Re-decorating is one of my favorite creative activities and mind-cleansing techniques. It is also one of my personal forms of meditation, so, while in the process, I channeled some thoughts to share.  As I grabbed a blade to clean out gunk from a tile slab  that I couldn’t stand every time I looked at, I thought, “wait a minute – why did it take me so long to change this if it feels so good to do something about it?” As I brought it back to its original pristine state, I realized: There are so many little things that bother us, things that are under our control to modify – like remove an object we dislike or paint a table with a color that we like better – and we complain but  don’t do anything about it. WHY?

The night before, I was going over potential pieces of art that my husband and I wanted to create for different rooms in our home. We had been talking for a while about a particular piece we wanted to make, with words and sentences that empower us every time we see it. Suddenly, a sentence popped into my mind as I finished revamping the tile: “live what you love”. This sentence has stayed with me ever since. I looked around, and said: “I will no longer live with anything I don’t love. This table goes white, the services of this vase are no longer needed, I’m moving this shelf four inches up, and we will finally stain the legs of this other table – TODAY.”

Armed with our only rule – “only if we love it” – we transformed the space with ideas we had always loved and had never done, and felt even more inspired and empowered. I was not even hungry, feeding off of creative energy, and I felt lighter and more fulfilled by the second.

Look around you, your home (or any other space that is yours), your closet – even your body, to a certain extent, inside and out. There are things you can change. Some are instantaneous, like painting an old table or getting rid of useless things you hold on to that collect dust and you haven’t seen, worn or used in forever because you just don’t really love them. Other changes take more time but are incredibly rewarding, like changing the way you eat in order to gain long-term health, feel energized, and look fabulous in certain outfits you always loved and wanted to wear. It all comes down to living what you love. Fill your life with things, activities, colors, people, shapes, textures, smells, places, feelings, sounds, jobs – everything that you love. Start with the things that are within your control,  and tackle each one step by step. Begin within your immediate parameters, your body (food, exercise, sleep), maybe a room in your house, your weekend routine (it’s time you go to that one place you absolutely adore but never get to). Then move to bigger things, like a new job, the partner you truly love (not one you settled for), perhaps a new city to live in, the one you always wanted to  live in, because – you love it!

There is no reason that you should live without those flowers you love. We’re not advocating unreasonable expenses here – cut out spending on things that you don’t love and transfer that to the “love” expense account. Same expense, more love. Because every time you look at those flowers, they make you feel ALIVE.  FLOWERS! It’s that simple! If you absolutely love them, get them. How about the color of that bookcase you have in that corner? What? You always wanted white bookcases instead of the oak ones you have? All your life? PAINT THEM! What’s that? You always hated that corner because the dehydrator looks hideous on that table?? Paint the table and put the ugly-but-useful-and-therefore-loved dehydrator somewhere else far away from your sight, in fact, why is it there in the first place, you only use it once every four months…MOVE IT TODAY! (Yes, I was talking to myself, and, yes, I moved it – and painted it). It feels so liberating to take one day out of your whole week, to do the little things that make a big difference in your life. Things that could be part of living the life you LOVE.

If you can’t tell which things you love and which you don’t, here are some phrases to help you tell the difference. If you don’t love it, you will say or feel:

• - “Hm. It’s not bad.” (BAD? the word bad is in this sentence…enough said.)

• - “It’s OK.”

• – “I don’t know…”

• - “Maybe…”

• - “Eh.”

So, next time you are about to buy something just because it’s on sale, or  you’re cleaning your closet/garage and find an old forgotten item that you plan on keeping forever on account of nostalgia although you truly don’t like it, or when you rearrange your house and there is that one item that is valuable but you cannot stand it and it puts you in a bad mood just looking at it, do yourself a favor and tell yourself: “Live what you love!”

Are you?

We often talk about dreams as goals but today we wanted to share some thoughts on the kind of dreams that take place when you sleep. If sleeping serves the purpose of cellular regeneration, dreaming serves the purpose of thought reorganization. On average, we sleep eight hours a night – spend a third of our lives sleeping – and of those eight hours, it is said that we only need three to six in order to restore our physical health. So, why eight? Eight hours is what we’re told we need for our minds to do their job of “filing” all the information that was received throughout the day, past thoughts that were reactivated, future ideas that were generated. Eight hours is what it takes to maintain mental health through the process of dreaming, and depriving us of our daily dose of this necessary process has resulted in hallucinations, nervous disorders, neurosis, and even death.

Symbolism is the language of dreams. Dreams use graphics to add meaning and feeling to what you are “seeing” in an almost film-like rendition of a part of your life. Dream interpretation is a very useful tool for accessing the elusive unconscious and subconscious states of mind, and a key to self-understanding. Interpreting dreams is something that can come naturally or it can be learned and improved upon. Either way, it is through this tool that we open the door to 90% of ourselves, as most of our behavior is guided by both our unconscious and subconscious mind, the part of us that is not aware (not conscious) of why we do the things we do. Psychologist Carl Jung used to say that it was through our dreams that we connected to the collective unconscious, the “planetary records”, the vault of shared experiences we had as a human race. From his research he developed archetypes, symbolic figures that were a part of everyone’s experience and that could be given a common interpretation. Beyond his work, psychologists have come up with some general interpretations for some very common dream symbols and some of their general meanings are:

• - Bed – This is literally where we go to sleep, and most commonly seen in dreams in a state of decay. If the bed you see is broken, the meaning couldn’t be more clear: You need rest.

• – Car/vehicle – If you’re driving, the car (its color, state) will tell you how you’re “conducting” an area of your life. The vehicle is a representation of you, your body, your path, your life and how you are leading or “driving” it. Reckless driving, a lack of brakes – you can interpret these literally. If someone else is driving your car and you’re sitting in the back, well, someone else may be in charge of conducting your life with you as mere spectator (it’s interesting to note who or what the driver is). If the vehicle is a bicycle instead, you’re not just driving, this is a very personal dream in which you and not outside circumstances or transitory situations are powering the vehicle (the car has a motor that runs it, the bike is run by your feet or your strength). This refers to an independent or autonomous phase of your life and how you’re conducting it.

• – Water – Symbolically, water represents life. In astrology (another ancient practice for self-knowledge) it represents emotions. In a dream, the type of water and what you do with it will tell you how you’re dealing with life. Do you see the ocean (limitless and vast) or a pool (limited space)? Is the water clean or dirty and difficult to see through (pure feelings versus negative emotions)? Do you run and jump in the ocean or do you stand at the shore afraid and uncertain (participate or afraid of living)? How you approach the water is how you approach or feel about life and your involvement in it.

• – House – What is the house of all of your thoughts? Your mind. Visiting a house or other type of home in a dream is going into the mind – yours or that of another. The state of the house will tell you about the state of that person’s mind and thoughts. Is the house in order or disorder? Is it clean or dusty and abandoned? Is it warm and welcoming or cold and barely inhabited? Is there furniture, and what state is the furniture in?

