Words Worth Reading: Arianna Huffington’s Thrive

When Arianna Huffington was called upon to the give the commencement speech for the class of 2013 at Smith College, she put together a growing list of notes that ultimately turned into the book, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating A Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder.

In bookstores for the first time today, Thrive inspires modern women to recreate standards of success by focusing on total health, and not just career triumphs. Huffington encourages women to pursue activities that encourage good health because she believes those same activities will result in greater workplace achievements as well as happier living.

She emphasizes four aspects of our health we can improve upon:

Well-Being
“No longer is meditation seen as some sort of New Age escape from the world,” she writes,  “It’s increasingly seen for what it is: a practice that helps us be in the world in a way that is more productive, more engaged, healthier and less stressful.”

The list of public figures “outing” themselves as meditators is growing by the day, and includes Ford chairman Bill Ford, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Aetna CEO Mark Bertrolini, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Twitter cofounder Eva Williams. Oprah Winfrey’s 21 day Meditation Experience program with Deepak Chopra has had nearly two million participants in more than two hundred countries.

Huffington provides some extraordinary facts on the benefits of practices supporting total wellness:

• According to the American Cancer Society, people with a sitting job or more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than those with a standing job. A study led by University of Illinois shows that walking for forty minutes at a person’s natural pace for only three times a week helps combat the effects of aging and increases brain connectivity and mental performance.
• Women in very stressful careers have an almost 4o percent higher chance of getting type 2 diabetes.
• Women who have heart attacks are almost two times more likely than men to die around a year after the attack. Those in high stress careers are more likely to become alcoholics than women in low stress careers.

Wisdom
“There are some for whom the word ‘intuition’ conjures the idea of hippy-dippy New age thinking, or something to do with paranormal,” Huffington writes, “But, in fact, from the beginning of recorded history, we have had the recognition of a kind of wisdom that is not the product of logic and reason.”

She asserts that Western culture is a monument to reason, giving us the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution and Information age. “But it wasn’t reason alone that gave us those triumphs, nor is it reason alone that gets us through the day,” she argues.

Wonder
“Spiritual teachers, poets, and song writers alike have in so many ways, through so many centuries, told us that unconditional loving is both at the heart of the human mystery and the only bridge from our sacred inner world into the frenetic outer world,” writes Huffington. She quotes Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” The empirical data now exists to back up what the sacred texts taught us long ago.

Giving
“There is a lot governments need to do, but we cannot just delegate our compassion to government and sit on the sidelines bemoaning the fact that it’s not doing enough,” Huffington asserts, “From the depths of our compassion, we can free ourselves of all that limits our imagination about what is possible.”

She continues, “It’s the only way to counteract the excessive greed and narcissism that surround us.” The cultivation of compassion is essential to a society’s survival. And, scientific studies show compassion can be enhanced with meditation training.

No mystical fairies have formally come out in support of Huffington’s research, but it is time to start pursuing the lives we want, the happiness we deserve and the goodness that exists for all of us to manifest.

We need to thrive.

By Mica Kelmachter