An Idle Or A Busy Mind?

We are living in a fast-pace world in which there is little room for idleness. However, when we retire, many of us find ourselves in a totally different world -- a world of idleness.

An idle mind is the devil's workshop. Is there any truth in this statement?

In Oriental thinking, an idle mind is often a muddled mind with distorted thinking -- a breeding ground for mental disorders. Thomas Carlyle, the famous historian, once said: "In idleness, there is perpetual despair."

A busy mind, on the other hand, may search for new truths, even as one ages. This keeps the mind functional and healthy. John Quincy Adams concurred: "Idleness is sweet, and its consequences are cruel."

However, Lin Yutang, a well-known contemporary Chinese philosopher, once said: "A busy man is never wise, and a wise man is never busy." That may be the golden mean: a too-busy mind may become distressed, while a too-relaxed mind may turn idle.


Physical and intellectual activities do stimulate the mind. Therefore, it is important that even on retirement, you should find something to occupy yourself with. As you age, your muscle strength and mental capacity will deteriorate and decline. Take up a new sport, such as golf, which is an ageless sport. Mental golf is good for your mind, and golf swings are good for muscle flexibility, as well as body balance and posture. The latter are especially beneficial to those who are aging, because they may prevent fall among seniors, which is one of the leading causes of death among the elderly.

As for intellectual activities, go back to school as you age. Learn a new craft, a new hobby, or even start a new career, such as think, write, and retire, or a business.

Keep yourself from being idle, and live long!

Visit my website: Longevity for You and my blog Increase Mind Power.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Mindfulness for Health and Happiness

Your body and mind are interconnected with each other. But many of us don’t see that relationship. Being present, or more consciously present in your body moment by moment, enables you to live not only in your physical body but also inside your wholeness (including your mind) as a human being. Your present moment relationship with yourself, with others, and with the world around you depends on mindfulness, which is purposeful awareness of your body in the present moment. It is this awareness that connects your body and mind in a unique way.


Mindfulness is your path to better health and greater happiness. It affects not only your body but also your mind. Mindfulness is a basic human capacity that can be cultivated and strengthened with practice. Essentially, you become purposefully aware of what is happening to your body in the present moment: that is, you direct your attention in a casual and nonjudgmental way to the present moment.


Remember, your body is yours only, and is always with you. Finding the moment-by-moment relationship with your body is your path to better health and greater happiness. The present moment is always here and is timeless. This unique relationship helps you become more caring and more compassionate towards others; gives you clarity of mind, such that you can see what is really important to you in your life, and allows you to let go of everything peacefully. Remember, life happens only in the present moment. The past is gone, and the future is uncertain. However, we are so easily distracted by thoughts of what happened in the past and thoughts of what may happen in the future that we lose sight of what is most important to us—that is, what is happening right now in the present moment. Mindfulness is directing our minds gently back to the present moment so that we may feel richer and more alive.


Mindfulness is mindful attention to the present moment. Practicing mindfulness is your path to the present moment. Anything you experience after coming into presence through mindfulness may become richer and more meaningful to you. This is how and why mindfulness can give you better health and greater happiness. In mindfulness, you recognize your thoughts as they occur, but you pay nonjudgmental attention to them; in other words, they neither distract nor disturb you.


If you are mindful of what your body and your mind are experiencing in the present moment, you will soon learn to become mindful of others, which is the beginning of compassion and loving kindness—a quality that enriches life. If you are mindful of others, you will also become mindful of everything else in life, such as your breathing and your eating. Breathing comes so natural that many of us are not mindful of how we breathe, so many of us do not breathe right. As a result of incorrect breathing, we get less oxygen to our lungs, cells, and organs. As a result, our health deteriorates. Likewise, eating becomes second nature to us that many of us are no longer mindful of the eating process: we simply shuffle and stuff food into our mouths, mindless of chewing and digesting the food we are eating. Indeed, in our daily routines, there are so many things that we are mindless about, because we have taken them for granted. Mindfulness is re-directing our attention to what we are doing at the present moment to re-establish the vital link between the body and mind.


