Silvie+Maryl | Upgrading Minds, Transforming Lives

It’s the third week of the new year, with the “new you” in full effect, and that may mean you’ve started to notice one of the consequences of major change: the effect of a new you on the people around you. Read More…

Do you have problems accepting good comments that come your way? When people compliment you, do you automatically say, “Oh, that? It was nothing” or begin to call out all the things you did wrong and how you could have done better? If that’s you, stop. Discomfort with compliments – as common as it is – more often than not reveals low self-esteem and a low sense of worth. Read More…

Every year around holiday season I hear sentences such as these: “I hate being single on holidays!” or “I need someone to cuddle with in the winter,” and “who am I gonna kiss on new years?” ENOUGH. These type of thoughts make a woman sound needy (co-dependent), in the market for a new human accessory, and clearly without a clue about what love is and how to get it. If you are looking for love, this is not the way to feel about it nor to approach it. How does one stop thinking this way? Read More…

Whether its a sugar addiction, binging on food or alcohol, reckless and frequently poor nutritional choices, staying in an unhealthy relationship or promiscuity, all of these behaviors have something in common: self punishment via your physical body. Self-sabotage and self-destruction is not the answer to feeling better about your self because, guess what? If you don’t work the issue out in this life, you will take it to be worked on in the next life (it’s kind of like rollover minutes). How many traumas, unresolved or pending issues do you want to accumulate? How many negative patterns do you want to not face, keep on experiencing, and roll over from life to life? Here’s a secret: You can have a fresh start TODAY, in this life. It’s all up to you to cultivate the courage to look at yourself in the mirror and do the work (figuratively speaking, though, other people can act as our mirrors as well). It’s time to stop taking the easy way out by ignoring what bothers you, avoiding seeing the real you, and pretending to feel better by doing things that may seem like instant gratification but are only hurting you in the long run, on all levels – physically, emotionally, and psychologically. 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…