Category: Brain

Slicing veggies is about to get 10 times easier. Here’s why it’s worth adding a mandoline slicer to your kitchen if you like eating veggies in any form.

Turn on, tune in and drop out … that was the catch cry of U.S. psychologist Timothy Leary in the 1960s. By 1966 psychedelics were demonised and banned, but now—in controlled scientific settings—there’s a psychedelic ‘renaissance’ in mental health therapy. Early research on the use of ecstasy in the treatment of stress disorders looks promising.

Tune in to hear why Ahrefs depends on content marketing to sell its product, how they came to have more backlinks than their competitors and how this keyword ranking company does its SEO.

The post GE 304: Ahrefs’ CMO and Product Advisor Tim Soulo Proves That Content Marketing Sells (podcast) appeared first on Business & Personal Growth Tips.

Question:

For the moment I´m totally lost and confused and it causes me daily feelings of stress, anxiety, headache and stomach pain.

I am in a situation regarding job and place of living that I have to change and now an opportunity for that might have come. But the problem is that I don´t know if the timing is right or not, I have
longed for this opportunity to come, but now I am extremely scared. The problem I have is that I don´t know if I have these tough feelings because the timing is not right (if I have to prepare more, or if that is
not the right place to live),if I am just scared of change and uncertainty regarding money (I have to give up a good salary for not knowing if I will have any money), or if I´m afraid to know what I really feel since my opinion might be in conflict with others.

Stress, feelings and thoughts are whirling around so much in my body that I can´t even feel or think clearly. I have a healthy, regular lifestyle and also meditate twice a day. Right now I feel this is what makes me keep my head above the water line, otherwise I think I would freak out. But even if my meditation practice works well and I find peace, I don´t find the answers of what is right to do and how to handle my feelings and fears, and how to sort out what is what, what is fear and what is my honest will. Do you have any suggestions on how to do that, how to go on?
I would appreciate any answer a lot.

By Deepak Chopra, MD

When you take the popular phrase “Follow your bliss” and trace it back to its source, something more powerful was intended. In a late interview the famous expert on mythology Joseph Campbell first used the phrase, saying “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you.”

This implication that bliss is a personal path, and that the path is pre-determined, is much more than “do what you really like to do,” which is how most people interpret “Follow your bliss.” Let me expand on this point by showing that “bliss” is much more fundamental than almost anyone realizes. It holds the key to transforming the mind.

Doing what you really like to do is certainly a good idea; it is much better than the opposite, doing what you have to do even if you don’t particularly like it. But no one can engage in pleasurable activity all the time. The human mind brings us experiences of pleasure and pain, and since the two are paired as inescapable opposites, mental tension and conflict are inevitable no matter how positive and pleasant you try to make your life be. (For deeper background, please see my most recent post, “Can You Make Your Mind Your Friend?”)

Campbell deeply understood the cultural and spiritual roots of “Follow your bliss.” He emphasizes the universal quality of bliss in the same interview. “Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.” This gives enormous power to the life you are supposed to be living, and it also points out how to get there.

Bliss in the ancient Indian tradition is Ananda, one of the three primal aspects of creation. “Sat Chit Ananda” is often translated from the Sanskrit as “eternal bliss consciousness,” which is the foundation of existence. What is implied is that existence ,consciousness, and joy belong together without beginning or end. That’s very different from the modern scientific assumption that the mind, especially the human mind, evolved over billions of years from inert, mindless matter.

Campbell knew what Ananda was, and in a simple way he tells us that if you get hold of bliss and follow it, you will arrive at the essential nature of the mind, which is blissful by nature. Therefore, existence itself is blissful by its very nature. Such a declaration, if true, would totally overturn our everyday experience, because it seems obvious that a person’s existence can be filled with problems, obstacles, struggle, conflict, and trauma.

For “Follow your bliss” to be sound advice is workable only if these negative experiences are in some sense unreal, by which I mean that they mask the actual nature of reality. Only the individual can prove the truth or falseness of Ananda, and this is done by following the invisible thread of consciousness to its source. If the restless, discontented mind, tossed between pleasure and pain, has a blissful source, it has to be reachable if it is to do any good.

