Category: consciousness

Happiness

Is happiness elusive?

Well the first thing that raised a smile was me putting in the word ‘happiness’ into a Google search and noticing the response – About 50,000,000 results (0.15 seconds)!

50 million results – wow.

Let me tell you that I don’t propose to cast myself as anything other than an ordinary Joe. The simple motivation behind this Post is that if a single person reading these words gets some insight into seeing their own lives in a richer way, then it’s worth while.

Let’s come at the subject from the perspective of good mental health. What’s that then?

Here’s an extract from MIND – the leading mental health charity in the UK.

From which comes this:

What do we mean by good mental health?

Good mental health isn’t something you have, but something you do. To be mentally healthy you must value and accept yourself. This means that:

You care about yourself and you care for yourself. You love yourself, not hate yourself. You look after your physical health – eat well, sleep well, exercise and enjoy yourself.

You see yourself as being a valuable person in your own right. You don’t have to earn the right to exist. You exist, so you have the right to exist.

You judge yourself on reasonable standards. You don’t set yourself impossible goals, such as ‘I have to be perfect in everything I do’, and then punish yourself when you don’t reach those goals.

If you don’t value and accept yourself, you are always frightened that other people will reject you. To prevent people seeing how unacceptable you are, you keep them at a distance, and so you are always frightened and lonely. If you value yourself, you don’t expect people to reject you. You aren’t frightened of other people. You can be open, and so you enjoy good relationships.

If you value and accept yourself, you are able to relax and enjoy yourself, without feeling guilty. When you face a crisis, you know that, no matter how difficult the situation is, you will manage. How we see ourselves is central to every decision we make. People who value and accept themselves cope with life.

The BBC, often so good at important public service issues, ran a series of programmes in 2008 under the banner of The Happiness Formula. Included in that web link is a simple test to measure one’s own happiness.

Psychologists say it is possible to measure your happiness.

This test designed by psychologist Professor Ed Diener from the University of Illinois, takes just a minute to complete.

NB: I just tried this test myself and wasn’t sure if the analysis part of the test was working – try it yourself. But the information offered is still well worth reading.

There’s more background on Prof. Diener here. And a short video below.

Perhaps more valuable is another excellent TEDtalks video Habits of Happiness.

Enjoy and smile!

By Paul Handover

Dolphins – truly innocent victims

This just makes me weep!

Watch.

Read and be Educated.

In Japan, fishermen round up and slaughter hundreds and even thousands of dolphins and other small whales each year.In the small fishing village of Taiji, entire schools of dolphins are driven into a hidden cove after a prolonged chase. Once trapped inside the cove, the fishermen kill the dolphins, slashing their throats with knives or stabbing them with spears. The water turns red with their blood, and the air fills with their screams.

Now go here and here.

Take action.

By going here.

Not for your sake, not for my sake but for the sake of this magnificent creature.

I tried to insert a picture of dolphins being slaughtered in Japan but just couldn’t handle the negativity that the picture sent out.

Read this and focus on the beauty of these creatures – and let that inspire you to take action. Please.

By Paul Handover

Serendipity

Is it luck or something more fundamental?

I love the word serendipity. It reminds me of the power of letting go. Allowing the universe to reflect back what is in our souls, good or bad!

Before moving to why this article surfaced in my mind, let’s just examine a couple of web definitions of the word. Here’s The Free Dictionary:

ser·en·dip·i·ty

n. pl. ser·en·dip·i·ties

1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

2. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.

3. An instance of making such a discovery.

.
Here’s the definition from the UK Web Dictionary:

Pure luck in discovering things you were not looking for.

But the Buddhist belief is that there is no such thing as luck. See here:

The dictionary defines luck as ‘believing that whatever happens, either good or bad, to a person in the course of events is due to chance, fate or fortune.’ The Buddha denied this belief completely. Everything that happens has a specific cause or causes and there must be some relationships between the cause and the effect. (My italics.)

So you takes your choice! The Free Dictionary goes on to provide a fascinating account of the word history of serendipity:

Word History: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for the word serendipity, which he coined in one of the 3,000 or more letters on which his literary reputation primarily rests. In a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.” Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip.He explained that this name was part of the title of “a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip:as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of….”

Anyway, to a real example of serendipity!

I subscribe to the Blog The Sales 2.0 Network and therefore had my attention brought to the article published on the 16th October entitled Be Inspired. Be a Changemaker. Here’s what caught my eye.

The work that the dedicated folks at WITNESS do is both humbling and uplifting and puts into perspective the value of what we do everyday.

Take 10 minutes from your busy day to view this video and then look at the WITNESS website to see what real change looks like. It will inspire you and enrich your life. It is important.

That reference to the charity WITNESS impressed me. Especially the fact that

it was founded by that great musician Peter Gabriel.

Here’s the video mentioned in the extract above:

So how to close this particular post? Not sure, to be honest. But whether one believes in luck or not, there’s no doubt that we attract the world around us that we ‘deserve’.

As has been said before on this Blog, we get more of what we think about most. So really the Buddhist approach that there “must be some relationships between the cause and the effect” is more than sufficient reason to be a good and integrous member of this planet.

By Paul Handover

The power of love

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Jala ad-Din Rumi 1207 – 1273

One would suspect that readers of this Post title would have many different responses to the word ‘love’. Perhaps in this harsh, economically challenged world, it seems a little quaint to think about love in anything other than a romantic sense.

But, trust me, there’s nothing quaint or ‘away with the fairies’ about reminding us all of both the power of love and the urgent need to bring that power further up the scale of human consciousness. Let’s even try and aim for where dogs are. Dogs intuitively demonstrate unconditional love to those around them that they trust.

Before we look at the effects of love, let’s remind ourselves of some of the outcomes from the stress and trauma generated by present times. A news item from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published in July, 2009, said this:

Researchers at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Oxford University estimated that soaring stress brought on by job losses could prompt a 2.4% rise in suicide rates in people under-64 years of age, a 2.7% rise in heart attack deaths in men between 30 and 44 years, and a 2.4% rise in homicides rates, corresponding to thousands of deaths in European Union countries, such as the UK.

Will Hutton, in his outstanding book, Them and Us, writes on Page 9:

Nor is the impact just economic. The sudden flipping from the wild optimism of the boom to the personal gloom and self-doubt of recession and system-wide financial crisis is bad for health and well-being.

So it appears as if there’s no shortage of reasons why engaging the power of love offers infinite possibilities for us all.

The BBC recently reported on research that shows that people in love can lower their levels of pain.

Love hurts, at least according to many a romantic songwriter, but it may also help ease pain, US scientists suggest.

Brain scans suggest many of the areas normally involved in pain response are also activated by amorous thoughts.

Stanford University researchers gave 15 students mild doses of pain, while checking if they were distracted by gazing at photos of their beloved.

Later on it that BBC item, it reads thus:

Professor Paul Gilbert, a neuropsychologist from the University of Derby, said that the relationship between emotional states and the perception of pain was clear.

He said: “One example is a footballer who has suffered quite a painful injury, but who is able to continue playing because of his emotionally charged state.”

He added that while the effect noticed by the Stanford researchers might only be short-lived in the early stages of a love affair, it may well be replaced by something similar later in a relationship, with a sense of comfort and wellbeing generating the release of endorphins.

“It’s important to recognise that people who feel alone and depressed may have very low pain thresholds, whereas the reverse can be true for people who feel secure and cared for.

Prof Gilbert states on his web page that “After years of exploring the processes underpinning shame and its role in a variety of psychopathologies,

my current research is exploring the neurophysiology and therapeutic effectiveness of compassion focused therapy.” (My italics.)

The old adage that you can’t love another if you don’t love yourself is based on very high levels of awareness. So the starting point to gaining the power of love is self-awareness. Here’s something from MIND:

Good mental health isn’t something you have, but something you do. To be mentally healthy you must value and accept yourself. This means that:

You care about yourself and you care for yourself. You love yourself, not hate yourself. You look after your physical health – eat well, sleep well, exercise and enjoy yourself.

You see yourself as being a valuable person in your own right. You don’t have to earn the right to exist. You exist, so you have the right to exist.

You judge yourself on reasonable standards. You don’t set yourself impossible goals, such as ‘I have to be perfect in everything I do’, and then punish yourself when you don’t reach those goals.

