John Concrane August 10, 2021

Wellness care and mindfulness meditation advices? If you’re like most people, the chances are that you’re so deeply caught up in the rat race that you don’t spare enough time to pause and take notice of all the beauty around you. But imagine how fulfilling life would be if we all appreciated our beauty as well as that of others and the world as a whole. Won’t your days be supercharged when you wake up each morning and the first thing that hit your eyes is a motivational aesthetic quote on your wall?

An interesting study by the University of Montreal proved that meditation builds endurance against physical pain. In the study, two groups received equal amounts of extreme heat in their bodies for a fair amount of time. One of the groups had Zen Buddhist masters who were dedicated meditators, and the other group had thirteen non-meditators. Researchers were amazed at how the Zen masters reported significantly less pain than the other participants (Ziddan, Mertucci, Kraft, Gordon, McHaffie, and Coghill, 2011).

Last week, a study from UCLA found that long-term meditators had better-preserved brains than non-meditators as they aged. Participants who’d been meditating for an average of 20 years had more grey matter volume throughout the brain — although older meditators still had some volume loss compared to younger meditators, it wasn’t as pronounced as the non-meditators. “We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating,” said study author Florian Kurth. “Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain.”

Before, I was constantly running things through the lens of theory and philosophy, creating multiple dramatic voices in the text. I am still thinking about the phenomenology of romance, but the problem of romance is something that’s passed to you as a child, through the family, through the entire world around you. It’s something I’ve always known so intimately, so maybe that’s why in addressing it. There’s a softness, there’s lyricism. I was beating that out of the poems before. This didn’t go without controversy. Some took issue with her feelings about her own experience, something to the effect of it being unethical of her to exploit her own exploitation. She was even accused of being a “fake” sex worker. Her accusers were not sex workers, so it’s anyone’s guess how they might know enough to tell a fugazzi from a genuine article, but this is neither here nor there. A few porn stars bowed up to troll for White, and that was the last of people saying she was a fake. See a lot more details on https://mytrendingstories.com/scarlet-phu. Write different versions, then look them over and compare. How do they look on the page? Dense and heavy, or light and delicate? How well does their appearance fit your poem? What about the sound? Try reading them out loud. What is the rhythm like, for example, short and choppy, bouncy, smooth? Are there places where your eye or voice pauses? Are these the right places? Which versions are most interesting to read? Are there any places where the look or sound becomes distracting (for example, if you have one very long line that sticks out too much)?

How do you stay political in all the different things that you’re doing? Mine is a politics that comes from care, and mutual aid. I think the poems come back to that core. It’s not this idea of self-care, which I think can be very individualistic, and almost selfish. To me, care is community care. It’s keeping an extra space for friends who end up homeless or in between apartments, which often happens when people are criminalized. There’s ways to use your money to maintain spaces of care. Throwing parties to me is care. All these people come together at my parties, and everyone is intellectual and sexy and smart and [they] have all of these interesting things to say, and the girls end up doing a lot of care for each other when they’re coming down from working too much. A lot of what happens during the parties [that I throw] is people intellectualizing what is happening at work and what their burnout is doing to them and how the proximity to money and wealthy people is fucking with their brain. It’s almost therapeutic care that we do for each other. It’s also care to fuck people who aren’t clients and take back sexual energy.

Not as large as the Museo de la Nacion, the National Archaeology, Anthropology, and History Museum does an excellent job of exploring the history of Peru from prehistoric times to the colonial era. The displays are well organized, and you won’t be overwhelmed by the amount of material, making it easier to understand. The variety is impressive, too, with priceless examples of ceramics, figural stone carvings, obelisks, wrapped mummies, burial tombs, jewelry, tapestries, and gold and metal work, many shown with scale models of the archeological sites. The ceramic collection features pieces, which date from 2800 BC, and among the carved obelisks are the granite Tello Obelisk and the famous Estela Raimondi. Parents should be aware that some of the ceramic figures may not be suitable for children. Included with the museum is the adjacent home, once occupied by both Jose de San Martin and Simon Bolivar.

Studies suggest that meditation functions on specific parts of the brain that are known to create depression, anxiety, and stress responses. For example, the medial prefrontal cortex, or the ‘me-center’ of the mind gets into overdrive during the depression and anxiety states. As a result, we experience more negative feelings about ourselves and keep sabotaging our self-esteem cluelessly. Amygdala, or the ‘fear center’ is a part of the limbic system that creates fear responses and activates the fight-or-flight system in the body, that consumes a significant portion of our energy, leaving us to feeling tired and weary for the rest of the day. During the depression and anxious states, the ‘me-center’ and the ‘fear center’ work simultaneously, causing a chain of reactions, as illustrated below.