January 2010
9 posts
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How the US exports its mental illnesses →
A thought provoking illustration of narrative medicine: “In this essay, I concentrate on two western forms of mental illness - depression and PTSD - which are spreading around the world with the speed of a contagious disease, bulldozing indigenous forms of mental illness as they go.” - a modern-day evolution of something Ivan Illich highlighted years ago. People, and even more...
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Blank Spaces In The Witch of Portobello
(A book by Paulo Coelho that provided just the right form of words to help me link together some of my understanding of blank spaces, or emptiness.)
On the role of imagination in literature (and all art):
“…you’ll manage to fill in the blank spaces that all those writers left there on purpose to provoke the reader’s imagination.”
On Athena’s (the central...
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Learning to Swim From Scratch
Learning basic skills as an adult can be very fun. So many everyday basic skills were learnt during childhood that it can be easy to forget what it’s like to be a beginner. Which can make it difficult to empathise with the beginners that come across your path. So, the latest thing I’ve decided to be a beginner at is… swimming, which I have almost no prior experience at.
So far...
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The Valsalva Manoeuvre
While looking up ‘core muscles’ in a bid to speed up my learning to swim, and to refresh my memory so as to improve faster at Shorinji Kempo, I came across the Valsalva Manoeuvre, which, remarkably, is a method in which you can voluntarily and dramatically instantly affect the behaviour of and stresses on your heart:
Core muscles are very important in the Valsalva maneuver, which is...
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“It had to happen sometime. What surprises me is that he’s become so...”
– Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar, 55, p324. Simply inspired.