Michael Sessions Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Michael Sessions. Here they are! All 55 of them:

You don't need the makeup." Sabrina felt like her face is on fire. He knew about her late-night beauty sessions. And, if she had heard him correctly, he was also admitting that he thought she was pretty. She looks over at him and found he was looking at her. "I kind of wish I hadn't said that," he said. "Me, too," she replied. "Would it help if I said you were stinky, muck-covered toad-face?" Sabrina nodded and edged as far away as she could on the trampoline. Puck did the same.
Michael Buckley (Tales From the Hood (The Sisters Grimm, #6))
You see, even after decades of therapy and workshops and retreats and twelve-steps and meditation and even experiencing a very weird session of rebirthings, even after rappeling down mountains and walking over hot coals and jumping out of airplanes and watching elephant races and climbing the Great Wall of China, and even after floating down the Amazon and taking ayahuasca with an ex-husband and a witch doctor and speaking in tongues and fasting (both nutritional and verbal), I remained pelted and plagued by feelings of uncertainty and despair. Yes, even after sleeping with a senator, and waking up next to a dead friend, and celebrating Michael Jackson’s last Christmas with him and his kids, I still did not feel—how shall I put this?—mentally sound.
Carrie Fisher (Shockaholic)
Nothing seems crueler--or more ironic--than these upper crusters who never pay a dime for their high-priced shrinks or reflexology sessions to call those who just want that tumor removed from their uterus a bunch of commies. Well, the revolution is at hand and let's hope all those uninsured commies give the rich such a headache that a whole bottle of Advil won't be enough to take the pain way.
Michael Moore
participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the most meaningful in their lives, comparable “to the birth of a first child or death of a parent.” Two-thirds of the participants rated the session among the top five “most spiritually significant experiences” of their lives; one-third ranked it the most significant such experience in their lives.
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
I hear a siren and, if we weren’t already in a hospital, I would have assumed they were coming for nearly everyone in this room.
Michael F. Stewart (Counting Wolves)
Although healing may not be the primary focus of the sexual experience, sexual issues of repression or trauma can be brought to the lovemaking session and patiently addressed.
Michael Mirdad (An Introduction To Tantra And Sacred Sexuality)
The survivors by and large went on with their lives. Three of them committed suicide. An unknown number found their way to alcohol and drugs. None were unscathed. But most found a way to survive, as they had for so long alone. They rediscovered their families; they attended school and church; they attended counseling sessions. They walked through shopping malls in wonder. They were occasionally seen to break down crying in the middle of a grocery store.
Michael Grant (Light (Gone, #6))
My legs are not quite properly operating and I’m having physiotherapy every Tuesday,” Michael said after Emma had beaten him to the phone. I accompanied him on one of these sessions, where he had to wait like anyone else for his turn. I was amazed that he did not have someone come to the house and that the therapy was not more frequent. He could barely walk now. But he was loyal to the National Health Service, the creation of his hero Nye Bevan and avoided any appearance of seeking special treatment or assistance outside the NHS.
Carl Rollyson (A Private Life of Michael Foot)
Batley insisted that no cult existed but the jury found him guilty of 35 offences including 11 rapes. three indecent assaults, causing prostitution for personal gain, causing a child to have sex and inciting a child to have sex. The three women, who got Egyptian Eye of Horus tattoos apparently to show their allegiance to their organisation, were found guilty of sex-related charges. Young boys and girls were procured by cult members to take part in sex sessions, the trial heard. The group preyed on vulnerable youngsters, impelling them to join with veiled death threats. Batley was accused of forcing a number of his victims into prostitution. (Morris 2011) There are, after all, no paedophile rings; there is no ritual abuse; recovered memories cannot he trusted; not all victimization claims are legitimate. (Pratt 2009: 70)
Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
He counseled vigilance, “because the possibility of abuse by government officials always exists. The issue is not going to be that there are new tools available; the issue is making sure that the incoming administration, like my administration, takes the constraints on how we deal with U.S. citizens and persons seriously.” This answer did not fill me with confidence. The next day, President-Elect Trump offered Lieutenant General Michael Flynn the post of national security adviser and picked Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama as his nominee for attorney general. Last February, Flynn tweeted, “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL” and linked to a YouTube video that declared followers of Islam want “80 percent of humanity enslaved or exterminated.” Sessions had once been accused of calling a black lawyer “boy,” claiming that a white lawyer who represented black clients was a disgrace to his race, and joking that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was okay until I found out they smoked pot.” I felt then that I knew what was coming
Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
In fact, there did not seem to be any limit to what Grof's LSD subjects could tap into. They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and even plant, on the tree of evolution. They could experience what it was like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun, the consciousness of the entire planet, and even the consciousness of the entire cosmos. More than that, they displayed the ability to transcend space and time, and occasionally they related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences during their cerebral travels, discarnate beings, spirit guides from "higher planes of consciousness, " and other suprahuman entities. On occasion subjects also traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality. In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple's name, street address, and telephone number. The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man's problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. "After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues' jokes, had they found out, " says Grof. "I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: 'Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.
