Another very valuable and salient article I found reading online. It’s helping me heal scars and I hope it is helpful to my readers as well. My good Facebook friend Sal has asked me to write an article about acceptance, patience, understanding, love and friendship in relation to helping a friend with mental illness. Something that should be right up my alley and I will do it soon. 💞😄
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-mentally-strong-people-dont-do/201601/9-ways-keep-your-personal-power?utm_source=FacebookPost&utm_medium=FBPost&utm_campaign=FBPost

As the author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do, I often hear from people about which of the 13 things they struggle with the most. The second thing on my list—mentally strong people don’t give away their power—is one of the hardest.
For example, a business executive confided that an associate always brings out the worst in him. A stay-at-home parent said her day hinges almost entirely on what type of mood her spouse is in. At some point, almost everyone has given someone else power over the way they think, feel, or behave.
Giving away your personal power robs you of mental strength. But maintaining control in your life requires that you make a conscious choice to take back your power. Before you can create positive change, you need to recognize the ways in which you give your power away.
Here are 9 ways to keep your personal power:
1. Don’t waste energy complaining.
There’s a big difference between complaining and problem-solving. Venting to your friends, family, and co-workers keeps you focused on the problem and prevents you from creating a solution. Grumbling implies that you have no power over your situation, and also shows that you lack power over your attitude.
2. Accept responsibility for how you feel.
Don’t let other people’s behavior dictate your emotions. Saying your mother-in-law makes you feel bad about yourself, or claiming that your boss makes you mad, suggests that they have power over how you feel. Instead, accept that it is up to you to manage your emotions, regardless of how others behave.
3. Establish healthy boundaries.
Giving in to guilt trips, or refusing to speak up for yourself, gives power to other people. Rather than blame them for wasting your time or “forcing” you to do something, recognize that you’re in charge of yourself. Establish healthy physical and emotional boundaries that give you control over how you spend your time and with whom you spend it.
4. Practice forgiveness.
Holding a grudge against someone who has hurt you doesn’t punish the other person—it only punishes you. When you waste valuable time thinking about a person you feel wronged you, it takes away your ability to enjoy the moment.
Forgiving someone is the best way to take back your power. But to be clear, forgiveness isn’t about saying what the person did was OK. It’s about choosing to let go of the hurt and anger that interferes with your ability to enjoy life.
5. Know your values.
When you’re not clear what your values are, you’re at risk of becoming a helpless passenger rather than a confident driver of own life. You’ll be at risk of jumping on board with other people’s ideas and may be easily led astray. Take back your power by acknowledging your values and living true to what’s important to you.
6. Don’t waste time on unproductive thoughts.
Have you ever come home from work and spent the entire evening wishing you didn’t have to go back again tomorrow? Suddenly, you’re giving your eight-hour workday 12 hours of your time. Take control over the thoughts that occupy your mind so you don’t give more brainpower to areas of your life that don’t deserve it.
7. Avoid language that implies you’re a victim.
Saying things like, “I have to work 60 hours a week,” or, “I had no choice but to say yes,” infers that you’re a victim of unfortunate circumstances. While there will certainly be consequences for the decisions you make, acknowledge that you always have choices.
8. Make your self-worth independent of other people’s opinions.
If your self-worth depends on others holding you in high regard, you’ll likely become a people-pleaser. Not everyone needs to like you, nor do they have to agree with your lifestyle. Evaluate the merit of criticism you receive, but never allow any one person’s opinion determine your self-worth.
9. Be willing to stand out from the crowd.
Self-doubt and fear can lead you to want to blend in with those around you. But trying to fit in with the crowd will cause you to disguise who you really are. Trust that you’re mentally strong enough to stand out and dare to be different.

 Sigh, what a dreamboat!!! Gosh, can we import him and export that &@$$ Drumpf? Please!

http://mashable.com/2016/03/29/justin-trudeau-yoga-namaste/#ch8K0DDqs5qoBY HEIDI MOORE
We know many things about Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau: his inclusiveness on gender and race, his strong faith in the American people, his warmth toward refugees, his ability to ignite the world’s best bromance with President Obama. 

