Six Degrees of Separation? Really?

We’ve all heard that saying, “Six Degrees of Separation”, meaning that everyone on earth is connected by a maximum of 6 person to person links. What most people don’t know, though, is where this notion came from, and that it’s not exactly true.

• Item: My friend, Sasha, a musician in London, knows three (3!) people I know on a first name basis: an economist in Boulder, CO, a research engineer in Princeton, NJ, and a German psychologist (though she may actually live in London — but London and its environs have 12 – 14 million residents). To my knowledge, none of these people knows each other. What’s going on?

“Six degrees of separation” came from an experiment done by Stanley Milgram, the psychologist, in the 1930s. It is said that he gave 300 random Nebraskans an envelope and told them to send that to someone they knew on a first name basis, who they thought could get it to a particular stockbroker in Boston, with instructions for them to do the same, and that the envelopes got there in an average of 6 steps. That’s not entirely true. The average of all 300 envelopes was 6 mailing legs to get to the target — but Milgram gave 100 of those envelopes to people in Boston, 100 of them to blue chip investors, and only 100 to random Nebraskans. And of the 100 given to the random Nebraskans, only 18 got to the target! But Milgram was on to something.

• Item: Last weekend, I went to a hypnotherapy class in Oakland, CA, which had 5 participants besides me. At lunch, I discovered that one of them, an attorney in Sydney, Australia, is a good friend of, and sometime attorney for, the my one friend in all of Australia. What’s going on?

Or perhaps you’ve heard of the game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where players try to tie a given actor to Kevin Bacon in as few steps as possible, based on the movies they’ve acted in together. So if an actor has worked in a movie with Mr. Bacon, he has a Bacon number of 1, if an actor has worked with an actor who has worked with Mr. Bacon, she has a Bacon number of 2, and so on. As you can see in the table below, using data from the internet movie data base, www.imdb.com, which has over 500,000 actors, the vast majority of actors are within 3 degrees of separation from Bacon, and virtually all are within 4 degrees:

Cumulative
Bacon Percentage
Number of Actors

1 .3
2 24.1
3 84.9
4 98.8

The book, “Six Degrees”, by Duncan Watts, from which the above data is abstracted, is all about “small world” networks, looking at networks as different as movie actors and the power grid from a mulitdisciplinary approach. After considering several models and research from the 1930’s onward, he concludes that “As long as individuals are more likely to know other people like them, and — crucially — as long as they measure similarity along more than one social dimension, then not only will short paths exist between almost anyone almost anywhere, but also individuals... will be able to find them.” And other research suggests that the two most powerful dimensions to explore are geographical connections and professional ones.

• Item: A few weeks ago, I went to an NLP training in Novato, CA. The trainer, from NJ, turned out to have grown up a few blocks from me, and to have been a patient of my (MD) father’s. What’s going on?

So it’s reasonable that you’ll be connected to anyone, anywhere in very few steps, and that you’re most likely to find them by asking where they’re from and/or what they do for a living. But I’m still not sure that explains what’s happening to me.

How to Really Connect on the Phone

Many years ago, I was the head of customer service (and a few other things, too!) for a small business that sold proprietary products to the fire service. One of my duties was to answer questions from any fire captain or chief who called in to ask about the products, or to get the information they needed to them. Another thing I did was to help staff our booth at 3 - 5 fire service trade shows each year, which meant that I eventually got to meet many of the people to whom I had spoken on the phone.

I began to notice that, when I met them, I already knew what these men (and they were almost exclusively men) looked like! Now, it wasn’t that they looked exactly as I had imagined them, had I even been aware that I was imagining them. Rather, if I described the impression I had, that description would have exactly matched the person. So while it wasn’t like seeing an exact photo of a particular chief, I would have described him, say, as being slightly overweight, with shaggy brown hair, smallish light eyes, a regular nose and a mustache — and that description would have fit!

And then I began to wonder how I did that.

What I realized was that as I heard a voice, I was unconsciously flipping through my internal data base of all the people I’d ever met and their voices, and making a picture of the person I was talking with based on that. I’m sure you do it, too. Think about it — you can usually tell a woman’s voice from a man’s, or hear someone’s approximate age (though I can’t say how), or native language, or which region of the US he or she is from, and sometimes their ethnicity. A more resonant voice is generally a larger person, though not always. How do I ‘see’ eye color, or hair color, or facial hair? Avoiding the obvious blond jokes here, I can’t put my finger on it — but again, flipping through that data base in my mind gives me clues.

Then there’s the emotional stuff. You can hear tension in someone’s voice — happiness, sadness and anger, too. You can hear uncertainty in “uptalk”, the way someone raises their pitch at the end of a sentence. Or certainty and confidence in the opposite — a lowered pitch at the end of a sentence. Yes, you can hear a smile — or else why would all those sales training folks tell you to smile when you call a prospect? Or maybe what happens is that the smile changes someone’s internal state, and you can hear that. If you pay close attention, you can even hear people’s emotions when they’re trying to hide them. Maybe it’s in the length of the vowels, or the breathing.

You can do this! Part one of connecting to people on the phone is to listen to how people talk, and not just what they say. Pay attention to how fast they’re speaking (can’t you just see certain people gesticulating wildly?), whether they speak with a more even pitch, or whether it has lots of peaks and valleys, how loud they are, which words they emphasize, where and when they hesitate. And notice what impressions come to you from this, however they come. You may not be “seeing” the person on the other end of the line, but you may learn a lot about him or her.

