Garbage Out, Garbage In

Reply

“Garbage In, Garbage Out.”

That’s a saying that we’ve gotten used to over the years, and it has a lot of relevance in our lives. If we put junk into the system, it’s nearly impossible to get high quality stuff coming out at the end of the process. This is true whether it be programming algorithms or physical well-being. There is a flip side, however; one that is becoming increasingly important.

What about our waste? Does it come back to haunt us?

As the thumbnail photo suggests, it certainly can. Recent studies of public tap water in various cities around North America have revealed that a lot of what goes down our toilet winds up right back in our tap water. I think a lot of us — and I was in this camp for many years — falsely believe that water treatment takes out all the bad stuff. Unfortunately, water treatment only deals with a small segment of overall water “health”.

A fact of life for many families is that prescription drugs are not taken according to protocol. This often leaves unused portions of the prescriptions that can end up either being used later without a doctor’s supervision for something that appears to be the same or similar to whatever the prescription was written for, or else they just sit unused for possibly years. One day, those expired drugs are discarded, often by being put down the toilet.

In a world of perfect water filtration techniques, the reclaimed/recycled gray water and waste water would be 100% fit for public consumption. The reality is, however, that as good as our water purification techniques are, they leave nearly all chemicals in place. That warrants repeating:

Nearly all chemicals that enter the water supply via waste water channels remain in the water supply to interact with all manner of other chemicals in the supply.

The average person wouldn’t think of giving boys birth control pills, but our water supplies are replete with estrogen and progesterone from discarded birth control prescriptions. Antibiotics, steroids, cancer treatments, AIDS/HIV drugs … they’re all a part of the modern urban water supply.

For most of us who recognize this problem, our first thought is to move to the countryside and get on well water. While this undoubtedly improves the situation, it can’t protect against it 100%. Water is migratory and it travels far and wide from lakes to rivers, rain to puddles and eventually all of it finds its way to the water table in the grand vista of the water cycle.

You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide

There’s no way of escaping what’s in our water. Whatever goes into our air or our soil will eventually make its way into our water. Whatever is in our water will, inextricably, make its way into us. To a very real extent, therefore, the health of our air and water directly relates to our physical well-being. If our water is sick, so shall we be.

I think the situation is best summed up by a combination of fiscal selfishness and ignorance. Fiscal selfishness on the part of companies and individuals who, despite knowing better, put toxic wastes directly into our water supply. For some, it’s a case of ignorance in that they’re unaware that putting a tub of rusty radiator fluid into a sewer will wind up back in the water we consume within a matter of days. Whether the behaviour is based on ignorance or greed, though, really doesn’t matter a lick at the end of the day. What matters is that any behaviour that has an overall negative impact is unsustainable.

Deal With It Now

If there’s one thing we can’t do with regard to the health of our water, it’s procrastinate. The short-term convenience of maintaining the status quo will eventually reach a tipping point of no return. Since the dawn of global industrialization, we’ve been burdening the planet’s self-healing mechanisms beyond their ability to cope. At some point, these systems that are already unable to keep up with our pace of pollution will fail altogether.

When dealing with vastly complex systems such as we have on Earth, there’s always a lag between cause and effect relationships. A cause may effect damage on a subtle level such that we’re not even aware of it until the situation is no longer minor. Complex systems have, by definition, complex interactions. Moreover, because our negative input into our planetary systems are many and varied, there won’t be any single solution — no magic bullet — that puts everything right again within a short period.

It’s Not About Jobs

It’s not about jobs. At least, it shouldn’t be. If you’re a one-trick pony who only knows how to cut down trees, then I suppose it might make for a painful transition were you to find your industry in flux. Change, however, tends to be a good thing, and I personally think that a move to sustainable, green living is one chalk full of business opportunities.

Green technology is big business. Green methodology is a field in which we’re only mere babes in the woods, so to speak. The key to our success will be a two-pronged approach to our environmental problems:

  1. Address issues in all areas to reduce the polluting of land, air and water;
  2. Address issues to clean up existing pollution of land, air and water to minimize residual effects.

Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of government and business to strongly focus attention to #1. Our tendency might be to view #2 as our silver bullet that will slay the vampire of non-sustainability, but it would represent an unwillingness to truly change.

We need clean, healthful water in which to drink, cook and even grow our food. Without clean, fresh water, our forests will struggle and eventually fail. If our forests fail, WE fail. We rely on our forests to act as the great air purifiers of our planet, and without them we cannot survive.

Instead of clinging to old ways of doing things, look for ways to reduce your waste and responsibly dispose of anything that could harm our water supply. Each little step in the right direction as a cumulative effect on the entire planet. A large number of small gestures can have an enormous effect that can put us — and keep us — heading in the right direction.

