Who's Sorry Now? 6 Steps to Regret-Proof Your Life

By Martha Beck | Oprah.com

So here's the story: After a lifetime of handcopying ancient texts, an elderly monk became abbot of his monastery. Realizing that for centuries his order had been making copies of copies, he decided to examine some of the monastery's original documents. Days later, the other monks found him in the cellar, weeping over a crumbling manuscript and moaning, "It says 'celebrate,' not 'celibate!'"


Illustration: Guy Billout

Ah, regret. The forehead-slap of hindsight, the woeful fuel of country ballads, the self-recrimination I feel for eating a quart of pudding in a crafty but unsuccessful attempt to avoid writing this column. If you've ever made a bad decision or suffered an accident, regret has been your roommate, if not your conjoined twin. It's a difficult companion, prone to accusatory comments and dark moods, and it changes you, leaving you both tougher and more tender. You get to decide, however, whether your toughness will look like unreachable bitterness or unstoppable resilience; your tenderness the raw vulnerability of a never-healing wound, or a kindness so deep it heals every wound it touches. Regret can be your worst enemy or your best friend. You get to decide which.

There are at least two time zones where you can choose to make regret's powerful energy healing rather than destructive: the past and the future. Both can be transformed by what you decide to do right now, in this moment.

Let's start by changing the past. If you think that can't be done, think again. Literally. The past doesn't exist except as a memory, a mental story, and though past events aren't changeable, your stories about them are. You can act now to transform the way you tell the story of your past, ultimately making it a stalwart protector of your future. Try these steps, more or less in order.

1. Get Beyond Denial
As long as you're thinking, "That shouldn't have happened or I shouldn't have done that," you're locked in a struggle against reality. Many people pour years of energy into useless "shouldn't haves." The angry ones endlessly repeat that their ex-spouses shouldn't have left them, their parents shouldn't have overfed them, or their bosses shouldn't have made them wear uncomfortable chipmunk costumes in 90-degree heat. Even drearier are the sad ones, who forever drone some version of "If only." If only they'd married Sebastian, or gotten that promotion, or heeded the label's advice not to operate heavy machinery, they would be happy campers instead of les misérables.

I call this unproductive regret. People use it to avoid scary or difficult action; instead of telling the story of the past in a useful way, they use it as their excuse for staying wretched. If you're prone to unproductive regret, please hear this: Everyone agrees with you. That thing you regret? It really, really, really shouldn't have happened. But. It. Did. If you enjoy being miserable, by all means, continue to rail against this fact. If you'd rather be happy, prune the "shouldn't haves" from your mental story, and move on to...

2. Separate Regret's Basic Ingredients
Of the four basic emotions—sad, mad, glad, and scared—regret is a mixture of the first two. Your particular situation may involve enormous sadness and a little anger ("My father died before I ever met him. Damn cruel fate!") or enormous anger with a side of sadness ("Why, why, why did I get a haircut from a stylist who was actively smoking a bong?"). Whatever the proportions, some regretters feel sadness but resist feeling anger; others acknowledge outrage but not sorrow. Denying either component will get you stuck in bitter, unproductive regret.

Considering anger and sadness separately makes both more useful. Right now, think of something you regret. With that something in mind, finish this sentence: "I'm sad that __________." Repeat until you run out of sad things related to that particular regret. For example, if your regret is contracting Lyme disease, you might say, "I'm sad that I feel awful." "I'm sad I can no longer ride my pogo stick." "I'm sad that the woods don't feel safe to me anymore."

When you've fully itemized your sadness, make another list, beginning each sentence with the phrase, "I'm angry at ________." For example, "I'm angry at my body for being sick." "I'm angry at God for creating ticks." "I'm angry at the entire town of Lyme, Connecticut, for which this $#@* disease was named." Write down all the causes for your rage, even if they're irrational.

Once you have a clear list of your sorrows and outrages, you can move on to step 3, where you'll work both angles to transform unproductive regret into the productive kind. This is extraordinarily useful but also profoundly uncomfortable because the only way out of painful emotion is through.

3. Grieve What is Irrevocably Lost
Sorrow is a natural reaction to losing anything significant: a dream, a possession, an opportunity. Productive grief passes through you in waves, which feel horrific, but which steadily erode your sadness. The crushing mountain of sorrow eventually becomes a boulder on your back, then a rock in your pocket, then a pebble in your shoe, then nothing at all—not because circumstances change but because you become strong enough to handle reality with ease.

You're finished grieving when you see someone gaining what you regret losing and feel only joy for them—maybe even secret gratitude that circumstances forced you to enlarge your own capacity for joy (this is how I feel about people who don't have a kid with Down syndrome). If your sadness stops evaporating, if a certain amount of it just isn't budging, simply grieving may not be enough. Regret is telling you to seek out a part of whatever you've lost.

4. Reclaim the Essence of Your Dreams
You can't change the fact that you binged your way up to 300 pounds, or lost a winning lottery ticket, or spent decades in celibacy rather than celebration. But you can reclaim the essential experiences you missed: loving your own healthy body, enjoying abundance, feeling glorious passion. In this moment, resolve that you'll find ways to reclaim the essence of anything you can't stop grieving.

Jenny's big regret was that one disastrous gymnastics meet had tanked her chances to make the Olympic team. When I asked her what she would've gotten from the Olympics, she said, "Pride, excitement, world-class competition, attention." Once she'd articulated these essentials, Jenny found herself gravitating toward a job in television, which provided all of them. Now, she says, her life is so exciting that she virtually never thinks about the Olympics. Instead of sidelining her, regret became just one more springboard.

I've been coaching long enough to brazenly promise that if you decide to reclaim the essence of anything you regret losing, you'll find it—often sooner than you think, in ways you would never have expected.

5. Analyze Your Anger
The anger component of regret is every bit as important and useful as your sadness. Anger is a bear, but if you pay attention, you'll hear it roaring useful instructions about how you should steer your future. Don't fear it, run from it, tranquilize it, try to kill it. Just leave the kids with a sitter, team up with a sympathetic friend, spouse, therapist, or journal, and let your angry animal self bellow its messages. There will be a lot of meaningless sound and fury, but there will also be information about exactly what needs to change in your present and future so that you'll stop suffering from old regrets and create new ones. Basically, your anger will roar out this next instruction...

6. Learn to Lean Loveward
When I saw A Chorus Line, I wondered if it's literally true that "I can't regret what I did for love." So I did a little thought experiment. I recalled all my significant regrets, and sure enough, I found that none of them followed a choice based purely on love. All were the consequence of fear-based decisions. In the cases where my motivations were a mix of love and fear, it was always the fear-based component that left me fretful and regretful.

For example, I'll be up most of tonight, having spent the daylight hours eating pudding in reaction to writer's block, which is a species of fear. I predict that tomorrow I'll regret this—I've spent many, many sleepless nights fearing this or that, and no good ever came of it. But I've also lost a lot of sleep for love. I've stayed up communing with friends, rocking sick babies, avoiding celibacy. And I really can't regret any choice that brought me one moment of love. Do your own thought experiment, and I suspect you'll come to similar conclusions. (Let's face it, a song that catchy just can't be all wrong.)

