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By Henry, March 28, 2009 9:04 am

Congruence: The art of style for people of substance

Age-old sages and fashion-forward aficionados agree: how we present ourselves speaks volumes about who we are. But while fashionistas focus on the latest thrends and on designer clothing and accessories, the total package goes much deeper. This includes posture, facial expressions, eye contact, voice tone, personal hygiene, how we dress, and, more importantly, our personality. All of this is energy and human beings recognize positive and negative energy on a subtle level. We may not be able to explain it but we know when we meet someone we can trust and someone we can’t. It’s not in the words they say but in how it is delivered. It is about congruence. When everything about us is aligned – physically, mentally, and energetically — we create trust, openness, and possibility.

Bringing congruence into our lives involves combining substance with style. If you want to get your great ideas across, you need to make it accessible. If you have an innovative product that you know will change the world, package it properly or else people may not even notice it. Don’t be naïve in thinking that substance alone is enough. Even spiritual leaders like the Dalai Lama know the importance of PR and marketing. Consider your style to be your own personal ad agency.

If I paid $900 for this designer t-shirt I too would hide my face in shame.

To be clear, style is nothing without substance. It becomes just an empty shell. If your life is f-cked up, no amount of makeup or bling is going to fool people. Well, at least not other people of substance. At the end of the day substance will triumph over style. So make sure you continue to work on building your substance. But if you don’t want to wait until the end of the day, substance combined with style readily triumphs over both individually.

The Roots of Style
Style comes in many different forms but, in my perspective, all of it is rooted in helping to bring out the uniqueness and inner beauty of who you are as a person so that you are more effective in your interactions with others.

Most forms of style occur on a nonverbal level. How you connect with others, such as adding a simple smile, eye contact or a basic greeting, can mean the difference between someone being helpful or not giving you the time of day. Dressing well and dressing appropriately communicates respect for others and taking pride in how you look. Adding intonation, stress and rhythm into your speaking voice indicates presence, power and confidence. All of these can open doors and create opportunities. Human beings respond much more readily to these nonverbal cues than the actual words we use in conversation. As much as 93% of effective communication is nonverbal. Only 7% is through the words themselves. Humans have been communicating with each other long before any of our complex language systems were invented. Your words are important but they have to be congruent with your nonverbal cues.

When your style is congruent with your character, it will help accentuate your strengths. It will bring out your already interesting personality. But don’t use style as a crutch to hide aspects of yourself you need to work on. Yes it may appear to cover your weaknesses but only superficially. If you are an asshole, people will still know you are an asshole, albeit a second or two later. Continue working on yourself for your own emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. It is the difference between someone who is just physically attractive and someone who is beautiful and radiant. It is the difference between someone who is well dressed and someone who makes a strong presence when they enter a room. For a light to shine brightly, you need a good internal source of power. No amount of style can create true inner strength and inner beauty.

Dressing Well
Dressing well is one aspect of style. But it isn’t about wearing fancy clothes. It isn’t about price tags or designer labels. It is about congruence. This means dressing appropriately, according to the situation, season, mood and, more importantly, your personality, physical attributes and energy.

Daoist Inspired Clothing

For thousands of years of recorded history, humans have recognized the importance of clothing. Beyond mere function or eye candy, clothes are storytellers. They provide insights into the culture and outlook not just of the individual but of a given society or era. For the Daoists (Taoists) in ancient China, clothes help create a harmonious relationship between you, your environment and the people you interact with. The materials, colors, motifs, shapes, silhouettes and patterns all have meaning. Woven together, fabrics can alter or enhance your energy. There is a lot of ancient wisdom passed on through clothing but I will leave that topic for another time.

For now, it is important to begin by knowing what the existing rules are for dress. You can’t break the rules if you don’t know them first. And you don’t want to follow the rules religiously because, then, it isn’t really you. Ultimately you want to follow your intuition and experiment with what works for you to make your own rules. This is what will make your style truly reflect who you are.

In the next several articles on fashion and style, I will be covering some of the basics of what I think is important to dress well. Please comment below if you have any requests, questions or opinions.

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By Henry, March 18, 2009 6:14 am

The following is an excerpt of the speech I gave at my graduation from Yo San University about the need to stay on your path and finding your purpose in life. Enjoy.

Live according to what is important to you. Follow your heart and don’t let anything stray you off your path. Use this medicine and integrate its teachings into your life.

It wasn’t until my divorce that I truly understood what any of that meant. During my first year at Yo San I got married to my then partner of 9 years. We had gone to college together, traveled the world, worked for social justice, and followed our hearts and dreams. When our marriage fell apart 2 years later, I went into a deep depression. It was the darkest and most challenging period of my life, as I struggled with feelings of anger, sadness, and grief. The life I thought I had disintegrated and I was left wondering what my life was really about.

Hindsight is 20/20. Looking back with clarity now, what ended my marriage was that I grew complacent with my life. I was going through the motions, keeping myself busy, and taking on things that “made sense.” But I had lost sense of my direction and meaning in life. I became comfortable with living the life other people wanted. But to be detached from my heart was painful, spiritually and emotionally. Everything felt like a failure or a fraud. I numbed the pain by becoming more and more distant from everything: my relationship with my wife, work, school and friendships.

The experience I went through was like getting needled in kidney 1 with e-stim hooked up to a car battery. Translation: a jarring kick in the ass. It was an experience that I don’t wish upon anybody. But sometimes life’s most precious gifts, the gifts of wisdom and transformation, come in the form of great challenges.

Don’t shy away from your challenges. It is an access to personal growth and development. It allows you to better understand who you are as a person. It also provides you a way to practice staying on your path regardless of what life throws your way.

Life is truly precious. You only have this moment… and this moment… and this moment. You never know when you will run out of moments. All of you have a great gift to share that will enlighten the world and make it a better place. You are short changing yourself and others unless you keep living your life. So keep following your heart and stay on this path you have nurtured during your time at Yo San. Be connected with your purpose, live with an open heart and don’t settle for anything less than striving to express the entirety who you are in every… single… moment.

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By Henry,

The following is an excerpt of the speech I gave at the Yo San University graduation ceremony on March 15, 2009. Although this was written for a graduating class of future Traditional Chinese Medicine healers, the experience of love applies to all of us. Enjoy!

Love. Love is what binds us together. Love inspires, empowers and heals. In our medicine, love is core to why we do what we do. It is what brings us together here to this moment, to this place. It is what makes our medicine seem so miraculous. Love energizes the human spirit and taps into its infinite capacity to heal and be healed.

Without love, we acupuncturists are simply technicians that stick cold, sharp needles into people. There is a difference between a needle inserted with love and one without care. The needles alone are just objects. It is our spirit and our love that makes our needles sing.

Without love, everything that we do has no meaning. It becomes mundane, routine and directionless. It doesn’t matter what we are doing. But when we are doing it with love, it adds that extra sparkle. That extra pizazz. Like how David Cohen passionately talks about the Shen in our principles and theories class. Or how Wing puts that extra Shablam! into his needles.

Love is a matter of intention. It is present everywhere we are – in every single moment of every single day in the darkest of shadows and in the brightest of light. It is accessible to us simply when we become open to it. We all have experienced it in moments when we are fully present and open with the world around us. This is because love is a natural part of who we are

One of the biggest challenges in our lives is how we can maintain that openness to love from moment to moment. It is a daily practice that, at the deepest level, is about living with an open heart. It requires us not just to be fully present and open when we are in the treatment room. It requires us to be fully present and open in all areas of our lives – from when we wake up in the morning to how we eat and from how we tie our shoes to how we relate to everyone and everything. It is all in the small details of life and how we choose to live it.

To love is a beautiful, miraculous gift we can readily give to anyone at anytime. It is also an incredible gift to receive. Our practice starts with us — by loving ourselves and caring for what we are doing and how we are doing it.

Keep your heart open and keep allowing the love of your heart to flow and permeate into everything you do. Starting with each and every one of us, this is how we can change the world.

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By Henry, February 28, 2009 2:17 am

Photo of a beautiful sunflower in the middle of a sunflower field.

Holism is the idea that everything in the universe is interconnected. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We are more than just the cells that make up our body. And we exist for more than the simple reason to exist.

We are here on this planet to work out our problems, both with ourselves and each other, and to understand who we are, to realize our inner purposes and to share our deepest gifts with the world. To do that requires us to live holistic lives where we are empowered, inspired and engaged.

Living a holistic life isn’t simply about being harmonious, peaceful or balanced. It isn’t simply about being a granola eating, tree hugging, hemp wearing hippie. Living a holistic life is more about living a full life, one in which we embrace all of who we are — our gifts and challenges, our strengths and weaknesses, and our light and shadow — because all of that makes us who we are. We grow stronger and wiser not by detaching ourselves from life to go mediate in solitude or by ignoring or burying parts of ourselves and our humanity that makes us uncomfortable. We grow stronger and wiser by staying fully present to who we are and by working through the myriad of challenges life throws our way.

In ancient spiritual traditions the lotus is a symbol of purity and divinity. It grows in muddy waters and yet its flowers are refined and unsullied. Similarly our path to wisdom and enlightenment takes us through the shadows of human existence. To know peace we have to know war. To know love we have to know hate. The entire spectrum of life in all its beauty and horror is where we exist.

Our greatest challenge in this life time is figuring out how we can live in this existence with an open heart from moment to moment and to allow our heart’s fullest expression to permeate through everything that we do regardless of what the universe throws our way. At its core this is what this blog is about.

Thank you and enjoy.

Henry