All that we are is a result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become. -Buddha Sakyamuni, Dhammapada.

My professor, Steven Goodman, once declared to the class, “No matter how many billions of years you have been in a coma, you can always wake up!” Many of us are enslaved in unconscious lives. Our moods and thoughts shift from moment to moment. Our energy levels and mental clarity are in constant flux. Ultimately, our lives, our well being, and our happiness are helplessly floating between waves of conscious and unconscious deliberation. We are miserable victims of a reality of fleeting thoughts.

Fortunately, as Steven said, we can wake up. We can heed the Buddha’s advice and create a reality in which we are happy, content, and conscious beings. We can do this simply by thinking and thereby changing what we hold in our minds to be real.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is one of the many methods that can serve as a catalyst in transforming our minds. NLP is the study of our thoughts and actions. It makes us, as subjective interpreters of what we see, responsible for our thoughts and moods (states). With this responsibility comes consciousness and choice wherein we are given the ability to change how we think and behave.

According to the NLP communication model, our senses are introduced to millions of pieces of information each second. We are conscious of only a fraction of what our senses perceive. Once our senses apprehend something, that information is filtered by our brain and nervous system where it is deleted, distorted, or generalized. This creates what NLP calls Internal Representations, or pictures, thoughts, sounds, or feelings that are completely subjective to our internal filtering process of external stimuli. An example of a positive internal representation would be having internal pictures and thoughts of successfully accomplishing a goal.

Our internal representations and physiology influence our state and our state influences our behavior. To have a positive physiology we want to have positive internal representations and take care of our bodies with proper diet, exercise, sleep, etc. This positive state will produce positive behavior which, in turn, produces positive outcomes. So, if we have positive internal representations, our physiology will match this by smiling (granting we are healthy and taking care of our bodies), we are likely to be in a positive state, and our behavior will be more resourceful. These principles apply to negative states, internal representations, physiology, behavior, and outcomes as well.

This information can be powerfully used to our advantage. When we find ourselves experiencing a negative state such as procrastination we are creating negative internal representations that reflect procrastination (e.g. internal pictures and thoughts of not carrying through with a task). Our physiology matches this. Our breathing is shallow, are facial expressions are less vivid, and our voices aren’t as strong. In order to reverse this, we can create internal representations of confidence and motivation. We invoke memories and feelings of confidence and motivation, recall and re-experience what it was like when we were motivated and productive. We can change our physiology as well by breathing more deeply, smiling, and standing up straight. Consequently, in a matter of seconds, we find ourselves in a state where we are genuinely confident and motivated.

Whenever we find ourselves in a state that we do not deem optimal for ourselves, we can access positive internal representations and physiology to put ourselves in a favorable state. The mind can not abide in two disparate feelings or emotions. As we continually practice putting ourselves in positive states, the mind will be more accustomed to these states, making it easier to access and remain in them. We will have resourceful actions and interactions to the current situation. We will shift from unconscious agents to conscious creators of our realities wherein we experience joy, clarity, and contentment.

Recommended Reading

Dhammapada, by Buddha
Unlimited Power, by Anthony Robbins

What Chiropractic Is

Background

Chiropractic is based on the philosophical premise that the body has an Innate Intelligence that guides its development, healing, and growth. The easiest way I’ve found to think about this is to use the example of a papercut. When you cut your finger, extra blood rushes to the area of trauma, it bleeds, the blood coagulates, fibers develop between the sides of the cut, the fibers stitch the separation together, scar tissue forms and then disappears. Think about the organization this took! It emerged out of evolution, out of trial and error and the chemistry of the way all of the pieces fit together, but your body acts with purpose to heal an injury.

This Intelligence is constantly adapting all of the forces of the world around and within you to maintain homeostatic equilibrium within you. Constant temperature, pressure, and movement are maintained through the interactions of literally trillions of cells, all coordinated by the nervous system.

Doctors of the Nervous System

Chiropractors are doctors of the nervous system. If you’ve seen a Chiropractor, and they’ve never talked to you about your nervous system, I’m truly sorry. It’s an unfortunate commentary on how Chiropractic education, caught in the requirements of the various state legislations that regulate it, causes budding Chiropractors to miss the point, or to lose their nerve when talking to patients about what they’re really doing. Even graduates of my school, which is very philosophically grounded and focused, often seem to miss the point and talk about pain management and moving bones, even while thinking about the nervous system. This only generates a confusing patient experience, which no one is served by.

