Category: Social Upliftment

“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.

Conclusion

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.

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.

Neural simultaneity between father and son

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.

Fatherhood and responsibility

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.

At that moment, I tried to correlate my dad to our former president Barack Obama’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in that community that I read in his book.
In “Dreams from My Father” the former president and author Barack Obama says, “sometimes you can’t worry about hurt, sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”

I quickly understood that my dad 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 and father-son bonding

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 recalling Elaine Clayton, an artist and the author of “The Way of the Empath” where she says, “an empath’s life is not an ordinary life, it requires the strength of a lion, because it takes real courage to be empathic.”

I was reading my dad’s 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.

Conclusion

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.

Charles Duhigg, author of “Supercommunicators” says “if we acknowledge someone else’s vulnerability, and become vulnerable in return, we build trust, understanding, and connection.”

Exactly the way Duhigg mentions, I also revealed something about me as my dad’s 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 everyone.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

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

“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

“Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others’ choices make us.”
– Richie Norton

Many years ago, I was with my wife in a mall to buy a wool coat to escape the winter in Columbus, Ohio.
My wife asked me, “Is that wool coat really worth $100?”
“If you decide to buy it, the answer is yes; If you decide not to buy it, the answer is no,” I replied.
“Your decision is based on your feelings about the coat, its price, and the money that you have at the moment. You make the decision by incorporating your feelings and these other factors about the coat,” I added.
Whether or not we’re conscious of it, we compare our precise benefit of anything from owning it with its price.
We always seek a balance of a few factors to make a decision which is beneficial for us.
And we come up with anything’s value to us by posing a simple question.
What’s the most I’d pay for it?
When valuing anything in life, the question turns into: what’s the most I’d pay for it?
We make decisions by being really intentional.

Intention is a precursor for our actions.
It means we only ever take action on things that we believe bring us joy and satisfaction.
Actions means taking risks, there are many types of risks in life.
I have gone through many of these, bigger or smaller, and I’m pretty sure you have also gone through many of these.
Sometimes, we fail, sometimes, we succeed, but always learning and moving.
When we start to live with intention, we start to enjoy our life, at this point, the lines between work and play begin to blur.
We start to do what we love and we start to love what we do.
Everything becomes a learning experience and a part of lifestyle.
This is my experience between work and play.

Strengthening our capacities in life is a continuous process.
It’s a practice, not a one time and done deal.
We can always revisit, refresh and retune, if we have intention, and there will not be a pop quiz next month or next year like what we did in the school.
At the end of the day, it’s not just about learning how to be better at something that we are working on.
It’s all about building our sense of what’s possible and bringing it into our sharp mental focus.
It’s all about changing ourselves from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset and understanding that we can always expand our capacity, no matter what.
When we start to live with intention, by doing some internal homework as I told in my wife’s coat purchasing process, it’s about knowing and trusting ourselves better, and valuing things properly.

In most cases our life goals change every five years on average.
Remember, life is the thing that always seeks intention and happens between our goals in different stages.
The specific steps on our predetermined goals might look different, depending on what we’ve been taught primarily on how to see “success”.
But whether the steps are high school, college, grad school, beginning career, better career, settling down, getting engaged, getting married, having kids, getting early retirement, or fishing in Thailand during retirement, there’s always something laid out.
This is all about being proactive and intentional.
Even as we’re working to achieve small things like getting kids ready for school, or cleaning the bathtub, or saving a little bit extra money for house downpayment or taking a course for weight loss program.
We still have to go through an intentional life one moment at a time, these everyday moments which look mundane but are what make memories in life.
These are nothing but the micro moments of positivity with intention.
Small changes with intention are the beauty of life that are sustainable which for most of us does not cost even a penny.

Let’s take one example of how small things accumulate over time.
The average person eats approximately one ton of food in a year.
If we think about sitting down to eat a ton of food, there is no way it’s going to happen all at once.
But bit by bit or piece by piece or meal by meal, by eating food every day for 365 days in a row, we can eat one ton without even imagining the final amount.
This is compounding and compounding is a macro effect.
Compounding happens faster if we start to live a life with intention, not only in money, in everything, the only thing that makes it very special is our awareness that compounding is playing a profound effect in our lives.

As I realized or experienced, life with intention serves three core purposes- joy, stability, and independence.
When we rely on only past life stories without questioning them, we aren’t making our highest and best decisions.
We’re not making decisions at all, not really. We’re living by default.
And default life is not a life actually, it is just an automation without any joy.
And, no one lives their best life by default.
Do you?
I don’t.
We have to live with intention, not by default.
Because we only get one life to live, we have so many aspirations to fulfill.

Then why don’t we go to seek joy, stability, and independence?
Because, we have beliefs and attitudes that have developed over time inside us.
The experiences of growing up with our parents, our friends, our community is rooted with us.
Many things that were taught by parents, teachers, friends, community, and things that we learned through personal experience are with us.
We still have an echo of “you can’t do that from our uncle” when we were 12 years old.
Something happens good or bad, and it becomes incorporated into how we see the world.
It’s all wrapped up together into a mental pattern that influences how we think and act about everything in life.
But the reality is everything can be changed gradually, if we start to live with intention, one step at a time.

Our path to a life with intention is open and out there, it doesn’t have traffic signals, but only we can drive it. No one else can or will drive it for us.
If we want to raise the odds of living with our dreams, then we have to design our life with intention.
And only then will whatever tools we have for us will truly serve us in creating joy and independence.

As I said, life with intention is a pure independent life.
If we don’t live our life with intention then we start to live in excess.
In reality, excess of anything can be a problem, a long lasting problem.
It doesn’t matter if it’s money, or sex, or alcohol, or drugs, or facebook, or parties, or rice, or broccoli, or sugar, or exercise.
Even excess water can kill us.
Even excess exercise can kill us.
Even excess broccoli can kill us.
Everything in life is designed for intention, because everything requires balance and balance is achieved by intention.
Used smartly, as a tool, intention is a vital resource, an essential component for survival.

How far we go in life depends on how soft and tender we are with the young.
How compassionate we are with the old, how sympathetic we are with the suffering, and how tolerant we are of the weak and strong.
Because in life with intention, we have to go through all of these, it’s just a matter of time.

Let’s take one example related to health of how things are interrelated and why we need intention in life.
This is from Dr. Michael P. O’Leary, professor of surgery, Harvard Medical School.
Blood vessel problems are the leading cause of erectile dysfunction.
Erections serve as a barometer for overall health and it can be an early warning sign of trouble in the heart or elsewhere.
Erectile dysfunction affects more than 18 million men.
Over half of men with type 2 diabetes also have erectile dysfunction.
In reality, men with erectile dysfunction have higher risks of having heart disease, memory loss, dementia, or stroke as their arteries are often clogged throughout the body.
So the fundamental question is almost everybody with the problem goes to a doctor to treat only erectile dysfunction.
Why?
Because they are not aware of what’s going on, awareness is a synonym of intention.
In reality, the same biological mechanisms that control blood flow to our brain and to our heart also control blood flow to our sexual organs.
There is a word called “macro”-that means we always have to look for the bigger picture, the truth is we are just a dot of a bigger picture.
The bigger picture at this time is the whole body, the machine, and whole body mechanism.
If we don’t want to be aware of what’s going on in our body in today’s technological age then we are not living with intention.
Remember, most of us aren’t trained to live with intention because it needs a little bit of extra effort.

Let’s take another example which is also related to health and diet.
I learned this late in my life when I started to live with intention.
I learned that we need to be healthy in life, and good health doesn’t come free, we have to be intentional on what we do and what we eat.
But I also learned that we don’t have to go too far to seek a healthy life, it’s again awareness.
It’s about building our sense of what’s true and bringing it into our sharp focus for our benefit.
For example, a lot of people don’t see the benefit and value of our everyday food, rice and beans especially of Asian people.
They always look for something exotic food outside where they see value.
Here is the hidden truth.
There are 22 aminoacids.
Out of 22, 9 amino acids are essential, our body cannot make, we have to eat as diets.
Out of 9, 3 are kind of not available everywhere: they are lysine, tryptophan, and methionine; but rest are found in many different foods that we eat everyday.
Legumes like beans are high in lysine but low in tryptophan and methionine.
Grains like rice are high in tryptophan and methionine but low in lysine.
Look at the meal that we eat everyday of rice and beans- you got the point, it is ideal if we broaden our horizon of understanding at a macro level.
But, of course, we have to eat it in balance.
If anybody says meat is required instead of rice and beans for strength, remind the person with the elephant.
The elephant is vegetarian.
I am bringing these examples just to show you the macro picture of life, if we really want to live with intention.

One final call to remind the importance of intention in life.
What is your understanding of stress in your life?
We have to find the right balance of stress in life.
We, of course, need enough stress but not too much like a guitar string.
If it’s too loose, there is no music, if it’s too tight, it breaks, and there is no music.
When stress becomes chronic, out of balance, it increases inflammation in our brain which exacerbates depression.
Once we’re depressed, our immune system is also depressed.
Keep in mind, chronic stress shortens our telomeres.
Telomeres are the ends of our chromosomes that regulate cellular aging.
When our telomeres get shorter, our lives get shorter.
Chronic stress also adversely affects our gene expression and has a harmful impact on the balance of the trillions of cells in our microbiome.
Again, we have to live with intention but not with over intention, otherwise, our guitar string will break.

Let me remind you the basic truth about a life with intention.
If you go only to other people’s carved path based on their mission then only they will enjoy the ride, not you, so live with intention.
We need intention because it creates macro understanding and that brings balance in life and that ultimately provides happiness, health, and prosperity.
Remember, we only get one life, so live with intention, enjoy the present and look forward to the future.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.”
-George Bernard Shaw

Few years ago, I was in my home country to visit my family.
I met the CEO of a startup company in the USA on one occasion, as he said, he was there for vacation with his family.
“How long is your vacation?”
He said, “four months.”
“What?” I was shocked.
His plan of scaling the various peaks and embarking on treks within the Himalayas in Nepal was monumental.

If you ask many people how they can increase their results in life, they’ll tell you by working more.
By hearing this new CEO’s vacation plan, I realized that either I’m not understanding something or there is a huge problem with us.
I quickly learned that more work will not necessarily increase more results.
More of the same usually results in more of the same, when what we actually want is better than what we already have.
I learned from this new CEO that effectiveness wins over effort and we eventually lose if we start to do a lot of things instead of the right things.

I said, “I’ve read your book. You say that you want to add value to people’s lives through sustaining innovation, but that’s not easy in my home country.
People don’t trust business people and entrepreneurs.
General public has a good reason for this: they say business people, especially classic business people are corrupt, don’t add value to other people’s lives here.”
Then I added, “I’m sure and hopeful that you can help them in some ways.”
In the meantime, I asked him, “what does your company do?”
He said, “we are developing a drink which can replace the sugary coke type of drinks that people can enjoy without much concern about their health status.”
“Awesome.”
“What inspired you to start this company?” I asked.
“Because my whole family is obese and diabetic. Somewhere somebody has to start because we are 21st generation people now, we can’t just sleep with coke and Mcchicken,” he added.

