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What is #depression? – Helen M. Farrell
05 Thursday Mar 2020
Posted in Depression, TedTalks, youtube
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watch the river
04 Wednesday Mar 2020
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Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. Pooh’s Little Instruction Book
Meditation for as short as 8 weeks can change your brain
03 Tuesday Mar 2020
Posted in Meditation, mindfulness
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Participants in the study spent close to a half-hour every day meditating or practicing some other mindfulness exercise (notable because most people associate meditation with sitting and thinking quietly, and that’s not the only type of exercise done in the study) for about eight weeks. They got MRIs of their brains before and after the eight week exercise, and when the study was over, many of the study’s 16 participants showed significant changes in the areas of the brain associated with behavior, memory, and stress. For more click the link below.
http://lifehacker.com/5989078/how-meditating-for-eight-weeks-can-boost-your-brain
Emotional Intelligence
03 Tuesday Mar 2020
Posted in Awareness, creative, Emotional Intelligence, groups
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I often work with groups using lists. In movement therapy as well as psychotherapy, educational and process oriented groups lists are a great structure for groups to explore thoughts, and/or feelings. Here is a list that often comes up in groups ten suggestions about feelings.
1. Become emotionally literate. Label your feelings, rather than labeling people or situations.
Use three word sentences beginning with “I feel”.
Start labeling feelings; stop labeling people & situations
“I feel impatient.” vs “This is ridiculous.” I feel hurt and bitter”. vs. “You are an insensitive jerk.”
“I feel afraid.” vs. “You are driving like an idiot.”
2. Distinguish between thoughts and feelings.
Thoughts: I feel like…& I feel as if…. & I feel that
Feelings: I feel: (feeling word)
3. Take more responsibility for your feelings.
“I feel jealous.” vs. “You are making me jealous.”
Analyze your own feelings rather than the action or motives of other people. 
Let your feelings help you identify your unmet emotional needs.
4. Use your feelings to help make decisions
“How will I feel if I do this?” “How will I feel if I don’t?”
“How do I feel?” “What would help me feel better?”
Ask others “How do you feel?” and “What would help you feel better?”
5. Use feelings to set and achieve goals
– Set feeling goals. Think about how you want to feel or how you want others to feel. (your employees, your clients, your students, your children, your partner)
– Get feedback and track progress towards the feeling goals by periodically measuring feelings from 0-10. For example, ask clients, students, teenagers how much they feel respected from 0 to 10.
6. Feel energized, not angry.
Use what others call “anger” to help feel energized to take productive action.
7. Validate other people’s feelings.
Show empathy, understanding, and acceptance of other people’s feelings.
8. Use feelings to help show respect for others.
How will you feel if I do this? How will you feel if I don’t? Then listen and take their feelings into consideration.
9. Don’t advise, command, control, criticize, judge or lecture to others.
Instead, try to just listen with empathy and non-judgment.
10. Avoid people who invalidate you. While this is not always possible, at least try to spend less time with them, or try not to let them have psychological power over you.
Top Songs I listened to in 2019: Riff Cohen – Dis Moi
02 Monday Mar 2020
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Top Songs I listened to in 2019: Riff Cohen – Dis Moi
Riff Cohen is an Israeli singer-songwriter, actress, and musician who performs songs in Hebrew, French and Arabic.
I have a 16,000 plus digital audio collection and I use Media Monkey to manage my files. One feature of Media Monkey is you can sort your collection based on the number of times played. This playlist is based on the top music and/or music video files I played/listened/streamed from my server in 2019. Complete Playlist HERE
snow branches
01 Sunday Mar 2020
Seguy Art Deco Designs 117
29 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted by RichardB | Filed under Seguy Art Deco Designs
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open to new
28 Friday Feb 2020
Our lives can be filled with creative moments, whatever we do, as long as we’re flexible and open to new possibilities—willing to push beyond routine. The everyday expression of creativity often takes the form of trying out a new approach to a familiar dilemma. Yet half the world still thinks of creativity as a mysterious quality that the other half has. Research suggests, however, that everyone is capable of tapping into his or her creative spirit. We don’t just mean getting better ideas; we’re talking about a kind of general awareness that leads to greater enjoyment of your work and the people in your life: a spirit that can improve collaboration and communication with others. 
Daily marijuana use has a measurable effect on the brain, a new study finds.
28 Friday Feb 2020
Teenagers who smoked marijuana daily for three years performed poorly on memory tasks and showed abnormal changes in brain structure, according to a Northwestern Medicine study. Researchers in Chicago observed the brains of teenagers who were heavy users of marijuana. In those individuals, memory-related structures in the brain appeared to shrink and collapse inward, possibly indicating a decrease in neurons.
These abnormalities were recorded two years after the teens stopped using marijuana, possibly indicating long-term effects, and look similar to schizophrenia-related brain abnormalities.
The brains were shaped more abnormally for individuals who began marijuana use at a younger age, according to the reports, which suggest that memory regions of the brain are more susceptible to the drug at earlier ages.
