The courage to be imperfect, the willingness to say "I love you" first, and the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees...

Excerpted from The power of vulnerability, a TED Talk by Brene Brown

There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging. That's it. They believe they're worthy. And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection, was something that, personally and professionally, I felt like I needed to understand better. So what I did is I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness, where I saw people living that way, and just looked at those.

What do these people have in common? ...These are whole-hearted people, living from this deep sense of worthiness...And so here's what I found. What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word cor, meaning heart -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.

The other thing that they had in common was this. They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they talk about it being excruciating -- as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say "I love you" first, the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees, the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental.

IT’S THE POWER OF LOVE

(Source: FIT, AMNY)

By Roxanne Anderson

Many of us diet and exercise but just can’t seem to get to our own personal level of optimum health. The missing ingredient could be love, which is part of something that many health counselors call “primary food.” Health and love are fundamentally linked.

Love makes you live longer
Studies done by Dr. Dean Ornish, founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, have shown that love actually helps us live longer. He believes that the time we spend with friends and family is essential for survival. In addition, research published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health shows that people who never marry are almost two-thirds more likely to suffer from premature death. This finding suggests that marriage represents an effective social connectedness to another person.

Hugs are good for the heart
A team from the University of North Carolina studied the effects of hugging on both partners in 38 couples. The study showed hugs increased levels of oxytocin, a “bonding” hormone, and reduced blood pressure — which cuts the risk of heart disease. Most adults today are starved for touch, but a little bit goes a long way.

Satisfying relationships help fight cancer
The University of Iowa found that cancer patients with satisfying relationships had more white blood cell activity than those with few social connections. Also, the work of Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of “365 Prescriptions for the Soul,” cites studies that reveal that among cancer patients married men live longer than single men, and that married male smokers have fewer cases of lung cancer than their single counterparts. Being well connected with people is an essential part of life. Bring more love into your life by strengthening your current relationships. Think about what you really want from other people, and experiment with the amount of alone time versus social time that is right for you and your social network. Most important, don’t forget plenty of hugs.

Happy Quote of the Day

Success is not the key to happiness.
Happiness is the key to success.
If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

Albert Schweitzer

Got Milk? Join The Campaign for Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness

Got Milk? Join The Campaign for Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness
Originally uploaded by lorenzodom

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” Jalal ad-Din Rumi

December 2, 2008, New York City:

Got Milk? Join The Campaign for Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness

Happiness is honesty.

However, critical to the successful tenure of honesty (and thus happiness) is tolerance.

People often lie because they are afraid of being rejected, afraid of being judged, and know, based on experience, that they cannot be honest, lest they face unfortunate consequences, because they are “different” and not falling in line with the program.

Although I spent almost 8 years studying international relations at the university and thus learned a great deal about détente, diplomacy and compromise, my oldest son, who was four at the time, taught me my greatest lesson about the importance of truth and the tolerance of others.

We were eating dinner and I was being stubborn and making him “eat everything on his plate,” as I often did, as I still do on occasion. The torment of this poor child was justified by some adulthood nonsense like “I work hard to put food on the table, so now you’ve got to eat it.”

But the ugly truth was that Enzo didn’t like what I had made for him. To the health-and-money conscious chagrin of many parents like me, this is often the case with kids. Thus, getting them to “eat their vegetables” is often like trying to push a square peg into a round hole.

However, as “right” as I may have been to force my child to eat what I had served him, I was also inadvertently teaching him—intolerance and importance of learning to lie. Because, although the honest truth was that the meal was distasteful to him, to survive and avoid an unpleasant experience, he had to learn to deceive me by placing the half-chewed morsel in his napkin.

When I caught him, I immediately recognized my own folly and simply laughed, kissed him and excused him from the table. I felt somewhat ashamed that I had tortured my innocent four-year old son in the name of an ideal, and immediately recognized why and where and when we begin to learn to lie; where the innocence of childhood is lost and where the misery of adulthood begins.

In sum, it is often when we are up against intolerance, when we know that speaking or being or acting honestly will only get us in trouble that we hide, disguise, deceive or lie by omission.

This is why teaching and learning—to compromise our ideals, to accept that our truths are not necessarily the truths of others, and making an effort to accept others, regardless of their differences, is so vital to the health and well-being of humanity and the world today.

"How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these." George Washington Carver

*

On Sunday morning, after standing in the cold pitter-pattering of rain for thirty-minutes, I got to go inside to see Milk.

Film critics are already saying that Sean Penn deserves an Oscar for his leading role as Harvey in this heroic and inspiring movie.

Milk is the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay publicly elected official in the United States, if not the world, who went from feeling lost at 40 in New York at his new corporate job in New York City in 1970 to leading and tragically becoming a martyr for the gay pride movement in San Francisco when he and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated on November 27, 1978.

Writer John Cloud remarked on Milk’s influence, "After he defied the governing class of San Francisco in 1977 to become a member of its board of supervisors, many people—straight and gay—had to adjust to a new reality he embodied: that a gay person could live an honest life and succeed." In 1999, Time Magazine listed Harvey as a hero and an icon and as one of The Time 100 Most Important People of the Twentieth Century.

Until Harvey came along in 1977, there was much to be said for the lack of tolerance in the United States. Although the nation had witnessed and been changed by the women’s and civil rights movements, millions of people whose love, affection and desire for others of the same sex were still hiding in the closet for fear of being judged, imprisoned and often subject to the threat of violence.

(By the way, much like the use of the misnomers of “black” and “white” have long been used to abet the division of races throughout history, I strongly believe that we should stop associating being “gay” primarily with one’s sexual orientation. Because being homo-sexual means a lot more than who you are apt to sleep with. As per Keith Olbermann’s recent commentary, it is also very much a a question of love, affection and the pursuit of happiness. )

As Time Magazine summarized it in their June 14, 1999 issue, being Gay and accepted in America still had a long way to go a mere thirty years ago:

"In the 1970s, many psychiatrists still called homosexuality a mental illness. In one entirely routine case, the Supreme Court refused in 1978 to overturn the prison sentence of a man convicted solely of having sex with another consenting man. A year before, it had let stand the firing of a stellar Tacoma, Wash., teacher who made the mistake of telling the truth when his principal asked if he was homosexual…To be young and realize you were gay in the 1970s was to await an adulthood encumbered with dim career prospects, fake wedding rings and darkened bar windows."

Thus, due to the brave actions of a man like Harvey Milk, a vast number of normal, loving, productive, creative and happy people all over the U.S. were encouraged and instilled with the courage to come out openly about who they were and fulfill one of the basic tenets of the Declaration of Independence signed over 200 years earlier—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

"If a bullet should enter my brain, let the bullet destroy every closet door." Harvey Milk


*

This morning I read an article in amNewYork, courtesy of Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News, titled “Homosexuality in Genes…”

According to this article, recent studies have shown that “compared to straight men, gay men are more likely to be left-handed, to be younger siblings of older brothers and to have hair that whorls in a counterclockwise direction.”

Although one might argue that this new scientific evidence strengthens the notion (i.e. the obvious truth) that homosexuality is a natural, normal and innate inclination, I was also alarmed by the way this news piece presented the significance of the study results. Because by focusing on identifiable, physical traits one might be giving license to bigots to discriminate.

That said, in light of the recent controversial passing of Proposition 8 in California and the release of the critically-acclaimed film Milk, these study results are timely, encouraging and will hopefully lead to some intelligent conversations and conclusions about human nature, living life honestly and the value of tolerance.

As always, thanks for reading.

"I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird." Paul McCartney


See also: A Question of Love