I find this topsy-turvy market to be an interesting phenomenon. Everybody says doom, doom, doom, and I say, keep the rudder in the water and make life work. It's easy to turn on CNN and become obsessed and confused and pissed off that you could just jump off a bridge. That's ridiculous.

A number of my students are in the real estate business. Lately we've been discussing the current market (at length). Huge mistakes were made on all fronts. Banks were practically throwing money at people, people who had no business accepting variable rates on loans, people who way overestimated how much they could afford in the long run. And now, instead of this being the problem of the banks and the borrowers, somehow it's everyone's problem, the taxpayers' problem.

So what's the solution? Should we tune in and commiserate with the networks at how crippled the economy is? Or ponder just how horribly crushing this recession is going to be for all of us?

I'm not very fond of the media. First of all, there's not much to it beyond entertainment these days anyway, and it's really just tidbits of "news" mixed up with salacious celebrity gossip (or even more salacious political gossip) but aside from that, I think it poisons the well for us to try to make positive change and have positive frames around our shared reality. As a collective conscious and collective unconscious, we have been duped into believing that we have no impact on the world around us, no power to make significant change.

In my quest to counteract the negativity, I read. The most recent book I picked up is called "Train Your Brain, Change Your Mind" by Sharon Begley. It's about the transformational ability of the mind and combines neuroscience with Tibetan Buddhism, and mindfulness. I'm inspired and worked up over this book and I'm only on page ten.

Our brains have the ability to heal and adapt to trauma, accidents, and can even reverse the negative programming we've been subjected to in different areas (the media being one of them). When we have intention and pay attention to what's really going on, not what's going on in the frames that others set for us, then we can make seismic changes in ourselves, changes which ripple into those around us, which move exponentially outward.

Oftentimes, spirituality and science have been at odds. We see this with the evolution v. creationism battle that is still being waged (and the wrongfully perceived "compromise" of intelligent design). But finally, neuroscience and the spiritual practice of Buddhism (which I do not practice but have a great respect for) have discovered common ground and are doing incredible things in the mind/body realm helping to transform what used to be problems and diseases that were once thought incurable or were only able to be "fixed" with pharmaceuticals (OCD, autism, dyslexia, depression).

There might not be a huge profit to be made from us fixing ourselves through intention especially for the big pharmaceutical companies, but the real profit is in us rippling out positivity and undermining the negative things that are being spoon fed to us.