संवेदनशीलता

मान्छेमा स्नेह, दयालुता र कोमलता छैन भने जीवन निरस, कठोर र कुरुप हुँदै जान्छ । जति जति उमेर बढ्दै जान्छ, मानिसले जिन्दगीलाई राजनीति, नोकरी र परिवारको चिन्ताले भर्नथाल्छ । मानिस भयभीत रहन थाल्छ, र विस्तारै विस्तारै आफ्ना सारा संवेदनशीलता गुमाउँछ । तब न उसले अस्ताउँदो सूर्य, न बादल, न ताराहरु देख्नसक्छ । उमेर बढ्नुको साथसाथै आफ्नै बुद्धिले मानिसको जीवन तहस-नहस गर्न थाल्छ ।

A Dead Rat Creates Trouble!

कौवाले मरेको मूसो फेला पारेको रहेछ । पन्ध्र, बीस कौवाले उसको पिछा गरिराखेका थिए । ऊ तिनलाई छल्दै सक्दो छिटो एकान्त ठाउँमा पुग्न चाहन्थ्यो । पिछलग्गूहरुले उसलाई ठुँगिरहेका थिए । कौवा रगतपच्छे भइसकेको थियो । यो के भइरहेको हो, उसले केही बुझ्न सकेको थिएन । अचानक उसको चुच्चोबाट मूसो भुइँमा खस्यो । सबै मूसो टिप्न तँछाडमछाड गर्न थाले । बल्ल उसले चैनको सास लियो ।

A Festive Dimension of Life

हामी जे गर्र्छौं त्यसलाई कर्तव्य मानेर होइन, उत्सव सम्झेर गरौं । बोझ मानेर होइन प्रेमका कारण गरौं । अभेदताको अनुभव गर्नु नै प्रेम हो । वास्तविक प्रेमले हृदयलाई विकसित गरिदिन्छ, सूर्यले कमललाई झैं । मोह वा आसक्तिले मन संकुचित गरिदिन्छ ।

Whatever you do, do it as celebration, not as responsibility. Do it with love, not as burden. True love will expand your heart just like sunlight causes a lotus to bloom. Attachment or ignorance contracts your heart.

बुद्धि

मान्छेमा स्नेह, दयालुता र कोमलता छैन भने जीवन निरस, कठोर र कुरुप हुँदै जान्छ । जति जति उमेर बढ्दै जान्छ, मानिसले जिन्दगीलाई राजनीति, नोकरी र परिवारको चिन्ताले भर्नथाल्छ । मानिस भयभीत रहन थाल्छ, र विस्तारै विस्तारै आफ्ना सारा संवेदनशीलता गुमाउँछ । तब न उसले अस्ताउँदो सूर्य, न बादल, न ताराहरु देख्नसक्छ । उमेर बढ्नुको साथसाथै आफ्नै बुद्धिले मानिसको जीवन तहस-नहस गर्न थाल्छ ।

खुसीहरूले बगाएर नलैजाऊन्

गर्लफ्रेन्डले 'भरे तोङ्बा खाऊँ है' भन्दा मेरा रौँरौँमा नशा दौडन थालिसकेको थियो । यद्यपि उसलाई यसबारे पत्तोखबर थिएन । उसको यो मादक-आग्रहबाट म निष्प्रभावित रहेको स्वाङ गरिरहेको थिएँ । आफूलाई सदाझैं 'कुल' राखिरहन सकेकोमा म भित्रभित्रै रमाइरहेको पनि थिएँ । मनमनै आफ्नो दर्शनशास्त्र पल्टाउँछु, 'यो हाडमासुको शरीरमा उर्लंने वासनाका आँधी र उत्तेजनाबाट मुक्त इन्दि्रयातीत आनन्द अनुभूति गर्ने मेरो आकांक्षा हो । त्यसभन्दा अघिका खुसीहरूले बगाएर नलैजाऊन् भनी मैले सतर्क रहने चेष्टा गरिरहनुपर्छ ।' यद्यपि केही बोलेमा उसले उडाउन थालिहाल्ली भनेर म चुप्पी साँधिरहन्छु । for more: http://www.nayapatrika.com/newsdetail.php?id=902100955479770&n_id=25

Never cry for any relation in life

Never cry for any relation in life
because for the one whom you cry
does not deserve your tears
and the one who deserves
will never let you cry.

