Thursday, December 22, 2011

Finding Your Joy in the Darkest Hour

Written by Jason Shields

Many of us are going through a sense of loss at this time of the year. Loved ones pass on; some move away; and others are separated due to petty disagreements and stubborn grudges. It can be one of the most lonely times an individual can experience. However, it does not have to be this way. God loves you. Not the fake God that you have made up for yourself with fear-based belief systems; the real God, the one who knows all about you. The real God wants the real you back.

Are you in a tight place? Can't imagine how all of this is going to work out? You don't need to; God already knows and will take any mess we find ourselves in and will turn it into something brand new and beautiful. True loss happens when you stop listening to God within you. You experience loss when you figure you can decide what is right and what is wrong for yourself and others based on external opinions from traditions and "books" and it leads to a whole lot of trouble. You may have a plan, but God has a better one. When was the last time that you sought out the Heavenly One who resides within you?

If something is going on in your life that you do not understand, think about it. Maybe you are not to understand it fully just yet. Maybe you are not ready for it. There are times when maybe the only thing we have to go on is not what we know, but what we believe on faith. And maybe this is one of those times. It isn't up to us to figure out how everything fits in. It is up to us to deal with it. The way we deal with it is to simply acknowledge that you are a child of God and God will never leave you nor forsake you, especially in your darkest hour or when you think you have really screwed things up. You are the child of a brilliant, intelligent Universe filled with elegance, sophistication and abundance.

Today, we celebrate the shortest day and darkest of nights. The Winter Solstice is always a time of reflection when Nature becomes silent amidst the cold and darkness. This is also a turning point where the Sun begins to brighten and lengthen each day. Nature teaches us that we are never alone; we simply go through cycles - some are lonely while others are filled with joy. Just know that the loneliness will get better and your pain will ease with time. God loves you and He created others on this earth to support you and love you for who you are. Be open to receive them into your life and they will come! Celebrate the Season with all of the Love that is YOU and radiate it out to our majestic earth.

Happy Holidays everyone!
Namaste,
Jason

Friday, December 2, 2011

What Matters to You Matters

Written by Jason Shields

I love the saying "if it matters to you, it matters." If something is important to you regardless of what others think, say or do, you should hold it close to your heart and nurture it and go with it. It could be a relationship, a goal, or a dream that you've always held on to. Whatever it is, the fact that you deem its importance is good enough. We are so inculcated into believing that others' opinions matter above our own; that somehow, we have to have their approval before we proceed with our goals or dreams. 

I believe that God is within all of us and the love and perserverence that keep you going during the rough and trying times is a testament to God's love and power moving through you. God's desire is the same as your own desire and God wants you to carry out and see it through to its completion. We are a species who are capable of extraordinary things. As humans, we are extremely adaptable to changes as well. Some changes are tougher than others, but just knowing that you have a Power within you that you can call upon is enough to weather the storms of life and get back on solid ground.

We lose sight, however, when the changes and circumstances seem unbearable and it is so easy to fall back on the opinions and approval of others, especially those closest to us. Parents especially, are hard on us and it is usually because they are afraid and insecure about their own lives and it is easier for them to project their fears onto our own. Maybe you have siblings or close friends that you have counted on for their opinions and support. Here's the difference: are you receiving an opinion biased through fear, or are you receiving genuine support from those you love? Therein lies the main difference. Find supportive family members and friends who will stand by you no matter what you decide to do. As for the rest of the fearful bunch, just silently bless them and keep on moving!

It is far better to keep your goals between you and God because what is secret is sacred. Yes, it is wonderful to have loved ones cheer you on, but just make sure that you share your dreams with only a select group of people who will be honest and sincere in their praises and their critiques. God knows you more than anyone on this beautiful planet and if he gave you a persistent dream or a nagging desire, he has also given you the power to see it through to the end. You are wonderfully unique! No one else is like you! You have talents and abilities that only you can share with the world. Once you have realized this powerful truth, you can set anything into motion! To boldly go forth into the unknown future with only your desire, goal and plan in hand is all that is required. God will carry you the rest of the way because the first step you took was the step of faith while listening to His sweet voice. God's voice is always urging you on to become better and to do great things for all beings on earth. When you are down and discouraged, just become silent: listen to winds that blow, feel the warmth of the sun on your face, hear the laughter of children in your neighborhood and know that these are all of God's methods of speaking to your heart.

Namaste!    

Friday, September 30, 2011

The Road to Freedom

Written by Jason Shields

We can change our attitudes about our past. The past is over and done and cannot be changed. Yet we can change our thoughts about the past. Have you considered how foolish it is for you to punish yourself in the present moment because someone hurt you long ago or that you misbehaved in a prior situation? If we continue to choose to believe that we are helpless victims and that life is hopeless, then the Universe will support us in that belief. Our worst opinions of ourselves will be confirmed.

If we choose to believe that we are responsible for our experiences, the good and the so-called "bad", then we have the power and the opportunity to outgrow the effects of the past. We can change. We can be free. The road to freeedom is through the doorway to forgiveness. We may not know how to forgive and we may not want to forgive; but if we are willing to forgive, we may begin the healing process. It is imperative for our own healing that we release the past and forgive everyone.

I'm not saying that it is all right that someone behaved in a misguided way. However, we must be aware that the past is over. We only carry hurt and the memory in our mind. This is what we want to let go of: the pain we are continuing to cause ourselves because we won't forgive. Forgiveness means giving up, letting go. We understand our own pain so well, yet it is hard for most of us to understand the pain of someone who treated us badly. That person we need to forgive was also in pain. And they are only mirroring what we believed about ourselves. They were doing the best they could, given the knowledge, understanding, and awareness they possessed at the time.

My Life With Autism


Written by Jason Shields of http://www.jasonshields.org/

Where have you been Jason?! This seems to be the question of the hour for me. The answer is simple: I have been improving myself! Six months ago, after an extensive battery of tests I was officially diagnosed with high functioning Autism or Asperger's Syndrome. It means that my brain functions and is wired differently than the majority of individuals. Too often, people think of persons with autism as isolationists, unable to communicate with the outside world. Autism is a spectrum disorder which means that there are many degrees ranging from the lower end, individuals who are nonfunctioning to high end, individuals who are aware of their differences. Thankfully, I fall into the higher functioning group.

My autistic mind is wired in such a way that I perceive tiny details that most other people often miss. Each day, I engage in an extreme form of an average, everyday activity: seeing. Humans rely heavily on their eyes to receive much of the information about the world around us. This is the reason why a significant portion of the human brain is devoted entirely to visual processing.

Conditions such as autism and savant syndrome remain poorly understood by most people, including many experts. It is not only savant minds that are considered somehow supernaturally gifted and therefore set apart from other people: the success of outstanding individuals in numerous fields, from Mozart and Einstein to Garry Kasparov and Bill Gates, has been attributed by many to minds they regard as unearthly and inexplicable. I think this view is not only erroneous but harmful, too, because it separates the achievements of talented individuals from their humanity.

