Mindfulness for stress relief guides? 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?
Can Meditating Before Bed Improve Sleep? Meditation, at any point of the day, benefits us in an array of ways. Whether we start our day with a peaceful session, practice it during lunch breaks, or meditate just before going to sleep, the positive impact is profound and visible. Some recent studies have proved that meditating at night helps people with insomnia and sleep disorders. A short practice right before we hit the bed helps to calm our nerves and get us into a relaxed state before we sleep. According to a study by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the sleep quality of people who practice bedtime meditation is better than non-meditators (Lazar, Carmody, Vangel, Congleton, 2011).
A review study last year at Johns Hopkins looked at the relationship between mindfulness meditation and its ability to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and pain. Researcher Madhav Goyal and his team found that the effect size of meditation was moderate, at 0.3. If this sounds low, keep in mind that the effect size for antidepressants is also 0.3, which makes the effect of meditation sound pretty good. Meditation is, after all an active form of brain training. “A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing,” says Goyal. “But that’s not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways.” Meditation isn’t a magic bullet for depression, as no treatment is, but it’s one of the tools that may help manage symptoms.
I’m thinking about how desire is at the center of what it is to be alive and how desire is the root of all suffering. Love and poetry and romance are, like, the only place of enjoyment for me. When feminists like Shulamith Firestone criticize romantic love, namely heterosexual coupling, as a site of oppression, I agree. But sometimes it also feels like romantic love is the only site of release, or even a site of resistance, under capitalism. Maybe I feel this especially as a sex worker, when you’re selling a sense of love or romance for work, the romance “off work” can feel like a space of reclaiming. Yet the new poems are coming so easily, I don’t know if I can trust them. I haven’t gone back to check, but I think there’s only one hyacinth in Porn Carnival. And no one gets bored to death by what existential crises overtake a body in the organic co-op of whatever town Bard College is in. It isn’t that type of book. You get lines such as “these girls were at the wrong orgy,” titles such as “In the Heart-Shaped Jacuzzi of my Soul.” Which isn’t to say it’s all so… rowdy. On god, she reminds me most of Octavio Paz. Still, it’s a book about sex work, mainly. See extra info at https://mytrendingstories.com/article/poems-inner-beauty/. Onomatopoeia is not an easy word to say or spell, but it is one of the most fun and common techniques used in poetry. Onomatopoeia is simply the use of a word that imitates a sound, like bam, crash, boom, splash. Words like these appeal to the reader’s senses and bring the reader into the poem.
The topic of our conversation is Rabbit White’s aesthetically and conceptually rich debut full-length collection of poetry, Porn Carnival. Rabbit White is a sex worker, and much of the poetry in this book is about her experiences in that line of work. Speaking with her is similar to the experience of reading her writing, which is heady, very coy, and curious. A poem like “Monologue Beyond Midnight,” which is a wry retort to an idea from Nietzche’s The Gay Science, is a cross section of Rabbit White’s humor, anger, and deep intuition of sound and texture. Rabbit White walked Vogue through her poems, her activism and advocacy, and the idea of inhabiting multiple personas for your art and your work.
There are 431 steps leading up to 10,000 Buddhas Monastery. They’re lined with life-size, gilded Buddha statues, each entirely distinct from the next. At the top, at the complex itself (also known as Man Fat Sze), another 12,000 golden statues will great you, as well as pavilions and a pagoda. Oh, and the panorama of Sha Tin and its mountainous surrounds. In a nutshell: it’s all very, very scenic and Insta-worthy. See also: 10 Buddhas to look out for at the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery.
Meditation has been around since ancient history. With science and technological advancements, we are only rolling towards the knowledge that was always there. Scientists today approach meditation as an all-around solution to lifestyle malfunctions and have put forth some mind-boggling evidence on how meditation rewires the neural channels to promote inner peace and equilibrium. Meditation promotes mental balance by controlling the “monkey mind” (Luders, Cherbuin, Kurth, 2015). Monkey Mind is a colloquial term for the brain activity known as the “Default Mode Network” (DMN). The DMN is responsible for what we think when we do not attend to anything specific. It causes the mind to wander and engage in non-targeted pieces of information that distracts us. Reduced DMN activity in the brain is the reason why meditators can remain more present-oriented and focused all the time.