Stress and Shampoo

Lavender Mint moisturizing shampoo by Paul MitchellI have a new tool: liquid relaxation for my head and hairs. Instant South of France feeling!

The lavender mint shampoo by Paul Mitchell also reminds me of the French flavor of life: Savoir-vivre, enjoy life

Transform the simple act of washing your hair into a mini-meditation and start celebrating your day! Enjoy!

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The quality of Sleep

It’s all about quality. The quality of life, love, friends and family. Quantity can make you feel tired, left alone and useless.

How would you connect stress with sleep? My personal life experience is, I can sleep for 10 hours and still feel like a smashed tomato or be totally refreshed after a 15 minutes Power-Nap. What makes the difference?

Our brains are a bit like computers, we have energy saving modes like standby (that’s when you wait in this endless customer support hotline), hibernation (you try to sleep but your brain still takes a backup of today), sleep mode (your brain finally shuts off after you got a blue screen) and dreaming (only for humans, unless you are HAL 9000).

When we enter the supermarket, most of us have a tag cloud in our heads: milk, bread, tomatoes, beer, juice, water, potato chips… We are lost until we start to focus and set priorities. If you want to relax and increase the quality of your life, a good sleep is a great foundation. Power-Naps and Sleep-Ins by ZEN-MEN might be great tools for you. Happy relaxing and Bonne nuit!

iTunes: ZEN-MEN

iTunes: free video podcast by ZEN-MEN

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Energy for the good Life

Energy for the good LifePeanuts + Charlie Brown + iPhone
=
Energy for the good Life!

The gods of the peanut have sent a tasty tool to Earth: Peanuts now grow in the App Store! I imagine Charlie Brown installing the free app on his iPhone, while he nervously looks at the football and his brain is filled up with one single thought:

Can I kick it???

Lucy holds the ball, Charlie is ready to go – action! While sailing through the air once again, he realizes, something has to be changed. He needs more energy for the good life! But how?

Peanuts! With a loud thud he lands on his back – ouch. “Ground yourself!” was a headline on a glossy, spiritual magazine. Maybe they had a different approach…

That brings us back to the fresh way with which the National Peanut Board wants to help people to get more in balance. The free app for the iPhone/ iPad offers yummy recipes, healthful snacks and a reminder tool. Never ever again run out of peanut butter! And it grows even beyond: a Break button :)

Relax with a guided meditation by Stephan Bodian, author of Meditation for Dummies. The full meditation is about 12 minutes. Have a look at your iPhone’s auto-lock settings before you hit the play button. Happy chillaxing with this fine mix out of food, facts and a free-your-mind meditation app. And remember: “You are what you eat.”

iTunes: Peanuts – the free Energy for the good Life App

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Forest bathing

A walk through a forest is a multimedia spectacle. Air to breathe, an ocean of colors, a concert of fragrances, surround sounds everywhere – from your steps on the trail to the tops of the trees. Forest bathing is healthy and even free!

Recently the NY Times wrote about the therapeutic effects of forest bathing. Stress reduction, benefits for your immune system, lower pulse rate, less cortisol, lower blood pressure and much more. Somehow it’s no surprise to me, that the popular practice is called “Shinrin-yoku” in Japan. When did you do your last forest bathing? Mine was today.

In case you should not be able to take a walk or a forest bathing in “real life”, perhaps you might like to try at least a virtual forest bathing in Chakryn forest, which is a wonderful place in the virtual world of Second Life. Sure, it will not have the same impact like a real life forest but it might reduce some stress. You will find me in Second Life under my user name ZEN7MEN Mannonen. Happy bathing!

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Words Of My Perfect Teacher

Sometimes you don’t need many words to describe something:

If he’s enlightened, why doesn’t he act like an enlightened being? … That’s a reasonable question, isn’t it?

Words of my perfect teacher is not only a movie, it’s also a journey inside your heart and soul. Much too often we try to fulfill somebody else’s expectations, we try to follow the rules. On our trail back to real happiness, we either will have to break some rules or  we might lose our-self. Choose wisely!

Amazon.com Words of My Perfect Teacher – DVD

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How to install iOS4 the relaxed way

Christmas comes early this year, the iPhone 4 is near! With the iPhone 4 comes the operating system update now called iOS 4, which will also bring new features for iPhone 3G(s) and the latest iPod touch generations.

Since I am waiting for a white iPhone 4, I thought in the meantime, let’s upgrade my iPhone 3G to iOS4. Let me take you on a trip! :)

First of all, relax – get some tea, beer, … whatever you like and free some time to do the upgrade. Depending on your iPhone (iPod touch) model, your connection speed and available download bandwidth from the Apple server, plus your data size, it will take about from 30 minutes to 2 hours.

Go into airplane mode, take a manual backup via iTunes, save your settings, call your mum, sync all, export your sales from the iPhone into the library, have a tea, click slowly. Then hit the update button to install 4.0. Click through the windows, accept here and there and be happy when it starts. Now might come the tricky part, if the upgrade makes again a backup, and the progress bar hangs for over 30 minutes at two bars, hit cancel. Start again and in the 2nd round, it worked here. Be patient with the progress bar, if you have e.g. 12GB data installed, that will take some time… Time for another tea.

After a while your iPhone will reach its blackout point, wants to be activated again, enter your sim code, when it wants to be plugged into iTunes, unplug the cable, drink some tea, and plug it back in. When the backup starts to rebuild the data, simply wait, the iPhone might reboot and then start to rebuild also all your personal data…

One minute after I connected to the mobile network, I got a SMS from the German Telekom telling me it wants to upgrade the phone driver, hit upgrade. In the settings I read Carrier T-Mobile 7.1 (was 7.0 before).

The new folders are good Feng Shui, cutting down my home pages to only 3 (was 10+). Happy upgrading!

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Help your soccer friends to relax

Maybe you noticed it already, it’s 2010 and another soccer world cup is shaking our planet (besides other things…). Personally I would say I am a part-time soccer fan but in these days, whoever I meet, from 5 year old kid to 93 year old grandma, at some point it comes up: “Do you know when the next soccer game is? How did they play?”

If you have an iPhone – relax, there’s an app for that! The best I found so far is iLiga South Africa from motain. It’s a great tool with easy overviews, live ticker and fine summaries. Have fun and help your friends!

iTunes USA iLiga South Africa

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Enjoy a mini break

OUT NOW! ZEN-MEN Medi-X videos are chillaxing for eyes and ears.
These modern short meditations help you to focus whilst you enjoy mini breaks during the day. Experience the here and now and create refreshing moments for your brain and your being.

All 12 full versions of vol.01 are in high quality and have a length of 5 minutes each. (Even higher than on YouTube!)
For example here: http://bit.ly/ZEN-MEN_iTunes
More information about the Medi-X project can be found here.
Audio from: Medi-X vol.001+101
Video locations: Mauritius, South of France, Finland

To celebrate the release, I am giving away 100 FULL videos for FREE! Just write me an E-mail, include your name and country and which one of the 12 videos you would like to get and I will send you an E-mail with your download link.

Thank you!

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Alltop and Opera Mini

and 
This is a good day, the best just got better! Alltop is a wonderful tool for me to read, organize and discover great content on the web. Most times I read MyAlltop page on the iPhone, it’s like my personalized newspaper. With the Opera Mini browser the reading experience just got a fun and quality kick! Switching between MyAlltop page and blogs, articles is really fast, tabbed browsing, zooming – just great!

Yes, it works also with Safari: click, browser window opens, click on an article, browser window minimizes, scrolling to a new browser window (if you have already a few open, enjoy the slideshow…), maximizing new browser window, opening URL, yawn…

So thanks Opera for making this mini browser with maxi value and thanks Apple for accepting it in the app store!

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Felicity with FeliciTEA meets Dragon Well

felicitea and dragon well
It’s teatime again! I got more tea from wearetea/ London, thanks Mikel!

Felicitea – the happiness tea

Fact; we can’t all be happy all the time. Whether the central heating system has decided to pack up, you’ve just become single again or you’re just down on your luck in general, we all need a pick me up from time to time to help us to remember how good life can be. Felicitea may not be able to fix the boiler, repair broken relationships or being good luck but it can provide a moment of happiness and we think that is priceless.

I did open it, the tea, the flowers, the colors – the perfume… instant happiness! :D I suddenly saw the tea scene of Alice in Wonderland before my eyes (the 2010 Tim Burton version), thought of pink Hubba Bubba chewing gums from my youth. The tea triggered funny memories in my brain and delivered a wonderful carpet with its taste to enjoy and dive into those precious emotions. Priceless!

Dragon well is one of the most sought after green teas in the world, notice the “great taste gold 09″ award. There is not much to write about this tea. The leaves are perfect, the aroma is amazing and the taste is stunning. Immediate feng shui for your being!

Again, thank you Daren and Suzanne for making such great teas!

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