So the ultimate lesson of regret, the one that will help guide you into a rich and satisfying future, is this: Every time life brings you to a crossroads, from the tiniest to the most immense, go toward love, not away from fear. Think of every choice in terms of "What would thrill and delight me?" rather than "What will keep my fear—or the events, people, and things I fear—at bay?"

Sometimes the choice will be utterly clear. Love steers you forward, and no fear arises. But on many occasions, things will seem trickier. The path toward what you love may be fraught with uneasiness, anxiety, outright terror. The pound dog will tug at your heart, but worry about upkeep will push away the first sparks of love and leave you without a four-footed friend. You'll long for success but dread the risks necessary to earn it. Your impulse to champion the oppressed might compete with panic for your own sorry hide.

That's when you can call on regret—not as a burden that you still have to bear but as a motivator that can forcefully remind you not to make choices that will feel awful in retrospect. If you've grieved your losses, reclaimed your dreams, and articulated your anger, regret will have made you the right kind of tough-and-tender: dauntless of spirit, soft of heart, convinced by experience that nothing based on fear—but everything based on love—is worth doing. Living this way doesn't guarantee an easy life; in fact, it will probably take you on a wondrously wild ride. But I promise, you won't regret it.


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What Painful Situations Can Teach You About Yourself

By Gary Zukav | Oprah.com

Everyone wants to learn the same thing from painful situations: how to avoid repeating them. For example, when you do your best to take care of someone and then that person pushes you away, you feel unappreciated. Or when you expect to be thanked and the opposite happens. Or when someone betrays your trust: You expected honesty and instead experienced dishonesty. The list of painful situations that you can learn about yourself from is very long, and you have probably experienced many of them.


Photo: Christopher Briscoe

If you treat each of these experiences as a separate, freestanding, random event in your life, you will continue to be surprised by them and, eventually, become frustrated. "Why is this happening to me?" will turn into "Why is this happening to me again?"

These are good questions, but when you look outside yourself for the answers, you will not find anything of spiritual value. For example, my wife, Linda, and I once hired a manager to help us. We chose him because he was interested in what we teach, seemed capable and was excited to work with us. A year later, we discovered that he had lost a lot of the Seat of the Soul Institute's money, left it with debts we did not know about and stole a laptop computer when he departed.

Of course, we learned to do a much better job of due diligence from that painful experience—checking references, verifying qualifications, researching previous work experience, etc. It was a lesson that I did not forget, but there was an even more important lesson that I learned from this painful experience.

After feeling shocked (an experience of a frightened part of my personality, which is also a not-loving part of my personality) and blaming him for my emotional pain (also an experience of a frightened part of my personality) and feeling like a victim, I discovered something completely surprising, interesting and humbling: In shame and blame—both of which are very painful to experience, provided that you do not distract yourself with drinking, eating, shopping, sex, smoking, etc.—I saw this person as someone whose intention from the beginning was to get the most for himself from our interactions, and he did.

What I discovered about myself truly jolted me: I had held the same intention toward him! The very same intention. I expected him to relieve me of my responsibilities, expand the institute and bring it revenue, and as long as he did that, I would be satisfied. In other words, my intention was to exploit him just as his intention was to exploit me. I got exactly what I gave. My real intention did not create the benefits for the institute that I had envisioned. It was to obtain as much from him as I could. I intended to exploit, and I created exploitation. It was a big lesson for me to learn. I am so grateful for it because it taught me to look carefully and honestly at my intentions, and showed me how powerfully they create my experiences.

This is how to avoid re-creating painful situations: Take the time to discover your real intention before you act. If it is to change someone or the world so that you will feel safe or better about yourself, don't act on it, because it is an intention of fear and can create only painful consequences. If your real intention is to create harmony instead of discord, cooperation instead of competition, sharing instead of hoarding, and reverence for life instead of exploitation, act on it, because it is an intention of love and can create only healthy and wholesome consequences.

When you do this, you are creating authentic power.


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How To Listen To Your Life

By Mark Nepo | Oprah.com

Listening is a personal pilgrimage that takes time and a willingness to lean into life. With each trouble that stalls us and each wonder that lifts us, we're asked to put down our conclusions and feel and think anew. Unpredictable as life itself, the practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous and challenging art forms on earth. Each of us is by turns a novice and a master—until the next difficulty or joy undoes us.


Illustration: Thinkstock

In truth, listening is the first step to peace. When we dare to quiet our minds and all the thoughts we inherit, the differences between us move back, and the things we have in common move forward. When we dare to quiet the patterns of our past, everything starts to reveal its kinship and share its aliveness. And though we can always learn from others, listening is not a shortcut, but a way to embody the one life we're given, a way to personalize the practice of being human.

In real ways, we're invited each day to slow down and listen. But why listen at all? Because listening stitches the world together. Listening is the doorway to everything that matters. It enlivens the heart the way breathing enlivens the lungs. We listen to awaken our heart. We do this to stay vital and alive. This is the work of reverence: to stay vital and alive by listening with an open heart.

Yet how do we inhabit these connections and find our way in the world? By listening our way into lifelong friendships with everything larger than us, with our life of experience and with each other.

Our friendship with everything larger than us opens us to the wisdom of Source. This is the work of being. Our friendship with experience opens us to the wisdom of life on earth. This is the work of being human. And our friendship with each other opens us to the wisdom of care. This is the work of love. We need to stay loyal to these three friendships if we have any hope of living an awakened life. These three friendships—the work of being, the work of being human and the work of love—frame the journey.

In a daily way, listening is being present enough to hear the One in the many and the many in the One. Listening is an animating process by which we feel and understand the moment we are in, repeatedly connecting the inner world with the world around us, letting one inform the other.

All of this helps us hear who we are because our identity and the reach of our gifts can only be known in relationship. The wave would not exist if not for the reach of the ocean that lifts it, and the mountain would not exist if not for the steadfastness of the earth that supports it. Listening helps us discover our relationship to all that supports us in life. Listening helps us find our place as a living part in a living Universe. And each moment is a new place to start, no matter how overwhelmed we might feel. For the living Universe can be entered at any time by listening to our inmost self. This begins by meeting ourselves and opening our minds to silence. It helps to think of silence as the connective tissue for all life. By listening to silence, we can be nourished by everything that is larger than us.

It is giving our complete attention to the silence that holds our self that awakens us to both the soul's calling and the call of the soul. While the soul's calling is the work we are born to do, the call of the soul is the irrepressible yearning to experience aliveness. The center of our aliveness doesn't care what we achieve or accomplish, only that we stay close to the pulse of what it means to be alive. In doing this, we stay close to the energy of all life.

The deeper we look at listening, the more we find that it has to do with being present, because a commitment to being fully present enables us to listen more to others, to their dreams and pain, to the retelling of their stories. It deepens our compassion. And listening to the history of our heart allows us to hear and feel the sweet ache of being alive.

Each of these ways of listening—to our inmost self, to the silence that joins everything, to the soul's calling for meaningful work, to the call of the soul to simply be alive, to the complete presence of others that holding nothing back opens in us, and to the tug of life and its sweet ache of constant connection—is a practice that deepens our understanding of who we are and of the precious life we're given in our time on earth.


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5 Pieces Of Advice Everyone Ignores(But Shouldn't!)

By Martha Beck | Oprah.com

She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it)." That's what Lewis Carroll wrote about Alice, and it's true of most people. We go through life generally getting good counsel about what's best for us—and then vigorously ignoring it. This explains why I never run out of clients. It's amazing: Intelligent adults pay me for advice so obvious worms can follow it (this, as we'll see, is no exaggeration), then fail to act on it, then pay me to advise them again.


Photo: Ann Cutting

Here and now, out of sheer guilt, I've decided to spell out the best—and, mysteriously, most ignored!—advice I possess. If you follow it, I guarantee the results will be positive. If you don't, at least you won't be alone.

1. What leaves you feeling bad, do less of. What leaves you feeling good, do more of.
This one suggestion is all you really need to find your destiny, form loving relationships, achieve optimal health, and have the best life story in the bingo parlor during your golden years. And it isn't hard to remember, judging by the fact that worms easily take it to heart. Put a worm at the bottom of a simple T-shaped maze, with food in the left side of the top and a mild electric shock in the right, and it will develop fervent leftist inclinations. Yet many clever humans turn repeatedly to the very things that ruin our health and happiness: artery-clogging junk food, alcoholic lovers, soul-crushing jobs.

We do this because, unlike worms, we convince ourselves that there are good reasons to do ourselves harm. We say things like "I had a hard day; I deserve this industrial-size bag of chips." Or "You always hurt the one you love." Or "But I need the paycheck!" Yet I believe all human beings—even politicians—are born with the capacity for suffering and joy for a reason: so that we can navigate the world as well as a worm.

Notice that I'm putting the emphasis on how something leaves you feeling, not on how you imagine it will make you feel. Worms have to experience a maze several times before they start making optimal decisions. Once the experience registers, however, they trust it. Not so with us. We overthink experience—and end up bedazzled by the same electricity that Tasered our last relationship, or disdaining the simplicity of things that reliably nourish us.

Today, try pausing before any action you take and recall how that action made you feel in the past. For example, writing often seems frightening or burdensome to me before I start, yet as many writers before me have said, I love having written. On the other hand, while nothing seems more appetizing to me than baked goods, I know that both wheat and sugar leave me feeling droopy and queasy. Just pausing to vividly recall the past result of each action helps me choose writing over procrastination and bananas over cookies. If you think through how each action leaves you feeling, you'll find yourself more and more able to choose those that add up to your best life.

2. To achieve bigger goals, take smaller steps.
As a teenager, I often injured myself trying to run mountain trails. Then I noticed that bikers downshift to climb hills. I began mimicking them, taking steps so tiny they felt inconsequential. This allowed me to run uphill quickly without getting tired, winded, or hurt. The one race in which I actually placed was on a mountain trail where I scurried along like a mouse on a mission, zipping past runners whose gazelle-like leaps were taxing their lungs and ruining their knees.

It turns out that the tiny-steps approach applies to any difficult thing, from schoolwork to parenthood to career. The bigger the task, the smaller my steps. If I feel myself tiring or avoiding tasks, I cut my steps in half, then in half again, until each step feels easy. Between steps, I give myself a reward—nothing huge, just a ten-minute nap in the sun, a smoothie, some online window shopping.

My clients find this shocking. They want to achieve big goals, and they love those spectacular, gazelle-like leaps. One client I'll call Roberta planned to start getting up two hours early each morning, running to the gym, and lifting weights before work. She'd had this plan for five years. She hadn't acted on it once. I suggested that, instead, she get up five minutes early, put on gym clothes, then have coffee—full stop. She thought this ridiculous (they always do), but it worked (it usually does). Roberta's five minutes in gym clothes grew to ten, then to 15, then to a Zumba class she loved. She's still increasing her fitness, one tiny step at a time.

3. Lie down and rest for a while.
Speaking of health regimens, there's a big piece of getting fit that most of us shortchange: rest. The majority of my clients who complain of depression, anxiety, irritability, and weight gain are actually chronically tired. The problems caused by lack of rest can feel so intricate, but the solution is so simple: Lie down, dear. Just lie down.

If you've ever attended a meeting after lunch, you know the mild coma endocrinologists call postprandial dip, which makes you want to lay your head down and drool during your boss's PowerPoint presentations. And why not? Totally relaxing for just ten minutes can reenergize your body, sharpen your mind, and make you much less likely to weep when you can't find a stapler.

In many cultures, it's customary to lie down during the day. In ours, it's emphatically not. To get used to the idea anyway, try a yoga class or the Alexander Technique, which you can do on the floor—any floor, even at work (instructions available online). If all else fails, just channel your inner worm.

4. When you don't know what to say, try the truth.
I won't lie: Investing in resting can cause social awkwardness. For example, an acquaintance I'll call Jill recently asked me to drive an hour (each way) to meet her for dinner. I was exhausted, and though I like Jill, I've learned the hard way that when I put politeness over basic needs, I end up feeling resentful, which damages the relationship.

When I suggested that Jill and I take a rain check, she frostily asked what could possibly be more important than a chance to connect with her. I tried to invent a fictional business trip or convincing symptoms of bird flu, but my perfidious mouth blurted the truth: "I want to lie down."

I felt Jill's outrage as she absorbed the fact that on my priority list, getting some rest outranked dining with her. Truth often has this effect, but despite the initial sting, it makes for stronger relationships. If I'd lied, I'd have misled Jill and angered myself. I want friends who want what's best for me, and Jill can either accept that or find someone who's willing to dine under duress.

No matter what your truth may be—about political views, movie preferences, the desire to live "off the grid" eating roadkill—calmly expressing it cuts a clear path through the jungle of social connection.

5. Free yourself from dysfunctional people by refusing to try to control them.
You don't even need to say it—I can already hear you thinking: If I tell the truth in every awkward situation, there will be hell to pay with my mother/husband/sister/coworker/book club! I get it: There are people in your life who, for various reasons, don't want your truth. You may think you have to change those people to live in total authenticity. Don't even try.

I labored for decades to make sad people happy, rigid people flexible, aggressive people empathetic, and so on, before finally noticing that (1) this never worked, and (2) it drove me insane. Then I read codependency expert Melody Beattie's advice on how to deal with dysfunctional people: "Unhook from their system by refusing to try to change or influence them." This felt totally alien and absolutely right, and it works. The key, I've found, is to stay the heck away from the idea of "making" someone do, feel, or think anything. This is not your job. Your job is to maximize your own happiness, kindness, and health. Let others choose whether to follow.

At this point, I should note that Alice in Wonderland did take some of her own advice. She remembered, for example, that "if you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later."

You've already had enough life experience to notice when a situation, a person, or a task is marked "poison." Remember how much that situation hurt the last time, and choose one that feels better now. Take small steps, lying down often along the way. Tell the truth and stay in your own business. Anything else is poison. And if you actually use this seldom-followed advice, you may one day wake up and realize that your life has become a wonderland.


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22 Steps To A Happier Life

By Philip Moeller | U.S.News & World Report LP

Research suggests that happiness can be fostered by focusing on relationships, constant learning, and feeling grateful and optimistic, among other strategies. These 22 steps, which come from the U.S. News How to Live to 100 project, can help you foster a sense of happiness in your own life:


Photo: iStock.com

All ages:

-- Cultivate these 12 behaviors, which Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness, has identified as practices that help people lead happier lives: Express gratitude; cultivate optimism; avoid overthinking and social comparison; practice acts of kindness; nurture social relationships; develop strategies for coping; learn to forgive; increase flow experiences, or intense focus on the present moment; savor life's joys; commit to your goals; practice religion and spirituality; and take care of your body.

-- Review your values. Intrinsic values include self-improvement, helping others, and making the world a better place. Extrinsic values include wealth and material accomplishments, physical appearance, and the appearance and reality of social influence. People say intrinsic values make them happier, but most actually adopt extrinsic values in their lives.

-- Invest in your relationships. Spouses, lovers, friends, and family are the keys to what gives our life meaning and happiness.

-- Assess whether you're lonely. More and more people live alone, while others can be lonely in an unhappy household. Whether you are living alone or with others, are you lonely and isolated, or is your living arrangement bringing you all the benefits you'd hoped? If your home life is not what you'd wish, evaluate how and when you might be able to change it. Having a strong social network is good for health and happiness.

-- Consider the role work plays in your identity. Whether you're a "work to live" or "live to work" type, there's no question that working can be central to your identity and sense of value. It's important to have a realistic sense of what work means to you and to have the self-awareness and confidence to judge whether your work life is satisfactory or needs to be changed.

-- Evaluate how well you cope with adversity, which is a reliable indicator of happiness. Make a list of the major problems you've faced in the past year. How did you deal with them, and what have you learned about yourself as a result? If you're stuck, it might be time to seek professional help.

-- Engage in life. Learning new things and being engaged in a variety of meaningful activities are essential to happiness at all stages of life. Are you fully engaged with life or are there areas where you've "checked out"? Has your level of engagement changed substantially in recent years? If something is "missing," what do you plan to do about it?

20s and 30s:

-- Review the number, quality, and status of your important friendships. Whether it's with family members, work colleagues, social acquaintances, or college friends, having roughly half a dozen strong friendships (there is no magic number) will pay big dividends for the rest of your life.

-- If you live alone (and even if you don't), think about the way you are living and whether you're lonely--lots of empty evenings by yourself, no one to share special or even ordinary events with, and the like. If you don't like the quality of your life, make changes by reaching out to groups or social networks.

-- While careers can be intense and all-consuming passions in your earlier working years, it's not too early to begin thinking about work-family balance. Work rarely tops family in people's rankings of life's most important achievements.

-- If parents want good relationships with their kids later in life, the foundations of those relationships are built now. Review the values you are passing onto your children. Engage them at a young age in volunteer activities that help other people, and you will be increasing their lifelong odds of being happier.

-- Evaluating the value and health of your marriage or other romantic relationship probably requires at least a daily check-up! It's important not to take things for granted. No relationship brings more happiness or, potentially, sadness, than the one with your closest partner.

40s and 50s:

-- Children-centric relationships change and often fade when the kids are grown. It's important to work at replacing these parts of your social network.

-- Take stock of your relationship with your grown children and your parents. You are, increasingly, the key decision-maker for both of these generations. What kind of a job are you doing--

-- Are you stuck in one or more ruts in middle-age? Review the activities and flow of your life and, as needed, build a plan to find new activities, experiences, and friends.

-- Replacing the time and emotional pull of raising children is a huge task for many people. Review how you're spending your time. This is a good time to build and expand community and volunteer activities.

-- Think about whether you have a great career or just a job. Either path can lead to happiness, but only if you accept a role for your working life that meshes with your aspirations and values. Understanding yourself and how work fits in with your life is increasingly important at this age.

60s and up:

-- Review how well you've matched your long-term aspirations with your financial resources. You don't need buckets of money to be happy. But you need some money. More importantly, happiness requires a balance of what you want to do and what you can do. How is your lifestyle balance faring?

-- Consider expanding your volunteer activities. It's a great way to match your interests and values with new things to do and interesting people.

-- Make a spring-cleaning plan. As we get older, households tend to get cluttered with possessions we no longer need and which, if we admit it, no one in our family needs, either. Regular downsizing is a good practice.

-- Is your spiritual gas tank full or running on fumes? It is natural and healthy in later years to begin thinking about issues that transcend daily living.

-- Use it or lose it! Build a fitness plan or, if you've got one, review how you're doing. Even into old age, vigorous exercise can help your physical and mental health.

The How to Live 100 ebook is now available. We hope it helps you on your own journey to live a long, happy, and fulfilling life.


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Becoming The Person You Were Meant To Be: Where To Start

By Anne Lamott | Oprah.com

We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be. The only problem is that there is also so much other stuff, typically fixations with how people perceive us, how to get more of the things that we think will make us happy, and with keeping our weight down. So the real issue is how do we gently stop being who we aren't? How do we relieve ourselves of the false fronts of people-pleasing and affectation, the obsessive need for power and security, the backpack of old pain, and the psychic Spanx that keeps us smaller and contained?


Illustration: Brian Cronin

Here's how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake's line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.

Oh, yeah, and whenever I could, for as long as I could, I threw away the scales and the sugar.

When I was a young writer, I was talking to an old painter one day about how he came to paint his canvases. He said that he never knew what the completed picture would look like, but he could usually see one quadrant. So he'd make a stab at capturing what he saw on the canvas of his mind, and when it turned out not to be even remotely what he'd imagined, he'd paint it over with white. And each time he figured out what the painting wasn't, he was one step closer to finding out what it was.

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself.

I can't tell you what your next action will be, but mine involved a full stop. I had to stop living unconsciously, as if I had all the time in the world. The love and good and the wild and the peace and creation that are you will reveal themselves, but it is harder when they have to catch up to you in roadrunner mode. So one day I did stop. I began consciously to break the rules I learned in childhood: I wasted more time, as a radical act. I stared off into space more, into the middle distance, like a cat. This is when I have my best ideas, my deepest insights. I wasted more paper, printing out instead of reading things on the computer screen. (Then I sent off more small checks to the Sierra Club.)

Every single day I try to figure out something I no longer agree to do. You get to change your mind—your parents may have accidentally forgotten to mention this to you. I cross one thing off the list of projects I mean to get done that day. I don't know all that many things that are positively true, but I do know two things for sure: first of all, that no woman over the age of 40 should ever help anyone move, ever again, under any circumstances. You have helped enough. You can say no. No is a complete sentence. Or you might say, "I can't help you move because of certain promises I have made to myself, but I would be glad to bring sandwiches and soda to everyone on your crew at noon." Obviously, it is in many people's best interest for you not to find yourself, but it only matters that it is in yours—and your back's—and the whole world's, to proceed.

And, secondly, you are probably going to have to deal with whatever fugitive anger still needs to be examined—it may not look like anger; it may look like compulsive dieting or bingeing or exercising or shopping. But you must find a path and a person to help you deal with that anger. It will not be a Hallmark card. It is not the yellow brick road, with lovely trees on both sides, constant sunshine, birdsong, friends. It is going to be unbelievably hard some days—like the rawness of birth, all that blood and those fluids and shouting horrible terrible things—but then there will be that wonderful child right in the middle. And that wonderful child is you, with your exact mind and butt and thighs and goofy greatness.

