Science of the SpiritS


Gift 3

The gift of being in your body

Susan Hassen
Wake-up World
Wed, 20 Jul 2016 15:51 UTC
grounding
"Be here now." We see this phrase everywhere, but are we actually embodying it? Are we consciously present and in our experience here on Earth? Often, the most simple of phrases hold the biggest treasures. Now more than ever, we need to be here now. We are in the midst of a global ascension and are experiencing a multitude of energetic shifts both off and on our planet. Being anchored into the Earth allows you to go with the flow of these new planetary changes while remaining safe and secure in your body.

As an energy practitioner, I've observed that the one thing every client of mine has in common is that they are not grounded into the Earth and fully occupying their bodies.

When you are ungrounded, life becomes chaotic and confusing. To be out of body is to be out of control. How can you focus when you're not actually here? My clients suffering from anxiety, nervousness, negative thoughts, paranoia, uncertainty, rage, insecurity, lethargy, exhaustion, and full body illnesses all have one thing in common: they are out of their bodies, and when you leave your body, you invite negative and heavy energies in. Moreover, clients holding trauma in their root chakra are by far the most ungrounded. This is because our grounding cord is located at the tailbone, and our energy streams from the crown chakra down through the root chakra before entering the grounding cord and making its way down to the core of the Earth. Clients with blocks in their root chakra lack the space to allow a healthy flow of energy to connect them from their grounding cord to the planet and release their trauma into the Earth. They go through life like a balloon floating around filled with toxic energies just waiting to pop. Not only is this a dangerous way to live, its not actually living.

Comment: Read more about how Staying in tune with the Earth's pulse is key to our wellbeing:
Grounding, a Proven Healing Method

In 2012, assisted by other researchers, I published a review study on the health implications of grounding in the Journal of Environmental and Public Health. We reviewed and summarized more than 15 studies on grounding, as well as many others on the effects of Earth's electrons on health. Basically, what we concluded from our review is that grounding helps improve cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, nervous, and immune system function by restoring the body's natural internal electrical stability and rhythms.

It also restores the body's healing potential. This study, along with my more than 10 years of research and observations, support that for many, daily grounding activity can:
  • Decrease inflammation as well as assuage its physical symptoms
  • Reduce or eliminate chronic pain
  • Improve sleep
  • Increase energy
  • Thin blood and improve blood pressure and blood flow
  • Relieve muscle tension and headaches
  • Lessen hormonal and menstrual symptoms
  • Speed healing, even after surgery, and prevent bedsores
  • Alleviate or eliminate jet lag
  • Protect the body against potentially health-disturbing environmental electromagnetic fields (EMFs)
  • Accelerate recovery from intense athletic activity
  • Balance the autonomic nervous system by decreasing sympathetic and increasing parasympathetic nervous activity: When dealing with challenges and stressful situations, we use our sympathetic nervous system and expend energy. When we're calm and relaxed, our parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, so the body can repair and restore itself.


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Network

Dream people of the Amazon: The world view and dream life of the Achuar tribe

Michael Q. Bullerdick
Van Winkle's
Tue, 07 Jun 2016 14:35 UTC
Achuar Tribesman
An Achuar Tribesman
When tonight's sleep predicts tomorrow's fortunes, it's hard to get any rest

Catholic missionaries who've made themselves responsible for educating the Amazon's Achuar people won't get around to such subjects as Romantic poetry and John Keats any time soon. But when they do, it's likely the Achuar will regard the poet as something of a kindred spirit. Keats developed the term "negative capability" to describe a kind of ultimate artistic license that's intended to free the mind from its reliance on the ordinary. He also used it to explain an aspect of artistic inspiration: how imagery, stanzas and even whole poems come to poets in dreams. Keats could very well have been describing the way of life for the Achuar, who are something of an authority on the art and practice of dreaming.

The Achuar [pronounced in three syllables as A-chu-ar] are a clannish, semi-nomadic people whose name means "the people of the aguaje palm." They are believed to be the last of the Earth's once-hidden indigenous people who currently number at about 11,000 individuals. The Achuar first made their acquaintance with Western man in the late '60s when Catholic missionaries entered the deepest recesses of the jungle along the border of Peru and Ecuador to the Amazon basin, one of Earth's harshest and most unforgiving ecosystems — a land of punishing humidity, floods and all manner of deadly reptiles, poisonous plants and insects. The fact that the Achuar have not only managed to survive but have actually thrived in the jungle for approximately 5,000 years is proof, they say, of their ability to commune with and receive guidance — often including detailed instruction — from the spirit world while dreaming.

It wasn't long after anthropologists and ethnographers arrived on the scene in the late '80s and early '90s that they realized they'd hit proverbial pay dirt in the Achuar as a truly rare subject of study. Here was a tribe whose intense isolation from the rest of the world helped preserve a pristine cultural identity, language and belief system. One of the tribal practices that immediately caught the attention of scientists, and became the reason the Achuar were introduced in academic journals as "The Dream People of The Amazon, was their unique daily morning ritual of "wayusa" or "dream sharing," which has continued into the present.


Comment: See also: The Shamans of the world tell us: "We are not alone"

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Target

Having a 'plan B' can hurt your chances of success

Katherine Milkman, Jihae Shin
Scientific American
Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:31 UTC
Preparing a backup plan can increase the odds you'll need it

coloured memo notes
© JOH_2931 via Flickr CC by 2.0Most people think that making a backup plan is always a good idea, and previous scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the benefits of planning. However, we highlight an unintended cost of making backup plans: a lower chance of successfully achieving your primary goal.
Imagine two aspiring entrepreneurs: Meg and Jen. They are equally capable and well-connected, and they are working on equally promising startup ideas. In fact, imagine that Meg and Jen differ in just one respect: Meg is thinking about what a good fallback job would be and how she plans to pursue it if her current startup fails while Jen is not.

Who do you think will work harder and in turn, have a better chance of success: Meg or Jen? Might merely thinking through a backup plan be enough to undermine Meg's motivation and likelihood of success?

This was the question that we wanted to answer with our research. And yes, we find in a paper published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes that merely contemplating a backup plan can reduce the effort you put forth to achieve a goal, thus hurting your chances of achieving it. Most people think that making a backup plan is always a good idea, and previous scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the benefits of planning. However, we highlight an unintended cost of making backup plans: a lower chance of successfully achieving your primary goal.

Comment: Related articles:

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Bulb

Psychology study cautions: Think twice before overdoing the positive thinking


PSYblog
Fri, 05 Feb 2016 21:23 UTC
positive thinking
© wsj.com
The unexpected negative effect of positive thinking on mental health.

Dreaming about positive events in the future makes you feel better now, but may make you feel worse later on, new research finds.

The more positively people fantasized about the future, the more depressive symptoms people experienced up to seven months later, the study found.

The findings kick against the ubiquitous self-help advice to 'think positive'.

Comment: Why positive thinking may be harmful for some

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Bandaid

Veterans coming home - who tends to their moral injuries?

Micael Bogar
Yes! Magazine
Mon, 04 Jul 2016 17:23 UTC
combat vets
© Micael BogarMicael Bogar and her brother
Listening can help ease the transition home for veterans and ultimately heal us as a nation.

In the summer of 2008, my younger brother Jason was killed in Afghanistan. He was 25 years old. It has been almost eight years since he died, and while the experience of losing a family member to war deserves many pages, I wanted to write this for all the civilians struggling to understand their role in supporting veterans as they come home.

I've now spent enough time away from the trauma of that summer to reflect on what could have been. When Jason came back from his first deployment to Iraq in the summer of 2005, he was a mess. I was coming home from the Peace Corps, and he was coming home from combat. He was quiet and brooding in a way he had never been before.

Comment: The practice of listening
Listening informs our decisions so that we can make choices for what is best for us, our families, our community, and our planet. But what starts to happen as we age and become governed by the ego is that we lose that curiosity, that hunger, to learn more. We become set in our ways, we think we may know enough to get by and be happy. So we stop listening, or we only listen to what we choose we want to hear. We stop paying attention and close ourselves off from possibilities and opportunities. The universe sends us glaring signs and we ignore them because we think we've figured it out. As you well know, nobody does—and maybe nobody ever will. But that is what life is all about: to search, to stay open, to receive, to love, to, to connect, to grow... And to listen.


