#truelove #allowing #dating
1. He deviates from his baseline behavior.
People have patterns to their behaviors. These usually are quite inflexible and fixed. When there’s a gross distraction such as an affair, patterns will change. So, take note that this could indicate he is cheating.
2. His mood changes quickly.
This might be the result of him being conflicted: being with you but wanting to spend time with the new woman. Naturally it will lead to frustration, moodiness, and even anger. He may even start fights in an effort to sabotage your relationship.
3. He’s attached to his phone.
He’ll take it into the bathroom with him and say “I like to read the news.” Is this a new behavior? If so, be aware. He may also sleep with it by his bed and be guarded of it, not keeping it lying out on the table.
4. He changes his appearance.
Does he dress differently? Is he getting in shape? These changes in the context of other signs are worth noting.
5. Sex.
This one is tricky. You might see a complete withdrawal from sex or you might see him initiating it more. He might feel an extra charge of testosterone and confidence as a result of his new flame and feel the need to discharge it with you. He may also be trying to compensate for his indiscretions.
6. He confuses information.
For example, “Didn’t we dine here?” is a clear indicator he’s been there before and not with you. His points of reference are blurred as time spent with you are confused with time spent with the other woman.
7. He has a history of cheating.
Past behavior is often an indicator of current or future behavior, even in relationships. If he’s done it before it only makes it easier to do it again.
8. He doesn’t show remorse or guilt for wrong doings in other areas of his life.
Normally these are powerful and healthy emotions that keep people in check. A lack of them is a problem.
9. There’s a family history of cheating.
Although this is a predictor of cheating, it does come into play as people learn to model their parents’ behaviors. If there is such a history, has he talked about it? What has he learned from it? Processing it in a healthy way might help safeguard him from making similar mistakes.
10. He lies and does it well.
Does he talk about how he has deceived people outside of the relationship? Does he do it with the bravado of a narcissist? Definitely a red flag.
Perhaps more important than being on the lookout for these signs is trusting your gut and intuition. It’s powerful. Listen to it and use it to investigate. Doing so might spare you a lot of pain and agony down the road. Don’t make the mistake that so many women do and look the other way. Denial will not make him stop cheating nor will it improve your relationship. Taking action will.
For more tips on healthy relationships check out my book BE FEARLESS: Change Your Life in 28 Days.
The Practice: Cultivate goodwill.
Why?
As the most social and loving species on the planet, we have the wonderful ability and inclination to connect with others, be empathic, cooperate, care and love. On the other hand, we also have the capacity and inclination to be fearfully aggressive toward any individual or group we regard as “them.” (In my book — Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom — I develop this idea further, including how to stimulate and strengthen the neural circuits of self-control, empathy and compassion.)
To tame the wolf of hate, it’s important to get a handle on “ill will” — irritated, resentful and angry feelings and intentions toward others. While it may seem justified in the moment, ill will harms you probably more than it harms others. In another metaphor, having ill will toward others is like throwing hot coals with bare hands: both people get burned.
Avoiding ill will does not mean passivity, allowing yourself or others to be exploited, staying silent in the face of injustice, etc. There is plenty of room for speaking truth to power and effective action without succumbing to ill will. Think of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or the Dalai Lama as examples. In fact, with a clear mind and a peaceful heart, your actions are likely to be more effective.
Ill will creates negative, vicious cycles. But that means that good will can create positive cycles. Plus good will cultivates wholesome qualities in you.
How?
Cultivate Positive Emotions:
In general, really nourish and develop positive emotions such as happiness, contentment, and peacefulness. For example, look for things to be happy about, and take in the good whenever possible. Positive feelings calm the body, quiet the mind, create a buffer against stress, and foster supportive relationships — all of which reduce ill will.
Practice Noncontention:
Don’t argue unless you have to. Inside your own mind, try not to get swirled along by the mind streams of other people. Reflect on the neurological turbulence underlying their thoughts: the incredibly complicated, dynamic and largely arbitrary churning of momentary neural assemblies into coherence and then chaos. Getting upset about somebody’s thoughts is like getting upset about spray from a waterfall. Try to decouple your thoughts from the other person’s. Tell yourself: She’s over there and I’m over here. Her mind is separate from my mind.
Be Careful About Attributing Intentions:
Be cautious about attributing intentions to other people. Prefrontal theory-of-mind networks attribute intentions routinely, but they are often wrong. Most of the time you are just a bit player in other people’s dramas; they are not targeting you in particular.
Bring Compassion to Yourself:
As soon as you feel mistreated, bring compassion to yourself — this is urgent care for the heart. Try putting your hand on your cheek or heart to stimulate the embodied experience of receiving compassion.
Meet Mistreatment with Loving Kindness
Traditionally, loving-kindness is considered the direct antidote to ill will, so resolve to meet mistreatment with loving-kindness. No matter what. A famous sutra in Buddhism sets a high standard: “Even if bandits were to sever you savagely limb by limb with a two-handled saw… you should train thus: ‘Our minds will remain unaffected, and we shall utter no evil words; we shall abide compassionate for their welfare, with a mind of loving-kindness, without inner hate'” (Nanamoli and Bodhi 1995, 223).
Personally, I’m not there yet, but if it’s possible to stay loving while being horribly mistreated — and from some of the accounts of people in awful circumstances, it clearly is — then we should be able to rise up in lesser situations, like getting cut off in traffic or being put down yet again by a teenager.
Communicate:
To the extent that it’s useful, speak your truth and stick up for yourself with skillful assertiveness. Your ill will is telling you something. The art is to understand its message — perhaps that another person is not a true friend, or that you need to be clearer about your boundaries — without being swept away by anger.
Put Things in Perspective:
Put whatever happened in perspective. The effects of most events fade with time. They’re also part of a larger whole, the great majority of which is usually fine.
Practice Generosity:
Use things that aggravate you as a way to practice generosity. Consider letting people have what they took: their victory, their bit of money or time, their one-upping. Be generous with forbearance and patience.
Cultivate Positive Qualities:
Cultivate positive qualities like kindness, compassion, empathy and calm. Nourish your own good will.
Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist and New York Times best-selling author. His books include Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence (in 13 languages), Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (in 25 languages), Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time (in 13 languages), and Mother Nurture: A Mother’s Guide to Health in Body, Mind, and Intimate Relationships. Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and on the Advisory Board of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, he’s been an invited speaker at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and taught in meditation centers worldwide. A summa cum laude graduate of UCLA, his work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, CBC, FoxBusiness, Consumer Reports Health, U.S. News and World Report, and O Magazine and he has several audio programs with Sounds True. His weekly e-newsletter – Just One Thing – has over 100,000 subscribers, and also appears on Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and other major websites.
For more information, please see his full profile at www.RickHanson.net.
There are two reasons why radical well being hasn’t captured the imagination of the general public. As we saw in the first part, people all too often let their health go and then depend on the standard medical approach of drugs and surgery. Taking an active role in their own well being doesn’t seem crucial compared to the powerful interventions of modern medicine once symptoms of illness appear. The second reason, however, carries just as much weight. People aren’t aware of the new findings that indicate how central the mind-body connection actually is.
We’re all accustomed to seeing our bodies as a set of separate parts (cells, tissues, organs) operating like a machine, and since machines tend to break down one part at a time, medicine has been compartmentalized into specializations for the heart, liver, brain, and so on. If your car doesn’t start, a mechanic examines the alternator or the battery; if your heart stops ejecting enough blood, a cardiologist checks it out with diagnostic tests.
Radical well being jettisons the model of body as machine for something closer to reality: a model that is living, dynamic, fluid, and adaptive. This new model leads to a state of higher health controlled and monitored by each person. The reason that directing your own health is so powerful can be summarized in a few insights that have taken decades to develop. As we emphasized in our book “Super Brain”:
• Every thought, feeling, and sensation in the mind sends a message to every cell in the body.
• Cells operate through feedback loops that mesh with the feedback loops of tissues, organs, and the body itself.
• Disease begins with subtle imbalances in these feedback loops.
• The brain’s ability to consciously direct a person’s life depends on intelligence embedded in every cell.
• Behavior today has consequences for our genes, altering their expression in profound ways.
Mainstream medicine finds itself in a paradoxical position at the moment, because these new insights, which came about from cutting-edge research, have had minimal effect on medical school training and the practice of physicians. The “body as machine” model, complete with outmoded notions of fixed genes, “hard” inheritance, and duty to treat patients only after symptoms appear remains firmly rooted in doctors’ minds.
Which leads to the conclusion that each person must decide to take advantage of the new model. The things that health-conscious people already do aren’t negated. It remains of primary importance not to smoke, avoid excess weight, and minimize use alcohol (with perhaps an exemption for drinking a glass of wine a day, at most). If you already have taken these steps, the new model also supports other familiar advice: exercise moderately, eat a good, balanced diet, and avoid environmental toxins. But these steps bring us only to the very edge of radical well being.
The really fascinating area to explore is known as “self-directed biological transformation,” which has enormous implications for your present health and everyone’s future evolution. Change is inevitable, and transformation is taking place in your body many thousands of times a second. For the most part, each of us has played a passive role in our own transformation, allowing biological processes, governed by our genes, to run automatically. The problem is that, as miraculous as the body’s feedback loops are, they deteriorate over time and are susceptible to imbalances that aren’t self-correcting. The result is unhealthy aging and disease. Short of that, the level of well being you experience is vulnerable to degradation biologically, much of which can be avoided.
Intervening in the body’s feedback loops comes down to a simple principle: The more positive the input your body receives, the more positive its output. Your body, down to the genetic level, is altered by the events of everyday life. (It’s already known that positive lifestyle changes directed at preventing and healing heart disease alter as many as 500 genes.) The time is right for proving just how much overall control we have over this enormous potential in the mind-body connection. One can foresee the future as self-directed biological transformation.
The platform for self-directed transformation is available to everyone. It includes yoga and meditation, exercise for strength, agility, endurance and play, a balanced farm-to-table and Mediterranean diet, good sleep, and stress reduction. These are well-established ways to improve bodily function. But there’s more to explore, given another basic principle: Every experience in consciousness has a physical correlate. A mystic experiencing deep inner silence, a Buddhist monk meditating on compassion, or a saint having a vision of angels isn’t exempted from this principle, because the label of “spiritual” doesn’t diminish the mind-body connection — that connection is actually amplified.
Whatever activity you undertake is a step in self-directed biological transformation. Knowing this, how should you choose to live? Certainly a higher priority should be given to those things that make you more conscious, with the aim of being more centered, free of psychological deficits, capable of experiencing love, bonding with others, and pursuing happiness with the dedication we show in pursuing success.
These intangibles assume central importance in achieving radical well being, for the simple reason that the true controller of well being, which is consciousness, is intangible. By opening up the doorway between consciousness and your gene activity, well being takes a leap forward. For example, recent studies indicate that meditation can have a strong effect on the length of chromosome telomeres, the nucleotide sequences that protect chromosomes from the deterioration linked to aging. That these beneficial effects occur so quickly indicates just how responsive genetic activity is to mind-body interventions — something never previously suspected.
To validate the effects of consciousness on biology requires imaginative, forward-looking research. At the Chopra Center alliances have been made with top-level medical-school researchers to delve into exactly how self-directed biological transformation works. Groups of subjects are being recruited to undergo intensive experiences of enhanced well being, with the aim of using the latest digital monitoring to detect change at heart and brain activity at the cellular and level of gene expression through blood samples.
Studies planned include:
1. Whole genome sequencing using HiSeq at Illumina
2. Whole genome gene expression of roughly 40,000 gene transcripts
3. Alzheimer’s-related amyloid beta protein species in plasma by ELISA and MesoScale
4. Cytokine levels in plasma by MesoScale
5. Whole-genome epigenetic changes using Pacific Bio systems
6. The plasma proteome
7. Blood based markers of cellular aging including:
8. Telomerase and telomere length
9. Oxidative stress
10. Inflammation, cardiovascular disease and stress biomarkers
11. Mitochondrial DNA health
12. Single lead ECG/ heart rate
13. Heart rate variability
14. Physical activity
15. Sleep quality
16. Respiratory rate and depth
17. Photoplethysmogram
The current thinking holds that genes are fixed, but new research shows gene activity can be changed by experience. The results have been entirely encouraging so far, and there are other related studies that are exploring consciousness-related changes in such areas as risk for Alzheimer’s disease. The public has become deeply confused — as have practicing physicians — by recent findings questioning many standbys of mainstream medical interventions, from antidepressants to statins, from mammograms to PSA testing for prostate cancer, up to and including the benefits of cardiac bypass surgery and angioplasty in reducing mortality rates from heart attacks. Sometimes, these interventions are unavoidable. But the positive thing to do is to embrace a new model of human biology that will keep people in the best possible condition of well being. A person who is thriving in mind and body holds the key to most medical mysteries before they are solved.
Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 75 books with 22 New York Times bestsellers including “Super Brain.”
Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD, Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School Vice-Chair of Neurology and Director of Genetics and Aging Research at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Allowing true love. Books and Subliminal Audios 