Filed in voter caging, Republican party, manufacturing consent, simplifying change, the super rich, super rich, Publicly funded elections, campaign finance reform, christian fundamentalists, World Peace, compassion, peace, politics, religion, truth, activism, propoganda, corporate media, media, noam chomsky, Uncategorized October 24, 2008, 5:25 pm
Were it not for the very real and serious consequences wrought by a political system that values victory over compassion, politics in the Untied States as it is currently constituted would amount to not much more than bad theater. What I find much more interesting is how the corporate media in
Just today (10.22.08) an Associated Press poll asserted that the Presidential election is too close to call; this makes no sense to me. This is the same John McCain who roughly 90% of the time voted in agreement with the historically unpopular President Bush, who is currently riding his prop pony and shrinking approval ratings into a dust bowl-like sunset, whistling past an international war crimes tribunal. Logically John McCain and his political agenda should be similarly unpopular.
To my mind there is likely an ongoing attempt by the super rich base of the Republican party to once again subvert the will of the people and to steal yet another Presidential election.
The bought-and-paid-for, subservient corporate media is softening the ground by persistently reporting that the election is a back-and-forth virtual draw; meanwhile likely Democratic voters in swing states are being surreptitiously prohibited from voting using similar if not identical voter caging methods that were so effective in the Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 elections.
Should John McCain be announced the winner, very possibly after court intervention, the corporate media will once again claim that the race had been close all along, thus providing the super-rich, Republican, Christian fundamentalists plausible deniability and the keys to what is left of the kingdom. This corruption of democracy and free will has worked out quite well for those gluttonous, fear-mongering, narrow-minded people benefited by the status quo but not quite so well for the rest of us
However, (and if you have visited this website even once you had to know there would be a however), all hope is not lost.
Our government is not broken, the method of selecting who governs is broken and the fix is simple in theory and inexpensive in practice; campaign finance reform is a must. Publicly funded elections would to a great extent take the super-rich and corporations out of the picture and make the candidates more responsible to the people. Give free radio and TV time to all candidates (not just the Democrats and Republicans), and shorten the election cycle to six months. If we can’t be convinced to vote for any candidate in that time there should be a “none of the above” option like the ones used in
I believe these five simple changes would shift the balance of power away from the few and redistribute it to the many, making our elected officials more accountable to the people they are hired to represent.
One last thing – vote on November 4th – if for no other reason than to honor those who have given and continue to give their lives for the privilege.
The Solar Solution
Filed in reduce military spending, reduce military budget, jewel in the rubbish, Gore Vidal, tax the churches, legalize drugs, decriminalize drugs, tax drugs, legalize and tax drugs, Buckminster Fuller, kill your televison, drugs, peace, truth, optimism, propoganda, corporate media, positive thinking, intention, Uncategorized September 29, 2008, 8:46 pmNote from Jim:After 2 months of trying we (mostly Dave) are still unable to say with any certainty why the ability to download the audio portion of these podcasts have been so hit and miss. Rather than cease production I have decided, for the time being, to turn these podcasts into blogs. Rest assured that we (mostly Dave) are continueing to search for a remedy to the issue and we have every expectation of returning to podcast status ASAP.
While creating these podcasts/blogs over the past year, I have tried to avoid overtly political content; the reason being that long ago I realized regardless of political affiliation, there will be no heroes riding in at the last minute to save us.
We will have to do that for ourselves – hence the nature of this website.
Whenever I feel my personal peace growing to the point of it being uncomfortable, I can always count on the corporate media to try to disrupt it with tales of blood and terror. On my most charitable days, to say that I am merely disappointed in the media and its performance as informant to the masses is about as generous as I can be. Over the past few days, watching the corporate media project their visions of worldwide financial catastrophe has brought to mind one of my first jobs out of high school.
I was a telemarketer (que horror movie music).
My job was to set sales appointments for a company that sold and installed solar water heaters. Part of my sales pitch was that a homeowner could redirect money they were already spending on their utility bills; combine that with state and federal tax credits and they could save money and energy without having to come up with any out of pockets expenses.
