READERS SUMMARY
Merry Christmas and Happy holidays from my family to yours. I want to start with a video and then give you something to think about until 2015.
By the time I went to college at 16, I had tunnel vision and laser like precision to change my trajectory in life. I knew the manner in which I grew up was not a long term growth option so I decided as a freshman I was going to change my world by transforming myself first.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid 30’s with a big lake house, a RV, an Escalade, a Corvette convertible, with a new baby on the way that I began to become morbidly obese. This was my first clue that modern day success was not going to be all it was cracked up to be. Concurrently I had spent 25 years in training to become a neurosurgeon. This super-stressful job AND the task of keeping up with Jones’s guaranteed that I would not remain well. In all my training, not once, did I learn how all these choices where working below my perception to slowly decay my life. As I slowly became obese, my whole world began to change and I had no idea what was wrong. Now I know it was the effects of brain inflammation causing steady decline in sleep quality and efficiency. This lead to adrenal fatigue and a failing redox potential in my cells. My once sharp brain was but a shadow of the power it once was. I knew it, but I could not really talk about it with anyone because of my job. This lead to total dissatisfaction in my professional life. It even began to bleed into my personal life. Around this time, my partners tried to marginalized me. This was the beginning of my upcoming change. I fought back turned the tables on them, and opened my own practice, and began to do things in a new way. I was determined not to allow my life fall apart on my watch.
I asked several of my colleagues to help me lose my weight and return to my former self but they were powerless to do so. This was the first time in my life I realized the medical establishment couldn’t help patients like me, and I became angry. How could I have spent 20 years training to do this job and it not contain the answers to a “simple” issue? Right about this time I injured my knee giving a talk on spine surgery. No trauma, no slip or fall, I just tore a meniscus by getting up at a podium. This was the last straw. I began to look at alternative treatments that looked at my problem with a new perspective. This all happened to me 10 years ago now. This was the greatest Christmas gift I was ever given, the gift of illness and ruin.
The point of this story, I was an integral part of “this system” , and it was treating me really well financially, but totally destroying me physically and emotionally. Everything was fine until I got ill, but because it was so unsustainable. I began to break down at an early age and then realized how my life resembled a mirage in a desert. The viewpoint from outside in was a far different perspective than the inside out view.
It turned out this Christmas gift was given to me at just the right time in my life.
Success is always about timing. Most of what makes a book good, is that we are reading it at the right moment in time. The same thing is true in life. There is never a wrong time, to do the right thing.
It’s not about where you were, and it’s not about where you are going. I found out ten years ago it’s about where you are at this specific moment in time; Moreover, where I was at that specific moment was dictated by my past choices and where I was going would continue to be navigated and dictated by my current actions. This insight was my greatest Christmas gift ever.
Critics find faults, but leaders find remedies. I realized in an instant, that my life was being ruined my behavior; It affected my sleep, my persona, and my health. Did I fall back to revert to mean? I was already living in the face of abject failure? No, I did not. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I was already at the point of no return. So what did I do? I read some books to gain a new perspective, of whatI might be missing. I decided to try to use other’s perspectives about failure and change drive “thought experiments” in my brain to increase my dopamine levels. This ultimately helped me overcome the decisions and choices I had previously made.
I think the whole “collective delusion” that modern life allows for is perfectly fine until it no longer is OK. There is no impetus for transformation when “life” seems to more or less work for us. Why don’t we see it? Might it be that human consciousness is evolving faster than today’s existing culture’s and structures can adapt?
Many people defer the long term gratification of collecting a big salary by spending decades of time obtaining formal education in school. Many believe formal education is needed to get the highest paying jobs. This is no longer true. A high school dropout can make more money in the short run than the guy stuck studying geology. Today, society is failing children; school no longer is a guarantee of success. In fact, college no longer can provide stable employment, medicine doesn’t work, modern foods makes most sick given enough time, love can no longer sustain relationships and as a results families and marriages are a mess, governments now fail their electors because there aren’t enough jobs. It’s not that these things are “bad” or even “real,” it’s more that the old system of “go along, do what you’re told, fit in” doesn’t work anymore because things are changing too fast. The world is set up for everyone to follow in step. When you step out of line you get ‘run over’. This is when you begin to see the delusion of your current truths. This is a gift when you change your perspective.
THE GIFT OF TIME
Career health planning should leverage your current assets, set course for you and your family in direction of your aspirations, and account for the realities that modern life brings us. We can not control all the fake food created, artificial light, and genetic alterations of our naturally occurring foods. The problem is for us these puzzle pieces are always changing, and are often their real biologic effects on us are not fully known today’s medicine.
The best we can do to “protect our house” is articulate educated hypotheses about each subject using our best data. We need to craft a document for our health like we do in estate planning, to navigate these risks to our future. A personal “health trust” to keep us healthy, if you will. In asset protection, we seek to protect our gains using legal constructs to keep the state from taking our money so we can leave it to our family and friends of our choosing.
All of our “personal health estate plans” should contain and lay out behaviors to avoid the sorts of assumptions that may subjugate out health and our families health. Good “personal health estate planning” documents make them explicit so that you can track them over time and make adjustments based upon your outcomes and how the data may evolve our beliefs. Essentially, you want to make explicit the things that need to be true today, for your plan to work for your lifespan. These hypotheses should lead you to specific actions and behaviors to make this reality happen as you had planned.
WHAT SHOULD BE IN YOUR HOLIDAY PLAN THIS YEAR?
1. Make a journal and write your thoughts down in it as soon as you rise daily. Ask yourself what is your true potential? In the world of physical science “potential energy is the energy stored in an object due to its position in a force field or in a system due to its configuration“….Human potential can be hampered if we choose to believe the same things daily and operate in the same matrix of living. We are not bound to the built constructs of the world, our potential is meant to surpass the artificial systems around us. As beings our potential is endless, but it’s our journey to discover what our true potential is and express it to the world. For our potential is not a reflection of the “man-made” world, rather our potential is meant to be an expression of our being. We are beings of boundless energy. One must know how to falter and fall, before they know how it feels to stand tall…..Your path is one of greatness, if you choose to create it.
2. If your purpose is noble, you will find fulfillment. And in fulfillment lies much more than material recognition – there lies your source of being.
3. Go to the library or to amazon and read a book like “Linchpin” by Seth Godin. It can change your life because it puts the new world and new economy into context so you can craft your “estate plan”. You’ll soon realize the things in your personality that causes you to struggling in the world is music being created by life while it awaits for you to sing and dance by its tune and not the worldview. Interestingly, not fitting in, being too individual, telling the truth about critical things and being transparent when doing so. are precisely what you and the world needs today. There is a huge advantage in the new, post-industrial world. Your health and life are waiting to dance……..you just need to be retune to listen to its notes.
4. Perspective – Our defining characteristic that allows us to see the world through a different lens. It’s with perspective we can live the world vicariously through others, and not just through self. It’s with perspective we can educate, change, adapt and feel the vibrations of the world. For if our life is not filled with a changing perspective daily, then what actions got us here will not be the actions that get us to the next plateau. Challenge your perspective daily to evolve into a greater form of self. For without a changing perspective, you are living asleep with the status quo. Ask yourself, what could you achieve if you were more willing to consider new approaches, rather than reflexively resist them?
5.Purpose leads to action. Action leads to reaction….Reverse engineer that statement and discover what type of reactions are you creating through your actions or inactions? For through your actions you will find your purpose. Begin to knock on a door that the new ancestral paradigm does not fully grasp. Asking better questions of your current beliefs leads to new wisdom……..we should all strive for that motivation.
6. One thing is clear, in the long run, logic dictates, people with a foundation of health knowledge and skills will collect more health assets and most often live a more healthy life. What is true in the world of computing is also true in health. You do not have to go to school for 25 years like I did, to learn how to stay healthy and avoid disease today. Today that information is awaiting those of you make learning about your health a priority today. Most of what I learned in my training can be found on the web these days. The hard part is collecting it all in one spot for people to learn from.
7. Science never stands still, only our thinking about it does. This concept is true in modern business today too. We need to adapt it in our own healthcare estate plan. There’s a similar belief in IPO’s today. Most modern technology companies focus on learning over profitability in their early years to maximize revenue in the later years. This is contrary to how modern healthcare works. We spend more the last year of life than we do at any other point of our lifespan. Maybe, if we begin to “health plan” smarter when we are younger, we can avoid that trap?
8.Unfortunately, for far too many of us, we’ve focused on learning end points at our college or professional school graduations. We read about stocks and bonds or randomized controlled clinical trials in medicine, instead of reading books that improve our health or our minds. These books are capable of allowing us to hear the music we can make in nature without any effort. We compare our health and our salary to those of our friends and family members, instead of comparing life lessons learned by all to remain well. We allowed bad thinking to infect our neural networks over the 120 years. It is as if we invested in the stock market first, and totally neglected investing in ourselves. Ask yourself, “what good is becoming a billionaire in life and dying at 60?” We were taught to focus, in the short term, on hard assets, instead of soft assets of life. This is a primordial mistake in modern humans. Change this, by giving yourself the gift of thought.
9. Good questions provide information. Great questions lead to transformations. If you don’t ask yourself the right questions, you’ll never get the right answers. Change requires natural truth’s. Without nature’s truths real change is impossible…Ask yourself today, what do I need to know about nature for me to begin the process of change? The answer may be very revealing. You have to begin by asking yourself deeper questions before you will get the correct answers!
10. Be someone who makes someone else look forward to tomorrow.
SUMMARY
Christmas isn’t a season to me, it’s a feeling. It is a time that seems to hold all time together for me. It is a state of mind we enter. It’s a feeling brought about by feelings of seasons past. When people come together and they don’t know why, but that does not stop them from doing nice things for one another, and smiling at others for no reason at all. It is a time where we should see ourselves in nature’s mirror. Sometime christmas time’s what we see is capable of changing who we will become. Christmas was never a single feeling, or a single emotion, in my mind. It was wherever the people who loved me were at that time, whenever we were together. Those places no longer exist more, but for a moment in my mind, I can use that feeling to forge a new way to improve my current situation. This holiday, I’m building on those memories, like laying bricks to create a solid shelter that I take with me my entire life, wherever I may go. At Christmas I remember who I am, and why I decided to be me. He who has no Christmas in his soul will never find it under a tree.
Modern life is speeding your epigenetic programs, by design. Tautomerization of RNA and DNA……….and no one sees it. Ancestral food is a very small part of the creation of Rx of this illness. But even in new paradigms that arise, people will forgo an inconvenient truth to comfort to embrace a comforting lie. Your current convictions this Christmas maybe greater enemies to your real truth than lies are. Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your creation and masterpiece. Give this to yourself this year.
Before you paint that masterpiece, here is some parting advice………stretch your canvas fully first, with the knowledge and wisdom of nature leading your brush strokes. At the core we are all artists yearning to express our creative abilities and the world was meant to be our canvas. Listen to the voices in your head. This is the radio station that plays your music. The world is waiting and watching for you to begin to dance to your music, so the question is what type of masterpiece will you create to be remembered by this holiday? When will you present your gifts to this world? If not now, when?
Merry Christmas and a Happy holiday.
CITES:
Anik Seth insights
Linchpin, Seth Godin.
http://practicalpaleolithic.com/paleolithic-diet-blog/were-consumers-lets-act-like-it
