Want bit more stress-FREEDOM in your life?
Here’s an idea for a bit more stress-FREEDOM in your life:
http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6611967/not-google-plus
the culture of stress-FREEDOM is optional
I used to make an analogy to illustrate the difference between an egalitarian social group pursuing stress-freedom versus a highly hierarchical one that cultivates dominance through aggression by comparing the two groups to bonobos vs. chimpanzees as we know them from studies and articles which all insist that the differences are hardwired in the animals’ brains, like the article published in the Washington Post.
Watching ‘Stress, Portrait of a Killer – Full Doc 2008 by National Geographic’ ( a 15 minutes version is also available) I’m not so sure about the hard wiring. If baboons can change their culture so radically from aggressive into peaceful why could humans not do it, too?
True, for the baboons the cultural change was only possible after the aggressive stressor jerks of the community were killed by their own damaged immune systems (and some infected meat stolen from humans)…
Epicurus and his friends did not wait for all the aggressive human bullies to kill themselves but formed intentional alternative communities for the cultivation of human flourishing through stress-FREEDOM and friendship.
In fact, in our own days, too, more and more human groups are opting out from the majority’s aggressive hierarchical competitive structures and build alternative communities with different structures, like the 200 year old ordered anarchy on Tristan da Cunha or the hundreds of intentional communities in the US and West Europe.
buy nothing days as exercise for freedom
I have just read an interesting interview Jules Evans did way back in 2002 with Kalle Lasn, the founder of Adbusters, which is a Vancouver-based collective of ‘culture jammers’, and the inventors of Buy Nothing Day:
http://www.politicsofwellbeing.com/2011/06/kalle-lasn-founder-of-adbusters-on.html?spref=fb
Ancient Epicureans had up to 30 “buy nothing days” a month. Even wealthy Roman Epicureans reserved 3-7 days a month for austerity: they slept on the hard floor and ate only bread and drank only water. The sense of this exercise was to keep up their faith in the doctrine that what [is thought by most people as] hard is in fact easy to put up with. It showed them that they can be happy without their belongings, supplies and services – a state pretty often achieved in cases when the emperor wanted their property for his friends and exiled them.
I had periods in my life when I had to live on extremely meager resources and I can say that this fact never affected my mental well being. Even if I don’t need to convince myself of this fact I still keep a bread-and-water day every now and then, just as a reminder of one of the techniques of stress-FREEDOM.
I am proud of my friends
I don’t believe pride is an emotion anybody should be proud of experiencing if
“pride is an inward directed emotion that exemplifies either a high sense of one’s personal status or ego (i.e., leading to judgments of personality and character) or the specific mostly positive emotion that is a product of praise or independent self-reflection.” (Wikipedia)
Especially Epicureans should be ashamed of it and work hard at getting rid of it as soon as possible since its ugly head indicates an over-inflated ego or a dangerous vulnerability to praise. If independent self-reflection should lead to pride one ought to improve one’s self-reflective skills. Urgently.
I can’t help feeling proud of my friends, though.
It took me over forty years to understand that I don’t understand the correlation between my needs, my desires and the way I satisfy those desires, resulting in stressing myself, my friends and family, my coworkers and supervisors, clients and suppliers. It took me another five years to read all the relevant books on Epicurean life techniques and happiness studies to work my way out of the jungle and another five years to hone my tools by using them to set people free of their self-defeating beliefs and unhealthy habits and help them dismantle the walls they build between themselves and their pathway to happiness through congruence and stress-FREEDOM. It took me another year and the invaluable support of my wife to write a wise AND funny book for those who are interested in spending the rest of their lives walking toward their own happiness instead of working for their own or someone else’s greed.
My friends, however, must have been born wise and don’t seem to need the distilled fruits of hard-earned practical wisdom packed in nicely wrapped palatable pieces of advice. They must be champions in analyzing their desires, in satisfying their natural needs through synergistic satisfiers, in keeping their lifestyle and behavior patterns in line with their values and attitudes, serenely threading down their own proven pathways from pain to pleasure, producing their own happiness though congruence and stress-FREEDOM.