• – Food – Literally, food is what you use to nourish your physical body. Symbolically, “food” is what you use to nourish your soul. Food in a dream stands for knowledge, whether it is simple information you lack or wisdom you want to acquire. Dreaming with a readily available banquet means that knowledge is at our disposal; being unable to eat it (because there are no plates, perhaps), is a sign or fear that we may not attain it.

• – Pregnancy – If you’re pregnant in real life, this is a literal dream representative of your actual state (or premonitory if you don’t yet know). If you’re not, this is symbolic of being “pregnant” with an idea, a project, any kind of new beginning. Following this symbol is that of seeing children in a dream, which speaks of recent or novel projects, jobs or even relationships. The state, age, and situation of the child (is it happy? is it a real child or a plastic doll when you look closer, and therefore not real? Do you seem to be taking good care of this child or is it being neglected?) will tell you about the project.

Colors we see, feelings we experience, and any words we say are all things that must be interpreted along with the graphic symbols in our dreams. A good practice is to wake up and write out what you remember of the dream while you still have access to it, or tell it to someone and hear the words you use to describe what you saw. Your words – on paper or being told to another – will help you decipher the symbols, as you put labels on the things you saw and these labels tell you what these symbols mean to you particularly, in your own language.

The next step after dream interpretation is dream creation. Can you control your dreams? I know someone who does so regularly. I tried it once, and ended up solving a personal problem that I didn’t feel equipped to handle in real life. Dreams are a great opportunity for emotional release and problem solving, and posing a question to our subconscious mind as we are falling asleep can render great results when we wake up. It is said Albert Einstein dreamed the theory of relativity. Maybe you can dream your own brilliant contribution to the world too, or, at the very least, deal with some important things that you didn’t think you could in the context of the perceived societal, physical and emotional limitations of the real world.

A new friend and I had a bet going on how to pronounce famed psychologist Abraham Maslow’s surname, and this prompted me to do a little research and revisit some of this visionary’s landmark concepts. Maslow is the father of humanistic psychology (I say it’s “maslov”, that’s how my college psych teacher pronounced it – Maslow’s parents were Russian immigrants after all, and we’ve all heard what happens to ‘w’s in Russian accents; my friend says it’s “maslow” as in “low price guarantee” – he was born in Brooklyn, which makes him American and likely to have adopted that pronunciation). Unlike Freud,  who focused on studying mental illness, Maslow researched and developed theories about the healthy aspect of the mind and human potential, which of course is so very HLife of him (our focus is optimal-centered, not on a sick or barely functional concept of health), so I had to share some of his less-talked-about work with you, which I found fascinating: The humanistic concept of values.

We mostly know Maslow for his hierarchy of needs (pictured above), the various levels of needs humans have and need to fill, with the most fundamental at the bottom and the more complex and abstract at the top: physiological (basic body functions), security, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. When I first learned about him and the hierarchy of needs over a decade ago, I was told each division of the pyramid was actually not a solid line but a dotted one, because we move up and down the ladder as our needs change. In other words, we don’t reach self-actualization and the party ends there – all of these needs are concepts we need to continue to fill and refill in our lives, which is a very dynamic way to look at challenges. If we lack something, we can get it, and move up to the next level and reach those goals. If we fulfill this or that need, we may need to fulfill it again at some other point. And that’s the way it goes. Just studying each one of these concepts and where we currently fall on the ladder on a given day or a stage of our lives is worth the neuron activity.

But a concept I wasn’t familiar with was his theory on B-values, and I wanted to share these with you because I think they are important for holistically healthy living. Maslow studied famous people like Albert Einstein, who he thought continuously reached the top “self-actualization” rung of the hierarchy of needs, and he concluded these people had what he called “peak experiences” – moments of extraordinary existence in a state of understanding profound concepts, experiencing great love, a deep fascination with the world around them, a clear awareness of reality, and harmony with all that is. As he studied these peak experiences, he decided these encompassed a way of thinking that included what he called “Being-values” (or B-values). These are:

- Wholeness (a holistic perspective)
- Perfection (as an idea to strive for, not the implication that we would already be so)
- Completion (fulfillment and destiny are both included here)
- Justice (fair is much better than nice, I say)
- Aliveness (I love this one. How many people do you know who are truly alive?)
- Richness (complexity, not material possessions)
- Simplicity (honesty is included here. And does honesty not simplify things?)
- Uniqueness (do you know who you are?)
- Effortlessness (grace – enough said)
- Playfulness (I know a wonderful sociologist who argues that play is a necessary human emotion – and I agree)
- Truth (deal with reality; beauty is truth, truth beauty – Keats is a classic for a reason)
- Self-Sufficiency (before you can be interdependent, you need to be independent)

In today’s fast-paced and infinitely mobile global community, a word like “values” may make you cringe or think “ancient” or “outdated”. There is nothing outdated about mental health and the ability to experience life optimally. With this in mind, I invite you to do your own research and analysis on what each of these values means in general and what it means to you personally, as well as how they – and IF they – manifest in your life today. I think you’ll find this exercise enlightening, or, at the very least, a little self-revealing. Oh, and if you can confirm the pronunciation of this wonderful forward thinker’s last name, do let me know.

]]> http://hlifemedia.com/2010/07/abraham-maslow-and-values/feed/ 4 http://hlifemedia.com/2010/07/the-definition-of-a-gentleman/ http://hlifemedia.com/2010/07/the-definition-of-a-gentleman/#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:47:47 +0000 Maryl Celiz http://hlifemedia.com/?p=5539

What is a gentleman? Driven by something I read and considered to be a weak definition of this term, I thought I’d offer my own two cents here. After all, I am a lady, and I think that’s enough to qualify me to at least give this a try.

On a very fundamental level, a Gentleman is, well, a Gentle Man. What does this entail? Well, for one, you have to be a man.  And, being a man, you have to be gentle.

Webster says “gentle” means:

1. Belonging to a family of high social status.
2. Chivalrous.
3. Honorable.
4. Distinguished.
5. Kind, amiable.
6. Suited to a person of high social station.
7. Tractable, docile, free from harshness, sternness or violence.
8. Soft, delicate.
9. Moderate.

The first definition implies that, to be gentle (or gentile, where the word came from), was to be a part of a special social circle or family tree, what you could call “nobility”. Nobility is a word used to refer to royal families, yes, but it is also a word that refers to the quality of being noble, meaning, being someone who is characterized by superior mind, character, ideals or morals. A gentle person is not an average Joe – he is outstanding, as he possesses those qualities outlined here above. A gentle man is one who is kind – to all of God’s creations alike, not just the hot chicks – distinguished, honorable (a man of his word, reliable and trustworthy), a man with a soft hand to treat a woman with the care that she deserves, not harshly, not violently, but as if she were a rose petal. A very special man, indeed.

