Health is metabolic efficiency. Sickness is metabolic inefficiency. Nobody is totally healthy or totally sick. Each of us is a unique combination of health and sickness. And each of us has a unique combination of abilities and disabilities, both emotional and physical.

As we grow up, we learn that we are loved for our abilities but hated for our disabilities. This happens at home, at play, at school, and at work. Sometimes, this even happens with our doctors, especially if our disabilities mystify them or remind them of their own disabilities.

So, we try to hide our disabilities from people and from ourselves. This charade undermines our relationships and our self-esteem. We learn to fear society and hate ourselves.

Self-hatred is the most debilitating sickness. It interferes with our ability to seek and accept help. And everybody needs help. How do we free ourselves from self-hatred?

First, we reclaim our disabilities, whether society accepts them or not. This means that we learn to accept ourselves. Then, we cope with our disabilities. This means that we learn to take care of ourselves.
(read more. . .)

Each of us has unresolved issues revolving around our relationships that linger in our souls. People don’t always say or do what’s right and it can seem impossible to heal that breach, particularly when that person is unresponsive or has passed away. The following fire meditation is a way to release pain and to heal a past or present relationship, or to deal with unresolved interpersonal issues. Through this type of meditation, it becomes possible to seek out reconciliation and forgiveness, as well as to rid yourself of the spiritual baggage that can come when you harbor emotional pain.

During this meditation, it can be helpful to have a partner who reads the instructions to you in a soothing voice. Or, if you prefer to meditate alone, you may want to record yourself reading the instructions and play it back when you are ready to start. Begin by finding a quiet, relaxing space. In choosing, keep in mind that you will want to have your back be as straight as possible, either by laying down on a flat surface or sitting up straight in a chair. Breathe deeply and relax your body and mind.

When you have reached a state of deep relaxation, envision the place where you feel most safe. It needn’t be a real location; it can be an isolated private island, a tropical beach, or a mountain sanctuary. It can even be your own bedroom. Take the time to really see and experience your safe place. Smell the air, listen for sounds, and feel the ground under you. When you are relaxed in your surroundings, envision a road. Look down it and watch for the arrival of the person or animal you wish to make peace with. Let them come at their own pace and, when they are in full view, ask if they are willing to heal with you. If their answer is yes, look at first at yourself. How old are you? What are you wearing? How old is your companion and what do they look like?

The next step is to envision a fire. It can be in any form you wish: a camp fire, a ceremonial fire, or a bonfire. As you begin to heal, throw your baggage into the fire and ask for forgiveness or the closure you are seeking. If you wish, you can step into the fire; it will not harm you. Release everything that you no longer desire for yourself or your companion into the fire. In doing so, you may feel your body temperature rise, or you may shake a little. This is normal. Take as much time as you need with your companion. When you are finished, release them, and they will turn and walk back the way they came. Stay in your safe place for as long as you desire. When you feel comfortable, open your eyes and note the great weight that has been lifted from you.

You’re not alone.

The home-cooked family meal is quickly becoming a thing of the past. A recent survey conducted by the University of Minnesota shows that the number of American families who regularly eat dinner together has dropped by more than one-third since 1970, as busy parents opt instead for the convenience of restaurant meals or takeout in front of the television. But Marialisa Calta, a food writer and working mother, is on a mission to turn back the clock. And while encouraging American women to unleash their inner Betty Crocker might not seem progressive, Calta’s serious commitment to helping parents embrace domesticity, at the dinner table at least, has landed her in the ranks of a quiet revolution taking place in small towns and cities across the country. Backed by a spate of studies showing that children who routinely eat dinner with their families not only perform better in school but are also less vulnerable to depression, drug and alcohol addiction and eating disorders, a Columbia University substance abuse counseling center (CASA) has even set aside an official holiday — Sept. 26 — devoted to getting parents and kids eating together.

Calta’s new book, “Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the Modern American Family,” takes readers into the kitchens and dining rooms of a dozen families across the country as they attempt to make a healthy, home-cooked meal every (well, almost every) night. With unpretentious advice and simple menus drawing on pantry staples such as beans, chicken stock and pasta (and featuring a special section on that Nixon-era workhorse, the slow cooker), “Barbarians” offers an antidote to the fussy, labor-intensive Martha Stewart mentality that intimidates many home cooks. “You don’t have to chain yourself to the stove,” she writes. “If you are organized enough to get your tired self dressed and to work every day you have the tools to get food on the table.” Around that table, Calta believes, parents and children share much more than food — they exchange stories, learn about each other’s lives, and hone social graces that serve them in school and beyond.

Sarah Karnasiewicz | Salon (read more. . .)

1. We seldom concretely identify those situation and people we find stressful. To understand what brings on stress in your life, try to maintain a heightened awareness of your physical and mental feelings for a week. When you feel your heart racing, your muscles tightening, or your stomach contracting, ask yourself why. Keep a list of those things that trigger stressful feelings.

2. Make relaxation part of your daily routine. Deep breathing and simple stretches can be performed both at home and in the office. Taking a few minutes to sooth your soul by savoring a cup of tea or grounding yourself can center you, giving you the ability to deal with stress more effectively.

3. It can be difficult to let go of worries or thoughts that provoke anxiety. One technique involves dissipating stressful thoughts before they get out of control. Concentrate on the thought and firmly say “Stop” to prevent the thought from recycling itself in your mind. In doing so, you will be free of the thought’s power to influence your mood.

