Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘life’ Category

How we see the world

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on April 27, 2011| 1 Comment »

As I wandered today I wondered……don’t we all perceive the world differently? If our stories, our personal stories, shape our selves, which is how it seems to me, then our experiences will frame our present reality. We experience today in the light of our past experiences and our imagined futures. Stories all have this movement….from the past, to the present, to the future – a beginning, a middle and an end I suppose.
So one of the most powerful ways in which memories and dreams can create our present is how they frame our perception and our interpretation of today’s experiences.

through the round window

What frames are you aware of? Which memories, which dreams or fears, create the frames of your present?

The other thing I wondered about today was about the uniqueness of our individual perspectives. We can only experience the world as a subject, as this subject, living this life. So, how does the world look from your unique, subjective perspective?

room with a view

(this is a view from the tatami mats, across the strips of carpet, towards the Japanese garden – this is a view from where I was kneeling)

Finally, how can we share these ways of seeing? How can we develop our inter-subjective experience? One way, for me, is through the sharing of our stories. You can share your experience by telling me it. I can share mine, by telling you…..or by showing you what I caught with my camera…..(I’m sure you can think of other ways too)

Read Full Post »

Moral development

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on April 2, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Ken Wilber proposes in his Integral Theory, that there is a over-arching map which you can see in various theories of psychological development. Essentially, he proposes four levels of development – egocentric, where the child’s issues are all about their own needs, to ethnocentric, where there is an awareness of the family, tribe, or community of others like us. At this level, accepted norms of morality are adopted. These levels are sometimes termed “preconventional”, then “conventional”. The next, “postconventional” level, Wilber identifies as worldcentric, where we become aware of being part of all peoples, or all Nature. He goes beyond that level to propose a fourth, “integral” one.

One of the authors he cites as an example of this framework, is Carol Gillegan, whose “In a Different Voice”, describes a theory of gender difference along this developmental path. Here’s a wee summary (I think this is an interesting take on development)

All children start out with this selfish stage, but as females progress into the next one, they are taught to care, and as they learn to care for others, they develop feelings that to care for yourself is selfish and wrong. At the next level of development they learn that to fail to care for yourself is as wrong as failure to care for others. They learn this because of their focus on relationships – relationships involve two parties and if one party fails to look after herself, the relationship will be damaged.

Gilligan’s theory about males, takes a focus on justice or rights. The little selfish boy develops through learning that all people have rights to life and self-fulfillment which are protected through non-interference. In other words, rights set limits. As they mature they learn that they have to take increasingly more responsibility for care.

I’m not a great fan of such tightly gendered understandings, but there’s certainly food for thought in this theory. Maybe these two approaches are better thought of as right or left brain approaches as McGilchrist describes them…..with a right brain approach suiting a focus on relationships and the left on logic and the individual. We all need both halves of our brain after all, so maybe these “male” and “female” paths are better thought of as “intelligences” (as in multiple intelligences theory) , or “lines” (in the Wilber model).

There’s certainly food for thought in why we have feelings of guilt or selfishness when we take some time to care for our selves. And how we balance that with feelings of guilt or selfishness from too great a level of “non-interference”. We need to be both self-caring and compassionately engaged.

Read Full Post »

April – transience

Posted in from the living room, life on April 1, 2011| 4 Comments »

Spring

When I was developing my monthly themes, this month struck me as the time of the cherry blossom. In Japan the brief weeks of the cherry blossom are greatly celebrated. There’s a connection between this natural phenomenon and the reality of transience. It’s the brevity of duration of the blossom which is celebrated.
There’s something about this idea which makes the present even more special. And so we can think about life. The few years we spend here are all the more special for their brevity.
This year, after the earthquake, tsunami, and still unfolding nuclear chaos, transience assumes an even greater poignancy in Japan, and, so, for me, too.
Yet whilst there is undoubted sadness in loss, this transience is something that deepens my gratitude for Life, and for the present.

Read Full Post »

Female and male “voices” or tendencies

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth on March 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Female/Male, yin/yang, moon/sun, there are these two aspects, types or tendencies described in many cultures throughout history. It’s too simplistic to say men are one way and women are the other. However, it’s also too simplistic to say men and women are the same. This way of thinking can be helpful if we consider male or female qualities are tendencies, rather than fixed types, if we see their interaction as being present and dynamic in all human beings, and if we aspire to an integrated, mature state, where each of us access both ways of being.

One helpful discussion about this is in Carol Gilligan’s “Different Voices”, where she highlights masculine and feminine ways or types of being in terms of “voices”.

