Yoga Journal - Yoga Meditation - Grounded in Gratitude

Yoga Journal - Yoga Meditation - Grounded in Gratitude: "On the surface, gratitude appears to arise from a sense that you're indebted to another person for taking care of you in some way, but looking deeper, you'll see that the feeling is actually a heightened awareness of your connection to everything else. Gratitude flows when you break out of the small, self-centered point of view—with its ferocious expectations and demands—and appreciate that through the labors and intentions and even the simple existence of an inconceivably large number of people, weather patterns, chemical reactions, and the like, you have been given the miracle of your life, with all the goodness in it today."

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'Sandwich Generation' Must Make Tough Choices : NPR

'Sandwich Generation' Must Make Tough Choices : NPR: "Record numbers of families consist of adult children, parents and grandparents under one roof. NPR correspondent David Greene and senior business editor Marilyn Geewax talk about the NPR series "Family Matters: The Money Squeeze," which focuses on the pressures faced by the "sandwich generation.""

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Training the Emotional Brain : An Interview with Richard J. Davidson : Sam Harris

Training the Emotional Brain : An Interview with Richard J. Davidson : Sam Harris: "In the book I describe 6 emotional styles are that are rooted in basic neuroscientific research.  The 6 styles are:
1. Resilience: How rapidly or slowly do you recover from adversity?
2. Outlook: How long does positive emotion persist following a joyful event?
3. Social Intuition: How accurate are you in detecting the non-verbal social cues of others?
4. Context: Do you regulate your emotion in a context-sensitive fashion?
5. Self-Awareness: How aware are you of your own bodily signals that constitute emotion?
6. Attention: How focused or scattered in your attention?"

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Yoga Journal - Yoga Philosophy - Break Away

Yoga Journal - Yoga Philosophy - Break Away: "The shadow side of the mature and sensible inner controller is the control freak—the one who frets endlessly about her to-do list, cuts off any relationship that threatens to turn unpredictable, and tightens up when the inner music gets wild. The control-freak part of you is convinced that she holds the reins to your sanity, and she is sure that, without her constant intervention, you'd be living in chaos, eating junk food, neglecting asana practice, and possibly risking death. (After all, at her primal core, the inner controller equates control with survival.)

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Amid Rural Decay, Trees Take Root in Silos - NYTimes.com

Amid Rural Decay, Trees Take Root in Silos - NYTimes.com: "Amid Rural Decay, Trees Take Root in Silos"

This is the landscape of rural abandonment that defines a region that has struggled with generations of exodus.

But increasingly there are unexpected signs of rebirth. Many of these decrepit silos, once used to store feed for livestock, now just hollow columns of cinder blocks, have through happenstance transformed into unlikely nurseries for trees.

The empty structures catch seeds, then protect fragile saplings from the prairie winds and reserve a window of sunlight overhead like a target. In time, without tending by human hands, the trees have grown so high that lush canopies of branches now rise from the structures and top them like leafy umbrellas.

Across a region laden with leaning, crumbling reminders of more vibrant days, some residents have found comfort in their unlikely profiles.

“It just struck me as, I don’t know, a symbol of something,” said Ken Wolf, who has spent many days of his retirement searching the area for what he calls, simply, silo trees, photographing dozens along the way. “I see it as a kind of passing.”

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Article:Multitasking

Productivity, Multitasking, and the Death of the Phone - HBR IdeaCast - Harvard Business Review
SHERRY TURKLE: Well, I think I mean by alchemy is that we had a fantasy, much as alchemy was a very elaborate fantasy, that we could use multitasking really to make time multiply. We could have more of it by multitasking. And it turned out that, like alchemy, things didn't really work out the way we had fantasized, and that every time we do a new task, add on a new task, our performance in every task degrades a little bit.And that's what science has now shown us. And it's been a rough realization, because so many of us got used to the idea that we were making time and felt like masters of the universe as we were doing all of these things at once.Another reason that multitasking felt like alchemy is that our brains rewarded us, our bodies rewarded us with a dopamine squirt, a shot of neurochemicals that made us feel great every time we added a new task. So we were rewarded for multitasking by feeling great, and it turned out that we were doing worse and worse at everything we did.

I think we've overstepped. Something's amiss. Texting at funerals. We've created a situation where we are so connected that we're forgetting that we need to be with each other. There's a wonderful thing in psychology that if you don't teach your children to be alone, they'll only know how to be lonely. And, in a way, we have we lost the capacity for solitude, the kind that refreshes and restores. And it's only in a kind of solitude that you can do a certain kind of work. And we're losing the capacity for collaboration if we're constantly communicating.

My own strategy is that I don't like what I call the always-on/always-on-you culture. And I think that comes across in the book, because I've tried it, and I find that I can't work with constant interruption. I can't concentrate with constant interruption. I can't really get good writing done. I can't get good thinking done.

Article: Mental Focus

The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review
What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It's like an itch we can't resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.

The Little Black Book Of Scams - Competition Bureau

The Little Black Book Of Scams - Competition Bureau: "Every year, Canadians lose millions of dollars to the activities of scammers who bombard us with online, mail, door-to-door and telephone scams."

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End of Life Conversations

These aren’t easy conversations to be had, but they can be positive ones. Whether the parent is in denial about their declining health or has a lifestyle that doesn’t embrace healthy, proactive aging, it’s vitally important that adult children figure out a way to cross the generation gap and talk about ways to be healthy as their parent gets older.

Ten Ways Your Local Grocery Store Hijacks Your Brain | Psychology Today

Ten Ways Your Local Grocery Store Hijacks Your Brain | Psychology Today: "Below are 10 great examples of how consumers get baffled by branding into parting with their hard-earned cash."

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