lundi 10 juin 2019

BE YOUR OWN SCRIPTWRITER . DONT REPEAT WHAT OTHERS WANT YOU TO SAY OR DO TO AVOID CONFLICTS AND ILL HEALTH

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Theatres of the Mind
YOU ARE ONLY AS HEALTHY AS YOUR IDEA OF WHO YOU ARE 
The education I received as a student of Anthropology in London was in my opinion is the best Education I was given and I was able to receive it. I had read Medicine and had become dutifully bound to remember everything and had done well in my examinations. The nagging question reminded, the Cartesian dualism of Health (Disease Care) and the neglect of the patient as an important player. An encounter with Native American Indians (Meskwakia) made me realize that all the biomedical knowledge is not sufficient for me to follow the path I had decided, to work with Indigenous peoples around the world.

I studied Anthropology with a major in Medical Anthropology in London.
I voraciously read all the books recommended as I was entering another world and vocabulary and another way of thinking from the biomedical orientation and certainty to the world of lived in chaos and uncertainty.
I think it was my teacher Cecil Helman from Cape Town who had recommended that I read the book by the New Zealand/British psychiatrist Joyce McDougall


From her obituary, she died aged 91 in 2011
In Theatre of the Mind: Illusion and Truth On the Psychoanalytical Stage (1982), she went back to her favourite metaphor, presenting patients enacting fantasies on a kind of inner stage, in response to the pain of earlier parts of their life. The perverse sexual act functions like a dream, a kind of hallucinatory creation of an alternative reality and serves as a solution to avoid painful internal conflicts.
In a landmark contribution to the study of psychosomatics, Theatre of the Body: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatic Illness (1989), McDougall presented a bold revision of the approach to the question of the relationship between the mind and the body. She created the term "disaffectation", a form of what was later to be known as alexithymia – the inability to put words to feelings – to describe those who had experienced overwhelming emotion that threatened to cause a breakdown in their sense of identity. Such individuals, unable to repress the ideas linked to emotional pain, simply ejected them from consciousness by "pulverising all trace of feeling, so that an experience which has caused emotional flooding is not recognised as such and therefore cannot be contemplated". These patients were not suffering from an inability to experience or express emotion, but from "an inability to contain and reflect upon an excess of affective experience".
I enjoyed the books but what still sticks with me are our outward manifestations of Identity and also the role we assign our minds to conduct our daily affairs and how these things affect our health.

Face is the window to the mind, the bard was quoted as saying but in this postmodern state of affairs, our faces do not betray our identities or our ways of thinking. The Question where are you from has no meaning to many people and also it does not define any budding relationships or romances. But certainly WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU ARE FROM? Would open a box inside the person.
In this modern day and age we are open and tolerant and of course to have these neutral identities and nurtured by ourselves is very important.
I see this among Muslims living in the West (or Malaysia and recently in Cambodia and Thailand). By dressing in a certain way, they are closing the possibilities of interactions with the wider world we live in and also the chance to learn from each other.
This certainly creates conflict, which is later expressed in the bodies of the person.
I wear a Longyi and a shirt and in Yangon no one questions my origins. A small investment of about 10 dollars and you can be Burman too (I can.). More Muslims wear Hijabs and Burqas in FRANCE than their original countries such as Morocco. What was traditional once upon a time now is made to manipulate the identity and the person you are. Obviously if you are in KL and you see a man wearing religious clothes, whether the saffron of a Brahmin, or the Malay traditional dress, we are not expecting really a discussion on Madness by Foucault but we expect a discourse about Mahler from a short and shirt clad Chinese intellectual.
Sadhguru had written about how to be a director of your own mind. How can you do that if you can’t go beyond the first step, that of your dress? Dress as Division rather than pride or humanity or interest in the other while claiming to be the other.
These are the thoughts when I was studying in London, a most cosmopolitan society on earth, where Saudi Arabian Post graduate students said they really don’t have to learn much as it is already been exposed in the Koran.
I asked my teacher, Cecil, how come so many Jews are so prominent in the field of Anthropology
He replied
Anthropology is the study of human beings and understands the conflict of being the other, who is best, suited to study the OTHER, than us, the Jews, who have been treated as Other for millennia.
How do these conflicts lead to ill health? I have many examples but will illustrate one or two.
If you can answer the following health related questions, with a cross-cultural anthropological understanding, I commend you for your openness.
Who has the highest rate of Cardiovascular Disease in the USA?
If I were to say to that it is the migrants from India Pakistan Bangladesh Sri Lanka, you have to open your mind and find an answer.
Can’t be the religion
Sri Lankans are Buddhist
Indians in the majority are Hindu
Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are Muslim.


It has to be with the loss of identity or the striving for some imagined identity created by the pressures of living in the USA

Why are the Malays more obese than Indians and Chinese in Malaysia and hold the dubious honour of having the fattest kids in Asia?
This in face of their favoured Bumiputra status and access to services from the government.

Identity if not well-understood can create conflict and if you have not resolved this within yourself, this conflict can lead to ill health.

Listen to Sadhguru even if you are Muslim or Buddhist. I am willing to listen to Dalai Lama or Sadhguru or Giles de Leuze as long as I am able to understand their reasoning. If I cannot understand it, the problem is not with them, but with me.
Two greats of French Philosophy, DeLeuze left and Foucault right . You may recognize some others.

Each one of us have a scriptwriter in our heads, as I write this the script writer directs the words. When I talk to others, the scriptwriter is the one who sculpts the words that comes out of my mind.
When you have a problem either with comprehension of what is happening outside of you, or what is happening inside of you, it is as if you have a metaphoric form of schizophrenia, in which the scriptwriter packs up his PC and leaves your mind and brain and the stage is empty. The other actors or the audience bored by the absence of your scriptwriter pack up and leave to.


Without understanding why
You begin to eat industrialized food
Drink a bit too much wine or spirits
Worse still a little bit of experimentation with drugs
As nature abhors a vacuum ..

Why is that heart attacks have become quite common in some parts of Asia, why do you see young people struck down by Stroke
You cannot always look for a biological answer but look deep and find the underlying cause that is causing the biology of your body to misbehave.
A gift from my friend YMC in KL .
On page 50, Sadhguru says:
The quality of our lives is determined by our ability to respond to the varied complex situations that we encounter. If the ability to respond with intelligence, competence, and sensitivity is compromised by a compulsive or reactive approach, we are enslaved by the situation. It means we have allowed the nature of our life experience to be determined by our circumstances, and not by us.

Ever since I had been introduced to the Yogic Philosophy by Vandana Yadav when she was visiting KL in 2009, I have marvelled at the similarity between the philosophy of the American Indian and the Oriental mystic teachings.






It is coming up to 4 pm in Siem Reap and I am eager to leave for KL in two days time to spend some time with my best friend in Asia and her entourage.





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