The Moving Finger Writes: Keeping sane in an insane world

The Moving Finger Writes: Keeping sane in an insane world

Are You In Toxic Relationships?

Understand the three kinds of relationships you have in your life. People who leave you alone are dealing with your suffering as a nuisance or inconvenience; they prefer to keep their distance in order to feel better themselves. Those who help you have the strength and awareness to do more with your suffering than you are able to do by yourself. Those who hurt you want the situation to stay the same because they do not have your wellbeing at heart.

Honestly count how many people are in each category you have in your life. This isn’t the same as counting friends and loving family members. Assess others solely as they relate to your difficulties.

Having made a realistic count, take the following attitude:

1. I will no longer bring my problems to anyone who wants to leave me alone. It’s not good for them or me. They don’t want to help, so I will not ask them to.

2. I will share my problems with those who want to help me. I will not reject genuine offers of assistance out of pride, insecurity, or doubt. I will ask people to join me in my healing and make them a bigger part of my life.

3. I will put a distance between myself and those who want to hurt me. I do not have to confront them, guild-trip them, or make them the cause of my self-pity. But I cannot afford to absorb their toxic effect on me, and if that means keeping my distance, I will.

Deepak Chopra

With or Without You - Sungha Jung

Wow! XX

Hope & Faith Change The Brain

You may have heard of the recent reports that much of the reason that antidepressant drugs work is the placebo effect.

The research was published a few months ago. It was a meta-analysis (summary of a number of scientific studies) of Fluoxetine (Prozac), Venlafaxine (Effexor), Nefazodone (Serzone), and Paroxetine (Seroxat), covering 35 clinical trials involving 5,133 patients. The placebo effect was shown to account for 81% of the effect of the drugs. That means that 81% of the effectiveness of the drugs was placebo.

Let me clear something up regarding this. This doesn't mean that the drugs don't work. It really means that the placebo effect is very high for antidepressants. That is, the power of the mind is considerable!

The drugs probably do work, although we don't absolutely know for sure, but when we believe in a drug, whatever the drug is for, our own natural healing capacity kicks in.

Recent MRI brain scans taken of people on Prozac, for instance, showed changes in the brain when a patient took Prozac but showed the same changes when they received a placebo and just thought it was Prozac. And similarly, when Parkinson's' patients were given an anti-Parkinson's drug, their tremors reduced and dopamine was released in the brain. However when patients were given a placebo but thought it was the drug, the tremors also reduced and the brain still released dopamine in the same places.

When we take a tablet every day, we receive a little tablet of hope and faith. We hope that it works and we have faith that it does. What new scientific research is now revealing is that it is this hope and faith that heals us. We have the power to heal! We always have. We just never realised it!

Every day, when we take our medication, hope and faith produce real chemical changes in our brain and even microscopic changes in the structure of the brain. Hope and Faith change the brain...!!!

These lead to changes throughout the body at the cellular level. Our own awareness of what is wrong with us, incredibly, directs where the cellular changes occur. That is how amazing and powerful we are.

So if you are sick.....Intend to get better. Determination, coupled with hope and faith can move mountains. It always has!

Dr David Hamilton PHD

'Intimacy means more than sex, as you know. Tell others that for you it is more about a connection of souls.

It is the true union of two beings. It is about walking through all moments, both good and bad, and never leaving the other's side.

You are intimate when you are fully with another, no matter what. In fact, this has very little to do with that which is physical.'

Neale Donald Walsh

angelwaves NEW BLOG

http://angel-waves.blogspot.com/

John & Yoko - Annie Leibovitz

How Many of us Belong to Just One Culture?

JL: We belong to a delicate fusion of cultures, through geography, ancestry and experience. I am Welsh with an eighth English. I live in Wales. I am proud of my Celtic heritage. I also feel part of a ‘hidden disability’ culture. Forced membership has stripped me of being in the healthy young 20 & 30’s culture, traveling culture, working culture, family & childbearing culture...

I exist between worlds, slipping in to one more so than another through years. A transient, dreamlike state. Given the chance to have my own flat after 8 years of homelessness. I am blooming. A flower opening to the Spring sun. Moving from non-existence to being someone.

I feel tolerance to others, whatever faith or background. As long as there is no harm toward another. Life has taught me that our vital source of strength comes from within. It is outside of what culture can define.

Light shines through us burning brightly. World feels the flame. Those who are aware only of our traditions, upbringing or outward shell see only a glimpse. Our truth is deeper. Impression of love remains. Hiraeth.

Hiraeth (Welsh): (n.) masc. The sense of loss that comes from having been separated from one’s home; missing the feeling of being home, of having a place.

Juliette Llewellyn
03.05.08

MM: Just what is a culture nowadays? Most of my ancestors were Celtic, from Wales and Ireland, and in both countries the English invaders passed laws hundreds of years ago with the intention of eliminating our ancient languages and customs, and thereby our cultures.

But we are still here, the relationship has become more peaceful with time, our languages are still spoken and in many ways we are still distinct peoples.

Is a culture what we as individuals are comfortable with? A shared set of standards, customs, way of relating to each other? If so, I switch happily between Welsh and Irish cultures, or my personal subsets of them, without a problem. But in our neighbouring country, England, I often feel a little out of place even though I lived there for many years.

I feel very much more at home in Sweden, probably because I lived there when my children were young and almost all their friends were Swedish. Swedish culture is quite different from anything found in Britain, and whenever I go back there I slot right in and wonder why I left.

Yes, I belong to at least three cultures and my life is richer for it.

And maybe more. There is a growing cultural divide between people who use technology such as the internet and mobile phones and those, often older, who don't, can't or won't. In many ways we are in divergent worlds, even if we live in the same town or the same house.

Some cultural links go across borders. Members of a particular religion, for example, may share a large part of their culture with co-religionists in other countries. Likewise, people who have escaped the clutches of a religion will have much in common when they meet.

And what about corporate cultures, where the individual gives up part of his or her personality in return for money! Or the aid-dependent culture, where war or natural disasters have made the traditional way of life non-viable?

Wow, could go on for ever. For example, the Samí, traditional reindeer herders in northern Scandinavia, maintain their languages and customs while using snowmobiles and helicopters to make herding easier. Are they living in one culture or two, or has the one culture developed by taking what is useful from the neighbours?

Maybe there are some people still living in just one culture, but I'm glad not to have that limitation!

Michael L MacKian
03.05.09
www.moving-finger.blogspot.com

All Written for:

World Press Freedom Day
http://www.1-day.org

ANGEL WINGS

In the morning I opened the cupboard
and found inside it a pair of wings,
a pair of angel's wings.
I was not naive enough to believe them real.
I wondered who had left them there.

I took them out the cupboard,
brought them over to the light by the window
and examined them.
You sat in the bed in the light by the window grinning.

'They are mine,' you said;
You said that when we met
you'd left them there.

I thought you were crazy.
Your joke embarrassed me.
Nowadays even the mention of the word angel
embarrasses me.

I looked to see how you'd stuck the wings together.
Looking for glue, I plucked out the feathers.
One by one I plucked them till the bed was littered,

'They are real,' you insisted,
your smile vanishing.
And on the pillow your face grew paler.
Your hands reached to stop me but
for some time now I have been embarrassed by the word angel.

For some time now in polite or conservative company
I have checked myself from believing
anything so untouched and yet so touchable
had a chance of existing.

I plucked then
till your face grew even paler;
intent on proving them false
I plucked
and your body grew thinner.
I plucked till you all but vanished.

Soon beside me in the light,
beside the bed in which you were lying
was a mass of torn feathers;
glueless, unstitched, brilliant,
reminiscent of some vague disaster.

In the evening I go out alone now.
You say you can no longer join me.
You say
Ignorance has ruined us,
disbelief has slaughtered. 

You stay at home
listening on the radio
to sad and peculiar music,
who fed on belief,
who fed on the light I'd stolen.

Next morning when I opened the cupboard
out stepped a creature,
blank, dull, and too briefly sensual
it brushed out the feathers gloating.
I must review my disbelief in angels.

Brian Pattern