How does your day begin?

How does your day begin?
I took this photo of the sun rising behind the old factories on the other side of Stirling station yesterday, and it got me thinking about the start of the day. Every day the sun comes up (but we don’t always notice it). In some cultures and traditions this simple, daily [...]

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It’s a time of change

I took a walk at the weekend. Up through the Birks of Aberfeldy. Robert Burns wrote a poem about this place. Here he is -

He wrote well before me, in an earlier time and an earlier season.
I went to the Birks to find leaves. I love the colours of autumn. Come and have a look [...]

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Learn to yearn

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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Muriel Rukeyser’s how to be a hero

I’ve just read Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry (ISBN 0-96381-833-3). An extraordinary book.
Here is the paragraph which hit me right between the eyes. Here’s where she hits the nail, squarely, on the head….
If our imaginative response to life were complete, if we were fully conscious of emotion, if we apprehended surely the relations that [...]

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Affirmations, worst for those who need them most?

A study by psychologists has looked at the common recommendation found in self-help books – affirmations. You know the kind of thing…..where you are encouraged to repeat over to yourself phrases like “I am a lovable person”, or “I accept myself completely.”
What they found was that in people who had high self-esteem, these affirmations helped [...]

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How extroversion improves the body’s defences

Here’s an interesting study published in the journal, “Brain, Behaviour and Immunity”. In a nutshell, they’ve found a relationship between personality traits of extraversion and the levels of an inflammatory chemical in the blood (Interleukin-6). The more extraverted, the lower the levels of this chemical. Why’s that a good thing? Well, the higher levels are [...]

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Storytelling, the basis of understanding

This blog is called heroes not zombies because I believe we all tend to sleepwalk through life (in a kind of zombie way), but that we have the opportunity to wake up and be the heroes of our own stories. So, I was especially struck by the following passage in “Metaphors we live by” -
Self-understanding [...]

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Putting people first….what should we measure?

While away on a trip to Japan recently I came across a news item about Bhutan’s development of a national happiness index. I’d read about this a few years ago and thought it was interesting but maybe just a gimmick or a passing fancy. I think it was the King of Bhutan who decided that [...]

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Resilience

If control is a delusion, and it’s pursuit is ultimately futile, what would be a better strategy? Given the complexity of human, social and global life, accurate predictions are not feasible. The grander the scale of the prediction, the more likely it will turn out to be wrong.
However, at a personal level, we need some [...]

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Supersizing the Mind. Andy Clark

Where does your mind exist? There’s a longstanding “common sense” view that it’s inside your skull. But, it’s becoming apparent, that is far from the whole story. Yes, of course a lot of what we call the mind is related to brain activity and the brain is indeed inside the skull, but many researchers are [...]

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