In this Shambhala Sun article, Chödrön cites six ways in which one can develop a ‘cool loneliness,’ one which prepares the meditator for perceiving and living a different reality, one in which being alone does not equate to feeling lonely.
Less Desire
[…] We often have an incessant need to know what’s going to happen, with a prospective job, new love, or the outcome of a disease. Becoming fixated on what the result is going to be creates anxiety and helplessness. The empowering route is to let go of the outcome and be present with the process, painful as it might be. The more you become affiliated with uncertainty, the less your mind creates scenarios which may not have the opportunity of occurring anyway. Quoting Zen master Katagiri Roshi, ‘One can be lonely and not be tossed away by it.’
Contentment
[…] Contentment means not escaping from your issues, rather acknowledging them as part of a process that, like all else, will one day be gone. We really do not have a lot of days on this earth; every one we spend restless is one we could have spent enjoying being alive.
Avoiding Unnecessary Activity
[…] Unnecessary activities include going out drinking and obsessively hitting the gym to daydreaming and oversleeping. […] Chödrön quotes the Japanese poet Ryokan: ‘If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.’
Complete Discipline
If we want to do anything in life well, it must be a discipline. […] In terms of loneliness, this implies taking these practices of stillness, reflection and meditation, and performing them, even during the toughest days… especially during the toughest days.
Not Wandering in the World of Desire
As Chödrön writes, ‘Loneliness is not a problem. Loneliness is nothing to be solved.’ While she already brought up cultivating less desire, this step simply means recognizing when you are engaged in an activity that is masking your loneliness, and to stop engaging in it. Such avoidances create addictions. […] Running away from loneliness results in more loneliness.
Not Seeking Security From One’s Discursive Thought** s**
[W]hen we use our inner world as an escape for what the outer world is presenting, we’re not dealing with the challenges right in front of us. If we crave security, we’ll find it by dealing with what confronts us. Running from challenges into the inner world of thoughts will never provide the security we seek.
Rock and Roll is old. Really old.
Vitruvian Guitar Rock Man by Leonardo da Vinci?
Researchers have independently identified the phenomenon of positive procrastination, although there’s some disagreement on what to call it. “Structured procrastination” is the preferred term of John Perry, a philosopher at Stanford who published a book about it last year. Admittedly, it’s not a long book (92 quite small pages), but give him credit: He got it done, and only 17 years after he identified the concept.
The key to productivity, he argues in “The Art of Procrastination,” is to make more commitments — but to be methodical about it.
At the top of your to-do list, put a couple of daunting, if not impossible, tasks that are vaguely important-sounding (but really aren’t) and seem to have deadlines (but really don’t). Then, farther down the list, include some doable tasks that really matter.
“Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list,” Dr. Perry writes. “With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.”
You can also call this “productive procrastination,” the term used by Piers Steel, a psychologist at the University of Calgary. It’s his personal favorite of the dozens of techniques he cataloged while researching his 2011 book, “The Procrastination Equation.”
“For most of us, procrastination can be beaten down, but not entirely beaten,” Dr. Steel told me, describing how one of his scholarly papers on procrastination took him a decade to write. “My best trick is to play my projects off against each other, procrastinating on one by working on another.”
Dr. Steel says it’s based on sound principles of behavioral psychology: “We are willing to pursue any vile task as long as it allows us to avoid something worse.” He gives theoretical credit to Sir Francis Bacon, the 17th-century philosopher, whose self-control strategy was to “set affection against affection, and to master one by another; even as we use to hunt beast with beast.”
At the very least, you can use it to stop feeling so bad about a problem that everyone shares. It’s certainly a saner strategy than the bromide about never putting off until tomorrow what you can do today. By that logic, you’d never stop working — there’s always something that could be done today.
Better to follow Dr. Perry’s rewritten version: Never do today any task that may disappear by tomorrow.
Whenever you’re anxious, sad or overwhelmed or simply need some soothing, it helps to have a collection of comforting — and healthy — tools to turn to.
But some calming activities don’t work for everyone.
So we asked three experts for their take on how readers can truly soothe their minds and bodies without needing more money, time or anything else, for that matter. Below are 13 strategies anyone can use to comfort themselves when they’re having a bad day.