A jewel in the rubbish that is the Bush administration is that they have bankrupted the
It is crucial to understand that despite what we have been told recently and will be told in the coming days, weeks and months; there is enough money to achieve a greater good for not only the American people, but all of humankind!
Any one or a combination of all three of these seemingly radical ideas would produce a pool of wealth that combined with technologies that have existed since the early 1970s would provide every man, woman and child on the planet with clean water and safe housing; to say nothing of education and health care. To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, Now it is simply a matter of will.
Coming soon: Are we watching the 2008 Presidential election being stolen right in front of our eyes?
Pardon the Interuption
Filed in Uncategorized August 23, 2008, 10:05 amDue to what can generously be discribed as an inconstant server there will be no podcast this month.
Rest assured that Dave and I (mostly Dave) are working to remedy the issue and plan to return next month with a new podcast.
In the meantime, be Peace filled and take care of yourselves so that you may be of better service to others.
Demystifying Healthy Relationships
Filed in spiritual health, physical health, healthy relationships, develping healthy relationships, lower stress, lower blood pressure, communication, healthy communication skills, Stuck in Wait, Claudia Black, Verbal Communication, Communication model, healthy communication, simplifying change, healthy attitudes, Stress Managment, Dr. Drew Pinsky, patience, terrorism, peace, personal development, Dr. Drew, Cracked, Proactive Stress Management, healthy behaviors, Proactive, Personal Peace, World Peace, religion July 28, 2008, 4:02 pmHuman beings are social animals; so much so, that one of the worst things that society can do to a person is to separate them from their friends and family. For example: break the law, go to jail. The mere threat of this type of punishment is enough to keep most people inside the social boundaries. If you’re already in jail and you break the rules, they separate you further – they put you in isolation. When I was teaching in the jails, I witnessed people losing total control of their behavior by being socially isolated. In fact, without relationships, more specifically – healthy relationships, it may be impossible to be a healthy person. Because as Dr. Drew Pinsky in his book Cracked said, “Healthy people use their relationships to regulate their feelings and emotions.” What that means is that if I’m feeling something that might cause me to act out in some dysfunctional manner, if I have healthy relationships in my life, I can call on my friends and family to give me another point of view, another perspective – something that might lead me towards a more functional and healthy behavior.
How to Have Difficult Conversations
Filed in healthy communication skills, healthy communication, Communication model, communication, Building trust, develping healthy relationships, healthy relationships, Ernie Larson, Verbal Communication, communication process, Stuck in Wait, difficult conversations, Ernie Larsen, The Platinum Rule, trust, process of communication, addiction, lower stress, healthy attitudes, personal development, patience, tolerance, love, peace, truth, health, compassion, feelings, Proactive Stress Management, habit control, healthy behaviors, Proactive, Personal Responsibility, Stress Managment, Personal Peace, Uncategorized June 26, 2008, 5:53 pmThis is the final part of a three-part series on communication, the focus of which is using effective communication skills to reduce the stress in our lives. Previously I described the communication model, and how it’s a wonder we communicate at all. I detailed a communication process that I refer to as “mirroring.” Which is in essence an insurance policy against the complications that come from miscommunication. I also described communication styles and the Platinum Rule: treating people the way they want to be treated instead of the way we want to be treated; or more commonly, the way we think they should want to be treated. So to conclude this three-part series on communication, I’d like to share with you a process that I’ve used many times over the years: one that has proven to reduce the defensiveness that so often accompanies difficult conversations.
The Platinum Rule
Filed in University of Illinois, reliabilty, Charles Osgood, Persona, The Platinum Rule, scarcity model, acceptance, openness, blame, blame game, projection, denial, honesty, The Golden Rule, healthy communication, feelings, World Peace, empathy, wisdom, buddhism, Proactive Stress Management, lower stress, communication, healthy communication skills, Building trust, healthy relationships, develping healthy relationships, Uncategorized May 28, 2008, 8:48 pmAs a method of reducing stress, with a larger goal of liberating ourselves from the either/or stressed based scarcity model of the universe, last month we began a series of podcasts dedicated to building healthier relationships through effective communication skills.
If you have ever been in an unhealthy relationship (and quite frankly who hasn’t?) then you know that almost nothing causes more stress. Being in an unhealthy relationship adversely affects every other aspect of our lives.
I first heard of the Platinum Rule when I was working as a corporate consultant in the mid ‘90s for a company called Persona. What attracted me to Persona was their Persuasive Communicator series of products, which I would come to find out, was based on Charles Osgood’s work in the 1950s at the
Imagine you are using a horizontal line to gauge how much the person is trying to control you, with a lot to the left of the line and not to the right.
Question #2) How much emotion does this person give off, including body language? You then use a vertical line to measure how much emotion this person is giving off, with a lot at the top of the line and not at the bottom.
Openness- telling the whole story even if the story is uncomfortable; openness is also means freely giving and receiving feedback.
Acceptance-what Buddhist call “right speech” – not criticizing or putting someone down.
Also Honesty-saying what you mean and meaning what you say.
This exercise is an exercise designed to get at the specific actions that build trust inside existing relationships and it’s most beneficial when done by both you and whomever you wish to have a healthier relationship.
Miscommunication Leads to Complications
Filed in healthy communication, The Golden Rule, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Communication model, healthy communication skills, communication, healthy relationships, spiritual health, mental health, Building trust, Verbal Communication, communication process, The Platinum Rule, drug addiction, behavioral addiction, Lauryn Hill, trust, Recovery, process of communication, Gordon Graham, self-image psychology, addiction, develping healthy relationships, lower stress, wisdom, personal development, optimism, Change Managment, drugs, joy, truth, health, peace, love, empathy, tolerance, Personal Peace, healthy behaviors, healthy attitudes, simplifying change, World Peace, Anger Management, compassion, actions, Anger Managment, Stress Managment, Uncategorized April 23, 2008, 8:08 pm
Lauryn Hill, on her 1998 CD The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, sang that “miscommunication leads to complications“. Relating to personal and world Peace, truer words were never spoken, sung or rapped. There’s a process that verbal communication goes through, and when you consider what happens in that process, it’s a wonder that we communicate at all.
In any verbal communication, there is a person who is sending the message: the sender. And there is at least one person who is supposed to be receiving the message: the receiver. In between the sender and the receiver there are several things that distract from and/or distort the information being conveyed. You see both the sender and the receiver have filtering systems, which are comprised of their personal beliefs, their personal histories, and how they physically and emotionally feel at the moment that they are trying to communicate. Are they tired? Are they angry? Are they distressed over something? Between the sender’s and the receiver’s filters is something called noise. In this case, the definition of the term noise is not limited strictly to those things we hear with our ears. Noise consists of anything that you can perceive through your five senses. Some examples might be: a sound outside the room that you’re in, a strange smell, a physical pain you’re experiencing, an attractive person walking by in the background as you are trying to listen to the conversation. Noise also includes anything you might be saying to yourself while the conversation is going on – your self-talk – it’s cold in this room, I’m hungry, what is this person talking about – anything that distracts you from hearing the message is considered noise.
Gordon Graham, a leader in the field of self-image psychology, working in both the change management and the addiction/recovery fields, suggests that due to what goes on in the communication process the average person hears only every third word. That might sound something like this, “Gordon leader field image in change the fields that what in the process person every word.” While that might put you on the same page, some conversations require that we be on the same paragraph. Some require that we be on the same sentence. And some require that we be on the same word. How many times has it happened to you – you thought you heard what the other person was saying, but you missed it – either by a lot or by a little. And because you missed it by a lot or by a little, not you’ve got trouble.
For this podcast I want to illustrate how to build trust through communication. And I want to provide a method of communication that is in effect an insurance policy against the complications that come from miscommunication.
Your insurance policy is something that I refer to as mirroring. It works like this: it’s a four step process.
The first step is that the sender sends an uninterrupted message. Step two is that the receiver repeats back in their own words their interpretation of what the sender said. Step three – and this is your insurance policy – the receiver asks the question something along the lines of, “Did I understand you correctly?” “Is that what you meant to say?” “Is that right?” Asking a question like that allows the receiver to be 100% wrong in their understanding of what the sender was trying to communicate. Step four – the sender confirms that the message heard was correct or not, and if not, the sender restates the part of the message that was misheard or the entire message if need be. And then you begin the process again, until both the sender and the receiver are satisfied.
It’s very important to understand that the goal of communication is to be understood – not to be right.
To help you visualize both the mirroring process and the communication process, there’s a document that you can download on the optimisimisaskill.com homepage.
In our last podcast, When Your Feet Hurt, Everything Hurts, I suggested that when you’re involved in an unhealthy relationship, every other aspect of your life suffers. Now I’m not going to define what is or isn’t a healthy relationship, except to say that healthy relationships require that all participants either be healthy or be sincerely working towards it.
The cornerstone of healthy relationships is communication. Without communication, caring about someone as an individual is impossible. Now that’s not to say that we don’t care about our brothers and sisters around the world who suffer from either natural or man made disasters and sometimes both. I want to suggest that to truly care about another individual, you have to truly know that person as an individual. And the best way for that to happen is through healthy, effective communication.
One of the more underrated components of healthy communication is trust. Think about it. If you don’t trust someone, do you even really care what they’re trying to communicate to you?
So how do you build trust? Well, there’s two ways, really. First, through your actions – you do what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it. And the second is through verbal communication. In the mid- to late- nineties, I worked for a management consulting company, and we had a technique that we referred to as “the Platinum Rule”. The Platinum Rule says that we treat people the way that they want to be treated, not the way we want to be treated. Let me give you an example of how that works. After leaving that company I became a teacher, and for about eight years I taught drug- and behaviorally-addicted parolees how to get into recovery, change their dysfunctional behaviors into healthy ones, and hopefully stay out of prison and get off parole. Now I consider myself to be a very open person – I’m one of those touchy-feely kind of people – I like to get involved and rub elbows and get in people’s space so that I can get to know them, and they can get to know me. Dealing with the clients that I was dealing with in these classrooms, that was a prohibitive barrier to reaching understanding. Due to the hostile environment in which many of these men and women were either living in or had just come from, these were people who needed at least three feet of space before they could begin to feel comfortable. So if I’m leaning over their shoulder trying to show them how to do an exercise, they’re not listening to me. Because what they need is their space. My preferred communication style is not only not relevant – in this case it’s a deterrent – the noise in their head, their self-talk, is saying, “Get away from me.” It’s so loud that communication is next to impossible. If I treat them the way I want to be treated, then communication is lost. But if I respect how they want to be treated, their defenses come down, and there’s a better chance to be heard.
OK, so how do you get to the specific information – and specifics are the key, that will tell you how a person wants to be treated? For a person you don’t know very well or at all, say a new co-worker or someone new to the neighborhood, they key is to observe. Go slow and watch. And if you pay attention, you will get the information that you’re looking for. Now if it’s a person that you are already in an established relationship with, say a friend or family member, what you do is you ask.
In our next podcast I will give you specific questions to ask that will provide you with the specific information that you’re looking for. Again, the goal is to communicate in a manner that is meaningful to those you want to be in a healthy relationship with.
I believe that relationships are a measure of the quality and quantity of the amount of Peace that individuals live with. And as I’ve stated many times, world Peace can become a reality when enough people find Peace within their own heart. To be involved in an unhealthy relationship only takes us further and further away from the Peace, love and understanding that we all crave.
When Your Feet Hurt, Everything Hurts
Filed in either/or mentality, universal life force, develping healthy relationships, autoimmune system, lower blood pressure, healthy attitudes, simplifying change, lower stress, healthy relationships, Ernie Larson, healthy communication skills, healthy communication, The Golden Rule, communication, Building trust, spiritual health, mental health, physical health, healthy behaviors, Low self esteem, personal development, self esteem, optimism, wisdom, meditation, health, peace, love, Change Managment, Reticular activating system, Personal Peace, Proactive, Proactive Stress Management, World Peace, Anger Management, Anger Managment, Stress Managment, Uncategorized March 24, 2008, 12:03 pmSince August of 2007, we have produced nine pod casts. The unifying theme in these pod casts is that world peace can become a reality when enough people find peace within their own heart. To that end, these pod casts have addressed subjects as raising our low self esteem, adopting healthier behaviors and attitudes, and simplifying the change process. In the January pod cast, I suggested that proactive stress management is the cornerstone to both physical health and personal peace. Lowering our stress levels lowers our blood pressure and makes more efficient our autoimmune system. Coincidentally, the less stressed we are, the less constricted our reticular activating system is, allowing us to free ourselves from the either/or mentality so that we can become more aware of the options that exist all around us. I’ve been amazed by the number of people I’ve come into contact with who are simply unable or unwilling to see beyond the black or white, right or wrong, left or right mentality. It is my contention that this world view stems from the many generations of programming that tells us that we’re ‘less than,’ that we are not the miraculous manifestations of the universal life force.
