Flower Mandalas Project

Self Love: Evolution In my more troubled youth, I was often told that to truly love anyone, I needed first to love myself. This advice, though well-intentioned, set up an unhelpful dynamic. Loving myself seemed as much like actual love as masturbation was to sexual intercourse – a solitary substitute for the real thing. Why would I want that? In my mid 20s, while riding the subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I had an insight: To love ourselves, we need first to experience being loved – not loved with strings attached, not intermittently loved, and not loved blindly, either, but loved for who we actually are, like Dr. Seuss loves: “You are you. Now, isn’t that pleasant?” Or Mr. Rogers: “You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you. And I like you just the way you are.” Without this loved-at-the-core experience, loving ourselves is difficult to manage. About 10 years ago, I received a variation of the “love yourself” advice,...

Build Your Resilience in 6 Steps   In recent posts, I’ve talked mostly about ReBalancer , the force that kicks in when our default stabilizer, Balancer , gets thrown out of whack by the UnBalancer . ReBalancer handles out-of-the ordinary stresses, but ReBalancer alone can’t keep us on an even keel. For that, we need Balancer to be healthy and strong. Balancer doesn’t ask us for much. Much like our immune systems, it chugs along on autopilot, making minor course corrections when needed. Only when it encounters something it can’t handle does it call on ReBalancer to provide assistance. This Balancer/ReBalancer tag team works very well most of the time. But if Balancer is weakened through too much stress for too long, or was never very robust to begin with, we become much more vulnerable to UnBalancer. Then if Balancer gets overwhelmed by a sudden stressor (an accident, a death, a financial crisis, etc.), it may crash before ReBalancer can take over. Recovery from such crashes c...

IMPORTANT : If you’re just tuning in now, click here for Part I , Balance: The Experiment  and then come back here. This is Part II of a two-parter on using Experiments to keep your life on track.  How to Design an Experiment Like any experimenter, when our ReBalancers design Experiments, they follow a sequence of steps. The implementation may be spontaneous or deliberate, but the steps are basically the same either way. Observe the current situation to see what needs to change. Examples: a) My motorcycle’s valves need adjustment or the engine will be damaged. b) Current ulcer treatment doesn’t really work. c) My life is a mess. Develop a hypothesis about how to implement change. Examples: a) If I use a system like my brother did, maybe I can learn from failed attempts. b) Ulcers may be caused by a pathogen that can survive in stomach acid. c) If I ask for help, I may get it. Test the hypothesis with an Experiment. Identify a small, experimental action tha...