LOVE is a MOVEMENT!! Street artist ESPO (aka Steve Powers) is using street art & words of love to revitalize Philadelphia. He is painting murals over the run down parts of the city with messages like “I Love You” and “Hold Tight” to inspire & brighten the down. Plus, he’s offering free signs for local businesses & training for young people in the area.

“Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” ~Aristotle

At the end of the day, when I feel completely exhausted, oftentimes it has nothing to do with all the things I’ve done.

It’s not a consequence of juggling multiple responsibilities and projects. It’s not my body’s way of punishing me for becoming a late-life jogger after a period of cardiovascular laziness. It’s not even about getting too little sleep.

When I’m exhausted, you can be sure I’ve bent over backwards trying to win everyone’s approval. I’ve obsessed over what people think of me, I’ve assigned speculative and usually inaccurate meanings to feedback I’ve received, and I’ve lost myself in negative thoughts about criticism and its merit.

I work at minimizing this type of behavior—and I’ve had success for the most part—but admittedly it’s not easy.

I remember back in college, taking a summer acting class, when I actually made the people around me uncomfortable with my defensiveness. This one time, the teacher was giving me feedback after a scene in front of the whole class. She couldn’t get through a single sentence without me offering some type of argument.

After a couple minutes of verbal sparring, one of my peers actually said, “Stop talking. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

Looking back, I cut myself a little slack. You’re vulnerable in the spotlight and the student’s reaction was kind of harsh. But I know I needed to hear it. Because I was desperately afraid of being judged, I took everything, from everyone as condemnation.

I realize criticism doesn’t always come gently from someone legitimately trying to help. A lot of the feedback we receive is unsolicited and doesn’t come from teachers—or maybe all of it does.

We can’t control what other people will say to us, whether they’ll approve or form opinions and share them. But we can control how we internalize it, respond to it, and learn from it, and when we release it and move on.

If you’ve been having a hard time dealing with criticism lately, it may help to remember the following:

The Benefits of Criticism:

Personal Growth

1. Looking for seeds of truth in criticism encourages humility. It’s not easy to take an honest look at yourself and your weaknesses, but you can only grow if you’re willing to try.

2. Learning from criticism allows you to improve. Almost every critique gives you a tool to more effectively create the tomorrow you visualize.

3. Criticism opens you up to new perspectives and new ideas you may not have considered. Whenever someone challenges you, they help expand your thinking.

4. Your critics give you an opportunity to practice active listening. This means you resist the urge to analyze in your head, planning your rebuttal, and simply consider what the other person is saying.

5. You have the chance to practice forgiveness when you come up against harsh critics. Most of us carry around stress and frustration that we unintentionally misdirect from time to time.

Emotional Benefits

6. It’s helpful to learn how to sit with the discomfort of an initial emotional reaction instead of immediately acting or retaliating. All too often we want to do something with our feelings—generally not a great idea!

7. Criticism gives you the chance to foster problem solving skills, which isn’t always easy when you’re feeling sensitive, self-critical, or annoyed with your critic.

8. Receiving criticism that hits a sensitive spot helps you explore unresolved issues.Maybe you’re sensitive about your intelligence because you’re holding onto something someone said to you years ago—something you need to release.

9. Interpreting someone else’s feedback is an opportunity for rational thinking—sometimes, despite a negative tone, criticism is incredibly useful.

10. Criticism encourages you to question your instinctive associations and feelings; praise is good, criticism is bad. If we recondition ourselves to see things in less black and white terms, there’s no stop to how far we can go!

Improved Relationships

11. Criticism presents an opportunity to choose peace over conflict. Oftentimes, when criticized our instinct is to fight, creating unnecessary drama. The people around us generally want to help us, not judge us.

12. Fielding criticism well helps you mitigate the need to be right. Nothing closes an open mind like ego—bad for your personal growth, and damaging for relationships.

13. Your critics give you an opportunity to challenge any people-pleasing tendencies.Relationships based on a constant need for approval can be draining for everyone involved. It’s liberating to let people think whatever they want—they’re going to do it anyway.

