Finding your way alone is tricky. Here are some things I’ve learned about navigating life.

Another year come and gone, a new year to look forward to, and an old year to reflect on, but only a little bit. Reflection on our past is important for self improvement, but it can be easy to go down the rabbit hole on the past: regret, things undone, a feeling of weight, on your mind and on your person. The thoughts of the past can burden us going into a new year if we let them. Here are some of the things I do to refresh myself for the New Year.

I don’t think about the past with regret. Or at least I try very hard not to; I used to spend hours looking back, wishing I would have done things differently, and lingering on the thoughts, the feelings and the regret of the past. I have learned that the past cannot be changed, and that when we linger on it for too long, it can bring sadness, depression and it can keep us feeling stuck from moving forward. The so-called ‘bad’ of the past, through another perspective, can become good, it can be opportunity for learning. It’s a mental training that’s lifelong that helps you find the courage to not see obstacles as barriers but as things to overcome.

I let go of old things and embrace change and new things. An old friend of mine from New York once said the best way to let go of your problems is to imagine them as helium balloons, you let them go and they float away. She taught me this visual exercise and it works. Imagine your problems as floating balloons you’re holding onto, and you let them go, one by one, until they float away and disappear. It’s worth trying.

I have a vision that leads me. If we don’t dream, we die, inside and out. When we lose our vision for ourselves in the future, or our purpose in life, then we lose the excitement of the future. Think about why you have lost your vision, why you are feeling lost or stuck?  What are you missing inside you that you need to heal or to focus on.  Are you burnt out? Are you in a bad relationship or a bad job? As I coach my clients in career sessions, every part of your life affects another part. You need to have balance in your life to feel energized and positive. If you’ve lost your vision for yourself for whatever reason, it’s time to find it again for this next stage of your life.

I stay open hearted and open minded. Always be kind is a motto I’ve borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut, and it might be the simplest reminder and the hardest to do, on a day by day basis. It’s easier as we age to become narrower in our interests, but your own youthful longevity depends on being open to new things, to change, and to situations. Resilience, curiosity, imagination, energy are built on the things we love, and what we love is so much less than what there is. Being curious every day about new things will remind you how much there is to feel in the world, and how much you are the one to build your own experience of the world. I like to be  curious and to stay open to the possibilities that come into my life; instead of saying ‘this is impossible’…I choose to to be open to it and treat it as a gift for consideration for my future direction. Neurologists will also tell you it’s good for you, which seems obvious to me.

I believe in people and my own future. Cynicism is our basic culture these days, to the point where we ourselves don’t realize how cynical we’ve become. Cynicism is a disbelief in people and potential, and if there’s anything I dislike the most it’s cynicism. It’s a low frequency emotion or intellectual stance, and it drains you and everyone of vital energy. Sure, some cynical humour can be funny, but are constantly cynical people funny? They are the hardest to be around because they drain you of thinking or feeling the potential in you for the joyful expression of your born talent.

While life can be tough, and we all experience this, I see only one option.  That option is survival, thriving, overcoming obstacles, learning and never giving up. I believe we are in the place we are supposed to be whether it is challenging or not, so be thankful for the space you are holding, learn what you are supposed to and simply BELIEVE.  Believe and trust…trust that you are being looked after and that you will be directed down the path that is best for you. My mantra….”Failure is not an option”.

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The best advice? Forget it!    | Photo: Diego Azubel/EPA

Holiday depression is common, but being happy is easier than we think. Watch this short excerpt from “Did you used to be R.D. Laing?” a documentary portrait of Dr. Laing by Kirk Tougas and Tom Shandel. It just might make you smile.

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“…you’ve got to be kind.”

In the book God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine, the millionaire Eliot Rosewater develops a conscience and dedicates his fortune to helping anyone who comes to him for help. The founder of The Rosewater Foundation and volunteer firefighter goes against the wishes of his family, who then hires a lawyer to prove that Eliot Rosewater is crazy in order to serve the lawyer’s greedy ends and the self-preservation of the Rosewater family. The Rosewater clan accumulated their fortune basically through forced labour at low wages. Being rich, they accumulate great wealth and a great name, but it’s wealth and a reputation built on the lives of the working poor they’ve take advantage of for generations. Eliot Rosewater’s conscience creates great problems for the standing and the fortune of the Rosewater family.

One of Vonnegut’s most famous quotations comes from God Bless You Mr. Rosewater:

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

To me, this is where true greatness lies. Be kind, dammit, is a great reminder that we lose sight of this basic principle in our day-to-day interactions with people. As the American poet Charles Bukowski says in The Crunch, “People are not good to each other/one on one/people are just not good to each other.” It’s a grim reminder of the truth of this statement, one we can recognize in our news reporting, in what we observe in situations around us, and even in our own lives. Kindness is not a universal habit, it’s safe to say. But what if it was?

If God Bless You Mr. Rosewater teaches anything, it’s that a conscience, being kind, is not the way of the world, to the point the world wants to prove such kindness is craziness. We tell ourselves in our everyday lives that being kind matters, but how often do we truly live it? Kindness is more than charity and charitable giving; Eliot Rosewater gives as much time to the so-called town kooks as the serious representatives of his own family. He listens intently to their troubles and commiserates with them. He asks them what they need, and then he gives it to them. Basically, everyone thinks Eliot Rosewater is mad. The fact is, he just might be, because such basic caring looks mad to a material world: why on earth would you give away everything? Why would you give an audience to the most down and out? Why would you ruin your family’s great name by making a mockery of the institutions they’ve built? Eliot’s basic answer is it makes him happy to make other people happy. So, he becomes a kind of Christ-figure in the book: anyone can make an appointment with Eliot and his Rosewater Foundation, for whatever they need. Eliot pays a reputational price as Mushari, the lawyer, and the Rosewater family try to brand him as insane and try to get power of attorney over Eliot. Meanwhile, he continues to give away his time and his fortune to the disadvantaged.

So, is kindness crazy? No. Do we sometimes, in real life, make excuses for being less than kind? Yes. How can we all be more kind in our everyday lives, even if we don’t have the millions of Eliot Rosewater? Well, I think what we can really do is listen, be present, and understand how what we do, or do not do, has consequences. If we care about and we’re kind from the most ‘down’ to the ‘highest’, it helps us become higher ourselves: more present and understanding at every interaction. People who have hard times might need food, shelter, clothing, a job. Those of us with more, might need to remember how lucky we really are, how accidental that luck is, and that we need to be kinder to everyone because that kindness is also our gift to ourselves, our own being, and how we become more, instead of less, human.

Kindness shouldn’t be random. Kindness is a state of being, a state of self that everyone can achieve if you put your mind, heart and soul into living it and giving it to others. Happy holidays everyone!

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Power vs Force In 2020.

One of my favourite books of all time is the book Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinations of Human Behaviour, by David R. Hawkins M.D. Ph.D. The book is a meditation on the evidence that the emotions we choose for ourselves determine at what level we resonate inside of ourselves for our own growth, and how our choices towards negativity creates sickness in us, and decides our fate in our relationships to everything in our life. The choice towards higher powers, on the other hand, is available to us all, says Dr. Hawkins, who presents us with the range of human emotions and their effects on us from the lowest to the highest, and some of the historical and near history people who exemplify, in their behaviour, the highest regions of human potential. He shows by example that while there are only so many Buddhas, everyone can aspire to become one, because aspiring changes the individual and the community around them. The climbing up or down is the thing. Down is hate and fear, which weakens the individual to their core, and impedes their growth to harmony and beyond that. Lower emotions keep you down. On the other hand, choosing love heals and empowers the individual, and sets them on a higher path, somewhere. The opportunities come with the choices. Professional efficiency, being good at your job, would resonate below a basic happiness line, according to Dr. Hawkins. But your work life happiness can be improved by choosing joy instead of resentment, for example; or compassion over anger. Love, being somewhere in the middle of the pack of human potential, lifts you up, and leads to that web effect or network effect, I alluded to moments ago. It’s a hard thing to do, conjure love, as an example, judging by today’s divorce statistics, or even the dehumanization of the modern workforce, layoffs of real people in favour of more automation. The modern world makes it hard on the individual to rise above. But, then again, maybe not so. The change does happen on the ground floor, with you, and me, and within each of us. For most of us, a basic and fundamental change in attitude would be a good start in completely changing our personal fortunes for the better, exactly by how we really interact with the world. In a brief introduction on Amazon, Dr. Hawkins’ book is described this way:

“David R. Hawkins details how anyone may resolve the most crucial of all human dilemmas: how to instantly determine the truth or falsehood of any statement or supposed fact. Dr. Hawkins, who worked as a “healing psychiatrist” during his long and distinguished career, uses theoretical concepts from particle physics, nonlinear dynamics, and chaos theory to support his study of human behavior. This is a fascinating work that will intrigue readers from all walks of life!”

