TED Conferences. You need them.

Your auntie dasch is SEW popular with the populace, especially during the holidays, but something disconcerting keeps happening ... I posted something on my Google+ feed and have been mentioning the contents of the post oot and aboot at some Holiday Swarees of late and, in casual convo, referencing it and other things I've viewed on the TED YouTube Channel and people have been asking me what it is ! I mean well-read-person after finger-on-the-pulse person and they have no idea what I'm talking about with the TED Conferences!  Sew, chilrens, please to let auntie school you, in case you don't know.


TED stands for "Technology Entertainment and Design" and it is a global set of conferences formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading" through "inspired talks by the world's leading thinkers and doers".  My introduction to the site was through this video:

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

 She's LITERALLY a brain surgeon and she LITERALLY, with a PowerPoint Presentation and an actual brain in her hands, walks you through what it was like, from inside and outside, to have a stroke.  It is one of the most amazing things to which I have ever been a witness.  From TED.com:

The annual TED conferences, in Long Beach/Palm Springs and Edinburgh, bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less).

My Google+ post referenced a newish series called TEDx Conferences:

Created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading,” the TEDx program is designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level. TEDx events are fully planned and coordinated independently, on a community-by-community basis

I posted there about this FASCINATING woman, Suzanne Braun Levine, who is writing about "Women in Their Second Adulthood.  She is a "writer, editor and nationally recognized authority on women and family issues and media [who] was the first editor of Ms. magazine and the only woman editor of the Columbia Journalism Review".  You see, your auntie dasch is d'un certain âge, don'tcha know ... that's French for over the hill ... and I'm finding so many parts of her concept speaking to deep parts of my spirit and I found her TEDtalk (below) so interesting because, as she says on her website, "Thousands of women in their fifties, sixties and seventies are living – and defining a totally new narrative. ... we are the first generation who reach 50 and have the possibility of as many years ahead of us as we have lived ..."  I realised if I keep living like I am, I'm not going to live as long as I have and the end part of my life is not going to be too pretty.  I really need to take serious responsibility for my body and in the below clip she says something that has not only healed me viz. diliberately unemploying myself from my last job, but challenged me for the upcoming year:

For many of us it takes a year or more to disengage from structure and habits. It takes time to shed the emotional and psychological baggage of a lifetime ... That's what we do in the "fertile void" ... In the Gnostic Gospels Jesus is reported to have said, If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth is what will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. The Fertile Void is where that choice is made....

So, anywho, please do yourself an enormous treat, both mentally and spiritually, and take the time to poke around all these sites ... I think they're going to lay a firm foundation for the upcoming year.

Thanks for sharing, I'm sure,
your auntie dasch