Love has no limit, no shape and no condition. If we could understand this, we wouldn’t have the need to buy chocolate ice-cream and watch sad love movies while we sit wallowing in self-pity.

The most fatal relationship killer goes by the name, attachment. This nasty little thing disguises its self as love at first and later becomes jealous and needy.

You see, attachment is also known as co-dependency, it makes us believe we cannot live without the person we love. And this puts both them and us in a dangerous cage. When being so deeply “in love” we forget about the importance of ourselves and our needs because the sensation of pleasing our loved ones feels so good.

When we love unconditionally, the pains of attachment can’t affect us. Loving unconditionally is the acceptance of all that is. When we can’t accept someone for everything they are we start to try and change them and we convince ourselves that we know best. This is often the start of toxic relationships.

Keeping pure love from turning into attachment isn’t easy, but here are 3 of the best kept secrets to realizing before it’s too late, with one extra – to conclude it all.

1. Ask yourself what you felt the first few days after meeting your loved one. Continue reading →

Have you ever been told that you should try putting yourself in another person’s shoes? Few of us fully understand that phrase because few of us understand what empathy really means.

Empathy is the ability to understand the emotions and perspectives or views of another person.  Empathy is about understanding and feeling what someone else is feeling without holding to it… It teaches us to respond instead of react. Empathy gives us security in feeling. It creates a bond between people and allows connection on a heart level.

Sometimes we are so unknowingly self-absorbed that we often forget that we are just like our family, friends, co-workers and acquaintances – meaning they all feel too.

I was once oblivious to someone’s feelings, and my incapability to grasp it caused a rift between us that only I could mend, once I understood empathy. I then met someone who lived in South Africa and she told me she used to visit the beach every day and always watched the beach vendors – she used to wonder where they come from, and what their story was.

So she began to ask. She went on to tell me how she noticed some of the eyes of the story tellers would light up when she assured them she wanted to know and was genuinely interested. It was then that she learned what empathy was. She heard heart breaking stories and she has shed tears with her fellow human.

She told me it was her curiosities that lead her to understand empathy and that it has changed her view on the world and people. She also said, “That if you ever want to try and cultivate empathy, you must listen with an open heart and without the intention of replying or reacting.”

I thought about one of the stories she had told me about one of the vendors and when I closed my eyes, I, for the first time, tried to imagine what he felt on his journey to from northern Africa to southern Africa. Continue reading →

We all love mandalas and when we draw one it essentially becomes us. Mandalas have been used in many ancient cultures as a process of connecting with the divine. The most common mandalas are drawn with repeating shapes and symbols while other mandalas hold imagery and each image is a representation of something else. No matter what the mandala contains it is used as a form of meditation, which also a form of connecting with the divine source.

In this article, we are going to take a look at the Tibetan Kalachakra mandala, otherwise known as, The wheel of time. This mandala is the most sacred to the Tibetans as it takes everything into account such as, the human mind and body, the whole external aspect – as well as cosmic and astrological. The Tibetans believe that it is possible to achieve enlightenment in this lifetime if one observes studies and then later produces the mandala.

The Tibetan culture firmly believes in the healing power of this mandala. “We firmly believe in its power to reduce conflict and we believe its capable of creating peace, peace of the spirit and therefore of the mind.” – Tenin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, 1993

When I first came across this intricate mandala it was because I wanted to get ideas for a mandala that had a similar shape. Little did I know, I was about to be let into a whole new world of exploring my mind, body, spirit.

The Kalachakra is known as a ‘divine’ palace, with five levels which are represented by 5 squares imposed onto one another.  Within this “divine palace” there are 722 deities and right at its center is Buddha, sitting on a lotus flower. Continue reading →

Bees, whether we know it or not, are responsible for many of the foods we eat, and of course,  honey! Without bees our crops would die and mankind will be plunged into despair.

