Dementia or Forgetfulness?

Dementia or Forgetfulness?

Did you forget that today is New Year's Eve?

As we continue to age, we all become forgetful. Memory lapses are not uncommon, but it doesn't mean we all will have dementia.

The symptoms of memory loss and dementia may look similar in the beginning: gradual, and even insidious. When signs of dementia begin to surface, some patients may try to "cover up" or even blatantly deny that there are problems; others may blame others. No matter what, ultimately, the early signs of dementia will become more serious and obvious, and they include the following:

(1) The person is uncharacteristically negative and suspicious. Sometimes it is difficult to tell if it is dementia or not, especially if that person is also suffering from anxiety or depression.

(2) The person is negligent of his or her personal care and grooming, such as not bathing or shampooing. Again, an individual with severe depression may also neglect his or her personal hygiene.

(3) The person has difficulty in conversation, such as repeating the same thing, or talking vaguely without any specifics.

(4) The person has lost his or her motor skills, such as displaying uncharacteristically illegible handwriting, or inability to type or use the computer.

(5) The person is unable to make a phone call, even if he or she remembers the phone number.

(6) The person eats improperly, such as eating only sweets when there is a proper meal.

(7) The person keeps the house badly cluttered and disorganized.

(8) The person shows poor judgment in spending. Again, an individual suffering from anxiety or other mental disorders, such as bipolar depression, may also demonstrate the same behavioral problems in over spending.

(9) Other more dangerous signs of dementia may include: consistently forgetting to turn off the stove; wandering around outside at night; acting inappropriately in response to "paranoid" suspicions, such as calling the police based on paranoia.

If a member of your family demonstrates some of these obvious signs of dementia, be more observant of the behavioral patterns or conditions to see if medical or professional help is needed.

Anyway, it is important to keep your brain healthy through diet and exercise. Your brain has billions of cells, and only a fraction of them are used. Despite the degeneration due to aging, you can still harness your brain power; use it or lose it. 

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Mind Wellness Wisdom

Mind Wellness Wisdom

The mind plays a pivotal role in wellness wisdom of the body, the mind, and the soul; as a matter of fact, it balances and connects the body and soul. To enhance you mind wellness wisdom, you need a reverse mindset.

What is reverse mindset? And why is it essential to human wisdom?

Lao Tzu, the author of Tao Te Ching, an ancient Chinese classic on human wisdom, advocated reverse mindset for human wisdom. His wisdom was profound, and his Tao Te Ching has become one of the most translated and extensively read books in world literature.

Descartes, the great philosopher, once said: "I think, therefore I am." Indeed, human wisdom comes from the mind—that is, how we think, because our thoughts determine who we are and what we do. Wisdom has to do with mental perceptions of what we experience, as well as with our interpretations of those perceptions.

But our thoughts may deceive us; that is, they may mislead us and do not tell us the absolute truths. Therefore, true human wisdom is the capability to separate the truths from the half-truths or the myths. To see through the deception or illusion created by our minds, we need wisdom or clarity of mind. According to Lao Tzu:

"We need a still and composed mind

to see things with greater clarity.

Because trouble begins in the mind."

Lance Armstrong, the dishonored athlete, is a classic example of having the wrong mindset of success is due to effort. Armstrong , as an aspiring athlete, created an ego-self that craved for satisfaction. To meet his own expectations as well as those of others, including his coach, he manipulated the doping program in order to excel and surpass others. He got what he wanted through "over-doing" but with an ultimate price -- losing everything, including what he thought he had gained. Armstrong's mindset is a conventional one for success: "over-doing" or "do more and get more" Mind wellness wisdom is to reverse that mindset.

The unconventional wisdom, according to Lao Tzu, is to have no separate-self. With no ego, you have no expectations; you do what you need to do, without undue efforts, you live in the present, enjoying every moment of it while you wait patiently for things to turn out naturally or the way they are supposed to. Without over-doing, everything will settle into its perfect place. That is the wisdom of "under-doing" -- or mind wellness wisdom mindset.

For more information, visit my website: Wisdom in Living.

Stephen Lau 

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Optimize Your Brain Health

The art of living well is to optimize brain health.

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 even sleeping. 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 because they determine your life choices. 

To live well, you need a healthy brain. Optimize 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 to optimize brain health.

