Featured

Stressbusters! The Mindfulness Approach.

FREE taster session this week, Thursday 10th April, 630-8.

Long term stress is damaging to your health. Ongoing high levels of cortisol and other stress hormones destroy healthy muscles, bones, and cells, suppresses the immune system, impairs digestion, and weakens the endocrine system. Sleep problems, chronic head and back aches, general muscular tension, high blood pressure and other cardiac issues are also common.

Often we don’t even realise how stressed we actually are. Our coping mechanisms (alcohol and drugs, shopping, denial, food, workaholism, computer games etc) appear to cover over the symptoms but do not solve the actual problem. The negative effects of stress continue damaging our mental and physical health.

Mindfulness meditation has a profound effect on our wellbeing, including changing our relationship to stress. It provides us with a toolkit for deep relaxation, and enables us to perceive clearly how we react to stressors in our lives.

Mindfulness builds resilience and inner calm. Take this opportunity for a deep dive into mindfulness with either a 3 week or 8 week course.

Devonport – Penguin – Burnie – Wynyard

Featured

Mirror

Once in a SAT retreat, Claudio Naranjo said that music had been for him a kind of mirror, especially in his childhood. It mirrored back to him a range of emotions and sensitivities that he rarely saw reflected in everyday life.

This rang bells for me. In all my years of musical life, it had never occurred to me that music was a mirror. As I considered this, I realised it was so, for me also. And this deepened my understanding of the role music had played in my life. Music, for me at least, is far, far more than “entertainment”.

In an emotionally stunted environment, and in a culture that ridiculed softer sentiments, I was starving for affirmation of my emotional life. For me childhood was a battleground where it was better to give away as little as possible. My inner world became intensely private. I didn’t want others trampling what was precious to me. As something of a misfit, I didn’t readily find companions with whom I could share my complex inner world. Adolescence magnified these difficulties, and I turned to other things to find satisfaction.

One of them was music. I already played clarinet to a high level by then, and teachers were surprised at the emotional maturity of my playing. I could bring people to the brink of tears. Having music in my life was a life-saver. My soul had an oxygen line to the surface. Finally I could breathe. With music I could express what I felt, without the encumbrance of words, without being torn apart on the war-fields of adolescence.

I also spent hours in my room listening to classical music. Here, the world opened up to me. Music showed me tenderness, joy, passion, frivolity, grief, war and peace, the sacred and the profane. It showed me expansion when mostly I felt contracted. It gave me the taste of sweetness when much of my life was bitter. I knew ecstasy in the depth of my bones. This was my education of life, my learning about people. It didn’t exactly prepare me for social interaction, and I remained socially under- developed well into my late 20s. But with music, I could dive deeply into my own soul. And somehow, this kept me connected to the human world. If humans created this music, then they too, must be souls crying out in the night.

An artist friend once said to me, that music had kept me open, some part of me at least. I thought a lot about what he said. I think what he sensed was this oxygen line from my soul to the surface of life. Yes, in this way, music saved my life. I try to imagine my life without swimming in the sea of music. But I cannot.

The Three Brained Being

The Greek – Armenian mystic Gurdjieff saw the human being as a three brained being: A head brain, or intellect; a heart brain, what we might today call emotional intelligence; and a gut or instinctive brain, which could be our “animal” intelligence, as well as kinesetic intelligence. We are far more than a mind/brain.

Neurones of the Central Nervous System (CNS) are found not only in the brain, but also in the heart and the gut. There is intelligence in all the organs of the body. (See article below) There are different kinds of intelligence. Healing and wholeness come not just from cognitive understanding. Any system of human understanding, any therapy or school of healing worth its name, must address our experience in all its dimensions or aspects. Alas, “Scientism”, (in contrast to science), has reduced the human experience to that which can be measured on a machine.

Modern education largely focuses on the rational intellect. There is some attention given to sport, usually with a competitive focus. And the arts are still hanging in there by the skin of their teeth, despite frequent downgrading and budget cuts.

We need to encourage more wholistic approaches to education, therapies, and our general concept of what a human being actually is. In the case of healing and general well-being (seemingly rare in these times), working with voice and movement, for example, can be combined with both nurturing emotional support, and with cognitive and rational understanding. Philosophers and poets from ancient times have espoused the benefit of movement, for example, as a way of digesting intense mental learning. We need a three pronged approach.

We are not just a brain in a jar!

We are body: tissues, bones, organs, blood, neurochemicals, instinct, movement, pleasure.

We are heart: we are the longing and wounded child buried away, we are kindness, we are delight, we are grief for the earth and the ones who have passed, we are touched and moved to tears by a painting or a song.

And we are mind: rational and reasonable, weighing up the evidence, gathering information, comparing, categorising, imagining, remembering.

The head centre is an important part of our being, but the neglect of the other centres has led to a great imbalance that shows up in almost every area of modern life. Impoverishment of, and even disconnection from, the heart and gut are part of a vicious cycle of blocked and rigid emotions, repression, distrust of our innate intuition and embodied wisdom. Lopsided development leads to alienation from self, others, and the earth. Disregard for the heart and gut by our political, economic, and social systems enables the trampling of such qualities as flexibility and kindness, and the desecration and commoditisation of the arts and cultural life. Now it’s all about competition, economic rationalism, and the cult of the hero. It’s survival of the fittest. Only the hero takes home the prize. No room for second place.

It’s hardly conducive to healthy community is it? Where’s the tribal spirit of interdependence and cooperation? In reality we are no different genetically from our caveman ancestors, who were social beings and lived in interdependent tribal groups. Homo sapiens – the man who knows. But knows what? We have indeed eaten from the Tree of knowledge of good and evil, and we have been paying for it ever since.

Hard headedness has led to hard heartedness. The soft underbelly of our animal self has been attacked and it’s deep wisdom rejected. It has had no choice but to armour itself against the tides of so called human progress. It hides underground, along with all our other “non-desirables”, waiting for an opportunity to be heard, and in the meantime, wreaking havoc with our sense of well-being. We need to bring back balance to our understanding of ourselves. Scientism has reduced us to little more than robots: hormonally automated bags of guts, blood and bones.

An education, a consciousness, a life, that seeks to bring balance to the three centres of intelligence can only make us more complete, more whole, more fully who we are as human beings. Life is vast and deep. Our mental/rational self is only one thread of this great tapestry. Who can understand the fullness of this mystery?

https://hubpages.com/education/your-second-brain-is-in-your-heart