Category Archives: books

Manual for climbing mountains — Paulo Coelho’s Blog

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1 min reading: Manual for climbing mountains — Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

What a great metaphor for living an adventurous, rewarding life! Start with the first step:

A] Choose the mountain you want to climb: don’t pay attention to what other people say, such as “that one’s more beautiful” or “this one’s easier”. You’ll be spending lots of energy and enthusiasm to reach your objective, so you’re the only one responsible and you should be sure of what you’re doing.

Continue until you get to the last step:

L] Tell your story: yes, tell your story! Give your example. Tell everyone that it’s possible, and other people will then have the courage to face their own mountains.

I’m so looking forward to finally reading Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist over my holiday break.

Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges – NYTimes.com

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Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges – NYTimes.com.

I love this new research about self-compassion. Our culture often gives us the message that we need to be tough and disciplined with ourselves, yet many aspects of our culture are not very healthy, from obesity, diabetes, and the standard American diet (SAD) to politics, greed, and the environment.

How can we as individuals change this? How do we get healthier? You can start with yourself.

A cutting edge of psychological research shows that giving yourself a break may move you toward better health instead of away from it.

Kristin Neff’s book, Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind, is on my to-read list.

People who score high on tests of self-compassion have less depression and anxiety, and tend to be happier and more optimistic. Preliminary data suggest that self-compassion can even influence how much we eat and may help some people lose weight.

Dr. Neff, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, distinguishes between self-compassion and self-indulgence. A key question is whether you treat yourself as well as you treat the people you care about. Would you tell your child or best friend what you tell yourself when you are struggling?

Also, having compassion for your own suffering does not mean that nothing needs to be done. You can take a moment to feel what you’re feeling, have compassion for yourself, and then consider what you can do to make it better.

This is one of the reasons I like doing and teaching the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) using the method I learned from Dene Ballantine.

  1. You accept your own not-so-great emotional experience with compassion.
  2. You bring your focus into the present and onto yourself, without judgment, by forgiving yourself and others. You let go of the story.
  3. You create a direction for movement toward a more pleasant emotional experience.

Book recommendation: Listen to Your Pain

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This blog post isn’t about anything especially far out. It’s actually pretty ordinary. It’s about injuries and pain and a book I came across in my studies that I like a lot. It’s very left-brained — and very practical.

Listen to Your Pain: The Active Person’s Guide to Understanding, Identifying, and Treating Pain and Injury is one of my textbooks in massage school. It’s not written for massage therapists, but I know I will find it useful.

I recommend this book for anyone who leads an active or adventurous life, who might occasionally experience falls, twists, or other accidents, who wants to know more about what’s going on.

I wish I had had this book in my library years ago. You might need to have a certain kind of information-freak mindset like me to appreciate this, but it could increase your understanding of your own body, save your medical dollars, and give you realistic information about what kind of time and attention it takes to heal from an injury.

Most of the injuries I’ve had have come from things like falls, bike wrecks, dance, yoga, running, pulling the lawnmower cord, a car wreck, and so on. Some like plantar fasciitis have crept up on me. It would have been helpful to me to be able to learn more about what was happening under my skin. One thing I’ve discovered in massage school is that most of us know very little about what’s going on inside our own bodies. 

Before massage school, I used books like The Anatomy of Movement and The Key Muscles of Yoga to help me understand my body better. In fact, referring to books like that probably helped draw me toward massage school and more study of anatomy. I love the drawings and the insight I get, and the language is a wonderful skill to acquire.

Here’s how Listen to Your Pain can be useful. Say you begin to experience knee pain. This could be obviously from something that happened, or it could be knee pain that gradually appears and worsens for no discernable reason, or maybe it comes and goes.

You can use this book to identify which structure in your knee is injured, how this injury usually occurs, ways to verify that you have this injury and not another, how long it could take to heal, what you can do yourself (ice, rest), what a massage therapist or doctor can do (deep frictioning, injections, surgery), and rehabilitative exercises.

The chapter on the knee is 54 pages long. It describes the anatomy of the knee joint and includes a drawing with arrows pointing to sites on the knee where injuries are felt to help you identify your injury. Fourteen specific knee injuries are described along with descriptions of several other knee injuries and conditions that are more difficult to pinpoint.