Everybody wants to lose some weight; some may even want to lose a lot more. Sadly, most of them gain back all the pounds they have lost, and then some. Why is that? Because weight loss is not just about eating less; after all, everybody wants to eat more, not less. Weight loss is about everything. Natural healthy weight loss is all-round, that is, it involves the body, the mind, and the spirit. To illustrate, natural healthy weight loss is also about the thinking mid; it is the thoughts that make you fat, more than anything else. According to Esther and Jerry Hicks' bestseller Money and the Law of Attraction, people not only want the food but also believe that the food will make them fat, and thus have created that which they do not want. Unfortunately, their thoughts "attract" what they do not want, so their bodies respond naturally to the thinking mind, and, as a result, they gain instead of losing weight.

(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, learning to breathe right. Correct breathing brings sufficient oxygen and nutrients to your brain cells for optimum maintenance. Maintaining good posture holds the key to breathing right.

Create a healthier brain through breathing exercises and breathing right. 

(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.  

(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!

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

A Pre-Conditioned Mind

A Pre-Conditioned Mind

You have heard "think out of the box", but is it easy to do that?

Most of us have a pre-conditioned mind, which is controlled by our subconscious mind. To think out of the box, you must have an empty mind in order to change your conditioned thinking. 

The human brain is like a computer program. Your whole being is like the computer hardware with the apparatus of a mind, body, and senses. The lens through which you see yourself, as well as others and the world around, is the software that has been programmed by your thoughts, your past and present experiences, your own expectations as well as those of others. That is to say, you may have subconsciously programmed your mind all these years with your memories, perceptions, and thoughts such that you may have become trapped in a constricted sense of self that has prevented you from knowing and being who you really are. 

Now, you must harness your mind power to change that conditioned thinking. That was one of the reasons why I wrote the book Be A Better and Happier You With Tao Wisdom, published on Amazon.

This 132-page book is based on the profound human wisdom expressed in “Tao Te Ching” written by Lao Tzu, an ancient sage from China.  “Tao Te Ching” is one of the most translated works in world literature due to its intriguing and profound views on human wisdom. Be A Better And Happier You With Tao Wisdom not only contains the translation in simple English of the complete text of the 5,000-word immortal classic “Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tzu, but also shows you how to attain true human wisdom through asking self-intuitive questions, creating an empty mindset with reverse thinking to let go of the ego-self to become a better and happier you.

TAO wisdom enables you to see the wisdom in the oneness of all life—that everything exists because of its “opposite” and that everything will ultimately become its opposite, just as youth becoming old age, and life becoming death. Spontaneity, which is following the natural laws of nature, holds the key to attaining true human wisdom to live your life as if everything is a miracle, even though you may have an autoimmune disease.

Part One of my book explains the prerequisites of human wisdom. Without true human wisdom, it is almost impossible to perceive the innate human goodness in self, as well as in others. Human goodness leads to the attributes of genuine human happiness.

Part Two is the complete translation of the 81 short chapters of Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching" in simple English for readers to understand the complex and controversial wisdom of “Tao Te Ching.”

Part Three highlights the essentials of TAO wisdom, and shows how it can be applied to contemporary living so that you may live as if everything is a miracle to be a better and happier you.

Happiness holds the key to recuperation from your autoimmune disease. Remember, all autoimmune diseases have to do with stress, which is often a byproduct of unhappiness. Happiness changes the way you look at your life, the way you make your life choices and decisions that may positively or negatively impact your disease over the long haul. Be a better and happier you through TAO wisdom.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Change Your Perspective of Love

Change Your Perspective of Love

We’re living in a world of conflicts and wars, but love still plays a pivotal role in our lives. Love involves our feelings and emotions; love gives us both happiness and pain. When the love is fulfilled, we feel happy; when the love is rejected or unfilled, we feel pain. 

In Christianity, love refers to the love of God and the love of one’s neighbors or even enemies. In Buddhism, love refers to an awakened state of mind; the word “Buddha” means “wake up.”

If you want to love others—no matter they deserve your love or not—you must love yourself first. .

Ironically enough, it‘s not easy to love yourself, let alone loving others, especially those you’re not particularly fond of.  

To love yourself is not as easy as you may think.

You may be judgmental: being hard on yourself, and feeling your inadequacy in spite of some success in your life. That is, your accomplishments to date may not be good enough for you, and therefore you want more.

You may have a pre-conditioned set of criteria for yourself, based on the self-image you have created for yourself, such as being too fat.

So, the first step is to change your perspectives of how you look at yourself or others. If there is anything you wish to change, then make the effort to change it. If you can’t, then accept what you cannot change. Self-acceptance is an important ingredient in the expression of love. If you cannot accept yourself, there is no way for you to accept others, let alone loving them.

