Barriers to Overcome

Don’t Delay Your Dreams
source By John Spayde

There’s a book you want to write, a painting you want to complete, a business you want to launch, an exciting possibility that keeps tugging at your sleeve. So what’s keeping you from your dream?

It can feel almost impossible to find time for the daily grind, much less our “someday” ideals. But psychologist Gay Hendricks believes that our biggest obstacle in embracing such pursuits is more of an inner block than a scheduling problem. He recommends first taking a close look at whether you are actually willing to experience as much happiness and satisfaction as your heart desires. Then, stop relegating your dream to someday, and start working on it — today.

Barriers to Overcome

Feeling unworthy. “Because of a fundamental self-esteem problem that many people have — even very successful people — they don’t believe that they deserve to be both successful and happy at the same time,” says Hendricks, “and this can block their creative expression.”
Fear of failure. “If I get in touch with my true zone of genius, actually do what I really love, and I fail, then I’m really screwed,” says Hendricks with a laugh. “But this possibility is what everybody who wants to do anything creative or extraordinary has to get through.”
Fear of success. “Human beings are highly skilled at feeling pain and adversity — we’ve had millions of years of programming for that,” says Hendricks. “All that conditioning can make success feel like an oddly unfamiliar and uncomfortable proposition.”
Not wanting to seem strange. Some people, says Hendricks, fear that there is something fundamentally odd about self-expressive work — that people will think we are weird or irresponsible if we give ourselves over to it wholeheartedly.
Start-itis. It may have been so long since you last embarked on a thrilling project that you simply don’t know how to begin. Even the mere possibility of starting may seem overwhelming.
Strategies for Success

Affirm your worthiness. “Introducing an affirmation into your mind (such as ‘It’s OK for me to be both prosperous and happy’) gives you a positive idea that you can gravitate toward,” says Hendricks.
Start small. “I’ve found that committing to just 10 minutes a day on a creative project works very well,” says Hendricks. “It becomes contagious. After a few days of 10 minutes, you find yourself wanting to do 15, and it can grow from there.”
Create goals and benchmarks. Set deadlines for finishing portions of your project, and consider committing to them as part of an agreement with another person. “If you don’t make a deadline,” Hendricks advises, “rather than beat yourself up about it, notice what happened, ask yourself why, and learn from that.”
Redraw your map of what matters. The best way to do something new or different is to place a higher priority on it than on your everyday activities. For example, work on your project first thing in the morning, if possible, before any activities that seem more “necessary.”
Recommit — repeatedly. “The real test of your commitment is when you fall off it,” Hendricks says. “It’s like learning to ski or ride a bicycle; falling and getting back up are part of the process.”
Expert Advice: Gay Hendricks, PhD, author of The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level (HarperOne, 2009).

Jon Spayde is the author of How to Believe: Teachers and Seekers Show the Way to a Modern, Life-Changing Faith (Random House, 2008).

Tails a Waggin'

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Attention Grows

Most of us spend our lives protecting ourselves from losses that have already happened.
― Geneen Roth

Treat yourself as if you already are enough. Walk as if you are enough. Eat as if you are enough. See, look, listen as if you are enough. Because it's true.
― Geneen Roth

What you pay attention to grows. Pay attention to your loveliness, your magnificent self. Begin now.
― Geneen Roth

If we think our job here on earth is to fix ourselves, we will keep looking for the broken places. If we believe our job is to be kind, we will keep lavishing love on ourselves.
― Geneen Roth

Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic…The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being.
― Geneen Roth, Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

You will never stop wanting more until you allow yourself to have what you already have. To take it in. Savor it. Now is a good time to do that . . .
― Geneen Roth

Most of our suffering comes from resisting what is already here, particularly our feelings. All any feeling wants is to be welcomed, touched, allowed. It wants attention. It wants kindness. If you treated your feelings with as much love as you treated your dog or your cat or your child, you'd feel as if you were living in heaven every day of your sweet life.
― Geneen Roth

For some reason, we are truly convinced that if we criticize ourselves, the criticism will lead to change. If we are harsh, we believe we will end up being kind. If we shame ourselves, we believe we end up loving ourselves. It has never been true, not for a moment, that shame leads to love. Only love leads to love.
― Geneen Roth

People get old, get sick and die. Or they die suddenly. Or their deaths drag on forever. My friend Tory is dying a slow, excruciatingly painful death of bone cancer. Eight friends have died of breast cancer. Polar bears are dying. Honeybees are vanishing. The oceans are drying up. There is a part of me that wants my money back. That wants to say, 'I didn't sign up for this. I don't like the way this whole thing is set up and I won't participate in it.
― Geneen Roth, Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

Believing that you are not worth your own love is the problem.
Go for the love. You will never be sorry.
― Geneen Roth

