A friend of mine is struggling with a break-up. This once-considerate man she dated suddenly seems like a real creep, ignoring her and distancing himself from her as if she were a stranger. She’s mad, hurt. She doesn’t want to remember him like this. She wants someone to be gentle with her feelings even while parting.

A mentor of hers suggested this technique: remember the most loving moments you felt with that person. Feel them completely, to the depth of your bones. Relive them. Feel the natural pain that comes along with letting go of someone you felt so strongly about. Remember the love and let it lead the way to healing.

I also suggested she recognize that everyone has the right to handle separation their own way. Because someone is distancing themselves doesn’t necessarily mean he or she has no feelings for you. Everyone is allowed to cope in their own way and each way should be respected, even if you can only muster a little bit of it. Someone people open up and release emotions during a difficult time while others retract or reject the feelings they may be experiencing.

Remembering love when you’re angry is no easy task; this isn’t spacey new age advice meant as an emotional placebo. It simply means, amidst your pain and anger, remembering the goodness of a loved one and allowing that to move the process forward.

Besides, we are never truly separated. Our relationships, on one plane or the other, go on and on and on and on and on….

Over the years, I’ve heard more and more people talk about the difficulty in adjusting to Daylight Savings Time. It’s as if we’ve become more sensitive to it. Some wonder why we break up our time cycle like this at all. But it is what it is, so here are a few pointers on how to adjust found in Gimundo this week.

(For me, exercise early in the day is key. Get that big blast of sunshine and take off the sunglasses sometimes!)

1) Use light therapy. Michael Terman, the director of the Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms at Columbia University Medical Center, claims that using a lightbox first thing in the morning, or visiting a light therapist, can help your body adjust to changing sleep patterns and provide an energy boost. “And it has direct antidepressant properties, stimulating the same neurotransmitters as antidepressant medications,” he told Time.
2) Exercise. Regular exercise at a set time of day can help create a healthy habit. Ongoing aerobic workouts have been proven to reduce depression, so don’t make excuses: Hit the gym or a walking trail each morning for an all-day mood boost.
3) Get a massage. Booking a session with a local masseuse isn’t a luxury: It’s a proven way to treat depression. Massage can decrease the stress hormone cortisol, while increasing levels of serotonin.
4) Drink your coffee. A recent analysis from the Nurses’ Health Study discovered that women who drink more than four cups of coffee a day were 20 percent less likely to become depressed than women who drank less. So, if daylight savings is getting you down, an extra shot of espresso might be just the ticket to get you back on track.
5) Eat more seafood. Seafood such as salmon and sardines are rich in Omega-3s, which have positive effects on depression. A nutritional supplement called SAM-e can also provide a mood boost; talk to your doctor for tips on naturally treating the blues.

What’s positive about jealousy, you ask? Lots, believe it or not. All of our feelings have lessons lurking inside. Jealousy may feel uncomfortable but it may indicate something that you feel is genuinely lacking in your life, or the love you feel for someone, or insecurity issues that remain unresolved. Here’s what the experts have to say:

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
Robert A. Heinlein

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
Jean Baudrillard

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
George Eliot

Back then I didn’t think a woman like that, or a relationship like that, could exist with complete freedom and no jealousy or possessiveness. I thought it sounded too good to be true and I was certainly convinced it wasn’t the life for me!
Sylvia Kristel

Don’t waste time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind.
Mary Schmich

From heresy, frenzy and jealousy, good Lord deliver me.
Ludovico Ariosto

I do not say anything from jealousy.
Anna Held

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.
Lawrence Durrell

It’s amazing the clarity that comes with psychotic jealousy.
Rupert Everett

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
Emile M. Cioran

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Jealousy is a dog’s bark which attracts thieves.
Karl Kraus

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
Erica Jong

Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.
Aristotle

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire.
Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits.
Paul Eldridge

Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.
Henry Ellis

Jealousy… is a mental cancer.
B. C. Forbes

Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don’t bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!
Bob Marley

Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/jealousy.html#ixzz1cYGqMHLR

This year has been filled with natural disasters throughout the world. Most recently, a7.2 magnitude earthquake ravaged approximately 2,000 building in eastern Turkey. But some hope lay amidst the rubble, as an infant, mother and grandmother are found after 2 days.

ERCIS, Turkey — A 2-week-old baby girl, her mother and grandmother were pulled alive from the rubble of an apartment building in a dramatic rescue Tuesday, 48 hours after a 7.2-magnitude earthquake toppled some 2,000 buildings in eastern Turkey.

Television footage showed a rescuer, Kadir Direk, in an orange jumpsuit squeezing into the hulk of crushed concrete and metal to free the baby. The infant, named Azra Karaduman, was wrapped in a blanket and handed over to a medic amid a scrum of media and applauding emergency workers.

The baby’s mother, Semiha, and grandmother, Gulsaadet, were huddled together, with the baby clinging to her mother’s shoulder when rescuers found them, Direk, the emergency worker, told The Associated Press. There was a bakery at the ground floor of the building, which may have kept them warm, he said.

Two-week old Azra Karaduman is carried by rescue workers from a collapsed building in the Ercis province of Van, in eastern Turkey, on October 25, 2011. (ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images)

The baby was in good health but was flown to a hospital in Ankara, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported. Hours after she was freed, the two others were pulled from the large, half-flattened building and rushed to ambulances as onlookers clapped and cheered. The mother had been semiconscious, but woke up when rescuers arrived, Direk said.

“Bringing them out is such happiness. I wouldn’t be happier if they gave me tons of money,” said rescuer Oytun Gulpinar.

Source: Chron.com

It’s always a positive thing when you can use something you were just about to throw out for some other purpose. It’s called “repurposing” or “pre-cycling.” And I bet there are plenty of items you are getting ready to toss that can be used for something else instead. Here are a few examples:

1. Reuse your blankets and towels. Bring them to a local shelter that will be glad to put them to good use and give animals a soft, warm place to sit.

2. Reuse seeds from fruit and vegetables and try to grow them!

3. Reuse old plastic bags. There are 10 creative ways to reuse plastic bags here.

4. Reuse paper bags as school book covers, or be a little more creative with these ideas.

5. Cut used pieces of paper into scrap pieces of paper (a message pad!).

6. Reuse stove heat by opening up the stove once you are done with it and letting the warm air into your home in colder weather. Reuse the heat!

7. Reuse coffee grinds by keeping them aside and placing them into your garden or soil.

8. Reuse coffee that you don’t drink by putting it over ice and placing it in the fridge for an iced coffee later.

9. Reuse Christmas trees (not the fake ones) by putting them outside for birds and letting it naturally break down.

10. Reuse packing peanuts, air pillows, bubble wrap and boxes for your own ebay shipping, or bring them by the local post office or recycling center for others to use.

Check out more here.

Let’s take a moment of thanks and appreciation for the Occupy Wall Street protesters. You don’t have to agree with them. But they are exercising their rights as US citizens and taking a stand and attempting to make a positive change.

What can you do today to take a stand, no matter how small? Make a difference in your own life first and the ripple effect will occur. How can you instill in others around you the importance of standing up for your rights?

I’ll make a small confession: I wasn’t quite sure exactly what fortitude meant before this post. A kind of strength, I guessed.

Not too far off. Let the experts throughout history give you a better indicator:

A mode of conduct, a standard of courage, discipline, fortitude and integrity can do a great deal to make a woman beautiful.
Jacqueline Bisset

Affliction is the wholesome soil of virtue, where patience, honor, sweet humility, and calm fortitude, take root and strongly flourish.
David Mallet

Fortitude is the guard and support of the other virtues.
John Locke

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.
Francis Bacon

Gird your hearts with silent fortitude, suffering yet hoping all things.
Felicia Hemans

I know of no higher fortitude than stubborness in the face of overwhelming odds.
Louis Nizer

I learned a lot in those first years in Miami, while struggling just for survival, by observing my father’s fortitude.
Desi Arnaz

Pray for intestinal fortitude, work hard, and keep the faith. Oh, and pray for good luck, you’re gonna need it.
Jerry Reed

Want of money and the distress of a thief can never be alleged as the cause of his thieving, for many honest people endure greater hardships with fortitude. We must therefore seek the cause elsewhere than in want of money, for that is the miser’s passion, not the thief’s.
William Blake

Last night during a meeting, I found my mind just racing - which was strange because I thought I felt focused and relaxed! Sometimes our minds can feel like a runaway train. Sometimes silence is just what we need!

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
Bertrand Russell

A quiet mind cureth all.
Robert Burton

Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.
Florida Scott-Maxwell

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
Blaise Pascal

All quiet along the Potomac.
George B. McClellan

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
Walter Bagehot

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Arundhati Roy

Anything for a quiet life.
Thomas Middleton

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

At the moment you are no longer an observing, reflecting being; you have ceased to be aware of yourself; you exist only in that quiet, steady thrill that is so unlike any excitement that you have ever known.
May Sinclair

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
Robertson Davies

Be quiet, or my wife will take away your first born and make him or her work in one of her sweatshops!
Marc Anthony

Indian novelist Arundhati Roy

“There’s concrete, concrete, everywhere. But if we look hard enough, there is vacant land we can farm.”

- Sigit Kusumawijaya, 30

Sigit possesses a quality we all need to embrace: the ability to look beyond our concrete jungles and find a place for change to take place:

Young Indonesians are breathing new life into their polluted concrete capital city with little more than buckets of soil and seeds.

A group of mostly young professionals, known as Gardening Indonesia, has joined the global urban farming movement, converting vacant patches of land between Jakarta’s skyscrapers into lush green vegetable gardens.

On a one-hectare (2.5-acre) lot between luxury homes in a north Jakarta suburb, Kusumawijaya and his fellow gardeners grow tomatoes, cucumbers, corn and chillies where an eyesore dumping ground once stood.

The group’s goals are to encourage a healthy population and a green city while saving money on grocery bills.

Source: AFP

This has been a week of heavy stories. Many of my friends and family are struggling financially. Each hit makes them feel a bit more overwhelmed. The stress can be enormous at times. This piece had several proactive steps to take while unemployed. Good points to remember:

The real question is, do you have the discipline to put your new found free time to good use?  With the time you have on your hands, you can finally start to write that novel, or spend more time with your family and reconnect with the kids. There is time to finally think about what you want out of life and your career. Money can’t buy that kind of personal time away from the pressures and demands of a full-time job.

Even if you are unemployed, you still have a skill set. The key to getting ahead in any economy is to recognize your strengths and use them to your advantage. Use your spare time to understand your strengths better and work on your personal mission statement.  Knowing what you bring to the table is going to allow for more confidence and creativity when it comes to looking for work. It will also be a big help in determining what kind of work you go after on the next job search.

An extended unemployment might be exactly what you needed. Your former industry might have been the worst career choice that you ever made. If you were pushed into it strictly because you needed a job, it could have been something you regretted during your entire career. No matter how high up you go in a company, it is going to be tough to get by when you have no passion for your work.  This is a chance to level-set and decide where to go from here.

Read more at: The Psychology of Well-Being