Aloft

I still have a week to go, living in a mostly empty condo, everything timed so that the TV and couch (my two remaining luxuries in life) will go out the door next weekend or on Monday, leaving me a whole day to put the finishing touches on packing, spackling, floor washing. I want to leave this place impeccable, and impeccably.

I still felt saddled by some large things I could barely move by myself, an old dresser and a bookcase, and few small tables, one lamp. I called 1-800-GOT-JUNK, made an appointment to have them come on Monday the 20th, just in case. However, meanwhile I managed to shove the two big pieces out into the hall, and put up a notice that they were free for the taking. This morning I was delighted to see they had been taken. Which means, I can cancel GOT-JUNK.

This is a big lift. It feels as if an updraft just caught my wings and I'm soaring effortlessly. The best part is, I still have an entire week to enjoy the feeling of being lifted effortlessly up out of the rut I had made, with all its "stuff," and grok, really grok this sense of freedom, memorize it, neuroplasticize it deeply into the chemistry set of my brain, so that I never forget how it feels to be light and carefree and effortless, letting the universe support my feeling playful.

The mental molt part is over. When the last big bookcase disappeared from the hallway, so did the last itchy spot in my sense of self.

The best part? We haven't even got to that yet! The best part is that I'm still here floating freely in Vancouver in my familiar surroundings for another whole week, able to still love them in this incredibly detached fashion, unbound by them, relishing my own anticipation of the week that is to come, the nice clean zen feel of it, the space of it reflected by the emptiness of my rooms, the carefreeness. THIS is the holiday feeling I need in the middle of my marrow. At last. This is how freedom is supposed to feel. It feels great!

A week from now, I will have to enact the actual move: from the high soaring place, from floating effortlessly on the updraft, I shall have to peer at the landing place, begin the descent: I shall have to take the sky train over to the train station where the mini-van waits to be picked up, deal with paperwork, drive it to my place, coordinate with the two guys I hired to load it, hope that it will contain everything satisfactorily, then actually drive myself and what's left of my life and stuff through the mountains to the flat land, where the sky is big and the sun shines almost all the time, every day. It will take two days to arrive, to touch down, start a new life cycle. Figure out, all over again, what I want to be when I grow up.

Mini-vans

The day before yesterday I chanced to look across the street to see a parked mini-van. I was a bit shocked at how small it was. I think I had been thinking of those big hippy vans from the 70's, perhaps, but with more windows. I started to get a queasy feeling in conjunction with a thought that maybe I wouldn't have enough room in the mini-van for the cubic footage of what I think I want to take with me.

This feeling built over the course of the day.

Yesterday I paid a visit to the company I'll be renting from, and one of the agents kindly allowed me to take a look inside a typical size mini-van, practice folding the seats down etc. It helped a lot. It is more apparent now that I, the basket queen, will have to let go of even more stuff.

Alrighty then. Chuckchuckchuck.

The silent auction continued

Yesterday evening a neighbour phoned and asked if she could bring her friend over to see some of the furniture I tried to auction off a week ago. I said sure. They came, they saw, they bought. The oak buffet, hutch, a large mirror, a carved wooden chest, and a table lamp have now found new homes. I sold them cheap.
Benefit to them: they get them way cheaper than I did.
Benefit to me: I get a little something, and do not have to pay to have them removed.

After giving the matter some serious albeit spattered attention, I decided yesterday to hire a couple guys and a dolly for an hour to come and load my van for me. It just makes good sense. I don't want to start a long road trip in a sitting position after having used my back in a manner repetitive and effortful. That's a recipe for back pain, which I do not need. It's not just the umpteen bags of heavy books I've packed and stacked, it's the heavy rug, 10x13, that I've decided to take with me since it's too big for anyone's space and therefore they do not want to buy it. I can't even lift let alone move that beautiful thing by myself. No way. So, in that I have to hire someone for that one item anyway, and pay them for an hour, I might as well keep them busy for an hour. If I'm organized, I can leverage their muscle power and get the whole job done.

This phase of the move is like second wind to a runner. It seems way easier than could have been imagined.

Friday

I was going to title this post "Friday Friday," but decided double naming days of the week was getting a bit old. It started because that Mommas and Papas song, Monday Monday, kept going through my head.

The weather here has been very very good. Beautiful even. It's as though Vancouver is giving me a lovely send-off. I must say, I really appreciate it. I can feel my energy improving, and my mood. I can hardly wait to go back to living in a place, where, although I was never any PollyAnna, how I felt or functioned was never weather-related. It was probably more age-related.

A strong image of myself came to me this week, a sense that when I moved here 25 years ago, it was as though a bow started to be slowly drawn back, and I was the arrow. I didn't feel it at all, all this becoming aimed at something. In fact I felt quite aimless much of the time. I could feel something sliding by however, and assumed it was merely time. It was the string of the bow, softly scraping me.

About a year ago, I started a bunch of activity that was new. Now I see it was the arrow-me, fully drawn back. Lots of tension. Unable to sense any movement. Having to create some. Get ready for something. Something that felt like it could be big. Huge restlessness.

Meanwhile, even as tension was buildingbuildingbuilding inside, outside, life proceeded calmly, containedly. I lost weight, got rid of a big albatross of a car, most uncharacteristically took a vacation. This past year has been all about me the arrow feeling pulled all the way back against the bow, then being held still by a Samurai, pointed toward a target. It's been about me knowing I was about to be launched at a target, trying to see what the target was. Is. It's me.

Now, from here, I can see that I have been the bow all along, as well as the arrow. It was not pleasant, or comfortable, it didn't feel good, it was painful at times, but it was also hopeful, occasionally exciting, and ultimately, necessary. Now, from here, I can see I'm the Samurai too. I don't have to let go until I feel one with the arrow-me, the bow-me, the target-me.

This is a calm time. The city is lovely. The weather is at the top of its game. I feel still on the inside, not especially busy on the outside. I'm getting caught up to myself. Things are coming together even as they are being pulled apart. I'm packing, organizing, deconstructing the life I allowed to build too big with stuff because I never thought I'd ever move again.

I'm letting go of the dream red velvet couch I enjoyed for 12 years, to a woman who has always dreamed of owning and enjoying a red velvet couch. She also bought my dream round oak pedestal dining table with lion claw feet, and I know that she and her partner will fill their home with many happy dinner parties. She bought my set of off-white dishes that will never scratch or chip because they're made of some amazingly hard substance. I was in it for the long haul, and loved these treasures for how they seemed to confer permanence and stability and quality. Now they will confer all that to her.

People are coming over to pick up the things they bought at the auction. I'm filling up the Chinese plaid plastic bags with the stuff I'm taking. I get tired so I take a nap. There's nowhere else I have to go, nothing else I have to do. I can pack in a manner truly luxurious, emptying out of existence anything that no longer serves my particular life, and keeping anything I want or really require. I can deal with the feelings that come up unexpectedly, as they arise. I can consider them fully, instead of setting them aside or pushing them away because of having too much outside life to deal with. I get it. I really get it now, how this is the best way to live a conscious life. Have lots of time and space around each thought, each feeling. Have lots of space, period.

Soon the arrow will fly.

Wednesday Wednesday

Happy Canada Day.

To celebrate Canada Day I did more coffee drinking, interneting, arranging with people for them to come by and take away their new treasures (my old ones, recycled). I got $225 today for household things, a framed print, a leather chair with ottoman, a table and rug. Not bad. I also hauled out 6 more loads of books and left them for whoever. (My book-lady neighbour did not respond to my note left taped to her door, and I've lost her phone number.)

I loaded up eight more large trash bags full of this and that for the Canadian Diabetes Association to pick up, in about a week. I carefully organized and packed a couple of those cheap strong plaid plastic bags, for moving.

I feel a lift under the wings. It feels like things have accelerated slightly. The apartment is emptying out, no books visible, pictures down, bare walls showing, floor space opening up. Empty bookcases. I feel so much more detached from all this than I did in February, when I had to dredge up the energy to start the process. Now, it feels like I'm nearly there.

Did I do anything special for Canada Day? No... not yet. My participation/connection to the rest of the human primate troop I belong to, now celebrating, is watching the festivities on TV. Later I'll be able to hear the boom of the fireworks outside over the water, whether I want to or not. Yay - happy birthday, Canada, my home and native land.

Monday monday

So, this is the start of the first week of the rest of my life.
So far, I've had a shower, some coffee, and spent the entire morning online.

Yesterday, I held a silent auction/ living-room sale/ house-cooling party at my house. It did very well - netted a lot more dough than an ordinary street sale would have. Wine was involved, and snacks, so that probably helped.

I managed to sell a few large pieces of furniture. Bidding wars did not take off like wild-fire, but I got reasonable bids/amounts of money for the couch, TV, table and chairs, bookcases.. no bites for the hutch or buffet. Oh well. The amount of money that did come in will pay for the removal of stuff that did not sell. Break even for sure and then some.

I am doing very well in the patience/detaching process, feel very even keel about it all. Am organized enough to feel that even as my material possession volume shrinks, it shrinks in a planned enough way that I will not be having to do without anything important.

On another front, that of hiring a vehicle to move me and my remaining bits of stuff, mostly heavy books, I learned that having a continuously paid-off credit card facilitates renting a car. I tried renting one on my own, but found that most rental companies do not rent outside the provincial border or beyond two. It's as though the world ends at the Alberta border. And these are supposedly national companies. I found myself talking to agents situated in the U.S. somewhere, even if the company I was calling was a .ca company. I found this amusing mixed with slightly shocking mixed with discombobulating.

Anyway - long story shorter - I finally called my credit card company to register change of address and learned that they would not only handle the car rental process, but that I had a bunch of points saved up that I had never even known about or used. OK. So, the credit card company (VanCity Visa) rented me a minivan, and applied the points. It took them no time at all. I think the takeaway point from this is that car rental agencies and credit card companies likely know and trust each other extremely well, and that if the credit card company says I'm a good risk, then the car rental company provides steep discounts. The vehicle rental cost, points aside, will be about half what I'd have had to have paid if I rented under my own recognizance. Live and learn.

Another tip for people transporting books, especially middleaged women who do not want to break their backs or gouge their arms: don't bother with cardboard boxes. Splurge and buy a bunch of those really cheap plaid plastic bags made in China. The zippers are crap and will break immediately, but the bags are completely weightless and incredibly strong. It's a lot easier to carry heavy loads in sturdy flexible containers with handles, and the arms down by the sides. Besides they are reuseable forever and fold to practically nothing for storing.

Final day at work

Final day of treating people, anyway.
It's not going to be my final day at work, however.. The workplace still has hooks in me - I still have ownership and therefore responsibility for the business itself. It's ironic that the part of the work I enjoy most is going to be the part I have to let go of first. Oh well. Such is life.

Tomorrow will be the first day of my new life.

I am wondering how that will feel.

My new life is going to cohere around deconstructing "precept"-ual fantasy wherever I find it. When I look back, I can see I've been headed in this direction for a very very long time already. One day, tomorrow perhaps, I'll wake up and see that it has become so.

Selling the practice

This is a very complex bunch of business, this whole 'selling a practice' thing. First of all, it isn't cut and dried like real estate. It's a lot more conceptual. It's also a lot more creative. One has to weigh and assign value to intangibles. As a result, there are no "agents" one can hire to shepherd the process. I'm nearly on my own. So, there are categories to consider.

"Hard assets" are the easiest category to deal with. I already have a list from last year when I divided myself from my practice, turned the "practice" into a "business" then sold the "business" the assets of the former "practice."

There is the little matter of 'location and venue'. I really have got myself into a peachy situation, in that there is no serious PT competition for miles, and in that I am ensconced in the only medically zoned building in the neighbourhood, with a handy sink, an elevator, wheelchair accessible office/bathroom, some free parking, climate control, nice blackout blinds that can open at the top or bottom. I have outlasted all competition that dared to set up. This has to be worth a few shekels to somebody.

There is the little matter of having found 'fabulous people' to work alongside of. These people come with the practice, namely a good well-trained PT who can't afford to buy the practice but who will gladly work there, a great receptionist/office-organizer person, a gracious and quiet roommate (half the rent) with her own practice which consists mostly of listening to people as they self-regulate in a sound-proof room. The landlord is in the office right beside ours. He is entirely accessible and unhesitatingly deals with any issue to do with the building, as he is also an occupant.

There is the not so small issue of a 'wide client base' gathered up over 15 years, about 20% of which is brand new every month, self-referred or referred by each other. These are people who expect to and are willing to pay cash. Cash! A fair bit of cash, too, in exchange for 3 or 4 visits to a person who will provide them with a reasonable, plausible, science-based construct to explain their pain to them, who will provide their brains with novel sensory-discriminative input in the form of manual therapy, seasoned with exquisite regard for their sensibilities and delivered in a carefully boundaried manner, and who will support their efforts to learn how to downregulate pain in all manners non-pharmacological. This is a well-trained client base. It comes with the practice. How does one put a price tag on something like this? I'm given to understand that some would pay mega to get their hands on a client list like this. I just hope I can "sell" this base to a person who will look after these people as carefully as I have attempted to.

Wish me luck.

I really hope I can sell it and disconnect completely from Vancouver. However, if I can't sell it in time to the right person at the right price, I may just hang onto it myself, try to run Sherwood PT from afar by granting somebody here in town power of attorney, learn how to run the bank account from Sask., let it continue to generate profit for me at a distance. I mean, if it is as good as I say it is, why would I even want to sell it? I could let it continue support me, and I don't have to be around much. As long as the headache factor is less than the profit factor, I would be fine, I think. As long as the tie doesn't bind too uncomfortably, I'm sort of OK with the idea of retaining a connection of 'owner' of a physiotherapy 'business'.

If I were a real entrepreneur, which I am not and do not have the energy to be at this stage of life, I could set up a string of clinics across Canada, all boutique-like in their service, but strategically innovative, in that each would take on a section of demographic in every city where the rent is reasonable, location is central, cash payment is expected, the client base grows itself through word-of-mouth only, and profitability comes from well-delivered hands-on service minus any hype or pseudoscience, and from keeping overhead down, way down. Bare bones delivery of science-based care for lasting relief of persisting pain, aimed at reducing overall pain suffering, one person at a time. No electrodes and no gym equipment. A clean space, fresh laundry in plain sight, nice freshly showered person with clean warm hands who knows how to use them and has a stripped down idea of why manual treatment is helpful to living human anti-gravity suit nervous systems and their embedded "I"-illusions, willing to answer each question fully from a pain perspective.

Letting go

I have been stressed out all week, fighting a bug which put me in bed all day Monday, made me cough (and have to wear a face mask) Tuesday, went into a lull Wed and Thur and came back with a vengeance Friday, putting me into bed directly after another face mask wearing day at work.

Adding to the stress of meeting immediate obligations while feeling sick has been the stress of trying to hold together a condo deal at the Weyburn end of this time of transition. It all climaxed in this same week, in the form of a time-sensitive binder full of complex legal documentation that I was required to read through, then initial off as having read and understood, and return.

I hit my own wall. I looked at page one, and realized that I was too stressed (too sick maybe) to be able to make any sense out of the written material. Which of course means that I'm too stressed to actually know if I do, truly, understand it, agree to it, and can sign off that I do.

When I get stressed, I get mad. How dare that real estate agent load me down with such a herculean task the very week I'm sick and have enough to do, trying to keep mere ordinary life on the rails? How dare she not be there to reply to my email or pick up the phone? (Seriously, someone who ignores one of each from me, AND a phone call from my notary... , well... , just what should one think? Just where should one place her on the sliding scale of slackdom?)

When I get mad, I get decisive. So I phoned my mother this morning, whose money represents the deposit on this condo in Weyburn, and is refundable up to the end of June. I told her my misgivings, told her how stressed I was getting about it, and that I wanted her to go get her cheque back and let the deal fall apart.

As I spoke, I could feel clarity reemerge into the dim dark recesses. I could feel certainty return. It's all relative of course; it might seem odd that letting go of something that's nearly in the bag would be less stressful than seeing it through, yet, that's how it is. I feel way more relaxed with the zen of Not Knowing, than I am with the stress of trying to pull something together that seems difficult and for which I find vanishingly small support to accomplish, but would result in a sure address to forward my mail to.

Instead, I'll just get my mail forwarded to my mother's address, until I have one of my own.

The stress level is down palpably. I'm breathing easier and I can focus on what's in front of me instead of feeling obliged to try to advance stick-handle what lies ahead.

When I leave Vancouver it will be like driving into the void. I won't have any preconceptions of where I'll be living, because I'll have no idea where it will be, for sure. I'll be more relaxed, with no time pressure on me about getting money transferred by a certain date. I'll be able to just leisurely open a new account, and have money sent from the old to the new, the old ones closed. So much easier.

Huge blue

I spent the entire past weekend in Calgary, at our national physiotherapy congress, some of which was keenly interesting to me, most of which wasn't, but it's all OK, because while I was there I got an email from my real estate agent saying that the subjects had been removed. Firm sale. I'm nearly outta here.

Meanwhile, I had this lovely view from my Calgary hotel room. What a sky. What a sky. My little digital camera could only capture a fraction of the expanse that was available.

When I returned to Vancouver, I again was reminded about why I am leaving it behind. Even though the weather is lovely right now, the summer and high temperatures merely bring another sort of "lid" to live under - the lid of haze and smog. Again, not enough clear blue light can get through to satisfy my requirements. Too hibernate-y feeling, even in late spring with high temperatures and long long days. I get it now. I really get it. I'm so glad I decided to bolt while I still have a chance, and before becoming too mired in by life and in no position to be able to bolt.

I have more details to deal with, like selling my practice and getting rid of the remainder of my stuff, renting a mini-van and loading my chosen books, computer gear, and a red rug I've decided to keep into it, but these are just details and lucky for me, my landlord is also a notary. He has agreed to help me out. Lucky lucky me.

Sold

It's all over. Almost. Will be, once all the subject-to's are gone, by May 29th. Then I will be officially in transition, not just preparing to be in transition.

I'm pretty satisfied with the sale. I got nearly as much as I was asking, and the buyers were people who knew what they liked and moved decisively, didn't burn a lot of fuel dithering around wasting everybody's time and patience. They came/ they saw/they bought, all in the space of a single day.

Hurray.

It looks like I'll be able to go where photons shine all year round, about mid-July. If I'm careful with money, I'll be able to afford a longed-for, self-assembled "sabbatical," during which I can rest one part of my brain (the treating part, which is so automatic it will never forget how) while I work on developing the conceptualizing, writing part. I plan to write furiously while I have the opportunity. Maybe less blogging, more actual book-writing.

Might have an offer

I just heard from my real estate agent - he says a realtor called him, wants to set up a meeting tomorrow afternoon to present an offer. How exciting!

A Friday work afternoon in May

This afternoon I had three new patients in a row, all very senior, a rare event - usually I treat people 20-ish to 60-ish..

Lady number one, age 85, recently hospitalized for food poisoning, a week ago. Had a cataract removed just on Tuesday. Said that she developed sharp pain in her neck and shoulders while being hospitalized for the food poisoning, that it was better but not gone, and didn't want to delay the cataract surgery because she didn't want to have to wait for the next available slot. So she toughed through it and turned up in my clinic, brought in by her daughter who I treated a decade ago. She definitely couldn't move her head on her neck much. She had never had any treatment ever before from anyone. Her husband had died 4 years prior, and she had moved overseas to Canada to move in with her daughter. Tough lady.

So, I worked carefully with her, and in the end she could move quite a lot better on one side but still had pain on the other, so I added a few pieces of stretchy tape, made sure the tape was holding her skin comfortably so she could move less painfully, showed her daughter how to remove them after a few days.

Lady number two was about the same age and had stumbled - although she had not fallen, she had sprained her ankle. She was wearing a brace on it, and limping. She had been to the PT her doctor had sent her to, but found she didn't like electrodes or ultrasound or the heat pack. She said her ankle had felt worse after. We had a provincial election here on Tuesday, and where she had gone to vote, a scrutineer had given her one of my business cards. She made an appointment and here she was.

She had lost her husband less than a year ago - they had been married nearly 60 years. She still could hardly believe he was gone. She was a treat to treat. Her nervous system responded extremely well to hands-on work, and by the end of the hour the swelling was way down and she had full range. When she got up she could walk normally. I asked her to leave the brace off. She hugged me. Twice. Might be back to have her fingers worked on.

The third new patient was an elderly man with pancreatic cancer, which had been diagnosed a year ago and treated with chemo. He looked really good. Thin but good color. He had pain in his belly. His son, who had been in for treatment for a few different problems, had made the appointment. I had been really clear on the phone that there were certain sorts of pain, like cancer pain, that my attempts wouldn't be able to help, but that if there were other kinds of pain as well, perhaps what I am able to offer could help with that. When he came in, I had the same conversation with the dad. As it turned out he had old shoulder injuries from sports, and very restricted shoulder range on both sides, so I took that on. I worked on skin (dorsal cutaneous nerve roots) along both sides of his spine, the sides of the trunk (lateral cutaneous nerves of the torso), the shoulder blades (many different nerves at different levels), and the front fold of the armpits (intercostobrachial nerves and supraclavicular branches of the superficial cervical plexus). Both arms were able to raise up all the way after. He still had the belly pain, of course. I reiterated that I didn't think what I did could help that, that the patches were his best bet. He said he was thinking of having acupuncture, that they offered it at the cancer clinic. I said I thought whatever they offered at the cancer clinic, under supervision, should be OK. We all shook hands and he and his wife left.

Quite the day, with three brand new elderlies all in a row. Elderly people make me go all soft and tender. They always have. Not sure why. They are living heroes to me.

I treated an old woman once shortly after I graduated. She was in her nineties, was being hospitalized for something I can't recall. Her hands bothered her a great deal. They were gnarled and thick-knuckled. She said, "Look at these hands. They are ruined. Whatever you do, don't use cold water to wash your vegetables. I used cold water all my life, and look what happened to my hands! Use warm water. It doesn't matter - you're just going to cook the vegetables anyway!"

I took her advice. I've never done anything under cold water that couldn't be done in warm.

Another 95 year old I worked with scoffed at herself one day about being a "dried-up old prune." I objected immediately. I pointed out that prunes were nothing but plums which had grown more condensed and had concentrated their sweetness. She was a poet. She got that in a deep place. I think she thought better of herself after that.

Once when I was in my mid-twenties, I was in a medical building for one reason or another, and caught one of those glimpses that lands like a snapshot, glued in the brain forever. An elderly man came off the elevator. He was short, but pulled himself up to his full height, as fully as he could. He was dressed impeccably, hat, jacket, tie. Shined shoes. For whatever reason, I suddenly saw him as living poetry, and my throat caught in that moment with the poignancy and beauty of it all. A life nearly all lived out. Fully. Upright. Dignified.

Still waiting

Still nothing. Still no offers on my condo..

I'm still in the transition zone therefore, feeling a bit bored, a bit restless. I decided to go where I had never gone before and put a few ideas out onto a taxonomy thread at IASP.

In a recent conversation about possibly renaming the syndrome currently known as fibromyalgia, a poster (MD) wrote:

">"Whatever we call tenderness in 11 of 18 spots with associated cognitive dysfunction is bound to be confusing unless there is an examination based on an agreed methodology (which currently doesn't exist) to identify specific muscles (40 % of tender points are thought to be TrPs in some studies and treatable with injections) that are the source of some or all of the patient's pain in distinction to CNS dysregulation."

I replied:

"Here is a thought (harboured for a long time) about the tenderness detection method used to arrive at a diagnosis of fibromyalgia: Please bear with me while I explain:

With all due respect, it seems to me, that unless the clinicians who originated this way of determining 'muscle' tenderness first physically removed the skin and its attached subcutis, then tested for tenderness, then placed the skin back on again, the idea that they actually found tender points in 'muscles' might be (dare I say) erroneous.

Cutis/subcutis is very thick, in case anyone doesn't remember. It contains a great deal of physiological tubing (nerves and vasculature and smooth muscle), sensitive structure and function, most or all of which is regulated by the sympathetic NS and efferent function of sensory nerves. Skin is closely read by the brain, and by the S1 sensory cortex, in full awareness by the non-anesthetized, non-hypnotized patients being tested for point tenderness.

I would like to propose, therefore, that tenderness in skin itself and its attached layers will always be a confounding variable to finding and being able to assert that point tenderness is from something wrong in muscle tissue. I'd say chances are rather high that some structure located within cutis/subcutis itself is what feels "tender" - a cutaneous nerve perhaps.

I'm speculating - however, I think my speculation is likely more accurate than the supposition that somehow one can locate tender points in muscles, by:
1. conceptually subtracting skin as though it did not exist, or was not sensitive, or didn't count;
2. forgetting that cutis/subcutis can be a good inch thick and is full of sensory neural structure, or that palpable hardness can't develop and then disappear within C/subC itself;
3. forgetting that a dense tough layer of fascia (hard to palpate through) surrounds and contains and separates 'muscles' from one another;
4. assuming the patient's brain/nervous system (already stressed and producing pain output) wouldn't read skin input first and regard exteroceptive pressure as something it needed to defend its organism from by making the patient flinch;

... all of which I think should be factored in long before the clinician/examiner assumes he or she has found a TrP in somatic 'muscle' tissue.

