Expanding the Golden Ball

You begin to see the benefits to your body when you do, and you will experience a noticeable change in your brain function, memory, and attention levels over time. You probably already know that to maintain muscle strength, keep your heart strong, maintain healthy body weight, and stave off chronic reduces such as diabetes, exercise is important. But exercise can also help boost your ability to think. Behind this, there is a lot of research, says Dr Scott McGinnis, a neurology teacher at Harvard Medical School. It means merely to support the life of others and their happiness. You will shift from the short-lived satisfaction of blocking others into the long-term, inner awareness that comes from supporting others. If you let others into traffic, you experience yourself as magnanimous. You notice that others wave to you in thanks. Your life becomes full of thanks, kindness, gratitude, and win-win outcomes, because those are the principles by which you stand and live. The next practice is to always be growing something in the office, apartment, home, or garden. This can be tomatoes in the window, or a bonsai plant, or little cacti, or whatever takes people's fancy. It should be something for which you take personal responsibility, even if it is just watering the geraniums in the window box. It is noteworthy that Nelson Mandela, even while in prison, grew tomatoes in a discarded trashcan and gave the fruits of his labor to the prison guards and their families. ALIGNING YOUR COMPASS It was clear from her embarrassed expression that she would much rather have chosen nutritionist or physical therapist. Marcie really, truly wanted to see herself as the kind of selfless person who wanted nothing more than to help people. But that self-sacrificing ideal was an ill-fitting shoe. The simple, hard-to-face truth was that Marcie needed to be her own boss, an entrepreneur who made things happen and told other people what to do. It was her deepest nature, and had already peeked out its entrepreneurial face in the form of her hobby shop venture. However, Marcie was deeply ambivalent about this aspect of herself, and she looked profoundly uncomfortable when the group came up with the inescapable conclusion: Marcie needed to be the boss.

One of the other group members told Marcie that she had seen the look on her face when she listed contractor and had known immediately that was the one Marcie loved. Anything that allowed her to be the take-charge, free boss of her own projects would fit the bill, but her real estate career had been requiring her to passively serve the needs of her customers. No wonder she was so miserable. But Marcie felt ashamed of her wishes to be in charge, cringing as she said, I don't want to be a steamroller! Exercise, directly and indirectly, improves your memory and cognitive skills. By inducing physiological changes such as decreases in insulin resistance and inflammation, it works directly on the body, along with promoting the development of growth factors, chemicals that influence the creation of new vessels in the brain, and also the abundance, survival, and overall health of new brain cells. It works directly on the brain itself as well. Many studies have suggested that in people who exercise, the parts of the brain that regulate perception and memory are greater in volume than in people who do not. The finding that is participating in a daily exercise program of moderate intensity for six months or a year is correlated with an improvement in the volume of selected brain regions is even more exciting, says Dr McGinnis. By enhancing mood and sleep, and by decreasing stress and anxiety, exercise can also improve memory and thought indirectly. Problems often cause or lead to cognitive disability in these areas. In terms of brain health, is one workout better than another? The response to this question is not known to us, since almost all of the study so far has looked at walking. But other types of aerobic exercise that have the heart pumping are likely to reap similar benefits, Dr McGinnis says. The capacity for success resides with everyone. Any of us can make others feel good about themselves. In so doing we begin to feel good about ourselves. This begins to rub off and points our compass in an increasingly positive direction in which success is merely the automatic by-product of what we ourselves have become. Advanced research has demonstrated that within all happenings in the universe there is a discernible pattern and organizing principle. In fact, if it were not for the organizing principle, no universe would even be possible.

