If you feel shame, recognize that no one else can shame you; only you can make yourself feel ashamed. Only you have the power to create your emotions-positive, negative, helpful, or unhelpful. The Stoics Hundreds of years ago, the Greek and Roman Stoics advanced that insight. In his treatise the Enchiridion, Epictetus wrote: Men are disturbed not by the things that happen but by their opinions about those things. In his Epistles, Seneca stated: Everything depends on opinion.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after reading Rudá Iandê's new book " Laughing in the Face of Chaos: A Politically Incorrect Shamanic Guide for Modern Life ". His insights about how "our emotions are not barriers, but profound gateways to the soul-portals to the vast, uncharted landscapes of our inner being" got me reflecting on imagination and how it shapes our inner worlds.
"Oh, you know me; I'm a perfectionist." Many, if not most, of us have either heard someone else say something like that or we've uttered it ourselves. But what does that really mean? What if there's more than one kind of perfectionism, and what kinds of coping techniques might be useful for someone who identifies as a perfectionist? In a recent study, researchers built on prior work by looking at changes in how much people were using mindfulness and self-compassion techniques over a two-week period.
ChatGPT now has more than 800 million visitors per week, and hundreds of millions are using Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, and Meta's Lambda. These AI systems are powerful and have many valuable uses in business, medicine, education, science, and other fields. They also have scary uses such as military applications, spreading misinformation, and the elimination of jobs.
Art wakes up and stirs emotions. How does this happen? This is the big question that Dr. Katherine Cotter, psychologist at the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, asked in a lecture in the Art Seeking Understanding series. Her new research, published in The Empirical Studies in the Arts, shows how tightly related are thoughts and feelings we have about art when we visit museums.
Forgiveness is often offered as a powerful solution, as an agent to not only help you heal from painful events but also allow you to move forward. The general idea is that holding onto anger can make you bitter and hold you back from healing from harm that someone has done to you. But the problem is that there are several serious complications when we try to use forgiveness as a solution.
Emotions evolved through natural selection as a way to get humans to avoid things that would threaten their survival and approach things that would serve them. Fear prompts us to defend ourselves. Love motivates us to connect, nurture, and cooperate. Anger arises when something threatens our values or boundaries. In essence, emotions condense our judgment about what's happening around us, driving us to make the "right" decision for survival and adaptation.
Emotions are not just fleeting reactions; they are essential guides for human connection and survival. Whether through the quiet ache of grief or the unexpected flood of tears in moments of joy, our emotional expressions reveal what matters most. Crying, in particular, speaks to this paradox: It can soothe inner tension, signal a need for support, or mark the overwhelming beauty of love and meaning. In this way, both sorrow and joy become invitations, reminders that feeling deeply is not a weakness,
Have you ever seen the onearmed man running a bye to the keeper while 20,000 people leap and writhe and hold their heads and the one-armed man shouts in agony? This scene captures the surreal essence of a cricket match, where intense emotion exists even amidst a seemingly uneventful game.
The project was designed to train the company's AI model to "recognize and analyze facial movements and expressions, such as how people talk, react to others' conversations, and express themselves in various conditions."
