Happy April Fool’s Day!!!!

The Great Spaghetti Harvest of 1957

What’s one of the best holidays for curing stress and giving you stress relief? Why, April Fool’s Day of course!

A good April Fool’s Day joke will make you laugh, and laughter makes you feel lighter of body, mind and spirit, and by so doing, will lighten your load and help you feel less stressed and more in the Low Density Lifestyle mode.

And so, in the spirit of April Fool’s Day, here are five of the most classic April Fool jokes and pranks:

The Great Spaghetti Harvest of 1957

The respected BBC news show Panorama announced in 1957 that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Many viewers called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied, “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

Wisconsin State Capitol Collapses in 1933

The Madison Capital-Times solemnly announced that the Wisconsin state capitol building lay in ruins following a series of mysterious explosions. The explosions were attributed to “large quantities of gas, generated through many weeks of verbose debate in the Senate and Assembly chambers.” Accompanying the article was a picture showing the capitol building collapsing.

Australia Converts to Metric Time in 1975

Australia’s This Day Tonight news program revealed that the country would soon be converting to “metric time.” Under the new system there would be 100 seconds to the minute, 100 minutes to the hour, and 20-hour days. Furthermore, seconds would become millidays, minutes become centidays, and hours become decidays. The report included an interview with Deputy Premier Des Corcoran who praised the new time system. The Adelaide townhall was even shown sporting a new 10-hour metric clock face.

The Greatest Baseball Pitcher Ever

In 1985, Sports Illustrated published a story about a new rookie pitcher who planned to play for the Mets. His name was Sidd Finch, and he could reportedly throw a baseball at 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy. This was 65 mph faster than the previous record. Surprisingly, Sidd Finch had never even played the game before. Instead, he had mastered the “art of the pitch” in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the “great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa.” Mets fans celebrated their teams’ amazing luck at having found such a gifted player, and Sports Illustrated was flooded with requests for more information. In reality this legendary player only existed in the imagination of the author of the article, George Plimpton.

Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity in 1976

The British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.

I hope these April Fool’s Day pranks gives you a few laughs and some stress relief, and at the same time gets you feeling lighter of body and mind and less in the High Density Lifestyle mode.

Stress: Life in the Fast Lane

For the next few days I will talk about stress and relaxation. Stress is both a symptom and by-product of living a High Density Lifestyle, while being relaxed and calm is something easy to do when you’re living a Low Density Lifestyle.

Relaxation is one of the ingredients in the acronym FREE, which if you remember, stands for Flow/Relaxation/Effortless Effort. Living FREE means living a Low Density Lifestyle.

Life in the Fast Lane

When you are living life in the fast lane, you are putting your body under a lot of stress. There is only so long the body is capable of operating at a maxed out level—you can only burn your candle at both ends for so long, and then the inner flame starts to be extinguished.

Stress is all-pervasive in our modern fast-paced culture. I will return to this category time and time again, and I will also return to the category of relaxation many times over. Why, you may ask? Because it can’t be talked about enough. Stress puts you smack in the middle of living a High Density Lifestyle, and the longer you live that way, the worse things become.

So let’s look a little more in-depth at what stress is.

A Brief History of Stress

The term stress was coined by scientist Hans Selye in the 1930s based on his careful observation of physiological responses in laboratory animals. Selye later broadened his findings to include the human response mechanism to a perceived threat, or “stressor.”

Selye found that when he exposed various lab animals to unpleasant or harmful stimuli, there were three general stages of reaction. He called these the General Adaptation Syndrome, or GAS. The three stages were Alarm, Resistance and Exhaustion.

By the end of the third stage of GAS, Selye found the animals depleted of their body’s most important resources: their adrenal glands were fatigued, their autonomic nervous system was misfiring and their immune systems were burnt out.

Furthermore, it was found that this type of reaction played havoc on the feedback loop that constitutes the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the system that controls reactions to stress and regulates many body processes, including digestion, the immune system, mood and emotions, sexuality, and energy storage and expenditure.

Not everyone reacts to stressors in such a detrimental fashion, and there are times when stress can have positive attributes (Selye called stress that enhanced function eustress). But most people don’t cope well to stressors because they are on system overload, bombarded by stimuli and overwhelmed by life’s demands. Living in this manner is truly a major impediment to a Low Density Lifestyle.

I’m FREE: Sing along with The Who!

I asked my friends Roger and Pete to put together a little ditty to help you understand FREE (remember Flow/Relax/Effortless Effort). I hope you enjoy their efforts.

Sometimes it’s easy to just let images and music tell the story. So this is a good way to get FREE.

