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Heart to heart

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 28, 2026| Leave a Comment »

I have a long, long love for the French language and culture. I’ve found books, articles, magazines over the years which do a couple of things which I didn’t come across in Scotland, reading English. It’s not just the way these texts are written, nor the way they use beautiful graphic art and images, it’s the subject matter they consider worth while spending time on. 

One particular book from 2009 opened up a whole way of seeing for me. The book is called “La Maladie cherche à me guérir”, and it’s by a doctor called Philippe Dransart. The book has never been translated into English as far as I’m aware, but the title in English would be something like “The Illness is searching for a way to heal me”. Dr Dransart starts from the idea of the embodied metaphor. Now, I have read about this idea elsewhere, not least in the books like “Metaphors we Live By”, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. But Dr Dransart draws from his own clinical experience to show us how often the actual words patients use, especially the body-focused metaphors they use, can be the key to understanding their suffering. Understanding not only their diseases, and why those diseases might have appeared in specific organs or tissues, but also understanding their psyche and life story, and how that connects so deeply to their unique patterns of illness. Put simply, he discovered, time and again, that when someone presented with a problem in a particular part of the body, then they’d often use metaphors about that very part when talking about themselves. 

In his book, he systematically considers metaphors and figures of speech used by patients presenting with problems in pretty much every system and organ of the body, but for my purposes here, I want to focus on only one – the heart. And, as an English speaker, I’m going to focus on the heart metaphor phrases which we use in the English language. 

I’ve already mentioned one at the very beginning….having a heart to heart. When we say that we imply that our conversation will be true, important, and intimate. You don’t have heart to heart conversations with just any stranger you might encounter in a coffee shop, do you? We have heart to hearts with loved ones, with family and friends, and with trusted professionals. In a heart to heart conversation we will talk about what’s important to us, and also, to what is shared between us. A heart to heart, does, after all, involve two people. It’s not something you do yourself, and it’s not something you’d normally try to do in a group. It’s personal. It’s specific. It’s an opening up to another. 

Let’s look at some other heart metaphors. Do you know someone who is “big hearted”? It means they are generous doesn’t it? Not at all the same as someone who is “big headed”! And notice we don’t say people are “big kidneyed” or “big livered” by the way. On the other hand, do you know anyone you think of as “heartless”? We might even apply temperature differences to these opposites. So maybe someone is “warm hearted” and another is “cold hearted”. A warm hearted person will often do, or say, something we’d describe as “heart warming” when we feel that comfortable, cosy feeling inside. 

What would you say if I were to ask you what was “dear to your heart”? You might say, not what, who, and tell me of loved ones. Or you might tell me about whatever it is that is most important to you, whatever you feel most passionate about. In fact, we tend to think of the heart when we think of passion, don’t we? Maybe we associate “will” with the head, but we associate “passion” with the heart. On the other hand, when we are de-motivated, we might say our “heart isn’t in it”. We are not really committed. It doesn’t move us, inspire us. 

We apply a weight to the heart too, don’t we? When did you last feel “light hearted”? Can you think of a time when you felt free of anxieties, content, even happy, where “light hearted” would be a good description? When I think of someone “light hearted” I think of them smiling, moving easily, maybe even skipping (if they are still young and fit enough to skip!) It’s a joyful image. But what gives you a “heavy heart”? When do you get sense of dread, a sinking feeling? We often move our metaphors down into our abdomens when we have these heavy feelings, don’t we, describing a “gut feeling” of something not quite right. Isn’t it interesting that we “feel” intuition in our hearts and in our guts? As if our bodies are telling us something, our brains haven’t quite figured out yet. 

The heart, of course, is the seat of love, isn’t it? We use a stylised image of a heart, usually a red one, as an emoji to say we love someone or something. We put red hearts on the Valentine cards. We make a heart symbol with our two hands when we want to communicate love at a distance. How often do you see athletes or performers do that when their fans are loudly applauding an achievement? 

When we fall in love, the very sight of our loved one can make our hearts “skip a beat”, and if they abandon us, we feel “heart broken”. In unresolved grief, we might even say someone died of a broken heart. 

The heart is also the seat of excitement. There’s a Dutch knitting podcaster who my wife listens to, who often talks about something being “heart jumping” – which, although not an expression I’ve heard much in English speakers, is a great one for conveying what is exciting, what stirs her or inspires her. 

Can you think of any others?

There are two more I’d like to consider. The first is how we oppose the head and the heart, saying someone lets their heart rule their head, or vice versa. Usually there, we are talking about the balance between rational thought, cognition, and feelings and emotions. 

And here’s my most favourite one, which comes from “The Little Prince” by Saint-Exupery. The fox asks the Prince if he want to know his secret. 

“It is very simple. The important things in life you cannot see with your eyes, only with your heart”

Isn’t that wonderful?

But how do we do that? How do we find the important things in life by seeing with our heart? 

When I was at university I was taught about the heart, its structure of four chambers, with valves between the atria and the ventricles, its muscle cells with their astonishing ability to beat out a rhythm, its incredible system of production and distribution of electrical currents to co-ordinate the beating of those muscle cells, its blood supply and its nerve supply, and a lot about the diseases of the heart, how to diagnose and treat them. 

But it was only years after graduation, when I was working as a young doctor, that I came across the discovery that the system of nerves around the heart was much more complex and powerful than had previously been thought. 

There’s a special kind of nerve in the human body called the neurone. We have somewhere between 80 and 100 billion of these cells in our brains, and another billion spread throughout the body. These neurones either transmit information up to the brain from our sensory organs and from specialised sensors which are spread through the other tissues of the body. Or they are responsible for sending electro-chemical signals from the brain to all our muscles, co-ordinating which contract, and which relax. 

The 100 billion neurones in the body are each directly attached to as many as 5,000 other neurones forming an astonishingly complex web known as a neural network. I mean, these numbers are beyond our comprehension, aren’t they? They are just mind boggling! 

For a long time we’ve paid a lot more attention to the neural networks in the brain than we have to the ones in other parts of the body. But we now know that there are in fact important neural networks which surround especially the heart and the gut. That discovery is fascinating enough, but, what I find even more fascinating is that the nerves connecting the network around the heart to the one in the brain are mainly carrying information from the heart to the brain. Only a minority of them are carrying instructions from the brain to the heart. 

So, it turns out, the heart is more than a complex muscular pump responsible for distributing blood around our arteries and veins. It’s actually doing some of the processing we used to think was exclusive to the brain. 

What’s it doing? Well it’s now known as heart intelligence. It’s gathering information and processing it before passing it on to the brain. 

I mean, that’s fascinating enough, isn’t it? But there’s more. We’ve discovered something else. Everything in the world which beats a rhythm sends out electromagnetic waves. As the rhythm of the heart changes so does the pattern of these waves. 

You know how in medical dramas on tv there is often a heart monitor attached to some sick person lying in a bed? The monitor shows the beating rhythm of the heart, with a little line running across the screen. A flat line means the heart has stopped beating. A healthy pattern is of little spikes appearing in that line at regular intervals. 

Well, it turns out, those intervals shouldn’t be too regular. The actual gap between each beat of the heart should be varying, ever so slightly. We can measure that variation and we call it “heart rate variability”. 

Different degrees of variability send out different patterns and strengths of electromagnetic waves. We’ve discovered a particularly important pattern, which we call “coherence”. When the rhythm of the heart achieves coherence a number of powerful, important healthy changes occur throughout the body. This rhythm affects the release of certain hormones and other chemicals, it affects the tone of the other muscles, and it affects the activity of the brain. Not only that, but heart rate coherence is associated with very distinct emotional states. It’s a two way process if you like. We can focus on the heart and induce both coherence and particular emotions, and we can relive certain emotional experiences and induce heart rate coherence.

I first learned about all this when I came across the publications of a group of researchers in America who described this phenomenon, and were teaching people how to achieve it. They called it “Heartmath”. I took the training programme and taught the techniques to many of my patients over the years. 

I’d like to teach one of these techniques right now. It’s called “Quick Coherence”.

There are three steps to achieve “Quick Coherence” – a basic Heartmath technique, and by the way, you can find out a lot more about these techniques at the website of the Hearthmath Institute. 

Step 1. Heart focus. Bring your attention or your focus to the heart area of your body. Remember how important attention is? It activates and it magnifies. So we want to bring our attention now to the heart area of the body.

Step 2. Heart breathing. Take three, slow, deep, even breaths, filling the heart area of your body with oxygen, then emptying your lungs of all the carbon dioxide. Slowly in, slowly out, for three breaths. Just these three deep, diaphragmatic breaths resets a part of the nervous system we call the “autonomic nervous system”, calming us down, settling us.

Step 3. Heart feeling. Now recall an event where you experienced one of the positive, heart felt emotions. Here’s a couple of ones I use to give you an idea of the kind of event I mean. One is one of my grandchildren running up to me, shouting “grandpa!” and jumping up into my arms. That’s a great one! Another is looking out over Ben Ledi from my living room window when we have one of those gorgeous deep red sunsets – just amazing! Pick one of your own, and recollect it. Stay with that memory until you become aware that you are feeling that feeling again. This is about recreating a feeling. Once you have it, that’s it. You’re there.

Congratulations, you just managed “Quick coherence”.

Many of my patients would use that technique to escape from a panic attack, or to settle a state of agitated anxiety. It’s quick. It’s effective. And it gets more effective the more you practice it. 

I describe the exercise in a bit more detail here – https://heroesnotzombies.com/2012/02/07/heartmath-a-simple-guide/

But we can do something else with this state of “coherence”. We can use it to access our heart intelligence. Let me just suggest one way to do that. Start by following the steps to achieve coherence, then ask your heart what it wants you to know. Just sit quietly for a few minutes, maintaining this coherent state with slow, deep breaths, and notice what comes up for you. Alternatively, ask a specific question. Is there something you are trying to decide? Is there a problem you are trying to solve? In the state of coherence, ask your heart for its suggestions. Ask it to help you decide. 

All this is a very deliberate, very conscious way of accessing our heart intelligence. But, in reality, this is just the way we are. We are using heart intelligence all the time. It never goes away. It’s just that it is occurring in the background, below the level of consciousness. 

But heart coherence isn’t just an exercise. As the research has shown it is associated with certain emotional states, namely, love, awe, joy, excitement, and contentment, ease, calm and peace. So when we experience an everyday event which generates one of those emotions in us, it sets up the heart to enter into coherence. The same thing happens if we re-create in our minds a particularly vivid memory of an event where we experienced one of those emotions. That’s the step 2 in the quick coherence exercise. 

There’s a way to make all this happen more often. Practice. Both the practice of an exercise like the one I’ve just described, or setting an intention at the start of the day. When we set an intention, it doesn’t mean that the universe magically aligns itself to that intention, but it can feel like that. It means we heighten our ability to notice whatever might align with that intention. 

You can prove this for yourself with a simple exercise. Pick a colour. Any colour. Now during the course of the day take a photo of whatever you see that is that colour. It’s likely you’ll pretty quickly start to see that colour everywhere. 

Well you can do the same with the heart. How about you set an intention to notice the moments in the day when you feel warm hearted, or light hearted? Or how about moments when you experience what the Dutch vlogger calls “heart jumping”? 

It’s that old thing of attention magnifying whatever it is focused on. An intention like this is a kind of focus, and it increases the chances of you experiencing what aligns with it. 

You can also increase your experience of heart centred living and seeing by reflecting at the end of the day – what did I experience today that was “dear to my heart”? What did I do which made me feel “my heart is in this”? Did I have any “heart to heart” conversations? 

Because there is another aspect to this heart coherence thing that I haven’t talked about yet. Remember how I said anything which beats with a rhythm sends out waves into the world? Well, anything which CAN beat with a rhythm can pick up those waves, and align itself. 

You know there is a story about the clockmaker who had several old clocks in his workshop. The kinds of clocks which work with a pendulum. At the end of the day, he would set each clock pendulum swinging. Before he left the room he could see that each pendulum was swinging its own rhythm, left to right and back again. When he came back to the workshop the following day he noticed that every single pendulum was swinging in synchrony. They had aligned themselves. That’s a physical phenomenon called “entrainment”…..the rhythms coming into alignment with each other. Well, the Heartmath researchers discovered they could measure the electromagnetic waves coming from the human heart. In fact they could measure them outside of the body as they spread into the environment. And you know what? They found that if someone achieved heart coherence, then the person standing next to them was more likely to develop it too. The wave pattern travelled from one person to the next….entrainment. Or, maybe you could say, “attunement”. Now this happens, not only with coherence, but with other patterns too. Maybe that at least partly explains why we feel uncomfortable around certain people, or why we can “pick up an atmosphere” in a room. 

But here’s the exciting part. If we deliberately practice coherence, both through exercises and emotional experiences, the we can spread those healing waves to others. 

Do you find that surprising? Well, let me tell you one other finding….that the power of the transmission increases when two people touch. So, one person whose heart is in coherence, holding hands with another is likely to induce coherence in their heart too. 

Now, you’re probably thinking…isn’t this a two way process? Isn’t the disturbed or anxious pattern likely to be transferred too? Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s true. But signals have a power, and the more we practice coherence, the more powerfully we will transmit that to others. 

Intentions and reflections. They can both train our attention. So let’s put our heart into both of them. 

How about a Mary Oliver poem?

An Old Story

Sleep comes its little while. then I wake

in the valley of midnight or three a.m.

to the first fragrances of spring.

which is coming, all by itself, no matter what.

My heart says, what you thought you have you do not have.

My body says, will this pounding ever stop?

My heart says: there, there, be a good student.

My body says: let me up and out, I want to fondle

those soft white flowers, open in the night. 

Her heart says, “there, there, be a good student”. Why not take that advice? Give it a go. Sit yourself down somewhere, take the three, deep breaths slowly, and ask “what does my heart have to say?” Maybe nothing will come to mind. Maybe something clear will appear. Maybe something will suddenly pop into your consciousness later, even at night, asleep, in a dream. 

In episode two of my podcast, “More Good Days”, I shared some music with you which I collected together into a “More Good Days” playlist. So, I thought, today, I’ll make a playlist for this episode, “Heart to heart”, gathering songs which mention the heart. 

I’m going to start with Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”. This goes all the way back to my first year at university, 1972, and even though, now, I’m really “growing old”, I think the “heart of gold” is still worth seeking out in life. I feel so blessed to have discovered so many of them! 

