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"Is Your Technology Biased?"

We thought you'd find this article recently published in the Washington Post interesting.  Is our technology biased?  Do we really understand its influence on ourselves and others? Is anything really private anymoer? One of our favorite cutting-edge thinkers, Douglas Rushkoff, weighs in in this piece by Dominic Basulto.

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Free Download! Jon Kabat-Zinn's "Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life"

It's free download time!  And we're happy to offer Jon Kabat-Zinn's "Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life" to you for FREE!  Jon Kabat-Zinn is renowned for bringing mindfulness meditation to the mainstream through books, workshops, and the Center for Mindfulness at University of Massachusetts Medical Center.  In this terrific program, Kabat-Zinn talks about mindfulness in every aspect of our lives, not just a formal meditative practice, making it accessible to everyone, no matter how busy we are! This program will only be available for free through Thursday morning, May 3, so take advantage of this special offer now!

Click here now for the free download!

Note: When ordering, please be sure the first item, Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday Life Digital Download for $0.00 is clicked.  The other items on the page are not part of the free offer.

 

 

Excerpt from "Broken Open" by Elizabeth Lesser - The Phoenix Process

We are delighted to share with you an excerpt from Elizabeth Lesser's wonderful book and New York Times bestseller Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow.  Lesser is the cofound of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York.  In the following excerpt, Lesser outlines what she calls "The Phoenix Process" - experiencing our life challenges as a way to further deepen and grow. 

The Phoenix Process

The transformational journey is a voyage with a hundred different names: the Odyssey, the Grail quest, the great initiation, the death and rebirth process, the supreme battle, the dark night of the soul, the hero’s journey. All of these names describe the process of surrendering to a time of great difficulty, allowing the pain to break us open, and then being reborn—stronger, wiser, kinder. Every religion includes in its texts, stories of descent and rebirth. From Jonah in the whale to Jesus on the cross, and from the Hindu hero Arjuna on the battlefield, to the prince Siddhartha leaving the castle in order to become the Buddha, the great ones have gone before us on this journey.

In a conversation between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, who was the twentieth century’s greatest interpreter of myths, Campbell talked about the hero’s journey: “A legendary hero is usually the founder of something—the founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the founder of a new city, the founder of a new way of life.”

In response, Moyers said to Campbell: “But doesn’t this leave all the rest of us ordinary mortals back on shore?”

“I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal,”

Excerpt from "Cause & Effect" with Marianne Williamson

In this thought-provoking transcribed excerpt from a lecture by Marianne Williamson, we are reminded at how the world and our perceptions change over time.

The conversation around our collective experience, our collective drama, is defined as politics. Now, the American people, I think, just like the people everywhere on this planet, all over the world -- we are now in the 21st century. There are conversations in philosophy, 19th century man. The 19th century man looked at the world differently than the 18th century man. The 20th century man looked at the world differently than the 19th century man. We would now see this as humanity. The point being that the 21st century human looks at the world differently than the 20th century human.
 
Now, we have phases that we go through, phases that we go through as individuals. You are a child, then you are an adolescent, and then you are a young adult, and these amazing processes that have to do. I remember when Gail Sheehy-- she wrote a book many years ago called Passages -- and Carl Jung has written about these things, how you know when you are in your teens life is one way, in your twenties life is another way, when you are in your thirties, another, forties another, fifties another, sixties another. There are these amazing passages that we go through and ways in which in every decade we live from a different place within ourselves.

Lesson 9 from Jon Kabat-Zinn's "Letting Everything Become Your Teacher"

Today's lesson from Jon Kabat-Zinn's wonderful guide Letting Everything Become Your Teacher is on "fresh mind" -- a pointed and useful reminder. 

LESSON 9 - Fresh Mind

To cultivate meditative awareness requires an entirely new way of looking at the process of learning. Since thinking that we know what we need and where we want to get is so ingrained in our minds, we can easily get caught up in trying to control things to make them turn out “our way,” the way we want them to. But this attitude is antithetical to the work of awareness and healing.

Reprinted from LETTING EVERYTHING BECOME YOUR TEACHER: 100 Lessons in Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn © 2009 by Jon Kabat-Zinn.  Reprinted by arrangement with the Random House Publishing Group.

Jon Kabat-Zinn Titles on BetterListen!

Jon Kabat-Zinn Bio and Links

Letting Everything Become Your Teacher

 

Lesson 8 from Jon Kabat-Zinn's "Letting Everything Become Your Teacher"

We are delighted to share the brief yet profound lessons from Jon Kabat-Zinn's delightful book Letting Everything Become Your Teacher: 100 Lessons in Mindfulness.  Today's lesson is on "whole being".

LESSON 8  - Whole Being

To cultivate the healing power of mindfulness requires much more than mechanically following a recipe or a set of  instructions. No real process of learning is like that. It is only when the mind is open and receptive that learning and seeing and change can occur. In practicing mindfulness you will have to bring your whole being to the process.

Reprinted from LETTING EVERYTHING BECOME YOUR TEACHER: 100 Lessons in Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn © 2009 by Jon Kabat-Zinn.  Reprinted by arrangement with the Random House Publishing Group.

Jon Kabat-Zinn Titles on BetterListen!

Jon Kabat-Zinn Bio and Links

Letting Everything Become Your Teacher

Excerpt 2 from "Healing at the Speed of Sound" with Don Campbell and Alex Doman

In this transcribed excerpt from "Healing at the Speed of Sound" with Don Campbell and Alex Doman, -- CEO of Advanced Brain Technology -- talks about how very much sound affects all the time, what we acclimate to and why, and the importance of how our auditory experience impacts our world.

I want to spend some time talking about our relationship with sound.  What is our relationship with a sound within our environment and within ourselves? It’s a very important consideration to make. And sound can be something that’s healthy and nurturing and nourishes and feeds us, or it can be something actually does harm, causes disease, and leads to ill health, so it’s about finding the balance of sound versus noise,