The Emotional Circle of Self

The Emotional Circle of Self refers to one's own self image and you're perceived impact upon those around you.

In psychological terms, the Emotional Circle includes the Id, Ego, and SuperEgo in one big mixing bowl.

Emotional well-being is unique to humans because we seem to be the only species that has an understanding of self identity, affect, and permanence/mortality.

Thus, the Emotional Circle of Self is where you house and express your self confidence.  Most often, good emotional health is a product of good balance and strength throughout the other four Circles of Human Health.

As with the other components in the Circle Theory, the Emotional Circle of Self works within the guidelines of the Gradient Theory.

This is where you house character traits like confidence, pride, and intellect.  It is also the Circle of yourself that you'll refer to when you consciously or unconsciously project an image of yourself to those around you and how you perceive their impression of that image has been received.

For instance, lets say you identify with the ability to be likable and friendly.  In social situations, you will believe yourself to be likable and friendly, and will therefore feel relatively unreserved in meeting new people, going to parties, or finding yourself in variable social situations.  Because you believe that people see you as likable and friendly, you will likely project an image that shows you being likable and friendly and, you will accurately assess that the people around you would qualify you as likable and friendly.

There is a potential monkey wrench in this last process for Emotional health - your impression of what others think of you.  That monkey wrench is empathy.  Some people exist with a greater ability to accurately assess the needs, wants, and thoughts of those around them.  Others do not.  If your ability to empathize with those around you is hindered in some way (a possibility which seems to be growing from, I believe, the greater reliance on technology for social interaction) then you will have a more inaccurate assessment of how others perceive you.  You may be thinking that you're projecting friendliness while your social interactions find you obnoxious.  Or you may believe that you are shy while others see you as sociable and interactive.

Further, the severity or "brightness" of the Emotional Circle of Self is variable depending upon your social situation.  You may feel smart and empowered among your peers at work but if you went to a career convention and met others that you felt are more accomplished than yourself, you may feel less intelligent but more open to apprenticeship.

A big part of your ability to manage your personal Emotional Circle comes from how you handle your variable impressions of yourself.  Using the previous example, if you typically feel smart in front of your friends and colleagues then find yourself in a situation with lots of people you consider smart making you feel less so, do you feel:

A) Inspired and empowered to learn?
B) Defeated and isolated?

Certainly embracing perspective A is going to be more healthy and rewarding than perspective B.  Also, by embracing path A over B, you'll gain exponential, not just added, emotional fulfillment.  Here is why:

If you feel defeated and isolated, these emotional impressions are the opposite of inspired and empowered.  You're emotional self worth will diminish based upon this movement in this particular gradient.  Because your self worth has been diminished, you'll feel at least slightly less confident in other aspects of your emotional identity as well.

If, on the other hand, you feel inspired and empowered - or even commit yourself to being inspired and empowered through mental conditioning - then you will gain emotional fulfillment through multiple sources.  First, you give yourself the ability to learn thereby feeling more intelligent having learned.  Second, despite your existing intellectual capability, you approached others with humility rather than defensiveness thus your new contacts will have a better impression of you as a person further boosting your emotional well being. And third, if your new contacts have a better impression of you then you will gain the satisfaction of having been accepted in an arena of higher achievers.  All of these shifts in emotional gradient will help you be more stable and confident while also making you seem appropriately humble and endearing.

 The Emotional Circle of Self offers you the ability to face day to day mental and social challenges you face.  A strong Emotional Circle gives you the ability to conduct yourself peacefully and rationally in almost any situation.  In contrast, a weak sense of emotional well being will force a person to aggressively seek reward from one of the other Circles of Self thereby making you feel more imbalanced on the inside.

The Emotional Circle is tricky because no one else can tell you how you feel about yourself.  All they can do is tell you how you should feel - and they will likely be wrong because telling you how to feel is a fallacy.  Creating a strong emotional self is a matter of gaining personal satisfaction from your intellect, convictions, and abilities and recognizing that you will not be better than everyone at everything yet you will be better than everyone at some things.  You have to accept both as true if you are going to have a truly health Emotional Circle of Self.

