Lama Surya Das: 5 Secrets for Healing the Spirit.

I love Sex and the City.  LOVE.  But this article has some great points.    – Renee

Don’t date like ‘SATC’ Carrie Bradshaw – CNN.com.

(The Frisky) — Carrie Bradshaw is not only a Manhattan and fashion icon, but as a dating columnist, she’s considered a dating icon as well. Why? She’s selfish, immature, manipulative, impulsive, and, let’s face it, kind of psycho.

She gives women, even kooky women, a bad name. Ladies, feel free to emulate Carrie’s style and visit her favorite NYC haunts, but when it comes to dating, it’s best to do anything but what she does.

Carrie makes several common mistakes throughout the “Sex and the City” series and by watching her missteps, women can learn a lot about what to do and, more importantly, what not to do, at all stages of a relationship.

Don’t assume. When Carrie begins dating Mr. Big, she assumes that since she’s not seeing anyone else, he’s not either. Predictably, she’s shocked when she finds him at dinner with another woman.

Although she and Big had shared a bed together, they had only gone on two dates by that point; he certainly didn’t owe her exclusivity, especially when they hadn’t discussed it.

If you don’t want your new guy to date anyone else, make sure he knows it. While there’s no magic time to have the “what do we call this relationship” talk, it’s imperative that you have the talk at some point.

Over-analyzing doesn’t solve anything. Carrie often falls into the trap of over and over and over-analyzing every aspect of her relationships, wondering what each and every little tiny thing means. She looks for hidden meanings in the most ordinary events. When Big takes her to the same restaurant twice in a row, she looks for a secret motive. She listens to answering machine messages from him repeatedly, straining to hear what he’s not saying.

Sometimes, men are not up-front about why they do what they do, but most of the time, a restaurant is just a restaurant and a message is just a message.

Stalking isn’t sexy. “Sex and the City” existed in a time before cell phones were ubiquitous, Google was a verb, and posting on Facebook and Twitter became a national pastime. Yet Carrie still manages to stalk Big, following him to church to see what he does on Sundays and with whom, and concocting a scheme to meet his ex-wife.

While there’s nothing wrong with looking up a new date online, cyberstalking or, worse, actually stalking someone likely won’t end well. When he finds out that you’ve been moonlighting as a private investigator, he won’t be flattered. Instead, he’ll wonder what he’s getting himself into and will probably be ready to end what may have just started.

Drama doesn’t equal passion. Carrie is scared when Aidan seems “too perfect.” She wants to know what’s wrong with him and insists he must be hiding a big secret from her. As she ponders her new relationship, she writes, “Do we need drama to make a relationship work?” The answer is no.

Unfortunately, many women equate drama with passion. A relationship filled with drama is usually exciting because you never know what could happen — good or bad. That kind of excitement can be destructive and is ultimately unsustainable. A drama-free relationship isn’t one that’s necessarily without love or passion; it’s one that’s mature enough to not need the emotional roller coaster.

“Perfect” doesn’t exist. Even as Aidan is too perfect, Carrie insists on perfection when she goes out with Berger for the first time. She goes shopping for the perfect outfit and tries to think of what activity they can do to make it the perfect first date. However, she soon realizes that Berger isn’t interested in her clothes or doing the best thing ever on a date; he’s interested in her.

When we strive for perfection, we’re bound to be disappointed because no date, guy or relationship will ever live up to that expectation.

Be the better person. In one of the most memorable scenes of the series, Berger dumps Carrie on a Post-it note. Was he nasty and immature? Absolutely! But was she right to yell at his friends when she ran into them at the club opening? No. Of course, she was hurt and angry, but she ranted at the wrong audience. Although he was a jerk, she made herself look ridiculous.

Everyone is dumped at some point — if you take the high road, he’ll look like the bad guy and it won’t look like he had a reason to end things.

If you’re not yourself around him, he’s not right for you. When she’s dating Aleksandr Petrovsky, Carrie subverts herself and her desires to please her new man. She feigns interest in his interests and eventually gives up her career, apartment and city for him.

It’s great to explore new things in a relationship — in fact, one of the best aspects of dating is that it opens you up to new people and ideas — but when you stop acting like yourself and start taking on your boyfriend’s ideas and ideals, it’s time to disentangle from the relationship and find yourself again.

Magical endings are for movies. The series ends when Carrie reunites with both Manhattan and Big. Sweeping camera angles, soaring music, and kissing under lampposts in the rain are great for fiction, but sometimes holding hands on the couch says more about a couple’s commitment to each other.

