love

this is it folks … THE big word
in the kitchen of our South African home, we had a notice up on the wall:

love was not put in your heart to stay
love is not love until it’s given away

we have to love … love each other, love ourselves, love creation, love our planet
send love to people we find difficulty with, love animals, love this day, love the food we are eating, love beer, not just love but show love to the people near and dear to us, love the stars and planets, love that beautiful flower, hug and love the tree that we pass by, love the warmth of the sun.

the more love I give out the more I seem to have
there is a never-ending source of love in me … or so it seems

Reggie Ray in his lecture of Buddhist Tantra, quotes a study, where terminally ill patients were interviewed. They were asked the question 'Is there anything you regret in life?'
Ninety percent answered 'I wish I had been loved more' and ten percent answered 'I wish I had loved more'.
It is a pretty telling study, don't you think?

meditation

                                    A mind that is quiet is naturally attentive.
                                 And a mind that is attentive is naturally quiet.
                Although Buddhists regard formal meditation practice as necessary,
          it is not the form of the meditation that is the key, but the act of focused attentiveness
                 - that which happens when you give yourself completely to a task at hand,
                                         whatever that happens to be.


Source:  Quiet Food - The Buddhist Institute of South Africa ISBN 1 919930 62 0

i’ve tried to make meditation part of my daily life. i say ‘tried’ because it certainly is not as much a part of my daily life as i would like it to be - i miss meditating on so many days, but i keep trying.
i’m trying to achieve a sense of being in the moment. and only that.
i believe it has been useful to me in slowing down the headlong rush of my life, the habit of always looking ahead and often thinking of the past, to the neglect of each moment. i feel that life slows down and time seems to stretch when i’m in the moment. when i’m absorbed and ‘in the flow’ as i’ve heard it put


i was given a book 
Meditation in Action by Chogyam Trungpa ISBN-10: 159030876X
which i found really good. this book is all you need to understand meditation and to start practicing


Jon Kabat-Zinn in his book Wherever You Go, There You Are ISBN-10: 1401307787
says - quoting the Amazon.com Review: “… meditation is important because it brings about a state of "mindfulness," a condition of "being" rather than "doing" during which you pay attention to the moment rather than the past, the future, or the multitudinous distractions of modern life.”


more recently, i was accepted as a novice monk at Wat Pah Nanachat , a monastery in the
Theravada Forest Tradition, situated in the northeast part of Thailand in Isan Province - see the image at the head of this blog.
the monastery aims at providing English-speaking people the opportunity to train and practise the ancient lifestyle that the Buddha taught his monks in the forests over 2500 years ago.
for the three weeks of my stay, i was able to participate fully in the life of the monastery and this experience has profoundly influenced my life. i was able to practice many hours of sitting meditation in the salle and walking meditation along the many paths meandering around the grounds of the monastery. waking call is at 3am, followed by chanting and meditation, leaf-sweeping and then on to the alms-round. the single meal of the day is at 8am. question and answer sessions and other opportunities to enquire about Buddhist practices are provided, though no mediation instruction is given.


Movement is good for the body, and stillness is good for the mind.
~ Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

stop !

we keep doing these things ... it's time to stop!
30 Things to stop doing to yourself

This hardly needs introduction. It's a blog by Mark and Angel who Hack Life ...  many good articles to ponder here.

Drs Gabe and Diana Mirkin

i’ve been following Drs. Gabe and Diana Mirkin for a few years now. i am so taken by the way they weave scientific information with down-to-earth facts and create articles that are understandable to me … they make so much sense. they research topics that have real meaning and hold importance for me to maintain a healthy and balanced lifestyle. one of the most admirable things they occasionally do is to go ‘out on a limb’ by saying things like … ‘this may not have scientific proof but all indications are that ….’. they dare make intelligent suppositions and sometimes draw logical conclusions when common sense indicates the correct way to think or correct way to act.
to put it more simply: if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck … it is a duck!

The website

Stay close to nature
Here, a series of articles explains how we evolved to eat the foods we eat. The articles explore and explain why we need food, the components of food: protein, fats, carbohydrates and so on.

Good food guide

Nutritional supplements
Use of nutritional supplements may be harmful say Dr Gabe Mirkin and Diana Mirkin. Fish Oil Pills Associated with Increased Prostate Cancer Risk.