Michael Talbot (The Holographic Universe)
IS CARDIO BEST BEFORE OR AFTER LIFTING? NEITHER! Doing cardio right before or after lifting can seriously hinder muscle and strength gains. Why? Researchers from RMIT University worked with well–trained athletes in 2009 and found that “combining resistance exercise and cardio in the same session may disrupt genes for anabolism.” In laymen’s terms, they found that combining endurance and resistance training sends “mixed signals” to the muscles37. Cardio before the resistance training suppressed anabolic hormones such as IGF–1 and MGF, and cardio after resistance training increased muscle tissue breakdown. Several other studies, such as those conducted by Children’s National Medical Center38, the Waikato Institute of Technology39, and the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland)40 , came to same conclusions: training for both endurance and strength simultaneously impairs your gains on both fronts. Training purely for strength or purely for endurance in a workout is far superior. Cardio before weightlifting also saps your energy and makes it much harder to train heavy, which in turn inhibits your muscle growth. So, how do you do it right?
Michael Matthews (Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body)
In 1963, Skinner’s Harvard colleagues Charles Catania and David Cutts put humans through the pigeon paces by instructing each of twenty-six undergraduate subjects to press one of two different buttons on a box whenever a yellow light flashed and to try to accumulate as many points as possible on a counter. Whenever the subject gained a point a green light flashed. A red light indicated that the session was over, which was when the subject reached one hundred points. Unbeknownst to the subjects, only the right button could generate points, and those points were delivered on a VI schedule of reinforcement, with an average time between point delivery of thirty seconds. The results were revealing in that human brains are no less superstitious than bird brains: most of the subjects quickly developed superstitious button-pushing patterns between the left and right buttons, because if they pressed the left button just before the right button happened to deliver a point, that particular pattern was reinforced. Once subjects established a superstitious button-pushing pattern, they stuck with that pattern throughout the session because they continued to be reinforced for it.
Michael Shermer (The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths)
On Sunday, November 10, Kaiser Wilhelm II was dethroned, and he fled to Holland for his life. Britain’s King George V, who was his cousin, told his diary that Wilhelm was “the greatest criminal known for having plunged the world into this ghastly war,” having “utterly ruined his country and himself.” Keeping vigil at the White House, the President and First Lady learned by telephone, at three o’clock that morning, that the Germans had signed an armistice. As Edith later recalled, “We stood mute—unable to grasp the significance of the words.” From Paris, Colonel House, who had bargained for the armistice as Wilson’s envoy, wired the President, “Autocracy is dead. Long live democracy and its immortal leader. In this great hour my heart goes out to you in pride, admiration and love.” At 1:00 p.m., wearing a cutaway and gray trousers, Wilson faced a Joint Session of Congress, where he read out Germany’s surrender terms. He told the members that “this tragical war, whose consuming flames swept from one nation to another until all the world was on fire, is at an end,” and “it was the privilege of our own people to enter it at its most critical juncture.” He added that the war’s object, “upon which all free men had set their hearts,” had been achieved “with a sweeping completeness which even now we do not realize,” and Germany’s “illicit ambitions engulfed in black disaster.” This time, Senator La Follette clapped. Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Lodge complained that Wilson should have held out for unconditional German surrender. Driven down Capitol Hill, Wilson was cheered by joyous crowds on the streets. Eleanor Roosevelt recorded that Washington “went completely mad” as “bells rang, whistles blew, and people went up and down the streets throwing confetti.” Including those who had perished in theaters of conflict from influenza and other diseases, the nation’s nineteen-month intervention in the world war had levied a military death toll of more than 116,000 Americans, out of a total perhaps exceeding 8 million. There were rumors that Wilson planned to sail for France and horse-trade at the peace conference himself. No previous President had left the Americas during his term of office. The Boston Herald called this tradition “unwritten law.” Senator Key Pittman, Democrat from Nevada, told reporters that Wilson should go to Paris “because there is no man who is qualified to represent him.” The Knickerbocker Press of Albany, New York, was disturbed by the “evident desire of the President’s adulators to make this war his personal property.” The Free Press of Burlington, Vermont, said that Wilson’s presence in Paris would “not be seemly,” especially if the talks degenerated into “bitter controversies.” The Chattanooga Times called on Wilson to stay home, “where he could keep his own hand on the pulse of his own people” and “translate their wishes” into action by wireless and cable to his bargainers in Paris.
