Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness: Appreciation

Showing posts with label Appreciation. Show all posts

June 05, 2016

A History Of Rituals

Our societies have dropped ever more rituals from our calendars. The long history of rituals seems to be winding down.

That’s a great pity. If you like our films, take a look at our shop (we ship worldwide): http://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/m...

Watch more films on HISTORY:
http://bit.ly/TSOLhistory

Produced in collaboration with Mike Booth
http://www.youtube.com/somegreybloke

Great Minds: Leonardo da Vinci
Five Brilliant Mathematicians And Their Impact On The Modern World
London Exhibition Explores Truth Of Leonardo da Vinci’s Genius
10 Mathematical Equations That Changed The World
Mad Geniuses: 10 Odd Tales About Famous Scientists
A Royal Affair and the Age of Enlightenment.
Benjamin Franklin:11 Surprising Facts
Hedy Lamarr - Beauty And Brains in Abundance
Khalil Gibran: 25 Lessons That Can Totally Transform Your Life
What Was the Enlightenment?
The Memory of Mankind Archive: The Greatest Time Capsule Ever

February 17, 2016

Experience the Magic of Redwood National Park

Travel to Northern California's stunning Redwood National Park and see some of the tallest trees in the world. Production company More Than Just Parks showcases the diverse wildlife and landscapes found in this temperate rainforest in their short film, Redwood.

More Than Just Parks: https://www.morethanjustparks.com/

The Short Film Showcase spotlights exceptional short videos created by filmmakers from around the web and selected by National Geographic editors. We look for work that affirms National Geographic's mission of inspiring people to care about the planet. The filmmakers created the content presented, and the opinions expressed are their own, not those of the National Geographic Society.

Know of a great short film that should be part of our Showcase? Email SFS@ngs.org to submit a video for consideration. http://video.nationalgeographic.com/v...

#shortfilmshowcase @natgeo

With thanks to You Tube

January 16, 2016

KonMari: A Look At 'Decluttering Queen' Marie Kondo’s Tidy Mind

The younger you start,the easier it will be. The young man in the video appears to be single and still living at home.Being a female, and married with children will take quite an effort but it can still be done.

Marie Kondo may be the biggest Japanese export since miso soup, but her wild international popularity is mysterious and no one, least of all the superstar herself, is convincingly able to explain it.

Since the English-language publication of her first book, a guide to keeping things tidy, she has achieved the kind of sales usually associated with teenage wizards and middle-class mum-porn. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying has spent more than a year on The New York Times bestseller list, and achieved similar status in Russia, France and Brazil. Kondo has drawn crowds in New York and San Francisco, Paris, Warsaw and Milan. But at the core of her books are ideas that, to most of her foreign readers at least, can only come across as utterly bizarre.

“It’s when I explain that things have souls,” she says. “For Japanese people, that’s perfectly natural. In Japan, people feel that inanimate things are their equals. But people in Europe, for example, find it difficult to understand.”

Kondo’s books are not just about folding and packing and shelving and storing (although they include useful and original advice on all of these matters). They are about achieving an intimate personal relationship with the spirit immanent in your humblest possessions — and talking to them. “Dear old screwdriver,” begins a soliloquy in her new book.

“I may not use you much, but when I need you, why, you’re a genius. Thanks to you, I put this shelf together in no time. You saved my fingernails, too. I would have ruined them if I had used them to turn the screws. And what a design! Strong, vigorous and cool to the touch, with a modern air that makes you really stand out.”

This, it becomes clear, is a dimension beyond Prince Charles-style mumbling to your pot plants. True disciples of Kondo thank their earrings, salute their jackets and high-five their handbags. No household item is too mundane to be the object of empathy and indulgence. “Have you ever had the experience where you thought that what you were doing was a good thing but later learnt that it hurt someone?” she asks in her first book, with the raw anguish of personal experience. “This is somewhat similar to the way many of us treat our socks.”

