The Better Brain Solution

All of us may experience difficulty in finding words and remembering names every now and then, especially when we continue to age. Slower mental processing is not uncommon as aging continues to take its toll on the mind and memory.

Difficulty in finding words and remembering names is evidenced in word-finding; specifically, in the interchanging of words and names, or verbalizing the interfering word instead of the intended word or name. These slips of the tongue or temporary memory lapses are examples of difficulty in finding words and remembering names. They may be embarrassing, and even stressful. The good news is that there are strategies for difficulty with words and names.

The strategies to overcome difficulty with words are as follows:

1. Slow down your speech. If need be, pause to screen out the interfering word. For example, you want to say "Clint Eastwood" but the interfering word may be "Cliff"; so take a pause when you come to the word, phrase, or name you are about to say to give yourself time to prevent verbalizing the interfering word or saying the interchanging word.

2. Listen to yourself (often times we are not paying attention to what we are saying) in order to identify the words, phrases, or names you may have difficulty in saying, and correct them instantly.

3. There is nothing wrong with self-correcting. Just continue to talk to maintain the flow of conversation.

4. Avoid behaviors that indicate your frustration, such as saying "Oops!" or snapping your fingers. Such behaviors will only draw attention to your problems in word finding, and aggravate your difficulty with words.

5. Think ahead to identify the words or names you may have difficulty retrieving. For example, when you are going to give a speech or to go to a social funtion, identify in advance a potentially elusive word, and find a synonym for it; try to remember the word through association so that you will avoid future word-finding problem.

Difficult with words and names can be overcome with the right strategies, although a little effort is required.

Your brain is still amazing despite the occasional setbacks in retrieving information and word-finding. 

Stephen Lau

Copyright © 2018 by Stephen Lau

Meditation to Change Life

Meditation to Change Life

There are many reasons why you should practice meditation every day: meditation can relax your body and mind, as well as enhance your spiritual connection. But, perhaps, the most important reason is that you can use meditation to change your perspectives—or rather, to see things as they really are.

Here is the explanation:

The human mind—the consciousness of the brain—has two components: the conscious mind, and the subconscious mind. All your experiences and your perceptions of what happens in your life impacted by your five senses are stored in both your conscious mind and subconscious mind. But there is a big difference in how the conscious mind and the subconscious mind may affect you positively or negatively. 

Your conscious mind filters all your thoughts—what you think is appropriate or relevant for your mental storage. In other words, your conscious mind consciously chooses what it wants to remember. Your subconscious mind, on the other hand, simply absorbs all your mental perceptions and reactions to all your experiences; it does not have the power to reason or to analyze any mental input. That is to say, it may not be able to tell the myths from the truths, or half-truths from the whole truths. Yet, it is your subconscious mind that controls your whole being, because your subconscious mind dominates your conscious mind. 

To illustrate, during the presidential campaign, you may be bombarded with all negative advertisements about the President and Mitt Romney. If you intend to vote for a certain candidate, your conscious mind may consciously absorb all positive information and reject any negative input regarding the candidate of your choice. But your subconscious mind is also receiving the negative input, without your awareness. If, at the end of the day, you have second thoughts about your choice, all the negative input received by the subconscious mind will start bombarding you, nagging you to change your choice. This is how and why negative campaigns work in the human subconsciousness. 

What has the subconsciousness to do with meditation?

In meditation, you enter the subconscious mind, and give yourself an opportunity to rummage all your thoughts absorbed and stored in the conscious mind, and to validate them. In meditation, you still your distracted mind, riddled with thoughts of the past and the future by focusing your mind on awareness—mindfulness of what is happening around you, such as your breathing, your bodily sensations, and your thoughts. Meditation is all about re-focusing the mind on what is important and discarding what is irrelevant or insignificant in the subconscious mind. In other words, meditation helps you see things in perspective.

In meditation, you find the quiet or stillness between sounds and thoughts and experiences. It is this underlying quietness—so quiet that you can almost hear it—that forms a link between you and your sensations and thoughts. 

In addition to sitting still to meditate, you can also learn how to apply meditation in almost anything you do in life. To illustrate, you can meditate while you are walking, instead of listening to the radio or your CD. This is how you can meditate while you are doing your daily walk:

As you begin walking, let go of the outside world.

