Work-Life (in the) Balance
Work-life balance may not be the best start if it brings more emphasis on a divide between both. For ages and until relatively recently people had only a ‘life’. ‘Work’ was what you had to do to stay alive within that life. At times, one had to work really hard… still it wasn’t ‘work’ as Read the full article…
A Bully is Not an Open Leader
A bully is not open to ‘total human being’. He is not respectful. He is not free towards himself nor towards others. [see also: ‘From Bullishness to Leadership’] Enumerating the above and other ‘elements’ of bullying, is enumerating – in the negative – the ethics of Open Leadership. Contrary to the latter, a ‘bully leadership Read the full article…
Religion IS Openness
In order to ‘make deepest connection’ (re-ligare), Openness as an invitation may be sufficient to let it happen in a natural flow. This is not about openness at a purely conceptual level. It is not about ‘talking the truth’. It is rather about ‘deeply being truthful’. Of course, this is not incompatible with talking the Read the full article…
Whence Beauty?
To me, a world without beauty is hardly a world worth living in. Some tend to reduce beauty to an ‘evolutionary trick’ something like a mechanism concocted by nature only to lure us into existence and even more: keep us here… This reasoning may be correct. However, the ‘only’ is loathsome because it’s not the Read the full article…
Rituals
An action becomes a ritual when it is repeated and when it is deeply meaningful. For this, one needs to be open to it. ‘Open’ as in ‘Open Religion.’ A ritual is a repetitive action to which one attaches ‘deeper meaning’. Without ‘deeper meaning’, a ritual has no, well, meaning. It’s like an empty box, Read the full article…
Feeling Better or Being Better
Do you want to work on feeling better in this world, or rather feeling OK in a better world? This is a moral choice A better world is a world of better persons, including you. It’s not a world, of course, in which you necessarily feel worse. Still, you might even consciously choose for such. Read the full article…
16. All Psychotherapy Aside
By far the most important active factor is invisible. Dodo verdict The dodo (synonym: loathe bird) is an extinct species of bird, used by Lewis Carroll in ‘Alice in Wonderland’. Somewhere in this story a contest is held for all animals, but oddly enough, everyone may start and stop running at any time. The dodo Read the full article…
“It’s Just the Way it Is”
No, it’s not. “This is reality, to which you have to adjust.” “This is how people are.” “It’s the way of the world.” Etc. etc. I do not agree. Apparently, I never came out of my ‘monkey years’, which in my country is another term for ‘puberty / adolescence’… and I see no reason why Read the full article…
Addictive Behavior = Communication
ADDICTIVE BEHAVIOUR = SYMPTOM = SYMBOL Addictive behavior (overeating, smoking…) is a symptom, comparable to other symptoms. So you can approach it – just like all other symptoms – in 2 ways: the symptom as a not-symbolic entity. In this case, the behavior is something that you just want to get rid of as quickly Read the full article…
15. H.Pylori: a ‘Harmless’ Bacterium versus Stress
Currently, medical causal thinking is a disaster. The pre-bacterium era Life, they say, can turn on a dime. For centuries and up to +/-30 years ago, the term ‘gastric ulcer’ stood for one of the clearest psychosomatic disorders. Stress was undoubtedly the cause par excellence of a gastric ulcer [19] [39]. What’s more, there is Read the full article…
14. Is This Me, or Is It My Brain?
I use my brain, but who is ‘I’ without a brain? Is a brain an instrument of ‘I’? If this is the case, then is ‘I’ a kind of homunculus that is present somewhere in a separate box in the brain? In the Middle Ages it was thought that this was indeed the case. For Read the full article…
13. Voodoo There, Voodoo Here
100% rationality IS 100% humanity. Gods and goddesses In the 6th year of my med school I did a five-month internship in Salvador Da Bahia, Brazil. Very interesting and also very significant for the ‘sensitive’ guy I was at the time. For many reasons. Among other things because of the contact with Candomblés, a Voodoo Read the full article…
12. What Did Pavlov’s Dogs Know?
Who was being conditioned: the dogs or Pavlov? The premise of conditioning Conditioning counts on a simple perspective upon the unconscious, as a collection of mental reflex-arcs. A kind of black box between Stimulus and Response which is hardly worth the effort to be opened. So, in the world of conditioning, one does not bother. Read the full article…
11. Psyche and Cancer: No Complete Strangers to Each Other
We know very little. We certainly should not pretend. A rats’ tale In the early seventies, two researchers, R. Ader and N. Cohen, showed very clearly that there is a major role of psychological stress in the evolution of cancer in rats [10]. Others confirmed this research and recently the cellular basis of it is Read the full article…
10. Leadership not Knowing Which Way to Turn
A leader knows that a ship cannot sail without the sea. Everyone a leader A leader is not only the one at the head of a company or of a hospital for example. Actually, everyone is a kind of leader within his/her own world. Leader of a medical department, a private practice, a household, a Read the full article…
9. The Warts Gnome
The method used to remove warts is of utmost importance! (dixit the gnome) The way he works In former times, one consulted a so-called ‘warts saint’ when one was suffering from banal warts. According to many narratives, that saint garnered a lot of success. Also hypnosis seems to work. Even ‘hypnosis without trance’. Even rubbing Read the full article…
What’s New in Meditation
I would say: everything. Meditation IS about the new. Even ‘always the same’ is always new. People have been meditating for ages. Way before for instance the start of Christianity, or even Judaism. Meditation is ancient. Still, new (to many) in meditation is that meditation IS the new itself. At every moment again: the new. Read the full article…