How To Turn Your Life Around And Embrace A New You
Modern Life Blogs: Life is a flow essentially filled with harmony and balance. While it may not always appear that way, it truly is. When disharmony is felt then it is our duty to seek balance again. The challenge rises when we get stuck in a funk and we tend to spiral down with a life that our eyes perceive. Thank goodness for a greater way to perceive the circumstances! Dead-end invites the mind to bring relativity to the facts, reconsider the situation and create new possibilities.
No Mud No Lotus
Tara Brach (video)
Understanding The Science Of Gratitude
Zoelle and Michelle Levey: The practice of gratitude antidotes two root sufferings that pervade the human experience. The first can be characterized as a feeling of “insufficiency” — not having enough or not being enough. This fundamental sense of dissatisfaction opens the way to the second kind of suffering — being incessantly busy trying to get more or be more in order to somehow fill this inner feeling of discontentment and lack. Living with an inner attitude of scarcity and poverty-consciousness also makes us prey to being manipulated by external forces that tell us that we will find happiness and satisfaction — finally — if we only acquire or consume this product or that, or once we go to this place or take some other action “out there.”
8 Of The World’s Healthiest Spices And Herbs You Should Be Eating
Eating Well Magazine/Vitality: Modern science is beginning to uncover the ultimate power of spices and herbs, as weapons against illnesses from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. “We’re now starting to see a scientific basis for why people have been using spices medicinally for thousands of years,” says Bharat Aggarwal, Ph.D., professor at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and author of Healing Spices (Sterling, 2011).
The Art Of Mindful Living: Beginning Anew
Plum Village/Thich Nhat Hanh - To begin anew is to look deeply and honestly at ourselves, our past actions, speech and thoughts and to create a fresh beginning within ourselves and in our relationships with others. At the practice center we practice Beginning Anew as a community every two weeks and individually as often as we like.
Meditation Prescribed More Often As An Alternative To Conventional Medicine, Study Finds Lara Salahi and Catherine Cole/ABC News - More than 6 million Americans are advised meditation and other mind-body therapies by conventional health care providers, according to a report released Monday by Harvard Medical School.
How To Save a Trillion Dollars Mark Bittman/NYTimes - For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones. Treating these diseases — and futile attempts to “cure” them — costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP. But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more.
How Meditation May Change the Brain
Sindya N. Bhandoo/NYTimes – M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.
Inward Bound — Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Let us be silent that we may hear the whispers of the gods.” Silence can be hard to come by and easy to avoid these days. We all are busy. As a remedy to the rampant noise and distraction, some people practice meditation in activity, in the form of mindfulness, a discipline of being fully present while doing just one thing. |
Can We Have A Democratic Election?
NY Review of Books: In all of the excitement over the Republicans’ sweep of the 2010 elections—their recapture of the House of Representatives, the decrease in the Democrats’ margin in the Senate, and the emergence of the Tea Party as a national force—most of us missed the significance of their victories in the states. The Republicans took control of both the governorship and the legislature in twelve states; ten states were already under Republican control. The Republican-controlled states undertook quite similar efforts to tilt the outcome of the presidential election in their party’s favor by denying the right to vote to groups that traditionally voted Democratic—minorities, the elderly, and students.
Focus Group Suggests That State Of The Union Speech Was Well Received
Los Angeles Times: “The most surprising” aspect of the reaction was “the lack of polarization” among the voters, he added. The speech has provoked a highly partisan reaction in Washington, but among the swing voters in the study, “the Democratic, Republican and independent lines” from the dial meters “tracked through most of the speech,” Greenberg said. “He captured people broadly.”
From CEO To Candidate, Romney Flip-Flops on Debt
Truthout: If Mr. Romney were really running as a private equity executive, how would he view what his campaign regards as one of the nation’s most pressing issues, the national debt?
For National Security Keystone Is A Dud
Lt. Gen. Norman Seip (Ret.), U.S. Air Force/The Hill: The only way we can reduce our vulnerability to rising oil prices, volatile supplies and foreign suppliers is to reduce our dependency on oil. And the only way we can do that is to use more efficient vehicles that let us to drive further with less oil, and develop our own sources of renewable energy right here in the United States.
99%er Champions
Katrina vanden Heuvel/The Nation - As we head into a presidential election year, I’d wager a lot the mainstream media will focus their attention on the horse race for the White House and other prime time campaigns. But this is a moment—when we are seeing a real shift in our politics, from Wisconsin to Ohio to Occupy—to be recruiting and supporting what I’d call 99 percenter candidates: those who share the core convictions of Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent movement.
What Our Health Care Spending Buys
Washington Post - A few commenters asked what all this spending means for health: Does higher spending on medical care translate into better health status? Thanks to another study out this week, this one from the United Health Foundation, we have an answer. The rankings measure 23 health outcomes in states including rates of smoking, obesity, preventable hospitalizations and cardiovascular deaths.
SWAT Raids, Stun Guns, And Pepper Spray: Why The Government Is Ramping Up The Use Of Force
The Huffington Post: Police militarization is now an ingrained part of American culture. SWAT teams are featured in countless cop reality shows, and wrong-door raids are the subject of “The Simpsons” bits and search engine commercials. Tough-on-crime sheriffs now sport tanks and hardware more equipped for battle in a war zone than policing city streets. Seemingly benign agencies such as state alcohol control boards and the federal Department of Education can now enforce laws and regulations not with fines and clipboards, but with volatile raids by paramilitary police teams.