Every brain is amazing. Anyone with the passion and dedication necessary to master a field or subject can succeed in it. Genius, in all its forms, is not due to any mere quirk of the brain; it is the result of far more chaotic, dynamic, and essentially human qualities such as perseverance, imagination, intuition, and even love. In essence, I have been learning about myself and how my brain actually works. The past six months have been and continue to be a major transformation of life, health and spirit. I have adopted a bodybuilding routine, took up swimming and am slowly incorporating an 80% raw vegan lifestyle. I have also decided to take up learning 3 foreign languages and am learning about how our brains process and store memory.

Life has been and continues to be more enlightening for myself as I learn more about Autism and the wonders of the mind. My primary mission in my life's work is to show that differently functioning minds such as mine are not so strange, and that anyone can learn from them. In my workshops on the mind, spirit and autism, I clear up many misconceptions about the nature of autistic minds and abilities and what it means to be intelligent and gifted. I am planning on a nationwide tour where the workshops/lectures will be free of charge! I have decided that when you allow the participants to decide what to give financially, God moves the hearts and minds to sheer generosity. We are all intelligent and extremely gifted.

So, this is what I have done with my summer. It is wonderful to be back writing again and working on my autobiography and helping others find peace and motivation in their lives. For more information regarding booking a workshop with “yours truly,” just send me an email at harboroflight@yahoo.com. In just a week, I will have a special page on my site which details all kinds of information regarding my workshop, outlines, etc.

God bless,
Jason

Thursday, May 26, 2011

"What's in Your Hand?" Finding Your Purpose in Life

Written by Jason Shields
I'm often asked, “What surprises you about your profession as a psychic and a writer?” And I reply that I get to do it. I would have never imagined that, not even in my wildest dreams did I think that my life career would end up this way. I don't even consider myself to be an author or a psychic even. And I'm often asked, why do you think so many people come to see you or read your books? I think it's because spiritual emptiness is a universal disease. I think that deep inside at some point, we put our heads down on the pillow and we go, "There's got to be more to life than this." Get up in the morning, go to work, come home and watch TV, go to bed, get up in the morning, go to work, come home, watch TV, go to bed, go to parties on weekends. A lot of people say, "I'm living." No, you're not living, you’re just existing. Just existing. I really think that there is this inner desire. I believe that you're not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but I believe God did. I think there are accidental parents, but there are no accidental kids.
And I think you matter. I think you matter to God. I think you matter to history. I think you matter to this universe. I think that there is a difference between what I call the survival level of living, the success level of living and the significant level of living. The latter of the two is when you figure out, “what on Earth am I here for?” I meet a lot of people who are very smart, and say, "But why can't I figure out my problems?" And I meet a lot of people who are very successful, who say, "Why don't I feel more fulfilled? Why do I feel like a fake? Why do I feel like I have to pretend that I'm more than I really am?" I think that comes down to this issue of meaning, of significance, of purpose. I think it comes down to this issue of why am I here? What am I here for? Where am I going? These are not spiritual issues, they're human issues.
As a minister, I do see a lot of kooks. I have learned that there are kooks in every area of life. Religion and spirituality doesn't have a monopoly on that, but there are plenty of religious/spiritual kooks. There are secular kooks, there are smart kooks, dumb kooks. A man came up to me the other day after one of my talks, and he had a white blank piece of paper and she said, "What do you see in it?" And I looked at it and I replied, "I don't see anything." And he said, "Well, I see Jesus," and started crying and left. I simply thought “Good for you.”
Everybody has a worldview. Everybody's betting their life on something. You are betting your life on something; you just better know why you're betting and what you're betting it on. So, everybody's betting their life on something, and when I made a bet, I happened to believe that God is Who He is and that God is pure love. I also believe that God must be central in your life. I believe in a pluralistic society - everybody's betting on something. And when I started my journey as a counselor and a medium, I had no plans to do what I am doing now. All of a sudden it just took off, and then I started saying, now, what's the purpose of this? I don't believe that you are given money or fame for your own ego, ever. I just don't believe that. So, what is it for?
And I began to think about what I call the stewardship of affluence and the stewardship of influence. I believe, essentially, that leadership is stewardship. If you are a leader in any area - in business, in politics, in sports, in art, in academics, in any area - you don't own it; you are a steward of it. For instance, it is why I believe in protecting the environment. This is not my planet. It was not mine before I was born. It is not going to be mine after I die. I'm just here for 100 years and then that is it, I move one to the next plane of existence.
I was debating the other day on a radio show, and the host was challenging me by saying, "What's a minister doing on protecting the environment?" And I asked this host, "Well, do you believe that human beings are responsible to make the world a little bit better place for the next generation? Do you think we have a stewardship here, to take the environment seriously?" And he replied, "No." I said, "Oh, you don't? Let me get this straight. Do you believe that as human beings, I am not talking about religion or spirituality, do you believe that as human beings, it is our responsibility to take care of this planet and make it just a little bit better for the next generation?" And the host replied, "No. Not any more than any other species." When he said the word "species," he was revealing his worldview. And he continued, "I'm no more responsible to take care of this environment than a duck is." Well now, I know a lot of times where we act like ducks, we quack like ducks, but you are not a duck. You are not an animal. And you are responsible - that's my worldview. And so, you need to understand what your world is, understand what your worldview is.
The problem is most people never really think it through. They never ask why they believe what they believe. They never really codify it or qualify it or quantify it, and say, "This is what I believe in. This is why I believe what I believe." I do not personally have enough faith to be an atheist, but you may. Your worldview does determine everything else in your life, because it determines your decisions, it determines your relationships, and it determines your level of confidence. It determines, really, everything in your life. What we believe, obviously determines our behavior, and our action determines what we become in life.