Focus on your breathing: listen to the relaxed sound of your breathing in and breathing out.

Make you walk slow and purposeful. As you walk, observe each step that you are making. Notice the physical sensation of your feet, as well as the way your arms are swinging back and forth, brushing against your body.

If distracting thoughts come, do not deliberately dismiss them; instead, re-focus your awareness on your breathing and physical sensations. Continue to walk.

In this way, you can turn almost any everyday activity into meditative nature to enhance your awareness and clarity of mind, which can be life-transforming in that it changes your perspectives about almost anything that happens to you. Your senses will come to life; you will see how things change from moment to moment, so you have a better understanding of what is important and what is “real” in your life; you will also find it easier to let go of things you found difficult to let go in the past.

The Unexplainable Store: The store provides more than 200 products and tools to help you meditate, boosting your brain power to maximize success in finance, relationships, weight loss, and other aspects of life. Meditation is life-changing easy-to-do daily practice

Yes, meditation is life-changing in that it changes your perspectives of how you view your life and what is happening to and around your life.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© 2018 by Stephen Lau

The Wisdom to Live Well

Empower your mind with wisdom to live as if everything is a miracle.  

Life is complex, and living is never simple. That is why you need the art of living well. Given that life is short, make the best and the most out of your life, as well as avail yourself of every opportunity to create your own box, instead of just th if inking out of the box. The art of living well is to create a life uniquely yours, an ideal life that you wish to live. To achieve that end, you need the art of living well.

To stay younger and healthier for longer, you need wisdom in the art of living well, which has everything to do with your mind.

First of all, are you wise or intelligent? Both or neither? Or you simply don’t know?

Now, ask yourself another question: "Are you happy?" If your answer is an indisputable "yes," then most probably you are wise and have wisdom in the art of living well. If your answer is not definitive, maybe you are intelligent, but not necessarily wise.

First of all, there is a difference between "wisdom" and "knowledge," and hence a distinction between "wise" and "intelligent." Knowledge is information; being intelligent is being knowledgeable. Wisdom, on the other hand, may have more to do with "distilling" and "internalizing" knowledge; in other words, the selection and application of relevant and appropriate information for a specific purpose. Therefore, mere accumulation of knowledge does not necessarily enhance wisdom, or make an individual wiser for that matter. Wisdom in living is the art of living well. To live well, you must cherish and nourish that wisdom.

Unfortunately, how to live one's life is never formally taught in school. If you are lucky, your parents may have given you some advice or their living examples may have shed some light on how you should live your own life. Most of us simply follow our instincts; or, worse, drift along, letting the turnout of events in our lives guide us along the way. But that is not true wisdom in living.

Does wisdom in the art of living well have a blueprint? Unfortunately, not! The reason is that every individual's life is uniquely his or hers; as such, there is no blueprint for the art of living well. Remember, nobody can live your life for you, because it is your life, and you must live it the way you choose. But you may want to know "how" to choose, and "what" affects your choice.

Wisdom in the art of living well is about understanding that in life you have a choice. As a matter of fact, life is all about choices. But what determines your choices? Your life choices are based on your life experiences. In other words, all your past and present experiences play a pivotal role in how you are going to live the rest of your life. Wisdom in the art of living well is the capability of the mind to discern your perception and the processing of those experiences. No two individuals have the same perception of the same experience; it is always the half-glass-empty or the half-glass-full to a greater or lesser degree. Given the critical importance of mental perceptions in determining life choices, one of the essentials of wisdom in the art of living well is mind power--the ability of the mind to control its thinking process and hence its thoughts. Remember, you are the sum of your thoughts, and your thoughts become who you are and what you choose. In other words, your thoughts become the raw materials with which you fabricate your life—that is, creating your own masterpiece.

Surprisingly, we have never been taught how to think. When we were young children in the early phase of growth and development, we were exposed to the world around us through our five senses; then our minds began to process what we perceived in our experiences, generalizing and interpreting it according to our mental input, and applying it whenever and wherever we thought appropriate and applicable. Over the years, these perceptions and experiences have become the substances or raw materials with which we think. But this may not be "how" we should think. The human thoughts are like an unbridled horse, which must be tamed first before it can become a stallion. Therefore, it is important to know how your mind works, so that you can empower the mind to work for you instead of against you.

For more information, visit my website: Wisdom in Living.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© 2018 by Stephen Lau

Hallucinations

A hallucination does not require an external stimulus for a person to see, smell or hear things that are not present. This is an abnormal perception and many elderly people end up suffering from hallucinations. However, hallucinations can be controlled through medications in majority of the cases.

Some elderly also complain of having bugs crawling under their skin or on their faces. These are all hallucinations. So, why do the elderly suffer from hallucinations? There are several reasons for this. Hallucinations can occur due to fatigue, emotional exhaustion, insomnia, depression, cancer of the brain, head trauma, high grade fever, liver failure, lesions in the brain, or demise of a close friend or a loved one.

The most common reason for hallucinations among seniors is a health condition known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome. This syndrome is prevalent among seniors who have lost their vision.

Another cause for hallucinations in the elderly, both visual and auditory, occur in seniors who are suffering from sundowning syndrome. The symptoms of this syndrome occur late in the afternoons, evenings and nights and are seen in seniors who have dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and psychosis.

The most common causes of hallucinations in the elderly are dementia. Alzheimer's disease, side effects of medications, and psychosis.

Stephen Lau  

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Enmpower the Mind for Natural for Natural Healing

Empower the Mind for Natural Healing

Natural healing is holistic healing. It is a healing process by which a person's health is restored in the most natural way without the use of conventional medicine throughout the entire healing process. The human body is blessed with divine gifts in the form of natural resources that enable not only the enhancement of health but also the freedom from any type of disease or illness.

Natural healing is effective because it uses mind power through affirmation and visualization, meditation, the goodness of nature through natural herbs and healthful foods, and the energy of your body through hand and body massage, yoga, and acupuncture to bring about healing of the mind, the body, and the soul. In order to prevent any future relapse and to guarantee long-term cure, the healing process has to be complete and wholesome. In addition, throughout the healing process, there is no need to take any form of chemicals or to undergo any invasive procedure, which not only may produce negative side effects but also may interfere with the healing process.

Natural healing has long proven to be a very good alternative to the traditional way of healing practiced by medical doctors. As a matter of fact, many natural healing clinics have sprung up across the United States. People are using holistic healing techniques more than anything else mainly because they are highly effective with minimal or zero side effects, and they are less expensive than the treatments of conventional medicine.

Be a natural healer of your own disease. But how do you bring about natural or holistic healing?

First of all, you must know the difference between healing and treatment: treatment originates from the outside of an individual, whereas healing comes from within that individual; treatment aims at removing symptoms of disease in an individual, while healing tackles the source of disease in that individual.

Next, natural healing begins with the mind first, not the body. Your mind controls your body, and everything you do and think. Mind healing precedes body healing.

For natural healing to take place, your mind must express the intent to heal, without which there is no cure or healing. Your intent to heal is then manifested in focus, which directs your mind towards your goal to heal yourself. In other words, the mind creates the action to heal the body.

To reach that goal, you need resources; that is, you must empower yourself with knowledge so that you may know "how" to heal yourself. Knowledge is power: it may establish a connection to your true self, which is known as self-awakening, and thereby instrumental in allowing you to make the right health choices and decisions, as well as to live your life in a lifestyle that is in accordance with your higher purpose. Self-awakening is an important component of self-healing.

Through the many facets of mind power, such as affirmation, visualization, and meditation, your mind begins its healing process. Self-healing begins with the mind, and mind healing is always mind over matter.

Natural healing is always slow: it does not happen overnight. You need to set your short-term and long-term goals, and make your commitment to reach those goals. Your commitment is your mental responsibility to heal yourself. Living is a challenge, and so is self-healing. During the healing process you may have to face different challenges before you can ultimately overcome the disease or illness. Facing challenges requires mind power.

Once your mind is healed, natural healing of the body will follow. Your body is the product of what your mind thinks and the choices it makes. If your mind wants to heal, your body will be healed. Natural healing is just that simple.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau