Get Your Karma Right

In Sanskrit, Karma means action. It has the same meaning as that of Newton’s third law of motion which states that “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. Our thoughts, words and actions trigger a reactive force. It is possible to change, modify, or suspend this reactive force, but it is not possible to eliminate it. This cause and effect law should not be made use of for punishing people, but used for imparting education and learning. There is no escape from the consequences of our actions, but we will suffer only if we make the conditions conducive for our suffering. Irrespective of whether the man or universe has created the laws, ignorance is not an excuse. If you want to know as to how you can do away with fear and feel empowered, please read on.

As they say, what goes around, comes around, so follow these 12 laws of karma and you will change your life forever.

#1: Great Laws
• Another cause and effect law is “As you sow, so shall you reap”.
• What you give to the Universe is what you get back.
• If you want love, happiness, peace and friendship, then you should be loving, happy, peaceful and a true friend to others.

#2: Creation Laws
• Life does not happen just like that, your participation is essential.
• Both inside and outside, we are a part of the Universe. We get clues for our inner state from whatever that surrounds us.
• You can be yourself. Surround yourself with those things that you badly want in your Life.

#3: Humility Laws
• Whatever you refrain from accepting will have to continue for you.
• If you look at someone as an enemy or as having a character trait which you think is negative, then you are not focusing on higher levels of existence.

#4: Growth Laws
• If you continue to carry the thoughts about your past actions, you will have to deal with them for life.
• If you want to grow, you must change. It is not the people, things or places around you that is to be changed.
• In our lives, the only given thing is ourselves. We have control only over ourselves.
• As we bring about a change in ourselves from within as to who as well as what we are, our life will also change.
 
#5: Responsibility Laws
• If something is wrong with my life, then something is wrong with me.
• The universal truth is that we mirror what surrounds us and vice versa.
• We must take the responsibility for what we have in our lives.
 
#6: Connection Laws
• Some things that we do may seem to be inconsequential, but it is important that it is done because in this universe everything is linked.
• One step leads you to the next one and it goes on and on.
• Someone has to initiate the work to get the job done.
• Both the first step and the last step are equally important. They are essential to complete a task.
• Our past, present and future are all connected.

#7: Focus Laws
• It is not possible for you to think about two things at a given time.
• When we focus on spiritual values, we cannot entertain lower thoughts like greed or anger.

#8: Giving and Hospitality Laws
• We will be asked sometime in our lives to demonstrate what we truly believe in.
• It is here that we actually practice whatever we claim to have learned.

#9: Here and Now Laws
• If you look backward to examine the problem, you cannot be totally present here and now.
• If you entertain old thoughts, patterns of behavior and dreams, then you cannot have new ones.

#10: Laws of Change
• History repeats itself till we learn the lesson that we have to take a different path.

#11: Patience and Reward Laws
• Initial toil is essential for all rewards.
• Toiling patiently and persistently helps you to get lasting rewards.
• True joy comes to us when we do what we are supposed to do and wait for rewards to come by themselves.

#12: Significance and Inspiration laws
• What you get back from anything is what you have given to it.
• The direct result of putting intent and energy into something is realization of its true value.
• Each and every personal contribution adds to the whole contribution.
• Lackluster contributions do not impact the whole. They are also not capable of diminishing it.
• Contributions made with love do not only bring life to the whole, but also inspires it.

How many of these karma laws do you follow?

Source
Genius Awakening

Keep Yourself Sharp

Everybody wants to sharp, Let us see how we can become sharp. 
Nobody can remember everything,so don't beat yourself
Nobody can remember everything, so relax if you don't remember something. Don't blame yourself and put down yourself. You have to use variety of things to remember everything. They include simple note taking to recording the conversation. Daily make a list of things to be done and keep ticking them as you do them. You will also feel something accomplished at each tick and once you finished the whole page, you can treat yourself.

Challenge yourself
Ordinary is just plain boring. You can start to do things in a better way be it your job or talking to your kid. Try set some impossible goals. Try to do things deliberately in a different way. It sharpens you mind. Solve problems on Logic, Problem solving, Mental orientations and corrective thought process.

Healthy Body = Healthy Mind
Take care of your Health, Healthy eating, Exercise , Sufficient Sleep help to keep one sharp. If you fall ill your sharpness and productivity decreases sharply. Drink plenty of water.

Express Yourself
Be Forthcoming with your thoughts, Emotions and actions. This makes your mind the effort and thus make you sharp and active.

