Awakened Heart.

When life knocks you down, it can be hard to get back up.
We can also learn to approach life in a way that allows us to accept any obstacles that confront us
This strategy allows us to stay strong in times of adversity and keep calm in times of danger.

In these blinks, you’ll also learn

Why loneliness can be cool;
Why fear is nothing to be scared of; and
How we experience death every day.

Fear is our first reaction as we get closer to the truth behind a problem we’re facing.
You need to understand your fear on a deeper level by taking time to reflect on it.
First thing we need to do to change this is to realize that our lives are in constant flux; things fall into place, fall apart and come together again in unexpected ways.
Create space in your life to let things happen.
the shifting nature of life had brought them an entirely new solution

Loneliness is the perfect opportunity for self-observation and self-love.
Every day, we juggle our work lives and social engagements, doing our best to improve ourselves and constantly aiming to achieve bigger and better things. Once you start using the middle way to face your moments of loneliness, you’ll begin to embrace them as opportunities for self-observation; in fact, you could even turn time alone into meditation sessions.

Hope has a surprisingly detrimental impact on our lives.
The Tibetan language captures the relationship between hope and fear especially accurately. In Tibetan, the word for hope is rewa, while fear translates as dopka. The word re-dok refers to the combination of hope and fear, a feeling whose duality captures our perpetual dissatisfaction with ourselves.

Celebrating impermanence, suffering and egolessness brings us closer to the meaning of life.

Why do we exist?
It’s in our best interests to celebrate impermanence,
we can do so by recognizing it during times of new beginnings. When someone is born, when you fall in love with someone new or even when you start the day full of energy, by embracing the idea that these beginnings come with their own unique endings, you’ll become more mindful of impermanence and the way it shapes our lives.

Suffering is another inevitable part of our lives. As the saying goes, there’s no pleasure without pain.
It reminds us that we can’t always get what we want, and helps us feel happier about our current state of affairs.

By embracing egolessness, we can learn to feel at ease with our past and future, and thus learn to live in the moment.

Being compassionate toward others allows us to love ourselves more deeply.
Practicing compassion toward others can make you more accepting of yourself at the same time.
Building relationships with those that society has rejected is much the same as getting in touch with the parts of himself that he’d rejected for so long.
By practicing tonglen, where we turn pain into joy through meditations on our own breathing. Start by thinking of someone who suffers. Hold them in your thoughts as you breathe in his or her pain. Then, as you exhale, breathe out the joy you’d like them to feel

Here are three ancient strategies you can use.
First no more struggle-Embrace
Second using poison as medicine – in other words, using times of suffering as a wake-up call.
The final strategy is the manifestation of awakened energy, or the practice of recognizing that everything is alive and perfect the way it is.

By incorporating self-acceptance, calm reflection and a deeper appreciation for the present moment into your day-to-day life, you’ll be better equipped to confront challenging times. Taking the time to learn about your fears, flaws and difficulties, while embracing even the most unpleasant parts of life, can also bring you closer to friends and family – and strangers too.

Actionable advice:

Accept the place where you are right now.

Hey, I'm reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön on Blinkist. Blinkist offers the best knowledge from nonfiction in powerful, memorable packs.

http://blinki.st/fea8a39b1243?chapter=58b4111b8566cb0004c1f409

Long Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

The root of many of the world's problems is our own short-sightedness and inability to see the big picture.
Those blinks will set you on the path of the long term consequences of the actions we take.

Open your mind to a long-term view.
If we hadn’t invented glasses some time ago, shortsighted people would have a serious problem.
It’s not only our eyes but our minds  that are shortsighted.

Once upon a time, our shortsightedness was beneficial;finding food, for instance, and avoiding predators.
When faced with the problem of malaria-carrying mosquitoes on the Asian island of Borneo, the World Health Organization (WHO) responded by spraying vast areas of the island with DDT
Due to WHO’s shortsightedness, the Royal Air Force was forced to airdrop cats into Borneo’s affected areas to bring the rat population back down.

"We are the only species that has the capacity to alter our environment so profoundlyto make it unlivable"

We place a huge importance on time and getting things done efficiently, so why is it so difficult for us to consider the long-term consequences of our actions
We can only truly understand what we’re able to experience, so the longest stretch of time we can really comprehend is around 80 years or so, which is next to nothing relative to 4.6 billion years of earth's life.
Though we struggle to deal with deep time, we excel at living by the seconds and minutes of the clock.
So what are the long-term effects of running our lives by the clock?
This pressure to make snap decisions and provide fast results often adversely affects the quality of our responses.
We also tend to eschew long-term solutions like dieting and exercise, instead favoring drugs that relieve our immediate symptoms.
This mentality can lead to returning symptoms – often worse than before – and deteriorating health.

Automobiles are a prime example of short-term thinking.
No thought was given to the long-term impact they would have on human society.
Wars have been waged and thousands of lives lost in the name of that automotive necessity, oil.
Still worse, number of lives lost in every war, falls far short of the number of lives lost in car accidents.
There are other, more existential issues that cars cause; each driver, for instance, exists within his own personal bubble, separated by glass and steel from his fellow man.
It’s exactly this kind of isolation and dissociation from one’s neighbor that can lead to the erosion of local communities.

