This isn’t a quiz….well, at least, not in the sense that I know the answer! I came across these strange marks on fallen trees in a forest recently. Have you any idea what makes this happen? Is it a fungus? An insect? A worm?? Look at the variety, it’s quite astonishing!

….under the forest floor, in a small earthy cave, this sparkling jewel of a web was woven……

come closer, for a better look…..

come closer, still….

see the colours of the forest reflected here?

now let your eyes just relax out of focus and see what appears….

One of the good things about a really early morning flight is that you have the chance to see the dawn from above the clouds. It’s beautiful to see them blushing pink as the sun rises over the horizon.

This reminds me, please go and look at this. It’s a movie by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. He takes the most amazing photographs of the world from the air. Now he has made this beautiful, awe-inspiring film about the Earth and the impact made by Homo Sapiens.

….never seen one of these before!

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 event was/is marked with some kind of ritual or acknowledgment – some “salute to the sun”, or some contemplation or prayer. I guess it’s no surprise in a country like Scotland where its not likely you can actually see the sun every morning that we don’t have that kind of start to our day.

But how DO you start your day?

Do you start on auto-pilot? Some combination of washed/dressed/breakfast/out the door? If so, is there a point where you take over from the auto-pilot? At what point in the day do start to live more consciously?

Or do you start your day with some personal ritual of waking or beginning? Feel free to share if you’d like.

This caught my eye as I walked to pick up my car in Stirling Station car park last night……it’s the full moon through the spars of the new bridge. Snapped it with my camera phone.
I like it!

How often do you find yourself going over something upsetting? Something someone said or did which you found hurtful? Hurts have an impact. They make their marks on us. The bigger the hurt, the deeper, more long-lasting the mark.

Is there anything we can do reduce the impact? Or do we have to just stand and accept whatever comes our way, feeling the impacts deeply, and for the rest of our lives?

Whatever builds up our resilience, both reduces the strength of any impact, and increases our ability to bounce back, to stand back up, to find a way to go forward.

One aspect of resilience is equanimity. Balance. Stability. A kind of strength. Over centuries in many traditions and cultures people have practiced meditation to gain this kind of strength. One of the goals of meditation is increased equanimity, or greater resilience. You can’t stop events from happening, but you can have an influence on how you experience those events. My meditation teacher used the following analogy (the photos are mine!)

A mark in rock lasts a long time

A mark in sand disappears more quickly

Imagine what it’s like to make the mark on water

Now imagine what it’s like to make the mark in the air

Regular meditation practice builds resilience. Things still happen, but more and more, what people say, what people do, has less of an impact. You begin to experience less marks in the stone, less in the sand, more in the water, or, ultimately, in the air.

I like that analogy.

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a really interesting programme this week entitled Metaphor for Healing. I don’t think you’ll be able to listen to it (unless it’s still on the BBC iPlayer) but they’ve put up a good page about it on the bbc website. There’s obviously a link between issues of metaphor and those of visualisation. In fact, in some ways metaphors are tools for visualisation aren’t they? The programme talked a bit about Jan Alcoe, who used visualisation to both cope with both her disease and her treatment. It’s not hard to think that every patient should have a session about this before undergoing chemo and radiotherapy. I’ve read a lot about visualisation in cancer settings before so although her story is a particularly impressive one, it didn’t tell me anything really new. However, the rest of the programme was about the conscious use of metaphor in consultations, and I’ve not heard that discussed so clearly before.

Dr Grahame Brown, a musculo-skeletal specialist at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham, claims he is able to save hundreds of patients from the need to have spinal surgery every year simply by “reframing the negative metaphors that have been unwittingly used by their doctors that can lead to a destructive and self-fulfilling cycle”. Many of the patients he sees have been referred for surgery after becoming convinced their spine is ‘crumbling’ or that they have ‘degenerating’ disc disease, when in fact they have a prolapsed disc or other normal wear and tear that is common in most people. Yet anxious patients latch on to these suggestions and become convinced that things are only going to get worse.

Now this really is fascinating. By becoming aware of the metaphors used by the patient (typically those given to them by other doctors) which make it harder for a patient to break free from chronic pain, then giving them different metaphors, he helps them change the way they think about, perceive, and, ultimately, experience their pain. He claims that this can have such a dramatic, quick effect, that many escape not only the need for surgery, but also escape from their pain.

It’s an impressive outcome.

There is specific mention of two techniques, or approaches, based on metaphor, used by people in this programme – the Human Givens method, which is a fascinating counseling technique, and the Clean Language approach, which is based on a technique developed by a practitioner inspired by “Metaphors we live by” written by Lakoff and Johnson, one of the books which have changed the way I think about the world. Fascinating to see these ideas turn into practice.

Look at the colour of this water. It’s an amazing colour isn’t it?

Why is it that colour? It’s the effect of all the leaves on the trees of the forest through which the stream is flowing. On another day, in another season, this very water (well, actually, this very stream, not this very water!), looks an entirely different colour. In fact, a few hours earlier, or a few hours later, it looks completely different.

This got me thinking. Not just thinking how beautiful it is. It is stunningly beautiful. But how change is a such a constant, and, how whatever we see is the result of many factors, and how everything needs to be understood in it’s context, and how nothing can be reduced to some simple set of data, or simple description, without, in fact, obscuring its reality.

Maybe it’s just the way my mind works, but it also got me thinking about the interactions between the environment and the elements of the environment. I’ve just taken out a subscription to a new journal titled Ecopsychology. I’ve never come across this term before, but its the area of study which looks at the interactions between behaviour and the environment. I love it when I come across these whole new fields of human exploration and knowledge.