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This is the first in a series of articles based on The Twelve Attributes of Human Functioning as set forth in the book The Life We are Given, by George Leonard and Michael Murphy.  You can find the entire list in last week’s blog post.  These articles reflect my own personal interpretation of those attributes.

The first of these attributes concerns The Perception of External Events.

 Our actions, our attitudes and our behaviors are based on our perceptions of what goes on around us, reality notwithstanding.  Perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.

For example, we watch the evening news on television.  The news portrayed on Television for the most part is bad.  Therefore, often we perceive the world at large as bad.  Yet, the reality is that:  “For every act of evil we see on the television, there are millions of acts of kindness.”  — Wayne Dyer on Oprah.

How we perceive outside events can be positive or negative.  If we see most events as positive, we are usually happy and content with life.  If we see outside events as negative, we incur a lot of stress.  We know that stress can result in sickness, poor overall health, and unhappiness.

How do you react when you are driving down the road and someone cuts you off in a dangerous and irresponsible way?  What is your immediate reaction and how do you handle it?  Often the digital salute is your response.  How does this make you feel?  Do you feel yourself tense up?  Do you clench your other hand on the steering wheel?  Can you feel your body tighten up overall?  What words do you say under your breath?  Often your can stomach churns and you might even feel nauseous .   The result is stress.

You’ve heard the expression, “it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you react to what happens to you.”  How you perceive and react to external events can affect your health.  Stress is basically conscious or unconscious negative emotions that are being held in the body.  Negative emotions can cause your body to be acidic (as opposed to an alkaline pH.), and can result in physical illness.  Disease happens in an acidic internal environment and doesn’t exist in an alkaline environment.

In the 12 Step recovery community, one of the things I hear often is about how a person has stopped the overt “digital salute reaction” to traffic and other perceptually stressful situations, and has just “let go of it”  The comments about the physical reaction within the body are telling, as well as comments about the resulting mental and emotional serenity and lack of stress.  It’s the reaction to the perception of the reality of the situation that makes the difference

As we age, our perceptions about things change.  The way we see events changes.  For example, when we are in middle age, we perceive life as challenging, uncertain and stressful.    As we get older, we tend to change that perception to one of “acceptance” of current reality as it really is, and our perceptions of reality are often closer to that real reality than ever (yes, that’s what I meant to say). Our actions, attitudes and behaviors usually change for the better.  When they don’t, we open ourselves up to excessive stress and poor health.    How we perceive the world around us is a function of our attitude, and as the Motivational Speaker, the late Zig Ziglar observed:  Attitude is Everything.

 Thank you for reading.

Several years ago, when these Energy Bites were produced and distributed as a multi-page PDF newsletter, I often did reviews of books related to Health, Fitness and Personal Energy.  One of those books I reviewed was titled:  The Life We are Given, by George Leonard and Michael Murphy.  Murphy was the founder, and George Leonard was a principle, of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Esalen was one of the hot beds of personal development in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  The book was published in the mid-nineties.

In the book, the authors listed Twelve Attributes they felt contributed to transformation, health and vitality.

Here is the list of attributes from the book:

1. Perception of external events.
2. Somatic/Kinesthetic awareness
3. Communication abilities
4. Vitality
5. Movement abilities
6. Capacities to manipulate the environment directly.
7. Feelings of pain and pleasure
8. Cognition
9. Volition
10. Sense of self
11. Love
12. Bodily Structure

Many of these attributes are the same as, or similar to, those attributes prescribed by personal development and Health, Fitness and Personal Energy proponents since the mid to late 1800s, and in come cases,  far back into Greek and Roman history.  They are also similar to some of the “secrets of longevity” we often see in much of today’s literature about aging.

They are also in keeping with the Personal Energy Formula I use in my own talks and workshops.

So for the next several weeks, I’ll go through the list of the Leonard/Murphy “attributes” and relate each to the Health, Fitness and Personal Energy of active older adults today.

I think you will find this series of articles useful and interesting.

Thank you for reading.

This is to reiterate the importance of something I wrote in a recent article: Falling.  I’ve written about falling on these pages several times.  I’ve written about how to prevent falls and how to recover if you do fall.  Maybe I should be more careful what I write about.

Edie and I were out of town last weekend for an event.  We were walking in the town park in Havre de Grace, MD on a mild and sunny day, having a nice conversation and walking down a series of wide and well marked steps.  Edie was engrossed in a conversation with me and missed a step.  After a few gyrations of hands and arms flailing around and legs giving way,  she was able to catch herself as she began heading downward.

Edie said the reason she was able to catch herself was as a result of building her ankle strength through a series of ankle exercises she does in a class at the gym.  The exercises are simple and I recommend them to everyone.  She simply lies on her back with one leg in the air and one leg bent with that foot flat on the floor, and writes the letters of the alphabet with each foot in the air.  It strengthens the ankles and make them more flexible to help catch you in the event you start to fall.

That’s fall number one for the weekend.

The second fall is embarrassing.  I caught my foot in the bedspread in the hotel room where we stayed, tripped, and fell to the floor.  Fortunately, the direct route to the floor was interrupted by a desk chair which broke the fall.  I still hit the floor fairly hard but managed to escape injury.

Since most emergency room admissions for seniors are a result of injuries from a fall, we missed out on a good opportunity to test the ER Facilities of the Havre de Grace Hospital.

Most falls result from slipping, tripping, or missing.  I would call Edie’s near fall missing, and my own as tripping.  Most are caused by some kind of home environment hazard like poorly marked steps, loose light cords, corners of carpets or rugs, or small, loose rugs.  It pays to pay attention to where you are and what you are doing when you are around any sort of potential hazard.  Most of the hazards will sneak up on you.  But you can protect yourself by being fit and strengthening your legs and core muscles.

Edie was fortunate to catch herself.  I was lucky I had a desk chair to break my fall.  But had we been paying attention to what we were doing, neither of us would have found ourselves as close to possible injury as we were.

It was a good lesson for both of us.  We now know to be more careful of those hazards that are around us everywhere, particularly in unfamiliar places.  You must be careful too.

Thanks for reading.