Recent Posts
The best definition of health that I am able to come up with is: doing well where you are. One of the challenges implied in this definition is that where we are changes.
While most of our lives are relatively stable most of the time it is also true that at any time it is likely for something to be changing. It may be something major (like a cancer scare, a discovery or loss of faith, a divorce or falling in love) or something minor (a new train timetable or a small additional task at work).
And so we are called on to be adaptable. This means that in some way our lives are changing almost all the time. And this can be very tiring. Especially if we don’t feel that we don’t have the time to sit back and assess what is going on.
There is much wisdom in the idea of having a day off every week. And an annual holiday too. In our societies where money increasingly reigns this is becoming more and more difficult. We are often in a situation of chronic low grade stress where we don’t ever get a clear break. So times of meditation and relaxation are a great idea. If you find your mind wonders when you meditate (as mine does) you might like to try something with movement like yoga or qi gong. Enjoying comedies shouldn’t be neglected either. Laughter is delightful and uplifting and good for us. (Norman Cousins believes he cured himself of a life threatening disease by watching funny movies.) All these are ways of getting more space into our lives.
Sometimes a more active response is called for and we need to modify our situation. Something creative is needed. The best exercise I know for developing our creativity is to get a piece of paper with squares on it. You could buy some graph paper and divide it up or use a ruler. The challenge is to think of as many ways as possible to divide a square into four equal parts. It has to be a new idea each time, not just a slight twist on the same idea. This is surprisingly demanding.
Another option would be to pursue some of the ideas of Edward de Bono for deliberate design. These are too numerous to mention. He has authored many books, most of which are excellent (I think Edward de Bono is truly brilliant and isn’t popular with the academics because he is popular and writes accessibly).
Health requires our adaptability and our creativity. And there are simple things we can do to develop these in our lives.
The way Traditional Chinese Medicine sees health is as the flow of yin and yang. These concepts, yin and yang, cover many things. Here we will just take a quick overview of what they mean in our health.
Firstly there is waking (yang) and sleeping (yin). We need enough sleep to restore ourselves so that we can move easily to our days activities (yang). And this may be more than we think. If you can allow yourself to sleep until you are ready to get up. You may be surprised by how much sleep you need. But when you do get enough sleep your alertness goes up a lot. In the West we tend to devalue the yin – we care about what people (the yang) but without the restoration of sleep we will do less and do it less well. Nourishing the yin aspect of our lives (the yin) is important.
During our activity (yang overall) there is also the flow from yin to yang. Working ceaselessly all our waking hours is not a recipe for good health. Those pagers are stressful, even when we aren’t paged. They mean part of us still working – even when it doesn’t look like it. And so the yang intrudes into the parts of our lives where we should be resting (a yin time). How rare it is to find people who can truly rest: who don’t get agitated and want to fill there rest with more activity, however aimless.
Our waking hours should alternate rest and activity. For each of these times are likely to be a little different. I take a while to start the day, others like to work lots in the morning and tail off in the afternoon. Others only fire up once the sun starts setting. The more you can know and work in accord with your own yinyang rhythm the easier your life will be.
The yin and yang can be applied at any scale, we can take it down to seconds (me thinking about what to say next and then typing for instance). But these strokes are useful and give us an easy place to start.
So to have a good foundation for your health have a look at how you flow from yin to yang.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine our lives are seen as being made up of the balance of “the five elements”. These elements are: water, wood, fire, earth, metal.
This is a quick look at what it means for the metal element to be in balance in our lives.
The type of metal meant is probably most easily thought of as a knife or sword, metal cuts. It cuts free and allows us to let go.
For our health getting rid of food and stale air is essential. The metal element in our lives is about getting rid of what has served its purpose. This may mean moving on from a relationship or an old pattern of relating in a relationship. It may mean that we have learnt what we can in a particular area. Any problem with letting go of what no longer nourishes us (whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual) is a problem with the metal element in our lives.
If we can’t do this we become bloated and overwhelmed. When the metal element in our lives is healthy we can deal with the details and process our experience. We are able to say that we are finished with something. This need not be harsh, it applies to times of beauty and exhileration as well as times that are painful. We can let go with gratitude for what we have learned and what has nourished us.
Dealing well with the details in our lives will lead us to a sense of who we are and what we are here to do. We won’t just deal with every little thing we will choose this and not that and know that we can move on when we have extracted the nourishment from our experience. This gives us a sense of ourselves. This is the water element. The metal element supports the water element.
A problem with the metal element is that it can become harsh, too hard. Those who decide coldly, without gratitude for what has brought them to where they are and without thinking about consequences, can often have ‘a steely gaze’. To avoid this we need a sense of warmth and serenity. This is the fire element. Fire melts metal, it stops us being cold and harsh and gives us clarity and compassion.
When the metal element is healthy we can let go of the old and welcome the new and nourishing. Just as we can breathe easily, letting go of the old and taking in the new, hundreds of time a day. So when the metal element is healthy we let go of what has served us.
“The five elements” is one way that Traditional Chinese Medicine looks at our health. The five elements are: water, wood, fire, earth and metal.
Let’s look a little closely at the earth element in our life. It is the part of our life or world that nourishes us (at every level – whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual). What feeds us is the earth element. If we are always hungering for something this means some aspect of the earth element in our life needs looking at
[ Click here to read more ]
In Traditional Chinese Medicine our health is seen as a balance of “the elements”. These elements are: water, wood, fire, earth, metal.
Let’s take a quick look at the fire element. Fire is an image that combines both light and warmth. When our wood element is in order we will be both warm and have good awareness (we will be ‘enlightened’ even in a very humble way). We will have a sense of serenity – not a cold detachment but a sense of seeing what we are doing, what is going on around and being able to respond with care
[ Click here to read more ]
Let’s take a moment to look at the heights of health. Instead of focussing on therapy, getting healthy again, let’s focus for at least one post, on when we feel our best.
An example. A friend has just done a performance as an amateur singer in a community choir. This had taken many months of preparation for her and the choir. And it was full of the usual shemozzle that can be so much a part of the amateur scene. However, she knew her part well and though nervous knew she could sing all the notes and give a solid performance. On the night one part especially went fabulously. She felt that she had all the time in the world to sing the next phrase, that her and the conductor were in sync and that she and the audience were caught up together in the song
[ Click here to read more ]
I kid you not: this is headline news today. The bleeding obvious brought to you at great expense by the Australian government.
It appears that the baby boomers are getting older. Yes, it’s true. Put this together with the fact that older people tend to be sicker than young people and there are implications for health funding. The maths involved is probably able to be done by a bright primary school child or certainly a high school child. Needless to say the report doesn’t suggest solutions. After all it’s an election year and any hint of higher taxes should not even be whispered
[ Click here to read more ]
Most of the medical information about health that we hear is technically about risk factors. That is, when we are told that smoking ‘causes’ cancer (especially lung cancer) what is meant is that smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer. This means that there is better than 1 chance is 100 that if you smoke you are X number of times more likely to get lung cancer than if you don’t smoke. (In this case the X is lots of times!)
Does this mean that you won’t get lung cancer if you don’t smoke? No. It just means you are less likely too. It also means that there will always be someone who gets away with it. Why? Simply because the odds don’t come up for that person
[ Click here to read more ]
Australian researchers will study whether climate change creates a distress response.
This reminds me of an old (not terribly funny) joke
[ Click here to read more ]
In last weekends newspaper there was a story about Ian Thorpe – a swimmer who has competed at the Olympics for Australia. [The Sydney Morning Herald is Sydney’s main broadsheet paper. There is another that I don’t bother reading anymore since it became a right wing tabloid printed in broadsheet format.]
Ian Thorpe was a remarkably good swimmer. On occasion he swam faster than anyone has before over particular distances. He retired because he found that it was no longer satisfying. All credit to him for this
[ Click here to read more ]
|
|
|
Add Comments
Read More
Comments (1)
Comment by evan
on Church conspiracies in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code
Some of the 'factual content' is fiction! This is because it is a novel!
I have an Aramaic scholar I can put you in touch with - Ian Yound at Sydney University.
It is interesting how popular it is. It is of no value factually - it is a novel!