The 7-minute workout at ANY time of the day.

Not enough time to exercise in your day? No place to exercise? I call "foul" on that concept. Here's what I just did:

It's raining today so I didn't feel like bundling up in the cold downpour to do my daily 30-min walk. (Most often in the year I train 2x/day: a brisk, hilly walk and some other training, like weights, core training, tango dancing, Exuberant Animal games, bike outdoors or indoors, etc). However, I needed to exercise despite the outdoor weather.

I refuse to even listen to my own excuses, so instead of creating a rationale why I can't get my exercise, I decided to solve the problem how I CAN do my exercise.

So I put on my iPod (I listen to radio podcasts) and I walked up and down my stairs. Muscles and physiology trained:

• quadriceps (front of thighs)
• hamstrings (back of thighs)
• hip flexors
• glutes (big muscles of my butt)
• hips (small muscles of my butt)
• calves
• ankle muscles
• feet (I was in socks)
• cardiovascular (heart, blood systems, and lungs)

I did 8 minutes. Only 8 minutes and I was breathing hard, muscles pumping. That's only a quick break in my otherwise busy (multi-project) day.

What's REALLY good is that I can do another 8 minutes again... and then again... and again today - all at times that I'd be needing to get away from the computer anyway*.

What's better, is that my cat really wanted to play - so for 5 minutes I held a 12-lb cat while doing the stairs. He purred, I climbed.

HOW YOU CAN DO IT TOO:

1. If you are at work, climb the stairwell for 8-10 minutes on a break, a few times a day. You won't really get sweaty but you will make a dent in your training for the day. 3 times and you'd done 30 minutes - plus, you are at work so it won't look like you are slacking off.
2. If you are at home, do this at home at any time. I recommend NOT doing it before bedtime, because it can jazz you.
3. If you have small kids (or a baby), this is a way to hold the baby and get some exercise... or put a toddler near the staors and play with it as you walk up and down. Trust me, if it kept a cat happy (notorious for losing interest), it will keep a baby happy.

You will find that your muscles will respond as well as your psyche will respond. Stair climbing will get easier and the little 'lift' will also keep you from snacking in the day as a pick-me-up.

How did this work for you?

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* Additional ways of making stair-climbing more exercise-oriented:

• go fast up and down - very cardio
• go by 2's at a time
• go up or down in a very w-i-d-e stance
• go up or down in a very narrow stance
• hold something in your hands or arms (cat, baby, books, weights, etc)
• do it with radio, music, friend or podcast: make the time go by quickly
• do deep knee bends when going up

Of talking and silence

It's November, and it surprises me. I haven't been writing much because I've been "doing" - in fact, for the almost 5 weeks I was 'doing' it in Shanghai, China. September was a blur of getting ready for (and thinking about) China, October was a blur of being in China. It's November. And I have so much to say about what I've encountered.

Except that I don't want to talk about my experiences. No, it's not that I want to be silent - that I don't want anyone to know what adventures I had; quite the opposite. Everyone should hear what 4 weeks in China was like, working and exploring. The main point remains that I've spent what feels like lifetimes of people 'just talking'. Not always communicating and not always solving. Just talking. Sometimes in ego, sometimes in frustration, sometimes in boredom. People in days, weeks, months of talking about themselves.

When one is living life -- truly living -- one's speaking changes. Conversation moves away from small-talk and ego. Instead of asking "How are you?" the question becomes "How are you?" People who are 'living' often may talk less and listen more. Or they may take action instead of discussing when to take action. They've encountered adventures and circumstances which need little embellishment; they breathe the activities and don't need to exhale in idle chatter about themselves.

Instead, they watch, barely speaking, and wait --for what?-- kinship, maybe. A sign that someone else has breathed adventures also.

Photo taken by Lauren Muney, Century Park, Pudong, Shanghai, China, Oct 2007. What an interesting trio...and how happy they were to be photographed.

'Feel' to make quality decisions

As any active reader of this blog knows, I am fascinated with understanding how the brain, mind, personality, and our 'selves' work.

This fascination began, I believe, when I was a freshman in college; a required class was "The History of Ideas", which explained that history is not made from 'fact', it's made from people who interpret facts and therefore do some type of action due to this interpretation. (Example: WWI was not simply about a monarch being killed by a bullet. It's about how his people interpreted the killing, and why they wanted to fight back). Different interpretations may bring about different actions which bring different results.

