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We all crave inner peace, well being and happiness yet we commonly seek those things in the wrong places and end up feeling even more empty, unhappy, lost or frustrated than we were at the start . Ultimately there really is no wrong as it is all learning and experience; however there are ways that are more direct, enjoyable and productive if we are really committed to creating these outcomes for ourselves.

The place to look for the path to our inner contentment is our mind. Not that it is the final resting place, but that knowledge and mastery of it leads us to our essential nature where all that we seek resides.  In the most fundamental way this is a journey of energy, however cognitive and emotional approaches can be an entry point as well. From my perspective, approaching our lives from an energetic standpoint clears the clutter and simplifies but we all must pass through the doorway on our own terms.

It can be helpful to think about your mind is awareness on a continuum. Think about it as a river that flows with your experience of it being a result of where you place your attention.  Whatever area you focus on becomes reality for that time with all its attendant resources and ecology, E.G. feelings, strengths, weaknesses etc. If you focus on the portion of the river that is congested with negative thoughts, the past, your story, unresolved feelings and dire predictions of the future, then that is what you have to work with. If you go upstream and connect at the mouth of the river that flows out of pristine mountain streams, you have a different reality and resources to draw on. From this vantage point the power of a clearer, truer flow can help clear the blockages downstream. This clearing of our blockages, old patterns and the release of our accumulated hurts and wounds brings a sense of renewal, a powerful shift in perspective and an embodiment of our true nature.

We all believe at some point that we do not have time to focus on, learn about and master our inner landscape, but when we look  at how things really work in this universe, the question can be asked…”Do we have time NOT to?”

I (Peg) am fascinated with the energetic aspects of money and what is does to us, what it does to society. For some time I have been thinking about the value of work and goods and services. Why do people work at jobs they don’t like? What factors go into deciding that an hour of time from one person is worth more or less than an hour of time from another? How did we get to the point where so many people are not earning a living wage while others have more than they will ever need or use? There are many reasons for all of this, on multiple levels.

What is interesting about our current times is that these topics have reached the mainstream and we are beginning to have intelligent conversations about them in many spheres of influence. Last week I started reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber. Within a few days, a friend told me about Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein. Interestingly enough, they were published on the same day: July 12, 2011, just ahead of the Occupy Wall St. movement. As I was scanning my email today, a third link came in. The Daily Good posted a story called: “When Generosity Meets Venture Capital.” When I delve deep into a topic, things often come to me in groups of three.

A public conversation about money, debt and humanity is emerging. It’s a growing movement and it’s exciting. During Biblical times, Jubilee years were held periodically where all consumer debt was cancelled. Just imagine how things would shift if we did this today! The time is right to envision a world where we all live in peace, health and happiness … and we can all contribute in one way or another.

Related articles

• Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber (theglobeandmail.com)

We’re hearing a lot about memory these days. What does it have to do with energy and being? Quite a bit, actually. Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Science of Remembering Everything, tells us that to memorize is to be more mindful and to pay more attention to the world around you. He says that “remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.” Taking notice is about being present. The more you notice and register in your mind via lively details, the more you truly experience. Your perspective broadens and your life becomes richer.

One of the tricks to remembering is to categorize what you’d like to remember into segments that represent people, objects and actions, make them vivid or “sticky”, and then store them in memory palaces (such as the rooms of your childhood home). Think about your own life and some of the things you can clearly recall. What are some of your happiest moments as a child? What about the saddest or the most frightening? What do you recall about your first job? How about your first relationship? More than likely an array of events, circumstances and situations come to mind. You can probably recall the exact day or time, who was present, where you were, what was happening. The deeper the imprint, the more likely you are to remember.

Although it takes a bit of practice, you can train your memory. As your memory expands, your knowledge base and perspective do as well. In ancient times, the collective memory was maintained and shared orally through the power of story. People memorized the stories and passed them down from generation to generation, expanding the mind. As the written word emerged, the human collective memory shifted from the individual mind to books. Now we are experiencing another significant shift with the proliferation of aids — such as the internet, smart phones with apps that will tell you where to park, what to eat, GPS systems that remember addresses and direct you how to go, and much more — that literally replace our memory. One of the downsides is that we don’t have to remember … our devices do it for us. This trend coincides with our stress-filled lives and the increasing decline of our memories.

Our lives are profoundly shaped by our perceptions and our perspective about life is expanded by our experiences … what we see, feel, hear, touch, and what we know.  To help broaden your mind and expand your energy, seek out new experiences and be mindful of them. Observe everything and remember to practice the art of presence every day.

Related articles

• Moonwalking (thefineprints.wordpress.com)
• Memory: Content or Method? (customerthink.com)

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness. — Chuang Tzu

After I cleared my incoming email recently of non-essential messages, five remained. “How curious,” I thought as two of the five messages pertained to happiness. One was from the Daily Good, which opened with the above quote from Chuang Tzu. Simple, refreshing and clean. The other was from publishing coach, Robin Hoffman, with details about another happiness book.

Next I typed “happiness” into the Yahoo search engine and noted 227,000,000 results! A Google search on the same term yielded 54,300,000 results. Far fewer, yet overwhelming.

What is it about happiness, I thought? The more we seem to pursue it, the further from our grasp it seems to be. Then I returned to the Chuang Tzu quote. It’s all right there. Stop doing and start being. Experiment with withdrawing your attention from the pursuit of happiness and decide to BE happy. Experience happiness in the moment, in every moment. Try it and share your experiences with us via comments to this blog or on our Living Energy Facebook page.

Related articles

• Livia Kohn, Ph.D.: Chuang-tzu: The Tao of Perfect Happiness (huffingtonpost.com)

Energy. It’s everywhere. Inside. Outside. All around and ever-expanding. Karen Kallie, Tony Pace and I call our work together Living Energy because it is alive, connected and always changing.

One of the aspects of energy that fascinates me is how our individual and collective energy patterns are mirrored in our space and visa versa. Have you ever noticed a pattern between your computer or technical devices and personal energy?  I have. When my energy is not running smoothly, my computer displays similar patterns and visa versa.

When it takes me longer than usual to do something, I know it is time to shift my energy, attention and focus: take a break, go for a walk, do some yoga, meditate, garden, write a note, cook a meal, call a friend, etc.  When I return, the process usually goes much more smoothly and takes far less time. Since this is a type of energy I want to expand every day, it’s worthwhile for me to tune in and notice what is happening. If I continued on the same path, I would be expanding the energy of blockage, frustration, jams and more.

The next time you realize that you are pushing against something, take a break. As Esther and Jerry Hicks might say, drop your oars, allow your boat to turn around and float downstream. Shifting your focus changes your energy and enables a new pattern to take root. Going with the flow that comes naturally to each of us, through our hearts and intuition, is far easier than moving against the current. It also feels much better.

There is a bit of controversy at Harvard University about the voluntary “Kindness Pledge” the institution has asked incoming students to sign this year. Some of those in opposition have indicated that kindness conflicts with intellectual freedom and that the pledge does not have a place at Harvard.

The Kindness Bus

I can understand this perspective. Kindness is a virtue that emanates from the heart, not the mind or the intellect. In my opinion, kindness is an automatic response when we cultivate love within our hearts, within ourselves. I can see where too much thinking about kindness might get you all mixed up inside. If you are arguing a point, the rational mind might suggest tossing aside civility and going for the jugular … win your argument at all costs.

What is “kindness” anyway and why is it important? The dictionary defines kindness as the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate. Wikipedia indicates that kindness is the act or the state of being kind —marked by goodness and charitable behaviour, mild disposition, pleasantness, tenderness and concern for others. It is known as a virtue, and recognized as a value in many cultures and religions. In his book “Rhetoric,” Aristotle wrote that kindness is an emotion that is defined as being helpful to someone in need, not in exchange for anything or for an advantage to the helper. Kindness is about caring. Kindness is important because it holds the possibility of all of us creating a better world. We are all human and we are one global community. What we do to one another, we do to ourselves.

While Harvard debates kindness, the rest of us can model kindness. Act according to your heart. Do what feels right. To learn more, check out Random Acts of Kindness, One Million Acts of Kindness, Carry Out Kindness. They’ll take you to even more resources and sites.

Be kind to yourself today and be kind to everyone you meet.

Related articles

• Harvard’s ‘Kindness’ Pledge: (huffingtonpost.com)
• Harvard Pledge Values ‘Kindness’ Over Learning: Virginia Postrel (businessweek.com)

This article and accompanying pictures provide great motivation to get into and stay with a routine meditation practice!

Even Beginners Can Curb Pain With Meditation

by Adam Cole 02:05 pm April 6, 2011

Robert Coghill/Wake Forest University School of MedicineSigns of pain disappeared from MRI images of the brain when freshly trained novices meditated.

Meditation has long been touted as a holistic approach to pain relief. And studies show that long-time meditators can tolerate quite a bit of pain.

Now researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found you don’t have to be a lifelong Buddhist monk to pull it off. Novices were able to tame pain after just a few training sessions.

Sounds a bit mystical, we know, but researchers using a special type of brain imaging were also able to see changes in the brain activity of newbies. Their conclusion? “A little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” Fadel Zeidan, a neuroscientist and the study’s lead author, tells Shots. That finding’s a first, Zeidan says.

In the study, a small group of healthy medical students attended four 20-minute training sessions on “mindfulness meditation” — a technique adapted from a Tibetan Buddhist form of meditation called samatha. It’s all about acknowledging and letting go of distraction.”You are trying to sustain attention in the present moment — everything is momentary so you don’t need to react,” Zeidan explains. “What that does healthwise is it reduces the stress response. The feeling of pain is a very blatant distraction.”

So how did the researchers gauge the effect? They administered a very distracting bit of pain: A small, thermal stimulator heated to 120 degrees was applied to the back of each volunteer’s right calf.  The subjects reported both the intensity and unpleasantness of the pain. If pain were music, intensity would be volume.  Unpleasantness would have more of an emotional component, kind of like how much you love or hate a song.

After meditation training, the subjects reported a 40 percent decrease in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness.  And it wasn’t just their perception of pain that changed. Brain activity changed too.

Primary Somatosensory Cortex

Notes

This depiction of the body, the cortical homunculus, was first developed by Wilder Penfield.  Each body part maps to a specific spot on a cross section of the brain’s sensory processing region, the primary somatosensory cortex. The larger the feature, the more brain space devoted to it.

Source: NPR; Credit: Adam Cole, Nelson Hsu

Every part of the body is mapped to a specific part of the brain called the primary somatosensory cortex. “If I touch you on your left hand right above your left knuckle, there is an area in the brain that corresponds to that specific area in your hand that will be activated,” Zeidan explains. “When you are in pain it is much more activated — more intense and more widespread.”

This activation shows up on MRI brain scans.  When subjects experienced the heat stimulus under normal conditions, the “right calf” part of the primary somatosensory cortex lit up.  But after the subjects were trained in meditation, the activity in this region was not even detectable.

Brain images also show that meditation increased activation in areas of the brain related to cognitive control and emotion — areas where the experience of pain is built. What’s more, better meditators (those who scored higher on a standard scale of mindfulness) tended to have more activation in these areas and a lower experience of pain.

But can you achieve similar results by just approximating meditation, or believing you are in control of your pain tolerance? Zeidan says probably not. In this study, subjects who paid attention to their breathing to mimic meditation saw no significant change in pain.  And, in a previous study, subjects given fake training failed to see meditation’s effects, even though they believed they were actually performing mindfulness meditation.

Zeidan says he will run some more studies to get at how meditation relieves pain.  He hopes meditation can soon be applied clinically, perhaps to help patients cope with pain after surgery or chemotherapy.

“You might not need extensive training to realize pain-relief benefits,” Zeidan says. “Most people don’t have time to spend months in a monastery.”

Related articles

• More about Pain and Meditation (contemplativemind.wordpress.com)
• Regular Meditation Can Help Tune Out Distractions, Study Says (fitsugar.com)

Today’s Daily Om inspirational essay about conscious decisions coincides nicely with the thought I’d like to share today: taking personal responsibility for yourself leads to an empowered and authentic life. This in turn supports better physical, mental and emotional health, resulting  in overall well-being and happiness. When we make conscious decisions we actively sort through our options, choosing the ones that feel right at the time. We actively choose our response vs. defaulting to decisions unconsciously. We choose what to do because it feels right vs. merely doing what we are told, even if it is not the popular or recommended approach. Acting by default is taking the easy route and doing whatever someone else says. Acting by default is a lazy approach.

Recently I met with a dermatologist. This individual made two recommendations that did not suit me. The first was to use a sunscreen that I know ranks high on the EWG’s “hazard scale” for sunscreens. The second was to use a petroleum based product with methylparaben to moisturize dry skin. When we discussed the sunscreen and alternative choices, it occurred to me that this professional was simply unaware of better choices for your skin. She was recommending products that block the sun but may also contribute to skin cancer. I wrote down the name of the second product, looked it over at the pharmacy and later researched the ingredients on my own. Although I didn’t remember why, paraben-based products were a flag in my mind. A quick Google search provided the answer: concentration of parabens, particularly methylparaben have been found in breast tumors. So here we have an educated professional recommending products that may contribute to more problems than the ones I was trying to solve. My guess is that this is a common occurrence. How often do we defer to others’ because we think they know better or they must be right (including me!)?

Rather than be angry about this professional’s lack of knowledge in this area, this experience reinforced my resolve to be personally responsible for my choices. This professional provided her best recommendation. In my opinion her recommendation fell short of being more fully informed. That part is up to me and up to each one of us.

As you go through each day, become more aware of your decisions. Pay attention to the ones that you consciously make vs. the times you just do what others say. Responding by default may seem like the easier and less overwhelming choice at the time. If it leads to you feeling disempowered or blaming others for any part of your choice then it’s really about delaying the inevitable: being responsible for your own choices, actions, thoughts and words.

The healthcare system is just one example. Each of our lives is filled with many more, particularly within our work, family and social environments. Play with these thoughts and try them out. How do they apply to your life? What changes can you make to live a more empowered and authentic life?

Related articles

• Study Shows Bisphenol-A and Methylparaben Have a Triggering Effect on Cancer (guide.thesoftlanding.com)
• A Review of the Five Best Sunscreens that are Safe for Both You & Your Child (savings.com)

“The New Science of the Teenage Brain,” National Geographic Magazine’s October cover story, is a “must-read” if youare the parent of a teenager or you interact with teens. Brain imaging technology shows us that adolescence is a key time for brain remodeling and wiring — a highly adaptive and functional period, as the brain continues to develop well into our mid-twenties.

The physical changes in the brain move slowly from the rear to the front. The rear of the brain, by the stem, is where we process functions such as vision and movement. The front of the brain is where more complicated thinking and processing occurs, along with goal setting and evaluation of different agendas. In teens, the front of the brain is still developing. As we age our ability to integrate memory and experience into our decisions improves.

Research has found that teens tend to make less use of the part of the brain that monitors performance, spots errors, plans, and stays focused. They use more of the brain that deals with impulse. However, when offered an extra reward, teens push the decision-making regions of the brain a little harder. Thus, richer rewards make the executive region of the brain more effective. This is one of the reasons why video games are so successful. They are fast, exciting and filled with lots of rewards.

The teen brain weighs risk vs. reward differently than adults. Teens love new and exciting things. They’ll take a higher risk for the thrill of it as well as for the social rewards, such as approval of friends. They react strongly to social ups and downs because that is a big part of their world. Teens are closely connected to their friends. They follow and learn from them.

So where do we draw the line with helping vs. hindering our kids? How do we guide our children to make the best decisions when they are not fully equipped to do so?  Studies show that kids do better in life when parents are involved and guide their children with a “light but steady hand, staying connected but allowing independence.” It’s a matter of being involved while creating a safe and somewhat protected environment where the teen feels like he or she is in control of decisions that matter to them.

As with all relationships, understanding another’s perspective is key. Knowing the teen brain is undergoing massive reorganization and growth during these prime years may help make the process a little easier. Give some thought to turning situations into a game. Include a series of rewards. Evaluating the risk vs. reward from a teen perspective may bring a whole new light to the situation.

If you find your stress level increasing as you interact with your teen, take a time-out. Breathe. Create some space. “Freeze-frame” the situation on a positive note and flow loving energy to yourself and your teen. Then come back and try again when your energy is clear, coherent and abundant.  As adults, we set examples for our children. Although they may be taking cues from their friends, they are watching us. They want to know what to do, yet they want it to be their decision. Gently offering a perspective based on wisdom and experience, vs. parental authority has a better chance of penetrating the teen brain than taking a heavy-handed approach that may hinder or shut down communication channels.

Related articles

• Online Course Explores the Teenage Brain (psychologytoday.com)
• FINALLY! A Scientific Explanation For Why Teen Brains Are Different (businessinsider.com)
• “An exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature” – The Teenager (19pencils.com)

Take a time out when your energy is tangled or knotted!

Do you ever feel like your wires get crossed, knotted or all tangled up?  This happens to me periodically, particularly with technology. Yesterday I spent three times the length of time it took me to write a communication to rectify a technical snag in the program. The longer I spent trying to fix the problem, the more constricted my energy became. I knew what was happening, yet I continued down the path. I felt that if I just tried a little harder I just might “get it.” I took a break for a few hours while I went for a walk and prepared dinner before approaching it again in the evening. I made progress, which brought some relief, but there was still one piece evading me. By the time I was ready to call for help, online support was closed for the evening. I tried again … using a few different approaches. Still no luck. Late into the night I acknowledged that I would set the problem aside, get a good night’s sleep, and contact the Help Desk in the morning. I’m glad I did. The problem was fixed within half an hour.

As I was going through this process I realized that my experience was a replica of what many of us do each day. When we have a problem, we push and push, trying harder and harder. We might make some progress but often not enough to resolve it completely. As we get deeper and deeper into the issue, our energy gets all tangled up. Once it is knotted up inside it gets harder to extract ourselves and seek a different route. We experience blockages at many levels … mental confusion and frustration, physical tightness of breath and body, emotionally we may feel anxious, be short with oneself or those we encounter.  The more wrapped up or emotionally invested we are in the issue, the harder it is to solve.

There is an art to gently untangling knotted energy. The solution is to step away from the situation, create some space and allow options to present themselves. Anything that brings relief will ease such situations, open the door and allow options to present themselves. A walk usually helps me. I often get a lot of ideas and answers as I walk. Yesterday this was not the case. A good night’s sleep is next on my list. This is what helped me. I went to sleep knowing that I would get a resolution to my problem in the morning. After I finally set it aside, I knew getting the right help would take far less time than I had already invested. And that is exactly what happened.

The next time you realize that your energy is tangled, step away from the situation and create space. Withdraw your attention from the problem and change your pace. Breathe. Go for a walk. Meditate. Play. Watch a movie. Read a book. Spend time with family or friends. Do something creative. Sleep. Return with a fresh perspective and re-charged energy. Take a new approach. It will make a difference.

Related articles

• Untangled (chrisbrogan.com)
• An Untangled Moment (karmalifereadings.wordpress.com)