The focus of the past nine pod casts has mainly been about creating this personal peace within ourselves. It is my current plan to address over the coming months what I personally believe to be the largest deterrent to one developing personal peace. And that is being involved in relationships with unhealthy people. Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a relationship is only as healthy as the sickest person in it.
When I was teaching addicts in the
In the future I plan to go into greater detail in what I consider to be the fundamentals of healthy relationships. Building trust through communication, developing intimacy, and identifying the various stages that healthy relationships go through – how to determine just how healthy your relationships are. I’ll provide you with techniques for having those difficult conversations, the goal being to articulate our inarguable feelings in such a way as to reduce the defensiveness of those you are having that difficult conversation with. I’ll give you a tool far more valuable than the “Golden Rule” in developing trust in healthy relationships – something I call the “Platinum Rule”. I’ll provide you with a method to reduce the stress that comes with miscommunication. All of this with the understanding that the cornerstone of healthy relationships is personal growth.
Because I value and appreciate your time, it is my desire that each one of these pod casts provide you with some information that you can use to positively impact your life, I’d like to end this pod cast by giving you something to think about, and an exercise to work on.
‘Opposites attract’ may work very well for magnets, but it doesn’t always work very well for people. Take a look at the relationships you have in your life. Who are your friends? Are they people who have nothing in common with you, or are they people you share lots of common interests with? Okay – here’s the exercise.
First, you’ll need a pencil and paper. Then what I’d like for you to do is to create a list of the traits that you look for in a friend. So for example, what you’ll find on my list – number one is a low-maintenance friend. I want somebody who can handle their own life without bringing too much drama into mine. I’m also looking for somebody who is optimistic about the future and is working to create a brighter future for themselves and everybody else. That’s just a couple of things. Your list can have as many different things on it as you’d like, but create a list that identifies the character traits that you are looking for in a friend. One of the reasons that this is one of my favorite exercises is that there is this great ‘aha!’ at the end of it. When I did this with my students, what they thought they were doing was creating a list of what they were looking for in a friend. But what they were actually doing was creating a blueprint for the person that they want to be.
Remember – ‘opposites attract’ works with magnets, not people. So if you’re looking for somebody who is low-maintenance, then you have to be low-maintenance to attract them. If you value honesty, then you have to be an honest person. If you are not an honest person, you can attract an honest person, but that relationship won’t last very long. If they are healthy and they value honesty they will soon see that you are a dishonest person, and they will distance themselves from you. Because healthy people have boundaries and they enforce them. If they are honest and they are not healthy people then what they will do is they will take on your dishonest character traits; because unhealthy people either don’t have boundaries or they have them, but they don’t enforce them. If you value physical health, where will you find physically healthy people? They’re out getting healthy – they’re outside doing things. They’re not sitting on a couch. So you have to get out and do those things where you will find physically healthy people.
So there you have it – a list of what you’re looking for in a person, and a blueprint for who you want to be. Now after looking at your list, if you deem yourself to be falling short in any of these areas, I’d like to recommend that you go back to the October pod cast, “You Can Change Without Growing, But You Can’t Grow Without Changing.” There you’ll find information on a process for change, some of the barriers to change. There you’ll find a downloadable document that you can use to create your own master plan for success regarding behavioral changes.
I look forward to any comments or questions you have on the subject of building healthy relationships. Next month look for a pod cast on how to build trust and reduce stress using good communication skills
Dialog with Feelings
Filed in Brain Waves, Lucid Dreaming, Delta, Theta, Beta, Alpha, performance programming, dreaming programing, accelerated physical healing, kill your televison, emotional intelligence, stop smoking, past life regression, habit control, levels of consciousness, Personal Responsibility, dalai lama, visualization, personal development, wisdom, history, peace, self esteem, hypnosis, Stress Managment, Personal Peace, feelings, positive thinking, sports psychology, Uncategorized February 23, 2008, 4:17 pm
Dialog with Feelings [9:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (87) Dialog with Feelings (Induction) [11:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (76)In this podcast, I would like to share with you the most enlightening and liberating thing that I have learned in my 20 year journey of self-discovery. It’s a meditation technique called Dialog with Feelings. If you are already enjoying the benefits of a meditation practice, then I beg your patience for just a couple of moments. If however, you have yet to begin a meditation practice, or have just begun a meditation practice, I’d like to give you a brief education on the fundamentals of meditation.
In practice, there is almost no difference between meditation, prayer, and self-hypnosis. All three of these actions share similar physical characteristics. Whoever is doing them is doing the same thing. We become still; we become quiet; we go within ourselves.
All of our lives, we have been programmed, we have been taught to pay attention to our thoughts and almost ignore our breathing. Meditation in its simplest, most pure form just reverses the focus of our attention. We become aware of our breathing. We breathe in…and we breathe out. We breathe in…and we breathe out. That’s meditation in its simplest form. A very common mistake that people who are new to the practice of meditation make – one that often undermines and causes people to give up the practice altogether – is the misconception that we calm our minds in order to meditate. That’s 180 degrees opposite of what we actually do when we meditate. We meditate to calm our minds.
Understanding levels of consciousness is also important when beginning a meditation practice. There’s beta, that’s us fully engaged in our daily lives, driving our car, going to work, talking to our friends and family – that’s a conscious state. The other three levels of consciousness are referred to as subconscious states. There’s alpha. Alpha encompasses everything from daydreaming through trance-like states, to deep dreaming. We also experience alpha when we’re watching television. That’s one of the reasons that television is so insidious. We are in a trance-like state, being bombarded with messages of fear and consumerism and crass commercialism. And when we’re in this state, these messages that we are getting – they take hold, they take root. The next lower subconscious state is referred to as theta. In theta, lucid dreaming is possible. And after that, the fourth level, delta – non-dream sleep. There are your levels of consciousness. Beta – wide awake, alpha – trance-like daydream state, theta – lucid dreaming, delta – non-dream sleep.
Tying this all together, through the simple act of shifting our focus away from our thoughts and towards our breathing, we can reach subconscious states. And in these subconscious states, there are lots of different things that we can do. There are lots of different tools that you can apply that help you in different areas of your life. Just some examples are accelerated physical healing, performance programming, dream programming, stress management, past life regression, habit control for those of you who are trying to quit smoking or stick to diets.
Which brings me back to Dialog with Feeling. When I began this journey of self-discovery 20 years ago, I was like most people. I was all too willing to abdicate the responsibility for my emotional well-being to anybody and everybody. I used words like, “you make me mad,” and “you make me happy.” Everybody does it. Take the next 24 hours – test this for yourself. Listen to people talk around you; listen to radio; listen to television. See how many times people blame their emotional state on other people. More to the point, see how many times you do it. How many times do you say other people are responsible for your emotional well-being? “You make me happy.” “You make me mad.”
What I learned is that our feelings are a unique language. Unique to us as individuals. And our feelings tell us much more about ourselves than they do about anybody else. However, most people have that backwards, and they try to use their feelings to figure out other people. I’m upset, therefore there’s something wrong with you. The meditation technique Dialog with Feeling enabled me to interpret my feelings and what they said about me. Instead of using my feelings to figure out other people, all of a sudden I was able to decipher my feelings in such a way that it freed me from the disempowering language of blame. But at the same time it enlightened me about the root causes of my emotions. As an extra bonus, I came to the realization that there’s no such thing as a negative emotion.