Less well-known about Trudeau is his impressive upper-body strength. 
The slim Trudeau, who is 6’2″, balanced only on his wrists on a table, achieving a yogi-approved “peacock pose,” or mayurasana. 
The pose is a powerful one — even besides the biceps required — because the peacock represents “big things, like immortality and love,” in Hindu lore, according to Yoga Journal. 
The pose has a rich mythology based on the theme of peacocks destroying snakes that represent human flaws and attachments. It also has an extensive range of detoxifying physical benefits, according to athletic wear brand Athleta, which says “this pose strengthens the digestive system, stimulates metabolism, and purges your body of toxins by massaging the digestive organs, increasing the blood circulation, and strengthening the core.”
While it’s not clear when or where the picture of Trudeau was taken — the blurriness suggests it’s a bit old — it was given viral new life by a Facebook post by Canadian yoga teacher David Gellineau.
Trudeau tweeted it himself in 2013.

Naturally, it also shows off the polymath abilities of Trudeau, a Renaissance man whose personal traits seem all the more appealing to many Americans given the dire state of the 2016 election. 
There are other examples of Trudeau’s aptitude for Eastern movements. 
In 2015, he and his wife Sophie did tree pose — with Trudeau in a full suit — impressing Canadians and yogis alike by maintaining excellent form, keeping their feet away from their knees. 
Trudeau has also showed off his physical abilities by dancing to bhangra, or Indian music, credibly enough to impress some Canadians of Indian descent and become a sensation in India. (The full video is at this link, with Trudeau entering at around 9:25 minutes in).
Trudeau’s abilities run in the family, it seems. There is a popular, widely circulated picture of his late father, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, doing the same peacock pose. 
There’s a long history of world leaders showing off their physical prowess, from Vladimir Putin’s shirtless hunting and workouts to Barack Obama’s jogging video with vice president Joe Biden, not to mention his beachgoing pictures. 
The strongman displays tend to be a bit retro, however — weights, shirtlessness — and Putin seems to avoid yoga, losing out on an opportunity to get a little more zen. 
Once again, Trudeau shows himself to be on the right side of history. We say namaste. 
BONUS: How to move to Canada

I have decided to stop being afraid. Afraid of what, you ask? Well, afraid of everything! I may not act afraid, but inside I have mostly always been afraid. Also many of my actions have been fueled by fear. The fear of loss. The fear of abandonment. And really, that is no way to act or live.

Does my decision mean I am healing from the past? Yes. It does. I am healing from all that happened in the past. The surest sign is that I can say I will not live in fear anymore! Fear of people leaving me, because that fear causes me to hang on too tightly and ironically causes people to really leave me. Yes, ironic and a little sad that friends who I want to stay in my life get annoyed and leave. So if I’m not afraid, I don’t hang on too tightly, no one feels constricted and leaves.

I will not live in fear of bad things happening. Also known as anxiety, your brain, my brain, when I wake up in the morning, hits me with a jolt of horrible anxiety. I have been meditating every day and hopefully, and by all accounts, it will help me with my anxiety.

I am afraid of learning my lines for my play, actually of not learning my lines. But I’m putting this phone down and starting to learn them in the next few minutes. I am the female lead in this play so I have quite a few lines. But I’ve easily learnt 10 times as many lines. So no fear, just get er done.

I will not be afraid of examining where I’m going with my life. I have many options, a PhD in the molecular biology of bipolar disorder. How amazing is it that I have the opportunity to do this! Other options are perhaps getting a real estate license, I love houses and I think I would be good at selling them. Since very fortunately, we are fine financially, I could even get a job at Macy’s and just work there. I’d done that once in Buffalo and had so much fun working there, helping little old ladies find anything they were looking for. Yet another option I have is writing my book. I really do have a book inside me just waiting to make a grand entrance into the world.

So no fear. Not even about my soon to be 21 year old baby Fluffin cat. She’s lived a long and happy life, and I love her to pieces, but… you know at her age there’s a but, I will be sad. Ok let’s not talk about this anymore.

No fear. Only possibilities, making some of them into reality, living fearlessly and positively. Amen.

 
Rod Crawford has heard plenty of firsthand accounts of spider-swilling slumberers. “Once or twice a year, someone tells me they once recovered a spider leg in their mouth,” says Crawford, the arachnid curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle.Luckily for all of us, the “fact” that people swallow eight spiders in their sleep yearly isn’t true. Not even close. The myth flies in the face of both spider and human biology, which makes it highly unlikely that a spider would ever end up in your mouth.

Three or four spider species live in most North American homes, and they all tend to be found either tending their webs or hunting in nonhuman-infested areas. During their forays, they usually don’t intentionally crawl into a bed because it offers no prey (unless it has bed bugs, in which case that person has bigger problems). Spiders also have no interest in humans. “Spiders regard us much like they’d regard a big rock,” says Bill Shear, a biology professor at Hampden–Sydney College in Virginia and former president of the American Arachnological Society. “We’re so large that we’re really just part of the landscape,”

More than anything, spiders probably find sleeping humans terrifying. A slumbering person breathes, has a beating heart and perhaps snores—all of which create vibrations that warn spiders of danger. “Vibrations are a big slice of spiders’ sensory universe,” Crawford explains, “A sleeping person is not something a spider would willingly approach.”

From the standpoint of human biology, the oral spider myth also seems ridiculous. If someone is sleeping with her mouth open, she’s probably snoring—and thus scaring off any eight-legged transgressors. Plus, many people would likely be awakened by the sensation of a spider crawling over their faces and into their mouths. Shear can attest: once, while camping, he awoke to find a daddy longlegs crawling on his face.

Spider experts concede that a sleeping person could plausibly swallow a spider, but “it would be a strictly random event.” People who claim they’ve swallowed spiders never seem to have any concrete evidence. “People tell me this happened to them, but they threw it (the evidence) away—flushed it down the toilet, usually,” Crawford says. There’s also a sore lack of eyewitnesses for such a frequent event as eight spiders a year. So even if you heard or read this spider statistic from a trustworthy source (such as a Snapple cap), you can rest assured that it doesn’t have a leg, or eight legs, to stand on.

And my favorite creek, Bear Grass Creek!

This is very cool! CRISPR is the system that excises foreign DNA out of bacterial genomes. It’s the equivalent of a bacterial immune system. Where we have a very complicated and extensive immune system that protects us from foreign pathogens (viruses, bacteria and others), it protects us even form poison, venom, foreign things and it is instrumental in healing us when we get cut or injured in some way. For a long time it was thought that bacteria had no such defense mechanism, then surprisingly CRISPR was found! It is the system that protects bacteria form bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect bacteria. If a virus successfully inserts its DNA into the chromosome of a bacterium, it will use the bacterial enzyme systems to make millions of copies of it self, eventually lysing and killing the bacterium to release all those copies of virus, and these viruses will then infect other bacteria. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. There are other viruses which infect animals or people, such as the chicken pox virus, aka varicella, the AIDS virus aka HIV (human immunodeficiency virus,) Herpes virus, Hepatitis virus, many many viruses. Retroviruses such as the HIV (AIDS) virus also incorporate themselves into the DNA of in this case T cells, and they incapacitate T cells which are part of our immune system. Thereby we get acquired immunodeficiency or AIDS. Now researchers have developed a new technique using CRISPR, the bacterial “immune system” to excise the HIV virus out of the DNA of human cells that it had infected. Although at this time, this technique can only be used in vitro, CRISPR isn’t specific enough to use in humans. It can cut large regions of DNA in cells, in a nonspecific manner. So CRISPR has to be made more specific before it can be used as a therapy, for HIV or anything else.

Read the article, it is really cool!

http://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2015/04/editing-hiv-out-of-our-genome-with-crispr/

The virus that causes AIDS is an efficient and crafty retrovirus. Once HIV inserts its DNA into the genome of its host cells, it has a long incubation period, and can remain dormant and hidden for years. And while physicians can mix a cocktail from a variety of antiretroviral drugs to keep it in check, the virus can reactivate if treatment is stopped.

In an attempt to render latent HIV completely harmless, UMass Medical School researchers are using CRISPR/Cas9, a powerful gene editing tool, to develop a novel technology that can potentially cut the DNA of the latent virus out of an infected cell.

“On the simplest level, we’re employing a very precise pair of scissors to go in and clip out all, or part of, the HIV genome and reattach the severed ends of the human genome,” said principal co-investigator Scot Wolfe, PhD, associate professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology. “If we could do that, the hope is that this would be a step on the road to getting a functional cure for HIV.”

CRISPR is a component of the immune system found in normal bacteria. In its natural state, it protects bacteria from viral invasion. Since its discovery, researchers have been seeking ways to program this system to quickly and selectively edit specific genetic sequences for study.

For all its versatility, applications for the CRISPR system remain confined to the lab. Despite recent advances showing that CRISPR/Cas9 can edit HIV from an infected cell in culture, this technique remains too imprecise to be used clinically because of its tendency to cut into random regions of the genome, producing deleterious, off-target effects.

To improve the fidelity and precision of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing system for this project, Dr. Wolfe has proposed fusing it with an additional domain that improves its specificity. This would conceivably allow the CRISPR system to edit out only the HIV DNA without the potential for stray cuts in the human genome.

The other hurdle to using current CRISPR/Cas9 technology against HIV is that while researchers have some notions where the virus might be hiding, they still don’t know how to find the virus in latently infected cells.

“Cells that are infected with HIV are permanent carriers of the viral genome. They are a kind of time bomb that can be reactive at any time if a patient stops taking their antiretroviral treatment,” said principal co-investigator Jeremy Luban, MD, the David J. Freelander Professor in AIDS Research and professor of molecular medicine. “In order to attack the virus in its latent state, we really need to understand where the virus lives and what it needs to survive.”

Dr. Luban and Wolfe will use a combination of innovative technologies to describe and model HIV DNA integrated into the genome of reservoir cells, also known as provirus. Characterizing the genomic landscape of these latently infected cells will allow the researchers to identify vulnerable and accessible genetic sequences that can be potentially cut out of the HIV virus to make it permanently inactive.

“Many scientists are looking for tools that will activate the virus so it will be visible to the immune system or drugs. We’ve chosen a different approach that looks to isolate and excise the provirus directly from resting cells,” said Luban.

With a model of the latently infected cells’ genome from which to work, Wolfe hopes to use his precise gene editing tool to excise the latent virus from cells. Part of the project will be to assess whether the precision of the system has improved enough to allow for selected removal of the HIV genome in humanized mouse models and cells from infected patients without causing collateral damage to the human genome.

“The underlying premise of this project that Scot has pushed forward using new technologies that he has developed, is to genetically engineer a system that can potentially remove the HIV genome from infected cells,” said Luban. “The hope is that one might develop the tools to deliver these agents to cells of the human immune system and actually eliminate the virus from where it is hiding.”

Joining Luban and Wolfe on the five-year, $4.6 million National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded project are Dale Greiner, PhD, the Dr. Eileen L. Berman and Stanley I. Berman Foundation Chair in Biomedical Research and professor of molecular medicine; Oliver J. Rando, MD, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular pharmacology; Job Dekker, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular pharmacology; and Manuel Garber, PhD, associate professor of molecular medicine. Each will lend their respective expertise in developing humanized mouse models; mapping chromatin structure; modeling 3D chromosome organization; and computational biology. Additionally, Katherine Luzuriaga, MD, professor of molecular medicine, pediatrics and medicine, and Thomas C Greenough, MD, assistant professor of medicine, will provide clinical expertise on the project.

“We’ve assembled a team of researchers here at UMass Medical School with the goal of better understanding the intricate structure of the latent HIV virus when integrated into immune cells because we believe that will allow us to better target it with CRISPR for gene editing,” Wolfe explained.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/inkfish/2016/03/23/prozac-water-makes-fighting-fish-mellow/#.VvXXTYwrLpA