Each of the injuries includes a description of what it is, how and why this injury can occur, a drawing of the anatomy involved, ways to test whether you have this injury with drawings, and treatment choices.

The treatment choices section describes the self-treatments you can do — waiting it out, limiting activity, icing, and so on. The author gives some rough guidelines for healing time — for example, for Pain on the Outside of the Knee (Lateral Collateral Ligament Tear), which can happen to yogis who spend a lot of time in the lotus position, it may take three weeks to three months to heal, depending on how severely the ligament is torn. He also lists possible medical treatments and exercises to strengthen the injured tissues.

Note that the book does not include ultrasound or acupuncture as possible medical treatments because the author was not familiar enough with them to include them. The book is purely Western medicine in orientation. From my experience, those modalities can be very helpful for injuries, so don’t rule them out. Maybe the 3rd edition will include them!

The author of Listen to Your Pain is Ben E. Benjamin, a Ph.D. in sports medicine and education. He studied with Dr. James Cyriax, the father of orthopedic medicine. This book has been around for 25 years and is in its second edition.

Hot buttons, EFT, and self-compassion

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Ever get a whiff of your own craziness, the things you do or say that are less than kind? I did today. I caught it myself — I see myself writing that like I caught some kind of fish. Yeah, a stinky fish.

In an attempt to be thoughtful, I actually was thoughtless. When I perceived that, I felt so remorseful my heart ached.

Then I found this quote from Tricycle Daily Dharma in my inbox. I’d saved it for several weeks, not knowing why.

We all have personal sensitivities—“hot buttons”—that are evoked in close relationships. Mindfulness practice helps us to identify them and disengage from our habitual reactions, so that we can reconnect with our partners. We can mindfully address recurring problems with a simple four-step technique: (1) Feel the emotional pain of disconnection, (2) Accept that the pain is a natural and healthy sign of disconnection, and the need to make a change, (3) Compassionately explore the personal issues or beliefs being evoked within yourself, (4) Trust that a skillful response will arise at the right moment. – Christopher Germer, “Getting Along”

I want to add step 2.5 to the above. If you are feeling the pain, and you know there’s a need to make a change but the feeling is so sticky, you can’t detach enough to explore your issues, you can do the Emotional Freedom Technique (several times if needed) to reduce the pain enough to get to step 3. It helps us feeling types move on.

In step 3, I discovered that I projected something onto another that was really about me. I’m looking at a big owie in my life head on.

I’m not to step 4 yet but it feels good to just know it’s there waiting, whatever the outcome. All I can do is trust.

Steve Jobs’s Real Genius | The New Yorker

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Steve Jobs’s Real Genius : The New Yorker.

I’ve posted several stories about Steve Jobs. Well, I’m typing this on my MacBook Air while my iPhone is charging. His life had an impact on mine.

Some of the qualities I admired about Steve were his open admission to having taken LSD and how that experience shaped him (name another CEO who’s gone public with that information!), his practice of Zen, and his love of good design.

Here, Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, The Tipping Point, Outliers) writes about Jobs’ dark side — his perfectionism — and puts his gift into historical context.

The Biology of Meditation. | elephant journal

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The Biology of Meditation. | elephant journal.

Lisa Wimberger provides a Cliff’s Notes version of the book Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment, by David Perlmutter and Alberto Villoldo.

Excerpt:

Stress, trauma and the health perils associated with those states all begin and get perpetuated in the limbic brain, which is comprised of the hippocampus, hypothalamus and amygdala. These are responsible for making our emotional connections outside of logic, taking snapshots of life, creating our dream state experiences, turning on our fight-or-flight response, and storing and delivering emotional information independent of time. The limbic system cannot discern past, present, or future — each “picture” it accesses is experienced by the body as though it’s current.

Fasting and/or a low-calorie diet, antioxidants, voluntary exercise, and meditation are key ways to turn down the limbic brain.

About meditation, she says…

…it is found that those who meditate or enter states of trance have increased blood flow to their pre-frontal cortex (PFC). This area of the brain is the executive decision maker, but is not quite the same as the neo-cortex “logic” mind. The PFC is activated on EKGs during states of compassion, inspiration, motivation and love. It has the ability to project and envision a future reward. It is the part of the brain responsible for motivating us to attain our goals and dreams. Blood flow to the PFC decreases when blood flow to the limbic brain increases.

Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough | AlterNet

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Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough | | AlterNet.

It is important to read this for an expanded idea of what the Occupy movement is about.

Believe it or not, it’s about love and being part of the 100%. It’s a revolution in consciousness.

The author is Charles Eisenstein. You can find his website at http://www.ascentofhumanity.blogspot.com. He has made his book, The Ascent of Humanity, available online. You can pay what you wish.

Thanks to Bryan Williams for sharing this link on Facebook.

We look to a different kind of revolution. At risk of revealing the stars in my eyes, let me call it a revolution of love.

What else but love would motivate any person to abandon the quest to maximize rational self-interest? Love, the felt experience of connection to other beings, contradicts the laws of economics as we know them. Ultimately, we want to create a money system, and an economy, that is the ally not the enemy of love. We don’t want to forever fight the money power to create good in the world; we want to change the money power so that we don’t need to fight it. I will not in this essay describe my vision — one of many — of a money system aligned with the good in all of us. I will only say that such a shift can only happen atop an even deeper shift, a transformation of human consciousness. Happily, just such a transformation is underway today.

There’s more, lots more. Read it.

Wheat belly

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Modern wheat is not good for anyone, according to Dr. William Davis, author of Wheat Belly, a new book that differentiates the wheat of today from the wheat of yesterday.

In this article on BoingBoing, Davis outlines how modern wheat has been genetically modified even since 1960 into a product that may be the real cause of the surge in obesity and diabetes.

He recommends that not just people with celiac, gluten-intolerance, and wheat sensitivity give up wheat. He recommends that everyone do so. If you’re wondering why you can’t lose weight, look at your wheat consumption. Rather than being a “healthy whole grain,” it might be working against your health instead of for it.

I don’t know the science and haven’t read the book, but I gave up wheat about four years ago, and I can tell you that it’s getting easier as more people jump on the no-wheat bandwagon. More restaurants offer gluten-free menus, and grocery stores offer more gluten-free foods. Gluten-free bakeries are even opening and doing well. Bakers and chefs are experimenting with alternatives to wheat flour and creating good new recipes.

Here’s what Davis says:

It is therefore my contention that eliminating all wheat from the diet is a good idea not just for people with gluten sensitivity; it’s a smart decision for everybody. I have experience in my heart disease prevention practice, as well as my online program for heart disease prevention and reversal, with several thousand people who have done just that and the results are nothing short of astounding. Weight loss of 30, 50, even 70 pounds or more within the first six months; reversal of diabetes and pre-diabetic conditions; relief from edema, sinus congestion, and asthma; disappearance of acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome symptoms; increased energy, happier mood, better sleep. People feel better, look better, eat fewer calories, feel less hungry, are able to discontinue use of many medications — just by eliminating one food from their diet — ironically a food that they’ve been told to eat more of.

Davis recommends going without wheat for four weeks:

If the health benefits of a wheat-free diet sound hard to believe, why not conduct your own little experiment and see for yourself: simply eliminate all things made of wheat for four weeks — no bread, bagels, pizza, pretzels, rolls, donuts, breakfast cereals, pancakes, waffles, pasta, noodles, or processed foods containing wheat (and do be careful to read labels, as food manufacturers love to slip a little wheat gliadin into your food every chance they get to stimulate your appetite). That’s a lot to cut out, true, but there’s still plenty of real, nutrient-dense foods like vegetables, fruit, nuts, cheese and dairy products, meat, fish, soy foods, legumes, oils like olive oil, avocados, even dark chocolate that you can eat in their place. If after that 4-week period you discover new mental clarity, better sleep, relief from joint pain, happier intestines, and a looser waistband, you will have your answer.

Here’s to more happiness!

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A five-year study by National Geographic fellow Dan Beuttner identified the world’s healthiest places and researched what made the residents healthy. His book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from People Who’ve Lived the Longest contains the results of his research.

Beuttner’s new book Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way describes his findings about how people in those places find happiness — and how you can too. He was interviewed on NPR. (You can find links to his other interviews on NPR. This is some pretty fascinating research.)

In some places people were happy because of government policies, such as a high tax rate that pays for education through college, health care, and retirement in Denmark — a safety net for everyone that relieves financial stress and maximizes creativity and happiness, and tax breaks for adults whose aging parents live with or near them in Singapore — because socializing with parents increases happiness too.

Here are a few tips that you can implement on your own to increase your happiness, without waiting for government to do anything:

  • Live around happy people. If you’re unhappy, move where the people are happier. Here’s a list of happy (and sad) cities. I’m happy to say that Austin is the second happiest large city in the nation.
  • Work smarter: Working to earn more than $75,000 (for a family of four) does not equate to more day-to-day experiences of happiness. So if you’re making $75,000 now, working harder might net you more money but it probably won’t make you feel better. Go do something fun instead of putting in that overtime!
  • Shorten your commute by moving near work or working nearer (or from) your home.

I also like to remember this awesome quote:

Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy. ~ Guillaume Apollinaire

Is maze brightness in rats an equivalent of enlightenment in humans?

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I thought you might like to read an excerpt from the book I’m reading in a book group. The book is called Life in the Labyrinth, by E.J. Gold, who is in the Gurdjieffian Fourth Way lineage of teaching awareness expansion.

As a child of thirteen and fourteen, I found my bedroom overrun with lab rats, and more or less as an afterthought — I had no other use for them, not being particularly attracted to vivisection and the like — built a few mazes to study rat behavior.

One item stood out clearly in my observations of dozens of rats stumbling, bumping and sniffing their way toward their final reward as they learned to synthesize experiential data through a primitive form of deduction…or didn’t learn, and nearly starved to death.

I discovered, independently of texts on behavioral sciences, something which I later learned was by convention called maze brightness, which could be defined for the moment as “becoming able to find new paths through the maze toward the reward-point through sheer repetition”, from which we could, if we weren’t overly concerned about how far we could quantum leap, deduce that some rats eventually become aware of the general rules of maze construction, of course only on a purely subjective-instinctive nose-and-gut level.

I discovered through this a special learning process which could enable the rat to solve not only one known maze but virtually any maze it may thereafter happen to encounter by accident or design.

I also concluded, probably rightly, that such a rat would, eventually — having blundered its way through a sufficient number of mazes — in spite of itself, begin to dimly recognize the inescapable fact that it is in a maze and that moreover, it cannot — at least by present means — remove itself to parts unknown.

Once this first all-important recognition has been achieved, without which nothing further is possible in any direction except down, it can begin to perceive and analyze its surroundings as they actually are, and not as its unexamined fears and perceptual occlusions have caused it to imagine them to be.

Because the perceptual-emotional will have, for the moment, been resolved, it will no longer exhibit the compulsion to maintain a self-constructed veil of confusion and disorientation.

One would think the thrill of observing that single rat, which out of dozens, suddenly gave indications of having become aware of the maze would soon pall, but au contraire…the excitement of this simple yet magnificent discovery never failed to strike me as anything less than downright apotheotic*, and any behavioral scientist worth his or her weight in potassium nitrate who says anything different is spouting pure scoria*.

A rat achieves maze brightness, and its eyes seem somehow at once both older and younger; general posture and behavior toward the environment and toward itself show radical signs of alteration. It seems less frantic, more self-assured, and noticeably less self-destructive.

At the same time, one can see visible signs of excitement as a new sense of freedom descends overwhelmingly upon it, the same sense of freedom which humans who have discovered what they call “enlightenment” experience.

E.J. Gold is a good storyteller, and I’ve just ordered two more of his books, Practical Work on the Self and The Human Biological Machine As a Transformational Apparatus. The book group I joined has already read them, so I have some catching up to do.

*apotheosis means to exalt a person to the rank of God

*scoria means the scum left after melting metal