I respectfully submit that one should not rule out anything one has not already considered.

Diane Jacobs PT"

Maybe I am getting a bit ornery these days, or as a result of aging, or as I prefer to think about it, ripening while still on the vine, but I'm not going to sit back and stay quiet anymore about anything, anywhere.

As talk-show host Ellen is fond of saying, "ANY-way..."

Nothing yet

There have been 13 showings, and another open house is scheduled for Saturday. No one has put in an offer yet, but that's OK - it's only been two weeks. Could be any minute.

My income tax is ready - the part that I can get ready that is to say. The bookkeeper is working on the rest.

This leaves me in a weird, unfamiliar zone - it's the transitional zone. After so much hard physical work and planning and executive decision making and lugging and tossing, I live carefully in a pristine apartment in which I am careful to mop up my own traces every day. No sock is left on the floor, no toothbrush allowed to sit on the sink.


What this means is that I feel like I can't start any new projects, which in turn feels like I'm living in a mental waiting room. I am so ready to move forward geographically speaking, but am still stuck in Vancouver. At least the weather doesn't suck much right now.

Ready for the next lap

I'm a big fan of built-ins. They add enormous square footage, especially in bedrooms. Plus, the bed does not have to be perfectly made - one can just push the bed up out of sight and get rid of more visual clutter.

I had a cat once upon a time. Getting wall beds installed neatly solved the problem of cat hair/hair balls on the bed. The cat received her own cozy cat bed to snooze in.

I have two of these. They are very well-behaved beds. They stay at any angle I put them at. I can lift them with a single finger.











I hope whoever buys this place will want to keep these - they are "attached," so technically they have to be offered as part of the condo, as do all the built-ins.

This afternoon there will be a private "showing." It seems a bit strange, the idea that people I do not know will be examining my private living space in detail.. but I realize that's just an inner introvert adjusting herself to reality. The reality is, I've got to move and leave this whole part of the world, including my part, behind. Unfortunately, I can't just unzip my condo and take it with me to a brighter part of the country the way I'd like to.

Last night I had a brief talk with a woman who provided me with a little list of the sort of documentation I will need and must prepare in advance of selling my practice. It's tax time right about now, so no time to breathe - it's time to move my attention away from my personal space and figure out how to extract myself from the public one I built. Meanwhile, by pure fluke, suddenly my treatment list has swollen back up to full. I do not know where the energy to treat all these people is going to come from, as I am sleeping rather restlessly, but I am certainly glad that the awful winter work slump seems over along with the arrival of warm spring weather. A lively bustling practice should be easier to sell than a half dead one, especially with Adrienne close at hand.

The first lap

Wednesday last week represented a milestone in my race to live under brighter skies. Finally, I had chucked out enough books and furniture and clothes and small household items to see the back of every closet, the bottom of every drawer, the surface of every shelf. Finally, I had cleaned out enough cupboards, vacuumed up enough dust, washed enough surfaces and painted enough walls, windowsills and baseboards. Finally, all the blinds were repaired/cleaned, and new Roman blinds covered the venetian ones (something I had never quite gotten around to before). It was time to list.

And list I did. My place is now officially for sale. Hurray. Now, all I have to do is be a fastidious Zen housekeeper and keep things well-enough organized that the place can be shown anytime (once I squirrel the twenty-year-old stained coffee-maker out of sight, hide the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, put the toothbrush in the drawer, and generally remove my own "living" traces from the place).

The place looked nice yesterday for its first Open House - I even added flowers. It's not a showcase, but it's attractive, fresh, clean, shiny, all the things that attract buyers, hopefully some buyers are enough attracted by the lowish price to want to bite. The realtor said that 8 parties, including three agents with buyers, had visited in under 2 hours. After he left two more groups of people, residents in the building, came by to look. One group was a young couple with a baby about 2 years old, who at the moment have a one-bedroom.

I think this bodes well - already 10 groups of traffic through a place that's been listed for only four days.

From the waterfall to the desert

I know that I'll feel more like me again, in Weyburn, with its sunny days and semiarid climate. I was thinking this morning that at the moment I feel like one of these giant over watered coastal coniferous trees, top-heavy and ponderous. They grow huge, but have hardly any root system. They do not need roots, because roots are something a tree sends down to find water. When water is plentiful, successful trees just don't bother. However, when a big wind blows they fall right over.

By contrast, prairie trees are sort of scritchy and shrubby and short. The wind blows all the time, so the wild ones mostly just manage to cling to the least windy sides of coulees and ravines, and often appear tilted. But they have huge and extensive root systems. They are stubbornly alive - they clutch the earth with everything they have, hold the soil together, seek out every last drop of water no matter how deep they have to dig, and are very very hard to blow over, or even pull out with heavy equipment. I'm by nature and up-bringing much more a prairie tree than I am a coastal tree.

It will certainly be novel stimuli to re-learn to view a rain as a welcome relief from sun, instead of how it is now, the complete opposite.

Everything is moving fast at the Weyburn end - my mother located a condo for sale in her building, which will be perfect. Knowing her, I doubt she'll let anyone else have even a fighting chance at it.

Oozing toward the move

The process of decluttering seems endless, but progress has definitely been made. I now have three empty and mostly cleaned up rooms, awaiting painting. I have thrown out massive volumes of accumulated life detritus. The Canadian Diabetes Association's Clothesline pickup service must be liking me these days. We have dated regularly for more than a month. They have carted off more than a dozen, perhaps as many as twenty huge trash bags filled with what were once treasures and may well be for someone else, "clothing and small household items."

In the end, no one wanted to buy my edited furniture within the time frame I had for selling it, so I had it hauled away. It worked out better this way - I had one potential "buyer" come by to see an antique drop leaf desk I'd been using as a phone center, but it turned out she was not interested in "buying" at all - she already had a condo full of furniture and enjoyed going to strangers' homes just to stare at their belongings. This creeped me (an introvert) out so much that I decided to circle my wagons and simply jettison.

And what a difference a few days can make.

Up until Monday, I was still thinking I'd be moving to Barrie, Ontario.

I phoned my mother, age 85 and holding, on her birthday on Tuesday. A church-going Catholic, she has always considered herself to have been especially lucky to have been born on St. Patrick's Day (no matter that she's not Irish, but is a mainly Polish-French mixture). I've mentioned her before, here. About her being Catholic, she might be the only Catholic woman on the planet who has exhibited apparent life-long immunity to what is supposedly universal catholic guilt.

Anyway, I made one of my obligatory phone calls to her on her birthday and found myself asking her what she thought of the idea of me moving to the city she's living in; Weyburn, Saskatchewan.

Clearly the idea has been rolling around in my undermind for a long time. So it finally emerged.

There is background to this: a low hum of discontent all my life with our relationship, a "breakup" with her about 20 years ago, no resolution but a definite truce.. probably all falling under ordinary Mother/Daughter life-long tension. Anyway, I consider myself a grown-up now, and she doesn't seem nearly as big or scary or mean or unfair as she used to when I was a child stuck on a farm with her as my only companion.

My needs are simple. I need time to write, a sunny window, mornings that are clear instead of cloudy, a place where I can live clutter-free in every sense, cheaply, without necessarily having to go out to work just to support a business in order to have it support me back. I need an external environment that feels safe, unlike Vancouver these days with it's gangland shootings at the current rate of about one per day.

Weyburn is this funny little city in the southern part of Saskatchewan where you can see nothing for miles and miles except ... miles and miles. Oh, and a huge upside down bowl of transparent blue sky filled with sunshine most of the year. I must not forget to mention the extraordinary skyscape available to one's photon-starved eyeballs in southern Sask.

It has been the crucible for a few prominent Canadians - Tommy Douglas, former premier of the province and architect of Canada's health care system, and W.O. Mitchell, beloved and famous Canadian humorist and author. I met both of them personally at various times. Tommy Douglas visited our home when I was a child. My father, who rarely got excited about anything, loved this man and his vision, and would have taken a bullet for him. I met W.O. Mitchell later in life, at a dinner party in the home of his nephew. I remember that no one else in the room (about 10 people altogether, maybe) could get a word in edgewise, but that no one seemed to mind. He went on at considerable length about the enormous size of earthworms in Calgary.

Weyburn is also somewhat famous for being the location of a huge mental hospital. In the 1950's it was a scary place where someone we knew worked, I think as an orderly; for some reason our family was friendly with this man, Ab Ruler, and his family. One time he took us all up a shady treed laneway to the "mental hospital" and showed us around a little. We even watched a movie there, The Ten Commandments. The hospital was able to house 900 patients, a capacity equal to a tenth of the entire population of the city, a size that seems very disproportionate to the actual incidence of mental illness in the general population, then and now. It must have represented a collection center for all mental illness patients in Western Canada east of the mountains, and a source of income for many people during the desperate dust-bowl 1930's. LSD experiments were conducted there, in the 50's, 60's... It seems the place was closed as late as 1971.

Anyway, back to the phone call.

I found these words tumbling out of my mouth: "What do you think of the idea of me moving to Weyburn, Mom?" followed quickly thereafter by "I don't want to live with you."

She was taken aback a bit, but very quickly found her footing and sounded delighted with the idea. She started planning immediately. There were condos for sale up the street. She knew a real estate agent I could contact. She knew a spa in town, maybe they'd like to hire me if I wanted to work. The new current under the surface, a swift clear current of feeling, one I can ride until it's over, is that I'm the Oldest Daughter, and can help her remain independent, something she cares desperately about, until it's time for her to make an exit. This current feels congruent with the gravitational pull I have anyway of moving further east, back out from under the cloud, fog, rain and grey dreariness of the Wet Coast.

So, it looks like some day soon I'll be living in a small city, pop. 10,000 and holding, with average age that I think must be older than middle-aged, a speed limit of 40 km. Back to the roots. Arriving "home," just a bit burnt out, with nothing but myself, a laptop, a couple of flash drives, a few special books, in a position (I hope) to be able to take a year off, soak up sun and do what I need to do next.

Progress toward "impeccablization"

Yesterday I managed to get a lot done: I figured out how to post to Craig's list and supplied some pictures to it of furniture I have to clear out in order to attractively "stage" my "home" for a quick and favourable sale. I started cleaning off a large mirrored door I once painted to match the wall, in order to make the hallway not look like such a long tunnel. I still like the shortened look more, but realize the home buyer might not enjoy the prospect of de-painting the mirror some day. Anything to leave no trace of me behind...

I "swabbed the deck" - meaning, I physically hauled several large flower and plant pots and balcony furniture down to the dumpster (from where people eventually made them their own), and washed the railing and floor. It's an extensive balcony, wrapping all the way around a corner.

I think it's been at least 6 years since I've touched that balcony. I used to like to keep a garden on it, sit out amidst the flowers on a plastic chair beside a plastic table, sipping a coffee in the morning and watching bees do their thing, carve out and maintain a peaceful urban oasis. One day I found a package of cigarettes out there. It appeared that someone who had no business on my balcony had climbed up to hang out, enjoy my second-floor garden, or maybe try to break in, had become interrupted, and left abruptly without actually smoking. The cigarettes were a mystery, in that neither I nor the roommate I had at the time smoked. Whoever it was (and it could not have been anyone who belonged on my balcony, in my urban oasis), the experience managed to put me off gardening entirely. From that point on the garden was never restored. I never enjoyed hanging out on the balcony anymore, knowing that it was too exposed, too vulnerable to feel like my private refuge.

Mold grows amazingly well in this climate, and there was no shortage of it, clinging impossibly to even shiny painted surfaces. It was a bit of a dirty mess, but nothing that several pails of warm water with bleach, a scrub brush, and some springtime energy couldn't handle. Now it's spotless and I feel victorious over that part of my tiny world.

Being very active all day like this is certainly easier than it would have been a year ago, when I weighed 25 pounds more.

Adrienne and my cranky leg

I think I lucked out at Sherwood Physiotherapy... a few weeks ago someone dropped by and left off a resumé. Once in awhile people leave resumés, usually for a reception job, but this one was from a PT. I checked it over and liked what I saw. New grad but a mature thirty-two years of age, already through one career as a professional dancer, experience with sports injuries, has already done a research project.

It seemed curious that she would pick my practice to apply to, so I gave her a call to find out more. We decided to meet so I could show her the clinic, then go for coffee. Turns out she wanted to work from my space in order to be convenient for all the dancers that live in the 'hood, where yoga and dance studios are everywhere. She had done her homework, had moved into the neighbourhood three weeks earlier, and decided to aim for employment at my place, which is the only PT clinic for blocks and blocks.

To call it a "clinic" is a bit presumptuous of me... It's more like a room in a nice office suite. A non-PT practitioner also has a practice in that suite, who I get along with quite well. Our practices have no overlap, other than we share the cost of a receptionist. My practice is one-on-one, carefully teasing the pain out of people while accompanying them for one or a few sessions.

It was dreadfully slow in Feb, so there was nothing for her to pick up, but this week is going better. She will take over my normal Wednesday off. See patients. Help pay some of the overhead.

We have been busy getting some promo material together, chatting about pain, treatment... I loaned her some books, the treatment manual I developed. Today she tried out some manual therapy on me.

Well, all I've got to say is the woman has hands on her that are like butter. My cranky right leg (which has been cranky for over 50 years) very much liked what she did to it. It's still working with what she was able to get it to let go of. It feels like it has little happy faces mixed with 7-up bubbles running through its vessels instead of blood. Walking home it felt like it was looser, stronger, longer and didn't get as tired as the left leg did, so I know my S1 cortex must have neuroplasticized a fair bit.

My cranky leg/ankle foot stems from a sprain at age 5. Age 5. I vaguely remember that it hurt for what felt like months. It was never handled, never cared for, never treated.

Lucky for me, I have the right mix of receptors or something, because it never gave rise to CRPS or fibromyalgia or anything. Most of the time it hasn't "hurt", exactly. It just felt shrunken and tight, like the antigravity suit was a bit too tight in the leg zone. No amount of yoga ever helped. Nothing I learned to do (to or with it, on my own) in over 50 years, almost 40 of which was spent being a PT, helped. OMPT certainly didn't help - in fact it made it hurt a lot for awhile. I saw a massage therapist who helped the pain, but my sense of it feeling "wrong" remained. I figured out a lot of my imaginative tape techniques by using my own leg to practice on.

This is all a big lead up to what happened today. I had let Adrienne watch me treat a few people, with their permission of course.. so today she wanted to practice a tarsal tunnel treatment, and knee treatment. Long story short, the work she did felt remarkable, and still does; all the Barrett Dorko characteristics of correction (fondly referred to as C's of C) - warmth, softening, effortless(!) movement (quite a bit of that - twitching, pulsing etc.), surprise (I've not had those sorts of results from other practitioners who've worked on me) - developed during the session. It was like my leg had been waiting for this for a very long time and was more than ready to have its nerves treated instead of its bones and muscles and joints.

So, I'm sold on Adrienne. So's my leg. Here's a little write-up about her that I attached to my website. I feel really good about the prospect, when the time comes, of leaving my practice, and all the people who've come to it for 15 years, in her very, very good hands.

More about making progress

So, today was a serious book day. I spent all morning sifting the remaining 25% of the total, which took hours. I was able to list a few more. I have 144 listed, 5 purchased and off the list.

The entire process feels like molting. Molting is something that often comes as a surprise to a human primate, because we have no fur, really.. yet, most animals molt, and I think we do too, although more in a symbolic, non-conscious way perhaps. I tried to explain this recently to someone.

Apparently even primates molt, so I don't see why it would be outside the world of symbolic or even otherwise non-conscious expression of the human neuromatrix. I think another metaphor would be ripened compost - if it can't decompose any more, it either needs to support growth (die to itself while helping transform something into something else -birthing) or else it needs more scraps to take apart (feeding). If it doesn't move somehow, back into a flow, it is a waste of perfectly good nature. Human lives are long but still all too short to be wasted on regret or stasis. That's how I've always lived the one I've got, at least. A molt: when one's life no longer fits one comfortably, time to move it to a new sleeping nest. It's the human primate way.

Molting seems to be a not-very-enjoyable process for everyone who does it. Insects are at their most vulnerable as they push themselves out of their cocoons. Snakes have to strip themselves out of their own skins by first slashing their face skin on a rock. Birds look absolutely awful when they are partly molted. Dogs shed. Cats shed. Monkeys molt. It's a price critters have to pay. They don't look attractive while molting, and they must feel quite itchy and preoccupied. This all feels familiar to me on a mental level just now.

Last night, while in a wound-up, sleepless state, brought on no doubt by being preoccupied with trying to hold it together on the surface while feeling like everything is falling apart inside, and writing about it, sort of.. I wrote, regarding the mountain of books, "No one wants them - I can't even give them away.

Ha. What a difference a day makes.

I had noticed that whenever I put out a few loads of books they did seem to vanish fast. I accepted that. The neighbourhood is full of dumpster divers patrolling at all hours of the day and night, looking for anything they might be able to sell. This morning I took out a few bags full, went back in, came back out with a bag of garbage not five minutes later. Much to my surprise I found a car parked with its doors open, and a woman and two teenage girls merrily chattering and rapidly scooping up the books, putting them into the car. "Good" I said. "Someone is taking the books." She was about 40, very smiley and merry. "Oh yes, I've been finding piles of books here every day for the last three days. I've been coming over to rescue them! I love books! My mother loves books! I just live over there.." and she gestured across the alley.

So, it turns out that she's lived across the alley from me, a single mom raising her daughters, for years, since before I ever moved into my place. I told her I had a whole pile more and that she was welcome to them. Together we lugged the books over to her place and stacked them on the floor. About 6 round trips with my two plastic baskets and two cloth shopping bags for her. She was ecstatic. She was planning to go to massage school now that her children were nearly launched into life. Many of my discards were books she wanted but would have had a hard time affording, perhaps. Plus, she knows people who know people who can sell them for 50 cents each, or whatever, to raise money for battered women's projects, at used-clothing stores, etc. So hey, letting go of this burden is a good thing that benefits this very nice, nurturing woman and her social network, and helps feed her dream of being a self-sustaining body worker person in some community in the interior some day. It's all good.

A woman I know commented to me recently that I was good at manifesting. I said, "Well, I don't believe in that. But I do believe that situations do emerge, which require resolution, and that resolution of situations is a natural phenomenon." "Oh," she said.

Making progress

The story of this month of February was the story of climbing back up out of winter, fighting off inertia, figuring out how to start a seller account on Amazon and plowing through my biggest problem first - what feels like thousands of books, but which only add up to.. well, maybe one thousand. Which is still a lot of books to deal with.

I soon found out that I couldn't become a seller on Amazon.com. As a Canadian I do not have that privilege. I'm restricted to Amazon.ca. Okie-doakie. As I started to list I realized there was absolutely no point in listing any book for anything less than $20. It costs nearly that much to mail a book somewhere. One has to buy mailing boxes or padded envelopes, some bubble wrap to keep the book safe, etc. Postage varies according to how heavy or big the book is, but rarely will come in under $10.

I learned some things fast - like that I was going to have to face the fact that it would be necessary to toss out most of them. No one wants them - I can't even give them away. Unbelievable. This took some getting used to. I'm ordinarily a resilient person, but these books were my friends, lovingly collected over at least a decade, most of them read or at least scanned, all of them worth another go, some of them worth a great deal more time spent lingering lovingly over their content. It created great disquiet, having to get started on the painful job of deconstructing my library collection. I never expected I'd ever move again as long as I lived, you see. I thought it was safe to start letting things like books accumulate. I had no idea I'd become seasonally affectively disordered to the point of being E-ffectively disordered as well. And realizing the situation and that I had to escape it.

I keep thinking maybe this is what it's like to be old and facing demise. One has a lifetime of treasured moments that one simply cannot share with anyone anymore. One has lost one's ability to do so. Maybe one's life has gone up in a house fire, along with all the pictures. Maybe one loses one's own mind, and the memories have deleted themselves. Maybe everyone in one's particular circle, including family members, is horribly killed in a war or something, and one finds oneself alone in the world. Now, picture yourself having to be the one to deliberately destroy these relationships, be the agent of one's own severance away from the minds of so many others, be the bad guy. Every time I picked up a book, checked it out to see if it was worth any money on Amazon, then put it onto the Keep, Sell, or Toss pile, I felt like I was killing or saving or selling another of my own friends. Only about 1 book in 10 is worth any money, therefore worth listing. I am keeping only about one book in 40. (This is the grief talking.)

It wasn't all bad though - what a happy surprise to learn that a single ortho text I had (and had absolutely no attachment to) was unavailable except for a few listed as "used-good condition", for around $600. I laughed out loud! I listed mine for $100 (I have no idea what I had paid for it new) and it was snapped up within hours. A really old (decades old) joint physiology text I lugged around through several moves sold - I'll be sending it off tomorrow. It's Vol 2 - Vol 1 and 3 are still for sale.

There are other surprises. Some books I bought for 4 or 5 dollars used are worth much much more these days. Alrighty then. They are listed. I started this venture a week ago, and have sent off 5 books so far, made about $200. A side benefit is that I stared a special account for this and have learned to do online banking now. (I feel so modern. It's the pride talking.)

Every day I haul out the less fortunate to the back alley, two bags full. I have two nifty bright colored shopping baskets I bought long ago on a trip to Central America. They are made out of some absolutely indestructible plastic woven into bright stripes and have sturdy handles. I use them for recycle containers usually, but now they are for hauling books I must discard. I still have three large stacks of books to go through, each one as tall as my waist. I've managed to get rid of two half height bookcases about a yard wide. My neighbour snapped them up to hold shoes in her hallway. I'm about three-quarters through the book mountain. (This is the relief talking.)

This whole chapter of life is very much about relief mixed in with regret. It makes me realize that in fact, it is entirely within the capacity of the human system to be able to feel two conflicting emotions, fully, at once, and stretch oneself enough to be able to contain both, and find whatever it takes inside to plow along, move forward anyway. Even if it feels like swimming through quicksand. One simply says to oneself, You can do this. It won't be much longer. Think how much easier life will be once you live in a sunny climate again.

So, by now if you've been reading along, you may be thinking, strange woman, bonded to her books instead of to a family or to other people. Well, in fact, I think I must have seen this whole parting thing and the pain it brings, way in advance, long before I ever experienced any of the joy bonding to others supposedly brings, while still a child. Generally, I've seen that the parting part of intimately relating seems to last a lot longer and be a lot less pleasant than the joining and developing part. At least in my experience. Therefore I have always had a cautious heart - never let it get too attached to any person. Enjoyed friends but never got overly attached. But books - books and cats - those were different stories entirely. I have been very incautious about bonding to both. Both are still capable of breaking my heart, right to this day, when the inevitable parting comes. Perhaps one day I will learn to not be so attached to them either.

My fantasy is to move completely unencumbered by "stuff." Have everything on my computer contained in a couple flash drives. Move into a new space with lots of windows and never again accumulate. Bare walls, bare floor. Painted plain white.

Truth is more like I'll still have boxes of stuff to move. But it will be like the old days when I was a student - just a few boxes: some changes of clothing, some kitchen stuff, some personal things, photos, and maybe 4 boxes of books, the laptop. But no furniture. Sleep on the floor for awhile. Buy a new desk top computer at the other end. Read books online instead. Live light.

Other bits of progress: I have a real estate agent at the other end, and one at this end. I have a good reliable fix-it guy to handle minor repairs here, to help me get my place impeccable-ized. A young woman walked into my PT life and wants to work in my place. I might have even found a buyer for the practice, although it will take a good thorough investigation first. I would take these things as "signs" that I'm on the right track, if I believed in such things. It doesn't seem to help me sleep soundly at night, every night, however. Plenty of tossing and turning and that upheavaled feeling. I swear it feels worse at this age than it used to, way back a couple decades ago.

Humans, the neotenous primate

Deric at Mindblog posted about this essay by Alison Gopnik titled Never-ending childhood.

Excerpts:

"people will have to learn more and more. The best way to make it happen is to extend the period when we learn the most — childhood."

"We may remain children forever — or at least for much longer."

"Humans already have a longer period of protected immaturity — a longer childhood — than any other species. Across species, a long childhood is correlated with an evolutionary strategy that depends on flexibility, intelligence and learning."

"Children get to learn freely about their particular environment without worrying about their own survival — caregivers look after that."

Well, ideally anyway... I think it's debatable. Lots of children all over the world now wander in streets having to be self-sufficient far too young. They get "old" far sooner than they should have to. Meanwhile, "chidren" elsewhere live and grow up to and through sexual maturity in socially reinforced and rewarded bubble zones of childhood and postadolescent protection, until they reach middle age.

The essay ends with,

"When we are all babies for ever, who will be the parents? When we're all children who will be the grown-ups?"

Exactly. Who indeed.

Exceptionalism of the American kind

Human primate life is equal parts bio/psycho/social. Ordinarily I look at the bio part; sometimes the psycho aspect is interesting, but only very rarely (for this introvert) does the big-wide-world social matrix interest me enough to write something on it. This week, the Obama-thon had everyone, even me, glued to a TV set.

