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Archive for the ‘personal growth’ Category

The challenge to mind body dualism isn’t new

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on December 8, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I don’t really like the term “mind body medicine” because it assumes a duality which is a delusion. That delusion isn’t just a problem which prevents real understanding of a patient’s suffering, it has wider and deeper effects…..as John Dewey (1859 – 1952) describes –

“The very problem of mind and body suggests division; I do not know of anything so disastrously affected by the habit of division as this particular theme. In its discussion are reflected the splitting off from each other of religion, morals and science; the divorce of philosophy from science and of both from the arts of conduct. The evils which we suffer in education, in religion, in the materialism of business and the aloofness of ‘intellectuals’ from life, in the whole separation of knowledge and practice — all testify to the necessity of seeing mind-body as an integral whole.”

I really like that phrase “habit of division” – a nicely different way of referring to reductionism and one which recalls Ian McGilchrist’s brilliant analysis of how we use our two cerebral hemispheres. Like all dualities, each part offers something unique, but either part, on its own, is just missing something important…….

bridge

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what makes life special……..

Posted in from the dark room, from the reading room, life, narrative, personal growth, photography on December 4, 2013| 3 Comments »

No, there’s no question mark at the end of that title. I’m not asking a question. I’m thinking about all the little everyday experiences which make life special

melon and ham

In the summer this year, in a little bookshop in the heart of France, I stumbled across a beautiful, inspirational book called “Le Sel de la Vie”, by Françoise Héritier. Then a couple of weeks ago, in my favourite independent little bookshop in Scotland, The Watermill, I stumbled across an English translation of the same book. I had no idea it had been translated and its just as engaging and inspiring in translation as it was in the original French. One of the strange things about translation is that “le sel” is “salt”, so the literal translation of the title would be “The salt of life”. However, to grasp the true essence of the original text it’s been translated as “The Sweetness of Life”. How interesting! Salt or sweet? Both work for me, and when combined (like in my delicious starter above) it can be even more special.

This little book is like no other book I’ve ever read. The author wrote it in response to a colleague’s postcard from his holiday on the Isle of Skye. He described the holiday as “stolen” and that got her thinking about how we spend our time and how he was stealing his own life by failing to be in touch with all the daily little experiences which made life so special, so sweet……

Given my recent post on the one sentence, I was really struck by this part of her introduction

So what follows here is an enumeration, an ordinary list in one long sentence……

I can’t really quote you any of the book because whenever I start it, I can’t stop it! She writes, in one long flowing list, using a free association method, listing sensations, experiences, memories which she considered to be everyday special. Does “everyday special” strike you as odd? I think this is such a key element to living a great life – to be constantly in touch with the “everyday special”. Believe me, if you can’t find the special in the everyday, you’re not awake!

OK, difficult though it is to stop, here’s a wee sample

….phone calls made for no reason, handwritten letters, family meals (well, some of them), meals with friends, a beer at the bar, a glass of red or white wine, coffee in the sun, a siesta in the shade, eating oysters at the seaside or cherries straight off the tree…..

You get the idea?

I think if you dip into this little book and read a line or two before setting off into the day each morning, you’ll heighten your “everyday special” awareness. It’s almost like a different kind of meditation. But the other thing which this book inspires is to start your own list (in fact, the English language version has a few blank lined pages at the end to encourage you to do just that)

Go on, try it…..

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Circles of sharing, spheres of influence

Posted in from the living room, life, personal growth on December 1, 2013| 1 Comment »

Draw a circle.

Inside that circle write down the names of every person who you spend some time with EVERY SINGLE DAY – not “most days”, but every day.

Draw a larger circle around the first circle.

Inside that larger circle write down the names of every person who you spend some time with EVERY SINGLE WEEK – not “most weeks”, but at least once every week ………….(if you like you can write the names of people you spend some time with most days of every week nearest the inner circle, and those you tend to spend some time with only once a week towards the outer part of the circle)

Now draw another larger circle around the second circle.

Inside this third circle write down the names of every person you spend some time with EVERY SINGLE MONTH – not “most months” , but at least once every month.

 

circles.001

If you like, add yet another circle for those you spend some time with EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

When I say “spend some time with”, I mean mainly those you share some physical space with, not just those you speak to on a phone, those you text, or those you chat with online. However, that’s also an interesting exercise to do. In fact, one variation of this exercise is to use two separate coloured pens or pencils and to use one colour for those you actually spend some time with physically, and another for those you spend time in communication with, but not in the same physical shared physical space.

 

  • Who is in which circle?
  • How much of your life are you sharing with whom?
  • How are those relationships influencing your life?
  • Do you want to make any changes?

