Clarity of Communication
One of the major reasons for the failure of relationships or of businesses is a failure to communicate clearly. There are also powerful reasons for thinking that much ill health is rooted in “blockages:” inadequate communication between your body, your mind, your emotions, subtle systems and spirituality.
Any communication consists of ten essential components:
- The integrity and mental state of the sender
- The intent of the sender
- The expectation of the sender
- The information
- The medium
- The context
- The receiver
- The mental state of the receiver
- The reaction or response of the receiver
- The meta-text and meta-communication of the exchange
Naturally, in a healthy communication, everyone involved takes turns being the sender and the receiver, and this interaction between you creates the overall message. I must be very clear that I’m not just talking about verbal communication, but also physical and intimate interactions, business and family discourses.
I’d also like to take the whole notion of communication a step further: meaningful communication needs for us to be consciously aware of the interaction, and we should see it not just as an exchange of information, but of energy. A charismatic individual may communicate a lot more than mere words and his or her impact may last long after the words have been forgotten. On the other hand, there is actually a technical term – phatic communion – for empty language that is purely used for social lubrication: “How are you?” “You’re welcome,” “Have a nice day.”
It really is important to be aware of all of these components of communication. A problem in any one of them can make a mess of any attempt for people to connect. Too often I see people think only of the sender, the message and the recipient, without realizing that it is the other aspects of communication that are the keys to success or failure. This is often very important in therapy: people may ruminate on something said to them, when they should be considering the context of whatever was said.
Meta-text and meta-communication refer to the whole spectrum of other components of our interactions that stretch beyond the message itself. These include the types of language that we use as well as prosodic cues. And if people are in close proximity, body language and gesture. You may well know that it is possible to tell a great deal about someone’s intentions by studying changes in the tone of their facial muscles, changes in the color of their skin and the directions I which they move their eyes when speaking. How we use certain words to fill in our communication can be as important as the main body of a communication. Something that we do all the time is to try to understand the underlying meaning or meta-text, that is often quite different form the actual words being spoken.
Whether dealing with an individual in therapy or a business that wants to perform better, there is a series of critical questions that will uncover communication problems:
- Do you have any communication problems?
- Who is responsible for it?
- Is there a disconnection between the mental state of any message sender and the message itself?
- Does the sender have a clear purpose in communicating?
- Are people able to understand the sender? (T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia fame) was said to have one of the largest vocabularies at the University of Oxford. So large that many people didn’t have a clue what he was talking about!)
- Is information being communicated appropriately?
- Is the environment conducive to communication?
- What is interfering with communication?
- How long has this been a problem?
- Why has the problem not been solved?
If there is a communication problem, consider starting from scratch:
- Any communication contains information and energy: are they both clear and pure?
- Is there congruence between what is being communicated and the intent of the communicator?
- Is there a culture of integrity in communications?
- Are people striving for the greater good or personal aggrandizement?
- What people, policies or procedures are interfering with communication?
- How are communications becoming degraded?
- What and who’s emotions are interfering with the informatyion and the energy of any communications?
- What might lead to the misunderstanding of a message?
- What systems are in place to ensure that communications are being received and understood correctly?
- What system of questioning is in place?
Once we understand each of the phases of communication, and that it is a dynamic exchange of energy and not just information transfer. And that ANY message or communication is subject to degradation, and that there are ways to check for and correct it, you are well on your way to abolishing many of the problems that can wreck relationships, capsize companies and ruin a therapeutic alliance.
“Once a human being has arrived on this earth, communication is the largest single factor determining what kinds of relationships he makes with others and what happens to him in the world about him.”
— Virginia Satir (American Family Therapist, 1916-1988)
“Skill in the art of communication is crucial to a leader’s success. He can accomplish nothing unless he can communicate effectively.”
— Norman Allen (American Playwright, Recipient of a Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play)
“A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive shortwave facilities scattered about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals.”