Learn mindfulness from an expert who provides a useful guide to harness the power of your mind with mental training tools and techniques to perfect the art of mental transformation.


For more information, visit my web page: Brain Power.


Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Natural Dental Hygiene

Maybe you always clean your teeth in the morning and before your go to bed. Or you may even use Listerine or other brands of mouthwash. But to really protect your teeth and mouth from harmful bacteria and gum deterioration, you need natural dental hygiene. For optimum oral health, use natural sesame oil to gargle on waking up.


Unlike other commercial mouthwashes, sesame oil has the following benefits:


1. It gently removes impurities from your tongue - the whitish coating.


2. It purifies your colon.


3. It improves your digestion.


Remember, digestive health is closely related to oral health. According to research studies, gargling and swishing oil in the mouth significantly reduces the number of species of bacteria in the space between teeth and gum, where gum disease starts.


Other benefits of using sesame oil for gargling and swishing for natural oral hygiene include avoiding dryness of throat, cracked lips, and cavities.


Instructions for natural oral hygiene are as follows:


1. Put some warm sesame oil in your mouth. Swish and gargle for a minute or two.


2. With your finger, massage, gently but thoroughly, some sesame oil into your gums.


3. Rinse your mouth to remove the residue of oil.


This is the most natural dental hygiene. Oral health is particularly important as you age.


Go to: 21 Secrets for Good Oral Health.


Visit my blog: Healthy Living Healthy Lifestyle.




Copyright© by Stephen Lau

How to Reduce Salt in Your Diet

You need oxygen to survive, but, ironically, oxygen is also your undoing. As you breathe in oxygen, you also give out carbon dioxide, which is toxic to your health. Nature has designed this unique built-in mechanism to guarantee your mortality. You get life-giving oxygen, but you also receive life-damaging byproducts in the form of free radicals. You are just like a log of wood burning oxygen for fuel. Fortunately, your body is also equipped with antioxidants that not only prevent free radical formation but also defuse the free radicals already formed. So, there is always a constant combat between antioxidants and free radicals within your body.


No matter what, free radicals may have damaged your cell walls. When cell walls are damaged, they become more difficult to metabolize the sodium intake, leading to more sodium leaks and hence further sodium metabolic impairment. Blood vessels damaged by excessive sodium leaks may result in swelling and edema. In this way, your arteries may become clogged and your blood pressure elevates.


Cellular damage to the DNA by free radicals is a major contributing factor not only to heart disease but also to many human cancers, as well as damage to the neurons in the brain. Therefore, reducing salt in your daily diet is important.


To prevent further free radical damage to your cells and blood vessels, reduce salt consumption. You have heard too often: Cut back on salt! But it is easier said than done, because nearly all processed foods contain some, if not excessive, amount of sodium chloride. Even Jell-O pudding may contain as much as 400 mg of sodium chloride.


Always read food labels before any food purchase. Unless it says “no salt added,” there is always a certain amount of sodium chloride. Reduce voluntary salting. Never reach out for a saltshaker in a restaurant. Lay off all high-salt condiments, such as soy sauce, steak sauces, gravies, and relishes. Restrict consumption of salt-laden foods, such as canned soups, potato chips, and pretzels, among other junk food. Eat whole foods instead of their processed counterparts. Go to The WholeFood Farmacy to get all your whole food products. Eat living and raw foods instead of processed foods, which are always loaded with salt.


Reducing salt consumption is an important component of a healthy longevity diet. Eating right is the art of living well.


Visit my web page: Healthy Eating to get more information on how eating healthy can heal.


Copyright© by Stephen Lau

You Are Your Choices!

The art of living well is the art of aging gracefully and healthily.




Aging begins as soon as we reach the peak of your performance curve in your life. In general, men peak their performance curve in their late twenties, while women peak theirs in their mid-thirties. That may be one of the reasons why women live longer than men. The performance curve is a turning point in your body when it just doesn’t grow any more and starts the aging process. It is believed that after the age of thirty-five, each biologic function declines by approximately 5 percent every 10 years. Over time, deterioration accelerates, resulting in disease and disorder.


Scientists have striven to measure the rate of aging in humans. They have been able to come up with an average number, but averages cannot take into account the significant variations among individuals; even the variations in the elderly are so great that there is no meaningful average at all. In other words, numbers are not only unreliable but also misleading. A case in point, according to a study at Harvard University, there was a 5 percent decrease in IQ every ten years; however, another scientific study indicated that some individuals actually improved their IQ even at the age of eighty. So, how could one explain that?


Does the speed of human aging have to do with genes? Yes, absolutely! But the genetic factor accounts for only about 25 percent of your aging: the rest has to do with your lifestyle and behavioral choices. The older you are, the more your choices determine how long and how well you are going to live—in other words, the speed of your aging process.


If you wish to live longer with a better quality of life, focus on your lifestyle and behavioral choices. You are your choices, and you become what you choose. Living is all about your choices—a sum of all the good and bad choices you have made. Truly, we all make bad choices every now and then, but there is no reason why we should continue with the bad choices we have made. Understandably, you may have the will to make the right choices, but your mind is weak. This is where you need to learn how to harness your brain power to turn things around in your favor. Visit my web page: Brain Power.


Also, visit my website: The Art of Living Well to find out how to live well.








Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Maintaining Brain Health Is the Art of Living Well

When you think of staying fit, don’t just think from the neck down: think about your brain! Brain health plays a critical role in almost everything you do — thinking, feeling, remembering, and sleeping. To live well, you need a healthy brain. Optimize your brain health throughout your entire life.


How do you maintain optimum brain health?


Simple, what is good for the heart is also good for the brain. Your heart pumps about 20 percent of your blood to your brain to nourish billions of brain cells with oxygen and nutrients.


Accordingly, anything that may damage your heart, such as alcohol and tobacco, may also damage your brain. Research showed that obese adults with high cholesterol and high blood pressure had six times the risk for dementia. In other words, a heart-healthy diet is essential to a healthy brain. Control your cholesterol and blood pressure naturally without the use of drugs, because pharmaceutical drugs are toxic chemicals, and should be avoided wherever possible. Manage your body weight naturally without resorting to fad diets. (Download a FREE copy of my 143-page e-book All-Round Weight Loss to get everything you need to know about losing weight naturally.)


Remember, a healthy brain affects how you think. You become what you think: your experiences and your perceptions of those experiences are stored in your subconscious mind, which directs your conscious mind. In other words, your actions are directed by your thoughts, which are the byproducts of your perceptions. You become what you see, and your reality is based on your perceptions. 

The Super Mind Evolution System: Discover your real mind power secrets. Cure your mind and body while sleeping.

Transform your fear into happiness, peace, and inspiration. Get MIND SURGE and 22 POWERFUL TOOLS for FREE to pre-program your dreams to enhance your mind power.




Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Yet Another Reason for Eating Natural Whole Foods

Due to the many health problems related trans fat, the food industry has ingeniously come up with another “man-made” fat to replace the now-unpopular trans fat. Well, it may well be a case of “jumping from the frying pan into the fire.”


This new process of making fat is called interesterification, which is a chemical process of making butter-like products from liquid vegetable oils. This chemical process uses enzymes to alter the molecular structure of a vegetable oil so as to give it the properties of a fat. Simply, it involves adding enzymes to a batch of vegetable oil to separate a triglyceride molecule into a glycerol and 3 fatty acids, and through the process of hydrogenation, the vegetable oils become hardened.


Some preliminary testing indicates that interesterified oils have the same health risks as trans fat.


Currently, there is no legislation covering interesterification, and the food industry takes advantage of this to make you believe that the “vegetable oil” you see on food labels of cakes, biscuits, and other food products are “healthy” ingredients.


No matter what is said on the food label, processed food is unnatural food. The more ingredients you find on the food label, the unhealthier it is for you. Eat natural whole foods.



Living and Raw Foods: To eat healthy, go on a living and raw diet.


The Super Food Library: Eat with the best of the best Nature has to offer.


Organic Food Gardening Beginner’s Manual: A 103-page manual with step-by-step guidelines to help you grow your own healthy organic food!






Copyright© by Stephen Lau