The future from now

When we project from modesty, it is hope.
When we project from immodesty, it is delusion.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Love After Love


The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,




and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you




all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,




the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.


Derek Walcott

organic metaphors etc

Sir Ken Robinson: Education should be like a Michelin standard, not fast food standard.






“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom” - Anais Nin

Quotes from Search Inside Yourself

"By happiness I mean here a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind. This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being. Happiness is also a way of interpreting the world, since while it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it" - Matthieu Ricard


"between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness" - Viktor Frankl

Mindful quote

"When you let go of clamoring to get more of what you don't really need, it frees up oceans of energy to pay attention to what you already have. And what you have expands naturally. " - Lynne Twist, July 2012, Mindful magazine April 2013

Ruth Ozeki: Creativity & Transformation

"There's no need to be a professional artist or writer to transform difficult situations into creative work. Poems, or journal writing, or quilts, or collages, or songs need never be made public. They can be utterly private, because in privacy is where the work is done, even for the so-called professional artists

Humans, all of us, are boundlessly creative beings, and as long as we recognize this and give ourselves permission to respond to our difficulties artistically and intuitively, not just medically or practically or rationally, then we can access this way of transforming suffering into something meaningful, which may benefit us all." - Ruth Ozeki, Nothing is Wasted, Shambhala Sun March 2013

Simple prayer on a bhutanese tour site

from: blue mountain holiday

A Simple Buddhist Prayer

By the power and the truth of this practice,
may all beings have happiness, and the causes of happiness.
May all be free from sorrow, and the causes of sorrow.
May all never be separated from the sacred happiness
which is sorrow less.
And may all live in equanimity,without too much attachment and too much aversion,
And live believing in the equality of all that lives.

May all beings be filled with joy and peace.
May all beings everywhere,
The strong and the weak,
The great and the small,
The mean and the powerful,
The short and the long,
the subtle and the gross:
May all beings everywhere,
Seen and unseen,
Dwelling far off or nearby,
Being or waiting to become:
May all be filled with lasting joy.
Let no one deceive another,
Let no one anywhere despise another,
Let no one out of anger or resentment
Wish suffering on anyone at all.
Just as a mother with her own life
Protects her child, her only child, from harm,
So within yourself let grow
A boundless love for all creatures.

Let your love flow outward through the universe,
To its height, its depth, its broad extent,
A limitless love, without hatred or enmity.
Then as you stand or walk,
Sit or lie down,As long as you are awake,
Strive for this with a one-pointed mind;
Your life will bring heaven to earth.
Sutta Nipata
Buddha’s Discourse on Good Will

TEDBlog: 4 scientific studies on how meditation can affect your heart, brain and creativity

HEALTH TEDTalks

4 scientific studies on how meditation can affect your heart, brain and creativity

Posted by: Kate Torgovnick
January 11, 2013 at 12:09 pm EST

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Many people have tried to sell me on the idea of meditating. Sometimes I try it, and have an incredible, refreshing experience. But usually, as I close my eyes and focus on my breathing, while I know that I’m supposed to be letting all thoughts go, more and more fly through my mind. Soon I have a laundry-list of “to-dos” in my head … and then my legs fall asleep. It’s all downhill from there.

Today’s TED Talk, however, might actually convince me to give meditation another shot.

“We live in an incredibly busy world. Our pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we’re always doing something,” says Andy Puddicombe at the TEDSalon London Fall 2012. “The sad fact is that we’re so distracted that we are no longer present in the world in which we live. We miss out on the things that are most important to us. The crazy thing is, people assume that’s just the way life is. But that’s not really how it has to be.”

In this talk, Puddicombe — who is as equally as turned off by incense as me — shares the fascinating story of how he become a monk, and gives a convincing argument for why it is worth it to take 10 minutes a day to refresh the mind.

“Most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it’s much different than that,” says Puddicombe. “It’s more about stepping back, seeing the thought clearly — witnessing it coming and going — without judgment, but with a relaxed, focus mind.”

To see a demonstration, with juggling, watch this surprising talk. And after the jump, four recent scientific studies that bear out that there might actually be something to this meditation thing.

