MSI Press Blog

  excerpt from  How to Live from Your Heart  by Nanette Hucknall - Making the Heart Work for You   Each person has a unique way to access and experience the heart center. You may be a person who feels pressure in your chest. This pressure tells you that your heart center is being activated. You may also experience a charge of energy that feels like a sudden wave of heat or an expansion of the chest. These are common ways in which people experience their heart center.  Some other ways that are less common are a sudden quickening of breath that resounds in the middle of your chest, a fast or slow movement in the same area that can feel like a rotating ball, a sharp pain that lasts just an instant, or a wave of oscillating colors. You may even see a symbol. A rose or a flame is a common symbol for the heart.  People experience and process information in four different ways:  Visual: You can close your eyes and see a scene with the mind’s eye....

  excerpt from  How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately  by Boris Shekhtman -  THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATIVE RULES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE In learning and teaching second and foreign languages, teachers and students have a number of resources at their fingertips to work with both the “top-down” and “bottom-up” aspects of language acquisition. Textbooks and reference grammars provide us with grammar rules. These are very useful in understanding how the language works and in helping us to make our communication literate. Some textbooks, along with conversation guides and the like, provide us with scripts for generating various kinds of speech acts in various topical domains. We have the weather forecast script, the political meetings-and greetings script, the professional reception script, the business meeting script, and so on and so forth. A very few textbooks (and then only at high levels of proficiency and only in some languages) p...

  Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication) from   Pathways to Inner Peace  by Diane Dreher, currently available on pre-order. The Path of Mindful Presence   PREPARATION WEEK 1, DAY 1 One reason we can feel so disconnected and distressed is that we’re often not present with what we’re doing. Research (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010) has found that nearly 50% of the time most of us are doing one thing while thinking about something else.  Does this sound familiar? Let’s imagine that it’s Monday morning. Your alarm goes off, and you wake up thinking about everything you have to do today. You’re caught up in planning, worrying about the report you’re giving at work and everything that could go wrong. You get up, head for the bathroom, brush your teeth, and splash cold water on your face. Then, you go to the kitchen to make coffee. Sitting by the window with your phone, you scroll through your email, barely tasting your coffee as you deal with announcements, a...

  excerpt from  Individualized Study Plans for Very Advanced Students of Foreign Languages  by Betty Lou Leaver Chapter Two The Need for an ISP at High Levels of Foreign Language Proficiency Achieving near-native competence generally does not come by serendipity, coincidence, accident, or “a fluke,” although occasionally (rarely) such things do happen. I know of several people who have said that high level proficiency just happened to them—but even so, it was only after many, many years of study and use of the foreign language in professional situations. Most high-level language users have reported spending much time in direct instruction, study abroad, and self-study (Leaver, 2003a). The average length of time taken by native-like speakers of nearly any foreign language, based on recent research, is 17 years (Leaver and Atwell, 2002). Some learners have been able to achieve this level, however, in much shorter periods of time. Most of these learners had a plan for their ...