Treat everyone with politeness
even those who are rude to you
not because they are not nice
but because you are nice.

Never search your happiness in others
which will make you feel alone.
rather search it in yourself
you will feel happy
even if you feel alone.

Always have a positive attitude in life
there is something positive in every person.
Even a stopped watch is right
twice a day.

Happiness always looks small
when we hold it in our hand
But when we learn to share it
We realize how big and precious it is.

Pain and Pleasure

If thou are pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now. (trans. George Long)A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things made in the world?" (trans. George Long)Let opinion be taken away, and no man will think himself wronged. If no man shall think himself wronged, then is there no more any such thing as wrong. (trans. Meric Casaubon)(...) As for others whose lives are not so ordered, he reminds himself constantly of the characters they exhibit daily and nightly at home and abroad , and of the sort of society they frequent; and the approval of such men, who do not even stand well in their own eyes has no value for him. (trans. Maxwell Staniforth)

"Die, you old fake!"

Practice is nothing other than the capacity to arouse fearless energy.Without this energy, whatever practices you perform,whatever virtuous feelings you have, all are without substance.Without this energy, will you be prepared when you come face to face with death in your ordinary state of mind? How then will you persevere over other hardships? - Suzuki Shosan 

a whoopee cushion

Before enlightenment, a whoopee cushion is funny; when you realize enlightenment a whoopee cushion isn't funny; after enlightenment a whoopee cushion is funny again.-- J. Wilson

How to Meditate

For meditation the first thing is the posture. you may sit in any posture. the posture must be very comfortable and still. we can meditate either on a floor or on a chair. in any place, whereever we feel comfortable. sit comfortably, cross your legs, clasp ur fingers. now close your eyes. stop inner or outer chatter. dont chant any mantra. just relax. totally relax. just relax. when we cross our legs and clasp our fingers, it gives us enough stability. eyes are door to the mind so should be closed. mantra chanting or any chattering inner or outer are the activities of the mind. so it should be stopped. when body relaxes, consciousness travels to the next zone mind and intellect. mind is nothing but a bundle of thoughts. there are numerous thoughts always to the surface of the mind. whenever there are thoughts in the mind we may get many questions, known or unknown. to transcend the mind and intellect, one has to observe the breath. observation is the nature of the self. so one should just wittnes the breath. dont do conscious breathing.

Dont enhale or exhale consciusly. the enhalation or exhelation happen on its own. just observe the normal breath. this is the main key, this is the way. don't go behind thoughts. don't think to queries/question/thoughts. caste the thought. come back to the breath. observe normal breathing. then the density of the thougts reduces. slowly breath becomes thinner and shorter.

Finally breath becomes smallest. Some sort of light flashes between the eybrows.

In this state, one will have no breath and no thoughts. he will be totally thoughtless. this state is called nirmal stithithi or no thought state. this is the meditative state. in this state we will be under the shower of cosmic energy. the more mediation one does the more will be the cosmic energy one receives. this cosmic energy flows through the energy body.

Mythmaking

Idealism is the death of body and imagination. i prefer art and mythmaking than philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche

How to Get Your Needs Met

Liately I've been studying the techniques of Nonviolent Communication (NVC). While it may sound like a no-brainer to yogis who are familiar with satya, it's more challenging to put into practice than I had expected.

The beauty of NVC is its theory that conflict doesn't exist between people; it exists between the strategies that people use to get needs met. According to NVC philosophy, behind potentially intimidating messages are simply people appealing to us to meet their needs.

When we receive messages with this awareness, we never feel dehumanized by what others have to say to us. The trick is to not take the message personally, and to connect empathetically with the other person.

healthy wealthy and wise

HEALTHY, WEALTHY AND WISE
Raizel Robin. Canadian Business. Toronto: Nov 24-Dec 7, 2003. Vol. 76, Iss. 23; pg. 129

Abstract (Summary)
Keeping workers happy and healthy is not a new concept. In the 1940s and '50s, companies encouraged social clubs and organized outings and picnics. By the '70s and '80s, however, the strategy had shifted to individual fitness and smoking-cessation programs. In the '90s, the likes of workplace spirituality, motivational speakers and on-site yoga became the rage. Today, you could say the hottest trend is capitalizing on a little bit of them all under the banner of "workplace wellness." Non-smoking support groups, company gyms, family-friendly workplaces, counselling, meditation, workshops in stress management and effective communication techniques, even personal coaches for CEOs-all of them fall under the catch-all phrase. Most programs focus on physical fitness and nutrition, though that, too, is changing. "There is a shift happening," says Karen Seward, vice-president of marketing, business development and research at Warren Shepell, a Toronto-based national employee-assistance program provider and consulting firm. "People have made the link between mental health and productivity and absenteeism-and the whole notion that people who are happy at home and happy at work are more productive in the workplace."
» Jump to indexing (document details)
Full Text (2144 words)
Copyright Rogers Publishing Limited Nov 24-Dec 7, 2003
[Graph Not Transcribed]
The nature of work has changed dramatically over the last half century. "Knowledge workers," a term first coined by business philosopher Peter Drucker in the 1950s, have replaced industrial labourers as the backbone of most corporations. In his seminal book, Landmarks of Tomorrow, Drucker used the term mostly to describe IT personnel, such as programmers, systems analysts, technical writers and researchers. Today, it can refer to just about anyone using a university degree at work, including financial analysts, lawyers and scientists. Knowledge workers now permeate every industry. No company is without them. They give businesses a competitive edge and are key to a healthy, productive economy.
Yet the changing nature of work is making many of them sick. While the corporate world spent 50 years developing exercise, benefit and insurance programs geared to the occupational health and safety of industrial employees--programs that are still in place today--experts say the well-being of knowledge workers is suffering. Sure, their jobs are different from factory work--but they can be just as physically strenuous, contributing to illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes, and nervous disorders like anxiety and depression. The symptoms are not as obvious, say, as a broken leg, but they can be just as costly. Mental illness in Canada alone costs $8 billion annually in lost productivity, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association. Heart disease costs about $5 billion a year in lost productivity and disability. Recent research shows that knowledge workers are more stressed out than any other type of employee--and if their minds and bodies aren't working properly, neither do they.
The average Canadian spends more than half of his or her waking hours at work--and half say they frequently toil on evenings and weekends. Days lost to illness or disability, meanwhile, have climbed each year since 2000, when a wave of downsizing began and those who still had jobs were forced to work longer hours with fewer resources. More than half of the Fortune 500 firms that downsized in the 1990s (there were about 1,468 of them) reported that productivity deteriorated as a result. If companies value their employees as key assets, say human-resources specialists, it's essential they encourage them to stay mentally and physically healthy.
Just like keeping manufacturing equipment in top working order, employee health has a tremendous impact on the bottom line. B.C. Hydro, for instance, reports that the return on investment of its employee wellness program is $3 to $4 for every dollar invested. That's a common result for many wellness programs, which have been expanding significantly in recent years. But some, such as Canada Life's, get up to $6 back. The savings come from reduced absenteeism and fewer extended health benefits and disability payouts.
Keeping workers happy and healthy is not a new concept. In the 1940s and '50s, companies encouraged social clubs and organized outings and picnics. By the '70s and '80s, however, the strategy had shifted to individual fitness and smoking-cessation programs. In the '90s, the likes of workplace spirituality, motivational speakers and on-site yoga became the rage. Today, you could say the hottest trend is capitalizing on a little bit of them all under the banner of "workplace wellness." Non-smoking support groups, company gyms, family-friendly workplaces, counselling, meditation, workshops in stress management and effective communication techniques, even personal coaches for CEOs--all of them fall under the catch-all phrase. Most programs focus on physical fitness and nutrition, though that, too, is changing. "There is a shift happening," says Karen Seward, vice-president of marketing, business development and research at Warren Shepell, a Toronto-based national employee-assistance program provider and consulting firm. "People have made the link between mental health and productivity and absenteeism--and the whole notion that people who are happy at home and happy at work are more productive in the workplace."
