New mothers who seemed to take more pleasure and joy in their role as parent — selecting from a list of adjectives more positive words like “ideal” to describe their infants, and words such as “proud” and “blessed” to describe their experience of parenthood — saw greater growth in their emotion-processing regions.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2010/10/21/the-mommy-brain-is-bigger-how-love-grows-a-new-mothers-brain/#ixzz16VzWYVQW
We’ve all heard about the importance of mother-baby bonding. When that doesn’t happen because a mother is battling postpartum depression, it’s not only mom who suffers; baby does too. Research has shown that babies who are neglected or cared for by depressed mothers may experience developmental delays.
This according to a recent article from a new version of TIME, Heartland. Maybe it was the pastel therapy themed website, or maybe the shock that the article announced an alarming increase in Post-Natal Depression. And if you haven’t heard about it before, stop reading right now and begin reading again.
It’s never a good idea to go back to the start, just as it is always bad to find blame in the past, when the only way we can get rid of those spectacular failures that light up our past, is in the present. And just as the present is the only time to become, the past will for ever remain a perspective, the life that we live should be living from the very best point of view we can.
If we can’t, and the world we inhabit become a place where only the strong can thrive, and only the fittest survive, then that in itself is a reason to be depressed. If there is by chance any hope that we might be better than some, and every once and again we get surprised by a kiss of luck, it would make perfect sense why we sometime, but lately more often than not need a kiss of life with CPR, nothing else.
Perhaps it is time that we stop trying to make everything so hard, when nature does everything so smart. Since nature has had more than a lifetime to figure it out, the ego we commonly share has barely had the time of his life as it is. Perhaps it is time that we stop, and find that the blueprint of man in kind is uniquely designed for success. That nature provide us with all we can sense, and that it is up to us to usef it.
Perhaps it is time that we see that survival is no longer an option, and the way to live life is to thrive and have fun. The choice to survive has been taken from us and belong to the nature of life.
That live is a gift we share with a myriad of being, and all of us are as uniquely diverse as any of the species we’re part of, and since time immemorial gave the power of choice to creation and made fate a fait accompli, the meaning we look for is as much a reason to life as a journey through life.
I was also in search of reason once, and on my journey I looked at the meaning of choice. What I found was that nothing makes sense if we look for meaning in life, and the reason to live can be found in the present we share..
The whole idea of TIME and Heartland together in a website just doesn’t make sense, don’t you think?
When everything goes right, the universe is at harmony with itself, and all is well. For some it borders on bizarre the way things are, and how reality conspire to everything being right, or how it frustrates you if everything goes wrong. Or maybe like me you get frustrated for days about how you should be doing things if you could, and then find that you did everything right all along?
I want to stop
No one can explain why we are all different,
or why our choices in life lead us along different paths.
We cannot hold ourselves blameless for the choices made by others,
nor can we exclude that these choices do not affect or include us.
No one is immune from the human condition,
nor the the result of the collective decisions we make.
It is worthy to note that most people have a pretty accurate idea of the problems they premise in life, but totally screw up the cause which in turn cloud any se for reason, and make solutions nothing more than a afterthought.
What a brilliant mix!
It is inauspicious to observe the first line as yin, but it is old, and in change. It represents the beginning, and is open to all change. The change is in strength, as in the 5 line, that remains yang. The topmost line of importance is a changing yin as is its bottom most important changing line 1. The changing yin become auspicious in both instances. The strength of these changes are evident in both the 5 line and 2 line in unyielding yang. The open yin in 4 is auspicious, and show the open conduit that give entry to heaven.
What begins as a trigram of water above wind, the source, become wind above heaven, the taming power of the small.
I recently announced that I was losing it. Funny that, when in fact it happened when I was in grade 8. It was a time of social pressure and change, friends to make and futures to explore, and I feared every minute of it. My own experience up to then had been happily sheltered, and my experience with making friends had been limited to choices I could bear.
