Bob is one of my trusted friends.
We became friends when he was doing MBA at Wharton School and I was a postdoc in UPenn.
We chatted last weekend on the phone and I came to know he was suffering from a long illness.
I am compelled to write this piece of content based on two conversations that I had with him, one last weekend and the second conversation almost a year ago.
I wish my friend a speedy recovery.
I remembered our conversation from almost a year ago which was somehow like this.
“Bob, you are a very good investment officer, you’ve created and delivered tons of value for the society,” I said.
“But sometimes I cry and sometimes I scream, and I feel pain and headache when I go home in the evening,” Bob said.
I asked “do you have any idea, why”?
He said, “I have no idea but I become drained and overwhelmed. I don’t have time to heal and relax, my relationship and health both are deteriorating.”
“Bob, everybody has limits in life, you are exceptional in your area of expertise, investment and banking, it doesn’t mean you can serve any number of clients in a day including your private networking session in the evening, and I know, they all like and love you and need you.
It’s not that you can serve more clients because they like you, your body which is your engine also needs self-care, good fuel as a diet, quality rest and sleep, and nurturing family relationships.
My friend, you have one body to work on in this life so you must learn how to say ‘no’ to at least a few things so that you can optimize your life and health for the long run,” I added.
It’s not only Bob’s problem, we all want to be liked by everyone, every family member, every friend, every relative, every coworker, and every community member.
This is the natural human psyche.
But at one point when we introspect our life we realize that it is absolutely not possible to be liked by everyone.
In the progression of life, we come across many things which are affected by not being little different than just being nice.
Being nice all the time is fool’s errand
Usually being nice to everyone and being liked by them is not our choice, it’s not going to solve our life’s purpose and meaning.
We must be strong first before making others strong so that flight attendants always say put on your mask first before helping others.
Being nice to everybody always basically becomes a recurring tool to lie to yourself.
It should feel energizing, empowering, creative, but if it feels exhausting and unfulfilling, then we have to stop being nice to everyone.
So relying on saying ‘yes’ to everyone and everything is a fool’s errand.
When we say ‘yes’ to everyone, we stop being our authentic selves and start to pretend to be someone which we are not, and that’s not going to serve us as we work to step out into different roles in life.
Saying ‘yes’ to everyone and everything might be ‘no’ for our physical and mental space or recreation and relaxation time.
That could also be ‘no’ for self education or self healing time or community or household contribution.
This could impact negatively on essential things like health, longevity, and prosperity depending on our choice and calling.
Remember, saying ‘no’ from our mouth is a complete sentence, it’s not a word.
But to do this we need practice and it demands a little bit of extra work.
It doesn’t come naturally, so we have to practice for it by starting with small things.
The bottom line is: If we move in the path that we want to be liked by everyone, we, most of the time, make bad decisions and remain unhappy.
Ultimately, these bad decisions drain time and energy every minute, pile up mental space, and promote nonsense that doesn’t matter to us anymore.
Most importantly, it ignores the essence of our life’s purpose which are basically, who we are and what we want.
Nothing happens until we decide when and how to say ‘no’ to at least a few things, we have to make a habit and just watch how our life revolves around and moves forward.
One lesson I learned is we have to set boundaries to say ‘no’.
Boundaries aren’t about saying ‘no’ to my friends, family members and coworkers.
Boundaries are about saying ‘yes’ to myself.
All we need is an enforced boundary to protect our health, time, joy, peace, and fulfillment.
Just be clear and mindful, it’s our job to protect us mentally and physically, nobody else’s.
Boundaries are to serve our purpose and goal, not to hurt other people around us.
The habit of saying ‘no’ comes with an alternative mindset
One way to associate with the habit of ‘no’ is to make it a ritual by associating with the right people as per our life’s goals and desires.
This association teaches us to prioritize the important stuff and let go of many others.
At one point in my life, I always hung out with wrong people who were not strong enough to make good decisions about health and longevity.
They were always tired and lethargic by hustling and running all day, no proper diet, no quality sleep, no exercise, no mediation.
And everytime I used to say ‘yes’ to these people, I was also draining myself in my private life.
So, this is one of my own personal experiences.
We have to find a group of people who challenge and inspire us, we have to spend time with quality people, and it will change our thinking.
The habit of saying ‘no’ comes with an alternative mindset and inspiring people’s association helps to cultivate this mindset.
Research says that the people we habitually associate with determine as much as 95 percent of our success or failure in life.
Upgrading our association with quality people is about making choices that make us feel amazing and fulfilling.
Recalling Jim Rohn’s statement, “we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with.”
Remember, no one ever reached Mount Everest alone, there is always a squad to accomplish a goal.
Ronald Burt, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of business says, “most successful people are labeled as “brokers”, they move between different networks, pass information around and build bridges between groups.
We must be this kind of brokers to create and deliver values in the society.
From my own research, these people say ‘no’ 99 percent of the time and say ‘yes’ only one percent of the time.
Once they say ‘yes’ in anything, they always live with that decision.
Keep in mind, always ‘yes’ to everyone and everything robs our dreams.
Warren Buffett and Seth Godin on ‘no’ advice
Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors of all time, says, “the key to success is to say ‘no’ to almost everything. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”
By making a habit of saying ‘no’ take our productivity actually up rather than down.
More mental space will be created by saying ‘no’ to many things.
What do we do with our new mental space?
It’s up to us how to use this free mental space.
We may not know immediately because dot connections in the mental space haven’t been discovered yet and real pictures don’t exist yet but eventually we grow neural connections and discover why we said ‘no’.
For example, if you would have asked anybody in 1990 about Facebook and Google websites, mobile applications, data analytics, and online merchandising, what would those people say?
They would say, “ this guy is sick, doesn’t know what he is talking about.
Facebook and Google are the result of new mental space and new neural connections by saying ‘no’ to many things by Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin.
By saying ‘no’ to many and ‘yes’ to few invites new neural connections that bring creativity and fulfillment.
Creativity and fulfillment involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in different ways.
So to do this we must practice ‘no’ to many things.
We make habits gradually and build life on it and act on the basis of how we perceive the world.
Just skip your regular 30 minutes of mundane running for five days and try meditation, you will know what your body is looking for.
We start to see the world and our life as they are at the moment, not as they were and they will be.
Saying ‘no’ requires us to be present and gives us a fresh, positive perspective of the world.
Seth Godin, an author and prolific innovator says, “just saying ‘yes’ because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying ‘no’ is not going to help you do the work.”
By the way, his book ‘The Dip’ has had a huge influence on me.
This book is mainly about quitting and focus.
Focusing our energy and our reserves on something we can be proud of and put our name on without using the sentence “I can’t” is an invaluable lesson.
The more we invest our ‘yes’ into mundane things, the more rigid our life becomes and the more sufferings we invite.
So please try to stop living always on auto-pilot, learn to say ‘no’ at least a few times and ‘yes’ to quality things that bring a healthy and joyous life with purpose.
Yam Timsina, PhD writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
How much scientific research is linked to what to eat to beat cancer?
We all want to become rich, but my meaning of rich is different here, rich, of course, financially, but rich also in time, energy, peace, power, and joy.
The only way to achieve this means we must be healthy.
One of the most fundamental things in life is our basic day to day lifestyle which has a profound impact on our quality of life, our healthspan, and our lifespan.
Our choices, especially, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and mindset are keys to optimize our health.
These lifestyle choices are entirely in our hands, it’s all up to us what and how to perform.
For example, moderate exercise can halve our risk of dying from heart disease.
Research indicates that careful dietary decisions can reduce our risk of death from any cause by 36% while poor diets can increase our risk of death by 67%.
Another finding from research is that simply walking 20 to 30 minutes everyday can avoid the risk of dying from a heart attack in half because exercise increases the blood flow to our brain, and improves our cognitive function as well.
One of the major lifestyle changes is dietary and nutrition habits.
Dietary decisions are most neglected and difficult to adopt in daily practice but are essential for our disease free life.
Dr. Dean Ornish, author of “UnDo It” and a clinical professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco says, “Think about it: Heart disease and diabetes, which account for more deaths in the U.S. and worldwide than everything else combined, are completely preventable by making comprehensive lifestyle changes. Without drugs or surgery.”
Cancer beating foods
Very few people know the secrets of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and brussels sprouts.
There are many factors but one most important is that they contain sulforaphane, a compound that reduces inflammation and can even slow the growth of tumors in our body.
Sulforaphane is cancer protective because it reuses antioxidants and detoxification enzymes that guard against the disease.
Sulforaphane not only inhibits tumor growth but also regulates hundreds of genes.
The broccoli sprout is a superfood that contains high levels of glucoraphanin, a precursor to the cancer busting phytochemical sulforaphane, one of the most powerful food derived molecules.
In fact, broccoli sprouts are up to fifty times more potent than broccoli alone.
Research on sulforaphane shows that 80% of the phytochemical we take goes into our body’s cells.
Here are some foods that are so good for our body that they influence more than one defense system.
Zucchini flowers contain a natural bioactive called spinasterol that protects DNA against mutations, aids immunity, and kills breast and ovarian cancer cells.
They also contain a good amount of vitamins A , C, E and K and provide important minerals like magnesium, zinc, and calcium.
Another food is persimmon leaves that could effectively inhibit liver tumor growth via enhancement of the immune function, and it displayed the potential to be a safe and effective anticancer and functional immune-enhancing agent.
Persimmons also have carotenoids, flavonoids, and vitamin E, all of which are potent antioxidants and anti inflammation in the body.
Flavonoids extracts from persimmons kill colon and prostate cancer cells.
Wasabi is widely used as a food spice in Asian countries and it has effects on detoxification, anti-inflammation, and the induction of cancer cell apoptosis.
It has anticancer activities and extracts prepared from fresh wasabi rhizomes kill liver cancer cells.
Extracts from fresh wasabi also kill breast and colon cancer cells.
Bitter melon is a tropical and subtropical vine of the family Cucurbitaceae and has promising anticancer effects on breast, ovarian, and cervical cancer cells.
Bioactives from bitter melon kill colon and breast cancer cells, lower cholesterol, and improve blood sugar levels in diabetes.
Bottarga is best eaten as a condiment food and has cancer-fighting properties.
It is rich in anti-angiogenic omega-3 fatty acids, specifically EPA and DHA, which are preserved even after long-term storage.
Extracts from it also kill colon cancer cells.
Squid ink is a type of seafood.
It has anticancer and strong antioxidant properties.
Studies have found that squid ink proteins and polysaccharides may suppress the growth of breast, lung, and prostate cancer cells
It has antioxidants, antiangiogenic, stem cell protecting, and immune enhancing effects.
It protects the gut microbiome against the side effects of cancer chemotherapy.
Beer is no more only a big dose of carbohydrates, it also contains xanthohumol and isoxanthohumol, which have anti cancer effects, are antiangiogenic, and can retard the growth of fat cells.
It also reduces the risk of kidney cancer.
Research indicates that a high-calorie diet with purple potatoes leads to a reduction in levels of interleukin-6, a pro-inflammatory protein linked to promote colon cancer.
Purple potatoes are antiangiogenic and they can kill cancer stem cells.
There was a time when spicy food was considered a health hazard.
But research made us rethink about spicy food.
Eating spicy food periodically is associated with a reduced risk from cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, respiratory disease, and infections.
Chille-fed microbiomes prevent inflammation and obesity.
Dr. William Li, author of “Eat to Beat Disease” says, “Eating to beat disease empowers you to help yourself and the people you care about. You can love your food to love your health.”
His TED Talk “Can we eat to starve cancer?” tells the story of what to eat to kill cancer.
Our food, inflammation and diabetes
More than 34 million Americans have diabetes, about one in ten, and approximately 90-95 percent of them have type 2 diabetes.
When we eat too much refined carbs like pizza, pasta, sodas, white bread, pastries, fruit juice with high fructose corn syrup, processed meat like hot dogs and sausage, french fries and fried food in general, we are adding sugar and it goes straight into our bloodstream and blood sugar spikes.
Our pancreas makes insulin to bring our blood sugar down, which is good.
But insulin also accelerates the conversion of those calories into fat.
It causes chronic inflammation and many of these mechanisms lead to chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart diseases.
Healthy fats actually stabilize our blood sugar.
The fastest way to lower insulin levels is to substitute fat for processed carbohydrates.
Some good fat-containing foods are olive oil, avocados, nuts, fatty fish, and unsweetened yogurt.
There are certain foods that fight for inflammation.
Olive oil, green leafy vegetables, brightly colored vegetables, fatty fish like wild salmon and mackerel, most fruits, nuts and seeds, and green tea are some of them.
Olive oil is high in polyphenols.
Specially nuts like almonds, cashews, chestnuts, macadamias, pecans, pine nuts, pistachios, and walnuts are very healthy.
Walnut reduces the risk of colon cancer.
Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist, researcher, and professor at Harvard Medical School says, “Highly processed carbohydrates are among the lowest quality components of the food supply, accounting for the majority of diet related diseases in the United States today.”
His book “Always Hungry” is a must read for those who want to break apart every myth about weight loss, and explains why we get fat and why we are always hungry.
This book also tells a story about why we become sick and how we can heal.
Dr. Robert H. Lustig, an American pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) says, “Sugar is the elephant in the kitchen.”
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Dr. Peter Diamandis, an American marketer, engineer, physician, and entrepreneur says, “Sugar is a poison.”
Plenity is a diet related pill to aid in weight management in adults who are overweight or obese and have a body mass index (BMI) of 25-40 when combined with diet and exercise.
Gelesis is a biotech company to empower people to improve and change their diet, lifestyle and health.
FDA approved plenity for obese people having BMI 25-40.
The higher the BMI, the greater the risk of developing diabetes.
A simple blood test that measures our average blood sugar level over the past two to three months is HbA1c.
HbA1c is glycated hemoglobin and it is made when the sugar in our body sticks to our red blood cells.
Our body can’t use the sugar properly and it sticks to our blood cells and builds up in our blood. Red blood cells are generally active for around 2-3 months so that the reading is generally taken quarterly.
If you have diabetes, your HbA1c level is 6.5 or above. A cutoff of HbA1c of 6.5 percent is an indication of diabetes.
Please remember this, one of the best investments in life is staying in good health by adopting healthy dietary habits. There is immense value for this investment and the truth is most of us came to know the value late in life once we pass and cannot regain it.
I’m sure in the future, we will have personalized nutrition based on gut microbiome, genetics, metabolic profile, and our environment to prioritize our health on an individual level.
Yam Timsina, PhD writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
Why do we need nanorobots to treat cancer?
In the coming future, everything will be cheaper to extract, make or synthesize because of automation.
Human labor will be replaced by a lot of robotics.
Energy prices will be way cheaper because of solar photovoltaics and energy storage across the globe.
Transportation costs will be cheaper and affordable due to autonomous electric vehicles on the road.
If you don’t believe it, just look back thirty years ago and check the price of a cell phone and compare its price with current price and it’s accessibility now and how many things you can do with your cell phone.
So then what about our health and longevity in the future?
Let’s explore a little bit about this and understand why we catch chronic diseases like cancer and how to tackle them in the future.
Aging and chronic health problems
When we age, it’s not only that we have a high chance of cancer or lung disease or heart disease or any other chronic disease but also
our body automatically just starts weakening or breaking down, same like rusting our old car.
Aubrey de Grey, a renowned biomedical gerontologist says, “aging is like wear and tear on the engine of an automobile. It is damage that accumulates as a result of the system’s normal operation.”
In our body, we have cellular metabolism to produce energy to stay alive and functional.
We also have cellular reproduction for self-replication as a natural phenomenon.
These cellular metabolisms generate a lot of waste in and around the cells and that damages various internal organs through oxidation exactly like rusting an old car.
Relatively, at young age, waste removal as well as repair processes are smooth and regular but at old age, these processes are not smooth.
Consequently, many errors accumulate and the body cannot fix all of them.
This damage or error might cause fatal issues like cancer, Alzheimer’s, parkinson and heart diseases.
The challenge now is how to preserve life as we are technologically so sophisticated.
Preserving life means extending as well as improving it.
The process for the development of new health treatments is changing rapidly from trial and error process of drug design to an exponential information technology so that we can systematically reprogram the suboptimal software of our life.
Cancer and other neurodegenerative diseases appeared later in our life when we started to live longer and our immunity started to fall apart.
They are mainly caused due to misfolded proteins called prions and other reasons.
Current information technology is nothing but sharing ideas to fulfill human potential and to solve many social problems including biological and medical issues.
The key of information technology is artificial intelligence AI that is taking us from linear advancement to exponential advancement in understanding these complex biological issues to treat and cure these chronic diseases.
AI and nanorobots for our longevity
The use of AI for discovery and design of both drugs and other interventions are coming rapidly.
We can find key safety and efficacy data in hours from simulated in silico trials whereas only human trials take years to get these data.
Ray Kurzweil, a world class inventor, thinker, author, and futurist says, “if we put nanorobots inside our body, we can repair the damage caused by aging at the level of individual cells and local tissues.”
He is one of my favorite authors and his latest book “The Singularity Is Nearer ” is a must read for those who always hope for a better and healthy future.
Aging degrades our organ performance but the nanobots will repair and strengthen them.
Nanorobots can be programmed to damage all types of pathogens, they can be also used to treat metabolic diseases.
They will help to keep substances into our blood supply or lymph system, for example, our entire digestive system supplies nutrients into the blood.
They might remove substances from our blood supply.
It might be the same as our lungs taking in oxygen and taking out carbon dioxide, similarly, the liver and kidneys remove toxins.
Pancreas produce hormones to control metabolism, change in hormone is the cause of diabetes, as we know, type 1 diabetes occurs because pancreatic islet cells cannot produce insulins.
Except our heart and brain, all of our major internal organs can keep substances in and out of the blood supply and many health problems result from their malfunction.
If we use medical nanorobots, they can monitor the blood flow and can also increase or decrease hormones, oxygen, nutrients, and toxins by mimicking the function of internal organs.
This technology will solve the problems of diseases and aging in the near future.
Nanobots will monitor, supply, and adjust these different substances so that our organs maintain good shape and ultimately we will be able to optimize our biology for longevity.
Cancer and more hope for the future
Cancer is a chronic problem for humanity and spreading like wildfire across the globe.
Do you know that we are always developing cancers in our body all the time.
But our immune system finds them at a very early stage and defeats them completely.
It’s only when our immune system fails to defeat and cancer enters inside our body.
A very strong performing immune system is one of the most important ways to defend against cancer, and virtually all chronic diseases.
Muscle is the largest endocrine organ in our body and research shows that people with strong muscle mass have a significantly lower incidence of cancer and other illnesses.
Higher the muscle mass creates the higher immune function in our body and the longer we live.
Nowadays, we know more about what’s going on inside our car or microwave or cell phone but we don’t know much about our body because of its complex biochemical pathways.
The problem is, it’s often too late by the time we find something wrong inside our body, especially cancers.
Eighty percent of cancers don’t have any screening mechanisms or tools to detect.
Many cancers like pancreatic and ovarian are so deadly because they are frequently detected very late.
Cancer is hard to remove because each cancer cell can self-replicate so that every single cell has to be removed from the body.
At some point, each cell can develop resistance to the body’s immune cells and any kind of treatment can destroy most cancer cells but after some time new tumors can grow again.
The problem of chemotherapy is that it cannot cure cancer entirely and can damage non cancerous cells. The biggest challenge of chemotherapy is that it also weakens our immune system.
Up to now our medical science has an incomplete molecular understanding of how cancer evades our immune system.
Our natural immune system includes T cells that can destroy bad microorganisms and without them, we cannot survive longer.
Hopefully, AI biological simulators will be advanced to break this poor understanding between cancer and immunity.
One alternative for radical life extension and cancer treatment in the near future is possible by medical nanorobots. The major development and extension will be in the area of our immune system.
Medical nanobots can examine each individual cell and can determine if it is cancerous or not.
If we are able to selectively repair or destroy individual cells, we can manipulate our biology and the medicine will work effectively and selectively.
Manipulation of biology means we can control our genes because cells self replicate by copying the DNA in each nucleus.
At the moment, immunotherapy is serving many stage 4 terminal cancer patients to go into remission which is encouraging development in cancer treatment.
CAR-T cell therapy technology is a clear example, it can reprogram a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells.
We now have induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells which can rejuvenate the heart after a heart attack.
We can grow organs using iPS cells.
These are adult cells which are converted into stem cells by the introduction of specific genes.
These iPS cells have been used for the regeneration of tracheas, bones, retinal cells, nerves, and tissues from heart, liver, and kidneys.
Dr. Silviu Itescu, CEO of Mesoblast, and professor of Columbia University Medical Center says, “The bone marrow in our body contains a homegrown pantry of non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory medicines.”
The native stem cells in bone marrow are also known as mesenchymal precursor cells, the body’s most versatile and potent building blocks. They differentiate into bone, cartilage, muscle or fat whatever we need.
After an injury, they are crucial because of two reasons: they keep inflammation within normal healthy range and they repair damaged tissue.
Scientists regard inflammation as a key culprit in aging and specifically in cancer.
The problem is that stem cells grow scarcer with age especially with people with chronic diseases.
Dr. Bob Hariri, an accomplished surgeon and biomedical scientist, pioneered in using NK cells to combat cancer.
His company, Celularity harvests NK cells from human placentas.
He says, “The placenta is often regarded as a throwaway organ, but it is packed with stem cells as well as NK cells. They are more youthful than those found in the bone marrow of adults or even children.”
Stem cells are somehow similar to cancer cells, the challenge is how to find ways to minimize the risk of uncontrolled cell division.
The good news is these iPS cells can behave like embryonic stem cells and can differentiate into almost all types of human cells.
When we know the mechanism of iPS action with advanced AI, regenerative medicine will identify the body’s own secret for healing.
Jeff Huber, CEO of GRAIL, whose mission is to detect cancer early, when it can be cured, has developed a blood test for cancers.
GRAIL developed a blood based screening test called Galleri, which could detect more than 50 types of cancer.
This test searches for tiny fragments of DNA and RNA that have been released into the bloodstream by a tumor and that reflects the tumor’s genomic features.
GRAIL’s technology is so sensitive that it can detect even a faint signal that an early tumor exists.
Let’s hope that exponential technological development interfaced with cheaper computing power, biotechnology, nanotechnology along with AI will help us to understand our biology better and defeat cancer and other chronic diseases.
The fundamental components of our living body like genes, proteins, and cells are changing into tools, as biology is appearing as technology, to shape and improve our life.
Our body, obviously, is a collection of cells and the better understanding and function of these cells with the help of these new technologies will bring multi-cancer early detection and cure.
Yam Timsina, PhD writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
Is the root cause of chronic diseases: the unhappy microbiome?
I think there are two things that can not be neglected in anyone’s life, no matter who we are, where we live and what we do for a living.
The first is our health and second is how much money we have or we make.
It doesn’t matter whether we care about these two things or not, these two things always come and touch our lives in different ways.
Let’s put it this way.
Can we preview the next year ahead?
Did we see that covid-19 was coming in 2020 when we were in 2018 or 2019?
The point is that we cannot predict what kind of health crisis is coming into our lives tomorrow.
Because it is very difficult to wrap our heads around how this thing called the human body works, how these complex biological and chemical systems are working all day and all night. But there are certainly things in our body which we can all learn from to live a healthy life.
Among many things, one part is the microbiome, which was ignored or not understood before but getting a lot of focus in research recently.
Up to now human health is typically taught as a symptom based approach, where we take the symptoms and plug it into a treatment and we expect a solution.
But there is a huge gap between symptoms and treatment because in general by the time we get symptoms of any disease, it is already too late to recover.
And that’s why I’m bringing up this piece of content about the microbiome in our body and its role in our health as a fundamental health endeavor.
When we become an informed healthy citizen, we become aware not only of how health problems and concerns appear but also how we can take actions to benefit from these new research findings around microbiome.
Global picture: chronic diseases and microbiome
Since the last many years obesity rates have consistently skyrocketed among adults and especially among children.
At the moment, more than 42 percent of American adults are obese and the number is constantly going up.
We are suffering from type 2 diabetes that is affecting many of our lives and the American heart association predicts that 45 percent of people in the US will have heart disease by the year 2035. This data is alarming and needs some kind of immediate action.
Not only diabetes, early cancer is dramatically increasing across the world, and the US is in the front line.
Someone in the US is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease every single minute and Parkinson’s disease is threatening worldwide as the fastest growing neurological disorder on the planet.
“All these diseases are directly or indirectly related to auto-immunity, leaky gut, and intestinal dysbiosis. They all stem directly from the gut. And gut chemistry is directly related to the microbiome,” says Dr. Steven Gundry, a cardiologist, heart surgeon, medical researcher, and author.
Inside our digestive system there is a galaxy consisting of trillions of bacteria belonging to thousands of different species with many viruses, fungi, and other microbes.
All these microbes have more than three million genes whereas the human genome has only twenty three thousand genes.
This means we have our genes in our body but we also have microbiome genes. The reality is the majority of genes in our body are not our genes but the bacterial genes.
If for some reason bacterial diversity is imbalanced, bacterial genes are also imbalanced then our suffering from many diseases starts.
Let’s put these microbes in our head to compare how big they are.
We have eight billion people and approximately three trillion trees are expected on earth. But there are more of these bacteria and other species in our body than people and plants combined in the universe.
Now the question is what do these trillions of bacteria do inside our body?
Inside our gut, they break down everything we eat into amino acids, fatty acids, sugar molecules with the help of stomach acid and enzymes.
These molecules then approach the gut lining to exit the gut and enter our bloodstream.
Our relationship with microbiomes is symbiotic, so if we help them to grow and nourish then only they will help us to remain healthy.
When our microbiomes are well balanced and well nourished, they ferment essential compounds which keep us healthy and also protect themselves so that they can take care of our body.
In addition to all of their many jobs, the metabolites created by the gut microbiome act as signaling molecules that regulate our appetite, immunity, and aging.
When our microbiomes are affected and out of balance, our immune system is also affected, our hormone levels fluctuate, our mental health and longevity suffer.
Due to this imbalance and destruction in microbiomes by many reasons of our modern lifestyle, there are increased risks of developing autoimmune, heart, and neurodegenerative diseases including arthritis, diabetes, and cancer.
Here is one simple example of how important microbiomes are.
Recent research showed that people with obesity have an imbalanced ratio of bacteria in the gut. Obese people have limited microbial diversity with less Bateroidetes and more Firmicutes, which are two main kinds of bacteria.
Metformin, the common medication used to control type 2 diabetes, works not by lowering our blood sugar but by improving our gut diversity and this drug also increases the abundance of Akkermansia, one type of good bacteria in our gut.
Metformin is also a mTOR suppressor in our body.
Let me tell you a little bit of science here, mTOR means mammalian target of rapamycin, when it feels that there is energy to spare it excites the growth hormone IGF1 which is insulin-like growth factor 1 that leads cells to grow and if mTOR feels like there is no energy available, it restricts the production of IGF1 and inhibits the growth.
Therefore, it’s always good to suppress mTOR to protect our health.
Microbiome, mitochondria and polyphenols: the intricate relationship
We all know mitochondria from high school biology which convert our food into ATP (adenosine triphosphate) which is our cellular energy house.
The information mitochondria receive is from our microbiome which directly affects how much energy mitochondria produce. Our mitochondria is powerful, it can produce 32 molecules of ATP for every molecule of glucose.
Mitochondria uses glucose as a vehicle’s gasoline and fat as charge on battery. When gasoline is finished mitochondria use fat to run the human engine as stored energy.
Mitogenesis is the addition of more mitochondria in a cell and under certain circumstances, a cell will make more mitochondria to handle the workload.
The interesting fact is mitochondria have their own DNA and can divide when they need to, regardless of what the rest of the cell is doing.
There are only two ways to make more mitochondria either by fasting or by exercising.
Generally at night, the repair of mitochondria occurs and our body also makes ketones at night and they inform mitochondria to repair and produce more of it.
Now let’s talk a little bit about polyphenol compounds, why they are so important.
The polyphenol compounds, which are antioxidants and found in colored fruits and vegetables like berries, pomegranates, walnuts can only protect our mitochondria if microbiomes absorb them.
So, the bottom line is, even if we eat different kinds of colored fruits and vegetables which contain many polyphenols, our body cannot absorb polyphenols directly, we need microbiomes to help us to make them absorbable by our body.
The chemistry of the microbiome is so delicate that it always needs a balanced diversified microbiome.
Microbiomes normally activate polyphenols to make beneficial signaling molecules that’s what we want but if the microbiome is imbalanced and not diversified, the same polyphenols might work against us by increasing the risk of developing some kind of cancers.
All dark colored fruits and vegetables which contain polyphenols work as a double sword: they protect mitochondria and they also repair DNA in our cells through activating Sirtuin1(SIR1) an enzyme in cell nucleus.
Resveratrol is another type of polyphenol which is found in red wine that decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease, inhibits memory loss, and increases lifespan.
Recent study shows that in cancer cells, polyphenols actually increase oxidative stress and drive tumor cells into apoptosis.
The same resveratrol is toxic to cancer cells and shows antiproliferative properties.
Resveratrol also activates sestrin genes that also activates Sirtuin1 to repair and protect cellular DNA. Sirtuin1 is used to suppress mTOR.
Again the truth is, polyphenols work only if our gut microbes digest them for us.
Flavonoids, another group of polyphenols, help to reshape gut microbiomes to tackle cancer. Here again, gut microbiomes digest flavonoids and help to inhibit carcinogenesis.
Quercetin, another flavonoid found in berries, onions, grapes, broccoli, and citrus fruits also activates sestrin and inhibits mTOR.
Independent of Sirtuin1 and resveratrol, there are other polyphenols that activate AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), an enzyme that activates glucose and fat uptake by mitochondria so they can produce more energy.
Another important polyphenol is called ellagitannins which are found in berries, pomegranates, walnuts.
Microbiomes use ellagitannins to produce a metabolite called UrolithinA, which increases lifespan through mitophagy and mitogenesis.
Mitophagy is the recycling of old and damaged mitochondria and mitogenesis is the creation of new mitochondria.
Even if we eat all the good foods like berries, pomegranates, and walnuts, if we don’t have good microbiomes in our body, we cannot produce UrolithinA from polyphenols.
So please, understand the intricate relationship between polyphenol and microbiome and why we should eat foods containing polyphenols and why the microbiomes are involved in the process.
So the cycle is that polyphenols regulate our biological and chemical system and microbiomes activate polyphenols and use them as signaling devices to our cells.
Conclusion
The first thing is we have to maintain the diversity of the microbiome by our own efforts: proper diet and exercise, sound sleep, and periodic fasting.
We must eat healthy foods, especially natural foods containing high amounts of polyphenols, fermented foods, and antioxidants. We also need enough vitamin D from sunlight, and the fact is if we don’t have the diversified microbiome, we can not synthesize vitamin D.
We must maintain our stress level because it imbalances the diversity of the microbiome which creates problems in the gut and that triggers inflammation and neuroinflammation.
Inflammation and neuroinflammation are the causes of multiple diseases in our body.
So now let’s remember Hippocrates, the Greek physician of the fifth century BC, who said “all diseases begin in the gut.”
So, please, let’s protect our microbiome and, they protect our health.
Jeffrey Gordon, MD, distinguished Professor of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the most influential human microbiome scientist working today says “you are what you — and your microbes — eat.”
Yam Timsina, PhD writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
Why do we fight with our spouse?
“Are we spending money on my dress or yours?” my wife said.
“On my dress,” I said.
“You’re so selfish, I knew that,” she exclaimed.
“You never cook, you never do dishes and house chores, this is why I’m always in tension and pressure,” she continued.
“Don’t use that tone and bring those things up with me now,” I reacted.
“Don’t even go with my tone, you silly.”
“If you roll your eyes one more time like that, I’m leaving this house,” she bombarded.
This was a small glimpse of my life fifteen years ago on Saturday morning.
After the heated argument, I left the room and entered another room, closed my eyes and started to count my breath in and breathe out for five minutes.
When we close our eyes, we see another world which remains a little more authentic and peaceful.
The problem was with me.
I realized multiple times before, but could not implement.
Why couldn’t I listen to her? My mind always asks me even today.
My internal echo answers, If I couldn’t show my wife I was listening, I probably wouldn’t get married in the first place.
My life is a little bit different now but still sometimes heated discussions and arguments with my wife have been a part of life.
Nowadays, I read everyday in the news that America’s divorce rate is skyrocketing.
I know the truth that every couple they fight, every couple has some kind of conflict.
But, for many couples, conflicts are storms that appeared and then dissipated, leaving behind only clean blue sky.
I also did a small research within my closed circle of friends directly and indirectly.
What I found is interesting.
I found that most unhappy couples fight for money, health, and alcohol and drug problems which are, I think, bigger issues for them.
But I also found that many happy couples also fight for reasons like attitude, sex, and miscommunication.
They also fight over matters like where to go for vacation this year and in which sport activity their son and daughter are supposed to be.
So, the truth is, most of the couples fight, and the reasons for fighting are inherently related to communication problems.
Controlling someone vs controlling emotions
Fifteen years ago I had a different problem, I wanted to control my wife and this happened because I would lose patience.
But now, I know patience doesn’t come naturally, I need to practice it over and over.
I think, trying to control someone, not only the spouse but anybody, means it is an invitation for more battle.
In any conflict, everyone craves for control, this is a natural human tendency.
But trying to control someone is very destructive and toxic.
We humans are born to be free from origin, this is how we have progressed through evolution.
Research data shows that when somebody wants to control us, we want to confront it, our blood pressure can rise, our body can flood with stress hormones and we might start looking for ways to escape or fight back.
Over the years, I have developed more self control and self awareness by controlling my emotions.
I take breaks for deep breathing and I pause and speak slowly if I am about to initiate the verbal argument.
If I focus on controlling myself, my environment, and the conflict itself, then only I initiate real conversation.
And I learned that only real conversation leads to understanding rather than winning the fight.
Controlling our emotions is all about discipline and personal development more than anything else.
Marriage and communication
Marriage lasts longer if we know how to communicate with our spouse, sometimes practically and sometimes philosophically.
Why do you think people get married?
Just curious.
I’m sure you all have multiple answers for this.
Among many answers, one truth for me is we need somebody to witness our lives.
Remember, there are eight billion people on earth, and when we get married, we are promising to care for everything about our spouse, successes and failures, the good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things, all of them all day and every day.
This is the promise of marriage.
Your life will not go unnoticed because your spouse will be your witness, he or she will witness and notice all of your life.
For the fast thinking mind, the answer looks philosophical but when you close your eyes, the answer makes sense to you, what we generally call slow thinking mind. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner psychologist, has given us a phenomenal book, “Thinking fast and slow” about human mind and how fast and slow mind works when we operate.
According to my research and reading, one reason marriage crumbles is because we don’t know how to communicate properly.
Communication could be verbal as well as non verbal.
One of my non verbal communications is to try to be non reactive as much as possible, and ask permission from my wife for future time for more discussion and to go for an outdoor walk or run.
My perception on my wife hasn’t changed since joining the running club, but my approach to the house conversation definitely has.
I think conversations, especially deep conversation, is the key, it looks easy from the surface but needs a lot of homework, courage, and time.
I want to sit and talk and have these difficult conversations about our family all day long now.
Beside courage and setting aside time, the only skill we have to nurture is how to be patient with our spouse during conversations.
Just be a little bit more patient, that’s it, it gives rewards not only for us but also for our kids because they will gradually learn about a valuable asset of life.
Patience enhances our listening power, and that opens many more doors later on in life.
Listening to a spouse means letting him or her tell their story and then, even if you don’t agree with him or her, trying to understand why he or she feels that way.
It’s hard to metabolize another person’s perspective in just one or two conversations.
Husband-wife relationships don’t usually resolve quickly because we have known each other for a very long time.
Eventually conflicts resolve if we practice patience and time for deep multiple conversations.
Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of ‘Supercommunicators’ says, “There is a science behind how human beings connect to each other and we can all learn to be supercommnicators at work and in life.”
Differences bring more values
As we all know, it’s a complicated world.
We’re eight billion people on the planet with different genomes.
Obviously, we all are different by many many factors and, I think, that difference is our main asset.
If you want to figure out who you are as a husband, then you need a wife who is different from you.
Similarly, if you want to figure out who you are as a wife then you also need a husband who is different from you.
When we embrace how our spouse sees the world and their identities within it, amazing things start to appear in our mind.
When we listen to their specific stories and acknowledge their feelings, we start to understand why two of us, who otherwise agree about so much, might see some aspects of life so differently.
Because we came from different genomes, so obviously we have some dissimilar backgrounds.
We need to explore these things very frankly in a cordial environment.
I begin to appreciate how our world has been shaped by our upbringing, education, race, religion, caste, ethnicity, geography, and other identities.
Talking about our differences is important if we are to begin to move beyond these blights.
One thing I learnt over the years, it is not our differences that divide us but it is our inability to recognize, accept and celebrate those differences that divide us.
I think how we structure everything in life that makes the difference.
We all have different identities, and these identities become more important than husband-wife fighting because our identities are related to overall family prosperity.
The bottom line, I think, is we are all people who want to do the right thing for our families and societies, regardless of other differences, we have that in common.
I don’t know about you but my aim as a husband is not to be a perfect husband, my aim is for curiosity and understanding so that my family flows with our differences.
I am quite aware we can not make the goal of perfection, because if we are looking for perfection, we never become authentic.
My goal is to stay and continue my conversation with my wife so that I can find a space for learning and supporting each other.
Even though I disagree with my wife, I want to show I respect each other’s right to be heard.
We are not here to convince someone to change their mind.
Harvard’s research on relationship and happiness
By education, profession, and training I am a scientist so my mind always looks for evidence, data, and proofs. I am like that, so here is one.
Harvard university has seven decades of research data on relationship, it says “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationship at age 50 were the healthiest, mentally and physically, at age 80”.
Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist from Harvard Medical School, says, “Human connection is our superpower. Good relationships help us get through life’s inevitable challenges, and they keep us happier and healthier.” His TedTalk is a must watch for everybody.
The most important influence for the most flourishing life is “deep love.”
Learning to love pays the most dividend throughout our lives.
The Harvard data from 2023 summary says, “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier.”
These relationships remain alive by long and intimate discussions and conversations.
These discussions can change our brains, bodies, and how we experience the world.
Beside all of these, still sometimes,
I half-listen to my wife.
I tell my kids not to ask more questions, the background is I’m still a little bit upset with my wife because she said something to me which I don’t like.
I ignore a good idea from my wife because I think I already have a good idea inside me.
I become a little reactive too soon too quickly on her statement.
But nowadays she always says, “I’m getting a lot better but still I have to go a long way.”
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
Father’s day memory, what?
First and foremost, I’d like to thank my younger brother who also flew from Copenhegan to home on my request.
We both wanted to visit our dad this time.
Though it was a short three week trip, it was very worthwhile.
For the last many years, I visited my home every year but this was a different experience for me to go back home from Chicago thinking a lot different about my dad than previous years.
My dad is very old now, he is 92.
By the grace of God, he is still active with all normal activities, not any chronic disease or any disorder except normal minor aging issues.
My dad was very interested in talking and inquisitive in many past years.
But time is different now, he wanted to talk to us about many things but he had a hard time to finish sentences as well as synchronize what he was trying to say.
But still I was absorbing what he was saying.
I would comprehend what he said because my brain aligned with him all the time.
At many moments, I also noticed that his body, pulse, facial expression would synchronize with me, probably due to the same genes.
This all was happening due to the same body chemistry, and, of course, this was neural simultaneity between us.
Sometimes, I also felt, I would mirror his speaking and listening style.
I really felt the essence of dad and son bonding that nature has given to all of us, if we go deeper in our conversation and listening.
I felt like I was the happiest son in the world when he would stare at me with no words in his mouth.
I would ask do you want to say something?
He would nod meaning ‘no’.
I wanted to know how to live a more meaningful life from his life perspective.
And, of course, he was sharing many things by his expressions rather than words.
He would try to say a lot but his memory and mouth didn’t allow that much but I understood completely what he was trying to say.
On this visit, I couldn’t talk much to him because he was gradually losing a lot of his memories.
And, I also realized probably this is normal considering his age, I don’t know, I am doing some research on it at the moment.
I tried to remind him about trips, occasions, and activities that we had taken together.
I asked questions about my grandmother but mostly he replied with short but emotional answers.
I had no idea what was going through his mind.
The last time I had known about memory loss was when my maternal grandmother was reaching 100 years old.
I had read but never thought this before that when our brain becomes older, we forget things so fast.
And I am seeing this in patterns continuously with my old family members, at least I saw it in my paternal grandmother, my maternal grandfather, my maternal grandmother, and now slowly catching up to my dad.
At one point, my dad was talking about the challenges of juggling work and fatherhood.
“It was a continuous struggle,” he said.
He recalled his struggle to raise us and was trying to correlate this with my three kids that I am raising now.
He always felt as if he was letting someone down, having to choose between a good social worker or a good dad.
I quickly understood that he was indicating my mom and how much responsibilities she took to raise us.
I realized that father-son conversations are the most powerful thing on earth.
This conversation between us was not just a fun and formal conversation.
It was an act of humility and respect, a pure learning experience for me.
It was also a conversation of pain and suffering along with time and progression of our family.
Once he talked about Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, though he couldn’t remember these names, I was amazed.
The beauty of electricity, electric lights, the telephone, the radio, the refrigerator, and the automobile, all the buzz and the news, his life went through.
He was pointing to my smart phone that I used everyday to talk in video calls from Chicago.
He said, “The world was changing the way in which I went about my life, and the population was soaring to unimaginable heights.”
According to him, since the early 1800s, there had been waves of immigration, but the trend was now accelerating like it never had before.
He was trying to connect his intention to me and my younger brother’s movements as we both live in America and Europe now.
During this trip, I spent the whole three weeks at home in Jhapa with my parents.
I asked my dad many questions which were kind of short and they often had a conversational dead end after a sentence of his answer.
I asked him questions like which place is best to live, Jhapa or Terhathum?
Do you remember your school?
I completely understood that these questions didn’t create any values or experiences for him.
They didn’t invite any vulnerabilities.
But when I asked him, “What do you like about our family to live in Jhapa?”
He said, “friendship and struggle.”
That question excited him to share his preferences, beliefs, and values that he nurtured with our family in Jhapa.
It made him emotional.
He went with a long answer with back and forth conversation.
I asked him, “how many of your friends are still around?”
He replied, “most of them already became dear to God, I don’t remember anybody now.”
Emotions are critical for any lasting conversation especially between aging dad and son.
This was guiding me what he was saying and how I was hearing and in a lot of cases without me realizing that we both were emotional.
I was in his emotions so that I was purely listening.
I was listening to what he was not saying so that I was revealing beneath the surface of his words.
I was reading his expressions and gestures, not words.
I don’t know why, maybe from experience I was listening without thinking about what my dad was saying because he was talking about very intimate things about our family.
He was trying to join all the small pieces of our family together.
The lessons I learned from this visit from my dad are immense.
It’s almost impossible to express in this small piece of writing.
But one learning that I would like to share with you all is this: If you want to connect with someone, especially with old people like dad or mom or granddad or grandmom, ask them what they are feeling at the moment, and then reveal your own emotions with them.
This conversation with my dad became a tool by inviting him to reveal his vulnerabilities and then I also became vulnerable in return.
I also revealed something about me as his son which I never revealed before.
I revealed we humans are amazing creatures.
We all crave for real connections whatever our situations are and how far we are.
We all want meaningful conversations whatever the age is especially when we are retired and stay at home with our family.
Thank you so much dad for everything that you have done for our family.
I love you and see you soon.
Happy Father’s Day!!!
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
We both wanted to visit our dad this time.
Though it was a short three week trip, it was very worthwhile.
For the last many years, I visited my home every year but this was a different experience for me to go back home from Chicago thinking a lot different about my dad than previous years.
My dad is very old now, he is 92.
By the grace of God, he is still active with all normal activities, not any chronic disease or any disorder except normal minor aging issues.
My dad was very interested in talking and inquisitive in many past years.
But time is different now, he wanted to talk to us about many things but he had a hard time to finish sentences as well as synchronize what he was trying to say.
But still I was absorbing what he was saying.
I would comprehend what he said because my brain aligned with him all the time.
At many moments, I also noticed that his body, pulse, facial expression would synchronize with me, probably due to the same genes.
This all was happening due to the same body chemistry, and, of course, this was neural simultaneity between us.
Sometimes, I also felt, I would mirror his speaking and listening style.
I really felt the essence of dad and son bonding that nature has given to all of us, if we go deeper in our conversation and listening.
I felt like I was the happiest son in the world when he would stare at me with no words in his mouth.
I would ask do you want to say something?
He would nod meaning ‘no’.
I wanted to know how to live a more meaningful life from his life perspective.
And, of course, he was sharing many things by his expressions rather than words.
He would try to say a lot but his memory and mouth didn’t allow that much but I understood completely what he was trying to say.
On this visit, I couldn’t talk much to him because he was gradually losing a lot of his memories.
And, I also realized probably this is normal considering his age, I don’t know, I am doing some research on it at the moment.
I tried to remind him about trips, occasions, and activities that we had taken together.
I asked questions about my grandmother but mostly he replied with short but emotional answers.
I had no idea what was going through his mind.
The last time I had known about memory loss was when my maternal grandmother was reaching 100 years old.
I had read but never thought this before that when our brain becomes older, we forget things so fast.
And I am seeing this in patterns continuously with my old family members, at least I saw it in my paternal grandmother, my maternal grandfather, my maternal grandmother, and now slowly catching up to my dad.
At one point, my dad was talking about the challenges of juggling work and fatherhood.
“It was a continuous struggle,” he said.
He recalled his struggle to raise us and was trying to correlate this with my three kids that I am raising now.
He always felt as if he was letting someone down, having to choose between a good social worker or a good dad.
I quickly understood that he was indicating my mom and how much responsibilities she took to raise us.
I realized that father-son conversations are the most powerful thing on earth.
This conversation between us was not just a fun and formal conversation.
It was an act of humility and respect, a pure learning experience for me.
It was also a conversation of pain and suffering along with time and progression of our family.
Once he talked about Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, though he couldn’t remember these names, I was amazed.
The beauty of electricity, electric lights, the telephone, the radio, the refrigerator, and the automobile, all the buzz and the news, his life went through.
He was pointing to my smart phone that I used everyday to talk in video calls from Chicago.
He said, “The world was changing the way in which I went about my life, and the population was soaring to unimaginable heights.”
According to him, since the early 1800s, there had been waves of immigration, but the trend was now accelerating like it never had before.
He was trying to connect his intention to me and my younger brother’s movements as we both live in America and Europe now.
During this trip, I spent the whole three weeks at home in Jhapa with my parents.
I asked my dad many questions which were kind of short and they often had a conversational dead end after a sentence of his answer.
I asked him questions like which place is best to live, Jhapa or Terhathum?
Do you remember your school?
I completely understood that these questions didn’t create any values or experiences for him.
They didn’t invite any vulnerabilities.
But when I asked him, “What do you like about our family to live in Jhapa?”
He said, “friendship and struggle.”
That question excited him to share his preferences, beliefs, and values that he nurtured with our family in Jhapa.
It made him emotional.
He went with a long answer with back and forth conversation.
I asked him, “how many of your friends are still around?”
He replied, “most of them already became dear to God, I don’t remember anybody now.”
Emotions are critical for any lasting conversation especially between aging dad and son.
This was guiding me what he was saying and how I was hearing and in a lot of cases without me realizing that we both were emotional.
I was in his emotions so that I was purely listening.
I was listening to what he was not saying so that I was revealing beneath the surface of his words.
I was reading his expressions and gestures, not words.
I don’t know why, maybe from experience I was listening without thinking about what my dad was saying because he was talking about very intimate things about our family.
He was trying to join all the small pieces of our family together.
The lessons I learned from this visit from my dad are immense.
It’s almost impossible to express in this small piece of writing.
But one learning that I would like to share with you all is this: If you want to connect with someone, especially with old people like dad or mom or granddad or grandmom, ask them what they are feeling at the moment, and then reveal your own emotions with them.
This conversation with my dad became a tool by inviting him to reveal his vulnerabilities and then I also became vulnerable in return.
I also revealed something about me as his son which I never revealed before.
I revealed we humans are amazing creatures.
We all crave for real connections whatever our situations are and how far we are.
We all want meaningful conversations whatever the age is especially when we are retired and stay at home with our family.
Thank you so much dad for everything that you have done for our family.
I love you and see you soon.
Happy Father’s Day!!!
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Are you sure your mitochondria are happy?
“Mitochondria seem to be able to exist, in the form of free-living bacteria, without our help. But without them, we die in a matter of seconds.”
-Lyall Watson
I was in my mid twenties.
I first got sick and that was followed by having chronic fatigue.
It was such a heaviness I’d never experienced before.
It didn’t matter what I ate regularly or how much I slept in those days.
I felt really heavy and unmotivated, no interest in anything.
It was an exhausting feeling and it took me a very long time to go away.
Eventually I was free from chronic fatigue but I learned a big lesson about our cellular mechanism especially about regeneration of power houses in our body for healing.
Few weeks ago, I was with my eldest daughter in a doctor’s clinic.
She had some health issues and we were in her doctor’s clinic for a follow up visit.
I met a middle-aged man in the clinic and he initiated the conversation while waiting for the doctor.
Immediately after a couple of minutes of conversation he said,
“Some days, for no reason, my body feels like it is made of nothing. My muscles feel like they just can’t do anything, I feel very tired, soft and fatigue very quickly. I was a very strong, energetic, and efficient person before. It feels so sudden, like I’m physically moving through quicksand, my doctor couldn’t relate my past and present life.”
I went into flashback immediately and correlated his story with my situation many years ago.
Of course, he was very dissatisfied and unhappy about what’s going on in his body.
What to say I just listened to him and politely asked him for any progress of diagnosis up to now.
He said, “I was diagnosed with CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome. My doctor did not even address the issue of my physical exercise pattern, even though it was an important part of my life and it’s such a key issue for managing ME/CFS, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.”
When I heard the word CFS, I immediately realized the disconnection between our human body, it’s whispering with us, and disease diagnosis.
In my own experience as well as acquired knowledge, understanding this disconnection is very crucial for healthy living.
His feeling was saying that his doctor isn’t getting ready to know him properly.
His doctor was looking for a problem, trying to fix the problem, and telling him what to do.
But he is looking for a conversation with his doctor, not his instruction, for that, I’m sure his mind is coming up with many questions for the doctor and the doctor should be very patient with him.
This, in my view, is a disconnection in our health system, his body wants a conversation and his doctor wants to give him an instruction.
In our short chat, he showed the curiosity to know the strength in our body, its origin, good and bad parts of it, and the role of genetics.
After passing half-way through life experiences and being a science researcher, I’ve realized that nobody in this world knows everything, we all kind of know one area that we study and spend time on it.
The only way we can uplift one another in society is by contributing and sharing the knowledge and information to each other about what we know.
This man’s curiosity which is also related to my past experience is the reason why I am writing this post.
After the conversation with this man in the doctor’s office, I realized immediately that very few people are aware about why our body becomes tired, fatigued and lethargic so quickly.
I asked him if he was exercising regularly and all of the sudden he started to feel tired and fatigued quickly.
I wasn’t testing his medical or scientific knowledge which I never do because we all have our own life, own circumstances, own choices, and experiences in life.
We all should respect each other and appreciate what we have to offer.
I only wanted to know how much he is aware about our biological body and its relation with energy, food, and regular lifestyle choice.
I asked him if he knew the power house of our cells, mitochondria, and how they operate in our body which are basically the center of our tiredness, fatigue and lethargic body.
He said, “no.”
Ultimately, this “no” initiated me to go a little deeper into mitochondria and let people know about them and their specificities.
Among many reasons, one of the most probable causes from research is that there are probably differences in mitochondria in people who suffer from ME/CFS.
And these problems may be associated with detoxification pathways which are related to mitochondria.
Mitochondria are powerhouses of cells, they are basically the batteries in our body.
There could be many other reasons but defects in mitochondria are very concerning in overall health and especially fatigue and tiredness in our body.
Our body’s energy storage and production systems play the key role to our body’s ability to produce energy, fight fatigue, and protect our body from inflammation.
Energy metabolism is the phenomenon by which our body converts food, water, and oxygen we take into energy.
Proteins are broken down into amino acids, the most basic components of protein that our body absorbs.
Likewise, fats are converted into fatty acids.
And carbohydrates are converted into sugar.
Once these simple products get into our cells, they are taken apart by a complex set of reactions to power our body.
The excess energy that we produce is stored in special fat cells called adipocytes.
To access this stored energy there is a requirement of coordinated hormone signals in our body.
So in simple terms, energy is generated in the factories of our cells, the mitochondria.
Every cell in our body except red blood cells has hundreds of them.
They have their own genes called mitochondrial DNA, because a long time ago they were their own organism before they came to join our body.
In reality, mitochondria were so powerful at converting oxygen into energy that other organisms absorbed them and they became part of us.
Our mitochondria are essentially batteries or energy sources of our body like the batteries in our cell phone or laptop.
The air we breathe and the food we eat charge these batteries so what type of fuel we take inside our body determines the health and longevity of our cell batteries or mitochondria.
Remember, all the mitochondria in a cell are in constant contact, communicating with each other about what is going on in their part of the cell.
They know whether they are happy or sad or frustrated.
They sense fluctuations in stress and sex hormones, blood pressure, blood sugar, and even how much ice cream and pizza we just ate.
They know when we are sleeping or reading or working.
They know when we are awake and doing meditation or sexual activities.
It all means that they are completely in tune with our body.
Since the mitochondria know all the internal communications, they influence the activity of the cell and get it to send signals to our body.
If things are quiet and smooth, they may lie low, relax, and enjoy.
If things are busy or stressful like we are doing heavy exercise or weight lifting or running a marathon then they ramp up.
Sometimes, the stress for mitochondria is too much and they get damaged, therefore, too much exercise is also not helpful, and the body treats damaged mitochondria as a foreign invader.
Supporting our mitochondria is not only charging our batteries but also promoting their longevity to run our body machine efficiently.
Fatigue is the result when the batteries run low.
One reason that happens is because mitochondria cannot keep up with the behaviors and choices of our current lifestyle.
Low physical activity, ultra processed food, bad breathing habits, poor sleep, and high stress cause life altering changes in cell metabolism.
In response to all of these cellular stresses, our cells make more mitochondria.
Quickly made mitochondria are sometimes damaged and cannot run smoothly, causing the body’s battery to run dangerously low.
It is useful to explore what supports our mitochondria and to make small shifts toward supporting our health.
Now the question is what makes our mitochondria happy.
Plant based foods, intuitive eating, adequate hydration, regular exercise, restful sleep, and managed stress are keys to make our mitochondria happy.
Ultra processed foods and extreme or minimal exercises both are responsible for making our mitochondria unhappy and sick.
Poor sleep in both quantity and quality, poor oxygenation, limited microbiome, and high stress are equally important to make our mitochondria unhappy and sick.
The concept of mitochondrial nutrients has been adopted in recent years through research.
It indicates the adequate nutrients to keep proper mitochondrial function in our body.
Different research experiments have shown that components of polyphenols, plant-derived compounds, and polyunsaturated fatty acids, can improve mitochondrial metabolism, biogenesis, and antioxidant capacity.
Such effects are valuable to counteract the mitochondrial dysfunction associated with many abnormalities.
The beneficial feature of polyphenols-enriched olive oil, vegetables, nuts, fish, and plant-based foods are the key nutrients to make mitochondria happy.
Mostly what research tells us is that health problems don’t just jump out on us from the dark room randomly.
They come through the accumulation of our life choices over time.
It’s not about just making our mitochondria happy, it’s about life, it’s about connection, it’s about love and it’s about all these things that mitochondria have given us.
I still think that our body is a temple, a sacred place and mitochondria are the batteries to light the temple.
They are the foundation of doing work for people around us, doing work that we like in community and connecting humanity because they give energy to perform such work.
The more we better ourselves and become clearer and healthier, the more we treat our bodies as temples and mitochondria as batteries of the temple.
Better we become healthy human beings, the better we can contribute towards the community.
Finally, I would like to share one of the lessons I learned recently.
In order to be proactive about our own health, we have to take personal inventory of our lives honestly.
We have to sit, think, and start a conversation about what we want out of this body, life and whole experience, and what actually we are doing everyday.
We have to think proactively about what we are looking for because health is very personal now. It’s becoming the conversation with the body itself, it’s not all about only medical intervention by medical professionals.
For example, if we have a tumor in our internal organ then we have to seek help immediately from a medical specialist, but if we want to live a happy and healthy life up to age ninety, then we have to start conversation with our own body immediately.
It’s an integration of a holistic but personalized approach in life.
Please, don’t ignore the conversation with your body, the earlier we start the better.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
-Lyall Watson
I was in my mid twenties.
I first got sick and that was followed by having chronic fatigue.
It was such a heaviness I’d never experienced before.
It didn’t matter what I ate regularly or how much I slept in those days.
I felt really heavy and unmotivated, no interest in anything.
It was an exhausting feeling and it took me a very long time to go away.
Eventually I was free from chronic fatigue but I learned a big lesson about our cellular mechanism especially about regeneration of power houses in our body for healing.
Few weeks ago, I was with my eldest daughter in a doctor’s clinic.
She had some health issues and we were in her doctor’s clinic for a follow up visit.
I met a middle-aged man in the clinic and he initiated the conversation while waiting for the doctor.
Immediately after a couple of minutes of conversation he said,
“Some days, for no reason, my body feels like it is made of nothing. My muscles feel like they just can’t do anything, I feel very tired, soft and fatigue very quickly. I was a very strong, energetic, and efficient person before. It feels so sudden, like I’m physically moving through quicksand, my doctor couldn’t relate my past and present life.”
I went into flashback immediately and correlated his story with my situation many years ago.
Of course, he was very dissatisfied and unhappy about what’s going on in his body.
What to say I just listened to him and politely asked him for any progress of diagnosis up to now.
He said, “I was diagnosed with CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome. My doctor did not even address the issue of my physical exercise pattern, even though it was an important part of my life and it’s such a key issue for managing ME/CFS, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.”
When I heard the word CFS, I immediately realized the disconnection between our human body, it’s whispering with us, and disease diagnosis.
In my own experience as well as acquired knowledge, understanding this disconnection is very crucial for healthy living.
His feeling was saying that his doctor isn’t getting ready to know him properly.
His doctor was looking for a problem, trying to fix the problem, and telling him what to do.
But he is looking for a conversation with his doctor, not his instruction, for that, I’m sure his mind is coming up with many questions for the doctor and the doctor should be very patient with him.
This, in my view, is a disconnection in our health system, his body wants a conversation and his doctor wants to give him an instruction.
In our short chat, he showed the curiosity to know the strength in our body, its origin, good and bad parts of it, and the role of genetics.
After passing half-way through life experiences and being a science researcher, I’ve realized that nobody in this world knows everything, we all kind of know one area that we study and spend time on it.
The only way we can uplift one another in society is by contributing and sharing the knowledge and information to each other about what we know.
This man’s curiosity which is also related to my past experience is the reason why I am writing this post.
After the conversation with this man in the doctor’s office, I realized immediately that very few people are aware about why our body becomes tired, fatigued and lethargic so quickly.
I asked him if he was exercising regularly and all of the sudden he started to feel tired and fatigued quickly.
I wasn’t testing his medical or scientific knowledge which I never do because we all have our own life, own circumstances, own choices, and experiences in life.
We all should respect each other and appreciate what we have to offer.
I only wanted to know how much he is aware about our biological body and its relation with energy, food, and regular lifestyle choice.
I asked him if he knew the power house of our cells, mitochondria, and how they operate in our body which are basically the center of our tiredness, fatigue and lethargic body.
He said, “no.”
Ultimately, this “no” initiated me to go a little deeper into mitochondria and let people know about them and their specificities.
Among many reasons, one of the most probable causes from research is that there are probably differences in mitochondria in people who suffer from ME/CFS.
And these problems may be associated with detoxification pathways which are related to mitochondria.
Mitochondria are powerhouses of cells, they are basically the batteries in our body.
There could be many other reasons but defects in mitochondria are very concerning in overall health and especially fatigue and tiredness in our body.
Our body’s energy storage and production systems play the key role to our body’s ability to produce energy, fight fatigue, and protect our body from inflammation.
Energy metabolism is the phenomenon by which our body converts food, water, and oxygen we take into energy.
Proteins are broken down into amino acids, the most basic components of protein that our body absorbs.
Likewise, fats are converted into fatty acids.
And carbohydrates are converted into sugar.
Once these simple products get into our cells, they are taken apart by a complex set of reactions to power our body.
The excess energy that we produce is stored in special fat cells called adipocytes.
To access this stored energy there is a requirement of coordinated hormone signals in our body.
So in simple terms, energy is generated in the factories of our cells, the mitochondria.
Every cell in our body except red blood cells has hundreds of them.
They have their own genes called mitochondrial DNA, because a long time ago they were their own organism before they came to join our body.
In reality, mitochondria were so powerful at converting oxygen into energy that other organisms absorbed them and they became part of us.
Our mitochondria are essentially batteries or energy sources of our body like the batteries in our cell phone or laptop.
The air we breathe and the food we eat charge these batteries so what type of fuel we take inside our body determines the health and longevity of our cell batteries or mitochondria.
Remember, all the mitochondria in a cell are in constant contact, communicating with each other about what is going on in their part of the cell.
They know whether they are happy or sad or frustrated.
They sense fluctuations in stress and sex hormones, blood pressure, blood sugar, and even how much ice cream and pizza we just ate.
They know when we are sleeping or reading or working.
They know when we are awake and doing meditation or sexual activities.
It all means that they are completely in tune with our body.
Since the mitochondria know all the internal communications, they influence the activity of the cell and get it to send signals to our body.
If things are quiet and smooth, they may lie low, relax, and enjoy.
If things are busy or stressful like we are doing heavy exercise or weight lifting or running a marathon then they ramp up.
Sometimes, the stress for mitochondria is too much and they get damaged, therefore, too much exercise is also not helpful, and the body treats damaged mitochondria as a foreign invader.
Supporting our mitochondria is not only charging our batteries but also promoting their longevity to run our body machine efficiently.
Fatigue is the result when the batteries run low.
One reason that happens is because mitochondria cannot keep up with the behaviors and choices of our current lifestyle.
Low physical activity, ultra processed food, bad breathing habits, poor sleep, and high stress cause life altering changes in cell metabolism.
In response to all of these cellular stresses, our cells make more mitochondria.
Quickly made mitochondria are sometimes damaged and cannot run smoothly, causing the body’s battery to run dangerously low.
It is useful to explore what supports our mitochondria and to make small shifts toward supporting our health.
Now the question is what makes our mitochondria happy.
Plant based foods, intuitive eating, adequate hydration, regular exercise, restful sleep, and managed stress are keys to make our mitochondria happy.
Ultra processed foods and extreme or minimal exercises both are responsible for making our mitochondria unhappy and sick.
Poor sleep in both quantity and quality, poor oxygenation, limited microbiome, and high stress are equally important to make our mitochondria unhappy and sick.
The concept of mitochondrial nutrients has been adopted in recent years through research.
It indicates the adequate nutrients to keep proper mitochondrial function in our body.
Different research experiments have shown that components of polyphenols, plant-derived compounds, and polyunsaturated fatty acids, can improve mitochondrial metabolism, biogenesis, and antioxidant capacity.
Such effects are valuable to counteract the mitochondrial dysfunction associated with many abnormalities.
The beneficial feature of polyphenols-enriched olive oil, vegetables, nuts, fish, and plant-based foods are the key nutrients to make mitochondria happy.
Mostly what research tells us is that health problems don’t just jump out on us from the dark room randomly.
They come through the accumulation of our life choices over time.
It’s not about just making our mitochondria happy, it’s about life, it’s about connection, it’s about love and it’s about all these things that mitochondria have given us.
I still think that our body is a temple, a sacred place and mitochondria are the batteries to light the temple.
They are the foundation of doing work for people around us, doing work that we like in community and connecting humanity because they give energy to perform such work.
The more we better ourselves and become clearer and healthier, the more we treat our bodies as temples and mitochondria as batteries of the temple.
Better we become healthy human beings, the better we can contribute towards the community.
Finally, I would like to share one of the lessons I learned recently.
In order to be proactive about our own health, we have to take personal inventory of our lives honestly.
We have to sit, think, and start a conversation about what we want out of this body, life and whole experience, and what actually we are doing everyday.
We have to think proactively about what we are looking for because health is very personal now. It’s becoming the conversation with the body itself, it’s not all about only medical intervention by medical professionals.
For example, if we have a tumor in our internal organ then we have to seek help immediately from a medical specialist, but if we want to live a happy and healthy life up to age ninety, then we have to start conversation with our own body immediately.
It’s an integration of a holistic but personalized approach in life.
Please, don’t ignore the conversation with your body, the earlier we start the better.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Is it similar to your happiness?
Whoever you may be: step into the evening. Step out
of the room where everything is known to you already….
-Poem by Rilke
When did you feel happy last time?
Have you ever realized or experienced it?
You never know when and how it appears.
The truth is, enlightenment of happiness doesn’t come only with philosophical reading, it might come with a very short conversation with our friend with the quality of tea in the tea shop.
It’s amazing when our subconscious mind recognizes it.
I’ve had some experiences with it.
I’ve found some unusual inner realization about happiness and, of course, it’s not about monetary, prestige or any grand achievement in life.
It’s happiness not in something I gained material but in something I lost.
You might be surprised once you attain it.
I’ve found the most happy moment when I lost myself in something else, actually, when I lost myself in something to find myself.
Here’s how I found one.
When I was thirteen years old, I started running in middle school.
I had no athletic gift, nor family history in running, nothing like that.
I just started to run, teachers pushed me a little bit with encouragement, that’s it.
I ran in many school competitions, I didn’t win a lot but I felt really good when I would run.
I ran through middle school to high school in various school competitions and local tournaments.
No one around me including my family and friends asked me to run, no one wanted it actually.
But the sense of happiness I felt during those years remains resonant to this day.
I didn’t understand back then because I wasn’t mentally mature to understand.
It’s hilarious when I reflect back and visualize those moments.
Through my undergraduate to graduate school, I didn’t run at all but jog a little bit due to various reasons.
I would say life happened so I became busy with many other things.
Actually, I didn’t find any environment in college to run, I kind of forgot about running.
Fifteen years later, I am not a much better runner now than I was then, but something followed me constantly inside without my pure realization.
I don’t know why and how I resumed my running again.
I realized that what sustains me in my life is my moment of interiority when I run and finish it.
What excites me in my present running is the moment when I forget other tasks of my present life or give up some tasks just for running regularly.
Sometimes we think that getting something tangible will make us happy.
What do you think?
Maybe it won’t be for some people.
Or maybe it will be for others, I don’t know.
I think for many people, maybe it’ll give them more power because they just might feel pride for taking some control on something they like.
One thing I’ve noticed is that doing something hard that interests us can still be rewarding for us.
Hard remains hard only in the beginning after that it becomes our ritual and if we follow that ritual then comes immense pleasure.
I can correlate this when I ran my first half marathon after a few 5Ks and 10Ks.
I had never run 13.1 miles before.
But the feeling of pride and satisfaction after finishing the run changed everything.
Gradually, I developed a running habit as a muscle.
More I work on it, the stronger it becomes.
I believe it applies to any activity that we do in life regularly.
The pride inside us pushes us further when we finish it and forces us to repeat it again.
The more we feel pride about it, the more we become sensible and responsible, and we become a part of our routine and ritual, which I realized is another ingredient of happiness.
When I run I feel pride in my mind and a kind of rushing in my body.
I make many of my mitochondria, the batteries of our body, a lot happier by running.
Remember, all the mitochondria in a cell are in contact, communicating with each other about what is going on in their part of the cell.
They know everything, they know what we are doing: sleeping, eating, running, relaxing.
They know all the activities, they influence the activity of the cell and get it to send signals to our body.
Running has become my self-directed accomplishment, no matter how absurd it may sound to outsiders, it has become a foundation of my sense of self and sense of happiness.
Losing myself in an all absorbing running, I’ve become myself.
The feeling of accomplishment by running, becomes another truth in my happiness.
As I move in my age, I feel this sensation more potent.
Nowadays I always tell the younger generation that we should always be on the lookout for right opportunities for body and mind, and we always stress getting what we’re worth.
