At the beginning of June I decided it was time to explore my relationship with food, dieting and diabetes. My doctor had been telling me for several years that I was at risk for type II diabetes. Not surprising since I have 32 sweet tooths and a love of bread, pasta and other wonders of refined flour.
I had been noticing for about 6 months a sense of being more at risk and I was definitely becoming more and more uncomfortable every day with my weight and a closet full of clothes I wanted to wear again. So, I did what I usually do when something interests me - I Googled and Amazoned.
I wound up ordering 4 books - 2 on diabetes and insulin control dieting (these were not much help other than reminding me of the underlying issues and knowledge), The Gabriel Method and I Can Make You Thin. The latter two books, were a major break-through, a fundamental shift, an awakening - a moment of truth.
These two books pointed out a few fundamental truths that I had been overlooking. It was phenomenal to experience the radical shift that happened with me as the truth of this knowledge hit me.
Diets Don’t Work
Our Bodies Keep Us Fat to Keep Us Safe
Both books have 4 simple guidelines for eating like a thin person. What’s really interesting to me is how things changed over night for me. Reducing my intake of refined flour and sugars was hardly even a choice - it’s more like I lost interest in them, they no longer seemed to drag me toward them. So, this was a big plus for helping my system stop the insulin swing that has been problematic.
About the time I made this shift, I started frequenting Lettuce, a great Salad & Soup restaurant in Walnut Creek, that opened in March. I eat at Lettuce almost every day. The food is just awesome, Laura & Bahman, the owners, are wonderful and their staff is friendly beyond measure.
This whole process is opening up several interesting inquiries for me. Yesterday, I took the belt in another notch for the second time since all this began - whoohooo!
The weirdest thing about all of this is the lack of effort. As I was reflecting on this the other day, I realized that the knowledge gained is acting as a huge support, but more importantly - the shift has led to a huge sense of openness and freedom.
It’s another one of those experiences where I find myself wondering who I am - the familiar self and long-standing habits have taken a significant hit.
A friend of mine recently commented that her ego hated a recent video someone had taken of her. An hour later, in a book I am reading the author addressed self-abuse - “We would never let people treat others the way we treat ourselves.”
The author went on to say that this chronic internal negative self-talk is probably the number one factor in personal misery. And this internal criticism is what keeps our lives locked in their current form.
No big surprises for me, but I appreciate the synchronicity of the reminders. My friend is pleasant on the eyes and a joy to be around, but things are different for her. Inside her head a totally different reality exists.
As it happens, I was discussing this friend with common friend earlier in the day and we both see her similarly. It’s amazing how we could get the whole country to say - wow, you’re fabulous - and our inner critic’s opinion would out-weigh 250 million people.
Here’s the $64 million dollar question - who’s voice is that in our heads? We weren’t born with it. It wasn’t pre-installed. It came from outside to find a cozy little home inside where it can endlessly rattle around making our lives miserable - robbing us of the simple treasures in life - peace, joy, innocence…
I was wondering what to write. I’ve been giving more and more attention to Twitter these days, so I thought maybe I would write something about twitter. My first thought was, “What are people tweeting this morning?”
So, I went over to TweetCloud to get a visual of this morning’s twitter consciousness. As you can see from the tweet cloud, what’s on tweeter minds is Project Natal (gaming not babies), Good Sex (always a hot topic), the lost Air France flight (tragedy) and Google Wave (techvolution).
Toys, sex, tragedy and technology. As I was pondering this collective consciousness and what to say about it, I noticed a spectacular sunrise happening outside (Walnut Creek California). Glorious pink clouds moving through the sky with the sun just starting to break over the mountains.
By the time I was able to get to the car and grab the cameras, the sunrise was further along than I would have liked, but here it is.
And now, I must take my leave as I have to drive to Pleasanton CA for a 7:45am appointment. But, let me just say - the sunrise will have more influence over my day than the twitter collective.
But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation - but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.
This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food - but all that is changing.
There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.
You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.
There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.
Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers.This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown - Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood - and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit.. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.
The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.
The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe - exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”
So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it is doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.
Quantum of Solace Doesn’t Disappoint
the Second Time Around
Last night, I was looking for a mindless action film to share a burrito with. And though, I had taken an oath to never rent Quantum of Solace, it was the only thing I saw that seemed to fit my need - without wasting a lot of time searching and thinking.
Coming out of the theater after viewing Quantum of Solace when it was released, I was very disappointed. I had hoped that this second James Bond film with Daniel Craig would have built more upon the character of Bond Craig established in Casino Royale. I was also disappointed by the lack of a more sinister antagonist. Mr. Greene was just a wimp, which bad acting, poor script and bad dialouge didn’t help. And then there was the obvious fumble of dropping the more sinister Mr. White from a more prominent role.
So knowing this in advance of renting Quantum of Solace, I was surprised to find that I was not disappointed in renting the film. In fact, the film was exactly what I wanted and expected. I imagine if they had corrected all the points mentioned above, I might have found myself too engaged in the film - not something I was looking for.
How often in life do we enter into something with high expectations only lto be disappointed. Some will say, don’t have expectations, then you won’t be disappointed. But most of the people I hear espousing this are more jaded cynics than enlightened beings.
As I write this, I see that most of my disappointment was not with the particulars listed above, but more about the loss of creative potential. The first Daniel Craig Bond film was such an unexpected, refreshing quantum leap from the inane Roger Moore Bond. My primary expectation seems to have been that Quantum of Solace would have continued with that creative evolution instead of falling back on the tried and true - action and adrenaline everywhere and not much else.
Somewhere in this mix is some insight into openness, curiosity and the thrill of things as they unfold. Inquiry to continue.
It’s been a while since I looked through this publication and I have never hooked up with a professional or service provider through the ads or articles. Flipping through Open Exchange, I soon found myself amused, delighted and intrigued by the ad/article topics, tag lines and teaser questions:
Personal growth… and professional success
Looking to change your life and build a more secure future?
It’s a soul thing
Changing lives …one bite at a time
Come Home to Your Self
Do you feel lonely in the world?
Do you want to look and feel better as you age?
Experience your highest consciousness
You don’t have to live with pain
Create your chosen future
Are you ready to transform your life?
Are you ready to go to your next level?
Are you bored, frustrated or insecure at work?
Allow your dreams to become your reality.
What goals dance on your horizon but never seem in reach?
Are you living with authenticity?
Coaching for tough times
The universe has an outrageous agenda for you.
Love, intimacy and sexuality. What is it?
Have you had a spiritual experience.
Well, the list goes on and on. The publication seems to be 90% ad content where you can have an article published along with your ad. I found my friend, Kamila Harkavy, in this issue. Kamila is a money mastery coach. You can follow her blog - Thrivelocity.
Kamila’s article in this issue of Open Exchange was titled - Why Get Coaching? In the article she points out 3 reasons why she continues to get coaching even after years of personal development work. I especially liked: 2. I am sure to produce a much more substantial return on investment than any stock, bond or other transactional investment.
Investing time, energy and money into our growth & development is the best investment we can make - I believe that as much as Kamila does. A wise investment is exploring our belief system, attitudes and preferences that keep the same old cyclical dynamics running. What I see in many of the ads is an appeal to ego renovation. That’s where we slap a new coat of paint on the house, but the person living within remains unchanged.
Real change is often upsetting because the old me (identity) is dissolved to some degree. Which challenges that ego refrain - I want to be me, I want to be me…
David Brooks had a recent article in the New York Times titled The End of Philosophy. In the article, Brooks addresses the evolution of moral judgment. Moral judgment, he argues, is more a product of emotion than reason.
Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, “Human,” is that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”
Brooks says, “Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.”
As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, “Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second.
According to Brooks, “Moral judgments are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain.”
The piece that Brooks seems to miss, in my opinion, is conditioning. We may be making moral judgments instantaneously at a pre-conscious or unconscious level, but much of that emotional, mental and psychic process is more heavily influenced by childhood conditioning than evolution. We may choose cooperation, but the choice we make toward competition or cooperation is definitely more of an emotional decision, than mental because the emotional conditioning is deeper than our cognitive process. Deeper still are the tension patterns in the body and the self-images we hold that are in alignment with these fixated energetic patterns.
A friend of mine asked me this question last night. My first response was that need seems to be more associated with survival and identity than want. Want can have a sense of expansion, but I don’t notice that with need.
Of course, we are talking mostly about emotional and psychological issues around want and need. But, anytime we talk about deep psychological and emotional content, we have to bring in the body because there is a deep connection between the body and survival issues - even when they are figments of our imagination.
The dictionary says that want is to need, to feel need, to desire or wish. Etymology of Want: Middle English, from Old Norse vanta; akin to Old English wan deficient
The same dictionary says need is a lack of something requisite, desirable, or useful - a physiological or psychological requirement for the well-being of an organism. Etymology of Need: Middle English ned, from Old English n?ed, n?d; akin to Old High German n?t distress, need.
The energetic dynamics in the body/mind seem different to me around want and need. Want seems to have more of a reaching or grasping quality to me than need. Need feels more connected with necessary or required than want.
I can want a new pair of shoes even if I have 5 pairs, but if I only have one pair with holes in the soles - I need a new pair of shoes. If I just bought a new outfit and don’t have shoes to match - I need a new pair of shoes to match the outfit, but I don’t necessarily need them to survive. Of course, if my identity is deeply tied to the image of me in the new outfit and a projected outcome of wearing it, my survival needs might be very high around that pair of shoes that I absolutely need.
I may want love or approval, but if I see the lack of it a temporary, it doesn’t necessarily threaten my identity or existence - if it does, then I may feel a desperate need, a deficient emptiness around it at the core of my being that feels like a survival need.
What say you about want versus need?Am I splitting hairs?
Egosyntonism and egosyntonic refer to living in accordance with what is acceptable to the ego. The ego syntonic life is an imprisoned life, though this is the life most of us think of as normal existence. We are imprisoned within our preferences, positions, attitudes, beliefs, convictions, worldview, self-image, ego ideal and the limited range of our nervous system and emotional depth.
M. Scott Peck wrote a popular book a while back - The Road Less Traveled. The road less traveled is the path we must take to free our consciousness from ego structure and ego identity which set the parameters for egosyntonic living.
Human vulnerability is a key ingredient for leaving the egosyntonic life behind. Human vulnerability is challenging for everyone. It can be tricky for egos with a bent toward victim identification or emotional sentimentality as we may mistakenly take these states which contain feelings of vulnerability to be the transformative human vulnerability we are referring to which they are not.
Anti-egosyntonic (egodystonic) vulnerability will challenge our self-image and range of comfort. We will feel anxious. Our minds and bodies may go into hyper-drive until we return to familiar ground or ego structure and identity begin to dissolve.
Those of us that drive can very easily highlight our comfort range by simply driving slower than we usually do or faster. For many simply obeying the speed limit would be enough to send them through the roof. Political beliefs are another fun way to discover just how conditioned we are.
The ego life involves a lot of fantasizing about our version of the “Wonderful Life” - based on our ego or spiritual ideal. Leaving wonderland and the ego syntonic life for reality is the road less traveled.
15 Pounds in a Month with NO Dieting!
Self-Torture is a Big Love Affair
I was wondering what to write. I’ve been giving more and more attention to Twitter these days, so I thought maybe I would write something about twitter. My first thought was, “What are people tweeting this morning?”
You are brilliant, and the earth is hiring
Who says this love
Last night, I was looking for a mindless action film to share a burrito with. And though, I had taken an oath to never rent 
Last week, I picked up a copy of 
David Brooks had a recent article in the New York Times titled 
A friend of mine asked me this question last night. My first response was that need seems to be more associated with 
