passion or money? Take a cross-over path

You hear it all the time- especially on self-help blogs- go after what you are passionate about and money will follow...er, right, but what if you're skint?

I have said similar stuff- my solution, for myself, was to work for money at weekends or downtimes and use my primetime- the day- to do my own thing.

But what if you have a family to support? You can't do that easily working a couple of nights.

You need to be both self-supporting and also, preferably, on what I call a cross-over path.

If you earn your bread at a call centre and spend your free time doing what you are passionate about the passion will probably fizzle out. You'll be so pissed off you'll want to spend your downtime doing other stuff.

A cross-over path is one that earns money, reasonable amounts, but allows you to cross over more and more to what really interests you. Journalism is a good cross-over path to writing and film making. Think of activities that are congruent with your ultimate ideal way of earning a living/spending your days. Take a long term approach. Look for other people who are doing what you want to do and see what cross-over path they used.

Tibetan monks raise body temperature

In Magic and Mystery in Tibet Alexandra David-Neel talks about the incredible ability of certain Tibetan monks. They are reputedly able to raise their body temperature at will. She writes of monks draped in wet sheets at -35 degrees C and great gouts of steam rising from the wet cloths as their superheated bare torsos turned the icy garment into something like a steaming pudding cloth. Other travellers have also made passing mention of this technique but it wasn’t until the 1980s that Western science was able to catch up with Eastern expertise.

Greater knowledge of Tibet and her monks- whether they live on the Indian side or the Tibetan side of the border, indicated that the monks involved were practitioners of gtum-mo- (pronouced ‘dumo’) a form of breathing found in the teachings of the Tibetan Vajrayana. This was derived originally from the Indian Buddhist Vajrayana tradition.

Gtum-mo is a combination of breathing exercises and meditative concentration. The basic form involves performing ‘the vase’- this is a breathing technique where air is brought deep into the lower abdominal region and held there, making a pot belly or ‘vase’ of the stomach. There is a forceful version of this where the air is sucked in, held and then expelled with great vigour. There is a also a gentler version where the transitions are far less marked and the intake and exhalation of breath, though deep, is gentle.

Accompanying the breathing are two varieties of meditation. For the forceful breathing (which is used to ramp up body temperature quickly from ‘cold’ so to speak) the meditation is to picture internally an inner flame, something like a Bunsen burner flame, roaring hot, that starts at the navel and shoots up to the crown of the head. You have to imagine that flame in all its heat, roaring noise and light burning up through the core of the body.

For the more gentle variant of body temperature manipulation the mental image is of a surging sensation of bliss and rising warmth throughout the body.

In January 1982 Professor Herbert Benson[1] reported in the august pages on Nature on his studies into what he termed gTum-mo yoga. Conducted in the Dharamsala monastery of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, three monks were able to raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by a creditable 8.3 degrees C. This is rather impressive- certainly it would make the difference between frost bite and frost nip or merely coldness. If climbers and others who venture into highly refrigerated environs could learn these techniques many digits might be saved.

In 2002 Harvard Gazette reported 2 monks- of Western origin and living in Normandy- who were able to raise their body temperature using gtum-mo techiniques.

But it wasn’t until 2013 that a more comprehensive set of tests and a general survey of previous attempts  was made. In the previous thirty years it had been found that raising peripheral temperatures- of hands and feet- could be made quite easily through various easily taught meditations, and, in fact, by training people to use simple biofeedback techniques. Typically a digital thermometer would be connected to sensors on the subject’s hands and feet. By sensing a greater awareness of the temperature of the hand or foot, whilst avoiding trying to force it up, the temperature could be made to rise as long raising temperatures was what was on the agenda.

But complications entered the field when it was found that raising core body temperature did not accompany raising peripheral temperatures. One theory suggested that various forms of muscular contraction served to raise hand temperature.

In the 2013 tests Dr Maria Kozhevnikov and her colleagues[2] showed that unlike biofeedback results, gtum-mo genuinely raised core body temperatures- so much so that the wet sheet dried by body heat alone was shown to be fact not fiction.

