Attending to body and mind and cultivating balance
To continue from where I left off yesterday… what is ‘the dance of the spirit and reptile?’ To put it simply, this is balancing the newest and oldest part of the brain, so your body and mind/spirit work in unison. To explain further bear with me while I recap and oversimplify some basic biology. The brain stem is the oldest part of the brain. Here lies our instinctual fears, and the reptiles, the first animals to walk the earth had only brain stems. Then the mammalian brain
Same ingredients, uniquely personal dish
When I created this website, everyone told me how important it was to keep it active and my initial thought was but what can I write about that’s new, that’s different? It’s all already been said many times already. But then I realized that, like food we use the same ingredients to make many different dishes and depending on subtle variations and our mood and the context, the same dish can taste very different at different times. And I remembered how important the role of t
What's important is 'Is it useful?'
I love stories and metaphors. Here is one for today. Exact source unknown. Imagine an Englishman, a Frenchman, a Chinese and an Indonesian all looking at a cup. The Englishman says, "That's a cup." The Frenchman answers, "No it's not. It's a tasse." The Chinese comments, "You're both wrong. It's a pet." And the Indonesian laughs at the others and says "What fools you are. It's a cawan." The Englishman gets a dictionary and shows it to the others saying, "I can prove that it i
Sadness
Did you see the film ‘Inside Out’? A clever idea of personifying our emotions. Many people think our emotions can be divided into good and bad emotions. They see emotions like sadness and anger and jealousy as bad and to be avoided and condemned. However, what the film brought out is that all our emotions are useful, and if we can recognize them and label them correctly, they serve to tell us what we need, and then we are in a better place to get our needs met. In the fli
