The Cope-A-Thon is a relaxing session you have with yourself to determine what has thrown you off kilter, and what, if anything, can be done to put yourself back the way you were.

       It should be run as often as necessary to deal with physical, mental, psychological, financial, and family problems and crises. Anything that produces major league stress or pain or worry or deep-seated anger, hostility, hate, fear, or other negative emotion is grist for the process.

       Keeping in balance is essential for your wellbeing. You must not vacillate getting to the root cause of things disturbing your equilibrium. Otherwise, the price you pay will be steep, in terms of added stress and internal carnage to body and mind.

       The Cope-A-Thon inhibits neglect of things that affect "stasis". Regular sessions are the key to effective functioning, good health, and long life.

       During such sessions, problems are identified and analyzed. Proper responses are worked out, after which such solutions are examined for flaws.

        Implementation results in either reaching your objective or furnishes you with feedback to which adjustments can be made or alternative options can be tried. In the face of disappointing results, if you keep doing different things that have been reasoned out before, you will almost always succeed.        

       Call it balance, equilibrium, or "stasis", that is the objective of every Cope-A-Thon session. You want to regain it and maintain it because it is your optimum state. As even a keel as possible as often as possible should be your objective.

       Life is a series of choices and, frequently, unexpected changes, that tend to throw you off center. Restoring your balance should therefore be given top priority. It is difficult to be healthy and happy if unaddressed problems and situations are tearing at your insides.

       The Cope-A-Thon is a subjective thing. Everyone runs it differently. Nevertheless, there are some aspects applicable across the board. Here are some suggestions.

       Your sessions will generally last ten or fifteen minutes. Usually, the two best times to run them are late at night before falling asleep in order to get the simmering process started, and/or early in the morning upon awakening, because then the ideas seem to present themselves in rapid fire mode.

        Do not expect to solve every problem at the same session in which it is identified. It is frequently necessary to examine the culprit from all angles, then let it simmer on your back burner until a solution suggests itself. Frequently, the problem is identified in the first session and the solution surfaces at a subsequent session.

       Unless it is an extreme situation, do not agonize if the first response you have chosen to put into action does not work. There is really no such thing as failure. There are only disappointing results that constitute feedback, to which adjustments can frequently be made to get you back on course.

        Running the Cope-A-Thon is a five-step procedure. The Manual elaborates on each step, with specific examples and descriptions of the identification, analysis, selection, validation, and implementation parts.

       Unfortunately, the idea that one must make time for preventive maintenance on himself or herself has not been embraced by most people, who seem to prefer waiting until problems escalate, inside or out, before seeking help.

        That is why most people end up in bad health, physically and mentally, and with a dismal record of achievement, just tolerating their days, never knowing how much quality can be injected into their lives just by facing up to problems in Cope-A-Thon style.

        You should always start with the physical. Dwell on external things that are noticeable or feelable. If you have intense pain somewhere you certainly should realize that it must be dealt with. If you look in the mirror and see a giant red rash on your face, you must get to the cause and cure of it pronto.

       A few years ago, I looked in the mirror one morning and saw a giant red rash on one side of my face that also itched like mad.

       The dermatologist whom I visited, on the teaching staff of the largest hospital in town, hemmed and hawed and finally concluded that it was contact dermatitis. He was unable to say, however, just what I had been in contact with. He could only mumble that it could have been any one of a hundred things.

       He gave me an ointment he cautioned had to be used sparingly since it was not really intended for the face. So why was he giving it to me? Was it possible he had some left over from the last time he removed varnish from his floor?

       Well, it worked for a few days and then the rash reappeared. A return visit was scheduled and when he cast his eyes on my red countenance, he told me it was not contact dermatitis but something called rosacea. He couldn't say what caused it and they did not know how to cure it. He could only prescribe another ointment to contain it.

       At which point I scratched both my face and him, then turned to self-diagnosis. I decided that the condition was stress-related and I took steps to temporarily back off from the situation that was producing the strain. I also worked out a regimen for treating the skin areas and the situation corrected itself real fast.

       Notice that I said temporarily. It was necessary, I felt, to first get rid of the ungainly symptoms before I launched a full assault on the real culprit.

       The beauty about the Cope-A-Thon is that it helps you to separate the wheat from the chaff and then to address and find solutions for both. By that, I mean one visible problem easily identified will frequently mask a much more serious problem.

       Here, the dermatological problem took on a life of its own but really stemmed from a much deeper problem, which could not be neglected for too long lest it manifest itself in a different but more severe physical form.

       So I cannot repeat often enough that your sessions should always go deeper than just surface manifestations.

       I am reminded of a large blue spruce in my backyard that one summer developed a mass of green leaves that seemed almost a mutant. As high as thirty feet up the tree. I suspected that such vegetation was not indigenous to the species.

       A green-thumb friend of mine looked at it and told me I had to search for the root. He found it twenty feet away from the base of the tree, sawed it off, and in a few days, the foliage that seemed to sprout from nowhere went the way of all deciduous leaves.

       Which taught me a very valuable lesson. Few things materialize miraculously. There is almost always a root cause and there is sometimes a more major problem wrapped within a lesser one. Get to the bottom of it and get rid of it.

       The quickest and easiest way to do that is to put the Core Lore System into play. The entire package (five manuals, almost 300 pages) has been priced so that anyone can purchase it without strain, and there is also a three-payment option. If you take action today, your life can start changing for the better tomorrow.