The Obama inauguration has come and gone leaving a very big wake. Ripples will come off that event for a long time. Probably nothing since the death of Princess Di has managed to rivet people's attention worldwide to such a single sustained focus for a couple whole days.
.....................

So, I heard Obama talk about American exceptionalism, and wondered what it was. I read a bit about it (including this), and have tried to figure out what its implications are.

As a Canadian, I see the US culture, its political construct, its way of organizing itself as a human primate troop, its behaviour and its impact, against a whole backdrop of older, tamer, more restrictive, certainly more ubiquitous, settled, and staid political systems, such as monarchy, or even dictatorship, where things settled into more less stable layers a long time ago. Boring, right? On the surface, the insistence on democracy sounds very very good, very refreshing. (I think 200+ years is a mere blink in social, human primate troop time.)

To me the term suggests pride in deliberate disinhibition of human potential, deliberately facilitated by a "human primate troop" (societal) political structure which accelerates movement between strata both laterally and vertically, horizontally and diagonally. It has always seemed to me that the "American Way" is self-congratulatory on its success at having developed a system that managed to un-lid human creativity, ingenuity, efficiency, adaptability, and effervescence. That is something everyone of every culture, country, age and color, is immediately addicted to. It's a manifestation of "people" power, and everyone wants to wear its symbols, eat the candy.

I watched Obama test the political part of the US electoral system, from the lowest P4 level deep down, on up to the pinnacle of the system, and prove it works - after all, he did go from being a potentially laid-back Hawaiian kid of a single mom, to being president of the US, in under 50 years. He proved that the idea that "anyone can become president" isn't just a myth - he figured out the trick! He studied, took apart the political machine, analyzed it, and was able to convince a majority that he is willing to and can put it all back together again, in working order. This says something about him, his choices, how he was raised, for sure, but it also says a lot about a system that anyone, REALLY, not just theoretically, can learn to manipulate, leverage to advantage.

He must be the world's most successful extrovert. He represents the people of the entire planet. He still smokes. That's got to make the tobacco lobby happy. Clearly he can think and plot. Read and write. Make great speeches. And look good.
.........


The dark side I see in American exceptionalism is this: It may have created its own demise from the beginning, due directly to having deliberately laid in political dis-inhibition, permitting social "upward causation" instead of functioning as social inhibition, keeping a lid on things, the way other political systems do.

I think this memeplex (which had never really existed, prior, at a nation level, start to finish), emerged as a raging cachectic economic fireball which started out small, 200 odd years ago, but which is now consuming everything, including everyone everywhere who was ever mesmerized by the spectacle of a country that gets-things-done no matter how much it might cost, whose business is business, whose might has rested on seeing how fast it can transform "nature" (which it calls "resources") into another second artificial circulation system of other stuff/money that isn't alive and is therefore hard for nature to take apart again. Runaway growth. Poking holes in the planet as fast as possible to extract oil as fast as possible. Using up nature. It all set an unfortunate example for the rest of the peoples on the planet, and they copied. (Damn those human primate mirror neurons.)

If Obama can manage to turn something like this around, green up US citizenry, grow the country a bit of a conscience, help it find some smooth way to stop acting like a reckless teenager banging the whole planet around, every human on the planet will be grateful to him. He won't be just another poser filling a job slot, he'll have been for real.

The Game he'll have to play, the thing that will keep all eyes riveted on him, is to stay suspended in mid-air (like this picture of him effortlessly playing basketball), so that no one spots his "tell", so that no one will know to the very last millisecond which way he is going to come down or which part will touch down first.

Mesmerize by continuous motion coupled with frequent reflection outward of attractive toothy grin, calm inner state, deliver all news (including the bad) in even soothing sedate studied tones, leave no stone unturned (take the oath twice just to make sure), report any progress, and obstacles, cheer on human creativity, ingenuity, efficiency, adaptability, and effervescence, but bend it toward solving social problems instead of making more of them through allowing the American memeplex to go unchecked with a social kind of "downward causation" - i.e., encouraging the sole objective of making more stuff/money => and fighting wars all over the place to maintain access to resources => to make stuff/money... etc.etc.

I'm so glad, if the perhaps overly optimistic US economic system had to fall apart some day, that it fell apart while Bush was still in office. The timing couldn't have been better, really, in that no one will ever be able to blame that on Obama. The political system may also collapse some day, but while it's still functional I'm glad that Obama is the one who has taken it on. It's as though he has volunteered to be the engineer on a freight train which has experienced sudden loss of brakes and is hurtling downhill. Maybe he can figure out how to steer it safely, maybe repair the brakes before it's too late... wishful thinking. The train looks like it's going to crash, but maybe he can save most of the passengers. At least he seems to care about them...

I say all this as someone from a more staid, less fast-moving, monarchist, pseudo- (by US standards) democracy slightly to the north of the US., with lots of resources, fewer people, which has never been in any great hurry to use them up completely as fast as possible. The pace is slower - we like to wait for nature to grow back a bit before we cut it down again..

Our head of state, Michaelle Jean, is a black first generation Haitian refugee, who (as far as I know) doesn't smoke. She was appointed to represent the queen.


Mostly she gets to travel and look good and attend tea parties, but if political trouble brews, as it did here last fall, she flies home, turns to page 57, section D paragraph 3, point viii, (or wherever) and does what's written in the traditional rulebook. Simple.
We have a protocol for everything, you see, and it saves everyone lots of stress, let's everyone get back to their respective tea parties.

The politicians of Canada are decidedly not noted for any creativity, ingenuity, efficiency, adaptability, and effervescence. They show up (usually) and (usually) keep things rolling along, but Canuck citizens are not required to participate in government in anything like the way US citizens are all expected to contribute. (I was amazed that the US ballots are several pages long, that each person who votes has to become familiar with every issue and its implications, that nothing much happens until and unless ordinary citizens haul themselves out to become informed about then vote on each item. Here, we, the Canuck citizens, hire politicians to do all that. We have all adopted our own versions of the "downward causation" tea party memeplex, instead, I suppose.)

I do not see that the citizens of the US have gotten much for their trouble so far. I see that, so far, the "democracy" they continue to have to pour effort and personal sacrifice into hasn't looked after them yet. Maybe it will start soon.

I also see that US citizens finally spotted someone who made them stop feeling tired and burnt out. Who has made them feel like maybe they can stop feeling oppressed, or like they maybe won't have to fight each other and the government for each and every scrap they have coming to them. Someone who might actually stop trying to hoover up all the remaining resources on the entire planet, and who might listen to them for a change, might try to re-route a few organized efforts their way to make ordinary lives a bit easier, less expensive, who might even help lighten the load on the whole planet for a change, make everything less expensive. Who might see "people" as integral bits of the earth, and the earth as the only place we all can ever "live." Who might see that it's time to stop acting like there's no tomorrow, now that there might not actually be much of a "tomorrow"...

Maybe even change the meaning of "exceptionalism" so that it more accurately reflects what US people are really all about, a very hard-working, self-democratized human primate troop, so we all get to see what kind of global conduct and capacity to carry responsibility they've really been training themselves for two centuries or thereabouts to have, and how they see what's going on/going down.

Can an entire human troop (the people of the US) lead all the other slower troops (every other country)? Can the supposedly less politically blind lead the presumably more blind? Out of a dangerous chasm it led everyone/everything into in the first place? Perhaps just by using up the planet faster than it could replenish itself?

I guess we'll all find out one day, in retrospect, if this is so. Maybe Obama will be able to arrange that. Meanwhile, I will continue to watch him, listen to him. I felt included in his address, because he included everybody, everywhere, and mentioned non-believers alongside other groups specified. It's a nice warm fuzzy to have one of one's primary groups be recognized, by name, by the newest politically alpha human primate of the entire world's human primate troop.

Additional reading:
1. Getting there from here (Atul Gawande on health care reform, New Yorker Jan 26/09)
2. Path dependence - definitions
3. Compatibilism from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
4. "If the world were a village of 1000 people"
5. American Exceptionalism - A Double Edged Sword (Lipset)
6. On America's Double Standard: The good and bad faces of exceptionalism by Harold Hongju Koh (2004)

Insular Winter Wallowing

I've been interested in the insular cortex for a long time now, thanks to Deric Bownd's Mindblog having introduced me to this brain part, and also the posts over there about Sandra Blakeslee's book, The Body has a Mind of its Own, about brain maps. Sandra Blakeslee follows the research of A.D.Craig, who studies the insula from the perspective of its relationship to ascending nociception. Awareness of what's going on on the inside of one's physicality and of oneself (whatever self is), is called interoception. The brain is continuously interocepting, and one can merely tune in if one wants. In my work, I teach people to become aware of their physicality, while mostly leaving it up to them to hook their new ability to perceive their physicality up to them"selves."

Deric Bownds has a new post, How do you feel - now? The anterior insula and human awareness, which describes a new Craig paper by the same name. The paper is in Nature Neuroscience Reviews. It's full of interesting ideas; like the hub of a bicycle wheel, spokes go everywhere from this paper. I haven't yet even begun to digest it, but might blog more about various spokes later.

Meanwhile, I found an old article, Flesh made Soul, by Sandra Blakeslee, on interoception and spirituality, which I found very interesting on re-read. (Here is a link to her articles page. You have to find Flesh made Soul, about fourth down the list at this time.) She talks about interoception and wonders if it has anything to do with spiritual feelings. She is an atheist, which I find reassuring.

I have been wallowing in my own insular cortices (one on each side and they do different things) for many weeks, and will continue to wallow into the indistinct future. Posts might be sparse for a little while as I sort through the prospect of pulling up an entire life that I had thought was finally settled, and moving on to a sunnier place. I will be back, but not right away, probably.

Vancouver photon levels

Pictures were taken today, at about 2 PM. Note the low light levels and black and white/colorlessness overall. Things could be worse, photon-wise, there could be no snow at all. At least with snow, photons bounce around some.
I don't know why I'm still living here. I do know I can't for very many more years.

"Can I be ill and happy?"

A PT friend sent me a link to an article called Can I be ill and happy? about a book he is reading, Illness: Cry of the Flesh, by Havi Carel, a philosopher, also the author of the article.

A review of the book found on the sales page says (abbreviated):

"This book is a tremendous achievement, as well as being a very moving personal document. It is a philosophical meditation on the nature of and social meaning illness, disease and death. It discusses philosophical and psychological literature, Epicurus, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. But it is also a personal memoir, it is about Carel's experience of being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, about what that meant for her presence in the world, about how she appeared in the eyes of others, and how she felt she appeared. It is about the encounter with medical professionals and their detached and external perspective on another's catastrophe; it is about the varied reactions of friends, some of whom couldn't maintain friendship. It is about how to confront the fact that all your assumptions about how your life is going to go: career, relationships, family, old age, can just be taken away. Carel was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare disease that affects young women, and for which the progosis is about 10 years from the onset of symptoms. The sufferer experiences a progressive decline in lung-function over that time. Life may be extended by a heart-lung transplant, but that's, obviously, a difficult business. .... She uses Merleau-Ponty's ideas about embodied subjectivity throughout the book to explore what illness is like for the sick person and how powers and abilities that are invisible to and taken for granted by the well person become all too manifest to the sick (or disabled or ageing) person. All the time, she is constantly moving backwards and forwards between this theoretical discussion and the fact of her own experience: the first onset of symptoms, "denial", diagnosis, treatment, the foreclosure of plans, projects, possibilities. The phenomenology of social situations gets explored too: how people react, their sensitivities and insensitivities, callous reactions, stupid injunctions from ignorant people to try faddish diets of exercise routines."

Another review.
Excerpt:

"The book seamlessly blends philosophical writings in illness (mainly those of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger) with phenomenology to privilege the first-person experience of illness. It begins with a discussion of what is meant by the phenomenology of illness, and by the end of the first chapter it is clear why Carel chose to adopt a phenomenological approach. We learn more about how the illness affects her on a personal basis, rather than a simple statistical charting of her decreasing lung function.

Next, Carel examines the social world of illness. She suggests that rather than viewing illness through either the first or third person (depending on your relationship to it), it should be managed through what Buber calls the I-Thou encounter, of one person genuinely encountering another. Using this approach to illness, Carel argues that the principal exchange between doctors and patients should be more empathetic and compassionate, rather than based on the "objective" method most commonly associated with Western approaches to health and illness.

Later chapters examine death and what Carel terms "health within illness". Here, the philosophical discussion centres on Heidegger's characterisation of human existence as "being able to be". Carel asks whether ageing and illness means coming to terms with being unable to be. Given that somebody might be ill, does being ill mean that he or she is unable to have a good life?"

Definitely looks like it would be worth a read. Looks like it will contain all sorts of extractable information useful to anyone embedded in a humanantigravitysuit complete with lifespan, whether short or long, coded into it.

Sensory awareness

So, I've been noticing my skin and how it feels since I got back. Well, all along really, but one thing I realize is how much more I am aware of it. I expect that my brain had become quite bored with 18 years of sameness and craved some new kinesthetic input.

Differences:

1. I became quite used to wearing light loose clothing (and not much of it) in Hawaii. The big difference is footwear. I absolutely hated the idea, two mornings ago, of putting on socks and shoes for the trip home on the plane. I thought about wearing flipflops until the last second, in the boarding lounge, but decided that would require too much effort, so put the flipflops in the luggage and donned the socks and shoes. But guess what I saw in the lounge? At least two people had worn flipflops from their condos, and were sitting in the boarding lounge digging out and putting on their socks and shoes. The first idea would have been the better one, and socially facilitated to boot.
2. Since I've been back, my feet, which have become reacquainted with the joys of perfect shoeless bareness and freedom and complete warmth, have been allowed to go without slippers. When they get cold, I can "feel" it, and they are put into slippers. I'm just more aware of my feet, period. They feel good!
3. My skin still feels warm from having had a taste of sunshine and direct radiation on it, in all the parts that had some. Back mostly. My back still feels deliciously warm, in the zone where it became tanned.
4. I feel better inside myself, whatever self is: my working hypothesis is that by stimulating the skin nerve endings with climatic warmth, and light, not just the ones in the eye-balls, there is a new congruence or even maybe reacquaintance of the visual sensory cortex with the kinesthetic sensory cortex, and some neuroplasticity has occurred, neuroplasticity of the most overdue sort. The thing is, I had gotten very very very far away from sunbathing. For so many reasons:

• Skin cancer. I don't care as much anymore about this, as I've gotten old enough that I imagine I will outlive the chances of it starting up then killing me.
• Having aged and fattened and become more shy about degree of body coverage. In Hawaii no one, and I mean no one, cares, or at least there is little or no gawking. The whole culture of the place is that the body is exactly where you live and operate from and it does not matter what it looks like. The culture there is not a snob, in other words.
• Here in Vancouver, even when it's hot out, it's such a rare event that most people are not in the habit of lying around in the sun. So the opportunities that do exist are missed, except I suppose for those with their own pool in their own yard to lie beside. Not a fact of life for most, so most everyone stays covered. Plus... it's always cool here, even on hot days, because as soon as you go in the shade or a cloud goes across, bam, it's immediately cold enough to be comfortable in ordinary cool-weather clothing and footwear. Poor brains! In cold climates they miss out on a lot of sensory integration! And then this behaviour gets reinforced by culture.
  
• I feel I reconnected to the sensory self I was as a child, with complete bodily freedom, few clothes and no shoes. More neuroplasticity there, through the arrow of time.

One little detail I forgot, a brilliant sensory cap to the entire vacation, was the big rainbow over the airport. It seemed to last for a very long time, at least an hour. As the plane took off it was visible out one of the windows in my line of sight. Nice send-off Hawaii - thanks for that.

Luck

Back home again. Lots of snow here. The plane landed about midnight. There were no cabs. Lucky for me, after schlepping my three bags about a quarter mile outside the airport, I saw a cabbie sitting, waiting.. I approached him, learned he was waiting to pick up his daughter. He was a nice guy and took pity on me - he and his daughter took me to my place anyway, and he kept us entertained with stories about all the novelty involved with driving in heavy snow.

It seems the city literally ground to a halt. Everyone's holiday plans went awry. No one could travel in or out of the city, which was buried under two feet of snow delivered by sideways winds. The airport could only operate one runway. Taxi drivers who lived in areas that got socked in couldn't get out to go to work, so they just laid low. No grocery deliveries could be made. Nothing moved for days.

Meanwhile, I was carefree in Maui with little or no attachment to the holiday part of the season, and therefore no plans ruined, having a mytai Christmas eve with the other carefree grey-haired people under a roofed area under a tropical rain, letting rum internally massage my spirit into something a bit brighter. Lucky me.

Last night's flight coincided with a lull in the weather such that there was only a two hour delay instead of a two day delay. Lucky me again. I came into my peaceful apartment last night, about 1:30 AM, tried to not wake up any neighbours, felt my familiar surroundings around me once again, noted that all seemed well, that my neighbour had very kindly piled my mail neatly, had watered the plant, and had made the place look lived in, in exchange for the promise of a couple boxes of those decadent chocolate macadamia nuts. Lucky me yet again for having a wonderful neighbour. Hello place - how strangely familiar yet novel, both at the same time.

This morning I checked to see what damage had been inflicted on the diet plan - only one pound gained, in spite of a steady diet of chocolate macadamia nuts, eggs benedict and mytais. Not bad I think. And it's been very easy to climb right back onto the former plan again today. Yet more luck.

I walked to the grocery store this morning, about a half kilometer there and another back. I loved the coolness of the air - just as much as I loved the warmth in Maui. It isn't cold out - I mean, no need for hat or mitts, just cool against a face that is still warm from direct sun. The sky, while not blue, is definitely letting sun through in some places. Way less bird song. No wind. No roar of surf. Very hushed, bright, peaceful. "Bright" is a new adjective - snow makes a huge difference to the overall photon level. I could even see my shadow, rare in these foggy dark edgeless parts.. lucky lucky lucky.

Yes, I think it will be possible to get through this winter in pretty good shape for a change. I feel an inner congruence that I haven't sensed in a long long time. Luck, my old friend, welcome back into my life. More snow is expected, and no complete melt until February. Sounds crazy, I realize, but I sincerely hope that's true.

Last day

In a few more hours I will be sitting in Kahului airport waiting for my Westjet flight to begin. Then I'll wait several more hours inside the airplane waiting for it to land. That's going to be my life today. Other days are usually better. I must say, the last three weeks have been mostly splendid, from a nature/climate/weather point of view.

Here is what awaits me at the other end, from one of today's weathercams. Of course, it will be night time instead of daylight.

I'm interested in learning if I succumb to SAD this winter or if spending a whole pile of cash to get outside this physical fogbank will have helped me avoid the inner one.

Bye bye Hawaii. Mahalo for all the lovely warm sunny days, wavy palm trees, birds, flowers, photon showers and purple ocean gazing. Thanks for letting me experience several warm salty surf splashes and immersions. Thanks for the modest tan I'll have for at least a week after I get back. It's been a good slice.

Surf's up

December 25, 2008

Happy everything to everyone.

Exercising permeable boundaries

Living for a few weeks in Maui has exposed my northern-acclimated brain to many new novel stimuli, one of which is the phenomenon of continuously open-to-the-outside glass slat windows. At first when the curtains billowed I would check to see if I had left the balcony door open, but no, it was closed, securely locked. In fact at first I didn't even realize there were banks of open slat windows along each side of the wall behind the drapes, that in fact one whole end of the condo was completely glass.

This makes for a bit of an adjustment, to constant fresh air and to continuous noise. The fresh air, I must admit, is very nice. Since the temperature is the same indoors and out, no problem. The noise took a bit more getting used to - not that people around here are noisy, with the exception, perhaps, of children having a marvelous time in the pool right outside - but I was not used to hearing every song from every bird, or every rustle of every bush as the breeze blows through. It's quite wonderful in many ways.

Fortunately, there is little or no crime here. I do keep the place locked, out of habit, and to minimize my own endogenous stress level, but I am very grateful that there is little to no exogenously caused stress around here. A very peaceful place indeed.

It occurred to me that I have yet to see any cats wandering around. I expect this goes a long way toward explaining why there are so many birds and why they all walk around as though they own the place. Truth is, they do.


I'm going to be a little sad to have to go back home on Saturday. I feel like I finally have arrived, not in Maui but to myself. Thanks in large part to Maui. Aloha, self. Peace.

A touristy day in Lahaina, Maui Part III: my salute to the Hawai'ian flag

Ever since I got here I've seen lots of flags - Canadian, American, a blue one which I have yet to learn about, and one I learned about today, the Hawai'ian flag. Here is the history of the overthrow of the Hawai'ian monarchy by the US, from the point of view of the Hawai'ian indigenous people. In 1898, the Hawai'ian flag was lowered in a ceremony conducted by Arthur Waal, the postmaster, and a US flag was put up, right in the courtyard of Lahaina, where the banyan tree imported by the missionaries lives. In 1998, Hawai'ian pride rose, and the flag was resurrected at a ceremony marking the hundredth anniversary of its displacement.

This link depicts the flag's design and what is represented by it. This Wikipedia link mentions that

"The flag of Hawaii (Hawaiian: Ka Hae Hawaiʻi) is the official standard symbolizing Hawaii as a U.S. state, as it previously had as a kingdom, protectorate, republic, and territory. It is the only state flag of the United States to have been flown under so many various forms of government and the only to feature the Union Flag of the United Kingdom, a relic of the period Hawaii considered itself a British protectorate (1794–1843)."

At the museum today, I saw the original, the one that had been taken down in 1898, by the postmaster of the day, Arthur Waal. I've included my little photo of it, framed and in the museum in Lahaina.

The story that goes with its return made my eyes wet, and still does, even now, hours and hours later.





First, we have the reluctant postmaster, ordered by his country to do some dominating behaviour to do with exchanging flags. So, he does. As graciously as possible.



He writes about the event in a way that suggests he was of very mixed feelings about the whole idea. He describes the solemnity of the Hawai'ian people as they see their flag come down. He feels for them. Here is a piece he wrote about it, after the fact. (Hopefully the picture will enlarge if you click on it, so you can read his words.

Long story short, he takes their flag back to California with him, and looks after it. Presumably he dies at some point, and his son is given the job of looking after it. Perhaps the son, Arthur Waal Jr., is in a clutter-busting mood one day, or perhaps he gets wind of Hawai'ian Pride starting up... in any event, he contacts the appropriate authorities, and offers them back their flag, the original.

Fast forward to 2002. New ceremony. A Hawai'ian woman, possibly a relative of the old royal family, in any case, a Kupuna, an esteemed elder, Pua Lindsey, makes a speech, is given the flag back, and in the process of accepting the flag, tenderly puts a lei on it, and thanks Mr. Waal for having taken such good care of it all this time.



The lei is no ordinary lei - it is a luxurious beautiful stunning lei, about an inch and a half thick, constructed entirely of soft golden feathers. Here is the picture of that, to the left.

If you click on the picture you will be able to see a larger version (I hope), and will be able to read it and go all mushy like I did.

There is something about someone laying a soft infinitely gorgeous feather lei "gently" on a tattered flag - the original flag that came down when their sovereignty, their nationhood, was rudely yanked away merely to smooth out business bumps - the kindness with which the flag (if not the sovereignty it symbolizes at least the physical object itself) was restored by this man, this son who may have noted his father's sense of helplessness, perhaps even sense of guilt, who enacts a ceremony that likely gave him as much personal peace of mind as it evidently gave this gracious group of people who received it back so lovingly... there is something about this gentle action toward a physical object that symbolizes a nation and its betrayal, at the same time, that reconciles opposites somehow, that is a forgiveness and a redemption.

Something about this event makes me feel something, powerfully and fully, gives me goose bumps, makes me think that members of the human race, in spite of its many warts, can do some really beautiful things for one another. It all has to do with that word, "gentle," which seems synonymous with "noble" somehow. Which is more noble?
1. To give back something that never was yours to begin with? Um... no... it is kind, but not noble.
2. To accept that stolen object and all the betrayal it represents, back, in a very gracious way? With a simple, gentle action that simultaneously forgives the representative of the wrong-doers, forgives those ancestors who were duped, demonstrates loving regard for everything once attached to the original meaning of the object? But that lets go of the past? That lays "nature" (symbolized by a beautiful splendid lei) on top of an artifact of a civilization that once was? Without animosity? Yes. In my mind, this is "noble."

"Gentle" is how I've striven to learn to do my hands-on work and have succeeded. It's how the weather is here (mostly). It's how the flowers are here. It's something that ties in with how that child danced at the luau. It's something that was once cultivated as a desirable trait in people. I think I feel nostalgic for it, and would like to see the human race get back to valuing it again. There is something tremendously powerful and for today, at least, in my mind, interchangeable about "gentleness" and "nobleness" that has been buried deep beneath "might is right" for way too long.

A touristy day in Lahaina, Maui Part II: Monster of the plant world

The apparently famous banyan tree in Lahaina was remarkable. My pictures of it did not do it justice - did not show it in true character, but I have a link here to a picture someone put up a few years ago, that shows it quite effectively. Bear in mind, a few years ago. It's a monster tree. It looks scary to me - like a giant monster, a ginormous octopus or something, growing ever larger, eagerly reaching out its tentacles to take over Maui completely some day if suddenly one day all the people were to disappear and there were no one there to keep it pruned.. an explosion in slow biological motion. Check out the lateral branch pattern, that would just keep going if people didn't keep it pruned. If one of those dangling bits touches earth, it grows into a new trunk. It is a roof over the entire park, the size of a small city block. If no one cut those back continuously, pretty soon the "tree" would be an impenetrable thicket. May there always be gardeners on Maui and may they keep that thing under control until the end of time.

Under the picture appears this explanation:

"The famous Banyan Tree located in courthouse square in the center of Lahaina was brought to Maui from India when the tree was a mere eight-feet tall. It was planted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Lahaina's first Christian mission. It has become the central point of town under which you'll find meetings, craft shows, entertainment and almost anything else you can imagine. The tree now reaches a height of about 50 feet and extends over 200 feet from side to side."

Here is a wikipedia link re: the "strangler fig" or banyan tree. Some reasons I can see for it becoming popular, even revered, are:

1. presumably it provides figs of some hopefully edible kind,
   
2. it would likely provide fast-growing and endless supplies of firewood for cooking,
3. it would provide shade and habitat for innumerable creatures.
   

Disadvantages would include choking out other kinds of vegetation.

A touristy day in Lahaina, Maui Part I

Today I had some energy to waste - such a luxury. I decided to be adventuresome and take the bus to Lahaina to see the Banyan tree. I saw it, and saw a great deal more as well (more about it later).

Took lots of pictures but most of them are pretty much a big yawn. Found a museum in the "Old Courthouse" that had one room devoted to the whaling industry, and taking photos was not prohibited, so I took shots of this and that. There was plenty of rusted out whaling and sailing paraphenalia there, and framed photos of how the blubber was removed from whales then cooked ... all kind of saddening, so I moved along. On one wall was an actual flipper or something, from a whale. (There was no explanatory sign that I could find.)

I was somewhat surprised to learn whales had hair on their flippers. I mean, I realize they are mammals, but I thought they did not do hair. They don't do hair the way seals do fur. It made me wonder if dolphins have hair.

Hair increases mechanoreception. It must make whales (at least this species, which I think are humpback) more sensitive to both their own movement and the movement of the environment against them. I've attached a picture of the whale part with hair.

Solstice Greetings V

At dawn today the surf was this beautiful lavender color again, while the sea itself was a burnished turquoise color.

Time to go make some more Vitamin D now, while the sun is still over the pool. What I like to do is let the sun pierce my eyelids, just for short little periods - it feels so good. Then when I put my hands over my eyes, I can see colors inside them (visual cortex waking up, or else just ectopic firing) that I never see in Vancouver - deep indigos and violets and cobalt blues. Even deep greens, although there are lots of those in Vancouver, so they don't seem as novel.

Solstice Greetings IV

Today has been the clearest my brain has been in ages. I mean ages. It might have had something to do with yesterday's sun bath, the first (nearly) all over sunbath I've had since I was a young adult. I went down by the pool, just below my balcony here. (If you imagine looking up one floor to the right, that's my room.)

I did not burn my skin, I just allowed it to make some Vitamin D for me in places it ordinarily can't. It turned slightly pink, which means I think it got busy.

Solstice Greetings III

Meanwhile, the downtown Barrie Cam shows me this wintery, sparkley, clear-skied scene, after a shortish but sunny day. I have decided I must plot my escape from Vancouver as soon as I can reasonably do so.

Solstice Greetings II

All day I've been checking into Vancouver's weathercam, and seeing nothing but this. It's that deep edgeless fog that Vancouver isn't but should be so famous for. The kind that stays around all winter, usually, not right on the ground like this, but just above the tops of the buildings. The kind I've been oppressed by for 18 years, and started to notice feeling oppressed by in about the last ten. Finally got tired of putting up with, last winter.

I know the cam takes a new picture every 60 seconds, and at some point the link will look all deceptively gorgeous for a few days, so I copied the image I've been seeing all day, this day, Solstice Day 2008, and jpeged it for posterity.

Solstice Greetings

Here is the sky at dawn today, here in Maui. Is that not the most gorgeous purple sky with a waning moon in it that you've ever seen at dawn?

Well, it has been for me.

Thoughts on Solstice Eve on Life's Absurdities

It all feels a bit absurd, yet completely if absurdly correct and corrective to be comfy and photonically stimulated in Maui at a time of the year when I'm normally incapable of much because of SAD. My brain feels like it will never get enough light.

The absurdity of lights wrapped around the trunks of palm trees, as in the picture to the left, taken at dawn yesterday, is counterbalanced by the thought of how absurd it would be to be languishing in Vancouver yet again right now, during this nadir of the wheel of the year, incapable of accomplishing anything much, forced into retreat because of the hubbub that occurs around "celebrating" the season, forced into idleness because of not being capable of stringing very many thoughts together in any case.. That's one kind of idleness, which feels like uncomfortable, dreadful, involuntary, forced idleness. Here, I'm actively trying to squeeze in as much "nothingness" as I possibly can. It's a completely different way to frame idleness, I'm learning..

Everything, no matter where one is this time of year, feels absurd, I suppose... It's 3 PM here and I'm drinking my first coffee of the day, in shirt sleeves and bare feet, outside on the balcony, enjoying my skinny little laptop (the only thing about me that is). The coffee is left over from yesterday. I've learned to make a potful, pour off a fresh cup, and let the rest get cold in the fridge, then drink it cold, mixed with half milk. Then drink it whenever I like.

But I'm learning to like actively adopting this kind of idleness as opposed to feeling out of synch with the other kind. Here, cultivating idleness is a fine art. People say hi, make polite but minimal chitchat (my favorite kind), as they make a slow beeline for the nearest deck chair to just sit, look, watch, rest, doze in the light. Everyone remains a stranger. No one wants to know your business or how you plan to spend Christmas or where you are going and who you'll be with, or what you plan to eat. No one here could care less about any of that stuff. Everyone is here to get away from their lives and entanglement in others' lives.

New arrivals are easy to spot. They seem edgy and anxious and too chatty. They have not yet learned to slow down so that the clock moves faster than they do. I've been here two weeks now, and my inner clock has slowed down to the point where I get asked on the street for directions to this place or that. I must look like I've been here forever or something. I can't possibly look like I know...

Right now in the pool down below my balcony is a new arrival from some land of -17C. He is around 40, I guess, somewhat heavy, and is burping, loudly and repeatedly. Perhaps the water is pressing his diaphragm upward. He is relaxing.

Life is absurd no matter where one is, or how far one is inside of or out of one's own element, but at least here it is pretty, colorful, warm, sunny, the air is extremely comfortable, there is no change of temperature from inside to outside to endure, the surf is endlessly reassuring, rhythmic, beautiful, and the different colors of ocean are a feast for the visual cortex. It's a really absurd and delightful way to get around, get through SAD, to get over what feels more and more like an ever-enlarging psychological hump at the end of every year.

A recurring image I have, that gets more intense the longer I live in Vancouver, is of myself, spread eagled onto a wheel of the year which looks like a wheel of fortune - the wheel spins and I spin with it, and every December my head goes FWAP! against the flexible brake. Don't know when the wheel will stop completely, but sure don't like those fwaps. Want to minimize them, change the picture somehow.

I have a link to a webcam of Barrie, Ontario, a place I'm considering moving to, perhaps, one of the several possibilities that exist and tumble over each other in the back of my mind as it sifts and sorts and tries to plan a way to gracefully age with more photons to enjoy meanwhile. It is at 44 degrees latitude and is under a wide blue sky, which seems more attractive for winter months, despite the snow, than Vancouver. At the moment of course, it can't compete with where I am just now. But I will look at Barrie every day, and continue to let my brain mull it over. Moving to Barrie seems less absurd in many ways than does remaining in Vancouver and needing to eject to Maui on a yearly basis. Although it wouldn't be that bad a life to stay in Vancouver and come here every winter, and although everyone around me in this place does exactly that, every year (there are people here who have been coming here regularly for 25, 35 years), there are drawbacks which seem absurd.

Advantages of moving to Barrie
1. minimize the carbon footprint by reducing the overall number of trips needed to get away to get photons,
2. increase the overall photon level year round, perhaps permitting my brain to fully recover from SAD in a few years,
3. expose my physicality to a bit more rigor by acclimating to differing temperatures throughout the year, similar to what I experienced growing up and to age 33.
4. don't have to move to Maui, become American, and give up the Canadian health system.

Dawn Day 14

Sigh.

Lavender and lace.

I loved the lavender color of the water today at dawn.

Day thirteen

I found a new path today. The potholes in the rock are about 8 inches across. According to a nearby sign, they are ancient depressions that were used by indigenous peoples to grind taro.

It is really hard to take a shot that really, really shows the color of the water. This is the best one of the bunch, relatively untouched. I didn't crop it. It contains the greens and purples found in the water here, but the picture cannot convey the intensity, not quite. The sky color is quite true. It is almost but not quite turquoise.

The water was very clear today. I saw a sea turtle come up for air, three times, about every 15 minutes.

The weather has improved hugely from last week. This little photo is from this morning's visit to the beach.

Gecko invasion

What this not very good photo, taken by me, flat on the floor on my front, using an ordinary Canon powershot digital camera, at close range in bad lighting, depicts, is a tiny gecko trapped under an ordinary highball glass, with a card stock brochure for the luau slid beneath it, in preparation for it being carted outside and dropped onto the top of the closest bush from my balcony.

It looked much cuter once there was solid glass between me and it. Prior to that, my brain was convinced that it was a hungry young dinosaur sizing me up as a food source that would last possibly for months.

We do not have geckos in Vancouver. I have seen them before, in other countries, on other trips, but not for decades, never without other people around, and never in my own personal habitat. Rarely have I had such a startling opportunity to witness my own physicality respond so abruptly to a perceived boundary issue brought on by something so tiny. I might not have even noticed it at all, in that it was a beige gecko scooting over a beige rug, but my eye caught movement and I saw it before it saw me.

There was a moment of instinctive horrified recoil. I could not help but feel it, feel it driving me toward panic, making me respond, do something, anything, to alleviate the sense of absolute wrongness my brain felt/caused me to feel, with a pounding heart and fast breathing, the entire sympathetic nervous system rush of adrenaline-driven/fight/flight response.

It seems ridiculous in retrospect, I mean c'mon, it was just a gecko (a baby to boot!) that wandered in .. as far as I know, they don't bite, besides it was tiny, probably more scared of me than I was of it - I've dealt with mice, large spiders, wasps, and calmly - this was a much smaller deal.

But in that moment, I felt freaked out.

There are two aspects that were important, in retrospect:
First, there was certain lack of prior exposure, lack of graded exposure to the phenomenon. Maybe if I lived in Australia or somewhere I'd think nothing of a harmless gecko running around in the living room.

Second, there was a boundary issue.
My brain had already moved into this condo. The brain that runs my life had already decided that the walls of the condo were the safe container within which it could relax, and had incorporated the space into itself, as "itself." (See Sandra Blakeslee, The Body has a Mind of its Own, for more about this.) However, I'm not really at home. Not really. And I think my brain might have decided on some much deeper level of context, that because it's actually on someone else's turf at the moment, maybe it didn't really have the right to be here, and might have to fight harder on behalf of its organism, should any sort of threat arise.

So, my brain over-reacted, and lucky me had a chance to see it in full threat mode for a few minutes, experience fully the anxiety and dread and disgust and sense of immediacy and need to act and pounding heart and shudder. It seems to have been a full-on primate reaction - I especially hated how the gecko moved - it darted in spurts, which made me want to get my bare toes away from the floor.

It was certainly instructive to experience my conscious attention dealing with my brain, tending it, telling it everything was going to be fine, figuring out what to do, hatching a plan (the same one I use for wasps in Vancouver that fly in through open unscreened windows), interacting with the gecko a bit to learn more about its true level of threat, in order to re-regulate the fear factor, going online to let friends know what I was dealing with and ask advice, also a primate reaction (seeking solace and virtual social grooming from members of my "troop"), and eventually improvising with a glass from the cupboard and the only stiff-enough paper I could find in the whole place to slide under it - carefully, slowly, gently, taking care to not hurt its tiny legs. I could see it looking at me - I could imagine its own teeny heart pounding and teeny brain reacting - suddenly a huge giant monster was in charge of its existence.

I took it out to the balcony and unceremoniously tossed it out of the glass onto the top of a bush, peering closely, making sure that its little sticky gecko feet had not managed to adhere to any surface I still had in my hands, or plan B would have been enacted - those objects would have been tossed as well.

Today I feel much better for having the whole episode behind me. And I'm going to deliberately ignore the fact it even happened, trust that my eyes will be on the ball, on their own, scanning their surroundings for danger of any sort, reacting appropriately if a tad strongly, keeping me safe so I can continue enjoying my stay, continuing to maintain the convenient and polite and in this situation, necessary fiction that the "I" I like to think is in charge is something other than the brain that gives rise to the illusion of "me."

Vacation timeshare pitch III

This is the front of the hotel. It's a massive thing filled with fake waterfalls and splendid viewing points.

But I must speak a bit about the sales discussion. I was met by someone named Kevin, who is originally from Boston and moved to Hawaii a couple decades ago. He has been in sales all his life. The "closer" was Nancy. Nancy was recovering from a hand fracture, had a cast - I expressed interest in her injury, so she told me about how her high heel had caught on a stair and she had slipped down three steps, was stopped by a landing, landed on a left knee and a right hand, all while carrying a glass of water in her left hand which, much to her annoyance, in the moment of falling she was determined to not spill. She said she managed to end up with half the water still in the glass. (I love stories like this.)

Anyway, I learned all about the "product," (actually about 5 products all packaged together), and what a great thing it was to spend the rest of one's life paying about 40,000 dollars US, plus another $1000 or so maintenance fees, for the privilege of indulging a travel bug four times a year in many different locations all over the globe in luxury. If I bought in Maui, I would become everyone's best friend and they would all want to trade with me so they could stay in Maui for a week while I stayed somewhere else for up to four weeks, for only a few hundred dollars a week. After about two hours of this, I finally got to see the suite, and we took one of those scary little glass-walled elevators up. Kevin was nice enough to let me take pictures from the balcony.

When it was time for the "close," I let them know that although I really appreciated the opportunity to learn all about their product, and it all sounded very nice, and I really was enjoying the photons here in Maui, that I wasn't interested in purchasing a time share. They wanted to know why. So I explained that although I was here and having the time of my life, I really did view a Hawaiian vacation as sort of more of a once in a lifetime indulgence, not a way of life. They looked at me as if I were from another planet somewhere.. how could I resist? I said that, really, truth was, I was more interested in reducing my carbon footprint.

The jaws dropped. They didn't get it. Nancy said, "But that plane is going to take off whether you are on it or not." "Yes," I said, "I realize that, but the more people who decide not to take planes the fewer planes there will need to be sucking holes in the ozone and contributing to global warming.." .... had they heard about global warming...?

They had, but they just couldn't connect it to anything they had to sell. Nancy and Kevin looked at each other. Kevin asked her, how do we respond? And Nancy looked at Kevin, then at me, and said, "This is the first time anyone has ever used a "carbon footprint" objection. We haven't been taught how to counter this objection."

After that, it was pretty clear the party was over, and it was time for winding it up. After one more little survey, I left and met Ben the Phillipino cabbie who I had arranged to meet at 2. Perfect timing - there he was.

On the way home he asked me how the meeting had gone, and I told him I didn't buy a timeshare. I said that although I loved being in Maui, and that I realized tourism was the main economy, that my being here was a one-time trip and that if I really wanted to be here forever I would just move here, like he had, not fly back and forth all the time, hurting the ozone. I said I thought the lifestyle was wasteful, that I doubted it benefited the local people much other than provide some jobs cleaning up condos and pools and maintaining buildings, that most of the profit probably went to the company. He didn't offer me his opinion - perhaps he didn't have one, perhaps he didn't feel comfortable expressing it if he did.

Anyway, we left it at that.

Vacation timeshare pitch II

Here are a couple other pictures of the view from the suite. It was taken from the wrap-around balcony. Pretty nice. Those are people down on the beach, not ants.

Vacation timeshare pitch

Today was payback for the lovely free luau I enjoyed two nights ago - it was time to go and listen to someone try to sell me a time share. I went to the appointment that had been scheduled, at the Ka'anapali Beach Resort, just a short way from where I'm staying.

It was a huge place with a gigantic amoebae-shaped pool and a long beach with a reef, which made the surf very gentle. The pool was ringed by dozens and dozens of pink lounge chairs. Check out the picture. I took this today from the tour suite on the eleventh floor. It reminds me of a cell, with a membrane, the gaps between the chairs like receptor sites.

Luau3

This little red-haired Hawaiian girl in the pink dress is named Maleia. She is a hula student. She hula-ed her way through the entire song, Tiny Bubbles.

She was a treat. My mirror neurons went into a frenzy. I think that is what is supposed to happen when people watch hula. It's interpretive. There are certain moves that reflect certain ideas, just as with sign language. Seeing this little girl dance was the highlight for me of the whole luau. She had incredible grace, and a fierce kind of eye contact with the crowd, and when she danced, she projected meaning out all over the room.

All the dancing was "good" but much of it seemed routine. This... child was dancing in a way that seemed intense and projective. I could feel her, I could get what the dance was about, what the deeper level of meaning of the song was, or at least I felt I could in that moment. She made my eyes wet, and I do not think it was entirely the fault of the evening's second mytai, or that I was just being schmaltzy, or merely that she was as cute as a button. I don't think I'll ever feel jaded about that song Tiny Bubbles the way I had been, ever again. She was a novel stimulus who managed to help my brain thoroughly refresh its auditory and visual cortex.

Luau 2

As you can see I sat quite close to center stage, quite remarkable in that there were 400 people attending. For $15 extra dollars one could purchase VIP seating.

(I almost never would do anything like decide on the spur of the moment that I deserve to be treated like a VIP. But I'm on a vacation, and have been feeling somewhat self-indulgent.)

On stage, the mistress of ceremonies is teaching a few hula moves to all those in the audience who were interested in going up to learn them.

Luau

I know, I know. How touristy of me to not only attend a luau but to post the iconic photo of a dancer wearing a coconut bra.

Thing is, I got to go for free, so who wouldn't? I mean, I'm not crazy, I'm here to have fun, and this was a chance to go have some that didn't cost much, apart from the cost of a taxi. I was offered a ticket in exchange for promising I'd go on a tour of condo property (no obligation), a promotional deal. OK, I can go on somebody's tour. I likely will not be buying a condo here anytime soon, but I can go on a tour so that someone can meet a quota and earn a living trying to flog one to me.

And the luau was fabulous.

Kona Storm

Today, the beach has an entirely different feel. Note the absence of people, other than yours truly taking the picture. Note the absence of footprints other than mine. It's a somewhat creepy but on the whole very cool feeling to have an entire, highly sought vacation beach, all to oneself. Why?

Because it's raining buckets, and everyone else is inside. The waves are disappointingly flat. So there is not much out there to enjoy at the moment. Except just being there by oneself, and pretending (briefly) the beach is all one's own.

To the right is another picture I took last night, of the moon over the beach. I realize how cliche it looks, but honestly, it's not my fault that pretty much everything looks absolutely gorgeous, so much so that just about any idle snapshot could be a calendar photo.

Ocean at dusk

The ocean has quite a different feel to it at dusk. The waves seemed more powerful or something. Probably just my imagination.

I sure am starting to like this ocean. I hung out beside it for what I thought was a half hour or so... just laid in the warm sand, watching little kids running into and getting tossed back up by the surf. When I came back up I realized 2 hours had passed without my inner clock even noticing. The surf is mesmerizing - exogenously applied meditation.

Day 6

There are some little spots along the road to the (other) grocery store about two blocks from the condo where I'm staying that are undeveloped and sort of left to themselves. I found this little tableau just aching to have a picture taken of it. It appears to be some sort of old abandoned farm implement under a gorgeous bougainvillea bush.

Scary road in Maui

I made an outing to the grocery store, about a kilometer away along a two-lane street, narrow and winding, lots of traffic ignoring the speed limit and no sidewalks, barely a path.

On foot.

And who says I never live dangerously? This is about enough excitement for one day here in paradise.

This is the exact same tree, however, the sky behind it looked more like a typical Vancouver morning this morning. Oh well.. the sky has brightened since.

Photon Therapy

So, here I am in paradise. I've got literally nothing to gripe about here in this idyllic-seeming place, my usual life seems a long way away right now. I'm in a little well-appointed condo in a land where the sun is up almost at least 10 hours a day, and we're talking UP! not masked behind massive cloud cover. It gets hot here. How novel.

This picture is one I took from the balcony at dawn yesterday.

I can feel my brain lightening as the days pass. I have three weeks to decompress fully from 18 years of being/feeling buried in Vancouver winters.

The internet connection had me concerned at first, but out here on the balcony it works great, and all is well.

The light at the end of the tunnel

A cousin in Ontario just sent this:

"The following is a Public Service Announcement:

Due to the recent economic crisis,
stock market crash,
bank failures,
budget cuts,
rising unemployment,
Government Turmoil
unstable world conditions,
outsourcing of business to foreign lands,
the hysterical cost of insurance, electricity, petroleum, housing,
and taxes of all kinds,
the Light at the End of the Tunnel has been turned off.

We apologize for the inconvenience."

Somewhat poignant, given that our governor general shut down Canadian parliament today. I guess this makes us a one-party dictatorship until the system reboots in six weeks, instead of the three-party European-style coalition democracy that was theoretically possible until just this morning. Hopefully the system CAN reboot in six weeks. No one likes living in political limbo.

My old friend, Sleep! Welcome back!

One thing that has improved remarkably and quickly with this temporary removal of the work traces (and may assist the mood disorder just as much as I anticipate the photons will) is a new (well, familiar from long ago) sleeping pattern. I literally had no idea how deprived of sleep I had become. I thought I got lots, enough to get by at least, but usually I awoke in the night and was a bit fitful - just assumed it was from being middleaged, getting older, etc. - often needed a 20-30 minute nap during the day, thought this was probably normal too...

The last two nights have been unbelievable - unbroken, nine-hour long chains of smooth transitions from one sleep state to the next, lots of dreaming, none that I remember vividly, but I do remember dream states... no waking up to visit the bathroom, no waking up at ALL!

I'd forgotten what a pleasure just sleeping for hours and hours on end can be. My brain seems to have lost no time at all getting back to itself in this regard - I'm feeling like a teenager again in some ways. I really am starting to see the whole point of taking extended vacations and leaving the cares and woes of the world behind. I feel a lot less angsty/guilty (which in retrospect was just a stupid unnecessary culturally installed reflex), and am regaining confidence in my ability to actively help my system regulate itself. Things now feel like they are unfolding as they should, which means the dopaminergic pathways must have fluffed themselves up a bit better. Good grief, what next? actual superfluous physical energy maybe? Some of that would sure be nice. :-D

First day of "vacation"

I'm officially not at work now, as of yesterday at 4:45 PM. And I officially do not have to return until January 5th, in the afternoon. (L-o-n-g-.........-e-x-h-a-l-e.)

Part of me feels, oddly, very upset by the prospect of all this idleness. Clearly I seem to have, overall, lost touch with my inner irresponsible child parts.

It will be a first real break (longer than three weeks) from work in over 14 years. It will be the first time I will have been out from under the Dark Grey December Sky Lid of the temperate rain forest in 18 years. The part that feels upset is undergoing a taste of Freedom Vertigo, is all. It's a minor cognitive tilt-a-whirl that I'm sure will pass, once I get to Maui and experience immersion in high photon density. Maybe even before then.

I'm thinking I'll get some time to contemplate what I'd like to be when I grow up (a job that is never really over), how to safely disengage from the life I've constructed here and move on, hopefully to a more sunny location, and some kind of reasonable time frame to conduct this transition, make it gentle on everyone including me.

Does the economy worry me? A little.. so it's a good thing that I have never really worried a whole lot about stuff over which I have no control, like the value of money. When the opportunity to move smoothly presents itself, I will do so in a heartbeat, even if I lose money in the process.

If I were really concerned about money, I'd never spend any, and I'd not have become a PT in the first place, because you never get rich doing human primate social grooming. At best, you make a comfortable living doing honest work that's meaningful in the moment, involves helping others, and does no harm. I can do that anywhere. It's one of the things that attracted me to PT in the first place. Who needs more than that out of life? Really?

Speaking of doing no harm, I received yet another missive from my good friend and correspondent, "anonymous," who regaled me yet again on the blogpost I wrote concerning Sandy Nette and her lawsuit. See Alberta woman with chiropractic stroke sues bigtime. Sorry anonymous, I am not going to publish your comment. Surely you can read, and have already read this part:

"Since I put this blogpost up I've received a couple comments from one or two readers, both named "anonymous." I did not allow their comments to appear. They are glaringly pro-neck-manipulation, and I think the pro-neck-manipulators have already had far too much leeway in the realm of swaying public opinion to give them any sort of platform, however buried, obscure and humble this blog may be.

It's because of:
1. chiro training in a rationalized (as opposed to rational), deliberately propagated, bizarre belief system, combined with
2. a cultivated and honed persuasive attitude,
3. which appears aimed at propagating reckless enactment of a type of human physical social grooming (high-neck-manipulation) which is irrelevant and unnecessary in the first place,
4. against all common sense AND scientific investigation,
5. for the sole purpose of making $,

... that this woman became tetraplegic.

I have too much respect for the human nervous system to ever condone manipulation of its high-neck housing; therefore, "anonymous," I consider my prevention of your promotion of it on my blog, a positive choice - an action (however tiny) against letting myself and this blog be a vector for further perpetuation of your particular memeplex. And I happen to think it's an accumulation of tiny actions that count in life."

I suspect that my dear friend anonymous constructed his straw man argument in Word and is simply surfing his way around with the help of google, and like a crazed harpy (even though probably male), is dropping his load everywhere he can. I'm sure I've already read the exact same prose many other times, in many places.. anyway, no need for me to allow it here. I get to set editorial policy in my own blog, anon. Tough darts, but that's how it's gonna be. Try popping this delightful bubblewrap instead.

See? I just guided someone from a harmful activity over into an enjoyable and harmless one. That's part of what I help people figure out how to do in my work.

Another part is helping people figure out how to do what they want to do without having to endure pain while doing it. The last but not least part is teaching people about pain, and engaging with their physical nervous system to relieve it while they and their nervous system simultaneously learn how not to have it. Do I treat necks? Yes, of course I do. Do they improve? Yes of course they do. Do I pop them? Never. See?

Really, I do love my work. But also, really, I do need this trip to a Land of Photons, and I need it now. I want a big blue-dome sky over me and gorgeous glinting light ricocheting around, vigorously bouncing off surfaces of everything instead of feebly allowing itself to be sucked straight into them. I want vibrant color all round, color that here would seem garish but there will seem blanched in the vibrancy of ambient blue-sky light. I want to see light bending off water and water that looks blueblueblue, not this dark green black stuff that we call "the ocean" here where I live, that up close reminds me of wrinkled, liquid trash bags rippling slightly in the breeze, weakly fwapping at the shoreline, sucking away sand, depositing dead cold darkgreenbrown slimey seaweed. I want sharp contrast, not fuzzy edges. I want black shadow, not a dull grey haze. I want light that hurts my eyes, burrows directly into my brain, forces me to wear shades to protect my peepers from sheer sizzle. I want to be dazzled by direct light, not fooled by artificial street lights tossed haphazardly upward from puddles on the street, not placeboed by a sun lamp with which, frankly speaking, the honeymoon was over long ago. Let there be light. Real light. Honest. Sun. Light. Puhleeze.

Update Nov.30
My friend "anonymous" has written to me again. This time, he said he agreed that avoiding neck manipulation was a good idea (which is a step forward), but said I was off the mark on chiro education. Come on Anon, get over yourself. Perhaps your chiro school was (relatively) wonderful, but I have it on quite good authority that there is no particular standard amongst U.S. chiro schools. So don't presume to speak on behalf of all chiro. Go read Chirotalk, where I get all my info about chiro from ex-chiros who are fighting their way back to sanity, who engage true believers in hilarious discussions. It was you who drank the chiro koolaid, not me - I see no reason to change my overall opinion of chiropractic.

"Money as Debt"

In that there seems to be a dark blanket of seasonal affective disorder that lies heavily over the economy these days, people might be interested in watching an educational doc. film (made in BC) about the topic of "money" and how it is mostly a concept, not anything real. In fact it's practically an illusion, kept in focus only by the illusion that there's lots of it and that it's OK to borrow as much as you need for whatever reason you want.

The people who actually are invested in keeping this illusion all fluffy, fail when too many people, too simultaneously, want what they think is theirs and ask for a balance sheet. Oops, turns out we don't have as much money as it looked like there was on paper..

It's a very interesting documentary. No wonder the "economy" is in such trouble. It's been running on almost empty for what? Decades. All I can say is that I'm happy I own my own (paid-off) place, I do not have debt, my life style is quite simple, and I'm not forced to retire, ever, if I don't want to. (As long as health holds out. And about that, I'm grateful to live in Canada.)

Here is the movie: Money as Debt.

Barry Beyerstein on Pseudoscience and other related matters

I've been neglecting both blogs I'm involved in, lately... One part of me feels like it's been spinning its wheels in the mental mud of descending seasonal affective disorder, while another part has become rather fascinated with active digestion and absorption of Berry Beyerstein's wonderful 50 page exposition, Distinguishing Science from Pseudoscience. I wrote several posts on SomaSimple on the topic, and compiled them into a single "digest" to try to keep life simple.

Important gleanings I took from this relatively short and cursory foray into the topic, are as follows:


1. BELIEF FIELDS and RESEARCH FIELDS:

From Mario Bunge: rather than dividing cognitive domains into sciences and non-sciences, we might divide them into "belief fields" and "research fields."

Belief fields include "religions, political ideologies, pseudosciences and pseudotechnologies, as well as any mystical system that believes that enlightenment can be gained through revealed truth rather than painstaking examination."

"The primary attribute of belief fields is that, for their devotees, evidence is personal and subjective. I.e., they advocate using emotional criteria to distinguish truth from falsehood. Belief fields hold private feelings and hunches to be reasonable grounds for certainty—or, as New Age writers put it, “You create your own reality.”"

Research fields "can include disciplines not typically thought of as scientific, as long as their practitioners are committed to gathering objective data to support their positions."

"evidence in research fields is interpersonal. That is, it can be compared by disputants, according to open and objective criteria. It is sometimes said that objectivity is merely inter-subjectivity. I.e., an “objective” consensus is reached by comparing various individuals’ perceptions with each other and against agreed-upon external standards."

2. THE ROCK BOTTOM SCIENCE "BASICS"

Contravene any of these and you are skating on thin ice too close to open water.
They are:
1. The inverse square law
2. Laws of Thermodynamics (e.g. the Law of Entropy)
3. Laws of Conservation of Energy, Momentum, etc.
4. Injunctions against reverse causality ("Time's Arrow")
5. One or more of C.D. Broad's "Basic Limiting Principles"
6. Data of modern Neuroscience, psychology, and psychophysiology

"Many pseudosciences claim extraordinary precision, power, or yields, well beyond those achievable by conventional scientists (and often by means of secret proprietary processes, formulas, or equipment)." Chiropractic springs to mind. PT often isn't very far behind however.. and many PTs seem to admire the marketing employed by chiropractors as if it were something to be aspired to instead of either ignored or pointing a finger at.

My favorite is number 6., ignoring the nervous system, a serious error my profession and the PT people in it make all the time, trying to pretend it isn't there, that it doesn't "sense", trying to work around it in order to make life simple for themselves, working from "models" (such as a joint biomechanical model) that refuses to take the nervous system into account at all - even the physical 72 kilometers of it weaving throughout the "body" referred to in "the literature" as "nerves"(!). This is so rampant that there are even PT university profs using the biomechanical model as their teaching platform who have the audacity to declare that pain doesn't exist and isn't our business as PTs. Ahem, I beg to differ, strenuously.

Broad's "Basic Limiting Principles" are listed here.

The world felt safe to exhale last night.

This blog is usually, mostly, about the physicality and practicality of living in a human antigravity suit, or treating it. Normally I have nothing to say about politics or any of the other myriad ways we human primates amuse ourselves by creating drama for these social constructions we call selves... but I will make an exception to say something about last night's US election.

It was all anyone could talk about today at work, and I work in Canada, not the US.. My ex-pat U.S. patients were especially pleased. I must say, so was I. It was a riveting process - maybe the last time any world event involving a single individual captured everyone's attention simultaneously was when Princess Diana died and the world stopped en masse to watch, mourn, say goodbye. Check out this headlines link. Check electoral vote, VoteFromAbroad for analysis.

Last night it happened again, and the world sat riveted as one, only this time people danced joyously in the streets and today it feels like the global community is one giant human primate troop determined to pull together to help each other and the world. McCain had to act a bit sad in order to resonate properly with his supporters, but to me he sounded a bit relieved to be able to let go of his impossible effort. His speech was so good I wondered if he hadn't maybe been working on it for the whole month prior.

One thing is for sure - no more will a person who wants to take on US presidency have to first, by default, be a white alpha male human primate. Obama has crashed that perception and the whole world is very happy about it. In fact, it seems to me that the world can barely wait to start cooperating with him, this new brown face that represents not just a new image of the US in the world, but much of the world itself. Massive and nearly palpable placebo effect, response.

Gobama. Thumbs up.

Catch-up

I've been neglecting this blog lately - apologies to anyone who might be following it. I'm busy with this and that, and get less enthusiastic usually as the sky darkens with winter's approach. This winter, however, I'm going to go to Hawaii for three weeks, so that should help. I am given to believe that there are a few more than just a couple dozen photons per cubic meter over there. I'm looking forward to becoming a human solar panel. I, who can't usually remember any pop songs that date from after around 1978, have lately been struggling to keep Sheryl Crowe's song,
"I'm gonna soak up the sun" from viraling itself throughout my brain.

On other matters, I want to introduce a new blog (new to me) which you will see listed under PT blogs in the menu to the right, but which is actually by an occupational therapist in New Zealand, called Healthskills. (It is also attached to Neurotonics, the other blog I'm involved in.) It's a lively blog full of great info for health practitioners who deal primarily with persisting pain.

One last thing - the Canadian dollar has avalanched down, and is now worth a good 22 or 23% less than it was just a few weeks ago - so our Virtual Symposium on Pain, blogged about here, is now quite a deal for anyone living outside Canada! I checked about registration, and learned that registration will stay open during the first week of November. All are welcome to attend and learn.

Unfoldment of a zebrafish

Mo at Neurophilosophy has a new post containing movies of the embryologic development of a zebrafish, with links to the site they come from. Great find Mo, thanks.

I love the spherical expansion, then that sudden whoosh into something that has two sides to it.

This is how vertebrate embryology is studied, and humans are vertebrates, so it's how we unfold too.

I'm a secret parkour admirer

Checked out Eric Robertson's PT blog this morning and found this post: Safe Falling. Don't you just love culture-based hyper-regulated technological solutions for prevention of potential injury of all our un- and undereducated contact with gravity and environment?

I like watching people move at high velocities and escaping unscathed - I enjoy watching figure skating, So You Think You Can Dance? (now in Canada too), and parkour. I'm definitely not anyone who would actively participate - now or at any time in my personal trajectory through life - rather I'm an appreciative voyeur. I love having my mirror neurons jazzed with incredible high-velocity human movement, and revel in the fact that it's possible without consequence (much of the time at least.. there are probably collisions with buildings or hands stabbed by glass or other mishaps, but not in these videos).

This parkour phenomenon is non-institutional, maybe anti-establishment even. It's unregulated, free, wild, eccentric, thoroughly primate. Looks like only boys perform parkour so far, if internet videos are any indication. One of my favorites, and one of the oldest I've found, is called russian climbing. Note the lack of any protective equipment. It would just be in the way, obviously..

It blows me away to think of the depth and quality of graded exposure that must have gone into developing all this physical capacity, the associated balance and equilibrium mechanisms that accompany it, and the frank conditioning.

Here is an example from France, which is credited with being the birthplace of this form of human primate display.

The other effect it has on me is the creepy one of feeling that I must always remember to lock my doors and windows no matter what floor I may happen to live on. Guys who can do this are like spiders - they could crawl in anywhere thieving their way through life.

Happy people and unhappy people

I recently had an opportunity to think long and hard about an observation that some people seem to be just naturally happy while others seem to be (just as naturally) unhappy.

The "Happies" find life relatively effortless, and other than minor speed bumps and hurdles everyone has occasionally, seem to capably move on and move smoothly. The "Unhappies" seem to go along ok for awhile, then inexplicably, any joy they may have found in a given activity seems to collapse and drain away all by itself, quite suddenly and for no apparent reason, leaving them floundering, frustrated, exhausted, unmotivated and burnt-out. Everyone can catch glimpses of what it's like to be the other, and can even inhabit each other's shoes, learn from each other's responses, but I think there is likely a default experiential bottom to selfhood which is either mostly one or the other, at a genetic level. And after a lot of life has passed by, one is required to suck up one's relation to life and come out of the closet as authentic, warts and all, even if one is (gulp) an Unhappy.

I am quite aware that I was born an "Unhappy." Luckily, I recognized it early on and was able to construct a life that could accommodate this quirk, spot it in others, ignore it most of the time, and keep going in spite of it.

If life could be compared to modes of transportation, the Happies would be like captains of their own sailboats. Their trip through life has ups and downs but is mostly broad and flat and smooth, few obstacles, good leverage, small energies needed, good control over response to one's environment, lots of opportunity to stargaze, a three-sixty view, a telescope through which to assess potential beaches/shorelines/rocks and either avoid danger, or maybe deliberately court it, testing their own control. Stiff headwind? Adjust sails and tack. Whitecaps? Adjust sails and lean. Keep sailing, keep moving. One must watch for obvious dangers but there is no inner inertia to be overcome. The Happies are the ones that mainstream culture becomes modeled after, which can make the Unhappies or Less-Happies feel even less congruent, inside, and delay their authentication/integration process.

A transportation metaphor for an Unhappy, I think, would be an engineer on a train that has to climb a mountain over a lifetime. Not only does the engineer have to move that train against gravity, he or she has only so much track to work with. The big stall periods are when the engineer (the nonconscious) has to stop the train, go back and rip up all the track that has been traveled, go ahead and lay it all down again in front of the train, get back on the train, drive it forward as far as it can/will go until the cycle must be repeated.

With any luck, and with sufficient insight, an Unhappy can learn to live with this luck of the draw, can learn to not be in any hurry, to stick as much as possible to the least steep grades, not be disoriented by switchbacks, to even, some day, be able to lay track and keep moving all at the same time, even attach sails to the train and learn to work them to advantage. Eventually the long stalls decrease in length. The Unhappies can treasure the small but genuine hope that if and when they ever get to the top, the view will probably be astounding, and they'll maybe even be able to share it with the Happies, and their life will have counted for something, been worth the sturm und drang und struggle after all. Plus they can remember that a sailboat will never make it up a mountain, nor carry as much cargo.

"Arthroscopic knee surgery does little for arthritis pain"

This just was broadcast on local BC news:
Popular surgery does little for arthritis pain.

Gee, I could have predicted that.. but it's nice that there's been a big study to provide support for the idea, and it's commendable that MDs can now withdraw this vain attempt at helping people with knee pain by poking around inside it.

Excerpt:

"Each patient received physical therapy and anti-inflammatory medications such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen. Eighty-six patients also received arthroscopic surgery.

The researchers found that all of the study subjects had similar improvements in joint pain, stiffness and function.

However, the patients who had surgery did not experience any additional benefits... doctors say the pain can be managed through exercise, regular physiotherapy and anti-inflammatory drugs."

Here is a link to a review of the article: Arthroscopic Knee Surgery- No Better than Placebo?; A Healthy Lifestyle Prevents Stroke, by Robert A Wascher MD.

This is just plain funny

Check out the thread on Chirotalk called The Chiro Zone.

Brain as Composter X

I don't know why, but my blogpost series always seem to end up as a series of 10 to 12. It seems to take that many for me to get complete thoughts expressed. Maybe it's the price I have to pay for having an old but still pretty busy undermind.

Anyway, this will be the wrap-up post to the Brain as Composter series. I promised I would tie in Burton's excellent book, and I will. First though, I want to summarize thoughts that occurred to me over the course of writing this series.

1. I'm not as thrilled with Dan Hemenway's article on permaculture as I was once upon a time. I think he feng shui-ed it a bit to make it pretty, and I fell for the prettiness as well as the content. I still like the content, but can see the prettiness of the packaging as a separate "meme" which I don't like as much. One has to learn to spot when one's mind is being manipulated by meme-packaging.

2. I also examined my own responses to Guy Claxton's Hare Brain Tortoise Mind book. I can see how in the decade since that book was written, my own ideas have changed - I categorize things differently than a decade ago. I feel like the book's content may even be supportive of an anti-scientific stance in the way it equates science with non-thinking - a stance known as PoMo. While I can nod at some of it, love to see ballooned pomposity pricked as much as anyone, love and use the word "deconstruct" all the time about almost everything, I do not agree with the PoMo attitude that "science" is just another "mindset" to be deconstructed. To further the farming metaphor, the pomo attitude toward science is equivalent to saying that topsoil is just another kind of dirt, no different, no better, no worse. I completely, vehemently disagree.

The products of science are one thing, and yes, they may become conceptual shorthand enabling successive generations of science-seekers and builders to move along more quickly.. however (and this is a big however) the process of scientific thinking is anything but D-mode. It takes ages (relatively speaking) to get something conceptualized, a test formulated, an experiment completed, a study written, and after that, wait for peer-review and eventual publication. Once published, this still doesn't mean that something can be called "science" - instead it might just be what Harriet Hall calls "tooth fairy science" - data have been generated about whether it's better to put the tooth in a facial tissue or in a baggie - with no question or discussion about whether or not tooth fairies exist in the first place.

So... I think, at this stage of the game I'm starting to know the difference. I hope.

Anyway, I still like the metaphor of the unconscious mind as the compost bin, and I do still like the idea of our brains being a natural system - without them there would be no consciousness to worry about. Without compost there is no topsoil. Without fertile topsoil nothing can grow, at least not for long. The process of composting takes care of breaking ideas back down into components, which when recombined, will support active growth once again, in a cyclical manner. Science is the end product, the sweet smelling wheat in the bin of human accomplishment. Science not only provides the seeds, it is the seeds that can be plowed back into future generations of underminds to grow future ideas.

At the very least, science can offer up things that we can feel reasonably certain ABOUT.. which I think Burton would agree is different from what he is talking about when he refers to the "feeling of knowing" being an emotion and the pleasurable sensation of "certainty" not being a reliable indicator of truth. Yes, it "feels" preferable to the "feeling" of cognitive dissonance, however, it behooves all of us to learn to tolerate feelings of uncertainty as we do other feelings of discomfort. Perhaps the more we learn to search into our niggles of various sorts, not only will we become more tolerant of them (and of other peoples' too, by extension), but the more "mindful" we will end up in the end. By mindful, I mean, capable of holding paradox and puzzle in our mind and letting them have sufficient time to compost themselves into resolution.

Here is a list of posts that have comprised this series:
1. Is certainty a dopameme? (May 6/08)
2. BrainScience Podcast #42: "On Being Certain" (July 25, 2008)
3. "On Being Certain": Ginger Campbell interviews the author, Robert Burton MD (Aug 13/08)
4. Brain as Composter (Aug 14/08)
5. Brain as Composter II (Aug 16/08)
6. Brain as Composter III (Aug 17/08)
7. Brain as Composter IV (Aug 18/08)
8. Brain as Composter V (Aug 22/08)
9. Brain as Composter VI (Aug 23/08)
10. Brain as Composter VII (Aug 24/08)
11. Brain as Composter VIII (Aug 26/08)
12. Brain as Composter IX (Aug 28/08)

Brain as Composter IX

In Brain as Composter VIII I outlined the various ways Claxton thinks about the fast extroverted thinking he calls D-mode thinking. I disagree that scientific thinking lines up with D-mode thinking as much as he tries to assert, which is my only criticism. I do not think D-mode and undermind types of thinking have to live as separated as Claxton suggests, or that they have to forever be antithetical. They can marry, enjoy a long and fruitful partnership through life, albeit with a few misunderstandings along the way probably.

Now, I want to bring out Claxton's treatment of what he calls the "undermind," (in his book Hare Brain Tortoise Mind) and what I'd like to rename, the "Composter."

1. from p. 7:

"Modern Western culture has so neglected the intelligent unconscious - the undermind, (...) that we no longer know that we have it, do not remember what it is for, and so cannot find it when we need it. We do not think of the unconscious as a valuable resource, but (if we think of it at all) as a wild and unruly 'thing' that threatens our reason and control, and lives in the dangerous Freudian dungeon of the mind. Instead, we give exclusive credence to conscious, deliberate purposeful thinking - d-mode."

Well, maybe not always. I think it might depend on how large one's association cortex is and how well it's myelinated..

2. from p. 37:

"The undermind is acquiring knowledge of which consciousness is unaware, and by which it is unchanged, and using it to influence the way people behave. Consequently a schism develops between what people think they know (about themselves), and the information that is consciously driving their perceptions and reactions. The views that they espouse about themselves, we might say,become at odds with the ones that their behavior in fact embodies."

I would like to say, I think it probably operates this way whether or not we are conscious of it, but we CAN develop a relationship with and have conscious input into it if we understand why it's there and what it requires. Also, as Burton points out, one cannot trust the feelings that come out of it, like the feeling of being certain. One must test ideas outwardly and scientifically to ensure their objectivity, validity, reliability.. how they stack up against the rest of the natural world. Good fence-keeping.

3. p. 75:

"Sometimes ..resonating of data and experience - perception and cognition - happens quickly. (...) Very often though, when the predicament is more intricate, the undermind needs to be left to its own devices for awhile, and then the need for patience - the ability to tolerate uncertainty, to stay with the feeling of not-knowing for a while, to stand aside and let a mental process that can neither be observed nor directed take its course - becomes all important. Someone who cannot abide uncertainty is therefore unable to provide the womb that creative intuition needs...creativity is enhanced when people are forced to slow down.. the willingness to think slowly.. makes possible broader cognitions, more abstract thinking.. and consequently greater flexibility."

This section seems to find echo in Burton's new book very well.

4. p. 13:

"The 'slow ways of knowing' are, in general, those that lack any or all of the characteristics of d-mode. They spend time on uncovering what may lie behind a particular question. They do not rush into conceptualization, but are content to explore more fully into the situation itself before deciding what to make of it. They like to stay close to the particular. They are tolerant of information that is faint, fleeting, ephemeral, marginal, or ambiguous; they like to dwell on details which do not 'fit' or immediately make sense. They are relaxed, leisurely and playful; willing to explore without knowing what they are looking for. They see ignorance and confusion as the ground from which understanding may spring. They use the rich, allusive media of imagination, myth and dream. They are receptive rather than proactive. They are happy to relinquish the sense of control over directions that the mind spontaneously takes. And they are prepared to take seriously ideas that come 'out of the blue', without any ready-made train of rational thought to justify them... The undermind is the key resource on which slow knowing draws, so we need new metaphors and images for the relationship between conscious and unconscious which escape the polarization to which both Descartes and Freud, from their different sides, subscribed. Only in the light of new models of the mind will we see the possibility and the point of more patient, receptive ways of knowing, and be able to cultivate - and tolerate - the conditions which they require."

I like how this ties back once again into the ideas of permaculture and working with nature instead of against it. Again, is this not the same way compost forms? I do not, however, see any difficulty with being "receptive" and "proactive" both at the same time. Surely they are NOT mutually exclusive. Surely as compost forms, the insects and microorganisms that are developing it, the thermodynamicism of a bin, are highly proactive... but the bin itself is receptive, isn't it?

5. p. 116:

"The undermind is a layer of activity within the human psyche that is richer and more subtle than consciousness. It can register and respond to events which..do not become conscious. We have at our disposal a shimmering database full of pre-conceptual information, much of which is turned down by consciousness as being too contentious or unreliable. Conscious awareness decides what it will accept as valid - and thereby misses dissonant patterns and subtler nuances. While in d-mode, consciousness tends to present to us a world that is somewhat cautious and conventional. Sometimes this is appropriate, but if we get stuck there and lose the key to the twilight world that subserves it, we mothball valuable ways of knowing which can find sense and weave meaning out of a collection of the faintest threads and scraps... one way of expressing this disparity between conscious and unconscious is in terms of two thresholds, a lower one, above which the undermind becomes active, and a higher one, above which information enters consciousness. The closer together these two points are, the more 'in touch' with the unconscious we are, and the more complete is our conscious awareness of what is happening across all the mental realms. The further apart they are, the more our conscious perception is impoverished. This quantitative notion of thresholds is rather crude, but it enables us to formulate an important question; what it it that determines how near or how far apart the two thresholds are? More generally, is the relationship between conscious and unconscious forms of awareness a dynamic one, subject to change, and if so, what forces control it? (...) Perhaps it is specifically things that are threatening that cause the conscious threshold to shoot up."

Well.. don't be a key-loser then. (There follows pages of info on studies to do with 'perceptual defence', amnesiacs who can 'remember,' the effects of "self-consciousness", effects of hypnosis, measurable visual perception by anger, blindsight, that all generally point to the idea that pressure, stress, being threatened or over-eager, lead to coarsening of perception and to narrower less functional minds.)

7. p. 203:

"..it is all the more significant that cognitive science is currently drawing our attention to the curious fact that we have forgotten how our minds work. As we have seen, the modern mind has a distorted image of itself that leads it to neglect some of its own most valuable learning capacities. We now know that the brain is built to linger as well as to rush, and that slow knowing sometimes leads to better answers. We know that knowledge makes itself known through sensations, images, feelings, and inklings, as well as through clear conscious thoughts. Experiments tell us that just interacting with complex situations without trying to figure them out can deliver a quality of understanding that defies reason and articulation. Other studies have shown that confusion may be a vital precursor to the discovery of a good idea. To be able to meet the uncertain challenges of the contemporary world, we need to heed the message of this research and to expand our repertoire of ways of learning and knowing to reclaim the full gamut of cognitive possibilities. This will not be easy, for the grip of d-mode on late twentieth century culture is strong.."

It is not entirely D-mode's fault - lazy "farming methods" perhaps.

8. from the last chapter, undermind and wisdom:

"..slow ways of knowing will not deliver their delicate produce when the mind is in a hurry. In a state of continual urgency and harassment, the brain-mind's activity is condemned to follow its familiar channels. Only when it is meandering can it spread and puddle, gently finding out such uncharted fissures and runnels as may exist. Yet thinking slowly, paradoxically, does not have to take a long time. It is a knack that can be acquired and practiced. The mind needs to be given time; but its ingenuity also depends on the cultivation of a disposition to take one's time, as much as there is. One can learn to access and use these other ways of knowing more fluently. One might even suggest that managers - and their workforces - might try meditation; though, as a preliminary they would need to understand what that means and how it helps."

My italics. I love this passage and the imagery it evokes.

More to come, a tie-in with the Burton book.

Brain as Composter VIII

Re Brain as Composter VII:

What follows in this post will be a (long) series of points that summarize attributes of what Claxton calls "D-mode" intelligence:

1. D-mode is much more interested in finding answers and solutions than in examining the questions. (Is the 'primary instrument of technopoly', is primarily concerned with problem-solving, treats any unwanted or inconvenient condition in life as if it were a 'fault' in need of fixing.)

2. D-mode treats perception as unproblematic. (It assumes the way it sees the situation is the way it is.)

3. D-mode sees conscious articulate understanding as the essential basis for action, and thought as the essential problem-solving tool. (Tries to gain a mental grasp, figure it out with everything from impeccable rationality with equations and flow charts to just weighing up pros and cons, taking things through, making a list, jotting down thoughts, making a pitch, etc.)

4. D-mode values explanation over observation (Is more concerned about why than what. The need to have mental grasp, to be able to offer an acceptable account of things is integral. Assumption is that it is normal to be intentional and proper to offer explanations. "..when this purposeful, justificatory, 'always-show-your-reasoning' attitude becomes part of the dominant default mode of the mind, it then tends to suppress other ways of knowing, and makes one skeptical of any activity whose 'point' you cannot immediately consciously see." My italics.)

5. D-mode likes explanations and plans that are 'reasonable' and justifiable, rather than intuitive. (Doubt in the sense of lack of conscious comprehension, becomes stultifying, a trap rather than a springboard.)

6. D-mode seeks and prefers clarity, and neither likes nor values confusion. (Likes to move along 'a well-lit path' from problem to solution, preserving.. as much mental grasp as it can...while some learning may proceed in this point-by-point fashion, much does not.)

7. D-mode operates with a sense of urgency and impatience. (Yeah, that's got to be real relaxing for patients..)

8. D-mode is purposeful and effortful rather than playful. (Always a sense of being under time pressure, being intentional, purposeful, questing, needing to have an answer to a pre-existing question, misses the fruits of 'relaxed cognition'.

9. D-mode is precise.

10. D-mode relies on language that appears to be literal and explicit Claxton:

"..tends to be suspicious of what it sees as the slippery, evocative world of metaphor and imagery. If something can be understood, it can be understood clearly and unambiguously, says the intellect. An intimation of understanding that does not quite reveal itself, that remains shrouded or indistinct, is, to d-mode, only an impoverished kind of understanding; one that should either be forced to explain itself more fully, or treated with disdain. Poetry does not capture anything that cannot ultimately be better, more clearly rendered in prose, and rhetoric is a poor cousin of reasoned explanation."

11. D-mode works with concepts and generalizations (likes to apply rules and principles, favors abstraction over particularity, works with generics or prototypicals, even individuals are treated as generalizations.)

12. D-mode must operate at the rates at which language can be received, produced, and processed. (maintains a sense of thinking as being controlled and deliberate, not spontaneous or willful.)

13. D-mode works well when tackling problems which can be treated as an assemblage of nameable parts. Claxton:

"It is in the nature of language to segment and analyse. The world seen through language is one that is perforated, capable of being gently pulled apart into concepts that seem...self-evidently 'real' or 'natural', and which can be analysed in terms of the relationships between these concepts. Much of traditional science works so well precisely because the world of which it treats is this kind of world. But when the mind turns its attention to situations that are ecological or 'systemic', too intricate to be decomposed in this way without serious misrepresentation, the limitations of d-mode's linguistic, analytical approach are quickly reached. Any situation that is organic rather than mechanical is likely to be of this sort. The new 'sciences' of chaos and complexity are in part a response to the realisation that d-mode is in principle unequal to the task of explaining systems as complicated as the weather, or the behaviour of animals in the natural world. Along with the rise of these new sciences must come a re-evaluation of the slower ways of knowing; of intuition as an essential complement to reason.

I want to say that I think there are many excellent scientific minds out there these days who can conceptually synthesize as well as they can analyze, so I think this list and its attempt to compare scientific thinking with D-mode thinking sounds a bit dated. However, an awful lot of society and its institutions/structures still use this mode reflexively - I would agree with him there.

And I am a bit torn over point 4, because I do explaining all the time, but I like to think that in me, explanation does not overrule or suppress observation/contemplation/other ways of "knowing," that in me, they go hand in hand. This whole blog series is a case in point. However, I've no way to be "certain"... so I'm likely to be wrong on that at least half the time.

I've always chafed at my own profession, PT, which strives to be as classically D-mode as possible for a supposed hands-on helping profession to be... I'd have to say, though, chiropractic with its complexification and ornate verbal embroidering of what is actually a simple set of tricks, manipulation, and which does not require any sort of brilliance to learn or to apply, takes most of the cake for being D-mode, e.g., it fabricates elaborate explanation upon very little observation, and imagines itself to be precise. As Claxton points out in #13, any insistence on using D-mode for treating a natural system (like a live, conscious human being in pain) is misplaced, probably: "when the mind turns its attention to situations that are ecological or 'systemic', too intricate to be decomposed in this way without serious misrepresentation, the limitations of d-mode's linguistic, analytical approach are quickly reached."

Next up, what Claxton thinks is involved in wisdom.

Brain as Composter VII

Re: Brain as Composter VI:

Two more qualities of 'slow thinking' are poetic sensibility and mindfulness.

About poetic sensibility, Claxton says,

"poetic sensibility has the ability to reset or create our agenda; to uncover issues and reveal concerns, perhaps in unexpected quarters, or surprising ways. By allowing ourselves to become absorbed in some present experience without any sense of seeking or grasping at all, we can be reminded of aspects of life that may have been eclipsed by more urgent business, and of ways of knowing and seeing that are, perhaps, more intimate and less egocentric (...) There is a kind of knowing which is essentially indirect, sideways, allusive and symbolic; which hints and evokes, touches and moves, in ways that resist explication. And it is accessed not through earnest manipulation of abstraction, but through leisurely contemplation of the particular.(...) For a person whose apprehension is under the spell of this attitude, the immediate context commands his interest so completely that nothing else can exist beside and apart from it (...) One slips away from self-concern and preoccupation into the sheer presence of the thing, the scene, the sound itself."

He quotes Kafka:

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

He quotes Rilke:

"If you hold to Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, to the small detail that scarcely one man sees, which can so unexpectedly grow into something great and boundless; if you have this love for insignificant things and seek, simply as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems to be poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the understanding, which lags wondering behind, but in your innermost conciousness, wakefulness and knowing."

It's hard to get through life without visiting this sensibility. It restores one to oneself, to one's own "nature." You can bask in it - you can roll around at your own feet if you want, interpreting it physically and sensorially and personally. From it you can write your own poems and paint your own pictures and sing your own songs and play your own music and create your own dramas. All these expressions will bring you closer to your own selfness. It's all good. But I would add, do not inhibit the development of your own capacity for critical thinking either.

Claxton's fourth quality is mindfulness:

"The fourth manner of paying attention which I want to describe in this chapter is a way of seeing through one's own perceptual assumptions. It is called mindfulness. The extent to which the world-as-perceived is a mirror of our preconceptions and our preoccupations (...) is easy to underestimate. It takes an effort to see what is happening, because our beliefs are dissolved in the very organs we use to sense."

He follows with an example of tasting saliva that is in your mouth, noting its pleasant quality, then spitting some into a glass and retasting it, noting how one's perception of it immediately changes into something less positive.

"The spit hasn't changed, only the interpretation."

He goes on to talk about aging and mindfulness:

"Being 'old' is not just a biological phenomenon; how one goes about 'being old' depends on one's (largely unconscious) image of what it is like, what it means, to be old, and this in turn reflects a whole raft of both cultural assumptions and individual experiences. Ellen Langer and colleagues at Harvard U. have examined the effect on elderly people of their own vicarious experiences, as children, of ways of being old. They reasoned that children may unconsciously pick up images of old age from their own grandparents - which they might then recapitulate as they themselves get older. Specifically, they surmised that the younger their grandparents were when children first got to know them, the more 'youthful' would be the image of old age that the children would unconsciously absorb, and the more positively they would therefore approach their own ageing. (...) it was found that those elderly people who had lived with a grandparent when they themselves were toddlers were rated as more alert, more active and more independent than those whose first experience of living with a grandparent had not occurred till they were teenagers (...) it looks as if the ways in which different people age depends quite directly on the assumptions and beliefs they have picked up in their own childhoods about what it is to be old."

He talks about pain and mindfulness:

"The unconscious assumptions that people stir into their experience are often hard to alter, but sometimes they can be changed just by a suggestion, especially if it comes from some kind of an authority figure. The experience of pain, for instance, can be dramatically altered, in normal conscious subjects, simply by telling them to think of it differently. When a group of people who had volunteered to suffer some mild electric shocks were told to think of the shocks as "new physiological sensations," they were less anxious, and had lower pulse rates, than those who were not so instructed. In another study, hospital patients who were about to undergo major surgery were encouraged to realise how much the experience of pain depends on the way people interpret it. They were reminded, for example, that a bruise sustained during a football match, or a finger cut while preparing dinner for a large group of friends, would not hurt as much as similar injuries in less intense situations. And they were shown analogous ways of reinterpreting the experience of being in hospital so that it was less threatening. Patients who were given this training took fewer pain relievers and sedatives after their operations, and tended to be discharge sooner, than an equivalent group that was untrained.
These experiments demonstrate how other people may be able to rescue us from what Langer refers to as 'premature cognitive committments' - help us become aware of the assumptions that we had dissolved in perception, and contemplate alternative ways of construing the situation."

My bolds.

"Mindfulness involves observing one's own experience carefully enough to be able to spot any misconceptions that may inadvertently have crept in. There are a number of ways in which this quality of mindfulness towards the activity of our own minds can be cultivated, though all involve slowing down the onrush of mental activity, and trying to focus conscious awareness on the world of sensations, rather than jumping on the first interpretation that comes along and hurtling off in the direction of decision and action. Mindfulness can be taught directly, as a form of secular meditation, for example. (...) "The essence of the state is to 'be' fully in the present moment, without judging or evaluating it, without reflecting backwards on past memories, without looking forward to anticipate the future, as in anxious worry, and without attempting to 'problem-solve' or otherwise avoid any unplesant aspects of the immediate situation. In this state one is highly aware and focused on the reality of the present moment, 'as it is', accepting and acknowledging it is its full 'reality' without immediately engaging in discursive thought about it, without trying to work out how to change it, and without drifting off into a state of diffuse thinking focused on somewhere else or some other time.. The mindful state is associated with a lack of elaborative processing involving thoughts that are essentially about the currently experienced, its implications, further meanings, or the need for related action. Rather mindfulness involves direct and immediate experience of the present situation."(Jon Kabat-Zinn)"

......................................................

So, in summary, from Hemenway's article on permaculture we have the basic design principles combined into four pairs:

I. ECONOMY AND ELEGANCE:
1. "Do only what is necessary. Conservation involves passive restraint from change or disruption of natural systems and active participation within them."
2. "Multiply purposes. Never do anything for only one reason. "Stack functions""

II. BALANCE
3. "Be redundant. There is always a variety of pathways by which an ecosystem can proceed about its business. A system's capacity for storage and resilience stems from its redundancy."
4. "Check your scale. Design and act within an appropriate size frame. The only cultural tools our society provides for evaluating scale are economic; these often lead to the selection of scales that are counterproductive, inefficient, and destructive."

III. RESILIENCE
5. "Work with edges. That is where the action is. Straight lines have far less edge than waves. You know this instinctively."
6. "Encourage diversity. Diversity here is intended to be diversity of relations between things, and not just a bunch of different structures assembled. Diversity of pathways is redundancy. Diversity allows both stacking and repeating of function."

IV. RECIPROCITY
7. "Look both ways before crossing. Everything works both ways."
8. "The gift must always move."

From Claxton's book we have the four slow ways of seeing:
1. Attentive Resonance
2. Focusing
3. Poetic Sensibility
4. Mindfulness

How they stacked up as being congruent with each other in my mind was as follows:

1. "Economy and Elegance" with poetic sensibility ("reset or create our agenda; to uncover issues and reveal concerns, perhaps in unexpected quarters, or surprising ways");

2. "Balance" with focusing ("awareness" (like that in "attentive resonance", see below).."is now directed inward, towards the subtle activities and promptings of one's own body" - this is a tough one to learn when everything in our culture has prompted/taught us to be externally directed);

3. "Resilience" with attentive resonance ("The habit of attending closely and patiently to the evidence, even - sometimes especially - to tiny, insignificant-looking shreds of evidence" - another hard one when all exhortations are to keep an eye on "the Big Picture.");

4. "Reciprocity" with mindfulness ("seeing through one's own perceptual assumptions", not fall prey to "premature cognitive commitments" - in our culture, no one seems to care about this at all, except those who prefer to consider all things from a scientific perspective before unleashing them outward, as Burton reminds us in On Being Certain).

Next I want to highlight more from Claxton, his comparison/contrast of what he calls "D-mode" thinking ("D" is for deliberate) with slow, "undermind" thinking, the kind that is ongoing and one can peer into using his 4 "qualities." (I would call them "mind gardening tools.")

Brain as Composter VI

Building upon Brain as Composter V:

Time to turn our attention to Guy Claxton, who wrote a very elegant little book several years ago, called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (1997).

He's an educator, so I guess it's fair to say that he's worked with "nature" in the form of figuring out the best way to not just convey information into young minds, but to extract thinking from them. (It also does not surprise me to learn that he is apparently a practicing Buddhist.)

Chapter 11 is titled "Paying Attention"; in it he explores 4 different ways of 'slow seeing'.

1. Attentive Resonance:

"The habit of attending closely and patiently to the evidence, even - sometimes especially - to tiny, insignificant-looking shreds of evidence, is characteristic of skilled practitioners of a variety of arts, crafts and professions, prototypically the hunter. From a bent twig, a feather or a piece of excrement the expert hunter can recreate and animal, its age and state of health; and he does so in an apparently leisurely fashion in which these scraps of information are allowed to resonate, largely unconsciously, with his mental stock of lore and experience. You can't rush a tracker. Each detail, slowly attended to, is allowed to form a nucleus, an epicentre in the brain, around which associations and connotations gradually accrete and meld, if they will, into a rich, coherent picture of the animal and its passage. As Carlo Ginzburg, author of a fascinating essay on 'Clues', has surmised, the hunter squatting on the ground, studying the spoor of his quarry, may be engaged in the oldest act in the intellectual history of the human race. Many other feats of vernacular connoisseurship - telling an ailing horse by the condition of its hocks, an impending storm by a change in the wind, a run of salmon by a scarcely perceptible ripple on the river, a hostile intent by a subtle narrowing of the eyes - are of the same kind. Each is an act of high intelligence, bringing to bear on the present a complex body of past knowledge, and accomplished by the eye, with little if any assistance from deliberate thought."

He could be describing clinical thinking in this passage. In fact he does:

"It is interesting to observe.. the changing context to medical diagnosis over the course of the last two hundred years. The process of detection and identification of disease these days is often devoid of this leisurely resonance of attentive observation with the working knowledge of a person's lifetime's experience. The modern general practitioner makes a succession of snap decisions as to either the nature of the disorder with which she is confronted, or what further objective, 'scientific' tests to order. She is now so rushed, and so enchanted (as we all are) with technology, and technological ways of thinking, that she generally prefers to trust a read-out from a machine over a considered clinical judgement. An instrument gives us 'real knowledge' about the patient, whereas the poor doctor on her own can offer nothing more substantial than an 'opinion'. Reliance on informed intuition seems increasingly 'subjective', risky and old-fashioned.(...)

Yet through out the history of medicine, the doctor has functioned more like the tracker or the detective than a technician."

I (often, usually, nearly uninterruptedly) feel a bit sad that my profession has decided to let go of this. For the most part, to sit and look and think and evaluate and wait and touch/handle/noodle tissue around and wait some more, in silence, or else while quietly chatting with a patient about some observation or perception they have about what they are sensing.. two people quietly thinking together out loud, while observing "nature" in the form of a nervous system that is malfunctioning somehow... this precious time to build a therapeutic relationship upon which everything transformative may actually hinge, is considered useless, unproductive, a waste of taxpayer's money within a health care system struggling to survive. This is the art of PT that has become all but lost. It certainly is not explored or encouraged or passed on during clinical training, and all economic factors weigh in complete opposition to it.

The one (maybe the only) thing "nature" needs to do its job, is time. Good compost takes time. Natural processing takes time, and yes, it might seem like it would be a boring thing to pay attention to, but it also can be very relaxing and fascinating, depending on how you view it. And the act of observing closely, and in the process teaching one's patient how (especially for pain problems), can catalyze the process toward resolution somewhat, most of the time. This is, I think, somewhere in the vicinity of helping someone's conscious part of their nervous system improve a relationship they are having with the nonconscious parts of their nervous systems.

The next way of slow seeing Claxton describes is focusing.

2. Focusing:

"The second fruitful way of paying attention is similar, except awareness is now directed inward, towards the subtle activities and promptings of one's own body. The ability to "listen to the body" is very useful in gaining insight into a whole variety of personal puzzles and predicaments. This ability has been dubbed focusing by the American psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. Back in the 1960's, Gendlin and colleagues at the University of Chicago were involved in large-scale research projects designed to discover why it was that some people undergoing psychotherapy made good progress while others did not, no matter who the therapist was or what she did. After analysing thousands of hours of tape-recorded sessions, Gendlin uncovered the magic ingredient, which could be picked up even in the first one or two sessions, and which could be used to predict whether the patient would make progress or not. It was not anything to do with the school or the technique of the therapist, nor, apparently, with the content of what was talked about. It was the client's spontaneous tendency to relate their experience in a certain way."

This is just like the situation we find ourselves in as manual therapists. We have people in pain, no really slick way to catalogue them or differentiate them; it barely matters what we do to them, what matters most is how they respond.

"The successful clients were those who spontaneously tended to stop talking from time to time; to cease deliberately thinking, analyzing, explaining and theorizing, and to sit quietly while, it seemed, they paid attention to an internal process that could not yet be clearly articulated. They were listening to something inside themselves that they did not yet have words for. They acted as if they were waiting for something rather nebulous to take form, and groping for exactly the right way to express it. Often this period of silent receptivity would last for around 30 seconds; sometimes much longer. And when they did speak, struggling to give voice to what it was they had dimly sensed, they spoke as though their dawning understanding was new, fresh, and tentative - quite different from the tired old recitation of grievance or guilt which frequently preceded it."

In my world, which is almost a perfect overlap but not quite (because I do not make any sort of regular practice out of exploring the emotional side of peoples' lives), the people who are able to change their pain output are those who learn to sense their bodies in new ways that are not painful; they manage to set aside their habitual responses to their stream of body angst/pain and look (deliberately, long, thoroughly, painstakingly) for something ELSE to sense instead.

"Gendlin called this hazy shadow which they were attending to and allowing slowly to come to fruition, a felt sense, and it was quite different both from a string of thoughts and from the experience of a particular emotion or feeling. It seemed to be the inner ground out of which thoughts, images and feelings would emerge if they were given time and unpremeditated attention. It appeared that many people lacked the ability, and perhaps the patience, to allow things to unfold in this way. Instead they would, in their haste for an answer, pre-empt this process of evolution, creating a depiction of the problem which told them nothing new, and which gave no sense of progress or relief."

What Claxton refers to as Gendlin's "hazy shadow", felt sense, inner ground etc., I've often sensed merely as a void, or maybe even "the" void. It requires a bit of courage to walk straight into at first, because to navigate it, one must give up completely to it, suspend every sense for a time, give up "certainty." It is like a dense cognitive fog; you can no longer see or sense the usual "ground." All ordinary cues vanish. New ones begin to appear shortly, however, for one who is determined and patient and trusts the process, which is to remove the brakes and let one's nervous system start over again while remaining completely conscious. (To link back to Burton's book, this is possibly the initial discomfort of uncertainty, a voluntary suspension of the "feeling of certainty" that one must learn to feel comfortable with if one is to become a true critical scientific thinker/checker/tester of ideas about what might or might not constitute "reality.")

Two of the finest tools there are for reducing physical pain are sensing and movement, (or moving and sensing, take your pick). Just be deliberate, fearless, kind, slow, adaptive and responsive to yourself. But determined. One must be consciously determined, no matter how long it seems to take. Yet, simultaneously, one must never convey determination or impatience to one's own non-conscious pain processing. It's quite the balancing act, but once learned it will pay off over a whole life-time. Everyone needs to learn to be able to access their tracker ability to get through physical existence with less rather than more of the attendant suffering that is inescapable from time to time, the price we pay for being embedded within physicality. It's in there for free - we evolved using it - we can dig it out again for use on occasion, maybe by meditating..

My profession should be one of the main ones out there, teaching this skill set to those we treat, but alas, in PT training most of us were never taught that it was important to begin with - like most things in life and learning however, it's never too late.

More to come from Claxton's book, and a tie-in with Burton's book, I promise, no matter how tangential this post may have become.

Brain as composter V

In reference to Brain as Composter IV:

The final pair of design principles that Hemenway set out in his article have to do with reciprocity:

7. Look both ways before crossing. Everything works both ways. If the bank gives you 30 years to pay for your home, you give the system (the bank) 30 years of your life in indentured servitude. If energy can come in through a window, it can fly out a window. If it takes a lot of heat and time to warm a mass, it can give off heat for a long time. Death of individual cells is necessary for the life of other cells. What goes up must come down. Got it?

8.The gift must always move. This is the universal law of gifts. To survive and be well and joyous, we must transform and give away all gifts which come to us. This is how species of an ecosystem coexist. I accept the gift of oxygen from the trees and other plants and return it as carbon dioxide. We violate this principle when we accept food from the earth and do not return our urine and feces, but instead use it to contaminate water. To return a gift without transforming it to your nature is to reject it - it is an affront to the love of the universe.

I don't have any direct comparisons (at least none that I can think of just now) with the nervous system for these two features, other than perhaps the relationship the CNS has with the PNS (usually) or the relationship neurons and glia have with one another, or the relationships various parts of the accretion we call the human brain has with all the creature parts it evolved through in its evolutionary history.. and still has intact and functional..

Some might think, what about the body? Doesn't the nervous system have a reciprocal relationship with the body? Well, yes it does: if you had a hypothetical human "body" that you could stand before you, and you could remove all but one tissue system with the click of a mouse, (as you can sort of do at www.visiblebody.com ), and you clicked away everything but the bones and meat, yeah.. you'd still have a "body"... but it wouldn't work without a nervous system to run it - it would quickly fall over, die and rot.

If you clicked away everything but the nervous system, you'd still be able to recognize the person, the person would still have height and breadth and shape, but that two percent that was left would seem pretty insubstantial and wouldn't work very well without an energy source or its mesodermal "overcoat" to help it preserve its temperature. With no living struts or bungee cords to hold it up, its "mayday" output would go nowhere and do nothing; it would collapse to the floor, all its 72 km of nerves in a heap of tangled threads and cords, under the weight of a brain that would fall down plop onto the top of the pile as the spinal cord collapsed with no spinal column to tether itself inside of or maintain in an upright position. With no oxygen or energy coming into it from lungs and metabolism, it would quickly go unconscious and die, turn into a puddle of goo.

So yes, there is a basic survival relationship here. However, I think the relationship the nervous system has with the (mesodermal) body is only one of the large number of relationships it maintains within itself and its various levels of function, and I want to stay on track here - the post series is intended to be about the relationship or "reciprocity" between the unconscious brain and the conscious brain.

In the next post I'll start bringing material here based on Guy Claxton's book, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, and continue the composter metaphor.