I must assume they do all this judging from the absence of their comments on the excerpts of my book that I have been publishing in sequels in my blog. The only topic they mildly reacted to was sequel 15: “How Is It Possible To Find Romantic Love? “
Complete strangers ask me when will my book be available in print and on kindl, when will I start training and coaching sessions on the Galenian Epicurean Conduct of Life, or at least publicly speak about it. (Which I don’t’ know yet. I still have to take care of my health and the happiness of my family.)
But it’s a relief that my friends are doing well, confidently threading their own pathways toward happiness.( Or what they believe is happiness?)
It’s a shame to feel proud but who could help not being proud of them? (Maybe Epicurus?)
HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO FIND ROMANTIC LOVE? (PP16)
Here’s sequel 16 of my Epicurean Happiness Guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” (from Chapter 2: NEEDS)
You might be wondering how you’re supposed to find your soul mate when, on one hand, Maslow and Max-Neef declare love and affection and sex to be important needs, while on the other hand, you’re not supposed to be needy and scare off anyone who’s not of a mind to serve as your rescuer. That’s a darn good question, with a fairly simple answer.
If we all had identical upbringings during which we successfully satisfied all of our needs, progressed in an orderly fashion up Maslow’s hierarchy, and dodged serious mental problems, we’d all enter the find-a-mate marketplace on equal footing where needs are concerned.
But that’s a huge, probably impossible, “if.” We’re not all sitting atop a solid brick foundation; most of us are missing a brick or two. For instance, those of us who grew up in poverty may not have had all of our safety needs satisfied. As a result of not having much money, maybe our parents could not afford good health insurance coverage, so trips to the doctor were few and far between, which resulted in our not having received the medical care we needed at a critical time. As a result, our teeth are crooked and stained, or we’re obese, or we have acne scars, or we need thick glasses.
Maybe we wore unfashionable hand-me-downs instead of the latest trendy clothes that everyone else — or so it seemed — got to wear. Maybe we couldn’t participate in sports because we had to work every day after school. These circumstances certainly don’t make us unlovable, but they very well could cause us to have very low self-confidence, low self-esteem and low expectations — in short, unmet needs.
This is where self-knowledge comes in handy. If we understand ourselves and our perceptions, shortcomings and idiosyncrasies, we can learn to accept ourselves as we are and push forward with a healthy relationship, rather than focusing on our sorry past and expecting someone to assume the job of parent and fill the chinks and gaps in our faulty foundations.
Our goal should be to be able to state with confidence and sincerity: “I need you because I love you.” Can you see how this is very different from “I love you because I need you”?
To read my complete Epicurean Happiness Guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” go to http://stressfreedomguide.com/
what doesn’t kill me, makes me thinner
or: every cancer cure has a silver lining!
I knew, I even signed a paper proving that I was told, that radiation therapy of the abdominal area can cause, among other side effects, also diarrhea.
Which it did. At first only on the treatment free days on weekends giving me a good excuse to skip the mandatory family walks.
The last three treatments were made with higher doses of radiation on smaller surfaces, in order to boost the curative effect. Which I assume they did, but they definitely boosted the side effects as well.
For the last three weeks (two weeks before and one week after finishing the radiation therapy) I have had the worst case of diarrhea in my life. The last three days I have been practically living on crackers, broth and cranberry juice.
However, during the 6 weeks of treatment I lost 12 pounds (5.4 kg) weight, a side effect of the side effect diarrhea, that I don’t mind at all.
The flipside is that the side effects of the therapy should dwindle away in 3-4 weeks after finishing it and I am going to put on weight again, adding to my overweight – if I don’t dwindle away myself in the process. Which would be too much loss of weight, even if my body mass index had turned into ideal.
Which I hope it won’t since my last motto is: better overweight in the bed than ideal weight in the casket.
I am planning on a wild experiment today: to gormandize a whole boiled potato and a whole grated apple today, on top of the beef broth and cranberry juice liberally served by my wife. It will have a win-win outcome: if I can hold them, I will keep, or, maybe even slightly increase my weight while definitely increasing my energy and pleasure levels. If I can’t: I will improve my body mass index.
If this isn’t positive thinking, I don’t know what is.
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