INDIA TODAY PLUS THIRD QUARTER 1997

 I BELIEVE that happiness is a choice that every one can make today. I have chosen to be happy. So can you. I didn't have the easiest childhood. My father was a workaholic and my mother was an alcoholic. I have had to work very hard to achieve the inner strength, peace and happiness I have today. For Indian readers who are familiar with Deepak Chopra I would say my work is similar but where he stresses Vedic and Siddhantic concepts, I have taken psychological and spiritual principles and made them understandable through humour, simple metaphors and aneedotes.

There are, broadly speaking, five aspects to our being: mental, physical, emotional, intuition and imagination. To be a whole person you have to work on all of them. The ability to integrate all these levels within ourselves is what makes us whole. Obviously, that is too vast a subject for this discussion, so I am going to limit myself to those critical habits of mind and body which we can practice in our daily lives to give ourselves the gift of peace and happiness. Let's look at our spiritual values first.
 
 

Jack Canfield, 52, is widely regarded as America's leading motivational speaker. Co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul which has sold more than six million copies, Canfield now has 14 books in this series which have been translated into 23 languages across 80 countries. The charismatic, feel-good guru took time out from his whirlwind tour of New Delhi and Mumbai recently to do this exclusive piece on emotional resilience and mental well-being for the readers of India Today Plus.

A Technology for Reaching God

It's important to believe in God­­but I made a distinction between religion and spirituality. Religion is often a dogma, it's about the mythology of this person or that saint, there are rules which have to be obeyed, etc. I'm more interested in having a direct experience of God. So, I'm more interested in the technology which will give me that. Every religion I've looked at has some technology---be it's fasting, chanting, yoga or meditation. The Catholic monks meditated, there's a difference between bhakii and karma yoga. I've studied all of them and found what works for me and I've tried to make it available to others. What works for me is a combination of disciplines: I do yoga, tai chi which is a Chinese martial art and three kinds of meditation­­vipasana, transcendental and mantra (sound) meditation. If you have to pick a yoga for me, I lean towards bhakii in the sense of devotion, adoration, singing, feeling love and joy exist in my heart.

These are not just fads. There are any number of studies which show that people who have faith live longer, have better recovery rates from serious illness and less depression. In an experiment with Benedictine monks in Austria the benefits of chanting and meditation­­which they do morning and evening­­were clearly established. When the monks were stopped from chanting for a month they started fighting for the first time in the history of the monastery, three times as many of them fell sick and there were four or five other negative impacts. When they were asked to resume chanting, things began improving immediately. It's the same with mantras. There are certain buzzwords in every civilization which raise consciousness. Try this experiment with muscle testing. If you have someone say the word "Rama", as they work out their muscles will get stronger. Say "Ma" and they will get weaker. In "Rama" we have the integration of both the male and the female. So we know that there are certain words in every culture which have an uplifting effect and chanting them produces results.

Prayer, yoga, mediation­­all of them involve discipline. I meditate every day and I do something with my body every day: yoga or tai chi. Everyone should follow some discipline to distress. If you take a rubber band and hold it stretched forever, it'll snap. So will you because what happens is that we get so stressed out in society that we need a relaxation method­­something physical like swimming laps­­to discharge tension. Say you're doing a business deal and someone blows it. Your reaction is to hit out but you can't do that in civilized society, so you feel the tension building up somewhere else, in your shoulder or back.

You can toughen yourself emotionally through meditation and spiritual teaching.
 
 

How to Control your Mind

THIS IS a fundamental part of mental resilience. You can spare yourself hours and days of anxiety and unhappiness by learning to control your mind. Begin by realizing that it's not the external world that is affecting you or making you miserable 'but your response to it'. And since you are in charge of what you think, you can produce thoughts that affect you either positively or negatively. So, if I think I'm no good, that's how I'm going to feel it. If I think I'm good, I'm going to feel good. Now, what did I base that on? Simple choice.

