Nataša Pantović's Blog: Nataša Pantović - Posts Tagged "consciousness"

What is Creativity

What is Creativity
Excerpt from Conscious Creativity Book



Conscious Creativity; Mindfulness Meditations

Nataša Nuit Pantović

Creative Thinking as Divine Inspiration or Human Trait

It took some time for the humanity to accept ‘creativity’ as a possible human ‘trait’.



It was during the Renaissance that creativity was first seen, not as a matter of divine inspiration, but as a gift of a great learned man to imitate God’s ability to create. As Prometheus stole the fire of the Gods and brought it to the mankind, humanity needed to steal the secret of ‘creation’ from Gods and understand its essence.

Creative Thinking and Learning the Skill of Creativity

Creativity refers to the invention of any new thing that has value. Someone creative has the ability to learn from traditional ideas and create new ones.



To be creative we have to choose to be different from everyone else...

For the full excerpt please check the Publisher website, Nataša Pantović Nuit Books What is Creativity

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Published on October 01, 2017 04:07 • Tags: alchemy-of-love, alchemy-of-soul, book, conscious-creativity, conscious-life, consciousness, course, creative-being, creative-thinking, creativity, creativity-books, excerpt, inspirational, mind, mindfulness, mindfulness-training, nataša, nonfiction, nuit, pantović, what, what-is-creativity

How to exercise mindfulness

How to exercise mindfulness

"Mindfulness works with continuous awareness of body, breath; feelings, thoughts, intentions. Our state of mind, our positive or negative attitude towards the world, is closely related to our experiences of happiness or suffering. mindfulness is awareness of everything that is happening in the moment of 'Now'. Mindfulness is a self development technique that will change the focus of our mind towards happiness..."

To read the full Mindful Being Book Excerpt please check the Publishers blog How to exercise mindfulness

There’s nothing wrong with getting new books at your local bookstore but if you’re an avid bookworm, then your budget probably can’t handle it if you get all your books there.

Luckily there are plenty of legal ways to get books for free or cheaply and here are some of the best ways to do that.

A Small Revolution - Jimin Han

This is a pleasant surprise. It's a Kindle First book I got a few months ago, along with the audio upgrade, that had so much more to it than I expected. At it's core the story is about four college girls who are held captive by a guy with a gun for reasons that blur between the personal and the political. But this isn't about some rejected college student who wants to take out his anger by showing power, it's more of a hostages make people listen situation.

Yoona is the protagonist and I loved the way she tells the story to Jaesung. It's not done in a way that makes it sound like she is relaying it to him later and that everything is fine. She talks to him as if he is her conscience. Jaesung is another character who is not in the room with them but he is still a part of it. You know from the beginning that Jaesung has something to do with why Lloyd, the gunman, has these girls in this room at gunpoint.

I appreciated Yoona, Jaesung, and Lloyd as characters, as would-be or possible revolutionaries. I loved the niavete they possess and the way each works through that in their own way and the way the interference, or not, of parents rang true to life for me. Some are very involved, others not so much or not at all. I couldn't help but feel for Yoona, not just in that room but as other events became known. Then there's Lloyd's unraveling, what brought him to the place, what motivates his conversations with the negotiator and I loved the negotiator. Much of the book isn't even about the room they are in but the way they all came to be there and these are the scenes that surprised me most.

I enjoyed the story embodied a part of American life by being about people who were the first or second generation to be born in the US, by being about people who still have ties to the land of their parents. I appreciated it as a story about Korean-Americans, which I feel is a group we don't hear much about, but also about Korea and a dorm room in the US. The story elements fit together beautifully and the only thing I would wish to change about it was a little more denouement.

Also, I really love this cover. Its perfectly captures the feel and tone of the story without giving anything away. Every time I see the cover since finishing the book, I get a little wistful about the story and all the characters and everything they wanted to do and everything they wanted to fix about the world.

I fell in love with this series back in December when I read Volume 1, Save Yourself, and had been looking forward to this volume ever since. It did not disappoint. I loved the title for this one and the way it plays into the plot.

First of all, I totally love the theme of the series in general. We have a WOC protagonist who has decided that she has had enough with the status quo and the waiting around and takes matters into her own hands. She even uses the dragon that guarded her castle in place of a mighty stead. I mean, how could I not love it?

