A very useful workbook on relaxing and reducing stress. As typical though, can't be trusted outside its domain (nutrition, exercise) and fails to see some within its domain: heartbreath meditation.
Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage: America's Love Lab Experts Share Their Strategies for Strengthening Your Relatio by John M. Gottman
Good book on communication, but uneven even there. Some notes:
Ask explatory questions, develop curiousity about other people's experiences and learn to listen. "Can you tell me more about this? Explain what you mean."
Present challenges and differences without criticizing.
Express and accept appreciation.
Recognize when you're stressed and take steps to relax.
Say what you're feeling and what you want and need, even if it's difficult.
Listen and respond to another's feelings and wants and needs before reassuring and before trying to solve the problem.
Respond to criticism with the honest question: "What do you want?"
Hear the longing in a complaint.
On messing up: "I feel terrible about this. What can I do to make it up to you? I would also like your understanding and support."
Respond to non-responsiveness: I really want you to understand my feelings here.
Ask explatory questions, develop curiousity about other people's experiences and learn to listen. "Can you tell me more about this? Explain what you mean."
Present challenges and differences without criticizing.
Express and accept appreciation.
Recognize when you're stressed and take steps to relax.
Say what you're feeling and what you want and need, even if it's difficult.
Listen and respond to another's feelings and wants and needs before reassuring and before trying to solve the problem.
Respond to criticism with the honest question: "What do you want?"
Hear the longing in a complaint.
On messing up: "I feel terrible about this. What can I do to make it up to you? I would also like your understanding and support."
Respond to non-responsiveness: I really want you to understand my feelings here.
Worth reading, carefully and with a barf bucket for some truly annoying statements.
Franco and the Spanish Civil War (Introductions to History (New York, N.Y.).) by Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses
Good read from 'mainstream' history.
A couple of good insights. Worth reading for that point of view. Surprising reformism mixed in ("today is different").
Damasio's Error and Descartes' Truth: An Inquiry into Consciousness, Metaphysics, and Epistemology by Andrew Gluck
Piece of shit to the 100th power.
A first person history of the Warsaw ghetto. This is a must read, must read, must read.
Upward energy (enlightenment/liberation) develops individual, and downward energy (body work/manifestation) brings organization of upper levels to lower levels.
Kundalini-Shakti is power/energy, and Shiva is calm/clarity and tantra is heartspace in middle.
Seven chakras provide a template for a balanced life.
"Chakra six symbolically reflects the unconscious while chakra seven is the realm of conscious understanding."
Kundalini-Shakti is power/energy, and Shiva is calm/clarity and tantra is heartspace in middle.
Seven chakras provide a template for a balanced life.
"Chakra six symbolically reflects the unconscious while chakra seven is the realm of conscious understanding."
Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition by John A. Sloboda
Skimmed some, gave too little attention to rate.
Lerdahl's "Cognitive constraints on compositional systems" is the only one that truly caught my eye. He strikes me as a thinker that recognizes the dialectic in life.
"Vast numbers of nonredundant events fly by, but the effect is of a smooth sheen of pretty sounds. The listener's processing capacities..are not overwhelmed."
Buts forward the ideas of a compositional and a listening grammar: the former is what generates the music, and the latter generates the representations of the music. (So the piece in the quote above was generated by complex rules...specifically an artificial/conscious grammar but lead to non-detailed representation. A mark of divorcing method from intuition.)
So he argues understanding 'listening grammar' by understanding how we cognitively process music will enable us to create better compositional grammars.
The final research finds the interesting but sort of obvious conclusion that skill at performance and composition are two different skills.
Lerdahl's "Cognitive constraints on compositional systems" is the only one that truly caught my eye. He strikes me as a thinker that recognizes the dialectic in life.
"Vast numbers of nonredundant events fly by, but the effect is of a smooth sheen of pretty sounds. The listener's processing capacities..are not overwhelmed."
Buts forward the ideas of a compositional and a listening grammar: the former is what generates the music, and the latter generates the representations of the music. (So the piece in the quote above was generated by complex rules...specifically an artificial/conscious grammar but lead to non-detailed representation. A mark of divorcing method from intuition.)
So he argues understanding 'listening grammar' by understanding how we cognitively process music will enable us to create better compositional grammars.
The final research finds the interesting but sort of obvious conclusion that skill at performance and composition are two different skills.
Moving character film of state control in East Germany.
This idiot is paid to write: http://jeffsharlet.blogspot.com/2007/02/florian-henckel-von-donnersmarck-lives.h...
The anon commenter corrects him well: "art may be politically impotent but also profoundly humanising, a means of sustaining a sense of empathy and compassion in the hope that "good times" will come again."
This idiot is paid to write: http://jeffsharlet.blogspot.com/2007/02/florian-henckel-von-donnersmarck-lives.h...
The anon commenter corrects him well: "art may be politically impotent but also profoundly humanising, a means of sustaining a sense of empathy and compassion in the hope that "good times" will come again."
Watch it.
The first six and a half minutes taken as a whole are amazing and worth it. Scattered throughout are complex bits on love and family (how, being strong can be a way to hide, how some things we do we think are loving are hurtful for others--see his relationship with his son, and how he resolves these things).
I find the opening scene of falling in love works and doesn't work. The following scene of the bittersweetness of family life with the comedian in a suit is moving. But in the movie it's a carcrash that kills their children, which I find more useful as a metaphor for their jobs killing their inner children. I think the movie would've been better if she had killed herself because their lives had become slowly twisted into something they hated, rather than because of arbitrary car crashes. (It would've been both more disturbing, and more true.)
I also think the climax doesn't quite work, but there's something true to it nonetheless.
It's a beautiful film that made me cry for sorrow and for joy at points, and made me think and feel differently about life.
The first six and a half minutes taken as a whole are amazing and worth it. Scattered throughout are complex bits on love and family (how, being strong can be a way to hide, how some things we do we think are loving are hurtful for others--see his relationship with his son, and how he resolves these things).
I find the opening scene of falling in love works and doesn't work. The following scene of the bittersweetness of family life with the comedian in a suit is moving. But in the movie it's a carcrash that kills their children, which I find more useful as a metaphor for their jobs killing their inner children. I think the movie would've been better if she had killed herself because their lives had become slowly twisted into something they hated, rather than because of arbitrary car crashes. (It would've been both more disturbing, and more true.)
I also think the climax doesn't quite work, but there's something true to it nonetheless.
It's a beautiful film that made me cry for sorrow and for joy at points, and made me think and feel differently about life.
Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives by Jeff Schmidt
Read if you're thinking about grad school.
Written in an annoyingly addictive way. I didn't enjoy it but was addicted. It also annoyed me that it got history wrong while claiming to be historical and that at the end, they cover the secret up, fing elitists.
Check out zen to done (google) for a cheap ebook or free webarticles. Probably will do fine with that instead of buying book.
Cobb is shit, not the shit. shit. Maybe near the top of the pile of shit that is contemporary theology though.
I read this in middleschool and kinda wish I hadn't. I have unarticulated fears from it.
Last Hunters, First Farmers: New Perspectives on the Prehistoric Transition to Agriculture (School of American Research by T. Douglas Price
Part of my interest in creation of class society.
I always remember...hopefully correctly....that he would mention when he went on a long trip from one town to another something like: "I had 13 minor satories and 4 major satories, and fell over laughing from a satori 7 times...if you don't fall over laughing from enlightenment somtimes, you're not doing it right!"
The book that introduced me to Leninism.
Life is beautiful...but sometimes it hurts like hell.
Read the first paragraph on marxists.org and tell me if any other autobiography or biography starts off so penetratingly.
I read this book after completing my religious studies major and was quite frustrated it contained insights and answers to questions I had been raising for years in class with no answers but instead resistance.