Fabulous quotes from MyTrendingStories? People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. People are never satisfiedIf they have a little, they want moreIf they have a lot, they want still moreOnce they have more, they wish they could be happy with little, but are incapable of making the slightest effort in that direction. Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose – and commit myself to – what is best for me. There is only one way to learnIt’s through actionEverything you need to know you have learned through your journey. What hurts us is what heals us.
Studies suggest that meditation functions on specific parts of the brain that are known to create depression, anxiety, and stress responses. For example, the medial prefrontal cortex, or the ‘me-center’ of the mind gets into overdrive during the depression and anxiety states. As a result, we experience more negative feelings about ourselves and keep sabotaging our self-esteem cluelessly. Amygdala, or the ‘fear center’ is a part of the limbic system that creates fear responses and activates the fight-or-flight system in the body, that consumes a significant portion of our energy, leaving us to feeling tired and weary for the rest of the day. During the depression and anxious states, the ‘me-center’ and the ‘fear center’ work simultaneously, causing a chain of reactions, as illustrated below.
One of the most interesting studies in the last few years, carried out at Yale University, found that mindfulness meditation decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN), the brain network responsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thoughts – a.k.a., “monkey mind.” The DMN is “on” or active when we’re not thinking about anything in particular, when our minds are just wandering from thought to thought. Since mind-wandering is typically associated with being less happy, ruminating, and worrying about the past and future, it’s the goal for many people to dial it down. Several studies have shown that meditation, through its quieting effect on the DMN, appears to do just this. And even when the mind does start to wander, because of the new connections that form, meditators are better at snapping back out of it.
Maybe I’m thinking less, or thinking of the reader less. Or I’m just feeling more, editing less. One of my poems begins, “This year I’m sick of thinking.” I am trusting what I call my cord to the heavens, my cord to the below, to muse. I’ve become simple. I’m writing sexual poems. I’m an unenlightened woman. Still, she had a critic or two: people who thought the book and its promotion were at once decadent and thirsty, people who thought that things so decadently thirsty weren’t right for the culture of poesy, people who thought the hype was on account of the party, not on the merit of the art. Naturally, these were educated people. And they were entitled to their ideas, even if they were wrong. Discover many more info at hdonline.is safe. Make it specific. Instead of Love, for example, write about “the love between my parents.” Then try making it even more specific: “the love between my parents and the silent ways it shows itself when they are eating dinner together.” Try relating it to a certain person, place, event. Love, Death, Anger, Beauty — these concepts do not occur in a vacuum. They are not grown in test tubes. They are experienced by individual people, in particular situations. And our deepest understanding of these concepts is at the human level, through the ways they touch us personally and the people around us. Creating this human connection will give your poem a stronger emotional power for your reader. And it puts your idea in a form where you can observe it carefully and discover aspects of it that have never been described before.
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.
There was a time when Hong Kong’s filmic output was only bested by Hollywood and Bollywood, and while it’s a less prodigious beast these days, the city’s film industry still once produced illustrious names like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, the Shaw Brothers, John Woo and Wong Kar-wai. Avenue of Stars pays tribute to these figures and many others who have helped burnish Hong Kong’s cinematic legacy. Selfie opportunities come with sculptures of these actors and actresses along the waterfront, plus you can check out their handprints on all the plaques. Even Hong Kong’s beloved local cartoon character McDull has a prime spot in front of the Victoria Harbour skyline. Plus, there’s themed exhibitions where you can learn more about the Hong Kong film industry’s history in more detail.
Have you noticed how meditation absorbs you into the moment? Mindful awareness comes naturally to us when we meditate, and we reach ‘flow’ state where our mind is in complete harmony with itself. A study on the effects of an eight-week mindful meditation course found that people who are regular meditation practitioners had heightened attention and concentration span. Even people who meditated for short durations showed more focus than individuals who did not meditate at all (Jha, Krompinger, Baine, 2007).