4. Get back to nature. Enjoying a relaxing day out of doors can help you feel more calm and balanced during your normal routine. A mountain hike or day at the beach can be a wonderful stress reducer. If you simply can’t get away, try listening to a CD of nature sounds or spending a few minutes in front of a sunny window.

5. Each day, give yourself the gift of doing one thing you truly enjoy. It may be writing, gardening, dancing, walking, or watching a good film. Doing something you like every day will improve your quality of life and frame of mind, making you better able to handle stress as it arises.

6. Assess your priorities and learn to say no. Determine what activities you don’t want to or can’t do at home or at work, and, if you can, stop doing them. Don’t overload your schedule by committing to new responsibilities because you are afraid to say no. Instead, dedicate yourself only to the activities that bring you joy.

7. Guided imagery can help you stay relaxed during periods of stress. Take a moment to imagine yourself in a peaceful setting that feels safe and nurturing, perhaps somewhere you have felt lighthearted and calm in the past. Concentrate on your setting until you feel your muscles and mind relax.

8. Exercise affects both the body’s energy level and the brain’s chemistry by encouraging the release of beneficial hormones. It can also help you let go some of the tension and pent-up energy associated with stress by giving you a healthy outlet for your feelings. The mood-elevating benefits of exercise last for days, but regular exercise is the most uplifting.

9. Take a break. When you’re faced with any type of stress, stop for a moment to collect your thoughts. Breathe slowly and deeply for ten seconds and try to clear your mind of unpleasant thoughts. You’ll still be facing the same situation, but your outlook will be clearer.

10. When you have compiled a list of stressful triggers, compile a second list outlining your personal methods for dealing with stress. Though unexpected or frustrating situations can seem overwhelming, you have the power to cope. Recognizing your strengths can make dealing with stress seem easier.

Industries that employ large numbers of people working at computers are experiencing great disability and health insurance problems because of a new pain disorder known as repetitive stress injury (RSI). Millions of Americans, mostly women, suffer from a painful malady of unknown cause called fibromyalgia. While gigantic medical industries have arisen to diagnose and treat these conditions, the plague continues.

This book is about that epidemic. It describes both a clinical experience that has identified the cause of the pain disorders and a method of treating them. Sadly, mainstream medicine rejects the diagnosis because it is based on the theory that the physical symptoms are initiated by emotional phenomena. Intelligent laymen in large numbers have embraced the concept, however, no doubt because they are not burdened by the bias imposed by a traditional medical education.

As if the pain epidemic were not of sufficient magnitude, a large group of physical disorders have been identified as equivalents of the pain syndrome, since they appear to stem from the same psychological process. These maladies have occurred commonly for years and, taken together with the widespread pain maladies, are universal in Western society. I refer to many of the headaches, gastrointestinal symptoms and allergies, as well as respiratory, dermatologic, genitourinary and gynecologic conditions that are the stuff of everyday life.

If most of these are psychogenic—that is, they originate in the mind (and it is my goal to demonstrate that they are)—we have a public health problem of staggering proportions. The medical, humanitarian and economic implications are obvious and will be enumerated.

This book is about emotions, illness and wellness, how they are related and what one can do to enhance good health and combat certain physical conditions. The ideas are based on twenty-four years of successfully treating an emotionally induced physical disorder known as the Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS). Although I will provide an up-to-date description of that condition, my major focus is the impact of the emotions on bodily function.

That connection came close to being accepted by Western medicine in the first half of the twentieth century and then fell into almost total disrepute. Repudiation of psychoanalytic theory, increased interest in laboratory research and the tendency of doctors to shy away from psychological matters (they see themselves as engineers to the human body) are the likely reasons for this historical trend. As the century draws to a close, few practitioners, either in physical or psychological medicine, believe that unconscious, repressed emotions initiate physical illness. Psychoanalysts are the only clinicians who have held to that concept, but their influence in the larger fields of psychiatry and general medicine is limited. In the physical medicine specialties virtually no one adheres to the idea.

Despite the lack of interest of mainstream medicine, much has been written on the “mind-body connection.” Careful studies have been conducted that relate psychological factors to pathological conditions such as coronary artery diseases and hypertension. I know of only one investigator outside the field of psychoanalysis who has identified unconscious emotions as the cause of a physical illness. One reads of stress, anger, anxiety, loneliness, depression, but they are discussed as conscious, perceived emotions. In many instances these feelings are thought to aggravate underlying structural pathological processes, such as herniated discs, fibromyalgia or repetitive stress injury.

In view of the widespread Freud bashing of recent years I may be courting disapproval to state that my concepts descend from Freud’s clinical observations and theories. But I know this only in retrospect, for I did not set out to prove Freud right. My developing ideas were the consequence of clinical observations; they were not based on preconceived notions about the mindbody connection.

As with Freud’s patients, I found that my patients’ physical symptoms were the direct result of strong feelings repressed in the unconscious. In addition, I have drawn on the concepts of three other psychoanalysts: Franz Alexander, founder of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, did pioneer work in mindbody medicine in this century; Heinz Kohut conceptualized what is known as Self Psychology and pointed out the importance of narcissistic rage; Stanley Coen suggested the crucial idea that the mindbody disorder I was studying (TMS) was a defense, an avoidance strategy designed to turn attention away from frightening repressed feelings.

This book addresses physical disorders that are caused by repressed, unconscious feelings. Because these disorders are very specific, they can be accurately diagnosed and successfully treated.

The Tension Myositis Syndrome is currently the most common emotionally induced disorder in the United States, and probably in the Western world. Since the publication of Healing Back Pain, other painful conditions of significant public health importance have emerged. They, too, are manifestations of TMS.

The book is laid out in three parts. Part I is a discussion of the psychology that induces these physical maladies, and it includes a chapter that might be called a bridge, for it describes the psychoneurophysiology of psychogenic processes: in other words, how emotions stimulate the brain to produce physical symptoms. After traversing this bridge (which sounds more formidable than it is), Part II takes up the various emotionally induced physical maladies, beginning with TMS, the disorder that introduced me to the world of mindbody medicine, and including such ailments as the common disturbances of the gastrointestinal tract, headaches, allergies and skin disorders.

Part III discusses treatment for these disorders.

For those who are interested, an appendix covers the more academic aspects of the mindbody (psychosomatic) process.

A word of caution to the reader: What follows is a description of my clinical experience and the theories derived from my work. No one should assume that his or her symptoms are psychologically caused until a physician has ruled out the possibility of serious disease.

The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold
Of being only four years old.

Still young enough to be a part
Of Nature’s great impulsive heart,
Born comrade of bird, beast and tree
And unselfconscious as the bee-

And yet with lovely reason skilled
Each day new paradise to build
Elate explorer of each sense,
Without dismay, without pretense!

In your unstained transparent eyes
There is no conscience, no surprise:
Life’s queer conundrums you accept,
Your strange Divinity still kept. .

And Life, that sets all things in rhyme,
May make you poet, too, in time–
But there were days, O tender elf,
When you were Poetry itself!

What happens to this wonderful beginning when we were all “Poetry itself”? How do all those tender elves become murderers, drug addicts, physical and sexual offenders, cruel dictators, morally degenerate politicians? How do they become the “walking wounded”? We see them all around us; the sad, fearful, doubting, anxious, and depressed, filled with unutterable longings. Surely this loss of our innate human potential is the greatest tragedy of all.

The more we know about how we lost our spontaneous wonder and creativity, the more we can find ways to get them back. We may even be able to do something about preventing this from happening to our own children in the future.

How Your Wounded Inner Child Contaminates Your Life

I couldn’t believe I could be so childish. I was 40 years old and I had raged and screamed until everyone–my wife, my stepchildren, and my son–was terrified. Then I got in my car and left them. There I was, sitting all alone in a motel in the middle of our vacation on Padre Island I felt very alone and ashamed.

When I tried to trace the events that led up to my leaving, I couldn’t figure out anything. I was confused. It was like waking up from a bad dream. More than anything, I wanted my family life to be warm, loving, and intimate. But this was the third year I had blown up on our vacation. I had gone away emotionally before–but I had never gone away physically.

It was as if I’d gone into an altered state of consciousness. God, I hated myself! What was the matter with me?

The incident on Padre Island occurred in 1976, the year after my father died. Since then I’ve learned the causes of my rage/withdrawal cycles. The major clue came to me on the Padre Island runaway.

While I sat alone and ashamed in that crummy motel room, I began to have vivid memories of my childhood. I remembered one Christmas Eve when I was about 11 years old, lying in my darkened room with the covers pulled up over my head and refusing to speak to my father. He had come home late, mildly drunk. I wanted to punish him for ruining our Christmas. I could not verbally express anger, since I had been taught that to do so was one of the deadly sins, and especially deadly in regard to a parent.

Over the years my anger festered in the mildew of my soul. Like a hungry dog in the basement, it became ravenous and turned into rage. Most of the time I guarded it vigilantly. I was a nice guy. I was the nicest daddy you’ve ever seen–until I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I became Ivan the Terrible.

What I came to understand was that these vacation behaviors were spontaneous age regressions. When I was raging and punishing my family with withdrawal, I was regressing to my childhood, where I had swallowed my anger and expressed it the only way a child could–in punishing withdrawal. Now, as an adult, when I was finished with an emotional or physical withdrawal bout, I felt like the lonesome and shame-based little boy that I had been.

What I now understand is that when a child’s development is arrested, when feelings are repressed, especially the feelings of anger and hurt, a person grows up to be an adult with an angry, hurt child inside of him. This child will spontaneously contaminate the person’s adult behavior.

At first, it may seem preposterous that a little child can continue to live in an adult body. But that is exactly what I’m suggesting. I believe that this neglected, wounded inner child of the past is the major source of human misery. Until we reclaim and champion that child, he will continue to act out and contaminate our adult lives.

I like mnemonic formulas, so I’ll describe some of the ways the wounded inner child contaminates our lives using the word contaminate. Each letter stands for a significant way in which the inner child sabotages adult life. (At the end of this chapter you’ll find a questionnaire to help you ascertain how badly your own inner child was wounded.)

Co-Dependence
Offender Behaviors
Narcissistic Disorders
Trust Issues
Acting Out/Acting In Behaviors
Magical Beliefs
Intimacy Dysfunctions
Nondisciplined Behaviors
Addictive/Compulsive Behaviors
Thought Distortions
Emptiness (Apathy, Depression)

CO-DEPENDENCE

I define co-dependence as a dis-ease characterized by a loss of identity. To be codependent is to be out of touch with one’s feelings, needs, and desires. Consider the following examples:

Pervilia listens to her boyfriend talk about his distress at work. She cannot sleep that night because she is fretting about his problem. She feels his feeling rather than her own.

