7 posts tagged “depression”

Forgiveness is an inner correction that lightens the heart. It is for our peace of mind first. Being at peace, we will now have peace to give to others, and this is the most permanent and valuable gift we can possibly give.
- Gerald Jampolsky, American psychiatrist, founder of the International Center for Attitudinal Healing

Forgiveness is only necessary because we believe that others should treat us fairly and they have not, thus we try to hold their offences against them.

This belief in the need for fairness between people is built into us. For a long time it was said that "Life's not fair, get over it." A study completed recently (at the University of Toronto, as I recall) indicated that babies have a sense of fairness. Given a choice, the subject babies tended to turn to a person who had done something fairly and away from someone who had done something we might consider unfair, and that was a fairness judgment involving other babies, not themselves. A sense of fairness, it seems, came along with our genetic material when we were born.

That sense of fairness usually serves us well. Most people are fair with us as we are with them. That builds a kind of unspoken trust, even if it involves a shopkeeper we have just met, because we have had good experiences with other shopkeepers in the past. When someone betrays that trust, we treat it as an act of aggression, as if the person had thrown down the proverbial glove and challenged us to battle.

Those who do not act on their impulse to be aggressive in the face of unfair treatment may hold a grudge. "I'll never go back to that store and I will tell everyone I know for the rest of my life to never darken its door."

The thing about grudges, about acts of unfairness, about betrayals of trust, is that most of the time the offender doesn't know he has committed a violation of our expectations. Moreover, he usually wouldn't care if he did know. With rare exceptions, the offender remains guilt-free. The offended person is the one who gets hurt.

That hurt is totally self inflicted. The hurt usually causes more grief to the person who adopts it than the consequences of the original offence.

Most people believe that people who hurt themselves--for whatever reason--are not entirely sane. No matter how just the cause of the offended person, hurting themselves by holding a grudge or throwing a punch and landing in jail, or beginning a shouting match is considered anti-social.

Everyone accepts that people are not perfect. What we find difficult to accept is when the imperfections of others play themselves out on us through acts we perceive as unfair. It doesn't seem to matter how difficult the life of an offender has been before the offence, the offensive act itself gets the dander of the offended person up.

When the emotions surrounding such situations are laid bare, don't they seem kind of ridiculous?

That's where forgiveness comes in. In most cases, when we forgive we do a great favour for ourselves. Only when we allow ourselves that sense of peace can we spread it around to others. As Gerald Jampolsky said, giving peace to others is the most valuable gift we can give anyone. But we must have that peace within us to share before we can give it to others.

Most people who treat us unfairly don't intend to hurt us. They just don't care. They have their own troubles and have no time for ours or our whining about them. How might we change their life by giving them forgiveness and peace?

Take this as a general rule: the most hurtful people are most in need of forgiveness and peace within themselves.

Which might give you greater satisfaction, venting your anger on someone who has offended you or giving them peace which could make their lives better for years to come? The former is faster, easier and more hurtful to ourselves.

I have had several occasions in my life to turn a bully into a friend. The first was in grade seven when I nearly strangled a bully who sat behind me in class, when he threatened to kill me at recess and he came at me with that objective in mind at the beginning of the break. I was happy that he didn't kill me and apparently he was pleased that I had let him live. We became friends for the rest of the school year. Other friendships have begun with people who began our relationship by cheating me in a business transaction.

As odd as this may sound, they needed the forgiveness, the peace I offered and the friendship overtures, likely because they lacked all of them in their personal lives. As oversimplified as it may sound, people who treat others unfairly, like bullies, need love and have neither the ready sources (such as from their mother) nor the skills to know how to make friends.

Now you're on notice. You know how to recognize people who need a friend. Someone of good character would accept that challenge.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that (among other things) explains the background of bullying and ways for children and adults to work their way around it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, nicknamed "the wise" Roman Emperor, (121 CE - 180 CE)

An emperor of Rome, indeed the leader of any country up to modern times, would need to be sanguine about the future because the chances of his having his head detached from the rest of his body before that body was worn out stood exceedingly high.

What about old Julius? He certainly couldn't have used all of his weapons of reason when he allowed his formerly trusted ally Brutus and his gang to slay him. Actually, he likely did. To the best of his ability.

Julius was a very ill man, suffering from a great deal of pain and loss of his abilities of perception due to disease at the time of his death. It's entirely possible that he did the equivalent of falling on his sword, just to put himself out of misery. He knew he was too sick to rule Rome, to give it his best. Yet his honour forbade him from committing suicide, even if it be for the good of Rome. It's highly likely that he knew what was about to happen when he met privately with his "enemies."

In other words, we now know that Julius Caesar likely used the best of his mental faculties to do what was best for both himself and for Rome. History hasn't recorded the event of his death that way, but history has a way of relating what its teller wants to the story to be.

Marcus Aurelius must also have used his abundant mental faculties during his almost two decades as emperor of Rome (actually king, as Rome did not call anyone an emperor). His reign was the ultimate example of Pax Romana and his death brought turmoil as to who should lead the greatest empire the world had known until then (later the British Empire was greatest in history, covering one-quarter of our planet's surface at one time).

Though Christians were still persecuted in his time in theory, in practice they seldom were. Rome (undoubtedly a brutal regime in many ways, though hardly the worst in history) really was fairly peaceful during Marcus's reign. It would have required considerable weapons of reason to make peace so effectively that the period was given its own name.

So we turn to ourselves. Every media outlet in the western world and most in other parts of the world report almost daily about how bad conditions are in the world. I have heard many young people from North America say that they don't plan to have children because the world is just getting worse and they couldn't in all good conscience bring children into such tragedy.

The world must be getting worse, just listen to our media tell us. But it's not so.

No point in history has ever been so peaceful, with such a great percentage of people living long lives, healthier than their ancestors, in human history. The media always tell us that the world is a terrible place and leave us to conclude that the future will surely be worse. Neither is true.

Even during the dreaded Holocaust, when millions of Jews, cripples, people with much lower than average intelligence and people who simply pissed off the Germans were being exterminated, good things were happening elsewhere in the world. In the west, women who worked necessary jobs in factories earned a decent living and started a movement for equal rights for women that is still going on today. The Jews that survived got a country of their own a few years after the war, something they had not been able to accomplish for themselves for the previous 3000 years. The powers of the world came together as never before to defeat evil.

Just as Marcus Aurelius said that we will face the future as it comes to us with the same weapons of reason that we use today, we must use the weapons of reason we have available to us today. Or we will make the world a worse place to live, unsafe, unhealthy, unlivable for our children and grandchildren.

Our weapons of reason that help us to cope with today must make us realize that good things are happening in the world each day, even we if don't read about them. We must reason that just because our media report almost exclusively bad news does not mean that the world itself is getting worse. They just report what many people want to hear. Paris Hilton makes the news when she sneezes (and maybe her dress has a "wardrobe malfunction"), but we hear nothing about the millions of good people around the world and in our own communities who are doing good deeds and making good things happen every day.

It's important that we heed Marcus Aurelius's advice about the future. It won't be as bad as the fear mongers want us to believe (they make their living scaring people, remember, rather than getting "real" jobs). And the present isn't as bad as almost every source of information we have make it out to be.

We need to use our weapons of reason every day of our life, not just about the future. The more we refuse to find out information about what is really going on in the world and decline to use our powers of reason when we learn it, the worse the world will become and the worse our own lives will become.

Not learning and not thinking is what will make the world really worse. Bad guys can easily manipulate the thinking and voting of people who are ignorant and who don't want to think for themselves, who depend on others to think and to tell them what to think and believe.

We have the power within us, even those of us with the poorest of education and the most dire of backgrounds. It doesn't cost a thing to use it. We just have to try.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can think for themselves about subjects other than the limited ones taught in schools.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession to their character.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, American philosopher and poet (1803-1882)

Think about it. That person who is so negative about the world, isn't he also a pessimist about his own future and his place in the world?