I said, “Maybe obesity and diabetes are in your family genes.”
He said, “nope.”
“The culprit is our daily food.”
“Remember, only in America and the most developed world, the unhealthiest foods are the tastiest, the cheapest, the large portions, the most available, and the most fun foods.”

He said that he is unconditionally convinced that the quality of any 21st and future company is a direct result of the quality of smart CEOs and the vision they pursue.
As a civilized human being on earth, the general public must focus their attention and analysis on the quality of products and services in any organization that they are using and investing in.
It is the CEO who creates the sustainable business plan that endures for the next generation, who build the processes that work, who create the technology that simplifies our lives, who execute the tasks that deliver the quality healthy products and services to ordinary people, and who determines the success or failure of a business based on the value they provide to the general public as a whole.
It’s the CEO who captures vision and resources to generate other healthier next generation people on the planet.

“People are suffering from wrong foods and wrong lifestyles, people are dying by consuming wrong and unhealthy foods.
Eventually, people will pay for brands and they will pay for quality and health, there is nothing more important than people’s health.
People will pay for their health and quality lifestyles no matter what, only time will tell them when to start.
If you go back to 30 or 40 years ago, Whole Foods was not a place to shop. Today, Whole Foods is the place to shop, it’s picking up.
Sometimes we need a little bit of a kicker and that kicker is a little bit of education,” he continued.

“Many professionals in any field still employ esoteric language to make their job appear more difficult than it is.
For example, take an investment officer, accounting should not be complex, it is the language of business.
It accounts for what a company owns and what it owes, and it helps companies keep track of the money that’s coming in and the money that’s going out.
It should be different for any 21st century CEO, don’t use esoteric language, show everybody what the product or service it provides to the public is, is it making the public more healthier or less healthier.
We need judgment to run a company as a CEO, and judgment is qualitative rather than quantitative and, most importantly, judgment can not be searched in google,” he said.

“Desire is a powerful emotion and many durable and valuable businesses of the past have been built upon it.
Coca-Cola began in 1886 and has a market value of $260 billion.
Coke’s main ingredients are sugar and water, and the company has habituated consumers to believe that “coke is the pause that refreshes” and it is a “real thing”.
But in today’s world, soda and sweetened beverages are one of the main causes of inflammation in our body.
Researchers have found that sugar can also disrupt healthy functioning of the immune system by causing inflammation.
Eliminating soda from our diet is one of the quickest and simplest ways to protect the public’s health.
Not only those, many refined carbohydrates, white bread, pastries, processed meats like hot dogs and sausages, french fries, and any fried foods in general are inflammation booster foods.
So, the question is who will start and who will replace Coke, who has that responsibility for the next generation healthy society?
Mark Twain says beautifully, “it ain’t what you know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Remember, more than 34 million Americans have diabetes, about one in ten, and approximately 90-95 percent of them have type 2 diabetes.
We have to create a desire not to be diabetic in the 21st century and after,” he said.

As we all know, highly processed or refined carbs like white flour, white bread, and pasta are not our friends.
They behave almost like sugar in the body.
According to David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School; “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.”
As the new slogan goes, “sugar is a new poison.”

“To a great degree, we are what we eat and what we do everyday.
Losing weight rejuvenates critical insulin-producing cells in the pancreas known as beta cells. And regenerating those cells can actually put type 2 diabetes into remission.
We have to promote healthy fats instead of coke to actually stabilize our blood sugar.
The fastest way to lower insulin levels is to substitute fat for processed carbohydrates.
But the question is how.
The biggest challenge is not how to develop these healthy food habits but how to replace these old junks which are everywhere with new healthy ones” he added.

Let’s take one simple example, how we become habituated with business.
Shoppers don’t go to Walmart because they love the experience, they go to Walmart because the company acquires everything from wine to broccoli to indoor plants to school supplies more cheaply than competitors and then passes those savings on to the customers.
Walmart sells convenience at a cheaper price so we go to Walmart.

Let’s take another example of a different company.
Google is not selling a status symbol or a fizzy drink, it’s selling a reliable search engine that consumers have become habituated to in their daily lives.
Because Google’s brand has nothing to do with creating just desire, it’s more likely to endure very long because it’s creating value to the general public’s own professions.
Because they need information for their daily work and they do it by sitting on the comfy couch in their living room.

“One of the reasons I am optimistic about next generation CEOs who would be value creators rather than classic CEOs of the past is that they must demonstrate an ability to disrupt themselves before a competitor does.
Google should disrupt itself with driverless cars and artificial intelligence so that we can read in the car while going to the office in the 21st century.
Amazon is a leader in e-commerce and cloud computing now but it must disrupt itself for the whole food business so that we can eat healthy food and snacks at home at the price of Mcdonald’s McChicken.
By the way, McDonald’s does not only sell McChicken, it sells franchises, which is a system not a product,” he added.

Andy Grove, former chairman and CEO of Intel has said at one point in his life, “there is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next performance level. Miss that moment, and you start to decline.”

Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017 but it doesn’t mean that parents are not buying toys for their children. Similarly, it’s not that Brick-and-mortar stores didn’t have the stuff in their store that we needed but the same stuff people started buying from Amazon without leaving their comfy couch at home.
For 21st generations, companies’ CEOs must disrupt themselves to keep obsessing over the public and putting them first for their health, healthspan, longevity, time, and fulfilling healthy lifestyles.

I was about to say goodbye and I asked him, “do you succeed in beating coca-cola?”
He said, “Everything looks like failure in the middle.
We cannot make tasty mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner without getting the kitchen messy.
Halfway through a brain surgery, the operating room looks like a battlefield of murder.
If you plan to send a rocket to space, about 95 percent of the time it becomes off-course and it fails.
But finally, all of these works give results by making mistakes and correcting them.
I’m just trying to be that CEO, that’s it.”

Finally, I noticed that he was still doing the work of creativity which is thinking at the banks of the Himalayas in Nepal, and he innovates once he goes to the USA which is doing the real work.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
-Victor Frankl
In 2021, I was running a half-marathon.
I met a fellow runner, we chatted and introduced each other.
He said he was running a lot of 5ks and 10ks the previous year.
Unfortunately, on half-marathon day, I saw him throw up blood.
I asked him, “do you have liver problems? I’m also seeing your eyes and face yellow.”
He said, “I don’t know.”
In the meantime, one of the volunteers came up and drove him to the local hospital. Doctors found he has high liver enzyme but they couldn’t figure out the reason for it.
Later, I came to know he was moved to the bigger hospital at Chicago, where he was diagnosed with Wilson’s disease associated with hepatitis C.
Wilson disease is a rare autoimmune blood disorder that causes copper to accumulate in the body.
His liver was damaged badly and lungs were filled with a lot of fluid.
Almost two and half years after that incident, we met again in the runner’s club and he recalled and shared some of his past experiences.
He said, “I was only a few moments away from death many times in my past life.”
But fortunately, after his liver transplant, though it wasn’t easy, he got a new life.
Now he has a beautiful family, a loving wife and a healthy daughter around him.
He is doing well, he owns a used car dealership in the suburb of Milwaukee.
He said, “ I’m making great progress in my life.”

I asked him what is progress for you?
He said, “At this stage in my life, my definition of progress is little different, if my daughter is having better quality lives than me and my parents, for me, this is the real meaning of progress, that’s what I’m trying to do.”
He told me that the difference between success and failure means the difference between a life of joy and a life of stress.
In his words, the gap between joy and stress indicates how well we manage the challenge of making meaning in our life.

“I always had linear expectations in my life but I always ended with nonlinear realities,” he said.
He was coming with the expectation to finish the half-marathon that day but ended up in hospital bed after not even finishing two miles.
“I had an unusual life throughout my past days, I always had recurrent health problems, I always suffered, but as Dr. Viktor Frankl, the father of the modern meaning movement has said, “you don’t have to suffer to learn, but if you don’t learn from suffering then your life becomes truly meaningless,” he added.

As we all know, merely understanding our core life problem, whatever it is, even if we can’t do anything about it, gives us a sense of control and sense of satisfaction.
By forcing ourselves to learn what’s happening to our life, we come to accept the reality, the reality of the problem. We become a catalyst in our own thinking and move towards the solution of problems.

He said that he changed seven jobs in his career.
In his last job, he had five reorgs, four bosses, four moves, one failed marriage, and five years later he had his own car dealership.
“One influential thing I learned by my weak health, is I created love for social and cultural overlap in our society, I developed a strong sense of building empathy, kindness, and belonging around me, my desire really sharpened to respect differences in our community; I guess that’s what I was looking as a meaning in my life. The essence of being human is shared emotions, connections and respect,” he said.

One day on his last job, he walked home to his one bedroom apartment and reviewed all credit cards, wondering how he could cut expenses. He reviewed everything, his savings, and all his possessions, and all the holes for expenses.
He figured out he would disconnect cable, phone, netflix, and use free channels and pre-paid phones, stop eating out, and buy no more clothes, shoes, and any other extra things.
He calculated he could survive for fifteen months from his savings.
Next day he walked into his very toxic boss’s office and quit on the spot.
“How did you get the courage to do that?” I asked.
He answered, “The pain of staying with toxicity was greater than the pain of leaving the toxicity, for better or worse, we live in a time when most of our circumstances in life start with I not we. I have to start somewhere.”
A relationship with our boss is toxic if our well-being and dignity is threatened in such a way that we suffer emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.

“Belonging is a feeling which I never experienced in my last job. Belonging emerges from developing and maintaining close relationships either with family members, friends, coworkers, or bosses.”
Harvard study has found that the only thing that really matters in life is your relationship to other people.
If we feel disconnected with other people then it hurts our feelings.
He left the job because he was disconnected and found no value in the working place.

“I’m not saying everyone should quit their job and have their own business, you can be a successful employee but the job you do must match with your personality, vision, and integrity.
You must create the personality of passion and commitment for what you do, you should always enjoy what you perform.
If you think your personality and work environment are out of sync, don’t try to change the system or people. It takes a very long time to change the system and people and there is high chance you’ll be unsuccessful. Instead just quit it and move forward,” he added.
“Of course, we have to accept that a punctuation mark happens in everybody’s life, the only thing we have to do is step back and take a different path,” he continued.

The life experiences provide a period of self-reflection and personal re-evaluation for every one of us.
These moments remain in motion with a series of reverberations that allows us to revisit our very identity.
This forces in our mind to ask what we don’t ask often enough: what is it that gives us meaning and how does that influence my life?
Self-reflection is power.
It is a mental strength, the power to do good. Blessed are the people whose self-reflection do a lot of good things in the society .
Greater self-reflection means greater power.
Self-reflection helps us to provide a path so that we can think properly in both personal and professional life.

There is a saying of Aristotle and his student Thomas Jefferson, ‘the pursuit of happiness’ has to do with an internal journey of learning to know ourselves and an external journey of service to others.
In reality, this journey is nothing but self-reflection.

Most importantly, self-reflection habit comes only after painful life experiences.
But whatever is the source, it helps us to pinpoint where and how to invest our time, money, and effort for the rest of our life.
In this life, there are not many places we can invest.
Of course, the first place to invest is education.
We can invest in our own education or in the education of our children or grandchildren or in the education of children whose family cannot afford.
Choice depends on us based on in which stage we are in life.
My friend studied a lot and became educated from his many jobs for how to be a small business owner and became an owner of a car dealership.
From his childhood, as he said, he was a fan of different cars.
He enjoyed cars from different perspectives, that’s what he chose to do in his later part of his life and opened a car dealership business.
Experience and life lessons taught him what he wants to do for the rest of his life.
He is expanding his car business in different locations outside Milwaukee.

“Education could be formal or informal. Both have the potential to increase one’s earning power over many years and lead to richer fulfilling lives with freedom of choice” he said.

He was always worried his whole life due to his poor health condition.
Therefore, for him, the second best investment in life is staying in good health by adopting healthy habits, especially food and exercise habits.
There is only one life, and the most priceless thing in life is good health.
As my friend said, the value for good health and education can not be measured, these two investments in life can affect our life in a lot of different ways.
Sadly, oftentimes, the value of these two investments we come to know late in life once time passes and we have either little or no time at all to restart.

In Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy theory what is above “self-actualization” is transcendence.
We can only realize this once we move beyond ourselves to see a greater fulfillment to serve the need and hope of others.
Greater fulfillment and service to others is possible only if we become educated and healthy.
“Life is a cause, a calling, a mission, a direction, a purpose, and most importantly, a transcendent commitment beyond ourself that makes our life worthwhile, ” he added.
Stay educated and stay healthy everyone.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“I have had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” -Mark Twain

When I visit my parents now, every morning I celebrate daily rituals with my mother.
Rituals are very common for her: celebrate the tulsi puja in the morning, read a few pages of Gita (holy book of hindu), celebrate the sunrise, and in the evening, repeat the same.
When it turns dark, we go inside and talk about her years growing up in Solma Tehrathum, Nepal or her schooling in Solma, or her calling to join a religious community recently.
My mother may say these moments in her life as listening to the voice of God but I say it is the tuning of her life to live in the moment.
She is happy going for long periods of time in complete worship.

When my mother was sixteen years old, she met my father, they got married, and together they created four children.
My mother has studied up to grade six formally but she can read fluently and write in moderation in our native language.
My mother and father had an amazing relationship, but through it all they maintained a deeper connection to their god.
It wasn’t always fun, there were a lot of problems and scarcities in the family, I saw them growing up but my mother was good at living in the moment to cherish what she had.
I learned the lesson: cherish what you have, live in the moment and move forward.

I am sharing my mother’s story with you because her story might be similar to your mother’s story.
Happiness and satisfaction always comes from the connections we build around our family.
Ritual is what binds a family.
Ritual is what makes a family differentiated and unique.
We each nurture an essential creativity that evolves with sharing and listening to the rituals.
When we have rituals in the family, we pass on to our future generations, that help them to live their lives with dignity.

When I was in high school working on the farm, I used to daydream about the things that I didn’t have.
I didn’t know then but I know now, that was my ritual without me knowing.
Even daydreaming during that time inspired me because I didn’t have an electronic gadget then like today’s smartphone in my fingertip.
It doesn’t really matter what we do and what we achieve in life, if we don’t live with our rituals everyday, life becomes complex.
Once we adopt ritual, we don’t worry much about the past, and not much time worrying about the future too.
In other words, staying in the present is the way to live, cultivating the focus on the here and now and avoiding unnecessary concerns about the future.

Ritual is living in the moment that just proliferates us.
When we live in the moment, we broaden our diaspora, we see the world in different eyes.
At least, I view the world this way.
Sometimes, I used to think and still feel that I couldn’t become wealthy by this time, probably, one of my regrets occasionally appears inside me, but after reading Hans Rosling’s book “Factfulness” I realized why I should be happy even though I am not wealthy.
Because I am living with my rituals, and in the moment now.
I had won little money in the past which was twice as sweet as the money that I earned.
I thought I could be wealthy.
But I also lost that won money immediately.
After certain times, I felt that money has a way of creating anxiety when there isn’t harmony in the way it flows into and out of my life.
I realized that it doesn’t matter how much I make or how much I spend, I must maintain harmony with money.
If money creates only anxiety and saps my energy, then I must stop worrying about more money, I must live in the moment.

I remember David Rubenstein’s advice to new investors, a renowned author and investor, “find areas outside of investing that can enable you to broaden your scope as a human, and experience things other than the pursuit of money and professional success.”
I still don’t understand how to apply this in real life.

In the moment of dissatisfaction and unhappiness, I encircle the world with my thoughts and gratitude.
I think around one billion people on the planet even today struggle everyday to find clean water, they work all day just to eat a meal at night.
There are another one billion people with an income that provides for most of life’s necessities.
Probably, I am in that category now.
And the remaining 6 billion are struggling to make the transition to access clean water to fulfill all their life’s necessities.

Living in the moment teaches us very different things about why we should enjoy what we have.
Let’s see the picture, how the human mind operates.
First we want to access clean water.
After this, we want to access nearby clean water.
After this, we want to access clean water at home.
After this, we want to access hot water for showers at home.
After this, we want to access hot water for showers attached in our bedroom.
The essence is that the pursuit of a better life will never end.
It keeps moving, this is another reason, living in the moment is so crucial.

The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie.
It’s deliberate, contrived, and dishonest but the dissatisfaction, the dissatisfaction inside us.
Generally dissatisfactions are persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
Those dissatisfactions will settle once we start to live in the moment.

One of the ways to live in the moment is to make something a ritual in your life.
For anything you do or want to build, you have to start somewhere, no question.
Make it your one ritual.
Just start and see what happens.
See your internal power setting that runs through your mind.
Make small adjustments in your task as you progress along the way.
When we do adjustments, it inspires us to move ahead further with more refined thinking.

Do it again whatever time interval is convenient for you.
Do it again when you feel.
You may not accomplish anything substantial but you sleep nicely, you feel happy and satisfied. You enjoy each moment of your involvement. You live in the moment.

Living in the moment teaches us one more thing that nobody makes a perfect thing, and you will never create a perfect thing, because it doesn’t exist.
However, the thing you create or the work you do, whatever it is, will reflect the life you want to live, that is what we all want.

What matters most is living in the moment, creating harmony with our desires, embracing the life of abundance, and making small progress every day in this world.
You, your family, your mundane work, your ritual. Just think.
We have to slow down our life to live in the moment.
We must celebrate our daily mundane work, the more we celebrate these works throughout the day, the more we live in the moment.

Over the last few years, one ritual I have developed is reading the books that interest me beyond books of my profession.
Sometimes I read one page or few pages in a day, sometimes I don’t.
But I always keep the book of my interest in the house in my access, maybe in the living room or bed room or dining table.
This ritual helped me learn a lot about life and purposes.
Recently, I have been reading a book that explains about food as a medicine, and various research labs across the globe are working on it, where I found out about prostate cancer.
I found that tomatoes decrease the risk of prostate cancer by 30 percent.
I am amazed that I am a chemical scientist by training but I had no clue what tomatoes do in my body.
I knew that tomatoes contain a bioactive lycopene that inhibits angiogenesis (blood supply to cancer cells).
Tomato skin contains 3 to 5 times more lycopene than the flesh.
Eating the cooked tomato is the best because naturally lycopene remains a trans-isomer which is poorly absorbed by the body.
But by cooking, lycopene turns into cis-isomer which is readily absorbed by the body.
Moreover, lycopene is fat-soluble so that if you eat tomatoes cooked in olive oil, the amount of lycopene goes up by threefold in our body.
This is just one example of how we transform our and other people’s lives just by cherishing our mundane ritual.
One question that should continue to come up is how can the global community continue to move to the next level by our own mundane ritual.

I am relating one example of my family friend who is suffering from cancer now.
I knew this when I was involved in running a campaign for awareness of cancer.
I can feel how painful this disease is.
If you have cancer, or have ever had it, what would be your ritual in life?
Of course, your number one focus would be to kill those cancer stem cells.
But how?
I know there’s no medicine that can kill cancer stem cells yet, but there are a growing number of foods, and their bioactives’ roles in our body.
Many of those bioactives of foods are being studied for their suppressive effects on cancer stem cells.
Fortunately, foods that target cancer stem cells don’t harm beneficial stem cells.
My friend’s current ritual is to read about those foods and their bioactives that might suppress the cancer stem cells.

Once we cherish our ritual, we have to learn to get in touch with the silence within ourselves, and we must know that everything in life has purpose.
One thing I learned growing up in a farming family is that there are no mistakes, coincidences, and regrets, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Just cherish those moments and move forward.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

Up to now I have done many jobs in my life.
I switched many jobs in different stages of my life depending on life circumstances.
Sometimes I got paid a little more money but I didn’t like my work and I gave up.
Sometimes I got less paid but I liked the work a little bit more and continued for a longer period of time.
At one point, I realized that my work is not something that I just do to make a living.
Sometimes I felt like this work is actually for me to make a difference, in my life as well as in the lives of many others.
What I aspire most about my work is how specifically it’s shaped around my experiences, skillset, values, and most importantly, peace of mind.
I believe this is not only my situation, probably, many of you might have been thinking the same way.

Many times, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking that the right job opportunity is mainly based on position, money, and the notion of success by our society.
But only you know what is right for you, nobody else does.
At one point, your body and mind come together and give you a big inner voice, what is the next step you need to take?
At the end of the day, that’s the only thing which matters the most.
What makes your job good, only you know, nobody else does.
It could be a sense of autonomy or authority based on your time, expertise, health, and a sense of fulfillment.
My learned lesson: make the choice that’s right for you, I mean for your body and mind together, and ignore the noise around you by others due to your decision.

Once I realized this, my working life, job, and career all became totally different things.
This could be the same for some of you but not for the majority. In many cases, a job may not necessarily be a career, but still people do.
Most of the time a job might be a short direction with a paycheck as the primary motivation for us, that’s what happened to me.
On the other hand, a career is an occupation developed over time based on life long ambition.
Life long ambition should be a synchronized equipment of body and mind connection.
I guess I learned this too late in my life.

One day I was reading an article and I found a research finding quite amazing.
“A college degree used to slot you into a forty year career. Now it’s just an entry level point to your first job,” an astounding finding from a renowned economist, Guy Berger.
Now the biggest question is why it’s happening.
There could be multiple reasons for it but few of them I experienced directly and indirectly in today’s fast pacing world.

Few months ago, I was in my doctor’s office.
I met one of my friend’s fathers outside waiting for a doctor.
His son was doing fellowship in neurology after completing his medical degree and residency in Richmond, Virginia.
I used to share an apartment building with him, and we used to swim almost everyday together.
I knew him a little bit through his son so we started chatting. He asked me about what I know about naturopathy during our conversation.
I said I had little knowledge about it but I’ve heard about it.
First he explained to me about his many worries that he had in his life, he had been trapped in a years long, expensive divorce battle with his wife.
He talked about stress, loneliness, and existential fear.
He had severe heart problems for a very long time, and no doctor was able to cure it completely.
After adopting naturopathy which he learned from his college teacher, his problems were gone.
“For many years I was under a lot of stress due to the nature of my job. I was constantly making more money but I was compromising with my body and mind constantly,” he said.
Ultimately he decided to switch the job for various reasons especially because he realized that the job was not suitable for him.
I asked him how he knew.
He told me his body and mind finally gave him a big single voice at once about this unfit.

“Naturopathy is natural because our body is also natural.
We need natural support and stimulation to our mind and body, with the aim of enhancing self healing,” he said.
Eventually, “Know thyself ” became his best two words in life as he continued.
He adopted the fasting cure, and changed his diet completely.
He used to eat meat everyday, but now, he only eats meat about once every week.
He has been seeing a therapist regularly for the conflicts in his life, in particular about the question of what job, money, and his standard of living are worth to him.
I learned a quick lesson from him through our conversation.
We can’t solve problems just by talking, but we can certainly learn to examine our priorities in life and reduce the pressure they put on ourselves.

He correlated our body, purpose, health, and natural healing to the life of Nelson Mandela.
He was talking about Nelson Mandela’s unwavering faith and meaningful goal and its connections in his health.
Twenty five years of political imprisonment could not break him.
During that time he completed a law degree by correspondence course and became politically active immediately following his release.
He had meaningful goals, the end of apartheid and the independence of South Africa.
He lived by singing and dancing to the age of ninety five.
He had conviction and connections which had neither planning nor calculations in his life but he had respect, humility, and patience in the face of the unknown.
His body and mind totally knew it and accepted it because he practiced it his whole life.

“Eighty percent of my heart problems I eliminated just by eating right, doing frequent exercise, and most importantly, by avoiding my stressful toxic job,” he concluded.

I remember, one of my coworker’s mom, she was 64 years old. She was a successful dentist by profession.
One day, suddenly, she was admitted to hospital due to a stroke.
Fortunately, she survived because doctors were able to remove the blockage in one of her veins in her brain.
Her higher blood pressure was measured at 230 instead of 120.
Later it became clear that her life was under immense pressure and in complete disorder.
She was dealing with many financial problems for her dental practice.
Not only that she was the sole proprietor of all the household activities, her husband never participated in household activities.
She was dealing with two very demanding people, a daughter who aspired to be a competitive swimmer and a son who wanted to start his own business.

After all, one day she visited a mind-body medicine clinic with the help of her friend.
First she learned how to change basic habits, she couldn’t remove her stress entirely but she became aware of it so she found new ways to deal with it.
She trained herself how to say “no” immediately if she has to, which was a big step for her.
She reduced her workloads in the dental clinic almost half by applying the methods learned in the mind-body clinic.

Most importantly, she trained to develop courage to set boundaries between herself and her family.
Her husband used to say, “unfortunately, my prescription is still at the pharmacy, because nobody picked it up.”
Her daughter used to say, “I can’t make dinner tonight, because I have a one-on-one discussion with my coach.”
But by now, she taught her husband how to collect his medicine himself.
She taught her daughter how to organize her schedule.
Her adult daughter has understood what to say and what not to say to her mom about her competitive swimming ambition.
Her son has understood that his mom needs to put herself first in order to put her life in order.
Most amazingly, she learned to make time for herself, time for body and time for mind.
Now, she makes frequent visits to her family members and old friends.
She talks to her parents every week.
She regularly participates in blood donation because she knows that it reduces her ferritin, a protein that stores iron in the blood. Increased level of ferritin increases risk of heart attacks and strokes.
She gradually started to take a more plant based diet as she knew that high meat intake elevated ferritin levels.
Nowadays, she makes time once a week for music therapy that she learned from her old friend.
She learned to take a bath with lavender oil after long work in the dental clinic.

She practices hydrotherapy, bathing with hot and cold water became part of her life on weekends and holidays.
She knew that hot stimuli through water relax muscles, stimulate circulation, and raise body temperature. These activities activate defense cells, hormones, and messengers are released.
The truth she knew is that a hot bath causes blood vessels to widen and blood pressure to lower.

When she becomes a little bit tired, she sits for short breathing meditation where she inhales, counts backward from ten, and exhales when she has reached one.

Last time when I met her she shared the news with me: For the last few years, her blood pressure has never crossed 140 / 80.

The truth of life is: it’s tough, always has been, always will be.
Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and latch on to the affirmative.
Don’t burn out.
Listen, honor, and respect what your body and mind is telling you.


Thank you for your time.
– Yam Timsina

“He who searches for evil, must first look at his own reflection.” -Confucious

Many years ago, my wife, my daughter and I got together with my longtime college mate whom I had not seen for quite some time.
We enjoyed dinner together, at least I enjoyed it until my daughter abruptly uttered something alarming to me as we departed from the dinner.
“You really need a positive hearing aid dad.”
I was stunned by her wording.
After we reached home, I asked my wife about a positive hearing aid that our daughter was talking about.
“The real problem is that you interrupt people when they talk to you and insert your negativity immediately without even completely listening to them,” my wife said.
“Not only that, after your injection of negativity on everything, you change topics without giving a chance to the other people what they were actually thinking.”
Quite stunning for me, not only my daughter, but my wife also proved me very wrong.
“And you not only bring your negativity chapter first when you respond, you always talk at people, not with people”.
“Just forget about whether you talk negatively or positively.”
“My dear, if you talk more than half the time with only exploration of the more negative sides, you have a serious problem, just accept it.”
Ouch!
The wording from my wife was an eye-opener for me.
Fortunately, she also advised me not to get negative first but to accept the reality, accept the present situation, listen to people with open full ears, and speak.
She advised that If I express my negative feelings first, I have a problem with people, especially, I have a listening problem with some sort of dissatisfaction associated with me.

I couldn’t sleep that night, the curtain of my life fell off completely not by some outsiders but by my own people.
Sometimes these kinds of moments appear in everybody’s life, it’s only the matter of realization.
And obviously, when?
Next morning, I determined that I would be my daughter’s and my love of life’s favorite person.
But how?
I started this journey by reading good books.
The first book I read on the topic was, “The Lost Art of Listening ” by Michael Nichols.
The author says, “listening is a skill and like any skill it must be developed. Listening is a natural outgrowth of caring and concern for people.”

I learned that If I am a poor listener, I am more likely to become a negative person.
The most negative person is the most worrying person, who worries all the time internally so that negativity comes out of their mouth first.

I learned some essential lessons eventually from reading good books.
To improve my positive attitude, I must listen well. I have to restrain myself from disagreeing or talking or sharing my own thoughts.
To become positive, I must hold back what I have to say and control the urge to interrupt.
Most people aren’t really interested in our negative point of view until I become convinced that we have heard and appreciated theirs.
If I really want a positive attitude, I have to exercise humility and restraint, I have to learn to change my behavior as I mature by emulating whom I admire and adopting those qualities they possess.
Most of my positive attitude comes from my adaptation.
As we all know, Charles Darwin, “It is not the smart nor the strong that survive, but those who have the ability to adapt.”
Remember, good listening skill is an adaptation.
Adaptation with an open mind and open ears crushes the negativity inside us.

I re-evaluated my lifestyle, my thinking, and my own expectations of it.
I have so much to be thankful for, not only in the creation of my own life, but also with the substance of my existence.
Then why does my negativity always appear first?
Of course, at one point of my life, I was tired of watching my life struggle aimlessly in the dark, missing many opportunities, zero knowledge financially, and growing increasingly unhappy.
I was too worried about things which never happened in my life.
Those moments probably helped me to cultivate my negativity all the way up to a certain point.

The serious challenges for me were overcoming adversity and handling worry and stress.
I was very weak at understanding the value of relationships.
If we don’t understand the value of any relationship then we have no way of knowing any mental and physical profile.
I was very poor at making decisions, and, most importantly, absolutely unknown about the process of letting go in life.

At some point in our lives, we have to decide whether to live to work or work to live.
I completely forgot about it.
I completely forgot these two words “let go”.

I learned the best way to ease my anxiety during times of stress is to recognize the anxiety because it brings negativity.
What is this?
Where is it coming from?
What is its cause?
For me, anxiety was a major contributing factor for my negativity.

We have to be calm by understanding our right paths, of course, there could be many right paths. We have to not only recognize the right path but also follow it so that there is less manic activity that is counterproductive for us.
To be positive, we have to be proactive, we have to be calmed by doing not just the right thing, but the best thing.
Best thing can be different for different people, but it’s up to us what is best for us.

One of the reasons for my negativity I realized was my status quo bias.
It was my irrational tendency to prefer choices that maintain the status quo even when other choices would make me better off.
I was very scared to change a few things in my life.
This tendency had many implications in my life.
I would like to read about Charles Darwin at home more than attending my friend’s casual party but I didn’t want to offend my friend.
I would like an afternoon nap more than roaming around a shopping mall but I didn’t want to tell anybody about this.

Some people think that status quo is a matter of laziness for them. But for me, it became a matter of not knowing where and how to start the change.
I have poor understanding of analysis and comparison of alternatives in my life.
I gave up my best hope too quickly.
So, I always remained negative.
Comparison of anything never becomes straightforward, sometimes, it’s confusing and intimidating.
For me, the mental cost of researching various alternatives of life was very high.
I am sure other people might have the same situation.

One of my father’s friends has 7 kids from two marriages, a big house, and is pretty much financially independent.
When I was a second year PhD student, he told me that he did a 4 years job in total in his lifetime under someone else as an employee.
He told me that the job was not made for him.
During that time he was so negative that he lost all of his hopes.
When I visited his home a few years ago, I saw at least 100 books everywhere in his house.
I saw a book titled “Atomic Habits” by James Clear in his rest room.
I was shocked.
At one point in our conversation he said, “I used my formal academic degree for those 4 years of my life, beside that all of my life I am pretty much dependent on these books.”
“All of my negativity evaporated through these pages not at once but gradually. I knew who I am.”

“I love a big family, many kids, a big house, financial independence, and lots of books everywhere, that’s who I am,” he said.

Remember, being a good positive person can begin with you, it’s your good graces that you have inside you, of course, each one of us have to recognize it.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina