Positive Visualization Quotes

The only time you fail is when you fall down and stay down.

When you connect to the silence within you, that is when you can make sense of the disturbance going on around you.

The true measure of success is how many times you can bounce back from failure.

Our way of thinking creates good or bad outcomes.

Happy people produce. Bored people consume.

Judgment is a negative frequency.

When your back is to the wall and you are facing fear head on, the only way is forward and through it.

Success will be within your reach only when you start reaching out for it.

Before you can successfully make friends with others, first you have to become your own friend.

No matter how small you start, always dream big.

It sometimes takes a state of solitude to bring to mind the real power of companionship.

Happiness is something we reap from the seeds we sow. Plant misery seeds and that us what you reap.

When you fail, that is when you get closer to success.

Doing the tough things sets winners apart from losers.

If you think you can then you can.

Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.

There is nothing around me but money, money, money.

Despite the popular wisdom that we achieve success through positive visualization, it turns out that incorporating negative visualization makes us more likely to achieve our goals.

Without enthusiasm then what we have surrounded ourselves with becomes worthless.

To control your life, control your mind. To control your mind, control your breath.

Everything we draw into our life is a mirror of our thought patterns and beliefs. In a way, we can control the outcome of our future just by thinking more positively and visualizing only the things we want for ourselves.

The only secret of wealth creation is knowing how to use Cosmic Ordering.

It’s the age-old concept of like attracts like, or the law of attraction. You get back what you put out, so you might as well think positively, focus on visualizing what you want instead of getting distracted by what you don’t want, and send the universe your good intentions so that it can send them right back.

Willful blindness sees no end of damage done.

No matter what your wishes, they are not crazy so long as they are not crazy to you!

Run and hide or rise and shine ...

Human beings are incredibly slow, Cosmic Ordering is incredibly fast!

It has taken me a lot of years, but I find silence is sometimes the best answer.

Become your own success story, not someone else's.

Finally, positive visualization can be a powerful adjunct to thought-substitution. Some survivors gradually learn to short-circuit the fear-mongering processes of the critic by invoking images of past successes and accomplishments, as well as picturing safe places, loving friends or comforting memories.

The man who never weakens when things are against him will grow stronger and stronger until all things will delight to be for him. He will finally have all the strength he may desire or need. Be always strong and you will always be stronger.Picture in your mind your own best idea of what a strong, well-developed individuality would necessarily be, and then think of yourself as becoming more and more like that picture. In this connection it is well to remember that we gradually grow into the likeness of that which we think of the most. Therefore, if you have a very clear idea of a highly developed individuality, and think a great deal of that individuality with a strong, positive desire to develop such an individuality, you will gradually and surely move towards that lofty ideal.

Your thoughts make what happen in your life~ You can turn anything negative into the positive~ What you visualize can come true and you attract it to yourself

When you begin to visualize and hold powerful positive imagery in your mind, it appears almost like magic. This is the power of gratitude.

With sticky thinking you can become unstuck!

Stop harboring grudges against those who have wronged you, it just holds you back when you really want to be in the NOW.

Remove whatever you no longer need in your life, to make room for what you do need in your life.

Sign is a live, contemporaneous, visual-gestural language and consists of hand shapes, hand positioning, facial expressions, and body movements. Simply put, it is for me the most beautiful, immediate, and expressive of languages, because it incorporates the entire human body.

Your reality is a reflection of yourself

Some people only dream of success… while others wake up and use Cosmic Ordering.

Follow your heart. It will lead you to where you need to be.

Life. Life is a show. It's up to you how to make your own story, do your own show and how to live your show you are on. You choose who you need to meet, where you should have your scenes or which scenes you want to do. How awesome your mind can do right?

Thoughts create emotions, emotions create feelings and feelings create behaviour. So it’s very important that our thoughts are positive, to attract the right people, events and circumstances into our lives.

The acceptance of woman as object of the desiring male gaze in the visual arts is so universal that for a woman to question or draw attention to this fact is to invite derision, to reveal herself as one who does not understand the sophisticated strategies of high culture and takes art "too literally," and is therefore unable to respond to aesthetic discourses. This is of course maintained within a world - a cultural and academic world - which is dominated by male power and, often unconscious, patriarchal attitudes. In Utopia - that is to say, in a world in which the power structure was such that both men and women equally could be represented clothed or unclothed in a variety of poses and positions without any subconscious implications of dominance or submission - in a world of total and, so to speak, unconscious equality, the female nude would not be problematic. In our world, it is.

