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Archive for November, 2013

poetry

Posted in books, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, photography, psychology on November 20, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Robert Burns statue

David Suzuki writes (in “The Sacred Balance”)

Definition identifies, specifies and limits a thing, describes what it is and what it is not; it is the tool of our great classifying brain. Poetry, in contrast, is the tool of synthesis, of narrative. It struggles with boundaries in an effort to mean more, include more, to find the universal in the particular. It is the dance of words, creating more-than-meaning, reattaching the name, the thing, to everything around it.

Iain McGilchrist, in his astonishing, “The Master and His Emissary“, describes the brain’s left hemisphere approach to the world as analytical, naming, classifying, analysing. And he cites poetry as one of the great functions of the right hemisphere’s way of engaging with the world. The right hemisphere “struggles with boundaries”, sees the connections, synthesises, holistically discovers “the universal in the particular”.

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Relationships

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, photography, science, Uncategorized on November 19, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Untitled

Relationships – here’s the key to understanding living organisms.

We don’t understand a human being by measuring his or her parts and adding up the results. We understand a human being by studying how the parts relate, and how the person relates to the rest of Nature.

Fritjof Capra puts it this way –

Systems thinking emerged from a series of interdisciplinary dialogues among biologists, psychologists, and ecologists, in the 1920s and ’30s. In all these fields, scientists realized that a living system – organism, ecosystem, or social system – is an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. The “systemic” properties are properties of the whole, which none of its parts have. So, systems thinking involves a shift of perspective from the parts to the whole. The early systems thinkers coined the phrase, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” What exactly does this mean? In what sense is the whole more than the sum of its parts? The answer is: relationships. All the essential properties of a living system depend on the relationships among the system’s components. Systems thinking means thinking in terms of relationships. Understanding life requires a shift of focus from objects to relationships.

I find this completely thrilling and it explains so clearly why we can’t use reductionism to fully comprehend living beings.

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The automaton

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, philosophy on November 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Our global financial/economic system consists of a network of computers programmed to trade to make money. The system has one goal – to make money. For what? For whom?

Manuel Castells writes in his analysis (in The Information Age) –

The outcome of the process of financial globalisation may be that we have created an Automaton at the core of our economies that is decisively conditioning our lives. Humankind’s nightmare of seeing our machines taking control of our world seems on the edge of becoming reality – not in the form of robots that eliminate jobs or government computers that police our lives, but as an electronically based system of financial transactions.

And, as Marc Havély writes in Prospective 2015 – 20125 (my translation)

the modern economy has only one goal – growth – to the detriment of human beings who are enslaved by work and consumption, and to the detriment of the biosphere which is plundered, polluted and destroyed bit by bit.

Isn’t it time we stopped and asked ourselves what our economic and political systems are for? What’s their function?

Is it the support of human happiness, wellbeing and thriving; the deepening of the human experience of meaning and purpose; the flourishing of Nature and all of Life; the furthering of the evolutionary development of the Universe?

Can we agree greater goals than accumulation of objects, consumption of resources, and a numbing of the experience of living?

Havély asks that we ask of our work or our purchases –

  • Is this excellent for my health, physical, moral and mental?
  • Is this excellent for Nature, for Life and for the Earth?
  • Does this add good value and richness to human beings as a whole?

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on the edge

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, photography, science on November 17, 2013| Leave a Comment »

icing

 

How does ice form? Because the water gets cold? Yes, ice doesn’t form until the water molecules settle down their activity enough to form a crystal structure. But it needs something else…….a seed. For ice to form, there has to be a starting point, such as an impurity or a roughness on the surface of the container.

When it starts to happen, it is beautiful to watch. Here, in the garden of the hospital, the ice is just beginning to form at the edge of this lovely bowl. Can you see it?

 

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the yin and the yang of autumn….uniqueness and change

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on November 16, 2013| Leave a Comment »

DSCN0646

 

Two important characteristics of nature are uniqueness and change.

Every leaf is unique. The lifetime of every creature, every person on this planet is unique.

And that uniqueness cannot be captured, cannot be measured, cannot be fully described at any one particular point in a lifetime.

No story is complete.

Nothing is fully understood, and, as change never ceases, there is always more to unfold, always more to develop.

I love the wonder and awe which spring up from my heart in the face of uniqueness and change.

I love the humility that demands of me.

To know that I will never fully know means I always have more to discover. To know that nothing is ever “finished” means that every day is a new creation.

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Inequality

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life on November 15, 2013| 1 Comment »

inequality

What’s wrong with this picture?

Is this degree of inequality a problem? Is it sustainable? Should we try to address it?

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What is it to be a man?

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life on November 14, 2013| 1 Comment »

Blind Light1

Fritjof Capra, in his “the hidden connections” refers to anthropologist, David Gilmore, who studied images of men, or male “ideologies” in many cultures around the world. He found interesting, consistent themes.

Gilmore found that in culture after culture, ‘real’ men have traditionally been those who produce more than they consume. The author emphasises the ancient association of manhood with material production meant production on behalf of the community. ‘Again and again we find that “real” men are those who give more than they take; they serve others. Real men are generous, even to a fault.

I think that is striking – producing more than you consume for the benefit of the community sounds an excellent ‘manhood’ quality to aspire to. He goes on to say that over time this image has changed, so that now it is common to see the ‘big man’ as the one with the greatest personal wealth and most power over others. Sadly, I guess that’s the image we are more familiar with these days.

So here’s what I’m wondering…….how did that change? And why? How did the image of manhood change from one who serves and provides to one who hogs the most for himself and exerts power over others?

Those questions, naturally, lead me to wonder what we can do (if anything) to reclaim the ancient images of ‘real’ men, and to encourage boys to become such ‘real’ men…….

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Mindbody

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, health, life, photography on November 13, 2013| Leave a Comment »

twostone1

twostone2

I was gifted this stone recently.
I love it’s yin yang quality of inextricably bound black and white. You can’t have one side without the other. You can’t separate one side from the other.
This is what the “mind body” idea is to me. I don’t tend to use the term “mind body” because I don’t accept it’s duality. I don’t accept the implication that mind and body are separate/separable entities.
We live with our whole being. We become ill in our whole being.
Health involves the coherence of the whole organism, not just a part of it. Aren’t mind and body just two different perspectives on a person? Each with its own qualities, but each inseparable from the other.

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Patient centred-ness in Integrative Care

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, photography, Uncategorized on November 12, 2013| 3 Comments »

Facing the Med

There’s a lot of talk around just now about “patient centred care”. It’s one of those concepts that nobody argues against. In fact, pretty much everyone claims to be doing it. If that’s true, then it must mean different things to different people. Or it must have so many aspects, that different people resonate with the concept because they understand and value one of those aspects.

There’s a vast and growing literature on “patient centred care” but I’d like to make a contribution to the debate. I’m writing here from the perspective of a generalist, holistic, integrative doctor. I work at the “NHS Centre for Integrative Care” which, we claim, is a patient centred service within the NHS.

Some health care services are disease centred. There are Diabetic Clinics, Asthma Clinics, Hypertension Clinics and so on. These are specialist services where only people with particular diseases are seen, and where progress is measured primarily by measuring changes in the disease activity.

Some services are therapy centred. When you attend one of those services, only particular therapies will be used, no matter what your diagnosis, or who you are. The two biggies are surgery and drugs. Most services are designed to support the delivery of one of those two therapies. “CAM” (“complementary and alternative medicine”) clinics are often therapy centred too. Acupuncture Clinics, Osteopathic Clinics, Homeopathic Clinics etc. When you go to one of those you will see someone who has specialised in that particular therapy, and they will try to help you using that therapy.

Integrative Care is a patient centred therapy. It delivers individualised, multidisciplinary care using a range of different therapies, based on a holistic, personalised understanding of the individual patient. It is generalist, in that it is not limited to patients with specific diseases, and it is integrated in that it is not limited to the use of one particular therapy.

Now, I’m sure, there are many who will explain why their disease-centred, or therapy-centred service is also patient-centred, but I hope it’s helpful to clarify why an “integrative care” service cannot be defined by either the therapies used, or the disease diagnoses of the patients attending.

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Patterns of the planets

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, science, Uncategorized on November 11, 2013| 3 Comments »

The other day I came across, in David Wade’s beautiful “Crystal and Dragon” book, a little drawing of the paths each planet takes (relative to Earth) and, apart from making me want to dig out an old “spirograph”, I thought it was simple but wonderful.

planets

 

There are patterns everywhere, and we human beings seem to be particularly good at spotting them.

There is diversity and uniqueness everywhere. In the cosmos, in the solar system, on our planet, Earth, in every living organism.

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