Meditation is becoming more and more popular these days. And it’s no surprise. Studies by Yale, UCLA, and Harvard have proven its scientifically-backed benefits. For those who develop a regular practice, the rewards are reaped in increased calm, clarity of thinking, and more. With all these benefits, who wouldn’t want to pick up the habit? Well, it’s easier said than done…
Most people who give meditation a try start out strong, meditating every day for a week or two. But as weeks turn to months, every day turns to a few days a week, and then slowly fizzles out altogether. Unfortunately, a sporadic meditation habit won’t do much for gaining calm and clarity, so how can you start meditating more often? Here are three key strategies.
Prioritize
We all know about priorities. But when it comes to little things, it’s easy to push them aside for comfort or other seemingly more important tasks. For those who attempt to meditate regularly and fail, meditation is usually one of the first things to get bounced from their schedule when life gets busy or tough. And really, this is exactly when you should be meditating most, as meditation will make it far easier to manage the stress and balance your schedule.
So, what do you do? Make meditation one of your top three priorities, or tasks to accomplish, for the day. If you can’t prioritize the meditation habit, none of the following ideas will do any good.
Take baby steps
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey writes, “In all of life, there are sequential stages of growth and development. A child learns to turn over, to sit up, to crawl, and then to walk and run. Each step is important and each one takes time. No step can be skipped. This is true in all phases of life, in all areas of development, whether it be learning to play the piano or communicate effectively with a working associate.”
Just like with any developmental process, building a habit takes time. It’s a growth process. An athlete doesn’t become an Olympian in a month. A six-year old doesn’t become a man overnight. And you too, shouldn’t expect to become a 20-minute-a-day meditator in a couple weeks. This is why it’s essential to remember to take one step at a time.
Instead of aiming to meditate 20 minutes every day from the get go, start out small. Meditate for one minute the first few days. Once you’ve successfully accomplished that, take another step forward and meditate three minutes for a few days. As you continue to consistently meditate on a daily basis, keep upping your minutes. Go to five minutes, 10 minutes and so on. Sooner than you know it you’ll be up to 15, 20, or even 30 minutes on a regular basis.
Meditate in the morn
Unexpected plans are a common cause of skipping out on meditation. If you usually meditate when you come home from work, a late night at the office or happy hour with friends can derail your daily meditation practice. Don’t feel bad if this happens once or twice, as even the most experienced meditators aren’t immune to skipping out on a session every now and then. However, while missing meditation a few times a month won’t do much for disrupting your increased calm, regularly missing it several times a week will. The solution?
Meditate in the morning. If you meditate before you go to work, there’s absolutely no way any unexpected plan is going to disrupt your practice.
While these three tips will help you create a regular meditation practice, it’s also important to think about why you want to meditate every day. In other words, think about those awesome benefits you get from a regular practice—calm, clarity, and gaining a better sense of direction in your life and career. Let these be the motivating forces behind your daily practice. Remind yourself of them often, and you’re much more likely to reach your goal.
John Weiler is the author of An Ordinary Dude’s Guide to Meditation. Learn more at his website Ordinary Dude Meditation or follow him on Facebook.
From the architect. K22 is a house of 3 siblings, each of them begins to be grown-up subsequently but they all have the same intention to live together with their parents and taking care of each other like they did previously. The house is located in the inner zone of Bangkok “Huay Kwang”, they all decided to live together in the familiar district better than settling down separately which would result in more costs for land and construction. The main concept of the house is to design sharing spaces for all family members while providing privacy for each one of them. It could be compared as a family’s apartment where each of them has their own living unit, and the common space that perfectly fits the needs and activities of people from two different generations. Consequently, the house promotes all members to spend their time and share their moments together as one big family.
Since the site is in rhombus shape, the house is only accessible from the front, leaving the other sides to be suitable for being a private garden. The entrance is linked to the main corridor which is surrounded by common functions; kitchen, working space and living room. Besides, there is another living area facing the private garden, where all members could spend their relaxation time together. The corridor is also connected to the service area, which is located next to the parking space.