I am a life long Genesis fan, not just the Peter Gabriel years, and I’ve got many, many favourite Genesis tracks in my favourites list. “Hold on My Heart” still moves me every time I hear it. 

“Heartbeats” by Jose Gonzales, is a beautiful song, with the memorable line – “sharing different heartbeats in one night”. We are all different, but is there anything more beautiful than sharing our different heartbeats?

“Heart” by Sleeping at Last, only mentions the heart in the title, not in the lyrics, yet it is a gorgeous, heart felt song. 

“My Heart Will Go On”, Celine Dion. Oh my, this ballad has been played a bit too much at times, but, returning to it today, flipping heck, it still reduces me to tears! 

“Heart and Soul”, by Roseaux and Olle Nyman, might be completely new to me, but the line “You’ll remain like a song in my heart and soul” reeled me in. Isn’t that what Celine Dion sings about in “My Heart Will Go On”? And isn’t that a beautiful metaphor that illuminates the deepest truth – that we keep each other “like a song” in our “heart and soul”? 

“The Shape of My Heart”, by Sting. Sting is another of my favourite singers who has written so many beautiful songs. This song asks me, and asks you, what is the shape of your heart? 

Finally, I’m suggesting an instrumental track, Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” which holds my heart and makes it soar. 

Until next time, bonne journée. Have a good day. 

Here’s a link to a Spotify playlist of these songs – 

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Life after death

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 4, 2026| 2 Comments »

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.” The Secret History. Donna Tartt. 

Throughout my career in Medicine my everyday was spent in one to one consultations with individual patients. My focus was always the person present before me. So you might think I’d be a firm believer in the physical world, and, indeed, I am. 

I found that patients who were suffering were often separated from the here and now, and that, one way to help them find relief was to bring their attention back to the present, teach them to notice and wonder about the everyday. 

I described myself as a wholistic practitioner because I understood each person as a whole being, not divisible into separate realms of mind and body, and certainly not reducible to the body alone. 

But is there more than this? 

When a person dies, is that it? Last chapter written. Book finished. Gone. 

That’s not my experience. Here’s why. 

A human being, a person, is not contained fully within the skin and bones of a body. We exist in relationship. We come to be within relationship. Relationship to others, certainly, but also relationship to the world in which we live. Our senses are activated by the signals they receive from the environment (and, yes, they are also activated by our own minds and bodies). Our world view is created by our experiences and events. We are beings constantly changing, constantly becoming. We are creative beings, always in the process of receiving, giving, expressing, making the everyday unique. 

I read someone recently saying that when they lost their parent, they suffered two losses….the loss of their loved one, and the loss of that part of themselves which only existed in relationship with that loved one. I think that’s an incredibly important insight. 

We are multi-faceted creatures, with a Self which is best understood as a “community of selves”. We experience, and others experience, a different self at work, from at home, a different self with a close friend, with a lover, with a competitor. 

It’s helpful to understand that we are the totality of the multiple relationships in our lives….past, present and future. Yet, where are these selves? Despite advances in neuroscience and imaging techniques we still cannot pinpoint these different aspects of the Self. We know some of the key brain areas involved. But we’ve also discovered that complexes of nerve networks, and chemical messaging pathways in the gut, around the gut, around the heart, and, indeed, throughout our physical body, are also involved. 

Within psychology, neuroscience, and the developing disciplines of psychoneuroimmunology and psychoneuroendocrinology, we have learned that our emotions and our cognition is “embodied”. In other words, they are not confined to our brains. Others have shown that we are good at outsourcing some of our cognition to the extent that we should think of our psyches as not simply “embodied”, but also, “extended”…..extended into the environment and into others. I suppose that’s become all the more obvious with our new technologies. Our phones have taken over vital parts of our memory functions, vital parts of our cognition. We use technology to create what is popularly called a “second brain”. 

But, even though we now understand that no human being lives in complete isolation, even though we now understand that we are not fixed beings captured within physical bodies, isn’t there even more to be understood? 

I think there is. And there’s a clue in that quote from “The Secret History”. We humans have always believed in ghosts, but, nowadays we call them by different names – memory, the unconscious. 

I think we see this best when we consider great artists and musicians. We can recognise a Van Gogh, even if we haven’t seen a particular painting before. We can identify Frank Sinatra even if he’s singing a song we’ve never heard before. We can spot a Mary Oliver poem, a Shakespeare play, a Hemingway novel. Can’t we? Because that’s the thing about the great creators. They were great at expressing their uniqueness. And when that uniqueness resonates with so many people, it can ripple down through not just years, but centuries. 

Even within a single family, there are characters whose uniqueness made such an impact that their “presence” is still felt, and known, generations later. 

There is something about the person which exists and persists outside of, and beyond the body, beyond the mind-body, beyond the brief period of history marked by two dates, a date of birth, and a date of death. 

It’s partly memories, but it’s also partly unconscious patterns of behaviour, patterns of speech or thought, sayings, expressions, the undercurrents of our everyday. It’s the lingering traces of uniqueness. 