Michael R. Beschloss (Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times)
Donald Trump repeatedly promised he would hire "the best people." He did not. That is not my opinion; it is President Trump's, which he expresses frequently. Trump has said that his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was "dumb as a rock" and "lazy as hell." His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was "scared stiff and Missing in Action," "didn't have a clue," and "should be ashamed of himself." Trump described one of his assistants, Omarosa Manigault Newman, as "wacky," "deranged," "vicious, but not smart," a "crazed, crying lowlife," and finally a "dog." After lasting only eleven days as communications director, Anthony Scaramucci "was quickly terminated 'from' a position that he was totally incapable of handling" and was called "very much out of control." An anonymous adviser to the president was called "a drunk/drugged-up loser." Chief strategist Steve Bannon was "sloppy," a "leaker," and "dumped like a dog by almost everyone." His longtime lawyer Michael Cohen was "TERRIBLE," "hostile," "a convicted liar & fraudster," and a "failed lawyer." The president was "Never a big fan!" of his White House counsel Don McGahn and "not even a little bit happy" with Jerome Powell, his selection to head the Federal Reserve, whom he called an "enemy." His third national security advisor, John Bolton, was mocked as a "tough guy [who] got us into Iraq." When the president was irritated with his former chief of staff, John Kelly, the president's press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, declared that Kelly "was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.
John Dickerson (The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency)
When you start a session in R, the variables you create are in the global environment .GlobalEnv,
Michael J. Crawley (The R Book)
keep things moving but she was missing in action. He didn’t want to call her cell in case she was still in session with Dr. Hinojos,
Michael Connelly (The Burning Room (Harry Bosch, #17; Harry Bosch Universe, #27))
At the first session the group piled on an unfortunate wild man from that backwater, the University of Utah, named Alan Kay. Kay had stepped forth in a public session to pitch his vision of a computer you could hold in your hand. He had already coined a name for it: “Dynabook,” a notebook-shaped machine with a display screen and a keyboard you could use to create, edit, and store a very personal sort of literature, music, and art. “He was crazy,” Wessler recalled. “People greeted the whole idea with disbelief and gave him a very tough time. He painted this picture of walking around with a computer under your arm, which we all thought was completely ridiculous.
Michael A. Hiltzik (Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age)
feels productive might not be. You might spend a good deal of time designing a monster or a scene or an encounter area only to have it fall apart when your players come to the table. Sometimes all the preparation in the world won’t result in a better game for your group. As an example, according to Michael Mallen, writer of the Id DM blog, the worst session he ever ran was the one for which he felt most prepared
Michael Shea (The Lazy Dungeon Master)
Meditation is not a random activity - it is a gradual and step-by-step process. It does work instantly. However, if you desire long-lasting effects, then it is necessary to practice it well. As you move forward on the route of meditation, your practice sessions will become longer and longer.
Michael Williams (Zen: Beginner's Guide to Understanding & Practicing Zen Meditation to Become Present)
The female editor chairing the session considered this for a moment, then said, “Well, you know, rape’s been very good to us, but do you have a new angle on the rape thing?” On one level, her statement was understandable given the scandals and tabloid-style sex stories that drove sales of People magazine in the ’80s. But for me, hearing a woman say “rape’s been very good to us” was life-changing. I believe there is a trapdoor under all of us that has a single pin keeping it closed; it only takes one nudge, at the right time, to pop it open. With that comment, my pin was pushed, the trapdoor opened, and I fell through.