Dealing with your rage and grief will give you life. That is both the good news and the bad news: The solution is at hand. Wherever the great dilemma exists is where the great growth is, too. It would be very nice for nervous types like me if things were black-and-white, and you could tell where one thing ended and the next thing began, but as Einstein taught us, everything in the future and the past is right here now. There's always something ending and something beginning. Yet in the very center is the truth of your spiritual identity: is you. Fabulous, hilarious, darling, screwed-up you. Beloved of God and of your truest deepest self, the self that is revealed when tears wash off the makeup and grime. The self that is revealed when dealing with your anger blows through all the calcification in your soul's pipes. The self that is reflected in the love of your very best friends' eyes. The self that is revealed in divine feminine energy, your own, Bette Midler's, Hillary Clinton's, Tina Fey's, Michelle Obama's, Mary Oliver's. I mean, you can see that they are divine, right? Well, you are, too. I absolutely promise. I hope you have gotten sufficiently tired of hitting the snooze button; I know that what you need or need to activate in yourself will appear; I pray that your awakening comes with ease and grace, and stamina when the going gets hard. To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself, for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.


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When You Don't Know What To Do

As told to Leigh Newman | Oprah.com

One scenario: Due to budget cuts, you may—or may not—be losing your job, and you're not sure if you should take the much-lower-paying job at another company or just stay where you are in case things work out. Another: With the birth of your new baby, you need to move, and you can't make up your mind between the neighborhood with the good public school and the one where the houses are actually in your budget. Yet another: After seven years together, your marriage has turned into a relentless series of bitter arguments, but you're not certain if you should try to reconcile or finally end the relationship.


Photo: Even Grounds

All of us have had these kinds of experiences—times when we have to decide something and we just don't know what to do.

The first step is usually to collect information. You have to look at the facts of the situation: What's for and what's against. But even then, you still may not be able to come to a conclusion. For example, if you're choosing between two three-bedroom houses, and they're just about the same price, and they're in just the same kind of neighborhood, you're not going to get very far. Pros and cons are one level of decision-making but not the most vital one.

When we can't make up our minds, it's because of our minds, or what I call "the voice in your head." Many people don't even know they have this voice. But it's talking away, creating a never-ending inner monologue. Sometimes the voice is even engaged in a dialogue, because it splits into two and you start talk to yourself. The chatter is so incessant it's like having a continuous humming sound from a refrigerator or an air conditioner in the room with you and after a while, you don't hear it anymore.

During tough choices, this voice isn't very helpful. Often it criticizes, keeping a running commentary about you and all the things you did wrong or you just didn't do. It criticizes others as well. It's like living with somebody who can't stand you, much less anybody else. You wouldn't want to live with a person like that. You would walk out of the relationship. But since you can't get free of your mind, you're stuck. The result? You get discouraged. You can't see the positive side to what might come from your decisions.

The voice in your head also creates a huge amount of problems that aren't really problems. They're just things that haven't happened yet, things that could happen tomorrow or next week. Listening to unreal problems has another name: worrying. That's what the voice in your head does. It what-ifs. It frets. It agonizes, and you can no longer sense the joy of life.

If it runs out of other ideas, that voice in your head then turns to complaining. Now, I'm not talking about complaining when you go to somebody and say, "This is wrong, and it must be put right." For example, when you're in a hotel and you see there's no hot water. Of course, you should phone the front desk and say, "I'm trying to take a shower. Can you please help me?" In these cases, something can be done. But when you're in situation where you're still making up your mind and you don't know where to go next, the voice in your head begins to complain about everything else, even things unrelated to the situation: the weather, how bad the economy is, how your life wasn't supposed to turn out this way and why everybody but you seems to figure things out. Complaining adds nothing except heaviness. It gives you a big sack of rocks to carry around on your back while you're trying to figure out what to do, and it prevents you, in many cases, you from taking any action at all.

Now imagine that that voice inside your head suddenly stops. You realize, Wow, it's so beautifully quiet. This is exactly what you need to make an effective choice. You need to be present. You need to be free of anything other than what is happening now.

Of course, you can't just snap your fingers and suddenly it happens. Some people first experience it during extreme sports. Climbing a mountain, for example, finding footholds and handholds, they realize they're not thinking at all. They're totally present, because if they slipped into having thoughts, they would fall off the mountain. Others go into nature. They look at the beauty all around them, they listen to the birds and the rustling of the leaves and suddenly they realize that this is what being present is. But you don't have to wait to become engaged in some dangerous activity or go into the wilderness. You can choose to be present anywhere, in any situation, by moving the focus of your attention away from thinking and into the aliveness of your entire body.

When you're present, your sensory perceptions—your hearing, your seeing—instantly increase. You'll feel a stillness, one that you don't have to manufacture. It's been there all along, under all that thinking about "what to do." You'll be able to see the difference between: here's the situation and here is what my mind is saying about the situation, or, in other words between: "I might lose my job" and "I might lose my job, which will mean I'll lose my house and have to take my daughter out of her school and move in with my parents, so I have to get another job by the end of the week, even if there are no jobs and I'm not skilled enough to get one."

This doesn't mean that you completely disregard or ignore the future, and it doesn't mean that you can no longer think about what you're going to do tomorrow. It just means that the focus of your attention is in the present moment. You need to plan for certain things but always come back to the immediacy and liveliness of what's really happening.

How do we do this? One way is to start recognizing that voice in your head. Once you hear what you're thinking, you may be able to stop thinking. Another way is to ask yourself What problem do I have right now? Often, this wakes you up. You'll have to admit: All right, right now I don't have a problem. For example, at this very second, you haven't lost your job. You may lose it later, but at this very second you have a job. Yes, you still may have a challenging situation that will later require action. But that's not a problem, is it? It's an event. Further, should a problem arise, right this second, then you'll do something about it.

Once you understand what your situation actually is—which is not what that voice in your head says it is—then, of course, you can stop struggling. The situation exists. You don't have to worry about it or drink over it or cry or debate or ask others for advice. You can stop resisting it because what was making you sick was your own thinking about it—not it.

In fact, you're able to go on with your normal activity—and that's where intuition comes in. Because when you connect with stillness, you also connect with a creative intelligence that is higher than analytical thinking. Very often, the right decision then arises spontaneously. It may not happen immediately. It may take your going back to your normal life, but this time period gives your intuition the room and silence it needs to surface.

Ultimately, I believe, whether you choose one way or the other doesn't matter. If you're present when you make your decision, then you'll be present in the next situation—and be ready to make choices as the need comes up. Of course, you always could have done things differently. But the ultimate importance is not what you do, it's how you do it—the state of consciousness brought to the process, which hopefully will let you feel the aliveness of all your experiences.


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The Get-Away-From-It-All Strategy For Solving Your Problems

By Annie Gottlieb | Oprah.com

I didn't know how to begin this article.

I'd read the book The Breakout Principle (Scribner), by Herbert Benson, MD, and William Proctor, about maximizing performance and creativity. Then I'd interviewed Benson, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of several books on mind and wellness, most notably the mega best-seller The Relaxation Response (Wings).


Photo: Thinkstock

After a few hours of trying different beginnings, I gave up and started trudging home from my office. About halfway there, it hit me: the lead, that crucial first sentence. Benson would say I'd just experienced a "breakout," a phenomenon as mysterious—until now—as it is familiar: You're striving toward a goal at work, in a relationship, in therapy, or at the gym, and you hit a wall. You're stuck, frustrated, and exhausted. Finally, you just let go. You turn to something completely different, perhaps something soothingly mindless and repetitive. "It could be as simple as putting on your makeup or brushing your hair," Benson says. "With me, it's sometimes shaving." And suddenly the answer is there. Your mind is flooded with insights and solutions, your body with the energy and grace that athletes call the zone.

That's a breakout, the term Benson has coined for a universal pattern of human functioning that powers our great leaps forward in every area of life. After such a leap, you don't slide back to where you were before. Every breakout you've ever had has lifted you, a millimeter or a mile, to a higher, freer plane. It's how we grow—not in one smooth arc, but in bursts that Benson diagrams as STRUGGLE > RELEASE > BREAKOUT > IMPROVED "NEW NORMAL."

Once we understand this process, Benson says, we can learn to help it happen. "Think back on it, and you'll find a certain set of behaviors you go through when you're stuck," he says. Whether it's a formal practice like yoga or a comfy space-out like knitting or folding laundry, he says, "you must get your mind completely off what you were struggling with."

Benson, who is also the founding president of Mind/Body Medical Institute in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, calls this "pulling the breakout trigger." In collaboration with neuroscientists and using new imaging technology, he's been researching what happens in the brain when you do it.

By understanding the science of the breakout, we can begin to master the art of it. Benson offers three rules. One: No struggle, no breakout. If a bath triggered your best eureka moment, you might suppose more life-changing insights will flow from more time in the tub, and then wonder why nothing happens. "Unless you've worked and struggled, backing off is not effective," Benson says. In creative work, the struggle is staring at that blank page or canvas; in a job project, it's arduous research and analysis; in sports or music, it's practice, practice, practice. Sometimes life pitches us into the struggle phase with an illness, a loved one's death, a job layoff, or a relationship crisis.

Two important things go on inside us during the struggle phase, according to Benson. One is a flurry of brain activity, strongest in the left or "thinking brain," the center of logical, linear, verbal reasoning. The other is the release of stress hormones, which increase our heart rate, blood pressure, and, in Benson's words, our "alertness" and "edge."

Up to a point, stress helps us think, cope, and work better. But beyond that point, it starts to tear us apart. The second rule is: Know when to quit struggling. In 1908, Benson writes, two Harvard researchers, Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson, proved that increasing stress first improves and then impairs performance. The key to the breakout is knowing not only how to back off, but when.

If you keep pushing yourself when you feel stuck, stress hormones start to swamp your system, and your primitive brain (the deep core that drives your most basic life functions and rawest emotions) goes into overdrive. Warning signs may include recycling the same idea over and over, anxiety, fearfulness, anger, a tendency to cry, frustration, boredom, forgetfulness, a creative block, or symptoms like headaches, backaches, or insomnia, Benson says. Push on and you may harm your health. Instead "say to yourself, I've done everything possible." And then follow the third rule: Pull the breakout trigger. Watch your breath. Watch a ball game. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Float in a swimming pool. Laugh yourself silly. Beat a drum. Stroke your pet. Listen to Mozart. Wash dishes. Hike a trail. Use the 12-step slogan "Let go and let God." There are countless ways to "sever completely your previous train of thoughts and emotions," the crucial mechanism of a breakout trigger, according to Benson. Physical or mental repetition helps, as does adapting a que sera sera attitude, in which you relinquish control. One simple powerful way to activate a breakout is with the "relaxation response".

There's a subtle knack to achieving the optimal mental state. "Try too hard and you'll lose the trigger," Benson says. "You can't make it happen; you have to allow it to happen. You go into a reverie, and then the mind, relieved of pressure, rearranges itself." And so does the brain. Based on the latest research, Benson and his colleagues suspect that it's the gas nitric oxide, released by a specialized (and only recently discovered) network of nerves, that shuts off stress hormones, turns on feel-good neurotransmitters like endorphins, and smooths the troubled waters of the struggle phase. (Nitrous oxide is also the secret of Viagra—and, ironically for a substance that seems to shout "yes!" its chemical formula is NO.)

Imaging studies of the brain during deep meditation and creative activity show the usual jagged, left-brain busyness giving way to what scientists call coherence, a serene synchronization of the logical left brain with the intuitive right and of the sophisticated neocortex with the primitive core.

What Benson believes he has seen on brain scans is what the ancients called vis medicatrix naturae, or "the natural healing capacity within us." With their power to alchemize stress into bliss, he says, breakouts are good for your health. With their power to deliver revelations and dissolve problems, they're good for your life. Faced with a crossroads or crisis, instead of knocking yourself out, you can trust this natural brain mechanism to come to your rescue. You've got to lay the groundwork, Benson emphasizes, but then you can choose to let go...and let NO.

A Simple Breakout Trigger

When active efforts at problem solving have taken you as far as they can, try invoking the "relaxation response," a simple way to open yourself to an exhilarating breakout. Benson's technique: Sit comfortably in a quiet place. Choose a word or a sound or a prayerful phrase that has positive meaning for you (peace, one, love). Close your eyes and breathe regularly. On each exhalation, silently repeat your words or sounds. If your mind wanders, don't fight it or feel you've failed. Just think, Oh, well, and gently return to your repetition. After 10 to 20 minutes, open your eyes, sit quietly, and let everyday thoughts seep back into your awareness. You've primed your brain for a flash of creative insight.

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What's Your Best Problem-Solving Approach?

By Oprah.com

Part 1: Think of a dilemma you're currently facing.

Now quickly push it aside and switch mental gears: Imagine you're walking through a park when you come to a hole in the ground blocking your path. On a piece of paper, sketch a scene that illustrates how you manage to continue on your way.

"When you draw yourself solving a problem, you call on your creative strengths," says Lynn Kapitan, PhD, therapist and executive editor of the academic journal Art Therapy. "Instead of thinking, I can't do this, you imagine what you can do—and realize you have strategies hidden within."


Photo: Thinkstock

Part 2: The way you drew yourself getting past the hole—whether on a tree-branch bridge or in a hot-air balloon—may give you new perspective on getting past the obstacle you're facing in real life. Kapitan suggests asking yourself these simple questions about your picture:

Q: How big is the hole? If it's more like a ditch than a canyon, maybe your real-world problem isn't as severe as you thought.

Q: Did you use the environment around you to get across the hole? If so, you might benefit from the support of friends, family, or a counselor as you tackle your problem. If you relied on yourself, try to identify any coping skills you take for granted (the ability to stay levelheaded, for example, or to find humor in any situation); they might serve you now.

