Learning to Stay Relaxed

It is inspirational to others, who come to experience the best in themselves just by virtue of this presence of greatness, which validates their inner nobility and nurtures their hidden potential. The world acknowledges the presence of this inner power just because it is. Nelson Mandela is a great example. Coming from the ABC of caring for all South Africans and not just his own racial group brought forth a unifying spirit strong enough to disassemble, against all odds, a long-standing inhumane apartheid system. They know how alive wishing makes them feel. They know what wishing does for the soul, and they know what it does for the world. Your wishing function is not immature fantasy. It is the raw material of reality. That was the truth the little boy needed to hear, not to make him feel better, but to put him back in touch with reality. I was lucky as a child to have a father who knew how to dream and was not afraid of wishes. One of my best memories was having him tell me stories about the fairies that lived among the big tree roots on the banks of a little forest stream near his childhood home. His descriptions were so vivid and his enjoyment so contagious, to this day I still look twice whenever I pass an old root-gnarled tree. Am I sure one day I will see a fairy? Not exactly. It makes sense that mindfulness can strengthen that since a central definition of mindfulness is the tendency to attend to the present moment. The better persons performed on the memory task in the mindfulness community, the more the volume of their hippocampus increased, too. This was, according to Greenberg, especially important. Although previous research has shown that meditation on mindfulness enhances short-term memory and that meditators have larger hippocampi, this is the first research to link the two results together. The changes in interference were not transitory, in other words, but contributed to real structural differences in the brain. In a lot of ways, we know that mindfulness is effective, but we don't know anything about how it works, Greenberg says.

It's helpful to see that brain changes align with real cognitive output changes, so that the more your cognition increases, the more your hippocampus alters. In the mindfulness team, however, the hippocampus growth was minimal, not enough to be substantially different from the creative writing groups. Greenberg suggests this may be explained by how brief the training was because, after eight weeks rather than four, prior research recorded hippocampus development. While this study involved healthy 18 to 50-year-olds, Greenberg speculates that mindfulness could be effective in treating individuals with memory disorders and smaller hippocampi at the same time, such as older adults or individuals with depression, past childhood trauma, or stress disorder. STEP 8: QUALITY Decide on the quality that you intend to serve in others, and be aware that what you serve in others is exactly what you will bring out in yourself. You pull to yourself that which you serve. It is impossible to serve two masters. You cannot become strong by catering to human weakness. You become strong by supporting strength. You become dynamic when you support the aliveness of others. You become great when you support the greatness of others. You become beautiful when you support the beauty of life. If you are truly coming from the heart, you do not have to worry about success. But my father taught me how to enjoy the possibility of fairies. He taught me how to enjoy the idea of things that aren't there. As a little girl I played with a much younger child in her backyard. I was inspired by some little toadstools to tell her all I knew about fairies and how they might come out at night to perch on these little seats in the moonlight. She was spellbound, until her mother abruptly broke it up by telling me to stop filling her daughter's head with such nonsense. She was raising her child to spurn all that make-believe stuff.

I could not have put it in words back then, but I definitely understood that her mother's intent was to raise a rational, realistic child who would never be fooled by anyone. But who's a fool for wishing? Fantasy, imagination, and wishing are not about ignoring reality; It's the what-if? And, since short-term memory is also essential for other cognitive functions, including executive functioning and problem solving, he believes his research could help explain why mindfulness is good for our cognitive health (according to other research). Greenberg says that sometimes we all forget things, where we left items or why we went into a room, so minimizing intervention might really be beneficial to everyone. A big part of our lives is proactive intervention and a key cause for forgetting, he says. Some psychologists went as far as to say, hey, we'd have infinite working memory power without constructive intervention. The findings definitely sound positive for someone who regularly loses stuff and has a parent who died from the dementia-related disease. You can save your precious time in the fruitless quest for missing keys with a little meditation. It has been clinically established that meditation improves concentration and memory. To improve your memory, you don't have to use any single meditation. The use of some meditation, such as meditation on mindfulness, helps you to concentrate your mind. You are much more able to solidify ideas in your short-term memory as you are able to concentrate more. The world will love you, be loyal to you, support you, and forgive you all kinds of mistakes. To demonstrate, we can look at an exemplar of greatness. Mother Teresa (cal. She was a little 90-pound woman who spent no money on advertisement, market strategies, or promotion and had no sales crew, no Madison Avenue image makers, and no speechwriters. Yet all she had to do was wiggle her little finger and she raised multimillions. Throngs followed her.

People would travel thousands of miles, stand in the sun and the rain on tired and aching feet for hours, to catch a glimpse of her. What was her magic? Was it that she was a celebrity? Was it that she was famous? When my father told me about fairyland, on the surface he was technically telling me stories about little creatures that did not exist. But the wonderful, eminently practical thing he was teaching me was to appreciate the possibilities. If I could open my mind to the possibility of fairies, what possibilities in myself might I open my mind to? In this way, I was encouraged to imagine what could be, to think of more than meets the eye. I should add here that although my father loved the idea of fairies and ghosts, he also knew how to run his own business, make a payroll, and plan for college funds - as should we all. The thing to remember is that being a responsible adult does not mean you have to get rid of wishful thinking. The paradox of modern culture is our one-sided worship of practicality, coupled with our secret, deep dependency on the creative minds of a few good dreamers. Nobody would have their dream automobile or house were it not for the wishes and daydreams of our inventors and architects. It is just as true that your dreams coming true depends on your internal inventor, your own inner architect of possibility. A caution that so many of my clients have heard from their parents is that dreaming is all very nice, but sooner or later you have to realize that real life is not like that. Practicing meditation will also assist you in improving your short-term memory. Get started today . You can be shocked to begin seeing the results, and you don't need to practice meditation for that long. One scientific study explored how meditation was responded to by a group of students. The students dramatically improved their GRE scores (a standardized test offered to students seeking to get into graduate school) with just two weeks of meditation practice (10 minutes a day, plus four 45-minute classes a week). With just two weeks of meditation practice

In fact, some research indicates that your attention span and memory can be improved by as little as four days of meditation. Frequently practice : It is ideal for practicing every day. Doing so would allow you to improve your memory by working. It can also be helpful to spread it out during the day, such as meditating for fifteen minutes in the morning, ten minutes at lunch, and 10 minutes at night. That is just the ABC of it all. Rather, people hoped for a glimpse of her, or a few moments in her presence, in order to experience her ABC. What they wanted to experience was her presence. No advertising, marketing, image making--yet many articles have been written about her. She had a following of fans worldwide. She was a winner of the Nobel Prize and internationally acclaimed as one of the greats of our time. Mother Teresa's greatness and power arose because she addressed the most noble qualities within human nature--unconditional love and nonjudgmental compassion. She exhibited the heart of all hearts, even though she was small, wizened, hunched over, and with no money or possessions of her own. There was a long waiting list to join her. As a matter of fact, people had to go through an eight-year period of trial, tests, and hard work in service to see if they even qualified to join her organization. My question is: whose real life is not like that? If your parents have stripped their lives barren of dreams and think that being realistic means having no imagination, that does not have to be the recipe for your life. It probably wasn't even a very good recipe for their lives, as you can see if you closely examine how much success anyone with this attitude actually has. Please give this some thought. Did shutting the door on wishful possibilities get them what they wanted? When parents invoke the name of reality to discourage their children's hopes, it's because they feel hopeless - not because real life is hopeless.