Don’t forget to cherish the small moments while you wait for the big ones that might never come.

TM & © 2010 TMV, Inc. | All Rights Reserved

Susan Smalley, Ph.D.: When Kindness Is a Mark of Success.

My family attended our son’s graduation over the weekend at the University of Vermont where the commencement speaker was Eric K. Shinseki, United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Aside from delivering a short and rather entertaining speech, he got across a pretty simple message to the emerging graduates: the real mark of success is kindness, and sharing that with others.

We sat through 3,000 graduates receiving their diplomas (a four hour ceremony) and celebrated with brunch afterward. Toward the end of the day, my husband and I and our new graduate took a walk from the hotel to the small town of Burlington where we ran into a young boy asking if we had any paper towels. Handing him a few Kleenex we turned to walk away, when we all stopped and turned to follow him asking … do you need more? Is everything okay?

As we looked to him, around the corner came a mother carrying her small child with blood gushing from his head – obviously having fallen in some sort of accident – and a small brother crying and trailing close behind. The mother calmly asked us to drive them to the hospital as the child screamed in pain and fear, blood now covering the mother’s arm completely as she struggled to hold him and calm him while trying to get help. The three of us led the mother quickly to our car as we talked to the younger brother and helped calm him down. My son jumped into the driver’s seat and calmly but quickly drove us to the emergency room at the UVM hospital where the mom and child were met by an immediately responsive hospital staff. As the mom began to talk to the staff, we said goodbye and returned to our hotel to walk again to town for dinner.

It was a perfect example of people helping one another – what we all do in a crisis – and what many of us do on a day to day basis: be kind to one another. I heard the other day that the Dalai Lama said we, as a people globally are becoming more compassionate, and the only reason we don’t all know it is that the media focuses so much on the negative: disasters, war, crime and horrors in the world. I am constantly reminded of the kindness of strangers, of our humanity, in the way people go out of their way to help one another – crisis or not. At the same time I know there are people acting cruelly to one another in areas where people have become hardened by war, violence and poverty. But then I think of the people I have met in my travels to India, South Africa, Kenya, Malawi and many other countries around the world, and I know that I see kindness far MORE than cruelty, and I see people working to stop the cruelty that exists. I know I am far luckier than many in the opportunities I have had in my life but I see the kindness of humans – our humanity – across economic, educational, religious and other socioeconomic differences. Perhaps the Dalai Lama is right and we are evolving into a kinder species with time, or perhaps that basic kindness has always been there it just becomes overshadowed by the rarer cruelties of humans that demand our attention to stop them and to assure they will not happen again.

As I see our three children grow into global citizens of the world, I see their kindness to one another, their friends, and strangers on a day to day basis. And I see the same in my friend’s friends, and the kids whose parents I do not know, and the kids I meet when traveling all around the world. Perhaps it is worth reminding us of our human kindness and to remind us to notice it every day; and as the commencement speaker suggested, to keep expanding it in all we do.

I share this Maya Angelou quote whenever I can, and in light of the commencement speaker’s message to new college graduates as they venture out into the world to gain ‘success.’

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Tom Ferry: The 4 Addictions That Destroy Your Dreams They’re Not What You Think.

In the midst of the economic meltdown … with chaos and hardship everywhere, my business is growing, I’m happily married 17 years and counting, I’m connected with my two boys, I have a terrific social life, I’m physically fit and most important … I’m happy! Is it possible during these challenging times to be this way?

I say yes!

Look, I have been to the lowest point in my life — waking up in the gutter, wasted on drugs with no hope of ever changing my life. If I can turn my life around, so can you.

Today, as a success coach, I think of myself as a life strategist in a business world. I travel from city to city giving lectures and conducting seminars that help change people’s lives. Guiding people toward greater success in their chosen field, while simultaneously enabling them to achieve a better balance across all the key areas of their lives — that’s what I do.

How is this type of turnaround possible?

I simply decided a long time ago to stop living by default and start to live By Design!

Now, what if I told you I could help you achieve the same results in your own life — show you how to navigate the rough water we’re all treading these days by creating a plan to not only survive but actually thrive in these difficult times?

As of July 2008, there were more than 123,000,000 Americans who were either struggling or suffering, in great part but not entirely due to the economic crisis. As things progressively get worse, that number continues to skyrocket, eclipsing the number of thriving Americans month after month.

Are you one of them?

To fully understand what holds us back from living to our fullest potential, you have to recognize that most people live life by default. What I mean by this is they fail to decide how they want their lives to be or have an unwillingness to do whatever it takes to make that happen, and simply accept things as they are. They believe they have no say or power to affect their course. But the bottom line about living by default, in my view, is that it represents choosing to be a victim!

