The Art of Living Well

An Idle Or A Busy Mind?

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Lau) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:59:00 +0000

We are living in a fast-pace world in which there is little room for idleness. However, when we retire, many of us find ourselves in a totally different world -- a world of idleness.

An idle mind is the devil's workshop. Is there any truth in this statement?

In Oriental thinking, an idle mind is often a muddled mind with distorted thinking -- a breeding ground for mental disorders. Thomas Carlyle, the famous historian, once said: "In idleness, there is perpetual despair."

A busy mind, on the other hand, may search for new truths, even as one ages. This keeps the mind functional and healthy. John Quincy Adams concurred: "Idleness is sweet, and its consequences are cruel."

However, Lin Yutang, a well-known contemporary Chinese philosopher, once said: "A busy man is never wise, and a wise man is never busy." That may be the golden mean: a too-busy mind may become distressed, while a too-relaxed mind may turn idle.

Physical and intellectual activities do stimulate the mind. Therefore, it is important that even on retirement, you should find something to occupy yourself with. As you age, your muscle strength and mental capacity will deteriorate and decline. Take up a new sport, such as golf, which is an ageless sport. Mental golf is good for your mind, and golf swings are good for muscle flexibility, as well as body balance and posture. The latter are especially beneficial to those who are aging, because they may prevent fall among seniors, which is one of the leading causes of death among the elderly.

As for intellectual activities, go back to school as you age. Learn a new craft, a new hobby, or even start a new career, such as think, write, and retire, or a business.

Keep yourself from being idle, and live long!

Visit my website: Longevity for You and my blog Increase Mind Power.

Stephen Lau

Mindfulness for Health and Happiness

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Lau) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:46:00 +0000

Your body and mind are interconnected with each other. But many of us don’t see that relationship. Being present, or more consciously present in your body moment by moment, enables you to live not only in your physical body but also inside your wholeness (including your mind) as a human being. Your present moment relationship with yourself, with others, and with the world around you depends on mindfulness, which is purposeful awareness of your body in the present moment. It is this awareness that connects your body and mind in a unique way.

Mindfulness is your path to better health and greater happiness. It affects not only your body but also your mind. Mindfulness is a basic human capacity that can be cultivated and strengthened with practice. Essentially, you become purposefully aware of what is happening to your body in the present moment: that is, you direct your attention in a casual and nonjudgmental way to the present moment.

Remember, your body is yours only, and is always with you. Finding the moment-by-moment relationship with your body is your path to better health and greater happiness. The present moment is always here and is timeless. This unique relationship helps you become more caring and more compassionate towards others; gives you clarity of mind, such that you can see what is really important to you in your life, and allows you to let go of everything peacefully. Remember, life happens only in the present moment. The past is gone, and the future is uncertain. However, we are so easily distracted by thoughts of what happened in the past and thoughts of what may happen in the future that we lose sight of what is most important to us—that is, what is happening right now in the present moment. Mindfulness is directing our minds gently back to the present moment so that we may feel richer and more alive.

Mindfulness is mindful attention to the present moment. Practicing mindfulness is your path to the present moment. Anything you experience after coming into presence through mindfulness may become richer and more meaningful to you. This is how and why mindfulness can give you better health and greater happiness. In mindfulness, you recognize your thoughts as they occur, but you pay nonjudgmental attention to them; in other words, they neither distract nor disturb you.

If you are mindful of what your body and your mind are experiencing in the present moment, you will soon learn to become mindful of others, which is the beginning of compassion and loving kindness—a quality that enriches life. If you are mindful of others, you will also become mindful of everything else in life, such as your breathing and your eating. Breathing comes so natural that many of us are not mindful of how we breathe, so many of us do not breathe right. As a result of incorrect breathing, we get less oxygen to our lungs, cells, and organs. As a result, our health deteriorates. Likewise, eating becomes second nature to us that many of us are no longer mindful of the eating process: we simply shuffle and stuff food into our mouths, mindless of chewing and digesting the food we are eating. Indeed, in our daily routines, there are so many things that we are mindless about, because we have taken them for granted. Mindfulness is re-directing our attention to what we are doing at the present moment to re-establish the vital link between the body and mind.

Learn mindfulness from an expert who provides a useful guide to harness the power of your mind with mental training tools and techniques to perfect the art of mental transformation.

For more information, visit my web page: Brain Power.

Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Natural Dental Hygiene

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Lau) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:26:00 +0000

Maybe you always clean your teeth in the morning and before your go to bed. Or you may even use Listerine or other brands of mouthwash. But to really protect your teeth and mouth from harmful bacteria and gum deterioration, you need natural dental hygiene. For optimum oral health, use natural sesame oil to gargle on waking up.

Unlike other commercial mouthwashes, sesame oil has the following benefits:

1. It gently removes impurities from your tongue - the whitish coating.

2. It purifies your colon.

3. It improves your digestion.

Remember, digestive health is closely related to oral health. According to research studies, gargling and swishing oil in the mouth significantly reduces the number of species of bacteria in the space between teeth and gum, where gum disease starts.

Other benefits of using sesame oil for gargling and swishing for natural oral hygiene include avoiding dryness of throat, cracked lips, and cavities.

Instructions for natural oral hygiene are as follows:

1. Put some warm sesame oil in your mouth. Swish and gargle for a minute or two.

2. With your finger, massage, gently but thoroughly, some sesame oil into your gums.

3. Rinse your mouth to remove the residue of oil.

This is the most natural dental hygiene. Oral health is particularly important as you age.

Go to: 21 Secrets for Good Oral Health.

Visit my blog: Healthy Living Healthy Lifestyle.

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

How to Reduce Salt in Your Diet

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Lau) — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 11:02:00 +0000

You need oxygen to survive, but, ironically, oxygen is also your undoing. As you breathe in oxygen, you also give out carbon dioxide, which is toxic to your health. Nature has designed this unique built-in mechanism to guarantee your mortality. You get life-giving oxygen, but you also receive life-damaging byproducts in the form of free radicals. You are just like a log of wood burning oxygen for fuel. Fortunately, your body is also equipped with antioxidants that not only prevent free radical formation but also defuse the free radicals already formed. So, there is always a constant combat between antioxidants and free radicals within your body.

No matter what, free radicals may have damaged your cell walls. When cell walls are damaged, they become more difficult to metabolize the sodium intake, leading to more sodium leaks and hence further sodium metabolic impairment. Blood vessels damaged by excessive sodium leaks may result in swelling and edema. In this way, your arteries may become clogged and your blood pressure elevates.

Cellular damage to the DNA by free radicals is a major contributing factor not only to heart disease but also to many human cancers, as well as damage to the neurons in the brain. Therefore, reducing salt in your daily diet is important.

To prevent further free radical damage to your cells and blood vessels, reduce salt consumption. You have heard too often: Cut back on salt! But it is easier said than done, because nearly all processed foods contain some, if not excessive, amount of sodium chloride. Even Jell-O pudding may contain as much as 400 mg of sodium chloride.

Always read food labels before any food purchase. Unless it says “no salt added,” there is always a certain amount of sodium chloride. Reduce voluntary salting. Never reach out for a saltshaker in a restaurant. Lay off all high-salt condiments, such as soy sauce, steak sauces, gravies, and relishes. Restrict consumption of salt-laden foods, such as canned soups, potato chips, and pretzels, among other junk food. Eat whole foods instead of their processed counterparts. Go to The WholeFood Farmacy to get all your whole food products. Eat living and raw foods instead of processed foods, which are always loaded with salt.

Reducing salt consumption is an important component of a healthy longevity diet. Eating right is the art of living well.

Visit my web page: Healthy Eating to get more information on how eating healthy can heal.

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

You Are Your Choices!

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Lau) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:30:00 +0000

The art of living well is the art of aging gracefully and healthily.

Aging begins as soon as we reach the peak of your performance curve in your life. In general, men peak their performance curve in their late twenties, while women peak theirs in their mid-thirties. That may be one of the reasons why women live longer than men. The performance curve is a turning point in your body when it just doesn’t grow any more and starts the aging process. It is believed that after the age of thirty-five, each biologic function declines by approximately 5 percent every 10 years. Over time, deterioration accelerates, resulting in disease and disorder.

Scientists have striven to measure the rate of aging in humans. They have been able to come up with an average number, but averages cannot take into account the significant variations among individuals; even the variations in the elderly are so great that there is no meaningful average at all. In other words, numbers are not only unreliable but also misleading. A case in point, according to a study at Harvard University, there was a 5 percent decrease in IQ every ten years; however, another scientific study indicated that some individuals actually improved their IQ even at the age of eighty. So, how could one explain that?

Does the speed of human aging have to do with genes? Yes, absolutely! But the genetic factor accounts for only about 25 percent of your aging: the rest has to do with your lifestyle and behavioral choices. The older you are, the more your choices determine how long and how well you are going to live—in other words, the speed of your aging process.