–Robert M. Hutchins (American Educator, and, from 1929-1945, President of the University of Chicago, 1899-1977)
Toxins and Information Medicine
In Healing Meaning and Purpose, I twice mention the impact of toxins: first I mention that environmental factors are now generally believed to contribute to many tumors. Three years ago the World Health Organization estimated that environmental factors are responsible for between one-quarter and one-third of the global burden of disease. Since the creation of synthetic inorganic and organic chemicals in the late 19th century, the global community has faced an enormous rise in the production and subsequent exposure to environmental chemicals, many of which are potentially toxic. The concentrations of many of these chemicals remain quite low, but a key observations if that combinations of chemicals may produce significant health hazards not generally seen with small concentrations of each individual chemical. There is a synergy that forms between them.
Secondly I mentioned the intriguing hypothesis that environmental toxins are a factor in the obesity pandemic.
The first of these has just received significant support from a study by Tyrone Hayes and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley. They studied frogs in York County, Nebraska, and found that a mixture of nine chemicals found in a seed-corn field killed a third of exposed tadpoles and in the survivors lengthened the time to metamorphosis by two weeks. This work confirms the point that I made: individually low concentrations of the chemicals have little effect on developing tadpoles. But add them together and the effects can be devastating. This study is cited together with several others in a thoughtful article in the current edition of Scientific American.
Understanding the damaging effects of combinations of chemicals, or the disease-producing effects of a combination of minor risk factors, was one of the planks that allowed us to construct the new and growing science of Information Medicine, in which combinations are the key to successful treatment.
Technorati tags: integrated medicine, toxins, information medicine
Turning One Hundred
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” –Chief Seattle (Native American Leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish Tribes who became a Roman Catholic and Cooperated in Creating Peaceful Relations with European Settlers, c. 1786-1866)
I know that the Chief was not talking about the Internet or the Blogosphere, but his comments could easily be applied to both.
I was astonished when Carol Kirshner, my web mistress (I’m STILL not sure if that’s politically correct term for her!?) told me that this was going to be my one hundredth post. I hadn’t realized that I was that garrulous, or that there was so much need for a balanced presentation of some of the issues that we’ve been discussing.
So I thought that it would be a good moment to look at blogs and their potential impact on our lives. In some ways they have recapitulated the early days of the Internet. Many blogs have been little more than graffiti, but with the passage of time, I think that we are seeing a rapid maturation of the Blogosphere.
If you have not yet read the book Naked Conversations, I think that it’s a must-read. There’s also an extremely interesting discussion about the ideas raised in the book here.
I’ve been particularly impressed with the way in which many individuals are using blogging to rapidly spread useful information. There are thousands of examples, but here’s one that I particularly like. And the recent attempts to explore blogging for medical purposes.
One of the fascinating things to someone who’s taught neurology for years, is the way in which links are developing in almost exactly the same way as occurs in the developing brain, and the same principles apply in the Blogosphere, and in the brain of mature individuals as they learn new information. As such, it tends to be an organic self- correcting system. When information is published that is wrong it us usually corrected very rapidly.
Because I am an integrated physician committed to empowering people to help themselves, I see blogs as one of the quickest and most efficient ways of achieving that aim. Using blogs has enabled me to disseminate interpretations of new insights and information. I think it is this: it is the interpretation that is crucial. Anyone can do a quick online search for information about an illness, a new health plan, or techniques for personal development. The trouble is that not many people have ever been taught how to interpret medical and scientific information: it is a skill that take s abit of time to learn.
My eclectic medical interests are well known, so I get a great many items in the mail that promise extraordinary benefits from eating this or doing that. There will often be some reference to a research paper. Yet when you check the reference, it often says something completely different! Let me give you an example of something that I cited in Healing, Meaning and Purpose.
“The precise amounts of a supplement are important, as is the combination. I want to give you an example of this. I have recently seen supplements being sold that claim to improve sexual performance. Some contain the amino acid L-arginine. That’s fine; L-arginine is a precursor for the vasodilator nitric oxide, which is involved in the mechanics of sexual arousal. There is just one problem. For L- arginine to work, you need to take about 9,000 milligrams. Most of the supplements give you only 200-500 milligrams. I have also seen supplements that contain mutually antagonistic vitamins, and others that are missing key components, for instance calcium supplements that do not contain magnesium.”
It seems to me that blogs, if they are done well, are an ideal medium for the rapid dissemination of interpreted information, correcting errors and helping people make rational decisions.
“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.” –Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (American Physician, Writer, Poet and Speaker, 1809-1894)
Thoughts on Qi
The essential idea that there is some subtle force or "energy" associated with the body is very ancient, and was discussed in India where one form of it was known as prana. Yet there are many types of prana, and there are other forces and energies of increasing degrees of sophistication. The most comprehensive investigations of subtle fields took place – and continue to be explored to this day -in China and Japan, where they have been known as Qi, Chi or Ki. Yet many other cultures also described something similar. Indeed paintings of the Christian saints with golden halos has been thought to be an interpretation of a highly developed subtle energy system. The subtle systems appear to be the bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds.
My book Healing, Meaning and Purpose makes the point that this idea of subtle systems is not some quaint notion belonging to an era of folk medicine and superstition, but is instead a vibrant area of academic research.
Some years ago, before I had started visiting China, I asked the apparently naive question: "What underlies Qi?" I was told that the question was meaningless, because Qi is everywhere and in everything. But I was not so sure, and so began the development of the concept of an "Informational Matrix," that permeates and animates the Universe. Over the years I discussed this concept in great detail with dozens of scientists, intuitives, and then some of the finest acupuncturists and qigong masters in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, as well as in the United States in Europe. I discovered that many people had similar evidence for this underlying principle. And this fundamental animating force has also had many other names: the Inner Light, Mind, Love and God.
I have posted an extract from my book on my website. If you choose to read it, let me suggest leaving all of your current knowledge and beliefs at the door. You can pick them up again on your way out!
With any luck, you will never again look at things in quite the same way.
Enjoy!
Technorati tags: Qi, chi, Inner light, subtle energy
Healing and Spirituality
For thousands of years, spiritual teachers and healers were one and the same. The first hospitals in Europe were founded by religious orders. There was always a rather interesting split: folk healers were primarily, though not exclusively female, while the hospitals were male dominated. One of the fruits of the Enlightenment was the separation of healing from faith. The separation of body and spirit was pursued vigorously by medical science as it advanced. Indeed, many in the medical establishment echoed Freud in comparing religion to a neurosis. A well-known figure in British medicine has made no bones about his opposition to the involvement of spirituality in medicine, which he says is the proper business of the church, and has nothing to do with science.
Over the last two decades, things have been changing. A number of physicians and scientists have recognized the importance of re-introducing a spiritual perspective into medicine. But do they have any right to do so? The answer is a definite “Yes”! There has been a gradual build up of scientific evidence that prayer and faith can protect health. A second area of investigation is whether religious or spiritual practice, in particularly intercessory prayer, can affect the health of those being prayed for?
First is the clear observation that faith and prayer can support physical and emotional well-being as well as the health of relationships. One school of thought is that this is all the consequence of an internal healing mechanism. Over 30 years ago Herbert Benson at Harvard first described the “Relaxation response,” a simple method of using techniques derived from Transcendental Meditation for changing a person’s emotional response to stress. He then demonstrated that prayer could also elicit a relaxation response.
In recent years, there has been a global effort to research the connections between faith and health, and I have been particularly impressed by the body of work being generated by the Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health at Duke University, that has provided incontrovertible evidence that religious people live longer, healthier lives. This seems to be more than just the stress-reducing impact of prayer and meditation.
We also have evidence that thankfulness and an attitude of gratitude may have a lasting impact on your mood and state of health and well-being.
Second is intercessory prayer. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the psychiatrist Daniel Benor. Like most people trained in Western medicine, he was very skeptical about spiritual healing until he saw a tough case that failed to respond to conventional medicine but was cured by a spiritual healer. He then started to study spiritual healing and has written the standard textbook on the subject, which runs to FOUR volumes. He once told me that the evidence for spiritual healing is stronger than the evidence for almost any other field of unorthodox medicine and stronger than the evidence for quite a number of practices in orthodox medicine!
The moral of the story? Do not neglect your own spirituality or the spirituality of those around you, and remember that empirical scientific research is showing us yet again, that the power of worship and prayer are far from being neuroses or primitive superstitions.
Technorati tags: spirituality, healing, thankfulness, prayer, Herbert Benson, Daniel Benor
Learning About Ourselves
Previously, I have recommended a fine weblog, Brainwaves, and Zach Lynch, the author, has another very important and interesting article. This time dealing with the way in which our brains handle different types of information.
We have known for some time that there are different types of memory that are stored in different regions of the brain and are accessed differently. The main types are episodic memory, that stores facts about personal episodes, and semantic memory, that stores general knowledge, such as the meanings of words, the capital of Peru and the way to the supermarket.
This new study builds on this knowledge, showing that self-referential thinking is associated with activation of a region deep in the right prefrontal lobe of the brain that is involved in coordinating many higher functions. In his blog, Zach makes a couple of good points:
- Personal learning is both more memorable and more motivating. I think that a moment’s introspection will confirm that. It does not apply for some people struggling with certain types of psychological problems, but for the rest of us, we would rather learn something about ourselves, than some dry facts about cotton production in India. Most of us learn by association and connecting facts with personal events, interests and histories is likely to be much the most effective way of educating people. In fact most good teachers do this already. When I’m lecturing I constantly weave in stories that will personally engage the people whom I’m teaching. This research provides a rationale for doing so.
- Some students have such a strong preference for personal learning that this may be the only way that they learn, so teachers need to be alert to these people and adjust their teaching methods accordingly.
In future research, it would be very valuable to see if these different styles link up with Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences. We are getting ever closer to the goal of being able to tailor teaching to the individual, to allow more people to fulfill their true potential.
Technorati Tags: personal learning, learning styles, Howard Gardner, multiple intelligences
Energy Medicine
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V)
–William Shakespeare (English Poet and Dramatist, 1564-1616)
There has been a lot of talk recently about energy medicine, energy psychology and even energy psychiatry.
What exactly are they, and why do we believe that these therapies only have half the answer?
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine divides energy medicine into veritable and putative. I find these terms a little clumsy. By veritable they mean energies like light, sound and electromagnetism that can be measured. They use the term putative energy fields, also known as biofields, because they have not been measured in a reproducible manner. Treatments like Reiki, Qigong, Shiatsu, Healing touch, Thought Field Therapy and perhaps prayer can all be included under the heading of energy medicines.
A note of caution here. The Scientific and Medical Network, which I had the privilege of serving for a number of years, has had a high-powered study group looking into energy medicine. At its inaugural meeting, the Nobel Prize-winning Physicist Brian Josephson made the important point that we need to be careful about our definitions. Let me clarify that, and tell you why this is such an important issue.
In my book Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I reported the stunning discovery that scientists seem to have "overlooked" more than 90 percent of the universe. This missing piece is being referred to as "dark" matter and "dark" energy. We know very little about it, but some visionary scientists are already wondering if this dark matter and dark energy may have something to do with the burgeoning evidence for the existence of "subtle" systems associated with the body. These subtle systems appear to be of many types, and in Asia have been given names like Qi (Chi) and Prana, or in the West were called the Etheric or the Fifth Element, after Earth, Fire, Air and Water. Why do I say that much that these therapies have only half the answer? I prefer to use the term subtle "systems", to be a little more precise than saying "energies", for these subtle systems are composed of the inseparable twins:
1. Subtle energies and
2. The subtle fields that carry them.
Without energy the fields could not actualize, and without the fields, there would be nothing to carry the energy.
The next point is that underlying the subtle systems is the key to healing. Before even there were the subtle systems, there was an Informational matrix. This is a very scientific and clinical term for something that we also know as the Inner Light or your Inner Divine Spark. You have it: we all do. Aging, illness and death occur when this matrix degrades. Then the subtle systems become chaotic and the biochemical and cellular systems follow. When we treat someone with acupuncture or Reiki, it is not so much that we are squirting "energy" into him or her, but that we are giving that person’s whole organism some cleaned-up information that has a positive effect on the person receiving the treatment.
"Love is the immortal flow of energy that nourishes, extends and preserves. Its eternal goal is life."
–Smiley Blanton (American Speech Pathologist, Psychoanalyst, Writer and Founder {with Norman Vincent Peale} of the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, 1882-1966)
Technorati Tags: More blogs about Energy+Medicine.
Reiki Energy Healing
