Hemlock

It's a lot easier to prevent toxic chemicals from entering your body than it is to remove them, and it's a lot easier to prevent toxic people from entering your heart than it is to remove them.

Whatever we take into us, whether food or people, become a part of us, so if those foods or people are poisonous, them we poison ourselves.

Practice preventive medicine both in the choice of food and the choice of people you bring in to your body and your life.

Weight Loss and Body Acceptance

I am conducting research for an eBook I'm writing called 10 Ways to Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days.

 The book presents the pros and cons of ten extreme ways to lose weight quickly.

As a health-advocate, I don't support extreme diets unless the dieter is very clear about the nature of the diet and has a clear idea about the purpose of consequences (such as quick weight regain) and unsustainability of such a diet. Further, I support permanent lifestyle change for health, and a "diet" is rarely conducive to that end.

The 10 Ways book has a bonus method, which I called Method 0. Method 0 is to love yourself as you are and forget dieting. We live in a thin-obsessed society, and while I am not fully convinced of some of the claims of the fat acceptance movement, such as HAES (Health At Every Size), I do strongly agree that accepting yourself as you are and loving yourself as you are is fundamental to health. A person can't hate their body into a shape that they will love. Our bodies love us, try to keep us alive and protect us, and we need to love our bodies back if we are to enjoy emotional and physical health.

I have two female friends who are very good looking and physically attractive. Both are below-average in weight, are mothers of multiple children, and have told me that they are - to put it mildly - unhappy with their "fat."

If not for the social construct of "you can never be too thin or too beautiful," would either of these women or countless others like them have any issues with their size and appearance? No. The reason they think they are too fat is for one reason only: social and media pressure. Both are healthy, reasonably active, and able to enjoy physical activities and tasks. If not for social pressure, there would be absolutely no reason for these women to ever give "a few extra pounds" a second thought.

So if these popular women have difficulties with body image, how much more so for people who are considered less attractive by current standards and are less socially accepted because of being "too fat?"

What I have learned and am learning has really given me pause and caused me to carefully consider how I want to write and market a book on extreme diets in a society that obsessed thin to the point that thin = happy, thin = good and the converse judgments.

While we cannot simply throw off media programming any more than we can throw off sexism, racism, or ageism, we can begin to see the ideal of physical perfection for what it really is: a way for corporations to profit from our insecurity. The way to combat this attack on our persons is through education. Learn the real issues and learn the difference between a media manipulation and real human values.

So while I'm an advocate of self-improvement and living healthy, active life, we all need to remember that a person's worth cannot be measured with a tape or a scale.

Damned Dementia

The fragility of the human mind really gets to me sometimes. I work with elders, and see these strong, capable, intelligent people, who have committed no crime other than longevity, be betrayed by the very organ that makes all meaningful human experience possible: the brain.

Many individuals are fine in each moment, but with a damaged short-term memory, are disconnected from what happened 30 minutes ago and what is to come. Time and time again they attempt to adjust to their environment and relate to information and experiences presented by their loved ones—people who often have trouble understanding that grandma or granddad has been unplugged from the normal flow of past, present, and future.
The past, present, and future are still real, of course, but without persistent memory, there is no bridge to connect them. I imagine it might be something like those few moments when you are woken up unexpectedly, unsure of where you are or what time it is. Your eyes dart around the room looking for the familiar. You think hard, waiting for your mind to save you, to fill in the void with the warm flow of familiar memories. And, in mere moments, it does. You relax and go about your day.

But for those suffering from memory impairment, the mind does not rescue. You struggle and search and wait. But you are disconnected. What did I have for breakfast? Who is this person in my room? Where is my husband? Why are people moving and stealing my things and messing with me?

My hope is two-fold. The first is that continued medical research will someday find a way to prevent this profound loss. The second is that in the meantime we are kind and gentle and understanding to those who suffer from cognitive loss.

Hierarchy of Sexual Activity?

If sex is about intimacy and pleasure (and not procreation), there is no hierarchy of sexual activity. Does the activity promote intimacy and pleasure? Good, enjoy each other without judgment. The last thing you need to take to bed with you is a bundle of social mores or self-limiting expectations that don’t serve you or your partner.

 

 

Unrequited

You approach,

The intoxication begins.

