Posted in from the living room, from the viewing room, health, life, personal growth, psychology, video on August 7, 2013| Leave a Comment »
The Heartmath technique involves recreating a positive emotion – not just remembering a positive event, but actually feeling the feeling again.
When I found this project from “soul pancake” it struck me that they were making little “heart math” moments in the street. Watch the video. It’s delightful, and I’m pretty sure it will make you smile……
……and remember, to flourish, you should try to have a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative feelings/experiences each day.
Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on June 14, 2013| 5 Comments »
I read Montaigne’s essay yesterday about “Liars” and it made me laugh out loud. I really enjoy Montaigne’s humility. It seems to me that he frequently wrote with a twinkle in his eye. In this essay he refers to his claim that he as a terrible memory. He says that others consider that an affliction of sorts, but he thinks it has advantages.
Firstly, he says that having a poor memory has saved him from being an ambitious person – “the defect being intolerable in those who take upon them public affairs”.
Secondly, he says it has saved him from deafening all his friends with his “babble”
I have observed in several of my intimate friends, who as their memories supply them with an entire and full view of things, begin their narrative so far back, and crowd it with so many impertinent circumstances, that though the story be good in itself, they make a shift to spoil it…for whilst they are seeking out a handsome period to conclude with, they go on at random, struggling about upon impertinent trivialities, as men staggering on weak legs.
…..old men who retain the memory of things past, and forget how often they have told them, are dangerous company; and I have known stories from the mouth of a man of very great quality, otherwise very pleasant in themselves, become very wearisome by being repeated a hundred times over and over again to the same people.
Thirdly, he says he is less likely to remember the injuries he has received (and therefore doesn’t hold grudges)
Fourthly….
the places which I revisit, and the books I read over again, still smile upon me with fresh novelty.
And, finally, (getting to the title of the essay) he says that it has saved him from being a liar, because liars always forget the details of their lies and trip themselves up. Knowing he has a bad memory means he doesn’t trust himself to lie!
Posted in from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on January 24, 2013| 2 Comments »
Kathryn Shultz has written a fascinating and thought provoking piece in the New York Magazine about the self-help industry, challenging the unspoken philosophical flaw at the root of much of it. The full article is worth a read, but the main point she makes is where is this bit of the thing called the self which stays intact, immune to the addictions, fears and anxieties experienced by the rest of self and able to change that bit. Are there two selves in the self? The one with the problems and the one with both the solutions and the wherewithal to sort out the other one?
Not only has nobody ever found these two selves, nobody has even found THE Self!
I particularly loved her reference to Josh Rothman writing about clouds –
The journalist Josh Rothman once wrote a lovely description of what a cloud really is: not an entity, as we perceive it, but just a region of space that’s cooler than the regions around it, so that water vapor entering it condenses from the cold, then evaporates again as it drifts back out. A cloud is no more a thing, Rothman concluded, than “the pool of light a flashlight makes as you shine it around a dark room.” And the self, the Buddhists would say, is no more a thing than a region of air with thoughts passing through.
Posted in from the consulting room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, psychology on January 7, 2013| 3 Comments »
The self is relatedness. The self doesn’t exist without relationship. The self appears in your deeds, and deeds always mean relationship.
James Hollis wrote that. It stopped me. You find there are books like that, don’t you? Books which you can’t read all the way through without stopping. I don’t mean the stopping for tea, or to answer the phone. I mean that stopping in the middle of the page, or anywhere in the page actually, because what you just read provokes such a mental reaction. This was one of the many places where I stopped when reading Creating a Life by James Hollis.
My first thought was, “how true”. I see connections everywhere, and I see the constancy of change. In fact, that is so important to me that I put the phrase, “becoming not being….” as the sub-head of this blog.
We are constantly becoming, ever interacting, exchanging, adapting and changing.
So, it’s true. The self doesn’t exist without relationship. I’ve thought many times that you could never know a person by observing them, through a one way glass,in an empty room. You have to see how a person interacts, with you, or with others, to have any sense of who they are.
Reminds me too, of “Ubuntu” – “I am because you are”
But then it seemed to me he’d gone too far when he added “deeds always mean relationship”.
Surely there must be deeds we commit alone?
But hold on, am I narrowing the definition of relationship too far here? Am I assuming a relationship is between two PEOPLE?
What about how I relate to Nature, to the built environment, to music and images and art? To this very book I am reading in fact!
It’s true what he says – the self really does appear in our actions, our reactions, and our interactions. It’s not a phenomenon which emerges in total isolation (even our memories and our imaginings are the creation of relationships aren’t they?)
So here’s something to consider today – what sense of self do I notice emerging from my deeds? my choices? my interactions?
Posted in from the reading room, neuroscience, psychology, science on August 20, 2012| 18 Comments »
Iain McGilchrist has released a short Kindle book entitled The Divided Brain and The Search for Meaning [ASIN:B008JE7I2M]. In it he presents an excellent precis of the ideas and findings he presents so brilliantly in his somewhat massive The Emperor and His Emissary.
The key to his thesis is that it is odd that our brains are divided into two asymmetric halves. Why is that? Why didn’t we just develop a single, unified cortex? There’s probably some big advantage in having two brains, but only if the two halves let us do different things. This is NOT an argument that the left does this and the right does that. It is NOT a claim that left-brained people deal with facts, and right-brained people are artistic. He dismisses such ideas as simplistic and erroneous. As he puts it –
Instead of asking, as of a machine, what it does – does it ‘do’ reason, emotion, language, imagery? – we should have asked – as of a person – what’s he or she like?
In other words, what are the different ways each hemisphere approaches the world?
He says that the right hemisphere primarily lets us be aware of the world, and looks for the connections, or the “between-ness” everywhere, whereas the left allows us to grasp, and, hence, manipulate the world.
The right hemisphere underwrites sustained attention and vigilance for whatever may be, without preconception. Its attention is not in the service of manipulation, but in the service of connection, exploration and relation…….One way of looking at the difference would be to say that while the left hemisphere’s raison d’être is to narrow things down to a certainty, the right hemisphere’s is to open them up into possibility.
These differences are profound and we need them both. the one helps us to pin things down, and the other opens us up to seeing change and possibilities.
Another way of thinking of the difference between the hemispheres is to see the left hemisphere’s world as tending towards fixity, whereas that of the right tends towards flow.
In his thesis, he claims that the left hemisphere way of engaging with the world has become unhealthily dominant and we’ve become stuck on its way of representing reality to us.
the purpose of the left hemisphere is to allow us to manipulate the world, not to understand it.
I highly recommend you get this book. You can easily read it through at a single sitting, then you’ll want to go right back to the start and read it again. If you haven’t read The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain will whet your appetite but it will also let you easily understand the basic premise.
The right hemisphere seems to be involved more with new experience, new events, things, ideas, words, skills or music, or whatever it may be, while they are still fresh, original and unique, and so to speak present, to the mind.
The left hemisphere abstracts and generalises, where the right hemisphere’s world remains truer to each embodied instance, and appreciates the unique.
Just stop and think for a moment what that means, and why we should want to re-balance our society by shifting the balance to the right hemispheric way of approaching the world…..
Posted in from the reading room, life, perception, personal growth, psychology on August 10, 2012| 1 Comment »
Einstein said that an important question to ask ourselves is “Is the universe friendly?”
It’s an interesting question because the answer you give influences how you experience Life.
If you think it is unfriendly, you are likely to see danger all around and to expect hostility. You are likely to respond by trying to control and conquer in order to be safe. If you think it is neither friendly, nor unfriendly, then you probably experience Life as random, brief and pointless. However, if you think it is friendly, you are more disposed to engage with an open-hearted curiosity, seeking to understand more and more.
This question which he posed is often considered in relation to thinking about the emergence of consciousness in the constantly evolving universe.
An article in this month’s Psychology Today refers to the question in this context. It’s worth a read, and concludes
Any inventory of the cosmos that omits us is like a survey of the body that overlooks the brain. In evolving the human mind, the universe has fashioned an instrument capable of understanding itself and empathizing with others. We are that instrument, and since we are part of the cosmos, we err if we judge it to lack kindness, love, and compassion. If I believe the universe is heartless, it’s because I myself do not love
Posted in from the dark room, life, perception, photography, psychology on June 25, 2012| 4 Comments »
Images evoke emotions.
