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Archive for the ‘health’ Category

What you wish for

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on April 23, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Last year there was a wave of complaints from people about “over-tourism”. Several cities, like Venice, Barcelona, Prague and Edinburgh were accommodating so many tourists that locals felt life was becoming difficult. There were even problems with the number of people visiting the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

Well, this year, look what’s happened. Nobody last summer could have seen this virus coming, and none of us have lived through an experience like this, but as I read yesterday about Spain, Italy and France all experiencing a complete collapse of tourism and making plans to prevent holiday travel into their countries for the foreseeable future I couldn’t help but be amazed at how much things had changed.

That also got me thinking about the old phrase “Be careful what you wish for. It might come true.”

I’ve visited Japan a number of times and one thing which has always struck me is the practice of writing down wishes and hanging them up in temples and shrines. That photo above is of one such simple wish. Often you’ll see a whole tree covered in little paper wishes like that.

In some shrines, wish-making is more organised and focused. For example, in Nara, I came across this one –

I understand these particular ones are from married or engaged couples and are hopes for a good future for their relationship.

Though, it would seem some non-Japanese speaking guy didn’t quite understand that….

Of course, I don’t know if the author of this wish (and where did they get that different, non-heart shaped plaque?) was referring to their grandma, mum and big sister, but it sure struck me as strange!

Connected to that particular shrine in Nara is one where the focus is on women’s health and wellbeing.

Back here in France, last year, I came across these wishes on an island where the main industry is oyster farming.

It’s interesting how many of these practices are perhaps not so much wishes but love hopes. They are declarations of love and an expression of desire for that love to last.

But not all, are about love. This person clearly loved their holiday on the island so much they’d like to live there full time.

In many parts of Europe you can find the padlock version of the love hope/wish –

I do find it heartening that so many people choose to focus on a relationship and their hope/wish for sustainable love when they make these public declarations. The first time I came across the padlock version on a bridge in Paris I found it really incredibly moving.

So, I wonder what you are wishing for at this strange time in our lives.

And I wonder what will change if your wishes come true.

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Diversity and uniqueness

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 17, 2020| Leave a Comment »

What do you think when you look at these lemons?

Do you think some of them look lumpy and ugly? Does it bother you that some of them are really small, and others really big?

I think they look beautiful. I love their diversity. The fact that some are very nobbly whilst others are smooth fascinates me. I love the shades of yellow and green in their skins. I adore seeing the small ones cradled amongst the large ones. I’m fascinated by their shapes.

In this one basket you can see that every single lemon is unique.

It’s harder to see uniqueness if the producer, or merchant, sets standards with a narrow range, stipulating limits on the degree of diversity he will accept.

The practice of setting “norms”, “standards” and narrow expectations tends to obscure uniqueness, but uniqueness is still the essence of reality.

Diversity reveals uniqueness to us.

It shows us that every single lemon, every single flower, every single creature, every single human being is unique. Each one comes to life at a particular time in a specific place. Each one has its own unique experiences as it grows….experiences differences in weather, climate, interaction with other forms of life.

I think we humans have obscured the fact of uniqueness in two ways.

Firstly, through “mass” anything….from mass production to mass consumption. A focus on the mass blinds us to uniqueness.

Secondly, we tend to confuse “individuality” with “uniqueness”.

We all want to be treated as individuals, don’t we? I know I do. But a focus on individuality carries a danger of fragmentation. It separates us. Mary Midgely, the English philosopher wrote about the phenomenon of “atomisation” very well. She warned of the dangers of failing to the see the whole when we examined something only in its parts, or its “atoms”. And, in particular, she objected to the neoliberal idea that there is no such thing as society, that the best way to structure a society is for everyone to pursue their own selfish interests in a free marketplace. Those ideas have destroyed communities.

I don’t want to be “just an example of a group”. I don’t want to be treated as “just a number”, as a statistic. I want to be seen, known and treated as an individual. How do I square that circle? By focusing on uniqueness.

Our individuality is often defined by listing our differences from others, our separateness from others.

But our uniqueness combines our differences with our commonalities.

How so?

“No man is an island”

I don’t exist separate from something called Nature. I don’t exist apart from something called The Earth. I don’t exist disconnected from other human beings. I don’t exist separate from other forms of Life.

