The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

What’s the worst problem you have right now? Have you lost your home? Your job? Are you worried you might? Have you watched your savings diminish before your eyes as I have mine? Or are you facing a terrible illness?



From the Buddhist perspective, all people are endowed with the innate ability to create value out of any situation, no matter how awful or tragic. Unlike the idea that every cloud has a silver lining—that something positive can always be found in everything negative—the principle of changing poison into medicine explains that we can transform even the most horrific tragedy into the very thing we need to become happier than we currently are.



WHAT MAKES AN EVENT BAD?

We tend to label any event “bad” that makes us suffer and seems unsolvable, believing we can see at one glance with perfect clarity the entirety of our lives from beginning to end and know the final value of any event the moment it occurs. In believing ourselves to be endowed with this perfect vision, however, we fail to recognize two important things:



The significance of any event changes depending on the circumstances surrounding it. A professional football player might judge a career ending injury to be unequivocally bad until the plane he otherwise would have taken with his teammates crashes on its way to a game.

The significance of any event changes depending on what we decide to do next. Our greatest failure can, and often does, plant the seed for our greatest victory. One could argue that Barack Obama would never have become President of the United States had he not suffered a devastating loss in a House race against Bobbie Rush.

SOLVING THE OUTWARD PROBLEM

Typically, we try to solve our problems using strategies we think have the highest likelihood of success. If Solution A doesn’t work, we try Solution B. And if Solution B fails, we turn to Solution C. And if Solution C fails then…we turn back to Solution A. Which almost certainly still doesn’t work, leading us to try Solution B again, and so on. We continue to cycle through all the solutions we’re willing to try and that we can think to try until learned helplessness ensues and depression sets in.



Many times, however, the true answer is Solution D. Solution D is often something we’ve either dismissed as unworkable or that literally hasn’t ever occurred to us. But Solution D is the one thing that can enable us to achieve the victory for which we were hoping or a victory far greater than we even imagined.



How, then, do we identify Solution D? I do it by turning to my practice of Buddhism (in fact, according to the Buddhist view, chanting guarantees us we can change poison into medicine). But it’s not easy. We might think we’re near to finding Solution D if the solution we’re contemplating seems too hard, if not impossible, to implement, risks something valuable we don’t want to lose, or requires more courage than we think we have. But a given solution may exhibit all of those characteristics and still not be Solution D. Sometimes Solution D isn’t hard, risky, or scary, but just doesn’t yet exist as a possibility at the time the problem first presents itself. Or sometimes Solution D may not mean changing our outward circumstances at all.



SUFFERING IS NECESSARY FOR GROWTH

But how can we claim we’ve changed poison into medicine if our outward circumstances don’t change?



The answer involves recognizing that getting what we want isn’t the only way to achieve victory. Not to diminish in any way the seriousness of some of the problems we face, but often what we want isn’t what’s actually best for us, or is literally impossible to achieve (bringing back a loved one from the dead, for example).



This is not to say that changing poison into medicine means rationalizing failure or accepting a consolation prize. It means true victory often comes to us in an unexpected form.



ANOTHER OUTCOME

But what other outcome besides the one we want could enable us to become happier than we were before the poison entered our lives? Achieving another favorable result we hadn’t foreseen? Possibly. But favorable circumstances can’t create lasting happiness because favorable circumstances are always temporary.



We could, however, claim genuine victory if in trying to change our outward circumstances instead we gain wisdom. Wisdom does creates lasting happiness because, unlike favorable circumstances, it can’t ever be taken from us.



What’s required, then, for us to attain wisdom? From the Buddhist perspective, we gain wisdom by freeing ourselves from delusion. But we only relinquish our delusions when the pain that comes from continuing to believe them exceeds the pain of letting them go—and that only happens when circumstances stir them up. If we never suffered the pain of a break up, for example, we’d never have the opportunity to discover we don’t need anyone’s love but our own to be happy. If we’d never lost our job, we’d never have had the opportunity to confront the truth that we hated it and stayed in it only out of fear. So, in fact, from the Buddhist perspective difficult circumstances are necessary for us to become happy. Difficult circumstances are actually our good friends.



A HAPPY LIFE

Some struggles, however, take years or even decades to win (one of the titles bestowed upon the Buddha was “He Who Can Forbear”). But as long as we refuse to give in to despair and firmly resolve to take concrete action until we either win or die, victory is always possible. And as we take that action, whatever it may be, we’d do well to remember Paul Newman’s example as he faced a much larger George Kennedy in the boxing scene from the movie Cool Hand Luke. No matter how many times you get knocked down, always get up!