Each family member can access to their own unit on the second level through the staircase locating in the middle of the common corridor. The house is divided into two sides, one with single-volume and another with double-volume. The single-volume side contains rooms for their parents and one of the siblings. The double-volume side has two units for the other two siblings and their upcoming new family members. With the distinctiveness of double-volume space, it consequently appear to have imprecise number of the storeys.
In each double-volume unit, the programming of the main floor and the mezzanine are flexible and adaptable; allowing the family to create their own preferable space. The structure and layout of the house also offer opportunities to further adjust or extend the units in the future to support the change in lifestyle and the growth of family.
The initial idea was to create a contemporary Chinese courtyard house with a “回” shaped volume, a layout with individual living units and shared family spaces. They are connected by a looped corridor and separated by small light wells.
Diagram
“Sky-Voids” are distributed in the corners of the building to provide natural lighting and ventilation and are designed as individual small courtyards.
Big glazing facing the central courtyard is designed and “Sky Voids” provide inner-views of the garden. This is a project trying to re-define a modern Chinese courtyard house and explore how space can be divided individually but stay closely connected
The house is located in the residential area of facing the Sagami Bay in Kanagawa Prefecture,Japan. This town has a mild climate and open atmosphere with sea breeze for long time. On the other hand, the site has different atmosphere of the whole town by surrounded new housing group.
We planned the house which is continuous form the town to outer space/interior space due consideration to the following conditions.
1) The house has private environment in a built-up area with natural environment and open-mind city. 2) The four of his family is tie strong and feeling a sign of his family.
The site space resemble as one of the living space. The gap make continuous internal and external space by utilize effectively the entire site. These shifted space become the entrance approach ,garden ,terrace ,parking and living space in continuously.
We feel external space also available as part of the living space due to moderate level difference by between south garden/terrace 1/terrace 2/dinning. As for even inside the house, similar to outside by the split-level with a moderate level difference, it will be the space to feel the sign of life.
It was consideration to ensure the thermal environment and the private space by north and west side facing the road is covered with almost wall. We feel pleasant breeze due to windows takes up north-south side and the warm air discharged to upper space by skip floor and stairs without riser.
This weekend, among more serious and frightening headlines, one news story offered a bit of relief: some patrons of a Brooklyn bar found themselves ordering drinks from a man who looked suspiciously like the actor Bill Murray. And that was, of course, because it was in fact the star of Ghostbusters and Lost in Translation, who appeared to work a shift at his son’s soon-to-open establishment. Involving charismatic performance, an everyday ritual of hospitality, and an invitation to revelry, the role of bartender surely fits Murray’s role as a trickster-god within the celebrity pantheon.
The appearance was actually scheduled in advance, but it carried the flavor of the improvisatory engagements with the surrounding world Murray has made a second career out of, since the days before Saturday Night Live and a raft of films made him famous (on the streets of Manhattan he would call out to passersby, “Hey, there’s a lobster loose!”), from playing to (and with) the spectators at celebrity golf tournaments to the many reported occurrences of Murray crashing bachelor parties, switching places with his cab driver (so the man could spend time practicing his saxophone), or sneaking up on people to put his hands over their eyes (offering the teasing farewell “No one will ever believe you”).
In his new book The Tao of Bill Murray, Gavin Edwards tracks down and compiles the history of interwoven life, work, and play from an actor who seems determined to blur the line that ordinarily separates the audience from the performer. The resulting book, presenting the portrait of a star unlike any other, a study in hilarity, creativity, and surprising moments of pathos. Among the tasks required: watch (or in Edwards’s case, largely re-watch) the Murray cinematic oeuvre, which ranges through a surprising range of comedy and drama, hits and misses. He volunteered to share a set of the most memorable, revelatory and sometimes unjustly overlooked moments in Murray’s characteristically unpredictable career. – Eds.
While writing The Tao of Bill Murray: Real-Life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing, I watched every movie Bill Murray’s ever made: over sixty of them. Because Bill makes his choices based on personal loyalty and what messages get left on his 1-800 number (no, really — he has no agent or manager), his output can be erratic. So there are some stinkers: if you’re feeling masochistic, the two worst are the 1980 sketch anthology Loose Shoes and the 2012 Charlie Sheen vehicle A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. On the other hand, Bill has made his fair share of amazing films, most of which have received the praise they deserve. My top five would be Lost in Translation, Ghostbusters, Rushmore, Broken Flowers, and Tootsie, which are generally acknowledged as stone-cold classics.
As I worked my way through a Netflix queue devoted to the four-decade cinematic output of Bill Murray, I treasured the moments when I saw Bill inventing himself onscreen, showing off talents he had kept to himself or discovering new aspects of himself. Sometimes it was over in an eyeblink: for example, Bill plays the venal mayor of an underground city in the middling YA dystopia City of Ember. There’s a wonderful moment when a look of malice flashes across Bill’s face, quickly replaced by his public smile. I can’t recommend that you watch the movie just for that split second, but I’m glad I saw it.
These are ten great but lesser-known movies with sneakily great performances by Bill, where he showed off unexpected talents or gave his career a new spin.
Most people remember this as the movie where Bill pulls off a bank heist while dressed as a clown, answering a guard’s question as to what type of clown he is with the answer “The crying on the inside kind, I guess.” Some know that it’s the only time Bill directed a movie — he had the clout and the ability to direct more, but decided it was too much work. But I remember it for a scene where that clown swindles a hostage out of an extraordinarily expensive Audemars Piguet watch: it was a self-winding timepiece, but if Bill didn’t wear it for a couple of months during filming, it’d get out of sync and he’d have to pay $150 to have it professionally wound. Bill had Howard Franklin (his screenwriter and codirector) write that scene so his character could wear the watch. It’s a reminder that Bill’s real life and onscreen identity bleed into each other in unexpected ways.
Offscreen, Bill can be winsome or withering, depending on his mood. Usually, the public gets to see his delightful side — the difficult behavior is reserved for his collaborators. But a performance like this, where Bill plays a steely gangster (opposite Robert De Niro’s nebbish), shows us that there’s a corner of his psyche filled with barbed wire.
Bill has improvised his way through an astonishing number of his films: especially on comedies, his M.O. has been to show up, read whatever pages he’s supposed to be performing that day, and then throw out the screenplay and improvise something much funnier. When he’s playing the lead, he’s responsible for “driving the boat,” as he puts it — but when he’s in a supporting role, he can make choices that are even more off-kilter (like the scene in Tootsie where he eats a plate full of lemon slices). Here, playing the villain “Big Ern” in a bowling comedy, he accessorizes with a spectacular comb-over hairstyle and a bowling ball that has a rose embedded in Lucite. Best improvised line in a movie stuffed with genius Bill-isms: “I finally got enough money that I can buy my way out of anything!”
Bill plays Polonius, the windbag adviser to the king (or in this modern-dress version, the CEO) who becomes an early victim in Hamlet’s killing spree. Hewing to Shakespeare’s text means that Bill has no room to improvise, but he gets right into the flow of the iambic pentameter. This part feels like a window into an alternate universe where Bill made his living as a member of a repertory theater: supporting role in a Shakespeare tragedy one week, leading man in a new musical comedy the next.
Bill stepped down from the lead role in Rushmore to playing just one member of a large ensemble in The Royal Tenenbaums: it turned out that his personal repertory company was being in Wes Anderson movies. He plays Raleigh St. Clair, who’s married to Margot Tennenbaum, the unfaithful wife portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow. His closer relationship is with his test subject Dudley, which provides a sad gloss on his opening scene in Ghostbusters, when he administers fake ESP tests: these are the limits of smart-assery.