Finally, back to romantic love. The most glorious feeling in the world.

Again expressed so beautifully by Rumi: “The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”

Some things are timeless.

By Paul Handover

Prayer for enlightment

A large reflection about truth, love and some form of meaning of what it is all about!

Funny how things happen!

I wrote the other post published today about an hour before this one. I have the CD Weave A Prayer from Glorious Chorus playing in the background and was idly reading the notes on the CD cover. The third track is Earth Blessing and the notes include the Sanskrit chant Prayer for Enlightment.

There are many strands that may be easily woven together to demonstrate, again and again, that love, integrity and grace are the only things that matter.

It’s so much about living in the present, appreciating the moment, just being. The wonderful example set by dogs – it really is about enlightment.

OM
ASATOMA SADGAMAYA
TAMASOMA JYOTHIRGAMAYA
MRITHYORMA AMRUTANGAMAYA
OM SHANTI, SHANTI, SHANTI

Lead us from darkness to light
From ignorance to truth
And from death to eternity
Let peace prevail everywhere

Watch this space.

By Paul Handover

We are all together

A wonderful reminder of the power of community

Hopefully, by the time this Post is published (it’s being written on the 12th) the steel rescue chamber above the trapped Chilean miners will be in action, carefully and steadily bringing the men to the surface, one by one. The event will be mainstream news so Learning from Dogs will simply watch from the side.

(And to the huge joy of millions, we now all know the miners are safe! Jon)

But there was something that caught my eye from the BBC News website on the 12th. Here’s the extract:

Meanwhile, Alejandro Pino, a journalist who has been in daily contact with the miners and advising them on handling interviews, revealed that he had been helping them prepare a speech.

“I asked them to give me just one word and with that word I would show them how to create a speech,” he said.

“It was just a try, so I can repeat to you what happened because I was touched by it and they were touched by it too, not because I made the speech but because the word they chose to start with was extraordinary: it was ‘comradeship’.”

Comradeship!

It doesn’t take very long to realise that mining is one of those crafts that relies on comradeship.

Here’s a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The greatness of a craft consists firstly in how it brings comradeship to men.”

From the word ‘comradeship’ it seems a small step to the word ‘community’ and all that is implied for the health and welfare of mankind.

Here’s a lovely reminder from William Morris in a paper on community by Mark K Smith published on the Infed website (for citation see end of post).

Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship’s sake ye do them. (A Dream of John Ball, Ch. 4; first published inThe Commonweal 1886/7)

Fellowship, community, comradeship – call it what you will, it will have to be the essence of mankind’s future.

By Jon Lavin

(Full citation is: Smith, M. K. (2001) ‘Community’ in the encyclopedia of informal education

http://www.infed.org/community/community.htm)

Ricochet – a P.S.

Ricochet writes to Learning from Dogs!

Yesterday, Learning from Dogs published a Post about Ricochet, the surfing dog.

I was delighted to receive a ‘reply’ from this wonderful canine which is reproduced in full here.

Thank you for posting about my work. It really helps raise awareness of my causes, and I appreciate it!

Here is the latest video of me & little Ian with the brain injury. He experienced a huge milestone in this video, during the session. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iIv5t2qKL4

[See below, Ed.]

Please join me on Facebook… it’s updated several times a day!http://www.facebook.com/SurfDogRicochet

Thanks again!

Ricochet

Indeed, I have to offer my thanks for the reply from Ricochet because my travels over the last few days made it impossible to keep the Blog posts running. This reply, turned into a Post, prevented a day being missed which, if it would have happened, would have been the first missed day since the Blog started on July 15th, 2009!

By Paul Handover

In my lifetime?

Possibly the greatest discovery of all time.

What would that be? Finding evidence that there is intelligent life on another planet.

With the assumption, of course, that there is intelligent life on Planet Earth 😉

So what prompted this article?

Simply that the British Magazine The New Scientist on its website has a recent article with the intriguing heading of Found: first rocky exoplanet that could host life.

Here are some extracts:

Astronomers have found the first alien world that could support life on its surface. It is both at the right distance from its star to potentially harbour liquid water and probably has a rocky composition like Earth.

“That’s the most exciting exoplanet I’ve seen yet,” says James Kasting of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who was not involved in the discovery.

The planet orbits a dim red dwarf star 20 light years from Earth called Gliese 581. Four planets were already known around the star, with two lying near the inner and outer edges of the habitable zone, where liquid water – and therefore potentially life – could exist on its surface.

Gliese 581 planet — A rocky world has been found squarely in the middle of the star Gliese 581's habitable zone (Image: Lynette Cook)

The article continues:

The discovery suggests habitable planets must be common, with 10 to 20 per cent of red dwarfs and sun-like stars boasting them, the team says. That’s because Gliese 581 is one of just nine stars out to its distance that have been searched with high enough precision to reveal a planet in the habitable zone.

“If you take the number of stars in our galaxy – a few hundred billion – and multiply them by 10 or 20 per cent, you end up with 20 or 40 billion potentially habitable planets out there,” says Vogt. “It’s a very large number.”

For more years than I can imagine, I have always thought that the most amazing scientific find of my lifetime would be the discovery of life on another planet.

I’m 65 at present – wonder what the odds are? But surely this announcement by The New Scientist does increase them?

CASSE

The Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economy

My post published a short while ago contained a contribution from Carla. This, in part, is what she said:

We have to try to work constructively for change. I keep urging people to check out the potential for an economy based not on constant growth, which is impossible on a finite planet, but on some sane principles of equity and sustainability.

If you go to http://www.steadystate.org and look at their position statement, you can see that people from all over the world are signing on–yes, just three or four people a day–but they are from every continent and just about every country.

Now, can you help this “go viral”?

I spent sufficiently long at the CASSE website to be comfortable that it is well worth supporting. Here are the members of the Executive Board. Here are the staff and here are their advisors. Here’s their Mission:

The mission of CASSE is to advance the steady state economy, with stabilized population and consumption, as a policy goal with widespread public support. We pursue this mission by:

educating citizens, organizations, and policy makers on the conflict between economic growth and (1) environmental protection, (2) ecological and economic sustainability, and (3) national security and international stability;

promoting the steady state economy as a desirable alternative to economic growth;

studying the means to establish a steady state economy.

Even if you don’t want to make a financial subscription to CASSE you can still register your support. Here is their Position Statement:

The CASSE position sets the record straight on the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution are just three powerful examples. And how will the next generation find jobs when the planet can’t support our overgrown economy? The CASSE position calls for a desirable solution – a steady state economy with stabilized population and consumption – beginning in the wealthiest nations and not with extremist tactics. Join the likes of E. O. Wilson, Jane Goodall, and David Suzuki; fill in the information below to sign the position and support a healthy, sustainable economy.

Go for it. After all, one of the definitions of madness is to continue doing the same thing and expect a different result.

By Paul Handover

S’shhh

Spend more time doing ….. well, nothing!

A couple of things happened today (written on the 2nd) that reminded me, once again, of the number one lesson that we can learn from dogs, that of quietly and peacefully enjoying now!

The first was a call with a close family member who has been over-stressed for months with a very sick father and juggling very demanding work pressures. R. took a couple of days off, 5 weeks ago, and immediately went down with a severe case of gastric flu, putting her to bed for 4 weeks!

See how her body demanded some ‘peace‘ as soon as it could get a wedge into her otherwise manic life!

Then later on I was trawling a few web sites and came back to Zen Habits, a beautiful Blog published by Leo Babauta. His latest Post was called simply

find stillness to cure the illness

Precisely!

Leo starts thus:

It’s a busy day, and you’re inundated by non-stop emails, text messages, phone calls, instant message requests, notifications, interruptions of all kinds.

The noise of the world is a dull roar that pervades every second of your life. It’s a rush of activity, a drain on your energy, a pull on your attention, until you no longer have the energy to pay attention or take action.

It’s an illness, this noise, this rush. It can literally make us sick. We become stressed, depressed, fat, burnt out, slain by the slings and arrows of technology.

The cure is simple: it’s stillness.

Now go and read the full article, not for Leo’s sake, nor for my sake. No, read it for your own sake.

And with no apologies to those regular readers of Learning from Dogs, who will have seen this picture before, look deep into this face below.

This is really how to do S’shhh! Go on, try it!

By Paul Handover

What do we mean by good mental health?

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