Andrew Weil's Blog: Dr. Weil's Healthy Living Blog, page 8

By Andrew Weil, M.D.

The question of whether or not it’s healthy to cut back on eating red and processed meat seemed settled years ago. The American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and the U.S. Dietary Guidelines have all recommend limiting consumption of these foods. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified processed meat products as carcinogens (these include hot dogs, ham, bacon, sausage and some deli meats).

In October (2019) our long-standing views about meat consumption were challenged by widely publicized research concluding that eating red and processed meats isn’t so bad for human health. An international team, led by Bradley Johnston Ph.D. of Canada’s Dalhousie University, reported after reviewing more than 200 studies on the subject that cutting back on the amount of meat you eat would have “little to no effect” on your risk of diabetes, cancer and heart disease. The researchers reported that reducing consumption of unprocessed red meat would cut deaths from heart disease by only four individuals per 1,000 persons over 10.8 years, deaths from type 2 diabetes by six people per 1,000 over 10.8 years and 7 people per 1,000 over a lifetime. Similar results were seen for reducing consumption of processed meat.

Most meat lovers may look at those numbers and conclude that there’s no point in reducing the amount of meat they eat. But critics of the analysis (and there are many!) argue that it didn’t succeed in making the case that it’s okay to ignore long-standing recommendations to limit meat consumption. A statement from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health maintains that the new guidelines “are not justified, as they contradict the evidence generated” by the researchers’ own meta-analyses. Among the five published reviews, the Harvard statement noted that three “basically confirmed previous findings on red meat and negative health effects.”

Frank Hu, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard, noted that earlier studies have shown that a diet low in red and processed meat is associated with a 14 percent lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, an 11 percent lower risk of death from cancer, and a 24 percent lower risk of type 2 diabetes.

Taking estimates of current red and processed meat consumption into account, Dr. Hu said that a moderate reduction could cut deaths by about 200,000 persons per year. “Even if only half of the reduction is real, that’s still of huge public health significance,” he added.

In her online column “Food Politics,” Marion Nestle, M.P.H., Ph.D., emerita professor of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University, wrote that, “Common sense is what’s missing in these studies.  Do the authors really believe that:

Meat eaters are healthier than vegetarians?
Eating more meat is better for health?
Meat eaters are less obese and have less heart disease and cancer than those who eat less?”

If not, she added, “the conclusions make no sense.”

Part of the problem here is the difficulty of performing nutrition studies. As you may know, the most respected research comes from randomly controlled, blinded trials where, for instance, if you want to know whether a new drug works, you assemble a group of patients, some of whom take the drug while others get a placebo. Neither the patients nor the researchers know who received the real thing until results are analyzed when the study ends. That kind of study isn’t feasible when you’re trying to determine whether nutritional changes have an effect on health. The Harvard statement noted that there never has been a randomized controlled trial looking at long-term health effects stemming from reducing red meat consumption due to “practical and ethical reasons.” The authors of the new investigation emphasized the same point.

In most nutritional studies, researchers collect dietary information from volunteers, then check on their health in subsequent years. While this may sound simple, researchers can’t document everything the volunteers eat or what changes they make in their diets – or lifestyles – over time.

There are other consequences of eating meat to consider beyond its effect on individual health. The slaughter of billions of animals annually for use as human food has been a long-standing concern among vegetarians. (You can find a chilling continuous count of the numbers of animals killed for food at https://animalclock.org/).  The toll is appalling considering that we don’t need to eat animals in order to survive – we can get along very well on diets that are plant-based.

Beyond that is the impact of the consumption of meat and dairy products on the environment. In a study published in June 2018, researchers at the UK’s University of Oxford reported that by giving up these products, individuals in the UK could reduce their carbon footprint from food by up to 73 percent, and if everyone followed a vegan diet, worldwide farmland use could be reduced by 75 percent.

This would lead to a significant drop in greenhouse gas emissions and free up wild land lost to agriculture, which the study identified as one of the primary causes of mass wildlife extinction. The investigators also reported that production of meat and dairy products is responsible for 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions but provides only 18 percent of calories and 37 percent of protein levels worldwide.

Source:

Bradley C. Johnston et al., “Unprocessed Red Meat and Processed Meat Consumption: Dietary Guideline Recommendations From the Nutritional Recommendations (NutriRECS) Consortium,” Annals of Internal Medicine, October 1, 2019, DOI: 10.7326/M19-1621

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Reflection:

We wrote legacy letters asking others for forgiveness for our actions and forgiving others in a recent workshop,

On her way out at the conclusion of the workshop, a young woman told me she’d done it wrong. I assured her that there’s no right or wrong in legacy writing. Then she explained that she’d written to her father, I replied that legacy letters can be written to future generations (as in a letter written by a teen to future generations apologizing about the ruined environment our generation is leaving them). And that legitimate legacy letters can be written to older generations as well as to people of our own generation. She then informed me that her father was dead.  I acknowledged her struggle and pointed out that relationships aren’t finished because one person is here and the other not. After a moment of reflection, she relaxed, looking relieved: smiled, thanked me, and revealed that she couldn’t have written the letter when her father was alive!

Just this month I heard a talk by a woman whose teen son was murdered by a young man. After 12 years of grieving, she began visiting the murderer in prison, and eventually forgave him. After 17 years she has included him as part of her family! I don’t think I have that much capacity to forgive, but I am in awe that some people can.

Sharon Strassfeld in her book, Everything I Know, wrote an amend to her daughter as she was leaving home for college: “I have no way to lessen for you the pain you suffered in having been an acutely sensitive child in the hands of a strong and assertive mother. But I will tell you that always, always, I gave you the best that I had available to give. And sometimes my best was simply not good enough. I’m sorry for that.”

Our written apologies and regrets are acts of love that will be appreciated now and long after we’re gone.

The purpose for this category of legacy letter is to repair a relationship in which we have wronged another and need to acknowledge what we did, make an apology, and ask for forgiveness. Making an amend reduces the clutter we carry as part of our personal baggage. It can release us from guilt. It may as well make us more forgiving and compassionate of others.

To forgive:

Is really to remember

That nobody is perfect

That each of us stumbles when we want so much to stay upright

That each of us says things we wish we had never said

That we can all forget that love

Is more important than being right.

Taking Action:

“You’re lying on your deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?” – Margaret Atwood 

List 3 people – or more – to whom you want to offer an amend or ask forgiveness (they can be living or not).
Next to each name write a short description of the harm(s) you’ve done.
Choose one person from your list and write your reasons for seeking resolution.
Write a 15 minute letter to that person focused on your description of the harm you did and your amend.
Put the letter away at least overnight, and then reread it; decide whether and when you will send it. If you decide “not now” put the letter with your personal papers, and bring it out regularly to reconsider your decision.
Repeat this practice with the other two people on your list, and add as many as you wish.

“May your reflection and writing grow your respect and compassion for yourself and those you love.”

Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient. Rachael Freed [email protected] and www.life-legacies.com

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Reflection:

In August I facilitated a workshop titled “We are the Links Between the Past and the Future.” Participants wrote stories they remembered or had heard about an ancestor. The stories were fascinating and the reading at round tables was enthusiastic and appreciated by the listeners as each person shared what they’d written.

“Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”

– Michelle Obama in Becoming

The purpose for remembering the stories is to link the past and the future, which is part of the context of who we are. When we yearn for the stories as we age, we may discover we missed the opportunity; parents and grandparents are no longer available.

“…suddenly, for whatever reason…you decide that it’s important to let your children know where they came from – you need the information that people you once knew always had to give you, if only you’d asked. But by the time you think to ask, it’s too late.”

– Daniel Mendelsohn in The Lost

The legacy purpose for telling stories is to extract the lesson from the person’s life to pass those values and wisdom forward to future generations. After workshop participants shared their stories, I invited them to write the lesson they’d learned from the story, and the values illustrated by the life of their ancestor.

Here are values learned from two stories in Your Legacy Matters.

From a man writing about his 89-year-old grandfather, a farmer and rancher until he died. “My grandfather would often say that he never worked a day in his life because he loved what he did, and it didn’t seem like work at all…. And now, as I look over the span of his life – all the changes he saw, the harvests he reaped, the [generations] he welcomed into the world – I realize that even with 90 whole years, our time on earth is short indeed. That life is too short to spend doing work that doesn’t feel like play….”

From a woman writing about her grandfather before WWII, who gave “a little pile of change” every week to all the beggars who came by in their town of Ludbreg in Croatia. “I was fascinated by all of this then – and have remembered it always as a lesson ‘to be kind to the less fortunate, and always be as generous as possible.”

“I cannot have a future ’til I embrace my past.”

– Debbie Friedman, songwriter      

Taking Action:

If you know stories of your ancestors, write them using language as though you were talking to the next generation.

If you don’t know stories, but you have living family members who you can ask questions of, start there.

Connection now may only be possible from the questions we consider and ask. And those questions may be more important than answers, because they put us in relationship with the past generation and the family members we contact.

“Learn to love the questions themselves. Until some distant day, without your knowing, you will have lived into the answers.”

– Ranier Maria Rilke

Then consider the meaning of the stories – what lessons do they teach you, about the story itself, and the person whose life and values are embedded in the story?
Before you begin writing, I recommend reading the four paragraph template for writing a legacy letter (pages 232-233 in Your Legacy Matters) to guide you in using the elements of context, story, lesson, and blessing to ensure that your letter is simple, interesting, and meaningful.
You may renew connections and deepen the family sense of belonging by asking questions. And you may find that others want to join you in the significant undertaking of preserving the family past, being the link between the past and the future, and gifting future generations with history deeply yearned for.
After you’ve written your first letter, consider writing other stories and lessons for your family, including your own stories and the lessons you’ve learned from your experiences.

May your experience deepen belonging and a sense of family connection by seeking the stories and lessons of your roots and passing them forward to future generations,

– Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient. Rachael Freed [email protected] and www.life-legacies.com

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The following is the second excerpt from Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison’s Amazon best-selling book, Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up . Informed by more than three decades of formal Zen and psychotherapeutic training and practice, Wholehearted brings Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison’s spiritual and clinical expertise into a readily accessible blend of insight and easily actionable guidance. The book provides strategies for identifying and exploring behaviors that often create unconscious barriers to personal confidence and interaction with others. Taking a remarkably fresh approach, Sensei Koshin brings time-honored Buddhist wisdom to how we live our lives, teaching us how to close the gaps we create between ourselves and others, and to wake up to the world around us in doable, wholehearted and positive ways. Find the first excerpt: Inviting Freshness Through Not Knowing here.

To me, lying is intimately connected with vulnerability. I believe when we lie, it’s because we’re afraid of exposing something about ourselves. I have a friend who works with a writer who constantly misses deadlines. It’s actually not that big of a deal, because my friend knows this about the writer, and course-corrects by giving him deadlines that are weeks prior to when my friend actually needs something turned in. The challenges arise not because of the lateness but because the writer can’t seem to accept this shortcoming about himself, so he writes my friend long emails with excuses as to why he’s late again – imaginative stories that my friend knows aren’t true. Because of this, my friend says, she’s established an opinion about this writer that has jumped from the level of “struggles with timeliness” to “pathological liar,” which, as you might imagine, causes ruptures in their working relationship. How much simpler it would be for the writer to email “I’m late again” and leave it at that!

I’m sure we can all empathize with this writer, though. We all have shortcomings we’d rather not admit to ourselves, habits we’d rather hide. And lying comes from all the interference we create to not actually tell a truth that we perceive will make us vulnerable. But our thinking about this is backward. “I think the greatest illusion we have,” the activist and playwright Eve Ensler writes, “is that denial protects us.” She continues, “It’s a weird thing about truth; it actually protects you. What really makes you vulnerable is when you’re lying, because you know you’re going to get caught, even by your own mind. That you know you’re a liar.” When you do finally tell the truth, there’s a strange relief that comes with it.