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Books

You are what you read: How deep reading is effective brain exercise

Alexa Erickson
Collective Evolution
Mon, 18 Jul 2016 18:22 UTC
reading
Are you a tabloid loving, pop culture obsessed, meme and GIF intrigued person? Do you like sensational novels to pass the time?

According to a new study published in the International Journal of Business Administration in May 2016, your love for "light reading," and web-based aggregators like Reddit, Tumblr and BuzzFeed may not be doing you any good.

The researchers concluded that what students read in college directly affects the level of writing they achieve. In fact, students who pick up academic journals, literary fiction, or general nonfiction wrote with greater syntactic sophistication than those who preferred the former options. Furthermore, the highest scores came from those who resorted to academic journals, and the lowest to solely web-based content.But then again, "good writing" is often subjective. What we're really talking about here is whether our overall ability to convey what we want to say comes across well to the masses.

Comment: More on the benefits of reading:

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Question

Is ignorance a choice?

Greg Calise
Wake-up World
Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:40 UTC
printing press
Throughout recorded history, humankind have had very short lifespans. After the advent of agriculture, the average life expectancy shrunk to much less than 40 years. This is not a lot of time to figure out life. On top of that, with the advent of civilization, people had to toil most of the day under feudal lords. Most of them were slaves. Knowledge was scarce. Whatever knowledge was available was held by the elite. The high priests, royalty and the wealthy were the only ones with access to any knowledge. Most people were illiterate. They lived in ignorance.

At the advent of the printing press, knowledge became more available, especially in the developed countries. Libraries became common place and books became affordable. In many places around the world, people are offered a basic education for free. Our life span has nearly doubled, and knowledge exponentiated. Now most people have access to basic knowledge about atoms, quantum theory, stars and galaxies and so many things in between.
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Pills

Probiotics can be used to help with depression by helping people let go of the past


Psy Blog
Wed, 15 Apr 2015 01:46 UTC
sad woman
© Shutterstock
Probiotics may stop sadness turning into depression by helping people let go of the past, a new study finds.

Researchers at the Leiden Institute of Brain and Cognition found that probiotics stopped people ruminating so much. Rumination is when people focus on bad experiences and feelings from the past.

Dr Laura Steenbergen, the study's first author, said:
"Rumination is one of the most predictive vulnerability markers of depression. Persistent ruminative thoughts often precede and predict episodes of depression."
In the study 40 people were given a sachet to take with water or milk every day for four weeks. Half of the people received sachets that contained a multi-species probiotic. The other half received a placebo for the four weeks.
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Clipboard

The basic laws of human stupidity

Michael R. Eades
Protein Power
Mon, 28 Oct 2013 08:39 UTC
Image
Stupid people are everywhere. And, as we all know, no class, race, sex, occupation, political affiliation, country of origin, or degree of wealth has a monopoly on stupidity. Stupid people cause profound damage to individuals and to society at large. But, for the most part, stupid people operate in a kind of anonymity. Consequently, we are frequently ambushed by them and pay the often hefty price.

I say stupid people operate in anonymity not because we all don't know stupid people, but because stupid people don't have a huge literature identifying them. There are countless books written on how to be smarter, how to improve critical thinking skills, how to learn faster and how to develop acumen in all sorts of fields of endeavor.

There are books on the traits of highly successful people and on the classification of various intellectual skills. But where is the Field Guide to Stupid People, the reference source we need to identify and avoid - as much as is possible - the often irreparable harm such people can inflict? Such a book doesn't exist. Or at least I thought it didn't.

All that changed a few months ago when I was in Paris, roaming through the English language section of my favorite Parisian bookstore, Galignani.
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Family

Labelling and describing feelings reduces anxiety even if you don't think it will


PSYBlog
Sun, 17 Jul 2016 21:37 UTC
fear and anxiety
Labelling anxiety — putting the feeling into words — can reduce the fear response, research finds.

In fact, the more fearful words people use to describe their anxiety, the more their anxiety reduces.

However, the study also found that people don't expect that labelling their emotions will reduce anxiety.

But, recordings of their skin conductance show that it does.

The study compared labelling anxiety with other common methods of reducing anxiety, including distraction and reappraisal.

Comment: Talking about your feelings will help you cope with scary and stressful situations.

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