Readers Summary
- What did you learn about yourself in 2011?
- What do you hope to build into you in 2012?
- How are you going to do it?
- What are the primal principles to Optimal Living?
Today is the last day of 2011 and I have written over 60,000 words for the new book since 12/23/2011. The book has just flowed from me. As I wrote one chapter today, it occurred to me that I have neglected the blog. I thought about what I learned the most about me this year in 2011. I learned that I spent an entire lifetime feeding my left hemisphere and subjugated the talents I had in my right hemisphere. You can’t become an oral surgeon and a neurosurgeon if you pander constantly to your more creative side. In fact, you need to use and develop the skill set in your left hemisphere. It has helped me become who I am today. I realized in the process of writing the book that like a body builder who works on their upper body to the detriment of their other body parts, you can become unbalanced in who you become.
I realized rather abruptly that the thing I learned about myself in 2011 is that I have a pretty good right hemisphere that I need to let out of the bag more often. I learned this year how to tap it and how to exercise and use it to complement my left side. In fact, I think I have found evidence of sub intelligence abilities I never knew I had. I stumbled upon them when I decided to launch the blog, and begin to talk about what I have found and the connections I have made between disparate biological systems. The more I wrote and shared, the more interesting things I found hidden inside me. My wife posited that it was likely due to opening my world up to the people I serve as having the great effect of expanding my own abilities. She is a pretty smart lady because I think she is correct, and she knows me better than anyone on this planet. We got into a discussion tonight while we are getting ready for an open house party for our friends and family for New Years Eve, and it opened my mind to the thoughts I am writing now for you here.
What am I going to build in 2012?
I have decided to continue to engage my right hemisphere, and become more creative in my thinking. I am intrigued by what I have found buried within. There are some talents I have that I did not know existed. So I am going to expand upon them and try to become more balanced in my brain capacity. I think I am going to develop some exercise’s to help facilitate this program of growth much like we would do if we hired a personal trainer to sculpt our bodies. I have decided to sculpt my creative mind in 2012. I think this might be a fun thing to share with many of you as well and let you know what I am doing. My wife suggested tonight that I came up with a Leptin Rx and Leptin Rx post script after 15 years of left brain exercising that now I needed to begin a program to find a new Rx for what makes us think, create, and do. 15 years ago, my left brain would have marginalized her suggestion. Tonight, I am embracing her idea because I think it is time for me to embrace some of the primal principles for the optimal living that I may have been neglecting since my reset.
How am I going to do it?
I am going to use a thought experiment beginning tomorrow in the AM in the hot tub as I wait for the sunrise to hit 2012 for the first time. I am going to think about miracles and creativity. I am going to consider what a miracle is to me. People usually consider walking on water, or turning water to wine (I would love to be able to do this for sure!) as a miracle. However, I think the real miracle is not to walk on water or to create wine from water, or air, or even grapes, but it to walk on this earth alive every day. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we rarely recognize. A blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, cold wind, white snow, the black expanse of space, the curious eyes of a child. In my opinion, those are the real miracles we miss every day.
Those miracles are in each and every one of us. Our goal is to learn how to discover our own full potential. To do so requires that we must become self aware that our full human potential is buried within us, and we need to learn how to awaken it as it sleeps under the guise of our dominant hemisphere. For me the words of the masters of primal principles might have woken me up to my full potential in realizing I need to use both sides of my brain to dig me out.
What are the primal principles of Optimal Living?
So what do I think are these principles that I might have discovered tonight on the last night of 12/31/2011?
- Connectiveness: I have gained a recognition and appreciation of how biology and life is connected, but failed to realize that this extends to creativity. I have to use my system wide brain thinking on both sides of the pond in my brain.
- Where art meets science: This is where we stretch the boundaries of logic to meet imagination. I allow my imagination to influence hard core fact to draw inferences to new rabbit holes I have never considered. Open a worm hole in my brain to explore and just spend days brainstorming and saying I am wasting time exploring the depths of my thoughts on imagination.
- Exploring enigma: Showing more willingness to go out on a limb for the sake of ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty and understanding that not knowing my lead to a new way to view an old problem. I need to keep an open mind in the face of the unknown. I need to learn to trust my gut and my Primal sense more.
- Soaking the senses: Go back to my childhood ways of refining my exercises for the senses. Pay more attention to the things we see, because 80% of what humans learn is from our visual inputs.
- Demonstrating it: I need to develop a commitment to test all my newly acquired knowledge through experience, persistence, and embracing failures in creativity to open new realities I had failed to consider initially.
- Remaining Curious: I need to use the insatiable approach I used to learn my craft in medicine and apply the same principle to now approach my creative imaginative side with the same reckless abandon and see where it takes me.
- Embracing my corporeality: I need to cultivate more grace and gratitude in things. I need to make my left hand do more than it cares to do, and my right do less than it can do. I need to expand my creativity with fitness and exercise plans to match my unique findings about the Leptin Rx. I need to drop my abruptness of thought and develop an understated poise under pressure.
In closing, I am going to use 2012 to sharpen my senses and probe the depths of the experience and relationships I have had the fortune to cultivate. I am going to reawaken the childlike powers of questioning things using the above mentioned Primal Principles for Optimal Living. I want to be serious in how I study things, but never forget the playfulness to connect things like I used to as child.
