ALEXA PELLEGRINI: “Psychic Housekeeping: How To Banish Negativity From Your Space”

When negative psychic energy accumulates within your home, you may feel easily tired, emotionally imbalanced, and struggle with maintaining relationships or holding down a job without realizing why. The answer is simple: like our bodies and spirits, our homes must be cleansed of negativity, too!

Clearing out negative energy in your home is the best way to finally make way for the new and improve your quality of life.

Smudge with Herbs For Optimal Cleansing

Smudging with sage is a classic way to free your home of troublesome energy, and it’s easy to buy for cheap. Sage is the perfect tool to use during times of crisis in your household. You can also smudge with your own blend of herbs by using an incense burner with a charcoal disk or a dish filled with sand. I recommend blending sandalwood, mistletoe, lavender and sage. Sandalwood generates loving energies; mistletoe increases your resolve to banish negativity; and lavender purifies toxic influences in your environment. Here is a smudging exercise to bless your home:

1. Prepare your sage or blend of herbs. Take caution to ensure that your materials are in a safe location when burning.
   • You may want to meditate beforehand to prepare yourself for the exercise.
2. As you light your sage or herbs, picture the rising smoke as a magnet for negativity. Visualize the smoke drawing in a visible darkness and clearing the way for beams of light. Begin in your room, then work your way downstairs.
   
   • It may help to use mantras while smudging. ‘I banish negativity from my home’ is one mantra that may work.
     
3. Finish the exercise at the back door of your home. Open the door and visualize the negative energy in your home exiting out the door.
4. Block this negative energy from reentering your home by hanging a protective amulet, such as the Hamsa, Evil Eye or a purifying stone (i.e., Clear Crystal Quartz) at the front and back doors.
   

Ward Off Negativity with Joyful Speech

When family members are frequently depressed, angry and unable to help themselves, don’t get caught up in their negativity –  try chanting a compassionate prayer or mantra to bring light into your loved one’s life. The positive energy released during this recitation will act as a healing influence on your home and as psychic protection from a loved one’s negative emotions.

Using Stones for Purification and Grounding

• Clear crystal quartz is one of the best stones to use to eliminate negative energy from your home. This stone’s high vibrations free  trapped energy that needs to be released – it’s particularly helpful when you have suffered the loss of a loved one or if you or a family member have chronic illness. Place shards of the stone in the corners of each room in your home.

• Snowflake Obsidian centers the mind and body while stabilizing energetic influences in your inner and external environments. Placing Snowflake Obsidian around your home will soothe energetic imbalances and filter out negative energy before it arises and gets trapped in your space.
• Hematite is a grounding stone that will protect you against psychic vampires and the negative emotions of other people in your space. Are you going mad from difficult in-laws or a troublesome guest? Wear a Hematite pendant to recenter yourself and bring peace and good karma into your home, even in the presence of difficult relatives.

Drain Dark Energy with Plants

Flowers have healing properties that will liven up a dark space and boost your spirit. These tiny powerhouses of energy pack a strong punch in combatting negativity – plants are strong enough to filter out harmful influences without withering. Start a garden in your windowsill, or place a few potted plants around different rooms of your house. Draw open the curtains to feed your plants and bring warmth and light into your home.

©Universal Copyright 2015 is authorized here. Please distribute freely as long as both the author Alexa Pellegrini and www.QuantumStones.com are included as the resource and this information is distributed on a non-commercial no charge basis.

JOE BATTAGLIA: “If You Want To Accelerate Brain Development In Children — Teach Them Music”

Alternative and complementary treatments such as creative art, meditation, and yoga have been proposed to bridge many gaps that conventional medicine cannot. But music, because of its ubiquity in our society as well as its ease of transmission, has perhaps the greatest potential among alternative therapies to reach people in deep and profound ways. Music matters and it heals.

Music instruction appears to accelerate brain development in young children, particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for processing sound, language development, speech perception and reading skills, according to initial results of a five-year study by USC neuroscientists.

We now know through controlled treatment outcome studies that listening to and playing music is a potent treatment for mental health issues. 400 published scientific papers have proven the old adage that “music is medicine.”

Research demonstrates that adding music therapy to treatment improves symptoms and social functioning among schizophrenics. Further, music therapy has demonstrated efficacy as an independent treatment for reducing depression, anxiety and chronic pain.

The Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) at USC began the five-year study in 2012 in partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and the Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) to examine the impact of music instruction on children’s social, emotional and cognitive development.

These initial study results, published recently in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, provide evidence of the benefits of music education at a time when many schools around the nation have either eliminated or reduced music and arts programs. The study shows music instruction speeds up the maturation of the auditory pathway in the brain and increases its efficiency.

“We are broadly interested in the impact of music training on cognitive, socio-emotional and brain development of children,” said Assal Habibi, the study’s lead author and a senior research associate at the BCI in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “These results reflect that children with music training, compared with the two other comparison groups, were more accurate in processing sound.”

For this longitudinal study, the neuroscientists are monitoring brain development and behavior in a group of 37 children from underprivileged neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

Thirteen of the children, at 6 or 7 years old, began to receive music instruction through the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles program at HOLA. The community music training program was inspired by the El Sistema method, one that LA Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel had been in when he was growing up in Venezuela.

Learning the Violin
The children earn to play instruments, such as the violin, in ensembles and groups, and they practice up to seven hours a week.

The scientists are comparing the budding musicians with peers in two other groups: 11 children in a community soccer program, and 13 children who are not involved in any specific after-school programs.

The neuroscientists are using several tools to monitor changes in them as they grow: MRI to monitor changes through brain scans, EEG to track electrical activity in the brains, behavioral testing and other such techniques.

Within two years of the study, the neuroscientists found the auditory systems of children in the music program were maturing faster in them than in the other children. The fine-tuning of their auditory pathway could accelerate their development of language and reading, as well as other abilities – a potential effect which the scientists are continuing to study.

The enhanced maturity reflects an increase in neuroplasticity – a physiological change in the brain in response to its environment – in this case, exposure to music and music instruction.

“The auditory system is stimulated by music,” Habibi said. “This system is also engaged in general sound processing that is fundamental to language development, reading skills and successful communication.”

Ear to Brain
The auditory system connects our ear to our brain to process sound. When we hear something, our ears receive it in the form of vibrations that it converts into a neural signal. That signal is then sent to the brainstem, up to the thalamus at the center of the brain, and outward to its final destination, the primary auditory cortex, located near the sides of the brain.

The progress of a child’s developing auditory pathway can be measured by EEG, which tracks electrical signals, specifically those referred to as “auditory evoked potentials.”

In this study, the scientists focused on an evoked potential called P1. They tracked amplitude – the number of neurons firing – as well as latency – the speed that the signal is transmitted. Both measures infer the maturity of the brain’s auditory pathways.

As children develop, both amplitude and the latency of P1 tend to decrease. This means that that they are becoming more efficient at processing sound.

At the beginning of the study and again two years later, the children completed a task measuring their abilities to distinguish tone. As the EEG was recording their electrical signals, they listened to violin tones, piano tones and single-frequency (pure) tones played.

The children also competed a tonal and rhythm discrimination task in which they were asked to identify similar and different melodies. Twice, they heard 24 melodies in randomized order and were asked to identify which ones differed in tone and rhythm, and which were the same in tone and rhythm.

Children who were in the youth orchestra program were more accurate at detecting pitch changes in the melodies than the other two groups. All three groups were able to identify easily when the melodies were the same. However, children with music training had smaller P1 potential amplitude compared to the other children, indicating a faster rate of maturation.

“We observed a decrease in P1 amplitude and latency that was the largest in the music group compared to age-matched control groups after two years of training,” the scientists wrote. “In addition, focusing just on the (second) year data, the music group showed the smallest amplitude of P1 compared to both the control and sports group, in combination with the accelerated development of the N1 component.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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