Capacity
There’s a nice article at a website that I like a lot. This one recommends adopting an approach of examining our capacity for work in four different ways: physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.
There are powerful reasons for using multidimensional perspectives to help people not just function at their best, but also to be resilient in the face of adversity. I would like to add two things to this article.
First is an exceedingly useful concept is the “complexity quotient” (CQ), which measures our ability to adapt to changing complexity. It is another way of thinking about a person’s “capacity.” Successful leaders, winning athletes and healthy individuals are extremely flexible and have a high CQ. They can raise their game and adapt quickly. On the other hand, they also have the ability to let go when the pressure is off. After recovering from a mental breakdown, the psychologist Carl Jung was known not only for his remarkable scholarship, but also for his extraordinary ability to relax and to become childlike and to think up all sorts of games for his children. These are signs of a well-rounded, balanced and integrated personality. Sometimes we see people in whom this ability goes haywire, and they overcompensate with drugs, alcohol or risky sexual behavior.
Second, I think that it’s valuable to also add the capacity of your relationships and your energy. Robust, dynamic and supportive relationships can enhance your capacity for work and play, and they buffer you from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We do not usually think about the capacity of the subtle systems of the body, but they are there and very real. Strengthening them with techniques such as breathing, yoga or qigong, can dramatically improve your quality of life and capacity for effectiveness and enjoyment.
Technorati tags: Capacity Complexity quotient Subtle systems Biofield
The End of Life As We Know It?
Your humble reporter was discombobulated to read a recent report from E3: the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.
It appears that hordes of young men – yes they were virtually all young and male – were far more interested in the electronic games on display than they were in a number of quite attractive young dancers and models who graced the event. Though we have not one iota of interest in the orientation of the assembled company, on statistical grounds alone we would expect that at least some of these young men should be wired to take an interest in presumably intelligent members of the opposite sex. Yet they seemed to prefer playing with their silicon monsters and joysticks.
Perhaps the gamers are all too cerebral to be interested in young models who may be unable to tell a bit from a byte. But in the midst of all the sage commentary about the expanding gaming market and the ready accessibility of computer games to people who have access to not much else in the way of entertainment, our thoughts meandered off in a different direction: we have been wondering if we are here witnessing some form of natural selection at work….
Technorati tags: Evolution Relationships Sexual attraction
Presence and Charisma
I was reading a heart-warming story reported by the BBC of a unique case of a young woman who had a heart transplant at the age of two, and when, ten years later, her adolescent body began to reject the heart, the transplant was removed, and her original heart, which had been resting for ten years, was able to take over. A medical first, but that was not what attracted my attention. Neither was it the lymphoma that she developed several years ago, perhaps because of the original illness that damaged her heart, or perhaps because of the anti-rejection medicines that she has had to take all these years.
It was instead the smiling face of Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub (I just love the pictures of him here.) who did the original operation and who consulted on this new operation. He recently turned 70 and no longer operates himself. I cast my mind back almost 25 years, when I was working at the National Heart Hospital in London and first met him. There are two things that I remember about him. The first is that he was the person who allowed me to show the successful use of acupuncture to treat people who had gone through open-heart surgery, and still had pain in their chests. And the second is the reason for today’s item: Magdi had the most extraordinary personal “Presence.” When he walked in a room, everyone would notice him. Most had no idea who he was, or his extraordinary achievements; they were just drawn to him.
I have met many people who have this “presence” or “aura.” In the Eastern world it is often thought of as another manifestation of “Qi.” Closely related to “presence” is charisma: a compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others. In the ancient world charisma was thought to be a divine power or talent, and the word comes from the Greek word kharis meaning “grace” or “favor.” There is a small scientific literature on this phenomenon of charisma, which often flows from having a strong presence. Some of the research is summarized here.
There are clearly many types of charisma: Political, sports, performance, business, spiritual, literary. scientific and so on. The only two people whom I’ve met who knew Einstein told me that people would usually all stand up when he entered the room. Charisma is more than just a personal characteristic; it can also be conceptualized as the way in which certain groups interact with each other. There is a fascinating book entitled Charisma and Social Structure by Raymond Trevor Bradley, that has a fascinating discussion of the transformative and transcendent power of charisma. It must also not be forgotten that there are those who have used charisma for evil ends: three of the most wicked people of the last century were also possessed of extraordinary personal charisma.
Clearly some people have presence and charisma. The question is whether theses characteristics can also be developed. The answer is yes, they can be. Presence is created by an overall impression constituted of posture, eye contact, stillness, silence, self-confidence, competence and serenity. People with a strong presence are often a little mysterious, in the sense that they tend not to reveal much about themselves or their accomplishments. I have also felt if very strongly in people who have worked to develop the subtle systems of their bodies. One of the most potent examples was a Korean Ki-Master who spoke not a word of English, but whose presence could be felt the moment he entered a packed room. Work on your subtle systems will likely cause you to be more still and serene and to have a better posture and that’s a great start.
There are a number of things that you can do to improve your own charisma:
- Create a strong first impression by developing your presence
- Develop a good impression when you speak
- Be a good active empathic listener who connects with other people and asks pertinent questions
- Be supportive of other people and their aspirations
- Be persuasive
- Be resilient and adaptable
- Expand your vision of what is possible
- Practice thinking creatively
- Use humor
- Be committed and courageous
- Initiate persistent action
- Instill hope in the people around you
Technorati tags: Sir Magdi Yacoub, Charisma, presence, empathy, acupuncture
Cell Phones and Relationships
In a recent post I commented on the dangers of multi-tasking, and cited Linda Stone’s excellent term “Continuous Partial Attention.” A little over three weeks ago, Marianne Richmond wrote an excellent post on "Attention: Giving it and Getting It" that discusses, among many things, the role of attention in our relationships.
I have just come across a study that supports everything that we have been saying. It was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in December and examined cell phone usage over a two-year period in 1,367 couples from the Cornell Couples and Careers Study. Increased cell phone use was linked to increased distress and lower family satisfaction. Being constantly available blurs the boundaries between work and family time.
Be very careful that you are not becoming a slave to that device on your belt.
“The waste of life occasioned by trying to do too many things at once is appalling.” –Orison Swett Marden (American Writer and Founder of Success Magazine, 1850-1924)
Technorati tags: continuous partial attention, relationships, cell phone
Sex, Time and Energy
I was taking a long flight yesterday, which gave me the chance to read through the results of a large survey done by Men’s Health and Cosmopolitan Magazines. You will see, gentle reader, how widely I spread my net in my ceaseless efforts to bring you important new materials to enrich your life….
The results of this survey of 6,000 men and women seemed at first to make interesting reading. More than half of men and women surveyed saying that they wanted to have sex at least once a day; around half of the women saying that they wanted to have more adventurous sex, and so the list went on. But then I started thinking: “Who are these people?” They certainly don’t sound much like the people that I know, or people with whom I’ve worked professionally.
So I showed the survey to She Who Must Be Obeyed, and she immediately agreed: “How old are they? And how many of them have children?”
Most healthy adults are interested in having intimate relationships, but how many people are too tired and too distracted to do everything that they want to? And how many people are busily multitasking their lives away to the exclusion of everything else? I was recently talking to a married couple who had packed the children off for the evening and had a date night all organized. The restaurant was booked, the theater tickets in hand, and they both fell fast asleep on the couch and missed both.
I’m sorry to disappoint some of my readers, but the world is not quite the way that it is portrayed in some magazines. At least not once you take on responsibilities. The problem with surveys like this is that it can make some people very dissatisfied, for it leads them into the trap of comparison: “If that’s what the survey says, then what’s wrong with me?” The answer is, of course, that there is no such thing as “normal behavior.” What you and your partner like and feel comfortable with is all that really matters, so long as it isn’t infringing on anyone else. Every time another survey like this comes out, every one of my therapist friends sees an increased number of people worried that they aren’t performing up to par.
Sexual mismatches can create a lot of difficulties in relationships, but let me make a suggestion: the most valuable thing to ensure the viability of intimate relationships is not so much to try to learn lots of different techniques, and it is sometimes just not realistic to put aside as much time for each other as you would like. So instead make the time together really count. There is nothing quite as attractive as an intimate occasion marked by complete focus on and awareness of the other person. Feeling the dance of the duality, focusing on all your senses, and, if you can, feeling the subtle systems of the other person. You already know that our experience of the passage of time is highly elastic. Focused awareness of another person can make even five minutes seem like a lot longer, and remember what I have said before, and is an important theme of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: time management is far less important than energy management.