It’s taken the universe 14 billion years to make YOU. It’s never created YOU before. It will never create YOU again.

“Be yourself, everyone else it taken”

When you meet someone, when you make a new friend, when you get together with your family, you tell your story. You tell the story of where and when you were born, of the events and experiences of your life and how they shaped you.

That story is unique.

Just like everybody else’s.

It’s the circumstances, the contexts, the environments, the specifics of time, place, and experience which create our uniqueness, and the uniqueness of our story.

As a doctor, nothing gave me greater delight than to have the privilege of hearing unique human stories every single day of my work.

I love diversity.

I love uniqueness.

I find it beautiful.

 

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Becoming One

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on April 15, 2020| Leave a Comment »

When I noticed this tree in the forest I thought it had a long deep groove running the whole length of its trunk. It was as if it folded in on itself. But then I looked more closely and I saw that a better explanation was that there were two trees growing together. You could trace two distinct trunks all the way up, each spreading its own branches high above the forest floor.

I was even more taken with this when I saw it as two entwined, two organisms, two life forms, living, surviving and growing together. It reminded me of the myths of the soul….that each of us is in search of the other half….each of us longing for our soul mate.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is one tree which has partially divided itself…..partially, but not completely, so that now it appears as almost two trees instead of one. But does it really matter? Do I care whether these are two trees living intimately together, or one tree manifesting two clearly visible aspects of itself?

The first idea stimulates my thoughts about how important relationships are. It makes me think about how I can’t fully understand anyone, or any thing, in exclusion from its relationships. We are all embedded in vast networks of other people, other creatures, plants, micro-organisms, elements and molecules. We all come into being through a process of emergence within those networks. We all survive and thrive only because of those relationships and networks.

The second idea stimulate my thoughts about our multiple selves. I’ve never been able to understand anyone, including myself, by reducing them to a single, solitary self. Miller Mair’s “Community of Self” really impressed me. It struck me as true. I know a distinct self as a doctor, which is quite different from, yet completely connected to, my self as a parent for example.

A homeopathic doctor in Paris once told me he saw every patient as like a diamond, with different facets glinting in the sunlight. Each facet represented an aspect of that person. That impressed me too.

Then, much later, I read the works of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and his focus on “a multiplicity of singularities” seemed to me to be saying the same thing, just in a different language.

We are all multiple.

We are all a complex of multiple, distinct, unique “singularities” – both within ourselves, and within our world.

We are all One.

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Flow

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, humour, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 14, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I love the concept, and the phenomenon, of flow.

Look at these grasses below the water. You can easily tell that the water is flowing strongly and making them all point in the same direction. You can even see the water. But you can’t see the flow.

It’s like when I’m in the garden. It can be a cloudless, blue sky day, or a grey, cloudy day, but at around 4pm I will feel the wind start to blow on my face. I’ll hear it rush through the trees, shaking their branches and rattling their leaves. But I can’t see it. I can’t see the wind. Just the effects of the wind.

Flow is like that. It’s an invisible force made visible by the way it shapes the world.

Look at this river. You can tell that it, too, is flowing fast, can’t you? There aren’t any rocks sticking up for the water to foam against but you could swear you can see the currents. Beneath, through, within, the water, is the flow.

We are like that too. We human beings. Life flows through us, shaping us, bending us, pushing us on, encouraging us, driving us onwards. Life flows through us making us grow, mature and develop.

It doesn’t help to resist that flow. Well, that’s not completely true, is it, because there is something in response, in reaction, which is a kind of resisting, a kind of pushing back on, leaning into, or standing against, which shapes us.

Flow doesn’t have a starting point.

Flow doesn’t end.

Flow is.

Many years ago, as I walked to the train station one day on my way to work, I came across an excellent example of how to respond to flow –

Surf it!

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What is it about the moon?

Posted in from the dark room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, science on April 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Why does the Moon fascinate us so much?

This recent full moon has been a particularly bright one, shining its white, white light across the countryside. It pulls me outside to gaze at it. I love to look directly at it, seeking out the shadows, forms and craters on its surface, recalling the old childhood stories of “the man on the moon”, seeing a face there.

It’s such a different light from sunlight. Well, of course, because sunlight comes directly from the Sun, and moonlight is sunlight reflected. I think that’s part of the Moon’s mystery for us. I’m often attracted to the sight of something which is lit by the Sun but where the Sun is implied. I know that the light I am looking at is coming from the Sun, but it looks like the object is radiating light itself.

Here are a couple of examples.

These white petals, and even the bright green stalks look like they are glowing from within.

These white feathers, too, look like a glorious lamp with the light at its core softened by the feathers themselves.

This is a young vineyard where each new vine is protected by a plastic case. When the sun is low in the sky it looks like a field of lamps, or candles lit to remember the sun by.

But it’s not just about the light.

We become familiar with the phases of the Moon at an early age, and whilst a lot of city dwellers can’t even tell you what phase the moon is at tonight, maybe in this time of pause and retreat, more of us will be aware of it. Maybe the skies are even clearer now, so the Moon will be more visible.

Because we are familiar with the progression of waxing and waning, of full moons, crescent moons and new moons, whenever we see the Moon I think we have some anticipation. We see a particular shape and we know it’s about to change.

We know that as small slivers of the moon appear, more will emerge, more will fade, and the cycle will, reassuringly repeat.

The Moon is one of the most tangible examples of the cyclical nature of time and Nature.

We know that, every single month it will appear to us in its fullness, and in its crescents.

I don’t know about you, but that, for one thing, is somehow deeply reassuring.

It’s a rhythm I can see with my eyes, feel with my heart, and think about with my mind.

I know…..there’s a whole lot else to consider here. I haven’t even touched on the influence of the Moon on tides and our internal body fluids. Nor have I explored the myths and stories.

But maybe I’ll leave that to you……..

Happy exploring!

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Suddenly everything was different!

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on April 9, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Suddenly everything was different!

Oh really?

Like “it came out of nowhere”?

Change isn’t like that.

Everything that happens emerges in the present out of the past and in the light of the possible futures.

Most change actually happens slowly.

Look at this leaf turning red. You can stand and watch it for a while but you’ll be hard put to see it actually turning red. Then one day, you notice it and, wow! it’s turned red!

It’s like when you stand and look at the clock and try to see the minute hand moving. Such a different experience from looking at the clock, noting the time, then absorbing yourself in a good book, looking up at the clock and thinking “It’s that time already??!!”

Sometimes I think we have an idea that we humans are separate from this world. That we just popped up fully formed one day. That we are separate from Nature. That Nature is something outside of us. But it isn’t.

We emerged within Nature as a wave emerges on the surface of the sea.

The wave appears, then it disappears. It never leaves the sea.

So, what’s all this got to do with where we find ourselves today in the midst of this pandemic?

Here’s the thing. This pandemic didn’t come from nowhere. It emerged.

It emerged, embedded in the physical, social, cultural, economic, political world in which we live.

I’m not a fan of all the war metaphors. This is not a deadly enemy out to beat us. And even if we “conquer” it (whatever that would look like), like buses, there’ll be another one along shortly.

I think it would be good to look at the bigger pictures.

How do we act in relation to each other?

How do we act in relation to other forms of life – the animals, the plants, the insects and the micro-organisms – none of whom we could live with out?

What if we shifted our emphasis away from competition towards collaboration?

What if we shifted our emphasis away from control to adaptation?

What if we shifted our emphasis away from consuming to helping?

What if we shifted our emphasis away from parts to wholes?

 

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The Journey

Posted in art, books, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on April 8, 2020| Leave a Comment »

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began

 

One day I was walking in a forest and I came across this signpost. Clearly, this was the way to go….

I followed the path strewn with blood red petals, but I didn’t know where it would take me.

Mary Oliver, in The Journey, the beginning of which I quoted above, continued her journey…

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

I turned a corner, and there before me I saw…..

…red petals cascading down a slope, and rising high up into the canopy of the trees. Maybe this is what I came to see? But I carried on….

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do –

determined to save

the only life that you could save.

 

Eventually, I found this….

…the heart of the wood.

So, this is how it is, isn’t it?

We don’t need a “goal”, or an “outcome”. We don’t need to “get” or “consume” anything in particular.

What we need to do, is find our heart.

This is as good a time as any to listen, and find out if you can hear what your heart is telling you.

We have access to more than one kind of intelligence. Not just the rational intelligence of the analytic left cerebral hemisphere in the brain, but the emotional intelligence of the heart.

You think that’s fanciful? Or just a nice metaphor?