J. Michael Straczynski (Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood with Stops Along the Way at Murder, Madness, Mayhem, Movie Stars, Cults, Slums, Sociopaths, and War Crimes)
Despite Tokyo’s astronomical land prices, anyone within earshot of real power commands a room the size of a basketball court in which to host those famous consensus-building sessions. If you want to measure a Japanese man’s clout, get him to show you his conference room.
Michael Lewis (How a Tokyo Earthquake Could Devastate Wall Street)
Oh, no. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. All his life, Michael had tried to distance himself from the paranormal. He valued the ordinary and never sought to stick his nose in places it didn’t belong. But now Luke had him thinking that it might be cool to participate in one of his ridiculous EVP sessions.
Jacqueline E. Smith (After Death (Cemetery Tours #3))
A small man with a Mr. Magoo stature and an old-fashioned Southern accent, Sessions was bitterly mocked by the president, who drew a corrosive portrait of physical and mental weakness.
Michael Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)
there were many contacts during the campaign and the transition between Trump associates and Russians—in person, on the phone, and via text and email. Many of these interactions were with Ambassador Kislyak, who was thought to help oversee Russian intelligence operations in the United States, but they included other Russian officials and agents as well. For example, Roger Stone, the longtime Trump political advisor who claimed that he was in touch with Julian Assange, suggested in August 2016 that information about John Podesta was going to come out. In October, Stone hinted Assange and WikiLeaks were going to release material that would be damaging to my campaign, and later admitted to also exchanging direct messages over Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the front for Russian intelligence, after some of those messages were published by the website The Smoking Gun. We also know now that in December 2016, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Kremlin-controlled bank that is under U.S. sanctions and tied closely to Russian intelligence. The Washington Post caused a sensation with its report that Russian officials were discussing a proposal by Kushner to use Russian diplomatic facilities in America to communicate secretly with Moscow. The New York Times reported that Russian intelligence attempted to recruit Carter Page, the Trump foreign policy advisor, as a spy back in 2013 (according to the report, the FBI believed Page did not know that the man who approached him was a spy). And according to Yahoo News, U.S. officials received intelligence reports that Carter Page met with a top Putin aide involved with intelligence. Some Trump advisors failed to disclose or lied about their contacts with the Russians, including on applications for security clearances, which could be a federal crime. Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to Congress about his contacts and later recused himself from the investigation. Michael Flynn lied about being in contact with Kislyak and then changed his story about whether they discussed dropping U.S. sanctions. Reporting since the election has made clear that Trump and his top advisors have little or no interest in learning about the Russian covert operation against American democracy.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
Beginning in 1973, Stanislav Grof, the Czech émigré psychiatrist who is one of the pioneers of LSD-assisted psychotherapy, served as scholar in residence at Esalen, but he had conducted workshops there for years before. Grof, who has guided thousands of LSD sessions, once predicted that psychedelics “would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope is for astronomy. These tools make it possible to study important processes that under normal circumstances are not available for direct observation.” Hundreds came to Esalen to peer through that microscope, often in workshops Grof led for psychotherapists who wanted to incorporate psychedelics in their practices. Many if not most of the therapists and guides now doing this work underground learned their craft at the feet of Stan Grof in the Big House at Esalen. Whether such work continued at Esalen after LSD was made illegal is uncertain, but it wouldn’t be surprising: the place is perched so far out over the edge of the continent as to feel beyond the reach of federal law enforcement. But at least officially, such workshops ended when LSD became illegal. Grof began teaching instead something called Holotropic Breathwork, a technique for inducing a psychedelic state of consciousness without drugs, by means of deep, rapid, and rhythmic breathing, usually accompanied by loud drumming. Yet Esalen’s role in the history of psychedelics did not end with their prohibition. It became the place where people hoping to bring these molecules back into the culture, whether as an adjunct to therapy or a means of spiritual development, met to plot their campaigns.
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
things instead of just believing.” She had turned Bill Richards’s flight instructions into a manual for living. Richard Boothby did much the same thing, converting his insight about letting go into a kind of ethic: During my session this art of relaxation itself became the basis of an immense revelation, as it suddenly appeared to me that something in the spirit of this relaxation, something in the achievement of a perfect, trusting and loving openness of spirit, is the very essence and purpose of life. Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectations, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact of the present.
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
Grant had more than sixty sessions and by the end declared himself “born again.” “All the sadness and vanities were torn away,” the fifty-five-year-old actor told Hyams, in an interview all the more surprising in the light of Cary Grant’s image as a reserved and proper Englishman. “I’ve had my ego stripped away. A man is a better actor without ego, because he has truth in him. Now I cannot behave untruthfully toward anyone, and certainly not to myself.” From the sound of it, LSD had turned Cary Grant into an American.
