Sunday, May 11, 2014

Salvador Dalí (Wikipedia)


Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech,1 marqués de Dalí de Púbol (Figueras, 11 de mayo de 1904 – ibídem, 23 de enero de 1989), fue un pintor, escultor, grabador, escenógrafo y escritor español, considerado uno de los máximos representantes del surrealismo.

Dalí es conocido por sus impactantes y oníricas imágenes surrealistas. Sus habilidades pictóricas se suelen atribuir a la influencia y admiración por el arte renacentista. También fue un experto dibujante.2 3 Los recursos plásticos dalinianos también abordaron el cine, la escultura y la fotografía, lo cual le condujo a numerosas colaboraciones con otros artistas audiovisuales. Tuvo la habilidad de forjar un estilo marcadamente personal y reconocible, que en realidad era muy ecléctico y que «vampirizó» innovaciones ajenas. Una de sus obras más célebres es La persistencia de la memoria, el famoso cuadro de los «relojes blandos», realizado en 1931.

Como artista extremadamente imaginativo, manifestó una notable tendencia al narcisismo y la megalomanía, cuyo objeto era atraer la atención pública. Esta conducta irritaba a quienes apreciaban su arte y justificaba a sus críticos, que rechazaban sus conductas excéntricas como un reclamo publicitario ocasionalmente más llamativo que su producción artística.4 Dalí atribuía su «amor por todo lo que es dorado y resulta excesivo, su pasión por el lujo y su amor por la moda oriental» a un autoproclamado «linaje arábigo»,5 que remontaba sus raíces a los tiempos de la dominación árabe de la península ibérica.


Galería



Color Therapy: Change your Underwear, Change your Mood

 
Natural Wisdoms: A regular feature:

Color is an amazing gift from nature. It is a living vibrational energy that is perceived and absorbed by your senses. It has a subtle yet potent interaction with your emotions and brain.

The colors you wear can reflect how you are feeling to the world, you can intentionally wear colors to shift your mood or you can hide from the world (blacks the color which shrinks your presence)

There are colors which stimulate the thinking (left) side of your brain and colors which stimulate the creative (right) side of your brain. There are colors to help you relax and others to energise and excite. Whilst some colors encourage communication others evoke stillness.

Did you know that yellow is the first color perceived by the human eye.

Below are some useful insights from my journey with color workshops over the past two decades.

Change your underwear: Change your mood:



Simply by changing the color of your underwear you can subtly fuel your energy reserves or balance your emotional needs. It is easy to do, no one need know what you are doing and I guarantee you will feel a difference.

Feeling tired grab a red pair, stressed out try some calming blue, emotionally upset go for the orange or in need of some optimism switch to yellow.

Color you world for balance:

1: Red will give you a boost of energy whilst stimulating your immune system. Red can activate your appetite - beware. It evokes action and passion and a perfect color if you tend to be a procrastinator.


2: Orange will allow you to digest your emotions without holding onto stuff and encourage emotional balance and optimism. It is warm hearted and offers a sense of community whilst offering a feeling of tolerance. Perfect color for social gatherings.


3: Blue is tranquil and peaceful. It has been proven to reduce pain levels. It aids in acquiring inner peace and supports creativity. Blue is associated with the right hand side of the brain.


4: Green refreshes, encourages growth, is balancing and healing. It is nurturing and associated with the heart. Green promotes prosperity and well being. Green of course is a combination of blue and yellow.


5: Yellow lifts your spirits and offers you a positive feeling. It evokes confidence and joy. It is connected to your mental thinking and improves attention to detail and academic achievement. It improves concentration and clarity of thought.


6: Purple is known to heighten your intuition. It is similar to blue in that it offers comfort and calm. A great color for meditation.


Experiment with color:
 
Don’t take my word for it though, experiment for yourself. Notice how different you feel wearing blue or orange or even red undies or any item of clothing.

