Excerpted from
Welcoming Our Children to a New Millennium: A Daybook of Hopes and Wishes for the Future
By Jane Middelton-Moz, Ph.D.

Families are gathered in the community center of a small town for a potluck dinner. Everyone is eating and chatting energetically when a man and woman walk in, the man tenderly carrying a tiny baby in his arms. They walk to the center of the room; then the man quiets the crowd, letting them know he has something important to say. Although most of the people know him, he introduces himself and his wife. He then lifts his child up high for everyone to see. "I am honored to introduce you all to our new son." The man gives his child's name and the name of the grandparents on each side. "He is now part of our community. I ask you to join our family in protecting him, watching out for him, teaching him and guiding him." One by one the members of the community welcome their new member, promising to keep the commitments the family has asked them to make.

Welcoming ceremonies for children at one time were part of every culture. For example: In many Christian faiths, the godparents chosen by the family are entrusted with the responsibility to serve as guides and helpers for the child, offering spiritual teaching and symbolizing that the child not only belongs to the mother and father, but to the entire Christian community.

In the Jewish faith as well, the community plays an important role in the welcoming and naming of a child. The Kvatter and Kvatterin serve as the guides and mentors for the child and play an important role in the Brith Milah (ritual circumcision and naming) of a baby boy and the naming of a baby girl. The Sandek who holds the child during the Brith Milah is considered to be spiritually linked to the child and will serve as his spiritual mentor.

In many Native American and First Nations cultures, ceremonial aunts, uncles and grandparents are chosen for the child, each promising to mentor and guide the child in particular aspects of his or her growth and development again reaffirming that the child's mentoring, discipline, growth and protection are the responsibility of the entire community that encircles the family, supporting them in the raising of their child. The child belongs to the entire community.

Webster's Dictionary defines "welcoming" as "receiving with gladness." As I work in communities throughout the world, I become increasingly aware of the number of children that were not "received with gladness" into the arms of their community and who walk the streets of cities, towns, villages, reserves and reservations unprotected.

In many places today, children are not the cherished responsibility of the community. Indeed, more and more advertisements for apartments and houses warn, "No children, no pets." Yet as walls between individuals and families get higher, and concern for children increases, countless individuals have voiced their fear that, as the new millennium approaches, communities in the true sense are becoming a thing of the past.

I have been fortunate to have the assistance of my daughter-in-law, Amy Hinchcliffe, in putting together the thoughts and wishes of children and adults that make up Welcoming Our Children to a New Millennium. The Creator gave me a special gift, not only in the talent Amy brought to this process, but also in knowing that as I watched her talk to people, type, and endlessly file and organize, I was also witnessing the development of a new life inside her. Amy and Shawn's child, my grandchild, Anastasia was present from the very beginning of this welcoming book and was born shortly before the book was released. During this process I also witnessed the miracle of another grandchild's birth. Lisa and Damien's son Logan Alexander Middelton was born early in January. Both Logan and Anastasia reminded me daily of the miracle of life and the importance of honoring and welcoming children.

I believe most people want to restore the feeling of community, support of families and the welcoming of children. It is my hope that Welcoming Our Children to a New Millennium will be a small step in beginning to welcome, celebrate and honor children and youth, will provide a medium that may begin to open up communication between adults and children, and will demonstrate, by example, sound community values. Indeed, it already has. Many of the individuals in communities throughout the United States and Canada who have written welcoming letters for the book or have helped collect letters from children have decided to continue this welcoming and communication between children, youth and adults in their own communities.

I have received hundreds of letters from children in schools in different locations in the United States and Canada. I have asked the children to address particular questions in their letters:

Children Ages Five Through Seven:

1. What are some of the things you like about your world?

2. What am some of the things you dislike about your world?

3. If a genie granted you three wishes that you could use to make the world a better place to live, what would they be?

Children and Youth Ages Eight to Eighteen:

1. Think about how life has changed in the last one hundred years. What are some of the changes that have helped make life better?

2. If someone asked you to identify the three biggest problems in the world, what would they be?

3. What would you like to see adults do in the new millennium that would make the world a better place for children, families and communities?

The letters I received were from children from different races, cultures and walks of life. As I read the letters, I was struck by the fact that there were more similarities than differences between races and cultures with respect to what children wanted from adults in the new millennium: They wanted adults to laugh more; to spend time with children; to stop drinking and using drugs; to stop violence to children and stop fighting with one another; to model what they ask of children; to pay more attention to Mother Earth and our natural resources; to respect and honor differences in race, culture, sex, sexual orientation and religion; to stop littering and polluting; to stop wars; to begin teaching accountability and values. For some six-year-olds, all they wanted from adults in the new century was to say hello to them when they came home from school.

Out of the hundreds of letters received, I selected 366, one for every day of the year. My only regret was that I couldn't publish all of them. Some wonderful letters that were selected could not be printed because I couldn't obtain permission to print them from a parent or guardian.

The welcoming letters from adults also represent individuals from many races, cultures, religions, sexual orientations and walks of life. They are representative of the many different families and extended families in our world today: heterosexual couples, same-sex couples, stepparents, adoptive parents, single parents, foster parents, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers. The similarity among these adults is that they are all role models, working to rebuild a world with a future. Out of the many adults that were asked, it is the adults you will hear from each month who have been willing to take time from their busy lives to write a welcoming letter to the children and youth of the new millennium.

In Welcoming Our Children to a New Millennium, there are welcoming letters written to children and youth every month of the year and letters from children and youth to adults every day of the year. At the top of each page is a question, "What have you done for a child today?" I hope it will remind us again and again throughout the years in this millennium that the most important thing we will ever do in our lives is to nurture and protect our greatest natural resource, our children.

My hope is that, as you read this book, you will begin to imagine a welcoming ceremony for children and youth in your community. By the time you finish the book, I pray your thoughts will have become a reality. Many adults who have written welcoming letters originally felt that what they had to say was not significant or important enough to appear in a book. One of the side effects of our disconnection is our sense of learned helplessness. that what we do or say is of little importance; someone else could do it better. When you consider organizing a welcoming and begin to think these thoughts, remember the words of the children throughout this book. Saying "hello" is important. It is never too late to welcome a child.

It seems fitting, as we begin the twelve-month calendar that celebrates and honors our children, that Amy and I add our welcome to the children of a new millennium:

Dear Children and Youth of the New Millennium,

I feel honored and privileged as a mother, grandmother and auntie to welcome all of you to a new millennium. As I begin, I would like each of you to imagine yourself in the middle of a big circle. Surrounding you are adults of diverse ages, from many different races, cultures, religions and walks of life, who have come together for the purpose of offering you our love, respect and support. We have come to celebrate your life, honor you and welcome you. We will speak to you one at a time, offering our hopes, prayers and wishes for your life.

It is my wish that you will always find beauty and the sacred in the ordinary: the feel of freshly mown grass beneath your bare feet; the fresh, clean smell of the ocean breeze; your very first glimpse of a butterfly on a summer's day or a firefly on a July evening; the sight of a graceful doe with her spring fawn; the joy of blowing your first seeded dandelion; walking in a crystal-clear, ice-cold creek; or the soft feel of a kitten's coat beneath your small fingers. It is my hope that adults will protect those ordinary things so you may always know the strength and safety of the spiritual.

It is, my wish that you will once again know the freedom of riding your trike on the sidewalk, the joy of running after the ice-cream man, fishing with your buddies in a mountain stream, or selling lemonade to your neighbors from a roadside stand. It is my hope that adults will once again make life safe enough for you to know innocence. It is my wish that you will have the time and safety to dream your dreams, experience the freedom and learn the lessons that are only taught through youthful experimentation. It is my hope that all adults near you will watch out for you, become your mentors, and provide the safety of community so you will be able to take the time to look inside yourself and learn from your accomplishments and mistakes.

It is my wish for you that you will be able to walk the halls of any school, feeling accepted for the unique people you are and learning that your offerings are valuable, your learning style is respected, and your contribution to your community is needed. It is my hope that adults will work on our issues of racism, prejudice, intolerance and discrimination so we might join together to make schools emotionally, physically and mentally safe enough for you to learn and feet success and accomplishment.

It is my wish that you will learn to use computers and other technological advances while maintaining your creativity. It is my hope that adults will uphold the values of family and community. We must be careful that the computer and television don't become the teachers of ethics and values, so you may learn to use technology competently without dependency.

My wish for you is that you will always have healthy elders to learn from and younger children to teach. It is my hope that adults will work to assume our place in the life cycle as mature role models and wise elders who will discipline you in a good way and teach healthy values so you wilt learn your responsibilities in the circle of life.

My hope is that you will be surrounded by adults who will not tolerate injustice or abuse, will always intervene with compassion when we witness child abuse, or will stand against injustice in order that you may learn the sacredness of life.

My wish is for you to feel determination, self-worth and the courage to follow your own path. My hope is that adults will nurture your creativity, talents and interests so you may believe in yourself and your dreams.

My greatest wish for you is that you will always be surrounded by adults who will be honest mirrors that reflect back your beauty and value. It is my hope that adults in the new millennium will care for all children as we would care for our own.

"One laugh of a child will make the holiest day more sacred still."

-R. G. INGERSOLL
 

I love your laughter and honor your tears.

With love and care for all of you.
Auntie, Grandma Jane

Excerpted from
The Tao of the Ride; Motorcycles and the Mechanics of the Soul
By Garri Garripoli

Every time I sit on my bike and I'm ready to turn the key, I think how wild it is that I'm going for a ride on a vehicle with only two wheels. Sure I understand the physics (as much as our human minds are capable of doing so) of the gyroscopic effect of a fast spinning wheel and the power of centrifugal force. But I still don't take it for granted for some reason; it's too bizarre. I can go back thirty-five years or so when my neighbor Karen, a big, ten-year-old Swedish blonde, 'taught' me, a five-year-old, how to ride a bicycle. Her technique (nothing against the Swedes) was to prop me on the big old Huffy with balloon tires while I held the handlebars with all my strength and centered my feet on the pedals. Next, she'd give me a running shove from the top of the driveway of our apartment complex, and I'd be on my way. It all seemed straightforward enough. The faster I'd pedal the smoother the ride. I remember I liked the feeling of the breeze in my face even back then. I felt free-free from the adults, free from all the siblings at home, free like a bird. This sensation lasted all of fifteen seconds before I realized I wasn't free from certain laws of physics, and I smashed squarely into the garage door. Karen hadn't taught me about brakes yet.

Balance goes beyond the ability to not topple over. I see so many people seeking balance who are caught in the duality trap-viewing life as an either/or predicament-falling over or not falling over. I liken it to my initial bike-riding experience. I learned the essence of the Ride lies in balancing the multitude of factors that you face in life. The duality trap-how many times do we see only two alternatives to a situation? Winning or losing, good or bad, black or white.

This is the appeal of superficially understanding yin and yang. The tai chi symbol, the symbol of the Taoists, depicts black and white as two opposing forces or aspects or dynamics in any system. One of my favorite and beloved teachers, the ninty-two-year-old Master Duan Zhi Liang of Beijing, hates even looking at this symbol because of what it leads people to think. As a Chinese Qigong healer [pronounced chee gung, it's an ancient exercise and healing system-G. G.] and martial arts expert, Master Duan's true gift is flexibility, both physical and mental, so limits of any kind really set him off. He always speaks of the 'perceived' limitation that people construct and how that keeps them from living and enjoying life. Because of this perception that most people hold of limits, they get the wrong idea of life's essence from the yin yang symbol. Everything is in a state of flux and chaos, Master Duan would remind me. Gaining balance within this chaos means accepting that nothing is only what it seems. Things are never just 'black and white.' The tendency of human nature though is to simplify and assume comprehension. This is most magnified in the scientific didactic outlook on life. To see two opposing forces at odds with each other is to feed a dualistic paradigm that can dramatically limit your growth and outlook on life.

The Tao Te Ching, the twenty-five-hundred-year-old book attributed to China's ancient sage Lao Tsu, is one of the key texts of Taoism. Taoism lies at the core of most Chinese philosophical concepts. It states that from the One comes the great tai chi, yin and yang, the dark and the light. From this concept sprouts the symbol depicting everything from the Taoist religion and the Korean flag to the surfer subculture. The important aspect to notice on the true depiction of this symbol is the black dot within the white area and the white dot within the black area. I thank my teacher and Taoist friend, Master Wan Su Jian, for introducing me to Master Li at the Shi Fan Yuan temple up in the mountains of Hebei province in China.

Master Li's fluency in the edicts, history and principles of Taoism make him a valuable teacher in the area of yin and yang. He explains that a seed of dark always exists within the white, and a seed of white always exists within the dark. Viewing life in this way, we can free ourselves from the duality trap-seeing only two sides fighting for superiority-and begin to move toward a much more fluid interpretation of the universe as we know it. When we recognize the imbedded nature of light within dark, and vice versa, lines of demarcation disappear. More options open in our life. Everything takes on its essential nature of dynamism-as opposed to the static of either/or-and we can feel the infinite nature of existence. To me, infinite refers to possibilities. We can't intellectually comprehend infinity, but we can know freedom and that comes with removing the boundaries that define the limits that bind us. Balance lets us see this freedom.

I weave my way down Topanga Canyon, letting the gears of my bike put enough drag on my speed so I can surf down the curves like a bird in flight. I live on top of a mountain in these hills just south of Malibu, and it's one of the great gifts in my life. Easing onto Pacific Coast Highway as the Canyon opens up to the ocean gives me a rush every time . . . the first time I felt it here was over twenty years ago. Mountains and ocean-earth and water-the Chinese consider this balanced relationship good 'feng shui,' a good interrelationship between existing elements. When elements-seen by the Chinese as dynamic players and not just static objects-are in a harmonious relationship, a good flow of Qi is facilitated.

Qi (pronounced chee) is the word the Chinese use to describe energy in its many manifestations from bioelectric vitality within our bodies to eco-natural movement all around us. Keep this Qi moving, keep it in balance through movement and deep breathing, and health in all its forms is promoted. In the traditional Chinese medical model, pain and disease comes from blocked Qi flow within your body. Get a clog in your gas line and it's no different for your bike. A motorcycle is a good mirror for seeing what goes on inside me. I've always seen life as a mirror in this way: What you see in others and in things around you is a pretty clear reflection of what's going on inside you. Since this is usually a lousy stance to take, most people don't agree with me, but consider a few things . . .

Did you ever wake up in the morning feeling rotten and the first thing you do is slam your toe against the dresser trying to find your lost left sock as you spill coffee on the only clean pair of jeans you have? Then you get on the freeway and nobody is using turn signals that day and you're late for a meeting you don't even want to go to.

Now, what about the morning you wake up exhilarated and in love with everything, you look in the mirror and actually think you look halfway decent, savor your breakfast and find five bucks in your pocket. You get on the road and before you know it, you're at work, someone opens the door for you, everyone gives you a smile, and you cruise through the day like the script was written for you for a change. Hmmm . . . call it chance? I don't think so, though it sure is an easy way out of responsibility. If you don't accept that the world, and what happens around you, reflects your thoughts and your moods, then you don't have to take any responsibility for the world, your actions or your attitude. Isn't that nice?

Responsibility can be looked at as the 'ability to respond.' My first real teacher of Eastern spirituality, Thane Walker, pounded that into my rebellious eighteen-year-old head when I went to study with him for a couple of years in Hawaii. If life mirrors our inner workings, our hope is to pursue a balance, a conscious resonance between reflections of our outer and inner worlds. As a Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist Master with a respect for the Tao, but who was also trained in Western medicine, Thane taught that this balance is the key to living a full and healthy life. The world is our mirror, our barometer that gives us the reading on our balance, or imbalance as the case may be. If things are lousy, it might be time to stop blaming and begin to take responsibility. It's time to 'respond' to the signs around you.

With this viewpoint, balance begins to take on a new framework that expands from the 'golden mean' directive of Greco-Roman philosophy. This was a principle that spoke of avoiding excess and living in moderation. The new and metaphysical approach focuses on remaining conscious of how we go 'out of balance' as we explore our limits. It's part of being alive to push the envelope, this is how we grow. Sometimes by mistakes and sometimes by sheer willpower. The Tao teaches that it really doesn't matter how something happened, just that it happened. The trick is to stay awake and aware as much as you can while it's happening. If you get really wasted from partying a little too much, it might be hard to stay awake, but you get the idea. Even pushing your limits in that way doesn't seem too destructive when you know that you're doing it. I only see the danger signs in people when they continually are 'out of whack,' out of balance and have no clue that they are teetering and preparing to crash.

The way of balance is to stay conscious and responsible for your adventures into the extreme and know what it takes to counterweight the experience. This may be a funny and commonsense way to look at things, but it's wild to see how foreign this is for many people. Seeking balance might mean taking a week or two off from heavy partying. What about taking quiet time to reflect and center yourself when the world just gets to be too much? I watch my friends forget this and wait until they get to that point where they begin to hate the world . . . and maybe themselves in the process. The goal is to balance your view of reality. This view either places your identity within your 'ego sphere' or within your 'world-you-view sphere.'

Another way to see this is to start becoming conscious of the times you perceive yourself as a single person against the world. Then, watch for the times you see yourself as an integral energy working together with everyone and everything around you. By finding the balance between these perceptions, I think we truly start to live. To be free and spiritual at home but bent and tense at work is a painful disintegration. I watch countless people spending half their life being one way and half their life being the other. We can be so context driven, acting one way in front of family and another way with friends, and another way at work. This is what drives us nuts. We intuitively know it's out of balance, but we justify it as the 'way it is.' I think that's a cop-out. It's just another way we lie to ourselves to avoid facing our fears and frustrations.

There's something about being alone on a bike, cruising down the road in the silence of a loud engine and pounding wind. In these moments, everything can seem perfect. We are elevated from the pressures of life, removed from the responsibilities. No one and nothing can touch us. You begin to wonder why the ride ever has to end, why you have to return to things the way they are. You wonder why the rest of your life can't be like this. Everyone who has something that takes them away from the apparent mundane can relate to this sensation. In those moments of frustration, we feel like there isn't any sense to life; there isn't any balance between the stolen minutes of peace and the chaos of the everyday. In these very moments, I learn most about the balancing act.

Why should your time riding be so coveted? Yeah, I know the obvious, and no one's going to take that private time from me. But why can't I take more of that buzz, more of what happens to my spirit in those moments of reverie and awareness, and infuse it into the rest of my routine? To find this is the essence of balance. It is to know that the ride doesn't stop when you get off the bike.

Balance is about remaining centered. Centered in that place that is our true self. It's about remaining conscious and aware when we are playing roles. In this game of life, roles are crucial to our existence and can be fun when we stay awake while we're in them. When we see we aren't the 'roles' but the one assuming them, everything changes. When we maintain balance as we shift back and forth, with both eyes open, we honor our individuality-an important part of the Ride-while being wholly integrated as 'role' and 'role-player.' This is the beginning of the Master's Game, the path of the Sage.

Excerpted from
Field Notes on the Compassionate Life; A Search for the Soul of Kindness
By Marc Ian Barasch

When I was in my twenties, my Buddhist teacher tricked me into taking a vow of universal compassion. Using some spiritual sleight-of-hand I've yet to unravel, he made it seem I could aspire to a tender concern for everybody, even putting their welfare before my own.

Fat chance, I'd thought. But in his wily way, he had framed this vow - the bodhisattva's promise to live for others - as a case of enlightened self-interest. It was not, he told me, a matter of wearing a one-size-fits-all hair shirt. I was taking the vow for my own good. It would give me some leverage to pry loose, finger by finger, the claustrophobic monkey-grip of ego; give the heart a little breathing room. By treating others generously, I might find them responding in kind. I felt I was being made privy to an ancient secret: To attain your own human potential, be mindful of everyone else's.

At some point in my vow ceremony, a deceptively casual affair held in a rocky field, it had seemed as if my vision suddenly cleared. I'd glimpsed, like a sky swept clean of clouds, everyone's innate okay-ness. Years later, I still marveled at the spiritual chutzpah of the liturgy: However innumerable are beings, I vow to save them all. It was vintage Buddhist bravado - a pledge to empty all the world's oceans using only an eyedropper. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I'd planted myself in a millenia-old tradition that claims you can love all without preconditions, exclusionary clauses, or bottom lines; that says life isn't quid pro quo, but quid pro bono.