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
We fix things. Do you understand that? We don’t analyze things. We don’t discuss things. We don’t wring our hands and cry about things. We fix them! If somebody wants to be analyzed they can see a shrink. When they come to the Department of Orthopedics at the Mayo Clinic they want only one thing: they want to be fixed. “Now get the hell out of here and go fix things. And I better not get any more reports of touchy-wouchy, hand-holding sessions in this department.
Michael J. Collins (Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon's First Years)
Mary had to grow up quickly, as her mother needed Mary to take care of her. Being a devoted daughter, Mary tried to meet her mother’s needs and expectations, but this was impossible; her mother was “an unfillable well of sadness, shame, and unworthiness.” After her mother died, Mary thought about her mother’s life, concluding that it was very sad. Then she wondered if she did enough for her mother, worrying that perhaps she hadn’t. Mary never felt loved by her mother. As she talks about the passing of her mother, tears well up in her eyes. Coming for her Life Between Lives session, Mary has only one thing on her mind. I just need to know if my mom really loved me.
The Newton Institute (Wisdom of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives From The Michael Newton Institute)
But perhaps Hubbard’s most enduring contribution to psychedelic therapy emerged in, of all places, the treatment room. […] Though he never used those terms, Hubbard was the first researcher to grasp the critical importance of set and setting in shaping the psychedelic experience. He instinctively understood that the white walls and fluorescent lighting of the sanitised hospital room were all wrong. So he brought pictures and music, flowers and diamonds into the treatment room where he would use them to prime patients for a mystical revelation or divert a journey when it took a terrifying turn. He liked to show people paintings by Salvador Dali or pictures of Jesus or to ask them to study the facets of a diamond he carried. On patient he treated in Vancouver, an alcoholic paralysed by social anxiety recalled Hubbard handing him a bouquet of roses during a LSD session. “He said, ‘Now hate them’. They withered and the petals fell off, and I started to cry. Then he said ‘Love them’ and they came back, brighter and even more spectacular than before. That meant a lot to me. I realised you can make your relationships anything you want. The trouble I was having with people was coming from me.’” What Hubbard was bringing into the treatment room was something well-known to any traditional healer. Shamans have understood for millennia that a person in the depths of a trance or under the influence of a powerful plant medicine can be readily manipulated with the help of certain words, special objects, or the right kind of music. Hubbard understood intuitively how the suggestibility of the human mind during an altered state of consciousness could be harnessed as an important resource for healing—for breaking destructive patterns of thought and for proposing new perspectives in their place.
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
Beginning in 1973, Stanislav Grof, the Czech émigré psychiatrist who is one of the pioneers of LSD-assisted psychotherapy, served as scholar in residence at Esalen, but he had conducted workshops there for years before. Grof, who has guided thousands of LSD sessions, once predicted that psychedelics “would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope is for astronomy. These tools make it possible to study important processes that under normal circumstances are not available for direct observation.
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
The mistaken belief that TS was psychological led to some interesting and misguided “cures” over the years. In 1957 the British Medical Journal reported on the (in hindsight) extraordinary treatment given by Dr. Richard Michael of the Maudsley Hospital in London to a man in his late twenties after using cutting-edge psychoanalytical approaches. Dr. Michael looked at the man’s home life (strong mother, weak but caring father) and sexuality (the “active participant” in same-sex relationships during his army service) and decided that the patient’s need to repress his sexuality in civilian life was probably the issue. The treatment administered by Dr. Michael was “carbon dioxide therapy,” in which the unfortunate patient was made to breathe air that was 70 percent CO2. Just to put that in perspective, that’s nearly twenty times the concentration of carbon dioxide we exhale during normal breathing. After thirty sessions of being gassed—during which Dr. Michael says he observed “violent sucking movements” and dreams that were “full of obviously phallic imagery”—the patient reported that he was pretty much fully cured, thank you kindly! Whether this was due to the efficacy of the treatment or simply the desire not to be gassed is open to question.
Emma Byrne (Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language)
They should focus instead on who you are, the values and goals you represent, your style, and how you plan to conduct business. Think about modes of engagement, too. How will you introduce yourself? Should your first meetings with direct reports be one-on-one or in a group? Will these meetings be informal get-to-know-you sessions, or will they immediately focus on business issues and assessment? What other channels, such as e-mail and video, will you use to introduce yourself more widely? Will you have early meetings at other locations where your organization has facilities?
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
By arresting me and putting me in courses and mandatory programmed counseling sessions, the authorities had shoved me onto an assembly line, believing it would fix me without ever accurately assessing what was broken. I was a broken person in need of wisdom, love, patience, and hope, not an object in need of fixing.
Michael J Heil (Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose)
It’s therefore essential for the onboarding leader to tease out all of the new boss’s aspirations and goals for the unit or company. Triangulation can be a useful technique for doing this: ask your boss the same question in three somewhat different ways, and see whether the answers vary. Testing comprehension can be another good tactic: during important conversations about expectations, summarize and share your understanding of critical takeaways from the discussion. You can do this verbally, as the session draws to a close, or in writing, in a follow-up e-mail.
Michael D. Watkins (Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction: The Essential Companion to "The First 90 Days")
Plutarch, in the first century AD, mentions the pneuma (translated as “wind,” “air,” “breeze,” “breath,” or “inspiration”), and that occasionally the oikos was filled with a “delightful fragrance” as a result of the pneuma, but he does not describe its exact nature. Instead he relays a long-running argument among his friends about why the oracle is less active now than it was in the past. The arguments include less pneuma; the moral degeneration of mankind leading to its abandonment by the gods; the depopulation of Greece and the departure of the daimones (spirits) responsible for divination. But Plutarch also insists that the Pythia did not at any point rant or rave. Instead, he comments that, after a consultation session, the Pythia “feels calm and peaceful.
Michael Scott (Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World)
Too often, we see mental illness as something that can be treated with a pill, or a few sessions with a therapist. We often do not view it as a problem that gradually builds over time, which is why, as in my case, it is not addressed appropriately until the situation has become decidedly severe.
Michael J. Schiuma ((In)Sane: Memoirs of a Manic Millennial)
I put my playlist on shuffle mode and it’s giving my emotions whiplash. Songs bounce from Bad Omens, Eminem, Dolly Parton, Korn, to Sam Tinnesz.  One of the nice things about letting my clients choose the music during their sessions is I’ve been introduced to a lot of artists I might not have heard of otherwise. I’ve got one hell of an eclectic compilation rocking through my studio because of it.
Briana Michaels (Click (Next Level, #3))
As Judge J. Michael Luttig explained at our June 16 hearing, I believe that had Vice President Pence obeyed the orders from… the President of the United States of America during the joint session of the Congress of the United States on January 6, 2021, and declared Donald Trump the next President of the United States… that declaration of Donald Trump as the next President would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a Constitutional crisis in America. At the close of our June 16 hearing, Judge Luttig described the prevailing state of affairs this way: “Donald Trump and his allies… are a clear and present danger to American democracy.
Liz Cheney (Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning)
To erase or “de-pattern” personality traits, Cameron gave his subjects megadoses of LSD, subjected them to drug-induced “sleep therapy” for up to 65 consecutive days, and applied electroshock therapy at 75 times the usual intensity. To shape new behavior, Cameron forced them to listen to repeated recorded messages for 16-hour intervals, a technique known as “psychic driving.” —Washington Post, July 28, 1985, quoting the Congressional Record of the Senate, 99th Congress, 1st Session, Volume 131, No. 106, Part 2, p. 131, in regard to the mind-control work of psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron, former President of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, while in the employ of the CIA
Michael S. Heiser (The Portent (Façade Saga #2))
For example, older men and women with an average age of seventy on a generic twenty-four-week strength training program with three sessions a week experienced about a 10 percent increase in leg muscle mass, a 40 percent increase in lower and upper body strength, and about a 20 percent decrease in sit-to-stand time,5575 which is a measure of physical function that can predict fall risk.5576
Michael Greger (How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier as You Get Older)
In fact, I found myself overwhelmed by the computers on this record. I hadn’t played seriously for four years and didn’t even like the sound or feel of my own playing. Perhaps I had been demoralised by the conflict with Roger. Certainly I ended up struggling to play some parts satisfactorily. With time pressure on, I surrendered a number of parts to some of the best session players in Los Angeles, including Jim Keltner and Carmine Appice – an odd feeling, a bit like handing your car over to Michael Schumacher. This was not only a defeatist attitude, but meant I then had to learn the damn drum part to play it live (an experience to file under ‘never ever again’).
