By Patricia Leavy, PhD. author of Low-Fat Love

Valentine’s Day can feel more like D-Day for single women. This Hallmark-holiday pushes coupledom in our faces and turns our world into a pink and red advertisement for romance. When you’re single sometimes all of the cupid’s arrows feel more like daggers.

To get through it, those who are presently unattached may throw themselves a pity party. Parties have themes, even pity parties. One version of this is to crawl into bed until the day passes. A more dangerous pitfall is to start romanticizing a relationship past—mentally digging up the buried remains of a relationship that is over, and probably for a good reason. This Valentine’s Day avoid the pitfalls of low-fat love, don’t dream of settling for less and pretending it’s more, and don’t try to cope b...

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Professional golfers leave nothing to chance in preliminary rounds as they try to make the cut for the final rounds, where the big rewards are waiting for them.

A perfect golf swing combines grip, relaxed balance, split-second timing and minute variations of angles – a multiple challenge. But golf provides other challenges: bunkers; water traps; fairway doglegs with hidden shrubbery and wind gusts that change the force and direction of our shots.

Professionals and hackers alike take responsibility for our ball’s whereabouts, though hackers never know how good a shot is until after we’ve played it. Still, that’s part of golf’s attraction.

Golf mirrors many aspects of faith, though God wants no-one to miss the cut – even offering to qualify us through Jesus’ death and resurrection. For just like golf, where we must personally accept our position, our relationship with him must be personal rather than second-hand.

Once we start expl...

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Hair loss has side-effects: reduced insulation and no last-instant warnings of unseen hard objects approaching bare scalps; but going bald has been a load off my mind.

Accused of being vain, a friend of mine with hair transplants countered: “Do you have false teeth?” His accuser was still nodding, but completely disarmed to hear: “Aren’t you as vain if you wear them when you’re not eating?”

We actually use our teeth more for framing our words than for eating, as I’ve found since breaking a tooth and wearing a single-denture plate – even if it makes me look “tooth-in!”

Improving our appearance is now a multibillion-dollar, multi-national industry; from toothpaste, shavers and perfumes to cosmetic surgery.

Back in 1960, cosmetic-surgeon Maxwell Maltz became a self-help pioneer with his term Psycho-Cybernetics, claiming that clearer goals and greater success come from an improved self-image. People rushed to him, eager to...

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By Arthur Janov, PhD

A kid acts up and acts out and we ask, “who does he take after, his mom or dad?” Maybe his grandmother? Or maybe none of them or all of them. I will need to explain. The point I am going to make is that we are pretty much driven not so much by our genes but by our epigenes; that is, what happens to our genes as we mature. Because experience, especially while we live in the womb, channels those genes into diverse circuits, turns them on or off, and generally, controls their behavior.

Is it nature or nurture? It is what happens to nature through our nurture, and that is not a play on words. What happens to us early on doesn’t change our genes but changes how and when and if they are expressed. And there are chemical processes that help explain all this, as well. I won’t make this complicated but it helps us understand ourselves and others if we take a little effort to suss out how this all works.

So it is not surprising how signals from the envi...

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“Everybody complains about the weather,” Mark Twain noted, “but nobody does anything about it!”

Yet while we can’t change the weather; anticipating what’s coming is always helpful.

My wife’s grandfather read his barometer every day; but on our hobby farm we had two barometers. One predicted weather changes. The other, a wooden “farmer’s barometer,” had a needle we could set to: “too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, or too windy;” with two small pegs blocking its access to “just right!”

Our son politely declined our barometer offer for his birthday by showing us his phone app to the weather bureau - and we foolishly thought that phones were for talking with…

Jesus once used the weather’s indefinability to illustrate how his spirit works: “You hear the wind, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going.”

His spirit invites us to explore new inner strength from his unchanging wisdom and character, so...

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By Rabbi Rami

New Year’s Day is over. Have you broken your Resolutions yet?

