Look into the future and you see worry, look into the past and you see regret, look into the present and you shall find the purpose of life.—Anonymous
Mary G survived a challenging upbringing, a world war, early widowhood, and cancer. Then, at the age of 72, two days after Christmas, she was admitted to hospital and died within hours from a condition of which there had been no warning signs.
Her daughter, Helen, said later, ‘I still feel incredibly guilty. When I was sorting out my mother’s things, I found a letter in her purse that I had written her several weeks before, telling her that we were moving away and couldn’t say at this stage when we would be able to see her again.
‘I didn’t mean to suggest that we’d never see her again; just that we didn’t yet know how things would work out. My mother had always been fiercely independent, so I didn’t think for a moment there would be any problem. I just thought we would be able to sort things out at some later date. But, somehow, I feel, especially from the way the letter had been folded and unfolded, that she had thought she might never see my husband and me and her grandchildren again.
‘I can’t help thinking she died of a broken heart.’
As fanciful as this might seem, Mary’s daughter may be right.
If Mary G had been living in Japan at the time, the diagnosis might have been Takotsubo, or ‘Octopus Trap Cardiomyopathy’. As it was, her death was ascribed to ‘congestive heart failure’.
Octopus Trap Cardiomyopathy is a condition that gets its name from the hallmark bulging out of the apex of the heart. To Japanese researchers, this resembled the shape of the Takotsubo, or octopus trap.217 The condition, though quite rare, affects mostly postmenopausal women who are under some form of exceptional mental stress. Grief, anger, and resentment are often factors in the victim’s mental condition. The early studies suggested that a significant disturbance of the central nervous system discharges abnormal amounts of catecholamines, predominantly norepinephrine, which results in chest pain, myocardial stunning, and sometimes fatal arrhythmia.
Meanwhile, Western researchers are starting to refer to ‘broken heart syndrome’, a metaphorical description beloved of romantic writers and resonating with most people. Sadness and loss are often accompanied by feelings of pain and constriction in the chest, even if heart failure doesn’t ensue.
An early pioneer in the association between emotional and physical pain, Colin Murray Parkes, 30 years ago published a comprehensive study demonstrating the phenomenon was more than a literary device. He showed that many people who failed to adjust to the loss of a loved one became susceptible to a wide range of illnesses, with heart disease heading the list.
Since then, the Mayo Clinic’s Dr Chet Rihal has studied the ‘broken heart syndrome’, and confirms a strong link between emotional loss and cardiac problems. Among other findings, he notes roughly 10% of people who survive a heart attack after the loss of a loved one are likely to have another attack within a short period of time.218 However, by far the majority of people coping with grief and loneliness survive without serious problems. Genetics and general health undoubtedly are factors in their ability to restore allostasis, while social connectedness, which we explore elsewhere (see pages 35 to 36), is another significant factor.
Despite overwhelming evidence that people absorb, filter, and adapt to a perfect storm of data that assaults them every moment of every day, Western medicine remains vague about the mechanisms that sometimes make stress toxic, and even life-threatening. Even though most researchers and practitioners of all specialties accept the corrosive effect of ‘stress’, the treatment modalities are patchy—suppress negative feelings, usually by pharmacological means, or remove the presumed source of stress.
We believe the inconsistent, and often ineffective, approach to the stress ‘epidemic’ results from a failure to distinguish between challenge (which is experienced and responded to with enthusiasm and self-efficacy) and what a study by Cornell University’s Center for Advanced Human Resources calls ‘hindrances’, events which leave individuals feeling overwhelmed, ineffective, and ill.219 Far from helping the victim recover, some studies have even shown that, rather than improve conditions, removal of all perceived hindrances causes the subject’s health and wellbeing to deteriorate even further.
As we’ve said many times, the default ruling therapeutic response is to try and block the effects of the imbalance (the racing heart, the churning stomach), by the use of drugs, and even, in rare cases, by sympathectomy (the severing of key nerves transmitting sensations to the brain). The alternative is some form of ‘talking therapy’—counselling, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and so on.
By and large, stress-related conditions are regarded as a product of the mind. Indeed, people suffering intense emotions often consider themselves somehow lacking in mental or moral strength. In reality—and, of vital importance—emotions originate in the body, not in the mind.
This is so important to the core values and approaches of Medical NLP that we will repeat it: Emotions originate in the body, not in the mind.
Anyone who has ever experienced anger, loss, grief, joy, bliss, or any other powerful emotion, understands this intuitively. Hearts race or ache, stomachs knot and churn, throats choke up. Despite all attempts to ignore them, the symptoms persist until either time or circumstances (or, sometimes death) put them to rest.
Until recently, the involvement of heart and gut in emotional crisis was regarded as incidental—a side-effect of an overload of stress hormones—and little more. Now, in certain more enlightened research establishments at least, the inner ‘wisdom’ of both heart and digestive tract are starting to be recognized.
Both systems are now known to have many thousands of brain-like neurons which function by perceiving fluctuations in the environment and adapting their behavior accordingly. They are even known to log their responses to make later behaviors faster and more flexible. In short, they are capable of creating memories.220,221
Most pharmacological research has focused on the brain and the substances it produces. Drug companies continue to seek the ‘magic bullet’ that will alter brain function and bring about positive changes in mood and behavior.
However, aside from their semi-autonomous neuronal function, the heart and gut—effectively ‘mini brains’—produce a range of neurochemicals of their own, including adrenaline (for sudden spurts of energy), atrial natriuretic factor, or ANF, to regulate blood pressure, and serotonin (the mood-regulating neuro-transmitter), more than 90% of which is produced in the gut. The heart even manufactures its own supply of oxcytocin, the so-called ‘love peptide’, which floods the body when people fall in love, bond with infants, or stroke their cats.
The most startling point about all this is that both heart and gut ‘talk’ to the brain and vice versa. There is even some evidence that either system can perceive problems and react accordingly before conscious awareness dawns.
The effects seem to be trans-cultural; societies across the world intuitively accept the heart and gut areas as central to their models (and their experience) of psycho-physical-spiritual stability. In the West, people have many idioms that point to a somatic origin: ‘following the heart’ (desire), ‘knowing in my heart of hearts’ (certainty), ‘gut feelings’ (intuition), and ‘not having the stomach for it’ (cowardice or fear), to highlight just a few.
And, in the area of personal and spiritual development, many conventions, such as the Vedic and Sufi traditions, have given rise to various heart-centered exercises and meditations which are strikingly similar to the clinically effective patterns and processes described later in this chapter.
On reflection, though, it should come as no surprise that the brain, heart, and digestive system are all involved in the fight-or-flight response. The vagus nerve, the largest in the body, meanders from the brainstem to the heart and down into the abdomen. It not only regulates the parasympathetic nervous system, thus damping down our runaway emotions, but it also communicates directly to the immune system through the neurochemical, acetylcholine. Without the action of the vagus nerve, the human heart would race at around 115 beats per minute, instead of the more usual 72 or so.222 When it is activated, it is often accompanied by a warm, spreading, liquid feeling in the area of the heart.
Dr. Stephen Porges, of the Department of Psychiatry and the Director of the Brain-Body Center in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, regards the vagus nerve as central to the development of mammals as socially engaged creatures. A key player in ‘neuroception’—the ability of neural circuits to distinguish whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life threatening—the vagus nerve is deeply involved in the phenomena of empathy and entrainment (which we discuss in Chapter 3; see pages 29 to 33).223,224
Porges believes that, as the pathways responsible for heart-regulation moved from the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus in reptiles to the nucleus ambiguus in mammals, a ‘face–heart connection’ evolved. This gave rise to an engagement system that would enable social interactions to regulate the visceral (internal feelings or somatic markers) state.225 This, Porges adds, is why a baby coos at a caregiver but cries at a stranger, or why a small child is attracted by a parent’s embrace, but regards a stranger’s hug as an assault.226
According to Porges’s theory, faulty neuroception may lie at the root of several psychiatric disorders, including autism, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression, and Reactive Attachment Disorder. Imbalance in the vagal response means a risk of system-wide dysfunction, or even collapse, it would seem. On the other hand, early research suggests that vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), using electrical impulses, may prove useful in treating a wide range of conditions, from intractable depression, migraine, and anxiety disorders,227 through fibromyalgia228 and epilepsy, to various autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis.229
As always, balance is everything. Over-stimulation of the vagus nerve can cause a drop in blood-pressure, dizziness, and fainting. The lightheadedness that often follows violent vomiting, or straining to pass a particularly solid bowel-movement, is caused by over-stimulation of this nerve, a response otherwise known as vasovagal syncope.230
Deliberate over-stimulation of the vagus nerve, known as the Valsalva Maneuver, is sometimes employed to calm a racing heartbeat, or to lift a heavy weight. The Valsalva Maneuver involves taking a deep breath and holding it while closing the glottis (the vocal folds of the throat) to trap the breath and pushing the belly outward.
