Living

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Enlightenment: Another term for weight loss.

Finding Our Inner Skinny

What's your food attitude? Our personality type and social style has an effect on our relationship with food. Adjusting that attitude begins with the inner game. If we don't start there, most of us ain't going nowhere but on a roller coaster ride of weight loss and gain.

If some of us have an interest in losing weight, but the dreaded idea of measuring food, pre-planning and counting calories has us reaching for a bag of Oreo cookies for comfort, then that approach will not work. And if watching slender bodies talk us through body bending exercises doubles the discomfort, more cookies, please.

Living@WOW!™ begins with a PQ Success Assessment that indicates personality type and social style, Then it's on to the inner game - a CD program tailored for our type that incorporates the proven powerful goal achievement tools of meditation, visualization and guided imagery. This portion of the program is designed to tap into our "body wisdom" that will accommodate our conscious decision to lose weight and guide us to healthier food and lifestyle choices, and a well-honed food attitude.

The Living@WOW! program also includes a goal-setting exercise with the ironic acronym PIE for Primary Inner Exploration and a Daily Pocket Journal with positive affirmations and space to note our food attitude adjustment.

And then there's Skype - the video phone of immediate and personal contact. Living@WOW! includes this as well. All together, the Living@WOW! Overweight to WOW! program is designed to lead us to our inner skinny.

More at livingatwow.com

Calm The Mind, Calm The Cravings

A calm mind is not filled with cravings or questions. It is only the inner chattering mind, searching for heaven knows what, that is restless and ill at ease. In futile attempt after attempt, the restless mind seeks to appease itself with outside activity - excessive food, alcohol, to***co, s*x, drugs and rock'n'roll. And the more restless and lost the vagabond mind feels, the more excessive its bad habits - what are called addictions.

Addiction is an insidious word. We've come to understand it to mean beyond our conscious control, as if some substance, some habit has taken over the reins of our life and we are helpless puppets controlled by compulsive strings, victims of some ventriloquist vodka speaking through us, our eyes and minds subject to being glazed over by mind-controlling boxes of glazed donuts. Addiction is a refuge for those who refuse to take shared responsibility for their behavior and so hide out as victims. Moi?

Did we read, "heaven knows what," earlier? Well, heaven does know what. The longing, the craving, the despair is a longing need to connect with our source - the God of Love. And while ego in the world of duality insists that everything good is outside (E.G.O.), our heart knows better.

The issue is a disconnect with the heart of our being, brought on by social coercion to live in our head. If we are longing, our longing, no matter how well disguised or denied, is for Love - not sentimental support group soap opera sentimentality. And not romantic or familial love, but the Love that awakening and realizing that we are already within Divine Presence brings.

This is the teaching at the core of all spiritual paths and religions. Mainstream religion has buried this truth, but the mystics of all traditions know it by direct personal experience. The Mystic Heart Meditation teachings are about this knowing - a mind-blowing knowing that blows out addiction and opens the door to Living@WOW! - with wisdom, optimism and wellness. www.livingatwow.com

That's the view from my window.

Love.

All Living@WOW!™ programs - even "Overweight to WOW!" begin with PIE. That's an acronym for Primary Inner Exploration. It's a format for assessing our current life and visualizing already having achieved our goals.

How To Become Adept At Adaptability

There are certain people or personality types that, even though we may love them, drain our energy, drive us up a wall and make us want to put a sock in it? For some of us, it's the pushy, takeover, alpha dogs who just have to be in charge and want to orchestrate everything from what's for dinner to who goes first at miniature golf.

Then there's the sentence finisher, the proper grammar polisher who sees only two ways to do anything - their way and the wrong way. How about the perennial promoter, the gladhand who is always upbeat, on and enthusiastic about selling us something, anything? And let's not forget the people pleaser who overdoes it. Did you get enough to eat? How about another sandwich? A piece of pie, then? No, no, take my place, my car, my bed, the last cup of Blueberry Cobbler coffee.

We probably recognized ourselves in there somewhere and definitely, I'm guessing, several people we know. Virtually all personality type indicators have these four categories of types and the characteristics briefly mentioned above. We may slip in and out of a certain type in certain situations, but overall we tend to have developed one dominant style.

Part of our personality seems to have come with the hardwiring, our natural tendency, and part from the nuturing and socialization we received from parents, teachers and peers. We notice that some kids come into the world with attitude and some come mellow, taking most everything in stride.

Here's a perspective that helps us to be less effected by differing personalities, and maybe even more respectful of the differences:

Consider that each of us made choices as we matured, and when it came to navigating our way through life's journey, we decided that we could be safer, more effective and successful by choosing one personality type over the others. From this view, our dominant personality type is literally a survival mechanism. Ego's job is to keep us safe. Ego, as popularly used, is our persona, our personality that we present to the world at large.

The next time a leader type takes over the dinner party, a polisher corrects our improper use of a salad fork, a promoter is too intent on selling us his cookbook, or a relater who prizes being liked more than anything insists that we take the last piece of apple pie... we could try a little tenderness. Hey, they're just trying to get by with a little help from their friends. It's their survival mode. We all have one.

We could smile to ourselves and peg their type. It's amazing how much this little shift in perspective can change our attitude. It immediately eases the frustration, softens our heart, enhances our compassion and kindness, and really reduces the stress referenced in the first paragraph. And then we're free to simply...

Love.

Meditate Weight Away. Really?

You might think that there's nothing more inactive than meditation and that inactivity is a road to ruin when it comes to weight and body tone. First of all, we're not talking about meditating in a yoga posture for 8 hours a day. And secondly, there is one inactivity that actually benefits a weight loss program.

If you're active enough to spend time on the internet, and obviously you are, because here you are on a social media site, and you have an interest in weight management and wellness for yourself or helping others with weight management, you've heard that sugar is enemy number one and that processed foods with all that sugar and added chemicals are what Robin is to Batman.

Well, one of the most famous cartoon lines ever, spoken in a word balloon by a character called Pogo read, "We have found the enemy and it is us." The real enemy number one is our very own brain. Yes, here we go again bashing ego. Well, what we're bashing is the busy brain - the number one demander of oxygen-rich blood and subsequently sugar, its fuel. Yup. The old inner chatterer is the real culprit, for many reasons.

We know how children, with their sponge-like brain (its thirst for information, not its physiology) crave candy and anything sugar. Hello. There's a clue. That busy brain wants to keep firing as it grows and accumulates information. That doesn't change a whole lot as we mature, and though we may not have the same thirst as a growing child, we have been socially shaped to rely solely on brain activity and rational process pretty much exclusively. As a result, we've lost touch with our own intuitive capacity and in some ways have overridden our inherent body wisdom. Ever overeat, for example? Or feel like crap after eating some junk food?

So what's this got to do with meditation and a weight loss program? Meditation quiets the brain activity. And in the midst of a quiet mind we can come into a clearing, tap into an inner wisdom that will wake up our natural taste buds that have been put in a comatose state by a lifetime of processed foods...and we will naturally make better food choices without the cookie monster version of sugar, sugar ringing in our head.

Of course, this is predicated on our conscious choice to manage our weight - especially if our goal is weight loss. A side note here, more on this later: When we begin to add more water-rich fruits and veggies to our diet, our taste buds wake up to a whole new joy of eating...healthy.

A couple of things are happening here. We're balancing a conscious choice to begin a program of weight loss with practical knowledge (sugar - bad) and a method of calling upon our inherent body wisdom to guide us to healthy food choices. By meditating we are not only opening up a communication channel between or conscious mind and our subconscious mind (teamed up they can accomplished incredible feats of magic), we are slowing down the impatient ego's demand for sugar.

Something to think about.

To be continued.

Love