Technology for Living

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I’m back, and I’m back to stay.

Ok, first: My apologies. I have not been here to document some very interesting stuff, but I will be making up for it as best as I can.

In short: I’ve made considerable progress in my meditative practice, my dietary changes have netted me a loss of a little over 30 in the last two months, and life in general has improved across the board. Things are definitely looking up.

My thanks to all of you who showed such patience. You’ll be seeing more of me presently.

John

What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts! - Robert Heinlein

I’ve been refining my diet over the last year or so. I’ve cut soda. I’ve increased my salad-to-everything-else ratio. Yet, my health goals have remained unmet. I haven’t gotten back into my older, slightly smaller clothes. Indeed, I seemed to be gaining weight, slowly but steadily.

Having tried everything I knew to do, it was time for an outside expert. When I consulted a nutritionist, I learned that while the removal of soda and addition of salad were both extremely good steps, neither one dealt with the real core of the problem.

For someone my height, I should be eating about 3000 Calories per day to stay at the same weight. Also, I shouldn’t be eating much more than 70-80 grams of fat per day. The nutritionist explained the numbers and then showed how eating foods that were densely packed with energy (nuts, cheese, chocolate…..sigh) blew the top off what my body could handle. Thus, even though I don’t eat what I would call a huge amount, the fact that it was all so dense means that I was still defeating myself.

Now I had some facts, I was armed to go forward. I went to calorieking.com and got some tools to really get a solid idea of what’s going on. With the nutrition information at my fingertips, I had what I needed to make intelligent, healthy and (yes) tasty choices in my diet. None of that was possible until I had the solid data.

Want to improve your life? How much?

The same can be said about improving your life in any dimension. If you want some peace of mind, how much? If you want to me more financially stable, then what are the numbers for that? That one may be the easiest in terms of getting the numbers, although I still wouldn’t call it “easy” per se.

In EFT, before you get going, you assess what’s bothering you on a scale of 1-10. After one round, you re-assess and figure out where you are on the same scale. This may be all that you need. Is it subjective? Of course it is! However, subjective data is valid when it comes to a subjective matter like you enjoying life. If you have no debt, and $50,000 a year passive income, most people would call that a 10. Some wouldn’t, however.  Use what works for you.

Once you have your facts and numbers, it’s time to proceed. Keep checking the status and seeing what is and isn’t working for you. If your spot on the 1-10 scale is getting better, then call it a win. If not, then try something else. It may be arbitrary and subjective, but it is data, and it is giving you an indication.

Above all, remember to be gentle with yourself in this process. It is unfortunately extremely common to beat ourselves up over the status of the situation. This can lead us to not even get the data. Speaking from personal experience (see above), this is really stupid. Had I known a year ago what I know now, I would be in a different position. (Whether or not I was ready to learn it then or whether I could have applied it as easily is a different matter, but I think it’s still valid.) Don’t sabotage yourself by skipping the first part of any endeavor: Get the facts!

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As evidenced in the last couple of posts, I’ve been noticing how my life is changing/growing recently. This reminded me of a passage from the Camelot musical that impacted me as a kid. The wizard Merlin impressed upon young Arthur that a great skill for coping with sadness is to strive to learn something. In my own experience, I’ve found this to be very true. Beyond that, I find that unless I am actively learning something, I’m just not the same individual. I have less drive, less joie de vivre as I do when I’m actually learning something.

It’s not a cure-all, however: Focusing on learning to the point of forgetting to actually engage in life will also backfire. It is tempting to think that with just a little more knowledge suddenly the path will open for you and it’ll be smooth sailing. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case.

(On a side-note: You do get experiences like that, but they tend to happen when you’re putting forth the effort and engaging life. Suddenly, a new bit of knowledge makes your efforts much easier and/or more effective. Book learning and hands-on learning are compliments, not opposites.)

When I occasionally feel overwhelmed at life, one thing which I tend to do is to ask myself what I’m learning. This is actually a bit of a sucker play: The act of doing so starts a process of analyzing what’s going on in life for new lessons. That and a review of what I am/have been learning recently remind me that I am still moving forward in my journey, and that while I may feel like a becalmed ship, the currents are still taking me where I want to go.

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Having decided to take better care of myself and my health recently, I have had time to re-evaluate my thoughts and decisions. I’ve asked myself if I wish that things had been done differently. As always I had no desire to turn back the clock and change things, but I wanted to really dig into why. Here is what I came to:

“Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.”
-Robert Heinlein

Even though I wound up paying for it, and even though I may not have gotten the end result I was looking for, I had priceless learning and experience. This wasn’t some pre-packaged, sanitized, game-with-cheat-codes-on, this was me stepping up to the plate and taking a big swing.

This is something which I hadn’t really done in a while. It’s the tendency of all of us to stay within areas that are more-or-less safe. Even the risks we take are usually planned out and carefully managed. That’s not to say that we should be jumping off bridges every day, but my point is that few of us actually take a serious step beyond those boundaries that we build. We’re safe there, we know what to expect, and how the story goes.

I have been given a rare and precious gift: I’ve actually over the course of the last little while moved outside my old boundaries somewhat. Of course, I’m not “free” of them - they’re as necessary a tool as your skin. However, being able to move beyond those boundaries is vital if you actually want to breathe with life instead of being a cog in the machine. I’m not just talking about work, here, either: You can let gravity bring you down until all you think about is the area of ground ahead of your feet that you’re looking at. You can stay that way all of your days. Alternately, you can take a chance and look up. You might stumble, or you might see a beautiful sky, or a work of art that captures your attention, or a case of need that you can fill.

Take a chance on yourself and take a chance with the world. At the very least, you’ll be able to say you’ve done it. If it’s still not for you, then you can go back to staring at the ground, but you’ll still be the richer for the experience.

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I have been pursuing many different things recently. One thing has been my meditation practice. I’ve been looking to get certain results from my meditation beyond relaxation and such. I fancy myself something of an explorer, and I wanted to use my meditative practice as part of that.

I have been following a specific path for so long, that it took an outside view to really make me aware that I was completely missing what I was looking for. I had been so focused, so intent, on the process, that I was unable to accept the result. I had quieted my mind to hear, but still I wasn’t listening.

The equivalent is if you are standing in the woods and you’re listening for a specific bird. You may be focusing on standing still. You may be trying to make your breath as quiet as possible, You may be trying to be as unobtrusive as possible so as not to scare the wildlife around you. However, if you are consumed with these thoughts, you will never actually listen to hear the birdsong.

Quite often, in our mad rush to accomplish, to get and to have, we don’t recognize that most of what we want, we pretty much already have. In the Sedona method, you learn to let go of the sense of lack. In the process you find that you have more of what you thought you were lacking than you ever imagined. Take the time to remember what you truly have and who you are. You are a uniquely gifted individual. Don’t throw those gifts aside because they don’t appear the way you expect.

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