By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The concept of cellular memory was made very real and personal to me today, in the woods.

Yesterday, it happened that I chose a very icy location for my daily hike, slipped several times, fell twice, and banged myself in a few places. I even iced one of the spots when I got home. Those areas were still a bit sore for a couple of hours but were OK by the evening.

Today, I went to different nearby woods, free of ice, just a thin and not-very-slippery coating of snow. And as soon as I got out of the car, two of the spots I banged yesterday—below my left knee and above my right wrist—started to hurt! They’d felt fine all day.

I am convinced they “remembered” that the snowy woods had caused pain the day before.

Even more remarkable: once they “realized” that the conditions were, in fact, different, the pain subsided quickly. Within about three minutes, my leg was no longer hurting. Another couple of minutes and my arm felt fine too.

If I’m reading the signals correctly, the implications are that any body part not only has a memory, but has emotions and even thought.

Since the mid-1970s, I’ve paid at least some attention to the way bodies react to stress. I’ve explored a number of modalities, from Re-evaluation Counseling (all about releasing rapped emotions that often manifest as tension) to rolfing to yoga to Network Chiropractic to Alexander Technique (and several others). And I’ve explored uncountable numbers of audios, books, and articles about our ability co influence our own fate and to manifest what we desire–often called the Law of Attraction (LoA). Many of these work on releasing stored tension in the body that stems at least in part from emotional distress.  Thus, my discovery today actually makes a good deal of sense to me. (And by the way, I have been enormously helped by the Alexander work, which I’ve done steadily since around 2005,  with a very skilled practitioner, Ruth Rootberg of Amherst, MA. Any Western Massachusetts people reading this might want to try her out.)

While I recognize that this may seem off-topic or too “woo-woo” for this blog, I’ll put out the idea that it’s actually very, very relevant. Changing oneself is key to changing the world. Understanding how much power we have to shape our own destiny helps us create the planet we’d like to live on—and looking at cellular memory might be a part of that. If we can have Prosperity Consciousness or an abundance mindset, can’t we also teach our bodies to de-stress?

Have you had any experience with this sort of cellular memory? Please share by posting a comment.

 

 

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business-general, Diversity, Entrepreneurship, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, travel

Two weeks in Turkey, not speaking the language, with my marketing radar wide open. Here’s some of what I noticed.

  1. A surprising number of Turkish TV commercials remind me very much of US commercials from the 1960s and 1970s: housewives demonstrating the superiority of some cleaning product, dancing chocolate bars, and so on. At the same time, some are totally state-of-the-art, with special effects and much more modern concepts about marketing. But as in America, often these forget to actually sell the product.
  2. At least during the slow season of our visit, most shopkeepers and hospitality business owners (and the general public) are very friendly, and eager to meet special requests.
  3. Personal service in the hospitality industry seems to be a Turkish hallmark. We repeatedly experienced people going the extra mile for us or plying us with gifts. As an example, one hotel proprietor arranged our public bus tickets to the next town, had the tickets delivered to the hotel, booked on us two tours at the next destination we were going to, and even paid the minibus fare from his gleaming hotel to the bus station, some 12 km away. Another one saw that we were making sandwiches and she supplemented our bread and cheese with a huge gift of fruit, olives, and better bread. An enterprising travel agent across from the bus station had his agency open hours before the others, in time to meet the early morning arrivals from the night buses. Offering a warm room on a cold morning and help communicating with hotels, he was doing a healthy business selling tours, balloon tickets, and lodging.And yet, some of the basics are neglected. One hotelkeeper never cleaned our room on a three-day stay (though all our other hotels cleaned regularly and thoroughly). A restaurant owner who served an excellent meal and whose dining room was beautifully decorated had not bothered to fix a long-broken door latch in the bathroom or his leaky toilet mount. Nonsmoking laws are violated constantly (almost every adult male Turk seems to smoke).
  4. The Turkish business community seems way behind in its use of the Internet. Vast numbers of businesses don’t have a website, and if they have an e-mail address on their business cards—many don’t—it’s Hotmail or maybe Gmail. Of those that do have a website, a surprising percentage have a useless brochureware site that gives nothing you can’t get out of a phone book—sometimes in multiple languages. And yet, the two-room hotel we chose in Goreme had a very professional English-language website, even though its owner speaks no English.
  5. My willingness to do business with someone is inversely related to how much pressure they exert—and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Despite this, in all the tourist locations, touts are everywhere, some of them quite obnoxious. Those with a different approach really stand out. In one souvenir craft shop whose owner gave us all the time we wanted to browse his offerings, answered our questions but otherwise left us alone, we bought five different items. Often, however, we were prepared to buy, but left without buying as the pressure increased. Yet the behavior continues.
  6. We saw very few beggars; much fewer than in the US. In Turkey, it seems the economically marginal eke out a living by trying to sell something: a glass of fresh-squeezed juice, a bagel, a bag of roasted chestnuts, a shoeshine, a song—or, of course, earn a commission from one of the rug or craft merchants. Particularly in Old City Istanbul, male strangers will approach you, chat you up, give some bit of genuinely helpful advice, and steer you toward their particular rug shop.
  7. There is a great deal of competition among nearby businesses, but also a great deal of cooperation. Merchants respect their neighbors and will work together to make a sale for someone. Tea shops in the Grand Bazaar do a thriving business ferrying chai to the rug merchants who offer it to their prospects.
  8. During the slow season (such as our December visit), many businesses hang on by the slimmest of threads. One restaurant owner told us he’d had one table to serve the previous day and we were, at 1 p.m., the only ones that day. He was quite excited that he already had a reservation for the following day.
  9. The sampling economy is so taken for granted in Istanbul that locals will simply reach in to a bulk food bin and try something without asking. If they like it, they buy. We didn’t have a chance to observe these kinds of markets outside of the Istanbul region, so I don’t know if that’s true elsewhere.

Crafts will vary enormously in quality and price. If you plan to go beyond Istanbul, get a sense of what the items you like cost. You may find them for half as much in other regions, or you may see them higher and want to pick them up before you fly out. If you want to make sure you’re buying Turkish goods, check labels carefully

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environmenl, Environment, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, Peace and War, People Helping People, poverty, Technology Tagged with , , , , ,

Watch this video about the Copenhagen Wheel, a device that captures and stores energy from cyclists pedaling and coasting, and supplements pedal power on the uphills or over long distances. And then read a few of the comments.

To me, this is brilliant technology! First, it makes biking—and particularly bicycle commuting over distances of 20 to 50 miles—an attractive option for tens of thousands of people who’ve felt unwilling to try it before. That, in turn, reduces the number of cars on the road, which has dozens of advantages to the planet and to our pocketbooks. Second, it makes it possible for the moderate cyclist (like me) to go much farther by bike.

A lot of the comments are angry that this will disrupt their exercise. I think they’re not thinking about it the right way. Instead of blaming a machine for interfering with their workout, think about the ability to bike instead of drive to good riding places some distance away, or to bike much farther distances to explore an area farther out.

I do ride for exercise. And I do face a BIG hill when I go out my door. I’ve learned to manage it, but when I first moved to that area, it was very tough. Something like this would have been a nice transition as I learned to conquer that tough hill.

And for the exercise-only bikers, I have one more suggestion: write to the company and tell them you want a manual override option: an off switch, in other words. Then you have the boost when you need it.

Let’s apply this kind of creativity to every aspect of our lives! We could not only solve climate change but war, poverty, and other global issues. I wish this company much success!

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Events, General Commentary, localism/locavore, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

I choose not to participate in the always-crowded and frequently violent orgy of consumerism called Black Friday. I do my best to shop locally most of the time, I don’t like crowed craziness, and I know Black Friday is not really a help to local small businesses that can’t afford to deep-discount.

There’s an alternative celebration on the day after US Thanksgiving that resonates more with me: Buy Nothing Day: 24 hours without any purchasing activity. I can’t always do it; sometimes the gas tank is empty or I’m flying home from Thanksgiving in another part of the country. But this year, I see no reason to spend any money today.

Wikipedia has a nice page on the history of Buy Nothing Day and some creative incarnations of anti-consumerism.

Meanwhile, society at large is going in the opposite direction. I was really hoping that the big-box store openings would be a flop. Unfortunately, there were big crowds leaving their families to chase down bargains. This, I see as a blow against workers’ rights. I very much doubt that all the employees working yesterday were volunteering to work on a holiday. In fact, there are demonstrations at Walmarts all over the country today, protesting this encroachment on workers’ family time. In my area of Western Massachusetts, it’ll be 3 p.m. at the Walmart in Hadley.

 

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Environment, language, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Progressives can be a gloomy lot. Too often, we focus on all the things wrong with society, all the problems we need to fix. I say “we,” because I’ve certainly done my share of that global kvetch.

But every once in a while, we actually win a major victory. I’ve been actively involved in a few of them, and I have to tell you, they feel great.

One of my favorite members of Congress, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla) knows the importance of celebrating our victories. He sent out an e-mail with the headline, “Hey, We Progressives Won Something.”

I opened the e-mail and discovered what we won: we didn’t go to war against Syria. And Syria destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile, under international supervision. The massive outcry of opposition certainly helped us get there.

Grayson gives us a lot to celebrate:

Let’s celebrate the war that never happened.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to hold sad and somber funerals for young Americans who would have lost their lives fighting in Syria.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to nurse and care for the wounded veterans who would have returned from the U.S.-Syrian war.

Let’s celebrate Congress NOT having to appropriate billions of tax dollars in emergency spending to support U.S. military operations in Syria.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to attend bitter marches protesting the U.S. war in Syria.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to rebuild Syria’s roads and bridges and schools, so that we can have a shot at rebuilding our own.

Let’s celebrate peace.

We won the battle, and the military-industrial complex lost the war.

We should be proud of our victories, because our victories matter. I know that politics sometimes can seem discouraging right now. Progressive often seem to lose, and lose frequently. But, you know what? Sometimes we win. And when we win, we save lives. We promote equality. We serve the cause of justice. We improve people’s lives.

(You can read Alan Grayson’s whole essay at this blog.)

Indeed, we do! Our actions–as individuals, and especially when we band together–actually do make a difference. Think how much poorer the world would be if the likes of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walensa, Wangari Maathai (the tree-planting woman of Kenya, who won a Nobel Prize for her work establishing a greenbelt in her country), Gandhi, Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn, and Martin Luther King, Jr. had not walked it.

And you don’t need to be an activist. The world is richer for the presence of scientists like the brilliant energy strategist Amory Lovins, who is still very much alive–and Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, and George Washington Carver, who are not…writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alice Walker, and even Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield (his The Success Principles is the one self-help book I regularly recommend)…and ordinary people whose names you won’t recognize, who turned their lives into blessings for the world. I’m going to honor one of those unknown heroes by name: my late mother, Gloria Yoshida, who was a civil rights volunteer in the 1960s. If a black person was told an apartment had already been rented, my 5’3″ white, Jewish mom was one of the people who would go and try to rent it afterwards. I remember her yelling at our own landlord, who towered over her, and looked pretty ashamed as she lit into him because “you just don’t want to rent to them because they’re black.”

That family history made it easier for me to take on a long list of causes over the past 40 years–even organizing the movement that saved a threatened mountain while all the “experts” said “this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do.”

What are YOU doing to make the world better? Please share in the comments section, below.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, language Tagged with , ,

My hometown newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, MA, noted today that the City of Northampton’s Office of Planning and Development has been renamed the Office of Planning and Sustainability.

When I moved to town in 1981, Northampton was in the midst of a building boom and developers were snapping up large farm and forest parcels on the fringes of town. Sprawl was the order of the day.

Now, huge amount of acreage have been protected, both in Northampton and all surrounding communities; Hadley, the neighboring town where I currently live, has preserved thousands of acres. And the City of Northampton has openly changed the mission of the planning department to embrace sustainability.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environmenl, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Buying local. Worker co-ops. Neighborhood resiliency. Community control. Does it feel overwhelming trying to track and sort out all of these community economy movements and buzzwords?

Writer Laura Flanders, Yes Magazine, and GritTV have collaborated to make it easier for the rest of us. They’ve launched a new feature called Commonomics, and the first installment is a nice roundup of some of these trends, told through the stories of people whose stories rarely make it into mainstream media.

The initial installment is called “Welcome to Commonomics: How to Build Local Economies Strong Enough for Everyone,” and OI recommend reading it.

 

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles Tagged with , , , ,

I recently interviewed Kelly Rudy of El Monte Sagrado, a green luxury hotel in Taos, New Mexico. In this 4-minute video, Kelly discusses some of the property’s unusual green features—especially the way water is handled and the types of plantings—in this four-minute interview .

To watch, just click on the link in the first line. Your comments are welcome.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Politics, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,

I revisited a post I’d written on election reform, back in 2007. In that post, I listed seven specific steps the United States could take to make its elections more representative and relevant.

But I left out a huge one—did I think back then, that it was so obvious it didn’t need to be listed?

Getting. Money. Out. Of. Politics.

That means not only repealing the wretched anti-democratic Citizens United decision, but much more. It means making politicians once again responsible to the people, and not to well-funded lobbyists. It probably means public funding of candidates, and limits on the dollars that can be spent. Ideally, it would mean an end to TV advertising of smear ads, and replacing them with a list of candidate websites (not just the largest parties but any party that achieves an agreed threshold of support) where people could learn the candidate’s positions on actual issues—in more depth than attack sound bites.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in censorship, Copywriting, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, language Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Reading a newsletter from a marketer I generally find thought-provoking, sincere, and personable, I was rather surprised to read an article where she took one of her subscribers to task for objecting to the word “sucks” on her home page.

To me, that word inserts an unnecessary barrier, the more ironic because she bases her whole approach on connecting person-to-person.

So of course, I wrote her a note:

As some one who does my best to–and *usually* succeeds–find the best even in the grumps (in that way, I’m like your late father, I guess)–may I put another possible interpretation out there? It’s likely that this person was just looking for an excuse to act out–BUT it’s also possible that he had good reason to be offended by the S word. I personally don’t use that word, because it can be can be interpreted as homophobic–being derived from a longer expletive that starts with a c, the first four letters of which represent the male organ (I’m not being a prude here by not stating the word, but I do have a goal of avoiding the spamfilters). For the same reasons, I don’t use the word “niggardly”, even though its etymology has nothing to do with the n-word–I don’t want people who don’t know that etymology to think I’m racist.

And there’s a difference between “plain language” and foul language. I grew up on the tough streets of the Bronx, and it was a minefield of F-bombs and other expletives–but I’ve lived in places where cursing is considered not just extremely rude but an offense against religion. So, take your choice–the left -wing or right-wing possibility of why he was teed off.

I don’t remember how I found your list, but I suspect I would not have subscribed if the first thing I’d seen was “disconnection sucks”. I have a thicker skin than to be offended, but there are always better ways to say it, and I would not have wanted to get into the network of someone whose language could have been interpreted as mean and deliberately offensive, because I surround myself with people who empower others and don’t denigrate them.

Luckily, I found you some other way (I have no idea how our paths crossed, actually)–and I know you to be a caring and empowering person. But think about the message you’re putting out here, intentionally or not. This is not so much a question of political correctness as it is of establishing unnecessary barriers. yes, I understand that you want to drive the wrong people away, and I respect that. I do the same thing. For instance, when someone approaches me about working together, there’s a paragraph in my reply that says,

“Please note that I reserve the right to reject a project if I feel I’m not the right person for it. This would include projects that in my opinion promote racism, homophobia, bigotry or violence–or that promote the tobacco, nuclear power, or weapons industries–or if I do not feel the product is of high enough quality that I can get enthusiastic about it.”

But I wonder if what your doing might drive the RIGHT people away too–especially since to me, it is so out-of-harmony with your real core message of marketing through the power of personal story.

I’ll be very curious to receive her response. And meanwhile, how about a response from you? Are curse words a barrier for you? Am I overreacting? Is she unnecessarily defensive? Why, or why not?

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail