Frequently Asked Questions

Can it really be that simple? Just energy and tension?

When we have a nice energy surplus, relative to tension, the mind is calm and it really is that simple. When we have an energy deficit, though, it feels like something is wrong or missing, and life seems far more complicated, and the mind gets busy explaining and defending and justifying and fixing and controlling and seeking for ways out, maybe creating a whole philosophy of life that explains why everything is so hard -- until we regain an energy surplus and the mind calms and it's all very simple again. So the answer depends on what kind of state we're in.

I know some people who won't believe this. Are they just pessimistic or what?

Some people think that continuing happiness is not possible, never having seen it before, and not trusting it when they do. Others think it may be possible, but it's not safe to be that happy ("setting yourself up for a fall"). Still others think that it may be possible and safe, but they don't deserve it. And yet others are restimulated to old times when they had to pretend to be happy when they weren't and they hated it, so now when happiness is suggested they want to scream at somebody.

But these four views (hopelessness, fear, shame, and anger) are just the sorts of thoughts that always arise from a low-energy/high-tension state, and as our state changes to high-energy/low-tension, these views vanish.

Why is it so hard to relax? I wish I could do it better.

First, tension is a habit. Physiologists who scientifically measure tension report that when most people say we're relaxed, we have actually relaxed about 20-30% of what is possible. We live in so much tension that we've forgotten what it feels like to relax deeply. So we have a muscular habit to calm in order to recover our natural ability.

Most of us have a guard muscle: it's the first to tense and the last to relax. It's in different places in different people, and it can change locations over time. When it lets go, we have our deepest sense of peace. It can be coaxed. So find it and try talking it down, breathing it down, or if, after a while, that doesn't help, just love it the way it is and wait and see what it does with love.

Second, we live in a high pressure world of hurry, worry, and no-matter-how-much-I-do-it's-never-enough that rewards us in proportion to the amount of tension we're willing to carry, and relaxing can bring fears that we won't fit in, we'll be cut out, left behind. To counter this, we make friends with people who are also catching on to happiness, and we create safety for each other.

Third, our bodies are pulsars, heart and brain beat to a rhythm, and, in accord with the laws of physics, they tend to entrain, or get in sync, with the far more powerful pulses of the culture -- the traffic, the TV, the deadlines, the hurry, the noise. To sustain a healthy rhythm in our lives, it's really helpful to entrain with a higher power and/or with a sane community.

Some good news here: psychological studies confirm that whatever mood we're in now, memory will call our attention to other times when we felt the same way. So if we're afraid now, our memories will be of fearful times; and if we're angry now, we've always suffered injustice; and if we're feeling guilty now, we've never done anything right; and if we're happy now, life has been good to us. Psychologists use the phrase, "mood governs memory."

It would also seem to make sense that present mood governs how we imagine our future.

The good news here is that we can transform our sense of our past and our future just by changing our present mood, a far simpler task.

So if happiness is an art, the medium of this art is the present body-mind: its tension and energy levels. Change that, change history.

Some more good news: there are magic words! But we have to know three things for them to work.

1. They only work for internal states, like peace of mind, joy of heart, and love of life.

2. Unlike in the fairy tales, they don't work immediately. It takes two minutes for adrenaline to clear the blood stream, and it can take up to two hours (if we're in a total panic) for cortisol to clear. These stress hormones are the direct cause of all worrying, and we have to hold the magic words in mind (words of one's own choosing about any internal state) as we wait for the system to clear.

3. The power of the words is greatly assisted by oxygen -- deep, easy breathing.

My husband won't have anything to do with feelings. What can I say to him?

The word, "feeling," describes the condition of the body. The body is always in some kind of condition (even if it's "numb"), and as psychological studies show, our feelings are always influencing our thinking. Thinking versus feeling, reason versus emotion, doesn't even make any sense. The practical question is: Which feelings are shaping our thinking? low-energy/high-tension feelings (--> thinking tired and worried) or high-energy/low-tension feelings (--> thinking optimistically and creatively).

If anger and forgiveness, greed and generosity, and the rest of these examples are not moral qualities, what would be an example of a moral quality? Is there anything left of morality?

Once we understand how we human beings work, then there is only one moral responsibility: to raise energy and lower tension. The more we do this one thing, the more all the good things flow, and the more everything falls into place and life takes care of itself.

This is the solution to the age-old question: "Why, when I know better, don't I do better?" The practical answer is: "Because I don't have enough energy to manage all the unreleased tensions I've accumulated." And the solution, the way to live the life we know is in us, is to build energy and safely release those tensions.

There's got to be a catch in here somewhere.

Well, a joyful life does involve some sacrifices. The more joy we want, the more we have to give up:

As compensation, there's a growing sense of wonder, a deep satisfaction with life as it is, a quiet mind, more free attention for helping others, and lots of sheer fun for no apparent reason.

Are there some emotional wounds that can never be healed?

