Stress No More

Stress is a debilitating condition, and as doctors and psychiatrists have, as yet, not given us the way to effectively deal with stress, I studied their Physiology textbooks and this is what they say: When the internal stability of the body gets disturbed – which happens when nutrients get depleted or when toxins build up in the body – we get stressed and the body’s cells cannot function properly, and our health suffers. And the way to avoid stress, and to ensure our health and well-being, is to maintain the body’s internal stability by consuming adequate amounts of all the nutrients and by eliminating the built-up toxins with a healthy exercise regimen. 

But of course, if we were to ensure our health and well-being with merely proper nutrition, pharmaceuticals and the medical industry would not be able to make their trillion dollar profits. Our President, Dr Abdul Kalam warns us in his book The Family and the Nation: “Crass commercialization has taken its toll on nutrition. The mass marketing efforts by food conglomerates, whose main interest is profit, compounded by misinformation by conventional healthcare institutions and their affiliates, make it difficult to differentiate between life-giving, nutritious food and substandard devitalized food.”
 
The healthcare institutions have so far kept this main fact about nutrition a secret from the public: 

Proteins, the building blocks of our bodies, make up three fourth the dry weight of every cell in the body. And proteins are nothing but chains of amino acids linked together. So amino acids are the most vital nutrients that the body requires. Also, almost all the neurotransmitters, which transmit messages in the brain, are produced from amino acids. So when any of the amino acids gets depleted, not only does our health suffer, but also our brain’s cognitive and emotional responses falter, leading to all sorts of mental disorders, and dysfunctional or corrupt behaviors.
It is only because the above vital facts have been kept hidden from the public that people are not giving due importance to the amino acids in their diets, and why so many of our students are experiencing stress and becoming drug and alcohol addicts and, even committing suicides. 

Poultry farming is a profitable business. And so, there are special ISI codes for amino acid requirements in poultry feeds – different for layers and broilers. But there are no codes for amino acid requirements in human beings. It looks as though a human life is not as valuable as that of a chicken to our healthcare authorities. 

Our normal response to stress is the fight-or-flight stress response, which is subjectively felt by us as anger or fear. In order to cope with stress, besides proper nutrition, one also needs the ability to quickly get rid of any arisen anger and fear. And psychiatrists and psychologists are not showing us the way to effectively deal with our anger and fears. In helping hundreds of addicts to overcome their alcohol and drug addictions, – I have been the all-India representative of NA, a worldwide fellowship helping drug addicts – I was fortunate to have discovered a simple Jungian psychodynamic therapy that helps people to quickly get rid of the resentments and fear. The details of this method are given in my books 12 Steps in a Day and The Lost Path, and can be used by anyone to cope with the psychological effects of stress. 

Now that you know the facts, I request you to use your good offices to see that the government takes the action to remedy the situation, and holds the medical and the mental health profession accountable for the problems people are facing due to stress. You can also begin educating yourself about the amino acids with the book Amino Revolution by Robert Erdmann or the other books available on amino acids. This book tells us which amino acids can be taken to avoid stress, anxiety, depression, and to deal with overeating, addictions and other health problems. For more information on dealing with stress, do check the Articles on our NGO’s website: www.karmayog.org/ngo/behappy

Understanding Emotional Intelligence

“Emotion can be considered in terms of a relation between an individual and the environment based on the individual’s evaluation of the environment (is it pleasant or hostile, for example), disposition towards the environment (am I happy and attracted to the environment or fearful of it?), and the actual physical response to it.” – Human Physiology by Vander et al

The social scientist knows: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure. You can’t measure what you can’t define. And, you can’t define what you can’t understand.” So, in order to manage emotions and develop Emotional Intelligence, we must first understand what emotions are, and define Emotional Intelligence. Emotions are, in essence, impulses to act. The root of the word emotion is motere, the Latin verb “to move,” plus the prefix “e-” to connote “move out” or “move away.” In order to maintain a relatively stable internal environment in the body (homeostasis) for the survival and well-being of our body cells, the brain motivates us to act on our environment to fulfill our bodily needs. But in an environment that is oftentimes hostile, we have to be cautious in getting what our body needs. It is our emotions that guide us when we ‘move out’ to act on the environment to successfully achieve our homeostatic goals.

“Learning is the acquisition and storage of information as a consequence of experience” (Vander et al). Intelligence is defined as ‘the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.’ So, Emotional Intelligence can be said to be the ability to acquire knowledge about our emotions – emotional knowledge – and to apply it skillfully. But if we are to apply this knowledge, we must be aware of it. Our intellect only deals with our consciousness – conscious experiences and our conscious learning or knowledge. So, for our intellect to use emotional knowledge, it must be acquired by us at a conscious level – that is, explicitly. Hence Emotional Intelligence can be defined as the ability to explicitly acquire emotional knowledge and to apply it skillfully.

We learn from all our experiences when we interact with our environment. The things we learn from our experiences by seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting are usually learnt by us explicitly – that is, clearly, with conscious awareness. However, we also learn about the affective aspects of things and situations in the environment. We learn whether the environment is pleasant or hostile, whether we are attracted to it or fearful of it. And, we also learn by experiencing sensations in the body that arise due to the physical responses we make – such as our physical flight-fight-or-freeze responses for avoidance, and our approach responses – when interacting with the environment. However, this affective learning, which builds up our emotional knowledge, is learnt by us implicitly – that is, without our conscious awareness – as we are normally not trained to be consciously aware of our bodily sensations.

When we acquire emotional knowledge implicitly, our brain – what Freud called the ‘Unconscious’ – uses the knowledge to directs our emotional responses, impulsively. But as the implicit knowledge cannot be used by our intellect, we finds it difficult to bring intelligence or rationality to our emotions. This is why our emotional responses often create problems for us. In order to avoid such emotional problems we ought to be consciously aware of our body sensations when we acquire and store our emotional knowledge.

Freud’s theory of the Ego and the Id is the most influential theory in psychology. In brief, the theory states that each of us is born with natural drives – the Instinctive Drive (Id) – which motivate our activities and behavior. However the influence of society and our environment – the Superego – conditions our Id and we develop our Ego, which then becomes the motivating factor governing our behavior. If the conditioning is appropriate the ego remains healthy. If not, the ego starts creating problems in our emotions, behavior and relationships. Freud’s theory has remained influential for over a century because it is based on sound physiological observations, although most psychologists today are not aware of it. Freud, in his Three Essays on Sexuality (1905: 83), had said "The source of a drive is a process of excitation occuring in an organ and the immediate aim of the drive lies in the removal of this organic stimulation." And, in The Ego and the Id (1923: 364), he states unequivocally that the ego “is first and foremost a bodily ego ... ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body." So Freud’s theory also suggests that we deal with our ego at the level of bodily sensations. 

We, at Be Happy Foundation, have discovered a set of simple exercises to observe and learn from our body sensations – for developing Emotional Intelligence. We also offer a brief psychoanalysis method to rebalance the Id, and to get rid of anger and resentments – for overcoming negative attitudes and personality conflicts.

Developing Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman’s bestseller ‘Emotional Intelligence’ was published over 15 years ago. Since then everyone has been talking a lot about Emotional Quotient, EQ. But, no one has as yet shown us the precise way to develop our Emotional Intelligence or EQ. Actually developing EQ, in simple words, means developing our ability to handle our emotions. And unfortunately no one seems to know the way to teach children the way to handle their emotions. This is the main reason why mental health problems in children are increasing day by day.

The World Health Organization defines mental health as "a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community." Whenever we cannot handle our emotions and our feelings get enraged, which happens quite often, we lose our state of well-being, i.e. we lose our mental health, according to the WHO definition, and are mentally ill. So, a low EQ, or the inability to handle our emotions often, is a symptom of an emotional sickness or a mental sickness.

But the trouble is that most of us are unable to admit that we are mentally sick. Lord Bernard Shaw had once said that “The earth is the mental asylum of the universe.” So there is noting wrong in being mentally sick or admitting it. And if we want to help our children to develop their EQ, it is necessary that parents be honest with their children, and admit it to them. If they cannot admit it, it leads to the famous ‘double blind,’ where parents ask children to do one thing, but themselves do just the opposite. This is what confuses children and they grow up with all sorts of mental conflicts.

For instance, parents get angry and scold, shout and hit children when children get angry and shout, cuss or beat others. The only way children know of expression their negative feelings (such as anger and fear) is to throw tantrums or shout, sometimes even by using profanity (bad words). If the child is stronger than the other person, like parents are stronger than children, he might even beat the other person.