To initiate any change, you must be mindful of why you need to change, and how to go about making the change. Mindfulness holds the key to discovering how you think and feel about yourself. 

Empty your mind of any pre-conditioned thinking or conventional mindset. For example, many of us are ingrained in our minds that the purpose of life is to enjoy—that has led to our quest for materialism. Another example, many of us have the belief that we all have inherited badness from the Fall of Adam, and therefore we may feel guilty for not being good enough, and thus leading to depression. 

All in all, to be able to love others, you need to love yourself first. To do just that, you need to empty your mind, and be mindful of the need to change your perspectives and to accept what you cannot change.

Be A Better and Happy You With Tao Wisdom: to find out how to have a loving and compassionate mind with Tao wisdom and live your life as if everything is a miracle.

Stephen Lau

Copyright © Stephen Lau

Empower Your Mind

Empower Your Mind

It is how you think that is important, rather than what you think.

The human mind is complex: it is composed of a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. In your conscious mind, you input what you want to remember and store it there. Your decisions and actions in life are based on the information stored in your conscious mind. Your subconscious mind involuntarily receives information that you are exposed to through your five senses, such as hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting. Your subconscious mind does not filter the input; in other words, you may not want to remember the information but the input is subconscious. But it is your subconscious mind that controls and dominates your conscious mind. An example, commercials bombard you with images of a product, and over time you may become affected or influenced by those images even though your conscious mind rejects them.

  

Accordingly, you can change your subconscious mind for life transformation. Target your subconscious mind, and not your conscious mind.

Empower the mind with subliminal messages, which work as a mild form of self-hypnosis -- slowly and gradually sending suggestions into your subconscious mind to change any incorrect self-beliefs, wrong ways of thinking, and even undesirable patterns of behavior. These subliminal messages allow you not only to bypass your "logical" conscious mind but also to overcome any resistance that may hold you back, thereby enabling you to access your subconscious mind with positive messages for mind empowering. Because of this state-of-the-art technology, you can develop in ways which would not be normally possible with your conscious personal development alone. Subliminal messages are powerful tools for mind empowering. Science and technology have made it possible to increase mind power to live a better life.

Once you have mastered the subliminal messages, you can master your mind by controlling its thoughts. Remember, you are your thoughts, and your life is a byproduct of you thoughts. As Napoleon Hill, the famous writer, said: "What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve." Yes, you can achieve success in your career, weight loss, relationships, or just about anything.

Subliminal MP3s: With over 200 subliminal MP3s for immediate download. Get your FREE copies to change your life for the better.The possibilities are limitless. 

A Course in Mind Power: Learn the untold secrets to unleashing your super mind power to transform your life to overcome your life stressors. Life is always mind over matter.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

The Importance of Human Wisdom

The Importance of Human Wisdom

The ancient Tao wisdom from China -- the wisdom of Lao Tzu, the ancient sage who was the author of the immortal classic Tao Te Ching on human wisdom -- provides a blueprint for nourishing human wisdom: an empty mind with reverse thinking, mindfulness for clarity thinking, living in the present with no expectations of the future, no picking and choosing, accepting and embracing everything that comes in the natural cycle of change—what goes up must always come down. True human wisdom is the ability to understand that how the mind works and how human attachments are formed.

Why is human wisdom so important in the art of living well? The mind is responsible for thinking, and hence what we do and how we live our lives. Our thinking comes from our thoughts, which derive from our perceptions based on our five senses. Our thoughts then become our memories, stored in our subconscious minds. These subconscious  memories affect our many life choices and decisions either positively or negatives, producing many experiences that become our assumptions and predictions that further change the way we think. In short, our life experiences become the raw materials with which we form not only our realities but also our ego-selves.

One of the essentials of Tao wisdom is living in the present moment. Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind said at the end: “Tomorrow is another day.”

Yes, tomorrow is another day, but that day may or may never come. Fortunately or unfortunately, we always choose to believe that it will come. Fortunately in that it may give us hope and expectation; unfortunately in that it may divorce ourselves from the realities of life, making us less grateful of the present or less thankful of what we already have 

Living in the now is exemplary of the consciousness of being, which holds the key to understanding human wisdom. Today is now, and mindfulness of the present is the realization not only that tomorrow is another day but also that it may never come. This mental consciousness makes us aware that we must be constantly asking ourselves mind-searching questions about what we need to know now; what we need to love now; what we need to be grateful for now. In short, today provides the compass and roadmap for our life journey, which may abruptly end tomorrow.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau