【推荐1】Amazing Benefits of Listening to Music during Meditation (冥想)

There are many benefits of listening to music during meditation. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should! It is not only relaxing but also beneficial for your mental health.     1    

Reduce Stress

One of its benefits is a reduction in the levels of stress and anxiety.     2     If your workload is very demanding, it is very natural for you to feel stressed-out often. When you listen to pleasant and soft music during meditation, you will feel calmer and remove stress from your life.

Balance Your Emotions

    3     Listening to music while meditating can help you balance your emotions. People who meditate while regularly listening to music can balance their lives. They are better in dealing with emotions. In fact, they can improve their relationships and heal wounds quicker than those who don’t take this beautiful practice.

Inspire You

When you listen to music while meditating, you feel inspired. This brings about a good feeling, and you can relax and enjoy yourself. You will also feel great about yourself. This is a great inspiration to someone who has lost hope in life.     4    

Wonderful, wasn’t it? The journey through music and meditation is something we should all try. Your body, mind, and soul will connect with each other.     5     Right from the moment you start meditating with the help of music, you will notice changes.

【推荐2】How to deal with stress

Have you ever felt stressed? Well, you are not alone, as every person in the world has to face stress at one time or another.     1     Here are some strategies for dealing with stress and pressure.

    2     To get rid of this feeling, keep yourself organized. For example, you could keep a daily organizer and plan your activities.     3     Do not get caught up in minor issues that only create additional work for you. Break tasks down into manageable bits and tackle them one by one or step by step. Proper planning also helps you avoid the stress of doing things at the eleventh hour.

Besides that, taking time to relax can help you ease stress. Doing things that you like such as listening to music, taking a walk, or reading a book can take your mind off things that bother you.     4     After a short break, you will feel refreshed and more able to tackle a problem or a piece of work.

Finally, do not set such high standards for yourself and others that it leads to dissatisfaction and pressure. If you aim for perfection all the time, you will end up frustrated and stressed out. Learn to slow down, let go and look at the positive side of things. If you are too uptight about something, you will not be able to think clearly and make good decisions. In addition, you could hurt the people around you. Focus on what has already been done and what is good.     5    

【推荐3】How to Make Friends, According to Science

Friendship is one of life’s most important features, and one too often taken for granted.

The human desire for companionship may feel boundless, but research suggests that our social capital is finite—we can only handle a certain number of relationships at one time. Social scientists have used some creative approaches to measure the size of people’s social networks; these have returned estimates ranging from about 250 to about 5,500 people. Looking more specifically at friendship, a study using the exchange of Christmas cards to test closeness put the average person’s friend group at about 121 people. However vast our networks may be, our inner circle tends to be much smaller. The average American trusts only 10 to 20 people. Moreover, that number may be shrinking: From 1998 to 2017, the average number of trusted friends decreased from three to two. This is both sad and of important consequence, because people who have strong social relationships tend to live longer than those who don’t.

So what should you do if your social life is lacking? Here the research is instructive. To begin with, don’t refuse to consider the humble acquaintance（交情）. Even interacting with people with whom one has weak social ties has a meaningful influence on well-being. Beyond that, building deeper friendships may be largely a matter of putting in time. A recent study out of the University of Kansas found that it takes about 50 hours of socializing to go from acquaintance to casual friend, an additional 40 hours to become a “real” friend, and a total of 200 hours to become a close friend.

If that sounds like too much effort, renewing inactive social ties can be especially rewarding. Reconnected friends can quickly recapture the trust they previously built, while offering each other a dash of novelty（新奇）drawn from whatever they’ve been up to in the meantime. And if all else fails, you could start randomly to tell secrets to people you don’t know that well. Self-disclosure makes us more likable, and as a bonus, we are more likely to favor those to whom we have revealed our soul.

Longing for closeness and connection is common and everywhere, which suggests that most of us are stumbling（跌跌撞撞）through the world, expecting companionship that could be easily provided by the lonesome stumblers all around us. So set aside this article, turn to someone nearby, and try to make a friend.

【推荐1】The Bridegroom’s Oak, a 500-year-old tree just outside of Eutin, in Germany, has its own postal address and receives around 40 letters every day. They’re sent by love seekers from around the world, in the hope that someone will read them and write back.

With so many dating apps(约会软件) and services available nowadays, sending letters to a tree hardly sounds like the best way to find love. However, there’s something charming about sending a letter and allowing fate(命运) to work its magic, so the Bridegroom’s Oak remains popular even now.

In 1890, a local girl named Minna fell in love with a young chocolate maker named Wilhelm, but her father didn’t allow her to see the boy. Instead of giving up on each other, the two started exchanging love letters secretly, by leaving them in a knothole(节孔) of an oak tree. After about one year, Minna’s father found out about their continued relationship, but instead of punishing them, he gave them permission to marry. The two lovers got married on June 2,1891, under the oak tree that helped keep their romance(罗曼史) alive.

The couple’s story spread around Eutin, and soon, people from all over the world who are unable to find love started writing romantic letters and leaving them in the tree’s knothole. However, love seekers visiting the Bridegroom’s Oak need respect only one simple rule. They can check all the letters in its knothole, and take with them the one they wish to reply to, but they have to put the others back for other people to find.

So far the Bridegroom’s Oak has been responsible for at least 100 marriages and many other romantic relationships.

【推荐2】I’m Andrew Siegel and this is my garden. This is where my family and I grow a lot of different vegetables and flowers. Gardening has been really important to my family because it gives us a chance to spend time outside together, away from all the electronics.

Especially for my five-year-old, it really gives her a chance to be in touch with nature-all the little animals, insects and things that come out here.

We find that a lot of the things that we plan for in the garden don’t always go the way that we’d like them to, and some of the things that we don’t plan for become what we enjoy the most that year. So it’s something that my family and I have learned: To appreciate (欣赏) all of it.

My advice for gardening beginners is to just start. Get a pot, get a little bit of dirt, get a tomato plant or whatever plant you want and just get started. I think sometimes it seems challenging. Trust me, it does not need to be perfect. You will enjoy every little thing you get out of it.

Gardening has taught me patience, something I don’t naturally have a lot of. It takes weeks, takes months for you to put into your work and the patience comes out in the end. You learn not only to be patient in that end product, but you’ve also learned that, after years of gardening, the end product is just part of it.

The journey of growing has become much more important to me than the actual product that we get in the end. Nothing has been so valuable as the time I spend out here. I’m by no means in a farmland, but I do have my own little piece of what I consider heaven, and I’ve really learned to appreciate every little moment — every insect, every plant, every flower — and when you can appreciate it in that way, there’s nothing better.