Looking back at it now is serendipitous, but back then it was a time of confusion and trepidation, and the fact that I had very poor social skills and a low emotional IQ made it difficult for me to interact with people. Having big ears did not help and soon earned me a number of nicknames that combined with my inability to make sense of the emotional playing field of High School popularity, and the ideal target for other people to make fun of me.
After a few months in High School I had managed to keep out of the spotlight of attention and power hungry teenagers, and thanks to the fact that my grade 7 group of friends had similar difficulties in being accepted to the more popular groups, I found a fragile safety in the protection of their company. When all the students were together on the playing field for breaks, our huddle kept us from being easy targets, but they were powerless in the face of a direct challenge. When I was called out by one of the popular groups’ leaders they could do nothing but stand and watch my humiliation as the heckler continued to make fun of me.
Unable to provide any explanation for the size of my ears, and trying to ignore the hurtful shame that was the brunt of his joke, all I could do was to hide my mind from the reality of what was happening. I hardly noticed how, encouraged by his group of supporters, the confrontation had changed from humiliation to confrontation, and my mind immediately withdrew against the emotional onslaught of a crowd swept in pack mentality. What had started as an exercise in abusing power of popularity, had turned a group of teenagers trying to fit in into an angry mob, hungry for blood.
As more and more people started pushing me around, my mind withdrew to a corner of safety, my consciousness hiding away from the reality of my abuse. I fell. Someone kicked me, and howling for blood, someone else landed a jolting hit to my head. With a primitive roar the rest of the pack joined in, and my body became the target of every group member that felt they had something to prove. I couldn’t believe what was happening! Through the haze of pain the only thing I could think of was how every single one of them would someday have to answer for the sin.
I felt like Abel once, and wondered if he hardly felt the pain like me, crying at the blasphemy of what was taking place. And then, through the corner of my eye I noticed that one of my friends had joined the angry mob. It felt as if someone had ripped my heart from my chest. As if everything that I believed in, friendship, trust, the goodness of mankind, God and all the angels had all forsaken me.
When it eventually stopped I was laying on the ground, covered in dust, bleeding and broken. I told the teacher that was trying to help me that I was fine and rolled myself up in the dirt, humiliated and hurt, shivering as my physical injury and pain was swept away by the cold and vast emptiness inside of me.
I don’t remember much of the rest of my time at school. Not that day, or much of any other day. I completely lost myself in the pursuit of science, literature and music. Every now and then I would let myself surface for a special appearance, or a performance in drama, music, or singing in the choir, hiding away from every possible source of confrontation. I filled my mind with the mystery of the classics, the wonder of hero’s and myths, and challenged myself in intellectual pursuit, refusing to look anybody in the face. Living my life in fear of recognizing the burning hatred I saw in the eyes of my friend as he kicked me…
To be continued?
To me, drinking tea should be a Zen experience, an opportunity to pause and reflect, to connect and commune, to tune out the rote of daily living with a ritual of sustenance and revival. And half of the human race agree that drinking tea should be a time of inner peace and harmony. A growing opinion that would like to represent the western half of our global society, see it as a party.
According to Wikipedia,
The Tea Party movement is a populist,[1][2][3] conservative/libertarian[4][5] political movement in the United States that emerged in 2009 through a series of locally and nationally coordinated protests.[6][7][8]
I’d like to disagree. And to prove my point I’ll refrain from using reference to establish relevance, but put a plea for common sense and call for a reality check, as much as that is possible in the context of politics. If I would be the President I would call for unity, reason, sense and sensibility, and give an ear to what they say. I’d say have a cup of tea.
Drinking tea provide the opportunity to achieve a space of inner calm and peace. It brings clarity to reason, help us look at the world from a different point of view, and allow us to see the choices that resonate with life and liberty. If I was the president I’d call for tea they way they do it in the east, to take some time to pause and reflect, to find the pervasive Zen that lays beyond the reality of politics.
If you’d ask me, what the world needs is to take a leaf from the wisdom of the land of the rising sun, to take a deep breath, and have a cup of tea. In fact, I think I’ll have one myself.
