By: Janice Mawhinney/ Source: Toronto Star

Can you learn to be a happier person by repeatedly visualizing two tiny parts of your brain and imagining yourself tweaking them?

Colorado teacher and musician Neil Slade says you can.

Slade has developed brain exercises, described on NeilSlade.com aimed at lifting your spirits and calming your fears. The website has become something of an underground sensation, attracting an average of 750,000 hits a month through word of mouth alone.

Slade suggests visualizing part of the primitive brain called the amygdala, commonly described as the seat of emotional experience. The two amygdalae, each about the size and shape of an almond, are located on either side of the head, between the eye and ear, about an inch in. Studies have shown the amygdalae have a part to play in everything from memory storage to anxiety.

Slade recommends locating your amygdalae in your thoughts, and visualizing a switch on each one, with the click-back position turning on the fear feelings, and the click-forward position turning on feelings of pleasure. Picture yourself purposefully clicking the switch forward.

Another way to stimulate lighter and happier feelings is to visualize yourself tickling each amygdala with a feather.

When University of Toronto psychologist Adam Anderson heard about the exercises, he laughed. The assistant professor is also the Canada Research Chair in cognitive neuroscience, and his research focuses on what the amygdalae contribute to human emotion. Anderson believes they are one of the elements of our feelings, but human emotions result from a delicate balance of the functions of different brain parts.

“I’m not saying it can’t work, but it’s a really silly idea that you actually have to picture your amygdala,” he says. “You could teach people to visualize their left elbows and it might be just as effective.

“It’s a form of relaxation and, if it works, more power to the people who do it. But as a scientist, I see it as maybe a form of meditation or a distraction from what’s bothering you.”

Slade thinks there is more to it than that. He believes visualizing the amygdalae can create physiological changes in the brain.

“You can directly elevate your mood through behavioural change such as laughter or physical exercise, or you can elevate it through mental stimulation like these amygdala exercises.”

Marie-Louise Oosthuysen de Guitierrez, a Mexico City teacher who is studying brain research in education, says Slade’s exercises work for her. “Visualizing clicking forward stimulates the prefrontal cortex,” she says. “It helps me to control intense emotions if I feel upset or angry. I immediately feel calmer.”

Janice Dorn, a psychiatrist and brain anatomist who has studied the brain for 41 years, believes Slade’s exercises stimulate the connections between the primitive, or limbic part of the brain and the more evolved prefrontal cortex in order to develop habits of happier thought and feeling.

Many people could learn to be happy by regularly repeating thought and visualization practices, Dorn says in a telephone interview from her office in Phoenix, Ariz.

It’s a matter of reprogramming your brain to have a tendency towards happiness instead of emotional pain, and most people can learn to do it.

She says choosing happiness over emotional suffering requires first consciously rejecting negative thinking.

She recommends quieting the mind and putting a larger perspective or a positive spin on your circumstances, imagining this moment 10 years in the future. Ask yourself how you can learn something useful from the experience.

“Look for a way to turn any part of it into a positive experience: that’s how the prefrontal cortex operates,” Dorn says. “The amygdala is always talking to the prefrontal cortex. So tell it about joy instead of telling it that you are a frightened, unhappy person who deserves to suffer.”

She suggests another exercise: Try to visualize your amygdalae lit up and shining beautifully. At that moment, take yourself to a time when you were as happy as you have ever been. Send the joy you feel to your prefrontal cortex so you can remember it.

“The more you practise these things, the more you can voluntarily increase the activity of the front cortical processing system. The more you do it, the better you get at it, and the better you feel.”

Those with serious mental illness or addiction problems should seek professional help, she adds. Instinct and emotions were once thought to originate in the limbic part of the brain, the first part to develop in humans.

The prefrontal cortex, the more evolved part of the brain , was believed to control higher functions such as judgment and permanent memory.

But Anderson says no one knows for sure where feelings originate. Still, much like cognitive therapy, he believes people can use their thinking to change the way they feel and this is how Dorn’s or Slade’s suggestions could work.

“Studies show that thinking supported by the prefrontal cortex can increase or decrease limbic responses,” Anderson observes. “You can reframe an event to make it look sunnier or feel better to you.

“There is new evidence from studies measuring brain activity that the prefrontal cortex can be called upon to turn up or down the activity in the … limbic regions such as the amygdala and hypothalamus. That is, having thoughts about how to make yourself feel better or worse actually changes the responses in primitive neural circuits, resulting in a genuine change in how emotions are created.”

By: Philip Zimbardo / Source: Daily Good

The following is adapted from a commencement address Philip G. Zimbardo delivered at the University of Puget Sound earlier this month. Dr. Zimbardo, a giant in the field of social psychology, is now a professor at Palo Alto University, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and the president of the Heroic Imagination Project. In the text of his talk below, we have embedded links to research supporting his advice to graduates.

As I now complete my 55th year of teaching psychology, I am ever more grateful for the unique opportunity we teachers each have to learn from and share in the youthful exuberance of our students.

Teachers who inspire their students are everyday heroes, who should be more treasured by our society, as should parents and guardians like you here today who have sacrificed much for the well-being and success of your longtime students.

I wish for all of you graduates a happy life and one that contributes to the collective good. To help you on your way, I want to lay out seven paths to personal happiness and collective well-being based on insights from my research on evil, heroism, time, shyness, and the power of the social situation.

So, here are Dr. Z’s seven paths to a fulfilling life, both personally and communally.

1. Use time wisely and well.

Time is our most precious asset, never to be wasted, and always to be used mindfully by balancing its three energy sources: Being well-grounded in a positive past that links you to your family, identity and culture; being open to the power of the hedonic present that connects you to the energy flow of the moment; and also in being motivated to succeed to the full extent of your ability in your hope-filled future that in turn, enables you to soar to new destinations.

With that temporal balance comes a new flexibility in adapting to the many situational challenges you will face. Respect and learn from the past, yours and those of others. Selectively immerse yourself in a present-orientation that fosters human connection and compassion, while opening you to appreciate nature and art more fully. Use its pleasures as self-rewards for the hard-earned successes you have won, and will achieve by being future-focused.

Finally, although there is never enough time in our fast paced lives, we each must learn how to make time for family, make time for friends, and make time for personal fun.

2. Love a lifetime of learning.

For several decades, you have been living a rather privileged life—one filled with the entitlement of being free from many societal obligations in order to think, to learn, to reason, to question, and to create. It is now time for you to more fully appreciate that gift by continuing to be a studious student for the rest of your life. As you do so, in Life 2.0, you will add on the commitment of making your community and your nation better in every way that you can.

For me, my continual joy in being a somewhat ever-older student means that I am always filled with curiosity and wonder, asking why, discovering how, challenging ignorance, and demanding evidence for all assertions by the “true believers.”

3. Nurture your passions.

In addition to making your usual, to-do list of tasks for the day, try making a second private list of what it is that you really want in life each day. Discover what you really feel passionate about and make that an essential focus and energy source in your life.

Doing so means that passionate endeavors will become a source of personal pride, which will help guarantee that your life will never be “meaningless” to you when you look back on it in the future, as too many economically successful business people have sadly reported.

4. Transform shyness into social engagement.

Practice becoming the socially engaging host at life’s parties instead of resigning yourself to be its perpetually reluctant shy guest.

Just as we all have a choice of being a leader or a follower, we each choose whether or not to adopt a shy persona, or a more outgoing one. Shyness is a self-imposed social restriction that limits others from having access to your inner strengths and virtues because you have created that social barrier. My metaphor for shyness is that it is a self-imposed psychological prison, in which one gives up freedom of association and freedom of speech—the most prized and hard-won freedoms of any democracy. But it is our own thinking and feeling that makes it so, not any natural law of nature.

One unexpected joy of graduation and moving on to new venues is that no one there yet knows that you are shy, so you can start all over and fool them into being excited to come to your parties, where you will dance with them, like in novelist Nikos Kazantakis’ wonderful Zorba the Greek.

5. Remake your image.

It is time to trade in your familiar, comfortable habits for personally challenging, novel adventures that can liberate you from the boredom of predictability. From time to time, consider violating the expectations others have about what you are expected to do, or you have come to do routinely and mindlessly.

To rise above the mundane, it is time to take more calculated risks, to learn from your mistakes, to try harder and think wiser the next time around. The simple solution for avoiding cognitive dissonance when your decisions do not work as you had hoped is to practice saying, “I made a mistake. I’m sorry, forgive me, Let’s move on.”

6. Become a positive deviant.

One source of negative group power is the pervasive pressure of social norms over each of us to not take action in emergency situations, to not get involved, to mind our own business, to do nothing when we know we should do something.

Most of us, when we witness examples of bystander apathy, typically say, “I would have gotten involved!” However, when we are actually caught up in the social drama of the social situation, the majority of us cave into the social norm of being helpless, mindless bystanders.

Time to change that. Practice being a social deviant in small ways to experience the power others have over you. Try putting a black dot on your face for a day. When questioned about this out of character marking, simply say, “I just felt like doing it, no big deal.” If you can resist the pressures friends and family and strangers will most likely impose on you to get rid of it, you will have gained a new sense of inner power of the one over the many.

Last, and for me most important, is path seven.

7. Train yourself to become an everyday hero.

Finally, it is time to start a new social revolution by becoming a willing social change agent, prepared to change the world for the better, each day in some way, by standing up, speaking out, and taking action, to do the Right Thing when others are doing the Wrong Thing, or the No Thing. You will make a commitment to challenge all evil in whatever forms it takes, doing so with moral courage linked to righteous integrity.

Let the most valued private virtues of compassion and empathy be your guiding light, but let readiness to engage in everyday heroic action be your daily goal and your most respected civic virtue. Develop a personal code of honor that you are willing to share with others.

Heroism can be developed, can be taught, and can be trained, like other vital individual characteristics, such as assertiveness and mindfulness. Heroism is acting on behalf of others in need or in defense of a moral cause despite potential risks and costs. Thus, it requires a socio-centric orientation rather than an egocentric one. Egocentrism, like pessimism and cynicism, is an enemy of heroism.

You will be more likely to notice someone in need if you have developed the daily habit of opening yourself to other people by routinely noticing what others are doing and imagining what they are feeling. One way to do so each day, in some way, is by trying to make other people feel special, respected, and valued—by sharing with them justifiable complements, while acknowledging their unique individuality.

Also remember that when people are organized into action networks, they carry out the most effective heroism, not as solo warriors. So learn to persuade others to share your vision of what needs fixing, by assembling your buddies into a Hero Squad to challenge collectively the evils of action, such as bullying, gender violence, discrimination, corruption, fraud, slave labor and sex trafficking, while also opposing the more pervasive evils of inaction, such as ignoring the threats of the devastating consequences of global climate change, and the failure to remedy the socio-economic devastation of our Native Americans by decades of non-action or wrong actions of our government agencies.

The challenges before you are many, the opportunities endless, all awaiting your solutions, your youthful energies, and most of all, your glowing idealism ready to be infused into a new kind of smart and wise social activism that can reshape our society in the next decades.

My call to action: Just Do It—But Do It Heroically.

Go forth in peace and joy and love to remake the world for the better, bit by bit, person by person, cause by cause, and heroic action by action.

By: pjane_sholmes / Source: Bubblews

Meditation is a very effective way to get inside your head and answer questions that just boggle you. Ideas become scarce in a few places, but abundant in a few. So where are these places? I’ve decided to compile a list:

1. The Shower.

Studies show that a huge amount of endorphins are released while at the shower. This means ideas just flow the same way water flows from your head through your chest. Having that private and limited space removes all distractions and provides you with much clarity. Alienation also plays a key role.

2. The Bus Station.

When you start living in a place where you don’t have that many relatives or friends, bus stations are just perfect for meditation, Sure you won’t have the space you need, but the fact that you’re alienated from everyone else, unless you’re a social person, will make the bus station just right.

