awakening | Ascension Lifestyle

01 Oct 2023
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The Power of Next

Whenever I am faced with life’s uncertainty, I ask myself the following questions: Why is this happening? What can I do to make it go away? How can I navigate this effectively? What can I learn from this experience?

Being at a crossroads can be challenging when what you know to be true suddenly isn’t. The straight and expected path you are on veers sharply, does a summersault, and flings you into unchartered territory leaving you unsure of what direction you are facing. Disoriented, the task of righting yourself can seem daunting. What do I do now? What are my next steps? So many asked questions, so many unanswered responses.

The ‘not knowing’ can be fertile ground for stress, anxiety, and fear to insidiously creep into your awareness. The question then becomes, “What can be done to mitigate the fallout and find direction?”

Baby Steps

Many years ago, I took a workshop on handling change, where the facilitator asked us to do one exercise every day for the rest of our lives (a pretty bold ask!). He asked us to change one thing every day. Simple, easy tasks that gently challenge any resistance to change thinking. Drive a different way to work. If you normally put your right shoe on first, today put your left shoe on first. Please note, I tried changing hands to brush my teeth and got toothpaste all over!

The goal of this exercise is to become more comfortable with daily changes, even small ones, thereby making the bigger, more challenging ones less scary. Now, I can’t say that I do this every day, but this exercise has provided comfort for me in times of turmoil.

While this exercise can be a preemptive approach to handling stress, I also found I needed an immediate touchstone that would provide me with some reassurance in the current moment that things were indeed going to be okay, I was going to be okay, in troubled times.

Next…

That touchstone for me lies in the concept of the word “next.” The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word next this way: in the time, place, or order nearest or immediately succeeding. It even has the word “succeed” in the definition!

When life gets challenging and I have been thoroughly flung into the unknown, I boldly (and sometimes confidently) say, “Next!” out loud. This shifts my energy, focus and intention away from the quagmire I find myself in and points me in a new direction. It’s amazing how saying this one word while keeping a curious spirit and open heart can provide a sense of comfort and possibilities.

Rather than dwelling on the unforeseen changes, I choose to look toward new possibilities. I may have no clue as to what those possibilities may be or when I will experience them, but I believe I will be guided. Many years ago, I purchased a greeting card that I had framed. On the card was a quote from Emily Dickinson that says, “I dwell in possibility.” That has been my sacred mantra and has served me well.

Next is possibility. Next is hope. Next is new beginnings. Next is sewn into the very fabric of forward motion. What are my next steps? What’s the next chapter for me? What’s next on the agenda?

As we get swept away and sometimes flung by life’s changes and challenges, stand in your power and declare…

Next!

Original article here

22 Sep 2023
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Selfishness Is Learned

Many people cheat on taxes — no mystery there. But many people don’t, even if they wouldn’t be caught — now, that’s weird. Or is it? Psychologists are deeply perplexed by human moral behavior, because it often doesn’t seem to make any logical sense. You might think that we should just be grateful for it. But if we could understand these seemingly irrational acts, perhaps we could encourage more of them.

It’s not as though people haven’t been trying to fathom our moral instincts; it is one of the oldest concerns of philosophy and theology. But what distinguishes the project today is the sheer variety of academic disciplines it brings together: not just moral philosophy and psychology, but also biology, economics, mathematics, and computer science. They do not merely contemplate the rationale for moral beliefs, but study how morality operates in the real world, or fails to. David Rand of Yale University epitomizes the breadth of this science, ranging from abstract equations to large-scale societal interventions. “I’m a weird person,” he says, “who has a foot in each world, of model-making and of actual experiments and psychological theory building.”

In 2012 he and two similarly broad-minded Harvard professors, Martin Nowak and Joshua Greene, tackled a question that exercised the likes of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Which is our default mode, selfishness or selflessness? Do we all have craven instincts we must restrain by force of will? Or are we basically good, even if we slip up sometimes?

They collected data from 10 experiments, most of them using a standard economics scenario called a public-goods game. Groups of four people, either American college students or American adults participating online, were given some money. They were allowed to place some of it into a pool, which was then multiplied and distributed evenly. A participant could maximize his or her income by contributing nothing and just sharing in the gains, but people usually gave something. Despite the temptation to be selfish, most people showed selflessness.

The fuzziness of psychological ideas makes them hard to test. If an experimental result doesn’t fit your theory of human behavior, you can fiddle with the definitions.

This finding was old news, but Rand and his colleagues wanted to know how much deliberation went into such acts of generosity. So in two of the experiments, subjects were prodded to think intuitively or deliberately; in two others, half of the subjects were forced to make their decision under time pressure and half were not; and in the rest, subjects could go at their own pace and some naturally made their decisions faster than others. If your morning commute is any evidence, people in a hurry would be extra selfish. But the opposite was true: Those who responded quickly gave more. Conversely, when people took their time to deliberate or were encouraged to contemplate their choice, they gave less.

The researchers worked under the assumption that snap judgments reveal our intuitive impulses. Our intuition, apparently, is to cooperate with others. Selfish behavior comes from thinking too much, not too little. Rand recently verified this finding in a meta-analysis of 51 similar studies from different research groups. “Most people think we are intuitively selfish,” Rand says — based on a survey he conducted—but “our lab experiments show that making people rely more on intuition increases cooperation.”

The cooperative impulse isn’t confined to an artificial experimental setting. In another paper, Rand and Ziv Epstein of Pomona College studied interviews with 51 recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal, who had demonstrated extreme altruism by risking their lives to save others. Study participants read the interviews and rated the medalists on how much their thinking seemed intuitive versus deliberative. And intuition dominated. “I’m thankful I was able to act and not think about it,” a college student who rescued a 69-year-old woman from a car during a flash flood explained.

So Rand made a strong case that people are intuitive cooperators, but he considered these findings just the start. It’s one thing to put forward an idea and some evidence for it — lots of past researchers have done that. It’s quite another to describe and explain that idea in a rigorous, mathematical fashion. Ironically, Rand figured he could make better sense of humans by stepping away from studying real ones.

The overwhelming majority of psychological theories are verbal: explanations of the ways people act using everyday language, with maybe a few terms of art thrown in. But words can be imprecise. It may be true that “cooperation is intuitive,” but when is it intuitive? And what exactly does “intuitive” mean? The fuzziness of psychological ideas makes them hard to test. If an experimental result doesn’t fit your theory of human behavior, you can fiddle with the definitions and claim you were right all along.

Rand has sought to create quantitative models. “Science is about developing theories,” he says, “not about developing a list of observations. And the reason formal models are so important is that if your goal is theory-building, then it’s essential that you have theories that are really clearly articulated and are falsifiable.”