Click on play and see what you think. I think Roger and Pete got potential. Maybe they should consider forming a band!

Being FREE: Flow/Relax/Effortless Effort

The secret to living a Low Density Lifestyle is becoming FREE. In an earlier post, I explained what the acronym FREE means. It stands for Flow, Relax, Effortless Effort.

Because it is a very important concept, I want to discuss FREE a little further at length.

The Flow state is known to athletes as being “in the zone.”  To an athlete, this is where everything just seems to go their way. And athletes will be the first to tell you that when they are in the flow state, they perform at higher levels.

Shawn Phillips, the well-known athlete, bodybuilder and author of Strength for Life, had this to say about the subject:

From the beginning, what I was connecting with in the gym was a universal energy source. I would just feel it flowing. Even when I was twenty years old, I called the gym my church. When I was there, it wasn’t about being social; it was about doing my practice. I was in it. I was in the zone.

Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, said,  “Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains.” In essence, this is what Flow is about. You become a circuit of energy, flowing infinitely, much like an unimpeded electrical circuit in which the electricity freely courses throughout.

Relax is something that doesn’t always come easy for many people. Sure, everybody knows how to veg out. But do you know how to profoundly relax, to tap into the stillness within and the center of your being?

To find that calmness and stillness within, you can do any number of things or techniques.  These can be meditation, prayer, walking in nature, speaking silently, listening to quiet engaging music, yoga, along with many other mind-body techniques.

A recent scientific study even found that relaxation techniques can beneficially affect your genes.

Relaxation is about finding your peace within the turmoil and hubbub of everyday life.  Some of you may do workshops or go to retreats or go on vacations to help find that inner quiet. And that is a good thing. But the trick is to embed that knowledge into your body and mind and integrate that understanding into your daily routine, so that everywhere you go, wherever you are, you are immersed in your stillness.

When you are acting with Effortless Effort, you can labor for hours on end, at times functioning on little sleep, and yet feel full of energy and life. You are firing on all cylinders, and the universe seems like a giant playground. You love what you do and you do what you love.

Interestingly enough, there are times when stress has a positive connotation. There is a term, eustress, which is the positive aspect of stress. In this case, a person is very busy, doing many things, but they are thriving in the midst of it, and loving how productive they are. A person in this situation is in full Effortless Effort mode. To an observer, it would seem as if this person is pushing themselves far too much and burning themselves out. But to the person immersed in Effortless Effort, they are thriving because they are firing on all cylinders and feeling alive, vibrant and awake.

And so, this is what being FREE is all about. Remember the formula? It’s LDL = FREE.  Keep that in mind–it will help you to live a Low Density Lifestyle.

The Low Density Lifestyle: The Secret to Becoming FREE

To live a Low Density Lifestyle, all you have to do is become FREE.  In this case, FREE is an acronym that stands for:

Flow

Relax

Effortless Effort

Let’s break that down some – I’ll explain what I mean:

Flow: Flow is the state of feeling fully in synch and in harmony with the universal flow that permeates throughout. You feel like you are in the zone at these times. The author and creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as:

” ‘Total control’ of one’s own mind is in fact too strong an expression to describe accurately what happens when one is in flow. The point is not that one can always do what one wants, but rather that the possibility of making things happen as one wishes is present in a way that seldom occurs in ‘real’ life.’ ”

Relax: Relax means finding the calmness and stillness within. When this happens, you can find your center and your balance. You can also find peace, because you are able to shut out all the static and noise that circulates all over the place.

There is a Spanish saying, “Cuán hermoso es de no hacer nada, y entonces descansar después.” This wise traditional proverb translates as, “How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then to rest afterward.”

And yet, so many of us are like a chicken without a head, running around here, there and everywhere, with a frantic energy. One of the big problems of modern day society is that so many people are burning their  candle out at both ends. The Chinese philosophers would say that people are burning out their yin, their nourishing aspect.

Effortless Effort: Effortless Effort is something the ancient Chinese philosophers called wu wei. The state of effortless effort describes a condition in which you are busy with effort, yet it seems effortless, as if the world seems to be working for you. You feel calm yet alert, focused yet receptive, drawing force from the storm while standing in its eye, acutely using all your senses. Like a marathoner who feels pulled forward, you accomplish the most with a minimum of energy. In this state hard work does not feel like work at all.

And so,  when you practice these essential characteristics—flow, relax and effortless effort—you promote a Low Density Lifestyle for yourself. An easy way to make these a part of your life is to commit to memory the simple formula: LDL = FREE.  That prescription stands for Low Density Lifestyle = Flow/Relax/Effortless Effort.

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