Forbes

Meditation for Anger (or Tough Meetings) Forbes We've all been there. You want to feel happy. Glowing. Full of life. But someone has said something that makes you angry. It might be a boss, investor or direct report. And perhaps now you need to walk into a meeting and face them. There is a ...

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Meditation for Anger (or Tough Meetings) - Forbes

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A Cure for One of America's Most Difficult Workplaces: Meditation Wall Street Journal (subscription) NEW YORKDuring a recent meditation class, Justin von Bujdoss, a 42-year-old Buddhist lama dressed in a tie and navy windbreaker that read Chaplain von Bujdoss, instructed his 19 students to close their eyes. Imagine a sphere of light above your ...

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A Cure for One of America's Most Difficult Workplaces: Meditation - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

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The Calm app - known for helping people relax on a daily basis - has a new feature to help you fall asleep.

We all know how important it is to wind down at the end of a busy day. If you have kids, you know that bedtime stories are a vital part of the process. Now an app which is known for helping you relax is helping you fall asleep, too.

Follow KTLA Tech Reporter Rich DeMuro on Facebook or Twitter for cool apps, tech tricks & tips!

Recently, I met up with Michael Acton Smith. He's the co-founder and co-CEO of Calm, a meditation app on Android and iOS already used by 8 million people to relax.

"Theres so much baggage around the word meditation, I think people assume its spiritual and woo-woo.We'remore interested in the neuroscience than the incense of meditation," explained Acton Smith in a room at the vintage chic restored Hotel Normandie in Los Angeles.

Now, in addition to the calming landscapes and soothing sound effects the app normally offers, there is a new feature called Sleep Stories.

"Theyre anything from 10 minutes to an hour long - theres a little bit of music, a few breathing exercises and people rarely get to the end of them," said Acton Smith.

Some are read by familiar voices like Ben Stein. There are even a handful for kids!

Calm worked with a clinical psychologist to engineer the stories to help you drift off.

"Our stories start interesting - then they get gently more sleep inducing until you fall asleep," said Action Smith.

The app features a selection of stories you can access for free but to unlock everything - including a daily meditation - subscriptions run as low as $5 dollars a month.

"The science shows so many positive impacts on ones life from helping us sleep better to improving our attention, focus, creativity, lowering blood pressure," explained Acton Smith.

If you want to give it a try, use the link below to access a free 30-day trial of everything the app offers. There is no credit card necessary to sign up.

https://www.calm.com/richontech

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Meditation app Calm can now read you to sleep with grown up bedtime stories - fox4kc.com

Chester Cathedral, England (image via Wikimedia)

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need within.

Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

The first church I ever loved was St. Bartholomews in New York, a 19th-century Episcopal parish on Park Avenue. In truth, it was one of the first churches I, an irreligious, halfhearted Jew, had ever entered. A beloved high school art history teacher led my class on a tour of some of Manhattans best-known churches: St. Thomas, St. Patricks, St. John the Divine. Since then, I have returned to all of them many times, but St. Barts happened to be first, and it has remained foremost in my mind. The paneled, gold-leafed chancel shone under the watchful eyes of plate-haloed saints and latticed glass. The light pulsed warm and steady up and down the pilasters flanking a broad Roman arch. The organ at St. Barts is world famous, but I dont remember if it was playing. I was lost inside myself.

What is a church? Is it a building or a religious apparatus in other words, is it defined by its structure or its function? The answer, of course, is an inexact combination of the two. Some churches, like St. Peters Basilica at the Vatican or Barcelonas Sagrada Familia, straddle the line nicely. They are in use to different degrees and in different ways. Tourists and worshippers inhabit these spaces for their respective purposes, but the groups cannot help but cross into each others territory. The worshipper is not immune to visual spectacle and historical significance; the tourist must adopt a posture of reverence to have the full experience or at least must cover her shoulders.

For most of its history, the church was a metonym for the Roman Catholic Church, just as the physical edifice embodied the institution. Throughout the history of man, secularism has been the exception, not the rule. The religious disposition has not waned because religious institutions have; if anything, a mass longing for order and communion has grown more clamorous in the absence of shared cultural outlets. Nearly all modern literature and art maps the edges of a gaping hole where God used to be.

To me, churches have always represented space outside of time. Perhaps this is because, by nature, they gesture to the ineffable, the unearthly, or perhaps its because the heyday of their social and cultural importance is long past. Their symbolism is, in a sense, frozen, conscripted to be forever what it once was. Whatever the reason, I find that crossing the narthex of a cathedral is like starting a great book: You simply arent in your home world anymore. Your body feels different here lighter to some, heavier to others. This land exerts a different gravitational pull on each visitor.

What does it mean to love church but not God? I have never been a theist, but I have always been a reader. A church is an object that is meant to be read, deciphered window to window by a trained eye. If you know how to read a church, you are in on a secret that comparatively few in the modern era spend any time with. In a painting, each brushstroke carries the intention of the artist, but the meaning of the sum is up for debate. Meaning within the architectural elements of a church is fixed. The nave and transepts make a cross, a crucifix. The front-facing faade is often divided into thirds, like the Holy Trinity. The vaulted roof inverts the hull of a ship, or an ark, which carries believers to Heaven. The altar rests high above congregants, evoking Biblical mountaintops. We enter and exit a church through the same doors, for in our beginning lies our end. An apse at each end of a square means an ancient Roman basilica; lancet windows and elaborate stained glass are Gothic. Imagine the power of these signs and symbols in our postmodern world of infinitely destabilized meaning.

But in my view, the truest kind of reader/viewer is not the intellectual, but the supplicant. To consume a work of art is really to be consumed by it: to surrender your will to the vision of the creator or, in this case, the Creator. In my experience, church people comprise a particular type, uncorrelated with religious or ethnic affiliation; their defining characteristic is a willingness to be obliterated by something greater. As French Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres said, It is on our knees that we should study the beautiful. The blessing of knowing how to read a church is that you can, for a little while, be done with knowing. You can rest in the comfort of the medieval illiterate that you know what all the pictures and panels mean, that this shared meaning holds you securely in place. You can move on to states of being deeper than intellect.

(Side note: Have I ever found myself in a synagogue that evoked a similar state of mind? I have not. I suspect a kind of somber austerity native to Judaism limits the Jewish temples reach toward the visual sublime. The Jews see God in a tradition of textual interpretation that is perpetually renewed no fixed meaning there. And the Protestants? They need not see God; they feel Him.)

Being in church makes me want to find the quietest, most passive part of myself and take up residence there. Its a state documented by hundreds of years of Western philosophy: what Freud called the oceanic feeling, what Kant called the sublime, what contemporary Buddhism-tinged practitioners might call mindfulness. In short, organized grandeur makes us feel small and powerless, yet connected to something all-powerful. I think of a line from T. S. Eliots Ash Wednesday: Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still. Church, if we take it seriously, if we give in to stillness, threatens to reorder what we care about.

But churches can only be experienced within space and time. We all live in bodies, bodies that we must maneuver through the world. Architecture, of all the arts, asks most directly that we consider the symbolic effect of the material. We can steer clear of museums, performances, and books, but we can never be nowhere. An extraordinary environment forces us into a confrontation with a striking somewhere, reminding us that we can and should take care in choosing where we place our bodies, for there we also place our minds. We know this intuitively think of the depressing office cubicle, which has spawned its own genre of literature, or the mind-numbing gray crisscross of highways but the pointless frenzy of modern life makes it frighteningly easy to forget.

I took a trip to Italy in the summer of 2015. My visit coincided with the great European heatwave that choked the continent through late June and July, sending even the most tenacious tourist scrambling for shelter on a semi-hourly basis. The symbolism was almost too precious: We creatures of the firmament finding respite from hell on Earth inside the marbled cocoon of Gods house, in Rome, a city at the precise juncture of pagan and Christian history. In a way, it was simple: We were hot, the church was cool. And in a way, the power of the church is that simple. Its a spiritual balm in a world that has ceased to prioritize pleasure and meaning above capitalistic production.

Church is a reminder that, if we are not careful, we may fail to seek what we most essentially and deeply need. Its easy for us to become mired in the material, the temporal, and miss those amorphous wells of meaning that the material and temporal are, after all, only meant to serve: beauty, goodness, connection with the infinite. The spear-tip windows of a cathedral lead inexorably to Heaven, even if only a heaven of the mind. Its ambulatory chapels pull us into separate worlds, belonging both to themselves and to the universe as a whole. The nave suggests the possibility of a single path through life, straight and true. Light through colored glass dapples the floor like spots of truth. And the organ? It swells the space with sound like water, clear and luminous, through which all the churchs visual glories are refracted, and which gestures beyond the seen and felt toward the far reaches of the senses, where suspecting a thing is as good as knowing it. This is the place I want to live.

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A Meditation on the Ineffable Grandeur of Churches - Hyperallergic

GUEST MEDITATION

My times are in thy hand, Psalm 31:15.

The writer of Psalm 31 is David. We note that he used the word times, which is plural. Yes, life is made up of a period of time, but there are times within our time of life.

Briefly in Davids life there was a time that he kept his fathers sheep as a shepherd boy out on the hillsides of Israel, and it was no doubt a very peaceful time.

Growing up with seven older brothers would be an interesting and learning time of getting along as a family. Then there would be at time that David was anointed to take King Sauls place as King over Israel, but there would be a time between his anointing and when he would occupy the throne.

In the meantime, he would trust God to slay Goliath the giant, play music for the king he was going to replace, be successful in battle, experience King Sauls jealousy, experience rejection, and live among his enemies; but the time would come that David would sit upon the throne as the anointed king over all Israel.

After becoming king, there would be a time of success, a time of failure, a time of restoration, a time of disappointment in his own family, and finally there would come the time of his death.

David had said, In Thee, O Lord, do I put my trust, Psalm 31:1; and he knew that regardless of the time, he was in Thy hand.

Read also John 10:28-30.

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Guest Meditation -- In thy hand - The Daily Progress

Forbes

The Stock Broker Who Learned How To Meditate Forbes I was employed as a stock broker at an NYSE-firm in Boulder in 1982 and I'd been reading some books about Eastern philosophy, one of which recommended the practice of meditation to help in the relief of stress, a topic of interest to me. It's stressful ...

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The Stock Broker Who Learned How To Meditate - Forbes

A number of Cancer centers in the U.S. are using what is called "Integrative Medicine" - treatments like acupuncture and other unconventional treatment that are not typically seen at a hospital, as they use holistic approaches to help patients overcome the side effects of Cancer treatment.

"People seem to think needles hurt, but they really don't," said Glenn Jones, who is undergoing Pancreatic Cancer treatment at the Banner MD Anderson Cancer Center. In addition to his bi-weekly Chemo treatment, Jones is also getting acupuncture. "I tell people I've been hurt worse a lot of times. I hurt myself worse than that shaving."

Jones said he has received acupuncture treatment six or seven times since he began treatment.

"I place the needles on generally the hands, the arms, the legs, the feet and I use the ears a lot because they're very affective for a variety of treatments," said Patricia Emslie, who is an acupuncturist.

According to Jones, the acupuncture provides relief from from some of the symptoms that are brought on by the Chemo treatments. Jones said it has helped with hot flashes, nausea, and pain.

"It helps right now, the main thing I'm having is what's called Neuropathy and it's due to the Chemotherapy and I really have no feeling in my feet," said Jones. "The end of your fingers feel cold all of the time to me, and it gets to where it's hard to pick up things, button your shirt, stuff like that. The acupuncture does help."

Jones is one of many patients that are now using Integrative Treatment. The type of care that is now being used alongside traditional treatment came about, thanks to the James M Cox Foundation Center for Prevention and Integrative Oncology.

"What we focus on is strategies to help people with lifestyle decisions, which means diet, excercise and managing stress, which we focus a lot on," said Dr. SantoshRao, a Medical & Integrative Oncologist.

Besides acupuncture, Yoga and massage are also offered.

"You're dealing with a very specific patient population," said Dr. Rao. "There are Breast Cancer survivors who have had surgery and have limitations. Older patients who are doing yoga sometimes for the first time. You want to be gentle. You want to make sure you're with somebody who's experienced, who knows from a cancer standpoint what's safe and what's not safe"

Other therapies are also offered, such as a Holistic Tobacco Recovery Program.

Integrative Therapies historically have not been a part of prescribed treatments, but with increasing patient demand, Rao is hoping Integrative Therapies will continue to grow, so patients like Jones can get the relief they need.

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Integrative Therapies offer new approach to Cancer treatment - FOX 10 News Phoenix

Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court today dismissed a petition filed by the Sant Asaram Ashram challenging an I-T Department notice about special audit of alleged shell companies owned by it.

A division bench of justices M R Shah and B N Karia allowed the I-T Department to go ahead with special audit of the group of companies owned by the controversial godman asaram, and his institution, Sant Asaram Ashram.

The ashram floated several shell companies which indulge in money laundering, the notice alleged.

With the court dismissing the petition, the department will be able to carry out a special audit as provided under section 142 (2)(A) of the Income Tax Act.

Asaram was arrested by Jodhpur police on August 31, 2013 in a case of rape filed by a minor girl. Later, two sisters from Surat also levelled allegations of rape against Asaram and his son.

The self-styled godman is in jail, facing trials in the two cases.

PTI

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HC rejects Asaram ashram's plea against special IT audit - The Siasat Daily

The name of Vincent Van Gogh probably isnt one that springs to mind for most people in connection with pop-country superstar Shania Twain.

But the Canadian singer and songwriter feels a special connection with the 19th century post-Impressionist painter in terms of how shes gone about writing the songs for her first new album in more than a dozen years, one that shell preview this weekend during her headlining set Saturday at the 2017 edition of the Stagecoach Country Music Festival in Indio.

Relaxing on the sofa in her Beverly Hills hotel room last week during a bit of downtime between rehearsals for that performance, which serves a key role of the grand rollout of her return to the pop spotlight this year, Twain made a comparison between the process her songs went through and Van Goghs methodology in his famous Wheat Fields series of dozens of paintings of haystacks.

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Look at how many of those there are, she said with a combination of excitement and curiosity. There are all these different lightssome are dark, some are bright, some show different times of day, some are foggy. Why would somebody paint the same painting over and over and over again?

He had to go through that same experience over and over and over again, she said, answering her own question. Some paintings are just not done until theyre done. Theyve got to paint that subject out of their system. And thats what I had to do. These songs just evolved. They started one place and ended in another.

Her new album wont surface until the fall, and at this point still doesnt even have a title. Its being scheduled for release during the all-important fourth quarter period during which the music industry sees its biggest sales, and consequently holds back its biggest guns for that time.

Twains album will test to what extent she retains the commercial power she held as the biggest female country star of the 1990s and early 2000s, and who was rivaled for a time perhaps only by Garth Brooks as the most potent pop star in the world.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America has certified her album sales at 48 million in the U.S. alone, and her biggest seller, 1997s Come On Over, has logged hearly half that figure on its own: 20 million copies, placing it among the Top 10 biggest selling albums of all time.

Her show at Stagecoach is a coup for festival organizers, who say theyve had their sights on her since the event began a decade ago.

The fact that she was offered it [a headlining slot] says a lot in itself, said Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, the concert-industry-tracking publication. Its a good move for Stagecoach--It adds a little freshness, and thats what they need for shows like that. Shes not been around a lot, so there are a lot of people who havent seen her for a long time.

Thats because Twain had stepped out of the limelight when Stagecoach was born in 2007. Having survived the tragedy of her parents death in an automobile accident when she was a young adult, Twain, who was born Eilleen Regina Edwards on Aug. 28, 1965 in Windsor, Ontario, suffered another round of personal and professional setbacks in the new millennium that once again left her reeling.

Her high-profile marriage to longtime producer and frequent songwriting partner Robert John Mutt Lange disintegrated after he allegedly had an affair with her best friend, and they divorced in 2010 after 17 years together. She told Billboard at the time she didnt know whether shed ever be able to perform again, so closely were she and Lange involved with her music career.

She also developed problems with her voice, a condition known as dysphonia that can be brought on by stress, but which she attributed to contracting Lyme disease.

Whatever the cause, it left her for a time virtually unable to sing. She went through extensive physical therapy for her voice, and now continues an intense regimen of warmup and other voice-strengthening exercises that allowed her to accept an offer from Caesars Palace to launch a residency at the Colosseum that ran from 2012 to 2014.

A singers typical problem is nodules on the vocal cords from overuse or poor technique, she said. That was not my problem. My problem isnt unique, or rare, but the exercises are very different than for nodules, and I cant get an operation for mine. The only way to fix it is to work hard.

With nodules you cant speak; youve got to rest, rest, rest, she said. With mine, youve got to work, work, work. Then she laughed again. I know, I know.

From her experience doing the Still the One residency in Las Vegas, she said, I learned a lot about myself, and my voice, from the Still the One residency in Las Vegas, she said, both because Id been having a lot of problems with my voice prior and because this was a real plunge into the unknown.

The big question?

Was I going to be able to hold up? she said. The environment is very dry there, and its very, very hard on a voice. A lot of singers have problems there. And theres the discipline required for doing a show like that ever night.

