Download Quilt 1.0

Download Else Fuse 1.01

So what’s odd?  It didn’t work.  There was some sort of problem with it that I couldn’t fix.  The code was really simple, but for some reason, it didn’t work.  But now, four builds of Fusion later, it seems to work just fine.  So I’m going to post it, and if you happen to find out that it still fails for some reason, go ahead and let me know.

Download Unit Vector OpenCL Fuse

It’s a very simple function, normalizing a vector and returning that in the RGB while putting the original length into the A.  In the case of the 4D normalize, you don’t get the length.  I have no idea what took me so long to get around to this, it only took an hour or two to flesh out, but I got hung up by the fact that my video card, a Quadro 5000, does not, at this time, have OpenCL drivers that support float3.  Float4?  Fine.  Float2?  No problem.  Float3?  Fail.  So I went ahead and implemented the 3D normalize manually, and used the fast_normalize OpenCL function to make a 4D normalize.

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Organic food is the fastest growing segment of the food market. I am both saddened and outraged that there are people who betray the consumer’s trust in this noble effort to bring farmers and consumers together in a synergistic and profitable way.

Download AlphaDivideMultiply Fuse 1.01

Just a simple RGB/A or RGB*A, plus a “Solid” and “Clear” so you don’t have to use the annoying Bol or Mat as much.   Nothing groundbreaking, but it should save a few clicks per day.

Both Frank and I are tested regularly and show elevated total and LDL cholesterol. Because our HDL-C levels are high and triglyceride levels are low, my guess is that the LDL-C is a harmless light and fluffy type. Not the small dense LDL-Cholesterol associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). On Kaiser’s own risk calculator, I have less than a 1% chance of CVD in the next 10 years.

Download MIP Fuse 1.13

This simple Fuse just takes a range over time and generates an image with the highest or lowest pixels.  Great for normalizing.  It does so for each channel, so it can be useful for color normalization too, or for finding the bounding box of a position pass.  It can also be useful for making “summary” thumbnails of footage.

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Certainly, food and beverage companies have to step up and do what they can. I am encouraged by decreasing trans fat content in food, and current efforts to reduce sodium, sugar, and especially high fructose corn sweetener. But reformulating food is only one piece of the puzzle. Harder questions need to be answered regarding our food supply.

I cringed when I saw the headline. The American Council on Exercise has partnered with the NuVal Nutritional Scoring System. The relationship between the fitness industry and nutrition has been messy for decades. The track record is dismal between the selling of suspect sport nutritional products and the offering of nutrition advice by people who only think they know.

Download ColorSplitter Fuse 1.1

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I can’t disagree more with the author. There is reason to be cautious, and I am not at all convinced that this food is safe in the fullest sense. While Dr. Miller is appalled “regulators chose the most risk-averse and burdensome approach”, there is reason to be cautious. FDA does not have such a good track record when it comes to approving novel food ingredients. Partially hydrogenated oils (trans fat), high fructose corn syrup, and artificial sweeteners are the first debacles that come to mind.

Turn on the TV and flip channels for a while. Eventually, you’ll come…

My son went to school with three servings of fruits and vegetables just for lunch. Why are so many people not eating their share? The authors suggest it is about access, availability and affordability. I would add two more: taste and quality.

Yesterday afternoon I scanned Chow Hound at the last minute for inspiration. I was frustrated that most of the recommendations were in West Hollywood, downtown or environs that weren’t going to work. My husband wanted to drive home from downtown and go together. I knew I was not going to get him in the car again for any significant distance. I opted for a restaurant we had been to a couple of years ago.

WHEN ONE FRAICHE IS NOT THE SAME AS THE OTHER FRAICHE

I did a double take passing by my local Whole Foods Market today. It is a convenient one block walk from my office and I am thrilled to have such fabulous food so conveniently located. Granted, I passed right by today, carting $80 worth of farm fresh produce from the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market. I like it all.

Now research from Sweden underscores an impact on body fat even two years after a 4 week “binge”. During the study 18 subjects consumed an average of 70% more calories than usual. (The experimental subjects were instructed to double their food intake, but were only able to increase it by 70%.) The researchers note that the calories came from two meals a day bought at fast food establishments, or from other sources of “high protein and saturated fat foods.”

He has lived in parallel universes for awhile now. Most of the food he sells is conventional, directed to the restaurant, hotel and institutional market. Price point is the paramount concern. Quality is a close second, but often price trumps quality. How food is raised and how the crops, animals and the workers are treated isn’t even on the table (pun intended).

I’m vacationing in Carpinteria this week, a second home for most of my life. My family started visiting Carpinteria when I was a baby and by my 16th birthday we were lucky enough to visit often, staying at one of the units my dad built just two blocks from the beach.

I am encouraged and reinforced. It is good to commune with those of like mind. There is much to gain from eating close to the earth, including meat and animal products raised by people who are committed to working with animals in the most humane and responsible way. We all benefit.

I have said for years that the scale is a very crude tool, and BMI is a simple ratio of weight and height. Many studies confirm that fitness trumps weight. Studies of active people and fit athletes bear this out. The heavier body mass from hypertrophied muscles increases both weight and one’s BMI, but doesn’t necessarily increase risk of disease or death. Most often a healthier active lifestyle actually decreases risk of morbidity and mortality because fitness is a huge factor decreasing health risks.

That is, except for the fact that many people–and scientists– want the issue of weight loss to be all about calories. We will be “treated” to these poorly investigated findings as long as there are scientists who insist that weight is primarily determined by the balance of calories in versus calories out.

www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MCG.2006.44

www.neuroconstruct.org/

www.wholebraincatalog.org/

www.gensat.org/retina.jsp

cellimagelibrary.org/

smallworldexplorations.org/

And the quote of the day “The gain in the brain comes mainly from the stain.”

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When artificially sweetened products are consumed and what they are consumed with makes a difference. This study looks at sweetened products consumed before a meal. The emphasis of the study’s findings is to underscore fewer calories consumed. But the majority of criticism I read focuses on what happens to those calories, something scientists call nutrient partitioning.

Drop us a line if you’d like to meet up, or if you want to suggest something not to be missed.

Or just keep an eye out for us.  I’ll be the guy in the SIGGRAPH t-shirt with no laptop.

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines are available for public comment and controversy has reached a new high. The USDA website has registered 1891 comments so far. Comments come from the usual commercial interest groups, nutrition and medical experts, journalists as well as the lay public. Most agree there are some noted and celebrated shifts in the report, and other recommendations just haven’t kept up with current research.

