Bernie Siegel’s Soul Prescriptions
Five ways to live a happier life.
By Bernie S. Siegel, M.D.

From “365 Prescriptions for the Soul.” Used with permission of New World Library

Prescription #1: Gratitude
A gentleman I was talking to on the phone related that his doctor and the EMR team had told him his heart stopped beating and he had died at least five times during surgery. He concluded our conversation by saying, “I used to have troubles, but now I have only blessings.” His outlook clearly had been turned around by this experience.

I meditate each day, and one portion of the meditation consists of my thinking about what I am grateful for. Most of us never stop to consider our blessings; rather, we spend the day only thinking about our problems. But since you have to be alive to have problems, be grateful for the opportunity to have them. Some people use their problems to get attention and are afraid to give them up and be blessed. I prefer to appreciate life and accept my problems as a part of my life.

When my body gets to the point where I can no longer function or feel gratitude, then I’ll leave it and become grateful again. But until then, I will appreciate what I have and not whine about what I don’t have. I will feel blessed by life and the opportunity to help others see that they are blessed too. Blessings come in many shapes and sizes. Be prepared, as my gentleman caller was.

Prescription #2: Hope
Hope restores us. What each of us hopes for will differ and change with time. I believe we need hope to go on living. Hope inspires us to reach for the future. It gives us something to look forward to and strive for on our path.
If we had no hope—for a cure, for winning the lottery, for falling in love, for the end of war, for being free of abuse, or for having food, warmth, clothing, and shelter—we would have no reason to go on. What you hope for doesn’t matter, but rather the essence of hope itself.

I see people who die a few minutes after a doctor tells them there is no hope of a cure. They give up and go. Others get angry and find joy in proving the doctor wrong. Something within them is challenged and hopeful. Hope is the divine motivator.

Prescription #3: Guidance
One day Marilyn, one of our support group members, sent me an email with the subject line “guidance.” In her email, she told me that the word “dance” being a part of the word guidance made her think about how dancing is like doing God’s will. Two people dancing are not struggling with each other; one leads and the other willingly follows. When the two become a team, their movements flow in harmony with each other. When she looked back at the word she saw the G as representing God and then U and I. So guidance is about God, you, and I dancing together.

When you are willing to trust and believe, guidance comes. I believe the rhythm we should all be dancing to comes from our Creator. It allows us to move as a team while creating our unique dance of life.

Prescription #4: New Year’s Resolutions
It is not a bad thing to make a New Year’s resolution, but you can also continuously set yourself up to fail. Be realistic and forgiving. The best resolution is to accept your limitations and start from there. Resolve not to give up on yourself, and to love yourself, even when you don’t like your behavior. So resolve to practice doing what you have resolved, rather than achieving sainthood tomorrow.

As you write down your resolutions, remember these things: Be kind; do not set yourself up for failure by creating multiple resolutions that involve too much self-denial. Keep your goals manageable and realistic. The best resolutions leave one day of the week to enjoy being human and not living by any rules or expectations you have created.

Prescription #5: Every Day Is New Year’s
A “new year” — I think the term is an oxymoron. How can you have a new year? You are the same person, and the world doesn’t start again with a clean slate. Your troubles don’t disappear. People don’t forgive you for what you did the year before. Unless you have amnesia, your life is anything but new when you awaken on the first day of the year. It is simply a way of measuring the passage of time. Why make such a fuss over it?

The truth lies in our desire to be reborn, to start again, to make resolutions and changes we can live up to. Then why wait for a certain date to start a new year? Why can’t tomorrow be New Year’s Day? Maybe it is!

I see it every day in my role as a physician: People learn they have a limited time to live, and they start their New Year behavior. They move, change jobs, spend more time with those they love, stop worrying about what everyone else thinks of them, and start to celebrate their life. They are grateful for the time they have to enjoy life and they stop whining about what they wish had happened during the past year.

When every evening is New Year’s Eve and every day you awaken is New Year’s Day, you are living life as it was intended.

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The Wisdom of the Day is brought to you by Sam Singh

First let me explain the sandbox theory. The sandbox effect is said to exist for new websites to discourage spam farms and short term link builders from being a valid result from search queries. That being said, it is often argued that it is better to buy an existing domain to build on then to develop a web from a new domain. I decided to put this to the test and develop 2 pages to rank for the term Brian McDowell.

Site 1
URL: http://www.GrubbDawg.com/
AGE: December 01, 2001
DESCRIPTION: The site has the phrase Brian McDowell on the home page one time. Brian McDowell is used as anchor text and links to Brian McDowell’s Linked-in profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/mcdowell. This page has a PR of 0 and no incoming links (0 according to Google. 52 according to Yahoo). The site was not optimized for the term in any way. The terms Brian and McDowell did not appear in the meta information at the time of the test (or ever in the history of the site). The GrubbDawg home page fails W3C validation with 8 errors.

Site 2
URL: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mcdowell
AGE: June 04, 2003
DESCRIPTION: The site has the term Brian McDowell on the page 5 times. Brian is used 12 times, McDowell is used 5 and McDowell’s is used 6 times. This site has a PR of 0 and has 0 incoming links from Google. The only link it has from Yahoo are from the GrubbDawg domain which you would assume would pass authority to this page. The Brian McDowell Linked-In profile fails W3C validation with 68 errors. The Term Brian McDowell appears in the meta title and the meta description.

I chose to test the sandbox theory on the name Brian McDowell since it is a non-competitive key phrase and top positioning should take little effort. Once I put the link in place, I sat back and waited for the infamous caching. Keep in mind that GrubbDawg was initially built with a flash entry page and was a test site since creation outside of the eyes of the search engines. This is the first time there was any relation for the term Brian McDowell.

The results? My search query on Google for the term Brian McDowell turned up both pages in the top 10 (positions 6 and 7 to be exact) in a matter of 2 weeks. During that time, no effort was put in to optimize either site for Brian McDowell or any other term. Both pages were untouched.

What now? Well obviously I created this writeup on optimizing for Brian McDowell so let’s see how long it takes to surpass the homepage. I also purchased a brand new domain to bring into the game. Stay tuned as my next writeup will be about Brian McDowell playing in the sandbox.

Forgiveness is having the courage to take down the walls that we think are there to protect us.

-Suztes40

The Wisdom of the Day is brought to you by Sam Singh

If we examine every stage of our lives, we find that from our first breath to our last we are under the constraint of circumstances. And yet we still possess the greatest of all freedoms, the power of developing our innermost selves in harmony with the moral order of the Universe, and so winning peace at heart whatever obstacles we meet.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Wisdom of the Day is brought to you by Sam Singh

I love my job. Last Friday we had our annual meeting at the U.S. National Whitewater Center in Charlotte NC. I was amazed by this place the second I got there. Now as you drive down this narrow road passing homes that can’t be more then 500 sq/ft (but on multiple acres), you can’t begin to imagine what inhabits the end of the road.

This place is an outdoor fanatics dream! This 300 acre complex has everything from white water rafting, rock climbing, hiking, mountain biking and team building ropes courses to picnic areas with fire pits. They also have a bar with one of the most diverse micro-brew selections in Charlotte (I chose the Hobgoblin, Rogue and DogFish Head 60). The buffet lunch that they prepared for our company was absolutely delicious.

The guides were all friendly and you could just tell they love their jobs. Head on over and check out their event calendar to see whats going on. They often have live music and special events. Head on over there and check them out some day. Spend a day rock climbing then settle back for a brew and some tunes by the fire pit.

LOVE

“I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend against its force… My love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.”
– Og Mandino

“Every instance of heartbreak can teach us powerful lessons about creating the kind of love we really want.”
– Martha Beck

“Nine-tenths of wisdom is appreciation. Go find somebody’s hand and squeeze it, while there’s time.”
– Dale Dauten

“Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”
– Jeanne Moreau

The Wisdom of the Day is brought to you by Sam Singh

“The life of the individual only has meaning insofar as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful.”

-Albert Einstein

The Wisdom of the Day is brought to you by Sam Singh

So as I mentioned before, I decided to go with WordPress for my blogging site. As an SEO professional, site structure was at the top of my list as was the tools I will be engaged with at home and at work. My career path has taken me from the land of ASP.net into the dark world of PHP (so long Microsoft, it was a fun ride). One of the things I liked about WordPress was the wealth of Plug-ins available and the ease of use. The first plug in I enabled was “All-in-one SEO” by Uberdose. This enables me to toss in the noindex functionality for archives to avoid some of the duplicate content issues. It also makes those stubern meta tags easier to maintain. There is a lot more work to do but the blog is young and ready to cultivate.

I believe there is an important distinction to be made between religion and spirituality. Religion I take to be concerned with belief in the claims to salvation of one faith tradition or another–an aspect of which is acceptance of some form of meta-physical or philosophical reality, including perhaps an idea of heaven or hell. Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma, ritual, prayers and so on. Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit–such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony, which bring happiness to both self and others.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

The Wisdom of the Day is brought to you by Sam Singh

In my endless search to find the proper CMS, I have decided to go with the infamous WordPress. This process was a major pain and included many trial configurations of Community Server and Dot Net Nuke. I have bounced between multiple hosting companies and domain servers. A huge thank you must go out to the support over at Code Moose Web Hosting who were patient with me as I got everything straightened out.