A man’s voice tends to be focused on autonomy, justice and rights, whereas a woman’s voice tends to be focused on relationships, care and responsibility. In other words, men tend towards agency, and women towards communion (see the qualities of holons).
Men follow rules, women follow connections. Men look, women touch. Men tend towards individualism, women to relationships.

Neither of these are better than the other. For example, if the masculine way goes too far, or goes wrong, we see

not just autonomy, but alienation, not just strength but domination, not just independence, but fear of commitment. And if the feminine way goes too far, instead of being in relationship, she becomes lost in relationship, instead of healthy communion, she becomes dominated by others, and instead of flow, panic, or meltdown.

Read Full Post »

An Integral framework of psychological development

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, psychology on March 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

In Ken Wilber’s integral map of development, he describes an evolution from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to worldcentric. By this he means an initial focus on “me”, to an identification with others like us (“we”), to an identification with all living things.

He demonstrates how this relates to stages of moral development, from preconventional, where a child is self-absorbed, to conventional, where they learn the rules and norms of culture, and identify with their tribe or group, then onto postconventional, where their sense of identity expands out to include all humanity.

Interestingly he suggests there may be another map which lays nicely onto these – body (a focus on my physical body), mind (expanding to shared relationships and values) and spirit (all sentient beings).

Or even, from a neurological basis, from the reptilian brain stem (centred on me), to the mammalian limbic system (centred on we – the seat of attachment), to the neocortex (able to perceive and identify with the world).

Read Full Post »

Active and passive paths to wellness

Posted in from the consulting room, from the living room, health, life, video on March 19, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Lovely piece on the School of Life site considering active and passive paths to wellness. The yin yang symbol is one of the most potent symbols we have – I wear one around my neck. One aspect of the symbol is the representation of a dynamic balance of active and passive principles. Taking this idea, Jules Evans writes about a session at the School of Life where representatives of each of these models tell their stories.

The active form of well-being lies in the happiness of pursuit, striving after a goal, making things happen. Its great champion is Aristotle, who defined happiness as a vital activity of the soul. The other form of well-being is passive. It finds happiness in the renunciation of the will – not in making things happen, but in accepting things happening as they do. This is the approach of the Stoics and Epicureans, both of whom define happiness as freedom from desire, and also of the Buddhists and Taoists.

I like this idea. My daily practice of medicine is grounded on the belief that all human beings are unique and by active, non-judgmental listening, I can come to understand the particular worldviews, coping strategies and pathological changes within each patient I meet (and, of course, how these are all linked). One consequence of this approach is to realise that different people have very different approaches to wellness. And that, fundamentally, is ok. There really is no one size fits all, and there is always an alternative.

Representing the Yang school of well-being, there is the entrepreneur Robert Kelsey, full of energy, leaping from mission to mission (‘first I was a journalist, then a banker, then a writer, then an entrepreneur’), picking himself up when a mission fails, only to launch himself on another voyage……[and, on the other hand, Ed Halliwell]….tells us that he only found peace from his battle with depression when he stopped “desperately striving to change my situation. When I did, a curious thing happened: my depression lifted”. Meditation is, he says, the opposite of striving: “It’s impossible to strive to do it. The process is about sitting and observing, being in the moment, rather than striving.”

 

Read Full Post »

Surfaces and depths

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, life on March 17, 2011| 2 Comments »

Do you remember hearing this riddle when you were a child…..”how many sides does a bottle have?”

The answer was “two – and inside and an outside”.

Ken Wilber’s 4 quadrant map stimulates us to think about these two sides of everything – what lies on the outside, the surface, can be seen, pointed to and known – Wilber refers to this aspect as the “right hand side” (related to his diagram), or to whatever can be empirically known by just observing. And what lies inside, on the “left hand side” of his diagram, and which can only be revealed through dialogue and interpretation.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from his “A Brief History of Everything” to explain this thinking tool –

…all of the Right Hand dimensions can be accessed with this empirical gaze, this “monological” gaze, this objectifying stance, this empirical mapping – because you are only studying the exteriors, the surfaces, the aspects of holons that can be seen empirically – the Right Hand aspects, such as the brain.
But the Left Hand aspects, the interior dimensions, can only be accessed by communication and interpretation, by “dialogue” and “dialogical” approaches, which are not staring at the exteriors but sharing of interiors. Not objective but intersubjective. Not surfaces but depths.

and

[the Right Hand phenomena] all have simple location, because they are the physical-material correlates of all holons…….But….none of the Left Hand aspects have simple location. You can point to the brain, or to a rock, or to a town, but you cannot simply point to envy, or pride, or consciousness, or value, or intention, or desire. Where is desire? Point to it. You can’t really, not the way you can point to a rock, because it’s largely an interior dimension, so it doesn’t have simple location. This doesn’t mean it isn’t real! It only means it doesn’t have simple location, and therefore you can’t see it with a microscope or a telescope or any sensory-empirical device.

I find this very helpful. Health care is so dominated by this focus on exteriors, on what can be objectively described and measured, but health is such a human experience, that to ever understand it in any individual demands that you explore their interior dimension. Through dialogue. This is just as real, and, arguably, even more important, than what can be seen on the surface, or the exterior. I like this reference to simple location, because my everyday work is in dialogue, in exploring narrative, in diving into the interior…..which cannot be discovered by simple mapping or locating.

Read Full Post »

Resilient Japan

Posted in from the living room, life on March 13, 2011| 1 Comment »

Every day just now we see more and more scenes of devastation from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It’s quite overwhelming. I’ve been in touch with a couple of my friends in Tokyo, and what they tell me, plus what I see reported on the news, reminds me again of the incredible depth of quiet strength and resilience which seems common in Japan. It got me thinking again about the story of the Diospyros kaki tree – the tree which survived the nuclear bomb in Nagasaki whose shoots have been spread around the world as a Peace Tree.

Here’s my story of the kaki tree.

 

Read Full Post »

Partitive and aspective

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, philosophy on March 10, 2011| 2 Comments »

Here’s a quote from a book entitled “Neuroethics“. This is from an essay by Nancey Murphy.

While Greek thought tended to regard the human being as made up of distinct parts, Hebraic thought saw the human being more as a whole person existing on different dimensions. As we might say, it was more characteristically Greek to conceive of the human person “partitively,” whereas it was more characteristically Hebrew to conceive of the human person “aspectively.” That is to say, we speak of a school having a gym (the gym is part of the school); but we say I am a Scot (my Scottishness is an aspect of my whole being.)

Until I read this, I’d never come across these particular terms. Nor did I know there was this difference between Greek and Hebrew thought. But what completely struck me was how congruent this idea is with what Ian McGilchrist says about the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In his “Master and His Emissary“, he makes the case for each hemisphere engaging with the world in its own unique way – the left engaging in a “representation” way, breaking reality down into parts to “grasp” it by mapping it against what’s already known, and the right engaging in a more holistic way, (what McGilchrist describes as a focus on the between-ness, rather on the things). Ken Wilber’s description focuses on the “interpretative” nature of this other way.

So this is interesting. This idea of a “partitive” world view is very much our dominant paradigm. We break experience into parts and we use the left hemisphere strongly to do that. It strikes me we are on the edge of a wave of change here though, and that this worldview is running out of steam. It’s failing to satisfy what it is to be fully human. If that’s true, then we should be seeking to develop our right hemispheric powers, creating a more “aspective” worldview.

Read Full Post »

A co-incidence of compassion

Posted in from the living room, life, tagged on March 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

This morning, as I walked to the railway station, I listed to a podcast from the BBC World Service. It was an old one (from last September) but I was catching up. This particular discussion was about rational and irrational behaviour in human beings and the section I listened to today involved Marilynne Robinson talking about altruism. She mentioned that it was Auguste Comte as one of the first to describe altruism, which he defined as

living for the sake of others

The debate on the podcast was around whether or not altruism had a self-interested root. That argument, I must say, doesn’t convince me. Human beings are social animals and we are hard wired for compassion and empathy just as we are also hard wired for self-interest. It’s the complicated entangling of these opposites that is at the root of so many human dilemmas.

Then, on the train, on the way home this evening, I started to read Karen Armstrong’s “12 Steps To A Compassionate Life” on the Kindle reader on my iPhone. Imagine my surprise when I read, in the opening chapter, her describing Auguste Comte’s description of altruism! Yet another interesting coincidence in my life!

Tomorrow being the hundredth anniversary of International Womans Day, I was especially struck by Karen Armstrong’s highlighting of Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale and Dorothy Day as all “bywords for heroic philanthropy”. She then goes on to make, for me, a very convincing argument that we can track compassion from an evolutionary perspective to maternal love, without which no newborn infant could survive. There’s something worth thinking about on International Womans Day.

By the way, I came across Karen Armstrong’s book when I stumbled upon this website last week – http://charterforcompassion.org/site/

Take a moment, and check it out. And while you’re there, why not join me in signing it?

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »