Here’s our list of things you can do on a regular basis to raise your personal vibration. Why raise your vibration at all? Because much of the current research, as well as the perennial teachings from nearly every spiritual background, indicate that at a higher vibration you are more likely to experience well-being in terms of your body, mind, and spirit, and with your overall quality of life. And isn’t that what we all want, really?

Exactly whose research am I citing? Well, among others, Lynne McTaggart, an American, award-winning, investigative journalist who did extensive research in this area. Her book, “The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe” is a well-researched look at the leading edge of consciousness research. It overlaps with much of the information that is coming out of quantum physics. Some other consciousness researchers include Cleve Backster, Jacques Benveniste, William Braud, Bob Jahn, Edgar Mitchell, Elisabeth Targ, and Charles Tart.

What this research tells us is that our beliefs, thoughts, behavior,
repetitive activities, and lifestyle choices have a direct bearing on the
quality of our personal vibration. And our personal vibration directly
affects the quality of our life, as well as our perception and mood.
More than that, over time it alters our brain chemistry.

Here, truly, is a viable alternative to anti-depressants and anti-anxiety
medicines. And that’s just for starters. If we want to increase our capacity
for joy, wisdom, peace of mind, meaning, fulfillment, authentic power, harmony, creativity, and love (!), we need only raise our personal vibration.

In an effort to be totally transparent, I’ll share with you that I’m a
student of this list myself. Being a “student of ” is just another way of
saying that it’s a work in progress. I certainly don’t attend to or
practice everything on this list, all the time. Not even close. I’m lucky if
I can incorporate a few of these things, some of the time. But it helps … a
lot … to be aware of these things, and aware that my goal is to continually
raise my personal vibration as much as possible.

Now, this is not intended as a definitive list. You may have other things on
your own list. If so, let us know. If we agree with your suggestions, we’ll
add them to this list so that others might benefit from it.

And it’s not an all-or-nothing list. You can do just some of these things,
some of the time, and still derive benefit. Nor is it a list to adhere to
slavishly. Use it in a way that appeals to you. Have fun with it. Enjoy it.
And watch your life blossom in ways you may not even imagine …

• Meditate
• Pray
• Exercise
• Eat healthy food & drink purified water
• Do breathing exercises
• Enjoy a spiritual practice
• Practice forgiveness
• Access inspiring images, music and readings
• Practice generosity
• Use visualizations and the power of imagination
• Cultivate a positive attitude and outlook
• Manage your time and simplify your life
• Practice gratitude
• Seek truth and beauty all around you, no matter your circumstances
• Use non-violent communication
• Nurture your body
• Get enough sleep
• Chronicle your personal growth in an ongoing journal
• Practice relaxation
• Reduce your stress
• Enjoy the nurturing and healing aspects of nature
• Use your voice to sing, hum and make toning sounds
• Practice kindness
• Upgrade your beliefs
• Learn more about and access energy medicine
• Observe and express your emotions in healthy ways
• Celebrate the increasing synchronicities in your life
• Get adequate support
• Be happy for no reason
• Nurture your friendships and enjoy your social life
• Be impeccably honest
• Open to pleasure, play and laughter
• Be of service
• Practice lifelong learning
• Be in and around water … at home, and especially in nature
• Do work that you love and love your work
• Access the power of intention
• Use the law of attraction
• Open to receiving
• Focus on joy and compassion
• Practice right action
• Offer love in all you do

Are you a little overwhelmed with this list? Well, yeaaaah!

But don’t worry. In the weeks and months to come, along with my regular
exploration of wellness concepts, tips and techniques, I’ll be writing in my
blog about ways to raise your personal vibration.

Please join us on a regular basis and be sure to tell your friends and
colleagues about Wellbeing Lifestyles™. We have well-researched wellness
information (much of it is free!) that can change your life … for good!

Please watch this beautifully produced film, narrated by Sigourney Weaver, about what’s happening to our oceans. Then, if you feel as moved as we were by what you see, join us in taking action…

By Troy Rampy

“O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, that thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down and steep my senses in forgetfulness?”          — Shakespeare

I’ve gone through stages, usually short-lived and for no apparent reason, where I fall asleep quickly at the end of the day and stay asleep throughout the night. On those rare occasions, I will generally awaken the next morning feeling refreshed and ready for a new day. Oh my, sweet joy.

If this describes your usual sleep pattern, count your blessings! You are truly among the lucky. According to the National Sleep Foundation, about half of Americans report sleep difficulty at least occasionally. But in these stressful times of economic uncertainty, dual-income families, overfull to-do lists, and compulsive multi-tasking, we all need a good amount of sleep to stay healthy … and sane.

Exactly what is a “good amount of sleep”? Although it varies from person to person, sleep experts generally recommend approximately seven to eight hours of sleep per night to function properly. But too many of us live an “on-the-go” lifestyle in which our need for sleep gets downgraded to a low priority. If you are stressed or under more demands than usual, you may need even more than eight hours, and most certainly you’ll need better quality sleep.

Fortunately, there are things you can do to improve the quality of your sleep. The first step may require a little detective work. You’ll need to examine your diet, exercise patterns, sleeping environment, personal habits, lifestyle, and current concerns. As you begin to see a connection between, for example, what and/or when you eat and poor sleep, you can develop your own improved sleep plan.

Here’s what you can do to upgrade the quality of your sleep … beginning tonight. I can personally vouch for the following list as it has helped me over the past few years to improve my own sleep patterns:

• Exercise. Exercise can help relieve the day’s tension — however, it’s best to complete your workout a few hours before bedtime so that it won’t interfere with your sleep. Exercise outdoors in sunlight whenever possible.
• Cut down on stimulants. Consuming stimulants in the evening (such as caffeine in coffee, tea, cola, or chocolate) may interfere with falling asleep. It can also prevent deep sleep. Nicotine is a stimulant that can have a similar effect. In addition, many over-the-counter and prescription drugs can disrupt sleep. Be sure to read the labels.
• Drink in moderation. Small amounts of alcohol may bring on drowsiness, but larger amounts can lead to nightmares and disrupted, fragmented sleep.
• Avoid heavy meals before bedtime. Eat an early, light dinner, if dinner is eaten at all. Heavy meals at night tend to keep you awake. rather than dinner, eating a light snack (a piece of fruit, a vegetable, or a starch) an hour before going to bed may improve sleep. Foods containing the amino acid “tryptophan” increase serotonin levels in your body, which in turn increase your feelings of sleepiness. It is best to eat tryptophan on an empty stomach. Foods that contain a notable amount of tryptophan are (with mg/100 grams): tofu (747), pumpkin seeds (578), Gluten Flour (510), Sesame Seeds (358), Almonds (322), Black Walnuts (290), Black-Eyed Cowpeas ( 267).
• Don’t nap during the day. If you are having trouble sleeping at night, try not to nap during the day because that can throw off your body clock and make it even more difficult to sleep at night. If you are feeling especially tired, and absolutely must nap, be sure to sleep for less than 30 minutes, early in the day.
• Make sure your bed is large enough and comfortable. If you are disturbed by a restless bedmate, switch to a larger bed, or your own twin bed. Test different types of mattresses and pillows. Try therapeutic-shaped foam pillows that cradle your neck, or extra pillows to help you sleep on your side. Get comfortable cotton sheets.
• Hide your clock. A big, illuminated digital clock may cause you to focus on the time and make you feel stressed and anxious. Place your clock so you can’t see the time when you are in bed.
• Keep regular hours. Get your biological clock in sync by going to bed at the same time each night and waking up at the same time each morning — even on weekends. Go to bed only when you are sleepy, and avoid staying in bed too long in the morning.
• Unwind early. Deal with worries and distractions several hours before going to bed. Find ways to relax an hour or so before bedtime. For example, you can take a warm bath, shower, or footbath, listen to soothing music, or read an enjoyable book. Don’t watch the “bad” News, or work on your lap-top before going to bed. Those activities will only serve to stimulate your nervous system and disrupt your frontal lobes. When that happens, it’s much harder to get good quality sleep.
• Develop a sleep ritual. Do the same things each night just before going to bed. This cues your body that it’s time to settle down for the night.
• Make sleep a priority. Find the optimal sleep schedule that keeps you energized throughout the day, then stick to your schedule. For most, that means getting to bed by 10:00 PM, and certainly no later than 12:00 Midnight. It is said that two hours of sleep before 10:00 PM is worth four hours of sleep after 12:00 Midnight. Be careful not to sleep too much or too little.
• Make your bedroom primarily a place for sleeping. It’s not a good idea to use your bed for paying bills, doing work, etc. Help your body recognize that this is a place only for rest…or intimacy.
• Keep your bedroom peaceful and comfortable. Make sure your room is as dark as possible, well ventilated, and slightly cool during the night. And try to keep it quiet. You could use a non-ozone producing air purifier, fan, or a “white noise” machine to help block outside noises.
• Jot down all your concerns and worries. Anxiety excites the nervous system and makes you more alert. Write down your worries and possible solutions before you go to bed, so you don’t need to mull them over during the night. A journal or concise to-do list can help you put away your concerns until the next day when you are fresh and can do something about them.
• Go to sleep when you are sleepy. Pay attention to your body and the natural cues it gives you. When you feel tired, go to bed.

