Adele, a magical voice.....

A while ago, I was introduced to Adele by a musician. I say musician, because without his technical comments I am not sure I would appreciate Adele's voice to the maximum degree. I love her Brit accent;  her exquisite timing; and the thrilling and nearly palpable ease with rolling scales, and musical acrobatics. What hearing her evokes in me , and the constant chills that I feel with any of her songs make her my favorite artist. Below says it all better than I ever could.

Adele

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other people named Adele, see Adele (given name). For other uses, see Adele (disambiguation).

Adele MBE
Adele at her Adele Live 2016 concert tour, March 2016
Born	Adele Laurie Blue Adkins[1] 5 May 1988 (age 29) Tottenham, London, England
Alma mater	BRIT School
Occupation	Singer songwriter
Spouse(s)	Simon Konecki (m. 2017)
Children	1
Website	adele.com
Musical career
Genres	Soul pop blue-eyed soul[2] R&B[3]
Instruments	Vocals guitar drums bass
Years active	2006–present
Labels	XL Columbia
Signature
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins MBE (/əˈdɛl/; born 5 May 1988) is an English singer-songwriter. After graduating from the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology in 2006, Adele was given a recording contract by XL Recordings after a friend posted her demo on Myspace the same year. In 2007, she received the Brit Awards "Critics' Choice" award and won the BBC Sound of 2008 poll. Her debut album, 19, was released in 2008 to commercial and critical success. It is certified seven times platinum in the UK, and three times platinum in the US. The album contains her first song, "Hometown Glory", written when she was 16, which is based on her home suburb of West Norwood in London. An appearance she made on Saturday Night Live in late 2008 boosted her career in the US. At the 51st Grammy Awards in 2009, Adele received the awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

She released her second studio album, 21, in early 2011. The album was critically well received and surpassed the success of her debut, earning the singer numerous awards in 2012, among them a record-tying six Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year; two Brit Awards, including British Album of the Year, and three American Music Awards. The album has been certified 16 times platinum in the UK, and is the Adele possesses a contralto vocal range.^[180] Rolling Stone reported that following throat surgery her voice had become "palpably bigger and purer-toned", and that she had added a further four notes to the top of her range.^[179] Initially, critics suggested that her vocals were more developed and intriguing than her songwriting, a sentiment with which Adele agreed.^[181] She has stated: "I taught myself how to sing by listening to Ella Fitzgerald for acrobatics and scales, Etta James for passion and Roberta Flack for control."^[182] Her voice has received acclaim from critics. In a review of 19, The Observer said, "The way she stretched the vowels, her wonderful soulful phrasing, the sheer unadulterated pleasure of her voice, stood out all the more; little doubt that she's a rare singer".^[183] BBC Music wrote, "Her melodies exude warmth, her singing is occasionally stunning and, ...she has tracks that make Lily Allen and Kate Nash sound every bit as ordinary as they are."^[184]For their reviews of 21, The New York Times' chief music critic Jon Pareles commended the singer's emotive timbre, comparing her to Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, and Annie Lennox: "[Adele] can seethe, sob, rasp, swoop, lilt and belt, in ways that draw more attention to the song than to the singer".^[185] Ryan Reed of Paste magazine regarded her voice as "a raspy, aged-beyond-its-years thing of full-blooded beauty",^[186] while MSN Music's Tom Townshend declared her "the finest singer of [our] generation".^[187]

 In the US, it has held the top position longer than any album since 1985, and is certified diamond. The album has sold over 31 million copies worldwide. The success of 21 earned Adele numerous mentions in the Guinness Book of World Records. She is the first woman in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 to have three simultaneous top 10 singles as a lead artist, and the first female artist to simultaneously have two albums in the top five of the Billboard 200 and two singles in the top five of the Billboard Hot 100. 21 is the longest-running number one album by a female solo artist in the history of the UK and US Album Charts.

In 2012, Adele released "Skyfall", which she co-wrote and recorded for the James Bond film of the same name. The song won an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, as well as the Brit Award for British Single of the Year. After taking a three-year break, Adele released her third studio album, 25, in 2015. It became the year's best-selling album and broke first week sales records in the UK and US. 25 was her second album to be certified diamond in the US and earned her five Grammy Awards, including her second Grammy Award for Album of the Year, and four Brit Awards. The lead single, "Hello", became the first song in the US to sell over one million digital copies within a week of its release. Her third concert tour, Adele Live 2016, visited Europe, North America and Oceania, and will conclude with four finale concerts at Wembley Stadium in mid-2017.

In 2011, 2012 and 2016, Billboard named Adele Artist of the Year. In 2012, she was listed at number five on VH1's 100 Greatest Women in Music. Time magazine named her one of the most influential people in the world in 2012 and 2016. With sales of more than 100 million records, Adele is one of the best-selling recording artists in the world.^[4]

Adele possesses a contralto vocal range.^[180] Rolling Stone reported that following throat surgery her voice had become "palpably bigger and purer-toned", and that she had added a further four notes to the top of her range.^[179] Initially, critics suggested that her vocals were more developed and intriguing than her songwriting, a sentiment with which Adele agreed.^[181] She has stated: "I taught myself how to sing by listening to Ella Fitzgerald for acrobatics and scales, Etta James for passion and Roberta Flack for control."^[182] Her voice has received acclaim from critics. In a review of 19, The Observer said, "The way she stretched the vowels, her wonderful soulful phrasing, the sheer unadulterated pleasure of her voice, stood out all the more; little doubt that she's a rare singer".^[183] BBC Music wrote, "Her melodies exude warmth, her singing is occasionally stunning and, ...she has tracks that make Lily Allen and Kate Nash sound every bit as ordinary as they are."^[184]For their reviews of 21, The New York Times' chief music critic Jon Pareles commended the singer's emotive timbre, comparing her to Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, and Annie Lennox: "[Adele] can seethe, sob, rasp, swoop, lilt and belt, in ways that draw more attention to the song than to the singer".^[185] Ryan Reed of Paste magazine regarded her voice as "a raspy, aged-beyond-its-years thing of full-blooded beauty",^[186] while MSN Music's Tom Townshend declared her "the finest singer of [our] generation".^[187]

Happy Fathers' Day for Estranged Dads Everywhere by Joshua Coleman

I work with one of the most heartbroken groups of people in the world: fathers whose adult children want nothing to do with them. While every day has its challenges, Father's Day-with its parade of families and feel-good ads-makes it especially difficult for these Dads to avoid the feelings of shame, guilt and regret always lurking just beyond the reach of that well-practiced compartmentalization. Like birthdays, and other holidays, Father's Day creates the wish, hope, or prayer that maybe today, please today, let me hear something, anything from my kid.

Many of these men are not only fathers but grandfathers who were once an intimate part of their grandchildren's lives. Or, more tragically, they discovered they were grandfathers through a Facebook page, if they hadn't yet been blocked. Or, they learn from an unwitting relative bearing excited congratulations, now surprised by the look of grief and shock that greets the newly announced grandfather. Hmm, what did I do with those cigars I put aside for this occasion?

And it's not just being involved as a grandfather that gets denied. The estrangement may foreclose the opportunity to celebrate other developmental milestones he always assumed he'd attend, such as college graduations, engagement parties, or weddings. Maybe he was invited to the wedding but told he wouldn't get to walk his daughter down the aisle because that privilege was being reserved for her father-in-law whom she's decided is a much better father than he ever was.

Most people assume that a Dad would have to do something pretty terrible to make an adult child not want to have contact. My clinical experience working with estranged parents doesn't bear this out. While those cases clearly exist, many parents get cut out as a result of the child needing to feel more independent and less enmeshed with the parent or parents. A not insignificant number of estrangements are influenced by a troubled or compelling son-in-law or daughter-in-law. Sometimes a parent's divorce creates the opportunity for one parent to negatively influence the child against the other parent, or introduce people who compete for the parent's love, attention or resources. 