To do that, he has developed computer simulations of society — The Sims, basically. These models represent collections of individual people described by computer “agents,” algorithms that capture a specific package of traits, such as a tendency to cooperate or not. You can do controlled experiments on these computerized citizens that would be impossible or unethical to do with real people. You can endow them with new personalities to see how they’d fare. You can observe social processes in action, on time scales ranging from seconds to generations, instead of just taking a snapshot of a person or group. You can watch the spread of certain behaviors throughout a population and how they influence other behaviors. Over time, the patterns that emerge can tell you things about large-scale social interaction that a lab experiment with a few real people never could.

One of the first such models, in the early 1970s, studied housing segregation. It represented a city as a 16-by-13 grid of squares, populated by two types of people: stars and circles. Each star would move to the nearest location in which at least half its neighbors were also stars — it had a slight bias to be among similar others. Circles did the same. Even these mild biases led quickly to stark segregation, with all-star and all-circle regions of the board — a much more extreme partitioning than any one agent sought. The researcher, the economist Thomas Schelling, used his model to help explain racial segregation in American cities. A neighborhood can splinter into homogeneous patches even when individual residents are hardly prejudiced at all. (Of course, in reality, segregation also reflects outright racism and explicit policies of exclusion.) Schelling’s work became a case study of how a group’s collective behavior can diverge from the desires of any one agent.

Such models have also been used to explore cooperation. In an influential paper in 1981, the political scientist Robert Axelrod programmed agents to play a simple game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Two players have to decide whether to cooperate with or betray the other, and they receive points based on their choices. The scoring system is set up to mimic an essential dilemma of social life. Together the players perform best if they both cooperate, yet each can maximize his or her own individual outcome, at the expense of the other, by acting selfishly. The game takes its name from a scenario in which the police interrogate two thieves, offering each a reward for ratting out his or her accomplice. The thieves aren’t able to communicate to reach a joint decision; they have to make their decisions independently. Acting rationally, each should rat out the other. But when they both act “rationally,” they actually end up with the most combined jail time.

It’s possible we’re born with a tendency to cooperate, but frequent cooperation (with beneficial results) is required to sustain our benevolence.

The game gets more interesting — and more analogous to real life — when you play multiple rounds with the same partner. Here, repeated cooperation is best not just for both partners as a unit but also for each individually. You can still occasionally double-cross your partner for extra points, however, as long as it doesn’t trigger later betrayal.

What is the best strategy, then? To find out, Axelrod solicited Prisoner’s Dilemma strategies from mathematicians, biologists, economists, political scientists, computer scientists, and physicists from around the world. Axelrod programmed his computerized agents with these strategies and made them play a round-robin tournament. Some strategies were quite sophisticated, but the winner was a simple one called tit-for-tat.

Tit-for-tat resembles human reciprocity. It starts with cooperation and, after that, does whatever the other player did on the previous round. An agent using the strategy extends an olive branch at first. If its opponent reciprocates, it keeps cooperating. But if its opponent double-crosses it, the tit-for-tat agent rescinds its peace offering until its opponent makes amends.

By combining the short-term temptation to be selfish with the long-term benefits of collaboration, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is an ideal model for human cooperation, and Rand has built on Axelrod’s work to understand why evolution might have favored intuitive selflessness.

Rand and his grad student Adam Bear considered a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in which matchups were either one-shot or multiple-round, chosen at random.8 The computerized agents faced a tough choice. In a one-off, they would score more points by betraying their opponent, whereas in repeated play cooperation made more sense. But the uncertainty made it unclear which strategy was best. Rand and Bear then added a twist. An agent could elect to pay some points at the start of an encounter—representing the efforts of deliberation—to suss out what kind of matchup it would face, so that it could tailor its strategy.

The agent had to decide whether the advantage of foreknowledge outweighed its cost. The price of the tip-off varied randomly, and each agent was programmed with a maximum price it would agree to pay; if the price exceeded that amount, the agent did not receive any advance information and instead chose some default behavior, following its “intuition.” In this way, the simulation allowed for different personality types. Some agents intuitively cooperated, others intuitively betrayed. Some occasionally deliberated, others didn’t.

Is deliberation helpful? That’s not immediately obvious. Intuitive thinking is fast but inflexible. Deliberative thinking can achieve better outcomes but takes time and energy. To see which strategy excelled in the long run, Rand and Bear’s model simulated a process of evolution. A large population of agents played the game with one another and either proliferated or died depending on how well they did. This process can model either genetic evolution or cultural evolution, in which the weak players don’t actually die, but merely adopt stronger strategies through imitation.

Most of us are genuinely good. And if we’re not, we can be encouraged to be. The math is there.

Typically, one strategy swept through the population and replaced the alternatives. This victorious strategy depended on the precise parameters of the game. For example, Rand and Bear varied the probability that matchups would be single- or multiple-round. When most were multi-round, the winning agents defaulted to cooperating but deliberated if the price was right and switched to betrayal if they found they were in a one-shot game. But when most were one-shots, the agents that prevailed were no longer willing to pay to deliberate at all. They simply double-crossed their opponents. In other words, the model produced either wary cooperation or uncompromising betrayal.

This outcome was notable for what was missing. Agents that always cooperated usually died off completely. Likewise, almost no set of game parameters favored agents that defaulted to the double-cross but were sometimes willing to deliberate. Bear and Rand stared at this asymmetry for several weeks, baffled.

Finally, they had a breakthrough. They realized that when your default is to betray, the benefits of deliberating — seeing a chance to cooperate — are uncertain, depending on what your partner does. With each partner questioning the other, and each partner factoring in the partner’s questioning of oneself, the suspicion compounds until there’s zero perceived benefit to deliberating. If your default is to cooperate, however, the benefits of deliberating — occasionally acting selfishly — accrue no matter what your partner does, and therefore deliberation makes more sense.

So, it seems there is a firm evolutionary logic to the human instinct to cooperate but adjust if necessary — to trust but verify. We ordinarily cooperate with other people, because cooperation brings us benefits, and our rational minds let us decipher when we might occasionally gain by acting selfishly instead.

The model also ties up a loose end from Rand’s earlier studies of public-goods games. In that research, time pressure caused some people to cooperate more, but never caused anyone to cooperate less. This asymmetry now makes sense. The only people who would have shown that behavior were those who were willing to deliberate, but defaulted to betrayal; the time pressure would bring out their Machiavellian inclinations. Evidently such people are rare. If someone is deep-down selfish, rational deliberation will only make them more so. And the evolutionary model shows why. Defectors who have qualms are quickly winnowed out by genetic or cultural evolution.

When it comes to getting people to cooperate more, Rand’s work brings good news. Our intuitions are not fixed at birth. We develop social heuristics, or rules of thumb for interpersonal behavior, based on the interactions we have. Change those interactions and you change behavior.

