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• Big Ideas About Time
  in Flexibility and change

  In my learning about the frontiers of science, mixed with years of practice in yogic traditions, I have become fascinated with issues of: time, nonduality, subjective reality, and the changing norms around these perceptions.  Have you ever noticed how mutable time is?  What effect it has on our psychological well-being?  For these reasons I am interested in and enchanted by this video.  I hope you enjoy it as well.

• Thanksgiving and Chopsticks: Learning to live in a new culture with old holidays
  in Random Thoughts Blog

  Having adopted life in Kinsale, County Cork Ireland over five years ago now we have become adept at managing the celebration of Thanksgiving, a holiday specific to one country when living in another. Upon reflection, the changes we have experienced are instructive of our settling in and making connections within our community.

  The first year I remember both celebrating and ruing the differences in what it took to get things done. On the one hand, there were no lines in the markets and we could purchase a free range turkey with no bother because few others wanted them in November.  However, we had to do without pumpkin pies as there was no filling to be found and the real pumpkins had all been sold earlier in the season.  Our guests were neighbours, older gentle and interesting folk who had graciously included us in the small gatherings that happened in the neighborhood.  Much of the conversation around the table made little sense to us, and in truth the Cork accents were often so strong as to render us incapable of reply.

  The second year was an experiment in mixed cultures, one that perhaps did not lead to the best entertainment experience of our lives.  We had sorted the pumpkin pie issue by simply bringing cans home in a suitcase after travel to the US. The turkey was the best we had ever had, coming as it did from the local butcher.  Our guest list included a younger couple who we knew from the town, the older gentleman who manages the works of our village, and an American who had rented one of the houses close by.  Unfortunately the American was of the sort who felt that his way was the best way and “What was wrong with the locals that they didn’t…?”  Not answering his emails being at the top of his list.  The one brief moment of connection for me was when I explained to him what I had learned from my Rotary group in Cork - that people here are so closely connected that they seldom resort to emails, at most texting.  Why move to the impersonal when you can go downtown for lunch and run into everyone you need to see?  What we were experiencing was our lack of connection rather than their rudeness.  The Irish couple concurred and I felt as though I had won a prize in multicultural understanding.  When the older gentleman fell asleep at the table it seemed a proper comment on the evening.

  Our third year felt as though we were finally at home and Thanksgiving modeled much of the lessons we had been learning.  We were flexible, resulting in a bigger dinner on the Saturday while we took the heart of the celebration of our holiday to our multicultural group meeting on the Thursday by sharing pumpkin pie.  Having built real homey connections with people, our guest list including the folks with whom we walked our dogs, worked, and lived close to, all of them people who shared other events regularly with us.  We understood 95% of what was said throughout the evening, only really breaking down at the end when our guests fell into politics and sports.  There was only one man whose accent was strong enough to cause me to have to ask him to repeat himself so I could answer a question.  And best of all people stayed, talked and laughed until well after 1:00am.  Great craic!

  It wasn't until the fourth year that we unpacked the China, and rolled out the bits and bobs that truly make the celebration one with historic memory by including grandmothers silver, the tablecloth we picked up in Hungary, and the centerpiece that included the little bits of handmade crafts from Africa.

  Perhaps, in retrospect, that is the greatest gift of moving to Ireland for us, that we become increasingly part of the world culture because travel is easier and the community norm allows for greater multicultural mix. That is the reason that this year we are moving both towards and away from what would have been our traditional celebration and taking Thanksgiving to a new high by incorporating our regular group of friends in a feast that stretches the tradition to include chopsticks.

  We found that it didn't work for us to have a meal on any day but Thursday so we are back to the traditional day while being adventurous instead with the food on the table. Our friend from China, Tina, will be making the feast and we are adding Chinese traditions to our American norm. In China, it is bad luck to have an odd number of main dishes so we will have a small amount of soup and then six dishes to be shared together: a couple of types of dumplings, a vegetable and potato salad, and a stuffed tofu and a spicy tofu.  Tina and her friend Grace will teach us how to make all these, thus adding to the repertoire of our lives.

  Thanksgiving continues to teach us many things as it helps us to reflect on our lives, and how much we have to be grateful for in our adopted home echoing the original Thanksgiving feast. Those settlers long ago found warmth and helpfulness in their new neighbours, who taught them new skills, literally keeping them alive over the  first winter. While nothing in our journey has been so extreme, we continue to find the connections with other people in the appreciation of the wide world in which we live in as sources for our deepest gratitude.

• Well-being #1: We All Want to Flourish - Here Is How
  in Personal Success

  Martin Seligman has a new theory. Who is Martin Seligman and why is this important? Dr. Seligman is the founder and one of the most prolific advocates of positive psychology. He is also a man for whom I have great respect. A maverick at heart, he flew in the face of a psychological tradition that looked for only disease and went on to develop scientific evidence about what leads to a positive and happy life. He took his 45 years of practice and rigorous research and solidified his ideas into five main characteristics or variables which lead to a flourishing life. This article is an overview of PERMA - his acronym to help us remember these five characteristics. As each is discussed, I hope you consider measuring your own life in terms of the relative strengths of each. My family and I have found it to be of enormous help in keeping our minds on the positive. PERMA also gives us a tool for communication when something feels a little off.  

  
  Pleasure is of course what most people think about when they think of flourishing. Pleasure, the sensations that give life its juice, contains attributes of happiness, joy, satisfaction, etc.  

  
  Engagement or focus or flow, whatever you want to call it, is the ability to be single-minded on a task so that time, and even our awareness of ourselves, stops. This attribute is the reason we play games rather than passively watch media. In my own life, the degree to which I am engaged in a task has huge effects on how much pleasure I take from it.  

  
  Positive Relationships are the heart of both PERMA and of our lives. Statistics have always shown that we tend to do well when we are involved in positive relationships. In reverse we may wither, to the point of death, when isolated. Coming from an individualistic family as I do, this is one of the characteristics I have to work on the hardest, which is only to say that not every flourish-creating characteristic comes easily to us.  

  
  Meaning is something individual to each one of us isn't it? Culturally bounded, very dependent on what we were taught was right and wrong, even on our spiritual or religious foundations, meaning underpins how we interpret the characteristics of our lives and determines much of our experience of the world.  

  
  Accomplishment, success, our ability to create the lives we want for ourselves and our family, drives much of the outputs of the Western world. When coupled with meaning, accomplishment forms much of the value on which people base their lives, at least in the Western world.  

  
  In each of the areas of life you can find success or experience failure. Also much of how we interpret whether or not we are flourishing will be determined by how we and other people around us see each of these. Just as relationship is the heart of this theory, feedback we get from others always has the potential to color our own view of our reality.  
  Future articles will look at each of these in more depth, will discuss how action research can be used to increase them, and will share some of Dr. Seligman, and my own, processes. Finally, the ways in which health and vitality interplay with PERMA will add to future discussions.

• Quantum Living.1: What We Observe Makes It So
  in Mind/Spirit/Emotion Relationship

  Much earlier in my life, I spent a great deal of time investigating metaphysics, which I define as ideas based on universally held beliefs across cultures from the beginning of time, with a focus on how the spiritual infuses our life. Along that path I was fortunate enough to participate in A Course in Miracles class and work group, who met once a week for year. Periodically, I come back to The Course and recently I have enjoyed it a great deal because of its connection to the writings/teachings of Esther and Jerry Hicks.

   

  This article investigates the similarities between the scientific quantum realm in terms of its understanding of the role of the observer and the concepts of how our minds create our realities as per both The Course and the ideas of “living with intent.

   

  On page 26 of the Workbook for Students (opened randomly for reading, as is my standard practice) I came across the following:

  The idea for today is a beginning step in dispelling the belief that your thoughts have no effect. Everything you see is the result of your thoughts. There is no exception to this fact. Thoughts are not big or little; powerful or weak. They are merely true or false. Those that are true create their own likeness. Those that are false make theirs...

   

  Salvation requires that you also recognize that every thought you have brings either peace or war; either love or fear. The neutral result is impossible because a neutral thought is impossible. There is such a temptation to dismiss fear thoughts as unimportant, trivial and not worth bothering about that it is essential you recognize them all as equally destructive but also equally unreal.

   

  Why are fear-based thoughts unreal? From the point of view of these teachers we live as co-creators with the universal life force energy through the power of our minds. In essence, we live in a heaven of our own making. The Hicks tell us that because of the wonderful contrasts in our world we form strong “rockets of desire,” telling that universal force what it is we want to create. Unfortunately, when our energy and emotions focus on lack and limitation in our lives then we create that instead of what our hearts and minds desire. Those are the unreal equally destructive thoughts of the course in miracles.

