Living On Purpose

I have recently found the author SARK, which is an acronym for Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy. So many people who participated in the call where I met her were raving about how she changed their lives; so I decided to go to the library to check out her books. I found two: Transformation Soup and Succulent Wild Woman. She’s authored plenty more, and all are hand written (that’s right, handwriting! She didn’t choose a font, unless someone decided to turn her handwriting into a font and call it SARK) with little drawings interspersed through the pages.

If you are on a healing journey in your life, I’d recommend her book Transformation Soup: Healing for the Splendidly Imperfect written in 2000. It starts out:

My mother is no longer the problem…now what?

And SARK explains about how she dedicated her early life to blaming her mother for her problems. She experienced abuse as a child and spent 9 years in psychotherapy on her own healing journey. At one point her therapist suggested that she stop talking about her mother during therapy! Her response:

I felt like I’d fallen out of a plane without a parachute, and finally managed to say, “What will we talk about then?”

Transformation Soup then goes on to explore the different healing modalities SARK has come across as she describes them with wit, wisdom, humor and pun-ny drawings. This book will help you during your own healing journey, for sure.

Succulent Wild Woman: Dancing with Your Wonder-full Self from 1997 is a book about exploring your creativity from all angles, but there are bits of everything in this book, and it’s quite hard to say what it’s about! Journaling, love, self-acceptance, erotic robots, feeling safe, being alone, how to paint, healing, motherhood, body image….this book really is an exploration.

On the call from thewomenmasters.com, SARK said, “All growth comes in spirals and layers.” That’s what I was aiming for when I designed my spiral shell wallpaper. (Use that link to go to the main wallpapers page and scroll to the 2 with shells on them: the 3rd and 4th from the top.) SARK clarifies what self-love is: you loving you so you can love the world more. Also, she said she supports people learning about their biochemistry as a way to heal oneself.

That’s what I was going for when I wrote Sad For No Reason. People go to therapy for years and years; some show great progress while others show little to none. Why? Is it the extent of the damage done in the first place during tender formative years? Or is the lack of progress due to biochemical deficiencies that short-circuit our brains’ ability to heal iteslf and accomplish creative problem solving? This is what I explore in Sad For No Reason. What I found astounded me and I hope it will astound you, too. When given the appropriate amino acid supplements and when the diet is cleaned up, the very people who struggled with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, or irritability for years with no progress during psychotherapy, could suddenly make leaps and bounds of progress in counseling.

Back to SARK! She has now become the self-proclaimed master of re-framing problems; so much so that she jokingly said her next store will be called “SARK’s ReFrame Shop”. You stop in, tell her your problem, and she’ll re-frame it into some kind of opportunity. That’s the trick; to find the opportunity within your current problems. So, say your creative dreams out loud, hug yourself daily, use her web site PlanetSark and her daily inspiration telephone line (1-415-546-3742 for a recorded message from SARK) and continue your journey to becoming a Succulent Wild Woman (or man).

I’m going on a lark here, and I’ve decided to share a report I wrote in the sixth grade. “What the heck could be so special about a sixth grade report,” you ask? This particular report recently surfaced in my life, and I was surprised and proud to re-read it.

As you may know, I offer the ebook Sad For No Reason: How to Use the Mood-Food Connection to Banish Depression Naturally. I came to write this book because I love the subject of natural health care, and I believe deeply that everyone needs to be educated about the types of foods that will help or hinder their health.

I found the following report in a box of old school papers. It confirms that I have been interested in this subject nearly my whole life. The teacher, Mrs. Mills, let us pick any subject we wanted to research, and she probably gave us a month to complete the work. I would have been eleven or twelve years old when I researched and wrote it. I’ve typed it exactly as I wrote it, and I included (sic) after my original errors. I could have stopped after chapter one. I have no idea what drove me to add chapter two about deadly mushrooms. I suppose I wanted to give a well-rounded view of wild plants; some are edible and some are poisonous.

The Wild World of Edible Plants

Please use this link to scan the report. I typed it up and included scans of the illustrations and a handwriting sample to show that even in the sixth grade, I gave one hundred percent to the subjects I was interested in. I tended towards perfectionism, and went above and beyone the teacher’s expectations. That’s the kind of effort I put into my ebook Sad for No Reason.

Last week I introduced Michael Neill, who will be a speaker at The Big Chat on June 12, 2009.

