The Cruise is Great, the lectures fantastic and I promise a synopsis soon, but today I need to write about something different: De-Stressing. And I’m glad to be writing this Memorial Day Saturday, a weekend that’s typically associated with a lot of excessive drinking and parties, because….. it’s Memorial Day, and that’s what we do, right? Party on a holiday because we need to and deserve to and it’ll make us feel better.  Right?  Wrong!  I think we’ve all been hypnotized into believing that we need to remedy our stressful days, weeks, and lives with alcohol, bad food, and staying up late. This belief is very apparent on a ship more so than in real life, because a ship is a FishBowl. You see everything.

Over the past few days I’ve heard moans and groans about weight gain, hangovers, and exhaustion – on THE CRUISE SHIP. The food’s free, the alcohol’s not but it’s unbelievably plentiful and available, and the entertainment and fun literally don’t stop.
But that doesn’t mean we should do it to excess. If our forms of “de-stressing” actually makes us feel stressed, guilty, anxious, depressed, and tired – later – that’s not real de-stressing. If our forms of “de-stressing” cause us to gain weight, harden our arteries, have erectile dysfunction, belly bloat, and feel like a bomb went off in our head, we’ve done NOTHING to de-stress in the Real Sense. We’ve just made ourselves more tired, more adrenally depleted, more hormonally off balance, and more set up for INFLAMMATION AND EVERY DISEASE OUT THERE. We age faster; who feels happy about that?

I know everyone’s plans are already set for this weekend, but entertain this thought for me: maybe all the over eating and excessive drinking is a HALLUCINATION OF PLEASURE. Not the real thing.

Real Pleasure, real De-Stressing – makes us feel great afterwards: no regrets. Zero, zip, zilch. Relief, energy, calmness, strength for upcoming challenges, that’s de-stressing.

Eating Real Whole Foods means examining our habits and thought patterns; we need to apply that same principle to our Entire Life. What’s really good – long term – for our body and soul? Long term. Long term. Remember these words this weekend and meditate on them: The Hallucination of Pleasure. Is that what we want?