I don’t think so.

It turns out we have a network of neurones, yes, neurones, the specialist kind of cell you find in a human brain, around the heart. There is a neural network around the heart. Apparently, the nerve connections between the brain and the heart are not just about the brain regulating the heart, they are two way. Our heart informs our brain.

And emotions? Those deep, intense embodied rivers of information and activity which course through the depths of our very being…..are they something supplementary? Are they something inferior in some way to our thoughts?

I don’t think so.

Our emotions are the organising, adaptive strategies which have evolved to enable us to survive and to thrive.

As the fox said to the Little Prince – “what is essential is invisible to the eye”.

Here’s Mary Oliver’s poem, The Journey, in full –

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

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The life force

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science, Uncategorized on April 7, 2020| Leave a Comment »

You know I think that, especially in times like this, we think of life as being incredibly fragile. It’s easy to see it as transient and fleeting, subject to being extinguished in the blink of an eye.

All that might be true, but there is an opposite equal truth.

Life is an incredible power.

Maybe life is one of the most, or even, THE most powerful force in the universe.

At one time this planet which we all share had no life on it all. Now you can find it everywhere.

Some of the most successful life forms are micro-organisms. They have spread into pretty much every single ecological niche you can think of. You find them in volcanoes. You find them on the deep sea bed. You find them under metres of ice.

There’s even a theory that single celled creatures like bacteria got together to create multicellular organisms – including, eventually human beings. Did you know that there perhaps ten times as many bacteria in your body than there are “your” own cells? Each of us is actually a symbiotic community of cells.

Astonishing (and a bit creepy too somehow!)

There are regions of the world where there is a huge diversity of plants. The Fynbos in South Africa is one of those. Periodically fire burns through that region destroying all the flowers, but the heat from the fire stimulates the germination of seeds in the soil which then spring up as flowers. Some of the species of flower which appear haven’t been seen for decades. Some were thought to have become extinct. But no, they come back to life (or maybe the were never dead?)

Albizia Julibrissin, the Persian Silk tree, taken to London in 1793 was thought to have disappeared but after the German bombing of London in 1940 its seeds germinated and it began to grow again – 147 years later!

I’m sure we’ve all lots of experiences of flowers popping up in the most unlikely places!

The photo I’ve shared at the beginning of this post, of the little flower appearing in the forest floor, reminded me of all that.

Yes, life is delicate and fragile, but it is also THE most incredible force in the universe. We would do well to remember that.

I think that’s partly why I don’t like all the war language which is being used during this pandemic. We are not at war with corona virus. We are, I hope, learning how to live with it. There are already scientists telling us these pandemics arise because we haven’t learned to live with all the life forms on this Earth, that our destruction of habitats and environments, our pollution and urbanisation, are the root causes of the emergence of this particular pandemic and will remain the cause of the future ones unless we learn to respect Life and to learn to live together, learn to adapt to life together on this little blue planet.

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Tree-like forms around us and in us.

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on April 6, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is probably one of the most familiar shapes you know. We humans evolved from a life in the trees and both individual trees and whole forests hold a lot of meaning for us. In fact, you could probably argue that these are such familiar forms that we pass them by, almost, or even completely, un-noticed.

Trees are the lungs of the Earth. They capture the carbon dioxide in the air, extract the carbon, and push oxygen out into the atmosphere. See this shape? Inside your lungs you can see pretty much the same pattern. The difference is that trees produce individual leaves along their smaller branches, but our lungs end in what look like little bunches of grapes. Both these structures are designed to present the maximum surface area to the air. This particular form maximises exchange. In the trees it maximises their ability to capture carbon dioxide and sunlight, and to send out oxygen. In humans it maximises our ability to get oxygen out of the air and into our blood, and to get carbon dioxide out of the blood and into the air. Nice symmetry, huh?

We use this same tree-like structure to organise our knowledge too. Think of genealogy, using what we even call a “family tree”. Or of any system of classification, which breaks the whole field down into ever bifurcating, diverging parts. You’ll have used that too when you make an outline to help you plan a document, each chapter divided into sections and each section divided into subsections and so on…

But there is a limitation to this model. It is based on separation. At every stage there are more and more divisions. By the time you get out onto the twig at the end of a branch it seems to be connected only by traveling back along the twig, branch and trunk, retracing the divisions to bring the flow together – just like you see as the many streams and little rivers flow together towards an estuary.

