Experiencing the World

We live and experience the world through our 5 senses – indeed, we make ‘sense’ of the world through them. The more distinctions and exquisite awareness we can make through our senses the more life enhancingly we can live. Sense-uality is your ability to use your senses, to revel in them, to embrace them and the world through each and every one of your senses.

Western society has a love-hate relationship with sensuality. At one extreme, it is denigrated and seen as a selfish, frivolous waste of time. At the other extreme, the rich and famous invest incredible amounts of time, money and resources indulging in stimulating their senses and sensuality. They pamper themselves, and the rest of us look on with envy.

So what’s this all about?

Why is there such guilt and conditioning around sensuality?

Sensuality is linked strongly to pleasure. It’s also linked to sexuality. There is a fine line between sensuality and sexuality. Stimulating your senses brings you alive. It expands your awareness. It enhances your life. It allows you to connect with the world, with other people and with various parts of your own multi-mind.

Unfortunately, the Judaeo-Christian philosophy that the western world is mired in, sees sexuality and therefore sensuality as evil and sinful. This is a paradigm of coercion and control that is more about ensuring people live programmed lives in obeisance of the central authority of the church and those in political power. It is opposed to personal freedom, to personal understanding and does not encourage free thinking or the questioning of the rules and social moirés.

When you love your life sensationally, you realise and desire more freedom, choice and personal power. It’s your life, so live it well and live it in your own way. Find and follow your own destiny, not the proscribed behaviours of a societally controlled existence.

One of the keys to living a great and enhanced life is therefore to embrace your sensuality. Develop each of your senses and your ability and experience and explore the world through them. Increase your awareness to make distinctions with every sense. Let go and relax into your senses. Reprogram your habitual ways of using (or limiting) your sensing of the world – your sensuality – by doing adventures that stimulate your senses. Really celebrate and revel in your senses and sensuality. Look for what is sensuous and accept it into your life.

Of course, control and balance is vital for wondrous living. So ensure that your sensuality is balanced and grounded. Stimulate your life but don’t over-stimulate. Find the bliss-point, the sweet spot that adds value to your life’ing rather than takes away. A glass of great wine can really add to a delicious meal; a flagon of wine indulged beyond sensibility will leave you hung-over and degraded with no memory of the meal it was consumed with.

Surround yourself with beauty. Listen to uplifting music. Use aromatherapy and incense to scent your life with wonderful fragrances. Light scented candles of an evening to combine the delight of flickering ambient light with the stimulation of perfume. Step away from family rules and stereotypes to find new ways to evoke your senses. Art, photography, food, clothing, fantasy – love your self in new ways, pamper and pleasure your world with new experiences. Let go of any societally conditioned feelings of guilt about sensuality and instead embrace a life enhancing attitude of being proactive and explorative with your senses.

Your sensuality is a deep expression of your joy in being your self. So open your self to the world, accept your body through your senses and be life enhancingly ‘sensible’. You really only ever experience the world through each of your senses, so enhance your life more sensationally and you’ll gain a sense of self you could only otherwise dream about.

Sensationally yours,

Grant :-)



Some sensational reading you may enjoy:

“A meditation on sensory experience that weaves personal experiences with history, science, philosophy and theology for a wide-ranging approach to our centuries-old but undissipated curiosity about the origins of pain and pleasure…. An erudite work.”

“Come to Your Senses is a unique approach that can change your life. These simple techniques may even save your life!”

“In Meta-Magick, Philip Farber combines traditional ritual sensibilities with contemporary concepts of neuro-linguistics.”

“Professor Lingis shows how new conceptions of sensation, sensibility, sensuality, and susceptibility enable us to discover the intelligibility of our sensuous environment.”

Loving your mind

As I've said in a previous blog entry, television, newspapers and the media exist to make money. They do this by focusing on FUDGE – Fear, Uncertainty, Disaster, Greed and Envy – in order to grab your attention and influence you both through editorial and advertising. They take existing negative values and amplify them.

Because of evolved processes and mechanisms in the neural patterning system of the brain, we are strongly attentive to danger and negative stimuli. The media makes use of these processes and mechanisms to garner your awareness and attention. They celebrate fear and failure. Good news is NO news. Papers are filled with disaster and despair.

The Research is in...

There is a huge body of research showing the influence of television and video on human behaviour. The preponderance of evidence from more than 3,000 research studies over two decades shows that violence portrayed in the media influences the attitudes and behaviour of those who watch it.

Television is filled with violence and aggression. For example, an American Psychological Association report on television showed that by the time the average child leaves elementary school, he or she will have witnessed at least 8,000 murders and more than 100,000 other assorted acts of violence on television.

This is not something you would subject your loving self to when you give yourself the gift of life enhancing!

We become what we focus on...


We become what we focus on, and we’re influenced by the messages and environment around us. Television sends a mixed bag of messages, the majority of which are negative and filled with stereotypes of selfishness, greed, demeaning sexuality and shallow values. Are these the messages you want to imprint in your unconscious mind? No!

The great personal development motivator Zig Zigler says that we are all:

“SNIOP – Susceptible to the Negative Influences of Other People”.

We are social beings and our brains are optimised for tracking and responding to the behaviours and social messages of others.

Television and the media present distorted views of others; they show us either the worst of human behaviour to which we either become desensitised or have our innate ‘out-group’ fears amplified, or they show us the very small percentage of special, ‘beautiful’ people – ultra-thin fashion models or ultra-rich greed models.

None of these are healthy messages for your mind. None of these are healthy messages for life enhancing.

I stopped following the media...

I well remember the day I decided to stop buying and reading newspapers. I was doing my Masters degree in Applied Physics. A National newspaper had decided to report on the research being done by our group. The reporter came and interviewed us all. This would be a minor article that would be printed in the back half of the paper – not earth-shattering news, more a general interest section.

We eagerly awaited the following day’s paper to see our small piece of fame. What a surprise we got. Almost nothing in the article was correct. We had been misquoted, the facts were wrong, the article was a load of rubbish. “Wow”, I thought, “How can they have gotten something so simple and so un-political, so wrong?” There was no benefit or purpose in how inaccurate the piece was. This was not something that had political or monetary motivation.

It was then I realised, that if something so trivial was so badly distorted, what was happening with the more important stories – the ones that carried social importance and influence? How were they being distorted and misreported?

Read something more useful instead...

I decided that in future I’d use my time to read a varied selection of non-fiction books and non-fiction magazines like ‘New Scientist’ to gain the important information about what was happening in the world. Society changes through the impact of science and technology. I would be better served learning about the coming advances that would change our world, rather than reading inaccurate and biased editorial from media designed to amplify FUDGE and serve the interests of power groups and money-lords.

What's your choice?

It’s up to you. How do you want to invest your time? Who do you want to be influenced by? What sort of influences – positive or negative – do you want in your life? Choose carefully.

In this massively changing and accelerating world, where information is bombarding and coming at you faster than you can filter it, do you want to carefully choose the media that’s sending messages throughout your mind and life? I sure do!

Living an enhanced and enhancing life means giving yourself the gift of positive influence. Loving yourself and supporting yourself means being careful of what information you allow yourself to be bombarded with. Stay away from television and newspapers – there are much better ways to learn about the world and learn about and create your wondrous and enhanced life.

Loving Your Mind... Loving Learning and Knowledge

Knowledge and choice give you more power and control in your life. You gain knowledge through reading. Reading brings the thoughts and ideas of other minds into your life. It’s an incredible way to absorb vicarious experience. Think about it. Most books, even fiction books, represent months and sometimes years of work and distillation of ideas and thoughts by another human being.

People write books because they have something to say or share. In a couple of hours reading you can experience what another person took a lifetime to accumulate and learn. Books and reading are an amazing way to quickly live aspects of another person’s life, to absorb some of their experience and wisdom.

Reading also increases your vocabulary. And research has shown that people’s perception of intelligence is correlated strongly with vocabulary. The larger your vocabulary, the more you will be perceived as intelligent by other people. This can be important because it has also been shown that income is linked to the perceptions of others. The take home message here is that reading can actually lead to more opportunities in life, a higher income and ultimately a better life.

Read often!


So read widely and read often. Go on an Accelerated Reading course. Learn to read swiftly and with increased memory and retention. Once you’ve mastered the skill of accelerated reading you’ll find that reading is immense fun. It takes you into a ‘zone’ of flow, where the words disappear and instead the ideas and images go straight from the page into your brain and mind.

It feels fantastic and the research from Positive Psychology shows that this experience of flow actually creates lasting positive spirals of creativity, clarity of thinking and emotional resilience. How cool is that? Reading is not only fun, it’s actually good for your mind and body!

Value reading

So make time to read in your life. Make it a positive habit. Pick up a book, a novel or a highly valued magazine, rather than turn on the idiot box television or video. Be thoughtful and selective in your reading. Stretch yourself.

You’ll be grateful to yourself for loving and supporting your brain and mind more wondrously. See yourself as a great reader and make it a permanent and proud part of your identity and life.

Now that is life enhancing!

O-priming your life

In the field of General Semantics, there is a linguistic technique called ‘E-prime’ that involves using English in a way that excludes the use of the verb ‘to be’ and its various forms.

The idea underlying this suggests that the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of attribution can lead to unsane thinking and consequent behaviour. For example, if you say “I am stupid” you are linking the process of stupidity to your identity, rather than expressing the behaviour as one of many skills or traits that you do. This can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies that maintain an unconscious competency of doing stupidity at all levels of your life.

Since language influences perception, the use of E-prime encourages the careful choice of verbs and meanings. E-prime can also lead to a less dogmatic style of expression and reduce the possibility of misunderstanding and conflict. I'll talk more about E-prime in a future blog entry. Today, I want to introduce you to a concept and skill called O-priming that I've been exploring.

Grasping, Desire and Ownership

The ancient philosophy of Buddhism maintains that the nature of the universe is impermanence and that consequently much suffering stems from attachment and grasping. The need for ownership and attachment can lead to unhappiness.

As the Buddha propounded in the discourse on the Four Noble Truths:

due to contact there is feeling;
due to feeling there is attachment;
due to attachment there is grasping;
due to grasping there is suffering;
suffering has ignorance-obscuration as its root cause;

There is a way out of suffering, which is to eliminate attachment and desire.

The Materialist Imperative

"We've been raised to compete, to want more! More! More! It's a way of life. It's about greed.”

Sandy Duncan

We have a long evolutionary history of hunter-gathering and an instinctual predisposition towards ownership. We love owning and gathering things. It’s the materialist imperative. We desire things: houses, cars, boats, clothes, toys and all the entrapments and enchantments of bling.

It’s also the ownership trap! Because everything you own, owns a small piece of you, and the more you own, the more it owns you. Remember this!

The psychology of ownership is fascinating and understanding it is crucial to overcoming patterns of attachment, desire and greed.

The psychology of ownership

Ownership changes perceptions. Research by Social Psychologists has shown that once a person owns an item they place higher perceived value on it than on an identical item they do not own.

Stop and think about this. The mere fact of owning something increases how much you value it!

Ownership is also linked to Loss Aversion. The research shows that people prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Indeed, some studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful psychologically, as gains.

So once you own something, it really does start to own you emotionally and psychologically. You become attached to it and form a relationship with it. It takes up your time, thought, energy and life.

Marketers are well aware of these traits and use them to manipulate you. Partial ownership confers similar effects on perceptions, so they encourage free 30 day trials and money back guarantees, knowing that the majority of people will grow attached to the item and not return it. Similarly, in on-line auctions, people start feeling they own the item even before the auction has completed and so drive the price higher than they would pay if they’d bought it from a shop.

Sure, owning stuff is useful. Where would we be if we owned nothing? Probably still swinging in the jungle and living from hand to mouth.

The problem occurs when we own too many things; when we get stuck in the greed of the ownership trap – of wanting more and more and more. And this problem is even more insidious when we 'own' ideas, when we grow attached to concepts, beliefs and ideologies.

Greed is a verb

Let’s get one thing sorted right away. Greed and attachment are verbs. They're processes. We often talk about greed as if it’s a noun, an object, a thing. However, people don’t ‘have’ greed. They ‘do’ greed – more accurately, they do greeding. Same with attaching. It’s an active process, a skill, an unconscious competency.

The behaviours of greeding and attaching occur naturally, use primitive biological survival circuits of the brain and body and are in large part instinctually driven. That’s why they're so insidious. Research shows that greeding is linked to hunger and sexuality, so it can be very powerful.

But the main point is that it’s a process that can be controlled and moderated. It's a skill that has counter skills that can be used to constrain and control these unconscious behaviours. Learning to notice and control the thoughts and languaging that supports greeding and attaching is one of these key skills.

O-priming

So to summarise: Everything you ‘own’ owns a piece of you, and that ownership, attaching and grasping can cost you dearly. Nothing lasts forever and everything is always in a state of flux and change. So grasping, attaching and ownership are insidious enemies to life enhancing happiness and can lead to much suffering.

Based on these deep insights from the ancient wisdom of buddhism and modern psychology, and following on from the neuro-semantic concept of E-prime, I have created the technique of ‘O-priming’.

O-priming involves the use of English in a way that excludes the use of the verbs, adjectives and predicates of ownership and attachment – especially in the case of ownership of intangible experiences. O-priming is effectively the use of english without the use of the verb ‘to have’ and other linguistic presuppositions of ownership.

O-prime is a semantic tool that helps you notice and filter for processes of attaching and ownership that can impoverish your model of the world, your experience, thinking and ultimately your behaviours. O-priming also encourages denominalising - shifting nominalised nouns (disguised verbs) back into their active verb form.

For example, if you say “I have an understanding of General Semantics” then you are indicating ownership. You are saying you ‘have’ understanding.

This suggests a grasping and need for understanding and nominalises the process of understanding into an object that you own. However, understanding is a process that can change with time, experience and knowledge.

If you feel you ‘have’ an understanding of General Semantics and then someone shows you your current understanding is not complete, how do you feel? There’s every possibility you may feel threatened since ‘your’ ownership and ‘your’ understanding is about to be ‘lost’.

Contrast this with the O-prime version that replaces ownership with process – that shifts “I have understanding” to “I do understanding”.

With O-prime, you could more accurately say “I feel I do understanding of General Semantics very well”. Or perhaps you may express it as “General Semantics is something I understand well” [though this would not be e-primed :-)].

These O-primed ways of thinking and communicating remove the semantic presuppositions of ownership and grasping.

Practical O'Priming

Removing all forms of ownership expression from your language is not really practical and not what is suggested. The key message of this deeper understanding is to note that the language of ownership can at times be pernicious and lead to unsane thinking and behaviour.

Instead, use O-prime appropriately to allow yourself to gain more choice and control over how you are modelling your world. Where useful, track for and replace the language of ownership in how you communicate and express your experiences so that the language you use supports your outcomes. This is much more life enhancing.

Stop grasping after permanence and allow yourself to flexibly flow with the ongoing processes of change. Every opportunity you can, refuse to be sucked into the ownership trap. Notice and adjust your languaging to support a more sane and life enhancing way of thinking and living.

Some Examples of Ownership Predicates

Presuppositions of ownership are indicated by words such as:

- All forms of the verb 'to have' e.g. Have, had, will have
- Get, got, own, buy, rent, contract, pay etc.
- My, mine, yours, theirs etc.
- Grasp, grab, catch, hold, take, possess, keep etc.
- Create, establish, build, make etc.


Do wording powerfully and in a way that supports enhancing your life and the lives of those you care about!

Life enhancing best wishing,
Grant

And here's some Life Enhancing reading for you:

Words are Life Enhancing

"Words can either Build Up or Tear Down, Strengthen or Weaken, Emancipate or Enslave…THE CHOICE IS OURS!"

Roger Anthony

As we've discussed, many times in this blog, words are the tools you use to understand, filter and construct meaning and reality. They're also the tools you use to communicate, negotiate, influence and inspire others.


So it won't surprise you to hear that the larger your vocabulary, the more life enhancing it is. It's like being a carpenter or trades-person and only having a couple of tools in your toolkit. If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail...

The more tools you have at your disposal, the better a crafts-person you become, the better you are able to do your job. It's the same with language.

The more distinctions you have for describing and articulating your world, the more refined you'll be in the outcomes you create. Meaning is created in large measure through language, so enlarge your skills in languaging and enlarge your vocabulary.

Word of the Day

What prompted today's blog entry was the arrival of the following 'Word of the Day' in my email inbox:

The Word of the Day is:

enhance \in-HANS\ verb
: heighten, increase; especially : to increase or improve in value, quality, desirability, or attractiveness

Example sentence:
The newspaper company hopes that including more full-color illustrations and adding extra news features will enhance their product and reverse the decline in circulation.

Did you know?
When "enhance" was borrowed into English in the 13th century, it literally meant to raise something higher. That sense, though now obsolete, provides a clue about the origins of the word. "Enhance," which was spelled "enhauncen" in Middle English, comes to us from Anglo-French "enhaucer" or "enhauncer" ("to raise"), which can be traced back to the Vulgar Latin verb "inaltiare." "Inaltiare," in turn, was formed by combining the prefix "in-" with Latin "altus," meaning "high." Although "enhance" initially applied only to physically making things higher, it developed an additional and less literal sense of "to exalt especially in rank or spirit," and quickly acquired extended figurative senses for "raising" the value or attractiveness of something or someone.

Why not subscribe...

Yes... many years ago, knowing the importance of an enhanced vocabulary, I subscribed to: the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary - Word of the Day

Every day I get a great email teaching me a new word, or giving me details about etymology, usage etc. of words I may already know, but don't know the history of or the deeper meanings of.

It's so easy. The emails are short, concise and interesting. Each day my vocabulary expands and the thinking tools at my disposal are enhanced and augmented. Now how cool is that. It costs me nothing and adds immense value to my life.

The 'Word of the Day' is Life Enhancing! I highly recommend you sign up for it, or to some other online word/dictionary service.

Perceived Intelligence

And if you want further motivation to enhance your language and vocab skills... did you know that research in the field of Intelligence has shown that "Total vocabulary has the highest correlation (0.8) with overall IQ of any individual measure of intelligence."

Yes that's right. Higher vocab is correlated with higher intelligence. It's also linked with perception of intelligence, that is, people rate those with a large vocab as being more intelligent.

So by increasing your vocab and ability to articulate you will change how others see you and how they rate your level of intelligence.

Higher levels of intelligence have also been correlated with work remuneration. Within limits, higher intelligence means higher pay. So by increasing your vocab you increase your IQ and therefore the likelihood of getting paid more.

This makes sense, because it's a natural mix of Perception Management - managing how others perceive and respond to you, and the fact that you can think more deeply and wide-rangingly when you have better tools for thinking - more and better linguistic distinctions in which to understand and influence your world.

Words are Powerful!!!

Is this making life enhancing sense to you? Do you get why Words are so powerful? And why you want and need to learn more words and increase your languaging skills!!!

As I like to think: 'The dictionary is your friend" :-)

So subscribe to the 'Word of the Day' and start to expand and enhance your tools for thinking, learning and creating meaning.

Happy Generative and Life Enhancing Wording,
and many smiles,
Grant

and here are some great books I recommend about the power of words and how to use them to enhance your life:

Niceness - It's Life Enhancing

Ok, I gotta tell you something... NewScientist (the magazine) is incredibly, amazingly life enhancing!!!! Read that again. Then rush out and subscribe. I really can't recommend NewScientist too damn highly. I threw away reading news papers and traditional media over 30 years ago, and instead subscribed to NewScientist and I've thanked myself ever since. Why?

Cause traditional news media is based and marketed on FUDGE (Fear Uncertainty Disaster Greed and Envy). It is incredibly biased. It's largely puerile. And it rehashes the same stuff again and again and again. It's basically the same process applied to different content. The names change, but the process remains the same. Wars, political overturns and machinations, crime, violence and fluff. There you go, you now have the recipe to create a newspaper. Go for it LOL

Society changes largely due to the social effects of new technologies and advances in science. And where will you read about them... in NewScientist and other like magazines and journals. By reading NS you get an overview of the coming advances in science and technology and can therefore reasonably predict and track the expected social changes that will emerge and impact your life. It keeps you life enhancingly ahead of the 'normal' curve.

Ok, now I've got that of my chest :-) I'll move on to the content of this weeks blog entry.

I was reading NS while enjoying a delicious dinner and a very nice glass of wooded chardonnay, when I came across a great article entitled 'Be nice to people'. The information in the article was life enhancing, so I thought I'd blog on it and share it with you.

The opening paragraphs of the article summarise it nicely:

It sounds kind of obvious, and a little trite: the world would be a better place to live in if we were all a bit kinder to each other. But how can we make that happen?

This is fast becoming a valid scientific question. Psychologists and neuroscientists are exploring how to increase people's capacity for empathy and compassion, with two ongoing studies claiming that meditation not only increases compassionate feelings but also improves physical and emotional health.

But you don't have to be a Buddhist monk or an expert on brain plasticity to help increase global compassion. There is evidence that altruistic acts spread through social networks. In other words, if you are kind to a friend, they are more likely to be kind to someone else they know.

Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School in Boston designed a cooperation game in which 120 students were organised into groups of four and asked to give money to their group. The game lasted five rounds, and after each round the students were reorganised so that no two appeared in the same group twice. The researchers told the participants at the end of each round how much the others in their group had given

They found that generosity is infectious. If someone gave a dollar more than the predicted group average, the others in that group gave approximately 20 cents more than expected in the next round. This altruism persisted into the third round.

Christakis's team found in a separate study that cooperative behaviour spreads to three degrees of separation - from friend to friend to friend. So if you are popular and well connected, you could have a special role to play: your compassionate acts could resonate further through the network, and you are also more likely to benefit from other people's kindness.

Now isn't that interesting -- The power of social networks to amplify consequences and behaviours! When you are compassionate and nice it spreads. Cooperation breeds cooperation. Generosity leads to generosity in return. Now this is truly a life enhancing insight! You can enhance your world by practicing and spreading niceness :-)

How cool is that piece of knowledge! It's a great encouragement to practice random acts of kindness, or give out free hugs. Be extra nice to your friends, it will feel great and lead them to spread the love into their social network. And I think the world can really use as much loving kindness and compassion as we can give it.

So become a 'niceness generator' and enhance your life and the lives of those connected in spreading activation throughout your extended social networks, it really will make a difference to the world!

with kind wishes
and nice thoughts
Grant


Christakis's book that describes his research and how to apply it in real life:

Book Description

"Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her. A happy neighbor has more impact on your happiness than a happy spouse. These startling revelations of how much we truly influence one another are revealed in the studies of Drs. Christakis and Fowler, which have repeatedly made front-page news nationwide."

"In CONNECTED, the authors explain why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, CONNECTED overturns the notion of the individual and provides a revolutionary paradigm-that social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behavior, politics, and much more. It will change the way we think about every aspect of our lives."

Enhancing your map of the world

In 1933, Count Alfred Korzybski wrote and published a seminal book called ‘Science and Sanity’ and founded a field of philosophy known as General Semantics. In his book, Korzybski showed how language influences our perceptions and actions and that incorrect use of language and thought can lead to what he called 'un-sane' behaviour.

Indeed, Korzybski coined the term ‘neuro-linguistics’ and created the foundation for many fields that sprang from his original insights, including the field of NLP.

Korzybski focused on the process of abstracting, of how we as humans build and evolve concepts and generalisations. He described how we build theories and maps of the world in order to make sense of our experience.

The map is NOT the territory

One of the key insights from General Semantics is that “the map can never be the territory”.

What this means is that... given that humans can never operate off and know the full and complete world – the territory – they must, and can only ever operate off a map of the territory.

And no map can ever be a full representation of the territory; therefore we will always be operating off a deleted, distorted and generalised/abstracted map of that territory.

This sounds like a very simple and obvious idea, yet it has profound implications and applications.

Thinking Tool – Mapping the world

"The map is NOT the territory. It only
represents the territory."

Most people don’t realise that their five senses do not actually provide an absolute and real experience of the world. Our senses and brains evolved to efficiently track and notice difference in the world, not to provide an absolute and accurate representation. Each of our senses tracks change rather than absolute data, and our brain then takes each of these differences and changes and does its best job at making a useful map of the territory.

For example, you probably didn’t know that your eyes are not like a camera. A digital camera has an array of pixels that take the amount of light focused on them and provides an absolute representation, a one-for-one representation of the image that the camera sees. Your eye however, has rods and cones for receptors, and these don’t measure the absolute amount of light focused on them. Instead they only give a signal when the amount of light changes; they only measure and track change and difference.

You have small muscles around your eyes called ‘micro-saccades’ and these muscles keep your eyes moving and tremoring in micro-circles. These movements ensure that the image on your retina keeps changing.

When neuro-physiologists first anesthetized these muscles, they found what was called the ‘Ganzfeld effect’ – the grey/complete field effect. When the image subtended on the retina stops moving, the eye stops sending a signal to the brain. If we anesthetized your eye muscles and kept your head still, and if there was nothing moving in your visual field, your vision would grey out and become blank. After about 5 seconds, you would see nothing.

This is because the eye and brain didn’t evolve to get an absolute image of the world. They evolved to efficiently help you survive, and the easiest and best way to do this is to only notice and respond to difference and change.

All of your senses and nervous system are ‘designed’ by evolution in the same way. You only track for difference and your unconscious mind builds a ‘best-guess’ map of the world from integrating and summing all these little changes and differences. You see, you can never ever absolutely know the world. You don’t have the sensory apparatus to experience the world absolutely.

Add to this your sensory systems only operate over small ranges of size, frequency, speed, etc. and you’ll realise that your map is certainly very, very deleted, generalised and distorted.
And as Korzybski pointed out ‘The map is NOT the territory’.

So when it comes to knowing the world, when it comes to knowing the ‘truth’ you need to be very, very careful. You can never absolutely know the ‘truth’. Your abstractions and the abstractions of your abstractions are a long way from absolute reality. That’s what science is all about, it’s a method for attempting to create accurate theories about the world; and any theory in science is always provisional and always an abstraction.

Language influences our perceptions

So what can you do with these insights? Well, Korzybski pointed out that there are certain forms of abstracting that our language and our culture encourage that are not accurate and lead to un-sane or neurotic behaviour. Language influences our perceptions. By becoming aware of how your language influences your brain, your thinking and decisions, your motivations and inevitably your actions, you can begin to consciously choose more accurate and sane languaging and abstracting.

You’ve already been introduced in this blog to some of the ideas from General Semantics and the tools developed by the fields it inspired and informed such as NLP and REBT. These tools, skills and concepts are life enhancing and can be used to generate life enhancing models or maps of your world that are more sane and more rational. Continue coming back to this blog and reading the coming entries and you’ll experience and learn many more. In coming blog entries I'll be sharing ideas and insights on two linguistic/cognitive techniques called E-prime and O-prime that are very powerful and life enhancing.

Until then, keep enhancing your map of the world :-)

best wishes and kind thoughts,
Grant


For those who are interested to learn more... Here's Korzybski's seminal book: Science and Sanity

And here's some other excellent books on General Semantics that I recommend as life and mind changing:

Appreciating your World

I received an email containing the following life enhancing story a couple of days ago, and thought it so impactful and fascinating that it was worth sharing with you!

Something To Consider...
----------------------------------
Washington, DC, Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007. A man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approximately 2000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes, a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then hurried to meet his schedule.......

4 minutes later: The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, and continued to walk.

6 minutes: A young man leaned against the wall to listen, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes: A 3-year-old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.

45 minutes: The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money, but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

1 hour: He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold out a theatre in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each.


This is a true story.

Joshua Bell playing incognito in the Metro Station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities. The questions raised: In a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

Consider this: if we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made... how many other things are we missing in life?!!


An Amazing Story!

What an amazing story! I checked it out by googling it, and yes, every word is true. In fact, the experiment was written up in an article 'Pearls Before Breakfast' in the Washington Post, and its author Gene Weingarten won a Pulitzer Prize for his outstanding and thought provoking analysis of the experiment. The article and experiment asked "In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?" And the results, which you can view in the video clip below and hear the awesome beauty of the performance, speak for themselves... Very few people stopped to enjoy and appreciate their world!



Savoring and Appreciating your World

Are you savoring and appreciating your life, your world and as many moments of each day as possible? The research from Positive Psychology shows that savoring, appreciation and gratitude all measurably increase levels of happiness and life satisfaction. Taking the time to notice and focus on the positive events in life really is life enhancing.

And the best thing is... with practice, the skills and strategies of savoring and appreciating form deep unconscious competencies that start to operate without the need for constant reminders. The more you do it, the easier it becomes and the more your unconscious mind finds and brings to your conscious awareness the wonderful, serendipitous, beautiful and joyful experiences that occur all around you.

Beginner's Mind

Let me share with you some of the techniques I use to appreciate my world...

To begin with, every time I walk to work at any of the Organisations I consult to, I always take the time to look at the sky, enjoy the ambience of the city-scape and notice the colours, sights and sounds around me. I play with and pretend that I'm a visitor from another country, or from outer-space, and look at the City with fresh eyes. It's amazing how much beauty and newness I find every single time.

In Zen Buddhism this technique is known as 'Beginner's Mind'. It's an attitude and way of thinking that evokes what in NLP is likened as 'the wide-eyed curiosity of a child'. We all know and can recapture that sense of wonderment. So play with it every single day, and you'll build it up like a well-exercised muscle. You'll easily find yourself savoring and appreciating your world anew and in wonderful and fascinating ways.

So here's the question: Do you think that through the eye's of a child, or the filter of a 'beginner's mind' you would have walked past Joshua Bell? Take a look at the description of the article above, you'll see that it was the children that noticed and tried to stop and listen. It was the time-bound, serious and focused adults that dragged them away and failed to notice the exquisite beauty and enchantment of Joshua's virtuoso playing.

My Tunnel of Happiness'ing

Another technique I use every time I walk to work, is to create a 'tunnel of happiness' that I walk through as I traverse the City. This 'tunneling' is done by looking for, noticing and amplifying every bright light, glint, and reflection that I can see high around me.

I use my peripheral vision to see these and I fantasize/visualise these bright, happy, glinting lights as a delightful tunnel encircling high around me. As I walk through my tunnel, I build strong and uplifting feelings of happiness inside my torso, chest, face and head. In this way I truly appreciate and notice the beauty of the buildings, the sky, the windows and reflections, the lights and all the shiny wonderful surfaces that make up our Cities.

If you are tracking the NLP concepts and strategies behind my 'Tunnel of Happinessing' technique then you'll notice the use of visual submodalities that pay homage to the pragmatic wisdom of the designers of great churches and cathedrals. In such places, for the last two thousand years, stained glass, high windows and candles have been used to imbue and stimulate a sense of awe and the numinous. Sparkle and glinting high in the peripheral visual field is associated with the experience of fascination, delight and awe.

Self-fullfilling Prophecy

I also look for happy people and try my best to connect with and get people to smile with me during my commuting. It's a natural effect of mirror neurons and the process of rapport that if you are exuding positive energy and happiness, you'll attract the attention of like-minded people and their response to you will amplify your own state. There's nothing quite as delightful and refreshing as a beautiful smile from a happy person acknowledging your existence. So make sure you include people in your daily search for positivity and happiness.

How are you Appreciating your World?

So how are you savoring and appreciating your world? Have you been rushing past and missing the moments of beauty in your world? Or are you now truly taking the time and attention to value and appreciate your world in new and life enhancing ways!


happiness, peace and joy,
Grant


And here's some Joshua Bell music you might enjoy:

Refreshing the Spirit with Al Bakker

As you know, this blog is about Life Enhancing and how to inspire yourself to live a wonderful life. To support this, I've been doing email interviews with people who inspire me and who I think live amazing lives.

This blog is also about what I call 'Life Enhancing Devices' (LEDs) - things that truly add value to our lives. And one of the key LEDs for me is kayaks. They allow us to go places and do things that are truly wonderful, inspiring and uplifting. They are a great form of exercise and can provide a very calming and meditative experience.


So today's blog entry is an interview with someone who I believe lives a wonderfully enhanced life, and who inspires me to get out and do more paddling, adventuring and living.

This person is Al Bakker, the founder of Southern Sea Ventures, a company that offers awesome kayaking adventures in some of the most beautiful places in the world.


I've been on a number of Southern Sea Venture kayak trips, and I think that what Al and his company does is fantastic and life enhancing. I'm always amazed at the new trips he is organising and the great paddles that he does. Al searches the globe for new and amazing paddling adventures and then opens them up so the rest of us can safely enjoy these life enhancing experiences. As Al says "Exploring the world’s beautiful places by kayak is a wonderful way to refresh the spirit. The quiet and unobtrusive dip of a paddle is a panacea to life in the modern world. I feel privileged to be able to show people different places and share skills that give them enjoyment."

Al has paddled whitewater and sea kayaks for 36 years in North America, South America, the South Pacific, Japan, Australia, NZ, Antarctica, South Georgia, the High Arctic and Greenland, Russian Far East and all across Europe. He has led commercial sea kayak tours for the last 21 years and developed sea kayak, rafting and cross country ski programs in many countries. Al is also a qualified SCUBA diver, Nordic ski instructor and examiner, swim instructor and examiner and holds swiftwater rescue and national lifeguard certification. He has worked as a helicopter ski guide, rafting guide and wilderness first aid consultant and is a keen photographer.

I caught up with Al via email as he bobbed across the Greenland sea heading towards the Arctic, and asked him why he felt kayaking and outdoor adventuring was so life enhancing.


* Hi Al, trust you are well and still out living amazing adventures!

Yep, enjoying getting to some lovely spots and feel privileged to be able to.


* What do you do to enhance your life? What is life enhancing for you?

I always try to balance work and play. It is easy to get overwhelmed with running a business and sorting out details but I find that getting out in the mountains or on the water is refreshing. It doesn’t have to be paddling but sometimes it is easier to get to some out of the way places by boat. Sharing some quality outdoor time with someone you care for is real important for me.


* What is so life enhancing about Kayaks and paddling? Why do you do it? What makes it so special?

Kayak tours are my business so that is part of it but my wife and I very much love to get out and paddle on our time off. Not so much for short paddles but on an overnight or week long trip.
It gives us a chance to leave the phone at home, breathe some fresh air and just live a simple day without distractions. Cooking a camp meal, setting up a tent in the wind, working out how to take the extra bottle of wine in the kayak is all fun.

For me, part of what makes paddling special is sharing it with someone. Whether it is going out for a surf or on a 2 week trip. I don’t paddle competitively and never have so it is recreation and work, and I like keeping it for that.


* You seem to fill your life with adventure and challenge... how do you motivate yourself to do the life enhancing activities such as kayaking in Antarctica and creating amazing new paddling trips?

Mate, one has to earn a living somehow! Seriously though, having the opportunity to paddle in the Antarctic and other places is not taken lightly. I very much appreciate how lucky I am to be able to do it. But it is equally enjoyable seeing others get the same enjoyment out of it. So. Making it possible for folks to get to some difficult places is really one of the most rewarding aspects about having such a tour business.


* Why do you think 'life-enhancing' is important? What's important about having dreams, goals and inspiring purpose?

I guess I would prefer to say it is important to take some time out from whatever job or stress you are in and do something that makes you feel good, whether it is playing music, taking pictures, hiking in the mountains, paddling a new river or seeing a new country or area in a sea kayak. I like the details of picking a trip, planning it, preparing but when on it, I don’t like to have every day structured and try and make it as flexible as time constraints allow so you can make the most of whatever comes up. From meeting an interesting fisherman, or a wildlife encounter or lazing around camp. Dreams or goals for me, make the difference of getting beyond the daily routine and commitments that just living can impose on your 24 hours.


* Who are your role models for 'life-enhancing'? Are there any exemplars that live enhanced lives that you look to for inspiration in your own life?

Many throughout my life, but my current hero is an 82 yr old who has been on a number of our trips. Started paddling 5 –6 years ago and get out of his kayak and climb back in upside down and roll it back up. He paddles 3 times a week and just loves to get out. I see many things in people I work with that is inspiring and constantly amazed at how families balance their work with being parents and still finding time to learn or play.


* What would you put on the list of the most: Life Enhancing Devices, Life Enhancing Values, Life Enhancing Beliefs, Life Enhancing Skills/Strategies and Life Enhancing Behaviors?

Enthusiasm, good humour, an interest in learning, curiosity, being aware of what is happening around you, and patience. One particularly rewarding pastime is watching wildlife. Simply being patient enough to watch, smell, and observe and see what the animal is doing can be fascinating.



Thank you Al for sharing your thoughts and experiences.

What Al says resonates with me. The experience, skill and flow of paddling a kayak, of moving your craft through the sea, of exploring amazing parts of the world, and sharing that with others are all so incredibly life enhancing.


If you've never paddled a kayak, then do yourself a big life enhancing favour and go hire one for a few hours, get some instruction and have a play. Better yet, book yourself on a kayak adventure trip. Most trips are suitable for beginners and will teach you the skills you need to enjoy the experience safely.

And if you are already a paddling aficionado then I encourage you to get into your boat and do some more paddling soon 'cause kayaks really are such wonderful LEDs.

Finally, let me point out that kayaking is not without risks. You should always wear and use appropriate safety equipment and take lessons from qualified instructors. Paddle thoughtfully and safely and you'll live to enjoy kayaking for many years ahead.


much happy paddling
smiles, Grant

Life Enhancing Language

Language is a powerful tool for enhancing your life. The way we think and express ourselves is crucial to how we make meaning and how we unconsciously motivate ourselves and others.

“Our language influences our perceptions”

Peter Senge

“Incorrect use of language leads to incorrect thinking”
Buckminster Fuller

Through language we create our reality

“Language is the means by which we organise and shape our experience"
Dr. Annabelle Lukin, Dep’t of Linguistics, Macquarie University

Language is one of our key tools for thinking and making sense of our world. It’s also how we communicate between parts of our multi-mind and with other people around us.

As will be pointed many times throughout this blog, and as suggested by both the fields of NLP and General Semantics, 'unsane' use of language leads to 'unsane' thinking and this in turn leads to 'unsane' actions and outcomes in life - not very life enhancing!

As highlighted by the field of NLP, there are three basic modelling processes we use to create our maps or models of the world. These are:

• Deletion
• Generalisation
• Distortion

Each of these modelling processes has language elements that are indicators of the process. In NLP, these language distinctions are described by what is called the NLP Meta-Model.

By becoming aware of and tracking for these distinctions you can become more precise in your thinking and communicating with your self and others. You can also gain more life enhancing choice and control over how you are modelling and generating your world by choosing language that supports your outcomes.


Wants vs Shoulds

When you create absolutist rules and generalisations about what you ‘should’ do and what you ‘have to’ do, you limit your freedom and apply pressure that can lead to parts of your multi-mind sabotaging your success.

No one likes to be pressured or forced into action. In NLP, generalisations such as ‘must’, ‘should’ and ‘have to’ are called ‘modal operators of necessity’. They indicate rules about the mode of operation you are following or requesting. Thinking that you “absolutely must do X” often leads to stress and procrastination.

A much more generative and useful way to communicate to yourself and others is to use ‘modal operators of desire’. Words such as ‘want to’, ‘like to’ and ‘desire to’ are much more compelling and are linked with life enhancing notions of value and attraction.

So when you are thinking and talking about your outcomes and goals, notice the words you are using. Practice and form habits of replacing the modal operators of necessity with modal operators of desire. For example, rather than saying something like “I should go wash the car now”, instead choose to express the statement as something like “I want to wash the car now so that it looks fantastic”. You’ll notice it has a different feel to it when expressed that way and is much more likely to lead to the intended outcome.

Powerfully using language that supports your outcomes can really make a difference to the happiness and success you are generating in your life.

Remember, words are powerful. So do languaging that aligns, encourages and supports all the parts of your multi-mind.


Cause and Effect

Cause and Effect thinking is an example of linguistic distortion.

This type of thinking is expressed in utterances that imply or presuppose belief that one thing causes another. When these beliefs don’t match the way the world really works, they are semantically ill-formed and impoverish a person’s model of the world. In this way, Cause and Effect beliefs limit your perceived choice or ability to act.

The most usual form that Cause and Effect distortions take is statements that a person’s actions or environmental circumstances ‘cause’ an emotional response in another person.

For example, the thought “My boss makes me angry” is a Cause and Effect belief that is inaccurate and not entirely rational. It doesn’t match the way the world fundamentally works.

No one can cause an emotion in another person. Your response to stimuli is effected within yourself. This is shown by the fact that a number of people can experience the exact same event and yet each of them will generate their own unique meaning and response. What one person gets angry about, another may find humorous.

This is a powerful and life enhancing insight. Emotions are not something that happen to you from external agency. Emoting is a process your mind/body does, with unconscious competence, in response to your environment. You can influence and change how you are emoting and responding.

No person or situation causes your emoting. However, if you operate from the semantically ill-formed belief that you do not have control, and that the world causes and creates your emotions, then you limit yourself and remove choice from your world. And that’s an enemy to happiness.

To counter this, listen for language, thoughts and beliefs that have the form:

X causes Y

If you hear yourself saying or thinking things such as “person X pisses me off” or “situation X depresses me” or “X causes me a lot of pain” then you are distorting your world and limiting yourself with Cause and Effect modelling.

The way to expand your choice is to turn such causal relationships around so they are more sane and rational. Put the locus of control back into the expressions by re-languaging them as “I cause Y when X”.

For example, instead of saying “My boss makes me mad”, re-language this as “I make myself mad about my boss”. Notice this now puts you at choice. You can now focus on outcomes and decide whether this is a response that is useful or whether perhaps there might not be a more generative way to respond.

Remember, choice = control.


Blaming Others

The field of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT) has also determined a number of irrational beliefs that people use to anger themselves.

Fundamentally, REBT has shown that the process of angering occurs when we blame others for not meeting unreasonable rules or expectations that we have generated in our model of the world. Beliefs such as “people must never make mistakes or else they are totally useless”, “everyone must always treat me fairly” and “I must always be totally loved by everyone” are irrational and unrealistic. Using such language to think about people and situations can only lead to disappointment, anger and low self-esteeming.

Listen for such irrational self-talk and actively dispute it. Replace it with more useful beliefs that match the way the world works. The truth is, people are fallible and will occasionally make mistakes, treat you unfairly or not meet your expectations.

Getting angry at this is pointless and unsane. Of course you’d prefer that they not do this, but recognise this is just your preference. Don’t take yourself and your expectations so seriously. Blame is an enemy to happiness and definitely life diminishing, so listen for it in your language and challenge the irrational beliefs that underlay it.


Escalating Anger

Intelligent people do not use words that escalate anger. They understand the power of words and know that anger is an emotion that down-regulates intelligence and creativity.

Thoughts and expressions such as "How could they!!!??" and "How dare they!!!???" will only create and escalate the unconscious process of angering.

Really listen carefully to the languaging you are doing and refuse to use hateful or vengeful words or expressions that escalate anger.


Universal Frighteners

An insidious form of linguistic distortion is known in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) as 'Universal Frighteners'. These beliefs are generalisations about FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Universal Frighteners are indicated by global qualifiers associated with generalisations about fear. Comments like “It’s totally shocking”, “That’s completely horrifying”, “It’s all really scary”.

Challenge these linguistic distortions by asking yourself and others questions like “How specifically are you scaring yourself about this?” and “What specifically about this are you fearing?”


Language is Life Enhancingly Powerful

You can gain power over your thinking and believing by listening for and questioning your use of linguistic deletions, distortions and generalisations.

Because we are habit forming creatures, you can overcome old habits and patterns of thought by using words and expressions that presuppose possibility and hope.

Language and thought really are powerful and can definitely enhance your life or diminish it - so listen to what you say and ensure you are using words that support happiness, choice and meaning in your life and the lives of those you love.


wishing you great life enhancing thoughts
smiles, Grant


And for those interested in learning more about the NLP Meta Model and other hypnotic language skills, I highly recommend the following books:

Life enhancing fluffy white stuff

Well... seeing as we are enjoying one of our regular sojourns up in the snow, I figure it's timely to blog about how playing in the snow is very, very life enhancing :-)


I don't think it matters what sort of snow play you do, whether it's downhill skiing, snowboarding, x-country skiing, riding a skidoo or just tramping and camping out back-country with a pair of snow-shoes strapped to your feet, they all add refreshing life enhancing value to your life. I've done them all, and every year we get out and about in the snow using every available form of snow play equipment, and we always come back feeling more alive, filled with delight and having had/done an awesome time.

So what is it about the mountains and snow that is so wonderful?

To begin with there's the beauty. Snow flakes falling and drifting from the sky, painting a pristine world of cleansing, calming white, creating a visage that lifts the spirit. The snow blankets the ground and dusts the trees with icing. Crystals hang from branches. Sun glints and rainbows across the softness like diamonds cast by natures hand. In the snow, everything seems more real, clearer, more alive.

Then there's the exhilaration of movement, speed, acceleration as you move and glide down the fall line. The feeling of riding a snowboard or a set of skis, over moguls, cutting swathes through the powder is akin to the petro-sexuality of motorbike riding. It's visceral. The adrenalin is addicting. It's blissful.


Added to all that, there's the value and effects of exercise. Snow play gives you a great workout. More oxygen flowing through your lungs and blood stream, bringing muscles alive. Washing the toxins from your system.

The flow of skiing, boarding or even snow-shoeing provides a 'broaden-and-build' positive emotional experience. It increases levels of serotonin and dopamine flowing in your system. It expands your creativity. It's pretty much impossible to carry the stress of work or life into a day of snow-play. To successfully and safely ski or board from the top of a mountain, you need full attention and the whole of your being committed to the unconscious competence of rider and device as one. This engagement is meditative and engenders peace and joy in your spirit.


Finally I guess I'd like to add that it's just plain awesome fun! Snow play brings out the wide-eyed spirit of the child. And the apres ski adventures add to the fun. If you stay up in the snow-fields then there's wonderful food, great company, lots of good wine, the odd sauna and spa experience and delightful walks after dinner in the star filled sky, crunching over fresh fallen snow crystals. Ahhhh, does life get any better than this?!!

So, if you aren't already a convert to snow-play, I seriously and playfully suggest you add some snow-play life adventure to your life. And if you are already an aficionado of the snow, then may I encourage you to go do some more of it. Make sure you get out and enjoy the life enhancing beauty and delight of playing in the fluffy white stuff every year of your life.

Treat with care

Just one small reminder and caveat... snow is cold and slippery, you need to be skillful, careful and treat it and alpine environments with respect. Be aware of the risks of hypothermia and always dress appropriately and take the necessary safety equipment with you. If you love and utilise the snow intelligently it will love you back and add immense value to your life.


happy life enhancing snow play,
and many smiles, Grant

Sharing and Savoring

Putting feelings into words produces therapeutic effects in the brain

I came across some fascinating research the other day that supports the intuitive insight that verbalising your feelings helps dissipate and make them less intense.

The brain imaging study by UCLA psychologists examined the effects of verbally labeling negative emotional images and showed that the amygdala, a region of the brain that serves as an emotional alarm system, was less active when subjects labeled the feelings engendered by the negative images. The study also found another region of the brain, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, was more active during emotion labelling. This region is located behind the forehead and is associated with inhibiting behavior and processing emotions.

According to the study's main author, Associate Professor Matthew D. Lieberman, "When you put feelings into words, you’re activating this prefrontal region and seeing a reduced response in the amygdala... When you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses." Lieberman also suggests, "Putting our feelings into words helps us heal better. If a friend is sad and we can get them to talk about it, that probably will make them feel better."

To me, this is a life enhancing research result that backs up what we all intuitively know: talking with a therapist, a loved one, a good friend, or even writing in a journal, helps us cope with and overcome feelings such as anger, fear and pain. Conversely, holding our feelings in, not expressing them and not consciously acknowledging them gives them power and makes them more likely to overtake you.

We all have times when we experience negative life events and are overwhelmed by negative emoting. The cool thing is that you now know that by practicing self-awareness and consciously labeling your emotions, you'll shift the response in your brain. Additionally, you now have life enhancing research evidence to encourage you to verbalise your feelings and share them with supportive friends. Getting your feelings out in the open makes them less intense.

Meta-emoting

Another life enhancing and useful tool for coping with negative emoting is the NLP technique of 'meta-emoting'.

The word 'Meta' (from Greek: μετά = "after", "beyond", "with", "adjacent", "self"), is a prefix used to indicate a concept that is an abstraction of another concept. So for example, a meta-language is a language about languages. Meta-data is data about data. And meta-emotion is emotion about emotion.

According to wikipedia, "Meta-emotion refers to the emotional reactions to one's own emotions (second-order emotions about primary emotions). An example would be being angry (the primary emotion) and being afraid of one's anger (the meta-emotion)."

This is a very powerful concept. You can get yourself into all sorts of psychological and emotional strife if you don't track your meta-emoting and control it.

For example, if you get scared of something such as talking in front of people, then you get scared about being scared, you create a loop that feeds back on itself and amplifies the fearing. This is typically a recipe for inducing a phobia - fear about fear about fear...

On the other hand, if you choose a meta-emotion that is more resourceful and positive, you can easily transcend and transform primary emotions via your meta-emoting. In the example above, if instead of fearing the fear, you chose to find the fearing as humorous and entertaining, then you'd find that the meta-emotion magically changes the primary emoting of fearing into something more resourceful. It's hard to do full on fearing when you are laughing at the fear :-)

By bringing your emotions to consciousness, labeling them, then consciously deciding on what your outcome is and what meta-emoting you are going to do, you create amazingly generative responses to the 'negative' events that occur in your life. And that is very life enhancing!

For those who are interested, here's an insightful read at UrbanMonk.net that talks in detail about the effects of meta-emoting: Meta-Emotions - The Downward Spiral to Unhappiness and How to Avoid Them

Celebrating Failure

Another thing I want to bring to your attention in discussing the importance of verbalising and sharing your emotions with others, is the notion of 'Celebrating Failure'. In NLP we make the distinction between content and process, and suggest that 'process' is often more important for control and change than is 'content'.

For most people, the word 'Celebration' evokes the notion of positivity, happiness and joy. However, from an NLP perspective we would say that this is the typical 'content' of celebrating.

The 'process' of celebrating on the other hand involves intense emotional responding, performance or sharing with others and stimulation. This process is normally applied to positive content. However, without realising it, many people apply the process of celebrating to negative content. They 'celebrate' failure, disaster and negativity.

So the thing I want to highlight, is to make sure that when you share and verbalise your feelings, you don't overdo it and transgress into celebrating failure. The idea is to express your feelings so that you alleviate them, not to amplify and celebrate them and make them an ongoing focus. Express them and let them go. Your life enhancing happiness and peace of mind depend on it.

Savoring Positivity

The other thing that links to enhancing your life by expressing your feelings is the research from the field of Positive Psychology on 'savoring'.

Dr. Fred Bryant, Professor of Psychology, Loyola University, Chicago has studied the effects of savoring for the last 20 years. His recent book, Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, describes the numerous benefits of savoring and its links to happiness.

Savoring involves enjoying and appreciating the good moments and aspects of each and every day. It's about sharing and celebrating the positive. This includes reminiscing about past experiences, really savoring and amplifying what's happening in the present and building strong positive anticipations for future events.

Fred's research shows that people who strongly savor their lives in an ongoing way, report higher levels of joy and life satisfaction. These positive emotions then broaden and build across contexts helping to buffer against stress and negative emotional experiences.

In his book, Fred recommends a number of strategies for enhancing your life through savoring, and of them the following are incredibly aligned with this blog entry:

• Sharing - sharing the emotional experience of an event with others increases enjoyment of it.
• Journaling - Writing a daily journal in which you recall the day's positive events enhances the savoring experience.
• Awareness - Intentionally sharpening your awareness for an event by focusing on and verbalising the positive emotions enhances the experience.

Practicing Mindfulness

So I hope you are now convinced of the usefulness and importance of becoming more conscious of your emotional experiencing, including both its negative and positive aspects, and of expressing your emotings appropriately. The wisdom of such 'mindfulness' practice is backed up by ancient esoteric traditions, such as yoga and buddhist philosophy. It's healthy and life enhancing.

With negative emoting, express it, share it and let it go. Become aware of and actively practice positive meta-emoting. And finally, savor and share every positive emotional experience that you can.

Get the most juice out of every moment of your life. It's your life, and you and those you care about will benefit immensely if you enhance your life through sharing and savoring.


positive smiles and great wishes,
Grant


Fred Bryant's Book on Savoring:

Excellent books on Positive Psychology:

Choice = Life Enhancing Control

Out and about the other night, doing some fun life enhancing adventuring, I got chatting with a beautiful lady named Phoebe, who stimulated the thoughts and ideas behind this blog entry.

Phoebe is studying to be a Pilates Instructor and combining this with skills and concepts from NLP, which together are a wonderfully integrative and powerful approach to building patterns of wellness, strength, fitness and flexibility into life.

Exercise and Fitness are Life Enhancing

The first distinction that came from my delightful conversing with Phoebe is the insight that the fitter, stronger and more flexible you are, the more resilience and stamina you'll be able to bring to everything you do in life. It's a truly important life strategy! You need to build core strength aligned with flexibility into your body, mind and life. And of course, practices such as Pilates, Dance, Martial Arts, Yoga and other exercise forms are a fun way to do that. By choosing something that is fun and integrative you are more likely to continue exercising as a life practice and an ongoing life journey.

Research on exercise benefits to mind and life

Over 62% of deaths in the western world are caused by heart disease, cancer and stroke. These are known as ‘lifestyle’ diseases. They are largely caused by people’s choices and behaviour. For example, the Journal of the American Medical Association found that in the year 2000, over half a million people died due to the effects of tobacco and alcohol, while another third of a million individuals died from poor diet and physical inactivity. What we see from this is that the leading causes of death and disability in the developed world are SLOW suicide. People are literally killing themselves through bad habits and negative behaviours.

Poor diet, lack of exercise and common addictions destroy your health, your well-being and ultimately your happiness. This is serious and definitely NOT life enhancing!

On the other hand, new research shows that exercise beneficially affects your genes, helps reverse the aging process at a cellular level, gives you more energy, makes you smarter, and can even help you grow new brain cells.

Once you are strong and fit you’ll find that exercise feels fantastic and leaves you feeling energetic and alive. Research has also proven that aerobic exercise can relieve symptoms of mild depression and can be as effective as psychotherapy. Exercise improves memory and increases cognitive function.

For your long-term health and happiness you need to enjoy a balanced mix of different exercise forms. Flexibility and stretching exercises are important to maintain suppleness. Weight-bearing exercise is necessary to maintain bone and muscle density. Aerobic exercise will keep your cardio-vascular system toned and healthy.


I really can’t highlight how important exercise is. It’s vital for your health and happiness.


The Cybernetic Loop

The importance and usefulness of exercise and flexibility is also backed up by the NLP Cybernetic Loop model.

The NLP Cybernetic Loop model encapsulates the understanding that the mind and body are connected in a control loop; that the mind/brain and body interact and affect each other, they are not distinct and separate; that what affects one, affects the other. The Cybernetic Loop is summarised in the diagram below.



What this model shows is that your thinking (your Internal Processing – thoughts, images, ideas) is connected to and both influences and is influenced by your feelings (your Internal State – your emotions). Your feelings in turn are connected to and both influence and are influenced by your physiology (your External Behaviour – your body, breathing, physical state), which in turn is influenced by and influences your thinking, in a loop.

The process of control runs both ways, each of the three components influencing the other.

So for example, whenever you think of something sad or picture something that makes you unhappy or depressed, you will begin to feel the emotions and feelings of sadness and depression, this in turn will cause you to hunch over, to breathe slower and lower in your chest, to tense your muscles. These changes in your physiology will lead to even more negative thinking and feeling which will amplify the negative physiological state and you will spiral into a more and more negative experience or attitude. You can see this in people who are severely depressed, they carry their depression in their stance and posture, they rarely look up, are unlikely to smile or breathe fully and deeply. They will be slow and lethargic, lacking energy and zest.

Alternately, this loop can function in a positive direction as a success spiral. If something positive happens to you, or you access a memory of a positive time or experience in your life, you will start to feel positive feelings and emotions. Your posture will change to being more upright, open, relaxed. Your muscles will relax. Breathing will be much more full and easy, bringing more oxygen to your brain and body. This in turn will support even more positive thoughts and feelings and the spiral will continue, generating positive changes in your mind and body.

The import of this model to exercise is that to feel good and think well, you need a body and physiology that supports this. You need a healthy body to have a healthy mind. Your health and wellness are vital to living an enhanced life.

Thinking Tool – The Body-Mind Health Spiral

Your mind and body are connected in a loop – thoughts, feelings, beliefs and health influence each other!

Law of Requisite Variety

It's obvious that it is life diminishing to impoverish your world through limited choice and flexibility. Freedom and choice are important values and you want to hold on to them with all your heart.

There is an old Estonian proverb, full of wisdom that says “never leave yourself with only one pair of shoes” because if they get too tight and start to hurt your life can end a painful misery. This maxim or learning tool refers to the idea that if you give away choice and only allow yourself one option in life, and if that option becomes problematic, you’ll end up with a life of unhappiness and misery.

There is a provable mathematical theorem from Cybernetics Systems Theory that supports this. Known as the ‘Law of Requisite Variety’ it suggests that in any system the element that has the most choice, flexibility or requisite variety will be the controlling element. Read that again... "the element that has the most choice, flexibility or requisite variety will be the controlling element".

The corollary to this is that to gain more control in any system, you need to give yourself more choice or flexibility. A simple way to remember this law is:

Choice & Flexibility = Control

Always give yourself more choice and flexibility and never give away your control. As often as possible in life always give yourself more choice (within reason) rather than less, it's life enhancing.


So that's this week's exploration of ideas and strategies for Life Enhancing, bought to you by a stimulating conversation with a very fit, flexible and astute lady. Thank you Phoebe for your input into my blog.


flexible and health filled smiles,
Grant


And for those interested, here's a pivotal book about Cybernetics applied to life success, referenced by the developers of NLP and well worth reading:

and here's a highly recommended book on Pilates:

Positive Emotion Words

In one of the organisations I’m currently doing consulting in, we’ve been playing with 'Positive Emotion Theme Days'.


Each day, I randomly select a positive emotion word and then the team I’m working with do their best to enact and live the selected emotion during the work day. It really makes for a much better work environment, is great for team bonding and just plain fun. I’m sure the improved mood and state of the team also carries over into better outcomes and experiences for our clients.

Couple of days ago I was looking through the dictionary for a positive emotion word and after about 40 pages I still hadn’t found one I could use. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever tried looking through the dictionary for positive emotion words, you might want to try it… but let me tell you, there’s not a lot of them in there!


We have more negative emotion words

In fact, research shows that we have more negative emotion words in our language than we have positive words. We have approximately 50% more words to express negativity than positivity.


I know this, cause I once counted them! Yes, I actually went through the whole Shorter Oxford Dictionary and looked at every word, determined if it was a word that had emotional valence associated with it and then rated it as positive or negative (by a defined rating criteria). The graph below shows my results for each of the letters of the alphabet, indicating how many positive and negative words exist for each letter of the alphabet.






The reason I undertook this research, was that I had heard during an NLP training that we have 50% more negative words than positive words and since words are the tools we use in large measure to construct and filter our experience and reality, having more negative distinctions can lead us into seeing and generating more negative experiences in our subjective world.


This made a lot of sense to me, and I know how powerful words can be and the importance of learning to use language positively and generatively. However, being a scientist by inclination and by training, I decided I had to check these statistics. So, during a period of relatively free time, I counted every word in the dictionary.

I’ll be blogging in future entries about the power of language and how it relates to life enhancing. In today’s entry I wanted to bring to your awareness, the fact that there are more negative words than positive words, in case you didn’t already know, and to remind you that to live an enhanced life you need to track for how you are languaging your world and make sure you shift the balance from negativity to positivity.


A Blinding Flash of the Obvious

I was also motivated to write about this due to a cool BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious) that I discovered the other day…

So there I was at work, attempting to find a positive emotion word in the dictionary to use as our theme for the day, and after 40 odd pages of looking I still hadn’t found one. At that point I decided to throw off the old technology, and move to the electronic form. I did a google on 'Positive Emotion Words', in attempt to find a list of positive emotion words I could use.


For a start, there sure don’t seem to be a lot of them on the web… not surprising really given we have less positive emotion words than we have negatives.

Secondly, I came across a couple of lists and blogs talking about emotion words and discussing the insight that there are more negatives than positives. For example, in the blog ‘COPYWRITING KID - From 0 to 100 in whatever it takes…’ the writer decided to make a list of emotion words because of the realization of “how important it is to have a broad vocabulary of emotional words”. In pulling together this list, the blogger soon noticed the following:

“Before I show the list here, I want to share something I noticed… I kind of had
a feeling that most of the words were describing negative emotions, so I then
broke it up for me and listed the positive and negative emotions in separate
lists. The result? 147 words that describe NEGATIVE emotions. 55 that describe
POSITIVE emotions.”

Mostly though, the thing that inspired me to write this blog entry today, was the information I came across on wikepedia when I searched for a ‘positive emotion word list’. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before, just the list of Plutchik’s Primary Human Emotions:

Primary Emotion

• Anticipation


• Joy


• Acceptance


• Fear


• Surprise


• Sadness


• Disgust


• Anger

Alternately, according to respected psychologist Paul Ekman, this list of primary, basic human emotions can be distilled down to: sadness, happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. These emotions combine in different ways to form other more complex emotions, including compassion, boredom, embarrassment, rage, hunger, etc.


More Primary Negative Emoting


So here I was, trying to find positive emotion words when these lists of primary emotions became starkly juxtaposed against the insight that our vocabulary contains more negative than positive words… and this generated the following BFO -- if you look at the list of primary human emotions above, you’ll note that there are approx. 50% more negative primary emotions than positive emotions.


So damn obvious really… if you do more negative primary emoting — if the human evolved patterning system has a built-in propensity for more negative emoting (probably as a natural survival mechanism to move away from danger and pain quicker and more powerfully than being attracted to food and pleasure) — then the language tools for thinking and processing the world will likely reflect those underlying mechanisms and patterns.


We have 50% more negative emoting words in our language because we are optimized to do 50% more negative emoting. BFO!

Now, what can we learn from this?

For a start, we need to give positivity and positive languaging much more attention, focus, skill and salience in order to overcome the natural tendency and unconscious competency in negative emoting and negative languaging.


We also need to track for negative languaging and the tendency for negative emoting in our environment, our teams, our families, friends and society, and do our best to filter it, shift it and lead it to the more healthier positive form.

It is not generally life enhancing to be wallowing in negativity or using negative and pessimistic languaging. It is much more life enhancing and brings about wonderful self-fulfilling prophecies in life when you celebrate positivity, joy, optimism and generative languaging.

Positive languaging is a very life enhancing skill!

We’ll talk more about the various components and strategies for positive languaging in coming blogs. So stay tuned :-) And in the coming days, perhaps you may enjoy and benefit from doing what our team is doing…

Randomly select positive emotions and use them as a theme for your day.


Try doing a day of ‘Delight’ or a day of ‘Tranquility’. Perhaps you and your friends or colleagues might really get a buzz out of doing a day of ‘Fascination’ or even a day of ‘Excitement’. The other day we did ‘Buoyant’ and it was such a bouncy, bubbly and fun day. Try ‘Positive Emotion Theme Days’ you might find them truly life enhancing.


best wishes and more life enhancing smiles

Grant


PS:
In case you didn’t get it consciously, we don’t ‘have’ emotions – we ‘do’ emoting! Of course, it typically seems like we have emotions, or more to the point, emotions have us… because we do emoting with unconscious competence and without conscious deciding. The exercise described above is designed to bring to conscious awareness and build skill in choosing and doing emoting.


Choice equals control in life and is incredibly life enhancing :-)

Motorbikes are Life Enhancing

[WARNING: contains adult content, so do NOT read if you are under 18 or easily offended]

I was once asked many years ago, why I love motorbikes so much, and I answered flippantly, 'cause they are life enhancing devices' :)

When I heard myself say that, I thought "yes, what a cool concept, LED - Life Enhancing Devices" and that started me down the track of thinking about and exploring the whole notion of Life Enhancing and what its structure and process is, and how we can add value to our lives and enhance them beyond living a mere mundane, mediocre, 'normal' life.

I'm also totally serious about motorbikes being LED's. They truly are!

Subjective LED

Of course, let me acknowledge that motorbikes are a subjective LED, rather than an objective LED (see my earlier blog about this distinction).

They're not for everyone. You have to have a gutsy and adventurous spirit to own and ride one.

You have to love acceleration and wind in your face, and being in the flow and connected more immediately with your environment. On a motorbike, you smell and feel the air in ways you just don't get in a car. Though I will say, that driving a sports car like (say) a Mazda MX5, which is like an open top, sport-driving focused go-cart, is as close as you can get to having a motorbike-like experience, while being tethered to the ground via four wheels rather than two. So count open top sports cars and similar into the category of motorbike-like devices.

Taking you to special places

Motorbikes can also take you places you just can't easily get to on other forms of transport. If you own or ride a trail-bike, then you can cover amazing distances into the forests and bush, flying along the most rugged of tracks, skimming across logs, rocks, ruts and gulleys, jumping high over bumps and sliding delightfully through the berms. The bike becomes an extension of your self. You flow through the land. And you can get from river to mountain top and back again in minutes, compared to hiking or trekking the same tracks in time periods of days. You'd have to do it to know just what I'm talking about. It's a truly amazing and life enhancing experience.


Road-bikes are just as exhilarating and life enhancing. There's a freedom of spirit. An ability to change direction, to stop, start and flow so quickly and effortlessly. At one with your bike, centered in a moving universe of flow. I'm waxing lyrical here I know... but those who have ridden enough to build unconscious competence and to form that fluid connection with their machine, will know what I'm talking about. And for those of you who have never ridden, I'm trying to evoke a sense of the experience, so you can see why I claimed all those years ago that bikes are Life Enhancing Devices.



And even more...

There's so much more I could say about motorbikes and how they add value to your life. I could tell you for example, a somewhat entertaining story about the connection of bikes and fast cars to sexuality. I was doing some consulting for a major Oil company that was a client of mine, when in one of those large corporate open space offices, I noticed one of the Managers had large glossy photos of some really hot cars pinned around his cubicle.

I wandered over, introduced myself and said "Hey, cool cars! Are they yours or just photos of cars you like?"

He responded with, "Yeah, they are cool. They're all mine! I own and drive every one of them."

"Awesome", I replied, "So you are a petrol-head too, just like me?"

"Oh, please" he exclaimed, "I'm no 'petrol-head', I'm a Petro-Sexual!"

Wow, what a concept, what a distinction! A Petro-Sexual!

Now, I have to explain... my friend Garry and I have for years playfully commented to each other that riding trail-bikes is almost a sexual experience, we call it 'surrogate-sex' and reckon that having a bike between your legs, moving gracefully and powerfully, connected as one, in the flow and with all the fun and adrenalin that comes from a great ride, is pretty much 'almost' as good as sex. Now I apologise if this has gotten into 'too much detail' for you and transgressed into personal adult land :) But what the hey, I'm trying to tell it like it is, and share honestly and from the heart, how great motorbikes can be.

So when I heard that guy, working in an Oil Company of all places (what a surprise hey), say the word 'Petro-Sexual', I knew right away that he had encapsulated what Garry and I had been talking about. Bikes, sports cars and similar fast machines are petro-sexual life enhancing devices :)

Over to you

Well, that's a window into my views on how and why I believe motorbikes et al. are LED's and can bring a wondrous refreshment to your life. Riding a bike puts a smile on your dial and an immediate and refreshing attitude adjustment to your life. After a ride, stress just melts away. The need for total focus (in order to survive) and the experience of flow produce what research in Positive Psychology calls the 'broaden and build effect'. It creates emotional, physical and intellectual balance, capital and buffering.

So what are your thoughts on this? Anyone reading this want to add a comment on the affirmative or otherwise? Have you got some examples you'd like to share of how bikes have enhanced your life?

Ride Carefully

I guess I'd like to finish with an important warning from the sponsor: Riding motorbikes is an inherently risky and potentially dangerous activity. Always ride safely and within the speed limit for the conditions. Done properly, riding a motorbike can be a life enhancing experience. Done poorly, it can not only be a life limiting experience, it can kill you!

So ride safe and ride to ride another day!


wishing you much Living In Full Enhancing!,
Grant

Forgiveness: For-giving is Life Enhancing

After reading my Life Enhancing blog, a friend of mine contacted me with the following comments:

Hi Grant,

There was a segment on 60 Minutes last Sunday 'Road to
Redemption' which really blew me away. I don't usually watch 60min but saw the story about a man whose 18 year old son had been murdered during a robbery 14 years ago. The father, Ken Marslew, decided to deal with his hate and anger by helping the man who drove the getaway car, organised the robbery, but didn't actually pull the trigger. He is helping this man who pleaded guilty and served 14 years in jail. They are going to work together to make the World a better place.

If you didn't see it go to their website. Ray Martin interviewed him, and it's an
unbelievably Life Enhancing story and worth blogging about.

I was planning to blog about Forgiveness as a Life Enhancing Skill at some stage over the coming months, but prompted by my friend Janine's email, and after watching the video of the 60 Minutes segment online, and being very inspired by the story, I decided to bring the timeframe forward and blog about it now.

Why focus on forgiveness?

The wisdom of forgiveness is highlighted in almost all spiritual traditions and more recently, research from a number of fields is backing up the usefulness and importance of practicing forgiveness. For example, both Buddhist philosophy and recent scientific research from the new field of Positive Psychology have shown that compassion, forgiveness and loving kindness are key components to happiness. The evidence is in - Practicing forgiveness is an important daily activity for living a happy, fulfilled and enhanced life.

Forgiving

And of course, there’s no such thing as ‘forgiveness’ – it’s a nominalisation (a disguised verb) for the ongoing process of forgiving. You don’t ‘have’ forgiveness for yourself or someone, you do forgiving of them. It’s an active process.

So how do you do forgiving? Well, it comes from the heart.

Did you know we have more than one brain? We actually have 3 brains in our body (which I'll be blogging on in more detail over coming months). Recent research has found that as well as a head brain, we actually have fully functioning ‘brains’ filled with neural tissue in our hearts and our guts – a heart (cardiac) brain and an enteric (gut) brain.

So expressions like “follow the wisdom of your heart” and “listen to your gut instinct” are quite accurate and deep neuro-linguistic reflections of our unconscious knowing of the existence of these distributed brain functions. It’s wonderful how complex and powerful our mind/body’s really are!

So coming up in this blog entry, I'll share a technique that uses the power of the heart-brain and gut-brain to help overcome anger and instead do forgiving.

But before that, let's take a moment to look at the details of some of the research findings from Positive Psychology.

"Forgiveness is the most powerful thing you can do for yourself. If you can’t learn to forgive, you can forget about achieving true success in your life.”
(Dr. Wayne Dyer)

Forgiveness is a powerful emotion!

Forgiving is a powerful emotion. When practiced, it floods the body with soothing and healing neuro-hormones and stimulates postive emotions and positive states of being.

The research from Positive Psychology has shown that people who forgive are healthier and happier than those who hold grudges. In one Stanford University experiment, people who learned and practiced forgiveness reported fewer backaches, headaches, muscle pains, stomach upsets and other common physical signs of stress compared to a control group. They also reported higher levels of optimism, hope and self-confidence. Showing forgiveness really is both good for you and good for your happiness and peace of mind.

The converse is also true. People who focus on anger, injustice and who feel they have been treated unfairly suffer from a higher risk of heart disease. A study of 8,000 people by researchers at the University College London found that those with a profound sense of injustice had a 55% higher chance of suffering serious heart disease. Researchers found that the focus on injustice and unfairness engendered negative emotions that lead to biochemical changes in the body.

An inability or unwillingness to forgive has also been found to be associated with persistent rumination and dwelling on revenge, while forgiving allows you to move on. When you are angry, resentful and bitter you are only hurting yourself. So it’s important for your mental health and important for your physical health that you forgive.

The take home message – focus on forgiving, your long-term health depends on it.

Healing the heart

The key is that forgiveness is about healing yourself and letting go of any negative responses and burden. The main thing to note is that the process of forgiving is vital for building positivity and healing in your own life.

A useful strategy for practicing forgiveness is to use your heart-mind to focus on forgiveness and to hold the feelings of forgiveness in your heart. As highlighted above, neuroscience has discovered that we have a heart-brain – a small functioning brain containing around 40,000 neurons in our heart. This heart brain connects and communicates with the head-brain and gut brain and validates the idea of the wisdom of the heart. Your heart-brain learns from experience and from practice. So by concentrating on and holding feelings of forgiving in your heart you can gradually and gently build up your skills and unconscious competence at doing forgiving. It’s an important process that will allow you to live more healthily, happily and with joy in your heart and life.

Letting Go

We all make mistakes. No one, and I mean no one is perfect! Indeed, ‘perfection’ doesn’t exist in the world. It is an ideal. From physics we know that we live in an entropic universe. What this means is that everything we do ultimately creates more disorder in the universe. Even the creation of order actually produces more disorder. For example, an air-conditioner cools the air in a room, thus reducing the entropy of the air. However, the heat involved in operating the air-conditioner always makes a bigger contribution to the entropy of the environment than the decrease of the entropy of the air. So the overall entropy in the universe increases from the operation of the air-conditioner.

So there can never be something that is perfect. Everything is in a constant state of change and everything is impermanent. That’s the nature of the universe we live in. By attempting to be perfect and blaming, disappointing or angering yourself when you or the people around you don’t live up to some ideal is both un-sane and counterproductive.

It’s time to let go of anger, of old regrets, of blame and recrimination. When you love your self and your life deeply and wondrously you let go of these negative emotions – of negative emoting. Trust yourself. Support yourself. Forgive yourself. For-give to your self. You deserve loving kindness. Calmly abide the trials and vicissitudes of life. Nothing's perfect, no one’s perfect, we all continue to learn and try to find our way in this wonderful but imperfect world. So relax, think ‘calm abiding’ and let go of any fearing, angering or blaming that you have been doing in the past now.

For-giving to yourself!

Some people think forgiveness is a sign of weakness. Those who’ve studied it can tell you without qualification that forgiveness is a sign of strength. It takes strength of purpose to choose to practice forgiveness. Especially in the face of anger and bitterness. Take a look at the 60 Minutes segment mentioned above. It took and continues to take immense guts and strength for Ken Marslew, the father of the murdered boy, to let go of the anger and bitterness, and instead embrace life and attempt to make a positive difference from what has happened.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning wrongful behaviour, excusing thoughtlessness, or forcing reconciliation with the offender. Forgiving is not the same as condoning. Forgiving is done for yourself. To heal and support yourself. It’s a gift of happiness and peace of mind that you give yourself. It’s about letting go of anger and resenting. It’s about moving out from under the emotional burden of bitterness and liberating yourself from negative feelings of hurting or angering.

As described in the research from Positive Psychology, an inability or unwillingness to do forgiving has been found to be associated with persistent rumination and dwelling on revenge, whereas forgiving allows you to move on. When you are angry, resentful and bitter you are only hurting yourself. So it’s important for your mental health and important for your physical health that you forgive.

Another important thing to note is the distinction between the inner experience of forgiving and the public expression of it. They need not both be performed to gain the health and happiness benefits of forgiving. The research suggests it can be sufficient to practice ‘silent’ forgiving in the form of a softened and more sympathetic heart. This can be useful when the aggressor does not earn or merit the forgiveness.

Remember, forgiving is about healing yourself and letting go the negative responses and burden. In cases where the aggressor has apologised and made redress, a public expression of forgiveness can be appropriate and can support building better and more healthy relationships. It’s up to you to decide what’s appropriate for your own outcomes and happiness. The main thing to note is the inner process of forgiving is vital for building positivity and healing in your own life.

How do you DO forgiving?

How do you do loving kindness and forgiving? Well, it’s really quite easy. Start with yourself. Create and hold feelings of forgiving and loving in your heart and then apply them to the situation or context that you feel needs forgiving. Start by thinking of memories or experiences that fill your heart with loving kindness, with compassion and forgiveness. Then really focus on those feelings, amplify the heartfelt sense of forgiving. Get in touch with these warm loving feelings. Build them up and out and around your heart and body. As you breathe in and out, feel them expand and grow, till your whole chest, your whole torso, your whole body is filled with deep feelings of loving kindness. Make sure you expand them from your heart to your gut. Deep inside your torso and stomach. This will send important messages from your cardiac brain to your enteric brain; from your heart brain to your gut brain.

Now start to think of the person or the situation or behaviour that needs and wants forgiving. Continue to breathe and amplify the heart and gut feelings of forgiving and compassion as you recall the situation. This focuses your heart and gut brains on loving feelings and allows them to learn and apply forgiving to the situation.

Say the words:

“I do forgiving, I feel forgiving, I am forgiving. I forgive everyone and everything. I forgive myself completely. I forgive the world and people for not being perfect. I am a worthwhile person who deserves loving, kindness and support. I forgive everyone and everything.”

Say these over and over, with warm, loving tonalities. Hug yourself both physically and in your imagination. And all the while keep breathing love and forgiveness into your heart and mind and life.

Do all this for a number of minutes, and then repeat it again for at least 3 to 5 times. Each time you practice the ‘doing’ of forgiving and compassion you’ll find it gets stronger and easier. Your heart and gut brains will learn and remember.

And also remember, forgiveness is not something you have, it’s a process you do. So continue to do it often. One really useful idea is to do a quick form of this every night before you go to sleep. When you rest your head on the pillow, give yourself a metaphorical hug and tell yourself that you forgive yourself and you forgive the world and that you love yourself and the world and really build and feel the loving kindness in your heart. Then spread this feeling of forgiving and loving kindness out into the world, and apply it to anyone who has caused you pain, loss or hurt. It’s a great way to love, nurture and enhance your life and generate more happiness and joy in your world.

You can also practice forgiving by doing the buddhist technique of Loving Kindness Mediation.

Loving Kindness Meditation

Research by Positive Psychologist Dr. Barbara Fredrickson has shown that the practice of the Buddhist technique of Loving Kindness Meditation can mitigate the effects of negative emotion. When practiced for as little as an hour per week, Loving Kindness Mediation can enhance positive emotions and buffer against negative emotions such as anger, fear and envy.

Loving Kindness Meditation is a meditational practice in which you send out thoughts and feelings of love, kindness and well-being to all sentient beings. It involves 4 phases, with each phase lasting approximately 5 minutes each. The meditation can be done as a visualisation in which you imagine and feel a sphere of love and light around yourself and then radiate it out from yourself. It can also be done as a verbal exercise in which you repeat phrases or mantras while remembering and recalling positive memories of love and kindness.

1. The practice begins by focussing on developing a loving acceptance of your self. This is the first phase. Fill yourself with thoughts, feelings and images of love, caring and acceptance. Repeat words like “I love and care for myself. I deserve happiness, health and love.” Visualise yourself filled with a radiant ball of love centered round your heart and radiating throughout your body and your life. Do this for 5 minutes.
   
2. The second phase involves meditating on loving kindness for someone you already care about and love. This could be a close friend, a parent, a lover, a mentor, teacher or benefactor. Concentrate on sending them feelings and messages of loving kindness. Visualise the light of your loving kindness and compassion spreading from your heart out to them, surrounding and filling them and their life.
   
3. In the next phase, you shift your visualisation and meditation to someone you are neutral to, perhaps a stranger or an acquaintance. Do this for 5 minutes also, before moving on to phase 4.
   
4. The final phase is more challenging. In this phase you focus on sending loving kindness to people that you dislike or who have been difficult or hostile towards you. Feel and imagine enveloping them in compassion, forgiveness and kindness. You can also spread your thoughts of loving kindness out to all beings in the world, encompassing all sentient creatures, all people.
   

You will find that this meditation exercise feels fantastic and has a lasting effect that stays with you for many, many hours. Indeed, Dr. Fredrickson’s research shows that the more you practice the meditation the longer the effect lasts and spreads across the contexts of your life, generating emotional and psychological resources that support ongoing happiness and success.

"Forgiveness is not an emotion, it's a decision.”
(Randall Worley)

Forgiveness and Kindness

So I hope I've convinced you that forgiveness and forgiving is a Life Enhancing Skill that increases happiness and is well worth actively practicing. Living with a spirit and attitude of forgiving is a proven strategy for overcoming the enemies to happiness of anger and retribution and enhancing your health, your life and the lives of those you care about.

Next time someone does something that pisses you off, do the kind thing to yourself and forgive them. Let it go. You’ll not only be kind to both them and yourself, more importantly you’ll be giving yourself the gift of the positive emotions that kindness brings. And remember, as the famous American humorist Josh Billings said “There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness”.


Finally, as Ken Marslew, than man interviewed by Ray Martin in the 60 Minutes segment says:

"There is a better way to deal with this stuff".

Do forgiving, it's Life Enhancing!
smiles and best wishes,

Grant

Here's some links to info on Loving Kindness Meditation:

• Loving Kindness Meditation Overview
• Loving Kindness Meditation Details
• Loving Kindness Meditation Technique

Here's some interesting info about the enteric and heart brains and techniques for communicating and working with them:

• The Brain in the Gut
• Enteric Brain Technique
• Follow Your Heart

And here's some books, based on scientifically validated findings, that you might find useful for increasing your life enhancing skills in forgiving:

Enhancing Life with NLP

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)

I've been studying, teaching and running workshops on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) for over 20 years. In my experience and deeply from my heart, I can tell you that NLP provides a powerful and life enhancing set of tools, skills, attitudes and understandings. That's a big claim, isn't it? So why do I say it?

For over 25 years, NLP has been one of the fastest growing developments in applied psychotherapy. It is a technology of achievement and excellence, derived from studying how experts in different fields obtain their outstanding results. NLP provides models for human communication, learning and behavioral competence.

Science Digest reported that NLP: “could be the most important synthesis of knowledge about human communication to emerge since the explosion of humanistic psychology... It may be the ultimate behavioural engineering tool”.

NLP provides a set of models, skills and techniques for thinking and acting effectively in the world, through which you can quickly and powerfully change, adopt or eliminate behaviours in yourself and others.

In my experience...

In my experience of over 30 years of in-depth studying of everything from formal psychology through to mystical philosophy, I have found NLP to be the most profound body of knowledge there is about human process. NLP is practical and pragmatic. It works! And it is increasingly supported by research in the fields of psychology, positive psychology and neuro-science. Yet NLP is still ahead of the curve compared to many of these fields.

Personally, I find NLP to be a life enhancing body of knowledge and set of behavioral skills. I can't recommend it glowingly or highly enough! It has made a huge difference to my life. For example, using NLP principles and techniques I've developed a field called 'LifeDesign' which I use to create a wonderful life by design rather than by accident. I've taught other people LifeDesign and they've equally achieved wonderful results. I'll describe the process of LifeDesign in more detail in a coming blog entry. However, the point I want to make here, is that without the ideas and skills of NLP it would have been unlikely that I would have created the LifeDesign process. So NLP has truly made a difference to my life and the lives of others.

Learning more

For those who are interested in learning more, I suggest you stick your toes in the water and grab a couple of books. Once you get a feel and an idea for the power of NLP, then you'll want to do some courses with a reputable trainer. In addition, there's always resources available on the web.

And of course, continue to read this blog, as I'll be sharing ideas and concepts based on NLP and Positive Psychology for doing Life Enhancing :)

Recommended NLP Books

Here's my list of 'must read' NLP books, ordered in the approx. sequence I recommend they be read in:

Frogs into Princes - Richard Bandler & John Grinder

Using Your Brain For a Change - Richard Bandler

Reframing: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Transformation of Meaning - Richard Bandler & John Grinder

Trance-Formations: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Structure of Hypnosis

The Structure of Magic: A Book About Language and Therapy - Richard Bandler & John Grinder

The Structure of Magic II: A Book About Communication and Change - Richard Bandler & John Grinder

Introducing NLP: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People - Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour

Persuasion Engineering - Richard Bandler and Joseph La Valle

Grab one or two and have a read. See if NLP makes sense and adds value to your life. Let me know what you think. I truly believe that NLP is Life Enhancing and that if you give it a go, you'll find it opens your mind and attitude to amazing ways of experiencing the world.

many great wishes and smiles,
Grant

Life Enhancing with author Thomas Sullivan

Thomas (Sully) Sullivan, is an author I really admire and for me a role model and exemplar of life enhancing. Sully's biography entry on wikipedia says:

Pulitzer Prize nominee Thomas Sullivan is the author of some eighty short stories and novels. His work involves characters in intensely psychological situations that range from thrillers (The Water Wolf) to comedy (The Phases of Harry Moon). Awards and recognitions are for literary and genre fiction.

According to Sully's website bio:

Sully is an avid swimmer, blader, cross-county skier and canoeist. Sullivan currently lives on a lake in Maple Grove, Minnesota, writing full-time and lecturing across the country.

Life Enhancing with Sully

I've been a subscriber to Sully's website newsletter for a couple of years now, and am always inspired by his lyrical thoughts, ideas and adventures. In his most recent newsletter, I was blown away by the following paragraph:

"Whatever your personal hurts and limitations, you can always find a way to live to the max. That’s because life actually takes place between the ears. Your dreams never rejected you, but you may have rejected your dreams. Surround yourself with the stuff of your fantasies, and you will rise to the level of ideals they represent. They will become real as you become real. If you live appearances, that’s what your ideals will become -- appearances."


Aligned and inspired by Sully's words, I thought it would be wonderfully life enhancing to interview him and ask him some questions about his thoughts on life enhancing. So today's blog entry contains Sully's deeply thoughtful and uplifting responses to the questions I posed to him. I hope you enjoy and are as inspired as I am by what Sully has written. Thanks Sully! We appreciate your time, energy and generosity in sharing your thoughts on life enhancing.

* What do you do to enhance your life? What is life enhancing for you?

For me it really begins with physical circumstances. I try to get outside of four walls, i.e., make the horizons my walls. Nature's horizons especially free me up and give me perspective. If I find myself locked into canyons of concrete and glass, there is always the sky -- particularly at night. Once I am drawing breaths that seem to come from the far corners of the universe, I can do the single simple thing that centers my day. I can think. Sounds too pat for an honest answer, right? But thinking deeply and actively is the Technicolor in my life. Without examining, savoring, anticipating and imagining, I would lose most of the adventure, intensity and romance that color my world.

* You seem to fill your life with magic and adventure... how do you motivate yourself to do the life enhancing activities such as midnight paddles on moon-filled lakes, and cross-country skiing across star-filled fields of snow-diamonds?

Your rich descriptions answer the question. Those settings are their own reward. But I guess what you mean is how does one overcome inertia in search of those vistas. For one thing, I think you have to have faith that they are there. And for another, you have to learn to find them as much through your insight as your eyes. The world teems with hidden miracles which often reveal themselves when you learn to connect the dots, to make deductions, and to grasp the underlying significance of things.