Gentle rubbing on the eyeballs or drinking or splashing the face with extremely cold water can also stimulate the vagus nerve.
It is important to note that the Valsalva Maneuver and the eyeball-rubbing techniques should not be practiced without medical supervision. Although allostatic overload is a dominant factor in most modern physical and psychological ills, some people may be at risk if their parasympathetic system is fired up too much or too quickly.
Fortunately, however, the vagus nerve can be stimulated in less invasive ways. In fact, influencing the vagal response may be at the heart (ambiguity intended) of many traditional approaches to health, including yoga, t’ai chi, and, especially, various breathing techniques, such as India’s ancient pranayama and China’s qigong.
Dr. Mark Liponis, who has studied a wide range of breathing patterns, suggests that certain exercises, especially those involving abdominal breathing, may stimulate the vagus nerve, sending acetylcholine cascading through the body, triggering the relaxation response, and damping down inflammation.231
The natural instinct of most human beings is to move away from uncomfortable experiences, both internal and external. The widespread use of psychotropic drugs, including the ubiquitous selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) prescribed in their billions for anxiety and depression, is an attempt to facilitate this. Self-medication—including off-prescription drugs, alcohol, sex, and food—is a common response to the discomfort of an under-performing vagus nerve. However, attempting to suppress uncomfortable feelings may be more damaging to cardiovascular and other tissue health than the emotions themselves.
People who do not express emotions, including those who suffer alexithymia, a sub-clinical inability to identify and describe subjective emotions, have been shown to suffer both altered immune responses and an increase in the inflammatory markers, high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) and Interleukin-6 (IL-6).232
In pointing out the above, we emphasize that we are not endorsing the now-discredited pseudo-therapy of pillow-thumping to discharge ‘repressed anger’. Rather, and, as we will demonstrate, we have found that learning to be mindful of, align with, and resolve, the physical manifestation of strong emotion is what helps restore flow and functionality, not ‘letting it all out’.
Overwhelming emotions almost always have their origins in past experience. The pattern-matching capabilities of the human brain work swiftly, often beyond conscious awareness, and sometimes to debilitating effect. The fact that events already experienced should resurface and find new footholds in the present should be regarded as phenomenological invitations to heal, rather than a punishment from the past.
In effect, this is a clear shift away from a predominantly mind-based healing approach, to one in which the body—more specifically the viscera—not only functions to ‘communicate’ a systemic imbalance, but also to suggest a route through which auto-regulation might take place.
But how will we know what works?
Most new systems are greeted in the mainstream with suspicion, and, probably, with some reason. It is generally believed that no universally accepted ‘objective’ measurement of the effectiveness of any treatment purporting to ‘fix’ stress (or any other psychological) disorders actually exists, therefore anything without an acceptable evidence-base tends to be rejected out of hand.
However, as we mentioned in an earlier chapter, a system for measuring the down-regulation of a person’s autonomic nervous system (ANS) that is often described as gold-standard, placebo-free, and evidence-based already exists.
Predominantly used by cardiologists to measure fetal cardiac distress, Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is regarded as a ‘window’ on the functioning of the ANS. General health and wellbeing of the subject is high when both arms of the ANS, the sympathetic and para-sympathetic systems, are functioning in harmony. If they are not, dysfunction and possibly even death may be imminent.
What makes this truly paradigm-shifting is the fact that the technology mentioned a few paragraphs back can also not only measure the effectiveness of any treatment, but also help individuals learn how to access and function in optimal states at will.
In simple terms, heart rate variability (HRV) is the measure of the intervals between heartbeats. These intervals need to be infinitesimally variable in order to respond to changes in the individual’s environment, both internal and external. Depressed HRV (also known as low coherence) is associated with under-functioning of the system; elevated HRV (high coherence) signals optimal functioning.
