that changed her own mind about stress. After decades educating people about the dangers of stress and imploring them to reduce stress for the sake of their health, Dr. McGonigal discovered an unexpected trend in the data.

When people believed stress was something bad that must be avoided, it had a far worse impact on their health. In contrast, among those who perceive stress as a normal part of pursuing goals, there was no correlation between higher stress and poor health outcomes.

Once again, how we perceive stress matters. If you believe stress itself is a threat, something you must reduce for the sake of your health, and yet can’t effectively reduce it, you feel trapped. You have no control, just like the rat getting shocked at random.

Feeling out of control makes us feel even more stress, perpetuating the harmful cycle. Perhaps it’s time to consider an alternative view of stress. What if we stopped seeing stress as something abnormal or threatening to your future health and instead thought of it as something that empowers us to be our best?

For instance, speaking in front of hundreds of people can be debilitatingly stressful. Many people try to fight stage fright, thinking the stress will make them more likely to stumble over their words and embarrass themselves. However, instead of thinking the stress is a bad thing that we must resist, we can think of it as an asset. A racing heartbeat for instance, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s a sign of the body sending more oxygen to the brain so you can do your best.

After we learn to see stress as something to harness rather than run from, we can take things one step further. Let’s see what happens when you pursue stress deliberately, on your own terms.

Stress for Success?

In his book, The Power of Full Engagement, peak performance coach Jim Loehr recommends oscillating back and forth between pushing hard and relaxing. Observing both athletes and executives, Loehr noticed that we engage more fully in our work if we push hard for periods of time and then pull back toward rest and recovery.

An athlete who knows there’s a short break around the corner is capable of pushing harder during periods of extreme exertion. And if you think about this in the context of your own life, it probably makes sense. It’s easy to push hard for the last two days of work before a vacation, or even the last hour of a typical workday. That’s because you know you’re about to get a break.

When you intentionally push yourself outside of your comfort zone and schedule periods of rest and recuperation, something interesting happens—your capacity to endure stress increases. It’s as if you’ve created a new set point for what feels normal.

For example, an entrepreneur who feels constantly pressed for time during her nine-hour workday might experiment with doing a 14-hour workday once per week for three weeks. Each of these long workdays is followed by a shortened workday of only six hours. In this case, she is stretching her sense of what’s possible by working longer than what feels comfortable. Then she recovers, taking it easy the next day.

The effect is less stress. Can you guess why? She has expanded her sense of what’s possible. She feels in control of the stressor (time pressure to get things done), because she knows that if the worst comes to worst, she can put in a few longer workdays to get caught up. Things no longer feel out of control.

Alternatively, she can practice timeboxing. This time management tool gives her better control over the focus of her attention when too many things are competing for her time. Timeboxing allows her to translate her highest priorities into blocks of time she’s reserved to get the most critical things done. Once again, the result is a feeling of control.

Since stress comes from feeling out of control, you can sometimes put yourself back in the driver’s seat, deliberately steering toward stress so you have greater control over deciding when to steer away toward rest.

Achieve More with Less Stress

You don’t have to choose between a healthy life and a life of full engagement with high, hard goals. You can have both.

The way to have both is to take control of the stress you put on yourself. By proactively seeking stress in forms that further your goals, you can change your set point for what feels overwhelming. Doing so will eliminate the feeling that stress is happening to you. It’s instead something chosen by you. You’re taking control of stress before it takes control of you.

If you want to take action on this idea, here’s what I recommend. Choose one area of life to experiment with (e.g., your physical fitness, tolerance for periods of intense concentration, or handling rejection on sales calls). Apply the concept of steering toward stress and then away from it.

If done correctly, as you steer toward stress, difficult challenges will begin to feel more like an adventure. Emotionally, you’ll experience a sense of thriving and empowerment as you navigate your way toward difficult goals rather than a feeling of being crushed by their weight. Then, when you steer away from stress, you’ll experience a deeper level of relaxed contentment that contributes to your well-being, both mentally and physically.

Bottom line—stress isn’t your enemy. It’s not even a bad thing. Stress is, in a very real way, what you make of it. You can take control of it, or you can let it control you. The choice is yours.

 

 

Original article here

18 Mar 2022
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Find More Ways to Be an Outsider

The world is full of outsiders: students away at a university far from home, immigrants to a new country, and people who go abroad for work or extended travel. Over the past year, more than 4.4 million American workers quit their jobs in the “Great Resignation,” and many of them became outsiders by joining a different company or moving to a new place, which they perhaps imagined might be friendlier to their personal needs and tastes.

