Category: Health Tips

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Hold Your Enthusiasm

Hold Your Enthusiasm
For a great many people who have no means of discharging the accumulated pain from life’s losses, retaining or recovering their enthusiasm is a very hard thing to do. Here are some things you can do to stay or rise further up the scale than sinking lower:
1. Take a daily walk. At least 20 minutes. While you are walking, don’t think, just look. Don’t get any more significanty than that. Just look. Looking creates space for a being and brings you into present time and sheds the impact from past emotional traumas.
2. Get a good night’s sleep each day. If something prevents you from doing that, FIX IT as a matter of high priority.
3. Hydrate the body throughout the day. Most people find water easier than doing fresh vegetable juices but the latter hydrates AND nourishes.
4. Eat well. Mostly plant based and no processed foods. Do a meal plan for the week and purchase accordingly. Have healthy snacks for when you need a blood sugar boost in a hurry and you would normally resort to less than optimum nutrition.
5. If you have anything wrong with your body, get it fixed. Find what caused it and change your operating basis so that is not repeated. Most GPs are reasonable at diagnosing the easier ails but they are not allowed to cure anything. Sound too strong a statement? It is actually illegal for anyone to claim they can cure a bunch of illnesses.
6. Handle or eschew people who are toxic to your well being. Sadly, there are some people whose joy in life is other people’s pain. No matter who they are you are better off without them.
7. Discover what your basic purpose is in life and start learning about it (you never stop learning) and working on it. When you do, progress through life will gradually transform from like walking through molasses in the middle of winter to like a hot knife cutting through warm butter. If you cannot figure out your basic purpose, call me. I have some techniques that can help you uncover it.
8. Finish those incomplete tasks you have on your plate. They occupy attention units for which you have far better use.
9. Repair any upsets you are holding on to, especially with people close to you.
10. Increase the quality and quantity of your communication with those around you.
11. Listen to music. Music not only has the power to soothe the savage beast it can lift the soul to new heights.
12. Read. You can’t live long enough to make all the mistakes and learn all the lessons yourself. Read and learn and be inspired.
13. Help someone. It takes your attention off yourself and makes you feel good. Every person’s basic purpose is a specialisation or focus of the desire to help.
14. If you can, travel. Experiencing other lands and cultures really does broaden one’s horizons.
15. Improve your ability to be there with the person in front of you and communicate to them as they are, here and now. Not who they were. Not who you think they should be or who you want them to be but the person they actually are, right here and now.
16. Allow the person originating to you to finish what they are saying without interrupting them or prematurely acknowledging them. Only when they are done, acknowledge them, fully.
17. Hold to your personal integrity. Don’t do anything, say anything or be anywhere you are not comfortable with. Don’t allow anything to occur in your zone with which you disagree without saying or doing something about it. Live the sort of life you would feel comfortable sharing with your parents and others would like to emulate.

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Start Young

Start Young
This is so true. Most of us only really start looking after our health after a major adverse health incident. I am very lucky that mine was a minor health incident and a desire to help my younger daughter eat a more healthy meal replacement than a Mars bar.

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xplan – One of the best ideas I have seen!

Please share this piece. If this somehow gives just one kid a way out of a bad situation, we can all feel privileged to have been a part of that.

Friends, as most of you know, I get to spend an hour each week with a group of young people going through addiction recovery.  Yes.  Young people.  I’m talking teenagers who are locked away for at least six months as they learn to overcome their addictions.  I’m always humbled and honored to get this time with these beautiful young souls that have been so incredibly assaulted by a world they have yet to understand.  This also comes with the bittersweet knowledge that these kids still have a fighting chance while several of my friends have already had to bury their own children.

Recently I asked these kids a simple question:  “How many of you have found yourself in situations where things started happening that you weren’t comfortable with, but you stuck around, mainly because you felt like you didn’t have a way out?”

They all raised their hands.

Every single one of them.

In the spirit of transparency … I get it.  Though in my mid-forties, I’m still in touch with that awkward boy who often felt trapped in the unpredictable currents of teenage experiences.  I can’t count the times sex, drugs, and alcohol came rushing into my young world; I wasn’t ready for any of it, but I didn’t know how to escape and, at the same time, not castrate myself socially.  I still recall my first time drinking beer at a friend’s house in junior high school—I hated it, but I felt cornered.  As an adult, that now seems silly, but it was my reality at the time.  “Peer pressure” was a frivolous term for an often silent, but very real thing; and I certainly couldn’t call my parents and ask them to rescue me.  I wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.  As a teen, forcing down alcohol seemed a whole lot easier than offering myself up for punishment, endless nagging and interrogation, and the potential end of freedom as I knew it.

X-Plan

For these reasons, we now have something called the “X-plan” in our family.  This simple, but powerful tool is a lifeline that our kids are free to use at any time.  Here’s how it works:

Let’s say that my youngest, Danny, gets dropped off at a party.  If anything about the situation makes him uncomfortable, all he has to do is text the letter “X” to any of us (his mother, me, his older brother or sister).  The one who receives the text has a very basic script to follow.  Within a few minutes, they call Danny’s phone.  When he answers, the conversation goes like this:

“Hello?”

“Danny, something’s come up and I have to come get you right now.”

“What happened?”

“I’ll tell you when I get there.  Be ready to leave in five minutes.  I’m on my way.”

At that point, Danny tells his friends that something’s happened at home, someone is coming to get him, and he has to leave.

In short, Danny knows he has a way out; at the same time, there’s no pressure on him to open himself to any social ridicule.  He has the freedom to protect himself while continuing to grow and learn to navigate his world.

This is one of the most loving things we’ve ever given him, and it offers him a sense of security and confidence in a world that tends to beat our young people into submission.

However, there’s one critical component to the X-plan:  Once he’s been extracted from the trenches, Danny knows that he can tell us as much or as little as he wants … but it’s completely up to him.  The X-plan comes with the agreement that we will pass no judgments and ask no questions (even if he is 10 miles away from where he’s supposed to be).  This can be a hard thing for some parents (admit it, some of us are complete control-freaks); but I promise it might not only save them, but it will go a long way in building trust between you and your kid.

(One caveat here is that Danny knows if someone is in danger, he has a moral obligation to speak up for their protection, no matter what it may cost him personally.  That’s part of the lesson we try to teach our kids—we are our brother’s keeper, and sometimes we have to stand for those too weak to stand for themselves.  Beyond that, he doesn’t have to say a word to us.  Ever.)

For many of us parents, we lament the intrusion of technology into our relationships.  I hate seeing people sit down to dinner together and then proceed to stare into their phones.  It drives me nuts when my kids text me from another room in our house.  However, cell phones aren’t going away, so we need to find ways to use this technology to help our kids in any way we can.

https://bertfulks.com/2017/02/23/x-plan-giving-your-kids-a-way-out-xplan/