When Maxmillian’s girlfriend ends their six-month relationship, he feels suicidal. He believes that his worth depends on her loving him. Maxmillian truly has no self-worth, which is engendered from within; he has others-worth, which depends on other people.

Jolisha is asked by her jock husband if she wants to go out for the evening. She is wishy-washy and finally says yes. He asks where she wants to go. She says it doesn’t matter. He takes her to the Viking Barbecue Stand and to see the movie The Return of the Ax Murderer. She hates the whole evening. She pouts and withdraws from him for a week. When he asks, “What’s the matter?” she answers, “Nothing.”

Jolisha is a “sweetheart.” Everyone comments on how nice she is. Actually, she only pretends to be nice. She is continually in an act. For Jolisha, being nice is a false self. She’s unaware of what she really needs or wants. She is unaware of her own identity.

Jacobi is 52 years old. He comes to counseling because he has been in an affair with his 26-year-old secretary for two months. Jacobi tells me he doesn’t know how this happened! Jacobi is an elder in his church and a revered member of the Committee to Preserve Morality. He led the fight to clean up pornography in his city. Actually, Jacobi is in a religious “act.” He is completely out of touch with his sexual drive. After years of active repression, his sex drive has taken over.

Biscayne takes his wife’s weight problem personally. He has greatly curtailed their social life because he is embarrassed to have his friends see his wife. Biscayne has no sense of where he ends and his wife begins. He believes his manhood will be judged by how his wife looks.

It wasn’t the detailed diagrams of the female reproductive system, or the drawings of six different types of hymens that captivated me. Nor was it the righteous, womyn-power assertions such as, “We are learning to live our sexuality on our own terms.” No, it was the book’s explicit, unflinching description of fantasies: real women revealing their most private erotic imaginings about horses (ew) other women (less ew) and men (totally awesome, as I may actually have said in 1986). I read the scenarios over and over in the privacy of my locked bedroom, until I finally left for college, where the logistics of living with a roommate promptly put an end to that.

The eighth edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves arrives in bookstores this month. Touted as one of the most lasting contributions of the second-wave women’s movement, it has been called the definitive women’s-health reference of the last 35 years. But ask the daughters of its original intended audience — the women who now call themselves the third wave — why they love it, and they’ll confirm it wasn’t the advice on healthy eating or bicep-building that mesmerized them in their youth.

“I definitely remember reading the sex parts, especially the lesbian parts, and being like, this is amazing, they’re real people talking about sex,” says Liza Featherstone, the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart. “It must be like a teenage guy discovering Penthouse Forum. Except better, because these aren’t stories about people having sex in airplanes that are probably made up. It must be the way that people experience amateur porn now.”

It’s true: reading OBOS isn’t entirely unlike watching a jiggly, implant-free woman and her paunchy, real-life boyfriend wrestling naked in front of their home cam. The fantasies in OBOS weren’t airbrushed, and neither were the people. And though one friend of mine claims that a childhood viewing of “the crazy picture of two fat lesbians, one of them in a wheelchair” led her to temporarily resolve that sex was absolutely, unequivocally grody to the max, most of us felt deeply, intuitively comforted by the knowledge that we could think our dirty thoughts and look like our less-than-centerfold-worthy selves and still get some action (eventually).

Hell, you wouldn’t even need a lover. (That’s the book’s very “Saturday Night Live”-sounding term, not mine.) In fact, OBOS picks up where Gloria Steinem’s “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” maxim leaves off. Every edition devoted an entire section to sisters doing it for themselves, sexually speaking. From the story about the gym teacher who feels up her female students to the girl who imagines sleeping with her brother because he’s “19 and groovy and looks just like me,” OBOS provided plenty of things to think about while doing the deed. “I don’t remember a lot about the rest of the book,” says Marisa Meltzer, a freelance writer who was given OBOS by her mother one Christmas. “I was like, let’s get back to the masturbation scenes.”

I’m pretty sure that when the book was first published in 1970, its feminist authors weren’t attempting to recruit young ladies to their cause with a bait-and-switch — get ‘em with the sex stuff, then pump ‘em full of women’s lib. But it worked anyway.

“The book definitely politicized me,” says Christine Cupaiuolo, online editor of Ms. magazine. “It made me more aware of the issues. It showed me a paradigm existed that I could work and live in.” OBOS illustrated that women could (and should) march in defense of abortion rights, fight the inadequacy of the American health care system, and tell their husbands to shove it when they skipped the foreplay — but still have a threesome or fantasize about being spanked. In the OBOS worldview, political action was an easy bedfellow of un-PC sex.

And by inadvertently appealing to pre-pubescent girls’ hormones, it provided a much-needed corrective. “One of feminism’s jobs has always seemed to be about giving women sexual agency and acknowledging they’re sexual people, and yet that’s not feminism’s identity,” says Jennifer Baumgardner, the author of Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism. (The North Dakota native confesses to a penchant for a certain OBOS scenario involving a bathtub and warm running water. “It was cold in Fargo,” she explains.) As far as OBOS readers knew, feminists weren’t man-haters — they seemed to love not just men, but also women, bondage, polyamory and water sports.

And all this free-to-be sexuality wasn’t just appealing to girls. “I was first exposed to naked women in Our Bodies, Ourselves, well before Playboy,” says Mike Carnegie, a 30-year-old graduate student and artist in L.A. “So any titillation would have always been wrapped up in some kind of awareness of feminist body-image concerns.” OBOS may have stealthily made a generation of men more feminist, though Carnegie isn’t convinced his experience with OBOS was entirely positive. “On the dark side, it contributed to a kind of imperial guilt in my teens — like jerking off to natives in National Geographic.” But he admits that when the time came, “I probably knew my way around a vagina better than I might’ve otherwise. Or so I like to think.”

To me, OBOS has exhausted its usefulness as a pornographic accessory. The scenarios don’t give me the same spark they did, back when I wasn’t just like a virgin. But the newest edition sits in an exalted position on my bookshelf, and not just because I’m nostalgic. Now, OBOS is what everyone says it’s supposed to be: a kind, tender, essential how-to manual. The new edition covers all of the old sexual stuff, plus more recent health-care issues — there are sections on plastic surgery, antidepressants and menstrual suppression, not to mention a misguided anti-Brazilian-bikini-wax diatribe — but the fierce feminist analysis, nowhere to be found in the average reference book, remains.

It’s a good thing, because our sex lives may be even more embattled now. With TV gays making network execs rich while real-life queers can’t even get a tax break, OBOS’s loving — and lusty — depiction of lesbian sex, coupled with its explorations of institutionalized homophobia, remains nothing less than radical. And as abstinence-only advocates tout the value of technical virginity — and their young charges comply by substituting unprotected oral or anal sex for vaginal intercourse — OBOS continues to provide comprehensive sex education without a hint of compromise.

Kara Jesella is a freelance writer in New York City. She is currently co-writing a book on Sassy magazine for Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Life is Really Very Simple. What We Give Out, We Get Back

What we think about ourselves becomes the truth for us. I believe that everyone, myself included, is responsible for everything in our lives, the best and the worst. Every thought we think is creating our future. Each one of us creates our experiences by our thoughts and our feelings. The thoughts we think and the words we speak create our experiences.

We create the situations, and then we give our power away by blaming the other person for our frustration. No person, no place, and no thing has any power over us, for “we” are the only thinkers in it. When we create peace and harmony and balance in our minds, we will find it in our lives.

Which of these statements sounds like you?

“People are out to get me.”
“Everyone is always helpful.”

Each one of these beliefs will create quite different experiences. What we believe about ourselves and about life becomes true for us.

The Universe Totally Supports Us in Every Thought We Choose to Think and Believe

Put another way, our subconscious mind accepts whatever we choose to believe. They both mean that what I believe about myself and about life becomes true for me. What you choose to think about yourself and about life becomes true for you. And we have unlimited choices about what we can think.

When we know this, then it makes sense to choose “Everyone is always helpful,” rather than “People are out to get me.”

The Universal Power Never Judges or Criticizes Us

It only accepts us at our own value. Then it reflects our beliefs in our lives. If I want to believe that life is lonely and that nobody loves me, then that is what I will find in my world.

However, if I am willing to release that belief and to affirm for myself that “Love is everywhere, and I am loving and lovable,” and to hold on to that new affirmation and to repeat it often, then it will become true for me. Now, loving people will come into my life, the people already in my life will become more loving to me, and I will find myself easily expressing love to others.

Most of Us Have Foolish Ideas about Who We Are and Many, Many Rigid Rules about How Life Ought to Be Lived

This is not to condemn us, for each of us is doing the very best we can at this very moment. If we knew better, if we had more understanding and awareness, then we would do it differently. Please don’t put yourself down for being where you are. The very fact that you have found this book and have discovered me means that you are ready to make a new, positive change in your life. Acknowledge yourself for this. “Men don’t cry!” “Women can’t handle money!” What limiting ideas to live with.

When We Are Very Little, We Learn How to Feel about Ourselves and about Life by the Reactions of the Adults Around Us

It is the way we learn what to think about ourselves and about our world. Now, if you lived with people who were very unhappy, frightened, guilty, or angry, then you learned a lot of negative things about yourself and about your world.

“I never do anything right.” “Its my fault.” “If I get angry, I’m a bad person.”

Beliefs like this create a frustrating life.

When We Grow Up, We Have a Tendency to Recreate the Emotional Environment of Our Early Home Life

This is not good or bad, right or wrong; it is just what we know inside as “home.” We also tend to recreate in our personal relationships the relationships we had with our mothers or with our fathers, or what they had between them. Think how often you have had a lover or a boss who was “just like” your mother or father.

We also treat ourselves the way our parents treated us. We scold and punish ourselves in the same way. You can almost hear the words when you listen. We also love and encourage ourselves in the same way, if we were loved and encouraged as children.

“You never do anything right.” “It’s all your fault.” How often have you said this to yourself?

“You are wonderful.” “I love you.” How often do you tell yourself this?

However, I Would Not Blame Our Parents for This

We are all victims of victims, and they could not possibly have taught us anything they did not know. If your mother did not know how to love herself, or your father did not know how to love himself, then it would be impossible for them to teach you to love yourself.

They were doing the best they could with what they had been taught as children. If you want to understand your parents more, get them to talk about their own childhood; and if you listen with compassion, you will learn where their fears and rigid patterns come from. Those people who “did all that stuff to you” were just as frightened and scared as you are.

I Believe That We Choose Our Parents

Each one of us decides to incarnate upon this planet at a particular point in time and space. We have chosen to come here to learn a particular lesson that will advance us upon our spiritual, evolutionary pathway. We choose our sex, our color, our country, and then we look around for the particular set of parents who will mirror the pat-tern we are bringing in to work on in this lifetime. Then, when we grow up, we usually point our fingers accusingly at our parents and whimper, “You did it to me.” But really, we chose them because they were perfect for what we wanted to work on overcoming.

We learn our belief systems as very little children, and then we move through life creating experiences to match our beliefs. Look back in your own life and notice how often you have gone through the same experience. Well, I believe you created those experiences over and over because they mirrored something you believed about yourself. It doesn’t really matter how long we have had a problem, or how big it is, or how life-threatening it is.

The Point of Power Is Always in the Present Moment

All the events you have experienced in your lifetime up to. this moment have been created by your thoughts and beliefs you have held in the past. They were created by the thoughts and words you used yesterday, last week, last month, last year, 10, 20, 30, 40, or more years ago, depending on how old you are.

However, that is your past. It is over and done with. What is important in this moment is what you are choosing to think and believe and say right now. For these thoughts and words will create your future. Your point of power is in the present moment and forming the experience of tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and so on.

You might notice what thought you are thinking at this moment. Is it negative or positive? Do you want this thought to be creating your future? Just notice and be aware.

The Only Thing We Are Ever Dealing With Is a Thought, and a Thought Can Be Changed

No matter what the problem is, our experiences are just outer effects of inner thoughts. Even self-hatred is only hating a thought you have about yourself. You have a thought that says, “I’m a bad person.” This thought produces a feeling, and you buy into the feeling. However, if you don’t have the thought, you wont have the feeling. And thoughts can be changed. Change the thought, and the feeling must go.

This is only to show us where we get many of our beliefs. But let’s not use this information as an excuse to stay stuck in our pain. The past has no power over us. It doesn’t matter how long we have had a negative pattern. The point of power is in the present moment. What a wonderful thing to realize! We can begin to be free in this moment!

Believe it or Not, We Do Choose our Thoughts

We may habitually think the same thought over and over so that it does not seem we are choosing the thought. But we did make the original choice. We can refuse to think certain thoughts. Look how often you have refused to think a positive thought about yourself. Well, you can also refuse to think a negative thought about yourself.

It seems to me that everyone on this planet whom I know or have worked with is suffering from self-hatred and guilt to one degree or another. The more self-hatred and guilt we have, the less our lives work. The less self-hatred and guilt we have, the better our lives work, on all levels.

Consider for a moment that happiness is our natural state of being. At the Center for Attitudinal Healing, where forgiveness is so much a part of everything that we do, we say that the essence of our being is love!

We learn to look at life from the perspective that we are spiritual beings who are just temporarily in these bodies of ours. When we look upon our lives that way, we also begin to see that love and happiness are inseparable. And what forgiveness teaches us is that it is possible to choose love over fear and peace over conflict regardless of the circumstances affecting our lives.

Before we talk about forgiveness, let’s briefly explore the roots of unhappiness. By looking at where unhappiness starts, we can move toward a very different way of looking at the world. A good place to begin this exploration is with that part of us which believes that our happiness lies in external things.

Living in this modern society, as we do, it becomes all too easy to believe that money and the accumulation of material things will make us happy. The trouble is that the more we accumulate, the more we want. No matter how much we get, it almost never seems like enough. Once we begin making choices from this perspective, we fall into the habit of believing that we will eventually find something outside ourselves that will bring us lasting happiness. The fact that this search frequently ends up with our feeling frustrated, angry, unhappy, and even hopeless is our clue that this belief isn’t working.

Why is it so difficult for us to see that our search for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is only hiding the fact that we are both the rainbow and the gold?

There are so many temptations in the world on which to blame our unhappiness or our lack of money and material things. We look around us and see people with more than we have who seem to be happier than we are. We turn to other people and seek to fill the hole in our souls with our relationships. It may seem like a big jump we are making from seeing more material things as the answer to seeing other people as the answer. But the same part of us which tells us that the answers are to be found in externals also tells us that we should be able to make other people responsible for our happiness. Surely, if we could only find the right person, our lives would be fulfilled!

Pretty soon we are on a psychological treadmill, going round and round in an endless circle, disappointed and unhappy because neither money and material things nor our relationships are making us happy. We have moments, but they seem too fleeting. We may begin to feel trapped by life. But what, we may ask, is the alternative?

What is this part of ourselves that keeps us seeking outside ourselves? Can we even name it? It is the part of us which believes that our true identity is limited to our bodies and personality self. It is the part of us which sneers at any suggestion that our true essence is that we are spiritual beings living for a time in these bodies.

I like to use the term ego to describe the part of us that is so concerned with externals. The ego tries to justify its presence in our lives by saying that it is only looking after our better interests, that our bodies need it to stick around or we are going to accidentally step out in front of a speeding truck or forget to feed ourselves or protect ourselves from all the dangers that are in the world. Our egos would have us believe that anyone who doesn’t think that money can buy happiness doesn’t know where to shop.

Again and again, our egos send us the message that we live in an unfair world where we will be victims if we aren�t constantly on the alert. Our egos are quite happy when we become convinced of our victimhood, because then we hand our power over to them. The last thing our egos would want us to believe is that we have a choice-that we can choose not to be victims, that we can, in fact, choose love rather than fear, that we can choose to forgive rather than hold on to our embitterments, grudges, and judgments.

It is easy to see how the ego interprets happiness, love, and peace of mind as its enemies, for when we are enjoying these states of being, we are experiencing our spiritual essence. We are seeing a world that is very different from the one our egos furnish us. Forgiveness is easy when we look at the world through the eyes of love, since it is then clear that the answers we have been seeking all of our lives can be found here and not in the ego’s beliefs in the externals of life.

At its worst, we hear the ego in our minds saying that it is impossible to experience happiness for long, so we had better be able to turn to the physical reality for our true and lasting happiness. Eventually, things will fall apart. Something is sure to go wrong. Someone or something will intrude on our happiness. So we’d better be on the lookout for the person who is to blame. The ego’s advice is to become a faultfinder, to make certain we are always right and the other person is always wrong.

Ultimately, our happiness or unhappiness actually is measured by the degree to which we accept the advice of our egos. Think about what happens whenever we judge other people, hold grievances in our mind, or cling to blame and guilt. What we feel at such times blocks us from experiencing love, peace, and happiness. Our feelings of unhappiness are magnified and we become faultfinders, probing our world for circumstances or people who might be to blame for our unhappiness.

Forgiveness is a transformational process. In a heartbeat, we can let go of the externally based paradigm that says we must look outside ourselves for true happiness. With a simple change of mind, we can release ourselves from the ego’s conviction that to be safe we must believe in our victimhood and act defensively. With a shift of perspective, we can stop seeking other people or things outside ourselves to blame for our unhappiness. We can embrace our true spiritual essence and instantly find that this has always been our source of love and peace and happiness. It is never more than a heartbeat away, and it is free for the asking.

Forgiveness can be learned at any age and by anyone, regardless of their present belief system, the past they have experienced, or the way they have treated others around them.

A Model for Forgiveness

Several years ago, my wife, Diane, and I met a remarkable woman by the name of Andrea de Nottbeck. We became acquainted with her through a most unusual phone call from a person in Switzerland, who told us that a woman who lived there had a painting she wanted to give us. The woman was ninety-three years old at the time and was very healthy. While she had given most of her wealth to philanthropic organizations, she still had one material possession to give away before she died. It was a thirteenth century painting of Jesus Christ.

Feeling perplexed about who should get the painting when she died, Andrea had gone out to the mountains to meditate on it. After a few moments, she had gotten the message “Love Is Letting Go of Fear.” The painting, she decided, should go to Jerry Jampolsky, the author of the book by this title, which is about the ways that we prevent ourselves from loving. And so she had her friend call me in the States.

We learned that following her husband’s death, several years before, Andrea had become a bitter, crotchety old woman. She was difficult to get along with, frequently provocative, and extremely argumentative. At the age of eighty-five, a friend gave her a copy of Love Is Letting Go of Fear.

This book became Andrea’s daily reading. Soon she began forgiving all the people in her life who she felt had hurt her. She forgave herself for behavior she knew had caused pain or had been unloving. Miraculously, her life changed. No longer crotchety and angry at the world, she became more carefree and joyful than she’d ever been in her life. To celebrate her transformation, she changed her name to Happy.

Without my ever knowing it until I met Happy, she had been responsible for getting Love Is Letting Go of Fear translated and published in French many years before.

When I heard the story of Happy’s transformation, Diane and I decided to visit her, combining our trip with one I already had scheduled for the Middle East. Upon our arrival, we met this most extraordinary woman. She showed us a French magazine with her picture on the cover-of her flying in a hang glider high over the French countryside! She was eighty-eight at the time. And as if that weren’t enough, she had gone stunt flying in a biplane at the age of ninety-one.

We spent three wonderful days with Happy at her home in Geneva, Switzerland. I have to say that she lived up to her new name in every way imaginable. She was one of the happiest, most peaceful, and most loving people I have ever met.

When we asked Happy what she had done to bring about all these positive changes in her life, she replied, “Oh, I just gave up all my judgments.”

We left Happy’s home just after the first of the year, having celebrated the New Year with her. Diane took the painting she had given us back to California while I went on to my meeting with some friends in the Middle East. Three weeks later, we received a phone call that Happy had died peacefully in her sleep as she had predicted.

To this day I think about Happy’s story of how her life was transformed through forgiveness. I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to meet this delightful woman. She will forever remain a most powerful model of forgiveness for both Diane and me, and a reminder to us all that we are never too old to change.

Miracles Inspired by Forgiveness

Finally, there is a story in Yitta Halbertstam and Judith Leventhal’s book, Small Miracles: Extraordinary Coincidences from Everyday Life, which clearly illustrates the process of forgiveness. I paraphrase it here:

There was a young man named Joey, who at the age of nineteen left home and turned his back on his Jewish religion. His father was extremely upset with his son and threatened him with total rejection if he did not change his mind.

Joey did not change his mind, however, and all communication between father and son ceased. The son wandered throughout the world to find himself. He fell in love with a wonderful woman, and for a while he felt that his life had meaning and purpose.

A few years went by, and one day in a coffee-house in India, Joey ran into an old friend from his hometown. His friend and he passed the time of day, and then the friend said, “I was so sorry to learn about your father’s death last month.”

Joey was stunned. It was the first he’d heard about his father’s passing. He returned home and began to reexamine his Jewish roots. His girlfriend and he split up because she was Jewish, too, but did not want anything to do with her Jewish tradition.

After a short stay at home, Joey traveled to Jerusalem and found himself at the Wailing Wall. He decided to write a note to his deceased father, expressing his love and asking for his forgiveness.

After Joey wrote the note, he rolled it up and tried to fit it into one of the holes in the wall. In the process, another note fell out of the same hole and landed at his feet. Joey reached down and picked it up. Curious, he unrolled the note. The handwriting looked familiar. He read on. Amazingly, the note was from his father, asking God to forgive him for rejecting his son and expressing deep, unconditional love for Joey.

Joey was thunderstruck. How could this possibly happen? It was more than a coincidence � it was a miracle. As difficult as it was for him to believe what had occurred, there was the note, written in his father’s own hand, irrefutable proof that this was not just a dream.

Joey began studying the Jewish faith in earnest. A couple years later, back in the States, a rabbi who was a friend of his invited him to dinner. That night at the rabbi’s house, Joey came face-to-face with his old girlfriend who had left him years before. She, too, had returned to her Jewish roots.

And, yes, Joey and his girlfriend were married soon afterwards.

Time and again we hear stories in which the process of forgiveness wipes clean the slate of a painful past. It is not always easy to accept the fact that a shift in perception can apparently produce such miracles, removing the blocks to our awareness of love. But Joey’s story indicates that not even death can stand in the way of this process. It is as if the reality of the incident that once caused us such grief vanishes and is replaced by the love that was always there � and will always continue to be there forever and ever.

Anyone shopping for a Mother’s Day card today might reasonably linger in the Sympathy section. We can’t seem to stop mourning the state of modern motherhood. “Madness” is our new metaphor. “Desperate Housewives” are our new cultural icons. And a mother’s brain, as commonly envisioned, is impaired by a supposed full-scale assault on sanity and smarts.

So strong is this last stereotype that when a satirical Web site posted a “study” saying that parents lose an average of 20 I.Q. points on the birth of their first child, MSNBC broadcast it as if it were true. The danger of this perception is clearest for working mothers, who besides bearing children spend more time with them, or doing things for them, than fathers, according to a recent Department of Labor survey.

In addition, the more visibly “encumbered” we are, the more bias we attract: When volunteer groups were shown images of a woman doing various types of work, but in some cases wearing a pillow to make her look pregnant, most judged the “pregnant” woman less competent. Even in liberal San Francisco, a hearing last month to consider a pregnant woman’s bid to be named acting director of the Department of Building Inspection featured four speakers commenting on her condition, with one asking if the city truly meant to hire a “pregnancy brain.”

But what if just the opposite is true? What if parenting really isn’t a zero-sum, children-take-all game? What if raising children is actually mentally enriching for mothers – and fathers?

This is, in fact, what some leading brain scientists, like Michael Merzenich at the University of California, San Francisco, now believe. Becoming a parent, they say, can power up the mind with uniquely motivated learning. Having a baby is “a revolution for the brain,” Dr. Merzenich says.

The human brain, we now know, creates cells throughout life, cells more likely to survive if they’re used. Emotional, challenging and novel experiences provide particularly helpful use of these new neurons, and what adjectives better describe raising a child? Children constantly drag their parents into challenging, novel situations, be it talking a 4-year-old out of a backseat meltdown on the Interstate or figuring out a third-grade homework assignment to make a model of a black hole in space.

Often, we’d rather be doing almost anything else. Aging makes us cling ever more fiercely to our mental ruts. But for most of us, our unique bond with our children yanks us out of them.

And there are other ways that being a dedicated parent strengthens our minds. Research shows that learning and memory skills can be improved by bearing and nurturing offspring. A team of neuroscientists in Virginia found that mother lab rats, just like working mothers, demonstrably excel at time-management and efficiency, racing around mazes to find rewards and get back to the pups in record time. Other research is showing how hormones elevated in parenting can help buffer mothers from anxiety and stress – a timely gift from a sometimes compassionate Mother Nature. Oxytocin, produced by mammals in labor and breast-feeding, has been linked to the ability to learn in lab animals.

Rethinking the mental state of motherhood is reasonable after recent years of evolution of our notion of just what it means to be smart. With our economy newly weighted with people-to-people jobs, and with many professions, including the sciences, becoming more multidisciplinary and collaborative, the people skills we’ve come to think of as “emotional intelligence” are increasingly prized by many wise employers. An ability to tailor your message to your audience, for instance – a skill that engaged parents practice constantly – can mean the difference between failure and success, at home and at work, as Harvard’s president, Lawrence Summers, may now realize.

To be sure, sleep deprivation, overwork and too much “Teletubbies” can sap any parent’s synapses. And to be sure, our society needs to do much more – starting with more affordable, high-quality child care and paid parental leaves – to catch up with other industrialized nations and support mothers and fathers in using their newly acquired smarts to best advantage. That’s why some of the recent “mommy lit” complaints are justified, and probably needed to rouse society to action – if only because nobody will be able to stand our whining for much longer.

Still, it’s worth considering that the torrent of negativity about motherhood comes as part of an era in which intimacy of all sorts is on the decline in this country. Geographically close extended families have long been passé. The marriage rate has declined. And a record percentage of women of child-bearing age today are childless, many by choice.

It’s common these days to hear people say they don’t have time to maintain friendships. Real relationships take a lot of time and work – it’s much more convenient to keep in touch by e-mail. But children insist on face time. They fail to thrive unless we anticipate their needs, work our empathy muscles, adjust our schedules and endure their relentless testing. In the process, if we’re lucky, we may realize that just this kind of grueling work – with our children, or even with others who could simply use some help – is precisely what makes us grow, acquire wisdom and become more fully human. Perhaps then we can start to re-imagine a mother’s brain as less a handicap than a keen asset in the lifelong task of getting smart.

Katherine Ellison is the author of “The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter.”