The word attractive will, first of all, depend on how you define things as attractive. If being fit and well- dressed is your example of attractive, then it is probably what it is. Hence, it is relative.
I will be publishing my articles from my recent trip to Hong Kong and Macau in the next days, and I'm excited to share them to you.
While everything worked fast and swamped lately, here are five reasons why smiling is not a senseless thing to practice in our everyday life. And why it doesn't make a total baloney for a topic:
It makes you look more attractive and younger
It's contagious, and it relieves stress
It takes less muscle to smile than it does to frown
It boosts your immune system and lowers blood pressure
Forcing yourself to smile can put you in a better mood
I hope this helped start your day right. Have a great week ahead!
Reference:
exhilirating (hyphen) adventures (dot) tumblr (dot) com
Stress is like an illegal recruitment agency. It keeps dropping in everyday, in any form, like it pesters our lives to make a living.
We, too always have a choice to either close our doors or give it a space to rent in our minds. I am no life expert but my ability to slay unwanted stress made me understand that it is an inevitable part of nature.
Nature is nature. And the key to having a harmonious relationship with nature is to not fight against it but to work for it. When we deny its existence that's when we slip, say, our own carnality showing off.
Now here's my personal remedy. The 7 senses- lifting things I do or choose to have to work out stress, being an unfortunately ever existing part of nature. Senses-lifting, huh? Well, it isn't found in Mr. Webster's, just in case you are curious for a little searching. :D But they are proven, so you can make use of them too or you can draw out some ideas which you can modify to suit your preference.
1. The look of a nicely shot photo
Anything pleasant to the eyes has an uplifting effect, right?
2. A skyline photography
Aaah, breather! A skyline view has a reflective effect on me that allows me to meditate about everything, far from the busy earth surface.
For a while I can be lost in thought and feel like it's possible to fly. Illusive, I know, but invigorating.
3. The smell of freshly opened books and magazines
The supple feeling is there. The fresh scent of paper and ink that your kindle cannot give you. Plus when your fingers first touch the glossy texture that makes you feel excited for the new things you're going to learn after reading.
4. The feel of a starlit night
Stars are like tranquil Christmas lights scattered in heaven. It is still and deep like how your thoughts can be. Doesn't it give you peace? When you finally retire to your bedroom after a jam-packed day?
5. The sound of a Jazz music
Beegie Adair? Or Michael Buble? They're just sooo soothing.
6. The feel of a morning breeze
Humid. Calm. You know, the marks of new beginnings. A perfect sanctuary for prayer.
7. The taste of a melting ice cream
Guilty pleasures! But what's de-stressing with your comfort food without thinking about the calories. The relaxing effect of a melted ice cream as it meets your throat.
There you have it. Working out stress using "senses-lifting" things. It's a new word now. Teehee!
There's one line in the novel turned movie, Eat, Pray, Love that clobbered me when I've heard it speak into my mind, "If you can't master your thoughts you will always be in trouble". It's as if I had no idea that line existed for years in books and in the persuasive mouth of famous speakers and Psychologists.
I believe most if not all of us are radically aware of this principle in life. But by the time we move out of our comfort zone and expand our relationships, stress beleaguers like compulsory.
However, it's not solely material thing or work strain that's responsible for our mental burn out but largely because of people. We relate to others even more than we do over our bed sheets. Thus, there are far more chances that our power over our thoughts gets shaken by the impact of these people in us.
Personal Commercial
Have you ever heard of that before? Listening to motivational speech is by far one of the best ways to build and rebuild our self-assurance. It's seldom however that we get the chance or sometimes even the interest to spare a time for these speeches until we find them badly necessary.
If the situation really calls for it and you need something to help you rise up from mental and self-esteem troubles, you can listen as fast to such a motivational speech by creating a personal commercial. You may formulate in your mind or write 3-5 lines that tell your strengths and goals. Recite them in front of a mirror or plainly narrate them into your mind like an introvert junior high would Winston Churchill. Or as the monk would Madonna, had it been the way to practice her vocation.
2. Your part...
Instead of thinking what the world can do for you, think of what you can do for the world. Taking your part in doing what can benefit the world will add up to your self-belief tank. No matter what you do, no matter where you go, if you won't realize that everything else is merely a response or reflex of what you make your mind believe, everybody you meet will just always become a nightmare.
