Day 26, Thursday, July 16, 2015

This morning I had to catch up on a number of very backed-up emails, and to finally get around to re-editing the next important journal article Tom Kelley, Eric Lambert and I wrote, after its critique by the peer reviewers. This one is for the journal, Spirituality in Mental Health, and compares our findings of 88% of those with Three Principles understanding reporting “flourishing mental health” to Keyes’s findings of only 18% in the general population. But these articles have been so much work and have taken up so much time! I’m not writing another one until we have the data for a control group study, which we need badly to finally be taken seriously by the psychological establishment. I also keep getting wonderful comments and appreciation from those who have now read the Paradigm Shift 3P history book.

Then I took a walk around a fairly nice park here in Bucharest. My legs are really hurting from that steep mountain hike and I need a leg massage bad! Then back to the park to have lunch with Oana. Then a much-needed nap—didn’t sleep very well on this very soft hotel bed last night.

And then it was time for my first session in Romania—on relationships. Unlike in Moscow, very few people showed up. Unlike Greece, I didn’t feel like talking about what happened with my relationship with Amy—amazingly, I haven’t even been thinking about it that much anymore (that will very likely change when I get back to Vermont, then Florida).

But with this small group I demonstrated what not to do in a seminar. I had it in my mind to talk about myths we have that keep relationships less healthy than they could be. I had come up with six of them and wrote them down on a flipchart beforehand. But it was not really appropriate for me to run down these myths for this very small group. My mistake was going through with my original plan and not deep listening to the group. I thought we recovered about halfway through the two hours and did end up with a pretty good feeling, but there was a lesson in that.

And we’re scheduled to have an even tinier group—only three paying customers, plus three organizers—for a day and a half over the weekend. Okay, have to put my thinking aside for that one!