In fact, you are probably already doing this beneath the level of your conscious awareness — maybe you’ve already decided you don’t like someone you just “met” on the phone, for example. But making it conscious for a while will help you improve the skills you already have.

And when this noticing becomes automatic, phase two of “how to connect on the phone” is to begin to match the other person’s speech. Maybe you slow down a bit if you’re talking to someone in the South — or speed up a bit if you’re speaking to a New Yorker. Maybe you have more peaks and valleys than you normally have, or maybe your tone of voice is more level than usual. Or perhaps you just address the feelings implicit in someone’s tone of voice — if (s)he sounds hesitant, ask what that hesitation is. This may feel uncomfortable in the beginning, but keep at it, and eventually, you’ll connect with people just as well on the phone as in person.

Birthday Rats!

This is so cool, I just had to share!

One thing I did for my birthday was to go for a long walk on the beach. When I came home, I found a HUGE rat right in the middle of the “Welcome” on the door mat! My cat, Beast, who is a great hunter, but hadn’t brought me any ‘gifts’ for quite some time, brought me a birthday present!

My husband, whose birthday follows mine by 6 days, and I had a birthday party on the Saturday in between our two birthdays. Nothing fancy, just inviting lots of people for a pot luck, since no one seems to RSVP any more. The morning of the party, we were frantically cleaning, but had yet to put out any of the food or the utensils. We do clean occasionally, so this should not have set off alarm bells for Beast. Nevertheless, he showed up with yet another rat — his contribution to the pot luck!

After the party ended, Beast showed up with yet another rat, and headed for my husband’s favorite chair. Perhaps it was his gift to my husband?

Do you have a good animal story, a time when one of your pets “knew” something they couldn’t really have known?

In case you’re interested, there’s a great book, “Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals” by Rupert Sheldrake. I read it a long time ago, but if I remember correctly, he shows many instances of dogs (and birds?) who know psychically when their humans are returning.

Everything Happens for a Reason, Doesn't It?

You hear it a lot, don’t you? “Everything happens for a reason” -- but doesn’t it often seem like random things are happening to you? Here’s another way to think about that. It feels a little like a shaggy dog story, but there is a point, or even two.

My official business address is a post office box in a town I used to live in, about 45 minutes from where I live today. One afternoon a few months ago, when I checked it, I found several items for “Debbie Smith” (obviously not her real name, which is much more unusual). A couple of these looked like they might be checks and a couple more looked like W-2s. The address was P.O. Box 265, and then a street address, and then the town. I guess Debbie has my box number at a private mailbox place, but somehow these said P.O.B. instead of P.M.B. By law, the post office must deliver anything that says P.O.B. to a post office box, even if it has an address following that, so they ended up in my box.

As it happens, Debbie used to work for me, many years ago, when she was in high school; her mother, “Karen” is a good friend of mine. So I did what any friend would do, and called Karen, and left a message saying that these items were in my mail, and should I drop them at her house before I went home (as I don’t know where Debbie lives)? I did a few other errands, and since I hadn’t heard back, I gave the items back to the post office, explaining what had probably happened, and asking them to deliver them correctly. Shortly thereafter, I heard back from Karen, who said she’d call Debbie, who had recently moved back to town, to let her know about the mail. Then Karen said she’d be meeting a mutual friend of ours shortly for an early dinner, and did I want to come? Sure! I changed my plans and met Karen and my other friend for dinner at a Chinese restaurant a few doors from the post office.

While we were eating, Debbie walked into the restaurant and joined us, having just picked up her mail. Sure enough, there were 2 checks and 2 W-2s, and she was thrilled to have gotten them. Then she said, “You know, just today I was visualizing money coming in the mail to me. I was clear that I wanted it, and that I wanted it today!”

So here are the points of the story:

Everything happens for a reason, but it may not be your reason. Everyone else out there has their own intentions. So enjoy being part of someone else’s synchronicity.

Be clear what you want — and others will be enlisted, perhaps without your or their conscious awareness, to help you get it.

Context is everything!

Sometimes, context is everything. It’s how you understand the meaning of a given word, right? When I was a kid, we played a game where the words “coffee pot” were substituted for two versions of a homonym, and you had to guess what the words were. So my mom would say, “I coffee pot the ball” and “I drove coffee pot the tunnel” and I had to guess the words “threw” and through”.

And sometimes it’s how you recognize people. Bear with me, here.

My office is very private. It’s pretty separate from the house; it’s downstairs, behind the garage, with its own door to a private patio. The patio is accessible only by a gate to the front yard and stairs up to the main deck and yard, which I can see from both my desk and the sofa where I sit to “read”. No one ever comes in unless I invite them. Even my husband checks the phone line to see if I’m busy before he comes down, and he comes from the inside; there’s never anyone except the cable guy or the phone guy on the patio, and that’s because I’ve called them. When I work, the only other creature there, besides me, is my cat, Creature. That is, my office is very private, and very safe -- which is important, because I need to be completely secure in the outer world so that I can focus on the inner world for/with my clients.