One of my students told me a story once about a man she was assisting in his dying process. His final wish was to see his daughter, from whom he was estranged. My student had to put a lot of effort into finding the daughter, because the man wasn’t in touch with her at all. When she did find her, and told her the father’s dying wish, the daughter said, “I don’t want to see him. I hate him, and I’m glad he’s dying.” My student went back to the man and told him that his daughter wouldn’t come. He pleaded with her to try again. So she went back to the daughter, and this time the daughter acquiesced. “OK,” she said. “I’m not going to stay long, but I’ll come.” My student joyfully brought the news back to the father. She was so happy that she was able to aid with such a beautiful reconciliation. The day the daughter arrived at the hospital, my student was standing outside the door in anticipation. She saw the daughter fly into the room. As soon as she got in, my student heard her say to her father, “You’re one of the most awful people I’ve ever known. You’ve caused more harm to me than anyone I’ve ever met. I hate your guts.” And then she turned on her heel and left. My student went into the room in a panic, apologizing. “I’m so sorry,” she said to the father. “I didn’t know that was going to happen.” The father responded, “That’s exactly what I wanted to happen. The truth is, I was a terrible father. She’s never had the opportunity to tell me that to my face, and I know it was eating her alive.” So that was his last gift to his daughter – the gift of having her truth heard, which was perhaps a relief to them both.

There are the garden-variety lies we tell (I remember when I was teaching poetry, I had a student who had three grandmothers die) but another way to think about lying is our unwillingness to examine what is really true. For me the most challenging lie between people is the lie of omission – what we don’t say. Many years ago I entered into relationship with a teacher whose intelligence, commitment to the path, and no-nonsense outlook inspired me. Over many years, we slowly developed an intimate relationship of trust – which was hard won, as there were many moments of distrust and challenge for both of us along the way. For instance, our relationship seemed to work best when I agreed with whatever my teacher said. I did feel that I was an apprentice, and my role was to learn, so this felt OK at first. I became devoted and did everything I could to support and create a container for my teacher’s vision. I joyfully did anything that was requested or that I could intuit would be helpful. My teacher often called me “son,” which, in the beginning felt like a reward, and I enjoyed this familiarity. I sensed, however, this created a difficult dynamic with my fellow peers; I experienced lots of sibling rivalry for the position of the “number-one son.” After a while, though, feeling prepared with a solid foundation on the path, I began to assert and express my own vision, which in the beginning was, on the surface, well received – but I felt there was something deeply displeasing below the surface. The more I developed my voice, the more the tension increased. This continued for six years. We never spoke about the situation directly; a lie of omission existed in the space between us. Our once flowing, meandering conversations and laughter became short and curt factual conversations, and our eye contact diminished. It seemed the more I became differentiated, the wider and wider the gap became. I don’t think either of us knew how to bridge the gap, and this created distrust.

In Japanese culture there is a word, ma, that describes the space between things. It is what makes Japanese art, architecture, and gardens so unique. So much attention is brought to the gap, to the pause, that you can really see the stone, the scroll, the tree, the shape of a branch. Without attention to the space between, there is no true beauty and life. This is what happened between my teacher and I: the ma was neglected through omission. We had known how to relate to each other earlier, and we did not know how to relate to each other in this new place.

As stories throughout time tell, when the mentor and the student can’t adapt to change and talk about it together, the relationship breaks: Baba Yaga and the adventurers, Chiron and Hercules, Pharaoh and Moses, Darth Vader and Obi Wan, and on and on. This is what happened to us: the lie of omission between us created confusion and distrust, the relationship suffered, and our once deeply held respect for each other was shattered, the bond broken. While profoundly sad for me, it doesn’t discount the love, respect, and appreciation I still feel for my former teacher. My Zen teacher, Sensei Dorothy Dai En Friedman, says, “It takes everything to be free.” We have to be willing to truly be in the layers and discomfort together. With shared commitment, it is possible, and preciously rare. Both people need to be fully willing to get into the muck and learn how to be in it together. When this is possible, my experience is that a deeper intimacy and trust arises.

The Zen Peacemakers understand not-lying as listening and speaking from the heart. It’s a prompt to stay connected to what is authentic for you, to ask yourself – and to be brave in hearing the answer – what you conceal about your own life. We all have those weird little pockets of concealment that we create, don’t we? I’ve never met someone without them, anyway. One person who exemplifies the refusal to lie to himself was the historical Buddha, which is partly what makes his story so inspiring. I’m sure you know people who went into certain careers because their parents wanted them to; “I’m a lawyer because my mom was a lawyer,” and so on and so forth. The Buddha’s dad was like that, too. He wanted his son to be what he (Dad) wanted him to be, instead of what he (Buddha) might want to be. He was a clan leader, kind of like a king. When the Buddha was born, his fortune was told. The  oracles said that he would be either a great king, like his father, or a great spiritual leader. Well, his dad sure knew which one of those options he preferred.

He took great pains to make sure that his son was always distracted by some luxury or another and didn’t let him leave the walls of the palace, so he couldn’t follow a spiritual path. Eventually the Buddha did leave the palace, and what he saw, which was essentially suffering, frailty, sickness, and death, struck him to the core. It was the Buddha’s “oh, shit” moment. He could have gone back to the palace and lived out the rest of his days in pleasure, but he couldn’t ignore the truth of what was in front of him. So, he walked away. In our lives, there are often expectations put upon us by another, whether it be our parents, society, what we read in magazines, or whatever. These expectations are almost like an overlay: what our life is “supposed” to be. They have less to do with us (or reality) than with some vague external idea. And then we go about measuring ourselves against that idea. That’s why what happened with the Buddha is so interesting; he encountered something within himself that felt at odds with his overlay – and used that incongruency to pivot.

To learn how to be who we are, it’s essential to actually listen to what’s true, instead of what we’ve been told is true. From this space, we can practice speaking what is actually true from our lived experience. This is the practice of not-lying.

What do you conceal about your life?
How can you see and act in accordance with what is?
How can you be more loving and brave in your relationships?