The loving mother who dotes on her children also looks on the world as a loving place, with bad guys being the exceptions not the rule.

The happy person sees happy people around him and finds happy situations even when reading world news.

The violent person can cite not just violent experiences from his own family while growing up, he can show you violence all around his community and the world.

A trusting person believes that the world operates on trust, while untrustworthy people are few.

Is your opinion of the world a confession of your character, as Emerson claimed? While the two are related directly, I believe that the relationship goes the opposite way to what Emerson stated. We see in the world people like ourselves. Those who are not like us seem to be the exceptions. When we don't see people like ourselves in our immediate world, we look for them in other places. Sometimes that means a move, a change of job or a change of partner.

Even in the face of apparently overwhelming evidence to the contrary, people will believe about the world what they want to believe. An optimistic person will see the world as a positive place. Nothing will console a negative person about what a hell-on-earth we live in and how no one should bring up a child in the present conditions.

Is the world really a great place with enormous possibilities? Or is hell something we live through each day of our lives?

It depends on what kind of person you are.

If you don't care for the world as it is, change your attitude toward yourself and those around you. You world will gradually become a marvelous place.

You don't have to take Emerson's word for it. Think about what you think of the world in general and about what you think of your own life.

It's true that life is what we make of it. It's also true that your world is what you make of it.

Live the life you want your life to be. The world around you will follow your example.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children with positive attitudes toward themselves and their world and need the tools to make it happen.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.
- Denis Waitley, American inspirational speaker and author (b. 1924)

What the hell does that mean?

If that was your reaction to the quote, you might be a bit light on the happiness scale, and may not know it.

Think about things that can be owned, earned, worn or consumed. They all require spending money. Thanks to the rich and powerful West and its persistent propaganda telling us that we can't be happy unless we spend money, an unbelievably large number of people in the world equate happiness and spending.

That requires people to have money to be happy, going along that way of thinking. Everyone who is poor must be unhappy, as a corollary. Or at least lack the ability to be truly happy.

People with lots of money spend, spend, spend. And they are happy. Or they believe they are. They must be, they conclude, because they are living the lifestyle that says they must be happy. They believe they are happy because they have been taught to believe that.

Yet look at the divorce rate among these people. Look at the percentage of their kids who take drugs and alcohol and simply can't manage in school. Look at the number who grow up with a video game as a surrogate mother instead of a real one. By the time they are in their teens, they don't want their natural mother anyway, many of them, because their mothers don't know what to do with them. And they have no idea what to do with their mothers.

So they all spend as much as they can to be happier.

But they don't get happier. What they do get is embroiled in addictions and obsessions, causes to which they devote much of their lives--such as their religion of choice or a political party--in a vain effort to teach the rest of the world how to be happy.

Some cults in other parts of the world understand. They have no source of the money needed to spend the way the addicts do in the West. So, jealous of the West and their own inability to get money to spend on the luxuries they believe they need to be happy, they become suicide bombers or terrorists of other stripes. Some kill their own people out of spite.

Most people in poorer countries don't behave that way, of course. But they have gotten the message. They believe that only fate has prevented them from being happy by not giving them the ability to earn money they can spend to make them happy. "Poor me, fate has dealt me such a cruel blow."

However, others in poorer countries do not succumb to the consumerism propaganda. They believe that happiness is what you make for yourself. And what you make for others around you in the process. They become musicians and dancers, for example, and find happiness in their music. They cherish the "spiritual experience of living every minute" with their music. Others get involved with other forms of artistic endeavour.

They lose themselves in whatever they do. Musicians become one with their music. Painters one with their paintings. Actors one with their particular craft, and so on.

Are the arts, then, the secret to happiness? No, it's the giving of themselves to something beneficial or to someone else that is enjoyed and appreciated by others that brings the happiness.

I can't say whether they live each moment with "love, grace and gratitude." Those are Denis Waitley's words. What words would I use? I stumble over them myself now that I have found happiness I could never have understood until recently.