You see, we can’t help but change this world, just by being alive. We consume, we metabolise, we send out into the environment molecules, energies, waves, thoughts, ideas and feelings. The world is never the same tomorrow as it is today, and that active, constant process of movement, of adaptation, of growth, of actions and reactions, ripples outwards over much greater distances and timescales than we can be aware of. 

We don’t just stand on the shoulders of giants, we live with them. Don’t you think it might be worthwhile getting to know some of them? We can still reach so many of those unique and amazing people. We can still develop healthy, creative relationships with Bach, with the Beatles, with Van Gogh, Turner, Picasso, with Jane Austen, Keats, T S Eliot, Rodin, Michelangelo and Leonardo, even if they are “long since gone”, because their uniqueness lives on. 

We don’t have to focus solely on the past either, because there is no doubt we are influenced by others every day. We can choose who we want to pay attention to (even if certain massive egos make it hard to ignore them!). We can choose which songs to listen to, which poems to read, which people we want to spend time with. Or we can just be blown along like zombies, driven this way and that, unconsciously, unthinkingly, our days determined by those who seek to influence and control us for their own purposes. 

There are such things as ghosts, and some of them, aren’t even dead yet…..

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Creative environments

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 23, 2025| Leave a Comment »

My area of work was health. I worked as a doctor over four decades and I learned a lot about what made for a healthy environment and what was a more toxic or harmful one. I reckon the characteristics of healthy environments are pretty universal. We all need to breathe clean air, drink clear water, eat nutritious food, have nourishing and caring relationships. There’s a lot of evidence about the positive healing effects of natural environments. I say “natural” but what I mean is, as opposed to built environments. Trees and forests stimulate healthy changes in body and mind, but busy six lane motorways, not so much. But even within these universalities we are all different, so, for some, it’s healing to walk by the shore, or to gaze out at the ocean, breathing in the salt air. For others, the most healing environments are in the mountains and lakes, breathing the clear, fresh air of a little altitude, surrounded by birdsong and wildflowers (“and not or” remember…..both these environments can be good for the same person) 

I read a section of Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” recently (I’m working my way through, reading and meditating on, one section a day just now. It’s such a rich resource)….this morning’s section was “Setting” where he discusses what environments are creative, illustrating how very different ones allow us access to different flows from the universe, each of which can stimulate our intuition. He points out how tranquil natural environments allow us to appreciate the direct information from the universe, whereas, busy peopled places, like cafes, town centres etc, can allow us to tune in to the universe as filtered through human beings. In all situations it’s a question of detached awareness, so that we can notice patterns, but not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by them. That made me think of the phenomenon we call doomscrolling, where we get caught up in social media feeds. They too can be sources of creative stimulation if we allow ourselves to notice the patterns and themes, and not get caught up in them. 

In fact, Rick also suggests cultural environments where we focus on reading, music, visual art, etc to pick up the information from the universe filtered through culture. 

The most important point he makes is that we are all different. His conclusion is that we need to “hear the chimes of the cosmic clock ring, reminding [us] it’s time. Your time to participate.”

It is.

It’s your time to participate, to become aware, to trust your intuition and to engage. Which environments do you find most conducive to creativity? What factors make a positive contribution to your creativity?

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I contain multitudes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 2, 2025| Leave a Comment »

A recent book review in New Scientist opened my eyes to something completely new to me – microchimerics. I’m pretty sure I’ve never come across the word before. Here’s the introductory paragraph of the review, which, I believe, captures the essence of the book –

“We now know that during pregnancy, fetal cells cross the placenta into the mother, embedding themselves in every organ yet studied. Likewise, maternal cells, and even those that crossed from my mum to me, can make their way into my kids. And things might get even more chimeric – I have older sisters, so their cells, having passed into my mum during their own gestation, might have then found their way into me and, in turn, into my kids. This fascinating idea – that we are a holobiont, composed not only of human cells and microbes but also fragments of others – and its implications sit at the heart of Hidden Guests: Migrating cells and how the new science of microchimerism is redefining human identity by Lise Barnéoud.”

I’ve long been aware of the discoveries of Lynn Margulis, who back in the 1960s published “On the origin of mitosing cells”, from which she developed the theory that the component parts of our cells evolved from separate unicellular life forms collaborating and incorporating – in other word, “symbiosis”. We humans are perhaps the most complex of all multicellular organisms ever discovered, and, it seems, multicellular organisms evolved by separate, unicellular ones co-operating and collaborating. 

I was taught in Medical School, that each of us is composed of many more cells which aren’t of “human origin”, than we are of our “own” family ones. Whole communities of micro-organisms live on and inside our bodies. We’ve come to think of these communities are “biomes”, and the gut biome in particular has been shown to be crucially important in everything from our immune defences, to our emotions and, even, cognition. Quite simply, we couldn’t live without them. 