Unlike cars, your neighborhood’s small businesses are great at bringing people together.
When a small business opens up in a neighborhood, unlike a chain store, they can’t just pack up and relocate if customers are unhappy, which gives them an incentive to try extra hard.
Local businesses also help their area’s economy by keeping on average 55 cents of every dollar spent within their community.
And with a strong local economy, there’s less need to use resources for long-distance shipping and transportation, both of which damage the environment.
By helping create a strong local economy, new local businesses will emerge and your community will be in good shape for future prosperity..

There’s a good chance you or someone you know has had to deal with the stressful problem of getting out of debt.
Getting in debt in the first place is often the result of short-term thinking.
Credit cards are an easy way to rack up debt, and they’re a shining example of costly shortsightedness.
The logic behind using a credit card is the very definition of short-term thinking. You’re essentially saying, “I’ll buy this now and worry about paying for it later.”
By promoting credit cards, our financial system is actually encouraging us to use short-term thinking and get ourselves weighed down with debt. This system is only concerned with stimulating the economy, and since people who’ve accumulated debt are people who’ve spent money, the individual details don’t matter. The economy is being stimulated.
But this doesn’t change the fact that it’s in the best interest of the economy to give people credit cards and promote mindless consumerism.
If people don’t spend, companies lose money and employees get laid off, which leads to even less spending and even more people losing their jobs.
On the other hand, our economy can’t withstand all this debt either, and there will eventually be a breaking point.
People need to realign their values with the things that bring true, long-term happiness.

A return to long-term sustainability means a return to small farming,
Once you start thinking about long-term prosperity, it becomes clear that new energy sources must be developed.
Even though we tend to focus on our individual problems, we’re also responsible for the world we live in.

Think sustainability and always put the long term generations in your decisions.

Adapted fro. Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World by Jim Brumm on Blinkist. Blinkist offers the best knowledge from nonfiction in powerful, memorable packs.

http://blinki.st/fea8a39b1243?chapter=58a8da9995f5390004fb0fd2

Irresistable

Understand exactly why you should limit your time in front of screens and devices.

If you are reading this you are almost certainly looking at a screen of a smartphone, tablet or computer. And chances are this isn’t the only time you’ve looked at a screen today.
What's wrong with that?

There’s a heightened risk of getting addicted.
We’ll get down to the roots of this irresistibility and offer some advice to obviate the problem

In this blog you will know
-That you probably spend twice as much time online as you think you do;
-Why answering emails quickly isn’t productive; and
-why you get so much pleasure from all those likes on Facebook.

How would you feel if you couldn’t use your smartphone for a day? How about an entire week?
Perhaps you’ve asked yourself whether you’re spending too much time on your phone and not enough time with your friends and loved ones.
Moment’s purpose is to collect user data and determine exactly how much time people are spending glued to their mobile devices https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zerodesktop.appdetox.qualitytime

Video games are another majorly addictive technology

We’ll take a closer look at the science behind addiction and what you can do to help keep yourself from getting hooked

The situations we find ourselves in often contribute a great deal to the development of an addiction.
Addiction was now beginning to seem less like an affliction only suffered by the weak of will and more like something that could happen to anyone, given the right circumstances.
Many substances provide feedback that hits the brain’s pleasure centers, and when this is combined with a situation from which we might want to escape – the horrors of war, for instance – you get the perfect recipe for addiction.
Technology also has the power to stimulate our pleasure centers.
Dopamine is released in the brain, which in turn sets off a feeling of intense pleasure.
This initial pleasure gradually decreases when the behavior is repeated. This causes people to make the addiction worse by spending more and more time online
Since behavioral addictions are less intense than drug addictions, they’re also easier to kick.
Email can be addictive, unhealthy and hurt productivity, so disable your notification systems.
Responding to an email within a few seconds of receiving it is just another addictive behavior and it actually reduces the quality of our work.
Disable your email notifications and set infrequent times to check your email.

The “like” button is a perfect example of an unpredictable reward. When we roll the dice and come up with the winning number, that rush of pleasure is especially addictive.

Children need to be protected from the dangers of technology addiction.
Too much time in front of a screen can actually affect a child’s empathy.
We don’t know the full extent of how digital media will affect the lives of today’s schoolchildren.
It’s important for children to learn that boredom, as well as physical and emotional challenges, are a fact of life that will require patience and hard work. The effortless entertainment of computers and mobile devices can undermine this important lesson.
Relying on willpower alone to change your behavior is a risky proposition; substitution, on the other hand, is a much more reliable method.
Realism, which offers a new routine: looking at the real world around you instead of the virtual world inside your phone.

Before you can move forward, you have to take the first step and acknowledge that the problem is there. So take a moment, turn off your devices and ask yourself: How irresistible has technology become in your life?

Action
Avoid opening more than two tabs on your internet browser

Adapted fron Irresistible by Adam Alter on Blinkist.

http://blinki.st/fea8a39b1243?chapter=58bd5b500d93aa00045b76d6

What We Say Matters

The words we speak establish our relationships with others and ourselves.

