My yoke is easy and my burden is light. – Jesus
What makes for an easy yoke (the metaphor is from using oxen to plough)? That it fits well. That is, it is in accord with the way oxen are made. This is the proper role of any discipline: to make us more truly ourselves; to fit well with what we are and can do so that we can do more.

That the burden be light means that there are no impossible demands. What’s more, the preference is for ease. This is quite different to the Nietzschean, “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”. Jesus favours ease and doesn’t ask us to risk our health or sanity to prove ourselves (but to who? Nietzsche? Our parents or other authority figures?). This approach can be applied in the martial arts – see the various books by Bruce Frantzis who emphasises doing 70%.

Grace
Biblical Christianity emphasises grace. In secular terms: life comes free. We did not make ourselves living beings. We can shape our lives and experience but we did not originate it. We can collaborate with and develop in harmony with what is real (life), or we can be miserable and fight it.

This can lead us to a life of gratitude. Not for everything in our world (the Bible is quite unsentimental about evil realities) but often for what we have and experience.

The Cross, and . . .
Biblical Christianity is quite often preaching about the cross of the Christ. And Jesus told his followers to take up the cross and follow him. The person carrying their cross was heading for certain death. Today it would be like saying: walk out in front of the firing squad with me.

The death referred to I think is the death of the ‘old nature’ (our bound and miserable existence devoid of true life). This is, often, not easy to do. Anyone who has been through a deeply transformative experience can tell you this. We know that the change is for the better – and we still can feel like we are dying (as in a sense we are).

After the death comes resurrection. Contrary to many a sermon, Biblical Christianity, does not praise the misery or suffering of the cross. Biblical Christianity focuses continually on the resurrection to full and real life. It emphasises the joy of the new way of living – that this is in accord with our true nature – that the old way was a life of delusion and misery.

The spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us from the law of sin and death – Paul
This is perhaps my favourite Bible verse. You can hear the joyfulness, the ecstatic release. The one point I want to emphasise is that for Biblical Christianity life comes in Christ. It is the ‘spirit of life’. Biblical Christianity is continually emphasising that the experience of spirit is one of joy; that it is able to cope with what life can throw at it, the spirit brings life.

This verse profoundly affirms life. God is not against creation but its distortion and misery. Biblical Christianity is a vision of life triumphant.

Flesh and Spirit
There has been much loose talk of ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ in Biblical Christianity. The ‘flesh’ is usually taken to be evil. This is not quite right. The problem with the flesh is its weakness (‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ – Jesus. When Isaiah tells the Israelis to not fear the Egyptians horses because they are flesh not spirit, his point is that they are weak and God (being spirit) is strong.

It is known that the flesh in this evil age is weak – a source of vulnerability, but God’s desire (revealed in the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation) is for healing of the flesh and for more life. Spirit brings more life – as Paul says, the spirit himself gives life to our mortal bodies. In Biblical Christianity there is no hint that creation is essentially evil – only that it has been distorted.

For a superb and insightful examination of flesh and spirit in the Old Testament see Perdersen’s Israel, its life and culture. This book changed the field of biblical anthropology; and its examination of the text is still relevant.

Theological digression. Neither does the Reformer’s doctrine of Total Depravity, despite the name, mean that there is nothing good in people. The reformers were emphasising that reason was not adequate to reach god. They were emphasising that reason too was fallen and not an especially spiritual part of us.

A Biblical Affirmation of Life
Biblical Christianity is for life, it emphasises the experience of joy and self-forgetfulness (to be able to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep means being able to set aside our own concerns). And it emphasises that this is not something we can do, however much we fret – it is received as a gift. Biblical Christianity emphasises gratitude. Biblical Christianity emphasises that the way to realise life is light and easy.

This post deals with things that have been the subject of reflection of reflection and argument for a couple of millenia.  For anyone with deep knowledge of these things this post will inevitably look thin and inadequate.  I have only really sketched an approach.  All comments are most welcome.

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One part of our western culture that has changed dramatically is the place given to family. Partly due to the cost of housing (especially in Australia, where I’m from, where the real cost of housing is increasing dramatically) it is rare for an extended family to live within walking distance. It is now common for them to be scattered between cities.

Does this mean that we must have a shorter life or a less healthy one than the healthy old people studied? To change our culture back to valuing family is more than one person (or perhaps even many thousands) can do.

What can we do?
Small things

• Prioritise friendship. Think up ways to spend enjoyable times with friends. If you go for a walk by yourself each day, you could perhaps involve a friend once a week. Make a time in your diary once a week or once a month where you do something to develop a friendship (new or old).
• If you are thinking of moving to a retirement village check out the kinds of communal facilities they offer. These will make it easier to form clubs and spend time with others.
• See if there is a club you can join around your interests.
• If you are in a tradition of faith, see if you can find a group that you are comfortable with and that would welcome you.

All of which takes time and lifestyle adjustments, which leads us to . . .

Big things

• See if there is a way to work part-time and spend your time developing friendships and doing things you love.
• See if there is a co-housing scheme which you like and where you want to live.
• Is there a way to design your life so that you are interruptible? So that you can easily stop what you are doing to help a friend?

These are big things and could take consistent work over quite a while to achieve. However, a healthy old age is a big concern, and these changes can often be made in small steps. And each step can be an improvement and feel good – it doesn’t require ‘discipline’ to keep on with these changes, just enjoying ourselves and finding ways to enjoy ourselves more. This is pretty much the ideal kind of change.

If you liked this post you may also be interested in these posts on,

How people live in societies characterised by a healthy old age, and,

What we can learn from how people live in societies characterised by a healthy old age.

My next eBook is going to be about societies characterised by a healthy old age and how this applies to our health. It will be mixing the research about the healthy old with research about the simple things we can do to stay healthy.

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I like Steve Pavlina
I like Steve Pavlina – I like his adrenalin-junkie style. I like how he pushes the boundaries and is always trying stuff (like sleeping twenty minutes every four hours instead in one block as usual). I like that he is willing to step outside the mainstream (exploring non-mainstream sexuality like polyamory). I like that he processes these things and doesn’t tell others that they should be like him (like his ongoing investigation of the diet that works for him). I like that he writes at length and investigates a subject in depth. And I like that even though he writes a lot there is always content in what he says. He may get it wrong, we may want to argue or disagree (even violently) but it is not fluff.

The Book
I like what Steve has tried to do in this book. He has tried to cover the whole field of self-development and come up with a theory to cover all of it. This means that we can test it and find what works or doesn’t. He has put his ideas out there – and made his thinking vulnerable in the process. This is a braver move than testimony: many people relate what worked for them and then say it may work for others. This is undoubtedly true and has integrity. It also is no guide to what may work for others – every person could write their own book like this. Steve’s top-down approach may miss the personal quality and vivid detail of testimony, but it has the virtue of saying that this will work and us being able to find out whether it does or not. We need Steve’s kind of book.

The book is in two sections, the first half lays out the principles, and the second gives the application to various areas of life. Each chapter concludes with exercises you can do.

PART ONE
I like six-sevenths of the basic framework. This basic framework is three concepts and their inter-relationships – these are organised as: the points of a triangle, the three sides of a triangle, and the middle.

The three points are: truth, love and power. In bodily metaphors (mine not his): head, heart and hand. “Power” may be an unfortunate choice of term – what Steve means is that we are able to do what we want to do, he doesn’t mean brute force. It is important to point out that the person is the triangle – not an addition of three points. We are not truth plus love plus power but the entity that is these all at the same time. For me this is a good framework. It is simple enough to be remembered and referred to easily. It is specific enough to offer guidance in the concrete details of our lives.

[The three basic principles however, in my view, fail one of Steve’s criteria: irreducibility. “Irreducibility means that we can’t think of any simpler terms to take account of the experience we are dealing with. To my mind the more basic idea is ‘life’ which I paraphrase as a compassionate joyfulness or a joyful compassion (this is often called ‘flow’ but my terms give more sense of the quality of the experience, for me anyway). Both joy and compassion require engagement with the situation, concern and engagement from the person, as well as an orientation to effective action in the situation. Truth, love and power is an analysis of the more fundamental experience of compassionjoy. I will return to this when I get to the principle of intelligence.]

There is one chapter devoted to each of these terms where they are explored in depth. In the first chapter for instance the key components of truth are given as: perception, prediction, accuracy, acceptance and self-awareness. Each of these aspects is also dealt with, often insightfully. Steve also gives what he sees as the major blocks to truth. There is much substance here. This is a book that you can think about, come back to, and take time to digest.

[I don’t think that ‘acceptance’ is actually a component of truth. I think that this is really what Steve thinks our response to truth should be – once we know what the truth is. This is important in our experience of truth but different to being a component of truth.]

The three points of the triangle give the basic framework: truth, love and power. The sides of the triangle give the combination of each of these two qualities: oneness, authority and courage. Oneness is the combination of truth and love; authority is the combination of truth and power; and courage is the combination of love and power.

This brings us to the seventh aspect of the basic framework, which sits in the centre of the triangle: intelligence. For Steve intelligence is the highest form of human expression. For Steve this is the unified whole of our experience. This is the one seventh of the basic framework that I disagree with.

What Steve means by intelligence is ‘alignment with truth, love and power’. By “intelligence” he means something different to academic cleverness or prodigious memory.

Steve asks us to,
Take a moment to ponder the above definition of intelligence. Does it satisfy your logical mind as well as your intuition? (p.116)

My answer is, “No”. Analytically – intelligence is a different attribute that can be applied to truth, love and power. Power can be exercised stupidly, and love can be well intentioned and dumb. To my way of thinking intelligence is an aspect of truth – understanding differences and relationships between parts and the part and the whole. Intuitively – the combination of truth, love and power (in the sense Steve uses it) is life/flow/joyouscompassion: intelligence is pale and superficial by comparison. For me “intelligence” doesn’t begin to capture the highest form of human expression.

PART TWO
In the second half of the book the general principles are applied to six areas of self-development: habits, career, money, health, relationships and spirituality.

Of these it is money that is the area of my life that I am least happy with, so I’ll examine this chapter as an example of the second half of the book.

MONEY
Each of the six areas in part two has the seven principles applied to it. Steve applies each of the principles to money.

• The truth about money is that it is a social phenomenon – it functions as a resource based on a kind of contract or agreement.
• The principle of love means that we earn money through making a worthwhile contribution to society.
• The principle of power means being responsible for our financial situation and also using money rather than letting it dictate to you – there may be non-financial ways to achieve the lifestyle we desire.
• Oneness means making money by making as big a social contribution as you can: to find the overlap between your personal values and what your society values (what they’ll pay for). This leads to a consideration of fairness – ‘the labourer is worthy of their hire’ (if they are making a worthwhile contribution).
• To develop authority in relation to money may mean educating yourself and trying out new behaviour. Developing authority in the overlap between personal and social values will make it easier to make money.
• Courage means asking for what you’re worth, and sticking with a heart-centred path.
• Finally intelligence and money. This means making intelligent choices to increase the social value you deliver and express yourself creatively.

[All this I can mostly agree with. My big disagreement is that there is social conservatism about it. A flagrant example is that parents caring for children are paid little, if anything, while those who play dress-ups for the movies can be paid millions. Steve’s answer is for the individual to adapt – to find the overlap between their personal and their society’s values. My values say that society – which an individual can influence in a small way – may also need changing.]

I hope this gives a sense of the rigour that Steve has. The principles are worked through to practical application in each area of life. The application is thought through, direct and concrete. I may disagree or want to argue with what is said but I like that there is enough substance and clarity so that I can argue or disagree. The subtitle of the book is, “the conscious pursuit of personal growth” and the clarity and concreteness certainly help to become conscious of the area being addressed.

Overall
Taken as a whole I really like this book. I like that it wants to play a big game and nails its colours to the mast. I like its rigour and the preparedness to lay out principles and say how they apply. It follows up on the subtitle, of being about by the conscious pursuit of personal growth, by being explicit about its own framework and how it applies in a range of areas.

My Problem . . .
. . . with this book is that it is a good book, perhaps even a very good book, just not a great book. (I think Steve has it in him to produce a great book.) I think it is easily one of the best books I have read on personal development. It is far better than most books out there. It is full of useful stuff and practical advice. The analysis and application is intelligent and often subtle.

Self-development for Smart People doesn’t rival Perls, Hefferline and Goodman’s Gestalt Therapy or Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I was hoping it would. However, I don’t know of any other books that rival Gestalt Therapy or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance either. This is a good book, just not the great book that I was hoping for.

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The small things are the usual ways that we fritter away our lives – but if we make small steps they can also add up to major positive change quite quickly. I hope you like it, Evan.

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There is an on-going project to research these long-lived and healthy people. The results of studying these people – giving us insight into how to live a long and healthy life – are now starting to be presented.

The most accessible presentation of this data is a kind of ‘long and healthy life pyramid’. There are nine factors, organised in a pyramid of four layers, that are shared by all the societies characterised by long and healthy lives. You can find the graphic on the Blue Zones About page.

The foundation is a sense of belonging to a group. This has three components:

• putting loved ones first
• connecting with a faith tradition, and
• surrounding yourself with the ‘right people’.

The next tier in the pyramid is eating wisely. This also has three components:

• eat 20% less at meals (eat ‘til 70% full or until ‘lightly satisfied’),
• eat whole foods, mostly plants (to paraphrase Michael Pollan), avoid processed foods, and,
• the fun one: a couple of glasses of wine daily.

The next tier is concerned with outlook, which they call “Right Outlook”. This only has two components:

• a sense of purpose, and
• periods of calm each day.

Finally, at the top of the period there is movement. This is concerned with,

• moving naturally. That is, having our living spaces organised to encourage movement and moving in ways we love – doing things with our loved ones but also doing activities we love (walking, dancing, gardening, playing and so on)

These nine factors are shared by all those societies characterised by living to a healthy old age. Most encouragingly they are things that are often within our control and can involve small adjustments.  Our health in our old age (with a little luck) is largely within our control – and there are small things we can do that can make a real difference.

These findings I think are remarkably important and quite encouraging.

If you like this post, you might also like:
Ageing Well: can we do anything about it?
Can We Have A Healthy Old Age?
Change the World (one bite at a time)

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The name may be a bit misleading. It is about more than slowness. The slow approach has three guiding values: good, clean and fair.
Good means that food tastes good – which means respecting the ingredients and enhancing the flavours rather than covering them up or producing blandness. This will mean respecting the land and how these things grow too (much reducing the influence of the agri-industries) and restoring a sense of the local and seasonal.

Clean, means a respect for the earth and the environment. Pollution isn’t healthy and it doesn’t make sense for what is nourishing to be produced in an unhealthy way. This is closely related to sustainability – relying on supplementing soils or animal feed is not sustainable. This also has implications for how food is transported (once again emphasising the local).

Fair. It is unfair that the poor feed the rich. It is unfair that those farmers in the richer countries are sometimes paid less than the cost of production for what they produce. Local farmers markets, community supported agriculture and altering of international trade all fall under the heading of “fair”.

As you can see Slow Food has quite a large agenda. To change our relationship to our food and how it is produced will alter our life and our world. This is my kind of revolution – one that is about a better quality of life for all those involved (more wealth for the poor, more time for the wealthy).

For a great introduction to the movement its founder, Carlo Petrini has written Slow Food Nation. There are numerous websites too (there will probably be one for whatever country you are in). Perhaps the best place to start is slowfood.com, they have a website that is available in several languages.

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A word of caution: These predictions are about statistics and averages – which means that they don’t apply directly to everyone. An example is smoking: smoking makes it much more likely that you will get certain diseases – but this doesn’t apply directly to everyone; so we get the reaction of, “My aunt/uncle smoked until they were 90 and it didn’t seem to do them any harm”. You can do everything right and still get sick (or are run over by a bus). These are statistical findings they apply to groups not to any particular individual. Having said that: there are some things that have been found to predict a healthier old age and some that do not.

These finding are from three longitudinal studies – the people were followed for fifty years and so there is good information on how they lived and the consequences that it had for them. The results of these three studies are reported in George Vaillants’ Ageing Well.

Firstly there are six factors – some quite surprising – that do not predict a healthy old age.
1. Hereditary. What you do matters more than the age of your parents.
2. Cholesterol (unless you have had a heart attack).
3. Stress. It may be unpleasant and cause ill health while you are experiencing it but you can recover to have a healthy old age.
4. Parental characteristics and upbringing (intelligence, social class, stability of marriage). While these things may affect our lives into middle adulthood by the time we are in old age they do not predict our health or happiness.
5. Childhood temperament. This may influence us well into adulthood. But by old age seems to make no difference to our happiness – perhaps because by then we learn to live with it or shape our lives to suit ourselves (?).
6. Emotional and social ease. These have influence into adulthood – but not into old age.

There are seven factors found that did predict a healthy old age.
1. Not smoking at all or stopping when young. This was THE single biggest factor for a healthy old age. ‘Nuff said.
2. Mature responses. That is coping with life’s difficulties through delay of gratification, humour, altruism and sublimation. This was even more important than,
3. Not abusing alcohol.
4. Healthy weight.
5. Stable marriage. Good for both physical and psychosocial health.
6. Some exercise. Good for both physical and psychosocial health.
7. Years of Education (probably due to self-care and perseverance).

For me these findings are very encouraging. With the usual portion of luck (not getting run over by buses and so forth) a healthy and happy old age is something that lies within our power.

If you like this post you might also like the others in this series.

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It is called Thriving in Your Situation. Buy it now by clicking here.

When I sat down to write it I wanted to be sure that what I had to say was really worthwhile. I thought I would write about how to be as happy as possible whatever situation a person you were in. If I could do that, then I was sure it would be something worthwhile.

I think I have found a way to do it. This way relies on some basic ideas:

• That wherever we are, we are in a situation of some kind; which may be more or less healthy for us.
• That we have needs and desires that can be met to a lesser or greater extent.
• That we filter our situation so that we can get the good stuff and keep out the bad stuff.

Imagine a simple organism floating in the ocean. It seeks what it needs (even if it is as simple as sunlight) and moves away from what it doesn’t need. As organisms get more complicated they develop more sophisticated ways of getting there food (such as by hunting for animals). This is the process of life – finding nourishment and avoiding the poisonous or useless.

For us humans it is more complicated. To be healthy we need to be nourished not only by physical food but by our thoughts, feelings and relationships too.

Every living thing engages in this process of sorting out the nourishing and poisonous and has one or more membranes to do this job – the ‘skin’ of the organism. With humans this membrane is not just our skin but our discernment about thoughts and relationships, as well as much else. A healthy person is one who has a good ‘skin’ – they can sort out what is nourishing for them and what isn’t.

Seeing things in this way means that there are a couple of problems – our ‘skin’ can be too rigid (in which case it keeps out some of the good stuff or keeps in some of the bad stuff) or too loose (in which case it lets in some of the bad stuff and lets out some of what we need to keep in).

To get better at living means being neither too rigid nor too loose. Perhaps being too rigid has led you to miss an opportunity, exclude an idea that you found useful later, or limit a relationship. Perhaps being too loose has led to you being taken advantage of, or saying what you wished you hadn’t. To get a sense of living well; contrast these times of rigidity or looseness, with a relationship or activity that you have found quite nourishing.

This process of living well can apply to any aspect of our lives.

• The physical such as food. Perhaps there are times when you overeat. At other times you may not eat enough (perhaps it is impolite to ask for a third helping even if you are still hungry). And then there are probably times when you eat food you like and feel satisfied.
• The mental such as when we are learning. There are probably times when you have crammed for an exam and other times when you have craved mental stimulation. Then there are the times when you have enjoyed learning (perhaps about a hobby or other interest).
• Perhaps there are times when being overwhelmed by emotion has led to you being dysfunctional, perhaps there are times when you have felt unable to connect with others emotionally. And then there are moments or relationships where the emotion flows naturally.
• Spiritually we may be overly dogmatic or completely lacking in discernment so that we end up confused and dissatisfied. Then there are moments when we feel connected and nourished by spirit.
• With our relationships we may find it all too easy to isolate ourselves or lose ourselves in the social whirl. Finding a balance in our social lives can be quite a challenge.

So there you have it – my formula for living well wherever you are: getting the good from your situation and keeping out the bad. The eBook is called Thriving in Your Situation. It is 28 pages (a little over 6000 words) filled with exercises so you can learn how to thrive wherever you are. Buy it now by clicking here.

The answer is living authentically.  Buy the book or sign up for the course now  from my Living Authentically website.

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