Speaking of man…what is a man? According to our friend Webster, a man is:

1. An adult male human.
2. A man is also a bipedal primate mammal of the species Homo sapiens that is anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished especially by notable development of the brain with a resultant capacity for articulate speech and abstract reasoning.
3. A man is also one possessing in high degree the qualities considered distinctive of manhood.

Of these three definitions, only one (the first) requires a “man” to have a penis (be male). So, having a penis, does not a man make (those of you who define your manliness by your “manhood” – some of you explicitly – it seems you are mistaken.) The first definition also requires a man to be an adult. Webster says an adult is a grown-up, fully developed and mature. Because we are holistic beings, this means a true adult is one who is fully developed and mature on all levels – physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. With just this, how many of you can say you’re a man so far? How many ladies can say they’ve met one or are with one right now?

This first definition also says a man is a human. Going beyond taxonomy and into philosophy, there is a very big difference between a man (or woman) and a human. To be human means to have humanity. To have humanity means to have developed a higher level of conscience and the understanding that we, as a species and as a collective universal body, are connected. It means to know that my actions affect yours and vice versa, that climate change is as much my responsibility as it is Nature’s and industry’s, that the behavior of men in general is directly related to the behavior of women, that what I think, say, and do to myself will have a direct and equal effect – positive or negative – on you. It means waking up to the fact that we are in this thing called life together – all of us. Being human means being aware of this and taking responsibility for ourselves, other beings, the planet, and anything beyond that. Being human means realizing that all that is, is one – and acting accordingly. Now, I ask you, how many humans do you know? And are you one of them?

We’ve said it before and we’re not the only ones: This is a time of great change. It is a time of choice. It is a time of stepping up to all of the internal changes and evolution that this new era calls for. With all this in mind, I ask  all of you guys to think about what it means to be a gentle adult male – a gentleman – and how this applies to you. After all, it is up to you to decide – do you choose to be just a great ape or do you choose to go beyond and be an outstanding gentleman?

And, ladies, take responsibility for this as well and help the men in your life step up to the greatest version of themselves that we all know they can be: kind, connected, strong of body/mind/soul, spiritually awake and self aware, giving, tender, balanced, loving, real…human.

In one of my favorite movies, “Alice in Wonderland”, the caterpillar asks Alice several times, “whoooo are youuu”? Alice is so overwhelmed and confused, trying to understand the environment she is in and her place in it, that she hardly knows what to say and doesn’t have an answer. How many of us have felt – and possibly still feel – this way? How many times have we encountered “caterpillars” asking us that same question? And, more importantly, how many times have we asked our own selves that question – “who am I?” Do you know the answer? Like with Alice, the problem for us is that life seems too overwhelming at times and we become confused, and so it goes that we fall in line with the rest of the herd in this illusion we call reality. With no real guidance or direction, it is tough (but not impossible) to find enough clarity of mind to delve deeper down the rabbit hole of our minds and spirits and begin to ask the right things: Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Not knowing the answers to these essential questions creates mental handicaps of unnecessary uncertainty and illusory “limits”. It is these illusory limits in our minds that push us further away from who we are, and, desperate for answers to our identity, we compensate by entering a pool of people who have defined themselves by a single word, or very specific nouns (your name/material things you own) or what they do (occupation/eating style/hobby), and we make permanent residence in a limited label life that leaves us even more discontent than before. Who are you again?

We are living in a world of labels that by default reduces us to one word: our name. Our names, although not who we are, are needed in order to use as a form of communication (or as I would call: incomplete identification). Nowadays, with the emergence of social networking, (which is wonderful in many ways) we are forced to come up with yet more limiting names that are suppose to define who we are. They might state what we like doing, but those nicknames do not define who we are. On top of that, in the past couple of years, another limiting trend has emerged: the “I am my food style”.  As if the way you eat defines (in other words, IS) who you are. Eating a plant-based diet is something I do, it might say something about the way I think to a certain extent (because we all have different reasons why we eat in a particular way, so you have to ask the individual personally), but its certainly not WHO I AM. I am not what I do, I am not my material possessions, not my car, not my house, not my job, nor my eating style. You are not your profession or how much money you make. All of these things can’t tell me who you are. Tangible, and visible things will certainly express a small reflection of your internal self, but physical expressions change as we continuously gain life experience, and, hopefully, evolve.

The bare and raw picture here is that we are beings defined by nothing tangible. We are limitless multidimensional beings having a limited, material (amazing, if you choose and believe it) experience created by us. We are light-energy beings having a physical experience. Our intangibility, such as our thoughts, words, actions and how much these three are in alignment with each other, do continuously define us more than anything else. If we can understand this, see ourselves in this way – with intangible eyes – approach our identity from this perspective, and WORK to get to know ourselves on this level, then we can start to get to know who we really are, begin a relationship with our selves and maintain our ego in a productive, positive balance. From that global perspective, and with knowledge and understanding of our true multidimensional selves, we can begin to give answers to the questions of who we are and why we are here, and develop genuine love within ourselves as well as with others.

You probably already know that your eating habits (methane from the meat you eat) and your car (carbon dioxide from exhaust) as well as other habits (like throwing away recyclable goods) affect the planet. You also know that  conserving water (taking shorter showers) and electricity (turning off those lights) help too. But did you know that, above all of those, there is one action that can pollute the atmosphere and drain the planet of resources in a worse way?

Negative thoughts are the worst toxic pollutant on the face of the planet.

If science now knows that there is no such thing as a solid, just an incredibly slow moving element (much slower than our eye can capture) and what we call “matter” is just energy at various degrees of density, then we can conclude that everything inside and around us is energy.  And by the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy, we know that energy can neither be created or destroyed – it can only be transformed – than we know that everything, good and bad, positive and negative, stays right here in our environment.  Nothing “goes away”. There is no such thing as “away”. There is just life, interacting, forever.

So it goes with your thoughts.  The same way you generate trash and toxins, so you generate trash and toxins when you create negative thoughts. These negative thoughts exit your brain in the form of electromagnetic energy that will not be destroyed, it will either be changed or will go on to add to a pile of energy just like it (like attracts like, just as if you’re a negative person and you surround yourself with negative people.) That bad thought (envy?) you had about your co-worker when he got his promotion, the time your brother embarrassed you in front of everyone and you thought “I could kill you right now!”, the other day when that bank teller fumbled through your transaction at a snail pace while you were on a very short lunch break and you told yourself what an idiot she was – all of those guys are going out and over to the collective unconscious, a sort of vibratory library of mankind’s thoughts, feelings and experiences, all of which form a cover around the planet, like a dome of energy of all kinds.

Do you really think that this energy has no effect on its creator and the rest of the people inside that dome?  Just like the slow and devastating degradation of the Amazonian rain forest, the so-called “lungs of the planet”, have an effect on the quality of air that you and I breathe right here in the United States thousands of miles away, the heat we feel during the increasingly changing seasons, the food we get to grow and eat as a result, so does this cloud of energy that surrounds our planet.  It has a direct effect, on our moods, our thoughts, our behavior.

Everything is energy. From a rock to a human, a food or a spirit, in different degrees it all comes from one source.  It is the intangible that animates the tangible.  Our physical bodies are the vehicle that hosts our true Self (intangible).  It is our anti-material body (mind/thoughts) that animate our dense physical bodies. So, it is our mind that experiences, creates and recreates this physical experience we call life. Our lives and our health are a reflection of what our mind/thought pattern creates daily. It is our minds and thought patterns that make choices, based on our limited or vast knowledge and understanding. Some people have more negative thoughts and create more negative experiences and environments (external as well as internal). Some people are aware of this and are conscious and in control of their thoughts and reinstate their birthright as co-creators of realities.

Our thoughts create our lives, and the world around us. We must take responsibility and be conscious of this from here on. If our lives are created and affected by our thoughts, so is the planet. The planet is an organic, living cell (a bigger body) that depends on us, just like we depend on it, for survival. We are interdependent, just like us and the cells in our bodies, which depend on us to feed them healthy food and have positive thoughts in order to give us a healthy life. We need  to care for our planet the same way we need to care for our bodies.  As the Law of Correspondence says “As above, so below; as below so above.” (The Kybalion). This means that things that happen on a smaller level can also happen on a large level.  As cells have consciousness and our thoughts and actions can affect their state of well-being, we can also affect the well-being of the planet.

So, in the spirit of Earth Week, we at HLife are asking you to please take responsibility for your thoughts and be conscious of their effect on your health, your life and your planet.  Don’t pollute us with negative thoughts when you can create beautiful, positive, health-inducing thoughts that are good for you and everyone, including Mother Earth. Celebrate this Earth Day on Thursday, April 22nd, by being aware of what you think and how you feel, and catch yourself if you’re habitually engaging in negative thought-patterns.  You can change this. Take a deep breath and think of the exact opposite – if you feel fear and want to lash out, think of love/reassurance/security and express a kind word.  Don’t worry about what others do.  They’re just mirrors to your own innermost subconscious thoughts and feelings anyway.  Be yourself – the best version you can be.  For all of us.

When we saw Professor Thomas J. Scheff teaching about emotions on UCTV, we knew we had to talk to him. A prolific author whose books include Microsociology, Emotions and Violence, Bloody Revenge, Emotions and the Social Bond, and Easy Rider, among others, Scheff is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an expert on emotions and social psychology. He is also a wonderful human being whose sense of humor permeates his teachings and resonates throughout this interview, where we discuss love, anger, and what he considers the master emotion: shame.

Maryl Celiz: What is the role of emotions in health?

Thomas Scheff: I think emotions are extremely important in every day life, in therapy, in politics – and much ignored, to say the least. That is, psychotherapists very seldom train to understand their own emotions and other people’s. But that’s absolutely essential. To connect with a person, you have to be in their emotional wavelength.  You have to understand what they’re feeling, because often they can’t explain it, they can’t put it in words. And, so you have to be sensitive, more sensitive than they are, oftentimes. So, it’s a big emptiness in modern societies that we’ve kind of shrugged off emotions as if they were not important and thought is everything. If you look at the major psychology departments in the world, I think there’s one that has section on emotions. I think it’s in England. Most psychology departments have large groups of cognitive psychologists, large groups of behavioral psychologists, courses on perception, on neurology – that’s very much a fad now, the neurology of the brain. But they seldom have even one person that deals with emotions. In our campus, the psychology department has one person, who deals with facial expression, or at least that’s one of his areas – but that’s the whole extent of it. In sociology, of course, I’m the only one in our department, and in social departments. So, emotions are neglected in the academy, and in medical school and so on. It’s a mess. And I’m protesting.

Silvie Celiz: Well, we’re very happy that you’re doing that. What actually prompted your own interest in the study of emotions and the role they play in all of this?

TS: I was a conventional sociologist until I was 40. I did a book, a famous one, on labeling mental illness, which takes a strictly sociological approach, no psychology (that’s what sociologists like, they don’t want anything to do with psychology). But at 40 I had some life experiences which unearthed a whole lot of emotions that I didn’t even know were there and then I got interested in studying emotions because of my own personal experience. I mean, it was a big help for me to start crying. I didn’t know how to cry – most men don’t. I learned how to cry, I cried a whole lot to catch up. And I experienced some fear that was really intense, to catch up, because men stuff fear. They pretend that they’re not afraid because they don’t want to be called ‘cowards’ – which is a total mistake because between fear and coward there is no relationship. Anyway, I learned how to deal with my anger better than I had. I was a very angry person until I was 40. And how to deal with shame, which is the hardest of all. Shame is very difficult. But I learned to laugh at myself, which is a big help, laugh at myself instead of at other people, which I’d been doing. And in laughing at myself I found that I was very laughable in a lot of ways – ha! So, I became very emotional and I felt much better and inspired to find out more about emotions in general, not just in my case – I started dealing with emotions in my classes, with my students. And they loved it – they couldn’t get enough. So, I became a student of especially shame and anger, which are very large continents and at the time that I started they were unexplored. And I’ve had a good time, and I’m still having a good time.

MC: How do we deal with negative emotions constructively?

TS: I’ve been teaching my students how to cry, for many years. The women cry but some find that it’s painful. And very few of the men cry. So, what I do is I have them make up a list of ‘best moments’, the best moments in their lives. You ever look at the Olympic winners? Here’s a man who won a mile run, and there are these men, standing up on these pedestals and they have their medals for winning – and all three are crying. What’s that about? Those men haven’t cried in years! They’re having a best moment, and they feel like nobody’s gonna call them a sissy because they just won the Olympics. It frees them up to feel their emotions and, of course, they’re crying all the losses they had to suffer to get to that point. They hadn’t been crying about them – they save them up for that moment.

SC: So crying is more about an overwhelming experience?

TS: Yes. Overwhelming grief or fear – or shame – is very painful. So, the best moments exercise teaches you how to be in the emotion without getting overwhelmed by it. Because in the best moments you’re also back in the past when you are feeling safe – and that’s the key to dealing with emotions in a healthy way. It turns out it’s not painful. A good cry when you’re in the theater and you’re watching a good film, it feels good. It’s a good cry. Sure, it may be due to a tragedy that’s happening to a person on the screen, but you’re not that person, it’s not happening to you, and that frees your up to feel your own neglected feelings because you know you’re safe. You can get up and leave the theater if you have to. I’ve done that. It’s that being able to quit if you want that allows people to feel their feelings in a pleasurable way. It’s happened to me many times.

MC: Is there ever a danger in being so in touch with emotions that you’re overly emotional and everyone sees you as an emotional wreck?