3. Manual
When a gadget say a tab or a DSLR gets defective, there's no better way or person to approach for some fixing than the one who made it. Or we review the manual. If we get caught up in a bad situation in life and we start to get defective with how we handle it, there's also no better way to approach for some fixing than the one who made us, God. And the bible is our manual.
Did I sound like a Friday night reveler that dances to almost the same mix of music by saying that line? Maybe. But I am just reminding you that our thoughts can become our worst assassin if we would always think we know better in life than the one who made us.
If you accept God as your creator and savior then His words will you hit you hard than a knife but will lift you up higher than a crane.
Don't wait until you hop from one job to another, or move from a place or two. There's no way these external factors can help you.
He is more than a person in the history. A playwright, an artist, a sportsman, a scholar, a writer, a traveler, a speaker, a professor, a leader, an advocate of the youth, a Pope, a man who lived his life in holiness-- John Paul II.
Born Karol Józef Wojtyła on May 18, 1920 in Wadowice, Republic of Poland and whose birthday is celebrated on this very day.
It was mid 1920's when the Red Army invaded Europe. The young polish never had an idea that he would grow up in a rather unstable society. He was 18 when he moved toKraków to begin undergraduate studies in Philology at the Jagiellonian University. A year after, Germany invaded Poland sending forth World War II, crippling a nation of mostly Christians into a helpless one.
The shift in the lives of Karol's friends and relatives being murdered, and of few fighting Church leaders being imprisoned has immolated his aching heart. All human rights and hopes put in carnage, and the death of his father Karol Wojtyła, Sr. prompted him to take part in bringing back human dignity.
Karol Wojtyła's vocational discernment was profoundly shaped by his experiences of the Second World War...his daily life amidst brutality and random death; his resistance activities; his first experience of manual labor; and his first steps in Carmelite spirituality; the death if his father and the murder of his friends.
In late 1939, every man young and able in the family was forced to work for the Nazis (German invaders). Karol plied as manual laborer and began underground academic life and resistance activities. Eventually his name bobbed up in communist secret police records. He joined in student demonstration that attacked these communist secret police and internal security forces.
On Priesthood
In between the years of guns and bloods Karol was accepted into clandestine seminary program. Archbishop Sapieha believed in his ability and heart to influence especially the young, in spreading the word of God and in fighting for the rights of human dignity. Sapieha ordained him as priest in 1946 and sent him for a higher theological study in Rome. He spent his first years in priesthood in Poland. He established to young men and women what he calls hisSrodowisko where he took these young people into camping and kayaking as well as teaching and studying the words of God. He had unconfined appeal to the young people. Everyone who became part of his life gets enlivened.
Young people were attracted to Father Karol Wojtyła for many reasons: his intelligence, his friendliness, his human sympathy--- "his permanent openness".
The late Pope kissing a baby
Father Karol who later on became Dr. hab. Wojtyla professor-ed in universities after being awarded the habilitation doctorate. He later became Bishop Wojtyla. The Second Vatican Council opened in 1962 and a year later, Karol was named Archbishop of Kraków by Pope Paul VI. In 1967 he became cardinal. He defended human rights of all Poles, believers and unbelievers.
Human beings, he insisted, had a natural instinct for the truth of things, a built-in inclination to the true, the good, and the beautiful. Yet men and women were free to make real choices, choices that we can know by reason to be decisions between what is objectively good and what is objectively evil, between what is noble and what is base. To reduce those choices, as communism did, to expressions of class interest or other economic forces was to dehumanize the human person. And if communism misunderstood human dignity and human freedom, it also misunderstood human community and society.
Cardinal Wojtyla kneeling before Pope John Paul I
After the short stint of John Paul I as Pope, Karol Wojtyla took over and became Pope John Paul II. He reigned as Pope of the Catholic Church from 1978 to 2005. He was the second longest-serving Pope in history and is undoubtedly the most-traveled one. His strong passion to spread the light and words of God led him to conduct Papal visits in many countries-- to the works of Mother Theresa of Calcutta in India, to promoting the essence of intact family in the US, and even to non-Catholics [Judaism religion for example], to Al Qaeda's Operation Bojinka's plan to assassinate him, supposedly in his visit in Manila in 1995 but was materialized in St.Peter's Square. He respected other religions including Islam. Most people in the world saw his spiritual profoundness through his undying passion for forgiveness and prayer.