The practice of Chiropractic leads to the liberation of the nervous system from patterns of behavior that are not grounded in present-time experience, but previous trauma. These patterns of behavior are represented in the spinal column as distortions in the posture. The crucial point here, though, is that it is not where the bones are that can lead to problems, it’s how the bones can move.

If you cannot bring your spine into any of the positions and postures that the shapes of the bones, tightness of the ligaments and tendons, and the cartilage surfaces have the ability to move into, you are reacting to your environment from within a habitual pattern. The rule of mobility in the body is “move it or lose it.” Any movement patterns that you habitually don’t engage in, you gradually lose the capacity for.

Emotions and the Body

In addition to the physical mobility, psychologically speaking, the positional and movement relationships among the vertebrae correlate with emotional experiences. Think about this in this way: when someone is really angry, you can generally tell by looking at them. You tell this because of their posture, their facial expression, and any number of subliminal clues relating to how they are using their body. If your spine gets stuck in a set of patterns that are implicitly related to anger in this way, other people perceive anger in you, and respond accordingly, if unconsciously. In all likelihood, your own status-reporting mechanisms report “all systems normal” because the implicit anger will be filtered out of the status report if it’s been there long enough.

All of this is to say, Chiropractic is a healing art that liberates the spine from habitual fixations. This liberation leads to greater functioning of the nervous system. This leads to the ability to develop new, more flexible patterns of behavior, both physically and emotionally. Chiropractic increases the individual’s capacity to sit still in readiness to respond purposefully to the environment.

In part 3, I’ll tie together the aims of Chiropractic, yoga, and Alexander technique, in an attempt to triangulate more clearly on just how good a tool for understanding the nature of the total self each of them is. Thanks for following the ride!

My personal time management system is a combination of GTD and Franklin Covey and involves a weekly review, inbox, planner, and email. For a time management system to be optimally beneficial, it must be personal. I have taken the aspects from Allen and Covey that work for me and implemented them to play off of each other’s strengths. Here’s how I keep myself organized:

Weekly Review

Once a week, I go through my physical inbox, my planner, my action lists, my goals, and my projects to see how I am progressing and what I need to focus on that week. This is known as the weekly review and is one of the most important tools in the GTD system.

When I have a task that I wanted to complete the previous weeks doesn’t get done, I will take a look as to why it was not done and see what I can do to fulfill that task or project in the new week. I also plan the coming week by checking which tasks from my action lists and projects I can and want to get completed, while being mindful of my schedule. If I have a time sensitive task, I will write it on the task list on the day it must be completed. Things that I need to do that week, but are not time sensitive are written on my “Weekly Compass” so that I will be reminded of them each day when I compose my daily task list.

Physical Inbox

This is a capture tool for papers, bills, reference items, and various actions I need to take. Whenever I have something that I can’t immediately deal with, such as a form that needs to be filled out, mail, or information that must be processed, I put it here. During my weekly review, I decide what needs to be done with the item and process it. (If my inbox saw more traffic, it would need to be dealt with more regularly. At this point, once a week is often enough). If there is a piece of reference material that I will need in the future, I put it in my alphabetized filing system. Items that will not serve me as reference and do not need to be acted upon are thrown away. Paper work and other actions that must be completed are processed and I add a task in my planner to complete them.

The Planner

My Franklin Covey planner is my primary organizational tool and I use it regularly throughout the day. The planner contains monthly calendars, daily schedules, daily tasks, a section for goals, and five personalizable blank tabs.

Each monthly calendar tab has a master task list for personal and business goals that are to be met that month. During the last weekly review of the month, I go through all of my projects, goals, and tasks and decide which ones I want to do in the next month and place them on this list. In my regular weekly reviews, I check this list and see which of these goals I can get done that week. Ultimately, I end up getting all of them done.

The “Prioritized Daily Task List” is located on the daily calendar next to the appointment schedule. It’s pretty clear what this is for — daily tasks. I design this list every evening before bed or each morning after waking. I refer to the list and check off things that I have completed during the day. The feeling of accomplishment that is accompanied by checking off a task in my list is one of my favorite rewards.

