9/20/2016

Boost your self-compassion

Four ways to boost your self-compassion

Take a moment to think about how you treat yourself when you make a mistake or fail to reach a goal. If you tend to beat yourself up when things go wrong, you, like most people, can use a little more self-compassion in your life.

Forgiving and nurturing yourself seem to have benefits in their own right. They can even set the stage for better health, relationships, and general well-being. So far, research has revealed a number of benefits of self-compassion. Lower levels of anxiety and depression have been observed in people with higher self-compassion. Self-compassionate people recognize when they are suffering and are kind to themselves at these times, thereby lowering their own levels of related anxiety and depression.

Learn to have self-compassion

Some people come by self-compassion naturally, but not everyone does. Luckily, self-compassion is a skill you can learn. Several methods have been proposed, and training programs are being developed, to help people discover and cultivate their own self-compassion.

Here are four ways to give your self-compassion skills a quick boost:

Comfort your body. Eat something healthy. Lie down and rest. Massage your own neck, feet, or hands. Take a walk. Anything you can do to improve how you feel physically gives you a dose of self-compassion.
Write a letter to yourself. Think of a situation that caused you to feel pain (a breakup with a lover, a job loss, a poorly received presentation). Write a letter to yourself describing the situation, but without blaming anyone — including yourself. Use this exercise to nurture your feelings.
Give yourself encouragement. Think of what you would say to a good friend if he or she was facing a difficult or stressful situation. Then, when you find yourself in this kind of situation, direct these compassionate responses toward yourself.
Practice mindfulness. Even a quick exercise, such as meditating for a few minutes, can be a great way to nurture and accept ourselves while we're in pain.

For more ways to draw on your strengths and find the positive meaning in your life, purchase Positive Psychology, a Special Health Report from Harvard Medical School.

Image: iStock

Originally published: January 2016

Source: http://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/4-ways-to-boost-your-self-compassion

Being in the Now

Today do something past, present and future. Past (pay debts, apologize), present (fully enjoy something,) and future (save, plan or learn.)

Juliet Funt @whitespaceatwrk

whitespaceatwork.com

9/19/2016

Useful Sklls

Hard skills that require constant practice:

1 giving a sincere compliment

2 listening with intent to learn

3 talking less, but saying more

Owl Missed The Man Who Saved Her

Owl Missed The Man Who Saved Her So Much She Couldn’t Stop Hugging Him

By Zainab Akande

Jun. 06, 2016

GiGi, a great horned owl, was completely alone — until she met the one man she'd never forget.
GiGi first arrived at Mississippi's Wild at Heart Rescue toward the end of May after suffering significant head trauma, which the rescue suspects was the result of being hit by a car. She had a massive concussion, her body was riddled with parasites and she had a condition called aspergillosis, which is similar to pneumonia in humans, Missy Dubuisson, founder and director of Wild at Heart, told The Dodo.

GiGi was so ill that, during the course of her treatment, she lost an entire pound of weight — which was a lot, considering great horned owls typically weigh anywhere from 2 to 5 pounds.

Wild at Heart Rescue"This bird was one of the most critical we have ever taken care of," Dubuisson said. "The fact that this bird has lived is beyond comprehension."
But if there was anyone at the rescue who could help GiGi get back in good health, it would be Douglas "Doug" Pojeky, president of the rescue and affectionately known as the "birds of prey whisperer."

"In all my years of working with birds of prey, I have never seen someone with such a bond with these magnificent birds," Dubuisson said.
Under Pojeky's care, GiGi went from knocking at "death's door to perching," Dubuisson said. She also went from being hand-fed to grabbing food on her own. GiGi had undoubtedly come to trust and care for Pojeky, and she made it known just how much in the most surprising way.
Wild at Heart RescuePojeky had been a trip to Michigan, visiting family, leaving GiGi without his company for awhile. After Pojeky returned, he gave GiGi an examination, and she immediately started bobbing her head and dancing on his arm. Then, she slowly walked up to his chest, rested her head on his shoulder and draped her wings around him in a fully fledged owl hug.
Wild at Heart RescueThe look of pure content on her face just before she embraced Pojeky showed just how happy she was to be reunited with her favorite human.
Pojeky told The Dodo that being hugged by GiGi held a particularly special importance to him. Growing up, a great horned owl used to perch on the top of Pojeky's family barn. While Pojeky's father often saw the owl, Pojeky and the rest of his family rarely did. However, on the morning of his father's death, the owl was spotted overlooking the farm house, where Pojeky's father had passed away, before flying off into the woods.
"For some reason when that bird was hugging me, all I could think of was my dad," Pojeky said.