Yesterday, for instance, our plane from Mumbai was delayed by three hours and people were yelling at the steward. I've learnt about the value of surrendering, of accepting for the moment that which you cannot change and I know you can beat the factor which makes you angry by coming up with an alternative emotional response. What I'm saying is: no one can give you trouble. People can do things­­whether you get troubled by them or not, is your choice. You say: "My teenaged son ruined my day because he came home at three in the morning." But I say, no, it's you who ruined your day by expecting that some time in your life your teenaged son wasn't going to test that limit and come home late. It doesn't mean you don't discipline him, it means you don't need to freak out about it.

Say you have a spouse or child who is unhappy and is causing you concern and anxiety. The first thing realize is that you're not responsible for them. You can help them up to a point but you can't make a horse drink water. You can love and support your near and dear and you can provide for them but you can't be responsible for their actions and reactions. So, what I've learnt is that I'm only responsible for me. I can teach you the tools of happiness, for instance, but only you can decide if you want to practice them. Once you begin to distance yourself from the outcome of actions, you won't get depressed. And if I do feel low, I ask myself what makes me happy? Well, exercise, talking to my wife, meditation, a massage, reading uplifting spiritual literature­­I do something which will give me a boost.

There are two ways to avoid being distressed by events. First: if you get upset, in order to stay healthy you have to express the upset. 'Upset' means there is something in you which is out of balance. To put it back in balance, you have to express it out. 'Ex' is like the word exit. If you press it down you get depressed, which is why we say you depress yourself by repressing your feelings. So if I press these feelings down in an effort to pretend I'm emotionally strong, I'm going to hurt myself.

Acknowledging the upset, I then go to the next level and say, I now realize that nobody's out to get me. My husband doesn't wake up in the morning and say: "How can I screw up my wife's day"; he doesn't wake up and wonder how he can mess up the finances or the kids. Traffic is out there but not to destroy my peace of mind....Once I have a mental construct which says: What is, just is, it's not personal to Jack Canfield, I can deal with it better. This is a crucial psychological tactic and it's successful in dealing with potential stress. The next time you argue with your wife say to yourself: "Oh, I get it, I'm making myself unhappy by demanding that my wife behave in a certain way." Think about it. You married your wife because you married a fantasy of who you think she is. Over a while, the fantasy wears off and you discover who she really is. A that point, what usually happens in a relationship is that you try to make your partner into who you thought he or she was. You nag them, you say they need to go lose weight at the gym, you buy them clothes they don't want to wear so they look hipper....Instead, if you go with the idea that you can accept your wife for who she really is then you can love her: Realize that you are not going to change her any more than you can change this table. So, acceptance is critical.

But it's tricky. There's a difference between acceptance and complaisance. Because I won't accept being pushed beyond a certain point. I don't want to accept racism but I can work to change racism without being angry. Similarly, you can work to change poverty situation in India without being angry at the gods or the politicians. The crux is this: I accept something in the moment because it is. To not accept it is to be separated and to be in pain. But if I accept something the way it is knowing that I want to change it, that's accepting both the situation and my desire to change it simultaneously. It is not complaisance.

This is where the value of the Buddhist concept that all suffering comes from attachment enters. There's a strain in Buddhism which says we need to try and conquer the three emotions of anger, lust and greed to become detached. But here's a word of caution. People sometimes try to be result before they get there. For instance, if you study yoga long enough you eventually become a vegetarian because you feel you don't want to be killing things. But if you try to do yoga because you want to be a vegetarian that's like saying now I'm into consciousness, I'm never going to be angry again. Then, when the anger comes up, instead of expressing it, I'm repressing it. What I want to do, what meditation does, is help you focus on what's creating the anger. "Oh, it's my desire level. It's my need to be important. It's my fear that my neighbor won't respect me, etc." And then comes the contemplative part of meditation. You ask: "Do I need their approval? Do I need recognition?"

