Medley

Sonal Murali – India

The author 

With the arrival of Coronavirus over15 months ago now, everything has changed. Just a few weeks ago, all of us were living our usual busy lives. And then we slowly watched our world go off its axis – slowly but determinedly. The scale of change that Coronavirus has endangered is of mammoth proportions. Initially it was a mere health crisis and now it has impacted every sphere of human activity, affecting us socially, psychologically and economically, calling for an imminent restructuring of the global economic order. We do not know what its far-reaching impact would be. The suffering and personal losses of different kinds have been tremendous. The imperative now is to safeguard our lives and our livelihoods. However lessons will have to be learnt and priorities will have to be re-drawn for us collectively.

After long search across many cluster systems we came upon a beautiful blue spheroid accented with green and baize. Most amazing was this atmospherically sealed world was teaming with intelligent, free moving life; colorful beings gliding through the air, teaming civilizations under the surface of vast bodies of water that actually dominate the planet.  Various groups of four legged creatures walking the earth on every body of land, and the smallest of all the insects and bugs as you call them are virtually infinite in number.  Then there are you humans, the keepers of it all, at once the most intelligent and yet the crudest of all the groups, threatening the earth’s vary existence.

Demystifying traditional Chinese medicine for conservationists could be the key to better protecting endangered species like pangolins, tigers and rhino, according to University of Queensland-led researchers.

UQ PhD candidate Hubert Cheung said efforts to shift entrenched values and beliefs about Chinese medicine are not achieving conservation gains in the short term.

Dreams take us to what feels like a different reality. They also happen while we're fast asleep. So, you might not expect that a person in the midst of a vivid dream would be able to perceive questions and provide answers to them. But a new study reported in the journal Current Biology on February 18 shows that, in fact, they can.

Tim Wyatt – England

The author

Seven steps to banish panic and enhance well-being

Had my grandmother still been alive she would have probably sourly observed, ‘The world’s going to hell on a handcart.’ Although she wasn’t the most optimistic soul who’s ever been in incarnation, had she been alive in 2020 (unlikely since she’d be 146) she would certainly have had a point. Living through two world wars and the great depression as well as having had ten children hadn’t left her with the cheeriest of natures. And she was a martyr to her arthritis. But let’s not defame the dead.

What she would never have appreciated – and nor do the majority of people today – is that as this pandemic casts its grisly shadow across the world like the plot of an all too familiar Hollywood plague movie, human adaptability kicks in. And creativity. A crisis can suddenly become transformed into an opportunity. The problem is that so many people are gripped by varying degrees of stress, panic, depression, isolation and fear that they don’t notice this.

Leo Babauta – USA

Overcome the Fears That Stop You From Focusing

This special bonus chapter was written by Gail Brenner who is a psychologist with 17 years of therapy experience who practices in Santa Barbara, California and blogs at A Flourishing Life.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In

that space is our power to choose our response. In our

response lies our growth and our freedom.”

– Victor Frankl 

Being alone ...

How do people experience time alone and time with others? Findings from a new Bar-Ilan University study reveal the intricacies of people's experiences in these basic social conditions.

The study used a unique approach of analyzing self-generated text from more than 1,700 participants who performed a sentence-completion task regarding their experience alone and their social experience when in the company of others. This approach shed light on people's perceptions when free to express themselves without being bound to specific questions.