I have made a slight modification to my “Prioritized Daily Task List”, a sort of GTDification, if you will. Instead of prioritizing my tasks ABC and 123, as recommended by Stephen Covey, I leave them all un-prioritized. David Allen believes that if you have a task to do that day, you want to do it and you want to get it done as soon as you can. Priorities are not needed. Just get the task list done. I’ve found this to be a more effective method to completing my tasks than prioritizing.

While writing about the Weekly Review, I mentioned the “Weekly Compass”. You may be asking yourself “What the heck is that?” Each Franklin Covey planner contains a page finder. This is a clear, pocketed bookmark that tracks the current day. The Weekly Compass is placed inside the page finder and is used to list my bigger to-dos for the week that are not time sensitive (this is another GTD modification on my part).

As I stated before, there are five tabs that can be used in whichever way you wish. I use my first tab for notes. The second is my action list. When something that I need to do pops in my head I write down here. During my weekly review, I decide when I’ll do it. My projects and their various tasks are kept behind my third tab. Someday/Maybes, such a travel destinations and reading lists, are organized in the fourth tab. My fifth tab is devoted to uplifting and thoughtful quotes that I have collected from various books and lectures.

E-mail

E-mail can be a very messy business if left unorganized. Of course, there are many ways you could order your system, but this is how I do mine and it works quite well. I believe I got this idea, based on GTD, from Merlin Mann of 43 Folders.

It is best to keep the inbox empty and to process it as often as possible. Most time management folks recommend that you set your e-mail client to check for new mail every hour, not every 10-15 minutes, so as not to distract you from your work and to avoid e-overwhelm. David Allen believes if you have something that needs to be acted on that can be done in two minutes or less, do it. Otherwise, file it accordingly and process frequently.

Here are my e-mail files:

Action: Items that involve work or an action outside of email.
Respond: Emails that need to a response on my part.
Waiting on: Delegated tasks or other items such as amazon.com orders that don’t directly involve me, but I am waiting for.
Reference: Important information that I will need to reference later. I have this further subdivided into Home, Coaching, and School.

That is the basics of my personal organization system. It sounds much more complex that it really is. Once you implement something of your own, it quickly becomes effortless and automatic. The key is to make your time management system something that will cater to your needs while retaining the optimization benefits taught by the masters such as David Allen and Stephen Covey.

Recommended Reading

• The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, by Stephen Covey
• The Eighth Habit, by Stephen Covey
• Getting Things Done, by David Allen

As you may or may not know, I’m a student at Life Chiropractic College West in Hayward, California. I began the program with a few reservations. I knew what it was that I wanted to really be helping people with, but wasn’t entirely sure that Chiropractic was exactly the right way to go about it, frankly. I knew that I could use the body as a lever on people’s sense of Self, and figured that the worst-case scenario was that I would be a doctor of using the hands to help people heal, and could do what I really wanted while under a Chiropractic smokescreen.

Before I explain precisely how I had a turnaround in my understanding of Chiropractic and just how well it fits into my view of healthcare, I want to describe as clearly as possible what Chiropractic isn’t, what it is, and what it really can be, when it’s done well.

What Chiropractic Is Not

Chiropractic is not cracking bones. Chiropractic is not jerking necks and making them crunch. It’s not injury rehabilitation. It’s not physical therapy (although physical therapy is technically under the scope of practice of Chiropractors in California). It’s not nutritional consultation or traction. It’s not putting bones back where they go over and over again every week because your normal life puts them in the “wrong” place.

If your experience of Chiropractic has left you with the feeling that this is what’s going on, then your Chiropractor wasn’t doing a very good job. In fact, if your Chiropractor hasn’t been actively educating you on what they are doing with your body, how what they do works, and what kinds of results to expect from treatment, grounded in Chiropractic’s effects on the nervous system, they’re doing an abysmal job. They probably missed entirely the point of their education, and are really just doing fancy physical therapy and spinal manipulation.

In part 2 of this article, I’ll talk about what Chiropractic really is,  how it really relates to yoga, meditation, and the capacity of the human organism to grow into understanding and enlightenment.

I wish very quickly to describe the ways in which we are going to be using some terminology for when it comes up.

