David Brooks, a centrist Republican writer for the NY Times is known as a grounded, insightful and deeply sensible political commentator. This humorous talk from TED on New Humanism shows how he is coming to grips with mindset and sense-making as the critical success factors for leading and governing.

I never would expect this coming from a Republican but that is what is so exciting about being alive today: we are constantly being challenged to question our long-held beliefs.

He talks about the importance of social trust, the value of emotions, mind-sight, and that people learn from people they love. He asks, “why are the most socially attuned people are earth completely de-humanized when they think about making policy?”

He says we are social animals not rational animals and we emerge out of relationships. When I hear folks like him, starting to make the case we have been evangelizing, I believe a tipping point is emerging.

Let me know how you enjoy this.

Happiness can be defined as the emotional balance sheet we keep that allows us to say honestly whether we’re living a happy life, in spite of unfavourable events happening in between.

The biggest confusion in the present times is the search for permanent happiness as we have started realising that material gadgets are short term joys and relationships have high failure rates. So how do I find my lasting happiness?

According to Gallup survey on global happiness 2010, life satisfaction, rises with personal and national income. But positive feelings, which also increase somewhat as income rises, are much more strongly associated with other factors, such as feeling respected, having autonomy and social support, and working at a fulfilling job. The study also reported that one sees a quite strong correlation around the world between income and happiness, but on the other hand it’s quite shocking how small correlation money has with positive feelings and enjoying yourself.

- Dr Amit Nagpal, PhD

Here’s a very imformative article on sleep, sent to me by Mariah and comes from Dr. Mercola’s website:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/11/27/dr-naiman-on-sleep.aspx

One of the Most Common Causes of Insomnia
Posted By Dr. Mercola | November 27 2010 | 26,157 views

Sleep is an essential part of optimal health. In fact, if you’re not sleeping well, it’s virtually impossible to be healthy…

In this interview, clinical psychologist and sleep specialist Dr. Rubin Naiman shares his extensive knowledge of this often overlooked aspect. His work has focused exclusively on sleep and dreams for the past 20 years.

What is “Sleep”?

This is an important question, because as Dr. Naiman says, “too often, we try to resolve sleep issues without knowing what it is.”

He draws a parallel to the general topic of health. Many people think that “getting healthy” equates to “fighting disease,” but health is much more than just the absence of illness…

“Likewise, sleep is not simply the absence of waking,” Dr. Naiman says. “This is a very common misunderstanding around the world today. We define sleep negatively. We define it in terms of what it’s not.

… So we believe that sleep is “not waking,” but to define it in those simple terms, which suggests that any kind of unconsciousness is a kind of sleep, is simply not true. There are certain qualities associated with sleep that most of us have become desensitized to.

So what is sleep?

When you look at changes in EEG, in electrical brain activity, as we go from waking into deeper stages of sleep, those changes parallel the same changes we see when people go into truly deep restful states. More specifically, I’m talking about meditators. Accomplished meditators have been shown to be able to access brainwave activity that looks very, very much like deep sleep.

In a sense, we need to think of sleep as not the absence of waking but another kind of experience in its own right. There is actually some data that suggests that you can learn to cultivate awareness during deep stages of sleep.”

The Spiritual Dimensions of Sleep

While research has shown that sleep is important for a number of different reasons, from improved performance and alertness to improved immune system function, and increased creativity, these benefits still do not tell the whole story.

“We need to remember that sleep, in addition to providing all the service to waking life, is an event in it of itself,” Naiman says.

“Sleep delivers something. It takes us to another place of consciousness.

I deeply believe that sleep has spiritual benefit. It’s an event in it of itself.

When we recognize that, we really shift our attitudes towards sleep as something we can actually enjoy — not something we simply need to do to be healthier.”

A lot of people are interested in spirituality, but how many of you have ever considered tapping into, or taking advantage of this spiritual dimension of sleep? I agree that looking at sleep from this renewed perspective could have a very positive impact on your relationship to sleep.

