Want to be calmer, healthier and happier? Well, there’s a simple way that costs nothing, and all you have to do is… nothing. Just 20 minutes of meditating – no incense or lotus positions involved – holds the solution to the problems of modern life, according to a new illustrated guide. Here, its author MATTHEW JOHNSTONE presents his charming 16-step guide…
Click to check out Matthew Johnstone’s meditation guide.
Image via Daily Mail
Ashley Bickerton (born 1959 in Barbados) is a contemporary artist, presently living in Bali. A mixed-media artist, Bickerton often combines photographic and painterly elements with industrial and found object assemblages. He is associated with the early 1980s art movement Neo-Geo, which includes artists such as Jeff Koons and Peter Halley. (Wiki)
Alastair Humphreys’ talk was called Why Not? – Motivation & 5 to 9 Thinking. He describes how thinking “Why not?” led him around the world and subsequently built a career doing the things he loves most: tackling expeditions in the world’s wild places and writing books about them.
Design Boom put together a cool list of aesthetically pleasing libraries made in 2013.
Check it out — here.
The image above is of the Datong library by Preston Scott Cohen
Jordan from Refine The Mind dug up a brief collection of poignant quotes on approaching life a bit more playfully.
From Fyodor Dostoevsky:
“The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.”
Joseph Campbell in the book Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
:
“As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.”
Alan Watts’ ever-charming perspective:
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the Gods made for fun.”
Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Breakfast of Champions
:
“I can’t tell if you’re serious or not,’ said the driver.
‘I won’t know myself until I find out if life is serious or not,’ said Trout. ‘It’s dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s serious, too.”
A sentiment of Charles Bukowski’s:
“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.”
Ray Bradbury in Twice 22: The Golden Apples of the Sun and a Medicine for Melancholy
:
“I always figured we were born to fly, one way or other, so I couldn’t stand most men shuffling along with all the iron of the earth in their blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds.”
The illustrious Friedrich Nietzsche weighs in:
“The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity; and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.”
From the immortal William Shakespeare:
“Frame your mind to mirth and merriment
which bars a thousand harms
and lengthens life.”Finally, Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, as quoted in Dr. Seuss: American Icon
:
“Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It’s more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.”
Via Refine The Mind
Here are twenty powerful secrets that will help you form meaningful relationships with people:
- When two people meet, the prize always goes to the one with the most self-insight. He will be calmer, more confident, more at ease with the other.
- Never permit the behavior of other people to tell you how you feel.
- Pay little attention to what people say or do. Instead, try to see their innermost motive for speaking and acting.
- Any friendship requiring the submission of your original nature and dignity to another person is all wrong.
- Mystically speaking, there is no difference between you and another person. This is why we cannot hurt another without hurting ourselves, nor help another without helping ourselves.
- When we are free of all unnecessary desires toward other people, we can never be deceived or hurt.
- You take a giant step toward psychological maturity when you refuse to angrily defend yourself against unjust slander. For one thing, resistance disturbs your own peace of mind.
- You understand others to the exact degree that you really understand yourself. Work for more self-knowledge.
- Do not be afraid to fully experience everything that happens to you in your human relations, especially the pains and disappointments. Do this and everything becomes clear at last.
- The individual who really knows what it means to love has no anxiety when his love is unseen or rejected.
- If you painfully lose a valuable friend, do not rush out at once for a replacement. Such action prevents you from examining your heartache and breaking free of it.
- Do not be afraid to be a nobody in a social world. This is a deeper and richer truth than appears on the surface.
- Every unpleasant experience with another person is an opportunity to see people as they are, not as we mistakenly idealize them. The more unpleasant the other person is, the more he can teach you.
- You can be so wonderfully free from a sense of injury and injustice that you are surprised when you hear others complain of them.
- We cannot recognize a virtue in another person that we do not possess in ourselves. It takes a truly loving and patient person to recognize those virtues in another.
- Do not mistake desire for love. Desire leaves home in a frantic search for one gratification after another. Love is at home with itself.
- There are parts of you that want the loving life and parts that do not. Place yourself on the side of the positive forces: do all you can to aid and encourage them.
- You must stop living timidly from fixed fears of what others will think of you and of what you will think of yourself.
- Do not contrive to be a loving person: work to be a real person. Being real is being loving.
- The greatest love you could ever offer to another is to so transform you inner life that others are attracted to your genuine example of goodness.
Source: “Twenty Special Secrets,” from Mystic Path to Cosmic Power, by Vernon Howard
Online Source: The Bounded Spirit
We have talked a lot about Elon, TESLA, Solar City and more here on this blog. Check out the 35 reasons why Business Insider thinks he has been a great story — Here.
Image via Forbes
Eddie Stern has posted a transcript of a very important lecture given by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois on the mind/body connection, providing us with invaluable insight into Guruji’s thinking about the role of yoga in well-being. Here’s Eddie’s description of the context (from his Facebook page):
In 1977, Guruji was invited to give a presentation at a Yoga Conference that was organized by Swami Vishnu Devananda in Bangalore. The papers were all collected and published in a book called “Yoga and Science”, and the title of his presentation was “Yoga and Therapy”. I had looked for the book for many years, but to no avail. Then this past fall, almost miraculously, the son of Leslie Kaminoff – who I knew from my pre-yoga days – found the book in India, and Leslie gave it to me.
Click to read the transcript of Yoga and Therapy.