What You Eat Is More Important than How Much You Eat
This article follows a 20 year study From Harvard School of Public Health that shows that telling overweight people to "eat less and exercise more" rarely helps them lose weight. Includes:
o Study surprises
o Foods that caused the most weight gain
o Foods that caused weight loss
o Lifestyle factors

Nutrition
Here is a collection of articles on important food issues, such as ‘How much water do you need’ or ‘How much protein do you need’ and ‘What to feed children’ and many more.

Health Reports
Another invaluable collection of health reports on varied topics of great importance.

Fast Foods Cause Diabetes, Heart Attacks and Premature Death

White Rice, like Flour, Increases Risk for Diabetes

Habits That Prevent Heart Attacks Also Prevent Cancers

The Good Food Book
You'll find lots of recipes and helpful tips here

Intermittent fasting
Apparently very good for you

attitude

This has to be the biggest word in life. Well … perhaps not the biggest. Perhaps LOVE is an even bigger word. Love and attitude, closely followed by energy, enthusiasm and curiosity are all intertwined and are huge words to live by.

   attitude
                   love
                            energy
                                         enthusiasm
                                                             curiosity

attitude

I think this word should be written up in the sky.
It should be up there, every day, drifting in and out of clouds like a huge message banner being pulled by an airplane.

You know what I mean by the cup being either half full or half empty. The same damn thing, thought of different ways can make a HUGE difference to the way we perceive the world. consequently our stance to everything that impinges on our consciousness will be coloured by our attitude. Everything.

I’ve seen people fall into the trap of choosing what they don’t want rather than what they want. you may think that I am being unreasonable here … what’s the big deal you may wonder? What’s the big deal about saying - I don’t want to go there rather than I want to go here?

This is the thing: slowly and surreptitiously these thoughts can take us over. By looking at what we don’t want directs us to focus on the negative and keeps that negative aspect in our minds and we could dwell on it and chat to our friends about it and think about it over a cup of tea. I don’t know where I heard the saying ‘That to which you give your attention, grows’ but it’s true. By thinking negative we become negative.
If only we would be thinking of what we want, be thinking of something positive, then these thoughts would give us impetus and energy and happiness. So I try to choose the path I want and try quickly to let go of negative things. For instance, when I get a parking ticket, I pay it immediately - the very next day if I can. because the longer I see that ticket on the table the longer it’ll bug me and it’ll keep bringing my thoughts to reproach myself of how stupid I was not to put money in the meter and so on.
I pay it and it’s done.

This morning i met someone in my fav cafe, les co’pain d’abord café on Boul Mount Royal
We had such an interesting discussion. it went on for hours and one of the things that we discussed was motivation. How do we motivate ourselves? Should it be - We are not trying hard enough, we need to try harder? Or should it be - We are doing great, even though we haven't yet reached our goal, let's keep trying?

I like the way that this is tackled in a that little book entitled: Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. In the book an elder seagull Chang is teaching Jonathan, the young student seagull and demonstrates by example what he means:
Chang moves a distance from Jonathan in an instant - without apparently moving a muscle (or a wing :-)
Jonathan is amazed and asks Chang how did you do that? Chang replies:
“To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is” he said, ”you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived”

I personally prefer this way of thinking and I believe this can also motivate us.

nakedness and nudity

i see these two as being quite different.

nakedness for me applies more to our love partner and the family whereas nudity i see as being in a public space without clothes.

nakedness is shedding clothes and looking at yourself with a certain sense of acceptance. i will not go so far as to say with total acceptance, because that is pretty tough i think, well it's certainly tough for me. maybe for you it's easy. but even a strong sense of acceptance is healthy enough. i think we need to have a love for our bodies to be able to roll around on the bed with someone and feel comfortable in our skin. to look, to touch and feel good about the other looking and touching. nakedness to me is feeling free and unashamed to look at each other within the family - accepting a healthy dollop of reservations here for exceptions or certain age-groups.

working towards accepting our bodies 'as is' i think is crucial. and if for some reason we're not happy with being this way, we don't like what we see in the mirror then perhaps embracing and not denying or rejecting, the impetus that this unhappiness may bring to help us set out on the road of healthy changes.

