The Nocturnal Tree

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying The top five regrets of the dying A palliative nurse has recorded the top five regrets of the dying. There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’. Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. “When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently,” she says, “common themes surfaced again and again.” Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware: 1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. “This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.” 2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. “This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.” 3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. “Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.” 4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. “Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.” 5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. “This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”

“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard”. That will probably be one of mine.

Yeah, this is pretty much how I feel right now.

I must find this card!

Now we know :)

I want this to be my wedding!

http://www.openforum.com/articles/the-neuroscience-of-changeor-how-to-reset-y… The mysteries of the mind and brain are many and complex. Neuroscience, through the magic of technology is just beginning to unravel some of them. Given that my livelihood revolves around creativity, I have become fascinated with neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the mind’s ability to change the brain. Yes, you read that right. Neuroplasticity radically reverses ages of scientific dogma which held that mental experiences result only from physical goings-on in the brain, and we can’t do much about it. But extensive studies by neuroscientists confirm that our mental machinations do alter the physical structure of our brain matter. So, when you change your mind, you change your brain. This is great news for most of us. The issue all of us grapple with is change. Whether it’s kicking a bad habit, coming up with new and original ideas, shifting a business focus, changing behaviors, changing company culture, or trying to change the world. At the heart of the issue is changing minds and mindsets—in other words, unlocking the brain. My fascination led me to a number of visits to Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, a practicing neuropsychiatrist affiliated with UCLA, and author of a book called Brainlock. The reason I sought him out is that he deals with one of the most challenging and debilitating afflictions, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). And here’s the thing, he doesn’t use drugs to treat patients. He teaches them to rewire their brain by changing how they think. I’m interested in Dr. Schwartz’s methods not because I’m curious about OCD, but because if he can help people with that kind of mental rigidity, think what can be done with the mind that isn’t all locked up. He created a successful four-step approach, and as he described it to me, it seemed quite obvious that his method could easily apply to anything we want to change. 1. Relabel The first step is to relabel a given thought, feeling, or behavior as something else. An unwanted thought could be relabeled “false message” or “brain glitch.” This amounts to training yourself to clearly recognize and identify what is real and what isn’t, refusing to be tricked by your own thoughts. You step back and say, “This is just my brain sending me a false message.” (For someone with OCD, instead of saying, “I have to check the stove,” they would start saying, “I am having a compulsive urge to check the stove.”) This sounds easy, almost a trite affirmation, like what they give you at one of those weekend long shut-ins where you transform yourself into the someone you always thought you could be. It isn’t. It’s hard. Focusing on something completely different when your brain is sending long-embedded directions with overwhelming force, is incredibly difficult. 2. Reattribute The second step answers the question, “Why do these thoughts coming back?” The answer is that the brain is misfiring, stuck in gear, creating mental noise, and sending false messages. In other words, if you understand why you’re getting those old thoughts, eventually you’ll be able to say, “Oh, that’s just a brain glitch.” That raises the natural next question: What can you do about it? 3. Refocus The third step is where the toughest work is, because it’s the actual changing of behavior. You have to do another behavior instead of the old one. Having recognized the problem for what it is and why it’s occurring, you now have to replace the old behavior with new things to do. This is where the change in brain chemistry occurs, because you are creating new patterns, new mindsets. By refusing to be misled by the old messages, by understanding they aren’t what they tell you they are, your mind is now the one in charge of your brain. This is basically like shifting the gears of your car manually. “The automatic transmission isn’t working, so you manually override it,” says Schwartz. “With positive, desirable alternatives—they can be anything you enjoy and can do consistently each and every time—you are actually repairing the gearbox. The more you do it, the smoother the shifting becomes. Like most other things, the more you practice, the more easy and natural it becomes, because your brain is beginning to function more efficiently, calling up the new pattern without thinking about it.” 4. Revalue It all comes together in the fourth step, which is the natural outcome of the first three. With a consistent way to replace the old behavior with the new, you begin to see old patterns as simple distractions. You devalue them as being completely worthless. Eventually the old thoughts begin to fade in intensity, the brain works better, and the automatic transmission in the brain begins to start working properly. “Two very positive things happen,” Jeff says. “The first is that you’re happier, because you have control over your behavioral response to your thoughts and feelings. The second thing is that by doing that, you change the faulty brain chemistry.” Schwartz confirmed that his methods could be used to create change in any are of business, work, or life. “Since it has been scientifically demonstrated that the brain has been altered through the behavior change, it’s safe to say that you could do the same thing by altering responses to any number of other behaviors. What all of this meant to me was that we can learn to improve our ability to defeat the traditional thinking traps we fall into when we try to change our view of whatever challenge we’re facing. We can override our default. We can retrain our brain by invoking the Apple tagline: Think different.

