The Mythical Mystery…
 
The  eternal chase for peace, success, and happiness, goes on.
 
 As it did before, still does, and always will do.
 
That’s life, and it hasn’t changed any more in our day from the way it was in Roman Times, Middle Ages, and right up to today.
 
Which is why you’d think we’d have got a handle on it by now. But with the rapid and explosive availability of knowledge now in the Internet, maybe we’ll all surpass ourselves, get knowledgeable, wise even, and find a way to solve problems, become tolerant, and manifest our wisdom in new and effective ways to live our lives in peace and harmony.
 
Maybe Facebook is the start; let’s all be friends.
 
Seriously, I read lately that the attitude of the population in any country is the sum of the individuals’ attitudes in it.
 
And while that seems pretty obvious, there’s an interesting provision that if that’s the case, all we have to do is work at becoming as useful, as good, and as beneficial to our community, and to ourselves, as we can, and then we’ll be contributing to a sum that will be useful, good and beneficial to itself.
 
So, like the passenger in the spiralling out-of-control ‘plane, put your own oxygen mask on first, then you’ll be set to help your fellow passenger.
 
So, decide, right now, by whatever means are available to you, to get yourself in shape, to put your mind in the frame, and to have a wonderful, productive, useful, and hugely enjoyable, life.
 
You really do make a difference.

 
‘The single most important factor in any company, is the people who work in it.’
Duncan Bannatyne
 
Everything has a price.
 
It could be time, it could be money, it could be discomfort, embarrassment, it could be self-denial, humility, even humiliation, or some other kind of self-sacrifice.
 
But everything worthwhile has some price. And how we think about, feel about, the desired outcome , is usually what determines how we feel about the price. If we’re wishy-washy in our feelings about our goals, whatever needs to be done can be daunting, even prohibiting.
 If we have a very strong desire about the projected outcome, the price may appear small, incidental even.
That’s motivation. It works both ways.
 
To be motivated is to be moved, stirred, inspired, to do something that will cause an effect; it’s an emotional response.
 
We like to see ourselves as mature, rational, logical, clear-thinking adults, unaffected by emotion in our decisions and perceptions, that we live by the intellect and not by the heart. That’s mainly because we’ve been educated to think that that’s the ultimate truth.
 
But it’s not the whole truth.
 
The term ‘Emotional Intelligence’ would have been considered almost unacceptable as recently as a decade ago. We would have asked how emotion and intelligence could be compatible. Oil and water don’t mix. And the use of emotion and the use of intelligence were considered to be mutually exclusive, an oxymoron.
 
 I believe the main reason for this was that the word emotion was associated with a kind of whimsical mindlessness, that to be emotional was ok for soft, irrational, woolly-headed people, people who up to a generation ago were thought to be not of the calibre of the full-blooded, hard-driven, decisive and all-conquering James Bond kind of He-Man. Success in any area of life was generally thought to be the product of Superior Intellect and Brute Force.
 
Again, not the whole truth.
 
Women are finally being given the equality they want and deserve. Successful people in any field speak of how they achieved what they did, by the power of how they felt, about a person, a county, a country, an ideal, something that motivated them to do whatever they had to do to affect their achievement.
 
What they thought about it intellectually may have been in accord with the feeling, but it would have been the emotion that drove them to action. Over the past decade, the power of emotion has come to be recognised in any endeavour. And about time too.
 
Which brings us back to price.
 
When we’re moved, motivated, driven, we’re much more likely to persevere in any undertaking. And because of that emotion, that motivation, we’re much more likely to come to any task with a will, a drive, a force, whatever the task may be.
 
In any event in life, anything to which you need to apply yourself, find reasons, when you’re starting, why that particular project inspires you. Let yourself think about it, how you feel about it, what it means to you.
Be distinctly personal about it.
 Find what it means to you, let yourself become come aware of the strength of feeling you have about it, and then, when you’ve decided that that is what you intend, go to it, with a will, and see it through.
 
Read this again.
 
If you need confirmation of this, reflect on some event in your life when you went beyond the perceived boundaries, when you searched for, and found, resources you didn’t know existed, when you did what you had to do, needed to do, and then saw that event through to its conclusion.
 