Last Wednesday morning, I was in my office, doing a reading/NLP session for a client. I had my eyes closed, paying close attention to the inner landscape, and was therefore not particularly aware of what was going on in my office. All was well. We had gotten to a place where my client was touching one of his big issues, which, frankly, he would rather have avoided. (This is how many issues get to be big issues — when they’re little issues, we avoid them because it’s easier or more comfortable to avoid them than to deal with them. That lets them grow unchecked, attracting other experiences like the one that caused the issue in the first place. But I digress.)

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! Went the back of the patio door.

Oh, my God! I practically screamed into the telephone, and then apologized to my client for blistering his ear as I rushed to the back door. There was a man standing there! And all the possibilities of who this could be flashed through my mind (PG&E? PacBell? The cable company? But I haven’t called any of them. A new neighbor? But why would a new neighbor come to this obscure, protected door?)

“Who are you?”, I asked the stranger.

“Steve”, he answered, with a slightly shocked look, as if to say, “you idiot!” — and immediately his very ordinary features morphed into the unique ones of one of my best friends from decades ago, as if all my experience of him suddenly populated his face. (Actually, we’ve known each other since we were teenagers and have stayed in touch all these years. No, I haven’t seen him in 5 years, but he really doesn’t look different from how he looked then.) It’s just that I talked to him the evening before, on his home phone, in NC, to say “thank you” for the birthday present he sent, so I “knew” he was home in NC. Since I didn’t expect him, I didn’t “see” him. I explained that I was really “out there” from doing the reading, and he readily forgave me.

How do you prevent this from happening? How do you ensure you recognize someone? I’m not 100% sure you can, but I have a couple of ideas.

The first one comes from my late father, who was a doctor in a small town in NJ, with a huge practice which spanned the state. Almost everywhere we went, someone would say, “Hi, Doc!” and he’d look momentarily blank, and then greet whomever by their name, and ask them something relevant to their lives. Once I asked him about that blank look, and how he remembered everyone, and here’s what he said: “When someone says, “Hi, Doc!, I know it’s someone from my practice, so I “see” them in the office — and then I know just who they are, their name, what they do for a living, kids names, all that stuff.”

So the first trick is to widen the visual frame of your memory, to see someone in the context in which you met.

The second trick is from “memory experts” who tell us to envision someone’s name stamped across his or her forehead.

Put the two together, so you see the person’s name, stamped on his or her forehead, in the context in which you know each other, and you’ll be all set!

As American as cherry pie

Made from my photos of cherries, red peppers, night sky, roses, narcisus, and squash.

Mirror Neurons and Social Contagion

On Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of helping a group of aspiring hypnotherapists develop their (already pretty advanced) intuitions. Before we started, several members of the group told me they’d been looking forward to this session, and afterwards, I perhaps understood why: they were natural psychics, and needed a little help understanding, and, in at least one case, coping with, what they were already doing.

After my usual explanation of intuition, we began the practice exercises. One exercise is designed to increase the students’ awareness of others’ emotions at an energy/intuitive level. It requires that one member of a small group fully experience some emotion, by recalling an instance of it, as in method acting, so that the others can notice how that emotion manifests, and what it brings up for them. This is critical to healers, because sensing what is going on for your client and managing your own emotions around that is necessary to your client’s healing.

As I told the students that the next emotion they were to experience was anger, one woman standing quite close to me jumped the gun, and remembered her anger immediately. I caught a glint of it in her eye, and before I was aware of what had happened, part of me thought, “Oh, s**t, she’s mad at me!” And this happened even though I knew I had just asked the students to “run anger”.

At another point, I asked the group to run fear, which they gamely did. While I was not part of the exercise, just managing it, I found myself nauseated and desperate to leave the room, in the classic “freeze or flee” mechanism.

What was going on?

What was going on was that my neurology was working perfectly! Our brains apparently have certain neurons, called mirror neurons, which “reflect back an action we observe in someone else, making us have that emotion, or have the impulse to do so”, according to Daniel Goleman in his book, “Social Intelligence”. These mirror neurons are the mechanism of our understanding what someone else is experiencing. They create a sort of emotional contagion between people (and even among crowds), especially when they interact face to face, and particularly when they look each other in the eye. This happens completely outside our conscious awareness.

So when I caught the eye of the woman who was “angry”, I experienced her anger, and when several members of the group were “afraid”, I became afraid.

So if you are someone who “catches” others’ negative emotions quickly and easily, what do you do?

The first step to solving a problem is to recognize it. If you regularly have emotions that seem to come out of nowhere, for no reason, your mirror neurons are probably very sensitive (or you have more of them, or they’re working overtime, or something). So the first thing is to ask yourself, “is this my emotion?” If the answer is no, then find a neutral or positive thought which will bring you back to your own decoupled physiology. A few good neutral thoughts are:

I am balanced, centered and grounded. (And really feel your connection to the earth.)
I have a protective bubble around me (or my aura). (Again, take a moment to notice the protection.)
I’m me; you’re you; we’re different (or separate).

Not only will you feel better, but then, in a more resourceful state, you have the ability to shape the interaction, so that the other person “catches” your more positive state.

Does synchronicity have a structure?