Ministers, like myself  are on call 24 hours a day year round. You know, the test of your worldview is not how you act in the good times. The test of your worldview is how you act at the funeral, how you behave in a crisis, how you act in a trial. And having been through literally hundreds if not thousands of funerals, it makes a difference. It makes a difference what you believe. I believe that my life is all about giving.
Because every time I give, it breaks the grip of materialism in my life. Materialism is all about getting - get, get, get, get all you can, can all you get, sit on the can and spoil the rest. It is all about more, having more. And we think that the good life is actually looking good. That's most important of all -- looking good, feeling good and having the goods. But that's not the good life. I meet people all the time who have those, and they're not necessarily happy. If money actually made you happy, then the wealthiest people in the world would be the happiest. And that I know, personally, is not true. It's just not true.
King Solomon & Queen Sheba
So, the good life is not about looking good, feeling good or having the goods, it's about being good and doing good. Living the good life is about giving your life away. Significance in life doesn't come from status, because you can always find somebody who has more than you. It doesn't come from sex. It doesn't come from a salary. It comes from serving. It is in giving our lives away that we find meaning, we find significance. I believe that is the way we are wired by God. Being a nondenominational minister, I study and read various scriptures of many religions. I started reading the Bible one evening when a particular problem was rearing its ugly head. There's a chapter in the Bible called Psalm 72, and it's Solomon's prayer for more influence. When you read this prayer, it sounds incredibly selfish and self-centered. It sounds like, he says, "God, I want you to make me famous." In essence, that's what he prays. He says, "God, I want you to make me famous. I want you to spread the fame of my name through every land, I want you to give me power, I want you to make me famous. I want you to give me influence." It sounds like the most egotistical request you could make if you were going to pray, that is until you read the whole psalm, the whole chapter. And then he says, "So that the king"- Solomon was the king of Israel and at that time the kingdom was at its apex in power - "so that the king may care for the widow and orphan, support the depressed, defend the defenseless, care for the sick, assist the poor, speak up for the foreigner and assist those in prison." Basically, he's referring to all the marginalized in society.
And as I read that, I looked at it, and thought, “You know, what this is saying is that the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence.” The purpose of influence is not to build your ego, or your net worth. Your net worth is not the same thing as your self-worth. Your value is not based on your valuables; it is based on an entirely different set of things. So the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. I had to admit that I could not think of the last time I thought of widows and orphans. They were not on my radar. I travel and read in some of the most affluent areas of America - a bunch of gated communities. I attend a church full of CEOs and scientists. And I could go five years and never, ever see a homeless person. They are just not in my pathway. Now they are 25 miles up the road in Indianapolis. So, I had to say, "OK, I would use whatever affluence and whatever influence I've got to help those who don't have either of those."
There is another story in the Bible about Moses. Whether you believe it is true or not, it really doesn't matter to me. Moses stands before a burning bush and God talks to him through this bush. And God says to Moses, “what's in your hand?" I think that is one of the most important questions you will ever be asked. What's in your hand? Moses replies, "It's a staff. It's a shepherd's staff." God says, "Throw it down." And if you saw the movie, the Ten Commandments, Moses throws the staff down and it becomes a snake. And then God says, "Pick it up." Moses picks it back up again, and it becomes a staff again. Now, I am reading this story, and I am thinking to myself, what is that all about? Well, I do know a couple of things from my own experience. Number one, God never does a miracle to show off. It is not about God being “cool”. God does not have to show up on a grilled cheese sandwich. If God is going to show up, he's not going to show up on a grilled cheese sandwich or sprinkler images.
God has a few more powerful ways than that to do whatever he wants to do. But He doesn't do miracles just to show off. Second thing:  if God ever asks you a question, He already knows the answer. Obviously, if He's God, then that would mean that when He asks you a question, it is for your benefit, not His. So, God is asking, "What's in your hand?" Now, what was in Moses' hand? Well, it was a shepherd's staff. This staff represented three things about Moses' life. First, it represented his identity. He was a shepherd, a leader. It was the symbol of his own occupation. The staff was a symbol of his identity, his career, his job. Second, it was a symbol of his income, because all of his assets were tied up in sheep. In those days nobody had bank accounts, or Mastercards, or hedge funds. Your assets were tied up in your flocks. So the staff was a symbol of his identity and it was a symbol of his income. And the third thing: it was a symbol of his influence. What do you do with a shepherd's staff? You use it to move sheep from point A to point B, by hook or by crook. You pull them or you poke them, one or the other. So, God is saying, "You're going to lay down your identity. What's in your hand? You've got identity, you've got income, you have got influence. What's in your hand?" God is saying, "If you lay it down, I'll make it come alive. I'll do some things you could never imagine possible." And if you've watched that movie, "Ten Commandments," all of those big miracles that happened in Egypt were done through this staff.
And I guess that's the main reason I wrote this today, to all of you very bright people who read my column. I am asking you, "What's in your hand?" What do you have that you've been given by God? Talent, background, education, freedom, networks, opportunities, wealth, ideas, creativity. What are you doing with what you've been given? That, to me, is the primary question of life. That, to me, is what being purpose-driven is all about. In one of my books, I talk about how you are wired to do certain things, you are shaped. This little cross takes spiritual gifts, heart, ability, personality and experiences. These things shape you. And if you want to know what you ought to be doing with your life, you need to look at your shape. What am I wired to do? Why would God wire you to do something and then not have you do it? If you're wired to be an anthropologist, you'll be an anthropologist. If you're wired to be an undersea explorer, you'll be an undersea explorer. If you're wired to make deals, you make deals. If you're wired to paint, you paint. If you are wired to sing, you sing.
Did you know that God smiles when you decide to just be you? Some people have the misguided idea that God only gets excited when you're doing "spiritual things" like going to church or helping the poor, or confessing your “sins” or doing something like that. The bottom line is, God gets pleasure watching you be you. Why? He created you. And when you do what you were created to do, God proudly says “That's my boy. That's my girl. You are using the talent and ability that I gave you." So my advice to you is, look at what's in your hand - your identity, your influence, your income and say, "It's not about me. It's about making the world a better place."

