Is it painful to be alone?

Lipton also goes on to explain that we close down our cellular structure with our fears, our attitudes and our beliefs: They wound up training 140 different species for commercial and entertainment purposes, even appearing with their animals on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and the Ed Sullivan Show. And it worked - at least for a while. In 1961, two years after Chomsky published his review, Skinner's former graduate students published a controversial article, The Misbehavior of Organisms, that challenged the legitimacy of operant conditioning. During their animal training, they began noticing some strange occurrences, one of which involved pigs trained to pick up wooden coins and place them in a piggy bank slot. The reinforcement schedule varied, but after about every fourth deposit, the pigs would be rewarded with food. The pigs repeated the behavior over several days, picking up the coins and carrying them to the piggy bank. According to positive reinforcement principles, the pigs would learn to deposit the coins progressively faster to speed up the time it takes to get the reward. But as Skinner's former students reported, this did not happen. They would pick up the coins, and while on their way to the piggy bank, they would continuously drop the coins and begin rooting, or digging at them. As a result, the pigs were beginning to starve themselves, preferring to spend their time rooting at the coins instead of depositing them for food. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel. For managers, listening with empathy requires giving up a self-centered view of work and of one's status in an organization. Giving up a self-centered orientation allows a manager to participate fully in the other person's experience. Constituents come to believe in their leaders--to see them worthy of their trust--when they believe that the leaders have their best interests at heart. Leaders who are clearly only interested in their own agendas, their own advancement, and their own well-being will not be followed willingly. At the heart of this other-orientation is the art of listening. It requires discipline and energy, directed externally rather than internally. Managers need to evaluate how much time they spend talking (often behavior that is self-oriented) and how much time they spend listening (most often behavior that is externally oriented). Now, let's take a moment to review some key points about empathic listening:

Empathic listeners do not: So what are we to do? The main reason to marry or commit to love, as we see it, is to side with hope over despair. Even though despair might make more sense, given the fate we're all heir to, even though we live in a world that proceeds not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope, isn't it better still to hope? And to love even while knowing that you will one day lose the person you love? Once you decide to live, it is best to live on the side of love and hope while this world wrings the life out of you. To commit to one person is a way to moor that love and know where it will be the next day, unless a storm blows it away. It is also to have someone you can tackle the messes with. Doing it together can make even the worst messes and meaninglessnesses somehow feel worthwhile. Life will beat us down, but it doesn't have to kill our hope, our dream, our connection, our love. Maybe that's what mature love is all about: taking pleasure in doing together what doing alone wouldn't be worth living for. If you choose to see a world full of love, your body will respond by growing in health. If you choose to believe that you live in a dark world full of fear, your body's health will be compromised as you physiologically close yourself down in a protection response. This is why in a yoga class we do physical exercise to relieve the body of stress and tension and to release stuck emotions. Then we do the real yoga which is calming the mind and connecting to pure source energy. Often yoga is taught as a series of interesting body shapes we strive to achieve, and this is not at all the point. The real healing in a yoga class takes place when we are in a pose called Shivasanna, lying on our backs in total stillness, utilising the power of our focussed mind. Similarly in qi gong, another powerful Eastern system for moving energy through the body - the practice begins by opening up the DNA. We open up the cellular structure to let the healing energy from the earth into the body so that it can create healing life forces in the body. This requires us to be relaxed and safe - the cellular structure is then in its open state and is able to engage and enter into an exchange of energetic information with its environment.

Qi Gong is at its most healing and powerful when it is practiced in the presence of a teacher who has been trained in giving direct transmissions of different types of healing energies. After witnessing several misbehaviors in animals, the experimenters concluded: Here we have animals, after having been conditioned to specific learned response, gradually drifting into behaviors that are entirely different from those which were conditioned. Moreover, it can easily be seen that these particular behaviors to which the animals drift are clear-cut examples of instinctive behaviors having to do with the natural food getting behaviors of the particular species. Furthermore, they stated, [B]ehavior of any species cannot be adequately understood, predicted, or controlled without knowledge of its instinctive patterns. It suddenly became clear to the trainers that the pigs were reverting to their instinctual behaviors, which, as loyal behaviorists, they previously denied existed. Rooting is an instinctive behavior for a pig, and no amount of positive reinforcement will change that, as the trainers discovered. The idea that animals' conditioned behavior (ie depositing coins in piggy bank) eventually reverts to their instinctual behavior (ie rooting at them coins) is what the trainers called instinctive drift. It wasn't just the pigs that were exhibiting instinctive drift, either; The ability of animals to learn or modify their behavior is limited by the extent of their instincts. As it turns out, the way trainers are able to teach animals to do impressive tricks, such as pigeons playing ping pong or elephants sitting in chairs, is by slightly modifying what the animals naturally do. Empathic listeners do: In essence, you need to prepare yourself to listen more empathetically: If you can let down your defenses, quiet the chatter in your mind, and turn all your attention to the person opposite you, you will suddenly know what her words and actions mean. Eliminate distractions. Put the phone on voice mail, close the door to your office, and put away things you are working on. Expect moments of silence, and be comfortable with appropriate silence. Allowing silent interludes between expressions of issues, facts, or feelings conveys patience, understanding, and a willingness to let a story unfold. Concentrate on maintaining good eye contact. This will help demonstrate an interest and connectedness to the speaker.

Clear your mind and focus on hearing what the speaker is saying. The most fundamental reason to stay is to make life for both of you better. This is the great hope, the real possibility that love holds out to us all: to put enough of an end to our aloneness that we can find a better life in togetherness. While we will never lose our aloneness, nor would it be healthy to do so, at least until we die we can find in togetherness a force that lets us endure pain and find joy, a force that can keep us hopeful even in the face of despair, a force that knows nothing of wealth and fame but knows everything of how to defeat demons and create angels. As we pointed out at the beginning, creating this force does require tools that can be hard to come by in modern life: attention; But the great good news is that you, or anyone, can lay claim to those tools simply by resolving to do so. Since our aim has to be always practical and offer action steps you can use in your daily life, we want to conclude the article with concrete tips, exercises, suggestions, and bits of time-tested wisdom. To provide you with this as economically as possible, we first provide a bulleted summary of tips, followed by a workarticle. The summary brings together in one place many of the tips that have been offered elsewhere in this article and introduces some new ones. The workarticle gives you a process that you can follow. It shows you how, day by day, you can reclaim the love you once had or deepen the love you have today. When such a teacher creates the energy field for the class, the healing properties of this field can be absorbed by the student's open and receptive cells. Making Our Energy Bodies Strong: The Theory There is a vast amount of evidence that points to how energy affects the processes of life. Conventional medicine, however, has still not fully embraced the role energy plays as information in biological systems, or the fact that microwaves, radio frequencies, the visible light spectrum and acoustic frequencies profoundly impact every facet of biological regulation. Common sense and the expanding field of science known as epigenetics also lead us to the understanding that the energetic environment that we place the cells of our body in is extremely important for our health. One of the most fascinating ideas that Dr Bruce Lipton shares in The Biology of Belief follows on from the way in which the harmonic resonance mechanism of sound waves can be used to destroy a kidney stone. The science of physics implies that the same mechanism can enable similar energy harmonics to influence the functions of our body's chemistry. And according to Lipton, there is enough scientific evidence to suggest that we can tailor a waveform as a therapeutic agent in much the same way we now treat and modulate the chemical structures in our bodies with drugs. In his study Effects of Conscious Intention on Human DNA, Dr Glen Rein (PhD) discovered that loving energy sent through intent creates conformational changes in the human DNA molecule.

The DNA molecule actually unwound and began to heal itself when in the presence of loving energy sent through intent. For example, a pigeon can be trained to peck a lever for food; Likewise, a pigeon can be taught to flap its wings to avoid being shocked since it's natural for pigeons to flap their wings to avoid danger. However, it would be extremely difficult to train a pigeon to flap its wings for food or to peck to avoid being shocked; It wastes your time and annoys the pig. Human Nature Skinner didn't believe animals are the only ones that learn through reinforcement; But, as with pigs and pigeons, people have instincts. Certain phobias are an example of this hardwired behavior in humans. We are prepared by evolution to be extremely sensitive towards the things that were deadly to our ancestors. Despite knives and electrical outlets being both modern and dangerous, there are no knife or electrical outlet phobias. Other work issues about which you are concerned need to be set aside during the discussion, to allow you to listen effectively. Try to avoid snap judgments. Engrained judgmental attitudes can thwart an effort to gain an understanding of another's unique circumstances. If you intend to keep notes, plan to write down only key points. Put your pen down at times, to open yourself to focusing on and listening to the other person. Excessive writing interferes with the ability to listen to everything that is being said, and it can be a way of maintaining an emotional distance that impedes empathic listening. As its definition conveys, empathy stems from feeling with the other person. Empathic listening emphasizes an interest in fully understanding the other person's circumstances and viewpoints. The idea is to focus first on understanding, before focusing on being understood.