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Archive for the ‘from the reading room’ Category

Victoria Satir

Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, personal growth, psychology on June 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I recently came across this summary of Victoria Satir‘s approach to health and personal growth….

The Five Freedoms – Using Our Senses—Virginia Satir
Satir keenly observed that many adults learned to deny certain senses from childhood, that is, to deny what they hear, see, taste, smell and touch/feel.
The Five Freedoms are:
The freedom to see and hear what is here, instead of what “should” be, was, or will be.
The freedom to say what you feel and think, instead of what you “should” feel and think.
The freedom to feel what you feel, instead of what you “ought” to feel.
The freedom to ask for what you want, instead of always waiting for permission.
The freedom to take risks on you own behalf, instead of choosing to be only “secure”.

 

Satir’s Therapeutic Beliefs and Assumptions
Satir’s therapeutic model rested on the following assumptions, that:
The major goal in life is to become own choice makers, agents and architects of our life and relationships
All human beings at heart are beings of love and intelligence who seek to grow, express their creativity, intelligence, and basic goodness; need to be validated, connect, and find own inner treasure.
We are all manifestations of the same life energy and intelligence.
Change is possible. Believe it.
We cannot change past events, only the effects they have on us today.
Appreciating and accepting the past increases our ability to manage present
The most challenging tasks in life are relational. Simultaneously, relational tasks are the only avenue for growth. All challenges in life are relational.
We have choices, disempowering and empowering ones, especially in terms of responding to stress.
All efforts to produce change need to focus on health and possibilities (not pathology).
.People connect on similarities and grow on resolving differences.
Most people choose familiarity over comfort, especially in times of stress.
No task in life is more difficult as the role of parent. Parents do the best they can do given time the resources they “see” available to them at any given time.
Next to our role as parents, no task in life is more challenging. We all have the internal resources we need to access successfully and to grow.
Parents often repeat own familiar patterns, even if dysfunctional.

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Bento’s Sketchbook

Posted in books, creativity, from the reading room, perception on June 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I always look forward to reading John Berger, ever since his classic four part documentary and book, entitled Ways of Seeing (see them all here)

I love his description of story where he looks up at the stars and sees story as the creation of the invisible lines which turn stars into constellations and how those constellations and their stories then influence the way we live (even at a simple level of navigation), and his other, related telling of how story joins up the steps we take to create a path, or a journey. Those ideas and descriptions have become such a part of how I see the world that, probably, I now realise, he didn’t exactly say either of those things, but the essence of his ideas has embedded itself in my psyche and the details now are more more personally mine.

His latest book is Bento’s Sketchbook (ISBN 978-1-84467-684-2) and I’ve had it on Amazon pre-order since I first became aware of it. It’s one of those books where you take it out of its cardboard packaging and immediately, I mean immediately, begin to read it. I took it everywhere with me, reading it on trains, in cafes, at work and in my house. I loved it. Completely loved it.

The book is based around the story that Spinoza, the philosopher carried around and drew in a sketchbook, but the actual book has never been found. John Berger decided, on receiving a blank sketchbook one day, to create the book Spinoza might have created. He does this by influencing the way he sees the world by bringing Spinoza’s writings to the front of his mind….in other words, he sort of puts himself into Spinoza’s shoes and sees the world from a Spinoza-Berger stance. (Oh, I’m not sure that really captures it!)

The book is about seeing. It’s about being aware, and really experiencing the present moment, and using drawing as a tool to enable that. This book completely inspires me to try to draw. I’ve had that thought many times, but can’t get the old school teacher’s judgement that I had “no artistic ability” out of my head. Time to banish that after all these years, I reckon. After all, what do you think? Don’t you think my photos show at least some artistic ability??

I normally include a few quotes from books I’ve loved but I’m not going to do that here. I don’t want to reduce it to quotes. This book is an experience and one which can’t be felt without seeing John Berger’s own sketches which heavily illustrate the words.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is an inspiration and a call to wake up……go on, become a hero, not a zombie! (my words, not his!)

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What’s going on?

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science, tagged on May 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Do you ever ask yourself “what’s going on?” I’m sure you do. There’s a trend which seems to be at it’s peak just now (at least, I’m hoping it’s about to decline!), which you can trace back to Enlightenment, the development of positivism as a philosophy and, emerging from that background a belief in the power of capital and reductionist science to produce both our globalised financial/political power elite and scientism (the belief that science, and only science, can reveal “truth”).

I recently watched Inside Job. If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to do so. It’s the clearest explanation of the 2008 financial crash and its roots I’ve read or heard. The frustrating thing about Inside Job is how it reveals that the same elite is still in power, still in the money, and still in control.

Then I read an article by Sam Harris in The Nation.

More a habit of mind than a rigorous philosophy, positivism depends on the reductionist belief that the entire universe, including all human conduct, can be explained with reference to precisely measurable, deterministic physical processes. (This strain of positivism is not to be confused with that of the French sociologist Auguste Comte.) The decades between the Civil War and World War I were positivism’s golden age. Positivists boasted that science was on the brink of producing a total explanation of the nature of things, which would consign all other explanations to the dustbin of mythology. Scientific research was like an Easter egg hunt: once the eggs were gathered the game would be over, the complexities of the cosmos reduced to natural law. Science was the only repository of truth, a sovereign entity floating above the vicissitudes of history and power. Science was science.

What’s the connection between this and the financial crises? –

During the past several decades, there has been a revival of positivism alongside the resurgence of laissez-faire economics and other remnants of late-nineteenth-century social thought. E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) launched pop-evolutionary biologism on the way to producing “evolutionary psychology”—a parascience that reduces complex human social interactions to adaptive behaviors inherited from our Pleistocene ancestors. Absence of evidence from the Pleistocene did not deter evolutionary psychologists from telling Darwinian stories about the origins of contemporary social life. Advances in neuroscience and genetics bred a resurgent faith in the existence of something called human nature and the sense that science is on the verge of explaining its workings, usually with reference to brains that are “hard-wired” for particular kinds of adaptive, self-interested behavior.

Beginning to see the connections?

Then along comes Adam Curtis’ new documentary on BBC2, All Watched Over by Machines of Love and Grace. What a strange title! It comes from a poem of that title by Richard Brautigan. It’s a three part series, and this first episode focused on Ayn Rand and her disciples, including the still influential Alan Greenspan. What a disturbing piece! I found it alarming to see such an emphasis on selfishness, such disdain about altruism, and such delusional belief in the power of “rationalism” to control outcomes. But these ideas still seem to be the foundation of the current power base in the world.

When I started this blog, and titled it “Heroes not Zombies”, I wrote about how to make zombies – and, later, I wrote about limits to control. Are there signs of change?

I do think the next wave will be based on an understanding that the world is not predictable, not controllable, and that human beings are not best served by being dominated by power elites, or so called “experts” (“scientific” or otherwise!)

But it’s a long road ahead……!

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Mystery

Posted in from the reading room, from the viewing room, life on May 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Great post across on the NPR blogs about whether or not we can know if there’s an afterlife. I especially liked this quote –

I do ponder, though, that as we incorporate new matter over our lives, we DO become different beings—our “I-ness” changes over time.

That’s so true….we change constantly, never really knowing the “I” we will become. It’s a wonderful mystery leading to daily discovery of amazement and wonder.

I loved the quote from Prospero at the end of the post –

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

and, the Iris Dement song too…..

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The Bed of Procrustes

Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy on May 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The “Black Swan” guy) has a new book out which is a collection of aphorisms. It’s called The Bed of Procrustes (ISBN 1846144582).

I like books of aphorisms. You can dip and dive into them and just stop where something provokes or captures you. Here are a few of his which have made me stop and think so far.

Don’t talk about ‘progress’ in terms of longevity, safety or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.

Who doesn’t want longevity, safety and comfort? But he’s right, there’s a difference between being a zoo animal and living free in the wild. Can we have the longevity, safety and comfort AND the freedom and excitement of the wild??

If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead – the more precision, the more dead you are.

This is pretty close to my heroes not zombies theme. If your every day is scheduled to death, is that satisfying? Is there some room for spontaneity, for freedom to respond to events and circumstances? If life can’t be fully controlled, it certainly can’t be fully planned. Globally, we’re caught up in command and control methods based on a delusion of the certainties revealed by science – whether it’s economic science, earthquake science, or medical science. The events of the last few years in particular are really showing the extent to which these theories and approaches are delusional and only further power and control over the individual.

It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.

This is a bit like Rumsfeld’s famous knowns and unknowns, isn’t it? But there’s also the issue of is reality only that which can be seen and measured?

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

This reminded me of Mary Midgely‘s superb “Science and Poetry” – one of my favourite philosophy books. Science isn’t everything and it can’t explain everything either….

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The uniqueness of now

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, perception, philosophy on May 10, 2011| 1 Comment »

When you listen to a favourite piece of music, do you have the same experience every time you listen? Have you ever had a wonderful meal in a restaurant, returned at a later date and had, maybe another wonderful meal……but were the two meals the same? Was the experience the same? If you look at a great painting, do you see exactly the same painting every time? I don’t mean is it the same object. I mean do you have the same perceptive, affective experience…….do you actually notice, regard, attend to the painting in an identical way, and does that produce an identical pattern of thoughts and feelings in you?

William James considers it this way in his Stream of Consciousness essay…

…and yet a close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily sensation twice. What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We feel things differently accordingly as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and winter; and above all, differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an impossibility….

The reality is, we never have the exact same experience twice. So maybe you should slow down a little, become more aware, more mindful of this present moment. You’ll never have another chance to have this particular experience again.

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William James – the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy on May 9, 2011| Leave a Comment »

In “The Stream of Consciousness”, William James dismisses the ‘synthetic’ method of attempting to understand consciousness by considering small parts of it and trying to create the whole picture by assembling the various parts.

On every ground then the method of advancing from the simple to the compound exposes us to illusion. All pedants and abstractionists will naturally hate to abandon it. But a student who loves the fulness of human nature will prefer to follow the ‘analytic’ method, and to begin with the most concrete facts, those with which he has a daily acquaintance in his own inner life.

This strikes me as very sensible. The phenomenon of emergence was described much later, as were the findings of complexity science, but in fact, the more we have discovered about complex systems, such as living organisms, the more it becomes clear the that whole cannot be understood from a simple cobbling together of knowledge of the parts.

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Telomeres, meditation, and aging

Posted in from the reading room, health, life, psychology on May 2, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I came across an interesting article in the Japan Times on Saturday. The heading was “Relax…it might mean you live longer”. Most of the article was about the emerging research work from the Samatha project about the health benefits of meditation.

It seems almost every week there’s a new story about the health benefits of meditation, but the work this article focused on was the effects on “telomeres”. Telomeres shorten every time a cell divides, and, ultimately the cell dies, so it’s thought that protecting the telomeres from this effect can reduce, or slow, the aging process. The key enzyme responsible for telomere health is called “telomerase”.

It appears that people participating in meditation retreats have significantly higher amounts of telomerase than other people (in control groups). However, the headline of the article is slightly misleading – meditation is an active process. It’s not a form of “relaxation”.

You might like to know that it’s not only meditation which can improve the health of the telomeres – exercise, stress management and writing journals can all do the same. In fact –

in increased sense of control and purpose in life are more important than the meditation itself. Doing something we love, whether meditating or gardening, may protect us from stress and maybe help us to live longer. “The news from this paper is the profound impact of having the opportunity to live your life in a way that you find meaningful.”

I particularly liked the concluding paragraph of the article –

But researchers warn that in our modern, work-obsessed society we are increasingly living on autopilot, reacting blindly to tweets and emails instead of taking the time to think about what really matters. If we don’t give our minds a break from that treadmill, the physical effects can be scarily real.

Aha! Moving from zombies to heroes, huh?!

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Are you sure?

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy on April 18, 2011| 1 Comment »

Excellent post on the School of Life site by Christopher Hamilton about scepticism. He starts by mentioning how Socrates doubted everything but how these days all kinds of people assume they’re cleverer than that –

Politicians know how to get the economy growing again (which we all know to be a good thing) and the economists know why it all went wrong in the first place; the health experts know what we have to eat to stay healthy, and the gym instructors know just the right amount of exercise we need; the Church knows what’s gone wrong with modern morality, and the atheists know that religion was a con anyway; evolutionary scientists know that we’re driven by our genes, and philosophers know it’s all much more complicated than that.

but of course……they really don’t know, do they?

the history of thought shows that equally sensitive, reflective, intelligent people come to radically different views about – well, about pretty much everything. Human beings claim to know because it’s frightening not to know…

Interesting how the contemporary so called “skeptics” (I’m thinking “Pub Skeptics” and their like), seem to be characterised by their complete sense of certainty……busy telling everyone that their views on anything and everything are absolutely right, and claiming that they know they are right because “science” tells them so.

How did “scepticism” morph from doubting everything to claiming to know things for sure?

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The irreducibility of health

Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, health on April 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Health is a state of being of a whole organism. It isn’t reducible to either single elements, or to a cumulative total of elements. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

A number of years ago, I read Hans-Georg Gadamer’s stimulating collection of essays, “The Enigma of Health“. He wondered about the strange invisibility of health. For example, at the moment I’m not particularly aware of having a left foot, but if something heavy were to fall on it, injuring it, I’d certainly be aware of it! I’m reminded of the Roger McGough poem, “Bits of Me”, where he refers to the bits of him which are making their presence know, when normally, they don’t! (a great, thought provoking, and funny poem)

I’m also very aware of how little “health” is discussed, taught or researched, what with both training and service delivery in health care being focused on disease discovery and management. But don’t we need to have some useful concept of “health” if we’re seeking to support and/or create it?

I recently came across some writings by the biologist, Brian Goodwin. He captures the issue beautifully here –

I take the position that there is a property of health of the whole organism that cannot be described in terms of the functioning and interactions of the constituent organs or tissues or molecules—whatever level of parts one wishes to consider. Furthermore, this property of the whole influences the functioning of the parts in identifiable ways; that is, it has causal efficacy. The absence of such a conception from mainstream biology and medicine is evident from the fact that there is no theory and practice of health taught to medical students that develops systematically such an emergent property of the whole organism with which one can work methodically. Health in the medical model is absence of disease, not presence of a coherent state that can be recognized and facilitated by an appropriate therapeutic relationship.

Wonderful. This is the understanding we need if we’re ever going to develop a science of health and a practice of health care.

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