You draw near,

Not near enough to touch,

but just near enough

that when you withdraw

I mourn yet again

the loss of something

I never had.

The Dawn

I am staggered
by the hint
of the unfathomable
beauty
open to an awakened mind.

Despite this vision,
I am yet
a dreamer who has
dreamed
of being awake.

Six-Pack Abs

The Quest for Six-Pack Abs

A lot of guys (and some gals) would like six-pack abs. But for many, wanting a six-pack is like wanting to have money by winning the lottery. It's a great dream, but we're not doing anything about it except maybe playing the numbers once in a while (by hitting the gym sometimes and trying to eat less.) It won't work.

News flash

• Almost no "nice-to-have" goals are ever accomplished. You must have passion.
• Almost no goals that are fuzzy are ever achieved or achieved by winging it. You must have a specific plan.
• Almost no goals are ever achieved with a few good tries. You must be focused and put forth sustained effort.
• Almost all goals are abandoned if we don't see results. You must measure your progress.

So let's say that you, like me, actually believe that you have a passion for six-pack abs, want to develop a plan to achieve them, are dedicated to staying on track and persevere, and have a method to measure progress. With the will to do all that in place, what's next?

Six Packs-Abs Basics

First, we need to educate ourselves. There's no point in starting if we don't know what we're getting into. Here are some of the basics about six-packs abs.

Getting Six-Pack Abs is Not about Health or Fitness

The search for six-pack abs is a vanity and status goal at its worse and a goal of discipline and fortitude at its best. The quest for six-pack abs is like a quest to brave the elements and climb Everest. Sure, you have to be fit to tackle the climb, but the goal is done for the achievement of it, for the personal challenge, not for the health benefits. Climbing Everest can get you killed. Although working on six-pack abs is unlikely to end in a fatality, it can be unhealthy. Be honest with yourself about why you want six-pack abs, because it's that vision that has to sustain you.

Abs May Not Be Made in the Kitchen, but They are Exposed There

If you have a layer of subcutaneous fat covering your ab muscles, the fat will hide your muscle definition, regardless of how well-developed those muscles might be. To expose your abs to the world, you have to have a very low body-fat percentage. For men, this means getting your body fat percentage down to around 10-12%. The average in the United State is about 25-30%. For women, getting your body fat down that low is pretty extreme, and frankly, I wouldn't advise it. My recommendation for females who want a super-fit body is to stop when the stomach is flat.

A woman looks fantastic at about 25% body fat and a guy looks really good at around 15% body fat. I don't know the actual numbers, but I'm guessing I'm around 20% or a little more body fat in this picture:

and around 15% or a little less in this picture:

I have spinal fractures, so to stabilize my spine, I keep my core muscles engaged at all times, but you can see that the area around and just below my navel is far too big, even on a tall, thin guy like me, to allow the lower part of the six pack to show.

Living within strict dietary guidelines is vastly more important to get your body fat down to ab-exposing levels. Ab muscles heal and develop relatively quickly, so abdominal exercise, while valuable, is far from the focus.

To Get Six-Pack Abs, You Probably Have to Fight Your Genes, and That's an Epic Challenge!

Nature wants you fat; it's a fact. Not super fat, that's bad, but a little fat. Having six-pack abs is not natural. As you burn more and more fat, your body slows down your metabolism to arrest that process. You body wants to maintain fat for health and protection. It's only your mind that wants six-pack abs, and in most fights between the body and the mind, the mind loses. Ask most smokers.

In my thinner picture, you can see the faint outlines of a four-pack. The difference between a subtle four pack and a visible six-pack is huge. The body will fight you to keep that last bit of stubborn weight, so it gets harder and slower and more frustrating the closer you get to your goal.

To summarize, six-pack abs are not natural, they are not necessarily healthy, and they are very hard to achieve. If you want them, it has to be because you accept the current cultural idea that they will make you look really good, or you have to see them as a personal challenge and achievement, or both.

The How-to

Since actually doing the work of getting six-pack abs requires dropping body fat to absurd levels, you need three things:

1. A Strict Diet (to keep the body from storing more fat and to use what it already stored)
2. Exercise (cardio to burn fat and core and oblique exercises to create definition)
3. Passion (along with vision, and fortitude)

There are many sources for six-packs ab diets and exercise routines, so I won't try to add another here. What I may do in a later post, however, is share my specific diet and routine I am using on my personal quest for six-pack abs.

If you are going on this quest with me, I salute you! (Though I am also tempted to recommend a psychological examination for us both.)

Despite the picture I am painting about this questionable goal and the extreme effort required to achieve it, six-pack abs are far from impossible. There are quite a few men and women with great abs, and you know what? There is this amazing thing about humans. If we see that others can accomplish something,it means that we can accomplish it too. It might take more effect or less, but it is possible.

So educate yourself, examine your motives, make a plan, and get to work! Let's do this!

Passé Cliché

She's a lousy friend,
but I won't paint it black,
for her baggage is great,
so I try to help her unpack.

But will Occam's razor
soon go snicker-snack,
and expose her to be
simply selfish and on crack?

The Ladder of Self-Confidence

Self-confidence is made, not born. You *build* confidence in yourself by challenging yourself and succeeding. Each success is adding another rung to the ladder that enables you to climb higher. And if you get knocked down a bit or fail? That's okay, because the rungs are still there, and soon you are back to where you were and can begins again to reach ever higher.

This beautiful Mother's Day morning brings an end to my successful completion of my Purium 10-Day Transformation Cleanse.

I'm 12 pounds lighter than when I started (9 lbs. in 10 days) and my waist is 1.5 inches smaller. Much more importantly, however, the successful completion of this challenge has renewed and reenergized my commitment for life-style changes that move ever closer to clean living and eating with the respect due to my body and mind.

Now onward to the next challenge!

Purium 10-Day Transformation Cleanse

2-4-15 Update: I am doing the Purium 10-Day Transformation Cleanse again later this month, and this time, my friend Lisa and I are writing an eBook about our experiences on the cleanse.

The eBook is called The Purium Success Guide, and we will not only share our experiences on the cleanse, but also tips and tricks and support and information to guide you through your own cleanse. 

The eBook will be available for the Kindle (initially, and later as in other formats) later in March.

If you would like to do the cleanse yourself, order your own 10-Day Transformation Cleanse kit at

MyPuriumGift

and enter my Gift Card Code

SPIRITSHOCK 

to get $50 off your order!

If you try the code and it rejects the code, simply shoot me an email at purium@spiritshock.com or try again in a few hours because it means that I need to buy more gift cards to cover the expense.

Thank you, good luck on your wellness journey, and stay tuned for more information about the forthcoming book!

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I started the Purium 10-Day Transformation Cleanse the morning of May 1st, 2014. To prep, I had two days of light, vegetarian eating and avoided processed foods.

Daily updates are at the end of the post.

Purium Cleanse Claims

1. Purium claims you can expect to lose 5-20 pounds in just 10 days.
2. Purium claims it can reset your metabolism and break your addiction to food.
3. Purium claims it will detox your body and clean your digestive tract.

I have three main goals with this cleanse, which are fairly close to their products claims:

1. Reset my brain to reduce craving for unhealthy "food."
2. Cleanse my system from chemicals and toxins present in processed foods.
3. Lose my middle-age "pooch," which measured at 35" this morning.

So, to help accomplish these goals, I am doing the 10-day cleanse.

What the Purium Cleanse Contains

The Purium cleanse comes with the following:

• Power Shake
• Master Amino (150 count)
• Apothe-Cherry
• Ionic Elements
• Daily Fiber Blend
• Shaker Bottle
• Gym Bag
• Tape Measure
• Easy-to-follow Transformation Support Guide

The Power Shake is the backbone of the program. It contains a bunch of powdered "superfoods" such as Activated Barley, Carrot Juice Powder, Hawaiian Spirulina, and Organic Kamut Grass Juice Powder, You drink it three times a day. It tastes fine. Some people like it or learn to enjoy it. The Master Amino is a supplement that you take 5 of three times a day. It claims to serve several purposes. The one I was most interested in is that it will help feed your muscles (it's a vegan protein source) while you cleanse. The Apothe-Cherry is a near-bedtime drink that contains antioxidants and is supposed to help you sleep. Some people like the taste. I don't, but it's okay. The Ionic Elements are drops that you add to water or your shake. It's supposed to help with various things, such as helping to reduce the effects of aging, promote restful sleep, support immune function, increase alkalinity, and promote the healthy growth of hair, skin, and nails. They suggest you add it to your shake, and that it tastes "fresh," but I think it tastes pretty bad and ruins whatever you put it in. I dilute it in water and drink it as fast as possible. The Daily Fiber Blend, of course, supports bowel function. It doesn't taste good, but it's fine and, well, full of fiber.

Note: to be fair, I have the "taster" gene, which makes me sensitive to bitter tastes. Wine and beer and coffee also all taste bad or sorta okay to me for the same reason.

You are also allowed "flex" foods three times a day when you need them. A flex food, explained mostly simply, is a small portion of a raw fruit or vegetable. There are several more choices, such as sauteed broccoli, almond milk, herbal tea, and vegetable broth. The big no-nos are meat, cheese, and bread.

My 10-Day Cleanse

I may not be the typical Purium client, but perhaps someone might be interested to see how this process goes for someone who doesn't have a weight-loss goal. I hit my target weight last year and currently have a BMI of 23. I'm 6' 6", am on the wrong side of the 40s, and have a medium build.

My weigh-in the night before the cleanse was at 199.4 (3 lbs less than normal weight for some reason, which seems a little dramatic for two days of vegetarian and light eating.)

I will evaluate Purium's claims as much as possible when the process is complete. Much of this is high subjective, so your mileage may vary.

I plan on using the kick-start from this cleanse to help launch me into a 6-pack abs workout program.

Day One

May 1st, 2014:
As I write this, I realize that it's hard to report on how I feel for the simple reason that I only got a few hours sleep last night, and can hardly keep my eyes open. Under the circumstances, however, I feel fine, and energy seems good.

One thing that makes this cleanse easier than my 10-Day Juice Fast six months ago is that the Purium cleanse allows and even encourages the use of "flex" foods, which are explained earlier in the article. I had two apples, a banana, and a few grapes. The grapes were a little more than the cleanse calls for, but I plan to eat a few every day anyway for their taste and cleaning properties.

So, other than going to pee every 15 minutes because of the high-volume of fluid intake, the first day has gone quite smoothly!

Day Two

May 2nd, 2014:
6pm
Was a little more hungry here and there today, but still quite manageable. Energy is good. Slept well last night. I have one flex food left, which I will eat later. I gagged a little on the ionic elements tonight, which was fun. Next time it's getting diluted more, maybe with 20 oz of water. Mental acuity seems fine as well.

As expected, my digestive system is getting a break, which is one of the other benefits of a liquid-only cleanse or a cleanse with a low volume of solid, unprocessed food such as this one.

Passed by a lot of homemade pizza tonight, which looked surprisingly good!

Day Three

May 3rd, 2014:
As with my 10-day juice fast, I am never hungry in the morning, though today when I went for a drive with a friend, I did start to feel hunger.

Today went well, and quite uneventfully, though I did consume a little more flex food than normal (fresh fruit). Because I am afraid of losing too much weight, I'm not too worried about eating a little extra clean food. I also ate a some warm food for the first time, a vegetable.

Energy and mental clarity are good, though I did take a long nap (which I try to do at least once a week on a weekend.)

I already feel mentally more prepared to resist sugar and processed foods, and am devising new ways to keep eating clean when the cleanse is over.

I'm really starting to hate the "Ionic Elements," though. That stuff is really bad!

Day Four

May 4th, 2014:
Pretty smooth sailing today, though I again consumed more than the recommended amounts of the "flex" foods. I had grapes, citrus, a veggie.... Again, these are pretty clean foods and I don't want to lose too much weight, but still I don't want to vary from the program recommended amounts too much, which may skew my results in other ways.

I did a quick visualization of some food choices, and these are the results:

-Sweets, Cake, Candy: Doesn't sound revolting, but I don't want any. Chocolate doesn't sound bad, but I also don't want any and am not looking forward to eating any.
-Pop (Sprite): (I went over a year with no pop, and then started having a Sprite a few times a week.) Not interested - doesn't sound refreshing.
-Meat: Sounds great. I am still looking forward to having some quality meat a couple days after the cleanse is done.
Dairy: Milk. Neutral. Wish I had a healthy source of milk. I don't, so I use almond milk. Cheese. Cheese sounds good.

So we'll see if this list changes over the next few days. When I finish I will be eating a plant-heavy diet with some fruit and meat, and right now that, along with more raw vegetables and fruits, sounds good!

Day Five

May 5th, 2014:

Here I am about half way through the Purium 10-Day Transformation Cleanse, and am finding that, as hoped, my desire for crap food has been reduced, as mentioned in yesterday's post.

Unlike the first few days of my 10-day juice-only fast, I don't have persistent low-level hunger all the time with this 10-day cleanse. The flex foods, plus vegan protein sources and other elements of the cleanse make hunger a minor issue for me.

Of course, for those with serious "food" addictions (most people), the deprivation of our crack, um, I mean, sugar, will certainly be a problem for a while. As much as I enjoy sweets, however, I am not fantasizing about them at all, and am convinced I can remain free of them as I transition into my abs program at the end of this cleanse.

Day Six

May 6th, 2014:
Today my overall energy level has been lower, but nothing worrisome. Had some trouble focusing at work. Both these symptoms, however, may have more to do with personal issues than dietary ones, as there are a few things going on personally and finals are this week, finals for which I am not well prepared. I also have a writing job that needs to be hit really hard, and that is stressful as well.

Sautéed some asparagus tonight for my flex food (I usually eat a raw fruit or vegetable), and it was pretty good! Later tonight my energy has seemed to increase a bit. Feeling pretty good as I get ready to go to bed.

Day Seven

May 7th, 2014:
Energy is lower than it "should be" at this point. I feel a bit tired, drug down, and have an overall sense that I am missing something nutritionally. I will expand the foods I am eating a bit and see if that helps.

Day Eight

May 8th, 2014:
Energy low (but I still feel fine overall) again today. Funny that the motivational text I got from Purium said, "Go ahead and exercise. You've got (sic) the energy." I read it and was, "Umm. no I don't. As a matter of fact, I had the energy before, and now I don't." Wonder why....

Still feeling as if I am missing something, and am starting to look forward to eating again. I do not have cravings, but the idea of some cheese seems to sound good for some reason. I am also still looking forward to some meat, but am not craving it. (Note that I am not much of a "craver" at any time.)

I had a final tonight and was feeling pretty tired before class, so I bought a trail mix bag from a local company. It had some nuts and dried cranberries in it - no sweets or grains. Maybe the fat in the nuts will re-energize me a bit.

Day Nine

May 9th, 2014:
Felt a little better today energy-wise. I am starting to get a little less focused mentally. Still have a general sense of needing a wider variety of food, but with some of the things I ate yesterday, I am feeling better, I think.

Still am a little more tired than I should be. Not only am I looking forward to a broader spectrum of food (still clean, still mostly green, and still very little processed), but I am also looking forward to working out.

I'm also getting a little curious about my weight. I may run into the gym tomorrow evening and do my weigh in.

I don't feel as if I have lost much abdominal fat, but my pants are looser, so I guess we'll see!

Day Ten

May 10, 2014:

My Purium 10-Day Transformation Cleanse comes to an end this evening. This was not about losing weight for me, but about cleaning my mind and body. Nonetheless I dropped around 9 pounds and 1.5 inches from my waist in the last 10 days. I intentionally ate considerably more than recommended, and still lost a significant amount of weight. The differences between the pictures aren't dramatic, but here it is:

Have I?

1. Reset my brain to reduce craving for unhealthy "food."
2. Cleanse my system from chemicals and toxins present in processed foods.
3. Lose my middle-age "pooch," which measured at 35" this morning.

I have reduced my craving for unhealthy foods, one can assume that 12 days of clean eating has helped my body detoxify itself, and my "pooch" is around 33.5" inches ( I dropped 9 pounds). Pants are loose and belts had to be tightened.

One thing I do know is that this cleanse and renewed my resolve to be fit, healthy, and clean!

Overall, the differences between the 10-day juice fast and this Purium 10-Day Transformation Cleanse are not overly dramatic. I lost more weight with the juice fast, obviously, but this cleanse was much easier to accomplish.

Now to give myself a couple of days to reacclimatize to animal protein sources, and I'll begin my abs challenge!

One Strike

Things were going so beautifully,
  but I committed a minor sin.
I thought she'd return to kiss me,
  but she never spoke to me again.

-K

The Importance of Feeling Valued

In the workplace, in friendships, and in romantic relationships, no one wants to feel as if they are just filling a spot and could be replaced by anyone at any time.

Our society, especially advertising, actively seeks to condition us into being insecure: your body, your possessions, your life choices, your achievements - none of them are good enough.

This has lead to a culture of people who act big on the outside and feel small on the inside.

So how can we be the change we want to see? One way is to express warmth and connection in any relationship by showing others they are valued:

• Be specific with praise
• Listen and remember details - it shows you are listening
• Make eye contact
• Express non-superficial admiration and sincere compliments
• Express thanks for thoughtfulness shown
• Celebrate other's achievements
• Remind others why you value them

Words are powerful, so let's use them to build others up. A word of encouragement, appreciation, or support from you can make a big difference in someone's life (even your own).

How to be Happy

I've read a lot of happiness literature, tried of lot of experiments, had a lot of kicks in the teeth, and in the end have been left wondering why it is that I appear to be happier than most people.

Part of the reason, most likely, is brain chemistry (the nature part of nature versus nature), but one of the most awesome things about being a human is that we have a superpower: the ability to change ourselves fundamentally, right down to the level of rewiring our brains.

So here is my list of how to be happy - a to-do list that can, over time, change you so profoundly that being at peace becomes a part of your nature and not just a feeling you get to experience once in a while when conditions are favorable:

• Have Goals. Have goals that you’re working on. One of the secrets to happiness is to always have something to look forward to. We can’t cruise. We are either moving backward or we are moving forward.
• Relate to Others: Share your life, good and bad, with people who love you. We are all social people. Introverted or extroverted, it only matters in terms of degree. We all need to be touched, loved, listened to, cared for, and we need to do all those things to others. Warning: You can love and help miserable people, but beware their poison. Miserable people will inject you with it in a foolish attempt to be free of it themselves.
• Create: Have a creative outlet. Build something, plant something, nurture a life, take a picture, write a story, paint a painting... anything in which you use your mind and your hands to bring something into existence that didn’t exist before.
• Give: When you help others you correct the distortions in your perspective. Simply put, staring at your own problems all day makes you crazy. Be a part of something bigger than yourself. It keeps you oriented.
• Embrace Reality: Almost all emotional suffering comes from a refusal to accept how things really are. Trying to force your wishes onto reality can only do one thing: make you miserable. Is the negative thing something you can change? No? Accept it or walk away. Yes? Make a plan and change it. Those are the only two sane options. The only paths to peace.
• Live in the Now: Energy sent into the past or projected into the future is lost. Visit the past and imagine the future when necessary, but to live either in the past or the future is to be a ghost. Bring your energy into this moment and live here.
• Take Care of Yourself: Care for your body, mind, and spirit. If you pollute your body, mind, and spirit, then what do you suppose is going to come out of your life?
• Take Ownership of Your Life: Your ship isn’t coming in. You’re not going to win the lottery. No one is going to save you. Finding a better lover won’t fix your problems. You own your own experience. Starting today, take responsibility for the quality of your life and stop giving your power away to others.
• Carry Yourself Like a Happy Person: I don’t suggest you pretend to be happy, but I do suggest you try to be happy. Shoulders back, smile when you can, walk strong, and make eye contact. Try being sad while dancing to an awesome song and you’ll see what I mean.

The next time you're sad, take a look at this list. It's not a magic formula to make everything okay, it's a series of guideposts to help steer you back onto the path that leads to peace and happiness, even when the road you are on today is a hard one.

What if something horrible is happening? Say you lost of loved one. You're devastated. You're a human, you should be. No one (who really cares about you) expects you to be happy. Take all the time you need to heal and grieve. But everything in the list is still true. Take care of yourself, try to accept the reality of what is, connect to loved ones... it all still works.

The Secret Language of the Heart

I searched every tongue in every nation

for words to describe your grace,

or the emotions that well inside me

each time I see your face.

But these things cannot be spoken,

in the end all words are weak,

for you are beautiful in every language
only my heart knows how to speak.

 

-K

Gender Predispositions and Nurture vs. Nature

There are things we would like to believe, and then there is nature, which often does not play along with our sociological wishes. We may not want there to be biological differences between the genders that predispose us to certain types of behaviors, but there are. And that’s OK.

Little boys are not more aggressive, for example, because aggression is modeled and nurtured, they are more aggressive because of increased levels of testosterone (though this is debated) and other neurological factors. But how those instinctive behaviors manifest themselves is hugely determined by how we are socialized.

Our biological drives and predispositions may be reinforced, they may be weakened, they may be eliminated or even reversed by the human factor, but we absolutely do not start out as a carte blanche.

So which is the prime impetus of human behavior, nature or nurture? Research seems to point to the fact that there is no clear leader -- they are both strong factors that cannot be cleanly divided.

But there are still people who absolve themselves (or others) of deplorable behavior, citing biology: "What do you expect, he's a guy!?" And there are still people that are made pariahs because they have desires that are not socially acceptable in their particular group, such as when religious intolerance constantly beats down (or up) a gay person for not following an artificial social "norm" that is every bit as natural as heterosexuality.

A person can't change the color of his or her skin through the power of thought, but the power of thought can change the meaning of what skin color says about a person. (Which should be, in my opinion, "Nothing.")

You Can't Ask Someone to Throw You a Surprise Birthday Party

Why? Because it devalues the result. To communicate your needs is healthy, but to attempt to control another person's behavior - to manipulate or coerce or to shame or threaten someone into giving you what you want - is not.

We might think we are just making sure our needs are getting met, but when we do it in this way, we feel worse than empty.

Love, help, time, gratitude... these things must all be freely given in order to have meaning. When not born of free will, these gifts are all tainted, laced with guilt, resentment, and dishonesty. Instead of filling us up, they poison us.

So while we should ensure that our needs and desires are being met, it should be by communicating these things to a person who, because of love, wants to - and is able to - provide them.

Just as you cannot make someone love you, you cannot make someone give you the fruits of love freely given.

Swept Out to Sea

I struggle mightily against
the undertow of these passions,
but my mind is a boy in man's shoes,
no match for the noble and ancient beast
that has been a part of me
since before I was born.

Are Women Crazy?

I hear it from men and, surprisingly, from women as well: “Women are crazy.”  Why is this idea so pervasive and is there any truth to it?

Our historically patriarchal society has, unsurprisingly, put men in an easier position than women when it comes to modern relationship dynamics (through no one has it easy). And this male privilege contributes to the perception that women are crazy.

How so? Well first, let’s take a look at one definition of crazy: Seemingly irrational behavior caused by a strong incongruence between biological desires and intellectual desires.

Or, more simply, it looks or feels crazy when you say or believe that you want to do one thing but you do the opposite instead. For example, you are diagnosed with lung cancer, are on oxygen, and yet you still want a cigarette. Maybe you even keep smoking. Crazy? Yes and no.

Pardon the brain science for a moment, but it helps to know that we have biologically-driven desires that come from the temporal lobe of the brain and reason-driven desires that come from the frontal lobe of the brain. These two parts of us are often at cross-purposes with each other. You might reason that you should eat less and lose weight, but the biologically-driven part of your brain pushes you toward eating more food, not less.

In culturally-programed social dynamics, men are given more license to follow their biological drives. “He’s a man, what do you expect?” Men generally feel less conflicted between what they want intellectually and what they want biologically. Men are generally less aware of internal incongruence. And even when a man says one thing and does another, he is usually let off easier by society because people in general think that men are more driven by their biology and less able to control those drives.

However when a woman intellectually believes one thing and does another, she has a harder time. Not only is a woman generally more aware of the conflict between her biological and intellectual self, but she is also painfully aware of societies’ expectations of how she should behave.

For example, a woman might express that she wants a kind, stable, caring, and responsible man, yet is irresistibly drawn toward a selfish, un-invested rogue that follows his own heart and rejects convention. If she gets into a relationship with the rogue and leaves a stable milksop in the process, people think she’s crazy. She might think she’s crazy herself. But she isn’t. She is drawn to the rogue’s alpha qualities (leadership, drive, independence, passion), not his “badness.” There are powerful instinctual drives and triggers at work here, and our puny intellect is seriously outgunned when it comes to a fight with our basic drives.

If a man leaves his wife for a younger woman, we doubt his character, and rightly so. If a woman leaves a “good” beta male for a “bad” alpha male, however we question her character and her intellect. “She’s nuts !” But she’s not. It may not have been wise, but she’s gone with old and powerful instincts that are similar to a man’s, but because of a double-standard, she is judged a bad person and “crazy.”