But just because a journey to the unfamiliar was voluntary doesn’t make it easy: Being an outsider can be lonely and difficult, especially if all the strangers around you seem to know and understand one another. Your instincts might tell you that uprooting yourself was a terrible decision, that the benefits you sought are much smaller than the costs you are bearing. You might even wonder if you’ll ever be happy again.

The truth is, however, you almost certainly did not make a mistake. There is little evidence that being an outsider creates long-term problems for happiness or lowers your chance of success; on the contrary, people thrust between places and cultures tend to develop strength, flexibility, and resiliency. Being an outsider may be one of the best investments you will ever make, and you should embrace it, pain and all.

Scholars have studied outsiders, including immigrants, refugees, students, and foreign workers, to understand the long-term effects on well-being and personal success. Some of the most illuminating work has focused on so-called third-culture kids (TCKs): children who grow up outside their parents’ home culture and, as a result, are influenced partially by their parents’ home culture and partially by the culture in which they live, but mostly relate to a “third culture” made up of fellow sojourners. The term was coined in the 1960s by the sociologists Ruth Hill Useem and John Useem in studies of people who grow up in, for example, missionary and military families.

A lot of older theories of philosophy and psychiatry would predict tough outcomes for outsiders, especially TCKs—and indeed, would recommend against being one if you can avoid it. In Laws, Plato argued that people should not even travel abroad before age 40, and that visitors be restricted to port areas of cities to minimize their contact with citizens. He believed that acculturation—the psychological change that occurs when a person blends into an unfamiliar culture—was damaging to one’s sense of self. Plato’s reasoning carried on into the mid-20th century, and was shared by such eminent psychologists as Abraham Maslow, Erik Erikson, and Carl Rogers.

Outsiders do tend to face particular genres of hardships, especially distrust by insiders. Despite the biblical injunction “Do not oppress a foreigner,” even believers often disregard friendliness in favor of tribal instinct when it comes to immigrants. You don’t have to move to a new place to feel the ill effects. People at the margins of society, by virtue of the language they speak or the lifestyle they choose, often bear the brunt of hostility. Joseph Stalin, for example, felt a particular animosity for the people he and his supporters called “rootless cosmopolitans”—generally, Jewish intellectuals, who he considered to live outside of mainstream Soviet society despite the fact that they lived in Soviet cities.

However, with all due respect to Plato, outsiders can actually do very well. True, they generally suffer somewhat in the short term after a move. For example, one recent study showed that international college students rated their life satisfaction about 4 percent lower at the end of their first semester than at the beginning of the term. But a mountain of evidence shows that in the long run, being an outsider predicts well-being and emotional strength; it may even protect against depression.

For example, one 2018 study in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology showed that TCKs grow up to be happier and more resilient than their peers who possess less multicultural experience, and are less prone to age-related declines in cognitive flexibility. A 2012 review found that being raised in at least two cultures leads, on average, to greater psychological and emotional well-being and higher social competence in adulthood. Also in 2013, scholars found that acculturation is negatively associated with depression, anxiety, psychological distress, and sadness.

Furthermore, TCKs don’t usually wind up insecure; they develop multiple cultural identities that they employ flexibly, the same way they switch between languages. This is almost like a superpower in a globalized, fast-changing world.

Spending time as an outsider is like any other big, taxing investment you can make in yourself: difficult and maybe painful, but with a positive, lifelong payoff. You might think of it as less like a fun vacation, and more akin to a voluntary personal challenge, like training for a triathlon. Here are a few ideas to incorporate an outsider ethos into your life.

1.   Remember that being an outsider is a feature, not a bug.

When you are new to a place or a group of people, you might be tempted to think of your unfamiliarity as a cost of doing business, and something to get over as quickly as possible. And by all means, you should make friends, learn the language, and find common ground. But don’t forget that the uncomfortable friction that occurs while you are integrating is making you stronger and more resilient. No pain, no gain.

2.  Find regular ways to be an outsider.

Given the benefits of bicultural experiences, don’t leave your outsider status up to circumstance. Find opportunities to be on the margins, looking in. In my profession of academia, for instance, we regularly take sabbaticals and go someplace completely new for a year or six months. Most people don’t have this luxury, but they can do something akin to it by changing jobs every few years, or transferring between cities. If that sounds too drastic, you can try switching up your regular haunts—go to a new church, club, or gym where you know no on

3.  Make friends with outsiders, even if you aren’t one.

Remember that the third culture of TCKs is the one they form together as outsiders. Although no studies that I could find have looked at the therapeutic benefits of this third culture per se, it stands to reason that such bonding is crucial to the outsider’s superior adjustment capacity; it is a way to practice creating one’s own culture spontaneously. Even if you aren’t an outsider, you can learn these skills by joining those in your community who are. Look for the new people in your workplace or town, who are probably hanging out together. There’s always room for one more.