14. Criticism gives you the chance to teach people how to treat you. If someone delivers it poorly, you can take this opportunity to tell them, “I think you make some valid points, but I would receive them better if you didn’t raise your voice.”

15. Certain pieces of criticism teach you not to sweat the small stuff. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter that your boyfriend thinks you load the dishwasher “wrong.”

Time Efficiency

16. The more time you spend dwelling about what someone said, the less time you have to do something with it.

17. If you improve how you operate after receiving criticism, this will save time and energy in the future. When you think about from that perspective—criticism as a time saver—it’s hard not to appreciate it!

18. Fostering the ability to let go of your feelings and thoughts about being critiqued can help you let go in other areas of your life. Letting go of worries, regrets, stresses, fears, and even positive feelings helps you root yourself in the present moment. Mindfulness is always the most efficient use of time.

19. Criticism reinforces the power of personal space. Taking 10 minutes to process your emotions, perhaps by writing in a journal, will ensure you respond well. And responding the well the first time prevents one critical comment from dominating your day.

20. In some cases, criticism teaches you how to interact with a person, if they’re negative or hostile, for example. Knowing this can save you a lot of time and stress in the future.

Self Confidence

21. Learning to receive false criticism—feedback that has no constructive value—without losing your confidence is a must if you want to do big things in life. The more attention your work receives, the more criticism you’ll have to field.

22. When someone criticizes you, it shines a light on your own insecurities. If you secretly agree that you’re lazy, you should get to the root of that. Why do you believe that—and what can you do about it?

23. Learning to move forward after criticism, even if you don’t feel incredibly confident, ensures no isolated comment prevents you from seizing your dreams.Think of it as separating the wheat from the chaff; takes what’s useful, leave the rest, and keep going!

24. When someone else appraises your harshly, you have an opportunity to monitor your internal self-talk. Research indicates up to 80% of our thoughts are negative. Take this opportunity to monitor and change your thought processes so you don’t drain and sabotage yourself!

25. Receiving feedback well reminds you it’s OK to have flaws—imperfection is part of being human. If you can admit weakness and work on them without getting down on yourself, you’ll experience far more happiness, peace, enjoyment, and success.

We are all perfectly imperfect, and other people may notice that from time to time. We may even notice in it each other.

Somehow accepting that is a huge weight off my mind.

via: TinyBuddha

Props to Terrence J who just came back from a life-changing trip to Haiti. He spent 3 days in Port-Au-Prince meeting & working with the victims of the devastating earthquake. He wrote an open letter to the YBF detailing his trip, and plans to go back next week, then to Europe to meet with UN ambassadors to see what more can be done to help.  Haiti STILL needs our help, people!! Click here to donate.

With a roof, food, clean water, and clothes on our backs we are more fortunate than millions. If you are reading this online you are one of the privileged. Please ask yourself, what are you giving back to the world for your blessings? You don’t have to be Oprah, Wyclef, or Angelina Jolie to make a positive impact on others. If it’s making an extra sandwich and giving it to the homeless person you always see on the subway, or volunteering with children whose parents can’t afford tutoring, you and your friends can create your own personal missions if you just try.

by Srinivas Rao

“You get peace of mind not by thinking about it or imagining it, but by quietening and relaxing the restless mind.” -Remez Sasson

What’s the first thought that goes through your head when you wake up in the morning? Is it deliberate or is it the default “Oh shi#$, it’s 6am!”?

If that’s how you start your day, then it’s likely your day will be filled with anxiety and stress. It’s not exactly the most productive mechanism for getting things done.

In the last week or two, I’ve been experimenting with something that has really changed how I feel about everything. I’ve talked about morning power questions in the past and have suggested you should ask yourself before anything “What’s the best that Could Happen?”. Questions are quite powerful if used in the right way.

How to Use Morning Power Questions

When you wake up in the morning you are always asking yourself questions whether you realize it or not. As you brush your teeth, drink your coffee or eat your breakfast thoughts are running through your head. You might be thinking “why am I so I tired, why didn’t I sleep earlier, what am I going to eat, etc, etc.”

These things generally don’t serve any useful purpose and in some cases as you can see are even hurting you. The idea behind using questions is to take conscious control of the direction of your day. So, let me give you a few examples of things that you could ask yourself first thing in the morning:

• What do I have to look forward to today?
• What’s absolutely perfect about my life?
• How can I make today absolutely awesome?
• What’s the best thing that could happen today?

By asking yourself these kinds of questions you start to shift the focus of your mind towards all of the things you want to have happen. One interesting thing to note is that your questions don’t need to have any basis in reality because your brain will answer anything you ask it quite literally. So if you’re going to be delusional, you might as well make your delusions extremely empowering.

The key to using this effectively however is to do it for 30 days in a row. What happens when you do this is that your brain will create a link, known as a neuro-association, between the empowering states you create with your questions and being awake in the morning.

One Question to Ask Yourself Every Morning

For about two weeks now, I’ve been asking myself one question from the moment I wake up. “What am I grateful for?.” You’ve heard before that you should start every single day with an attitude of gratitude. This is probably the simplest way to actually do that.

If you ask yourself that question enough days in a row you will wake up feeling on top of the world every single day. As you start to view your life and the world around you as full of things to be grateful for, you’re going to bring more and more of that into your life.

We all have lots to be grateful for, but we often get caught up in all the things that are wrong with our lives. Hopefully this will enable you shift your focus.

Ways to Change Your Morning Routine

I want you to give some consideration to changing up how you start your day. In addition to power questions I encourage you to start your day in a more peaceful, quiet way then you have in the past. I think you’ll find that the impact this will have on you both physically and mentally will quite powerful.

1. Don’t Turn on the Computer or TV

As a blogger, for the last year or so the first thing I would do every single morning is turn on the computer. Even if you are not a blogger you may have a tendency to turn on the computer right when you wake up. Starting your brain off with so much information overload right when you wake up can’t possibly be healthy.

I encourage you to just enjoy your coffee or breakfast for about 20 minutes. Turning on the TV is one of the most insidious things you can do. The news can have such a negative impact on you that you might not even realize it. The news is generally about everything that’s wrong in the world and this is the first thing you become exposed to in the morning.

One thing that we know from years of self help is that our minds tend to be extremely receptive in the morning. That’s why I encourage you not to turn on the TV if you’ve been doing it.

2. Listen to Music/Something Uplifting

I love listening to music and when possible I even use an alarm that actually plays music. I try to find really uplifting songs or even songs that have really peaceful melodies. One of the best times to listen to a self-help tape or program is right when you wake up. Think about how the effect this will have on you if you do this for about 30 days.

If you listen to inspirational/uplifting material right when you wake up then you will eventually condition that message into your mind and connect it with waking up in the morning.

3. Meditate

I think one of the most challenging things about meditating is to free yourself from thought. As somebody with a mind that moves at what feels like a million miles a minute, this isn’t something I’m great at myself. Early in the morning your mind is in a fairly quiet state and even 5-10 minutes of deep centered relaxation/meditation can make a huge difference in your day.

How do you start your morning routine? Is there anything else you’d add to this list?

via: TinyBuddha

Bill Gates: Who Needs a College Education When You Have the Web?

Famous college dropout predicts that college degrees will become less and less useful.

Bill Gates founded Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, back in 1975 after dropping out of Harvard University.  Gates was critical in propelling his company to its incredibly dominant position in the operating systems industry and to its expansion into other market niches as well.  While semi-retired, Gatesremains active at Microsoft and involved a vast variety of charitable efforts.  These days he’s even helping to design a nuclear reactor.

For all his success, apparently he’s still not a fan of college, though.  Despite receiving an honorary degree from Harvard in 2007, Gates’closing speech [video] at the Techonomy 2010conference delivered criticism of colleges today.

Gates calls college education “increasingly hard to get” and says that “place-based” traditional college studies will be “five times less important than it is today.”

He argues, “The self-motivated learner will be on the web.  And there will be far less place-based [college] things…College — except for the parties — needs to be less place based.”

Gates said he doesn’t predict such broad changes in K-12 education.  He did however single out immersive charter school programs like the Knowledge Is Power Program as best practice examples of how to get kids to learn optimally.  He remarks, “If you want to take intercity fifth grade kids and get them to think ‘Hey learning is fun…I do that with other kids.’ you need to have at least 80 percent of their waking hours devoted to your thing or otherwise you lose — and these charter schools do that.

While his vision of the internet replacing a college education seems radical given today’s professional atmosphere — and even Microsoft’s own hiring policy — seems unlikely to come in the near future, it doesn’t seem impossible that it could come at some point.  Thus Gates’ words may yet prove prophetic — another bold prediction from a man often ahead of his time.

Then again, Gates did predict the incredibly successful iPad would flop.

via: DailyTech

You know what they say — “A College education will make you a living, self-education will make you a fortune.”

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.

The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

- Steve Jobs

Think Different from gchavezpooley on Vimeo.

Who Was Edgar Cayce?
Twentieth Century Psychic and Medical Clairvoyant

Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) has been called the sleeping prophet, the “father of holistic medicine,” and the most documented psychic of the 20th century. For more than 40 years of his adult life, Cayce gave psychic “readings” to thousands of seekers while in an unconscious state, diagnosing illnesses and revealing lives lived in the past and prophecies yet to come. But who, exactly, was Edgar Cayce?

Cayce was born on a farm in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1877, and his psychic abilities began to appear as early as his childhood. He was able to see and talk to his late grandfathers spirit, and often played with imaginary friends whom he said were spirits on the other side. He also displayed an uncanny ability to memorize the pages of a book simply by sleeping on it. These gifts labeled the young Cayce as strange, but all Cayce really wanted was to help others, especially children.

Later in life, Cayce would find that he had the ability to put himself into a sleep-like state by lying down on a couch, closing his eyes, and folding his hands over his stomach. In this state of relaxation and meditation, he was able to place his mind in contact with all time and space—the universal consciousness, also known as the super-conscious mind. From there, he could respond to questions as broad as, What are the secrets of the universe? and What is my purpose in life? to as specific as, What can I do to help my arthritis? and How were the pyramids of Egypt built? His responses to these questions came to be called readings, and their insights offer practical help and advice to individuals even today.

Although Cayce died more than 60 years ago, the timeliness of the material in the readings—with subjects like how to discovering your mission in life, developing your intuition, exploring ancient mysteries, and taking responsibility for your health–is evidenced by the hundreds of books that have been written on the various aspects of this work as well as the dozen or so titles focusing on Cayces life itself. Together, these books contain information so valuable that even Edgar Cayce himself might have hesitated to predict their impact on the contemporary world. In 1945, the year of his passing, who could have known that terms such as meditation, Akashic records, spiritual growth, auras, soul mates, and holistic health would become household words to millions?

The majority of Edgar Cayce’s readings deal with holistic health and the treatment of illness. As it was at the time Cayce was giving readings, still today, individuals from all walks of life and belief receive physical relief from illnesses or ailments through information given in the readings—some readings were given as far back as 100 years ago! Yet, although best known for this material, the sleeping Cayce did not seem to be limited to concerns about the physical body. In fact, in their entirety, the readings discuss an astonishing 10,000 different topics. This vast array of subject matter can be narrowed down into a smaller group of topics that, when compiled together, deal with the following five categories: (1) Health-Related Information; (2) Philosophy and Reincarnation; (3) Dreams and Dream Interpretation; (4) ESP and Psychic Phenomena; and (5) Spiritual Growth, Meditation, and Prayer.

Further details of Cayce’s life and work are explored in the classic book, There Is a River (1942), by Thomas Sugrue, available in hardback, paperback, or audio book versions.

Members of Edgar Cayces Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), the nonprofit founded by Cayce in 1931, have access to the entire set of 14,306 readings in a database residing in the member-only section of our Web site. The readings can also be found in their entirety in our onsite library, located at our headquarters in Virginia Beach and open to the public daily.

Baby you from Jean-Sebastien Monzani on Vimeo.

Pacific Star II from Colin Rich on Vimeo.