Once a shader proves to be useful and the required inputs are more or less locked-down, we typically convert it into a full-fledged 3D Fusion tool (expect more of these posted soon, by the way).

Download GenericShader3D 1.0

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We’ve replaced the menu link for Visualization Services with We're Hiring because, well, we’re pretty solidly booked.  Maybe you could help with that?

We’re looking to immediately hire both permanent and contract developers to help us make everything from offline medical image processing and rendering tools to realtime interactive and simulation applications.  We can’t go into all the details here, but if you would like to find out more, drop us a line.

The LA Times Health section features two articles regarding milk in the diet and both of the articles explain my ongoing tolerate/hate relationship with this section. I like the idea of disseminating science via the daily newspaper. It is a resource many people look to for reliable information, whether reading it at the breakfast table or looking it up online. But the lack of journalistic rigor make these articles more saccharine than science.

This makes it do to meshes what my previous setups did in particles.

3 maps used to make geometry of a colon

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So the political pundits are all over Elena Kagan’s response to a rhetorical question by Sen. Tom Coburn (R- Okla.) I probably would have taken the question quite literally, too. This discussion deserves far more attention. While health authorities bemoan the lack of “nutrient dense” whole foods in the American diet, government policy actually entices people to eat fewer fruits and vegetables.

So what happens when a target heart rate is set too high? The increased level of stress during an exercise test distorts the patient’s health status, and medical treatment is likely to be inappropriate as well. But there is more to this. Heart rate is an indicator of how the body is burning fuel.

The research postulates that adequate protein provides the necessary tryptophan–an amino acid that is the precursor of serotonin–that is necessary to produce adequate serotonin. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that enhances a state of calm and contentment. How interesting that it may be the serotonin receptors in the pancreas are key in the proliferation of beta cells that help the pregnant woman’s body produce the insulin needed during pregnancy. Without enough protein, the researchers suspect serotonin production is limited, which limits beta cell proliferation as well as insulin production. The result: increased incidence of gestational diabetes.

When you eat mostly whole, fresh foods prepared with skill, sodium is used to enhance all flavors, not just to get to “salty”. The trouble with the general public is that we have been fed a increasingly salt saturated diet as food manufacturers and less skills cooks use salt indiscriminately. More salt in foods leads to less salt sensitivity and we become accustomed to a saltier taste or don’t notice the excessive salt at all because it is hidden behind much more intense flavors.

Rustum is in our heart and our heart is a place of prayer. Please join me in praying for Rustum’s health.

Love,
Deepak

A two week excursion to the Western Caribbean and the Florida Keys in April challenged every aspect of my grass fed lifestyle. The best I could do was mostly eat fish with plenty of fruits and vegetables, knowing most of my food was raised conventionally and it is very unlikely any source of animal product was grass fed.

Deepak discusses the biology of love

Of all the attributes that define human beings, our need to form strong emotional attachments to each other may be the most profound. And of these attachments, the bond between a mother and her infant is the most fundamental. It is a human being’s first attachment, a powerful bond that is formative in the broadest possible sense. – Mother-Baby Bond: The Biology of Love (VIDEO)

Spinal fusion surgery for back pain was reviewed in three articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week http://cot.ag/bjDgWW . The sobering conclusions were that we are spending up to 10 times more for complicated new surgical procedures and frequently getting worse outcomes and up to twice as many complications.

We’re working on a project that really needs to leverage the DoD in Fusion for efficiency at certain scales, but we are going to be relying on tools that don’t support DoD yet.  I made several attempts to create some Fuses to affect the DoD in such a way that we could control it more effectively over a comp.  This one takes advantage of the SetDomain tool to do the actual manipulation of the DoD, so it’s just a modifier that sets the appropriate sliders.

Download DoD Union Finder Modifier Fuse 1.0

Download DoD Union Finder and Crop with Metadata example comp 1.0

(Particle Emitter “attached” to a Sphere)

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Both my husband and I had dental appointments for routine cleaning in the last few weeks. Frank has always enjoyed better dental health. He boasts of his one lifetime cavity and comes home singing from his appointments, all aglow from lots of praise for taking such good care of his teeth. I have never enjoyed such a sunny experience. In our household my teeth are considered an investment, and if the price of gold keeps going up, I may have to start fearing for my life.

Q: No matter how much I am active about something, no matter how much I reach for others, no matter how I change, meditate, change the state of mind, no matter how much I work or contribute, everything in my material world remains the same. Nothing changes. I work on the inside, but on the outside all my circumstances and conditions are the same. What is wrong, and why I am stuck? Thanks.

Q: Honestly, I can’t imagine a more blessed life. Everything I’ve ever dreamed of, I asked, and here it is. I know that pain of the soul can manifest through illness and injury. It’s been a very long journey. Looking back, I can see why it all happened, when it happened and how it happened. It was all important to get me to where I am today. Oprah.com

The USDA recently defined organic meat and milk as livestock that has spent at least 4 months of the year grazing on pasture with at least 30% of their feed from grazing. This is noted by organic farmers as a significant improvement over the old rules stating that animals must have “access to pasture.” We know what that means–a door that opens to grass the the animals may never touch.

Position Pass and Camera Metadata Screengrab

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ColorBlind fuse

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Real life kicked in with a vengeance last week. I worked at a conference for four days, and then literally ran to a train for a three day cycling trip with my family. Most meals were consumed away from home. And despite my best efforts, I feel different, and not in a good way. I’m not as lean and visibly more puffy– and that is despite cycling over 75 miles during the last three days.

You can forget about finding grass fed milk lattes. I opted for tea most of the time, and succumbed to the call of Starbucks just once over the four days. San Francisco is not exactly an outpost, and in many ways Northern California trumps SoCal in terms of grass fed availability and consciousness. After all author, Michael Pollan of The Omnivore’s Dilemma teaches at UC Berkeley and Alice Waters has effectively spread the organic gospel across the bay.

Almost five months have passed since I switched to mostly grass fed animal products. I feel much the same as I did when I discovered that I benefited from a higher fat and protein diet–I can’t go back. I feel better, I am happier. I feel more resilient when the tough stuff happens. No one has erased my Italian heritage, but I don’t seem to engage the same. There is less of an obsessive, perseverating quality to my emotions. I feel them and they resonate, but they don’t overwhelm my thoughts.

Yes, my cholesterol went down, from 249 mg/dl to 229 mg/dl. But most of the decrease can be attributed to a drop in the “good” cholesterol, HDL-C, from 58 to 53.

I am grinding my own beef. If someone had suggested to me last year that I would be in this position, I would have laughed out loud.

Tonight we are going out to dinner for my birthday, a nice restaurant with close friends. I am familiar with the menu, and already know I will probably order the lamb. It is from New Zealand and grass fed. I am continually reminded how sharply my thinking and behavior has changed since I began the grass fed experiment almost five months ago.

I am running errands today and ran out of time before I got hungry and needed to eat. I just don’t eat away from home all that often, and certainly not on the fly. Eating mostly grass fed dairy and meat has impacted even the simplest food decisions. I stopped by a local market and picked up a piece of fruit and some chicken. What a mistake.

Bronchitis again. Every December it feels like I am destined to succumb. A simple sinus infection immediately invades my lungs and I am at the doctors for antibiotics. I don’t like this, but I haven’t quite figured out how to stop my life and not get exhausted.

One of the most positive ways to live is to look on every obstacle as a hidden opportunity. This holiday season poses huge challenges for those among us who have lost their jobs or feel financially insecure. Even if you don’t fall into that category, the evening news brings worries on many fronts, from the deficit to terrorism. I’d like to propose that there is a common problem in all these things that you can turn into an opportunity.

Published in Oprah.com

We met on Wednesday. She said, “You look really different.”

In a moment of indecision, I opted for what was convenient and what would save me another trip to the market on a Saturday.  I am truly stunned at how how bad I feel.  I don’t want to eat this food.  I am already scheming on a plan to maintain my own clean, and unadulterated food supply, leaving the kids to scarf down the cheaper and more convenient fare.

What is a Trigger Point Injection?

Most flavored domestic yogurts add much more carbohydrate in the form of sugar or other caloric sweetener than their plain cousins.   Cheaper yogurts sweeten with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), others may granulated sugar and some stretch to use dehydrated cane juice (sucrose) for a healthier appeal.  There is still far too much sugar added.   It is too bad.

I am preparing a presentation regarding the metabolic and nutrition advantages of grass fed beef for Frank’s business: higher omega 3’s and CLA, lower total fat, lower calories.  I think I have a good handle on the benefits.  Then I read a reference regarding food safety.  I’m intrigued and look for more data.

I am dietitian and eat exceptionally well.  I am concerned that the knee jerk to statins is masking a more wholistic solution to our current concerns about heart disease in this country.  Despite exercising regularly and eating well, I knew there was at least one more thing I could change.

Fuses, however,  let you use handy methods to modify a matrix.  I’ve used some of them to create an RGB equivalent of the 3D Transform tool.  It has a similar UI, just as 3TT does, but this modifies RGB, not XYZ or UVW.

Color Matrix Transform fuse

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Color to Mono

Mono to Color

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Some spiritual thinking suggests that patterns of (unwanted) events keep reoccurring in our lives, until we understand the lesson it is trying to teach (and change the pattern). I can understand how this may be applied

In our quest to grow and evolve, we all run into obstacles. We meet resistance. Change proves stubborn and at times impossible. Anything that I can do to overcome these obstacles is a contribution I never wish to pass up.

In our quest to grow and evolve, we all run into obstacles. We meet resistance. Change proves stubborn and at times impossible.  Anything that I can do to overcome these obstacles is a contribution I never wish to pass up.

Book Tour Schedule

Tuesday, October 13                      New York, NY

7:00pm                                 Open Center

Riverside Church

Riverside Drive and 120^th Street
New York, NY 10027

http://www.opencenter.org/an-evening-with-deepak-chopra-reinventing-the-body-resurrecting-the-soul/

Wednesday, October 14               New Jersey

7:30pm                                 Transformations

Scottish-Rite Auditorium

315 White Horse Pike
Collingswood, NJ 08108

http://www.readytotransform.com/deepak_101409.html

Thursday, October 15                     Connecticut

7:00pm                                 RJ Julia

Polson Middle School

302 Green Hill Rd
Madison, CT 06443

http://www.rjjulia.com/deepak-chopra-inspiration.html

Friday, October 16                           Washington, DC

7:30pm                                 Hooks Books Events

The GW Lisner Auditorium
730 21st Street, NW

Washington, DC 20052

http://www.readytotransform.com/deepak_101409.html

Monday, October 19                      St. Louis

7:00pm                                 Left Bank Books

Ethical Society of St. Louis

9001 Clayton Road

St. Louis, MO 63117

http://leftbankbooks.indiebound.com/event/deepak-chopra-reinventing-body-resurrecting-soul-0

Tuesday, October 20                      Minneapolis

7:30pm                                 University of Minneapolis

Northrop

84 Church Street S.E.,

Minneapolis, MN  55455

http://northrop.umn.edu/event/deepak-chopra

Thursday, October 22                     San Francisco, CA

7:00pm Commonwealth Club

Santa Clara Convention Center

5001 Great America Parkway

Santa Clara, CA 95054

http://tickets.commonwealthclub.org/auto_choose_ga.asp?area=13&shcode=1323

Friday, October 23 Berkeley, CA

7:30pm First Congregational Church of Berkeley
2345 Channing Way
Berkeley, CA 94704

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/77425

As time permits, I’ll go through my other fuses and add similar functionality.

But let’s say the light prevails and the Democrats deliver a bill that gives insurance access to millions of previously uninsured Americans. As great as that victory would be, health care won’t be reformed. Isolated voices like Andrew Weil, (writing at Huffington Post and in his book, Why Our Health Matters ), and Dean Ornish, (writing as the medical editor at huffingtonpost.com and in his book, The Spectrum ), and former Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano are telling us why.

Here are the basic points that aren’t being addressed:

1. Prevention, the key to future health, isn’t being followed enough. That’s why Americans are getting more obese and sedentary every year. That’s why sugary drinks are now the single largest source of calories in the average diet. Alcohol and tobacco still account for 35% of all medical expenditures. Leading causes of bad health — obesity, heart disease, and type II diabetes — could be rolled back by sensible prevention that people simply aren’t following.

2. Supply and demand for doctor care is upside down. Patients aren’t demanding the bulk of the $700 billion in unnecessary tests and procedures performed every year in this country. Doctors are creating the demand to cover their backs and increase their income. Even conscientious doctors who put the patient first are caught in lockstep habit, calling for unnecessary tests because that’s what doctors do in this country.

3. Without a public option, there’s no real incentive for insurance companies to lower their costs. The free market isn’t free when the consumer is presented with non-competitive insurance plans that basically aim at corporate profit and when Wall Street dictates how corporations must be run in order to survive.

4. To borrow a phrase from Sec. Califano, we’ve become a “sick-care system” that puts all its efforts in developing newer drugs and offering more surgery once a person is ill. Doctors are not trained to keep people healthy. They are also strongly tempted to perform needless procedures that do not extend life span, such as hysterectomies, lower back surgery, heart bypass, and balloon angioplasty.

5. We are addicted to the sick-care system, and no money is being allocated in any of the reform bills in Congress to breaking this addiction. Massive public education was successful, over a long period of time, in getting people to quit smoking. Now we need the same massive public education to get them to adopt prevention. Will doctors, insurance companies, and big pharma do the job for us? Well, did big tobacco do the job of ending smoking? Without government action, the private sector will push drugs and surgery because prevention doesn’t show up as profit on their bottom line.

I regret having to walk in the shadow this way. Pres. Obama brought a good deal of light to the whole muddled issue of health-care reform. He spoke truth and balanced it with political realism. He chastised the political reactionaries who want to kill reform by using lies, fear, and misinformation. We’re better off for having heard the speech. But costs won’t go down and Americans won’t be healthier until the five points listed above are dealt with. Right now, health-care reform has been couched in terms of economics first and morality second, with little thought to what should really come first: turning sickness into wellness.

Posted in the San Francisco Chronicle

Absolute Value

I’m often trying to find the magnitude of something, regardless of sign.  Commonly done for things like normals or velocity or distance.  You would expect there to be a built in tool for that sort of thing, but there isn’t.

Previously,  I did it with a CT or a Fuse operating on a per-pixel basis.  An f.Color.rgb = abs(f.Color.rgb) sort of thing, which is pretty slow in Fusion as a CT or Fuse, but is plenty fast in Cg.  More on that later.

Today I had an idea on how to do it with a matrix.   The basic idea is to scale the the image by .5, and by -.5 and find the difference of the two.  So |x| = (.5*x)-(-.5*x)

This method is much faster.  The resulting Fuse runs about 40% faster than a CT, and several times faster than the old Fuse I had made which operated pixel by pixel.  Unfortunately, ROI isn’t supported yet for Fuses, so if you have a tiny ROI, the CT or the CMx’s will both run faster.   EDIT: ROIDS can be supported in Fuses…  I’ll need to add it to the Fuses I’ve posted so far.  Stay tuned…

So here’s the Fuse, a Cg ViewShader that lets you view the absolute value in a Viewer, and an example comp showing the CT, Fuse, and CMx methods, as well as the ViewShader.

Download FAbsolute Fuse 1.05

Download Absolute Value Viewshader 1.01

Download Example Comp (Absolute Fuse) A01

It would be interesting to see if the disparity between the speeds  of processing the matrix vs per-pixel goes away when you compile a c++ plugin…

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Absolute Value

I’m often trying to find the magnitude of something, regardless of sign.  Commonly done for things like normals or velocity or distance.  You would expect there to be a built in tool for that sort of thing, but there isn’t.

Previously,  I did it with a CT or a Fuse operating on a per-pixel basis.  An f.Color.rgb = abs(f.Color.rgb) sort of thing, which is pretty slow in Fusion as a CT or Fuse, but is plenty fast in Cg.  More on that later.

Today I had an idea on how to do it with a matrix.   The basic idea is to scale the the image by .5, and by -.5 and find the difference of the two.  So |x| = (.5*x)-(-.5*x)

This method is much faster.  The resulting Fuse runs about 40% faster than a CT, and several times faster than the old Fuse I had made which operated pixel by pixel.  Unfortunately, ROI isn’t supported yet for Fuses, so if you have a tiny ROI, the CT or the CMx’s will both run faster.   EDIT: ROIDS can be supported in Fuses…  I’ll need to add it to the Fuses I’ve posted so far.  Stay tuned…

So here’s the Fuse, a Cg ViewShader that lets you view the absolute value in a Viewer, and an example comp showing the CT, Fuse, and CMx methods, as well as the ViewShader.

Download FAbsolute Fuse 1.05

Download Absolute Value Viewshader 1.01

Download Example Comp (Absolute Fuse) A01

It would be interesting to see if the disparity between the speeds  of processing the matrix vs per-pixel goes away when you compile a c++ plugin…

]]> http://thevisualmd.com/expert_panel/deepak_chopra_md/video_reinventing_the_body_changing_the_metabolism_of_time http://thevisualmd.com/expert_panel/deepak_chopra_md/video_reinventing_the_body_changing_the_metabolism_of_time Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://thevisualmd.com/expert_panel/deepak_chopra_md/san_francisco_chronicle_do_you_want_a_health-care_system_or_a_healing_system http://thevisualmd.com/expert_panel/deepak_chopra_md/san_francisco_chronicle_do_you_want_a_health-care_system_or_a_healing_system Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The current debate over health-care reform has been about politics and money. There is no escaping either factor. Huge vested interests are spending millions of dollars a day to pressure Congress into minimal reform. But even if the political system were pure as snow, an aging American population makes it inevitable that the health-care system is going to grow more and more expensive.  These external factors fill the news every day, obscuring a simple fact. Your health depends far more on the healing system than the health-care system.  The healing system is inside your body. Its intricacies are just now being fully explored, but certain broad trends have become clear.

– The healing system is more flexible and powerful than previously thought.  For example, the brain can heal itself, a finding that seemed impossible a few decades ago.

– The healing system is highly sensitive to outside conditions. Stress and emotional discomfort, for example, can severely compromise your ability to heal.

– Healing affects your genes and how they are expressed. An expressed gene is an active one, and this activity turns out to be far more responsive to your state of mind-body health than previously thought.  The old image of fixed genes is rapidly changing to a conception in which the body’s genetic material is eavesdropping on all the experiences in your life. In short, a gene isn’t a thing; it’s a process.

– The healing system is automatic, but your lifestyle choices make a huge difference in the efficiency of healing.

These factors hold true throughout your life, and if we simplify them to one sentence, this would be it: Change your life and you change your healing system.  That may sound like the advice we get constantly about proper diet, exercise, and stress management.  But with new evidence showing up every day that lifestyle affects an incurable disease like Alzheimer’s, for example, it’s becoming clear that your own healing system will always be the front-line defender of your well-being, not your doctor or the drug companies. So-called lifestyle diseases used to be restricted to conditions like heart disease, obesity, and type II diabetes, where a link with improper diet was easily demonstrated. Now a wider range of disorders is being linked to lifestyle choices, not by one-to-one correlations but through more general trends. That is, no one can predict exactly which disease you might contract due to poor lifestyle choices, but at the same time, reversing those poor choices has a broad effect in improving your power to heal.

Some recent statistics bring home how crucial it is to rely on the healing system rather than the health-care system.

• 58 Million Americans are Overweight; 40 Million Obese; 3 Million morbidly Obese
• Eight out of 10 over 25′s Overweight
• 78% of American’s not meeting basic activity level recommendations
• 25% completely Sedentary
• 76% increase in Type II diabetes in adults 30-40 yrs old since 1990.

The statistic that really jumps out has to do with sedentary lifestyles. We are addicted to sitting on the couch watching beautiful, slim, fit actors and athletes on television, with a steady increase in other sedentary activities like surfing the Internet and playing video games. In addition, these activities are reaching into younger age groups, making children less active and therefore more inclined to obesity. Yet the simple fact is that the alternative to being sedentary isn’t joining a gym. The greatest benefit of exercise occurs when you move from being sedentary to light activity like walking, doing housework, gardening, and climbing the stairs.  Exercise at higher levels will bring increased2 benefits, certainly, but this first step brings the biggest single improvement in health. Being sedentary is more harmful to you than forgetting to jog three times a week. In addition, at least one study has shown that when overweight adults are put into groups that walk, jog, or run every day, the group that lost the most weight were the walkers.

Thrashing out health-care reform is a defining issue for the coming decade and an inescapable duty. Having said that, I urge you to look inward rather than outward.  The most perfect health-care system can’t do as much for you, on a daily basis, or do it as cheaply as your own healing system.  The evidence is there, waiting to be acted upon.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

It’s estimated that 2.5 million unnecessary surgeries are performed each year, with hysterectomies, heart bypass grafts, lower back surgery, and angioplasty leading the list.  Just two procedures alone, coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) — known in the trade as cabbage — and balloon angioplasty cost $100 billion annually.  With long waiting lists for CABG, you’d think it was vital for prolonging the lifespan of heart patients, but that’s a mistake. Current statistics suggest that about 3% of bypass surgeries extend life expectancy, with angioplasty scoring even lower at zero percent.

On all sides the “more is better” cult cripples and bankrupts the American health-care system. If you pay your doctor a visit tomorrow, you have a  43 percent chance of being given an unnecessary test. Stress-related chest pains that are muscular in origin can still wind up leading to a battery of expensive cardiac tests, including risky catheterization. If you have a cold or flu, there’s a 73 percent chance that you will be prescribed an antibiotic, which is useless against viruses, including cold and flu viruses, but which carry risks of allergic reactions and other side effects, not to mention weakening of the immune system.

The U.S. ranks 37th in overall health system performance in the world by the WHO while paying far and away the biggest bill. What we need is not more unnecessary tests, which cost an estimated $700 billion dollars a year, but more intelligence.  The Obama administration has rightly focused on the three main points of reform:

1. Provide coverage for the 47 million citizens who don’t have insurance. Their health care is being paid for through public funds when the final bill comes due — no one gets treated for free — so it’s absurd to hide the cost when it can be borne by those who need the care and have a duty to pay for it.

2. Provide a public option so that private insurers don’t have the profits game entirely to themselves. Not only will a public option be cheaper, but it starts to remove the cutthroat profit motive in healthcare insurance  to a more sensible and ethical motive of improving people’s health and wellbeing.

3. Bring down medical costs, which involves two main fronts of attack. First, stop the “more is better” ethic (or rather, lack of ethics) that is tied to doctors’ profit motive. Second, bring malpractice coverage and lawsuits into line with reality, since many medical tests are motivated by physicians protecting themselves rather than protecting the patient’s health.

A great deal of fear and misinformation has been stirred up recently about end of life care in regards to health care reform. From my experience as a physician, efforts of extend life indefinitely through resuscitation and respirators usually only extends the patient’s suffering and extends the hospital bill thousands of dollars a day. While there are important exceptions, nevertheless it is vital that patients have the opportunity to discuss and make these critical decisions for themselves before they are incapacitated and force their families into a decision fraught with guilt and uncertainty.

Anyone who wants to delve into the truly dismal state of health-care economics has a wealth of sources at hand.  Read the excellent articles now online at the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker magazines for a starter.  You will quickly realize that this isn’t an issue where the already insured are altruistically passing reform to benefit “them,” the incapacitated elderly,  the chronically ill, and the under-insured, all of whom have the smallest voice in Congress while health-care lobbyists actually outnumber members of Congress six to one.  We have arrived at a generational crossroads where wasteful, inefficient medicine meets an aging population.  We must make it through to the other side as a whole nation.

Otherwise, consider what looms ahead.  The present generation of young children might become the first to live shorter lives than their parents thanks to runaway childhood obesity and lack of exercise. Fast foods continue to zoom in popularity, and sodas and sugary drinks are the main source of calories in the American diet . Health-care costs could cripple American industry by amounting to 50% of overhead by mid-century.  Even if those dire possibilities don’t faze you, consider one of Pres. Obama’s most basic points: compared to other countries, the richest nation in the world is paying more for less when it comes to health care. That alone is reason enough to quash the myth of “more is better” right now, while we have the best chance of real reform.

Published in San Francisco Chronicle

Healthcare Reform: Lets Face the Truth – Part 2 of 2

CNN Campbell Brown

Cropped compare of anisotropic proxy of a 4k plate

Along those lines, we’ve taken to using an inline proxy setup that provides some benefits over the built-in proxy.  It’s based around the assumption that tools take into account the pixel aspect ratios, which differs from the code branching that occurs with proxy, so you may not get correct results, but it’s also shows when tools are improperly handling pixel aspect ratios.

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The end is near...

I’m on my way home now.  Ben and I got to see a lot of really nice presentations, and we had some good discussions with researchers and suppliers.

Texmoca

Texmoca is a very unique demonstration of natural occurrences of Voroni type packing.  Small heating elements burn oil which spreads out, cools, and falls in beautiful convection currents.  Best coffee table of the show, but the heat it gives off makes it bad for drinks, good for fondue.

Ground Substance, from LabStudio

The Generative Fabrication exhibit was really nice.  Particularly the contributions by LabStudio.

Field3D

Sony Pictures Image works is working on an open source voxel storage format, Field3D.  You can check out the project or the programmer’s guide.

GPU Illumination

Went to the course titled Advanced Illumination Techniques for GPU Volume Raycasting, fortunately it wasn’t a rehash of the 2006 book, but had mostly new work, including some really nice ambient occlusion, scattering, and shadowing techniques.  Also showed some of Voreen.  Really nice bunch of guys.

Ok, I’m off to see a panel discussion with Jenny Sabin of LabStudio.

Gel Sight

Gel Sight is a retrographic surface imaging technique that was wonderfully elegant in it’s simplicity and effectiveness.  They also gave out free samples…

Cuda raycasting 13GB of cryomacrotome goodness (in stereo)

Nvidia had a stereographic interactive realtime rendering of the full 13GB Visible Human dataset being rendered in CUDA on 3 Quadroplexi.  Very impressive.  The glasses used were the new Nvidia active shutter glasses, and were very effective.

Resistive multitouch in many form factors

A new startup out of NYU showed a novel resistive multitouch device.  Very effective, low cost, and suitable to many applications.

UPDATE: Sorry about the broken link, Touchco was bought up by Amazon, so pretty much all of the cool applications they had in mind are replaced by the Kindle 3.

VLC madness courtesy 2 Fusion-io cards

Fusion-io showed their new “budget” nonvolatile storage adapter, the ioXtreme.   $900 gets you 80GB, with a read speed o 700MB/s.  The IO’s aren’t very high, much less their enterprise solutions, but that doesn’t matter if you are reading sequential data.  The booth was pretty crazy, too, one of the better live hardware demos I’ve seen in a while.  I’ll get some pictures tomorrow.  VLC never looked so impressive…

A SIGGraph Sousaphone

We’ll be showing off some of our plugins at the Eyeon booth on Wednesday, and we’ll be attending some panels, courses, and papers that really look exciting.  We’ll post some general observations of SIGGraph as well.

First thing I’ll mention, Autodesk has a rather modest booth made of cardboard and zip ties.  Really.

There are three different mechanisms that affect your pain when it is related to muscles- and that means most of the pain you will experience in your life.

1. Referred pain patterns- Pain may be referred from one muscle to another when the nerves carrying painful sensations in a muscle stimulates the same area in the spinal cord as an adjacent muscle.

The health care crisis in this country is a monster, like one of those mythical giant squids that could grab a sailing vessel, wrap its tentacles around it, and pull it to the bottom of the sea. President Obama’s message is that the U.S. economy is that ship. Without reform, health care costs will sink us in the near future. Yet it’s no surprise that Congress can’t find a solution or that the public is deeply worried about the cost of reform. Each arm of this monster thinks it has a right to hold on.  Doctors don’t want lower salaries. Pharmaceutical companies don’t want a flood of generic drugs from across the border.  Lawyers and insurance companies fight for their share of premiums and court settlements. Patients don’t want reduced care.

In a televised town meeting aimed at selling his program, Obama rightly pointed out that Americans pay more for health care than anyone else in the world but don’t necessarily get more. One example is the estimated $700 billion dollars in unnecessary tests that doctors routinely run each year. As soon as he made the point, however, a doctor in the audience raised a familiar specter. If your wife or daughter had cancer, he said, would you tell them they can’t get the best care possible, no matter what the cost? It’s a fearful question, and frankly, the ace in the hole that mainstream medicine has been pulling for decades.

So which is worse, cancer or the huge cost of health care?

If we can set our fears aside, certain facts need to be faced.  A recent European study on prostate cancer poked a hole in the need for early detection, a need that’s drummed into us constantly for every type of cancer and which costs billions every year in expensive tests.  The new study “indicated that saving one man’s life from the disease would require screening about 1,400 men. But among those 1,400, 48 others would undergo treatments like surgery or radiation procedures that would not improve their health because the cancer was not life-threatening to begin with or because it was too far along,” to quote The New York Times.  The same story covered an early-detection campaign known as “Check Your Neck” aimed at thyroid cancer. Yet this rare cancer kills only 1,400 people a year, and there’s no evidence that regular checkups for it save lives.  The same holds true for ovarian, lung, and skin cancer. Considering all the factors, including side effects and risks of treatment, one expert in early detection gloomily declared,  “There are five things that can happen as a result of screening tests, and four of them are bad.”

The one good outcome, finding a fatal cancer that responds well to treatment, is what Americans pay billions and billions of dollars in the hope of achieving.

So, will doctors back off on the standard PSA tests to detect prostate cancer, much less the protocols of radiation and surgery to treat it? Not unless a new system of health care emerges that reduces fear as well as costs. Thirty years ago I first entered alternative medicine with an emphasis on wellness, believing that it represented a new system. I still believe it does. Cancer, and the anxiety it induces, is a red herring.  The mean adjusted age of death from all types of cancer — meaning how long the average patient survives before succumbing to the disease — has barely changed since the 1930’s for both  men and women  With all the early detection and advanced treatments, a cancer patient today is by no means guaranteed to live longer than a cancer patient in our grandparents’ generation. That’s another fact we need to face.

The final fact is that American health care needs prevention more than anything else.  The majority of medical costs go to treating three conditions: obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. As this society grows fatter, older, and less likely to exercise regularly, all three will rise, and yet sensible prevention would go a long way to halt or reverse that trend. A major type of diabetes, Type 2, is directly linked to obesity, so even though type 1 is incurable, maintenance and prevention would effectively fight the scourge of diabetes, not to mention the myriad secondary problems it causes.

The thing about a giant squid is that you can’t peel it off one tentacle at a time. You need to find a way to pull off every arm at once. In our current crisis, doctors and Congress cannot do the job. Vested interests will be fighting over health care for years to come. The public is right to worry that Obama’s promised reforms cannot be paid for without extra taxes, and even then the overall costs may not go down. But it’s the public that is best equipped to kill the monster, not by focusing on the war on cancer, gene therapy, heart bypass surgery, and the next miracle drug — these all cost a king’s ransom and are controlled by powerful interest groups — but by finally waking up and taking charge of our own health. The cry for preventive medicine and inexpensive natural treatments isn’t new or glamorous, yet we need to heed it now more than ever.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

Download KrazyKey 1.0

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This is example of a schema that came through last week.

I was about to whip out my favorite file renaming software, but I wanted to retain the original names for communication with the customer.  The solution is pretty easy so I thought I’d share it.  There might be a tool that does this already but its good to know how to do this on any machine without any special tool installed.  We’re going to fix this problem with CMD.exe. muahahaha!