Kohevnikov located one of the very few nunneries where a body temperature raising ceremony exists. This was at the 4200 metre high Gebchak convent close to Nangchen in Qinghai province. The ceremony was held annually and the nuns participating would wear only a short skirt, shoes or sandals with a wet cotton sheet draping the rest of their body. It would be performed in winter when air temperatures would be dry but -25 to -30 degrees C. Anyone who has dipped their hand in water at these temperatures will know the extreme discomfort involved, and how hard it is to regain skin warmth after drastic colling like this has happened. Ranulph Fiennes dipped his hand in icy sea water to release a sunken sledge and did not dry and warm the hand immediately. He later remarked that these two minutes of carelessness cost him the finger tips of that hand. I’ve swept a frosty tent surface with a bare hand at -15 degrees C and found the hand still cold even ten minutes later after wearing a mitten. Such anecdotal evidence makes even the existences of the sheet ceremony all the more impressive.

The nuns were aged between 25 and 52 years old and some performed the forceful variety of gtum-mo and some the more gentle kind. It was reported that the forceful kind could not be sustained for very long, so it was used to warm the body up, after which the gentle type would be used when walking and wearing the wet sheet.

Nuns raised their peripheral temperatures easily by 1.2 to 6.8 degrees C. More importantly the forceful type of gtum-mo raised core body temperature by over a degree. One woman was able to get it higher and only stopped because she felt uncomfortable. Another stopped because she was developing fever symptoms.

If peripheral temperature raising results in a lowering of core body temperature then using techniques to merely warm the hands might actually hasten hypothermia. However, if, as the gtum-mo tests show, you can raise core body temperature and peripheral temperature you have the means to withstand great cold- as the nuns show during their freezing sheet ceremony.

As a control a group of westerners who had some experience of yoga or meditation or kung fu, were taught the gtum-mo technique. Very quickly they were able to show similar effects of raised body temperature as the much more experienced Tibetan nuns. Something that appears mysterious and oriental turns out to be rather ordinary after all. I for one will certainly be using it when I next find myself shaking with cold in some Himalayan fastness.

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[1] Herbert Benson “Body Temperature changes during the practice of gTum-mo yoga” Nature 295 21 Jan 1982

[2] Maria Kozhevnikov March 29 2013 PLoS ONE “Neurocognitive and somatic components of Temperature Increase during g-Tummo meditation”.

Be Extraordinary

What do self-help books offer? The promise of wealth? Success? Happiness? I remember a gut shot of recognition when I saw Anthony Robbins first book on the shelves: Unlimited Power! Isn’t that ultimately what the punter wants? Us?

All of us believe that we do indeed have a slumbering colossus within, waiting to do incredible things, if only we could just find the key…We firmly believe we are only using 5% of our brains, as in the movie Limitless, the only problem being in the details ie. accessing the other 95%.

Then there was The Secret- if you worship what you want to achieve you will achieve it.

I have a friend, the most successful entrepreneur I know from my callow days in academe, he’s a multi-millionaire and a very nice chap. Thirty years ago when he was a just a (highly successful) salesman he’d have a self help book on his desk next to his phone. “You don’t read them to get the answer,” he told me, “You read them to get re-energised when you’re feeling down. Then you can make that call and sound like you mean it.”

The father of another friend was also a very wealthy entrepreneur- he had a whole bookcase of self-help books. Maybe he, too, was using them to get some kind of lift. In any case it made me sceptical of the nay sayers, those who pour scorn on any attempt at self betterment using a book that screams: Go For It!

Naturally, there are some crap self-help books out there. But even the crappest has one thing, or perhaps two things, of value in it- usually stuff that they are repeating, or a lively quote they’ve borrowed from another righteous tome of personal development. There’s an awful lot of recycling going on in the self-improvement field.

Anthony Robbins, despite his nutty NLP ideas and simplistic pleasure/pain motivational schemas, hits the nail on the head with his titles: The Unlimited Power I’ve mentioned, along with Awaken the Giant Within. He understands that it is a FEELING we want NOW not some nebulous future state.