Geneen Roth

When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself -- that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control.
― Geneen Roth, Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won't discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself.
― Geneen Roth, Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

Geneen Roth

We want to change ourselves in order to love ourselves. But we've got to love ourselves in order to change.
-Geneen Roth

Gay Henrdricks

Don’t delay your dreams. Psychologist Gay Hendricks believes that our biggest obstacle in embracing creative dreams is more of an inner block than a scheduling problem. He recommends first taking a close look at whether you are actually willing to experience as much happiness and satisfaction as your heart desires. Then, stop relegating your dream to someday, and start working on it — today.
Read.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
- Oscar Wilde

Mark Twain

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
- Mark Twain

All Good things for Woonsocket

I was holding back on moving my clock to save the extra hour for when I really need it but then I got tired and went to sleep.

We are excited that Lisa Baldelli Hunt will be our next Woonsocket mayor. She is smart approachable and all good things for Woonsocket.

I had a great day walking Lily and saying hello to people raking leaves. Cheers to the rake!

I live My Life Upside Down

Asleep at 7:30 pm awake 1:30 AM. It's all good. I needed to eat some of my leftover pancakes anyhow. Boiler man will rebuild the firebox innards at 9AM, I can't wait.
I should open a restaurant called animal house pancakes. Mine are so amazing: springy and made of whole wheat flour sourdough, buttermilk and neighborhood applesauce. Pancakes for supper meat loaf for breakfast, I live my life upside down. A better name for my diner.

Naomi Wolf

Dear Younger Self,

INVEST FIFTY BUCKS IN THE STOCK MARKET EVERY MONTH!! You don’t need to eat out so much. Think of all that compound interest!

If they don’t have beards and aren’t clean-shaven either, they make good short-term but bad long-term boyfriends. Beware.

Stop worrying about making people happy or getting people’s approval.

Forget trends; go for the classics.

Don’t gossip; it makes you untrustworthy.

Condoms, condoms, condoms.

Kindness is everything.

-Naomi Wolf

Saving my Hour

I have not switched the clocks yet, I am saving my hour for when I really need it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

If you can't marry money, at least don't marry envy.
― Ursula K. Le Guin

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
― Ursula K. Le Guin

Saturday Stale Sourdough reborn as French Toast

I had one small loaf of my homemade three grain whole wheat oat corn, sourdough loaf leftover from last week and this morning being Saturday I decided to make french toast, my grandma Sophie's favorite. I beat 6 eggs with Wright's Dairy local milk and a teaspoon of Job Lot real vanilla. I fried them in my vintage 1960's Hoover brand electric frying pan and they came out perfectly. We ate them lightly salted with Job Lot's real maple syrup and black coffee.

Coffee Gods

Drinking a strong cup of coffee can relieve the symptoms of hayfever and it might be useful in preventing everyday allergies.

source

Walking

I love to read the NYT health news. When I go for a walk I like to observe and take in the world with all of my senses.

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Early Music Lessons Have longtime Benefits

source
By PERRI KLASS, M.D.

When children learn to play a musical instrument, they strengthen a range of auditory skills. Recent studies suggest that these benefits extend all through life, at least for those who continue to be engaged with music.

But a study published last month is the first to show that music lessons in childhood may lead to changes in the brain that persist years after the lessons stop.

Researchers at Northwestern University recorded the auditory brainstem responses of college students — that is to say, their electrical brain waves — in response to complex sounds. The group of students who reported musical training in childhood had more robust responses — their brains were better able to pick out essential elements, like pitch, in the complex sounds when they were tested. And this was true even if the lessons had ended years ago.

Indeed, scientists are puzzling out the connections between musical training in childhood and language-based learning — for instance, reading. Learning to play an instrument may confer some unexpected benefits, recent studies suggest.

We aren’t talking here about the “Mozart effect,” the claim that listening to classical music can improve people’s performance on tests. Instead, these are studies of the effects of active engagement and discipline. This kind of musical training improves the brain’s ability to discern the components of sound — the pitch, the timing and the timbre.

“To learn to read, you need to have good working memory, the ability to disambiguate speech sounds, make sound-to-meaning connections,” said Professor Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. “Each one of these things really seems to be strengthened with active engagement in playing a musical instrument.”

Skill in appreciating the subtle qualities of sound, even against a complicated and noisy background, turns out to be important not just for a child learning to understand speech and written language, but also for an elderly person struggling with hearing loss.

In a study of those who do keep playing, published this summer, researchers found that as musicians age, they experience the same decline in peripheral hearing, the functioning of the nerves in their ears, as nonmusicians. But older musicians preserve the brain functions, the central auditory processing skills that can help you understand speech against the background of a noisy environment.