Rand, Nowak, and Greene tested that idea in their 2012 paper. They asked some subjects whether they’d ever played such economics games before. Those with previous experience didn’t become more generous when asked to think intuitively; they’d apparently become accustomed to the anonymous nature of such games and learned a new intuition. Unfortunately, it was a cynical one: They could get away with mooching off others. Similarly, subjects who reported that they couldn’t trust most of the people in their lives also didn’t become more generous when acting on intuition. It’s possible we’re born with a tendency to cooperate, but frequent cooperation (with beneficial results) is required to sustain our benevolence.

Happily, even the Grinch can expand his heart by three sizes, as Rand demonstrates in a recent study. First, he had test subjects play the Prisoner’s Dilemma for about 20 minutes with a variety of opponents. For half of the subjects, the average game lasted eight rounds, meaning cooperation was the best strategy; for half, the average game lasted a single round, which discouraged cooperation. Afterward, everyone played a public-goods game. Those stewed in cooperation gave significantly more money in the second phase of the experiment than did those without it. In less than half an hour, their intuitions had shifted.

How do you encourage cooperation in places where cooperation isn’t the norm? Corporate America comes to mind. “In a lot of situations people are basically rewarded for backstabbing and ladder-climbing,” Rand says. Rand and Bear’s modeling paper, in which intuitive defectors don’t trust each other enough even to consider whether cooperation would pay off, points to an answer. Rand suggests that, at least at first, incentives could come from above, so that the benefits of cooperating don’t depend solely on whether one’s partner cooperates. Companies might offer bonuses and recognition for helpful behavior. Once cooperation becomes a social heuristic, people will begin to cooperate when it benefits them, but also even when it doesn’t. Selflessness will be the new norm.

When selflessness is the norm, encouraging people to make decisions quickly can bring out their better angels. Extensions of this research reveal that we see quick or unthinking acts of generosity as particularly revealing of kindness, and that people may even use this signal strategically. In recent work, Rand and his collaborators have shown that people are faster to make decisions to cooperate when they know someone is watching, as if aware that others will judge them by their alacrity. Among other puzzles, Rand is currently trying to untangle this apparent paradox—the strategic use of intuition.

Rand’s work offers a correction to those misanthropes who peer into the hearts of men and women and see shadows. Most of us are genuinely good. And if we’re not, we can be encouraged to be. The math is there.

If you think seeing life as a set of economics games and cooperation as self-interest in disguise sounds dismal, it is actually not so distanced from what you might call virtue. “When I’m nice to other people, I’m not doing it because of some kind of calculation. I’m doing it because it feels good,” Rand says. “And the reason it feels good, I argue, is that it is actually payoff maximizing in the long run.”

Rand then adds a crucial clarification. “It feels good to be nice — unless the other person is a jerk,” he says. “And then it feels good to be mean.”

Tit for tat indeed.

Original article here

02 Sep 2023
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This Is Where Your Childhood Memories Went

We called them fairy rocks. They were just colorful specks of gravel—the kind you might buy for a fish tank—mixed into my preschool’s playground sand pit. But my classmates and I endowed them with magical properties, hunted them like treasure, and carefully sorted them into piles of sapphire, emerald, and ruby. Sifting the sand for those mystical gems is one of my earliest memories. I was no older than 3 at the time. My memory of kindergarten has likewise been reduced to isolated moments: tracing letters on tan paper with pink dashed lines; watching a movie about ocean creatures; my teacher slicing up a giant roll of parchment so we could all finger-paint self-portraits.

When I try to recall my life before my fifth birthday, I can summon only these glimmers—these match strikes in the dark. Yet I know I must have thought and felt and learned so much. Where did all those years go?

Psychologists have named this dramatic forgetting “childhood amnesia.” On average, people’s memories stretch no farther than age three and a half. Everything before then is a dark abyss. “This is a phenomenon of longstanding focus,” says Patricia Bauer of Emory University, a leading expert on memory development. “It demands our attention because it’s a paradox: Very young children show evidence of memory for events in their lives, yet as adults we have relatively few of these memories.”

In the last few years, scientists have finally started to unravel precisely what is happening in the brain around the time that we forsake recollection of our earliest years. “What we are adding to the story now is the biological basis,” says Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. This new science suggests that as a necessary part of the passage into adulthood, the brain must let go of much of our childhood.

Sigmund Freud gave childhood amnesia its name in the early 1900s. He argued that adults forgot their earliest years of life in the process of repressing disturbing memories of sexual awakening. While a handful of psychologists saw merit in this claim, the most commonly accepted explanation for childhood amnesia was that children simply couldn’t form stable memories until age 7—even though there was little evidence to support this idea. For nearly 100 years, psychologists assumed that memories of infancy did not endure because they were never durable in the first place.

The late 1980s marked the beginning of a reformation in child psychology. Bauer and other psychologists began to test infant memory by performing a series of actions—such as building a simple toy gong and striking it—and then waiting to see if a child could imitate the actions in the right order, after a delay ranging from minutes to months.

“Mice performed worse on certain kinds of memory tests after living in a cage with a running wheel.

This work laid bare the contradiction at the heart of childhood amnesia: Infants can create and access memories in their first few years of life, yet most of these memories eventually vanish at a rate far beyond the typical forgetting of the past we experience as adults.

Maybe, some researchers thought, enduring memories require language or a sense of self, both of which we lack as infants. But although verbal communication and self-awareness undoubtedly strengthen human memories, their absence could not be the whole explanation for childhood amnesia. After all, certain animals that have large and complex brains relative to their body size—such as mice and rats—but do not have language or, presumably, our level of self-awareness, also lose the memories they make in infancy.

Perhaps, then, researchers reasoned, the paradox had a more fundamental physical basis that was common to people and other big-brained mammals. The question was, what?

Between birth and our early teens, the brain is still laying down some of its fundamental circuitry and thickening its electrical pathways with fatty tissue to make them more conductive. In a massive surge of growth, the brain sprouts innumerable new bridges between neurons. In fact, we have far more links between brain cells in our earliest years than we end up with in adulthood; most are pruned away. All that excess brain mass is the wet clay from which our genes and experiences sculpt a brain to suit its particular environment. Without such limber brains, young children would never be able to learn as much as quickly as they do.

As Bauer and others discovered, this adaptability comes with a price. While the brain undergoes this prolonged development outside the womb, the large and complex network of disparate brain regions that collectively create and maintain our memories is still under construction, Bauer explains, and not as capable of forming memories as it will be in adulthood. As a consequence, the long-term memories formed in our first three years of life are the least stable memories we ever make and highly prone to disintegrating as we age.

