I’m sure you love your partner dearly. What happens though when your partner’s family doesn’t feel so accommodating of you? Family can play an important role in any given individual’s life, even after marriage.

When relationships between spouses and family become strained, it can take a huge toll on everyone involved, especially on your relationship. It’s impossible to control the emotions of those around you, but there are a few ways to help you cope with family members who are less than fond of you.

The first step is to focus on your relationship. 

Arguably, the most important adult relationship you will ever have is that with your spouse. It is vital that you do your best to focus on making this your best and healthiest relationship possible. The most testing time is where your partner’s family is less than approving.

This puts additional strain on your partner and you, creating an unhealthy, stressful situation. Working on communication skills is important, along with the ability to focus on resolving conflict early on, before it explodes. Continue reading →

What does family mean to you? Is it love or togetherness? Family also represents unity and strength.  There are however some families who make the mean girl club seem like a church choir. The rules are simple – you MUST have similar outlooks, beliefs and goals, you need to fit in or you’re labelled strange or worse – THE BLACK SHEEP.

1. As a child, you may have been considered to be difficult, uncontrollable and hardheaded. Stubbornness ran rife. Authority was never a thing for you and you would never just do things because they were expected of you. Your view? “Just because they’re adults doesn’t mean they know best!”

2. Did you ever feel like you were born into the wrong family? Did things ever feel out of sync as a child? Even into your teens, there may have been a rift between you and the rest of your family. Subconsciously, you may even feel like your life experience is more of a karmic lesson. Dreaming of the day you could just up and leave, you wish to only see them when necessary as an adult.

3. Able to conceive the ability to do completely unorthodox things in their eyes, you leave them wondering how. They often question where you get your ideas from as they could not possibly have come from them.

4. Ever been threatened or warned not to embarrass the family? You don’t care! You know who you are and will never be ashamed of the brilliance you possess. Continue reading →

Alcohol plays such an integral part in most of our social lives that we drink it without truly considering the health consequences.

We’ve been told about the dangers of excessive drinking but regular low-level drinking isn’t generally considered an issue. Now a new study Otago University in New Zealand has discovered credible evidence that even drinking smaller amounts of alcohol directly causes seven different forms of cancer.

Research published in the journal Addiction shows a clear correlation between alcohol and cancer of the oropharynx, larynx, esophagus, liver, colon, rectum and breast.

The findings were made after a thorough review of ten years worth of research assembled by the World Cancer Research Fund. These findings also suggested that alcohol also increased the likelihood of skin, prostate, and pancreatic cancer as well – although this link would need to be explored further.

One of the key findings of the study was the link between regular consumption of alcohol and cancer, rather than just excessive consumption.

Professor Jennie Connor, who headed up the research at Otago University, suggests that regular low-level consumption is a significant health concern – ‘the highest risks are associated with the heaviest drinking but a considerable burden is experienced by drinkers with low to moderate consumption, due to the distribution of drinking in the population.’

Continue reading →

As we gain a greater awareness of the previously unknown depths of animal psychology the practice of battery farming and unethical treatment of farmed animals is being proven increasingly barbaric. Multi-national meat and dairy companies have overlooked animal welfare in order to increase profit for decades.

Recent scientific research shows that this short-sighted and cruel way of operating has negatively affected the nutrition of the milk they’ve been selling. The study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison used serotonin (the compound responsible for happiness in humans and cows) injections to test if the boost would increase calcium output.

Over the course of the study 12 Jersey cows were injected and the results were conclusive that the level of calcium in each cow was increased, which leads to healthier milk. The findings also showed that the calcium levels were maintained across the whole lactation period. In fact the calcium levels increased every day until the 30th day of the study, ensuring nutritious milk was produced consistently.

This isn’t the first time a study has shown that increasing the happiness of cows increases the quality of the milk they produce. In 2001 the University of Leicester, England, found that playing slow music to cows relieved the animals’ stress levels and caused them to produce 3% more milk than the average cow. This milk production increase is evidence that improving animal welfare can also increase the profitability of a farming enterprise. Continue reading →

If thoughts lead to words, words lead to actions, then where do actions lead?

Also, to ask bluntly, where does all that begin? Where do the thoughts come from?

Some call it inspiration or an idea. Thoughts bubble and circulate within the subconscious mind and social circles together share a soup of different thought patterns conceived from individual experience, only then to be selected and directed by each individual to produce words and actions for the collective and/or self.

Those outputs are then recycled into this system further refining in either direction love or fear, or a combination of both in vast and varying aspects. This all being a vast concept that has minimal or maximal effect on just one person as well as scaling levels of social interactions.

Whether it’s the contemplations of the drug induced hippies from the ‘Summer of Love’, cutting edge findings, or the ancient knowledge from rulers, scholars and conquerors. ‘Spirit Science’ has taken a collection of thoughts/writings/words/actions from many recent and old histories and produced an output via the collective media channels that our kindred use for information absorption. We have all engaged in this discussion, some more than others, but all relevant nonetheless, and all immensely important beyond measure. Continue reading →

Scott Campbell, University of Michigan

Being alone has many benefits. It grants freedom in thought and action. It boosts creativity. It offers a terrain for the imagination to roam. Solitude also enriches our connections with others by providing perspective, which enhances intimacy and fosters empathy.

To be sure, solitude is not always experienced positively. At times, and for certain people, it can lead to feelings of loneliness and isolation. In that sense, solitude is a two-sided coin, as is the case with other necessities in life, like food. As with food, we can benefit from being mindful of the quantity and quality of solitude we experience in daily life.

This is true of both deliberate solitude and those moments of being alone that are inadvertently stumbled upon. Both varieties of solitude have the capacity to deliver the benefits mentioned above, but the latter may be heading toward the endangered species list, at least for some folks.

In social psychology, solitude has traditionally been defined and measured as being physically alone, or in some cases not engaging with people who are also physically present. Since that foundation was laid, times have changed, as have the possibilities for “being with” others. Continue reading →