Share on Facebook

Feet On The Ground

Reply

When I was a boy growing up, I was blessed to be in a small town that was surrounded by lakes, rivers and forests. It was common for me and my friends to head off to the lake on a summer morning only to come home for a quick sandwich before heading back to romp and explore again. Once school was finished, my shoes were seldom worn again till a cool September morning brought about that first trek back to classes.

After I grew up, I moved to Toronto and my opportunities to wander around with my toes on the soil lessened. Still, whenever I had the chance while wandering through a park or near the waterfront, I’d doff my shoes and socks and immerse myself in the experience of barefooted connection.

If it’s been a while since you experienced walking barefoot outside, let me tweak your memory back in time. Remember that glorious sunshine overhead, warming you and filling you with that palpable happiness? Good. Now, think back to taking off your shoes and then your socks. You stand up and wiggle your toes in the cool grass. The sense of joy and release is almost indescribably subtle, but it’s there. You stand, wiggling your toes for a moment, just taking in the feeling, and then you take a few tentative steps. It feels good. This feels right.

For those of us who avail ourselves to the opportunity to walk barefoot on a regular basis, that sense of subtle joy and release is common. I’ve been very curious about it and have come to a few conclusions as to why the simple act of removing our shoes can be a profound experience at times. I’ve yet to find a time when it didn’t feel good. Why might that be?

One of the aspects, I think, is likely a recognition of our body that we’re being authentic with ourselves. In this case, I’m using the term authentic to mean natural, as in “It’s her nature to do that.” We were born without shoes or hooves and are well adapted to walking with our bare feet on the ground. From an evolutionary point of view, it’s precisely what our bodies expect of us.

A second point is something known as grounding or earthing. Dr. James Oschman is an expert in the field of energy medicine, and it’s his assertion that we are very much “electrical” beings. Our body systems rely on electrical impulses to effect all manner of intrabody communications. When our electrical systems are working well, we experience good health. When our electrical systems malfunction, things go terribly wrong. Earthing, according to Oschman, balances our electrical potential and helps to keep our electrical systems in proper running order.

From a completely different perspective, however, I find benefits of barefoot walking in maintaining a sense of connection to all things. Take, for example, the walk on Saturday, during which I took the above photograph. (Yes, those are my feet below those jeans.) I was walking through the hilly trails in Nozuda Park. This park is just rural enough that one must be mindful of coming across tiger keelback (yamakagashi) and mamushi (a type of pit viper). When walking through these trails, I was very much aware of my increased mindfulness and awareness. I consider this to be a good thing, venomous snakes aside.

Of course, when walking barefoot, one wants to protect one’s feet from injury, so that mindfulness is essential. For me, though, it definitely goes beyond that. As I was walking, I was keenly aware of how my steps through the trail were quieter than when I’d be wearing my hiking boots. I felt the rocks and twigs and tree roots beneath my feet. This lends a much greater sense of intimacy and connection to the experience. Instead of floating through the scene as an observer, one is directly a part of it.

This sense of intimacy with our environment is something that I strongly feel we should cultivate.

Share on Facebook

Perceptions of Reality

Reply

Reality is a funny thing. On one hand, we know that reality needs to exist at some level. On the other hand, however, how we perceive that reality depends on a myriad of things. Our perception of reality is filtered by our thoughts and beliefs. The problem is that while we’ve come to consider that reality is the state of things as they actually exist, we’re constantly evaluating that “actually exist”-state through the haze of prejudice, expectation and belief.

As one who has followed a meditation practice for over 30 years, I will categorically state that our mental state completely defines our experience of reality. On one hand, I experience my logical, “I’m a programmer” state wherein everything is logically evaluated, categorized and stored away in some matrix somewhere for later retrieval. On the other hand, I’ve cultivated the ability to experience a completely connected “one with Life, The Universe and Everything” reality that almost defies description.

The two perceptions are linked. It’s the same experience, but one is filtered while the other is raw. The first time I experienced that fully “raw” connection with everything, it was overwhelming to the extreme that it was actually physically painful. That might not sound like something you’d want to experience, but I will say that it was something that I wouldn’t push away were it to happen to that degree again. It was remarkable.

Since that original experience, I’ve been able to easily switch between my “programmer’s brain” to my “connected brain” at will. I didn’t understand what had happened at the time, but it seems in retrospect that years of meditation and energy work had resulted in a very sudden “opening”. The challenge has been to maintain that connected-brain access, as the more time I spend in my logical perception, the more disconnected I seem to get from that unfiltered access. It just goes to show that meditation is a process that doesn’t have a final destination.

I’ve never really been able to describe these experiences in a way that makes sense to others. A friend of mine, Jana Shannon, finally gave voice to my experience when she shared a TED Talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, who is a brain scientist. Her talk on right-brain/left-brain perception is fascinating and beautiful. I urge you all to take 20 min. and have a listen to her talk, “Stroke of Insight”:

 

Share on Facebook

We’ve Got a New Facebook Presence

Reply

For those of you who are interested in keeping tabs on our activity via Facebook, Living Intentionally is pleased to announce our new Page, located at http://www.facebook.com/iamlivingintentionally. We’re excited to expand our presence and discover new ways to connect with everybody.

If you there’s a way in which you’d like to see Living Intentionally interacting, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Share on Facebook

Teaching Respect

Reply

Recently, it seems that embarrassing your kid on Facebook has become all the rage for 21st-century parenting. Tommy Jordan famously shot his daughter’s laptop after she badmouthed him online. More recently, Denise Abbott punked her daughter online by hijacking her Facebook account and posting a photo featuring her daughter with an X over her mouth. I find these trends disturbing on several levels. In the spirit of internet punditry, I’m going to explain why.

Disclaimer: Up front, you need to know that I’m a parent. I’ve got several absolutely incredible kids. The fact that they’re incredible makes me feel as though I have some decent ideas on parenting. And since it’s my blog, I feel perfectly free to stand on my soapbox and share these ideas. :)

Let’s get started, shall we?

I think a lot of parents are confused about their role in a child’s life. Many parents I know and see seem to emphasize control as their primary role. Control initially happens as a means of protection from harm. This is a slightly off-balance variation of guidance. In practice, it looks the same to a lot of folks, but the differences are deeply significant.

If we look at our young baby crawling around,  baby wants to put all sorts of things in his/her mouth. Modern parents tend to only allow teething rings, toys and other “kid-approved” goodies to go into that space. This is done from the seat of best intentions, but it fails on several important levels. First of all, our intrepid explorer puts everything in her/her mouth as a means of discovery. By disallowing self-discovery of good/bad, our child’s primary means of developing self-evaluation skills is greatly diminished. Instead of letting the child come to the logical conclusion that repeated handfuls of sand in the mouth ultimately tastes not so great and might be better avoided, helpful parents disallow the behaviour and the kid doesn’t come to his/her own conclusion. Opportunity lost.

The second opportunity lost is for the child’s immune system to be introduced to all manner of helpful and not-really-harmful bacteria. We all recognize the need for growing children to exercise to develop strong frames. Growing immune systems need similar exercise, and it comes from being exposed to different bacteria in the environment such that it can learn to appropriately identify and react to different pathogens. Without adequate practice, a child’s immune system never learns which response is relevant to which pathogen. This can create a foundation for the development of allergies. Moreover, in lieu of healthful bacteria being introduced to the gut, overall health can be sorely compromised later in life.

That’s a lot to think about, and our baby hasn’t even stopped crawling yet. Suffice it to say, however, that we shouldn’t confuse our role of Guide as being Controller. Unfortunately, many parents were raised by controllers instead of guides. It’s difficult to break out of a cycle of experience. Thinking outside the box requires that we see the box for what it is. In this case, we need to guide the kid to learning how to decide what should go in his/her mouth, not control what goes in there. The difference is crucial.

Fast forward a few years and if we review the family dynamic, the role hasn’t really changed much on the parent’s side. Our job is to guide, not control. Most importantly, we need to be teaching by example. This concept is vital to our success as parents, as any inability we have in this regard will result in our children’s behaviour mirroring that inability.

A perfect example of this behaviour cycle is witnessed in the above-mentioned punishment via online humiliation. Parents, by all means, should teach and expect respect. In my experience, there’s really only one way to teach your children to respect others, and that is by respecting your children. Your children learn to respect you and others by whether you respect them and others. If you’re of the fold that believes children should be seen and not heard, you’re surely not showing them any respect as an individual. In removing any meaningful avenue of self-expression and initiating in the child a sense of disempowerment, you sow the seed of rebellion.

In the face of a lack of freedoms and rights, people will game the system. Period, full stop.

If parents wish to curtail online bashing by their kids on <insert favoured social media here>, it’s incumbent upon them to give their kids a voice. Children should be empowered to state their concerns. Parents may not want to think of a family unit as a democracy, but by trying to run a household as a dictatorship or theocracy, you’re doomed to creating an environment of unrest.

What about punishment?