While I was growing up, I was taught repeatedly, at home, at school, at church, playing sports and doing just about every activity involving others my own age that I must come first in my life. I must be in charge. I must be in control. I must succeed at everything. "Pay yourself first" and buy what you can with it. Borrow to buy what you can't afford so that you can show it off to others so they can see your success. Only when I outgrew that infantile, selfish and consumerish way of thinking and began to share my life freely with others did I find happiness.

With happiness, the more you give to others, the more you get back in return. Business doesn't work that way, which is why business wants us to be selfish. And consumers. Business lives for money. A life built around a business model is pretty shallow.

Business, however, cannot be happy. It's emotionless, even sociopathic if you believe some studies. Shaping our lives on a business model not only doesn't bring much happiness in return, it tends to lose for us many of the opportunities for happiness that we could have enjoyed.

Make someone happy today. You'll be glad you did. Really.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children how to be more than consumers, who want them to live lives full of happiness.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Two things a man should never be angry at: what he can help, and what he cannot help.
- Thomas Fuller

First of all, this quote deals with the management of anger, one of the strongest human emotions. Fuller implies that we can either control it or let it run loose. He suggests that if we want to control it we need to understand the root of the anger and whether the investment of emotional energy that anger requires is worth the investment.

In general, anger expressed is never worth the investment of emotional energy it requires. Furthermore, it tends to do more harm to the angry person than to the object of the outburst. It never does any good over the long term.

Mostly we don't realize how much harm anger can do to us. Anger, especially when held as a grudge over a long period of time, can depress the immune system, opening the possibility for organ failure or disease. That's pretty serious, especially as it's a form of self harm.

Even in a short term bout of anger, the immune system takes a sharp downward spike so that during the period of anger the angry person may have little or no defence against attack by rogue bacteria or viruses. While an angry person is shaking a clenched fist at or giving the finger to someone who has given offence, serious trouble may be brewing inside his own body. And he will know nothing about it, until tragedy strikes and a doctor gives the bad news.

There is no point in getting angry at something you can help because if you can do something about it, you should do it and get on with your life. No problem getts better become someone gets angry about it.

If you can't help the problem, there is no point in getting angry because no one else can help you with it either. Sometimes life sucks, but it's just like hitting a pothole in the road with a wheel of your car, you drive on and forget about it.

Why do we even have the emotion we call anger? If it's so self destructive, how did it even evolve and why don't we evolve it out of ourselves?

Evolution is taking place within our species now. We are in the midst of evolutionary progress whereby the female vagina is moving from access from the rear to access only from the front. Slightly more than half of today's women lack a clitoris. And around 35 percent of us never develop wisdom teeth. These changes simply happen so slowly that we don't notice.

We could evolve anger out of our species, but that would mean giving up one of the most critical responses to danger, the fight or flight response. Anger is nothing more than the fight or flight response extended over a longer period of time.

The fight or flight response allows us to quickly evaluate a potentially dangerous situation, then choose to deal with it (fight, in a loose sense of the word) or get out of the way (flight). If we are crossing a road and suddenly see a bus bearing down on us, it wouldn't be wise for us to have to weight all of the options as to how to respond to the situation, requiring a brain process that takes far too much time for our own safety.

With the fight or flight response, a heavy dose of epinephrine (better known by its trade name Adrenalin) races through our bloodstream, making our nerves and muscles almost instantly ready to respond to whatever the brain decides we should do--tackle the matter in a confrontation or get out of the way. As humans rarely win confrontations with buses, we need almost instant response to save our life.

That same surge of epinephrine goes through someone who is in the process of getting angry. Some people can go from calm to full blown anger in the same time it takes a Porsche to go from zero to 60 mph. Unfortunately, that is when the brain process of evaluating a situation to determine the best possible course of action, the one that takes much longer than fight or flight, should kick in. For some, it doesn't.

For others, it does. We have experienced, either by being personally involved or by being onlookers to others in situations, the danger of emotionally violent responses that end up with hurt, regret and repentance later. So we have conditioned ourselves to make that longer brain process kick in instead of the fight or flight response that produces anger.

