Below flash mob was organised by Kim Mac Gregor for her grassroots movement I believe she's amazing in honor of her friend Erika who lost her battle against cancer.
I dedicate this post to my best friend Sabine whom I've known for a long time. And I think she's amazing because:
She is a true and great friend who knows what to say when and when to shut up and just hug me.
She has moved mountains and chosen the road less travelled to live life HER way.
She is an amazing painter who dreams her paintings.
She went from city life to running a little farm together with her partner.
She knows how to talk to dogs - and people.
She takes in lost animals, lots of them...
She conquers blows and comes out stronger.
She finds a reason in things that happen.
She stayed my friend even when we had a crush on the same boy.
She is beautiful.
She easily found her way in a foreign country.
She stood up to her parents.
She was such a great support to her brother in the midst of family drama.
She comes back to the real world from time to time to see me.
She lets me visit for a few days and all we do is walk and talk.
She appreciates small things.
She is not materialistic.
She is a free soul and he world is a better place because she's in it.
Yesterday I went to a speech by author, entrepreneur, agent of change, inventor of words Seth Godin in Antwerp (Belgium).
I have read a few of his books and follow his pondering via his blog and I like his train of thought.
Yesterday he said that there is no scarcity of choice, that we have over-branded ourselves (read my earlier blog post on Choices are luxuries, or are they?).
Today it is much harder to stand out because there are already so many other products/services out there to choose from.
His mantra is: ideas that spread, win. That if you want to be successful, you need not just create a product or service, you need to create a culture, a tribe.
You need to take people some place they want to go. People don't follow boring.
How do I do that, you may ask. It's actually pretty simple. It begins with taking a first small step in that direction: Make a difference by choosing to make a difference.
Because people are interchangeable, we live in a world of overproduction and everyone has a degree. Competence is no longer a scarce commodity.
Seth says 'If you can write it down, I can find it cheaper'. If your job description overlaps with the possibility to automate your work, you are doomed.
So you need to stand out. You need to be original, better, unwritedownable. You need to be or create a Purple Cow.
One thing you SHOULD NOT do is bowl. Because at bowling, everyone is more or less good. Don't choose something where the best is perfect, where everyone does or is able to do well. Do not choose an activity where the best possible score is perfect.
Seth is no fan of current education and Sir Ken Robinson joins him in that in saying that Schools kill Creativity. We have learned to be obedient, to follow the rules.
For Seth, obedience belongs in the dog training school.
The HOW you do this is not important. What's important is that you do it. That you SHIP.
You cannot blame the system anymore because in our day and age, you have all the possibilities in your hands. If you have a laptop, you can do it.
What stops us from doing it? What stops us from shipping?
As Seth puts it: "You don’t need to be more creative. All of you are actually too creative. What you need is a quieter lizard brain.”
We have inherited this primal fear from our ancestors. Back when we were animals, we needed to be afraid because it meant survival. Nowadays, the most afraid will be punished the most.
So where do you put the fear?
“The genius part is getting the lizard brain to shut up long enough to overcome the resistance.”
Watch this video on shipping, the lizard brain and the resistance.
Seth ended his speech by giving some interesting advice for parents and the 2 thing they need to teach their children.
Teach them to solve interesting problems (he suggested asking them how they would solve the debt crisis of Greece)
Lance from Jungle Of Life should be the ambassador of Bodacious-ville. He is bold and audacious and with his blog unites people from all over the world through his thoughts and projects.
This time he got me hooked as well to participate in the Car dancing project, a micro-movement organized by The Levity Project.
Do you ever dance in your car? Swing along with the music? And then you stop at a red light and suddenly stop moving because you become conscious of the people in the cars next to you?
Well, the car dancing movement was organized as a celebration. And even though it felt uncomfortable, silly and even stupid when I was recording it, after a few takes it was still silly but became less stupid and just simple fun.
For my boys this was just 'business as usual' as they don't really know yet what it feels like to be uncomfortable, fenced in by some society rules (who made those up anyway?).
When I showed them the final result with all the other people car dancing though, they thought that was pretty cool :-)
Watching the result below I feel honored and proud to have been a part of it. And you can see that all the participants had fun stepping out of their comfort zone.
So what did you recently do to step out of your comfort zone?
Bored with his ad agency gig and the uninspiring work he was producing, Ji Lee – now Creative Director of Google Creative Lab – decided to take matters into his own hands in 2002.
The result was the ad-spoofing Bubble Project, in which Lee placed blank speech bubbles on ads around New York City.
The masses responded and the project went viral, gaining Lee recognition and ultimately forwarding his professional career.
Here, Lee talks about how he created, financed, and marketed the project single-handedly.
Seth Godin, Purple Cow guru named 'America's greatest Marketer' (by American Way magazine), writes a very atypical blog.
He writes a post almost every day. And from reading them you can just see him biking to work every morning (I don't know him well enough to know whether he does this or not but he seems that kind of guy to me) thinking about something someone said last night, or about the funny kid he sees in the street or the ad he saw on tv last night.
Sometimes his posts are just that, thoughts. Or thought provoking statements. Or questions.
Sometimes I don't get it.
Sometimes I do - and I have one of those A-ha moments (no, not the Norwegian band!). And I think 'shoot, I wish everybody else got this too'.
Anyhoo, he just published a free e-book about What matters Now - which should be really all we care about anyway.
It's 80 pages of his tribe writing about topics ranging from Generosity over Strengths and Consequence to Neoteny.
And if you don't know what any of these mean, or just want to know what some influential people have to say about what matters NOW, go get that free e-book.
I am sure you know someone who has or has had cancer. Maybe that person was a family member, maybe a friend. Maybe that person is no longer with us, or maybe that person is fighting a daily, difficult battle.
I've had my share of such people. Most of them are gone now. Thinking about them keeps them alive. Doing something to support the search for a cure gives their death a purpose.
The Susan G. Komen foundation is the leading breast cancer movement in the world, working together with people from all reaches of the world, in search of a cure.
This is the collective effort of over 150 writers from throughout the world. Writers uniting together in a race for the cure.
Every one of these writers has contributed a favorite article to this e-book, creating a wonderful collection of stories. Stories of inspiration, personal growth, fitness, food, humor, and more.
I am proud to be one of them.
Please visit the Susan G. Komen Blog-4-Cause website to learn how you can support the mission to end breast cancer. In addition, you'll find information on how to recieve this Blog-4-Cause E-book, our gift to you. A bonus e-book, from author and life coach Tim Brownson, is included as well.
There is much hope in a future filled with possibility. Together, we all can make a difference!
I have just come across this original project by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. The Beckoning of Lovely is an expanding film project involving hundreds of strangers from around the world. Amy Krouse Rosenthal initiated the project last fall by filming a spontaneous public gathering on 8/08/08 at "The Bean" in Millennium Park. The event was a beautiful testament to the power of community, cooperation, and hope amongst strangers in the name of all things lovely. The project has since evolved into the making of a full-length feature film.
One year later
She is also a children's book author. And that speaks to me greatly at the moment. I love such versatile and creative people.
Lawyers. Accountants. Computer programmers. That's what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of "left brain" dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which "right brain" qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate. That's the argument at the center of this provocative and original book, which uses the two sides of our brains as a metaphor for understanding the contours of our times.
Here’s a simple mind map of the book for those of you who want a brief overview.
Today I am sharing an article from Marelisa Fabrega with you. Her Abundance Blog is very inspiring and I recommend you check it out.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained brain scientist who suffered a stroke in 1996–at the age of 37–in the left hemisphere of her brain. She spoke of her experience at the 2008 TED Conference and wrote a memoir titled “My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey”.
Dr. Taylor was named one of Time Magazine’s Most Influential People in 2008.
In both the TED.com talk and the book she describes what the four hours felt like during which she was having the stroke and she watched her brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process information, and what life was like afterward. In addition, Dr. Taylor explains her discovery that through the right hemisphere of the brain, the part of her brain that was untouched by the stroke, inner peace is just a thought away.
In case you’re wondering, that is a real human brain Dr. Taylor is holding in the image above. She used it as a “prop” during her Ted.com Talk. You can find out a lot more about this remarkable woman and her fascinating experience below.
The Human Brain: Each Hemisphere Has Its Own Personality
Dr. Taylor explains in her TED.com talk that if you’ve ever seen a human brain, it’s obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from each other; that is, the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another.
If you’re familiar with computers, the right brain hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while the left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. Because they process information differently, each of our brain hemispheres thinks about different things, they care about different things, and, Taylor argues, they even have very different personalities. The two hemispheres do communicate with each other through the corpus callosum but, other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate.
Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment; it’s all about right here, right now. It thinks in pictures and abstractions and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our body. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into a collage of what this present moment looks like, smells like, tastes like, sound like, and feels like.
Dr. Taylor explains that we are energy beings connected to the energy all around us through the consciousness of our right brain hemispheres.
Our left hemisphere is a very different place. It thinks linearly and methodically. It’s all about the past and about the future. It’s designed to take that collage of the present moment and pick out detail after detail; it then categorizes and organizes all of that information, associates it with everything in the past we’ve ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities.
The left side of our brain thinks in language. It’s the internal brain chatter that connects us to the external world. It’s the calculating intelligence that reminds us when we have to do the laundry and pick up bananas on the way home. And most importantly, it’s the voice that tells each of us: “I am”. And as soon it says that, each of us becomes separate from the energy all around us and separate from everyone else. That’s the portion of the brain that Taylor lost on the morning of her stroke.
Some of the Things Taylor Experienced While Having Her Stroke
This information about some of the things Dr. Taylor experienced as she was having her stroke was taken from her Ted.com Talk:
She looked down at her arm and she realized she could no longer define the boundaries of her body. She could not define where she began and where she ended. The atoms and the molecules in her arm blended with the molecules and atoms in the wall. And all she could detect was energy.
Her brain chatter went totally silent. It was as if someone had taken a remote control and pushed the mute button. She found herself inside a silent mind.
Then she was captivated by the magnificence of the energy around her.
Because she could no longer feel the boundaries of her body, she felt enormous and expansive. She felt as one with all the energy surrounding her. And it was beautiful. It was Nirvana. Any stress related to her job was gone. Any stressors from the outside world were gone, and she felt a sense of complete peacefulness. She lost 37 years of emotional baggage.
She was lost in an existence of love and expansiveness, of color and energy. She adds the following: “In the wisdom of my dementia, I understood that this body was, by the magnificence of its design, a precious and fragile gift. It was clear to me that it functioned like a portal through which the energy of who I am can manifest here. I wondered how I could have spent so many years in this construct of life and never realize I was just visiting.”
Life in La-la Land
Taylor explains that when the cells in her left brain became nonfunctional because they were swimming in a pool of blood, they lost their ability to inhibit the cells in her right hemisphere.
In her right brain, she shifted into the consciousness of the present moment. She had no memories of her past and no perception of the future, but was instead in a “right here, right now, the present moment is all there is” awareness. She calls this experience being in La-la land, and adds that everything was an explosion of magnificent stimulation and she felt complete euphoria.
Describing this state, she sounds like a mystic. “All details of my life and language were gone. Language is a kind of code, and things were no longer reduced to coding. I was looking at the big picture and could see how everything is related. Everything is in motion, connected in a dance of grace. The brain is what imposes boundaries, and boundaries convey a perception of separation, but that’s a delusion. Everything is one . . . I got to sit in the space of silence gurus meditate toward for years.” (Source).
