#that may have been influenced by me reading All Quiet On The Western Front recently

[team-cap-for-the-win]

Let's talk about Steve Rogers, his journey in the MCU, and what changes I would make to maintain narrative coherence

Warning: long post, brief mentions of war, PTSD and depression

Just want to put a little disclaimer that this is in no way me declaring the definitve way it should have gone. Just giving some personal pointers and tweaks that I believe would make for a more compelling and satisfying story.

Let's start off with The First Avenger. This movie is fine, it does well with establishing Steve as a character, and hits emotional beats. Here's my hot take on the first Cap movie though (and what could have been in the later installments).

(I know, I know, these movies were meant for general audiences, but hear me out.)

If it had focused more on the horrors of war and how it destroys people, how the atrocities comitted forever changed soldiers' psyches... It could have had a pretty strong anti-war message.

Steve's story could have been a real metaphor for how young soldiers become so alienated from their former life that they feel like they cannot return home anymore. How war had taken everything from them, their youth, their future, their friends. When I watch the ending and Steve finds himself in the future, it's like he's in an alien world.

And he can't. Go. Back. He'll never be able to go back. He can only go forward. But how do you live in a world that feels strange and foreign to you, in a world that doesn't need WW2 soldiers anymore? How do you live in a world where you do not belong? Of course this would have required more turmoil on Steve's end. Surely he had seen (and maybe done...) terrible things that would cause him to have PTSD, or he could have clinical depression from his ordeals instead.

Now, the MCU does drop hints that Steve's not okay, but it doesn't go very far. It wouldn't need to be shown too much, but at the very least there could be scenes of positive coping mechanisms - like seeing a therapist, for an instance. That would make for good rep for mental ilness; while there could be some ugly bits shown too, because that comes with it, it is important to hammer home that it isn't something that defines Steve and he can put effort into living better.

(Here I shall take a moment to note: we were so close to getting more stuff like this in the movies. For instance, there's a bunch of deleted scenes from the first Avengers movie which whow how lost and sad Steve really is. Winter Soldier very subtly points to the direction that Steve isn't happy and doesn't know how to achieve happiness. And another instance I can think of is in the beginning of Civil War, where Crossbones brings up Bucky and Steve freezes up. If that was framed differently, it could put another layer to the entire conflict...)

Once again, all this would make a for a great story of recovery and healing, as Steve adapts to his new life and finds friends and love again.

Another thing to factor in is Bucky: a ghost from Steve's past. If we had gotten Serpent Society, we could have got a lot more content regarding their relarionship. In my humble opinion, it would have been really good if Steve had to accept that the old Bucky was no more, but that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Likewise, the old Steve is gone too. But they can make it work. And start over.

Ultimately, he would not return to the past, because that's something he was forced to leave behind. He can only go forward, remember? That's what all of us can do. All of the stuff that I've mentioned leads to the conclusion that for his story to make narrative sense, he would stay in the present.

Which brings the big question. How do you gently scoop him out of the MCU after Endgame without killing him off?

I considered two options:

Somewhere along the way, he gets deserumed, and while he can't really do field work anymore, he's still a strategic genius and he can do a lot to help out others. He chooses to live, and his life is something he gets to experience off screen. Bonus if he starts dating Sharon.

Much like the first option, but he stays as he is. He decides to live, and maybe goes on a soul-searching journey before figuring out what comes next, gets together with Sharon - once again, this can be left wide open, and we as the audience let him experience his life on his own.

Of course; this creates some issues. For one, Steve is a person that doesn't quit fighting for others. And two, it would be difficult to explain his absence in the future Marvel movies.

But all of that could be technically shoved to the sidelines as the new characters come into focus, and we, as the audience, suspend our disbelief in favour of narrative completion. If we can do that for characters like Bruce Banner, why not Steve?

And hey, I never said he has to disappear completely. He can still be mentioned, working for SHIELD, or maybe even have cameos if Cevans was up for that.

If the story was structured this way, I believe it would be more hopeful and powerful. Even lost, battered souls like Steve can find their way again with the help of others. Back away from the edge and enjoy life... live.

And I think that would be beautiful.

TLDR; Marvel let me rewrite the MCU because I think doing it somewhat this way could have improved the narrative coherence of Steve's story and give a more sarisfying conclusion to this character.

[karupoeg11]

2, 15, 28, 50, 52 and 86 for the ask game :)

Thank you very much for the Ask! 💗

Some answers might be pretty long....

2. What kind of emotions do the stars evoke for you, if any? The ocean, the sky, the moon?

The stars and the universe have always evoked great admiration and respect in me. I've given much thought on the life cycle of stars, how they are born in nebulae, vast clouds of hot gas and dust - they are like stellar nurseries. How the blue hypergiants live their life radiating heat and emissions and how gracefully and explosively they leave their life by casting away the outer shells and compressing their core into such a dense form that a neutron star may form.

I can't wrap my mind around the fact that a neutron star is so dense, one tiny piece in size of a sugar cube could outweigh the entire human race in mass.

I ponder over the supermassive black hole that keeps our entire home galaxy together and functioning. We can so peacefully enjoy our lives in the outer skirts of Milky Way on our precious blue diamond, a sparkling droplet of water surrounded by a harsh desert when in the heart of our galaxy stars are ferociously spinning around, melting together and being devoured by the black devil. Just so we could live....

I was about eight years old when I found a science magazine where a vivid description of a gamma ray burst caught my eye. It was described as an indeterminate amount of energy released when two neutron stars collide which can wipe out the entire galaxy. I just thought that was so cool! 😄

15. Is there a song, book, movie, or other piece of media that has drastically altered your life? What was it, are there multiple?

Yes, there is, multiple. I just highlight two of them. The first one was a book titled "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque. I couldn't put it down before my mind had swallowed it in one big single bite. I don't even know if I blinked too many times while reading it. The atmosphere the author conveys through the vivid descriptions of the Second World War paints a picture soaked in blood and tears.

I don't remember for how long I cried after finishing that book. For the dog whose cries was heard from the distance. For those soldiers who went looking for it at the same time dodging from bullets and projectiles. What happened to all those people.

This book made me value my life more, to put it shortly.

The other one was a movie titled "Martyrs". There are two versions of this (2008 and 2015) but I prefer the earlier version. I stop here just by mentioning it because it falls under the category of extreme horror and could be traumatizing for some.

That too changed me on the long run.

28. What has influenced your taste in music?

The summer of 2019 where I saw a breathtaking live version of "The Keeper" performed by my gorgeous lion.... 🔥🦁

It was the first time of my entire life when I saw him and I just looked at him with my eyes wide open in awe and disbelief. How can a human being outshine the most massive of hypergiants in the universe? I still don't know the answer.

50. What qualities do you find charming?

I'm an extremely socially awkward person so I'm drawn to people who are shy and quiet on the outside but warm and friendly on the inside. They must possess true love and respect for all nature and all animals, not just the cute ones. 😉

52. Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the meaning of your life? Are you looking for meaning?

No, not at all. For the past years I've been battling with the thoughts my own brain generates. And I've only recently started to knowingly develop qualities in myself that hold greater value for me. Let's just see where that leads to. I think I'm pretty meaningless, altogether. Takes off a lot of pressure.

86. What could you talk about for hours?

One word: SPIDERS.

I love those leggy multi-eyed friends to pieces. Whenever I feel stressed I imagine a billion big hairy spiders around me, embracing me, hugging me tightly. It helps me.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Beer with a Painter: Emily Cheng

Emily Cheng, “Stupa Axis” (2016), flashe on canvas, 84 x 78 inches (all images courtesy the artist)

I feel quieted in Emily Cheng’s studio — to the point where I wondered, afterwards, if I’d even posed questions. A fountain is gurgling, and she has set out beer and snacks. The paintings invite reflection more than commentary. I had visited her studio more than 10 years ago, and at the time felt that she was a painter whose work fell outside the buzz around contemporary art; looking back, I feel as if she has been gently challenging us for years.

The forms in her paintings are suggestive of the most primary elements: the landscape; the body; religious iconography. Large circular and floral forms are often positioned symmetrically on her canvases. These forms radiate outward into planetary orbs, tendrils, and vertebrae-like networks. However, many passages are stranger, more imaginary, and less regular than one might expect: dreamy, painterly occurrences that can be bodily and abstract.

The paintings have a lightness in tone and surface quality, but they are forceful in their suggestion of movement. They seem to chart energy channels, and push us into spaces that can’t quite be articulated or described.

