Posts tagged Hearts
Hearts Have Their Own Brain and Consciousness
Feb 29th
Many believe that conscious awareness originates in the brain alone. Recent scientific research suggests that consciousness actually emerges from the brain and body acting together. A growing body of evidence suggests that the heart plays a particularly significant role in this process.
Far more than a simple pump, as was once believed, the heart is now recognized by scientists as a highly complex system with its own functional “brain.”
Research in the new discipline of neurocardiology shows that the heart is a sensory organ and a sophisticated center for receiving and processing information. The nervous system within the heart (or “heart brain”) enables it to learn, remember, and make functional decisions independent of the brain’s cerebral cortex. Moreover, numerous experiments have demonstrated that the signals the heart continuously sends to the brain influence the function of higher brain centers involved in perception, cognition, and emotional processing.
Continue Reading – Hearts Have Their Own Brain and Consciousness
Sweet Forgiveness Healing Hearts and Minds
Jan 23rd
Contributing Writer for Wake Up World
We’ve all been running around in circles, trying to find the golden key that unlocks the door and releases our permanent happiness, reminds us of who and what we are, and reveals what our purpose in life is. In a nutshell, our real purpose is to bring peace to the world by bringing peace to our own mind. In order to accomplish this miracle, each of us will need to focus on one goal: The Mastery of Forgiveness. Over the course of time, there will be some arm wrestling over the true meaning of what it means to forgive, but any way we slice it, every time we forgive, we have just increased our happiness.
Continue Reading – Sweet Forgiveness Healing Hearts and Minds
Re-Greening Our Hearts (Part 4)
Oct 24th
A Practical Path for a Successful Planet
If you have not read Part 1, please read it first here
If you have not read Part 2, please read it first here
If you have not read Part 3, please read it first here
24th October 2011
By Jack Adam Weber - Guest Writer for Wake Up World
It is time to reclaim our lives by taking back our physiologies, our minds, and our hearts through good thinking, creativity, meaningful work, community, simple pleasures, more leisure time, and holistic living. We need to spend more time in nature, any way we can. We can learn to reprogram ourselves under the tutelage of Nature herself. Nature influences us at both obvious and deep unconscious levels. Longer sojourns in nature are recommended so that its subtle yet powerful effects can reach and heal us beneath the mental, physiological, emotional, and lifestyle conditionings that can take time to loosen their hold on us.
We may choose at some point to live rurally. Even if we don’t know how to, cannot imagine, or feel repelled, embarrassed, or guilty doing so, by moving into such a life, we place ourselves in position to discover deeper inner fulfilment. Here we also can remember how to perceive and live life poetically. Natural metaphors (including poems themselves) unite seemingly disparate aspects of life, thereby unveiling wholeness and catalyzing healing. For instance, the satisfaction and wisdom gained from growing food—from planting a seed to eating its fruit—is also an exciting and ineffable experience. The nature-saturated among us, who have also, for example, witnessed and helped along the miracle of food grown from seed, are and will increasingly become crucial medicine for planetary healing. The 11-year old Birke Baehr is a glowing example.
Re-Greening Our Hearts (Part 3)
Oct 20th
A Practical Path for a Successful Planet
If you have not read Part 1, please read it first here
If you have not read Part 2, please read it first here
20th October 2011
By Jack Adam Weber - Guest Writer for Wake Up World
To a great extent, each of us can choose what we consume, depending on the resources available to us. Certain “necessities” for coping and positively contributing to life are primarily provided by corporate monoliths (cars, gasoline, and computers, for example). Nonetheless, making self-empowering and nature-sustaining choices when we can is the obligation of every reasonable person who values life. In these critical times we need healers not product-pushers in politics and policy, business and its media.
The talking heads of Big Business justify their mania and lack of soul by appealing to the very fear they create. Advertising driven by larger-than-life transnationals such as Coca-Cola, Monsanto, McDonalds, Toshiba and Mitsubishi does the evil work of stimulating people’s addictions, weaker selves, and unhealthy cravings. Then they feed this bottomless pit (bottomless because the filler is insubstantial and unable to truly satiate) of craving for their own profit.
