Silvie+Maryl | Upgrading Minds, Transforming Lives

Patience is a quality that we must cultivate. Impatience brings out the emotion of aggression, and the consequence is usually guilt that results from verbally lashing out and hurting others as well as ourselves.

Here are a few tools that can help you on your road to mastering patience. Read More…

Yes, Aretha Franklin said it best: R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me. Since it sometimes feels like we have forgotten all about this very important concept in today’s society, I’m gonna tell you a little bit about it and how it relates to our well-being.

Respect is the basis for healthy relationships. Because of this, it is the fundamental value upon which a peaceful and productive society depends.

It is often said that, to be respectful, we should treat others the way we’d like to be treated.  But what people often forget to do is to first find out how they would really like to be treated – it starts with the self, with how we treat ourselves. Many times, we treat others with the same consideration we have for ourselves – which is ZERO. So, the first question here is: If you really think about it, how well do you treat yourself? Do your actions and your lifestyle (the series of actions that define your approach to life) show that you are treating yourself with the utmost respect?  What does that mean?  What is respect?

Respect involves the thoughts, words and actions that demonstrate: Read More…

As transmuting a negative emotion requires research on its polar opposite, I recently found some interesting information on the opposite of fear – the quality we know as courage. We also know courage by many other names: adventure, audacity, backbone, bravery, daring, determination, endurance, enterprise, firmness, fortitude, guts, heroism, intrepidity, mettle, nerve, power, prowess, resolution, spirit, spunk, tenacity, valor, boldness, venturesomeness, and – this one is my favorite – élan. Read More…

A new friend and I had a bet going on how to pronounce famed psychologist Abraham Maslow’s surname, and this prompted me to do a little research and revisit some of this visionary’s landmark concepts. Maslow is the father of humanistic psychology (I say it’s “maslov”, that’s how my college psych teacher pronounced it – Maslow’s parents were Russian immigrants after all, and we’ve all heard what happens to ‘w’s in Russian accents; my friend says it’s “maslow” as in “low price guarantee” – he was born in Brooklyn, which makes him American and likely to have adopted that pronunciation). Unlike Freud,  who focused on studying mental illness, Maslow researched and developed theories about the healthy aspect of the mind and human potential, which of course is so very HLife of him (our focus is optimal-centered, not on a sick or barely functional concept of health), so I had to share some of his less-talked-about work with you, which I found fascinating: The humanistic concept of values. Read More…

What is a gentleman? Driven by something I read and considered to be a weak definition of this term, I thought I’d offer my own two cents here. After all, I am a lady, and I think that’s enough to qualify me to at least give this a try. Read More…