Birthday quotes daily for a good funny moment? 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?
What Does the Latest Research and Science Show? A recent survey on the incidence of meditation in the US population indicated a marked increase in the number of adults and children who practice meditation every day (Black, Barnes, Clarke, and Stussman, Nahin, 2018). Psychologists and allied mental health practitioners agree on the effectiveness of meditation in reducing physical, mental, and emotional disturbances. A study by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) found that mindful meditation reduces pain sensations in the body without using the brain’s natural opiates (Cherkin, Sherman, Balderson, Cook, Anderson, Hawkes, Hansen, and Turner, 2016). The research suggested that combining meditation practices with medication for treating pain conditions like osteoarthritis, headaches, and other chronic pains can be useful for providing long-term remedies.
A study conducted at the University of Utah suggested that “mindfulness may be linked to self-regulation throughout the day, and that this may be an important way that mindfulness contributes to better emotional and physical well-being.” According to Maria Camara, PhD, a psychotherapist who is also a qualified mindfulness teacher, meditation helps us connect with our true qualities. Once we’ve accepted who we are and learn to work with our thoughts directly, we reveal a loving capacity that has always been present within us. It’s no wonder that mindfulness increases happiness, enhances clarity and gives peace of mind.
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. This didn’t go without controversy. Some took issue with her feelings about her own experience, something to the effect of it being unethical of her to exploit her own exploitation. She was even accused of being a “fake” sex worker. Her accusers were not sex workers, so it’s anyone’s guess how they might know enough to tell a fugazzi from a genuine article, but this is neither here nor there. A few porn stars bowed up to troll for White, and that was the last of people saying she was a fake. Find more details at https://mytrendingstories.com/article/poems-funny-a-cats-prayer/. Think of like looking at the wind through a window. You can’t see the wind, right? The wind is invisible. But at the same time, you can see the wind because of its impact on the things that are visible. You see the leaves flapping. You see the surface of a puddle ripple. You see a girl hunched inside her coat, her hair blowing into her face. You see someone try to light a cigarette and the match go out. Abstractions like Love and Death don’t look, sound, or smell like anything. But they affect everything around them. And you can describe the places they’ve touched.
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.
When the Palais de Tokyo opened in 2002, many thought its no-frills aesthetic was something of a deliberate statement. In fact, it was for budgetary reasons. Happily, the venue has truly flourished since, hosting acclaimed exhibitions and performances in its open-plan space. Extended hours and a cool cafe bring in younger audiences, and the roll-call of artists is impressive (Roberto Braga, Wang Du, Theaster Gates and others). The name dates to the 1937 Exposition Internationale, but is also a reminder of links with a new generation of artists from the Far East.
Some studies on meditation and its effects on attention showed how meditation improved care by controlling the alpha brain waves. The alpha waves in the brain operate the way we use our sense organs and respond to external stimulations. Considering the number of distractions that we have in this media driven world today, the team of scientists of this research created an eight-week mindful meditation program and assessments revealed that participants who completed the retreat showed heightened sensitivity to visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli.