Today, I would just love to share this quote from Osho with all of you. It is so beautiful, and will make so many relationships more beautiful.

“First meditate, be blissful, then much love will happen of its own accord. Then being with others is beautiful and being alone is also beautiful. Then it is simple, too. You don’t depend on others and you don’t make others dependent on you. Then it is always a friendship, a friendliness. It never becomes a relationship, it is always a relatedness. You relate, but you don’t create a marriage. Marriage is out of fear, relatedness is out of love. You relate; as long as things are moving beautifully, you share. And if you see that the moment has come to depart because your paths separate at this crossroad, you say good-bye with great gratitude for all that the other has been to you, for all the joys and all the pleasures and all the beautiful moments that you have shared with the other. With no misery, with no pain, you simply separate.”

To slow down any thing and any act is beneficial to life. Our life, if we desire to slow down aging, should be lived with little stress. Do not try to be perfect. Aiming for ninety percent is enough. To aim for one hundred percent is counter-productive.

Young people who have fallen in love should understand the philosophy of falling in love. Feelings of love can never reach the cutest person. In novels, many characters are willing to die for love. They shed tears of anguish. However, when two people finally get together, how long does the feelings last? Even in the most romantic plots, the feelings fade away after a few years. Love is sweet in the beginning and bitter in the end.

So, life is best lived with no attachment. A poet once wrote, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we can close our eyes and stay in a vague recollection of perfect moments forever?” How can prosperity be extended? How can wealth be maintained? How can power be kept? It all comes down to non-attachment.

The aesthetics of relationships can only come if there are flaws in the relationship. If you look at most top novels, movies, and tv series, they don’t tend to end with happy endings. If a scratch gets on an antique, there will definitely be a broken heart. But, a perfect antique would only be looked at. People feel there is value in a broken heart. It gives life profound meaning. What do you think?

I have been wondering for a while what separates winners from losers? What makes an ordinary person move out of their comfort zone to become something incredible?

Is inspiration the answer? Maybe. But, inspiration seems to last as long as a child’s desire to become a movie star. It’s there for one moment, then the next thing you know, you get distracted by some other thought, and forgets everything altogether.

Today, there are so many people interested in the subject of personal development, success talks, spiritual cultivation, yet, how come so few get any decent results from their search for something more in life? How many people actually finish the books they read? How many people even read in today’s society? Are people just inherently lazy?

What I found is that to create a truly long lasting change in life you must first have the motivation for change and find it an urgent matter. I must credit this idea I’m about to share to Tony Robbins and his program “The Edge”. He outlines 7 steps to long lasting change. The first of these steps is to GET DISTURBED.

In his words, you have to get disturbed enough so that you feel compelled to change. Get disturbed enough that you say NO MORE! I WILL NOT TAKE IT ANYMORE! You have to expose yourself to the pain and confront it until you are compelled to make the necessary changes.

Truly, if you look at the life of any successful person, it all started with a stage of living in some form of disturbance. You have to get yourself into such a horrifying state that you truly hate it. You hate it so much that the pain of staying put is greater than the pain of changing. Basically, you have to be backed into a corner and have no other option but to change. That’s how any long lasting change occurs.

Of course, this is just the first step in Tony Robbin’s 7 step system. You also need a clear idea or purpose of where you are going, and put the energy of being disturbed toward this purpose. If you want a more elaborate explanation, you can just look up the 7 steps on Google and you will find it there. I’ve covered the gist of it, and seriously you have enough information to get started. How do you get disturbed? It’s different for everyone. What might make you mad can be fun for another person. So, there isn’t any specific techniques. Just pray for help. If you don’t like the idea of prayers, then use visualization and manifestation. Both of them should work. The changes you expect won’t come right away. Something small will occur each day. When you are ready, you will get yourself into unexplainable amounts of stress and problems. Now, take a hold of this and use it for change. Keep up the prayers and don’t forget to give thanks for all the help. Soon, the stress will transform into excitement and that’s when work becomes one of the most incredible things in life.

Also, actions are what will eventually create tangible results in the world we live in. You can sit there and think all day long, but unless you take action, nothing will happen. Even manifestation requires action. Heavenly beings can’t do it for you, all they can do is make the process more doable. In the end, you must make the change yourself. Again, I must also stress the importance of merit here. All of these words have no meaning unless you have the karma to experience the truth of these statements. You’ll probably forget 80% of what I said by the time you finish this article. Really, what was the point of reading this in the first place? If you had the right merit, you would remember what you need to remember.

Merit can be compared to a kind of currency that can be spent for the purchase of things you desire in life. Folks, I am revealing a huge secret here. If you accumulate enough merit, you will have no problem getting anything you want in life – wealth, happiness, and enlightenment is no different.

Positive thinking, manifestation and visualization are good tools to manifest what you desire, but they are only effective if you have the necessary merit to afford them. That’s why almost all religions tell you to give at least 10% of your income to charity. That’s where the idea of tithing comes from. To help yourself, you must help other people first. Merit is the one thing missing from many of the self-help books available on the market today. It’s what separates winners from losers.

Assume we have a lifetime of sixty years. To those who seek after enlightenment, this is very important. The account of life must be calculated clearly.

A sixty-year-old life. Thirty years is spent sleeping in bed. Only thirty years left. In these three decades, the first decade is spent as a naive child. There goes ten years. Later on, we get old, every part of our body is aged and doesn’t work properly. So let’s count that as another five years. Only fifteen years are left. Fifteen years of life to live.

How much time is left? Thirty years, minus these deductions, plus three meals a day, a bunch of number 1s and 2s, and all kinds of other messy stuff. How many years are you really living? Calculate it yourself.

In these remaining years, if you are not in pain and stress, you are lying in bed sick. Have you considered this before?

I know a bit of accounting, too. Did I do a good job? This is called cost accounting.

See? Life is like this. In this short-lived life, if we do not work hard in diligent practice, then this life is pointless and worthless.

We need to contribute to the world – spiritual cultivation is about service to other beings. In other words, you can become a monk today, go study under a guru, but you’ll only learn meditation, special techniques, mantra, worship, which are all at the prelinary stage of merit accumulation. Wisdom accumulation won’t even be mentioned. Those with a lot of merit also have a lot of wisdom.

Really, merit can be bought with money, but wisdom can not. Wisdom is not worth a dime, but you can’t get it. Why aren’t your level of wisdom high? Because you have not accumulated merit. Therefore, the first step of any spiritual path is the accumulation of these two things. Only when a student has sufficient merit can he or she move on.

Student: Master, will you please talk about health and the regimen of life?

Master: Do not worry about health. Forget the body. Forget the self. Forget even the length of life. Forget time and space. The more you engage the body, the more you wish for longevity, the worse it will be. I tell you the truth.

From the point of view of my own health in the past few years, I can verify this. The more you worry about the body, the more you lack good health. The perception of the body becomes more serious. Any tiny threat to the body will cause you to panic.

If you want health, you should attach great importance on the word emptiness. In this world, many people desperately consume vast amounts of energy and resources in their pursuit of a good life. Yet, they are only speeding up the depletion of life itself. To maintain good health and longevity, they must learn to be still, be quiet, and be empty.

To understand life and realize the highest realm of existence, a person first need to know how to enjoy solitude. Otherwise, when they get old, when they retire, that person will be in pain – because all of a sudden they have nothing to take care. Many people do not know how to live with this. During retirement, many old people actually just want to die – all because of their fear of solitude.

Everyone has their own method of sleep. Here, I introduce three special methods that you can try:

1. Simply stretch your legs before going to sleep. Sit in the lotus posture or cross-legged on the bed. Make sure the posture is natural. Place both hands over each other resting on the legs. Breath naturally. Feel that the pores of the entire body is breathing as one unit. If you start yawning and tears starts to come out, then the effect will be even better. When it comes time to sleep, go ahead and lie down on the pillow to sleep.

2. Lying on your back, breath naturally and feel that the breath is like a spring breeze. The breeze first melts the muscles in the big toe… the other four toes… the feet… the calves…the legs… all the muscles slowly melting away. If you are still awake after doing this, repeat this until you fall asleep.

3. For those of you who fall asleep right away, you can sleep on your right side. Place your right palm to support the right ear. The palm of the right hand is attributed with the element of fire. The ear is attributed with the water element. When you sleep like this, the two elements come together and forms “Completion” (the 63rd Hexagram in the I Ching) or the coordination between the heart and the kidney in the body. In the long term, this will nourish both the heart and the kidney.

Traffic laws – if you don’t know them, then it’s easy for you to get into an accident. For example, 23:00 to 3:00 is the period when the bile of the liver is most active. The liver and the gallbladder need to recover the blood. If you remember last week’s post, you need to lie down during this time. If you go to bed every night at around 22:00, being quiet and not speaking to anyone, you will be asleep by 23:00. The hepatobiliary system starts to recover, filters out toxic blood, resulting in fresh blood. You won’t have any gallstones, no hepatitis, nor any type of cystic disease if you sleep at 22:00. If you stay up until 1:00 every day, the liver can not recover, and it will be impossible to remove the toxic blood. Fresh blood can not be generated. The gallbladder can’t even exchange its bile liquid, so these people are easily prone to gallstones, cysts, and a variety of other diseases.

In Europe, one in four people have the hepatitis virus. These people don’t know the “traffic laws” of sleep. It’s best to not talk half an hour before you go to sleep. Obviously, don’t talk when you are on the bed. When you talk, your lung becomes active, and the same goes with your heart. When people talk, it’s easy for them to enter an excited state, so it makes it harder to fall asleep.

21:00 – 23:00 is the best time to go to bed. Sleeping at this time benefits the arteries. It is a common characteristic for people with long lives to sleep before 21:00. If you are a female, sleeping at this time is the secret to maintaining a beautiful appearance. You should sleep early and rise early.

The windows need to be closed when you are asleep. Don’t leave the fans or the air conditioners on. A lot of illnesses can be caused by leaving them on. Because the blood circulation is slow when people are asleep, the body temperature drops, so a layer of yang chi will form on the surface of the body. This layer of yang chi is what prevents ghosts from invading. What does this mean? It means people with sufficient yang chi don’t have nightmares, because the yang chi is what can protect you from negative entities. This is not the case if the air conditioning and the fan are left on. If the windows are open, the wind slips through the windows, and the wind will enter into your tendons. If the air conditioners are left on, there is also wind, and the wind again goes into your tendons. The cold wind enters the bones. When you wake up in the morning, your body becomes yellow. Your face turns yellow. That tendon behind your neck becomes stiff. Your joints will feel sore and painful. Some people may even get a fever. This is all caused by the cold wind that slipped into the tendons and the bones of the body. In other words, your chi is damaged. If the windows, the air conditioner, the fans, even the door of the bedroom are not open when you sleep at night, you would get better sleep. If it is hot, open the bedroom door, but leave the windows closed. This will get you slightly less effective sleep, but your whole body won’t be in fatigue, and your back won’t be stiff, when you wake up the next day.

Some people leaves the air conditioner in the living room on and the door of the bedroom open. This is about the same as sleeping with the air conditioning on. Once the air conditioning is turned on, the cold wind from the air conditioner enters the bones, so it turns the mind cold. Where is the mind? The mind is in the brain. The brain is a sea of marrow. The cold wind is in the bones marrows. Of course, this means the cold wind is also in the mind. That’s why there is a fever.

Always try to sleep early. If you sleep late, and damages the small amount of yang chi that you have, then you will surely be weary the next day. Close the windows. Don’t leave the air conditioning or the fan on. Protect your yang chi.

The habits and lifestyle of the twenty-first century causes a lot of negative effects on people’s body. They have caused the “four serious diseases” of the modern era: refrigerator syndrome, fruit syndrome, TV and Computer syndrome, all nighters syndrome.

Midnight (23:00-1:00), in fact, 23:00 is the beginning of a new day, not the 0:00 that the day starts with. This is a wrong concept that we have made. At 23:00, when the gall bladder opens, if you are not asleep by then, your metabolism and immunity will decline, so your bodily functions are greatly reduced. The central nervous system will be damaged, making you more susceptible to a variety of mental illnesses, such as depression, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, agitation, psychosis, etc. From 11pm to 1am, if the gall bladder wants to replace the bile, and this can not be done, after a long time, you may find kidney stones starting to form.

If you are not asleep from 1:00-3:00, the liver won’t be able to get rid of the toxins in your body, or create fresh blood, causing negative effects on the possession of blood, leaving it blue. After a long time, you will be susceptible to various types of liver disease. Nowadays, people don’t have very good livers, particularly in European countries. On average, there are 1 in 4 individuals who are hepatitis B positive, mostly because of they are living in violation of the natural laws of nature. It’s caused by not going to sleep before midnight. Hepatitis A can be cured easily, but hepatitis B is very difficult to treat. Hepatitis B virus carriers often do not sleep at night because they are too weak. In other words, their life is a mess. The virus has already reached inside the cells. That is the hepatitis B virus is within the cells, but right now it still doesn’t have the power to cause hepatitis. When the body is at its most vulnerable state, the virus will strike, and hepatitis will form. This means that there will be a 40% – 60% chance of getting getting liver sclerosis in the future.

A wise man should know heaven, earth, and the relationship between people. An unwise man would hence be replaced.

Nowadays, society puts money above almost everything else. Many people complain that many kinds of greedy officials are appearing in society, but the fact is all these people grew up in ordinary families. If you think they that greed is more and more of a problem today, then you must realize that it’s not their fault, but rather caused by inadequate family and social education. That’s the reason why education is called the issue of the century.

Today, many parents like to pass the dreams they can’t realize in their own lives on to their kids and put the pressure to make them happen on to their shoulders. This gives kids incredible stress, and is very harmful to many kids’ mental development. I’m reminded of a man who did not do well in most of the subjects he studied, so after half a year, he dropped out and started studying by himself. Today, he is the most respected man in Asia. Many people become educated through self-learning, so it should be up to ourselves to choose what we really want to become.

During the Warring States Period, a famous doctor named Wen Zhi told Emperor Qi Wei, “My rule for physical health is to put sleep before anything else. Humans and animals only grow during their sleep. Sleep helps food digest in the stomach. Therefore, sleep is the number one way to preserve health. When a person doesn’t sleep for an entire night, even one hundred days may not be enough for that person to recover.”

From 9 PM at night to 5 AM in the morning is an effective period for sleep. Man is an animal, and like plants, are organisms. At daytime (5 AM to 9 PM), the activities humans do produce energy. At nighttime (9 PM to 5 AM), cell division do their work, taking the energy produced during the day and turns them into new cells. It is the time when the cells rehabilitate, and the biological cycle resets. The sun is on the other side of the earth. Yin directs stillness. It is time for man to sleep. To sleep at this time will make man have good physical and mental health. This means babies who sleep a lot becomes chubby, grows fast, and noisy kids’ development is also related to sleep.

Sleep is a function of health. Using many healthy cells to replace putrid ones. For example, a night without sleep and the body can’t replace its putrid cells. If a million cells wither away during daytime, the body would only be able to replace half of them. Then, your body will have deficits. After a long time, people will become hallow, like the hallowing of a radish. Why do some people live over one hundred years? – because they sleep every night at 9 PM.

Plants absorb the sun’s energy, and grows at night. This is why at night there are jointing sounds from crops on the farm. Humans and plants are both organisms. The time for cell division for these two kinds of organisms are about the same. Once it’s past the time to sleep, the rate new cells are produced won’t catch up to the rate old cells wither. As a result, humans will age faster or fall ill. Man needs to live in accordance with nature. Follow where the sun goes. If the sun is up, I am up. If the sun is down, I sleep. Man is but a speck of dust in front of the sun. To go in opposition of the sun is a foolish choice. Sooner or later, you’ll be destroyed by the gigantic force of the sun. This is objective truth.

In practical real life, many people have trouble falling asleep, and some have problems with the quality of their sleep. Sleep is an integral matter. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, when there is an excess of liver fire and an excess of stomach fire, people will feel uneasy with sleep. If the Yin element is insufficient in the liver, sleep would be tiring.