Building a strong immune system

Building a strong immune system

In ancient China the village paid the doctor while they were well, and it was considered their job to keep everyone in the village well.  If they got sick they stopped paying because the doctor had failed.  The old saying goes that prevention is better than cure so below is a list of 14 things that experts say build immunity.  Most of them are common sense.

• 1.       Exercise 30 minutes each day
• 2.       Get into the sunshine (Your body manufactures vitamin D from sunlight)
• 3.       Sleep 7-8 hours per night.
• 4.       Avoid smoke
• 5.       Cutback on Alcohol and Coffee
• 6.       Avoid stress
• 7.       Laugh more
• 8.       Socialise with nurturing people
• 9.       Keep a pet
• 10.   Drink Water
• 11.   Avoid simple sugars as they over tax our system
• 12.   Eat loads of fruit and veg
• 13.   Increase garlic consumption
• 14.   Eat protein

Creative People are this

Creative People Are

What makes some people dull as ditch water and others creative and interesting?  The following are traits which encourage creativity:

1.  Curious

If you can still find wonder in the world, things to do or  make or see or experience then you tend to be healthier and more involved with living instead of just exeisting.

2.  Open minded.

This does not mean gullible rather it is a perspective which tryies to look and everything from an even point.  As we get older it seems as if we have already made up our minds about so many things that we stop wondering .  Sometimes we do not want to change our minds since we have spent so long defending a particular position that we are frightened of losing face if we are seen to change our minds.  So we end up living a lie.

3.  Fit.

Not the ablity to do an iron man compitition without breaking sweat, but the ability to do those things we wants without collapsing into a snotty heap when ever we have to walk or climb.

4.  Self Awareness.

We tend to blame others and play the victim when we don't believe that we can solve a problem by our selves.  This is a negative trait which on times wrecks our good intentions and vision.

Bank account theory of marriage

Marriage in the bank

There are endless books about how to improve your marriage or stabilise your marriage, or save your marriage etc.  Most of them involve learning new communication skills and learning the ability to have disagreements with out animosity.  Who could argue that this is not a good thing? But it does tend to focus on the negative.



Dr John Gottman  (www.gottman.com)  has a very interesting idea that marriage should be treated like a bank account.  You need to pay in to be in credit, things get rocky when you are in deficit.  This appeals to me because the concept is simple, and easy to put into practise, in fact healthy marriages do this automatically.

Ways to pay in.

1. Create a culture as a couple.  We all know those couples who stay married but live totally separate lives.  This may suit a few, but couple that want to sty together need to do and like things together.
2. Have a mission.  Why are you a couple?  Sit down and have a think about what you as a couple are for.  This can be quite challenging, at the very least it asks the right questions of a relationship.  What are you trying to achieve as a couple?
3. Establish traditions that you as a couple celebrate.
4. Be nostalgic.  The 'do you remember' moments are the ones that make us bond together.  I have even heard it used in marriage counselling when the counsellor wanted the couple to remember when they were in love and act in the same way now.  A bit of Behavioural Therapy.
5. Celebrate the story of your love.  How you came together, the ups and downs.
6. Stay connected.  In our technological time its easier than ever to stay in touch.  However technology is a double edged sword and it easily distracts us as well.
7. Express appreciation often.  We all know we should, but have to confess that it is easy to take those closest to you for granted.

When the account is in credit Dr Gottman points out that a marriage will survive crisis better and even thrive.  For me its a reminder to put in the work as prevention is better than cure.

Monastic Lessons for living

Notebook for

Finding Sanctuary: Monastic steps for Everyday Life

Jamison, Christopher

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PART ONE - Everyday Life

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In simple terms, the consumerist lifestyle forces people to work too hard in order to fulfil their consumer ambitions.

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Benedictine Order: this is the Latin word for peace, ‘PAX’, surrounded by a crown of thorns. There is no peace without sacrifice and there is no peace without justice.

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Virtue is the true door into the sanctuary of infinite space.

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It is unique because the sanctuary-dweller is also the sanctuary-builder.

PART TWO - Monastic Steps

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you should try omitting vulgarity, gossip and ‘just for a laugh’ from your conversation and see what happens.

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‘Because of the turbulence of life, the one who lives in the midst of activity does not see his sins. But when he is quiet, especially in solitude, then he sees the real state of things.’

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For Benedict, distractions inside my head are actually noises inside my heart: they are the result of the natural human condition - the condition of not having a pure heart.

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To pray is to address God as a familiar friend - to speak to ‘you’ rather than to think about ‘him’.

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a virtuous circle of awareness to help us do this: pray constantly, in order to have a pure heart, in order to see God everywhere, in order to pray constantly.

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To base a spirituality on a technique for meditation, or a technique for anything, is to reduce what should be a way of life - spiritual living - to a system.

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There is nothing wrong with obeying good rules and there is nothing wrong with exercising free choice. The danger lies in claiming to be doing the one while actually doing the other.

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A powerful question to ask at this point is: who sets your agenda? Who sets your agenda minute by minute, from day to day? Who sets your agenda in the long run?

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People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular - and too lazy to think of anything better.’

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Keeping busy is a way of avoiding being true to oneself, so the desire to stop being busy has met the desire to be true to oneself.

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Somebody with humility must have learned how to handle their own emotions and how to touch the goodwill of other people in order to involve others in the project of building greatness.

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family and community life people can waste a huge amount of time and energy complaining about ‘the management’, grumbling about the conditions and gossiping maliciously. Benedict hates grumbling and forbids it above all other vices: ‘Above all, let them not grumble,’

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The fellowship of the Church has been overtaken by the individual desire for spiritual comfort. The literal love of neighbour has been replaced by local conciliation services to resolve neighbourhood disputes.

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They observed that, after polite preliminaries, the first emotion to break out in the group was hate. Through family life, people had learned how to behave one-to-one and in a small

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group, but nobody had the skill of working in a large group.

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the participants felt disempowered by the presence of large numbers of people and they translated this frustration into hatred for particular people and for the group in general.

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Grumbling is the opposite of good conversation; it is the denial of the vow of conversatio morum and so is prohibited in the strongest terms.

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in the modern view, true spirituality is psychological well-being combined with the moral golden rule.

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modern spirituality is short-sighted and accommodating, religion is prophetic and challenging.

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‘Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy. Anything they believe in and choose they call holy; anything they dislike they consider forbidden.

Work and Mental Health

Notebook for

Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing

Smart, Andrew

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1: That Loathsome Monster Idleness

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emerging from modern neuroscience, it may be no accident that as our working hours increase, our mental well-being and physical health decrease.

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Why does study after study show that we are more stressed, have worse family relationships, weigh more, and are less happy because we are working too much? Does it seem odd that as the time management industry sells more books, the number of hours we work increases? To quote Bertrand Russell, “can anything more insane be imagined?”

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What this means is that multitaskers cannot filter out irrelevant information because their attention is overloaded with whatever tasks they are not doing. In other words, a multitasker cannot actually distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information because the multitasker does not really know what they are doing at any given moment.

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Multitasking is compulsive behavior that actually leads to a condition very similar to adult ADHD.

2: Someone Else’s Noise

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Yet we feel obliged to risk our long-term health in order to work extremely hard at jobs we don’t particularly enjoy in order to buy things we don’t particularly want.

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The precuneous seems to be involved in self-reflection. One of the best ways to get to know yourself is to find a quiet or comfortably noisy place, stare at the sky, space out for a

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while and see what the precuneous gets up to.

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The ability to reflect on your current situation, your past, and your future are all intimately related. People who have the luxury to spend time doing this by being idle tend to be more creative, and to have better mental health in general.

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The butterflies only come out to play when all is still and quiet. Any sudden movements and they scatter.

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Fortunately, the only way to attain this optimal level of default mode activity is to put your feet up, find a nice pillow, lie back, and let go of task-oriented activity. Looking at great art, listening to your favorite music, and doodling may help facilitate this process.

3: Aha! moments and Self-Knowledge

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All the clocks struck at the same time because the clocks were not being wound.

4: Rilke and the Idle Examined Life

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“The lazy man does not stand in the way of progress. When he sees progress roaring down upon him he steps nimbly out of the way.” —Christopher Morley, “On Laziness”

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The common sense notion about “workaholics” is that they find idleness and inactivity to be unbearable because they are escaping emotional pain through constant work.

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We start to identify more with the phone in our pockets than the mind in our heads.

6: Revolution or Suicide

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An underlying assumption of productivity and time management is that the natural way human beings work must be suppressed for the sake of organization and productivity.

7: The Signal Is the Noise

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We do not know at this point what the long-term effects of ADHD medication are, especially on healthy young brains. It is entirely possible that some form of adaption could occur, and less natural dopamine would be produced, which could lead to problems such as depression later in life.

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I suspect that there is a strong cultural and economic component to the increasing rates of ADHD.

Wendell Berry. Our Only World

Notebook for

Our Only World: Ten Essays

Berry, Wendell

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1. Paragraphs from a Notebook

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Cures, to industrial medicine, are marketable products extractable from bodies. To cure in this sense is not to heal. To heal is to make whole, not so ideologically definable or so technologically possible or so handily billable.

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the scientific-industrial culture, founded nominally upon materialism, arrives at a sort of fundamentalist disdain for material reality. The living world is then treated as dead matter, the worth of which is determined exclusively by the market.

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But we appear to be deficient in learning or teaching a competent concern for the way that parts are joined. We certainly are not learning or teaching adequately the arts of forming parts into wholes, or the arts of preserving the formal integrity of the things we receive as wholes already formed.

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We may say with some confidence that the most apparently beneficent products of science and industry should be held in suspicion if they are costly to consumers or bring power to governments or profits to corporations.

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Scared for health, afraid of death, bored, dissatisfied, vengeful, greedy, ignorant, and gullible— these are the qualities of the ideal consumer.

2. The Commerce of Violence

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Each new resort to violence enlarges the argument against our species, and the task of hope becomes harder.

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People do not become wealthy by treating one another or the world kindly and with respect.

3. A Forest Conversation

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In forestry as in farming, low production costs can increase the quality of work and so of care for the land. The logger who is free of financial anxiety can stop and think.

4. Local Economies to Save the Land and the People

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“Employment” in a “job” completely satisfies the social aim of the industrial economy and its industrial government.

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Our aim, to borrow language from John Todd, must be “elegant solutions predicated on the uniqueness of [every] place.”

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There can never be too much knowledge, but there certainly can be too much school.

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This technology is advertised as “labor-saving,” but in fact it is people-replacing.

5. Less Energy, More Life

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If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer.

6. Caught in the Middle

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And so we are talking about a populace in which nearly everybody is needy, greedy, envious, angry, and alone.

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If one accepts the 24th and 104th Psalms as scriptural norms, then surface mining and other forms of earth destruction clearly are perversions.

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Conjugal love, Kierkegaard wrote, is faithful, constant, humble, patient, long-suffering, indulgent, sincere, contented, vigilant, willing, joyful. All these virtues have the characteristic that they are inward qualifications of the individual. The individual is not fighting with external foes but fights with himself. . . . Conjugal love does not come with any outward sign . . . with whizzing and bluster, but it is the imperishable nature of a quiet spirit. (Either/ Or, in A Kierkegaard Anthology,

8. Our Deserted Country

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The purpose of industrial technology has always been to cheapen work by displacing human workers, thus increasing the flow of wealth from the less wealthy to the more wealthy.

The living mountian

Some books give you a sense of place.  This one by Nan Shepherd does just that.

Notebook for

The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (Canons)

Shepherd, Nan

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Introduction

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‘They come to me most often,’ she says, ‘waking out of outdoor sleep, gazing tranced at the running of water and listening to its song.’ But the best way of all to uncouple the mind is to walk:

Chapter One: The Plateau

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To pit oneself against the mountain is necessary for every climber: to pit oneself merely against other players, and make a race of it, is to reduce to the level of a game what is essentially an experience.

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The sustained rhythm of movement in a long climb has also its part in inducing the sense of physical well-being, and this cannot be captured by any mechanical mode of ascent.

Chapter Two: The Recesses

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The inaccessibility of this loch is part of its power. Silence belongs to it. If jeeps find it out, or a funicular railway disfigures it, part of its meaning will be gone. The good of the greatest number is not here relevant. It is necessary to be sometimes exclusive, not

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behalf of rank or wealth, but of those human qualities that can apprehend loneliness.

Chapter Five: Frost and Snow

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the gamekeeper’s dictum is: if you can’t see your own footsteps behind you in the snow, don’t go on.

Chapter Seven: Life: The Plants

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Birch, the other tree that grows on the lower mountain slopes, needs rain to release its odour. It is a scent with body to it, fruity like old brandy, and on a wet warm day, one can be as good as drunk with it.

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there as where a native horse, tended by a man deep-rooted in the place, drags the chained trunks down from inaccessible corners, and is led back for the night to one of the ancient farms on the edge of the moor.