However, in many crucial ways, for a long time after having her stroke she was like an infant. She couldn’t talk, she had forgotten how to walk, and math and reading were gone. Someone gave her the pieces of a baby’s puzzle and she stared at them without comprehension, perplexed.
She found that in order to learn anything she had to take information from the last moment and apply it to the present moment. When her left hemisphere was completely nonfunctional early on, it was impossible for her to learn.
For example, she eventually became physically capable of putting on her socks and shoes, but she couldn’t understand why she had to put the socks on before the shoes. To her they were simply unrelated actions and she did not have the cognitive ability to figure out the appropriate sequencing of the events.
Over time she regained the ability to weave moments back together to create an expanse of time, and with this ability came the ability to learn methodically again. She adds that life in La-la land will always be just a thought away for her, but she’s grateful for the ability to think with linearity once again.
More of Jill Bolte Taylor’s Insights
Here are some more of Dr. Taylor’s insights:
I was shifted into the power and the beauty of what is, right here right now, that we’re often distracted from because the left hemisphere is so tuned in to so many details.
“I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”
“We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now we are brothers and sisters, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment, we are whole, we are perfect, and we are beautiful.”
We have this tiny little group of cells in our left hemisphere that says “I am”, and as soon as it does that I become a separate individual, solid, separate from everyone else. (Source).
We’re not in a balanced brain society, we’re spending most of our time in our left hemisphere, which creates stress. (Source).
The knowledge that we are connected to everything else is always there, people are just not privy to it because the left brain is so dominant. (Source).
Dr. Taylor describes that she was floating from isolated moment to isolated moment because her left hemisphere-which is the one that makes connections between moments-was no longer working; therefore, A no longer had any relationship with B. The result was that she was totally focused in the present moment.
The 90 Second Rule
This is the 90 second rule from the book “My Stroke of Insight”: When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.
That is, something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body it takes less than 90 seconds.
This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again.
How Can We Exercise Our Right Hemispheric Circuitry?
(Image from here.) Dr. Taylor concluded her TED.com Talk by saying the following: “Right here, right now I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are, I am, the life force power of the universe. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you . . . The more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.”
Dr. Taylor made the decision to maintain the dominance of the right brain in areas it performs better than the left brain. She consciously avoids certain places in the mind where impatience, worry, criticism or unkindness live. Anytime her awareness drifts there, she consciously steps over to her now-familiar right side, where compassion and a subjective sense of time make things very different.
She explains that the blue sky is always there, and she sees the blue sky as the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the clouds, and the clouds represent brain chatter. The clouds come in and they block the view of the blue sky, even though the blue sky is always there.
The brain chatter comes on line and then it’s organizing and categorizing and dramatizing all of our lives in the external world. But when you quiet down those thoughts you get rid of the clouds; you unveil what’s always been there – which is the existence of the right hemisphere and that peacefulness and that awareness that everything is one and everything is connected. That is the experience of euphoria.
Dr. Taylor adds that she’s very clear that her brain chatter is a tiny group of cells that perform a specific function and that she has a say on whether or not that circuitry runs. All she has to do is make the decision that in this moment, she’s not going to have those thoughts; she’s not going to run that particular circuitry. She focuses her mind on the bigger picture and thinks about other things and blocks the clouds from being there. (Metaphor of the blue sky and the clouds taken from here).
In addition, she sets aside a day every week for her authentic self–a silent day of right-brain consciousness. She nourishes her right brain hemisphere with music, guitar-playing, and water-skiing. She also combines her science-training with her art by creating anatomically correct stained glass brains which she sells as fine art.
Conclusion
When Dr. Taylor was having her experience of Nirvana, was she delusional as a result of having a stroke, as some have argued? Or, as she maintains, was she touching real perceptions of an unexplored facet of reality, one that is wired into all of our brains, should we only learn to reach it?