Prayerize, visualize, actualize—that is the formula for successful imaging.

The process of change does not occur on superficial levels, through mere “positive thinking.” It involves exploring, discovering, and changing our deepest, most basic attitudes toward life.

To change your life, you need to become aware of yourself

We can’t control everything that happens to us, but we can control how we respond to things we can’t control.

goal-setting, positive thinking, visualizing, and believing.

The universe only exist within us. All of what is outside of us is also within us.

Everybody talks about being rich, Cosmic Ordering does something about it.

Often the only difference between success and failure is not using Cosmic Ordering.

If you do not completely accept yourself, you can not love yourself fully. It would be hard to love anything unconditionally.

Ignite the light within you, it will make your world brighter.

Focus on what you can do right now, not what you can't do right now

A man can be knocked down a thousand times and can still get back up, but when he puts himself down he has defeated himself more than a million others could have done.

The real winners I've met in life weren't necessarily skilled or perfect. They just had the tenacity to never, ever give up.

Time if the inner form of animal sense that animates events-the still frames-of the spatial world. The mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector. Each weaves a series of still pictures-a series of spatial states-into an order, into the 'current' of life. Motion is created in our minds by running "film cells" together. Remember that everything you perceive-even this page-is actively, repeatedly, being constructed inside your head. It's happening to you right now. Your eyes cannot see through the wall of the cranium; all experience including visual experience is an organized whirl of information in your brain. If your mind could stop its "motor" for a moment, you'd get a freeze frame, just as the movie projector isolated the arrow in one position with no momentum. In fact, time can be defined as the inner summation of spatial states.

When people want success but visualize failure, they attract failure because they don’t know about the power of repetition/visualization.

Nobody is really an expert, as we are all still learning.

When life gives you lemons, use Cosmic Ordering!

Believe and achieve with Cosmic Ordering.

Cosmic Ordering success sticks to you like mud to a blanket.

On the road to success some will always expect tragedy ... ditch your doubts and experience success with Cosmic Ordering.

Whatever your desire, use Cosmic Ordering to get what you require!

In the beginning man was poor, then along came Cosmic Ordering.

A clever person solves a problem; a wise person uses Cosmic Ordering!

Twenty years from now you will be disappointed you never used Cosmic Ordering today.

A man may fail many times, and then he turns to Cosmic Ordering.

To fail is nothing, unless you continue to ignore Cosmic Ordering.

There are more triumphs than defeats with Cosmic Ordering.

With a burning ambition, sustained focus, and daily action - there simply are no limits to what you will achieve.

The practice of engaging in affirmations allows us to begin replacing some of our stale, worn-out, or negative mind chatter with more positive ideas and concepts.

You get back what you put out, so you might as well think positively, focus on visualizing what you want instead of getting distracted by what you don’t want, and send the universe your good intentions so that it can send them right back.

Your hopes and dreams are like a giant helium balloon, tugging on your hand to take you above the clouds, to that quiet place of peace and contentment. All you have to do is stop resisting, to let go - and ALLOW your hopes and dreams to take you there.

Think about your dreams. Think of every detail of what you want to manifest. Imagine every person included in your plans. Sense all the emotions that you want to happen when your dreams come true. Visualize where will you be when your dreams already happened. Breathe the air where you want to manifest it. Dream. Imagine. Believe. There's no more truer than this. It is what it is.

It might not be a common practise to placebo oneself, but why not try? Weren’t we all doing it to some extent every day anyway? Telling ourselves mind over matter, think positively, visualize, manifest, fake it till you make it. Delusion was an accepted part of life. So why not take a more formalized, clinical approach?

the pop-psychology literature is full of gurus urging you to visualize success. It turns out that a positive mental attitude isn’t quite enough to get the job done. Maybe financial gurus shouldn’t be telling us to imagine that we’re filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.

Between the thermals, downdrafts, and quirky winds, I wasn’t sure how anybody kept the things aloft except with a liberal application of positive thought.

The law of manifestation operates like a triangle: First, know what you want and visualize it as if you already had it; Second, see it behind the illusion of reality, practice it in your decisions, choose the people you hang out with, etc; Third, believe, have faith and work on your emotions to be at the right frequency. This triangle of manifestation is one of the secrets of many religions: Christianity, Scientology, and Freemasonry. In Masonry is seen as "heart, mind and desire"; in Scientology is perceived as "reality, communication and affinity"; in Christianity is understood as "Father, son and holy ghost"; basically, "actions, learnings and emotions". In Christianity, the Father equals reality or the Creator of the illusion, the son is the way, the path, he road of our decisions and actions, and the holy ghost is our heart, instincts and desires manifested in that same path. In word words, through Jesus, and with the power of the holy ghost, you reach God. This is an allegory that not many Christians can understand. Jesus represent behavior - right and wrong, the holy ghost is our faith, your heart and emotions reflecting back at you what you attract, it's the energy that connects you to your dreams, and God represents the Architect of Reality. So, through moral behavior and positive emotions, your understand God and life, and then you receive "paradise". This paradise is whatever you dream for yourself. Furthermore, if someone has shown you this way, he has been as an angel to you, a messenger of God; if someone stopped you from reaching it, he has been as a demon, a worker for Satan, the enemy, if you failed in seeing this path, you have redirected yourself towards hell. And if you hate your life, you are already in hell. If you want to get out of hell, you must accept the truth, and this truth is that you must know God, for He is the truth. He and the truth are one and the same.

A quantum atom with two electrons is a much more complicated object to visualize, and I'm not aware that it's ever been done very well. The challenge is that for each possible position of one electron, the wave function of the other is a different three-dimensional object. So really, the natural home of the total wave function, for the two-electron system, is a space of 3 + 3 = 6 dimensions. It is quite a challenge to present such an object in a way that human brains find meaningful.

A lot of people think, “If I think positive thoughts, or if I visualize having what I want, that will be enough.” But if you’re doing that and still not feeling abundant, or feeling loving or joyful, then it doesn’t create the power of the attraction.

It was something Brynna had done a report on in school last year. At the time he’d thought it stupid, but he finally got it. Visualization. In order to make something happen, to become something else, you had to see it clearly in your mind. That was the first step of achieving success. Vague dreams never amounted to anything. Only those that were fully seen could manifest. Just like with the dagger. Thoughts had power. Negative and positive. They influenced everything. They could empower a person or rip them to shreds.

Trailblazers in feminist Porn include female filmmakers like Tristan Taormino and Erika Lust, who make certain that their actors are treated fairly and respectfully. They create sexy, sensual visuals and storylines, and always make certain their actors have chemistry, connection, and real orgasms.

Usually, when I’ve met the people who are meant to be in a position of power, I’ve always made sure to give them a damn good soul stare—y’know, look right in their eyes, through the blackness of the pupils and into whatever conscious field exists within. Then lock the eyes on, but let them gently defocus so that the defined parameters of the visual physical go blurry and you can feel the energy behind it, the unseeable energy that isn’t made of photons. Then, if your mind is quiet, you will be informed of the quality of their essence, or at least of the manifest persona that they believe themselves to be.

A Warrior-Sage, you see, is someone who believes in magic and makes magic work for him. He may not call it magic, but the terminology doesn’t matter. He may call it positive thinking, or belief, or PMA, or power, or visualization, or self-confidence, or faith, or self-control, or zeal, or enthusiasm, or any of a thousand names, but it’s magic all the same. He may call it the God force, or universal consciousness, or Spirit, or his inner self, or peace, or gentle effort, or universal law, or Zen, or divine love, or even dish water! But as long as he makes it a part of his life and understands how to use it, then it’s magic.

Virtuality is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns. The definition plays off the duality at the heart of the condition of virtuality—materiality on the one hand, information on the other. Normally virtuality is associated with computer simulations that put the body into a feedback loop with a computer-generated image. For example, in virtual Ping-Pong, one swings a paddle wired into a computer, which calculates from the paddle’s momentum and position where the ball would go. Instead of hitting a real ball, the player makes the appropriate motions with the paddle and watches the image of the ball on a computer monitor. Thus the game takes place partly in real life (RL) and partly in virtual reality (VR). Virtual reality technologies are fascinating because they make visually immediate the perception that a world of information exists parallel to the “real” world, the former intersecting the latter at many points and in many ways. Hence the definition’s strategic quality, strategic because it seeks to connect virtual technologies with the sense, pervasive in the late twentieth century, that all material objects are interpenetrated by flows of information, from DNA code to the global reach of the World Wide Web.

