Ample calm + ample play time = good project ideas

 

MORE PLAY

 

 

 

This month, I’ve seen lots of people working on blocks in self-expression. This is the single core root of insomnia, addiction habits, weight gain and being over-weight, relationship dramas. It is crucial that you share the vibrancy of the real you and get your gifts out.

 

Goshdarn, you’ve got to do what you love. What the world needs now is love, art, and magical experiences.

 

It’s relationship revitalising. Being yourself out loud means others you attract find that attractive! And shows you don’t NEED them to provide or coax it from you.

 

Also, it’s smart economics. Everyone’s drawn towards happiness and beauty, music, expressive input that uplifts them. The people not “in crisis” will want somewhere to expand (and spend time/money on) their happy feelings. So treat yourself to being that happy feeling, providing it and stabilising yourself! When you’re inclusive and generous to the well and well-off community, with more great wellness gifts… you surround yourself with this healthy diet of good outlook. And you come up with better ideas. to give out that spring your listeners into natural health.

 

We’re all attracted to what makes us feel great So if you want to be magnetically attractive AND stable in any arena, it’s your job forever to focus on generating your own joy within. Keep it simple – dance, play, colour, laugh, sing. Take the dogs for a run. Drum. Stick your tongue out and say ‘bleaerrrgh’.

 

When you’ve recently had or remembered joy, and got yourself comfortable being joyful, people are drawn to you like magic. Go do something adventurous that makes your heart cheer, and you’ll resonate that out for days to come. To everyone you encounter. Friends, family, work connections, day to day contacts. This can transform the way your world is panning out. You’re right to seek regular topups, and big powerful adventures.

 

Be aware for fears that show their protective face. Like with any messenger, you can listen to the message and be safe, but don’t need to join your fear in its emotion. YOU don’t need to feel it.

 

Put your actual hand on your heart and feel its voice. Listen to these real feelings, and don’t judge them. You don’t have to make a decision based on them yet.

 

Listen for your heart’s simple call and guidance. What do you feel, and what would you like to be feeling? What would that feel like? Remember, if it feels negative or contracting, then replace it with an instead. Always bring to mind an antidote. What would I like to feel instead.

 

What can you DO, now, that will put you into that feeling-space for an hour or two to get out of your thoughts and into that feeling? It’ll remind your subconscious mind what you are seeking, so it can help you get to more of that.

 

Feeling what you feel will lead to knowing what you want, and then, the paths to it show up. Now you’re more in tune with your intuition, what have you always wanted to do? How can you DO this thing you know you love doing?

 

Like the empowering kick of feeling fit that comes after the ordeal of pushing yourself in a workout, you’ll get the biggest buzz from completing and presenting to the world, the creative gem that you are most afraid of sharing. The one you’re shyest about. This is the one you’ve got to do. That’s how you know it’s that one. Biggest effort = biggest unimaginable rewards.

 

My clients are rocking this principle to great effect. People come in for anything from insomnia, frantic overwhelm from living parallel lives, debilitating consumption habits and ruts, untapped business potential, flat mojo, bored reliance on the humdrum for confidence. All caused by not being 100% themselves, their style, right here, all in.

 

One has begun a glorious-scale landscape artwork proposal which he’s already got support for, and unusual funding on the way. Another has redesigned herself after completing a love relationship and is now designing what she would like from life and a future love. Two more have both started ballet and choir singing, one is transforming her career to become an ergonomic product designer, one has completed years of accounts mess and hoarding, with 15 binbags of clutter binned, and a new system arising not only for his home but his business shape, which will make him a lot of money, and support more free time and space for love in his lifestyle.

 

All are clearing and rebeautifying their houses (your literal personal space). This is the place to start. All creativity requires clear uncluttered space at home (even drawers) and a calm mind and buoyant heart (that’s your call to fitness).

 

DOING that creative work, creating your product or giving the show, is a stress-immuniser. Get you out of your brain and into the hearty place of whimsy and play and pure feel.