Q: Did you draw your picture quickly? If you were guided by instinct, you may prefer to trust your gut. But if you took time to think, you might want to learn more about your problem before you proceed.

Q: Did you end up taking a risk, a leap of faith? Bold action just might move you closer to your goal.

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Is Your Glass Half Empty Or Half Full?

By Susan C. Vaughan, MD | Oprah.com

Imagine this scenario: Your boss calls you at 10 A.M. and asks you to come to his office for a 2 P.M. meeting. The company rumor mill has been forecasting terminations, and now you're anxious. Which option best describes how you'd react?


Photo: Thinkstock

Option 1
You make a list of the people who would be let go before you, based on seniority and job performance. Then you prepare to defend your work if need be.

Option 2
You try to identify what you may have done wrong recently. Then you invite a close coworker out for coffee and speculate about the meeting.

Option 3
You proceed with your day, but in the back of your mind you think about all the things you dislike about your job, until a pink slip doesn't seem so terrible.

Option 4
You spend the morning sending out feelers to your contacts in the field. Taking action and knowing you have other prospects makes you feel better.

If you chose option 3, congratulations—it demonstrates two hallmarks of healthy optimists. First is the ability to stop negativity from hijacking your thoughts. Second, and almost as important, is how this is done: The person in option 3 convinces herself she'll be okay even if she is fired. She has her talents and self-worth firmly in mind, which can make a big difference in a meeting with a superior.

If optimism isn't currently your default, the good news is that it's a perspective you can cultivate. When you feel fear rising, try these two steps:

1. Fake a sunny attitude. Your brain gets feedback from your face—so if you force yourself to smile, you may actually feel better.

2. Identify all possible silver linings. Imagine you have the "righting reflex" of a cat: No matter what, you'll always land on your feet.

This exercise was created by Susan C. Vaughan, MD, author of Half Empty, Half Full: Understanding the Psychological Roots of Optimism (Mariner).

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What The Happiest People Know For Sure

By Dawn Raffel

I grew up revering goals of all kinds: big, small, and bite-size; readily attainable; wildly ambitious; broken up, written down, projected on the stars. My attitude was hardly surprising, given the adages that are central to our culture: If you can see it, you can be it; if you don't know where you want to go, you're never going to get there; the road to bliss is paved with goals. Okay, I made that last one up, but a lot of us seem to believe it.


Photo: Thinkstock

Which is why Stephen Shapiro, a cheerful subversive in casual business attire, comes as a shock to the system: He's making a cottage industry of what he calls goal-free living. (His book is titled—what else?—Goal-Free Living.) If you want to be happy—successful in the broadest sense—he suggests you take your nifty five-year plan and your lifetime to-do list and throw them out the window. And while you're at it, get some air.

Shapiro had a long track record of running motivational workshops for major corporations when he had his epiphany on the road. He had published a book called 24/7 Innovation and was planning to interview business leaders throughout the country for what he envisioned as a sequel. Not far into his research, though, he spotted a pattern: The most fulfilled people were also the most spontaneous and the least goal oriented. Fascinated, Shapiro chucked his agenda and drove 12,000 miles in his techno-wired car (equipped with cellular Internet access, digital recording equipment, and everything else short of an espresso bar), interviewing risktakers and box breakers, and asking for their suggestions about who else he should meet. He spent time with everyone from Doug Busch, a VP and a chief technology officer at Silicon giant Intel, to John T. Martin, then curator of one of the world's only voodoo museums, as well as 148 others thriving in such fields as education, technology, and philanthropy. After learning about the circuitous paths they'd taken, Shapiro was convinced that the key to happiness lies in checking out the detours and back roads, literal and figurative, without fear of changing course. Road maps for life, he believes, might lead to material gain, but there's a good chance that if you follow them unquestioningly, you'll lose yourself.

"I was giving a speech on a cruise ship recently, and the other speaker was a professional athlete," he says. "Her session was on setting goals, and mine was on not setting them. Someone in the audience raised her hand and said, 'I have a question. I've been very good at setting goals and very good at achieving them, and I'm still miserable. Why is that?'"

Give Shapiro a minute, and he'll rattle off the reasons, as he did that day at sea, and as he does almost every day, everywhere he can. "Number one I'm calling 'Whose goal is it, anyway?'" he says. "Most people's goals aren't their own. They tend to be driven by society and family pressure."

Second, he says, when you focus on a goal, "you put blinders on. You lose your peripheral vision and miss out on all the great opportunities around you. Third," he says, hardly pausing for breath, "you're always living for the future. You end up saying, 'I'll be happy when....' You sacrifice today in the hopes that something wonderful is going to happen tomorrow. But it almost never does." Yes, you might win the promotion or bag the trophy, but you rarely feel the lasting satisfaction you'd imagined. "Mountain climbers have a concept called the false summit, where they get to what they think is the peak and then they realize they're only at the bottom of an even bigger mountain," Shapiro says. "That's what happens with goals. You're constantly chasing them. The fourth issue is that you're courting failure." Meaning, he says, you become attached to one outcome, and even if you get it, reality seldom matches the dream in all its Technicolor splendor.

But just a minute here. Aren't goals, however idealistic or elusive, crucial to achievement? How much greatness would be lost to the world if artists, athletes, scientists, and thinkers fled potential disappointment and boredom to wander off in search of delight?

"Goal-free living isn't about being aimless or saying, 'Oh, this is getting tough. I've got to stop,'" Shapiro contends. "It's about being passion-driven in the moment, while knowing you can change course." It's also about "getting out, playing, and trying lots of new things." You can't find out what you love to do by sitting and thinking about it, he says; you must experience it.

Intel's Doug Busch, for instance, started off picking fruit during college, then maintained machinery in a poultry processing plant. "Most people think that's pretty low-end, but he actually loved it, and realized the reason was that he wanted to work with his hands," Shapiro says. "So he went back to school and became a mechanical engineer." Next, he got a job at Intel and grew more interested in other aspects of technology, eventually growing into his current position. "This is meandering with purpose," Shapiro says. "When you're living a life of passion, you're almost always making a contribution.

"Let's say you'd like to be a healer," he says. "You can move down the road to medical school but look around and see that maybe you don't want to be a doctor after all. Maybe you want to be a nurse, or work with the elderly, or start a charity. You don't lock yourself in."

If, like me, you are a goalaholic, you can't be expected to quit cold turkey, nor do you need to. "The question is, do you have the right goals, and are you relating to them the right way?" Shapiro says. Some people abuse goals "as a way of escaping from being present. They distract themselves by looking ahead. I'm much more into enjoying every single moment for what it is and allowing things to unfold." He suggests thinking in terms of aspirations (work in the visual arts) rather than goals (get a painting into a specific gallery by date X) because they give you pleasure today and are more broadly defined.

Even corporations—in fact, especially corporations, Shapiro tells his clients—suffer from rigid planning. No one can foretell how the world will look in just a few years—witness the quick burst of the dot-com bubble. His biggest beef is with the popular institutional concept of goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, results oriented, and time based. The idea that you'll know right away whether you've succeeded or failed is misguided and crippling: "Not only have you set yourself up for failure but you've put a time limit on everything," Shapiro says.

His antidote to the pain of a failed goal is to step back and ask yourself whether you defined the desired outcome too narrowly and whether you tried to control the uncontrollable. "Life is unpredictable," he says. "So give up control. Create many paths. And play hard."

Above all, trash the "If I don't succeed by Tuesday, I'm a loser" mentality. "You know what?" he says merrily. "I'm not going to be done with what I'm doing till I'm dead. Sometimes I think of things so audacious they couldn't come true, so I just keep playing with them. It's really about applying creativity to every aspect of your life."

And that, if you'll excuse me, sounds like a worthy goal.

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The One Thing You Can Do To Honor Your Inner Voice

By Gary Zukav

Have you ever been thinking about a friend when the phone rings? "I was just thinking about you!" you exclaim. "What a coincidence!"

The word coincidence means that two events happen at the same time, like your thinking about your friend and your friend's call. When this happens, it is never an accident. Your friend and you are connected in ways that your eyes, ears, nose, skin and tongue cannot show you but that your intuition did.

Have you ever had a feeling you shouldn't do something and then done it anyway?

"I knew I shouldn't have trusted him!" you say.

That is right. Your intuition told you, but you wanted so much to trust that you ignored it.


Photo: Thinkstock

Multisensory perception and intuition are the same thing, but multisensory perception is a more accurate name. Most people think that intuition is a hunch that occurs now and then, but it is more that that. It is a very sophisticated system that allows you to know more than you can with your five senses. As we become more and more intuitive—and we all are—we encounter different kinds of experiences.

Libby was my favorite grandmother. I loved to visit her when I was little. There was a restaurant in her building, and after dinner we would walk through the lobby hand in hand. Each time she met a friend, she would say, "This is my grandson. You remember him, don't you?" I was embarrassed, but if I objected (which I always did), she would jerk my hand downward and say "Shuuush!"

I was in college when she died. A lot of people came to her funeral. When the rabbi gave her eulogy, I watched him from an alcove to his left. A small television hung from the ceiling. This gave us a front row view of the rabbi. Seeing Grandmother Libby's funeral on television was so bizarre to me that I started to laugh. Suddenly, I felt Grandmother Libby jerk my hand downward.

"Shuuush!" she said sharply.

She didn't want me disturbing her funeral. I stopped laughing and we stood silently, side by side, for the rest of the service. I never grieved Libby's departure, because she didn't leave. I did not tell my family about this experience for 30 years. I didn't think they would believe me. Now that we are all becoming multisensory, it is not necessary to wait 30 years before sharing experiences like these.

Multisensory perception is life changing. It allows us to see what is nonphysical as well as what is physical. Everyone's life is changing in this way. We are becoming more aware of intuition. We have more to pay attention to.

There is no single way to experience intuition. It is different for everyone. Do you know anyone who is exactly like you—who weighs the same, has the same color hair and the same length arms? That is not possible because each of us is different.

The same is true of intuition. Some people have hunches. Some get ideas. Some people hear music, and others see pictures. Some people get sensations, like the feeling of a crisp winter day. Others hear words, like I did with Grandmother Libby. None is the correct, or the only, way.

You can find your way by paying attention to what is happening inside of you. This is the biggest difference between five-sensory perception and multisensory perception: The five senses require you to pay attention to what is outside of you. Intuition requires that you pay attention to what is happening within.

Gary Zukav is the author of Spiritual Partnership: The Journey to Authentic Power. This article is from his book, Soul Stories.

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Rev Up Your Emotional Metabolism

By Leigh Newman

Figure Out if Your Pain Is Clean or Dirty
Fast-tracking your way out of a dark period starts with figuring out what kind of pain you’re feeling, says Amy Johnson, PhD, psychologist and author of Modern Enlightenment: Psychological, Spiritual, and Practical Ideas for a Better Life. Clean pain is the raw emotion that results from what happens to you. It’s real, and it’s logical. It crops up when you lose a spouse or your job or discover someone’s betrayed you, and it often causes you to say things like “I feel so lost” or “I miss him so much.” Dirty pain, on the other hand, is when you try to explain why the event happened or predict what will happen next, saying things like “He never loved me.” Or “My life is never going to be the same again.” What this does is add a distracting dose of punishment. Another way to think about it? The clean version is a recognition of what you’re feeling. The dirty version is a judgment about why you’re feeling that emotion and how long it will last. The more you can stick the former, the quicker you’ll get through the tough times.


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Put Yourself Through 90 Seconds of Total Hell
Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy—and time. What usually happens, says Johnson, is that we try to divert ourselves from what’s upsetting us. We eat something or buy something or do whatever’s going to make us feel better in the moment. But “research has shown that when you sit with those clean, pure emotions like sadness or anger, they actually pass through you in about 90 seconds.” So if you can just be with it and say, “I can handle this feeling,” it will burn up and dissipate. This doesn’t mean you’ll be over your breakup or your dog’s death in 90 seconds. That emotion is going to come back. But the more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you’ll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.

Add the Extra Sentence
Many of us have a punishing, critical voice in our head. Every time it yells at us, it sidetracks us from figuring out what we really need to do. Silencing it is the ideal solution—but that might take some serious long-term practice (Want to try? See Eckart Tolle.) The author of On Grief and Grieving and founder of Grief.com, David Kessler, has a swifter strategy: adding one extra sentence to each negative, discouraging thought. For example, if the voice inside your head says, “My husband died, and I’m never going to love again,” you add, “in that way.” Another example? If the voice says, “I lost my job, and I’m never going to find another one,” you add, “exactly like the last one.” When you eliminate the punishing conclusion by tacking on a more positive (more realistic) one, you eliminate the weeks soaked with guilt and worry. You may find in one of your add-ons an unanticipated possibility.

Get Off the Sad Couch
Here's something we hadn't thought of before: If you lie in bed and think, “I’m such a loser,” for three days straight, pretty soon, whenever you look at your bed, you'll start thinking, “I’m such a loser,” says Johnson. Trying to fight that thought by disputing it might even make you more upset. You may, in fact, find yourself thinking, “I know, I know, I’m a loser for thinking I’m a loser.” Save yourself the time-and-mind suck. Get out of that bed or off that couch. Go to the park or the beach or even just the grocery store. The trip will break the repetitive cycle of your thoughts and may even spark a fresh one. After all, it’s kind of hard to think, “I’m a loser,” when you’re staring a lilac in bloom, or eating $20-a-pound brie samples—for free!—at the cheese counter.

Hit the Library
When you want to rev up your physical metabolism, the first thing to try is working out. The same goes for your mind. It needs exercise. Reading books by people who have gone through similar struggles can spur on new solutions, says Ellen Oler, LCSW, which is an approach known in psychology circles as Biblio-therapy. It also lets you know what to expect after, say, a divorce or the death of a parent. (Random rage? Crying fits on not-so-obvious anniversaries like your last mortgage payment on the house your bought together?) You’ll spend less time puzzling out why the heck you’re feeling so badly and more on how to feel better. Another person’s story can also work like a personal trainer—pointing out the pointless exercises to avoid, cheering you though the dark, hopeless stretches—transforming you into a lean, mean, emotion-burning machine.

Find the author at Leigh-Newman.com

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