Personal Power and a Positive attitude after praying, you should also completely men-tally, emotionally and physically “act as if it is already accomplished!” In truth, it already has been accomplished in GOD, and that is the only true “permanent’ reality of life! Taking this one step further, you should even experience this truth with all five senses. See it being real, hear it, touch it, smell it and taste it! As far as you are concerned, for all intents and purposes, the prayer has already been completely answered and you should live your life on every level of your being as if this was the case! If ever you start to slip from this “immaculate conception” in your own mind, you should immediately do an affirmation and positive creative visualization to reaffirm the “Truth of GOD” back into your reality. The other way to reaffirm this truth back into your being is to repeat the prayer! Just the Act of doing the Prayer is an affirmation in and of itself!

If you want to increase your neural resonance skills, take a moment right now and practice. Turn your attention to someone who’s talking near you, or watch a person being interviewed on TV. As they talk, imagine that you are that person. Visualize yourself in the position they describe and put in as much detail as you can, as if you were actually there.

When we go to the beach and bare our skin, we’re not there to be visually appealing to others. We’re there to feel the sand, hear the waves, smell the salt, take in the view. We’re there to make memories. The dimples on our thighs or whether another beachgoer disapproves of our size is irrelevant. It’s not why we’re there. Being aesthetically pleasing is not the purpose of our existence.

I didn’t know it yet, but he would become one of our high school’s super-athletes. There were hints of athletic (and, presumably, sexual) prowess there. For one, boys as ridiculously Abercrombie- esque good-looking as he was are always sports stars throughout high school. It is a rule, a self- fulfilling prophecy. It seems as if, sometime during elementary school, coaches make note of the little boys with the most classic bone structure and the best height projections and kidnap them, training them under cover of night. Not all of them will make it in college ball (that’s what people call it, right?) because by the time they’re all seniors, many of them will have been riding more on the sportsman-like nature of their faces than their actual abilities. But until that day, coaches will keep putting them on the field in the most prominent and visually appealing positions because they just kind of look like that’s where they should be. At least I’m pretty sure that is what’s going on.

The decision to create a book trailer is entirely up to you. I can remember when "video killed the radio star" on MTV and how excited I was with some music videos (the ones that lived up to or exceeded my imagined vision of the song) and the ones I disliked so much, I even stopped listening to the song (the imagery just ruined it for me!) Some people argue that in a visual landscape, a book trailer is a must, while others stand firm that books should be read and not seen; unless of course it gets made into a screenplay and then a film. The most practical advice is to trust your instinct. You know what you want to say with your book and if it aligns congruently with your brand, then for a non-fiction book it may be a strategic move. On the other hand, it may come off as too "salesy" and go in the opposite direction. As you can see, I still have a love / hate relationship with matching someone else's images to my own imagination. No matter what you decide, remember to keep it aligned with your brand.

Yann LeCun's strategy provides a good example of a much more general notion: the exploitation of innate knowledge. Convolutional neural networks learn better and faster than other types of neural networks because they do not learn everything. They incorporate, in their very architecture, a strong hypothesis: what I learn in one place can be generalized everywhere else. The main problem with image recognition is invariance: I have to recognize an object, whatever its position and size, even if it moves to the right or left, farther or closer. It is a challenge, but it is also a very strong constraint: I can expect the very same clues to help me recognize a face anywhere in space. By replicating the same algorithm everywhere, convolutional networks effectively exploit this constraint: they integrate it into their very structure. Innately, prior to any learning, the system already “knows” this key property of the visual world. It does not learn invariance, but assumes it a priori and uses it to reduce the learning space-clever indeed!

Visualize the success, not the failure. This part is tough for us perfectionists. We have a hard time ever seeing ourselves as winners; our heads tend to go to a place of “Nothing is going right.” Don’t get hung up on the minutiae. Say what you want, out loud, over and over again. Sound crazy? It works. Before I go onto the competition floor, sometimes I look in the mirror and say out loud, “I want you to do your very best, and I want you to be passionate and be in the moment.” Giving myself those marching orders often reminds me to focus on the positive instead of getting lost in what might be wrong (but likely is just in my head).

