Bremer > Recent Status Updates

“Multiply a hundred billion galaxies by a hundred billion stars, and you get a billion trillion stars in the observable universe. That’s a million times more stars than the total number of sounds and words ever uttered by all the humans who have ever lived.”

Notes: verbalizing inner voice to give a child insight into how you think, being descriptive, emphasizing a growth mindset, dialoguing to deal with issues rather than authoritarian "because I said so" approaches, modeling consistent ethical behavior, apologizing for your mistakes in an open way, expecting children to make the same mistakes repeatedly (repetition is important in the learning process), deep listening.

From infancy on, caregivers have to consistently develop empathetic, loving, honest, open, non-judgmental patterns of communication with children, so that these children can live from secure attachments.

They must acknowledge their feelings and engage them respectfully. Especially in early childhood, a child’s brain is rapidly growing neuronally. Every experience matters in the shaping of their potential.

“They teach [the child] gentleness and beat him; they teach him mildness of speech and shout at him; they teach him a Stoic apathy to finance and quarrel before him about the division of their income; they teach him honesty and answer his most profound questions with lies. Our children bring us up by showing us, through imitation, what we really are.”

“I know that life is in its basis a mystery; a river flowing from an unseen source and in its development an infinite subtlety; a dome of many-colored glass, too complex for thought, much less for utterance.

And yet the thirst for unity draws me eternally on.”

"Their musical names remained forever fixed on the American land, but their bones were forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders. Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered."

"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future."

"No man is invincible, and therefore no man can fully understand that which would make him invincible. Even with complete and thorough study there is always the possibility of being defeated and although one may be expert in a particular form, mastery is something a man never stops seeking to attain."

Motivation may be a spark to get your fire going, but where will motivation be when you feel lazy, when you're tired from working a twelve-hour shift, when you pass the month-marker of your New Year's Resolution? What matters more than motivation is doing something that you're uncomfortable or afraid of doing every day. Building on rituals of discomfort until you callus your mind. Self-discipline to reach excellence.

"In practicing meditation, we're not trying to live up to some kind of ideal--quite the opposite. We're just being with our experience, whatever that is... Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives."

"...going into the areas of society that he has rejected is the only way to make friends with the parts of himself that he's rejected. It's all interrelated. We work on ourselves in order to help others, but we also help others in order to work on ourselves."

Time lost never returns,
life is lived only once, not
in preparation for a future,
but as it is. As it is.