A lot of contemporary communication skills workshops and programs focus on finding where your boundaries are and how to defend them. While the first of these goals seems like a very useful one to me, it strikes me that training people how to protect their boundaries is an unfortunately misguided way of approaching them.

First, let me clarify what I mean by “boundaries” with some situational examples.

• You are at a party and an inebriated guest makes an uncomfortably vulgar pass at you.
• You are out to dinner and one of your dining companions makes a racist, sexist, homophobic (name your bigotry) remark.
• A pushy salesperson won’t take no for an answer, persistently trying to sell you a product or service you’re clear you don’t want.
• A close friend or family member drops by unexpectedly, comes in without waiting for an invitation, and stays for hours without taking the many hints you drop (”Well, I have to get in the shower now,” you say. “Oh, that’s all right, I’ll just play Wii Sports!” they reply).

The common theme in the above examples is that Something You Don’t Want to be happening to you is happening to you. Many contemporary communication experts recommend learning how to be clear and assertive about your boundary violations without being aggressive (see Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, NVC, for instance). Others recommend disregarding social conventions of politeness as being ultimately dishonest, and simply speaking your unfiltered honest truth, such as “get out of my house, you’re annoying me, Mom.” (see Brad Blanton’s Radical Honesty method).

I’ve had some experience with both of these techniques, and for me they missed the point of discovering boundaries. Boundaries are our ideas of What We Don’t Want in our life. They can be things like “I will not tolerate racism or sexism in my home in any form,” or “I must have 3 days advance notice before my spouse’s mother can stay the night with us.” I’m sure you can come up with some personal boundaries you’ve had violated recently with just a few moments of thought.

Notice that the way we find these boundaries is generally to have them violated. Most people don’t spend much time sitting around thinking about what they will not tolerate that hasn’t happened, coming up with lists of What They Don’t Want. I’d wager that people who do this tend to lead less happy and productive lives, in fact. Instead, it is when we are suddenly confronted by our discomfort that our boundaries present themselves for our scrutiny. For example, one of your friends laughs at you for believing in Fairies, and you suddenly realize that you simply can not abide by being laughed at.

Radical Honesty’s approach would have you say “you’re a jerk for laughing at me.” You’re speaking your unfiltered truth to their trespassing upon your interior space, without trying to frame it nicely or filter it for acceptability. “This is my experience, in my terms: you’re a jerk.”

NVC would approach the matter differently, asking for synthesis on your part of the other person’s perspective before speaking. “I’m feeling discomfort because of my belief that friends shouldn’t laugh at each other. Without making you wrong, I’d really appreciate it if you would honor that belief that I hold by not laughing at me.”

My critique of Radical Honesty is that your message is highly unlikely to be received well unless every person you’re communicating with has agreed to the same principles of complete lack of filtration. It is a wonderful way of alleviating everyone of the burden of having to hedge every statement with “this is just my opinion/feeling/experience, but…” On the other hand, unless you have an agreement that that’s how communication works, people are generally extremely put off and annoyed by you for not bothering to show them the courtesy of expressing yourself in a way they can hear.

In the example I gave above, where “without making them wrong” you ask that they honor their belief that friends shouldn’t laugh at each other by not laughing at you is, I think, a beautifully formulated communication of a fundamentally psychologically weak stance. It’s like repeating to yourself “I am not strong enough to be laughed at without taking it personally and feeling deeply wounded.” Why would you wish to adopt that mantra? Please understand; I don’t believe that NVC is the problem here. The problem isn’t in how the idea is being structured and presented (which I feel NVC does a beautiful job of providing a framework for), it’s the idea itself!

So what do you do with boundaries? If your friend is laughing at you, do you say something or not? Of course your answer will depend on context (who is this friend? How close are you? How intensely uncomfortable are you?). What’s clear to me, however, is that your discomfort is no one else’s responsibility to handle but your own. And handling your discomfort by making sure that nothing happens to you that makes you uncomfortable, such as “no one must ever laugh at me,” is fundamentally impossible. If you’re clear that someone laughing at you is What You Don’t Want, congratulations, you’ve successfully identified a boundary. Now what?