TS: (Laughs) I cry very easily. And my wife, who understands me very well, she’s still embarrassed if I cry in public. Even though she knows that it’s OK, and it’s OK with her, and it’s good for me. But she’s still embarrassed. My kids pretend that they don’t know me if I cry in public. But I want to do it, I feel I am revealing my true self: I am sad about something that’s going on and I cry. There’s a wonderful song by Iris Dement, it’s called “No Time To Cry”. That’s the story of our civilization – we don’t have time to cry. And that’s a metaphor for we don’t allow people to feel their emotions. Crying, shaking and shivering – that’s a fear response – laughing. I’m a big laugher, don’t get me laughing. My wife is worse than me, especially her own jokes, she loves her own jokes, she’ll be on the floor laughing about something that I don’t even know that it’s funny. But it doesn’t matter what you’re laughing at as long as you’re laughing at yourself or the Universe and not at other people. Laughing at other people is hostile, it’s rejection, you’re rejecting them. If you laugh at yourself, it’s OK, you’re just saying ‘silly me, what did I do, I’ve done it again’. And it’s acceptance of yourself and your feelings. And you’ll never guess what emotion laughter is tied to in my vocabulary. Maryl, you guess.

MC: Nervousness?

TS: That’s intimately connected with the emotion but emotions are states of bodily arousal. It’s a physical thing. And being recognized rather than rejected is deeply implicated in causing this reaction. Laughter is the catharsis of a very fundamental emotion, which we don’t like to mention in our society. Silvie, you get to guess.

SC: Would it be violence?

TS: No, that’s anger or fear. In my classes, I’d ask students to get up and tell about a mistake they made in public. And they would get up and start telling, and they would get convulsed in laughter, sometimes you couldn’t even understand what they were saying because the laughter was blocking out the language. So, you make a mistake and then you need to laugh about it. What emotion is connected with making a mistake?

SC: Shame!

TS: Ah-ha! (claps) Shame is my baby. I write and talk and research and on and on about shame and its connection with withdrawal, on the one hand, which is the most common reaction and to aggression, on the other hand, which is much less common but I argue that unacknowledged shame – shame that you stuff – is at the root of either withdrawal and aggression. So, anger by itself is nothing. It’s just a frustration. But when it is combined with unacknowledged shame, it goes round and round and gets you into deep water very quick. And I’ve written a lot about that. I call shame the ‘master emotion’, because it regulates the other emotions too. Why won’t people cry when they need to cry? Well, because they’re embarrassed about crying in public (except me).

SC: So what is a good technique to master an emotion?

TS: It is best to talk to someone else, because it gives you the ability to see yourself as the other person is seeing you – we do that automatically without knowing it, we get into their heads and look at ourselves. That’s how we understand conversation, because people are very unclear and unless we do that we can’t understand the simplest conversation. But it’s that split that gives you distance from an emotion. And it’s being able to be in and out of the feeling that allows you to feel it safely – if someone is listening to you, you feel even safer, you got someone on your side, someone sympathetic, and that’s very important.

MC: What if the person you’re talking to doesn’t really understand their own emotions?

TS: Well, it is a problem, but as long as the person is sympathetic and patient – that’s very important, that they don’t get impatient, that they’re willing to hear you out – it’s helpful to just have someone else hear you out when you’re struggling with some problem. I learned that from my wife. For many years, she was a mediator in a divorce court, and it’s a very messy business because she’s dealing with some very angry people all day long. So she’d come home feeling really tense and then she’d tell me about her day. And when we first got together I thought ‘how long is this gonna go on? How come she’s telling me the same story over and over again? Blah, blah, blah’. I had to be patient, patient, patient. But then I had a brilliant idea after three months: She seems to feel better after she does that! And if she doesn’t do it, she’s still tense. So then I thought about that a while, with my brilliant, fast-moving brain, and in another three months I had another idea: I can do that too! I can talk to her about MY day. And so I started to share my time with her, and I’d tell her about my day. It would take me about two minutes. And then she’d ask me questions about my day, and I got to expand it a little bit. And then she kept asking me questions, and I kept expanding. And then I’d come to an event during the day, and I felt it as I was telling her, ‘oh! I didn’t deal with that at the time, I was too busy.’ And then I’d talk about that situation and get into the feeling that I had swallowed at the time. That was a big revelation for me and I found out that some of my days were very intense. And I was hiding a lot of the feelings that came up during the day and I could only feel them when I told my wife. And so we got off on a good start that way, because we were helping each other with difficult jobs that we both had.

SC: If I do or don’t have someone, what are some basic guidelines to help ourselves out with our emotions?

TS: When you come home from your job, you need to review your day. It’s better to review it to a sympathetic listener, but if you don’t have it, review it to yourself. Looking for best moments, that’s the way to start. That’ll encourage you to be able to deal with the bad moments. I love this conversation, I never quite put it that way before, you two are inspiring me. Can I join your team?

MC/SC: We would love that.

TS: Three persons against the world.

SC: We need more of these types of conversations and insights on how to handle our emotions.

MC: These basic understandings of our own emotions and how to communicate them to someone else are crucial for relationships too, which is something that everyone wants.

TS: When my wife and I I first got together, we used to quarrel long and hard, nasty quarrels, would go on for hours. And she was in graduate school at the time and she said to me, ‘I’m gonna study marital quarrels, because you and I are both experts’ (laughs). And I said, ‘well, how are you gonna do that?’ And she said ‘I’m gonna set up a video camera in the kitchen and i’m gonna video tape our quarrels.’ And I said, ‘that’ll never work, why don’t you do something else?’ She said, ‘like what’. I told her some harebrained idea and she rejected it. So she put a camera in our kitchen and every time we would start to quarrel she would say ‘hold on’ and she would turn on the thing, and then we would argue for about an hour or two or more. And I thought I was being very wonderful, until she showed me one of the tapes. And I said ‘Oh my God! That’s not me up there – that’s my dad!’ I used to hate it when he quarreled like that, pointing his finger and so sure of himself and acting like this, and I said ‘we can’t live like this’. And so we went to a marriage counselor and he introduced us to the idea of communicating with each other. And started us on that route, and it was a good thing because if we hadn’t done it, we would’ve split up. So, it was very personal, my experiences with emotions and with relationships. I flunked the first two marriages but I’m not gonna flunk this one.

SC: You said shame is the master emotion – is that the only one?

TS: Well, it’s a little bit of an exaggeration but what I mean is that it’s shame that keeps people feeling their other emotions, and shame itself. People are ashamed of being ashamed. They’re ashamed of being angry, even the screamers are ashamed of it. They’re ashamed of being afraid, especially men. Women aren’t as ashamed of being afraid, they’re more realistic about it. And they’re ashamed of crying, of grief. So, it helps with all your emotions if you start dealing with your shame a little, and embarrassment, humiliation. The way you do that is a little different then the others. You have to talk about it a lot at first, how you were humiliated and how you felt. And if you talk about it enough – sometimes it can take a long time – you come to see it in a humorous way. And when you see it like that, you laugh about yourself. And that takes it out of the cellar, it brings it out into the light. And most laughter at ourselves is very healthy. We need to do that in order to deal with the physical parts of shame, embarrassment and humiliation. So, what I say to people is that shame, embarrassment and humiliation are bodily preparation to laugh. You had a lot of tension in your body, which can be released by laughing. Anger – you ready for this or you want to talk shame some more?

