EVERY MORNING — EVERY EVENING

Every morning when I wake up I find myself completely back to the foundational level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs— I’m hunger. I need food. I need water. To thrive in this new day, I have to use the coping skills I’ve learned during my life to meet two of my most basic needs— food and water. Yes, I can go without these basics— for a day but just a day or two without water and then, whatever I’m seeking to actualize at the higher levels will come to an abrupt stop. Regarding food, well I could go several days, even a week, and if forced, perhaps a few weeks. But that’s about it. And after a few days, a fast without any food at all will begin having strong effects on my thinking and emoting— diminishing their quality.

And then every evening, I also return to the most foundational level of the levels of needs— I need sleep. I begin yawning and I have to find a safe place where I can go unconscious for 6 to 8 hours.

Funny, isn’t it? No matter how far along the personal development pathway you have come, you like me and like all of us, keep coming back to the fundamentals. Every day between waking and sleeping, we are called back to the foundational needs that drive us, that create our energy, our vitality, and our health.

So what does this mean? It means that to actualize your highest and best, you have to take care of the lowest and first. Ignore these and you do so to your own detriment. And you will pay for it. The price? Energy, health, short-life, vitality! The price? Ill-health, not feeling good, loss of motivation, fatigue, lack of a sense of pleasure, irritation, annoyance, stress, illness. So Self- Actualization also involves actualizing everyday, and an ongoing process, your lower biological needs.

When I began focusing on Self-Actualization Psychology as part of Meta-Coaching and Neuro- Semantics, my whole focus was on the highest and the best. I wanted to know how to unleash my potentials and to facilitate the same in you. So at first my focus was exclusively around the highest end of the hierarchy. Only later when Tim Goodenough and I created the Self- Actualization Assessment Scale did I fully turn my attention to the bottom of the hierarchy. That’s when I realized that we have to get the foundation right for people to fully actualize their highest and best.

What the S-A Scale did for me was direct my attention to the problem that many of the people I was meeting were having in actualizing their potentials. They had holes and weak spots in how they were coping, or not coping, with their eating, exercising, sleeping, etc. They were living in “the red zone” (not coping well with the lower needs) of the Scale. So their life-energies were

being undermined and their energy depleted on the lower needs making them less alive andwith less vitality for the higher needs.

So now you know why our Self-Actualization Workshops began with Unleashing Potentials (“The Ultimate Self-Actualization Workshop”) and then moved backward to Unleashing Vitality which uses the S-A Assessment Scale and deals with learning how to effectively cope with all of your needs and drives.

Now, if you’re interested in unleashing your own basic vitality —and actualizing your potentials for lots and lots of energy and vitality— there are 2 workshops for you this year.

1) South Africa — Pretoria People South Africa September 3-5 Organizer: Cheryl Lucas [email protected] Cell: 083 267 1412 Tel: 012 362-6542 Skype: Meta Coach www.psacoaching.co.za www.meta-coaching.org

2) Italy — Bolgna November 19– 21 Bologna (http://foxyurl.com/4qg) 25 miles away), Organizers: Nicola Riva and Lucia Giovannini mobile: +39 348 5600507 [email protected]