We're Not Gonna Take It!

“Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.”

— Saadi

This week, I’ll be addressing a subject that is right up there with politics and religious debates in its ability to annoy just about everyone:  The virtues of patience.  Now, before you run screaming and try to pretend you didn’t even read this far, let me assure you that this blog post won’t be about trying to make you feel bad for not having any.  I hope it will give you a few new angles from which to consider the concept of patience.

Let’s start by addressing the opposite, which is, I think, far more familiar to most of us leading a typical modern life.  Things are hectic and we’re trying to balance so many different parts of life and self all the time.  This is demanding and difficult.  Here are some specific thoughts on why we tend to spend so much time in some variation of this state:

·      With the advent of hyper-connectivity, we are constantly aware of hordes of other people anytime we glance at one of the many screens to which we have access.  We can see what millions of other people are thinking, doing, and achieving at the click of just a few buttons.  It can seem like others have a lot more of the good stuff in life than we do, at least if their own narratives are to be believed.  Those who are at all competitive may feel the need to do more in order to keep up at every turn.

·      The world seems a lot more crowded than it used to because of the constant crush of new information.  With all the people out there doing things, it seems less likely that what we have have to contribute will be seen, acknowledged, and valued.  Before the free flow of information was possible, you could be a major contributor in any market by following rules that had been in place for thousands of years in business interactions. Now the rules have changed almost overnight, and continue to evolve at a rapid pace.

·      We need a great deal of flexibility and a willingness to learn constantly in order to succeed now. Until you become comfortable with always being in flux, which may take time to learn, all your discomfort might build up in ways that boil over and stop your momentum until you can regroup.

·      The world population is growing at unprecedented rates. If you're paying attention, you notice that there are new and worrisome problems connected with this change for which we don't currently have solutions. 

·      In many places, there are more people on the roads and riding public transportation than ever before, as well as in lines at supermarkets and other necessary stopping points. It can seem like everything is more difficult and time consuming because of the crowds everywhere you turn.

So what is this mythical thing called patience?  There's a cultural idea many of us have inherited that tells us patience is a virtue of the very good, and very boring.  Patience is not fiery or exciting, and we're often told that people need to be a hot, brightly burning mess in order to get anything great done.  We’re given examples of all the great artists who lived hard and flamed out early.  Well, that might be fine if you knew what you were passionate about early in life and had the means to pursue it; on the other hand, what if you'd like to live past the age of 30 and have the option to continue learning and doing new things as you go?  You’re going to have to last and be able to keep yourself moving.  There will always be ample reasons to be impatient in this fast-paced world, but impatience is not a fun or creative state to be in. Because it destroys our ability to apply ourselves in a focused manner over time, mastering impatience is necessary if we want to achieve anything that requires consistent effort.

I like to think of patience as the ability to wait for glorious results and enjoy the work you need to do all along the way to achieve your goals, avoiding having a meltdown that stops your progress anytime something real or imaginary gets in your way. When I put it this way, it probably sounds pretty reasonable and necessary, right?  I think the idea that being a patient person means being either deeply, impossibly good or passionless really needs to go!

Here are a few ideas for increasing your capacity for patience, broken out into the areas of self that is involved. Since most cultures today emphasize the mind, the mental solutions may seem more familiar, but they all work together and should be considered:

Mental solutions:

·      Read biographies/autobiographies of people you admire. I guarantee that these will not read, "I was born, and then everything I ever wanted happened without my lifting a finger."  Even if the person was born into wealth and privilege, his success was not that simple.  This puts you in the good company of others who have worked for what they wanted.  It also reminds you of the value of a good story, which is what you will create by staying in the game.

·      Contemplate how more people on the planet also means more brain power and creativity available to solve the world’s problems and improve quality of life for everyone.  Would you want to go back to a time in which there was a lot of unoccupied land, but no essential services?  No dentistry?  No emergency medical care?  I wouldn’t.  No, thanks.

·      Remind yourself that reality T.V. tempts us to believe that succeeding overnight with little effort is a viable route to our goals.  In fact, most of those featured in these programs have done plenty of work behind the scenes to get where they are, if only the work of promoting themselves—which still counts as work!  

·      Make an effort to become aware of mental nosedives when you are indulging in them.  You don't have to be in a deep meditative trance to notice your own thinking.  Let's say you just got your 5th book rejection, and you're frustrated.  You might think something like, "This book is going nowhere.  I don't know why I bother.  No one cares about what I have to say.  No one likes me."  We all string together thoughts like this sometimes, but it's probably clear to the observer that a few publishers passing on your project has no correlation to whether or not people like you.  You actually do have power over what to think about yourself and your life, but first you have to practice noticing your mental habits.  Then, you can begin to change them by talking gently to yourself as you would a friend in distress.  In the above example, you could say to yourself, "Wait a minute.  I have plenty of people in my life who like me, and if not, I can make new friends.  I bother because I like writing and know I have something to say."  Time to be your own best friend!  This is another essential life skill that most people never acquire, but being able to give yourself an effective pep talk can be invaluable when you’re working on challenging projects.

Physical solutions:

·      In short, take care of your physical body.  Ignoring these needs makes it a lot harder to be patient.

·      If you're not sleeping enough, you will be irritable and reactive, and you won't be able to think clearly.  There's really no way around it.  Find the number of hours that works best for you by experimenting.

·      You also need high-quality nutrition in order for your body to function well.  Learn about nutrition yourself or get help with a basic plan. 

·      Regular exercise increases your energy, stamina, and strength and helps manage stress.  Find something you like to do to get your body moving.

Emotional solutions: 

·      Anger is the enemy of patience.  Most of us have huge stores of built-up anger caused by a lifetime of incidents, which we've swept under the rug because we've been taught that it's rude and unacceptable to express it.  If you want to build your capacity for patience, you're going to have to deal with your anger.  While there are lots of suggestions you can find for doing this, in my experience, nothing is as effective as EFT/Tapping for processing old emotions without any destructive side effects.  Plus, you can do it yourself anytime, anywhere, for free.

·      Other old emotions and traumas may be partly behind those previously mentioned negative thought spirals.  You may find that processing old disappointments, humiliations, and other discomforts makes it a lot easier to avoid the nosedives over time, because now those memories aren’t dragging you down every time you’re challenged.  Some things you can't just think yourself out of because they’re not purely mental.  That’s why modalities with physical and emotional aspects are so important.

Spiritual solutions (these are best when they respect your beliefs and traditions, so you’ll need to find what works best for you):

·      Ask for help.  You can ask people you know or ask for help from some spiritual force, but the act of being willing to ask and being open to receiving help can be transformative on its own.  Sometimes if you can relax a bit, you can find creative insights coming to you that were not available before.

·      Acknowledge that you don’t know everything about how things you want could come into being.  Everyone has different strengths and talents, and that’s ok.  If we work with ours and let others work with theirs, and trust that it can all work out, life is more enjoyable and holds more opportunity.  Embrace mystery.  Allow blind faith to work in your favor.

·      Spend some time every day thinking about things you’re grateful for.  This is not about denying what may be wrong in your life or trying to discipline yourself about having negative feelings.  It just helps you to remember that those aren’t all your life is about.  It helps you look forward to enjoyment that you already have access to.  Some people like to write these things down.  When you’re in bed going to sleep or just after waking up can be a nice, relaxed time to appreciate what’s good in your life.

Allowing yourself to be more patient doesn’t mean you have to deny that you want things, or that there are things in your life that you don’t like.  It’s healthy to learn to dial down your moments of full-on freaking out so you can smooth out your experience of life, exhaust yourself less with needless lows, and make faster progress toward your goals.  Don’t be afraid to consider ways to bring more of this virtue to life.  If it helps, tell yourself that this means you’re being a rebel in this stressed-out, stretched-thin world.  I dare you to start making serenity trendy!

Walking the High Wire

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

— Albert Einstein

With an estimated 7.4 billion people on the planet in 2016, it can seem as though there can be nothing new under the sun, and yet new discoveries are made every day.  New songs are written, paintings made, books completed, gizmos prototyped, with every passing day.  Humans are a busy lot!  This is possible because genetically, there has never been anyone identical to you in history.  We’re all intrinsically unique, and with so many moving parts, both concrete and intangible—hopes and desires, likes and dislikes, talents and challenges; physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual progress and happenings.  Every day is a kaleidoscope of your interacting elements, which never cease to run through their individual cycles; yet those cycles are all timed differently, and rarely align in the same way because of the complexity of the model.  To a certain extent, in trying to maintain our balance with all of our parts, we’re all trying to slog our way across a high wire bucking in a high wind.

One of the great challenges in life is that, because of our uniqueness, no one can create a formula for living that is perfect for more than one person.  We can share our wins and losses with each other, and we can offer the wisdom we feel we’ve acquired, but sometimes others won’t even be able to hear the messages we’re sending let alone duplicate our successes and failures.  We must all tinker with the models that have been passed down to us if our greatest possible success and happiness is what we’re after.  And there’s a sort of catch-22 at play, in that we have to be in a reasonably balanced state in order to make good decisions for ourselves, but without making “good” decisions that suit our needs, it’s hard to find balance.  We start by making decisions that others have told us are good, but whether they will suit our uniqueness and get us where we want to go is always the question.

When how we operate, or what we want, is sufficiently different from those around us, whether in one way or in many, we may feel particularly bewildered about what to do.  Maintaining some semblance of balance is a lifelong endeavor, and there is no “done,” but it’s even harder when you’re young or when you’re striking out in new directions.  Luckily, in this age of information, we have access to guidance from sources well outside our own communities, and that can be incredibly helpful in broadening our horizons.  You still have to put advice into practice and try it out for yourself, and you need the patience to do this over time, as every day is different.  For instance, sometimes your first attempt at something will be disastrous, but with practice you realize its merit.  I once watched a fellow participant in a meditation class, a first-timer, have a full-on meltdown because she was so frightened by the prospect of confronting her internal world in silence.  As soon as she tried to do it, she panicked and essentially ran screaming from the exercise.  In this case, I don’t know whether she ever tried again, but I do know that many people who initially find meditation to be extremely challenging learn to love some form of it with experimentation and practice.  And when I first tried EFT/Tapping, I was not even sure that I felt anything at all, but after several practice sessions, I became more and more astonished with its efficacy and usefulness.  I just had to put it into practice and experiment with it for myself.