That's a matter of rigid training or of personal discipline of the self.

Road rage is an obvious example of people who take the stupid behaviour of someone too personally (it's rarely intended to be taken as offence) and allow their fight or flight response to take over. The "fight" part dominates and the person exhibits some form of rage, often an illegal behaviour, but he doesn't consider that at the time because he doesn't have time to think about it.

Implicit in Thomas Fuller's advice is that we should think, thoroughly and clearly, when a situation presents itself that could develop an anger response. Not only is it wise to avoid doing harm to our own health, it's not smart to ruin relationships or break the law in a bout of anger.

Anger is within our own control. All it takes is practice and some self discipline.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children important life lessons, such as how to avoid doing harm through anger and how to master their emotions.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

We either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same.
- Carlos Castenada, mystic and author (1925-1998)

We get out of life what we want, what we put effort into creating for ourselves.

As a Canadian, I am quite familiar with the favourite topic of Canadians meeting strangers or casual friends in a setting such as in an elevator or in line at a supermarket checkout. We talk about the weather or some level of government.

The weather is always too hot, too cold (Canada ranks as the coldest country in the world), too wet, too dry, too much snow, always too something. Governments always get raked over for something they have done wrong or something that they have done that is expected to have tragic results in the future.

Though we may have something good to say about the weather or a government in an extended conversation with a friend, those shorter casual meetings always deal with what's wrong. We complain as a matter of course. It's part of our culture.

Have you noticed how annoying someone who works nearby you is? Why can't your spouse do those few things that are important to you the way you want, at least once in a while? Kids clothes are absurdly expensive, they don't appreciate the clothes when you buy them without them on hand to try them on and give their blessing, and they make the most atrocious choices when given the opportunity to pick their own because they want to dress like their friends.

Why don't auto makers build cars to last, the way they do with trucks? Why do television newscasts always deal with bad stuff, isn't anything good happening in the world? Why do emergencies happen at the worst times so they mess up your day? Murphy was right with his law.

Get the idea? Life's a bitch, then you die, as the saying goes. Live your life focussing on the negatives and complaining about everything that catches your attention and life sucks.

Some local initiatives try to get people to avoid complaining. They exist around the world, but receive little media attention because the media does what we want them to do, report what is bad. You may not have heard of any of them. Here's an idea.

Live a complaint-free life.

Most of us have no idea how often we complain. What we know too well is how often others close to us complain, especially when they complain about us. How about trying to cut all complaining out of your life?

Here's how it works. It's best to begin with two or more people who are close to each other (house mates, co-workers) so that they can point out to the other(s) when they complain.

Select an elastic band that fits loosely over your wrist. Each time you catch yourself complaining (or are caught by the other), either snap the elastic on your wrist or transfer it to the other wrist. If you snap the elastic, don't do it hard enough to hurt yourself, just hard enough to help you remember. Both methods are used and both have their supporters.

There doesn't have to be a prize for the "winner" because everyone wins this game. It's really a lifestyle change. What you will try to do is to beat your own record for complaint-free days. It's not a competition because competitions end.

Be aware that it won't be easy. When you begin you will find yourself not being able to get through one day without a complaint of some kind. When you do get through one day, then two and more, the reward is double. First there is the success of setting your own record.

The second reward, which you will find becoming greater as you achieve longer periods of success at having complaint-free days, is that your life will be better. You will feel better about the world and about yourself.

Along with that goes the relief from stress, which many of us don't realize we experience every day. That results in better health. And better sleep.

You don't have to get a big raise, divorce your spouse or give your kids to Rumplestiltskin to feel better and live better. You have to stop punishing yourself, which is what you do by complaining.

Complaints, especially frequent ones, are like a prison you build around yourself. You don't realize what you have done until someone points it out to you. Of course you wouldn't have built a door in your prison cell because you didn't even have a plan to build it. It just happened.