Viewing it as a sort of spiritual process, as opposed to a temporary shut-down from waking life, could help relax your anxiety about “having” to sleep.

Understanding Why and How Insomnia Occurs

The most commonly reported sleep disorder is insomnia; having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, or the inability to get quality sleep throughout the night.

According to Dr. Naiman, one of the most common causes of insomnia is a condition called “cognitive popcorn:”

“Cognitive popcorn is something that occurs when you put your head down, trying to go to sleep or trying to get back to sleep in the middle of the night, and suddenly your mind starts to produce all of these thoughts.

They’re unwanted thoughts, uncontrollable thoughts. It’s as if the mind has a mind of its own. That’s a very common complaint that keeps people awake.”

In order to understand why you can’t sleep, you need to understand that sleep is an outcome of two classes of variables:
Sleepiness – Under normal conditions, your sleepiness should increase throughout the day, peaking just before you go to bed at night. This is ideal, as you want your sleep to be high at the beginning of the night.
“Noise” –If the noise is conceptually greater than your level of sleepiness, you will not fall asleep.
“Noise” occurs in three zones: the mind level, body level, and the environmental level.
Dr. Naiman gives this example: “If you’re energized during the day, you’re feeling passionate, you want to move, be productive and so on, that’s great. But if that experience occurs in the middle of the night, that becomes a kind of noise.”
The most common type of mind noise, however, is the “cognitive popcorn;” unstoppable thoughts running through your mind at night.
Examples of body noise include pain, discomfort, indigestion, side effects from prescription drugs, or residual caffeine from drinking coffee too late in the day.
Environmental noise is usually obvious, such as noises in your room or house, a snoring partner, music, lights, or being too hot.

In order to get a good night’s sleep, you want your sleepiness level to be high, and the noise level to be low.

According to Dr. Naiman, more often than not, the reason why people can’t fall asleep is NOT because of lack of sleepiness, but rather because of excessive noise.

Therefore, the FIRST thing you need to ask yourself when you can’t sleep is:
“Where/What is the noise (mind/body/environmental)?”

Typically, people will find between three to six different factors that contribute to the noise burden keeping them awake!

So it’s important to really evaluate your environment and inner/outer state to determine ALL the contributing factors. If you address one problem, but not the others, you still may not be able to fall asleep, or stay asleep throughout the night.

For more in-depth details about the various forms of insomnia, please listen to the interview in its entirety, or read through the transcript.

Two Common Problems that Can Keep You Tossing and Turning

Two very important contributing factors that can make sleep elusive are:
Light
Temperature

Why You Need to Sleep in Complete Darkness

Having too much light in your bedroom at night can interfere with your body’s production of melatonin. Melatonin is both a hormone and an important antioxidant against cancer.

Disrupted melatonin production, caused by lack of bright light during the day, and too much light in the evening and at night, can also have a significantly detrimental impact on your health, aside from “just” disrupting your sleep. There’s actually strong evidence showing there is a dose-dependent relationship between exposure to light at night and a significantly increased risk for breast cancer.

Dr. Naiman takes a small amount of melatonin each night even though he does not have any sleep problems. He takes it because — like most people living in developed countries — he believes he’s overexposed to light at night, which contributes to melatonin deficiency.

“Years ago, the average length of a day was 12 hours; 12 hours of light, 12 hours of darkness,” Naiman says. “Today the average length of a day is 16 hours. We are exposed — this is true for children as well — to so much more light than we used to. … But it’s poor quality light. It’s like the empty calories that we get in a lot of food today.

And, during the day, most of us are underexposed to light.”

Using full spectrum lights in your home and office can help ameliorate the lack of high quality sunlight during the day, and paying attention to the amount of light you flood your home with in the evening is important as well.

You can now also find light bulbs that do not give off blue light, called “low blue lights,” which emit an amber light. The blue wavelength in the light spectrum is the light that specifically suppresses melatonin, so these types of light bulbs are ideal for your bedroom and bathroom.

TVs and computers also emit a lot of blue light, which will zap your melatonin if you work past dark.

Keep in mind that even a small amount of light, like turning on the bathroom light to go to the restroom, can be enough to suppress the melatonin production for that night. This is why it’s so important to avoid using night lights, or turning lights on if you have to get up in the middle of the night.

This is also why I strongly recommend installing blackout shades to ensure total darkness in your bedroom.

Keep it Cool!

In addition to making sure your bedroom is kept pitch black, maintaining the ideal room temperature can have a dramatic impact on your ability to fall asleep and stay asleep.

Keep the temperature in your bedroom no higher than 70 degrees F. Many people keep their homes and particularly their upstairs bedrooms too warm.

Studies show that the optimal room temperature for sleep is quite cool, as low as 60 to 68 degrees.

Keeping your room cooler than 60 degrees F. or hotter than 70 degrees F. can lead to restless sleep.

This is because when you sleep, your body’s internal temperature drops to its lowest level, generally about four hours after you fall asleep. Scientists believe a cooler bedroom may therefore be most conducive to sleep, since it mimics your body’s natural temperature drop.

Why Sleeping Pills aren’t the Answer

About two years ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) produced an excellent meta-analysis on the effectiveness of sleeping pills.

What did they find?

Sleeping pills DON’T WORK!

“If you look at polysomnography (this is the objective measures of sleep on people)… more often than not, sleep is worse on a sleeping pill,” Naiman says.

In this meta-analytic study, they found that on average, sleeping pills would help people fall asleep approximately 10 minutes sooner. If it’s taking you an hour or two to get to sleep, 10 minutes is statistically significant, but frankly, personally, biomedically, it’s not significant at all.

On average, sleeping pills increase total sleep time maybe 15 to 20 minutes. Again, if you’re looking at an eight-hour night – it’s really, really insignificant.

But here is the catch. This was a really phenomenal find. They found that what most sleeping pills do is they create… fragmented sleep. Sleeping pills actually make you wake up numerous times. But you don’t remember them because the sleeping pill disrupts the memory formation.

So you wake up thinking you had a good night sleep, but when you look at objective measures of your sleep, it’s really very poor. So we’re tricking ourselves. It’s poor quality sleep.”

Sleeping pills also come with a slew of detrimental and potentially dangerous side effects.

Additionally, most people do not realize that sleeping pills can have a half life of about 18 hours. So, if you take them every night, you’re basically sedated all the time. Not surprisingly, they’re associated with cognitive deficits in the morning.

Sleeping pills are also a potent anti-cholinergics, which suppress REM sleep and dreaming. These drugs are also known to increase dementia risk in seniors.

In 2008, Americans filled more than 56 million prescriptions for sleeping pills and spent more than $600 million on over-the-counter sleep aids. But anticholinergic sleep medications in particular may be causing far more harm than good, especially long term, without providing any benefit at all.

Trust me, there are far better, safer and more effective ways to get a good night’s sleep.

For a long list of safe and sane tips to improve your sleep, please see this article.

Final Thoughts

This interview contains a treasure trove of important information, so please, if you or someone you love suffers from poor sleep, take the time to listen to the entire interview, or read through the transcript. It contains much, much more than what I’ve summarized above. (Please note that we did have some technical problems with the audio so the transcript might be better)

Also keep an eye out for the second installment of this interview, in which Dr. Naiman will discuss the ideal amount of sleep time.

There’s convincing evidence showing that if you do not sleep enough, you’re really jeopardizing your health.

Everybody loses sleep here and there, and your body can adjust for temporary shortcomings. But if you develop a chronic pattern of sleeping less than five or six hours a night, then you’re increasing your risk of a number of health conditions.

For even more helpful guidance on how to improve your sleep, please review my 33 Secrets to a Good Night’s Sleep. If you’re even slightly sleep deprived I encourage you to implement some of these tips tonight, as high-quality sleep is one of the most important factors in your health and quality of life.

What is Executive Coaching?

There are as many different flavors for Executive and Life Coaching as there are pizza toppings. A good coach combines the best of mentoring, counseling and guiding. A coach asks open-ended questions and challenges his/her clients regularly to refocus his or her perspective and improve performance.

Unlike a consultant, mentor or therapist, the relationship with your coach is a partnership. The coach views the client as the expert on their own life and guides them to produce sustainable and fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. The coach doesn’t focus on the client’s past but instead challenges the client to take responsibility for his/her present situation and supports the client to reach future goals. To do this a coach asks generative questions, listens fully, guides their clients to make decisions from their core values and holds them accountable to their word, without judging them.

Coaches are trained to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has.

The National Association of Business Coaches estimates that there are over 50,000 business coaches in the United States today. According to the December 2000 Chicago Business Online site, “20% of American small businesses are using coaches, up from 4% just four years ago.” Business Coaching isn’t limited to just small businesses. IBM, Ernst and Yound, Eastman Kodak, IBM, Dow Chemical, Capitol One, Marriott International and Glaxo Wellcome are use coaching services to hear help their managers adapt to a constantly changing business environment.

Benefits of Coaching include:
• Experience what it takes to live more aligned with your deepest life purpose.
• Learn the necessary tools and orientation of attention in order to form, contain and sustain living from your passion.
• Fresh perspectives on personal challenges and opportunities
• Enhanced decision-making skills and enhanced confidence
• Resolve issues quickly and effectively
• Greater interpersonal effectiveness
• Increased confidence in carrying out their chosen work and life roles
• Practice living the disposition of openness and freedom even amidst life’s most difficult challenge
• Help you align your values and vision with your practices
• Help to gain clarify on what’s important for you
• Help keep you on track toward your goals
• Create an action plan, to evaluate setbacks and celebrate successes
• Connect with and make the most of your wisdom

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Michaelshell/Executive_Coaching

An important aspect to Life Coaching is listening. There are different ways to listen. Normal listening (which I call spectator or habitual listening) gives the appearance of listening but isn’t true listening. Instead we are waiting for the other to finish so we can say what we want to say. When one listens as a Spectator one separates oneself from the game of life, creating isolation and otherness. Seeing the world in this way creates a shortage of understanding and compassion, sorely needed in the world today.

Another type of listening is Generative Listening. Generative listening values the relationship as sacred and is based on being fully present for the other. It requires coming into the conversation with nothing and full awareness. As you notice thoughts and feelings arise in you, release them and return your focus to the other person. Notice when you are trying to formulate a response or offer advice and let it go. It’s a process of constantly letting go of the impulse to put words to your thoughts and return to offering presence to the other.

When we do this we are replacing habitual Spectator listening with intentional presence. As a Generative Listener we are actively and intentionally attentive to what is important and meaningful for the other person. This deep listening is a gift to the speaker in that they experience being deeply heard and understood. It also offers them the space to find the truth within themselves.

I’ve created the following list of Spectator listening habits in an effort to enhance awareness of these tendencies. Do any of these resonate with you?

Analyzing

Fixing

Controlling

Comparing

Judging

Blaming

Labeling

Obeying

Assuming

Deserving

Comparing

Being right

Changing subject

Agreeing

Disagreeing

Playing the Victim or Villain

Complete speaker’s thought

I hope you find this helpful and I’d love to hear what’s alive in you having read this!

Michael

In the last Life Coaching entry I gave a brief description of Life Coaching, why it is important and how it differs from counseling. I received a lot of positive and supportive comments. Thank you!

I’ve often noticed that when people think of Life Coaching they equate it with positive thinking. They are related however there is much more to Life Coaching than positive thinking. I agree that, in general, it’s helpful to see the cup as half full rather than half empty. However, there can be a danger in this approach if one covers up what he or she is actually feeling and thinking with positive thinking. I call this a “spiritual by-pass”. Let’s say I get laid off from my job and naturally I am upset about it. I can tell myself that everything is ok, don’t worry be happy. I can tell myself not to be upset because that’s negative. It might work but more often than not it won’t because I am not honoring the part of me that is upset. I’m not being true to myself.

Life Coaching is about honoring and integrating all parts of ourselves. If I want to live an authentic life I need to experience my experience, which means feel all my feelings fully, positive and negative. With practice you begin to realize that you are not your thoughts – you develop faith in feeling the feelings you don’t enjoy as an avenue to experience joy on the other side. Once I have fully felt my upset I remind myself that I can choose where to focus my thoughts in relation to this feeling. When I forget that I have the ability to choose my response (or response-ability), I will know because I fall into automatic reactionary mode. Indications of this include making the other person wrong, making the situation wrong or making myself wrong. There’s nothing wrong with that. (There’s nothing wrong period, but that’s a subject for a future blog entry.) It just means that nothing will shift, I will have less response choices and I have lost an opportunity to grow.

On the other hand, if I do remember that I have the ability to choose my response then I pause and take a breath. I call this, “the power of the pause”. After a breath I ask myself, “what universal value am I yearning for right NOW?” In this example, the answer might be “stability, to be seen as competent and financial freedom”. Now I will take 10 seconds (feels like an hour sometimes) and focus on those universal values. I repeat to myself a few times: “I have a yearning for competence, stability and financial freedom.” Now, the so-called problem, being laid off, hasn’t changed. However, I now feel physically lighter, I’m energized and more response options arise. Again, this gets easier with practice and it is usually easier with to with the support of another person.

So, instead of simply telling myself that everything is ok I feel the negative feelings fully. Next I ask myself, “what is important to me here?” I know that what I focus on expands so I focus on my universal values instead of making myself, the situation or the other person wrong. Then a shift happens and more options on how to deal with the situation arise.

For a strange example of how automatic I can fall into reactionary mode pleas read my letter to the editor under the title “Customer Service Blues” or “Life is But a Dream” in the Dec. 31 edition of Village Soup.

Authentic Communication focuses on honest self-expression — exposing what matters to oneself in a way that’s likely to inspire compassion and action in others, and empathy — listening with deep compassion.

Based on the teachings of nonviolent communication and Marshall Rosenberg, authentic communication’s central teaching is that all actions are motivated by an attempt to meet universal human needs. When in conflict with another, if we focus on the needs another is attempting to meet we cultivate greater understanding and we find more freedom in our response.

By focusing on underlying needs we tend to spend less time judging, analyzing, complaining and comparing and we spend more time attending to the present moment, cultivating connection and compassion with oneself and others.

The ability to maintain connection with others while working amidst conflict offers invaluable support for personal relationships, communication in the workplace, group process, and perhaps most surprisingly, for finding deep peace in connecting compassionately to oneself.

Formal nonviolent communication (NVC) self-expression includes four elements: observations (distinguished from interpretations/evaluations), feelings (emotions separate from thoughts), needs (deep motives) and requests (clear, present, doable and without demand).

It’s the most powerful and effective tool I know of to resolve conflict and create connection with oneself and another.

Check out Steve Jobs inspirational talk given at Stanford’s Commencement in 2005 about following your bliss….

-Stanford Report
June 14, 2005

‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says.

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parent’s garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.
- Steve Jobs

The Oneness Project is a series of events related to Onenessness, culminating with a major Oneness conference in the fall of 2011. The intention of these events is to explore and celebrate different aspects of Oneness through discussions and dialogue, music and meditation. Nationally known thought leaders will join local healers and teachers on moderated panels of Oneness. Possible panels include water, energy, consciousness, economics, faith and language.

Local complimentary health practitioners will be invited to join international leaders in dialogue and will highlight their work at their booth. It is hoped that the impact of this event will extend past Maine via live simulcasts in other parts of the world. The goal is not simply talk about Oneness but to have an experience of it.

“More of us than ever before are feeling called to awaken to the fullness of our authentic power and to become active, engaged agents of evolution and change. We’re hungry to realize the unique purpose of our lives and to share our unique gifts with the world. We sense intuitively that we have a critical role to play in shaping the future of our world. But what is the pathway to awakening to the fullness of our Unique Self? Where should we give our energy and attention in order to make our greatest contribution? And how might we work together and support each other in this process?” – Marc Gafni.

To learn more about The Oneness Project visit: www.michaelshell.onenessness.com

Other events related to The Oneness Project include…

The Onesness Blessing

There is a new phenomenon moving throughout the world on nearly every continent known as Oneness Deeksha or Oneness Blessing. It is a transfer of energy that pierces through the veils and illusions of the mind, bringing about deep stillness and peace.

On almost every continent of the world people are experiencing the Oneness Blessing and the transformation it imparts. Oneness Blessing is a transfer of energy that is pure grace. This Blessing is given by people who have been initiated as Oneness Blessing Givers by monks. Oneness Blessings are transfered by touch, or intention. The purpose of the Oneness Blessing is to bring about a neuro-biological change in the person that receives it slowing down the senses altering one’s experience of life. The Blessing stimulates and activates the parts of the brain that experience joy, happiness, bliss and divine love and deactivates the parts of the brain that experience suffering. Ultimately after attending a special retreat in Fiji the receiver experiences a shift in consciousness that allows them to NATURALLY perceive and experience life differently permanenetly. Such a person would be described as “Awake”.

What Are The Benefits Of The Oneness Blessing?
- Imparts a higher state of consciousness on anyone who receives it.
- Deep inner silence and peace.
- Cleanses/Balances energy centers.
- Removes negative energy, and negative life patterns.
- Imparts tremendous energy into the person.
- Provides relaxation.
- Cleanses physical, psychological and spiritual obstacles.
- Heals traumas from past and present.
- Can heal people from physical disease
- Awakens psychic abilities

Interested in receiving The Oneness Blessing in Midcoat Maine? Lucy Pincince is offering them for free at High Mountain Hall in Camden. For info, check out

http://www.highmountainhall.com/teachers/lucy-pincince

Like to be involved/included? Send me an email at wellnesscoach@gmail.com. Tell me what you’d like to contribute, what you’d like to get out of for yourself and include what you are most passionate about.

There is a fascinating article on the brain from Discover Magazine titled, “10 Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain”, from August 2007.

Function and structure sometimes get collapsed so here’s a distinction. The function is its purpose and its activities; this is the mind. The structure is its physical form or its brain.

The mental faculties of the brain include memory, perception, emotional response,reasoning – these all refer to the physical aspects of the brain.

The top 10 mysteries of the brain:

1. What is consciousness? On a functional level it appears to exist outside of the mind.

2. How do the specialized systems of the brain integrate together?

3. Why do brains sleep and dream? No one knows but if we do know that if you deny someone of the right to sleep and dream they start to show signs of mental illness.

4. How is time resprested in the brain? All we know is that it’s not at a uniform rate.

5. What is intelligence? No objective standard or definition exists. Includes education, literacy, ability to reason, emotional intelligence, imagination, perception, etc. An IQ test is one way to measure intelligence relative to others but it certainly is not the only way.

6. What are emotions? Energy in motion.

7. How does the mind simulate the future?

8. What does the baseline activity in the brain represent? Hasn’t been established and may not even exist.

9. How is memory stored and retrieved? Some experts say memory is not stored in the brain.

10. How is information encoded in the brain? This is seen as the holy grail in psychology, psychiatry related to the brain.