And remember this: you will never be free so long as you are concerned about the opinions of others.
Technorati tags: sex, relationships, time management
Testing for Telepathy
“By means of thought, we are able to obtain all the elements we need from the universe and to reach all the beings we want to contact. Yes, through the law of affinity, thought takes charge of seeking out these elements or these beings. Even if the person you have in mind is on the other side of the world, out of the six billion people on earth, your thought will go directly to him or her and to no one else, as if it had been magnetized to make contact with precisely this person. So from now on, when you want to acquire an element from the universe or to contact someone, think about this element or this person without concern for their whereabouts. Provided your thought is intense, it will go straight to its target.”
–Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (Bulgarian Spiritual Master, 1900-1986)
Of all the subjects that I’ve discussed, one of the most difficult is telepathy. It is difficult not because of a lack of empirical data, but because it is such a polarizing topic. Some people believe in it, and others claim it is impossible, that any research that says otherwise must be wrong and if you believe in it, you will believe in anything. Yet it is an important subject, and the research data keep on coming.
The English biologist and writer Rupert Sheldrake has just published a study in a well known and peer reviewed journal. Perceptual and Motor Skills is a journal with a reputation to protect, so you can be sure that this study was scrutinized particularly carefully. This study investigated possible telepathic communication in connection with emails. In the study there were four potential email senders, and for each trial one of them was selected at random, and there were 50 email receivers, who had to guess who was going to send them an email one minute before it was sent. Further experiments were done with a small number of people who were videotaped continuously. All the experiments generated results that were significantly above chance.
What this means is that we have another piece of evidence to add to the overall body of knowledge about telepathic interactions between people and animals.
Part of the difficulty about telepathy is in understanding how it could happen. When people are in close physical proximity they can pick up on subtle physical cues like body language and dilation of the pupils. I am also persuaded by the data from the HeartMath Institute, indicating that the electrical field generated by the heart can be detected by other people at a range of several feet, and that it can lead to entrainment of the electrical rhythms two people’s brains. But the email experiment is important because none of these factors come into play. My own take on this is that we are all constantly and inextricably interlinked with one another. Most of the time we don’t notice it because of the constant chatter of the mind and the efforts of the ego to protect our individuality. But under certain circumstances – shock, meditation, deep relaxation, sex, and near-death experiences – the walls come tumbling down and we experience our connection for what it truly is. And then we see the non-dual reality of the world.
The other point is this: I have made the point that the Laws of Healing have been gradually changing and evolving over the last century, and our individual and cultural consciousness is evolving and adapting. Because of that, more and more people are having first-hand experience of the interconnected web of life.
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together . . .” {All’s Well that Ends Well, Act IV, Sc. Iii} –William Shakespeare English Poet and Dramatist, 1564-1616
Technorati tags: Intuition, Rupert Sheldrake, Telepathy Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
Gender and Relationships
I sometimes review interesting or important books at Amazon.com. I’ve just done that with a book entitled This Changes Everything: The Relational Revolution in Psychology by Christina Robb that is important for us on several levels. The book reviews the work of three remarkable individuals – Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller and Judith Lewis Herman – who between them changed the way in which we think about some important gender differences.
The philosopher Ken Wilber first alerted me to Carol Gilligan’s work several years ago. In the mid-1970s, she wrote an essay entitled "In a Different Voice," that was subsequently expanded into a book that I recommend highly. She described the marked discrepancies in moral development processes and self-expression between men and women.
According to Gilligan, the whole notion of a woman’s self tends to be inextricably bound up in a web of close relationships. Women tend to be more diligent about maintaining and nurturing these relationships, and inter-personal details tend to be far more important to most of them, than they are for most men. I remember someone sending me a little joke about gender differences, in that mothers know the names of all their children’s friends, their parents’ names, birthdays, favorite music, likes and dislikes in people, food and clothes. While fathers may or may not notice the small people in the house. That was, of course, a joke. But like all jokes it had within it a grain of truth. But notice that I keep using words like “tend to,” when describing gender differences, because there are plenty of men who are into all these interpersonal details and women who are not remotely interested.
At the time that Carol Gilligan started writing about this, much psychological thinking in the United States had not yet dragged itself out of the confines of the post-Freudian theorizing that had dominated American psychology for decades. Gilligan and her co-workers identified relationships as the foundation of psychological and physical states. At the time, the idea that men and women might tend to think and relate in different ways was anathema. I worked in Boston around that time, and it was clear what could and could not be thought about and discussed. Gilligan’s work was courageous, and taken together with the findings of psychiatrists Judith Lewis Herman and Jean Baker Miller, would ultimately lead to radical alterations in the way that we understand the psychology of women. Are these gender differences social, political or biological? The answer is, I think, yes: all of the above.
It is surprising how often discussions of gender differences are still omitted from much work on self-psychology. In an otherwise wonderful book – The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, edited by Tilo Kircher and Anthony David – there is scarcely any mention of gender.
I am not much of a fan of trying neatly to cleave men and women’s thinking styles in two. There will always be a great deal of overlap, and the key is not so much biological gender, but the style normally associated with a gender. The research of these three pioneers and of another pioneer – Deborah Tannen – is teaching us that the roots of many problems in our lives may be a consequence of misunderstandings about what men and women consider to be the most important things in their lives. It is also important to recognize that the amount of “maleness” or “femaleness” that we bring to our relationships and to our sense of self will change and evolve over time. Have you ever watched a relationship between a dominant career oriented male and a passive female gradually change into one in which the male takes the more passive role? This is a good example of a shift in “maleness” and “femaleness.”
I have been impressed by some of the recent work of David Deida, who has done a lot to explore the interplay of male and female essences in our lives. I have already mentioned in some of my other postings the importance of moving from a dominator to a partnership model in all of our relationships.
Consider whether problems in any of your relationships may be a result of misunderstanding gender needs.
Technorati tags: gender differences, psychology, relationships, gender
More on Chess and the Mind
After my last article about some of the things that one can learn from chess, a blogger in Australia added “patience” to my list. And he is quite right. Except that I have, sad to say, never mastered the art of patience. It’s a character flaw. Maybe I would have had more success at the Royal Game if I had been just a bit more patient. I suppose a few extra IQ points might have helped too…
There is a nice article on Susan Polgar’s blog : Susan is the oldest of three remarkable Hungarian sisters who were trained to be geniuses from early childhood by their father László Polgár. She now lives in New York, and she is an International Chess Grandmaster who also happens to be fluent in seven languages. She is doing a great deal to promote the enormous benefits of chess, particularly in the United States. Clearly the sisters had “good genes,” but it is inspiring to see what can be done for youngsters if they are exposed to a highly enriched environment early in life. But there is something else to the Polgar story. Despite the stereotype that over-education might lead people to be unbalanced eggheads, all three have turned out to be remarkably normal and charming young women with children of their own. One sister – Judit – is the highest rated female chess player of all time, and the third sister – Sofia – is an International Master living in Israel.
The normalcy of the sisters is in stark contrast to the situation of many children that I have seen in Japan, who are already having extra tuition in Kindergarten. Scholastic failure is a recognized cause of suicide in Japan, and the Japanese actually have a word for death from overwork: Karoshi.
I wish Susan well in her efforts to promote chess, but I would also love her to share with the world how she and her sisters managed the balancing act of marrying extreme intellectual development with normal emotional and interpersonal relationships. That is in many ways even more remarkable than the sisters’ extraordinary accomplishments.
Technorati tags: chess, balance, Susan Polgar,
Marital Conflict and Hardening of the Arteries
The Bible contains at least three references to the undesirability of hardening one’s heart:
“And the Lord said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.” — Exodus 4: 21
The BBC is carrying a report of a paper presented to the American Psychosomatic Society meeting in Denver Colorado. Researchers from the University of Utah have added another piece of evidence that marital conflict bad for you. In a previous posting I discussed the evidence that marital conflict can compromise the immune system. Now we have confirmation that marital conflict can also have an adverse effect on the coronary arteries, leading to hardening and calcification of these crucial blood vessels.
The researchers studied 150 married couples, with at least one partner in their sixties. None of the people in the study had ever been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. Each couple was asked to pick a topic that caused disagreements in their marriage: topics included money, disagreements about in-laws, children, vacations and household chores. They were then videoed while they discussed the topic, and the videos were watched by psychology students who coded comments as friendly or hostile, submissive, or dominant or controlling. Cardiac scans were then done to look for signs of disease.
Wives who made the most hostile comments during the discussion had a greater degree of calcification of their coronary arteries, indicating the build up of plaque in these crucial arteries. It is not just the behavior of one person: the highest levels of calcification were found in women who behaved in a hostile and unfriendly way and who were interacting with husbands who were also hostile and unfriendly. Husbands who were more controlling, or who were more dominating, or whose wives were controlling or dominating, were also more likely to have more severe hardening of their arteries than other men.
These findings are in line with everything that I have been writing about looking at all the five dimensions or domains of a person: physical, psychological, social, subtle and spiritual. If you ask most people what they are doing to protect themselves against heart disease, they will probably talk about not smoking, taking exercise and healthy eating. That response is correct, but inadequate. Toxic relationships are just as dangerous, as are certain psychological response styles. For many years it was thought that the so-called “Type A personality,” was a risk factor for coronary artery disease, but research has shown that it is just two aspects of this response style that are responsible for the increased risk of coronary artery disease: anger and hostility.
Disagreements are bound to come up in any relationship, but the way that we communicate gives us a great opportunity to do something healthier for both people. In my book Healing, Meaning and Purpose I discuss the wonderful work of Riane Eisler, and I talk a lot about methods of transforming relationships from an unhealthy dominator model into a healthy partnership model.
Particularly if you are in a relationship, I urge you to take some action today to move towards greater heart health.
Technorati tags: marriage, heart disease, Riane Eisler, bad relationships
Sexuality and Spirituality
The talk shows and multiple Internet sites have picked up on a story about a controversial website that is pulling a great many people to a progressive church in Granger, Indiana. Some people have been getting very hot under the collar, and saying that there’s no place for frank advertising and for discussions of sex in a church, or a church-based website.
To be honest, I fail to see what all the fuss is about. It is self- evident that no two people are ever going to agree about everything to do with religion. And just as obvious that there are some clearly different schools of psychological and spiritual development. Some are by their very nature sexually repressive while others, and I am thinking here primarily of Tantric and Taoist traditions, have actively used sex for spiritual enlightenment. But there has also been an important study that has shown that many people who are not following any particular spiritual tradition have spiritual, mystical or transcendent experiences during sex. This is reported in a very fine book by developmental psychologist Jenny Wade.
In the introduction to Jenny’s book, the philosopher Ken Wilber makes an important point, that leads us straight back to the controversy over the website. He asks why so many people laugh at or snigger about sex? And his answer is superficially astonishing, but, I think, quite correct. He says that we laugh at sex because it can kill us.
Many psychologists and philosophers have examined the basis of laughter, and have all, in their different ways come to the conclusion that it has something to do with an event that we find unnervingly significant. I think that is was Freud who pointed out that laughing when someone slips on banana peel causes laughter because it is a reminder that anybody can fall victim to the same thing.
So what does Ken mean by that statement? He means that sex can kill the “everyday you,” your normal personal ego, and sometimes enable people to experience the depths of their own spirituality. And that can be very scary. Clinicians still see a great many people who have developed problems because of conflicts over their own sexuality and their beliefs; In particular their religious beliefs. Yet here is the paradox: sex may not be conducive to religious belief but it can be highly conducive to spiritual experience. Yet Jenny Wade’s study also showed that 80% of the people who had these experiences never told a single person about them. Presumably because they fear that they will be laughed at.
For the people who felt upset about the Church in Indiana, I think that it’s important to realize that sex is not going to go away. Everybody knows that sex sells, and if people are drawn into hearing a balanced message to help them re-establish their moral compass, isn’t that a good thing?
Technorati tags: sexuality, Jenny Wade, spirituality, Ken Wilber
