I decided to start another blog as I was finally feeling well. I realised that I was not starting another blog for any other reason other than to separate out parts of my life. My purpose was to join up all the dots of my life to be me in all situations so why did I feel the need to be separate. I realised that it was difficult to track the two and deal with my new found interest and my recovery blog. Then I had the startling realisation that I was going back to my bad habits. That I now wanted to write about more than my internal world. That I wanted to share the beauty of my external world but I wanted to keep the two separate. I wish I could now transfer the few posts I did on it to this one and join them all up but instead I will just have the one. Its all me so why not have just the one. I love lots of things. I love nature, I love art, I love music, I love to walk in the rain, I love the feel of the sand under my feet in the icy cold sea in spring, I love to listen to the birds singing, to smell the sea air and the spring flowers, I love to cook, I love animals, I really love dogs, I love construction, I love to take photographs, I love to listen to the radio, to read, to try new things. I love my family and my friends and the Guinea pig. I love being alive and I love myself unconditionally. I really really really really love myself. I am lovable and interesting, beautiful and kind. I deserve the best life I can give myself. I am joined up. I need to stop trying to sabotage all my effort and work. I need to catch myself up when I start to pick at the stitches of my joined up life and that means one blog, one phone, one diary, one life, and its all mine lived for me and me alone. I am selfish and well done me for getting to this point in my life where I am able to be so.
Showing posts with label the creation of self. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the creation of self. Show all posts
Thursday, 5 May 2011
Thursday, 21 April 2011
what causes disease
what causes disease
Extracted from an aritcle by CLAIRE O'CONNELL
I found that article facinating. Connectivity is the buzz word of modern society. We are all connected. this over connection can disturb those of us who need quietness and space to process the world. Part of the healing process is processing what has happened in our lives to bring about the disease. This is not always practised in a holistic way by conventional medicine, and the physical process which bring about disease is not always fully integrated by alternative medicine. We are at a point in the evolution of science and the understanding of the mind body link where both communities are beinning to see the other side of their so called rivals. I had a wonderful experience when my daughter was in hospital last week. My second daughter has been treated for a medical complaint which went away and recently came back. The first time I went to every quack in the locality, and here I use the word quack in an affectionate way, as quack is a sound made by a bird and is the best way we can describe another creature, that is a duck, trying to communicate with us. We do not know what he is saying but we know he is communicating, anyway back to the point. I have discussed the alternative therapies with him in the past and this time decidied to go down the conventional treatment method only and have as yet not tried to quack. But amazingly he considered the question my daughter asked him about the connection between a new vaccine and her disease the last time she was in hospital. This time he told me that he had investigated it and said that it is worth a try and although there is no scientific basis for it working there have been trials and cases where it seems to work. This is such a huge growth in his attitude to non scientific treatment, just because we don't know why it works and we cannot prove that it works does not mean that it does not work.
I found the above article this morning and I believe that the mind body connection, the wholeness of being, the fact that disturbances of brain function , which has hitherto been called mental illness in in fact a full body illness and cannot be treated in isolation. We need to heal the whole person in all cases. We dont not know how our thoughts create the physical disturbances as yet but research is getting closer with the advances in neuroscience. Philosophy, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, logic, medicine, alternative therapy, religion, art, music , all of the world and our experiences go up to make us who we are. We often go through the world blind to the guides there to help us on our path, we forget that all our lives are joined. We are each the centre of the universe because the universe is infinite but infinity connects us.
To quote my late father :"they are all out of step except you". They a were all marching to a different drum and I did not know that there was more than one drum beat in the world. We are all connected, all the drumbeats go to make up a cacophony of noise and wonder, sometimes it is in harmony and at other times in disharmony. Our search for connectivity and wholeness is a search for our tribe that beats the same drum beat as us. But when we want only one beat, the one the we know the sound of, the one that we have heard all our lives we close our ears to the possibility of learning a whole new song and to all the other musical instruments in the world. I value openness, I value honesty, I value knowledge and now I have found a new value one that is completely new to me , I value the difference in others , I do not need to live in a world with only one drum beat I live in a world full of all sorts of sounds. Time for a new therapy for me , music and sound , it unlocks so much of our minds and unlocking the mind is the key to unlocking the soul.
Today I will not look at what is the evidence for that truth that I thought about. Today I will be open to everything, I will listen to all sounds, and not just one, I will take off my glasses and marvel at the uniqueness of all sounds; the beautiful birdsong, the clicking of the keyboard as I type, the weird sounds the dog and child are making, the accidental music of the electric guitar as she learns to play, the squeak of the sliding of the fingers down the string, the buzz of the electrical equipment, the hum of the fridge, and that lovely singing of the thrush outside my window. We are all connected but we can only experience that connectivity if our senses are attuned to the world.
Perhaps the scientists that discovered the micro RNA were so open to working out how things worked that they did not dismiss anything they encountered in their search for knowledge. I think that it is a lesson to us all , and to me in particular. Open up to the world around you be situational aware, there is some much out there to enjoy. I was thinking about the many people who have shown we the way on my road to recovery and think of them as signposts, because road signage is very much part of my work, and I need visual metaphors to understand the world. I have long mulled over the poem Autobiography in 5 parts which I have read and reread since I first discovered it many years ago. When we are looking for a new street we can find it with the help of our signposts. Be open to them and stop and carefully read them when they appear as they have been sent by your subconscious to show you the right path for you.
Loose the rigidity that keeps you in your rut and follow the signposts that the world is offering you to new an fantastic places.
Happy Thursday.
Extracted from an aritcle by CLAIRE O'CONNELL
Probably every biological process has a microRNA or set of microRNAs behind it, but when we began our work about three or four years ago nothing much was known about them in the immune system at all,” he says.
“Then we began to find them in the immune system. We began to find they were very strongly regulated by Tolls , and Toll Four was inducing loads of them.”
In particular, their research pointed to microRNAs having roles in keeping inflammation under control.
“We have found that microRNA is very important for dampening down the inflammatory process – through a negative feedback effect they fine tune the system,” says O’Neill. “We have stumbled into a set of molecules that are probably important for the resolution phase of inflammation, so microRNAs are very important for returning the body to normality after an infection.”
This summer, O’Neill’s team will start another research project on microRNAs in the immune system, teasing out a potential tug of war between microRNA 155 and microRNA 21 during inflammation. So far this work, which was funded by Science Foundation Ireland, has looked at how the microRNAs affect cells. But with a grant from the European Research Council, O’Neill can now progress the research to more complex preclinical models to get a more complete picture.
“We are very much on a frontier here,” says O’Neill. “We are really fishing now in the world of microRNAs, to see are they relevant and can they affect disease outcome.”
And knowing more about the mechanics of the volume control will help inform the use of microRNAs in diagnosing and treating disease, he adds.
I found that article facinating. Connectivity is the buzz word of modern society. We are all connected. this over connection can disturb those of us who need quietness and space to process the world. Part of the healing process is processing what has happened in our lives to bring about the disease. This is not always practised in a holistic way by conventional medicine, and the physical process which bring about disease is not always fully integrated by alternative medicine. We are at a point in the evolution of science and the understanding of the mind body link where both communities are beinning to see the other side of their so called rivals. I had a wonderful experience when my daughter was in hospital last week. My second daughter has been treated for a medical complaint which went away and recently came back. The first time I went to every quack in the locality, and here I use the word quack in an affectionate way, as quack is a sound made by a bird and is the best way we can describe another creature, that is a duck, trying to communicate with us. We do not know what he is saying but we know he is communicating, anyway back to the point. I have discussed the alternative therapies with him in the past and this time decidied to go down the conventional treatment method only and have as yet not tried to quack. But amazingly he considered the question my daughter asked him about the connection between a new vaccine and her disease the last time she was in hospital. This time he told me that he had investigated it and said that it is worth a try and although there is no scientific basis for it working there have been trials and cases where it seems to work. This is such a huge growth in his attitude to non scientific treatment, just because we don't know why it works and we cannot prove that it works does not mean that it does not work.
I found the above article this morning and I believe that the mind body connection, the wholeness of being, the fact that disturbances of brain function , which has hitherto been called mental illness in in fact a full body illness and cannot be treated in isolation. We need to heal the whole person in all cases. We dont not know how our thoughts create the physical disturbances as yet but research is getting closer with the advances in neuroscience. Philosophy, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, logic, medicine, alternative therapy, religion, art, music , all of the world and our experiences go up to make us who we are. We often go through the world blind to the guides there to help us on our path, we forget that all our lives are joined. We are each the centre of the universe because the universe is infinite but infinity connects us.
To quote my late father :"they are all out of step except you". They a were all marching to a different drum and I did not know that there was more than one drum beat in the world. We are all connected, all the drumbeats go to make up a cacophony of noise and wonder, sometimes it is in harmony and at other times in disharmony. Our search for connectivity and wholeness is a search for our tribe that beats the same drum beat as us. But when we want only one beat, the one the we know the sound of, the one that we have heard all our lives we close our ears to the possibility of learning a whole new song and to all the other musical instruments in the world. I value openness, I value honesty, I value knowledge and now I have found a new value one that is completely new to me , I value the difference in others , I do not need to live in a world with only one drum beat I live in a world full of all sorts of sounds. Time for a new therapy for me , music and sound , it unlocks so much of our minds and unlocking the mind is the key to unlocking the soul.
Today I will not look at what is the evidence for that truth that I thought about. Today I will be open to everything, I will listen to all sounds, and not just one, I will take off my glasses and marvel at the uniqueness of all sounds; the beautiful birdsong, the clicking of the keyboard as I type, the weird sounds the dog and child are making, the accidental music of the electric guitar as she learns to play, the squeak of the sliding of the fingers down the string, the buzz of the electrical equipment, the hum of the fridge, and that lovely singing of the thrush outside my window. We are all connected but we can only experience that connectivity if our senses are attuned to the world.
Perhaps the scientists that discovered the micro RNA were so open to working out how things worked that they did not dismiss anything they encountered in their search for knowledge. I think that it is a lesson to us all , and to me in particular. Open up to the world around you be situational aware, there is some much out there to enjoy. I was thinking about the many people who have shown we the way on my road to recovery and think of them as signposts, because road signage is very much part of my work, and I need visual metaphors to understand the world. I have long mulled over the poem Autobiography in 5 parts which I have read and reread since I first discovered it many years ago. When we are looking for a new street we can find it with the help of our signposts. Be open to them and stop and carefully read them when they appear as they have been sent by your subconscious to show you the right path for you.
Loose the rigidity that keeps you in your rut and follow the signposts that the world is offering you to new an fantastic places.
Happy Thursday.
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
building my happy place and other projects
I am a very visual person. I think in images. I find words hard to use to describe unless it is in a series of visual metaphors so when I initially started to move beyond the awful despair and crying associated with the early days of my episode I looked to pictures to try to understand what was happening to me. The first image I worked with was a black well surrounded by grey stones in a dark place, without light , without colour. I tried in so many ways to colour the picture but each time I closed my eyes all I could see was the bottomless pit. I was now fortunately kneeling at the top of the pit looking in, previously I have been hanging on by my fingernails trying to claw myself out. Thankfully the help of family and a very good doctor pulled me out of the pit. Time and counselling have turned the bottomless dark well into a very pleasant place. Now it is a lovely stone labyrinth that I can journey through to an inner sanctuary of calm, the pit is now a beautiful still pool in the middle of the labyrinth . It is surrounded by a wild flower meadow. In my new found sanctuary it is always summer. Not the sweltering heat of mid summer rather the beautiful early summer weather in May , just hot enough to lie out in the sun. Where the ground is warm but still sit has the slight springyness of the damp winter rain. I have added it to my projects: to build that beautiful sanctuary in real life so that other troubled minds can find a place to revive and renew themselves.
I started this post in order to describe how I started to overcome the despair. Essentially I sought to visualise a happy place to counter-act the dark pit I felt I was in. I tried to find images on the internet, then I tried to take photos and piece them together, I tried to draw it. Eventually I started to collect images from books magazines and the internet. It lead me back to my love of art. I found that I have sky arts on my tv and started to watch art programmes. I was inspired by the film The gates. I had forgotten how much I loved Christo's work as a teenager, his wrapped landscape was so different from my previous view of art it was inspiring. What drew me to the film was the total vision he had and his inspirational self belief. This film should be compulsory viewing for the depressed. Pure joy was what he created. How long had I lived a life without joy, where I sought pleasure rather than joy and happiness. I did not even recognise the difference until last week while reading the art of happiness. Pleasure is fleeting but happiness comes from within and does not depend on pleasure for its existence. So I started to compile a list of projects that I would like to complete.
The first was a collage of Gustav Klimt: The kiss. I spent days and days looking and examining the image. For me it represented the pureness of female submission, something I had explored last year. I was still at odds with my desire to be submissive and could not reconcile it with my intellectual belief that I was equal with men. Who knows where this exploration will end up but for now I am working on the collage. at present I am collecting things to use in it. I examine the image form books and from the Internet. I have plans to go view it. Next year or later this year is a significant anniversary of his birth, 150 years and there are a number of exhibitions planned so I hope to travel to see them in reality, possibly by train but who knows yet.
The second project is a bubble machine. I love bubbles. As I looked out into the garden while washing up I thought how lovely it would be if there were bubbles blowing around in the garden. At the time I was reconnecting with my interest in kinetic art so I made the connection that I could make a wind powered bubble machine to blow bubbles for me. I have an endless permutation of possibilities. So far I am collecting different shaped bubble wands and drinks cans to make the anemometer-like windmill to power the fan to blow the bubbles. I decided to make it out of objects I find or that I have lying around so it could also even be from parts of old bikes , I love bikes and the rotation of the wheel on the bearings is so pure.
Again a work in progress but such fun to think about. I love the concept phase of a project where different ideas are considered. I love the initial creation stage and also the construction bit. work projects are just no fun for me anymore since it became all about money and paperwork. I miss the early days of my career where the creation of the project was the aim, not the keeping the stakeholder happy, not the balancing of the books but the essence of taking an idea and bringing it to its conclusion, then admiring the achievement. Hopefully my art projects will bring me the pleasure I lost in my work. Perhaps they might bring me the happiness of expressing myself through the creation of things. Or is that even possible.
The most important project is to start a business so that I can use my talents to create an income for myself that does not rely on paid work. I dont want to be defined by what I do for a living anymore. I invested too much of my time and effort doing things for others now it is time to do things for myself. Finally I know what I want in my life. I want a simple happy life, one that I can look back on without regret, one in which I create things of beauty, the life I have always wanted but put aside as I did all the things that I thought I should. The only should I need to keep in my life is I should take care of myself.
While writing I always listen to music. This post was accompanied by Leonard Cohen. I am off to read my book of Leonard Cohens poetry now.
Happy Wednesday
I started this post in order to describe how I started to overcome the despair. Essentially I sought to visualise a happy place to counter-act the dark pit I felt I was in. I tried to find images on the internet, then I tried to take photos and piece them together, I tried to draw it. Eventually I started to collect images from books magazines and the internet. It lead me back to my love of art. I found that I have sky arts on my tv and started to watch art programmes. I was inspired by the film The gates. I had forgotten how much I loved Christo's work as a teenager, his wrapped landscape was so different from my previous view of art it was inspiring. What drew me to the film was the total vision he had and his inspirational self belief. This film should be compulsory viewing for the depressed. Pure joy was what he created. How long had I lived a life without joy, where I sought pleasure rather than joy and happiness. I did not even recognise the difference until last week while reading the art of happiness. Pleasure is fleeting but happiness comes from within and does not depend on pleasure for its existence. So I started to compile a list of projects that I would like to complete.
The first was a collage of Gustav Klimt: The kiss. I spent days and days looking and examining the image. For me it represented the pureness of female submission, something I had explored last year. I was still at odds with my desire to be submissive and could not reconcile it with my intellectual belief that I was equal with men. Who knows where this exploration will end up but for now I am working on the collage. at present I am collecting things to use in it. I examine the image form books and from the Internet. I have plans to go view it. Next year or later this year is a significant anniversary of his birth, 150 years and there are a number of exhibitions planned so I hope to travel to see them in reality, possibly by train but who knows yet.
The second project is a bubble machine. I love bubbles. As I looked out into the garden while washing up I thought how lovely it would be if there were bubbles blowing around in the garden. At the time I was reconnecting with my interest in kinetic art so I made the connection that I could make a wind powered bubble machine to blow bubbles for me. I have an endless permutation of possibilities. So far I am collecting different shaped bubble wands and drinks cans to make the anemometer-like windmill to power the fan to blow the bubbles. I decided to make it out of objects I find or that I have lying around so it could also even be from parts of old bikes , I love bikes and the rotation of the wheel on the bearings is so pure.
 |
| my bubble farm created by the organic bubble machines(children). |
Again a work in progress but such fun to think about. I love the concept phase of a project where different ideas are considered. I love the initial creation stage and also the construction bit. work projects are just no fun for me anymore since it became all about money and paperwork. I miss the early days of my career where the creation of the project was the aim, not the keeping the stakeholder happy, not the balancing of the books but the essence of taking an idea and bringing it to its conclusion, then admiring the achievement. Hopefully my art projects will bring me the pleasure I lost in my work. Perhaps they might bring me the happiness of expressing myself through the creation of things. Or is that even possible.
The most important project is to start a business so that I can use my talents to create an income for myself that does not rely on paid work. I dont want to be defined by what I do for a living anymore. I invested too much of my time and effort doing things for others now it is time to do things for myself. Finally I know what I want in my life. I want a simple happy life, one that I can look back on without regret, one in which I create things of beauty, the life I have always wanted but put aside as I did all the things that I thought I should. The only should I need to keep in my life is I should take care of myself.
While writing I always listen to music. This post was accompanied by Leonard Cohen. I am off to read my book of Leonard Cohens poetry now.
Happy Wednesday
Wednesday, 23 March 2011
what i saw on the road to recovery
The first snow of winter
More winter snow , a rare sight here.
The most amazing carbonara sauce cooked by a 10 year old
Something very strange at the Viceral exhibition
A swing
Adam and eve are in there somewhere, Why did he blame eve????
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