By all means, we need to teach that actions have consequences, but many people send the wrong message. In the above examples of public displays of shooting laptops and defacing Facebook pages, parents teach the following lessons:

  • Parents will disallow any avenue of self-expression possible and, failing to do so, will resort to public humiliation as required to force desired conduct;
  • Parents will flagrantly disregard TOU and even state/federal law to create said humiliation (accessing and defacing a Facebook account is simply not legal, let alone moral behaviour);
  • In the face of an apparent lack of respect, the parent will show no respect whatsoever to the alleged offender (in this case, the child).

These are not the intended messages, but they are the messages being imparted at a deeply subconscious level.

We humans learn by example. Our parents are our role models. If you’re a parent, you have an obligation to understand how your actions will ultimately unfold. If you want to be respected by your kids, show your kids respect. It’s a logical fallacy to think that respect is earned. Respect is given or not. Trust, too. One chooses their stand and reaps the reward of that decision.

So, parents of the world, my advice to you is simple: If you want to keep your kids from badmouthing you on Facebook, give them a real voice at home. Everybody has reasons for disagreement. Those who learn to discuss them from a place of trust and understanding can, inevitably, come to some common understanding. Beyond that, however, is the more important point of why any such badmouthing bothers you in the first place. This, too, has deep significance.

If you’re worried about what others say, even — or especially — your kids, then you might want to evaluate how you perceive your worth. Do you depend on others holding you in high esteem as a means of determining your worth and value as a person? If so, you’re selling yourself really short and, worse, empowering others to control your happiness. What others say or think about you has nothing whatsoever to do with your actual worth as a person. Your worth stands apart from anything others may say or do. Your legacy is yours to create and yours alone.

If we want our kids to lead lives rich with tolerance, freedom, responsibility, respect and altruism, we need to live these ideals in our own lives. You can’t demand respect from your kids in the absence of same in their regard and expect to be respected. Life doesn’t work that way. Expressing intolerance, humiliation, bullying and retaliation as parents will create exactly those attributes in our kids.

On my own journey as a father, I’d like to thank my kids — (in chronological order) Tara, Skye, Jasmine and Nigel — for their help in teaching me to do a better job of it. I hope to keep getting better.

Share on Facebook

Invoking the Precautionary Principle

Reply

Over the years, the debate over climate change versus global warming and global dimming has offered up plenty of finger-pointing and little in the way of agreement. In any larger group discussion of the matter, you’ll almost invariably find participants running the range from people who think that global warming is junk science dreamed up by tree-hugging liberals who are bent on destroying <your country here>’s jobs, to those who feel that government is bent on bringing down society in the name of the almighty <your currency here>. Some folks haven’t a clue about the science, while others work pretty hard to understand it.

The topic is both broad and deep, so it’s not a surprise that it has been nigh on impossible to gain agreement within the scientific community about the situation, its causes and the risks involved. On the plus side, there are a lot of really intelligent people who are working within their domain to better understand the problem and offer answers. On the negative side, science and economics are not unfamiliar bedfellows, so amongst the Real Deal science being done, one also has no small number of studies being done with a financial agenda attached to them, i.e., a vested interest in (dis)proving various theories.

Ultimately, I don’t have a problem with the disagreement. After some 50 years on the planet and being a father of several kids, I’ve long been familiar with the debacle of even trying to get 4 people to agree on where to go for dinner, let alone imagine the global scientific community coming to agreement as to the causes and effects of climate change here on Earth. No, the disagreement doesn’t bother me. Something else does.

Recently, I was discussing the idea that time might be running out and that we should err on the side of caution. My friend replied that she just wanted to see good science and that if we were to act in the absence of good science, we might destroy everything. For me, it was a sobering statement. I consider a refusal to “conserve and protect” prior to scientific evidence that it’s required to be risky business, indeed.

When it comes to healthcare, people have gotten used to the idea of the Hippocratic Oath and its sister doctrine “Primum non nocere” (First, do no harm). The idea, obviously, is that people in the healing arts will, above all else, always act in the best interest of the client and that they should recognize that there are times when no intervention at all is sometimes better for the client than intervention.

The Precautionary Principle would be the environmental equivalent to Primum non nocere. It states that in the absence of scientific consensus for an action or policy that has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or environment, the burden of proof that it is not harmful lay on those taking the action. In the event that insufficient proof is offered, the mandate shall be to err on the side of caution to protect public and environment from damage. Only after substantial evidence disproving harm is offered shall policy makers relax protection.

This principle has more and more been ignored by North American policy makers. The reasons for this are many and varied, but the end result is that instead of acting from a place of precaution and only moving forward after seeing significant evidence of safety, we see it commonplace to move forward first and only backpedal once we’ve seen significant evidence of injury. This mode of behaviour is logically flawed because it presupposes that any eventuality can be reversed or undone. Such logic is fallacious.