If you’re like me, the answer to that question is “yes,” so this is a good time to think about forgiveness.

Forgiveness isn’t a skill you can master and employ whenever you wish, or a tool you can use the way you might use an umbrella or a fork. Rather:

Forgiveness is a natural response to reality that arises from a deep understanding of the nature of life and how best to live it.
Forgiveness isn’t a way to escape from your past or to forget it; it’s a way of not dragging your past into your present.
Forgiveness isn’t a way to avoid suffering; it’s a way to avoid clinging to suffering.

Life is a blend of joy and sorrow, happiness and horror. Forgiveness won’t change that. But it can free you from dragging sorrow into your moments of joy, and prevent you from allowing moments of horror to corrode your moments of happiness.

There are two keys to living life with ...

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Small, leafy historical towns like Longford punctuate Northern Tasmania’s fertile coastal farming belt, evoking much of the charm of 19th century English rural villages.

Begun by free-settlers with the aid of convict-labour in 1813, Longford reflects how England’s landed gentry transferred their lifestyle to a new hemisphere; with one pioneer farm now becoming a National Rose Garden, displaying over four thousand blooms.

Longford’s historical fabric has even woven in features like high-speed engine noise!

From 1953 to 1968, its local roads annually became a seven-kilometre circuit, hosting major world motor racing events like the 1959 Australian Grand Prix.

Longford’s elegant stone Christ Church also springs its surprises: its First Settlers’ Cemetery has graves dating back almost two hundred years; its clock and bell almost as old; and an arboretum that once grew every tree mentioned in the Bible.

As gifts from K...

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“Happy New Year!”

Our local pessimist’s greeting cards are as cheerful as his get-well cards: “I hope you’re only feeling half as bad as you probably will be very soon!”

Pessimists get their kicks from suspecting or finding faults when they want perfection.

But let’s greet 2012 with positive perfectionism; without pretending problems won’t happen; by seeing perfection as continual progress rather than a fantasy to protect.

High hopes greeted 2011, for no-one saw its secret stash of natural disasters, political, social or financial crises; quite apart from any personal, less-public pain.

Positive perfectionism allows for problems. It also allows God to step in when problems or threats arrive, so the problems don’t have the final say.

Positive perfectionism adds confidence and generosity to our plans, lifting our sights past our own efforts or benefits and into what God does for a living. For he loves infusing our ...

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“Use a barometer to calculate a building’s height.”

This physics exam question expected students to compare roof-top and ground-level air-pressure readings.

One student’s answer: “I’d drop the barometer from the top, time its fall, and calculate from the formula for gravitational speed;” was rejected. He challenged his lecturer, who said:“You used the wrong formula.”

“But there are at least four other ways,” the student protested.

“I could measure the length of the building’s and barometer’s shadow, then use Pythagoras’ Theorem for right-angle triangles.

“I could mark off the building in barometer-lengths as I climbed it with a ladder.

“I could lower the barometer on a string and measure the string’s length.

“I could tell the janitor: ‘If you tell me how high this building is, I’ll give you this barometer!’”

The lecturer relented.

New Year is a marking point; an opportunity to try new met...

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Being suddenly engulfed in darkness can be scary, until logic offers explanations like a switch being thrown or a short-circuit somewhere.

But imagine your terror if your night-time stillness was suddenly swamped in light, and Edison’s light bulbs were still centuries away!

That’s how it was for a bunch of shepherds when a cluster of angels burst in on them. They were quietly minding their own business outside Bethlehem and; back then; seeing an angel was your ticket out of here. For God was so distant and feared that it was forbidden to even say his name!

The shepherds were dead-scared.

They had no social or religious clout, but God’s message for them was all positive: “Don’t be afraid, for I’ve got great news of joy, peace and goodwill for everybody! Your Saviour has been born in Bethlehem, and you’ll find him in a manger! ”

Whenever we gaze out over a restless ocean or a ...

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