Stephen Covey with his worthy ‘Habits of highly successful people’ pushes, as many do, the concept of SUCCESS as the ultimate goal. Gawd knows I’ve been suckered down that alley a few times. Just what is it exactly I now ask? Being on telly? Having people stop you in the street? Lots of cash? And when does it start? Or end? The world is littered with successful people who think of themselves as failures because they aren’t as successful as someone else a notch higher up the bed post; Napoleon torturing himself because he hasn’t got to India as Alexander did, Steve Jobs thinking he isn’t Bill Gates, Bill Gates whinging that he isn’t Steve Jobs…

Success- as I’ve written elsewhere- is an exercise in framing an enterprise. Frame it so that it succeeds and you are a success. You have bragging rights. But you’ll still be disappointed unless you’ve grown to recognise the warm feeling in your midriff that success gives you- that’s what people want, cut to the chase and get the feeling direct from pills, the bottle, a line of cocaine. Which is why so many successful people turn to such things. Success, is, literally, in your head.

Money- well- there’s never enough and then you’re approaching the later stages of your life and you realise that hey, you don’t need that much, and actually time is rather more attractive as a commodity, and health isn’t bad too…

Beyond the functional requirements for money it becomes a ‘success token’. A kind of substitute currency for success. And success can likewise be turned into money.

So the books offer chimeras. Or they offer the equivalent of a day dream.

Real self-help is about building the exterior self, making it work better in the world, enabling you to be happy. Happy enough to pursue, probably at the same time, worthier goals of inner evolution. The two help each other, but it’s hard to concentrate on becoming a better person if you’re just not happy.

As Idries Shah suggests: first make yourself happy. Then think about higher studies.

Hitching yourself to open-ended concepts such as ‘being a success’ is a recipe for unrelenting toil and unhappiness. You need to be happy NOW.

I give lectures every now and then at Universities- I love doing it- but the message I find myself putting over time and again is: travel. Travel while you have no financial burdens and responsibilities, travel while you are still automatically open to new experiences, travel while you can still enjoy roughing it, travel while you can still be mentored by people along the way. With a bit of recalibrating, people of any age can do all of the above, but they can do other stuff too. People aged 18-30 often can’t- but they can travel.

And while I was on my own travels recently I connected travelling with ‘Being Extraordinary.’

When you come back from a trip- and increasingly I have ceased to use the word holiday, trips seem to offer more than that nugatory term seems to supply, when you come back you have this altered energy. Probably you are more relaxed, but usually you are more focused- things you have ignored for months you quickly achieve. In fact there is a curious parallel with the week BEFORE a trip when your productivity soars and you get everything finished in time and the week when you return when you blast through all the things you’ve been thinking about on the trip…what if you could just have the week before and week after and cut out the trip altogether?

Keep the trip. What I am circling is the idea that travel allows ANYONE to be extraordinary- by definition you are taken out of your ordinary and put somewhere new and challenging. That’s where your special energy comes from, and that’s where your special powers come from.

Special powers? Yep- all travellers know that after a few weeks you become a sort of superhero out there on the road. You can talk to anyone. Shyness goes- it has to- as you need to talk to lots of people each day just to survive. Of course you have your ups and downs, but basic extroversion becomes the order of the day. And talking to anyone you find a strange equality pervades the world of travelling. Just moving on- the downsides of class, race and sect just don’t drag you down. What other powers? Coincidence, happy chance encounters, miraculous meetings- all that becomes…expected. You become the beholder of strange sights, strange experiences, incongruities that seem to offer the key to a place, amazing rushes of energy.

Of course, all the time your money is running out, so, eventually, and probably rightly, you head home.

A week or two later you’re ordinary again.

Unless you decide to Be Extraordinary…all the time.

That, I have decided after long consideration, is the real deal. My next post will outline how…

Thinking in patterns

As Idries Shah wrote in The Sufis, 'the average person thinks in patterns'. Different cultures have different patterns, travel between cultures and the patterns begin to emerge. Whenever we react without taking a step back, whenever we attempt to think sequentially or !in the correct way' we are usually thinking in some age old pattern, or even a new one. Such patterns reflect no doubt well worn circuits in the brain, rat runs of thought worn in through repetition and rewards, social and material. But the real thing is to evade these thought rails and live intuitively. 

