Watch your words

A student came into the place I work this week. Once we recognized each other, she had a story to tell me.
"My knees had been bothering me for some time. It's funny, after going to the doctor, I found out yoga is the worst thing for me."
To which I replied, "That seems strange. You mean to tell me conscious breathing linked to movement, or yoga, is bad for you? Perhaps you mean certain poses are not right for the health of your knees right now."
"No, no. You don't understand. My doctor said yoga is bad for me. I won't go to class any more, but I'm here because I still want to wear the clothes."

Your words create your world. Whatever you habitually write, speak, and think constrains your perception of reality. In effect, you are hypnotizing yourself with every word you speak, and to every word you listen.

I first began to understand the power of words many summers ago reading the book "Frogs into Princes" by Bandler and Grinder. The book is a transcript of a three day master class on NLP, or Neuro Linguistic Programming. This field is interested in how words are interpreted by the brain, and how we can use that information to open a person's mind to understand more of its resources.

For instance: imagine Marty McFly from Back to the Future. Any time someone calls him a chicken, he must fight back. Just like a computer program, if this, then that. This is his pattern, his samskara. He is stuck in this lane of thinking where fighting is the only choice when called a chicken. A NLP coach would ask his subconscious to create other possible choices the next time this situation occurs. Then he could choose from 2-3 other actions to take when called a chicken: shrug it off, walk away, or call for backup. Or, if a person is stuck in the way of thinking, "my doctor says yoga is bad for me", you could coach them into understanding, "these select poses done in this way will cause my knees to give me pain. I can listen to my body and modify or omit those poses as I practice".

If this sounds like hypnosis to you, you would be correct. NLP posits that we are literally hypnotizing ourselves with the words to which we choose to listen. That means we are constantly accepting suggestions about what our reality is from: the radio, the TV, books, facebook, email, advertising, and most of all by the words our friends and family speak (our social bubble).

Don't take my word for it. Do an experiment.

First, write a page of words describing how you feel about your health, your personal, and your career lives. This is our control reading.

Then, for the next 7 days, follow these guidelines:

1) When you have nothing kind or constructive to say, say nothing.
2) Eliminate dualistic words from your everyday speech. Good and bad do not really exist. There is only more effective and less effective. Even this is still subjective, but most people I've surveyed have less emotional attachments to the word "effective".
3) Choose the things to which you listen carefully. Words set to music are interpreted by deeper parts of the brain than spoken word, making them more powerful.
4) Spend 15 minutes a day in complete silence.

Now, write another page of words describing how you feel about your health, your personal, and your career lives. This is the experimental reading. Compare both pages.

If that's too big of a commitment for you, try this bite-sized version:
Listen carefully to the words you speak, and others speak. Notice if you make requests in the positive, "Please remember to do X", or the negative, "Don't forget to do X." Reflect on the effectiveness of both. Which statement makes it more likely you will complete the task?

More brain food next week.

P.S.- Let me know how your results.

Love is a four-splendoured thing

Tomorrow, February 14th, is a day I've been taught is about love. Commercials and cultural programming dictate that you buy someone wine, flowers, chocolate, jewelry, and a nice dinner. If you were from another planet, this is the definition of love the media would teach you- it's a product you can buy with money, a mix between rich indulgences and rare earth elements.

All it takes is thirty seconds watching how animals love each other to understand one of two things: humans did not evolve from animals, or that love doesn't have much to do with material goods.

The Buddha spoke of love in four forms:
1) metta - loving kindness, or friendliness
2) karuna - compassion
3) mudita - sympathetic joy
4) upeksha - equanimity

Metta is finding friendliness and peace toward all beings. It's speaking with and having genuine interest for everyone you meet- the barista at your coffee shop, your random friend from a past class, your life partner. The person who exudes metta wishes for the betterment of all beings.

Karuna is having compassion for those in suffering. That's all of us, bums to bodhisattvas. ("We're not humans having a spiritual experience, we're spirits having a human experience." - Teilhard de Chardin) Because we live in the land of duality, of opposites, we will always be on a journey to one side of the spectrum or the other. The person who recognizes this and still radiates love for everyone is expressing karuna.

Mudita means sympathetic joy. This is the love you feel for someone who experiences great success. It is love without envy or ego. When you can feel triumph, excitement, felicity for their victory and abstain from allowing your subjective mind to compare your experience to theirs, you know mudita. (I would start working with feeling mudita towards friends' accomplishments, then gradually move across the line toward people you find less likable.)

Upeksha is equanimity, finding peace with every moment. When you have learned to enjoy the ups as much as the downs, the lefts as much as the rights, or the up up down down left right B A select starts as much as the 007 373 5963s, you have touched on equanimity.

May you experience these four forms of love, or Brahma Vihara, this Valentine's Day.

Shantih.

Marry a rich girl.

"Marry a rich girl," he tells me. "Some of my friends who moved to this country worked in hotel bars, spending time with rich people. They dress like rich people, even though they don't have money in their pockets. They found rich women to marry, and now they're rich. I move to this country, work in a grocery, spending time with poor people. I dress like a poor person. I marry the cashier who is poor, so I am poor."
"Do you have a plan to get out of poverty?"
"To get rich, I would have to leave my wife and children to find a rich woman. Of course, there are things more important than money."

This is the life wisdom the taxi driver imparts.

We are all playing a role in this life. Sometimes it's a different character we play with certain people: we are one "self" when we're with family, another with friends, another at work, another when we feel judged or lesser than someone else, another on our first date with a new person. How many "self"s do you play?

Part of the process of growing up, becoming "comfortable with yourself", or maturing, is trying on enough outfits and personas to understand which fits you. Eventually, you learn to custom tailor your character to line up precisely with your values. It's quite a feat when fully achieved, pretty much a superpower. I'm sure you've encountered at least a few fully-cohesive characters, people who are simply magnetic because they are who they choose to be, they're fully present, 24 hours a day.

The opposite of this is the person who reacts to everything, real or imagined, living in the past or future. It's: the crazy person on the subway who shouts out at tormentors who are no longer there, the person in a groggy daze just going through the motions, and the person who constantly misinterprets everything said or done toward them like they don't deserve what they already have. We all fall into these patterns of being from time to time. The secret is- realize you've been asleep, reward yourself for realizing it, and come back to the present.

The Taxi Driver gives us this gift- if you wish to be/have/do something you can't/aren't yet, fake it 'til you make it. And even then, all you need is love.

And whether you marry a rich girl along the way or not, enjoy the ride.

Change and Death

If you've taken any of my classes in the past few months, you make have heard me make mention of "the constant". It's the thing inside you that, in the midst of the movement of life, is still. The constant is the space inside of you, the eye of the hurricane, that is simultaneously full and empty at once. In life, only two things are for sure- Change and Death.

I've been creating a lot of Change in the past few years: reorienting my career path, healing my body with yoga and food, getting married, buying an apartment. I hadn't been experiencing much Death. There must always be balance.

I received a message this week that my family dog, the one we've had for 14 years now, has kidney disease. Even with change of diet and exercise, there is no cure. Her kidneys were not designed to last forever. To my surprise, the first thing I felt was acceptance. I knew, with each visit back every year to where I grew up, that she wasn't getting any younger. That constant friend, Change, had paid me a heavy visit. Or was it Death? They're really the same thing, you see.

I hope to see her a few more times before she moves on to her next form.

All of this puts me in the "do it now" mindset. How much time do you have left? Are you spending it wisely, putting your skills and talents to use as a service for humankind? Are you using your life to unite or divide? Heal or hurt? Love or hate?

I ask these questions because it's vital for you to know who you're choosing to be, what you choose to make your life about. Get clear on the basest of truths- this body you're in is going to wear out. It may be 5, 10, or 100 years from now (I've got at least 99 left), but it is finite. You're choosing how you spend your life in every moment.

Take time this week to tell everyone how much you love them. Give everyone hugs. Take that class you've always wanted to take. Talk to that cute person in the coffee shop. What've you got to lose? Your life? You won't be here much longer anyway. Enjoy this moment. And this moment. And this moment.

Peace to all.
Love to all.
Light to all.