Gratitude
Failure
"I have not failed; I have only found 10,000 ways that won't work" Thomas Edison
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from poor judgment." Mark Twain
"I have not failed; I have only found 10,000 ways that won't work" Thomas Edison
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from poor judgment." Mark Twain
Space
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." Victor Frankl
Thoughts from Dan Siegel (UCLA Professor of Interpersonal Neurobiology):
Too often we forget that discipline really means to teach, not to punish. A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioral consequences.
------
Parents know how powerful storytelling can be when it comes to distracting their kids or calming them down, but most people don't realize the science behind this powerful force. The right side of our brain processes our emotions and autobiographical memories, but our left side is what makes sense of these feelings and recollections. Healing from a difficult experiences emerges when the left side works with the right to tell our life stories.
When children learn to pay attention and to share their own stories they can respond in healthy ways to everything from a scraped elbow to a major loss or trauma.
------
It's important to help our kids understand that feelings are temporary. On average, an emotion comes and goes in 90 seconds. If we can communicate to our children how fleeting most feelings are, then we can give them the mindsight skills to examine those emotions and correct themselves by saying, "I'm not dumb; I just FEEL dumb right now." The more our children can understand that feelings come and go, the less they'll get stuck and the more they'll be able to make good choices.
-------
Healthy relationships between children and their parents, students and their teachers, and clients/patients and their therapists each promote resilient functioning. By sharing energy information between two people in an “integrative way,” these relationships are stimulating the neuronal activation and growth of the regulatory circuits in the brain. Relationships that honor differences and promote linkages between two people are at the core of health and happiness.
-------
Through the lens of Interpersonal Neurobiology, resilience can be seen as the cultivation of nine functions including bodily regulation, compassionate communication, emotional balance, flexibility, fear modulation, insight, empathy, morality and intuition. These functions emerge from the integrative fibers of the prefrontal cortical areas that coordinate and balance a wide range of neural circuits.
What's amazing about this? Both secure parent-child relationships AND mindfulness practices promote these nine functions.
-------
Our sense of a "we" is born from these earliest ways in which we "feel felt" within the mind of our caregivers. Seeing the connections between the mind, the embodied brain, and our relationships lets us come to view the self as a plural verb rather than a singular noun. Being open to one's own inner life with kindness, connecting to another person, being a part of a group, being a member of a larger community, and having a sense of meaning that emerges from interconnections with a larger whole, each form the foundation for a sense of "we" that is at the core of what can be called a spiritual life.
-------
The principle of "integration," the linkage of differentiated parts, can illuminate how each of these foundational layers contributes to a sense of transpiration in which the self is expanded beyond the boundaries of the body. A compassionate membership within a larger interconnected whole becomes a way of being in the world.
-------
Focusing on the present rather than letting the mind drift may help to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, suggests new research from the Shamatha Project at the University of California, Davis. http://news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=10538
-------
When we ourselves register attunement, either consciously or not, our own state can change. The observed takes in the observer having taken her in, and the two become joined. This is resonance. Beginning with a genuine sense of care and interest by the focus of the other's careful attention, resonance extends this positive interaction into a fuller dimension of the other being changed because of who we are. This is how we feel "felt" and this is how two individuals become a "we."
-------
A great way to integrate the upstairs and downstairs brain is to "move it or lose it." Kids love to move. So when your child is upset, and after you've acknowledged his feelings, give him reasons to move his body. Wrestle with him. Play "keep it up" with a balloon. Toss a ball back and forth while he's telling you why he's upset. Moving the body is a powerful way to change a mood. What "move it" strategy works for you?
-------
Fear drives us to shine a focused beam of light onto what we think we must know, to keep us safe, to give us a sense of truth, of keeping the world the way we think it should be. We have words and ideas that frame and form the field of awareness that dull our senses, shaping what we think we know, in thoughts, about what can be known. But the real truth is that those “cognitive contraptions” help structure a neural attempt to make sense of a complex world, only to then entrap us in the very structures that we have created.
-------
It's very exciting to understand (and to teach our kids) that we can use our minds to take control of our lives. By directing our attention, we can go from BEING INFLUENCED by factors within and around us to INFLUENCING them. We can shift our focus so that we are no longer victims of forces seemingly beyond our control, but active participants in the process of deciding and affecting how we think and feel.
-------
The terms “awareness” and “consciousness” are seen by many as synonyms. Though sometimes people extend the personal use of consciousness to refer to a wider, shared process, even this broader use of the term consciousness can still be seen as a form of SHARED AWARENESS, of something being in the front of people's minds, of a cultural awareness, of a "collective consciousness."