Stretch your body. […]
Take a shower. […]
Visualize a peaceful image. […]
Speak compassionately to yourself. […]
Reach out. […]
Ground yourself. […]
Listen to soothing music. […]
Practice mindfulness. […]
Move your body. […]
Picture the positive. […]
Zoom out. […]
Practice alternate nostril breathing. […]
Let yourself feel bad. […]
Read the article for more details.
Jaw-Dropping Photos of Nature Through the Eyes of an Effects Designer
Thanks to website Cuded, we found out today that photographs captured by a visual effects designer are as jaw-dropping and explosive as we had imagined. Artist David Jon Ogmundsson, who also works as a motion graphics designer, continuously has his eye on the landscape around him during his travels. Several of his incredible photos document the 2010 volcanic eruptions of Mt. Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland. It’s an unbelievable sight. The Reykjavik-based photographer has a flair for the dramatic, evident in his otherworldly compositions, striking angles, and colors. See more amazing photos of nature in our gallery.
Surreal Photo Manipulations That Make You Do a Double Take
Photographer Thomas Barbéy, who we first learned about on Design You Trust, counts René Magritte, M.C. Escher, and Roger Dean amongst his favorite artists, and the trio’s influence on Barbéy is clear. He creates surreal photo manipulations that aren’t necessarily subtle, but the way they fit together inspires a double take. The images, though bizarre, are based in everyday life or things found in nature: traffic jams, walks on the beach, animals in the wild. Barbéy sees his works as puzzles and notes that some compositions combine images that were shot decades apart. He always waits for the perfect match. Take a closer look in our gallery, and visit the artist’s website for more surreal montages.
Once our emotions start to take a grip of our physical body, what can we do to move from a state of limitation and fear into an open, tranquil, peaceful state?
Come back to the present moment. […]
Put things in perspective. […]
Become an observer of your thoughts. […]
Change your experience. […]
Prevent your mind from sabotaging you. […]
Be grateful. […]
Read the article for more details.
Investigation in Emotion Classification
This is the early stage research of the project. In late January, 2012, I emailed around Royal College of Art asking for words describing emotions in languages other than English that are untranslatable into English. Interesting enough, in order to understand the untranslatable words I had to have several correspondence with the person who contributed the word, and through this back-and-forth discussion can I actually get the glimpse of the emotion itself. These explanation of the untranslatable words are often in the format of “it is a kind of (emotion A), close to (emotion B), and somehow between (emotion C) and (emotion D).” This triggers me to map out the emotions based on the classification of emotions provided in Shaver et al. - “Emotion Knowledge - Futher Exploration of a Prototype Approach.” in the book Emotions in Social Psychology by W. Parrott (2001). Which I intented to visualised the untranslatable words as chemical molecules that reacts with the emotion “nodes” to the fact that untranslatable words are often complicated emotions that are the mixture of other translatable emotions.
Pictured above: New emotions invented by the Internet.
The Wabi Sabi expression is asymmetrical or irregular, and it possesses a certain randomness; the materials used and the artist/ designer should be in “dialogue” during the creation process in the sense that the artist/ designer should let the material lead a great part of the shaping process, instead of being occupied with an overall conceptual idea. The materials used are natural, and they show the passage of time, and provide the experiencing subject with a stimulating tactile experience. The vulnerability and decay of the objects are viewed as adding value to the design experience; the changing colour and texture, creates a bond between the experiencing subject and the object, and adds a degree of melancholy (due to the impermanence of all things) to the expression. Objects created in accordance with Wabi Sabi are made of materials that are visibly vulnerable to the effects of weathering and human treatment. Wabi Sabi is not shiny, flashy and new. It is rough, gloomy, and subtle.
There are similarities between Wabi Sabi aesthetics and the sublime aesthetic experience, which in brief terms is connected to asymmetrical compositions and complex expressions. These similarities are for example the disregard of conventional understandings of beauty, the irregular, gloomy, and rough, and the stimulation of mental activity. However, where the sublime experience, in philosophical writings by e.g. Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998), is connected to fear and challenges; the experiencing subject is overwhelmed by vast nature or chaotic structures that in theory could expand into infinity, the Wabi Sabi expression offers an instant sense of peace by affirming human impermanence and imperfection. And it does this in a modest and subtle way. Wabi Sabi is connected to details, to uncompromising simplicity, and to to irregularity.
This work is an alphabetical list of the most important architects with their best known building. A lot of them have been left out with grief because we only need one for each letter and we done an effort to have different nationalities. If you love architecture, for more stuff you can follow us in ombuarchitecture.tumblr.com.