Monday, May 23, 2011

Poltergeists: Fact or Fiction

Written by Jason Shields
The most common perception of ghosts is that they are shadowy or invisible beings who throw dinner plates and move pieces of furniture around rooms, occasionally materializing as fearsome entities, sometimes levitating people themselves for their amusement. As you will see throughout many of the articles I write on ghosts and spirits, there is actually a wide range of phenomena that are commonly categorized as ghosts and spirits. The ghosts that throw things and are generally responsible for the rather dramatic household disturbances are known as “poltergeists” which is the German term meaning “noisy ghost.”
Many paranormal researchers, including myself, believe that these invisible housebreakers are really not crazy and rude ghosts, but bundles of uncontrolled psychokinetic energy, the direct action of mind over matter. I also contend that these violent disturbances which often manifest in homes or around certain individuals are attributed to the sexual changes and adjustments that accompany puberty, the early stages of a marriage or union, or the feelings of inadequacy and frustration accentuated by some traumatic experience that an individual has survived. I believe that the majority of poltergeists fit into the above category: pure psychokinesis or Type I Poltergeist.
While there may be many instances in which the outbreak of poltergeist phenomena might be associated with the dramatic changes that adolescence brings to a child’s psyche, many of the classic cases of noisy ghosts throwing objects and severely disrupting the natural flow of things occurred where no adolescent was present. If the extrasensory ability of psychokinesis, mind over matter, can somehow cause an individual to become an unaware participant in haunting phenomena, then we may have to expand the theory of the poltergeist to include those instances in which the human mind, under stress, fatigue, sleep deprivation, and so forth, may release uncontrolled spontaneous energy that has the power to activate and interact with dormant spirit forces. 
What are dormant spirit forces? Ghosts. A ghost’s energy may lie dormant for years; even centuries until someone with the correct energy vibration awakens its energy. By using the term “awaken,” I simply refer to stimulating the ghost’s energy; it is kind of like striking a tuning fork which vibrates to the same frequency of the ghost. Many times, ghosts who have been on the earth for a while, have been reliving their lives over and over subconsciously, and never realizing that they are indeed dead. Such examples are inherent in suicides, murders, and tragic, unexpected deaths that took place at the hand of another. In essence, the person and many times an adolescent, like me at the time, will awaken the ghost’s energy by feeding its source using feelings and emotions.
When a poltergeist is at its peak, the person or family involved may be stressed to a psychological breaking point. Psychoanalyst Dr. Nandor Fodor maintains that a poltergeist is an unquestionably sadistic force. Fodor theorized that the projection of aggression by means of unexplained biological agents, such as poltergeists, is one way in which an adolescent can release hostility against parents and other figures of authority and still maintain his innocence. Such was my case as an adolescent. Growing up different had its challenges. In addition to dealing with the physical and emotional tormenting at school, I also began seeing more “dead people” hovering around me. It was an extremely lonely and awkward period for me. I had considered suicide on multiple occasions because I felt as though no one had a clue as to what I was going through. Anger was my central emotion and I often held it in. without an outlet of expression, the emotional energy found other avenues of expression: light bulbs bursting out of their sockets, computers at the school crashed, and televisions would change stations or turn themselves off and on, just to name a few. My parents at the time just chalked it up to faulty wiring or “coincidence”. By the time I had graduated high school, the disturbances stopped.
It was not until my early to mid-twenties that I began to figure it all out. The poltergeist phenomena started up again during a particularly stressful period of my life: I had purchased my first home and had lost my job during the loan process. Even though I had my psychic profession to fall back on, finances had become stringent and I was an emotional basket case, to say the least. Needless to say, I was prone to fits of anger which had built up slowly over the days and weeks of being unemployed. Finally, I found a job as a drug counselor at a methadone clinic in Indianapolis. Even though it lessened the financial burden, the mental and emotional toll of dealing with drug addicts and the methadone treatment process escalated.
At first, I began to notice poltergeist subtleties in my new home, such as objects on the tables (pens, photo frames) jerk suddenly out of the corner of my eyes. I would often find my car keys, which I always placed at one side of sofa table nearest the door, had moved their way to the opposite side of the table. During that time, for the life of me, I could not keep enough light bulbs on hand. They would continue to burn out after only a few days and sometimes within hours of being replaced. When I finally decided that the counseling job was not for me, and had decided to become a full-time medium counselor, the poltergeist activity slowed down dramatically. When I made the decision to take in a roommate, who now happens to be my business consultant Jon, the activity resurfaced.
By then, I knew all about poltergeist activity and that I was the main cause of the unusual disturbances. Having a new roommate come into your home when you are used to having things run your own way posed its challenges for the both of us. My clientele were also increasing and I began to see more and more people in my home. Jon, bless his heart, was extremely patient during the next couple of years which followed. He had been a skeptic when we first met, that is until I told him that his deceased father had been following him all around. Of course, with roommates you will have disagreements and we had our fair share followed by frenzied psychokinetic bursts of energy which resulted in a few glass vases bursting on their own, along with several prized pieces of my now late grandmother’s hand painted china. These instances were few and far between in occurrence but powerful nonetheless. In some cases, I would find glass shards literally sticking out of the paint in the walls of the room where the poltergeist event occurred.
I will never forget the first instance of psychokinetic poltergeist activity involving Jon and I. we were washing dishes and I had been talking about an ongoing problem we were having with one of the neighbors at the time. I was holding a glass coffee carafe by its plastic handle when all of a sudden, the carafe burst into a gazillion pieces into the sink and all over the kitchen floor. Ironically, neither one of us were injured. Actually, in retrospect, nobody in my life has ever received any real physical harm and it is seldom that anyone ever does during a poltergeist attack. Many if not most of my clients who have experienced poltergeist phenomena have never been harmed. It is mainly seen in the movies for dramatic flair.
So far, I have given you examples of psychokinetic Type I Poltergeist activities. Type II Poltergeist phenomena occurs when a spirit/ghosts’ energy interacts with a living being’s psychic energy to produce physical disturbances. For example, a few years ago, I had received a call one winter morning that a church member, a man in his early twenties, had committed suicide. I had known him relatively well from church; well enough that he knew I was a medium. Needless to say, his spirit showed up at my house frantic. His angry demeanor fueled his psychic energy momentum and propelled an entire shelf of plates which hung in my dining room through a plate glass table shattering it into bits. Let us just say that he received my undivided attention. Another less dramatic but amusing poltergeist event was when Jon and I came home from doing a lecture on paranormal phenomena and found my office furniture neatly stacked from floor to ceiling in the most unusual way.       
What do you do when you are in the midst of a poltergeist occurrence? Identifying the source of the phenomena is key to what action one will take in resolving the issue and this involves ruling out any of the possible explanations discussed above: emerging adolescence, a new marital union, extreme hormonal fluctuations and intense emotional feelings such as anger and frustration. If none are present, then one must consider the possibility of a ghost’s energy that has reawakened or a ghost who has attached itself to and is “feeding” on the energy of a living host. Both of these occurrences are quite common and can overlap. For example, an adolescent male going through puberty who is also frustrated in his struggles for independence and autonomy may easily attract or awaken a ghost’s energy that has lain dormant for years.
As a counselor, merely getting the client to discuss their issues in a non-combative environment usually resolves the poltergeist phenomena quickly. Everyone needs, at one time or another, an unbiased counselor to talk to; one who will not judge them and will actually listen to them undividedly. Remember, most poltergeist activity is pent up frustrated energies that manifest themselves in frenzied bursts of manifestations. If, on the other hand, the psychic researcher discovers a ghost is attached to the individual, other action is taken. In many of these instances, I have had to talk to the ghost directly or, if the individual is halfway across the country, I instruct the individual afflicted on how to address the ghost. The basic procedure is reminding the ghost that he or she is dead and getting them to literally see the light of Heaven, the doorway that we all choose to go through when we die. The mere process of talking directly to the ghost usually surprises them so that they are no longer subconsciously reliving their former death over and over. The ghost is able to stop and listen and see the Light of God. At this moment, they also are able to see their loved ones on the Other Side who have been waiting for them and they cross over.
Very few instances involve ghosts of malicious intent. Like I tell my clients, we do not lose our freewill the minute we die; we choose to go into the light of God and join our loved ones in Heaven. However, there are occurrences that have been recorded where the ghost of a murderer or someone who has done evil deeds during his or her lifetime stay behind for fear of being judged or they actually have the malicious intent of being an evil spirit. In such a case, psychic protection and ritual is called for. I remind my clients in those circumstances that they are the ones who are in control. As long as they have faith and love in their home and truly believe in the goodness of God, evil cannot prevail. My usual prescription is lighting a white candle in the middle of each room, burning sage incense and sprinkling sea salt in each of the four corners. I know that this is not the “scientific” protocol, but it has worked for generations of poltergeist hauntings.
Lastly, never forget the power of prayer. When you pray, your loved ones and guides immediately surround you with a bubble of psychic protection where it is simply your heart opening up to God. Pray for the lost soul’s energy to become actively conscious and alert to the Light of God. Invite your loved ones on the Other Side to join you in welcoming the spirit over. A little prayer goes a long way. A simple but powerful prayer is the Unity Prayer of Protection which I will leave you with:
The Light of God surrounds us
The Presence of God enfolds us
The Power of God protects us
Wherever we are, God is and all is well.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Take the Slow Road to Happiness