I wish I had all the answers and could make everything easier for everyone, but that’s a tall order!  I’ll just have to offer some ideas here for constructing your own tool kit for navigating your own personal high wire:

·      Start simply.  Address your physical needs first:  Eat the highest-quality food you can get your hands on, including plenty of vegetables and fruits grown with the fewest and least possible pesticides (poison to you and me); avoid refined sugars and other empty calories, in other words those foods lacking in nutrition; aim for 7+ hours of sleep per night, and try adjusting up and down to see what works best for you; get some form of exercise on a regular basis—find a way to move your body and sweat at least a little.  These items form the basis of any life lived in some semblance of balance.  You can’t skip them, nor can anyone who wants to remain alive in a physical body, so when you’re out of sorts, come back to these first, always.

·      Ask yourself what your mental and emotional states are generally like, and spend some time noticing.  Find daily practices that support healthy attitudes and emotional expression.  I’ve written other blogs on these issues that you may want to check out, but in short, meditate, do affirmations about your values and your intentions, talk to supportive friends and family, write in a journal, read books about people who inspire you, use EFT or hypnosis recordings, attend meetings of like-minded others; adding a spiritual component to any of these is even better, whatever your tradition of choice might be. 

·      Take a look at the overall shape of your life.  Are you doing work you like, are you making enough money to meet your needs, are your relationships supportive and satisfying, are there activities you look forward to experiencing when you wake up in the morning?  When you answer no, think about baby steps you could take to move toward situations you’d like better.  If you’re stuck, ask for help or find it in a library or online.  Choose a small step to make and put your plan in motion.  It’s ok if you can’t see the whole path to your destination.  Just do something.  Every time you make an attempt, you learn and grow.

·      Do you feel a sense of purpose in life?  If not, it will be hard to stay engaged in life, let alone feel inspired; look for clues in the things you loved to do as a child, in the achievements you feel best about as you think back over your life, and in the kinds of things that move you deeply in movies and books.  If you suddenly had all the money in the world, and you had a year off to rest and travel and regroup, what do you think you could do all day and not get tired of?  (This can take some serious imagination if you’re someone who has lived with a lot of obligations or who is chronically exhausted, but it can also be a lot of fun, and is worth trying.)  You can start with a very basic idea like wanting to “help people,” “motivate others,” or “clean up messes,” and then think about your favorite skills to use to see what might be up your alley.  If you love to cook, you might find that helping others could combine with that so that you envision starting a catering company that donates a percentage of meals to those in need.  If you feel satisfied by cleaning up messes, and your favorite skills are in information technology, you might be able to work as a consultant to people and companies who need to get organized in the digital space.  This can take effort to think through, but having a purpose that feels important and expressive of who you are is an essential component in maintaining your energy levels and your commitment to persisting in the face of difficulty, which we all face every day!

Creating and maintaining good functional balance is never going to be easy, especially in today’s fast-paced world, but if you yearn for a better life, this is unavoidable work.  If you can become fascinated with the process of learning about what you need and what is key for you, that is the best solution.  If you make some noticeable progress in your overall balance, your success stories will likely drive you as you continue learning and experimenting with new ideas.  No one knows you as well as you know you, so trust your hunches, and try not to freak out if something you try goes badly.  After all, every day is different.  If you try the same thing on a different day, you might find that you get a different result.  Keep reminding yourself that this is work that feeds everything you’re able to do and become, and it’s worth a great deal of effort.  Over time, your ability to maintain balance will build naturally if you keep at it.  Confused?  Go back to basics, and as you do this repeatedly, you’ll build helpful habits that make greater flexibility and creativity possible.  Celebrate your successes, learn from both success and failure, and just keep inching along that wire.

Slings and Arrows

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

It’s normal to experience disappointments in the course of your daily life.  These can stop you short many times each day, if we’re talking about small disappointments such as just missing a green light, finding that your grocery store is out of one of your favorite items, or having a friend cancel an outing you had planned together.  Now, while they might be jarring, most of these don’t make much of an impact on your overall picture—but larger disappointments certainly can.  In fact, they can be the genesis of negative beliefs that don’t serve you at all, and that may run your behavior for decades after they’re created.  An event that may have seemed insignificant to others can start you down a path of fear and limited thinking, whittling the cornucopia of possible choices you have in any given moment down to a handful of uninspiring options.

Let’s look at a few ways in which this can play out: 

·      Most of us have a memory of a parent, even the most excellent one, overreacting to something we did when we were relatively small.  Perhaps we were playing happily and decided to add a work of art to the wall of the family home.  There was a sense of excitement in the idea of making something beautiful (at least to us) and sharing that with a parent.  When it came time for the big reveal, we displayed the opus proudly only to be faced with the fury of someone who now had to find a way to clean it up, and thought we should have known better.  That feels like a slap in the face when our intentions are innocent and happy.  An unfortunate memory like this can impress us in ways that last a lifetime.  We may come away from it with beliefs such as, “I can’t do anything right,” “No one wants what I have to give,” or “My family doesn’t understand or appreciate me.”  And such beliefs can corrode one’s enthusiasm, creativity, and confidence in subconscious ways that are powerful, but can remain mysterious, because you may not even remember the event as you get older.

·      The first few years of school usually hold some difficult social situations.  Kids start relating to each other in more complex ways, and experience the results of others learning through trial and error.  Most of us experience at least a betrayal or two, fights, resentments, and competitions for attention.  While everyone learns, so many disappointments and hurt feelings proceed from these social experiments.  If patterns emerge, we may come away with beliefs like, “No one likes me,” “Everyone is mean and it’s not even worth trying,” or even just “I hate school.”  There’s often little formal instruction at educational institutions on general communication, conflict resolution, negotiation, sharing, and other essential skills, and these beliefs can remain ingrained if we don’t figure out better ways of relating and coping on our own.

·      In high school, most kids experience life with a high degree of angst in the areas of identity, social acceptance, and achievement, whether academic, athletic, or artistic.  Popularity is often the coin of the realm, so everyone jostles for position both through both attempting to prove their own worth and attempting to disprove others’ worth in order to seem more important.  It’s normal for kids to play with dominance tactics, including those designed to provoke or humiliate others.  Less competitive, more naturally cooperative kids can have a hard time dealing with these status games, and end up feeling stung and embittered by confrontations.  Most of us rack up more experiences of betrayal, embarrassment, and disappointment during these years; these memories can remain particularly painful because we’re experiencing many things for the first time.  We may assume that this is how all such situations will go in the future.  We don’t realize that our peers will continue to grow and mature, as well as gain experience, confidence and clarity, and so will we.  A humiliation experienced at this time of heightened hormones and emotions can seem like death and destruction on a scale that adults find hard to understand.  We may begin to believe that, “I’ll never get what I want,” “I’m not attractive,” or something general like “People are horrible.”

·      As we enter adulthood, we understand that we are now more responsible for our own choices.  We start having to sink or swim, making decisions independently about relationships and leisure time, life direction, health, diet and fitness, and financial matters, and bear the consequences.  Mistakes made here can quickly color our faith in our own abilities, since we’re “supposed” to be able to handle ourselves by now, but in reality may still have many gaps in understanding of basic mechanics, and a lack of supportive habits, which must be built over time.  Beliefs like, “I can’t keep up with everything I need to do,” “I’ll never be able to support myself financially,” or “I’ll never be able to get where I want to go in life” may result from early failures.

·      At any time, we can experience life-changing disappointments such as the death of a loved one, the failure of a relationship, or the sudden loss of a job.  Unfortunate beliefs like, “I’ll never recover,” “I’ll never find love again,” or “I’m a loser” may spring into being.

 Did any of those beliefs sound familiar to you?  Disappointments affect all of us, and yet there isn’t much help available for actually processing the often overwhelming emotions and the negative beliefs that result from them in everyday life.  Most people either talk things through with family or friends, or see a psychological professional to gain perspective on the situation, but usually neither of these addresses the trauma we may be holding in the physical body or the emotional patterns that keep us limited.  If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know what I’m going to say here—techniques with a somatic (meaning involving the body) element seem to be the most helpful for supporting rapid change in these areas.  In my world, there’s just nothing like EFT/Tapping for shaking limitations loose and helping us to shift our understanding of past events and their role in shaping who we are.  Using it helps us to gently but effectively let go of the adverse effects of painful events that are now part of the distant past.  Once you have a chance to lighten the emotional load you’ve been carrying from past disappointments, a new world of possibility opens, and that, to me, is one of the most exhilarating  experiences there is.

Interview with The Feng Shui Guy

“Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.”

— Brian Tracy

Ariel Joseph Towne, The Feng Shui Guy

Have you ever been curious about Feng Shui?  You're in luck!  I sat down with Ariel Joseph Towne, a.k.a. The Feng Shui Guy, to talk about this ancient art form:  What it is, how he came to know it, and how it can help to create balance in your life.  Our lively conversation ranged over topics such as how he helps people support good sleep, his secrets on fostering synchronicity, the dynamic connection between inner and outer work, and the importance of inner quiet and gratitude.  Be sure to check out his Web site for more information about his books and coaching services. 

Onward and Upward

“The longer you hang in there, the greater the chance that something will happen in your favor. No matter how hard it seems, the longer you persist, the more likely your success.”

— Jack Canfield

Just keep going.  This is one of the most important principles I know of in the grand scheme of creating a successful life.  You don’t have to always be running—you can walk, skip, hop or dance—and it’s ok to take a breather now and then when you need it.  But if you can build the habit of just doing what you can to move forward a little bit every day, your progress toward what you want will be much faster than if you tend to exhaust yourself and drop out, or reconsider everything when you don’t get immediate results. 

In such a fast-paced world, one in which we’ve been shown that everyone can become an “overnight” success by just getting on a reality T.V. show, our expectations may have become a bit unrealistic.  For most people, success is the result of years of effort, which invariable include lots of ups and downs.  Even those who seem to have gotten a big, lucky break have usually spent plenty of unglamorous time preparing and wondering at times if they’d ever get anywhere.  Just like the rest of us!