Visualize a purpose and an outcome. This concept really struck me from reading Frankl, and it’s a lesson all leaders need to master. Think of it as a mental dress rehearsal for what will happen (notice I said will, not could). If you picture a positive result, it trains your brain to look for the resources that will help you achieve it. Seeing what you want stimulates your creativity and strengthens your confidence. This is more than just daydreaming. It’s eliminating the self-doubt and negativity that can deter you, and putting in place a plan that will lead you on your desired path. And once you know that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s much easier to face the dark.

Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable. Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow. And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness. The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.

Red: Maintaining health, bodily strength, physical energy, sex, passion, courage, protection, and defensive magic. This is the color of the element of fire. Throughout the world, red is associated with life and death, for this is the color of blood spilled in both childbirth and injury. Pink: Love, friendship, compassion, relaxation. Pink candles can be burned during rituals designed to improve self-love. They’re ideal for weddings and for all forms of emotional union. Orange: Attraction, energy. Burn to attract specific influences or objects. Yellow: Intellect, confidence, divination, communication, eloquence, travel, movement. Yellow is the color of the element of air. Burn yellow candles during rituals designed to heighten your visualization abilities. Before studying for any purpose, program a yellow candle to stimulate your conscious mind. Light the candle and let it burn while you study. Green: Money, prosperity, employment, fertility, healing, growth. Green is the color of the element of earth. It’s also the color of the fertility of the earth, for it echoes the tint of chlorophyll. Burn when looking for a job or seeking a needed raise. Blue: Healing, peace, psychism, patience, happiness. Blue is the color of the element of water. This is also the realm of the ocean and of all water, of sleep, and of twilight. If you have trouble sleeping, charge a small blue candle with a visualization of yourself sleeping through the night. Burn for a few moments before you get into bed, then extinguish its flame. Blue candles can also be charged and burned to awaken the psychic mind. Purple: Power, healing severe diseases, spirituality, meditation, religion. Purple candles can be burned to enhance all spiritual activities, to increase your magical power, and as a part of intense healing rituals in combination with blue candles. White: Protection, purification, all purposes. White contains all colors. It’s linked with the moon. White candles are specifically burned during purification and protection rituals. If you’re to keep but one candle on hand for magical purposes, choose a white one. Before use, charge it with personal power and it’ll work for all positive purposes. Black: Banishing negativity, absorbing negativity. Black is the absence of color. In magic, it’s also representative of outer space. Despite what you may have heard, black candles are burned for positive purposes, such as casting out baneful energies or to absorb illnesses and nasty habits. Brown: Burned for spells involving animals, usually in combination with other colors. A brown candle and a red candle for animal protection, brown and blue for healing, and so on.

She looked thoughtful. “Who knows? Perhaps now is the time to see through the habit. Accidents, illness, healing, they’re all more mysterious than any of us ever imagined. I believe that we have an undiscovered ability to influence what happens to us in the future, including whether we are healthy—although, again, the power has to remain with the individual patient. “There was a reason that I didn’t offer an opinion concerning how badly you were hurt. We in the medical establishment have learned that medical opinions have to be offered very carefully. Over the years the public has developed almost a worship of doctors, and when a physician says something, patients have tended to take these opinions totally to heart. The country doctors of a hundred years ago knew this, and would use this principle to actually paint an overly optimistic picture of any health situation. If the doctor said that the patient would get better, very often the patient would internalize this idea in his or her mind and actually defy all odds to recover. In later years, however, ethical considerations have prevented such distortions, and the establishment has felt that the patient is entitled to a cold scientific assessment of his or her situation. “Unfortunately when this was given, sometimes patients dropped dead right before our eyes, just because they were told their condition was terminal. We know now that we have to be very careful with these assessments, because of the power of our minds. We want to focus this power in a positive direction. The body is capable of miraculous regeneration. Body parts thought of in the past as solid forms are actually energy systems that can transform overnight. Have you read the latest research on prayer? The simple fact that this kind of spiritual visualization is being scientifically proven to work totally undermines our old physical model of healing. We’re having to work out a new model.” She paused and poured more water on the towel around my ankle, then continued, “I believe the first step in the process is to identify the fear with which the medical problem seems to be connected; this opens up the energy block in your body to conscious healing. The next step is to pull in as much energy as possible and focus it at the exact location of the block.” I was about to ask how this was done, but she stopped me. “Go ahead and raise your energy level as much as you can.” Accepting her guidance, I began to observe the beauty around me and to concentrate on a spiritual connection within, evoking a heightened sensation of love. Gradually the colors became more vivid and everything in my awareness increased in presence. I could tell that she was raising her own energy at the same time. When I felt as though my vibration had increased as much as possible, I looked at her. She smiled back at me. “Okay, now you can focus the energy on the block.” “How do I do that?” I asked. “You use the pain. That’s why it’s there, to help you focus.

My Future Self My future self and I become closer and closer as time goes by. I must admit that I neglected and ignored her until she punched me in the gut, grabbed me by the hair and turned my butt around to introduce herself. Well, at least that’s what it felt like every time I left the convalescent hospital after doing skills training for a certification I needed to help me start my residential care business. I was going to be providing specialized, 24/7 residential care and supervising direct care staff for non-verbal, non-ambulatory adult men in diapers! I ran to the Red Cross and took the certified nurse assistant class so I would at least know something about the job I would soon be hiring people to do and to make sure my clients received the best care. The training facility was a Medicaid hospital. I would drive home in tears after seeing what happens when people are not able to afford long-term medical care and the government has to provide that care. But it was seeing all the “young” patients that brought me to tears. And I had thought that only the elderly lived like this in convalescent hospitals…. I am fortunate to have good health but this experience showed me that there is the unexpected. So I drove home each day in tears, promising God out loud, over and over again, that I would take care of my health and take care of my finances. That is how I met my future self. She was like, don’t let this be us girlfriend and stop crying! But, according to studies, we humans have a hard time empathizing with our future selves. Could you even imagine your 30 or 40 year old self when you were in elementary or even high school? It’s like picturing a stranger. This difficulty explains why some people tend to favor short-term or immediate gratification over long-term planning and savings. Take time to picture the life you want to live in 5 years, 10 years, and 40 years, and create an emotional connection to your future self. Visualize the things you enjoy doing now, and think of retirement saving and planning as a way to continue doing those things and even more. However, research shows that people who interacted with their future selves were more willing to improve savings. Just hit me over the head, why don’t you! I do understand that some people can’t even pay attention or aren’t even interested in putting money away for their financial future because they have so much going on and so little to work with that they feel like they can’t even listen to or have a conversation about money. But there are things you’re doing that are not helping your financial position and could be trouble. You could be moving in the wrong direction. The goal is to get out of debt, increase your collateral capacity, use your own money in the most efficient manner and make financial decisions that will move you forward instead of backwards. Also make sure you are getting answers specific to your financial situation instead of blindly guessing! Contact us. We will be happy to help!

One early terracotta statuette from Catal Huyuk in Anatolia depicts an enthroned female in the act of giving birth, supported by two cat-like animals that form her seat (Plate 1). This figure has been identified as a 'birth goddess' and it is this type of early image that has led a number of feminist scholars to posit a 'reign of the goddess' in ancient Near Eastern prehistory. Maria Gimbutas, for whom such images are proof of a perfect matriarchal society in 'Old Europe' , presents an ideal vision in which a socially egalitarian matriarchal culture was overthrown by a destructive patriarchy (Gimbutas 1991). Gerda Lerner has argued for a similar situation in the ancient Near East; however, she does not discuss nude figurines at any length (Lerner 1986a: 147). More recently, critiques of the matriarchal model of prehistory have pointed out the flaws in this methodology (e.g. Conkey and Tringham 1995; Meskell 1995; Goodison and Morris 1998). In all these critiques the identification of such figures as goddesses is rejected as a modern myth. There is no archaeological evidence that these ancient communities were in fact matriarchal, nor is there any evidence that female deities were worshipped exclusively. Male gods may have worshipped simultaneously with the 'mother goddesses' if such images are indeed representations of deities. Nor do such female figures glorify or show admiration for the female body; rather they essentialise it, reducing it to nothing more nor less than a reproductive vessel. The reduction of the head and the diminution of the extremities seem to stress the female form as potentially reproductive, but to what extent this condition was seen as sexual, erotic or matriarchal is unclear. ....Despite the correct rejection of the 'Mother Goddess' and utopian matriarchy myths by recent scholarship, we should not loose track of the overwhelming evidence that the image of female nudity was indeed one of power in ancient Mesopotamia. The goddess Ishtar/Inanna was but one of several goddesses whose erotic allure was represented as a powerful attribute in the literature of the ancient Near East. In contact to the naked male body which was the focus of a variety of meanings in the visual arts, female nudity was always associated with sexuality, and in particular with powerful sexual attraction, Akkadian *kuzbu*. This sexuality was not limited to Ishtar and her cult. As a literary topos, sensuousness is a defining quality for both mortal women and goddesses. In representational art, the nude woman is portrayed in a provocative pose, as the essence of the feminine. For femininity, sexual allure, *kuzbu*, the ideal of the feminine, was thus expressed as nudity in both visual and verbal imagery. While several iconographic types of unclothed females appear in Mesopotamian representations of the historical period - nursing mothers, women in acts of sexual intercourse, entertainers such as dancers and musicians, and isolated frontally represented nudes with or without other attributes - and while these nude female images may have different iconographic functions, the ideal of femininity and female sexuality portrayed in them is similar. -Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia

For years before the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps won the gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he followed the same routine at every race. He arrived two hours early.1 He stretched and loosened up, according to a precise pattern: eight hundred mixer, fifty freestyle, six hundred kicking with kickboard, four hundred pulling a buoy, and more. After the warm-up he would dry off, put in his earphones, and sit—never lie down—on the massage table. From that moment, he and his coach, Bob Bowman, wouldn’t speak a word to each other until after the race was over. At forty-five minutes before the race he would put on his race suit. At thirty minutes he would get into the warm-up pool and do six hundred to eight hundred meters. With ten minutes to go he would walk to the ready room. He would find a seat alone, never next to anyone. He liked to keep the seats on both sides of him clear for his things: goggles on one side and his towel on the other. When his race was called he would walk to the blocks. There he would do what he always did: two stretches, first a straight-leg stretch and then with a bent knee. Left leg first every time. Then the right earbud would come out. When his name was called, he would take out the left earbud. He would step onto the block—always from the left side. He would dry the block—every time. Then he would stand and flap his arms in such a way that his hands hit his back. Phelps explains: “It’s just a routine. My routine. It’s the routine I’ve gone through my whole life. I’m not going to change it.” And that is that. His coach, Bob Bowman, designed this physical routine with Phelps. But that’s not all. He also gave Phelps a routine for what to think about as he went to sleep and first thing when he awoke. He called it “Watching the Videotape.”2 There was no actual tape, of course. The “tape” was a visualization of the perfect race. In exquisite detail and slow motion Phelps would visualize every moment from his starting position on top of the blocks, through each stroke, until he emerged from the pool, victorious, with water dripping off his face. Phelps didn’t do this mental routine occasionally. He did it every day before he went to bed and every day when he woke up—for years. When Bob wanted to challenge him in practices he would shout, “Put in the videotape!” and Phelps would push beyond his limits. Eventually the mental routine was so deeply ingrained that Bob barely had to whisper the phrase, “Get the videotape ready,” before a race. Phelps was always ready to “hit play.” When asked about the routine, Bowman said: “If you were to ask Michael what’s going on in his head before competition, he would say he’s not really thinking about anything. He’s just following the program. But that’s not right. It’s more like his habits have taken over. When the race arrives, he’s more than halfway through his plan and he’s been victorious at every step. All the stretches went like he planned. The warm-up laps were just like he visualized. His headphones are playing exactly what he expected. The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural extension.”3 As we all know, Phelps won the record eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. When visiting Beijing, years after Phelps’s breathtaking accomplishment, I couldn’t help but think about how Phelps and the other Olympians make all these feats of amazing athleticism seem so effortless. Of course Olympic athletes arguably practice longer and train harder than any other athletes in the world—but when they get in that pool, or on that track, or onto that rink, they make it look positively easy. It’s more than just a natural extension of their training. It’s a testament to the genius of the right routine.