Ritual as Resource: Energy for Vibrant Living Review

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Ritual as Resource: Energy for Vibrant Living ReviewMichael Picucci's Ritual as Resource is a worthy successor to his landmark, award-winning volume: The Journey Toward Complete Recovery. In this new book, Dr. Picucci introduces the reader to core themes from the "energetics" field and then blends them with "authentic process", a community-based approach to growth and recovery outlined in his previous work. One key theme in this book is the presence of the opposing energies in our lives; sometimes we experience them as stress, inter-personal conflict, or trauma. With the conscious use of ritual, we can learn to accept and even thrive on these opposing energies. Readers encountering the "energetics" field for the first time may find these ideas somewhat challenging. But the reader is well-rewarded as the themes come together in an uplifting message about how to live an emotionally healthy life in modern society.
The true richness of the book comes through most clearly in the author's discussion of how to create your own "rituals" for healing, health and personal power. Rituals are consciously crafted sets of actions incorporated directly into one's daily life - from the delightfully simple "shower and health" rituals to deeply moving rituals to cope with life threatening illness and death. Dr. Picucci shares his own life experiences in an intensely personal way, helping the reader understand how energy and resources can help a person face virtually any life challenge. Using this book as a guide, I have created my own rituals that now are essential and deeply satisfying parts of my daily life. Readers will find this book a wonderful source for creating their own rituals, to make their own lives richer and more spiritually fulfilling.
Ritual as Resource: Energy for Vibrant Living OverviewMichael Picucci has survived HIV, heart attacks, cancer, and the loss of many loved ones. Beyond merely coping, he has thrived—but how? This book explains. Mixing vivid life stories and simple, step-by-step creative ritual exercises, Picucci offers readers a self-empowering path to energetic healing through contact with what he calls 'healing resources.' These resources are varied but center on a higher power that can be accessed through ritual. Ritual, he explains, allows anyone to tap into the 'instinctual brain' that is traumatized by the unnatural demands of modern life, and further into the 'shamanistic brain' that opens the way to four important energetic pathways: awakening the felt-senses of the body; resolving emotional traumas; communicating with the instinctive self; and journeying into the 'spirit world,' the worlds of light, energy, and consciousness. Ritual as Resource shows how to stimulate dormant internal energy to heal and transform the troubled self.

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The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature Review

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The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature ReviewThe Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker
Is there a difference between the meanings of these two sentences?
(1) Hal loaded hay into the wagon, and,
(2) Hal loaded the wagon with hay.
Well, Steven Pinker claims there is a difference and it's a difference that reveals something about the way the mind conceptualizes experience. That is "the stuff of thought" with which Pinker's latest book is concerned, and this "stuff," as he convincingly demonstrates, can be made accessible through a careful analysis of "the stuff of language," i.e., word categories and their syntactic habitats.
In the case of the two sentences above, we can see the human capacity to frame events in alternate ways through the dual function of verbs like "load." This verb draws attention to the hay and its movement in the first sentence, but to the transformation (a kind of metaphorical "movement") of the wagon in the second.
That children can learn the dual use of "load" and the dual conceptualizations that it entails, and distinguish this verb from others (like, say, toss) that don't work in both sentences (E.g., we don't say "Hal tossed the wagon with hay" even though we can say "Hal tossed the hay into the wagon") is evidence that distinct ways of thinking underlie our ability to master language. There are, after all, many thousands of verbs that fall into scores of different categories based on their applicability to different contexts like those involving Hal's hay in the cases above. Pinker believes that our ability to learn the subtle distinctions that control these and other word usages is evidence of their role as reflectors and enablers of the basic elements of human thought, elements like causality, animation, possession, time-as-space, and so on.
Pinker faces quite a challenge in bringing to life profound truths about human nature through a systematic, fine-grained analysis of mundane words like "drip" and "pour," but he succeeds admirably. This is a book that will amply reward a careful reading.
Of course some words are inherently more interesting than others, and for my money the chapter on "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" is by itself worth the price of the book. A number of features that help condemn a word to the realm of taboo are revealed here. For example, there are clear syntactic distinctions between the usually unprintable words for sex (which Pinker, I'm happy to report, audaciously prints) and their more presentable cousins, such as have sex, make love, sleep together, copulate, etc. I had never before noticed that the taboo and vulgar forms, which tend to specify physical motion, differ from the non-taboo terms in that they usually occur in a subject-verb-direct object construction (e.g., Austin shagged Vanessa). The more respectable terms lack a direct object and do not specify "a particular manner of motion or effect." Furthermore, they are semantically symmetrical, so that if Austin had sex with Vanessa, Vanessa also had sex with Austin. More fundamentally Pinker ties the cathartic effect of some swearing with "the Rage circuit, which [is]... connected with negative emotion." The Rage circuit, as part of the limbic system, is found in other animals and is associated with "a reflex in which a suddenly wounded or confined animal would erupt in a furious struggle to startle, injure and escape from a predator, often accompanied by a bloodcurdling yowl."
This is rich stuff, the drawing of a neat connection between a specific category of words and an emotional pattern linked to specific parts of the brain. This chapter also helps make sense of Tourette's syndrome and otherwise identifies swearing as "a coherent neurobiological phenomenon." Other chapters are similarly rewarding. Pinker's analysis of metaphors both expands on, and, to an extent, revises the classic works in this field by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and others.
I have some quibbles with parts of Pinker's overall model, but this is to be expected with a work so ambitious and wide-ranging. I am surprised, for example, that Pinker doesn't mention the extensive work on cognitive prototypes by such authors as Brent Berlin and Eleanor Rosch since their research seems to overlap with his.
Another point: His arguments against connectionist models of language and thought I found to be not quite convincing. Here Pinker is arguing for a genetically-based set of neural patterns to explain the complexities of language, where connectionism points to a more flexible, post-natal learning system. Pinker demonstrates that connectionism is probably not adequate to explain language learning if one assumes (as he apparently does) that learning after puberty is just as permanent as that which is learned in childhood. But such an assumption is unwarranted, and if childhood learning does have a special durability, his criticism of connectionism loses its punch.
Also, in discussing social change (part of his analysis of changing tastes in the naming of children), he cites data indicating that most disappearances such as the end of hat-wearing among men in the 1960s, were the natural outcome of a long and steadily declining trajectory for this fashion. However, there are so many distinctly abrupt social changes that can be identified in this era (including such linguistic ones as the disappearance of the basic slang term "swell" and its replacement by "cool") that this argument for gradual social change leaves me skeptical.
Naturally these are the kinds of disputable points that a book like this is bound to stir up, and that's, of course, all to the good. All in all, Pinker has succeeded, once again, in writing a book which, while effectively tackling a very knotty set of issues, manages to be both accessible and engaging. Five stars.The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature Overview

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Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain Review

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Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain ReviewThis book is based on information that can be found at the Mentat Wiki and consists of 75 tips and methods for helping you organize your thought processes and exercise your brain so that you think more efficiently. Some of them are well-known brain exercises, and some are not so well known. I had seen most of the memory hacks before, with the exception of the one on the "tip of the tongue" effect. In the section on creativity, I enjoyed the hack on looking at your brain as a random number generator that needs seeding by doing such tasks as picking up a magazine that you wouldn't normally look at and then reading it. I also liked the hack on learning Morse code like an efficiency expert. Although the task itself is of dubious value, the process teaches the reader the value of mnemonics which is, as the author puts it, is like putting Windows on top of DOS. The final chapter, on overall mental fitness, is of particular use to us baby-boomers as it reminds us not to neglect the essentials of basic overall physical health since this has a powerful effect on the brain. I really enjoyed this little book, since it has so many ways to expand your brain power and creativity that can easily be incorporated into your daily life.
The table of contents is not shown by Amazon, so I list the table of contents/hacks here:
Chapter 1. Memory
1. Remember 10 Things to Bring
2. Use the Number-Shape System
3. Make Lots of Little Journeys
4. Stash Things in Nooks and Crannies
5. Use the Major System
6. Use the Dominic System
7. Visit the Hotel Dominic
8. Dominate Your Memory
9. Memorize Numbers with Carroll's Couplets
10. Tune In to Your Memory
11. Consume Your Information in Chunks
12. Overcome the Tip-of-the-Tongue Effect
Chapter 2. Information Processing
13. Catch Your Ideas
14. Write Faster
15. Speak Your Brain's Language
16. Map Your Mind
17. Build an Exoself
18. Pre-Delete Cruft
Chapter 3. Creativity
19. Seed Your Mental Random-Number Generator
20. Force Your Connections
21. Contemplate Po
22. Scamper for Ideas
23. Deck Yourself Out
24. Constrain Yourself
25. Think Analogically
26. Enjoy Good, Clean Memetic Sex
27. Play Mind Music
28. Sound Your Brain with Onar
29. Keep a Dream Journal
30. Hold a Question in Mind
31. Adopt a Hero
32. Go Backward to Be More Inventive Going Forward
33. Spend More Time Thinking
34. Extend Your Idea Space with Word Spectra
Chapter 4. Math
35. Put Down That Calculator
36. Make Friends with Numbers
37. Test for Divisibility
38. Calculate Mental Checksums
39. Turn Your Hands into an Abacus
40. Count to a Million on Your Fingers
41. Estimate Orders of Magnitude
42. Estimate Square Roots
43. Calculate Any Weekday
Chapter 5. Decision Making
44. Foresee Important Problems
45. Predict the Length of a Lifetime
46. Find Dominant Strategies
47. Eliminate Dominated Strategies
48. Don't Overthink It
49. Roll the Dice
Chapter 6. Communication
50. Put Your Words in the Blender
51. Learn an Artificial Language
52. Communicate in E-Prime
53. Learn Morse Code Like an Efficiency Expert
54. Harness Stage Fright
55. Ask Stupid Questions
56. Stop Memory-Buffer Overrun
Chapter 7. Clarity
57. Learn Your Emotional ABCs
58. Avoid Cognitive Distortions
59. Use the Fourfold Breath
60. Meditate
61. Hypnotize Yourself
62. Talk to Yourself
63. Interview Yourself
64. Cultivate the Naive Mind
65. Employ Mental Momentum
Chapter 8. Mental Fitness
66. Warm Up Your Brain
67. Play Board Games
68. Improve Visual Attention Through Video Games
69. Don't Neglect the Obvious: Sleep, Nutrition, and Exercise
70. Get a Good Night's Sleep
71. Navigate Around the Post-Lunch Dip
72. Overclock Your Brain
73. Learn the Facts About Cognitive Enhancers
74. Snap Yourself to Attention
75. Assemble Your Mental Toolbox
Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain Overview
You're smart. This book can make you smarter.

Mind Performance Hacks provides real-life tips and tools for overclocking your brain and becoming a better thinker. In the increasingly frenetic pace of today's information economy, managing your life requires hacking your brain. With this book, you'll cut through the clutter and tune up your brain intentionally, safely, and productively.

Grounded in current research and theory, but offering practical solutions you can apply immediately, Mind Performance Hacks is filled with life hacks that teach you to:

Use mnemonic tricks to remember numbers, names, dates, and other flotsam you need to recall
Put down your calculator and perform complex math in your head, with your fingers, or on the back of a napkin
Spark your creativity with innovative brainstorming methods
Use effective systems to capture new ideas before they get away
Communicate in creative new ways-even using artificial languages
Make better decisions by foreseeing problems and finding surprising solutions
Improve your mental fitness with cool tricks and games

While the hugely successful Mind Hacks showed you how your brain works, Mind Performance Hacks shows you how to make it work better.


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Body Language in Business: Decoding the Signals Review

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Body Language in Business: Decoding the Signals ReviewBody language and other forms of nonverbal behavior are the subtext of all communication. Becoming fluent as a receiver and a sender is a necessary business skill. Authors Adrian Furnham and Evgeniya Petrova set out to debunk popular myths about body language, particularly any promises that you can learn to "read people like a book." They examine different aspects of body language, such as facial expression, gesture, touch and eye contact. They also explain ways that body language provides cues and, in some cases, can mislead. Lastly, they offer practical strategies to consider in using your body language as well as decoding others' signals. Furnham and Petrova broaden their examination of nonverbal communication to include other subjects, including feng shui, public speaking and bullying. Body language enthusiasts seeking detail will find this all-encompassing analysis insightful. For the less committed, the book's aerial view of so many facets of this subject might muddy the waters. However, getAbstract considers this an essential read for those wishing to sharpen their "soft" skills or raise their emotional intelligence.Body Language in Business: Decoding the Signals OverviewThis book is about body language: signals we send and receive, messages we transmit and decipher, and "statements" we make about ourselves nonverbally. Body language is the most primitive system of communication that we share with other species in the animal kingdom. We also use it in the board room and the salesroom to great or little effect. It is the language that we all speak regardless of background or upbringing. It is in our 'DNA': it is a part of our human nature, the very stuff of communication. In this book we seek to clarify a few issues. Firstly, we pose and answer the question what does it entail to communicate via body language. Secondly, we deal with the issues of how body language can be used and, regrettably, sometimes abused, to communicate. There is much confusion (and dare we say nonsense) about how to interpret nonverbal signals. Finally, we choose to concentrate on practical applications of these facts and observations to the world of work and business. Body language is important at work from the selection interview to the farewell speech. Nonverbal communication is also the essence of political propaganda, PR, marketing and advertising, and understanding of how these silent signals work can be a crucial asset to business as well as to consumers' education. This book will give you practical tips and advice about how to become better and more successful in business by reading and displaying the right body language.

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