No. No matter how big the hurt, it's always a finite amount, and we can get through all of it. How long it may take depends not on the passing of time, but on how much time we can spend in healing ourselves through deep, intense crying, laughing, storming, shaking, or whatever process it is that our bodies need to do to release the physical tensions from the hurt. When we receive enough safety and loving attention to really let go, very awful hurts can heal in a few months.

If you'd like information on emotional healing through the P.E.E.R. Process, try John Lee's website: www.jlcsonline.com/peer.htm

How can you be happy in the presence of suffering?

A suffering person first of all needs compassion, in the forms of attention, understanding, acceptance, praise (for how well they're doing under the circumstances), encouragement, and support. Compassion is a mighty healer, it's a powerful gift to give to a suffering person, and it's a joy to be able to give it. What makes us feel bad when we're around suffering is not so much the other person's pain, but our own feeling of helplessness to do anything about it. When we can act to relieve suffering by giving our loving attention and care, it's very joyful.

If there are no bad people, why do such bad things happen?

If there are people who are basically bad and always will be, then we have to live fearfully without much hope for a better future. But if hurtful things happen because people are acting out the tensions of their own unhealed hurts, and there are ways to heal those hurts and stop the chains of hurting each other, then we are empowered to do things to help each other heal, and humanity's future looks brighter. Fortunately, the latter is the case, as most people who work daily with the suffering know, and that's a joyful thing. Nobody is originally bad, nobody has a "dark side" that's essential and permanent. We just get too tense, too tired, and too toxic (the Big Three Destroyers of our natural happiness), and we just need to help each other relax, rest, and renew.

I'd like to hear how God figures in this picture.

When we get it right about God, we feel completely safe and loved, never the least bit afraid or blamed or shamed, but deeply relaxed and energized. There is no fear of anything, not even death. Feeling so loved, naturally we love back, and naturally we pass the love on. For some people, sometimes all it takes to relax and energize is to hold the thought of God's presence all around us and within us.

But aren't we supposed to fear God?

If "fear" means "awe," yes. But ordinary fear is physically contractive and love is physically expansive, so it's physically impossible to fear and love at the same time, and we can only choose one.

I'm a Baptist and my girlfriend is a Buddhist, and this is causing some strain. Any advice?

It is possible for a person to be in love with all the world's religions. As wounded as they are by the wounds of the people who represent them, deep down under the weeds of doctrinal politics and being right at other people's expense, there is a flower of peace, love, and joy that blooms eternally.

I'm told that I have an addictive personality. Can you say something about that?

Yes, and from personal experience. Stopping the alcohol and drugs, we start to overeat. Controlling the food, we obsess about sex or money or religion or sports or television. This is because the addiction is a symptom of an underlying tension, and controlling the symptoms will never heal the disease. It's like the tension is an underground root that sends up branches, and when we cut off one branch, the root just sends up more branches. The more we energize and relax, the more the root withers and the branches fall away by themselves. The phrase, "addictive personality," sounds like something permanent, but it doesn't have to be.

What if your relationship isn't happy?

A relationship is just a mirror of the people in it, not a separate entity that can solve our problems. Two people in a high-energy/low-tension state will face and solve life's problems together.

Two people in a low-energy/high-tension state will have lots of unresolved conflict, and problems will seem never-ending, and there'll be a lot of blaming, either of the other or of the self. (Most arguments happen at night, when we're tired and just want to force a quick solution.)

One person can be low-energy/high-tension, but if the other is high-energy/low-tension, s/he can carry the couple through. However, if it's always the same person doing the carrying, that person will eventually get too tired to go on.

In other words, the basic solution to relationship and family problems is for everyone to raise energy and lower tension. Encouraging and helping each other in doing this is a very essential part of any successful relationship and is the secret of long, happy marriages.

Isn't love the answer?

A practical definition:
love is what sees the good
and the beautiful
in people and situations
and speaks and acts accordingly.

Many people had a grandparent, or uncle or aunt, who always saw the good in you and took your side and delighted in you and didn't want anything back. That's what love feels like.

So there is such a thing as pure love, but it gets mixed in with other things, mostly various needs. We have a romantic tradition that very nearly equates love and need. ("I love you, I need you," wail the songs.) But love is the opposite of need. Love is expansive and opens out; need is contractive and pulls in. Everyone knows how it feels to be "loved" by a needy person.

And love never, ever hurts anyone. Need does that. Love is always safe.

We also have an ethical tradition that confuses love with morality. ("I love you when/because you're good" means that I may not love you when I judge that you're bad." We all know how that feels.) Whenever love and morality mix, the inevitable result is conditional love, which makes us tense and does not bring us much joy. Pure love has nothing to do with morality because love doesn't wait for a reason. No waiting to feel worthy or deserving or belonging. Love doesn't need us to change, grow, or improve. Love isn't in it for results, but for the sheer joy of loving.

Pure love, unmixed with needs, or with fear, guilt, pity, duty, sex, romance, etc., arises within us spontaneously when we're in a high-energy/low-tension state. It feels like heaven on earth, and yes, that kind of love certainly is the answer.

Does all this lead to any particular political philosophy?

From what I've seen in working with thousands of people, in general, it seems that conservative politics are grounded in fear (of "human nature," mostly); liberal politics are grounded in guilt (the problems are our fault); radical politics, of both the left and the right, are grounded in anger. The philosophies are rational structures built up over these chronic emotional tensions. We can see this from the tensions in the people's faces and hear it from the tensions in their voices.

There are also people whose politics are not grounded in emotional tensions, and their interest is in solving problems in ways that increase the general happiness for our future generations.

Is there some way to stop worrying?

Worry is a symptom, a signal that tension is higher than energy. (Anxiety and depression, at clinical levels, are signals that tension is way higher than energy.) This condition turns on the body's stress response, and stress hormones enter the blood stream and arrive at the brain. This signals trouble, and the brain races about to locate and fix the trouble.

But the brain is not equipped to see that the trouble is internal, so it finds or creates the trouble in the relationship, or in the bank account, or in other people's behavior, or in some catastrophic medical self-prognosis. Worry is just the mind doing its job when energy is less than tension, and it won't stop until we do something to raise energy or drop tension. When we do, then the mind stops worrying and either relaxes or, if there's an actual problem, thinks creatively.

But if for some reason, temporarily we can't raise energy or lower tension, here's a neat trick:

The mind has four languages, four complex symbolic systems, in which to think -- words, pictures, sounds, and numbers (which flower into literature, art, music, and mathematics) -- and outside of which it can not think at all (try thinking without using words, images, sounds, or numbers). Words are the dominant system for most of us, and also are where most of our worrying is done.

Now here's the trick: When we activate one system, it tends to de-activate the others, so if we activate pictures, sounds, or numbers, the words and their worries often tend to fade out. Visual artists find that drawing does this. Musicians find that music does this. Meditators find that counting beads or breaths does this. And any of us can decrease worry by counting breaths at any time, by starting up a silent rhythm, or by closely studying an object.

What is the meaning of life? I know that question is sort of a joke these days, but what would you say?

In a low-energy/high-tension state, we search for order and meaning in the struggle and chaos. In a high-energy/low-tension state, the mind is calm and clear, content and satisfied with the here and now, and there is no searching. Questions of meaning are symptoms of an underlying imbalance, like smoke from the fires of being tense, toxic, or tired, and when we philosophize or theologize, it's like trying to organize smoke. When the fires are out, the air is clear, the mind is calm, and there's nothing that needs to be organized or explained. In a high-energy/low-tension state, the "meaning of life," an intellectual concept, drifts away in the fullness and completeness of the joy of our felt "experience of life."

This may sound too idealistic or simplistic to a person who lives in a chronic low-energy/high-tension state, but when we enter a high-energy/low-tension state, we know that we have really found the secret of happiness.

Truth is what we find when love journeys out beyond all limits.

This whole approach seems self-centered. Shouldn't we be focusing on all the social problems we have?

When we're in a high-energy/low-tension state, that's just what we do naturally, and when we're in a low-energy/high-tension state, we might feel that we should help out, but we don't. Also, let's look and see where these social problems all come from. A low-energy/high-tension state:

1. means we don't have energy to give, even to our partners, and makes us irritable and withdrawn, so our marriages don't work and we get our high divorce rate.
2. drives us to escape the bad feelings in addictions of all kinds -- chemical and behavioral -- and addictions in turn account for a very large part of crime.
3. keeps the nervous system in a stress response, so we're flooded with stress hormones, which wears out our bodies, which inflates our health care crisis.
4. makes us feel that something is missing in our lives, which makes us needy, which causes consumerism, which causes us to overuse the earth's resources, which brings us our ecological crisis.
5. makes us nervous and fearful and suspicious of others, which creates racism and sexism and ageism and classism.
6. makes us so fearful that we see even God as a possible threat, and we live in fear of divine punishment, which makes us desperate to get it right, so we clutch at legalisms and doctrinism, which leads to sect-righteousness, which brings us religious bigotry and persecution.
7. makes us feel that no matter how much we have, it's never enough, which makes us greedy instead of generous, which creates economic class divisions and social injustice, which, on an international scale, causes terrorism and war.
   

Our personal energy deficits -- collectively -- are the root cause of all these problems. As humanity moves into a high-energy/low-tension state, all these problems resolve.

Feelings are contagious. Whatever we're feeling, we're spreading. One person in a high-energy/low-tension state is helping to heal all the world's problems just by being healthy.

* * *

We can have the best education and the latest information and follow the highest spiritual teachings and still not have enough energy to put these to consistent use. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. The main thing is:

What can I do
right now
to raise my energy
and lower my tension?

Everything else follows from this one step.