MC: I’ve been waiting for anger.

TS: Okay. Anger is bodily preparation, well, Darwin thought it was bodily preparation to fight, and it is – you get a big shot of adrenaline in your system, which prepares you for some sort of exertion. And when I was young enough, I knew that if I ran six miles fast enough, I would burn off some of that adrenaline, and it would help me sleep at night. You ever go to bed angry and you can’t go to sleep? That’s the adrenaline pulsating, it’s a very powerful upper, as my students would say. Well, how can you metabolize all that adrenaline in 30 seconds? I’ve discovered that I can get rid of that energy in less than a minute, if I play it just right: Your body has to feel the anger, you have to feel the heat, instead of hiding it. Your anger is just an internal state, so I’m not talking about acting out anger. Animals, they have to act it out. Human beings don’t. I just say ‘I’m angry at you because’. And if they don’t understand, I say it again a little differently, because human beings don’t like to be told the same thing to an adult twice – they get mad. And if they still don’t get it, I say it again. They can’t tell I’m angry because I’m won’t look like it but I am. And as I am doing that routine, sometimes my body gets hot, and after that, I feel fine – I can take a nap right there.

SC: So what about those people who raise their voice and start screaming?

TS: They’re acting out the anger. But that doesn’t work. Experimental psychologists, one of the few things they’ve demonstrated is that acting out anger doesn’t help – it makes things worse, usually. So, it’s not a good idea. It makes the other person angry and that’s not good either. So, what you want to do is keep your voice down and say courteously but relentlessly why you’re angry. And sooner or later they’ll get that you’re angry, and they’ll apologize. They’re a little surprised that you’re angry and not showing it, but you’re showing it verbally. And that gets your body into the right place to metabolize the adrenaline. You don’t have to run the six miles. But it doesn’t work every time. I’m supposed to be an expert on this and wish I could be as good as I’m telling you about but I don’t think anyone is. If my wife is yelling at me, I have a strong tendency to yell back, and then we’re in it. And she’s over it in five minutes, but I’m not. So, I wish I could be as good as I’m telling you about but I don’t think anybody is. Sometimes I manage better. One time she yelled at me and I said ‘ouch’. And she said, ‘what?’ And I said ‘ouch’. And she said ‘what does that mean?’ And I said, ‘it means what you said hurt me. It hurts. Ouch.’ And she laughed. And I laughed. And it was over. So that’s the ‘ouch’ technique – there are thousands of more out there that I don’t know about but try it out sometime: ouch.

SC: My husband does that.

TS: He does ‘ouch’?

SC: Yes.

TS: Do you laugh?

SC: Yes!

TS: Perfect. You’re probably better at it than I am, I’m good at explaining it but I’m not that great at doing it. I’m a B- student, you’re an A+ student.

MC: If acting out anger doesn’t work, then why do we keep doing it?

TS: Well, why do we keep invading Afghanistan? Our system of government is broken. And our society is very broken with respect to these crucial matters, it’s been broken for a very long time. In the 19th Century it wasn’t as bad, people could talk about shame openly. But they don’t anymore. Shame is the ‘s’ word. You have to be very careful. When I introduce this to my students, I take a very long time to get there. First we talk about embarrassment, then humiliation – and humiliation is still safe, because people see that as coming from the outside, something is being done to you, so they’re not as spooked by it as the ‘s’ word. You can’t talk about shame openly in public, not directly. You can say ‘oh, what a shame.’ But that’s different. Shame is something that people see as internal – it’s your fault: You’re ignorant, you’re stupid, etc..we have thousands of ways of putting ourselves down, which our society teaches us to do. When we are in grammar school, we get put down a lot. teachers don’t mean to put you down – they’re trying to teach you something – but they put you down anyway. You think you’re stupid, ‘cause you can’t get the right answers.  Most teachers don’t realize they’re putting students down, they think they’re giving them the right answers.

MC: Are embarrassment and shame related to low self-esteem?

TS: Low self-esteem is a hidden way of talking about shame. Instead of ‘I’m much more ashamed than I am proud of myself’, you say, ‘I’ve low self-esteem’. We have all sorts of dodges away from the truth of what we’re actually feeling. We say ‘that was an awkward moment’ – it wasn’t me that was embarrassed, it was the moment that was awkward. We have thousands of ways of saying of overlaying what’s going on.

SC: What about love?

TS: I think of love as giving just as much value to the other person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors as you do to your own. Here’s the hard part: no more, no less. You don’t value them more than yourself, and you don’t value yourself more than them. And that’s very, very tricky. You connect with them, and you honor the beloved, but you’re not engulfed with them. I have a book coming out about love and the balance of connecting. The key to understanding shame is relation. Shame is a relational phenomenon. Helen Lewis said that shame is a signal of threat to the bond. And pride, genuine pride, is a signal of a secure bond, of connectedness, that you’re connected with another person or persons. Shame, embarrassment and humiliation are signals of disconnect. Shame is a social phenomenon as well as an individual one. It’s about connect and disconnect. When we make a mistake, we feel disconnected. We’ve done something wrong, which disconnects you from people that are watching.

MC: How do men and women differ when it comes to emotions?

TS: I have an article about the machismo and Madonna system, about how men and women share in the repression of emotions. I put it this way: Men repress shame, grief and fear, and act out anger. A man is more likely to act out anger than a woman. Whereas a Madonna, which is the feminine equivalent of machismo, they repress anger and acts out fear. And that makes a fit, because a Madonna wants a strong man to protect her so she’ll be less afraid. And the man wants a woman who won’t get angry at him, so he can enjoy life. So it’s a repressive arrangement on both sides. And I think women are slightly less repressed than men, because the men repress fear completely. But the women are more repressed in modern society, especially with anger. Anger is a natural, organic reaction to frustration – of course they have it. And you need to know that and the other people need to know that. Women who smile too much and who say they don’t get angry, that’s repression. And any repression of emotions is going to do damage to your psyche and to your body and to your relationships. So I say, let’s get the men and the women together and get into the emotional relational world, into social emotion.

National Nutrition Month (March) is almost over, and as we welcome the sunshine and heat everyone must be thinking two things: Spring cleaning (home, closets, garage) and Spring cleanse (body detox…beach body!) But here is something you may not know about that goes hand-in-hand with body detox: Mental Toxicity. In this Spring cleaning state-of-mind (no pun intended), let us give you a heads up on this very important part of detox that people generally do not seem to acknowledge, in spite of it being so crucial for real cleansing and optimal health.

Mental toxins are all the negative thoughts, emotions, associations, and memories that hunt us, archives of “programs” (as I like to call them) that exist in the back of your mind or subconsciousness. Many of these programs, mental discomforts/distortions that you have ignored and not dealt with, negative feelings and thoughts that have not been analyzed, broken down, worked out and understood, are still inside of you in the form of mental toxic waste. This mental toxicity hanging around in your your mind, literally “weighs” you down because it is energetically heavy and dense, and if it is not cleansed it will resurface at some point and attack you when you least expect it, and quite probably turn into the physical imbalance we call illness.

When we eat healing foods, partake in a body detox program, and  eat nutrient-dense, high-quality foods like unprocessed whole foods and in particular raw whole foods, physical and chemical toxins aren’t the only ones that are released to be cleaned out -  mental toxins also join the cleansing party. We must be aware that, as we cleanse our physical bodies of excess fat, metals and any other accumulated physical toxins, any mental toxins that have been buried deep under all of that fat or chemical toxicity will also resurface, jumping out like a caged lion recently released. And that is your chance to tame them, work through these toxic ideas/programs/patterns, transmute their energy, and reroute them somewhere else. Remember, nothing in the Universe is ever destroyed, it is all recycled, transformed, transmuted, and reused in another way.  By cleansing these mental toxins out and fully working them out, analyzing them, accepting them, understanding them and the process of release, and letting them go, you will be free of their toxicity. Understanding them is the key and final step for transforming mental toxins into high frequency, elevated, positive thoughts of knowledge, compassion, wisdom, and love.

The mental cleanse that takes place as a result of the physical cleanse is a “side effect” that people often forget about. Ever wonder why you are more aggressive/defensive/sensitive after changing your diet to a more light and sophisticated diet? Shouldn’t you act as light as you feel physically? Sure – once you have cleansed those mentally toxic negative emotions and thoughts out of your system as well, you will. But that takes work, and, more than anything, AWARENESS. This is actually a natural, wonderful thing that is taking place as part of your healing process. Embrace it.

Here are few tips on how to work through this and cleanse mental toxicity to thoroughly free your mind and truly heal yourself holistically (mind/body) from distortion and misunderstanding, and let go of negative thought patterns that are actually the starting point for physical disease.

When we say “work out”, mental toxins we mean this kind of internal work:

• ✽ Identify what is the underlying problem (you might need a pen and paper). What is bothering you so much?

• ✽ Figure out what emotions accompany your negative reactions: Envy, anger, fear, resentment, guilt, shame, etc…

• ✽ Question, analyze, and discern in detail where all these sentiments come from.

• ✽ Once you have done this, try again and go deeper: What triggers these thoughts and emotions? Is it a person, a sound, an association, a memory, a color, a voice, what a person stands for or represents? Think, and dig. You have the answers within and the power to heal yourself.

• ✽ Use the Law of Cause and Effect and the six other laws of the Universe to help you reach an understanding of your situation, where these negative thoughts started, the root of things.

• ✽ As difficult as it may initially be, make an effort to fully understand your entire process, from trigger to reaction.

Once we understand what, when, who, how and why, that wont bother you any longer, because all that internal “work” was the detox. Understanding our negative thought patterns means knowing that things don’t happen to YOU, they just happen, as an experience for us to learn form it, grow, evolve, and elevate. Your mental toxins need to be transformed and transmuted into crystals of light, wisdom from experiences that were understood, a clear comprehension of the choices that you made in the past (maybe even form past lives). When we genuinely understand our emotions and thought patterns, we feel inner peace, love, compassion, and patience. And harmony sets in…a feeling that we are back home.  Always remember, HEALTH is not just in your body, it starts with the thoughts in your mind.  Happy Holistic Spring Cleanse!

]]> http://hlifemedia.com/2010/03/spring-cleaning-the-mind/feed/ 2 http://hlifemedia.com/2010/02/dear-hlife-fibroid-mind/ http://hlifemedia.com/2010/02/dear-hlife-fibroid-mind/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:00:55 +0000 Maryl Celiz http://hlifemedia.com/?p=3474

Dear HLife: If all illnesses start in the mind, what does a fibroid mean?

Dear HLifer:

You’re on the right track asking this question, because the minute something happens to your body, you need to focus on one thing: What is my body trying to tell me?

The physical body is a map to the mental “body”.  Your physical body has many jobs and one of them is telling you exactly what is going on in your mind, which is something that you may not be able to see. The point of connection between the mind and the body are the emotions. There are healers who say that all problems are emotional, and that’s not untrue.  A holistic approach to health looks at all bodies – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual – to get a whole picture of what is causing the imbalance.

So, as you have to analyze your particular situation, let’s walk through an example on how to do this.  The first thing you need to do is look at the part of your body that is affected. Let’s say this fibroid is located in the uterus (as many are). The uterus is an area of the body intimately connected to femininity, as it is an organ that only females have. It is also a part of the reproductive system, the place of ultimate physical creation (babies). Let’s say it is located on the right side of your uterus. The right side of the body is governed by the left brain, and the left brain is linked to the masculine, the father, analytical processes.

All of this is beginning to paint a picture: There is an extraneous mass (something that stands out and is not supposed to be there, but is calling attention) located in the feminine, reproductive and therefore CREATIVE center of you, a place deeply connected to you as a woman, relationships, children…particularly placed on the masculine/paternal/analytical side of the body.

All illnesses begin with a thought (in the mind, like you said). And this thought generates an feeling, and then an emotion. This emotion is then expressed physically in your body.  It looks like there was a thought, an idea (“I should already have children), which then funneled down to an emotion like fear (“Maybe I’ll never get to have children”). Perhaps this is a personal fear, pressure on part of your parents (father, perhaps? Patriarchal/societal, maybe?) that has to do with having children, relationships. If you’re single and older, it is normal that this would be on your mind. If you’re not, perhaps this creation or “child” is a project/dream of yours, one that you are not paying attention to but deep down inside needs to manifest – a creation you need to give birth to.

Identifying the idea that started the physical problem is key in treating something. Many women have uterine fibroids that are benign and don’t cause much trouble, and others can be easily treated with alternative or Western methods. But it is your job to treat this WHOLLY, and this means getting to the source of the problem, the place where the fibroid began – IN A THOUGHT.  From there, analyzing how you feel about that idea/thought, and where that thought decided to manifest itself in your physical body will help you treat your condition holistically, so that it is solved on all levels of your being and it will not resurface to call your attention again, as happens oftentimes when just the physical body is treated.

Once you have identified the cause, the negative thought and emotion, you can treat these with opposing (positive) thoughts and feelings that reinforce what you want to CREATE, instead of what you don’t want.  In other words, you need to reprogram your negative programming into positive programming. An example in this case would be thinking: “Creation is a gift that all of the Creator’s children have. I am a creator, too. I have the power to create, and, when the time is right for me, my creations will manifest into the most beautiful of truths.”  Or, “I am confident and secure in the fact that I can create my own destiny, beyond societal expectations of me. I am a unique individual with a unique path, and it is up to me to decide what that path will include. I am safe and I trust in myself.”  Also, “Thank you, fibroid, for showing me what I could not see.  Your job is done.”

You need to get into the habit of interacting with your internal world – your organs, your cells, your thoughts. All of these energy clusters belong to you – they make up who you are, and you need to get to know them and communicate your will to them clearly. The healing process and the self-analysis it requires can only work when you begin to become intimately connected to your inner Universe.

Good books to help you understand this process and how to do it are Louise Hay’s Heal Your Body A-Z guide, which has a “dictionary” of health issues and the probable thought pattern that gave rise to it, along with new thought patterns that you can adopt to help you in the healing process. Another great book is Del Cuerpo Al Espiritu by Dr. Rogelio D’Ovidio, which I highly recommend if you speak Spanish (or if you can find it in English, which I have not been able to do yet.) Louise Hay cured herself of cancer by changing her thoughts and negative emotions as well as her diet – and she has been changing the world for the better ever since.  Dr. D’Ovidio is an MD who discovered a whole-body approach to healing and whose book walks you through every single organ and organ system, to help you identify the source of your condition.

The link between science and spirituality is my passion. So, it was a natural high when I heard Gregg Braden speak this past weekend at The 8th Annual Conscious Life Expo in Los Angeles about this very thing with relation to a much-discussed date in time: 2012. A New York Times best selling author, former computer geologist and systems designer, Bradden is a pioneer in bridging science and spirituality, as is demonstrated in his fifth book, Fractal Time: The Secret of 2012 and a New World Age. Here are a few key points from his talk.

❂ 2012 is not the Apocalypse
“I see no scientific evidence for things ending in 2012”, Braden said during the workshop. Scenarios like those in the movie 2012 and some TV specials are far from the truth, and, in fact, Braden added, “I think 2012 is an important topic, but it is not THE topic.”  He explained that this date is significant because it marks the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new one and that this in itself is the interesting thing. He also added this: “The next 12-18 months are the most pivotal in our civilization,”, emphasizing that it is not one day in 2012 that matters, but how we handle all the changes that are leading us to that cycle end/beginning-point. “It’s not about a day, it’s more about a zone or window of time.”

❂ Cycles: This has happened before
Time is cyclical. Just like we have cycles as human beings (birth, growth, death in an average of 90 years) as does Nature (sun rises, high points, and sets in one day, moon waxes and wanes in 28 days, etc..) civilizations have cycles that mark events and changes for them as a whole.  Cycles are determined by our location in space. The center of our galaxy radiates energy that affects life on Earth, and where we are located as a planet determines the influence. Things change because our position changes, due to rotation, translation and the wobble of Earth on its axis. One Earthwobble completion takes about 26,000 years, and earlier civilizations divided this into five cycles of around 5125-5200 years. The cycle our civilization is in now started in 3014 BC, lasts for 5125 years (which Braden calls a Great World Age), and ends in 2012.  Cycles repeat, and if we can understand them and their key points, then we can do what Braden and many other experts are saying we are supposed to do right now: “Reset the patterns of past centuries and mold them into new life-affirming patterns.”

❂ It’s about choice, it’s about YOU
So, if time is cyclical and what has happened before happens again, how can we change things?  Braden explained that we are in a time of crisis, this meaning a time in which we still have the opportunity to do something about it, a time to call attention to greater healing.  Right now, we are being pushed to the limits – economic crisis, more divorces than ever before. “The human race is at a unique turning point,” he said. He also said that a cycle brings about the same conditions BUT THE RESPONSE OF TO THESE CONDITIONS IS UP TO US. “Will we choose to create the best of all possible worlds?”  Yes, cycles mean that what has happened before is set to happen again, the environment/conditions for what took place returns. But it is up to US to react differently, which is why so many people are committed to exhausting themselves to inform you of that responsibility, of that choice you have to make to change a previous personal or global pattern. A time of ending and beginning is a time of change, and a time of change is a time of choice. What do we want this world to change into? Braden offered the idea of a more collaborative world instead of the current (or former) more competitive one, a planet in which we work together for the common good, realizing we are all connected and my actions affect yours and vice versa. We share the same air, and if you pollute it, I will breathe that contamination. This business of changing times is not something external and independent of you – it is happening with and TO you. “You and I are changing in the context of this changing world. We have to,” said Braden. Time are changing and, whether you want to or not, you are changing.  You can choose to do nothing about it or choose to be the master and commander of that change.

❂ Bye, bye good ole days
In a time of change, we are so busy keeping up with the changes that we forget one implicit truth: Nothing will ever be the same.  The “good old days” are gone, and gone for good.  What was normal 10 years ago will never be the norm again. “This is why our personal center, our personal focus, is so important,” said Braden.  If the outer world is rapidly morphing into something that ten years ago was unrecognizable – would you have imagined texting, tweeting and facebooking as your main form of communication back in the 90s? – then knowing who we are (and who we are NOT) within this new world is crucial.  The key thing is: Know who and what you are as well as what you want to become in these times of changes, and choose to create an improvement over the past “norm”. The new “normal” can be way better than 10 years ago – and this is up to every single one of us.

❂ Of war and peace
Braden noted that cycles of war and peace in past civilizations were directly linked to these Great World Age cycles. Does that surprise you? No – we’re in them middle of such conflict – not to mention potential threat from China with the Dalai Lama meeting Obama today – a time of economic crisis and more. Like Braden says, the key is to learn from past reactions to these points in the cycles, and make the best choice. “Some civilizations chose fear and that was bad. Others chose to collaborate, and they survived. It’s what we have to do now,” he said. The changes and potential conflicts/resolutions are global: climate, sea levels, food. They’re also personal. Make no mistake – these are the times of the wars between the sons and daughters of light and the sons and daughters of dark.  Which one are you? Will you choose for or against the planet, for or against the animals, for or against equality, balance, harmony, healing?  Make the connection between your personal choices and the global conditions.

❂ World Age changes are intense
Are any of the changes you’re going through “light” or “easy”?  No.  People are struggling. Everyone is more or less in some sort of upheaval, whether it be in the work, love or social arena. Braden says this is characteristic of this particular point in the cycle – changes will be frequent, and intense. We are being faced with the final opportunities to make changes in our personal lives – get rid of patterns that have defined our thoughts and behaviors for decades (and centuries, if you believe in reincarnation)- and in our lives as part of a global community. This is happening right now. This is what this time is for. And right now, 2010, it’s crunch time. You have to see this as an opportunity.  It’s the last round of “make-up tests” to pass onto the next grade. Give it your best shot.  All you have to do is set your intention, decide to focus on the collaborative, the healing, the new and improved way to relate to yourself and the world, flowing communication and an awareness of the connection we have to every molecule of life on this planet. The rest will show itself to you.  The information is out there, here and – as it always has been – within you.