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In this case, I had an idea for a plugin and needed a way to explain the concept to Ben and Matt.  Basically, I wanted to find the largest “object” in an image, and this is the comp I came up with.

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You know, B&W footage.

I needed to find the parts of the data that were changing the most and compare them to the overall data and the maximum delta.

What I ended up with, once Ben pointed it out to me, was a simple example of calculus laid out in a couple tools.   The simplest case is just taking the frames I have and interpolating the same number of frames, so there’s no missing samples.  It’s silly, really.

But you can try it with other sampling, so there’s also an example of a Sobel filter, with a 1D kernel perpendicular to the normal 2D one.  Cute really.

If you checked out my interactive smoothing comp, you can see how I used a Sobel filter to make the forward facing laser pointer by looking at the differentiation of the R and G channels over time.  Same idea, just different way of expressing the temporal dimension.

I’m tossing in a Laplacian filter too, just for fun, it’s not useful for the calculus part, but it was easy to do, and shows how you can change the kernel to make different effects.  It’s possible to also evaluate 2D or 3D kernels this way, too.  The temporal offsets can be combined with spatial offsets so you could make a 3D blur filter, or a 3D sharpen.  Or a 3D Unsharp Mask, as I’ve also included.

I doubt that any sensible person would sanction withholding medical treatment for a sick child because of his parents’ religious beliefs, especially when it’s a case of life and death. So far as I know, courts have always sided for treatment. America is a secular society based on the rule of law. Priests who abuse children are not immune to civil law because they have taken vows (even though the Catholic Church for decades acted as if the clergy was immune, treating abuse cases as an “internal matter”). Christian Science is the most prominent denomination that believes in healing through faith, but they have come to terms with medicine as a practical matter in modern life.

Since the issue seems cut and dried, what is there to discuss? — the uncomfortable shadow zone between two world views. Secular society gives special privileges to churches, and politicians cannot succeed without at least paying lip service to a belief in God. Yet as we all know, everything that God once took care of has been usurped over time. Just as we don’t expect God to provide supernatural medical care, so we don’t expect the deity to prevent accidents, divert natural disasters, conquer enemies, or impose divine retribution on wrongdoers. Such expectations were the norm, however, in an age of faith.

For some believers, adapting to a purely secular worldview is abhorrent, and here it is easy to sympathize. Human beings crave meaning, and that often includes a higher meaning. To spend one’s life grinding away at work and accumulating possessions isn’t an adequate substitute. Even a loving family and success isn’t adequate. We are wired to look beyond the material world. It’s been said that all the things denied or unknown to science — beauty, truth, service, morals, compassion, empathy, justice, aesthetics, philosophy, and spirituality — are the very things that make life worth living.

Sadly for believers who take their religion too literally, being dragged into court is backlash from wanting more meaning in their lives. They have been blinded by promises made in the name of God. The priesthood in every society has prospered on such promises, and now that religion wanes every decade, the priesthood needs miracles and Providence and divine love simply to survive. I think the trap of two worldviews won’t end until we arrive at a form of secular spirituality, based on the evolution of consciousness. If someone can experience grace and divine love in their own lives, or if not those things then expanded consciousness, with or without a traditional God, the foundation for such experiences must be their own awareness. Accepting second-hand dogma, however uplifting, always leads to the kind of contradiction these unhappy medical cases exemplify.

Published in the Washington Post OnFaith

Screengrab from the realtime colonoscopy demo

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Unlike the previous example, this one does NOT bake out all the animation to one image, but instead uses an animated image to represent the data over time.  This makes it interactive and allows it to work with motion blur.

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I’m smoothing animation data (or adding noise or offsets or whatever) using nothing more than some Probes.

In this video, the green dots represent the original animation, the blue dots the smoothed animation, and the orange is the original with some noise added.

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This example video shows a yucky little roto problem…  Time lapse footage of a shape variant object. The colors flicker like mad, the shape is doesn’t interpolate well with few keyframes, there’s nothing for a point tracker to grab onto…  It’s just the sort of thing you need to use a spline on.

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Sampling along polyline to generate output image

When isolating a object with a definite edge, the ideal output is a horizontal line at the exact center of the image, dividing the interior and exterior textures. The next three images show the tool in action on an image of Morning Glory Pool at Yellowstone National Park. This image has a high-contrast yellow-to-green edge along the bottom of the polyline (foreground of the image) and a yellow-to-gray edge along the top.

The next image shows what is happening conceptually. Interpolated samples are obtained along lines that are perpendicular to the polyline. The number of samples between key points is consistent, so the sampling is finer when the key points are closer to one another.

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Fusion:

7.  Stop Squinting! Ctrl-mousewheel will make the fonts used in text entry boxes larger. -Chad
8.  Itty Bitty 3D! Change a viewer to 3D, then turn on the 3D SubV.  Now you can put any 3D tool in that SubV, and set the main view to 2D. -Chad

3ds Max:

1.  Mouse Chase! You can truck a view so that it centers on your mouse point with the “i” key.  Interactive viewport pan I think is what the kids call it.  Nice thing is that you can do it whenever, so even if you are in the middle of a modeling operation, you can change the view, allowing you to zoom in really close, but still cover a wide area.    -Chad

We keep a running list of these tips up there between “Tools” and “About”.

3D Vectorscope Fun!

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Answer:
The sadness you are experiencing now is coming from you, not your husband, so I’m not sure that a trial separation will help. I wouldn’t say you are being immature or expecting too much, but you may be looking in the wrong place thinking that being alone is going to automatically provide you with the clarity and guidance to find your way out of depression and lovelessness. It’s even possible that this relationship provides you with an element of support that might be essential to your recovery.

You may benefit greatly by seeing a therapist who can help you deal with the pain underlying your depression. Ideally you will want to see someone who can offer you a holistic regime that includes diet, exercise, meditation, cognitive therapy, and creative expression as primary modalities to help you use this period of your life to make a quantum leap in your spiritual growth.
Love,
Deepak

Emotional turbulence interferes with emotional well being and initiative. Fear, anger, guilt and anxiety are deviations from natural condition of balance and stand in the way of spiritual evolution. Restoring balance can be evolutionary in itself.

Patients suffering from life threatening illness often report that their diseases have taught them to love and value the other people in their lives more deeply than before they became ill. During recovery they learn to appreciate and understand areas of life that they took for granted before. Overcoming anxiety can bring the same disguised benefits that dealing with a physical illness can bring. Anger, fear, and worry are not diseases, but we can grow from them even as we process them to become the person we want to be.

By resorting to our inherent intelligence, harmony and creativity, we engage our ability to manifest a positive outcome, but if we are emotionally turbulent, then we are too agitated to access to that field of potentiality. Through meditation we experience our silent self beyond our thoughts and emotions. This is our internal reference point for equilibrium and from where we can create a desired outcome. To restore balance in our life, meditation must therefore be an essential ingredient. It is also important to support this with balanced activity in the basic areas of diet, exercise and sleep. Assuming these fundamental balancing components are in place, I would offer an additional exercise to specifically address what to do in the face of intense anxiety and fear.

Emotional distress is a form of pain. If we learn how to recognize pain as soon as possible, we can also learn how to effectively metabolize and eliminate pain. If we don’t deal with pain when it occurs, we can be certain it will resurface as compounded emotional toxicity later on. The remembrance of pain not processed appears as insomnia, hostility, or anger. If a past hurt has not been metabolized and eliminated there will be anticipation of having that experience again, generating fear and anxiety. As a further complication, if you don’t know how to deal with either of these feelings of anger and fear, you are likely to turn them inward at your self, believing “It’s all my fault.” That guilt depletes our physical, emotional and spiritual energy until any initiative or movement feels impossible. We feel exhausted and paralyzed leading to depression. Toxic turbulent emotions have one cause—not knowing how to deal with pain. Pain is normal to life, but suffering isn’t. When we do not know how to deal with pain, then we suffer.

Learning how to metabolize pain involves these steps:

• Identify and locate the emotion physically
• Witness the experience
• Take responsibility
• Express the emotion
• Release the emotion
• Share the outcome
• Celebrate the process

Set aside a few minutes when you won’t be disturbed. Sit comfortably and close your eyes. For a few minutes, just meditate in silence. Focus on your breathing or if you prefer you may use a mantra.
Now with eyes still closed recall some circumstance in the recent past that was upsetting to you. It may be a time when you felt you were mistreated, an argument with your partner, or perhaps a past injustice at work. Identify some instance where you felt emotionally upset.

For the next 30 seconds think in detail about that incident. Try to picture what actually happened as vividly as you can, as if you were reporting it for a newspaper. Here you are the observer watching this event. You are not the event, the argument, or the emotional upset; you are merely witnessing what is happening from the perspective of your silent self. You are carrying the effect of the meditation you just did, allowing you to maintain a vantage point that is not overshadowed by the quality of the emotions.

Now identify exactly what you are feeling. Put some word on the incident that describes what you are experiencing. Be as precise as you can. Do you feel unappreciated? Insulted? Treated unfairly? Give the feeling a name. Come up with a word that epitomizes the painful experience. Focus your attention on that word.

Gradually allow your attention to move away from the word. Let your attention wander into your body. Become aware of the physical sensations that arise in your body as a result of the emotion you’ve identified. These two elements—an idea in the mind and a physical sensation in the body, are what an emotion truly is, and they can’t really be separated.

This is why we call it a feeling. It is because we feel emotions in our bodies. Let your attention pass through your body as you’re recalling this experience. Locate the sensations the memory brings up. For many it’s a pressure in the chest or a sensation of tightness in the gut. Some feel it as pressure in their throat. Find where it is in your body that you’re feeling and holding the emotional experience.

Now express that feeling. Place your hand on the part of your body where you sense that the feeling is located. Express audibly, “It hurts here.” If you’re aware of more than one location for the pain, move your hand from place to place. At every location, pause for a moment and express what you’re feeling. Say, “It hurts here.” When you experience physical discomfort, it means that something is unbalanced in your experience—physically, mentally, or spiritually. You body knows it—every cell in your body knows it. Befriend these sensations and their wisdom, because the pain is actually leading you to wholeness.

Writing your feelings out on paper is a valuable way to express the emotion. This is especially effective when you can write out your painful experience in the first person, in the second person and finally from the perspective of a third person account.

Be aware that any painful feelings you experience are your feelings. These feelings are happening inside your body now as you remember the pain, even though nothing is actually taking place in the material world. You’re only remembering what happened, yet your body is reacting with muscle contractions, hormonal secretions, and other responses within you. Even when the painful incident was occurring in the material world, the effect was entirely within you. You have choice in how you respond and interpret this emotional turbulence. Recognizing this is taking responsibility for your feelings.

This doesn’t mean that you feel guilty. Instead, it means that you recognize your ability to respond in new and creative ways. Taking responsibility for your feelings, you can also gain the power to make the pain melt away. You’re no longer blaming anyone else for having caused the pin, so you no longer have to depend on anyone else to make it go away. Hold that understanding in your consciousness for the next few moments.

Now you’re ready to release the pain. Place your attention on the part of your body where you’re holding the pain, and with every exhalation of your breath have an intention of releasing that tension. Over the next 30 seconds, just feel the painful sensation leaving your body with every breath. Some people find that making an audible tone that resonates in that part of your body where the pain is localized helps to loosen and lift the contraction away. You can also experiment to discover what works best for you. For others singing or dancing does the trick. You may try deep breathing, using essential oils, or a taking a long warm bath. Finally, if you have written out your emotions on paper, it can be useful to ritually burn the paper and offer the ashes to the winds.

Sharing the outcome of releasing your pain is important because it activates the new pattern of behavior after the old painful pattern is released. Imagine that you could speak to the person who was involved in that original painful incident. What would you say to that person now? Bear in mind that he/she was not the real cause of your pain. The real cause was your response. In your transformed state you are now free. So you can share what happened without blame, manipulation or seeking approval.

Perhaps they intended to cause you pain, and you may have unwittingly collaborated in that intention. Maybe you would like to say you no longer intend to fall into such traps. Whatever you say is totally up to you. As long as you have an awareness of the steps we’ve taken so far in this exercise, whatever you say will be right for you.

Now you can celebrate the painful experience that had taken place as the valuable material that helped you move to a higher level of consciousness. What was previously a disconnected, destructive and disabled part of your psyche is now integrated and contributing its power toward your greater spiritual goal. Instead of responding to the situation with a pain reflex, perpetuating the problem, you’ve turned it into an opportunity for spiritual transformation. That is something to celebrate. Go out for a nice dinner or buy yourself some flowers or a present to honor the new you.

Use this exercise whenever you feel upset to free yourself from emotional turbulence and the underlying pain. When you do that, you’ll find opportunities will arise more often in every area of your life.