Another thing I was taught in Medical School was that all of our cells die off and are replaced, so that many times over the course of the average lifetime, we find ourselves with a complete set of cells which we didn’t have when we were younger. In many ways it’s best to think of ourselves, not as discrete, separate, fixed entities, but rather as flows – flows of cells, of chemicals, of substances, energies and information. 

So, at a biological level, we do indeed “contain multitudes”, as Whitman wrote so beautifully in his poem, “Song of Myself”. 

These latest findings about microchimeric cells are only the latest discovery into this reality….we aren’t just creatures with many facets, or features, we are creatures containing multitudes. 

All of this resonates with Miller Mair’s theory of mind which I’ve long found convincing – “instead of viewing any particular person as an individual unit, I would like you to entertain, for the time being, the ‘mistaken’ view of any person as if he or she were a ‘community of selves.’ I found this metaphor, of a community of selves, rather than a single self, to be incredibly useful in understanding both my patients and myself. It is the psychological equivalent of the biological one of “biomes”.

The “community of selves” idea came back to my mind recently when I read a post on social media where the writer said that when their father died, they lost not just him, but a part of themselves. I hadn’t really thought about that before, but it strikes me as very true. Because each of these “selves” which we experience arises within particular relationships, and we can become aware of how certain selves are only present within those particular relationships. Miller Mair describes how some of the “selves” in our “community” are short lived, whereas others persist and become more integral, or core, to who we are. I’m sure that’s the case with those who we love most, those about whom we care the most. So, there is, indeed, a part of ourselves which will be diminished, or even lost, when a loved one dies. 

I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered the story of the “air telephone” in the garden of a survivor of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It’s an incredibly moving story. You can read it here – https://observer.co.uk/style/how-we-live/article/wind-phone-japan-grief and it’s beautifully told in the “This American Life” podcast in this episode – https://www.thisamericanlife.org/597/one-last-thing-before-i-go-2016

The telephone box, containing a telephone which wasn’t connected to anything, became a place to grieve, by allowing survivors to spend some time speaking to their dead loved ones. This story came back to my mind the other day when I was watching the final scene of the final episode of DCI Banks, where the detective builds a small cairn up on a hill, as a place to go where he could speak to his dead loved one. 

Culturally, we’ve shifted away from graveyards filled with the headstones of those who have passed, to cremations, with the remains scattered in places of meaning, or, sometimes, behind a plaque, but, whatever we do, we need to find the special places to connect, to share some time and space, not just to mourn, but to keep alive the unique parts of our selves which those loved ones created with us. 

We do, indeed, contain multitudes. In so many ways. We are woven from such complex threads of DNA, of cells, of families, societies and cultures. We are not separate, and we are not alone. 

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Creative environments

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 26, 2025| Leave a Comment »

My area of work was health. I worked as a doctor over four decades and I learned a lot about what made for a healthy environment and what was a more toxic or harmful one. I reckon the characteristics of healthy environments are pretty universal. We all need to breathe clean air, drink clear water, eat nutritious food, have nourishing and caring relationships. There’s a lot of evidence about the positive healing effects of natural environments. I say “natural” but what I mean is, as opposed to built environments. Trees and forests stimulate healthy changes in body and mind, but busy six lane motorways, not so much. But even within these universalities we are all different, so, for some, it’s healing to walk by the shore, or to gaze out at the ocean, breathing in the salt air. For others, the most healing environments are in the mountains and lakes, breathing the clear, fresh air of a little altitude, surrounded by birdsong and wildflowers (“and not or” remember…..both these environments can be good for the same person) 

I read a section of Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” this morning (I’m working my way through, reading and meditating on, one section a day just now. It’s such a rich resource)….this morning’s section was “Setting” where he discusses what environments are creative, illustrating how very different ones allow us access to different flows from the universe, each of which can stimulate our intuition. He points out how tranquil natural environments allow us to appreciate the direct information from the universe, whereas, busy peopled places, like cafes, town centres etc, can allow us to tune in to the universe as filtered through human beings. In all situations it’s a question of detached awareness, so that we can notice patterns, but not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by them. That made me think of the phenomenon we call doomscrolling, where we get caught up in social media feeds. They too can be sources of creative stimulation if we allow ourselves to notice the patterns and themes, and not get caught up in them. In fact, Rick also suggests cultural environments where we focus on reading, music, visual art, etc to pick up the information from the universe filtered through culture. 

The most important point he makes is that we are all different. His conclusion is that we need to “hear the chimes of the cosmic clock ring, reminding [us] it’s time. Your time to participate.”

It is.

It’s your time to participate, to become aware, to trust your intuition and to engage. 

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Materials, energies, information flows

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »

One way to understand how deeply interconnected we are, and how change, not statis, is the norm, is to think of three flows – flows of materials, substances, atoms, molecules, and other particles; flows of energy, electromagnetic, gravitational, sounds, and other energy waves; and, information, language, symbols, ideas, and thoughts? You might have other examples for each of these three flows. You might dispute one or more of the ones I’ve chosen, but let’s stick with the general idea here – there are flows of materials, energies and information which swirl around this planet. The flow around, into and through us, for the most part, invisibly. And they flow out of, and beyond, us…changed.

