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Archive for the ‘personal growth’ Category

The 30 minute discovery challenge

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on April 2, 2013 | 2 Comments »

OK, here’s something I did yesterday and it resulted in such a GREAT day I thought I’d share the idea and see if you, too, might like to try it.

Here’s the challenge -

Travel no more than 30 minutes from where you live to somewhere you have never been before, walk around, explore, take some photos, or make some notes, then come home and reflect on it.

You can travel any way you like – walking, cycling, driving a car, public transport. Doesn’t matter if you live in a city, a town or in the country. The key to this is to explore somewhere NEW.

Here’s my personal story from yesterday. I was born and brought up in Stirling, went off to study and work as a doctor in other places for about half my life, then came back to live in Stirling again. So I’ve lived in this town for about half my life. Yesterday we decided to take a trip and do something we’d never done before. April first turned out to be the first day of the season for the ferry boat to cross the Lake of Menteith to Inchmahome Island and that was somewhere we’d never been. The Lake of Menteith is a 3o minute car drive from my house so off we went. Here’s some of what we saw -

The Lake of Menteith -
Lake of Menteith

The ferry -

Lake of Menteith ferry

The priory -

Inchmahome Priory

Inchmahome Priory

Inchmahome Priory

Men fishing -

fishermen Lake of Menteith

We also witnessed the spectacle of swans taking off, flying and landing, and seeing (and hearing!) some nesting Canada Geese (having totally by chance watched Fly Away Home yesterday on TV – strange universe we live in….how do those things happen?)

How many times yesterday did I say “How come we’ve lived in Stirling half our lives and we’ve never been HERE before?” ? Lost count.

So, here’s the idea. Find somewhere within the half hour radius of where you live, somewhere you’ve never been before, and go explore. If you like, come back here and tell me about it – create a flickr set, write a post on your blog, tweet about it, or post it on your Facebook page.

Why?

Because Life is brand new every day, and if you deliberately set out to explore this new day, you’ll experience the thrill of that directly.

See what it does for you to see life as wanting to surprise you, to share novelty with you, to fully engage you in this present moment. See how it feels to share what you experience.

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Falling apart and creating anew

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on March 25, 2013 | 2 Comments »

diversity in the autumn garden

It’s common for us to experience loss, break down, destruction and disintegration.
In the middle of it, it can become hard to see the wood for the trees, and it can feel like this falling apart is not just inevitable but permanent.

As the leaves fall from the trees in the autumn, the bare branches of the winter woodland give the appearance of life being over for those trees.

Human beings know they don’t live forever, and although some have a belief in reincarnation, or lives of different forms from this life, nobody expects they are not going to experience loss, degeneration and death.

If the course of Life could be summarised as destruction and decline, then what kind of Life would that be? Is that really what we believe? That the direction of Life, the direction of the Universe even, is towards destruction and disintegration? Having begun with a Big Bang, are we heading for the final whimper (as T S Eliot wrote?)

But look again at the photo above. What do you see? Death and destruction? Loss and endings? Life and growth? Change and diversity?

The old mechanical, materialist view of the world teaches the idea that we try hard to resist destruction. “Entropy” is the term used to describe the inevitable run down of a system. But this view is more relevant to machines (which are “closed” systems), than it is to Nature (which is full of interconnected “open” systems).

Prigogine coined the term “dissipative structures” to better describe the reality of Nature and living organisms. He found that complex adaptive systems used dissipation to renew themselves, and in this renewal they grew, developed and adapted to changes in their environment. Indeed, Varela and others coined the term “autopoiesis” (self-making capacity) to describe the essential characteristic of a living system.

All living systems, ourselves included, are continuously breaking down existing structures and elements in order to create ourselves anew – in order to not just adapt, but to flourish. Not a single cell in our bodies lives as long as we live. In fact cells live between a few days and few months on average. It’s not the material, or the “stuff” of which we are made which makes us who we are. In that sense, we are much more like a river than we are like a machine.

