I hear music up above my head

It's the story of your life. And that story isn't just part of you. It is you in a fundamental way. Life is the story you tell yourself. But how you tell that story--are you a hero, victim, lover, warrior, caretaker, believer--matters a great deal. How you adapt that story--how you revise, rethink, and rewrite your personal narrative as things change, lurch, or go wrong in your life--matters even more. The papers were filed last month. No chance of reconciliation? He said no, I replied. The words came out flat. I could still hardly believe the betrayal that I felt. The bitterness of it all stirred from within and climbed up my throat. I tasted the bile on my tongue and gulped it back down, biting the left side of my lip as to hide my weakness. Learning he had long ago, moved on allowed me to finally make sense of his behavior. Suddenly I understood why he had distanced himself. Suddenly I understood why he left. Empathy is a concept often mentioned but less often understood. Most people recognize the importance of being sympathetic, and this is often confused with empathy. Empathy involves not only understanding the emotions of others deeply, but it involves sharing those emotions. This means experiencing the subjective feelings of others, a capacity that is uniquely human and a very important part of emotional intelligence.

There is a lot to the subject of empathy, a subject that will be explored fully in the fifth article. The goal is that the reader not only recognizes the key role that empathy plays in emotional intelligence but develops the skills needed to have empathy and infuse this quality into all of their relationships. Training your own emotional, intellectual skills is key to success in relationships of all kind. Emotional understanding, and the actions and words that stem from it, allow you to connect with others uniquely and powerfully. In the sixth article, you will learn how emotional intelligence is critical to all relationships, and how your previous relationships may have suffered because these important skills were not being put to good use. From friendships to familial relationships and romantic relationships, honing empathy, and other aspects of emotional intelligence is key to getting the most out of your relationships. They tend to say something like, Sure, of course, I really am different people at different times and in the different parts of my lives. Or sometimes they say, Well, I've known this about myself for a long time, but I never talk about it. Given the strength of the Single Self Assumption, many people have never considered their own experience of healthy multiplicity. But once the healthy selves worldview is brought up, those able to look beyond the Single Self Assumption begin to see the confusion and difficulty that flows from it begin to drop away from their lives. An obviously easier and better way to live is not just around the corner but already resides within you. As your selves come to look past the Single Self Assumption and experience what we are discussing here, most or all of you may naturally and readily choose to take increasing advantage of the totality of who you are. Each of your selves, whether or not you ever name them or identify any of them with precision, is a very real being, entity, or self-state, an autonomous complex (as Jung called it) that has its own agenda, its own needs, and its own ways of working with your other selves and other people (and their selves). It is not just that you have different moods, aspects, or feelings; It's really quite striking: we have a culture-wide adherence to an assumed unity that rarely if ever exists, and a corresponding denial of what many of us already know to be so about the way that things actually are. Almost all of us have experienced what it means to be in a different self. Maybe you don't register this, your mind searching for the letter's terminus, which comes suddenly, out of nowhere, mid-sentence: `whether all this constitutes a psychiatric overlay, likely stress-related? Or is it indicative of incipient organic process? In other words, anxiety or terminal disease? Our questions to each other often hinge on such choices, known as `differentials', usually pairs of names opposed like bouts: Alzheimer's vs Vascular?

Alzheimer's vs Depression? Alzheimer's vs Lewy Bodies? Lewy Bodies vs Parkinson's? Parkinson's vs Progressive Supranuclear Palsy? Progressive Supranuclear Palsy vs Corticobasal Degeneration? Title fights. You pick a particular practice (or set of practices) and designate them as your gong and diligently practice them every day, without fail, for the time period. This not only builds resolve but also forces us to wake up and pay attention to our day-to-day routines. We know that our everyday microhabits lead to the lives we have now. Making small, simple yet significant changes along a longer period of time is the way forward. Change a little here and there and eventually life takes off in wonderful ways. A gong is a powerful way of not only building focus and determination but also ensuring that you train regularly. A gong is a dedicated act of self-love that snaps you out of your daily trance and brings the light of awareness to your consciousness. The more we practice, the more we wake up and the better off we are. Because it takes at least 90 days for a particular good habit to burn into your nervous system, I have found the 100-Day Gong to be the most appropriate length to practice. You can think of it as a 100-day ritual that helps instill new habits. With every player, there is a floor and ceiling. But each one can get better if we put them in certain activities that give them the opportunity to develop and train the decision-making components of anticipation, recognition, and awareness. Part of the issue is that most coaches don't know how to do that. In hockey we have a much better understanding of how to improve a player's skating ability, for example.

We can help a player learn how to stick handle, or work on catch and release, or improve the velocity of his or her shot. But as coaches and parents, we also need to ask how can we help this player with anticipation skills and recognition skills and decision-making skills. For me, these are our next challenges. As a professional coach at the NHL level, I try to learn as much as I can about how people learn. By learning about the brain, I can use activities in practice that can help us train our guys to get better at the intellectual side of the game, which is every bit as important as the physical aspect. When I sit in meetings with our scouts to talk about drafting players, I often hear He's six foot four, 220 pounds, strong as an ox, and can stick handle in a phone booth. With the pancreas undermined, there really is no insulin to process blood sugar. Therefore, someone with type I diabetes has to get the insulin from outside, perhaps by daily injection, for life. Usually type I is detected in patients before their twentieth birthday. This form of the disease though, is not the one responsible for the burgeoning increase in cases mentioned earlier. According to the American Diabetes Association, type I diabetes is responsible for only 5 percent of all diabetes cases. Type II diabetes, also known as non-insulin-dependent diabetes or adult-onset diabetes, is the one whose numbers are getting staggering. This one, which occurs most frequently in adults over forty, and more often in women than men, is not tied so much to early infections or genetic factors as to lack of exercise, obesity, and lifestyle factors. However, it is now beginning to show up more and more in children and young adults. Type II Diabetes in Children and Young People This is a heartbreaking trend. My life as an unhappy, overweight, serial dieter has been transformed. All the energy, time and effort I used to put into trying unsuccessfully to lose weight in the past has been freed up and goes into more joyful, rewarding and enriching activities. Today, I have a life Beyond Chocolate. Sophie Just like my sister, I spent most of my adult life from the age of about 13 to 34 either on a diet or eating for Britain.

I remember very well the first time I dieted; We decided that we would have a bowl of All Bran with skimmed milk for breakfast followed by two Ryvitas with Marmite for lunch and the same for dinner! I lasted about two days. Over the years I went on every diet in the article and made up many more of my own. I believed with all my heart that if I could just lose weight and be thin then everything would fall into place. When I was thin, men would find me attractive. Recently, something happened to me that made me focus on these issues: I lost control of that story bouncing around in my head. For a while, I didn't know who I was; I didn't know where I was going. I was lost. That's when I began to realize: While storytelling has drawn significant academic and popular interest in recent years, there's an aspect of personal storytelling that hasn't gotten enough attention. What happens when we misplace the plot of our lives? When we get sidetracked by one of the mishaps, foul-ups, or reversals of fortune that appear with uncomfortable frequency these days? What happens when our fairy tales go awry? That's what happened to my dad that fall, to me around that time, to all of us at one time or another. We get stuck in the woods and can't get out. I quickly pulled myself out of my memory when I noticed Elizabeth watching me process my thoughts. My throat tightened and my belly clinched as I worked to control my breath and the tears that threatened. My mind raced as I tried to think of ways to hide my embarrassment. Though no words were spoken, Elizabeth seemed to understand the gravity of it all.