Productivity-focused app Any.do, which is available on iOS, Android and the web, has gained popularity largely because, well, it helps people get things done. But, with households and businesses being about more than just one particular user, the…
Tim Cook has long topped lists as the “most powerful” gay person in the world, and today he’s publicly addressed his sexuality for the first time. “Throughout my professional life, I’ve tried to maintain a basic level of privacy,” the Apple CEO says…
Nintendo might be on the verge of reinventing itself once again: The Japanese company is currently best known as a gaming giant, but in its storied history (which dates back to 1889), it has run taxis, sold instant rice and more. Now, Nintendo is aiming to build out its health division, adding more details to a plan announced back in January for a so-called “Quality of Life”… Read More
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. economy grew at a solid annual rate of 3.5 percent in the July-September quarter, propelled by solid gains in business investment, export sales and the biggest jump in military spending in five years.
The Commerce Department says that the third quarter result followed a 4.6 percent rebound in the second quarter. The economy shrank at a 2.1 percent rate in the first three months of the year due to a harsh winter.
The report was the first of three estimates of the gross domestic product, the economy’s total output of goods and services. Economists believe the economy is maintaining momentum in the current quarter with consumer spending expected to be helped by a big fall in gas prices.
Lucky creative writing students in a University of Pennsylvania seminar will be able to earn academic credit for wasting time on the Internet next spring. The class, appropriately titled “Wasting Time on the Internet,” will require its students to spend the three-hour weekly sessions dividing their attention between the world of the Internet and the classroom.
The instructor, Kenneth Goldsmith, tells The Washington Post that he will strictly enforce “a state of distraction” among the students — exactly the sort of thing he and virtually every other professor on Earth spends time trying to eliminate from their classes.
House Speaker John Boehner has lashed out at the Obama administration for reports that a senior official described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “chickensh*t,” while another unnamed official described him as a “coward.”
SCHAGHTICOKE, N.Y. (AP) — State police say building inspectors have condemned an upstate New York home after crews had to tear out the walls to find many of the more than 150 cats that were removed from the property.
Troopers say the Mohawk-Hudson Humane Society spent Tuesday and Wednesday removing the kittens and adult cats from Bertha Ryan’s home in the Rensselaer County town of in Schaghticoke (SKAT’-ih-kohk), 20 miles northeast of Albany.
Police say 11 dead cats were found on her property.
Officials say a trooper who went to the home earlier this month to check on the welfare of a resident saw that there were numerous felines inside living in deplorable conditions. After obtaining a search warrant, authorities discovered that many of the cats were hiding behind the walls.
Troopers say charges are pending.
There is a saying which goes, “That which is in front of you is your teacher.”
You can learn a lesson from anything and everything life throws your way. And if you view life this way, you’ve always won. You’re always receiving gifts.
That’s how I see my years spent pursuing a career path that didn’t sit right with my heart.
Here are 18 valuable lessons that I was fortunate enough to learn:
1. Your livelihood takes up too many hours in your life to do something that makes you miserable.
If you are weighed down by negative energy and disatisfaction in your work, that energy will inevitably seep into other areas of your life.
2. Go with the flow.
If you are not yet living your dream life, make peace with this fact while you work towards your goals. If you struggle against each day, resenting each task you need to complete, it will drain all of you energy. Do things with a happy heart and a light-touch, and you will feel freer.
3. Listen to your intuition.
Your heart knows what you really want. Your head will play tricks on you, trying to convince you to stay put, blanketed by the security of the status quo.
4. There is life outside of work.
There are so many other areas in life to find beauty, joy and fulfilment. You may find your flow in nature, cooking, travel, creativity and friendships.
5. Have the courage to live a life true to yourself, not a life others expect of you.
Not doing so is the top regret of the dying. If you have a burning ambition to experience the role of your dreams, take steps to make it happen. If work is not high on your list of things that bring you meaning and purpose, don’t feel pressured to say or act otherwise.
6. Open up about your desires.
You never know what doors may open once people hear about your goals.
7. You don’t need to know precisely what you want to do or have a detailed 10-step plan.
You just need to take baby steps in the general direction of your desires. You don’t need to see the whole path – just 10 feet ahead.
8. There are more possibilities and opportunities in this world than you will ever know.
Steve Jobs once advised us to look around and realise that everything in our surrounds has been created by people no smarter than us. Question the way the world works, and know that you can change it.
9. You will adapt to new situations much easier than you think.
Don’t wait until you are ready. Chances are you will never feel ready. There is an old Zen proverb which goes, leap and the net will appear. You will figure it out as you go – you always do.
10. The only person who has never failed is the person who has never tried anything.
Don’t be so terrified of it.
11. You are not your job title, your profession or your resume.
Your worth is not dependent on the “success” of your career. You are inherently worthwhile. You achieve your purpose on this earth by simply being you.
12. Be gentle with yourself.
Set goals and take steps, but don’t beat yourself up in the process. You will accomplish so much more through self-love than through whipping yourself into line.
13. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
So if you want to apply for a role, enter a competition, pitch an article or float an idea, go for it. Because you have automatically lost if you don’t even try.
14. Making big changes in your life takes courage, discipline and persistence.
There will be soul searching, late nights, hard yards, doubts and fluctuating emotions. Buckle up, because it will be worth it.
15. There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way.
Make a decision to feel happy, successful and abundant NOW, and the world will respond in kind. Don’t make the mistake of waiting for external events before you claim your happiness.
16. You are a one-of-a-kind blend of magic.
There has never been nor will there ever be anyone like you in the history of humankind with your unique set of skills and passions. Contribute your gifts to the world.
17. Emotions are temporary.
That gripping fear, those crushing doubts, may seem so intense and real. But they will slowly fade and vanish. So don’t get give them too much attention. Try and let them be.
18. There is a huge sense of satisfaction which comes from following your dreams, even if you haven’t reached them yet.
It feels so much better to be at the bottom of the right ladder than it does to be at the very top of the wrong ladder for you.
Suzanne Heyn is a freelance writer and yogi. In her GPS Guide below, she shares her personal steps to reach peace.
After years of struggling with depression, illness and loss, I finally discovered a beautiful gift: a path to peace. It was only after accepting the demons inside my head that light entered my life. Fighting against sadness and negativity only made them stronger. Those difficult emotions became my greatest teachers. As Rumi said, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Below are some tips on how to create your own path to peace.
Suzanne Heyn is a freelance writer and yogi who is working on her first book about healing from breast cancer. She blogs about finding peace and living a healthy life at Modern Yogi and on Instagram, @modern.yogi.
This GPS Guide is part of a series of posts designed to bring you back to balance when you’re feeling off course.
GPS Guides are our way of showing you what has relieved others’ stress in the hopes that you will be able to identify solutions that work for you. We all have de-stressing “secret weapons” that we pull out in times of tension or anxiety, whether they be photos that relax us or make us smile, songs that bring us back to our heart, quotes or poems that create a feeling of harmony or meditative exercises that help us find a sense of silence and calm. We encourage you to visit our other GPS Guides here, and share with us your own personal tips for finding peace, balance and tranquility.
Our dreams can be deeply powerful intuitive messengers that hold keys and clues to our deepest selves. Far beyond their ability to amuse or terrify us, they hold a profound communication system that when we learn to understand we can use to heal and transform our lives.
Most times it is the frightening, confusing or worrisome dreams that cause us the most concern and when those doozies hit us in the wee hours of the night, we often wake, jolted from our sleep wondering, ‘What the heck does that mean?’
Here are some powerful yet simple steps to begin deciphering the intuitive messages held in your dreams. It is helpful to do this work with a pen and paper and write down everything you notice as you go through the process. If at all possible, do this interpretation before you get out of bed, so the energy and the imagery of the dream that has caught your attention are fresh and accessible in your mind and body.
#1. What is the energetic foundation of your dream?
What is the predominant emotion, feeling or sensation that was generated by your dream? Was it fear, frustration, worry, anxiety, terror, helplessness? Delight, passion, ecstasy, freedom, joy? Try to get as precise as you can at identifying it.
The reality is; the dream did not produce these emotions, feelings or situations, the emotions, feelings and energies produced the dream. The energy at the root of the dream is being held and replayed by your subconscious mind to be brought to the surface to be acknowledged, released or healed.
#2. Witness the foundational emotion.
When you identify the energy at the foundation of your dream; witness it. That is, observe the fact that this energy or emotion is there and it is real. But instead of saying, “I AM afraid. Or I AM angry. Or I AM frustrated,” say to yourself… “There is fear here, or there is worry here, or there is anxiety here.” Accept that this energy is in fact present in you and that it is there to teach you, but that it is not you. It is simply energy needing to be moved.
This shifts you into the position of ‘observer’ instead of ‘experiencer’. This simple yet powerful shift in perspective, allows you to witness the energy that the dream has brought to the surface without allowing it to take over and run the show, which it may be doing to some degree in your waking life anyway. Your dream life is only another reflection of where that hidden energy is having its way with you without your awareness.
Observing instead of becoming the energy allows us to regain our position of personal autonomy and we can then exercise our Free Will instead of having the patterns of hidden emotion continue to run as a disempowering loop.
Stay with this observation for a few minutes and write down what you notice.
#3. What is the symbolism that the dream carries?
Dreams are rarely direct and they are more rarely predictive. (Although they can be, so don’t throw the baby out with the bath water on that one) But because they are messages from our subconscious mind, they are more commonly symbolic, so they need to be interpreted via our personal and unique creative awareness, in order to find their deeper meaning.
For example: you may have a dream that you have a cancerous tumor somewhere in your body, or you are being chased or are falling or are being held against your will. Or you may have lost something very important to you, or you are the only waiter in a restaurant full of people, you can’t use the computer and you are naked. (That was a big one for me in my waitress days.)
Write down the story being told in your dream then ask yourself, “What does this situation symbolize to me?” Without analyzing or thinking about it, allow the ideas and thoughts connected to that question to flow. You may get, “I am afraid I am going to die without getting to do what I truly want to do with my life. I am afraid I am going to lose love. I am feeling a lack of control or safety. Or I don’t believe I have what it takes to be good at what I do.”
Whatever comes up for you is correct for you. Allow those interpretations to have truth and meaning and allow them to be without the need or desire to pick them apart as right or wrong, true or false or fact or folly.
Take a moment to just sit with what you have brought to the surface. Allow it to take shape within your awareness. Often times these discoveries will reveal a deeply hidden and subconscious belief that has been running for a very long time without your awareness — and the reason it is coming to the surface now, is because you are now in a position to do something about it.
Our limiting subconscious beliefs have great power in our lives when we are unaware of them. Becoming aware of them immediately shifts the base of power from unconscious to conscious… and once things are conscious they can be healed.
Once you have discovered this hidden pattern, decide for yourself if you want it to continue to be true for you or not. If the answer is ‘no,’ which it usually is, then give yourself permission to let that pattern go and then decide.
#4. What action can you take in your waking life that can help to break this pattern apart?
Healing our lives or making any physical change always begins internally. But it only becomes real as we take action both internally and externally. Ask yourself what inspired action can you take, today, that you have 100-percent control over, that will help you break apart the old limitations.
It might be to start writing what you really want to say in a journal, script or book outline. It might be signing up for a class that you have always been afraid of or making a phone call to initiate a conversation that you know needs to happen. Whatever comes to mind for you, is appropriate for you. But once you discover that conscious action, you must take it, for it is a crucial key to establishing new patterns that will determine your ability to heal or succeed.
Dreaming with our eyes open.
Our dreams do not have to be random frightening experiences over which we have no control. Once they are recognized as the powerful messengers that they are, we can start using our dream time as powerful healing time. When we learn how to recognize and use the power of the wisdom revealed to us when our eyes are closed, we can apply it to creating the life of our dreams when our eyes are open.
Simone Wright, ‘The Evolutionary Mind Coach for Elite Performers and Visionary Leaders”, is the author of First Intelligence: Using the Science and Spirit of Intuition. She has trained law enforcement, CEO’s, entrepreneurs and health care providers how to use the power of their Intuition to gain greater success and personal meaning in their lives and career. She uses her intuitive skills to assist in police investigations, missing children’s cases and corporate business strategies. She has appeared on international radio and television and been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Visit her online at : www.simonewright.com.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