In a highly individualistic culture such as ours, divorce may cause the child to view a parent more as an individual with relative strengths and weaknesses rather than a family unit of which they're a part.

Little binds adult children to their parents today beyond whether or not the adult child wants that relationship. And a not insignificant number decide that they don't.

While my clinical work hasn't shown fathers to be more vulnerable to estrangement than mothers, they do seem to be more at risk of a lower level of investment from their adult children. 

So, yes, let's take a moment to celebrate fathers everywhere. And another to feel empathy for those Dads who won't have any contact with their child on Father's Day.

Or any other day.

The Art of Buddhist Inquiry - by Jack Elias, CHT

Jack Elias, CHT is a longtime Buddhist practitioner, author, and certified NLP practitioner. Jack is founder and director of the Institute for Therapeutic Learning. He was an early Western student of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He writes Finding True Magic, the blog.

Recently, while reading Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche’s blog entitled “Is Buddhism a Religion?” I was surprised by the number of comments below the blog post that seemed to have a strident or combative tone. I was reminded of what my Buddhist teachers taught about how to relate to questions and the art of inquiry.

There are many perspectives you can take on the question, “Is Buddhism a religion?” A good Buddhist response to the question might be, “So what if it is? So what if it isn’t?” Once when asked “What is Zen?” my teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi answered, “Whatever you say, that is Zen. Whatever you say, that is not Zen.” Then, Roshi would say, “Do you understand?” Our blank stares gave the answer.

With a mischievous chuckle, Roshi would begin to explain that words can’t contain the whole truth. When we use words to talk about the truth, it’s like pointing a finger at the moon. So becoming attached to a particular answer to a question is like thinking that only your finger – and no one else’s – can point at the moon. If two people think this way, they end up fighting about their fingers, and forget all about the moon.

In the stream of comments on Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche’s blog post, there was more than one instance of furious finger-fighting. (Oh my god. I hope I’m not finger-fighting right now.)

An important element in a Buddhist approach to this or any question is to be mindful of the effect the question has on you. How and where does your mind move when you hear it and consider it? In what way are you invested in getting an answer to this question?

When I think of the question, “Is Buddhism a religion?” I see how answering either “yes” and “no” would leave out important aspects of Buddhism that are extremely rich, aspects I wouldn’t want to lose. As long as I keep in mind that yes is not a jail and no is not a jail, I’m free to appreciate that the answer is both yes and no. Yes and no are each a valid entryway into what Buddhism has to offer.

One person may hear a statement like ‘Buddhism is a religion’ and feel very comfortable, while another may hear it and “go ‘round the bend.” If you remember that words only have the meaning we give to them, then you can appreciate any question (or statement) as a mirror that you look into, to see how your mind is working.

If you try to settle a question with a final answer, or start defending a particular statement, you destroy the mirror. You miss the opportunity to see more deeply into the workings of your mind.

A while back, one of my hypnotherapy students became extremely angry at her fellow students for their lack of punctuality in coming to class. When she couldn’t take it another minute, she began voicing her frustration with them, defending her position with ideas of right and wrong, rude and polite, considerate and inconsiderate, and so on. Everyone in class became annoyed with her for making a mountain out of a molehill.

Because it’s an experiential class, I asked her to focus on her anger and look into it, to see if the anger might have a deeper cause than being offended by others’ rudeness. With a little help, she soon remembered being a little girl in Germany during World War II. She had been visiting her grandparents in the country and had missed the train home. Back in the city, much later than usual, she arrived to find that her home had been destroyed by Allied bombs and her parents killed. If only she had been on time! Maybe she could have had those last precious moments with her parents. She broke into sobs.

When her classmates heard this story and witnessed her grief, their irritation with her dissolved. And because she had discovered the real reason for her irritation with them — the real answer to the real question — she was released from her desperate obsession with being on time.

Everyone in the class now changed their attitude about being on time. Punctuality stopped being a rule to be enforced by some and selfishly ignored, or rebelled against, by others. Classmates stopped seeing each other as being right or wrong, or good or bad depending upon their choice to be on time or to be late to class. Because choosing to make the effort to be punctual was no longer a point of contention, it became an opportunity to support each other with compassion.

If you think of questions as a way to greater clarity and freedom, it changes the way you relate to them. Instead of trying to defend one right answer (for example, “punctuality” being the answer to “lateness”) you contemplate. You ask yourself, “Is this my real question? Is this the real answer?” In this inquiry, your questions and answers become stepping stones to a more profound Q & A.

Questions and answers in Buddhism are not meant to settle any matter. Their purpose is to sharpen the intellect and to awaken the best in the human heart/mind by removing confused thinking. When you use Q&A in this way, you find both healing and liberation.

So . . . Is Buddhism a religion? Is it important to be on time? Is reality for or against you?

May you discover why you care about the questions and answers you really care about. May you go beyond enforcing, ignoring, and rebelling against rules and doctrines. May your questions and answers become contemplations that bring you healing and freedom.

DAVID GRAY ...Disappearing World.... with Lyrics

The Profound Psychological Shift That Frees People from Perfectionism by Drake Baer

Here’s The Profound Psychological Shift That Frees People From Perfectionism

“It’s not a way of thinking. It’s a way of being in the world.”

About two decades ago, a woman knocked on the door of Paul Hewitt, a clinical psychologist based in Vancouver, Canada. Outwardly, Anita — the pseudonym given in Hewitt’s new book — had everything meticulously together: she told her therapist of an idyllic childhood, the supportive family she came from, the daughter she felt close to, her broad network of friends. But the loss of her mom, who was her closest friend and confidant, was a big blow to her; it had happened ten years earlier, and was a continued source of hurt and anger. More recently, she’d injured her shoulder, forcing her out of her career in food science. However successful she appeared, she was actually suicidal and depressed.

She had tried many treatments to deal with her depression and thoughts of suicide, but none worked; she used the “runner’s highs” from long distance swimming as a way to cope with her loss, though the shoulder injury ended that. Few people in her life knew the depth of her pain. She had come to Hewitt because he’d heard an interview with the University of British Columbia psychologist where he talked about the links between depression, suicide, and perfectionism.

“She was one of the most suicidal people I’ve ever worked with,” he tells Thrive Global. Anita’s transformation serves as the central case study in the new book Perfectionism: A Relational Approach to Conceptualization, Assessment, and Treatment, co-authored by Hewitt’s frequent collaborator Gordon Flett, of York University, and the private clinical psychologist Samuel F. Mikail.

Over the past three decades, these researchers have found that far from being a quirk of high-achievers, an innocent humblebrag you give to job interviewers when they ask you what your greatest weakness is (“I’m sometimes a perfectionist”)—this way of approaching life creates or amplifies all sorts of mental health issues. It also signals a problematic relationship with the self. “It’s not a way of thinking,” Hewitt says. “It’s a way of being in the world.”

As they understand it, perfectionism isn’t about perfecting things: your job, a specific project, the way you look, or a relationship. At a fundamental level, it’s about perfecting the self, and this urge doesn’t come from a healthy place: “All components and dimensions of perfectionism ultimately involve attempts to perfect an imperfect self,” the authors write.

Perfectionism is an “epidemic,” Flett tells Thrive Global, and one that is growing. In recent studies of both American and Australian adolescents, 3 in 10 high schoolers displayed some sort of unhealthy perfectionism. It is also life endangering: a 2009 paper tracked 450 older Canadians over six and half years, and found that people with higher scores on perfectionism were more likely to die.

Perfectionism is implicated in eating disorders. It appears to make it harder for people to cope with chronic illness, like irritable bowel disease, fibromyalgia, and recovery from heart disease and traumatic brain injury. In cancer patients, perfectionism is related to greater symptoms of anxiety, depression and insomnia. Perfectionists do a lot of “emotional preoccupation coping,” or ruminating about what’s wrong, rehashing what could have been otherwise. The influential Yale psychologist Sidney Blatt found perfectionism to lead to self-critical depression, and multiple studies have found links between perfectionism and attempted or completed suicide.

While perfectionism is popularly thought to drive achievement, anecdotes and research indicate that its problematic forms get in the way of sustainable success. Flett holds up Brian Wilson, the creative genius behind the Beach Boys’ best work, as a prime example. Though Wilson made what is considered one of the greatest albums — if not the greatest — of all time, he drove himself to a nervous breakdown for not being able to top the Beatles as the greatest ever. (Rolling Stone puts Pet Sounds as number two all-time; Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is number one.) That’s part of why the myth that perfectionism drives success is so off: perfectionists are more anxious about their work. In a self-aware 2010 study, Hewitt, Flett and their colleagues found that among 1,2000 psychology professors, those who strive for perfection and hold unrealistic expectations for themselves were “less likely to produce publications, receive citations, and publish in high-impact journals.”

The lesson: if mistakes are unacceptable, it’s going to be hard to get things done. You’ll be more likely to procrastinate, since you can’t do badly on things you haven’t yet started.

It starts early: in Perfectionism, the authors report that they can reliably and meaningfully assess perfectionism in kids as young as seven years-old. They interpret perfectionism to be an outgrowth of a child’s attachment style — which, to put it briefly, is the way kids (and the adults they turn into) are taught to assume relationships work, through their interactions with their mother or primary caregiver. Predictably, perfectionism gets passed down from one generation to another.

“Think about the child as a learning machine,” Hewitt says. “A three year old can learn a second language, no problem whatsoever. They learn everything about everything.” Early on — before they can speak, and before lots of episodic memory takes hold, children are learning if being too close or wandering far away makes their mother anxious, whether people are there to help them with things and soothe them when they’re upset, or if others are dangerous and powerful.

“For some of these kids, they’ll develop a sense that they’re not worthy, that there’s some flaw, defect, or otherwise something wrong with them,” Hewitt says.

An assumption starts taking foot: If I’m perfect, I won’t be rejected, ridiculed, abused — I’ll be loved and accepted. It’s an unconscious negotiation they make with the world: If I’m perfect, all this good stuff will happen, all these needs will be met — and their frequently difficult relationships with parents, siblings, and peers will become easier. His clients will often say that they’ve needed to be perfect for as long as they can remember, that they were never good enough, so they were always striving. “Perfectionism develops as a way to cope with that defective sense of self and a sense of not fitting in with others, not fitting in with the world, not having a place in the world,” Hewitt says.

These themes were certainly present with Anita. Early in her treatment, she recalled a memory from her childhood. At about age five, for reasons that were hazy, she and her sister were sent to away from their mom and dad to live with some relatives for a few months. The anecdote came up several times during therapy, with more details coming out each session. She recalled feeling upset, alone, abandoned, and unable to comprehend why she would be living away from her parents. Then, in another session, another scene emerged: the sight of her mom coming off the plane, and how beautiful she looked as she came to gather her and her sister up. In recalling the memory, it was obvious this was a significant experience for her, but she couldn’t quite tell why.

Over time, it became clear that being separated from mom was a significant experience for Anita. This was the pivotal moment where her perfectionism took root. She realized something about that experience she had as a child: following it, she became committed to never doing anything that might prompt that feeling of separation from her mother again.

As an adult, she arranged her life to be as much like her mother’s as possible: working in the same field when she was still alive, then eventually the same facility. When she and her husband were first married, they rented a room from their parents, then moved down the street. Being over-responsible for others’ welfare was another expression of this, since she’d never want to do anything to make her mother upset with her, and the perfectionism was a way to secure her mother’s ongoing affections.

Though she had organized her life around keeping her mother close to her, death took her mother away. Her swims were a way to deal with this — she’d often fantasize about her mom being alive during euphoric stretches in the water. But with her shoulder injury, that was gone too. The abandonment she’d spent so much of her life staving off came crashing in, along with anxiety, rage, depression, and suicidal impulses. Her commitment to keeping things seemingly perfect patterned her other relationships, too: even in the most extreme places of pain, she never told her friends or family.

This is why, Hewitt says, techniques that just target the way people think — like cognitive behavioral therapy — aren’t a good fit for perfectionism. The way he sees it, the words that compose our mental narratives are expressive of deeper beliefs we have about ourselves. “You can tell the quality of a relationship through the tone of the dialogue,” Hewitt says. “The content of how you’re communicating represents the relationship you have with that person.”

You talk to your boss with a certain style, your partner, your parent, your friends. The tone you use with the listener reflects the relationship you have, and it’s the same deal with the self. Most of our inner dialogue is about taking care of life’s responsibilities — you have to do this, that, and the other thing. That’s like you and your partner getting ready to go work in the morning — who’s going to go to the grocery store, who’s going to take the dog out. But in times of conflict or transition, things can take a deeper, more intimate, and more revealing turn: If you just lost your job or your relationship, what tone do you take with yourself? For people who aren’t perfectionistic, there will be self criticism, but also self soothing. But for perfectionistic people, it can be all scalding censure.

Doing psychotherapy with these people is extremely emotional, Hewitt says — for him and the patient alike. The stories are hard. A main goal is to help people to see that they have a relationship with themselves — a task that in itself is like explaining water to fish — and through that relationship, move to self-acceptance. But this is easier said than done, and you can’t just command someone to have a more agreeable internal life if they’ve spent a lifetime doing otherwise. “These people are hugely hard on themselves, with a hatred that is breathtaking at times,” Hewitt says — perfectionistic people will treat themselves like with a harshness on par with “a nasty adult beating the crap out of a tiny child.”

One key task for Hewitt as a therapist, then, is to find the right moment to help his patients to perceive their own self-regard. When the right teachable moment presents itself, he’ll ask clients to imagine their four-year-old selves, and remember how much pain they were in — how hard they were trying to fit in, how hard they wanted to feel better, to feel loved, how to make their parents or siblings or peers care for them.

If you could leave my office right now, and run into your four year-old self, knowing how much pain that four year old was in, what would you do? Hewitt will asks his patients. Often, the patient will say that they’d put their arms around the kid, and tell them they’re OK the way they are. But what do they actually do to themselves? Curse, swear, kick and scream. “That internal dialogue — ’I should have done this perfectly, I should be doing that, I’m horrible, I’m awful, I’m the most stupid,’ stuff like that — that represents that inner relationship with self,” Hewitt says.

You don’t just tell a perfectionistic person stop being so critical. Like physical pain, this harsh self-dialogue is a symptom of an underlying issue, and taking a painkiller when you have appendicitis isn’t going to be much help. “The symptom is a message to you, saying there’s something wrong in your abdomen,” Hewitt says. That’s why, in his sessions with patients, they don’t really talk about “perfectionism,” they discuss the underlying issues — the attachment, the longing for deeper connections with others, a sense of defectiveness with the self. “We want them to understand the purposes their symptoms serve,” he says. Once you understand the perfectionism’s function— a way of seeking security, love, self worth — then you can understand the deeper emotional machinery underlying a behavior.

The work with Anita focused on two levels: identifying how her perfectionism protected her from abandonment and then getting to a place where she could truly understand that she didn’t lose her mother because she wasn’t good enough — neither as a kid moving away to live with relatives, nor as an adult, with her mother’s death to cancer. That involves, of course, a ton of self-acceptance and self-compassion, two things that perfectionists tend to have a tough time with. For Anita, it worked: her depression and suicide diminished, her relationships got better, with no relapse. To this day, Hewitt gets a Christmas card every year. She thanks him for another year she has with her family.