Let’s say that you want to follow your bliss as far as it can take you. There are essentially three stages on such a path. Stage 1 is the experience of personal joy, which all of us have known at least once in our lives. These moments touch the lives of people who fall in love or who achieve a triumph or who simply find themselves overjoyed for whatever reason. You grab and hold on to Stage 1 bliss as long as you can, but eventually the moment passes.

A change occurs in Stage 2. Instead of possessing an experience of joy, the joy possesses you. By this I mean that it is more impersonal. In Stage 1, bliss is all for me, the ego-personality. In Stage 2, you rise above personality. The Latin roots of the word “ecstasy” mean “to stand outside.” That’s how Stage 2 bliss feels. You go outside your normal boundaries.

Stage 2 feels light and sometimes out-of-body. Religious awe falls into this category, along with wonder before the beauty of Nature, or its immensity. There can be a sense that time has stopped or that your mind has expanded into a new space that is free, open, untroubled, peaceful, and forever calm. But the essential aspect of Stage 2 bliss is that it possesses you, not the other way around.

Stage 3 is the experience of Stage 2 bliss on a permanent basis, so that it becomes the default state of your awareness. Every person’s mind has a default state already, a set of grooved-in reactions, responses, beliefs, and attitudes that make up their personal story. Stage 1 bliss occurs inside this default setting, while Stage 2 takes a brief vacation from it, and then Stage 3 leaves the old default setting behind completely.

At that point, “Follow your bliss” has accomplished what it was meant to accomplish: liberation. There are many terms for this state, such as enlightenment, waking up, Nirvana, Moksha, or the peace that passes understanding. The important thing is the experience, which begins simply enough, by focusing on the bliss you can create in your life, valuing it, and beginning to experience, usually through meditation or Yoga, a settled sense of the quiet, peaceful mind.

The mind’s quiet is actually an open space in which creation begins to vibrate, at first beyond our perception. But over time this vibration is perceived and grows. The vibratory quality of creation is what Ananda adds to the other two terms, Sat Chit, which are the infinite creative potential of pure Being, existence in its original state before any activity has begun.

Only when you are aware of your essential nature in bliss can the complex problems of the mind and all its suffering be solved once and for all. Your mind will become your friend, because you experience bliss even under circumstances that used to bring pain, confusion, and conflict. “Follow your bliss” has a transformative power, which Joseph Campbell understood and wanted to tell us about.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com

Question:

How can I get happy if I can’t trust my Inner Guidance?

I’m like a hostage needing to fall in love with it’s captor if I’m going to survive, while all the while praying to be rescued. I’m overboard emotionally and physically: depression; tiredness; exacerbated hypothyroidism from chronically getting “What I don’t want” and only recently learning the “why” of that.

I’m waking up from a life lived backwards. Clairvoyant, clairaudient, I’ve blindly followed the advice of my Inner Guidance for as long as I can remember. And the past 3 years, I’ve come to realize – wake up to – the fact that my Inner Guidance’s advising hasn’t been so loving. In fact, the “unhappy” I have in my life is because of having followed the advice of my Inner Guidance.

A few weeks ago, when I metaphorically inherited Unhappy and Bitter’s house, I realized I HATE my Inner Guidance. I realize we’re not playing on the same team and that I’ve been foolish to trust it, believe it. And it confirmed that that is so. It went on to say it doesn’t respect me … that it would have been braver for me to have died in childhood than have survived through becoming a people pleaser. Harsh!

Is Spirit this harsh to all clairvoyant/clairaudient’s wishing conscious contact? Do you know why I have such a mean, unloving Inner Guidance?

At the end of my rope (almost too literally) I want peace. I pray for peace. What I get is Inner Guidance’s acknowledgement of my making the wrong mental choices, or complex emotions to untangle myself from, or lies or false futuristic prophecies to ignore the fear of.

My people pleaser-ness in desperation, has tried to make peace with Inner Guidance, but honestly, what kind of peace can be had where there’s no trust? So accepting I no longer trust my Inner Guidance has been a hard acceptance to come to. And of course, Inner Guidance, hearing my everything, just dishes up more fear for me to find myself clear of. I dig myself out of Unhappy and Bitter, and IG drudges more. And it’s happening more and more. I feel emotionally controlled, dumped on, by Inner Guidance. The weeping, grief, and crying jags go on for days, and take me back to childhood and my shock and unfathomability at what appears to be my intrinsic inappropriateness.

I don’t know how much longer I can endure this kind of “spiritual” treatment. My grip on reality is waning in my confusion and cluelessness about what is happening to me and why. Inner Guidance says I’m doing the Great Work. Even gave me a bouquet of red and gold tulips in a meditation a few weeks ago. But I can’t tell the truth from the lies any longer.

In a recent meditation. Inner Guidance sent me a dolphin. I pet the heart-sick dolphin which spoke in an old old language I didn’t understand. And when I said I don’t understand you it said in PERFECT English, “Don’t worry. Be Happy.”

Abraham-Hicks say it takes a happy road to make a happy end. I want more than words can say to take this loosing hand of a life (having inherited Unhappy and Bitter’s house) and make it win. I see now how the deck has been so stacked against me from the very beginning by Spirit having used my Inner Guidance to create mayhem in my life against my trying to be “good.”

Each day, I get up determined to “BE happy” but succumb to the futility of that when I feel Inner Guidance laughing at me. I try to hold onto appreciating the present moment like your book THE WAY OF THE WIZARD says. As it turns out, the present moment is the only place I feel safe these days. But it takes a force of Will for me to stay there. Given I’m so tired, I’m hit and miss. And there’s Inner Guidance’s quick acknowledgement that I’m creating “MORE of what I don’ want.”

God is love. I’m love and I do the best to be the love that I am. If I could do better I would. As I live at the edge of the world in the Japanese countryside, in isolation and rejection, fearing what my Inner Guidance is going to do next to me, has become more than I can bear. I pray for help.

I probably haven’t learned the lesson that my Inner Guidance thought it was teaching. I’ve learned that although I don’t have the GREAT power and ALL KNOWINGNESS It does, in the least, I’m kind and allow others to be as they are, even when it’s to my detriment.

Know that I know you’re a very busy man and that I’m grateful and appreciative of whatever feedback/encouragement/advice you have to offer.

When refugees first arrive in Australia they’re understandably relieved to be relatively safe. But significant trauma—from their past as well as the daily stresses of their lives here—can cause real disruption to their wellbeing. Top 5 scientist in residence Belinda Liddell teams up with us to discuss her research into the refugee experience and its impact on mental health and the brain.

Question:

I’m a 35 year old woman who was briefly married to someone who was both physically and mentally abusive. I also grew up in an abusive home where there were interventions by police and child services, but no real help given to me. My years before age 18 were a nightmare. Since 18 and especially since my divorce, I’ve had extensive counseling and made good progress. I’m considered attractive and make a good salary as a professional but I’m finding it very hard to meet someone despite trying singles’ events, online dating, etc. I have been trying to stay positive that I will meet someone and have the children I’ve dreamed of, but sometimes I feel sheer grief at being alone at my age, having spent most of my life since 18, alone. I also feel panic at the thought that my window of opportunity to have children is slowly but surely closing. My biological clock is ticking loudly. I do affirmations every day, but feelings of grief and fear still hit me during the week. I feel like I’ve been “left behind.” What can I do to attract a positive, healthy relationship? It often feels like life has been unfairly cruel to me. I’m really struggling with this.
Part 2
I just sent you an email but wanted to mention everything I’ve been trying for the past 3 years to help my situation: regular meditation during the week, affirmations, visualization, energy healing, hypnotherapy, journaling, reading your books and other spiritual/self-help books on a regular basis, and praying every day. I do yoga about once a week and try to spend time in nature. I also exercise 4-5 times a week and I’m always out and about visiting friends, going to social events, etc.
Nothing has helped me in my search for a life partner. I even tried doing nothing for almost a year, (letting go) and… nothing happened. Even more discouraging, I have no children and my marriage was short, yet I have friends who left long-term marriages with kids and they’ve found serious relationships while I’m still alone. Is this an energy block? What can I do? People tell me I’m a beautiful, amazing person but I still can’t find a life partner. It makes no sense to me.

In a world fixated on how we look and what we eat, it’s not surprising that body dissatisfaction represents an increasing mental health issue—and it affects all body types, genders, and ages. Whilst anorexia nervosa is still a significant condition for girls and young women, some boys can experience a condition called muscle dysmorphia.

Our memories form the basis of our sense of self. When a brain disorder damages memory, it’s not clear what remains of the person when some of those memories are missing. A neurologist from the UK explores memory and identity through the moving stories of her patients.