In early 2018, Frankland and his colleagues published a study indicating another way the brain relinquishes our childhood memories: not only do they degrade, but they also become concealed. A few years back, Frankland and his wife Sheena Josselyn—also a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children—started to notice that the mice they studied performed worse on certain kinds of memory tests after living in a cage with a running wheel.

“Our earliest memories are often insoluble blends of genuine recollections, narratives we sponged up from others, and imaginary scenes dreamt up by the subconscious.

As the couple knew, exercise on a running wheel promotes neurogenesis—the growth of whole new neurons—in the seahorse-shaped hippocampus, a brain region that is essential for memory. But while neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus likely contributes to the ability to learn and remember, Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and others had suggested that it might also necessitate a certain amount of forgetting. Just as a forest has room for only so many trees, the hippocampus can hold only so many neurons. New brain cells might crowd the territory of other neurons or even replace them altogether, which could in turn break or reconfigure the small circuits that likely store individual memories. Perhaps, then, the especially high rate of neurogenesis in infancy was partly responsible for childhood amnesia.

To put this notion to the test, Frankland and Josselyn transferred infant and adult mice from the plastic shoebox-sized cages they had known all their lives to larger metal cages they had never seen before. In these new containers, they zapped the rodents’ feet with mild electric shocks. The mice quickly learned to associate the metal cages with the shocks, stiffening with fear whenever they were returned to those enclosures.

While baby mice began to forget about this connection after a single day—relaxing when they found themselves in the shock cages—adult mice never forgot about the danger. But when adults ran on a hamster wheel after the shocks—thereby stimulating neurogenesis—they started to mirror infants in their forgetfulness. Prozac, which also encourages neural growth, had the same effect. Conversely, when the researchers hindered neurogenesis in infant mice with drugs or genetic engineering, the young animals formed much more stable memories.

To get a really close look at how neurogenesis might change memory, Frankland and Josselyn used a virus to insert a gene encoding a green fluorescent protein into the DNA of the mice’s newly sprouted brain cells. The glowing dye revealed that the new cells were not replacing old ones; rather, they were joining existing circuitry. That suggests that, technically, the many little circuits of neurons that store our earliest memories are not wiped out by neurogenesis. Instead, they are thoroughly restructured, which probably explains why the original memories become so difficult to recall. “We think it’s an accessibility issue,” Frankland says, “but it’s sort of a semantic issue too. If a memory becomes impossible to access, then it is effectively erased.”

This restructuring of memory circuits means that, while some of our childhood memories are truly gone, others persist in a scrambled, refracted way. Studies have shown that people can retrieve at least some childhood memories by responding to specific prompts—dredging up the earliest recollection associated with the word “milk,” for example—or by imagining a house, school, or specific location tied to a certain age and allowing the relevant memories to bubble up on their own.

But even if we manage to untangle a few distinct memories that survive the tumultuous cycles of growth and decay in the infant brain, we can never fully trust them; some of them might be partly or entirely fabricated. Through her pioneering research, Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine has demonstrated that our earliest memories in particular are often insoluble blends of genuine recollections, narratives we sponged up from others, and imaginary scenes dreamt up by the subconscious.

In one set of groundbreaking experiments conducted in 1995, Loftus and her colleagues presented volunteers with short stories about their childhood provided by relatives. Unbeknownst to the study participants, one of these stories—about being lost in a mall at age 5—was mostly fiction. Yet a quarter of the volunteers said they had a memory of the experience. And even when they were told that one of the stories they had read was invented, some participants failed to realize it was the lost-in-a-mall story.

When I was a toddler, I got lost in Disneyland. Here is what I recall: It was December and I was watching a toy train loop through a Christmas village. When I turned around, my parents had disappeared. Dread dripped down my body like cold molasses. I began blubbering and wandering the park, searching for them. A stranger approached me and took me to a giant building filled with TV screens playing feeds from security cameras all over the park. Did I see my parents on any of the screens? I did not. We went back to the train where we found my parents. I ran into their arms, overcome with joy and relief.

Recently, for the first time in quite a while, I asked my mom exactly what she remembers about that day in Disneyland. She says it was spring or summer and that she and my family last saw me beside the remote control Jungle Cruise boats, not the railroad near the entrance of the park. As soon as they realized I was missing, they went straight to the Lost and Found Center. A park official had indeed discovered me and brought me to the center, where I had been placated with ice cream.

It was unsettling to have what I thought was a pretty accurate memory so thoroughly contradicted, so I asked my mom to search our family photo albums for some hard evidence. All she could find were pictures from an earlier trip. We will probably never have any tangible proof of what happened. We are left with something far more elusive: those tiny embers of the past, embedded in our mind, twinkling like fool’s gold.

Original article here

03 Aug 2023
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2023 So Far

We’re now 7 months into 2023 and I’ve been noticing some things that are quite different from previous years.

People are curious for something new, something fresh and different. Almost like folks have stopped saying that’s woowoo and started saying ‘Whatcha got?’
There are most definitely two distinct realities emerging. The old hierarchical one where everything is scary and scarce. And the new quantum one where everything is available for you to create your own version of life and reality.
While the weather might seem unpredictable, at the same time there’s an increase in the miraculousness of Nature. One wonders if the weather gods aren’t putting purpose in people’s faces and saying ‘Time to act.’, while at the same time the Nature gods are enticing us into a more wondrous interconnection with all of life.
The quantum field is present all around us now. The air we breathe is packed with great possibilities. Super flow of genius, ideas & innovation have become easy to access.
We believe … we create. In other words, you think a subtle thought and minutes later whoosh there it is staring you in the face in your reality. So make your thoughts and beliefs great ones! Coz they’re gonna become real real fast from now on.
There is Joy, oh so much Joy, if you just let yourself experience it. It’s really just a matter of raising your vibration and poof a smile comes on your face with laughter bubbling up from inside. One wonders if that godness that dwells within us all isn’t eager to burst through into our daily lives now. Big smile at that thought.
And the animals … omg! Spectacular. Sentiently more conscious than ever before. Perhaps they have an ability to let that inner godness burst free more easily than humans.

All that to say that while this might be a really weird year so far, in my books it’s truly an awesome one. Here’s to more great wonders to come.

About the Author:

Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

28 Jul 2023
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Super Powers … Everybody’s Got ‘Em!

I believe this with every fibre of my being and I live it, in myself and witnessing it in others, in every way I can. So what are some of these super powers that we’re seeing these days? I’ll try to encapsulate a few of the ones I’m aware of.

ENERGETIC FREQUENCY GENERATOR … There are a lot of new technologies that can generate higher frequencies for us these days. I actually prefer to do it for myself. We can generate higher frequencies from deep within ourselves (our source centre) as well as able to draw them in from the limitless energies of the universe in creation. We can use these frequencies to source high vibe vitality in ourselves and others. We’re also experimenting right now the possibility of using these self-generated frequencies to eliminate disease and activate the physical body’s miraculous capacities.

THE ABILITY TO REACH OUT TO COMMUNICATE WITH THOSE ON THE OTHER SIDE AND TO PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD … It’s the same skill, no matter who you’re talking with, those alive or those who’ve passed over. My way of doing this is to reach out to connect with their greater being and commune being to being. Others may do this in a variety of ways. We are all infinite fields of intelligence, mastery and power that are available in shared communion, especially for greater purpose insights.

ALCHEMICAL SOURCE CREATOR … An alchemist has the ability to take something as it is and unleash its miraculous potentiality and possibilities. Doing this as a source for Life to thrive makes it a deliciously wondrous thing to do for anyone or anything, unleashing their awesomeness that simply awaits an alchemical touch.

REALITY CREATOR … I’m not just talking about creating our own lovely reality, but about being able to source the creation of a brilliant reality for the world to thrive upon. We can do this in a variety of ways. By innovating consciousness (the beliefs, possibilities & frequencies by which we live our lives). By sourcing a new matrix of high vibrational frequency as the vibe we all get to live and create within. By uplifting all beings upon the planet, seeing them in their sourceness, calling their magnificence present and quickening their evolutionary callings into who and what we’re all meant to become next for this world to elevate and thrive.

SYNERGY SYNCHRONIZER … I had to stretch to find a name for this one. It’s one I’ve been playing with in the past year. It’s about aligning a person or circumstance to the perfect synchronization with all that they are meant to become and source in this world. As if all this great stuff is just waiting for us in a field of us somewhere and generally folks aren’t aligned with that level of synergistic opportunity. So I align them with their own field of brilliant flow and, ‘zing’, amazing things happen for them effortlessly and graciously.

As I said, these are just a few. There are soooo many. It’s an exciting time as we explore and unleash these in ourselves throughout the world.

About the Author:

26 Jul 2023
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The Chords of the Universe

My interest in the relations between music and mathematics started at an early age. My grandfather played his violin for me when I was about five years old, and I still remember it clearly. Later he explained to me various topics in his physics book, from which he himself had studied when he was young. In the chapter on sound there was a musical staff with the note A, and next to it the number 440, the frequency of that note. That image must have engraved itself on my mind – my first glimpse into the role that numbers play in music. While my grandfather’s violin is no more with us, his tuning fork did survive; although rusted, it still faithfully vibrates at 440 cycles per second. I recently gave it to my percussionist grandson. I hope he will one day pass it on to his grandchildren.

But it is not enough just to study music: one must play it. I started my musical journey playing a recorder. There are numerous Baroque-era works for this simple instrument, but for an appreciation of classical music (‘classical’ here meaning the era of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, roughly 1750 to 1830), a recorder just won’t do, so I took up the clarinet. This instrument was Mozart’s favourite wind instrument, and he wrote for it – or rather for his friend, the clarinetist Anton Stadler – some of his most sublime music. The clarinet has the unusual feature that when you open the thumb hole on the back of the instrument, the sound goes up not by an octave, as with most woodwinds, but by a twelfth – an octave and a fifth. This greatly intrigued me and made me dwell into the acoustics of wind instruments. I was fascinated – and still am – by the fact that a column of air can vibrate and produce a musical sound just like a violin string, even though the vibrations are totally invisible: you can hear them, but you cannot see them.

Music and mathematics have always been intimately intertwined. Anyone who has ever played a musical instrument is aware of the presence of mathematics on every page of the score – from the time signature that sets a piece’s rhythm, to the metronome number that determines the speed at which the piece should be played; and, of course, the very act of playing music requires us to count 1, 2, 3… and arrange these numbers into groups, called bars or measures. So it comes as no surprise that mathematics has had a significant influence on music. Much less known is that the influence extends both ways.

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, active during the 6th century BCE, might have been the first to uncover a quantitative relation between music and mathematics. Experimenting with taut strings, he found that shortening the effective length of a string to one-half its original length raises the pitch of its sound by an agreeable interval, an octave. Other ratios of string lengths produce smaller intervals: 2:3 corresponds to the musical interval of a fifth (so called because it is the fifth note up the scale from the base note); 3:4 corresponded to a fourth; and so on. Pythagoras also discovered that multiplying two ratios is equivalent to adding their intervals: (2:3) x (3:4) = 1:2, so a fifth plus a fourth equals an octave. In doing so, he unknowingly came up with the first logarithmic law in history.

The octave, the fifth and the fourth produced pleasing combinations of tones, or consonants, whereas more complicated ratios, such as 9:8 or 15:16, led to dissonances. This revelation made a deep impression on the Pythagoreans, prompting their belief that everything in the Universe – from the laws of musical harmony to the motion of the Sun, Moon and the five planets – was governed by simple ratios of whole numbers. Number rules the Universe was the Pythagorean motto. It would dominate scientific thought for the next two millennia.

In Greek tradition, music ranked equal in status to arithmetic, geometry and spherics (astronomy), which together comprised the quadrivium, the core curriculum of four disciplines that a learned person was expected to master. We should note, however, that the word ‘arithmetic’ had a different meaning to the Pythagoreans than it has today: it meant number theory, the study of the properties of integers, rather than the practical skills needed to compute with numbers. Likewise, Pythagoreans regarded the music component of the quadrivium as referring to music theory – the study of harmony – rather than the practice of playing music. This was typical of the aloof attitude of the Pythagoreans to all things practical. Theirs was a perfect universe, governed by notions of beauty, symmetry and harmony, but removed from mundane considerations. It might have been one reason why they kept all their discussions secret, fearing that they would be ridiculed by their fellow citizens, the vast majority of whom had to toil daily to eke out a living.

Though no Pythagorean writings survive – if they left any at all (everything we know about them comes from much later writers) – the Pythagorean legacy lasted well over 2,000 years. Number rules the Universe became a rallying motto to generations of scientists and philosophers, who sought to explain the mysteries of the cosmos on the basis of musical ratios or simple, elegant geometric figures. The planets, for example, had to move around the Earth in perfect circular orbits; it was inconceivable to the Greeks that any shape other than the perfectly symmetric circle could rule. It was all part of their grand view of a Universe ruled by beauty and harmony – their musica universalis, or music of the spheres.

Among the last Pythagoreans was the eminent German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), considered one of the fathers of modern astronomy. At once a devout mystic and an ardent believer in Copernicus’s heliocentric system, Kepler spent more than half his life trying to derive the laws of planetary motion from those of musical harmony. He believed that each planet, in its motion around the Sun, plays a melody that our ears are unable to hear, being below the range of audible frequencies (not to mention that it was produced in the vacuum of space, where sound cannot propagate). He even assigned each planet a celestial tune and wrote it down on the musical staff – resurrecting the celebrated musica universalis. It was only after decades of following this blind path that Kepler finally abandoned the Greek circular orbits and replaced them with ellipses.

