Self-Reinforcing Optimism: How to Engineer Serendipity

Source:http://www.finerminds.com/consciousness-awareness/self-reinforcing-optimism/

Turning Reality Into Poetry: The Importance of Eliciting Wonder and Awe

Awe: “An experience of such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world to assimilate it.”

How can we disrupt our daily mental programming, which has come attuned to overstimulation, so we can go from being numbly unaffected by the here and now, to becoming completely awestruck by life’s limitless magnificence?

In this 3-minute video, philosopher and contagiously enthusiastic filmmaker, Jason Silva, explains the importance of moving out of our comfort zone so we can experience awe and wonder in our daily lives.

http://www.finerminds.com/consciousness-awareness/turning-reality-into-poetry/

What is Your Biggest Mistake? | Man on the Street

What Is Your Biggest Mistake?

“Mistakes may seem like obstacles to success, but they can propel us towards our ultimate goal if we choose to learn from them”                                                                              Carmen Burby

One of the participants in the video states that her biggest mistake is the fear of making mistakes!  Her observation fully resonates with me.  I have a perfectionist tendency and I thrive on excellence.  However, the perfectionist attitude I have is just a mask to cover my fear of making mistakes.  I believe, it stops me from getting out of my comfort zone when I spend a great deal of time perfecting something which is considered to be of a good standard - hence, constraining myself within my own perceived limits and not expanding to discover the unknown because of this irrational fear.

What Have You Learned From Your Mistakes?

I am fully aware of my perfectionist tendencies.  Previously this attitude was deeply embedded in me and literally ran on autopilot.  Now, I believe that mistakes are the only way to grow.  However, it took me a great deal of time to attain this level of awareness.  And it emerged slowly during a truly dark period in my life.  I fully embraced the realisation of “Awareness” from the start but its practical application is another matter.  I am still striving to fully apply it in my daily life – but I know I have the tool of “Awareness” which I now try to utilise in everything I do.   For example, today I was attempting some new yoga exercises, which I could not do very well at the beginning, but then I remembered and applied “Awareness” into my practice!  I stopped, stood tall, readjusted my posture and took deep breaths and concentrated on the task at hand and with the aid of “Awareness” my practice seemed to flow more easily and naturally.

Summary

In summary, what I learned from my biggest mistake was to cultivate awareness by harnessing the principles of "Mindfulness" and to let go of my perfectionist tendencies and move on.  Sometimes it is acceptable and constructive to make mistakes.  In taking action we may make mistakes but very often these mistakes can be corrected.

What Is Your Biggest Mistake?

What Have You Learned From Your Mistakes?

Source:	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOUUO5bgxKs.  Video by Katie Wise and Nicole Villela
Post:	Tune into the wisdom within published on 21.05.2014.  Accessible on http://www.energysprings.blogspot.com
Commentary:	By Carmen Burby

The Power Of Compliments | The Science Of Love

I completely agree with Mike Bernstein and Matt Pitman who are the creators of this video when they say, “ A lot of us have trouble accepting compliments. We are worried that it will make us seem self-absorbed, or we just do not believe that what the person is saying is true. But studies shown that accepting compliments does not just help you, it also helps your relationship”.

Tune Into The Wisdom Within!

21 May 2014 by Carmen Burby

Our body is intelligently equipped with everything it requires to serve us efficiently and effectively during the journey that is our physical existence. 

Recall

We need to recall times in which we felt wonderfully in tune with ourselves, when we felt at ease with our environment at home, at work, or with friends and so forth.  For example, it could be a simple walk in nature on a sunny day, a sunset or sunrise, your favourite place, sharing a meal with friends, sitting in a garden bathed in warm sunshine, watching a child at play, a successful meeting with a client, a party you attended looking beautiful and radiant or just remembering the look of people on a sunny day.  Hold that memory and feel it, sense it, savour it, smell it, touch it, see it and embrace the recollection of that beautiful experience.  Would you agree with me that we feel and look more relaxed, happier and friendlier when we recall happy moments?

Spring Cleaning 

             Our Subconscious / Conscious Mind 

                       (In The Broad Sense)

•  Subconscious Mind

It would be good if from time to time we try to do some mental spring cleaning, decluterring our minds as it were, disposing of unwanted material that does not serve us anymore.  It could be said that since our early formative years we have been storing memories in a generally random and indiscriminate manner. 

We stored everything, both good and bad events.  This is the work of the Subconscious Mind, which acts like a sponge.  Cannot reason, receives impressions and simple absorbs and works as it were on autopilot.  It does not actively filter or discriminate between the negative and positive impressions it receives.  It is like a bin in which you put anything.  It is the reservoir of all that we experience in life.  It accepts whatever is thrown into it!

• Conscious Mind or The Intellect

As we develop we start to reason and challenge certain beliefs and principles that do not serve us anymore.  This is the work of our Conscious Mind, which reasons, discriminates, takes action and does not work on autopilot like a machine, but it is fallible and prone to make mistakes.  In taking action we make mistakes.  We did not perform as well as we hoped, we failed and felt disappointed but we can and will do better with perseverance, and we can correct a mistake.  However, if we do nothing at all we do not have anything to correct.  Therefore, we must draw our own personal conclusions on what changes we need to make and what needs to be done in order to effect those changes!  Thus, we need to adjust, and make the necessary corrections and in this way we start to grow.  Mistakes may seem like obstacles to success, but they can propel us towards our ultimate goal if we choose to learn from them.

