Stan Chung, Author

September 3rd 2019 Dear Summer, You have flown by and we have filled you with much more action than reflection. So the time has come for some reflection on that... which protects and nurtures wellness, healing, and self-awareness. It is one thing to do all the wonderful things that we have done this summer to promote self-care and keep relationships healthy, but it is another question to ask about our healing. Do I feel better? Do I have positive systems in place that will provide me the kind of resilience needed to thrive in the coming months? First of all, I start and end with self-awareness. How am I doing? Hmm. Very well, but a more focused question is this: what habits have I gained this summer that are positive and what habits do I need to modify or pay better attention to? I start with the word habits because habits are what you do consciously and unconsciously to manage what I term the four bases of self-care. These bases are sleep, exercise, diet, and reflection. Let’s start with asking about sleep. How am I sleeping? How is your sleep? To me there are three things to note about sleep: duration, quality, and consistency. When you are starting out on the journey of self-care, sleep is #1. It is first base. You can’t do a lot without it. If you’re not sleeping well, then everything becomes a challenge, especially mood. I think my sleep duration still needs work. I need a bit more. After all, sleep is intimately connected to exercise and diet: I have weaknesses in those other two areas that impact my sleep. So, if I need to sleep longer how do I do it? Strangely enough, one of the positive habits that I’m learning is not to stress out about sleep. If I don’t sleep well, then, first, I need to be aware of it. In the words of Jackson Browne, who I saw this summer in Sandpoint, Idaho, no more running on empty. Once I am aware of my sense of energy gained from sleep, then I can say to myself: you have to watch your mood today; you might need a nap today; you need to pay attention to your energy levels so you don’t go into the red zone trying to do things that may cause further harm than good. Sleep quality is also something that I am working on: I need to find ways to reduce interruptions at night and at dawn. Finally, sleep consistency is the big thing for me. Yes, I am doing a better job tracking my sleep over ten days so that I can make decisions about my sleep with the right data. Tracking my sleep, energy, and mood over ten days has turned out to be very important to my overall wellbeing. So good job on that one. Next, exercise is second base. I’ve done a good job on exercise this summer, but I still have a long way to go. I’ve enjoyed golf, tennis, biking, swimming, and hiking every week this summer. I have probably done more this summer than any before it, so why am I still so hard on myself? Yes, I think that’s a very good question. My self-assessment habits speak to my tendency to see gaps and instead of victories. I am hard on myself in ways that need better understanding. I need more positive regard for myself. How do I do that? More on that soon. The third base is diet. I think my eating habits continue to need strengthening, particularly reducing late night snacking and improving vegetable intake at dinner. But we are doing well, especially buying the right things at the grocery store and making sure that meal planning happens. I give Alberta and I good marks for all the healthy meals that have been prepared. Our teamwork really pays off. Eating fresh cilantro, parsley, basil, and heirloom tomatoes from Alberta’s garden is such tasty joy. Finally, reflection is the last stop, home plate. I think the core of my reflection habit is maintaining a daily journal which I did not do in August but have maintained for many years. Journal writing is nutrition for the soul. It doesn’t just make life better, it makes it juicier and much more meaningful. Reflection helps make the most of the gift that is life. According to James Clear’s wonderful book Atomic Habits, habit building begins with small habits that compound into systems that help us achieve optimal self-care. My habits around four key areas need continuous attention, but not in the manner where one is always setting goals. Frankly, a guy like me doesn’t need more goals. On the contrary, for me the key is to build a habit of self-awareness so I can watch and understand my own thoughts. What am I thinking? What am I not thinking? Who the heck is doing the thinking? I need to build small and easy ways to be more aware of what I think about. One of the best things for me is to do this: write down ten things every morning that I am grateful for. So here they are for this morning. I am grateful to be alive, to breath air, and fill my lungs with a sense of energy, love, and soul. I am grateful for my family and the people around me who love me. I am grateful to live with a body that is healthy, strong, and relatively pain-free. I am grateful for plants that nourish us and offer us nothing more than beauty. I am grateful for the sky and sun and clouds. I am grateful for how tenuous, delicate, and fast-moving life is for within the rushing river of time, I can find lasting meaning. I am grateful for self-awareness, so that I can reflect on my time here, to be grateful for nature and all my relationships, and to sense through my body and mind, a gentle spirit of acceptance. I am grateful that life is good. I am grateful for you who reads this and those who don’t as well. It’s OK. It’s all good. Thank you for being you. Finally, I am grateful for the silence and emptiness of this page that makes life feel so wondrous, full, and beautiful. Sincerely, Sae

Dear Sad Friend, This is not the best analogy but sadness is like a bad cold. Not a happy feeling but it’s short term. Sadness and a cold have to be watched because they can be a messenger for something more....Continue reading

Sunday Letter to a Friend - May 27th 2018 Dear Friend, Sorry I don't recall you being in Maui or you getting hurt. The downside of being hurt is, yeah, being hu...rt. The upside is that it can represent our desire to try new things and do things that require some sort of risk. Risk is one of the key topics concerning wellness that I have learned. It's like a tao fulcrum. Sometimes our desire to risk emotionally teaches us that we still really need to feel, still need to take chances and feel alive. But when the risk is not necessarily appropriate or involves potentially involving other people, risk can be a self-centered disregard for others in favour of our less noble appetites. To be blunt about it, researchers correlate emotional affairs with mental instability. Many of us go through difficult periods and an affair is a strong indicator of the need for more self care, more self listening, and perhaps living more closely to an awareness that isn't just focussed on our harming ourselves through filling our immediate appetites. I have come to consider that most of the world's big problematic issues--from colonial capitalism, mega corporations, environmental degradation, to global patriarchy--are less about solely external situations and more about what lurks inside us as we address the confusion as well as the liberation of our desires/instincts. In short, externally appearing problems reflect the extent to which we understand and listen to the pain and trauma of our families and our cultures. That's why hurt people hurt people without knowing it. That's why trauma can last for tens of generations. That's why the most typical sign of trauma is self-trauma, the surprising yet typical desire to pursue self harm--to self-sabotage our happiness, to punish ourselves for our own shame, failures, guilt, and moral injuries. On my better days, I have this feeling that so many people are walking around in the midst of trauma. Even being a witness to trauma can be triggering and release unconscious or generational forms of non-physical suffering. Even the word "pain," I realize, is so easily misunderstood. We use dichotomous thinking to consider pain, even though we know better, as merely an external phenomenon, not our body’s reaction to something we need to learn something from. So we mask the pain, deny it, or find ways to address the pain, but not the cause. So many live with the consequences of denying our spiritual, moral, and emotional injuries. In general, my physical pain is a manifestation, a signal. Retail therapy, as you have said, and many other similar pursuits are just that, a signal that we need to learn something from. Not being able to be alone, sit still, live in awareness--these are examples of non-physical pain that seems so harmless because denial and fear and habituation anaesthetizes us from awareness. How is self-awareness created, sustained, and extended beyond the self? Mindfulness, in many forms, may be one of the keys. My addiction to my own sense of goals and objectives is also a kind of signal to me to be more forgiving, more patient, and more willing to hear my intuition about the state of my non physical energies. My goal, if I have one, is simply daily self-care. Eat. Exercise. Sleep. Do each with mindfulness. I have to work pretty damn hard at not reverting back to the person who used goals to self-flagellate. In my life, I have perhaps achieved a few things, but looking back I missed a lot of the process, a lot of the deep quality of seeking that is the essence to achieving something meaningful over a long term. So today my energies go to experiential goals like inquiring daily about self-care, living in the moment, and caring for others through listening. In the end, this may be how we enjoy life as you put it in your note. For me it's the essence of the joy I seek. A kind of joy that feels like a bulb illuminating what already exists, an illumination of the simplicity and depth of being "with" the world, being "caught" in its embrace, achieved by a kind of releasing with the waves holding your body up, a sort of letting go of ourselves so that we recall our belonging to a larger form of being, with our relatives the rocks and trees and birds. Have a good Sunday, my friend.