Every morning, we wake up to a choice: status quo or something better? 
We must decide if we are content to live as we have been doing or do we, can we, change? Wayne Dyer has summed the challenge like this: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” But we’re also hopelessly caught in a kind of Catch-22: How can we change the way we see life if it is largely determined by our genetic and experiential history–something we have no control over? The answer lies in our ability to transform our personal story.
Let’s start off by confessing that each of us is just the main character in his or her own story. And that story—like all good ones—is made up. It bears no resemblance to any truth because it is simply our version of the truth. So it is fantasy, mostly lies. Not that we’re liars (we are that too, but that’s a different story). Some of us see ourselves as victims - or patients - or martyrs. Some have chosen to cast ourselves as heroes - or providers - or saviors. And, we could just claim that all of these scripts are the result of mere chance; or we can take ownership of them by admitting that our personal vision of the truth is nothing more than story we choose to believe in with the most energy.
But that admission also opens a vital option for us too. We can exercise the author’s ultimate prerogative - a rewrite. We can turn the page and start a beautiful new chapter about the story of how we began to transform ourselves to become well, to be healthy, and to be at peace. We can grant ourselves the power to declare this day - this moment - different from all the others we have experienced so far. Wellness is a script where renewal is central to the plot. It’s sets up the development of sustained inspiration, fueled by faith that every moment lying ahead can hold as much joy and beauty as we choose to put into our story.
The truth is that we just need to throw the switch in our heads. Turn disbelief into wonder. Maybe it’s nothing more than walking the dog two extra blocks (for the dog’s sake) - or heading to the gym for the first ten minutes of your life - or maybe, it’s canceling fast food tonight and deciding to cook a fresh, wholesome meal - or maybe, it’s listening. Maybe it’s asking a question, instead of giving an answer, so there’s a space created for another person’s voice to fill - or maybe it is just watching stuff instead of doing stuff.
The changes may be small changes but they are the bricks with which we build the path of rejuvenation. Two blocks becomes four. Ten minutes in the gym leads to fifteen. One good meal takes you to the organic produce aisle. And one conversation of active listening leads to a deeper friendship. That’s how renewal begins.
The best part of renewal is creating a context for dreams. My daughter taught me the power of context. One day, when she was about ten, she went through a stage where she had a fantasy that she would go diving for buried treasure off the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Don’t ask me where or how this notion came. Let’s just assume she wrote it that way. But, as part of her chapter, she decided one afternoon she should lead me by the hand to the swimming pool in our backyard.
Here, she took a step down into the water and then settled her diving mask on her face. Then she looked up at me expectantly as if to say: “Well, we’re not going to find any gold standing here on the edge—out of the water.” So I put on my mask, flippers, and snorkel to play along and off we glided into the deep—the deep end, at least. The next evening the ritual repeated itself only we swam about longer. Somehow the game got more elaborate with each dive. Soon, on my way home, I would stop off at the pet store and purchase a handful of small plastic sharks and rubber whales, designed for decoration in aquariums, and bring them to populate the imaginary reef in our pool. We would swim after them and race to see who could get them first. We would hold our breath and dive to the bottom to retrieve them. Our play sessions in the pool stretched into hours.
I also began to mysteriously develop a terrible French accent - a bad imitation of Jacques Cousteau - with which I would narrate each of our dives. “As we pree-pair to leeva da safetee of da Calypso, my diving part-nair and I sink een-too dee deep when we suddenly see dee vague but ohm-meenous sha-dough of what could only be aah great white shark.” Then I’d start shaking a handful of my sharks back and forth, wrestling with them in a miniaturized feeding frenzy, and left me sinking helplessly to the bottom. Only my daughter could save me. And for that, well, she had to decide to change the story. Forsake her quest for the gold or save me instead? The great whites would then slowly sink into the depths. As she swam to rescue me, I could see my daughter smile so widely that tiny little bubbles would escape from the corners of her mouth. I am sure Monsieur Cousteau could not have written it better.
Renewal means today will be different because we are willing to entertain new, different stories which all begin by allowing ourselves the freedom to play the characters we want to be.
This article originally appeared in Dr. Hamilton’s Well-Beings column on boomer-living.com
Our collective reaction to the swine flue epidemic over the last few weeks tells us quite a bit about ourselves.
When the first news stories broke, a sense of an impending plague began to swell. Death—inexplicable, unstoppable, and on a scale so large that it made the loss of individual human lives virtually trivial—was headed our way. Undercurrents of panic followed. Frenzied press conferences from the CDC. Government spokespeople telling the public to remain calm. I don’t know about you but nothing makes me feel more uncomfortable than people whose sole advice is to remain calm. Remain calm? Why should I? You’re the government. You’re supposed to have all the answers. And what do you come up with? There’s no need to panic. Thanks. Next.