I wonder what feelings you become aware of when you look at this image?
Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography, psychology on June 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »
I’ve been thinking recently (again!) about two inter-related dimensions of being human – a creatureliness and a symbolic self, as Becker describes it, or as a visible and in invisible self, a body and a soul….an so on. Then yesterday I read in the superb “The Alchemy of Illness” by Kat Duff –
The Nahuatl peoples believed that we are born with a physical heart, but have to create a deified heart by finding a firm and enduring centre within ourselves from which to lead our lives, so that our hearts will shine through our faces, and our features will become reliable reflections of ourselves. Otherwise, they explained, we wander aimlessly through life, giving our hearts to everything and nothing, and so destroy them.
That set off my thought patterns down several roads…Heartmath and the intelligence of the heart – learning the ways to use our heart-thinking (yes, there is a neural network around the heart which we use to do a kind of thinking). Then I got to thinking, reflecting on a conversation my wife and I had on waking this morning, “imagine what it would be like if what was in your soul actually shaped your face so everyone could see it” – how would you appear to others if what was in your heart shaped your appearance?
Then that last line, “Otherwise, they explained, we wander aimlessly through life, giving our hearts to everything and nothing, and so destroy them.” brought me right back to heroes not zombies, and to Kierkegaard’s line about tranquillizing ourselves with the trivial.
Two hearts……..
So, what’s in your heart right now?
Are you in touch with your soul’s purpose?
How are you responding to what your heart has to tell you?
Posted in books, education, from the reading room, health, philosophy, psychology on June 11, 2012| 1 Comment »
This blog name grows on me with the passage of time. People like it, and they tend to “get it” very quickly. I came up with it because I saw that an awful lot of people seem to live life on autopilot, but when you sit down with them in a consultation, you discover one hero after another. People are truly amazing. And every person is the hero of their own story. It’s wonderful to hear the stories unfold and see the heroes emerge.
In Becker’s “Denial of Death”, he writes
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget. Or, alternatively, he buries himself in psychology in the belief that awareness all by itself will be some kind of magical cure for his problems.
And he refers to Kierkegaard who criticised the tendency to live a “safe” life by living at “a low level of personal intensity” as a form of
Tranquilising itself with the trivial
……..there’s a lot of that about!
Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, psychology on April 12, 2012| 5 Comments »
There’s been quite a drive to reduce human beings to purposeless, temporary clusters of molecules. I don’t buy into it. For me, to understand what it is to be human involves taking on board consciousness, an inescapable subjective experience of a self, the interconnectedness of a person with others and with the rest of the universe in which we exist, and, not least, through the development of symbol manipulation and language development, a constant bent towards storytelling and seeking meaning in every day existence. (Cripes! That was quite a sentence, and, believe me, I had to stop myself there…..I could see that sentence spilling over into an entire page…)
The NY Times recently published a piece, “In Defense of Superstition“, about Matthew Hutson’s “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking”. This is one of those things which makes you wonder about the nature of reality. I don’t think reality can be reduced to its physical, material elements. There’s a lot about reality which emerges from the fact we live as conscious beings in an inextricably interconnected universe. From this perspective, what are we to make of magic, and magical thinking?
The article cites research showing that golfers told the golf ball they are to play with is a lucky ball are 35% more likely to sink the putt, and that people can improve their memory performance when in possession of a lucky charm. This doesn’t surprise me. What you believe, and what you experience emotionally and subconsciously significantly influences your behaviour and your performance.
Do you remember a movie entitle, “The Cooler“? I think it was William H Macy as an unlucky charm, employed by a casino boss to stand next to people on a winning streak, so they’d start to lose. When he falls in love, his ability to transmit bad luck disappears….fascinating movie.
We co-create our reality with the world we live in, and most of that creation doesn’t come from the “thinking” part of our brain!
The article sums up
But without it, the existential angst of realizing we’re just impermanent clusters of molecules with no ultimate purpose would overwhelm us. So to believe in magic — as, on some deep level, we all do — does not make you stupid, ignorant or crazy. It makes you human
I agree with the last two sentences, but I don’t agree with the assumption that we are “just impermanent clusters of molecules with no ultimate purpose”. Do you?
Heroes Not Zombies 