This description hardly does justice to Dr. Hawkins’ important work. Within, what you’ll find is a guide who’s created a kind of guidebook to recognizing that our feeling emotions are the most vital part in achieving our ultimate selves, which means transcendent happiness in every human person, in higher spiritual, emotional, intellectual and physical health and resonance.

Dr. Hawkins notes that there are very few individuals on the planet who have ever resonated at the highest levels available to people, beyond even the high resonance of love, well above, in fact. It’s these individuals whom billions follow and idolize down the centuries and forever since. These people, like Jesus and Gandhi, become spiritual guides and gods, or virtual gods, to the billions. This doesn’t happen by accident, says Dr. Hawkins. Down the line from the top of the truly illuminated few, there are then the many well-known and famous people, known for their intellectual giftedness, who have changed the way the world thinks; people like Rousseau or Voltaire, he says, resonate at high intellectual levels and we remember them and idealize them for their high achievements. But we also don’t revere them, in the way we do the truly Enlightened Ones, the luminous prophets of the world.

Then there’s you, and me, reacting in our lives, every day. Life is hard. Things happen. And I know It seems just automatic sometimes in our day-to-day lives to choose fear before hope, jealousy before acceptance, hate before love. Yet it’s these very choices, down or up, that become our mental habits, that then become persistent physical and spiritual weaknesses or strengths. Our reality is shaped by our choices. There are a lot of health benefits to thinking healthily. The way up is the hardest, because started a new habit is always the hardest, but the way up is the only way. The world is full of negative thinkers, negative words, negative feelings, which means it’s easy to find a way of thinking that will bring you down, if you let it. The choice begins with each of us, and it’s a reflected habit that becomes, as Ovid said, character.

The most negative emotions, like fear, hate, jealousy, control, and envy, resonate at such a low level that these emotions make us sick if we choose these levels or stay at these levels for long.

The choices we make daily affect ourselves and our lives so radically, argues Dr. Hawkins, that it’s in everyone’s interest to work on evolving into the powerful emotions, the positive ‘Power’ emotions from his title, and away from the negative ‘Force’ emotions that keep us down, keep us weak, unhealthy, and disable our relationship to others and the world at large. If you sit around all day hating everything and being jealous, you can expect the quality of your life, your relations, your health, and even your understanding of the meaning of life, to be very impaired. You will feel weak because force emotions create weakness in us. The higher emotional resonance we achieve, the more powerful we become in all the ways we admire in others who show these qualities. We stop forcing control over our lives and the lives of others and instead accumulate the positive powers that give us understanding, more happiness, presence, more ability to help those struggling and, ultimately, our highest enlightenment.

If you’ve ever heard the fable of the sun and the wind, you will get the gist of this important book. In the allegory, a man is walking with his jacket on. The sun and the wind have a bet as to which of them will be able to get the jacket off the man the fastest. First the wind goes. The wind blows and blows, first blustery, then gale force. The harder the wind blows, the tighter the man clutches his jacket around him. The wind tries and tries, harder and harder each time, to get the man to remove his coat. The wind finally runs out of air and gives up. The man has his jacket on, buttoned to the throat, collar up around his ears.

Now it’s the sun’s turn. The sun comes out and shines on the man, warmer and warmer and warmer. Not hot but unhurried. The sun keeps shining on the man steadily, bringing warm rays down. Pretty soon, the man, getting warmer and warmer, decides to remove his jacket. The sun wins the bet easily. That’s the difference between power and force, and why power, like the sun shining, is more profound than the blustering force of the wind, which as strong as it is, can’t equal the awesome, persuasive and easy power of the sun.

If you’re looking for a good gift for yourself or someone you love, think about getting them Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinations of Human Behaviour. It’s easy reading, engaging, and useful map to have on you journey towards being your most powerful self.

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