Written By Jason Shields
What I'd like to start this article off with is an observation. If I've learned anything over the last year, it's that the supreme irony of publishing a book on Taoism “I Know I am Now” which is about slowing down in life and being in the Now is that I have to go around promoting it really fast. I seem to spend most of my time these days, zipping from city to city, studio to studio, interview to interview, serving up the book in really tiny bite-size chunks. Everyone these days wants to know how to slow down, but they want to know how to slow down really quickly. We live in a world stuck in fast-forward.
A world obsessed with speed, with doing everything faster, with cramming more and more into less and less time is the current theme. Every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock. To borrow a phrase from Carrie Fisher, "These days even instant gratification takes too long." And if you really think about how we try to make things better, what do we do? We speed things up. We used to dial; now we speed dial. We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk. And of course, we used to date and now we speed date. And even things that are by their very nature slow, we try and speed them up too. I was in Chicago recently, and I walked past a gym that had an advertisement in the window for a new evening course. And it was for, you guessed it, speed yoga. So, this is the perfect solution for time-starved professionals who want to “salute the sun,” but only want to give over about 20 minutes to it. These are the extreme examples we find in our society now, and they're amusing and good to laugh at.
But there's a very serious point, and I think that in the headlong dash of daily life, we often lose sight of the damage that this roadrunner form of living does to us. We are so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it is taking on every aspect of our lives: on our health, our diet, our work, our relationships, the environment and our community. And sometimes it takes a wake-up call to alert us to the fact that we are hurrying through our lives, instead of actually living them; that we are living the fast life, instead of the good life. And I think for many people, the wake-up call takes the form of an illness, a burn-out, and eventually the body says, "I can't take it anymore," and throw in the towel. Or maybe your relationship goes up in smoke because you haven't had the time, or the patience, or the tranquility, to be with the other person, to actually listen to them.
And my wake-up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my goddaughter, who routinely stays with us, and I found that at the end of day, I would go into her room and I just couldn't slow down! I would speed read "The Cat in The Hat." I would be skipping lines here, paragraphs there, sometimes a whole page and of course, my little goddaughter knew the book inside out, so we would quarrel. And what should have been the most relaxing, the most intimate, the most tender moment of the day, when you sit down to read to a child, it became a clash of the titans between my speed and her slowness. This continued on for some time until I caught myself scanning a newspaper article with time-saving tips for fast, busy people. And one of them made reference to a series of books called "The One-Minute Bedtime Story." And I, I wince saying those words now, but my first reaction at the time was very different. My first reflex was to say, "Hallelujah, what a fantastic idea!” This is exactly what I'm looking for to speed up bedtime even more." But thankfully, a light bulb clicked on over my head, and my next reaction was quite different. I took a step back, thought, "Whoa! Jason, has it really come to this? Am I really in such a hurry that I'm prepared to fob off my goddaughter with a sound byte at the end of the day?" I put away the newspaper, and as I was getting on a plane, I just sat there and I did something I had not done for a long time, nothing. I did nothing. I just thought, and I pondered long and hard. And by the time I got off that plane, I had decided I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to investigate this whole roadrunner culture, and what it was doing to me and to everyone else.
I had two questions in my head. The first was, how did we get so fast? And the second is, is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down? Now, if you think about how our world became so accelerated, the usual suspects rear their ugly heads. You think of urbanization, consumerism, the workplace, technology. But if you were to cut through those forces you get to what might be the deepest primary driver, the purpose of the question, which is how we think about time itself. In other cultures, time is cyclical. It's seen as moving in great unhurried circles; always renewing and refreshing itself. Whereas in the West, time is a one-way linear street. It is a finite resource, it is always draining away. You either use it, or lose it. As Benjamin Franklin said “Time is money.”  What is this doing to us psychologically? It creates an equation. Time is perceived as a scarcity, so what do we do? We speed up! We try and do more and more with less and less time. We turn every moment of every day into a race to the finish line; a finish line, incidentally, that we never reach, but a finish line nonetheless.
I guess the ultimate question should be “Is it possible to break free from this mindset?” Thankfully, the answer is yes, because what I have discovered, when I began looking around, that there is a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better, and that busier is best.
Right across the world, people are doing the unthinkable: they're slowing down, and finding that although “conventional” wisdom tells you that if you slow down, you will end up being roadkill, the opposite turns out to be true. By slowing down at the right moments, people find that they do everything better. They eat better, they make love better, they exercise better, they work better, and they live better. These types of slow moments, places and periods of deceleration are what some people in various parts of the world refer to as “The International Slow Movement.”
Now if you'll permit me a small act of hypocrisy, I'll just give you a very quick overview of what is going on inside the Slow Movement. If you think of food, many of you will have heard of the Slow Food movement, which began in Italy, and has spread across the world, and now has 100,000 members in 50 countries. And it is driven by a very simple and sensible message, “We get more pleasure and more health from our food when we cultivate, cook and consume it at a reasonable pace.”  I think that the explosion of the organic farming movement, and the renaissance farmers' markets, are other illustrations of the fact that people are desperate to get away from eating and cooking and cultivating their food on an industrial timetable. They want to get back to slower rhythms. Out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy, but has spread right across Europe and beyond. In this movement, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape, so that people are encouraged to literally slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another. So they might curb traffic, or put in a park bench, or some green space.
In some ways, these changes add up to more than the sum of their parts, because I think when a Slow City becomes officially a Slow City, it is kind of like a philosophical declaration. It is saying to the rest of world, and to the people in that town, that we believe that in the 21st century, slowness has a role to play. In medicine, I believe many people are deeply disillusioned with the kind of quick-fix mentality you find in conventional medicine. And millions of them around the world are turning to complementary and alternative forms of medicine, which tend to tap into sort of slower, gentler, and more holistic forms of healing. Now, obviously the jury is out on many of these complementary therapies, and I personally doubt that the coffee enema will ever gain mainstream approval. But other treatments such as acupuncture and massage, and even just relaxation and meditation, clearly have some kind of benefit. Even “blue-chip” medical colleges everywhere are beginning to study these things to find out how they work, and what we might learn from them.
Sex. There is an awful lot of fast sex around, isn't there? I was coming to -- well -- no pun intended there. I was making my way, let's say, slowly to my next workshop in New York, and I went through a news stand and I saw a magazine, a men's magazine, and it said on the front, "How to bring your partner to orgasm in 30 seconds." Even sex is on a stopwatch these days. Now, you know, I like quickies just as much as the next person, but I think that there is an awful lot to be gained from slow sex, from slowing down with your partner in the bedroom. You tap into a deep seated power where you discover the deeper psychological, emotional, spiritual currents, and you achieve a better orgasm with this slow buildup. Society all laughed at Sting a few years ago when he went Tantric, but fast-forward a few years, and now you find couples of all ages flocking to workshops, or maybe just on their own in their own bedrooms, finding ways to put the brakes on and have better sex. And of course, in Italy where -- I mean, Italians always seem to know where to find their pleasure -- they've launched an official Slow Sex movement.
Let us turn to the workplace, right across much of the world, North America being a notable exception; working hours have been coming down. Europe is an example of this, and people are finding that their quality of life improves as they work less, and also that their hourly productivity goes up. Now, clearly there are problems with the 35-hour work week in France - too much, too soon, too rigid. But other countries in Europe, notably the Nordic countries, are showing that it is possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic. As a result, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland now rank among the top six most competitive nations on earth, and they work the kind of hours that would make the average American weep with envy. Further, if you go beyond the country level and down at the micro-company level, more and more companies are finally realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or simply take time to unplug: take a lunch break, or to go sit in a quiet room and switch off their Blackberrys and mobile devices, during the work day or on the weekend, so that they have time to recharge and allow the brain to slide into a kind of creative mode of thought.
It is not just adults these days who overwork themselves. It is children, too. My childhood ended in the mid-'90s, and I look at children now and I'm just amazed by the way they race around with more homework, more tutoring, more extracurricular activities, than we would ever have conceived of a generation ago. And some of the most heart wrenching emails that I get on my website are actually from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout, pleading with me to write or talk to their parents, to help them slow down, to help them get off this fast moving treadmill. Thankfully, there is a backlash there in parenting as well, and we are discovering that many towns in the United States are now coming together extracurricular activities on a particular day of the month, so that people can decompress, slow down and have some quality family time.
Homework is another story. There are homework bans springing up all over the developed world in schools which have been piling on the homework for years, and now researchers are discovering that less can be more. There was a case up in Scotland where a fee-paying, high-achieving private school banned homework for everyone under the age of 13, and the high-achieving parents freaked out and said, "What are you doing? Our students will fail". The headmaster said, "No, your children need to slow down at the end of the day." And just this last month, the exam results came in, and in math and science, marks went up 20 percent on average last year. What is very revealing in this study is that the elite universities, who are often cited as the reason that people drive their kids and push them so much, they are beginning to notice the quality of the students coming to them is falling. These children have wonderful grades and they have their social lives jammed with extracurricular activities, to the point that would make your eyes water. However, they lack spark, they lack the ability to think creatively and think outside the box, they don't know how to dream.
These Ivy League schools, such as Oxford and Cambridge and so on, are beginning to send a message to parents and students that they need to put on the brakes a little bit. In Harvard, for example, they send out a letter to undergraduates, mainly the freshmen, telling them that they will get more out of life, and more out of Harvard, if they put on the brakes: do less, but give time to things, the time that things need, to enjoy them, to savor them, even if it means sometimes do nothing at all. And that letter is called "Slow Down!" with an exclamation mark on the end.
So wherever you look, the message, it seems to me, is the same: less is very often more and slower is very often better. With all of this said, of course, it is not easy to slow down, is it? I mean, I received a speeding ticket on my way to a lecture on “I Know I am Now” which has the main message of slowing down, and heralds the benefits of slowness. I was actually en route to a dinner held by Slow Food at the time. And if that's not shameful enough, I got that ticket in Ohio. And if any of you have ever driven on an Ohio highway, you'll have a pretty good idea of how fast I was going.
But why is it so hard to slow down? I think there are various reasons. One is that speed is fun, it is “sexy”.  It is all that adrenaline rushing through your body. It's hard to give it up. I also think there is a kind of metaphysical dimension to speed. Speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper questions that truly challenge us and make us think deeply about where we are in life. We fill our head with distractions, with busy-ness, so that we don't have to ask, “Am I well? Am I happy? Are my children growing up right? Are politicians making good decisions on my behalf?” Another reason, I think, perhaps, the most powerful reason, why we find it hard to slow down, is the cultural taboo that we've erected against slowing down. Slow is a dirty word in our culture. It is synonymous with lazy, slackers, for being somebody who gives up. You have heard at one time or another, "he's a bit slow." It's actually synonymous with being stupid.
The main purpose of the Slow Movement is to tackle that taboo, and to say that, yes, sometimes slow is not the answer, that there is such a thing as "bad slow." On our way home from Chicago recently, we got stuck on the Interstate due to a traffic accident and spent three and a half hours there just idling and creeping along. And I can tell you, that's really bad slow. But the new idea, the sort of revolutionary idea of the Slow Movement, is that there is such a thing as "good slow," also. Good slow is taking the time to eat a meal with your family, with the TV turned off; taking the time to look at a problem from all angles in the office to make the best decision at work. Or even simply just taking the time to slow down and savor the simple joys of your life.
Now, one of the things that I found most uplifting about all of this stuff that's happened around the book since it came out, is the reaction to it. And I knew that when my book on Tantra and Taoism came out, it would be welcomed by the New Age brigade, but it's also been taken up, with great gusto, by the corporate world, big companies and leadership organizations. People at the top of the chain are beginning to realize that there is too much speed in the system, there is too much busy-ness, and it is time to find, or get back to, that lost art of shifting into lower gears. Another encouraging sign is that it is not just in the developed world that this idea is taking root. In the developing world, in countries that are on the verge of making that leap into first world status, such as China, Brazil, Thailand, Poland, and so on, these countries have embraced the idea of the Slow Movement. There are many people in them, and there is a debate going on in their media and on the streets. I believe they are looking at the West, and they are saying, "Well, we like that aspect of what you've got, but we're not so sure about that."
Is it possible? That's really the main question before us today. Is it possible to slow down? And I am happy to be able to say to you that the answer is a resounding yes. And I present myself as Exhibit A, a kind of reformed-and-rehabilitated speed-aholic. Don’t get me wrong; i still love speed. You know, I travel to and fro, I work as an author with deadlines and I see a multitude of clients daily and I enjoy the buzz and the busy-ness, and the adrenaline rush that comes from all of those things. I workout daily and I love aerobic activity, and I wouldn't give them up for the world. But I've also, over the last year or so, got in touch with my inner tortoise.
And what that means is that I no longer overload myself gratuitously. My default mode is no longer to be a rush-aholic. I no longer hear ticking of the clock with time's winged chariot drawing near, or at least not as much as I did before. The beauty of all of this is that I actually feel a lot happier, healthier, more productive, than I ever have. I feel like I'm my life rather than actually just racing through it. And perhaps, the most important measure of the success of this is that I feel that my relationships are a lot deeper, richer, and stronger.
For me, the litmus test for whether this would work, and what it would mean, was always going to be bedtime stories, because that's kind of where the journey began. At the end of the day, when my goddaughter is staying with us, I go into her room. I don't wear a watch. I switch off my computer, so I can't hear the email pinging into the inbox, and I just slow down to her pace and we read. Children have their own tempo and internal clock, they don't do quality time, where you schedule 10 minutes for them to open up to you. They need you to move at their rhythm. I find that 10 minutes into a story with Samantha, she  will suddenly say, "You know, something happened at school today that really bothered me." And we'll go off and have a conversation on that. And I now find that bedtime stories used to be a kind of -- a box on my to-do list, something that I dreaded, because it was so slow and I had to get through it quickly. I had other work to do. It has become my reward at the end of the day, something I really, really cherish. And I have a kind of Hollywood ending to my article here which goes a little bit like this:
A few months ago, I was getting ready to go on another book tour, and I had my bags packed. I was downstairs by the front door, and I was waiting for a taxi, and my Samantha came down the stairs and she'd made a card for me. She handed it to me with a bright big smile and I read it, and it said, "To Jason, love Samantha." And I thought, "Aah, that's really sweet, you know, is this a good luck on the book tour card?" And she said, "No, no, no, Jason, this is a card for being the best story reader in the world." And I thought, "Yeah, you know, this slowing down thing ... " It works.

Monday, May 16, 2011

The Healing Power of a Smile

Written by Jason Shields
When I was a child, I always wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to save the world and then make everyone happy and I knew that I'd need superpowers to make my dreams come true. i grew up on a farm where there were a multitude of places to explore and use as the backdrop to my imaginary missions. I would find intergalactic objects from planet Krypton and Solaris, a planet I cooked up on my own, which was a lot of fun, but didn't get me many results. Having a disability, I thought it was my mission to spread love and acceptance to the whole world. I believed that somewhere, there existed a magical talisman that when activated, would make everyone happy an at peace with each other. When I grew up, I still continued to hold on to those childhood dreams and realized that science-fiction was not too far off the mark. However, I still needed a true source that I could tap to discover my inborn “superpowers,” and  I decided instead to embark on a journey of real science, to find a more useful truth.
I started my journey in California with a UC Berkley 30-year longitudinal study that examined the photos of students in an old yearbook and tried to measure their success and well-being throughout their life. By measuring these students’ smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject's marriage would be, how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being and how inspiring she would be to others. In another yearbook, I stumbled upon Barry Obama's picture. When I first saw his picture, I thought that these superpowers came from his “super collar”. Now I know it was all in his smile.
Another aha! moment came from a 2010 Wayne State University research project that looked into pre-1950s baseball cards of Major League players. The researchers found that the span of a player’s smile could actually predict the span of his life. Players who didn't smile in their pictures lived an average of only 72.9 years, where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years, almost a 10% increase.
The most interesting news that I’ve discovered in all of this research is that we're actually born smiling. Using 3D ultrasound technology, we can now see that developing babies appear to smile, in the womb! After they are born, babies continue to smile, mostly in their sleep. Even blind babies smile to the sound of the human voice. Smiling is one of the most basic, biologically-uniform expressions of all humans.
In studies conducted in Papua New Guinea, Paul Ekman, the world's most renowned researcher on facial expressions found that even members of the Fore tribe, who were completely disconnected from Western culture, and also known for their unusual cannibalism rituals, attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and I would. So from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to modern art in Beijing, we smile often. A smile expresses joy and satisfaction.
How many of you readers smile more than 20 times per day? Recent statistics on research indicate that more than a third of us smile more than 20 times per day, whereas less than 14 percent of us smile less than five. In fact, those with the most amazing superpowers are actually children who smile as many as 400 times per day. As a child from birth till about 12 years of age, I was known for my smile and large dimples. The adults, with who I spent the majority of the time, always commented on my smile. In fact, I was known for my smile. Jason Shields and the word “smile” were synonymous.  
Have you ever wondered why being around children who smile so frequently makes you smile? A recent study at Uppsala University in Sweden found that it is very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles. You ask, why? Because smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles. Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physically can help us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the person who is smiling at us.
In a recent mimicking study at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress their smiling muscles. Without the pencil, subjects were excellent judges. When the pencil was placed in their mouth, when they could not mimic the smile they saw and their judgment was impaired.
In addition to theorizing on evolution in "The Origin of Species", Charles Darwin also discovered the facial feedback response theory. His theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better, rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good. In his study, Darwin actually cited a French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, who used electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles. Please, don't try this at home.
Duchenne also observed that there seem to be at least two distinct patterns of facial muscle movement which we happen to group together with the same word. One involves bot h the muscle which parts and raises the lips (zygomatic major), and the muscle which raises the cheeks and gathers the skin inward toward the eye socket (orbicularis oculi). He identified this as the smile of spontaneous joy. The other involves only the zygomatic major muscle around the mouth. In acknowledgment of Duchenne’s insight, University of California researcher Paul Ekman has dubbed the smile of spontaneous happiness a Duchenne smile, while the other is sometimes called a false, social, or masking smile.
In a related German study, researchers used fMRI imaging to measure brain activity before and after injecting Botox to suppress smiling muscles. The finding supported Darwin's theory by showing that facial feedback modifies the neural processing of emotional content in the brain in a way that helps us feel better when we smile. Smiling stimulates our brain reward mechanism in a way that even chocolate, a well-regarded pleasure inducer, cannot match.
British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate. The same study found that smiling is as stimulating as receiving up to 25,000 in cash, 25 grand a smile. It's not bad. Think about it this way: 25,000 times 400 -- quite a few kids out there feel like Bill Gates every day.
And, unlike lots of chocolate, lots of smiling can actually make you healthier. Smiling can help reduce the levels of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphin and reduce overall blood pressure. And if that's not enough, smiling can actually look good in the eyes of others. A recent study at Penn State University found that when you smile you don't only appear to be more likable and courteous, but you actually appear to be more competent.
So whenever you want to look great and competent, reduce your stress or improve your marriage, or feel as if you just had a whole stack of high-quality dark chocolate, without incurring the caloric cost, or as if you had just found $25,000 in a pocket of an old jacket you hadn't worn for ages, or whenever you want to tap into a superpower that will help you and everyone around you live a longer, healthier, happier life, smile.

Friday, May 13, 2011

The Opportunity of Adversity

Written by Jason Shields (Adapted from Aimee Mullins' Talk on TED)
I made a recent discovery a few months ago when I was working on my autobiography. I love technology and being able to have a dictionary and a thesaurus at the click of my fingers. I’ve always used them in the past whenever I wrote anything. I came to the startling realization that I have never looked up the word “disabled”. In all of my writings throughout the years I never thought to actually look up the word. It was just a part of my vocabulary, that and the term “physically challenged.”
Allow me to repost the entry:  "Disabled," adjective: "crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, rundown, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. Antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." These “adjectives” were so ridiculous that as I read them, I started to laugh hysterically, until I got to the words, “mangled, lame, mutilated” and I choked up. A wave of sadness and emotional shock went through me. These words unleashed such a catastrophic impact on me emotionally and I felt assaulted mentally.
However, it is not just about the words. It is what we believe about people when we label them with these words. It is about the values and beliefs behind the words and how we construct these values and beliefs. Our language reflects and affects our thinking and how we view other people. Many ancient societies such as the Mayans and the Romans believed that to vocally utter a curse was so powerful, so magical, because to voice the curse out loud would literally bring it into existence. So, what reality do we want to call into our existence: a person who is limited and weak, or a person who is empowered and strong?  By simply “naming” or “labeling” a person as casually as we do today, we are placing that person, that child, that individual, into a box and sealing off their power. In fact, we do it to ourselves every day! Would we not want to shine the light on them and open doors to endless possibilities instead?
One person in my life who had a profound impact on me was my late uncle Ernest. We called him Ernie. He was confined to a wheelchair since birth, paralyzed from the waist down. In spite of his physical condition, I never saw him as “disabled” or “maimed”. He was just Uncle Ernie to us children. Ernie had a high position in the Public Works office of the city where he supervised hundreds of employees. He lived in a time where there were no Americans with Disabilities Act and the majority of buildings did not have wheelchair accessible ramps. Everyday though, he climbed the steps up to his office and performed his duties. The family suffered a severe blow when Ernie died of cancer when I was around 12 years of age. In the years I did know him, not once did he discuss my “physical challenge” related to cerebral palsy. He simply treated me the same as the rest of the children.
This is an example of how an adult in a position of power or authority figure can ignite the spark of power in a child. However, when you think of the previous examples of the thesaurus entries, you quickly come to the conclusion that our present use of language does not allow us to evolve into the reality that we all would like, the reality where an individual can see himself/herself as capable of accomplishing anything. Our language has not caught up with the present demands and changes of our society. We have discovered beautiful technological advancements, from artificial limbs and laser surgery for vision improvement. He have replacements for aging bodies that allow people to fully engage in life again and even move beyond the limits which nature has imposed upon them. We now have a multitude of social networking platforms which allow people to express their own unique identity, to describe themselves in their own unique way. They can choose which groups they can belong to. So, technology has revealed that everyone, every single individual has something rare and powerful and beautiful to contribute to the world. Most importantly, the ability of the human being to adapt is one of our greatest assets.
The human ability to adapt is an amazing thing! People have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, but I must make a distinction here. I have never been comfortable with the phrase “overcoming adversity; I have always felt uneasy attempting to answer people’s questions about it. The reason to me is clear now: in the phrase “overcoming adversity” is an implicit meaning that success or happiness is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or barely scratched. It is as if my successes in life have come from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with cerebral palsy, or what other people perceive as my disability. However, we are changed, we are scathed or marked by a challenge whether it is a physical mark or mental/emotional one.
Today, I am going to make a suggestion: I believe adversity is a good thing to experience. Adversity is not an obstacle course that we learn to navigate through or “get around” in order to resume our life. It is an integral part of life. I tend to think of adversity as my shadow. Even though there are times when I see a lot of it, or during times when it’s very small or even barely noticeable, it is still there. It’s always with me. Of course, I am in no means trying to diminish the impact and the tremendous weight of a individual’s struggle.
There is adversity and challenges in life; it is all very real and relative to every individual, but the issue is not whether or not you are going to meet adversity, but how you are going to meet it. So, your responsibility is not to simply shield those you care about from adversity; but preparing them to meet is with strength and belief that they can persevere. We do such a disservice to our children when we make them feel that they are not equipped to adapt. There is an important distinction between the objective medical fact of my having cerebral palsy and the subjective, societal opinion of whether or not I am disabled. To be honest, the only real and consistent disability that I have had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be labeled by their definitions.
In our desire to protect those we care so much about; when we give them the cold, hard truth about their medical prognosis, or a prognosis on the expected quality of their life, we have to make sure that we are not putting the first brick in a wall that will eventually incase that individual and actually disable him/her.  We must abandon the current model of only looking at what is broken and how to fix it; this only serves to be more disabling to the individual than the medical pathology itself.
By refusing to treat the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their potency, their possibilities, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have. In effect, we are grading a person’s worth by our community. We need to see through the pathology itself and into the range of human capability and adaptability. Most importantly, there is a relationship between those perceived “deficiencies” and our greatest creative ability. It is not about devaluing or negating or looking at adversity as something bad or something to avoid; something that must be swept under the rug. No. instead, it is to find those opportunities that are wrapped up inside of the adversity.
My point is not so much as overcoming adversity; as it is opening ourselves, our inner souls up to it, embracing it, grappling with it and yes, even dancing with it. If we learn to see adversity as natural, consistent and useful, we will be less burdened by the presence of it.
There is a fundamental truth regarding human character: it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent, it is the one that is most adaptable to change. I believe that conflict is the beginning of creation. The human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through conflict and transformation. Transformation and adaptation is our greatest human skill. Until we are tested, we do not know what we truly are made of. Maybe that is what adversity gives us, a sense of self, a sense of our own true power. We can be receptive to adversity as a gift. We can reimagine adversity as something more than just “tough times”. We can view it as change. Adversity is simply change that we haven’t adapted ourselves to yet.
I believe that the greatest adversity that we have created is the idea of “normalcy.” Who on earth is “normal?” Normal does not exist. There is common. There is typical, but there is no normal. Would you honestly want to meet or be that boring, drab person if they did exist? I think not! If we can change this belief system from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility and potency, to dare to be a little bit more dangerous and adventurous, we can release and fully engage our own personal power. We can unleash the atomic power that is within so many of our beautiful children who look up to us, and invite them to never fear engaging in their rare and valuable abilities with the community.
Anthropology tells us that human beings have always needed one requirement from its respective family and community: the need to be of use, to be able to contribute. There is evidence that 60,000 years ago, the Neanderthals carried those with serious physical injuries and their elderly. Why? Perhaps they believed and respected the life experience of these people were of value to their own community; they did not view these people as broken or useless, they were seen as rare gems, valuable.
Many of my friends and people I see as “family” have made this shift in thinking. They understand that there is a huge difference between the medical condition and what a person will do with it. There has been a shift in my thinking over the years. If you would have asked me at the age of 18, if I would trade the body I had for a stronger one, a “robust” and “normal” one, I would not have hesitated for a split second. I had aspired to that kind of “normalcy” back then. If you asked me today, however, I would not be so sure. This change inside of me has occurred because I have been exposed to more people who have opened doors of possibility for me, rather than those who labeled me, placing me into their comfortable little boxes.
All you really need is just one person to show you the realization of your own power. You sometimes hold the key which unlocks another person’s power simply by your own words! The human spirit is very receptive and if you can be open to your own intuition, God will use you to open the door for someone at a crucial moment in their life. You are then educating them in the best sense. You are teaching them that they can open doors for themselves. The meaning of the word “educate” in Latin literally means “to draw out”.  It means to bring forth what is already within, to bring out the inherent potential of another person. Which potential do you want to bring out of yourself and others?
There was a psychological case study performed in the late 1960’s in Britain when researchers were observing students who were in the midst of moving from grammar schools to the more comprehensive schools. This is much like American students transitioning from middle school to high school. They call it “streaming trials” and we call it “tracking” in the United States. It is the process by which researchers separate students from A, B, C, D, etc. The A students receive a tougher curriculum along with the best teachers and so forth. Over a three month period, the researchers took D level students and game them A’s. They told them they were A students; they told them they were smart and very bright. At the very end of this three month trial, the students were performing at A levels.
The heat wrenching flip side of the study is that they took the A students and told them they were D’s, and that is exactly what happened at the end of the three month trial. Those who were still in school, that is, besides the students who had dropped out, performed at the D level. One crucial aspect of this study was that the teachers were duped as well. The teachers did not know that a switch had occurred. They were simply told: these are the A students and these are the D students. They acted accordingly with the labels. This is how they taught them and treated them.
I think that the only true disability that exists is a crushed spirit; a spirit that has been crushed does not have hope. It fails to see the beauty in life. It no longer has a natural, childlike curiosity or the innate ability to imagine. If instead, we seek to bolster the human spirit to keep hope, to see the beauty in itself and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are using our power responsibly and well. When a spirit possesses those qualities, it is able to create new realities and new ways of being.
There is a poem by a fourteenth-century poet named Hafiz. The poem is called “The God Who Only Knows Four Words.” Every child has known God, not the God of names, not the God of don’ts, but the God who only knows four words and keep repeating them, saying, “Come Dance With Me!” Come dance with me.