Then, and this is key to the whole process, capture the feeling, the emotion, the sense of drive and energy that pervaded every cell of your existence, and let yourself feel the strength of that feeling again.
 
Do that daily. And while you’re doing it, apply it to whatever you’re doing now. Like most people who’ve done this with a bit of a will, you’ll see the difference.
 
You’ll find that what you may have considered to be a price,
is in fact, a privilege.
 
 

 
Light Moves and Heavy Training. 
Some notes from recent events in training;
1] Honour your technique when learning, and later, as you practice your exercises.
You don’t have to be inch perfect all the time, but make sure you’re not getting sloppy and casual about the form.
2] Set yourself up before a training session, not just physically, but in your mind. Training is an event, and if you regard it as such, you make an opportunity to express yourself physically, and to discipline yourself mentally. You can then drive yourself emotionally to the edge of your comfort zone, and beyond, but with a control. That’s what makes a difference.
3]   Focus on the muscle most involved in the exercise. The rest of the body will synergize instinctively. Let it happen. That’s why you need to take your time. That doesn’t mean you slouch through the moves. You do them with vigour, power, and deliberation.
4] The term for exercising is ‘training’. Make sure that that’s what you’re doing, and not just going through the motions. True Training is an exercise in attention, and intention. That’s the kind that pumps the muscle, pulses the circulation, ignites the blood and fires the mind.
It invigorates, enlivens and relaxes the mind, the body, the spirit.
Let it work for you and have a Healthy, Happy, and Hugely Enjoyable Patrick’s Day.

This story takes place in the Auvergne Region, in Central France. It concerns an elderly gentleman I’d met in 1971 in my wife’s town, Moulins-sur-Allier, and with whom I’d become friendly. His name was Mr. Jean Gaston. He had been a soldier in the First World War, and a celebrated Resistance fighter in World War Two. He now ran his newsagent’s and tobacco shop in the square of the town.
One day, after we’d been acquainted a couple of years, this was 1975, he invited me to accompany him on a visit to a WW2 museum, high in the remoter part of the Auvergne hills.
The following morning, I picked him up at 5.30 am and we set off.
The museum, he told me, was in commemoration of a battle in 1944, between a Resistance group, and three full German battalions. The majority of the Resistance group was made up of very young people, and elderly, because all the people of the ages in between,  were either in the army, prison camps, or in active Resistance groups around the country.
On the way to the museum, Jean told me to take a turn at some cross-roads. We drove for a short while and came to a derelict cottage at which he asked me to stop. We got out of the car, and he continued his story of the battle.
The purpose of the attack by the group back in those days of war, was to delay the Germans in their journey as reinforcements against the impending Allied Invasion.
Having held the might of the soldiers for nearly nine days, the Resistance fighters retreated, scattering in the hilly and difficult countryside. Their losses were high, but they had achieved their aim.
Jean, my friend, had been visiting the site of the battle every year since about 1954. One day, he told me, he took a wrong turning in the labyrinth network of tiny roads that led to the village. He came to a cottage at which a middle-aged man was standing at the gate. The man had a pile of small sticks on top of one of the pillars, and was sharpening them systematically, using a tiny penknife. Jean introduced himself, explained he’d got lost, and said where he wanted to go.
 The two men chatted for a while. They were both ex-Resistance fighters, and though they’d never met, had heard of each other, and had mutual friends. Jean thanked the man, Robert Feuillore, and went on his way.
Arriving at the museum, Jean made a note to himself to look for any mention of Robert Feuillore.
What he found, chilled him.
Commander Robert Feuillore had been one of the heroes, who, in the gallant attack that delayed the German advance to Northern France, in May 1944, had been shot to death by the enemy. He was now buried in Vallon-en-Sully, the small village in which he’d been born, beside his wife, Yvette, who had also been killed in that encounter.
On his way back from the museum, Jean went by the road and to the cottage at which he’d met Robert.
When he came to the cottage, what met him was the ruin at which we were both now looking.
The little iron gate was hanging off the hinges, the pathway to the house was overgrown, and the front door was ajar, showing a derelict and weathered abandoned interior. Most of the windows were broken, shards of remaining glass jutting from the frames, letting the sweltering heat of the summers, and the subzero cold of the snow and the icy winds, do their worst, in winter.
On one of the gate pillars, though, was the tiny penknife, and the pile of sticks, that Jean had witnessed being used by the man he’d met only hours before. Jean told me he’d picked up the tiny bone-handled knife, put it in his pocket, and got from that place fast.
He looked at me for some kind of reaction, lifted his shoulders in Gallic wonder. We got back in the car and drove off. I didn’t know what to think.
Every year after that, when we went to Mont Muchet, we drove by the cottage.
Every year we stopped, got out of the car, and just looked. I always had the feeling he was looking for some kind of sign, something to prove that what he’d told me was true, would validate his story.
At Easter of 1996, I went as usual to visit Jean’s newsagent, but it was no more.
Instead, there was a busy café. Fearing the worst, I went in and made enquiries. The café was run by Jean’s son, Michel. When I said who I was, his face brightened and he said,” Ah yes, the Irishman of whom my father spoke.” His face saddened then, and he continued, “My father died just after Christmas this year. He had a peaceful, happy death. And he told me that if you should call, he would like you to have this.” And he handed me a small box.
I thanked him, left the shop and made my way to a table on the square. Slowly, I opened the box, having a good idea what I was going to find. And there it was, the little bone-handled penknife.
As I took it out, I wondered, and still wonder to this day, whether I’m the victim, a willing victim, I don’t mind saying, of a humorous, imaginative old man whom it was my privilege to have met in this life, or if I’m the witness to a truth so profound and mysterious, that I cannot, nor ever will, even begin to understand it.
Je ne sais pas.

 
18/1/16    A Mindful Life.
What we think about all day long, and especially how we think about it, every day, is what our life becomes. Don’t doubt it.
For example, if you wake in the morning and let yourself get into a state of dread about the traffic on the way to work, it’s likely that you’re going to dread pretty well everything else too. All day long. A frame of mind sets itself in place for the day.
But you’d be amazed how many people don’t think about that, let their minds become filled with whatever kind of dung happens to be flying by. I know that because unless I’ve done my ritual, I do it myself.  
Now that doesn’t mean that you pretend the traffic doesn’t exist and put a silly grin on your face and tell yourself you’re going to have a great time stewing at the traffic lights.
That’s not being positive. That’s being self-delusional.
However, you could accept that you’re going to have to endure the traffic anyway, and decide to put the time to good use by setting up your mind, your day, your attitude. Now there’s something for you to think about.
And your first question has to be, ‘How do I do that?’
And we’ve got two interesting and practical steps right there in that question.
I’ll tell you what they are the next day.

  Try a Fast…
If you’re half way interested in the fasting process, and the benefits you can get from it, you’ll be very pleased to know that PROVIDED you keep yourself hydrated, you’ll be fine.
At this time of the year, the ideal thing is to have some warm water available. The temperature does make a difference and the warm water tends to have a very wholesome and cleansing effect on the system.
Here’s how one man tried and succeeded in doing a full 24-hour fast, never having done one before.
He got up as usual in the morning, did all his showering, shaving and so on, and then, instead of having his breakfast, had a glass of warm water.  As he felt fine with this, he decided he’d leave it till eleven or so before eating anything, depending on how he felt.
At eleven he felt fine, had the warm water, and continued with his plan. At lunchtime he felt a bit of a pang, but nothing much, so he skipped lunch, went for a twenty-minute walk and carried on with his day. Now, he DID notice that he was bringing up some wind, but that passed after half an hour or so. At four in the afternoon he felt well, went for a brief walk around the block to stay away from the biscuits and bars in the tea trolley; his sugar levels were a bit low by now and he had an urge for something sweet. But he resisted.
At about half five, he had a surge of energy that took him by surprise. In fact, what he said was that he felt so good, light, alert, bright, that he was reluctant to eat anything for the rest of the day as he felt he might jeopardize the good feeling he was enjoying.
And so he finished his day. As he had put no pressure on himself, no compulsion, to complete the fast over the twenty-four hours, he knew that he could stop at any time he liked. He left himself the option. Some would say that that is the antithesis of achieving an aim, but we’re all different in our approach to life and events.
For the rest of the evening he sipped warm water, carried on with his life as usual, and didn’t eat any solids till the following day at eleven o’clock; having two boiled eggs and half a slice of toast.
I’ll tell you about the benefits and how he capitalized on them, the next day.
Stay well.

Extraordinary Application
It’s over 50 years ago, now. We were approaching the Easter holidays, and my mom asked me what I was going to do about my Leaving Exam. With about 7 weeks, or just over, to go to the exam, I hadn’t much of an answer.
I was good at Latin and English, because I enjoyed them. But the other subjects were a nuisance; something to be endured, or preferably avoided, while I attended to important matters like listening to the Stan Kenton, Gerry Mulligan, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and my hero at that time, Gene Krupa. If those names mean nothing to you, they

were a tiny few of the musicians around whom my world circled. So intense was my interest in nearly all kinds of Jazz, that if I wasn’t listening to it, talking about it, or thinking of it in some form, I considered the time being wasted.
So, back to my mom’s question; what was I going to do about my leaving cert? For an hour or two, the question hung idly in my mind. I wasn’t really concerned. And then, and then, for some reason beyond my understanding, I caught a breath, and I held it, as a wave of alarm washed through me.
 I realized, that on the amount of study to which I’d applied myself, up to that moment, my chances of passing an exam in any of the subjects other than the two I’ve mentioned, amounted to very, very, little.
Dread seeped through me. Fear, fanned by a creative imagination, caught light and flamed into something approaching an emotional conflagration.
It was as if the continuous barrage of parental invective over the year was suddenly accumulating into a pointed, gathering force that was hell bent on swamping me in a tsunami of guilt, fear, uncertainty and self-doubt.
To this day, I can hear my mother’s sad and frequent laments; ‘What in God’s name is the matter with you?’, ‘What are you going to do?’, ‘Why can’t you be like everyone else?’, ‘I don’t know what’ll become of you!’, and, in times of severe distress, ‘Where did I go wrong?’
I thank whoever my God is that I’d always had the wit to see that this was a rhetorical question and so I refrained from any kind of answer.
As this new experience was threatening to suck what energy there was from my existence, I realized I’d wandered, without thinking, up to the attic in the top of the house. Up here, I felt less threatened, less vulnerable, had the incipient nudges of normality returning. And this was my good luck, as I was about to read something that could so easily have been scanned, vaguely understood, and promptly dismissed.
And another thing kept the butterflies in my stomach flying in order, and that was the fact that I’d never intended not to study. I’d always been in accord with the idea of getting a good result in the Leaving Exam. But apart from the Latin and English, I’d just never got around to burdening myself with the ritual of application to any other subjects.
The attic in our house in those days was, to me, a wonderful place. On the fifth floor, it had a broad window in the roof which looked out across the town, to the river Slaney, set between the tower of Selskar Abbey and the top of the pear tree in the corner of our garden.
The wall at one end of the room was covered top to bottom by bookshelves, each shelf full to the edge. I was browsing through the rows of old cloth-bound books, taking out one at a time, sniffing here and there that fausty old smell that is peculiar to aged books, when I came upon one with an inscription on the second page.
The writing was in faded, sepia tinted ink, copperplate style, slanting to the right. ‘From P.B. H., to P. B. H. October, 1914’, it said. I knew those initials. They were my late father’s. He would have been twenty in 1914, three years older than I was now.
He’d died in 1950, twelve years previously, aged 56, after a life of toil, effort, long days and hours, and I’m very pleased to say, some notable success.
Flicking through the book, a heavily underlined paragraph arrested my attention. The words underlined read, ‘The greatest things in daily life are achieved, not so much by the extraordinary powers of genius and intellect, so much as by the extraordinary application of simple means, and ordinary powers, with which we’re all more or less endowed’
I read it again. And again. And then again. And yet again. I kept on reading it, over and over. Then I found myself saying it, out loud, as I was reading it.   Then I found I was saying it without having to look at the words, as the idea, the truth of it, began to take hold and imprint itself on my eagerly assimilating, hungry young mind. It was growing on me. Then in me. The idea and the fact of the words were taking shape in me. They were becoming my truth.
‘Extraordinary application’. How simple. What a revelation. That’s all it took. To do anything. Extraordinary application. And I knew, I really knew, that I could, should I wish, apply myself extraordinarily.  That was all it took. Extraordinary application. I read the underlined words again.
I had seven weeks, I thought, and a few days. About sixty days altogether. And nights. I needed five subjects, including the dreaded compulsory Irish. I had two in which I knew I could do fairly well, even excel. All I needed was three more, and I’d probably pass the Leaving. If I could pass the Leaving, I knew I would exonerate myself of the laziness that had come to represent me in most peoples’ minds. But more attractive to me was the prospect of confounding those who knew me, who had come to despair of me, and ultimately, I reluctantly admitted, dismiss me.
I started that very evening. And continued. Day in, day out. And most of the nights. I swotted, studied, revised and recited. I beamed onto everything concerning the subjects needed. Nothing else. I became a mental magnet for anything related to those subjects. My reticular activating system kicked in and sucked up relevant details, dismissed the irrelevant. On it went, day and night. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sleep was brief, irregular, deep and refreshing.
The concentration was fierce, but soon levelled out at a constant and all absorbing rate, drawing in facts and figures and perceptions and retaining them with a simple clarity. The energy was self-perpetuated, boundless in its awareness of what could be, was being, achieved.
I never let up.
My poor confused mother, previously critical of my indolence, now fussed and worried over me, as I read, studied, wrote and applied myself in this frenzy of academic endeavor.
But I was taking it all in my stride. I knew, I just knew, that all I was doing what I knew, I, or anyone for that matter, could do when necessary. Extraordinary application. That’s all it was. A flurried show of extraordinary application.
Time flies when you’re that busy. The Leaving came. And it went.
Later that summer, lodging in London, I got the results in the post.
I’d passed.
My mother wrote at length in surprise and pleasure. It was the talk of her acquaintances. So now there was hope for me. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t lost to the sensible path of convention. I heard about other boys, expected to do very well, who hadn’t, and some of them would have to repeat. They became the objects of bigoted criticism.
 ‘God’, wailed their confused and scornful parents. ‘If even HE could do it, why couldn’t you?’ Many were lost for words. 
But in this case, I wasn’t. Nor, where ever he was, I thought, was my dad, P.B. H.
We knew. Two words. Extraordinary application.
 
 
 
 

  Apropos Courage.
Courage isn’t something you lie in wait for.
It’s a daily habit.
We need courage to face the day, do the simple small things, the things that seem insignificant in our lives, and yet are so important. Courage and persistence are wholly compatible. We need to persist with courageous daily action to get our lives lived.
That’s the sort of heroism I’ve witnessed over the years; not the single incident where someone commits an act of public courage and has it printed in the papers, shown on TV, spoken about on the radio.
Uh uh. What I’ve been privileged to see is the quiet private courage that deals with the problems that destroy sleep, tire the mind, devastate the emotions and break the heart. And no one knows. It’s all borne in private, sometimes desperate, loneliness of the dark early hours, allowing the imagination to flare the worst in vivid pictures, and the possible dire consequences to stand clear and inevitable. And still the spirit prevails.
That’s courage. That’s persistence.
Kipling knew about this, didn’t he?
‘If you can dream, and not make dreams your master,
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can deal with Triumph and Disaster,
And treat those two imposters just the same.’
Be aware.

Things, like Life, tend to get out of balance; hence the endless search for what we call, ‘Life/Work Balance’.
No bad thing. The first thing is to be aware of it. Then, you can do something about it.
And, like those wise souls who’ve already read ‘Dynamic Health’, you’ll be aware that in any undertaking, there are three factors that will get you there, no matter what the undertaking is.
First you need to know what to do.
Then you need to know how to do it.
Then you need to, as my wife once said to me about getting my first book finished and published, ‘Just shut up and get on with it.’
Best piece of advice I ever got on getting a book started, continued and finished.
Next piece approaches the first of these three simple needs.
In the meantime, get familiar with some basic and MOST EFFECTIVE ways to stay healthy, help concentration, and make the most of yourself and your life,
see http://davidhegarty.weebly.com/the-book.html