Herbal #Tea : A Space Refresher

Posted: March 30, 2014 in Stimulus Space Response
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by @anarchyroll
3/30/2014

Tea, the original medicine.

I drink herbal tea at home for stress relief, improved breathing, and to help me get to sleep quicker. I could take prescription drugs for these things, but why use chemicals when something that grew out of the ground works just as good or better.

I also drink a ton of tea when I write at Starbucks, but that’s because it’s free refills with new bags after five purchases with a gift card. For someone looking to be social on a tight budget, two bucks and some change for all the tea you can drink in a social environment frequented by women in their 20s is a deal I’ll take any day. But I digress.

In a way, it still amazes me how much my physiology changes each time I drink my teas. Herbal tea is not just a drink. And it’s not meant to be sipped on. Black and green tea you can sip and drink at any temperature. Just remember when you are drinking herbal tea to drink it:

  • As hot as you can drink it
  • As fast as you can drink it

Don’t burn your lips, mouth, or throat. Be smart about it. But as soon as you can drink it safely, gulp it. Why? This method enables the medicinal aspects of the tea formula to kick in faster. I first heard this from Richard Bandler. The next time I had herbal tea I tried the as hot, as fast style and the difference was striking.

Yoga led me to meditation and meditation led to herbal tea. How? Yoga and meditation are simple. Essentially stretching and sitting still while breathing deeply and concentrating on the breath. Those simple acts can bring about drastic change, they have for me at least. The drastic change both brought about got me thinking what other simple things could help me in drastic ways.

National chain grocery stores have gigantic tea aisles, let alone organic and health food stores. My local supermarket had an organic section. That section had several aisles, one of the aisles was half organic herbal tea varieties. One of the brands was Yogi tea. Since I was doing yoga, the name stood out. What stood out more was the different kinds they have. When I thought about the three reasons I wanted herbal tea to help me with;

  1. Stress/anxiety relief
  2. Breathing help through my nose
  3. Sleep aide

I noticed they not only had formulas for those needs, but had multiple varieties. I was sold and haven’t looked back. My paradigm of drinking tea shifted from a beverage, to akin to taking vitamins. I don’t just notice the difference when I go a prolonged stretch without herbal tea, I literally feel the difference.

I encourage everyone to explore what herbal tea can do for them. It’s no magic pill, but the I do truly believe it can help. And unlike chemically concocted prescription pills, there are no side effects. It will either help or it won’t, but won’t help and also cause anal bleeding, depression, or erectile dysfunction.

Sometimes when I loose sight of the space between stimulus and response, drinking the tea helps me to both remember that it is there and see it clearer than I did before.

Herbal tea contributes to me being my best self. It enables me to breath better, feel better, and sleep better. It takes the lump out of my chest when I’m feeling stressed/anxious, it allows me to get more oxygen to my brain and muscles, and allows me to get more restful sleep. I hope you will try a formula or two or three and I hope that herbal tea will help you as much or more than it has helped me.

 

Namaste

 

Occupy Hope?

Posted: March 30, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms
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by @anarchyroll
10/19/2013

(I recently found this in my drafts section. Apparently I forgot to hit the send button last year.)

Ignorance is bliss says the ostrich with its head buried in the sand.  That is also a core principle of America’s middle class, don’t ask questions, just pay the mortgage.  This blind obedience and fear has bred generational conflict, the most obvious and colorful being the hippie revolution of the 1960s.  Occupy Wall Street hasn’t had the staying power as the hippies, mostly because the hippies grew up to be more selfish and greedy than their square parents could have ever imagined.  The infrastructure that the hippie turned yuppies put into place during the 1970s-80s were designed to suppress and silence rather than embolden and amplify the average person. The average person has in fact been rebranded as a second class citizen, in step with casino gambling being rebranded as the derivatives market.

During the Obama Hope era, another rebranding has occurred, journalism has been rebranded as espionage. More journalists have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 than every other previous president combined. Change we can believe in?  Well certainly for proponents of George Orwell’s 1984 becoming a nonfiction book it is.  People so blinded by red elephants and blue donkeys are so in the trenches of daily punditry that perspective and bigger picture of things has dissolved from their frames of reference.  Almost as if the job of pundits is to provoke the average person into debating with his/her peers rather than their superiors, elders, and elected officials.

The very reason that some people think the Occupy movement to be a failure is why it is a success.  Cynics I have talked to say they didn’t accomplish anything, often unaware there is an active branch still holding rallies and protests in their nearest major metropolitan city.  Occupy has connected the disenfranchised and given a worldwide platform to the voiceless.  Simply because the evening news doesn’t cover them, and the conspiracy theory forums tri labeled them, doesn’t mean the goals of the movement weren’t accomplished.

I could’ve swore that the initial goal of the people gathering in Zuccotti Park was to draw attention to inequality in terms of income and justice for those in the financial sector of America and its damaging effects at an unprecedented scale on the people, places, and things that make up 99% of the developed world.  Am I wrong?  Oh, they never stated an official, singular, vision or purpose? Well read between the fucking lines, or their blogs…whichever.

Inspiration via Devastation: Part 4: Glenn Greenwald & Edward Snowden

Posted: March 30, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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by @anarchyroll
10/4/2013

(I recently found this in my drafts section. I guess I never hit the publish button last year.)

As I consumed more and more audio books on personal development, philosophy, self help, spirituality, and self actualization I believed less and less in conspiracy theories. As I aged I met more and more people who, as fictional character Don Draper said in the first season on Mad Men, are so desperate to be led, that they’ll follow anybody. The desperate need some people have, to believe that somebody is in control of everything. People cloak themselves in cynicism and sarcasm to mask their fear of mortality and of being too big a coward to even attempt to make a difference in the world. They justify their inaction to themselves by looking for and finding circumstantial evidence that there is a higher power, new world order, shadow government, etc pulling all the strings, in control of all things important. Therefore, why try? why protest? why write letters? why call congressmen? why not do anything other than work a job they hate so they can numb themselves with personal entertainment when “not on the clock”.

As I studied history however, I couldn’t shake the thought that there was a ruling class of wealthy land and resource owners that have continuously taken action in secret to maintain control of money, land, and resources. Learning about someone like Edward Bernays and the invention of the American middle class consumer by the economic ruling class at the turn of the 20th century, did not dissipate my said thought. Old money with a scarcity mentality fueled by paranoia and greed is one thing, the Military Industrial Complex along with the World Bank/IMF working in the shadows to rule the world Pinky and the Brain style just seemed too derived from a bunch of immature, overweight, uneducated men who don’t get laid enough if at all.

Edward Snowden was the Rosetta Stone for legitimacy to those who are paranoid of governmental overreach and privacy invasion. Glenn Greenwald, reporter for The Guardian newspaper has been Snowden‘s contact to the outside world. Information has continued to trickle out for over two months, each leak, has been an ocean of concern of shock, awe, concern, and outrage for anyone who values privacy, freedom (personal and/or of information), governmental transparency, and power. If you are reading this and unaware of who either Snowden or Greenwald are, please click the hyperlinks in this blog to educate yourself on who they are. Simply knowing their names is not enough. Knowledge itself is not power, it is merely the material to create power, or the vehicle to get you to power. You must use the material to formulate the power you wish to have, you must operate the vehicle to arrive at the power destination.

Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald’s bravery and journalistic heroism gets my blood pumping in a way that up until this point in my life, only professional wrestling could. That may read as lame as shit, but professional wrestling has been my biggest personal passion in life, for my entire life. When friends, family, teachers, lovers, and strangers would tell me to be realistic about what I wanted to do in my life, I turned to writing, I turned to journalism, I turned to media communications as a secondary career option. Snowden and Greenwald have given me as great a gift as I could possibly ask for. The consistent flow of positive emotions that lets me know that writing and journalism can give me a lifetime of fulfillment. That if I could never be a professional wrestler or more importantly, a successful one, that I could spend the rest of my life in journalistic pursuits, shining light on information kept from the public in the dark, and die a happy man.

I have spent so many years stagnant. Afraid to take action not only out of fear of failure, but out of the fear of taking the wrong path. Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden removed that fear from me. Ironically, by releasing some of the scariest nonfiction information I have ever seen, read, or heard of in my entire life. What the Obama administration is doing to whistleblowers is disgusting. What the NSA is doing is despicable. The surveillance state that the Patriot Act has allowed to formulate is un American. I have found my second passion in life. I have never cared about being rich, I have cared about being happy. I have read enough books from enough credible figures to know that happiness and wealth are not correlated. Beyond having food, shelter, cleanliness, and safety I don’t care for my destiny to be that of a mindless consumer.

I now know that I can be happy being a writer for the rest of my life. I know I can be happy being a journalist, a broadcaster, a radio dj, a talk show host, a producer, a managing editor, a columnist, an author, a staff writer, and any other position my college degree and my natural abilities make me qualified for because I now have the passion and desire to go with my BA and abilities. Edward Snowden’s leaks may have scared the hell out of me, but sometimes we need to be scared to wake the fuck up. I have been woken up. Glenn Greenwald‘s unapologetic journalistic integrity inspires me to the point of goose bumps literally every time I think of his interviews since the Snowden story broke. That is what it takes to get me moving in the direction of my dreams. Thanks to Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden not only am I moving, I want to, and feel obligated to keep moving.

#Northwestern Winning Right to Unionize is a Game Changer

Posted: March 28, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
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by @anarchyroll
3/28/2014

Whether you know it or not, college athletics changed forever this week.

Northwestern University’s football players were found to be employees of the school, not merely student athletes, by the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago. This means the players now have collective bargaining rights with the school. That means the players now have a say in terms of monetary compensation for their time and effort on the football field beyond an athletic scholarship. Why is this a big deal?

The student athlete paradigm has been crumbling over the past decade. EA Sports no longer puts out it’s NCAA Football or Basketball video game franchises. Why? Because former student athletes filed multiple class action lawsuits and won (one) because they were not being royalties (residual checks) for the use of their likenesses. EA settled but the NCAA is vowing to take the case(s) to the Supreme Court. The NCAA is also saying they will take the NU case to the highest possible court/governing body. Why? Money.

The NCAA is exposing itself for what it is, a money laundering operation. They exist solely to make money off the time, energy, effort, blood, sweat, and tears of 18-21 year old men and women at Division I universities in the United States of America. They care nothing about graduation rates of the players. They care nothing about their health and medical costs. They only care about how much money they can make off of television contracts for the Bowl Championship Series and March Madness.

By exposing themselves as money hungry pigs, the NCAA is losing it’s battle in the court of public opinion. Rather than evolving and paying the students who are making NCAA and the universities billions of dollars (with a B) each year, they are trying to keep them as scholarship slaves. Scholarships are fine for athletes and universities that aren’t on national television on a daily and/or weekly basis. Scholarships are fine for academics. But NCAA Division I athletics is about money, nothing more, nothing less. If it wasn’t then ESPN and CBS wouldn’t be allowed to make anything more than enough money to cover operational costs to broadcast the sporting events.

But that’s not the way it is. It’s not 1960 anymore. Sports equals business in America. So pay the employees what they earn by destroying their bodies in the primes of their lives for the glory and admiration of their parents and peers. The times they are a changin’. You don’t want to pay students who are on national TV every week? Then;

  • Take the games off national TV.
  • Revoke all contracts outside of local public access.
  • Force all coaches to make the same as the professors.
  • Don’t allow schools to travel out of state to play away games.
  • Disperse all funding equally between all sports played at each school.

Don’t want to do any of those? That list is unrealistic and naive? Yeah, no shit. So pay the players. Don’t give them straight cash homey. Pay them in gift cards so they can buy;

  • food
  • clothes
  • tutors
  • laptops
  • plane tickets to go back home during breaks

If the students can afford these things themselves they won’t be dependent on their parents, boosters, or shady gamblers who get them into point shaving schemes. No one is saying pay the quarterback of Notre Dame $1 million a year. But how about you give the kids some money to have fun on the weekends so you can stop putting schools on probation, stripping wins, taking down banners, and expunging winning records?

Why is NU winning union rights important? It changes the face of college athletics forever. How? Because students will be looked as employees. The tide has turned on this issue. Much like gay rights and marijuana legalization, there is no going back, only forward. It is only a matter of time before all major universities are affected by this. That will affect scheduling, coaches contracts, television contracts, merchandise rights, and tuition costs. The college experience as a whole can and will be changed by this going forward. We have just witnessed the tip of the iceberg.

#Meditation the Mental Space Generator

Posted: March 28, 2014 in Stimulus Space Response
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by @anarchyroll
3/27/2014

Yoga was a slippery slope to meditation. The breathing, the focus on breathing, the slowed down mind, the relaxation, the stress relief, the clarity, the endorphins rush, the visualizations, the calmness, the acceptance, the awareness, the present.

I am forever happy and grateful for the practice of meditation coming into my life. I hadn’t heard much about meditation, and apparently that is common. Davos hosted a conference on meditation just this year. Meditation has been around for thousands of years.

When it comes to slowing down my thoughts, calming myself down, reducing anxiety, and positive visualizations; I can use all the help I can get. I have struggled with depression since I was 13. Yoga I started strictly for the physical health benefits. Meditation is exercise for the mind, heart, and spirit.

Like yoga there are many ways to meditate. If you are just beginning the main things to remember are;

  1. Sit or lay down
  2. Press your index finger and thumb together on each hand
  3. Close your eyes
  4. Breath from your stomach/diaphram/solar plexes
  5. Concentrate your thoughts/inner dialogue on tracking the movement of the breath from inhale through exhale

That is the 101, basically everything beyond that is intermediate to advanced level. Those five steps will take you longer to master than you think. Especially in the smartphone centered, rat race world we have been born into. If you are a senior citizen, it’ll be easier, just take yourself back to before the world got into a big hurry.

Stimulus Space Response in the name of this blog. That name comes from the teachings of George Herbert Mead and Stephen Covey. Both talk about the space between stimulus and response where humans execute free will to interpret an interaction. This space is unique to humans, not animals possess this ability. Here I try to write about concepts and things that can be plugged into that space in order to make our response to any stimulus one that is integrated with the best version of our self.

Meditation to me is the tool to cultivate the space between stimulus and response. Like the jack one uses to move a car up off the ground to replace a flat tire.

I have included links throughout this article for help in getting started with meditation. I would suggest doing at least a brief yoga routine before going into a meditation session. Be patient with yourself and with the progress of learning something new, as in the rest of life. I still have unproductive meditation sessions because my mind is habitualized to be preoccupied with thoughts of scarcity, victimism, and mental movies of worst case scenarios. Meditation is not a magic pill, but it does help. I am happy and grateful for what it has done and continues to do for me, and I will be sure to write about it more in the future.

Yoga not only led me to meditation but also led me to try herbal teas. In times of crisis I often need herbal tea more than meditation as the tea has the ability to physically alter my state upon consumption. More on that to come…

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