Mindfulness meditation and yoga and blogs? If you’re like most people, the chances are that you’re so deeply caught up in the rat race that you don’t spare enough time to pause and take notice of all the beauty around you. But imagine how fulfilling life would be if we all appreciated our beauty as well as that of others and the world as a whole. Won’t your days be supercharged when you wake up each morning and the first thing that hit your eyes is a motivational aesthetic quote on your wall?
Research indicates that the effects of meditation can be similar to antidepressant drugs. Pregnant women and new mothers, who are at risk of developing depressive disorders due to sudden hormonal flushes in the body, benefitted a lot when they practiced meditation and yoga training. The evidence clearly indicates that besides reducing mood fluctuations in new moms, meditation also helped them in developing a secure connection with the newborn (Dhillon, Sparks, and Duartes, 2017). From generalized anxiety disorders to phobia, panic disorders, obsession, and bipolar mood swings, daily meditation practice helps in regulating the unreasonable emotional ups and downs. Methods like Vipassana reduces the density of grey matter in brain areas that associate stress and anxiety and brings in overall emotional stability.
Recognize any menaces: These are external circumstances and situations that are bothering you, or that might occur and block you from achieving your goals or taking hold of them. Evaluate and prioritize: Lastly, as always, with development ventures, and anything that resembles strategic reasoning, it is useful to interpret your analysis. Challenge yourself: Attempt to highlight one, or at most two, things from any of the strengths, vulnerabilities, possibilities, and menaces you think will be most critical in delivering (or stopping you from achieving) your goal. Those fields will be your priorities; you will need to take action.
I’m thinking about how desire is at the center of what it is to be alive and how desire is the root of all suffering. Love and poetry and romance are, like, the only place of enjoyment for me. When feminists like Shulamith Firestone criticize romantic love, namely heterosexual coupling, as a site of oppression, I agree. But sometimes it also feels like romantic love is the only site of release, or even a site of resistance, under capitalism. Maybe I feel this especially as a sex worker, when you’re selling a sense of love or romance for work, the romance “off work” can feel like a space of reclaiming. Yet the new poems are coming so easily, I don’t know if I can trust them. This didn’t go without controversy. Some took issue with her feelings about her own experience, something to the effect of it being unethical of her to exploit her own exploitation. She was even accused of being a “fake” sex worker. Her accusers were not sex workers, so it’s anyone’s guess how they might know enough to tell a fugazzi from a genuine article, but this is neither here nor there. A few porn stars bowed up to troll for White, and that was the last of people saying she was a fake. Read a lot more information at temporary tummy tuck tattoos. Similes are a type of figurative language that compare an object, person, or event to something else. They help readers to better understand the characteristics of something by showing a relationship between the two things. Similes use the words “like” or “as” in the comparison, such as “The dog ran as fast as a race car.” Or “His words cut through my heart like a knife.”
There’s a quote in an interview you did about the idea of poetry being inherently queer. Intuitively, that makes a lot of sense. Well, you can’t talk about poetry without talking about Sappho. Are your shorter poems inspired by Sapphic fragments? Completely. Poetry is open to the innumerable differences of the reader, and the way it falls in the reader’s ears, there is that flirtation there, and that act of invitation, which is to me inherently queer. I can’t help but think of poetry in the tradition of Sappho—how can she not be a part of any love poem that you’re writing? Then I was wondering if every poem was a love poem. That also might just be me unable to write anything other than love poems because of my belief in romance that I can’t undo in myself, which I want to play with and intellectualize. What does love look like to you, intellectually? For me, being in love is simply having someone who is a comrade, sharing the same values, sharing a same sense of beauty, sharing a same sort of joie de vivre or love of art, being aligned. That’s what being in love is.
St John’s Cathedral, this cathedral is the oldest Anglican church in Hong Kong. It sits on Government Hill, and overlooks the financial district. Constructed in an English Gothic architectural style in the shape of a cross, it houses the seat of the Archbishop of Hong Kong. St John’s Cathedral has quite an unusual history – it was briefly turned into a club during the Japanese occupation of WW2, and many of its stained glass windows were removed. If you’re in Hong Kong at Christmas, the midnight service is highly popular. Queue up from 9pm to be sure of a seat.
How Does it Help with Stress? Many researchers today argue that the effect of meditation on stress might be overrated. While there is evidence that supports a lack of commitment and consistency in daily meditation, we haven’t yet reached the point where we can question the effectiveness of meditation and mindfulness for promoting mental peace and happiness. In the 1970s, Herbert Benson, a physician at the Harvard Medical Institute, introduced a meditative practice that he called ‘The Relaxation Response.’ Benson’s studies on stress and its impacts revealed that the adrenaline rush that sudden adversities create could suppress the nervous system and blood circulation, increasing the chances of cardiac arrests, depression, manic psychosis, and even cancer.