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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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12 Nov 2023
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Who Controls Your Thermostat?

 

 

People have been fighting over who controls the temperature at home since we lived in caves. Who controls the fire? Who gets to sleep comfortably next to its burning embers on cold nights? Now we call it thermostat wars. One family member likes to crank up the AC in the summer heat, while another is putting on a sweater to be comfortable.

Smart home technology may be the way to end the thermostat wars. Smart thermostats can adjust the temperature room by room, and when someone is in the room or not, lower it temporarily in winter and raise it in summer, making everyone happy while keeping utility bills low.

Smart thermostats can play a role in climate change, too, by responding to peak demand — adjusting to avoid rolling blackouts and overloaded power lines that can start forest fires that take lives and property. Individual choices, house by house, make all the difference.

Our solutions to heating and cooling our homes have evolved with technology. It’s been a bumpy ride. In 2007, the Department of Energy’s extremely successful Energy Star program stopped certifying programmable thermostats—because almost no one used them consistently, and, therefore, they weren’t saving energy. Besides the energy nerds, homeowners found the thermostats too complicated to manage. It was easier to do things the old fashioned way—by changing thermostat settings during the day as needed for comfort.

In that same year, a whole new generation of smart thermostats appeared on the scene when Ecobee debuted what they called the “first smart Wi-Fi thermostat.” Nest soon followed with their own entry into the smart thermostat market. Unlike programmable thermostats, which simply allow you to schedule temperature settings throughout the days, Ecobee and Nest use artificial intelligence to figure out how to keep your home comfortable while reducing your electricity bill.

Smart thermostats can learn your day-to-day patterns and adjust the temperature for both comfort and efficiency. For example, you could set the old programmable thermostats to turn the air conditioning on and off based on time of day, such as when you are at work or late at night. The new ones add occupancy sensors to the toolbox. If you work from home one day a week or someone is staying home from school, you needn’t change all the programming, or override the system. It will happen automatically to keep you comfortable and your home efficient. Smart systems also allow slow or fast ramping up or ramping down temperatures, so that in an emergency your utility can raise your air conditioning setting in a way you won’t notice.

Beyond the Thermostat Wars

We’ve come a long way and now have programmable, communicating thermostats that connect wirelessly to phones and computers and utilities and allow remote access and control.

Some utilities now offer incentives to customers in exchange for the ability to control the smart thermostat when power demand is high. The utility’s control is often minimal and customers can typically override the utility setting, but a utility in Colorado recently locked thousands of customer thermostats during an “energy emergency.” If you enroll in this kind of program, be sure you understand what you may give up as a participant.

There are a few ways that working with the utility can be a win for consumers. Many utilities offer time-of-use pricing, so that electricity is cheaper at night when there is lower demand and more expensive during peak demand periods in the late afternoon and early evening. A smart thermostat can minimize your electricity use during peak demand times automatically. The rewards are lower energy bills for you, the customer, without much sacrifice of comfort.

Another way to save money during peak events is by enrolling in programs through companies that partner with utilities, like EnergyHub or OhmConnect.

So what does the utility get out of this arrangement? Quite a bit. Here are a few benefits for utilities:

  1. The utility’s service area will not experience as many blackouts. This goes a long way in keeping customers happy and perhaps avoiding some litigation over spoiled food and such.
  2. If the utility is better able to handle peak load, it will minimize the use of expensive, dirty, coal fired “peaker plants.” These are power plants that are in reserve for emergencies. They are expensive to start up and operate, and they put out a lot of CO2, NO2 and other harmful pollutants.
  3. By automatically shifting energy use in consumer’s homes, utilities may be able to help homeowners avoid costly upgrades to their electrical systems.

But all of these changes bring up another problem. Now that your thermostat can connect to your utility, who can see your home data? In our new connected lifestyles, can you trust your thermostat to utility program staff?

To address these issues, some states have taken steps to protect consumer privacy in the smart grid era. California, Colorado and Virginia guard against improper third party acquisition of your data for commercial purposes, such as targeted advertising. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) grants strong privacy rights, including allowing a consumer to opt out of the sale of her information to third parties, and to request that a business delete her information from its records.

Trust between utilities and their customers must be based on transparency about how energy use data is collected and stored. As the smart grid evolves, the utility industry will need to update their privacy rules to keep pace, making sure that customers always maintain control over their own data.

 

 

About the Author

 

Jim Gunshinan is a versatile and experienced writer and editor of nonfiction and creative nonfiction works. He writes in a conversational tone and, as a published poet, can paint pictures with words that connect and inspire. Jim blogs about, and has published articles about green homebuilding and renovation, energy, the environment, and climate change. He has also published articles on science and spirituality, personal essays, and poetry.

 

08 Nov 2023
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Why Staring at Screens Is Making Your Eyeballs Elongate—and How to Stop It

How close is the smartphone or laptop you’re reading this on from your eyes? Probably just a few inches. How long have you spent looking at a screen today? If you’re close to the average it’s likely to be over nine hours.

Research from ophthalmologists shows that our constant screen time is radically changing our eyes. Just like the rest of our bodies, the human eye is supposed to stop growing after our teens. Now it keeps growing.

When our eyes spend more time focusing on near objects, like phones, screens or even paperbacks, it makes our eyeballs elongate, which prevents the eye from bending light the way it should. This elongation increases nearsightedness, called myopia, which causes distant objects to appear blurred. Myopia affects half of young adults in the US, twice as many as 50 years ago and over 40% of the population.

For adults this might cause eye strains or speed up existing vision issues. But for kids, whose eyes are still developing, the situation is so dire that the American Academy of Optometry and American Academy of Ophthalmology both consider myopia an epidemic.

Working for prolonged periods, whether texting, reading or jotting emails is what optometrists call “near work”. The trouble with holding a screen close to your face isn’t about light shining into your eyes, it’s about the strain of the eye. For one, your eyes blink far less when they’re focused so closely. As you’re holding your phone in your hand, performing near work, your muscles stretch and your lenses shift since our eyes over-accommodate to constant close-distance tasks. That’s why they’re growing.

When you put on a pair of glasses, your eye muscles relax because they’re no longer straining. Ditto if you put down your phone – sans glasses – blink a couple times and stare off into the distance for 20 seconds.

Does this affect you? Probably. How much extra time on screen have you had in the past 18 months? How much work have you been doing from home? Pre-pandemic, our phones were already constant companions. When many of us began working from home and e-learning last year, researchers predicted this dramatic online increase would cause never-before-seen eye dysfunction. They were right.

In the spring of 2020, Chinese researchers tested over 120,000 Covid-quarantined students aged six to eight and found myopia and other vision issues linked to home confinement increased up to three times compared with the previous five years – that’s with as little as 2.5 more hours of e-learning (not counting video games, social media, etc). Results for US students could be much higher since many American kids spend most of their days online. “Virtual learning has definitely increased myopia,” says Dr Luxme Hariharan, of the Nicklaus children’s hospital in Miami, Florida, who points anecdotally to a huge shift in cases in the last year. “Prolonged near work [like looking at screens up close] makes our eyes overcompensate.”

“We can clinically measure the millimeter lengthening of the eyeball,” explains Dr Eric Chow, a Miami, Florida optometrist. “Studies have shown that the longer the axial length, the higher the risk of eye diseases like glaucoma, retinal detachment and cataracts.”

Straining vision introduces a host of eye-related health problems. And it’s more than just kids needing prescriptions. “People say ‘oh, it’s just glasses,’” says Dr Aaron Miller, a pediatric ophthalmologist at Houston Eye Associates. “The nearsighted have much higher chances of retina tears and glaucoma, bigger issues secondary to nearsightedness. It’s the long game we worry about.”

He adds: “The shape of the eye is round like a basketball,” he explains. “When an eye becomes nearsighted, myopic, the eye is longer, like a grape or olive. The retina – the coating – can get stretched and thinned. As we age, sometimes there can be breaks in the retina. Like cracks in wallpaper. When that occurs, these cracks cause fluid to enter in behind the wallpaper, that’s what we call retinal detachment which causes a lot of people to go blind.”

This isn’t just a western problem. There is a genetic component here, but it’s clear that behavior accelerates the change. Poor eyes can lead to decreased work efficiency and huge loss of productivity – think money–for multinationals. That’s why nations like China are so worried about this that they have already changed their education system, limiting how long students study – even extra tutoring – to curb the near-work that heightens myopia. The US should do the same, says Miller.

Labeling myopia a second public health crisis is no hyperbole. 10-year-old Aleena Joyce’s screen time tripled in the last 18 months, with many school days – and two-thirds of Aleena’s waking hours – held almost entirely on her iPad. The Illinois fourth-grader had already been diagnosed with myopia – nearsightedness – in kindergarten, and her eyes had worsened each year.

“Sometimes we would have to go in prior to her annual eye exam because she noticed more difficulty with reading the board at school,” says Yusra Cheema, Aleena’s mother.

Aleena was one of a handful of students who said that their vision had markedly worsened in connection with increased screen time. The parents of Alan Kim, the child actor and nine-year-old Minari star, said their son’s prescription doubled in the last year in part due to the near work of on-set studies held on his iPad.

Each child now uses new FDA-approved contact lenses that effectively reshape the eye to slow down myopia. But most parents and their kids have no idea this issue even exists.

These problems affect adults too. Constant connection can heighten high or degenerative myopia, severe nearsightedness that progressively worsens and can lead to cataracts, glaucoma and retinal detachment – since the eyeball stretches and the retina thins – but thankfully, it’s rare. Risk grows with age, and can speed up gradual loss of the eye’s ability to focus, called presbyopia.

Detection can help. Home approaches like GoCheckKids, an FDA-registered vision screening app allows any parent to take a photo of their child’s eyes to analyze how light refracts and measure their risks for near or farsightedness and other eye diseases.

Specialized contact lenses are another major tool, says Dr Michele Andrews, a vice-president of CooperVision, the company behind the FDA-approved MiSight contacts. “It’s a contact geared for children aged eight to 12 whose eyes are growing,” she explains, “Which slow down the progression of myopia and change the shape of the eyeball.”

In late 2021 at the American Academy of Optometry meeting in Boston, an annual eye research conference, Andrews presented the results of a seven-year study that showed abnormal axial length growth slowed by an average of 50% among eight-to-17-year-olds who wore her company’s corrective contacts. Perhaps most striking is for those who suffered from myopia, wore the lenses, then stopped wearing them, “we learned there is no rebound effect,” she says. “Myopia did not come back” after kids stopped wearing her company’s contacts. That’s because these lenses “change the way the light bends inside the eye and pulls the image in front of the retina”, she says, which slows axial growth because the clear image is now in front of the retina. If there’s no reason to grow then the problem resolves itself early.

As myopia is typically most pronounced – and dangerous – as the eyes grow, this solution is geared for kids. But adults have hope too. “Spend more time outdoors,” recommends Chow, at least two hours daily. “Studies have shown that increased sunlight decreases myopia progression.”

Most important is taking breaks which help eyes rest, blink and lubricate. Then there’s the 20-20-20 model. “Every 20 minutes, look at a distance 20 feet away, for 20 seconds,” Hariharan advises. “Being on the computer for hours on end isn’t good for your health. Don’t break to play video games or pick up another screen. Go outside!”

 

 

Original article here

31 Oct 2023
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Becoming Super Conscious

 

Many many people (and animals and forests and oceans too) have become super conscious in these past few years. Is that you too? Here are what I see as the 12 sign of being super conscious now….

  1. We don’t get triggered by things in the way we used to. There’s a kind of calm understanding of what’s behind things and where they might lead if someone recognises its potential and greater purpose.
  2. We walk in awe of the natural world, going ‘look at that sky, the green of everything, the bursting wonder of flowers and the sheer joy of connecting with animals’.
  3. We KNOW things. Yup just simply know stuff we never learned or heard of before. I call this quantum intelligence and it seems to be catching on.
  4. We know who we are and at the same time it’s kind of irrelevant as we are now the source creators of ourselves. Identity has ceased to matter and fulfillment of greater purpose has taken its joyful place.
  5. We appear to be timeless in some way. Yes there are signs of aging, but at the same time there’s a radiant inner glow that supersedes any belief in getting older.
  6. We are radiant suns lighting up reality, not just in our close proximity, but in the greater field of us all.
  7. There is a strong sense of Source both within and without. We see source in everything and everyone. It seems we are now inner connected via what I like to call the Source mycelium network that connects all life now.
  8. We can commune with animals, trees, the stars, the universe. It’s more than telepathic, it’s communion at its most wonderful level.
  9. We are possibilitarians, apocaloptimists, transformers and transcenders of all that has come before. The past is maleable, we live in the presence of the present, co-creating a future too fabulous to even yet imagine.
  10. We talk with those who’ve gone on to the other side with great ease and grace, reveling in their next becoming. We are even watching a wave of loved ones being reborn right now as the next wave of super conscious beings on the planet.
  11. We are a collective force of wonder, of creation, of super connection, each with our own unique masteries and genius surging to the fore to innovate everything.
  12. We source new consciousness and quantum leap new possibilities into reality. We are future innovators, loving life, spreading Kindness with a capital K and living in a version of reality that is magical, synergistic, beautiful and naturally abundant.

 

About the Author:


Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Original post here

 

26 Oct 2023
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Why Career Transition Is So Hard

 

 

Today people at all stages of their careers are asking themselves profound questions about the kind of work they do, how much of it they want to do, and the place it occupies in their lives. We’re asking ourselves these questions in part because fewer and fewer of us conceive of life as having the three “traditional” stages: a short early stage devoted to learning, a long middle stage dedicated to work, and a later stage devoted to enjoying one’s golden years. Instead, with growing frequency, we’re alternating between changing jobs and careers, pursuing opportunities for education, and making time for periods of rest and restoration.

This isn’t a midlife-crisis type of questioning that flares up at a certain age and gets resolved once and for all. The accelerated pace of technological change and, most recently, the advent of AI are reshaping jobs and organizations in ways that call for constant career reinvention. So we all need to learn how to get better at making the most of the frequent transitions that will constitute a long working life.

There’s a lot that’s beneficial and necessary about this shift, but no matter how often you change careers, you’re likely to experience the transition as an emotionally fraught process—one that involves confusion, loss, insecurity, and struggle. Big changes can be exhilarating, but they’re also terrifying.

For more than two decades—ever since I began conducting research on the topic for my book Working Identity—I’ve been studying career reinvention: what prompts people to do it, how they go about it, and how it affects them. In this article, drawing on work I’ve done since the book’s publication in 2004, I’ll explain why such transitions are so hard for so many of us, despite their growing frequency and prevalence, and I’ll offer some ideas for managing them more intentionally and successfully.

Why Change Is Hard

Some of what makes changing careers difficult will be unique to you and your particular circumstances. But you’ll almost surely have to confront two challenges while in transition: a lack of institutional support and an unsettling loss of professional identity.

Lack of institutional support. Until recently, many of the important moves in our working lives were institutionalized, meaning they were well scripted by the communities and professions that oversaw them. If you wanted to become a doctor, make partner at a law firm, or move up the management ranks, you had to follow a clear sequence of steps. From schooling through retirement, you knew more or less how long each step would take. Peers went through them with you, and elders showed you the way. Throughout the process, gatekeepers marked your progress with degrees, credentials, promotions, and, eventually, gold watches.

Today, with the rise of nonlinear career paths, many of the transitions we make are “under-institutionalized.” There is no immutable series of steps for the change you need to make, and no telling how long it will take or how to measure your progress. Complicating matters, the direction of travel is often from large organizations, which have well-structured recruiting and hiring processes, to smaller players, private firms, and entrepreneurial opportunities in unstructured job markets. Increasingly, too, people are shifting from full-time jobs to fluid, individualized portfolios of gigs and part-time roles. All this can offer you an endless sense of possibility, but it also makes it harder to figure out what you want to do, and where to start.

Loss of professional identity. Decades’ worth of research in social psychology shows that our sense of identity is anchored in the well-defined groups and organizations with which we are associated and by which we are recognized. Without the cover and support of a traditional employer and a stable work identity, we can quickly start to feel lost, anxious, irrelevant, and insecure. Those feelings can be strongly amplified if instead of choosing to leave your job, you’ve been let go or fired.

