[With this Post, Jon introduces a series of forthcoming articles looking at the inner person and exploring ways in which each of us can enhance our feelings of contentment and happiness. Ed.]
Stop the world, I want to get off!
Starting again requires giving up
Whichever way we look, there appear to be huge problems. Not insurmountable but, metaphorically speaking, sheer vertical cliffs without any easy way up.
One might ponder if the last 50 years, that post-war period of growth and prosperity, have, in reality given society real, sustainable, core improvements or whether all the ‘gains’ have come at such a cost that the net benefit is questionable?
This could be seen as pessimism gone mad. Undoubtedly, there have been some huge gains from a scientific point of view and we now enjoy lives that are greatly enhanced and longer. But not to ask such a fundamental question is to assume the alternative, that everything in the garden is rosy.
Now this may seem a strange introduction to a topic that is going to be deeply personal and private.
But both the private, individual world of the ‘self’ and the great, interconnected world of the planet are indivisible. Every aspect of our lives, our livelihoods, our environment and the future of our children depends on how well, and how sustainably, we manage our personal, local, national and international interests.
For example, if Prof. Lovelock’s theory on the planet being a self-regulating organism is correct, his Gaia theory, then possibly in the lifetimes of our children, and certainly in the lifetimes of our grandchildren, worrying about a job or repaying the mortgage will be irrelevant. Our descendants will be worrying about their very survival!
I called this piece Giving Up. Why?
Because the only way forward is to give up on the present. I will expand on this theme in future Posts.
The future depends on each of us being happy and contented with ourselves and avoiding looking out there for the magic cure to all our troubles. Being, as far as we are able, at peace with our circumstances and able to do the best, individually, as well as the best for our families, our friends and the larger world in which we work and play.
I have heard people ask the question before, “How can I best help the world?” The only truthful answer is to develop ourselves as individuals. In doing this, the field of consciousness that we are all connected to is also lifted or elevated to a higher level.
At this stage of history, either…the general population will take control of its own destiny and will
Noam Chomsky
concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others or alternately there will be no destiny for anyone to control.
-Noam Chomsky
By Jon Lavin
[Anyone who has been affected by this article and wishes to contact Jon may find his contact details here. Ed.]
What has become very clear to me, after watching the U.S. Health Care Summit between Democrats and Republicans as objectively as possible, is that the President’s goal was not to craft a thoughtful approach to shoring up and improving the U.S. health care system.
Pres. Obama making one of many points at Healthcare Summit
No, the reason for the President and the Democratic leadership to convene the so-called summit was to grandstand; to make a show; to create a photo opportunity; and, most importantly, to try to garner enough support from the Democrats in Congress to ram through the Reconciliation option on the behemoth, disastrous 2000-plus page version of the bill, filled with incomprehensible, internally conflicting doublespeak.
A sad day for American politics. A very sad day for American citizens. We deserve better.
Even in the midst of great pain, we must think through our choices
The last week has been really mad. I have been working in different companies and organisations and having to be part of redundancies, power struggles and people rebuilding their lives.
For example, I was in a company that had just let its second lot of people go in as many months. It’s gone past losing ‘dead wood’ and now people with valuable skills needed for recovery are going. I’ve noticed previously that good, employable people with key skills start to get concerned and will often take voluntary redundancy rather than hanging around to see how things pan out.
End of job!
It’s the shocking way that it’s done as well that’s unbelievable. No warning, just a phone call to attend a meeting, no hint as to what the meeting is about, then an envelope slid across the table and then a rapid escort off site. All done and dusted in 5 minutes.
Having been through this myself some years ago, it’s not something you forget in a hurry. Lots of feelings of rejection and feeling unvalued and unwanted are what I remember. Perhaps its part of being bought up in a job-for-life culture and then having that illusion shattered.
Working with people in this situation is literally quite shocking and traumatic because it clearly affects them and their lives and the lives of their families, and it affects me because the work we started comes to an abrupt end usually with little or no warning, and so does a source of income to be brutally honest. I don’t even have chance to say good-bye in many cases.
Every Thursday I become a trainee psychotherapist and work with people who mostly struggle to hold down any sort of job. The reasons for this are generally because of upbringings that are awful beyond description. The shock and trauma that is in the air when working with these people is amazing, and so scary for them that the idea of being present in the room with me and is virtually impossible.
So that brings us to managing in a world where lots of mad and non-integrous things happen. I believe that mindfulness can provide a key to these situations; being present for another does more than any instruction manual!
Being present means we make ourselves available at many levels to someone who is suffering. By avoiding the subtle invitation to join someone in their shock and trauma but by being there for them, to the best of our ability and listening to them at depth, we can provide an environment where real reflection can take place. Then options may be chosen which are not born of panic and reaction but come from reflection and response.
I believe that this approach gets us out of the ‘noise machine in our heads‘ (that is forever churning and worrying, in my case) that we have no control over, and creates space for more subtle things to come through the quiet and calm.
Most people I’ve met in my engineering work like to assume that they think their way out of tight situations but I’m not convinced that this process is actually effective. I have heard and practised many times the activity of ‘sleeping on something’ and then being able to decide on a course of action the following morning with relative ease. My psychotherapy clients can’t think their way out the awfulness because thinking about things has got them into a spiral
Albert Einstein
process which is highly addictive, predictable and virtually impossible to break without the intervention of a higher level of awareness. I think it was Einstein who said something like, “you can’t use the same intelligence that created a problem to solve it“! In other words, a different approach or level must be used.
I believe that this different approach or level can be used to solve most problems we have. By bringing a different level of awareness to a challenge, whether it is redundancy or some other sort of deeper problem always gives different results and provides more options. It’s just that initially it needs to be facilitated, until we can do it under our own steam. I am heartened that even in the depths of a recession that there are still companies out there that support this approach and the work I do.
By Jon Lavin [This article from the BBC is worth reading in conjunction with Jon’s excellent Post. Jon may be contacted via learningfromdogs (at) gmail (dot) com]
As a child I was given quite a reasonable amount of freedom, and so a bicycle was my mode of transport, I was quite fit, was good at running, and in both cases did well in competition. In fact my memory of man’s first landing on the moon in 1969, was as a result of a 100 mile cycle ride that day when I got sunburnt down one side!
Then came the middle years … Motorbikes, cars, some running now and then, but only modest use of the bike, perhaps more recently of late, so that I can go out with the children, and a regular daily walk with the dogs. Continue reading “Reversing the trend”→
Once again the British Broadcasting Company, BBC, has put together a spectacular television production; the epic story of how geology, geography and climate have influenced mankind. It is remarkable and fabulous viewing as you can sample in these opening minutes from the first episode on Deep Earth.
The four programmes, Deep Earth; Water; Wind; Fire, are testament to both the incredible symbiosis between mankind and the elements and how that relationship is critically balanced in a way that allows us to survive. Some of the images are truly outstanding, for example, the section on Prof. Iain Stewart exploring the Naica Cave system in Mexico.
Naica Cave system, Mexico
This theme of the balance of geological circumstances that allows, just, mankind to survive comes across time and time again in these films. For example, our relationship with fresh water which we all take completely for granted.
Have any of us really pondered how long we would survive if there was insufficient clean, safe drinking water to go around?
The programmes also reveal something of the technological prowess that mankind has achieved to allow the way these films have been produced.
So why, oh why, are we also such a stupid, stupid species – so stupid that we foul our own nest to an incredible degree.
Like most people if most western nations, for many years I had a cell phone, or a mobile phone as they are known in the UK.
I can recall a few years ago there being a scare in the UK about the microwave radiation hazard involved in using a cell phone but it certainly passed me by in terms of not really worrying about it.
Now a recent report in GQ Magazine seems to be gathering some momentum: once again, it’s about how your cell phone may be hazardous to your health. It would be too easy just to dismiss this as just another poke at a very successful technology but something about this article caused me to write this Post – make of it what you will.
Here’s an extract:
Earlier this winter, I met an investment banker who was diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He’s a managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was writing a story about the potential dangers of cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if his name wasn’t used, so I’ll call him Jim. He explained that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and was not immediately fatal—the five-year survival rate is about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of his intense cell-phone usage. “Not for nothing,” he said, “but in investment banking we’ve been using cell phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach kind of phone.” When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan, about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and more of such cases—young, relatively healthy businessmen who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he believed the industry had discredited studies showing there is a risk from cell phones. “I got a sense that he was pissed off,” Jim told me. A handful of Jim’s colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more reports he encountered of young finance guys developing tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn’t a coincidence. “I knew four or five people just at my firm who got tumors,” Jim says. “Each time, people ask the question. I hear it in the hallways.”
The unacceptable face of the big agricultural businesses
Another wonderful link from Naked Capitalism. This one refers to the way that the definition of ‘organic’ as in organic milk is being twisted and distorted to favour the huge indoor milking herds, up to 10,000 cattle, that in any sensible mind could never be regarded as the organic production of milk.
This to me is a picture of organic production of milk:
An English meadow
This to me is NOT! Yet the milk from these cows is defined as organic!
Organic milk?
This last picture is courtesy of The Cornucopia Institute, another web site worth a visit whether or not you take an interest in farming – after all, one presumes that you do eat!
Learning from Dogs 