Words can build trust and can express sincerity, appreciation and courtesy, but words can also sow the seeds of discord.
Sometimes, we choose words that hurt other people’s feelings,We might not intend to be mean, but it’s the manner in which we express ourselves that causes resentment. So how can we communicate honestly without hurting other people’s feelings?

You’ll also learn:
How to tell your housemate to clean dishes?
Why making requests can be like offering gifts; and
How you can best talk to yourself.

Speaking truthfully and without harming others increases the well-being of everyone involved.
Speaking has profound effects on our well-being and the world around us.
The way we speak reflects how we view ourselves, as well as our opinions of others.
The way we speak also affects the way our discussions unfold.

"You’re so messy, you don’t give a damn about the house!”"
Instead of calmly stating your feelings, instead of communicating clearly about the issue, you both end up angry and argumentative.

So, how can you approach such situations to maximize your well-being as well as that of the other person?
Using right speech, language that’s truthful but not harmful.

Nonviolent communication allows you to speak in an honest, nonjudgmental way.
The first two elements of nonviolent communication are observations and feelings.
An observation is simply a statement of facts, Feelings, on the other hand, are signals sent by your subconscious that tell you whether your needs are being met.
By combining observations with feelings, you can make a nonviolent statement of truth like, “when I see dishes on the kitchen counter, I feel frustrated".
The next step to nonviolent communication is to express needs and requests.
Needs are things like food, security or creative expression.
A request needs to be present and doable.
When you combine all of the above components, you can say something like, “when I see ........ I feel frustrated because my need for ........ isn’t met. Would you be willing to ...... .. within the next 30 minutes?”

The final thing in NVC is making genuine requests, never demands. This means being open to the possibility that your request will not be accepted.

Focusing on your needs and empathizing with others can help you overcome and avoid unpleasant feelings.
Judgment and anger can often prevent people from communicating truthfully without harming others.
Fear of judgment causes people to agree to things that don’t meet their needs.
Acting without meeting your needs will leave a negative residue.
Empathy can help you avoid angry feelings altogether.
Sharing our feelings and needs as a form of gift-giving.
We can use empathy to improve communication  while defending their need for respect and autonomy.

By honestly expressing our feelings and needs while remaining open and avoiding doing harm to others, we can speak the truth without hurting ourselves or others.  

Adapted from What We Say Matters by Judith Hanson Lasater, Ike K. Lasater on Blinkist.

http://blinki.st/fea8a39b1243?chapter=58b4068fafd1210004c15f72

Change your mind & Change your life

At any given time, what we feel is the result of the brain and mind interacting with each other.
Our minds are our mental processes – our thoughts, wishes and feelings.the brain is a highly complex bundle of synapses. Our consciousness is based on the interaction of the mind and the brain.

The purpose of this blog is:
-Be happier
-Stop exacerbating misfortunes
-Become a more compassionate and loving person.

By engaging in self-reflection we can lead happier, more fulfilling lives.
A good example of self-reflection is thinking about what makes us happy?Focus always on the positive.
By actively reflecting on our lives, we enable ourselves to become better people.

Suffering describes all the feelings in life we don’t like and would rather not experience.
Suffering is what we should avoid. Positive feelings is what we should seek out.
The decision is whether to approach something or avoid it.
The approach/avoidance behaviors aid our survival, they can also make us unhappy.
When we can’t attain the things we approach, desire or pursue, or when our desires cause us long-term suffering.
Sometimes,attaining goals can ultimately lead to suffering!

Reactions!Beware of your reactions. When someone strikes you with a dart that causes discomfort, don't through another "Dart of Rage" that causes you more harm.
"Do no harm" to yourself.
For example, if you’re anxious about the speech you have to give tomorrow, that feeling of anxiety can remain for hours – or even days – after you’ve delivered your speech and the source of the first dart has vanished!

The key to happiness lies in certain ways of thinking.
-Mindfulness is the state of complete awareness ;being mindful helps us to feel happy and more relaxed.
-Wholesome intentions, thinking about yourself as strong and powerful. Indeed, by actively thinking “I am strong, it’s good to be strong,
-Practicing composure helps us to control our emotions and reduces any unhealthy desires we may have. Composure is a circuit-breaker. Composure entails understanding how things make you feel, and realizing that your emotional feelings can be separated from your desires. A good example is success. Success makes us feel good, but an endless craving for it can cause us to feel dissatisfied, and even depressed

We suffer, for example, whenever we take things personally, or crave approval or affirmation from others.
Let go of this strong sense of self and immerse ourselves in the world without ego, we feel a sense of peace and fulfillment
However, a strong sense of self often comes in useful, and – through meditation – we can learn when to take things personally and when to step back from ourselves.
With a greater sense of empathy, one can become a more compassionate and loving person.

Action:
-Throughout your everyday life, try to be mindful
-Use mental imagery during interpersonal conflicts.

Adapted from "Buddha's Brain"  by Rick Hanson on Blinkis

http://blinki.st/fea8a39b1243?chapter=53eb4a6d36343300077e0000