Emotional ups and down are a standard feature of any transition. Unfortunately, you’re likely to have to cope with them for longer than you might expect, for several reasons. If you’re an experienced executive, you probably have some very specific skills and knowledge, and that can make finding a new fit challenging, especially because many senior positions are not advertised publicly. Vetting and interviewing processes have also gotten longer—the result of a confluence of factors, including the use of multiple screening methods such as personality tests and skills assessments. More broadly, the current economic uncertainty can make it slower and harder to secure a job or financing for an entrepreneurial venture.

Search Different

When it comes to making big life decisions, we’re typically told that the first step is to figure out what it is that we really want. Once the hard work of self-reflection is done, the thinking goes, the rest is simply a matter of implementation.

The problem is, that approach doesn’t work. Year in and year out, I’ve seen the same dynamic: People know what they don’t want to do anymore, or what is no longer viable, but they don’t know what to do instead. So they delay getting started, feeling that they first need greater clarity or waiting until they’ve lost a job and are forced to make a change.

It’s easy to blame this inertia on human psychology: We fear change, lack maturity, don’t understand ourselves, have failed to reflect on our true nature. But my research has led me to a different conclusion. Usually we fail to change simply because we don’t know how to go about it. The problem lies in our methods, not our minds.

Career change is iterative. You can’t line everything up in advance. You have to figure things out over time and make adjustments as you go.

The story of Thomas (a pseudonym) is instructive. Thomas had a conventional career in finance with a Fortune 500 company until he reached the age of 48. Each year he got bigger bonuses, greater performance evaluations, and bigger responsibilities, and he was eventually promoted to finance director in his company’s health care business. But when that business was dismantled, he lost his job, and finding a new one proved difficult. He couldn’t make a lateral move, because roles at his level were few and far between; he didn’t yet have the experience to become a CEO; and he was told he was overqualified and “too well paid” for more-junior roles. Eventually he got an offer from a midsize firm that needed his expertise temporarily. It wasn’t an ideal match, but he took the position to avoid having a big gap on his CV.

After that gig ended, Thomas was back to square one. But during the search process he’d reconnected with a couple of old friends and colleagues in similar straits who had pooled office space and launched freelance advisory businesses that allowed them to generate some income while searching for the next thing. Thomas collaborated with them on two start-up ideas, but neither really took off, so he and his family made some adjustments: His wife ramped up her career, and they moved to a less costly city and invested in profit-generating rental properties.

During those difficult years, Thomas began thinking about a market gap he had noticed while working for his previous employer: the dearth of assisted-living facilities for the aging population in a region he knew well. Gradually he made connections with the players in that space, looked at models in other countries, and began helping companies orchestrate deals in the sector. Over time he became a go-to person for this kind of work. Now, with interest rates rising and the deal flow slowing, he’s seeking an operational role again, keen to use the skills he’s acquired.

What can we learn from Thomas’s story? After he was forced into a career change, he didn’t begin by trying to figure out who he “really” was and map out a plan before moving forward. Instead he hustled, following his nose and activating his networks, trying lots of different things, often simultaneously, without fully settling on one. He learned and adapted, which is what we all have to do in a world that rewards optionality and the exploration of many possible selves.

A Liminal State

Embracing optionality and multiplicity in the search for a new career, as Thomas did, makes a lot of sense intellectually, but emotionally it’s a roller-coaster ride. That’s because it puts you in what anthropologists call a liminal state, where you must navigate between a past that’s clearly over and a future that’s still uncertain.

Liminality can be unpleasant, especially for those of us used to single-mindedly pursuing clear goals on a well-trodden path. But when you’re changing careers, liminality gives you the necessary time and space to question the old givens. Think of it as an identity time-out, when you can let go of your commitment to who you used to be and focus more creatively on who you might become. It takes time to discover what you want to change, identify the habits and assumptions that might be holding you back, and build sufficient skills experience and connections in a new arena. So instead of trying to land your next role as quickly as possible, you must embrace liminality. You have to be willing to get and stay lost for a while.

My research has shown that there are three important ways to make the process easier.

Diverge and delay. Finding your next role almost always takes longer than you expect. Make the most of that time. A traditional plan-and-implement program is likely only to get you more of the same. If you want your liminal period to lead to real discovery, you need to experiment with divergent possibilities while delaying commitment to any one of them. In doing so, you’ll have to think more creatively and will obtain more information about yourself and your options.

Consider the case of a lawyer I’ll call Sophie. Coming out of a two-decade corporate career, Sophie wasn’t sure what she wanted to do next, but she was keen to explore a range of possibilities, among them documentary filmmaking, nonexecutive board roles, and sustainability consulting. Over a three-year period she got herself a board-director accreditation, took filmmaking and journalism courses, worked on a start-up idea, did freelance consulting on compliance, joined a nonprofit board, did an internship in a newsroom, completed a corporate film project in her old area of ethics and integrity, and produced (and won prizes for) two short films. With deeper insight about the economic realities of the media and entertainment industries, she now feels well placed to decide between putting most of her energy into documentary filmmaking and building a more diverse portfolio of work.

Exploit and explore. Human beings are very good at either-or thinking: Either I’m leveraging my old skill set or I’m pivoting to something new. But most people making a career transition have to do both simultaneously, at least at first—ideally staying in their old jobs and careers while exploiting and exploring on the side until something new becomes viable.

One investment banker did just that when he began to tire of his career. While still working at his blue-chip firm, he started a blog lampooning the industry under the pen name Litquidity, shortened to Lit. Next, after switching to private equity, he launched the Litquidity Instagram account. As his following grew, he thought about turning his side gig into a full-time one but didn’t feel he could take the risk. Reluctantly he returned to banking. But just a few years later the Litquidity business had grown enough for him to make that transition. Today Lit is a social media sensation, with several Instagram accounts, a popular newsletter, a podcast, a deal with a recruiting firm, and roles as an angel investor and venture capital scout for Bain Capital Ventures.

Bridge and bond. We grow professionally in and through our relationships with others. But when it comes to career change, the connections we already have aren’t usually all that helpful. You need to build your relationships in two ways: by bridging, which involves creating or reactivating relationships beyond your current social circle, and bonding, which involves deepening ties and finding community within a close circle of kindred spirits.

Bridging often gets more attention because the golden rule of job-search networking has always been to mobilize your weak ties—the relationships you have with people you don’t know well or don’t see very often—to maximize your chances of learning about new opportunities. A recent study of more than 20 million LinkedIn users showed that this is indeed true: Weak ties help you get a job because they connect you to farther-flung social circles. The hitch is that most people dread the prospect of reaching out to their extended network in this way because it’s hard work that can leave you feeling exposed and vulnerable.

That’s why bonding relationships—critical for anyone trying to stay healthy, happy, and sane—are so important for people in transition. They provide the support, sustenance, and space people need to process the unsettling emotions of the transition period.

There’s no one way to forge bonding relationships. Sometimes the important ones are with people you already know (especially spouses), but sometimes they are with kindred spirits, people also in transition, or those already working in the field to which you aspire. Thomas bonded with the buddies he shared office space with. Sophie bonded with the newsroom team (who invited her to stay on a freelance basis after her internship), a community of female documentary filmmakers, and some of the other mature students in her courses. There’s convincing evidence that when independent consultants find their tribe, they are not only more productive but also better able to tolerate the anxiety of being on their own. One way or another, we all need a secure base from which to explore the unknown and turn painful feelings into sources of creativity and growth.

The Learning Plot

Being in transition is like losing the plot of your professional life. You need to diverge and delay, exploit and explore, and bridge and bond to find a new narrative thread. In doing so it’s essential to engage with others and tell them your story—again and again, as much to make sense of your experience as to enlist their help. This process, which I call “self-reflecting out loud,” will propel you forward, in no small measure because others will respond, sympathize, commiserate, ask questions, call your bluffs, and share their own experiences in ways that will help clarify your thinking.

