At 57 years old, Greg Thomas was diagnosed with stage 4 head and neck cancer.
“When I found out that I had cancer, they told my family to go ahead and start planning my funeral.”
Greg passed the hours walking his dog on a rural Minnesota road — a road that led him to a beautiful, but abandoned, church.
He began caring for the crumbling relic, scraping off a century of peeling paint.
At 57 years old, Greg Thomas was diagnosed with stage 4 head and neck cancer.
“When I found out that I had cancer, they told my family to go ahead and start planning my funeral.”
Greg passed the hours walking his dog on a rural Minnesota road — a road that led him to a beautiful, but abandoned, church.
He began caring for the crumbling relic, scraping off a century of peeling paint.
A new study has found that participating in an 8-week meditation training program can have measurable effects on how the brain functions even when someone is not actively meditating. In their report in the November issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston University also found differences in those effects based on the specific type of meditation practiced.
“This is the first time that meditation training has been shown to affect emotional processing in the brain outside of a meditative state,” says Gaëlle Desbordes, PhD, corresponding author of the report. Additionally, the two different types of meditation training yielded some differences in the response of the amygdala – a part of the brain known for decades to be important for emotion. One type appeared to reduce states of depression.
Several previous studies have supported the hypothesis that meditation training improves practitioners’ emotional regulation. While neuro-imaging studies have found that meditation training appeared to decrease activation of the amygdala, those changes were only observed while study participants were meditating. The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that meditation training could also produce a generalized reduction in amygdala.
Within three weeks before beginning and three weeks after completing the training, 12 participants from each group traveled to Boston for magnetic resonance brain imaging (fMRI). Brain scans were performed as the volunteers viewed a series of 216 different images – 108 per session – of people in situations with either positive, negative or neutral emotional content. Meditation was not mentioned in pre-imaging instructions to participants, and investigators confirmed afterwards that the volunteers had not meditated while in the scanner.
In the mindful attention group, the after-training brain scans showed a decrease in activation in the right amygdala in response to all images, supporting the hypothesis that meditation can improve emotional stability and response to stress. In the compassion meditation group, right amygdala activity also decreased in response to positive or neutral images. But among those who reported practicing compassion meditation most frequently outside of the training sessions, right amygdala activity tended to increase in response to negative images – all of which depicted some form of human suffering. No significant changes were seen in the control group or in the left amygdala of any study participants.
“We think these two forms of meditation cultivate different aspects of mind,” explains Desbordes ,a research fellow at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH and at the BU Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology. “Since compassion meditation is designed to enhance compassionate feelings, it makes sense that it could increase amygdala response to seeing people suffer. Increased amygdala activation was also correlated with decreased depression scores in the compassion meditation group, which suggests that having more compassion towards others may also be beneficial for oneself. Overall, these results are consistent with the overarching hypothesis that meditation may result in enduring, beneficial changes in brain function, especially in the area of emotional processing.”
Source: Massachusetts General Hospital
Occupy Wall Street has become a lauded and effective relief organization for victims of Sandy.
The social media savvy that helped Occupy protesters create a grass-roots global movement last year is proving a strength as members fan out across New York to deliver aid including hot meals, medicine and blankets.
There is a sense of camaraderie reminiscent of Zuccotti Park, as young people with scruffy beards and walkie-talkies sort the donations coming in by the truckload to their Brooklyn clearinghouse stocked with every household product imaginable, from canned soup and dog food to duvet covers.
You can volunteer with Occupy Sandy’s efforts by filling out a form here. If you want to donate goods and supplies to the movement, check Occupy Sandy’s news feed and Wedding Registry to determine what they need.
(WATCH the NBC video below, or READ the AP story in NBC New York)
Occupy Wall Street has become a lauded and effective relief organization for victims of Sandy.
The social media savvy that helped Occupy protesters create a grass-roots global movement last year is proving a strength as members fan out across New York to deliver aid including hot meals, medicine and blankets.
When an Ontario band asked friends for help in recovering their stolen guitar, they had no idea a rock star would come to their rescue.
Last month Kevin Kennedy experienced a musician’s worst nightmare after his white acoustic Yamaha Dave Navarro edition guitar was stolen at a local club. He shared the news on Twitter and Facebook and offered a $1,000 reward for its return.
When an Ontario band asked friends for help in recovering their stolen guitar, they had no idea a rock star would come to their rescue.
Last month Kevin Kennedy experienced a musician’s worst nightmare after his white acoustic Yamaha Dave Navarro edition guitar was stolen at a local club. He shared the news on Twitter and Facebook and offered a $1,000 reward for its return.
Jonathan Gillis likes surprises, the bigger and more elaborate, the better.
A Texas Army National Guard sergeant, he was supposed to be in Afghanistan on Sunday but instead was at the finish line of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon waiting for his wife with flowers in hand.
Giselle Gillis, stunned after running the half-marathon, ran straight into his arms. They hadn’t seen each other in 11 months.
In addition to universal healthcare, Canada can now add swapping guns for cameras to its list of progressive policies.
The program to reduce gun violence by promoting photography is called ‘Pixels for Pistols’ and it aims to take guns off the streets by issuing a free Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH8 point-and-shoot camera to anyone who turns in a working firearm to the Winnipeg Police Service.
According to Dr. Marc Bekoff Ph.D., emotions like joy, love, empathy, compassion, kindness, and grief can readily be shared by improbable friends including predators and prey such as a cat and a bird, a snake and a hamster, and a lioness and a baby oryx.
The popular PBS series, Nature, featured Bekoff in a documentary called “Animal Odd Couples”, which aired last week.
According to Dr. Marc Bekoff Ph.D., emotions like joy, love, empathy, compassion, kindness, and grief can readily be shared by improbable friends including predators and prey such as a cat and a bird, a snake and a hamster, and a lioness and a baby oryx.
The popular PBS series, Nature, featured Bekoff in a documentary called “Animal Odd Couples”, which aired last week.
As he inched through the churning, chest-deep water, Jay Price struggled to distinguish one potential catastrophe from the next. Fifty-foot oak trees snapped in violent crackles like broomsticks all around him. The 60 mph winds howled like a freight train. Broken telephone poles torpedoed over the top of him.
Price and his comrades from the Manasquan Hook and Ladder Company No. 1 kept pushing forward, chest deep in the rushing water, to reach another stranded person in their homes and rescue them to the safety of their M35 Army cargo truck, one by one through the chaotic night.
Since the storm, Price, has worked tirelessly in the town and enlisted the 94 members of his football team at Manasquan High School — where he is the head coach — to help in the recovery and cleanup efforts.
(READ the story, w/ photo, in New Jersey.com)
On October 24th, Michael Cali Moore, a National Guardsman, sent “Dan,” the anonymous founder of the Facebook page “Awesome Sh*t My Drill Sergeant Said” a message concerning his Battle Buddy, a Guardsman in another platoon:
“I don’t know where else to turn. I’m 100% certain that my friends is planning on killing himself tonight and I cannot get a hold of him or anyone that can get to him. Can you help me?” he wrote, adding details of his friend’s personal and financial woes.
The answer turned out to be yes.
(READ the full story from Yahoo News)
Ten years ago, Debbie Jakacki, owner of Jakacki Bag & Barrel in Chicago, a family business that’s been around since 1942, found herself continually frustrated by her employees. “We didn’t have a lot of people who had a great work ethic,” says Jakacki.
After learning about the Safer Foundation, a Chicago-based nonprofit that helps people with criminal records find gainful employment, she decided to give it a try.
It has worked out very well for Jakacki, who now figures she has hired over 100 former prisoners.
Ben Overstreet badly wanted to play football, but when he started his senior year at Gulf High School in 1949, he stood 5-feet-5 and weighed 105 pounds.
Ben made the team, but as equipment manager, not player. He cheered from the sidelines and brought the other boys water.
His time would come.
As a boy, Ben had dreamed of piloting airplanes so he joined the Air Force. At first, he was a clerk typist, but in 1953 he qualified for flight training and went on to become a war hero earning a Silver Star
.
(READ the full story in the Tampa Bay Times)
A measure of U.S. home prices jumped 5 percent in September compared with a year ago, the largest year-over-year increase since July 2006. Prices have risen in all but seven states.
The gain reported by the Associated Press on November 6 offered more evidence of a sustainable housing recovery.
Air Force officer James Mitchell, overwhelmed by the hardship and destruction he witnessed in Vietnam, decided to visit the Sacred Heart Orphanage. When baby #889 was placed in his arms, he knew it was meant to be.
19 Years after her adoption from the Da Nang orphanage, Kimberly Mitchell chose a career in the Navy to fulfill her fathers wish.
For 30 years, Gerard Thomas was among the 70,000 American veterans sleeping on the streets every night.
As a paranoid schizophrenic he was in and out of prison and mental institutions for decades. When out of trouble, he slept on park benches, in doorways or in the woods.
These days, the 62-year-old devotes his life to helping homeless veterans.
He now has an apartment, a bike, a desk and a three-computer workstation. He works as a certified peer counselor to homeless vets and mental-health patients.
(READ the full story from Washington Post)
Armed simply with chainsaws, a corps of military veterans has arrived on the Jersey Shore to help Sandy-stricken residents trapped by a maze of downed trees and debris.
The team members, whose previous tours have included Iraq and Afghanistan, arrived in New Jersey this week from Arizona, where they were serving in the Veterans Fire Corps, a program that helps recent-era vets prepare for careers in conservation. Their recent training in chain saw operation and wildland firefighting made them perfectly suited for the mission at hand.
“We volunteered right away,” says Joseph LiCausi, a former Navy petty officer from Queens, New York. “Cleaning up roads, getting trees out of the way, helping displaced people get food. It feels good to help out.”
Armed simply with chainsaws, a corps of military veterans has arrived on the Jersey Shore to help Sandy-stricken residents trapped by a maze of downed trees and debris.
The team members, whose previous tours have included Iraq and Afghanistan, arrived in New Jersey this week from Arizona, where they were serving in the Veterans Fire Corps, a program that helps recent-era vets prepare for careers in conservation. Their recent training in chain saw operation and wildland firefighting made them perfectly suited for the mission at hand.
“We volunteered right away,” says Joseph LiCausi, a former Navy petty officer from Queens, New York. “Cleaning up roads, getting trees out of the way, helping displaced people get food. It feels good to help out.”