We know that 'masters, such as aikido masters and wine experts use fewer brain cells to perform similar tasks over time. This frees up neural space for greater and greater appreciations of subtlety. At some point a mysterious flipping point is reached when they suddenly 'know' what to do without having to reason it out. You might argue that the patterns have simply become so internalised they aren't noticed anymore, but I think tHat is a side point. As a writer I know the feeling of using my intuition rather than logic as a guide, but it only came after many years of grafting away and relying on rules and reasonable procedures. The point comes when you decide to trust your intuition. It's really as simple as that. Faced by having to navigate a canoe down powerful Rapids I had no time to dither. Instant decisions were required and I was certainly no master of paddling. But I found that necessity forced me to trust myself and the river was descended safely.

Greed, distraction, fear, expectation, all these things cripple intuition. Necessity, meaning situations where only intuition works (and not mere guesswork) is not so easy to engineer in routine life. Get out of the routine then, but also start running less important areas of your life on intuition. Get used to feeling a strange reluctance to do certain things, which can only be sharpened by spending some time doing stuff you hate and comparing strange reluctance with laziness. Often there is no warning bell, just a clean transparent feeling that one course of action is Mildly better Than another. But in the end you have to trust.

Trust your intuition, it's as simple as that. I find it's useful to lose the idea that intuition delivers 'hole in one' results, spot on every time. Well we don't live in a perfect world. Broadbrush success is all you should need or expect. But play enough good golf and you can expect the odd hole in one, a byproduct rather than an aim of the enterprise.

Objection

What we object to in a thing may simply be its unavoidable yang or yin elements. Nothing can be 100% one thing or the other. And for yang and yin read 'outgoing' or 'inward looking' if it makes more sense to you.

Day THREE of my three day fast

4kg weight loss since the beginning. Feel fairly terrible this morning. Worse than yesterday if anything. But walking into town I feel I could keep going forever- walking I mean, not fasting. Fasting helps stimulate brain neuron growth- and so does walking- both are needed for ancient man to find more food when he is hungry. I try several shops for an incredibly expensive printer cartridge. No one has it in stock. I find dealing with people very easy, just as I do when I’m on a mission of some sort, or ill; everyday life, downtime so to speak, doesn’t suit me as well. I go round to see a pal and drink a lap sang tea and a fruit tea. That and the conversation seems to change my head- the dull ache has gone. More walking on air back, really I feel I could keep going forever as long as there are no hills…In the evening I sip a thin soup made from half a teaspoonful of bouillon powder- I’m allowing myself one of these a day plus a couple of lap sang teas and numerous fruit teas. Thin soup…heaven! No hallucinations to report but coming out the front door this morning it seemed very bright; everything looked heavily delineated, separate from its background and I greedily took in all sights, revelling in being out here, looking, noticing.

Last day- only one more night to get through. Who could have thought you could have such an adventure and save money too!

Haughty and Generous

Idries Shah famously reintroduced the idea that traditionally it was often considered the ideal, or near ideal, character to be both haughty and generous. I was talking about this today with author and friend Jason Webster. I suggested that, like much of Idries Shah's apparently simple statements, it would reward further thinking. One could superficially understand being 'haughty and generous' to mean one should be snotty and snobbish yet also generous. But think back to those previous eras when the idea was first promulgated. Then there was a more rigid set of behaviours for each class. You didn’t really need to be snobbish- there was such an obvious difference between you and the next level. Snobbery only becomes necessary when you actual rub shoulders with the hoi poloi. In Egypt the upper classes can be snobbish, but I often found the real aristocrats weren’t- they were kind and considerate to all people they came into contact with because it was so obvious they were from another zone. And many were also generous.

Jason suggested being haughty in this context meant refusing to be flattered when people noticed your generosity; an antidote to ‘using up’ whatever accrues when one is generous. I think, though, that, in addition to this there is also the fact that a haughty person does not rely on others for sustenance, does not ‘consume’. He or she is a producer- and yet they pass on things of value to others- they are generous. They aren’t looking to take, they are looking to give. Being snotty has nothing to do with it- the real deal is about aiming to reach a place where you can help others without needing or seeking help yourself, which includes, of course, the ‘help’ of being praised.