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Life everywhere

Posted in books, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science, Uncategorized on November 29, 2013| Leave a Comment »

fern eclipse

David Suzuki, in ‘The Sacred Balance’, says

Many have believed in an animated, inhabited, sacred world surrounding them, the natural world that constitutes reality. These beliefs restore our sense of belonging, of being-with, which is threatened by our dividing, conquering brain;

Oh, this connects with so many other things I’ve read these last few months. That last phrase taking me back to ‘The Master and His Emissary‘ – “our dividing, conquering brain” – what a brilliant description of what our left hemisphere does! But it’s this sense of Life everywhere which really captures my imagination. Marc Halévy in ‘Ni hasard, ni nécessité’ writes about the concept of hylozoism….a term I had never encountered before. Look it up. I thought Halévy had invented it as a neologism – but he hadn’t. It’s a very, very old idea which, suddenly becomes very, very new and relevant now. It’s the idea that everything has life in it. He juxtaposes hylozoism to materialism and says

It reveals to us that all matter is alive, that all matter is an expression of life, that all matter is living. (my translation)

Without looking it up right now, I seem to recall Howard Bloom argues something similar in ‘The God Problem‘ too, where he makes the case that even neutrons demonstrate free will.

It seems that Life is everywhere, and that the Cosmos is where we belong, what we are part of, not apart from. Does it make you feel differently about our planet once you realise it isn’t a resource but a manifestation of a living universe

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becoming not being

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on November 23, 2013| 2 Comments »

Snowtop in the clouds

 

What’s this blog all about?

BECOMING NOT BEING

You can see that phrase in the title banner, and its that phrase which kick started my writing of this blog.

Look at this photo I took this week. I think it captures the absolute essence of “becoming not being”.

Start wherever you want. At the top you can see the blue sky, whispy clouds kissing and caressing the surface of the snow covered mountain, or is the snow blowing up into whispy clouds in the sky? You can see the shadows of the clouds darkening the surface of the land, and you know, you just know, that those shadows, those clouds, and, yes, the borders of the snow, are constantly changing.

In fact, it’s quite hard to see the boundaries up there. Where does the land end, the cloud begin? Where does the blue sky end and the cloud begin?

Then as you come down further you see the land without snow…..the blues, the greys, the browns……all, forever, becoming not being.

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We know very well what matters most to us:

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, narrative, personal growth, philosophy, science on November 21, 2013| Leave a Comment »

the people we love, the place where we live.

That’s a quote from David Suzuki’s book, “The Sacred Balance”. It comes just after this paragraph –

Although we know who we are, where we come from, what we are for, we give that knowledge no weight; our culture tends to deny or conceal that insight, and so we are left alienated and afraid, believing the truth to be ‘objective’ instead of embodied (my italics). A world that is raw material, resources, dead matter to be made into things, has nothing sacred in it. So we cut down the sacred grove, lay it waste and declare that it does not matter, because it is only matter. Just so the slavers of an earlier century declared their merchandise to be incapable of ‘proper human feeling’. Just so generations of experimental animals have been sacrificed in the name of research. Pesticides poisoning the lakes and rivers, fish disappearing from the oceans, rain forests going up in smoke – this is the world we have spoken so powerfully into existence, and we will continue to live in it unless we change our tune, tell a different story.

What a powerful piece of writing!

Aren’t there so many important points in that one paragraph? How we fail to recognise the embodied nature of reality, and instead create the delusion of ‘objects’ and ‘objectivity’. And how from that one delusion we create a whole story of separateness and objectification which colours our relationships to others, to Nature, and, ultimately, to ourselves.

We DO know very well what matters most to us – and that is the people we love, and the place where we live.

Shall we just act from that knowledge? Test our choices against that truth?

How would life look then? What story would we be telling……a love story?

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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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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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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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Hope

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth on November 8, 2013| 1 Comment »

the colour of light

Václav Havel said

[Hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

One of the commonest things patients tell me is that our work together has given them hope. That’s always very heart-warming feedback, because without hope, it is difficult to live.

But reading Havel’s statement about hope not being “the conviction that something will turn out well” got me thinking. I suppose because I completely agree. I don’t think hope is about giving people the conviction that all will be well. How could anyone give that guarantee after all? The future remains unknowable….whether we are well, or whether we are sick.

But if hope is not about believing a disease will go away, what is it? Havel says it is the “certainty that something makes sense” and I think that is right. One of the values of integrative practice is that it is sense making. Taking a holistic, individualised approach to a person, listening empathically and non-judgementally, with full attention and acceptance, sets up the potential for understanding – for the practitioner to understand the patient, and, for the patient to understand themselves, their illness and its place in their life. Understanding is sense making.

I think hope is something else too, though. A lot of people who consult me feel stuck, trapped, suffering, or in despair…..they are scared that this is now how life is going to be. Hope emerges when it becomes clear that change is not just possible but probable. Havel uses the word “certainty” and as the future is unknowable in detail we can’t offer certainty about specific outcomes.

But change is one of life’s certainties. As every individual is actively involved in creating their own experience, hope emerges when we realise life can be different, and that our choices can influence how different it can be.

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