Little powers and much more

Too often we are satisfied with the little powers we achieved.

The  way/ways we nourish our mother energy in our community and then society, is really working? We didnt achieve that level where the connection between heart and brain is constantly linked and increasing in power. The fact is our inner connection is still like a swing at the kids playground. We are genuinely happy with the regular spiritual practice and activities we created, true or not true?

I ask myself questions. I know i am not alone in questioning my actions and results. I am never satisfied with myself because another fact is: there is still SO MUCH energy which wants to be free and express Herself in the most delightful and nourishing way.

we are always so peaceful and satisfied all the time.  so very human all the time.

Motor force in the background

Forget the past forget the past. What is this? …Erase the past? …Understand the past? …Give dignity to the past? Past is a source of power, a spiral of gems waiting to be lucidated and finally sparkle in all their splendor and sacrality. Each person has a special background because each person is special. Two Mondays ago i has the fortune to walk around Rome, the only world city where history comes alive and you cannot forget your past. Rome sucks you back wherever you are born and whatever is your motherlanguage. Rome does make your inside bell ringing: Love Your Past, Give it the Dignity. This is why Rome is awsome and this is also why I am pervaded by immense gratitude fora pretty long Roman pastlife. She understands me. Of course my visit was not only for pleasure causes but there was a productive reason linked to important working documents that She was still taking care of. It was now the time to be fully entitled the predicted sole owner of these Papers. And there i was enjoying the renewed past. When we k.n.o.w. where we are coming from, extraordinary motor forces get ignited. Never forget who we really are if we want to take the chance to drive. 

Egofish

I presume you all know where ego is located in the brain. In case you have no idea about brain deepest anatomy and functions you are still on time for that. It is very easy to understand & useful to know. Here is a species of fish with a big ego which made me laugh a lot. Besids the fact that it seem to have been tatooed Chinese characters with black ink on the body too!

15 reasons why it s good to know own Mr Ego.

1. because it gives a tremendous opportunity to laugh about your self and have lots of fun with your personal nuts!
2. because it helps you understanding the real purpose behind your actions, dreams, goals…
3. because it clarifies for you the purposes of other people ideas in your circle or groups regarding activities, projects ecc. you are involved.
4. because it gives you the last chance to face your ultimate stupidity.
5. because it gives you the last chance to understand the meaning of your feelings.
6. because it gives you the golden chance to distnguish between ego and self confidence, which are two very different aspects of personality.
7. because it helps to prevent general painful troubles with others.
8. because it will give you a vision on a large scale of  how things move in the community you belong to.
9. because it will help you to connect with other people who know their Mr Ego too (they are special and sometimes rare)
10. because it feels like an amazing satisfiction with no other comparison to silent the ego thoughts.
11. because an egoless life is much smoother and neater than an egoful life.
12. because it gives you clarity and dynamism of thinking.
13. because it makes you different and precious in every place you go.
14. because it will build like a shield of protection around your personality and space of action.
15. because it will move your attention on new things, very smart.

Six common ways (or conditioning) how couples manage the union

In its own way each couple is different. A man and a woman living together have something that other couples do not have. That something is quite impossible to identify and it can be the result of a mix of features or one single vision that works like a glue between the two personalities. There is also the fact that each couple is like one living body constantly evolving and constantly changing… or degenerating too, it depends. I am always intrigued by couple relationship dynamics first of all from mine itself and then also from outside, friends, relatives…. Infact some couples can be used as reference or models. Okey, this is my brief musing of the day. On a  most evident point of view there is that “cool” conditioning which is there to create the condition for the couple to be together. See few of them:

1. interests, hobby: trendy! experiencing the emotion of travelling often to explore new places and cultures together. Or to go skiing on weekends. Or to party alooot. When we cultivate  a passion in common we have this oneness feeling, like we are one with the partner. Sharing interests is a key for our companionship, otherwise we would feel like two strangers.
2. church activities: getting really popular these ones! weekly meeting for fellowships and meetings with our friends: we cannot live without it because this is what gives us the strenght and the nourishment  to grow together, appreciate life for every little thing, accept the challenges and what life has to offer.
3. life philosophy: we dont really know what is uniting us but we guess it’s the perspective and the way we look at every day in our life; the concern we have for each other and the nature. yes! we feel very much connected with the nature, we feel comfortable together and we tink at the same way on lots  and lots and lots of topics and issues.
4. work: we are working in the same field since long, we are the best partners and complement each other perfectly for the role. So we are very happy to be also merried because there is a special understanding which comes from our common experiences, we are able to anticipate the other’s thoughts and ideas, flowing with his/her creativity at the same time, it’s really thrilling, it gives lots of energy!
5. tradition and family: our parents got  married in the same style, this is very typical in our countryand works for the betterment of the family. We share the same system of belief and grew up with it, this is the base we stand on: our families are now related and very happy for us, they gave the blessing for a fulfilled merried life, nothing is more important. 
6. culture and language: we come from the same country, a similar lifestyle, similar friends; we speak the same language at all levels; it’s great we can discuss stuff, ideas, make plans; it works smooth cause we have the same mind form, guess we have absorbed it during all this time until we met; culture is the key, we have lots to share, a full background which gives that feeling of strenght and unity.

 

Within quality of a shot

The real master photographer is the one who spends his days without spoiling  80 – 90% of  his attention  on things which surf around photo world like travelling each time in magnificent places to shot unique pictures or becoming more knowledgeable about cameras and tecniques.  Today the gift of the divine creativity seems to had been bestowed upon an infinite myriad of precise fingers and enlightened brains. Wow! It is amazing to observe how many zillions of outstanding photoblogs are growing in this net. Impeccable clicks triggered during impeccable holidays or free weekends. We are surrounded by visual geniuses like never before. What an evident fact? So are all the geniuses the same or some genius is more or less genius? How to capture the rightousness of an image? How to know it is something really of great quality? And that the photographer was meant to be in the right place shoting the right image? One simple thing is that the master photographer kows himself much better than his camera and the flash.

Developing love is basic reality to educate children

 

I spent more than an hour skyping with Clara and Vicky from England yesterday at my office. These two young girls, we were living together in Italy few years ago when I was nanny and their mother was pregnant of the third child. At office I did not have the microphone so could only write down everything and listening to all they were speaking from the other side. The most beautiful chat: little things: stories, laughs, sending funny emoticons, chewing candies and so on. Just in the middle of the busiest time of my schedule at work. Just at the perfect moment for inundating the heart with something strong and sane.

 

Now the attention towards how the children do spend their time is growing more and more everywhere. They are becoming the centre of our mind. There are plenty of books talking that we have to keep our kids engaged as much as possible to learn, to grow, to absorb in order to develop their skills and talents. This is false actually. I think that orientatively if they can be busy for half of their time with homework and activities they can also do nothing for the other half of the time. I grew up at this way: School, home works and dance class three times a week were all on a fixed schedule for about ten years from 6 to 19. All the left free time was spent to create things with the help of parents or friends. Painting, reading, listening to music, playing an instrument without any instructor, just alone, toys, journals, swimming in the summertime, going for mushrooms, asparaguses or cyclamens and mimosas during spring time, pic-nics, tons of free walks around the town and so on. The love surrounding was soft and spontaneous, just enough to guide explorations and personal growth.  

My birthday parties were memorable, sometimes at the central park among rocks and small animals sometimes at the beach, and aunties, mommies and friends were all enjoying at the same time. It has been going for years like that. There were no scheduled activities and we used to run free in the nature or making a volcano or a castle with the sand. Everything was really simple and familiar, the environment comfy and the people smiling. Love was developing on its own natural way… and still is.

 

Here in Hong Kong my friends-mothers tell that the schools are putting a lot of pressure on the little ones. They have to pass examinations and study hard even at night several times during the week. Plus at least three courses-activities in afternons and/or weekends. I am sure this is not the right path to educate children. I am sure both teachers and educators, parents are lovely and careful. But love and pressure do not combine nicely most of the times, do they? If a child feels he is too often forced to do something, that means he is not comfortable with this rhythm and this situation will be translated sooner or later in another problem. It is obvious. There are other ways to educate which are safer and more adapting to a child inner self. And it is in the inner self where all the talents and the skills already reside! 

all about f.o.r.G.i.v.e

 

I felt the lovely hug of a mother by reading the speech in English of H.H. Shri Nirmala Devi from last Sunday, Easter.

Few excerpts: A special day for forgiveness. And that is why I say whatever you would think that it is very late, but we have done a meeting, because I didn’t want to miss the time [the occasion]. Forgiveness comes from people who are very generous, who are good-hearted. You know, everybody makes mistakes and so we can also make mistakes, but that means we have a right to forgive and we have a heart to forgive.

So whatever might be your powers, whatever you have achieved in your life, whatever position you maybe occupying… but you must learn the way to forgive, otherwise you are nowhere near Christ. You must learn to forgive. That is such great quality if you can forgive, all the time forgive.

And that is why today I wanted to meet you all. I wanted to meet you all and tell you that today is the day to forgive. That does not mean that you sit down and think about how many people you have to forgive. That would be absurd. But something that haunts your mind and you think you have been troubled, have been in turmoil.

 

The interesting thing is that you don’t know how many powers you have and you don’t even forgive. Then you have all these powers and the greatest power you have got is to forgive.

 

Just forgive. For what? It is a practical thing. Most practical. Supposing somebody slaps you. Alright, if someone slaps me, what should I do? Should I slap him back? No. Then should I ask him, why did you slap me? No. Then I should think he must be a stupid fool to do like that? That won’t help. On the contrary, if you can just forgive, forgive that person who has done something wrong… For you it is important that you must forgive, because it has no effect on you… But if you forgive, it will have more effect. Your goodness, your righteousness…

 

 Thank you Lovely Adored Mother.

 

This is the Era of Forgiveness we are living at this time I think. Because everytime we forgive we are proceeding higher towards a wider opening of our top-of-the-brain. If we want to have an open mind, thing that seems so much trendy nowadays, we must forgive, no other way actually. Forgiveness is the fastest way to open the mind, the safest, the most enriching and fulfilling, the most noble, the coolest, the most natural one. There are too many points in favour of this attitude, quality.

 

Today I find forgiveness really exciting, so reassuring feeling the heart beats going in such a rythmical and confident way every time you for-give-it! It s almost the same feeling of when you give a beautiful wrapped gift to somebody and you feel joy for having got and prepared it specifically for that person. It s like giving a present …

 

So what is helpful to give such a gift to the others? I am considering two things which are cool:

1) Be forgiven by others and automatically absorb this action in form of vibration into yourself. I have been living these kinds of circumstances where my huuuuge naughtiness has been forgiven so marvelously by the most important people, the parents (and not only them). It felt like swimming in the pure world of comprehension, cause I knew i was so badly mistaking.

2) Meditate on forgiveness by watching how the egoistical and conditioned attitude act thru our person in all the different occasions.

the beauty of the heart
is the lasting beauty:
its lips give to drink
of the water of life.
truly it is the water,
that which pours,
and the one who drinks.
all three become one when
your talisman is shattered.
that oneness you can’t know
by reasoning.

[Rumi]

It’s not true that a new language should be taught by mothertongues to the kids

                                             photo

I have two close examples which support the fact that children can learn a new language not necessarily from mother tongue teachers.

The first is a long study to which by myself I participated in 1998-1999 with a master thesis in Rome. Based on the main idea of Bruner about constructivism in psychology and learning processes we focused on children at kindergarten level living in an Italian context and being exposed to the English language as second one (L2). The research was inspired by 400 teachers and their young pupils. We eventually wrote this book comprehensive of all the work done. The cool point is that maybe only one of the teacher was a native English speaker, all the others learned in our seminars and transmitted their knowledge in the classroom. We analyzed their progress, prnunciation, improvements, diaries, workshops, a lot of interesting material…They did an excellent job and the children learnt each year more and more! Statistics and databases inclueded in the same book. Do you know why the children learnt English? The main result was that is because the teacher love them and express her lovely attitude plus interest towards them daily and firmly. A section of the project was dedicated to the expressions of her face, to her words and behaviours with the little ones. They love the L2 because they love in primis the person who is teaching them. That is why we intitled the book “The magic teacher”. This magic is nothing but pure love!

Second example is fresher and again comes from an experience in Italy which I only heard about directly and am supporting with material in Chinese language. My auntie, an experienced teacher and coordinator of seminars and workshop at a primary school, is already conducting Chinese classes in ludic form to the kids. And she never spoke Chinese before. She is using the modern Youtube way, karaoke, playful settings and real small storytelling linked to the new life of her adorable daughter (me 🙂 ) Here is an example i provided her few weeks ago. It is just so much sweet:

“Children understand love more than anyone else” (Nirmala Srivastava)

Why celebrities come into our life

Celebrity worshipping is one of the train stops in this Trend Blend map for the new year. How true is it? After noticing the word “HAPPY..” in the set up message of the chat with my sister I immediately thought “oh wow she’s wishing Happy Chinese new year to everybody” when scrolling the full sentence appears “Happy birthday Vasco”: her favorite singer whose songs she listens with no interruption almost. She also went to his concert joining a crowd of thousands of thousands last year. Is it the kind of worshipping we are talking about today? Probably yes~! It’s like a battle in the human mind. We follow whom we like. But usually the aspects of the celebrities to catch mostly our attention are simply frivolous and unreal, like they last for some years; maybe also for 20 years but then they leave the place to other celebrities just depending on which side of our ego or superego we would like to worship better. It is more related to an internal oriented worshipping.

What do we do to defend ourselves from these celebrity-attacks? Are we still completely ourselves even though we are very much dragged into their creations and trends? Until which point is our attention independent and pure? Until which point we depend on these sort of gurus thru their music and art instead of depending on the guru within ourselves? How much does our centered balances still hesitate?

Globalizing our education

 Always impressed by the people who talk wisely about what global means. Thank you to Mr. De Bary, professor emeritus, to have spent the time of a life to research and understand the connection between East and West from the educational point of view.

Today I wish to amplify these points in regard to certain specific issues in contemporary education. The common denominator among all of our educational situations is (1) the challenge to sustain any kind of humanistic learning at all in the face of the extreme competitive pressures of modern technologies; (2) the need of most educational systems to reengage with their own local traditions, from which they have been largely cut off; (3) the need but also the difficulty of sustaining this effort, beyond the initial stage, to encompass other traditions so as to achieve, over time, a global literacy as the standard of what every educated citizen of the world should know in order to engage in meaningful discourse with other peoples.

 

Within each major tradition, this dialogue has taken place through a process of constant, repeated cross-referencing and back-referencing, internal and largely independent of external involvement except to the extent that, from at least the seventeenth century onward, writers in the West, great and not so great, have confirmed for themselves what important writers in the Islamic, Indian, Chinese and Japanese traditions have long held in esteem. Thus in the Islamic tradition al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun have based themselves on the Quran and commented on the great Sufis, while European writers, no less than Middle Eastern, from medieval times onward have recognized the stature of al-Ghazali and more recently Ibn Khaldun. Something similar is true of India, with the Upanishads and the Ramayana taking up the discourse from the earlier Vedas, the Gita from Upanishads, and Shankar from both. And it is true too of China, with Mencius, the Laozi and Zhuangzi taking issue with the Confucians, and so on.

 

Today in a multicultural education that serves human commonality as well as cultural diversity, both content and method may vary in different educational situations, but a core program should make the repossession of a given society main cultural traditions the first priority, and then move on, in a second stage, to a similar treatment of other major world cultures. Further, to the extent that time and resources allow, it would provide for the consideration of still other cultures that, for a variety of historical and geographical reasons, have not so far played such a dominant role in world history (In the East Asian context I would certainly point to Korea in this respect).

 

[from “Confucian Tradition & Global Education” by W.M. Theodore De Bary]

Career: Three elements to absolutely work on/out

 There is so much attention on career these days: books printed out, seminars organized, talks and chats at office, during lunch and at home. We are also bombarded by so many ads about self-improvements, self-growth, self-this and that. Another thing is that we also know that each and every individual cannot improve alone, he needs some good humus that only the collectivity he’s plugged in can give. This is the reason why a big part of the general attention is also on the team work, the power of the collective. I would dare to say that we still do not know anything about how to live collectively in a full satisfied way. If we would then so many problems would just dissolve because they would be disintegrated in some kind of vortex which is even bigger than the individual mind.

 There are 3 enormous obstacles which block the professional growth, followed by comments from the expert:

1) guilt:

 I think this is a modern tecnique, to feel guilty. Some sort of a modernism is in it because I dont know how it has worked out. And this modernism of this horrible thing called “guilt” is something that really […] to clear out.

2) no pro-collective skills

So today’s understanding should be that we all should become collective from inside. We should not grudge or grumble about everything – and enjoy the collectivity.

But the second side of collectivity is this: do not try to exploit the collectivity, otherwise you’ll be in trouble…When you are collective, you have to be respecting the collectivity of others. By your presence, another person should not, by any chance, suffer or should not feel in any way insulted or inconvenienced. So when you are in the ollective, it should be such that another person should enjoy your company, enjoy you being there. That is something where there is no problem. But if you are demanding and if you are asking for things and you think no end of yourself, you cannot at ll be collective by any chnace, but you’ll suffer for that. Automatically you will suffer.

3) anger 

[…] Like anger, people always boast “I’m very angry with him”. Just make that anger into forgiveness and you’ll see the person.  Instead of you getting into problems, he will get into problems. Anger will upset you, but forgiveness will upset him, automatically. It’s the biggest weapon you have got, is to forgive […]. And this will give you self-respect, taht you ar enot disturbed by anything you see.

Like a ship has to be seaworthy – if you put the ship on the sea and if it breaks, what’s the us of making a ship?[…] You have to be seaworthy and if you are seaworthy nothing can disturb you. 

Reading these excerpts and meditating on them, I found out they really well fit the need of people (like me) working full time for middle or big companies. Watch the obstacles out! They are some kind of viruses leading to further complications. For example they will make the person degenerate towards un-constructive behaviours, damaging not only the individual image but also the one of the company. Moreover they will provoke interminable waste of precious time and money for everybody at different levels.

Enlightenment loves integration

 What’s our mind form? Do we usually tend to unite or to divide? It’s a very wide question but it can probably offer an input about personal psychology and self-understanding.For example they can ask: is it the Hong Kong people attitude the same as the mainland China’s one? The united tending mind is more tempted to answer yes and prefers to firstly enunciate a common vision of the idea.Well – would say – most of the people living in Hong Kong have at least one generation who was settled in the Mainland before spreading down to the city. Moreover the attitude of their heart is just the same, cordial, open and smiling, treating the guests with respect. It does not make any difference if they live in a small or large town. Although their lifestyle is different, the basic behavioral way of acting unites them.  Can I say that to discriminate between good and bad also requires a united mind? For example the Honoris Causam awarded psychologist Nirmala Srivastava states: “The discrimination between good and bad becomes one in your mind, becomes one of your inner temperament, then you are always very much satisfied because you know you are not doing something which is wrong”.

Healthy children: rule of memory

What to do to make sure that a child is growing well and healthy, in the proper direction of growth. First of all we all should know which one is the proper direction of growth, we need to move our awareness towards this issue within ourselves if it is possible. The truth is that children grow healthy when they are let to be themselves. For example if we have a seed of violet, the same seed will be happy to grow as a violet and not as a daisy. We cannot change the nature of a seed. Now the nature is something very simple we should mirror every day. If we do not understand the nature from within we cannot understand its manifestations from outside. If we don’t know how to explain to ourselves how we were as child, we cannot understand the children either. If positive feelings and memories are left in our consciousness from the time we were younger, then it is easier to understand who is younger because the mechanism is eternal and is the same for everybody, age after age. If negative memories mostly guide the ship of our mind then we are not going in the proper direction and we cannot help anybody else to grow in the right way.The proper way is a path of security, confidence, love and understanding. It is the innocence, which is the source of all of these. Innocence is simplicity. It knows when to start and when to stop something. It gives complete joy and satisfaction of life. Just like a child does.