For years, meditation fans have said that the practice keeps them healthy. But a new study,published in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes in November 2012,actually tested this. For the study, 201 people with coronary heart disease were asked to either (a) take a health education class promoting better diet and exercise or (b) take a class on transcendental meditation. Researchers followed up with participants for the next five years and found that those who took the meditation class had a 48% reduction in their overall risk of heart attack, stroke and death. It’s an initial study, but a promising one. [Time]

Is meditating a good way to increase creativity? Maybe, but it depends on what kind. Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands looked at the way two types of meditation — focused-attention (for example, focusing on your breath) and open-monitoring (where participants focus on the both the internal and external) — affected two types of creative thinking — the ability to generate new ideas and solutions to problems. In a study published in April 2012 in Frontiers in Cognition, they revealed that the participants who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show improved results in the two creativity tasks. However, those who practiced open-monitoring meditation did perform better at task related to coming up with new ideas. [Meditation Research]

Researchers at UCLA wanted to study the brains of people who had been meditating for years, versus those who had never meditated or who had only done it for a short period of time. They took MRI scans of 100 people — half meditators and half non-meditators. They were fascinated to find that long-time meditators showed higher levels of gyrification (a folding of the cerebral cortex that may be associated with faster information processing). In a study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in February of 2012, they shared that, the more years a person had been meditating, the more gyrification their MRIs revealed.  [UCLA Newsroom]

Distractions are everywhere. But can meditation help a person better navigate through them? A computer scientist at the University of Washington teamed up with a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona to test this. The pair recruited 45 human resources managers, and gave a third of them eight weeks of mindfulness-based meditation training, a third of them eight weeks of body relaxation training and a third of them no training at all. All the groups were given a stressful multitasking test before and after the eight weeks. In a study published in the Proceedings of Graphics Interface in May of 2012, they showed that the mindful-mediation group reported less stress as they performed the multitasking test than both of the other groups. [Washington.edu]

So, how do you feel about meditation?

Einstein's quote

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - einstein

Meaning vs Happiness

Credit to The Atlantic via link below: --- Inspiring article for aspiring boddisattvas...

There's More to Life than Being Happy

"It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness."

Kacper Pempel/Reuters

In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was ahigh school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?"

As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. "In both cases," Frankl writes, "it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them." For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

Viktor Frankl [Herwig Prammer/Reuters]

In 1991, the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club listedMan's Search for Meaning as one of the 10 most influential books in the United States. It has sold millions of copies worldwide. Now, over twenty years later, the book's ethos -- its emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self -- seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for meaning. "To the European," Frankl wrote, "it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'"

According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high -- as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word "happiness" in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy, without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. "It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts happiness."

***

This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write.

How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.

Nearly a quarter of Americans do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful.

Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.

"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers write.

What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was namedan ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.

The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.

"Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy," Baumeister told me in an interview.

Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.

Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy.

Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering."

***

Which brings us back to Frankl's life and, specifically, a decisive experience he had before he was sent to the concentration camps. It was an incident that emphasizes the difference between the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of happiness in life.

Peter Andrews/Reuters

In his early adulthood, before he and his family were taken away to the camps, Frankl had established himself as one of the leading psychiatrists in Vienna and the world. As a 16-year-old boy, for example, he struck up a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and one day sent Freud a two-page paper he had written. Freud, impressed by Frankl's talent, sent the paper to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for publication. "I hope you don't object," Freud wrote the teenager.

While he was in medical school, Frankl distinguished himself even further. Not only did heestablish suicide-prevention centers for teenagers -- a precursor to his work in the camps -- but he was also developing his signature contribution to the field of clinical psychology: logotherapy, which is meant to help people overcome depression and achieve well-being by finding their unique meaning in life. By 1941, his theories had received international attention and he was working as the chief of neurology at Vienna's Rothschild Hospital, where he risked his life and career by making false diagnoses of mentally ill patients so that they would not, per Nazi orders, be euthanized.

That was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would change his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over him, Frankl had applied for a visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl knew that it would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through the trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a newly married man with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety, where he could distinguish himself even further in his field.

As Anna S. Redsand recounts in her biography of Frankl, he was at a loss for what to do, so he set out for St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna to clear his head. Listening to the organ music, he repeatedly asked himself, "Should I leave my parents behind?... Should I say goodbye and leave them to their fate?" Where did his responsibility lie? He was looking for a "hint from heaven."

When he returned home, he found it. A piece of marble was lying on the table. His father explained that it was from the rubble of one of the nearby synagogues that the Nazis had destroyed. The marble contained the fragment of one of the Ten Commandments -- the one about honoring your father and your mother. With that, Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and forgo whatever opportunities for safety and career advancement awaited him in the United States. He decided to put aside his individual pursuits to serve his family and, later, other inmates in the camps.

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No Flowers On the Psych Ward

The wisdom that Frankl derived from his experiences there, in the middle of unimaginable human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was then: "Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself -- be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he is."

Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves -- by devoting our lives to "giving" rather than "taking" -- we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness

How a sense of sacred can help sustainable business

How a Sense of Sacred can help sustainable business

A wonderful article by Guardian.

Sustainability leaders could learn from Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who believes in a deeper human connection with nature and looking beyond purely material consumption

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• Jo Confino
• Guardian Professional, Tuesday 8 January 2013 15.10 GMT
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Business leaders tend to focus on power and profit margins but finding a connection with nature could be far more fruitful. Photograph: Cultura Creative/Alamy

There is a saying from a famous Buddhist master that the miracle of life is not being able to walk on water but on being able to walk on the Earth.