Emily Cheng in the studio (2015) (photo credit by Wolf-Dieter Stoeffelmeier)

Cheng lives and works in New York City. She received her BFA in painting in 1975 from the Rhode Island School of Design and studied at the New York Studio School for three years. She has had solo exhibitions at The Bronx Museum, Winston Wachter Fine Art, and Bravin Post Lee Gallery, New York.  She has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Shenzhen Art Museum, Shenzhen, China; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; Hanart Gallery, Hong Kong; the Ayala Museum, Manila, Philippines; Zane Bennett Gallery, Santa Fe; Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City; and Schmidt Dean Gallery, Philadelphia.

 *   *   * 

Jennifer Samet: What was your introduction to art and painting? Did you start drawing or making art as a child?

Emily Cheng: I can remember that as a small child, I was happy if you parked my stroller in front of a wall with peeling paint. There are family photographs where everyone else is looking at the camera, and I am looking down at the snow. I was mesmerized by the different colors of the sparkles in the snow.  These things still fascinate me — when I see special paint splotches on the sidewalk, I record them on my cellphone.

In the fifth grade, I started oil painting and looking at images of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Manet. I also saw abstract painting for the first time: de Kooning, early Guston and Pollock. My father loved Western painting, so art was always part of my everyday life. There was no question of what I was going to do.

Emily Cheng, “Into Pink” (2016), flashe on canvas, 84 x 78 inches

JS: You got your BFA from Rhode Island School of Design but also studied at the New York Studio School. I remember that Nicolas Carone was an important teacher for you. Can you tell me about him?

EC: Yes, Nick Carone was the teacher who had the most influence on me.  He talked about the image. All of his students heard overlapping and different things from him. What I heard was that there is a potential for unseen things — an implied image — in painting. There is a possibility for that image to have power, which can resonate long after you’ve stopped looking at the painting.

I also remember Leland Bell, as a visiting artist at RISD, giving a lecture on a Chardin painting. Before his lecture, the Chardin was just a still life with a little dog. As Leland talked about it, it became a superhighway running in different directions, with all kinds of passages and ways to move through it. It opened up and became three-dimensional — dynamic.

I studied with Leland and Elaine de Kooning for a summer session in Paris. We spent a lot of time in museums and we would be trailed by museum-goers, picking up interested people along the way. Leland was a beautiful enthusiast of the joy of paintings. He spoke about artists who were not so popular, like Raoul Dufy.

Bell opened me up to structure in painting. When you go through a Chardin with Leland, he is not talking about composition, he’s talking about structure. Structure is bones, the spine; composition is where you place and arrange things.

If you want to think about structure in drawing you can think about Giacometti. Giacometti was all about making the unseen connections spatially connect.  Things have many relational points. That also influenced how I thought about the body when I left school.

Emily Cheng, “CosmicHead3” (2017), flashe on canvas, 47 x 35 inches

JS: How does your work relate to ideas about the body?

EC: A lot of my work has to do with how we reside in our bodies, how our bodies relate to gravity, and how we can (or cannot) connect to the universe. It is about the subtle body.

A lot of what I’m painting doesn’t exist in the visible world. So, to capture its enormity and its suggestive power, you have to be able to go into your imagination, which is not always cooperative. You pull out what you can from it. I want to tap into some kind of energy that can’t be named, or that hasn’t been visualized. Silence is the moment when I see the next step, or an image waiting to materialize.

That is why I don’t listen to music when I’m painting. The way I explain it to my students is that when you have music playing in your studio, you have two artists in the room. But one artist is already articulating much more clearly than you are. It’s the same if you listen to books on tape or the radio. I understand that some people need to be out of their thinking minds. I get that. But I’m not thinking much when I’m quiet. I am listening to being.

JS: Your work can also have a map-like or diagrammatic aspect. It also often plays with symmetry — with geometric forms and symbols radiating out from the center.  Can you talk about that?

EC: I’m very attracted to diagrams and maps because I like the correlation between going through something in your mind, and the physical activity of moving through that space. When you look at a map of a city you are running a system through your mind. Then you go into the city and you relive that template, that configuration.

The interest in symmetry goes back to the experience of being dyslexic, and it has to do with the standing body. Recently I was amazed to find that even in my paintings from the early 1980s, I was thinking about the body, symmetry, and Chakra-like points. I didn’t know anything about chakras back then.  I was just creating a point system for the standing body. Then I took this whole other odyssey of working with planets, centers, and arabesques that were very non-symmetrical and gestural. Now I find myself back in symmetry.

I see the paintings as templates for the body, and if they were asymmetrical, they wouldn’t feel like the body. They are also about bodies in the world and universe. About ten years ago when I was working on a book, I was flying back and forth to China. There was something about flying halfway around the world, so many times per year, that I started thinking about what that meant and felt like — being above the world, detached from the planet for a short period of time. Every religious tradition discusses death as being above the world, or out of the world. It gives you a long vision of history, life, the planet.

JS: Recently, you have been exhibiting frequently in China. Can you talk about how your work is tied to your Chinese-American identity, and how that may have evolved over your career?

Emily Cheng, “Feeling at Home” (2016), flashe on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

EC: Growing up in the suburbs as an American, with Chinese parents, I accepted everything for what it was. In the 1990s, people started talking about their roots. I thought it would be very interesting to go back into Chinese culture and examine it. I found some Buddhist cave paintings that were really outside of my own experience. This began my studies into Chinese art.

As far as identity goes, when I started traveling to China, and reading sociological studies of the differences between Americans and Chinese, I would observe certain characteristics, and think, “Actually, that part of me is very Chinese.”

I began reading Buddhist and Taoist texts. After I got over my aversion to Confucianism’s sexism, I thought Confucius had a lot to contribute as well. He is very interesting socially and politically, in context with Lao-Tzu.

I was looking at a lot of Buddhist art, Silk Route painting and court figure painting, which is very different from the tradition of ink painting. Lately I’ve been looking a lot at Chinese landscape painting. In the past, I never thought landscape painting had anything to do with my own work. It is so much about the lexicon of a particular style of brushwork. Now I feel really lucky to have that link to another tradition — one in which the vastness of landscape can be expressed through the gesture of the mark.

I found out six years ago that I am related to Lin Yutang, the 20th-century writer. He wrote annotated translations of Lao-Tzu and Confucius, as well as his own ideas of living. I love how Buddhism addresses the very mental aspects of the self-consciousness, perceptions of reality, community, and one’s role in the world. The Tao gets you to look and think about yourself as a physical body in flow with the greater universe. So, together, it is quite rich.

I try to separate the institution from the original texts or ideas. In working on my Charting Sacred Territories project, I wanted to trace all this rich imagery that we have inherited from the world’s greatest religions and to show the complex interconnectivity and genealogies of each religion — branches of sects, denominations, and groups. There, you can’t help bump into the whole structure of institutions. That’s what they are. And the institutions are often at the root of our problems today. But the devotional and philosophic aspects of religion, at its best, are beautiful.

It was the same thing that made me gravitate to certain Renaissance paintings when I first traveled to Europe. Some paintings are just above and beyond others. Some paintings of Madonna and Child are sublime, while others are run of the mill.

JS: So you tie the success or sublime quality in painting to the devotional interests of the artist? That is so interesting.

EC: I can’t prove it, but yes.  In some cases, the painter tapped into ideas larger than the commission. Maybe they saw the universal qualities of the mother and child and were able to express it through form in an inspired, touching way. It is difficult to talk about, because art historians generally approach Renaissance painting in an iconographic way. That is how they are trained. This discussion includes concepts of auras, and things that can’t be seen, but only felt. Our rational minds resist that, but a fresh eye can see it.

I will say that when a painting clicks, it is something akin to that devotional feeling. It is something greater than the self. That is when it makes the ultimate connection. Not every painting does that. That’s why, for me, a painting that works is so beside the point. If it doesn’t have that click, that energy, that force, then to me, it is nothing. It’s just another painting that works.

I don’t start with a concept; I start with a feeling. If that feeling is prevalent enough, it will manifest into an image. These are things that are not easy to paint, and it’s not part of our daily experience to think about them.

I have never thought of my work, or any artwork for that matter, as a reflection of our society or our culture. To me, that’s just like adding more junk into the junk. I am probably making these paintings at a particular time and place for very particular reasons. I am always thinking about the timeline from 20,000 BCE to the present. I want to be in the dialogue of all time, and not just my time.

Emily Cheng, “Hinterglem II” (2016), flashe on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

JS: You utilize a vocabulary of different kinds of painterly marks: lines, dots, arabesques and other gestural brushstrokes, even drips. How do these come together in your work, and how are they related to different painting traditions: Eastern and Western?

EC: I have recently returned, in my work, to joining the templates and the systems with gestural marks. For a decade, for me, gesture only existed in drapery and drips. I started working again with gesture through ink on paper. I was doing a residency in DaWang, China, and the artist who had the studio before me left a lot of cheap paper and black ink.