Now you can build a new landscape for yourself. You can build real and positive structures in your landscape because it's entirely within your control. You aren't in control of anything so long as you live your life from complaint to complaint.

Remove the negatives that hold you down--stop complaining--and you will have built a different life for yourself.

Your culture may be filled with complainers, but that doesn't mean you have to be part of those who suffer by beating themselves up by complaining.

At first you may seem a bit odd to others because you have changed, for those you meet who knew you as your old personality. Then they will realize how you have changed. They will want to know how you accomplished it. Tell them. Explain how you did it, by eliminating one complaint from your life at a time.

Your life will never be totally free of complaints. You might not even want that because you do need some causes to make your life worthwhile.

There are always ways to say something in a positive manner that you used to say as a complaint. It's called constructive criticism. That doesn't mean that you criticize to help someone. It means that you point out a path for someone to follow that will bring benefit to that person (as well as to you, maybe).

Criticism that stops with a complaint is destructive. Criticism that continues by providing a path that will make someone's life better--especially if you point this out at the time--benefits the other person, you and the whole world as your kindness and caring spreads.

Yeah, kind of like what I just did. I told you that you complain too much, then gave you a path to follow to make your life better and healthier. You likely didn't even think of it as criticism because it showed you a way to improve your life.

That's constructive. Go find your elastic now.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers so that they have the tools to help children grow into healthy, confident, competent, complaint-free adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

I offer you peace.
I offer you love.
I offer you friendship.
I see your beauty.
I hear your need.
I feel your feelings.
My wisdom flows from the Highest Source.
I salute that Source in you.
Let us work together for unity and love.
- Mohandas K. ("The Mahatma" - Great Soul) Gandhi

Beautiful, isn't it? It's a longer version of the meaning of the Hindi salutation "Namaste."

Why doesn't it work?

Gandhi himself, perhaps the most peaceful leader in history, was murdered by one of his own, a fellow Hindu. Peace didn't seem to work for him that way. Why not? Especially when, generally speaking, most Indian people are peaceful compared to the people of most countries.

A concept such as peace must be taught to children, to all children, in order to be effective. Forces that work slavishly to teach fear and violence to children never sleep. In the United States, for example, you would be hard pressed to listen to a newscast or read a daily newspaper that would not incline a child toward fear and/or violence if its contents were taught to that child. Violent news is certainly repetitive.

Concepts we want to impart to our children require repetition, whether peace or violence. The US national anthem is a war song, the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag a commitment to use violence to enforce the safety of the people of the country, if necessary. The US has, since its inception, always found someone to fear, thus a reason to engage in war almost constantly throughout its history.

These two have been daily features in US classrooms longer than anyone can remember. That is, the message that violence is to be considered a primary means to resolve conflicts is taught to children every single day they attend school.

That is but one example. Canada, one of the more peaceful nations in the world has a somewhat similar national anthem, though not a pledge to its flag.

The same teachers who supervise these daily exercises--the US anthem and the pledge--do not place similar emphasis on the concept of peace or peaceful resolution of conflicts. They rarely, if ever, appear in curriculum, though the conflict messages are repeated daily.

Peace, to most of us, means that when the potential for disagreement arises, the parties involved should consider ways of resolving it other than by using violence or psychological coercion.

Until that message is conveyed to children more often than the messages about violence, the message that is taught in a stronger manner will win out in the minds of the kids, who will grow up to have similar beliefs but have access to more weapons.

Indians are taught to adore and to respect the leader who brought independence to their country. They are also taught the concepts of peace and passive resistance.

Canadian children are taught that a Canadian began the concept of international peacekeeping through the United Nations and that Canada is the only country in the Americas that gained its independence from its imperial power by peaceful means.

What children are actively and repetitively taught becomes a way of life for them in adulthood.

Those who love and support violence are tirelessly dedicated to passing their message to younger generations. Those who love peace tend to not have the same devotion to their cause.

If you want change, teach the children.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, what and when to teach children the important life lessons they need to become secure, competent and confident adults. It's a manual for life.
Learn more at http://billallin.com