Come for a walk with me in the frozen countryside

I woke up this morning and looked outside. Thick fog. I couldn’t see more than a couple of hundred yards. Everything I could see was covered in white, icy frost. Brrr…… How horrid! At least it’s Sunday, and I can stay warm and cosy, tucked up inside my house!
Then I thought, hang on a minute, [...]

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Space-time warps in YOUR life

Here’s one way to think about the hurts and wounds in your life, and how to address them.
Gravity is a force we don’t understand. How can two objects exert an influence on each other at a great distance? There doesn’t appear to be any kind of invisible string connecting them! Einstein came up with an [...]

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Light and dark

The Celtic mind adored the light……….We need a light that has retained its kinship with the darkness. For we are sons and daughters of the darkness and of the light.
Every thought that you have is a flint moment, a spark of light from your inner darkness.
All creativity awakens at this primal threshold where light and [...]

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Complexity science

I wish someone could come up with a better name for this branch of knowledge and enquiry – calling it “complexity science” makes it seem so, well, COMPLEX! But actually it isn’t! It’s only the science of understanding reality in the raw. By that I mean understanding how natural and living systems function in the [...]

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Real world medicine

One of the things that frustrates me about clinical epidemiology (which goes by the name “evidence based medicine”) is how often it seems detached from the real world. Whilst researchers and statisticians pore over reviews of randomised clinical trials, real people with real problems turn up each day in the doctors’ consulting rooms. In the [...]

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Treating cancer – it’s not all about drugs and surgery

Researchers at Ohio State University have just published a randomised clinical trial of pyschological interventions in women with breast cancer. Here’s the summary conclusion -
breast cancer patients who participate in intervention sessions focusing on improving mood, coping effectively, and altering health behaviors live longer than patients who do not receive such psychological support. The study [...]

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Two value thinking

A few years ago I stumbled across the works of the “General Semanticists“. I won’t go into detail about this school of thought here, but it originated with a man called Alfred Korzybski in the early years of the 20th century. He wrote and taught about the way in which human beings reacted as whole [...]

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Creativity and the uniqueness of your life force

I recently came across this quotation from Martha Graham -

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. [...]

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Death avoidance or health?

What’s the point of health care? Does that seem like a question with an obvious answer? It would be reasonable to expect that the answer would be that health care is about caring for people’s health. But that’s an answer which is not really an answer. It raises the question, what is health? Stop and [...]

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Today, an amazing day

I took this photo while standing on a cold, wet platform waiting for a train to take me to work.
This is not an unusual experience. It’s not a rare experience. It’s very easy to bury your head into your shoulders, stand and shiver, and just wish you were somewhere else.
This year I’ve been reading some [...]

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