Simple Steps

Fruit In The Garden Of Good And Evil

My Zen (actually Korean Chan) master once said something to me that has stuck in my mind.

Modern human beings have lost the ability to distinguish their symbolic abstractions in words from reality.

This was said in a different way in the movie Oh God, You Devil where George Burns, playing the devil was asked what his greatest accomplishment was. He answered, “Language!”

Have you ever noticed that language is the convenient way we obscure and justify when we mistreat our fellow human beings. We always seem to find a way to come up with a reason why we are “doing unto others” in a way other than we would have “done to ourselves.”

So, let’s keep this simple.

When you help people you do good.

When you hurt people you do bad.

End of story.

Keeping your life this simple will help you enjoy the world more. Forget the pundits and politicians, and just do good to others.

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Posted in Buddhist Thoughts, Personal Change, Simple Steps, Special Thoughts

A Practical Approach for Keeping New Year’s Resolutions

We all want to change something in order to make our world better so that we can enjoy it more. At this time of year those changes often take the form of New Year’s Resolutions, and right about now some of you are about to give up on a resolution or two. Don’t! The secret is to do 3 simple things to make your Resolutions really work for you instead of against you.

Before going into the three simple things, take a moment to consider the form of typical New Year’s Resolutions. They are things like “I’m going to lose weight.” or “I’m going to start feeling better.” Those are very broad topics. The problem is that these are like someone asking you to shoot at a target that’s “over there somewhere.” You can only hit a target if someone says, “Hit that target right there.” In the same sense you need a clear target. “I’m going to lose 30 pounds.” and “I will make my knees stop hurting.” are much less lofty Resolutions because you can definitely say whether or not you acomplish them. Even so, there is a problem with them. This goes into what can be called The Psychology of Daily Defeats. If you set your Resolution to lose 30 pounds, the fact is that you can’t acomplish that in a short amount of time. It just can’t be done. So, everytime you get on the scale you will say to yourself, “I haven’t lost the 30 pounds yet.” or “I still need to lose 25 pounds.” That means you experience defeat because you haven’t achieved your Resolution… evenutally you give up.

So the second step is to create micro Resolutions. Things you can easily accomplish on a day to day or weekly basis. For example, the lose 30 pounds Resolution can be broken up into micro Resolutions like…

Find out about glycemic index based eating this week
Do 1 Vitalogy Recipe this week
Eat Vitalogy meals 80% of the time this week
Lose 1 pound this week

These are simply, easily accomplished micro Resolutions you achieve one small thing each week. Then you begin to experience Daily Successes. That reinforces what you are doing.

Many people will recognize this as setting goals and tasks from objectives. Those words work great in business, but the problem is that they are too weak psychologically for personal change. So, the third simple thing to do is to make a commitment in writing to someone you care about for each micro Resolution… and report back to them on how you did. If you make the commitment to lose 1 pound, then report that back.

These three simple steps of

defining clear targets
setting easily acomplished micro Resolutions
making commitments about your micro Resolutions

Will help you achieve the Resolutions that you made.

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Posted in Food, Health, Personal Change, Simple Steps, Vitalogy, weight loss

Vitalogy – Best Exercises For The Body and Healthy Eating

Meet Mr. Frosty, the official Vitalogy mascot

There are lots of health, diet, and exercise programs on the internet. So who needs another one, right? I guess I did because I’ve really enjoyed the Vitalogy program and unlike everything else I’ve tried, it’s made a huge difference in my life. If you check out the Vitalogy Fun Diet and Exercise Web Site, you’ll see me all over it and that’s because I totally endorse the product and am directly involved with promoting it on the internet.

So why do I like it? If you look around it doesn’t take long to see that most programs for getting more fit, eating more healthy, and losing weight are really created with an assumption that you’re already pretty fit to begin with. I remember one video where the “easy” version of the exercises were way too strenuous. That’s why I call Vitalogy Healthy Eating, Weight Loss, and Fitness for the Rest of Us. And that’s exactly what it is. Let’s face it, if you spend much time on the internet you have a bit of a geek in you, and Vitalogy is really health for geeks. It adapts to any age, weight, and level of fitness.

The thing I really like about it is that it doesn’t require big chunks of time to really accomplish a lot. No driving to the gym and back and spending 30 minutes to an hour “working out”. Instead, it’s just a minute here and there — like while you’re waiting for a file to download or during a commercial on TV — just small amounts of time add up quickly… and as you begin to feel more fit you naturally want to do more.

And the meals I’ve learned to prepare are terrific.

Best of all, even though all this is serious stuff, Vitalogy is also about having some fun as the video above shows. And be honest, isn’t it much easier to do fun than it is to do work. I think so!

If you have muscle or joint pain, stiff muscles, want better muscle tone, want to drop a few pounds, or whatever I highly suggest you give the Vitalogy lifestyle a try. And if you’re a registered Enjoy A Better World Newsletter member you can do it for free starting today.

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Posted in exercise, Food, Health, Simple Steps, Vitalogy, weight loss