The Dream.

“To know more, one must feel less, and vice versa… Nature, the soul, love, and God, one recognises through the heart, and not through the reason. Were we spirits, we could dwell in that region of ideas over which our souls hover, seeking the solution. But we are earth-born beings, and can only guess at the Idea — not grasp it by all sides at once. The guide for our intelligences through the temporary illusion into the innermost centre of the soul is called Reason. Now, Reason is a material capacity, while the soul or spirit lives on the thoughts which are whispered by the heart. Thought is born in the soul. Reason is a tool, a machine, which is driven by the spiritual fire. When human reason … penetrates into the domain of knowledge, it works independently of the feeling, and consequently of the heart.”
_
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We were all Children. We grew by recognizing the things that made us happy and through building strength to expand our own limitations. As Children we needed to trust in Adults and we did that by realizing how they lived together and shared their knowledge/appreciation for Life. We saw how much Love would make couples laugh and adults do silly things. We saw how Love would make adults play and look happy. There were also responsibilities! Like washing your hands before coming to the table because of all the little creatures that like to creep up and make a party inside our bellies and then, there are so loud we can't sleep; or before crossing any street always looking sideways, because even though we're actually super strong and magical healers, there's this thing called "hurt-pain" that is as unpleasant as the smell of a fat dog fart, or vinegar up our nose! Avoid hurt as much as possible...

We were taught to play, share, learn and stay curious, but also to be gentle and kind, so if someone was crying we would hug them or just sit by their side, or if an animal had no home or food we would try to build a shelter or bring food, or if mom/dad were "tired" we should let them rest for a bit and just go outside and look at the many different shapes clouds can have.

We were taught to be human. Not be fearful, closed or sceptic.
We were taught to be responsible for our own feelings and actions.
We were taught that we could choose, that was our responsibility.
We were taught we could heal, and anything could be healed, if not here, in the beautiful hospital there is up in the Sky.

“Your intuition and your intellect should be working together… making love”
_
Madeleine L’Engle

But if Society condemns the public display of affection or even just an open conversation on our sexual/love nature, then unfortunately this relationship betweens feelings and reason can too easily become corrupted.

“The kind of thinking that makes a distinction between thought and feeling is just one of those forms of demagogy that causes lots of trouble for people.” 

_

Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky wrote in such a beautiful way about this very love-hate, happiness-sadness, ugly-beautiful, good-evil relationships. How inseparable they are, so it is always a matter of choice. Which do you choose...?

"All are tending to one and the same goal, at least all aspire to the same goal, from the wise man to the lowest murderer, but only by different ways. It is an old truth, but there is this new in it: I cannot go far astray. I saw the truth. I saw and know that men could be beautiful and happy, without losing the capacity to live upon the earth. I will not, I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of men… I saw the truth, I did not invent it with my mind. I saw, saw, and her living image filled my soul for ever. I saw her in such consummate perfection that I cannot possibly believe that she was not among men. How can I then go astray? … The living image of what I saw will be with me always, and will correct and guide me always. Oh, I am strong and fresh, I can go on, go on, even for a thousand years.
(...)
And it is so simple… The one thing is — love thy neighbors as thyself — that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live."

_

Dostoevstky

Lets aspire to be lovers again, lets aspire to be good, kind, open, goofy... let's meditate together, hold hands, dance, sing without any bad criticism, but with openness, empathy, joy. Forget who you're supposed to be. Be. Be the tree, the ocean, the air, wind or rain. Practice gratitude, even in the worst apparent time in your Life. Make your self travel when pain is too much to bear, when you want to quit. Listen to music, smoke weed, dive in the cold ocean... just don't succumb to pain.

Jack Kerouac wrote it like this to an ex-girlfriend...

"I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.

(...)

We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born."

He ends the letter with one of his free-flowing, uninhibited poems:

"The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks don't see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already
in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they’re
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s’why I’ll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes."

_
Jack Kerouac

Tempo a gente tem, quando a gente dá...

"(...) Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them"

_

Mark Haddon

I think I wish I could understand Life. I wish I could see the "logic" of it all. To understand why is there so much irony and so much revolting "screenwriting". I can accept the paying back for something wrong you've done, but is so unfair not to know what is that you're doing wrong, repetitively doing wrong. And I'm writing I think I wish because we might not ever be naive and happy-go-lucky again if we managed to understand Life. Maybe we're better off not understanding it.
... no, I think that if we knew the rules of this game we could make it work in our favour.
The "No rules, great Scotch" works when you're planning in spending your life drunk.

"O rio fica lá, a água é que correu (the river stays there, the water is what has gone) 

Chega na maré, ele vira mar (arrives in the tide, it turns into sea)

Como se morrer fosse desaguar (as if to die, is the same as to recede)

Derramar no céu, se purificar (spill in the sky, purify)

Deixar pra trás sais e minerais (leave behind, salts and minerals)

Evaporar" (Evaporate)

_

Little Joy "Evaporar"

(...)

What Flows through your mind sculpts your brain. (...) Mental activity, whether conscious or unconscious, maps to neural activity, just like a picture of a sunset on your computer system maps to a pattern of magnetic charges in your hard drive.

Cool the fires of greed and hatred to live with integrity. Steady and concentrate the mind to see through its confusions. (...) Virtue simply involves regulating your actions, words, and thoughts to create benefits rather than harm for yourself.

It's a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the human mind and heart - in others words, the sages and saints of every religious tradition - all say the same thing: the fundamental nature of every human being is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, kind, and wise . . . and is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That.

It's impossible to change the past or the present: you can only accept all that as it is. But you can tend to the causes of a better future. How? Try this: when you recall of an upsetting memory, give it a positive feeling to it. "A single raindrop doesn't have much effect, but if you have enough raindrops and enough time, you can carve a Grand Canyon. But to take these steps you have to be on your won side. That may not be very easy at first; most people bring less kindness to them selves than to others.

So!

"Nurturing your own self-development isn't selfish. It's actually a great gift to other people."

_

Rick Hanson

Let be, Let go, Let in.

Use your Mind to change your Brain for the better.

Create an Optimal Brain to find Happiness : )

Self-directed neuroplasticity:

- reacting and responding to either positive or negative experiences.

We have a Brain and what a brain is, in its appearance, is a grey mass, with more than 100 billion nerves that communicate in trillions of connections called synapses. Those electrical or chemical signals flash from one side to another, travelling like shooting stars inside our heads. To get a picture of the speed and immensity of this just think of a single breath, and in that space, imagine a quadrillion messages flashing in your brain… Yes, the Brain is pretty complex.

A simple way to put what the Brain and Mind are is to think of them as Hardware and Software. So the Brain is a necessary condition for the Mind, but! the Brain depends on the Mind too.

Our Brain evolved from a system based on the idea of Avoidance; Approach and Attachment. Both Happiness or sadness arise from this cadence of actions. And the Brain has been evolving and growing in size based on the necessity of bonding/empathising with others, social skills so to speak.

Humans need more time than other mammals to develop because of the size of their Brain. Female Human can’t sustain the birth of a full developed brain so we need more time outside, childhood, to grow the Brain.

So, as the brain changes the Mind changes, but the Mind changes as the Brain changes too.

Pleasure Vs Pain… Love Vs Envy… those emotions have actually been mapped in scans, but when it comes to I, the Idea of Myself, there are too many and non-related areas that light up.

There’s not a particular part of the Brain for I, Me.

In scanners, the area for concentration/meditation is the same as for feelings. Scans show that people that are focused in feelings/concepts like Peace, Kindness, also have a embodied experience, so, our mental flow sculpts the Brain, creates paths, and that is why is possible to reduce the effects of Stress through meditation.

- Neurones that fire together wire together.

Our cortical mass with age gets thinner, but in scans they’ve seen how people who repeat certain actions thicken the cortical tissue surrounding those regions. And not only by really doing something, but also just by imagining the action.

This is what Neuroplasticity is.

So we can be a lot more thoughtful about what we are doing. The more pessimist you are, the more you reinforce the physicality of that feeling in your brain. The contrary is also true.

We should then be more mindfully self aware. It’s not just a catchy new age slogan… It’s a result, it’s a cause and effect reality.

You change your Mind you change your Brain reinforcing yourself.

Our amygdala is focused more in avoiding harmful things than reinforcing good habits. It’s good if you find food, and that behaviour is highlighted in our brain as a “do more and repeat” action, but, if we get caught in a trap and die it’s worse, so in that sense, rewarding a good action is secondary when compared to avoiding danger/surviving, in other words, the brain is like velcro for negative experiences. 

How can we change this?

Self-Compassion is a way, but, self-compassion is hard for many people, due to feelings of

unworthiness, self-criticism, or “internalised oppression.” 

A suggestion by Hanson to encourage the neural substrates of self-compassion is to do this experiment:

Start by getting the sense of being cared about by someone else; Bring to mind someone you naturally feel compassion for and sink into that experience of compassion in your body; then shift that compassionate feeling to yourself, perhaps with phrases like: “May I not suffer. May the pain of this moment pass.”

Anxiety, temperament, nervous behaviour… happens to everyone, happens in corporations, happens even in a national, world scale. What it does is to overestimate threat and underestimate opportunities. So we feel threaten and our body releases all different kind of stress responses, we feel overloaded, we feel unsure about the Future and raising a family, we overreact and give up too quickly, we get into “Inner Homeless Mode”, you don’t belong anywhere, you’re misunderstood everywhere.

Protect me, protect me… red alert! Us vs Them, vs It!

- If we want to make the World a better place we should ease up on reactivity.

But this Tiger way of acting is not always present. We sometimes achieve our optimal mind state, where we feel self-actualisation, inner Peace, enlightened. To be in The Zone, Calm, Content, Caring and Creative, but then, a trigger gets us back into reactive mode: if you want to prove you’re enlightened go visit your parents.

“If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves”

- Buddhist saying.

There are 3 Fundamental Pillars of Practice that show up in contemplative traditions as well as in modern psychology: Mindfulness (Open up), Virtue (Values) and Wisdom (What is the greater good) or in six words: Let be, Let go, Let in.

Remember the Brain’s Velcro attitude (taking in the negative), try taking in the positive, get in that habit, build that positive atitude.

Try this: Pick a positive fact, remember it, make yourself really feel it, savour it for 15/30s. Feel it sinking in, even replacing old places of pain in your Heart. Do this every time you can, you will see a big difference in time. You’ll become a velcro for positive experiences. Happiness is an important skill. Happy people are good people, good in productivity. Live by your own code of integrity and conduct, unilateral virtue. Be good for your own good.

Keep calm (get in the zone), soothe your stress and open up for some feelings, say to someone you love them. Find your own way, but find it in a positive way. Practice gratitude and peaceful mental states.

Authors @Google: Rick Hanson

Author: Rick Hanson 

Book: Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

How to Live Happily ever after...?

Practice Daily Mindfulness

Live with your Heart

Eat healthy & joyfully

Get active & fit

Declutter

Find simple focus, have Fun

Create daily

Free yourself from fear

Humans need LOVE

Stay Curious...

We get sad, we get scared, we wonder what could we do to feel better when we're sad or feeling lost... Usually we grab on to a glass of wine, or cigarette, or more than a glass of wine or just one cigarette... but, do we actually feel better after it? We get drunk, we get drowsy but we don't actually feel better. Whatever pain is consuming our energy, it's still there when we wake up.

But if this is not happening to you and you're just watching someone else going through that "If I do this I'll better" process , no side effects right?!

Well,  that's what some neuroscientist are starting to notice and suggesting. Your mind is built by you as a witness. We see the world not exactly as it is, but through our own lenses, and we create our own virtual reality of reality. What we actually capture of reality is just a brief idea, because our mind is usually somewhere else. Hey, why is it so hard to meditate? Because the mind wonders into those short personal movies of what happened or must be done, it's hard to focus just on our breath and on the room temperature. The mind wonders and constructs castles, castles with dungeons...

So, what I'm suggesting here is that, instead of letting ourselves go in whatever movie the mind is on, we stop and be curious about what we're thinking and what we are feeling.

Stay curious and ask yourself why you feel you need an extra piece of cake, or why you need to go on Facebook/ Email/ Twitter / Youtube again...

If you're curious about yourself and your choices, you start catching your own mind and it's tricks. Don't let it win over you. Release your self from beliefs, addictions that are not good for you. Stay curious...

Ask yourself, am I really feeling a lot better after eating that whole chocolate? Does this cigarette taste that good? Why do I need to go to the bathroom when that person enters the room? ... you know.

So stay curious, don't let your mind tell you what you're feeling, feel it for yourself.

From Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom By Rick Hanson

"(...) What flows through your mind sculpts your brain. (...) In a larger scale your mind is made by your brain, body and natural world. (...)

(...) Cool the fires of greed and hatred to live with integrity; steady and concentrate the mind to see through its confusions; develop liberating insight.

(...) It's a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the human mind and heart - in others words, the sages and saints of every religious tradition - all say the same thing: the fundamental nature of every human being is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, kind, and wise... and is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That.

(...) well, who is the one person in the world you have the greatest power over? It's your future self..."

So how can you change your brain?

"(...) when remembering an upsetting experience, recall the feeling of being with someone who loves you, which will gradually infuse the upsetting memory with a positive feeling.

Nurturing your own development isn't selfish it's actually a great gift to other people.

stay young and pure
less is more...

Baddiewinkle: An Extraordinary 87 Year Old Woman from Refinery29 on Vimeo.

… After some thinking and feeling very grateful for all that Life has given me, I do wonder if we’re here just to have pleasure and fun and collect experiences after experiences. I don’t think so… I’ve been living as so, but I don’t believe in it anymore. We’re here to make efforts, to be the best version of ourselves. Who we are we don’t know. We’re something that has a Heart, a Soul and a Body. More than that it’s just our imagination doing it’s own creative thinking, its weekly creative team brainstorming. And because we don’t know but we’re constantly learning and being tested, I think I can say that finally ageing as started to open a bit more sense into this living “business”.

We’re not here to collect pleasurable moments and have the time of our Life. Great if we do, and some effort should be put in making Life sweeter, but how empty and how many mistakes can be avoided if we change that hedonistic perspective into a more humanistic one. To make our Life more about what we create, change and help build, than a collection of experiences that don’t connect with each other or create any meaning.

Life is not about what we collect, but what we do and pass on.

Have your own delightfully self pleasures, indulge your self in poetic wonders and discover amazing kingdoms inside that powerful mind of yours, but don’t be selfish, don’t think only about yourself, even, or especially, if you’re scared to loose, if you’re scared to loose control. Is our Life ever our own, ours? … It's not given to us by ourselves, neither do we choose when to let it go, so how can we call it ours? This life we live it’s not ours, it’s a gift.

When we put it that way, our Life has not being ours but instead, the best gift ever! I guess that feelings of gratitude and respect to whoever thought of creating us float to mind.

And in that regard, do we need more gifts? More free stuff? More entertainment?!

I’m gaining more appreciation for Life and everyday I have the chance to live I know I’m really lucky to be, just be. Yes, Life could be a lot easier, but it’s not Life that is stopping me, it’s my mind. My mind wants a job, a house, a relationship, adventures to show friends and friends to appreciate them. My mind demands, desires, asks… but, who is my mind if not myself?

I think our minds are like our personal “softwares”. We’re all upgraded through school, college, work, but we are also the designers of that software, that’s why we’re not all the same, even though we speak and think the same way. We are wired the same way, but we live (as in feeling and learning) differently.

What I wish/trying to share here are two linked ideas that I believe can really give our Life the meaning we so search for. We are responsible for our choices, even though we haven’t got a clue of what´s our mission in this planet, I guess we missed out that part of “your mission in case you decide to accept is…”, but we can choose and within that choice, we can be respectful and grateful for being free to choose, or we can act like selfish children who draw a tantrum when they don’t get what they want or can’t share the brand news toys given to them.

If we wish to have a fulfilled life, we need to be Full. Full in our words, in our commitments, in our decisions, in giving and receiving. Full as in, there’s no room for doubt, for dubious acting, deception. There’s only fullness on intentions, like a Full on Moon, that rises in the Sky, making crops grow, tides change and making untamed wild creatures howl. Lets be Full, and live what we really believe in. What makes you choose the things you do? ... 

Quando temos um sonho e esse sonho cresce, entranha-se, até que já não sabemos bem se o que pensamos é sonho, se é a realidade que todos partilham. Mas partilhamos mesmo uma só realidade? São questões que nos inebriam e nos seduzem a desacreditar no que nos ensinaram e nos forçam a crescer! Não, não partilhamos uma só realidade, partilhamos talvez o sonho de qualquer coisa, mas de real só temos as palavras, com verbos e regras gramaticais. Temos medo de nos sentirmos sozinhos, por isso nos copiamos e colamos, mas se perguntarmos em voz alta se o que vemos é o mesmo que o outro vê, levamos logo com outra pergunta, o quê? e outra pergunta, precisas de falar? já foste ver alguém sobre isso...? Isso o quê? Isso de pensar, sonhar e desacreditar no que nos ensinaram, arranjando força para crescer, tornar-se adulto, tornar-se independente e conseguir dizer com doçura, sim, estou feliz, estou contente, estou fixe! Não tenho o mesmo que tu, nem desejo o mesmo, mas estou bem com este agora.