My recommendation is to take the opportunity to explore your discomfort, and the reasons for it. Instead of defending your boundary and your right to it, explore why it’s there and what you can learn about yourself from the fact that you have it. This will desensitize you to the discomfort that other people’s social gaffs may cause, which is probably a worthy goal. If being laughed at rankles you, I think you primarily have the following options:

• live your life periodically uncomfortable at being laughed at
• live your life constantly expressing the unacceptability of being laughed at
• learn what it is in you that finds it so infuriating and painful and learn to release the feelings of discomfort. They only represent your internal representation of other people’s motivations, and what a strange thing to be living your life avoiding that is!

Your happiness and comfort are too important to allow other people’s opinions, words, and actions to be able to shake you out of a state of contentment and peace, and telling them not to have them, express them, or be near you because of them simply isn’t functional. Striving instead to be unshaken by What You Don’t Want will help you maintain your equanimity in all circumstances, and allow you to communicate the thoughts and ideas that are really important to you in a way that they can hear and understand and respect. Instead of asking for a behavioral change from others, create one in yourself that makes you stronger.
Ultimately, you are the audience and the star of the movie of your life. Think about what message you’re sending your non-conscious mind (the audience) when you act. If you want the audience to walk away with the idea that the main character is incapable of handling adversity, then the appropriate action is to constantly tell people that you have boundaries, where they are, and defend them like they’re incredibly important. If, however, you want your non-conscious to behave like the star of the show is powerful, capable of handling any situation calmly and with poise, you have to take responsibility for acting capable and strong in every circumstance, and one appropriate way of doing that is by looking only to what you really know and can understand, yourself, to pave the way.

Don’t defend your boundaries; expand them.

Recommended Reading

• Radical Honesty, by Brad Blanton
• Nonviolent Communication, by Marshall Rosenberg

There are very few things that I love more than a clean house. I’ve even been (jokingly… I hope) accused of being obsessive about it. Having a clean house just makes me feel good, more energized, healthier, and happier.

Have you ever noticed that one of your favorite ways to procrastinate is to clean your desk or apartment? Have you noticed that you work more productively and think more clearly when you’re in a clean environment? I certainly have. I don’t have any hard scientific proof, nor do I know if science has even looked into this phenomenon, but my hypothesis is that our outer space is a reflection of our inner space. When our work and living spaces are orderly, so are our minds. We are less distracted and we can work and live better, with increased clarity.

When I clean, it’s an active meditation. Not only am I cleaning my surroundings, I am cleaning and clearing my mind. It’s an utterly empowering, rejuvenating, and fun process. I actually get excited about cleaning!

One of my favorite television shows is How Clean is Your House? In this program, the Cleaning Queens of Britain, Kim Woodburn and Aggie MacKenzie, scrub and declutter some of the filthiest abodes you could ever imagine. I’m not even kidding. Piles and piles of junk in every corner, the floors are nowhere to be seen, bugs are breeding in the kitchen, and the occupants are so entrapped in their situation that they don’t even know how to begin reversing it. A good number of these people suffer from asthma and allergies (with all the mold and bacteria in these houses, it is not at all surprising). Nearly each of these houses harbors large colonies of klebsiella, e. coli, and staphyllococcus. Gross!

Once the house is cleaned, Kim and Aggie give the occupants two weeks to acclimate to their new surroundings and lifestyles. It warms me to see how these peoples’ lives have changed for the better: more romance, families getting along better, reduced or alleviated symptoms of allergies and asthma, greater senses of pride, confidence, self love, and happiness. All this from a clean house!

I know that the examples in How Clean is Your House are extreme cases and that most of us don’t have these problems. However, we can all benefit from living and working in a clean atmosphere.

Here are some of my tips for cleaning your house and keeping it that way:

1. Create and stick with a cleaning schedule: Every Friday I go through my house and clean every room. I vacuum, sweep, do laundry, dust, and put displaced things where they belong. I have a systematic approach where I move from the patio, to the living room, dining room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and then the bedroom. Each room getting cleaned top to bottom. Then, I sweep and vacuum, as I don’t want to track things from room to room or knock crumbs and dust onto a clean floor while dusting or cleaning kitchen and bathroom counter tops. Finally, I burn some incense, candles, and essential oils to add a nice little cherry to the top of my calm and clean atmosphere sundae. I find this systematic approach optimal for me, but others may want to try something different. The important thing is to have a regular schedule and stick to it.

It’s not even necessary to clean the entire house at once. Perhaps you only have time to clean one room a day. If so, assign yourself (or your kids or roommates) certain days to clean each room. Have a plan and stick to it.

2.Get rid of clutter: Clutter is a clean house’s nemesis. If you don’t use something, get rid of it. Put it on craigslist.org, give it to a friend, or give it to charity. Above all, don’t keep it. Get it out of the house and forget about it. (This is a topic deserves an article itself. I’ll hit on this next time!).

3.Enjoy the process: Many people despise cleaning and find it boring. My suggestion is to find joy in it by focusing on how good it feels to be in a clean room. Put your attention on how great your house looks when it’s tidy. Concentrating your energy on the end result will propel you to spotless bliss.

4.Use cleaning items that you love: Find cleaning products that you enjoy smelling and using. Don’t buy a cleaning product if you can’t stand its smell or it doesn’t work well. You won’t want the smell of your house to be an assault on your nose, nor do you want to use twice the elbow grease because of a crappy product. You’ll be less likely to use it and less likely to clean. There are countless environmentally friendly products available now that leave your house smelling fresh without killing your olfactory senses. Two of my favorites brands are Method and Seventh Generation.

5.Keep up with the little things: It doesn’t take long to go from immaculate to garbage heap. Throughout the week, keep up with little things like dishes, vacuuming, and putting things away as you use them. It will only take 5-10 minutes a day and will streamline your cleaning routine, making your weekly clean up faster and easier to maintain.

Once you get into a habit of keeping a clean house, you’ll find that it’s almost effortless, even enjoyable. Notice how much more comfortable, clearer, happier, and confident it makes you. Create your own routines and practices, play with the process, and bask in the joy of chilling out in a sparkling, clear abode. Happy cleaning!

There is an unfortunate misunderstanding in our culture about the nature of intuition. Let me first address what intuition isn’t.

• Intuition is not having visions

Please don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not saying that you can’t have intuitive visions, or visionary intuition, but that intuition is not, fundamentally, either of those things.

• Intuition is not precognitions of doom

It’s quite possible to have intuitive “hits” about upcoming disasters, misfortunes, and otherwise doomful things, but this is the exception, and not the rule.

• Intuition is not an emotional sense

Intuition, real intuition, is not a sudden experience of fear when thinking about your mother dying. It’s not looking at someone you care about and suddenly being grief-stricken knowing that they have an incurable illness that they don’t know they have yet but you miraculously do.

• Intuition is rarely direct

My experience of my intuition is that it rarely is a bell ringing followed by the voice of God telling me something that’s true in no uncertain terms. “Your sister is going to have a baby!” says God, and “Oh!” says I - is not how it tends to work.

Intuition is, in fact, a very dry experience. It’s not emotionally loaded; emotional weight is a good sign that you’re having an imaginative experience and not an intuitive one. Let me reiterate: if you look at a friend and suddenly experience fear that they’re going to die in a plane crash tonight, you can be relatively confident that you’re not getting an intuitive hit on their death, just subjecting yourself to an emotional flight of fancy.

If, on the other hand, you look at a stranger and have a sudden thought about them having a baby soon, and you just don’t care in the slightest and can’t even figure out why you’d have that thought, that may well be an intuitive data point. But referring to my last bullet point above about the indirectness of intuition, I want to add that that thought about the stranger having a baby does not necessarily mean that that stranger is going to have a baby in a literal sense. It might. It might also mean that that stranger is about to birth a new creative endeavor, is starting a new business venture, is close to reclaiming his or her childlike wonder of the world… who knows!

Only you can or do. No one else can interpret your intuitive symbolism for you, any more than someone else can really accurately interpret your dreams; or if they can, it’s only because they have practice interpreting other people’s symbolic sets. The symbolic meanings of dreams, like intuitive data points, are based entirely on the experiencer’s internal metaphorical and symbolic languages. This means you need to practice associating intuitive symbolism and understanding with its physical-world correlate if you want to improve your intuitive abilities.

This brings me to the major point. We’re all intuitive. We’re born screamingly intuitive, with massive amounts of information flooding our tiny post-natal brains constantly until we develop functional filters based on the types of information our parents and others around us are interacting with. We have gut instincts and hunches that tell us how to survive, first, and then lead us, if we let them, into doing what we were born to do.

If your intuition isn’t a regular and steady presence in your life, if you don’t feel like you know what your intuition feels like when it lands, how to interpret it, or how to get intuitive guidance without feeling like a flaky new ager who has to carry crystals around everywhere in order to figure out what to order for lunch, or even if your intuition does guide and lead you, but you want to develop it and take it to the next level, may I very strongly recommend the following:

• Anatomy of the Spirit, by Caroline Myss
• Energy Anatomy, by Carline Myss

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

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.

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.

Intelligence is a hairy topic. It’s heavily emotionally loaded, whether you were one of the “smart” kids, one of the “dumb” kids, or of “average” intelligence, chances are at some point you were affected by teasing about intelligence. The average kids teased the dumb kids. The dumb kids teased the smart kids. The smart kids used their intelligence to make everyone else feel stupid in comparison.

I was one of the “smart” kids. I was consistently baffled by being teased for being smarter than my classmates. It didn’t make sense to me until I was old enough to understand that the kids teasing me were feeling threatened. By the time I realized this however, I’d grown into a habit of responding in a way that reinforced their feeling that I was intellectually threatening (an extremely effective coping mechanism for dealing with being teased, as it turns out, is to make yourself seem dangerous to the kids who are teasing you).
I started school again relatively recently, and suddenly realized that I wasn’t equipped with a better engine with more horsepower than most of my peers (my mom’s favorite metaphor to get me motivated to do my homework in high school was to remind me that a Ferrari in neutral is less effective than a Toyota in gear). I just had a different set of “utilities” installed on a different “operating system” (Steve Pavlina does a good job of setting up this metaphor in this article, if it’s not immediately clear what I’m talking about. It’s a good article anyway, so check it out!).

Working with this idea has served me in a number of ways.

First off, it has allowed me to detach my ego from my intellect. This means that I don’t feel intimidated by people who are “smarter” than I am, but instead feel excited at the prospect of learning their mental technology for greater optimization in my thinking processes. I also no longer feel smugly superior to people who aren’t as smart as I am; they weren’t as lucky to have been handed such good technology, or to stumble across it on their own. I no longer identify who and what I am in terms of a comparison of my intellect to other people.

In short, viewing my intelligence as a product of my operating system and the applications I’ve installed (or had installed) has been a functional mindset for me. I am not terribly interested in the advantages my genetic makeup may have conferred to me; at the least, that’s not the sort of advantage one can really measure meaningfully, it’s nothing I can take any reasonable credit for, and I sincerely believe that even if objective and agreed-upon measures of intelligence could be generated, a strict hierarchical ranking of that sort leads only to more comparison, which tends to lead to less happiness. Finally, I have yet to be convinced by much of the genetics-based science out there that the nature-versus-nurture argument is any closer to being resolved than ever it has been.

I really wish to emphasize that greater overall life satisfaction and happiness are some of my primary goals in my life, in the lives of my clients (I do body and energy work, you can read about that here), and hopefully in your life. To that end, I strongly recommend considering this mental exercise: force yourself to view everyone in your environment as an amazing genius who is working toward your growth, their growth, and the growth of humanity as a whole.

So some jerk cuts you off? Force yourself to see that jerk as a living human being who is moved by the same grace that moves saints. How? See the opportunity he gave you to practice detachment from your environment and from stimuli. Your mother was abusive? See her handing you the opportunity to heal the trauma from her past that she was unable to heal. See her putting you through a painful initiation ritual to allow you to grow more massively and expansively than most people have the opportunity for.
Why?
It really doesn’t matter, within your experience, if the fantasy you’re making up about the other person is true or not. If you can leverage your experience for your own growth and happiness, you will grow and be happier.

“In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.”

“When you think everything is someone else´s fault, you will suffer a lot. When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy. Pride leads to violence and evil. The truly good gaze upon everything with love and understanding.”

–His Holiness the Dalai Lama XIV

I have struggled with food and weight my entire life. I lost about 70 pounds in college, primarily using Weight Watchers‘ point system, but the bulk of my motivation during that period was self-loathing. Hating my body was the only thing that kept me focused on eating in this way that felt weird and unnatural, but was helping me drop the dreaded fat. Once I’d reached my goal weight, I hadn’t really learned how to eat well, only how to force myself to eat small.
Is anyone surprised that I gained 20 of those pounds back?

I’m not a nutritionist. I’m a Chiropractic student. So what am I doing writing about nutrition and eating well?

In addition to being a student, I’m an artist. I’m almost obsessed with aesthetics, and the relationship between aesthetics and the choices we make. I keep finding that the decisions that always lead me to the greatest health and satisfaction are the most aesthetically pleasing choices I can devise for any given situation. That being the case, when I view the food I eat as being informed by my aesthetics, I have to ask myself: “what would I eat, if…?”

If I were living my dream life, I’d be eating fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, whole grains, nuts, seeds. I’d be eating food that’s handmade with love and passion and consummate care. I’d eat food that is full of my energy, that I made myself. So that’s what I’m doing.

My new rule is simple: if I feel like making it from scratch, it’s good for me. As often as I’d actually want to bake a chocolate cake from raw ingredients is about as often as eating chocolate cake would be a good thing to be putting in my mouth (so far, it hasn’t come up! ). I’m focusing on fresh fruits and vegetables as the bulk of my food intake, because that’s what I would do, aesthetically, in my dream life. I love being surrounded by vibrant living color, so I fill myself with living, vibrant color.

Will this help me lost those 20 pounds? I can’t say for certain yet. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on that front. I love the food I’m eating, love the way I feel, and have a relationship with my food now based on gratitude, love, and, of course, my aesthetics.

I’ve gotten some good insights from:

• Fit for Life, by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond [I'm not following this strictly, but all-fruit before noon and avoiding mixing nutrient-dense foods in one meal has really made a difference for me!]

One of the things I wish to do in this blog is to present a number of “functional mindsets” or “functional metaphors.” These are states of mind, ways of viewing and interacting with the world around and within us that are more optimized for our individual goals than other, culturally inherited paradigms. I could talk around this for pages, so let me give an example to demonstrate first.

I suspect most of you have heard the somewhat smarmy platitude “have an attitude of gratitude” before. As poetry, it stinks. As useful lifestyle instructions, however, it excels. Positive psychology research (the field of psychology that deals not with pathology and dysfunction, but the social and neurological dynamics of happiness and satisfaction) indicates that conscientiously adopting gratitude as a mindset by doing exercises such as writing down 5 things you’re grateful for every day is strongly positively linked to an experience of life that is happy, content, and joyful.

Mind-body research shows that expressing gratitude before eating (to God, the farmers who grew your vegetables, the animals that died for your meat, the company you’re in, the good day you’re having, whoever and whatever you feel like) actually increases nutrient absorption. This makes sense at the least because it will increase your appreciation of what you’re eating, and therefore likely decrease the speed at which you’re eating it, though who knows what tricky processes might be invoked on a metabolic level when you’re saying grace? Practicing gratitude makes you physically and emotionally healthier.

Gratitude is a highly functional mindset.

Sharing functional mindsets can be a powerful way of cooperatively and collaboratively growing with friends and family. Viewing concepts like gratitude, detachment, and contemplation (to name a few) as functional mindsets makes it easier to simply experiment with them, notice what results you get, notice when you’re using them, when you’re not, and what you get out of adopting them, and then make informed decisions about how you’re living your life.

It all comes down to choice. The easiest definition of a functional mindset, then, is a state of mind or way of viewing the world that either brings you new functionality, or one that increases your conscious awareness of having a choice in how to respond to your environment. A functional mindset is one that helps you feel more powerful.

For more on positive psychology and happiness research, I heartily recommend checking out:

• The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt and
• Happier, by Tal Ben-Shahar