I would suggest that this time of uncertainty and constant application yields precious abilities, even when it seems like nothing is happening.  When we keep going despite resistance, worry, boredom, and annoyance, we’re building a habit of focus and healthy stubbornness that can serve us throughout life.  Of course, I’m not implying that we should be so stubborn that we never consider our results and adjust course, or listen to the constructive feedback of others.  I am in favor or each person dancing to their own drummer, though; you must ultimately be the one who decides what is right for you, and sometimes even the most well-intentioned advice must be ignored if it doesn’t seem right to you and for you.  Some of the people who have invented the most astonishing things throughout history have been told over and over that creating what they saw in their mind’s eye was impossible. They kept going and perfected those things anyway.  Healthy stubbornness in action!

There are many ways to keep yourself going when it’s difficult and uncomfortable to do so.  I suggest broadening your tool set so that you have a better chance of staying in the game when the going gets frustrating.  For example:

·      Figure out what motivates you and roll with it.  Are you someone whose abilities wake up when you’re moving toward something good, or working to outrun something you fear?  Most of us respond somewhat to both, but you may find that one or the other is more effective for you.  If you like to imagine moving toward something you want, remind yourself at least once a day what you’re working toward by imagining it vividly—preferably numerous times per day.  This will bring you little surges of energy and the ability to recommit to your task every time you do it.  You can also give yourself a little pep talk here and there and remind yourself of the progress you’ve made.  If you get fired up when you imagine moving away from something bad, you can imagine something like that instead—see, hear, and feel people talking about how you failed and they knew you’d never amount to anything, etc.  For most people, far more repetitions of the positive style of motivation is best, but throwing in a vision of what you definitely don’t want can sometimes add some spice to the mix.

·      Take care of your physical needs without fail.  Don’t skip meals, but keep them healthy.  Get regular exercise, which builds energy and helps manage stress and lift your moods, and stretch your muscles to stay limber.  Get at least seven hours of sleep per night.  Brush and floss.  You get the picture.

·      Tell only the people you know you can trust to be supportive about your big goals.  The last thing you need is a lot of negativity from people who think small, or are threatened by your unique vision. 

·      Commit to being a lifelong learner.  No one starts off as an expert.  We all build expertise in the areas we choose over time, and it never happens overnight.  You don’t have to keep up with all information all the time, but you do need to keep up with your chosen field of interest, and again, it’s a fast-paced world out there.  This will take some time and attention always if you want to be good at what you do, but it will also keep exposing you to the brilliance of others, which is inspiring.

·      Find ways to blow off steam when you hit road blocks.  Do or watch something that makes you laugh yourself silly.  Spend time with friends.  Volunteer for a worthy cause and get your mind off your own troubles.  Spend some time on a hobby that just makes you feel good.  Read biographies of successful people, who I guarantee went through hard times before they became famous and respected for their contributions.  Write out your woes in a journal.  Go outside and enjoy the natural world.

·      Be willing to rethink your strategy as you try things and learn from your experiences.  Consult others who have done something similar for advice and a change of perspective.

·      If you crash and burn or fall off the wagon in some way, know that everyone experiences failure sometimes, and we often learn far more from these episodes than from we do from smooth sailing.  Failures and mistakes may feel terrible when they’re happening, but they are not the end unless we decide they are.  If you’re still alive, there’s still more left within you.

·      Remind yourself that what you have to give is unique and important.  Even if it’s not yet ready or not yet connecting with an audience or customers, someone out there needs and is waiting for what you have to offer.

For some people, succeeding to a level that feels satisfying takes far longer than they ever hoped or imagined.  If this is you, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong—this is a very common human experience.  We can’t always know beforehand exactly what will get us to our destination.  Just keep taking a step forward every time you can, keep learning, and above all, just keep going.

Red-Letter Days

“The way to stay inspired and motivated is by doing what you like, doing what you love.”

— Raphael Saadiq

Sometimes, you just have a naturally amazing day.  You wake up feeling rested and enthusiastic, the skies are sunny and blue, you make all the green lights without driving like a maniac, people return your smiles, and you have time to get everything done.  Everything seems to hum along easily.  It’s so lovely when this happens.  But for all the days when it doesn’t, how to stay sane?  In a crowded world, we cross paths with so many others, all on their own private missions, all the time.  Sometimes there are crashes, whether physical or philosophical.  We have to deal with numerous institutions, from governments to schools to businesses, that bring order to our world, but which we didn’t create and may not agree with.  There are important people whose happiness we’re trying to contribute to every day.  And there are just so many distractions competing for our attention!

I’ve come to think of the happy phenomenon described above as the result of the alignment of numerous factors, some of which are hard or impossible to predict.  While you can’t force this experience of ease into being, there are certainly things you can do to make this experience more common.  If you’re serious about creating more instances of it, here are some areas to check in on:

·      With what foods and liquids are you fueling your body?  If your nutrition is not good, and if you’re not properly hydrated, you will start to crumble, both physically and mentally.  You can’t be productive if you’re crashing throughout the day because your body is missing essential elements that it needs to function.  You need high-quality protein, healthy fats, and lots of fruits and vegetables.  You also need more water than you think you do.

·      How much sleep are you getting, and is it deep and restful?  So many important things are meant to happen when you sleep.  If you’re consistently getting less than seven hours per night of high-quality sleep, you’re running on empty.  You will have a much harder time with mental focus, and you’re far more likely to be emotionally volatile; your body will feel less coordinated and heavier.  Some people need more than seven hours, so if you feel the need to sleep late on days off, try bumping up your sleep time routinely and see how many hours it takes per night before you stop needing that “catch up” time.  In addition to sleep, we also need some rest time when we’re not running, doing, or worrying.  Hobbies and creative pursuits, reading, time with friends, and other fun, relaxing activities can fall into this category.  If you don’t allow yourself any of this kind of time, you’ll have a hard time enjoying your life at all.

·      How much exercise are you getting?  Moving your physical body both strengthens your fitness and creates happiness chemicals known as endorphins (which can enhance mood for many people just as well as the most powerful pharmaceuticals tailored for this purpose).  Exercise has so many benefits for your body and your outlook that it must be considered an essential element in your daily routine.  Be smart and check with your medical professional before you make any substantial changes in your health regimen, but do find an activity you can do and work it into your life.  Not immediately, but with continued application, you will create more energy than you use this way.

·      What gives your life meaning and purpose?  Are there things that get you out of bed in the morning because you genuinely want to do them on a deep level?  These can be anything really as long as you feel like you’ve chosen to give them an important place in your life and they’re important to you—learning to play an instrument whose sound you’ve always loved, caring for an aging relative, writing a book, climbing a mountain, solving a problem in your community—just something that fires you up when you think about it or makes you feel satisfied when you do it.  If you don’t have anything like this drawing you forward, you’re leaving a major source of energy and joy on the table.

·      What really inspires you?  A particular style of music or a particular composer or recording artist?  Movies with heroic themes, well-written novels, beautifully performed theatre, Olympic or other professional sports, the beauty of the natural world, your pet, etc.?  When you figure out answers to this, do your best to bring these things into your experience on a regular basis.  These things will also create more energy and enthusiasm for you.

·      What just annoys the heck out of you?  And how can you minimize the impact of these things on your life?  Maybe you need to be careful not to spend too much time around the more negative people you know.  Maybe you need to wear earplugs when you have to be somewhere really loud.  Maybe you can brainstorm about how to spend less time commuting.  You get my drift.  Sometimes small adjustments can yield a lot of relief.

·      What are you doing as a calming daily practice for your mind, emotions and spirit?  If you want to have more days when you sail through life with joy and ease, you can’t skip this one, even though it can be hard to carve out the time for it.  Find one thing or several things that can occupy this function for you, and prioritize doing one of them every day.  Write in a journal, meditate, pray, use EFT/Tapping, spend a few minutes every day thinking about what you’re grateful for, walk mindfully, breathe deeply, or do something else that is calming, relaxing, and that helps you to feel centered and reassured.  When you’re attending to your own needs, it’s far easier to be generous and understanding with others.

If some of these suggestions seem annoyingly familiar, as though they’ve come directly from the desk of Captain Obvious, that is most likely because these are some of the most important things we can do as humans to increase the likelihood that we will function well and happily as we go about the business of being alive, and they don’t change over time.  When you’re handling these basics, you’re helping yourself to have a far better daily experience, and you’re also far more able to contribute positively to the world around you.  It’s a life’s work to become a pro at balancing all this, but you’re probably already good at some of them.  Pick one where you know you could do better and start trying new things, and then rinse and repeat!

A Time for Everything

“Be aware of wonder. Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.”

— Robert Fulghum

Here in the U.S., we’ve just celebrated Independence Day.  It’s a fun, social holiday when it’s customary to gather for backyard barbeque, swimming, lawn games, and festive libations, and then we finish big by blowing things up.  Hopefully, only fireworks.  The whole thing is an excellent expression of the exuberance of summer, as well as the freewheeling attitude that begs to prevail during the hottest weather.  In some ways it feels like the high point of summer, a day that epitomizes everything this season stands for.  So it can seem like something of a letdown to get back to normal life the day after.  How does one go on working when it seems like it’s high time to drop everything and hit the beach for a month, responsibility be damned?

It’s a fine thing to partake of the customs and spirit of each season, and yet there will always be things that need doing.  There are also things you probably want to be advancing for yourself during this time—goals that reflect true desires you’d like to see fulfilled.  How can you stay motivated in the midst of distraction in the form of good times to be had all around?  Some thoughts:

• First of all, don’t fight the fun!  Find ways to let yourself enjoy the opportunities that present themselves.  If you don’t do this enough, you’re likely to get fed up at some point and bolt from the things you actually want to be doing because all that self-denial has made you want to rebel.  What this balance between work and play should be is unique to each person, and takes trial and error to discover.  It’s also not a constant, so you’ll need to be honest with yourself about what you’re craving on a daily basis and do your best to find sensible ways to feed any craving that you know is healthy.
• Next, look at the list of what you’re working on and see if you can streamline it to make a little more room than usual to breathe.  Do you have to make progress on all of those items?  Could you work on only one thing per week, even if you’re really charging forward on that thing, in order to create a little more head space and know when you’re done each day?  Could you pencil in a little more free time here and there to do with as you like?  What would go undone if you did that?  Maybe you can live with the answer to this. 
• Where could you lighten up on others, who are also probably experiencing a similar draw toward a little more down time?  Can you see ways to lower your expectations of others a little so they feel more freedom to enjoy extra relaxation without guilt?  It’s not very nice to do less if you’re just going to burden others with more.
• Once you have made a little room for yourself, consider why you want to make the progress you do.  Reminding ourselves of the purpose behind actions that may not immediately pay off is crucial to generating the energy necessary to getting things done.  For example, cleaning the bathroom is not an inspiring prospect, but keeping germs and dust under control means you get to experience health and the pleasure of living in a clean, uncluttered environment.  Focus on the happy result you’re working toward, and it gets a lot easier to get up and go.
• Finally, you can take all the fun you’ve experienced at recent social events, or other pleasant experiences, and play the memories like music in the background when you’re working.  Whenever you think of it, remember the laughs, the play, and the good times with people (or animals) you feel close to; you can even think about the ways in which the work you’re doing is likely to impact them for the better, no matter if the benefits are indirect.  For example, if you’re cleaning the house, you can think about how nice it will be for them to visit a clean space next time, and imagine the fun you’ll have when they do—or even just how your clean house supports your health, which helps you feel good enough to join in whenever there’s an invitation.

