Term 3
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
Mindfulness in NW Tasmania
How music casts its spell on us….
WinterSong!
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
Neanderthal Art
These cave paintings in Cantabria, Spain, have been dated by Calcium Carbonate techniques to be more than 65000 years old. This predates the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe by some 20-25000 years. Scientists thus believe these paintings are rare surviving examples of Neanderthal art.
19th century impressions of Neanderthals were of the “Homo Stupidus” variety, and some of these attitudes prevail today. However, examples of art, such as painting and the existence of flute fragments, suggest that they were not as primitive as once believed.
Although a far cry from the masterpieces of the AltaMira, Chauvet, and Lascaux caves, for example, the pictures below demonstrate a symbolic and conceptual view of the world.
Music, on the other hand, is a mostly non-representational, and therefore abstract art. We can say that music is composed of patterns, and that animals too make patterns, like a spiders web, or a blackbird’s repertoire of songs. But animals are generally unable to deviate from those instinctual patterns. Artistic freedom and intentionality seems to have awakened in human species with the Neanderthals. They were the first known humans to deliberately bury their dead, and decorated graves with offerings. Before this time, the boundary between human and animal becomes blurry.
There are some linguistic and physiological theories that Neanderthals had singing before they had language. These activities fire up different parts of the brain, as has been demonstrated in stroke victims who can sing but not speak. It would make sense for singing to come before language, as song appeared first in nature, and as babies babble before they can speak.
There are also remnants of bone flutes believed to be Neanderthal. Discovered at Divje Babe in Slovenia, the fragment is made from the femur of a cave bear. Carbon dating suggests a date of 60000 years ago, putting the flute in a period when Homo sapiens had not yet arrived in Europe. As they are only fragments it isn’t possible to discern the tonality, but the finger holes remaining suggest a diatonic minor scale.
What was this flourishing of artistic intention that seemed to begin with the Neanderthals, and continues unabated today? What is the point of art, the purpose? Was it evolutionarily advantageous? Could a fine singer or painter or flute player court a potential mate more successfully? This behaviour is clearly at work in the bird world. Is art merely an aphrodisiac?
Or is this another patriarchal interpretation of something that is, ultimately, a mystery?