The American Heritage Dictionary defines Synchronicity as “Coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related, conceived in Jungian theory as an explanatory principle on the same order as causality.” Here’s an amazing example, that just happened to me:

A few weeks ago, I decided on the spur of the moment to launch a 5 week teleclass on the practice of happiness, based in current research into meditation, emotional intelligence, luck, and positive psychology (the psychology of happiness). I picked weekly Wednesday evening “meetings” from 6 – 7 PM California time for a few reasons. I chose the 6PM time because it would be accessible to anyone in the US. I chose Wednesday because mid-week sessions are likely to be better attended, I sometimes go to meditations on Tuesday nights, and people tend to go out on Thursdays. That left Wednesdays. I did it really quickly, without considering what else was going on in my life, and without looking at my calendar.

What was I thinking?

After I sent out the email, I noticed that my favorite yoga class runs from 7 – 8 PM on Wednesdays. Bummer! I was going to have to be late to class for 5 weeks. Oh, well.

And then I noticed that I had a dental hygiene appointment, about 45 minutes away from my office, from 4:30 – 5:30 PM on the day of the first class (yesterday), which meant that I couldn’t get home in time for the class. It is almost impossible to reschedule an appointment, as they are made 6 months in advance. And I had already tried to reschedule this appointment to accommodate the schedule of the hypnotherapy school where I teach, to no avail (had to change the teaching schedule instead — luckily another teacher was willing to trade). I was going to have to do the first class on my cell phone, with probably poor reception, from the discomfort of my car in a parking lot on a hot day. Major bummer!

And here’s what happened:

Last Wednesday night, the yoga teacher announced that for the next 6 weeks, Wednesday night class would be moved to Thursday night! And in fact, this exactly matches my need, because one of the Wednesdays is July 4th, and so my 5 classes are spread over 6 weeks.

Yesterday morning, the dentist’s office called, very apologetically, to say that the hygienist with whom I was scheduled couldn’t do my session! And that I would go to the top of the cancellation list for another appointment. In fact, they called me back the same day with a new date.

Here’s another thing: a couple of weeks after I announced the class, Neale Donald Walsch, author of the “Conversations with God” series, announced that he was holding a one hour teleclass on “Happiness with God” -- from 6 – 7 PM PDT on the night of my first class. How weird is that?

I’d like to believe that it was my clear intention to do this class — for free, and the universe supporting that choice, that led to the synchronicities, but I truly don’t know. Or maybe all this other stuff was set up in advance, and I picked that time because I subconsciously knew about everyone else’s plans. And the question for me is, is there a structure to synchronicity, like there’s a structure to luck (See Richard Wiseman’s “The Luck Factor”)? Because if I understood that, life would be a LOT easier!

Where or when in your life do synchronicities happen? Have you noticed anything that seems to trigger them? Please let me know. If enough people write back, maybe we can figure out a pattern... I’ll share (anonymously) anything useful that I get (unless I’m asked not to).

Can you go home again? Hope... and Acceptance

Last week was quite a whirlwind — NJ for a class, visiting family and friends, and a college reunion, back to SF, only to go to Sacramento on business. But I’m finally home, thank goodness! And because there was such a whirlwind, I have a few impressions I’d like to share with you:

Can you go home again?

It’s very odd to walk around a college campus where you spent almost all of 4 years (I worked as a research assistant in the summers, and stayed for a month or so after graduation, so it really was almost all of 4 years). There is this time travel experience — you know you are you, and it’s 2007, but then, you hit a part of campus that hasn’t changed since you lived there, and... you’ve traveled back in time. I walked by a dorm I lived in one summer, and the window of “my” room had a window fan in it, just like I had. It literally stopped me in my tracks. When am I? It’s as if the present is layered onto the past in the physical place. (Read “Time and Again” by Jack Finney for a terrific novel based on this premise — and no, the movie just isn’t as good).

But then there is also this sense of the place growing and evolving as the community grows and evolves, as everything evolves. Some buildings are the same; others have only been changed on the inside. There are new buildings, housing new scholarly departments and new students. Some trees have gotten bigger, some have died and been replaced by smaller ones. The black squirrels seem to have been replaced by gray ones. The faces, of course, have changed, but the feel remains the same. Engineering students are still working their butts off -- I commiserated with a current engineering student, and one who’d been out 5 years, about how hard we all worked as undergrads. And everyone still feels connected.

So if you can accept that everything changes, then you can go home again.

Hope

I had the good fortune to get a ride (thanks, Julie & Rich!) out to the Plasma Physics Lab, which is 4 miles from the main Princeton campus, for the first time ever, so I could take a tour of the facilities. The PPL is one of the few experimental locations in the world for the development of nuclear fusion energy. Currently used nuclear energy is produced by fission, splitting atoms, and it leaves nasty by-products. By contrast, fusing types of hydrogen atoms to make helium, which is an inert gas, also frees up vast amounts of energy, and leaves only the helium as a byproduct.

Here’s the good news: according to the tour director, who is a physicist (although the communications director of the lab and not an experimenter), commercially viable fusion energy is pretty much inevitable. Certainly many things remain to be worked out, but apparently the question is not if, but when. His view is definitely by 2050. The (slightly) bad news is that the PPL would like to be doing experiments 25 weeks a year on the test reactors they have, and are only funded by the Dept. of Energy for 12 weeks a year. How much sooner could this happen if the lab were fully funded? Can we afford to wait until 2050?

A further question is which nation will commercialize fusion energy, and thereby gain the business for putting these small reactors everywhere. Other research institutions are in Russia, China, the EU, and Japan. While the research is apparently a joint endeavor of these countries with India at this point, commercializing it may not be.

