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Where healing comes from

Posted in from the consulting room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, psychology, tagged flow on July 18, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon who lived and worked in the US, studied the relationships between self-image, self-esteem and personal growth. He wrote “Psycho-cybernetics” in 1960 [ISBN 978-0-671-70075-1]. He uses a distinct language and set of concepts, which seems very 1960s to me, but the underlying understanding of human behaviour, the connections between the mind and the body, and the ways people can be helped to grow, strike me as being very true. I particularly like his emphasis on the importance of imagination and how we use it to create a self-image, and in so doing, how that sets our embodied mind (not a term he uses) off to get on with delivering according to the interpretation of reality we give it.

I like the last chapter of “Psycho-cybernetics” especially, where he says –

…the body itself is equipped to maintain itself in health; to cure itself of disease……in the final analysis that is the only sort of “cure” there is.

I’m still amazed how little this is understood. So many people, health professionals included, are caught up in the delusion of pathology and drugs. Health is not absence of pathology. Drugs don’t “cure”……they just manage disease. If there’s any healing going on, it’s the natural processes of the body which are responsible. The best drugs can do is modify disease, and in so doing modify illness, whilst we hope healing takes place in the background.

It might be an old concept to think about healing energies, but I like the way Maltz puts it –

This élan vital, life force, or adaptation energy – call it whatever you will – manifests itself in many ways. The energy which heals a wound is the same energy which keeps all our other body organs functioning……whatever works to make more of this life force available to us; whatever opens to us a greater influx of “life stuff”; whatever helps us utilize it better – literally helps us “all over”

I think, and I hope this is the way Medicine will develop – by understanding better just how people get better, and by studying the methods and techniques we can use to genuinely stimulate and support healing. It’s not the dominant paradigm yet, but I’m going to bet it will be!

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Life flows

Posted in life, philosophy, tagged flow on July 17, 2011| 2 Comments »

Life……is essentially a current sent through matter, drawing from it what it can.

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher worked on three major areas of thought – duration, memory, and what he termed “élan vital” – the vital tendency.

There’s a Life Force – not a “thing”, but real nevertheless.

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Where’s your favourite place to rest?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography on July 6, 2011| 3 Comments »

Here’s some suggestions…..

Centre for Integrative Care Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital

Out in the countryside – near Callander

Princes St Gardens, Edinburgh

Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris

In the chateau, Carcassonne

In the garden, Chateau de la Mignarde

In a wheelbarrow!

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Reading

Posted in from the reading room, life on June 26, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Johann Hari, writing in the Independent about books, reading and the distractions of the internet, includes the following quote

Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…. It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise

Fabulous! We all need this experience. We all need to withdraw a little, step back from the noise, gain what Iain McGilchrist refers to as a “necessary distance”, not just from other people, other activities, or the world, but from our own thoughts, habits and obsessions. Reading books can certainly create some necessary distances, but there are other ways too. Many other ways, actually.

What we need is focused, aware attention.

If we take a little time to focus, and to give our full attention to, a book, a movie, a song, a poem, our breath, this present moment……..then we’ll gain this necessary distance. Without it, we’re on autopilot – zombies not heroes!

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Lighten, brighten and enlighten

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy on June 16, 2011| 3 Comments »

June is the month of the light. Next week in Scotland, it’s midsummer’s day – the shortest day of the year (you’d never know we’re in the middle of summer, given all the rain and wind we’ve had!). So, I’ve been thinking again about light.

Candle light in particular reminds us how sharing light increases it. Have you ever lit one candle from another? When you do, the first candle doesn’t get any dimmer. By lighting one candle from another, you end up with more light.

I wonder what kind of light I bring into this world? You might like to wonder about what you pass on to others too, because, although we might not physically pass light to each other, we certainly pass our emotions, our attitudes, our way of being onto to those around us and spread them the way that light can spread.

Around the turn of the year, when I was thinking about my Life (with a capital “L”), I played with this idea of light and I thought, actually, what I try to do, as a doctor, can be captured in three verbs about light.

Firstly, I try to lighten others’ loads. I try to ease their suffering. If I didn’t achieve at least that, I’d not be much of a doctor. I hope that everyone I see has their life, or the burdens in their life, lightened a bit as a result of my care.

But that’s not enough for me. I don’t want patients to come back and just say they feel a little lighter. I want their lives to be brighter. By that I mean I hope their days become better days, more fulfilling, more colourful, brighter days. I hope for others, and I hope for me, that life becomes brighter, and by that, I really mean an increase in that “emerveillement du quotidien“.

But even that’s not enough for me. I hope, at best, to enlighten, to show new possibilities, to support and stimulate new growth. I just love when I hear that a patient’s life has become lighter, brighter and, yes, transformed – that they’re experiencing a personal enlightenment.

If you think about light this month, why not think of it as a metaphor, as well as a physical phenomenon? What metaphors of light seem most relevant in your life?

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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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Ups and downs

Posted in from the dark room, life, photography on May 4, 2011| 1 Comment »

The path through life isn’t a straight one, or a level one. It’s full of ups and downs. No two days are the same.
So when you have a day of climbing, enjoy the climb

and when you have a day of descent, take it easy, and descend carefully

you can be pretty sure, it’ll be different tomorrow……(as Heraclitus almost said, we don’t walk the exact same path twice….)

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at this very moment….

Posted in from the dark room, life, photography on May 2, 2011| Leave a Comment »

…when you push the shutter button, your camera captures this very moment…

….which you couldn’t have predicted was about to occur.

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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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