“
...you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.
”
”
Lemony Snicket (The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #1))
“
Unless you have been very, very lucky, you have undoubtedly experienced events in your life that have made you cry. So unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.
”
”
Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)
“
To Garan's credit, the treatment of Dellian prisoners did change after that. One particularly laconic man, after a session in which Fire learned positively nothing, thanked her for it specifically. "Best dungeons I ever been in," he said, chewing on a toothpick.
"Wonderful," Garan grumbled when he had gone. "We'll grow a reputation for our kindness to lawbreakers.
”
”
Kristin Cashore (Fire (Graceling Realm, #2))
“
You can’t be beaten by something you laugh at.
”
”
Jonathan Harnisch (Freak)
“
For enjoyment is a weapon. The man who is capable of joy is capable, to a large extent, of changing his world. Joy is not a weak spineless idiot either. Its backbone is stronger than bitterness.
”
”
Jane Roberts (The Early Sessions: Book 3 of The Seth Material)
“
If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.” A warning from his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she’d upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random.
”
”
Jeff VanderMeer (Authority (Southern Reach #2))
“
At IDEO we have dedicated rooms for our brainstorming sessions, and the rules are literally written on the walls: Defer judgment. Encourage wild ideas. Stay focused on the topic. The most important of them, I would argue, is "Build on the ideas of others.
”
”
Tim Brown (Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation)
“
I got the memo, Nathan,” I interrupt him crossly. “You don’t love me. Aren’t going to love me. I hear it loud and clear. A fucking cuddle session isn’t going to change that.
”
”
Alessandra Torre (Till Death (The Dumont Diaries, #3))
“
A woman in her thirties came to see me. As she greeted me, I could sense the pain behind her polite and superficial smile. She started telling me her story, and within one second her smile changed into a grimace of pain. Then, she began to sob uncontrollably. She said she felt lonely and unfulfilled.
There was much anger and sadness. As a child she had been abused by a physically violent father. I saw quickly that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body. Her pain-body had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation.
She was not yet able to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts, being completely identified with both. She could not yet see that she was feeding the pain-body with her thoughts. In other words, she lived with the burden of a deeply unhappy self. At some level, however, she must have realized that her pain originated within herself, that she was a burden to herself. She was ready to awaken, and this is why she had come.
I directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts, her unhappy story. She said she had come expecting me to show her the way out of her unhappiness, not into it.
Reluctantly, however, she did what I asked her to do. Tears were rolling down her face, her whole body was shaking. “At this moment, this is what you feel.” I said. “There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?”
She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and said angrily, “No, I don't want to accept this.” “Who is speaking?” I asked her. “You or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?” She became quiet again. “I am not asking you to do anything. All I'm asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don't you want to find out?”
She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, “This is weird. I 'm still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less.”
This was the first time I heard somebody put it like that: There is space around my unhappiness. That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.
I didn't say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called “The Unhappy Me.” Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past – the dimension of Presence. Since you cannot be unhappy without an unhappy story, this was the end of her unhappiness. It was also the beginning of the end of her pain-body. Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.
When our session came to an end, it was fulfilling to know that I had just witnessed the arising of Presence in another human being. The very reason for our existence in human form is to bring that dimension of consciousness into this world. I had also witnessed a diminishment of the pain-body, not through fighting it but through bringing the light of consciousness to it.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
“
Horst passed him a bottle he had picked up in his rapid trip from there to here. Remarkably, it's contents had survived the transit. "Drink this," he said, unmoved by Cabal's anger. "You need to save your voice for your next session."
Cabal took the bottle testily and swigged from it. there was a moments pause, just long enough for Cabal's expression to change from testy to horrified revulsion. He spat the liquid violently onto the grass like a man who has got absent-minded with the concentrated nitric acid and a mouth pipette. He glared at Horst as he took off his spectacles and wiped his suddenly weeping eyes "Disinfectant? You give me disinfectant to drink?"
Horst's surprise was replaced with mild amusement. "It's root beer, Johannes. Have you never had root beer?"
Cabal looked suspiciously at him, then at the bottle "People drink this?"
"Yes."
"For non-medical reasons?"
"That's right."
Cabal shook his head in open disbelief. "They must be insane.
”
”
Jonathan L. Howard (Johannes Cabal the Necromancer (Johannes Cabal, #1))
“
But until then, you might find yourself laboring much longer than you should, still trying to get someone to change, thinking that one more coaching session will do the trick—or one more bit of encouragement, or one more session of feedback or confrontation. Or worse, one more concession.
”
”
Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
“
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)
“
When we pray, we make tremendous power available, dynamic in its working, causing changes in our favour. Certain prayer sessions are specially designed by the Lord to help straighten out things in the spirit-realm regarding our immediate or later future as individuals, families or ministries.
”
”
Chris Oyakhilome (How To Pray Effectively: Understanding The Rules Of Prayer For Different Situations And How To Apply Them For Your Desired Outcome)
“
For example, if overwork is due to (in)stability of the production systems, it’s your job as the manager to slow down the product roadmap in order to focus on stability for a while. Make clear measures of alerts, downtime, and incidents, and strive to reduce them. My advice is to dedicate 20% of your time in every planning session to system sustainability work (“sustainability” instead of the more common “technical debt”).
”
”
Camille Fournier (The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change)
“
Time does not cause change in matter, appearances to the contrary. I am going to skip a giant step, and say that man himself and all conscious beings produce matter subconsciously.
”
”
Jane Roberts (The Early Sessions: Book 2 of The Seth Material)
“
I am constantly looking for signs; from subtle changes in eye movement and breathing to a wild bird singing just outside the window during a session. Synchronicity, or synchronous events, not coincidences, are communicating. Inside and outside, within and without … All have meaning.
”
”
Stephen Poplin (Inner Journeys, Cosmic Sojourns: Life transforming stories, adventures and messages from a spiritual hypnotherapist's casebook (VOLUME1))
“
I thought back to the counselling sessions, how we'd talked about thinking things through rationally, recognizing unhelpful patterns of behaviour and being brave enough to try doing things differently.
”
”
Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
“
I've sat through far too many "crying in the beer" sessions where all the energy for change was dissipated in the intensity of the complaining. Once you see an idea for improvement that makes sense to you, do it.
”
”
Kent Beck (Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series))
“
I made it three days before the text messages started one afternoon while I was trying to finish warming up before our afternoon session. I had gotten to the LC later than usual and had gone straight to the training room, praising Jesus that I’d decided to change my clothes before leaving the diner once I’d seen what time it was and had remembered lunchtime traffic was a real thing. I was in the middle of stretching my hips when my phone beeped from where I’d left it on top of my bag. I took it out and snickered immediately at the message after taking my time with it.
Jojo: WHAT THE FUCK JASMINE
I didn’t need to ask what my brother was what-the-fucking over. It had only been a matter of time. It was really hard to keep a secret in my family, and the only reason why my mom and Ben—who was the only person other than her who knew—had kept their mouths closed was because they had both agreed it would be more fun to piss off my siblings by not saying anything and letting them find out the hard way I was going to be competing again.
Life was all about the little things.
So, I’d slipped my phone back into my bag and kept stretching, not bothering to respond because it would just make him more mad.
Twenty minutes later, while I was still busy stretching, I pulled my phone out and wasn’t surprised more messages appeared.
Jojo: WHY WOULD YOU NOT TELL ME
Jojo: HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME
Jojo: DID THE REST OF YOU KEEP THIS FROM ME
Tali: What happened? What did she not tell you?
Tali: OH MY GOD, Jasmine, did you get knocked up?
Tali: I swear, if you got knocked up, I’m going to beat the hell out of you. We talked about contraception when you hit puberty.
Sebastian: Jasmine’s pregnant?
Rubes: She’s not pregnant.
Rubes: What happened, Jojo?
Jojo: MOM DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS
Tali: Would you just tell us what you’re talking about?
Jojo: JASMINE IS SKATING WITH IVAN LUKOV
Jojo: And I found out by going on Picturegram. Someone at the rink posted a picture of them in one of the training rooms. They were doing lifts.
Jojo: JASMINE I SWEAR TO GOD YOU BETTER EXPLAIN EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW
Tali: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? IS THIS TRUE?
Tali: JASMINE
Tali: JASMINE
Tali: JASMINE
Jojo: I’m going on Lukov’s website right now to confirm this
Rubes: I just called Mom but she isn’t answering the phone
Tali: She knew about this. WHO ELSE KNEW?
Sebastian: I didn’t. And quit texting Jas’s name over and over again. It’s annoying. She’s skating again. Good job, Jas. Happy for you.
Jojo: ^^ You’re such a vibe kill
Sebastian: No, I’m just not flipping my shit because she got a new partner.
Jojo: SHE DIDN’T TELL US FIRST THO. What is the point of being related if we didn’t get the scoop before everybody else?
Jojo: I FOUND OUT ON PICTUREGRAM
Sebastian: She doesn’t like you. I wouldn’t tell you either.
Tali: I can’t find anything about it online.
Jojo: JASMINE
Tali: JASMINE
Jojo: JASMINE
Tali: JASMINE
Tali: Tell us everything or I’m coming over to Mom’s today.
Sebastian: You’re annoying. Muting this until I get out of work.
Jojo: Party pooper
Tali: Party pooper
Jojo: Jinx
Tali: Jinx
Sebastian: Annoying
...
I typed out a reply, because knowing them, if I didn’t, the next time I looked at my phone, I’d have an endless column of JASMINE on there until they heard from me.
That didn’t mean my response had to be what they wanted.
Me: Who is Ivan Lukov?
”
”
Mariana Zapata (From Lukov with Love)
“
held. This was before the U.S. Supreme Court changed all the laws on search and seizure. Fifty-eight of the most powerful mobsters in America were seized and hauled in by the police. Another fifty or so got away running through the woods. Also in 1957 the public was getting a close look at organized crime on TV every day during the televised sessions of the McClellan Committee Hearings on Organized Crime of the United States Senate.
”
”
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
“
Andrew paused in moving a microphone cable, considered for a moment, and nodded. He said, “Yeah. I really am.” Redefining winning made the recording session far less agonizing. But better still, a year later, when the group met again, several singers approached Amelia privately to tell her, “That Monitor thing? That’s changed, like, my whole life.
”
”
Emily Nagoski (Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle)
“
I surround myself with salt, so it soaks up the humidity from my steamy solo love making sessions.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life)
“
So unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit. So
”
”
Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events Collection #1-3 with Bonus Material: The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, The Wide Window (A Series of Unfortunate Events Boxset))
“
God is not going to love me any more or any differently when and if I finally lose this weight and become free from the stranglehold of food. Jesus’s love for me, my Father’s love for me, never changes.