Secondly, everything we did to halt the spread of the virus bordered on futile or symbolic. We never closed air traffic from Mexico. Why? Because it would disrupt airline schedules. Businesses. Tourism. It would cost money. So instead, the poor Mexican citizens closed their schools, restaurants, offices, and even their churches. But we left doors to the single most dangerous source of far-reaching contamination wide open: airplanes.
Thirdly, we were inundated with stores about how soon the NIH would create a vaccine. When would it be available? In the meantime, how many millions of doses of Tamiflu would be mobilized to protect the American public from the swine flu? Fifty million? What if we all got the flu? All three hundred million of us? How would you triage out the Tamiflu? Youngest and oldest? Most likely to die? Healthiest in their prime? Most vital to national interest? Government officials and soldiers? Or taxpayers?
And then we were told wash our hands and cover our mouths when we cough. I was waiting for news reports on the latest soaps and towels being developed to aid the American citizenry in stopping this killer virus. Oh, and we closed schools as soon as a flu case was discovered forgetting that much of the contact and spread of flu had occurred long before an individual became symptomatic. Then we discovered cases unrelated to travel to Mexico so they were springing up de novo and we were no longer sure what to close.
Finally, we forgot about it. Not that many people had died from it anyway. Enhanced interrogation techniques seem more relevant. And maybe it wasn’t Black Death, losing sight of the fact that nearly 30,000 people die every year from the flu in the United States and no one starts heading into underground shelters or buying Hazmat suits. Many people stopped eating pork until officials formally changed the name of the virus to H1N1 because there was pressure on the government to help out the pork industry. Great. Still “swine flu” was the number one topic on Twitter for about four days after the name change. “H1N1” never appeared. It was kind of like changing “Wall Street” to “Trust Us Street.” It didn’t stick.
In the end, the Swine Flu episode (this is only Part I, stay tuned for the whole season) taught us that when things scare us, we get irrational (close Mexico but keep the planes flying) and desperate (let’s shut down GM and convert the company to making barrels of Swine Flu vaccine but forget that the only real remedy is handing out soap). And, finally, when something really frightens us change the name (so Swine Flue becomes H1N1 and torture becomes enhanced interrogation techniques).
The episode mirrored other steps being taken in the country, like giving billions of dollars to the companies that cheated and deceived the American public. Then we declared that imprisoning and torturing individuals is illegal, a violation of our laws, the Geneva Convention, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights established by the UN. Oh, but let’s not prosecute anyone who did it or approved of it. Let’s leave all the elected Representatives (especially the ones that lie about it) and Senators in place who let it happen. After all, either everyone didn’t know (was there anyone in the United States—in the world—who didn’t know?) or, if they did, they were just following orders (or memos, even better).
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for the American psyche. But…there’s no need to panic. Remain calm.
The left side does all the talking. It’s where speech, logic, analysis—all the cognitive skills so valued by our society—come from. The left hemisphere of our brain is our species’ crowning evolutionary achievement. It is our left-sided linguistic abilities 
that launched us into well-coordinated hunter-gatherers. Our ability to make records, to share technologies allowed us to become the master consumers and predators on our planet.
Acquiring our linguistic abilities came at a price. When we focus on speech, there has to be the emergence of a speaker and a listener. There is automatically a “me” and a “them.” The universe splinters off into what we identify as being within and without. We create an ego.
But there is another part of the past buried in us too. It is in our right hemisphere. Our mute, emotive, intuitive half. It is the side of our brain that puts us back in touch with nature, that makes us feel part of something greater than ourselves, beyond expression.
Think about how we meditate. We close our eyes. Why? To cut down on the constant sensory barrage that drives our insatiable visual cortex. We slow our breathing down, focusing on inspiration and expiration. Every time a thought comes into our head, we ignore it. We return to our breathing, trying to stop the incessant banter in our heads. Gradually, we get to a moment where there is serenity. Our inner voice is silenced. Why do so many spirituality retreats ask us to refrain from speaking? Because we cannot reach our spiritual core through the left hemisphere. The notion of speech is so intermeshed with that of the self that we must develop ways to work around language itself to get beyond an egocentric perspective.
So here’s a few exercises to work on some right hemisphere “muscle:”
1. Take a few hours out of a weekend and tell everyone you are not going to speak. Keep a pad of paper with you. Limit yourself to only answering on the pad with drawings to indicate your answers.
2. Go spend part of the day with your favorite pet. Look at the amount of expression possible between the two of you without words! How is it you can communicate without words? If you don’t have a pet, head off to the zoo and spend a few hours with your favorite animal.
3. Put ear plugs into your ears and then headphones over that to block the sound. Walk around without any noise. Do this someplace secluded and safe from traffic. Look at the world without noise. It’s a different place. Sit down somewhere cozy. Listen to your breathing and heartbeat. That’s really your true, inner voice.
4. Take a night to go camping under the stars—by yourself. There’s something about feeling the sweep of the heavens as your roof. With no one to distract, you begin to have your own private conversation with the cosmos.