All in all, from the Earth’s point of view, this is the most hopeful thing I’ve heard in years.

Acceptance

10 years ago, when I told people at my reunion that I did clairvoyant readings and coaching (which wasn’t called that then), most people who didn’t know me well, and a few who did, looked at me like I was crazy. It wasn’t much better 5 years ago.

But this time, the reaction I got from most people was “Cool!” I had pretty deep conversations, where I was passing on psychic information, with a couple of people who I’m sure wouldn’t have given my information any credence back then. And this is a pretty mainstream group of professionals. Is it because the culture has changed? Or because we’re older? Or because I speak about it in a way that’s easier to relate to? I don’t know, but I sure hope it’s the first of these. Anyway, my sense is that it’s safe to come out of the closet with your abilities (for those of you who have been in one).

Do you want to be happier? More successful?

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a very brief talk on the relationships of meditation, luck, emotional awareness and success, as part of a larger program given by others. There was a lot of material, actually too much for me to cover in the ten minutes I had, and that bugged me. Still, people were quite blown away at the picture I’d drawn for them of how all these things relate to and reinforce each other. So after I sat down to listen to the rest of the program, it hit me — this information needs to get out there! People need to know not only about this reinforcing relationship, but also about all the exercises that one can do to feed the virtuous cycle. So I had an idea... But first...

Quick — How happy are you, on a scale of 0 –10? (Where 10 is “it couldn’t possibly get better — life is a blast!” and 0 is “I’d be better off on the other side”.) Check inside quickly to answer that (whatever number comes up first is the right one). Then scroll down...

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If you answered less than 10, would like to improve that happiness level? (And if the answer is 0 – 1, please go get individualized professional help now.)

If you’re reasonably happy, or so-so, or even kinda bummed, and would like to be happier day to day, read on.

Did you know there are simple, scientifically proven strategies (no, no drugs!) to boost your happiness and sense of well-being, not to mention your success? Because there is now lots of research into the psychology of happiness, emotional awareness, the effects of meditation on the brain and body, and the structure of luck, which you can use to improve your life. But it’s fragmented into hundreds, maybe thousands, of different books and websites.

You could find all this information yourself, but why bother? Do you have that much time? I’ve gathered much of the best of the current research in one place. How much would you be willing to pay for all this information? $300? $500? $1000?

I’m offering it, along with some experiential tools not included in the literature, this one time only, for FREE (of course, there is a small catch, but it is for your own good)!

I’m offering a teleclass, based in solid scientific research into meditation, luck, happiness, and emotional awareness, which aims to boost that happiness level, along with your success, by giving you simple, easy tools and strategies. This is groundbreaking, as I haven’t seen anyone put all these things together in one place. There will be some lecture, especially in the first session, to explain the framework for the class, some guided meditations, some group discussion, homework (about 30 – 40 enjoyable minutes daily — and you may already be doing some or much of it), and questionnaires.

Here are the details:

When: 5 Wednesdays, 6/13, 6/20, 6/27, 7/11 and 7/18, 6PM PDT, which is 9PM EDT, for 45 – 60 minutes each

Where: Wherever you are, by long-distance telephone. However, you must not be driving a car, as it would be too dangerous to take part in the guided meditations.

Cost: Because this is a beta test, it is FREE, if you (a) attend all teleclasses and (b) fill out all questionnaires (don’t worry, they’re short). If you don’t do these things, the cost is $100, which is what it will be in the future. I do this because if you don’t attend all the classes, and don’t fill out all the questionnaires, I don’t know what is working, or how well.

Contact: Hollis Polk at hollis@888-4-hollis.com, 650-616-9377, or 888-4-hollis (888-446-5547) to sign up, get details and/or ask questions.

I’m looking forward to this — it will be fun! Please join me for what promises to be a life-changing journey!

What's YOUR Story? Part II

Turns out there are some academics studying how people tell their own stories, and how they change over time. The article is here:

This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It) - New York Times

Turns out that how you tell your story afffects your outcomes, or so they think. It may be that people who are more positive tell better stories, as well as hove better outcomes, so the 2 things vary together, rather than one causing the other.

How a thing begins is how it will continue

In the fall of my senior year in college, I went on my very first "real" job interview for a post college job, with a very prestigious consulting firm. I expected that at the end of the day, I would either be thrilled because I had a job offer, or seriously bummed because I didn't. But it didn't work out that way.

The company made me a job offer, and then pressured me strongly to accept it on the spot, which I didn't feel I could do. After all, it was only October, it was my first interview, and I'd barely started to look. In the end, they gave me the weekend to think it over (the interview was on a Friday). I didn't take the job then, but we agreed to talk again in the spring. I eventually accepted the job.

And spent the next 2 years feeling manipulated and used. You see, the way they made job offers was the way they treated their employees -- badly, peremptorily. The way one does something, whether it is a person or an organization, is likely the way it does anything and everything.

And so it is with the Bush administration. They stole the 2000 and 2004 elections, and continued with their pattern of lawlessness, from lying about the reasons for going to war, to outing a CIA agent whose husband spoke out against those lies, to attempting to use the Justice Dept. to steal elections, to illegally spying on American citizens, and on and on. You know the litany.

Beware a bad beginining -- people are always, always, always showing and telling you who they are.

Ding Dong, Wofie's Gone!