To my surprise, the vow hadn't made me feel obligated, but liberated from my own suffocating strictures, from the narrowness of my concerns. It was as if I'd been waiting for a signal, a green light to step onto the crosswalk to the opposite curb; some goad to be compassionate not out of blind craving for virtue, but because it seemed the only genuinely interesting thing to do with my life.

Just forming the intention to make myself useful felt salutary, like some fast-acting antivenin to my snakebit business-as-usual. I had assumed life was about magnifying myself (for the greater good, of course), but now that seemed like the wrong end of the telescope: It made everyone else look small. I soon took a job running a residential therapeutic community in exchange for room and board, surprised at my ability to care for the walking wounded. I stopped thinking so much about how others had let me down, broken my heart, failed to anticipate my needs or take my oh-so-unique sensitivities into account. I began striving to see - and even nourish - other people's possibilities, receiving in return those surprise concoctions that the human spirit dishes out when it feels accepted and at its ease.

But there came a point on my journey when I'd stumbled badly and fell far: a dire illness, an interminable recovery, penury, loneliness, full-on despair. Friends clucked in sympathy but stepped gingerly over the body. Family didn't do much better. I had a soul-curdling realization: The people you love (and who ostensibly love you) may not be there when you need them most. I got through it - the kindness of strangers and all - but I was soon back to squinting at people through my cool fisheye, seeing their preening vanity, their intellectual shortfalls, their ethical squishiness. It took time to realize such shortsightedness takes a toll - let alone that there was anything I could do about it.

Finding my way back to meditation helped. Nothing like getting a good, long look at myself (and funny how much I looked like everyone else). I noticed how often my social trade-offs were more about getting than giving; how many of my thoughts revolved in geosynchronous orbit around Planet Numero Uno. Inner work is a warts-and-all proposition; it gets harder to kid yourself. Still, my teacher had insisted one thing was certain: Despite seeing all the ego's pitfalls and pratfalls, real bodhisattvas make friends with themselves. Everyone, he said, possessed some worth past quantifying or qualifying, some value beyond judgment or fine-tuning - and that included oneself.

To love our neighbor as ourselves, after all, is the great injunction of every religion. But what does loving yourself mean? It's one thing to say it; another to know it in your bones. Do I talk to the mirror, whispering sweet nothings? tenderly imagine a little homunculus inside and pet it, tickle it, scratch it behind the ears? The spiritual consensus seems to be it's like learning to love anyone: You start by getting to know them. The side-benefit to this, compassionwise, is that to know yourself is also to know the person sitting next to you, and the one halfway around the world. "Read thyself," wrote philosopher Thomas Hobbes. "Whosoever looketh into himself... shall know what are the thoughts and passions of all other men."

Still, having looketh'd into myself, I can't say I loveth all I see. I have read myself, and there in oversize type it says: petty, suspicious, greedy, vain, jealous, lazy, stingy, dull (and that's just on the page; there's more between the lines). That I also reckon myself to be magnanimous, conscientious, loyal, thrifty, brave, and intermittently humble is beside the point. It's not enough to offset scourging self-judgment with a roll-call of compensatory pluses. We have to take ourselves (and each other) whole. The Dalai Lama points out that the Tibetan term for compassion, tsewa, generally means love of others, but "one can have that feeling toward oneself as well. It is a state of mind where you extend how you relate to yourself toward others." If it's true that what goes around comes around, compassion is about nothing if not love's tendency to circulate.

And radiate. Alexander Pope (poet of the "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind") envisioned compassion as a series of concentric circles rippling outward:

"... Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
... Friend, parent, neighbor, first it will embrace;
His country next; and next all human race."

It sounds great. It is great. But for many of us, there's a nagging doubt that this whole compassion routine could edge into self-effacement - into loving others instead of ourselves, giving away the store until the shelves are bare. The usual formula is first to stockpile some extra self-esteem - then you can afford to be generous. That isn't quite how the nineteenth-century religious philosopher Søren Kierkegaard saw it. The command to love thy neighbor, he wrote, had but one purpose: "as with a pick, [to] wrench open the lock of self-love and wrest it away from a person." (He said it approvingly, but... oh, great, now compassion will burglarize us.) What about looking out for number one? Isn't it prudent to follow that flight attendant's advisory: First place the mask over your own nose and mouth, tightening the straps to begin the flow of oxygen? We're of no use to anyone if we're passed out in our seat from hypoxia.

It's a hard balance to strike. If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I? There is a growing sense in our society, left, right, and center, that the balance has woozily tipped; that our obsession with seamless self-contentment ("What I love about Subway is it's all about me!") has occluded our ability to love each other. Our cultural default setting has become "get your own needs met." Our psychosocial mean temperature, suggested one recent article, is "people-friendly narcissism." Our therapeutic model focuses so much on strengthening the ego-self that it omits what some dissident psychologists call the self-in-relation. One group of mostly female psychologists has proposed "openness to mutual influence" as a more reliable barometer of mental health than self-esteem.

But self-esteem remains our all-purpose buzzword, a stock phrase in therapists' offices, corporate training modules, even elementary school curricula. This is fine on the face of it: After all, what's the alternative - self-loathing? Psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the term itself in 1940 after observing a monkey colony in a Madison, Wisconsin zoo. He was fascinated by the cockiness of the troupe's dominant alphas and the social benefits they accrued, so reminiscent of socially successful people. His concept of self-esteem had its origin, then, not as simple self-affirmation, but as the alpha's great cry of triumphal self-love: I Am Somebody - and You're Not. (Maslow's first stab at terminology was "dominance-feeling.") This self-esteem was more akin to that sense of self that made Sinatra sing how swell it was to be king of the hill.

What Maslow failed to stress was the social dimension. Even in a primate colony - especially so - no ape is an island: Modern primatologists point out that an alpha animal, contrary to its reputation as solitary lord of all it surveys, is thickly enmeshed in a social webbing, dependent on the reciprocities of group life. Maslow's paragon of the "self-actualized" person ("authentic, individuated, productive," with "a surprising amount of detachment from people in general") begins to sound less like a social creature than a self-pollinating flower.

Taking potshots at Maslow may be a little unfair. At a time when psychology was obsessed with what goes wrong in the psyche, Maslow championed the things that go right. He was an exuberant advocate of human potential when most shrinks spent their fifty-minute hours chronicling pathology. And he did posit that self-actualization would inevitably lead to responsibility for others. But his emphasis on personal growth as the be-all helped spawn a national cottage industry devoted to building a better me, some enhanced self-to-the-tenth-power with its full entitlement of psychospiritual fabulousness. Not such an awful idea, I suppose, but as the song goes, Is that all there is?

I dropped in on a human potential workshop recently. Plenty of talk about self-empowerment and self-realization, self-efficacy and peak performance, but compassion didn't rate a second billing on the marquee. It made me wonder what sort of selfhood we're seeking: the self that "gets its needs met" but is never fufilled? or the self that abundantly gives yet is never emptied? Instead of self-discovery, what about other-discovery, our real terra incognita?

I wonder, too (as a pragmatic question, not a moral one), if this pedal-to-the-metal pursuit of happiness really does make us any happier, or if we have the whole thing backwards. "The American way is to first feel good about yourself, and then feel good about others," notes the Benedictine monk Thomas Keating. "But spiritual traditions say it's the other way around - that you develop a sense of goodness by giving of yourself."

I've been an Audrey Hepburn fan since I was a boy with my first major movie-star crush, all the more when I discovered that the adorable, to-die-for gamine of Breakfast at Tiffany's was also a great humanitarian. I once came across a lost nugget of her philosophy while waiting in the dentist's office. A fashion magazine had asked her for her beauty tips, and she'd written back:

"For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For poise, walk with the knowledge you never walk alone.
If you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one
at the end of each of your arms."

This homily, a sort of St. Francis Prayer for the Maybelline Set, is a graceful rebuttal to the fetish of self-improvement. Instead of being all about me, it's about us; instead of getting and having, it's about giving and then giving some more. St. Francis himself went beyond mere charity. The son of a rich clothier, he gave up wealth and privilege to dress in rags and hang out with lepers. This was taking kindness to an extreme few of us would find attainable, let alone remotely appealing. But compassion has a certain down-and-dirty quality and a more than casual familiarity with the soul's darker, draftier labyrinths.

At its root meaning of "to suffer with," compassion challenges our tendency to flinch away from life's too-tender parts. I know this much: When I acknowledge my own pain, I am much less squeamish about drawing nearer to yours. I seem to acquire my compassion piecemeal, hurt by hurt. After a bad sprain and time spent on crutches, I became more sympathetic to the locomotion-impaired - the lame and the wheelchair-bound, those who hobbled on canes and walkers.

Perhaps Thomas Aquinas was not so far off when he claimed, "No one becomes compassionate unless he suffers." I take this less as a mandate for medieval masochism than an indecorous call to embrace our own authentic experience. If we're not at home with the depth of our feelings, we're likely to skirt the deep feelings of others. Do we love ourselves/others only when we/they are feeling fine? (Or as a rural proverb has it, "Do you only care about your cow when it's giving you milk?") I've become suspicious of the unblemished life. Maybe the heart must be broken, like a child's prize honeycomb, for the real sweetness to come out. Although something inside us yearns to walk on air, never touching the ground, compassion brings us down to earth. It has been likened to the lotus, whose exquisite, fragrant blossom grows out of the muck and mire.

The Buddha, the jewel in the lotus himself, didn't start out in the mud. He was raised like a hothouse flower, living the cosseted life of a pampered young prince. His royal parents, fearing a prophecy that he would grow up to become a spiritual teacher instead of a king, confined him within high castle walls, surrounded by every luxury in a kind of Hindu 90210. The lame, the sick, and the down-and-out were banished from sight. It wasn't that his parents were afraid their son would be shocked by the sight of suffering (after all, he was to be a battle-hardened feudal monarch), but that he would respond to it. They were afraid, in other words, that their son might become compassionate.

One day the prince secretly ventured outside. He stumbled first upon a diseased beggar, then a dead man. The walls that had separated him from the world-as-it-is crumbled. Indeed, the castle might be thought of as a sort of metaphorical ego-structure: Don't we often try to secure happiness by fortifying ourselves against imperfection? When the Buddha proclaimed his First Noble Truth, dukha ("dissatisfactoriness"), he was pointing to the dissatisfaction of this ego-driven existence. A traditional image from the Sanskrit is an oxcart wheel that wobbles because its axle is out of kilter: To be self-centered is to be off center from life itself. In the end, the Buddha's enlightenment was to accept everything and everyone as they are; to sit down, as it were, for the full meal, and stop trying to eat around the broccoli.

Though his teachings acquired an aura of detachment in the Western mind (my own included), the image of some solitary quest for higher consciousness misses the point. When I first took my vows and embarked on the Path, I assumed that after X years of diligent meditation, I'd be a wise man with a small secret smile, wafting clear and calm through my own inner space, in some permanent altered state. Lovingkindness would be a spin-off technology from my private moon shot, like Tang or Teflon. But after some time spent trying to attain escape velocity, I noticed that most spiritual teachings regard compassion as the main event - the path to enlightenment, the way to slice through self-deception, the means and the motive to relinquish small thoughts for Big Mind. "Spiritual practice is not just about feeling peaceful and happy," a Buddhist lama once told me, "but being willing to give up your own comfort to help someone else. Unless there's some sacrifice for others, it's just meditation by remote control!"

What do we mean by compassion? The word itself is one among many used to describe the profundity of human connection; but it's the only one, I'd submit, which implies kindness without condition. Empathy, for example, refers to our ability to feel and perceive from another's viewpoint. But acutely sensing someone's feelings can also be disturbing (the plight of the "oversensitive"), leading as easily to drawing back as to reaching out. Sympathy is famously tenderhearted, but can also remain at arm's-length (think "sympathy card," or "I sympathize with your concerns, but..."). Even when it comes to altruism, the noblest self-sacrifice can be merely parochial, reserved for one's family or the insiders of one's religion or nation, too often at outsiders' expense.

Then, of course, there's the heart's miracle-potion of love. "All, everything that I understand," exclaimed Tolstoy, "I understand only because I love." Love to him was not just romance's quickened pulse, but the plangency of some universal heartbeat - a distinction that, in our eagerness, we often brush right past. We crave love's fierce attachment, its irresistible force of gravity. Next to the possessive throb of desire (yo quiero in Spanish means "I love" and "I want"), kindness can sound like weak tea indeed (just a tad to wet the whistle, ever so kind of you). We give lip service to compassion; we give lip-lock to love.

But with great love often comes great exclusivity. In the chivalric love story of Tristan and Isolde, Tristan's heart is said to be "sealed and locked from all the world save her alone." Kierkegaard referred to erotic love as "the very peak of self-esteem, the I intoxicated in the other I... [T]his united I selfishly cuts itself off from everyone else." Yet just as self-love can lead either to self-absorption or the discovery of common humanity, so can romantic love spiral inward or blossom out; make us hoarders of private happiness or philanthropists of the heart. To talk of love as a singular phenomenon reflects more the parsimonious limits of language than the complex facts on the ground.

I once fell in love with a beautiful, brilliant young woman who came into my life like Cupid's sledgehammer, right between the eyes. I was like a dazed cartoon character with twittering bluebirds circling my head. Amazingly, she fell in love with me, too, or so it seemed. The only problem was ... I'd apparently made it all up. As she later explained with remarkable patience, what I'd taken for the romantic real deal was to her just budding friendly affection. When I'd gotten over my embarrassment, I had to laugh. I'd misinterpreted her every gesture, word, and look, seizing on parts to construct a whole picture more to my liking.

This kind of love is a long day's journey from compassion (I certainly hadn't taken her feelings into account), or from those emotional commitments I share with those I love and who, thankfully, love me back. But I am amazed, reflecting on it, at the complex palette of emotions that had so vividly painted this non-affair. It wasn't just lust-at-first-sight. I'd felt a profound sense of cherishing toward someone I hardly knew. I'd seen in pristine focus a perfect (and I mean perfect) stranger's unique goodness. William Blake's observation, "Love to faults is always blind/Always is to a joy inclined," was on full display. (In one British study, when a person in a brain-scanner was shown a photo of their beloved, the neocortical regions associated with judgment shut down, going dark as a Broadway theater on a Monday.)

This bestowal of value on another, seeing them in their supernally best light, is a strong component not only of romance but compassion. Faced with love's many nuances, the Greeks wisely concocted a whole spectrum of terms to describe it, from storge (tenderness) to erotike (sexual desire) to such fortunate grace notes as eunoia (benevolence) . Science is bearing out the distinctions. A study of college students in the grip of a hot new romance showed unique activity deep in the limbic system - activity that differed markedly from the neural signatures of long-term relationship and friendship. (In other studies, lust, passion, and long-term attachment have been shown to have differing brain chemistries.)

When I was in the throes of my big crush, I'd also noted a yearning to care for, to do for - that sense of almost maternal nurturing that lovers, male and female alike, feel toward each other when they call each other baby. Indeed, the type of love most often cited as an analogy for compassion is mother-love itself. The Hebrew word for compassion, rachamim, is the plural of the word for womb. Christianity's most tender image of compassion is the Pieta. Said the Buddha: "Like a mother who protects her child, her only child, with her own life, one should cultivate a heart of unlimited love and compassion toward all living beings." Science has recently shown how the interactions between mother and child - all the soft stroking, gazing, vocalizations, and nurturance of infancy - become the basis for all subsequent relatedness. (Says Allan N. Schore of the UCLA School of Medicine: "[O]ur brains are physically wired to develop in tandem with another's through emotional communication, beginning before words are spoken.")

Researchers who study maternal attachment have been zeroing in on oxytocin, a master hormone in mother-infant bonding. Intriguingly, oxytocin is also implicated in the experience of falling in love. Released when we touch, it also functions as a sex hormone in both females and males. (One recent newsletter spotlighting new directions in pharmacology has pegged it as a sure bet for erectile dysfunction.) Oxytocin has even acquired a certain coolness factor. A casual Web surf reveals everything from a Christian marriage site extolling it as proof of the virtues of conjugal cuddling to a sex fetishist site pondering whether a tight-laced corset causes it to be released into the bloodstream.

Does oxytocin make the world go round (or at least lubricate it as it spins on its axis)? A friend of mine, a specialist in international conflict resolution, described an incident that made me wonder. He'd been summoned to a meeting of political opponents whose bitterness was virtually paralyzing a government. Communication had broken down completely, along with all trust. The high tension in the room, he said, was enough to electrocute you. But in the midst of one angry exchange, a baby who had eluded the child-care services crawled out onto the floor between them.

"Suddenly these men who were on the verge of throttling each other got this awww look in their eyes," he recalls. "I've never seen a situation turn around faster. Hardened positions seemed to melt. People made concessions. It was like someone had slipped them a drug."

Which in effect might have been the case. "In the presence of a baby," notes neuroscientist Sue Carter of Chicago's Psychiatric Institute, "both males and females will produce oxytocin, leading to tender, maternal-like feelings.* How might this translate into other sorts of social attachment?" Given that, as Carter points out, "A single exposure to oxytocin can make a lifelong change in the brain," it's not a trivial question. Some suspect that oxytocin is the culprit in "helper's high," those glowing feelings of warmth and well-being described by almost everyone who does volunteer work. A group of

UCLA researchers is studying the link between oxytocin and the emotion they call "love of humanity," wondering if the hormone might be the actual milk of human kindness.

Here science approaches the view of love proclaimed in the mystical traditions. According to the Sufis, for example, the feelings we have for family, friends, and lovers are all aspects of divine love. The narrowest affection can lead to compassion for all, even to the universal mystery they call the Beloved. In an essay entitled "My Heart Can Take On Any Appearance," the Islamic sage Ibn El-Arabi proclaimed the highest love to be "like the love of lovers, except that instead of loving the phenomenon, I love the Essential. A purpose of human love is to demonstrate ultimate, real love." High romance or doing-the-laundry love, simple affection or mad crushes, maybe all are prismatic beams of one transforming light.

I recently saw a film about a morose, beaten-down man whose job in a Las Vegas casino was to bring gamblers calamitous bad luck. Known in the trade as a "cooler," when he drew near, the dice became frigid, the cards grew a layer of hoarfrost, and the queen of hearts wept icy tears. But then he fell in love, and the world turned topsyturvy. Everywhere he went, slot machines that had spit lemons now pealed with ecstatic jackpots, the dice were too red-hot to handle, and baccarat tables practically sprouted crocuses. Even murderous goons and heartless goombahs were stirred to noble deeds. It was a wonderful evocation of that love which flouts the law of averages, beats the house odds, and finally breaks the bank.

I have a few friends who embody this brand of beneficent love some researchers refer to as "generativity." I'd first gotten to know Alicia and Paul (not their real names) when I was teetering at the edge of a private cliffhanger. They'd heard I was hurting, and though they barely knew me, they'd shown up one day with a check that pulled me back from the brink. No strings, they'd assured me as I stammered my thanks. I didn't have to do good with it, reciprocate in any way tangible or intangible, or even, they joked, have dinner with them. Just be, they said. It wasn't just the sum, several months' food and rent, that startled me, but the clear sense I got of the givers' unencumbered hearts.

Over the years, we've become close friends. Alicia and Paul live on a hilltop bordered by redwood forest with their three kids, a cockatoo, an ancient desert tortoise, a once-feral cat, a snake, and a pet white rat, all of whom gather around their large breakfast table each morning and seem to get along famously. The family is both well-off and deeply well-intentioned. They save swatches of rainforest; they build schools and teach in them; they take political refugees into their home; they plant community gardens, digging in the dirt. The last time I saw her, Alicia had just received her massage certification so she could give dying hospice patients the tenderness of her touch.

I sat in their kitchen one recent morning, looking out on a vista that was almost absurdly breathtaking: clement, mist-shrouded valleys undulating like bumps in a green carpet, rolling up to the edge of a silvery sea. Paul wandered in for breakfast. Soon, so did a pet rooster, its spurs clicking regally over the ochre tiles until, abandoning all dignity, it leaped onto his lap. "It's spooky," he said. "Even our animals are nice." He wasn't bragging, just bemused. With his straw-blond hair and ruddy, open face, Paul's surfer-dude placidity yields only occasional glimpses of the shrewd businessman who secured the family's fortunes. He clearly adores his kids, who are all stalwart, funny, and for tweeners preternaturally considerate. He doesn't see himself as particularly compassionate, he tells me, just lucky - lucky to have made enough money to be able to give some away; lucky to have met his wife.

He credits Alicia for giving him the compassion 411. "Philanthropy's not that hard. Learning how to be really kind to people - that's more elusive. Alicia's sort of a genius in that department."

I can attest to it. She makes you feel so favored - as if you'd done something extraordinary by simply existing - that you can't help but osmose a little of whatever she has and try to pass it along. Alicia, I'd always assumed, was one of those from-the-cradle love-bugs, born with some extra endowment of solar warmth.

"You've got to be kidding," she says. If anything, she insists, she was "born sad, not sweet"; an anxious, self-enclosed kid. It was her mother, a "kind of saintly" woman with an eighth-grade education, who got through her shell. "She flat-out taught me compassion. She said that life's greatest joy was to 'pull the beauty out of people,' because that makes your life beautiful, too. She was rock-solid in her devotion to other people. She'd be there for that super-annoying person no one else wanted to be around, take care of the one who'd landed in the biggest mess. She adopted every single fuck-up in my family, and a fair number of passing strangers." At age eighty-five, her mother still corresponds weekly with dozens of people in varying degrees of muddle and distress; people who, Alicia says, "count on her letters to help them hold on."

"I'm not at all like her," Alicia claims. "I'm much more critical of people. Mom kept saying the secret was just to take a genuine interest in others - just ask them questions, want to know how they are, really. I'd try that and it would feel good, so I'd do it some more. Step by step, I got to see how wonderful that sensation is of serving others." Alicia also credits her kids ("they taught me how to nurture - but that's nothing unusual, right?"), a few books, and sundry gurus. But she says it wasn't until she met Tommy that it all came together.

He had dropped by one day to visit a friend who was doing construction on their house. Tommy had been told he had less than a year to live: AIDS. He had no money. No place to stay. "Well, it seemed so obvious," says Alicia. "Not just to say, Gee, I'm so sorry, good luck; but duh! you can stay here." Alicia and her family and a group of friends agreed to divide up the tasks. "I assigned myself to care for him physically, give him massages, that kind of thing. I found I just loved it. When you see the suffering a person's enduring, there's no way you can't respond. It takes you beyond yourself. Suddenly all those judgments you'd make if you just met them at a party evaporate. You're stripped down to two people doing their best to partake of this mystery."

Tommy had been walking with a cane when they first met him. Six months later, he was a quadriplegic. "But God, was he fun! He had this sparkly, devilish, bad-boy quality. Even when he was really sick, he'd want to go down to Baha and throw some big soiree, so we'd organize this whole elaborate caravan of his friends and our friends and IVs and wheelchairs and just do it. You think you've loved before, but this kind of thing opens your heart a thousand times. Tommy seemed to get more and more transparent the closer he got to death, and it enfolded you. I was with him when he died, when that transparency just turned into light."

Her weekly hospice work grew out of that experience. Alicia at fifty still has that lean, blonde, freckled California-girl look, her shoulders tan and muscular from paddling in the surf. It's easy to imagine her large, strong hands kneading the failing flesh and comforting the moribund. But aren't there times, I press her, when you wonder why you're putting yourself through this; when you think of other things you could be doing - times you feel repulsed?

"I would have thought so," she says. "But the worse it got, somehow the more I felt attracted. After all the surgeries, the bodies look like battlefields. You feel the loneliness of that person whose skin is falling off, who has tubes coming in and out of everywhere. And still, behind this war-torn shell, you feel the incredible strength of humanity. It may sound strange or corny, but there's nothing more heavenly than connecting with that."

Alicia's no sentimental pushover. She says she has a "fierce" side. She describes one of her charges who was "frankly an asshole, and the fact that he was dying hardly softened that one bit. He ticked me off something terrible. I had to draw the line: I'm not just a rug to be walked on, and I'm not doing you a favor if I let you." But she's learned to do something when she feels cornered: to "clear away evaluation and just rest someplace that doesn't have all those opinionated voices in it. When you do that, then out comes this love that melts people - not melts who they are, but who they aren't. Finding that is just like finding yourself. It makes you feel great." She laughs. "I swear, it's a totally selfish thing."

While we've been talking, the phone has been ringing. And ringing. Somebody wants something. Alicia gets up to answer. "If we can't help each other, what's the point?" she says. "Everything else gets kinda old after a while."

Now I'm not trying to sell you on Alicia and Paul as Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi. They've had rough patches like any couple; they're spiritually unfancy folk. They enjoy their bounty with a contagious joie de vivre. You could quibble that, sure, it's easy to open your heart in the lap of luxury; but I've met insanely wealthy people who are more miserable than Midas.

Besides which, I know another family that's just like Alicia and Paul's, except they're living a gritty existence barely above the poverty line. If 90 percent of life is showing up, they go the other 20. Their door is always open, even if the weathered porch is sagging in. There's always a pot of chili on the stove. If you drop by, their easy affection embraces you (and you, and you, too). Their small living room feels crowded with conviviality. You can stay a few nights on the fraying couch if cat dander and dog hair don't bother you too much. They take care of jobs and kids and ailing grandparents and friends' troubles and community causes, and when I ask them how they do it, they say, "Do what?"

Folks like these have basically eliminated any option of pretending that I don't know what we can be for each other. I know I could stand to be kinder, more generous, fiercer in cleaving to the good, true, and beautiful. I've been pondering something John of the Cross wrote: "Where you find no love, put love, and you will find love." Maybe it could be worth a shot.

One evening, I gathered a random assemblage of people to chew the fat about love. Heady types mostly, some with sharp elbows, so they were a little cautious at first. "There's no remedy for love," said a poet, lamenting its "misconception and intrigue." But after they'd proved to each other they weren't just soppy romantics, they admitted there was more to the story.

"Love dismantles the whole judgment thing," said one, a lawyer. "The sluice gates open, and more water flows over the dam. When that happens, love's a verb - you can love anything."

"When we're in love, we're a love factory," a woman said. "We're churning out so much, we have tons extra to give away."

"Whenever you love," opined a political activist, "you're undermining consumer culture. Who needs all that stuff when you have other people?" He gave a little smirk. "Like they say: Accept no substitutes!"

"Love is like the great pulsating orb in old sci-fi movies," someone effused toward the end of our increasingly well-oiled evening. "The one where no matter how many missiles you fire at it, it just absorbs them all and keeps getting bigger and bigger!"

After they tumbled out into the night, noticeably buoyed, I thought about that last one. Doesn't love encompass everything you can throw at it? Doesn't the whole human repertoire spiral out of and circle back to love? Even justice, Martin Luther King once said, is "love correcting that which revolts against love." It may have been the evening's wine talking, but suddenly everything seemed to have something to do with love. The same love-molecule, like water, everywhere, in every form: boiling into steam as passion, or freezing into glistening hate, or just flowing, upstream and downstream, into every crack and crevice, irreducible.

Don't know how to handle your husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, boss, employee, parent, child, friend, enemy? Love! Everything else is just a finger in the dike, holding back an ocean that, ironically, you could happily drown in. Sometimes I think, trying to get it through my own thick seawall of a skull, that compassion means only this: When in doubt, just love.

By the next morning, the effects of the evening's mild bacchanal had worn off; but I still half-believed it.

The Good Eye

Life offers up its own daily catechism, even if it's just seeing people in a little better light. Why not just resolve to give everyone the benefit of the doubt? "If we treat people as they ought to be," said Goethe, almost nailing it, "we help them become what they are capable of becoming." Or more to the point: Treat them as they already are, if we but had the Good Eye to see it.

Once, at a conference, I noticed a man striding toward me, his face alight. He seemed really happy to see me, but I didn't have a clue who he was. When he got closer, he pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, peered at my face, looked down at my nametag, took a step back.

"I'm so sorry," he said, embarrassed. "You looked just like a friend I haven't seen for years. You even have the same first name ... so when someone pointed you out. . ." He trailed off; the effusive warmth seeped away. I told him it was fine. His Good Eye had enveloped me in a gaze of anticipatory delight that made me feel golden. We wound up having lunch. He told me about his research (which coincidentally dovetailed with my own); he talked about the happiness and sorrows of raising a young daughter with multiple sclerosis (for everyone is fighting a great battle). We still stay in touch.

Maybe we should all take off our glasses and hope for more cases of mistaken identity. For that matter, it might be unmistaken. Why not welcome everyone as some long-lost cousin, sprung from our African mother, bumping into each other again after a fifty-thousand-year separation. Wonderful to see you after all this time -- you look great!

A friend of mine, a psychologist, works as a counselor to the obdurate, lethal men at Arkansas's infamous Tucker Max prison. She's well aware that most people look at her clients and see only dregs -- "ugly toothless hulks," as she puts it -- but she claims she can only see "radiant bulbs with these big lampshades blocking the light. I know they're supposed to be 'untreatable psychopaths,' but I feel like, Oh, take that fright-mask off! It could come off in two seconds!" It sounds absurd, but she's remarkably successful. In her presence, the toughest nuts crack wide-open; even their wary, death-row warders let down their guard and cry. She has an x-ray vision that goes straight to the human core.

"It's like there's this horribly thick suit of armor," she explains, trying to make me see it through her eyes, "and I know someone's trapped inside, so how do we get them out?" I ask her why she even bothers. "The joy!" she says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Just the joy of being with people when they show up as they really are."

If we can't see who people really are, say possessors of the Good Eye, it's just our ordinary eye playing tricks on us, focusing on differences and defects, blind to deeper connection. If we misstake each other for strangers, it's just blurry vision. The Good Eye is the corrective to Einstein's "optical delusion of consciousness." As with the rearview mirror that cautions Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear, we might be closer, much closer, than we think.

The sixteenth-century Tibetan meditation master Wangchuk Dorje recommended a practice he called "the Activity of Being in Crowds." Walking through a throng, he said, is a "good opportunity to check your progress and examine the delusions, attachments, and aversions that arise." I find the bustle of a mall an especially good place to check my Good Eye for jaundice. It's not just the plenitude of people, but of everything under that fluorescent sun that pushes our buttons.

With everything winking merrily, beckoning with comeons for instant gratification, and mirrors, mirrors everywhere (it is all about me, after all!), I go into a sort of mall trance. The mind itself gets into the spirit of things, hawking its tawdrier wares; my finicky responses to the goods on display merge with my reactions to the people I pass -- little covetous twinges, subtle flickers of attitude, petty judgments on how people walk, talk, dress, and chew gum. And here a surge of superiority, there a deflating thought of inadequacy; here a lurch of desire for a sleek, well turned-out woman, there a picador's lance of envy at her undeserving boyfriend in the slobby polo shirt.

I return from these shopping expeditions with a discount grab-bag of those feelings the spiritual traditions agree most occlude compassion. I'm collecting a set of action figures based on Augustine's deadly sins (and can we just define sins as "biggest obstacles to selfless love"?). Yesterday I snagged Mammon, avarice (a Buddhist would call him tanha, craving), and today my favorite, Leviathan, jealousy, complete with light-up green eyes.

The Koran describes jealousy as a "veil" that beclouds the eye of the heart. Jealousy turns other people into sources of resentment: If I had what you have, Leviathan croaks mechanically when I push the little oval button in his back, then I would be happy. Jealousy tints everyone in bilious shades of envy. It presents a perfect paradigm of insufficiency: I am less because you are more. It's a zero-sum game. Jealousy's only hope is that the other person will be diminished, imagining that would free up proportionately more for itself. (It extends all the way to that uniquely German coinage, schadenfreude, gloating over another's misfortune, the Good Eye turned into the Evil Eye itself.)

But just as there are emotional toxins, there are also antidotes, remedies, what the apothecaries of yore called specifies. In Buddhism, the supreme medicine for envy is said to be mudita, or "sympathetic joy," which calls on us to feel happy about another's success. Easy enough when it comes to rejoicing for those we really care about: Every parent kvells over their kid's triumphs; a teacher exults when her favorite student aces the math exam. But to expand this feeling from a narrow circle to a wider arena is like pulling wisdom teeth.

I once witnessed an exchange between a Tibetan lama and a questioner on this subject. "Rinpoche," inquired a pleasant middle-aged man in a checked sport shirt, "I adore my son. He's a linebacker for his high school football team. I find myself rooting for him to just cream the opposing quarterback. Is there anything wrong with that?"

"Of course not," the lama replied. "You love your son, and you want his happiness, and he's happy when he beats the other team. This is only natural."

There was an audible sigh of relief in the room. The spiritual path may be challenging, but it's not unreasonable.

The man smiled. "Thank you, Rinpoche," he said, making a brisk little folding gesture with his hands.

The lama laughed sharply. "I was only joking! Actually, this is not at all the right attitude. In fact," he said, glancing at the man mis- chievously, "a good practice for you would be to root for the other team. See them winning, see them happy, see their parents overjoyed. That is more the bodhisattva way." The man thanked him again, this time with an ironic groan at a homework assignment that stretched past football season.

I have a wildly successful acquaintance next to whose perfectly pillowed existence mine seems a lumpy mattress. I've seen him on magazine covers, a self-satisfied, cock-of-the-walk, air-brushed grin on his face. Even worse, he's in my field, though he does ever so much better (sell-out!). I've been training myself, as an antidote to a fulminating case of green-eye, that whenever I feel that little twitch of envy, I wish for more bluebirds of happiness to come sit on his eaves. "Don't you mean," asks a cynical friend, "come shit on his sleeves?" But the fact is, my good wishes provide an unexpected sense of relief. It's an unknotting, expansive feeling, as if what's his and what's mine suddenly, metaphysically, belong to both of us and to neither. I recently came across a line from Yoko Ono: "Transform jealousy to admiration / And what you admire / Will become part of your life." Maybe she did break up the Beatles, but I think she's onto something.

Don't believe me? Try it for yourself. Root for the other team. Visualize someone who makes you envious -- someone who squats smug as a toad in what is surely your rightful place in the world. Think of them in all their irritating splendor, enjoying the perks and accolades you no doubt deserve. Then ... wish sincerely that they get even more goodies.

Isn't this the mortal sin of "low self-esteem"? Well, not exactly; it's more like a metaphysical jujitsu. In rooting for someone else's happiness, we tune to a different wavelength. We feel more beneficent, less deprived, more capable of giving. The focus on another person's satisfaction becomes a lodestone that paradoxically draws us closer to our own. (Isn't most envy just our own potential disowned? We are jealous of what we ourselves might become.) Seeing the world through another's eyes (you in me, me in you) makes it feel there's at least twice as much to go around; not more money or fame or square footage, but what underlies the whole pursuit: more love.

It could be argued this approach might work in a monastery or on a mountaintop, but not in the hurly-burly of real life, where the game is tooth-and-nail and rooting for your own team is what keeps the opposition from eating you alive. I recently saw a quote from mega- mogul and master of the Squinty Eye, Donald 'I'rump, extolling the benefits of pure paranoia: "People you think are your friends in business will take your money, your wife, your pets ... Life's a vicious place. No different than a jungle." Yet I've met people who swim in the piranha-infested corporate waters for whom the Good Eye has not only been good karma, but good business.

Excerpted from
Bradshaw On The Family
By John Bradshaw

Checklist for How Your Self-Esteem Was Damaged in an Addicted Family

After 17 bitter years of painful alcoholism, I put the cork in the bottle 30 years ago. In many ways the last thing I would have believed as a child was that I would become an alcoholic. I cried myself to sleep many a night because of my father's drinking and his abandonment. Frozen with fear in my bed at night, I waited for him to come home, never knowing exactly what was going to happen. I hated alcoholism and all it stood for. I obsessed about his drinking day in and day out. At 30 years old, I wound up in Austin State Hospital on a voluntary commitment for the treatment of alcoholism.

As paradoxical as it seems, many children of alcoholics become alcoholics. And if they don't become alcoholics, they often marry alcoholics or people with some other compulsive, addictive personality disorder.

This paradoxical pattern focuses on the truth of "families as systems" more than any other single factor. Some 20 years ago, persons from alcoholic families started realizing that there were commonalities in their lives that seemed to have less to do with them and more to do with their families of origin. Led by Robert J. Ackerman, Claudia Black, Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse, Janet G. Woititz and Wayne Kritsberg, the Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACoA) movement formed. With the Adult Children's movement, the family systems concept took a giant step forward.

During the first decade of my recovery from alcoholism, I knew nothing of the Adult Children's phenomenon. I had dabbled intellectually with family systems. I had incorporated the work of Virginia Satir, Jay Haley and R. D. Laing into my adult theology classes at Palmer Episcopal Church in Houston. But I never got the connection with my own alcoholic family of origin. I thought that my addiction to excitement, my people-pleasing and approval-seeking, my overly developed sense of responsibility, my intimacy problems, my frantic compulsive lifestyle, my severe self-criticalness, my frozen feelings, my incessant good-guy act and my intense need to control were just personality quirks. I never dreamed that they were characteristics common to adults who as children lived in alcoholic families.

Even though I was recovering from alcoholism, I was still acutely compulsive. My compulsivity was causing life-damaging consequences. I was working, buying, smoking and eating compulsively. This realization led me to seek further treatment for my still-addicted personality.

The work in chemical dependency and especially the ACoA movement has helped me understand the nature of compulsivity and how it is set up in families who use ineffective coping skills to deal with anxiety and distress.

Adult Children of Alcoholics

The fact that there are common characteristics of children who grew up in alcoholic families betrays an underlying structure of disorder. I've outlined some traits of ACoA using the first letters of the phrase Adult Children of Alcoholics.

Addictive/compulsive behavior or marry addicts
Delusional thinking and denial about family of origin
Unmercifully judgmental of self or others
Lack good boundaries
Tolerate inappropriate behavior

Constantly seek approval
Have difficulty with intimate relationships
Incur guilt when standing up for self
Lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth
Disabled will
Reactive rather than creative
Extremely loyal to a fault
Numbed out

Overreact to changes over which they have no control
Feel different from other people

Anxious and hyper vigilant
Low self-worth and internalized shame
Confuse love and pity
Overly rigid and serious, or just the opposite
Have difficulty finishing projects
Overly dependent and terrified of abandonment
Live life as a victim or offender
Intimidated by anger and personal criticism, or overly independent
Control madness-have an excessive need to control
Super-responsible or super-irresponsible

From this checklist it's clear that as children of alcoholics, we are not just reacting to the alcoholic's drinking. We are reacting to the relational issues: the anger, the control, the emotional unavailability of the alcoholic parent. These traits are a response to the trauma of the abandonment and ensuing shame that occur in alcoholic families.

Excerpted from
Soul of Adulthood: Opening the Doors...
By John Friel, Ph.D., Linda Friel

While each of us grapples with layers of meaning inside of us, there are also parallel struggles going on in the broader world outside. The two are obviously related because our political and historical dramas are reflections of the myriad layers of our individual longings as they emerge, express themselves and collide with one another. Whatever is in our hearts gets projected out onto our leaders, and conversely, our leaders find themselves in power at least in part because they have found a way to resonate with our longings. So when john F. Kennedy gave his electrifying inaugural address in 1961, he put some of us in a bind. A new leader carries into power all of the hopes, dreams and anxieties of the people whom he leads, and many people have high hopes that their new leader will do something for them to make their lives better. But there he was telling us not how he was going to improve America, but how we could improve America by taking responsibility for it ourselves.

It was a brilliantly hypnotic remark and many of us responded, carried along by our enchantment with his public image. Kennedy was energetic, sophisticated, charming, detached and intellectual, and thus tapped directly into the spirit of an America ready for the new era of media-dominated politics. As there are many layers to the soul of an individual, nations have many-layered souls, too. At one level it didn't matter if he was a womanizer or if his physical health was bad, because we didn't want or need to know these things about him at the time. It would have hurt too much to know. We were not only in an age of cold war, detente and space races, but also an age of innocence and naiveté, at least on the conscious plane.

As we get ready to enter the 21st century, many feel that our country has gone to hell in a handbasket, and at a very superficial level that may be true. The world seems darker, more complicated and more anxiety-ridden today than it did in the early 1960s. Over the past 30 years, there have been countless dialectical struggles over civil rights, economics, communism versus capitalism, women's rights, rights of the poor and homeless, and many others. We have battled in Congress, in the streets, in our bedrooms and boardrooms, and some would say that all we have to show for it is a high divorce rate and a lot of latchkey children waiting at home for their single parent to return from work at the end of a long day.

But that gloomily oversimplified analysis is probably just as inaccurate as was our naiveté in the 1960s - things are different, not necessarily worse. Each generation appears to have its particular struggles that must be played out. Today, some social critics suggest that we are engaged in a national struggle between victim and perpetrator. We have analyzed these concepts back and forth on television talk shows for so many years now we seem to be spinning inside a maelstrom of confused finger-pointing. Who can tell the good guys from the bad guys anymore? Everything has become so muddy and relative that murderers go free because juries feel sorry for them, and people don't know if their memories are real, imagined or simply there by a therapist's suggestion. We seem to have lost both our moral compass and our sense of personal accountability.

Charles Sykes makes a compelling case for his belief that we have steered a course into the treacherous waters of victimism - a mindset in which each of us sees himself as a victim of someone else's offenses. Rather than accepting that life doesn't always work out the way we would like, we now file lawsuits as easily as we change disposable razors. If we are unhappy, then somebody else must be to blame. After all, this is America the land of entitlement, in which we now only ask what our country can do for us. If Sykes' thesis is correct, then it follows that no matter what the real cause of our misery may be, there must be someone who can be made to pay for it.

We suspect that Sykes' book may be reviled by many people who only see centuries of social injustice needing to be rectified. However, he asserts quite strongly that victims of abuse and neglect have every right to be respected for their victim status and to get the help that they need to move beyond it. The emotions surrounding victimization in America appear so powerful, so unconscious and so deep that many people don't hear that part of his message. They hear the word "victimism" and become outraged. But as psychologists who work daily with victims of childhood trauma, we cannot ignore the fact that when victimhood becomes institutionalized, victims have little choice but to remain victims. Over the years, we have learned a very difficult truth-that if one is to stop being victimized in the future he must first face the fact of his victimhood, work through the pain of the trauma, and then take responsibility for his life in the present. In simpler terms, he must first heal the old wounds and then learn how to become an adult.

Inside the Victim Role

As annoying as the debate about political correctness may sometimes be, it isn't trivial. Words are one of our primary tools to maintain connection with each other, and they are in constant social evolution. In the 1950s it was Freudian-chic to know that human beings react strongly to the word "mother." Mothers are so important in our early development that no matter what kind of relationship we have with them our reactions will be marked. The word "death" has similar emotional richness for many, as do the words "earthquake" and "tornado." Words are symbols for ideas, events, things and feelings that have meaning for us, great or small; lately, the word "victim" has gained considerable emotional power in American society.

A woman we knew believed that if she admitted she was a victim of something she would dissolve into a puddle of shame. This reaction to the word often signals our fear of admitting our limitations, which is a formidable limitation in itself. At the other extreme is a man who believed that unless society legally acknowledged his victimhood by requiring payment of some sort, he would be trapped in it for all eternity, never to be happy or fulfilled, which is also a formidable trap in itself.

Excerpted from
Perfectly Normal: Living and Loving with Low Libido
By Sandra Pertot, Ph.D

"I never feel like [having] sex," says Julia. "What's wrong with me?
When I know Tom wants sex, I usually feel that I just can't be
bothered. He's upset because I always seem to be saying no,
and I never come on to him."

There is nothing obvious to distinguish Julia from other women. She could be a businesswoman or a housewife, twenty-something or in her midlife, in a caring relationship or one that is emotionally barren. She is just as likely to be fit and healthy as she is to be overweight and rundown. She may once have felt very strong sexual desire or have always had little energy for sex. There are many women who feel like Julia does, and they may have only one thing in common: They sometimes think that they wouldn't care if they never had sex again.

In TODAY'S WORLD, young women expect to want sex with passion and enjoy it with abandon. A good sex life is regarded as a right that is taken for granted. With increasing recognition of women's rights in both the personal and public domains, women are no longer expected to play a subservient role to men in their personal relationships, and positive images of female sexuality are the norm. Lead characters in books and movies are routinely portrayed as sexually confident women, and numerous books and magazine articles are dedicated to helping the average real-life woman discover her sexual potential.

Of course, female sexuality hasn't always been viewed so positively. During the past century, female sexuality was variously denied, trivialized, repressed, and subjugated. To understand our current view of female sexuality, we have to start by looking to the past.

FEMALE SEXUALITY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Medical and religious writers in the early decades of the 20th century viewed sex as a necessary evil that should be controlled at all times. They thought that masturbation, for example, could lead to mental or physical illness and even early death. Men were unfortunately more susceptible to the evils of sex, but women, mercifully, were often spared. Influential writers such as Dr. William Acton believed that normal women lacked sexual feelings of any kind and had sex only to please their husbands or to become pregnant.

Not everyone shared this view. The famous Viennese psychiatrist Dr. Sigmund Freud believed that sexual pleasure was a basic need for both men and women. However, he wasn't at all confident that women could mature enough to reach their sexual potential. Writing in the early part of the century, Dr. Freud had a powerful negative influence on the understanding of the sexual nature of women. He characterized them as mutilated males, biologically inferior because they lacked penises. And he insisted that an essential phase in the psychosexual development of women was acquiring the ability to achieve orgasm from penile thrusting alone. Although he recognized that the clitoris was highly sensitive and the vagina relatively insensitive, he stated that the inability of a woman to achieve orgasm with only the stimulation of intercourse was an indication of severe personality disorder.

Female Sexuality in the 20th Century

The legacy of writers such as Acton and Freud continued into the second half of the century. In 1972, British sex educator Clare Raynor echoed Acton by declaring that though men have strong sex drives, women want sex only for babymaking. Many experts continued to support Freud's view that it might be difficult for women to mature sufficiently enough to come to orgasm during intercourse, and writers such as Canadian gynecologist Marion Hilliard, M.D., advised women not to be selfish and to consider their partner's feelings. This meant that sometimes they should fake arousal and orgasm so that their partner could feel proud and confident as a man.

Maxine Davis, a popular author in the 1950s whose books were still highly regarded and read decades later, gave women some conflicting advice. She advised young wives that it was their responsibility to adapt themselves to their husband's needs in order to have a successful marriage, because their own sexual pleasure wasn't an essential part of love-making. Like Raynor, she advised women to sometimes fake orgasm, but she also recommended that they come to climax during intercourse at least some of the time, because this was the only true path to sexual ecstasy. At the same time, Davis felt that they should never take charge, because she believed that men don't like bossy women.

In the early 1960s, popular psychologist Joyce Brothers, Ph.D., advised women who did indeed desire sex to not make it too obvious. She felt that for a marriage to be good, the husband had to dominate both sexually and financially. Wives could certainly work outside the home, provided they didn't have a more-responsible and more-financially successful job than their husband did, and they could want and even enjoy sex as long as they weren't too aggressive about it and allowed their husband to set the sexual pace.

It's no wonder that many women found the whole notion of sex confusing. Premaritally, it was the woman's responsibility to control any sexual behavior to avoid pregnancy, and within marriage, she should not be too keen on having sex but certainly be prepared to do her conjugal duty. If she was doing her marital duty, maybe she could or should enjoy it and perhaps even have an orgasm but only if she could do it in the normal way (that is, through intercourse). Even then, because of the absence of realistic sex education, there was a good chance that a woman wouldn't know what intercourse actually was-the wedding night was something of a shock to many a virgin bride. And if she did know what was expected of her, how did she know? Was she "that kind of girl"?

While there were some writers throughout the century who questioned the notion that sex was inherently sinful and tried to bring some enlightenment into the lives of married couples, overall, society remained essentially conservative. Married couples had limited access to information on sexual matters, and girls were typically denied even basic information about menstruation, so the onset of menarche was often terrifying.

All that was about to change.

The Cultural Shift

When world-renowned sex researchers William Masters, M.D., and Virginia Johnson published their groundbreaking work Human Sexual Inadequacy in 1970, they estimated that as many as 50 percent of couples led unsatisfying sex lives. At that time, they believed that the most significant causes of sexual problems were conservative cultural attitudes about sex, and ignorance about basic sexual functioning.

As difficult as it may be to believe now, the extent of sexual ignorance at that time was such that most people were unaware of the existence of the clitoris; many young brides had no idea that men had erections; and even into the 1970s, there were some couples whose apparent infertility was due to the fact the wife was still a virgin-neither partner knew where to put the penis!

It was assumed that a man knew more about sex and had to be patient with his virgin partner, guiding her through the mysteries of sex. It isn't clear how men were supposed to acquire this greater sexual knowledge and understanding, because sex education seems to have consisted of furtive schoolyard discussions, awkward "talks" from parents, and what was learned by self-discovery. If sex education in any formal sense did occur, it concentrated on reproduction and the immorality of premarital sex and masturbation; techniques for sexual pleasure were certainly not on the agenda.

There were many influences that combined in the 1960s to help shape a significant shift in our attitudes toward sex over the subsequent decades. These changes provided a climate for Masters and Johnson's work that had not existed before (although their ideas still met with considerable hostility from the conservative sections of society).

One of the most significant of these changes was the development of the contraceptive pill. Effective contraception meant that couples could explore sex for pleasure without fear of unwanted pregnancy. Still, no one, not even the sex researchers, asked the obvious question: What makes sex pleasurable? Instead, it was assumed that sexual pleasure was inevitable with certain sexual behaviors and that appropriate sex education would give couples all the information they needed.

Improved contraception led to a new phase in the women's movement. Control of fertility meant the opportunity to explore other life choices and redefine relationships with men. Women began to question the traditional view of sex as a wifely duty. The view of women as sexually naive and uninterested was seriously challenged during the 1960s, and for many women, being expected to endure male caresses without consideration for their own enjoyment was no longer acceptable. More and more women wanted a part of the "sex for pleasure" movement, and they developed the confidence to seek it. Not only that, many women felt strongly that they should participate in sex only when they felt like it. Saying no to your partner was becoming accepted as a fundamental right.

This change in focus away from reproduction and marital duty drew attention to the problems of people who did not automatically find sex an enjoyable pastime. The time was right for serious researchers to explore the sexual difficulties many people reported, and Masters and Johnson took up the challenge.

One of their major starting points was to discredit the long-held view that sexual problems are always a symptom of deep, underlying psychiatric illness that can be cured only by long-term psychotherapy. Instead, they claimed an impressive cure rate with their treatment program, which combined sex education, a series of couples exercises called Sensate Focus, and specific behavioral strategies for each of the sexual dysfunctions. This approach came to be known as sex therapy.

Sex therapy challenged old beliefs and lack of knowledge. It came as a surprise to many that women were capable of orgasm and that it was most likely achieved by clitoral rather than vaginal stimulation. Couples learned that what happened prior to intercourse (foreplay) was as important as the act itself. Men learned that they could delay ejaculation to enhance the satisfaction of both partners and that they didn't have to endure impotence in painful, embarrassed silence.

One of Masters and Johnson's most fundamental aims was to abolish goal-oriented performance. They believed that if people stopped being anxious about their performance and were willing to put into practice some basic techniques, good sex would happen naturally, making sexual pleasure within easy reach of everyone. (Interestingly, early sex therapy did not address the problem of sex drive: It was assumed that once a couple stopped being anxious about sex and learned how to achieve sexual pleasure, sex drive would automatically increase.)

As a young sex therapist in the early 1970s, I remember embracing all this exciting knowledge and the associated treatment protocols with an almost evangelical zeal. It seemed, back then, that sexual liberation was about to be realized-and my colleagues and I often joked that we'd be working ourselves out of a job, because there would be no need for sex therapists in the new millennium.

The Irony of It All

Despite 30 years of access to sex therapy and an increasing openness about sex during that time, the reported rates of sexual problems have not changed significantly-making for an interesting paradox. There's more sexual content in books and films than ever before, and there are hundreds of books and magazine articles dedicated to exploring and offering solutions for all kinds of sexual difficulties. In spite of this, a large population survey conducted in 1994 by University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann, Ph.D., and his associates estimated that 43 percent of women and 31 percent of men in the United States have sexual problems. One in three women rated themselves as lacking interest in sex, which was double the reported rate for men. (The major concern for men was worry that they climaxed too quickly.)

These results were astounding, particularly the figures on low sex drive in women. Although other more recent studies haven't found the same high rates, they still report that 20 percent of women, or one in five, complain of low libido. These numbers don't come as a surprise to sex therapists. Our offices are busy with women of all ages who worry because they don't feel like having sex as often as they believe they should, or as often as their partners would like.

Think about it. Sit in a mall and watch the crowds go by, and consider that at least one of every five women walking past you is likely to not be too keen on sex. That's an awful lot of worried or dissatisfied women and stressed relationships.

How did this happen? In an age of sexual sophistication and celebration of sexuality, when one of the best-selling books in the late 20th century was called The Joy of Sex, what went wrong? Why has the optimism we sex therapists had in the 1970s failed to be vindicated? Why, in particular, do so many women not want sex?

These are the questions the first part of this book seeks to answer. (And although I am focusing specifically on women's lack of sexual interest, this isn't to say that men don't have their own problems. Indeed, one in six men in Dr. Laumann's 1994 study rated themselves as having little or no interest in sex, but in my clinical experience, the issues affecting male libido are different from those of concern to women, and they would justify a book of their own.)

This book is not about a mystical philosophy to put your sex life on a higher plane. It's not a guide to sexual positions and a variety of sexual techniques nor a manual of behavior programs to help you learn to be orgasmic or deal with painful intercourse. There are hundreds of books already available on these topics. Rather, it's a book for women-and their partners-who often feel irritated at the thought of sex or simply can't be bothered, then worry that there must be something wrong with them or their relationship. You'll be relieved to learn that this isn't necessarily the case.

To solve the problem, though, we have to start trying to see through a well-constructed illusion, which is the focus of the next chapter.

The Illusion of Sexual Individuality

Sexually, we like to think that we have it together, that we are more sophisticated and sexually aware now than at any other time in history. Yet, as we have seen, the current stereotype of normal, desirable sex is still quite narrow and rigid.

One exercise I often do when training sex therapists is ask them to describe what normal sexual frequency is. Typically, the answer is, Whatever is right for the individual. Then I ask how they would describe someone who only rarely desires sex, or a couple where one partner wants sex twice a week and the other once a month. Is one person closer to "normal" than the other? How would they, as sex therapists, go about helping this couple achieve sexual harmony? Which person is under more pressure to change? Despite the standard answer from therapists that this couple suffers from mismatched libidos and that both people are "normal," the pressure in therapy is most commonly on the person with the lower sex drive to pick up the pace.

When people claim to be liberated sexually, what they really mean is that they explore and enjoy experimentation and variety at the active, lusty, passionate end of the scale. We feel we are being broad-minded when we are comfortable with or tolerant of sexual diversity, such as homosexuality or bisexuality, or are prepared to experiment with oral sex, sex toys, threesomes, or bondage and discipline. However, if we are to truly embrace the notion of individual differences in sexuality, we need to think far more broadly than this and become respectful of people who are at the other end of the spectrum. Where does the asexual individual fit into the scheme of things? How is a person who prefers only "conventional" sex judged? What label is given to someone who is turned off by oral sex or by being touched on the genitals? What words are used to describe a woman--or man--who doesn't seem interested in sex? What are some of the factors that are commonly thought to lead to this disinterest?

In a recent survey in the United States, 43 percent of women and 31 percent of men identified themselves as having one or more sexual problems. Among women, 33 percent complained of low sexual desire 24 percent reported inability to come to Orgasm, and 14 percent stated they experience pain during sex. For men, the most frequently reported problem was premature ejaculation, accounting for 28 percent of complaints, while 15 percent rated themselves as lacking interest in sex, 10 percent said they had problems attaining or maintaining an erection, and 3 percent had physical pain during intercourse.

Some researchers have criticized this study because these problems were identified by self-rating rather than by clinical evaluation, but it is precisely this aspect of the survey that intrigues me. If one in three women believes she is not as interested in sex as she should be, and one in four men doesn't last as long as he thinks he should last, which of the following is more likely?

. We have a major epidemic on our hands.

. Many in this self-selected group aren't dysfunctional at all but are either variations on the norm or comparing themselves unrealistically with an ideal.

It's difficult to believe that such a large proportion of our population is sexually inadequate. Because problems such as painful intercourse and difficult erections are relatively objective, the figures given are likely to be fairly accurate, but even within these categories, the problems may be caused by worry about performance rather than by any psychological or physical disorder.

Many women who believe they are not experiencing arousal and orgasm have been influenced by the stereotype of hot and powerful sexual response portrayed in the media and promoted by the myth that if you aren't sure whether you've had an orgasm, you haven't! Some women who believe they are unable to reach orgasm are surprised to learn that that nice warm feeling or that sigh of relaxation is an orgasm, even if it is perhaps a 2 on a 10-point scale.

Sexual desire and ejaculatory control are more subjectively determined and evaluated. What is sexual desire? Is it physical passion, Or is it an emotional desire for intimacy? Can it be different things at different times? Is it possible to want sex but prefer to avoid it, and if so, why? What is a "normal" level of sexual interest?

Interestingly, this survey did not include questions about desiring sex with great frequency. Does that mean that you can't want sex too much, but you can want it too little?

How quick is too quick for ejaculation? Which partner is worried about it? Why? Is the problem that the woman finds it difficult to come to orgasm with penile thrusting despite the man controlling ejaculation for a reasonable time?

Additionally, for those people who rated themselves as not having problems, how did they decide this? Were all of them behaving close to the cultural norm, or were some of them confident enough to be happy to be different?

These questions need to be carefully considered before anyone, including sex therapists and researchers, can begin to understand the extent of individual variation in sexuality. Until these issues are thoroughly explored and discussed in sex manuals, magazine articles, and self-help books, people in the community will continue to rate themselves as having sexual problems even when there's a good chance that they're perfectly normal.

Normal Variation in Individual Sexuality

Thirty years as a sex therapist has highlighted for me what should be recognized as a self-evident truth--that people are not the same sexually, in the same way that they are not the same with respect to height, weight, intelligence, personality, food preferences, general health, and so on. In spite of the fact that the many ways in which people differ sexually become evident from just listening to them talk about their sexual experiences, there is little or no discussion of such differences by authors writing in the field of human sexuality. There are the acknowledged differences in sexual orientation, but gay and lesbian couples can also find it difficult to negotiate differences in individual wants and needs.

One of the most obvious ways in which people differ is in terms of their interest in sex, usually called sex drive. However, there are several other characteristics that also vary among individuals, as evident from the following list.

Frequency of sexual activity. Some people hope for, keenly want, or desperately need sexual activity several times a week or perhaps even more than once a day, whereas others are entirely satisfied to have sex once a month or even less often. Although there is general acceptance that the need for sex varies, there is no agreement as to what, if anything, constitutes an abnormally low or abnormally high sex drive. It's easy to see, however, that there would be some tension in a relationship where one person wants sex several times a week and the other would like it less than once a month.

Robustness of desire. Fluctuation of interest is a specific aspect of sex drive that can be confusing. Some people's level of interest remains reasonably constant no matter what else is happening in their lives, whereas others may switch off if they feel overwhelmed by other issues. This can lead to misinterpretation of motives: A person whose interest stays steady regardless of life events may seem insensitive, while one whose desire fluctuates may sometimes seem emotionally less committed to the other partner.

Type of desire. Currently, the expectation in Western culture is that sex drive is about hot passion or physical lust, but for some people, desire is much more muted and may be softly emotional rather than intensely physical. How does one partner interpret the signals of the other?

Desire versus response. This difference has been recognized in sex research for many years, but it doesn't seem to be widely appreciated in the community. Some people want to engage in sexual activity quite frequently but may not necessarily become aroused and orgasmic. Conversely, there are many people who aren't aware of any regular interest in sex and feel they could live without it, but if the partner initiates sex under the right circumstances, they can respond with enthusiasm.

Initiation versus response. It makes sense that if someone rarely feels the desire for sex even though she may enjoy it when it occurs, she isn't likely to initiate it very often. It simply doesn't occur to her, and her partner may be devastated, seeing it as a rejection or an indication that he's not sexually attractive. An imbalance in frequency of initiation of sex can be a major hurdle for couples to overcome.

Ease of arousal. Some people find it difficult to get turned on, and their partner complains that it takes a lot of work to start to get them hot, while others respond quickly. Sometimes, those who are slow to arouse are not confident enough to say what they need, or their partner persists in trying to stimulate them in various ways that actually turn them off. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that some people simply arouse more quickly than others.

Time to orgasm. Why do some people come more quickly than others? Should everyone be able to reach orgasm in a standard period of time? There are behavioral programs that can teach men who ejaculate rapidly how to delay reaching orgasm and that can help those with inhibited ejaculation come more easily, and there are strategies that will help women become aroused and come to orgasm more quickly. However, there will still be a range of times that it takes to come to orgasm, with some people having characteristic patterns of early (easy) or late (difficult) orgasm and others varying widely, depending on the circumstances.

Variation in response style. Perhaps this variable would be better termed variation in pleasure style. Sometimes, one partner has little interest in sex and doesn't really want to become aroused and have an orgasm, being quite happy to have quiet, cuddly sex, while at other times, the physical response is strong and urgent. This can be confusing if the other partner thinks sex is always about arousal, experimentation, and so on. And, Of course, there are individuals who mostly prefer quiet intimacy and find attempts at sexual arousal irritating, which can leave both partners bewildered and frustrated.

Variety in sexual behaviors. There seems to be an almost limitless range of things that people can do for sexual pleasure. Titles of magazine articles such as " 1,001 Ways to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed" give some idea of the smorgasbord that's available. However, it would be unreasonable to expect all people to like all of these behaviors. There are those who find particular acts abhorrent and those who find them simply boring. Some people prefer to rely on a limited number of tried-and-true activities, while others crave variety and experimentation.

Importance of sex. People's responses differ significantly when they're asked to rank the importance of sex in a relationship when compared with other variables, such as love, affection, companionship, financial security, children, and so on. Although studies consistently show that men tend to rate sex as more important than women do, this is a generalization, and either gender may give sex a high or low priority.

These are some of the variations in human sexuality that I have encountered in my long practice of sex therapy. I don't know how the normal/abnormal boundaries should be set, but it's my view that most of this variation should be considered part of normal human diversity.

Does this mean we must just accept how we are and not try to reach goals that may make sex more satisfying or relationships easier? If not, how do we decide what can be changed, and by what method? These are not easy questions to answer.

Certainly, sexual problems exist. If people believe they have a problem, then clearly something is worrying them. However, if they are comparing themselves with an unattainable ideal, their individual level of sexual functioning is not validated, and what is normal for them becomes defined as sexual dysfunction. The real problem confronting us is how to decide if someone's concern is a matter of definition and misinformation or if the behavior is truly outside the normal range. Even if it's not common, does this make it a dysfunction?

Sexual Potential: Not Created Equal

Lack of acceptance of the extent of individual differences, and the associated belief that normal people experience regular sexual desire and enjoy experimentation, has led to the belief that everyone has the same sexual potential. Surely, the thinking goes, if it's normal to have a persistent physical sex drive, for example, there must be some way to help people who don't have it to overcome their problem. The idea that what many people are already doing may be the best they can do is just not acceptable. It's this assumption that has caused so much misery in our time.

The emergence of sex therapy in the 1970s encouraged the view that everyone has the same sexual potential. Behavioral programs to teach women to be orgasmic and men to delay ejaculation assumed that with the right strategies, everyone could achieve these goals. If these programs didn't work for some people, the usual conclusion was that they were suffering from some form of sexual pathology that was loosely labeled sexual inhibition. The logical conclusion that perhaps the particular goals or techniques weren't right for those people wasn't even discussed. Although sex therapy has undergone many shifts in recent times, the idea that there may be many definitions of a successful sexual relationship is still not usually addressed by either therapists or clients.

Instead, we have spent a lot of energy trying to identify the factors associated with sexual "failure." A common view is that if we "fail" sexually, there must be some sexual trauma or secret in our past to account for it and that not reaching the standard is inevitably bad and should be corrected with therapy.

Sexual Personalities

Look around at your friends, family, and colleagues. Each person has a unique set of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that make up the sum of whom they are. This set of characteristics forms the personality of the individual and is consistently present for that person. Some characteristics may dominate or be present in all interactions, while others may reveal themselves only in specific situations.

In general, personality is considered to be stable over a person's lifetime, but not all characteristics are fixed or inflexible, and people can and do adapt according to circumstances and life experiences.

At the present time, there is a tendency to use sexual personality characteristics in a critical way. For example, for "conservative," read "inhibited"; for "shy," read "hung up"; and so on. However, if we acknowledge that each person has a unique personality and that what one person likes and admires in a friend, another may find annoying, then we can assume that the situation is similar with sexual personalities. In other words, what one person finds attractive, endearing, or exciting in someone else's sexual personality may be a complete turnoff for a different person.

Who is in a position to make a judgment as to which personality is the most functional? In the end, this judgment tends to become relevant only when an individual becomes involved in a sexual interaction. Of course, this brings into play the importance of the relationship between the two: A relationship characterized by mutual generosity, kindness, and gentleness is more likely to be able to resolve or accommodate differences than is one that is harsh, critical, and rigid.

Excerpted from
The Face: A Natural History
By Daniel McNeill

In his Travels (1356), Sir John Mandeville found the Andaman Islands rife with sensational beings. Headless humans strolled about with eyes and mouths on their chests. He saw noseless, sheet-faced citizens with punchhole eyes and lipless mouths. On one island, residents had a huge upper lip that shaded their faces as they drowsed in the hot afternoon. Elsewhere, tongueless dwarves with hard, grommet mouths sucked up food through a straw, and people walked about with ears that hung to their knees.

One scholar said Mandeville never traveled further than the local library, and it's almost certainly true. Faces like these inhabit the same realm as centaurs and flying monkeys, and for the same reason. They don't work.

The real human face is a glory of function, yet strange in ways beyond Mandeville's imagination. Indeed, it sets us apart from even the Neanderthals. For instance, it is flat, an extraordinary fact in the snarling animal world. Our mouths, noses, foreheads, and chins are almost unique. Males sprout beards and mustaches, unusual among primates. Our hair grows so long we regularly cut it, unlike any other creature.

It is a singular structure and it teems with subtleties. Indeed, it resembles a mansion full of invisible servants, little Ariels like the eyebrow performing tasks we never realize. It's also a zone of sensuality, of surging lips and gossamer hair, dancing eyelashes and pupils bright with sin. Such cues can be obvious, but they can also work sub rosa, spinning delight out of apparent air.

Of all items we see in daily life, the face most urgently needs a tour, for it is an enchanted terrain, one that both engages us and sedates the curiosity. From the eyes down to nose and mouth, and out to the frame of ears and hair, it is a playground of secrets. Some are shallow and some very deep, and the most basic of them goes back to the early days of animal life itself.

Why have a face?

The Early and the Odd

Why have a face?

We don't strictly need one. Many creatures, like sea urchins, starfish, clams, jellyfish, and protozoa, disdain it entirely. Others have partial faces. The microscopic rotifer has a pair of eye-spots on a rod in a feeding cup, an almost faceless face. The face of the sea anemone is all mouth, and of the octopus, two peering eyes. Snails have tiny mouths and eyes on stalks that wave over their heads.

Yet faces are amazingly common in the animal kingdom. Jaguars, salamanders, and hawks have them, as do all insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Why them and not the jellyfish?

The answer lies in evolution, the treasure chest of meaning for anatomy. The faces of everyone-Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan, William Shakespeare, Cher-began in the sea.

A true face bundles mouth and sense organs, and it may be older than shell or bone. Geneticists say multicelled life arose around 1.2 billion years ago, but hard fossils don't appear until much later, around 544 million years ago. Soft-bodied creatures like worms and the weird, feather-like Ediacarans scuttled about in this vast eon, but their remains are scarce. The first face likely coalesced toward the end of this period.

When shelled creatures suddenly did arrive, they were spectacular. It was the great Cambrian carnival of life, the zoological equivalent of the Paris art world in, say, 1910, and memorable faces adorned the seas. The tiny Opabinia, for instance, boasted a tentacle like an elephant's trunk and five mushroom-like eyes. It is so weird that, when first shown to an audience of paleontologists in 1972, they burst out in laughter.

But other creatures were more recognizable, like the slithery worms with eyes and mouth in front, and they show the origin of the face. It is the child of motion. When an animal swims regularly in one direction, the head becomes its leading edge. A forward mouth swallows food easily, through simple momentum; a mouth astern would recede from it. The head also contacts nonstop novelty, so the sense organs cluster up front, like the guidance system of a missile. There they reveal the future, an animal's fate in the space ahead.

Vertebrates like fish have four times more basic structure-mapping genes than invertebrates, and more intricate heads and bodies. And with fish, significant brains become common. The brain audits the facial senses. In theory it could go anywhere, like the central chip of a computer, but biological wiring is frail. So it too lodged up front, like a pilot before an instrument panel. And since the mass of neurons makes a choice killing point, fish evolved a hard covering for the brain, a skull or head-shield. Bone became the foundation of the face.

If you could take the stars in the Orion and shift them about at whim, the constellation would quickly vanish. Orion is more than Rigel, Betelgeuse, and its other stars. It is a pattern, and so is the face. In fact, we see the same array of mouth, nostrils, and eyes in creatures from eels to Einstein. It has been a marvel of hardiness, outlasting mountain ranges. That means evolution has crushed other designs.

What's made it so durable? Why, for instance, does the mouth always lie below the nostrils and eyes? And why don't we have eyes in the back of our heads, so we could see the whole world at once?

The face has a master sculptor: the quest for food. Hence the mouth dominates everywhere, in toads and foxes, caymans and wildebeest. It is the portal where an animal assimilates the world, begins to change it from nonself to self. Hazards abound here and care is paramount. So three checkpoint senses-taste, smell, and sight-lurk nearby to reject poisons and generally tell ambrosia from ash. The taste buds lie within the mouth, the nostrils sit just above, and the eyes perch a tier higher.

Why are the latter two above the mouth? As it happens, this placement yields many rewards. For vertebrates in general, it sets the eyes above falling food and out of the body's shadow. Fish especially need eyes oriented to sunlight, which fades even a few hundred feet down. The arrangement also lets land animals gobble morsels from the earth, sniff rising aromas, and view snout and ground at once, instead of snout and sky.

Some creatures boast extra senses on the face. Blind cavefish have ridges of tiny rods which detect the ripples in water from moving prey. The dimples of pit vipers like rattlesnakes can register shifts in heat as slight as 0.002° F. and help them strike rodents in dark burrows. And sharks have a bulb of flesh jutting out between their eyes and low-slung mouths. Long a puzzle to zoologists, this nosecone contains the ampullae of Lorenzini, which sense electrical pulses from living creatures. To a shark, all food is like a parolee with a radar bracelet.

Strong forces have fixed the face pattern, yet species can stretch it. Carnivores like cats and bears have frontal eyes like headlights to give them binocular vision, which sharpens their sense of 3D, makes them better hunters. But this pairing narrows the visual field, so they often compensate with swivel necks-an owl's can turn some 270 degrees-and eyes that rotate in their sockets. Like all higher primates, humans hew to the carnivore model and have necks and matched, movable eyes. We don't have eyes in the back of our heads because by turning our necks and eyes we can see the whole panorama anyway.

Prey, however, need a faster early-warning system. Many, like gazelles, have eyes on the sides of their heads, to scout a wider range and spot cheetahs earlier. Most fish employ this sentry strategy, and in fact their lenses can bulge through their pupils, giving them a near 360-degree view. Some bottom-feeders take a more drastic tack. Their faces split. The ray, for instance, has a mouth and two nostrils on the smooth, broad belly where it eats. But its eyes lie on top. Its enemies can only come from above, so eyes below would be a gift to barracudas.

Nature smiles on other deviations. Nostrils atop the skull seem pure Mandeville, but whales and dolphins have blowholes there to breathe more easily when they surface. A long, liana nose is bizarre, yet the elephant grew one because its head can't reach the ground. The great flanged face of the hammerhead shark is one of the oddest in the vertebrate world. It may have arisen to spread the nostrils farther apart, increasing the difference between odor levels in each, so these sharks could better track the origin of delectable scents.

Does any animal have eyes on the back of its head? The shrimp Rimicaris exoculata, which lives near seafloor vents in the Pacific, comes close. It has eyes on the rear of its shell. Oceanographers wondered why, and discovered a subtle, surprising glow from the vents themselves. The shrimp monitors this unexplained light to keep hot fluid from scalding it.

These are huge variations, as faces go. But here as everywhere, a small change can sometimes spur a destiny.

Why Have a Hairless Face?

We treasure smooth facial skin and can respond very badly to interruptions in it like acne and wrinkles. A particular grotesquerie is hair all over the face, the rare "werewolf" syndrome. Yet hair coats the faces of most mammals. We have a bare face, and this apparently trivial fact has shaped our very nature.

It goes back to primates. According to a tale in the Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation epic, the gods' first attempt to populate the earth resulted in people with "dry faces." The gods deemed these wooden specimens a first draft and tried to expunge them. Their descendants inhabit the jungles today: monkeys.

Monkeys are far from wooden, of course. They are quicksilver creatures, agile, social, ceaselessly achatter. And their "dry" or naked faces can stand out strikingly, isles of color amid fur. It is an innovation, for their immediate forebears, the prosimians like lemurs and lorises, have hairy faces.

What chased the pelt away? A big clue lies in the upper lip, where a second change occurs. In most mammals, the upper lip clings tightly to the gums. That's why no real cat will ever grin like Garfield, and why a title like The Jaguar's Smile implies fantasia.

But in monkeys the upper lip is free and moves about deftly. It lets the countenance take a plethora of shapes, and each can be a signal. The face thus grows more articulate. And since these signals must be visible, the fur withdrew. Our faces are bare so others can read them.

Prosimians show the alternative. They communicate mainly by odor. A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), for example, will scent its tail and swirl it about to disperse messages. The aroma wafts out slowly and it dallies. The signal is a drone.

But the naked face is a dance of meaning. For instance, a monkey ready for fun will show a "play-face," a near-grin that displays the lower teeth. Others see it instantly, and a second expression can follow at once. Hence these animals convey far more every minute. It's like the difference between smoke signals and live video.

The earth abounds with social creatures like dogs and lions, and they too have face signals. But the smooth face greatly expanded the vocabulary, made messages clearer, subtler, and more varied. It hooked monkeys into a dense, rapid information web and led to supersocial creatures. Chimps console each other and play intricate political games, for instance, and we humans are virtuosos of cooperation. Our ability to gauge trust and work with others depends partly on the face, and it has let us farm, mine, and wire the earth, beat back predators and disease, and dwell in rich cities and suburbs. The hairless face was a first step to civilization.

The Great Resculpting

Few ideas jarred the nineteenth century quite like natural selection. Many thinkers felt an ape ancestry was impossible, even insulting, given our broad minds and deep souls. In one notorious jibe, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce wondered whether evolutionist Thomas Huxley had descended from apes on his grandfather's or grandmother's side.*

Yet suppose apes' faces looked like ours. Would the bishop have ventured this jest? Would fundamentalists be quite so sure Darwin was wrong if they could see the spitting image of themselves beyond the moat in a zoo, calmly stripping leaves off a branch?

Our faces don't resemble those of apes or of any other animal, and it's one reason we've deemed ourselves so singular. Indeed, the recent remake of the human countenance is the most arresting part of its history, and unprecedented in evolution. For our faces stem partly from the products of our minds. Each of us has a smart-face, bred of weapons, fire, and desire.

The steppingstones to humanity lie in Africa. They begin with walking apes, like the famed fossil Lucy, who dwelt in transitional woodlands between 5 and 1.3 million years ago. Known as australopithecines, these creatures looked much like chimps, with their swooping muzzle, chunky teeth, and wisp of forehead.

Yet their upright stance demilitarized the face. A four-legged animal's jaws and teeth reach forward, like a spearpoint, and make the face a natural weapon. A wolf, for instance, lopes along with fangs in front, and even chimps routinely nip their rivals. On two feet, with head poised atop shoulders, the australopithecines not only lost this protective design, but left their whole bodies open to attack.

So how did they fend off the sabertooth cats and hyena packs of the transitional forest? Did they have a vicious kick, like the ostrich and kangaroo? Perhaps they had sharp claws, or wielded wooden sticks. In fact, they probably fled up trees. They were not pure bipeds. Their curled feet and apelike semicircular canals, or balance sensors, suggest they lived part-time in the boughs like chimps. They may have evolved a two-legged stance to cross the ground from tree to tree more quickly.*

The australopithecines lived for eons, but by 2.5 million years ago the globe was cooling and the current pattern of seesaw ice ages had commenced. Africa dried and the trees thinned out, and these creatures may have become easier marks as they raced between them. They dwindled away and a new animal appeared: Homo habilis, the first member of our own genus.

Here was a radically different creature. Homo habilis didn't scurry up trees. It was strictly two-footed. How did it stave off carnivores? It almost certainly used weapons. It could hurl rocks at them, but more significantly, it made stone tools. Some were sharp flakes that could have drawn blood from predators and cut tough hides, possibly letting Homo habilis dine on meat.

Homo habilis was novel in other ways. Its brain grew 50 percent, an astonishing development. And its face began drifting toward the human. Its forehead lifted a bit, its muzzle slimmed, and its teeth shrank, perhaps because they mattered less as weapons. Some had heavy browridges, which anchored the jaw muscles, and the first nub of a projecting nose.

From Homo habilis through Homo erectus to us, the four key changes occur: The face flattens. The forehead rises to house the ballooning brain. The nose juts out. And the chin appears. The first three commenced early, and the chin debuted almost yesterday.

The true human face appeared at the end of a deep ice age 130,000 years ago, with modern Homo sapiens in Africa. It differed strikingly from that of even the Neanderthals, our closest cousins. Indeed, when archeologists want to tell the latter from us, they look first to the face. The Neanderthals had bulging browridges; we just have eyebrows. They had moonlike skulls; ours more resemble short loaves of bread. They possessed long, narrow jaws and massive teeth they apparently used as a clamp. Their noses were great fleshy sodbreakers. They had cavernous eyesockets and virtually no chin. And, notably, they retained a modest muzzle. Our faces are flat.

The vanished muzzle may be the most beguiling evolutionary fact of all. A projecting mouth is essential equipment in almost all vertebrates, from pike to polar bears. It lets them snare, gnaw, and nip.* Yet we don't need it at all. As Darwin suggested in The Descent of Man, our brains made the muzzle obsolete.

A muzzle thrusts teeth outward so they can close like a trap, killing and wounding. Leopards maul prey and camels bite attackers. But our teeth lie within the skull and they make awkward weapons. We manufacture better ones instead, and our hands have evolved myriad grip positions to handle them and other tools.

We also gnaw food less, since we gained control over fire. Hearths first appear around 300,000 years ago, though they don't become common in archeological digs until around 40,000. Cooking softens food, reducing the need for strong jaws and teeth, and if we used fire more than the Neanderthals, it might also explain our loss of browridges.

And we rarely nip our fellows, as chimps do. We fling words instead and the right ones can sting, as witness the Wilberforce-Huxley exchange. They won't stop a grizzly, but they do very nicely with other people. If the muzzle lingered on for nipping, language could have obviated it.

These advances made the muzzle pointless. But it might still have persisted, a genetic free-rider like the appendix. It didn't, and archeologists have wondered why.

The reigning explanation invokes desire, and centers on the allure of the childlike face. We find babies winsome, since ancient folk with this trait paid more attention to their children, raised more healthy adults, and thus spread the gene that makes us google at infants. The attraction carried over to babyfaced grownups. They looked more appealing, reproduced more often, and passed on more babyface genes. The muzzle sank as if punctured and the face came to look infantile. The theory may be right. It's hard to test.

The individuals of 130,000 years ago were anatomical us. They had our foreheads, cheekbones, and flashing teeth, and if we could have looked them in the eye, we would have understood what we saw.

Double Star

"O! What a life is the eye! what a strange and inscrutable essence!" wrote Coleridge. Indeed, the eyes are far more than tools of sight, and we have just begun penetrating their glittery mysteries.

Nothing else shows thought like the eyes. They are the psychological center of the face, Pliny's "window to the soul," whose glow can speak intelligence and love. They are little pools of being, and they can bewitch us.

The eyes are as close as we get to seeing a mind. They can be dreamy, contemplative, vague. Elfride Swancourt's in Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes are "a misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or surface." Eyes can glint like laser pricks; one can "look daggers" at another. They can dart about like a trapped animal or twinkle with mirth. They can perform immelmanns of scorn. A look in the eye is human contact, and as Claude Lévi-Strauss found in India, can instantly spur beggars to solicit. Eyes can murmur sweet enticements; one can have "bedroom eyes." And when thought and feeling are absent, they can look hard as marbles, or even rubbery, like Popeye's in the Faulkner novel Sanctuary (1931).

Subjectively, we exist just behind our eyes, which form a transparent scrim on the world. We both oversee the outside and lie exposed to it. Hence the eyes are the most powerful and most intimate part of the face. In anger they flare, as if thought alone could scorch a target, while in shame people avert them, hiding the mind from view. And in delight and love the eyes sparkle, beckoning people to peer in. Indeed, lovers gaze into each other's eyes and feel a dizzy freefall.

The eyes seem alive, and when a razor slits an eye in Un Chien Andalou (1929), the audience always gasps. Photos of eye surgery are notoriously hard to look at. Some peoples have mutilated eyes from fear of their power. The Ainu of Japan dug a knife into the orbs of a slain bear to keep its spirit from seeking revenge, and the Parintintin Indians of South America ate the eyes of dead foes, to blind their ghosts. Images fare no better. Muhammad aimed first at the eyes when he attacked the idols in the Kaaba. During the Reformation, Dutch iconoclasts gouged at eyes in paintings, and when Easter Islanders toppled the basalt faces in their grim civil war, they methodically shattered the eyes.

For centuries many criminals believed murder victims retained an image of the killer's face on their retinas. Hence, after Frederick Guy Browne slew a constable on an English roadside in 1927, he leaned over and fired one shot into each of the dead man's eyes. Police caught him anyway.

The eye long seemed to mock evolution. How could such a splendid tool have appeared in stages? What good is half an eye? Yet the evolutionary stages are out in plain view. Protozoa have dotlike "eyes" or photoreceptors that register the mere presence of light. Limpet eyes have receded into pits. In abalones, the pit has almost closed over, forming a pinhole eye like a camera obscura. And squids, octopi, and most vertebrates have full camera eyes, with lenses that form sharp images. Using computers and cautious assumptions, biologists Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger have estimated that an animal could go from a flat skin-eye to a camera-lens eye in 364,000 generations, or in most cases less than 500,000 years.

We possess two orbs, like every other sighted vertebrate except the four-eyed fish. Monoculars like the bloody Cyclopeans of The Odyssey and the griffin-fighting Arimaspi in Herodotus live only in myth. Even primitive worms like the half-inch Planaria, which dwells under rocks and in streams, have paired eyes. Two eyes show an item from separate angles, so it appears against a slightly different background on each retina. The brain assesses this discrepancy and thus gauges distance, a trick called parallax. Two eyes also provide backup. If some Odysseus drives a hot pike into one, we, unlike Polyphemus, have another.

The visible eye is about one-sixth of the entire ball, and its fascinating effect stems from its three interacting parts: white, iris, and pupil.

The white is part of the overall eyeball sheath, the sclera, which becomes transparent over the iris and pupil. Its gleam resonates with the teeth, and in a brilliant glance the two can seem to swap electricity.

Does it matter that it's white? Would blue suffice, or ochre? In fact, the ivory color is crucial. Since it contrasts with the darker iris and pupil, it highlights eye movements. If the sclera blended in with the iris, we would have trouble telling where people were looking and flail about socially.

Detecting gaze direction is a vital ability and our brains have special wiring for it, a weathervane for glance. It tells us whom individuals are looking at, focusing on. Hence if we see that a person is angry, we know whether he's menacing us or another. When we enter a group, this skill rapidly builds a social map, showing who is heeding whom. One scientist suggests this "attention structure" quickly clues us to hierarchy and fosters social coherence. It organizes us.

Our sensitivity to eyes yields other boons. Gaze implies one's next movements, and thus can signal purpose or desire. For instance, gorillas in the zoo will look to an object they want, then beseechingly toward a human. We say "with an eye to" and "with a view to" to denote goal, and the Zulu phrase isa liwela umfela ugcwele, "yearning reaches the impossible," means literally "the eye crosses a flooded river."

In fact, eye movement sends a constant stream of messages, and it may lie at the core of the striking eloquence of the eyes, as we'll see. But without a backdrop like the white, this language would simply elude us.

Between white and pupil lies the iris, a chromatic ring. It is not one flat hue, but a riot of spots, wedges, and spokes. Its color also changes from pupil to perimeter. Each iris pattern is unique, and experimental ATMs are already using them to identify customers.

The jumble of hues in the iris can make eye color a matter of opinion. Novelists have shamelessly exploited this latitude, ballooning interstitial tints and using the results in a subtle color-code of character. For instance, yellow eyes invoke the feral. The Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein's monster have yellow eyes, and Rosemary's baby has orbs of golden yellow, whites and all, with black-slit pupils like a cat's. Gold hints at greed and allure. Balzac endowed the miser Grandet with such eyes, and the bisexual houri in his The Girl with the Golden Eyes (1835) has eyes of "living gold, brooding gold, amorous gold." Gray eyes suggest inscrutability, and bedeck such fairly opaque characters as Homer's Athena, Flem Snopes, Lolita, Buck Mulligan, and Bartleby.

Colored contact lenses opened a Pandora's box, enabling iridescent eyes, mirror eyes, square pupils, written messages over the entire cornea. They allowed designer eyes and FX specialists exploited them. For instance, Linda Blair's vivid green eyes in The Exorcist lent an extra jolt to her possession. Today, computers can make actors' irises change color and even show little films.

The iris is actually a pair of muscles, the most beautiful ones in the body. They work like a camera diaphragm to change the aperture of the pupil, letting more or less light reach the retina. One set of fibers radiates out from the pupil. If you enter a dark theater, these marionette strings pull the pupil open. The other fibers coil round the pupil like a noose. Return to the glare of sunlight and they contract, shrinking it. Without the iris, we would often be blind.

We come at last to the black heart of the eye, the pupil. It is the object of the iris's embrace and the opening onto the wonders of the retina. One out of every five people has pupils of different diameter, which can actually change size independently and alter the balance in a few hours. Blue-eyed individuals possess larger ones, on average, than brown-eyed. The pupil is not uniformly circular in humans, and in animals it varies from the keyhole slit of the lemon shark to the horizontal blob of sheep or cattle. Shape doesn't matter. They can all control the amount of light entering the eye.

In people, the pupils take on an extra role. They are profoundly expressive. These obsidian disks widen not only in dim light, but before an image that excites us, as shrewd poker players and bargainers know. Men's pupils dilate when they look at photos of sharks and female nudes, women's when they see pictures of babies, mothers with babies, and male nudes. The pupils mirror our level of awareness overall. Fear, surprise, joy, anxiety, loud noise, and even music will expand them, and boredom and drowsiness shrink them.

We tend to like those who care about us, so big pupils attract us. Researchers showed men pairs of photos of women identical in every way except that retouchers had enlarged the pupils of one, and found men preferred her but couldn't say why. Hence dark eyes seem romantic. Rochester and Hester Prynne have deep black eyes, as does Lotte in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Our pupils reach peak size in adolescence, almost certainly as a lure in love, then slowly contract till age sixty.

The eye dances with profound little messages, the source of its life. Movement and pupil size are two of these signals, and a third is even subtler.

Cutting Room of the Mind

Even the busiest attorney or executive loses about twenty-three minutes in every waking day. They simply vanish and we are oblivious to it, as if spellbound. The time trickles away in 14,000 tiny gaps, which the brain edits out of our perception. They are blinks.

Blinks are like the spy who lived next door. They seem utterly ordinary yet hold many secrets.

They recall our aquatic origin. When the first tetrapods crept onto land some 370 to 360 million years ago, they faced the peril of desiccation. In water, animals never dried out; on land, the sun stole their very substance. Early amphibians slipped in and out of water often and reptiles evolved near-watertight scales. But eyes contact air directly, so to keep them wet, creatures developed eyelids with tear glands. Each blink is a little dunk in the primeval sea.

The eyelid is the tool of the blink. Cicero called it "exquisitely designed by nature," and he could not have been more correct. For instance, the eyelid blocks out the world when we want to sleep. But since it is just one millimeter deep, the thinnest skin on the body, it is slightly translucent, so sunrise or sudden light can wake us up. The eyelid helps register alarms.

Above the outer corner of the eyelid lurk the tear glands, which emit a fluid that the lids sweep over the eyeball. These tears are not just water. They are part of the circulatory system. The cornea must be transparent so we can see through it, and hence it has no blood vessels. Tears bear oxygen to it and keep it alive. They also contain chemicals that kill bacteria and proteins that smooth the eye surface and trap debris. A quarter of tear fluid evaporates, and the rest seeps down into the nasal passages and keeps them moist. That's why crying makes us sniffle.

Eyelashes highlight the blink. They are a moving palisade, holding insects and other hazards at bay, and indeed blinking is a reflex to any threat to the eye. The lashes perform the same task as the hairs in the nose and ears, but they live in Elysium compared to their troglodyte cousins. They are the eyes' attendant graces. Emma Bovary's brilliant brown eyes, "her real beauty," seem black because of her lashes. The starburst pattern of lashes draws attention to the eye, and flirts flutter them to gain even more. Eyelashes are erotic in other ways. In Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator and Albertine entwine eyelashes in bed. Malinowski says Trobriand Islanders bit off eyelashes in lovemaking, an act they called mitakuku.

We say "in the blink of an eye" to mean "instantly," but objectively the comparison falters. The average blink lasts a third of a second, and the lid covers the pupil for a sixth of a second, during which we are blind. (Deliberate blinks take longer and no one knows why.) This gap is far from an instant, since we can detect flickers as brief as 1/300th second in a lantern. In fact, a sixth of a second is long enough for an attacker to catch us off guard, and biologists like George Williams have wondered why we always blink both eyes at once. If we alternated blinks, we could see the world all the time.

On the other hand, subjectively the comparison is almost too good. Since the brain kills awareness of normal blinks and knits the world into one flowing vision, a blink seems to take no time at all. It feels shorter than an instant.

Blinking is like breathing. We do it automatically, all day long, about 15 times a minute. Dry spots begin to pepper the eyeball after 15 to 45 blinkless seconds. Slow-motion photography reveals the career of a blink. The lids shut like a zipper, traveling inward from the outer edge to spread the tear fluid. They close twice as fast as they reopen, like a coquette turning her head and slowly looking back. Surprisingly, we rarely complete a blink, unless we're blinking deliberately. It doesn't seem to matter.

Pliny the Elder says that of the 20,000 gladiators in Caligula's training school, only two did not blink when facing a threat. They were thus unbeatable. In folklore, the blink has long suggested broken concentration. Whoever "blinks first" has lost focus and nerve. We say "without batting an eye" to mean "apparently unperturbed," and a "blinkard" is a dimwit.

Science supports the folklore, in essence. When we look or even listen intently, our eyes stay open, as if to suck in every mote of information. But when our attention strays, we blink. We blink less while we're reading sentences, and in bursts in between. One experimenter found that his best readers kept their eyes open for an entire page, and released a flurry of blinks when turning it. Drivers blink as they turn to glance at the speedometer, and again after they've assessed the velocity. We blink less when tracking an object or working a maze and more just afterward.

On the other hand, as we grow bored or fatigued, we blink more. If we drive a car or read for a long period, the blink rate rises. In one study, people were blinking 6.9 times per minute when they started reading and 11.0 times per minute four hours later. As concentration wavers, the eyelids dance.

Speaking also boosts the blink rate. For instance, doing mental arithmetic doesn't change it, but if one verbalizes the steps, it jumps. Reciting the alphabet silently slows the rate; reciting it aloud quickens it. We blink less often while listening to a question and formulating an answer, and more while delivering it. Blink frequency also rises during cross-examination on the witness stand, or even just talking with a friend. We may blink more when speaking because we are absorbing less information or, some scientists think, simply because we are moving the tongue.

John Huston likened blinks to cuts in movies, since we blink when shifting our gaze from one spot to another. Walter Murch, editor of such films as Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, goes further. Natural blinks can almost dictate cuts, he says. Where a careful listener blinks, a film editor can probably cut. Skilled actors also blink at good cut points. Blinks help us make sense of a continuous world by dividing it into little chapters, he feels, and ultimately, the film editor is blinking for the audience, cuing it to discrete thoughts or acts.

Blinks communicate. Actor Michael Caine eschews blinks in close-ups, believing they lessen intensity, and for years actually practiced not blinking. Murch suggests that blinks show others when we have grasped an idea and thus subtly coordinate conversation. Bad actors, he notes, don't think their characters' thoughts and so blink at the wrong moments. So do politicians. Such miscues disturb the rhythm and we pick them up, he says. We sense unnaturalness and often assume such people are lying. He may be right. Blink science remains in its nonage.

Sphinx

An obvious fact is as plain as the nose on your face. Yet aside from its blatant existence, few things are plain about the nose. It is esthetically deceptive, symbolically bipolar, physically protean, and even semi-secessionist. It has lodged right in the middle of the face, and there it flings riddles at us.

What kind of nose is most attractive? In Little Women, Amy feels her flat nose has been the great misfortune of her life and puts a clothespin on it to try to extend it. In Rabelais, Friar John says firm breasts in wet-nurses halt nasal growth and give children ugly snubs. Renaissance theorist of beauty Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1543) deemed a turned-up nose unsightly, and Malinowski reports the Trobriand Islanders felt a flat nose was unattractive and limited the potential for romance.

But others idealize the retroussé ("turned up") nose. Thackeray gave Becky Sharp a snub. Dickens attributed criticism of it to envy, and Marilyn Monroe practiced holding her upper lip down when she smiled, to make her nose seem smaller.

Scientists have now resolved this strange controversy: Men overwhelmingly prefer a small nose in women. Indeed, when cartoonists omit the nose of a pretty woman, men fill in with a snub.

The nose is a paradox in psychoanalysis. Freudians classically deem it a symbol of the male sex organs, and in the Slawkenbergius tale in Tristram Shandy a horseman visits the Promontory of Noses and gets a near-obscene one. Yet psychoanalysts also say the nose emblemizes the female genitals, though not as frequently. It is both protrusion and opening.

The nose has bemused anatomists. Even today, they give varying names to the same muscles and cartilages, draw its muscles differently in established textbooks, and disagree about whether one muscle, M. nasalis, widens or shrinks the nostril.

No part of the facial flesh feels as autonomous as the nose, and novelists have played extravagantly on this sense. In the Slawkenbergius tale, the horseman replaces his nose as casually as if it were spectacles. Judge Whimplewopper in Ishmael Reed's The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) has a nose so long he has to rest it on a purple satin pillow. Fans of it throng the corridors outside court and seek the nose's opinions. In The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), a nose tattles on its owner. The device occupies just one percent of the book, yet it resonates, capturing our fear that, when we lie, our faces may betray us.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) brought noses to full-fledged life. In "The Diary of a Madman," the title character says noses have built a civilization on the lunar surface. "That's why we can't see our own noses: they are all on the moon." Platon Kovalyov's proboscis in "The Nose" (1834) is the most interesting specimen in literature. When a barber slices it off, it gains freedom and carves out a career for itself in St. Petersburg. Kovalyov spots it in a gold-braided uniform and begs an audience. It is proud, in the way of noses, and dismisses him curtly.

Indeed, a hubris attaches to the nose. An arrogant person has "his nose in the air" or "turns his nose up." In Japanese, hanataka, "high nose," means "proud." The obsolete term "nose-wise" meant "clever, in one's own opinion." Samuel Johnson defined "to nose" as "to look big, to bluster." We "thumb our noses" at others, putting a thumb on the nose and wiggling the extended fingers in derision. Pride's link to the nose reflects a biological fact: We wrinkle it automatically to show disgust.

Yet the nose can also signal humility. It can be passive, a kind of handle-not a sign of respect for its owner. We can tweak a person's nose, or pull it. A "nose of wax" is a weak person, easily manipulated. The Serbo-Croatian phrase vuci za nosa, literally "to drag by the nose," means "to make a fool of." In Gogol's "The Quarrel of the Two Ivans," a woman grabs Ivan Nikiforovich's nose and leads him around like a poodle. "Is that all our noses are good for?" the author laments.

The nose is the most variable part of the face. It can be snub, ski-slope, bulbous, bent like a boomerang. It can be aquiline ("curved like an eagle's beak"), straight, Roman ("having a prominent, slightly aquiline bridge"). The classic "English" nose, like Henry VIII's, is straight with a delicate camber. The nose can be flat and wide, or splayed out and close to the skin. It can be long, high, and narrow, like a blade.*

Comedians like Jimmy "The Schnozz" Durante and Phyllis Diller gained fame with their noses. In The Bank Dick, a little boy points at W. C. Fields and laughs, "Look at the man's funny nose!" His mother scolds him: "Mustn't make fun of the man's nose, dear. You'd like to have a nose that big full of nickels, wouldn't you?"

Fields suffered from rosacea, a peculiar disease that makes the nose a scarlet flare. It exaggerates the normal flushing of the face and ultimately swells the capillaries, causing constant redness. The extra blood can make the skin overgrow and dot the nose with ugly pustules. Alcohol flushes the face and worsens the ailment, which came to be known as "drinker's nose" or "grog blossoms." J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), another famous victim, offered $100,000 to anyone discovering its cause. Scientists have yet to collect, though they have linked it to the wicked-looking mite Demodex follicularum, and one new theory points to Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that causes ulcers. Some physicians believe Bill Clinton has rosacea.

Sun also reddens the nose, and faster than any other part of the face. Because the nose protrudes, ultraviolet rays can strike it from almost any angle, especially the side, while the forehead and other surfaces gain respite. Like a salient in a battlefront, the nose takes more bombardment.

Probably no literary figure has described the nose more stirringly than Cyrano de Bergerac. Dramatist Edmond Rostand (1868-1918) once wrote billets doux for a friend in school, though apparently not to a woman he loved. Yet he clearly had a sense for Cyrano's plight. "A large nose is the sign manifest of such a man as I am-courteous, witty, liberal in opinions, fired with courage," says Cyrano at one moment, and at the next he bemoans his nose as a curse. Any extreme facial feature can harm looks, but the nose is especially hazardous. Oddly, Cyrano, for all his brilliance, missed the one insight that could have saved him: Roxane didn't care about his nose.

Why do noses jut out at all? Coleridge suggested it was so people could take snuff. The nose puzzled Firenzuola, who listed uses for it-breathing, smelling, and purging-then shrugged and said it seemed mainly an ornament.

In fact, our facial prow is zoologically bizarre. Galapagos tortoises have just two holes in their heads, and they are typical. The nares of fish and lizards don't project. Neither do those of gorillas or chimps. Among living primates, only the proboscis monkey has a protruding nose.

Perhaps it is an odor canopy. Since we are vertical and flat-faced, the nose may gather aromas rising from below, so we can better assay food. We mainly sniff viands-unlike most animals, we rarely use scent for prey, social signals, or other items at a distance-so mouth-facing nostrils may make evolutionary sense. On the other hand, we don't know how much good this configuration actually does, and it first appeared on the slope-faced Homo habilis, where it would have done less.

Maybe it began as an anteroom for breath. It certainly serves this function today. As air passes up the nostrils, it picks up heat and moisture from the mucous membranes, so it won't chill or dry the lungs. Hence tropical peoples have smaller noses than arctic ones, and the cold-dwelling Neanderthals possessed gigantic noses. However, almost every warm-blooded animal performs this task inside the head, in convoluted passages called turbinals. We have turbinals too, and the question here is why they should have partly migrated outside the skull, where they are more vulnerable.*

Could the nose be just a lowly servant of the eye? That's the theory of psychologist T. G. R. Bower, who observes that every animal with panoramic vision has some projection of itself that interrupts its view. For instance, chimps have muzzles, dogs have snouts, and the owl has a nasal tuft that covers 30 degrees of its visual field. Bower argues that human eyes compare the world against the nose. The nose is always visible, so it helps us position objects and tell whether they or we are moving. This idea is so delectable it's hard not to root for it.

In 1960 biologist Alistair Hardy suggested an even more radical notion, one writer Elaine Morgan has since expanded on. It has become one of the most ridiculed and interesting ideas in prehuman anthropology: the aquatic-ape theory. It holds that we spent some recent evolutionary time partly in water, perhaps to elude lions and other carnivores. During this period our bodies changed. We lost most of our body hair, since it no longer kept us warm, and instead developed a fat layer under our skin, like dolphins, seals, and other marine animals.

Water altered us in many other ways, the theory contends. For instance, it reduced our sense of smell, and indeed among mammals only dolphins and whales have worse olfaction than we do. The following table, taken from Morgan, compares features in apes, people, and aquatic species, such as hippos, dolphins, and penguins. (A Yes in the latter column indicates that several animals share the trait.)

What good is a projecting nose to a water-dweller? Many primates are good swimmers, but the champ is the proboscis monkey (Nasalis larvatus) of Borneo. The proboscis swims underwater and dives from 50 feet, higher than any Olympic platform. It has a fantastic nose, a sock of flesh that in males actually overhangs the mouth. This nose protects the monkey's nasal cavity from headlong rushes of water. So does ours. At the beach it deflects waves, and when we swim it diverts the slipstream flowing past. If we were noseless like gorillas, we would constantly face the surprise of water-choked turbinals.

The aquatic-ape theory has surface appeal, yet so far most scientists have ignored it. It is hard to see how some human

Apes Humans Aquatic

Prominent nose No Yes Yes

Sparse body hair No Yes Yes

Streamlined body hair No Yes Yes

Subcutaneous fat No Yes Yes

Tears No Yes Yes

Baby's weight heavy compared to mother's No Yes Yes

Midwives No Yes Yes

Sense of smell Good Poor None

Diving reflex No Yes Yes

Automatic swimming in babies No? Yes Yes

High brain-body ratio No Yes Yes

Conditionable vocalization No Yes Yes

features, like babies' ability to survive for an hour underwater, could have arisen without a watery environment. Yet until this theory survives an enfilade of scientific criticism, its merit will remain unclear.

The structure beneath the nose has a more obvious role.

The Primeval Feature

If we view the face as a geography, it is two long forests, a pair of multicolored sunken lakes, a Gibraltar-like peak, and an abyssal pit. The pit is the most dramatic item on the map, and it is of course the mouth.

The mouth is the oldest part of the face, the gateway for food, drink, and at times air. It is primal, essential. Even the one-celled paramecium has a mouth. We can survive outside a hospital without eyes, nose, or any other facial feature, but without a mouth we starve. Pliny cites learned authority for the existence of the Astomi in Pakistan, who lack mouths and live on the aroma of roots, flowers, and apples. In fact, some simple creatures do lack a mouth and absorb food through their "skin." But it is vital for any kind of digestive tract.

The mouth is the first facial organ to form. It arises in embryos soon after fertilization, in the process called gastrulation. A dent appears in the spherical embryo and deepens, pulling in the cells that will make up the muscles and inner organs, and forming the gut. When this tube reaches the far end of the embryo, it breaches the cell wall and creates the mouth.

This aperture is the body's main entrypoint and guards hedge it about. Before swallowing food we test odor, taste, texture, temperature, shape, and irritability, and we have a gag reflex to stop it at the last minute. Our emotions also patrol this ground. For instance, saliva feels normal in the mouth, but spit some in a glass of water and it becomes instantly repulsive. Yet it is the same saliva.

The mouth is the most plastic part of the countenance. Eyes move constantly but subtly, in a delicate shimmy of jumps and tremors. The mouth often rests, but once in motion, it can sigh, yawn, smile, laugh, drop open, pout, tremble, and tighten. When we speak, the mouth moves in seemingly endless ways: widening, opening, closing, puckering, protruding, retreating. And if we like, we can twist the mouth into weird topologies. It is the contortionist of the face.

Our mouth sets us apart from other creatures in several ways, but the most striking is its narrowness. Human mouths are usually no wider than the span between the pupils, a surprise to most beginning portrait artists. Some fish like carp also have tiny mouths, which they use for suction feeding, but they and we stand almost alone. Indeed, next to us even chimps have huge maws, running hairline to hairline, and horse and alligator faces are almost all mouth. Why did ours shrink?

First, because it could. Muzzles need wraparound mouths, but ours is free from this constraint and has evolved to different ends. One is protection. Since we don't use our teeth as weapons, the mouth need not be wide, and a small one is safer from contaminants. Another is probably expression. The face muscles can control small lips more deftly, enhancing our array of smiles and grimaces. A third may be language. Sounds like "oh" and "w," for instance, require the lips to form an O.

Intriguingly, the large mouth has rarely been a sign of beauty, but the small mouth has. In Victorian times, especially, a tiny mouth was dainty. Trollope's women often had such a mouth, as did Dickens's Little Nell.

The mouth is the home of two notable facial transients: the teeth and the tongue.

Teeth are performers, beaming into view as we speak and smile. They give the face delicious volatility and can dazzle us with their ivory gleam. "Toothsome" describes a form of beauty and radiant teeth seem the reward of a smile. Firenzuola said the teeth impart "so much charm to a pleasant face that, without them, sweetness does not seem to reside too willingly upon it." Their secret is less sublime: saliva. It coats the teeth with water, so they gleam in the light.

Teeth last longer than any other part of the face-not surprisingly, since enamel is the hardest biological substance known. South American cannibals made necklaces from the teeth of devoured enemies. States have warred to own a tooth of the Buddha, who preached against ownership. The most precious tooth on earth today came from the Buddha, we are told, and resides in a gold vessel in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Gary Snyder, who viewed the plaster cast of it, said it was two inches long.

Modern teeth arose with the advent of jawed fish around 440 million years ago. Only jaws can grip, manipulate, cleanly cut, and grind prey. The first jawed fish, the sardine-sized acanthodian, prowled the seas until 260 million years ago. Its teeth were tiny stilettos like piranhas', but teeth quickly radiated into cones, blades, and crushers.

Teeth reach their apex in mammals. Most other animals use them mainly to seize prey. But mammal teeth can shear, crush, and grind food. They allow chewing, a notable power. Chewing speeds digestion and puts more of the natural world on the menu. It also leads to a dextrous tongue, for nudging food into position, and to polymorphic teeth.

Mammals boast a more complex array of teeth than other animals, an intricate palisade of incisors, canines, premolars, and molars. The incisors are the blades, cutting bites from carrots and apples. Canines, our relic fangs, have deep roots and handle tough foods like jerky. The premolars and molars crush food into pulp for the stomach. Behind the molars lurk wisdom teeth, which often never emerge. (They may in fact be evolving away, since with our flat faces we need fewer teeth.) Teeth have diversified so much in mammals that a paleontologist can often identify a genus and even a species from a single tooth.

People fiddle with the face and have altered every part of it, even, with laser surgery, the eyeball. They have throughout history improved on teeth. Pre-Columbian Indians of Mexico added inlays of jadeite, pyrite, gold, and turquoise. Tribes have notched, grooved, scratched, perforated, and sculpted their teeth, and in Mesoamerica alone, dental anthropologists have identified 59 different types of tooth mutilation. The Baule of Ivory Coast often remove a diagonal half of each front incisor, creating a black triangle when they smile. The Kadars and Malavedans of southern India file their teeth into points, as do the Tiv of Nigeria. Tiv soldiers stationed in Cairo found, to their delight, that Egyptians thought they were cannibals, and they quickly learned that fierce faces in the bazaar won them breathtaking bargains.

Dracula has sharp white teeth that extend over his lips-fangs, essentially. But most people prize well-ordered, soldierly teeth. Precontact Inuit and aboriginal Taiwanese had perfectly aligned teeth, but the modern diet of soft, refined foods has jumbled them. Etruscan girls wore braces as early as 700 b.c., and today orthodontic treatment is the greatest precollege expense most parents lay out for their children. Diet also fosters decay, and dentists plug caries and replace teeth that fall out. These are the most common repairs we make on the face.

We speak with the tongue and a talkative person is a "tongue-pad." Yet this odd and agile organ rarely emerges onto the face, and its appearance is often aggressive. We stick tongues out to insult people, a gesture that smacks of the child. The classic Medusa pokes out her tongue, and the Maoris howled their unnerving war cries with tongue far out. Indeed, they carved knives with a face as hilt and a tongue as glinting blade.

A tongue in the cheek is more ambiguous. Smollett's Roderick Random says, "I signified my contempt of him, by thrusting my tongue in my cheek." But today "tongue-in-cheek" means ironically, not to be taken seriously. In modern Western society, a real tongue nestled in the cheek suggests hesitancy, pondering.

The tongue can express other feelings. Run lusciously across the lips, it is a classic sexual invitation. A slightly protruding tongue can imply uncertainty. One turned downward suggests bewilderment, and most of us have seen the gesture of goofy delight-wide grin, tongue down, eyebrows raised-signifying surprise achievement: "I don't know how I did that!"

Fish lack tongues. They commonly seize food by sucking water into their mouths, a trick that utterly fails in air, so when fish first ventured onto land, they sprouted tongues. Old World chameleons can dart their tongues out more than a body length to snare insects. Most birds have tiny tongues, but the flamingo has a thick, esculent one, and Roman emperors Elagabalus and Vitellius fed guests heaping bowls of them.

We think of the tongue as a single muscle, but it is actually a bundle of them which can shorten, lengthen, and widen it. Muscles outside the tongue also tug it, so it changes shape deftly, a key fact for speech. Some people can roll their tongue into a tube and others can't. It's a genetic variation of baffling purpose.

The flare-like papillae on the tongue contain most of our 10,000 taste buds, though these sense organs also dot the palate, larynx, and pharynx. Most register not just one taste, but several, and thus send information in polyphony to the brain.

The tongue helps us swallow, and we do so about nine times a minute while eating, once a minute while not eating. The latter act is unconscious and salutary. Saliva coats many microorganisms with mucus, and swallowing takes them down to the stomach, where gastric acids annihilate them. Billions of other bacteria inhabit the mouth, a large proportion on the tongue. Most are benign, and many form one more rampart of the body's defense.

Outside, the mouth is a little duchy, like the eye, and many vassal features lie in its sphere. Most notable are the philtrum, nasolabial folds, chin, and lips.

The philtrum is the shallow vale between the nose and upper lip. It rarely attracts attention on its own, but where its two ridges touch the mouth, the lip rises to meet them. In between, it dips slightly. The philtrum thus fathers the graceful notch in the upper lip.

The nasolabial folds flank the mouth. These two creases slant out tentlike from the wings of the nose down past the lips, bounding the cheek. Age deepens these pleasant lines into character marks. Since they magnify smiles and other mouth expressions, they are key signals of mind-state. Yet not one person in a thousand can name them.

The nasolabial folds vanish in a paralyzed face, but not in a corpse. Why? In our daily life nerve impulses pull the folds up and back somewhat. Paralysis halts these signals and the skin turns smooth. Yet after death the muscles freeze in slight contraction, and the lines live on.

The chin is unique to humans. Not even Neanderthals had one. It appeared around 130,000 years ago, with the first anatomically modern people, and it remains a puzzle.

It is not utterly pointless. It seems to aid mastication, though its arrival coincides with no known shift in diet or subsistence pattern. And it clearly sets faces off and helps us lock onto them better. As hair frames the top half of the face and jawline the sides, the shadow of the chin marks the bottom. In profile, its jut signals the base, like a serif in typography. Without a chin, the lower face would merge with the neck, and face shape would blur.

Such uses don't necessarily explain its origin. Indeed, it may be inadvertent. Some believe it simply appeared when the muzzle retreated, much as islands emerge when sea level drops in an ice age. The mouth flattened faster, leaving a bony knob that recalls our nipping and gnawing days.

Darwin observed that relics like the appendix take more diverse forms than other organs. They have lost their utility, so most variations in them are not harmful and persist. If the chin is actually a remnant of the muzzle, it should come in many shapes and sizes, and in fact it does: soft, cleft, jutting, dimpled, long. Ironically, this variety has become a use in itself, multiplying the range of possible faces and distinguishing us.

The chin is crucial to looks. A slight chin is unattractive, especially in men, and hence another theory involves sexual selection. In males, the chin grows during puberty in response to testosterone, so larger chins suggest its greater presence. Since testosterone weakens the immune system, its excess is an "honest" signal of good health in men, advertising their ability to resist disease. Hence women may have evolved to like large chins. George Williams suggests that, today, male chins may be developing into sexually selected structures like the antlers of Irish elk, and in fact the average size of chins has grown over the last 200 generations. They are expanding, not retreating.

At rest, the mouth is pure lips. Lips are the spice of the face, twin ruddy bulges separated by the dark line of the mouth, like a pair of cushions. They can be thick or narrow, bulging or inswept. At rest they can seem to pout, frown, or smile, and some lips form a "cupid's bow." All are a transition zone between the dry skin of the face and the moist mucous membrane of the inner mouth. Their surface is thin enough to reveal blood below, so lips look dark.

Lips are border guards. They excel at distinguishing foreign objects, and can detect a single hair in our food. They lie in the forefront of our oral defenses.

But lips also serve subtler ends. For instance, they cue us to speech. We read them subliminally, which is why out-of-sync dubbing in foreign films bothers us. Lips are especially helpful in borderline cases. In one study, people recognized 23 percent of sentences uttered in noise, but 65 percent when they could also see the speaker's face. Noise has bedeviled speech recognition technology, and the face could help cut through it. Says Dominic Massaro of U.C. Santa Cruz, "You can go from chance to perfect by just having the face." Massaro is seeking to supply the deaf with glasses that distinguish visually similar sounds, like ma and ba, by flashing different colors.

Indeed, we rely so heavily on lip signals that they breed the strange effect called the McGurk illusion: People presented with the sight of one mouthed phoneme and the sound of another typically hear it as a blend of the two. Visual ga and aural ba, for instance, yield da. We are hearing partly with our eyes.

Ventriloquists speak liplessly. The trick is ancient. Inuit magi used it, and Zulu shamans made warnings seem to issue from the wattles of their huts. Greek and Roman ventriloquists claimed divine spirits spoke from their stomachs-hence the name, which means "belly-talking." In the sixteenth century, belly-speaker Elizabeth Barton, the "Holy Maid of Kent," drew thousands of pilgrims to hear her prophecies against the second marriage of Henry VIII. He had her hanged at Tyburn in 1534. In rural China, female ventriloquists sometimes spoke through little dolls on their stomachs, but the ventriloquist's dummy did not become common until the latter nineteenth century.

"If a man is not born a ventriloquist, he will never become one," said Victorian ventriloquist Walter Cole. Such claims swathed him and other adepts in a useful mystique, but in fact people learn the art, as they learn magic and juggling. The illusion has two parts. First, performers must create a second voice. Edgar Bergen must sound like Mortimer Snerd. To do so, they hump up the rear of the tongue, as if uttering an ng, and force part of the vocal tone through the nose. Second, they must speak with still lips. The main hurdle is producing b, p, and m inside the mouth. Ventriloquists make the b and p by placing the tip of the tongue on the front teeth, and the m by touching the rear of the tongue to the roof of the mouth. These feats demand the patience of Demosthenes.

The lips also enhance facial expression. They enlarge the rim of the mouth and thus highlight smiles, sneers, and gapes. We pull the lips tightly in to conceal expression, much as we put a hand over the mouth.

And, most obviously, lips give sensual delight. They are twin pleasure puffs, rich with touch sensors. Lips are part endoderm, like the lining of the gut, and their boundary with the skin or exoderm forms a line between inner and outer self. It means that, when we kiss, our inner selves touch.

An Anatomy of Kissing

A kiss is not just a kiss. Indeed, it is a medium more than a single message. The Romans noted three kisses: of friendship (oscula), love (basia), and passion (suavia). The Talmudic rabbis identified a more formal trio: kisses of greeting, leavetaking, and respect. Like love, kisses can both exalt and degrade. They can signify treachery, as the Mafia's kiss of death, and abasement, as in "The Miller's Tale." They can be ironic. Mata Hari blew a kiss to her executioners before they shot her.

The kiss of love is the core. Byron called it a "heart-quake," and it can make the lips more eloquent than any speech. Heine writes, "Yet could I kiss thee, O my soul, then straightaway I should be made whole." A kiss can pour love from lips to lips, two receptacles filling each other.

A love kiss fuses. Hence the first kiss signals new intimacy in a relationship, and can even begin it. The kiss-as-union became a staple of Renaissance poetry, and one of its masters was Johannes Secundus (1511-1535), whose lovers kiss eternally, swoon to near-death, diffuse their souls into each other's bodies. This merger is common too in medieval art. We see it in Giotto's Meeting of Anne and Joachim, where the two seem to form a single mass, and in his Kiss of Judas, where a cloak further unites the traitor with Christ.

The two most famous sculpted kisses show very different sides of love. In Auguste Rodin's The Kiss (1898), two naked lovers coil into each other. The woman wraps an arm sensually around the man's neck, while he touches her bare hip. She kisses him from below as she falls slowly, deliciously to the supine. The work is alive with dreamy whirl, an erotic vertigo. It somehow inspired Constantin Brancusi's The Kiss (c. 1910), in which two blocklike humanoids press flatly together and lace arms around necks. Their faces almost disappear into each other, and we see them mainly in profile. The sheer awkwardness of this embrace-their mutual dependence, their inability to fully grasp each other-makes it poignant. Fittingly, Brancusi actually carved it from a single stone.

Distance is no obstacle to the kiss of love. People kiss images of their lovers: drawings, photos in lockets, freeze-frames on tape. They kiss snippets of hair, letters, lovers' possessions, tombstones-any link to the person. They pucker lips and release them, to send kisses through the air, whether they see each other or not. They fountain up the lips: an anticipated kiss, a request. The ancients drank out of goblets at the spot their lovers' lips had just touched, a kiss through time.

The kiss of passion, the deep or French kiss, makes two mouths into one. It has a splendid history as an emblem of animal lust, but of course it is also an act of tenderness and intimacy. The lovers' tongues caress each other, dance about the teeth and inner cheeks, bathe in each other's oral fluids. This kiss merges inner seas and resets the bounds of self.

Even deep kisses are tasteless-usually-ye

Excerpted from
Coaching Your Kids to Be Leaders: The Keys to Unlocking Their Potential
By Pat Williams

Leadership is the ability to achieve goals through people. Leaders get things done-not through their own effort, but through the combined efforts of people. A military leader achieves victory on the battlefield through his soldiers. A coach achieves victory on the athletic field through the players on the team. A political leader achieves a visionary goal through the people of his or her administration.

To measure the effectiveness of a leader, don't look at the leader. Look at the followers. Look at the organization. Look at the results. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether the leader is articulate, charming, or busy all the time. In the final analysis, the only question that truly matters is this: Does that leader achieve results through people?

Jose Abreu, secretary of transportation for the state of Florida, told me, "Whether I'm leading the Florida Department of Transportation or coaching a team of Little Leaguers, my task is essentially the same. My job is to shape consensus and build team unity so that the team can achieve its goals.

"I used to coach my son's Little League team in Hialeah. It was a team of overachievers. Nobody thought our team had the talent to go undefeated, yet there was one season in which we won every game we played. During one of the games that season, I overheard a parent of one of the boys on the opposing team. 'Look at those kids!' he said, referring to our team. 'Look at the way they follow instructions! I don't know if I'd want my son to be on his team. They look more like synchronized sewing machines than real people.'

"That parent meant it as a disparaging remark. He saw the kids on our team as robots. But they weren't robots. They were a team! They took direction; they were coordinated; they acted as one. I took that comment as a compliment to my ability to get our team to win games when no one thought they could."

A leader gets things done through people. Does this mean the people in the organization or team feel used or manipulated? Do they feel as if they are being treated like robots? Absolutely not! People admire leaders who challenge and direct them to achieve great things. Its an exhilarating experience to be a part of a team effort, to make progress toward an envisioned goal, and to know that you have a leader who is taking you to that goal.

People can tell when a formal leader lacks the ability to lead. Given the choice between an incompetent formal leader and a competent informal leader, people will follow the competent informal leader every time. So it is important that we put people with authentic leadership ability into formal leadership positions.

Michael Means, CEO of Health First, Inc., told me, "My first real leadership opportunity came through the military. After joining the U.S. Army Reserve in 1971, I was sent to basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington. On the first day of basic training, I was selected as a platoon guide, probably because I was six feet four inches and had a degree in business administration from the University of Florida. I am fairly confident that my selection had nothing to do with any inherent leadership skills on my part. Like most opportunities, the mantle of leadership was simply thrust upon me.

"I learned through that experience that a position of leadership is a privilege, a responsibility, and an honor that should never be taken for granted or abused. Authentic leadership is not the result of having a job title or having a place on a formal organizational chart. It's what you do with that job title that matters. A leadership position must be earned, and it must be reearned every day. If we fail to earn it, it can be quickly taken away."

Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of baseball, told me: "I was fifteen or sixteen and a student at Hotchless Prep School. One day the headmaster said to me, 'Fay, the boys will follow you and want to follow you, but you are not a leader.' No one had ever said that to me and it really hit me hard. From that point on, I started to think of myself as a leader."

Former Dodgers general manager E. J. "Buzzie" Bavasi spoke of his experiences: "I didn't realize I had any leadership ability until July 1944. I was in the infantry, a staff sergeant, and we had to take a hill called Monte Battaglia, which appropriately enough means 'Battle Mountain' in English. We needed the hill to establish an observation post overlooking the Po Valley. So we went up the hill with sixteen men, and we came back down with four. A young lieutenant ordered me to go back up the hill and bring back two machine guns. Well, we had absolutely no intention of going up that hill again. The machine guns were ruined, and we had lost a dozen men.

"I explained this to the lieutenant, but he insisted that we go, stating that the guns were worth twelve hundred dollars. I asked him for his home address. He asked why. I said, Til have my mother send you a check.' With that, the whole platoon was in an uproar. I then realized what it took to be a leader. The lieutenant may have had the rank to order us up that hill-but he didn't have the leadership ability. And we didn't go back up that hill."

Formal leadership is based on position, authority, and rank. A formal leader is usually empowered to control outcomes by distributing rewards (such as bonuses and incentive awards) and punishments (such as demotion or firing). A person who has the position and rank of a leader but lacks the abilities of a leader is a boss, not a leader. Bosses exercise control through fear, intimidation, and punishment. Bosses may be able to accomplish short-term goals, but over the long haul, they are not able to inspire the motivation and loyalty that produce a cohesive, successful team or organization.

Bosses push their people. They demand, order, threaten, and bully people to get results. Authentic leaders pull their people. They inspire, motivate, and draw people along in order to achieve results.

"The benefit of becoming a leader," Dr. John C. Maxwell told me, "is not that you will be able to tell people what to do. This is a misconception among adults as well as children. In reality, with leadership comes responsibility. The benefit of being a leader lies in being able to work with others, encouraging and equipping them, and together seeing something great achieved. Although we admire people who seem to be solo achievers-presidents, war heroes, inventors, athletes, and movie stars-the truth is that no individual has ever done anything of significant value on his or her own. Significant accomplishment always requires teamwork. And being a leader means working with a team. It is not easy to be a great leader, but only great leaders inspire great accomplishments."

Excerpted from
Everyday Enlightenment: The Twelve Gateways to Personal Growth
By Dan Millman

Life's greatest challenge-one you face in each of the twelve gateways-is turning what you know into what you do. You know the importance of good diet and regular exercise; you know it's best to treat others with kindness. But until you reclaim your will-assert your power to act upon what you know-even the best plans remain unrealized.

"St. Nike" Was Right

Everything is easier said than done. But no matter how intelligent or talented you are, only your actions shape your destiny. To fulfill the promise of the second gateway, you need know, and act upon, only three magic words: Just do it.

But how do we "just do" what we know is best? How do we achieve consistent self-control and self-mastery?

This question came to a head a few years ago, just before I walked onto the stage to present a seminar entitled "The Laws of Spirit." A fellow approached me and asked how he could accomplish his goal of losing weight. "A low-fat diet and regular exercise," I answered. With hardly a pause he again asked how he could eat better and how he could stick with an exercise program. "I know I need to get moving," he said, "but I don't have the willpower. So how do I strengthen my will?"

"You already know how to do it," I said. "Knowing how isn't the problem. Besides, right now you seem to have plenty of will-look at how effectively you've engaged me in conversation while we keep a thousand people waiting."

"Yes, but just one more thing-"

The time had come to apply my own will and begin my talk. So I did.

Something about that fellow bothered me. Then I realized what it was. He reminded me of myself-and of the years I searched for strategies, shortcuts, methods, techniques, formulas, and easy ways to motivate myself to get things done. But life continually returns us to the inescapable reality that the best way to do what you need to do is to just do it. Sometimes it's easy. Sometimes it's tough. But that doesn't change the fact that the only way to get something done is to do it. Reclaim your will and you reclaim your life.

You have free will, but your will isn't always free. Freedom has a price; life has hurdles to overcome. In Reclaim Your Will I use the terms "will," "willpower," "self-discipline," and "self-control" interchangeably, because any of them, when applied over time as patience, persistence, and perseverance, lead to self-mastery. This gateway shows how to exert the power of your will to overcome life's obstacles, laying a solid foundation for success both in the material and spiritual realms.

As you pass through the second gateway, you will explore topics such as the power of purpose, the hurdles on the path, the subconscious secrets of motivation, practical guidelines for getting things done, realities about what you can and cannot control, how to transcend tendencies, and, finally, some inspiring reminders about what you are here on earth to do.

Reclaiming Your Power

Difficulties intimidate you only when you doubt the power of your will. Learn from the characters in The Wizard of Oz-the quick-witted scarecrow who thought he lacked a brain, the loving tin woodsman who felt he lacked a heart, and the brave lion who feared he lacked courage-all of whom came to realize that they had long possessed the traits they desired. Like them, you have never lacked or lost your will; you have only forgotten its power.

The will is like a muscle; it grows stronger with use. And like your muscles, it needs to move, to exert itself. Your inner strength is waiting to be called upon, to grow stronger still. Now is your chance to remember, rebuild, reawaken, and reclaim your innate powers of will. Welcome to the second gateway.

Excerpted from
Charisma: Seven Keys to Developing the Magnetism that Leads to Success
By Tony Alessandra, Ph.D.

You're sweating it out in a corporate conference room, awaiting your turn to speak. And, of course, you're trying to subtly size up your competition for this big consulting job. Then this one guy gets up to make his presentation-and, arrghbb! It's a Maalox moment.

He moves with such grace and confidence that the room falls silent and all heads swivel as he approaches the microphone. Looking poised and confident, he smiles, then begins. Instantly, it's clear that he's good-and he and everyone else in the room knows it. His strong, measured voice, his relaxed tone, his precisely articulated and well-chosen words, even his classy but understated appearance, seem to fixate the crowd.

You think, Wow! Who is this guy? And then you realize it's just not what he is saying, or how he looks. It's his whole being. He couldn't be more stunning if he wore a neon suit.

But you feel your envy dissolve into admiration as his words sink in. Thai's because he affects you and the others not just rationally but in an emotional, visceral way, too. As his cadence quickens and his voice and gestures signal that he's nearing the high point of his remarks, you feel yourself soaring along with the ideas he presents so passionately-so much so that you decide, competitor or no competitor, you'd probably follow him to a convention of cannibals if that's where he wanted to lead you. This guy has it!

Appeal to Mind and Emotions

You've probably met such people who've inspired you with their vigor and motivated you by their energy, who've appealed to your emotions as well as your mind. And you may have found yourself, quite willingly, drawn to them and perhaps performing beyond expectations to accomplish their goals.

But have you asked yourself: What's the source of such authority? What are its ingredients? What has so endowed these men and women with personal magnetism?

Does it come merely from speaking well? Or is it that they're socially adroit, able to adjust smoothly to any personality or situation? Or is their secret how they manage to project an attractive, exciting image that makes us feel good just being around them?

Actually, it's all of that-and much more. And for lack of a better term, we often group such qualities under the word charisma.

Charisma is easy to spot but hard to describe. Nailing down a definition is like trying to define America, or happiness, or what constitutes a terrific meal or a great vacation. Everybody you ask has a different idea, all of them valid, at least to themselves.

Well Within Your Grasp

I'm also convinced that, popular wisdom to the contrary, charisma is not something you're born with, like having blue or brown eyes. It's not in your genes-and it's not beyond your grasp. In other words, you already have charisma. But it's not configured the same way in you as it is in the person next to you.

Think of it this way: Each of our personalities consists, let's say, of a series of containers, like cups or glasses. Some are nearly empty, some brimming, yet others are partially filled to varying degrees. Together they constitute our charisma, or at least our potential charisma.

If all the glasses were filled to the top, you'd be so charismatic people would think you were a god-and you'd probably think so, too. But nobody has a complete set of totally full glasses, although some really, really gifted people may come close to this ideal.

But, for most of us, the glasses are filled a bit erratically. Maybe your glass marked Persuasiveness is very full, but your glass labeled Adaptability is bordering on empty. Or you're a good listener, but your skill at projecting a strong, exciting image is so-so.

So, everybody has glasses, but everybody's glasses are filled to differing depths. This book can help you raise some of those levels. Together, we'll work on those areas where your glass isn't very full.

Like enhancing any other set of skills, developing your charisma takes practice and hard work, which is to say that you must be motivated. "Nobody will follow a turnip," Robert B. Horton, former chairman of Standard Oil, once wrote. "To lead you need passion . . ardor, zeal, enthusiasm-this personal involvement is absolutely necessary in a good leader."

Hope for Geeks?

Can a geek become charismatic? Can a dweeb become dashing? Yes, if he or she works on filling the right glasses.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, is not an imposing physical presence or a marvelous speaker. Yet he's clearly a leader and, some would say, charismatic. Why? Because he's extremely wealthy?

No, he's probably extremely wealthy because he is charismatic. In his case, his glass marked Vision or Ideas is filled beyond overflowing, making him an intoxicating leader. Some of his other glasses probably could use an extra dollop.

I've been studying, teaching, and writing about human behavior, especially in business, for more than twenty years now. As a professional speaker, I've observed and talked to many powerful communicators. And as a consultant to some of America's biggest firms, I've been lucky enough to watch many of the nation's top business leaders in action. As a result, probably like you, I know charisma when I see it-even if it's sometimes hard to pinpoint.

Excerpted from
Your Best Year Yet! : Ten Questions for Making the Next Twelve Months Your Most Successful Ever
By Jinny S. Ditzler

The Best Year Yet workshop would have been a one-off wonder were it not for the thousands of people who have participated in the process over the years and shared their thoughts, ideas, and experiences. They are the source of this book and the wealth now available. Here are a few of their stories. I've given them new names to protect their privacy.

Paul, a forty-three-year-old general manager with years of experience in large multinational organizations, is now in his fourth year of planning his life in this way. More than anything he appreciates the ongoing need to make room for Gold Time and says, "I'm much better at it, but it's hard." He says most of his success so far is a result of a newfound ability to tell people he's busy when he really has no appointment-only time set aside to do the most important activities. Paul says,

I think there are about four phases in this process. First there's the novelty of the idea; then the guilt sets in, along with quite a bit of struggle to do what really matters. Finally the change really starts to happen and it feels like a rebirth. I'm looking forward to the final phase when it's all automatic-like brushing my teeth!

Hannah, a fifty-three-year-old mother, grandmother, and acupuncturist, is in her fifth year of this process. She appreciates tackling one main area of her life so it becomes the dominant theme in her life for the year. "Things happen over the year that are connected to this focus-many things happen, especially letting go of stuff I don't need," she observes.

She's learned to be far more flexible in the process and far less guilty when something doesn't turn out as she hoped. Because everything doesn't happen just the way she planned it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with her. Hannah says,

Seeing that I'm not living the way I want to be has been difficult. I have to admit that I've been postponing a lot of things that are dear to me. Now's the time.

Joseph, one of the earliest participants in the workshop, who started by taking the course and soon was leading it himself, is a thirty-five-year-old CEO of a successful international consulting firm. As a participant in the process since 1981, he talks about having a much, much higher level of confidence that he can do what he needs to do.

The most important secret has been getting help when I needed it. I know that a large part of what holds me back is something I can do something about. But the most difficult part is not getting back into the old groove of limiting behavior-it's hard to keep this level of awareness over a long period of time.

Another longtime player is Ann, a fifty-four-year-old successful actress and writer. Overall she feels her biggest win is that she's learned to make progress on the things that matter. For example, although meditation was an attractive notion for many years, it's now moved to being the focal point of her life.

I'm getting more and more honest with myself about setting goals. When things are not working, I can now tackle it. But it's a gentle process of being more honest about my performance overall. After all this time I see that the quality of my life is far more important than success and achievement in one area of my life.

Peter, a forty-three-year-old cofounder of a leading financial services marketing group, feels that sticking with this process for over twelve years has given him a strong competitive advantage. It's so important, he says, to get away from the process of day-to-day phone calls and "to do" lists and do the important things-otherwise they just drift away.

Most difficult for him is trying to do it on his own. Every time he's tried it this way, he's not done so well.

The combination of peer pressure and peer support makes a difference-even though the people I get together with have no real bearing on the goals themselves. It doesn't matter.

He too reports a shift from a life that's work-oriented to a focus on the quality of his life.

Finally, the experience of Michael, who describes himself as a fifty-three-year-old successful actor who's learning the hard way. This experience has helped him sort out a major difficulty dealing with the "stuff of life." For years he avoided really tackling both the problems in his life and his dreams, feeling a combination of unworthiness and disinterest. Now that he's learned to deal with this aspect of his life, there's more room for his inner self-the part that really matters to him.

There's a new inner voice speaking to me. When good things happen, it says, "It's okay, you deserve this"-rather than the old inner voices, which warned me that it wouldn't last. The most difficult part now is that I get overconfident and lapse into a daze and then fall into a hole. Constant awareness is necessary and I'm not there yet.

There are so many stories to tell of friends, clients, and family who have started to meet the promise of their potential. From day one my strongest motivation has been for people to see their gifts as clearly as they are seen by the rest of us-and to honor themselves by having their dreams come true. The world is a better place every time this happens.

Most people have all the talent, skill, awareness, and ambition they need, but it's often hidden under a cloud of self-doubt, past disappointments, or by simply being too busy. We rarely take time to examine what we're doing or why we're doing it.

The material in this book is designed for life planning through creating greater consciousness and awareness of the goals, targets, and objectives that are aligned with what you want for yourself in all aspects of your life. I hope you'll be happier, healthier, and truly more successful in all you do.

By Theun Mares

Anne has a weight problem. She has tried many different diets, but they just don't seem to work. Although she sticks with them, and sometimes loses weight, the effects never last for long. In the end, she gives up, feeling disheartened and that she really can't change her situation.

Anne is typical of many who want to alter their lives in profound ways, but find that they are unable to make these changes last. Is there a remedy? Yes. The secret to long-lasting personal change lies in understanding what change is all about, as well as our expectations when we try to bring change into our lives.

Most importantly, lasting change only happens when we are clear about our motivations. Only when we are truly honest with ourselves are we are likely to make the right changes and, consequently experience real, meaningful, lasting fulfillment.

Inner vs. Outer Change

There are two types of change: the first is characterized as inner, and the second as outer change. It is important to know the difference.

Inner change happens inside ourselves when we resolve something. Inner change is lasting and based on a solid foundation of thinking and feeling differently about our life. Inner change happens when, suddenly, our life seems different and filled with new possibilities, as when we overcome the pain of an old love affair.

Outer change, on the other hand, relates to life's externalities. These happen when we are bored or dissatisfied and try to introduce something that alleviates these feelings. We might, for example, redecorate our apartment, buy new clothes or move to a new city.

Outer change is, at its core, fleeting - it all too often fails to address the inner conflicts it sought to mollify. The fallacy in this type of outer change is a belief that it will make us feel better about our inner selves in a lasting way. If an overweight person decides to lose weight, yet the real motivation is low self-image, no amount of weight loss will improve the problem.

Why Change?

Whenever we seek to alter our outside world to pacify unnamed inner conflicts, we inevitably come face to face with our old feelings. This can become a negative cycle of never-ending pursuit of outer change that, in the end, solves nothing.

If you truly yearn for lasting change, you need to be clear about your reasons for wanting that change. Start by asking, "Why do I really want to change my life?" Although the question is simple and straightforward, the answers, if you are honest with yourself, may surprise you.

Say, for example, that you are feeling unfulfilled and you decide to redecorate your apartment. Is this really the only motivation for doing so? Will it really help you feel better? It all depends on what you want the change to accomplish.

If the reason you are bored is that you are feeling half-hearted about your relationship, redecorating will obviously not help. Even though outer change might make you feel excited for a while, you have used it to avoid the real issue, thus your new feelings will not last long.

Outer Follows Inner

Whenever you have made inner changes, ask yourself, "What do I need to do to reflect my inner change in my outer life?" This is important, because, in order to benefit us, our changes need to impact on our outer world in some way. For example, if you decide that you will now stand up for yourself, you will have to put that commitment to yourself into practice through your actions.

Some outer changes are the simple consequence of inner ones, such as throwing out old things when you have let go of a past relationship. Others, like evaluating friendships that are not going well, may be more complicated. Others may impact our outer world in a much more subtle, but nonetheless extremely powerful way--like when we start treating ourselves and others with a lot more warmth and respect.

Start by looking at all the different ways in which you can implement your inner change. If the inner transformation is far-reaching and deep, it might mean altering many different areas in your outer life.

Say you are generally unhappy, because you feel bad about yourself, and you do not value your abilities. Your low self-worth could be reflected in a job that does not reflect your capabilities, a run-down apartment, shabby clothes and seedy acquaintances.

Once you have successfully made the inner change of really feeling good about yourself, you will be able to look again at all of these areas, and others too, in order to evaluate how each reflects your new sense of self-worth.

So, in addition to finding a new job, you could reflect your new sense of self-worth in all other areas of your lives, such as your apartment, clothes, acquaintances and leisure activities. Because these outer changes have followed inner change, they are more likely to be lasting and fulfilling.

Take Action

Once you've decided on your next steps, implement them as soon as you can. It is important to follow up immediately on decisions because situations always change, and the longer you wait, the more your options might start disappearing.

Whenever we procrastinate, we lose momentum, clarity and our resolve begins to weaken.

Say you are feeling bored in your relationship. After some soul-searching, you decide that you have no interests in common - it was only your partner's exciting lifestyle that drew you together. Here, you realize that you have not valued your own interests. In this situation you need to take action by valuing your own interests.

Once you have made this inner change, you can find out whether you can develop interests together, and so remain in the relationship, or not. Again, you need to take action and either transform the existing relationship, or end it.

The keys to living a joyful and successful life lie in our abilities to initiate and handle change. However, most of us are adverse to change. We generally prefer the comfort of routine, even if it is dull, to the upheavals that change brings, and so we tend to sit back until they become too much for us to bear.

The problem with this approach is that we are forever at the mercy of circumstances. We end up simply reacting to events in our lives, rather than taking the initiative to create the kind of life that we really want.

By learning to work with change, and understanding the different types of change, we find the changes we make will be lasting. What's more, our lives will become much more successful, joyful and fulfilling.

Change is inevitable, and life is full of crossroads where we must make important decisions that shape our future. Whether it's changing careers, ending a relationship, moving to a new city, or pursuing a passion, making significant life changes can be both exciting and overwhelming. However, it's important to remember that positive life changes require deliberate action and intentional choices. In this article, we will explore two paths to positive life change and provide practical tips for navigating the crossroads.

Path 1: Mindset Shifts

The first path to positive life change involves making mindset shifts. Our mindset is our mental attitude, our belief system, and our overall approach to life. Mindset shifts are important because they allow us to break free from limiting beliefs and self-imposed barriers that may be holding us back. Here are some practical tips for making mindset shifts:

Recognize your limiting beliefs: Identify the beliefs that are holding you back. Ask yourself: What beliefs do I hold about myself, others, and the world that are limiting my potential? Write them down and challenge them.

Practice positive self-talk: Our internal dialogue influences our mindset. Make a conscious effort to replace negative self-talk with positive affirmations.

Surround yourself with positivity: The people we surround ourselves with influence our mindset. Surround yourself with positive, supportive people who uplift and inspire you.

Embrace failure: Failure is an inevitable part of the journey to positive life change. Embrace failure as an opportunity to learn and grow, rather than a reason to give up.

Path 2: Action Steps

The second path to positive life change involves taking action steps. Action steps are the intentional actions we take to move towards our goals. Without action, our mindset shifts remain mere thoughts and ideas. Here are some practical tips for taking action steps:

Set clear, specific goals: Identify the specific outcomes you want to achieve. Write them down and break them down into smaller, manageable steps.

Create a plan: Develop a plan of action that outlines the steps you will take to achieve your goals. Assign deadlines and hold yourself accountable.

Take consistent action: Consistency is key to positive life change. Take action every day, even if it's just a small step towards your goal.

Celebrate your progress: Celebrate your progress along the way. Recognize and acknowledge the small wins that move you closer to your goals.

Positive life change requires both mindset shifts and action steps. By making mindset shifts, we can break free from limiting beliefs and self-imposed barriers. By taking action steps, we can move towards our goals and create the life we desire. Remember, making positive life changes takes time, effort, and commitment. But with the right mindset and intentional action, anything is possible.