Heroes Not Zombies

Active and passive paths to wellness

March 19, 2011 by bobleckridge

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.”

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

Man with a strange gait

March 18, 2011 by bobleckridge

OK, I meant strange gate……

Posted in from the dark room, photography | Leave a Comment »

Surfaces and depths

March 17, 2011 by bobleckridge

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.

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, life | 2 Comments »

Fading out the background

March 16, 2011 by bobleckridge

I probably see this tree every day. It’s just that I don’t remember ever seeing it. However, because of the fog this morning, the background which the tree usually disappears into, was faded to white and suddenly…..there’s a tree!

Posted in from the dark room, photography | 1 Comment »

What storytellers do…

March 16, 2011 by bobleckridge

Read this quote from Robert Redford today in the “i” newspaper

Storytellers broaden our minds: engage, provoke, inspire, and ultimately. connect us

Fantastic!

Posted in from the reading room | Leave a Comment »

What’s this?

March 15, 2011 by bobleckridge

Posted in from the dark room, photography | 6 Comments »

Ken Wilber’s 4 quadrants

March 15, 2011 by bobleckridge

Ken Wilber’s “Integral Theory” has a number of elements. The holon is one of them. Another important element is the simple, elegant and immensely useful Four Quadrants. He simply draws a cross which yields four squares, or quadrants. On the horizontal, the upper two quadrants represent a singular perspective, and the lower two, the plural perspective. On the vertical, the left hand quadrants represent the interior, and the right hand ones, the exterior.

Even more simply, you can think of the pronouns which apply to each quadrant – upper left, is singular, interior and is communicated by using “I”, whereas, upper right, is singular exterior, so is communicated using “it”. Bottom left is plural interior, communicated with “we” and bottom right, being plural exterior, communicated with “its”.

You can see that the left hand refers to subjective experience and the right to objective.

One of the things you can do with this is map other conceptual maps onto it. So, if we take Karl Popper’s “three worlds”, then top left is “subjective”, bottom left is “cultural” and the right hand side is “objective”. Habermas describes three truths – the subjective truthfulness of I, the cultural justness of we, and the objective truth of its. You can also map Kant’s three great works against this – Critique of judgement (art and self-expression), Critique of practical reason (morals or we), and Critique of pure reason (science).

Finally, you can map onto the same plan, Plato’s Beautiful, Good and True.

I’m sure you will probably be able to come up with other parallels, but why not play with this for a bit. I think you’ll agree it provides a very useful and much more holistic framework within which to understand things.

I especially like how he values ALL four quadrants, and in so doing, makes it clear that if you only come at an issue from one of the quadrants, you’re just not going to get the full picture…..puts objective science into its right place in my opinion!

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy | 11 Comments »

The concept of a “holon”

March 14, 2011 by bobleckridge

Have you ever heard of a “holon”? It’s an idea first circulated by Arthur Koestler (read more detail here), summarised as –

1.2 The organism is to be regarded as a multi-levelled hierarchy of semi-autonomous sub-wholes, branching into sub-wholes of a lower order, and so on. Sub-wholes on any level of the hierarchy are referred to as holons.

1.3 Parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist in the domains of life. The concept of the holon is intended to reconcile the atomistic and holistic approaches.

1.4 Biological holons are self-regulating open systems which display both the autonomous properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts. This dichotomy is present on every level of every type of hierarchic organization, and is referred to as the “Janus phenomenon”.

So, taking this idea as a starting point, we can consider the whole universe to be made up of holons. I really like this idea. It reminds us that nothing exists in isolation, and nothing can be fully understood without understanding it’s relationships as well as it’s “surface properties”. Ken Wilber, in particular, has picked up the idea and elaborated further with this his four “drives” of every holon. (“A Brief History of Everything” is a good place to start if you want to read more, and here‘s an interesting summary)

Ken Wilber’s “drives” are interesting. He describes two pairs – a horizontal pair and a vertical one. The horizontal pair are “agency” and “community”. Every holon needs agency, or autonomy, to preserve its uniqueness and its individuality. We humans need that. Our immune systems are designed to quickly recognise what is “not me” and our sense of self also strengthens our feelings of uniqueness. However, we also need community, in that we also need to connect and to belong. We love and are loved. One of the most severe punishments in any jail is “solitary confinement”. We are wired to connect to others and to our environments. We need both agency and community.

The vertical pair are “self-dissolution” and “self-transcendence”. Self-dissolution is that disintegration of the whole into parts (or more correctly into sub-holons, as all holons are made of holons!). This is something we experience as illness. When things fall apart, when our systems go out of balance, in essence when we experience dis-integration, we are experiencing “self-dissolution”. The opposite of this is growth and development. The fairly new biological term for this would be “emergence” – which is the development of characteristics and behaviours previously unseen in this organism or system. Wilber terms this “self-transcendence” which is a nice counter to that of dissolution. We have the capacity to literally transcend our current state through creative growth and evolution.

Of course none of us stay the same. We all experience continual change – some of it dissolution and some of it transcendence. (I’m reminded here of the biological processes of catabolism and anabolism).

This idea – the idea of a holon, (both as seeded by Koestler, and developed by Wilber) – is, I think a wonderful one. Once you grasp it, you’ll start to understand reality differently.

Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy, science | Tagged integral theory | 3 Comments »

Resilient Japan

March 13, 2011 by bobleckridge

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.

Posted in from the living room, life | 1 Comment »