http://www.openforum.com/articles/boost-your-brain-and-give-it-a-breakat-the-… Executives at GE, 3M, Bloomberg Media, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, and Salesforce.com do it. Google teaches a course in it at Google University. Ford chairman William Ford does it, as do former corporate chiefs Bill George of Medtronic and Bob Shapiro of Monsanto. Phil Jackson and Tiger Woods do it. Oracle chief Larry Ellison does it and asks his executives to do it several times a day. Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre hotels and an author of Peak does it. Thomas Edison did it. The “it” is meditation. The question of course, is, why? The answer may lie in surprising new research demonstrating that not only does meditation give your brain a mental pause, but it may also give your brain a mental pushup. The mental pause Neuroscientists have known for over a decade that our ability to engineer creative breakthroughs hinges on the brain’s capacity to synthesize and make connections between seemingly disparate things, and a key ingredient is a quiet and relaxed mind. Research has consistently demonstrated that mental relaxation enables the brain to effectively clear itself and reboot, all the while forming new connections and associations. The result is new and sudden creative insight—those breakthrough moments when after steeping ourselves in a tough problem, the solution comes to us in an “aha” moment, usually when we’re doing something other than working on the problem: Sleeping, hiking, driving, taking a shower. Meditation may be the most powerful tool known to effectively create more of those moments. Since the 1990s, neuroscientists have been studying Buddhist monks to understand how meditation affects brain activity. The most experienced Buddhist practitioners, those with over 10,000 hours of meditation behind them (called “adepts”), exhibit abnormally high levels of gamma brainwaves, which are the brainwaves that immediately precede the Eureka! moment. According to Bill George, now a Harvard leadership professor and bestselling author, meditation has been an integral part of his career. He meditates twice a day, and during his tenure as Medtronic CEO, designated one of the company’s conference rooms for mental breaks, encouraging employees to give meditation a try. Google has had regular meditation sits since 2006, and in 2007 initiated a mindfulness and meditation course at Google University, encouraging employees to use the practice to increase self-awareness, focus and attention. The mental push-up But what’s most intriguing is new research from the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging suggesting that people who meditate show more gray matter in certain regions of the brain, show stronger connections between brain regions and show less age-related brain atrophy. In other words, meditation might make your brain bigger, faster and younger. The researchers used a type of brain imaging known as diffusion tensor imaging, or DTI, which a relatively new imaging mode that provides insights into the structural connectivity of the brain. The study (which appears in the online edition of the journal NeuroImage) consisted of 27 active meditation practitioners (average age 52) and 27 control subjects, who were matched by age and sex. The meditation and the control group each consisted of 11 men and 16 women. The number of years of meditation practice ranged from five to 46. According to lead researcher Eileen Luders, herself a meditator, “Meditation appears to be a powerful mental exercise with the potential to change the physical structure of the brain at large. Meditation might not only cause changes in brain anatomy by inducing growth but also by preventing reduction. That is, if practiced regularly and over years, meditation may slow down aging-related brain atrophy, perhaps by positively affecting the immune system.” What does all this mean? It means you can relax your brain and exercise it at the same time! For a quick lesson on how to get started with meditation, read Banish Judgement, Boost Creativity.

Why to meditate.

One of my favorite books is Creativity in Business, written by Stanford Business School professors Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers—who taught one of the most popular courses by the same name. In the book they introduce the “Voice of Judgment” (VOJ). Steven Pressfield, in his books The War of Art and Do The Work, refers to it as “Resistance.”

Your VOJ will stop your creativity cold. It comes in two basic flavors: 1) self-judgment/self-criticism, 2) judgment from others. Banishing the VOJ isn’t easy, but in my creativity workshops I teach a simple way to do just that.

Step 1: Pay attention

Get yourself a creativity journal. Every day for a week, jot down every negative or non-constructive critical comment, emotion, behavior or thought that you encounter during the day. (No one has ever had any trouble related to a scarcity of negativity or criticism). This means your own comments, emotion, behaviors or thoughts as well as those of others.

Tally them at the end of every day and put a star by those with most impact on you and your creativity. Jot down your reflections and reactions to those VOJ encounters each day, using the following questions as a guide:

When do I notice the VOJ most? Is it more active in my personal or professional (school) life?

About how many times a day do I judge myself for something? How many times do I find myself judging others? How many times a day do I allow others to judge me?

What did the VOJ prevent me from doing today? In the past? How is it impacting my future?

When I’m in a group, how much time can elapse before the VOJ appears? When I hear it, how do I handle it?

When and where is the VOJ most absent?

The only goal is self-discovery and self-understanding. Once you recognize it for what it is, you can do something about it. Namely, destroy it. How? By silencing its voice and quieting your mind in the following way.

Step 2: Perish the thought

Adam Smith coined a term called the Impartial Spectator. Smith defined “the impartial and well-informed spectator,” as the ability to stand outside of yourself and watch “the person within” in action. We each have access to this person. The notion of the Impartial Spectator is really no different in principle than the mindfulness meditation practiced by Tibetan Buddhist monks, one of the most studied groups in neuroscientific research for their abnormally high gamma brainwave activity—the waves now proven to immediately precede the “Eureka!” moment.

There is no better way of removing creative roadblocks than meditation. As Anya Kamenetz recently described in her Fast Company column, Meditate Your Way to a More Creative Mind, when they were at a creative crossroads in the 1980s, Walt Disney’s Imagineers called in a meditation coach. The ideas began to flow: Tokyo Disney, Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland among them.

The instructions for mindfulness meditation conducted by ancient Buddhist priests are straightforward enough. They amount to sitting still, breathing, “watching” yourself breathe—invoking the Impartial Spectator—and not thinking about anything but observing yourself from outside yourself. In other words, suspending all judgment.

Easy, right? Here’s what to do:

Sit still in a chair, in a quiet room, for 20 minutes, and just watch yourself breathe. Pick a time and a place when you can be reasonably sure no one will interrupt you. Close the door to minimize outer distractions. Sit comfortably in a chair, or cross-legged on the floor, with your hands resting in your lap. You can close your eyes, or you can keep them open but unfocused. Place your attention on the inner rim of your nostrils, where you can feel the subtle movement off air as you breathe in and out.

Now, ‘watch’ your breathing go in, go out, go in, go out. Make a mental note for each in-breath and out-breath like this: ‘breathing in,’ ‘breathing out.’ Or just ‘in’ and ‘out.’ Try to be aware of the entire in-breath, from the time it starts to the time it stops. This is the time to make the mental note ‘breathing in,’ if that’s your choice of note. Don’t worry about the exact words, it’s the process of observing yourself that’s critical. Then try to be aware of the entire out-breath, from the time it starts to the time it stops. This is the time to make the mental note ‘breathing out.’

Now, if you suddenly notice that your mind has wandered away from your breathing, just make a mental note of that. For example, ‘wandering, wandering,’ or ‘thinking, thinking,’ or ‘imagining, imagining’. Then gently bring your attention back to an in-breath or out-breath, and continue observing and making mental notes of those observations.

Try it. Then make notes in your journal on what you experienced.

Human nature being what it is, the VOJ will never go away completely. But if you can get in the habit of doing both of these simple exercises regularly, you will render it powerless.