Your story will most likely depart from the timeless myth in which a hero (you!) struggles to pivot to the next career and, by dint of hard work and determination, ultimately finds a happy ending. That kind of simple, linear plotline doesn’t reflect the realities of today’s working world, in which jobs and careers are precarious, liminality can be long, and resolution—if there is any—tends to be short-lived. So we all need to get comfortable with a new kind of narrative that revolves around what I call “the learning plot”—a story of ongoing struggle and adaptation. That’s what Thomas, Sophie, and Lit all did.

As constant reinvention becomes the norm, the stories that define us have no start or ending. Instead of closure, the prize is learning: What we learn about ourselves when we embrace, rather than resist, the loss of status and identity will give us access to more options in the long term. Proficiency in being liminal won’t reduce the great uncertainty before you. But it will increase your capacity to successfully navigate the present and future transitions that are the signature of a modern career.

 

 

 

Original article here

22 Oct 2023
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Is Dreaming Real?

 

“The farther away I go,” Alex wrote, “the closer I’ll be to you.”

A week later, she lay dead on the floor of a middle school bathroom in Thailand. That was three years after she had shown up late for dinner with a black eye from her first seizure. It was eight years after our first date climbing trees in Central Park.

“That breeze, that tickled your ear?” she wrote once, when there was just an ocean between us. “That was me.”

Her final letter ended with a question. “How long until we see each other again?”

It was the night of her funeral when it happened. She was there, waiting on the far bank of a raging river, radiant with red hair flying. I began to wade across, but the black current swept me away before I could reach her. She came again another night, as I slept, trapped behind thick glass we pressed our palms against. Then, another dream—this time of Alex in a hospital waiting room. “It isn’t her,” the nurse insisted, summoning security. Unable to contemplate nothingness, the mind can only shape the contours of the void. Death becomes an uncrossable river, a wall of unbreakable glass, an obvious lie.

I dreamed of Alex for years. Each dream was different, yet the theme was immutable: She could not be reached. Then, one night, I went lucid, and everything changed.

*   *   *

Dr. Keith Hearne, a psychologist, defines lucid dreaming as becoming “fully aware of being in a dream.” This realization is instantly transformative: Rather than a dream being something that simply happens to you, suddenly you can influence the dream’s content and direction.

 

As his wife sleeps unsuspectingly beside him, Liam flies through an endless cosmos of beckoning planets searching for sex.

 

Aristotle documented the phenomenon, as did the Buddha Shakyamuni. Depictions of lucid dreaming appear in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in the oral traditions of Australian aborigines. In a conceit shared by many modern practitioners, the Upanishads from the sixth century B.C. equate lucid dreaming with godhood. “Up and down in his dream, the god makes manifold shapes for himself, either rejoicing together with women, or laughing, or seeing terrible sights.”

Among scientists, the concept was widely considered a myth until Hearne proved otherwise. At 8:07 a.m. on April 12, 1975, research subject Alan Worsley sent a message to Hearne from within a lucid dream. Our bodies are paralyzed during REM sleep, except our unseeing eyes, which still flit around behind sealed lids, like captive butterflies. While an EEG confirmed that Worsley slept, the dreamer performed a series of choreographed eye movements, akin to Morse code. “The signals were coming from another world—the world of dreams,” Hearne wrote, “and they were as exciting as if they were coming from another solar system.”

For many lucid dreamers, or “oneironauts,” inner space and outer space converge. At the moment of lucidity, Clare Johnson delights in backflipping out of her current dream and landing in an infinite void. Felicity Doyle often begins by exploring a galaxy of “soap bubbles,” all portals to exotic locales. Another man, who asked to go by a pseudonym due to the nature of what he shared, summons a universe. As his wife sleeps unsuspectingly beside him, Liam, as we will call him, enacts the two most common lucid dream motifs: He flies through an endless cosmos of beckoning planets searching for sex.

“I usually take the approach that the women have been waiting for me,” Liam explained. “I transmit that thought to them ahead of time, telepathically, ‘I’m your long-lost love.’ ”

They couple—in ruined castles, on red sand beaches, in luminescent wilderness—and then he flies away, never to return. “There is only one particular woman that I search for again and again,” he confessed. “I’ll think, ‘Oh, maybe there’s something in that bed,’ and I’ll pull back the covers and sure enough, there she is. Maybe half the time, I’m successful.”

In waking life, the woman is a family friend—someone Liam knows through his wife. Objectively, they have never shared more than casual conversation, but in dreams, she is the ultimate lover, even boldly initiating sex with Liam in front of his wife and family. “I love those moments,” he grinned. “It’s almost like bragging—bragging to myself about my own lucidity. I’m so strong, I can do it in front of my own mother-in-law.”

In the morning, Liam feels no guilt. “This is a safe space to explore anything taboo,” he concludes. Other lucid dreamers report going even further, carrying out acts of rape, pedophilia, incest, and murder with impunity.

I first met Liam at a private gathering organized by Doyle. Over a light lunch, 10 oneironauts discussed recent nocturnal adventures: turning into animals, conversing with historical figures, shooting heroin. Some spoke about cutting through the fabric of dreams to see what lies beyond. Others advised the more reckless to tie silver cords to their dream bodies first, to keep them from wandering too far and being lost forever.

While a recent study found that 47 percent of respondents have had at least one lucid dream, Doyle’s guests reported frequent and prolonged experiences. It is unclear why certain individuals are predisposed to lucidity, but research suggests that oneironauts tend to possess a greater puzzle-solving ability. It was also evident, from my conversations with dreamers, that training is critical for developing any innate potential.

As lunch progressed, the discussion turned to matters of willpower. While even novice oneironauts are usually able to exert minimal control over their dream environments (levitating a handkerchief, for instance), more impressive feats are often stymied. The dream world possesses a kind of perverse and shifting logic. Concessions can often be made. If the dreamer cannot fly, for example, she might consider manifesting a magic carpet. If a dreamer wanted to move a mountain, she might first have to rig an atomic bomb.

As far back as Doyle can remember, this world of dreams always seemed “more real” than her waking one. “It’s brighter and more vibrant there. Everything sparkles,” she insists. “It’s crystal clear in all directions.” Other dreamers report synesthesia, viewing scenes from multiple angles simultaneously, and ethereal music beyond the capability of any earthly instrument. Jared Zeizel regularly visits an orchard bearing surreal fruit more delicious than any meal he has ever tasted.

“As a child,” Doyle later told me, “I had extreme social anxiety.” We sat amid the clutter of her suburban San Francisco home, eating oranges as her lively 8-year-old practiced piano across the room. “My parents got divorced when I was 3, and then my mom got divorced again when I was 15. There was fighting at home and at school. Kids threw their lunches at me, and shoved me into lockers. Dreams were my only escape.” Yet, even there, securely inside her own mind, the suffering continued.

“There is this boy, and we are blissfully in love,” Doyle began, describing a recurrent dream that has persisted for decades. His appearance changes from night to night, but his essence is the same. “Our love is deeper and stronger than any I’ve ever known, and in every dream, we are torn apart. I go questing after him—just bizarre scenes like climbing telephone poles in the desert to peer into the distance, or asking a series of giants, ‘Have you seen him?’ Or, I remember a wardrobe of uninhabited bodies—just skins on coat hangers, and I was desperately searching through, ‘Not him, not him,’ just sobbing and sobbing. I would wake up and be wrecked for weeks.”

At 19, Doyle lost a leg in a motorcycle crash. “I shattered my pelvis,” she whispered, to spare her daughter the details, “and my femur broke, and I severed my femoral artery. At that point, I had no pulse. They didn’t expect me to survive.”

“As far as the leg,” she continued, gesturing at her stump, “I find it a very useful tool. You may not be able to discern the difference between your physical body and your spiritual one, but I know what it feels like all the time.” Where her leg once was, Doyle now experiences a phantom limb permanently bent in the exact position the leg had been that day, straddling her motorcycle, at the moment of impact.

She has long since become accustomed to life on crutches, but every now and then, she will open a door in a dream and see herself across the threshold, back in the intensive care unit, suspended in a web of tubes and wires, somewhere between life and death. “I’ve learned to close that door, and walk away,” she stated. And, when she walks away in dreams, she walks on two legs.