3. The Bus.

When you hop in the bus, not only are you alienated from the people in the vehicle, but the fact that the vehicle is in constant motion provides you with a feeling as if you were in a trance. Gradually changing scenery means flying images, and this can stimulate your mind the way some video games do.

4. The Church.

It’s obvious that the Church is perfect for meditation. Believing in a high power and knowing that this high power is in close contact gives you a feeling of security, as if everything’s possible.

5. The Bank.

Banks are just cozy. I sometimes go to banks just to leech free air-conditioning and get some peace. It’s amazing how banks are really silent and that seeing long lines perpetually moving puts you in a trance-like state.

6. The Seashore.

The sound of the waves crashing in is ancient music. Thanks to evolution, we’ve learned to love water. The breeze is also an added bonus.

7. The Pool.

Like being in the shower, water has a way of making us think deep. The immersion thing also lets us feel a very light embrace that’s comforting.

8. The Clinic.

When you’ve got a good hynotherapist, the clinic’s perfect.

9. The “Your Room”

Being in a place where everything’s under your control is probably the best place to meditate. Just remove all unnecessary distractions.

10. Not The Classroom.

The classroom absolutely sucks. Interacting with others is unavoidable, which just sucks up all your mental money: attention.

Source: Before It’s News

Q: Becca, I’m unhappy with my job, both in my paycheck and the drudgery of the work. Any advice on which chakra I need to balance?

BECCA: I’m often asked how to tell which chakra is out of balance, and there are many ways that can give you an answer. I like using a crystal pendulum over the Bag of chakra stoneschakra centers, using a bag of chakra stones*, or muscle testing – all ways to measure the strength of the energy field. Of course, you can also determine which chakra you may need to balance based on your feelings and experiences.

BUT, and this is a big but, I always recommend starting at the Root Chakra and working your way up to balance all seven major chakras, because it’s rare to have just one chakra blocked or too open. Each energy center affects the others. In your case, it seems you may have an imbalance in both your Root Chakra – not feeling secure with your finances, and in your Crown Chakra – not finding meaning and purpose in your work.

IMBALANCED CHAKRAS EQUAL FINANCIAL DIFFICULTY

Let’s look at how each chakra center could be affecting your job and life’s work.

First, the Root Chakra gives you a sense of security and belonging. If your first chakra is out of balance, you may have a hard time fitting into a corporate culture if you’re working for someone else, and you may have a hard time finding your niche of customers if you start your own business.

The Sacral Chakra is not only associated with the flow of creativity and sexuality, but the flow of money. So if your second chakra is out of balance, you may experience a problem with cash flow and have a hard time stretching your paycheck to cover the rent. If you’re an entrepreneur, you may have a lack of creative ideas to propel your own business forward.

The Solar Plexus Chakra is the center of your personal power. If your third chakra is out of balance, you may find it difficult to assert your leadership skills. You’ll find it hard to ask for a promotion or raise if working for a company, or to grow a strong, successful business of your own.

The Heart Chakra is associated with love and caring. If your fourth chakra is out of balance, you won’t get along as well as you could with your coworkers or clients. You’ll find it hard to relate to their needs, and therefore, your efforts will bot be sufficient or they will miss the mark.

The Throat Chakra governs whether you are able to speak your truth. Are you able to convince your potential clients or boss of the effectiveness of what you’re offering? Strengthening your fifth chakra will enable you to believe in your own message and be much more effective at selling yourself and your products.

The Third Eye Chakra is where we receive information and ideas. Do you feel inspired at work? If you have your own business, do you feel guided in how to grow your company? Strengthening your sixth chakra will open you up to new channels of abundance.

The Crown Chakra is our direct connection to Spirit. If your seventh chakra is balanced, you’ll feel that you’ve found your meaning and purpose in life and express it in your work or other activities. When you work for the greater good, success will be yours.

So, how should you balance the seven chakras?

Guided visualization may be the easiest way for most people to get in touch with their chakras, and sense where there needs to be more attention paid. I offer a Chakra Meditation from my book, The Chakra Diaries, for free download on my website. When you balance a chakra, you will notice an improvement in all areas connected to that chakra – from physical symptoms to your finances.