as for nudity ... i believe certain changes, certain growth can only take place once we shed the armour of clothing. to me this is huge. clothing is something to hide behind, something to give us 'a look', the look that we might have cultivated for years. it keeps people out and keeps us from feeling as vulnerable as we ought to feel in order to make profound changes to our thinking. once the initial embarrassment is over i sense a deeper connection with those around me. shed the clothing and walk out with other people who are not clothed and there is nowhere to hide.

i've experienced such stupendous revelations when interacting with others in this way. to witness the rainbow of gender expression that is to be human (real life it is not as most forms would lead us to believe ... tick one or the other box :-); to see the human form 'warts and all' and to see power and beauty reflect in the faces of people who have survived cancer operations led me to look deeply within myself and understand some of my own weaknesses and negative preconceptions.

i've been humbled by the strength people have shown in their nudity.
reducing the anxiety to be seen without clothing also reduces tensions in ourselves that can manifest in different ways. of course we may not all have the opportunity to be nude in public, we can't take our clothes off and kinda walk out into the neighbourhood park, can we? but perhaps by looking around you might find a place, or group where this is possible. if a chance occurs for this, then take it. you also might find such an experience positive.

 :

profound videos ...

Sometimes I come across something that really holds meaning for me.
These are amazingly powerful:


Why do people succeed? Is it because they're smart? Or are they just lucky? Neither. Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an un-missable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success.
8 Secrets of success

What should we eat? A powerful example of what food can do for us.
Dr. Terry Wahls - Minding Your Mitochondria

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.
The paradox of choice

Gil Hedley: Fascia and stretching: The Fuzz Speech. Gil Hedley answers some questions on why we need to move, why we need to exercise and to be active. He shows us on a human cadaver, the physical changes that occur in the body, if we do not exercise.
Fuzz buildup in our bodies

Clogged arteries for Dummies is a video created by Dr Michael Clapper: He shows us exactly what arteriosclerosis looks like in the artery. He delivers a powerful demonstration of why we should eat the correct foods.
Clooged arteries for Dummies

At his Stanford University commencement speech, Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple and Pixar, urges us to pursue our dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself.
How to live before you die

TEDxHouston - Brené Brown, vulnerability, joy, creativity, belonging, love
Vulnerability, joy, creativity, belonging, love

Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.
Making the case for anti-obesity

William Li presents a new way to think about treating cancer and other diseases: anti-angiogenesis, preventing the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor. The crucial first (and best) step: Eating cancer-fighting foods that cut off the supply lines and beat cancer at its own game.
Can we eat to starve cancer?

Louis Schwartzberg presents a project he is working on: Happines revealed from the point of view of a child and an old man.
Nature, beauty and gratitude

 :

life will be better ...

life will be better ...

this is one of those articles that arrived as an email attachment … you know the ones … the ones i usually delete :-) but this one lives to see another day. the author is unknown.

i’m adding a post-script … a very poignant, personal post-script that i hope will resonate for you and give what is written here a special significance.

We convince ourselves that life will be better once we are married, have a baby, then another. Then we get frustrated because our children are not old enough, and think that all will be well when they are older.
Then we are frustrated because they reach adolescence and we must deal with them. Surely we’ll be happier when they grow out of the teen years.
We tell ourselves our life will be better when our spouse gets his/her act together, when we have a nicer car, when we can take a vacation, when we finally retire.

The truth is that there is no better time to be happy than right now.
If not now, then when?
Your life will always be full of challenges. It is better to admit as much and to decide to be happy in spite of it all.
For the longest time, it seemed that life was about to start. Real life.
But there was always some obstacle along the way, an ordeal to get through, some work to be finished, some time to be given, a bill to be paid. Then life would start.
I finally came to understand that those obstacles were life.
That point of view helped me see that there isn’t any road to happiness.

Happiness IS the road.

So, enjoy every moment.
Stop waiting for school to end, for a return to school, to lose ten pounds, to gain ten pounds, for work to begin, to get married, for Friday evening, for Sunday morning, waiting for a new car, for your mortgage to be paid off, for spring, for summer, for fall, for winter, for the first or the fifteenth of the month, for your song to be played on the radio, to die, to be reborn… before deciding to be happy.

Happiness is a voyage, not a destination.

There is no better time to be happy than… NOW!

Live and enjoy the moment

my post-script:
when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, the doctor came out of the consulting room to give me the diagnoses. he asked whether i wish to break the bad news to her or whether i’d like him to do it. i chose the former, planning to gather the family together and so we could all offer mutual support.

she had worked hard all her life, scrimped and saved and went without, to the point that life became a journey of frugality and self-sacrifice. i can fully understand this, since she came from a poor family, had to gauge out a living and did have to make sacrifices. life was hard for her and she raised her children with determination and overcame the constant struggle to put food on the table.

at the time of the diagnoses, she was in a really nice seniors’ home and had put her name down for a particular apartment that overlooked the harbour. it had a panoramic view over the city and the prospect of living there pleased her so much. we had only just moved her in and it must have seemed to her that she had finally arrived at some glorious point in her life, when the family gathered to break the news of her liver cancer.

she took the news in her stride and asked “so how long have i got … two, three years?”.

“no, only three months” was the bad news we had to give her.

i remember the moment well … she looked away, almost absent-mindedly, paused a few seconds and said “and i was just about to start living”.

 :

any moment

i found this poem hidden in an amazing book that’s full of truths:
Thus it is by Martin Exeter Published by Foundation House Publication Inc.
ISBN 0 935427 23 6

for me, this poem seems to stab to the very core of meaning in our attitude

        Any moment of hating
                Any moment of lying
        Any moment of resentment
                Any moment of dying

        Any moment of loving
                Any moment of giving
        Any moment of thankfulness
                Any moment of living

        All our moments add together
                Like digits in a sum
        And the answer tells us plainly
                Whether life or death shall come

 :

what’s important

some years ago i went on some courses in south africa run by dr. baruch banai

i attended Turning Point, Joyspring and The Mile, organized by by insight training center

i thought they were powerful. they were really good for me and i have no doubt that the way i am now has been affected by these workshops. i ‘d like to share one simple but hugely important item that sticks in my mind from one of these courses:

be clear on what is important to you

in its simplicity, this is saying to us that we can’t have things both ways. if we need to cross the stream and there is no bridge, we have to accept that we will get our boots wet. if it’s more important for us to keep our boots dry then we don’t cross the stream. simple. there is no compromise here.

in life we often come up against similar situations. we want something but can’t let go of something else. we often cause concern and anguish for ourselves simply because we don’t accept this simple fact. there’s a decision to be made … this or that … not both. we hang on and hang on and try all sorts of things to keep both. be clear on what is important to you.

once we’re clear on what’s truly important to us; what it is that we really want and then let go of the other thing, then life becomes so much simpler.

sex

Sex is like air … it’s no big deal until you’re not getting any : - )

I’m starting with a joke because I don’t want this blog entry to be too serious. Sex is a huge subject and very much up there in the forefront, alongside the subject of love and it can have a big influence on our wellness.

But people are divided. To some people, like me it’s very important but to others, it may not be. If you’re happy the way you feel then all is well. I’m not making recommendations one way or the other. For me sex is a beautiful gift - a gift from the gods. For me it can be used in many ways: to make us happy; to show each other love; to bond a relationship; to play on a sunday afternoon; it can be the most wholesome and beautiful thing between people.
It can be many things depending on how we feel, who we are with and what the moment brings.
a Previous partner would wake me in the middle of the night to have sex if she couldn’t get off to sleep - she swore that it was better than a sleeping pill. It can be strong and aggressive, it can be playful, it can be loving and dreamy, it can be casual, it can be with the intent of making babies – wow! can it be more wonderful than that?

I see two aspects of sexual expression:
the play, the touching, fondling, kissing part with a partner and/or the orgasm with or without a partner. Both make us feel good - one strokes us on the outside and one strokes us on the inside. They can go hand in hand or not ... it doesn't matter I think but what matters is that we engage in it (if that is your propensity - as I mentioned in the previous paragraph) and abandon ourself to it and enjoy it. it is so satisfying and feels so good that I think it must have a deep wellness component.

I would take the following tongue-in-cheek but  Live Science Magazine
reported some years ago that if you can't make it to the gym, try fooling around. Your heart might thank you. A study of 2,500 men aged 49 to 54 found that having an orgasm at least three times a week cut in half the likelihood of death from coronary heart disease.