Even to find a publisher for this sort of stuff might be regarded as a lucky break, but The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying has gone a great deal further than that. It has been published in 21 countries, from Romania to Thailand, with 17 more in the pipeline; Arabic and Lithuanian are the newest languages to be added to the list, alongside Hebrew, Bulgarian and Vietnamese. The KonMari method, as it is known in Japanese, is brilliant, singular and bonkers, and it has sold 4.8 million copies around the world.

Kondo’s name — often in the form of the hashtag #kondoed — has even entered the English language. Twitter users speak of kondoing their bedrooms, their email inboxes, even the excess apps on their iPhones.

I’d like to say that I knew Marie Kondo before she was famous, but that would be true only in a relative sense. The first time I met her, early last year, she was merely a bestseller in Japan, Germany and South Korea. I invited her to my Tokyo flat to perform an abbreviated version of the six-month-long, multi-session tidying consultations — a kind of psychotherapy for the home — that she has conducted over the years with hundreds of clients, and which served as the laboratory in which she developed her ideas.

Like all the best mental revolutions, it is disarmingly simple. Forget about finding the perfect drawers or cupboards. The first and most important step is simply to take your possessions, starting with clothes of the same type, tip them out on the floor, hold each one individually to the light and ask yourself, “Does this spark joy?” If joy is indeed kindled, the item must be retained, carefully assigned a place of storage, folded in the regulation Kondo style, and regularly and lavishly praised. Objects that fail to spark joy are to be thanked, stroked, apologised to and then ruthlessly consigned to the rubbish. The result, Kondo insists, is not only a tidier home, but a life enhanced.

Kondo’s clients report profound consequences from the simple act of having uncluttered their homes. Some have lost weight, or finally walked out of dead-end jobs. Some have found the conviction to get married; others the strength to divorce. “If you feel anxious all the time but are not sure why, try putting your things in order,” Kondo writes in her new book, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying.

I enjoyed my brief encounter with Kondo — the underwear drawer on which she worked her magic remains the most orderly part of my home. I have no interest in conventional self-help, but I completely saw the point of her distinctive method and her observation that external clutter can be a symptom of inner unhappiness. But neither I, nor anyone else, imagined that, barely a year later, she would be ranked alongside Angela Merkel, Pope Francis and Kim Jong-un in Time’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. And so I went to see Kondo again to try to work out who she is, and how on Earth all of this happened.

In Japan, people often become remoter and less interesting the more famous they become — and at first I feared this had happened to Kondo. Setting up our meeting required 39 emails, relayed from my office in Tokyo, through a publicist in London, an agent in New York, to a publisher in Tokyo — with the answers returning from Japan to Japan via the reverse route.

I had assumed that since she had not only been to my flat but run her hands over my underwear, this time I could expect to visit Kondo’s place and have a nose around the home of the world’s tidiest person — but this, it was firmly explained, was out of the question. Having negotiated these obstacles and found my way to her office, however, Kondo was just as I remembered — sweet, self-deprecating, unpompous and faintly mysterious.

The first thing that strikes you is how little of her there is. Even by local standards, she is elfin, almost childlike, in stature and build. She is 30 years old and, like many Japanese women, could pass for eight years younger. It is no surprise to find that she is neatly turned out, but there is a quality about her beyond mere tidiness, an air of deep restraint and conservatism.

This immaculate exterior is all the more remarkable for the other transformation, apart from international bestsellerdom, that has come over Kondo. After marrying last year, in July she gave birth to a baby girl, Satsuki. “It’s a drastic change,” she says, “because my life is not my own any more. Until I had a daughter, my life was devoted to the work of tidying. I was totally focused on my work. So this way of life is quite new. Now my happiness is her, and looking after her, and watching her grow up.”

Kondo’s husband, Takumi Kawahara, was her university boyfriend, and now serves as her manager and photographer. Not surprisingly, she says, he is an orderly fellow; indeed, this seems to have been a central part of his attraction. “After we married, when we moved in together, he brought only five cardboard boxes with him.” Five boxes: in the Kondo universe, such asceticism is as thrilling as a rippling six-pack or a powerful sports car.

“It was a surprise,” she says of her huge international sales. “My publisher warned me that it’s rare for a Japanese bestseller to become a bestseller overseas, particularly in America. But it’s difficult to say what has changed, really.” What, after all, is a woman whose life is dedicated to uncluttering to spend her riches on? A new home — a humble-sounding two-bedroom apartment in central Tokyo.

The beginnings of all this can be precisely pinpointed to an afternoon in 2001, when Kondo was 16. She grew up in a middle-class home, the second of three children. Her father is a salaryman, her mother a housewife, and an avid reader of women’s magazines. By the age of five, Marie was already poring over them for their housekeeping techniques. “As far as everything else went — cleaning, washing, sewing — I could do it,” she says. “The only thing I couldn’t do was tidying up.” The failure became an obsession. “At school, while other kids were playing dodgeball or skipping,” she wrote, “I’d slip away to arrange the bookshelves in our classroom, or check the contents of the mop cupboard … I had begun to see my things and even my house as an adversary that I had to beat.”

One day, without warning or consultation, she threw out one of her father’s suits and her mother’s handbag. Her defence — that they were never used — went unheard: Marie’s tidying activities were banned. “I thought that tidying up meant throwing things out — I saw it only in negative terms,” she says. “That was what led to my nervous breakdown. One day, I came home from school. There was no one else at home. I still had my uniform on. I was already looking for something I could get rid of. I walked into my room with the rubbish bag in my hand. And I looked at my room, and felt that I wanted to throw out everything in it. That was the climax of my stress, and at that moment I collapsed unconscious.”

Two hours passed before young Marie came round. “I stood up and in my mind came the words, ‘Look at things more carefully.’ I don’t know if it was an actual voice, or a feeling that came from myself. I believe it was the god of tidying.” It came to her that she had been looking at things the wrong way round — rather than seeking out unneeded objects to throw out, she should be identifying the things she loved and wanted to keep. “That was the moment when I had my inspiration,” she said. “That was when the KonMari method was born.”

I can’t be alone in suspecting that there must be more to this story. For a 16-year-old girl to feel irritable about clutter in her bedroom is one thing, but to fall unconscious suggests much deeper unhappiness. “I can say that when I collapsed I was unhappy,” she agrees. “I didn’t like anything I had — the clothes, the odds and ends in my room.” But was she unhappy in other ways? “I don’t remember clearly, but I didn’t feel unhappy in relationships, including my parents and friends. I just wanted to tidy up.” Surely there must have been something else going wrong in her life, apart from mess? “I’d say that I had lost the balance in myself, balance of any kind, because all I was interested in was tidying up. I didn’t like any of my things. I thought about them in a mean way. That’s why I collapsed.”

A period of anguish. A moment of spiritual crisis and breakdown.

Then rebirth, divine revelation and enlightenment. Even if this doesn’t make sense as a story about a teenager in her bedroom, it makes one thing clear — the KonMari method has as much to do with religion as it does with spring cleaning. As a young woman, Kondo served as an attendant “maiden” in a shrine dedicated to Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan.

Shinto has no scripture, no commandments, no code of ethics or system of philosophical speculation. Its deities are to be found in mountains, trees, rocks and man-made objects such as cooking stoves and individual grains of rice. Its rituals are concerned not with morality but with purification; the contrast between clean and unclean is as strong in Shinto as the dualism of right and wrong in other religions. Kondo’s white blouse, her love of cleansing hot springs, and her insistence on the souls of socks all derive from this source.

“Japan has many earthquakes,” Kondo says. “The earthquakes cause fires, and traditionally houses were all made of wood, which burnt so easily. In the past, many Japanese have had the experience of destruction in which they lost everything and had to rebuild from scratch. So I think that Japanese find it easier to get rid of things than Westerners do. They can accept that what they possess now will not be with them always, because that kind of thinking is part of their DNA.” Few of them will be aware of it, but the inhabitants of city lofts and suburban townhouses who excitedly kondo their closets are acting out a secular version of an ancient nature religion, rooted in thousands of years of catastrophic Japanese history.
[....]

By Richard Lloyd Parry

With Many thanks to The Australian
More on You Tube

November 04, 2015

Eating Mediterranean Foods Could Prolong A Healthy Brain For 5 Extra Years

This is something that most British celebrity chefs like James Martin, Rick Stein, Jamie Oliver and others have discovered for themselves, certainly the longevity that this diet seems to encourage.

All countries in the north and south of the Mediterranean have similarities.

Suits me, but I will pass on the octopus! Some ideas below:

People know they should eat healthy foods if they want to maintain their bodies into old age, but a lot of the time we’re likely to focus on the health of the major organs that occupy our torso.

However, a new study looking at the diets of elderly people says we can enjoy greater longevity if we eat foods that are good for our brain, and suggests that those who follow a Mediterranean-like diet – consisting of more fish and vegetables, along with less meat and dairy – may lose fewer brains cells due to ageing.

"These results are exciting, as they raise the possibility that people may potentially prevent brain shrinking and the effects of ageing on the brain simply by following a healthy diet,” said Yian Gu of Columbia University in the US.

Gu and her colleagues examined the diets of 674 people who were older than 80 years of age and did not have dementia. The participants completed questionnaires about the food they ate and had their brains scanned afterwards.

The researchers divided the participants into two separate groups depending on the content of their diet. One group contained people who followed Mediterranean diet principles in at least five food components – including greater amounts of healthy foods or less consumption of unhealthy foods. The other group contained those who did not eat a Mediterranean-like diet.

When the researchers compared the two sets of brain scans, they found that the people who followed a Mediterranean-style diet had a total brain volume that was 13.11 millilitres larger than those in the other group. Their grey matter volume was 5 ml larger, and white matter volume was 6.41 ml larger.

It might not sound like much, but in terms of brain longevity, Gu says the difference is significant. "The magnitude of the association with brain measures was relatively small, but when you consider that eating at least five of the recommended Mediterranean diet components has an association comparable to five years of ageing, that is substantial,” she said.

It’s important to note that the researchers aren’t claiming that the Mediterranean diet is responsible for the greater brain volume – just that there’s an association going on here that they still need to get the bottom of. In any case, it’s definitely food for thought. (Sorry.)

The findings are published in Neurology.
By Peter Dockrill

With many thanks to Science Alert

Some related posts:
Jamie Oliver: How Being A Special-needs Student Changed My Life
How Non-French Chefs Are Saving French Food
Britain Is A Nation Of Skilled Chefs But 1 in 10 Can't Cook, BBC Good Food Survey Finds
Manuka Honey - The Only Healthy Honey
Sri Lanka’s Sirilak Garden: History And Spices
A Japanese Company Is Building The World's First Autonomous Farm
Julia Child’s French Cooking Book Was A Trail Blazer

March 17, 2015

You Make A Difference!

Little random acts of kindness, gratitude and appreciation.

Yes, you can make a difference!

(Audio in English with subtitles in Chinese)

More about Og Mandino here.

Thanks to AW for this one!

February 23, 2015

Sometimes You Just Want To Say Thank You #TDThanksYou

More of this would be very nice. It has gone viral too!

From You Tube:

Love our Automated Thanking Machine? See what these people did in just 24 hours to #MakeTodayMatter: http://youtu.be/dP7OgLCc4vo

TD turns ATMs into Automated Thanking Machines to create some very special moments for customers across Canada.

A thank you can change someone's day. #TDThanksYou

Want to see more of the Automated Thanking Machine?