Never old to learn
Whatever be the age you can learn, Lenin learnt Bycycling in old Age. Many of the Businessman learnt their techniques of business very late and became successful. So it is never late to try and learn new things. Learn some skills and Management to do things well.

Complement Yourself.
Treat yourself as you treat others. Some of us can set very high standards and become biggest critic of our actions and results. Always compliment yourself regardless what others say about your successful actions. You can divide large projects into small projects and complement yourself of achieving every mini goal you have set to achieving the larger goal.

Clarity
Clarify your thoughts and set your goals., Know what you want to become in life. Especially clarity on the purpose of each action you undertake, thatway you bring clarity to your thoughts, feelings and actions.

Self Esteem
Always look for positives, just not the negatives. That is count your blessings or keep a bragging journal, that way your can improve your self esteem. Self esteem is essential for analyzing the situation dispassionately and thus making you sharp.

Slave to Technology
Cut the tech, use your mind more. That should be more. Man is very smart in making tools that substitute the work he does that is why we are the most intelligent compared to other animals. But the flip side is decrease in sharpness. Cut the technology and use yourself more. Make calculations by hand, Call on people than leaving a message etc.

Your own Master
Make your decisions, Keep your own agenda , not set by others. Some can be doing the agenda set by others, which leads to disinterest in what we are doing and why we are doing. So decide for yourself what you are going to do and do it at your own time, not set by others.

Relax
Take a Break, Relax to your hobby. Dont always pushing for things. Take hobby not related to your profession and enjoy.

Work = Life
Make your every action a journey, not a task.  Like it is said in Bhagavat Gita :Path is life. The Path you undertake is life. That Journey is your life. Dont focus too much on the result. Enjoy the process.

Sleep
Sleep enough and well. Sleep recharges your body and refreshes your brain. Brain organises the days information in the night. So sleep is as essential as the work you do.

Eat Healthy
Ayurveda Says you are what you eat. So eat what is good for you and your body. Eat in proper quantities and proper proportions in healthy nutrients. Eat to your work need.

Habits
Cut Bad Habits and Cultivated Goods habits. Habits is what gives us consistency and ultimately defines Us. A Man is what is habits are. So Develop healthy successful habits.

Brain Rules

The brain is an amazing thing. Most of us have no idea what’s really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know. Dr. John Medina is a developmental molecular biologist gives his 12 Brain Rules

#1: Exercise boosts brain power.

The human brain evolved under conditions of almost constant motion. From this, one might predict that the optimal environment for processing information would include motion.

Exercise improves cognition for two reasons:

• Exercise increases oxygen flow into the brain, which reduces brain-bound free radicals. One of the most interesting findings of the past few decades is that an increase in oxygen is always accompanied by an uptick in mental sharpness.

• Exercise acts directly on the molecular machinery of the brain itself. It increases neurons’ creation, survival, and resistance to damage and stress.

#2: The human brain evolved, too.

• The brain is a survival organ. It is designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment and to do so in nearly constant motion (to keep you alive long enough to pass your genes on). We were not the strongest on the planet but we developed the strongest brains, the key to our survival.

• The strongest brains survive, not the strongest bodies. Our ability to solve problems, learn from mistakes, and create alliances with other people helps us survive. We took over the world by learning to cooperate and forming teams with our neighbors.

• Our ability to understand each other is our chief survival tool. Relationships helped us survive in the jungle and are critical to surviving at work and school today.

• If someone does not feel safe with a teacher or boss, he or she may not perform as well. If a student feels misunderstood because the teacher cannot connect with the way the student learns, the student may become isolated.

• There is no greater anti-brain environment than the classroom and cubicle.

#3: Every brain is wired differently.

• What YOU do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like – it literally rewires it. We used to think there were just 7 categories of intelligence. But categories of intelligence may number more than 7 billion—roughly the population of the world.

• No two people have the same brain, not even twins. Every student’s brain, every employee’s brain, every customer’s brain is wired differently.

• You can either accede to it or ignore it. The current system of education ignores it by having grade structures based on age. Businesses such as Amazon are catching on to mass customization (the Amazon homepage and the products you see are tailored to your recent purchases).

• Regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people. The brains of school children are just as unevenly developed as their bodies. Our school system ignores the fact that every brain is wired differently. We wrongly assume every brain is the same.

• Most of us have a “Jennifer Aniston” neuron (a neuron lurking in your head that is stimulated only when Jennifer Aniston is in the room).

#4: We don't pay attention to boring things.

• What we pay attention to is profoundly influenced by memory. Our previous experience predicts where we should pay attention. Culture matters too. Whether in school or in business, these differences can greatly effect how an audience perceives a given presentation.

• We pay attention to things like emotions, threats and sex. Regardless of who you are, the brain pays a great deal of attention to these questions: Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me? Have I seen it before?

• The brain is not capable of multi-tasking. We can talk and breathe, but when it comes to higher level tasks, we just can’t do it.

• Driving while talking on a cell phone is like driving drunk. The brain is a sequential processor and large fractions of a second are consumed every time the brain switches tasks. This is why cell-phone talkers are a half-second slower to hit the brakes and get in more wrecks.

• Workplaces and schools actually encourage this type of multi-tasking. Walk into any office and you’ll see people sending e-mail, answering their phones, Instant Messaging, and on MySpace—all at the same time. Research shows your error rate goes up 50% and it takes you twice as long to do things.

• When you’re always online you’re always distracted. So the always online organization is the always unproductive organization.

#5: Repeat to remember.

• The human brain can only hold about seven pieces of information for less than 30 seconds! Which means, your brain can only handle a 7-digit phone number. If you want to extend the 30 seconds to a few minutes or even an hour or two, you will need to consistently re-expose yourself to the information. Memories are so volatile that you have to repeat to remember.

• Improve your memory by elaborately encoding it during its initial moments. Many of us have trouble remembering names. If at a party you need help remembering Mary, it helps to repeat internally more information about her. “Mary is wearing a blue dress and my favorite color is blue.” It may seem counterintuitive at first but study after study shows it improves your memory.

• Brain Rules in the classroom. In partnership with the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University, Medina tested this Brain Rule in real classrooms of 3rd graders. They were asked to repeat their multiplication tables in the afternoons. The classrooms in the study did significantly better than the classrooms that did not have the repetition. If brain scientists get together with teachers and do research, we may be able to eliminate need for homework since learning would take place at school, instead of the home.

#6: Remember to repeat.

• It takes years to consolidate a memory. Not minutes, hours, or days but years. What you learn in first grade is not completely formed until your sophomore year in high school.

• Medina’s dream school is one that repeats what was learned, not at home, but during the school day, 90-120 minutes after the initial learning occurred. Our schools are currently designed so that most real learning has to occur at home.

• How do you remember better? Repeated exposure to information / in specifically timed intervals / provides the most powerful way to fix memory into the brain.

• Forgetting allows us to prioritize events. But if you want to remember, remember to repeat.

#7: Sleep well, think well.

• When we’re asleep, the brain is not resting at all. It is almost unbelievably active! It’s possible that the reason we need to sleep is so that we can learn.

• Sleep must be important because we spend 1/3 of our lives doing it! Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.

• We still don’t know how much we need! It changes with age, gender, pregnancy, puberty, and so much more.

• Napping is normal. Ever feel tired in the afternoon? That’s because your brain really wants to take a nap. There's a battle raging in your head between two armies. Each army is made of legions of brain cells and biochemicals –- one desperately trying to keep you awake, the other desperately trying to force you to sleep. Around 3 p.m., 12 hours after the midpoint of your sleep, all your brain wants to do is nap.

• Taking a nap might make you more productive. In one study, a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots’ performance by 34 percent.

• Don’t schedule important meetings at 3 p.m. It just doesn’t make sense.

#8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way.

• Your brain is built to deal with stress that lasts about 30 seconds. The brain is not designed for long term stress when you feel like you have no control. The saber-toothed tiger ate you or you ran away but it was all over in less than a minute. If you have a bad boss, the saber-toothed tiger can be at your door for years, and you begin to deregulate. If you are in a bad marriage, the saber-toothed tiger can be in your bed for years, and the same thing occurs. You can actually watch the brain shrink.

• Stress damages virtually every kind of cognition that exists. It damages memory and executive function. It can hurt your motor skills. When you are stressed out over a long period of time it disrupts your immune response. You get sicker more often. It disrupts your ability to sleep. You get depressed.

• The emotional stability of the home is the single greatest predictor of academic success. If you want your kid to get into Harvard, go home and love your spouse.

• You have one brain. The same brain you have at home is the same brain you have at work or school. The stress you are experiencing at home will affect your performance at work, and vice versa.

#9: Stimulate more of the senses.

• Our senses work together so it is important to stimulate them! Your head crackles with the perceptions of the whole world, sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, energetic as a frat party.

• Smell is unusually effective at evoking memory. If you're tested on the details of a movie while the smell of popcorn is wafted into the air, you'll remember 10-50% more.

• Smell is really important to business. When you walk into Starbucks, the first thing you smell is coffee. They have done a number of things over the years to make sure that’s the case.

• The learning link. Those in multisensory environments always do better than those in unisensory environments. They have more recall with better resolution that lasts longer, evident even 20 years later.

#10: Vision trumps all other senses.

• We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you'll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you'll remember 65%.

• Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.

• Why is vision such a big deal to us? Perhaps because it's how we've always apprehended major threats, food supplies and reproductive opportunity.

• Toss your PowerPoint presentations. It’s text-based (nearly 40 words per slide), with six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads—all words. Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images. Burn your current PowerPoint presentations and make new ones.

#11: Male and female brains are different.

• What’s different? Mental health professionals have known for years about sex-based differences in the type and severity of psychiatric disorders. Males are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia than females. By more than 2 to 1, women are more likely to get depressed than men, a figure that shows up just after puberty and remains stable for the next 50 years. Males exhibit more antisocial behavior. Females have more anxiety. Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male. Most anorexics are female.

• Men and women handle acute stress differently. When researcher Larry Cahill showed them slasher films, men fired up the amygdale in their brain’s right hemisphere, which is responsible for the gist of an event. Their left was comparatively silent. Women lit up their left amygdale, the one responsible for details. Having a team that simultaneously understood the gist and details of a given stressful situation helped us conquer the world.

• Men and women process certain emotions differently. Emotions are useful. They make the brain pay attention. These differences are a product of complex interactions between nature and nurture.

#12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

• The desire to explore never leaves us despite the classrooms and cubicles we are stuffed into. Babies are the model of how we learn—not by passive reaction to the environment but by active testing through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. Babies methodically do experiments on objects, for example, to see what they will do.

• Google takes to heart the power of exploration. For 20 percent of their time, employees may go where their mind asks them to go. The proof is in the bottom line: fully 50 percent of new products, including Gmail and Google News, came from “20 percent time.”

Source

Brain Rules

Learn to Concentrate

Do you believe you can't study because you can't concentrate? Actually, concentration is a SKILL you can learn! Learning a new skill works better with practice, so plan to practice the steps below. You'll see a difference within a very short time, and soon you'll concentrate anytime and anyplace.

1. Teach your mind not to wander. This is the easiest and most effective thing. When you lose concentration, remind yourself: "BE HERE NOW." Focus back on your task. You'll probably have to do this over and over in the beginning…that's OK. Just "BE HERE NOW." Practice ignoring. Don't look for who just dropped lots of books, or at the wiggling person next to you. Make a Mind Tunnel between you and the task or the person you are supposed to be listening to. Paying attention is a decision!
2. Plan your worry time. Sounds odd but works great! Schedule time during each day when you can think, worry, makes lists, and focus on thoughts and concerns. If you slip into worrying or planning when you are supposed to be concentrating, put it on your Worry List; then keep that appointment with yourself. Return to your task and "BE HERE NOW."
   
3. Get some air. Breath deeply from your abdomen, get up and move around, change your position intermittently. Keep your brain and body oxygenated!
   
4. Change the topic. Switch tasks every hour or so to keep your alertness fresh.
5. Keep your mind active. Actually consider what you are reading, ask yourself questions about it, anticipate what your teacher will think is important about the information. Take notes.
6. Unfreeze your body. Sit in an upright but relaxed position. Check your muscles and body parts-including fingers and toes-and make sure they're not clenched.
7. Reward yourself. Finished studying a chapter? Call a friend. Finished a written
   assignment? Read a chapter in a novel. Finished a term paper? Go out to dinner. You choose what works for you.

AND SOME MORE

PLAN TO STUDY USE GOOD LIGHTING SIT IN A COMFORTABLE CHAIR TURN OFF THE TV AND THE PHONE MUSIC? ONLY IF IT WORKS FOR YOU HAVE A SNACK

BELIEVE YOU CAN DO IT GET ENOUGH SLEEP REMEMBER THE REWARD WEAR COMFORTABLE CLOTHES DO THE HARDEST WORK WHEN YOU'RE MOST ENERGETIC HANG "DO NOT DISTURB" SIGNS

Source
Woodford, Kansas State University