If you wish to live longer with a better quality of life, focus on your lifestyle and behavioral choices. You are your choices, and you become what you choose. Living is all about your choices—a sum of all the good and bad choices you have made. Truly, we all make bad choices every now and then, but there is no reason why we should continue with the bad choices we have made. Understandably, you may have the will to make the right choices, but your mind is weak. This is where you need to learn how to harness your brain power to turn things around in your favor. Visit my web page: Brain Power.

Also, visit my website: The Art of Living Well to find out how to live well.

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Maintaining Brain Health Is the Art of Living Well

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Lau) — Sun, 23 May 2010 21:46:00 +0000

When you think of staying fit, don’t just think from the neck down: think about your brain! Brain health plays a critical role in almost everything you do — thinking, feeling, remembering, and sleeping. To live well, you need a healthy brain. Optimize your brain health throughout your entire life.

How do you maintain optimum brain health?

Simple, what is good for the heart is also good for the brain. Your heart pumps about 20 percent of your blood to your brain to nourish billions of brain cells with oxygen and nutrients.

Accordingly, anything that may damage your heart, such as alcohol and tobacco, may also damage your brain. Research showed that obese adults with high cholesterol and high blood pressure had six times the risk for dementia. In other words, a heart-healthy diet is essential to a healthy brain. Control your cholesterol and blood pressure naturally without the use of drugs, because pharmaceutical drugs are toxic chemicals, and should be avoided wherever possible. Manage your body weight naturally without resorting to fad diets. (Download a FREE copy of my 143-page e-book All-Round Weight Loss to get everything you need to know about losing weight naturally.)

Remember, a healthy brain affects how you think. You become what you think: your experiences and your perceptions of those experiences are stored in your subconscious mind, which directs your conscious mind. In other words, your actions are directed by your thoughts, which are the byproducts of your perceptions. You become what you see, and your reality is based on your perceptions.

The Super Mind Evolution System: Discover your real mind power secrets. Cure your mind and body while sleeping.

Transform your fear into happiness, peace, and inspiration. Get MIND SURGE and 22 POWERFUL TOOLS for FREE to pre-program your dreams to enhance your mind power.

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Yet Another Reason for Eating Natural Whole Foods

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Lau) — Mon, 03 May 2010 21:51:00 +0000

Due to the many health problems related trans fat, the food industry has ingeniously come up with another “man-made” fat to replace the now-unpopular trans fat. Well, it may well be a case of “jumping from the frying pan into the fire.”

This new process of making fat is called interesterification, which is a chemical process of making butter-like products from liquid vegetable oils. This chemical process uses enzymes to alter the molecular structure of a vegetable oil so as to give it the properties of a fat. Simply, it involves adding enzymes to a batch of vegetable oil to separate a triglyceride molecule into a glycerol and 3 fatty acids, and through the process of hydrogenation, the vegetable oils become hardened.

Some preliminary testing indicates that interesterified oils have the same health risks as trans fat.

Currently, there is no legislation covering interesterification, and the food industry takes advantage of this to make you believe that the “vegetable oil” you see on food labels of cakes, biscuits, and other food products are “healthy” ingredients.

No matter what is said on the food label, processed food is unnatural food. The more ingredients you find on the food label, the unhealthier it is for you. Eat natural whole foods.

Living and Raw Foods: To eat healthy, go on a living and raw diet.

The Super Food Library: Eat with the best of the best Nature has to offer.

Organic Food Gardening Beginner’s Manual: A 103-page manual with step-by-step guidelines to help you grow your own healthy organic food!

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Living in Perspective with Daily Meditation

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Lau) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:08:00 +0000

There are many reasons why you should do meditation practice every day: meditation can relax your body and mind, as well as enhance your spiritual connection. Meditation is excellent mind training, in which you focus a distracted mind on awareness—mindfulness of what is happening around you, such as your breathing, your bodily sensations, and your thoughts. Without this awareness or mindfulness, there is no stress meditation, or spiritual meditation. Meditation is all about re-focusing the mind on what is important and discarding what is irrelevant or insignificant. In other words, meditation helps you with living in perspective.

In meditation, you find the quiet or stillness between sounds and thoughts and experiences. It is this underlying quietness—so quiet that you can almost hear it—that forms a link between you and your sensations and thoughts. Through living in perspective, you learn how to become aware of your adaptation to cope with the mundane world, such as dealing with attitudes and behaviors, as well as pain and stress; knowing yourself better, such as the reasons for your anger or negative emotions; self enlightenment or divine illumination, such as the purpose of your existence. In short, meditation is mental training of awareness of breathing, physical sensations, and mental thoughts by means of focusing only on the present moment, or what is “real” at the present moment.

