The Level Beyond Mastery

Back in about 1972 I was working at Whitney Young Jr. Memorial Hospital, a mental institution, as a recreational therapist. You know one of the strange things? Some of the people just seemed…fine. No issues. I wondered why they were there.

There was one little Asian woman who was an exemplar of this. She was sweet, smart, perky, most of the time seemed just fine. I was in a conversation with her one day and somehow it drifted to abortions. She said she’d had several. I asked about her birth control choices.

“The pill,” she said. “But they don’t work.”

Surprised, I asked: “they don’t?”

“No. I had two abortions while I was on birth control pills.”

Still puzzled and a little curious, I asked a few more questions, which she answered fine. Yes, a doctor had prescribed them, yes, she had followed the directions. Well, I thought, nothing’s perfect. But I asked one last question:

“You’re sure you took one every day?”

She laughed. “No, I kept forgetting to do that, so I just took them all at the beginning of the month.”

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Part of the reason the Five Minute Miracle works is its distribution during the day. It is NOT the same to do five minutes at the end of the day. Doing it every 1–3 hours would be better than breathing for FIFTEEN minutes at the end of the day, for a bunch of reasons but the one to focus on here is IT BREAKS YOUR PATTERNS.