Rather than promote healing, sustainability, and self-empowerment in a mutually interdependent package, Big Business promotes unchecked capitalism by promoting and glorifying this external system of insatiable desire through the cycle of acquiring more and more, the buying and too prompt burying of their cheap toys and gadgets, affording them windfall profits while ordinary folks become more inwardly and outwardly impoverished. The more they hook us on the allure of their stuff, the more we are driven to buy and the more (truly and illusorily) powerful they become. This cycle results in loss of happiness, wholeness, wisdom, connection to grace in our bodies, as well as an ongoing financial struggle to make ends meet under the burden of constant debt and compounded interest. Allowing ourselves to be bought out as consumerism prostitutes leads to depression, helplessness, soul loss, ill health, and every other symptom of self-avoidance and lack of self-care. So, next time you drive by McDonalds, reach for the non-organic milk or corn, sign the loan papers for the fancy new SUV, shut down your true feelings, courage and intuition….just don’t go there. Pull back, take a breath, give yourself and the tree next to you a hug.
Imagine if the media and advertising sectors of Fortune 1000 transnationals were annually reviewed for their moral and ecological integrity and were required to dedicate a portion of their multi-million dollar advertising budgets to encouraging empowerment and sanity rather than continually manipulating people and promoting the deification of people’s base desires.
Re-Greening Our Hearts (Part 2)
Oct 17th
A Practical Path for a Successful Planet
If you have not read Part 1, please read it first here
17th October 2011
By Jack Adam Weber - Guest Writer for Wake Up World
Promising parts for a new vision of ecological sustainability are already afoot. India, Bolivia, Ecuador and districts in the state of Pennsylvania and throughout New England have enacted Earth-centered constitution declaring, for example, the inalienable rights of “natural communities and ecosystems,” to possess the same rights to survival and “living well” as humans. You can read more about this here and in the newly released book, The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, produced by the Council of Canadians, Global Exchange and Fundacion Pachamama.
Unfortunately, it is still legal to “make money” (especially gobs of it) without being truly accountable for the negative side-effects of production. When windfall monetary gain and supernatural power for their own sake are the primary motivation for work, care is both diminished and devalued. Sacrificing profits is avoided at all costs to the point that doing business becomes fanatical, unrelinquishable, and manically pursued with religious zeal. This is driven by the dictatorship of the linear, left brained, conquer and dominate mentality. Extending this plummeting and primarily profits-based mentality to considering our planet’s current and future energy choices underlies our current ecological, economic and health crises.
In contrast, an Eco-centric paradigm favors economic choices based on what might allow humanity to survive with a standard of living worth being alive for: clean air, water, food, good health, happy and healthy children in birthright possession of their full mental capacities and with their limbs all in tact. Please add to this birthright a still wild, fertile, and a highly diversified ecosystem which nurtures us on every level. Making extraordinary amounts of money through heartless work is innocuous enough if it did not negatively impact the rest of the world. But this is not reality, and by definition, likely impossible.
The Re-Greening of Our Hearts (Part 1)
Oct 14th
A Practical Philosophy for a Successful Planet
“A sacred choice is one that does not seek to compensate for a wound, but to heal it.” `~Rick Vassalla~
14th October 2011
By Jack Adam Weber - Guest Writer for Wake Up World
Here we are in the thick of Occupy Wall Street, with the movement and its message spreading worldwide, loud and clear: No more collusion by government and Big Business. No more tax cuts for the already rich and dirty. No more destruction of our planet for the bad habit of bullying-billionaire-ism, an epidemic disease attacking the weak of heart and low morale.
In the first weeks of the ongoing Fukushima disaster I read too many editorials describing the choice between a nuclear or more sustainable future as hinging on the monetary cost to multinational companies, government, and taxpayers. Does it also make you squirm in your skin to hear our world fixated on economic gain at any cost, with the real possibility of environmental collapse as well as species and human extinction from toxic waste streams given secondary concern? Do you care more about remaining “competitive” in the international marketplace above the survival and health of your children and family?
I have reached my limit of political puppet talk to distract attention from and justify the destruction of life on Earth. I couldn’t give a crap about the International Marketplace, whatever it is. Come to think of it, I think we should downsize the mythic International Marketplace by 90% (I’d still like to have curry powder to cook with) and replace it with hundreds of regional festivals where we all camp out and envision a new, locally-based future. Camp Headquarters will be biking distance from your home!
We need a new paradigm for living and doing business on Earth, not just an adjustment of the current system. We need a modus operandi that is eco-centric not solely human-centric. This orientation forms the crux of Deep Ecology, which perceives nature as sacred, not primarily a commodity for human progress and development. By granting Nature a right to live and thrive, we grant the same to humanity. We can no longer pretend as though nature is forever indispensable and able to re-grow itself no matter the pace at which we use it up. Or that some fantastic messianic miracle of technology is going to save us and regenerate what we have denigrated. Even if there were such a technology, what kind of world would remain in the aftermath?