By training your awareness only to remain present in whatever activity you are undertaking in real life, you will find yourself right in the center of that activity you are engaging in. In this way, you will be doing your very best, and meanwhile getting the greatest satisfaction from doing so.

You can learn how to live in perspective through everyday meditation practice. Mind training through meditation leads to a mental state of stillness that can be maintained no matter what you are doing, or what is happening around you. This is the power of meditation.

You can also learn how to apply meditation in almost anything you do in life. To illustrate, you can meditate while you are walking, instead of listening to the radio or your CD. This is how you can meditate while you are doing your daily walk:

As you begin walking, let go of the outside world.

Focus on your breathing: listen to the relaxed sound of your breathing in and breathing out.

Make you walk slow and purposeful. As you walk, observe each step that you are making. Notice the physical sensation of your feet, as well as the way your arms are swinging back and forth, brushing against your body.

If distracting thoughts come, do not deliberately dismiss them; instead, re-focus your awareness on your breathing and physical sensations. Continue to walk.

In this way, you can turn almost any everyday activity into meditative nature to enhance your awareness and clarity of mind, which can be life-transforming in that it changes your perspective about almost anything that happens to you. Your senses will come to life; you will see how things change from moment to moment, so you have a better understanding of what is important and what is “real” in your life; you will also find it easier to let go of things you found difficult to let go in the past.

Live your life in perspective with daily meditation practice.

To find out more about meditation, go to my web page: Healing Meditation.

Yes, meditation is life-changing in that it changes your perspective of how you view your health and wellness.

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Stop Your Brain from Aging

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Lau) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:59:00 +0000

The art of living well is to optimize your brain health. Your brain is one of the most important body organs: it is the seat of your thoughts, emotions, and feelings; it controls everything that you do, such as thinking, remembering, and even sleeping. An aging brain is not conducive to living well.

Optimize your brain health throughout your entire life. How do you maintain optimum brain health? Simple, what is good for the heart is also good for the brain. Your heart pumps about 20 percent of your blood to your brain to nourish billions of brain cells with oxygen and nutrients.

To stop your brain from aging, you need to do the following:

(1) Manage your numbers: cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, and body weight. These numbers affect your heart as well as your brain. Research showed that obese adults with high cholesterol and high blood pressure had six times the risk for dementia. Control these numbers without drugs.

Download a FREE copy of my 143-page e-book All-Round Weight Loss to get the know-how to lose weight naturally (you need not give your email address for your free download).

(2) Eat a heart-healthy diet, which is essentially a low-fat, high-fiber diet rich in natural nutrients. Eat whole foods, not their processed counterparts.

(3) Avoid all pharmaceutical drugs, which are toxic chemicals, wherever possible. Chemical toxins in foods, drugs, and the environment create free radicals, which damage brain cells. Detoxify your body on a regular basis with Basic Body Detox.

(4) Learn to optimize your breathing, that is, learn to breathe right. Correct breathing brings sufficient oxygen to your brain cells for optimum maintenance. Tai Chi Breathing teaches you how to breathe right. Breathing incorrectly is the cause of many ailments and disorders. Good posture also facilitates optimum breathing.

(5) Stress ages not only your body but also your brain. Stress affects your body's production of DHEA, which is a hormone critical to anti-aging and longevity. Meditation is an antidote to stress (Read my web pages: Why Meditation, and Meditation Healing for more information).

(6) To stop your brain from aging, you may need to change your lifestyle, such as getting involved in brain activities to keep your memory sharp and to optimize your cognitive functions. Your brain health may decline as you age due to altered connections among brain cells. The good news is that research has found that keeping your brain active not only increases its vitality, but also builds its reserve of brain cells and connections. Remember, your brain has the capability to generate new brain cells at any age. Adult learning is an important factor in brain health. Use it, or lose it!

Brain Fit For Life is a user's guide to lifelong brain health and fitness. Learn everything you need to know to keep your brain from aging, which begins with the mind.

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

A Sense of Humor -- The Art of Living Well

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Lau) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:38:00 +0000

A sense of humor is an important ingredient in the art of living well. Many people "think" they live well, but, in fact, they do not. The reason is that in this competitive world, contemporary living may have become too down-to-earth. Indeed, if one takes life too seriously, there will be little room for any sense of humor. Without a sense of humor, living would become drab, dreary, and even depressing.