”
”
Stasi Eldredge (Becoming Myself 8-Session Study Guide: Embracing God's Dream of You)
“
To generate lots of behavior options, you can use the following categories during your own Magic Wanding sessions. What behaviors would you do one time? What new habits would you create? What habit would you stop?
”
”
B.J. Fogg (Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything)
“
Only discovering and healing the root causes of each individual's dependency puts an end to dependency. One-on-one sessions are key because the individual issues at the core of dependency are just that- completely individual.
”
”
Chris Prentiss (The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A Holistic Approach to Total Recovery)
“
I have rules,” she said to him. He stilled his pen, raised expressionless eyes to her face, and waited. “When you bring me an old servant who’s come willingly where the king’s men have bidden him, a man who’s never been convicted, or even accused, of a crime,” Fire said, “I will not take his mind. I’ll sit before him and ask questions, and if my presence makes him more talkative, very well. But I will not compel him to say things he would otherwise not have said. Nor,” she added, voice rising, “will I take the mind of a person who’s been fed too little, or denied medicines, or beaten in your jails. I won’t manipulate a prisoner you’ve mistreated.” Garan sat back and crossed his arms. “That’s rich, isn’t it? Your own manipulation is mistreatment; you’ve said it yourself.” “Yes, but mine is meant to be for good reason. Yours is not.” “It’s not my mistreatment. I don’t give the orders down there, I’ve no idea what goes on.” “If you want me to question them, you’d best find out.” To Garan’s credit, the treatment of Dellian prisoners did change after that. One particularly laconic man, after a session in which Fire learned positively nothing, thanked her for it specifically. “Best dungeons I ever been in,” he said, chewing on a toothpick. “Wonderful,” Garan grumbled when he’d gone. “We’ll grow a reputation for our kindness to lawbreakers.
”
”
Kristin Cashore (Fire (Graceling Realm, #2))
“
I want more friends, more casual impromptu hangs, more dropping by with dinner, more walking and talking and advice sessions, more kids underfoot, more asking for and saying what we need, more hands to carry heavy boxes, more laughing and cackling and snorting, more children farting at the dinner table, more of what makes life messy, less painful, more sweet. I want to give and receive, to always be swapping Tupperware and food, all of us crowded together like curvy lumpen mangoes in a baking dish.
”
”
Angela Garbes (Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change)
“
In books, coaching sessions, and networking events aimed at the white-collar unemployed, the seeker soon encounters ideologies that are explicitly hostile to any larger, social understanding of his or her situation. The most blatant of these, in my experience, was the EST-like, victim-blaming ideology represented by Patrick Knowles and the books he recommended to his boot-camp participants. Recall that at the boot camp, the timid suggestion that there might be an outer world defined by the market or ruled by CEOs was immediately rebuked; there was only us, the job seekers. It was we who had to change. In a milder form, the constant injunction to maintain a winning attitude carries the same message: look inward, not outward; the world is entirely what you will it to be.
”
”
Barbara Ehrenreich
“
Salvation doesn’t mean simply being rescued from the consequences of our wrong choices. It doesn’t mean being delivered into better circumstances. It means being changed. Salvation isn’t primarily a matter of going to the good place. It’s about becoming good people.
”
”
John Ortberg (Eternity Is Now in Session: A Radical Rediscovery of What Jesus Really Taught about Salvation, Eternity, and Getting to the Good Place)
“
every human being.”[12] Salvation doesn’t mean simply being rescued from the consequences of our wrong choices. It doesn’t mean being delivered into better circumstances. It means being changed. Salvation isn’t primarily a matter of going to the good place. It’s about becoming good people.
”
”
John Ortberg (Eternity Is Now in Session: A Radical Rediscovery of What Jesus Really Taught about Salvation, Eternity, and Getting to the Good Place)
“
Stop worrying about what you cannot control. It’s a total waste of your energy, energy that could otherwise be used to help you focus on what you can influence. I spend large parts of my coaching sessions helping people to sift through their challenges and concerns – helping them to determine what they can change and what they have no control over.
”
”
Nigel Cumberland (100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living)
“
At the beginning of each session, one of us will begin talking about some random idea, another person will chime in or change the subject, and miraculously, after twenty minutes, we find that we have zeroed in on a question that everyone is passionate about. What continues to astonish me is the frequency with which religion slips into the room, unbidden but persistent.
”
”
Alan Lightman (The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew)
“
There is a vast difference between being a Christian and being a disciple. The difference is commitment.
Motivation and discipline will not ultimately occur through listening to sermons, sitting in a class, participating in a fellowship group, attending a study group in the workplace or being a member of a small group, but rather in the context of highly accountable, relationally transparent, truth-centered, small discipleship units.
There are twin prerequisites for following Christ - cost and commitment, neither of which can occur in the anonymity of the masses.
Disciples cannot be mass produced. We cannot drop people into a program and see disciples emerge at the end of the production line. It takes time to make disciples. It takes individual personal attention.
Discipleship training is not about information transfer, from head to head, but imitation, life to life. You can ultimately learn and develop only by doing.
The effectiveness of one's ministry is to be measured by how well it flourishes after one's departure.
Discipling is an intentional relationship in which we walk alongside other disciples in order to encourage, equip, and challenge one another in love to grow toward maturity in Christ. This includes equipping the disciple to teach others as well.
If there are no explicit, mutually agreed upon commitments, then the group leader is left without any basis to hold people accountable. Without a covenant, all leaders possess is their subjective understanding of what is entailed in the relationship.
Every believer or inquirer must be given the opportunity to be invited into a relationship of intimate trust that provides the opportunity to explore and apply God's Word within a setting of relational motivation, and finally, make a sober commitment to a covenant of accountability.
Reviewing the covenant is part of the initial invitation to the journey together. It is a sobering moment to examine whether one has the time, the energy and the commitment to do what is necessary to engage in a discipleship relationship.
Invest in a relationship with two others for give or take a year. Then multiply. Each person invites two others for the next leg of the journey and does it all again. Same content, different relationships.
The invitation to discipleship should be preceded by a period of prayerful discernment. It is vital to have a settled conviction that the Lord is drawing us to those to whom we are issuing this invitation. . If you are going to invest a year or more of your time with two others with the intent of multiplying, whom you invite is of paramount importance.
You want to raise the question implicitly: Are you ready to consider serious change in any area of your life? From the outset you are raising the bar and calling a person to step up to it. Do not seek or allow an immediate response to the invitation to join a triad. You want the person to consider the time commitment in light of the larger configuration of life's responsibilities and to make the adjustments in schedule, if necessary, to make this relationship work.
Intentionally growing people takes time. Do you want to measure your ministry by the number of sermons preached, worship services designed, homes visited, hospital calls made, counseling sessions held, or the number of self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus?
When we get to the shore's edge and know that there is a boat there waiting to take us to the other side to be with Jesus, all that will truly matter is the names of family, friends and others who are self initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus because we made it the priority of our lives to walk with them toward maturity in Christ. There is no better eternal investment or legacy to leave behind.
”
”
Greg Ogden (Transforming Discipleship: Making Disciples a Few at a Time)
“
Humans are curious creatures, and most people find it almost impossible to ignore their email and social media notifications until the end of their work sessions. If you’re being interrupted every few minutes by a ping or flashing browser tab, it will greatly reduce your productivity and concentration. Additionally, these social activities are pleasurable—they give our brains a little hit of dopamine, otherwise known as the happy hormone. In other words, social media can be addictive. A quick five minutes on Facebook can easily turn into an hour, as many of us can attest to. Rather than struggling against your brain’s natural inclination to procrastinate, save yourself a lot of time and hassle by simply closing your email tab and banning social media during work time.
”
”
S.J. Scott (Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less)
“
There’s the reassuring smell of a coal fire and beeswax polish, and the dark-green leather button-back booths are deep and comfortable, built for long, relaxed drinking sessions. An old man and his snoozing Jack Russell are the only other patrons. It’s one of those unpretentious, end-of-the-world pubs that you know hasn’t changed much in decades, ruddy quarry tiles and a brass surround running the length of the well-stocked bar.
”
”
Josie Silver (One Day in December)
“
I had enough of a story churning in my head that combined all the elements of the day—the interview, the concert, the after-party’s private session—when he put his guitar away and asked me if I had ever experimented with homosexuality. Talk about unexpected segues. Letting him know that I had not and wasn’t about to, I successfully changed the subject by asking him to give me a condensed account about traveling to Mississippi in search of Bukka White.
”
”
Kenny Weissberg (Off My Rocker: One Man’s Tasty, Twisted, Star-Studded Quest for Everlasting Music)
“
Near the end of the session, a slight, middle-aged man in a dress shirt approached the microphone. “I’m here to ask your forgiveness,” he said quietly. “I’ve been a pastor with a conservative denomination for more than thirty years, and I used to be an antigay apologist. I knew every argument, every Bible verse, every angle, and every position. I could win a debate with just about anyone, and I confess I yelled down more than a few ‘heretics’ in my time. I was absolutely certain that what I was saying was true and I assumed I’d defend that truth to death. But then I met a young lesbian woman who, over a period of many years, slowly changed my mind. She is a person of great faith and grace, and her life was her greatest apologetic.” The man began to sob into his hands. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you,” he finally continued. “I might not have hurt any of you directly, but I know my misguided apologetics, and then my silent complicity, probably did more damage than I can ever know. I am truly sorry and I humbly repent of my actions. Please forgive me.” “We forgive you!” someone shouted from up front. But the pastor held up his hand and then continued to speak. “And if things couldn’t get any weirder,” he said with a nervous laugh, “I was dropping my son off at school the other day—he’s a senior in high school—and we started talking about this very issue. When I told him that I’d recently changed my mind about homosexuality, he got really quiet for a minute and then he said, ‘Dad, I’m gay.’ ” Nearly everyone in the room gasped. “Sometimes I wonder if these last few years of studying, praying, and rethinking things were all to prepare me for that very moment,” the pastor said, his voice quivering. “It was one of the most important moments of my life. I’m so glad I was ready. I’m so glad I was ready to love my son for who he is.
