“If you practice yoga every day with perseverance, you will be able to face the turmoil of life with steadiness and maturity.” ~BKS Iyengar
“Singapore is doing a good job. Income taxes are low, incentives to save are high, savings rates are high, and they do their best to attract capital and labor. There is a bit of a backlash now, with some of the problems immigrants are bringing here, but that has happened to all nations at some point in history. Overall, Singapore is doing well. Singapore is becoming the new Switzerland as its sits right next to China and has been helped by problems with offshore havens like Switzerland and Cyprus. It will be the fastest growing money center in the next 10 years.”
-Jim Rogers
Jim Rogers was a farm hand from Demopolis, Alabama. He went on to study history at Yale and PPE (political Science, philosophy, and economics) at Oxford. Rogers then moved to New York and co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros.
After a successful career, he realized that making money was not his main goal. He retired at age 37 to take a trip around the world on his motorcycle. He wrote about the trip in his book Investment Biker (a good read).
Today, after traveling basically everywhere (3 trips around the world, the last one in 2000 lasted over 3 years) and understanding many of the worlds cultures and markets, he is one of the most trusted minds in investing.
I posted this quote on Lucid Practice to ponder the question, “Where is the best place in the world to live?” Jim was from the US but realized that incentives to live here, especially economic incentives, are low.
Globalization and The Global Mind (the internet) has made living anywhere in the world possible for anyone. Jim moved his family to Singapore because as he says, “If you were smart in 1807 you moved to London, if you were smart in 1907 you moved to New York City, and if you are smart in 2007 you move to Asia.”
So my questions to you are: Where is the best place to live right now? Culturally? Economically? What country has the nicest people? Smartest people? People most in touch with Faith?
Ah, the good old days, when people used to talk to each other in public rather than looking at their phones or listening to headphones all the time. Except that’s not been the case for awhile as XKCD demonstrates with a series of quotes from various publications dating back to 1871. This is from William Smith’s Morley: Ancient and Modern published in 1886.
With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion… the dreamy quiet old days are over… for men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel… leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them… the hurry and bustle of modern life… lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day’s work done, took their ease…
In 1946, a young Stanley Kubrick worked as a photographer for Look magazine and took this shot of NYC subway commuters reading newspapers.
The more things change….
http://kottke.org/13/06/the-quickening-pace-of-modern-life
What are the key benefits of cold showers? Cold showers are incredible. By taking cold showers, you can improve your physical and mental health listed below.
Updated 8/9/2015
1. Increased Tolerance to Stress
Exposure to cold water gives your body a higher tolerance to stress by purposely exposing it to stress. If you can withstand a cold shower, the rest of your day’s challenges will seem like a breeze.
2. Increase in Lucidity
A cold shower turns a mundane task into a lucid practice. You begin to feel the sensation of each water drop hitting your skin. You notice an increase in gratitude for the fact that your internal organs are able to rapidly pump blood to regulate your body temperature.
3. Increased Blood Circulation
Exposure to cold water causes your blood flow to be redirected to your vital organs, it forces your body to circulate your blood more efficiently & effectively.
4. Healthy Skin and Hair
Cold water helps close pores. This keeps your skin looking smooth & healthy while not drying your skin out as hot water showers can sometimes do. The cold water will help keep your hair look shiny and keep your skin soft, rather than itchy, ashy and dried out. Just one of the many benefits of cold showers 😉
5. Immune System Supercharge
Cold water immersion has been shown to increase metabolic rates due to shivering and activating the immune system.
In Siberia, in a ritual called Rodnichok or cold springs, parents dump a cold bucket of water over the heads of children. They do this year round for ages 2-6. Again, this is in Siberia. Those kids are tough. It’s shown that about 95% of the kids who participate are healthy through the flu season as opposed to 75% of the those children in groups that don’t participate.
6. Increased Testosterone
In a world where men are increasingly willing to pop prescription pills to solve low-testtosterone problems, the solution is actually in their own bathroom. A 1993 study done by the Thrombosis Research Institute in England showed cold baths to be correlated with high testosterone levels.
7. Anti-Depressant Properties
Due to the high density of cold receptors in the skin, a cold shower is expected to send an overwhelming amount of electrical impulses from peripheral nerve endings to the brain, which could result in an anti-depressive effect. Also, cold showers have been linked to an increase in , a protein that is helpful in regulating glucose levels and breaking down fatty acids.
Two bonus positive side effects:
1. Improved Lymphatic System Functioning
The lymphatic system takes waste away from your cells to help fight disease. It’s separate from your blood vessels, but is moved around by the contraction of your muscles. Cold showers cause your entire body to contract and forces the lymphatic system to push the lymph fluids throughout your body rather than pooling in one part of your body as it would if it were compromised or inefficient.
2. Better Sleep
Doctors recommend insomniacs take cold showers to help aid sleep. It might be because the feeling you get after the initial shock of the shower helps your body calm down & relax.
It may seem daunting at first…. I promise it gets easier each time so take the plunge!! It might just change your life. 😉
Some of the tips above can be contributed to: http://impossiblehq.com/cold-shower-health-benefits
Cheers to my friend @PhilFeelsGood who first introduced me to cold showers!
Outstanding pictorial & textual guide to beginning & advanced asana backbends:
http://www.mryoga.com/backbends
Benefits of backbends: Improves spinal flexibility and strength creating better posture, stimulates the central nervous system, abdominal organs and aids in digestion, tones the adrenal glands, kidney, pancreas and liver thyroid gland, abdominal organs and lungs, stretches the chest, lungs, upper and lower back, throat, shoulders, hip flexors, can relieve menstrual cramping and menopause for women, and calms the mind.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672708/6-dioramas-depict-ai-weiweis-life-in-captivity#1
“THE ARTIST AND ACTIVIST CREATES SOME OF HIS MOST POLITICAL WORK YET.”
A great visual guide to the practice of yoga
If you are God then why does this all matter?
This interview gets great around 3:00….