To further excite you into experimenting with color therapy I’ve added a few special treats to whet your appetite.
 
Color your wallet for wealth:

 
Years ago after listening to a color therapist a group of my girlfriends all switched to green wallets. Green represents growth, abundance and prosperity. It is the color most often associated with money. In Feng Shui green relates to the wood energy which is associated with wealth. You might also like to read the Tao of a full happy wallet if you are keen to boost your money vibes.

Lose weight with color:

 
Research has shown that blue is the most likely color to suppress your appetite. A blue light in your fridge may be just the trick you need. Blue is not a color you think of when you imagine food. Nature does not offer many blue foods except for a few such as blueberries. Red will stimulate your appetite and encourage fast eating. Notice how many take-aways have red signs or decor.

Labeling


Labeling is a kind of jumping to conclusions in which we apply a negative term to a complex person or event. It often also entails overgeneralization because we tend to label all the members of a group with the characteristics we may have seen in some. Often its most damaging form is self-labeling. We all do it. If someone who has just met you asks you who you are or what you do, you are likely to respond by labeling yourself: "I'm a student," or "I'm an electrician," or "I'm a history major." Such labels always leave out much more than they include. But if we take them with a grain of salt they probably don't do much harm. What does a lot of harm is an evaluative label we apply based on past experience. A lot of students have told me, "I'm a poor English student," or "English is my worst subject." But as far as I can tell, good students are as likely to label themselves in this way as poor ones. So I conclude that these students have labeled themselves on the basis of weak evidence. When I question such students I usually find that the fact behind a label such as "I'm a poor English student" is something like "I got a D in the grammar portion of 10th grade English" or "I didn't like the books we read in high school literature classes."
A student once told me at the very beginning of the semester that he was a lousy writer. I asked him what he'd written. He said that he'd never written anything longer than a paragraph in high school. I asked him how he could possibly know he was lousy at something he'd never really attempted seriously. He said that he "just knew." He had labeled himself for no very good reason. But once a negative label becomes an automatic thought it can easily act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody likes to spend time doing what he or she is not good at. So if you've labeled yourself as "dumb" or a "bad student" or "no good at English/math/history/geography/biology" you will expect to do poorly in it, and you probably will.

Labeling others can be as damaging as labeling ourselves. Labeling reinforces stereotypes about groups of people and, in general, encourages us to say and do stupid things. I am amazed at the speed with which many students label a book "boring" and then proceed as if that single vague label were all that could be said about the text in question.

The negative labels we apply to ourselves and others in our automatic thoughts are almost always vague and ambiguous because they are automatic. If you try to write an essay from your automatic thoughts--you may think of them as your "opinions"--you will find that it consists of nothing more than a string of labels. If you are going to write well about your opinions, you will have to bring them beyond the stage of automatic thoughts and give reasons for those opinions that make sense to other people. In order to do that, you'll have to define the labels you're using. If you can define your terms clearly and give evidence for your beliefs, then you have gone beyond automatic labeling and begun to engage in reasoned argument.

One form of labeling is so widespread in this business that it deserves brief mention on its own. It's called grading. Grades may or may not be necessary, but they can unquestionably do a great deal of damage if we take them too seriously. Letter grades are horribly vague and imprecise. If you doubt that, you can easily disprove it: Stop right now and write down a clear, precise, and universally applicable definition of an "A" that will allow us to tell whether a piece of work is worthy of an "A" without knowing who the teacher is or who the student is. Can't do it. That's because letter grades mean vastly different things to different people. At best, letter grades are a very rough code for a very general evaluation of a student's performance. They never answer the most important questions a student needs to ask: What did I do well? Where could I improve? Have I achieved my own goals in this course? How can I build on what I've learned? What can I do now that I couldn't do before? How can I be a more effective learner? A student who receives an "F" and knows the answers to some of these questions is better off than one who gets an "A" and never asks them. The label is an abstraction. It is never as important as the more complex reality it stands for. If we allow the label to become all important, so that we ignore the reality it is supposed to stand for, then we have yielded to this cognitive distortion in a way that seems to me to resemble the thinking of people who are seriously mentally ill. G. K. Chesterton, writing many years before the development of cognitive therapy, said that "madness is a preference for the symbol over that which it represents"(11).




Disqualifying the Positive


This is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking in which we filter out all the positive evidence about our performance, and only attend to the negative. It is all-or-nothing thinking, without the "all"! This cognitive distortion will produce automatic thoughts that reinforce negative feelings and explain away positive ones. If you've ever tried to argue someone out of a bad mood, you've probably seen this cognitive distortion from the outside. If you've ever been in a bad mood yourself, you may have seen it from the inside. Usually people who are caught up in this cognitive distortion are genuinely depressed about something, but it may be something that has no obvious connection with the topic at hand. I was going over an essay with a student who had gotten responses from three other students to a working draft of his essay. Our conversation went something like this:
STUDENT: I think I should just throw this out and start over. It's trash. Look at what Cheri said about it.
ME: Well, yes, she did beat up on it pretty well. But Bob, who also read it, seemed to like it.
STUDENT: Yeah, but he was just trying to be nice.
ME: How do you know that?
STUDENT: Oh, you know, people try to say nice things, even if it's really just junk, because they don't want to hurt your feelings.
ME: Well, that obviously isn't true of Cheri. But, OK, if you want to start over, do you have another topic in mind?
STUDENT: No. Well, I did, sort of, but it's no good either. They'd trash it just like this one. I could never get enough evidence to convince her.
Someone who is disqualifying the positive can't discuss a subject rationally because he is using a double standard. Negative evidence, no matter how weak or irrelevant, counts. Positive evidence, no matter how strong or persuasive, can be explained away. As it turned out, the student in the above conversation had just broken up with his girlfriend and was feeling very low. But this sort of automatic thought doesn't make any more sense when you're sad than it does when you're happy. The "logic" behind it goes something like this: Things are bad, so why not make them worse?

All-or-Nothing Thinking


We engage in all-or-nothing thinking when we accept automatic thoughts which describe events in black-and-white categories, with no shades of gray. It is a more extreme form of magnification and minimization in which we minimize to the point that many positive aspects of life completely disappear from sight. Such automatic thoughts lead to a kind of perfectionism that defines everything short of 100% success as a failure. To a point, such perfectionism can lead us to try harder; but in the long run, inevitably, it tends to discourage us from trying at all. Since we encounter very little black or white in the real world, this kind of thinking squeezes much of the brightness out of our view of the world: all the shades of gray come to look as black as night.

A few years ago I was teaching a class in which several standardized tests were required. One semester, a woman took the class who got the highest total score on the standardized tests that I've ever recorded in that class. Out of a possible 200 points on the four tests, she missed five. But when this woman got her first essay back, she found several criticisms and suggestions for improvement. (The essay was not graded.) She seemed depressed and irritable in class for several days after getting the essay back. Finally, I persuaded her to come in and talk to me about it, and I asked her what she was so concerned about. 

"Well," she said hopelessly, "I guess I'm just going to get an 'F' in this class." From her point of view, her essay wasn't perfect, so it was worthless. Her automatic thoughts on receiving the essay back were probably something like this: "There are flaws in this essay, even after I worked hard on it, so I wasted my time. I produced nothing of value." That's all-or-nothing thinking.

This cognitive distortion can be devastating when you are trying to learn a new skill or improve your performance in an old one. A sculptor who thinks in terms of all-or-nothing will never finish a statue because the first stages of the work will always be rough. A writer who sees her rough draft as either finished or failed will never really finish an essay. You must accept your first draft as potentially good, but unfinished, in order to improve it. Many students fail to produce good essays not because they produce bad ones, but because they never finish the good ones they start.


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