Every periodic function can be written as an infinite sum of pure sine waves

Half a century after Kepler, Isaac Newton formulated his universal law of gravitation, thereby providing a rational, mathematical explanation for the planetary orbits, and adding the parabola and hyperbola to the possible orbits of the celestial bodies. But he too was obsessed with musical ratios, devising a ‘palindromic scale’ in which the intervals were the same whether you went up or down: 9:8, 16:15, 10:9, 9:8, 10:9, 16:15, 9:8. He compared it to the seven rainbow colours of the spectrum.

The newly invented differential and integral calculus, developed independently by Newton and G W Leibniz in the decade 1666-1676, made it finally possible to put the relations between numerical ratios and musical harmony on a firm mathematical basis. One of the outstanding problems that the calculus was able to tackle was to find the exact shape of a vibrating string and the nature of the sound it produces. Was it the sum of many – perhaps infinitely many – sine waves or pure tones, each with its own frequency and amplitude? Or was it a combination of waves propagating back and forth along the string’s length? In what became known as the ‘Great String Debate’, four of Europe’s foremost mathematicians – Daniel Bernoulli, Leonhard Euler, Jean le Rond D’Alembert and Joseph Louis Lagrange – argued passionately over this issue, and laid the foundation of post-calculus analysis along the way.

But the definitive solution to the string problem had to wait another half-century, when the eminent French mathematical physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) showed that every periodic function, subject to certain restrictions, can be written as an infinite sum of pure sine waves, whose frequencies are integral multiples of the fundamental, lowest frequency of the function. These individual sine waves are known as overtones or harmonics; they are the building blocks of all sound, and they give each sound its characteristic tone colour, or timbre – the quality that distinguished the sound of a violin from that of a clarinet, even when they play the same note.

As my musical interests expanded, I gradually ventured beyond the Baroque-Classical-Romantic period (roughly 1600 to 1900), and turned to modern music. In the 1960s there was still much talk about Arnold Schoenberg and his atonal or serial music. He devised it in the early 1900s, convinced that it should replace a sacred cornerstone of classical music: the principle of tonality. Tonality required that a piece of music should centre around a given key, called the tonic, such as C major or G minor. Granted, as the piece developed, it could stray from its designated key to related or even remote keys, but ultimately it would return to its home key, the tonic. The key thus served as a musical frame of reference, in which every note had a specific relation to the tonic; for example, in the key of C major, the note G (a fifth above C) was the ‘dominant’ note, while the note F below C was the ‘subdominant’.

But in the second half of the 19th century, composers gradually began to deviate from a strict adherence to the principle of tonality, making it difficult to sense where the music stood in relation to the tonic. Schoenberg, believing that tonality had run its course, was determined to supplant it with the series, or tone row. In a series, each of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale of semitones appears exactly once; a note could be repeated only after the series had been completed. This gave a composer a staggering number of combinations to choose from: 1 x 2 x 3 x … x 12 = 479,001,600, to be exact (not counting shifts by octaves, which Schoenberg allowed). In serial music, complete democracy ruled: no single note held any preferred status over the others. Every note was related only to its immediate predecessor in the series; gone were the roles that different notes had played in relation to the tonic. At its heart it was a mathematical system, and Schoenberg was determined to impose it on music.

As a mathematician, I see a striking similarity between Schoenberg’s serial music and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, as though a parallel dismantling of the canonical structures of music and physics were happening simultaneously. In 1905, Einstein gave the ether its coup de grâce: there is no ether, no single universal frame of reference at absolute rest; rather, every observer has his or her own reference system, related only to its infinitesimally close neighbouring system in spacetime. One cannot fail to note the similarity to Schoenberg’s atonal music, in which each note is related only to its immediate predecessor in the series. You might call it relativistic music.

Schoenberg worked on the design of a musical typewriter; Einstein invented a refrigerator

Schoenberg and Einstein were almost exact contemporaries, born within five years of each other to middle-class Jewish families. Their mothers, both named Pauline, were steeped in classical music, so the two youngsters were raised in music-loving homes. They started their careers as low-level employees – Schoenberg as a bank clerk in Vienna, Einstein as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. At a young age, both turned their backs on traditional Judaism, only to return to it late in life, having been deeply affected by the rise of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust that followed. Both men were essentially self-taught: Schoenberg never got a formal musical education, while Einstein (though he graduated from the University of Zurich) got his education by studying the great physics treatises of the 19th century on his own.

Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, both men emigrated to the United States. Schoenberg immediately got rid of the German umlaut of his original name, Schönberg, while Einstein had to get used to the American pronunciation of his name (pronounced ‘Einshtein’ in German). Both passionately pursued their hobbies – Schoenberg as a painter and avid tennis player, Einstein playing his iconic violin and enjoying an outing on his little sailboat. They also liked to tinker with gadgets: Schoenberg worked on the design of a musical typewriter, while Einstein, with his fellow physicist Leo Szilard, invented and patented a refrigerator.

Following the Nazi dismissal of all Jewish professors from German universities, both men worked tirelessly to help displaced academics find jobs in their countries of refuge. Neither Schoenberg nor Einstein ever set foot on European soil again (although Schoenberg’s remains were buried in his native Vienna), and they died within the same time-span that separated them at birth, in their 76th year.

The revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Schoenberg came against the backdrop of groundbreaking changes in other fields, all happening as the 19th century turned into the 20th. Gustav Mahler premiered his First Symphony, Titan (1889), conducted by the composer himself. Sigmund Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Pablo Picasso entered his ‘Blue Period’ (1901-1904), and Max Planck introduced into physics a new concept that would soon revolutionise all of science: the quantum of energy. If all that weren’t enough, David Hilbert, Germany’s foremost mathematician at the turn of the century, challenged the Second International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Paris in 1900, with a list of 23 unsolved problems whose solutions he regarded as of utmost importance to the future growth of mathematics – as indeed they would prove to be.

Whether these developments had any effect on Einstein’s and Schoenberg’s work is difficult to say, but it is revealing that several of the actors in this new world were actively involved with music: Einstein’s violin immediately comes to mind; Planck was an accomplished pianist; and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg seriously considered pursuing a career in music before turning to quantum mechanics.

In his quest to unify music and mathematics under a single universal umbrella, perhaps Pythagoras was right after all.

Original article here

14 Jul 2023
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The 8 Types of Boundaries We Should All Be Setting

A friend overstepping, a family member oversharing or a work colleague who you’re fed up with talking to you like crap. It may feel like these are just the occasional, yet inevitable, less-than-ideal parts of life, but really there’s an answer to minimising them all: better boundaries.

We all have boundaries, but many of us struggle to express them, particularly in tense situations where we want to avoid conflict as much as possible. However, it’s true that, like a muscle, the more you practice setting boundaries, the stronger you feel doing so.

Why are boundaries so important?

In an Instagram post, Nawal Mustafa, aka The Brain Coach, set out the importance of clear, firm and supportive boundaries in every aspect of our lives. “Boundaries are a way for us to honour our needs, set realistic expectations, and teach others how to treat us,” she explains. “They are a form of self-care and self-love that allow us to protect our energy and psychological health.”

Physical boundaries

Mustafa explains that this includes who is allowed in your personal space, who can touch you and how close someone can get to you, as well as what you choose to put into your body. Subtle violations of this boundary might look like pressure to drink alcohol when you’ve said you don’t want to (“Go one, one won’t hurt”) to unsolicited comments on your appearance (“You’ve lost weight since I last saw you!”).

Even in situations where these breaches are more annoying than damaging, remember that you are always within your right to ask someone to stop.

Emotional boundaries

Some of the hardest to maintain, emotional boundaries can look like not taking on other people’s emotional burdens (aka trauma dumping) and not engaging in triggering topics.

Especially in close relationships like with family and friends, it can be awkward and difficult to express your need for some distance. Mustafa suggests helpful phrases like “I want to support you but I have too much on my plate right now” and “I don’t have the emotional capacity to talk about politics” as ways you can kindly but firmly reclaim your emotional space.

Communication boundaries

These can often be most apparent in the workplace, where you may have to raise issues with how someone is speaking to you, as well as what you yourself can and cannot say. However, they also come into play in other areas of our lives, such as wanting to maintain privacy.

Being clear on what you deem acceptable is the best route to success, Mustafa indicates. If you’re not ready to talk about something, dislike the tone you’re being spoken to in or feel demeaned by name-calling or being dismissed, be explicit about your barriers.

While you can’t guarantee they will react in kind, you’ll know that you’ve done everything you can to protect your wellbeing.

Financial boundaries

Money has long been taboo, particularly with family and friends, but amid a cost of living crisis and rising inflation, now is also the time when we’re feeling the most stretched and need to put limits in place.

Whether you’ve been invited somewhere that’s too expensive, need to ask a friend to pay you back or want to politely decline loaning someone money, try not to let any feelings of guilt or embarrassment overpower you.

The reality is that every person has different spending priorities, salaries and financial boundaries, so it’s time we all stopped being so awkward about communicating them.

Mental boundaries

We often forget how important it is to set boundaries with ourselves, too. Instead of a punishment or indication that we’ve done something wrong, it helps to see personal boundaries as practice in self-trust and confidence.

Mustafa shares that important mental boundaries include allowing ourselves to have personal thoughts, beliefs and opinions that differ from others, and being OK with others not agreeing with us.

If you have people-pleasing tendencies, these may be hard to maintain, but the mantra: “It’s OK if you don’t agree with me” is a good one to keep in mind.

Time boundaries

If you’re the kind of person that gets sucked in helping out a friend before realising you’ve no time left to work on yourself, take note. Mustafa explains that we should also monitor how much time we choose to spend with others, as well as how others should respect our time.

A family member that’s always late? Tell them. A friend that will call and call and call until you pick up? Let them know that you can chat, but only for 15 minutes.

The same goes for rejecting invitations. Don’t feel pressured to spend your time somewhere you don’t want or need to be.

Energy boundaries

Similarly, continually putting the wants and needs of others before our own can be seriously draining, leading us to emotional exhaustion.

While “protect your energy” might sound like just another therapy slogan, it’s actually a valuable lesson in how the people you surround yourself with can impact your mood.

If a family member, friend or colleague is going beyond needy and veering into enmeshed relationship territory, it may be time to set some firmer boundaries.

Relationship boundaries

Encompassing all of the previous elements, relationship boundaries relate to how people can treat us, how they behave around us and what they can expect from us.

“Boundaries can be applied in many different aspects of life, such as our time, our emotions, our physical space, and our mental energy,” adds Mustafa.

“Setting boundaries is not easy to do, especially if you have lived most of your life in an environment where we don’t see other people setting or respecting boundaries. It may feel very uncomfortable at first, but with time, it will get easier and you will feel more confident and at peace.”

Original article here

05 Jul 2023
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Breakthrough Predictions for our Imminent Future

I want to make some ‘predictions’ for what’s coming on the horizon of human & world consciousness. It’s kind of hard to call them predictions as I’m not looking into the future and telling you what I’m seeing. I’m co-sourcing, with a good number of other quantum maestros, breakthroughs in consciousness that are starting to appear in the world now. So, having said all that, here goes….

A MASSIVE BREAKTHROUGH IN INTELLIGENCE IS COMING IMMINENTLY. The first part of that is what I call quantum intelligence … the ability to understand and witness the invisible forces of life, like genius ideas, energy, life force, the miraculous and more. The second part of it is what I call collective intelligence … we are joining our human consciousness to that of other species, nature & the universe and are about to know everything that all facets of life know, past, present and, who knows, maybe future too.

WE ARE ENTERING THE SYMBIOCENE ERA … a new geological era characterised by harmonious actions between humans and all other living beings. We’re already seeing an increasingly wondrous consciousness emerging in the animals of the world. Cross species love. Animals in distress calling on humans to help. The beauty and wonder of species being brilliantly photographed and shared across the world to help us come into a brilliant relationship with Nature, Oceans, Earth and Animals in a synergistic way.

WE ARE BECOMING SOURCE CREATORS OF LIFE. We are superseding the old human consciousness with its restrictions and limits. We are embodying our greater beings, living into greater purpose, discovering the alchemical power of the quantum field and thriving in an ever-increasing Life Source powered vitality.

WE ARE VERY SHORTLY GOING TO DISCOVER THE SECRET TO WHAT LOOKS LIKE MIRACULOUS WELL BEING. In other words we may be able to knit our own bones if broken, super vitalise ourselves (that’s already happening), be in miraculous relationship with disease and perhaps eliminate it all together from the human and Earth condition. Some people I know are already well into living this.

OK, LET’S TALK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE. Nature is truly truly miraculous in ways I’m not sure we even fully understand yet. And yes humans need to get on board with respecting the beauty and plenty of this Earth. As we develop an alchemical love relationship with Nature and Earth more and more, we will discover that we are collaborative co-creators with it all and that Source Consciousness lives within us and Nature and the Universe that will have us turn what looks like imminent disaster into the miraculous emergence of new possibilities of life on Earth.

I’m sure there’s loads more cooking on the horizon of what I love to call Fabulous Futures, but that’ll do for now. Here’s to a brilliant, amazing and fabulous future for all life everywhere to thrive like never before.