This podcast is designed to provide you with the basest of theories regarding meditation and hypnosis. For those of you interested in the actual practice of Dialog with Feeling, there is an additional download wherein I use guided imagery to take you from the beta state to the alpha state, and then through the Dialog with Feeling exercise.
I find in my practice usually I’m working with some feeling that I’m uncomfortable with – anger or fear or something along those lines – it doesn’t have to be one of those feelings. It could just as easily be the feelings of joy, happiness or peace. The biggest obstacle to enlightenment for people who are doing this meditation occurs when they judge the information provided by the subconscious mind. It’s our conscious mind that rationalizes – “That can’t be it,” “It doesn’t work that way.” Our subconscious mind will not lie to us.
Let me give you a personal example of how the Dialog with Feeling meditation technique works. A little over 16 years ago, my wife and I got married. We were married in
As I said at the beginning of this podcast, this is most enlightening and liberating thing that I have learned in my journey. Enlightening because I use my feelings now to better understand myself. And to paraphrase the Dalai Lama, to learn one thing about yourself is more beneficial than to learn a thousand things about somebody else.
A Recipe for Personal Peace
Filed in Anger Management, World Peace, Cracked, Dr. Drew, Dr. Drew Pinsky, Personal Peace, Personal Responsibility, Jesus Christ, Les Brown, Proactive Stress Management, Proactive, feelings, tolerance, meditation, joy, love, peace, wisdom, personal development, patience, Reticular activating system, Change Managment, optimism, Uncategorized January 29, 2008, 11:02 pmFor 7 ½ years I taught drug- and behaviorally-addicted parolees in
While teaching this part of the curriculum, I developed a strategy that I refer to as a “Recipe for Peace.” To better understand this recipe for peace, I’d like to first share with you what our curriculum suggested was the process for anger. I used two metaphors for describing the process for anger to my students. One was an ‘anger stew.’ The meat and potatoes of anger stew is stress. The carrots and onions are triggering thoughts. The two main triggering thoughts are ‘shoulds’ and ‘blames.’ So the recipe works something like this: If a person is highly stressed and they can find somebody to blame for what’s going on in their life, it gives that highly stressed person an excuse, a rationalization, to act out in some dysfunctional, destructive, angry way. Likewise, if a person is highly stressed and they can find somebody that they think should be doing something and isn’t, or shouldn’t be doing something and is, it also gives them the rationalization to act out in some angry fashion. So again, the recipe for anger is stress plus triggering thoughts equals anger.
Now the constructive opposites for this anger recipe, what I call the recipe for peace, goes like this: Proactive stress management plus personal responsibility and acceptance equals peace. So let’s look at this recipe for peace in more detail.
To help my students better understand the connection between stress and anger, I gave them another metaphor. I suggested that they try to see themselves as balloons, and the air in the balloon is the stress. Every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they are either putting more air into their balloon until they pop, or taking air out. The proactive stress management aspect of the peace recipe is just about that. Taking air out of the balloon. It’s important to understand that there’s no such thing as no stress. A certain amount of stress is necessary just for us to be able to stand. We call it ‘muscle tension.’ We’ve all seen babies who can’t even hold their heads up; that’s no stress – that’s no muscle tension. In future podcasts we’ll discuss this in much greater detail, but I would like to give you five simple things that you can do right now to reduce the stress in your life so that you can get further and further away from living on the edge of anger.
The fastest and easiest thing that you can do to be proactive in your stress management is deep breathing. To prove this point to you, let’s do an exercise really quickly. Keep track of your pulse for 15 seconds. Then multiply that number by four. … Ok, now take three long, slow, deep breaths. … Now take your pulse again for 15 seconds and multiply that number by four. … In the vast majority of instances when I have done this exercise with my students, they found that their pulse rates dropped – significantly in some cases – just by taking three deep breaths. When they took five deep breaths, their pulse rate dropped even more. So the most immediate thing we can do to reduce the stress in our lives is deep breathing. Something that works for me is that I have environmental cues that remind me to stop and take a couple of moments to re-center myself. Currently I’m working at a grade school with developmentally disabled kids. And as you might imagine in a grade school, bells are ringing all the time. So every time I hear a bell, I stop, take a couple of deep breaths, and that re-centers me. That re-focuses me. It allows me to reduce any stress that I might have acquired since the last bell rang.
There are other fundamental things that we can do, such as eating healthy, taking vitamins, getting exercise, getting the proper amount of sleep. If any or all of these behaviors are things that you are currently doing in your life, then I’m sure that you are well aware of the benefits. However, if you’ve had difficulty instituting these behaviors into your life, a previous podcast entitled “You Can Change Without Growing, But You Can’t Grow Without Changing” provide processes so that you can begin to institute these healthy behaviors.
The most beneficial thing we can do for ourselves is to have healthy relationships with healthy people. Dr. Drew Pinsky in his book, Cracked, suggested that healthy people use their relationships to regulate their emotions. Healthy people do not bottle up their emotions and then explode later because somebody isn’t doing something that they think they should be doing. Proactively managing our stress also benefits us in other ways. It keeps us healthy. If you look at the word ‘disease’ – d-i-s-e-a-s-e – disease – it’s in the word – dis-ease. Not at ease. The more stressed we are, the more sick we become. Stress is a major contributing factor for everything from the common cold to cancer.
Another debilitating aspect of being highly stressed is that it constricts our reticular activating system – the part of the brain that helps us see options. The more stressed we are, the less options we see. Conversely, the less stressed we are, we begin to see not only the black and the white, but all of the gray in between. Future podcasts will be devoted to processes, that when practiced, can have a profound impact on the quality and quantity of one’s personal peace.
The second aspect in the recipe for peace is personal responsibility. The December podcast entitled “Putting a Man on the Moon” is entirely dedicated to personal responsibility – being responsible for our actions, our thoughts and our feelings.
The third component in the recipe for peace is acceptance of oneself and acceptance of others. Acceptance is closely aligned with personal responsibility. It’s very important to understand that people change their behavior only when they see the benefit in changing their behavior. We can’t make people do anything that they don’t want to do. How many hours of our lives have we spent trying to convince somebody to do something that they didn’t really see the benefit in doing. How much stress and anxiety have we brought upon ourselves engaging in this fruitless endeavor? People change when they see the need to change. And we need to accept that. Personal responsibility in relation to the acceptance of others rests in how long do we allow ourselves to be exposed to behaviors and attitudes that we do not believe serve our best interest. If we have friends and family or acquaintances whose behavior we allow to adversely affect us, it is our responsibility to protect ourselves. And in some cases that may mean ending relationships. But we have to take the responsibility for being as healthy and as peace-filled as we can possibly be.
It’s been my experience that being accepting and tolerant of other people is often easier than being accepting and tolerant of ourselves. Acceptance of ourselves requires that we learn to forgive ourselves for our past transgressions. One of the videos that I used to show in my class was a Les Brown video. And in this video he said, “If you wouldn’t do it today, you’re convicting an innocent person.” When I heard that the first time, it was like a lightning bolt struck me out of the sky. I realized at that moment that I was beating myself up for things that I hadn’t done in 10, 15, 20 years. And that I’m a different person today. And there’s no good point to me holding myself emotionally hostage to behaviors that I haven’t done in 20 years. One idea can change your life, and that single sentence, “If you wouldn’t do it today, you’re convicting an innocent person,” enabled me to set down baggage that I’ve been carrying around with me for most of my life.
Many of my students when talking about stress and anger management had the misconception that once they had completed that part of the curriculum that they would never be angry again. Perfection is not the goal. Perfection is impossible. Jesus Christ, the Christian physical embodiment of peace and tolerance, snapped when he saw that money changers had turned the temple into a marketplace. The goal is to have reasonable responses. And lower stress levels allow a person to do just that – have a reasonable response. Something other than the ‘fight or flight’ mentality.
It is my belief, and I have seen it work in my life and the lives of others, that the recipe for peace is proactive stress management plus personal responsibility and acceptance of ourselves and others. When these three behaviors and attitudes are practiced we begin to develop more peace within ourselves, which ultimately leads to more peace in the world. We are responsible for creating the peace in our lives. And it doesn’t take much imagination to see that world peace can become a reality when each person finds peace within their own heart.
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