It’s natural to feel some connection to the character of the seasons.  If you acknowledge what’s on offer at any particular time and find ways to adapt and enjoy it, you’ll be serving your overall happiness and continued effectiveness.  None of us is a machine, nor should we be.  Choose to be a human and take part!

The Emotional Gym

“Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.”

— Brian Tracy

In discussions on happiness, much is made of caring for and balancing the triumvirate of body, mind, and spirit, and rightly so.  But I find it astonishing that comparatively little is said of dealing with the emotions, which are such a huge part of the experience of being human.  They are the landscape of our inner world.  What happens in our lives is colored by and interpreted through the lens of our emotional states; these states are dominant in determining how we feel about the overall quality of our lives, far more so than the list of happenings in our personal history. 

There’s a massive amount of information available on caring for the health of the body; it will come as a surprise to no one reading this, I suspect, that generally accepted wisdom on this topic suggests that a healthy diet and exercise are important (though what these look like specifically is a matter of great contention).  A tremendous amount of energy is spent the world over on educating the mind, challenging it to remember acquired knowledge and synthesize new thought, as well as on teaching it to calm and quiet through a wide variety of meditation techniques in order to unleash some of its more mysterious abilities.  Every world religion has a mountain of lore behind it on fulfilling the spiritual side of human nature, and non-religious spiritual guidance also fills libraries.  But where do emotions even fit into this picture?  

Are they merely chemical reactions produced by the physical body?  Some would say so.  This school of thought tends to brush them off as meaningless byproducts of the mash-up of air breathed, food eaten, and the normal functioning of the body’s systems.  In the opposite camp, Esther Hicks pioneered a concept of emotions as spiritual guidance system; according to her writings, they indicate whether you’re on track to simultaneously enjoy your life and move toward all of your deeply held desires.  Others would say that emotion is a byproduct of thought, so if we want to achieve our goals, we need to learn how to manufacture supportive thoughts through discipline so that we can be efficient in life.  I think that there is utility to be found in all of these viewpoints, but I suspect that this is a conversation that is far less familiar to you than the conversations around the big three of mind, body, spirit.  Having done a lot of work, in recent years, that includes a strong focus on dealing with emotions constructively, I hold a conviction that this conversation needs to come out into the open.  I think the rising tide of news stories depicting violent acts perpetrated by seemingly functional, but obviously massively unhappy people demonstrates the degree to which we have been ignoring this essential element in our overall health and balance.

Let’s take a look at the three viewpoints mentioned above and what they have to offer us. 

• Emotions as meaningless chemical byproducts.  What if they are, to quote Shakespeare out of context, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”?  Well, if this is true, and they have nothing of value to offer us, what should we do?  This viewpoint doesn’t attempt to argue that they have no effect on us.  However, it also doesn’t offer guidance in dealing with this very loud aspect of daily life.  I think it’s the root of the habit of denial of our emotions that has become so trendy since the dawn of organized scientific inquiry.  And the denial of something so basic to our experience of and interpretation of life seems to me to present a glaring lack of utility, and even a long-term danger to our mental health.  To put the merit of this viewpoint to work, I think we need to pay attention to the chemical reactions that have been studied, such as the production of endorphins through physical activity.  This is powerful, and something that almost every person can use to manufacture euphoria, not to mention physical fitness, which is a joy of its own, and a feeling of increased enthusiasm for life.  For example, according to www.health.harvard.edu, a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 1999 showed that when three groups of people with depression either took Zoloft or took part in an aerobic exercise program, or did both, the results of all groups were roughly the same—60–70% percent of all three groups could no longer be classified as having major depression.  Regarding diet, we also have choices to make that impact our body’s ability to function mentally and emotionally as well as physically.  According to an article by Drew Ramsey, MD, “One study found that adolescents with low-quality junk food diets are 79 percent more likely to suffer from depression. Another found that diets high in trans fats found in processed foods raised the risk of depression by 42 percent among adults over the course of approximately six years. And a huge study of women’s diets by the Harvard School of Public health concluded that those whose diets contained the greatest number of healthy omega-3 fats (and the lowest levels of unhealthy omega-6s) were significantly less likely to suffer from depression.”  The information available about diet can be confusing, but I think it’s obvious that it has an impact on the body’s chemical state.
• Emotions as byproducts of our thoughts.  If emotions are a direct result of the thoughts we think, how can we go about improving this feedback loop?  Some say that when we have an uncomfortable emotion, we should learn to become aware of the thought train we’ve been on and give ourselves a chance to arrest a thought pattern that is causing us to spiral downward.  There are many flavors of meditation through which we can gain insight into calming an overactive, hyper mind and practice a state that brings relaxation to the body and emotions.  We can learn, through practice, to substitute a neutral mental state at this point, and even to then direct our thoughts toward more positive patterns.
• Emotions as spiritual guidance system.  Esther Hicks, as previously mentioned, sees the above and raises it by suggesting that 1. it is helpful to reach for a slightly better thought over and over throughout one’s day in order to keep moving back into alignment and happiness; 2. noticing when we’re feeling bad and learning to coach ourselves into better states allows us to accept the spiritual and physical gifts that are always available to us; 3. when we’re spending time in negative emotion, we’re resisting the best that life has to offer, and the emotions we feel are there to point us in the right direction.  This viewpoint suggests that emotions are best interpreted as a signpost that can lead to progress if we take the time to stop and read it.

Again, I think all of these viewpoints have something excellent to offer us in our understanding of emotions and their place in balanced functioning.  And yet, they generally address ways to improve emotional states without much thought as to how understanding the very personal meaning emotions have added to our lives can be instructive.  This is yet another element that I now consider to be absolutely crucial in my understanding on this topic, and that is only beginning to be granted the attention I think it deserves.  Psychological professionals have been working on this for over a hundred years, but in many ways this pursuit has been branded as the realm of people with serious mental and emotional health issues, people who aren’t able to function normally.  Others who exhibit interest in emotional introspection are sometimes made fun of as far-out hippies who want to spend a ridiculous amount of time navel gazing.  Yet in my experience, it’s helpful and healthy to take time every day to contemplate and address one’s emotional states—what’s been your dominant state, when have you felt out of control or stressed emotionally, and what can be done about that?  Your mind can help you trace what’s bothering you and give you ideas about how to create solutions.  It can also help you to imagine better ways of functioning, and rehearse those mentally so it’s easier to remember a new option next time the same kind of situation arises.

Even more important than the mental consideration of one’s emotions, however, is the act of honestly expressing what feels true and valid.  Most of us are so conditioned not to do this with any regularity that it feels frightening and often seems overly negative and whiney.  Even so, I have found that in expression are the seeds of all manner of healing, inspiration, and peace.  I generally find that each form of expression will be more effective or less so for each person, but the act of expression itself is key to creating harmony and happiness.  It’s just as essential to overall balance as physical activity, which is why I titled this blog post the way I did.  The challenge is in finding a mode of expression that is both honest and fun for you without being destructive to others so that you can use it on a daily basis.  Unexpressed emotion builds up over time and becomes long-term stress, and can even contribute directly to physical pain and discomfort.

Music, writing, visual art, storytelling, and other art forms can be enjoyable and constructive avenues for this emotional expression.  While I absolutely love the arts, currently my favorite way to get this need for expression satisfied is through EFT/Tapping, because it’s so flexible and highly personalized and offers many efficient techniques for working through uncomfortable emotions.  It can seem like a pretty odd thing to do at first, but for many people it quickly becomes a very welcome way to express constructively and lighten an emotional load that was standing in the way of forward motion and a positive outlook.  As EFT proliferates, I think we’re going to see an increased awareness about the usefulness of venting emotion and stimulating positive emotional change for everyone, not just the people with serious concerns and traumas who end up working with psychological professionals.

Finally, I find that there’s a layer of meaning that can be extracted from getting clear on what we really feel.  Emotions can be a powerful indicator of where you are out of alignment with your own values, whatever those may be.  As just one example, if you act in a way that is out of keeping with what you consider to be right and appropriate behavior, you will likely end up feeling embarrassment or shame.  Allowing yourself to admit how you feel and trace it back to your behavior allows you to become aware of how you wish you had acted, and work toward doing so next time.  Going through this process is empowering if you are willing to take the time and deal with a bit of discomfort as you find your way to clarity.  I think everyone deserves to feel empowered in this way, so I encourage you to try out some modes of emotional expression and see what helps you to feel greater clarity and freedom, and what you can enjoy so that you’ll be able to create this experience often.  I have come to feel that the importance of having tools that work in this area cannot be overstated.  There is so much joy to be had when you’re not using so much of your energy to deny how you really feel, or that you have emotions at all for that matter!  And there is such a better life to be lived when we feel that something so influential as our emotions can empower as a rule rather than overwhelm and hinder.  So find some emotional gym equipment and start trying it out.  I think you’ll find that it really does improve your everyday experience in being you.

The Upward Path

“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.”

— Michelangelo

Among the needs that humans have in the esteem category is the need to feel our own capacity, in other words our ability to handle life as its events wash over us.  We all long to feel that we are enough.  In fact, in my work with clients, I often find that most of us have a deep-seated horror of not being enough that keeps us in a lack mentality, which in turn continually stimulates the body’s stress response.  Numerous factors can feed this vicious cycle, including the amped-up messages we receive daily in many modern cultures that no one is ever enough, that we must all be striving to be the best at all things all the time—which of course is a losing battle, because no one person ever could be.  In the end, no one else can decide for you that you are enough.  You must simply decide yourself that you are.  Maslowe identified several ways in which we seek satisfaction in the process of making this decision, some of which we’ve already covered, some of which we address this week, and some of which we’ll look at next week.  Since the highest rung on the ladder of capacity that can be achieved through learning and practice is generally known as mastery, that is where we will set our sights today.  This is within the reach of most of us, and a worthy goal to strive for.

