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…
Deep Listening
is probably the hardest thing to do. It’s also very important. People continuously use terms of which they think others surely know what is meant, as if these terms are exact pointers to abstract, ‘Platonian’ concepts. However: look at the brain and you notice that concepts-as-used-by-humans can never be ‘Platonian’ even if one can delineate Read the full article…
Enlightenment, Kant, AURELIS, Growth
It’s time to bring things together. This is according to me the only way forward. ‘Western Enlightenment’ points to a historical period from +/- 1650 onwards, till +/- first part of 19th century. It was multifaceted, to say the least, and came in several waves from ‘moderate’ to ‘radical’… to even ‘totalitarian’ (à la Robespierre). Read the full article…
Having ‘Control’ and Letting Go of It
I think of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (in case you don’t know him, long live the Internet). I think of wings. I think of a huge sense of freedom. Therein too lies control, be it of a very different dimension than in the phrase ‘I have everything under control’. It’s less evident. People do sometimes mind Read the full article…
The Improvisational Leader
Being ‘improvisational’ is more than improvising now and then. It’s a continuous action as the scene develops like a jam session. Latin ‘im-pro-visus’ = un-fore-seen, not having made preparations for… New situations arise and people look at you, the leader, for a solution. It’s a leader’s job to be improvisational. You improvise ‘in the moment’. Read the full article…
Inter-Religious, Deep Down
… instead of an inter-religious ‘dialogue’ that conglomerates only at the surface, while depth is safely kept out of the picture. Because that is of course no dialogue in the first place. It’s rubbing-each-other in order to elicit good feelings and putting a nice image to outside. Hidden agendas remain unchanged. Sorry. No dialogue. Even Read the full article…
Order out of Chaos?
Something can appear chaotic while containing an inherent order. In this case, the ‘chaos’ is possibly very important. People have a natural aversion to chaos. This may even be seen as a general characteristic of life: in defiance of a universal ‘fall towards entropy/chaos’, life stitches together a living space of order. Life, in this Read the full article…