The Food Sensitivity Self Test

Food sensitivities are likely becoming more prevalent in society.  In fact, I believe, they are some of the biggest culprits that induce inflammatory eating.  Inflammatory eating will most often be evident through mild symptomatic responses like runny nose, low energy, achiness, joint/muscle soreness, and frequent illness.

Forcing your body to constantly defend itself from the food you eat will consume energy, and divert valuable immune resources from fighting real infection to fighting protein over-abundance.

Classically thought of food allergies include items like :

• Nuts
• Peanuts
• Fish
• Shellfish
• ripe fruit
• alcohol

If you carry allergies or sensitivities to any of these items, you are probably already aware of that fact and you avoid contact with the nefarious food.  Allergic reactions to these items can be very strong and sometimes severely dangerous, causing swelling, difficulty breathing, skin redness and itching, and even anaphylaxis.

I'm not going to discuss these severe allergies here.  If you suspect that you have one of these allergies, see a doctor immediately so that you can begin to manage your symptoms appropriately.


Rather, this article is about slowly developing sensitivities to proteins.  Protein sensitivity does not lead to immediate emergency and, therefore, a person can often go a lifetime without identifying potential causes for their chronic fatigue, pain, or weight difficulties.

Slow onset food allergies come from an over-abundance of certain proteins in the diet, and are probably even dependent upon your mother's diet as you were developing into a baby.

Slow onset food allergy/sensitivity shows more chronic and fewer acute symptoms.  Unfortunately this means there is a lot of cross-over between a person who shows signs for food sensitivity and for other common ailments such as arthritis or chronic fatigue syndrome.

No matter what the cause of your symptoms, however, you may always attempt to identify food sensitivity through the steps below.  Going through the process wont hurt.  All it will do is give you insight into how your body works and feels.


The Culprits:


There are four main protein types that show up frequently in a processed diet:

• Gluten
• Casein
• Albumen
• Soy

These protein types are associated with these foods:

• Gluten :  Wheat & Barley
• Casein :  Milk & Dairy
• Albumen :  Eggs
• Soy :  Soy

In order to determine whether you have a food sensitivity, all you need to do is follow the two week rule.

The Two Week Rule

The two week rule involves simply removing one of those primary proteins from your diet completely for two weeks.  Actually, it's not quite so simple.  Here are the steps:

1)  Take note of how you feel right now: 

- do you have regular aches, tiredness, fatigue?
- do you get digestive or respiratory distress regularly day in and day out?
- It's a good idea to record this information in a notebook or "health journal" so you can track improvement.  Write down days and times that you feel symptomatic.  You need a basis of information from which you will be looking for positive change.

2) For two weeks, completely remove one of the major proteins from your diet!

-  "Completely" means completely!
-  No cheat days, no accidents
-  You must read food labels, ask for nutrient contents at restaurants, and avoid all possible exposure to ingesting these proteins for two full weeks.
-  If you ingest a potentially offending food early, you must start the test over unless you get a positive result.  (Sometimes less than two weeks is enough time to get a positive result but going the full time almost guarantees a valid result.)

3) After two weeks, take note any symptom changes

-  Did your tiredness, irritability, achiness, or digestive distress change over the last two weeks?

4)  Put the potentially offensive protein back into your diet

-  You don't need to over-do it, but now that you've avoided the substance for two weeks, eat a piece of bread or have a small glass of milk or whatever food it is you've been avoiding.

5) Again, take note of how you feel now that you've replaced the potential offender

-  Did anything change from beginning to end?
-  Do you feel better or worse?

In the two week rule, you aren't necessarily looking for a cure, but rather for a significant change in how you feel.  In this case, a "positive" result is actually a circumstance that makes you feel worse.  You're trying to make a direct connection between what you eat and how you feel.

In my case, excluding gluten from my diet completely removed daily digestive distress I had been experiencing.  The moment I put gluten back into my diet, the digestive distress returned.  You're results should be similarly evident for causality.  If you're not sure about the results, either try the test again, or try another protein for comparison.



When you decide to try the Two Week Rule, here are a few things to consider:

Only tackle one protein at a time
-  Trying to exclude multiple proteins at once wont yield a positive result for any because you've added extra variables.


Select your two weeks carefully
-  You wouldn't want your two week self experiment to coincide with a big party or some event where you know it's going to be difficult to exclude certain foods.  You need to have a very high level of control during the two weeks.


Inform others
-  Particularly if someone else frequently buys or prepares your food, be sure that people you frequently eat with know about your experiment.  If you keep it quiet, they may feed you something you don't want without your knowing.


Try all four
Although you may have a preconceived notion of which food you have a sensitivity to, it doesn't hurt to try all four at some point just to see if there is a difference.  You don't have to attempt each experiment in succession, but the less you consume foods to which your body is sensitive, the better you'll feel!




 

Inflammatory Eating

Do you ever get the feeling that your energy is just not what it used to be? 

Does it seem like you have more hard slog days, than easy coasting days?

Does your head ache, skin itch, nose run, and your joints ache more than you'd expect?

You may chalk this up to aging or work or many other possible diagnoses, but there is one probable cause you may not have considered : allergies.

Even if you don't believe yourself to have the classic form of allergic hay fever, it is still very possible that you have developed a sensitivity to your environment simply due to over-exposure.  One of the most major environments we expose ourselves to is our own diet.

Believe it or not, food is actually an external extension of our own bodies.  Because the digestive tract is continuous from mouth to anus, and there is no blood flow nor cell production nor any other biological process happening within this cavity, whatever is in the digestive system is actually considered "outside the body".

Not until nutrients and toxins are absorbed are they considered inside the body.  And yes, there are plenty of toxins in food.

We all know that narcotic drugs, alcohol, and poison are toxins, but so too are things like sugar, fat, salt, and to many people, certain proteins.

The first thing we think is, wait a minute, proteins are the building blocks of cell synthesis and are necessary to survive.  This is true, but if we dig deeper, not in to the function of proteins but rather the synthesis itself, we discover that the body uses finite materials to absorb and utilize proteins.  These materials are called enzymes.  Primarily gut enzymes.

You can imagine that, if we have a finite amount of enzymes to process individual proteins, then the possibility stands to reason that we may have an over-abundance of any particular protein relative to usable enzymes.

If we consider our body a car, and proteins as fuel, what would happen to the car if we over-filled it with gasoline?

Fortunately, our body does not necessarily come to the same solution as an over-filled gas tank (regurgitation).  In some severe cases, however, it does.

Rather, for the less severely affected food sensitivity sufferer, an over-abundance of protein induces an allergic or, at minimum, inflammatory response.  While food sensitivities may or may not induce histamine production indicative of an allergy, it's the inflammation that causes all those feelings that make you think you're not quite yourself.

Personally, I believe that due to our diet changes over the past 50 years, and due to the shift from agrarian to industrial farming, it is much easier to over-load our systems with specific nutrients while almost completely neglecting others.

Considering this shift in the methods we use to feed ourselves, we can look at what we eat differently than our parents and grandparents.

What are the largest food staples on earth?  

Corn, wheat, rice, soy, and livestock/animals. 

There may be some others in there, but for this discussion, these items will suffice.

Corn, wheat, rice, soy and, from animals, milk and eggs can be found everywhere - in almost everything!  Next time you go to the market or a restaurant that will show you ingredients, take a look and see if you can find any packaged product that doesn't contain one of these foods.  It's nearly impossible.

The packaged food innovation has also given us the opportunity to store food for a longer period, so it is much easier to manage and more accessible than fresh produce, grains and meat.

Greater abundance + Greater accessibility = Greater Consumption

We're consuming more of the same types of things in the last 50 years than we had in the previous 100,000.  What is the chance that our enzymatic availabilty has caught up with agrarian innovation?

Hence, food allergies.

So, what's the problem with that? 

Clearly, if you're severely allergic to any particular food, your body has an emergency response and you end up in the hospital.  Not a good thing.  But what if you're response is not severe?

A mild response is less likely to be noticed, yet more likely to compound over time.  Little by little your body becomes more sensitive to the food that it recognizes as a toxin.  And little by little that toxin creates more inflammation in your system.

Inflammation is your body's method for fighting infection or damage.  It requires energy and resources and induces mild to severe pain.

If your body is interpreting your food as damaging or infectious, as long as you consume that food, you'll feel lower energy and a heightened sensitivity to aches and pains...  

These days of abundant food, its all that much more important to be mindful of what we eat.

If you're frequently feeling tired, sick, achy or even in a regular bad mood, consider your fuel -

- consider your food.


  

 
 

You'll never be better than me...

This morning I awoke with an interesting question on my mind...

Interesting for two reasons:

1)  I haven't been able to come to a solution to this question all day.

2)  My brain made the question all on its own just so I could wake up and find it.  (This gives you an idea of what it's like to spend a day in my head!)

So here's the question - actually its more of a riddle:

There are three men living in the desert who subsist upon tomatoes.  Tomatoes don't grow well in the desert and therefore each has a different solution to their conundrum.   

Before you read the solutions below, think to yourself how you might solve this problem?  The problem of course being that your main food staple does not grow well in your environment.  I'm willing to bet that your personal solution will guide your answer to the following question which is the point of this exercise. 

The question to be pondered is:

Which man is the smartest?

 Now that you have thought about this problem and formed your own preconceived notion for arriving at a solution, read the solutions below and see if you can answer, which man is the smartest? 

Here are the men's solutions:

A)  Since tomatoes don't grow well in the desert, the first man decides to re-locate to an environment where tomatoes grow plentifully.

B)  Since tomatoes don't grow well in the desert, the second man studies hard and figures out a way to encourage tomatoes to grow in the sandy soil.

C)  Since tomatoes don't grow well in the desert, the third man works to alter his diet from one that requires tomatoes to one that requires oranges.  Oranges grow much more plentifully in the desert soil.

Which man's solution is the smartest?


Unfortunately, I don't have the answer to this question.  But I awoke with the question in my head so I felt like it was worth analyzing.

Clearly there are variables which would make any of the given solutions more attractive in certain circumstances.  For instance, if oranges are indeed plentiful - particularly to the point that they grow naturally in the desert - then solution C seems to be the most practical and, therefore, smartest.

If, however, a man cannot live on oranges, and must find tomatoes, then solution A would make the most sense because the short term move to a location plentiful with tomatoes would pay off more easily than the long term difficulties involved in harvesting or changing one's diet. 

But what if the man's family lives in the desert and they cannot move and they don't have the dedication necessary to change diets?  Then, of course, solution B is the most viable.

 The point of this question, I suppose, is to recognize that it is almost impossible to make clear, definitive, quantitative judgements such as determining who is most or best or highest, without first completely defining the the parameters and indeed negating all but the most necessary possibilities.

At the end of the day the question that sits in my mind is:

How do I know that someone, anyone, is smarter/better/more/less/weaker/stronger/grander than me?

The answer is I don't.

Is the fastest man in the world faster than me? ... Not if he's running a footrace and I'm in a car.

Is the prettiest person in the world prettier than me? ... Not if they are blonde and the person in front of me prefers brunettes.

Is the smartest man in the world smarter than me? ... Not if he knows how to build a greenhouse and I like oranges.

Is anyone really more than me? ... No, because I am the best "me" that there ever will be.


So this is what I woke up to this morning - reminding myself that nobody is better than me at being me, and I am better than no one at being them.  Not everyone is comfortable with equality, but it is an indisputable fact.  When compared exclusively within our individual selves, we are all equal!





...By the way, this type of puzzle is why I hate and performed so poorly on multiple choice tests.  There are never enough choices! 

Physical Circle of Self

The Physical Circle of Self refers to one's physicality.  In an application sense it means is your body physically healthy and capable to handle the rigors of a physical world?  Can you lift, bend, stretch, move, react, and balance in a manner that suits your activities' necessity. 

Also, are you generally well or ill?  
Do you get or feel sick frequently?  
Do you have a chronic disease?  
Do you manage that disease or does it hinder your daily life?  
Do you take daily steps toward making your body healthier like eating good foods and getting regular exercise, or do you have more of a tendency to eat inflammatory or high energy foods that could get lost in storage?
Do you have comfortable digestion?
Do you take daily medications or pain killers?  
Are you in recurring or constant pain?...

All of these questions are necessary to ask in order to evaluate one's physical health and happiness.

But beyond all that The Physical Circle of Self refers to one's perceptions regarding one's own physicality:

• Do you believe you are physically able?
• Do normal human physical activities like walking, carrying or lunging scare you?
• Are you comfortable looking in the mirror? (This question can cross through all circles in one form or another)
• Are you comfortable in your clothing?
• Are you comfortable in your skin?
• Do you feel attractive?
• Do you feel coordinated?

The key to the Circle Theory and the Gradient Theory is that not all answers to these questions need be positive in order to live a happy, healthy life.  Indeed the answer to some of these questions for some people may be flat out "No way!"  But in that case, one's identity in another area of the Circle of Health & Happiness must be equally committed toward the positive in order to balance out the perceived negative.

If you were born with a physical disability, for instance, a balanced self would require a strong sense of personal self worth in the Emotional Circle, for instance, or possibly a strong ability to communicate in the Social Circle.

The key to ultimate physical health is twofold:

1) Maintain physicality enough through life to successfully handle the physical rigors you impart upon yourself.

&

2) Avoid exceeding the necessary amount of physical activity lest you encourage excessive tissue damage and deterioration such that your body is unable to recover.

I'll cover the various facets of physical health more in depth in the future, but for now, examine your life and ask yourself these questions I've posed.  On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your overall physical health?

The Circles of Health & Happiness...

A woman lies upon a towel on a sandy beach in the Mediterranean.  Accompanied by the gentle sloshing of low level tide and the squeals of guls and sandpipers she bathes in the occasional warmth of the sun in contrast to the shade from the palm fronds that flutter over her.  She sips a fruity drink and melts into the ground to the salty fragrances of sea mist, mangrove, and kelp.

Arm in arm the couple enter the gallery matching one another's stride.  Adorned in their most elegant tuxedo and gown with gold cuffs upon his sleeves and diamond bangles from her ears their wide smiles belie the vicissitudes in their careers.  Bravado ensues after a slight din in the natural party clamor at the announcement of their entrance.  In what seems like slow motion, lights sparkle, smiles brighten and a rush of welcomes greet their appearance.  With a whiff of champagne on their lips and light hors douvres to satiate, they dance and sing and chat the night away with a hundred of their closest friends.

High in the foothills overlooking a lush valley bisected be a stream a lone man chops wood for the winter.  Having pickled, smoked, and jarred plenty of food for the winter, his nostrils flare to the smell of pine and lilac on the wind.  His gruff skin and scruffy beard match the expected mesquite flavor in the evening air.  With a fire already burning in his little wooden shack, he retreats for the night, falling asleep to the whistle in the wind and the crackle in the fireplace.


 Each of these stories describe a person or persons in balance with their circles:

Physical

Spiritual

Material

Social

Emotional

The concept of life being separated into different intersecting components is not new.  Depending upon what priest, sage, monk or fortune teller to talk to you may encounter five lessons, four pillars, eight sequences, ten laws, or any number of other teachings that are meant to guide people toward happiness and good living.

I created the five circles because it is a concept that makes sense for me - and I discovered them before I found the teachings of others.

In the symbol:

 Each circle is equal in diameter, equidistant from the center, and interchangeable with one another.  They are open to one another letting their contents spill into the balanced center.  Independently their colors represent moods, wishes, states of being, and environments in which an individual lives.  When all colors are combined in their maximum state of balance, none shines brighter than the others and all that is left is pure white light.

It is the white balance that people should seek for happiness and healthiness, letting their own shimmering white light burst forth in a blinding expression of themselves.

It is not easy to balance your circles, and if you do, it is then not easy to keep them in balance.  Invariably your attentions will be drawn more predominantly toward one circle or another at any given time and this is okay.  The way you again achieve balance is not to fight the movement of your attentions but rather to accept them, recognize them, and then find yourself focusing on your less frequently visited circles more often.

A common example would be the disconnect many Americans experience with their Material self.  The material self, the green circle, refers to that part of us that works for a living, generates income, purchases goods and services, and takes satisfaction that our basic needs like food and shelter are accounted for and our wants are reasonable.

Many people have a tendency to spend entirely too much time and effort on their material selves.  A fact that can easily be mathematically proven by simply comparing the amount of time we spend working and consuming as compared to the time we spend socializing, or reading quietly - which would indicate focus on some of the other circles.

Placing too much time, effort, and desire into one circle forces that circle to swell - imbalancing the whole and indeed causing other facets in our lives to shrink until they become all but unrecognizable.

Like matter and energy, the self can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be changed and morphed into shapes that invariably damage our health and happiness.

Any individual's circle structure can, however, grow or shrink as a whole depending upon the person's necessity.  The circle structure does not fall in the "more is better" paradigm, however because more is not necessarily better for all people.  Sometimes less is better.  But an individual will not have the opportunity to examine their own quantities unless they have already balanced their own qualities - hence, the balance of the circles of health and happiness...

In The Beginning...

Welcome to my "What is your Why" blog!  Life is all about why you live it and within this and future texts, you will have the opportunity to become intimately connected with me, with your environment, with the world around you, and most importantly, with yourself.


I am passionate about human health.  Not just the "am I sick or aren't I?" kind of health, but the kind of health that comes from recognizing/feeling/owning an individual perspective and passion for your own life.



This blog is in fact an expression of my own health for you see, I have found what drives me - what it is that I am in my essence.  I have found my "why" which is a concept I'll explain in a moment.  I am a healer.  My mind, body and soul are all best expressed, most devoted, and indeed I am happiest when I am helping others feel healthy and happy!



After spending over a decade trying to help people with their Physical health as a fitness trainer, I've realized that there is much more to people than just their body - and my desire to help people is greedy, so this is my attempt to heal all of it.



By "all of it", I mean everything.  All the facets and components of being human.  Everything that it takes to make a person happy and healthy.  In my line of work I've been fortunate because I've had the opportunity to meet many different types of people and it's occurred to me that no matter who you are - whether you consider yourself:

    •    rich or poor
    •    beautiful or comely
    •    tall or short
    •    fat or skinny
    •    smart or dumb
    •    light or dark
    •    religious or atheist
    •    extrovert or introvert
    •    confident or shy
    •    coordinated or clumsy


... or any of the millions of other methods we use to describe ourselves and others, everyone has an equal opportunity to be happy and healthy or sick and miserable and that commitment has more to do with one's perceptions of the world around them rather than what is actually happening.



The foundation of Health & Happiness is Balance


This idea is the ultimate purpose for this blog.  To offer you the tools you need to find your balance, your bliss, your health and happiness.


If you look at the top of the page, you'll see a symbol I created.  It looks like five colored circles spilling into one another to create a white light.  These five circles each represent a component of what it means to be happy and healthy and they must all be attended to regularly and equally if one is to experience true health and happiness!


The circles represent:


Physical   Spiritual   Material   Emotional   and    Social   healthiness.


I truly believe that each of these portions of human existence must be attended to in a balanced manner for people to be truly happy and healthy.


So please, read on!  Hopefully some of the information you gather here will help you bring solace to your own life.


and comment! I welcome your comments, your inspiration, and your criticism.  Remember, ultimately I am doing this for me and every time someone comments, I know I've touched them in some way which is healing for me.  So even if you never return, just leave me a note and you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you helped someone today too...


Again, Welcome!  Lets have a better tomorrow, today!