 

Dare to pretend, and create in the world what was not there before you. You’ll open your imagination and problem-dissolver brain. This is medical hypnotherapy using reality rather than spoken suggestion. It resets the circuit of your brain that mops up stress and makes ‘sense’ of things.

 

A therapist can lead you out of a rut, but a better life uplift would be stylishly creating and crafting your own cheeky route, that inspires a whole new character development you can draw on everywhere for a lifewide elevation. Finding your WAY.

 

I give my clients exercises for conjuring new forms of looking at their situation, seeing possibilities, going exploring safely with thought-escapades. It’s often in a fill-in-the-gaps way with the hypnotherapist’s imaginative introductions, that arises from your own deeper mind. You’re the conscious audience to your creative mind’s likeable exhibition.

 

It’s time for having more play, more imaginative nonsense, interacting with experience. That is the essence of fun. When it’s all too serious, we need more nonsense. More laughter. It’s the immune system’s equivalent of drinking a glass of clean water.

 

My new thing is African Drumming. I imagine I’m snake charming with tigers. The strength of muscle and voice that it gives me, are making me a better hypnotherapist. More accessible and more commanding if I need it. How about you? You know what your own next joy step is. Now is your time for vibrance. Your play is also your creativity. Express your emotions and let the goods come out as you clear the clutter. Get your gifts out.

 

Now is your time to shine

 

 

 

Relishing Failure

“Failure was a stripping away of the inessential.

I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised.

And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

- JK Rowling

 

 

Without the delight and relish in the possibility of failing, we live cowed unmoving lives of quiet desperation.

Fear is the anticipation of discomfort. Conjuring up a poor-case scenario to recreate in the now. We make our body experience the discomfort as if it were there, but it isn’t!

Daft.

You don’t need to do this.

In the letting loose we discover from our failures how to succeed and bounce back.  It’s totally out of your comfort zone, mine too. I’m predicting that this year there’ll be times when I cock things up, wildly. Exponentially even. But rather cock up cataclysmically big, than not get off the starting blocks at all.

When you lose what you built, you realise more keenly what it is about the foundations that can make the difference between strong and weak. You empower yourself to know how to build from scratch, more sustainably than before.

And as you create afresh, you add more personality each time, more freshness, more you. You make it more attractive.

I’ve been taking an improvisation course for the past few months. Improv is nothing like acting, you are thrown in a deep end and must conjure up creative gibberish from nothing. From the depths of your mind. But the interesting part is in the interactions. The unexpected with others, and giving yourself up to just going somewhere, not leading, but knowing when to step in with a solution or direction, and bringing a natural conclusion without ‘creating a scene’ on your own in your head, and driving it.

www.imprology.com   -London’s Old Street / Charing Cross *

In one scenario, we were in teams of three, and told to without language two of us kill the other one by the end of the scene – act it out. Wow. Seriously, what an eye-opener. Hallo, deepest-self, I see you…

It became clear that in each of the groups, an ending became initially clear, but the killed person just didn’t want to die. It’s only a scene. Each threesome group went on a little too long, until someone took one for the team, and died. But as our teacher pointed out, this is the most precious person in the improv game. The one who will sacrifice themselves for an ending. Otherwise improv scenes would last for hours. And it is less moving to watch.

I discovered from doing improv that I am far more power-exerting over a group dynamic, than I first thought.  I find it easier to be high-status than low. [Something I wouldn't have believed at all until I actually saw it, live, in front of me, with the mirror held up.]  I lead groups toward our natural dynamic, not with my own goal in mind so much, but I found I make space for others to shine.

What I was delighted to discover, is that I had been avoiding failing. There is a magic to being told by someone you trust and respect, to enjoy failing more. Fail more. We hear it from business billionaires, authors, seasoned adventurers, I’d heard it from world-class world-record-breaking athletes I’ve worked with as a hypnotist. But I knew it logically, and to parrot to others, until I did something as random as unplanned improv, that showed me directly how I actually am.

Then I got it.

It’s only in the acting, that you realise what you do. You can’t see it from the backseat or the theory perspective. It felt like when I was drowning. As soon as I gave up trying to swim towards the surface and the daylight, the wave taking me further out  took me down past a rock where I was cushioned for a moment and the wave breadth went past, and I pushed and it bobbed me back up to the air. I got my breath back and got seen and was rescued, Baywatch style. Improv was humbling and extraordinarily powerful for my life and my profession, more than I can put in to language.

As a natural controller and managing director in my business, the art and knack of trust and enjoyment in improvisation, has been the most exceptional spring underneath me in letting the wall find me, the bottom of the well, or the rock at the bottom of the sea floor. Being told to fail more was a gorgeous impetus to enjoy my life more and become intuitively more resilient and less attached to outcomes and has given me more enjoyment.

So I’m very excited about my future failures, and I’m going to post about them up on here. It’ll make it more fun telling you how I have bounced back, and share out loud about my varying sizes of triumph and success.

Are you a great big failure? Did you powerfully manage to conjure into reality, the very worst case scenario that terrified you and your greatest horror be realised? This is GREAT news! You are a Manifester. You can bring your pipe panics and pipe dreams into living reality around you. YOU STAR.  You are living proof. It’s now just a matter of turning the tide towards a route that energises you.

Literally, whatever turns you on for your life, go that way.

Is your back pushed back against the wall? Then few can push back harder.

Then it is time to DECLUTTER.

Strip away and send back to the Cosmos, all that doesn’t serve you. Have a yard sale, take sacks of outdated costume down to the thrift store or charity shop, whack it on eBay, clean your Inbox out, unsubscribe from all the newsletters that don’t energise you. WATCH how you Feng Shui your life, and make space for the new, and the failings that come with it. Get the goal, let the ideas come. Shine up from your underconscious.

If you fail and tumble a bit that is how you know you are moving forwards.

It’s 2012.  No more paddling against the tide. Turn your tide, now, and you’ll begin to have more fun, dive through the tidal waves, and begin to stream line your life.

Accepting and revelling in failure allows you to make more and get back up faster each time. Till you bounce like a ninja.  Today can change everything. Allow rock bottom to be the solid foundation on which you rebuilt your life.

x

www.twitter.com/jenny-glanville

www.EthicalHypnotist.com

 

Invictus

Invictus

# 12 on top 500 Poems User Rating: 9.2 /10 (281 votes)   – vote -  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10      Print friendly version   E-mail this poem to a friend   Send this poem as eCard   Add this poem to MyPoemList   Add this poet to MyPoetList

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.  William Ernest Henley

 

Modern Hypno- Master Japanese in 2 Weeks

 

 

Mat :

Is it possible to learn 10 new foreign words a day? That’s what I am going to have to do to pass my Japanese exam in two weeks

Jen :

hai, matty-chan

Mat :

I must have crammed over 20 new words yesterday. Remember most of them but it’s going to take me a while to learn their kanji. Luckily the exam only requires me to know 300 kanji, which I should in theory have studied before

Jen :

bed early, start sunrise. fave repetitive hypnotic power track on repeat. here’s mine

pretend you are beatboxing, or chanting awesomely, while watching the meaning as images on a really chill music video. look up the core connector words in the dictionary (be, as, in, with = the entries with the most examples) and memorise the sentences, then you can whack in new nouns or whatever to personalise. write em out on *coloured* A4 and shove them on the wall = memory recall. these are way the culture fits concepts together. you’re in love with a japanese girl, you have a feel for this already. watch jap movies you can pause and when you get a single awesome quoteable line, one that you’d like to say or have so you can use it, pause, repeat, nick it. weave it into your exam. ditto rap. = tenchi matty-samma

Succinct for wordpress. Details on request.

x

 

 

Jumping Into Your World With You

 

I’ve always wanted to jump into other people’s experiences with them. It’d be like a shortcut to more efficient communication. Standing face to face with someone is adversarial when there’s communication gaps and misunderstanding. It heightens emotions and can get hostile. Better to be next to someone, discussing not them, not you, but the shared project you’re working on together. I’ve found that I really love sitting next to my loved one in a restaurant, more than sitting opposite them. We see the same things, share the journey, rather than staring at each other which makes a person self-conscious. Comfort should feel unselfconscious. If you’re both on the same page, looking at the same idea landscape and discussing it, you both get a lot more ground covered and it’s more fun.

I think it extends to anyone. A new pair of eyes collaborating with you on your exploration, completely rocks. This person’ll bring you whole outlooks and insights that you’d never have thought of, because you think uniquely and so do they. Literally, whatever their background, whoever they are and whatever your little judgements about their details. You’re human, you’ll both miss bits, but you also both see little twinkles of beauty that most people will miss. Two people working on the same thing creates the power of three people. AND the resources. We add to each other. Like good poetry that uncovers beauty in tiny missable details. Your view of the world is enriched by the perspectives of others.

I’ve been running my own businesses for nine years and helping others establish and grow theirs. Whenever I’ve flourished its been when I’ve achieved a balance in working just me, and working in tandem with my others. Working behind the scenes, and needing the audience and clients to work with. Your gift depends on a recipient to be a gift. It feels like the evolutionary step of going from single-handed, to creating and working with a real team. And it’s not just my work. I’m recently making the move from thinking like a single, to trying on the thought of having future family responsibility. My freedoms limited, my resources needed for someone else, something bigger than just me. I think it’ll give me power and impetus to succeed. Just as much as having someone stronger or more capable than me, mentoring me to get up and running. It’s less intuitive for me – I’m the youngest in my family and not used to being the head-girl or older sister type. But from teaching I’m getting quite used to it. Whoever they are, your team bring unexpected and unimaginable benefit. The littlest comment can transform your life when it’s from a perspective nothing like your own. Kids are going to upgrade what I think I can accomplish, because I’ll need to… I’ll be unselfconscious then suddenly realise what I managed and impress myself.

My point is working with others as my mirror. Kids and the family and friendship structures we make, show us back what we go round the world expressing. Our deepest issues and truths, reflected back to us. The issues we see from others started with us. But once we sort the issues out, the communication is bridged again, and we’re back in intimacy and on the same page… sitting next to each other in the restaurant…. we get the benefits of two lives at once. The wisdom of two lifetimes, the fruits of your cohort’s life coincidences without having to try on the troubles that got them there. They become your co-protagonist. The play is now more than a monologue. And you’re happier and smarter, and the two of you, have less drama… which uplifts the others you meet together. Like a resonant sound extending beyond your own fields of influence.

And as you try to get your head-thought into their head, you’ll usually find they’ve worked out another piece of understanding-jigsaw, that will elevate your horizons with its simplicity elegance or poignant beautiful complexity.

Deliberate empathy helps your life pan out better too.  On my gap year I was a teacher in Mexico. When you see the world from someone else’s view – I mean do all you can to try to jump into their world with them and see/feel what they’re seeing/feeling – you spot the gaps in their understanding and can fill them in. Way easier than not knowing how the person’s listening.

I gave a talk about this in Centre Camp at Burning Man festival, in 2009… of the 65,000 people at the festival, about a thousand came out at lunchtime to hear about the neuroscience of empathy, the unknowns, and the vast practical joy of seeking to jump into each others’ heads…

 

This lady can’t help it.. Fiona Torrance has mirror-touch synaesthesia. It’s an unusual form of synaesthesia, the mental quirk of seeing colours or feeling sensations and images when you think of certain numbers, or sounds. Very common in autism savant, where these people can recall huge numbers of many tens of thousands of digits long, accurately. Mirror-touch is the phenomenon of feeling what others feel, when you see it.

I’d love to ask her specific questions and to know what the drugs are they’ve put her on, and how they work. What do you think about all this? http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/19/i-feel-other-peoples-pain

 

Basic synaesthesia is best described in this lovely TED talk by my favourite neuroscientist, Vilayanur Ramachandran. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl2LwnaUA-k

I have my own thoughts on the role of the Angular Gyrus, but I’ll save these for another day.

 

- Jennifer  x

 

 

#LondonRiots – London’s Burning, Bonfire Night, and why I don’t use vouchers

‎”There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don’t have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.”

Martin Luther King

I learned a lot about my lifetime of associates this week. Since the bizarre looting sprees across London this week, long and far removed from the death of Mark Duggan …. since the community self-attacks, firebombings and rape and arson mentality went viral around England, my Facebook has been a really telling speaker’s corner for the real opinions of the Londoners I’ve mixed with over the years. I’ve grown up in co-operative living with fresh minded creatives, community builders, eco warriors and spiritualists. And some needy dossers. I worked in the charity sector for years where you meet incredible souls you never dreamed such pure and good hearted unwavering people existed. And some people stuck in the habit of asking for money to be given to them/others.

It’s got to be an exchange for your own strength of confidence. Or there’s no self-expression. When you earn something, people know you worked to gain it, there’s a nobility to the fact you contributed. Like other people’s children when they help in the home…. you respect them both more. When you didn’t pay for it first, you have to lie about how you came by it. It really does take a lasting pleasure away. Your items should show off what you chose to do, and give. Who you chose to be in the community of adults.

Banks have pillaged the west of it’s reserves like the despots of war-ravaged Africa, the bailout was nuts – a loan maybe, but a handout? It’s a cold-war crime. But this doesn’t legitimise the smash-and-grab zeitgeist. It’s an argument for harsher bank penalties and an international better system and justice there, not a comparative. If we conduct ourselves on comparatives, we’re no better than the anorexic gazing through the beauty magazines. It’s not the way to be powerful.

Whatever the banking evils and rapes, or the frustration of nobody hiring, or the separation of chunks of the neighbourhood based on who has better items, different accents, faster cars and nepotism…. there is no justification for firebombing a hairdressers or breaking into a person’s home.

It reinforces the idea that you are someone who gets handouts. You are Mr Voucher. You had to do it by a Freebie. If there are no jobs, you create one. Service. You want help up out of a situation, create a way to help those who can help you in return. Find ones whose ethics you like. Nobody owes you support once you can stand up and walk around. It’s right to help people. But if you think you ‘need’ help, you feel needy – be conservative with your judgement of how needy you are. You will feel more safe and begin to find keys to stability.

I decided on the back of this to have a long-overdue Facebook friend cull. Not everyone is what I would call a friend. I deleted over a dozen. It was liberating like turning down housing benefit or the allure of a pretty trap. I’m looking at new places to live this month, and Finsbury Park was on my list – but I had a block on it for the way the locals were living on the land. The streets weren’t clean. The litter levels say a lot about the safety of an area for a girl walking home after dark. And a shopkeeper braving the mood to supply and make a living. When you have people not feeling like it’s their town, there’s a resentment you can feel in the air — about things ‘should’ be made available to me, but they’re not… or that I can take things, because he/she has so much and I don’t. We equalise rather than compete. It’s the equivalent of running alongside someone in a race and slowing them down rather than run faster. The sabotage is less admirable. It doesn’t impress intuitively.

Even if I’d been around these opinions in the past, there are some thought patterns I don’t want to be showing up in my space any more. I don’t want to be around them or associate with them. It’s really important to choose who you want to be friends with. So in a surprise and quite chrystal clear way, I have become a Nimby. Not In My Facebook. It’s all about Google Plus now anyway. I’m making a stand for my space.

So it was impressive to see Dalston’s Kurdish and Turkish community, who valiantly came out together in large numbers to protect their businesses. Some had to beat up looters and fend people off, but this section of the road no longer got attacked by thugs that night – and indeed, a number of the shops stayed open. The community have been in the British press earlier this week too, as Turkey wish to join the EU. Any member state joining the EU gains the right for any of its citizens to settle in any other EU member state: this supercedes any EU country’s own immigration policy.

When Poland joined, England was told to expect 10,000 new inhabitants – we actually had closer to 250,000. The press are concerned whether resources could cope if Turkey were to join, based on previous miscalculations… we’ve been told to expect 1,700,000 new people, so it could be as high as 10 million newcomers. But as our local Turkish barber pointed out, if Turkey are allowed into the EU, lots of the British Turkish ex-pats will go back – because now there’s a real chance for Turkey.

And when new people ‘farm’ the new land, and help it to create more jobs and more products, they contribute to the economy. There’s always enough to go round.

We do need more engagement for young people. We need decent parks and open space, rather than selling it off…. trees, open areas. We need more inspiration and explanation to people with fewer opportunities, of how to set up business, create jobs, graft and build beauty and strength and health back into their neighbourhoods. And more sharing about why. Why it benefits you personally – what is there for you when you start to give.

But what I’m most pleased to see, was the trending straightaway the next day of #riotcleanup – gatherings of volunteers and calls to arms for street cleaning across the capital. Armed with colourful plastic brooms and household dustpans, normal people pitched in and cleaned up. All the glass, all the soot, all the havoc. The discarded Gstar jeans and Nike trainers grabbed in the wrong size. The busted widescreen plasma TVs with ripped plugs someone didn’t know how to fix, and the glass screen cracked and unrepairable. It was a sunny blue sky in London.

Positivity

Jenny xx

www.ethicalhypnotist.com

Any body reading this who would like to donate to the homeless people in Tottenham, the Tottenham Green Leisure Centre is where to help.

The things they need most are:

Baby and Toddler Clothes

New underwear of all sizes – both male and female

Blankets

Towels

Baby Food

Disposable Nappies

Non-perishable food items

 

South African HIV wellness *

From 2006-08 I lived in Cape Town, South Africa. I gave hypnotherapy to glamourous arts and media professionals, surgeons, directors of sustainability initiatives, business owners, lawyers and high-fliers.  I also worked with several agencies to set up the PNI South Africa Association, creating the first structured hypnotherapy from an African language context. For sudden reasons I had to move back to London, where I’m now settled. But I’d like to carry this on.

In much of Africa after the Sahara belt, there is prevalent HIV and immune-deficiency, set to the backdrop of widespread poverty, an indigenous community’s lasting scar of having lost land and lives and dignity during apartheids and various civil wars. There’s a measurable impact on the immune system when people believe they are part of a group they cannot leave, and membership “means” being dirty, or lower in a pecking order. For further reading, try Suzanne Kobasa – she writes prolifically on stress hardiness, her buzzword, and her 1981 study of AIDS showed you can recreate the AIDS self-attack where there is no virus…. you can do this with Induced Shame and Guilt. Her original work is hard to find online… I’ve emailed to ask.

Another amazing star of HIV medicine and hypnotherapy in South Africa, is the fascinating and ever-adorable David Patient. David was number 350-odd of the first ever people to have been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS in 1983. He took medicine for about three months, but it made him sick and unhappy, so he took himself off the drugs, and resigned himself to whatever was coming. He also had hypnotherapy, and trained to qualify as a hypnotherapist. In searching for the basic fundamentals of healthy longevity in the face of his diagnosis, he worked out key helping strategies for HIV wellbeing – gut health, clean water, contribution of value to one’s community, growing and eating natural veg, praying or meditating. Living with integrity. Although still HIV positive he now no longer has AIDS. When told he had six months to live, few would have foreseen that David has just celebrated its 28 year anniversary.

www.twitter.com/davidpatient

www.davidpatient.com

Personally I’d say praying for help would be less productive than consciousness-experiences of spiritually taking charge, being the decider. Spirit is an important idea to play with, who cares if it’s founded in reality. (We’d be in better health if we could be imaginative with gay abandon, and all stopped trying to prove our dreams and myth stories.)

And then there’s the working ladies in Uganda. I’d love to talk with them about their outlooks on life, their approach to things. I wonder if they are onto some meme or unusual idea, which could prove helpful.

A resilience-strengthening, self-hypnosis initiative could conserve medicine resources and solve the generic medicines problem – we could try the self help first until the only option was medication, which would prevent pharmacological harm and drug immunity. We could abate the commercial pharma companies frustrated at cheap and untested generic copies of their medicines, which they’re seeking to recoup very real investment for, the money that paid for the drug to be discovered.

No-one would claim it’s “the answer”, it isn’t. But goodness me it is helpful. And crucially, does not do harm.  With medicine, there’s a need for placebo, a need for antidotes and medication, and a need for self help and empowerment in your own recovery. The great ethical issue with non-drug therapies is getting people’s hopes up when they are vulnerable, promising magic from an unproven snake oil. Hypnotherapy has been shown categorically, in decent sized rigid trials, to shrink viral warts and the outbreaks of human papilloma virus. I think it’s a good basis to club together with hypnotherapy presentations to be used in working with HIV.

A good self-hypnosis plan could be shared openly freely, and be made attractive, personal and stylised by Africa’s rich artistic talent. If you would like to contribute to this project, or have an idea which could help bring this to fruition, please email me.

 

Studies available on my website, www.EthicalHypnotist.com – Sci/Med page.

With best wishes,

Jenny x

jenny@ethicalhypnotist.com

London, England

 

Beauty in Micro-Gravity Fire

Now in its eighth year, the 2011 Combustion Art Competition Awards held at a recent meeting of the Combustion Institute brought together a bunch of pyrotechnic scientists celebrating their expression of the breathtaking beauty of fire.

This was the winning shot. Flaming Star

 

Combining three separate images, all taken as part of her research into spacecraft fire safety, aerospace engineer Sandra Olson of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, won with her star-shaped rendition of flames burning in microgravity.

The blue areas are produced when visible light is released from the chemical reaction in a process known as chemiluminescence. The white, yellow and orange colours occur as soot burns in the flame.

(Image: Sandra Olson)

 

From Nature Journal – city life seems to generate mental illness

Between the crowds and the noise and the pressure, city life often seems to set one’s brain on edge. Turns out that could literally be true.

A study of German college students suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress, particularly social stress, than those of country dwellers. The findings don’t indicate which aspects of city life had changed the students’ brains, but provide a framework for future investigations.

“Whether people are exposed to noise, live near a park, have a big group of friends or not — you can do those experiments, and tease apart which parts of urban living are associated with these changes,” said Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a psychiatrist at German’s Central Institute of Mental Health.

Meyer-Lindenberg’s findings, published June 23 in Nature, are a neurological investigation into the underpinnings of a disturbing social trend: As a rule, city life seems to generate mental illness.

Compared to their rural counterparts, city dwellers have higher levels of anxiety and mood disorders. The schizophrenia risk of people raised in cities is almost double. Literature on the effect is so thorough that researchers say it’s not just correlation, as might be expected if anxious people preferred to live in cities. Neither is it a result of heredity. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and mind.

What those causes are is unknown, but many researchers have speculated that urban social environments are partly responsible. After all, cities are hyper-social places, in which residents must be constantly on guard, and have mathematically more opportunity to experience stressful interaction. Too much stress may ultimately alter the brain, leaving it ill-equipped to handle further stress and prone to mental illness.

‘We provide the first mechanism that links cities to mental illness via social stress.’
“Most people speculated that it had something to do with social environments, but there was never any direct data,” said Meyer-Lindenberg. “We provide the first mechanism that links cities to mental illness via social stress.”

Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues initially tested 16 male and 16 female college students. Before the test, the students’ heart rate, blood pressure and stress-hormone levels were measured. There were no significant differences between country and city kids. Neither were there appreciable differences in mood or personality.

Duing the test itself, the students were put inside a brain-scanning fMRI machine, then asked to take a computerized math test designed to be socially stressful: Each correct answer was followed by more difficult questions, false feedback told each student that his or her score was exceptionally low, instructors glared disapprovingly and bemoaned the waste of money.

The city kids displayed heightened levels of activity in two brain regions: the amygdala, which is central to processing emotion and stress, and the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, which regulates the amygdala. In short, city brains had disproportionately amplified responses to social stress. They’d become sensitized.

Meyer-Lindenberg’s team repeated the study twice more with a total of 70 more students. Each time the same pattern emerged. The researchers then looked for links to age, education, income, marital and family status, mood and personality. But when those were taken into account, the pattern still remained.

The larger the city in which a student lived, the more active their amygdala. The longer they’d lived in a city as a child, the more active their cingulate cortex. In other studies, the cingulate cortex has been described as especially sensitive to early-life stress, with alterations linked to adult psychological problems.

Communication between the cingulate cortex and amygdala also seemed to be less efficient in city dwellers. In a commentary accompanying the study, California Institute of Technology neurobiologists Daniel Kennedy and Ralph Adolphs noted that similar patterns are seen in people with genetic predispositions to psychiatric disorders.

“Taken together, the findings suggest that the cingulate–amygdala circuit is one on which genetic and environmental risks for mental illness may converge,” they wrote.

Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues noted that, while they consider social stress to be the most likely trigger, other factors — pollution, crowding, as-yet-unanalyzed demographic and socioeconomic factors — could be involved. German college students also represent a very limited test group.

According to Meyer-Lindenberg, residents of cities in the developing world may be subject to more intense stresses than his students. “The divide between urban and rural is not that strong in Germany. You can go between city and country very quickly,” he said. “We would expect the differences in stress to be bigger in places with a larger divide between urban and rural.”

In future studies, researchers could run similar studies on people with varying urban experiences and backgrounds, possibly filling in by identifying exactly which aspects of city life make brains more vulnerable to stress. Urban planners and policymakers could then apply those insights. Also open for investigation are whether city dwellers are vulnerable specifically to social stress, or other forms as well.

With a growing majority of humanity now firmly urbanized, “the fact that we will be living mostly in cities seems inescapable,” wrote Kennedy and Adolphs. “This highlights the importance of understanding the effects that such living conditions will have on human mental health.”

Cityscape Image: Geoff Wilson/Flickr

Citations: “City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing in humans.” By Florian Lederbogen, Peter Kirsch, Leila Haddad, Fabian Streit, Heike Tost, Philipp Schuch, Stefan Wust, Jens C. Pruessner, Marcella Rietschel, Michael Deuschle & Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg. Nature, Vol. 474 No. 7352, June 23, 2011.

“Stress and the city.” By Daniel Kennedy and Ralph Adolphs. Nature, Vol. 474 No. 7352, June 23, 2011.

 

Blog- Exotic Dancers Turn To Hypnosis To Keep Customers Spellbound

 

(The Sun) – A hypnotist is helping lap dancers lure men into spending more money on their sexy shows, The Sun reported Monday.

Entertainer Grant Saunders was called in by club boss Jason Armitage as takings slumped in the recession.

Girls at Cleopatra’s Lounge in Huddersfield, northern England, hope to keep spellbound punters forking out for £10 ($16) dances.

Saunders, 34, said, “They will use a technique called anchoring. The man’s subconscious mind becomes open to suggestion as a dancer speaks to him and gives him a little touch on the shoulder or the knee.”

But no one will be put in a trance, Saunders added.

Saunders said, “It’s just about making them better saleswomen.” Armitage added, “My girls could earn £5,000 a week a few years ago. Now they’re lucky to make £500.”

 

Dancer Sabrina, 25, said, “I never say never to learning anything.”

Source: The Sun

 

It’s Summer Solstice – today we will celebrate the Sun. And hypnotic exotic dancers.

Reminds me of the Tantra day for dancers that I ran in Cape Town’s only strip joint, Mavericks, in conjunction with the proudly ethical Whet Sensuality Emporium.

http://www.whet.co.za/store/

http://www.mavericks.co.za/

It’s worth pointing out that wherever there are exotic dancing venues in an area, the rate of sexual assault and rape goes down… not up. For more on this, check out Belle du Jour’s blog at http://sexonomics-uk.blogspot.com/

Sex Workers’ rights assoc brank new spankingly good website
www.SWAAY.org

 

Let me know if you’re interested in or have experienced, hypnosis in spellbindingly good dancing!

In Bright Regards

Jenny

www.EthicalHypnotist.com
London