Despite its universal acceptance as a reliable indicator of incipient heart failure, little attention has been paid to using HRV technology to measure up-regulation of the nervous system—otherwise known as ‘coherence’. Coherence is not, as is often assumed, a deeply relaxed, ‘down-time’ state. Coherence has its own distinctive characteristics that stand apart from the more usually accepted three states of consciousness, waking, sleeping, and dreaming.
As humans, we tend to experience emotions sequentially—surprise followed by excitement followed by happiness followed by nostalgia, for example. However, people exhibiting high coherence, in which heart, brain, and autonomic nervous system are functioning in synchrony, describe a state of deep comfort and relaxation running in parallel with high focus and attentiveness. Various meditative traditions refer to this integrated state as ‘mindfulness’ (Buddhism) or ‘restful alertness’ (Transcendental Meditation). As one subject reported while demonstrating high coherence, ‘I feel very sharp and dynamic in my dealings with the outside world, but inside I’m extremely calm and quiet.’
Coherence not only refers to increased synchronisation between the two branches of the autonomic nervous system, but also to a shift toward heightened parasympathetic activity, increased heart-brain synchronisation, improved arterial flexibility, and entrainment between diverse physiological oscillatory systems.233 Some of the markers of coherent functioning include a sense of emotional and physical wellbeing, behavioral flexibility, and improved cognitive performance. Regular experience of coherence has been demonstrated in a number of studies to facilitate the body-mind’s ability to self-regulate.
In the West, the measurement of coherence as a marker of health and wellbeing is largely disregarded. As one consultant cardiologist explained, ‘We simply don’t have a drug or a procedure that can improve coherence. We know a lot about the breakdown of health and we can measure that quite accurately. But we don’t have a model of health that corresponds to the concept of improving coherence, so it isn’t really even on medicine’s radar.’
Once again, it’s a different picture in Japan.
Ikigai is a Japanese word with no English equivalent. In English, it is often translated as ‘subjective wellbeing’. However, Japanese researchers have associated ikigai with a number of qualities, including a sense of meaning and purpose and a joyful or welcoming attitude to life. High ikigai is associated with health and longevity; low ikigai with disease and reduced life expectancy.
A seminal longitudinal study conducted in 1994 and recently published surveyed tens of thousands of Japanese between the ages of 40 and 79. Embedded within a large number of questions was one that simply asked, ‘Do you have ikigai in your life?’234
Over the following seven years, researchers monitored the subjects, taking into consideration various accepted risk factors, known as ‘confounds’, including age, gender, body-weight, smoking, alcohol consumption, diet, stress levels, and history of disease. When the data were analyzed, ikigai emerged as a highly accurate predictor of who would still be alive at the end of the study. Simply put, nearly 95% of those who reported having a sense of meaning in their lives were still alive after seven years, compared with 83% of those who had reported no meaning in their lives.
All this considered, we look forward to the study that correlates ikigai with high coherence—and which demonstrates to the full satisfaction of the Western scientific world that health and wellbeing, as well as the techniques and treatments designed to promote them, are as measurable as dysfunction and disease.
For those practitioners who do not have access to the technology to measure HRV (and it is becoming increasingly available to even lay practitioners), a simple and fairly accurate marker of an individual’s state of coherence lies in his breathing pattern.
Mainstream medicine pays little attention to breathing, except where respiratory tract or cardiac disorders are suspected. In these cases, investigation is restricted to respiratory rate, dyspnea (difficulty in breathing), tachypnea (unusually rapid breathing), blood oxygen saturation, the sound of breathing (for example, wheezing or vesicular), and recession (caused by abnormalities of the muscles of the chest wall).
The Medical NLP practitioner, on the other hand, is encouraged to be alert to:
All these behaviors result in over-breathing which forces carbon dioxide from the lungs, stripping it from blood, tissue, and cells. This, in turn, prevents oxygen from being released from the hemoglobin into tissues and organs, a phenomenon first identified in the early 20th century and known as the Bohr Effect.235
A number of research projects now suggest that reduced carbon dioxide levels can cause excessive cortical excitability, resulting in anxiety,236 depression, and a wide range of physical and psychological disorders.
