The Lush Garden of Hope



Nancy Forrester's Secret Garden
Key West, Florida

 A tough economy has made us sad and scared. Politics as usual has made us cynical. The government has made us mad. Big Money has made us helpless. All of that is what many people think, judging from the public discourse we hear daily.

Operating on exactly the same set of facts and circumstances, many people think that the economy has made us creative and willing to change. That politics as usual has made us aware of our responsibilities to pay attention and get involved. That government has made us safer. That Big Money can buy air time and print space, but it can't change people's hearts and minds.

To be honest, a lot of us would concede that at different times, we've seen the same things both ways, sometimes hopeless, and sometimes hopeful.

Is any view more or less "true" than the others? Aren't all the ideas that seem so true to each of us coming from our individual interpretations of common information and experience? Don't we each create our own unique perceptions by filtering ideas through our own consciousness? Can anything external make us interpret life one way or another? Don't we think for ourselves and see things differently at different moments in time?

Consciousness is the link betwen the myriad thoughts that constantly flow through our minds and the way we understand them and relate to them. But it's invisible to us because we are immersed in it. We talk blithely about people who seem to live in a "higher consciousness" or about "levels of consciousness," as though consciousness were some abstract concept that had nothing to do with our ordinary lives. Yet it has everything to do with every single experience we have because consciousness is both our awareness of the formation of ideas and of what those ideas mean to us. In other words, Consciousness generates the "reality" we experience, given the thoughts that are passing through our minds. Consciousness is the illusionary garden in which we grow and harvest our life. Thoughts are the illusionary plants we grow. When our consciousness is bleak and desolate, the plants appear sparse and sickly. When our consciousness is bright and spirited, the plants appear lush and lively. The interior, illusionary landscape of our reality changes according to the state of our consciousness, which is ever-changeable.

Sydney Banks, in The Missing Link (p. 40), put it this way: "As our consciousness descends, we lose our feelings of love and understanding, and experience a world of emptiness, bewilderment and despair. As our consciousness ascends, we reagin purity of Thought, and, in turn, regain our feelings of love and understanding."

The way life looks to us is the clue we are given not to the way life actually is, but to the state of our consciousness at any given moment. We assess life through our own consciousness. When things appear grim, we can assume that things are, indeed, grim and we are the helpless victims of the circumstances we see. Or we can recognize that we're in a temporary descent, and not take appearances to heart, knowing that optimism, high spirits and freedom will return if we don't take negative appearances seriously. Just that understanding, knowing that consciousness offers us an automatic guidance system to help us through life, sets us free to "ascend," to allow our feeling state to lift. We can rise gratefully, unfettered, and we can fall gracefully, unafraid.

Ascending consciousness is the lush garden of hope. If we tend the garden of our own consciousness, we find the wisdom to tend to our lives and make the most of our dreams.

Where there is Love



http://www.guidedogs.org/

A few days ago, a friend invited me to an open house at the Palmetto, Florida, location of Southeastern Guide Dogs, where dogs are bred, raised and trained to serve people with disabilities. The most talented become guide dogs for the blind, but some become therapy dogs, or family pets for children with special needs. Until I visited, I never realized how hard these dogs work to learn how to help people, and how much heart the dogs put into it.

I wondered: Why are these beautiful dogs so happy and eager to learn and serve? Why are they so dedicated?

But as I watched the dogs with the puppy raisers and the trainers and the volunteers, the answer was obvious: unconditional love. The dogs are loved from the moment they are born, and they love back, with no judgment. The beautiful feeling of pure love, and the serenity and safety of that feeling, permeate all aspects of that amazing training center. The dogs are not afraid.

It brought to mind an NPR segment I had heard recently about the rescue of the Pit Bulls from the squalid dog fighting center in which Michael Vick was involved. The judge in the case insisted the dogs be evaluated, one by one, not simply euthanized. And the people who went to evaluate the dogs reported having the feeling the dogs were longing for love, only they were terrified, so they would approach, and then cower. But given patient, unconditional acceptance, almost all of them came around and responded with loyalty and affection. Love was absent in their lives until they were rescued, but, once felt, its power still drew goodness from them.

Only hours after encountering the dogs, I saw another manifestation of the power of unconditional love on a small segment about CNN heroes. Efren Penaflorida, a young man from the slums in the Philippines, who grew up in a shack near a dump, constantly threatened by gang members, chose to educate himself, and then chose to educate other children in the slum. He loads up a pushcart with books and pencils and paper and

Efren Penaflorida at work

whatever teaching tools he can gather and pushes faithfully   into the slums, setting up in any   empty spaces he can find, inviting children to learn with him and find their own hearts and minds.

He had a choice. He could have choked on the bitter fruit of his youthful misery and become what he saw around him. To transcend a cruel life is to step into unconditional love, turning away from conditional hate and fear, despair and distrust, to embrace what is universal and constant. Efren realized that circumstances cannot destroy love, and the hope it awakens. Why do the children gather around him? They respond to the respect he has for who and what they are at the core, regardless of the fact they are barely surviving at the frayed, grimy edges of poverty. They respond to his unconditional love. In those moments around the pushcart, the children are not afraid.

Where there is love, good things happen. When love is absent, fear lurches in. But love and fear cannot abide in the same space at the same time.

When we look around, we see examples everywhere, across all of life. We see the good fortune of  those who are loved and cherished from birth, although that fortune is shared by too few in this world. But we see, too, that love can reach through the worst of circumstances to the heart, like a taproot finding the life-giving water beneath the roughest and driest of soils.

Look around at so much that is happening now, and see how fear lays waste the best of human intentions and creates a barrenness that wilts the soul. But look, too, to see that love does not die. It waits, like the seeds in the dessert, to bloom profusely with the first drops of encouragement.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said it quite clearly: "Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend."





If not then, now?

Twin lights at Ground Zero
on the anniversary of the
destruction of the towers.

Several people have asked me how to find this essay, which I first wrote and published a few days after September 11, 2001. Sad to say, at the time, I received death threats and hate mail, as well as expressions of gratitude. And, sad to say, it is more timely now than even then. For the solemn anniversary of September 11, I republish it here.

If Not Now, When?

On the morning of September 11, 2001, humanity arrived at a moral crossroads. Acts of such extreme disregard for the sanctity of individual lives, for the values of civilization, and for the tenets of every religion must not, cannot, occur without a powerful, immediate response. The question the entire human race faces now is: What response do we make?

Could the collective thinking of the entire free world even begin to arrive at a response sufficiently horrific to be equally impactful on the minds of terrorists who have absolutely no respect for life and consider suffering and death for their own cause noble? Could we call it revenge, and feel satisfied? How much horror would it take to “make up for” the horror we have just witnessed? Is it possible for people who cherish human freedom and care deeply for human beings and practice faiths based on love, charity and forgiveness even to contemplate vengeance without sacrificing their own spiritual integrity? If we ferret out and destroy nations and individuals or groups who are filled with hatred and blood-lust for those they hate, will that forever end hatred, or will it simply end the sordid lives of those who openly hate now, taking with them the innocent lives of countless others? Will that address the source of such hatred? Will the awful deeds called forth by vengeance imperil the sanity and well-being of the perpetrators of such vengeance? How does killing people who kill people ever put an end to killing?

The moral crossroads are: War, or peace? Hatred, or love? Vengeance, or transcendence? Power, or empowerment? Suffering, or grace?

Those who plotted, planned and executed stupendously brutal acts of mass destruction were willing to inflict massive death and die themselves for their ideas, ideas that represent a twisted interpretation of a compassionate religious doctrine. They were consumed with arrogance and immersed in their own conviction that their gross, unconscionable deeds will be rewarded by the deity they worship. But we cannot hate them without the context of understanding that they are not alone. Brothers have shed the blood of brothers, families have shed the blood of families, sects have shed the blood of sects, races have shed the blood of races, nations have shed the blood of nations throughout history -- and continue to do so today -- for the same reason: reckless unwavering devotion to an idea that appeared more important to them than life itself, with no understanding of where ideas come from, or why they seem so important.

Vengeance is such an idea. Anger is such an idea. Defense of a proud nation is such an idea. (And do we not know in our heart of hearts that this proud nation needs no more “defense” before the rest of the world than the sight of hundreds of brave men and women in New York risking their own lives fearlessly for the fragile hope of saving even one other life in the face of overwhelming, stinking death?)


Within the ancestral memory of our own vibrant nation is a civil war so brutal, so miserable, so devastating to those who fought it that we can barely tolerate, today, the reading of the words they wrote to describe the horror of that war or the cruelty of the slavery that precipitated it. As many people died in the battle of Gettysburg alone as are estimated, now, to have perished in the World Trade Center. Within the ancestral memory of our own vibrant nation is the genocide of Native Americans justified by a stance of racial and religious superiority so reprehensible that we have buried the true history of it in euphemisms and platitudes. And we are not alone, either. These are harsh memories; they are but fragments of the collective harsh memories of mankind. From the dawn of time, the unspeakable has occurred side by side with the sublime and we have known that humanity is capable of anything.

No individual, no culture, no race, no nation can claim perfection of thoughts or deeds.Yet every human being, every culture, every race and every nation can claim the perfection of the purity of the energy that precedes all thoughts and deeds, of whatever universal power they will call God, before the forms they give it to name it. And every human being, every culture, every race and every nation can claim access to the infinite perfectibility of those forms, which still can neither describe nor proscribe the ultimate perfection of the formless from which they were formed.

And that is why, within the ancestral memory of our own vibrant nation is Ellis Island heralded by the Statue of Liberty and a sincere welcome for many races, many cultures, many creeds. And that is why, within the ancestral memory of our own vibrant nation, is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which created the most extraordinary expression of freedom, creativity and opportunity ever seen on earth. We celebrate so many triumphs of the spirit, victories small and large over oppression, tyranny, violence, greed, hatred and fear. In that, too, we are not alone. Not alone at all.

The human race is connected not by common beliefs, not by common deeds, not by common history, but by common ability to conceive of its own ideas and bring them to life to create history – any ideas, any history. The human race is connected at the source, by the flow of perfect formlessness into all that has been formed, is being formed, shall be formed. The human race is not alone, but part of the whole of creation, a tiny fragment of the oneness that is the universal all.

If we do not understand that our own ideas are merely metaphors of the process of creation itself, then we cannot understand the power of ideas, the elemental force of thoughts as they form to impel actions and create the realities in which we live. Failing to understand that, we are doomed to repeat history mindlessly, lost in our memories. If we come to understand the formless power from which ideas and impulses spring, and come to appreciate the gift of that power to allow us to be capable of absolutely anything, we are empowered to create new stories, to step beyond the boundaries of our memories and the constraints of our familiar thoughts, and live the lives we want, regardless of what has happened in the past, even the recent past, even yesterday.

Nothing we can do as a nation can bring back the life we had on Monday, September 10. But we as individuals and as a nation have a choice about the life we will have on Monday, September 17, and on Monday September 24, and beyond. We do not have to wreak vengeance, declare war, and commit violence to atone for the violence committed. But we can. We do not have to find peace and comfort in our souls and seek new understanding that allows us to express our strength without force. But we can.

On Monday, September 10, I was engaged in a conversation that included Sydney Banks. “People do not understand the enormity of the implications of understanding the principles behind life,” he said. When he said it, I thought I did at least glimpse it, but I wondered if I was missing something. Within 24 awful hours, I knew I had been missing something, and I began to glimpse it: We either see how to create love in the world and understand the cycle of thinking that leads to both hatred and love, or we don't. The difference between we do or we don't is enormous. The implications for the future of mankind are enormous.

We stand on the brink of declaring a war that could change life as we know it. In doing so, we are declaring that the thinking of angry, vengeful people willing to sacrifice as many lives as necessary at any cost is justified -- when it is our thinking. We are declaring the actions of angry people who agree with us good; the actions of angry people who disagree with us evil. We are declaring that anger is power and we are declaring that we will give up whatever it takes to prove that our anger is more powerful than another’s.

Does that make sense? Does that resonate in the soul as a wise, insightful, strong response to cowardice and terror? Is more terrible terror the antidote to terrible terror?

Like all of us, I have been getting well-meaning e-mails advocating "beautiful" sentiments — reminiscent of the "make love, not war" of our youth. Like all of us, I have been getting well-meaning e-mails advocating war and the utter destruction of our enemy. All those ideas, the beautiful and the awful, are compelling ideas that have arisen via the power of thought. There is a spiritual logic deeper than ideas and deeper than sentiment. It is the understanding that sets people free from their most disastrous thinking and empowers them to follow their most ennobling thinking. That logic separates thoughts we have had and the thinking we are now doing from the spiritual knowledge of our ability to keep doing it, to think beyond our current ideas, to know what we have never known before, to continue to respond to life with deeper and wiser ideas.

We can use our minds freely, in any way we see fit, at any moment. We can use our minds in pursuit of new wisdom, or in slavish devotion to old ideas. We can use our minds to create a magnificent Phoenix arising from the smoldering ashes of horror. Or not. The knowledge of that choice is the freedom to turn our back on the nightmares of mankind and live the life of our dreams. We can make that powerful, immediate response to everything we abhor, and choose to change the world.

If not now, when?

Written September 13, 2001

Take Me Home, Country Roads

Last week I returned to West Virginia to be part of a wonderful conference celebrating resiliency. The organizers were two women who had at one time beeen my students at West Viginia University, in the Public Health Master's course called Prevention through Resiliency. Their imaginations were captured and their hope was inspired by the potential to awaken the innate health and strength in all people to elicit well-being, regardless of the presenting circumstances. They left that course dedicated to sharing what they were learning, joining an effort to create a new vision for prevention that was promulgated for nearly 12 years through the West Virginia University School of Medicine.

So it was that a more than a hundred people gathered last week in Flatwoods, WV, to celebrate the human spirit and share ideas about the many ways to strengthen the partnership of health that is the foundation of 3-Principles-based work. And so it was that we were all reminded that simple truth, told uniquely from each heart, reconnects us to the spiritual bonds that all human beings share: the energy of life that is our essence; the capacity to create thought that generates our ever-changing realities; and the awareness that brings us the sensory experience of what we have thought. Mind, Thought and Consciousness: these three principles, once seen, set people free from living as victims of their own imagination. They explain how we are always making up our own realities, each in our own way according to the way we are using and holding our thinking each moment. They show us that if we leave our thinking alone, trusting that it will change naturally, we will always come back to balance, back home. To put it in silly terms, they show us that we are like the Weebles of our childhood. We have a built-in self-righting mechanism. Remember them? Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down.

That's why the Principles are taught as "prevention," because as people truly see how their thinking works from the inside out to create their reality, they know how to avoid the downward spiral of upsetting thinking. They know they can trust their innate resiliency to lift them to safety. They know the vortex is no more real than any other of the infinite thoughts they could bring to mind.

The man who discovered the Principles, the man who was the primary teacher of many of us "old-timers" in this work, put it this way. "The solutions to outwardly complex probems created by misguided thoughts will not arise from complicated analytical theory, but will emerge as an insight, wrapped in a banket of simplicity." (Sydney Banks, The Missing Link, p. 139) Insight is a moment of wisdom that takes us home, beyond whatever thinking we are stuck in, and reveals some deeper, clearer truth. Insight is the pure and gentle flute melody that is heard when the clangorous brass quiets down. We always know it because with it comes a positive, quiet confidence, a sense of security in our understanding of where we are and how to navigate through life.

As we listened last week to the insights from so many people, told fresh in their own words, and felt the joy and vitality of people who have come home to the wisdom that Mr. Banks said "cleans the channels of your mind and brings sanity into your life," we all were joined in compassion, warmth, love and hope. We renewed our faith that every person in the world, no matter how tragically or intensely caught up they may be in a cyclone of negative thought, is only one insight away from a totally different experience.

And at the end, as people always do in West Virginia, we sang "Take Me Home, Country Roads." We joined voices and hearts in that simple call to be "in the place where I belong". We rededicated ourselves to the vision for humanity that Mr. Banks expressed at the end of The Missing Link:

"With wisdom, people see beyond the filters and biases of race and culture, to realize the beauty in everyone. Such understanding enables people to stop fearing and distrusting those who are different, to see the commonality of human beings regardless of cultural differences. Wisdom applied to society would do more than anything else to halt the ethnic clashes and wars the world suffers from today." (p. 136)

Those timeless words were written in 1998. And we remain, timelessly, one moment, one thought, one insight, away from peace. We are never really lost. We are never far from home.

The antidote to rage

It doesn't seem so long ago that anger was not a socially acceptable behavior. Persistently angry people were referred to "anger management" or other help so they could calm down and settle things peacefully. People who exhibited rage were seen with compassion, but were considered to be in an emotional state that required immediate treatment before they did something terrible to themselves or others.

How did we get to the point where rage is now accepted as a common, even positive, emotion? How did we come to be talking about voter rage, public rage, rage against this or that, as though it were constructive and likely to result in something good?  Who thought it was a good idea for rage to become "all the rage"? And how did we ever buy that?

Frankly, I think this is a strange and disturbing twist of human understanding. Rage is a downward spiral of thought and emotion that cannot lead to healthy, wise, or positive outcomes. It cannot because people who are enraged are not in their right minds as long as they remain enraged. They are alienated from others who do not see things exactly as they do, and wrapped up in the swirling ribbons of their own most frightening or upsetting thoughts. On top of that, they are creating an internal biochemical stew that will, if unrelieved, lead to chronic health problems and a shortened life.

Rage has no relationship to circumstances, although the more people feel rage, the more obvious it seems to them that their rage is being caused by something outside themselves. That's the danger of unrelieved and misunderstood rage, and the reason enraged people lash out -- it makes sense to them in an enraged emotional state to try to get relief from destroying the thing that appears to be making them angry, appears to be obstructing their view of life, appears to be a threat to their understanding of the way it is and the way it should be.

I used to share a chart (see below) with some of my classes to show how thinking we do not recognize as our own thinking looks like "reality."

Once we find ourselves in the "black box," it appears to us that the thoughts we hold are quite obviously the way it is, and we are quite obviously right, and anyone who sees things differently is somehow defective. This is a subtle point. Wars are fought; murders are committed; drastic decisions are made on behalf of the ideas and belief systems we would die for before considering changing our minds, but still, people taking an unremitting stand for those ideas would acknowledge that there are others in the world equally committed to totally different ideas. Despite the stakes, there is an understanding that we -- individually and collectively -- have created systems of thoughts and beliefs  that are so important to us we would do whatever we could to preserve and protect them.  But we still know that others feel equally strongly about their beliefs; we understand that we live in a world of separate realities. So we take our stands with passion, determination and conviction, but without rage. We remain capable of calm decision-making and we remain able to consider consequences, unintended or not. We remain able to be touched by other human beings, by the common human experience of commitment to our particular ways of thinking. 

Rage lives in the black box, where we find all our psychological pain because, when we are caught up in that thinking, we have no psychological flexibility, no capacity to stand back from our thinking and reflect on it, no ability to recognize the passion or enthusiasm of others as their commitment to their thought-created realities. Rage is not only a deeply unhealthy and harmful human feeling state, as it spreads and self-reinforces, it prohibits our natural human ability to transcend our own thinking and find solutions and answers that are as yet unknown.

The antidote to rage is understanding it for what it is, a frightening but temporary state of mind. We don't need to manage anger; we need to eliminate it because it is an unhealthy misunderstanding of non-constructive thought. We need to lose our individual tolerance for spiraling into anger and rage because we pay a huge psychological, biological and spiritual price for giving away our peace of mind. We need to lose our communal tolerance (even admiration!) for mass rage because it leads to conflict and gridlock. People operating from the stance of rage cannot listen for solutions or engage in civil discourse to evolve opposing ideas into something better, something that leads to agreement and resolution.

Rage is something we create from our own bad feelings and insecurity. A person at peace and feeling secure does not, virtually cannot, create rage. We could eliminate rage from our lives by caring about how we feel, and losing our willingness to feel increasingly negative, insecure, angry. Those feelings are warning signs that our thinking is taking us down; those are warning signs to relax our minds, leave our thinking alone for a bit, regain our bearings. 

In all of our lives, there is a grandmother, or an aunt, or a friend, who said, "Take a deep breath."  "Sleep on it." "Don't do anything until you calm down." They were offering the antidote to rage.

The Identity Trap

In just the past week, I've had discussions with various people who said the following things. I'm sure you could reflect on your week and come up with similar examples that others have said or you have said about yourself.

"I'm such a Type A. I only do three-day weekends. I'd love to take that cruise with my friends, but I could never handle a long vacation."

"I'm a total shopaholic. I really can't afford this and I'll probably regret it, but once I try on something that looks good on me, I have to buy it."

"I would love to adopt a dog, but I could never do it. I know I would not walk it every day. I'm too much of a selfish free spirit to live by some animal's schedule."

"I'm a nerd. Always was. I'd love to make friends, but people don't like me. So I avoid them."

To sum them all up: "I've locked myself  in a psychological cage, so I can't let myself follow my heart or listen to my common sense."

It's easy to forget where our "identities" come from, and how to let them go if they're not working out for us.  I can't think of any mothers of infants who would say their babies were born Type A's, or shopaholics, or selfish free spirits, or nerds. We look at babies as just little human beings, full of promise and possibilities, who can follow their dreams and inclinations in any direction. We all recognize, with small children, that they will shape their futures the way they shape silly putty, changing their minds often along the way. We laugh and clap when the little boy or girl who wanted to be a sheriff last week decides this week to be an astronaut, or maybe a teacher, or a chef, or an architect. We watch them soar into joy,  droop into sadness, careen into excitement, settle into boredom, and we don't worry about it. We accept without question that children's minds are open fields in which they can run and play, and zig and zag.

Then, if no one tells them how thinking really works, our children, just as we did, grow up and learn to take some thoughts more seriously than others. And the next thing we know, they've created a whole story about themselves, and they start living as though they were characters in a novel from which there is no escape. Who knows where those serious ideas came from? Something a teacher said. Something on TV. Something they started ruminating about all on their own. Something that scared them. Something in a book. Something their parents thought. It wouldn't help to track them down; it doesn't help to analyze them.

What helps is knowing that no matter how a whole construct of thinking about ourselves started or developed, the simple fact is we made it up. We chose, at some point, to think about it and then think about it some more, and then take those thoughts to heart. And anything we make up, we can change. To put it another way. The thoughts we think and take more or less seriously are products of our own power to think. If we don't imagine them into form, they can't get into our experience of reality. We can't help what comes to mind because we can think anything and thinking is a constant process. Thoughts pop into our heads almost at random, invited or uninvited. But we can certainly help what we think about what comes to mind, and how seriously we take it, and what we do with it. We certainly can understand the process of creating thoughts as a human gift, a life capacity that allows us to navigate our path through time. We decide what is just a passing thought and what is a really big-deal, serious, important thought that we need to keep re-thinking and ponder. When we don't realize that we're the thinkers of our own thoughts and the deciders about what to do with them once we've thought them, it's really easy to get caught in a trap of our own making, a set of thoughts we believe are "the way it is" because we've thought so much about them they seem really true.

They didn't start out that way. Every thought that comes to mind has the potential to be a passing thought, or not. Every thought we've taken seriously will pass into nothingness as soon as we leave it alone, let it go, soften our focus on it if and when it pops up again.

It's not really complicated to understand. It's just a matter of an insight into how it all works. I heard a former prisoner talk one time about how he "cleaned up" and stopped committing crimes. "I went to this class about how thinking works while I was in prison," he said. "And I realized that everyone has criminal thoughts from time to time. But only criminals take them seriously. And I didn't have to be a criminal. I could just let those thoughts pass and wait for something better to come to mind."

Dropping the burden

Chronic, unremitting stress has been identified for nearly 20 years now as the underlying cause of much of our biological, psychological and spiritual distress. A critical "reinvention" ideal for people looking to create a happier, healthier experience of life would be to eliminate stress. Yes, to live stress-free. But few people imagine that possibility.

We carry our own particular burden of chronic stress as though we had no choice, like a sack of rocks we cannot drop, a drag on our progress towards happiness and well-being. The scientific term for that burden is "allostatic load," the level of continual harm from chronic stress on mind, body and spirit. We come into life equipped, psychobiospiritually, to bounce back from what is called acute stress without long-term consequences to our health and well-being. Acute stress is a brief interval of readiness to act -- what happens when we recognize danger or threat and marshall all our energy to respond to it. Acute stress passes after we take action, and then relax back into balance. Chronic stress is the weight of stressful thinking that sustains a constant state of alert and alarm with no relief. Chronic stress creates exhaustion of  mind, body, and spirit and depletes our resources so that when a new incident occurs, an acute stress situation, we have diminished our ability to respond to it appropriately.

My good friend and colleague, Dr. William F. Pettit, Jr., created a chart to illustrate this vividly.    (Click to enlarge.) Each of the lines in the chart represents a different level of understanding of how stress is created and sustained, a different setting of an individual's allostatic load. The higher the level of understanding, the quicker we bounce back from new stressors, incidents of alarm. The lower our starting point, the heavier our allostatic load, the more prolonged our recovery from stressful situations or ideas. For those who bear a heavy allostatic load, recovery is painfully slow, and often they are unable to return even to the low level of well-being they experienced before the new stress occurred.

Our understanding of how stress works within our own psyches determines whether life stressors are experienced as a quick climb over bumps on a smooth path, or a slow slog through deepening quicksand. It doesn't matter what the content of the stressor is, since every person's thinking about what is serious in life is different. One person's catastophe is another person's ho-hum. It only matters what we do with our thinking about that content.

So, what can lift our allostatic load, raise our spirits, help us live stress-free? The antidote is our own resiliency, set free from habits of dysfunctional thinking. We are naturally buoyant. We are innately stress-free. We can tie ourselves to our sack of rocks and sink, but as soon as we untether the rocks, we rise and float. Our allostatic load, that bag of rocks, is the stuff we've innocently made up and ruminated about -- chosen to carry -- without recognizing what we were doing.

At this point, someone will certainly think, "What about people in horrible, horrible circumstances, like war and poverty and terminal illness? Are they making it up? How could they not be stressed all the time?" Of course no one is making up circumstances; life happens beyond our control. Still, we can all see for ourselves that people's responses to circumstances are enormously variable. People in horrible circumstances are not all stressed, and those who are stressed are not all stressed all the time. The variability has to do with each person's own capacity to reconnect to resiliency, to allow their minds to quiet and their spirits to lift and their wisdom to guide them.

In the words of the late philosopher Sydney Banks, "Let your negative thoughts go. They are nothing more than passing thoughts. You are then on your way to finding the peace of mind you seek, having healthier feelings for yourself and for others."

Connecting the Dots

We can't help ourselves. We rush into high gear to figure out or learn the answers to life's questions, frustrating ourselves thinking, thinking, thinking, and taking on stress when we don't know what to do. It's hard for us to settle down into quiet reflection and accept that we DO know what to do, if we grasp the logic of insight and depend on discovery.

Do you know the puzzle called the "Nine Dot Box" in which you have to connect all the dots using only four lines without lifting your pen from the paper? To connect them all in four lines without leaving the paper, your line has to travel outside the perceived "box" created by the dots. Of course, first-timers often get trapped inside the "box" and can't complete the puzzle, even though the instructions never mention any limitations on where you can take your line. The first time I saw it done, a corporate executive had an absolute fit when he saw the solution. "You didn't give us complete instructions!" he shouted at the facilitator of the meeting. In the back of the room, one of his staff members giggled. The only way she could see to do it in four lines was to travel beyond the perceived boundaries. She was giggling because she had thought she was just too dumb to figure out how to solve it within the box. So she had been waiting to see how the "smart" people did it "right". She was one of only three people in the room who connected all the dots. She was laughing at herself because she got it right and then immediately assumed she was wrong, just as caught up in her own perceived boundaries as those who couldn't leave the box.

That exercise is a simple illustration of the need to keep our minds quietly open and accept creative solutions that occur to us. The people with the least at stake, who are just playing around with the puzzle, tend to catch on to it quickly. The people who get invested in being "right" and figuring it out, usually don't see it until someone shows them how to let the line flow and ignore perceived boundaries. They see a box of dots, rather than seeing nine dots floating in open space, because they get caught in the familiar, what they should know, right away, and lose the touch with their capacity to see things fresh.

I've seen people use the experience of this puzzle to "brand" people, to conclude that some of us are creative thinkers and some of us are not. But that undermines the human spirit completely. All of us are creative thinkers, and sometimes all of us lose touch with that creativity. It depends on how we're using the gift of thinking at any moment in time. Understanding how our minds work sets us free from getting "boxed in" by temporary limitations.

There's a logic to it, principles that explain it all. We're all vibrant with the dynamic energy of life itself. We use that energy to form thoughts, and we become conscious of the thoughts we have formed because they generate a sensory experience of the moment. It's a constant inside-out flow from formless energy into the forms of our lives. The energy of Mind. The power of Thought. The awareness of Consciousness. Three principles that describe the creative process by which we understand life. To make the most of our experience, we have a simple guidance system: how it feels to us as it's happening. When we're thinking ourselves into negativity, distress, frustration, anxiety, upset, we realize that because we feel the psychobiospritual signals of discomfort, insecurity, dis-ease. When we're thinking ourselves into a positive, creative, wise, insightful state of mind, we realize that because we feel the psychobiospiritual signals of comfort, security, ease. Everyone knows how they feel -- whether they're relaxed with a free and clear mind, or tense, with a racing and cluttered mind. Everyone knows when they're at ease with the flow of life, and when they're not.

Not everyone knows that they're not stuck with any particular use of their thinking, that they can turn away from racing and cluttered thoughts and allow their minds to quiet down, like particles settling in a snow globe as soon as we stop shaking it. In the blink of an eye, their confusion and tension will dissipate and they will be at peace. When people have been in the habit of stressful thinking for a long time, they start to take it really seriously. It looks like all there is. They lose the freedom to let it go and let their heads clear and their discomfort pass. They lose their faith in joy, wonder, the exhilaration of knowing they are safe to navigate life through all its ups and downs and challenges and thrills.

What brings us all back is simple logic. Remembering that we're making it up and seeing it as real. Remembering that we're all the same; we create all kinds of thinking and take it more or less seriously. Remembering to heed the signals we get when we start to use our thinking against ourselves, the moodiness and urgency and bad will and self-absorbtion that characterize insecurity. Remembering to say "So what?" to our own insecurity, embrace it as part of life, and let it pass. 

Every day brings us a nine-dot box of some sort, a question to which we don't have an immediate answer. But every waking moment offers us a new possibility of connecting the dots.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

My inbox lately has been increasingly clogged with dire warnings. I have been told that I am likely to be poisoned from breathing oil fumes, swept into oblivion by a giant methane-explosion-induced tsunami moving at 600 miles per hour, cast into poverty by foreign investors calling in their loans to the US, murdered by a band of unchecked immigrants, blown up by a terrorist I thought was my harmless neighbor tending his garden, subjected to a horrible curse if I fail to forward a message immediately to at least 10 friends, doomed to heart disease by a lifetime of eating huge quantities of "hidden" salt and sugar in commonplace foods... I could go on and on. The underlying message always is, "You should worry, worry, worry. Terrible things could happen."

And then, yesterday, I received a poignant e-mail letting me know that the brother of one of my colleagues at West Virginia University dropped dead, alone in the water, on a practice swim for a big swim event. He was an athlete. He had done that practice swim, which he loved, many times. He was only 58 years old. No one ever would have thought that this would happen to a healthy, hearty man in his prime. No one worried about him when he set off to swim with a smile and a wave to his family, as he did nearly every day. I was reminded that terrible things DO happen, but they are rarely the things we've been anticipating.

The real message we get from life, if we listen, is: Worry is pointless. Worry erodes our health, our sense of wellbeing, and our ability to enjoy the present moment. Anything could happen any time. We can't predict disaster, and we can't predict wonderful surprises, either. All we can know for sure is what HAS happened and what IS happening, right now.

But too often, we miss what IS happening because we are so caught up in ruminating about or regretting what HAS happened, which we cannot change, or in worrying and fretting about what COULD happen, which we cannot predict. So the precious gift of now is lost because our worried minds are elsewhere.

For years, I have taught resiliency and have told participants in my classes and seminars the facts about stress and worry, about what it does to the immune system and to the capacity of our minds and bodies to regain or sustain health. I have recommended the book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers to hundreds of students and colleagues, to share with them the scientific understanding of the price we humans pay for entertaining stress, worry and anxiety. I have recommended the books Second Chance and The Missing Link to hundreds of students and colleagues, to share with them the logic of the simplicity of living at ease in the present, free from stress, worry and anxiety. I always feel privileged to be able to point in the direction of health and peace of mind, and watch innate wisdom blossom in people as they see this for themselves.

I want to send a message to all those people anxiously poring over and urgently sending out frightening messages of imminent horror that the world, individually and collectively, should be worrying about constantly. Stop! Please, just stop. You have the best of intentions, but all this doom and gloom stuff is not helping to make the world a better, safer place. Indeed, it is keeping people on edge and off balance as they turn their minds away from life right now and helpful ideas that might occur to them from a quiet state of mind to think about scary things over which they have no control.

It makes sense, of course, to be prudent. But being prudent is not a product of worry. Prudence is wisdom applied to information, in neutral, in the present. Once we've done everything we can, it is pointless to think more about it. Thinking more about it and extrapolating fearful ideas from it generate worry.

It is prudent to know the news and read your mail and ask, "Is there anything I can do right now to address this situation?" If the answer is yes, it is prudent to do that. If the answer is no, there is no point thinking further about it. There is nothing I can do to prevent a giant tsunami, for example. Going over and over in my mind about how horrible that would be is a misapplication of my imagination, a way to use my own thinking to keep me from enjoying life now. Instead of playing with my dog and enjoying the beauty of nature when we take our walks, should I be ignoring the dog because I'm too upset to play, and plodding nervously through our walks wondering what the scene would look like as the giant wave strikes?  Would that kind of thinking help me in any way?

A wise person, years ago, startled me out of a bout of worry, with this question: "If you knew you only had a few hours to live, is that how you would be using your mind?" Ever since then, worry has seemed like a waste of precious time to me. I cannot think of a single hour I've spent worrying that has contributed one iota to the quality of my life.

Ah, but the hours spent relishing beautiful sunsets, making up games with my grandson, tending to a growing plant, talking about constructive ideas with colleagues, immersing myself in beautiful music, writing a poem for an occasion, laughing at silly jokes, holding the hand of a dying friend and sharing good memories, cheering in the heat of an exciting sports event, picking up the phone to talk to somene I've missed, reflecting on a challenge and arriving at a surprising new answer -- those are the moments fully lived in the present. Those are the deposits in the account of a happy life.

I heard Bobby McFerrin interviewed on the radio recently. The interviewer said she wouldn't give in to the temptation to ask questions about the song "Don't worry, be happy!" because she was sure he was sick of people attaching his name only to that old, silly song, instead of his enormous body of subsequent creative work. He said he didn't mind talking about that song. A lot of people loved it. It cheered people up at a time they seemed to need that message. Essentially, his answer was, "Don't worry about what questions you ask me. Be happy we're here together now, talking about the power and beauty of music."

Remember the core idea of that little song? "In your life expect some trouble, but when you worry, you make it double."

A Failure of Imagination

Insecurity, and all the non-constructive feelings it spawns, shoves wisdom and imagination out of its way when it overtakes our public dialogue. There is a highly predictable connection between the prevailing feeling state, or state of mind, in which we spend our time and the thinking and actions that make sense to us and seem possible to us.

It has been difficult to watch the erosion of common sense and wisdom as insecurity has infected more and more of our responses to critical issues over the past several weeks. It seems the news is filled with, and thriving on, reports of people in increasingly insecure states of mind struggling to deal with huge challenges. The missing piece in all our discussions seems to be the need for clarity, quiet minds, wisdom, insight and imagination to solve problems we've never seen before.

But there is hope in the innate and extraordinary resiliency we all share as human beings. We are always capable of dropping down from a secure state of mind that supports creative solutions to the most daunting problems, into insecurity, which blocks that capacity, as I've tried to illustrate in the chart below. But we are equally capable of turning around. At any moment, our heads clear, insight bubbles to the surface, we "see" what we're doing with out own thinking, and we can just as easily reverse the arrows and come back to peace and clarity. 

What does it take? Wanting to feel less stressed; knowing that it's in us to be at ease with our thinking and elicit our highest quality ideas; trusting that the only way to keep negative thinking going is to hang onto it. As soon as we let any thought go, the natural flow of thinking resumes and the quality of our ideas and feelings, like everything else in life, moves towards balance.

Dreamers and Do-ers

In the past week or so, I've been privileged to be involved in two extraordinary gatherings that inspired people to imagine what is possible.

First, last week, more than 40 people from agencies and education and government in Manatee County came together at USF Sarasota-Manatee to join in the launch of an initiative representing a transformational dream for the 13th Street corridor in Bradenton, Florida. The leader of this initiative is Cynthia Newell, a powerful woman with joyful and unshakeable faith in the capacity for people to transcend anything, no matter what. She has a dream. But she's a do-er as much as a dreamer. And in two hours, educators, government officials, researchers, community members, service organization leaders, business people got involved, engaged and motivated to share the work of revitalizing a healthy, vibrant community in a declining neighborhood where, today, gangs rule, the unemployment rate is twice the national average, and many people -- not all -- have begun to lose hope for a bright tomorrow. C-4, she called the work: Collaborate, Connect, Create, Communicate.

As people talked and shared their hopes for re-awakening health and warmth and creativity and dignity all throughout that community, for keeping children safe to learn and challenging them to really envision their own potential and catch the fervor for moving towards it, for rebuilding and re-energizing the business heart that keeps the beat of progress, for bringing unlikely partners together to move toward a common goal, you could feel the warmth and love suffuse that room. We might became we can, as long as we work together.

Cynthia is a natural leader; she elicited the leadership in a room full of people ready to step together across the threshold of the unknown and envision greatness. They, in turn, will bring out the best in those with whom they work. And it will all start one soul at a time, as people realize their own resiliency and power and start to reinvent their lives.

And, yes, it will happen. It will because leaders like Cynthia and those who stand with her are filled with hope and passion and purpose and don't give in to their temporary self-doubts or insecurities. And it will happen because it is in the cards, a natural outcome for all people when they rediscover the source of their own wisdom and generate insights about their lives. I've seen the thrilling human dimension of the power to change so many times before, and it will be thrilling to see it and share in it here, in my home town.

Then, this week, I attended my first meeting as a Board member of Realize Bradenton, an organization that has been several years in the making with the intention to make the City of Bradenton a wonderful place to be, the kind of place you really want to spend time just walking around and taking it all in. So, not far at all from that 13th Street Corridor where Cynthia is making magic, Realize Bradenton is making magic, too. It's bringing artists, designers, musicians, planners, poets, landscape architects, builders -- more dreamers and do-ers -- together to make a nice town a great 21st-century community of friends and neighbors. Talk about imagining what's possible!  They're talking about a meandering, walkable waterfront, serene little parks where people can find quiet and watch the Manatee River roll by and listen to the gulls and the sighing breezes, places for children to play, places for dogs to play, places to stand back and enjoy public art, wonderful galleries and shops mingled with all the cultural and educational attractions already there.

Once more I found myself in a room full of people brimming with respect for each other's ideas and the courage to think about the unexpected, the as-yet-unrealized possibilities of a little city that people have come to love but take for granted, sort of like a quiet old aunt. It's nice, and it's there for you, but it's all to easy to wave and pass on by.

So much has already been realized by this organization yet in its infancy, and so much more will happen soon. I thought about the charming artistic geckos that adorn so much commercial wall space now in Bradenton, and how they've made boring blank spaces quirky and appealing, worthy of a second look and some conversation. They started in someone's artistic thinking, someone who thought, "Why not?" and created a phenomenon from nothing. That's the power of the human mind set free.

It's wonderful to see, in these times when it too often feels like human relations are strained to the breaking point and all we hear is name-calling and blame-calling, that ordinary people can come together with love and hope in their hearts and accomplish extraordinary things.

Wise mental energy policy

Consider the thinking process as our "consumer" of "mental energy." Although our mental energy is a renewable resource, and we can always tap into it without fear or running out, we have a finite number of hours in each day (month, year, lifetime) during which we can deliberately access it and use it for our own creative purposes, deciding how much of it to spend on what quality of thinking.We are confronted with the same hard choices about how to conserve and wisely use mental energy as we are with how to conserve and wisely use electrical energy.

As electricity flows into our homes, we make a series of decisions about how to use it. Turn off the lights when we leave a room, or not. Set the thermostat variably, depending on who is home and what is going on, or not. Buy energy efficient appliances as we replace things, or not. Turn off things we're not using or paying attention to, or not. The electricity is "there" and will keep on flowing, regardless of whether it's being wasted, put to foolish uses, misused, or conserved and put to wise use. It is a neutral force.

As mental energy flows through us, we also make a series of decisions about how to use it. Ruminate and worry about things over which we have no control, or not. Engage in negative upsetting emotions and discuss them with others at length, or not. Analyze problems until we're caught in a spiral of circular thinking, or not. Clear our heads and open our minds to fresh thoughts, or not. Our mental energy is always "there" and will keep flowing, regardless of whether it is being wasted, put to pointless uses, misused, or conserved and put to wise use. It, too, is a neutral force.

The most precious resource we have as human beings is our ability to think for ourselves and take our thinking more or less seriously, using our state of mind as a guide (just as we use our electric bill as a guide to how well we're doing at home). 

The question we face, each day, as individuals, is "What price are we willing to pay for dysfunctional uses of mental energy? Stress, and stress-related illnesses? Spreading ill will and bad feelings? Missing the moment?" We have a very effective feedback mechanism, just as reliable as our electric bill, that tells us when we are squandering our mental energy. It is always innocent; we all do it. The goal in life is to do it less, and to recognize more quickly when are doing it.

As we reflect on how we are using the energy of our lives to create our thinking and our perception of reality moment-to-moment, it becomes clearer and clearer that we are the authors of our own "mental energy policy." Where do we set the bar?

Case study in insecurity

It has been occurring to me as I watch coverage of the BP Executives in interviews that they represent a case study in insecurity. I'm curious what you think about that? In the reading materials provided for this workshop, I've got something called No Pain, Big Gains, which talks about corporate culture and the difference between the actions of an insecure company and one that operates with a high level of calm and security. In Dick Bozoian's readings, he's got an extensive chart in the piece called Leadership, Management and Organizational Effectiveness, which details the differences in behaviors and thinking between insecurity and confidence. I'd be curious, if you've read through these two essays, how you would interpret the BP response to this environmental disaster. Where do they fall on the scale? What would you do, if you were responsible for bringing them into the conversation in a more constructive way, to elevate the level of their participation?

When we start reflecting about security and insecurity, and the critical importance of state of mind, we see examples all around us of situations that would turn out much differently if the leaders involved could act from a sense of security and confidence and strength. I'm curious if you're noticing that, as well.

How we look at others

While updating a course I teach online for West Virginia University last week, I developed a new lecture called "Stance Towards Others". It relates to things we discussed at the first Workshop here. It really matters, as far as the outcome of our interactions, especially from a leadership perspective, how we "see" the health in ourselves and others. (Here's a link to the PowerPoints; unfortunately, I can't link you to the Camtasia lecture because it's embedded in a course only open to those who are registered for it.)

In all interactions, we have a certain "stance". Often, for people in leadership positions, it is superiority, or the insecure feeling of pressure to know the answers and thus be in charge. Depending on one's leadership style, that can manifest, in one-on-one dealings with others, as everything from commiseration to one-up, one-down guidance. When we don't truly understand the profound common ground on which we ALL stand, no matter what -- we are using the gifts of mind, thought and consciousness to create an experience and see it as real moment-to-moment-to-moment -- we lose our trust that we can actually relate to others on an equal footing and bring out the best in them. To the degree that we are insecure ourselves -- not sure that we can count on our own wisdom or quiet down enough to get in touch with an insight -- we tend to assert ourselves more or less, rather than listening and waiting for an insight to see what to do or say next.

The good news and the bad news for all of us is that we see it in ourselves before we can see it in others. That's the good news because as soon as we get the realization of our own strength and access to wisdom, it is easier to find peace and sustain hope and optimism and address life challenges with certainty. That's the bad news because we can't get there intellectually by "wishing" it so or repeating the "facts." It comes to each of us in a moment of insight, out of a quiet, peaceful feeling, from reflection. It comes to each of us in our own way and our own words. No one can force it or make us get it.

Blame or Accountability?

In the aftermath of negative events, it's becoming increasingly common for people to confuse blame with accountability. I've noticed it frequently in the "Keeping them Honest" segments of CNN's AC360, but I've come across it often in other settings, too. Terrible thing happens. Officials are interviewed. First question: "Who do you blame for this?" And then the feeding frenzy starts as people of different persuasions blame the past, blame government, blame X-corporation, blame other groups with different beliefs, blame the press ... The list of those who can be blamed is endless.

The problem is that "blame" is a dead-end street. It's a way for people under pressure to feel vindicated for things that have gone wrong. And blame is more and more used as a substitute for accountability. Now that I've "blamed" X, it's X's problem. Let X figure it out. And once X is blamed, X gets defensive and insecure and is psychologically inclined to do whatever X can to shift the blame to Y. And on and on. We end up in a downward spiral of negativity, defensiveness and bad feelings, with no possibility of a reach for common ground and innovation to address challenges.

When all of those who need to work together to be accountable are operating in that milieu of bad feelings and bad will, solutions are impossible. We're back to the schoolyard fights when the teacher comes into the middle of the fray and says, "All right, who started this?" He did. No, she did. No, I did not. They did. It's not my fault! Don't blame me, my father told me to fight back. ...

In the world defined by an understanding of the Three Principles and how State of Mind works, the operative question is not "Who do you blame for this?" or "Who started it?" The operative question is "How are we going to come together now to solve this?" The ideal is to sidestep the negative spiral, move towards understanding and good will, and unleash everyone's creativity and wisdom to address solutions -- to bring accountability into the present moment.

I've been playing around with what if scenarios for some of the current "blame game" problems we face locally and nationally. What occurs to you?

Where do we go from here?

For the second workshop, in August, we'll be looking at how the principles discussed in the first workshop actually play out in real-time situations. Why does it actually matter what state of mind people are in when they conduct business? How do people effect change when a situation is becoming negative or unpleasant? What actually happens when one or more people in a working group are recalcitrant or unrelentingly negative?

For this to be a meaningful experience, I'm asking you to keep an eye out for "cases" -- we'll be talking through and role-playing real situations to have the experience of thought/state of mind in action.

In the meantime, reflecting back on the 4/28 workshop, let us know what you may have noticed that seemed different to you as you got back to your daily routine? Or ask about what may be puzzling? Or bring up situations that you'd like to work out in a different way.

You should all have a PDF file of reading materials from both Dick and me that support all the philosophical conversations we had yesterday. Sometimes people like to have it all in black and white to review. If you'd rather read it on line, the materials are also available here as an e-book.

Post your questions and ideas. The blog will keep us leaning and growing together between workshops.

Get the readings as an e-book

Hello Reinvent Yourself! Participants,

If you've registered for the workshop, you have received reading materials as PDF files. But, here's an alternative. Since we're getting together online through this blog, the readings are also available as an e-book. If you happen to have an iPad or just like to read things online, you may prefer this.

These readings are just browsing materials. No homework assignments, but we've found that people like to have reading materials to look through that support the training in the workshops.

See you Wednesday!

Get started with us on April 28

Hello,

If you've joined the Blog early, WELCOME! I'll start posting comments and looking to start conversations the day after our first workshop, April 28. The blog will stay open, so we can continue to share and learn together, through the end of 2010. I am looking forward to working with you.