This came to mind as I read an introduction by Prince Charles in What has nature ever done for us?, Tony Juniper's new book on the importance of natural capital. Prince Charles says that a key reason we are so wantonly destroying the natural world on which our very lives depend is that "there now abounds a disturbing lack of a sense of the sacred".

"This is very important," he writes. "If nothing is sacred, most of all nature, then we create the potential for the perfect kind of storm, to which it will be virtually impossible to adapt, let alone mitigate."

He hits the nail on the head; we are not going to save ourselves and countless species from destruction with innovations in technology and business thinking alone, unless we heal our profound disconnection with Mother Earth.

I recently wrote about the importance of epiphanies in creating change and experienced one a few years ago when I was doing my masters degree in responsibility and business practice.

We spent a week at Shumacher college in Devon and one exercise was to go to a river valley on Dartmoor and, wearing a blindfold, experience nature via a sense of touch and smell. Halfway through the exercise, we were asked to switch our attention and try to feel how nature might be experiencing us in that moment.

It was only afterwards that I realised how important that change of focus actually was. How arrogant of me to have believed that it was only 'I' who could have an experience of the world around me, which was not being reciprocated.

It isn't just Shumacher college that realised that a deep connection to nature can lead to profound change. The Natural Change Project, set up by WWF, offers leaders potentially life-changing experiences of wild places. And the social enterprise, Leaders' Quest, has a similar philosophy.

Building bridges with nature

This type of experience is particularly important for business leaders and transformational change will come only if they understand the meaning of sustainability in their guts, rather than as an intellectual exercise aimed at safeguarding profits.

Money and power often create separation and what we need these leaders to feel is intimacy and that community is an inclusive concept.

I recently spent two weeks at a retreat with Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh at his Plum Village centre near Bordeaux in France. It was my third visit and each one ranks among the happiest times of my life.

The practice of mindfulness teaches me that true happiness comes from a deep appreciation of the profound simplicity of life in the present; the joy of breathing, of walking, of contemplation, of good wholesome food and company.

This naturally engenders the understanding that everything is connected in the web of life in a far more profound way than trying to get one's mind around the energy, water, food nexus.

It is in this atmosphere of quiet meditation that I rediscover a sense of peace and inspiration – like a water channel dredged of mud and debris – which allows me to return to the Guardian with renewed vigour.

The problem with modern society, however, is that it tends to ride roughshod over these simple pleasures because there is no economic value in them. Instead, we are sold a way of life that deepens our sense of isolation and loneliness.

Looking beyond material consumption

Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay as he is known, says repeatedly that we have more than enough to already be happy and that buying more material goods will only expose us to more unhappiness. How often do we really appreciate our good health or feel gratitude for those people around us? In most cases only when we are in danger of losing them.

Sitting in his modest Toadskin hut, around a crackling fire, Thay tells me that there is nothing wrong with consumption, only what we consume: "When we do walking meditation we consume. In the context of modern civilisation, to walk like that is a waste of time. You don't do anything. You don't talk or think and that is a waste of time because time is money.

"So we consume time but for us this is good consumption because we allow our body and mind to relax and rest and every step we touch the wonders of life, the refreshing and healing elements of life.

"After half an hour of walking like that you feel refreshed and restored and that does not need a lot of money, does not need anything at all ... from the parking lot to the place where they [readers] work; walk in such a way that every step can restore their peace and their joy and love for life. Teach them how to stop their thinking."

It's easy to dismiss this kind of approach as lacking relevance to the complexities and pressures of modern life and Thay is the first to admit that living the life of a monk is far easier than living in the 'real' world.

But rejecting such a simple approach often just protects us from the deeper recognition of the collective loss of our freedom and sense of connection, in exchange for power, fame, money and sexual gratification.

Juniper does a wonderful job in his latest book by showing the marvels and infinite complexity of Mother Earth and how that connects to the health and economic success of the human species. He also gives powerful arguments for why we should be valuing natural capital rather than taking nature for granted. But will this knowledge actually lead to a transformation in our behaviour?

Thay suggests that a greater intellectual knowledge of the impact of our destructive behaviour, or of nature's wonders, will not create the change that is necessary and that only a deeper connection to our hearts and a personal insight into the inter-being of everything in the universe, can offer hope to humanity.

"We are very intelligent but we have to learn how to love Mother Earth," he says. "When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

"You see the relationship between you and the sun change ... Before, you see the sun as something very far away and not having too much connection, but the connection is very, very deep. You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the earth also ... your relationship with the earth is so deep, and the earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

"If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again."

The full interview with Thich Nhat Hanh will appear on Guardian Sustainable Business next week.

Jo Confino will also be in conversation with Tony Juniper at a lunchtime lecture at the RSA this Thursday