   

  What does this have to do with quantum living? Schrödinger's cat is a parable that you may be familiar with – the cat in a box that has been given a pellet of poison but is neither alive nor dead until the observer opens the box to determine which is real. This has to do with the fact that in quantum physics a particle is either a particle or a wave, with the ability to behave as both simultaneously until it is measured. When light particles are sent through a measurement device that looks for particle behavior, they behaved exclusively as we would expect particles to behave and throw the requisite themes of light as we would expect. When we are not measuring for particles the striated beams of light produced correlate as we would expect for a wave.

   

  But where does neuroscience weigh in on this topic? Dr. Karl Pribram, delves into how information is stored (or not stored) within our brains. His holonomic theory summarizes decades of scientific evidence to conclude that how we see the world is transformed by the retina in our eye much as a lens pulls out an entire image from a beam of light forming a holographic image. We have the ability to create the whole of that image in our minds. The interpretation is more in our minds then in objective reality.

   

  This quantum living/subjective reality/scientific and metaphysics/etc. series of articles continues to be a format through which I work out for myself and other curious souls the relationships that appear to exist between science and metaphysics. I enjoy investigating realms or topics previously thought never to converge. The “Whether we see the cup as half empty or half-full “ debate continues to remain a personal choice and becomes one that influences every aspect of our life.

   

  I leave it to you, my reader, to determine for yourself whether and to what extent these analogies portrayed an interesting cross-section of similarity. Perhaps we should take the idea that no thoughts are neutral seriously as we choose how to live our lives?

• Power of Mind: When the Going Gets Rough
  in Mind/Spirit/Emotion Relationship

  When I was bicycling today I came to an extremely long hill. As | went up the hill I felt tired, and so I decided to take a break about halfway up and drink some water. When I got back on my bike I was in too high a gear, spun around a little, lost my balance, and had to put my feet on the ground not to fall off. Determined not to let it get me down or deter me from my goal, I went back a few paces, got back on, and began riding again. Why am I telling you this story? Because it is a metaphor for this article, one that reminded me of the life requirement of proper use of willpower as we focus our minds on what we want to achieve.

  I've been reading Napoleon Hill lately. Have you read Think and Grow Rich? If you haven't, it's an early 1900s classic self-help book written by a man who interviewed over 500 very successful people and then wrote about how to employ the power of our minds to achieve outstanding results. It's a bit old-fashioned in the writing style to be sure, but there is something inspiring about this story of Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford. These people, like many people today, seized the moment and the potential for great innovation and literally changed our world for centuries to come.

  Napoleon Hill stresses over and over the requirement for a person to be able to get back up on the bike when they fall off, or keep a single-minded focus on their dream even when everything around them appears to say it is impossible. One of the most impressive stories in the book is of his own ability to overcome helplessness when his son was born without ears. Most would have caved under the obvious reality of lack of hearing, especially after x-rays showed that there was no inner ear structure, no obvious relationship to the brain through which hearing might develop. Dreams of a normal life seem dead. Nevertheless he decided that not only would his son hear, but that his current lack of hearing would become his greatest advantage later in life. He proceeded to tell the young child that these dreams would be true. At the end, both sides of the vision did come true. Some hearing developed in the boy so that if people shouted at him he could make sense of it. His parents kept him in regular classrooms so he never felt like his disability required that he be kept apart. Eventually technology caught up with them and a set of headphones was developed that allowed for him to hear within normal voice ranges. Finally, institutions for the deaf employed him as a motivational speaker and he became a leader in that community.

  My having difficulty riding up the hill on my bicycle today is a small challenge. Napoleon Hill and his son faced what appeared to be insurmountable challenges. Somewhere in the middle, are those challenges in my life that make me feel really bad and throw me off my game. Perhaps you have something where when it goes wrong, you can't get it out of your mind? All three of these differently sized challenges are solved by the same skill -- that of being able to focus on positive outcomes, create a positive emotional state as a result of that focus, and believe in the results. These three steps open us up to create the exact life we want to live.

  I got back up on my bike and made it up the hill. Napoleon Hill and his son overcame great odds and his son went on to hear, speak and become a leader of the deaf community. What challenges are you facing today that may seem insurmountable? Are you collecting positive stories about how people have overcome similar challenges so that you can believe that you will as well? Perhaps you aren't even approaching a dream because all you see are the challenges that hold you back? This article and others in the Power of Mind series are meant to provoke all of us along paths that are forged to help us get what we want out of life. For me today my perseverance was to continue on a very steep hill -- what will you persevere through to get where you want to go?