“Being grateful does not mean that everything is necessarily good. It just means that you can accept it as a gift.”
~ Roy T. Bennett
Roy T. Bennett is a thought leader. He loves sharing positive thoughts and creative insight that has helped countless people to live a successful and fulfilling life. He realizes that he should spread these thoughts by writing and inspire you to believe in yourself, your abilities and your own potential….
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 28, 2026 Biological Systems, Health and Healing Michael J. Shea, PhD who holds a doctorate in somatic psychology from the Union Institute and a master’s degree in Buddhist Psychology from Naropa University. He has taught at the Upledger Institute, the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, and the International University for Professional Studies. He is a craniosacral therapist, licensed massage therapist, and educator with the Shea Educational Group that is a center for the study of the human heart. He is author of Somatic Psychology and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy – Volumes 1 through 5; Myofasical Release Therapy: A Visual Guide to Clinical Application; Myofascial Release Therapy and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy: The Heart of the Practice; The Biodynamics of the Immune System: Balancing the Energies of the Body with the Cosmos; and The Biodynamic Heart: Somatic Compassion Practices for a Clear and Vital Heart. His website is sheaheart.com. Michael describes the vital role of the vagus nerve in regulating physiology, safety, emotions, and overall health. He explores how turning inward—feeling the heart and meeting fear—can open the door to a deeper awareness of ourselves and reality. He shares simple ways to support vagal tone, fostering greater joy, compassion, wholeness, and wisdom. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:19 Anatomy of the vagus nerve 00:05:08 Polyvagal theory and safety 00:09:39 Relationship to the heart 00:14:22 Empathy, wisdom, and compassion 00:23:23 Four types of safety 00:34:59 Intuition and discernment of thoughts and feelings 00:44:40 Food, immune system, and digestive health 00:58:17 Bliss, pleasure, and sexuality 01:14:57 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is a licensed occupational therapist, intuitive healer and coach, and spiritual guide based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Emmy is the founder of the Intuitive Connections and Holistic OT communities. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com (Recorded on March 5, 2026)
adam28xx Aug 30, 2020 Twenty years ago, on 30 August 2000, Michael Tilson Thomas conducted Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” in London’s Royal Albert Hall, so this video counts as a 20th Anniversary tribute! … This same performance was previously uploaded here in its two separate parts but the 20th Anniversary provides an ideal opportunity to hear the work uninterrupted. The San Francisco Symphony, of which MTT had become Music Director five years earlier, was making its Proms debut. It was attended by a 5,000-strong highly enthusiastic audience and their rousing reception prompted two encores, by Prokofiev and Stravinsky. both introduced by MTT himself. A memorable occasion indeed!
Donald Trump’s picture could soon be on every new U.S. passport.
The State Department is finalizing a plan to put the president’s face in the travel document, The Bulwark reports, citing two sources with knowledge of the passport redesign, one of whom provided pictures. The new passports will include Trump’s second inaugural portrait superimposed over the Declaration of Independence, along with his signature in gold.
According to The Bulwark, there will be a “limited run” of 25,000 of these Trump passports, which are still waiting to be approved. While the current U.S. passport includes an image of Mount Rushmore, which has the heads of four presidents, this would be the first stand-alone image of a U.S. president, living or dead, in a passport. No foreign passports have included pictures of heads of state, and U.S. passports have previously carried the signature of the secretary of state, but not the president.
Trump has made a habit of putting his name on things in his second term as president, from the U.S. Institute of Peace to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He’s put banners with his face on federal buildings and created a website for prescriptions called TrumpRx.gov.
This new passport is supposedly part of the 250th anniversary of American independence, and comes as the Treasury Department hopes to produce two coins with Trump’s face on them: a $1 coin with Trump’s face on it for general circulation and a commemorative coin that would be “as large as possible.” The president seems intent on having Americans feel shame every time they open their wallet or travel overseas.Share This Story
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The IAU’s criteria for defining a planet, which Pluto failed to meet due to its shared orbit with other objects in the Kuiper Belt, has been a point of contention among Pluto supporters.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman testifies during a hearing held by the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies to review NASA’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request, Monday, April 27, 2026, at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington. | Credit: NASA/Joel KowskyMore
NASA chief Jared Isaacman wants to restore Pluto to its former glory.
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) stripped Pluto of its planethood, reclassifying the icy world as a “dwarf planet.” The decision was controversial, and not just because it forced schoolchildren around the world to learn a new mnemonic for our solar system’s major denizens.
Little Pluto was beloved and remains so, especially in the United States. After all, it’s the only planet discovered by an American, Clyde Tombaugh, who made the historic find in 1930 using imagery captured by Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Twenty years on, many Pluto lovers are still fighting the IAU’s decision, claiming it was unscientific and inconsistently applied.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman testifies before the U.S. Senate appropriations committee on April 28, 2026. | Credit: U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations
The IAU defined a planet according to three newly pronounced criteria: It has to orbit the sun, be massive enough to be spherical, and clear its orbit of debris. Pluto fell short on the third count, according to the IAU, as it shares space in the distant Kuiper Belt with many other dwarf planets. But Earth shares orbital space with lots of asteroids, as does Jupiter, Pluto-planet advocates note. So why was Pluto singled out?
We now know that such Pluto defenders include Isaacman, a billionaire private astronaut and tech entrepreneur who became NASA chief this past December.
Isaacman testified about the White House’s 2027 NASA budget request today (April 28) before the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. At the very end of the hearing, Republican Sen. Jerry Moran asked the NASA administrator his thoughts on Pluto, noting that Tombaugh hailed from Moran’s home state of Kansas.
“Senator, I am very much in the camp of ‘make Pluto a planet again,'” Isaacman replied.
“And I would say, we are doing some papers right now on, I think, a position that we would love to escalate through the scientific community to revisit this discussion and ensure that Clyde Tombaugh gets the credit he received once and rightfully deserves to receive again,” the NASA chief added.
As those words indicate, all NASA (or any Pluto advocates) can do on the matter is escalate the discussion. The ultimate decision on Pluto’s status lies with the IAU, a global society of professional astronomers that defines celestial objects and assigns official names to them and their surface features.
A significant escalation occurred in July 2015, when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft returned the first-ever up-close imagery of Pluto. Those photos revealed a stunningly diverse world with towering mountains, vast nitrogen-ice glaciers and other jaw-dropping features, including a now-famous heart-shaped landform that mission scientists dubbed Tombaugh Regio.
Is your boat also becalmed? I ask the authors of my books. Your commitments made, your loves chosen, did the wind drop? Did you wonder whether you were meant to wait for the next breeze, or whether you should row for your life?
With an eye to a fear the poet Mary Ruefle once named with her typical winking poignancy — “the deep-seated uneasiness surrounding the possibility that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility” — Ogden observes the fractal nature of this fundamental fear, branching into every aspect of what and whom we devote ourselves to. She writes:
In my attitude to these loves of my life, I find the same mixture of conviction and shame. I am devoted. I am embarrassed by my devotion. I cannot help but envision the contemptuous face of the one who sees my idol as a lump of clay.
Suppose a life that might, or might not, be consecrated to an imbecility. What then? What answers are there, beyond trying to answer with a certainty that can never be secured?… To put mattering in the form of a question concedes too much. The question mark’s business with me will never be finished. It stands like a cow in the road, uncomprehending, unmoving.
For my part, I stand with the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska: “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems,” she wrote in her splendid poem “Possibilities.” I prefer the absurdity of devotion to the absurdity of indifference.
At the heart of devotion is a recognition that the reality of the other — whether or not you understand it, that is, can extract personal meaning from it — matters. Iris Murdoch captured this in what remains the finest definition of love I have encountered: “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”
Ogden considers the poems of Emily Dickinson — those great love letters to reality — as a paragon of art that “evades the demand for ultimate meaning,” an opening something “that will not come to a point.” In Dickinson’s poem “A Bird, came down the Walk,” she observes, the bird is not the bird of the Romantics that sings and symbolizes, not the bird of divinations, but a creature occupied with the “prosaic things” of its own life met on its own terms: surviving, weighing its wants against its needs. Ogden writes:
John Keats’s nightingale warbles continuously across centuries. Walt Whitman’s thrush mourns Abraham Lincoln. Dickinson’s robin comes up close and gets about the work of surviving. This poem is about watching a series of alien troubles managed and dispatched. If poets are like birds, then on the view of this poem, it is not because they sing; it is because they mind their own business. The poem goes down the walk. It does not know I saw. It does not ask itself whether I think it matters. My doubt will not annihilate it.
Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane
Each existence — yours, mine — is a living poem and every experience in it is, if we let it be, a bird. Its business is its own. Our business is not interpretation or rumination but observation, integration, devotion to what is — pure presence, without fear or judgment or the impulse for control, with reality and the infinities nested within it: all those realities different from our own, beyond it, never fully apprehended by means of reason, reachable only, and barely, by love.
This requires what Iris Murdoch so memorably termed “unselfing” — the same difficult practice that offers the best relief I know for the clutch of selfing that is most suffering.
Ogden writes:
The other day I watched a song sparrow perched on the topmost point of my arched bean trellis, feathers on his striped throat erect, his body the trumpet of his territorial call. The entirety of the tiny body became the huge sound. I rejoiced for him; I took a total interest in his interest in singing. In a similar way, I take comfort in walking my hound dog. His is a different world from mine, but one equally organized by keen preferences. Because of what he can smell, areas of grass that seem undifferentiated to me are intensely important to him. Rattled by the passing of another dog, he will carpet the affected area with his snuffling, pulling in the air so hard and quick that his whole snout shakes. Looking back at you from a wild face is striving and a wish for sequence; not, however, a striving or a wish for sequence that is like yours. You can follow along with a different mathematics; you still get to calculate, but not about yourself. It is only because the animal pursues a real project, and not an idle dream, that watching it is a relief.
We don’t know what it is like to be any creature other than ourselves — the bird, the dog, the person we love. The great triumph is to let the fantasy of understanding go and love anyway.
A habit is a spell you cast upon yourself that only you can break. “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil,” William James wrote in his pioneering treatise on the psychology of habit. What we habitually let in — ideas into the mind, people into the heart — shape what we become. In lives that begin as accidents of chance and go on being besieged by myriad chance events beyond our control, the choices that become habits are the most powerful instrument we have for being active agents in our destiny — none more transformative than the habits by which we govern our attention.
Novelist Samantha Harvey considers how to best resist being turned into passive pawns in the attention economy in her conversation with my friend Natascha McElhone who, besides being a beloved actor in her primary life (and generously lending her time and talent to narrating the audiobooks of Figuring and Traversal), co-hosts the excellent podcast Where Shall We Meet — a guided tour of the minds and worlds of some of the most interesting and creative people alive, from writers and philosophers to astrophysicists and polar explorers.
With an eye to the great heist of mind that is social media — a system built to benefit the bottom line of companies by exploiting our psychological and physiological vulnerabilities, training us to be passive “users” of “content” rather than active participants in the co-creation of meaning that is literature — Harvey offers a compassionate way of meeting ourselves where we (like or or not) are, and beginning there in the project of striking a better balance between passive and active attention:
There are times when it’s incredibly active and pleasurable and generative to go down these clickbaity rabbit holes online and just be amazed at what you can find. It can spark all sorts of thoughts and challenge things that you felt and give you new information… It’s a magical thing to have, absolutely, and I do that myself… I just get to call it research… We have at our disposal this amazing world of not just information but of other people’s thoughts and feelings and interpretations, and that’s a great invitation, I think. [The question is] how do we stay active in that process when built into the structure is this imperative to become passive.
Responding to Natascha’s observation that active reading is not unlike dreaming — a kind of sustained and thrilling presence in another world by an act of unselfing that requires, as Natascha puts it, “being in one place for long enough to traverse into someone else’s psyche, to be interested enough to get out of your own head and into someone else’s” — Harvey reflects:
When I write, and also when I read, and probably in slightly different ways, dream-like spaces open up. And I think that is [what good books] invite — they ask for attention in a way that nothing else does, quite… The act of attention and of imagination takes work… but [books] also offer us something… spellbinding… [A great book] will have you enraptured, it will hold you in this dream space. That’s what you want as a writer — to arrest your reader, to to take them up in the spell and not let them down and not make them want to leave.
This, she observes, is the difference between reading, which demands the active imagination, and consuming “content” by scrolling passively through a “feed”; the difference between being compelled to stay, by means of a generous offering of another world, and being coerced to stay, by means of nervous system manipulation. It is also the difference between reading for information and reading for illumination. Harvey likens the former to “a corridor along which information is carried” that you passively pace, whereas the latter — the experience great books give us — opens doors on all sides of the corridor so inviting that you begin to actively and joyfully wander all the different rooms, spellbound by what you find there:
Fiction… opens up the possibility of other consciousnesses, other spaces, other ideas — and not just the ones that the author provides by telling you information, but the ones that are opened up in your own psyche through your own memories… multiple, countless rooms that you walk through, one to the other, and you never really know what’s in the next room or how many rooms there are, but it’s space — in a life that can sometimes feel rather breathless and and full and stressful and and distracted, suddenly you’re in something quite palatial that is only limited by your own imagination.
This difference between passive consumption and active imagination sounds to me like the difference between a trance and a dream. In a trance, something other than ourselves is in possession of our minds. In a dream, parts of us — the shy, the unheard, the neglected, the wild — come to the fore and begin to live, boldly and imaginatively, returning us to reality a little more integrated, a little more awake to our own complexity. Dreaming, which evolved in the bird brain as a laboratory for practicing the possible, is a highly active and dynamic state in constant, if coded, conversation with the conscious self of our waking life. It is an act of unselfing in order to become more fully ourselves. To refuse to be entranced and choose to be enchanted may be the most important habit in that most important choice of investing our consciousness: to whom and what we gift our attention.
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Is your boat also becalmed? I ask the authors of my books. Your commitments made, your loves chosen, did the wind drop? Did you wonder whether you were meant to wait for the next breeze, or whether you should row for your life?
There are times when it’s incredibly active and pleasurable and generative to go down these clickbaity rabbit holes online and just be amazed at what you can find. It can spark all sorts of thoughts and challenge things that you felt and give you new information… It’s a magical thing to have, absolutely, and I do that myself… I just get to call it research… We have at our disposal this amazing world of not just information but of other people’s thoughts and feelings and interpretations, and that’s a great invitation, I think. [The question is] how do we stay active in that process when built into the structure is this imperative to become passive.