Say it with me, folks:

"May the hearts and minds of those in power be turned to the good of the earth and its people, or may they be removed from power immediately and permanently."

Maybe it's picking up steam...

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Or
Be Careful What You Ask For

You remember that old Disney cartoon, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, don’t you? Maybe you remember it better than I do, because all I remember is that the apprentice used the sorcerer’s tools, while not really knowing how, and made a BIG mess. Well, I’m feeling a bit like that sorcerer’s apprentice at the moment.

I’ve been working with a new, powerful manifesting tool I’ve channeled recently, based in the “Heart of Relationship” (see http://10minutesaday.blogspot.com/2006/09/web-of-creation.html for details on the Heart of Relationship). And though I’ve advised people for many years that they need to be complete when they ask for something, carefully considering all aspects of what they choose to manifest, I find I’ve been falling short myself! Here’s an example:

I choose to easily manifest a car which runs on vegetable oil. As I’m not a mechanic, I need to either buy some kind of a diesel car and pay someone to convert it (and there is no consensus on what are the best cars to convert), or buy one that someone else has converted. This is looking like quite a project!

First, it probably requires that I have the money for the car (yes, there are other ways, but let’s not quibble). I figure I can find one that I actually want to drive (a relatively recent Jetta TDI) for $15,000 (you can find ancient Mercedes converted for less, but I don’t want an old clunker), which means finding $15,000 so that I can sell my old car after I have purchased the new car. (I generally don’t buy depreciating assets, like cars, with credit. And I hate spending my savings, so I want money to “show up”.) So I do my process, saying “I choose to have $15,000 show up.” That was the complete statement.

A couple of weeks later, while I was out of town, my husband called me to say that there was a FedEx envelope from my investment house for me, and did I want him to open it? Well, I had no idea what this could be, as I hadn’t talked to my financial advisor in months, so yes, I did want him to open it. There was a check for $15,000! Normally, if I want them to send me my own money, I have to fax a request, which I obviously hadn’t done in this case. When I called to find out why I’d been sent a check, the advisor’s assistant could give me no reason, was suitably embarrassed and apologetic, and, of course, resolved the issue as though it never happened.

But I do know, on a deeper level, why I got that check — I got exactly what I asked for -- $15,000 showed up! Now I am being more specific — I choose that a NEW $15,000 show up to buy my veggie oil car!

Ding, Dong, Fallwell's Dead

Okay, I feel a little gulty about this, but the truth is that the news of Jerry Falwell's death did cheer me up a bit. Like I said, I'm not proud of it. On theother hand, if his absence helps the world heal, then it's a good thing. And I believe each of us chooses when to go.

They think he died of a heart problem -- I'm not sure he had a heart (See http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/10806.html), which would, of course, qualify.

To distract myself every time I'm tempted to gloat, I say the following prayer:

"May the hearts and minds of those in power be turned to the good of the earth and its people, or may they be removed from power immediately and permanently."

I do this prayer at least once a day, often many times a day. Do you think it helped?

The Platinum Rule

Everyone knows the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Pretty simple, and pretty good.

And I’d like to humbly submit the upgrade, the Platinum Rule, “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.”

What do I mean?

We all know that everyone’s different — one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, to quote another folk staple. So why do we assume that someone else would want to be treated the way we wish to be treated? Yes, everyone wants courtesy, respect, love, support and all those other wonderful, non-specific words (nominalizations, for you NLPers). But one person may equate support to being left alone in her grief, while another may equate it with constant companionship.

The Golden Rule can even create problems. Here’s one example: my first husband liked to get his information auditorily, because had a phenomenal auditory memory; he couldn’t see very well, though, and had a lousy visual memory. I, on the other hand, with a great visual memory and a terrible auditory one, wanted to see my information. But of course, we didn’t understand this, and assumed each other’s memory was just like the ours.

So, using the Golden Rule, if I needed to remind him of something, like what to get at the grocery store, I’d leave a note on the back of the front door, where he’d be sure to see it on the way out in the morning, and could take it with him to use at the store in the evening. Of course, half the time, he never saw the note! If he needed me to call someone to renew the auto insurance, he’d tell me before he left for work — and it would slip my mind.

And in the evening, he wouldn’t have gotten what we needed at the grocery, and I wouldn’t have called the insurance agent! Multiply this by a hundred times, and you get the picture. I felt ignored, and he felt like he wasn’t being heard. It was a constant source of friction in our marriage.

Then I learned about representational systems, which are all about how you take in and store information. Some people, like me, are very visual, others primarily auditory, and still others primarily kinesthetic, so they learn by doing. I explained this to my husband, and we began to live by the Platinum Rule — I’d tell him what I needed, and he’d leave me notes. Much better, even though it felt a little weird to both of us!

So, how do you put the Platinum Rule into action? Any time something isn’t gong well in a relationship, ask yourself, do I know what the other person wants, and how they want it? If the answer is ‘no’, or even ‘maybe’, ask the other person! You’ll be glad you did.

The power of prayer hits the NYT

Just had to put this in here, from the NY Times columnist, Tom Friedman:

"The Aussie ‘Big Dry’"

"Almost everywhere you travel these days, people are talking about their weather — and how it has changed. Nowhere have I found this more true, though, than in Australia, where “the big dry,” a six-year record drought, has parched the Aussie breadbasket so severely that on April 19, Prime Minister John Howard actually asked the whole country to pray for rain. “I told people you have to pray for rain,” Mr. Howard remarked to me, adding, “I said it without a hint of irony.”