Of course we bring a load of baggage with sexuality -  our mother’s and father’s influence, our early experiences, our fears about letting go, our fears about our bodies and being naked, our adult experiences – often having been let down or having been disappointed or even hurt. For me the never ending performance anxiety. I could go on and on. Such a complex area of our lives is bound to affect our wellness.

if however, you are one of those people for whom it is not high on the list, then don’t  read further.
Be truthful with yourself though … we must not pretend it’s not important if in reality it is, but our many failures (or what we perceive as failures though in fact they may not have been failures at all) have convinced us to pretend that we don’t care about it. That’s not a good idea. The thought will only continue on a much deeper level in our minds and it can spread poison into other areas of our lives.

I can’t even suggest that you ‘be yourself’, because I can see how I’ve changed over the years. When I look back on my own sexual path which started in such naivety, I see that I’ve learned so much from every person that I’ve met on that path. I try not be hold back, to go into each relationship with as much hope, openness and honesty as always and just keep on … trusting, loving, experiencing, and having fun.  

happiness

am I happy? i don’t know … i think half the time it’s not knowing what level of happiness i should be at that stops me from saying – yes, i’m happy. i wonder if others are in fact much happier than i am? should i be feeling happy? isn’t there something more?

it reminds me of tree-planting, when rookies get cream. let me decipher this language to some of you who may not be planters … as a beginner planter, you (like everyone else) get good, bad, terrible or sometimes very good ground that we call ‘cream’. so when a new planter looks at their ground and doesn’t realize this is the best they are ever likely to get, they just start planting in the ordinary way – plant for a bit, sit down for a rest, eat a sandwich, have a smoke, plant some more.

when experienced planters gets cream they goes crazy! they know that if you don’t plant this quickly, soon enough others will start coming onto your land to ‘help’ you to finish it. there’s not much cream usually and it goes quickly. so the experienced planter pulls out all stops! no sitting down! nothing but plant, run back to bag up and plant like there’s no tomorrow. an experienced planter knows that this IS cream.

so knowing that yes, this IS happiness is a big thing.

but what IS happiness? does money bring happiness? well the scientific answer (and we so love scientific answers don’t we?) is that it’s the little things in life that govern whether we feel happy or not. for the purpose of the study, rich people and middle and low income people were given little bleepers and throughout the day at various times when their bleepers went off, they were asked to enter whether they felt happy or not at that precise moment.

the results of this study concluded that in fact, whether you were rich or not had nothing to do with your level of happiness. researchers found that the link between wealth and good mood to be “greatly exaggerated and mostly an illusion”. it was little things, like the joy in the cup of tea you were drinking, or whether you felt good after your night’s sleep, or whether any number of small seemingly insignificant things made you feel good at that particular time that determined your overall level of happiness. “even a life-changing event like winning the lottery or suffering a disabling injury doesn't preoccupy most people for ever” researchers said. “eventually, rich or poor, we all go back to focussing on how good our breakfast tastes and what's on TV.”

my good friend mary holding posted on facebook recently: ‘for the first time in my life, I'm not waiting for anything to happen so that I can be happy’.

don’t you just love what she said?

ps. this is an interesting analysis: The Economics of Happiness
Wednesday 31 August 2011
by: Jeffrey D. Sachs, Project Syndicate | News Analysis

just ordinary tea

Another little gem from The Orange Book - which I found lying on the table at a most unexpected place. Yes … when the student is ready the teacher will come.

Just ordinary tea – enjoy it!

Live moment to moment.

For three weeks, try: whatsoever you are doing, do it as totally as possible; love it enjoy it. Maybe it looks silly. If you are drinking tea it is silly to enjoy it too much – it is just ordinary tea.

But ordinary tea can become extraordinarily beautiful – a tremendous experience. Make it a ceremony: making tea … listening to the kettle and the sound, then pouring the tea … smelling the fragrance of it; than tasting the tea and feeling happy.

Dead people cannot drink tea; only very alive people. This moment you are alive! And don’t think of the future; the next moment will take care of itself. Think not of the morrow: for three weeks live in the moment.

