Just… don’t read this.

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Kill it with fire.

Kill me with fire.

Is apologizing really a sign of weakness?

Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85% (via mchotdog)

what a radical idea yo

(via matthewdgold)

Bam. Kids “misbehave” for actual, real, valid reasons. And have feelings.

(via amydentata)

I, for one, am astonished at the idea that children are people. 

Also, I love this. I want to found a school based on this principle.

(via bigfatfeminist)

(via themorninglight)

Sometimes I honestly think sleep solves everything and makes everything seem not as bad as they might already seem.

A haiku about getting out of bed:
No no no no no
No no no no no no no
No no no no no

(via anditslove)

(via blua)

Really, don’t read this if you don’t want to read about someone’s personal magnified drama that has no relevance to your own wonderful life. I simply have nowhere else or no one else to say to what I need to say.

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(via happythings)

my econ teacher told us to look at a page on her site where she posted something and told us to read it. I read it and found it the most inspiring and reveling thing ever. It sort of answered a lot of things for me. Something I should’ve could’ve posted here a lot earlier, but thought I’d share it here. Maybe you’ll be a little bit enlightened, as well.

What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is a form of self-awareness that can be described as “a state of being in the present moment and accepting things for what they are without judgement”. This concept was originally taken from Buddhist meditation teachings, but it has been adapted for use in the treatment of depression and for assisting with mood regulation, and has been found to have considerable health benefits. When you are mindful, your awareness is in the current moment. You become keenly aware of yourself and your surroundings, but you simply observe these things as they are. You are aware of your own thoughts and feelings, but you do not react to them in the way that you would if you were on “autopilot”. It’s like a form of alert meditation that you can absorb yourself in at any time, or all the time.

Switching off your autopilot

Most of the time we live our lives on “autopilot”. Our minds seem to have a will of their own. Thoughts come and go, and it seems as though we don’t have much say in what thoughts turn up in our head. If each of us were to stand back and observe our own mind, we would notice how easily our thoughts skip from one unfinished idea to the next, constantly interrupting each other and overlapping in a constant stream of pictures, ideas, memories and desires. Through mindfulness you learn to “take a step back” and observe all this mental activity and all the feelings and impulses that it causes, and you begin to separate yourself from their influence.

This is the essence of mindfulness.
When you are mindful, you become a relaxed witness to your inner life, and you are freed from being constantly affected by all your mental activity and by all your judgements about the world and everything that’s taking place within it. “Observation” is the key word here. You consciously observe your thoughts and feelings, rather than allowing yourself to swim around in them. The moment you become aware and conscious in this way, you are living in the moment, and not on autopilot. At first this feels like you are creating a sense of space within yourself. With time and practice it opens up a whole new dimension of freedom, relaxation and stillness.

Mindfulness will free you from harmful judgements

When you are mindful, you remain in a state of alert attentiveness to the present moment. Instead of judging the things that are going on around you as “good” or “bad”, you simply accept them for what they. By not labelling or judging the events and circumstances taking place around you, you are freed from your normal tendency to react to them. Consider this basic example of just how fruitless judgement can be… Imagine you are driving down a freeway when all of a sudden, another motorist cuts in front of you. Your mind instantly judges the motorist’s actions as “bad” or “disrespectful”, and within an instant you begin to feel angry. Now you have the right to feel anyway you choose about the other motorist, but make no mistake, your anger is definitely a choice, albeit a choice that your autopilot made for you. When you are on autopilot, your thoughts, feelings and reactions just seem to happen to you. But when you are alert and mindful of the present moment, you respond to the world with an openness, and a sense of acceptance, rather than with judgement and automated reactions. When you are mindful, you get to choose how you react to life. So often, judgement is not just fruitless, it’s also harmful to yourself.
When you are mindful, you are more keenly aware of everything that is going on around you in this current moment, because you are not so preoccupied with your usual mental wrangling. The “space” that mindfulness opens up gives you the opportunity to observe the happenings of the world in a fresh light and to accept “what is” and leave it at that. Without mindfulness, you react mentally, emotionally and physically to life, and sometimes the consequences of those reactions are even more damaging that the events that brought them up in the first place!

A new way to heal emotional disturbances

It is inevitable that life will involve some hard times and that you are bound to feel emotions such as sadness, grief or anger along the way. We can’t be happy all the time. But with mindfulness, you learn to observe these feelings without labelling them good or bad. You can choose to accept “what is”, even if it is taking place inside you. This is such an important concept to understand. When you allow an emotion to “just be” you give it the opportunity to pass on by.

Mindfulness is “allowing”, and allowing emotions to come and go is one of the most powerful ways to relieve yourself of inner turmoil. As Sogyal Rinpoche writes in his book, “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying”: “The practice of mindfulness defuses our negativity, aggression, and turbulent emotions…..Rather than suppressing emotions or indulging in them, here it is important to view them, and your thoughts, and whatever arises with an acceptance and generosity that are as open and spacious as possible.”

Mindfulness can be developed to the point where it can be practiced right in the middle of stressful situations. While being mindful you can still remain alert and respond appropriately to the situation at hand, but without resorting to your autopilot and reacting. By practicing mindfulness, you will find that you accumulate far less mental noise during the course of the day. You will begin to feel calmer and clearer as you go about your activities.