Most people are living in what I refer to as an active coma. They’re alive, functioning, but appear to be plugged into an imaginary life support, hoping someday when they wake up everything will be okay. Think about it; they’ve become victims of the circumstances of the world and they’re doing little to nothing about it! They’re suffering with the economy, the housing crises, politics, their finances or lack thereof, their relationships, their health and their emotional well-being, just to name a few. And they’re stuck, concerned, worried and afraid to act! They’re afraid to change, afraid to try a new approach; they’re in a coma!

Why is it that some people live their lives full of love, abundance and purpose, what I would call a rich and full life, while others live in a state of fear, lack and indecision? It is because most of the world sees themselves as victims. They’re always suffering. Now more than ever, adversity is destined to be on your path. Are you worried about losing your job, home, marriage, health or money? The question isn’t how did you get here, but what will you do now?

When you realize that you’ve been living your life by default, you will become consciously aware that you are responsible for your choices. With 20 years and nearly 30,000 hours of success coaching behind me, I have learned that most people get comfortable suffering and accept things as they are too quickly, rather than choosing to change or try something new!

Aristotle said the formula for happiness and success is to “first, have a definite, clear, practical idea, goal or objective. Second, attain it by whatever means available, whether wisdom, money, materials, or methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.”

All success is predicated on finding what you are passionate about and then becoming relentless in your pursuit of every possibility so you will achieve your dreams.

When I was making some difficult decisions to change things up in my own life several years ago, my mentor and friend Mike Vance asked me five thought-provoking and life-altering questions to help me envision and then plan out the path I should take.

1. Why are you here — what’s your purpose?

2. How do you want to show up for others — what are your values?

3. What are your God-given talents?

4. Five years from now, how is the world experiencing you?

5. Who would you already be if you were already there?

None of these questions was easy to answer, but they all got me thinking … hard. It was as if a door had been opened that I never even knew existed. If I could identify these answers, anything was possible. All I had to do was figure out my next step. If I could do that, I could stop living by default and would discover the keys to creating a life, By Design.

The people living By Design live by a different set of rules. They know an upset is just an upset, their problems are assets and the past is where it belongs — somewhere behind them. They aren’t victims; they’re victors, heroes if you will, because they are willing to jump through hoops to live the life they dream of. I’ve met people who don’t have two nickels to rub together, as well as extremely successful business people that fall into this category. Living By Design isn’t about how much money you have. It’s a frame of mind that positively impacts every core area of your life. It isn’t easy, but living By Design is hugely rewarding, and that my friend, is our goal.

The Four Addictions

I’ve discovered four addictions we all have that destroy more dreams, more hopes and more lives than alcohol, drugs, food, gambling or sex combined. When I refer to addictions, I am not focused on any of these. To me, those are habitual symptoms or effects brought on by four much larger causes that are the root cause of those symptoms.

They are:

1) The Addiction to opinions of other people. As a society, we’re addicted to what others think about us and how others’ views of the world affect us.

2) The Addiction to drama. Some people are drawn to and consumed by any event or situation that occupies their thoughts and fills their mind with negativity, which often brings attention to them in unproductive ways.

3) The Addiction to the past. These people have an unhealthy attachment to events or situations that have occurred in the past. They’re stuck in how things used to be.

4) The Addiction to worry. This addiction is comprised of all the negative and self-defeating thoughts that make us anxious, disturbed, upset and stressed, that hold us back in life.
Tom Ferry’s Sure Signs of Four Addictions — these are merely ideas to help you identify how each addiction could be showing up in your life. Do not reject the addiction if you don’t relate to the six examples in each category. Think about situations in your life that might be more relevant to you.

The Addiction to the Opinions of Others

1. You Are Concerned About What Others Are Saying or Think About You.

2. You Have Good Ideas and Intentions But Find Yourself Afraid to Act on Them.

3. You Over Leveraged Yourself Financially in the Last Decade With Cars, Clothes, Homes, Jewelry and More.

4. You Are Constantly Seeking Other People’s Approval or Avoiding Their Disapproval.

5. You’re Afraid to Speak in Public.

6. You’re Afraid to Speak Your Mind.
The Addiction to Drama

1. You Love To Gossip.

2. You Are Always In The Middle of a Crisis.

3. You’re Glued to the News, Magazines and Stories About X Y & Z.

4. You Have a Tendency Toward Over Reacting Versus Rational Behavior.

5. Everything Is a Bigger Deal Than It Actually Is.

6. You’re a Pot Stirrer.
The Addiction to the Past

1. You Constantly Talk About the Past and the Way Things Used to Be.

2. You Resist Change.

3. You Continually Fail to Plan for a Better Future.

4. You Argue for the Past That Things Used to be Better.

5. You’ve Allowed Relationships to Become Stale, Uninteresting and Without Passion.

6. You have Physically or Mentally Peaked.
The Addiction to Worry

1. You’re Depressed, Concerned and Fearful about Everything.

2. You Spend Time with Other Worriers.

3. You Turn to TV and Movies as a Way to Escape the Thoughts in Your Head.

4. You Continuously Wake Up at Night from Your Mind Chatter.

5. You Continuously Go to the Worst-Case Scenario First.

6. You Use Food, Alcohol or Drugs to Control Your Moods and Feelings.

If you were to take away only one message from me, I want you to free yourself from the four addictions. Your life will become instantly and infinitely better.

I’m not a guru. I am a regular guy who has made it his life’s mission to make a difference in other people’s lives. I have been exposed to more and perhaps different models of excellence over the course of my career, which has helped me develop and brand my own model of excellence, one you can now benefit from and experience for yourself.

I am one of the fortunate guys in this world who wakes up every day eager, anxious, excited, fired up and ready to get to work. I love my wife and two sons. Against many obstacles, I have created an extraordinary life. Am I somehow luckier than you?

No.

I simply learned to and choose to live my life By Design–not by default. So can you.

Skin color affects ability to empathize with pain – CNN.com.

(Health.com) — Humans are hardwired to feel another person’s pain. But they may feel less innate empathy if the other person’s skin color doesn’t match their own, a new study suggests.

When people say “I feel your pain,” they usually just mean that they understand what you’re going through. But neuroscientists have discovered that we literally feel each other’s pain (sort of).

If you see — or even just think of — a person who gets whacked in the foot, for instance, your nervous system responds as if you yourself had been hit in the same spot, even though you don’t perceive the pain physically.

Researchers in Italy are reporting that subtle racial bias can interfere with this process — a finding with important implications for health care as well as social harmony.

“Pain empathy is basically feeling someone else’s pain,” says Carmen Green, M.D., a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the research. “This paper tells us that race plays a role in pain empathy.”

In the study, which appears in the journal Current Biology, people of Italian and African descent watched short film clips that showed needles pricking black- and white-skinned hands. As they watched, researchers measured the participants’ empathy (i.e., their nervous-system activity) by monitoring sensors attached to the same spot on their hands. They also tracked the participants’ heart rates and sweat-gland activity, a common measure of emotional response.

“White observers reacted more to the pain of white than black models, and black observers reacted more to the pain of black than white models,” says the lead researcher, Alessio Avenanti, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Bologna.

The researchers also showed clips of a needle pricking a hand painted bright purple. Both the Italian and African participants were more likely to empathize with this intentionally strange-looking hand than with the hand of another race, which implies that the earlier lack of empathy was due to skin color, not just difference. “This is quite important, because it suggests that humans tend to empathize by default unless prejudice is at play,” says Avenanti.

The researchers gauged prejudice by testing the participants on how readily they associated good and bad concepts with Italians and Africans. The people who showed a strong preference for their own group in this test also tended to show the least empathy when the hand belonging to the other group was needled, the researchers found.

Although the culture and history of racial bias is somewhat different in Italy than in the U.S., Avenanti suspects the findings would be similar if the same experiment were conducted with Americans.

Empathy is more complex in the real world than in a laboratory. Even so, the study findings suggest that racial differences and prejudice could play a role in some doctor-patient interactions, especially in the treatment of pain or chronic pain.

“A doctor with high racial bias may understand the pain of other-race patients in a more detached or disembodied manner and, in principle, this may contribute to the causes of racial disparities in health care,” Avenanti says.

Previous research has shown that doctors tend to empathize more with a patient’s pain — and provide higher-quality care — if they have a history of pain themselves, or if someone close to them has experienced chronic, debilitating pain, Dr. Green says.

“Now we are understanding that if you see someone as being more like you, you can empathize with their pain better,” she says. “Race, age, gender, and class probably play a role in how we assess and treat patients with pain.”

So does that mean that, say, an African American with low back pain should seek out only doctors who are African American?

Not necessarily. Green says it’s more important to find a doctor who actively listens to you and asks questions.

“If you feel you are not heard, or that your pain complaints are not being taken seriously, you can and should see another doctor,” she says.