There's no shortage of companies catching on. MDS Nordion, Steelcase, Canada Life, Royal Bank, Enbridge Inc., Rogers Communications (which owns Canadian Business)--most big corporations have wellness initiatives of some sort. "Business today is a stressful environment," says George Cope, president and CEO of Toronto-based Telus Mobility. "I think healthy employees become part of a good overall business strategy." A few programs, such as Dofasco's (see "Taking care of business," p. 133), have even won awards.
Most forward-thinking executives probably see the benefits, but the quality of wellness programs, and how often employees use them, are crucial to their effectiveness. In a national wellness survey of Canadian companies released in September by workplace wellness consulting firm Buffett Taylor & Associates of Whitby, Ont., 83.4% of respondents said their company offered at least one "wellness initiative," such as stress management techniques, weight-control programs, fitness incentives or nutrition awareness. That's a huge increase from 64% back in 2000, when economic times were much better.
The jump shows companies are taking wellness seriously enough to ensure they provide assistance even when times are tough. But the majority are not currently offering comprehensive programs. Feeling the pressure to implement wellness initiatives, but often constrained by tight budgets, some even count extended healthcare benefits as wellness, according to Warren Shepell's Seward. Though comprehensive programs are catching on, the numbers show there are barriers to their effectiveness. Despite corporate efforts, one in three workers reports being stressed out due to excessive work demands and long hours, according to Statistics Canada. A survey by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada reported in 2000 that 43% of Canadians feel overwhelmed by their job, finances or family. Beverly Beuermann-King is a wellness consultant in Little Britain, Ont., with 13 years' experience. "Pessimism, dissatisfaction, lowered concentration, decreased motivation, accidents, absenteeism and poor health are all symptoms of job stress," she says.
A worn-out, unhealthy workforce is a costly one. The Conference Board of Canada estimates difficulties employees have in balancing work with family life cost employers in this country $2.7 billion annually. Meanwhile, workplace stress and stress-related illnesses cost the economy about $5 billion a year, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association.
Psychiatrist Edgardo Perez, CEO of Homewood Health Centre, an employee assistance provider in Guelph, Ont., studies the effects of depression in the workplace and has found that up to 10% of employees at any given time will have moderate symptoms of depression or anxiety. Depressed workers may feel constant fatigue and worthlessness, he says. They may feel like failures, exhibit a loss of interest in their usual activities and withdraw from social situations. As well, they may be reluctant to work collaboratively. Anxious employees may also be irritable, have irrational fears of death and feel cut off from reality. "All of this interferes with their ability to concentrate and be productive," says Perez, who has found the problem can diminish an employee's productive work time by 20%.
According to Perez, depression costs the Canadian economy $12 billion a year. About $6.6 billion of that is due to productivity issues, and the rest is eaten up through the cost of medication and care. It's enough of a problem that several prominent Canadian business leaders decided to form the Business and Economic Roundtable on Mental Health, which calls depression an "unheralded business crisis in Canada."
But some companies are trying to turn the tide. Take B.C. Hydro, for instance. Its Lifestyle Program (see "Healthy idea," page 131) awards points to employees for doing any wellness activity, which can include working out at the on-site gym, spending time with family or even keeping a journal or meditating. Points can be redeemed for T-shirts, water bottles, baseball caps and other fitness gear, but are mainly a way to monitor the program's effectiveness. The employees who participate in the Lifestyle Program take, on average, two fewer sick days a year than employees who don't.
MDS Nordion, a company in Kanata, Ont., that provides most of the world's supply of radioisotopes used in nuclear medicine, implemented a wellness program that goes beyond health. It also studies how work is done and the amount of control given to employees. Since 1993, absenteeism has declined to four days per person a year from an average of five and a half.
