Keeping it fresh

Want to change the way you experience exercise? These tips can make workouts more enjoyable.

1. Set your own calendar. Bored by the same-old, same-old schedule of exercise? Mix up your activities and time spent on each. People who plan ahead are more likely to follow through. So, once a week, pencil in your choices on your calendar. Carving out room for several short daily stints is often easier than one lengthy bout of activity. Three 10-minute blocks on Tuesday, one 10-minute block on Wednesday, two 10-minute blocks on Friday, plus a 90-minute hike or bike ride on Saturday meets aerobic goals for the week. Choose combinations and activities that appeal to you. Remember, though, its best to be active at least three days a week.

2. Wear a pedometer. The simplest step-counter can up the ante on exercise, according to a 2007 Journal of the American Medical Association review of 26 studies. Over all, those who clipped on a pedometer raised their physical activity by nearly 27%, adding about 2,100 to 2,500 steps a day. Other results were promising, too: a drop of 3.8 mm Hg in systolic blood pressure and a decrease in body mass index. Setting a step goal counted for a lot. Those who did so significantly increased activity; those who didnt generally remained at baseline.

So it may be worthwhile to invest in a pedometer and to set a step goal for yourself. To translate aerobic exercise guidelines from the page to the pavement, aim for 3,000 steps in 30 minutes thats 100 steps a minute. Five days of this (or three days of 5,000 steps in 50 minutes) enables you to meet your weekly goal of 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity. Cant find a chunk of free time that long in your schedule? Try 10-minute chunks that is, 1,000 steps in 10 minutes throughout the week.

3. Plug in. Turn on your computer and power up with the great range of individual exercises and workouts on these websites:

Or go interactive with a video game. Change up your weekly exercise routine by balancing, bowling, boxing, or trying any number of other active options available through Wii Fit and Wii Sports. Or work up a sweat stamping out the beat to music videos on Dance Dance Revolution, a video game that is available for PlayStation, XBox, and Wii.

4. Rise to the challenge. If your workouts arent challenging or interesting enough, expand your horizons. The Presidential Active Lifestyle Award and Presidential Champions challenge (www.presidentschallenge.org/celebrate) encourages you to become more fit. The Presidential Active Lifestyle Award helps you set activity and healthy eating goals over the course of six weeks, while the Presidential Champions challenge allows you to earn points for all sorts of activities: badminton or baton twirling, jai alai or juggling, ski jumping or skydiving, along with many more plebian pastimes. The more effort an activity requires, the more points you rack up while doing it. Log in alone or as a group (you can start your own group or join an existing one) to track your progress toward Bronze (40,000 points), Silver (90,000 points), and Gold (160,000 points) medals. Theres even a Platinum medal for those earning 1 million points. (Point requirements are higher for advanced athletes.)

See original here:
Starting to Exercise - Harvard Health

Michael Vedviks obituary blamed the Seattle Seahawks last-minute loss of Februarys Super Bowl for his untimely demise one day after the game.

The wife of the Washington state man said her freshly dead husband, 53, would have found the gallows humour hilarious.

People find a lot of different ways to deal with lifes inevitable endings, whether its losing football games, jobs, relationships, friends or, someday, their own time on this planet.

One often-useful response to the fear of loss is humour. As Woody Allen said, I dont fear death. I just dont want to be there when it happens.

In addition to jokes, however, psychology, philosophy and spirituality are also employed to come to term with the tragedy, as the ancient Greeks put it, that things fade.

Facing up to loss and death is the central theme of Easter, which the worlds two billion Christians this weekend.

The story of the life, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, who came to be known as the Christ, or Messiah, takes on lifes most profoundly difficult challenge.

To deal with the fact that every special person, every wonderful experience and everything we love in this world will eventually end, Christians say Easter teaches that death is not the final word.

Even though human lives are full of passion and creativity, existence also entails, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, perpetual perishing.

Its no wonder so many look to humour to face the angst.

Excerpt from:
Douglas Todd: Facing up to loss - psychology, philosophy and the Easter story

The power of praying comes from daring to enter that mysterious place between the emerging God and us. But its not an empty spaceits our own selves on progressively larger size scales, where we are participating in multiple emerging phenomena and creating emergent identities. As the ancient Egyptian world blended outward into the spiritual world, so does ours. And the higher our consciousness goes along the Uroboros of Human Identity, the more it blends into the emerging phenomenon of God. In tuning our ordinary consciousness in to those higher levels that we may have scarcely ever visited before, we approach God.

This may seem bizarre. How can size scales alone control such great mysteries? How can whats essentially a number have the most profound of spiritual impacts? Well, size is not just a numbersize determines cosmic identity. The number that describes a size is not in itself important but is a powerful symbol of the complexity possible on that size scale. Size is a key to the universe. On the Cosmic Uroboros size distinguishes the physical from the spiritual. In fact, in this universe the size or complexity level of a thing or event determines not only its nature but which world its operating in and which physical laws control that world.

But all these worlds exist all the time. And our minds now know it. We cant simply ignore this when we think about God. God fits into this very pattern by emerging.

Prayer is a conversation among different faces of ourselves as we exist on different size scales. We send our ordinary consciousness out to connect to our roles on emergent size scales. Those roles speak back to us if were open to their existence. After all, thats us in there playing them. They expand our sense of self. Their messages sound like thoughts, but in some deep sense they actually are messages, because they come from outside our normal culture-stunted state of mind.

Its time to crack open the whole idea of talking to God. If we are in a universe now known to span more than sixty orders of magnitude, and God is emerging from the infinite interactions of human aspirations, we have to look at everything anew. Weve already begun to do this intellectually, but can we do it emotionally? How can we step outside images of God that are many centuries deep and realize that those are only images and not reality?

It turns out all humans have a tool that will let us do this. The perfect name for it was suggested by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. In an interview filmed in the early 1950s Jung was asked bluntly, Do you believe God exists? Earlier Jung had written that all people need ideas and convictions that can give meaning to their lives and help them find their place in the universe (his phrase). He had written that we have the capacity to satisfy this need symbolically with a god image. He answered the interviewer by saying, What I know is that all humans have a god-capacity. Thats the tool. Our god-capacity.

Religions offer up symbols and images bounteously, but a capacity is something that belongs to us as humans, not as members of any religion. Our god-capacity is not tied to any specific tradition or symbol. It doesnt require any particular view of God. Its the ability to scratch the meaning-itch with a symbol. Shouldnt we want that symbol to represent the highest truth we know?

Public atheists like Richard Dawkins and others assume that unless a supernatural God is out there, ready and willing to answer prayers, there is no point in praying, and since such a God does not exist, praying is self-delusion. To them our god-capacity is not an ability but a liability, because it leads people to believe in the objective reality of their fantasies.

Many people do indeed believe in the objective reality of their fantasies, and doing so can be wildly dangerous in this world, but trashing our god-capacity because some people do this is like trashing love because sometimes it goes wrong.

At this moment in history, what is the highest and best use of our god-capacity?

Originally posted here:
Youre praying to the wrong God: What organized religion gets wrong about prayer