According to cardiologist Claude Lum, hyperventilation may give rise to a collection of ‘bizarre and often apparently unrelated’ symptoms which may affect any part of the body, any organ or system.237 Lum coined the phrase ‘fat file syndrome’ to describe what we in Medical NLP refer to as the ‘revolving door syndrome’, where patients keep returning, or move from practitioner to practitioner, amassing an impressive array of chronic symptoms, none of which responds to conventional treatment.
It follows, then, that helping patients shift the pattern of breathing away from hyperventilation will not only be beneficial to overall health, but, since a modified breathing pattern can reduce cortical excitement, will also increase receptiveness to any advice or treatment that follows. Simply put, a relatively simple shift in the breathing pattern is the quickest, most effective, and most easily measured way of improving coherence. Experiencing, or even remembering, events that evoke feelings of love, gratitude, or other positive emotion, can also have a measurable effect.
Many breathing exercises exist which purport to have beneficial value, but the easiest to learn focuses on a simple relationship between the in- and out-breaths. Put simply, the in-breath increases sympathetic functioning of the nervous system (which is an argument against encouraging anxious people to ‘take a deep breath’), while the out-breath activates the parasympathetic response. A slightly prolonged out-breath, then, triggers a sense of calm alertness, conducive to attentive listening, improved understanding, and greater adherence to new instructions and advice. Both in-breath and out-breath should be through the nostrils.
Even a brief period of this kind of mindful attention on the heart-beat and breathing pattern can have a far-reaching and beneficial effect on the subject’s wellbeing.
Our personal experience has been extremely encouraging. Patients who are taught to become mindful of their heart rate and breathing pattern and to use both as a kind of biological feedback process have reported marked improvement in a wide range of conditions, including anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic pain, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD).
Before-and-after HRV readings seem to support the theory that the improvement in health and wellbeing is mirrored by an increase in coherence.
For those readers interested in following current research in cardiac coherence and health, we suggest you visit the website of the HeartMath Institute in Boulder Creek, California.238 The institute is a leader in current research on stress, emotions, ‘heart intelligence’, and other diverse areas related to human physiology and performance, including heart-brain interactions and cardiac coherence. It offers a number of approaches to improving health and wellbeing. A version of the basic HeartMath technique follows:
As you breathe in and out, imagine that the air moves through the chest wall, so that it is the heart, rather than the lungs, that expands and contracts.
After a few moments of ‘heart breathing’, recall a strongly positive emotion, like love or gratitude.
Continue the exercise for five minutes or so.
Our recommendation is that the following program, which is slightly more complex and involves using the individual’s own heartbeat as a biological feedback device, be adopted by practitioners as well as their patients. As we discuss elsewhere in this book (see Chapter 3, pages 29 to 33), emotions are contagious239—and, therefore, our assertion is that coherence is, too.
Exercise 1
1. Place the palm of your left hand on the center of your chest. Comfortably curl the fingers of your right hand around your left wrist and find your radial pulse just beneath your thumb.
2. Sit quietly for a few moments, simply being mindful of the rising and falling of your chest beneath your palm. Stay neural and detached as you do this. Do not take deep breaths. Simply allow your breathing to settle into its own natural rhythm.
3. After 20 or 30 seconds, slightly lengthen your out-breath without altering the in-breath. Find the maximum exhalation you can comfortably make. Your count may be something like 3 in, 5 out, or 4 in, 7 out…whatever seems most comfortable to you. The important thing is to maintain a small in-breath and a longer out-breath for the duration of the exercise.
4. Now alter your rhythm (still short in, longer out) to match your pulse rate. In effect, you are using your own heartbeat as a biofeedback mechanism.
5. While maintaining the steady rhythm, led by the beating of your heart, recall some person or event that evokes a strongly positive emotion of peace, love, or gratitude. If thinking about an individual, our advice is to choose carefully. Ensure it is someone who is without ‘baggage’, and for whom you can have unconditionally positive feelings, without expecting a response. Since few adult relationships are truly unconditional, we suggest choosing a child or a beloved pet. In neither of these cases do we expect ‘pay-back’ for our love.
6. Relax into the feeling, while maintaining the ratio of small in-breath to longer out-breath for a few minutes. If your mind wanders, simply return to the practice when your awareness returns.
You can adopt this exercise as a daily meditation, say 15 minutes twice a day (the optimal time, we find), or you can simply practice a few breaths at any time you feel the need to ‘re-connect’ or ground yourself…or, better yet, both.
You can also do this ‘on the fly’, without interrupting whatever you’re doing to sit down and close your eyes. Simply put your attention where the palm of your hand was resting, then follow the instructions above, from 2 onwards. Those practitioners familiar with the core NLP technique of anchoring (discussed elsewhere in this book—see pages 147 to 152) may experiment with anchoring this subjective experience of coherence, remembering that the effect will be deepened with regular practice.
Since the effect seems to spill over into the rest of your life from some time after even a few minutes of this practice, we also suggest you do it several times a day, whether you feel stressed or not. In time, this becomes a pre-emptive strike against autonomic overload.
The next technique should be used wherever any strong emotion, such as anxiety, fear, anger, and even jealousy, threatens to engulf the individual. The Medical NLP model, which subscribes strongly to the belief that bodily feelings are somatic markers of cortical dynamics (another way of saying when you become mindful of the physical expression of your emotions, you are opening a doorway into the workings of the brain), has developed several simple techniques to resolve relatively complex ‘psychological’ experiences.
Exercise 2
1. As soon as you become aware of the emotion, scan your body. Notice where the emotion expresses itself. It will usually concentrate somewhere along the mid-line down the body, where innervation is most dense.
2. Simply mindfully observe the physical expression of your emotion. Breathe mindfully, small breath in, longer breath out. Avoid judgments and inferences, such as ‘painful’, ‘awful’, ‘scary’, and even labels, such as ‘anxiety’ or ‘anger’. Simply observe, openly and objectively and with a sense of curiosity. Remember, these ‘somatic markers’, or symptoms, are communications that something in the body-mind system is off-kilter. They are not there to hurt or punish you.
3. Pay attention to their physical characteristics—size, shape, temperature, coloration, or any other qualities—without attempting to change or remove them. Give them full permission to move or change in whatever way occurs spontaneously.
4. Notice particularly how the sensation moves and where it is blocked. You will almost certainly find that you have tensed up to prevent the feeling from moving. For example, anxiety is often experienced as a sensation fountaining upward from the stomach into the throat where most sufferers tense up, fearing irrationally that it will cause them some terrible harm.
5. Give any blocked sensation permission to complete its movement. This often requires courage, but it is particularly important. Relax around the sensation and let it move of its own accord. When resistance is removed, the sensation always accelerates into feelings of greater comfort, if not of complete resolution.
6. Continue as long as is comfortable. Do not fall into the trap of trying to use this technique to block the emotion. That will only set up further tension and discomfort. If you need to pause the process for any reason, simply make a mental ‘bookmark’ to come back to the point where you left off, and resume the process as soon as you can.
This is a skill, and requires practice. A key prerequisite is an easy, non-judgmental detachment from the experience. We suspect a substantial cause of pain derives from people’s tendency to verbalize their subjective experience as a way of desensitizing themselves against the neurological perturbation. However, as an examination of the Structural Differential reveals, this process of ‘naming and framing’ is usually catastrophic. The inferences, both verbal and visual, feed back into the higher levels of experience, increasing physical and emotional worsening of the experience at every pass.
The first time you are successful at simply allowing a somatic ‘event’ simply to be, without any attempt to control it, you will almost certainly be struck by the effectiveness of such a simple process. Change can occur spontaneously and quickly and in the right direction. The body-mind system has an inner ‘wisdom’ that always moves towards auto-regulation, given the right circumstances. We are facilitating a natural process, not ‘making it happen’.
Also, be aware that change can be experienced in many different ways. The symptom may simply fade away. Or, it may occur less frequently. Or, your nervous system may simply ‘forget’ how to do it. Or, it may transform into another feeling or sensation. It may even intensify, until it goes over a threshold, rather like an over-inflated balloon bursting.
In all these events, and any others than might occur, simply stay open and curious, allow whatever happens to happen in its own way, following the symptom whatever it might be doing, and be prepared to surprise and delight yourself when change occurs, spontaneously and without effort.
Optimal experience is something that we make happen.—Mihaly
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