About Koshin Paley Ellison:

Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, MFA, LMSW, DMIN, is a best-selling author/editor and nationally recognized spiritual teacher and psychotherapist. In his second book, Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up, Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison addresses common distractions, beliefs and habitual patterns, providing a way through stress, disengagement, anger  and feeling unloved. Widely acclaimed for his guidance in helping people understand and apply time-tested Buddhist teachings as simple strategies for living in today’s chaotic world, Paley Ellison is a dynamic, original and visionary leader, teacher and speaker. He is a co-founder (with his husband, Sensei Robert Chodo Campbell) of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, the first Zen-based organization to offer fully accredited ACPE (Association for Clinical Pastoral Education) clinical chaplaincy training in America. Through the Zen Center they have educated more than 800 physicians and their students have cared for over 100,000 people facing the vulnerabilities of aging, illness and dying. Follow him on social media:

Instagram: @koshinpaleyellison
Twitter: @koshinpaley
Facebook: @koshinpaley

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By Andrew Weil, M.D.

In my book, Spontaneous Happiness, I write about lifestyle practices that can help people achieve and maintain happy lives. Bear in mind that by “happy,” I am not referring to endless bliss. Despite what many in the media proclaim these days, such a state is neither achievable nor desirable. Instead, these practices are designed to help most people reach and maintain a state of contentment and serenity. From there, a person can still experience appropriate emotional highs and lows, but knows that he or she will soon return to a pleasant state that might be termed emotional sea level.

I’ve summarized information about 10 of those practices. These will, I believe, be of particular benefit for those who struggle with mild to moderate depression, but can also potentially benefit nearly anyone who follows them:

1. Exercise:

Human bodies are designed for regular physical activity. The sedentary nature of much of modern life probably plays a significant role in the epidemic incidence of depression today. Many studies show that depressed patients who stick to a regimen of aerobic exercise improve as much as those treated with medication. Exercise also appears to prevent depression and improve mood in healthy people.  Many exercise forms – aerobic, yoga, weights, walking and more – have been shown to benefit mood.

Typical therapeutic exercise programs last for eight to 14 weeks. You should have 3 to 4 sessions per week, of at least 20 minutes each. For treatment of depression and anxiety disorders, activities of moderate intensity, like brisk walking, are more successful than very vigorous activity.

I am a particular fan of integrative exercise – that is, exercise that occurs in the course of doing some productive activity such as gardening, bicycling to work, doing home improvement projects and so on. Many people find it far easier to stick to activities like this than to lifting weights or running on a treadmill.

2. Follow an Anti-Inflammatory Diet:

Normally, inflammation occurs in response to injury and attack by germs. It is marked by local heat, redness, swelling and pain, and is the body’s way of getting more nourishment and more immune activity to the affected area. But inflammation also has destructive potential. We see this when the immune system mistakenly attacks normal tissues in such autoimmune diseases as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Excessive inflammation also plays a causative role in heart disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, as well as other age-related disorders, including cancer. More recent research indicates that inappropriate inflammation may also underlie depression – so controlling it is key to both physical and mental health.

Perhaps the most powerful way to control inflammation is via diet. My anti-inflammatory diet consists of whole, unprocessed foods that are especially selected to reduce inappropriate inflammation, as well as provide abundant vitamins, minerals and fiber. It consists of fruits and vegetables, fatty cold-water fish, healthy whole grains, olive oil and other foods that have been shown to help keep inflammation in check. For details, see the anti-inflammatory food pyramid at my website.

3. Take Fish Oil and Vitamin D:

Adequate blood levels of fish oil and vitamin D have been strongly tied to emotional health. They are so necessary and deficiencies are so common in the developed world that I believe everyone, depressed or not, should take them. Take up to three grams of a quality, molecularly distilled fish oil supplement daily – look for one that provides both EPA and DHA in a ratio of about three or four to one. I also recommend 2,000 IU of vitamin D each day.

4. Take Depression-Specific Herbs:

Specifically for those with mild to moderate depression, I suggest trying:

St. John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum): This European plant appears to work well for those affected by low mood. Look for tablets or capsules standardized to 0.3 percent hypericin that also list content of hyperforin.  The usual dose is 300 milligrams three times a day.  You may have to wait two months to get the full benefit of this treatment.
SAMe (S-adenosy-L-methionine): A naturally-occurring molecule found throughout the body, SAMe  (pronounced “sammy”) has been extensively studied as an antidepressant and treatment for the pain of osteoarthritis.  Look for products that provide the butanedisulfonate form in enteric-coated tablets.  The usual dosage is 400 to 1,600 milligrams a day, taken on an empty stomach.  Take lower doses (under 800 milligrams) once a day, a half hour before the morning meal; split higher doses, taking the second a half hour before lunch.
Rhodiola (Rhodiola rosea): A relative of the jade plant native to the high northern latitudes, it appears to improve mood and memory. Look for 100-milligram tablets or capsules containing extracts standardized to three percent rosavins and one percent salidroside.  The dosage is one or two tablets or capsules a day, one in the morning or one in the morning and another in early afternoon.  This can be increased to 200 milligrams up to three times a day if needed.

5. Do Breathing Exercises:  

Conscious breath control a useful tool for achieving a relaxed, clear state of mind. One of my favorite breathing exercises is the 4-7-8 or Relaxing Breath. Although you can do the exercise in any position, sit with your back straight while learning the exercise. Place the tip of your tongue against the ridge of tissue just behind your upper front teeth, and keep it there through the entire exercise. You will be exhaling through your mouth around your tongue; try pursing your lips slightly if this seems awkward. Then:

Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound.
Close your mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four.
Hold your breath for a count of seven.
Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound to a count of eight.
This is one breath. Now inhale again and repeat the cycle three more times for a total of four breaths.

Note that you always inhale quietly through your nose and exhale audibly through your mouth. The tip of your tongue stays in position the whole time. Exhalation takes twice as long as inhalation. The absolute time you spend on each phase is not important; the ratio of 4:7:8 is important. If you have trouble holding your breath, speed the exercise up but keep to the ratio of 4:7:8 for the three phases. With practice you can slow it all down and get used to inhaling and exhaling more and more deeply. This exercise is a natural tranquilizer for the nervous system.

6. Try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT):

CBT, a relatively new form of psychotherapy helps patients overcome habitual negative views of the world and themselves, and has been shown to be among the most effective psychological interventions for anxiety and depression. A full course of treatment is 14 to 16 sessions, with occasional booster sessions during the following year to maintain improvement. CBT can be done individually or in groups, and people can also get started with self-help books and online programs.

