Sticks and stones may break your bones
And names hurt you just the same.

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Fortunately, happiness is a skill set. Whether you're predisposed to it or not, you can learn it and practice it and build up your reserves of strength, resilience, and general health as a side-effect of enjoying life more:

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I love being reminded that though pain is ( Read more... )

Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch
By Melissa HogenboomScience reporter, BBC News

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I love Danny Dorling's work. And this article's a great example of it.

English education policy is based on a nasty little theory

Underlying education policies in England is the misguided idea that only a few children are clever and that the rest are less valuable, argues Prof Danny Dorling


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Martha Beck explains how rhino tracking crystallised her thinking on how our culture's focus on the logical and rational has led to us ignoring a huge, vital chunk of our brains' capabilities. It's by learning to befriend and respect our irrational, sensational selves that we can get to a healthy balance which allows us to flourish. And we need to ( Read more... )

Philip Zimbardo has spent decades researching evil, and is now focusing on how to teach heroism:

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Well worth checking out Zimbardo's work. It's always fascinated me that he has learned how to make most good people do bad things, which totally undermines the idea that a person must be innately weak or evil to do bad; now his research on heroism is ( Read more... )

I've struggled with my resistance to Self-care over the years. While I grokked that my system was trying to protect me from going near anything that upset me, and so derailed a huge variety of methods of self-enquiry and healing, I've recently begun taking Self-care Very Seriously Indeed, and this has led to a discovery:

I'm addicted to not ( Read more... )

I was very low on spoons yesterday, so T suggested we watch one or two of the episodes of Revolution that a friend of his had recorded. We ended up watching all of them back to back ( Read more... )

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Rankin also has a 4-part discussion of how the mind heals the body and why blaming anyone for their illness doesn't make sense .

The blurb from TED on this video runs thus:

"Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy shows how "power posing" -- standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don't feel confident -- can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact ( Read more... )

• Finally saw the Muppet film! We love the Muppets. Who DOESN'T love the Muppets? Only people who can't laugh, that's who. And I worry about them

• sabrinamari suggested I post a link to this excellent article by Hystery on the historical debt owed by modern Paganism (and feminism, and Theosophy, and...) to a group American Quakers - the comments section is worth ( Read more... )