One can be a master of information, or of practice, or of both.  Someone can have expert-level understanding of a subject matter area, yet be unable to produce results in that area.  That person is still a master of intellectual knowledge, and that can be incredibly useful if applied in some way or passed on to others who can apply it.  Someone else can be a master of doing something with a high degree of excellence, but be unable to explain it, and lack the benefits that come with studying widely on the subject.  He may have focused on results only, and sought only the coaching and information that was absolutely necessary to keep moving forward.  This too can be extremely useful, as this kind of mastery leaves a trail that others can analyze and duplicate, and again pass on to others.  The master who is most revered, though, is often the one who both understands a subject deeply and can demonstrate that knowledge through action and the creation of exceptional outcomes.  This person is often widely influential.  She is likely to receive feedback from others to that effect, which helps her to feel significant—but that’s next week’s topic!  I’m getting ahead of myself.

Thoreau famously claimed, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and I think most of us know all too well what he was getting at.  Many people fail to find ways to live with purpose, verve, and the feelings of self-esteem we’re addressing here.  So if we all desire feelings of competence, and building mastery in any area is helpful in producing those feelings, why don’t more of us commit to striving for mastery?  Well, how about:  Life is not easy, first of all.  Second, if we are not stubbornly purposeful about setting a course and continually working to stay on it, it’s so darned easy to be distracted by what others want for us, by the demands of others, by pain, by pleasure, by loud noises, and heck, by shiny objects!  You name it, we’re curious about it.  And that’s fine.  That’s all part of life.  But if we don’t allow ourselves to apply our innate abilities to the pursuit of mastery, we miss out on one of the grander adventures it’s possible to have on this planet.

The process of blossoming into mastery is one filled with drama.  I remember years ago hearing Marianne Williamson make the distinction between the “cheap drama” that prevails when you’re living a petty, childish, self-absorbed life, and the worthy drama that remains part of your experience when you’ve grown into a more authentic, mature person.  (I’m paraphrasing from memory here, so apologies to Ms. Williamson if something is lost in my translation.)  I loved this concept, and I think this applies to growing into mastery as well.  Truly mastering nearly anything requires treading a long road that includes difficulty and constant effort and change.  It includes learning from others who are available to you, even when you know they’re not the best teachers or you don’t love their personalities.  It also includes the necessity of eventually throwing off the strictures of what has been done before, just as a teenager must assert personal independence through acts of rebellion (on whatever scale) in order to become an adult.  There will be times when you have support and help, and others when you don’t; portions of the road will inevitably be lonely and dark.  At times your prospects will seem hopeless as you hit barriers that seem final.  You will lose things along the way, which is part of the price of the journey.  You will gain many others, including successes and personal strengths that can’t be taken from you.  The empowerment that results from reaching the mountaintop at the end of the road is one of life’s peak experiences (another concept originated by Maslowe, by the way—what a guy).  If you ask anyone who you consider to be a master of a subject or a skill set, I think you’ll find that his or her story of the path that lead to mastery was full of ups and downs, and expressed the truly meaningful drama inherent in striving for excellence through exhilarating highs and frightening lows.

While some of this may sound pretty good, the hard parts are no joke.  Most of us are never taught the skills that make up the strength known as discipline.  Most of us are petrified of discomfort, for instance, and are never given strategies for dealing with it in a healthy manner so that we can keep moving toward our mountaintop.  Most of us lack basic knowledge about maintaining the health and balance of the body, mind, emotions and spirit.  Many of us were never shown the basics of organization, which is necessary for keeping everything together through a long and taxing effort.  Many of us were not instructed in the development of focus and techniques on restoring it when it has evaporated.  You can expect more on these topics in blogs up ahead.  But those who are keenly aware that they are missing essential pieces in these areas will lack the confidence to take on a process that can be as grueling as the effort toward mastery.

For those who do venture out onto the path, and who persevere through all the strangeness they encounter, life becomes far fuller and richer.  Whatever they are able to achieve is far more than they had before, and more than those who never try will ever have.  Now, I believe all human life has value, and that we need not be on a path toward mastery in order to be worthy.  We still have the power to decide for ourselves that we are worthy for any reason or no reason at all, and in fact I recommend it!  Doing so tends to immediately make life feel better, and that tends to enliven our energy and creativity, which in my world is pretty much always a good thing.  But if we are able, why not try to wring the most juice out of life that we can?  Feeling that we are competent, that we have done good things, and that we can do more is a major component of building self-esteem.  Why not reach for something grand and see how far we can climb?

It’s worthy of mention that yet higher than mastery is the realm of genius, but that is reached only when mastery is combined with natural talent to yield the astonishing feats of someone at the pinnacle of his or her area of endeavor.  Therefore, as you consider what to master, I highly recommend choosing something that ignites your curiosity with the flame of passion.  When you love a subject, learning is a joy, even a happy compulsion.  It will be a lot easier to keep going if you always have that flame keeping you lit from within.  It will also attract others with its brilliance and power, which can open up opportunities as you reach milestones and require new resources.  Now, off you go!  If you’re not yet on the path to mastery, dig deep for ideas about where you can place your target.  The pace and the goal are entirely up to you, and your business only.  What mountain do you want to scale?  What's a tiny step you can take to begin?

*I was influenced in this post by some of the resources listed here, including a great book called Mastery.

Ever a New Summit

“Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Another among the esteem needs that Maslowe wrote about is a sense of achievement.  This is an important factor in our conviction of self-worth, both because human beings are built with a natural drive toward creativity they long to satisfy, and because most cultures revere those who have achieved unique and groundbreaking results.  It’s worth periodically looking at how you’re feeling about what you’ve achieved in the course of your life so that you can address your innate desire for a sense of achievement; doing this helps to show the way toward keeping your self-esteem at healthy levels.

So what is achievement?  Dictionary.com defines it as, “Something accomplished, especially by superior ability, special effort, great courage, etc.; a great or heroic deed.”  So this is no walk in the park—it needs to be an accomplishment that required unusual innate qualities, or strife, or both.  And who decides what it should be and when the criteria for accomplishment have been met?  In the context of a discussion about self-esteem, only you decide what an achievement is and when you’ve attained it.  Others will have opinions about what you’ve done, and that will most likely impact your self-assessment to some degree, which we’ll discuss in later blogs in this category.  But no one can ultimately decide for you when to be satisfied with your own performance.  That is your responsibility, and the process of deciding shapes both your life and your opinion of yourself.  This is where clearly defined goals can be useful.  If you have taken some time to think through what you want to the best of your current abilities, it’s far easier to direct yourself along the path to the finish, and to be certain about when you’ve arrived.  If you haven’t clarified your goals, you are far more likely to encounter confusion about where to go, what to do, and when you’ve accomplished something about which you can feel satisfied.

Here are a few other factors that will impact how you feel about your accomplishments:

·      Was the goal something you really wanted to pursue?

Most likely you’ve had the experience of having put considerable time and effort behind something that didn’t bring you the satisfaction you originally expected when you finally achieved it.  This can happen for numerous reasons, such as:

o   It was never really expressive of you.  Someone else wanted this for you, and you went along, either to make them happy, or because you thought it was a good idea, but you never noticed that your own passion was never truly engaged.

o   Somewhere along the way it would have been appropriate to adjust the goal, but you refused to do so for whatever reason.  People do and must grow and change.  It’s normal to realize once you’re in the middle of an effort that your expectations or process need to adjust in order to keep pace with what’s true for you.  A goal is meant to draw you forward, not lock you rigidly in place.

o   Your goal was not worthy of all the time and effort you poured into it.  If you spent years on a complicated revenge scheme, you might eventually achieve it.  However, if you felt satisfaction at the result, there would also be shame mixed in; you would know that your achievement spoke of your own unresolved pain and pettiness.  If you had, instead, taken steps to express your pain, forgive over time, and protect others from injustice, you would likely have felt satisfaction that was clean and clear of internal conflict.

·      Was the process enjoyable?

o   If the process of getting to your goal was not enjoyable, you may have forgotten to build fun into your process.  Sometimes we think that only through suffering can we create results that are glorious.  While it’s true that the application of discipline required to achieve things that fit the dictionary definition of achievement will probably result in some discomfort, it’s also important to be able to enjoy your life during the times that you’re waiting for the gratification at the end of your road.  All of it is your life, not just the occasional end point of an extended effort.

o   If you hated every minute of working toward the goal, once you achieve it you are most likely exhausted, depleted, and in the habit of being in a bad mood.  You may also have convinced yourself that this is the only way anyone gets anything done, and that life is grim and difficult (if you didn’t already believe these things before).

o   Was someone else trying to control you throughout the process?  If so, you’ll end up with a strong flavor of resentment about the whole experience, even if you like the end result.

·      Does your goal result in a satisfactory change in your life?

o   If you thought that your achievement would result in a harvest that didn’t appear, you’re likely to feel frustrated even if you feel great about what you did.  Sometimes we follow in others’ footsteps and expect to have the same experiences, which doesn’t always happen.  Sometimes we pin our fantasies to our goals, such as fame and unreasonable fortune, and are surprised when the fantasy elements aren’t a part of the achievement.

o  If your goal did result in the expected harvest, it’s still possible that you didn’t end up feeling the way you thought you would about it.  We have a tendency to expect external achievements alone to change how we feel about life and about ourselves, but this discounts the inner game that we must also play in order to feel good about life.  As the saying goes, “Wherever you go, there you are.”  You can’t outrun your own negative emotional and thought patterns.  No achievement will absolve you of the need to do the inner work that is uniquely yours. 

No matter how satisfied you are with an achievement, you will find that, as soon as it’s yours, you want something else!  This is a normal part of life as a human being.  We are creative, evolution-oriented beings who crave experience.  This is why it’s best to avoid seeing any goal as the solution to all things in your life and focus on more on a sense of enjoyment of the process—otherwise you’re missing out on the vast collection of moments that make up the majority of your existence.  People who look back at their lives in old age often regret that they were not more engaged in all the small and less significant moments of life, and that they did not take every opportunity to be present to the love and enjoyment that was available in every one of them.  It’s all important.  But if you feel unhappy about what you’ve achieved in life when you take all of it into consideration, I hope you’ll take the time to consider deeply what it is that you most want, and begin to chart a course toward it.  Working toward goals that feel great and significant is a basic human desire; if you want to live a life that feels whole, you must not neglect this.  And try to do it with zest for maximum enjoyment! 