If you are constantly waiting for the world to act upon you, to show you what you in fact have to search out, then you are at the mercy of happenstance. You become a spectator as opposed to a participant. Spectators find meteors after they are hit in the head by them. Participants gather stars from light years away. Participation is as much analyzing horizons as it is activity. When you have observed and thought enough, you are in control of what happens to you, and you will always find magic and adventure.

* Why do you think 'life-enhancing' is important? What's important about having dreams, goals and inspiring purpose?

If you are not here to discover as much truth as possible, what are you here for? And dreams, goals and purpose are all way stations on the way to truths.

* Who are your role models for 'life-enhancing'? Are there any exemplars that live enhanced lives that you look to for inspiration in your own life?

Many. I try to find whatever is inspiring in everyone. And those few whom I have failed to discern in that fashion give me pause for thought too. What keeps them going? What self-doubt or fear is so great that they can continue to live drab lives of conformity or predictability or devoid of the slightest risk to their fragile gestalts? So I particularly admire those who break free from fear and guilt imposed by the expectations of others. To live as a prisoner of appearances rather than by one's own heart, mind and soul seems to me to be the greatest waste of life possible and an affront to creation.

* What would you put on the list of the most: Life Enhancing Devices, Life Enhancing Values, Life Enhancing Beliefs, Life Enhancing Skills/Strategies and Life Enhancing Behaviors?

Devices: anything that allows me to access nature or integrates with my body to produce transits, i.e., skis, roller skis, rollerblades, bikes, canoes, snowshoes. And, yes, I would add the computer to that list for its vast linkage of information.

Values: independence, resourcefulness, imagination, selflessness, a desire to know all things, romantic idealism, and the courage to live true to oneself without fear or guilt.

Beliefs: that to live by truth is the ideal, and that we all have the task of overcoming ourselves and the choice of making romantic idealism a reality.

Skills/Strategies/Behaviors: this would be an infinite list, but every item would reach for the positive. An assumption that all things are possible would motivate the list. The best skills/strategies/behaviors would be those that find an ingenious way to accomplish what seems hopeless or impossible to reconcile. And most of those forays against the impossible or seemingly contradictory would begin by dismantling mental walls and emotional barriers.

* Anything else that comes to mind for you on the subject of generating a wondrous life :)

A wondrous life should not be without pain or negatives. Opposites enhance each other. The key thing here -- the thing that turns the tide -- isn't whether or not you experience the negative but rather what you do with it. That is how triumph happens and magic becomes possible.

Sully

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/


And for those interested in reading some of Sully's books:

Also why not check out Sully's nomination on the1000best.com and give him a boost or send him a trib!

Choice, freedom & respect

Here's a short rant I wrote some time ago, that describes a little of my thinking behind why I believe focusing on Life Enhancing is so useful and important...

Life is an adventure!

You wake up one day and there you are...

Alive and wondering what it's all about. And you know, no one can really tell you.

Sure, you'll find lots of people who have their own beliefs, but no one really knows or can prove their beliefs about the 'true' meaning of life to you. So who and what do you believe?

Believe me, its a challenging question! :-)

Right Now!

And as far as we know we only get one life. It's this one. Right Now!

So you want to make the most of your time, right now, on this planet. And how are you going to do that? How will you know what to do to live a great life?

Look around you. Look at all the people you know. Is there anyone who inspires you? Is there anyone whose life you really really respect? Is there someone who is an exemplar of life enhancing?

Or like me, do you look around and go "hmmm, I don't want to live most of the lives I see. I don't respect the way most of the planet is living or the results they're getting in their lives."

So how would you know?

Here's an important question: What is the life strategy you are going to choose to live by? What are the guiding rules and principles that will ensure that you are living an enhanced and wondrous life? - that will enable you to become a person you can be proud of, to live a life you can respect?

So that on your dying day, when you're throwing off your mortal coils, as you look back over your life, you can be pleased with the life you've lead, with the life you've lived.

Interesting isn't it that the etymology of the word 'respect' is 'to look back', 'to look again'.

So... moving into your future, now, looking back on what you are going to have been doing with your life, how are you going to live and think and make decisions in your life so that you are living the sort of excellence you want to have lived.

Fascinating question isn't it! And so incredibly and vitally important to living an enhanced life of choice, freedom and joy and not just a default life served up by the place and time you are living in history right now.

Enhancing your Life

You know, deep in the sparkling places of our minds, there is wondrous opportunity and choice.

WE need to bring it forth to our consciousness so that we can review it and refine it and make it a sparkling gem of a life. Life really is like a diamond or gem, dredged up from the soil of mother earth, all rough and rock like, but with appropriate conscious working and attention it can be cut and shaped to a beautiful crystal clear gem, filled with gleaming beauty and value.

That's the way to make life worthwhile. It's through conscious attending to the unconscious patterns and processes of our creative intuition; focusing on the fruits of our evolving desires and through the conscious filters of what we decide and design to be our evoking passions. It's about what we decide to believe and make happen in intelligent ways. It's about consciously choosing to focus on and do life enhancing!

What are you going to do?

How are you going to live your life? What are you going to do to express your joy of living? What choices are you making? Where is your self-control? What life are you designing for yourself now?


How are you enhancing your life?

Make the most of your time on this planet! You only get one chance, make it count!

LIFE – Living In Full Enhancing!

Life Enhancing Devices: Top of the List!

Nearly 20 years ago, I came across my first brain-wave synchronisation machine (aka 'Light and Sound Mind Machine') at a Mind and Body Expo. It looked and sounded amazing, so I sat down and tried it. Awesome!

It was such an amazing experience that I immediately ordered one. I now own a number of them, along with a swag of other bio-feedback and Neuro-enhancement devices. I use them regularly and they really make an incredible difference to the quality of my life.

Life Enhancing Device

"One of the most Life Enhancing Devices there is!"

In my opinion and experience, these Mind Machines are one of the best LED's (Life Enhancing Devices) there are! BIG claim hey! So why do I make that claim?

Light and Sound Mind Machines work by creating patterns of light and sound that entrain or modulate your brain into selected states of consciousness. For example, when your brain is experiencing alpha-waves, it is in a state of deep relaxation. Exceptionally competent meditators, people who have studied and practiced for decades, are able to shift their brain-waves into what is called super-theta. Delta brain-waves are produced in the state of sleep, and the normal state of consciousness is associated with beta-waves.

What a Mind Machine does is synchronise and move your brain into states that you select, for a duration you select. So for example, if you are feeling stressed and tired, you can select a program that will move you from beta, into alpha and then on into a deep super-theta state, before returning you to alpha and then beta. This is like doing an amazingly advanced and incredibly refreshing meditation. It's incredible how good and rejuvanating it feels!

You can also use the device to get to sleep. My beloved used to do nightshift nursing, and would have incredible difficulty sleeping after a hectic and stressful night at work. Once we owned a Mind Machine, she would put on the goggles and headphones, select a sleep program and the machine would guide her off into alpha to relax her mind and then on into deep delta sleep. It then switched itself off after the preselected time period, leaving her in a deep and restful sleep. No more restless and frustrating tossing and turning. Just deep and refreshing sleep. Now how cool is that!

I've meditated for over 30 years. I've studied and am adept at a number of different techniques. There's nothing quite like a great meditation session. And yet, there are times when I'm so physically tired, or when I've been pushed into such a stressful state by the exigencies of life, that it's almost impossible to achieve a truly deep state of meditation in the time I have available.

This is where the Mind Machine comes into it's own. You see, it doesn't matter what's happening in my subjective state, once I push the on button, the device starts moving and entraining my brain-waves into the selected program and 'I' just drift off into the deepest state possible, without any conscious volition on my part. It all just happens like a wondrous journey into deep inner-space. Wonderful! And at the end of the 20 minute session I return back to normal consciousness feeling so damn calm, relaxed, enervated and alive. I truly love my Mind Machine! It is a magnificent Life Enhancing Device!

Note that there are some caveates... these machines are contra-indicated and should not be used by people who suffer from epilepsy or psychoses.

If you choose to buy yourself one you should make your own mind up about them, based on your own decisions, not on my recommendations.

Personally, they work for me and a number of friends who have also bought one. I truly wouldn't be without one. But hey, everyone has to choose their own path in life, and each person needs to be the author of their own life enhancing :-)

Here's the new Mind Machine that I've just ordered, it looks to have some fantastic features, and I can't wait to try it:

Procyon Light & Sound Mind Machine

Procyon Product Features

• Full Spectrum Audio-Visual Synthesizer Light & Sound Mind Machine for modulating states of consciousness, dwelling at the threshold of sleep, deeply relaxing, or activating visual creativity
• 50 Built-In Sessions to guide your Mind into amazing and deeply entraining states
• Over 16 million colors, digital audio & new GanzFrames
• New Software & Cable for programming & downloading new sessions via USB and the internet

And here's some cool books about the whole subject of brain wave synchronisation and neuro-feedback.

smiles and deep brain-wave enhancing,
Grant

What is 'Life Enhancing'?

Ok...

I think we'd better start by defining and exploring what we mean by 'Life Enhancing'.

The word 'enhance' comes from latin and means to raise up or make high. It's modern meaning is: to make greater, increase in value, to improve, to raise up and to augment.


Adding value to your life

So something is 'Life Enhancing' if it increases, augments or adds value to your life. Pretty simple in concept. And as I've indicated in my first blog entry and subsequent comments, it's a very useful tool for directionalising and filtering your mind, attention and unconscious responses so that you get and achieve more success, happiness and joy in your life.

I think one of the key ideas inherent in the definition of 'enhancement' is the notion of 'increase in value'. Research and experience from both the fields of NLP and Positive Psychology has shown that Values are vitally important tools for success and happiness. So not surprisingly, we'll be exploring human values in great depth and detail across the course of coming blog entries. I've been studying values for many, many years now and have some very cool, powerful and interesting distinctions to share about them. They really are one of the keys to leveraging generative change in your life.

Getting back to defining life enhancing... In summary, something is life enhancing if it adds value to your life and supports and augments things or processes that are important to you in your life. As an example, if you value health, peace and balance, then the practice and skill of Calm-Abiding Meditation will be life enhancing for you.


Subjective vs Objective Life Enhancing

I think this example touches nicely on something I want to note about 'Life Enhancing'.

I believe that Life Enhancing can be divided into domains of 'Subjective Life Enhancing' and 'Objective Life Enhancing'. Something is subjectively life enhancing if it augments and hightens one of your values. That is, it's all about what's important to you. Motorbikes might be life enhancing for me, but if you don't like them, then they are hardly likely to be life enhancing for you.

There are some things however, that are objectively life enhancing. These objective life enhancers apply to all intelligent and sentient beings. For example, I believe it can be argued that Freedom is a life enhancing value that applies to all creatures. The more freedom and choice a being has, the more their life is enhanced. The less freedom a creature has, the more their life is curtailed or limited.

So as we explore ideas for life enhancing, we'll make sure we track whether the things we are examining and playing with are more or less objective or subjective in their nature.


Life ENHANCING vs LIFE Enhancing

I also want to highlight another aspect of life enhancing that is useful and important. Life Enhancing can be defined and divided into 'Life ENHANCING' versus 'LIFE Enhancing'. What do I mean by that?

Well, Life ENHANCING is what we've described above, it's where some existing aspect of your life or values is enhanced via a life enhancing device, experience, behaviour, skill etc. On the other hand, LIFE Enhancing is about expanding, augmenting or amplifying your ability to experience life. It's where you get or experience MORE life; your LIFE is enhanced, rather than just your existing life and values being ENHANCED.

Do you understand the distinction I'm making here? Perhaps an example might be useful.

Wealth is both LIFE enhancing and life ENHANCING. If you love adventure, say, then you can use wealth to experience more and greater adventures. In that way, your existing values around adventure can be ENHANCED through the use of wealth. So you can see that wealth is life ENHANCING.

On the other hand, the LIFE enhancing aspect of wealth is that it allows you to purchase more of every aspect of life. Wealth is bandwidth. It allows you to buy experience. You can use it to expand your life, your knowledge, your skills. In that way you can develop new values and interests. You can get more of life, if you use wealth wisely.

So these two aspects of 'LIFE ENHANCING' are very powerful and useful for generating ideas on how to, well... enhance your life :-) and we'll explore them and the structure of 'Life Enhancing' in coming blog entries.


What do you think?

Okay, over to you now. What do you believe defines 'Life Enhancing'? What are your thoughts on this? Leave a comment and let's converse together on what we mean by 'Life Enhancing'.


BTW, in my next blog entry, I'll share with you what for me is the most Life Enhancing Device (LED) I've ever come across...


so until then,
smiles and wondrous wishes,
Grant