GOP Propaganda Guru Scared To Death Of Occupy – 10 Ways He’s Trying To Spin The Movement
Alternet: Frank Luntz has been helping to distort the language of Republicans for decades. His specialty is developing dishonest phrases to replace accurate descriptions of social and political issues when the accurate descriptions produce negative impressions of conservatives and their unpopular agenda.
The Strategic Value of Forgiveness
Marc Gopin: There is one more element in the astonishing success of Gandhi/King/Mandela: love and forgiveness of adversaries. Nelson Mandela could have nationalized all the white wealth in South Africa but he did not. Mahatma Gandhi could have easily demonized the British in India but he did not. Martin Luther King had good reason to hate America but he loved it instead.
Occupy Wall Street Protest Reaches a Crossroads
New York Times: “The quality of life needs to be solved but should not be an excuse by those unsympathetic to the message or the protesters’ First Amendment rights,” one of the letter’s authors, State Senator Daniel L. Squadron, said.
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Obama: Make the Economy Work For Everybody
Jonathan Cohn: Obama offered a few new and intriguing policy ideas on Tuesday – among them, a proposal to get more taxes from companies with operations overseas and an initiative to develop partnerships between community colleges and local businesses. He also called for some political reforms, most important among them an end to filibusters of judicial appointees. Mostly, though, he stuck to the proposals and themes he’s put out in the last six months, most memorably in his September address on jobs and his December speech on fairness.
That’s Obama’s Jobs Plan?
Matthew Yglesias: But framing the entire economic message of the speech was a strikingly retrograde, self-contradictory, and confused agenda of reviving American prosperity through mercantilism.
If You Build It: Obama’s Plan To Fix the Economy
GOOD: It’s safe to say that these ideas are largely positioning for a reelection campaign; generally laudable and fairly safe. Or, in the case of his gradually tougher position on the largest banks and their scandalous behavior toward mortgage borrowers, just radical enough to guarantee obstruction. They tell a story of a president who is increasingly working to create the most economically beneficial playing field for workers, entrepreneurs and companies, but not yet imagining changes in the contest’s rules—or the creation of a different game altogether.
Keystone Pipeline-How Many Jobs Would It Really Create?
CNN: Meanwhile, one study from Cornell University said the pipeline could actually lead to a decline in jobs in the long run. One reason is that the pipeline would lead to higher fuel prices in the Midwest, the study said, and that would slow consumer spending and cost jobs.
Contagion Catastrophe
Jim Tankersly:
This is the worst-case scenario from Europe, and it just might come true: Italy defaults on its debts. Every major Italian bank collapses. Recession grips the eurozone. Sovereign defaults and bank failures ripple across the Continent. Saddled with bad loans to nations and lenders in Europe, American banks hemorrhage cash. Credit freezes in the United States. Multinational companies, unable to raise money, curb U.S. investment and hiring. Wall Street demands, but fails to get, new bailouts. The entire developed world plummets into recession and, quite possibly, depression. This, in contrast, is the placid warning that President Obama gave Americans about the threat: “If Europe is contracting,” he said on Monday, “then it’s much more difficult for us to create good jobs here at home.”
A Banker Speaks With Regret
Nicholas D. Kristof: The Federal Reserve action isn’t a scandal, and arguablyit’s a triumph. The Fed did everything imaginable to avert a financial catastrophe — and succeeded. The money was repaid. Yet what is scandalous is the basic unfairness of what has transpired. The federal government rescued highly paid bankers from their reckless decisions. It protected bank shareholders and creditors. But it mostly turned a cold shoulder to some of the most vulnerable and least sophisticated people in America. Last year alone, banks seized more than one million homes.
The Grand Bargain
Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin/The Hill: Any complete solution, therefore, requires that Democrats agree to structural reform of Medicare to slow its cost growth and Republicans agree to increase revenue to pay for the retirement of the baby boomers.
Protests Illustrate Dire Economic Anxiety, Bloomberg Says
New York Times: At the panel on Thursday morning, he repeated his contention that it would be more productive for the protesters to work to improve the economy, rather than demonstrating, and he criticized those, including politicians, who vilify banks. But he seemed to take the protesters’ anger more seriously than he had before, and to express more concern about possible consequences of the unrest.
Partisanship Hurts Deficit Work
Roll Call: The Republicans had offered $401 billion in new revenues and $876 billion in spending reductions, including $275 billion in health entitlement savings — figures Democrats said Wednesday they were prepared to agree on. But Democrats proposed four major changes: no increase in Medicare retirement age, no change in the way the consumer price index is calculated, no permanent extension of Bush-era tax cuts and consideration of some of President Barack Obama’s jobs proposals.
A Hidden Toll As States Shift To Contract Workers
New York Times: What governments save in salaries and benefits often “ends up on the government books through all sorts of programs,” said Paul C. Light, a professor at the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, referring to unemployment insurance, Medicaid and other public assistance for workers earning low incomes.
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