Organizing principles have different levels of power. We now have one of the secrets of the success of powerful people. Their entire lives are automatically and effortlessly organized by the complete and total alignment with and commitment to very high and powerful principles. This is how Mahatma Gandhi defeated the British Empire. `'But, I said to her, is it any better to pretend you are a washing machine, when you really are a steamroller? Marcie was afraid to let go of the more feminine role of service that she thought her loved ones expected of her. She did not want to run the risk of becoming too different from her family's norm. Marcie could justify leaving the family real estate business for a lifetime of selfless service to others, but to leave in order to create her own business seemed downright competitive and conceited. Shouldn't she instead stay in her brother's business and help him (serve him) first? If she had an interest in business, wouldn't she be more of a good person if she devoted her energies to her brother's success? Here was Marcie's dilemma in full bloom. Yet for that hour in the group, Marcie awakened and left feeling buoyant and excited about the prospect of finding a way to do contracting work. However, the ego makes it hard to resist those fears, and Marcie was no exception. A week later, she told me that after several days of feeling on a high from her radical self-discovery, she had recoiled back into doubt and fear. Research in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found that tai chi has shown the ability of older adults to improve cognitive performance, especially in the field of decision-making function, which handles cognitive processes such as planning, working memory, attention, problem-solving, and verbal reasoning. That may be because tai chi, a martial art involving slow, concentrated movements, needs new abilities and movement patterns to be mastered and memorized. Exercise be developed as a routine, much like taking a prescription drug. And since several studies have shown that beginning to enjoy the cognitive benefits of exercise takes about six months, be patient while you look for the first results, and then to continue to exercise for life. Aim for a target of exercising 150 minutes per week at a moderate pace, such as brisk walking. Begin with some minutes a day and increase the sum every week by five or 10 minutes until your target is achieved.

Exercise is not just beneficial for the body. It's good for the brain as well. You can find that forgetfulness or lack of memory is becoming a concern as you age. Certainly, you're not alone. Power comes from aligning with those dominant attractor patterns that support life. We see this orientation in the grace and friendliness of truly successful people. They want to put others at ease, supporting their comfort and well-being. Even their artlessness, naivete, or clumsiness is done within an overall context of grace. It is almost as though unconsciously they know when it is most graceful to be awkward. That sheer awkwardness is what sets the other people at ease. How often could we think back to a point in our lives when we just suddenly pretended we had forgotten something, or were flustered, and the sole purpose was to put the other person at ease? That was a good space to come from and assures us that our consideration for others brings an automatic grace that fits the needs of the moment. Success is neither something that we have nor something that we do. It is the automatic consequence of what we are. She was just too dependent, she was just too afraid, etc, etc I knew that Marcie had already stepped out on her path to the future, because the others and I had seen her excitement during that group session. Marcie and her ego could deny it for as long as she needed to, but the boss in her was not going away. It was just going to take some time to accept. About two months later, I ran into Marcie again and she was glowing with excitement. She had not quit her job, but she had bought an old house to renovate and sell. Her love of setting things up, scheduling, and telling people what to do now had its potentially profitable outlet.

Marcie had taken the step out into the gap of true growth, moving toward who she really was. The Ego's Final Exam In an earlier article, I told you how the ego likes to jump in and knock down your excitement by asking you the one question that deflates everything. This is what I think of as the ego's final exam question. This occurs because the bonds between our brain cells, or neurons, are beginning to break. Fortunately, there are ways of enhancing these ties and developing your memory while you're at it. The influence of your memory is determined in your brain by the frequency of certain neural pathways. The older you become, the worse you become with those links. This can cause problems like forgetfulness and loss of memory. If you might think this is something to worry about during later life, in your mid-twenties, those bonds actually start to break. You can find yourself beginning to lose episodes of memory. An explanation of this? If you forget where you're putting the keys. You have forgotten the act of throwing down your keys, not what the keys are. Our lives and what we accomplish in the world are merely the outcome of what we truly are within ourselves and what we have decided to serve. This truth is what makes our work easy. In steering the ship, if we change direction only one degree on the compass, after a few days of sailing we will be hundreds and hundreds of miles from where we would have been had we not shifted our course that one little degree; Perhaps no one knows this better than the recovering alcoholic or addict. THE WAY OUT OF ADDICTION What we are addicted to is not a substance but the experience of our true Self, a state of inner peace and love for all life.