Nick Mason (Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd (Reading Edition): (Rock and Roll Book, Biography of Pink Floyd, Music Book))
You’ll also need to establish new, more formal channels for communicating your strategic intent and vision across the organization—convening town hall–style meetings rather than individual or small-group sessions, or using e-mails and video more frequently to broadcast your messages to the widest possible audiences.
Michael D. Watkins (Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction: The Essential Companion to "The First 90 Days")
George Mumford, a Newton-based mindfulness teacher, one such moment took place in 1993, at the Omega Institute, a holistic learning center in Rhinebeck, New York. The center was hosting a retreat devoted to mindfulness meditation, the clear-your-head habit in which participants sit quietly and focus on their breathing. Leading the session: meditation megastar Jon Kabat-Zinn. Originally trained as a molecular biologist at MIT, Kabat-Zinn had gone on to revolutionize the meditation world in the 1970s by creating a more secularized version of the practice, one focused less on Buddhism and more on stress reduction and other health benefits. After dinner one night, Kabat-Zinn was giving a talk about his work, clicking through a slide show to give the audience something to look at. At one point he displayed a slide of Mumford. Mumford had been a star high school basketball player who’d subsequently hit hard times as a heroin addict, Kabat-Zinn explained. By the early 1980s, however, he’d embraced meditation and gotten sober. Now Mumford taught meditation to prison inmates and other unlikely students. Kabat-Zinn explained how they were able to relate to Mumford because of his tough upbringing, his openness about his addiction — and because, like many inmates, he’s African-American. Kabat-Zinn’s description of Mumford didn’t seem to affect most Omega visitors, but one participant immediately took notice: June Jackson, whose husband had just coached the Chicago Bulls to their third consecutive NBA championship. Phil Jackson had spent years studying Buddhism and Native American spirituality and was a devoted meditator. Yet his efforts to get Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and their teammates to embrace mindfulness was meeting with only limited success. “June took one look at George and said, ‘He could totally connect with Phil’s players,’ ’’ Kabat-Zinn recalls. So he provided an introduction. Soon Mumford was in Chicago, gathering some of the world’s most famous athletes in a darkened room and telling them to focus on their breathing. Mumford spent the next five years working with the Bulls, frequently sitting behind the bench, as they won three more championships. In 1999 Mumford followed Phil Jackson to the Los Angeles Lakers, where he helped turn Kobe Bryant into an outspoken adherent of meditation. Last year, as Jackson began rebuilding the moribund New York Knicks as president, Mumford signed on for a third tour of duty. He won’t speak about the specific work he’s doing in New York, but it surely involves helping a new team adjust to Jackson’s sensibilities, his controversial triangle offense, and the particular stress that comes with compiling the worst record in the NBA. Late one April afternoon just as the NBA playoffs are beginning, Mumford is sitting at a table in O’Hara’s, a Newton pub. Sober for more than 30 years, he sips Perrier. It’s Marathon Monday, and as police begin allowing traffic back onto Commonwealth Avenue, early finishers surround us, un-showered and drinking beer. No one recognizes Mumford, but that’s hardly unusual. While most NBA fans are aware that Jackson is serious about meditation — his nickname is the Zen Master — few outside his locker rooms can name the consultant he employs. And Mumford hasn’t done much to change that. He has no office and does no marketing, and his recently launched website, mindfulathlete.org, is mired deep in search-engine results. Mumford has worked with teams that have won six championships, but, one friend jokes, he remains the world’s most famous completely unknown meditation teacher. That may soon change. This month, Mumford published his first book, The Mindful Athlete, which is part memoir and part instruction guide, and he has agreed to give a series of talks and book signings
Anonymous
In April 2012, The New York Times published a heart-wrenching essay by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher in the New York City public schools. Under the headline “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart,” she began with an anecdote about teaching John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As her class read the end together out loud in class, her “toughest boy,” she wrote, “wept a little, and so did I.” A girl in the class edged out of her chair to get a closer look and asked Hollander if she was crying. “I am,” she said, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.” Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher, shaped her lessons around robust literature—her classes met in small groups and talked informally about what they had read. Her students did not “read from the expected perspective,” as she described it. They concluded (not unreasonably) that Holden Caulfield “was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage.” One student read Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies as raps. Another, having been inspired by Of Mice and Men, went on to read The Grapes of Wrath on his own and told Hollander how amazed he was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” She knew that these classes were enhancing her students’ reading levels, their understanding of the world, their souls. But she had to stop offering them to all but her highest-achieving eighth-graders. Everyone else had to take instruction specifically targeted to boost their standardized test scores. Hollander felt she had no choice. Reading scores on standardized tests in her school had gone up in the years she maintained her reading group, but not consistently enough. “Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data,” she wrote. “But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test preparation tutorial program.” Instead of Steinbeck and Shakespeare, her students read “watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures.” They studied vocabulary words, drilled on how to write sentences, and practiced taking multiple-choice tests. The overall impact of such instruction, Hollander said, is to “bleed our English classes dry.” So
Michael Sokolove (Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater)
whenever we hired someone, they would receive a couple of LSD sessions as part of their training
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
HOW OFTEN YOU SHOULD DO CARDIO In terms of frequency, here’s how I do it: • When I’m bulking, I do two 25-minute HIIT sessions per week. • When I’m cutting, I do three to five 25-minute HIIT sessions per week. • When I’m maintaining, I do two to three 25-minute HIIT sessions per week. • I never do more than five cardio sessions per week, as I’ve found my strength begins to drop off in the gym if I do.
Michael Matthews (Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body)
Both ‘Childhood’ and ‘Smile’ were recorded live with an orchestra at the Hit Factory on the same day, with the majority of Michael’s live vocals from the sessions used on the final versions. But Michael was so unhappy with his vocals for ‘Smile’ that he recorded over a dozen takes. “Michael did a bunch of takes live with orchestra that would be called amazing by most standards,” Rob Hoffman said. “He then did more later that day, and I think some the next as well. In all I think there were 14 takes.” Michael may not have been satisfied, but the orchestra was blown away by the performance. “When we finished recording with the orchestra, Michael asked me if he could go out in the studio and meet the musicians,” Bruce Swedien said. “During the recording, the entire orchestra had been listening to Michael sing through their individual headphones. When Michael walked out in the studio to meet the orchestra, they gave him a standing ovation. Every member of the 50-piece orchestra stood up and tapped their music stands with their bows, as loud as they could! Michael was thrilled.
Mike Smallcombe (Making Michael: Inside the Career of Michael Jackson)
Putin clearly had signaled that engagement with us was not in his portfolio. Yet we understood from that session that he remained the primary decision maker in Russia.
Michael McFaul (From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia)
The debate lasted for thirteen days of private and public sessions during which de Valera behaved as if he were motivated, not by precepts of Republicanism, but by notions of the divine right of kings. One commentator has written: ‘Whenever the President wanted to say something he seemed to act almost as if he had a right to determine his own procedure.’87 In all he interrupted the proceedings more than 250 times.
Tim Pat Coogan (Michael Collins: A Biography)
However de Valera got his way with the private session suggestion. He had two major objectives in following this course. One, he wanted Dail approval for the sort of draft treaty he felt should have been signed. Secondly, he returned to the charge of signing without permission:
Tim Pat Coogan (Michael Collins: A Biography)
Savannah gave little thought to her habit during the journey, except toward the end when she pictured herself as a smoking gargoyle. “You know how gargoyles look, crouched down with their shoulders hunched? That’s how I felt and saw myself, a little golem creature smoking, pulling in the smoke and not letting it out, until my chest hurts and I’m choking. It was powerful and disgusting. I can still see it now, that hideous coughing gargoyle, whenever I picture myself as a smoker.” Months later, she says the image is still helpful when the inevitable cravings arise. In the middle of her session, Savannah suddenly sat up and announced she had discovered something important, an “epiphany” that her guides needed to write down so it wouldn’t be lost to posterity: “Eat right. Exercise. Stretch.
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
A prelude is more freeform than a regular game session, skipping around to cover the important points in the characters’ background, defining moments that help shape who the character is and will be. The player gets a chance to test out certain traits to see if the character is capable of what the players wants him or her to be able to do.
Michael Lee (Demon: The Fallen)
He’s not our man. He had a plane ticket showing he was out of town during the Staten Island shooting, and he was at a group therapy session the night before yesterday, when Glossner was shot in Manhattan.
James Patterson (Crosshairs (Michael Bennett, #16))