someone created a random generator that creates randomized inspirational quotes overlaid on random images in a soothing fashion and each and every image is comic gold
it’s pretty much the best thing ever and here are some of my favorites so far
so good
I’m getting this one made into a motivational poster for my home office
Here are three guided meditations you can use to help inspire your mindfulness practice and address your specific challenges.
Sometimes it is helpful to cut out thinking and sometimes it is helpful to talk back to your thinking. These meditations are examples of how to talk back to your thinking. They are written in a form inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh’s guided meditations. You can also write your own guided meditations to work on life issues where you would like to create change.
**Overcoming jealousy, building self-esteem, working with anxiety and depression take time. Each of these guided meditations take about 2-3 minutes if you breathe with the lines. If you just read them they take about 30 seconds and don’t give you the benefit of deep breathing. Practice one or all of these every day. Practice the anxiety one whenever you are feeling anxious and need a bit of relief.
**Practice every day, once or twice a day and notice the effects, both immediately and as the weeks pass.
If a child is overwhelmed, remove them from the overwhelming situation.
If a child is hungry or tired, address those needs.
If they are throwing a tantrum in the department store, take them somewhere quiet and let them cry until they are calm. They’re probably just bored or cramped or overwhelmed and need a minute.
Address the cause of misbehavior, not how it manifests.
Make sure things like transitions, when you are leaving or moving on, are clearly communicated. Sudden transitions can be a huge trigger for tantrums. Best to try and mitigate with proper advance notice.
Explain your reasons to children when you are enforcing rules
Listen to children when they explain their objections to rules. You don’t have to agree with them all the time, but you should listen.
Understand that you, the adult, can also be overwhelmed, tired, hungry, and frustrated too. Acknowledge, to your kids, out loud, how these things are impacting you and apologize if you snap at them unfairly. Again, this is modeling emotional response.
Make the rules clear, simple, and consistent. Don’t change what the rules are based on your mood that day, or if you must, explain it before hand. If you normally let them play video games in the car, but you can’t today because your head hurts and your driving to a new place and you need to concentrate so you don’t want the sound to distract you- explain that to your kids. If they counter with “I have head phones. Is that ok?” Then, yeah. It’s ok.
If you need to have consequences for their actions, then actually follow through. Don’t threaten with consequences that you won’t really do. That makes it a lie, and makes it super ineffective in the future.
Make consequences fit the behavior. Explain why that is the consequence.
Some good consequences might include: cleaning up a mess they made, taking a cool down time for a few minutes, not getting to a special treat like a trip to the movie theater with their friends, etc. Remember, we are trying to avoid physical pain as a form of punishment.
Speak to children respectfully and prompt them to speak respectfully back.
Choices. Give kids a reasonable, manageable number of choices. Do you want to wear the green shirt or the blue shirt? Do you want Cheerios or waffles? Carrots or green beans? Do you want to give grandma a hug or a high five? Older kids can handle more choices than younger ones.
General rule of thumb: You aren’t trying to raise an obedient child. You’re trying to raise a thoughtful, respectful adult. And you have to be a role model, not just in what you say, but also in what you do.
For a full and updated list of writing advice, click here. All advice is by Marina Montenegro and originally posted on Writing the Words blog. (This list is updated to include August’s Romance section)
I just heard this woman say “you procrastinate because you are afraid of rejection. It’s a defense mechanism, you are trying to protect yourself without even trying.” and I think I just realized what was wrong with me.
Yep, this is a very, very common reason for procrastinating. It’s also why procrastination, even though it’s often associated with laziness, is a fairly common trait in a lot of people with anxiety and perfectionism issues.
This idea – You’re not lazy, you’re protecting yourself – hit me really hard while reading, of all things, Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which turns out to be as much about how brains work and how relationships work as how orgasms work.
In an early part of the book she talks about Fight/Flight/Freeze responses to threats–the example she uses is being attacked by a lion. You fight, if you think you can defeat the lion; you run away, if you think you can escape the lion; and when you think there’s nothing you can do, when you feel the lion’s jaws closing on your neck, you freeze, because dying will hurt less that way. You just stop and go numb and wait for it to be over, because that is the last way to protect any scrap of yourself.
Later in the book, she talks about the brain process that motivates you to pursue incentives, describing it as a little monitor that gauges your progress toward a goal versus the effort you’re expending. If it feels like too little progress is being made you get frustrated, get angry, and, eventually, you… despair. You stop trying.
You go numb and wait for it to be over, because that’s the only way left to protect yourself.
So it occurred to me that these are basically the same thing–when facing a difficult task, where failure feels like a Threat, you can get frustrated and fight it out–INCREASE DOING THE THING until you get where you’re going. Or you can flee–try to solve the problem some other way than straight on, changing your goal, changing your approach, whatever. Fight or flight.
But both of those only apply when you think the problem is solvable, right? If the problem isn’t solvable, then you freeze. You despair.
And if you’re one of those Smart Kids (Smart Girls, especially) who was praised for being smart so that all tasks in the world came to be divided between Ooh This Is Easy and I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN DO THAT AND IF I FUCK UP I WILL DIE, then… it’s pretty easy to see how you lose the frustration/anger stage of working toward a goal, because your brain goes straight to freeze/despair every time. Things are easy and routine or they are straight up impossible.
So, you know, any time you manage to pull yourself up and give that lion a smack on the nose, or go stumbling away from it instead of just falling down like a fainting goat as soon as you spot it on the horizon, give yourself a gold star from me. Because this is some deeply wired survival-brain stuff. Even if logically you know that that term paper is not a lion, it really is like that sometimes.
idea: selina kyle as a reverse archeologist. she steals from museums and private collections and returns things to the shrines and graves where they belong. she brings a clay jaguar to monte alban and now she can talk to cats. the whip is because she’s indiana jones. batman makes half-assed attempts to stop her but it’s not like she’s wrong so like ¯_(ツ)_/¯ he’s got violent crimes to deal with, what does he care if she’s stealing back smuggled relics from rich assholes. he met that guy at a party once and he was a huge asshole so fuck him. steal his toupee, too. it’s probably endangered. ‘oh no catwoman is escaping and there’s nothing we can do. robin sit back down. there’s nothing we can do. she’s taking that statue back to egypt and we have no possible recourse against this terrible nonviolent crime with a single dick victim. i am definitely really mad about this. i’ll fight her later, when you’re sleeping or at a friend’s house or something. you’ll understand when you’re older.’
so far this post has been reblogged by one single dude who was super offended by the idea of putting relics back where they came from, and a legitimately shocking number of hype archaeology majors who aspire to working primarily in repatriation.
just moving along like everyone else 