I had never really thought I had the right to work in that medium, because I am Chinese-American and don’t write calligraphy or even read the characters. But I was staying in a fairly remote place, in the mountains just above a little village.  It gave me the freedom to pick up this ink and paper and experiment.

At first I started making drawings of statues — early, small Greek and Cypriot bronzes I had seen at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. I was trying to find a way into these mute figures, these strange little statues behind glass. I felt that they retained a lot to offer us in this contemporary time.

By painting them, I found a way into their being by loosening up the gesture. Ink led me to freeing up the mark and feeling that it could become part of my repertoire again. That was something I hadn’t done in decades, really.

Now I think of gesture and line as something that can work together, in and around each other. Drapery in Renaissance painting is so tactile. In Chinese figural paintings, the lines are about spirit. The figures walk with swirling drapery flowing behind. It is a way to animate and bring life to the figure portrayed. So it’s the difference between the eye moving through form and space tactilely and sensually, and the felt spirit moving through line.

With line, you can move through the painting at breakneck speed. The dots slow the eye down, like an ellipsis, a pause, so that you are not doing a “drive-by” on a painting. We are conditioned to size things up very quickly. When you can slow the eye down, it is always a good thing.

Emily Cheng, “After Shen Shicong 4” (2017), flashe on canvas, 35 x 47 inches

I’ve always loved drips in painting. Drips announce that it is a painting and bring the viewer into the experience of the moment it was made. That visceral connection is a joy ride.

I don’t feel like I am building on one tradition, because that would mean being an adherent. I have an allergy to that. I am finding my way in the dark. If I find a few little things to hold on to, along the way, I’m very happy for the experience.  I’m open to many kinds of traditions and practices, which overlap. Finding the connections between them is what interests me. We don’t have to pick and choose one thing, or be monogamous in that sense. Life is too short.

The post Beer with a Painter: Emily Cheng appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[what-s-up-friends-us]

Here he tells you what you need to enjoy better health, feed and sleep well, relieve pain and have a long life.                        TAKE AWARENESS OF THEIR FORMABLE MENTAL POWER I can visualize myself satiated with food.  If you are about to drink a milkshake and you think it is very high in fat and calories, ghrelin levels - the hormone that regulates appetite - will drop a lot and leave you with a greater feeling of fullness than if you chose a drink healthier, even if both provide the same amount of calories, a study recently published in the journal Health Psychology showed. It can increase my brain mass through meditation.  MRI images show that the hippocampus - the part of the brain that is responsible for learning and memory - becomes denser with just a couple of months of practicing deep meditation. Besides, the density of brain cells decreases in the amygdala, the part that regulates fear, anxiety, and stress. Those physical changes in the brain alter your mood. It can raise my body temperature.  A group of Tibetan nuns can increase their internal body temperature to about 37.7 ° C in conditions of ambient temperature below zero just by practicing a type of meditation called g-tummo. This is a rare group, it is true, but researchers taught Western subjects a similar technique and observed that they managed to raise their body temperature. The breathing they used produced thermogenesis, a process of heat generation that could improve people's performance in icy environments. You can add years to your life.  If you maintain a positive attitude towards aging and feel constantly useful and happy, you will most likely live an additional seven years, studies by Yale University indicate. Take diet soda.  If you drink a can a day or more, you could end up with three times more abdominal fat than if you didn't. Texas researchers conducted a study to prove it: subjects who drank sugar-free soda daily increased about eight centimeters in waist in nine years; those who drank none increased by only two centimeters, and occasional drinkers, 4.5 centimeters. Choosing a diet drink instead of a regular one to eat fewer calories can be counterproductive. One study showed that those who did ended up consuming more food - and calories - throughout the day. Please drink only mineral water. Bow your head to see the phone.  Would you hang four bowling balls around your neck? Before saying that it is a silly question, consider this: the combined weight of those balls - about 27 kilos - is equivalent to the force exerted by tilting your head forward at a 60-degree angle to send a text message from your smartphone. And it does that up to four hours a day! For the love of your cervical vertebrae and their integrity, try to keep the phone at eye level. Put on a sweater as soon as you feel cold.  Hold on a little. Researchers discovered that when hormones tremble, certain hormones are activated that convert white adipose tissue, which stores energy, into brown tissue, which burns calories. Trembling for 10 or 15 minutes has a hormonal effect equivalent to performing a moderate exercise for one hour. Skip the stretch before exercising.  He strives to do cardiovascular and strengthening exercises regularly, which is fine, but his joints need to stretch as well, especially as he gets older. The connective tissue that forms and supports the ligaments and tendons becomes more rigid and brittle with age, which implies a decrease in flexibility and range of movements. Yoga and Pilates are two good options for stretching muscles and joints, but even simple and controlled stretching exercises of 10 to 30 seconds in length can help you keep the movement more easily. "Forget" to tell your doctor about memory problems.  Only one in four adults over 44 years old recognizes having memory problems. If you start to forget things, you must tell the doctor. Sometimes a drug or a combination of drugs causes confusion or makes me forgetful. Anxiety and depression can also have that effect, as can a slow thyroid or a vitamin B12 deficiency. These conditions are completely treatable. And if your memory gaps are related to senile dementia, an early diagnosis is decisive, since it offers the brain a better chance to benefit from treatment.                                                     I WISH I COULD EXPLAIN ... Why healthy people can get cancer.  Maybe you know someone who followed all the "rules" - used sunscreen, ate vegetables, didn't smoke - and still got cancer. I would like to have a good explanation of this, but the truth is that about two-thirds of the variation in cancer risk is due to random genetic mutations that favor the growth of tumors. In essence, it is bad luck. However, that does not exempt you at all from following the rules. Although some risk factors may be out of your control, many others depend on you. How placebos workTaking a sugar pill can affect the heart rhythm, alter brain activity, relieve depression and reduce Parkinson's symptoms; that is, produce real physiological responses to an essentially false treatment. An analysis of 84 clinical trials of chronic pain medications revealed that the placebo effect is getting stronger. In 2013, patients who received placebos experienced a 30 percent decrease in their pain levels, on average, compared to about 5 percent in 1990. Scientists try to find out why a person responds well to a placebo, but a No friend of that person, what exactly happens in the body and brain of people when they take a placebo, and the best ways to harness the power of placebos. How my viscera affect my mood. I house up to 100 billion microbes, most of them in the intestines. "Good" bacteria help me assimilate food; the "bad" makes me produce gases and increase inflammation. Imbalances in intestinal bacteria are related to many diseases. The less clear link is that between those bacteria and the brain. One hypothesis states that intestinal bacteria produce serotonin and dopamine - hormones that regulate mood - or other substances that influence anxiety and depression. Another possibility is that the microbes activate the vagus nerve, the main means of communication between the intestines and the brain. Scientists are studying these bacteria thoroughly now, so stay informed.                                                 WHAT I CAN EXPLAIN IS WHY ... Turn off the car radio when it is lost.  The brain has a limited number of cognitive resources; In fact, it is not designed to process many things at once. On a tour of a family route, I can listen to the radio and at the same time pay attention to the road, but if I need to read the road signs or find a home, the music becomes a distraction. Squinting helps me see more clearly. As they change their shape a little when they are closed, the light that reaches it is concentrated in the retina, and that helps me focus better. Chatting with a stranger makes me happy.  Conversing with another person, even a few minutes, such as the employee who prepares the morning coffee or a seatmate on the train back home, makes you feel that you are part of the world and improves your mood. I swing my arms when I walk. His arms are like pendulums that swing naturally while moving. So you spend less energy when you go somewhere on foot. If you try to keep them still while walking, you will consume 12 percent more energy.                                 WHAT THE COLOR OF YOUR EYES COULD REVEAL If you have dark eyes: Lower risk of contracting macular degeneration. Lower risk of skin cancer. That inspires more confidence. If you have light eyes (blue or green): That is more competitive. Lower risk of suffering from vitiligo, an autoimmune skin disease that is characterized by the presence of areas without pigmentation. Increased propensity to drink alcohol. HABITS THAT WOULD BE GOOD TO ADOP Read real books.  That is, real books printed on paper. Scientists have observed that people who use electronic reading devices have a much harder time remembering details of what they read, compared to those who read printed materials. Actions such as holding the book with your hands, turning the pages and touching the paper can contribute to a better mental reconstruction of what has been read. On the other hand, exposure to the bright blue light on the screen of an electronic reading device before bedtime makes it harder for you to fall asleep and get a restful sleep. Cover your mouth when you sneeze.  Surely they taught him to do this when he was little. However, according to an observational study, one in four people does not cover their mouths when coughing or sneezing in front of others. That's not all: less than five percent of people use handkerchiefs or cough or sneeze into the inside of the elbow, as health experts recommend. And the last thing: it is proven that an average human sneeze expels a cloud of germs at high speed that can contaminate an entire room in a few minutes. Understood? Go for walks in a park.  Living in urban areas appears to put people at greater risk for mood disorders, compared to those living in the countryside. Contact with nature can have a sedative effect on the prefrontal cortex of my brain, which is activated when it is ruminating negative things and is related to some mental disorders. Studies show that if you are going to walk to a quiet park full of leafy trees, you will have fewer negative thoughts. Practice the race at intervals.  High impact interval training is a good way to burn fat. It consists of alternating strenuous races at full speed with recovery periods at a less intense pace. Danish researchers tested a formula called 30-20-10 with a group of recreational runners. Although their total training time was halved, in just seven weeks the subjects reduced their blood pressure and cholesterol levels, as well as the time they ran five kilometers. Try it: 30 seconds of light jogging, 20 seconds of running at a moderate pace and then 10 seconds of full acceleration to complete a minute. Touching your forehead to take off a craving.  Looks strange? It is. However, the researchers tried some 30-second techniques to stop the compulsion to eat. Touching your forehead gave the best result with obese participants in a study: it reduced their cravings and drove them away from their favorite foods. The next time a cupcake is a temptation, a finger on the forehead can placate the craving. Colors to reduce stress.  There is currently a huge variety of coloring books with illustrations. Take three five-minute intervals (with a two-minute break between each one), and you will have an excellent cardiovascular exercise session in 19 minutes. Write slowly. This can improve your writing skills. Researchers had two groups of subjects write a text on a computer, some with one hand and others with both, and observed that those who typed with one hand displayed a broader and more expressive vocabulary, compared to those who typed With the two hands. The explanation is that writing slowly allows me to choose the words I want to use and express myself more eloquently. When my fingers fly over the keyboard, I offer only the first word that comes to mind.                                            ATTENTION TO THESE EXPERIENCES! First menstruation:  it is the sign of becoming a woman, or so they say, moms and grandmothers. British researchers add that the age at which you have the first menstruation may indicate the risk of heart disease. A study of 1.2 million middle-aged women revealed that those who had their first menstrual cycle at age 13 were at the lowest risk of getting heart disease; those who were 10 years old or younger and those who were 17 years old or older were at greater risk. The age of the first menstruation seems to be indicative of general metabolic health, as well as of the propensity to diabetes and to have a low bone mass. First knee injury:  may increase the risk of post-traumatic arthritis. And it doesn't need to be very serious: a torn meniscus or a torn ligament, common effects of falls, can leave my knee unstable and cause faster wear. The damage does not always lead to osteoarthritis (age, weight, and genes are other factors), but an injured joint is about seven times more vulnerable than a healthy one. Last cigarette smoked:  Just five years after the day you quit smoking, my risk of getting cancer of the mouth, throat, esophagus, and bladder is reduced by half. Thank you. First fracture:  to be attended by a doctor, and if you are 50 or older, ask to have a bone densitometry. About 80 percent of people do not request this, and it is a mistake. Osteoporosis could be the cause of a broken bone, especially if the injury was not the result of a stroke, such as a car crash. If the bone mass is low, you should know how to take steps to delay your progress.                                   THESE FOOD TIPS IMPROVE GENERAL HEALTH Use yogurt well.  The aqueous matter that floats on the solid is whey and is full of protein, calcium (which strengthens the bones), vitamin D and probiotics (which protect the intestines). When the strip without ingesting it is deprived of these nutrients. Bake the potatoes.  Whether in the kitchen oven or in the microwave, potatoes retain most of their nutrients. If you peel them and cook them in water, they lose all the skin fiber and almost two-thirds of the vitamin C. Let the chopped garlic stand.  When the tooth is bitten or ground, an enzyme called alienate is released that helps the formation of disease-fighting compounds. Let the garlic stand for 10 to 15 minutes. Cooking the garlic pieces too soon can deactivate the enzyme. Season the spinach with lemon.  These dark green leaves are a rich source of iron, but to absorb that mineral from plants more easily, spinach must be accompanied by vitamin C, of ​​which the lemon is packed. Click here for more tips

http://bestofftops.blogspot.com/2019/09/secrets-that-your-body-is-trying-to.html

[nancygduarteus]

How Buddhism Became Therapy

Dressed in flowing gold robes, the bald female meditation teacher told us to do nothing. We were to sit silently in our plastic chairs, close our eyes, and focus on our breath. I had never meditated, but I’d gone to church, so I instinctively bowed my head. Then I realized that, since this would last for 15 minutes, I should probably find a more comfortable long-term neck position.

This was the first of two meditation sessions of the Kadampa Buddhism class I attended this week near my house in Northern Virginia, and I did not reach nirvana. Since we were in a major city, occasional sirens outside blasted through the quiet, and since this was a church basement, people were laughing and talking in the hallways. One guy wandered in to ask if this was an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The more we focused on our breath, the teacher assured us, the more these distractions would fade away.

After we had meditated for 15 minutes, the teacher shifted focus to the topic of the class: Letting go of resentments. This was the real reason I had come to this meditation class, rather than simply meditating on my own at home with an app. I wanted to learn more about Buddhism and how its teachings might be able to improve my mental health—and that of the myriads of other Americans who have flocked to some form of the religion in recent years. These newcomers aren’t necessarily seeking spiritual enlightenment or a faith community, but rather a quick boost of cognitive healing.

The people I spoke with were young and old, but rarely Buddhist by birth. Perhaps some have just run out of options: Mental-health disorders are up in Western societies, and the answer doesn’t seem to be church attendance, which is down. There’s always therapy, but it’s so expensive. My meditation class was $12.

As she opened a book on Buddhist teachings, the teacher told the class it’s harmful to hold grudges. Resentment feels like holding on to a burning stick and complaining that it’s burning us. And yet, being harmed by someone also hurts. So, the teacher said, the question was this: “What do I do with my mind if I feel like I’ve been harmed by someone?”

Americans everywhere seem to be asking themselves variations on this very question: What do we do with our minds?

The forty-something dad in Los Angeles was plateauing. He had achieved most of his career goals, rising to the level of senior manager at a large company. But the competitive nature of the work had taken its toll on his marriage, and he was in the process of getting a divorce. He rarely saw his grown children. “In short, I am going through a midlife crisis,” the dad told me via email, a few days before I attended the meditation class. (He asked to remain anonymous because his divorce and other struggles aren’t public.)

Last year, this dad turned to traditional psychotherapy for a few months, but he didn’t see as much of a benefit from it as he had hoped. He felt like he was mostly being taught to justify destructive emotions and behaviors. His therapist did, however, recommend two books that were helpful: How to Be an Adult in Relationships, by David Richo, and The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield. Both authors work in Buddhist themes and ideas, and earlier this year they introduced him to the practice of meditation.

Hungry for more, the dad recently attended a Buddhist meditation class in Hollywood, where he learned ways to deepen his own meditation practice and to change his approach to relationships. Now, he feels more open and is willing to be more vulnerable around his family and friends. “As a Catholic, I struggle with some of the religious concepts,” he says, “But it doesn’t prevent me from adopting the Buddhist techniques and philosophies.” Besides, he told me, it really does seem like the universe is putting Buddhism in front of him now.

Though precise numbers on its popularity are hard to come by, Buddhism does seem to be emerging in the Western, type-A universe. The journalist Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True became a bestseller in 2017. Buddhist meditation centers have recently popped up in places like Knoxville, Tennessee, and Lakewood, Ohio. There are now dozens of Buddhist podcasts, which doesn’t include all the apps and playlists that are geared specifically toward personal, non-Buddhist meditation. Four in 10 American adults now say they meditate at least weekly.

Hugh Byrne, the director of the Center for Mindful Living meditation center in Washington, D.C., says the local meditation community has “blossomed in the past few years.” As I stress-Ubered from meeting to meeting in D.C. recently, I noticed a few “meditation spaces” have opened up where far more consumerist establishments used to be. Academic research on mindfulness meditation has also exploded, making what in the West was once an esoteric practice for hippies more akin to a life-hack for all.

Buddhism has been popular in various forms among certain celebrities and tech elites, but the religion’s primary draw for many Americans now appears to be mental health. The ancient religion, some find, helps them manage the slings and arrows and subtweets of modern life. Many people are stressed out by the constant drama of the current administration, and work hours have overwhelmed the day. There’s something newly appealing about a practice that instructs you to just sit, be aware, and realize nothing lasts forever. Perhaps it’s simply comforting to know that the problems that bedevil humans have been around since long before Gmail.

A few themes and ideas seem to unite the disparate experiences of the people I interviewed. The Buddha’s first “Noble Truth” is that “life is suffering,” and many of Buddhism’s newly minted Western practitioners have interpreted this to mean that accepting emotional pain might be preferable to trying to alleviate it. “Buddhism admits that suffering is inevitable,” says Daniel Sanchez, a 24-year-old in New Jersey. “I shouldn’t focus on avoiding suffering, but learn how to deal with suffering.”

In addition to meditating every morning and night, Sanchez reads the Diamond Sutra and Heart Sutra, texts from the early Middle Ages, and listens to zen talks. The sutras are quite a departure from the normal content of psychotherapy, in which one might ponder what truly makes one happy. Buddhist thought suggests that one should not compulsively crave comfort and avoid discomfort, which some see as permission to hop off the hedonic treadmill.

A Colorado life coach named Galen Bernard told me that Comfortable with Uncertainty, by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, has influenced his well-being more than anything, except perhaps his very first experience on Prozac. He says the book and its teachings have helped him avoid labeling certain experiences as negative by default. For example, transitioning to a friendship with an ex-girlfriend after a breakup was painful for him at first, but Chodron’s and others’ writings helped him see that “it might seem like too much pain,” he says, “but actually it’s just an experience I’m having that … can actually be a portal to joy on the other side.”

For decades, people have been attempting self-improvement through classes and seminars, many of which incorporated elements of Eastern religions. The Human Potential Movement of the 1960s influenced the work of the foundational psychologist Abraham Maslow and, perhaps less positively, the Rajneesh movement documented in the Netflix show Wild Wild Country. In the 1970s, the organization Erhard Seminars Training, or EST, offered courses on how to “take responsibility for your life” and “get it.”

What’s different—and perhaps comforting—about Buddhism is that it’s an existing religion practiced by half a billion people. Because relatively few caucasian Americans grew up Buddhist, they generally don’t associate any familial baggage with it like some do with, say, the Christianity or Judaism of their childhoods. While liberating, this also means that the practice of secular Buddhism often differs dramatically from the religion itself. All of the secular practitioners I spoke with for this piece are reading different books, listening to different podcasts, and following different teachers and traditions. Their interpretations of Buddhist teachings aren’t necessarily consistent with one another or with traditional texts.

I ran some of their insights by an expert in Buddhism, David McMahan at Franklin and Marshall College, who said some of these Western interpretations are slightly morphed from Buddhism’s original cultures and contexts. Buddhism carries with it a set of values and morals that white Americans don’t always live by. Much like “Cafeteria Catholics” ignore parts of the religion that don’t resonate with them, some Westerners focus on only certain elements of Buddhist philosophy and don’t endorse, say, Buddhism’s view of reincarnation or worship of the Buddha. Call them Buffet Buddhists.

Taken out of their Buddhist context, practices like meditation “become like a dry sponge,” McMahan said, “soaking up whatever values are around.” Traditional monks don’t “meditate for business.”

This so-called “secular Buddhism,” says Autry Johnson, a Colorado bartender and tourism worker who meditates regularly, “is a little more accessible to people that wouldn’t primarily identify as Buddhists, or already identify with another religion or philosophy but want to adopt aspects of Buddhist practice to supplement their current worldview.” (Indeed, many meditation centers emphasize that you don’t have to be Buddhist to attend sessions.)

Buffet Buddhism may not be traditional, but its flexibility does allow its adherents to more easily employ the philosophy for an anti-depressive jolt. Some people practice Buddhism and meditation as an alternative to psychotherapy or psychiatric medication, given mental health care’s cost and scarcity: Sixty percent of counties in the U.S. don’t have a single psychiatrist. “I have pretty good health insurance,” Bernard says, “but if I want support, it’s a month and a half to see someone new. Having a resource that I can pop open is invaluable.”

Some people turn to both Buddhism and psychotherapy. “There’s an overlap between the reason people will come to therapy and the reason they come to meditation,” says Byrne, the director of the Center for Mindful Living. Some therapists are even starting to incorporate Buddhist concepts into their practices. Tara Brach, a psychologist and the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, D.C., offers meditations and talks with titles like “From Human Doing to Human Being” on her website. In Texas, the psychologist Molly Layton encourages clients to mindfully “sit with their thoughts,” rather than to “jump into the cycle of their thinking.”

Mary Liz Austin, who practices psychotherapy at the Center for Mindful Living, similarly helps clients see that “it’s the attachment to the outcome that really causes suffering.” Another favorite teaching of hers is Chodron’s aphorism that “everything is workable.” This means, essentially, that something good might come out of even the worst moments. “I’m having an experience right now with my father in law. He’s dying of cancer. It’s a shitty situation,” Austin says. “But what I’m seeing is that the fruits of this cancer diagnosis is everyone is by his bedside, everyone is showing amazing love to him, and that allows the people in your life to show up in a way that you see so much what matters.”

At times, it’s the meditation teachers who sound more like psychotherapists, offering practical tips for dealing with existential quandaries. Byrne, a meditation teacher, wrote a book about the power of mindfulness for habit change. He uses mindfulness meditation to help people understand impermanence, another Buddhist teaching. The idea is to see your emotions and experiences—including anxiety or pain—as constantly changing, “like a weather system coming through,” Byrne says. Everything, eventually, ends.

Cecilia Saad found this to be an especially attractive element of Buddhism. A close friend of hers was diagnosed with cancer three years ago, and Saad was impressed by how calm she remained throughout her diagnosis and treatment. “We’ve talked a lot about her outlook, and she always goes back to her Buddhism,” she says. Now, when Saad is stressed about something, the concept of impermanence helps her to imagine that she’s already survived the event she’s dreading.

At my meditation class, the teacher read from her book in her even, perfectly unaccented voice. The book told us to consider that there are two reasons someone might cause us harm: It’s their nature to be harmful, or a temporary circumstance caused them to act in a harmful way. Either way, the teacher said, it doesn’t make sense to be angry at the person. The nature of water is wet, so you wouldn’t rage at the rain for getting you wet. And you wouldn’t curse the clouds for temporarily having a weather system that causes a downpour.

“When are we compelled to hurt people?” she asked, rhetorically. “When we’re in pain. It’s easy, if you see the fear, to have some compassion.”

She asked us to close our eyes and meditate again, this time while thinking about letting go of resentment toward someone who had harmed us.​ I shifted awkwardly and wondered how the burly guy sitting in front of me wearing a “Lift Life” t-shirt felt. I was having trouble focusing on resentment, and my eyes flickered open involuntarily. It was 30 degrees outside, yet most of the seats were taken. The fullness was uplifting. Still,  it was remarkable that so many of us were willing to stumble through the freezing dark just to take in some basic wisdom about how to be less sad.

In Sunday school, when you opened your eyes during prayer, other kids would tell on you, thereby implicating themselves as having opened their eyes, too. That’s how people are sometimes, I thought: They’ll burn themselves for the chance to harm someone else. I took a deep breath and tried to have compassion for them anyway.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/buddhism-meditation-anxiety-therapy/584308/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

How Buddhism Became Therapy

Dressed in flowing gold robes, the bald female meditation teacher told us to do nothing. We were to sit silently in our plastic chairs, close our eyes, and focus on our breath. I had never meditated, but I’d gone to church, so I instinctively bowed my head. Then I realized that, since this would last for 15 minutes, I should probably find a more comfortable long-term neck position.

This was the first of two meditation sessions of the Kadampa Buddhism class I attended this week near my house in Northern Virginia, and I did not reach nirvana. Since we were in a major city, occasional sirens outside blasted through the quiet, and since this was a church basement, people were laughing and talking in the hallways. One guy wandered in to ask if this was an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The more we focused on our breath, the teacher assured us, the more these distractions would fade away.

After we had meditated for 15 minutes, the teacher shifted focus to the topic of the class: Letting go of resentments. This was the real reason I had come to this meditation class, rather than simply meditating on my own at home with an app. I wanted to learn more about Buddhism and how its teachings might be able to improve my mental health—and that of the myriads of other Americans who have flocked to some form of the religion in recent years. These newcomers aren’t necessarily seeking spiritual enlightenment or a faith community, but rather a quick boost of cognitive healing.

The people I spoke with were young and old, but rarely Buddhist by birth. Perhaps some have just run out of options: Mental-health disorders are up in Western societies, and the answer doesn’t seem to be church attendance, which is down. There’s always therapy, but it’s so expensive. My meditation class was $12.

As she opened a book on Buddhist teachings, the teacher told the class it’s harmful to hold grudges. Resentment feels like holding on to a burning stick and complaining that it’s burning us. And yet, being harmed by someone also hurts. So, the teacher said, the question was this: “What do I do with my mind if I feel like I’ve been harmed by someone?”