Pope John Paul II immediately after he was shot
Weigel mentioned in his book that Pope now Blessed John Paul II gathered his largest crowd in human history on the world's least-Christian continent, when he celebrated the closing Mass of World Youth Day in Manila, Philippines on January 15, 1995. I feel honored as a Filipino on the vastness of warm welcome and support that my nation gave to the Pope that time.
Blessed John Paul II's message to the Filipino people:
God has given you two great gifts: the richness of your faith and the closeness of your family.
On Love and Marriage
He was not only a Pope concerned of life but of love, marriage, and sexuality. He wrote a book entitled Love and Responsibility in 1960 which speaks of work, philosophical in nature, on the human person, human sexuality, love and marriage which I will attempt to blog about in the next days.
Published in Polish in 1960 and in English in 1981
George Weigel's work for years paid off in fulfilling his promise to the late Pope to tell in complete detail the road to holiness that a man named Karol Józef Wojtyła did in the history of the 20th century.
Pope John Paul II praying at the Western Wall
In Weigel's parting words to the late Pope before his death:
The conversation over dinner was wide-ranging, and at one point, after the usual papal kidding about my having written "a very big book," John Paul asked about the international reception of Witness to Hope, his biography, which I had published five years earlier. He was particularly happy when I told him that a Chinese edition was in the works, as he knew he would never get to that vast land himself. As that part of the conversation was winding down, I looked across the table and, referring to the fact that Witness to Hope had only taken the John Paul II story up to early 1999, I made the Pope a promise: "Holy Father," I said, "if you don't bury me, I want you to know that I'll finish your story."
It was the last time we saw each other, this side of the Kingdom of God.
Even up to now, I still find myself in tears of joy and admiration to this great holy man.
Reference:
The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II-- The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy by George Weigel
The calendar flipped another page and began the first of May yesterday. I am due to take an off from hospital duty so I thought for activities to fill in the hours while I am away from pressure and stress.
Some of my latest obsessions I looked forward to comforting me include buying the latest collection of clothes from a favorite online store and watching the brand-new episode from a favorite TV show. But none of them of course ensconced that something inside was bothering me.
To my mind co-oped the thought that being a nurse is never at all easy. Unsolicited challenges come that test a nurse's ability to handle every situation well without losing the strength to go ahead no matter how hard life gets.
I ran into a serious challenge on work. I would rather not tell the story except for the truth that it affected me so much.
I swear have never been this negative since but when a situation hits me hard, it's never easy to stand back up and continue the walking. I know how my spiritual side went downhill since the time I forgot when.
Enough for the cliffhangers.
What happened to me recently proves again that no earthly things, tangible or intangible could ever make a peaceful heart.
I just reached the point where I am so desperate to recollect myself and be whole again. But I am forgetting where exactly to start.
I never expected to catch the first day of May so bad. My eyes were so fluffy. My heart-felt so heavy.
I had no immediate person to talk to so I simply reached for the rosary without saying a single prayer and my mind remaining cluttered.
It was last year when the Roman Catholic faithful like me dedicated this same day to Mother Mary. It was also the feast of St.Joseph the Worker, the Divine Mercy Sunday, and the day of Beatification of now Blessed John Paul II. Having all these remembered made me I grasp that prayer is always the last and best weapon left. Regardless of why painful things have to happen and never knowing when and how they get solved, it is important to always hold to our faith to the Lord.
Without faith, it is impossible to please God. For he who comes to God must believe He exists, and rewards those who diligently seek Him. (Hebrews 11:6)
The life of Blessed John Paul II portrayed a good example of faith to God.
I would like to share this beautiful prayer I used, imploring favor through the divine intercession of Blessed John Paul II:
I came across this video while browsing on my Facebook news feed. It broke my heart. I realized how God molded everything exactly as he sees it suitable.
Strong is the new beautiful. And speaking of strong, here's a pet peeve: reading and discovering how to live a more positive life but not actually knowing how to apply it when it's needed.
Great speakers and writers of creative and positive life share huge amount of tips on how to make just that. However has it that few of the real challenges in learning what they preach doesn't come with learning but in maintaining what was learned.
Most readers have the tendencies to get mastered by their thoughts and not mastering the way they think. Hence, forgetting the motivating lessons on how to live a creative and positive life.
It’s
hard to warrant life as being good when too much problems hits you in the eye. When
you’re laid off at work and your mother gets cancer; or you failed in the board
exam five times, and went through a very painful annulment; or when the society
attached you stigma simply because you fall short physically for a human eye.
People
you know and who knows you in the same way work up to tell you that life can
still get better if only you hold on to it. But you know to yourself that no
one thing that they said has come up to give you a hasty remedy because the
pain is engraved deeply, an unfathomable form of spiritual emptiness and
clutter. Nobody in good shape of life can just plainly understand how difficult
it is to get imprisoned in that kind emotional whack.
When
the only legal thing life’s trials has ever done to you is to make you feel so
deserving of misery, don’t you think it’s easier to give up and lose hope?
I have been knuckling down
myself, volunteering in a hospital for almost eight weeks. That’s nearly two
months. And until now I really wonder how I was able to hold down close to
months of physical and emotional burnout of working 40 hours every week without
pay, and a slight amount of ill-humor from few random people around.
Honestly,
that is even far from other people’s experience. But one of the hardest parts
of getting through bad situations is when you reach the point where you can no
longer balance yourself well. It happened to me in the past few weeks.
I
belong to an entire generation of Nurses who after graduating and getting the
license hardly gets a paying job in the same profession. Or when we get a chance
we have to start from scratch and become a “volunteer”. It’s one of the
trending professional misplace these days. Even supposing, I still find it
okay. Sometimes we really have to start from the bottom to get to where we want
(the top).
There only came a point when I could no longer find my passion in what I was
doing. At times I become so ambivalent of whether my motivations for entering
into nursing were really right. Or if I ever had a wrong notion about it.
Going
on duty always seemed like a struggle each day. And often times I think of
quitting and never coming back to the hospital again.
When
my co-trainees ask me what my plans are after the training or if I’d still ever
want to work in the hospital, I stutter and trip over my words hoping to find
an answer I would not regret. But even I. Even I was racking to find my own
answer to the question.
I didn’t know what to do. I cried each night and found
myself always praying that I would never do any harm to my patients despite the
inner struggles I was having for weeks.
I’ve
never been this negative in the several years past. But adequate enough to say
that losing hopes amidst too much negative circumstance shots no one in
exemption.
“Doing nothing can sometimes be very tiring”. Don’t you think this is one of the most familiar oxymoron you could ever hear?
Oftentimes we grumble about our jobs draining us and errands preoccupying most of our supposedly free time. Sometimes when paper works pile up and our to-do list sit out unaccomplished, we opt to one day finding a time to loosen up and really do nothing to compensate for the “cruel kindness” this busyness has caused us. And when we think we’ve had too much of work we could not do otherwise because it’s what makes our living or else we won’t get our lives moving forward. I’m not so sure if you can relate with me on this.
When our motivation for things go AWOL and our equal right to find some rest gets more bereaved, to for moment be idle becomes a credible way of escape. However, idleness often betrays us more than we think. It makes haste slowly of our longing to get a temporary break and be back right up again.
“The busy man is troubled with but one devil; the idle man by a thousand”.
Doing nothing instead widely opens the door to the attacks of the tempter. Idleness invites an ample time for us to rather think of many varied things that either dirt our minds or make it become more negative. When we become busier being idle, it retards out desire for life and ambition. To physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually be productive is an aim a little impossible; paralyzing our way to success (i.e. to successfully attain what we’re supposed to achieve and make good at it).
“The way to be nothing is to do nothing”.
It said, let the devil always find you doing something and he’ll soon be convinced that it is of no use. But don’t let him find you idly busy, as what Socrates said, “Not only is he idle who is doing nothing, but he that might be better employed”.
The disadvantages of idleness affect no one in exemption. That’s why you have to give yourself the right cure once you reach a point of exhaustion and the lack of motivation.
Here’s a weird bit but sensible advice from Elizabeth Gilbert in one of her articles:
If you've lost your life's true passion (or if you're struggling desperately to find passion in the first place), don't sweat it. Back off for a while. But don't go idle, either. Just try something different, something you don't care about so much. Why not try following mere curiosity, with its humble, roundabout magic? At the very least, it will keep you pleasantly distracted while life sorts itself out. At the very most, your curiosity may surprise you. Before you even realize what's happening, it may have led you safely all the way home.
Yeah, let’s talk about it open-mindedly. Do away with your prejudices for a moment. It’s a topic so unusual for me to write about, yet it’s one of the most interesting, right?
Lust. It isn’t just a guy problem. It’s a problem of both the macho and the unmanly-- a human problem.
Most people young and old have issues with this. Those who think they don’t may freely stop reading the next lines and click the “X” button on the upper right. This is for all people single, dating, married, or separated who is most probably facing the same habitual sin.
While writing about it is easier said than done, lust has become a confidential sin that lie in wait of people in distinctive yet common ways. I won’t make up for all the right solutions and judgment on this matter. None of us come to anything with conspicuous analysis. Everyone is but civilly passing on premises and speculations according to the decipherability of an idea and some personal influences.
Thrashing out this topic, though would demand more than a few thoughts and deliberation. But touching a fraction of it would, I think do you more justice than acquainting you with litany of estimations. So I promise to sum this up to a few descriptive.
This post has been inspired by a book that speaks of sexual morality by Joshua Harris, a good Christian Author who “rightly beguiles” you into yielding and seeking for the best author and giver of love, life, and faith. I may not agree in everything that he’s written there but reading his books and understanding his points somehow makes me feel eligible to meditate on moral dedications and be responsible in sharing these ideas without being too anecdotal lest faulty opinions lead me self-righteous.
Here’s a familiar scenario:
A sexy and attractive lass is walking down the hallway in spaghetti straps and miniskirts. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating the attractiveness of this head turner and that staring at her and trying to imagine a little bit more is very minimal in comparison to actually walking up to intentionally harass her. Or, purposely or accidentally clicking on porn tube instead of youtube to watch few videos is not as grave as engaging into fornication with several sexual compulsives. Do you agree?
While some people may not have the same opinion, agreeing to this is like tantamount to saying that not giving up 100 % to lust is still acceptable; that there is a precise limit of percentage of it that won’t make that much of damage for so long as you know how to control yourself.
But how do we know if we’re on the right measure of lust? What are the things that we could consider as justifiable whenever we try to lust? Or if a little amount of it is fair, then why is lust still ever found in the 7 capital sins?
Smile is the Art of Happiness, says one writer. And being able to master that art is one key to living a beautiful and successful life.
Easy to say at some point when everything that is happening seems to revolve around the way we would want it to. Or should I say that when you get to hold of that “mature concept” of life and everything in it, then it’s way favorable to quote that you have already “mastered the art of happiness”.
Image Credit: Mashable Deviantart.com
Sure there’s nothing wrong in saying that smiles really do affect people, slack of whether or not they’re genuine, spontaneous, or a little bit “held-to-ransom”. The fact that we throw back some of it when it’s flaunted to us reveals that it touches our mood into something of a lighter side.
One study says our emotions are reinforced by the corresponding expressions we make. It’s like a feedback loop. But ironically humans still have the ability to suppress and repress unpleasant emotions, and smiling is one concrete channel of doing it.
We smile at most to show that we can still hold for ourselves no matter how unbearable a situation and our feelings for it can be. And although without smile (no matter how false) we can hardly begin with the cliche’ that the way to happiness starts with oneself. Albeit factual is that cliche’.
For whether or not smile is an Art of Happiness or an Art of Emotional Defense, doesn’t mean we are less truthful and less sensitive to the world than others are.
I’m actually smiling now as I write this post; sublime to whatever problems (personal and the likes) that are wishing me an emotional constipation. I just hope to share with you a little piece of thought and conviction.
“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word,
a listening ear, and honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring,
all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”