When was the last time that you were presented with an opportunity to try something you liked but you didn’t try for some reason?
What’s something that you have always wanted to learn about but never try?
If you are turning something down because you’re not good at it or you know nothing about it.
Then you are not only cutting off any opportunity to learn or get better at it but also blocking your own inner growth and happiness.
Because you never know where your happiness is.
And to grow inside is to be happy.
What is supposed to be the habit of being happy?
I think it is a habit of mental growth in any area, personal, professional, vocational, hobby, whatever?
Habit of mental growth means we troubleshoot, pivot, fail, we try again and troubleshoot again because we love to do it.
Every attempt becomes a lesson to help us in the next adventure, no pressure and no time bound.
For example, when I started running, I didn’t know how to breathe from my mouth which is essential for long distance running, but eventually it became normal.
We just have to risk failing but still it gives us inner satisfaction.
There could be something on the other side of our fear that will be so damn great, that I experienced when I passed the finish line of my first marathon.
We just have to start doing what we like and then have tenacity to stick with it.
Giving up midway would be like turning the stove off just before the water boils.
The one thing we can rely on in life is the force of doing and repeating things that interests us as we get older, and as we age.
There is a difference between achievement and accomplishment especially when we age.
Ambition is a good thing at all times, especially if it is the drive that lets our accomplishment turn into a vocation.
We all have to make a living doing some work, and one of the worst things in life is making a living doing something we hate to do.
This would never be the happy ending of life, this would be the only thing to talk about as a regret later in life.
This is not my personal experience because I’m not there yet, but I’ve heard and experienced multiple such stories when I talk to older people.
They look depressed and sad when they share their past stories.
There is no such thing as happily ever after in real life.
There is just after.
And more after if we’re lucky.
It’s up to us to face every moment with a challenge to do our best and to make the most of it.
Every attempt is a chance to recalibrate.
Sometimes, especially in the curves and dips of life, all of us forget what will truly make us happy.
That’s ok, it’s normal.
It’s in the mistakes and in the challenges that we can discover and rediscover our happy hormones.
All of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are interconnected, understanding this connection is key.
In my past life, I would think I would never get better at anything.
This thought would bring me feelings of sadness and frustration.
Then rather than go for a run or walk, I would decide to stay home.
The more I would avoid physical activity outside, the weaker I would feel.
My thought would say, “I will never get better.”
And then would come my feeling- “Sad, angry, frustrated.”
And then I would change my behavior and habits, “I would stay at home instead of going out for a run.”
This is a glimpse of my past life experience, a vicious cycle of life-trap.
If you have a similar life-trap, you need to disrupt this feedback loop to be happy in life.
Remember, being happy isn’t all about adding positives for better results, it’s also about nullifying the negatives wherever possible on the life road.
Life doesn’t come with traffic signs, it’s a freeway without any speed limit, traffic lights and signals, we have to make those traffic signals ourselves.
By sharing this joy of riding with others we’ll always be happy.
First we must be happy ourselves and we have to make happiness a mutual thing.
Mutual happiness teaches us mutual reliance, what matters most to our happiness is the strength of our connections to family and close friends.
The good thing is happiness is an adhesive and an expander.
First we share happiness with our parents and spouse or children, just within a family,
then with our close friends,
and then with a small group of people around us,
and finally with a bigger audience circle.
Ultimately, we go outside and make the world happy.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
of the room where everything is known to you already….
-Poem by Rilke
When did you feel happy last time?
Have you ever realized or experienced it?
You never know when and how it appears.
The truth is, enlightenment of happiness doesn’t come only with philosophical reading, it might come with a very short conversation with our friend with the quality of tea in the tea shop.
It’s amazing when our subconscious mind recognizes it.
I’ve had some experiences with it.
I’ve found some unusual inner realization about happiness and, of course, it’s not about monetary, prestige or any grand achievement in life.
It’s happiness not in something I gained material but in something I lost.
You might be surprised once you attain it.
I’ve found the most happy moment when I lost myself in something else, actually, when I lost myself in something to find myself.
Here’s how I found one.
When I was thirteen years old, I started running in middle school.
I had no athletic gift, nor family history in running, nothing like that.
I just started to run, teachers pushed me a little bit with encouragement, that’s it.
I ran in many school competitions, I didn’t win a lot but I felt really good when I would run.
I ran through middle school to high school in various school competitions and local tournaments.
No one around me including my family and friends asked me to run, no one wanted it actually.
But the sense of happiness I felt during those years remains resonant to this day.
I didn’t understand back then because I wasn’t mentally mature to understand.
It’s hilarious when I reflect back and visualize those moments.
Through my undergraduate to graduate school, I didn’t run at all but jog a little bit due to various reasons.
I would say life happened so I became busy with many other things.
Actually, I didn’t find any environment in college to run, I kind of forgot about running.
Fifteen years later, I am not a much better runner now than I was then, but something followed me constantly inside without my pure realization.
I don’t know why and how I resumed my running again.
I realized that what sustains me in my life is my moment of interiority when I run and finish it.
What excites me in my present running is the moment when I forget other tasks of my present life or give up some tasks just for running regularly.
Sometimes we think that getting something tangible will make us happy.
What do you think?
Maybe it won’t be for some people.
Or maybe it will be for others, I don’t know.
I think for many people, maybe it’ll give them more power because they just might feel pride for taking some control on something they like.
One thing I’ve noticed is that doing something hard that interests us can still be rewarding for us.
Hard remains hard only in the beginning after that it becomes our ritual and if we follow that ritual then comes immense pleasure.
I can correlate this when I ran my first half marathon after a few 5Ks and 10Ks.
I had never run 13.1 miles before.
But the feeling of pride and satisfaction after finishing the run changed everything.
Gradually, I developed a running habit as a muscle.
More I work on it, the stronger it becomes.
I believe it applies to any activity that we do in life regularly.
The pride inside us pushes us further when we finish it and forces us to repeat it again.
The more we feel pride about it, the more we become sensible and responsible, and we become a part of our routine and ritual, which I realized is another ingredient of happiness.
When I run I feel pride in my mind and a kind of rushing in my body.
I make many of my mitochondria, the batteries of our body, a lot happier by running.
Remember, all the mitochondria in a cell are in contact, communicating with each other about what is going on in their part of the cell.
They know everything, they know what we are doing: sleeping, eating, running, relaxing.
They know all the activities, they influence the activity of the cell and get it to send signals to our body.
Running has become my self-directed accomplishment, no matter how absurd it may sound to outsiders, it has become a foundation of my sense of self and sense of happiness.
Losing myself in an all absorbing running, I’ve become myself.
The feeling of accomplishment by running, becomes another truth in my happiness.
As I move in my age, I feel this sensation more potent.
Nowadays I always tell the younger generation that we should always be on the lookout for right opportunities for body and mind, and we always stress getting what we’re worth.
When was the last time that you were presented with an opportunity to try something you liked but you didn’t try for some reason?
What’s something that you have always wanted to learn about but never try?
If you are turning something down because you’re not good at it or you know nothing about it.
Then you are not only cutting off any opportunity to learn or get better at it but also blocking your own inner growth and happiness.
Because you never know where your happiness is.
And to grow inside is to be happy.
What is supposed to be the habit of being happy?
I think it is a habit of mental growth in any area, personal, professional, vocational, hobby, whatever?
Habit of mental growth means we troubleshoot, pivot, fail, we try again and troubleshoot again because we love to do it.
Every attempt becomes a lesson to help us in the next adventure, no pressure and no time bound.
For example, when I started running, I didn’t know how to breathe from my mouth which is essential for long distance running, but eventually it became normal.
We just have to risk failing but still it gives us inner satisfaction.
There could be something on the other side of our fear that will be so damn great, that I experienced when I passed the finish line of my first marathon.
We just have to start doing what we like and then have tenacity to stick with it.
Giving up midway would be like turning the stove off just before the water boils.
The one thing we can rely on in life is the force of doing and repeating things that interests us as we get older, and as we age.
There is a difference between achievement and accomplishment especially when we age.
Ambition is a good thing at all times, especially if it is the drive that lets our accomplishment turn into a vocation.
We all have to make a living doing some work, and one of the worst things in life is making a living doing something we hate to do.
This would never be the happy ending of life, this would be the only thing to talk about as a regret later in life.
This is not my personal experience because I’m not there yet, but I’ve heard and experienced multiple such stories when I talk to older people.
They look depressed and sad when they share their past stories.
There is no such thing as happily ever after in real life.
There is just after.
And more after if we’re lucky.
It’s up to us to face every moment with a challenge to do our best and to make the most of it.
Every attempt is a chance to recalibrate.
Sometimes, especially in the curves and dips of life, all of us forget what will truly make us happy.
That’s ok, it’s normal.
It’s in the mistakes and in the challenges that we can discover and rediscover our happy hormones.
All of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are interconnected, understanding this connection is key.
In my past life, I would think I would never get better at anything.
This thought would bring me feelings of sadness and frustration.
Then rather than go for a run or walk, I would decide to stay home.
The more I would avoid physical activity outside, the weaker I would feel.
My thought would say, “I will never get better.”
And then would come my feeling- “Sad, angry, frustrated.”
And then I would change my behavior and habits, “I would stay at home instead of going out for a run.”
This is a glimpse of my past life experience, a vicious cycle of life-trap.
If you have a similar life-trap, you need to disrupt this feedback loop to be happy in life.
Remember, being happy isn’t all about adding positives for better results, it’s also about nullifying the negatives wherever possible on the life road.
Life doesn’t come with traffic signs, it’s a freeway without any speed limit, traffic lights and signals, we have to make those traffic signals ourselves.
By sharing this joy of riding with others we’ll always be happy.
First we must be happy ourselves and we have to make happiness a mutual thing.
Mutual happiness teaches us mutual reliance, what matters most to our happiness is the strength of our connections to family and close friends.
The good thing is happiness is an adhesive and an expander.
First we share happiness with our parents and spouse or children, just within a family,
then with our close friends,
and then with a small group of people around us,
and finally with a bigger audience circle.
Ultimately, we go outside and make the world happy.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Do you feel psychologically well-being and content?
“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”
– Jim Rohn
In March of 2020, my whole family including me had Covid.
Then, about six months later, I again had Covid.
Then, about one year later, Covid invited me again.
I don’t understand why Covid attacked my body so much even though I consider myself a pretty healthy person.
After this I began to have a new experience of minor pain in one of my internal organ spleen, I suffered from partial thrombosis in the spleen.
I consulted many medical professionals including hematologists, they cured my partial thrombosis but nobody found out the cause despite many medical tests and interventions.
My emotional state was being impacted so I started to become more curious about what’s going on in my body.
I started researching and reading many different books and medical journals, basically related to medicine, exercise, physiology, mind-body relationship, and nutrition.
Reading many books had a very deep positive effect on my knowledge, thinking, habit, and most importantly, the perception about life.
If we become unhealthy and ill then nothing remains important in life, every other achievement or success in life just becomes empty.
After reading many books, I realized there are only certain things that we can control but many things are beyond our control, for example, genetic diseases.
Sometimes, genetics is also contributed by environment, personal history, education, poverty, and community characteristics.
Moreover, I understood that our healthcare system is misguided in treating illness as an isolated case and taking medication for an isolated case only approach.
In reality, any illness responds best to treatments that consider the whole body and underlying causes.
But, in many cases, especially in finding causes and origin of illness, science is not there yet, we have to wait and see how fast we can make progress because our biological body is inherently complex.
There’s just so many unknowns.
Eventually, reading multiple books written by specialists helped me to develop many different habits.
I started doing yoga regularly.
I used to run long distances everyday before which I changed to walking and running every alternate day.
I started doing ten to twenty minutes of meditation practice everyday no matter what early in the morning before starting my day.
I looked at how I became a different person after coping with Covid and health challenges that I’d been dealing with.
And I just try to remind myself of the knowledge, tools, and skills that I learned from different books written by specialists.
Utilizing them by taking action in life, especially by making a simple habit change is the key, and it is very powerful.
Any good habit in life contributes tremendously because we compound its benefits over time, but practicing these activities collectively is what makes a big difference.
We overestimate what a tiny good habit can do in a week or month but we underestimate what it can do in years from now.
I always say a good healthy habit- I don’t say just habit, I say a good healthy habit, if we follow everyday, shows an astounding compounding effect on the whole body in the future.
I can share a simple personal experience.
If you have poor sleep, that obviously increases inflammation in your body and that eventually becomes chronic if not taken the proper steps on time.
But as a simple solution, if you start to take a more plant based diet as a simple habit change, then inflammation decreases gradually, it doesn’t happen overnight but it will happen eventually.
This is the power of daily habit which compounds over time.
If we make small positive changes to our daily habits, thoughts, and routines; that can have profound effects on the well being of our body.
We take everything for granted in life.
We try to value everything in life as much as we can.
But, it’s harder to quantify being a healthy dad or healthy mom or a healthy son or a healthy friend.
How do you quantify these values?
I am a scientist so I want to quantify these values otherwise it is just a vague idea.
One way to do this is compare the progress with time like day, month, year whatever it could be.
We have been hypnotized into the thinking that we can measure the value of our lives by our net worth.
If we look at the empirical evidence, people who make $1 million a year are only incrementally happier than McDonald’s workers who make less than 30K a year.
This statement is not from me, this is from research finding.
Sometimes we find that some people have a lot of money but they don’t have anything else except money because they value everything on money, they sacrifice everything including health for money.
I have worked and experienced these types of people in my life, this is the life trap we should be aware of.
Last month I met a man in a hospital lobby and he said he loved traveling and spending time with loved ones and the family.
He loves to read inspiring stories, biography and history books and wants to travel but he can not do so now because he has to be in the hospital and doctor most of the time.
He said, “I didn’t see the value in free things in life. I didn’t value napping, walking, running, and reading when I was young. These were free when I was young. I can’t do all of these now because my ill body doesn’t allow me to do that anymore.”
“Any long illness like mine can mean a demanding life struggle to survive only, this struggle is my full time job now and it’s hard for me,” he added.
When we become positive, we turn into more positivity as the saying goes positivity creates more positivity, this is another secret sauce of life.
The longer we focus on a positive thing, the more we linger on a happy moment in life.
Then more likely our brain will create a neural pathway for more positivity.
The brain is a superhighway system in our body, the neural network that controls emotions, pain, and movement are like roads.
We generally think of these networks as isolated roads, but they are actually highly interconnected.
So we need more positivity inside us to be healthy.
We have a natural inclination to obsess more over negative thoughts especially of past events, but it’s our evolutionary gift to keep us alive but it doesn’t make us happy and healthy so we have to practice positivity regularly.
For example, research says for every negative thought that you have, think of four good things you’ve accomplished in life.
Life learning experiences automatically teaches us how to be happy and healthy in life.
Sometimes these experiences would be different on an individual basis but the theme is the same: enjoy the present moment and cherish it wholeheartedly with good healthy habits.
Experience the results physically, mentally, and spiritually by taking actions.
These are some of my personal experiences.
Be kind and generous.
Read many different kinds of books that you like, by reading many books we live more than one life which is the essence of living.
Spend time with your family as much as you can, these are the only people on the planet who care about you.
Talk to your real friends more often and do activities with them frequently, learn to know the difference between real and fake friends. Surround yourself with uplifting, supportive friends. Some friends bring you down, they are fake.
Go to the beach and play volleyball with your kids.
Go long distance running or hiking with your loved one or spouse on Sunday morning, you both live different lives on that day because of the hormone you produce that day.
Kiss your cat or dog and talk to them with eye contact, they respond to your feelings with universal language and unconditional love.
Surprise your grandpa and grandma with their favorite food, and watch the overwhelming love and care in their eyes for you.
Meditate five minutes for seven days if you have never done meditation before and feel the differences in your body and mind.
Take little time and effort to connect with another human being especially different from your profession or society.
These are nothing but the ingredients for a happy life which eventually lead to a healthy life and they don’t cost a lot of money.
It’s just a way of living and a choice of a happy lifestyle.
Remember, we invest a lot in our careers and pursuit of wealth, but we don’t care about our body.
We need to invest more in our health otherwise all the careers, wealth, stocks and vacation homes won’t be of any use.
We need to be happy in the face of work, career, life pressures, and it is possible only if we take better care of our body and mind.
And, one more time, it doesn’t cost a lot of money, it only needs a little bit of self-discipline and intention.
In today’s modern technology world, we are sleepwalking through life and ignoring the most valuable thing about our life: being happy and healthy.
We just have to start and go with the momentum of the body and mind.
At some point our body and mind speak with us, we just have to understand that language, for that we have to listen very carefully to what they are saying.
After listening, changing just one small bad habit into a good habit can create a chain of reactions in a positive way affecting so many other habits.
Any new habit looks like restriction in the beginning, but eventually it can provide freedom, the value of which can not be measured.
Freedom for us to be true to our life goals.
Freedom for us to see our life without any guilt.
Freedom from debating every little life issue that we encounter.
With a small right habit, our life will get a purpose and meaning.
We will be living, enjoying, and cherishing life with intention bringing well-being, content, and prosperity together.
Today’s fast changing world has taught us to chase and spend money in the pursuit of happiness.
But once we become exhausted with plummeting blood sugar, the pursuit of happiness changes into a chronic problem.
Health does not become wealth in our twenties and thirties, but when we touch forty we realize it.
Once we realize it, it is already late, then the only time we have is to regret, we know regret does not solve the problem.
We know that science doesn’t have the answer to every problem yet, but there are many common lifestyle habits that can minimize many life risks.
Many times, healing is not only dependent on pharmaceuticals but on the understanding of the body, mind, and spirit.
Body, mind, and spirit asks nothing else, just a little extra time with us.
This is nothing but becoming aware of our body, also called “mindfulness”.
Just keep in mind, good health is nothing but a good lifestyle and ongoing journey.
A good and healthy lifestyle is a process created by many tiny habits, not always a destination.
A good healthy habit is about reclaiming our identity, managing our thought process, and becoming empowered to build the life we deserve.
Our health is an investment and worthy of our effort and long term planning.
Let’s figure out where we are now and where we want to be.
Remember, for most humans, any kind of change is hard, but it’s normal, gain confidence by starting.
Just take a small action step, give it a try.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
– Jim Rohn
In March of 2020, my whole family including me had Covid.
Then, about six months later, I again had Covid.
Then, about one year later, Covid invited me again.
I don’t understand why Covid attacked my body so much even though I consider myself a pretty healthy person.
After this I began to have a new experience of minor pain in one of my internal organ spleen, I suffered from partial thrombosis in the spleen.
I consulted many medical professionals including hematologists, they cured my partial thrombosis but nobody found out the cause despite many medical tests and interventions.
My emotional state was being impacted so I started to become more curious about what’s going on in my body.
I started researching and reading many different books and medical journals, basically related to medicine, exercise, physiology, mind-body relationship, and nutrition.
Reading many books had a very deep positive effect on my knowledge, thinking, habit, and most importantly, the perception about life.
If we become unhealthy and ill then nothing remains important in life, every other achievement or success in life just becomes empty.
After reading many books, I realized there are only certain things that we can control but many things are beyond our control, for example, genetic diseases.
Sometimes, genetics is also contributed by environment, personal history, education, poverty, and community characteristics.
Moreover, I understood that our healthcare system is misguided in treating illness as an isolated case and taking medication for an isolated case only approach.
In reality, any illness responds best to treatments that consider the whole body and underlying causes.
But, in many cases, especially in finding causes and origin of illness, science is not there yet, we have to wait and see how fast we can make progress because our biological body is inherently complex.
There’s just so many unknowns.
Eventually, reading multiple books written by specialists helped me to develop many different habits.
I started doing yoga regularly.
I used to run long distances everyday before which I changed to walking and running every alternate day.
I started doing ten to twenty minutes of meditation practice everyday no matter what early in the morning before starting my day.
I looked at how I became a different person after coping with Covid and health challenges that I’d been dealing with.
And I just try to remind myself of the knowledge, tools, and skills that I learned from different books written by specialists.
Utilizing them by taking action in life, especially by making a simple habit change is the key, and it is very powerful.
Any good habit in life contributes tremendously because we compound its benefits over time, but practicing these activities collectively is what makes a big difference.
We overestimate what a tiny good habit can do in a week or month but we underestimate what it can do in years from now.
I always say a good healthy habit- I don’t say just habit, I say a good healthy habit, if we follow everyday, shows an astounding compounding effect on the whole body in the future.
I can share a simple personal experience.
If you have poor sleep, that obviously increases inflammation in your body and that eventually becomes chronic if not taken the proper steps on time.
But as a simple solution, if you start to take a more plant based diet as a simple habit change, then inflammation decreases gradually, it doesn’t happen overnight but it will happen eventually.
This is the power of daily habit which compounds over time.
If we make small positive changes to our daily habits, thoughts, and routines; that can have profound effects on the well being of our body.
We take everything for granted in life.
We try to value everything in life as much as we can.
But, it’s harder to quantify being a healthy dad or healthy mom or a healthy son or a healthy friend.
How do you quantify these values?
I am a scientist so I want to quantify these values otherwise it is just a vague idea.
One way to do this is compare the progress with time like day, month, year whatever it could be.
We have been hypnotized into the thinking that we can measure the value of our lives by our net worth.
If we look at the empirical evidence, people who make $1 million a year are only incrementally happier than McDonald’s workers who make less than 30K a year.
This statement is not from me, this is from research finding.
Sometimes we find that some people have a lot of money but they don’t have anything else except money because they value everything on money, they sacrifice everything including health for money.
I have worked and experienced these types of people in my life, this is the life trap we should be aware of.
Last month I met a man in a hospital lobby and he said he loved traveling and spending time with loved ones and the family.
He loves to read inspiring stories, biography and history books and wants to travel but he can not do so now because he has to be in the hospital and doctor most of the time.
He said, “I didn’t see the value in free things in life. I didn’t value napping, walking, running, and reading when I was young. These were free when I was young. I can’t do all of these now because my ill body doesn’t allow me to do that anymore.”
“Any long illness like mine can mean a demanding life struggle to survive only, this struggle is my full time job now and it’s hard for me,” he added.
When we become positive, we turn into more positivity as the saying goes positivity creates more positivity, this is another secret sauce of life.
The longer we focus on a positive thing, the more we linger on a happy moment in life.
Then more likely our brain will create a neural pathway for more positivity.
The brain is a superhighway system in our body, the neural network that controls emotions, pain, and movement are like roads.
We generally think of these networks as isolated roads, but they are actually highly interconnected.
So we need more positivity inside us to be healthy.
We have a natural inclination to obsess more over negative thoughts especially of past events, but it’s our evolutionary gift to keep us alive but it doesn’t make us happy and healthy so we have to practice positivity regularly.
For example, research says for every negative thought that you have, think of four good things you’ve accomplished in life.
Life learning experiences automatically teaches us how to be happy and healthy in life.
Sometimes these experiences would be different on an individual basis but the theme is the same: enjoy the present moment and cherish it wholeheartedly with good healthy habits.
Experience the results physically, mentally, and spiritually by taking actions.
These are some of my personal experiences.
Be kind and generous.
Read many different kinds of books that you like, by reading many books we live more than one life which is the essence of living.
Spend time with your family as much as you can, these are the only people on the planet who care about you.
Talk to your real friends more often and do activities with them frequently, learn to know the difference between real and fake friends. Surround yourself with uplifting, supportive friends. Some friends bring you down, they are fake.
Go to the beach and play volleyball with your kids.
Go long distance running or hiking with your loved one or spouse on Sunday morning, you both live different lives on that day because of the hormone you produce that day.
Kiss your cat or dog and talk to them with eye contact, they respond to your feelings with universal language and unconditional love.
Surprise your grandpa and grandma with their favorite food, and watch the overwhelming love and care in their eyes for you.
Meditate five minutes for seven days if you have never done meditation before and feel the differences in your body and mind.
Take little time and effort to connect with another human being especially different from your profession or society.
These are nothing but the ingredients for a happy life which eventually lead to a healthy life and they don’t cost a lot of money.
It’s just a way of living and a choice of a happy lifestyle.
Remember, we invest a lot in our careers and pursuit of wealth, but we don’t care about our body.
We need to invest more in our health otherwise all the careers, wealth, stocks and vacation homes won’t be of any use.
We need to be happy in the face of work, career, life pressures, and it is possible only if we take better care of our body and mind.
And, one more time, it doesn’t cost a lot of money, it only needs a little bit of self-discipline and intention.
In today’s modern technology world, we are sleepwalking through life and ignoring the most valuable thing about our life: being happy and healthy.
We just have to start and go with the momentum of the body and mind.
At some point our body and mind speak with us, we just have to understand that language, for that we have to listen very carefully to what they are saying.
After listening, changing just one small bad habit into a good habit can create a chain of reactions in a positive way affecting so many other habits.
Any new habit looks like restriction in the beginning, but eventually it can provide freedom, the value of which can not be measured.
Freedom for us to be true to our life goals.
Freedom for us to see our life without any guilt.
Freedom from debating every little life issue that we encounter.
With a small right habit, our life will get a purpose and meaning.
We will be living, enjoying, and cherishing life with intention bringing well-being, content, and prosperity together.
Today’s fast changing world has taught us to chase and spend money in the pursuit of happiness.
But once we become exhausted with plummeting blood sugar, the pursuit of happiness changes into a chronic problem.
Health does not become wealth in our twenties and thirties, but when we touch forty we realize it.
Once we realize it, it is already late, then the only time we have is to regret, we know regret does not solve the problem.
We know that science doesn’t have the answer to every problem yet, but there are many common lifestyle habits that can minimize many life risks.
Many times, healing is not only dependent on pharmaceuticals but on the understanding of the body, mind, and spirit.
Body, mind, and spirit asks nothing else, just a little extra time with us.
This is nothing but becoming aware of our body, also called “mindfulness”.
Just keep in mind, good health is nothing but a good lifestyle and ongoing journey.
A good and healthy lifestyle is a process created by many tiny habits, not always a destination.
A good healthy habit is about reclaiming our identity, managing our thought process, and becoming empowered to build the life we deserve.
Our health is an investment and worthy of our effort and long term planning.
Let’s figure out where we are now and where we want to be.
Remember, for most humans, any kind of change is hard, but it’s normal, gain confidence by starting.
Just take a small action step, give it a try.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
How often do you do introspection of your life?
“Give the world the best you have and you may get hurt. Give the world your best anyway.” -Mother Teresa
Last few weeks, my life was in a kind of paradigm shift, and a deep thought process of introspection.
I was taking longer breaths because I needed some extra oxygen to get out of my linear thinking.
Just to understand the correlation between my body and mind, I registered and attended a spiritual session where a spiritual leader was giving some hidden truths of life.
Gathering was in a big hall.
Spiritual guru was centered on the topic of pain and suffering and he was addressing how love and respect are still in the center of pain and suffering.
Around one hundred people were attending, and suddenly, one attendee said, “I don’t visit my father often, my situation is different now. My father and I just don’t have the same feelings for each other that we used to have in the past. I guess I just don’t love him anymore and he doesn’t love me either.”
“Please, love and respect your father, whatever the conflict is, he gave you this life,” the guru replied.
“I told you, the respect and feeling just aren’t there anymore,” the attendee replied.
“Whatever, you respect and love your father,” guru said.
“The feeling of respect and love isn’t there,” the attendee repeated.
“Then love and respect your father. If the feeling of respect and love isn’t there, that’s a very good reason to love and respect your father.”
“But how do you respect and love when you don’t respect and love?” the attendee replied.
“Because, respect and love both are verbs. Respect and love both are feelings and they both are products of respect and love. Both are verbs. So always respect and love your father.
Show your sacrifice and listen to your father.
Always empathize, appreciate, and affirm him because he brought you into this world.
So, please, if you can, respect and love your father unconditionally, even if he did something wrong to you.”
“Are you willing to do that?” the guru asked.
The whole hall was in a pin drop silence during this exchange of words.
During that moment, I came across my father’s face multiple times, and it happened automatically, and his face was constantly coming in front of me, even though he was on the other side of the planet physically.
Pictures and snapshots of my last face to face conversation with my father constantly hanging over my head.
“You know,” my father said, “our whole lives, your mom and I never made our kid’s life easier” my father stared out the window behind me.
I saw dark shadows under his old tired eyes.
My father was almost 90 years old and had worked actively for close to 60 years.
My father’s mouth was turned up in the tiniest smile when I was listening to this, but I wondered if it was a smile at all.
My dad and mom raised our family, including me and my two younger brothers, and two elder sisters.
They started from nothing and built a great life through hard work and they taught us many core values of life, especially when you are in life’s punishment.
I could say a lot of things about me, my want, my desire, but that wasn’t how I was taught in my family.
One thing they taught me which I will never forget is to bring good health, satisfaction, and trust into life.
They consistently taught me not to let these three things down in life even if we are in distress, pain and suffering.
In my house, humility was valued more than anything else in life, but that’s not how it works in many places where we work nowadays in this modern world.
I was in introspection but who can understand this better than my father and mother.
I constantly relied on my father’s advice not to let my trust go down during turmoil.
After the meeting with the spiritual guru, I called my father in the evening at home and talked to him.
I always get relief and start to think differently when I communicate with my father, I reach a new level of understanding that almost runs by nuance.
Because each conversation contains the cumulative effect of the previous conversations, that is hardly anything to catch upon.
Instead, I can share deep insights and feelings rather than just my current understanding about life.
I don’t see life as a fixed piece of pizza where there is only so much time.
Time with my father and mother doesn’t mean time away from my wife or kids.
I started to see the effect on my kids.
I see time with my father and mother would actually increase the depth of our kid’s relationship with me and my wife as parents.
Kids experience by seeing how much we love our parents and it helps to continue the cycle moving forward.
I have read about a parable from Roberto Assagioli about three stonecutters who were building a cathedral in the fourteenth century.
The first one says, bitterly, “can’t you see what I’m doing? I’m cutting stones into blocks and I will be doing this until the day I die.”
The second one says, warmly, “I’m earning a living so I can support my lovely family. I can provide clothing and food in our home filled with love.”
The third one says, joyfully, “I’ve the privilege to help build a great cathedral so magnificent it will inspire people and lift their spirits for a thousand years.”
Same work, but each person brings very different meaning to it.
“We often have more choices than we realize.
We must never cease from exploring inside us, even if we are in pain and suffering at the moment,”
At the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we began and know the place for the first time,” the spiritual guru said.
That’s what I’m getting from my father as we are celebrating his 91st birthday soon.
A lot of times, especially in the past, I didn’t have time to go and see my parents every year. I didn’t have time to call my mom everyday or every other day.
And the truth is, we can’t introspect in front of other people even if we are happy and satisfied, but introspection along with our parents is normal.
To introspect along with our parents is to release the stress out through tears so we become stronger.
As we all know we have only 24 hours in a day, so the question is how to manage to be with our parents in times of distress.
The secret I learn is this.
Many times, in life, if we think deeper, peace and satisfaction comes not from doing, but from undoing.
Peace comes not from getting, but from letting go.
I let go of my past.
Peace is there with me already until I disturb it.
Behind the dramas of our everyday lives is always the light of the projector.
I am just that.
If I start to undo, I get a lot of time.
I learned the task of undoing.
Many people are not happy on this planet and maybe you are one of them right now.
So what they do, they fall into the trap of codependency that spawns some very metastasizing emotional cancers.
These emotional cancers are criticizing, complaining, comparing, competing, and contending.
I also do one of them many times.
How much time is needed to do these?
I know I need a lot.
If I start to undo these emotional cancers, how much time I get, I’m just guessing, maybe a lot.
The essence of being human is being able to direct our own life.
We are human so we can do more than an animal or recent AI robot, because they can only react.
We can make choices based on our values, these values can be transferred from us to our kids, same like from our parents to us.
This concept of undo also applies in today’s fast moving innovative areas of research, development, and technology.
We all know how to get new innovative thoughts into our mind, but we’re struggling right now to get the old ones out.
This is one reason our generation is always suffering.
The old one never wants to leave, it is with us all the time consuming our energy and time.
From my father’s lesson, I learned that we are not made or born as great thinkers or innovators, we’re self-made thinkers or innovators, this should be our trust with us.
We are a function of our choices.
I have read in books that Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are also products of their choices by undoing many things in their everyday lives.
It gives at least motivation to us when we go for introspection.
Good choices are built by unwavering habits.
And, these habits lie at the intersection of knowledge, attitude, and skill.
Most of the time, people cry at home in private when they are suffering.
We all do the same.
But the reality is we have to make our home a productive place to synthesize our knowledge, attitude, and skill.
Because, if you look around, the most important work people do in the world will be within the walls of their own home.
As you can imagine we work 8 hours outside home but we are 16 hours at home.
There are many successes but no other success can compensate for failure in the home.
For example, we can visualize anything that we want in life at home, we can pen down that visual form in printed form.
Visualization is very powerful but there is more powerful than this, that is writing down on paper.
That’s what I’m also doing at the moment.
I’m releasing my introspection through a pen into the paper, I feel relaxed.
I’m writing so I’m connecting my conscious mind with the subconscious mind.
I’m writing which is a psycho-neuromuscular activity and literally it is imprinting my brain.
Based on this sketch, we can get our hands dirty, we can cry, we can make mistakes, we can take risks, and perform whatever we want.
We can communicate to our mind about our worth and potential so clearly that we can come to see it in ourselves.
Our minds always try to do the right things for us but our bodies always try to do things right. We must try to seek the best path moving forward.
At the end of the spiritual session, the Guru said, “Life is about coping with change, it is also about coping with complexity, so you are the architect and manager of your life.”
“You cannot innovate inventories, cashflow, and costs of your life, you only have to manage all of them, they don’t have the power and freedom to choose because they are as they are.
Only you have the power to choose,” the spiritual guru added.
Thank you for your time.
– Yam Timsina
Last few weeks, my life was in a kind of paradigm shift, and a deep thought process of introspection.
I was taking longer breaths because I needed some extra oxygen to get out of my linear thinking.
Just to understand the correlation between my body and mind, I registered and attended a spiritual session where a spiritual leader was giving some hidden truths of life.
Gathering was in a big hall.
Spiritual guru was centered on the topic of pain and suffering and he was addressing how love and respect are still in the center of pain and suffering.
Around one hundred people were attending, and suddenly, one attendee said, “I don’t visit my father often, my situation is different now. My father and I just don’t have the same feelings for each other that we used to have in the past. I guess I just don’t love him anymore and he doesn’t love me either.”
“Please, love and respect your father, whatever the conflict is, he gave you this life,” the guru replied.
“I told you, the respect and feeling just aren’t there anymore,” the attendee replied.
“Whatever, you respect and love your father,” guru said.
“The feeling of respect and love isn’t there,” the attendee repeated.
“Then love and respect your father. If the feeling of respect and love isn’t there, that’s a very good reason to love and respect your father.”
“But how do you respect and love when you don’t respect and love?” the attendee replied.
“Because, respect and love both are verbs. Respect and love both are feelings and they both are products of respect and love. Both are verbs. So always respect and love your father.
Show your sacrifice and listen to your father.
Always empathize, appreciate, and affirm him because he brought you into this world.
So, please, if you can, respect and love your father unconditionally, even if he did something wrong to you.”
“Are you willing to do that?” the guru asked.
The whole hall was in a pin drop silence during this exchange of words.
During that moment, I came across my father’s face multiple times, and it happened automatically, and his face was constantly coming in front of me, even though he was on the other side of the planet physically.
Pictures and snapshots of my last face to face conversation with my father constantly hanging over my head.
“You know,” my father said, “our whole lives, your mom and I never made our kid’s life easier” my father stared out the window behind me.
I saw dark shadows under his old tired eyes.
My father was almost 90 years old and had worked actively for close to 60 years.
My father’s mouth was turned up in the tiniest smile when I was listening to this, but I wondered if it was a smile at all.
My dad and mom raised our family, including me and my two younger brothers, and two elder sisters.
They started from nothing and built a great life through hard work and they taught us many core values of life, especially when you are in life’s punishment.
I could say a lot of things about me, my want, my desire, but that wasn’t how I was taught in my family.
One thing they taught me which I will never forget is to bring good health, satisfaction, and trust into life.
They consistently taught me not to let these three things down in life even if we are in distress, pain and suffering.
In my house, humility was valued more than anything else in life, but that’s not how it works in many places where we work nowadays in this modern world.
I was in introspection but who can understand this better than my father and mother.
I constantly relied on my father’s advice not to let my trust go down during turmoil.
After the meeting with the spiritual guru, I called my father in the evening at home and talked to him.
I always get relief and start to think differently when I communicate with my father, I reach a new level of understanding that almost runs by nuance.
Because each conversation contains the cumulative effect of the previous conversations, that is hardly anything to catch upon.
Instead, I can share deep insights and feelings rather than just my current understanding about life.
I don’t see life as a fixed piece of pizza where there is only so much time.
Time with my father and mother doesn’t mean time away from my wife or kids.
I started to see the effect on my kids.
I see time with my father and mother would actually increase the depth of our kid’s relationship with me and my wife as parents.
Kids experience by seeing how much we love our parents and it helps to continue the cycle moving forward.
I have read about a parable from Roberto Assagioli about three stonecutters who were building a cathedral in the fourteenth century.
The first one says, bitterly, “can’t you see what I’m doing? I’m cutting stones into blocks and I will be doing this until the day I die.”
The second one says, warmly, “I’m earning a living so I can support my lovely family. I can provide clothing and food in our home filled with love.”
The third one says, joyfully, “I’ve the privilege to help build a great cathedral so magnificent it will inspire people and lift their spirits for a thousand years.”
Same work, but each person brings very different meaning to it.
“We often have more choices than we realize.
We must never cease from exploring inside us, even if we are in pain and suffering at the moment,”
At the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we began and know the place for the first time,” the spiritual guru said.
That’s what I’m getting from my father as we are celebrating his 91st birthday soon.
A lot of times, especially in the past, I didn’t have time to go and see my parents every year. I didn’t have time to call my mom everyday or every other day.
And the truth is, we can’t introspect in front of other people even if we are happy and satisfied, but introspection along with our parents is normal.
To introspect along with our parents is to release the stress out through tears so we become stronger.
As we all know we have only 24 hours in a day, so the question is how to manage to be with our parents in times of distress.
The secret I learn is this.
Many times, in life, if we think deeper, peace and satisfaction comes not from doing, but from undoing.
Peace comes not from getting, but from letting go.
I let go of my past.
Peace is there with me already until I disturb it.
Behind the dramas of our everyday lives is always the light of the projector.
I am just that.
If I start to undo, I get a lot of time.
I learned the task of undoing.
Many people are not happy on this planet and maybe you are one of them right now.
So what they do, they fall into the trap of codependency that spawns some very metastasizing emotional cancers.
These emotional cancers are criticizing, complaining, comparing, competing, and contending.
I also do one of them many times.
How much time is needed to do these?
I know I need a lot.
If I start to undo these emotional cancers, how much time I get, I’m just guessing, maybe a lot.
The essence of being human is being able to direct our own life.
We are human so we can do more than an animal or recent AI robot, because they can only react.
We can make choices based on our values, these values can be transferred from us to our kids, same like from our parents to us.
This concept of undo also applies in today’s fast moving innovative areas of research, development, and technology.
We all know how to get new innovative thoughts into our mind, but we’re struggling right now to get the old ones out.
This is one reason our generation is always suffering.
The old one never wants to leave, it is with us all the time consuming our energy and time.
From my father’s lesson, I learned that we are not made or born as great thinkers or innovators, we’re self-made thinkers or innovators, this should be our trust with us.
We are a function of our choices.
I have read in books that Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are also products of their choices by undoing many things in their everyday lives.
It gives at least motivation to us when we go for introspection.
Good choices are built by unwavering habits.
And, these habits lie at the intersection of knowledge, attitude, and skill.
Most of the time, people cry at home in private when they are suffering.
We all do the same.
But the reality is we have to make our home a productive place to synthesize our knowledge, attitude, and skill.
Because, if you look around, the most important work people do in the world will be within the walls of their own home.
As you can imagine we work 8 hours outside home but we are 16 hours at home.
There are many successes but no other success can compensate for failure in the home.
For example, we can visualize anything that we want in life at home, we can pen down that visual form in printed form.
Visualization is very powerful but there is more powerful than this, that is writing down on paper.
That’s what I’m also doing at the moment.
I’m releasing my introspection through a pen into the paper, I feel relaxed.
I’m writing so I’m connecting my conscious mind with the subconscious mind.
I’m writing which is a psycho-neuromuscular activity and literally it is imprinting my brain.
Based on this sketch, we can get our hands dirty, we can cry, we can make mistakes, we can take risks, and perform whatever we want.
We can communicate to our mind about our worth and potential so clearly that we can come to see it in ourselves.
Our minds always try to do the right things for us but our bodies always try to do things right. We must try to seek the best path moving forward.
At the end of the spiritual session, the Guru said, “Life is about coping with change, it is also about coping with complexity, so you are the architect and manager of your life.”
“You cannot innovate inventories, cashflow, and costs of your life, you only have to manage all of them, they don’t have the power and freedom to choose because they are as they are.
Only you have the power to choose,” the spiritual guru added.
Thank you for your time.
– Yam Timsina