Today, I have some great information on Bill Cumming, the other presenter/host of The Big Chat. A regular conversation for him is, “What can one person do?” Here is what he has found out:

The capacity to create the world we desire and the lives we dream about, exists within each of us. We have seen that when individuals experience themselves as valued and are treated with dignity and respect, they take better care of themselves and everything around them.

When people feel valued, they take better care of themselves. I like to read this line over and over. Every day, I meet anywhere from one to fifty new people,  in stores, commuting, at cash registers, delivering mail…you get the picture. When I take the above quote to heart and really, really ask myself if I helped them feel valued through my small interaction with them, many times the answer is no. Sure, I use my manners. Sure, I say please and thank you. But I’m not going out of my way to make sure that my acquaintances know that I value them. What if I did? What if I did that even if I were suffering in some way? Whose outlook on life could I change for the better?

Back to Bill…

The conversation “What One Person Can Do” is a class, and some of the clients for the  program include school systems, Job Corps programs, the Maine State Prison System, YMCAs, corporations and individuals.

The goals of the class are so powerful I decided to take them straight from Bill’s web site:

• To experience the power that resides within each of us.
• To experience our ability to create meaningful, productive, joyous, contributory lives.
• To experience our ability to create environments where others can choose to create meaningful, productive, joyous, contributory lives.
• To experience our ability to maintain our focus when it seems that no one else is interested or cares.
• To experience ourselves as powerful, capable and able, completely in charge of our own well being.
• To experience our ability to create an environment of exceptional support, communication and teamwork.
• To experience our ability to be master problem solvers.
• To experience our ability to see what is wanted and needed in any situation and know how best to produce that result.
• To develop a process of self-care that supports each participant, their families and producing brilliant work.

All I can say is wow. If I had all of these skills perfected….oh, what one person can do! But, I’m a work in progress and I’m partway there to experiencing all of these things. I see that the main keyword in this list is “experience,” which is very different from “learn.” Sure, I’ve “learned” that I have the ability to “create an environment of exceptional support, communication and teamwork.” I have not, however, had the experience of this kind of environment in every situation I come across.

I read about the history of this One Person seminar, and I was further blown away. Bill was visiting a jail, trying to understand why in the world any man would rape his own daughter. He met a rapist and murderer who offered a sincere apology that Bill’s daughter had to go through a rape. Bill understood that people CAN be reformed; changed in their hearts.

“Ever since then all he has wanted to do is share with the world what he discovered to be true — that people who are well and know that they are loved do not damage other people or their environment.  All the damage in our society comes from people who do not feel well (healthy or whole in relationship to themselves).”

Everyone, I want to say how I, Jessica Alvarez, deeply feel. It is my mission and could very well be the mission of every human on the planet, to overcome past hurts through compassion, mindfulness, experiential knowing, and forgiveness. I must take charge of my becoming well, because I interact with other people on this planet. The legacy I want to leave is not that I have damaged the people around me through dysfunctional behavior, but that I have inspired the others around me to want to become well, too.

Bill went on to form the Boothby Institute, a non-profit 501(c)3 organization created to provide people the opportunity to experience ownership and responsibility in a climate of empathy and loving-kindness. And thus, the “What One Person Can Do” core program was born.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be meeting both Michael Neill and Bill Cummings in Los Angeles California for The Big Chat. Won’t you join me?

I had the opportunity to see the documenary, “Processed People.” The message is simple: to have good health, eat food, not food-like things, and exercise.” And oh, how hard that advice is to follow in today’s society!

Just look at the line-up of DOCTORS who were interviewed for this film! Processed People: Experts

The obesity specialist doctor has observed that when people are put into a controlled environment, namely his clinic, and they eat a healthy diet and exercise every day, then health problems disappear. Cholesterol drops. Blood triglyceride levels drop. Diabetes goes away. Cardiovascular health returns. How completely simple: eat a plant-based diet and exercise to be healthy. Yet it’s difficult to carry out!

Experts in the film also noted that every system in the body is improved by a proper diet, including one’s MENTAL HEALTH. Depression is often cleared up when processed foods are removed from the diet.

A processed food is one that has had all the natural nutrients stripped out of it, and then synthetic vitamins are added back in. That would be anything bleached, like white flour and white sugar. And that would be anything pasteurized, like commercial milk. What does that leave us with? What can we eat now that 90% of our daily intake is now no better than poison?

