the limping shrink

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/aucklandmuseum_collections/51371483677 There was a busy woman in a group of my students a few years ago who kept trying to solve problems for me. She wanted to shake up the organisation to bring more students to my class, provide better tea, find better links to illustrate my talks. Which was very kind of her but I didn't in fact see these as problems that needed to be solved. She was focussing so much on not being selfish, that she saw it where it wasn't and missed out on learning the very thing she was there to learn. When I was a student I had a memorable training post in West London where I shared the Paediatrics on call with another student. She was a serious young woman with the leanness of a long-distance runner, who knew she wasn't good with children and wanted all the experience she could get. So when the pager went off in the night she literally ran the five hundred yards from the on call r...

What made me aware of being anxious was the physicality of meditation.  You may not think of it as a physical experience, but try it yourself and you'll find that whatever your mind is doing, sitting still in one position for twenty-five minutes makes you all too aware of the tensions in your body. It hurts.  Akiyao from the University of Michigan Medical School, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons This summary diagram is about chronic pain but it nicely shows the interconnectedness of physical pain, posture and mental stress. Not only that, but the experience of doing it every day for a few weeks or months (or for the whole of a weekend on retreat) makes it absolutely clear that your body and mind are not really different things. They are different ways to describe one thing. That the tension in your muscles is the tension in your mind. And the other way around. They don't just make each other, store each other, reinforce...

Until a few years ago my greatest regret was always that I didn't jump off the runaway train of my medical career. I almost wrote 'before it crashed', because that's where the train is going. The inner struggle appeared to be about whether to live the life my mother wanted for me, or the hypothetical one that I would have had if she hadn't had two doctors as parents. She had refused to follow them into the family business, believing she would cry if she had a patient who was going to die. So somehow the baton passed to the next generation, and everyone agreed it had to be handed to me. I was often to be found in the open train doorway looking at the grass-is-greener countryside speeding past, but I didn't jump. When I investigated some of the more obvious professional alternatives it just looked like a different kind of hell out there. One where profits mattered more. And wearing business suits and playing a corporate game seemed to be unavoidable. Better the id...

Photo used under creative commons licence   I dream I walk a sloping field with friends.   The grass is long and full of healthy damp, I'm crouching, tickled where my trousers gape, The others chatting somewhere over there.   A giant bull is charging me, horns down. I fall flat on my back. Oh! I'll p lay dead!  Eyes closed, each nerve fixated on the sounds -  The heated huffing on my timid arm, My tender navel brushed by searching breath, The muzzle, hefty-horned and broad as me.    No fight in me,  there's nothing I can do. Play dead or be dead, nothing I can do. The bull stops snuffling, lifts his massive head And lays it next to my defenceless ear. Bristles weaving through  my thinner hair, We breath together, we are one warm lung. For how long I don't know - he ambles off, His solid thighs in flow as I wake up. How sweet it was! But I know better now, Since I'm not trampled, he must be a cow.

I've been writing every day for three weeks now (yes, you got me, I started before the first of January), and it's teaching me something about how writing works. There's nothing new here that I haven't heard other writers say over and over again, but it's different when you experience it for yourself, isn't it?  The first thing I notice is that there are two modes of writing for me - what Objective Personality System* calls blast report and consume report.  Blast Report: The one where I have an idea of the whole shape of what I'm going to write and a pre-drawn plan with the main headings. An outline like the outline in a colour-by-numbers drawing. That sort of writing is easy, like writing up a patient assessment. Since I know all the headings already I just have to slot the data in there and there it is.  I don't have to think much about it during the writing. In fact I close myself down so there's nothing coming through my senses, and I'm not l...

There are frost crystals on the grass this morning, making the lawn crunchy underfoot, and the water in the can has frozen lumpy around floating leaves. The bikes waiting to be serviced and given away look arthritic with rust. My toes are telling me I shouldn't have come out in my socks. But as I turn, there between the bare branches is the first warming ray of the sun, and I remember the bow-tied radiologist. January morning - my photo Every House Officer would rather not need anything from a radiologist.  When your consultant orders a special test, one that is complex, new or expensive enough to require the time of a radiology specialist, the boss doesn't usually stop to explain why. You're the fourth or fifth white coat in the line, struggling to hear what they're saying from where they are, over there at the head of the bed, and they're nonchalantly flicking the frisbee of, say, an ERCP or a transcranial doppler that you can still barely translate into English a...

Waking up This beautiful photo comes from wikipedia  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_%28physics%29 Creator: Diego Delso | Credit: Diego Delso CC BY-SA  delso.photo  Copyright: CC-BY-SA   As I wake I often feel a bubble rising through me. I don't know what's in the bubble, but it's full of something - wakefulness, cortisol rising, the reticular activating system, consciousness, joy? I don't know, I've labelled it all of them at different times. Whatever it is, it feels hugely significant. It feels as though if I allow it to rise all the way it could blow the top of my head off. That I might go mad, or become an angel or something, even though I don't believe those things that's how it feels. That there would be no way back from that experience. The inner protective me automatically clamps down on it before it rises all the way, like it tends to do with strong feelings in general. In case it ends up being embarrassing. Waking up used to feel like be...

Cleaning house Over the last few days I have found myself sweeping through the house and discarding things. Simplifying. I have been drawn to it in the gentle, meandering way a donkey is drawn from one end of a field to another by the smell of a new thistle. More led than driven. And like the donkey no doubt, I know it's right. It's time.  It started with me committing to going through everywhere in the house to find my phone, without judgement or expectation. And now there's space in the kitchen cupboards, the plants are happy and there's a place for everything. I found my phone a quarter of the way through. There's more to do, of course, but I'm sure it will come. I can feel the weather of it on the way. Thanks to Karen TheBrit_2 https://www.flickr.com/photos/26686573@N00/25066762642 Under creative commons licence Stubborn Ass This is so very unlike the way I usually tidy - a rough wind of impatience and resentment in a hurry before an outsider is due to visit...

The Joy of Golden Light https://www.pexels.com/photo/sunlight-on-the-wall-13742375/ Copyright Nathanael Arias When I pass the open door of my eldest child's bedroom at 8am, the golden light through the windows lights up the world with optimism. And of course it's not the world so much as my heart that I'm talking about. My heart is softened and lightened by the soft gold light. And my world becomes softer, lighter in the magical glow.  It's an instinctual thing, isn't it? Like the way we feel like finding a cozy place when the days grow shorter. Or the way the signs of spring bring the sap up in us too. I'm drawn to the mysterious way I interact with the world I experience. The way my experiences make me and my inner world makes the outer world. The line between outside me and inside me isn't nearly as clear as we would have it be. If a Tree Falls in the Forest It reminds me of the riddle: If a tree falls unseen in the forest, does it make a sound?  There is...

This lovely photo is copied on creative commons licence If you want to make an extract of orange to find the essence of it, you can  Squeeze the juice out and the essence seems sweet Grate the skin and it appears to be intense and tough Slice the pith and find an essence of bitterness and astringency Examine the pips and find an essence of inheritance or resurrection Go back the tree and find the seasons Go back to the orchard and find belonging The same is true if you're looking for meaning in your life. The meaning you find is the meaning your personal spectacles are directed towards finding. Or the meaning your personal experiences have led you to. You look through maternal spectacles and the meaning of a life is instinctual love. You look through achievement spectacles and the meaning of a human life is the highest rung of the professional ladder, the most prestigious prize that the person won in their life. You look through victim spectacles, or famine and war spectacles and y...