A new study shows two potential benefits of undergoing a painful ritual.

STEPHEN JOHNSON 25 September, 2019 Michel RENAUDEAU/Getty (bigthink.com)

• A new study examined peoples’ objective and subjective indicators of health before, during, and after a painful ritual.
• The results showed that people who underwent the painful ritual reported a greater quality of life and subjective health improvements.
• Painful rituals also seem to have a unique ability to produce “shared physiological alignment” within groups.

During the festival of Thaipusam, some Tamil Hindus will take on various physical burdens — or kavadis — as they make a pilgrimage to the temple of Lord Murugan, the god of war. It’s one of the world’s most extreme rituals, with some male participants mutilating their bodies with hooks, skewers, and other objects. But why would people put themselves through such physical pain?

A new study suggests one reason might be that painful rituals can improve health.

“When I was conducting fieldwork as a graduate student of anthropology, I was intrigued by some of the pronouncements of my informants,” study author Dimitris Xygalatas, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut, told PsyPost. “They described their participation in an exhausting fire-walking ritual as an experience of suffering, but at the same time also as a path to healing.”

“These claims are not uncommon in the anthropological literature. So, the intriguing part was that in various contexts, ritual activities that pose obvious health risks such as bodily injury, bleeding, or infection, may also be considered to have health benefits. Nonetheless, little research had been done on the topic, and my colleagues and I felt that we should investigate it.”

The study, published in Current Anthropology, examined 39 men from the town of Quatre Bornes in Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. The researchers asked all of these men to wear portable monitoring devices that measured sleep efficiency, physical activity, and stress levels for three weekly periods before, during, and after a Thaipusam festival.

About half of the men mutilated their bodies during the festival, while the other half didn’t. The researchers then compared the stress, sleep, and physical activity levels from both groups. The results showed that the group who mutilated their bodies didn’t suffer any lasting pain or negative effects. In fact, this group self-reported greater quality of life and health improvements than men who didn’t participate in the piercing rituals.

Why? The researchers suggested two potential explanations: undergoing intense pain or physical sensations might trigger the body to release euphoria-inducing neurotransmitters, and intense rituals like these might encourage a sense of community and “increased social support and self-enhancement.”

“We are often too quick to dismiss traditional practices as useless or even harmful, for example, in cases where they act as a distraction from medical attention. Those cases do exist. But in many contexts, these rituals can function as mechanisms of resilience, by boosting people’s sense of wellbeing and allowing them to integrate into a social support network,” Xygalatas told PsyPost. “After all, this is why these practices have survived for millennia, and in the face of modern trends towards secularization.”

It’s not the first time Xygalatas has researched the potential benefits of painful rituals. In 2008, he and his team studied the physiological responses of fire-walkers – and also their friends family in the audience – by using portable devices that attached to their bodies. The results showed that the fire-walkers’ heart rates were often dangerously high. But those results differed from the fire-walkers’ own experiences — they typically reported feeling “completely calm” while walking across the coals.

Even more interesting were the results suggesting that painful rituals can “produce shared physiological alignment” within groups.”Once more, the results were stunning, revealing an astonishing level of synchrony in heart-rate activity, extending from fire-walkers to spectators of the event,” Xygalatas wrote for Aeon. “Indeed, when we mapped the social network of our subject pool, we saw that the degree of synchronicity was directly related to the level of social proximity. A fire-walker’s heart-rate patterns resembled those of his wife more than those of his friend, and those of his friend more than those of a stranger. In other words, the closer the social ties between two people, the more their heart rhythms were synchronised. This relation was so strong that we were able to predict people’s social distance simply by looking at the similarities between their heart-rate patterns.”

INCIDENTS

 junio 11, 2018 (thereisnews.com)

What started as a joke ended with the future of two altar boys from Spain. They were detained overnight, after having surprised them putting weed in the censer-burner of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

The censer-burner is used the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela to celebrate the Epiphany of the Lord. Several assistants stated that in this occasion the holy precinct was suddenly covered in an odd smell “it did not smell as always, it was a familiar smell but I could not relate it to anything, but in my son’s bedroom sometimes smell like that”.

Following the Mass, these altar boys were arrested by the police after confirming that the strange smell was correspond to marijuana, “it was a joke, the idea came during the Christmas Eve mass, we bought no more than half a kilo of weed and we drop it inside the censer-burner, we are sure that people has left of the Cathedral happier more than ever”. Finally, they were freed without charge but they will not be able to discharge their functions as altar boys any more.

(Submitted by Richard Burns, H.W., M.)

This is a non political Astrological reading of the candidates by Wendy Cicchetti

Link here: https://www.facebook.com/wendyabeggcicchetti/videos/10220148411083003/
Or link here: https://www.twixtearthandsky.com/webinar/PresRace2020/

by Celestial Design

September 25, 20195:01 AM ET (npr.org)

ELISE HU

Credit: NPR (and William P. Chiles)

Scientists are better understanding why we age — and they’re also better explaining the cellular changes that lead our bodies and brains to decline.

This research has led people like David Sinclair, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and Peter Attia, a longevity doctor and oncologist, to challenge the conventional wisdom that aging is inevitable.

Sinclair believes the humans of the future will live decades longer than we do now, thanks to biological and technological interventions that are already being discovered.

In short: Better understanding the mechanisms of aging has led to promising treatments to slow, stop and even reverse the symptoms of growing old. And turning back the clock this way isn’t just about a longer life span; it’s about extending healthy, vital years. Could pills that mimic the positive benefits of exercise, at least in mice, be effective for humans? And what does this portend for the future, if we will all live decades longer?

This season of Future You is dedicated to the human body and what capabilities we will have in the coming decades. You can find the latest episodes on YouTube or at npr.org/futureyou. And send us your ideas about upgrading humans: Email us at futureyou@npr.org, or contact us through Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,” philosopher Erich Fromm wrote in his foundational 1956 inquiry into what is keeping us from mastering the art of loving. But why is it, really, that frustration is indelible to satisfaction in romance? At least since Jacques Ferrand’s 17th-century treatise on lovesickness, scholars have attempted to shed light on the phenomenon that has inspired the vast majority of art, music, and literature since humanity’s dawn — the pain of love.

In Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation (public library), French-Moroccan sociologist Eva Illouz examines how the social organization of modern life has profoundly altered the hues and texture of our experience of romantic agony by transforming three elemental aspects of the self: “the will (how we want something), recognition (what matters for our sense of worth), and desire (what we long for and how we long for it).”

Illustration from An ABZ of Love Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite vintage Danish guide to sexuality

Although unrequited love and the anguish of longing have a perennial place in our experience of romantic pain, Illouz is concerned with the pain that lives within actualized romantic relationships. She writes:

When relationships do get formed, agonies do not fade away, as one may feel bored, anxious, or angry in them; have painful arguments and conflicts; or, finally, go through the confusion, self-doubts, and depression of break-ups or divorces…. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches.

The rise of clinical psychology in the twentieth century only solidified and granted scientific legitimacy to this notion that our romantic misery is a function of our psychological failings — an idea that caught on in large part because implicit to it was the promise that those failings can be deconditioned. And yet, Illouz argues, such overemphasis on individual shortcomings gravely warps the broader reality — a reality in which the systems, institutions, and social contracts that govern our existence seed the core ambivalence of love and life: what we really want.

She writes:

In the same way that at the end of the nineteenth century it was radical to claim that poverty was the result not of dubious morality or weak character, but of systematic economic exploitation, it is now urgent to claim not that the failures of our private lives are the result of weak psyches, but rather that the vagaries and miseries of our emotional life are shaped by institutional arrangements… What is wrong are not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but the set of social and cultural tensions and contradictions that have come to structure modern selves and identities.

[…]

The reason why love is so central to our happiness and identity is not far from the reason why it is such a difficult aspect of our experience: both have to do with the ways in which self and identity are institutionalized in modernity… Love contains, mirrors, and amplifies the “entrapment” of the self in the institutions of modernity, institutions, to be sure, shaped by economic and gender relations.

Art from Love Is Walking Hand in Hand by Charles Schulz, 1965

What Marx demonstrated about commodities in the marketplace Illouz aims to demonstrate about the economy of love:

[Love] is shaped and produced by concrete social relations [and] circulates in a marketplace of unequal competing actors… Some people command greater capacity to define the terms in which they are loved than others.

Illouz argues that sociology — a discipline, more than any other, “born out of a frantic and anxious questioning about the meaning and consequences of modernity” — is the most revelatory lens through which to examine how modern life, marked by the period beginning at the end of WWI, has restructured the romantic self. Nearly a century after Bertrand Russell’s inquiry into why religion arose in human life and what is supplanting it, she considers how the displacement of religion by secular culture has impacted our ideals and our interior experience of love:

Modernity sobered people up from the powerful but sweet delusions and illusions that had made the misery of their lives bearable. Devoid of these fantasies, we would lead our lives without commitment to higher principles and values, without the fervor and ecstasy of the sacred, without the heroism of saints, without the certainty and orderliness of divine commandments, but most of all without those fictions that console and beautify.

Such sobering up is nowhere more apparent than in the realm of love, which for several centuries in the history of Western Europe had been governed by the ideals of chivalry, gallantry, and romanticism. The male ideal of chivalry had one cardinal stipulation: to defend the weak with courage and loyalty. The weakness of women was thus contained in a cultural system in which it was acknowledged and glorified because it transfigured male power and female frailty into lovable qualities… Women’s social inferiority could thus be traded for men’s absolute devotion in love, which in turn served as the very site of display and exercise of their masculinity, prowess, and honor. More: women’s dispossession of economic and political rights was accompanied (and presumably compensated) by the reassurance that in love they were not only protected by men but also superior to them. It is therefore unsurprising that love has been historically so powerfully seductive to women; it promised them the moral status and dignity they were otherwise denied in society and it glorified their social fate: taking care of and loving others, as mothers, wives, and lovers. Thus, historically, love was highly seductive precisely because it concealed as it beautified the deep inequalities at the heart of gender relationships.

[…]

To perform gender identity and gender struggles is to perform the institutional and cultural core dilemmas and ambivalence of modernity, dilemmas that are organized around the key cultural and institutional motives of authenticity, autonomy, equality, freedom, commitment, and self-realization. To study love is not peripheral but central to the study of the core and foundation of modernity.

As sexuality became unmoored from morality, love became a currency for social mobility. Illouz places this shift alongside the Scientific Revolution, the invention of the printing press, and the rise of capitalism in its effects on our lives and our basic experience of identity. She writes:

While love has played a considerable role in the formation of what historians call “affective individualism,” the story of love in modernity tends to present it as a heroic one, from bondage to freedom. When love triumphs, so this story goes, marriages of convenience and interest disappear, and individualism, autonomy, and freedom are triumphant. Nevertheless, while I agree that romantic love challenged both patriarchy and the family institution, the “pure relationship” also rendered the private sphere more volatile and the romantic consciousness unhappy. What makes love such a chronic source of discomfort, disorientation, and even despair … can be adequately explained only by sociology and by understanding the cultural and institutional core of modernity.

[…]

By juxtaposing the ideal of romantic love with the institution of marriage, modern polities embed social contradictions in our aspirations, contradictions which in turn take a psychological life. The institutional organization of marriage (predicated on monogamy, cohabitation, and the pooling of economic resources together in order to increase wealth) precludes the possibility of maintaining romantic love as an intense and all-consuming passion. Such a contradiction forces agents to perform a significant amount of cultural work in order to manage and reconcile the two competing cultural frames. This juxtaposition of two cultural frames in turn illustrates how the anger, frustration, and disappointment that often inhere in love and marriage have their basis in social and cultural arrangements.

How to reconcile these competing cultural frames and manage the deep, daily frustrations they germinate is what Illouz goes on to explore in the remainder of the illuminating Why Love Hurts. Complement it with philosopher Alain Badiou on how we fall and stay in love and Anna Dostoyevsky on the secret to a happy marriage.

Tod Perry 09.25.19 via Mattel (upworthy.com)

As the world slowly becomes more inclusive about gender expression, so is the toy aisle.

Last year, Mattel, the creators of the ultimate gendered toy, Barbie, did away with “boys” and “girls” toy divisions in favor of non-gendered sections such as “dolls” or “cars.”

Target has also been moving away from gendered toy aisles. Last year, it announced it would phase out gender-based signage from a number of departments, including toys.

While it may appear as though manufacturers and big-box retailers taking a progressive stance, their choices are in total alignment with the market. Millennial parents have a growing interest in purchasing toys and clothing for their children that are gender-neutral.

via Target Corporate

“As millennial parents start families of their own, we see them reconsidering some of the more traditional elements of parenting,” said Dana Macke, associate director of lifestyles and leisure at Mintel, told Market Watch. “As such, brands are trying to bridge this divide by developing toys that meet both kids’ and parents’ gender expectations,” Macke continued.

Mattel has responded to this change in cultural and market norms by launching the Creatable World series of gender-less dolls.

via Mattel

via Mattel

via Mattel

The dolls, which cost $29.99, don’t have broad shoulders like Ken or breasts like Barbie. Creatable World dolls can be played with as a boy, a girl, or neither. They’re slim with androgynous faces and short hair and can be fitted with wigs and a wardrobe consisting of sneakers, graphic tees, hoodies, tutus, or camouflage pants.

“Toys are a reflection of culture and as the world continues to celebrate the positive impact of inclusivity, we felt it was time to create a doll line free of labels,” Kim Culmone, senior vice president of Mattel Fashion Doll Design, said in a press release.

Mattel’s president Richard Dickson insists the Createable World dolls aren’t a political statement.

“We’re not in the business of politics, and we respect the decision any parent makes around how they raise their kids. Our job is to stimulate imaginations. Our toys are ultimately canvases for cultural conversation, but it’s your conversation, not ours; your opinion, not ours,” he told Time.

Creatable Dolls are a welcome addition to the toy aisle because they give children what we all need: more choice and freedom.

Children growing up today are at a wonderful advantage over older generations because they have greater freedom to express themselves however they choose and to feel comfortable and safe doing so. Mattel’s new dolls give them one more way to express themselves and to better relate to those who are different.