“We often refer to the ‘cocktail party’ problem — or imagine going to a restaurant where a lot of people are talking,” said Dr. Claude Alain, assistant director of the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and one of the authors of the study. “The older adults who are musically trained perform better on speech in noise tests — it involves the brain rather than the peripheral hearing system.”

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, are approaching the soundscape from a different point of view, studying the genetics of absolute, or perfect, pitch, that ability to identify any tone. Dr. Jane Gitschier, a professor of medicine and pediatrics who directs the study there, and her colleagues are trying to tease out both the genetics and the effects of early training.

“The immediate question we’ve been trying to get to is what are the variants in people’s genomes that could predispose an individual to have absolute pitch,” she said. “The hypothesis, further, is that those variants will then manifest as absolute pitch with the input of early musical training.”

Indeed, almost everyone who qualifies as having truly absolute pitch turns out to have had musical training in childhood (you can take the test and volunteer for the study at http://perfectpitch.ucsf.edu/study/).

Alexandra Parbery-Clark, a doctoral candidate in Dr. Kraus’s lab and one of the authors of a paper published this year on auditory working memory and music, was originally trained as a concert pianist. Her desire to go back to graduate school and study the brain, she told me, grew out of teaching at a French school for musically talented children, and observing the ways that musical training affected other kinds of learning.

“If you get a kid who is maybe 3 or 4 years old and you’re teaching them to attend, they’re not only working on their auditory skills but also working on their attention skills and their memory skills — which can translate into scholastic learning,” she said.

Now Ms. Parbery-Clark and her colleagues can look at recordings of the brain’s electrical detection of sounds, and they can see the musically trained brains producing different — and stronger — responses. “Now I have more proof, tangible proof, music is really doing something,” she told me. “One of my lab mates can look at the computer and say, ‘Oh, you’re recording from a musician!’ ”

Many of the researchers in this area are themselves musicians interested in the plasticity of the brain and the effects of musical education on brain waves, which mirror the stimulus sounds. “This is a response that actually reflects the acoustic elements of sound that we know carry meaning,” Professor Kraus said.

There’s a fascination — and even a certain heady delight — in learning what the brain can do, and in drawing out the many effects of the combination of stimulation, application, practice and auditory exercise that musical education provides. But the researchers all caution that there is no one best way to apply these findings.

Different instruments, different teaching methods, different regimens — families need to find what appeals to the individual child and what works for the family, since a big piece of this should be about pleasure and mastery. Children should enjoy themselves, and their lessons. Parents need to care about music, not slot it in as a therapeutic tool.

“We want music to be recognized for what it can be in a person’s life, not necessarily, ‘Oh, we want you to have better cognitive skills, so we’re going to put you in music,’ ” Ms. Parbery-Clark said. “Music is great, music is fantastic, music is social — let them enjoy it for what it really is.”

Ear Worms

source
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

THE FACTS
Virtually everyone experiences them, and rarely are they thought of fondly. They are earworms, the tunes that burrow into our consciousness and play on repeat.

In a recent study involving hundreds of people, Ira Hyman Jr. of Western Washington University and colleagues looked at what made songs most likely to stick, exposing unsuspecting subjects to popular songs and then asking them to complete various tasks.

Previous research showed that people can recall the first verse of a song they like, but after the chorus stumble over the lyrics. At this point the song becomes incomplete — a conflict without closure — and that is one way that it becomes an intrusive thought, Dr. Hyman said.

“You get to the chorus, and then it’s looping right there, and you’re kind of doomed at that point,” he said.

The study found that songs typically intrude during tasks that are either too difficult, which causes the mind to wander, or too easy, which creates a mental opening for repetitive thoughts. The trick to flushing out an earworm, Dr. Hyman said, is to find a task that is engaging and that requires the auditory and verbal components of your working memory — like reading a good book or watching a favorite show.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Research suggests that songs we like, not ones we despise, are most likely to form intrusive thoughts.

Music in the Womb

source
Babies Can Learn Music in the Womb
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

A new study suggests that babies can learn a melody they hear while still in the womb, and recognize it after they are born.

For the study, published online last week by PLOS One, Finnish researchers divided 24 pregnant women into two groups. Five times a week, the “learning group” played a CD that included a one-minute rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” which the unborn children heard an average of 170 times before birth. The control group did not hear the recording.

Then the scientists did EEG tests on the children at birth and again at 4 months as they listened to the original tune and a version in which several notes were altered.

The learning group had a larger response to the melody than the control group did, and the difference was still apparent at 4 months. And the amplitude of response to the changed melody correlated with the number of times the infants were exposed to the original melody in utero.

The lead author, Eino Partanen, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, urged parents not to make too much of the finding. “A baby can be relaxed and soothed by melodies it hears before birth,” he said. “But there is no evidence that it will get your baby into Harvard.”

Tractor Girl

In her other lives in and around Sydney, Denise is an organiser of crafting workshops with many different groups of people, especially those who live at the fringes of society – the intellectually disabled and homeless – encouraging them to investigate their own capabilities at making. She also recently undertook a craft project with the Spinal Unit at the Prince of Wales (2012).

Denise is also the instigator of and participant in many urban art projects, such as ‘Guerillas Knit Vaucluse House’ (2010), in which she and a group of 15 others sat in the historic Sydney building and over three months gradually yarn-bombed their way through many of the house’s artefacts. Another project involved installing discarded computer keys embedded in resin onto various urban surfaces in Newtown (2010). ‘Escape’ buttons become magic buttons for urban use. Don’t you wish you had an “escape button”? I know I would sometimes love one, just for a sweet hour or two of quiet…

More of her art here.

Guerilla Knitters

source
Graffiti artist spins a new kind of yarn
by Sunanda Creagh

A stitch-up … Denise Litchfield with her dog, Baxter, attaches one of her creations on a pole in the May Street art project.

WHERE other graffiti artists use spraypaint, Denise Litchfield uses wool.

Litchfield is part of a growing global movement of guerilla knitters, who stitch their handmade creations onto trees, poles, street lights and other objects in the public domain.

"It redefines street art and is also a reference to graffiti," the Stanmore woman said. "It's absurd and feminine and fun."

Using recycled or cast-off yarn, Litchfield has attached her creations to poles and trees in Newtown and Rozelle and her long-term goal is to knit cosies for fire hydrants and bollards.

Ms Litchfield also pokes fun at the notion of a graffiti "tag" by creating cardboard swing tags similar to those attached to items in a boutique.

"I write messages on them and put them on bikes and dogs. One friend said she was walking down King Street and saw a tag that said 'All your problems have been taken care of' and thought, 'Yeah, I needed to hear that,' " Litchfield said.

"I have been doing it for about six months and I don't know of anyone else doing it in Sydney. I haven't been intercepted by a council ranger yet but often when I put them up people stop to ask what I am doing and to have a chat," she said.

Litchfield has won the support of a Marrickville councillor, Peter Olive.

"I'd be only too happy for her to do some knitting in the Marrickville local government area," he said. "I see it as a form of art and it's not harmful or anyone else's property or the public space. I think it should be encouraged."

Emily Howes, an expert from University of Technology, Sydney, and author of a PhD thesis on "indie craft", said guerilla knitters operated in Scandinavia, the US, Japan and South Africa. She thinks Litchfield might be Sydney's first.

"I think there is a groundswell of activity. The really big guerilla craft group is a collective called Knitta, which has outposts around the world," she said. "They see craft as a subversive and politically motivated act - a way of jolting people out of their comfortable reverie."

More here.

Denise Litchfield

Apart from the talking horse in the late 60's, I loved the Addams Family. They were alternative, lived their own lives completely unconcerned with fitting in. They were also the only tv couple with passion. Real french speaking, arm kissing passion. . .

-Denise Litchfield, Grrl and Dog blogspot
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Warm Air, Cold Meatloaf

I went to bed at five thirty and got up at three thirty. It is an eerily warm and winy day especially for November first. I have opened the windows to let the warm air in. Cold meatloaf for breakfast.

Bread Pudding

Here.

Home

There's a young woman in the green Hess booth, in a black suit and a white shirt. She's 25 and has a Ricky Ricardo haircut, jelled shiny black. She's smoking a cigar, while running the gas station. Locked in for the day, she's surrounded by skyscrapers of soda, cigarettes and potato chips. She only has to talk to one person at a time, through a microphone, protected by glass. As life should be.

I walk by and stop at Jamie's shop to buy bananas, onions and celery. I buy a softball sized lump of ground pork and another of ground beef and decide to use my last loaf of stale bread to make a gigantic meat loaf in my 12" skillet. I already have a pound of carrots, Worcestershire sauce, and ketchup. I chop and stir with a frenzy. The loaf is in the oven and bakes for 50 minutes. I bake for my husband. When the house smells good it is home.

Barbara Crooker

All Saints by Barbara Crooker

It's one day past the Day of the Dead, and this has been
a bad year, six funerals already and not done yet.
But on this blue day of perfect weather, I can't muster
sadness, for the trees are radiant, the air thick as Karo
warmed in a pan. I have my friend's last book spread
on the table and a cup of coffee in a white china mug.
All the leaves are ringing, like the tiny bells of God.
My mother, too, is ready to leave. All she wants now
is sugar: penuche fudge, tapioca pudding, pumpkin roll.
She wants to sit in the sun, pull it around her shoulders
like an Orlon sweater, and listen to the birds
in the far-off trees. I want this sweetness to linger
on her tongue, because the days are growing shorter
now, and night comes on, so quickly.

All Saints by Barbara Crooker, from Gold. © Cascade Books, 2013.