We’re in the situation where everybody agrees that climate change happens. A segment of scientists believe that we’re facing global warming. A smaller segment of researchers have added global dimming to the equation. Yet another segment of scientists are unsure that global warming really is happening. And yet another segment accept that global warming is happening, but think the sun is ultimately to blame. In all of that disagreement lay the fundamental issue that we would be smart to invoke the Precautionary Principle such that we, to the very best of our ability, do no harm to this planet that sustains us.

We need to stop assuming that our actions are insignificant and take the precaution that they just might be. We need to stop assuming that the global temperatures are within normal ranges because we’ve only barely begun to understand the possible role that global dimming plays in masking the effects of global warming. Finally, we need to stop engaging in economic apathy and change the ways we do things in order to protect our forests.

Sometimes I think that people forget that trees are our primary means of maintaining the correct oxygen content in the atmosphere. They regulate temperature, clean the air and water, have root systems that help protect against soil erosion and create a canopy that protects us from harmful UV, only allowing healthful UV to reach the ground during the peak sunlight hours. The health and coverage of our forests are vital to the circle of life on this planet.

Instead of cutting down a tree for your Yuletide celebrations, try planting one instead. We’d all benefit.

Share on Facebook

Living Green … Living Intentionally

2

Global warming and its co-dependent, global dimming, have been on my mind a lot lately. The health of Mother Earth has been steadily on the decline for the last few hundred years, and while many of us seem to be aware of that fact, it seems nearly impossible to come to agreement on what to do, if anything at all, about it.

Disclaimer time: I’m a tree-hugging greenie at heart and have been since the day I was born into a family of flower children in 1961. I spent many years in scouting, learning about stewardship, conservation, no-trace camping and orienteering. Much of my childhood and young adulthood featured summers — and sometimes winters — where I’d tear off into the great wilderness of wherever and set up camp for up to a week at a time.

Canoe trips, portages, island camping, river exploration, week-long sailing ventures through the Muskoka Lakes … all these played a huge role in my experience as a young person. I spent a lot of time in various national and provincial parks during my youth in the U.S. and Canada. And during all those adventures, the recurring theme was to steward the land that sustains us.

When it comes to the issue of conservation, stewardship, climate change, global warming and global dimming, I find myself frustrated. Economics seems to be an ever-present adversary in the “hell bent for leather” camp, and many the time I’ve suggested we not lay waste to great tracts of forest, I’ve been accused of wishing financial ruin on various families. It’s sad. Untrue, yes, but sad more because if we fail to care enough for Mother Earth, her ability to sustain us will cease. If living isn’t sustainable, economics is a moot point.

This isn’t pie in the sky rhetoric wherein I participate in a plot for the Rainbow Warrior to thwart the hunt of a whaling ship (I’ll leave those antics to my father). This is, however, about recognizing that our long-term survival quite literally depends on dedicating ourselves to conserving the environment and reducing, as much as possible, our “footprint” on this planet.

From an economic standpoint, the Green vs Industry arguments have been largely adversarial. The Green movement may, for example, try to stop logging on a mountainside in British Columbia and the argument against their efforts is jobs. As one who has a house full of kids, I truly recognize the need for work, but destroying large tracts of forests in return for money seems like a losing proposition. To put that statement into perspective, I’d like to borrow some words from William McDonough during one of his TED Talks:

Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons and self-replicates. Well, why don’t we knock that down and write on it?

McDonough was talking about how we utilize trees for writing instead of readily-available and inexpensive polymers. Polymers are available and used already for book manufacturing, so why isn’t it de rigueur? I think it’s a reflection of short-term returns versus the long-term scenario. I think it’s a sign of economic habit and an unwillingness to change.

This unwillingness to change is both interesting and prevalent. In the days immediately following the Tohoku Earthquake of March 11, 2011, people all over Japan stepped up to the plate to dramatically curb their energy consumption. It wasn’t just fashionable or a good idea, it was required to ensure that rolling blackouts would be minimized. In the months that passed, however, the trend to return to normal energy consumption levels was unstoppable. Instead of coming home late from a client visit to find a dark entrance to the apartment building, all the lights are blazing. Just as it was on March 10th last year.

I turn them off. Inevitably, somebody else turns them back on and leaves them on, but for at least a few moments, there is a reminder that conservation is a good idea. I think this is vitally important to our very survival.

It has become rather trendy to drive around in an energy efficient hybrid vehicle. Well, for about 3-to-6 years, anyway, at which time many families trundle off to the dealer to buy yet another energy efficient hybrid. There’s a huge problem with this picture: Buying a new Prius every few years has a larger carbon footprint than driving a gas-guzzling, CO2-belching ’64 Olds 442 by a large margin.