Mr./Ms. Independence

“Independence is happiness.”

— Susan B. Anthony

Following Maslowe’s breadcrumbs, we’ve now arrived at the area of needs related to esteem.  Now that we’ve taken care of basic physiological needs, safety, and love and belongingness needs, he postulates that we will become interested in seeing our sense of self-worth reflected back to us from the world around us.  One of the achievements we long to feel that we’ve earned is independence, which allows us to know our own strength and our ability to stand alone.   While few of us prefer to feel that we must remain alone, being confident that we can handle what comes up in life is an important part of feeling like a competent, whole adult.  If it seems that we must always be relying on the support of others to make our lives run, the human spirit within has a tendency to resent the lack of freedom—even if it is we ourselves who refuse to do what is necessary to move toward independence.

When we have done the work to feel self-reliant, the confidence that results can form the basis of endless avenues of growth.  Being reasonably sure that we can produce results that consistently avoid complete disaster, we become willing to take some risks, learn by doing, take on adventures that challenge our limits.  People who have fulfilling lives have usually acclimated themselves to stretching beyond their comfort zones to some extent in following their desires and goals; this helps to keep life interesting by refreshing our perspective and encouraging creativity.  Desire and creativity are natural hallmarks of humanity.  If harnessed toward worthy goals, they are the most potent fuels we have behind our journey toward self-actualization, the highest level in Maslowe’s concept of personal evolution.

If we lack the confidence in our own competence and ability to rely on ourselves, we will find it very difficult to get anything done.  Nothing kills enthusiasm like the conviction that our efforts are doomed before we’ve even started!  The enjoyable journey toward something we’d really love to create becomes incredibly arduous, if not impossible, if we think it’s impossible to arrive.  If procrastination is something you struggle with, you’ve likely skipped some steps in the process of building your sense of independence.  If you take a look at what’s missing, you may find that filling in the gaps is just a matter of giving yourself a break from blame and worst-case scenarios, realizing that you just need some practice, and devising a simple plan to get it.  If your confidence in yourself is very low, you may need to start very small and work up incrementally, which is fine.  Whatever works to move you forward is worth doing; since it’s natural for us to have desires and use our creativity, feeling stuck in a rut is never going to be enjoyable.

The growth of independence is a natural part of human development, and most of us do gain some before adulthood.  Children who are loved, supported, and encouraged by their parents to challenge themselves appropriately throughout childhood will naturally build confidence in their abilities.  However, there are some obvious things that can go wrong, for instance:  If a parent is overprotective, the child may not be allowed to be challenged enough; if too dominant, the child may not be allowed the space to develop her own judgment and opinions; if not loving and supportive enough, the child may never feel safe enough to accept a challenge and try it on, as the idea of failure can seem disastrous if you don’t have anywhere to land; if too demanding, the child may feel that they have far too much to do already without adding elective risk in pursuit of a personal goal.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, then you may need to imagine a parent for yourself that you didn’t have.  What would the most skilled, loving parent advise you to do in order to build your own skills and confidence?  When you look back, what do you wish your parents had done (and not done) in helping you to gain independence?  Most of us can come up with some answers here without too much difficulty.  Chances are, you’ve thought many times in your life when considering your family, “Why couldn’t they have just…”  Once you have some ideas, you can use that imaginary parent as inspiration, brainstorm yourself about what you think would help you, or ask a friend you trust to help you come up with a few small steps you could take to get used to taking manageable risks toward something you want.

If you had the overprotective variety of parent, you may need to just practice taking risks at all, of any kind, like asking a stranger for the time, or taking a slightly different route to a familiar destination.  If you had the dominant parent, you might want to start writing in a journal about what you think, and what went well each day, as well as what didn’t and what you might do better next time so that you can develop your own voice.  If your parent wasn’t loving and supportive enough, then you need to build the habit of being more loving and supportive of yourself, and gather kind and caring people around you so that you can feel that it’s safe to fail here and there, and ok to take time to recover when necessary.  If you had a demanding parent, you may need to practice scaling back on busy-ness in order to create space to try some new things, and find ways to combat your judgmental inner voice.

You may also need to find a coach or a cheerleader who will take an interest in your process and share the journey the way the best possible parent for you would have done.  It’s also a great idea to get advice from an expert in your area of interest, whether in person or in book or recorded format.  This can help shorten your learning curve, which can make this process seem more likely to end in success, and thus, more fun.  As you gain experience and understanding, you can become more bold.  Keep in mind that most of us grow more quickly and easily by leveraging positive reinforcement—some kind of healthy reward for small victories, whether it’s a bubble bath or a celebratory dinner with those you love.  It also helps to share our ups and downs with others in some way.  And for many, thinking about ways in which this learning process might help others in the future can make the process more fulfilling.

No matter what childhood you had, chances are you emerged from it feeling like you missed something or other that everyone else seems to have mastered.  We often tell ourselves that we’re hopeless, even broken, because of these missing pieces.  This is clearly not an approach likely to lead to growth and happiness.  If you can isolate an area or two in which your natural development may have been arrested, even small movements forward in those areas can yield significant returns in confidence, because these movements remind us that reaching a distant goal may be possible after all.  We need to know that change and growth is possible to feel like we’re really alive.  Do yourself the honor of spending just a little time on considering what you need in order to feel more confident and independent, and I think you’ll find that your horizons broaden such that life’s prospect is suddenly much more appealing.  

A Friend Indeed

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Another important pillar of having a life that feels like you belong and are loved is having friends.  There’s nothing like a close friend who appreciates you with all your flaws, and with whom you can have a wonderful time doing anything or nothing, to help you feel like all is right with the world.  Unlike with family, we have choice in who we will align ourselves with in friendship from the time that we are children.  While this can allow for more generally comfortable, easy and supportive relationships than those we may have with family members, this may not be so if we don’t have natural talent in relating to others.  For many people, the world of friendships can seem bewildering to navigate and fraught with peril.  Engaging may not seem worth the risk.  And yet, without close friends, loneliness is virtually inevitable.

As with many other aspects of life, we rarely get direct instruction on how to foster friendships.  We’re expected to pick this up through osmosis, which is not the most helpful approach when we’re small, vulnerable, and have no idea what to do, and no one else does either.  Many of us have painful memories of difficult experiences with other children, who tend to be pathologically honest, are often thoughtless and come across as mean, and who often start experimenting early with hierarchy and power games.  Most of us remember betrayals that led us to approach the process of making friends with more caution, at least for a time.  Some people will choose to opt out of the process altogether after these stings, depending on how painful they were and how frequently they occurred.  Success depends on our natural ability to fit in and persist in resiliently failing forward until we, and those around us, develop some actual skill in relationships.

Often when we’re younger it’s easier to create strong bonds with others, because we spend so much time in close proximity with so many other people during our years in school.  Time and shared ups and downs help to draw us closer with others.  As we get older and live farther away from some of the friends we made in youth, and as life gets busier and more complicated, it can be hard to hold onto those relationships.  Long-distance friendship skills are a different ball of wax, and several degrees of difficulty harder to maintain.  It can also be harder to make new friends as adults, since we have a lot less time on our hands than we used to, and we’ve reached the time of life when it’s likely that we’re focusing on our own pursuits and passions, whether those be work, family, dating, or other extracurricular activities.  If we don’t encounter others we take a liking to in the course of work, hobbies, or religious/spiritual devotions, it’s going to take work to find friends elsewhere.

Men may have a more difficult time than women with making new friends at all ages, particularly in Western culture, because of the way that they are socialized.  Men are taught to be active, always doing and solving and tinkering with projects; there is a prevalent image of the hero as a lone cowboy who doesn’t need anyone else because he can handle everything just fine all on his own.  There is often a drive to establish hierarchy in relationships between men, which can keep them locked into specific roles.  In general, boys tend to make friends through proximity; they are less encouraged to learn complex manners, be nice to everyone, and sacrifice their own comfort for the feelings of others.  While many women learn to overbalance toward unhealthy self-sacrifice, they do tend to get more practice in observing, understanding, and caring for others, which may make it easier for them to quickly bond with someone else in a way that men may not have built the patience for.   These are gross generalizations, and each friendship will be the unique product of the interplay between two individuals who may not fit into any established stereotypes.  I do think it’s important, though, to acknowledge the extra challenges men may face here. Recent studies have shown that loneliness causes the production of stress hormones in the body, and a stressed body is more likely to develop a host of chronic illnesses.  It’s a matter of health that we learn to create more satisfying friendships, and it’s worth working on social skills required to build and maintain friendships even if it’s uncomfortable at first.  It’s also worth thinking through the stereotypes you were taught, and making your own decisions about who you will become.

So what are the essential skills involved in friendship?  Here are a few to consider, though you can doubtless think of more:

• Acceptance.  If you were to do nothing but criticize another, they would be unlikely to enjoy spending any time with you at all.  Your willingness to accept a friend as good enough just as they are allows them to relax and feel safe to be themselves with you. They will share more of themselves with you, and understanding will grow between you.
• Loyalty.  If you’re not able to stand behind your friend even when they act out of character, make a mistake, or are going through a difficult time in which they have little to give, you are likely to grow apart.
• Encouragement.  Find ways to listen to what your friend wants for themselves and offer your support, through words or deeds; celebrate what goes right for them, even if you feel moments of envy, so they know you’re invested in their success. 
• Compassion.  Work to understand how your friend feels.  No relationship can have much depth without a sense of mutual compassion and care.
• Generosity.  Be willing to give your time, love, and support (in a way that works for you too, of course).
• Honesty.  If you aren’t willing to be open with another about what’s true for you, there will be a wall between you.  If you aren’t willing to hear what’s true for them, they will end up feeling frustrated.  The best expression of honesty is combined in equal measure with kindness.  “Brutal honesty” is a display of lack of effort and consideration—after all, do you enjoy being treated with brutality by others?  I thought not!
• Fun.  While sometimes it helps to pour out our worries and woes to a friend, if you aren’t willing to let those go and allow yourself to have a good time with your friend, you’ll be missing out on one of the best things about friendship.  Everyone likes to have fun in different ways, but you can cultivate some sense of fun with each friend.  (If you can’t, then you’re probably not a good match.)
• Appreciation.  If you don’t genuinely appreciate your friend’s mix of unique qualities and feel enthusiasm for their company, they will eventually notice.  It feels a lot better to be around someone who clearly likes you than it does to spend time with someone who is non-committal and blasé.

Whether or not you’re currently good at these skills, growing more comfortable with them is time well spent.  Decide to think about one of them each week or month as you go about your social interactions, and notice how you and others display them; experiment with how you can use some of the same techniques you’ve observed, or improve your expression of the ones you’re already familiar with.  These are all skills we practice for a lifetime, and there’s no such thing as perfect.  Just get in there and work on how you can do a better job than you have in the past.  We are social creatures, and any improvements to your relationships will improve the overall quality of your life.

Thicker than Water

“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.”

— George Bernard Shaw

Having reviewed the most basic needs in Maslowe’s hierarchy, we now move into examining love and belongingness needs.  Once we have satisfied the physiological needs necessary for survival, and successfully created an adequate sense of safety, the theory goes, we will long for love, affection, and a sense of belonging with family, friends, and other social contacts such as those we make through work and religious affiliations.  The family is the first set of social contacts we have in life, so we’ll start there; the relationships we build at home will lay the foundations for the habits, beliefs and expectations of a lifetime.  The experiences we have at home when we’re young will resonate throughout the rest of our experience in ways both pleasant and upsetting, such that no matter where we are in our development, we are likely to be contending with the memories of these formative times.

It is a natural human desire to feel loved by one’s nearest relations.  We yearn to feel that we’re valued and have a place in the family structure.  And yet, there is just so much that can go wrong here!  My mother always said that when you have more than one child, you notice that they just come out different.  I know I’ve noticed in the course of making friends in life, and growing to understand them more deeply as an adult, that people can be much more different from me than I would have thought possible when I was younger.  We don’t choose our family members, and depending on the luck of the draw, we can find them baffling and endlessly frustrating.  Despite the fact that we all want very much, on some level, to give and receive love, the true connections that make this possible are often missed as though we’re out-of-control freight trains speeding through the night, driven by conductors behind locked doors.  And yet, our family will have more opportunity to know us better than most others ever will.  This can all create webs of complex dynamics that defy resolution.  It takes an enormous amount of work sometimes to move beyond their ability to continually press our buttons.  After all, they co-created those buttons.

“Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.”

— Cary Grant

Every person I’ve ever spoken to who has become a parent has echoed the sentiment that one can never be really ready to have children—it’s such a deeply challenging experience that it cannot be adequately communicated, and that’s probably for the best.  If anyone fully understood the reality beforehand, they’d be unlikely to do it, and the human race might be in trouble!  Given that, it shouldn’t be surprising that most of us feel dissatisfied with some of what we experienced at home.  Most people get no useful instruction in the art of parenthood.  They make it up as they go, and the younger they are when they embark on this adventure, the less likely they are to have worked out the recipe for their own peace and happiness beforehand.  One cannot pass on what one doesn’t have.

“The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.”

— George Carlin

To complicate matters, Nature seems to have set up human development to support the most rapid possible learning of the young in order to ensure their survival.  In Spontaneous Evolution, Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman note that until we’ve reached the age of six, our brains are most often in either delta (sleeping/unconscious) or theta (imagination/reverie) states, meaning that they are basically operating in a hypnotic trance.  Children this young are unable to analyze the information and programming coming at them from all sides.  They just absorb it directly into the subconscious for good or ill.  This helps them to quickly get up to speed with the requirements of their environment, but it also makes it possible for anything they observe to be written into their deepest psychology.  I find this to be a stunning revelation, and an incredibly strong argument for bringing the most awareness and care you can to your interactions with children—you are, quite literally, creating their worldview with your input into their experience.  Sadly, most people have no idea that children are quite this undefended, and children become products of carelessness.  Later, when we’re old enough to reason and make decisions for ourselves, we can clear out the jumble of unsupportive programming and experiences, but most of us have a lot of detritus to deal with, and the process of sorting through it is not fun.  That’s why we often avoid it and just live with the original stuff!

Giving and receiving love in the context of family dynamics often requires complex skills and a great deal of maturity.  Doing this well can be one of the greatest challenges we face in life.  Since the desire for love and belonging in the family is not going anywhere, one of the foundations of a happy life is to continue trying to rise to the call of what is necessary in your case to improve your relationships with family over time.  One of the skills we all need to build in order to do this is the ability to take over as parents to ourselves; this is an essential element in the development of real maturity.  We must learn to give to ourselves what we wish we had gotten from our own parents, whatever nurturing and care was missing in our early days, so that we can feel less needy in the presence of family in the moment.  In order to do this well, it is necessary to find a way to accept and let go of the past, which is a tall order for many, I know, especially for those who experiences trauma at the hands of close family members.  I’ll write more on how to do that in later posts.  It’s also necessary to become emotionally observant enough, as well as courageous enough, to learn when you need to create boundaries, speak up for yourself, and bring behaviors that are problematic for you to the attention of family members if you want to improve relationships that are challenging.  There is a world of books written on the development of these skills, and no shortage of professionals who can assist you with instruction, perspective, and coaching here using any number of great methodologies and tools.  As galling as it can be to have to do all this work, if you want to live a truly happy life, I think you’ll find it’s necessary, and it does get easier as you learn.   You deserve a happy life that’s full of love, connection, and harmony, and your family members deserve the chance to be in loving relationship with you.  However far the distance may seem that you need to travel, just start with a small step, and start building momentum.  

The Way Toward Heath

“I believe that the greatest gift you can give your family and the world is a healthy you.”

— Joyce Meyer

In the pursuit of a life that feels safe and secure, health is an extremely important topic.  Few things can be such a distraction from a life lived on our own terms as physical pain or disease, or emotional or mental pain and dysfunction.  Tending to our health is not as simple as building walls around our property or choosing our friends wisely (though these things may have their complexities).  I would have to say that there is more misinformation and confusion around what sustains health than in virtually any other area of inquiry I can think of.  Most of us are disheartened by the sheer volume of contradictions we encounter as we do our best to take care of ourselves and our families, and the fear-mongering rhetoric designed to sell us things pertaining to our health.  There is more information available than ever before in history, but no clear consensus on what works, and we are in danger of becoming overwhelmed and giving up entirely on having the experience of balance and vitality we’re after.

Many of us did experience vibrant health as children.  If so, we have a memory of what that felt like, at least.  We know what the best-case scenario is, and we can try to recreate and support it with our best efforts.  Those of us who didn’t may feel that the quest to gain it has about as much chance of success as a search for a legendary pirate’s treasure chest.  How can you find something you’re not even sure is really possible?  More on this later.  But chances are, if you’re out of your teens, that you may have encountered some sort of health challenge, whether that’s an old injury that just never healed quite right or a chronic issue that you haven’t been fully able to resolve.

Once we’ve had this experience of an unwanted problem that interrupts our physical, mental, or emotional functioning, fear of what the future may hold often creeps in.  After all, if this could blindside us, what else is in store in this life?  If the body can betray us in this way, how can we ever trust it again?  Of course, we may have been taught to have an adversarial relationship with our bodies before there was ever injury or meaningful illness in our lives.  We learn early from our families and communities about what our bodies do, what they mean, what we can expect from them.  If we see people around us suffering and feeling disempowered about maintaining and renewing health, then we come to believe that the body is fragile, and that our health is already eroding with each birthday.  We hear messages about how as we get older, aches, pains, and illness are inevitable.  Aging starts to sound like a bad deal for us, something to dread.  Does this sound to you like a helpful mindset for living in successful partnership with your body, mind, and emotions? 

If you notice that you have negative beliefs about your ability to enjoy health, working to be healthy, or taking appropriate care of your mind, body, emotions, and spirit, what can you do about that?  As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, admitting you have a problem is the first step.  Once you’re aware that there are conditions in place in yourself that you don’t prefer, congratulations!  You are now in a position to do something about it.  While these beliefs remain unconscious and unexamined, your life is likely to proceed in much the same familiar direction.  Becoming aware of disempowering beliefs can be painful and frightening, as this tends to stir up uncomfortable memories and the emotions that go with them.  This is where it might be a good idea to get help from someone more experienced, whether that’s a psychologist, a spiritual counselor, a coach, or a book about someone else who went through something similar and can give helpful guidance.  There is enough evidence now about the very real effect that our thoughts, beliefs and emotional states have on our long-term health that we should all be taking these into account and finding new ways to optimize them if we’re serious about supporting lifelong health.

Vast numbers of books have been written, and will continue to be, about the mechanics of what you MUST do to create and maintain health.  I am not going to enter the fray here by trying to give you some seven-step process to perpetual perfection.  As someone with some experience in dealing with chronic physical pain from different sources over the course of years, I feel that the most important thing I can add to the collective pool of knowledge is that we are each unique.  There is no one-size-fits-all solution.  I give you permission now to stop looking for it.  Now, before you wail in despair that managing your own health without a formal education in medicine is too large a project for you to be taking on, let me ask you, how does it feel to be clueless about how to maintain your health?  What if you could, little by little over time, learn what your body needs until you felt your energy, harmony, and confidence beginning to overflow?

The truth is, of course, that you can.  This doesn’t happen overnight, but if you decide that it’s what you want, and start thinking in this way, you will start compiling information that will help you in your quest.  You’ll start to notice that you feel better when you eat certain foods, sleep for a certain amount of hours starting and ending at certain times, do certain kinds of physical activity.  You’ll notice that you have more energy after spending time with certain people and less after spending time with others; some activities are more energizing, others more draining.  What most of us feel best with is the creation of balance, such that you intersperse these so that you never end a day feeling too drained, and you always add in some things that energize and uplift you to keep you going.  If you’re going to eat things you know aren’t good for you, at least you learn to balance that with making sure you get some high-quality nutrition into your body every day.  It’s the noticing and the intention to support your own health that will begin to swing your trajectory in a wide arc, over time, into an entirely new direction.  Those two things have more power than you might believe.  They don’t seem like the solution to anything when you’re desperate and in pain, but they are the long-term solution to finding what you need in order to thrive.  Most of us do our best to ignore pain signals from our bodies, minds, and emotions in favor of remaining functional, because this is what we’re taught to do.  We think there’s no point in dwelling on the negative or opening up to the experience of what the pain has to tell us because we haven’t considered that there might be wisdom there.  If you have a helpful technique to use, often there is, and it’s not necessarily hard to find (ahem…Tapping…or meditation or journaling or any number of others).  As you have some success in observing, implementing small changes, and feeling positive results, it will be easier to keep activating that intent to continue learning and implementing your way to vigorous health.

If you’ve never had the experience of health that you want, or it’s been a long time since you have, and you’re feeling disappointed and pessimistic, you will need to work on your ability to trust—trust that the world is large enough to contain the ideas and guidance you want, trust that you are capable of learning and growing, and trust your body to communicate to you when you are doing something right and when you may be contributing negatively to the issue at hand.  Read stories or watch movies about others who have triumphed in any situation for inspiration.  Allow yourself to relax for at least a few minutes a day and imagine how good it will feel to, well, feel good; really allow yourself to enjoy the experience of imagining this.  Enlist the support of others in reminding you of problems you’ve solved in the past, and all the fine qualities you have that can help you in moving forward this time.  Make sure you’re bringing some humor into your life by listening to one of the many brilliant comedians working today, spending time with someone who makes you laugh, or doing anything that tickles your funny bone.  Humor is essential to getting through hard times, and has profound healing powers of its own.

If you want to speed up you progress, then, as with anything, it’s a great idea to go do some research on what people who are considered to be successful in this arena have to offer.  Read stories about others who have had similar challenges to yours, or who are just passionate about health and sharing what they’ve learned.  Search for experts in relevant medical fields.  Find local health practitioners, including natural health experts like nutritionists and acupuncturists, who are highly rated online and seek their expertise.  Just remember that you are not everyone else.  What has worked for many others may not work for you, and vice versa.  If you’re really after health security, you’ll need to commit to firing up a lifelong curiosity about how to support your health as you continue to balance all the other areas of your life.

I wish I could say that I have all the answers and I can make it easy for you from this day forward to maintain glowing good health throughout your life.  I believe that the truth is that you are the only one who can chart the appropriate path to this goal, but there is support available for you every step of the way.  No one else could do this for you even if they wanted to, because the responsibility for the choices you make every day will always rest with you.  I think you’ll find that over time, as you grow to trust in your ability to care for yourself successfully, you’ll enjoy the ability to make your own choices and strike your own balance as a privilege.  The process will cease to be so overwhelming and become more satisfying, and you will become a source of information and guidance for others.  With no disrespect to the wisdom inherent in the Star Trek franchise, I say that I think that in today’s world the healthy functioning of the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual unit is really still the final frontier, practically speaking.  Most of us aren’t ready to move beyond this challenge into the realm of space—currently an inspiring, fantastical, glorious avoidance of the fact that we’re not even able to get our basic selves together!  We still have so much to learn about doing a decent job of being healthy humans on this planet.  This is a challenge that’s worthy of us too.  By all means, let’s keep dreaming big, but let’s also do the work to buoy ourselves up long enough to get to our biggest goals by attending to the unglamorous bits too.  May you have the most radiant health this week, this month, this life!  Feel free to comment below on anything you find to be a particularly helpful part of your own health regimen for the benefit of others.

To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

“Sleep is the best meditation.”

— The Dalai Lama

Sleep.  S-l-e-e…huh, what?  Were you saying something?

I know, this is not a sexy topic.  Let’s see if we can make it a bit more cloak and dagger, then:  Did you know that extreme sleep deprivation might even be able to kill a human?  I guess it makes sense if you really think about it, but I remember that the first time I heard this, I was taken aback.  I'm guessing that I now have your attention!

According to the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, “…animals deprived entirely of sleep lose all immune function and die in just a matter of weeks,” so it seems likely to smart people who study this topic extensively that the same fate might await a human deprived of all sleep.  However, the messages we usually hear in everyday life in Western culture suggest that there’s something wrong with us if we need more than a few hours of sleep.  When we’re obviously tired, people make fun of us, rib us about too many nights on the town, act like we’re being whiny little babies, imply that we should be able to man up and walk it off.  There are many factors that can contribute to sleep disturbances, but it can seem self-indulgent to spend time working out what crops up here.  After all, everyone has trouble sleeping sometimes, right?  Is that really a big deal?

Modern life has become a race to get more done, produce more tangible results to prove our worth (which is considered from a very “yang” perspective—what have you done, what can you brag about, how hard are you working?)  We’re unlikely to get much notice or credit for trying to create a balanced lifestyle that sustains time with family and friends and our health, and longevity—unless the attainment of six-pack abs is involved!  While we certainly can choose to live by these standards and leave the popular mindset unconsidered, the updated science tells us that sleep is absolutely necessary to our proper physical and mental functioning.

Inadequate sleep is associated with the following, for example:

• Inflammation, which contributes to issues like high blood pressure, arthritis, diabetes, and strokes
   
• Impaired memory, attention span and learning
   
• Decreased emotional stability; tendency toward irritability and depression
   
• Less access to creativity
   
• Diminished athletic ability and stamina, as well as reaction times and the ability to make good
  decisions while driving a vehicle
   
• Loss of muscle mass rather than fat while dieting, as well as increased appetite
   
• Increased stress hormone levels
   
• Decreased synchronization of organ systems
   
• Inability of the brain to process and organize our life experiences (neural consolidation)
   
• In the extreme, hallucinations and paranoia, and even brain damage

Not good at all!  The Same Harvard Web site linked above has this to say about sleep and mortality rates: “Data from three large cross-sectional epidemiological studies reveal that sleeping five hours or less per night increased mortality risk from all causes by roughly 15 percent.”  Also not good.  Ignoring the implications of your sleep life is clearly not the brightest thing to do!

Now, while I think that there are examples of high-functioning people throughout history, such as Mozart, Da Vinci, and Margaret Thatcher, who are reported to have slept surprisingly little, you’ll also note that these people had a very strong, passionate sense of purpose in life.  If you’re not currently living a life fueled by passion and purpose, you’re likely unable to hook into the incredible drive it would likely take to sleep for Da Vinci’s reported two whole hours per day.  There are also physical factors that will contribute to our needs; there's at least one gene that has been found to influence how much sleep an individual will require.  Especially given the toxic chemicals that are all around us these days and the pace of modern life, I think that most of us are fooling ourselves when we pretend we don’t need seven to eight hours per night on average.

On the other hand, I’m willing to acknowledge that societal rhythms that mirror the progression of daylight have kept us from experimentation with non-traditional ideas as far as sleep patterns.  For some, a polyphasic sleep model, in which frequent naps replace a single block of sleep, may actually work quite well; for some, two blocks of four-hour sleep might do the trick; when I was in college, for instance, I found that sleeping for several hours in the early evening followed by a period of homework and then getting more sleep really boosted my productivity and positive attitude about getting my work done.  I still find that a mid-afternoon siesta can be really helpful when I want to stay productive all throughout the day.  There are some fun infographics out there, like this one showing what famous historical figures have done with their sleep patterns that might give you some ideas if your work arrangement allows you to experiment.  Ultimately, I think sleep is one of those areas in which the most successful plan for each person might be a highly individualized one.  It’s worth doing some work to figure out how to maximize its restorative function in your routine. 

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the maintenance of adequate yin energy, to which sleep is a big contributor, is understood to be the body’s potential, its ability to create the stuff of your body, like blood and bone, and restore it as necessary.  It’s the ability to stay grounded in reality that balances a hyperactive mind, which the majority of us have in the living of the modern lifestyle.  The equilibrium required between both means that you can’t just run everything on yang energy, which is about activity and doing things with your body and mind.  That will burn you out and shorten your life span in this system of thought, and science is bearing this out.  In cultures that spend very little time in calming activities like meditation and quiet time alone while awake, sleep is one of the only things that we do regularly to build yin energy, especially since most of us don't do a great job with nutrition, another of the main sources of yin.

If you are someone who often feels drowsy or impatient, or is already exhibiting diseases that are influenced by lack of sleep, here are some factors to consider in improving this crucial part of your life:

• Make sure that your bedroom is a restful, clean, pleasant space that feels safe.  You should be able to enjoy being in it, and remove distractions and visual and auditory reminders to get things done.  Don’t work in this space.  Keep it for sleep and intimacy only.
   
• Your bedroom should be dark at night, as light hitting your eyes and skin while you sleep signals the body that it’s time to be awake.
   
• You might want to add a white noise machine or air filter that emits a gentle, constant sound.
   
• Keep your cell phone, computer, Blackberry, and other electronics elsewhere while you sleep.
   
• Develop a wind-down ritual so that you’re going to sleep at the same time each day, like doing some light stretching or breathing exercises, or some enjoyable reading in bed. 
   
• Wake up at the same time each day as well, expanding the amount of time you sleep on a daily basis until you don’t feel the need to “catch up” on the weekends. 
   
• Your body temperature is supposed to drop at night, so don’t exercise or take a hot shower or bath right before you want to sleep.  Allow for a cool-down period and lower the room temperature so you’re not too hot.  I also find that I'm more likely to have nightmares if I'm too warm while sleeping.
   
• If you do have trouble getting back to sleep during the night, don’t lie there feeling anxious about it.  Get up and do something relaxing like some more reading or listening to calming music until you’re drowsy again.  EFT (Tapping) is also great for helping you to relax, unwind, and get back to sleep.
   
• Don’t consume caffeine or nicotine past the early afternoon.  And while alcoholic beverages can help you relax into sleep, they can also disturb the second half of your sleep cycle.  Take note of whether this might be happening for you.
   
• Don’t eat a big meal right before bed.  The digestive process makes it hard for the body to sleep deeply.
   
• If you have a pet that is active at night, consider keeping it out of the bedroom while you’re sleeping.
   
• If you have health challenges that interfere with sleep, do what you can to address them.  If those challenges mean that you need extra sleep in order to heal and restore yourself, make it a priority to get it.
  
  I hope you can see how important it is to achieve a healthy sleep routine for you and your specific needs.  Try not to let anyone else decide for you what you need (unless you have serious issues with your sleep, in which case professional advice on your particular situation may be invaluable).  Instead, experiment and really pay attention to what works for you.  The reward will be more energy, clarity of mind, calmer emotions, enhanced creativity, and more vibrant health.  Hey, maybe this is sexy after all.