Source: The Orange Book, The Meditation Techniques of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

regular exercise

regular exercise
one of the major hurdles in exercising regularly is time and money. time to go to the gym: to get our gear together, pack it in to the car, drive there and back … it takes so much time and money. how many of us has decided that - this year, we will exercise? how many of us have exercise bikes, or weights that are gathering cobwebs in some remote corner of the house. that’s the problem with gadgets. they seem great when we are full of enthusiasm. the gym sales people love us in january, but often don’t see us from february or march onwards because we get bogged down with other things.
so the best way of overcoming this difficulty is to not go to the gym – which means exercising at home. i find this the best way because there are no excuses – there are no gadgets, no travel time. ask yourself if you are worth 11 minutes a day to keep healthy? the answer has gotta be YES!
so here’s the deal:
there’s an exercise program that was developed in the 60’s by the canadian air force. no gadgets, no travel time, it can be done in your home, in the bedroom or any spare room. i’ve been doing it for many years and it works. 5 basic exercises for men and 10 basic exercises for women (don’t ask me why it is 10 for women … i too am puzzled). these exercises hit all the major body parts, the upper body, the big muscles of the leg, the stomach. they can be done by anybody whether you are totally unfit or whether you are close to being an olympic athlete. no, i am not kidding, these 5 basic exercises are even good for the superfit person – check out the star-jumps in exercise 5, page 29 of the Chart.
the thing to do is to start doing them and develop the habit of exercising. i find the mornings are the best for me, my stomach is empty and i do them as i roll out of bed (unless someone is sharing my bed in which case i don’t feel like just rolling out :-) check out the original booklet which gives you charts for different fitness levels.
start with the level that is recommended for you – check with your doctor if you feel you need to.
start now. read my blog ‘until one is committed’ if you’re hesitating.
ps. these exercises were developed in the 60s, and show straight back sit-ups and not crunches. i don’t know much about these things but i believe, it is crunches we should be doing to exercise our stomach muscles and we should also be doing them obliquely (cross over – left elbow to right knee) and not with straight backs: raise heads first, shoulders and then upper body in a smooth rolling motion.

our correct weight

we are organisms - many celled, largish, intelligent, but for all that, still simply organisms. as such, we have a certain build, a certain weight that is the correct weight for our organism.
i feel much better if i have to climb a few flights of stairs and my weight is correct – if my muscle to weight ratio is correct. when i go hiking and have a hefty backpack to carry: the tent, the spare clothing, and the food - the going becomes much more difficult, i’m out of breath easier and i get tired quicker and need to rest more often. the weight i have to carry (the backpack plus my body weight) is not in balance with the heart. the heart has not only to be fit (and i’ll talk about fitness in another blog) but also has to be the correct size for the organism – and that’s me.
regular size heart working hard all the time to pump blood to a large body = trouble.
Sportspeople - long distance runners, climbers, talk of their muscle to weight ratio as being crucial for participating in their particular sport. Every pound of weight we put on is 5 miles of blood vessels. If your heart beats 100,000 times a day, that's 500,000 miles a day for one pound of fat,– see discussion here
body mass index (bmi) is a is a tool used to assess our weight which in turn helps us to learn about our health risks. are you at your healthy weight? you can either look up your bmi on the chart below or find out fast here

exercises for the back

Chronic pain is debilitating, both by making you feel terrible and by stopping you from doing other things: things which will generate energy and enthusiasm and are fun to do. If you have backache, you don’t feel like exercising and you’re not in a position to go for a jog or climb a mountain or go skiing or even play with your children. These fun pursuits give you energy and they create a social atmosphere of interaction that makes you feel good. Social, physical interaction in my opinion is a positive contributory factor for wellness.
As will be apparent on reading my other wellness posts - I strongly believe that there is a physical component to wellness; in feeling physically good, feeling strong, feeling healthy, having a positive body image … all these things can help promote a feeling of wellness. Note well that i am not saying these are prerequisites … only that they can contribute!
What then can we do about persistent backache?
These are the exercises given to me by an osteopath many years ago when I had back problems. I had an accident which put my back in a bad way; the hospital had given me a corset to wear (for the rest of my life they said) but the osteopath said "if you do these exercises every day for the rest of your life, you will never again have backache".
He was right.
I've added 4 exercises (the ones without numbers) to the original list. With one exception these added exercises are yoga exercises, which I found over the years. They feel particularly beneficial for me - perhaps they might also be beneficial for you, so leave them in or take them out? The exception is the chiropractor exercise (I call it this because it was recommended to me by a chiropractor); apparently helps to keep some of the bones of the lower back from becoming immobile.
Every day for the rest of your life - less than 10 minutes a day - no backache
Sounds like a good deal to me

until one is committed

Let me recount the story of how I got hold of this bit of wisdom. My daughter Karen and I were heading treeplanting and stopped at OceanIsland Backpackers Hostel in Victoria. Coming down to breakfast next morning, we found a sheet of paper with the photocopy of this quote from Goethe at each table in the kitchen area. I was gobsmacked by the quote, it made an tremendous impact on me - not only the quote but that someone would have the generosity of spirit to making all those copies and placing them on the tables. I wonder how many lives have been touched, enriched and perhaps improved by that single, simple action. So here it is for you to ponder:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative (and creation).

There is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too - All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.

A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would have come his or her way.

Whatever you can or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

nutrition in a nutshell

this might sound trite ... to simplify something to this degree but when i came across this quote in this book i was gobsmacked at the beauty of it, the trueness of it and the utter simplicity of something that can be made to seem so complicated.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Note of explanation: The author explains that by ‘food’ he means basic foods, such as: fruit, wholemeal grains, meat, vegetables, potatoes, eggs, cheese, milk and the like, that we usually find around the perimeter of a supermarket and not the processed, prepared foods that we find in the centre isles.
Source: In Defense Of Food by Michael Pollan

this i believe

‘This I Believe’ is a CBC Radio project that engages Canadians in writing and sharing the core values and beliefs that guide their daily lives. It is no longer operating.
I wrote this essay within the guidelines of the CBC radio project. You may read the background information to This I Believe and the 50+ essays that have been submitted and broadcast by the CBC at the following links: Description of the project here Contributions broadcast by the CBC here
This is the essay written by me on the lines of the This I Belive project:

       I believe in the promise and the beauty of each new day!

I am sitting in the kitchen of my apartment, looking expectantly at the trees in the lane behind the houses. It’s early morning. The shadows are still deep among the green wall of leaves facing me but the sky is a clear blue vault overhead. The point where the sky meets the tree-line is about to explode into light. The golden orb of the sun is peeking out, sending yellow shafts flashing in my direction, bathing the plants on the windowsill in the palest lemon imaginable. I can already feel the warmth on my face and I breathe out, I relax. What shall I do - how shall I make this day, I ask myself?

For me, every sunrise offers a brand new start - like turning a notebook onto a clean page. Even if I messed up the previous pages, here and now I can start again. Something that I have neglected: perhaps to write a letter to one of my children rather than the usual quick email. A letter which is long overdue, to tell them how much I love them. Perhaps today I can try not to let the traffic get me down. Perhaps from today I will try to be more organized and have some friends round for dinner – something that I have been putting off for far too long.

I have learned over the years that so much of how the day goes is within my power to affect. Not all days start sunny; many seem very ordinary and humdrum, yet by focusing on little pleasures, even those days bring me joy. Noticing the pure colour of a tomato, or being conscious of the smell of ironing or the smooth texture of an avocado in my mouth, somehow revives my spirits and stops me from feeling depressed. There are so many moments of enjoyment in a day, if only we would look up from our busyness and make a habit of recognizing them.

To me, each day is filled with promise; each morning gives me the chance to start afresh. To start with new enthusiasm, new energy and do what I have vowed to do before but never got round to. To be open to new ideas; to be on the lookout for something brand new to add some spice and excitement to my life. Each sunrise not only bathes me in golden light but also reassures me that this beautiful earth is here to enjoy, and I have been given yet another day to do just that – to enjoy my life, to smile at someone, to feel the wind in my hair.

And if for some reason I did not do everything that I should have, and the day is ending; well then, I always have tomorrow. That’s one of the most wonderful things - knowing it’s never too late; I can start again with each sunrise and ask myself yet again – how shall I make this day?

For This I believe, I’m János Varga in Montreal.

about me

I've been thinking about wellness and trying to live in a way to promote my own wellness for a long time. Been collecting snippets of information, links, quotes and wisdom for years. 
Sometimes when I found something, it would just hit me … that particular time was the right time for me to find it and then and only then did the meaning come through. Have you heard of the saying ‘when the student is ready, the teacher will come’? I might have seen it before but it had just passed me by. 
Many quotes, bits of wisdom that I’m reproducing here or offering a link, can be found elsewhere on the internet. I clearly show the source of all material and it is not my intention to use other peoples thoughts as my own. If i quote something here, it is because I found it significant for me, 
I found that it helped me in my life and who knows, you also might find it significant in your life. I would like to share these snippets of wisdom with you. 
As Barack Obama would say ... yes, we can :-) … I believe wellness is within our grasp