In this way, cultural evolution may occur by a shift in SHARED AWARENESS that is transmitted in the profoundly important but often subtle patterns of interpersonal communication that are a fundamental part of our socially embedded and interconnected mental lives.
Thoughts from Dan Siegel (UCLA Professor of Interpersonal Neurobiology):
Too often we forget that discipline really means to teach, not to punish. A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioral consequences.
------
Parents know how powerful storytelling can be when it comes to distracting their kids or calming them down, but most people don't realize the science behind this powerful force. The right side of our brain processes our emotions and autobiographical memories, but our left side is what makes sense of these feelings and recollections. Healing from a difficult experiences emerges when the left side works with the right to tell our life stories.
When children learn to pay attention and to share their own stories they can respond in healthy ways to everything from a scraped elbow to a major loss or trauma.
------
It's important to help our kids understand that feelings are temporary. On average, an emotion comes and goes in 90 seconds. If we can communicate to our children how fleeting most feelings are, then we can give them the mindsight skills to examine those emotions and correct themselves by saying, "I'm not dumb; I just FEEL dumb right now." The more our children can understand that feelings come and go, the less they'll get stuck and the more they'll be able to make good choices.
-------
Healthy relationships between children and their parents, students and their teachers, and clients/patients and their therapists each promote resilient functioning. By sharing energy information between two people in an “integrative way,” these relationships are stimulating the neuronal activation and growth of the regulatory circuits in the brain. Relationships that honor differences and promote linkages between two people are at the core of health and happiness.
-------
Through the lens of Interpersonal Neurobiology, resilience can be seen as the cultivation of nine functions including bodily regulation, compassionate communication, emotional balance, flexibility, fear modulation, insight, empathy, morality and intuition. These functions emerge from the integrative fibers of the prefrontal cortical areas that coordinate and balance a wide range of neural circuits.
What's amazing about this? Both secure parent-child relationships AND mindfulness practices promote these nine functions.
-------
Our sense of a "we" is born from these earliest ways in which we "feel felt" within the mind of our caregivers. Seeing the connections between the mind, the embodied brain, and our relationships lets us come to view the self as a plural verb rather than a singular noun. Being open to one's own inner life with kindness, connecting to another person, being a part of a group, being a member of a larger community, and having a sense of meaning that emerges from interconnections with a larger whole, each form the foundation for a sense of "we" that is at the core of what can be called a spiritual life.
-------
The principle of "integration," the linkage of differentiated parts, can illuminate how each of these foundational layers contributes to a sense of transpiration in which the self is expanded beyond the boundaries of the body. A compassionate membership within a larger interconnected whole becomes a way of being in the world.
-------
Focusing on the present rather than letting the mind drift may help to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, suggests new research from the Shamatha Project at the University of California, Davis. http://news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=10538
-------
When we ourselves register attunement, either consciously or not, our own state can change. The observed takes in the observer having taken her in, and the two become joined. This is resonance. Beginning with a genuine sense of care and interest by the focus of the other's careful attention, resonance extends this positive interaction into a fuller dimension of the other being changed because of who we are. This is how we feel "felt" and this is how two individuals become a "we."
-------
A great way to integrate the upstairs and downstairs brain is to "move it or lose it." Kids love to move. So when your child is upset, and after you've acknowledged his feelings, give him reasons to move his body. Wrestle with him. Play "keep it up" with a balloon. Toss a ball back and forth while he's telling you why he's upset. Moving the body is a powerful way to change a mood. What "move it" strategy works for you?
-------
Fear drives us to shine a focused beam of light onto what we think we must know, to keep us safe, to give us a sense of truth, of keeping the world the way we think it should be. We have words and ideas that frame and form the field of awareness that dull our senses, shaping what we think we know, in thoughts, about what can be known. But the real truth is that those “cognitive contraptions” help structure a neural attempt to make sense of a complex world, only to then entrap us in the very structures that we have created.
-------
It's very exciting to understand (and to teach our kids) that we can use our minds to take control of our lives. By directing our attention, we can go from BEING INFLUENCED by factors within and around us to INFLUENCING them. We can shift our focus so that we are no longer victims of forces seemingly beyond our control, but active participants in the process of deciding and affecting how we think and feel.
-------
The terms “awareness” and “consciousness” are seen by many as synonyms. Though sometimes people extend the personal use of consciousness to refer to a wider, shared process, even this broader use of the term consciousness can still be seen as a form of SHARED AWARENESS, of something being in the front of people's minds, of a cultural awareness, of a "collective consciousness."
In this way, cultural evolution may occur by a shift in SHARED AWARENESS that is transmitted in the profoundly important but often subtle patterns of interpersonal communication that are a fundamental part of our socially embedded and interconnected mental lives.