Brain as composter IV

Here I am on post four already, still building the case for looking at the unconscious/non-conscious as metaphoric garden-building composter/compost. So, in reference to Brain as Composter III:

Hemenway says resilience is the main feature of the next pair of design features of permaculture. Here is his point 5:

"Work with edges. That is where the action is. Straight lines have far less edge than waves. You know this instinctively. People gravitate to the edges, like a beach, the forest edge, the side of the path, or the living room wall (where we put our furniture).
Nature amplifies edges, as in your lungs or kidneys, when it wants to amplify energy transfer; it reduces surface edges, as in a dewdrop or a turtle shell, when it wants to limit transactions. There appears to be no limit to the extent that knowledge and awareness of edge effects can improve on a design. Study of edges in nature willimprove our understanding and ability to use this principle."

Hemenway again:

"Encourage diversity. Diversity here is intended to be diversity of relations between things, and not just a bunch of different structures assembled. A garden with an assortment of different plants randomly arranged will not be nearly as productive as one in which the plants are arranged as co-productive companions.
Designed diversity is a concept I find difficult to discuss separately from its intimate relationship to redundancy and edge effects. Diversity of pathways is redundancy. Diversity allows both stacking and repeating of function."

This is Angevine:

"The human nervous system is a hierarchy, culminating in the brain, of 100 billion or more neurons of 10,000 types, 1-10 trillion neuroglial cells, 100 trillion chemical synapses, 160,000 kn of neuronal processes, thousands of neuronal clusters and fibers tracts, hundreds of functional regions, dozens of functional subsystems, 7 central regions, and 3 main divisions. All of these parts form a coherent, bodily pervasive, diversified, complex epithelium with interdependent connectivity of neurons, mostly neither sensory nor motor but anatomically and functionally intermediate."

So, here we have a single epithelium (or "edge") that has permeated throughout an entire organism (which it built with a earlier kind of cell offspring), and has diversified into 10,000 types of neuronal cells. From Six Crucial Properties of Nervous Tissue, we see this:

"The nervous system is an epithelium, with cells close by and little space between. Far more complex than other epithelia, with flattened cuboidal or columnar cells in single or stratified sheets covering surfaces or lining spaces, the nervous system is a supereptithelium: a huge three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with billions of pieces of varying size (1 to over 150 um) length (1 um to 1 meter) and, in some cases, an extraordinarily complex and beautiful configuration. Electron micrographs show that its pieces fit together, precisely and intimately, with little space left over, an evident benefit for cell communication."

Nature took this 'edge' and folded it into a roundish hemispheres.

More to come.

Brain as Composter III

In reference to Brain as Composter II:

In this post the comparison between design principles in permaculture and how nature built a nervous system continue.

The next pair of design principles for good permaculture as laid out by Hemenway are to do with balance.

"3. Be redundant. "Repeat function," Bill would say. "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" is how my grandmother put it. Look at any nutrient cycle or watershed. There is always a variety of pathways by which an ecosystem can proceed about its business. In nature, this is done so that each organism occupies a unique niche in an ecosystem; yet if any one species is removed, everything it does for the whole will be accomplished by other organisms. A system's capacity for storage and resilience stems from its redundancy. It is the understanding of this principle, for example, that reveals that growing our food in monocultures, where everything hinges on the success of one species, is stupid and self-destructive."

Here is Angevine:

5. The Purposefulness of Neural Components

Every part of the nervous system has at least one function, often many more. Small parts of the CNS may play crucial roles, as in the extensive distribution and profound influence of axons from inconspicuous brain centers. The locus ceruleus ("blue spot") on each side of the fourth ventricle contains about 12,000 large melanin-pigmented neurons. These synthesize norepinephrine and release it in the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and almost every other part of the CNS. Electrically, they are almost silent in sleep, hypoactive in wakefulness, and hyperactive in watchful or startling situations. They serve vigilance and attention to novel stimuli. They contribute, indirectly but no less crucially, to perceptual and cognitive functions. By contrast, immense structures make large but expensive contributions, as in the cognitive and motor abilities afforded us by the billions of neurons in our cerebral and cerebellar cortices.

Hemenway:

4. Check your scale. Design and act within an appropriate size frame. Or, as Granny said,"Don't bite off more than you can chew." This is why permaculture starts at the backyard and works out.. to keep on a scale commensurate with our understanding. We are only responsible for the next step in whatever we are doing, and that step is always right before us, within our reach.
Issues of scale are tricky and require continuous attention to the consequences of a chosen scale. Small may be beautiful, but smallest is not always optimal. Some things can be done well only on a large scale (e.g., manufacture of photographic film), whereas others rapidly deteriorate with increasing scale (e.g., food preparation). The only cultural tools our society provides for evaluating scale are economic; these often lead to the selection of scales that are counterproductive, inefficient, and destructive.

(The reference to photographic film shows how long ago this article was published.)

Angevine:

1. Ubiquity

With 100,000 miles of nerve fibers the nervous system rivals the vascular system. Both pervade the body and function in harmony. By nerve impulses or circulating red and white cells, glucose, hormones and immune principles, they integrate body activity, protect the body, enhance its performance to met stress or demand, promote its growth and nutrition, and maintain its tone and vigor. The trunk and branches of both systems reflect body form. If either system and no other part of a person were visible, he or she would be recognizable. Density of innervation varies as the value of parts to sensory discrimination or motor control. In well-innervated areas (lips, fingertips) stimuli are sharply discriminated as to modality, intensity, and location, but in sparsely innervated areas (flanks, legs) these are less defined. Similarly, muscles vary in the ratio of motor neurons to muscle fibres. The higher the ratio, the more precise the control of the muscle and the movement it serves (a motor neuron may excite 2000 muscle fibers in a limb muscle or as few as 5 in extrinsic ocular muscles.

More to come.

Brain as Composter II

In reference to Brain as Composter:

Here are the four "pairs" of eight principles of design mentioned by Dan Hemenway in his article over two decades ago. They were likely noodled around somewhat in order to present well, and in alignment with 'ancient philosophy' on harmoniousness, and so they do.

On economy: "

1. Do only what is necessary. This involves humility in realizing that our understanding is limited. It means a respect for the natural way in which things happen.
This is what the radical farmer Fukuoka means when he says that his is a "do-nothing" philosophy and why he always questions the reason for every task. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Conservation is always the first resource of "doing nothing." In its simplest terms, it is putting on a sweater instead of turning up the thermostat. As a state of mind, that's a fair beginning. In the deeper application, conservation means honoring the naural cycles, not breaking them apart which results in "waste."
Conservation involves passive restraint from change or disruption of natural systems and active participation within them."

I remember the basic organizing principle as written by Angevine in Encyclopedia of the Human Brain (here's a link), centralization, third one in:

"3. Centralization

The key feature of the nervous system is centralization. It offers few circuits for local interactions of body parts. The CNS is almost always involved even if the distance, as from thumb to index finger, is slight. Intercession of the brain and spinal cord ensures integrated and coordinated activity.

Exceptions are instructive. The local cutaneous response to irritating stimuli (raking a blunt probe over the skin) has three components: local reddening (vasodilation from injury), wheal formation (transient edema from tissue fluid extrusion), and ensuing vasodilation (flare) with lowered thresholds and increased sensitivity to pain (pinprick). The flare and hyperalgesia represent an axon reflex. Nociceptive (pain) nerve endings are activated by substances released by injured tissue cells, and nerve impulses are conducted a short way centrally along nociceptive axons and then distally over branches of these axons to nearby arterioles, causing them to dilate. Advanced or primitive (it is sluggish, starting in about 20 sec. and developing fully in around 3 min), this reflex involves local nerve fibers only, not the CNS.

The "triple response" illustrates three concepts. Pain receptors sense chemical, as well as mechanical and thermal stimuli. Their sensitivity is increased by substances accumulating in the damaged area. Their response includes a neuroeffector component. They release substances (peptides) that initiate further events, providing further protection and favoring local tissue repair.

Studies in invertebrate neural systems show extensive local control of visceral function. Exceptions to central control are also found in the mammalian ANS. Near-normal interaction of bowel segments persists in the absence of CNS innervation. Sensory fibers from the gut exert feedback in intramural autonomic ganglia on visceral motor neurons regulating smooth muscle in the intestinal wall. The nervous system has pattern generators, both central and peripheral: systems with cellular, synaptic, and network properties (cyclic firing rhythms, reciprocal inhibition of cell pairs, leader and follower cells) that provide automated mechanisms for generating rhythmic movements (breathing, walking) or periodic activities (sleeping, waking). Regulated by neural (sensory feedback, volitional override) or neuroendocrine influences, pattern generators are pithy examples of neural endogenous activity." Do more with less would seem to be the message here."

Back to Hemenway, on elegance:

"2. Multiply purposes. Never do anything for only one reason. "Stack functions" is the way Bill Mollison expresses it.
In nature, all design is elegant. My hand is clearly designed for grasping. But it also serves as a heat radiator for my body, a weapon (fist), a signal device, a bodily support surface (as in pushups), a sensory organ, a carrier of affection (caresses), and an implement of communication (fingers in sand).
If we perceive several functions of an object of decision, then many more will be present. If we perceive only one function, then fear, greed, or our egos are in the way."

This property reminds me of Angevine's 8th principle, chemical message coding:

"8. Chemical Message Coding

The basic function of the nervous system, from which all others derive, is communication, performed (with unsung neuroglial support) by neurons. It depends on special electrical, structural,and chemical properties of these diversified cells with their long processes, on their exploitation and refinement of two basic protoplasmic properties, irritability and conductivity, on their external and internal neuronal morphology featuring multipolar shape and integrative design, almost infinite modes of dendritic and axonal branching, widespread, diversified connections, and specialized organelles, and on their use of chemical substances to encode, deliver and decipher messages of their own and other neurons.

Neural circuits are chemically coded. Neuroanatomy encompasses interneuronal connections and also chemical mediators and transmitters. Neuroactive substances comprise neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, and neurohormones. Their definition in contexts other than site of action, postsynaptic neuronal activity, and corelease of one or more additional neuroactive substances can be misleading. Neurotransmitters are small molecules acting swiftly, locally, and briefly on target cells. Neuromodulators are very small (peptides), regulating but not effecting transmission, and neurohormones are also small, with intrinsic activity mediated by neuronal and other cells, exerting slow, widespread, and enduring influence via the extracellular fluid or bloodstream.

Neurons releasing hormones are quasi-endocrine cells, liberating secretory products from axonal endings into the perivascular space to be conveyed to blood vessels and thence to target organs. The provincial concerns of neurophysiology and endocrinology have fused into neuroendocrinology, as psychoneuroimmunology has united psychobiology, molecular neurobiology, and immunology."

More to come.

Brain as composter

In reference to "On Being Certain": Ginger Campbell interviews the author, Robert Burton MD:

Now I remember where I first had this brain/compost idea, which is a recurring one... here is a link to an old thread on SomaSimple, Permaculture/Natural Brain Systems: "Eight Principles for Designing Natural Systems."

In this thread, which went on for several days (during a seasonal affective disorder episode in December 3 years ago, a good time to think about composting perhaps...) I compared an article I'd saved for a long time about permaculture called "Four Pairs: Eight Principles for Designing Natural Systems" by Dan Hemenway, and a book I was reading at the time called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton.

The writing in both is so evocative I could easily see the parallels, or maybe I was just easily evoked in that state, but whatever, the two seemed to me to be a perfect fit. (Still do actually, even though it's summer.) Underlining all of this paralleling is the fact that what I work with, every day of my life, is the human being and human body; no matter how fancy he or she may have become, or separated from his or her physicality intellectually, a human being is and will always remain a bit of nature, comprised of 100 trillion or so cells.

What the heck. I'm going to bring the principles here, as a series of blog posts. No.. I'll do better, I'll bring the whole article here. Here is Dan Hemenway, from an article published in 1985 in a publication called Whole Earth Review, with excerpts from the introduction:

"I owe a special debt to my friend and teacher, Bill Mollison, whose coined word, "permaculture" I use to describe much of my own work. Bill's emphasis on human participation in the design process of nature fitted together for me the pieces I was gathering.

Working with these guidelines, I found that the patterns I observed fit within eight principles of design. None of these four pairs is likely to surprise anyone familiar with the wisdom within the various grounded religions and philosophies our species has articulated."

I think he's referring to yin and yang and all that.

"...we, especially those of us who are North Americans, rather routinely fail to observe them in our daily lives. I find their articulation helpful in evaluating my own lifestyle and seeking to correct my course.

While each of the principles is familiar in sense, if not practice, there is value in stating them together as part of a whole. That is perhaps the ninth principle: Everything is part of the whole."

I wouldn't disagree with that.

"Problems which occur together often have common solutions. Ecologies are efficient and durable when all parts support capture, transformation, and storage of energy by the whole... There is a sense, then, in which each principle is an aspect of the others. The appearance of the connections between them is a function of our vantage point, where we stand at the moment... conservation goes further, and restores broken cycles. That is our real work: to design many pathways for this renewal, based on a design that connects us in our diversity of resource and perspective."

He's discussing farming, of course..

I'll be bringing large chunks of the thread here probably, including the thoughts about Guy Claxton's book on his way of thinking about the unconscious and conscious. It will be a long blog series I'm afraid... A lot of it will no doubt seem kind of round-about, but the first thing to realize is that nothing is more roundabout than nature is. If we want to develop a good new metaphor for what is "human" about thinking, one that includes biology, we can't very well leave out nature.

Next up, the first pair of principles from Dan's article.

ADDITIONAL READING:
1. Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison (who is mentioned by Dan Hemenway in the intro)
2. Dan Hemenway's webpage

"On Being Certain": Ginger Campbell interviews the author, Robert Burton MD

I help out Ginger Campbell sometimes by transcribing some of her podcasts for her, just the ones I decide are so interesting I want to spend time with the podcast and might as well be doing something useful at the same time that might help out other listeners, i.e., typing. The typing helps me too - makes me listen more slowly, makes me repeat parts to make sure I heard them right.

Here is a link to my transcription of her BrainSciencePodcast interview #43, an interview with author Robert Burton MD, about his book, On Being Certain: Believing you're Right Even When You're Not. (I wrote a post based on this book, and the previous BrainSciencePodcast #42, here.)

In the interview, toward the end, Burton compares perception of mind to perception of pain:

"I don't know if I can articulate this because it's still sort of seeping around in there is that most of us feel that we are what our conscious mind tells us we are. That question you asked about the free will and about someone said what your unconscious is doing is not part of 'you' - I think that we sense only what we sense. We sense ourselves as starting an idea, having a thought, making plans, etc etc. and we really don't see that that facility arises out of the same cognitive stew that causes all these perceptual illusions in general. And somehow, if you were to take a look at sort of western thought, it really is all about the mind-body thing. All the major questions arise out of the conception that the mind is somehow a separate entity. I mean there's a book by John Searle the philosopher - he has a whole book called The Mind, and he covers all the various kinds of theories, but none of them make any sense if you think about it. Because way down deep the mind is simply a higher level function that we can't conceptualize, just the same way as you said it's more than the sum of its parts I think you said.. this whole idea of emergence is really impossible to visually see - in other words you realize that if you take a chocolate chip and you take a piece of flour and take water, there is no embedded cake in there.. there's nothing - there's just chocolate and flour but we know you can make a cake. Well the cake is material. You can still see it. But in this case the problem is, the problem is what the brain generates is immaterial, that we can't see, yet does exist. I mean exists in the same way that pain exists. Pain isn't anywhere. The brain doesn't experience pain in the neurons I'm suffering. When you stub your toe there's no neuron that goes ouch. It occurs at a higher level. The problem I haven't figured out yet which I think might be the next project is, there needs to be a metaphor for understanding higher level function when seen from a lower level that will allow people to get rid of this distinction and argument about the mind and free will and causation. I think these are all problems of language that arise out of misconceptions what the mind is. Which is sort of what I think might be the next project."

Ginger says:

"You pointed out in your book that we don't think pain is something mystical or magical just because it can't be localized - it's emergent - yet somehow it seems natural to look at our mind and feel that it has to be somehow different."

His next comment is:

"Right. And I haven't been able to think of it because maybe I'm too dense, but there must be some analogy or metaphoric analogy where you can say, well just as pain exists but is undetectable, the mind exists, but it exists arising out of stuff that we cannot control so even though it feels like it's separate and also feels like it's in control in some sense it also feels like it's you, and feels like a self - these are all phenomena that are undetectable but necessary - I don't want to use the word illusion because illusion implies it doesn't exist - but on the other hand it is an illusion if you mean by illusion you can't see or taste or smell or touch it. It's an illusion without being an illusion."

I'm working on an analogy/metaphor for him - it has to do with brain as compost bin, thoughts generated by the unconscious or fed into the unconscious as compost itself. What occurs in the bin is unconscious thinking; conscious thinking or ruminating on something would be analogous to deliberately turning the compost, aerating it, waiting until it is aged to perfection.

Developing a systematic thought process, for example a scientific approach to thinking, or a scientific process to test an idea to make sure everyone can feel "certain" about it, would be analogous to using the compost to grow something with. But the thoughts that end up as conscious tested thoughts, although they may have sprung forth with the help and support and nutrition provided by the compost, are no longer compost - they become living and growing ideas that belong out in the culture, seeding new thoughts.

OK, it needs work, but I think it's a start.

Microglia and Pain: A Manual Therapy Perspective

I am posting here just to put in a link to a series I have made on the topic by the same name over at the Neurotonics blog.

Brain Science Podcast #42: "On Being Certain"

In reference to Alberta woman with chiropractic stroke sues bigtime:

Ginger Campbell's latest podcast is about the book, "On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not ", by neurologist Robert A. Burton, MD.

About half way through it, she says;

"Earlier on I asked the question, "What would be the possible benefits of "a feeling of knowing" that is actually false?" This brings us to a consideration of our brain's reward systems, and how they interact and influence our thoughts.

We know that there are extensive connections between the pleasure rewards systems, emotions, and the opioid peptides in the brain. We have talked about in the past the mesolimbic-dopamine system, which is a key component of the brain reward circuitry that originates in the upper brainstem. It, not surprisingly, seems to use dopamine as its key neurotransmitter. This mesolimbic dopamine system connects to the parts of the brain that are involved in emotion and cognition, including parts of the frontal lobes, and the nucleus accumbens which is thought to be involved in addiction. It's been shown that brain mediated rewards cause behaviours to persist, including addictions.

So you have to wonder, how is this related to the feeling of knowing? Dr. Burton gives an example in the book, of a person faced with a charging lion, who climbs up in a tree and survives. After the person escapes he has the feeling that he has learned something. And if you make these sorts of decisions repeatedly, you will probably have a positive feeling of "correctness" that becomes linked to that behaviour.

Dr. Burton argues that the feeling of knowing and feelings of familiarity are integral to learning."

Fine, so why am I bringing this forward? Because my human primate social grooming brain thinks humans are learning machines who:
1. can learn all sorts of crazy things
2. learn all sorts of physical actions
3. make up all sorts of bizarre and sometimes dangerous rituals

.... that often fall into the category of "stupid human tricks."

Among these, I would definitely put neck manipulation of the high velocity sort.

I can't prove it, but have always suspected that both doing it and having it done to one's own person likely belong in the category of "addictive behaviours" as well as "stupid human tricks", but this is the first time I've heard a (potentially associated) brain pathway actually spelled out.

No one in the greater HPSG sub-troop acts more "certain" of themselves, on the whole, than those practitioners who favor this approach. Except possibly the patients who've been on the receiving end of it, convinced that it "helps" them, even when they still "need" it monthly for 10 years, etc. (See Keith's observations/comments in "Alberta woman" link.) I'd put that in the category of "false knowledge"; the feeling of being certain outweighs the obviousness that it doesn't really help much of anything at all, except a reward pathway (temporarily) and furthermore only reinforces a behaviour peculiar to humans, reinforces a pathway that goes nowhere and does nothing permanent, does not give the brain a chance to learn a new behaviour toward self-sufficiency.


Further reading:

1. Harriet Hall's review of the same book.
2. Is certainty a dopameme?


August 8/08

I'm back into this post to drop a link to Ginger Campbell's Podcast #43, an interview with the author. It really rips along - give it a listen! Thumbs-up.

Glia from a manual therapy perspective

I've been neglecting the blogs in favor of immersing myself in learning all about glia - two books arrived, and I confess I've become captivated by these little critters.

The books are Glial Neurobiology (2007, Verkhratsky and Butt) and Neuroglia (2005, Kettenmann).

In particular, microglia are involved in pain production, it seems. I'll be delving into more about this on the Neurotonics blog soon.

Antidote for ordinary 'sturm und drang'?

Eric Matheson at Feel Better...move well blog recently posted a couple youtube videos on meditation, Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation. His post contains a Jon Kabat-Zinn Google presentation which I already posted about earlier this year, plus a new one I hadn't seen before, another google talk by Philippe Goldin.

I've watched about 20 minutes of it so far, and so far I'm captivated. He makes the point that meditation is moving out of the domain of faith-based activity, is becoming a scientific curiosity instead. A wide range of applications are developing out of earlier work done by Kabat-Zinn's work with stress reduction.

Maybe someday there will even be simple, straight-forward, pre-packaged, no-need-for-any-belief-system, non-pharmaceutical, evidence-based mental exercises to manage ordinary human angst, the 'sturm und drang' of ordinary existence, life in an achingly vulnerable human brain that evolved so fast that it learns too much about too many things too soon, and must spend far too much time growing its own buffers somehow; buffers, which if they are merely defense mechanisms, can sometimes do more harm than good.

Moving back into this body

In reference to Car-free at last:

Lately I've surfaced, after about 8 years of being at the computer every day for hours, to notice the effects that have accumulated. For one thing my environmental standards (i.e., housekeeping levels) have slipped some. Too-much-sitting has definitely moved me away from my own physicality. Selling the car was a ritual move, a symbol of intent, a sacrifice made to impress upon my own brain how seriously I am inclined to view any threatened parting of me from my aging (nearly 60), softening, and too heavy body, and its lack of stamina, increased sense of windedness. I walk to work and back a couple times a day, always have, a total distance of not quite 4 km. The work itself is physical. This however, is definitely no longer enough to counter the entropy I feel in this body. It just doesn't feel like a happy body anymore. I do not have overt pain, just a feeling of stiffness when I first stand up and a feeling of inner resistance or friction, lack of space inside.

It's noticeable enough that I actually joined and am going to go to a gym today.

I will have to suck up the displeasure I feel at descending a staircase into a basement affair, with the smell of rubber and steel and sweat, and the anxiety of feeling physically incompetent before the gaze and possible judgment of who knows how many hard-bodies who've already been there working out for years. I paid my $ and I have the right to be there, using equipment and adding CO2 to the cloud already in the room. The payoff will not be a lovely athletic body, because I lack such genes - instead my payoff will be a stronger humanantigravitysuit that fits better, hopefully feels better and may actually manage to dump some of its excess ballast.

I'm going to keep a food diary too - I hear it's a good CBT way to handle weight loss. For sure, if ideomotor (nonconscious) eating was adequate to sustain normal weight, I'd be normal weight instead of overweight. So, it's high time for a new strategy.

Later:
I'm back from the initial foray to the gym. It didn't smell bad at all. There is even fresh smelling air pumped in from somewhere, somehow. Everything was spanking clean; even though the equipment has seen better days in terms of its paint job and shininess, it was clean, and this is huge. The place is in a basement, with the ubiquitous row of treadmills facing a row of TV sets with the sound turned down, but the music was not clanging or too loud, and I have to say, I've never been on a smoother more well-appointed treadmill in my life, or a nicer smoother workout bike.

A bit of treadmill, a bit of bike, pushing a few machines around a bit (noting where my shoulders feel a tad stiff meanwhile), all in all about 45 minutes worth, and I walked out with quads that felt like cotton candy and a definite sense of being back in contact with my abs. Well, with what I have that supposedly are abs.. Plus, feeling way less stiff.

I found this today: Protein coingestion stimulates muscle protein synthesis during resistance-type exercise. Hmm. Maybe this is why I've been craving red meat lately - red meat which I almost never eat. I'm about to eat it two days in a row. I thought it was just me succumbing to magical thinking, that eating meat would help me build some of my own, but maybe there's actually something scientific to it.

Update July 16/08:
The diary thing is a good idea. So is the protein idea. I've eaten three sirloin steaks, two chicken breasts and two large slabs of salmon. Not much else, because I don't feel very hungry after such a large amount of protein... not until the next day. (But it is fruit season and I do love fruit... so a bowl of fruit with some non fat yogurt is a treat most days.) An unexpected side benefit is deeper, better, longer sleep. In the past week, I've been to the gym twice, have exercised at home with weights twice, have lost 5 pounds and 4 inches. I feel better, and am more sure now that I can reclaim this physicality for at least a few more decades.

Update July 26/08
So far so good. Weightloss has slowed way down, of course, as my body fights to retain itself and resources shift around, but the high protein thing seems to be working for me in terms of keeping my appetite reduced and me from being at the mercy of it. I'm rarely "hungry"- by "hungry" I mean, "can't think about anything but food and trying to find something to put into the mouth." One night I got "hungry," did succumb to eating a piece of cheese, which switched it off. I wrote it down in the food diary of course.
So, so far: weightloss: 6.5 lbs., no change in BMI, inches lost: 5. Trips to gym, still only 2. But I did jog about a third of a km. That's rare.