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15 Jun 2023
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Make Peace with Your Unlived Life

Tina was at a crossroads. Her daughter had recently left for college, and her husband had his own pursuits. And although she’d once enjoyed banking, she now bore little interest in her work. For some time, she had been asking herself whether she should quit. But what would her colleagues and bosses think of her?

This stream of consciousness carried Tina to deeper, more revealing questions. What if all her choices had been in response to what others expected? She had always been her parents’ golden child – a star student who married a man they approved of and went into the same industry her father and grandfather had pursued. Now, at the age of 45, she was wondering if these choices were really pseudo-choices, given the pressure her family had put on her? And even more frightening: what other choices did she have at this point in her life?

Tina increasingly began to question herself. Where was all of this coming from? Was there a hidden part of herself she didn’t understand – or maybe even know about? She remembered how as an adolescent she had always been preoccupied with: “What do people want me to do? And who do they want me to be?” Perhaps, the time had come to revisit these questions—to take an honest look at what she really wanted to do, not what others expected her to do. But what did the “True Tina” really want?

The idea of a “true self” and a “false” or “shadow” self has long preoccupied psychologists. For example, Carl Jung introduced the notion of the shadow side of our personality. He viewed “the shadow” as our unknown, dark side—made up of the primitive, negative, socially depreciated human emotions such as sexuality, striving for power, selfishness, greed, envy, jealousy, and anger. But although the shadow personifies everything that we fear, and therefore refuse to acknowledge, it remains a part of us. Jung believed that unless we come to terms with our shadow side, we are condemned to become its unwitting victim.

Similarly, Erik Erikson, another famous psychologist, introduced the idea of the identity crisis. Erikson, like Jung, suggests that identity formation has its dark and negative side. There are parts of us that are attractive but disturbing and therefore tend to be submerged. In the process of becoming an adult, we not only internalize what’s viewed as acceptable, we also internalize (be it only subliminally) parental and societal attitudes about undesirable qualities and characteristics. For many of us, these “undesirables” turn into “forbidden fruits”–things we are attracted to To feel more authentic, we may have to integrate these forbidden fruits into our sense of identity.

Donald Winnicott elaborated on the idea of the “true self” and “false self.” He explained that beginning in infancy, all of us, in response to perceived threats to our well-being, develop a defensive structure that may evolve into a “false self.” He suggests that if our basic needs are not acknowledged—not mirrored back to us by our parents—we may presume they are unimportant. Complying with our parents’ desires, we may repress our own desires, not actualizing what we really like to do. We may believe that non-compliance endangers our role in the family. In addition, we may internalize our parents’ dreams of self-glorification through our achievements. But this acquiescence to the wishes of others is an emotional lie. It comes at the price of suppressing our own needs. In our efforts to please others, we hide and deny our “true self,” which in turn leads to self-estrangement. If that’s the case, the “false self” will get the upper hand. It becomes a defensive armor to keep the “true self” at bay and hidden.

If there is too great a discrepancy between the “true” and the “false” self, it will make for a vulnerable sense of identity. And if we are unable to acquire a stable sense of identity—we may end up one day unraveling as Tina did. After a lifetime of complying to others’ expectations, Tina was experiencing what Erikson would call a delayed identity crisis. At a certain point in her life, it became difficult for her keep up the lie.

What Tina’s case also illustrates is that the journey of identity exploration that often begins at adolescence doesn’t stop there. In her case, the tension between “false self” and “true self” came to a head, contributing to a renewal of the confusion she had experienced at an earlier stage of life. Not living a full, complete life—not integrating these other parts of herself, call it her shadow or negative identity—turned out to be extremely draining, contributing to life choices that didn’t accommodate her real needs. Ignoring her shadow side was taking an enormous amount of energy, depleting her of her inner creativity, and contributed to various stress symptoms, including depressive reactions.

But the “return of the repressed” should not be looked at as a purely negative experience. Although a person might view these parts of herself as a representation of her unlived life, a delayed identity crisis can also contain the seeds of psychological renewal—the motivation to enter new directions in life. Romancing your shadow—accepting these unlived parts of yourself and learning to read the messages that are contained in it—can lead to a deeper level of consciousness, as well as spark your imagination. When a person is ready to accept these parts—and not try to push them aside — she or he may discover all sorts of creative, positive ideas begging for fulfillment. These buried desires will help them to reflect not only on the question of “Who am I?” but also “Who do I want to be?” This can turn a negative spiral of self-pity turned into the opposite.

That’s what happened in Tina’s case. She came to grips with her previous life experiences. She captured her dreams in a journal, and wrote about the associations that came to her. She wrote letters to her past and future self. She told her husband about her dreams and the emotions they evoked. Together, they talked about her feelings of frustration and anxiety. Her husband began sharing some of his dreams with her, as well. Their conversations eventually took a more concrete turn, as they discussed their future together, including their careers, finances, and upcoming life choices. Her self-exploration gave her greater awareness both of her inner theatre and what her life journey had been up till this moment.

Reassured and invigorated, Tina took a hard look at her work responsibilities and saw ways that she could make changes that would benefit the bank as well as herself. She even got into an argument with her father at the dinner table about politics, and to her great surprise, he seemed to respect her opinion.

Most of us find this difficult, confusing work, as Tina did. But learning to sort out our inner demons can be liberating. Questioning, reflecting, and having meaningful conversations with important people in our lives can help us come to terms with our shadow sides and create the rapprochement needed between our “false” and “true” selves. To do this, we have to figure out how to accept what we learn about ourselves without judgment. And to do that, we must approach self-knowledge with curiosity, as if it were a fascinating adventure – an exploration of the riches contained in this previously unknown world inside the self.

Original article here

06 May 2023
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Tips for Joyful Living

Every once in a while I wonder how my life can get any better. And then it does! Over and over again. How is it that that can happen without much effort on my part to make it so? Here are my #lovinglife suggestions for joy seekers everywhere.

1. Beam radiant vibes to the world and laugh loads, all while practicing doing things you love.

2. Seek to be moved by life. Look for awe-filled moments and be thrilled by the tiny tears that come with epiphanous insights.

3. Express yourself with panache. Let your uniqueness fill the parade square of your life.

4. Surround yourself with quirky, rebel friends up to great things in life … and shower appreciation and love upon them.

5. Create moments that are special and that brighten the world with happiness and joy.

6. Be up to GREAT things and have a ball making them happen.

7. Give no credence to naysayers. Become a Joy-bringer for the world and shower naysayers with love.

8. Decide what you’re FOR and then be for it in every delightful way you can.

9. And finally put yourself in what I like to call ‘universal super flow’, allowing the powers and forces of Life to surge through you to elevate this world.

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