• Would I be right in saying that at this stage you are thinking that I know these two concepts already, but how can I start cleansing my subconscious of the unwanted material which is no longer beneficial to me?

To answer this question, I will base my reply on Swami Visnu-devananda’s book The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga.  At page 267 he says that “instead of guiding and giving proper suggestions with the developed intellect, man interferes with the natural work of the subconscious through wrong suggestions and thus adds miseries to his life.  However, with the help of the subconscious mind, we can change vicious nature by cultivating healthy, virtuous qualities that are opposed to undesirable ones.  If we want to overcome fear, we must concentrate on the opposite quality, courage.  The positive always overcomes the negative.  Even distasteful tasks and duties can be changed by cultivating a desire and taste for them.  All actions, pleasures, and experiences leave subtle impressions on the subconscious mind”.

In this way, by depositing opposite positive impressions in our subconscious mind we are burning as it were the negative impressions, which are impeding our development and causing us misery.  So, in this way the more spring-cleaning we do the more room we make for more positive impressions. 

Conclusion

In our daily lives, when we experience some daunting and trying times, no matter how busy we might be, we can just close our eyes for a few seconds to bring inner awareness and tune into ourselves with our active conscious mind to access the positive deposits we made in our subconscious mind. 

Hold a memory and feel it, sense it, savour it, smell it, touch it, see it and embrace the reminiscence of that beautiful experience.  Would you agree with me in saying that we feel and look more relaxed, happier and friendlier when we recall happy moments?

NB:

This blog is based on the teachings of Swami Visnu-devananda as outlined in his book The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga and of Swami Jyotirmayananda, who is the Director of the Sivananda Yoga Centre in London who recently led a workshop on Yoga and Stress management.  The workshop was like a beacon, which enlightened me and inspired me to write a few lines on this subject, but in reality I am only skimming the surface of the theme.

© 2014 Carmen Burby.   htpp://www.energysprings.blogspot.com

Researching Meditation with Dr Ramesh Manocha

Posted on 31 March 2014 by Carmen Burby

    

The Eastern View of Stress Meditation is an eastern tool that offers western health practitioners a new way of looking at health. The role of stress in disease is well recognised by modern medical researchers but, despite the progress that has been made in this field, there remains some very fundamental yet unanswered questions. One of those question is, “What exactly is stress?”. /

Few of us can easily come up with a good definition of “stress”, yet while we don’t know exactly what it is, we intuitively recognise that it is a factor that affects almost every aspect of our lives! The eastern explanation of “stress” is probably one of the most commonsense and practically useful ones. While you read this see if you can “look inside” and apply this perspective to yourself.

Stress, says the eastern perspective, is the by-product of thought. If we examine the nature of the thoughts that each of us experiences from moment to moment we will find that they all relate to one of two broad categories: (l) events that have occurred in the past or (2) events that we anticipate will occur in the future. Whether the event was an argument with a friend yesterday (past), an unpaid bill (future), a deeply troubling childhood experience that has become part of our subconscious (past) or anxiety about the share market (future) we will find that all of these troubling thoughts, and the resulting stress that they cause us, to have arisen from only the past or future!

Take the exercise a little further. If the vast majority, if not all, our thoughts emanate from events in the past or future, is it possible to think about the absolute present moment? Most of us will admit that, while we can think about events in the past (even a few moments ago), or events scheduled in the future (even milliseconds in the future), it is impossible to actually think about the present moment which we are continuously experiencing and is ever changing.

Now think about the stress that we all experience from time to time. Despite the huge variety of situations that “stress” us they all have one thing in common: we have to think about the events before they can reduce our sense of wellbeing. In other words thought itself is the final common pathway by which all events create stress within us! The past, comprised of events that have already occurred, no longer exists. Similarly the future, comprised of events that have yet to occur and are therefore undetermined, does not yet exist. However, paradoxically, we human beings exist only in the present.

The mind (and its thoughts), since it is comprised only of stuff from the past or future, is therefore not real and so the stress that it generates is also not real! If we are beings that exist in the present, and we realise that the stress and angst of life emanate from a mind which is the product of past/future, we acknowledge also that the antidote for the mental illusions that cause stress is to reign in our attention and focus it on the present moment. While, for most of us, focusing on the absolute present moment is virtually impossible, it is this razor’s edge of “thoughtless awareness” that the easterner seeks to cultivate and sustain in meditation. The vast inner silence of the thoughtless state leaves the mind uncluttered. By existing in that “space-between-thethoughts” one is neither enslaved to one’s past nor confined to a predetermined future. The inner silence of meditation thus creates a naturally stress-free inner environment.

Source:

http://www.researchingmeditation.org/meditation-research-summary/the-eastern-view-of-stress

http://www.energysprings.blogspot.com