In candor, I’m approaching this topic with a fair amount of bias. Being an outsider early in my adulthood was the most positive experience I have ever had. At 25, I moved to a foreign country where I didn’t speak a word of the language, and knew not one soul save for a woman I hoped to marry, but who spoke little English. It was brutal, but life-changing in the best way. After a few years, I had lost my fear of new things, whether it was an unfamiliar language, working with strangers, new love, or a community hostile to foreigners.

 

That woman became my wife, and subsequently became an outsider in the United States. Over the past 30 years we have moved many times, as have our now-adult TCKs. Our youngest, who is adopted from China, attended three high schools during an especially peripatetic period in our family, and then chose a college in Pamplona, Spain. The changes were hard at first, but she is flourishing, just as the data would predict.

 

Original article here

13 Mar 2022
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How to Get Smarter Every Day, According to Neuroscience

A friend of mine spends 20 to 30 minutes a day solving Sudoku puzzles. He says it improves his speed of mental processing and makes him, well, smarter.

Hold that thought.

Ask people which factor contributes the most to success and most will choose intelligence, even though science says you also have to be lucky: Right place, right time. Right person, right time. Right idea, right market, right audience at the right time.

Yet even though there are ways to “create” your own luck, you can’t control luck.

But you can control, to some degree, how smart you are.

Let’s Define “Smart.”

While there are a number of different forms of intelligence, let’s focus on two. Crystallized intelligence is accumulated knowledge: facts, figures. Think “educated.”

Of course we all know people who are “book smart” but not necessarily smart smart. That’s where fluid intelligence comes into play: The ability to learn and retain new information and then use it to solve a problem, to learn a new skill, to recall existing memories and modify them with new knowledge. Think “applied intelligence.”

Becoming more educated is, while not easy, certainly simple.

Improving fluid intelligence is harder, which is one reason why brain games–crossword puzzles, Sudoku, brain training apps, etc.—are fairly popular.

But do they make you smarter? Do they improve fluid intelligence?

Basically, No.

A 2007 study published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences assessed the impact of brain training games on fluid intelligence. After participants played Tetris—yes, Tetris—for several weeks, cortical thickness and cortical activity increased.

Both are signs of an increase in neural connections and learned expertise. In simple terms, their brains bulked up and got smarter.

But after those first few weeks, cortical thickness and activity started to decrease, eventually returning to pre-Tetris mastery pursuit levels—even though their skill levels remained high. Participants didn’t lose brain power.

Instead, their brains became so efficient at playing Tetris those increased neural connections were no longer necessary. Using more mental energy was no longer necessary. As with most things, once they kinda figured it out, it got easy.

Unfortunately, no matter how much work it took to learn new information or gain new skills, “easy” doesn’t help improve fluid intelligence. Once knowledge or skill is in your pocket, you certainly benefit from the increase in crystallized intelligence.

But your fluid intelligence soon returns to a more baseline level.

That’s the problem with brain training games. Solving Sudoku puzzles, and only solving Sudoku puzzles, won’t improve my friend’s fluid intelligence in any other areas.

It only makes him better at solving Sudoku puzzles.

Learning how to use a new inventory management system will improve your fluid intelligence, until you’ve mastered it. Setting up Quickbooks for a new business will improve your fluid intelligence, until you’ve mastered the accounting process basics.

Once you achieve a level of comfort, your brain no longer has to work as hard, and all that new mental muscle gained starts to atrophy.

So what can you do?

Stay Uncomfortable.

Easy: Once you’ve mastered a new game, a new process, a new skill, a new anything—move on to something new.

At work. At home. Anywhere. Just keep challenging yourself.

Not only will you pocket a constant flow of new information and skill, your brain will stay “bulked up” and forging new neural connections, making it easier to keep learning and growing.

And then there’s this: The more you know, the more you can leverage the power of associative learning—the process of relating something new to something you already know.

Not in a Pavlov’s dog kind of way, but by learning the relationship between seemingly unrelated things. In simple terms, whenever you say, “Oh, that makes sense: This is basically like that,” you’re using associative learning.

The more you learn, the more likely you will be able to associate “old” knowledge to new things. Which means you only have to learn differences or nuances. And you’ll be able to apply greater context, which also helps with memory storage and retrieval, to the new information you learn.

All of which makes learning even easier, which research shows will result in your being able to learn even more quickly—and retain a lot more.

So if you like brain-training games, master one and then move on to another. And another.

Better yet, keep pushing yourself to learn new things about your business, your customers, your industry, etc.

Not only will that help you become more successful, you’ll also get to improve your crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence—which will surely help you become even more successful.

Where win-wins are concerned, that’s a tough one to beat.

 

Original article here