Huh? How can this be?

Carbon footprint isn’t just a matter of what resources are required to operate the vehicle, it also includes manufacturing. I suspect you won’t be too surprised to find that it takes a regular ol’ gasoline-powered automobile to average ~66,000 km before it breaks even on its manufacturing footprint. That’s a fair bit of driving before you break even, but if we assume the average North American drives approx. 24,000 km/15,000 mi, we can see it can be as soon as 3 years after purchase of a smaller econobox to hit that break even point after which it’s all gravy.

For you Prius owners out there, the situation is, alas, dramatically different. The batteries in a typical hybrid use rare-earth metals, and the word rare is there for a reason. Rare-earth metals have complex and carbon-rich processing such that the carbon footprint break-even point for a Prius owner is … wait for it … over 600,000 km. No, that’s not a typo. And now the math speaks for itself: If a Prius owner wants to have at the very minimum a 0 carbon manufacturing footprint, he/she will have to drive that Prius for an average of 25 years.

In the coming weeks, Living Intentionally will look at various issues regarding global warming/dimming and explore ways of living a little more lean such that we can conserve our resources and ensure that the legacy we leave to our grandchildren amounts to more than devastation. Time may be running short, but I think we still have some.

Love to all,

trane

Share on Facebook

Unconditionally Loving Yourself

Reply

In my quest to learn how to heal myself, probably the most meaningful truth I’ve discovered is that the root of nearly every relationship problem we encounter can be traced back to the inability to unconditionally love oneself. It might not seem obvious, but if you had an argument with a loved one recently, it can be traced back to how you feel about yourself. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that every conflict we engage in has something to do with our sense of Self.

When it comes to relationships, we tend to view others as doing things to us. And while there may be some truth to that view, it’s isn’t so much the actions of others that is important as it is how we relate to those events. How we relate to events is all about how we process our base feelings. Our emotions are the result of processing our feelings through the filter of our beliefs.

Beliefs can be summed up very easily. They’re nothing more than thoughts that have been repeated many times. Most of our beliefs are formed in our early, “formative” years prior to developing our critical factor. In those first 5 or so years of life, we tend to very straight-forwardly believe what our authority figures instill in us. It is as if we’re an empty book upon which our future “truths” are written. Those first few years are vitally important in who we become as people.

The situation can be rather complicated when our authority figures have issues such that they instill within us feelings of inadequacy, insecurity and a lack of worth. Many a child has been presented with the immense burden of guilt for somehow not measuring up to an adult’s expectations (usually itself a signature that the adult was bestowed a similar burden of guilt as a child). I was one of those fidgety, daydreaming kids and I remember well being told by a teacher that I’d never amount to anything. I’m grateful that I managed to find the truth of who I am and was able to shake off that belief. It took me well into my adulthood before I managed it.

In studying my own personal demons and then looking outward at the experiences of others, I came to realize that the strife we experience in our relationships always exists as an expression of the lack of self-love and self-worth experienced in each participant. Arguments arise more from the need for recognition rather than from any sense of wrongdoing. I say that because without sensing a lack of recognition, one would never have reason to speak loudly. We yell because we don’t feel heard. We yell because we don’t feel validated. And we don’t feel validated because we don’t have a healthful relationship with Self.

There’s often some confusion about unconditional love because a lot of folks aren’t really sure of what love is. The dictionary doesn’t help, either, because right there in the definition of love is the confusing word itself: affection. It’s fair to say that romantic love is all about affection, but unconditional love transcends mere affection and stands entirely separate from it.

Unconditionally loving oneself could be described as transcendental acceptance of our entire Being. It’s the old “warts and all” thing, with special emphasis on acknowledging our ultimate perfection within the moment. It involves accepting any and all faults one may have and viewing that state in the moment as being exactly who we need to be in order to Be.

Unconditional love does not know guilt, for guilt is the expression of wrongdoing. Of course, that doesn’t mean that our actions are not without negative consequence. It means that we objectively process our actions and their consequences without the burden of guilt and are able to learn from them. Without the burden of guilt, we have the capacity to see things much more objectively, which is especially important if we are to cultivate a society that leans towards altruistic behaviour. Guilt may make for useful motivation, but it is terrible at inspiration.

During my limited time during this incarnation, I’ve had no small number of experiences that made learning to unconditionally love myself rather challenging. Learning how to objectively view my behaviours has not always been easy, but it has always been of great benefit. The more I practice, the easier it gets. Moreover, the more I practice unconditionally loving myself, the better all my relationships get.