Update Aug 7/08
Sticking with the plan, keeping the diary, not exercising much, lost a bit more (8 pounds so far total).

Update Aug 11/08
I'm looking forward to the day, way off in the mists of future time, when I won't be all jazzed about having lost another half pound. But I did. And I'm jazzed. Eight point five.

I'm also jazzed because I finally figured out a way to get vegetables into myself without gagging on them - I hate the way they taste, most of them. It's not their fault, it's just the way it is between me and vegetables. They get stuck between my teeth, and they taste bitter, and they don't feel good in my system. Usually.

Well, I discovered that throwing broccoli or celery or whatever, into a heavy-duty blender, with some low-fat milk, and whizzing them to death first, makes them go down a lot easier. It's instant "cream of whatever" soup. The veges are still quite raw. Heating the "soup" up in a big latte cup, in the microwave for a couple minutes, makes the whole experience (of eating veggies, for me) a lot less nauseating. Then I can "drink" it - it even gets a sort of nice foam on top.

It's best to make this fresh each time. I tried storing some "cream de broccoli soup" in the fridge overnight, and the next day the taste had gone bitter.

August 21/08 Update
A total of ten pounds are off as of today. Ten pounds, fifty days.
That works out to one pound every 5 days. A fifth of a pound per day. Sixteen ounces in a pound. Three point two ounces per day. Not a lot of effort. Actually, less effort than I should have been making probably. Most of that was in the first week however, so... there will be a slower rate. But it barely matters. I've got the rest of my life, so I'm not especially worried how slow it goes.

What I really am struck by is how I have "learned" not to care about eating so much/as much, by writing each item down. I'm eating more vegetables (as cream soup) and liking them more. As long as I rotate the protein so it's not the same two days in a row, I'm cool with that too. I've had a dish or ice cream and a slice of that fudge sold at the local fair (and enjoyed them). They did not seem to slow the process appreciably. My metabolism must therefore be improving a bit. These food indiscretions seemed not to awaken any sleeping appetite dragons.

Sept 12/08 Update
Down two and a half more pounds. I'm sticking with the flesh- 1 or 2% milk - veg- and/or - fruit-smoothie diet quite easily. As long as weight keeps peeling off, I don't care how long it takes, really. I'm not tired of the food and I'm not hungry. It's very paleolithic + dairy, except that I have a good blender and access to food shops, unlike my human primate ancestors. The big change is the food diary idea. It's a really good tool - seems to be precisely what I needed for getting out of the nonconscious maze.

October 4/08
Down by 15 pounds as of today. Have been at this weight before but never so mindfully, never by calculatedly descending the metaphoric mountain, usually just by falling off it somewhere at some point, and bouncing back up. The food diary helps a lot. I do not skimp on portions. I merely eat one meal a day (involving fish, fowl or meat), and a snack (fruit smoothie) for dinner. Yes, it's slow. I realize that. But I also am not especially willing to resort to (artificially added) exercise yet. I walk everywhere (total about 40 minutes/day), physically carrying everything I need to move from A to B, and am actively moving about at work and using upper body strength all day. I think it's enough. I'm trying to learn to eat less. That's what this is really about. As Harriet Hall says in her review of Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto,

Eat a variety of food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I will start to shift to mostly plants a bit later perhaps. Pollan suggests mostly leaves, not seeds. I suppose by being a fructi-carnivore, I'm not eating properly. But I do feel satisfied for now, and so far this is working for me.

November 22/08
Down by 20 lbs. from start in June. Feel better. Definitely.
I've noticed I always gain a pound or so for a few days after socializing. I attribute this to having stress - I'm an introvert and socializing is always (no matter if I enjoyed myself or not) stressful. And I do not indulge calorically when I socialize, so I suspect it's from my cortisol level having gone up a little, for a little while.

Car-free at last

In reference to Divorcing the car:

Five minutes ago I walked inside $1800 richer (in twenties bound into 4 lots with rubber bands, in my packet, a thick wad to take to the bank later when it opens), and way more than just a ton lighter.

My car has just been affectionately transferred to a new owner, and all I had to officially keep were the plates. Oh, and the little bag of trash I filled from inside glove box and drink console. I can put the remote for the garage door away now. [big smile]I don't need it anymore[/big smile].

I feel good, really pleased with how relatively effortless this transition was.

Divorcing the car

Over a lifetime I've had a changing relationship to car ownership. When I was a teen I desperately wanted to learn how to drive, as I'm sure all teens still do. But it was the early 60's, the Canadian prairies, and I was a girl in a farm family which had yet to become egalitarian in how it treated its son (my brother) and me (the oldest but a mere female). My mother did not acquire a driver's license until well into her thirties.

A memory snippet from around the age of ten: I remember her practicing with the family car (a powder-blue 2-door '53 Ford Meteor), steering it carefully around the yard with her glasses (cat's eye shape, framed in reddish brown across the top, little sparkles in the corners) perched on her nose, looking very focused, very aware of her responsibility for the control of hundreds of horse power. She thought there was no need for me to learn to drive or get a license. My brother however was encouraged to get a license and a car as soon as possible. Not fair.

At the age of twenty five, long after graduating from physiotherapy school and feeling very definitely like an adult, I took driving lessons. At age 28 I bought my first beater, a green '74 Chevy Nova. My anger at my mother's mean sexism finally could abate. I felt like I had the world by its tail. Wheels at last. Driving victory was mine.

I loved driving. Took long trips. Explored. A couple Toyotas after that, a Ford hatchback, and this last car (which I will say goodbye to tomorrow), an Olds, the one and only car I've ever had that had air conditioning. All have been second hand.

It is thirty years later and the honeymoon is long over. I'm fed up with owning a car. My car sat idle, mostly, for the past year, as I learned and practiced how to be carless again. This decision to finally let go was not taken in haste - I remember vividly how much I used to love being a car owner/operator, how much I once associated it with independence - but... the thrill is definitely gone.

I'm tired of getting the car fixed, putting in gas, washing it, checking the tires.. all the stuff one does with a car. Actively loving and caring for it. I'm tired of paying for insurance on a big hunk of metal that just mostly sits there. And I'm really annoyed that the battery died because of letting it sit and not burning up gas. Thanks a bunch. Here I was being good to the planet and the battery dies from not being used. Time to kiss car ownership goodbye.

I'm looking forward to joining a car co-op - I'll be able to drive when and if I need to, but I won't have any responsibility for upkeep. I'll save a small fortune in insurance. Nothing will be in my parking spot but empty space. Decluttered.

With the money I get for the car I will be able to afford a new laptop, something I'll really get a lot more use from. The deal happens tomorrow, for cash. By Sunday evening I'll be carless and will feel much less encumbered by life.

Monday Jun 30:
Well, I'm still a car owner today... "the best laid schemes 'o mice and (wo)men gang aft agley" and all that. The car was inspected by the prospective new owner this morning (instead of yesterday) and he likes it. But he wants to bring cash (fine by me), and can't until Saturday July 5. Our new time is 8AM Saturday morning. I'm still very much looking forward to being a carless person.

New blog - Eric Matheson PT: Feel Better, Move Well

The PT blogosphere is growing all the time. Eric Matheson has just launched a new blog called Live Better, Move well (and a new website, Matheson Physiotherapy. If you live in Nanaimo and need some help, Eric is your guy.)

Eric's latest blogpost is entitled Itch, and I must confess I read his post on SomaSimple and got the idea for my own blogpost, Itchy and Scratchy from it.

I like the line he drew out:

"This understanding of sensation points to an entire new array of potential treatments - based not on drugs or surgery but, instead, on the careful manipulation of our perceptions."

So true - for pain also.

Eric, I like your post better than mine.

Itchy and Scratchy

The New York Times has a great article by Atul Gawande about itch, and how sensors can go wrong. It's not the same as persistent pain, but it sounds awfully similar in behavior. Here is a link to The Itch. Here is a link to an audio interview about it.

Here is Jonah Lehrer's blogpost about it in his Frontal Cortex blog.

Here is a link to Atul Gawande's website.

Alberta woman with chiropractic stroke sues bigtime

A class action lawsuit has been filed against chiropractic in Alberta. A woman was turned into a quadriplegic by a chiropractor.

More of these cases are coming to light all the time. Rather than writhing in shame the way a profession should if lives are ruined at constant spaced intervals by its own "rock star" type of human primate social grooming, chiropractic shrugs and moves on, lets the individual chiropractor take the hit and acts like it's not the profession's fault.

This is an unconscionable attitude to take. I've always thought so and I always will.

In this case, (as I understand it) the woman and her husband are hoping to take the profession itself, and the provincial government which subsidizes it to court instead.

Nobody "needs" this kind of high-neck manipulative intervention on a regular basis to maintain their "health." Never let ANYONE tell you otherwise, no matter how charming they seem. It's a lie. It's a crock. Don't let anyone twist your neck for any reason. It's dangerous.

Watch the video, Kinsinger Report on Chiropractic.

Here is more information:
1. Chirotalk thread on the topic (Chirotalk is a board run by sane ex-chiropractors which means it's anti-chiropractic)
2. Old blog post, How I really feel about chiro
3. Please sign this petition against neck manipulation. Seriously, folks, this is a malevolent and thoroughly unnecessary human behavior that should be extinguished completely. Analysis of all the hidden symbolic dominance-submission ritual content it contains can wait until after it's been de-legalized.
4. Paralyzed woman sues chiropractic for half billion
5. Alberta woman launches massive chiropractic lawsuit
6. Sandy Nette's website
7. Action for Victims of Chiropractic (UK)
8. Video (short) Is a Headache Worth Dying For?
9. Chiropractic Lawsuit, blogpost by Steven Novella at Neurologica Blog
10. Adverse effects of spinal manipulation: a systematic review (JRSM 2007)
11. A Deadly Twist (story of another survivor of chiropractic stroke)
12. Chiropractic and Stroke (blogpost by Harriet Hall, MD and skeptic)
13. Another survivor, Graham Maynard's site
14. Stroke after chiropractic (CNN)(short video of a news clip)
15. Fact sheet on the class action (7-page pdf)
16. Doctor Who? Deception by chiropractors, by David Colquhoun
17. Chiropractors resort to legal intimidation, by David Colquhoun

Here are videos from the Nette couple's website, sandynette.com:

1. Sandy Nette's Story (about 8 minutes. Sandy speaks through a message board)
2. David Nette's Story: Part 1 (about 10 minutes. David talks about what happened at the hospital initially.)
3. David Nette's story: Part II (about 10 minutes. David talks about how he adjusted to the new situation he found himself in with his wife.)
4. David Nette's story: Part III (about 9 minutes. David talks of their shared resolve to prevent this ever happening to any other person, by launching the class action lawsuit.)

These videos are very revealing, very, very real and raw. They are a must-see.
........................................


June 20/08:

Since I put this blogpost up I've received a couple comments from one or two readers, both named "anonymous." I did not allow their comments to appear. They are glaringly pro-neck-manipulation, and I think the pro-neck-manipulators have already had far too much leeway in the realm of swaying public opinion to give them any sort of platform, however buried, obscure and humble this blog may be.

It's because of:
1. chiro training in a rationalized (as opposed to rational), deliberately propagated, bizarre belief system, combined with
2. a cultivated and honed persuasive attitude,
3. which appears aimed at propagating reckless enactment of a type of human physical social grooming (high-neck-manipulation) which is irrelevant and unnecessary in the first place,
4. against all common sense AND scientific investigation,
5. for the sole purpose of making $,

... that this woman became tetraplegic.

I have too much respect for the human nervous system to ever condone manipulation of its high-neck housing; therefore, "anonymous," I consider my prevention of your promotion of it on my blog, a positive choice - an action (however tiny) against letting myself and this blog be a vector for further perpetuation of your particular memeplex. And I happen to think it's an accumulation of tiny actions that count in life.

July 6/08:
Back in with this blog thread from Science-Based Medicine on this case.

July 17/'08
Back in with another Science-Based Medicine blog thread which deconstructs a chiro article which suggests patient visits to chiros and patient visits to medicos result in the same numbers of strokes overall.

Sept.28/08
Calgary Herald article by John William Kinsinger MD, Jun 21/08: Cracking necks destroys lives

Nov.16/08
Last night CTV's news program, W-FIVE, examined Sandy Nette's lawsuit. The program provides a glimpse into her life - it looks like she is able to use her left hand a little bit now. The viewer is introduced to a few of the others (people who had strokes shortly after chiro manipulation, some of whom recovered and others who didn't) who also are part of the class action suit.
The clip from W-FIVE

Jan.6/09
SPARC : Stroke Prevention & Atherosclerosis Research Center
Strokes From Neck Injury

Blogpost on bilateral internal carotid artery dissection from chiropractic neck manipulation.

Jan.7/09
Paciaroni M, Bogousslavsky J; Cerebrovascular Complications of Neck Manipulation.
European Neurology 2009;61:112-118 DOI: 10.1159/000180314
(If that link doesn't work, go here and click on full text or pdf.)

Feb 10/09
Harriet Hall, Chiropractic’s Pathetic Response to Stroke Concerns

Pain Science Division is not only official, but the news is now out

In reference to Canadian Physiotherapy Pain Science Division:

This morning I sat for a few minutes and read the "e-blast" from CPA, a report on our last National Congress, with this list of topics:

Tremendously Successful and Incredible Congress!
New CEO of CPA Officially Installed at Congress
New Pain Science Division Launched
Best and Brightest Recognized
Congress Receives Positive Media Coverage
Cost of Business Survey - Only 4 Weeks Left!
CPA Teleconference Program - Last 2 Sessions!
Obesity Survey - What Should Physical Therapists Do
Physiotherapy Foundation of Canada - New Board of Governors

The item I bolded above states:

New Pain Science Division Launched

It was a very successful Congress for those behind the three-year-old effort to have a Pain Sciences Division of CPA. The Board of Directors voted unanimously to approve the Division launch this past weekend. The purpose of the Pain Sciences Division is to disseminate current scientific information to Canadian physiotherapists, foster collaborative efforts between academic researchers and clinicians involved in pain management, and to promote physiotherapists as leaders in non-pharmacological pain management both nationally and internationally.

The first annual general meeting of the new Pain Science Division will be held in 2009. CPA members can join the new Division in the fall of 2008 when they renew membership.

Neil Pearson, a physiotherapist member from Penticton, BC, and a pain management specialist, is the new Chair of the Division. He says those who were behind the scenes did a lot of work to get it off the ground and are very excited now that it has been approved.

You may recall that a survey about creating a Pain Division was sent out to members in January, and there was overwhelming support for it.

For information on CPA Divisions, contact Tracy Blyth in the national office (email deleted)

The excitement was particularly sharp the day of the vote, two weeks ago. Although decreased in amplitude this excitement has not diminished in frequency or endurance. I feel it the way I can feel my own blood coursing around, a feeling that's right there whenever I care to tune into it.

That which sustains our humanantigravitysuits II

In reference to That which sustains our human antigravity suits:

This is hilarious. May the Farm be With You, a short video (under 10 minutes I think) with a loosely borrowed StarWars theme. Meet young Cuke and Obe Wan Canoli who fight the Forces of Darkness and rescue Princess Lettuce. You won't want to miss Ham Solo and ChewBrocoli.

That which sustains our human antigravity suits

In light of recent news reports about a global food shortage, I'd like to bring a series of you-tube videos here, highlighting the obnoxious corporate behavior of a certain company, Monsanto, that would do anything/is doing everything to take over anything/everything to do with global food supply, simply
a) to make itself money and power, and
b) because it can, and no one stops it.

(Behavior in this category is considered psychopathic when identified in ordinary mortals. See this film, The Corporation.)

Judge for yourself if any trails might lead to this company as a major contributor to this alleged food shortage.

Part I: Monsanto Patent for a Pig
Part II: Monsanto Patent for a Pig
Part III: Monsanto Patent for a Pig
Part IV: Monsanto Patent for a Pig
Part V: Monsanto Patent for a Pig

I grew up on a farm. As I watched this set of videos, my blood alternated between curdling and boiling. It's enough to turn a peaceful person into a political activist.

Canadian Physiotherapy Pain Science Division

We made it!
The group a few of us started in Canada in 2005 is now officially a division.

I've blogged about our little group, the CPPSG, a few times before, specifically Nov 2006, about a year after we were denied divisionhood after our first application.

We decided to keep going anyway, representing the profession as mirrored in a new way, a brand new way to most of the members that comprise it. We kept plugging along, developing a public profile. Neil Pearson engineered a magnificent set of webcasts on pain. We produced a series of newsletters of pretty good calibre, free to the public and to members of the profession worldwide. Each of our (total of six) members remained fully engaged in life, practice, and keeping our little flame lit.

It paid off, because at the end of May, just a week ago, the decision to include our group as the Pain Science Division of CPA was unanimously approved by all the official leaders in the Canadian branch of the profession.

Now the REALLY hard work starts. Yours truly will take on getting a new website together, which will be a major learning curve. Already there are lots of knocks on the door re: a series of teleconferences for fall. We're going to have our hands full, and we'll be keeping skype very busy.

We are aiming to improve the general overall level of knowledge in the profession regarding pain and how to treat it, when to not try to treat it manually, how to understand it, what to tell patients about it. There has never been an official physiotherapy division in Canada that coalesced around a ubiquitous symptom before, or around delving into what pain means. Instead, physiotherapy divisions have usually coalesced around a type of treatment or a specific patient population or a segment of human anatomy. We are the first division to have taken on tackling the essence of why physiotherapy exists in the first place - to help people overcome their pain and suffering, and try to help us all get better at it as a profession at the same time; understanding pain much better, by studying, learning and teaching a deeper model, also as a profession.

Wish us well.

One little drawback is that we won't be able to produce public newsletters anymore, for awhile. We have to become inner-focused, membership-focused, to get our work done within the Canadian branch of the profession. But we still have a commitment to the public and to physiotherapists worldwide, so I envision a day coming when we will start to produce publically available newsletters again.

"The pain is gone"

To me, an old-fashioned human primate social groomer who has always leaned harder toward the "therapist" side of treatment rather than the "physical", but who uses manual therapy as my main intervention, the advantage of deep science-based pain models like my favorite, the pain neuromatrix model, is that one can remain connected to one's patient (i.e., in good therapeutic contact) while explaining to them what their experience of pain, or in this case radical pain relief, might mean, regardless of how strange it may seem to me or may have seemed to them.

Here is a diagram, famous by now I'm sure, of Melzack's neuromatrix model. Click on it to make it bigger, so you can read the detail.

I often haul out this little diagram and sit down with a patient, because a lot of times, simple handling isn't quite enough - they need answers.

Case in point: last week I saw a young woman for the first time. She had been sent to me by her massage therapist (who I've known for years) who had worked with her for many months. Let's called the patient Rosie (not her real name).

Rosie had had a prior history of low back pain for ten years, for which she had gone to a chiropractor semi-regularly. She had worked as a fund raiser for some outfit, until about two years ago; while nursing a sprained ankle (and on crutches) she was in a car accident. Now she had back pain, sprained ankle, and neck and shoulder pain. She was unable to do her fundraising job anymore and had had to quit.

She had endured persistent neck and shoulder pain for two years in spite of seeing 36 of the finest manual therapists, both conventional and alternative, that Canada has to offer, in two different provinces, and having attended a modern pain clinic.

Then, to her surprise, during a meditation retreat in December last year, her pain vanished. All of it. Gone.

Emboldened, she began a vigorous yoga program, and inadvertently overstretched something. Bam. She had felt instant leg pain and a lot of weakness in the quads. This had persisted beyond the massage therapist's expertise, and was why she had been sent to see me.

I learned that after she had given up fundraising after the MVA, she had become involved in an experiential psych counselling training program, where they let her learn from a physical position of comfort, i.e., horizontal.

At visit #1 I had taken her history and provided some manual treatment, some very rudimentary pain education, and showed her a neural glide to do for the leg. She'd been happy for something to do - anything.

Yesterday at visit #2, I was ready with a neuromatrix diagram and was planning more in depth pain ed.

She arrived.
I asked how she was doing, and she said, "Fine, I'm all better."

(I was thinking,... huh? Did she go on another retreat?)

I asked how she had managed it this time, and she replied that the evening prior she had invited two shamans in to work on her, and they had, with burning herbs and drumming, and lots of touching. Before they left, they had pronounced her cured.

And sure enough, she felt that way. No pain.

She really did seem better, could walk better, move better, sit comfortably, breathe better.. Wow, I thought. "Good for you," I said.

"Well," she said, "I still feel some stuff..."
"..It looks like the stuff you might still feel doesn't bother you anymore - is that how it feels?" I asked.
"Yes," she replied, "I still feel some stuff but it doesn't bother me at all. I didn't need to come today, but it was too late to cancel my appointment."

We had an hour to spend, so I decided to stick with the plan; I asked her if she was interested in learning some things about pain. She said yes, so I invited her to go through the neuromatrix diagram with me. We sat down and I began explaining how the center circle with circular arrows represented the entire nervous system, how it was always processing even at night during sleep, how it was more of a verb, therefore, than it was a noun, how the diagram depicted the movement of this neuromatrix through time... how it had three main inputs on a spectrum that ranged from mental (cognitive evaluative) to physical (sensory-discriminative) to physiological (motivational-affective) and three main outputs, one of which just so happened to be pain, which could be influenced by any of the three inputs and which in turn influenced the three main inputs plus the other two outputs...

As we wandered through the diagram, I plugged in pieces of info she'd given me, she asked questions, we talked about treatment crucibles, safe containers and catalysts, symbolism and shamanism, meditation and movement forward. During her shamanic experience she had had a great deal of novel sensory-discriminative input, through all her senses, not just kinesthetically. I told her it sounded like it had been enough to get her neuromatrix off the square it had been stuck on. I pointed out, based on the prior meditation/pain relief experience, how much more her particular pain matrix seemed to respond to shift of cognitive input than it did to sensory-discriminative input. I mentioned that for most people, sensory-discriminative input of the physical kind was often sufficient, but that she'd burned through 37 manual practitioners of various kinds, including me, without much help, and she nodded..

She told me this was all making more sense to her now.. that she was someone who just didn't "get" things through only her body, the way most people can if some reasonable sensory-discriminative input of a novel sort is provided... Instead things had to make sense to her through her emotions/mind.

Apparently long ago some other PT had loaned her the book "Explain Pain", for a few months, and she had diligently made notes and some photocopies, but it had never quite sunk in or gelled. Now it was finally starting to make sense. She said, "I wish I could read that book again. It was really good, as I recall." I replied that she could buy her own copy if she wanted.

We discussed rehab, and I told her about some options, but that wherever she went, to stay in complete control, not let anyone rush her, and to use "graded exposure" and "pacing", concepts she already knew about.

I showed her two chapters from Pain: A Textbook for Therapists and she took copies. She said this would help her learn the neurobiology for when she herself would be a therapist, counselling pain patients. I mentioned she would be able to buy this book online as well - that buying these two books for herself would be much cheaper in the long run than seeing a bunch of expensive therapists for sensory-discriminative input that her particular brain seemed to not be wired to be able to easily accept. She agreed.

I worked with her leg for a little while, and unlike the first time, this time she remarked on feeling heat and movement in the thigh, and non-painful sensation connected to the leg in other parts of her body. I asked her if she could do an active straight leg raise after, and to her surprise, she could.

She left very pleased with all the progress she had made in one week, by her own efforts. I didn't need to see her again in my opinion; her downregulation was well and truly hooked back up. She's away to her next adventure, all in one piece again finally.

Way to go, Rosie. Way to go.

Still Meditating on Meditation

In reference to Growing a steering wheel for one's brain, and "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction" - Jon Kabat-Zinn:
A recent article in the NY Times delves into the history of mindfulness meditation in therapy; check out Lotus therapy by Benedict Carey.

Thank you to Deric at Mindblog.

I just (a few days ago) obtained a copy of Kabat-Zinn's book, Full Catastrophe Living, and am reading random pages from it at bedtime. I usually do this with books ... expose my sleepy brain to them, see if something in there can grab my tired attention hard enough to make me want to read them cover to cover when I'm awake and can fairly engage. It's my own Sleepy Brain Interest Detection Screening Mechanism.

I'm grateful, actually, that at this stage of life I appear to be relatively catastrophe-free - there has been a very nice patch of smooth sailing for several years.

PS: I'm back in this post on May 29, to link to a just-released podcast from Ginger Campbell, in her books and ideas series, an interview with Delaney Dean on Mindfulness Meditation. Here are Campbell's show notes. Here is a link to the actual podcast. I am eager to listen to it.

Chris Koch : Transcript of podcast with Ginger Campbell

I've just released this transcript on Dr. Campbell's BrainScience Podcast Forum. It is of her interview with Dr. Chris Koch, in Podcast #22, last fall.

Dr. Koch, together with Francis Crick, did research to find neural correlates of consciousness. Together they wrote The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach in 2004. Dr. Koch has continued this work subsequent to Dr. Crick's death.

The podcast transcript can be found here:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg8sf6hf_33z9z29kfm