5. Now this one will get me in trouble with a lot of the ecologists but I’m going to suggest it anyway. Get out in your car and drive on some sweet stretch of highway. If you feel inclined, open it up. It’s magic. Rolling down the road. The hum of a muscular motor. Music blasting. It shorts the old left hemisphere out. It’s pure adrenaline rush and plain old fun.
6. Go skiing. Same idea. Speed on a different kind of road. As a friend once said: “A mountain full of snow that makes the heart soar.”
7. Go fishing. Casting out there and fiddling with a rod and reel makes our cares melt away.
8. Cook a favorite meal for someone you love. Food is the ultimate expression of love and says everything without words.
9. Pull a Tom Cruise. Make sure no one’s around, first. Take your pants and shoes off. Put on a pair of sunglasses Break out Bob Seeger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll.” Crank up the volume. Get out a hairbrush and sing your heart out. Risky Business but it’s worth it.
10. Take your honey out and go to some Country and Western outfit where you can learn line dancing.
No one said spirituality has to be silent. Just speechless.
Note: This article by Dr. Hamilton first appeared on Boomer-Living.com, the website for Active Baby Boomers. Dr. Hamilton is a monthly contributor to Bommer-Living’s Well-Beings section.
A few days ago I learned that my book—my first book—The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope was one of the recipients of the Nautilus Silver Award for 2009. These awards are meant to recognize “distinguished literary and heartfelt contributions to spiritual growth…and positive social change….” I am touched that readers and competition judges could attribute such important goals to something I wrote. The authors who have received this award in the past have included His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, and Andrew Weil. These are my heroes. Their works shine, endure, and inspire. I don’t belong amid this circle of spiritual icons. I’m a fan not a member. The award is an accident, a kindness, a benevolent wink from the Universe in my direction. Of course, the recognition is wonderful and gratifying. But the award is a gift, not a reward. It reminds me the world is like that: beautiful things are given to us without our having done anything to deserve them.
Someone once said: a writer is someone who is a fan of reading but has taken it to extremes. Succumbing to that impulse induces a schizophrenic experience: an exercise in both self-involvement and self-detachment. You obsess about your own words at the same time that you are willing to give up a part of yourself. Sales rankings, promotion, book tours, signings, and awards make writing an emotional mine field. But every writer traverses it in the hopes their craft will improve. The writer knows that better writing is always possible. Because there are those particular authors whose prose is so lyrically composed, whose descriptions so vivid, and characters so poignant, that their writing simply takes one’s breath away. You read their works and want to fall on your knees in front of their art, skill, and craft. These are the masters–the ones with divine talents beyond the reach of the average writer. These gods (my personal pantheon includes authors like Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Larry McMurtry, John McPhee, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Chabon, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, Ernst Becker, Jess Walter, John Steinbeck, Ken Kesey, Studs Terkel, Bernard Malamud, William Warner, Tom Wolfe, David McCullough, Phillip Roth, Edward Wilson, Annie Proulx, John Updike–to name just a few) are the writers for whom there are no adequate awards to recognize the gift their talents give us. They simply show how far words can go: words change lives and can change the world.
So while I am deeply moved by the Nautilus Silver award, I accept it simply as token of good luck. I give twenty rules to live by in the last chapter of my book and the first rule is: “Never underestimate luck.” I add that luck merely establishes the realm of what is possible but that one should “never feel any sense of personal triumph when you’re lucky. Be grateful that it went your way.” So I am going to take my own advice, and write harder, deeper, and better. Oh, and thank you.
10. Get in touch with Nature
We are all Nature’s children. She is our mother in the largest sense of the word. We can only appreciate her secrets when we behold the mystery of her beauty. Get yourself outside. Take a breath of fresh air. Watch a bird. Stare at a tree. A flower. A cloud. Let yourself get in touch with the beauty that binds you to the whole Universe. Nature is the great soother and the great teacher.
9. Live in the moment
Illness teaches us that the future is just an illusion, a mirage. Mortality teaches us to focus on just the present instant that is the only place where any of us can become truly and fully alive.
#8. Illness is never a punishment
Far too many people see a disease as some form of cosmic punishment for some past sin. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Illness is nothing more than entropy. It is the second universal law of thermodynamics: “the entropy of the universe increases during any spontaneous process.” In other words, as your consciousness is enfolded into a mortal, physical body, it requires a great deal of organization: atoms into molecules, molecules into DNA, cells into tissues, and organs into communicating body systems. But all of this is subject to breakdown: like any mechanical part, like any natural process. In so many ways, even those illnesses that can be prevented often occur because people did not heed lessons, did not respect the impact of outside forces on the body’s systems. The Universe never punishes, it merely happens. Imagine blaming yourself if an earthquake happens. It just occurs and it engulfs whatever it does. Cracks do not occur in the Earth’s crust so they can propagate and find a particular individual. If a person is hurt or killed, we simply understand it as a natural phenomenon. Illness is a just an isolated natural disaster occurring on an individual basis. Nor is there a vindictive God who brings suffering to His children. He is filled with love and compassion.