Remember CliffNotes from school? (I wouldn’t have made it through High School without them) Well, Imagine a collection of CliffNotes style summaries for personal development and transformation books. That’s exactly what Brian Johnson has created at PhilosophersNotes.com. I just finished “Letters from a Stoic” by Seneca in about 20 minutes. It would have taken me weeks to get through the original text. What a time saver!

Also, on the site, Brian shares 822 Big Ideas, 3,366 Quotes and 29 Videos he’s collected.

Here at The Wild Divine, we see dozens of books, products, gadgets, gizmos, and ideas every week. We only share with the wider Wild Divine community the ones we think are truly valuable. This is one of the most amazing projects we’ve seen. http://www.philosophersnotes.com/

Kyle

Melons and Stress: French Study

Do you like Melons?

A French study has identified a key ingredient in melons called superoxide dismutase, which is thought to have beneficial antioxidant properties which prevent damage to the body’s tissues. The study was published in BioMed Central’s open access Nutrition Journal.

The positive effects on perceived stress and fatigue reported in the group of 35 who took the enzyme capsules were much greater – and much longer lasting than a control group that was given a placebo.

The bottom line seems to emphasize that fruit and vegetables are packed with compounds which, in combination, have a beneficial effect on health.

Click to see the full article on BBC here:

With back-to-school on everyone’s mind, here’s the results of a study that shows positive results from meditation and mindfulness training, two of the core principals in our Healing Rhythms product.

The full text of this study can be read here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17940025

Recent studies suggest that months to years of intensive and systematic meditation training can improve attention. However, the lengthy training required has made it difficult to use random assignment of participants to conditions to confirm these findings. This article shows that a group randomly assigned to 5 days of meditation practice with the integrative body-mind training method shows significantly better attention and control of stress than a similarly chosen control group given relaxation training. The training method comes from traditional Chinese medicine and incorporates aspects of meditation and mindfulness training. Compared with the control group, the experimental group of 40 undergraduate Chinese students given 5 days of 20-min integrative training showed greater improvement in conflict scores on the Attention Network Test, lower anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue, and higher vigor on the Profile of Mood States scale, a significant decrease in stress-related cortisol, and an increase in immunoreactivity. These results provide a convenient method for studying the influence of meditation training by using experimental and control methods similar to those used to test drugs or other interventions.