As I looked at the featured articles for this week's newsletter, in preparation for writing my introduction, I saw that the titles of the two articles at the top both started with the words "How To Recognize...", I realized  that this is a key part of our personal empowerment: learning to recognize, or be aware of, what is around us and what they really are. Sometimes a thing or person has a certain appearance, but the inside is completely different from the outside.

Some foods are like that. A ripe coconut has a coarse brown almost impenetrable shell, yet the inside is sweet. A pineapple is prickly yet the insides of a ripe pineapple can be divinely soft and sweet. Often in life, we can be fooled by the externals. Some "store-bought" tomatoes for example, taste nothing like a garden-ripened tomato. An organic carrot tastes completely different than a conventionally-grown carrot. The organic is much sweeter.

In the same way, some people who look "picture-perfect' on the outside, may be...