The nature of reality
March 15, 2010 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Visual Meditation of the Week
Our society spends so much time on ‘what is true’ that sometimes we forget that there are different kinds of truth. The plum trees did not look exactly like this when the picture was taken. But they did feel just like this. Take a moment and acknowledge where your truths may not align with simple facts. Celebrate them.
Spring plum blossoms, Juliet Chase, all rights reserved
Sunrise
March 1, 2010 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Visual Meditation of the Week
The morning sun moving across the landscape is one of the best reminders of how quickly life can change. Light can turn something that seems boring and uninteresting into something glorious. Are you holding the light in your life or are you waiting for someone else to shine one on you?
How a floor plan can map your mind too
May 12, 2009 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Health and Happiness
Image by viralbus
How we perceive our environment really does say as much about how we think as it does about our choice of homes. And memory can be a funny thing. Drawing a floor plan of your home can tell you a lot about your subconscious values and associations. It’s a rare person that remembers things exactly as they are so this is about what you can learn from the discrepancies, rather than if there are any. This exercise may teach you a lot or a little about yourself and like many things you’ll likely get more out of it the more time you take with it. Although even a quick run through can be revealing. It’s definitely fun and can be interesting to compare results with someone you live with or a friend whose home you know well. Find some graph paper to help keep your lines straight and then dive in. One tip is if you make one square on the graph paper equal to 12 inches you won’t need to tape too many pages together.
Step 1: From memory, draw a floor plan of your home, including all the levels, doors, windows, closets. etc. It’s great to do this one at work or at a coffee shop where you won’t be tempted to cheat by walking around. Make it as accurate as possible and then put it away.
Step 2: When you have some time and preferably an assistant for the measuring tape, draw a second floor plan of your home by going room to room and measuring the walls, windows, door widths etc.
Step 3: Now compare the floor plan from memory with the measured one. It’s amazing how the brain can leave out the only doorway or an entire stairwell leading to the second floor. What did you forget? If you forgot a door to a specific room, what is that telling you? Are you closing off that part of your life even if you haven’t physically barricaded the room? What rooms did you make bigger or smaller than they are? What rooms did you get pretty much spot on? It’s possible that rooms that you perceive as smaller, just have too much stuff in them and a little rearranging will leave your home and your psyche feeling more comfortable.
Was this a useful exercise? Please come back and share what you learned!
Challenging your perceptions and your limits
March 24, 2009 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Health and Happiness
There’s a subtle concept in psychology that can be paraphrased as there’s no such thing as universal truth. Basically, that everything we process with our brains is done through a series of self-created rules or filters, ‘this means this,’ that we aren’t even conscious of. You may have seen this referred to as framing or cognitive distortion at the negative extreme. The mind knows what it knows – think of the phenomenon of amputees who ‘feel’ the missing limb. His brain and nerves still hold the truth of what was.
It’s impractical to think of going through life questioning every unconscious thought, reaction, or interaction. However, when they hold you back, that’s the time to take out the magnifying glass and re-examine the rules; maybe they’ve changed or maybe they need to.
For more on how to do this, read Move Beyond the Limits That Are Holding You Back on zenhabits