Discernment and judgment are interrelated ideas that need to be teased out. I define discernment as the process of recognizing when some object, event, person, or opportunity is good for you. It’s knowing what you want when you see it. Judgment, on the other hand, is a process of extending that discernment out into the world around you.

When I have a teacher who approaches their teaching in a way that I don’t enjoy, I actively practice recognizing that as being about what’s in my integrity; I use discernment to know that I don’t want to do whatever it is that’s bothered me. The reflexive habit of judgment tries to say that what the teacher is doing is wrong, and uses my lack of enjoyment as evidence for why they shouldn’t be doing it.

In short discernment equates with “do not want,” and judgment with “must not be.”

Being able to tease those processes apart makes it easier for me to decide which one I really want to be doing (practicing discernment), and do that. As judgment falls away, I feel softer, easier, and happier.

Sacrifice is an art largely lost on contemporary mainstream American culture. I think we even view the idea as somewhat barbaric, or at least laughable. The word ’sacrifice’ means ‘to make sacred,’ and America is sorely lacking a unifying sense of the sacred that is not seen as rabid and rapacious or flaky and ignorant.

Last April, I had a right orchiectomy because I had two small tumors on my right testicle. When the doctor told me that it was going to have to come out, I was relatively freaked, but knew in no uncertain terms that he was right. I decided fairly quickly, though, that I was going to trust the Universe to be presenting me with exactly what I needed to grow in precisely the way I wished to grow. I’ve found that adopting this view, while somewhat “irrational,” is highly functional for creating an experience of peace and happiness, and as there is no way to objectively determine that the Universe doesn’t work like that, I figure why not go for happy.

With this resolution in mind, I actively chose to view the loss of my testicle as a sacrifice. It was not something being taken from me, but something I willingly offered up to the Gods, the Universe, the Ancestral Spirits, whatever, to show willingness and readiness to receive a greater experience of the sacred in my life.

When I entered surgery, I was calm, I was peaceful, I was smiling and joking with the staff. I was, in fact, doing all I could to keep my mother calm, because she was far more freaked out than I was (as is a mother’s job, I suppose!). The last thing I remember thinking as they put me under was a prayer of offering, to whoever might be listening.

When I had more or less recovered about a week later, I noticed that I was consistently happier than I had been before the surgery. I was more calm, more level, more connected. I was rolling with emotional punches that could have thrown me previously, and I was smiling more. I felt gentle.

I’m certainly not recommending everyone get cancer or have invasive surgery to remove pieces of themselves. What I’m suggesting, though, is that if you tell a story about yourself of sacrifice, humble offering, and willingness to receive what the Universe will send you next, you’re far more likely to have an uplifting experience of life. I sincerely identify getting cancer as one of the single best things that has ever happened to me, not because going through the surgery was fun, but because I dedicated the surgery and loss of my testicle (clearly an emotionally charged part of the anatomy if ever there was one!) to my own growth and understanding.

Next time you’re thrown a curveball that you know could cause you emotional distress, take at least a moment to offer your pain up to whatever you can believe in: your highest self, your subconscious mind and its machinations, the Universe, Jesus, Mary, Krishna, Kali, the Buddha, Great Spirit. Who you’re offering to honestly, in my opinion, doesn’t matter. What matters is making an offering from love and trust, and letting the Universe provide.

I must confess that I am a Franklin Covey poster boy. I started using the system in 1997 when I began my undergraduate studies and have used it since. Throughout the years I have experimented with other time management systems such as PDAs, computer programs, and smart phones, but I always come back to the simple pen and paper system of Stephen Covey.

What I love about the Franklin Covey system is that everything I need is in one place. Unlike PDAs or smart phones, it’s not necessary to click on a program to see my calendar, another to view my task list, or another to make important notes. It’s all there in my binder.

The planner is my ubiquitous capture tool containing both monthly and daily calendars with a daily task list next to the daily schedule of appointments. This allows me to take into account what my schedule will be like for the day when creating a task list. When my schedule is busy I’ll obviously make fewer and less time consuming tasks than I will on the days when I have a freer schedule. Alongside the daily schedule and task list is a section for notes and information that may be needed as reference that day. For example, if I have a task to make a business call, then I might make a note of the phone number and the important points that I want to discuss while on that call.

The system is highly customizable and contains five tabs that can be used however you desire. Mine are set up in a GTD like fashion (in my next time management article I will talk about my personal time management system and how I combine GTD and Franklin Covey). The planner includes other tabs where I can easily keep track of my daily, monthly, and yearly finances and make detailed action plans for my various goals and projects.

My favorite aspect is the cornerstone of the system wherein personal values and mission are emphasized. Covey’s philosophy is that our values determine how we live. Unclear and poorly defined values are reflected in our daily actions. Clearly defined values lead to less stress and more success and clarity. Stephen Covey includes in the planner a number of powerful exercises that assist in defining values and creating personal mission statements. I do these exercises every year when I get a new planning system and review them monthly. This is both empowering and liberating and serves to keep me focused throughout the year on what I value most.

Ultimately, I can’t give Franklin Covey enough accolades. It’s a powerful, convenient, easy to use, and diverse time management tool that keeps my personal, academic, and professional roles in such order that I don’t even want to imagine what my life would be without it.

Recommended Reading

• The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, by Stephen Covey
• The Eighth Habit, by Stephen Covey

When I first stumbled upon the idea of detachment while reading some Buddhist literature in my early days of college, I found the idea repugnant. It sounded like emotional repression and the deadening of the self to the intense wonders of the emotional world.

This was a reasonable error on my part; the concept of detachment is not an easy one to grasp at first glance, for precisely the reason I tripped over it: why on Earth would you want to do that?

Detachment is not the practice of turning yourself into a Vulcan. It is not the process of preventing the uprising of emotional experience, or of stopping the flow of feelings.

What detachment is is ceasing to identify yourself with the flow of your emotions. It’s very easy to confuse “I feel anger” with “I am angry.” In fact, in normal speech, we don’t even differentiate the two. Note that the first assumes that “I” is an observer of sensations, and the second that “I” is, in some sense, the sensation of anger.

While it would be easy to argue that the point is just semantics, the distinction between the two types of “I” is really crucial. The thrust of a detachment practice (which is really a large part of what Buddhism is) is shifting the locus of the sense of Self from what is being felt to what is doing the feeling.

This sounds technical and abstract, so let me turn to an example:

I was watching television the other night, and the program I was watching was about a woman who had so many clothes that her entire apartment was full of bins, and she even had a storage unit full of bins of clothing. I won’t go into details about the show (it didn’t thrill me, overall, because it lacked an emphasis on shifting the participant’s self-perception), but suffice to say there came a point when the woman who had too many clothes had to watch her boyfriend, her good friend, and a fashion consultant throw away quite a lot of her favorite clothing.

She responded by crying and clutching her heart and face alternately, saying “Oh, God, no!” and generally being surprisingly involved with a bunch of textiles. Within the framework that I outlined above, I would describe her as being:

1. Attached (in the technical sense) to her wardrobe
2. (Mis)-identified with her feelings about the clothing

What I mean by the first is that she was so involved with her wardrobe, emotionally, that she clearly was feeling physical and emotional pain on witnessing (in some cases, torn, stained, and moth-eaten) garments thrown away. While I don’t in any sense wish to invalidate her experience by claiming that she shouldn’t have those feelings or that attachment, I do wish to suggest that she could enhance her experience of her life if she did not require that objects (by their nature temporary) never disappear.

What I mean about being misidentified with her feelings is that she was clearly confusing her emotions about the garments (relating, presumably, to how she was feeling when she bought or wore the garments) with the garments themselves.

The most striking moment in the show was when the host said to her “these aren’t your feelings. These are things,” and she looked somewhat surprised, as though she’d never considered such a thing before.

Detachment, then, is simply the practice of reminding yourself that your feelings about objects aren’t the objects, your feelings about events aren’t the events, that your thoughts aren’t you, and needn’t be given the same honor and attention that you habitually give them.

In Buddhism, detachment is about cultivating a sense of control over emotions. Detachment is performed, not to divorce totally from an emotion or not to feel, but to recognize that it is part of the game so that the ego can take a step back and watch the emotion, to feel it and to know it, and in so doing to learn and grow from it without being caught up in it and sucked into the harmful drama of it all.

If you’re attached to an idea that’s preventing you from taking action you want to take, spend some time deciding what perspectives and behaviors you need to change to remind yourself and reinforce the knowledge that you have the ability to choose to take action anyway.