“That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed of all natural graces, sleep.”                                — Aldous Huxley

by David Granirer, MA

Confused is how many people feel when it comes to the whole idea of political correctness and workplace humor. Some resent having to watch every word that comes out of their mouth, while others now feel safer knowing their vulnerabilities won’t be targeted for ridicule. The bottom line is that political correctness has brought a whole new perspective to what is and isn’t acceptable humor. And that’s not necessarily a good or bad thing, it’s just a reality to which people have to adjust.

In order to bring some clarity to this complicated and emotionally charged topic, it helps to put aside the issue of what is or isn’t politically correct, and look at the functionality of our humor. In other words, what healthy workplace humor is supposed to accomplish, and whether or not the way we use our humor accomplishes those purposes.

Healthy Workplace Humor

My definition of healthy workplace humor is “acts involving some sort of surprise and/or exaggeration that make people feel good.” Certainly this can take the form of joke telling, but it can also take many others. Leaving a cookie on a coworker’s desk, giving an unexpected compliment, and sending an encouraging e-mail are all acts that involve some form of surprise (“Hey, I wasn’t expecting that!”) and leave people feeling good.

By “making people feel good,” I mean that healthy workplace humor accomplishes four main goals: It releases tension, creates a sense of acceptance, conveys a sense of unity or support, and restores a healthy perspective on a given situation. So if I’m having a bad day and someone does something humorous, chances are I’ll feel less tense, more accepting of myself and my situation, less alone, and more able to see the whole picture, whereas before I may have been fixated on just one small part of it.
These four goals of healthy humor are non-controversial – something everyone supports, regardless of their views on political correctness. We all want to work in an environment that is as tension-free as possible, where we feel accepted, supported, and able to develop a healthy perspective on the difficulties we inevitably face as working people.

So a good criteria for the functionality of our humor is to ask ourselves if how we use it promotes or undermines these four goals. And what we find is that politically incorrect humor undermines them all. Take an actual case in point. A female employee receives a surprise gift from some male coworkers. So far so good, but unfortunately, the gift contains lingerie and sexual devices. Of course workplace tension immediately shoots up, acceptance is destroyed, office unity is shattered, and now everyone is hyper-focused on the issue of sexual harassment, losing any sense of perspective they may have had. So this kind of humor is not only politically incorrect, it also creates a negative atmosphere, something no one wants in his or her workplace.

This act, which perhaps to give the benefit of the doubt may have begun as a seemingly harmless practical joke, broke some very important rules of healthy workplace humor, resulting in a lawsuit and several people losing their jobs.

Safe Humor Rules

Practicing the following four rules ensures that humor will achieve the aforementioned four goals:

Rule#1: Don’t make jokes about coworkers’ sexuality. People are very uncomfortable with sexual innuendo in a workplace. Your friends may find it hilarious, but unless all the people you work with are close friends you’ve known for years, leave it at home, because someone is bound to be offended.

Rule #2: Don’t make jokes about people’s appearance. This is another emotionally charged area, and whether you agree or not, just don’t go there.

Rule#3: Avoid jokes about religion, ethnic background, nationality, sexual orientation etc. unless it’s to joke about your own.

Rule#4: Avoid jokes about bodily functions. The only exception is if you work in a healthcare or other setting where these jokes are necessary to maintain your sanity.

Surprise, surprise, these rules also conform to what would be considered the guidelines for politically correct humor, which essentially are not to make jokes about people’s sexuality, minorities, God, and, grossness. But we’re not talking politically correct, we’re talking about achieving the four goals of healthy humor, which everyone can support.

So what’s left to joke about? Here are three safe areas:

#1: Yourself, your flaws, neuroses and inadequacies. When you make these jokes, people are brought closer to you because they can relate. And so far, no one’s ever been sued for joking about him or herself.

#2: The situation you all face, i.e., the upcoming merger, the new reorganization, the difficult customers you deal with, etc.

#3: Personal characteristics in areas of low ego-involvement. Though most people are extremely sensitive about appearance, they’re much less invested in other aspects of themselves. For example, I don’t mind if someone makes jokes about my bad handwriting or the fact that I look tired because I had to get up at four in the morning to change a diaper. Poking fun at Peter because he’d rather ski than do paperwork, or Mary because she has a distinctive laugh is relatively safe to do, and communicates affection rather than disdain.

No question, the reality has changed. What used to be okay in terms of humor isn’t any more. Before it was easy to get a laugh by putting someone down. But as we’ve seen, all this creates is negativity. However, this new reality forces us to be more clever, creative, and considerate in the way we use humor. And I think that most people would like to think of themselves as clever, creative, and considerate, regardless of their views on political correctness.

By Pico Iyer

Associated Press/Ashwini Bhatia Dalai Lama speaking last month to Tibetan students at the Tibetan Children’s Village School in Dharmsala, India, about the principles of Buddhism.

“Dream — nothing!” is one of the many things I’ve heard the 14th Dalai Lama say to large audiences that seem to startle the unprepared. Just before I began an onstage conversation with him at New York Town’s Hall this spring, he told me, “If I had magical powers, I’d never need an operation!” and broke into guffaws as he thought of the three-hour gallbladder operation he’d been through last October, weeks after being in hospital for another ailment. For a Buddhist, after all, our power lies nowhere but ourselves.

We can’t change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world — and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment. The point of life, in the view of the Dalai Lama, is happiness, and that lies within our grasp, our untapped potential, with every breath.

Easy for him to say, you might scoff. He’s a monk, he meditates for four hours as soon as he wakes up and he’s believed by his flock to be an incarnation of a god.* Yet when you think back on his circumstances, you recall that he was made ruler of a large and fractious nation when he was only 4 years old. He was facing a civil war of sorts in Lhasa when he was just 11, and when he was 15, he was made full political leader and had to start protecting his country against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, leaders of the world’s largest (and sometimes least tractable) nation.

This spring marked the completion of half a century for him in exile, trying to guide and serve 6 million Tibetans he hasn’t seen in 50 years, and to rally 150,000 or so exiled Tibetans who have in most cases never seen Tibet. This isn’t an obvious recipe for producing a vividly contagious optimism.

Yet in 35 years of talking to the Dalai Lama, and covering him everywhere from Zurich to Hiroshima, as a non-Buddhist, skeptical journalist, I’ve found him to be as deeply confident, and therefore sunny, as anyone I’ve met. And I’ve begun to think that his almost visible glow does not come from any mysterious or unique source. Indeed, mysteries and rumors of his own uniqueness are two of the things that cause him most instantly to erupt into warm laughter. The Dalai Lama I’ve seen is a realist (which is what makes his optimism the more impressive and persuasive). And he’s as practical as the man he calls his “boss.”

The Buddha generally presented himself as more physician than metaphysician: if an arrow is sticking out of your side, he famously said, don’t argue about where it came from or who made it; just pull it out. You make your way to happiness not by fretting about it or trafficking in New Age affirmations, but simply by finding the cause of your suffering, and then attending to it, as any doctor (of mind or body) might do.

The first words the Dalai Lama said when he came into exile, I learned not long ago, were “Now we are free.” He had just lost his homeland, his seeming destiny, contact with the people he had been chosen to rule; he had been forced to undergo a harrowing flight for 14 days across the highest mountains in the world. But his first instinct — the result of training and teaching, no doubt, as much as of temperament — was to look at what he could do better. Now.

He could bring democratic and modern reforms to the Tibetan people that he might not so easily have done in old Tibet. He and his compatriots could learn from Western science and other religions, and give something back to them. He could create a new, improved Tibet — global and contemporary — outside Tibet. The very condition that most of us would see as loss, severance and confinement, he saw as possibility.

Not all Tibetans can be quite so sanguine and far-sighted, of course, and in terms of a resolution of Tibet’s political predicament with China, the Dalai Lama has made no visible progress in 50 years. Beijing is only coming down harder and harder on Tibet, as he frankly admits. But when I watch him around the world, I see that he’s visiting other countries and traditions in part to offer concrete, practical tips for happiness, or inner health, the way any physician might when making a house call. Think in terms of enemies, he suggests, and the only loser is yourself.

Concentrate on external wealth, he said at Town Hall, and at some point you realize it has limits — and you’re still feeling discontented. Take his word as law, he constantly implies, and you’re doing him — as well as yourself — a disservice, as you do when assuming that any physician is infallible, or can protect his patients from death in the end.

None of these are Buddhist laws as such — though in his case they arise from Buddhist teaching — any more than the law of universal gravitation is Christian, just because it happened to be formulated by Isaac Newton (who said, “God created everything by number, weight and measure”). I’ve been spending time for 18 years in a Benedictine monastery, and the monks I know there have likewise found out how to be delighted by the smallest birthday cake. Happiness is not pleasure, they know, and unhappiness, as the Buddhists say, is not the same as suffering. Suffering — in the sense of old age, sickness and death — is the law of life; unhappiness is just the position we choose — or can not choose — to bring to it.

Not long ago, I was traveling with the Dalai Lama across Japan and another journalist came into our bullet-train compartment for an interview. “Your Holiness,” he said, “you have seen so much sorrow and loss in your life. Your people have been killed and your country has been occupied. You have had to worry about the welfare of Tibet every day since you were four years old. How can you always remain so happy and smiling?”

”My profession,” said the Dalai Lama instantly, as if he hardly had to think about it. His answer could mean many things, but one of the better things it meant to me was that that kind of happiness is within the reach of almost anyone. We can work on it as we work on our backhands, our soufflés or our muscles in the gym. True happiness, in that sense, doesn’t mean trying to acquire things, so much as letting go of things (our illusions and attachments). It’s only the clouds of short-sightedness or ignorance, the teachers from the Dalai Lama’s tradition suggest, that prevent us from seeing that our essential nature, whether we’re Buddhist or not, is blue sky.

Pico Iyer is the author of nine books, most recently, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” just out in paperback.