I, for one, choose to believe that we can all reach this state of peacefulness by balancing our brain and becoming more in touch with our right brain hemisphere. How about you?
You can watch Dr. Taylor’s Ted.com Talk below:
Editor’s Note: I would like to thank Hilary Melton-Butcher who writes over at “Positive Letters” for directing me to Dr. Taylor’s Ted.com talk, I found it truly mesmerizing. (I found all of the information for this post on the internet, including articles published in major newspapers and interviews with Dr. Taylor conducted by Oprah and others.)
This Carnegie Mellon speech of his was a response to that. Having only a few months left to live, he had to make sure that his time was spent in a effective way. So here he talks about Time Management.
Do you have a busy job? Children? Emails to read? Errands to run? Do you have a messy desk full of paperwork? Do you have To do lists? Are the effective? Do you have fun? Do you procrastinate? Randy addresses all these issues in a very enthralling way.
Believe me, there is a lot in it, so take some time and enjoy.
Change your mind, change your brain and find happiness.
If happiness is an inner state, influenced by external conditions but not dependent on them, how can we achieve it?
Let Mathieu Ricard, Buddhist monk and biologist , show you how your mind has the power to make a huge difference in the quality of your life. Meditation improves your health, your attention, your life expectancy, your attention capability and so on. He has a unique way of presenting things with his unassuming humor.
It is a long video, but well worth your time. So grab a coffee and listen while looking at amazing photos he took in the Himalayas.
Social entrepreneur Ann Cotton, Founder and Executive Director of CAMFED International, tells Global X what happened when she ran into a young woman in Zambia, a 26-year old orphan who was responsible for her three siblings: "She was fearful she was HIV positive. She asked me to go with her to the clinic."
Listen to her as she also talks about the world in 2017, a world "where every human being will be born from a well-educated woman."
I really do believe I was put on the planet to help people have creative confidence. I don't have 27 agendas. I'm not the sustainability guy, or the developing-world guy. My contribution is to teach as many people as I can to use both sides of their brain, so that for every problem, every decision in their lives, they consider creative as well as analytical solutions.
-- David Kelley, founder of IDEO
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Until about a year ago, David Kelley was on a roll. He had received a National Design Award, been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, held an endowed chair at the Stanford School of Engineering, and even won the Sir Misha Black Medal for his "distinguished contribution to design education." He also had a loving wife, a daughter to whom he was devoted, and a vast circle of friends that included Apple's Steve Jobs and actor Robin Williams. Then, one morning, he noticed a lump on his neck. David Kelley, the founder of IDEO, had cancer. Read the inspiring account of David's journey into design thinking.
He is able to prove that having too many choices - something we consider being positive - can work in our disadvantage and make us unhappy.
I always considered choice to be a luxury, but Gilbert got me thinking... I find it deviously and devilishly interesting to see how humans can be tested into traps they create themselves. I know myself and I would have pondered and worried about having picked the right picture.
Thus, sometimes, not having a choice actually makes you happier - in the long run anyway.
"The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another... some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for (sic, printed quote says "from") the horror of our own injustice."
One of my readers, Lance at The Jungle of Life, pointed me to the video below and made me discover the very special person that is Nick Vujicic. Nick, a now 26 year old Australian, was born without arms and legs. He has turned around what looked likely to become a sad and difficult life and is touring the world to inspire and motivate people from all walks of life.
“People say to me, ‘How can you smile?’” he says. “Then they realize ‘there’s got to be something more to life than meets the eye if a guy without arms and legs is living a fuller life than I am.’”
He challenges the way people see themselves. He asks them to change their perspective: on life, on themselves, on others. Circumstances are just that, circumstances. One should look beyond them. Obstacles are not problems but opportunities to grow. Attitude is the most powerful tool we have. Happiness does not come from temporary things. Because the happiness that does is just that, temporary.
Are you motivated right now? Why? Why not?
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