”
”
Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church)
“
Liberals have elections to contest and centrist working-class voters to win back. That is job number one. And nothing will turn voters off more surely than being hectored in this way. So a couple of reminders to the identity conscious: Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony. They are not therapy sessions or occasions to obtain recognition. They are not seminars or “teaching moments.” They are not about exposing degenerates and running them out of town. If you want to save America’s soul, consider becoming a minister. If you want to force people to confess their sins and convert, don a white robe and head to the River Jordan. If you are determined to bring the Last Judgment down on the United States of America, become a god. But if you want to win the country back from the right, and bring about lasting change for the people you care about, it’s time to descend from the pulpit.*
”
”
Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics)
“
Measuring the wrong thing is often worse than measuring nothing, because you do get what you measure. So if the assessments focus on how much people “enjoy” the experience—be that reading a book, watching a talk, or going to a training session—those same books, talks, and trainings will respond to those measurements by prioritizing the wrong outcomes: making participants feel good and giving them a good time. Simply stated, measuring entertainment value produces great entertainment, not change; measuring the wrong things crowds out assessing other, more relevant indicators such as improvements in workplaces. Improvement comes from employing measurements that are appropriate, those that are connected to the areas in which we seek improvement. In the case of leadership, that appropriate measurement would include assessing the frequency of desirable leader behaviors; actual workplace conditions such as engagement, satisfaction, and
”
”
Jeffrey Pfeffer (Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time)
“
Every writing session after this realization, I dedicated five minutes (sometimes more, never less) and wrote out a quick description of what I was going to write that day. Sometimes it wasn't even a paragraph, just a list of this happens, then that, then that. This one simple change—those five stupid minutes—boosted my word count more than any other single thing I’ve ever done. I went from writing 2k a day to 5k a day within a week without increasing my 6-hour writing block. Some days, I even finished early.
”
”
Rachel Aaron (2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love)
“
Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside.
Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried.
'This is embarrassing,' I admitted.
'It doesn't have to be.'
'It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said.
The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter.
In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family.
I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology.
”
”
Alice Jamieson (Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind)
“
It is possible - given absolute control over the media and the police - to rewrite the memories of hundreds of millions of people, if you have a generation to accomplish it in. Almost always, this is done to improve the hold that the powerful have on power, or to serve the narcissism or megalomania or paranoia of national leaders. It throws a monkey wrench into the error-correcting machinery. It works to erase public memory of profound political mistakes, and thus to guarantee their eventual repetition.
In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I’m imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over news stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.
”
”
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
Intellectual truth alone will not make you free, though it is certainly a necessary preliminary. If this were the case your walls would fall away, since intellectually you understand their rather dubious nature. Since feeling is so often the cohesive with which mind builds, it is feeling itself which must be changed if you would find freedom from your particular plane of existence at your particular time. That is, to some extent a change in feeling will allow you to see variants. Since feeling is a cohesive, to change it completely would hardly be of any advantage since your world of present existence would fall apart.
”
”
Jane Roberts (The Early Sessions: Book 1 of The Seth Material)
“
One more thing to mention that is unique to swimming locker rooms is that there is a lot of undressing, multiple times a session. We arrived in our clothes and changed into our practice suits to warm up, then we changed from our practice suits into our racing suits, then from our racing suits back into our practice suits to finish warming down, and then from our practice suits back into our clothes. So just in one session, you would undress down to nothing four times. Then we would come back for finals that same day and repeat the process all over again. Just trying to hit home the fact that there were lots of opportunities to be seen fully exposed each day.
”
”
Riley Gaines (Swimming Against the Current: Fighting for Common Sense in a World That’s Lost its Mind)
“
Of course, the cadavers, in life, donated themselves freely to this fate, and the language surrounding the bodies in front of us soon changed to reflect that fact. We were instructed to no longer call them “cadavers”; “donors” was the preferred term. And yes, the transgressive element of dissection had certainly decreased from the bad old days. (Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers—that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a means once common enough to warrant its own verb: burke, which the OED defines as “to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection.”) Yet the best-informed people—doctors—almost never donated their bodies. How informed were the donors, then? As one anatomy professor put it to me, “You wouldn’t tell a patient the gory details of a surgery if that would make them not consent.” Even if donors were informed enough—and they might well have been, notwithstanding one anatomy professor’s hedging—it wasn’t so much the thought of being dissected that galled. It was the thought of your mother, your father, your grandparents being hacked to pieces by wisecracking twenty-two-year-old medical students. Every time I read the pre-lab and saw a term like “bone saw,” I wondered if this would be the session in which I finally vomited. Yet I was rarely troubled in lab, even when I found that the “bone saw” in question was nothing more than a common, rusty wood saw. The closest I ever came to vomiting was nowhere near the lab but on a visit to my grandmother’s grave in New York, on the twentieth anniversary of her death. I found myself doubled over, almost crying, and apologizing—not to my cadaver but to my cadaver’s grandchildren. In the midst of our lab, in fact, a son requested his mother’s half-dissected body back. Yes, she had consented, but he couldn’t live with that. I knew I’d do the same. (The remains were returned.) In
”
”
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
“
Because most of these patients suffered from alexithymia, it was not easy for them to report their response to the treatments. But their actions spoke for them: They consistently showed up on time for their appointments, even if they had to drive through snowstorms. None of them dropped out, and at the end of the full twenty sessions, we could document significant improvements not only in their PTSD scores,10 but also in their interpersonal comfort, emotional balance, and self-awareness.11 They were less frantic, they slept better, and they felt calmer and more focused. In any case, self-reports can be unreliable; objective changes in behavior are much better indicators of how well treatment works.
”
”
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
The client thereby embarks on a process of selective change, which is possible, rather than remaining paralyzed by the seeming necessity of total change, which would be impossible. Besides that issue of building a fence that gets addressed in the first session, another issue is also often addressed then: the question “Why now?” That’s short-hand for: “Why did you decide to seek help in a crisis center today, and why do you feel a sense of crisis now, rather than some time earlier, or not at all?” In the case of a crisis arising from a single unanticipated shock, such as the Cocoanut Grove fire, that question needn’t be asked because the obvious answer is the shock itself. But the answer is not obvious
”
”
Jared Diamond (Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis)
“
What is the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen?”
Dragging his gaze from the beauty of the gardens, Ian looked down at the beauty beside him. “Any place,” he said huskily, “were you are.”
He saw the becoming flush of embarrassed pleasure that pinkened her cheeks, but when she spoke her voice was rueful. “You don’t have to say such things to me, you know-I’ll keep our bargain.”
“I know you will,” he said, trying not to overwhelm her with avowals of love she wouldn’t yet believe. With a grin he added, “Besides, as it turned out after our bargaining session, I’m the one who’s governed by all the conditions, not you.”
Her sideways glance was filled with laughter. “You were much too lenient at times, you know. Toward the end I was asking for concessions just to see how far you’d go.”
Ian, who had been multiplying his fortune for the last four years by buying shipping and import-export companies, as well as sundry others, was regarded as an extremely tough negotiator. He heard her announcement with a smile of genuine surprise. “You gave me the impression that every single concession was of paramount importance to you, and that if I didn’t agree, you might call the whole thing off.”
She nodded with satisfaction. “I rather thought that was how I ought to do it. Why are you laughing?”
“Because,” he admitted, chuckling, “obviously I was not in my best form yesterday. In addition to completely misreading your feelings, I managed to buy a house on Promenade Street for which I will undoubtedly pay five times its worth.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, and, as if she was embarrassed and needed a way to avoid meeting his gaze, she reached up and pulled a leaf off an overhanging branch. In a voice of careful nonchalance, she explained, “In matters of bargaining, I believe in being reasonable, but my uncle would assuredly have tried to cheat you. He’s perfectly dreadful about money.”
Ian nodded, remembering the fortune Julius Cameron had gouged out of him in order to sign the betrothal agreement.
“And so,” she admitted, uneasily studying the azure-blue sky with feigned absorption, “I sent him a note after you left itemizing all the repairs that were needed at the house. I told him it was in poor condition and absolutely in need of complete redecoration.”
“And?”
“And I told him you would consider paying a fair price for the house, but not one shilling more, because it needed all that.”
“And?” Ian prodded.
“He has agreed to sell it for that figure.”
Ian’s mirth exploded in shouts of laughter. Snatching her into his arms, he waited until he could finally catch his breath, then he tipped her face up to his. “Elizabeth,” he said tenderly, “if you change your mind about marrying me, promise me you’ll never represent the opposition at the bargaining table. I swear to God, I’d be lost.” The temptation to kiss her was almost overwhelming, but the Townsende coach with its ducal crest was in the drive, and he had no idea where their chaperones might be. Elizabeth noticed the coach, too, and started toward the house.
"About the gowns," she said, stopping suddenly and looking up at him with an intensely earnest expression on her beautiful face. "I meant to thank you for your generosity as soon as you arrived, but I was so happy to-that is-" She realized she'd been about to blurt out that she was happy to see him, and she was so flustered by having admitted aloud what she hadn't admitted to herself that she completely lost her thought.
"Go on," Ian invited in a husky voice. "You were so happy to see me that you-"
"I forgot," she admitted lamely.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
I dream of Morocco and Paris, and a koi pond in the backyard. Making art, supporting art, learning art. Late-night talks with soul sisters who make me feel crazy blessed and motivated. Stage presence. Books and more books. Film. Belly laughs. I dream about communion. My man. Our son. Always. I dream of sitting around a fire with leaders and lovers of progress. Being able to give yeses that open doors and new dimensions for people. I dream of tenderness and innovation. I dream of invitations that humble me, and magical connections with people I recognize on a cellular level. I dream that we band together to leverage change. I dream of feeling more electric and sweet every single day. Mostly, I dream of being amazed. How ’bout you?
”
”
Danielle LaPorte (The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms)
“
Speaking before a joint session of Congress, President Johnson said:
“This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”
It’s remarkable to note that, more than fifty years ago, an American president was already aware of, and acknowledging, human-created climate change.
Johnson had been briefed on the dangers of CO 2 increases by the famous climate scientists Charles Keeling and Roger Revelle, among others.
So, not only was Johnson aware of the issue, but he was already concerned enough to raise it before Congress. That single sentence in his address gives the lie to the claims of so many climate-change deniers that global warming is some kind of recent hoax.
”
”
Adam Frank (Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth)
“
There is a specific dzogchen meditation practice in which we bring ourselves to the place of stillness by closing the eyes and contemplating all of the body’s physical actions over a lifetime, action by action, day by day, year by year. Although we can’t review our entire life in a single meditation session, we can elicit enough physical memories to bring ourselves to the point of exhaustion. The instant we arrive at this point, we release all the actions into the stillness of the moment and abide without changing. “Abide without changing” means that as our thoughts and experiences continue to arise and dissolve, we continue to rest in our own nature and simply observe without elaborating. We try not to follow the past, plan the future, or change the present. We “leave it as it is.