7. Laugh:

Smiling and, especially, laughing, are potent mood boosters. One way to quickly, intentionally inspire laughter is via laughter yoga. Begun by Dr. Madan Kataria, a physician from Mumbai, India, the first “social laughter club” convened in March of 1995 with a handful of people. Now, according to the official laughter yoga website, there are more than six thousand clubs in 60 countries.

The method used in laughter clubs is straightforward.  After brief physical exercises and breathing exercises under the direction of a trained leader, people simulate laughter with vigorous “ha-ha’s” and “ho-ho’s.”  In the group setting, this “fake” laughter quickly becomes real and contagious and may continue for a half hour or more.  And the joy lingers; regular participation in laughter clubs has been shown to improve long-term emotional and physical health in a variety of ways, including a significant lowering of the stress hormone, cortisol. To learn more, go to www.laughteryoga.com.

8. Limit Media Exposure:

Today, many of us are choking on “data smog,” a dense cloud of trivial, irrelevant, or otherwise low-value information made possible by the internet’s power to disseminate vast amounts of media virtually free. The result is fractured attention spans and attenuated human relationships. Monitor the time you spend with digital media (television, the web, email, text messaging and so on) in a given week, and cut that amount at least 25 percent in the following week. Use the time you free up for outings in nature, exercise, or face-to-face communication with friends.  If you like the result, keep restricting virtual life “surfing” and expanding real-life, connected, human experiences.

9. Forgive:

Forgiveness is almost universally held by philosophers and saints to be a key to happiness – and modern research confirms that those who can quickly and easily forgive when appropriate enjoy better emotional health. Conversely, resentment is the fuel that feeds depressive rumination, and can quickly spiral into a self-reinforcing low mood. Fortunately, the ability to forgive can be cultivated. The Stanford Forgiveness Project offers books, audio and video courses, and online programs that can help.

10. Practice Gratitude:

Author G.K. Chesterton wrote: “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” I suspect Chesterton didn’t do this automatically. He knew that, like forgiveness, gratitude can and should be cultivated through diligent practice.

One powerful method is keeping a gratitude journal. Spending a specific time each day or week recording things for which one is grateful has been shown boost subjective happiness levels in as little as three weeks. A less formal practice – and one that I follow – is to devote a few moments of my morning meditation session to feel and silently give thank for all of the good things in my life. As a result of doing this for several years, I find myself often making mental notes throughout the day of blessings such as rain here in my desert home, flowers that are opening in my garden, or a glorious sunset. Of all of the practices listed in this article, I believe learning to feel and express gratitude may be the most important in achieving and maintaining a happy life.

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Andrew Weil, M.D., is a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, a healing-oriented approach to health care which encompasses body, mind, and spirit.

Combining a Harvard education and a lifetime of practicing natural and preventive medicine, Dr. Weil is the founder and director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where he also holds the Lovell-Jones Endowed Chair in Integrative Rheumatology, and is Clinical Professor of Medicine and Professor of Public Health. The Center is the leading effort in the world to develop a comprehensive curriculum in integrative medicine. Graduates serve as directors of integrative medicine programs throughout the United States, and through its fellowship, the Center is now training doctors and nurse practitioners around the world.

Dr. Weil is an internationally recognized expert for his views on leading a healthy lifestyle, his philosophy of healthy aging, and his critique of the future of medicine and health care.

Dr. Weil’s Education

A.B., biology (botany), Harvard University, 1964
M.D., Harvard University Medical School, 1968

After completing a medical internship at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, he worked a year with the National Institute of Mental Health, then wrote his first book, The Natural Mind.  From 1971-75, as a Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, Dr. Weil traveled widely in North and South America and Africa collecting information on drug use in other cultures, medicinal plants, and alternative methods of treating disease.  From 1971-84 he was on the research staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum and conducted investigations of medicinal and psychoactive plants.

Accomplishments

Founder and director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona
Editorial director of the popular website, DrWeil.com
Founder and chairman of The Weil Foundation
Chairman of Weil Lifestyle
Founder and co-owner of the growing group of True Food Kitchen restaurants

Dr. Weil writes a monthly column for Prevention magazine. A frequent lecturer and guest on talk shows, Dr. Weil is an internationally recognized expert on medicinal plants, alternative medicine, and the reform of medical education. In partnership with Seabourn and The Onboard Spa by Steiner, his “Spa and Wellness with Dr. Andrew Weil” mindful-living program is offered on all of the Seabourn cruise ships. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, USA.

Oxford University Press is currently producing the “Weil Integrative Medicine Library,” a series of volumes for clinicians in various medical specialties; the first of these, Integrative Oncology appeared in 2009. Since then, Integrative Psychiatry, Integrative Pediatrics, Integrative Women’s Health, Integrative Rheumatology, Integrative Cardiology, and Integrative Gastroenterology, and many others have been published.

Dr. Weil’s Publications

He is the author of many scientific and popular articles and many books, including these national and international best-sellers:

Selected Books:

The Natural Mind; The Marriage of the Sun and Moon; From Chocolate to Morphine (with Winifred Rosen)
Health and Healing; Natural Health, Natural Medicine
Spontaneous Healing
8 Weeks to Optimum Health
Eating Well for Optimum Health: The Essential Guide to Food, Diet, and Nutrition
The Healthy Kitchen: Recipes for a Better Body, Life, and Spirit (with Rosie Daley)
Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being
Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future (issued in paperback with new content as: You Can’t Afford to Get Sick).
Spontaneous Happiness(2011)
True Food: Seasonal, Sustainable, Simple, Pure(2012)
Fast Food, Good Food(2015)
Mind Over Meds (2017)
17 volumes in the Weil Integrative Medicine Library, from the Oxford University Press

Magazines & Periodicals:

Monthly column in Prevention magazine
Monthly Self Healing mailed newsletter
Annual volume of the Self Healing newsletters, all published in a single-issue publication, by year.
Periodic single-issue and topic-specific publications, including the recent, Andrew Weil’s Garden to Table Cooking

Join Dr. Weil on social media:

Twitter: @DrWeil
Facebook: DrWeil
Instagram: @DrWeil
YouTube: @DrWeil
Pinterest: DrWeil
Flickr: DrWeil

Learn More About Andrew Weil, M.D.

Weil Foundation

Andrew Weil, M.D., donates all of his after-tax profits from royalties from sales of Weil Lifestyle products directly to the Weil Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to supporting integrative medicine through training, education, and research. Since its inception in 2005, the Weil Foundation has given out more than $6.1 million in grants and gifts to medical centers and other non-profit organizations nationwide. weilfoundation.org
What Is Integrative Medicine?

Integrative medicine is healing-oriented medicine that takes account of the whole person (body, mind, and spirit), including all aspects of lifestyle.
About Weil Lifestyle

Weil Lifestyle is an organization founded with the mandate of providing an ethical funding platform to support the Weil Foundation.
Weil’s Podcast Appearances

Listen to Dr. Weil talk about the long and interesting road his life has taken, and his strongly influential role in establishing the field of integrative medicine.
Dr. Weil’s Ongoing Commitment To Integrative Medicine

Dr. Weil donates an additional $15 million (adding to the previous $5 million) to the University of Arizona for the expansion of the Center for Integrative Medicine.

Updated 8/01/2019

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By Andrew Weil, M.D.

I had a tiny vegetable garden in back of my row house in Philadelphia when I was in grade school. My mother, Jenny helped me with it. I remember growing radishes, tomatoes, maybe lettuce – mostly from seed. I also had flowers: zinnias, asters, marigolds. I remembering looking through many issues of the Burpee seed catalog, always dreaming that one day I’d have enough space for a real garden.

I didn’t get to do that until 1973, when I settled outside of Tucson near the mouth of Esperero Canyon in the Catalina Mountains. My land there was pure Sonoran desert, with lots of saguaros, chollas, ocotillos, mesquite and palo verde. I had to excavate an area not far from my house, truck in decent soil, and protect the area from everything that wanted to eat what I grew.  I learned that winter gardening in the desert is much easier than trying to grow vegetables in the summer heat.  I was able to grow and harvest broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce and peas and sneak in some tomatoes before it got too hot.

Tomatoes!

The first really large garden I had was at the X9 Ranch near Vail, Arizona. The old ranch house where I lived in from 1994-2010 was in a flood plain, with the best soil I’ve ever found in southern Arizona – rock-free silt that needed irrigation and lots of organic matter. I had a 40 x 40 foot plot that had to be completely fenced and bird-proofed.  I also had to dig down and line the bottom with wire netting to keep out pocket gophers. I was able to produce a lot of food there, eand I experimented with many varieties of vegetables.  Again mostly in winter, as I was away in British Columbia most summers, but I got a great harvest of Tahitian squash (a huge, sweet winter squash – my favorite) that was ready when I returned in the fall.  I grow mostly from seeds, and I love experimenting!

Some images from my gardens:

Summer Garden in British Columbia
Flowers In My Summer Garden
My Organic Garden In Tucson, Arizona
Flowers In The Desert

More information and videos for curious gardeners and beginners:

What To Grow
How To Make Healthy Soil
Beginning A Garden
The Benefits Of Gardening
Natural Pest Repellents

The post My Life In The Garden appeared first on DrWeil.com.

Maybe Your Most Important So Far
Reflection:

Legacy begins in Genesis, Chapter 49. The dying Jacob blessed his sons and asked them to return his bones from Egypt to the family burial plot where his ancestors, Sarah and Abraham, were buried. The two ideas, (blessing the next generation with cultural values, and expressing death and dying wishes) became the template for the ancient ethical will.

Contemporary legacy writing asks us to honor these two components as well. If we weren’t mortal, there’d be no need to write legacy letters preserving history, stories, wisdom and love for those ‘who’ll come after us. ‘But unless we’re diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, we keep thoughts about dying and death at a distance, even as we age.

A legacy letter that accompanies the advance directive (living will) acknowledges the reality of dying and death so that our children and loved ones know what it is we really want for ourselves at the end of our lives. In such a letter we can express our wants and needs at end-of-life, ‘why’ we’ve chosen what we’ve chosen, and we personalize the objective ‘do’s and don’ts’ of the legal document.

Once the subject is introduced, we can have real conversations with our families and loved ones about the reality of aging and dying. We can begin to uncover and share our fears and desires, our concerns and our doubts with each other. And we leave a legacy to younger generations illustrating a new way to relate to dying and death.

The rewards of writing this letter for the writer are many: a trust that what we hope for in our last days will be honored by loved ones; that we are not just elders, parents or grandparents, but sacred human beings with unique identities who want to be known in our strengths and vulnerabilities by those we love and who love us.

I wrote my first letter in 2005, as part of my legacy document. Though I promised myself then that I would update it every year, the next time I looked at it was before I had surgery four years ago.

On July 8th of this year I had shoulder replacement surgery. A few days before surgery I read through and updated the letter again should something happen while I was in surgery. I slipped the copy from my desktop into the folder I was taking to the hospital, just in case.

I came out of surgery healthy without any complications and feeling very positive about my future as a bionic woman with a titanium shoulder. That afternoon as my son and daughter sat in the hospital room with me, I brought out the letter said “We never have time to talk about this – you’re both busy with families and jobs and friends. But I have your attention here and I’d like to go over this letter even though we don’t need it today.”

They agreed; I asked my son to read the letter aloud and for us to have a conversation about what it is I wanted them to do should I not be able to voice my wishes myself near the end of my life. At the second page my son stopped reading, and said, “Mom, you first said you wanted this but now in this paragraph you’re saying something quite different. I won’t know what to do when the time comes.” Together we re-edited this letter begun 14 years ago, clarifying it, and adding my desire for palliative and hospice care and my not wanting invasive procedures, techniques, or medicines to prolong my life if there would be no chance that I would recover.

Finishing, my son said, “Mom, I promise that I will honor your wishes, do these things for you, but I want you to know it will be hard and I will miss you.” What more could a mother want? I felt safe, loved, cared for. My peace of mind about my life and my dying was a second gift along with my new shoulder.

“Death didn’t have the power to undo a life and its legacy. But perhaps the fact of death amplified life‘s significance.”

– Sunita Puri, MD

These legacy letters can and should be an opportunity for conversation with your loved ones as I have just shared with you. Dying is not easy to talk about because it is still a taboo in our culture. But it is the one thing we can be assured of – no matter who we are, no matter what our station in life, each of us will die.

“This is how we’re going to live for a long time: not always, For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, After the long season of tending and growth, The harvest comes.”

– Marge Piercy

To die wrapped in a blanket of care, protection, and love of our families and loved ones is an incomparable legacy for all involved.

Taking Action: 

Reread your legal document (advance directive, living will, medical directive).
Reflect on its contents. Then take as much time as you need to think about what’s most important to you for your physical, emotional, and spiritual care as you approach the end of your life.
I recommend reading Sunita Puri’s moving and elegant book about palliative care, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour before you write your letter.
Write your letter, setting it aside and editing it as much and as often as you need. (Rereading may remind you of additional things you want to say.) Review and reedit it as years go by and your circumstances change.
After you’ve written your letter, look for an appropriate time for a conversation with your loved ones, so that when your time approaches, you’ll have the peace of mind that I’ve shared with you today.

May you experience peace of mind as you put your life and dying in order, and gift your loved ones with this legacy.

– Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters and Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: [email protected], and www.life-legacies.com

The post A Very Important Legacy Letter appeared first on DrWeil.com.

Reflection:

As I think about us being the link between past and future generations, I wonder about our ancestors, how they had the courage, held on to their dreams, and often risked everything to fulfill their dreams of coming to America, and here we are, the culmination of those dreams.

“When we undertake the pilgrimage, it’s not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach the depth of our souls” – Orhan Pamuk

We grieve forgotten or broken dreams from our past, but in honoring the life of poet Mary Oliver, who asked: “What it is you plan to do with your wild and precious life?” it is our responsibility as legacy writers to “reach the depths of our souls,” to make conscious the plans, aspirations, and dreams we have for our future, and to provide that as legacy for future generations.

A simple example: A young woman recently told me she wouldn’t get in to a course of study she dreamed of, so she wasn’t going to apply. My response was that she surely would not be admitted if she didn’t apply! We both laughed; she decided to make application, and she begins that course of study in October.

“We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming – well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.” – Amy Tan

Having dreams for and planning for our futures require us to believe that our lives are always precious – and often wild. We need the courage our immigrant ancestors had to live our dreams, knowing we won’t always get what we hope for. It requires of us the willingness to grieve broken dreams, to let go, and eventually to open again to hopes for the future – words more easily written than lived.

“I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most, Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” – Alfred Lord Tennyson

Taking Action:

1. Reflect and write about dreams you had for your life as an adolescent and young adult. Did they become a part of the life you’re living now? In each decade since then, your life has likely changed in surprising and unexpected ways. Were those changes related to conscious visions and dreams you had for yourself? If yes, how have you celebrated them? And if not, have you allowed yourself to grieve them so you can dream new dreams?

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – H. Jackson Brown Jr.

2. Let yourself explore and dream about what you aspire to for your next twenty years. Be brave enough to commit to them by writing them down.

3. Choose a legacy letter recipient – a trusted someone with whom you want to share your dreams for yourself.

4. In your letter share about old dreams that came to fruition and those that did not. And allow yourself to be vulnerable enough to share those things you hope for in the next twenty years.

5. After you’ve written your letter, reflect again – about how thinking and writing about your aspirations for your precious and wild life adds to your courage to act to make them real, as well as how that makes you feel and think about yourself, and the legacy of your life.

“May you allow yourself to dream your dreams, and may they enrich your precious life.” – Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters and Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: [email protected], and www.life-legacies.com

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The following is an excerpt from Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison’s Amazon best-selling book, Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up . Informed by more than three decades of formal Zen and psychotherapeutic training and practice, Wholehearted brings Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison’s spiritual and clinical expertise into a readily accessible blend of insight and easily actionable guidance. The book provides strategies for identifying and exploring behaviors that often create unconscious barriers to personal confidence and interaction with others. Taking a remarkably fresh approach, Sensei Koshin brings time-honored Buddhist wisdom to how we live our lives, teaching us how to close the gaps we create between ourselves and others, and to wake up to the world around us in doable, wholehearted and positive ways.

There’s a great poem from the Third Ancestor of the Zen tradition that begins, “The Great Way is not difficult for those who don’t cling to preferences.” Right—easier said than done. Usually, our preferences rule the roost. Conditioned feelings and opinions tend to determine how we behave in all of our relationships, which means that, in our every interaction, we tend to follow the same script. Rather than taking the chance to interact with the moment as it is, we interact with the fixed ideas that live in our heads. “Not knowing” is the dropping of all of this; instead, we completely enter the moment in front of us. In Zen we call this having “beginner’s mind.”

In the first ten years of my meditation practice, I was super into the idea of being a meditator. I was always telling people, “Yeah, I’m a meditator, actually.” “I’m off to go meditate.” “Did you know I meditate?” Oh, I was so obnoxious. “You don’t meditate?” I’d ask people, unprompted. “You should try it.” Obviously, I was not at rest with myself and was compensating for some insecurity. And obviously, I wasn’t really having beginner’s mind. I was assuming I knew something that other people didn’t.

In Chinese, one of the translations of the word for suffering is “walls in the mind.” Even though I was purporting to be a meditator, I was using my practice to do exactly the opposite of what it’s meant to do. I was building a wall not only between myself and other people but also between me and my own mind. Caught up in my opinions and preferences, I was creating subtle divisions, because I wasn’t being honest with myself. The whole thing had a kind of odor to it. I can recall people’s faces when I used to do this; it was this scrunchy look like they were smelling something bad, like, “Why don’t you just leave me alone?”

The behavior was coming, in part, from a place of sweetness. There was that young enthusiastic quality of finding something new that was exciting and meaningful, and wanting to share it. But in a subtle way, I was creating evil. Wow. A big intense word and idea. Evil. Creating separation. I could have simply shared my authentic experience and left it at that: “I’m really enjoying what I’m doing. This meditation thing . . . I feel like it’s changing me. It’s really new, and I’m really excited.” But instead I made it about the other person and my opinions about what they should do, and with that, I distanced myself from them as well as from my own truth.

There’s a beautiful quote from the American Zen pioneer and teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi about beginner’s mind: “In the beginner’s mind, there are unlimited possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.” In every moment, there are unlimited possibilities as to what might occur. But when we follow the same old script—for me and the meditation thing, it was a habit of mine to look to other people to validate my own feelings—there are not a lot of possibilities. It’s not a fresh interaction. It’s totally stale, and maybe even a little stinky.

Now, sometime later, I don’t feel insecure about my choice to meditate anymore (in fact, I’m not even sure if it is a choice anymore), and I’ve stopped pushing it onto other people. What’s funny about this is that recently I was talking to a friend who had come to the center because he was curious about learning how to meditate. I was telling him about how I used to be that annoying meditation evangelist. He told me, “I’ve enjoyed watching how you behave in the world, and I’ve always appreciated that. That’s what made me want to practice here.” So it took some time, but I did end up learning my lesson about it, and when I did, that’s when others finally became attracted to the idea of meditating. A key part of the practice is learning how to surrender to not being in control. Allow the unfolding. In other words, we don’t need to hang up a sign. If we can live from a mindset of “not knowing,” we naturally cease from evil, and we’re left free to really get into things.

I love the Japanese phrase ichi-go ichi-e, which means “one moment, one chance.” It makes me think of dew evaporating. Have you ever seen that? Right before the sun comes up, all the dew, it’s beautiful. And then—so quickly—it’s gone. The opportunity to cultivate freshness, to cease from evil, is always available to us. But just for a moment . . . and then it’s gone.

In the story of Cinderella, she really wanted to go to the ball, but the conditions were just not right. The interesting thing about the Cinderella story is that while there are many versions of it, there aren’t any in which Cinderella complains. She keeps on meeting with obstacles, and she’s sad about it, and she doesn’t complain about it. Her stepfamily throws lentils in the ashes and tells her she can go if she picks up every single individual lentil in time, and she gets down and dirty and does just that. Then she gets all dressed up, and her stepsisters rip the gown to shreds. Eventually, of course, she does get to the ball, with the help of some fairy-godmother magic.

There is something about her attitude that I find really helpful. She enters the situation fully. It’s a totally sad situation, so she allows herself to be totally sad about it, but she also just does the next thing she needs to do, never knowing for sure how it’s all going to work out. Most important, Cinderella doesn’t go and start a war with her family. You can imagine Cinderella doing that, right, and who would blame her? In feelings of fear, insecurity, hurt, we sometimes lash out. The thing is, we’ve been doing that really well for thousands of years. No one needs to practice how to turn the hurtful people in our lives into enemies. The challenge is to do something new instead. How can we be like Cinderella? How do we embrace not knowing, especially in the moments where it feels completely shitty, where we might be on our knees, picking lentils out of the ashes?

My teacher’s teacher’s teacher, Roshi Bernie Glassman, started “bearing witness” retreats at concentration camps and other places of mass suffering. He brings people together—people from both sides of the suffering, both the perpetrators and the victims—in counsel, memorial, and contemplation at places like Bosnia and Native American reservations. In 1998, I went to one in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where family members of mine had died. In fact, in my Jewish household, I had been raised to hate anyone who contributed to the Holocaust, especially Germans and Poles. I’m serious. At my childhood dinner table it was like, “Would you like some bread and butter? And don’t forget to hate the Germans and Poles, and have a little kugel with that.” So, we’re sitting in a circle on the train tracks at Auschwitz. It’s November. It’s freezing, and in that moment I was really into “Why did we come when it’s so cold?”—which is part of the point. We sat by the selection site where they would send some people to the gas chambers and some to the barracks for work. We were reading aloud the names of all the people who died there, and what we had to do was simply be with our minds. It was excruciating for me. But the more I sat, hearing the names, being with the legacy of all that evil and feeling the sorrow of all that loss, the more I started to think about all the beings throughout the world who have been or are being killed precisely because of the walls people build between themselves, because of the differences we fabricate and the things we assume.

To see that each of us is responsible for that is a real ass-kicking. Because, don’t we do this every day, in our own small and subtle ways? Dismantling these walls, made up of our opinions and preferences, is a radical move. At the Auschwitz retreat, I was able to do that in part by actually meeting German and Polish people, and listening to them, and learning to love them. One Polish woman my age and I took a long walk back into the forest behind Birkenau. I trembled as I shared how I was taught to hate Poles and Germans because my family’s neighbors locked them in their barn and set it on fire—before the Nazis came. She stopped on the path. Her eyes full of tears, she took my hands and said she was there because her grandparents killed their neighbors the same way. We held each other as we sobbed and wailed. We have the opportunity to do this on an everyday level, too. Not knowing is learning how to interrogate what we assume to be true: “I’m better than you” or “everybody should meditate” or “my stepsisters are so mean”—whatever the stories we happen to tell ourselves are. This is how we do no evil.

What are your walls, and how can you take them down?

What does it mean to see everyone as yourself?

About Koshin Paley Ellison:

Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, MFA, LMSW, DMIN, is a best-selling author/editor and nationally recognized spiritual teacher and psychotherapist. In his second book, Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up, Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison addresses common distractions, beliefs and habitual patterns, providing a way through stress, disengagement, anger  and feeling unloved. Widely acclaimed for his guidance in helping people understand and apply time-tested Buddhist teachings as simple strategies for living in today’s chaotic world, Paley Ellison is a dynamic, original and visionary leader, teacher and speaker. He is a co-founder (with his husband, Sensei Robert Chodo Campbell) of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, the first Zen-based organization to offer fully accredited ACPE (Association for Clinical Pastoral Education) clinical chaplaincy training in America. Through the Zen Center they have educated more than 800 physicians and their students have cared for over 100,000 people facing the vulnerabilities of aging, illness and dying. Follow him on social media:

Instagram: @koshinpaleyellison
Twitter: @koshinpaley
Facebook: @koshinpaley

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