The biggest impediment to happiness may very well be using others’ views of us to determine our sense of worth. I’ve done it (over and over, it seems) and it always turns out the same: I get unhappy. And there’s the crux of the matter: When you leave your sense of worth up to others, you empower them to control your happiness. It’s not a workable way of living simply because it’s just not possible to become complete through the perception of others. You can only be complete through your perception of Self.

Loving yourself, completely and without reservation despite any issues and hang-ups you may have, is the first and most fundamental step forward into any lasting healing. In such transcendental acceptance of Self, you open up limitless possibilities in being able to move your viewpoint of any trauma from hurtful to healthful. You can discover true forgiveness, of Self and others, and move from a place of waiting for your happiness to be bestowed upon you to creating it with your own limitless understanding and love of yourself.

And, for the record, not only do I love myself, I love you, too.

trane

Share on Facebook

Spring Has Sprung: Taking Stock of Where You’re At

Reply

It’s finally April and that means that for many of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s finally spring. For me here in Japan, it’s spring enough that with the curtains open at 5 a.m., I can enjoy the deep orange of the budding sunrise. I just love this time of year. I’m a sucker for cherry blossoms.

The changes of the seasons have a strong influence on my outlook. At the summer solstice that is coming in a few short months, it’s time for me to see how my thoughts and actions have fully blossomed and grown. It’s a time to celebrate all that I have planted during the year and enjoy the fruits of my labour. When the autumnal equinox rolls around, it’s time to assess the successes and failures that are in progress and make moves that can have a strong influence on the year’s outcome. I use the winter solstice as a time to evaluate the past year and use the lessons I’ve learned as the seeds to plant for the coming year.

Which leads us to the vernal equinox. Well, okay, I missed writing about the event itself, but I use this time of year as a time of tending to my crop of freshly sprouting intentions. The buzz in the air is palpable, and the plant and animal life are energetic with the purpose of creating both life and opportunities. I love this flow of energy, and it strongly stimulates me to move along with it.

As every gardener knows, sometimes the seeds you plant are a wee bit stubborn in sprouting. From a metaphorical (and metaphysical) perspective, we can look at our situations and take note of how things we’d expected to happen didn’t quite take root. It’s an excellent opportunity for us to take stock of where we’re at and adjust our thoughts and actions accordingly.

This was certainly the case for me. I spend most of my business life digging deep into details. I’m not just paid to be a problem solver, mind you, I’m primarily a problem hunter. This makes for interesting work (much of time time), but it can get frustrating to have your work quite literally be dealing with problem after problem. Sometimes, you just want to have things go smoothly. Moreover, finding problems all the time tends to bring that element of experience into areas of your life beyond work. It can affect your relationships, too.

It was that last aspect that I noticed as I sat in my home office chair pondering the recurrent frustrations I was experiencing with my partner. I was bugged and it was spilling over into my relationship. Thankfully, we caught this in time before it became a major issue. Being aware of a problem from an objective perspective is always the first step in being able to work with and improve the situation.

Evaluating your progress during various times of the year can be an extremely helpful tool in your self-help/self-improvement arsenal. When taking stock of where you are, practice moving your perspective back from the emotional/subjective chatter (the ME stuff) and try to focus on the real, objective facts of what you’re experiencing. It can be a real boon to recognizing and implementing the changes you need to really create a great year.

Much love to all. And remember: Stop and smell the flowers. They’ll only be here for a while.

Share on Facebook

Stewardship Versus Dominion

Reply

People are smart. We come from a long line of smart organisms. In fact, if we look at the trillions of organisms living on and in us in our own microbiome, you could look at each of us as being a smart superorganism.

Life on Earth has proven itself over and over again to be resilient and, most importantly, adaptable. An organism’s ability to adapt is one of the defining characteristics of evolution. If an organism can adapt to changes in its environment or in its food supply, it has an excellent chance of survival.

Some really smart people learned to play with certain characteristics of various things to make them subjectively better. Breeders have learned how to make dogs smaller, eyes bluer, fruit sweeter … the list goes on and on. In our daily life, there is hardly a single aspect of what you eat, drink, wear, sit in/on or … well, anything at all … that hasn’t been tinkered with a great deal in the pursuit of making it BETTER.

We’ve come so far down the path of tinkering with things that we don’t often even think to leave them be. We’re smart, after all, and it’s assured that whatever we tinker will WILL be better. Won’t it?

Sometimes, we get it wrong. Sometimes we get it so wrong that I have difficulty knowing where to start discussing it. That accounts for some of the long pauses between posts on the site here. Rather than just have Living Intentionally be some stream-of-consciousness blog, which isn’t in and of itself a bad thing, I want it to be somewhat more directed. And my thoughts are often rather scattered, popping down various intellectual rabbit holes and not surfacing again until an avenue of discovery has been well explored.

One of the topics that has been pestering me to write about it for a while now is that of dominion versus stewardship. I think it’s possible that, as a species, we spend too much time focused on the dominion part and not nearly enough time on the stewardship. Moreover, I think there is some confusion about stewardship itself implying dominion over that which you’re stewarding.

In my opinion, the above-mentioned tinkering is a reflection of this imbalance of dominion and stewardship. I think it also reflects our species’ intrinsic feeling of separation from everything around us. This sense of separateness and separation leads us to becoming disoriented about our role in Life, The Universe and Everything.

Let’s take the fore-mentioned breeding. A lot of the breeding we do has what we determine to be advantages, and they may very well turn out to be precisely that. There’s a dark side, however. How many collie owners, for example, worry about the genetic disposition of their dogs to collie eye anomaly? CEA is a congenital, inherited disorder that was artificially created through generations upon generations of inbreeding genetic traits. Any time you play with inbreeding, you create problems in the gene pool.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are in the same ballpark. The Smart People like to think they have a handle on the function of genes such that they take genes from one organism and splice them into another. It often comes with surprising (and unwanted) consequences. Eating Roundup Ready corn, for example, can have you suddenly having pesticide-generating DNA in your gut flora. (Don’t think so? Research has already seen evidence of this happening.) Your own supposedly beneficial gut flora could begin poisoning you. Not a quick-death type poisoning, mind you, but the sort that causes chronic inflammation leading to various cancers and autoimmune disorders.

The GMO craze has gotten, well, even crazier than just playing with the food we eat, though. How about GMO goats? They’ve been around for a while. A few years ago, goats were engineered to express a human gene that was then used to create drugs. Sounds innocuous enough, right? Later, a Utah researcher figured out a way to make a kind of “spider silk” from proteins derived from the milk of GMO goats. And if that weren’t Frankenstein enough for you, the latest is that GMO goats are being researched to create a malaria vaccine within the milk. In other words, goats are now “pharm” animals rather than farm animals.

Where does it stop?

In other news, some folks continue their head-in-the-sand world view that humans couldn’t possibly be responsible for or play a role in global warming. The problem, again, is a stunning sense of disconnect from the environment and, dare I say it, a less than strong grasp of cause and effect relationships within systems. And in a can’t see the forest for the trees view of the problem, huge tracts of land are deforested daily. Our oceans are turning into toilets that don’t flush. Our skies are filled with aerosols and particulate that block the sunlight from reaching the planet and skew the UV spectrum from good to bad.

What to do?

I don’t have all the answers, to be sure. I have noticed one very significant thing since coming to Japan, though: Indigenous populations tend to much more strongly identify with our Mother Earth than more recent boarders. I’d never really clued into this while living in Canada. I mean, sure, everybody recognizes that the First Nations peoples were all about conservation, stewardship and living in harmony with nature, but I didn’t recognize that beyond my own borders.

Here in Japan, the Ainu people have a remarkably similar cultural legacy to Canada’s First Nations people and Native Americans. Interestingly, they share similar cultural stigmas and a lack of freedoms, too. And if we go down under, the aboriginal population there shares a similar cultural history and experience. It’s sad, but enough of these cultures remain that there’s still time to learn from them.

The one thing that I’ll leave you with is to look at stewardship of this planet as being mutually exclusive from any sense of dominion you may have over it. That stewardship should extend not only to the plants and animals, it should extend to its peoples. It should extend to its skies and oceans. Take part in learning about the food you eat. Discover the truth of the Circle of Life and how your presence here has a tremendous impact on all aspects of the environment here. Not just locally, but globally.

We are smart people, but we sometimes act as though we have all the answers. A lot of times, our search for technology to solve our problems goes against the simpler approach of just living in peace and harmony with All That Is. We would do well to walk barefoot with our Brothers and Sisters and learn how to break camp in the morning without leaving a trace that we were there. We should learn to take only what we need so that the systems that sustain us can remain in healthful equilibrium. And we need to work to encourage business to think Green for the long term benefit rather than shareholders’ short term gain.

No growth is infinitely sustainable. Economists like to talk about sustainable growth, but there’s no such thing. For the truth, look to biological systems. Any population that gets out of balance within its environment finds ways – natural or artificial – to bring it back into balance. For a long time now, humanity is racing forward with precious little appreciation for just how out of balance we’re pushing this planet and our place here.

It’s time for us to work together, to embrace stewardship. Live and love all peoples, Red, Yellow, Black, White and every other variation there is. We are all One.

Share on Facebook