”
”
Tenzin Wangyal (Tibetan Yogas of Body, Speech, and Mind)
“
Homework _Yes _No 1. Did you make a serious effort to understand the text? (Just hunting for relevant worked-out examples doesn’t count.) _Yes _No 2. Did you work with classmates on homework problems, or at least check your solutions with others? _Yes _No 3. Did you attempt to outline every homework problem solution before working with classmates? Test Preparation The more “Yes” responses you recorded, the better your preparation for the test. If you recorded two or more “No” responses, think seriously about making some changes in how you prepare for the next test. _Yes _No 4. Did you participate actively in homework group discussions (contributing ideas, asking questions)? _Yes _No 5. Did you consult with the instructor or teaching assistants when you were having trouble with something? _Yes _No 6. Did you understand ALL of your homework problem solutions when they were handed in? _Yes _No 7. Did you ask in class for explanations of homework problem solutions that weren’t clear to you? _Yes _No 8. If you had a study guide, did you carefully go through it before the test and convince yourself that you could do everything on it? _Yes _No 9. Did you attempt to outline lots of problem solutions quickly, without spending time on the algebra and calculations? _Yes _No 10. Did you go over the study guide and problems with classmates and quiz one another? _Yes _No 11. If there was a review session before the test, did you attend it and ask questions about anything you weren’t sure about? _Yes _No 12. Did you get a reasonable night’s sleep before the test? (If your answer is no, your answers to 1–11 may not matter.) _Yes _No TOTAL
”
”
Barbara Oakley (A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra))
“
The game’s rules were Byzantine, and we had to work them out through trial and error. One rule, which had only gradually become apparent, was that one could only move into another character’s head if the move did not involve too big a jump in social status. A peasant could not swap into the head of a king, even if the king knelt down to kiss the peasant. But the peasant could get there by jumping into the head of a blacksmith, and then an armourer, and then an officer in the king’s guard, and so on - working their way up by discrete steps. Sometimes it would not be possible to change character between one session and the next, but that was all part of the game’s richly involving texture. It was difficult and slow, but because at each step one had access to the memories and personality of the inhabited character, it was seldom boring.
”
”
Alastair Reynolds (House of Suns)
“
Slowly, but steadily, my feelings did start to change- feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn't. I -like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian -felt very comfortable, very at home in mu body in my lesbianism. One doesn't repent for a sin of identity in one session. Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of my sin. I don't mean different incidents or examples of the same sin, but different facets of sin -how pride, for example, informed my decision-making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness. I have walked this journey with help. There is no other way to do it I still walk this journey with help.
”
”
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
“
PASSION PLAY WORKSHEET Your true strengths are living right here. What are you intensely interested in? While you’re at it, include your moderate curiosities. You go to the best cocktail party ever. It’s a life-changing event because you meet the most with-it, interesting, empowered people, and each of them can contribute to your career and interests in some way.… Who was there? What kind of information did they share with you? What did they ask you? How did they offer to help you? If you could go to five conferences or events this year, which ones would you go to, or what would they be about? What could you talk about late into the night with like-minded people without running out of things to say? What activities make you feel really useful, alive, and strong? When do you feel like a rock star, a gifted contributor, a very cool and purposeful human being? In terms of things that you do, when do you feel most like yourself? What do you want to be known for?
”
”
Danielle LaPorte (The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms)
“
As explained in the first chapter, human beings are physically hardwired to constantly move about and exercise. Every day, we build up a lot of stress, and physical exercise provides an outlet to get this out of our system so we can stay healthy. In the modern world, our stress is exacerbated by our incessant consumption of negative news and by rapid changes in our culture and norms. Negativity and confusion add stress to the body. Exercise will help manage this by releasing neurotransmitters, called endorphins, into our body to manage our response. Exercise temporarily mimics the fight-or-flight response that you may feel when you are stressed. But in the long run, it will help calm and de-stress you. Endorphins help calm your responses and ultimately result in removing the built-up stresses from our lives. Studies have shown that people experience positive changes after just one or two cardio sessions. Exercise will also help you sleep, which is directly correlated with lower stress and anxiety.3 Exercise
”
”
Paul Uponi (Muscular Christianity: A Case for Spiritual and Physical Fitness)
“
One evening in 1930, as he was struggling to recapture the feverish spirit that had fueled his first book, Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe decided to give up on an uninspired hour of work and get undressed for bed. But, standing naked at his hotel-room window, Wolfe found that his weariness had suddenly evaporated and that he was eager to write again. Returning to the table, he wrote until dawn with, he recalled, “amazing speed, ease, and sureness.” Looking back, Wolfe tried to figure out what had prompted the sudden change—and realized that, at the window, he had been unconsciously fondling his genitals, a habit from childhood that, while not exactly sexual (his “penis remained limp and unaroused,” he noted in a letter to his editor), fostered such a “good male feeling” that it had stoked his creative energies. From then on, Wolfe regularly used this method to inspire his writing sessions, dreamily exploring his “male configurations” until “the sensuous elements in every domain of life became more immediate, real, and beautiful.
”
”
Mason Currey (Daily Rituals: How Artists Work)
“
It may not have been directly related to my fears for Chris when he was gone, but I grew more apprehensive about being alone with the children in the house. We lived in a relatively quiet suburb, and yet-what would I do if there was an intruder?
Before we had kids, the answer was simple: I’d hide or run away. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, even a thief. But now that I had children my attitude changed:
Take one step inside my house and I will put a bullet through your skull.
One day after he’d returned home from the Ramadi deployment, Chris and I went down to a gun range. As he showed me some of the basics, I started asking questions.
And more questions.
And more after that.
Why this, and why that.
“Really?” he said finally. “Are you challenging what I said?”
“No, no,” I tried to explain. “I just want to know everything about it.”
Maybe husbands shouldn’t teach wives about certain things, and vice versa. I did eventually get pretty good with a gun-but that was after enlisting a friend of Chris’s to help teach me. Somehow those sessions were a little easier.
”
”
Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
“
The tone of those negotiations was very contentious,” says Becky Sauerbrunn, who served on the national team’s CBA committee and participated in most of the negotiation sessions. “They didn’t go anywhere. We would go into those meetings and say we want equal pay and they would say you’re not really generating the revenue to deserve equal pay to the men. And it just went around and around like that.” But then on March 7, Rich Nichols saw something that caught him by surprise. It was an article by Jonathan Tannenwald of the Philadelphia Inquirer that broke down financial numbers contained in U.S. Soccer’s General Annual Meeting report. The report itself was released quietly on U.S. Soccer’s website without fanfare—Tannenwald was the only journalist for a major newspaper who picked up on it. What the U.S. Soccer report showed—and what in turn the Philadelphia Inquirer explained—was that U.S. Soccer initially budgeted a $420,000 loss for 2016 but changed their numbers to expect a profit of almost $18 million, based largely on the gate receipts and merchandise sales of the women’s national team during the 2015 Women’s World Cup victory tour.
”
”
Caitlin Murray (The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer)
“
They were interrupted as a young girl walked along the pavement in front of the sessions house, calling, "Flowers! Fresh-cut flowers!" She stopped in front of them. "Posy for the lady, sir?"
Ransom turned to the girl, who wore a colorful scarf over her long dark hair and a patchwork apron over her black dress. She carried a flat basket filled with posyes, their stems wrapped with bits of colored ribbon.
"There's no need-" Garrett began, but Ransom ignored her, browsing over the tiny bouquets of roses, narcissus, violets, forget-me-nots, and dianthus.
"How much?" he asked the flower girl.
"A farthing, sir."
He glanced at Garrett over his shoulder. "Do you like violets?"
"I do," she said hesitantly.
Ransom gave the flower-girl a sixpence and picked out one of the posyes.
"Thank you, sir!" The girl scurried away as if fearing he might change his mind.
Ransom turned to Garrett with the cluster of purple blossoms. Reaching for the lapel of her walking jacket, he deftly tucked the ribbon-wrapped stem of the posy into a buttonhole.
"Violets make an excellent blood-purifying tonic," Garrett said awkwardly, feeling the need to fill the silence. "And they're good for treating cough or fever."
The elusive dimple appeared in his cheek. "They're also becoming to green-eyed women.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Hello Stranger (The Ravenels, #4))
“
I know Christians who yearn for God's older style of a power-worker who topples pharaohs, flattens Jericho's walls, and scorches the priests of Baal. I do not. I believe the kingdom now advances through grace and freedom, God's goal all along. I accept Jesus' assurance that his departure from earth represents progress, by opening a door for the Counselor to enter. We know how counselors work: not by giving orders and imposing changes through external force. A good counselor works on the inside, bringing to the surface dormant health. For a relationship between such unequal partners, prayer provides an ideal medium.
Prayer is cooperation with God, a consent that opens the way for grace to work. Most of the time the Counselor communicates subtly: feeding ideas into my mind, bringing to awareness a caustic comment I just made, inspiring me to choose better than I would have done otherwise, shedding light on the hidden dangers of temptation, sensitizing me to another's needs. God's Spirit whispers rather than shouts, and brings peace not turmoil. Although such a partnership with God may lack the drama of the bargaining sessions with Abraham and Moses, the advance in intimacy is striking. . . The partnership binds so tight that it becomes hard to distinguish who is doing what, God or the human partner. God has come that close.
”
”
Philip Yancey (Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?)
“
This book festival...grew to attract thousands of visitors every year. Now they felt like they needed a new purpose. The festival’s continuing existence felt assured. What was it for? What could it do? How could it make itself count?
The festival’s leadership reached out to me for advice on these questions. What kind of purpose could be their next great animating force? Someone had the idea that the festival’s purpose could be about stitching together the community. Books were, of course, the medium. But couldn’t an ambitious festival set itself the challenge of making the city more connected? Couldn’t it help turn strong readers into good citizens? That seemed to me a promising direction—a specific, unique, disputable lodestar for a book festival that could guide its construction...We began to brainstorm.
I proposed an idea: Instead of starting each session with the books and authors themselves, why not kick things off with a two-minute exercise in which audience members can meaningfully, if briefly, connect with one another? The host could ask three city- or book-related questions, and then ask each member of the audience to turn to a stranger to discuss one of them. What brought you to this city—whether birth or circumstance?
What is a book that really affected you as a child? What do you think would make us a better city? Starting a session with these questions would help the audience become aware of one another. It would also break the norm of not speaking to a stranger, and perhaps encourage this kind of behavior to continue as people left the session. And it would activate a group identity—the city’s book lovers—that, in the absence of such questions, tends to stay dormant.
As soon as this idea was mentioned, someone in the group sounded a worry. “But I wouldn’t want to take away time from the authors,” the person said. There it was—the real, if unspoken, purpose rousing from its slumber and insisting on its continued primacy. Everyone liked the idea of “book festival as community glue” in theory. But at the first sign of needing to compromise on another thing in order to honor this new something, alarm bells rang. The group wasn’t ready to make the purpose of the book festival the stitching of community if it meant changing the structure of the sessions, or taking time away from something else. Their purpose, whether or not they admitted it, was the promotion of books and reading and the honoring of authors. It bothered them to make an author wait two minutes for citizens to bond. The book festival was doing what many of us do: shaping a gathering according to various unstated motivations, and making half-hearted gestures toward loftier goals.
”
”
Priya Parker (The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters)
“
The philosopher John Locke once described the case of a man who had learned to dance by practicing according to a strict ritual, always in the same room, which contained an old trunk. Unfortunately, wrote Locke, “the idea of this remarkable piece of household stuff had so mixed itself with the turns and steps of all his dances, that though in that chamber he could dance excellently well, yet it was only when that trunk was there; he could not perform well in any other place unless that or some other trunk had its due position in the room.” This research says, take the trunk out of the room. Since we cannot predict the context in which we’ll have to perform, we’re better off varying the circumstances in which we prepare. We need to handle life’s pop quizzes, its spontaneous pickup games and jam sessions, and the traditional advice to establish a strict practice routine is no way to do so. On the contrary: Try another room altogether. Another time of day. Take the guitar outside, into the park, into the woods. Change cafés. Switch practice courts. Put on blues instead of classical. Each alteration of the routine further enriches the skills being rehearsed, making them sharper and more accessible for a longer period of time. This kind of experimenting itself reinforces learning, and makes what you know increasingly independent of your surroundings.
”
”
Benedict Carey (How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens)
“
He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group everybody seemed to think that year's Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. He didn't talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: 'He's come out the other side.' That was all. No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just . . . come out the other side.
Or you don't.
”
”
Stephen King (The Stand)
“
He found himself thinking of something
Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy
named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or
fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no
showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had
said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group
everybody seemed to think that year's Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound
something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had
done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken
bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed
from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just
another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound
station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen
months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no
longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but
he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an
audition. He didn't talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had
disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: 'He's come out the other side.' That was
all. No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person
you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no
maps of the change. You just . . . come out the other side.
Or you don't.
”
”
Stephen King (The Stand)
“
He found himself thinking of something
Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy
named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or
fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no
showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had
said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group
everybody seemed to think that year's Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound
something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had
done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken
bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed
from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just
another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound
station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen
months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no
longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but
he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an
audition. He didn't talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had
disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: 'He's come out the other side.' That was
all. No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person
you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no
maps of the change. You just . . . come out the other side.
Or you don't.
”
”
Stephen King (The Stand)
“
You have to eat the shit," he repeated over and over during one of our first sessions. He had the tone and zeal of a boxing trainer. "Shit tastes good!"
"What does that even mean?" I chuckled.
"Don't laugh," he said sternly. Marshall told me that my job wasn't to cook food. It wasn't about looking at numbers or commanding people, either. My company would live or die based on my capacity to eat shit and like it. "I am going to watch you eat as many bowls of shit as our time will allow," he said. We had plenty of time.
Eating shit meant listening. Eating shit meant acknowledging my errors and shortcomings. Eating shit meant facing confrontations that made me uncomfortable. Eating shit meant putting my cell phone away when someone was talking to me. Eating shit meant not fleeing. Eating shit meant being grateful. Eating shit meant controlling myself when people fell short of expectations. Eating shit meant putting others before myself.
This last detail was important. With Dr. Eliot, I got away with describing my MO as self-destructive--my managerial tendencies were harmful, but only to me. Now, according to Marshall, I was using that assessment as cover for my poor behavior. In my mind, all the people who had left Momofuku were leaving me. When they failed at their jobs, they were betraying me. Marshall pointed out the ugly truth that this belied. I believed that the people at Momofuku were there to serve me.
I had always wielded my dedication to Momofuku with great arrogance. Friendships could crumble, hearts could break, cooks could fall to their knees and cry: all collateral damage in the noble pursuit of bringing good food to more people. I believed that I was Momofuku and that everything I did was for Momofuku. Therefore, whatever was good for me was good for Momofuku.
”
”
David Chang (Eat a Peach)
“
DITCHING SESSIONS AND OTHER DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOR 5 out of 10 None. I’m not going to bother documenting all of the reports I’ve gotten about Keefe’s recent behavior (or any of the other prodigies currently acting up.) Nor am I allowing any punishment to be assigned. The plantings for Sophie Foster and Dex Dizznee were only a few days ago and everyone needs more time to process their shock and grief—particularly Keefe, who seemed inconsolable when I saw him in the Wanderling Woods. —Dame Alina LEVEL FIVE VIOLATION SERIOUSNESS SENTENCE PRINCIPAL’S COMMENTS DITCHING THE UNIVERSE According to a report from the gnomes, Keefe was found in the Mentors’ private cafeteria again, covered in butterblast crumbs. 2 out of 10 One detention assigned. First day of sessions and Keefe’s ditching again. I definitely should’ve tried to get him assigned to a different session. But the Council’s been busy since Sophie Foster and Dex Dizznee returned. I still can’t believe anyone would capture children—and I don’t want to think about what Sophie and Dex endured. Our world is changing.… —Dame Alina VIOLATION SERIOUSNESS SENTENCE PRINCIPAL’S COMMENTS DISRUPTING STUDY HALL According to a report from Sir Rosings, Keefe was talking to Sophie Foster during detention—and made a “sassy” reply when Sir Rosings called them out. When Keefe continued to talk, Sir Rosings gave them both detention. (Keefe apparently looked excited by the prospect. Sophie less so.) 1 out of 10 One detention detention assigned. Honestly, this seems a somewhat minor offense, considering the theatrics Keefe usually pulls. But I respect Sir Rosings’s decision. —Dame Alina Update: Keefe’s detention (and Sophie’s as well) was postponed a day after he injured his hand in Elementalism while trying to bottle a tornado. (Sophie apparently had some trouble in her inflicting session as well.)
”
”
Shannon Messenger (Unlocked (Keeper of the Lost Cities, #8.5))
“
And its with my head between my knees that I've loved all the men in my life, that's how I love my psychoanalyst, who doesn't see my body fidgeting on the couch when I'm queasy from repeating my mother who worms and my father who comes, when I want to sit up and show him that I'm not just a voice and that a single thrust of my claws can say as much as ten years of chattering about what's hidden behind the words. that the marks they leave are no better than the rage of a child crying for its mother's breast, and besides, who knows whether he's sleeping with his head between his hands and dreaming of me naked in a bathroom, who knows whether he's not masturbating silently to add a bit of life to my narratives, it's something I'll never know, something I don't have the right to hear, and if I did know what would happen, what would occur if I surprised him with his hand wedged down his pants and took his cock in my mouth, how much time to live would there be left for us if I moved my mouth from bottom to top and right to left, how much time before he came, before the end of the world and lightning striking, well, I don't know that, either, and maybe it would be better if it did happen, after all, maybe I'm dying from nothing happening between us and the fact that we'll have to replay the scene of my parents in the bathroom, finally put actions where there were only my tears, maybe it would be better to face each other and talk about love, confront each other in bathwater and stroke what falls under our hands, it would be better if we could be client and whore for the space of a moment, for the length of a session be the one who pays and the woman who gives herself, the roles would have to change within the time it takes for him to close his books and become a man in my arms, but it will never happen, one last time, it can't happen since those things never occur when you're me, when you're calling out life from death's side
”
”
Nelly Arcan (Putain)
“
Try Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness meditation is like Tylenol, in that the same treatment is capable of helping with multiple issues: decreasing anxiety-induced overarousal, boosting your focus, and improving your ability to detect rumination. Mindfulness-based therapies have been shown to be effective for helping people reduce anxiety.
Mindfulness meditation does not need to be intimidating. Research by the makers of the Lift goal-tracking app found that beginner meditators start with an average of three to five minutes. They also found that once people had meditated 12 times, there was around a 90% chance they’d do more mediation.
Experiment: Explore and find a version of meditation that works for you. Start with three minutes of one of the following practices, and increase the time you spend meditating by 30 seconds each day:
--Pay attention to the physical sensations of your breathing. Lie down and put your hand on your abdomen to feel the sensations of it rising as you breathe in and falling as you breathe out.
--Sit or lie down and listen to any sounds and the silence between sounds. Let sounds just come in and out of your awareness regardless of whether they’re relaxing sounds or not.
--Walk for three minutes and pay attention to what you see.
--Walk and pay attention to the feelings of air on your skin.
--Walk and pay attention to the physical sensations of your body moving.
--Do three minutes of open awareness, in which you pay attention to any sensations that show up. Pay attention to anything in the here and now, which could be sounds, your breathing, the sensations of your body making contact with your chair, or the sensations of your feet on the floor.
--Spend three minutes paying attention to any sensations of pain, tension, comfort, or relaxation in your body. You don’t need to try to change the sensations; just allow them to be what they are, and ebb and flow as they do.
When your thoughts drift away from what you’re supposed to be paying attention to, gently (and without self-criticism) bring them back. Expect to need to do this a lot. It’s a normal part of doing mindfulness meditation and doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.
You’re likely to get more benefits from meditation if you do it on a regular basis and for longer amounts of time per session.
”
”
Alice Boyes (The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points)
“
Remind yourself where you come from.
I spent the majority of my life running away from Utah, from the life I led there, from the memories I associated with those early years. It felt very someone-else-ago to me. London changed me profoundly.
When we were dancing on DWTS together, Jennifer Grey called me one night. She was having trouble with her back and wanted to see a physiotherapist. “Can you come with me?” she asked. She drove us through a residential section of Beverly Hills. We pulled into a house with a shed out back. Oddly, it didn’t look like a doctor’s office. There was a couch and incense burning. An Australian guy with a white beard came in : “Hey, mates.” I looked at Jen and she winked at me. This was no physical therapy. She’d signed us up for some bizarre couples therapy!
The guy spoke to us for a while, then he asked Jennifer if she wouldn’t mind leaving us to chat. I thought the whole thing was pretty out there, but I didn’t think I could make a run for it.
“So, Derek,” he said. “Tell me about your childhood.” I laid it all out for him--I talked for almost two hours--and he nodded. “You can go pick him up now.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Pick who up?”
The therapist smiled. “That younger boy, that self you left in Utah. You left him there while you’ve been on a mission moving forward so vigorously. Now you can go get him back.”
I sat there, utterly stunned and speechless. It was beyond powerful and enlightening. Had I really left that part of me behind? Had I lost that fun-loving, wide-eyed kid and all his creative exuberance?
When I came out of my therapy session, Jennifer was waiting for me. “If I’d told you this was where we were going, you wouldn’t have come,” she said. She was right. She had to blindside me to get me to grapple with this. She’s a very spiritual person, and she saw how I was struggling, how I seemed to be in some kind of emotional rut. Just visualizing myself taking the old Derek by the hand was an incredible exercise. I think we often tuck our younger selves away for safekeeping. In my case, I associated my early years with painful memories. I wanted to keep young Derek at a distance. But what I forgot was all the good I experienced with him as well: the joy, the hope, the excitement, the wonder. I forgot what a great kid Derek was. I gave myself permission to reconnect with that little boy, to see the world through his eyes again. It was the kick in the butt I needed.
Jennifer would say, “Told ya so.
”
”
Derek Hough (Taking the Lead: Lessons from a Life in Motion)
“
Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after his lung cancer was diagnosed, he continued the activities that he considered important, marching against crackhouses, campaigning against the demolition of the Ford Auditorium, organizing Detroit Summer, making speeches, and writing letters to the editor and articles for the SOSAD newsletter and Northwest Detroiter. In 1992 while he was undergoing the chemotherapy that cleared up his bladder cancer, he helped form the Coalition against Privatization and to Save Our City. The coalition was initiated by activist members of a few AFSCME locals who contacted Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings who in turn contacted us. Jimmy helped write the mission statement that gave the union activists a sense of themselves as not only city workers but citizens of the city and its communities. The coalition’s town meetings and demonstrations were instrumental in persuading the new mayor, Dennis Archer, to come out against privatization, using language from the coalition newsletter to explain his position. At the same time Jimmy was putting out the garbage, keeping our corner at Field and Goethe free of litter and rubbish, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, picking cranberries, and keeping up “his” path on Sutton. After he entered the hospice program, which usually means death within six months, and up to a few weeks before his death, Jimmy slowed down a bit, but he was still writing and speaking and organizing. He used to say that he wasn’t going to die until he got ready, and because he was so cheerful and so engaged it was easy to believe him. A few weeks after he went on oxygen we did three movement-building workshops at the SOSAD office for a group of Roger Barfield’s friends who were trying to form a community-action group following a protest demonstration at a neighborhood sandwich shop over the murder of one of their friends. With oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable oxygen tank by his side, Jimmy spoke for almost an hour on one of his favorite subjects, the need to “think dialectically, rather than biologically.” Recognizing that this was probably one of Jimmy’s last extended speeches, I had the session videotaped by Ron Scott. At the end of this workshop we asked participants to come to the next session prepared to grapple with three questions: What can we do to make our neighborhoods safe? How can we motivate people to transform? How can we create jobs?
”
”
Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
“
10 Practical Strategies to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills and Unleash Your Creativity
In today's rapidly changing world, the ability to think critically and creatively has become more important than ever. Whether you're a student looking to excel academically, a professional striving for success in your career, or simply someone who wants to navigate life's challenges with confidence, developing strong critical thinking skills is crucial. In this blog post, we will explore ten practical strategies to help you improve your critical thinking abilities and unleash your creative potential.
1. Embrace open-mindedness:
One of the cornerstones of critical thinking is being open to different viewpoints and perspectives. Cultivate a willingness to listen to others, consider alternative opinions, and challenge your own beliefs. This practice expands your thinking and encourages creative problem-solving.
2. Ask thought-provoking questions:
Asking insightful questions is a powerful way to stimulate critical thinking. By questioning assumptions, seeking clarity, and exploring deeper meanings, you can uncover new insights and perspectives. Challenge yourself to ask thought-provoking questions regularly.
3. Practice active listening:
Listening actively involves not just hearing, but also understanding, interpreting, and empathizing with the speaker. By honing your active listening skills, you can better grasp complex ideas, identify underlying assumptions, and engage in more meaningful discussions.
4. Seek diverse sources of information:
Expand your knowledge base by seeking information from a wide range of sources. Engage with diverse perspectives, opinions, and ideas through books, articles, podcasts, and documentaries. This habit broadens your understanding and encourages critical thinking by exposing you to different viewpoints.
5. Develop analytical thinking skills:
Analytical thinking involves breaking down complex problems into smaller components, examining relationships and patterns, and drawing logical conclusions. Enhance your analytical skills by practicing activities like puzzles, riddles, and brain teasers. This will sharpen your ability to analyze information and think critically.
6. Foster a growth mindset:
A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Embracing this mindset encourages you to view challenges as opportunities for growth, rather than obstacles. By persisting through difficulties, you build resilience and enhance your critical thinking abilities.
7. Engage in collaborative problem-solving:
Collaborating with others on problem-solving tasks can spark creativity and strengthen critical thinking skills. Seek out group projects, brainstorming sessions, or online forums where you can exchange ideas, challenge each other's thinking, and find innovative solutions together.
8. Practice reflective thinking:
Taking time to reflect on your thoughts, actions, and experiences allows you to gain deeper insights and learn from past mistakes. Regularly engage in activities like journaling, meditation, or self-reflection exercises to develop your reflective thinking skills. This practice enhances your critical thinking abilities by promoting self-awareness and self-improvement.
9. Encourage creativity through experimentation:
Creativity and critical thinking often go hand in hand. Give yourself permission to experiment and explore new ideas without fear of failure. Embrace a "what if" mindset and push the boundaries of your thinking. This willingness to take risks and think outside the box can lead to breakthroughs in critical thinking.
10. Continuously learn and adapt:
Critical thinking is a skill that can be honed throughout your life. Commit to lifelong learning and seek opportunities to expand your knowledge and skills. Stay curious, be open to new experiences, and embrace change.
”
”
Lillian Addison
“
• No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We will talk about almost anyone about our physical health, even our sex lives, but bring depression, anxiety or grief , and the expression on the other person would probably be "get me out of this conversation"
• We can distract our feelings with too much wine, food or surfing the internet,
• Therapy is far from one-sided; it happens in a parallel process. Everyday patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves,
• "The only way out is through" the only way to get out of the tunnel is to go through, not around it
• Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt"
• Attachment styles are formed early in childhood based on our interactions with our caregivers. Attachment styles are significant because they play out in peoples relationships too, influencing the kind of partners they pick, (stable or less stable), how they behave in a relationship (needy, distant, or volatile) and how the relationship tend to end (wistfully, amiably, or with an explosion)
• The presenting problem, the issue somebody comes with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely.
• "Help me understand more about the relationship" Here, here's trying to establish what’s known as a therapeutic alliance, trust that has to develop before any work can get done.
• In early sessions is always more important for patients to feel understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make changes.
• We can complain for free with a friend or family member, People make faulty narratives to make themselves feel better or look better in the moment, even thought it makes them feel worse over time, and that sometimes they need somebody else to read between the lines.
• Here-and-now, it is when we work on what’s happening in the room, rather than focusing on patient's stories.
• She didn't call him on his bullshit, which this makes patients feel unsafe, like children's whose parent's don’t hold them accountable
• What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to?
• Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons, that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous system and help them stay present
• Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.
• The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at
• How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to.
• The purpose on inquiring about people's parent s is not to join them in blaming, judging or criticizing their parents. In fact it is not about their parents at all. It is solely about understanding how their early experiences informed who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits)
• But personality disorders lie on a spectrum. People with borderline personality disorder are terrified of abandonment, but for some that might mean feeling anxious when their partners don’t respond to texts right away; for others that may mean choosing to stay in volatile, dysfunctional relationships rather than being alone.
• In therapy we aim for self compassion (am I a human?) versus self esteem (Am I good or bad: a judgment)
• The techniques we use are a bit like the type of brain surgery in which the patient remains awake throughout the procedure, as the surgeons operate, they keep checking in with the patient: can you feel this? can you say this words? They are constantly calibrating how close they are to sensitive regions of the brain, and if they hit one, they back up so as not to damage it.
”
”
Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone)
“
A 1978 study added support for the finding that the more stimuli present while you are learning, the deeper information is processed in your brain. There were two groups that had two study sessions. One group studied vocabulary in two different rooms, and the other studied vocabulary in the same room twice. The first group showed far better recall. What does this mean for you? You should change locations as frequently as possible while learning the same information. If you can’t change your scenery completely, change what’s on your desk, the music you are listening to – anything that impacts any of your five senses. The more change of stimuli, the more roots the information will take to your brain.
”
”
Peter Hollins (Learn Like Einstein: Memorize More, Read Faster, Focus Better, and Master Anything With Ease… Become An Expert in Record Time (Accelerated Learning) (Learning how to Learn Book 12))
“
we were still conducting Oval briefings modeled for President Bush, who wanted to have the articles briefed in detail, absorb the material, and ask briefers questions at the same session. President Obama preferred to read and digest the material ahead of time. There was almost a mystical aura around the PDB, with people apparently reluctant to make changes to it, but I knew we could make better use of the president’s precious time.
”
”
James R. Clapper (Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence)
“
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)
“
Hershiser returned to Bowling Green for the summer session and played for an amateur baseball team. In his junior year, he finally made the school’s traveling team and became a starting pitcher. Now he hoped the scouts in the stands would notice him.
”
”
Tommy Newberry (Success Is Not an Accident: Change Your Choices; Change Your Life)
“
There’s a great story that Roger Hawkins tells. He’s the drummer on some of Aretha Franklin’s most iconic songs, like “Respect” and “Chain of Fools.” As part of a group of studio musicians in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he was drumming on hugely important R&B songs when he was just a teenager, far too young to have any sense of, or ego about, his talent. So one day Hawkins was playing on a session that Jerry Wexler from Atlantic Records was producing. Out of the blue, Hawkins claims, Wexler walked down from the control room and into the studio and told him, “Roger, you are a great drummer.” Wexler wasn’t involved in some larger conversation with Hawkins. He just wanted to tell him. Hawkins’s reaction to it, in his own words: “So I became one.” That story always made sense to me. I’ve had that same moment of feeling like everything’s changed because of one compliment, one tiny bit of encouragement. That, in a nutshell, is what Peter Buck did for me. Not that he ever walked into the studio just to tell me how great I was. No, but he made me feel like an equal.
”
”
Jeff Tweedy (Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.)
“
Smart Acupuncture Pointers That Will Boost Your Knowledge
How much have you learned in the past about acupuncture? Acupuncture is often symbolized by the patient, face-down, with needles protruding from their bodies in various locations. Perhaps it would surprise you to know that acupuncture is really very beneficial; although, you must be informed to make a wise choice regarding treatment. Read this post to learn all that you can about it.
There is a lot more to acupuncture than the treatments involving needles. This medicinal practice is associated with a philosophy. You should learn more about the philosophy of acupuncture to adopt a healthier lifestyle. There are plenty of meditation exercises, home remedies and other practices you can use to introduce acupuncture in the different aspects of your life.
Keep in mind that it may take some time for you to feel the full benefits from your acupuncture treatments. It may take more than one or two visits to find relief from pain or improvement in your conditions. Make sure you are ready to commit to the full program recommended.
If you want to know more about acupuncture, but fear needles, see if your practitioner is familiar with laser treatments. This type of acupuncture uses lasers instead of needles. This does not hurt at all, and lots of people claim that it works really well in relieving their conditions.
You should drink plenty of water before you attend your scheduled acupuncture session. It has been shown that people who are well hydrated respond better to treatments. While you should not consume a lot of food before a session, it is a great idea for you to drink a good amount of water.
Herbs
Talk to a doctor about anything you are taking if you plan on having acupuncture treatments. If you are currently taking medication, herbs, or supplements, you need to speak to your doctor about what you can continue to take. They may have to make changes to what you're taking before or in between your acupuncture treatments.
Ask your acupuncturist if there are certain herbs you should consume in between sessions. Remember, this is a holistic practice. There are many different things to it compared to Western medicine. Herbs are a big part of it. They can help relax your body and remove any sort of pain left over from your session.
Before your procedure, the acupuncturist may recommend herbal treatments. Such herbs can be helpful, but they may result in undesirable side effects or harmful drug interactions. Therefore, talk with your doctor before starting any herbal regimen.
Are you currently taking any medications, vitamins, or herbs? If so, get in touch with your doctor and ask him whether or not you can continue to take these things before and during your acupuncture sessions. You would hate for your acupuncture sessions to be less effective because you did not know you weren't supposed to take any of these things.
Hopefully, you are more comfortable with the idea of scheduling an acupuncture appointment. Acupuncture can be very beneficial. Follow the tips presented here to make the most of your therapy by visiting rosholistic.com
”
”
frankfurt naturopathic doctor
“
Tops Tips About Acupuncture That Anyone Can Follow
Do you have aches and pains that do not seem to respond to traditional medicines? If you do, you may want to give acupuncture a try. This form of medicine has been around for thousands of years, and has becoming quite popular among Western medicine. If you want to find out more about it, read the following article.
Some people find acupuncture treatments are quite effective for migraine headaches. One very positive aspect of this type of alternative treatment is the lack of any side effects. Even though very fine needles are inserted into the flesh at specific points, most people do not feel any pain at all from the procedure.
In most places around the United States, a license is required to practice acupuncture. Before going to a new office, ask to see the acupuncturists credentials. It is important to ask how experienced they are and where they went to school. Any place that can not provide this information should be visited with caution.
Ask your acupuncturist about the style they use. Acupuncture is a very complex discipline and there are several methods acupuncturists can use to relieve pain or stress. Make sure the methods your acupuncturist uses are painless. If you are new to acupuncture, ask if you can get a very simple treatment to get used to the sensatin.
Understand that acupuncture focus on the entire well being of you as a person. In Western culture, it's often the norm to concentrate on symptoms, what's ailing you immediately. That's not true of acupuncture. It looks at the big picture and tries to help your entire body. It's a major difference in thought.
Herbs
Talk to a doctor about anything you are taking if you plan on having acupuncture treatments. If you are currently taking medication, herbs, or supplements, you need to speak to your doctor about what you can continue to take. They may have to make changes to what you're taking before or in between your acupuncture treatments.
Ask your acupuncturist if there are certain herbs you should consume in between sessions. Remember, this is a holistic practice. There are many different things to it compared to Western medicine. Herbs are a big part of it. They can help relax your body and remove any sort of pain left over from your session.
Herbal treatments could be suggested to you by your acupuncturist before treatment. As beneficial as certain herbs are, if you are on certain medications, you may develop side effects. You should check with your doctor for possible issues before adding herbs to your treatment.
Are you currently taking any medications, vitamins, or herbs? If so, get in touch with your doctor and ask him whether or not you can continue to take these things before and during your acupuncture sessions. You would hate for your acupuncture sessions to be less effective because you did not know you weren't supposed to take any of these things.
Acupuncture can give you relief from pain that no other methods can provide. Just take your time to learn more about it so you will be comfortable with the idea. Talk to people who have gone through treatments. The more find out about acupuncture by visiting rosholistic.com
”
”
frankfurt naturopathic doctor
“
Get Educated About Acupuncture With These Simple To Follow Tips
Acupuncture can be a great experience for people that are informed about the process and the benefits that can result. Rather than assuming that acupuncture will be very uncomfortable or painful, keep reading on to find out the truth. The tips in this article should give you some clarity about the process!
Make sure you contact your insurance company prior to scheduling acupuncture appointments. There may be some treatments or specific programs that are covered and others that your insurance company might not pay for. Prior to treatment, check out insurance issues with both your insurance company and the acupuncturist.
If you are nervous about acupuncture, and you are not sure if it is right for you, do not be afraid to ask questions. Believe it or not, one of the most common inquiries is whether or not the acupuncturist practices a painless style of treatment. Your fears may be eased when you hear some of the answers.
Some vitamins or supplements should be stopped if you are starting acupuncture treatments. Ask your specialist if there should be any certain medications or vitamins that you stop taking before the treatments begin. You don't want to inadvertently stall your progress.
It is always important that you feel comfortable with the person preforming acupuncture on you. Being uncomfortable and remaining tense through the treatments can end up being counterproductive to your therapy. Find an acupuncturist that you feel totally comfortable with and once you do, stick with that person. You can even give other people referrals.
Herbs
Talk to a doctor about anything you are taking if you plan on having acupuncture treatments. If you are currently taking medication, herbs, or supplements, you need to speak to your doctor about what you can continue to take. They may have to make changes to what you're taking before or in between your acupuncture treatments.
Ask your acupuncturist if there are certain herbs you should consume in between sessions. Remember, this is a holistic practice. There are many different things to it compared to Western medicine. Herbs are a big part of it. They can help relax your body and remove any sort of pain left over from your session.
Acupuncturists often recommend herbal treatments prior to a session. These herbs can benefit you, but they may either have side effects or wreak havoc with your current medication. Speak to your main doctor prior to taking herbal supplements so as not to cause problems.
Are you currently taking any medications, vitamins, or herbs? If so, get in touch with your doctor and ask him whether or not you can continue to take these things before and during your acupuncture sessions. You would hate for your acupuncture sessions to be less effective because you did not know you weren't supposed to take any of these things.
If you want to try acupuncture and you have not heard that much about it, you can learn more about the process by reading about it or asking friends. However, the tips in this article should have given you some idea on how it works. Now you can make the decision about going through with it, if it's right for you!
”
”
frankfurt naturopathic doctor
“
Get Educated About Acupuncture With These Simple To Follow Tips
Acupuncture can be a great experience for people that are informed about the process and the benefits that can result. Rather than assuming that acupuncture will be very uncomfortable or painful, keep reading on to find out the truth. The tips in this article should give you some clarity about the process!
Make sure you contact your insurance company prior to scheduling acupuncture appointments. There may be some treatments or specific programs that are covered and others that your insurance company might not pay for. Prior to treatment, check out insurance issues with both your insurance company and the acupuncturist.
If you are nervous about acupuncture, and you are not sure if it is right for you, do not be afraid to ask questions. Believe it or not, one of the most common inquiries is whether or not the acupuncturist practices a painless style of treatment. Your fears may be eased when you hear some of the answers.
Some vitamins or supplements should be stopped if you are starting acupuncture treatments. Ask your specialist if there should be any certain medications or vitamins that you stop taking before the treatments begin. You don't want to inadvertently stall your progress.
It is always important that you feel comfortable with the person preforming acupuncture on you. Being uncomfortable and remaining tense through the treatments can end up being counterproductive to your therapy. Find an acupuncturist that you feel totally comfortable with and once you do, stick with that person. You can even give other people referrals.
Herbs
Talk to a doctor about anything you are taking if you plan on having acupuncture treatments. If you are currently taking medication, herbs, or supplements, you need to speak to your doctor about what you can continue to take. They may have to make changes to what you're taking before or in between your acupuncture treatments.
Ask your acupuncturist if there are certain herbs you should consume in between sessions. Remember, this is a holistic practice. There are many different things to it compared to Western medicine. Herbs are a big part of it. They can help relax your body and remove any sort of pain left over from your session.
Acupuncturists often recommend herbal treatments prior to a session. These herbs can benefit you, but they may either have side effects or wreak havoc with your current medication. Speak to your main doctor prior to taking herbal supplements so as not to cause problems.
Are you currently taking any medications, vitamins, or herbs? If so, get in touch with your doctor and ask him whether or not you can continue to take these things before and during your acupuncture sessions. You would hate for your acupuncture sessions to be less effective because you did not know you weren't supposed to take any of these things.
If you want to try acupuncture and you have not heard that much about it, you can learn more about the process by reading about it or asking friends. However, the tips in this article should have given you some idea on how it works by visit rosholistic.com
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frankfurt naturopathic doctor
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Since we cannot predict the context in which we’ll have to perform, we’re better off varying the circumstances in which we prepare. We need to handle life’s pop quizzes, its spontaneous pickup games and jam sessions, and the traditional advice to establish a strict practice routine is no way to do so. On the contrary: Try another room altogether. Another time of day. Take the guitar outside, into the park, into the woods. Change cafés. Switch practice courts. Put on blues instead of classical. Each alteration of the routine further enriches the skills being rehearsed, making them sharper and more accessible for a longer period of time. This kind of experimenting itself reinforces learning, and makes what you know increasingly independent of your surroundings.
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Benedict Carey (How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens)
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There are five steps to correctly performing a Walking Your Blues Away session. They are: Define the issue. Bring up the story. Walk with the issue. Notice how the issue changes. Anchor the new state.
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Thom Hartmann (Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being)
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Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy
formulation.
One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged
for me out of that discussion.
1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings.
Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them.
Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen.
2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That
said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier.
3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian
subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.”
One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.
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L. Rudel
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Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation.
One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion.
1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings.
Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen.
2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier.
3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.”
One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.
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L. Rudel
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There are many reasons why girls should not travel alone, and I won’t list them, because none of them are original reasons. Besides, there are more reasons why girls should. I have the utmost respect for girls who travel alone, because it’s hard work sometimes. But girls, we just want adventures. We want international best friends and hold-your-breath vistas out of crappy hostel windows. We want to discover moving works of art, sometimes in museums and sometimes in side-street graffiti. We want to hear soul-restoring jam sessions at beach bonfires and to watch celestial dawns spill over villages that haven’t changed since the Middle Ages. We want to fall in love with boys with say-that-again accents. We want sore feet from stay-up-all-night dance parties at just-one-more-drink bars. We want to be on our own even as we sketch and photograph the Piazza San Marco covered in pigeons and beautiful Italian lovers intertwined so that we’ll never forget what it feels like to be twenty-three and absolutely purposeless and single, but in love with every city we visit next. We want to be struck dumb by the baritone echoes of church bells in Vatican City and the rich, heaven-bound calls to prayer in Istanbul and to know that no matter what, there just has to be some greater power or holy magic responsible for all this bursting, delirious, overwhelming beauty in the great, wide, sprawling world. I tucked my passport into my bag. Girls, we don’t just want to have fun; we want a whole lot more out of life than that.