As the evidence mounts in support of wellness programs, they will become more a social movement than a trend, say industry watchers. Martin Rutte is author of Chicken Soup for the Soul At Work, a 1998 book that has sold more than a million copies and made him a popular lecturer on the North American wellness circuit. "Twenty years ago, the only thing I could talk to you about in the workplace was the financial health of the company and maybe my career," says the Canadian writer, now based in Santa Fe, N.M. Today, the workplace is starting to acknowledge what he calls "the fuller human being"--the interconnectedness of mental, physical and even spiritual health. But for all the good intentions, if a company can't follow through with a culture that encourages employees to make time for wellness programs, they simply won't take advantage of them.
That's what happened to one senior human-resources director, Linda (her name has been changed at her request), who spent six years with a major chartered bank working 10-hour days on top of a two-hour commute. "My marriage suffered," she says. "We had to go to counselling because we were never there for each other."
Linda's health declined, as well; too busy to take a sick day, she developed pneumonia from a neglected cold. One Friday afternoon, as she was getting ready to enjoy a well-deserved weekend with her kids, her boss told her to come to work to finish a project--the following Sunday. Linda refused, but her superior kept pushing, and suggested they bring in both their daughters and plunk them in front of a TV while the women got their work done. Burned out, Linda later resigned--with no pay package and no other job to go to.
The funny thing about the bank Linda left, she remembers, is that it had a top-notch wellness program in place. "We had so many stress-management programs and work-life balance programs," she says. "There were counselling services and hotlines for day care and parent care." But the managerial culture, she says, prevented people from taking advantage of the services. It's a prime example of what Dr. Len Sperry, a professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Wisconsin and a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, has called "a dysfunctional culture."
Just as people can be Type A's, so, too, can organizations. That can take its toll in many ways--but in Linda's case, the bank lost a key executive. "Having subsidized food in the caf and a free gym doesn't cut it these days," says Graham Lowe, a sociologist and president of the Graham Lowe Group, a consulting firm based in Kelowna, B.C. "It's relatively easy for an employer to invest in wellness," he emphasizes, but the program can be completely ineffective if its use isn't encouraged.
Linda's experience is all too familiar to Malcolm Weinstein, an executive coach and president of Weinstein Management Ltd. in Vancouver. Recent media attention to the plight of the under-appreciated, overworked, lonely-at-the-top CEO has had a positive effect on upper management, he says, but it's frequently middle managers who end up bearing the brunt of work-related stress--and they might be less inclined to take advantage of wellness programs. "I work with a lot of CEOs," says Weinstein. "They're more aware of achieving work-life balance now and are downloading their responsibilities." The pressure is worst among second-and third-tier managers who feel they must satisfy the most senior people and carry out orders they don't always want to, such as firing people. "There's a fear of admitting an inability to cope," says Weinstein. "There's pressure to be heroic that often extends beyond people's limits."
That's precisely why more companies are getting serious about their wellness programs. "HR people are asking us not just to put in wellness programs, but to think strategically about which programs will work best for them," says Seward of Warren Shepell. The attitude just a few years ago, she says, when companies would typically call up and ask for a catalogue of topics, then order a few sessions, was, "We'll send out an e-mail and hopefully people will come.' Now, companies are really making a clear link between their business objectives and mental health issues."
Linda, the former bank exec, found one organization that does just that. She's now happily employed at a large pharmaceutical firm and has no regrets about leaving her former job. Her new company's culture is entirely different, she says, because the president's corporate philosophy encourages wellness. If she works extra hours, she takes time in lieu. She feels encouraged to leave at a reasonable hour and has cut down her commute. And no more working weekends. "Life is a privilege," she says. "It's important to have a life outside work."
Indexing (document details)
Subjects:
Wellness programs, Employee benefits, Productivity, Manycompanies, Wellness programs
Classification Codes
9172 Canada, 5310 Production planning & control, 6400 Employee benefits & compensation, 9172
Locations:
Canada, Canada
Author(s):
Raizel Robin
Document types:
Feature
Document features:
tables
Publication title:
Canadian Business. Toronto: Nov 24-Dec 7, 2003. Vol. 76, Iss. 23; pg. 129
Source type:
Periodical
ISSN:
00083100
ProQuest document ID:
500107081
Text Word Count
2144
Document URL:
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=500107081&sid=2&Fmt=3&clientId=19371&RQT=309&VName=PQD

digital dharma

Digital Dharma
Hal Stucker. Photo District News. (Eastern ed.). New York: Feb 2008. Vol. 28, Iss. 2; pg. 112, 3 pgs

Abstract (Summary)
EURO RSCG WORLDWIDE RECENTLY CREATED A PRINT campaign for Wasa whole-grain crisp breads that cleverly associate the wholesome snack with the ancient practice of yoga. The images also contain a striking number of visual puns based on the motifs common to Nepalese paintings: apple slices arranged to resemble a lotus blossom, green beans laid together to resemble a halo, and kiwi slices in the shape of two faces-mirror images of each other-that look down on the scene below and seem to shine with an inner light.
» Jump to indexing (document details)
Full Text (1565 words)
Copyright VNU eMedia, Inc. Feb 2008
[Headnote]
A series of ads for a healthy snack took inspiration from the ancient practice of yoga, and the modern practice of Photoshop.
EURO RSCG WORLDWIDE RECENTLY CREATED A PRINT campaign for Wasa whole-grain crisp breads that cleverly associate the wholesome snack with the ancient practice of yoga. Art director Paul Chiemmongkoltip brought the idea to fruition with the help of photographer Kate Turning and retoucher Amy Dressers. The series of ads was based loosely on Nepalese thangka paintings. These are a colorful type of Buddhist religious paintings traditionally used to teach about the life of the Buddha. The Wasa thangka, however, would feature a young female yoga practitioner surrounded by healthy fruits and vegetables, temptingly laid out on the company's whole-grain crackers.
Dresser describes the Wasa ads as "Kaleidoscopic-sort of fantasy, high-key color images with a central figure and a flurry of stuff going on around them, so your eye goes all over the page."Turning says that her images had to suggest a "mystical world of health and well-being," so each element had to have a mysterious, floating quality.
While Turning and Chiemmongkoltip were shooting the food and the yoga practitioners, Dresser first tackled the backgrounds, creating them from several stock images. "The art director wanted them to basically be the Himalayas, but not exactly, with more of an illustration feel to the foreground and the clouds," Dresser recalls. Each line of background mountains is subtly different due to Dresser's manipulations, with "slight variations," she says. "The main mountain line and the skies are similar, but the clouds are more painterly in some and fading more in others."
Though Chiemmongkoltip had drawn up what Dresser described as a very tight layout, the choice of colors for the background was left mostly up to her. The retoucher was relieved to find that she could be more experimental with tints and tones and wasn't tied down to, say, matching a specific Pantone color. Dresser also did a considerable amount of hand painting, for example adding several layers of mist to the mountains. For this, she says, she used a "weak little fuzzy zero-percent hardness brush that I labored over them with, trying to make them look fake and real at the same time."
Dresser carefully amplified the highlights on the clouds and mountains, giving the overall light a somewhat otherworldly effect. "That's one of my main missions in most of the images I work on: making the highlights look as nice and as pretty as I can possibly get away with." The background was given an overall tint with a hue saturation layer, and then very specific color adjustments were applied to small parts of the image using color adjustment layers.
"There was no one layer that would either make or break the whole thing, just a lot of them put in doing tiny adjustments." Dresser ultimately ended up with a big folder full of adjustment layers for the background, usually about 15 to 20 for each background image.
To place the cracker, food and yoga figure elements into each shot, Dresser began by cutting the items from the backgrounds by hand. "I do most of my work using Photoshop paint tools, and really don't use things like vectors very often," she says. "Most of the images here were shot on white, so it was easy to isolate them from the backgrounds using channels, and then I traced around the edges and painted the masks in by hand. I've found that when I use shortcuts, cleaning up the edges sometimes takes as long as it does when I'm doing it all by hand."
She also took special care in cutting out the crackers. "I really was careful to cut out all the nooks and crannies on them, because I knew that they'd really care about the product looking as genuine as possible. So I didn't cut off the little imperfections or even out the bumpsI was very loyal to what the product actually looked like."
The images also contain a striking number of visual puns based on the motifs common to Nepalese paintings: apple slices arranged to resemble a lotus blossom, green beans laid together to resemble a halo, and kiwi slices in the shape of two faces-mirror images of each other-that look down on the scene below and seem to shine with an inner light. To create the kiwi effect, Dresser modified a mask she had hand-drawn for one of the figures seen in profile. "I started with that, but then we wanted to make the face look more like it was drawn and less photographic, so I did some tweaking on the mask, giving it more or less forehead, more full lips, trying to make it look a little softer." She then put in a darker outer edging on the face to set it off from the background, painting the tone in using a separate curve layer laid over the top.
The series has been very successful, with ads running in both the U.S. and Europe. And the campaign apparently has good karma to spare. Dresser, a vegetarian, took home several packages left over from the shoot and her boyfriend started eating them. And even though the initial freebies are long gone, he now goes out and buys Wasa.
[Sidebar]
AMY DRESSER
Phone: (323) 662-6377
E-mail: someone@urbancom.net
Web: www.amydresser.com
Principal Contact:
Amy Dresser is represented by Kate Chase Presents
Contact: Kate Chase
Address: 40 Arago Street, San Francisco, CA 94112
Phone: (415) 337-1700
E-mail: kate@katechase.com
Equipment: Power Mac Gii with a quad-core processor, eight gigs of RAM; Mitsubishi Diamond Pro monitor with an Envision LCD for menus; a Wacom Pen Tablet, Photoshop CS2
Sample Clients:
Bacardi, UPN Networks, CBS1TNT Networks, Best Buy, Kodak, Honda, Proctor & Gamble, Pepsi, RJ Reynolds, Smuckers, Warner Brothers Records, Atlantic Records, Entertainment Weekly, Time, Maxim
Grain of truth. Opposite page: The final ad for Wasa Is based loosely on Nepalese thankga paintings. The imagery was shot by Kate Turning and the extensive post-production was done by Amy Dressers. Left: Two ads from the same campaign. Above: The various elements that made up the final ad.
TIPS AND TRICKS
COLOR PALETTE AND CONTRAST-Dresser had to create a separate color scheme for each image, similar in nature to the colors on the original Buddhist paintings she was imitating, which were very bright and very highly saturated. "I'm not that scientific a retoucher," she says, "I'm not that mathematical, so that fact that I didn't have to match a specific Pantone color and that I could just make the colors look good to my eye was a huge weight off my shoulders."
As a general matter of style, Dresser tries to make things look "fake and real at the same time," usually by hand painting to amplify highlights and deepen shadows, though she says she is "usually more focused on highlights than she is on shadows," trying to make the highlights "a little more amplified than they ever could be in real life." For the Wasa images, the idea was to give the clouds in the background an "imaginary, mystical, unrealistic look and feel. They all began from shots of real clouds, and I used that as a template, but sampled different parts of that image, and then painted over it on several layers-dark, light and medium-painting over the light and dark areas to amplify them, and particularly trying to amplify the highlights as much as I can get away with."
TWEAKING THE YOGA FIGURES-Symmetry was also critical to making them work as a takeoff on the Nepalese paintings. Each image had a separate model, and all of them also had to look as though they were expert yoga practitioners, shining with the inner glow of enlightenment. This meant Dresser had to do a fair amount of tweaking in order to make the figures look both symmetrical and also to make them appear to be holding their yoga postures correctly. "I feel the most at home retouching people," says Dresser. "With these, there was a little bit of cheating, there are some parts that are flips, to make them more symmetrical than they actually were, and there was also some tweaking of the poses."
For example, one model's knees needed to be brought down to get her into a correct half-lotus position. Another model was holding a pose that involved standing on one leg. This made her shift her weight, so that the top portion of her body was leaning slightly over in one direction. Here, Dresser had to straighten her spine. For all the models, "I drew a bunch of guidelines to make sure that elbows were at the same level, that shoulders were even and that torsos were straight up and down." For this Dresser used mostly cut-and-paste. "I'm not a big fan of the liquefy tool, and with some of the adjustments on these models, they were fairly severe. It wasn't just a matter of smooshing in an arm here or there; I had to create a whole new angle for some of their limbs. They weren't really heavy-duty adjustments, but I did have to work out the symmetry of the body before I started masking it all out."
Above: More elements that were composited into the final ad. The retoucher describes the ads as "fantasy, high-key color images with a central figure and flurry of stuff going on around them."

Indexing (document details)
Subjects:
Yoga, Mountains, Color
Author(s):
Hal Stucker
Document types:
Feature
Document features:
Photographs
Section:
CREATE TOUCH OF CLASS
Publication title:
Photo District News. (Eastern ed.). New York: Feb 2008. Vol. 28, Iss. 2; pg. 112, 3 pgs
Source type:
Periodical
ISSN:
10458158
ProQuest document ID:
1432861681
Text Word Count
1565
Document URL:
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1432861681&sid=7&Fmt=3&clientId=19371&RQT=309&VName=PQD

eat, love, pray

LOVE IT/LOATHE IT
JENNIFER REESE, Alynda Wheat. Entertainment Weekly. New York: Feb 1, 2008. , Iss. 976; pg. 79

Abstract (Summary)
[...] rather than a pumpkin coach, a juicy book contract transports our heroine to her metaphorical ball, letting her travel the globe, consume mountains of Roman spaghetti, practice yoga, and eventually replace David with a devoted Latin lover.
» Jump to indexing (document details)
Full Text (262 words)
Copyright (c) 2008 Time Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be duplicated or redisseminated without permission.
Two critics weigh in on Elizabeth Gilbert's divisive best-selling memoir, 'Eat, Pray, Love'.
LOVE IT
Shelve it among the fairy tales. Elizabeth Gilbert's incandescent memoir succeeds as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for women who no longer relate to Cinderella. Replace the timid, motherless maiden with a newly husbandless writer in her 30s; instead of evil stepsisters, sub in David, a rebound boyfriend who's Just Not That Into Her. And rather than a pumpkin coach, a juicy book contract transports our heroine to her metaphorical ball, letting her travel the globe, consume mountains of Roman spaghetti, practice yoga, and eventually replace David with a devoted Latin lover. She returns home not just healed, but a superstar. Is it all a little gooey? You bet. I can't defend this luscious confection any more than I can resist it.
LOATHE IT
The problem isn't the book, it's the author. Eat, Pray, Love is, after all, Elizabeth Gilbert's lavish reward to herself for dumping a seemingly unobjectionable husband and taking up with a cad. For the next year, on perhaps the most expensive backpacking trip in recorded history, she babbles about her selfless generosity to her ex (!), how much pasta she can pack away, and what a devoted, spiritual creature she's become. That's scarcely a triumph over adversity--and even if it were, Gilbert created that adversity herself. Besides, courtesy dictates more grace in winning. If, despite a marked self-centeredness, you somehow manage to end up with everything everyone has ever wanted, keep it to yourself.
[Author Affiliation]
JENNIFER REESE

Alynda Wheat

[Illustration]
[PHOTO]


Indexing (document details)
Subjects:
Autobiographies
People:
Gilbert, Elizabeth
Author(s):
JENNIFER REESE, Alynda Wheat
Document types:
Feature
Section:
THE REVIEWS: BOOKS
Publication title:
Entertainment Weekly. New York: Feb 1, 2008. , Iss. 976; pg. 79
Source type:
Periodical
ISSN:
10490434
ProQuest document ID:
1418281161
Text Word Count
262
Document URL:
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1418281161&sid=7&Fmt=3&clientId=19371&RQT=309&VName=PQD