Excuses Begone! Part 1 of 12: Undo Your Memes
September 23, 2009 by dr. lam · 4 Comments
As my faithful readers know, I love Wayne Dyer! In the past, I have covered, The Power of Intention and Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life (about the Tao Te Ching). I am now going to do a series on his latest book and learning material, Excuses Begone! For those wanting to learn more in-depth about his ideas in this work, I recommend both the audiobook and the book, as the former covers a live seminar he held in his hometown of Maui, Hawaii, and the latter is well, brilliant.
He opens the book with trying to have us understand how and why we get stuck in our ways. We too often blame our genetic blueprint. ”My DNA made me do it”, or “That’s the way I am.” He preaches that our genes can be changed, and we can get unstuck from our hardwired genetic stock. He cites Bruce Lipton’s seminal work, The Biology of Belief, which I just finished reading and found to be very interesting. Lipton, a cell biologist, started to see the profound impact that our mind had on our genes and left his longstanding teaching post to begin work on his idea that what we believe is more important than who we are on a physical plane.
The most powerful story to which I have alluded in the past is Dr. Bruce Moseley’s work that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Moseley pondered as an orthopedic surgeon how much good he was doing for his arthritic patients when he performed knee surgery. He subjected one group of patients through the traditional rigors of his arthroscopic surgery. In another group, he simply splashed water in the air, made the drilling noise, and opened and closed his incision. He found that in the latter group, they had just as much benefit as the operated group. He opined that his surgical skills were really not even needed to achieve the desired result. Individuals like Tim Perez who walked with a cane before was able to play basketball effortlessly, which Perez chalked up to the power of the mind. (For those who are interested, here is a video log I shot last week on healing of the mind.)
In short, medical science has always believed in the so-called placebo effect. It is powerful in many respects because it is an acknowledgment to our understanding of how we can influence our gene matter through establishing the right beliefs.
The study of mimetics involves understanding the basic building block, known as a meme. Just like a gene is the fundamental component of genetics, a meme is the core element of our belief system. A meme as defined by Richard Brodie in his book, Virus of the Mind (which I also own but have not read yet), is “a thought, belief, or attitude in your mind that can spread to and from other people’s minds.” Most of our struggles emanate from our memes encoded through childhood. Dyer talks about how he grew up in the wake of the Depression that has lingered even into his late 60′s now with the scarcity mentality that plagues him despite his accumulated wealth.
What we will talk about is how we can change our memes, stop blaming our genes, and how to free us from both. We can program and reprogram our memes and even our genes. Many people battle cancer, heart disease, and other “genetic” failings through indomitable will. It is your choice to change your memes and your genes.
Broken Open Part 8 of 8: Guarding the Eggs
September 22, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
Man: Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.
Psychiatrist: Well, why don’t you turn him in?
Man: I would, but I need the eggs.
-Woody Allen
Sometimes we are like the man who does not want to turn his brother in because we need the eggs. What eggs? Our own illusion of our self-fabricated lives. We rather hold onto a worn-out illusion because it is easier than force ourselves to change or to see ourselves differently. As Lesser says, “We don’t want to consider that perhaps we’re wrong about a couple of things: perhaps our victim stance is a cover-up; maybe our ex or our boss or our parent is not the monster we’ve made them out to be. Maybe we need to ask ourselves, What’s in it for us to keep seeing the world in a certain light? What eggs do we think we need?”
Lesser warns that we also should not be trying to court catastrophe in hopes that we can have an incredible divine rod hit us from above. We are not more or less special because of a certain circumstance that has befallen us. Instead, we can glean from the myriad large and small “encumbrances” that affect our daily lives and that can provide grist for the mill. We should be alert for life’s messages to help guide us in our journey. If we are broken open, then we can learn from not being broken down. If we have not been broken open, we can still be our own catalyst for change so that we do not continue to guard our own precious illusory eggs.
Mindfulness Mondays 17: Opening Yourself to Other Cultures
September 21, 2009 by dr. lam · 4 Comments
It is rather appropriate that I am writing this blog on a transatlantic flight from Europe to the United States. As Americans we tend to live insular lives. We can travel to any country and speak English and assume that the other culture should speak our own. We see the pervasive evidence of our culture disseminated everywhere including McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, blue jeans, and matinee idols. We live in a chauvinistic position with the rest of the world that is slowing slipping.