When parents punish or shout at children for expressing their negative feelings as above (or even for making or admitting their mistakes), what children learn is that they should never express their negative feelings (or even be dishonest and not admit mistakes), lest they be reprimanded or punished. This bottling up of their negative feelings is probably the thing that is most responsible for anxiety, depression, ADD/ADHD and other problems in children. And when children experience these problems later on, they find it difficult to admit it to their parents, for the fear of getting scolded, which their parents have instilled in them. So you can see, I hope that it is self-defeating when parents scold or punish children for throwing tantrums, and even for using profanity.

The only way to help children to develop their EQ is to teach parents and teachers some simple way to handle their emotions, so that they can teach it to their children. Attitude is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as ‘the settled way of thinking and feeling.’ Our thinking and feeling always depends on what we have learnt – or on the information that is stored in our memory. When the information we’ve learnt is inappropriate or wrong, like the negative things children learn from their parents as mentioned above, it leads to a lot of anger and fear and all sorts of behavioral problems. So in order to develop the ability to handle and manage our emotions and develop EQ we ought to have the technique to check our past experiences, understand what all wrong things we had learned in the past, and then to make corrections to them. 

At present most therapists use cognitive therapies for dealing with emotions. But in cognitive therapies only the present thought leading to the emotions are corrected. They do not address the root cause of the problem – all the wrong information that had been stored in our memory in the past. So a different approach to handling our emotions and developing EQ is called for. Also, it takes weeks and months of weekly sessions for a person to learn the way to handle his feelings when using these cognitive therapies. And, nobody likes to sacrifice so much of his time just for learning to handle his emotions.

In ‘Emotional Intelligence’ Goleman says, “Though the predisposition to substance abuse may, in many cases, be brain-based, the feelings that drive people to “self-medicate” themselves through drink or drugs can be handled without recourse to medication, as Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery programs have demonstrated for decades. Acquiring the ability to handle those feelings—soothing anxiety, lifting depression, calming rage—removes the impetus to use drugs in the first place. These basic emotional skills are taught remedially in treatment programs for drug and alcohol abuse. It would be far better, of course, if they were learned early in life, well before the habit became established.”

I have been fortunate to have been an addict and an alcoholic. In searching for a way out of my problem, I found a simple way for quickly overcoming resentments and personality conflicts from the book ‘Alcoholics Anonymous.’ By adding a relaxation therapy of Vipassana meditation to it, I found it to be the best way for handling our emotions. I worked a couple of years as a counselor at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Seva Mandir Hospital in Bandra, helping addicts, alcoholics and their family members. In that period I was able to see that the simple psychoanalysis therapy could be completed in just a single session of three or four hours.

While the psychoanalysis can correct the wrong information stored in our declarative or ‘explicit memory’, the simple Vipassana meditation, which I use in my therapy, helps us to correct the wrong information stored in our ‘implicit memory’ system or the ‘body memory,’ which I had talked about in my previous blog, as it makes us aware of our body sensations and helps us to learn from them. It is so simple that even children can learn it. It is the best way to inculcate values in children, and for them to develop their EQ. At present Vipassana is being taught only to children of all schools of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation. If any school wishes to teach this meditative technique to their student, it will be my pleasure to teach it to them.

The Physiological Basis of my Psychotherapy Method

Someone asked for some clarification on the following statement I had made in my previous blog: "In this therapy, I have included the body psychotherapy technique of dispassionately observing the bodily sensation."

Here is the clarification:

Krishna's discourse in the Gita starts in Chapter 2, verse 11. Then in here's what e says in 2.14 and 2.15:

[Sensations of] heat and cold, pleasure and pain, are born, O son of Kunti, only of the contact of the senses with their objects. They have a beginning and an end. They are impermanent in their nature. Bear them patiently, O descendent of Bharata (Gita 2-14).
That man whom these cannot disturb – the calm man who is the same in pain and pleasure – alone is able, O great amongst men, to attain amrit (Gita 2-15).

What Krishna says about bearing the body sensations of heat and cold etc. patiently -- i.e. without reacting to the sensations -- is known as Vipassana meditation. I had noted simply as "dispassionately observing the bodily sensation" in my letter, for the sake of brevity.

Now "Learning is the acquisition and storage of information as a consequence of experience" (Human Physiology by Vander et al). And we experience everything by means of our sense receptors, as sensations. All this information gets stored in our our memory.

Physiology talks of two types of memory, the declarative or explicit memory and the non-declarative or implicit memory. The declarative memory stores the information we gather from our five external sense receptors/organs. It's the memory we can put into words, and which the mind has access to, for its cognitive tasks. Cognitive therapies can at best make use only of the declarative memory. The 'Inventory Analysis' method of my psychotherapy is a cognitive approach.

Implicit memory stores the information that our internal sense receptors gather, 'autonomically' or without our conscious awareness. This is the information sensed about the changes in the internal environment of the body -- homeostatic fluctuations -- and about the sensorimotor sensations associated with our motor activity or our bodily actions, including our emotional responses. This memory is called body memory by body psychotherapists. This memory is what causes our habits and habitual emotional responses. (The memory of learning to ride a bicycle falls in this category.) Our mind has no access to this implicit memory. That is why, I think, the behavioral aspect is added to cognitive therapies. By doing the opposite thing to the habit again and again this implicit memory can be changed.

Body psychotherapy deals with healing by using touch or by making the client aware of his/her bodily sensations. And Krishna's advice that I quoted at the beginning of this mail is the best body psychotherapy that I have found. 

My Paper for the UGS Conference on Mental Health

Here is the gist of my paper titled Understanding and Controlling Dysfunctional Behavior that has been accepted for presentation and subsequent publication in the UGC sponsored National Conference on ‘Mental Health: Role of Education, October 1-2, 2011:

Our behavior is usually controlled by our emotional nature and our attitudes. In order to correct dysfunctional behavior it becomes necessary for us to be in control of our emotional nature and to change some of our attitudes. I have been fortunate to develop a brief psychodynamic method – from the 12 Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous – which not only helps addicts to recover, but is also an effective way to overcome anger and resentments, and for changing negative attitudes.

Oxford Dictionary defines ‘attitude’ as ‘a settled way of thinking or feeling.’ Our thinking and feeling depends on the ideas and beliefs that are already stored in our memory. When we learn the wrong things, the ideas in memory become inappropriate and our attitudes become negative. In order to change our attitudes it then becomes necessary for us to change the inappropriate ideas that have been stored in our memory.

Whenever our instinctive drives, or the needs, for safety, relationship and love, and for self-esteem or ambition – the ‘Social Needs’ of the Maslow Model – get hurt or threatened, we get upset, angry or afraid, and we may also hurt others because of it. In this psychodynamic approach, we inventory our past episodes of anger to see which of the drives had been affected. Then, by analyzing the inventory it becomes possible for us to understand which of our ideas and beliefs had been creating problems for us, which we can then correct. This is how this method helps us in changing our negative attitudes and in overcoming anger and resentments. It will also help us in forgiving others when necessary, as ‘forgive’ means to ‘stop feeling angry or resentful towards (someone) for an offence or mistake.’

Freud, in his Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), had said "The source of a drive is a process of excitation occuring in an organ and the immediate aim of the drive lies in the removal of this organic stimulation." And, in The Ego and the Id (1923), he states unequivocally that the ego “is first and foremost a bodily ego ... ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body."

In this therapy, I have included the body psychotherapy technique of dispassionately observing the bodily sensation.  In the Bhagavad Gita (2.14 and 2.15 ), this technique is the first thing that Lord Krishna asks Arjuna to follow, as it helps a person to remain calm and balanced in times of both pain and pleasure. This technique, which the Buddhists call Vipassana, is so simple when learnt from the book or CD Sadhana by Anthony de Mello S.J. that it can be easily taught to children in all the schools. At present it is only being taught to the students of all the BMC schools. I hope all people, especially children, get a chance to benefit from this wonderful technique of India.

The paper also covers the topic of nutrients, which is often neglected. 75% of our body is made up from the 20 amino acids. Amino acid deficiencies can lead to depression, anxiety, addictions and other health problems. Educating people about the individual amino acid deficiency symptoms, their nutritional supplements and their diagnostic blood tests can go a long way in safeguarding mental health and in  the prevision of addiction, suicide and behavioral problems.

Why we need Yoga and Inner Body Awareness

This is the End Discussion from my Paper titled The Indian Heritage and the Art of Forgiving presented at the International Conference on Positivism: Path to Success, Satisfaction & Bliss, organized by Amity Institute of Behavioural & Allied Sciences, 6th – 8th August, 2011 (The full paper can be found in Macmillan book New Facets of Positivism (ISBN 023-032-342-1):


In the Indian tradition, the goal of one’s life is to attain yoga. Patanjali defines yoga as the ‘cessation of fluctuation in consciousness.’ Yoga is the state of consciousness where nothing arises nor passes away – a state without a beginning or a deathless state. Deathless means amrit in Sanskrit, which is the state the Bhagavad Gita asks us to attain, and also the aim of Buddhist meditation, although it is also called nibbana by the Buddhists and brahmanirvana in the Gita (2.72). The word used by the Jains is anarambhi, which means ‘without a beginning.’ From this it is evident that all the ancient Indian traditions are asking us to make the efforts to experience the same state of consciousness where nothing arises nor passes away.
The way to attain this state of consciousness in the two most ancient religions of the world, Hinduism and Buddhism, as we have seen above, is also the same Indian Meditative Technique. This technique, given in Anthony de Mello’s book Sadhana, has been highly praised by the Christians – on the cover of the CD Sadhana, Anthony de Mello has been acclaimed as “A Guru For The Twentyfirst Century.” This technique is also regularly taught at a Vipassana Meditation Center in the Islamic State of Iran. As this meditative technique has been accepted by all the major religions of the world, it can go a long way in uniting the people of the different religious faiths.
This meditative technique helps us to experience and know the things going on within our body. Within the body every second, millions of cells are dying, which is just pain and suffering. When we can experience and know how much we are suffering within, we can also understand how others are also suffering. This realization makes us more altruistic and helps us to have more understanding for others.
Each of the trillions of cells in our body is constantly craving and attracting nutrients and avoiding and expelling toxins. Thus it is our very nature to instinctively crave for the things we need and avoid things that harm us. When we observe the sensory experiences of the activity within the body, and continually refrain from reacting to them with craving and aversion in our meditation, over time, we gain the ability to control our instinctive and impulsive nature. Thus the Indian meditative technique can help us to curb our impulsive behavior.
The sensations we experience within the body tell us what we need in order to survive and we use our external sense organs to find and get what we need. When we are unable to observe our inner body sensations we are unable to figure out what we actually need. And we go out and get much more than what we really need; our wants far exceed our needs. And when we all live in this manner, it creates a scarcity of our needs in our environment, which leads to not only the overexploitation and degradation of our environment, but also to all sorts of social problems, including ill-will, conflicts and wars. The Indian meditative technique of observing our body sensations can go a long way in getting rid of all these problems.
The Indian meditative technique has been tried and tested and found to be highly effective. After a successful trial on a batch of SSC students few years back, the Vipassana Research Institute now teaches the breath awareness exercise of this meditation technique, annapana, to all children in the schools of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. The Breath Sensation Exercise from the Sadhana book, or CD, can be used to help children improve their attentive capability.
The scientific Indian meditative Technique is so very effective in improving our lives and in changing human nature that it is even used to help hard core criminals. Regular 10 Day Vipassana courses are now held at various correctional institutions, including the Tihar Jail at Delhi and the maximum security Donaldson Correctional Facility in Alabama, USA.[i]
After being dejected by the bloody Kalinga war, the great Emperor Asoka took up the practice of dhamma, which is what this Indian meditative technique – Sanatana Dharma, the great Indian Heritage – is called by the followers of Gautama Buddha. His edicts say that he had ‘entered the sangha,’ which according the Buddhist Tipittika scriptures means that he had ‘experienced nibbana.’ And thereafter he eschewed war and dedicated his life to the dhammavijay – victory by means of dharma. In all his edicts he shows us how dhamma has benefited the people, and finally in his last edicts he tells us why he had engraved the edicts in hard rock: “I have done this, so that among my sons and grandsons, and as long as the sun and moon shall endure, men may follow dhamma.”  [Seventh Pillar Edict]
 “Over Great areas of the world it still survives; it is possible that in contact with western science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original teaching of Gautama, revived and purified, may yet play a large part in the direction of human destiny.” – H. G. Wells, The Outline of History


[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dhamma_Brothers and http://www.prison.dhamma.org/ussummary.htm