Science of the SpiritS


Heart

Discussing death over dinner: The topic of death is the main course


Yahoo News
Sat, 16 Apr 2016 16:11 UTC
death dinner
© Wayne PriceMichael Hebb's 1st death dinner, held in San Francisco in Oct 2012.
Hebb estimates that since 2013, more than 100,000 death over dinners have been held in 30 countries. Last week in a lovely home, tucked into a Cambridge, Massachusetts courtyard, Hebb led a death over dinner discussion, hosted by the founder of a health care/tech lab, Christian Bailey. Nine of us, ranging from 33 to 64 years old—most who work in the health care space—sat around a long rectangular table, drinking wine and eating a sumptuous meal, while talking about death.

The day before the dinner, Hebb sent homework, including neurologist Oliver Sacks's farewell column in the New York Times, written a few months before his death. In the piece, Sacks quotes philosopher David Hume ("It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present.")

At the dinner, Hebb began by asking everyone around the table to "acknowledge a person who's no longer with us, somebody who had a positive impact on your life." After each name, we toasted the departed person and clinked glasses.

"When we go to a funeral today in the way the U.S. lets us die, everyone in that space has been through an extraordinary amount of hell."

Comment: See also: Life lessons learned from a near-death experience

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Padlock

Drama therapy: Unlocking the door to change

Yvette Brazier
Medical News Today
Wed, 30 Mar 2016 17:14 UTC
drama class movement
© unknownDrama therapy can help people of all ages to express themselves.
What if one key could unlock expression in a child with autism, turn a young woman away from substance abuse, or stop a hardened criminal from reoffending? There is perhaps not one key, but there may be one set of keys: drama therapy.

In the 1920s, a Romanian psychologist, Jacob Moreno, observed how role play and experimental theatre freed people to reveal their thoughts and feelings. He began to incorporate drama into psychotherapy.

Psychodrama continues to be practised as a technique to help individuals achieve resolutions to specific issues by discovering how the past impacts the present.

In the 1960s, a radical Brazilian theatre director, Augusto Boal, was working on the concept of community theatre, from which would emerge "the theatre of the oppressed."

Boal envisaged a theatre where the audience could express themselves through becoming actors, presenting and solving the problems of their own lives. His work provided new direction for drama therapy.

Today drama therapy helps people in a wide range of contexts to achieve change, be it through shedding old habits, learning new skills or accepting a difficult past.

Comment: See:

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People 2

People are naturally attracted to those whose emotions they understand

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Thu, 14 Apr 2016 00:00 UTC
emotional attraction
People rated someone's attractiveness after they demonstrated emotions including happiness and fear.

Almost everyone has experienced a near instant attraction to another person, whether just social or something more.

According to new research, neuroscientists now think this could be down to an instant ability to read facial emotions.

People who find each other's emotions easy to read are naturally drawn to each other.

Reading emotions successfully gives people the feeling of understanding and connectedness.
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Magnify

The reasons why some couples differ so much in their physical attractiveness


PsyBlog
Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:00 UTC
blind date

Are couples who are mismatched in physical attractiveness just as happy?

Partners who get to know each other over time tend to differ more in physical attractiveness, a recent study finds.

In contrast, couples who get involved with each other soon after meeting are often much close in physical attractiveness.

Professor Eli Finkel, who co-authored the study, explained:
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Bulb

Imagery effective way to enhance memory, reduce false memories, study finds

Georgia State University
EurekaAlert!
Mon, 11 Apr 2016 10:59 UTC
memory
© Yellow Hat
Atlanta -- Using imagery is an effective way to improve memory and decrease certain types of false memories, according to researchers at Georgia State University.

Their study examined how creating images affected the ability to accurately recall conceptually related word lists as well as rhyming word lists. People who were instructed to create images of the list words in their head were able to recall more words than people who didn't create images, and they didn't recall false memories as often. False memories occur when a person recalls something that didn't happen or remembers something inaccurately.

The findings are published in the Journal of General Psychology.

"Creating images improved participants' memories and helped them commit fewer errors, regardless of what kind of list we gave them," said Merrin Oliver, lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student in the educational psychology program in the College of Education & Human Development at Georgia State.

Comment: The information in the article speaks to the benefits of a more active type of thinking and remembering. Modern life, technology, entertainment, etc., have gotten people out of the habit of using their brains actively in favour of a more passive mode. The brain is like a muscle: the more you use it, the more it can do.

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Heart

Life lessons learned from a near-death experience

Jen Engevik
First to Know
Wed, 06 Apr 2016 11:07 UTC
woman on newspaper
© unknownAnita Moorjani
She was dying...

Anita Moorjani remembers feeling her spirit leave the bounds of her cancer-ridden body and drift into another dimension. All of her loved ones, including her husband, assumed she would take her last breath in moments.

As she drifted towards death, she experienced something magical: "I was engulfed in a total feeling of love," she explained. "I also experienced extreme clarity of why I had the cancer, why I had come into this life in the first place, what role everyone in my family played, and generally how life works."

"When I crossed over, I realized that I had been making decisions and living life from a place of fear rather than love. This approach to life had made me sick."

Comment: Who is making your decisions?

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People 2

Caring too much about what others think of you could be holding you back

Jake Van Der Borne
Jake's Health Solutions
Wed, 13 Apr 2016 15:54 UTC
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. - Virginia Woolf
goldfish
Your mother has always said you are smart, but lack ambition.

A former boss once praised you for your creativity, but said you were too unorganized.

One of your college professors complimented you on your research skills, but criticized your "scatterbrained" writing style.

Each of those sets of comments contains what could be perceived as positive and negative feedback, if you evaluate them objectively.
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Cassiopaea

Access your inner shaman: Using the universal life force to heal your body

Therese Wade
Waking Times
Tue, 12 Apr 2016 15:04 UTC
We live in a sea of subtle energies. We can become conscious of them and learn to use them.
andromeda
Ancient cultures understood that we live in a vast sea of energy. They understood that the planets and stars are conscious beings who communicate with each other. They believed that the trees serve as antennas, which allow natural subtle energies and information to flow up from the Earth to the stars and planets, and from all other celestial bodies into the Earth. They taught that everything and every being has consciousness and channels this energy according to its capabilities, to help facilitate this essential cosmic dialogue. In fact, they understood that all matter, including the physical body, is a gathering of this universal energy. They recognized that our thoughts and emotions are a form of energy, and that when these are in harmony with the living universal energy field, we become clear channels. Then, the life force of the Earth and cosmos flows through us more smoothly and abundantly, guiding our evolution as new perspectives are revealed and advanced abilities are awakened within us. These abilities include heightened creativity, extrasensory perception and the ability to bring about dramatic physical healing. Shamans learn to feel, sense and use this energy without filtering or distorting it. They often refer to this process as becoming a "hollow bone".
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Question

Why are the mysteries of the pineal gland ignored by mainstream media?

Christina Sarich
Waking Times
Mon, 11 Apr 2016 14:46 UTC
pineal gland
There is an endocrine gland within our bodies that, when unimpeded, receives more blood flow per cubic volume than almost any organ in the body, including the heart.[1][2] It has been written about in masked language, or painted in art throughout the ages, and represented in a staggering number of ways for thousands of years - yet modern medicine hasn't found it interesting enough to study clinically - or has it?

The pineal gland's true purpose is shrouded in mystery. Is this intentional?

Will it take an information coup to keep us from being estranged from the cosmic gifts which so many of our ancestors refer to as being locked within this tiny pine-cone shaped mass of cells, or is there modern, scientific corroboration for what the ancients called the Epicenter of Enlightenment just waiting for us to peruse?

Comment: For more on the pineal gland see:

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Fire

Dr. Kelly Brogan: Sometimes suffering is inevitable

Dr. Kelly Brogan
Alternet
Mon, 04 Apr 2016 12:42 UTC
suffering
Challenges can be exactly what the doctor ordered. Sometimes even tragedy is part of our path.

Productivity. Certainty. Predictability. Consistency.

These words feel like a cozy blanket to our minds. And, at least since the Industrial Revolution, it has been a shared agreement that these values amplify and support the economy while also offering the average citizen an opportunity to opt into an illusion of safety. It is an illusion because there is no room for true individuality in a society that prizes a sense of safety over all else. There is no room for growth, there is no room for transformation, and there is no room for suffering. Writer and researcher Graham Hancock calls this the War on Consciousness, exacted through narrow definitions of permissible states of consciousness (and support of chemicals that suppress consciousness) in support of corporate and governmental control.

Perhaps this is the prison cell that we willingly walk into, sighing with relief as the door locks shut.
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