Bees are flying insects that pollinate our crops and flowers. They are life givers and sustainers of life. There are over 20 000 different species of bee, each one unique and important to our eco-system.

Bees are responsible for ‘fertilizing’ our crops, which in turn are eaten by livestock which we then eat, assuming you’re a meat eater. Needless to say, if bees are removed from the picture, humanity and planet earth are doomed.

For instance, for every (approximately 100) fruit trees, one bee hive is needed for pollination. Without that bee hive the fruit trees will not grow. Studies have shown that fruit trees regularly visited by bees produce perfectly shaped fruits in compassion to trees rarely visited by bees, which produce deformed, discolored fruits.  This a list of just some of the fruit and veg that rely on bees;

cauliflower, cabbage, garlic, blueberries, pumpkins, plumbs, onions, cherries, cucumbers and many more.

One of the most interesting things about bees is that they are able to get disease, and just like us and many other animals, they also feel stress. Continue reading →

I know when you hear “gluten free diet” the first thing you think of is boring bland food. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Whether you are gluten intolerant or not it is always helpful to know what you are putting into your body.

First, let’s answer the biggest question, what is gluten?

Gluten is a protein of which most of our store bought products consist of, such as , French fries, pasta, bread, beer, rye bread and many more.

Gluten is made up of proteins which are known as gliadin (a prolamin protein) and glutelin (a glutelin protein).

These don’t affect most people but in a recent study published on the online journal,  Gastroenterology & Hepatology, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) and Celiac disease are the two leading intolerances caused by gluten and wheat, affecting up to 20 percent of American adults and 1 in every 145 Americans.

People who suffer from any sort of gluten or wheat intolerance digest this protein differently to people who are not suffering from the intolerance. Continue reading →

A recent brain scan done on a number of dogs by Hungarian researchers has finally shed some light on a very controversial question, “Can dogs really understand what we are saying and can they differentiate between honesty and dishonesty?”

According to a study recently released on Science, dogs can indeed understand human vocabulary – but what is even more fascinating is that dogs are also able to judge our tone of voice. Interestingly dogs have, like humans, two hemispheres which makes up their brain, left and right.

They use the left hemisphere to process words, and the right hemisphere to process tone. This ultimately means, like humans dogs can tell when you are genuine or fake, all from the tone of your voice and the words used.

Simply saying, “You are such a good boy” in comparison to, “You are such a good boy!” can determine whether the dog believes you or not.  Dogs, like humans look for true demeanor, sincerity and honesty in the tone and action of what is being said.

Lead researcher Attila Andics from Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University stated that, “dogs use very similar brain mechanisms” to that of humans in regard to how we process what is being said to us.

The receptors in our ears listen for what is being said, and how it is being said. Our brain then receives those frequencies and begins to integrate them to arrive at one logical meaning.

Where did this conclusion come from? Attila Andics and his team of researcher’s trained 13 dogs to remain absolutely still while being scanned with an MRI machine. While in the machine Andics recorded the brain rhythms of each dog as they listened to their trainer’s voice.

Dogs ultimately want to be praised so to see what part of the brain is stimulated when speaking in different inflections, the trainers used words and tones that implied praise as well as disappointment.

The study showed that when being praised the dogs ‘reward’ center is activated and stimulated – the same area of the brain responsible for pleasurable stimuli such as sex, food, walks, play and being petted.

“It shows that for dogs, a nice praise can very well work as a reward, but it works best if both words and intonation match,” said Andics.

He then went on to say, “So dogs not only tell apart what we say and how we say it, but they can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant. Again, this is very similar to what human brains do.” – Incredible to say the least!

For those of you who love and are familiar with dogs and their ways, this study is probably old news, but the most interesting and incredible part of this whole study is that dogs have not developed the capability to actually vocalize words but they are able to understand it.

They can understand the intention behind them, and that the neural mechanisms needed to actually process speech and intention is not as unique to humans as we originally thought!

H/T: Gizmodo