So here we catch up with Adrienne and Bedelia, who is her personal blacksmith and sidekick. They are going to save Angelica! Or are they? Is Adrienne the only one to take matters into her own hands? Does Angelica even want saving? Adrienne has many sisters and while it should be easy to expect that they all be different from each other and nuanced and have different points of view, I also know that expectations like that usually end in disappointment.

Not this time. Whitley has created this amazing world for us and gives us sisters who neither think the same nor act the same. The outlooks that Angelica and Adrienne have on their like situations are not at all the same and serve to manifest very different outcomes for themselves and those who come to find them.

Personally, I loved Angelica. I loved getting another view on the subject of being so admired. I loved that the writers decided to just jump right into the alternative point of view and that none of it went in the direction that I expected. I also loved the rest of the family situation and the foreshadowing of the mysterious Black Knight that I have my suspicions about.

As before, the art is wonderful. The way that Angelica is obviously a little older and is more beautiful and even a little sexy without being overdone or exposing anything was impressive. The rest of the art is fun and colorful and keep it obvious that it's an all ages comic. If you haven't jumped in on this series, I suggest you do. I've already started the third volume and plan to post it soon!

I was intrigued with the premise of this work right from the beginning. Well put together and deeply researched, this book goes beyond the simple explanations to get down to the how and why of it all.

I have always hated the term "opting out" and I'm really starting to understand why. I feel like it misunderstands the choice. Opting out makes it sound like women are choosing to disengage from the greater of two goals, when I never believed that to be the case. This book gets into that part of it and even helped me put some better language to my own feelings about it.  

It begins by presenting the reason for the study and then spending some time detailing the reasons why this specific set of women were chosen to be studied for this. Stone exclusively studies married, highly educated, well off, and high achieving white women because they are, theoretically, the women with the least amount of barriers to success in the workplace. None are "opting out" for those reasons we attribute to those who are less off, which are typically attributed to child care costs.

Stone details several reasons why women are not staying at the same workplace they had their kids at and why some appear to be leaving altogether, even when some aren't. They do freelance work or volunteer locally at a professional level. 

The book makes the case that the women are more likely being pushed out of the workplace by policies that make it impossible to be good at mothering or that don't allow women to have a good relationship with their children and then are given permission to give up on their original careers by husbands who aren't under the same pressures to be available for their children and their boss in the same way and at the same time. Mothers and fathers are not looked at in the same light by employers or society at large, so fathers are not typically subject to the double bind that pushes these women out. I thought it was an interesting touch to see their husbands, most of which were similarly qualified at the beginning of their marriages, as a control group. 

The other issues that are discussed in this book alongside the why's and how's are that it's presented as a choice for women to work and therefore a privilege for women to not work. It discusses how it's seen by the women making this choice as an act of feminism rather than a defiance of it. There is also a discussion on identity and whether it is career or parenthood that identifies a person and how these women handle that question too.

Altogether, I found the book interesting and enlightening. It isn't entirely new information for me, but that's mostly on account of countless conversations with women who were also in the double bind and figuring out what to do. It didn't sound like a lot of these women had female peers to talk to about it but I have had plenty of these conversations with women who make significantly less but who are debating whether to continue difficult career paths and several with my husband as we discussed what to do when we were expecting our son. We had the same "one of us will be home with the kids" idea that some of the women in the book had, but ours came to a different conclusion. I was making more, but more important to our decision, I was under a contract that would have been near impossible to get out of. By the time my contract was over, my husband had been home with our son a few years and it would have been ludicrous to try to switch given other life situations.

This is a great book for anyone interested in researching women and the workplace, or simply interested in why women still leave the workplace for family while men still don't do it much. The end gives prescriptions for how workplaces can entice women to stay and reasons it would be good business for them to do so, but even the author has little hope of this happening any time soon.

Its pre-Lean In Movement, in fact, it's referenced in the Lean In book, which was where I first heard about it. It was only used as a reference to the way that women give deference to husband's careers, thus ensuring that husband's will be in better positions to be the one who stays at work after kids are born, but still an important part of the point that Sandberg strives to make as well. Coincidentally, this better position would also give husband's a better standing to bargain from in order to get more time or accomodations for kids, but that's not a typical expectation for them. We still tend to see male careers as important and female careers as options. Workplaces and society both do this and so women's careers suffer, even when the women are committed to them, even when the women don't have the option to opt out. Change needs to happen, but first we need to understand how our problems are created. This book digs in and looks at this one.