The research was published in the December issue of Schizophrenia Bulletin.
breathing
26 Wednesday Feb 2020
Posted in Awareness, breathing, grounding, Mental Health
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When we come out of the womb and take our first inhale and when we pass away and take our last exhale the breath is primal and fundamental to are being.
Since breathing is something we can control and regulate, it is a useful tool for achieving a relaxed and clear state of mind. Here are some simple breathing exercises:
Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound.
Close your mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four.
Hold your breath for a count of seven.
Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound to a count of eight.
This is one breath. Now inhale again and repeat the cycle three more times for a total of four breaths.
Place one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen. When you take a deep breath in, the hand on the abdomen should rise higher than the one on the chest. This insures that the diaphragm is pulling air into the bases of the lungs.
After exhaling through the mouth, take a slow deep breath in through your nose imagining that you are sucking in all the air in the room and hold it for a count of 7 (or as long as you are able, not exceeding 7)
Slowly exhale through your mouth for a count of 8. As all the air is released with relaxation, gently contract your abdominal muscles to completely evacuate the remaining air from the lungs. It is important to remember that we deepen respirations not by inhaling more air but through completely exhaling it.
Repeat the cycle four more times for a total of 5 deep breaths and try to breathe at a rate of one breath every 10 seconds (or 6 breaths per minute). At this rate our heart rate variability increases which has a positive effect on cardiac health.
Once you feel comfortable with the above technique, you may want to incorporate words that can enhance the exercise. Examples would be to say to yourself the word, relaxation (with inhalation) and stress or anger (with exhalation). The idea being to bring in the feeling/emotion you want with inhalation and release those you don’t want with exhalation.
In general, exhalation should be twice as long as inhalation. The use of the hands on the chest and abdomen are only needed to help you train your breathing. Once you feel comfortable with your ability to breathe into the abdomen, they are no longer needed.
Relapse Stages
26 Wednesday Feb 2020
Posted in Handout, recovery, relapse stages
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One of the hand outs I use with groups. This is a shorten version of Relapse Stages and just a starting off point for further discussion.
First stage – I am un aware. I don’t see it, and have no idea I am in trouble. (people around us may notice subtle changes in attitude and behavior).
Second Stage – We become restless, incurable and discontent. Our focus shifts from internal to external, we stop focusing on ourselves and start focusing on other people around us. We start blaming; acting the victim, fear and anger start to become evident.
Third stage – Unresolved feelings occur and they are not dealt with in a healthy manner. We go into the emotional and physical withdrawal, than start to isolate. Negative attitudes start to predominate such as compulsive behavior, we start discounting recovery, we may engage in magical thinking.
Fourth stage – A crisis in our life provides the excuse for us to start using it again, or we create a crisis that rationalizes are returned to use. In other words, we have made the decision to use, and are ready to light the fuse.
As we move through the stages of relapse, a few different things are occurring. Firstly, the need to regain our ‘right’ to re-engage in our addiction seems to make sense. We talk ourselves into the false belief that this time we can control it.
There’s a gradual and progressive destabilization of our lifestyle. Lastly, Stress and Stressors will accelerate this process.
How racial stereotypes impact communication
25 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in Communication, Expectations, Racial stereotypes, research
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Racial stereotypes and expectations can impact the way we communicate and understand others, according to UBC research.
The new study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, highlights how non-verbal “social cues” – such as photographs of Chinese Canadians – can affect how we comprehend speech.
“This research brings to light our internal, biases, and the role of experience and stereotypes, in how we listen to and hear each other,” says Molly Babel, the paper’s lead author and an assistant professor with UBC’s Department of Linguistics.
One of the study’s tasks involved participants from the UBC community transcribing pre-recorded sentences amid background static. The sentences were recorded by 12 native speakers of Canadian English. Half of the speakers self-identified as White, and the other half self-identified as Chinese. All speakers were born and raised in Richmond, B.C., which is south of Vancouver.
The pre-recorded sentences were accompanied by either black and white photos of the speakers, or by an image of three crosses. Overall, listeners found the Chinese Canadians more difficult to understand than the White Canadians – but only when they were made aware that the speaker was Chinese Canadian due to the photo prompt.
Participants were also asked to rate the strength of the accents of the speakers. They were asked to listen to two sentences from each speaker – one accompanied by the speaker’s photo, the other by an image of crosses. “Once participants were aware that they were listening to a White Canadian, suddenly the candidate was perceived as having less of a foreign accent and sounding more like a native speaker of Canadian English,” says Babel.
“It tells us as listeners that we need to be sensitive about the stereotypes that we carry,” notes Jamie Russell, the study’s co-author who was an undergraduate honours student in UBC’s Department of Linguistics during the project.
Background
The study, “Expectations and Speech Intelligibility,” is published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The authors are Molly Babel and Jamie Russell, both of UBC’s Department of Linguistics.
The study involved five tasks: speech perception in noise, accentedness rating, an implicit measure of ethnic bias, an explicit measure of ethnic bias and a social network self-assessment.
Top Songs I listened to in 2019: Laboratorium Pieśni
24 Monday Feb 2020
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I have a 16,000 plus digital audio collection and I use Media Monkey to manage my files. One feature of Media Monkey is you can sort your collection based on the number of times played. This playlist is based on the top music and/or music video files I played/listened/streamed from my server in 2019.
Laboratorium Pieśni – Song Laboratory (world/ethno/spiritual/mystic folk music) is a group of female singers from Poland, created in 2013. Using traditional, polyphonic singing they perform songs from all over the world, mainly: Ukraine, Balkans, Poland, Belarus, Georgia, Scandinavia and many other places. They sing a capella as well as with shaman drums and other ethnic instruments (shruti box, kalimba, flute, gong, zaphir and koshi chimes, singing bowls, rattles etc.), creating a new space in a traditional song, adding voice improvisations, inspired by sounds of nature, often intuitive, wild and feminine.
change
24 Monday Feb 2020
more snow plants
23 Sunday Feb 2020
Japanese Textile Designs 119
22 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted by RichardB | Filed under Japanese Textile Designs
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Pomeranian & Chiuahua Coloring Page
22 Saturday Feb 2020
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Posted by RichardB | Filed under Coloring Pages
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Yoga & Depression
21 Friday Feb 2020
Posted in Depression, mental health, Wellness, Yoga
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From an article on the Yoga International web site: 
Anyone who has suffered from depression understands how deep, abiding sadness or worthlessness can infiltrate and affect every aspect of our being. Our psychological makeup, physical health, mental outlook, and even our ability to interact with friends and family and be present to the world around us can get shaken to their core. Why? Because we identify with and attach ourselves to things that will inevitably change. As our feelings and other symptoms of depression persist, we have an increasingly difficult time imagining a life in which we break free from their spell and avoid “becoming” them.
Yoga teaches us that we aren’t our feelings or our symptoms but live in multidimensional relationship with them. One way to grasp this paradox is to picture the Self (purusha or pure, undifferentiated awareness) as pervading all nine interlocking and interdependent spheres of influence without being any one of them. See More here.
https://yogainternational.com/article/view/yoga-for-depression-an-integrated-practice
Relaxation & stressless
21 Friday Feb 2020
Posted in Handout, Relaxation, Stress, Wellness
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Stress is one reason people report relapsing and using substances/intoxicants. I’ve been teaching a stress less/relaxation class for years and below is one the handouts that participants report is most helpful.:
Change the situation: Avoid – Alter. Change your reaction: Adapt – Accept
1. Avoid unnecessary stress
Not all stress can be avoided, and it’s not healthy to avoid a situation that needs to be addressed.
Learn how to say “no” – Know your limits and stick to them.
Avoid people who stress you out –Limit the amount of time you spend with people that cause you stress.
Take control of your environment – If the evening news makes you anxious, turn the TV off.
Avoid hot-button topics –If you repeatedly argue about the same subject with the same people, stop bringing it up or excuse yourself when it’s the topic of discussion.
Pare down your to-do list –If you’ve got too much on your plate, distinguish between the “shoulds” and the “musts.”
2. Alter the situation
If you can’t avoid a stressful situation, try to alter it. Figure out what you can do to change things so the problem doesn’t present itself in the future.
Express your feelings instead of bottling them up. If something or someone is bothering you, communicate your concerns in an open and respectful way.
Be willing to compromise. When you ask someone to change their behavior, be willing to do the same.
Be more assertive. Deal with problems head on, doing your best to anticipate and prevent them.
Manage your time better. Plan ahead and make sure you don’t overextend yourself.
3. Adapt to the stressor
If you can’t change the stressor, change yourself. You can adapt to stressful situations and regain your sense of control by changing your expectations and attitude.
Reframe problems. Try to view stressful situations from a more positive perspective.
Look at the big picture. Will it matter in a month, or a year?
Adjust your standards. Set reasonable standards for yourself and others, and learn to be okay with “good enough.”
Focus on the positive. When stress is getting you down, take a moment to reflect on all the things you appreciate in your life, including your own positive qualities and gifts.
4. Accept what you can’t change
Some sources of stress are unavoidable, in such cases; the best way to cope with stress is to accept things as they are. Acceptance may be difficult, but in the long run, it’s easier than railing against a situation you can’t change.
Don’t try to control the uncontrollable. Focus on the things you can control such as the way you choose to react to problems.
Look for the upside. As the saying goes, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” When facing major challenges, try to look at them as opportunities for personal growth.
Share your feelings. Talk to a trusted friend or make an appointment with a therapist.
Learn to forgive. Accept the fact that we live in an imperfect world and that people make mistakes.
Microphone jammer
20 Thursday Feb 2020
Posted in discovery
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Tired of smart watches, cell phones and digital assistants listening in? Now a wearable microphone jammer that is capable of disabling microphones in its user’s surroundings, including hidden microphones. Our device is based on a recent exploit that leverages the fact that when exposed to ultrasonic noise, commodity microphones will leak the noise into the audible range. By making it wearable, our jammer outperforms existing approaches with an improved coverage and less blind spots.
RichardbBrunner 