From Happiness in this World http://twurl.nl/s6jxr3

COMMENTS

-

---

NocturnalMistress
17:10 Feb 28 2009

you write things that people need to see and read and learn about. I thank you for this new information. *hugs*

---

POST COMMENT

CHICAGO — Perhaps all those blog posts you wrote about your breakup really did have a purpose.



Naming feelings takes some of the emotional impact out of them by engaging a brain region that aids self-control, according to new research.



In a clever series of experiments, UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman found that labeling a picture of someone who looked angry as "angry" reduced the negative emotional feelings that most people feel when viewing such a photograph.



"Putting feelings into words activates this region that's capable of producing emotional regulatory outcomes, which could explain why putting feelings into words dampens them down," Lieberman said in a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting on Saturday.



While plenty of psychological treatments have involved talking about one's feelings, Lieberman's work is some of the first to demonstrate the underlying neural basis for the therapeutic nature of talking something out. The research is based on the idea that engaging a part of the brain that aids in self-control, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, helps put a damper on feelings, no matter how you get that part of the brain involved.



First, the researchers had subjects view photographs of men and women with some positive and some negative facial expressions. The negative facial expressions tended to stimulate activity in the amygdala, a region of the brain associated with processing emotions.



The researchers had the subjects play a simple game while looking at the photos. If the photo was of a woman (and 80 percent of the pictures were) they pressed the "go" button, but if the picture was of a man, they didn't press the button — their brain had to intervene to inhibit the motor response of pressing the button. Simply exerting self-control over the motor function by not pressing the button led to reduced negative emotional response. The idea is that the self-control area of the prefrontal cortex turns on and helps all forms of self-control. They call this "inhibitory spillover."



In the next set of studies, they had one set of people label the photos with simple gender-name matching — match Seth to the picture of a man, not Sarah. Another group was asked to name the emotions on the faces of the people in the pictures. The subjects who named the emotions experienced less negative emotion associated with negative images. By focusing on the emotions in the pictures to label them, the subjects engaged that piece of the prefrontal cortex and "down regulated" their intensity.



It's important to note that the regulatory effect didn't come from increased self-awareness about one's relationship to the emotion. The more tightly regulated emotional response was practically a side effect of the cognitive task of labeling the emotion in the face.The researchers postulate that the same principle is at work when you talk about your feelings: it's the bare fact of labeling your emotions that counts, not whatever conclusions you draw in the course of verbal expression (or poetry writing).



It's possible that these techniques could be used to treat fear-based conditions from arachnophobia (fear of spiders) to zemmiphobia (fear of the great mole rat).



One downside: The researchers found that naming happy feelings also reduces their intensity, so the next time you're watching the Puppy Cam, you can keep all those "They are so cute!" comments to yourself.



http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/talkitout.html

Loneliness plays an important part in coming of age stories. Toss in brutal bullying of a latchkey kid, single moms, a nondescript – read soulless – apartment complex, an assortment of teenaged glue sniffers, drunks, and other layabouts living on their disability benefits and you have the makings of a contemporary take on the usual outsider story.



Add a bleak, wintery landscape and a pedophile, Hakan, who moves in next door to the 12-year-old protagonist, Oskar, with his “daughter” of the same age, and you might have a predictable story. Except that in John Lindqvist’s “Let the Right One In,” the girl, Eli, is a vampire.



A series of gruesome murders occur and Oscar compiles newspaper clippings in his scrapbook. This is not morbid behavior. The story is set in 1982 and the Nintendo Entertainment System hasn’t been invented yet. Anyone who has played a video game knows that plenty of slaughter happens on the screen. Parents reading about Oscar’s scrapbook actually wish their kids would turn off the video games and read about murder in the newspaper.



Hakan is to Eli as Renfield was to Dracula, only with a sick twist. He worships Eli, but it’s his sexual compulsion which drives the truly horrific, and the sickly comic, aspects of this story. He supplies her with blood . . . at a price, but his ineptitude leads to his capture. Even here, Eli takes pity on him, but her sympathy leads to a further twist in the story and Hakan becomes a zombie with an erection. This is new in vampire lit. It is also social commentary. Hakan is a pedophile who will never be rehabilitated, much less killed.



More Blood Mother Blog