Category — Self-improvement

I’ve just read this article about the importance of positive beliefs on John Wesley’s wonderful Pick the Brain blog. It’s a good lesson for Baha’is and is backed up by the Baha’i scriptures.

John Wesley writes:

Unlike knowledge, beliefs don

I found myself strangely moved by this quotation from Rumi’s wisdom on the right work, read out by Sarah Clive as she was rounding off her storytelling course last weekend.

The Right Work

There is one thing in this world that you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there’s nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else, and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.

It’s as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human beings come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It’s a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It’s a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.

You say, “But look, I’m using the dagger. It’s not lying idle.”

Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny, an iron nail could be bought to serve the purpose. You say, “But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and all the rest.” But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself.

Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give your life to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don’t, you will be exactly like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You’ll be wasting valuable keenness and foolishly ignoring your dignity and your purpose.

As a Baha’i, I felt this one with particular force: “It’s as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do.”

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Rumi, spirituality, work

…is to stop procrastinating! I’m afraid procrastination is one of my abiding faults. I hate making telephone calls, so I put them off. I have a number of artistic endeavours in mind, such as learning to draw, writing short stories, even a novel, but I put them off for fear of failure. Even, dare I say it, inviting my neighbours to do Ruhi Book One with me, is a matter for agonizing delay.

…but when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money

Technorati Tags: procrastination

It seems that regular meditation will not only give you more energy and concentration, but it will give you a bigger brain too. All of the above I need desperately.

A New Scientist article from last November (why I have I only just got to this - ah, I know, I need the bigger brain to cope with the flood of information that I have to deal with daily) reports on two research projects:

Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better ? and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

People who meditate say the practice restores their energy, and some claim they need less sleep as a result. Many studies have reported that the brain works differently during meditation ? brainwave patterns change and neuronal firing patterns synchronise. But whether meditation actually brings any of the restorative benefits of sleep has remained largely unexplored.

So Bruce O?Hara and colleagues at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, US, decided to investigate. They used a well-established ?psychomotor vigilance task?, which has long been used to quantify the effects of sleepiness on mental acuity. The test involves staring at an LCD screen and pressing a button as soon as an image pops up. Typically, people take 200 to 300 milliseconds to respond, but sleep-deprived people take much longer, and sometimes miss the stimulus altogether.

Ten volunteers were tested before and after 40 minutes of either sleep, meditation, reading or light conversation, with all subjects trying all conditions. The 40-minute nap was known to improve performance (after an hour or so to recover from grogginess). But what astonished the researchers was that meditation was the only intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.

?Every single subject showed improvement,? says O?Hara. The improvement was even more dramatic after a night without sleep. But, he admits: ?Why it improves performance, we do not know.? The team is now studying experienced meditators, who spend several hours each day in practice.

Brain builder

What effect meditating has on the structure of the brain has also been a matter of some debate. Now Sara Lazar at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, US, and colleagues have used MRI to compare 15 meditators, with experience ranging from 1 to 30 years, and 15 non-meditators.

They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.

?You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger,? she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis ?aren?t just sitting there doing nothing”.

The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons, she points out, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections.

Not only that, but:

God can help you relax, according to a study of meditation. People practising spiritual meditation were more relaxed and better able to withstand pain than those performing secular meditation.

College students who volunteered for the study were randomly assigned to one of three groups regardless of their spiritual beliefs. The 25 students in the spiritual meditation group were told to concentrate on a phrase such as “God is love” or “God is peace” during their meditation periods. Those in the secular meditation group used a phrase such as “I am happy” or “I am joyful” while the third group were simply told to relax.

This is from another New Scientist article. Unfortunately this is premium content and I am much too mean to pay for the whole article. It’s intriguing, tho’. I’ll have to take more time to say my 95 ‘All?h’u'Abh?’s’.

Technorati Tags: meditation, religion, spirituality

I’ve just been really inspired by reading Creating Passionate Users. This blog has some mind-blowing, wise and well-researched things to say about learning. It’s a mine of useful information and, far more important than information, inspiration and teaching.

I’ve been on a major blog crawl today - when I should have been preparing for the Home Office on Monday, but it was all worth it to find Creating Passionate Users. It’s such an ass-kicking site (to use one of its favourite phrases). It may be focused on the software industry, but what it says about teaching and learning is spot on. It took me to Beyond Bullets another useful site about the use and abuse of PowerPoint (or, in my case, the much cooler Mac app known as Keynote). But what I love about Creating Passionate Users above all is its out-and-out commitment to the importance of effective learning and teaching.

Because what you believe in, you can teach. And teaching is the “killer app” for a newer, more ethical approach to marketing. While in the past, those who out-spent (on ads, and big promotions) would often win, that’s becoming less and less true today for a lot of things–especially the things designed for a younger, more-likely-to-be-online user community.

Kind of a markets-are-classrooms notion. Those who teach stand the best chance of getting people to become passionate. And those with the most passionate users don’t need an ad campaign when they’ve got user evangelists doing what evangelists do… talking about their passion.

As an ex-teacher, I can really go with this.

Nobody becomes passionate until they’ve reached the stage where they want to grow in a way they deem meaningful. Whether it’s getting better at a game or helping to save the world, there must be a goal (ideally, a continuously progressive goal) and a clear path to getting there. It’s our job, if we’re trying to encourage others to become passionate, to enable it. And the only way to do that is by teaching.

So, how do I teach Home Office officials about the Baha’i Faith in a way that won’t bore them rigid and will answer their questions, give them what they need, improves their day?