February 2012
59 posts
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“If you have the guts to keep making mistakes, your wisdom and intelligence leap...”
– Holly Near
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The day to leap
February 29. What a very special day it is, coming around just once every four years. Last time it popped up, I did what a girl is supposed to do and proposed. Thankfully, it worked and I have a husband.
Now it has come around again, I wonder what I can do to make the most of it? I felt a bit groggy and lacking in energy this morning so, given that I didn’t have to go and work in an office...
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Do you take care of the needs of your soul?
Do you believe you have a soul? Or is the idea of “the soul” too religious for you? Then you might be attracted to the work of philosopher Alain de Botton, founder of the School of Life, who wrote in his blog yesterday about how we fill the gap left by the demise of the priesthood.
For centuries, he says, priests took care of your soul from birth until death, attempting to make sure it was in a...
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When is it time to rewrite the script?
Our brains are hardwired to tell stories. We make sense of our inner and outer worlds by coming up with a narrative. I’ve written here before about our storytelling brains, and how the bulk of our memories are fiction.
We all have our stories - from the gossipy small stories to the big, narrative arc of our life story. There’s nothing wrong with telling tales, as long as we remain...
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The healing power of the heart
There is no such being as a human who has never had a problem processing their emotions. We all learned coping strategies early in life and these represented our best effort at trying to minimise our experience of “difficult” feelings.
But we wouldn’t think it was an effective strategy to suck a dummy now, would we? So what would happen if you replaced those immature strategies with new, mature...
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Battling creativity's evil twin
I’ve been putting off writing this post today. Mostly because I’m on the road, but also because I can be a brilliant procrastinator. However, I have fought my urge to defer it until tomorrow or occupy myself with other tasks.
So why do we procrastinate? It’s not always down to laziness or distraction, as quite often we put off the very tasks or projects that are most...
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Will Western women save the world?
The Dalai Lama certainly thinks so - he’s said as much. This is not an insult to Eastern women; just an acknowledgment that affluent, self-realised Western women have a much better chance of rescuing the planet than less affluent Eastern women who may still be in survival mode.
Up until now we have had a massive imbalance between masculine and feminine power. Certainly in the past 100...
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Neptune and our deep need for connection
This month, the planet Neptune moved into the sign of Pisces, where it will stay for the next 13 years. The significance of this will not be lost on anyone who is interested in astrology - as I have been for many years.
If you are receptive to the language, astrologers have demonstrated time and again that the movement of the outer planets affects us all, and when they change sign it heralds a...
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“The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I...”
– Thich Nhat Hhan
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Why Goldie Hawn wants us all to be mindful
I knew Goldie Hawn was a practising Buddhist but I hadn’t realised she had done so much to introduce the concept of mindfulness into American and Canadian schools.
Her foundation’s website lists more than 200 which have signed up to the MindUP programme, a 15-step course that aims to produce children who are in touch with their feelings and aware of the workings of their brain.
And...
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“Authentic power needs no books
Subscribes to no one’s philosophy
The knowledge...”
– Alison Stormwolf
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Finding your wisdom in deep inner space
I derive great pleasure from the English language. I especially enjoy discovering new words - or rediscovering words that had slipped out of my vocabulary.
My word of the day is sapient. It’s another way of saying wise, having good taste, or good judgment. It comes from sapience - meaning wisdom. Related to this is the Latin word sapere, meaning “to taste, to be wise, to know”.
...
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Never turn your back on Mother Earth →
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Be yourself! But which self should I be?
We’ve all been there. We’re feeling nervous, about to do something that’s outside our comfort zone. A well-meaning friend or family member is trying to reassure us. “You’ll be fine!” they say. “Just be yourself.”
Let me ask you, has this ever made you feel better? Has it boosted your confidence? My experience has mostly been no, it has not. In...
“Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”
– Walt Whitman
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RIP Whitney - but the living need peace too
Yesterday, Whitney Houston was laid to rest, her family just beginning to grieve as her fans tied helium balloons outside the church in Newark where she once sang in the choir.
Private grief versus public grief - two very different propositions. The public have “lost” someone they barely knew while family members are dealing with the profound sense of loss of a loved one.
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“There are only two ways to live your life - one is as though nothing is a...”
– Albert Einstein
“So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling,...”
– Brenda Ueland
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Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream
As it’s the weekend, I thought it would be a good time to talk about creativity. Hopefully you’ve been able to stay in bed a while longer this morning. Hopefully your mind is not crammed with to-do lists. Hopefully you don’t have any major commitments or obligations to fulfil.
If that’s the case, then put down your iPhone, iPad or MacBook. Leave Facebook, Twitter and...
“Trade perfectionism for wisdom.”
– Robert Holden, from Success Intelligence
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Would you hire a life coach who hadn't really...
I was fascinated to read a piece in the New York Times recently about the new trend in the US for younger life coaches - some as young as 20.
My initial reaction to this was probably similar to yours, ie fairly dismissive. How on earth can someone barely out of their teens be able to work effectively in a profession that requires maturity and a degree of self-awareness?
Then I pulled myself up...
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Is there a cure for destination addiction?
When we hear the word addiction, we usually think of drugs, or alcohol, or perhaps sex. But there is a whole range of addictions that may not be life-threatening but are far more commonplace. In fact, you might not even think of them as addictions, but try the following for size:
Addiction to caffeine Addiction to being right Addiction to watching television Addiction to neediness (also known...
“We cannot be present and run our storyline at the same time.”
– Pema Chodron
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Things I've learned while being separated from my...
I keep a daily gratitude journal and have done so for a couple of years, using a simple website called Happy Rambles. They send me an email every day, I reply to it listing my gratitudes, then they store it for me in an online journal that I can view and search.
I find it really has changed the way my brain works. From the moment I wake up in the morning, my brain is scanning for...
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Why I never celebrate Valentine's Day
During my many years of dysfunctional independence, my single friends and I would often try to go out for a meal on February 14, forgetting it was Valentine’s Day. When we eventually found a restaurant that didn’t have a mandatory “romantic” set menu at vastly inflated prices, we would huff and puff about all the miserable-looking couples who had been forced to sit opposite each other...
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Is Adele the first star of the Age of...
Last night, a 23-year-old girl from north London swept the board at the Grammys - winning all six of the categories in which she was nominated. She has achieved extraordinary success at a time when the music industry seems to be dying on its feet . In fact, she has sold three times as many records as the far more image-savvy Lady Gaga.
She may not have 47 million followers on Twitter...
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Don't edit your truth
“I pray for the courage to speak my unedited truth because I believe that otherwise I cannot be of true value to anyone else.” So speaks happiness expert Robert Holden in his book Success Intelligence. This is what he does before giving a talk - which he does about 100 times a year - when his mind is telling him stories about looking good and gaining acceptance from his audience....
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Do we really need a World Happy Day?
If you didn’t know, today is World Happy Day. It is the brainchild of documentary filmmaker Roko Belic, who wanted to co-ordinate screenings of his new film Happy - a look at the scientific and spiritual underpinnings of that most elusive emotion - all over the world.
It is being supported by many worthwhile organisations, including Action for Happiness, of which I am a member, and you...
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My love is like a green, green ivy leaf...
This morning, the Telegraph website published a lovely gallery of photos of naturally occurring heart shapes (link below), which demonstrates that there really are hearts everywhere if you look for them. It got me thinking about the heart icon, how our brains scan for it and pattern-match it all the time, and what were the origins of a symbol that has come to mean everything from eternal love...
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Happy thoughts, happy brain - is it that easy?
I’ve just been reading an article on the Psychology Today website which says if you want to be happy, make sure you keep your brain happy. Because being happy means more to your brain than you might imagine. It seems that the brain is primed to respond to pleasure in a way that reinforces pleasure, therefore it rewards happy thoughts.
Every thought you have releases brain chemicals, so...
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Things I know about internet dating
Internet dating has been in the news this week. The Guardian asks, “Is it destroying love?”; Time Magazine wonders: “Does it make it harder to find The One?” I can speak with some authority on the subject because I met my husband through a dating website.
Our story was deemed remarkable enough for a leading newspaper and monthly magazine to print articles about how we met -...