Wild at Heart Rescue

Once GiGi makes a full recovery, she'll be released back into the wild. But in the meantime, she has Pojeky to lean on.
"It literally brings tears to my eyes to watch him interact with these birds," Dubuisson said. "They absolutely know him and trust him. It's the trust that you see in her face."

Source: https://www.thedodo.com/gigi-owl-hugs-rescuer-1843393092.html

Zainab Akande Zainab is an Associate Writer for The Dodo. Lover of celebrity pets, normal pets and her pet Shih Tzu.

Quotes

“Creativity is magic. Don’t examine it too closely.” — Edward Albee

Stop living the lie and start living the dream, moving forward with a new life of focus and passion and purpose—and far less stuff.

Without self-discipline, success is impossible, period. -Lou Holtz

Photo published for Seashore Image, Texas | National Geographic Photo of the Day

9/14/2016

Walking Outdoors is Therapeutic

Walking Outdoors is Therapeutic

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe

Willie Nelson and Neil Young standing in solidarity (wearing buffalo robes) w/ the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe! #NoDAPL

Rosebud Sioux Tribe Asserts Treaty Rights in Opposing Transfer Black Hills to State of SD http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/09/05/rosebud-sioux-tribe-asserts-treaty-rights-opposing-transfer-black-hills-state-south …

Link: http://standingrock.org/

9/11/2016

Paul Gauguin playing the harmonium

Paul Gauguin playing the harmonium in Alfons Mucha’s studio, Paris, c.1895

http://bit.ly/2cm2kA2

9/10/2016

'People said I was cursed by a witch'

'People said I was cursed by a witch'

Watching Haydn's Creation on local cable I heard a voice that reminded me of Fritz Wunderlich...... I looked up to see a man deformed by thalidomide standing next to beautiful soprano Annette Dasch... it was a shocking image.

Thomas Quasthoff: 'People said I was cursed by a witch'

Bass-baritone singer Thomas Quasthoff has overcome obstacles and adversity to become a globally popular figure. On the eve of a series of concerts at the Barbican, he talks to John Whitley.

Video VIDEO EMBED: Thomas Quasthoff http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraphtv/article4173891.ece#ooid=d0aGUxMTrN5oeyBpy9oedxXeiFVVqZtX

Link to this video 02 Jan 2009

To say that Thomas Quasthoff has a lively personality would be an understatement. The German bass-baritone positively fizzes with charisma: people stand to see him come into a crowded restaurant, students queue for his lessons and, at 49, he has spent years packing the world's grandest concert halls, from Vienna's Musikverein to the Hollywood Bowl.

"Yes," he says, with no pretence at false modesty, "at the present time I'm probably the most successful musician in the classical music world in Germany." So he can rest easy about filling all 2,000 seats at the Barbican in London for his five concerts as the Artist in Focus there, which begin with Haydn's Creation.

What makes Quasthoff's popular success so remarkable is that he has achieved it mainly in the rarefied and intimate world of devotional music and recital – traditionally far less glamorous than the high-profile opera stage and the antics of the Three Tenors.

In particular, he has transformed the art of lieder – originally domestic entertainment for friends around the piano – so that it appeals to big audiences at mainstream concerts in vast spaces. He is the first singer to do so since the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the Sixties – and, he suggests with a chuckle, he makes it rather more fun.

But the most astonishing thing about Quasthoff's career is that it's a triumph over adversity: he was one of thousands of Thalidomide babies who were born severely deformed in the Fifties and Sixties after their mothers had innocently taken the drug during pregnancy.

Young Thomas was parted from his parents at nine months, spent 18 months in quarantine and almost four years in a sort of plaster shell. Today he stands only four feet four inches tall and has three-fingered flippers where his arms should be. When performing he needs a high chair and a lectern for the score.

It's an achievement, however, that he is fed up with being praised for. "I am not here as some sort of role model. Of course, maybe at first people would come to see a freak. But they come a second time so then I know it's for my singing."

However forcefully he dismisses it, though, Quasthoff shares with other Thalidomide sufferers an aura of danger, of seeking out impossible challenges. The drug's effects are still an unknown quantity – no one can predict what may happen next week or next year, and this seems to push sufferers to live on the edge.

He acknowledges that he has sublimated into his performances this sense of risky improvisation and the rage he still feels at the barbaric way he has been treated.

"When I was little and waiting for my mother outside a shop, sometimes passers-by would say I was cursed by a witch. And that stays with you. But now I use that in my singing, so it's actually a plus."

Somehow the adolescent Thomas was sustained throughout all these rebuffs by an innate musicality, fostered by the swing and pop records his brother collected, and the development of an exceptional voice. "Of course there were setbacks – some pretty harsh ones. But you must never capitulate."

All great artists have that steely determination and Quasthoff's velvet-rich, penetrating baritone would have ensured him stardom in any generation. But what makes him revolutionary is the way he creates a performance of operatic depth and power within the intimacy of a recital.

"You know, the extraordinary thing about the lied is that each song can be really a whole opera in itself, a story in miniature. So a lied singer must be a true musician – the voice is not enough on its own, thank God. I've heard in my life so many singers with incredible voices but who were dying on stage because they had nothing to present with that voice.

"What we as artists, if we're really good, have to do is to create a space not only for the acting but where the sound can almost be seen. So you have to provide a focus, give the audience something to concentrate on. You can create this imaginary space on stage just by the angles at which you look or stand – not making a lot of movement but doing more than simply standing straight up. Immediately the audience is held."

This relaxed interpretation is the antithesis of the old stand-and-deliver technique favoured by stars such as Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

"Let's be honest, Fischer-Dieskau put lieder singing on a platform that's really like an intellectual monument. I never, never, ever, ever liked it. What I do is to have a conversation with the audience. And if there are people coughing, of course I ask them to stop, as I would in any conversation.

"That's what you get if you go to listen to jazz or swing – it's normal to have a conversation with the audience. In classical music there is this tradition that is saying to the audience, stay there, don't talk, look at your programmes."

To show how to jettison such fusty formality, Quasthoff has made a CD called The Jazz Album: Watch What Happens in which he swings from Ellington to Gershwin without a trace of recital-room orotundity. "When I sing jazz, it sounds like jazz," he says in his fluent mid-Atlantic English. "It's time for us to get rid of this idea that everything has to be solemn."

He applies the same sense of joyousness to the lied: "Alongside all the hard work of understanding the lyrics, the music, there is the truth that lied singing is fun, is joy. And it may be that the amazing success of these songs is because they are so close to everyone's own feelings.

"I prefer to bring the podium a little bit down and to say to people, look, this lied singing is also a part of your life, it's not some separated art form which is only for the intellectuals. That's stupid – the lied is the best way of communicating very directly with an audience."

And since Quasthoff admits to being "a compulsive communicator", he has no regrets that his disability has handicapped any operatic career or that related ailments now oblige him to reduce his concerts, even cancel a few: "The body changes, naturally, and the voice changes, too. I used to do 90 concerts a year , and always in different places – that's a hell [of a lot] of concerts!"

So, now approaching 50, it's a relief for him to cut back on the peripatetic life of the superstar. "I don't know of any book that begins, 'We had a good time at the airport,' " he says.

What he savours much more is life with his new family in his specially designed house – he married two years ago – and his classes at the Hanns Eisler Academy in Berlin, where his magnetic personality attracts droves of would-be students.

"Well, I am very, very good in spontaneous talking and I really enjoy teaching. I take it very seriously."

And the first lesson is the one that has sustained his own life – stay true to yourself: "Don't be an imitation of someone else. You may not like what I'm doing, but this is me. I have to make my own footsteps in the snow."

Concerts begin on Jan 10 at the Barbican, London EC2 (020 7638 8891).

GEORGIA https://youtu.be/lAKpJWI30HA

Thomas Quasthoff - Have A Little Faith In Me
https://youtu.be/-C5jXN-feU0
Thomas Quasthoff - My Funny Valentine
https://youtu.be/ZMb0g6I80hI

Bobby McFerrin + Thomas Quasthoff at Jazz Fest Wien 08 JazzFestWienTeam 376,579 views
https://youtu.be/RESX8YroSCQ

Thomas Quasthoff - Moon river
https://youtu.be/n8ICOyxlYdI

Thomas Quasthoff and Eugene Levinson perform Mozart's "Per Questa Bella Mano" with Riccardo Muti conducting the New York Philharmonic in a Live from Lincoln Center Broadcast

https://youtu.be/5k_1uuc2C7c
Annette Dasch, Thomas Quasthoff - HAYDN "Die Schöpfung" [8]

https://youtu.be/1mZHd_SHpcw

English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Q...

