I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 21,000 abstracts.
Last September I went back to Cambridge for a reunion ... the first time I'd ever been back to school or university for such a thing. It was an experiment in "emotional archaeology" and I wrote a series of blog posts about it. At one stage I experimented with a dialogue between the 22 year old and the current 62 year old versions of me. In the post "Going back for a university reunion: self-esteem, hallucinogens, wonder & the transpersonal", I wrote "I changed subject too from philosophy to medicine (in 1970).
I had lunch with a health professional friend the other day. Later he emailed me saying "The last few times we have met you have mentioned the importance of attachment style in determining aspects of the interaction between patients and health care professionals." He went on to raise a series of questions about health professional-patient relationships, about the way that the attachment style of both health professional and patient can affect outcomes, about how adult attachment is measured and the possibility of improving attachment patterns, and about links between attachment & mindfulness. Gosh a lot of interesting questions being raised here.
(This blog post is downloadable as both a Word doc and a PDF file)
When I get to heaven they will not ask me, “Why were you not Moses?” Instead they will ask “Why were you not Susya? Why did you not become what only you could come?” Susya, a Hasidic rabbi
"Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy." Thich Nhat Hanh
(This post & the previous one in the series are downloadable combined into a Word doc or a PDF file)
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes." Proust
"Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." Rumi
"Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men." Confucius
(This post & the next in the series are downloadable combined into a Word doc or a PDF file)
"But the future is the future, the past is the past; now we should work on something new." Shunryu Suzuki
In 1970 I started to learn meditation with the Cambridge Buddhist Society. It was the year that Shunryu Suzuki's great book "Zen mind, beginner's mind" was published. I was deeply intrigued. So much of his writing was challenging:
In the words of Mary Oliver's beautiful poem "The summer day":