Bill agreed to be in Ed Wood (the Tim Burton movie about the misfit transvestite director) before he read the script, and then was dismayed to discover that the part was written as a gay stereotype. “The last thing I want is to be obvious, direct, and offensive,” he said. Instead, he delivered an unforgettable performance as an upper-crust heir yearning for a sex-change operation, unlike anything else on his resume: smooth, unflappable, and so covered with powder that in the film’s black-and-white footage, he glows.
Bill’s reason for agreeing to make this movie: “Well, no one’s ever asked me to work with Robert Duvall before.” Bill delivers a sly performance in this period piece as a struggling undertaker, and he and Duvall bring out the best in each other — really, Bill should make movies with all of the Godfather principals.
Bill has a great rapport with Frances McDormand — both in Olive Kitteridge and in this Wes Anderson movie, where they play a married couple, both lawyers, on a New England island. In a movie that’s centered on the love story between two runaway twelve-year-olds, Bill has a scene-stealing turn that feels like it’s drawn from a wild night out in his own life: He wanders unsteadily past a Parcheesi game played by three kids. Wearing plaid pants and no shirt, with an ax in one hand and a bottle of booze in the other, Bill announces, “I’ll be out back. I’m going to find a tree to chop down.”
This forgotten gem is a farce with misunderstandings so finely tuned that Bill couldn’t modify most of the dialogue. But playing a video store clerk who gets pulled into a web of international intrigue in London, Bill gets to play sustained naiveté, displaying innocent joy at all his new adventures, whether he’s kissing a beautiful operative or driving through a line of orange cones on the motorway.
Bill is underestimated as an impressionist: it’s a skill that he needed for Saturday Night Live (when he was playing, say, Walter Cronkite) but that’s rarely needed in his film career. When he wanted to play his badger lawyer character in Fantastic Mr. Fox with a strong Wisconsin accent (Wisconsin is the Badger State), he prepared by listening to lots of Wisconsin NPR — but director Wes Anderson vetoed that choice. Here, playing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he does a marvelous job of vocal (and physical) impersonation, which frames his version of FDR: brilliant, impish, randy.
The foundation of a myth: when you’re a customer at a late-night café, you might find that your waiter, for no reason at all, is Bill Murray. But no one will ever believe you.
In Connect Parkville we pursue the idea of “stitching together” urban fabric with “quiet architecture”, informed by Austrian architect Hermann Czech’s “architecture as background”. We work to principles of “simple moves” and economy: no more, or less, than is necessary to achieve our program.
Axo
These are universal ideals applied in a site and brief specific response. This project, for a family of five in a visually intact but functionally stressed conservation area, required another layer over existing program and built form. Our insertion is a quiet addition that relies not on references but scale and contrast executed with appropriate confidence. The addition is backdrop, its exterior casual, formed by lightness.
We have taken the idea of layering literally: the brief (accommodation, domestic activities, outdoor activities, storage) calls for new space (internal and external), connectivity and a skin: floor, wall, roof.
Plan 1
Plan 2
The skin protects from and is open to the outside, and relates to its built context. Surrounded by solid masonry walls, the new works are layered and loose: the roof is lifted, split and extended; new walls show multiple skins; the main façade is screened with obscure glass to express ambiguity. To the street the new addition appears transparent under the sun and the extension seems to float. Sun penetration through skylights continuing to the outside and reflections add to the notion of “layers of light”. We pushed our program hard to incorporate this detail into this domestic realm (and stay within average costs for a project of this nature).
We introduced ease of use and informality, lightness in more than one sense of the word. The old house was opened for flow and interaction; main residence and out building linked with simple gestures. Communal functions in the home are separate but connected: the kitchen as transitional space; dining a discrete light-filled atrium; and the living room as introvert retreat. To create an inherently sustainable project the solution considers solar control, thermal comfort, natural light, and ventilation.
Sig Nordal 