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Nicole Trilivas (Girls Who Travel)
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People ask, "Why is my guide always present when I call?" Let us explain that we exist in a world beyond time and space, and when we commit to work with you, we are aware of the whole range of our work together. If you change your mind, that changes the picture, but from moment to moment we have a whole picture of our work with you. We experience no time between our sessions with you. To us, there is no stop or start, but only a continuous thread consisting of our time together. When you channel, a part of us is once again in your Universe, that part of us does not know linear time and is still aware of our last time together. We often experience this as you might experience a telephone line when the connection fades in and out. We simply wait for the next strong connection. We are of a much vaster consciousness than you are. We can handle thousands of things at once. Our connection to you takes up a very small portion of our overall awareness, and part of our commitment to you is to maintain a steady clear channel whenever you call.
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Sanaya Roman (Opening to Channel: How to Connect with Your Guide)
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The Guiding Light is the longest-running serial in broadcast history. Still seen on CBS television, its roots go back almost 60 years, to radio’s pioneering soaps. Though its original characters have been swallowed and eclipsed by time, it still has faint ties to the show that was first simulcast July 20, 1952, and in time replaced its radio counterpart with a daily one-hour TV show. Its creator, Irna Phillips, was often called “the queen of soaps.” She was so influential in the field that she was compared with Frank and Anne Hummert, though the comparison was weak. While the Hummerts employed a huge stable of writers and turned out dozens of serials, Phillips wrote her own—two million words of it each year. Using a large month-by-month work chart, Phillips plotted up to half a dozen serials at once, dictating the action to a secretary. Mentally juggling the fates of scores of characters, she churned out quarter-hour slices of life in sessions filled with high drama, acting the parts and changing her voice for the various speaking roles, while secretaries scribbled the dialogue that flowed from her lips. She gave up teaching early in life to enter radio as an actress at Chicago’s WGN. She was 25 that year, 1930. In 1932 she began to write. She discovered that cliffhanger endings were surefire for bringing those early audiences back to their sets each day, but that slow and skillful character development was what kept the audience for years. She decided that the organ was the ideal musical instrument for those little shows and that the instrument should be played with pomp and power, with all the authority of a religious service in a great European cathedral. The music gave weight to the dialogue, which was usually focused and intense.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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The bodystrike heppen in bodyworkout session caused many Plussize people quit in training special those who do it with the aim of losing kilos.I've got an idea, just change the purpose of doing it do it for healthy living lifestyle cause it heppen in a matter of time, when doing it continueously it makes wonders.lnstead of losing you develop healthy,sexy fit muscles see, you better continue ignore it as my friend bunny and I do.
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Nozipho N.Maphumulo
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Step 2: Reverse the polarity In this step, you write down an intention that supports you in “reversing the polarity” – shifting the focus from acting to receiving. For so much of our lives, we are in a “doing” mode. We feel we need to take action to get things done, and of course in many cases action is the only way forward – but not always. Sometimes we have to reverse the polarity and just receive. This is one of those times. The idea is first to reverse the usual polarity of making effort in your daily life and thinking you are in control of the outcome. Next, replace that habit with receptivity to whatever appears. This “reverse the polarity” practice is the essential next step in a controlled precognition session, because it allows your superconscious or higher self to communicate with your conscious mind. At first, it isn’t always easy to “let go” and enter a receptive mode, so it works best to create an intention designed to help you reverse the polarity. This intention should also contain a summarized version of the Higher-Self Handshake (Chapter 4). Go ahead and write down this combined intention, right under where you wrote about your mental and emotional state. I am letting myself go into receiving mode to receive exactly the right information about the target during this controlled precognition session. I allow my conscious mind and my higher self to do exactly their correct jobs and only their correct jobs.
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Theresa Cheung (The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life)
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The only song that was mine that stayed unchanged from the original sessions was ‘Sometimes It Snows In April,’ and the rest was changed. You can hear the drums that I mic’d on ‘Under The Cherry Moon,’ but everything else is just gone. I think he got so lost on this album. The sound just got washed out.
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Duane Tudahl (Prince and the Parade and Sign O' The Times Era Studio Sessions: 1985 and 1986 (Prince Studio Sessions))
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I always launch my Crash & Burn sessions with an object in the room, but you can start any way you want. On this day, there was a bowl of grapes on a table, so I started with the word grape. Slash marks indicate the moments when new ideas or memories came crashing in. Grape. Grape juice. White grape juice / When I was a kid I stepped on a broken Mello Yello glass bottle and cut my foot — got infected — happened by a pond / oh, the pond, Yawgoog had three different waterfronts and Ashaway Aquatic Center —
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Matthew Dicks (Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling)
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Then the center of influence shifted to London, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Who, the Kinks, and all the bands that orbited them. San Francisco, with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Santana, had its moment in a psychedelic spotlight around the Summer of Love and the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, but as the 1960s gave way to the '70s, the center of the musical universe shifted unmistakably to Los Angeles. "It was incredibly vital," said Jonathan Taplin, who first came to LA as the tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band and later relocated there to produce Martin Scorsese's breakthrough movie, Mean Streets. "The nexus of the music business had really moved from New York to Los Angeles. That had been a profound shift . . . It was very clear that something big had changed."'' For a breathtaking few years, the stars aligned to glittering effect in Los Angeles. The city attracted brilliant artists; skilled session musicians; soulful songwriters; shrewd managers, agents, and record executives; and buzz-building clubs. From this dense constellation of talent, a shimmering new sound emerged, a smooth blend of rock and folk with country influences. Talented young people from all over the country began descending on Los Angeles with their guitar cases or dreams of becoming the next Geffen. Irving Azoff, a hyper-ambitious young agent and manager who arrived in Los Angeles in 1972, remembered, "It was like the gold rush. You've never seen anything like it in the entertainment business. The place was exploding. I was here—right place, right time. I tell everybody, `If you're really good in this business, you only have to be right once,' so you kind of make your own luck, but it is luck, too. It was hard to be in LA in that time and have any talent whatsoever in the music business—whether you were a manager, an agent, an artist, a producer, or writer—[and] not to make it, because it was boom times. It was the gold rush, and it was fucking fun.
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Ronald Brownstein (Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics)
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Almost nobody gives a damn about your life but you, and according to Chase, there’s a good chance you don’t even give as much of a damn as you think. If you did, you’d already have done the hard work necessary to change yourself to match your idealized image. Most people aren’t capable of that. It’s too hard, we’re too lazy as a species, and life is just too long and too filled with problems that need immediate solving. And then, at some point, you’re not in the picture anymore, and it’s all a moot point, for you anyway.
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Matt Zoller Seitz (The Sopranos Sessions)
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To me, people do change, but it’s a long process. People always think, “Well, people have trauma and then they change.” But I don’t know if that’s true.
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Matt Zoller Seitz (The Sopranos Sessions)
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Gena Moon is a spiritual guide and an intuitive channel for divine guidance in our 3D realm. She is a clear channel who has the ability and gift to connect to the divine and translate information directly from her spirit guides and angels to you. Gena is gifted at tapping into the subconscious where the root of the solution presents itself in order to facilitate the process of manifestations into fruition more effortlessly. She is known for being able to easily shift your approach in order to create real change in you. Her "ENLIGHTENING" readings and "INSTANTLY TRANSFORMATIVE" personal coaching sessions are a common theme! Her approach is gentle yet direct, honest and personalized. She is known for her ability to easily "tap-in-to" essential information about you and your situation in order to bring real, long-term change. Once you experience her energy, you'll know just how dynamic her energy is: Fluid, engaging, shocking, revealing, emotional, exciting, detailed, informative, clarifying, confirming, enlightening, transformative, and uniquely... Gena!
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GENAMOON
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Before he could push me any further, I pressed him back. “I have to get to class,” I protested. “I can’t afford to miss lessons before my Elemental Trials.”
“No, we wouldn’t want you to fail The Reckoning, would we?” Caleb teased, moving his mouth across my jaw and working really damn hard to keep me here.
“I mean it,” I said on a laugh, pushing him back more firmly.
Caleb pouted at me, refusing to step back while he kept me caged in with his body.
“Come to Terra House tonight then,” he asked, his navy eyes sparkling with promises.
“I won’t be going anywhere tonight, there’s a curfew, remember?”
“Those rules don’t apply to me. Besides, I’ll keep you safe if you’re with me. You’ll just have to stay the whole night.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “I can keep myself safe, thanks. But now I’m going to be late-”
“If I run you to class will you come tonight?” he asked, his mouth slipping to my neck and sending shivers right through my spine.
“If you get me there on time, I’ll consider it,” I replied.
Caleb glanced at his watch then cursed, sweeping me into his arms before speeding back out of the tiny room.
I managed not to shriek like a nine year old on a roller coaster, but I did cling onto his blazer like my life depended on it as the world shot past us in a blur so intense I couldn’t concentrate on a single thing.
Caleb skidded to a halt right outside the Fire Arena locker rooms and placed me back on my feet before leaning close to speak in my ear.
“One minute to spare. I’ll expect you tonight, sweetheart.” He pressed his mouth to mine and my heart leapt a little at the fact that he’d done so in plain sight. I had no intention of being marked as his in front of the whole school and I pulled back quickly, looking around to make sure no one had seen us. Luckily, we were already so close to being late that everyone else had already headed inside so I was spared the drama.
“Don’t go getting ahead of yourself,” I warned as I headed into the girls’ locker room. “I only said I’d consider it.”
The door swung closed between us and I bit down on a smile as I headed in to get changed. I almost considered refusing to wear the flame resistant outfit required for the class, but I decided that today wasn’t the day for me to have that argument with Professor Pyro. I’d just have to accept the fact that I wouldn’t have the same level of control over my fire magic as I would without it. But I’d keep practicing without the outfit until I was confident enough to prove her wrong.
In the meantime I had to get through this class and hope she would just be pleased that I’d finally managed to get in a training session with Darius.
The thought of the Dragon Shifter set me on edge. But I’d known I’d have to face him some time. Hopefully there would be enough going on in class to ensure that that time wouldn’t have to be now.
(tory)
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Caroline Peckham (The Reckoning (Zodiac Academy, #3))