That leaves whole foods. Yes, to reduce your depression, or even to make it disappear, you will help your therapist greatly if you just eat whole foods. Then you will be thinking clearly, free of false moods brought on by nutritional imbalances and deficiencies, so that your therapist can help you make real progress! I have a deep feeling that just like judges who say, “I hope to never see you in my court again!” therapists also will be happy to help you through your problem with a send-off like this, “I hope you don’t have to come back! Have good health!” (Although I can’t vouch for all therapists. I would hope they got into the profession to really HELP people move through problems)

Here is a quote from Processed People that I thought was eye-opening:

You either spend time exercising and eating right, or you spend time in the health care system trying to treat the problems that resulted from you NOT spending the time to exercise and eat right.

To your strong will power!

p.s. I almost forgot to talk about the reason I named this post “trends in medical care.” The movie made a point that our health care system has failed us.  It is now nothing more than a disease care service. It does nothing to educate the public how to eat right and exercise. It promotes taking pharmaceuticals to cure all ails, but doing that is simply treating the symptom and not going to the root of the issue and really curing the illness. Doctors, especially the big disease specialists, are getting rich off of doing procedures, not from giving goodwill classes to educate their patients how to live healthy. It is up to each individual to take charge of his/her health and health issues through research and knowledge.

I like to have clean floors. According to Twitter, I’m not the only one! Since it’s Saturday there were pages upon pages of entries with the words “clean floor” in Twitter search today! Weekends are housecleaning time!

Usually, the first chore I do each morning is to sweep the floor, or ask my older son to sweep it. Last night my younger son, 3 years old, decided he wanted some sugar. He grabbed an opened bag of large-grain cane sugar that I carelessly left where he could reach it.

*Stop the presses,* you say, “I thought the Liveonpurpose girl was all about not eating sugar!” Yes, yes, I have preached that in the past, and will in the future. I like to pat myself on the back when I buy the unbleached cane sugar, but it’s only a step up from refined white sugar. The fact is, our family slows to a grinding halt without it. Husband needs sugar and milk in his morning coffee. I take it in my green tea.  I use cane sugar or brown sugar to sweeten the children’s oatmeal. Okay, I’m done making excuses, I love sugar. But I have educated myself on what it does to my body and I use it in moderation. There. Done. On with the story.

…carelessly left where he could reach it. Of course, it spilled all over the floor! Despite the efforts of my older son who generously cleaned it up without being asked, I could still feel the grainy sugar under my feet.

I swept some more until I couldn’t see any more grains on the floor, and since it was night, went to prepare for bedtime.

The next morning I awoke and climbed the stairs to behold all the sugar on the floor I couldn’t see the night before. The sunbeams were pointing out the imperfections on the floor for me, so I could easily clean it up. (Allegory, anyone?)

This is a case of  ‘as without, so within’, but a little mixed up. The light needs to come on in our heart/mind to point out the emotional things that need cleaning up within us. I didn’t kick myself in the rear for not being able to see that sugar the night before. I didn’t chastise my older son for not sweeping all of it when he tried, either. I simply said, “Wow, now I can see well enough to clean this up properly.” The process of self-observation and  self-inquiry turns on the light in your heart/mind.

Self-observation is all about developing the watcher in your mind. This watcher simply observes you react to everyday situations. Oftentimes, just the act of watching yourself make decisions or reactions is enough to curb a behavior that doesn’t serve you any more. Sometimes you need to take it a step further and engage in self-inquiry, such as doing The Work of Byron Katie that I mentioned in the previous blog post.

Do you see the image of the floor below? The morning sunbeam is neutral, simply showing me what is there. It isn’t mad that the sugar is on the floor! It’s just a light. This is how you can approach your emotional work, like you’re simply turning on the lights. There may be a mess there that took years to build up, or there may be simply a little spill. In either case you are to be commended for taking action once the lights are on. One step at a time, done with love, will clear the heart for the future.

I was recently asked this excellent question, “What would you say are the biggest obstacles most people run into that prevents them from living on purpose?”

I would say a person is living on purpose when he or she has relative control over thought processes.  I say it this way because all of us get into accidents, make mistakes, or fall by the wayside. When that happens, our reaction to our situation will reveal whether we are going to pull ourselves up with steadfast purpose.

So, to answer the question, the biggest obstacle preventing people from living on purpose happens when we relinquish our control over our thought patterns, thereby getting stuck in the victim mentality, or in an entitlement mindset, or with low self worth.

We need to become aware of the repetitive thought patterns that hold us back by witnessing how we think right now. Then, let it be okay to be who we are. Loving and accepting ourselves for who we are RIGHT NOW is pretty much vital. Beating ourselves up mentally for our own mistakes digs a deeper hole in the rut of our repetitive thinking.

T. Harv Eker introduced me to the idea of having a big enough toolbox to be able to overcome problems:

• When it comes to…success, you can have the greatest tools (strategies and systems) in the world but if there’s a tiny leak in your “toolbox” (your mind), you’re going to have a problem.

Americans are consuming approximately $9.6 Billion in “Self Improvement” or “Personal Development” products and services each year! There is no shortage of tools to put in your toolbox, that’s for sure.

I would recommend The Work & Holosync simply because I know these techniques. There are plenty more very effective tools for becoming aware of our thought processes, like the Sedona Method and NeuroLinguistic Programming. I have not tried these, though.

I’m just learning about EFT, or the Emotional Freedom Technique.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  Some people think it’s malarkey, and some people like Dr. Mercola endorse it fully.  I’ll try it out and see for myself. You can find many more videos on it at Youtube. It’s just a tool to use to get yourself out of a thinking ‘rut’.

When web site developers are building code for an online application, like a proprietary shopping cart, they need to know exactly what the application is supposed to do before they even start. They need to know who the audience is, what the end goal is, whether there will be volume discounts, whether the opt-in email list will be offered before or after the sale, and exactly how many steps the user should see during checkout.

As the developers near completion, and testing begins, managers will ask for new functionalities that nobody anticipated in the beginning. This is called “scope creep.” Now the developers have to go back to square one and try to hack in the new function without completely rewriting the entire application. It’s a patch, because deadline is coming.

Then, two months after launch of the application, users are demanding their own control panel so they can change details about themselves easily (just pretend this wasn’t written in the first place). Now the developers have to take code from another source and make it work with their own application. It increases the “bugginess” of the application because of some loopholes and perhaps not enough time built into the project for testing.

After a year or two of changes to the code, the developers feel it would just be better to start over, taking into account all these new features, and rebuild from the ground up. It would be a cleaner application all around. But budget constraints disallow this approach, and the application must make do as-is.

This is my allegory for how today’s society has been built. Systems and governments and political divisions have all been put into place piecemeal. Our society is built patchwork style, with lots of loopholes and bugs. People are falling through the cracks. People are losing their lives, their livelihoods. The bugs in this system run so far down and there has been so much scope creep in the infrastructure of our daily lives that it only makes sense to me to make a fresh start.

For instance, I know that to combat depression, a person’s diet needs to be clean, and free of highly processed junk foods and refined sugars. To be free of depression, a person needs to be able to make a living doing what he enjoys, whatever gives him a sense of purpose in his life. To be free of depression, a person needs to be able to communicate with his family members calmly without fear of an emotional blowout (often these blowouts are due to poor nourishment in the first place, which predisposes a person to fits of rage…)

But when I try to envision living like that in this society, I draw a blank. I go to work, I want to eat lunch, but there are no alternatives to fast food; nothing I can grab in a half an hour that fits into a “feel-good” diet…unless I really work hard at preparing lunches at home, which I don’t. I send my children to school, but they also do not have a healthy choice for lunch at school and they’re overwhelmed by soda machines and candy sold in the school store. Anytime I want my family to watch TV, I have to subject them to false advertising, violence, foul language, lack of morals…ok I’m sure you get it by now. Unless I extricate us from society, how can I make healthy lifestyle changes work, especially when the rest of my family is resisting any changes?

This is what an “intentional community” is all about. Wouldn’t it be nice to build your own society with a higher purpose in mind? Yes, there are monasteries, there are ashrams. These are communities centered around spiritual growth and connection to God. What if you wanted to include anybody who is hurting because of today’s society, regardless of religious views? Could it work? It certainly gets complicated. In mentally building my own “simcity” I realize I’ll need stores that only stock whole foods; nothing refined. I’ll need either our own tv channel or no tv at all. I’ll need schools that don’t treat children as cattle moving towards the guillotine, but as real individuals with infinite potential. I’ll need a medical care system that is radically different from what we have now, with no insiders’ links to big pharmaceuticals. Hmm, get rid of the bribery, the lies, the coverups…Wow, we really need to start over it seems!

But then remember that everything is already just as it’s supposed to be, because of God’s divine plan. Of course, we have free will to do what we want with our lives. It is by our own choice that we come to a healthy lifestyle; not because our parents forced us to move into this intentional community far removed from society’s current reality. And it is by our own choice that we come to know God, or reject God, or deny God, or whatever. Once a viewpoint is forced upon us we tend to resist it, don’t we?

Take M. Night Shamalayan’s movie, The Village. click for a full synopsis–a spoiler.
Although fiction, we can see from this story that a forced intentional community can feel like paradise for a while, but then something always happens to spoil it! In the movie, the village elders “ferociously” protect the secret that their little idyllic village holds. And then the illusion they worked so hard to protect is shattered. They wanted to shelter their children from violence, and it was violence that shattered their world yet again.

So, while we live in our patchwork web application of a life here in society, we can bring positive intention to our selves. Truly, the answer to straightening out the twisted web of society is to love one another, then although the web of society remains the same, our perception of it is changed. To crawl out from the darkness of depression while encompassed within it seems very hard, much like you just need to start over; yes, a fresh start! But the way to do it is start by loving yourself, accepting yourself as you are, and exercise your free will to choose a better life for yourself.

Here is a quick video from an international ambassador for peace teacher ISHA. In the video she explains how do deal with your fear. In my insiders view on depression, I can see that usually fear is at the root of our depressions. If we can move aside and give love to our fear, the fear will dissolve. This is how to lift depression!

One of my “day job” responsibilities is to edit a wellness guide. Whose bright idea was it to put a second index in it, anyway? Indexing for a book is time consuming. While I was spending all that time marking products I wanted to index, I was also learning, and forming ideas about how we as Americans in industrialized society live our lives.

I found out, for example, that by including a supplement very high in antioxidants, particularly from grape seed extract, you can lower your chances for developing at least 90 health conditions. That is to say that in this book, 90 of the conditions listed, from Acne all the way to Varicose veins, mentioned that adding antioxidants will help the condition.

This fact alone staggers me, and it takes a while to sink in. “You mean that if I ate more fruits and vegetables, which are naturally high in antioxidants, I’ll have better health? You mean that eating fruits and vegetables not only makes my body stronger, my immune system stronger, but my mental capacity stronger as well?”

Blueberries? yes. Grapes? yes. Oranges? yes. Kale? yes. Collard greens? yes.

Health is about lifestyle. Of course, there will always be the lady/man who is the picture of perfect health, who exercises and eats lots of salad, and still ends up with cancer or heart disease. There are more pieces to the puzzle of good health than diet and exercise alone. Some other factors are heavy metal exposure, pesticide exposure, biotoxins like black mold, and an improperly aligned spinal column (yes, really. All the nerves to all your organs go to your spinal column. If the nerves are compromised, disease is the result).

What is one of the side effects of mercury exposure? Depression. What is one of the side effects of vitamin B deficiency? Depression. What is one of the side effects of DHA deficiency? Depression.

Our mental health is important, right? How else can we live out our purpose, if we don’t have clear thoughts? Our bodily systems are interconnected. Please don’t be surprised to know that what we eat or don’t eat affects how clearly we can think!

Judging from what we learned from the last post about the Global Consciousness Project, the Peace Intention experiment, also spearheaded by a “What the Bleep” interviewee, should prove to be a viable and noteworthy research project.

It’s going on now, and each day at a specific time you log in for ten minutes only, to focus positive intention on a war-torn area. Lynne McTaggart from “What the Bleep” is leading this experiment and will show us by comparing violence statistics from before and after if we were able to reduce violent crimes by ten percent, simply by our intention.

“How could my intention here affect those people in that war-torn area?” my husband wondered. He said, “but they can’t see us or hear the meditation! What good could it do?”

Deeply religious people throughout the centuries have believed in the power of prayer, but only now is the mainstream scientific community able to have a platform where the funding is available for experiments of this type. Scientific paradigm is shifting, and more attention is being placed on practical applications for the lessons learned from quantum mechanics. Why not? Why not try to see if we can reduce violence by our intention? Is it futile? Our random number generator experiment shows intention may not be the most steadfast and efficient way to reduce violence, but it can be done. Statistically speaking, there is a good chance that there will be less violence committed this week. Do you want to save a life? Do you want to live with a purpose? Try it.

Try it now. We’re mid-way through the experiment. Their servers will count how many people log in to do the ten minute meditation each day, and her team will get data from that war-torn area about violent acts committed.

The Peace Intention Experiment