"And here’s what’s really funny: It actually started to rain! "

A side benefit of running

As I mentioned in my last email, I’ve been running as well as walking for the last couple of weeks. I walk until I feel like running (my heart chakra sort of attaches to something in the distance and that pulls me), then run until I feel like walking (usually my throat gets sore).

You just never know what else any particular change will open up. Here’s what I mean:

This method of running requires me to stay present to my body and the surroundings, rather than do affirmations or work out things, like what I’m going to write. This makes me much more aware of my energy field. This in turn makes me much more aware of the energy fields of whatever I pass than I am normally. I think it’s because our energy fields are actually interpenetrating each other. Do you remember doing experiments with magnets and iron filings in junior high science class, so you could see the magnetic fields and their interactions? It’s like that, only I can feel it rather than see it, as if my aura is a giant sense organ. Or to use another metaphor, it’s as if a tree’s field is combing through mine, and vice versa.

Furthermore, I notice those other energy fields much more strongly when I run than when I walk. I suppose that’s because when I walk, I’m going too slowly to notice the subtle differences between different energy fields. For example, when I move quickly, it seems that the energy field of a gingko is much softer than the field of whatever conifer is next on my route.

Have you ever had a similar experience? Because if you have, I’d love to hear about it.

Reality Creation Begins at Home!

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, “you create your reality through your beliefs” (to quote Seth, a discarnate entity, in books channeled 30 or so years ago by Jane Roberts). Well, reality creation starts at home, with your identity. How many stories, good or bad, do we tell ourselves about who we are? And I’ve got those stories going on, too.

Now, I’m a also really big believer in playing to one’s strengths. I mean, no one really wants you around for what you’re bad at, right? So unless you’ve been in one of my classes, where I made a joke of it, you don’t know that I referred to myself “one of the slowest runners on earth”. And you don’t know that I can barely carry a tune. Well, actually, the tunes need their own dollies.

This “slow” part of my identity came about in 7th grade, when we first started to run track in gym class. I was small for my age, with short legs, and two years younger than all my classmates, which made me a head shorter than many of them. There were girls whose legs came up to my bottom rib! So naturally, I was embarrassingly slow in that group. I hated being 50 - 100 yards behind everyone else! And it hurt — mostly in my lungs, but also a bit in my legs. Oh, I forced myself, and I kept on forcing myself to run when I couldn’t swim or skate, because back then, it wasn’t known that walking was about as good for you as running. As I got to be an adult, I developed shin splints, and that’s when I completely gave up on running.

I still walk — a lot. 3 miles most days, sometimes more, occasionally less. And in my neighborhood, that means I do serious hills, with stretches that are 20% grade. I hike, too — which is pretty much just walking in nicer surroundings, as near as I can tell. But running... NOT!

The non-musical part of my identity started earlier, when I couldn’t carry a tune as a small child. My Dad kept saying,”Oh, she’ll get it when she gets older; I couldn’t carry a tune till I was about 12, and now I’m fine.” And he was. He could sing, as could my mother and sister.

Also in 7th grade, in a vain attempt to be normal at a school where I was anything but (not only by my age and size, but also by my ethnicity), I joined the Glee Club. The other short girl (a 6th grader) and I sat directly in front of Mrs. Miller at her piano. All year long, Mrs. Miller kept saying that one of us was flat, but she could never tell which one. Occasionally she’d silence everyone else to figure out who it was, with the idea that whoever it was would be, um, invited to leave. She never did, though whether that was figure it out or ask us to leave, I still don’t know. One year of optional humiliation was enough; I learned my lesson, and thereafter confined my singing to solo sing-alongs in the car and “Happy Birthday”, where I figured even if anyone noticed, they wouldn’t care.

Fast forward a few decades.

Last weekend, I joined my more-or-less monthly meditation/discussion group for our very first retreat. The group has built up an amazing energy over the several years we’ve been meditating together. It’s so strong that I feel it literally hold my torso up if I lean in to our circle. And each person I’ve gotten to know is really cool, too — intelligent, articulate, talented, good-hearted, really committed to his or her own spirituality and to community, many of them teachers in their own right. We were going to a beautiful spot in Sonoma, with comfy, though rustic, sleeping cabins, a huge room with a wooden floor and cathedral ceiling for meditation, all set in spectacular gardens — and scrumptious food, too. So it was going to be a great weekend!

And then the group leader, decided that we should run as well as meditate and discuss some texts. He wanted to import the running coach he described as a genius, who “gave him running”, a coach who is used to working with world champions. The group agreed. My reaction was that since I was so bad, any coaching could only help. And hey, someone who can coach champions can probably help anyone. So I was open. Not expecting much, but open.

We arrived at the ranch on Friday afternoon, got settled, and had meditation and discussion before and after dinner, as well as some exercises and meditation before breakfast on Saturday morning. After breakfast, the plan was for meditation to lead into running. Okay, I thought, this is a different approach, and it might actually work for me. No discussion of running form at all. We began with a quick lecture/demo/participation of different running speeds. Then we moved (literally) into a zen walk, where the point is to walk as slowly and mindfully as possible. That’s easy for me, as I grew up skating school figures, which basically require the same focus on the body moving through space. Then the coach, Mike Spino, just said, now you can walk at whatever speed you feel like as long as you maintain your focus. If you lose focus, stop, recollect yourself, and begin again. And if you feel like running, run.

After a little while, I actually wanted to run! This was new! Maybe it was the mindfulness of it, or maybe it was my connection to the group, which included some long-time runners. Then something in my body wouldn’t feel quite right, and I’d go back to walking. Then I’d want to run again. Periodically, Mike would gather us back to teach us something new, or to zen walk, or to do another exercise. In one exercise, we stood and silently shared energy with a partner (whoever was closest to us at the moment) by holding our palms facing our partner’s palms without touching. We were then instructed to have one partner “pack the energy” into the other partner and run together. My partner missed the running together part, so we somehow split off in different directions. Oh, well.

Later on, Mike gathered us in a group out on the driveway, had us focus on a tree 100 yards or so away, visualize throwing a lasso onto the tree, tying the other end around our waists (I connected it to my heart chakra instead) and letting the lasso pull us to the tree. I flew! Okay, it was slightly downhill, but I was passing people! Me, the (now former) slowest runner on earth! I had to change that part of my identity. I’m a runner now.

The next day we went out on a nearby track. We meditated, did the zen walk, walked and ran and walked and ran some more, in any direction (not just around the track). Sometimes we ran as a group, staying together intentionally. Mike taught us another visualization, one of a giant hand coming down from the sky to support us and push us forward. With that one, I felt like my feet barely touched the ground!

And we got another shot at the partner exercise. This time, my partner was a 6’1” ex-NFL linebacker. Oh, God, I thought, how am I ever going to keep up with him? But we shared energy through our facing palms. He wisely decided that he should give me the energy and fell in behind me when we were instructed to run. I could actually feel his hand behind my back, pushing me down the track! And we still weren’t touching.

On the drive back to Sacramento (yes, I’m still out of town, working on my cell phone), it occurred to me that what a great coach does has nothing to do with techniques or skills. A great coach gives you parts of yourself that you could not previously access. I know I do that for people all the time, but I never got what I did, until someone did it for me. Thank you, Mike! I’m truly grateful.

So here’s the really odd part. I indulged myself in an iPod sing-along on the way back to Sacramento, and I’m pretty sure I was on key a lot more often than before. And a few days later, when I called my Mom to sing her “Happy Birthday”, she commented, with no prompting, that I’d done a good job, sung all the right notes. She’s never done that before — she would never say something to make you feel better if it weren’t true — so I believe her. Maybe I can carry a tune? I know I can if I find the right coach to teach me. Maybe I can begin to think of myself as a singer, too.

More psychic fun with slots!

I received the following response to last week’s email (see my blog here if you missed it: http://10minutesaday.blogspot.com):

25 years ago I spent 3 days in Vegas, during which I released all desire to return. Yet I was with a girl friend and we had fun. We made money on the slots by removing desire to win from our minds. Our method was to stand together and focus on loving each other as one of us operated the machine. We both refused to go into winning desire. We would select machines to move to by ascertaining which one looked friendly and wanted to be included in our loving. Using this method we consistently made small amounts of money on the slots, enough to pay for our lodging and meals while in Vegas.

The various casinos also gave out betting starter packs with 5 or 10 dollars in scrip for use at gaming tables. If we lost, we moved on to another casino. If we won, we bet our winnings. We made a much smaller amount by this method than on the slots where we invested only our own money. I believe this is because the tables involved other people and diminished our focusing ability, compared with when it was only me, her, and the machine at play.

So perhaps one-armed bandits are angels in disguise, teaching unattached love through psycho-feedback!

I think this approach to slot machines is a terrific idea, and am going to try it with my husband. I’m passing it along because it illustrates very clearly some research from Princeton’s psychic lab (the late, lamented PEAR).

The lab had lots of apparatus whose movement was controlled by a random event generator (aka random number generator), where if the last digit of the current number was higher than the last digit of the previous number, it would go one direction, and if the last digit was lower than the last digit of the previous number, it would go the other. So for example, a small fountain of water would be higher or lower, depending on the random number. The idea was to affect the random number, and therefore the apparatus, solely with your intention. Lots of people could do this effectively. (Why does this matter? Well, if you’re going to Jupiter, and your consciousness puts the automatic navigation system even a degree off, you’ll never get there.)

Here’s the interesting thing. It turned out that women and men were each equally effective individually. Two women together were no more effective than one individual. Two men together were no more effective than one individual. But a man and a woman together were 4 times as effective as one individual! And a man and a woman who were a couple were 7 times as effective as one individual!

So the idea of working with the slot machines as a couple is pretty intriguing to me. I’ll let you know what happens.

Hollis
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Hollis Polk
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Helping you create a life you love every single day!

Check out my blog at: http://10minutesaday.blogspot.com

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Hollis Polk is a personal coach, who has been helping people create lives they love for 15 years. To do this, she blends neurolinguistic and hypnotherapy techniques, decision science, clairvoyance, and the common sense learned in over 20 years of business experience. Hollis is a Master Practitioner of neurolinguistics, a certified hypnotherapist, and has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Princeton and a Harvard MBA. She is also a successful real estate broker and investor, and has owned and run several successful businesses.

If you want to know more about Hollis, see her website, http://www.hollispolk.com.

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