Excellent article - Become Happier By Choosing your Thoughts Consciously

Become Happier By Choosing your Thoughts Consciously by Heather Havey


The mind is designed to take care of us. It collects data and then reminds us of this data through random, rapid thoughts and mental images. This ability is such a miraculous gift, and it allows us to operate intelligently and successfully in our lives.

However, please keep in mind that our brain is a 3-pound lump of cells. It easily mis-perceives and misinterprets data. When this happens, especially when it perceives life from a lens of insecure beliefs, then we can be tormented and we can suffer the effects of what many spiritual practitioners call the "monkey mind." Every being in existence experiences this most of their lives. We tend to trust and believe our thoughts blindly, and as a result we react to them all the time.

Meditation and taking silent, peaceful times each day are invaluable tools because they bring us enhanced space with which to observe our thoughts. One additional tool that we can practice is a variation of meditation. This practice is simple: Observe how our thoughts make us feel.

If a thought makes you suffer - if it gives you negative emotions such as doubt, anger, sadness, jealousy, and so on - then the thought is one that is based upon limited perceptions and often false beliefs that we have accepted as true. Bryon Katie once brilliantly said, "When a thought hurts, that's the signal that it isn't true."

To read the full article: http://www.examiner.com/x-18399-Honolulu-Health-and-Happiness-Examiner~y2009m8d15-Become-Happier-By-Choosing-your-Thoughts-Consciously******************************************************
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Widen your View

All I can is that there seems to be a vision possible to man, as from some more universal standpoint, free from the obscurity and localism which specially connect themselves with the passing clouds of desire, fear, and all ordinary thought and emotion; in that sense another and separate faculty...How can I express it?...for the sense that one is those objects and things and persons that one perceives - a sense in which sight and touch and hearing are all fused in identity. Nor can the matter be understood without realizing that the whole faculty is deeply and intimately rooted in the ultramoral and emotional nature and beyond the thought-region of the brain.

- Edward Carpenter, from Towards Democracy

"10 Ways to Eat Healthy on a Budget" by Heather Havey, M.A.

"10 Ways to Eat Healthy on a Budget" by Heather Havey, M.A.

1. Grow your own organic food. Seeds are very affordable. Simply takes a bit of prep, water, sunlight, and TLC. The joy of harvesting food that you grew yourself is priceless, will bring you great joy, and can change your life. Watching these plants grow can bring you peace, gratitude, and awe. Feeding yourself, friends, and loved ones will also bring you great joy.

2. Buy organic from local farmers. Food that has been shipped around the country or world is more expensive than food grown in your own town. Also, by supporting local organic farmers, you are supporting a healthier world (no poisons), and you are not supporting the destructive corporatization of the bigger farms. Huge companies typically care about profit and growth; consideration of your health is an afterthought, if a thought at all.

3. Buy seasonal produce. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and grains that are in season, are cheaper to buy.

4. Drink more water. People spend a LOT of money on sodas, alcohol, coffee, tea, and so on. Drink more water. Also, do not buy bottled water. Drink water purified from your own faucet or well. Also, you can easily grow camomile, peppermint, lavender, and other herbs to make your own tea with.

5. Buy bulk. You will save money by not buying quantities of foods with no need for packaging materials.

6. Prepare your own food rather than eating our or buying prepackaged meals. This always saves money. Also, typically your own homemade meals will be significantly healthier than any canned, jarred, packaged, processed, altered, or restaurant foods (though some restaurants can be very healthy).

7. Be a grazer. Rather than prepare elaborate and expensive meals, eat simply. Make a simple salad. Eat a cucumber, sliced. Eat a piece of fruit. Make a simple fruit salad. Make a simple soup. If you have fruit trees in your yard, you can eat those fruits for a snack. Be a grazer, of natural foods.

8. Eat less: when you feel hungry, sometimes all you need is a big glass of water. Americans eat far too much food!!! Eat smaller quantities of more nutritious food.

9. Organize potluck dinners or picnics with friends...and enjoy them out in nature.

10. If you see a particular sale on an item, eat that for the day or week.

Heather Havey, M.A., is a naturalist, veganic farmer, and author. She teaches yoga/meditation as well as organic farming techniques. She supports the "food not lawns" philosophy of filling your life with natural organic beauty, wildlife, and nature - rather than overly-manicured, poison-filled "lawns." To reach her: www.peacethroughkindness.com

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Please Bless Us To Share Your Love

© 2008 Peace Through Kindness
http://www.peacethroughkindness.com/
(this prayer is an adaption of Paramahansa Yogananda)

Abraham Maslow - Quotes from Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences

Some Maslow quotes from Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences

General Quotes:
If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?

Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred.

You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Victory depends on whether or not a duelist has the courage to fight until the bitter end.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up.

One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within-and make the point: This can be done.

The good society is one in which virtue pays.