A closer look at a Blue Jays Super Fan – http://youtu.be/a0OnFBFY4og

Cooking with a Master Chef – http://youtu.be/FHJr8bCFEaQ

Parfois, on veut simplement dire merci – http://youtu.be/1FtDl5ClsS8

October 01, 2014

Khalil Gibran: 25 Lessons That Can Totally Transform Your Life

From Wiki:
Khalil Gibran (full Arabic name Gibran Khalil Gibran, sometimes spelled Kahlil;^[a] Arabic: جبران خليل جبران‎ / ALA-LC: Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān or Jibrān Khalīl Jibrān) (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) was a Lebanese artist, poet, and writer.
Born in the town of Bsharri in the north of modern-day Lebanon (then part of Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Empire), as a young man he immigrated with his family to the United States, where he studied art and began his literary career, writing in both English and Arabic.

In the Arab world, Gibran is regarded as a literary and political rebel. His romantic style was at the heart of a renaissance in modern Arabic literature, especially prose poetry, breaking away from the classical school. In Lebanon, he is still celebrated as a literary hero.^[6]

He is chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his 1923 book The Prophet, an early example of inspirational fiction including a series of philosophical essays written in poetic English prose. The book sold well despite a cool critical reception, gaining popularity in the 1930s and again especially in the 1960s counterculture.^[6]^[7] Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Laozi.^[7]

Khalil Gibran was born into a Maronite Catholic family from the historical town of Bsharri in northern Mount Lebanon, then a semi-autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire.^[8]

His mother Kamila, daughter of a priest, was thirty when he was born; his father Khalil was her third husband.^[9] As a result of his family's poverty, Gibran received no formal schooling during his youth in Lebanon.

However, priests visited him regularly and taught him about the Bible, as well as the Arabic and Syriac languages.

From Wiki: Much more there.

[....]

1. Be thankful for the difficult times. They have showed you how strong you can be.

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

2. Kindness is a quality of the strong.

“Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.”

3. There’s no such thing as absolute truth.

“Say not, ‘I have found the truth,’ but rather, ‘I have found a truth.’

“I AM IGNORANT of absolute truth. But I am humble before my ignorance and therein lies my honor and my reward.”

4. It’s the small people who try to belittle and humiliate others.

“To belittle, you have to be little.”

5. The harm others do to you is easier to forget than the harm you do to others.

“If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always remember.”

6. You might forget those who made you laugh, but you will never forget those who were by your side in your darkest hours.

“You may forget with whom you laughed, but you will never forget with whom you wept.”

“Hearts united in pain and sorrow will not be separated by joy and happiness. Bonds that are woven in sadness are stronger than the ties of joy and pleasure. Love that is washed by tears will remain eternally pure and faithful.”

7. It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary.

“In the sweetness of friendship; let there be laughter and the sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”

8. Love is life. And life is love.

“When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”

“Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.”

9. Put love into your work.

“Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distills a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.”

“They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.”

10. To understand the heart and mind of a person, look at what he aspires to be.

“To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.”

“Trust in dreams, for in them is the hidden gate to eternity.”

11. True love can’t be possessed.

“Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love. And think not you can direct the course of love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.”

12. Seek to put up with bad manners pleasantly.

“The real test of good manners is to be able to put up with bad manners pleasantly.”

13. Love binds everything together in perfect harmony.

“They say: ‘If a man knew himself, he would know all mankind.’ I say: ‘If a man loved mankind, he would know something of himself.”

14. Always look on the bright side of life.

“The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose.”

15. We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.

“The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.”

16. True love is the offspring of spiritual affinity.

“It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.”

17. Let there be space in your relationship.

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

18. If you pray when it rains, make sure you also pray when the sun shines.

“You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.”

19. When you give of yourself, that’s when you truly give.

“You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”

20. Real beauty comes from within.

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”

21. Your children are not your children. They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

“Your children are not your children. They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.”

22. Every relationship should be free from bondage.

“No human relation gives one possession in another—every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship or in love, the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach alone.”

“If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don’t, they never were.”

23. Be thankful for both the good and the bad in your life. It’s all meant to teach you something.

“I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.”

“When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”

24. Your attitude towards life will determine life’s attitude towards you.

“Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.”

25. A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand.

“A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?”

With thanks to Earth We are One