Even within the confines of the United States, we expect everyone to speak our language and to conform to our cultural standards. Diversity is a non-issue. Despite great advances over the past few decades concerning racism and cultural division, we may not still be that embracive to all of those around us.
Being a European history major in college, I really enjoyed learning about different cultures. I love tasting different foods, learning the customs from different cultures, and learning even a few phrases from a different language.
This week be mindful of your own culture, but set your intention to gain some knowledge no matter how small about another culture: Google a culture that exists out there on the net and read about it; learn some basic expressions in a different language with Rosetta Stone; meet another person from another culture and ask him/her about his or her life in one’s native country; or try another culture’s food that you have never tasted before and were afraid to do so. By exploring other cultures (especially if you have children who are still open-minded enough to explore those cultures), you can open vistas to your own knowledge and appreciation of other people and narrow the perceived gaps that separate us as human beings. As we discussed in last week’s blogs, we all should be more connected than separate.
Broken Open Part 7 of 8: Comfortable with Uncertainty
September 18, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
Another Tibetan Buddhist monk, Pema Chödrön, wrote a book, Comfortable with Uncertainty, that helped Elizabeth Lesser shed her own fears and anxiety. Chödrön learned her lessons from Chögyam Trungpa (mentioned in last friday’s blog) who lost his family, teachers and country after the Chinese invasion of Tibet broke him open radically to being present in an unsettling experience.
Trungpa teaches that many people pray for life to turn out in a certain way. Instead, he encourages us all to learn from what life already has decreed, i.e., for us to look at life’s messages in the events that we have already lived. As Lesser says, “I try to apply Trungpa’s wisdom especially when I am at work and nothing seems to flow easily. The meeting that is turning acrimonious, the project that is failing, or the assistant who is moving: Each of these situations is a reservoir of meaning, a bank of rich information. The answer to every problem is wrapped in the problem itself. I need only stop resisting, open wide to reality, and decode the message.”
Well put. Sometimes, we try to force our own destiny and only accept a destiny that is framed by our narrow construct of it. If things are not going our way, we become alarmed rather than look at what message that a certain event may actually hold for us. For example, I was involved in a minor fender-bender that was my fault. I thought I was in the left lane in a narrow street but there was another lane to my left, as I tried to turn into an empanada restaurant, scraping the unsuspecting car to the left of me. I remained at peace during the incident, was thankful that no one was hurt, and offered a prayer of gratitude that I could learn to be a more careful driver in the future. That was my message that I decoded.
Life may not throw at you a perfect recipe every time. You have to make a great meal from whatever recipe is given to you. Find that hidden message in your daily life and look with appreciation at the message that may help you move forward in life along your journey. Remain comfortable with the uncertainty of your future life. You can do that when you start to see only messages rather than obstacles in your life’s journey.
Broken Open Part 6 of 8: No Birth, No Death
September 17, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
One of the world’s most revered meditation teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh, teaches the concept of “no birth, no death” and has quoted Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier to support his beliefs: “Rien ne se crée, rien ne se perd.” (“Nothing is born, nothing can die.”) Thich Nhat Hanh, known affectionately as Thay, has been a longstanding advocate for peace in previously wartorn Vietnam, his native country, which he was compelled to flee during the era of the Vietnam War. He continued to teach the message of peace from abroad and was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr.
His concept of “no birth, no death” is distinctly Buddhist, as he is a Buddhist monk. To illustrate he holds up a single sheet of paper and exclaims that this is not just a piece of paper in his hand but he is also holding a tree since the paper emerged from a tree along with the clouds that caused rain to facilitate the tree’s growth that led to the paper. Further, we touch sunshine when we touch the paper because the sunshine nourished the growth of the tree just as much as the clouds did.
What Thay is getting at beyond a metaphysical explanation of a sheet of paper is that continuity of life rather than the abrupt starting and end points that we typically consider are what matter. Without needing to be a Buddhist, we can see each of us as continuity of one another and a continuity of a larger life force. By doing so, we relinquish our ego more fervently like Ram Dass has done. Hopefully, we can do that without the need to be as broken open as hard as the great guru. We need to see ourselves as a part of the whole. Today, hold a sheet of paper and touch the sunshine. See everyone around you as just an extension of who you are and where you have come. Divorce your own egoistic mind and share in our commonality and continuity.