This separation is true. It’s a fundamental characteristic of reality. But there’s another form just as fundamental, which maybe we neglect.

The web of nodes and links.

In networks we see a different way of connecting. The human brain has more specialised cells (neurones) than anyone can count….it’s billions – can you imagine what billions of anything look like? It’s pretty hard. But wait, it gets even more mind boggling than that. Every single one of these neurones establishes direct connections (synapses) with thousands of others. Thousands. That means the total number of connections in the brain is in the trillions…..nope, I can’t imagine what that looks like either!

There are networks everywhere in Nature. From inside our bodies and brains, to local ecosystems, to the entire “biosphere” of planet Earth.

I’m fascinated by networks and I’ve written a few posts which gather together some of the most influential books I’ve read on this subject. Have a look at this, at this, or this.

The thing is the tree-model isn’t the only one which helps us to understand Life, the network model is needed too. I find that a lot. It’s not a matter of “either/or” it’s a matter of “and”.

That’s become my mantra – “And not Or”.

It helps me to focus on the connections, to understand what holds opposites together, and to keep returning to the perspective of the whole…..whether that is a whole, unique patient, or a whole, unique Earth.

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Representations – attractors

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on April 5, 2020| Leave a Comment »

One of the strongest characteristics which human beings have is our ability to make links.

We connect what we see to what we have already seen and to what we imagine we might be able to see.

There’s a lot in that sentence, but I’m not going to unpick it right now….suffice to say we blend the perceptions of the present with memory and imagination.

That is an incredible power.

It helps us to discern patterns which we use to recognise what we are perceiving and to be able to make reasonable assumptions about the future.

For example, as a doctor I learned how to diagnose. Diagnosing involves listening to a person’s description of their experience and to their telling of their story, examining them physically if needed, then conducting certain tests if still not in a position to make a good diagnosis. A diagnosis enabled me to do two things – firstly, to recognise both the likely disease or pathology underlying the patient’s experience, and secondly, to gain an understanding what that meant in this person’s life. Yep, diagnosis is more than naming a disease. It’s about arriving at a level of understanding – an understanding of this illness in this person’s life.

Once I had a diagnosis I could then decide how to act. I could decide what to do and how quickly I had to do it. At that moment I’d be imagining certain futures. If I do this, then what might happen, and if I do that instead, what might happen? How quickly might those possible futures become real? To answer those questions I needed a knowledge of the patterns of disease – how is this disease likely to develop based on what we have all seen so far?

I picked this image today to reflect on our ability to recognise patterns around us, AND to apply those patterns widely. When we look at something, we don’t just “see it as it is”, because everything we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, sets off chains of memory and imagination.

So when I look at this particular tree I see these three enormous swirls. They look like whirlpools and water eddying around hidden rocks. A while ago I learned about complexity science and it really opened up my understanding of the world.

There are certain characteristic features of complex systems and one of them is the existence of “attractors”. “Attractors” are kind of organising points. They are part of what creates the differences within any given system or object. I’ve seen some scientists describe reality as “lumpy” rather than “smooth” and although I don’t really like that language I understand what they mean.

The universe is not uniform.

The phenomena of the universe are not distributed uniformly.

There are three common kinds of attractor –

Point attractors – these organise the surrounds around a single point. These three knots in this wood look a bit like three point attractors.

Loop attractors – this is where there are two centres of attraction acting together as one. They produce what looks like an infinity loop, or a figure or 8. They are a way of seeing polar opposites as part of the same system.

Strange attractors – also called complex attractors. This is where there are a number of centres of attraction all interacting within the same system. It can be hard to see any patterns here but we can recognise them when we seem the whole system. In other words, if we zoom in too close and focus only on certain parts we can’t see the way this system as a whole behaves. But when we stand back, zoom out, climb the hill, “take the view from on high”, or however else you want to describe it, we see that all the apparently separate parts are actually interconnected and working together.

I think as you encounter the world, you’ll see examples of these three kinds of attractor everywhere. See how many you can spot this week.

Ok, so, let me be clear. This is MY interpretation of these things. I’m not a complexity scientist. I just wanted to share how I make sense of my life and the world I live in.

I hope that there might be something here which sheds a light on things for you too.

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