Forsake "Woe is Me" - Breathing Space Blog

Key thought:
     Steve Rizzo, author of Get Your Shift Together says to, "Stop using your toxic past as an ID card to validate your right to proclaim your 'woe-is-me' story to the world. Practice awareness and choose to break free from The Big Mouth Inside Your Head now."

Getting Hacked = No Breathing Space - Breathing Space Blog

Using any of the 25 most popular passwords of 2014 is highly risky. A hacked password equals no breathing space. Instead make up something more complex, with random letters and numbers, such as ij6kf40d1. Or use an acronym and numbers known only to you, such a mwdSina8 ("my wonderful dog Skippy is now age 8").

These are a hackers delight:

      1. 123456 (Rank unchanged from 2013)
      2. password (Unchanged)
      3. 12345 (Up 17)
      4. 12345678 (Down 1)
      5. qwerty (Down 1)

      6. 123456789 (Unchanged)
      7. 1234 (Up 9)
      8. baseball (New)
      9. dragon (New)
    10. football (New)

    11. 1234567 (Down 4)
    12. monkey (Up 5)
    13. letmein (Up 1)
    14. abc123 (Down 9)
    15. 111111 (Down 8)

    16.mustang (New)
    17. access (New)
    18. shadow (Unchanged)
    19. master (New)
    20. michael (New)

    21. superman (New)
    22. 696969 (New)
    23. 123123 (Down 12)
    24. batman (New)
    25. trustno1 (Down 1)

Paper Reduction as an Art Form - Breathing Space Blog

Brett Weston was an artist with vision.

While most artists consider the destruction of their work a tragedy, as reported in Time magazine, photographer Brett Weston always considered it a necessity. Best known for haunting semi-abstract nature studies in the tradition of his famous father Edward, Weston vowed for years to destroy his negatives so that others could not make new prints from them after his death.

On his 80th birthday, Weston kept his vow. Surrounded by friends and family, he tossed hundreds of negatives into the living-room fireplace of his home in Carmel, California. Art historians and photography curators were horrified. The Center for Creative Photography, a photographic archive in Tucson, even sent a representative to Weston’s home in an unsuccessful effort to persuade him to change his mind. Weston insisted that he was merely limiting his legacy to work fashioned by his own hand. “Nobody can print it the way I do,” Weston explained. “It wouldn’t be my work.”

For Breathing Space, Concentrate! - Breathing Space Blog

Here are notes I took from Sam Horn's session on Concentration years back. Still great advice to this day!

* Concentration defined: voluntarily focused attention.
* Discipline of ignoring irrelevant matters
* Fixing ones' powers, efforts and attention
* Most people work best under a deadline; when their concentration is focused.
* Fatigue is a big road block to concentration

This last note is telling!:
* Society is moving towards a lower frustration tolerance with less discipline, and more need for immediate gratification. These are detriments to concentration.

Seek Completions All Day - Breathing Space Blog

The process of giving yourself a mental completion on all tasks or even thoughts, described in my book Breathing Space, sets up a mental partition for you whereby you have more energy, focus, and direction for what’s next.

You can practice completions all day long. When you get up tomorrow morning, whether you had good sleep or bad sleep, you'll be complete with that phase of your day, and so on. If you give yourself acknowledgment, and this takes only two or three seconds, you will have more energy, more focus, and more direction for whatever else you face.

Smell the Roses! - Breathing Space Blog

Studies at The Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation shows that flowery odors will help your brain function more effectively. Test subjects were asked to complete puzzles before and after being exposed to flowery odors. The scents apparently relax or improve your mood—subjects were able to complete puzzles 17% faster after smelling the flowers.

Drugs, Unfortunately, Rule - Breathing Space Blog

Where is the Breathing Space in a nation that pops a pill at every turn? You'll never convince me otherwise: as a society our default response to information and communication overload is ingesting psychopharmaceuticals.

Patrick Di Justo, writing years back in Wired Magazine said, "America may be the land of Mickey Mouse and Goofy, but the U.S. isn’t exactly the happiest place on Earth. Antidepressants are the most commonly popped pills in the country, accounting for 227 million prescriptions filled last year alone. Of course, Prozac and its descendants aren’t the only popular psychiatric meds: Remedies for seizure disorders -- often used to treat bipolar disease, as well as epilepsy -- and for anxiety are among the 10 most-prescribed drugs in the nation."

"But even as our hunger for pills has grown, basic innovation has slowed. Many “new” medications are actually reformulations of previously approved drugs, not novel molecules. As a result, some of the most widely taken treatments have been around for years: Today's leading anxiety beater, alprazolam, for example, originally hit the market in 1981 as Xanax."