Attachments area
Preview YouTube video Thomas Quasthoff - Georgia on my mind

Preview YouTube video Thomas Quasthoff - Have A Little Faith In Me

Preview YouTube video Thomas Quasthoff - My Funny Valentine

Preview YouTube video Bobby McFerrin & Thomas Quasthoff at Jazz Fest Wien 08

Preview YouTube video Thomas Quasthoff - Moon river

Preview YouTube video Levinson & Quasthoff Mozart's"Per Questa Bella Mano" w/ Muti

Preview YouTube video Annette Dasch, Thomas Quasthoff - HAYDN "Die Schöpfung" [8]

Oliver Sacks: a Life Fully Lived

Oliver Sacks on Death, Destiny, and the Redemptive Radiance of a Life Fully Lived

“It is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”

By Maria Popova

Oliver Sacks on Death, Destiny, and the Redemptive Radiance of a Life Fully Lived

“To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,” Montaigne observed in his sixteenth-century meditation on death and the art of living.

“The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it,” the late surgeon and bioethicist Sherwin Nuland wrote half a millennium later in his foundational treatise on mortality.

I am yet to encounter a human being who embodied and enacted these difficult truths more wholeheartedly than Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015).

He confronted death directly, with courageous curiosity and radiant lucidity, in one of his New York Times essays posthumously collected in the small, enormously life-affirming book Gratitude (public library) — that great parting gift which gave us Dr. Sacks’s warm wisdom on the measure of living and the dignity of dying, edited by his partner, the writer and photographer Bill Hayes, and his friend and assistant of thirty years, Kate Edgar.

After learning of his terminal diagnosis, the irreplaceable Dr. Sacks peers into the depths of existence from the bittersweet platform of a long and, suddenly, immediately finite life:

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

As he faces the end of his own path — an end he had escaped narrowly decades earlier, when he saved his own life with literature and song — he writes:

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

Complement the thoroughly transcendent Gratitude with Dr. Sacks on what his beloved aunt taught him about dying with dignity and courage, his enchanting recollection of his largehearted life, and this remembrance of him written the day of his death, then revisit John Updike on writing and death and this wonderful Danish children’s book about making sense of mortality.

Source: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/08/30/oliver-sacks-gratitude-death/?mc_cid=524ae8a15d&mc_eid=431d4057b4

Oliver Sacs' Partner Tells a Personal Story

SundayReview | Opinion

Out Late With Oliver Sacks

By BILL HAYES
AUG. 26, 2016

Oliver Sacks at his New York City home in 2015. Credit Bill Hayes

When Oliver Sacks died on Aug. 30 of last year, at 82, the world lost a beloved author and neurologist. I lost my partner.

Oliver hated that term: partner. “A partner is what one has in business,” he would say, bristling, “not in bed, not in the kitchen next to you making dinner.” The man was nothing if not meticulous about words. We’d never married — never wanted to — so “husband” was out, and “companion” was too euphemistic. Oliver was old-fashioned: He preferred the word “lovers.” We loved each other; that said it.

Thinking back on my life with Oliver, two episodes from his last year come to mind, each revealing something of the private and public Dr. Sacks. The first took place at home in late November 2014, two months before he learned of his terminal cancer diagnosis. We had just finished dinner, it was about 7:30, when we heard noise on the street — chanting. We went to the big picture window overlooking Eighth Avenue. It was a Black Lives Matter march — the avenue filled, police escorts, signs, bullhorns.

“We should be with them,” Oliver said. Ordinarily the very definition of apolitical, he had been extremely distressed about the events in Ferguson, Mo., the killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island, repeated incidents of police brutality — all “morally reprehensible.”

But by then, the marchers had already moved north a block to 14th Street. We sat back down.

About 10 minutes later, I heard the same sound, the same chanting. “Oliver, I think they’re coming back — the rally — another wave.”

“Let’s go!” Cane in hand, Oliver scurried as quickly as he could to the coat closet, and began putting on his down jacket, muffler, hat and gloves. Whereas I could throw stuff on in a second, it simply took him longer. By the time we got outside our building, the marchers were once again gone.

We went back inside, deflated. But before we could hang our coats up, we heard yet another round, faintly, and without going to the window to check, pulled our coats back on. “We’re like the Marx Brothers,” Oliver said, laughing.

We got back into the elevator, got ourselves onto the sidewalk, and joined the tail end of the last wave of the march up Eighth Avenue, then heading east on 14th. His mood now sober, Oliver raised his voice with the others for several blocks. We walked more slowly than the rest, so we made it only as far as Sixth Avenue. From there, we stood and watched the marchers recede, headed for a big rally at Union Square.

On Sundays, Oliver and I would take a long walk in the West Village and often end up at our favorite bookstore, Three Lives & Company. On such a day in June of last year, one of the clerks, Troy, asked us if we were going to “Oliver Sacks Night” at Julius, the gay bar across the street from the store.

We had no idea what he was talking about. With that, Troy pulled out a flier for the monthly Mattachine Society party held at Julius; each party had a theme, and this month’s was Oliver Sacks. Apparently, it was inspired by the photo of him on the cover of his memoir “On the Move” — Oliver in 1961, age 27, looking studly in full leather atop his BMW motorbike. In the book, published a month earlier, he had come out as a gay man and discussed our relationship publicly for the first time.

I looked at Oliver skeptically: “Would you go? Do you want to go?” I was sure he’d say no.

“Yes,” he replied at once, “I would.”

In our six years together as a couple, we had never been to a gay bar. Oliver felt genuinely nervous about being recognized at one; but equally so, with his increasingly poor eyesight and hearing, he couldn’t abide crowded, noisy places of any kind. Oliver hadn’t been inside a gay bar in at least 40 years. But now? And for such an amusing reason — why not?

The party started at 9. We were early. (Oliver was always early for appointments; to be late, even five minutes late, could throw him into a panic.) I ordered beers and, feeling cheeky, introduced Oliver to the attractive bartender. The young man looked confused, as if thinking, “What? Oliver Sacks is still alive?” (One couldn’t really have blamed him; in a widely read essay published a few months before in The New York Times, Oliver had written candidly about his illness and impending death.)

Normally tongue-tied when it came to small talk, Oliver spoke right up: “Yes, that’s me —” he pointed to the fliers bearing his image taped all over the place, on the bar mirrors, on the walls. “Well, me a long, long time ago.”

The young man shook O’s hand with an air of genuine respect, then disappeared. In moments, I understood why: A voice came over the loudspeakers: “Gentlemen? Ladies? Queens? May I have your attention? I have just been told that Dr. Oliver Sacks is in the house — welcome to Oliver Sacks Night, Dr. Sacks!”

Applause erupted. Oliver could not have looked more tickled. And then, delighting him more, a tall drag queen appeared, tapped Oliver on the shoulder, and took his hand. She led him further back into the bar, and got a stool for him to perch on next to the table where a D.J. was setting up.
“What can I get you, hon?” said the drag queen.

“Oh!” Oliver exclaimed. “I don’t know!”

Oliver and decisions: another difficulty for him.

“We had beers,” I interjected, “how about another beer?”

The drag queen gave Oliver a squeeze on his upper arm. “You got it, babe,” she said. “And by the way, nice biceps.”

“Why, thank you,” Oliver said courteously.

A cold Heineken was placed in his hand, but he was able to take only a swig or two. Men and women were lining up to meet him. Here he was, enthroned on a rickety bar stool next to a makeshift D.J. booth in what’s known as the oldest gay bar in New York, shaking hands with one fellow gay person after another. Many were dressed like the Oliver Sacks in the poster — in leather. Some simply said hello, a few asked for autographs or selfies, three or four told stories. Everyone said thank you. A young woman told Oliver that she was autistic, and his writings on autism had helped her and her family to understand her identity.

By now, an hour after our arrival, the bar was jammed, the music getting loud, and for Oliver’s comfort and safety we thought it best to leave. We said our goodbyes and stepped outside. But a number of men followed us out onto the sidewalk. Questions came: How are you doing, Dr. Sacks? How are you feeling? What are you working on? What was Robin Williams like when you filmed “Awakenings”? What’s the most bizarre case you ever had? And so on.

Oliver propped himself against a streetlamp pole. A semicircle had formed around him (Troy and his boyfriend among them). He chatted and answered questions with élan for half an hour then signaled to me with his eyes that he was ready to go — exhausted, I could tell.

Not long after this night, we would learn that the metastases in his liver had spread to other organs, making his prognosis even more dire than we had expected. We had hoped he might have another six months at least.

Oliver took my arm, and we slowly walked home.

“Well, that was very nice,” he said, “very congenial indeed.”

I agreed. “Maybe we’ll go back again some night.”

Oliver thought about this for a moment. “No, that was enough for me,” he said. “That was perfect.”

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