Americans everywhere seem to be asking themselves variations on this very question: What do we do with our minds?

The forty-something dad in Los Angeles was plateauing. He had achieved most of his career goals, rising to the level of senior manager at a large company. But the competitive nature of the work had taken its toll on his marriage, and he was in the process of getting a divorce. He rarely saw his grown children. “In short, I am going through a midlife crisis,” the dad told me via email, a few days before I attended the meditation class. (He asked to remain anonymous because his divorce and other struggles aren’t public.)

Last year, this dad turned to traditional psychotherapy for a few months, but he didn’t see as much of a benefit from it as he had hoped. He felt like he was mostly being taught to justify destructive emotions and behaviors. His therapist did, however, recommend two books that were helpful: How to Be an Adult in Relationships, by David Richo, and The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield. Both authors work in Buddhist themes and ideas, and earlier this year they introduced him to the practice of meditation.

Hungry for more, the dad recently attended a Buddhist meditation class in Hollywood, where he learned ways to deepen his own meditation practice and to change his approach to relationships. Now, he feels more open and is willing to be more vulnerable around his family and friends. “As a Catholic, I struggle with some of the religious concepts,” he says, “But it doesn’t prevent me from adopting the Buddhist techniques and philosophies.” Besides, he told me, it really does seem like the universe is putting Buddhism in front of him now.

Though precise numbers on its popularity are hard to come by, Buddhism does seem to be emerging in the Western, type-A universe. The journalist Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True became a bestseller in 2017. Buddhist meditation centers have recently popped up in places like Knoxville, Tennessee, and Lakewood, Ohio. There are now dozens of Buddhist podcasts, which doesn’t include all the apps and playlists that are geared specifically toward personal, non-Buddhist meditation. Four in 10 American adults now say they meditate at least weekly.

Hugh Byrne, the director of the Center for Mindful Living meditation center in Washington, D.C., says the local meditation community has “blossomed in the past few years.” As I stress-Ubered from meeting to meeting in D.C. recently, I noticed a few “meditation spaces” have opened up where far more consumerist establishments used to be. Academic research on mindfulness meditation has also exploded, making what in the West was once an esoteric practice for hippies more akin to a life-hack for all.

Buddhism has been popular in various forms among certain celebrities and tech elites, but the religion’s primary draw for many Americans now appears to be mental health. The ancient religion, some find, helps them manage the slings and arrows and subtweets of modern life. Many people are stressed out by the constant drama of the current administration, and work hours have overwhelmed the day. There’s something newly appealing about a practice that instructs you to just sit, be aware, and realize nothing lasts forever. Perhaps it’s simply comforting to know that the problems that bedevil humans have been around since long before Gmail.

A few themes and ideas seem to unite the disparate experiences of the people I interviewed. The Buddha’s first “Noble Truth” is that “life is suffering,” and many of Buddhism’s newly minted Western practitioners have interpreted this to mean that accepting emotional pain might be preferable to trying to alleviate it. “Buddhism admits that suffering is inevitable,” says Daniel Sanchez, a 24-year-old in New Jersey. “I shouldn’t focus on avoiding suffering, but learn how to deal with suffering.”

In addition to meditating every morning and night, Sanchez reads the Diamond Sutra and Heart Sutra, texts from the early Middle Ages, and listens to zen talks. The sutras are quite a departure from the normal content of psychotherapy, in which one might ponder what truly makes one happy. Buddhist thought suggests that one should not compulsively crave comfort and avoid discomfort, which some see as permission to hop off the hedonic treadmill.

A Colorado life coach named Galen Bernard told me that Comfortable with Uncertainty, by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, has influenced his well-being more than anything, except perhaps his very first experience on Prozac. He says the book and its teachings have helped him avoid labeling certain experiences as negative by default. For example, transitioning to a friendship with an ex-girlfriend after a breakup was painful for him at first, but Chodron’s and others’ writings helped him see that “it might seem like too much pain,” he says, “but actually it’s just an experience I’m having that … can actually be a portal to joy on the other side.”

For decades, people have been attempting self-improvement through classes and seminars, many of which incorporated elements of Eastern religions. The Human Potential Movement of the 1960s influenced the work of the foundational psychologist Abraham Maslow and, perhaps less positively, the Rajneesh movement documented in the Netflix show Wild Wild Country. In the 1970s, the organization Erhard Seminars Training, or EST, offered courses on how to “take responsibility for your life” and “get it.”

What’s different—and perhaps comforting—about Buddhism is that it’s an existing religion practiced by half a billion people. Because relatively few caucasian Americans grew up Buddhist, they generally don’t associate any familial baggage with it like some do with, say, the Christianity or Judaism of their childhoods. While liberating, this also means that the practice of secular Buddhism often differs dramatically from the religion itself. All of the secular practitioners I spoke with for this piece are reading different books, listening to different podcasts, and following different teachers and traditions. Their interpretations of Buddhist teachings aren’t necessarily consistent with one another or with traditional texts.

I ran some of their insights by an expert in Buddhism, David McMahan at Franklin and Marshall College, who said some of these Western interpretations are slightly morphed from Buddhism’s original cultures and contexts. Buddhism carries with it a set of values and morals that white Americans don’t always live by. Much like “Cafeteria Catholics” ignore parts of the religion that don’t resonate with them, some Westerners focus on only certain elements of Buddhist philosophy and don’t endorse, say, Buddhism’s view of reincarnation or worship of the Buddha. Call them Buffet Buddhists.

Taken out of their Buddhist context, practices like meditation “become like a dry sponge,” McMahan said, “soaking up whatever values are around.” Traditional monks don’t “meditate for business.”

This so-called “secular Buddhism,” says Autry Johnson, a Colorado bartender and tourism worker who meditates regularly, “is a little more accessible to people that wouldn’t primarily identify as Buddhists, or already identify with another religion or philosophy but want to adopt aspects of Buddhist practice to supplement their current worldview.” (Indeed, many meditation centers emphasize that you don’t have to be Buddhist to attend sessions.)

Buffet Buddhism may not be traditional, but its flexibility does allow its adherents to more easily employ the philosophy for an anti-depressive jolt. Some people practice Buddhism and meditation as an alternative to psychotherapy or psychiatric medication, given mental health care’s cost and scarcity: Sixty percent of counties in the U.S. don’t have a single psychiatrist. “I have pretty good health insurance,” Bernard says, “but if I want support, it’s a month and a half to see someone new. Having a resource that I can pop open is invaluable.”

Some people turn to both Buddhism and psychotherapy. “There’s an overlap between the reason people will come to therapy and the reason they come to meditation,” says Byrne, the director of the Center for Mindful Living. Some therapists are even starting to incorporate Buddhist concepts into their practices. Tara Brach, a psychologist and the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, D.C., offers meditations and talks with titles like “From Human Doing to Human Being” on her website. In Texas, the psychologist Molly Layton encourages clients to mindfully “sit with their thoughts,” rather than to “jump into the cycle of their thinking.”

Mary Liz Austin, who practices psychotherapy at the Center for Mindful Living, similarly helps clients see that “it’s the attachment to the outcome that really causes suffering.” Another favorite teaching of hers is Chodron’s aphorism that “everything is workable.” This means, essentially, that something good might come out of even the worst moments. “I’m having an experience right now with my father in law. He’s dying of cancer. It’s a shitty situation,” Austin says. “But what I’m seeing is that the fruits of this cancer diagnosis is everyone is by his bedside, everyone is showing amazing love to him, and that allows the people in your life to show up in a way that you see so much what matters.”

At times, it’s the meditation teachers who sound more like psychotherapists, offering practical tips for dealing with existential quandaries. Byrne, a meditation teacher, wrote a book about the power of mindfulness for habit change. He uses mindfulness meditation to help people understand impermanence, another Buddhist teaching. The idea is to see your emotions and experiences—including anxiety or pain—as constantly changing, “like a weather system coming through,” Byrne says. Everything, eventually, ends.

Cecilia Saad found this to be an especially attractive element of Buddhism. A close friend of hers was diagnosed with cancer three years ago, and Saad was impressed by how calm she remained throughout her diagnosis and treatment. “We’ve talked a lot about her outlook, and she always goes back to her Buddhism,” she says. Now, when Saad is stressed about something, the concept of impermanence helps her to imagine that she’s already survived the event she’s dreading.

At my meditation class, the teacher read from her book in her even, perfectly unaccented voice. The book told us to consider that there are two reasons someone might cause us harm: It’s their nature to be harmful, or a temporary circumstance caused them to act in a harmful way. Either way, the teacher said, it doesn’t make sense to be angry at the person. The nature of water is wet, so you wouldn’t rage at the rain for getting you wet. And you wouldn’t curse the clouds for temporarily having a weather system that causes a downpour.

“When are we compelled to hurt people?” she asked, rhetorically. “When we’re in pain. It’s easy, if you see the fear, to have some compassion.”

She asked us to close our eyes and meditate again, this time while thinking about letting go of resentment toward someone who had harmed us.​ I shifted awkwardly and wondered how the burly guy sitting in front of me wearing a “Lift Life” t-shirt felt. I was having trouble focusing on resentment, and my eyes flickered open involuntarily. It was 30 degrees outside, yet most of the seats were taken. The fullness was uplifting. Still,  it was remarkable that so many of us were willing to stumble through the freezing dark just to take in some basic wisdom about how to be less sad.

In Sunday school, when you opened your eyes during prayer, other kids would tell on you, thereby implicating themselves as having opened their eyes, too. That’s how people are sometimes, I thought: They’ll burn themselves for the chance to harm someone else. I took a deep breath and tried to have compassion for them anyway.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[spanlish-blog]

Why the Trump-Putin Bromance Could Be in Serious Trouble

Donald Trump, the same president so often referred to by liberal bloggers as "Putin's puppet," is expected to sign a new batch of sanctions targeting Russia any day now. And with the Pentagon mulling the possibility of providing arms to anti-separatist forces in Ukraine—something Barack Obama opposed—it's increasingly hard to make a simplistic case that Trump is prioritizing Moscow's interests.

Just in case, the sanctions bill recently passed by Congress features language that makes it almost impossible for Trump, whose inner circle remains under federal investigation for possible collusion with the Kremlin, to withdraw the measures. This president normally broadcasts his emotions to any Twitter user who wants to read them but has been mostly quiet about the bill. That may be because he's effectively powerless to push back: The sanctions passed by such an overwhelming, bipartisan majority that if Trump vetoed them, Congress would almost certainly override him and pass them into law anyway.

Vice President Mike Pence, for his part, spoke supportively of the bill on Tuesday in Tbilisi, Georgia, arguing that if Russia wants reconciliation, it "has to change its behavior."

Meanwhile, Russian president Vladimir Putin isn't hiding the fact that he's furious. On Friday, his government announced plans to seize two pieces of US diplomatic property in and near Moscow. And on Sunday, the former KGB agent personally announced US diplomatic employees working in Russia will need to find new jobs. "Over 1,000 employees—diplomats and technical workers—worked and continue to work today in Russia; 755 will have to stop this activity," Putin told local media. (Russia had telegraphed that it was considering these actions back in mid-July.)

That might not be the full extent of Moscow's retaliation, either. In the lead-up to the White House announcement that Trump would sign the sanctions, Konstantin Kosachev, the Russian lawmaker who heads the country's Foreign Affairs Committee, warned the US that "the future degradation of bilateral cooperation is becoming inevitable." He added that Russia plans to come back with a response that won't "symmetrical" but instead "one that is painful for the Americans."

We tried Putin's favorite form of martial arts:

For a sense of why these pending sanctions are making the Russians blow their collective lid so completely, and to learn a little bit about what other kinds of trouble may be on the horizon, I got in touch with Eugene Chausovsky, senior Eurasia analyst at the military intelligence firm Stratfor. He explained what, exactly, the sanctions do, and helped me try to forecast how this saga will play out.

VICE: Are these sanctions—which mostly go after Russia but also target Iran and North Korea—going to hurt Putin directly, or really dent Russian economic power? Or is Putin just mad because he doesn't like being messed with? Eugene Chausovsky: Well, as far as hurting Putin, they'll certainly tighten the restrictions that the US already had in place against Russia, particularly in the energy sphere. When you're dealing with things like offshore, deep-water, or shale projects, that's going to be significantly restricted in terms of US persons or companies operating within these kinds of projects.

What does sanctioning Russia's energy and oil sector mean? Is that like stopping those projects from being financed, or stopping Russia from physically getting the oil? It's actually both. There are the financial sanctions on certain energy companies that will certainly limit US personnel or companies from dealing in certain maturities of debt issued. That has been changed to all debt with a maturity of over 60 days [making it harder for sanctioned companies and people to obtain short-term loans]. Then, as far as the [restrictions on] participation [by energy companies], that refers to operations in any new offshore deep-water or shale projects globally, where Russian companies have either a controlling stake or a substantial minority stake of 33 percent or higher.

Does any of this have a negative impact on average, workaday Russians? These sanctions are not completely new. They're tightening sanctions that are already in place, particularly targeting the energy sector. Certainly the average Russian has been hurting in recent years, but I would argue that that's more in line with Russia's economic weakness as a result of low oil prices than from the sanctions. So the answer, I guess, is, yes, it certainly doesn't help. But I don't think it has as dramatic of an impact on the Russian economy—and on individual Russians—as the broader macroeconomic conditions in Russia.

You mentioned these sanctions aren't entirely new. What parts are novel? It's basically just ratcheting up the economic sanctions that were already put in place [under the Obama administration]. Some of these are optional, for example the sanctions on firms that help develop Russian energy export pipelines. That's where the Nord Stream 2 controversy comes in. But that's optional [Trump has to decide whether or not to apply this measure].

I hear Germany's pissed off about that part. What's going on there? [Nord Stream 2] isn't about increasing Germany's imports of Russian gas. It would basically be giving them another avenue [through] which to import Russian gas, [rather] than going around to more risky mainland European pipelines—which go through countries like Ukraine, for example. So the reason Germany is opposed to this is because they don't want the US to have a say in their own pipeline projects, whereas other countries, like the Baltic countries, are less worried. And actually that's what's going to prevent EU unity from overriding or really challenging the US on this.

So the EU is divided here? When you're talking about upsetting the "EU," you have to keep in mind that the EU is a group of 20 member states, so it's not acting in one monolithic manner. That's actually something Russia tries to exploit by manipulating and trying to create divisions between the EU member states. Nord Stream 2 is the perfect example of this, because Germany certainly has commercial interests in a pipeline like this. [Then] you have countries that aren't thinking only in a commercial perspective—they're also speaking in geopolitical terms.

Which countries are we talking about here? The borderland countries in between Germany and Russia, the Baltic States, and also Poland. These are the kinds of energy projects that Russia uses to try to manipulate divisions within Europe—that's why the projects have been so controversial. But this is also the reason why it's not going to be possible to get complete unanimity from this from within the EU.

So Russia has already retaliated by seizing US diplomatic property, and demanding the firing of staffers who had been working in those places. What do you think is next? I think what we should be watching for in terms of the Russian response is [a] quote-unquote "asymmetrical response." That's something Russia has referenced before, and something they've used before. Basically, they respond to what they consider Western aggression in different theaters that don't have direct correlation but are nonetheless intended to wear on the US, or the show the US that it [Moscow] has areas where it can bring the pain.

Where can Russia bring the pain? One [place] is Ukraine. In the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, the negotiations there haven't really produced any significant movement from a political perspective. So I think it's an area where Russia can look to sort of ratchet up tensions. Now that sanctions have not only been extended but increased, that's one area where Russia can try to ramp up—perhaps in a limited but still painful way—against the Ukrainian forces and [in favor of] the separatists that it influences.

Russia also tends to defy the US in North Korea and Syria. and the sanctions passed by Congress have implications for the Middle East and Asia, as well. Can Russia do anything to interfere on those fronts even more? Since Russia has a seat on the UN Security Council, they can look to any sanctions or moves by the US, and veto. They can build up relations they have with the North Korean regime, and try to play a spoiler role there. And [with] Syria, between the US and Russia there was recently the ceasefire agreement in southwestern Syria, that's something Russia can either pull out of, or look to other areas where it can play that spoiler role.

How big of a nuisance will Putin have to be to make his voice heard here? I don't think [Russia's response is] going to be hugely disruptive in terms of affecting the world's order. I just mean, these are irritants essentially that Russia can use on the US. The goal is essentially to get the US back into that negotiating position—back into a conciliatory or compromising position. Right now the opposite is happening.

The New York Times wrote about these sanctions as evidence that Putin's apparent plan to get Trump elected has backfired. Is that your interpretation? There's a couple different ways to look at it. Certainly, what Russia was hoping for was a new US administration that would be more willing to work with them, and have a less confrontational relationship than under the previous administration. Trump, during the election campaign, seemed like he was the candidate more willing to do that. [So] in that sense, you could argue that it has backfired. But [Putin] is a pretty strategic thinker, [and] I think realistically, he knew there would be major constraints, and that it wouldn't be easy for Trump to change all the engrained policies toward Russia.

Barring this dramatic turnaround, what Russia is interested in, if it can't get the policies it wants from the US, then at the very least Trump presents them with someone who can foster their "chaos campaign." It's like, OK, let's at least try to exacerbate the internal divisions within the US, which I would argue we have been seeing to an extent. [In] a certain sense, you could argue it has backfired, but Russia's playing a long game. Putin's not just looking at the next few weeks and months, but also where things are going in the next months or years, so time will tell on that.

If these sanctions resemble current and recent ones so closely, it seems worth asking if those recent sanctions actually worked. Have they? The US is trying to get Russia to implement the Minsk Protocol, an agreement about the future of Ukraine. And we haven't seen any of that happen in terms of Russia pulling back its support for the separatists, Russia stopping its military actions in and around that territory. So the sanctions, if we're looking at them from [a standpoint] of trying to get Russia to be more compliant, so far they have not been effective. But if the goal is to weaken Russia over time, that remains to be seen.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Source: Why the Trump-Putin Bromance Could Be in Serious Trouble Source: Why the Trump-Putin Bromance Could Be in Serious Trouble

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Required Reading

Ossip van Duivenbode’s photos of MVRDV’s Tianjin Binhai Library are stunning. You have to see them all. (via Archdaily)

Cybercrime is hurting commercial galleries, according to The Art Newspaper:

The fraud is relatively simple. Criminals hack into an art dealer’s email account and monitor incoming and outgoing correspondence. When the gallery sends a PDF invoice to a client via email following a sale, the conversation is hijacked. Posing as the gallery, hackers send a duplicate, fraudulent invoice from the same gallery email address, with an accompanying message instructing the client to disregard the first invoice and instead wire payment to the account listed in the fraudulent document.

Once money has been transferred to the criminals’ account, the hackers move the money to avoid detection and then disappear. The same technique is used to intercept payments made by galleries to their artists and others. Because the hackers gain access to the gallery’s email contacts, the scam can spread quickly, with fraudulent emails appearing to come from known sources.

Antwaun Sargent writes that this is a golden age for “Black Painting” in the US:

Specifically, we’re witnessing the awakening of black figurative painting and portraiture, and as a figure Michelle Obama “is an archetype,” Sherald, 44, told me last week on the phone from Baltimore, where she’s based. “I want all types of people to look at my work and see themselves, just like I watch a Reese Witherspoon movie as a black woman and can empathize with her because we have had to internalize whiteness in that way to survive.”

A short history of protest posters by G. James Daichendt:

The history of protest posters dates back to the 16th century when Martin Luther and members of the Protestant Reformation posted Luther’s 95 Theses on the church doors. The message communicated a discontent and ultimately provoked a split within the religion. While this interpretation requires some reframing, it’s not hard to imagine how the poster has proven to be a powerful tool to amplify one’s voice in a community. Often anonymous and for a specific moment in time, the shelf life of posters may not be long but the impact (negative or positive) is often received as a harsh criticism or a call to arms depending upon the power structures being challenged.

Should we be working to stop Google and Facebook from becoming even more powerful? Well:

If it’s clear that Facebook and Google can’t manage what they already control, why let those corporations own more? America’s antitrust enforcers can impose such a rule almost immediately.

For one thing, there is no doubt these corporations qualify for antitrust regulation. Facebook, for instance, has 77% of mobile social networking traffic in the United States, with just over half of all American adults using Facebook every day.

Nearly all new online advertising spending goes to just Facebook and Google, and those two companies refer over half of all traffic to news websites. In all, Facebook has some 2 billion users around the world.

Hindu nationalists in India are starting to be more vocal of their criticism of the Taj Mahal, which is the country’s most popular tourist attraction. The issue for nationalists is that it was built by a Muslim ruler:

Critics of the Taj Mahal are also growing increasingly bold. In past months, religious nationalists in the Hindu-majority country have stepped up a campaign to push the four-century-old Mughal monument to the margins of Indian history. One legislator recently kicked up a national storm when he labelled the tomb “a blot”.

Resentment at the fact the country’s most recognisable monument was built by a Muslim emperor has always existed on the fringes of the Hindu right. But those fringes have never been so powerful.

Attacks on the monument, a lifeline for its home state of Uttar Pradesh, have grown so loud that last week the state chief minister – himself a critic of the Taj – was forced into “a day-long exercise in damage control”, one newspaper said.

A conversation on the “deep history of humans and music” with Gary Tomlinson:

Whenever people think about the origins of music, they stack it up against language. Automatically they start with, “Well, what’s its relationship with the origin of language?” And to pry those two things apart was of course a very important agenda in my book, because when they’re put together either music is made to piggyback on language as something subservient to the origin of language, something that came along as a result of language—this is Steven Pinker’s view of music as “auditory cheesecake”—or else music is made into a romanticized, ur-emotional language from which we finally came to speak propositional notions, while the heart of music remained something emotional. I think both of those views of music are wrong, I think they’re incomplete, I think they’re silly in some ways. Music the language of emotions and language the language of propositions—this is so drastic a simplification of what we do as humans with both music and language.

Here are 14 Russian ads that ran on Facebook during the 2016 election:

Why is YouTube and Facebook removing evidence of atrocities? The Intercept reports:

The disappearance of Abdusalam’s photos are part of a pattern that’s causing a quiet panic among human rights groups and war crimes investigators. Social media companies can, and do, remove content with little regard for its evidentiary value. First-hand accounts of extrajudicial killings, ethnic cleansing, and the targeting of civilians by armies can disappear with little warning, sometimes before investigators notice. When groups do realize potential evidence has been erased, recovering it can be a kafkaesque ordeal. Facing a variety of pressures — to safeguard user privacy, neuter extremist propaganda, curb harassment and, most recently, combat the spread of so-called fake news — social media companies have over and over again chosen to ignore, and, at times, disrupt the work of human rights groups scrambling to build cases against war criminals.

“It’s something that keeps me awake at night,” says Julian Nicholls, a senior trial lawyer at the International Criminal Court,  where he’s responsible for prosecuting cases against war criminals, “the idea that there’s a video or photo out there that I could use, but before we identify it or preserve it, it disappears.”

Activists are realizing that foreign governments have a bigger role in protests than they previously have had in the US. Micah White, one of the co-founders of Occupy, writes about his own experience:

Black Matters was one of many fake activist groups, such as Blacktivist and the police brutality tracker DoNotShoot.us, created to mimic and influence American protesters. RBC discovered around 120 Facebook, Twitter and Instagram frontgroup accounts with a combined total of 6 million followers and likes.

As a revolutionary American activist I’d been on guard against domestic intelligence agencies, not foreign governments, and Russia exploited that posture.

How a Brooklyn blogger helped decipher Paul Manafort’s alleged money laundering schemes:

She started blogging about development issues and other purely local matters. Along the way, she became pretty well versed in development issues and how to ferret out information. That was helpful when she was walking around with her camera this winter. She does that often merely to document changes in the neighborhood for the blog. She always wonders what might have been in a certain place previously.

She walked past a brownstone that looked a mess from the outside. Windows were broken and the front door had been replaced with plywood and close with a huge chain. “It just looked unkempt with a lot of construction debris.”

A neighbor saw her with her camera and began chatting. Kelly said she was just taking photos for her blog. The neighbor said, “You want a scoop?” She alluded to a “celebrity” who now owned on the block. Kelly figured she must mean some Hollywood type, since they have been spotted with regularity in recent years. But then the neighbor said, “Paul Manafort.”

Lindsey Hilsum reviews four books on the realities of Syria today, and she writes:

The Western focus on ousting ISIS rather than the regime of Bashar al-Assad has been the cause of much bitterness among Syrian activists. They understand that, unlike the Assad government, the jihadists with their anti-Western ideology are a threat to Europe and the US, but the regime and its allies have killed far more Syrians, and activists resent the way their hopes were lifted and then dashed. “The problem is not that the world did nothing,” says one of Wendy Pearlman’s sources in We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled. “It’s that they told us, ‘Rise Up! We are with you. Revolt!’… People were encouraged to stand by the revolution because they thought they had international supporters.” The book comprises interview fragments untethered to narrative, so although many of the testimonies are moving, it reads like raw material or the transcript of a podcast.

The TV show Family Guy called out Kevin Spacey back in 2005:

In case you want to read the 31-page federal indictment against ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Richard Gates:

READ the 31-page federal indictment against ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Richard Gates: https://t.co/a1m4tRo5Yh http://pic.twitter.com/a6tmw8j0ZV

— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 30, 2017

2017 in a nutshell:

2017: When a fictional president is held to a higher standard than the actual President. https://t.co/1u6qTLQhNw

— Millennial Politics (@MillenPolitics) October 30, 2017

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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