In a nutshell, this means that life is subjective... if you understand this, you are halfway to peace. This was a revelation to me, and I think I became a closet anthropologist on the spot.

Of course, I can make so many different connections to spiritual life, how our pasts affect us (our "baggage", some might say), how mainstream education affects us, and also peer pressure. But I'll leave this to a different story.

Right now, I'm more interested in a story from the Boston Globe about how having emotions affects how we make decisions. It seems that if people have altered emotions from injury or brain chemistry, they often make risky decisions:

"In 2004, Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene used brain imaging to demonstrate that our emotions play an essential role in ordinary moral decision-making. Whenever we contemplate hurting someone else, our brain automatically generates a negative emotion. This visceral signal discourages violence. Greene's data builds on evidence suggesting that psychopaths suffer from a severe emotional disorder -- that they can't think properly because they can't feel properly. "This lack of emotion is what causes the dangerous behavior," said James Blair, a cognitive psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health."

This is fascinating because of one important reason: emotions are our feedback loop. Buddhism and other compassionate spiritual traditions use compassion to "put yourself in someone else's shoes" to understand even a modicum of what the other person is feeling.

How does this relate to "The History of Ideas"? History is made of actions, which is made from decisions - which were based on ideas. Ideas are inspired by feelings - or even lack of feelings. I daresay that the world most renown mass-murderers (Pol Pot, Hitler, etc) may have had 'ideas' about why they created mass genocide - but before their ideas, they certainly had a lack of compassionate emotions which would allow them to feel the pain of death for millions of people.

The next time you have a thought about an action - ask your feelings what they are telling you. They may be telling you to make a new, better thought.

"Nutritionists on speed dial"

I didn't create this article title, and it's not exactly accurate: the actual description is of clients who take cell-phone photographs of their meals and send it to their nutritionists for comment.

Here is the description of the service, available in Canada and Japan, from an innovation website called Springwise:

"Most dieticians agree that food awareness and healthy eating habits beat a fad diet any day. The problem is that most people don't have the discipline, time or interest to continuously track what they're eating and how many calories each meal or snack adds to their daily intake. A practical solution has been launched in Osaka, where a Tokyo medical equipment maker is working with public health officials to help consumers keep tabs on what they're digesting. How it works? Before lifting their chopsticks, users take a picture of their meal with their cellphone's camera. They send the picture to the system, and nutritionists analyse the meal and its nutritional value, following up with advice on necessary adjustments. Feedback follows within three days. Users can also get more information online, and upload photos from digital cameras. The system is being trialled with 100 cardiac, diabetes and obesity patients, and is hoped to rein in growing health problems caused by growing waistlines in Japan, especially of men in their 20s and 30s.

A similar commercial service has been available in Canada and the US for a while. Canadian MyFoodPhone also gets users to send in pictures of what they're eating, creating a running nutrition diary. Once a week, a nutritionist advises the client on how they’re doing and what they need to improve. "

What do I think, as someone who talks weekly and daily to clients about their food, exercise, time management, stressors, and other lifestyle issues? It's an interesting idea, to have actual 'proof' of what a client eats. (I myself have taken photos of my own interesting meals).

Here's a deeper thought:

The cell-phone-meal-photo would only work if the client truly listened to the nutritionist's advice about each meal. Only then would the analysis be a tool to wean the client from ongoing need for analysis, to soon be able to make quality nutrition decisions for him/herself - for the rest of his/her life.

This is what I love about being a coach. Every day I think about helping others create their lives anew, and hoping everyday that soon they will not need me anymore. I tell my beginning clients: "My goal is to get rid of you." Most of my past clients don't realize that I celebrate when they leave me, only because I know that they can live their own lives without help.

Personalized medications, not that there's anything wrong with that

At the risk of sounding like a drug-pusher, I agree that some medications are needed for depressed people. Depression (and other mood disorders) is often a brain-biochemical issue, and in my personal observations of clients and others, this bio-chem sometimes needs a little boost. Not 'happy pills', not 'drugged-out living', but balancing of the chemicals which are lacking.

(At the risk of also supporting an over-prescribed, over-anxious population, I also agree that many people taking medications actually need to learn how to use their minds better; some people who are often depressed may be under-functioning in healthy "let's take a step back from this situation" behaviors.)

In the meantime before everyone gets into their lifelong mindfulness, news is coming from the medical research world that soon, people suffering from depression might soon be prescribed the perfect medication for their own needs. Until now, depression-sufferers often had to go through weeks of testing to find the medication they needed, often feeling ill from an incorrect medication, or not having any mood-lifting at all.

The new news reported by the New York Times discusses the new direction of medications: genetic testing, which matches a patient's genetic profile to steer him or her to the right class of medications, which will remove weeks, months, and years of emotional anguish while improper meds are taken:

"... it will soon be possible for a psychiatrist to biologically personalize treatments. With a simple blood test, the doctor will be able to characterize a patient’s unique genetic profile, determining what biological type of depression the patient has and which antidepressant is likely to work best.

Scientists have identified genetic variations that affect specific neurotransmitter functions, which could explain why some patients respond to some drugs but not to others. For example, some depressed patients who have abnormally low levels of serotonin respond to S.S.R.I.’s, which relieve depression, in part, by flooding the brain with serotonin. Other depressed patients may have an abnormality in other neurotransmitters that regulate mood, like norepinephrine or dopamine, and may not respond to S.S.R.I.’s."

In addition, when genetic testing becomes the wave of prescribing, then no longer will advertising be needed to encourage one medication over another (the test will determine need) and drug reps will no longer have commercial sway over doctors.

In other words, medicine won't be:

--a guessing game
--a popularity contest
--a panacea snake oil cure-all

...it will be medicine.

Mindfulness: in the classroom and out

The New York Times has an article about mindfulness programs in mainstream classrooms of public schools:

As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.

Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. [...]

The techniques, among them focused breathing and concentrating on a single object, are loosely adapted from the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the molecular biologist who pioneered the secular use of mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 to help medical patients cope with chronic pain, anxiety and depression. Susan Kaiser Greenland, the founder of the InnerKids Foundation, which trains schoolchildren and teachers in the Los Angeles area, calls mindfulness “the new ABC’s — learning and leading a balanced life.”

...“Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention,” said Philippe R. Goldin, a researcher. “But we never teach them how.”

...“If we can help children slow down and think,” [Principal] Dr. Haick said, “they have the answers within themselves.”

...Tyran Williams defined mindfulness as “not hitting someone in the mouth.”

“He doesn’t know what to do with his energy,” his mother, Towana Thomas, said at a session for parents. “But one day after school he told me, ‘I’m taking a moment.’ If it works in a child’s mind — with so much going on — there must be something to it.”

Participants of my coaching programs and even my other projects have experienced mindfulness techniques for themselves -- or commented how the techniques work for me.

Mindfulness is simply the state of "being aware". It's not magic. It simply allows a person to stop living in his or her habit reactions. "Habit reactions" is what prompts a child to 'hit someone in the mouth' (as the child in the article mentions) - or makes us indulge in addictive and sometimes self-hurtful behaviors.

Mindfulness also allows us to clearly see repetitive problems in our lives. To stop and feel our problems allows us to recognize them as problems; intsead of responding in a way we've always responded (habit reactions), we can see the actions as they unfold. Mindfulness even allows us to step back from ourselves like observers - we give ourselves 'space' to watch ourselves, and possibly make a new (and better) choice for our actions.

There is a freedom in mindfulness: our emotions or habits don't have to lead us anymore. We are free to make a new choice or to even choose a new emotional response. In this world of people killing others simply for supposed ego-infractions, a little mindfulness taught in the classrooms may go a long way to starting a new society of free-thinkers and calm lives.

I agree with the schools - most parents and teachers don't teach children how to 'be aware'. Perhaps mindfulness-education will have its detractors, but every great innovation had its detractors. We'd still be 'watching' the sun circle the Earth if someone didn't innovate a better idea.

"The Tudors" on Showtime: tactile living

I recently added Showtime to my basic cable for one reason: "The Tudors" miniseries. It's handsome, gripping, intrigue-ful, well-acted, well-funded, and multilayered. I'm surprised that I can watch scenes over again (digital cable allows this through "OnDemand") and see new details.

Recently I've been exploring 'the senses' - what gives our senses life, and what is 'living'? Granted, this is television -- but I've been struck with how deeply the characters, scenes, and subjects are vibrantly textured. Even the 16th century church music composer, musician and singer Thomas Tullis is portrayed as a frazzle-haired urchin whose talents charm the court. (Granted, there are some historical licenses taken with the show, but it's TV, not historical interpretation)

Here is a 'music video' promo for the series. I loved the scenes and the music of Evanescence. Enjoy. Think about tactile living: living in all your senses.

Thanks to Showtime for providing this little graphic.