It’s almost like we are a wave, or a vortex. A whirlpool perhaps, a coalescence, an efflorescence, transforming these flows into something which has self-integrity, something which appears separate, and consistent over the course of a lifetime. We, like everything else on this little planet, are transient, and exist only as a temporary flux. Some writers describe us as being like a wave which appears briefly on the surface of the ocean, a wave which can be pointed to, a wave which can located, even named. Waves don’t leave the ocean, and they don’t last for long, soon dissipating and disappearing back into the vast waters from which they came.

The chapter I read in Rick Rubin’s, The Creative Act, today, describes the idea of data, entering us, filling our inner vessel, where it is changed, not least by the relationships which from between it, and what was already there. He says these relationships produce our beliefs and stories, and, ultimately, our world view.

We can choose what we want to make with all of this – our unique stories, our art, our creations – and then we can choose to share them, where they set off, hopefully, to encounter others, other stories, other creations, other people.

I don’t like the word “data”. I’m sure it’s just a personal thing, but I have a feeling or disgust, or repulsion, when I come across the word “data”. I know, for many others, “data” is the stuff of their daily existence, maybe even what gives their lives meaning. But, I just don’t like it. I prefer the word “information”. I prefer “stories”. I prefer “encounters” and “relationships” and “patterns”. But, as I say, maybe that’s just me. I’m also not a great fan of the idea of a “vessel” inside us…..just as I’m not a fan of the idea of memory being like a filing cabinet in the brain somewhere. So, I prefer this concept of flows, flows of materials, energies and information, which we alter as they enter our inner “vortex”, and emerge changed as we breathe, or act, or talk them out into the world again.

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Tuning in

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »

“There’s a time for certain ideas to arrive,
and they find a way
to express themselves through us.”

There’s a theory about where ideas come from, and where memories reside. I’ve read this theory, or some version of it, in several places over the years. Most recently I read it in Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act”. He suggests that sometimes great ideas come to us but we don’t act on them, then some time later we see them expressed by someone else. It isn’t that other people have stolen our ideas, it’s that the idea’s time has come, and if we don’t act on it, then someone else may.

I read a very similar view a few years ago in Elizabeth Gilbert’s excellent, “Big Magic”, where she said if we don’t write when inspiration comes our way, then, maybe somebody else will. Maybe the idea or inspiration will flow on to someone else because it needs to be expressed. Maybe we will miss our opportunity.

Iain McGilchrist, in “The Matter with Things”, explores memory and consciousness, and dismisses the idea that they lie encased in our skulls. Rather, he argues, our brains act as “receivers” which filter out some of the signals being received to present us with our experiences of consciousness and memory.

Others have argued something very similar……from Jung’s “collective unconscious”, to Sheldrake’s “morphic fields’.

So, it’s not a new idea that we have the ability to “tune in” to whatever is flowing through the universe, nor that that includes ideas, inspirations, memories, and so on. This tuning in is a bit like turning on a radio, the old fashioned, analogue kind, turning the dial, and listening as voices and music begin to appear in the white noise, first of all quiet and fuzzy, till we tune in better and it comes through loud and clear. Aren’t you still amazed that you can sit in a room somewhere, hearing only silence, but, in fact you are surrounded by, you are bathing in, a whole world of songs, stories and speech? You just need to switch on the radio, and tune it in for it all to be revealed.

That still amazes me.

But the idea that the universe is full of stories, words, ideas, images, and music, and that all we need to do is to create the space for it to appear, all we need to do is tune in, and listen….then be inspired…… then we can choose to act on these inspirations, these dreams, these ideas…..express them. Well, that amazes me too.

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The importance of connections

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »

This is one of the most extraordinary trees I’ve encountered. The one on the left seems to have reached out to the one on the right, then the two trees have merged to continue upwards together as one trunk. I don’t know how they did this. It’s like grafting but as best I can tell this wasn’t a forest where there was active grafting happening. I’m pretty sure they’ve managed this all by themselves.

This image is one of my favourites and it always makes me think about the importance of connections. There really isn’t any species of life where each organism exists all by itself, disconnected, as it were, from its fellows, from other creatures, and from its environment. We can only imagine that an organism could exist completely separately if we think of it as a fixed, bounded object. But, in reality, there are no fixed, bounded objects.

As we zoom in and in to look deeper and deeper into any organism, or so-called “object”, we get down to the atoms we all learned about at school. But twentieth century physics has enabled us to look inside those, previously imagined, “fixed” objects, and we’ve discovered that there is no final, fixed material in there. Rather, even atoms are interactions between flows of energy and information, sparkling briefly in and out of existence. They aren’t fixed. They aren’t separate.

Human beings have evolved to have the longest period of dependency for their young. It takes years and years for babies to learn enough to be able to survive….I was going to say, “by themselves”, but, actually we never live “by ourselves”……..independently. So we have evolved superbly social capabilities. It has been argued that we are, in fact, THE most social of all animals.

Yet we swallow the myth of the “Self made man”, of the “hero”, or “genius”, who has somehow come to be all by themselves, without the help and support over their years, of others. It’s a nonsense. The narcissistic, massively egotistical politicians we see today are totally deluded. They only have what they have because of others, because of their connections. Same goes for the tech billionaires. They didn’t create money from nowhere, they grabbed it from others. They didn’t invent and build the technologies they own all by themselves, they profited from the skills and work of many others.

Maybe we need to follow connections a bit more carefully in order to realise just how co-dependent everyone really is.

Finally, let me zoom out a bit and consider nation states. These are inventions. They didn’t drop down onto Earth from the sky, fully formed. Some human beings, some time in the past, staked out the borders and said everything inside these lines is “mine” or “ours”, then fought off any attempts by their neighbours to live on any of that land. Those borders around the nation states are way more permeable than the politicians would like you to believe. The entire planet has one water cycle. You can’t keep separate what flows into one ocean from another. You can’t keep what flows into an ocean separate from the sky, the rivers and the lakes. Same with air. We have one atmosphere around the entire planet. You can’t stop radiation from a disaster like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island spreading freely across “borders”. Same goes for most species in the world – for bacteria, viruses (remember Covid??), insects, birds, plants and many mammals. As each species is lost through loss of habitats, connections are broken, and we are all diminished. We humans are one species. It doesn’t matter which part of the map someone has drawn is where we were born, or where we live now. Our fellow humans aren’t only those in our village, our city, or even our nation state. We are inextricably connected to them all. We are inextricably connected to the entire planet.

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Our entanglements

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 2, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I’ve been watching the series, 1883, recently. There’s one scene I found especially thought provoking. The character, Shea, or “Captain”, talking about grief, describes his belief that when you love someone a part of their soul becomes embedded in yours, and a part of yours in theirs. His wife, who died from smallpox, had a dream to see the ocean, so he’s making his trek West across America to get to the ocean, so that he can share that experience with the part of her soul he carries in his forever.

Whatever you believe about souls or spirits, this is either a beautiful fact, or a wonderful metaphor. I am sure that when we love someone, and they love us, then we do become entangled forever. Even if there is physical separation resulting from life paths which diverge and take us to other towns, or other countries, even if there is the physical separation of death, then this entanglement continues.

I often think that a person is more than the physical existence of their body. They are their personality, their stories, and, indeed, their soul. Every single one of us changes this world simply by living in it. It’s inevitable because we are so embedded and interconnected. The changes we make are unique. There was never the distinct you, before you were born, and there will never be an identical copy of your life at any time in the future. We impact on those who encounter us. We are changed by our encounters.

So, as memories and stories continue, so does the entanglement of two souls.

I’ve understood that for a long time, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I might share my wonder of the world, my amazements and delights, with my loved ones, parts of whose souls I carry inside mine.

I like that idea. It’s beautiful.

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Paying attention to something makes it bigger

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 23, 2025| Leave a Comment »

We have two focus modes in our brains, with each of our cerebral hemispheres using one or the other. The left hemisphere engages with the world through a narrow focus. It pays attention to re-cognising what we already know. It tries to help us identify objects, literally grasp them, or understand and manipulate them. The right hemisphere engages with the world through a broad focus, paying attention to the bigger picture. It seeks out patterns, connections and relationships. When the left hemisphere identifies something it should pass that info to the right for it to be contextualised. Sadly, we’ve developed habits of not bothering to do that, sticking with our generalisations and abstractions.

What we pay attention to becomes magnified. It is the means by which we engage with the world. It creates our experience of the world. If we prioritise the left hemisphere focus we engage with a world of objects, of tools and “things”. We engage with a desire to manipulate and control. But if we prioritise the right hemisphere we engage with a world of relationships, of contexts and patterns, with a world of subjects. We engage with a desire to belong, to make connections, and to see the whole picture.

We live in what has been termed “the attention economy” where the big digital companies make their money through advertising, and advertising only works by grabbing your attention. Politicians have become adept at this too, casting out statements designed to shock, enrage or stoke fear….because shock, anger and fear are primary responses to threat.

But as you’re “doomscrolling” or reading social media headlines and posts, which of them command your attention? Are they the ones that make you feel enraged, afraid, insecure, inadequate? If so, those are the feelings which are going to get magnified. Those are the feelings that are going to shape your perception of reality. Or are they the ones which delight you, which stir feels of wonder, curiosity or joy? Do they put you in touch with the three classic values of beauty, truth and goodness? Do they increase your feelings of dignity, decency and compassion? If so, that’s how you are going to perceive reality.

What we focus on, and what’s important here is to be aware of what we are focused on, shapes our world and our day to day experience of life.

Our attention is our super power. We should use it wisely.

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