In her dreams, the 47-year-old is young again. And she runs, over hills and rooftops, through houses. She leaps over fences. The last time Doyle saw her dream lover standing there with their daughters, she ran to them too. “I instantly knew them,” she explained. “Our wedding, the births of our children—I knew my dream family more than I ever knew my waking one.” They wept with joy at their reunion, but all too soon Doyle felt the harrowing sensation of being pulled back into a body. Her family begged her to stay. She clutched at them with all her strength.

Doyle awoke beside her real husband. “He has no interest in dreams,” she admits, though like her, he has his own double life. Among other revelations too painful to utter, Doyle discovered just three months ago that her husband has a cigarette habit. “He lied to me for nine years,” she confessed. “I’d smell it on him and he’d say things like, ‘I must have been standing next to a smoker.’ ”

The resulting marital crisis has provoked an enduring insomnia. Doyle juggles a pharmacopeia of sleeping pills, but the sleep is never deep enough to go lucid. Now, at a time when she needs her inner world the most, she is an exile.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, in a clinic outside L.A., Dr. Joseph Green works with patients suffering from the opposite problem. Many of them are terrified of falling asleep. The psychologist specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly the intrusive nightmares so characteristic of that disorder. Green teaches lucidity techniques that allow clients to re-engineer their nightmares from the inside.

 

While skepticism creates lucidity, faith is required to sustain it. Among oneironauts, the concept takes on an almost religious tone.

 

The therapist begins by advising patients to document their dreams—the first step to lucidity. Journaling helps strengthen the connection between the conscious and subconscious mind, and the dream material can be studied for recurring themes. Each theme is an opportunity to perform the vital task of reality testing. “For example,” Green explained, “I’ve always had cops in my dreams, so whenever I see a cop during the day, I ask myself, ‘Are you dreaming?’ ” Eventually, the subject asks that question in a dream. Some practitioners test reality by pushing an index finger through the palm of their hand, some pinch their noses and try to breathe, others jump to see if they can levitate. Confirmation instantly subverts reality.

While skepticism creates lucidity, faith is required to sustain it. Among oneironauts, the concept takes on an almost religious tone. As London-based lucid dreaming therapist Dr. Clare Johnson explains, “If you’re afraid there’s a monster around the next corner, lo and behold, there is. If you’re worried that a door won’t open, lo and behold, it’s locked.” If you believe you can fly, you can fly. If you begin to doubt it, though, down you go. Here, in the dream, the mind’s role in creating reality is absolute.

Johnson and Green train clients to reflect extreme confidence within dreams. Rather than flee from one’s nightmares, the dreamer is encouraged to engage. “Everything in the dream is part of you,” Johnson notes. Everything is alive, and everything has a message. “Instead of running from a monster, turn and face it. Try sending love. Try giving it a gift. Try asking what it wants.”

Green described a Vietnam veteran whose best friend died beside him in a firefight. The veteran relived the episode in eruptive nightmares for half a century until the therapist taught him how to rewrite the script. When the dream returned, the veteran became lucid. “Get up,” he told his dying comrade. “The war is over. We’re going home.” The stricken soldier smiled, and the two men strolled off the battlefield arm in arm. The veteran never had that nightmare again.

Christina Cha was 10 years old when her favorite aunt, Theresa, was raped and murdered. In a recent essay, Cha imagined herself as the girl she had been, addressing the deceased. “It was 1982. Purple is my favorite color, and rainbows and unicorns are important to me.” She had just been the flower girl at her aunt’s wedding. “When you are found, you wear black and white with red. … [C]loth pieces lying on the ground, empty of you. … Your body, dumped in a parking lot in Little Italy.”

The murder, Cha confided, sent “a nuclear blast” through her family. “This heavy seriousness descended—this heavy silence, just full of rage and sadness. Suddenly, I had to be tough. Being cute was a death sentence. Being girly was shameful. My father began teaching me martial arts. I became hypervigilant. I tried to be invisible.”

 

These therapeutic methods are so beneficial that, having vanquished all naturally occurring nightmares, some oneironauts begin creating their own.

 

As hard as she tried, however, she could not hide from her nightmares. Theresa had been strangled by her own scarf, and now on a nightly basis, so was Cha. Again and again, she dreamed of serial killers. Sometimes, Theresa appeared as well, only to greet her niece with a ghastly face-warping grin. Cha’s epiphany came one night as she lay bound in a dark basement somewhere in the depths of her own subconscious. A terrifying figure loomed over her. As always, she was to be raped and murdered—except this time, Cha became lucid. “I just started making fun of my captor,” she recalled. “ ‘Do it!’ I shouted. ‘Fucking kill me!’ And then, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even get an erection. It was ridiculous and disgusting, but it felt wonderful. I actually said, ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ ” That was the last serial killer dream Cha would ever have.

According to Johnson and Green, the successes of Cha and the veteran are common. “If you think of a dream as a subconscious message trying to reach your conscious mind,” Green explained, “when you lucid dream, the message is delivered. After that, there’s no reason for the dream to return, and that’s what we find time and time again.”

These therapeutic methods are so beneficial that, having vanquished all naturally occurring nightmares, some oneironauts begin creating their own. One of Jared Zeizel’s favorite methods is to summon a negative version of himself to embody his fears and shameful impulses. “I call him Dark Jared,” Zeizel expounded. “He’s a very gaunt-looking, shadowy clone. When Dark Jared is there, I embody Light Jared, and I’m able to separate the negative elements of myself from the positive elements.”

The summoning ability Zeizel demonstrates is integral to another important clinical process—bereavement. “If we dream of a deceased loved one,” Johnson believes, “it can help us maintain a connection with them and trust that they’re OK.” In the years I have spent collecting thousands of dreams from around the world, that theme is prevalent. When the dead appear, they are usually joyful and vibrant. The elderly return to the prime of life. The cancer patient has a full head of hair. The victim of dementia remembers everything.

*   *   *

That is how it was with Alex—at least initially. Seeing her began to instantly trigger lucidity. I could then overcome the barriers between us, leaping rivers, shattering glass walls with an operatic high note, or pummeling her wardens into submission. For a while, she was impervious to touch. My hand would pass through hers, but we persevered. It helped when she donned gloves. The sense of closure was visceral—even just to say “I love you” again and hear it back in her exquisite voice contoured by her conspiratorial smile.

Eventually, though, the process began to break down. I could not find Alex so easily anymore. She would appear only as a sound or a fragrance. I would try to fly to her, but a scrum of dream characters would pin me down. I would summon her, but a pile of bones or cured meat would appear instead. It was like a subconscious immune response had been activated.

Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman reported something similar in his own lucid experiments in the 1940s. After months of progress, Feynman had a dream in which he realized that his lucidity was caused by sleeping on a brass rod, which had disturbed his visual cortex. After casting off the rod in that dream, he was never able to go lucid again. His brain, Feynman theorized, was tired of him interfering with the natural sleeping process and had “invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn’t do it anymore.”

 

We are often told that dreams are not real, but Einstein’s experience subverts this idea.

 

Feynman’s fascination with the intersection of dreams and reality was shared by several of his colleagues, including Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein. In adolescence, Einstein had a momentous dream that he would always remember. “I was sledding with my friends at night,” he recounted. “I started to slide down the hill, but my sled started going faster and faster. I was going so fast that I realized I was approaching the speed of light. I looked up at that point and I saw the stars. They were being refracted into colors I had never seen before. I was filled with a sense of awe. I understood in some way that I was looking at the most important meaning in my life.” The experience would eventually inspire his theory of relativity. “My entire scientific career has been a meditation on my dream,” he reflected in his later years.

We are often told that dreams are not real, but Einstein’s experience subverts this idea. Ultimately, his dream represents a deeper and more enduring reality. That belief is echoed by many oneironauts, paying out their silver cords, as they venture further and further into the dream world. For them, the distinction between waking life and dream life has become meaningless. Doyle, for example, is unable or unwilling at times to acknowledge a boundary between her worlds. “I truly believe that I could regrow my leg,” she insists, “if I absolutely, and 100  percent beyond the shadow of a doubt, believed that I could.”

Thomas Peisel recalled his own journey with lucidity, which culminated in him converting to Buddhism. “Lucid dreaming is like an amusement park. When you first get lucid, you want to go on all the rides. After being in the park a thousand times, though, the rides begin to lose their appeal. You start to wonder, ‘Who built this park and why?’ ”

For Peisel, one of his most profound dreams hints at the answer. “I could see an entire city before me—the people and buildings were crystal clear all the way to the horizon. I remember thinking—not only am I in this dream, but this dream is inside me.” It is a return to the Upanishads. Everything is God, the text claims—God hiding from himself in the form of a cloud, a tree, you, me.

In the end, Alex died twice. First, in waking life, then gradually in dreams—one reality reflecting another. “You have gone too deep,” she once warned, in a particularly vivid dream, “you shouldn’t be here.” After that, Alex began to appear less frequently, and only in peripheral roles: a supernumerary, a silhouette in a window. Eventually, a kind of amnesia arose. In a jostling crowd, we collided softly, apologized, and carried on without recognition. It was the last time we ever spoke.

Even though she has vanished again, the memories from my dreams have relieved the sense of loss. I think about how she once wrote, in life, about measuring distances by the degree to which we can comprehend them. The more I comprehend, the more the distance collapses, and the more the dreams become real. For a little while, we were there together inside of the illusion—two separate beings generated by a single sleeping mind.

 

 

 

Original article here

18 Oct 2023
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Moving Beyond Victimhood: The Great Unconscious Metapattern Of Our Time

 

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names shall never hurt me,” was an old adage way back in the early 1800s. For over 200 years it soothed and encouraged many a bullied student and adult. But no longer.

Today, it seems we are the walking wounded, insulted by everything. Names hurt us. Not being honored with the right pronoun hurts us. Not getting enough “Likes” on a social media post hurts us. Someone offering information we don’t agree with hurts us. Seeing historical statues of former slave owners hurts us. Our skins are thin. Suffering has become a badge of honor. And the more we publicly acclaim our suffering, the more there seems to be of it. (In other words, what we focus on materializes right in front of us.)

This is not to dismiss the reality of trauma. The world is full of it. Child abuse. Sexual abuse. Emotional abuse. Racial abuse. Gender abuse. Deliberate ritual abuse. Hunger. Starvation. War. Famine. Humanity carries the heavy epigenetic burden of all of these things—inherited ancestral patterns that take the form of thoughts, choices, and actions aligned with pain and suffering, lack, judgment and subjugation.

But humanity also carries the possibility of greatness. We also carry the inherited ancestral patterns of strength and courage, forgiveness and compassion, fairness and justice, a desire for change and evolution, love, and respect, mutual support and community. These higher emotions and strengths more than outweigh our shortcomings … but only when we choose to focus on them. We move into greater and greater possibilities and integrity only if we commit to those things, claim these traits as our own, and proudly live them.

Understanding Metapatterns

As the word implies, metapatterns are major patterns that affect many. Nationalism is a metapattern. Economics is a metapattern. Religion is a metapattern, and so is victimization. There isn’t a person, a family, a community, a government, a nation in the world that hasn’t seen suffering, abuse and inequality at one time or another. We have all been victims. There is nothing special about it. What is special is rising above it.

It is the nature of all systems — a family system, political system, religious system, a business system — that patterns within the system that are suppressed, excluded, and unacknowledged keep repeating. Abuse is a perfect example. For hundreds of years, societies suppressed acknowledgment of abuses perpetrated on people — women, indigenous peoples, people of color, pagans, Jews, Muslims, Christians, gays. As a result, the abuses kept on repeating with increasing prevalence and force. Which is exactly what we’re seeing now.

It is an incredibly healthy thing that we are now in the process of getting these deeply traumatic abuses and wounds out into the light and are discussing them. However, unless handled wisely, we run the danger of becoming the victims of past victimization by turning on perceived perpetrators and victimizing them. The old “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” philosophy unconsciously lives in a lot of people’s thinking. That, too, is an inherited pattern. A pattern destined to leave us all blind and toothless unless we can turn it around and realize one very important point: The opposite of being a victim is not being a perpetrator.

The opposite of being a victim is mastering your world, mastering your patterns of thoughts, feelings and actions. The opposite of being a victim is stepping into authenticity, self-expression and joyous creativity, freed from the patterns that shackle us to the past.

Moving Beyond The Victim Pattern

So, how do we go about going beyond the victim metapattern? First, we need to understand that generational symptoms — patterns of thoughts, emotions, choices, and actions — are inherited. Clinical studies have proven that emotional trauma experienced by our parents and grandparents (and even further back in our genetic line), leave physical markers on our genes, affecting gene expression. These markers make us prone to the same kinds of trauma, over and over again.

The patterns of victimization — unconscious ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that attract abuse — are literally passed down epigenetically from generation to generation. This is what is termed “emotional DNA.” The same holds true for abusers/perpetrators. How many times do we find that an abusive parent was also subjected to violence as a child? Too often. The inherited pattern of being an abuser is also passed down.

The next thing we need to do is see that abuse and victimization are not serving our personal growth, happiness, or overall social advancement. We need to understand that anger and outrage, lashing out, seeking punishment, and reparations for old sins is simply a continuation of the very dynamic we’re hurt by and angry about.

Metapatterns are in us. And they are destined to unconsciously drive us and run our lives (from one side of the issue or the other) until we see them, acknowledge them, and choose to change and elevate their shape and effect. Only then can we move beyond them.

Symptoms Of Victim/Perpetrator

How do you recognize when a pattern or metapattern is affecting you? It shows up in our language and as symptoms: discomfort, irritation, a block to some desire, boredom, a lack of progress, ill health. Sometimes it manifests as a variety of symptoms. When it comes to the metapatterns of victimization, some generational symptoms passed down epigenetically from one generation to the next are:

  • Seeing oppression everywhere
  • Hatred for the perceived oppressors
  • Seeing discrimination even when it isn’t intended or doesn’t exist
  • A sense of not being seen and respected
  • Clinging to past wounds, past actions
  • Unworthiness
  • A sense of always being put down
  • Inability to prosper

As well, there are generational symptoms of perpetration passed down epigenetically from one generation to the next. It’s interesting to note that some symptoms of past victimization and past perpetration are the same. Some of these symptoms are:

  • Guilt
  • A subconscious desire to be punished or to fail
  • Self-sabotage
  • Anger and the continued desire to inflict pain and suffering
  • A sense of unworthiness
  • Apologizing for everything, even when no harm is done
  • Inability to prosper

In a quick example to show how this works, Hua Ming (a pseudonym) came to the US on a university exchange scholarship from China. After graduation, she chose to stay in America and became a citizen in order to continue her work at a prestigious laboratory as a geneticist. In time, she recognized she felt blocked. She was frightened by her growing responsibilities at work. She was frightened by the increasing expectations of her American fiancé and her upcoming marriage — frightened to the point she was considering throwing it all away and moving back to China.

When Hua Ming decided to pursue professional guidance for her anxiety, she realized it was really more an issue of not being able to live up to Western people’s assessment of her value. She couldn’t understand how she was suddenly worthy. “I can’t do what they’re asking of me,” she thought. “My boss expects me to lead this next team project. My fiancé thinks I should go for my PhD and an even higher position. Who do they think I am?”

Looking at Ming’s family heritage, it wasn’t hard to uncover the pattern of unworthiness grounded in her ancestral pattern of gender discrimination. Her parents had been terribly disappointed to have a girlchild. Low expectations had plagued her all her life. Despite her determination to rise above those low opinions of her — a determination that had carried her far from her homeland — the unconscious inherited sense of unworthiness as a woman and lack of value was dragging her down.

Through an understanding of emotional DNA, family patterns, and metapatterns, she finally got to see that the unworthiness she was feeling wasn’t really hers, but rather inherited emotions piled on top of a negative upbringing. She was able to work through those negative emotions.

Instead of remaining a victim to the old patterns, she was able to see how far she’d come because of them and what she had to offer. She turned the negative into the positive. She saw her true strength and courage. She thanked her ancestors for the gift of unworthiness that had fired her determination to become more, and given her the opportunity to change the past patterns of victimization that were plaguing not only her but her whole native country.

Time To Shine

It’s time for humanity to choose to move on from the victim mindset. Past abuses are past. The only reason they continue to plague us in the present is because we are unconsciously repeating the old patterns that are begging to change. Our deep system-wide unrest, bitter unhappiness, and intolerance of abuse and discrimination in all forms is a joyous red flag waving saying, “Let go of the bitterness. Let go of the intolerance for the intolerant! Let go the judgment of the judges! Let go of victimizing past perpetrators. That’s all part of the old pattern. Let go!”

Focus on the adventure and possibilities. Possibilities open hearts and doors. People are craving a bigger reality that allows them to participate in and co-create a happier, more fulfilling, and exciting world. Steve Jobs summed it up best when he said, “Blessed are the crazy ones who believe they can change the world. Because, indeed, they can.”

 

 

Original article here

15 Oct 2023
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Pick Your Hard

I fast once a month. It’s hard. Even though I’ve been doing it for years, I start dreading my fast day the night before; fretting about how I’m going to be able to pass through the discomfort. And where I’m typically not hungry until around 11am, on a fasting day I wake up hungry. Then, I stumble through what I need to get done as best as I can, given how lousy I’m feeling. Even though I know what to expect, it never seems to get easier.

This week I heard someone say, whether you choose to take care of yourself or not, both are hard. So, pick your hard. This flies in the face of the world we inhabit, where we are constantly being steered towards doing what’s easy, what’s fast and what’s convenient. More to the point, we’ve been educated to believe that nothing has to be hard. We’re all supposed to feel good all the time. We’re all supposed to be winners.

But, here’s the thing. Experiences in life that are difficult, and that we find a way to meet and be strengthened by, give us something to be proud of. These moments give us a sense of who we are and what we are capable of, helping us cultivate an inner strength and grit to turn to when the going gets hard. Best of all, the empowerment that becomes available to us offsets the tendency to be subject to all the forms of escapism the modern day world offers up so we don’t have to feel the sting of living.

That’s why I fast. Because it strengthens my resolve and my determination to embrace what it means to be alive in the times we are living in. The “hard” of fasting helps me to remember and honor the preciousness of food. And it serves as a counterbalance to all the excesses we are constantly being force-fed to indulge in. Best of all, choosing what is hard reminds me of what it takes to walk my talk, even when it feels difficult.

Because here’s the truth:

  • It’s hard to have a long overdue conversation, and it’s hard to carry what is unresolved.
  • It’s hard to make changes in your life, and it’s hard to not feel good.
  • It’s hard to take the time to discover what your offer to the world is, and it’s hard to work at a job you hate.
  • It’s hard to admit to the limitations of what you can and cannot influence, and it’s hard to try and control what you cannot control.
  • It’s hard to learn about who you are and what makes you tick, and it’s hard to live believing the wrong things about yourself.

 

So, pick your hard.

 

Original article here

 

06 Oct 2023
Comments: 0

Why Your Brain is Wired for Pessimism—and What You Can Do to Fix It

Ever had someone tell you to just cheer up? Did it drive you crazy? Well, turns out that someone telling you to “be happy” isn’t just annoying—it’s also wildly unhelpful.

“‘Happy’ is a pretty useless word,” says Dr. Martin Seligman, psychologist and former President of the American Psychological Association. “If you tell someone to be happy, it doesn’t tell [him or her] what to do.”

Seligman compares being happy to falling asleep: it’s not something you can actively do—in the way you can get stronger by lifting more weights. It just kind of has to happen. And as the father of positive psychology—the study what makes a good or meaningful life—much of Seligman’s work has dealt with trying to help people figure how to make it happen.

Naturally, you might think he’s an optimistic guy.

“Half the world is on the low positive affective spectrum,” he says referring to positive affectivity, a trait that usually correlates with sunnier dispositions. “I’m part of it, and a lot of the justification for what I work on, and what I write, is to try to help half the world, who is not naturally positive affective, to be more positive and optimistic.”

What he has learned is that well-being can be broken into five elements: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment (PERMA). Improve those and you might find yourself closer to that vague idea of “happiness”. Unfortunately, that’s not so easy when half of us are low on positive affectivity. But Dr. Seligman learned how to be optimistic, and here, leaning on many of the ideas he explores in his book The Hope Circuit, he lays out how you can, too.

Why does it seem like we are wired for pessimism?

The species that [was] going through the Ice Ages had been bred, and selected, through pessimism. The mentality that said, “It’s a beautiful day in San Diego today, I bet it’ll be beautiful tomorrow” got crushed by the ice. What got selected for, in the Ice Ages, was bad weather animals, who were always thinking about the bad stuff that could occur. So what comes naturally to people is pessimism.

The problem about pessimism is that, to the extent [that] it’s gonna be a nice day in San Diego tomorrow, and you’re thinking all the time, “What a disaster it’s gonna be,” you can’t enjoy it. What needs teaching, because it doesn’t come naturally, is optimism.

When you look at pessimistic people, probably the single [most-telling] hallmark is they think that bad events are permanent and that they’re unchangeable. So what learned optimism is all about is recognizing that you’re saying that to yourself, and then realistically arguing against it.

[So if I say] “This interview is turning to shit,” [that’s] a typical pessimistic, catastrophic interpretation. I have to argue against it. And so I marshal evidence: “Well, when I talked about the Ice Age, he really got it and ran with it.” And then, “I’ve literally given a thousand interviews in my life, and they almost always turn out well.” It’s recognizing what you’re saying to yourself—how permanent and catastrophic it is—and then arguing against it.

So is this at odds with something like mindfulness, which argues you should be present in the moment? If you’re focusing on optimism, you’re also sort of missing the present moment, right?

Well, I think, if you look at what people are doing, and what you’re doing right now when we’re talking, you’re prospecting into the future. You’re not living in the moment of this interview. You’re saying, “What is Seligman saying that I can use, or write about?” More than half the time, adults are planning futures. And so, the notion that we should live more and more in the moment denies what, evolutionarily, we’re really good at.

What distinguishes human beings from all of the other animals is that we’re creatures of the future. We’re not Homo sapiens—”sapiens” is wisdom and knowledge. I’m not impressed by our wisdom and knowledge. But I am impressed [by] how much of our mental life is about the future. I’ve come to think of us as Homo prospectus. This is what human beings are good at, and it’s why we dominate the planet. Not because we live in the moment.

What do you say to someone who’s in a situation where they say, “No amount of thinking about this optimistically is going to get me out of it”?

People are not infrequently in dire circumstances and you don’t want them to unrealistically argue themselves out of it. That’s a message to change your life. It’s called the Dark Night of the Soul, and it’s not to be brushed off. When you realistically appreciate the hopelessness of the circumstances you’re in, that’s a message to change your life.

I’ve read a few people have said that you might be better off cultivating a sort of non-attachment to well-being: be mindful that a lot of life is going to be suffering, and if you can find contentment in that, you might be better off than seeking out happiness.

I think the good thing about meditation—mindfulness, concentrating on the present, detaching—is as good anti-anxiety, anti-anger tools. But one of the costs of accepting fate, accepting that you can’t go on and do something good in the future, correlates highly with physical illness, shorter life span, less accomplishment at work. So, it’s a good anti-anxiety tool often, but it’s got a lot of costs as well.

A lot of it depends on what you care about. So, I meditated 40 minutes a day for 20 years. And what that did, essentially, was to cure my anxiety. And by age 40, I found out I wasn’t anxious anymore. But the big issue was depression. And that’s when exercise took over, because what depression is about is demobilization, and what exercise does it, it mobilizes you. So, depending on the issue in your life, there’s no cure-all here.

Of all the things you’ve studied, or learned, is there one idea you constantly find yourself encountering most frequently?

I think it’s hope. So, the basic theme of my thinking, and my life, is the development of hope—how important it was in my own life, for psychology, and now, how for human future. Positive human future is not gonna come about by accident, it actually needs hopeful people who plan for it, and make it happen.

How do you feel about where we are right now? It seems like we are struggling with optimism.

It’s very easy to get mired down in the mundane, bad events. Someone being President who you don’t like, and the like. But I think the great lesson is that since the Enlightenment, things are really getting better, and there’s long term cause for hope. We need to realize that human progress is what we’re riding on, and it projects into a good future.

And what are the things that would make us realize that?

There’s a big optimism gap between how people feel about their own lives—which is about 6.5 out of 10, on average—and how they feel about the world, which is much more like 4 [out of 10]. And I think the antidote is [to realize] that 100,150 years ago, the average lifespan was in the 40s; now it’s in the low 80s. Malnourishment; access to clean water; real income; literacy—that’s the stuff that tells you about human progress.

Why is it that we rate ourselves higher on the optimism scale than we do the world?

No one knows. I’ll speculate if you like: we know our flaws pretty well, but we know the world through media, and what media tell all the bad things that are happening at a much more rapid rate than the good things that are happening. We’re looking at the cavity, and not the good tooth. I think that’s why education is important, and why books like Steve Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, which take people through the statistics, are important. And we don’t do very well with those. But what we do well with is tragic stories on the headlines. The anecdote to “if it bleeds, it leads” is actually the statistics on human well-being, which, by every statistic I know, is much better than it was 200 years ago.

 

 

 

Original article here

03 Oct 2023
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How an Anti-Inflammatory Diet Can Help Tame an Autoimmune Condition

An estimated 23.5 million Americans, including my husband, suffer from an autoimmune condition — and their numbers are growing, though researchers don’t know why. You’ve likely heard of the most common autoimmune diseases — including type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, celiac disease, psoriasis, inflamatory bowel disease and Crohn’s disease — but you might be unaware that there are more than 80 named but lesser-known types. Through working as a nutritionist and living with my husband, I’ve learned the importance of diet in battling these disorders.

What is an autoimmune disease?

A healthy immune system can plainly distinguish between a foreign invader and its own body. When something inhibits the immune system’s ability to decipher what is safe and what is dangerous to the body, the immune system can attack its own healthy cells and tissues believing that they are threatening. This self-attack is an autoimmune condition.

What causes an immune system to attack its own healthy cells is still largely unknown but according to the National Institutes of Health, “There is a growing consensus that autoimmune diseases likely result from interactions between genetic and environmental factors.” There are studies that show that certain genes can predispose a person to certain autoimmune diseases, and this is why many autoimmune diseases show up in one family, as they do in my husband’s family where vasculitis, rheumatoid arthritis and alopecia all reside.

Yet simply having the gene doesn’t guarantee someone will get the disease. The gene is like fire kindling; there must also be a spark — or an environmental trigger — for there to be a blaze. Known triggers are infections, exposure to environmental toxins, hidden allergens, or stress and lack of sleep. Autoimmune conditions are like embers of a fire that never fully burns out. After the initial blaze, they can flare up again and again. We try to keep my husband’s condition tamped down through diet and exercise.

How a healthy lifestyle helps

Studies suggest that a healthy lifestyle can help keep the immune system balanced while less healthy situations can trigger the immune system to overreact. For instance, low vitamin D levels have been shown to be a risk factor for multiple sclerosis. Obesity has been linked to many autoimmune diseases, including MS, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. Stress and anxiety have been shown to cause all kinds of autoimmune flares. On the other hand, anti-inflammatory dietary choices can lessen rheumatoid arthritis. Getting the right nutrients, maintaining a healthy weight, managing stress and sleeping regularly can help prevent an autoimmune flare.

“It is current knowledge that nutrition, the intestinal microbiota, the gut mucosal immune system, and autoimmune pathology are deeply intertwined,” reads a 2014 study, entitled “Role of ‘Western Diet’ in Inflammatory Autoimmune Diseases” and published in the journal Current Allergy and Asthma Reports. In other words, what we eat and the health of our digestive tract are directly connected to our autoimmune system. Other studies suggest that autoimmune issues can be managed by healing a damaged gut.

Think of the gut as the front line of defense in an army. It is the first location that foreign and potentially dangerous substances deeply interact with our bodies. This is likely why almost 70 percent of our immune system lies in and around our gut so that it can react when poisonous, dangerous, allergic or toxic things enter our systems.

Since the gut is so directly tied to the immune system and healing a damaged gut can potentially manage an autoimmune condition, it seems important to keep yours healthy. You can do this by cutting out foods that inflame the gut, limiting unnecessary medications that can alter the bacteria balance in the gut and consuming prebiotics (such as artichokes and asparagus), probiotics (such as kimchi and miso) and bone broth to build a healthy mix of bacteria.

Anti-inflammatory food choices

The following foods have been shown to cause inflammation so should be avoided if trying to balance the immune system and keep inflammation under control: 

  • Sugar
  • Refined carbohydrates
  • Trans-fats
  • Omega 6 fatty acids
  • Processed foods and meat
  • Alcohol
  • Caffeine
  • Artificial sweeteners
  • Food dyes

The following foods have been shown to reduce inflammation:

  • Leafy greens
  • Fruits such as blueberries, strawberries and blackberries
  • Fatty fish, high in omega 3 fatty acids
  • Olive oil
  • Avocados
  • Nuts and seeds (if not allergic)
  • Herbs and spices such as turmeric, cumin and garlic
  • Vitamin D has been shown to help prevent inflammation and autoimmunity

When my husband was diagnosed, his doctors checked for underlying infections and allergies. When they didn’t find a specific trigger, he went on a strict anti-inflammatory diet for eight weeks. He took fish oil, vitamin D, vitamin C and zinc, and he did yoga, exercised regularly and got a lot more sleep than he usually did. These actions helped his body heal and not long afterward he was back throwing a baseball with our boys feeling like his energetic self. He’s only had one flare-up since, and it followed a few weeks of travel that affected his sleep patterns and stress levels. We will never know what sparked the wildfire, but we are forever thankful to know what tames it.

 

 

Original article here

01 Oct 2023
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The Power of Next

Whenever I am faced with life’s uncertainty, I ask myself the following questions: Why is this happening? What can I do to make it go away? How can I navigate this effectively? What can I learn from this experience?

Being at a crossroads can be challenging when what you know to be true suddenly isn’t. The straight and expected path you are on veers sharply, does a summersault, and flings you into unchartered territory leaving you unsure of what direction you are facing. Disoriented, the task of righting yourself can seem daunting. What do I do now? What are my next steps? So many asked questions, so many unanswered responses.

The ‘not knowing’ can be fertile ground for stress, anxiety, and fear to insidiously creep into your awareness. The question then becomes, “What can be done to mitigate the fallout and find direction?”

Baby Steps

Many years ago, I took a workshop on handling change, where the facilitator asked us to do one exercise every day for the rest of our lives (a pretty bold ask!). He asked us to change one thing every day. Simple, easy tasks that gently challenge any resistance to change thinking. Drive a different way to work. If you normally put your right shoe on first, today put your left shoe on first. Please note, I tried changing hands to brush my teeth and got toothpaste all over!

The goal of this exercise is to become more comfortable with daily changes, even small ones, thereby making the bigger, more challenging ones less scary. Now, I can’t say that I do this every day, but this exercise has provided comfort for me in times of turmoil.

While this exercise can be a preemptive approach to handling stress, I also found I needed an immediate touchstone that would provide me with some reassurance in the current moment that things were indeed going to be okay, I was going to be okay, in troubled times.

Next…

That touchstone for me lies in the concept of the word “next.” The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word next this way: in the time, place, or order nearest or immediately succeeding. It even has the word “succeed” in the definition!

When life gets challenging and I have been thoroughly flung into the unknown, I boldly (and sometimes confidently) say, “Next!” out loud. This shifts my energy, focus and intention away from the quagmire I find myself in and points me in a new direction. It’s amazing how saying this one word while keeping a curious spirit and open heart can provide a sense of comfort and possibilities.

Rather than dwelling on the unforeseen changes, I choose to look toward new possibilities. I may have no clue as to what those possibilities may be or when I will experience them, but I believe I will be guided. Many years ago, I purchased a greeting card that I had framed. On the card was a quote from Emily Dickinson that says, “I dwell in possibility.” That has been my sacred mantra and has served me well.

Next is possibility. Next is hope. Next is new beginnings. Next is sewn into the very fabric of forward motion. What are my next steps? What’s the next chapter for me? What’s next on the agenda?

As we get swept away and sometimes flung by life’s changes and challenges, stand in your power and declare…

Next!

 

 

 

Original article here