I find this idea thrilling. Partly because I work every day with people who are experiencing loss and breakdown, people whose lives are falling apart. When a loved one dies, when your relationship or your job ends, when disease appears suddenly, or slowly in your life, it can all become quite overwhelming and it can be hard to see how any good can come of this experience. But here’s the key point, such continual change, such cycles of breaking down and destruction are not just inevitable but they are a necessary part of growth and renewal. These special times are times of renewal.

Spring time (not quite managing to appear yet here in the UK) is a good time to reflect on this. I’ve mentioned before how the Japanese celebrate transience through the cherry blossom festivals.

Renewal occurs through adaptation. As our lives change, if we take the time to become more aware, and we learn not to cling to current forms, we can see that in the midst of dissipation we discover the vast potential for creativity and growth. Just think of the universe story for a moment. Is it one of era after era of decline and destruction? No. It’s one of ever increasing diversity and complexity. It’s a story of cycles of joining together, breaking apart and forming new connections. It’s a story reflected in every single living being. Here’s the miraculous truth. The universe is not a closed machine heading day by day towards destruction. It’s a vast interconnected web of open systems producing the most elaborate, most complex and most amazing phenomena day after day after day.

snowdrops closeup

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No such THING as the self

Posted in from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on January 24, 2013 | 2 Comments »

Mount Fuji from the sky

Kathryn Shultz has written a fascinating and thought provoking piece in the New York Magazine about the self-help industry, challenging the unspoken philosophical flaw at the root of much of it. The full article is worth a read, but the main point she makes is where is this bit of the thing called the self which stays intact, immune to the addictions, fears and anxieties experienced by the rest of self and able to change that bit. Are there two selves in the self? The one with the problems and the one with both the solutions and the wherewithal to sort out the other one?
Not only has nobody ever found these two selves, nobody has even found THE Self!

I particularly loved her reference to Josh Rothman writing about clouds -

The journalist Josh Rothman once wrote a lovely description of what a cloud really is: not an entity, as we perceive it, but just a region of space that’s cooler than the regions around it, so that water vapor entering it condenses from the cold, then evaporates again as it drifts back out. A cloud is no more a thing, Rothman concluded, than “the pool of light a flashlight makes as you shine it around a dark room.” And the self, the Buddhists would say, is no more a thing than a region of air with thoughts passing through.

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Self in relationship

Posted in from the consulting room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, psychology on January 7, 2013 | 3 Comments »

The self is relatedness. The self doesn’t exist without relationship. The self appears in your deeds, and deeds always mean relationship.

James Hollis wrote that. It stopped me. You find there are books like that, don’t you? Books which you can’t read all the way through without stopping. I don’t mean the stopping for tea, or to answer the phone. I mean that stopping in the middle of the page, or anywhere in the page actually, because what you just read provokes such a mental reaction. This was one of the many places where I stopped when reading Creating a Life by James Hollis.
My first thought was, “how true”. I see connections everywhere, and I see the constancy of change. In fact, that is so important to me that I put the phrase, “becoming not being….” as the sub-head of this blog.
We are constantly becoming, ever interacting, exchanging, adapting and changing.
So, it’s true. The self doesn’t exist without relationship. I’ve thought many times that you could never know a person by observing them, through a one way glass,in an empty room. You have to see how a person interacts, with you, or with others, to have any sense of who they are.
Reminds me too, of “Ubuntu” – “I am because you are”
But then it seemed to me he’d gone too far when he added “deeds always mean relationship”.
Surely there must be deeds we commit alone?
But hold on, am I narrowing the definition of relationship too far here? Am I assuming a relationship is between two PEOPLE?
What about how I relate to Nature, to the built environment, to music and images and art? To this very book I am reading in fact!
It’s true what he says – the self really does appear in our actions, our reactions, and our interactions. It’s not a phenomenon which emerges in total isolation (even our memories and our imaginings are the creation of relationships aren’t they?)
So here’s something to consider today – what sense of self do I notice emerging from my deeds? my choices? my interactions?

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Separate and connected, the heart of opposites

Posted in from the consulting room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth on January 3, 2013 | 2 Comments »

For many years when I’ve taught about the different ways in which we develop an identity I’ve described a line with two poles.

At one end is “I”, the unique, separate, different “me”. We have a whole body system, the immune system, developed to be constantly on the alert for what is not “I”, whether it be a virus, another person’s genetic material, or a chemical substance from “outside”. The immune system is primed to quickly recognise any such foreign material and isolate or remove it.

At the other end is “we”, the connected self, the “me” which is part of “we”, whether that be in relationship with another single person, or with a group.

We all need to know that we are unique, that we are different and separate from others. What can come with that however, is a sense of disconnection, or loneliness. Just as importantly we need to know that we are connected, that we belong, that we “fit in” and that we love and are loved. What can come with that can be a loss of personal identity, a feeling of just being a number within the group.

I pointed out that this line with its two poles didn’t have a point somewhere along it where everything was balanced. It doesn’t work like that. We move continuously along the line, back and forth, changing our focus, our awareness and our sense of self, but never wholly living at only one of those poles.

Then last year, I read two books which mentioned concepts which fitted right in to this simple diagram. Thomas Berry’s The Great Work, where he beautifully describes the twin polar opposites of “wildness and discipline“.

When first the solar system gathered itself together with the sun as the center surrounded by the nine fragments of matter shaped into planets, the planets that we observe in the sky each night, these were all composed of the same matter; yet Mars turned into rock so firm that nothing fluid can exist there, and Jupiter remained a fiery mass of gases so fluid that nothing firm can exist there. Only the Earth became a living planet filled with those innumerable forms of geological structure and biological expression that we observe throughout the natural world……….The excess of discipline suppressed the wildness of Mars. The excess of wildness overcame the discipline of Jupiter. Their creativity was lost by an excess of one over the other.

The greater the wildness, the greater the emphasis on “I”, on separateness. The greater the discipline, the greater the emphasis on “we”, on the bonds, the connections.

And Howard Bloom’s The Global Mind, where he picks out five characteristics of complex adaptive systems and highlights the first two as “diversity generators” and “conformity enforcers”. Diversity generators increase the wildness and the sense of “I”, whilst the conformity enforcers increase the discipline and the sense of belonging.

I now have two lists with a line connecting them, and it still didn’t look right. It wasn’t a simple spectrum for example, and it wasn’t a line where there was some balanced point half way along where we “should” be. So, I turned the horizontal line into a vertical line running between the two lists, and then I bent the line into an “S” shape. Drawing a circle right around the whole image turned it into a yin yang symbol and I thought, “Yes, that’s it” – that’s the heart of the universe.

yin yang

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Lub dub

Posted in from the consulting room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth on January 2, 2013 | 1 Comment »

“lub dub, lub dub, lub dub”

That’s what I was taught to listen for when I was first shown how to use a stethoscope. This was the natural sound of the heart. It was a beautiful rhythm. I think you can’t help being impressed, or even moved by it. I remember the first time I was taught to use another, similar, but different device – the pinna. A pinna was a plastic cone which you placed on a pregnant mum’s tum to listen to the baby’s heart beat. So fast, but so amazing. Thrilling every time. But it was a kind of private thrill because nobody else could hear it. These days, we use technology to show the beating heart of the baby, or to play the fast lub dubs through speakers so everyone can hear it.

The heart beat is a constant alternation of opposite states – systole, where the heart muscle is contracted and the chambers of the heart are emptied, and asystole, where the muscle rests and the chambers fill with blood. There is a such an amazing truth in that observation.

At the heart of the universe there is creation. There is a story of the universe, from The Big Bang, to the emergence of hydrogen and helium, the cycles of growth, expansion and contraction of the great billions of stars, to the creation of Planet Earth, at first lifeless, then rapidly (in universe timescales!), creating simple, single celled life forms, complex, multicellular ones, plants, creatures of the sea and the land, right up to our continually developing, evolving human race with its most peculiar characteristic of consciousness. This story is the the story of constant becoming. It’s a story of ever increasing amounts of uniqueness. The universe loves diversity. And it loves to make connections.

This is the heart of the universe. Two opposite processes, tightly bound together – diversification and integration.

We need both the diversity generators and the conformity enforcers as Howard Bloom refers to them in The Global Brain.

Can you hear it?

This constant creative heart beat?

Lub dub, lub dub.

yin yang

Right here inside you, right here and right now, in your unique and singular life, the amazing, constant rhythm of becoming…..

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Heart of the universe

Posted in from the consulting room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, science, tagged , , on January 1, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Sometimes (quite often actually), I wake up with a word or phrase in my head. This morning it was “heart of the universe”. The particular word or phrase can set off all kinds of different thoughts and where this one quickly went was “It’s 2013. It’s 40 years since I dissected a human heart. Second year, Medical School, Edinburgh University. That year we learned Anatomy and Physiology. I was amazed at the structure of the heart. It’s four chambers, the valves, the specialised heart muscle cells which each had their own rhythm, the conduction pathways from the “AV node” which carried the co-ordinating electrical beat to produce the two, opposite states of the heart – systole and asystole.

It was two years later before they told us to put on white coats, buy a good quality stethoscope, and led us on ward rounds, to stand collectively around patients’ beds, and one by one, place our shiny new stethoscopes on their chests to listen for the “lub dub” of the “normal” heart, and listen carefully for the clicks and sounds which filled the silences and revealed the disorders of the valves.

Over the years as a GP, I prescribed the drugs to slow hearts down, to regulate disordered rhythms, and to improve the blood supply to get the oxygen to the cells starved by blocked arteries and causing angina. I also found people presenting with pain, flutters and skipped beats of the heart whose investigation results showed no obvious pathologies. What were we to do with them? And where was the explanation for their symptoms? If their symptoms weren’t signposts to pathology, then what were they?

Gradually, I became aware of how we use heart in our language, as people told me about “broken hearts”, “heart ache”, “longings of the heart”, “an emptiness in my heart”, “getting to the heart of the problem”, “filling my heart with joy”. Of course, from early years I became familiar with the shape of a heart as we would draw it to communicate love. We see that shape everywhere.

three leaves

cafe love

tree

wishes

Why the heart? Why not the liver, or the pancreas, or the spleen? Why not the kidneys?

I knew there were intimate connections between the brain and the heart, mainly channeled through the “autonomic nervous system”. Then only in the last few years did I learn we’ve discovered that there is a neural network around the heart and associated with that is the production of neuropeptides (the small proteins which act on the brain) within the heart and its neural network. So, the links are more intimate than I realised, and, most importantly, more two way than I realised – the brain acts on the heart, but the heart also acts on the brain. In fact, it seems we do some of our mental processing using these neurones around the heart. (That dismissive phrase which I never liked – “it’s all in your head” – turns out to be even more stupid than I always thought it was)

And as time passed, and I experienced encounters with more patients, I began to see that sometimes (not always but often enough to always consider), there were direct links between “heart issues”, “heart language” and “heart symptoms”, irrespective of the presence or absence of pathologies.

So, here’s something to consider as you think ahead into 2013. How about building your “heart intelligence”? That’s a concept that means somewhat different things to different people, but let’s just use it as it is, without detailed definition.

Try the Heartmath technique. Sit quietly, focus on your heart area, take three deep, slow heart breaths, then recreate for yourself a heart feeling (you can find the details here). In this state of “coherence”, ask your heart a question, and wait to see what answer appears. Write it down.

What does your heart tell you about 2013?

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Wonderful, not fearful

Posted in from the viewing room, life, music, personal growth, video on August 26, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Emeli Sandé sang a beautiful version of Read All About It, Part III at the closing of the London Olympics, and the line “we’re all wonderful, wonderful people so when did we all get so fearful?” has been running through my brain ever since.

(I’ve embedded the video link here, but you’ll see the Olympic Committee insist you go watch it on youtube….go on, click the link…it’s worth it!! The lyric in question comes in at the 2 minute mark….)

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Is the universe friendly?

Posted in from the reading room, life, perception, personal growth, psychology on August 10, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Einstein  said that an important question to ask ourselves is “Is the universe friendly?”

It’s an interesting question because the answer you give influences how you experience Life.

If you think it is unfriendly, you are likely to see danger all around and to expect hostility. You are likely to respond by trying to control and conquer in order to be safe. If you think it is neither friendly, nor unfriendly, then you probably experience Life as random, brief and pointless. However, if you think it is friendly, you are more disposed to engage with an open-hearted curiosity, seeking to understand more and more.

This question which he posed is often considered in relation to thinking about the emergence of consciousness in the constantly evolving universe.

An article in this month’s Psychology Today refers to the question in this context. It’s worth a read, and concludes

Any inventory of the cosmos that omits us is like a survey of the body that overlooks the brain. In evolving the human mind, the universe has fashioned an instrument capable of understanding itself and empathizing with others. We are that instrument, and since we are part of the cosmos, we err if we judge it to lack kindness, love, and compassion. If I believe the universe is heartless, it’s because I myself do not love

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How do we get to know someone?

Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth on June 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Every day at work I’m focused on trying to understand another person. Every patient who comes to our hospital is seeking, amongst other things, an explanation.

If someone has been given a diagnosis of, say, Multiple Sclerosis, amongst the many questions they are likely to have, are “What does this mean?”, “What does it mean to me, and to my life?”, “How has it come about?”, “Why me?”, “What is this illness and what things are going to make it better, or worse?”

We all have many other questions too, but these questions are amongst the ones to do with explanation.

It’s perhaps even worse when a clear diagnostic label hasn’t been given. When someone suffers chronic pain, chronic fatigue or chronic low mood but “all the tests are normal”. What then? What’s going on?

Explanation involves getting to know someone. If we limit the explanation to a tissue level e.g. “arthritis”, or to an organ level e.g. “angina”, then we stop before we explain this illness in this particular person’s life. And if we want to help the person, not just the “arthritis” or the “angina”, then we’re going to have to take into account the uniqueness of this person’s experience of this particular illness.

A major way we can do that is through story.

It’s through the telling of a story that we gain our insights, and our explanations. For me, two of the questions I want to answer with every patient are “what kind of world does this person live in?” and “what are their coping strategies?”

The kind of world we live in is fashioned by our beliefs, our values and our circumstances (our contexts or environments, physical, relational, cultural), and the way we try to adapt to the changes in our lives are manifest in our default and learned strategies.

In an article entitled, “What do we know when we know a Person?”, Dan McAdams points out that the explainer, or the observer is also important  -

One must be able to describe the phenomenon before one can explain it. Astute social scientists know, however, that what one chooses to describe and how one describes it are infiuenced by the kinds of explanations one is presuming one will make. Thus, describing persons is never objective, is driven by theory which shapes both the observations that are made and the categories that are used to describe the observations, and therefore is, like explanation itself, essentially an interpretation.

In other words, my world view and my coping strategies will influence what I see, what I hear and what sense I make of the patients who consult me. I’ll return to that issue in another post, but Dan McAdams article starts with an interesting conceptual framework for what we know about another person.

Individual differences in personality may be described at three different levels. Level I consists of those broad, decontextualized, and relatively nonconditional constructs called “traits,”…….At Level II (called “personal concerns”), personality descriptions invoke personal strivings, life tasks, defense mechanisms, coping strategies, domain-specific skills and values, and a wide assortment of other motivational, developmental, or strategic constructs that are contextualized in time, place, or role……..Level III presents frameworks and constructs that may be uniquely relevant to adulthood only, and perhaps only within modern societies that put a premium on the individuation of the self…..Thus, in contemporary Western societies, a full description of personality commonly requires a consideration of the extent to which a human life ex- presses unity and purpose, which are the hallmarks of identity. Identity in adulthood is an inner story of the self that integrates the reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future to provide a life with unity, purpose, and meaning.

You can read the full article by Dan McAdams here.

So, how do we get to know someone? Partly it involves knowing ourselves, being aware of our own way of seeing and experiencing the world, knowing what we pay attention to, what we are fascinated by, disinterested in, what we believe and what we value.

And, partly, it involves a focus on the telling of a story – one which “integrates the reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future to provide a life with unity, purpose, and meaning”.

That’s a good start, I reckon.

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