This is why I ended up going on a tour [the Rock This Country tour in 2015-2016] after that, because I thought, Wow, I can do this! If I can do it here, I can do it anywhere, she said, bursting into laughter at her spontaneous allusion to the Frank Sinatra late-career anthem New York, New York. It gave me courage to do more shows and get out on the road again. It was a good test for me.

In fact, that tour brought her back into the Top 10 of Pollstars ranking of the highest-grossing North American concert tours of the year. In 2015, she grossed $69 million from 72 shows in 56 cities, including dates at Staples Center in L.A. and the Honda Center in Anaheim.

Her business was generally very good, Bongiovanni said, although not all her shows were sellouts.At one time she was one of the top acts in country music, and then she went away for a while. Now a whole other groups of acts that have come along.

Having passed the test of whether she could still endure the rigors of touring, and having stabilized her personal life and remarrying in 2011to Frederic Thiebaud, the ex-husband of her former best friend---Twain gave herself another challenge: to write all the songs for her next album on her own. After the soul-searching she did while writing her 2012 autobiography, From This Moment On, she had no shortage of raw material to draw from.

Right from the beginning, I was not going to collaborate with anybody for this one, she said. This needed to be an independent experience.

I hadnt written by myself for a long time, she said. I was married for 14 years to my collaborator, and I really just needed to do that again. I needed to go back and do that by myself and have an uninterrupted flow of creativity that was insular, to see what I was made of, to see what I have there.

What she found translates as painfully vulnerable in places, commandingly resilient in others, happily grateful elsewhere. (You let me go/You had to have her/You told me so/I died faster, she sings in Im Alright.)

The solo approach was limited, however, to her songwriting. In place of Langes production, which had also played a key role in her commercial success by bringing a sonic edge from his hard rock background into the world of country music, she has teamed with a variety of different co-producers for most of the new tracks.

Yet the new songs largely extend, rather than dramatically break from, the sound and style that kept her atop the charts for an extended period with a string of No. 1 country hits including Any Man of Mine, You Win My Love, Honey, Im Home and Youre Still the One.

She hadnt settled firmly on which new songs shell unveil this weekend at Stagecoach, but said the prime contenders are Swingin and Lifes About to Get Good, both of which are full of the lyrical and melodic hooks shes specialized in all along.

She said that Lifes About To Get Good was a textbook example of the reward she gets out of writing songs.

I was thinking OK, what is life about? I was being kind of serious; I was reflecting: Lifes about joy, lifes about pain, lifes about this, lifes about that, she said. Then all of a sudden: Lifes about to get good. And I thought, What a great play on words! How fun is that? Who uses about as a play on words? Im sure no ones ever written that before and I was all excited.

I was getting satisfaction out of [considering] aspects of life and what its all about, then I have this really cool artistic moment--a writers thing, like Oh, yeah, thats really good, thats a great twist, she said. When those things come together, its all very satisfying. That is where the craft of writing comes in, the more soulful purpose of the meaning of the song comes out.

randy.lewis@latimes.com

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'Life's About to Get Good' for Shania Twain with new album, Stagecoach appearance - Los Angeles Times

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (KY3) - Liz Mehrtens and her husband built onto their back porch and then enclosed it so they could enjoy a relaxing sanctuary from the world. And it would have been a cozy room if it weren't the neighbors. Thousands of them thundering by at 60 miles per hour on James River Freeway.

"I hate listening to it," Liz explained. "It goes all day and all night."

For the most part, they never use the quiet space they dreamed about, Liz said, "Now it's all fixed up, but it's still too noisy to sit out here. When we moved in here, it wasn't here, the James River Freeway. And it just got worse and worse."

Even with thick insulation, the traffic noise penetrates through the walls. So when Liz received a letter from the Missouri Department of Transportation-- it was sweet music to her.

The agency is looking into building a sound wall on the south side of James River Freeway and east of Freemont Avenue. People like Liz who live adjacent to Route 60 can share their thoughts on the proposal at an upcoming public meeting from 5 until 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 2, at Campbell United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall, 1747 E. Republic Road.

MoDOT has already conducted a noise study to look at all areas north and south of James River Freeway but concluded the south side--east of Freemont--was the only section that would benefit from a barrier.

After the public meeting, MoDOT will mail the residents in that area a ballot to vote on the wall.

For Liz, it can't go up soon enough. "It would be nice if we could sit out here and enjoy it. Watch a ballgame or listen to the Price is Right," she said.

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Sound wall along James River Freeway sounds like sweet music to ... - KY3