Posted in from the dark room, photography on April 20, 2010| 1 Comment »
Carrying a camera, even the camera in that mobile phone you have in your pocket or handbag, is a great way to find something amazing every single day. If some part of your mind is on alert for what’s interesting, you’ll find that you just notice more.
Look at this for example –
I don’t know what this plant is, but as I got out of my car, the sun was streaming through these petals and I couldn’t resist capturing it with my camera.
Posted in from the dark room, health, photography on April 15, 2010| 1 Comment »
Here’s a double page spread from the newspaper the other day –
Isn’t that interesting? On the left, an ad for fast food, and on the right a drug to deal with stomach acid!
Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, photography, tagged flow, healing, IPNB on April 7, 2010| 2 Comments »
I’ve long held that a way of thinking about health is to use the concept of flow. When the various different aspects of our selves and our lives integrate in a coherent way we experience flow – good energy, good vitality, strength, the feeling of being alive (there are many ways to describe it)
I recently came across an interesting expansion of this idea when I read “Mindsight” by Dan Siegel (ISBN 978-0553804706).
He describes health as being like a flowing river and he says the river has two banks, either of which we tend to drift towards as we become unwell.
One bank is rigidity, and the other is chaos.
It’s true. We can see that in some illnesses we are stuck, caught in loops, trapped in ever decreasing circles which shrink our world. What should be flowing has become solidified, sluggish, frozen, or blocked.
In complexity terms, this kind of pattern exists around “point attractors”. You’ll be familiar with point attractors in the universe; they are the black holes which suck everything into them. Nothing escapes.
In other illnesses everything seems to fall to pieces, life itself falls apart and we find ourselves lost, or overwhelmed with confusion. We don’t know who we are, or where we are, and we don’t know how to find a way out.
In complexity terms, this kind of patterns exists as a “chaos attractor”, a zone of chaos where there are no clear patterns but which somehow maintains itself.
Which of the patterns are most familiar to you?
Rigidity?
or Chaos?
Healing involves a release from these states – from rigidity, or chaos, to flow.
Posted in from the dark room, photography on March 29, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Here’s one of my favourite activities – finding wild orchids. They tend to be really small and not so easy to spot, then when you get down on the ground to see them up close, they’re consistently, amazingly, beautiful.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, photography on March 25, 2010| 5 Comments »
Thich Nhat Hanh teaches a lovely meditation practice for children, and points out that many adults like it too.
He calls it “four pebble meditation” and here’s how to do it –
Collect four pebbles and keep them in small bag.
Each pebble should remind you, in turn, of a flower, a mountain, still water and space.
Take the first pebble in your left hand and say “I see myself as a flower. I feel fresh.”
Repeat three times, then lay the pebble down.
Take the next pebble in your left hand and say “I see myself as a mountain. I feel solid”
Repeat three times, then lay the pebble down.
Put this pebble aside, and take the next one in your left hand, saying “I see myself as still water. I reflect things as they truly are.”
Repeat three times, then lay the pebble down.
Put this pebble aside and take the last pebble. “I see myself as space. I feel free.”
Repeat three times, then lay the pebble down.
Posted in creativity, from the dark room, photography on March 21, 2010| 1 Comment »
Who do you think might answer if you press the top button? (use google translate if you don’t speak French)
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography on March 17, 2010| 2 Comments »
I listened to a Thich Nhat Hanh talk yesterday. He said, without impermanence there is no life. I hadn’t thought about that before. He said, without impermanence the seed will not become a flower.
Without impermanence we wouldn’t get to enjoy these beautiful blossoms every year.
Posted in from the dark room, photography on March 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Posted in from the dark room, photography on March 15, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Try this.
click on this photo and you’ll be taken to the original I uploaded onto Flickr. Click on it there and choose the “all sizes” option on the top left above the photo. Look at it in the biggest version available.
Isn’t it amazing? Isn’t it as if there’s a whole universe in there? In that single flower? Look at the colours. Aren’t they astonishing?
I hope you enjoy this little tulip moment.
Posted in from the dark room, photography on March 14, 2010| 1 Comment »
Every Spring in Japan the Cherry Blossom appearance is a great event. Thousands of people go out with their cameras and photograph the new blossom, the parks are full of strollers wandering around, stopping to look at the blossom-laden trees. The front pages of the national newspapers in Japan carry photos of the first blossom and the nightly TV news tracks the spread of the blossom through the country day by day. We don’t have anything quite like that in the UK, or anywhere else I’m aware of actually, but there’s a little village in the South of France which is named after it’s spectacular annual blossom and this year, after several years of wishing, I’ve managed to make a trip to see it.
Let me show you around.
The village is Bormes les Mimosa. Here’s what the village looks like during the blossoming of the Mimosa trees.
Let me share some photos of the Mimosa with you, then I’ll show you some of the village.
Sadly, I’m not very good at describing scents but the scent of this blossom is really lovely. It’s everywhere in the village making the whole place seem both sweet and fresh.
Here are some overviews of the village
The old village itself is a medieval village with winding, twisting little alleys climbing up the hillside. There are loads of tiny passageways and stairways making it a wonderful place to go exploring.
Heroes Not Zombies 