Every emotion has a thought that precedes it and you begin to be aware that a certain kind of thinking produces a certain kind of emotion. So, if I'm to control my emotion, I must learn to control my self-talk. This self-talk is the internal dialogue I have with myself and it can often be irrational. Realizing this is an important aspect in helping me control my thoughts. Eventually, you will get to the place where there is no anger. But if you try to do that before you've worked it through, then you're repressing it and it's emotionally unhealthy. You want to work so you have no anger but if, along the way, it does show up you must express it. That doesn't mean you have to break things or hit somebody. The next time someone upsets you tell them: "This is really making me angry. I want you to not do that." I am at a level now where the moment I become angry, I say: "Oh, I'm making myself angry, they're not. I'm the one experiencing the upset, they're not. I'm the one who's unhappy, so this anger isn't serving me."

Going along this line of thinking I can detach myself from ideas of how I should be, how much money the company's making, etc. Once I realize I don't need X, Y or Z then nothing scares me. In a sense it's the antithesis of a consumer society which makes us want things without needing them. I can want a big meal, I may not need it. There's a big difference between wanting something and needing it. Let's take a look at the debate on consumer versus traditional values which is gaining strength in America and is highly relevant to the burgeoning middle class in India.
 
 

Going Back to Traditional Values

THERE'S A whole movement in America now under this name and it is basically the same as what you call Asian values in your part of the world­­the belief that family is more important than money. There is a hierarchy of values: God first, family second, business and community third. In America we have always had a greater sense of individual destiny because our country was founded by pioneers moving from the East to the West. Their mindset was something like this: "I'm the mountain man, let me get on my horse, ride West, get a hundred acres of land and settle down on my ranch." There was a sense of individual freedom: "I'm going to get my rifle, don't come on my land." So we, as a people didn't inherit a sense of community. Of collective consciousness.

I never understood communism and how it came about till I was in Norway which is close to the erstwhile Soviet Union. I did an exercise there. I told a group of people to walk around practicing asking skills. Verbalize their individual wants. They simply refused. It was like I was asking them to get up and take their clothes off. "You just don't do that here," they said. "You ask what the community needs and you give it. You ask how you can help your family but it's not right to ask for yourself." So, the community became more important than the individual. That's true of many Asian countries where people accept restrictions because it is for the good of the community. By contrast, in America, individual freedom is more important than the community. However, I think that as you get population density increasing all over the world, you have to start paying attention to community because it's in your face. So that's one aspect of where Asian values and American values are starting to move in one direction.

Obviously, there are nations in the world where commercial success has happened and people enjoy high levels of material comfort, just as there are others where this is not the case. In India you have both. As people start to get all those material goods, they think: "Wow, this is going to make me happy. Having that new car, the right clothes, the right haircut which makes me look good...but you know the truth is I still have PMS, I still get mad at the kids and my husband's still cheating on me." It doesn't matter how much money you have or don't have, people still have to deal with the same old issues. Money does solve some of your problems­­the kids get a good education, your couch is comfortable, you're not sleeping on the street­­but what about the humanist element?

There are all kinds of people on Beverly Hills who are on Valium because they're anxious, stressed out, they don't know how to raise their kids, their husbands are beating them up like O.J. Simpson. Here are people that should have been happy. They're super successful. But she's on drugs, he's out there beating up people. His self-esteem was so low because he was black and wanted everyone white to love him which was fine, but the point is he never mentally left the ghetto where he was raised. Our research in America shows that every prisoner in for a violent crime was abused as a child. If you get abused you've got to heal that through therapy or meditation. The same is true for many nouvea-riche people who come from poverty where they work hard and do well and have to reframe their attitudes to material success.

The debate in the Indian middle class is another example. It concerns people who have come up from near poverty in some cases and experience incredible material change in their lives. How do they deal with it in emotional terms? As Americans are now realizing, they have to hang on to their spiritual and family values.

Then, there are three practical tools which we must keep in mind when it comes to keeping our emotional well-being:

First, you've got to be able to talk about your feelings. And you've got to have someone who'll listen to you seriously. The biggest problem with many kids and teenagers today is that their parents are too busy to really listen to them. How many times have you heard a parent say: "Come on, shut up, do your homework

and leave me alone." We see in America that half the Valedictorians in our colleges are Asian names. The reason is Asians place tremendous importance on studying, getting ahead. They tend to study in families or groups. Americans study alone. But my wife, who is a counselor, has seen over and over that you have a tremendous repression within Asian families­­especially Japanese or Korean. You see repression of emotions, needs, of sexuality, playfulness. You've got this burning, seething repression of 'aliveness' if you will. On the surface you meet these very stiff, very bright, very successful persons but often their marriages are a mess. When they come to America, where the values are different, their kids start acting up because the whole cultural context of their lives has changed and they don't know how to open up.

Going back to the main point, it's critical to have someone who listens to you. I'll share an illuminating piece of research with you. A woman who gets breast cancer and joins a support group where she talks about her feelings, has double the chances of survival than someone who does not. We see this over and over again in therapy. That's how important verbalizing our feelings is. I'm always asking my kid: "How are you feeling? What's going on?" You need time with children, you can't just sit them down and say: "Tell me how you are." There's an art to it. Maybe you do it while playing basketball with your child or drawing, or at bedtime or during a long drive in the car. There's something called reflective listening. It's a good way to get people to open up.

Second, you need to be touched. In some cultures that you go into, say Hispanic cultures like Latin America and Mexico, you'll see the family sitting together on a couch, there'll be people all over each other: Then you go into a German home and everyone sits separately; studies show people literally have more space per square inch around them. It's critical that we emulate those cultures that are healthier emotionally. If we think of Latin people, they're more touchy-feely, loud with their emotions, well, it's healthy. If you go to Italy and if you're a woman, everyone's pinching you and touching you and it's sexist and all that, but it's also playful and people get their touch needs met. I think it's important that we get a minimum of 12 hugs a day. I tell my clients that they need four hugs a day for survival, eight for maintenance and 12 for growth. Widows and others who live alone have more health problems and don't live as long. Interestingly, there's research in America which shows that men who kiss their wives goodbye in the morning before they go to work have less automobile accidents. Even stroking a pet releases endorphins in our bloodstream. These hormones make us relax and feel good. Research shows stroking a pet or being stroked by someone lowers blood pressure.

Third, you must be able to ask for what you want. I don't know enough about Indian cultures but in Hispanic cultures women never ask for what they want. It's not supposed to happen.

So they drop hints and tell stories alluding to what they want to say, they express their desires as someone else's­­it's all very indirect. There is a book called The Alladin Factor which deals with this subject. When American women first started telling men what they wanted, like equal pay for equal work, our men didn't know how to react. Now, that's changed. I can see that Indian men will have to do some learning too. Because nature seems to work in a way that something underneath is always trying to come out. Wether it's children or blacks in America, those who are dominated feel the need to be freed. I've been watching on television, Asma Jahangir this Pakistani human-rights lawyer, who is visiting Delhi and I say:"Right on, go for it." You ask: What creates emotional health? It's learning to be direct. It's a characteristic we need to develop. When did you last say: "I need a hug, or would you rub my back?"

I think women here have been taught not to be demanding, that there's a greater value in being self sacrificial. But it's important they get their needs met so they can help others to meet theirs'. If I'm only helping you (the term we use in psychology is co-dependent) I'm making your needs more important than my needs. What I'm saying is different: your needs are as important as my needs and mine as yours, neither one is more important than the other. Now, when you're a parent, obviously you sacrifice your needs for your children and that's appropriate. But, ultimately, what are we teaching children? That eventually they should be able to meet their own needs. And to do so, It's okay to ask for what they---or you or I---want.