Weekly Tweaks

Watching my husband eat can make people crazy.

No, it’s not that his table manners are *that* bad (though admittedly he does slurp his soup horrifically).

It’s that he’s ambidextrous - neither hand is clearly dominant, and he’s as likely to hold a fork in his left hand as his right. Seeing him switch back and forth just looks…. well… it looks wrong. It sometimes takes people a little while to figure out what is triggering their sense of “something’s just not right, but eventually, the inevitable conversational exchange happens:

“Are you left handed, or right??” they ask, staring.
“Yes!” he replies, torturing them with his best deadpan expression. [click to continue...]

Once upon a time… I didn’t “get” abstract art. I understood color, and motion, and composition, sure - after all, I’d been painting since I was a tot. And in art class, I’d gone through exercises of gradually distorting an image until it looked like something (or nothing) else - and I recognized the high level of creativity involved in turning a photo of a toaster into a series of squares and swirls.

But other than the occasional “that looks cool”, my results were lackluster, and the whole thing felt intellectual and cold.

Then I read “Drawing on the Artist Within” (a follow up to the classic “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards). With one quick exercise from the book, I grokked abstraction on an *emotional* level.

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Long term readers are aware of the American Pseudo-Buddhist influence which underlies much of my thought process. (It’s good stuff, that Pseudo-Buddhism, especially when served over steamed rice and chased with saki -or so I’m told.)

You may also familiar with my unrelenting book addiction, fueled by frequent trips to the Half-Price book store, that dark-alley drug dealer that forces me to snort, smoke and mainline wholesale words and ideas indiscriminately.

So you’d probably expect me to have a pile of dusty books about Buddhism, Zen, and the like, right? Right!

Last week, heeding the call of addiction, I dug through the stack and plucked out an unassuming white paperback. I flipped through its pages and landed on a rather nice little meditation. Being the sharing sort (and feeling a bit lazy today) I thought I’d share it as this week’s mind tweak. Explanation of just why it’s a tweak follows, but first…

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Taking a break from the social media/temperament series, I thought we all needed a good laugh. 

When does it rain brains?  During a brain-storm of course!
Where does a brain go to college?  A hippocampus. 
What did Mr.Brain say to Mrs.Brain on their anniversary?  “I lobe you!”

Ok, maybe those weren’t GOOD laughs…   there’s a reason I don’t write a humor blog, you know!  Here, is this better?

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One of my favorite mind-tweaking methods is to track down my most sacred assumptions, turn them upside down, shake violently and see what moos. 

So when  I ran across “The Work” of Byron Katie during a recent New Age debunking binge,  I was pleased  to find it a practical method of  investigating and challenging our beliefs about the world, and how we think it should be.    There *are* some gems  buried in the newage fluff out there (really, there are!) and this appears to be one of them.  Here’s how it goes.

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