What is a sense of humor? A sense of humor is a human perception of any absurdity and incongruity in life—and there are plenty of them. An incident or a situation may not be funny enough to evoke laughter, or it may even be tragic, but an individual having a good sense of humor may be able to elicit laughter out of it. People have their unique perceptions of the same given situation; it is all in the mind—the mind that controls how you think and what you do.

According to the 2006 International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, a sense of humor can significantly improve the survival rate of end-stage renal disease patients by as much as 30 percent, because positive distractions from stressful situations, such as dialysis, may have salutary effects on patients. Another example is Norman Cousins' book Anatomy of an Illness, in which the author successfully battled with his terminal cancer by exposing himself to abundance of humor from movies and comic books.

So, a sense of humor is an important tool in the art of living well. If you wish to be a happy and successful individual, develop a good sense of humor. Life is forever full of problems. A good sense of humor enables you to have a positive outlook on virtually every aspect of your life.Why Make Yourself Crazy?

How do you develop a sense of humor?

(1) Learn to change the way you look at life. Changing your perspective is going back through your entire life, and looking at all the wrong belief systems that you have acquired through different experiences in different stages of your life. Unlearn what you have learned, and tell yourself that they are incorrect.

(2) Learn to laugh at yourself—in particular, your mistakes and weaknesses. Remember, nobody is perfect!

(3) Learn to live in the present. According to Zen (an Oriental way of life) philosophy, living in the present is the only reality in life: the past is bygone, and the future is unknown. Living By Zen shows you how to live your life in the present, and to the fullest.

(4) Learn to put a smile on your face, under any circumstance. It helps you develop a sense of humor, and a smile is always contagious to others.

(5) Learn to recall all the things in life that make you happy. When you are in a foul mood, simply recall them to rid your mind of negative or unpleasant thoughts.

A sense of humor can make you younger and healthier for longer: it is the art of living well.

Enjoy Being You: Be yourself, create your own future and your own realty!

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Too Much Acid Can Cause Disease

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Lau) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:30:00 +0000

Throughout your lifespan, your body cells replicate and rejuvenate for cellular health. However, cell replication and rejuvenation require an optimum environment, which is a balance of acid and alkaline in your body. When your body is too acidic, the tissues of your cells are forced to give up their alkaline reserves, and thus depleting them of alkaline minerals, which are the components of the tissues themselves.

Where does the acid come from?

Acidification may come from taking too much food that contains great amounts of acid, such as animal proteins and sugars. The sources of acidity from drinks are alcohol, coffee, sodas, and tea. Even tobacco smoke can cause acidification in the respiratory system.

How do foods cause acidification?

Your digestion of animal proteins, such as meat, eggs, and cheese, produces amino acids (containing acid minerals, such as phosphorus and sulphur) during digestion process, and uric acids during acidic degradation.

Your digestion of glucose may be adversely affected by poor metabolism, and thus turning originally alkaline foods into acidic ones.

Acid foods are citrus fruits and berries, unripe fruits, and acidic vegetables (such as tomato and watercress), honey, and vinegar. However, acidic foods may be alkalizing, if your body metabolism is efficient and capale of metabolizing and oxidizing the acid.

Remember, always eat the fruit, instead of drinking its juice. The reason is that alkaline minerals are present in the pulp, and the juice without the pulp is therefore more acidic.

Alkalizing foods include green vegetables, potato, and dried fruits. Dried fruits are alkalizing because much of the acid has been removed through the drying process.

For optimum health and wellness, you need to eat a well balanced diet. Too much acid, in particular, is a cause of disease for the following reasons:

(1) The corrosive nature of acid irritates your body organs, causing inflammation, which is often a source of pain, and hardening of tissues, such as your arteries.

(2) Acidic sweat may cause skin allergy, especially in areas where sweat seems to accumulate, such as your armpits.

(3) Acidic urine may also cause infection and inflammation in the urinary tract, resulting in bladder problems.

(4) Acidification produces free radicals, affecting your immune system.

(5) Too much acid reduces the activity of enzymes in your body, and thus resulting in improper digestion and poor assimilation of nutrients.

The optimum acid and alkaline levels (known as the pH scale, which is between one and fourteen, with seven being neutral) should be between 7.30 and 7.40. Deviations above or below this range can signal potentially disease symptoms.

Acid Alkaline Diet provides excellent information on how to maintain a balance of acid and alkaline in your blood, body tissues, and body fluids for optimum health and wellness.

Stephen Lau