“We step into marriage fully unprepared.” ~Winifred Reilly
Winifred has been a writer all her life, writing poetry when she was a little girl. She has been a marriage and family therapist for nearly forty years, getting into the field because her own marriage wasn’t doing so well and she wanted to know everything she could about marriage. Over the course of that time she heard from several clients that they had no books that they could refer to where their particular challenges were concerned, and this was one of the reasons she wrote the book.
Winifred felt she needed to write the book, and noted that she initially started the book as a collection of her clients’ stories, but after traveling down this particular path for a time she realized that it was very boring. Winifred then realized that writing her book as a personal story would be more effective, and so wove in the story of her own marriage as one of the book’s themes, with the other two being the story of her training and the stories of her clients.
Winifred notes that, where marriage is concerned, everyone is in the same boat, so therapists couldn’t hide behind the curtain of authority to be effective. She also notes that the skills necessary to maintain a marriage long-term are learned along the way, rather than learned prior to marriage.
Winifred remarked that people try to agree, to create consensus, rather than figure out what to do when they disagree. Agreeing to disagree means that people can’t come to any conclusion, and while this might be okay for relatively minor things, this doesn’t work with deeper issues, such as having another child or moving out into the country. Winifred notes that partners need to tolerate one’s spouse disagreeing with one, and that staying connected with oneself while remaining open to the other is a fine art.
Winifred notes that there is no formula for how people take a stand. She does, however, point to a developmental model of marriage which was devised by psychotherapists Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson, who run the Couples Institute in Menlo Park, California, which has five stages of marriage:
Courtship, where the couples agree on everything;
Difference, where the couple assert their preferences which are different from their partners, which then results in conflict;
Couple can express their feelings and handle conflicts with each other;
More separateness, such as doing activities without their partner;
Moving back to each other with a mutual sense of longing for reconnection, this time being on a deeper level.
Winifred points out that the things that couples fight over are actually trivial things that are actually smokescreens for deeper issues, which she calls “the big picture.” People actually fight about whether or not they are valued and thought highly of by their partner, she notes, as well as whether or not they can trust the other person, and power and control issues also come into play. The real issues behind fights, Winifred remarks, are actually about selfhood.
“If your success is not good for your soul, then achieving success doesn’t mean anything.” ~Bob Imai
Master Okawa is the spiritual leader who founded Happy Science in 1986, which is a movement which started in Japan, whose purpose is to enable people to find fulfilment and success through the principles of love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress. The movement now has some ten million members scattered throughout 160 countries, and Bob himself is a minister in Atlanta, Georgia. He came across Happy Science in 1990 while still an engineer researching on self-driving cars and experiencing some discontent in his life. He became a monk as a result of investigating into the teachings of Happy Science and has been connected with the movement since then.
The Laws of Success contains principles that both people and organizations need to achieve success. Bob notes that, in order to find true success, one has to know the meaning, purpose and mission of one’s life, as it is believed that we are spiritual beings who live several lives on this physical plane over and over again, in order to improve and nourish our souls, as this is the context in which the book exists. In this context, it is believed that we choose the kind of lives we will lead in the physical realm before we enter it, and that our mind enables us to access all the wisdom and knowledge we need to attain our success. That said, Bob notes that one does not necessarily have to believe in life after death in order to get something from The Laws of Success, as the book also comes from the context of harnessing the power of the mind, which has been behind successes, historically.
The pillars of success that support success are originality (we have our own, individual measures for success), shared joy (success is accompanied by joy) and a sense of unique contribution (true success contributes to society), and Bob shared Thomas Edison as an example who showed examples of all of these pillars in his life. Bob notes that success isn’t an outcome or a result, but that it is a process designed to improve ourselves. Self-realization is the basis of success, with visualizing one’s goal being the first thing to do. A positive attitude is also necessary to achieving one’s goal, after which one should then act on it. Bob notes that the path isn’t easy, so making habits to support success, as well as breaking down the tasks into small, easily achievable parts.
The Laws of Success might be thirty years old, and Bob points out that the principles within enabled Happy Science to grow from the small numbers in its movement that long ago to its present size. He remarks that The Laws of Success is similar to such books related to the Law of Attraction, such as The Secret, but that there is nothing in the latter that talks about the basis of such concepts, which is a belief in the spiritual realm.
Bob also advises that people meditate - by which he means people should just take a little time each day to sit in total silence - to access the wisdom that comes from one’s mind.
“We can’t make America great again unless we make America fit again.” ~Siphiwe Baleka
Siphiwe was a world-class swimmer in college, and had been an athlete since he was young. He took a job as a trucker, and within two months of taking the job, he gained fifteen pounds, which was over ten percent of his body weight, which scared him. He realized then that he needed to take responsibility for his weight, and then went on to try out various fitness programs and diets. He realized that there was no such program specifically designed for long-haul truck drivers and their particular environment, and so went out and developed his own. Siphiwe then studied metabolic endocrinology and used digital sports equipment to help his progress, and it was through these that he discovered that his metabolism was so low when he was driving trucks that he needed to find a way to keep it up while driving.
Siphiwe noted that truck drivers actually have an unhealthy profession, as they have highest rates of obesity, the highest rates of metabolic syndrome, and has the lowest life expectancy, and this is due to the nature of their work and on the impact on their bodies. He notes that truck drivers don’t have access to kitchens, have no refrigerators in their trucks to store food in, and drive mostly on the main interstates and highways, which makes such things as getting to a local farmer’s market, or even the gym, impractical, and remarks that, for all intents and purposes, truck drivers “might as well be astronauts living in outer space.” Truck drivers are also subjected to changes in schedule, depending on what they haul, and this disrupts the body’s internal rhythms and hormonal releases, as truck drivers thus train themselves to override these internal rhythms and the hormones that regulate metabolism. This often results in such things as truck drivers not getting hungry, and as they don’t eat their metabolisms turn off. Siphiwe points out that the average truck driver eats only once or twice a day, and while they may overeat during those times, their bodies are, overall, starving, which makes their body store fat.
4-Minute Fit is based on the work Siphiwe has done since 2012, working with truck drivers to improve their physical wellness. It is a program that shows how to turn one’s metabolism on at the start of the day in four minutes’ time, and then how to keep it on throughout the day, with minimal effort. The idea for the book came from an editor for Sports Illustrated who had done an article for what he was doing, and Siphiwe figured, if truck drivers can do it, anyone can. According to him, one in three Americans is obese, and this costs 150 billion dollars a year, and he also points out that the main reason that seven out of ten applicants to the United States Armed Forces are rejected because they were obese or physically unfit.
Siphiwe notes that losing weight is easy; keeping it off is the true challenge, as this requires a change of behavior, which then requires one to get into one’s values and emotions, as the source of behavior is usually subconscious programming. Siphiwe thus wants to get to a person’s motivation behind their desire to change, and while he admits that this can be emotional, he notes that emotion is also energy which can be harnessed. Siphiwe then starts by knowing where a person is nutritionally at the present, identifying the food which the person presently eats which does the most damage and then eliminating that during one week, and then doing the same with another food the following week, which makes for a gradual change rather than a fast overhaul.
Siphiwe notes that he has cases of drivers who have lost weight and kept it off for years, as well as others whose health has greatly improved over a long period of time, and since his program is the least disruptive one around it can be used by anyone. He notes that the science behind his system has been around for three decades, and what he adds to that is turning on metabolism at the start of the day and then keeping it up by giving it what it needs when it needs it.
Siphiwe notes that there is a direct relationship between what one gets out of life and one’s health; and the more one can do what they want to do when they want to do it (which is his definition of fitness) the more one can do and experience, which enables one to learn, grow and receive from the Universe. He notes that all motivational speakers always ask: “What’s your ‘why’?” and the “why” needs to be so big that it gives one enough energy to do the necessary and inconvenient things needed to achieve one’s goals.
“Telling people things doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere.” ~Donna M. Orange
Donna comes from the Pacific Northwest, and after becoming a philosophy professor she became a psychoanalyst on the East Coast for some thirty-five years. She recently retired to Claremont, California, where she focuses on the topics covered in her book, as she felt the climate crisis when she returned to California, heard nothing from psychoanalysts where climate crisis is concerned and had been influenced by her philosophical studies into radical ethics. She developed the book in reaction to her own realization about the nature of the present climate crisis and the suffering experienced by those who are affected by climate change, and also as a way to explain why people are turning away from the issue of climate crisis from her psychoanalytical experiences and perspective.
Donna explains that “radical ethics” comes from a Jewish and a Christian philosopher who argue that “The other comes before me,” which is an ethical attitude that is radically different from the present attitude in the West, which is about focus on what is good for oneself and one’s immediate family above all else. Radical ethics essentially describes how people would treat each other, and highlights the responsibilities we have to other human beings.
Donna points out that there are several aspects about the present mindset that feed into climate crisis, with political climate denial being based on political and financial advancement being one, and with another being disavowal, which is an inability to face the situation, and to thus avoid it as it occurs as being too big and too scary to be handled. Double-mindedness is a psychoanalytic concern and is when people know how bad the situation presently is, but still go on behaving as if the change isn’t taking place which, to Donna, stems from being overwhelmed and ashamed and trapped in egoistic individualism. Donna points out that the science is solid, and that facing up to this is a psychological matter.
Donna also noted that there are cultural elements that perpetuate the present attitude towards climate crisis, which includes colonialism and slavery. She points out that people in the United States aren’t present to that they live on stolen land, and compares Canada to the United States in this regard, pointing out the Canadian children hear a declaration that they live on the lands of the First People who have lived on it. Donna remarks that, because Americans are unconscious to the suffering they have historically inflicted, they are unconscious to the suffering of others caused by climate crisis, and that the United States will lead the world into the disaster of climate crisis.
Donna believes that people need to stand up and be counted to do work to deal with the issue of climate crisis, and notes that psychoanalysts seem to be waking up to that their work isn’t just about helping out individuals with their concerns, but that they are also citizens of a global community. She points out that the Climate Psychology Alliance, which is an organization of psychologists and psychoanalytics, is an established organization in Great Britain and she hopes that a similar organization can be set up in the United States. She points out that people need to be moved “for more than fifteen minutes” for true change to take place, particularly since climate change isn’t easily visible to the common person, and that radical ethics has a place through the respect for other spiritual traditions. Donna also notes that alliances need to be created with religious and spiritual leaders due to the influence these have.
To those who wonder about climate change, Donna would ask them about the kind of world they would want to live in two or three decades from now, after which they should imagine what the world will be like for themselves and the people around them if things continue the way they are. She noted that young people are willing to ask themselves such questions and would like to ask everyone to think that all humans are connected to each other and matter to each other. Purchase from Amazon: Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis and Radical Ethics by Donna M. Orange
