M&M: Stay

Dear reader,

in 2005 the movie “Stay” came out, one of my favourite movies. The story is somewhat dark and the ending is frustratingly open. What I like most though are the visual elements: the use of colours and transitions from one scene to another. Also I like Ewan McGregor and Ryan Gosling, who are both playing the lead roles in this movie.

Ryan Gosling is playing Henry Letham, a young man, who we see driving a car at the beginning. Then a tire blows and an accident happens. Cut. He's sitting on the street and as the camera moves away from him allowing us a wider view of the scene, we see the car burning behind him. He stands up and just walks along the street.

The psychiatrist Dr. Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) had a bad night and overslept. But this should only be the beginning of a couple of very strange days for him. On the university campus he meets his friend and teacher Lila (Naomi Watts), who asks him what's wrong. The neighbours baby kept him awake. Lila is confused. The neighbours are 80 years old. Sam takes over for a sick colleague, among her patients is also Henry. He doesn't like the fact that suddenly someone else is his therapist. Is his therapist unable to cope with him and let that other one take over? But eventually Henry opens up and tells about his plan: “Saturday. Midnight.” That's when he's going to kill himself. On his 21^st birthday.

Over the course of this movie, we see Henry and others driving in a car. Those scenes in the car are from a different time or indeed a different world(?) than the rest and in fact most part of the movie. I think I don't anticipate too much, when I write, that Henry in fact was badly injured during the car accident and is about to die. The psychiatrist “story” is all in his head and is his way of thinking whether he wants to live or die. He wants to live really. Otherwise he wouldn't have gone to Sam for help, who is in reality the driver of another car and now is giving first aid. Another woman, who Henry in his mind makes to be Sam's girlfriend, checks the car and tells him that the others are dead. Many things and people in the movie are twisted in Henry's head and used for the reality in his mind. Finding those things, what is used and how and finding what's reality, makes the movie fun and interesting for me. Henry's full name is Henry Letham. Letham being an anagram for Hamlet. A young woman, who served Henry a couple of times in a diner and could maybe help Henry is also actually rehearsing for a Hamlet play.

Some wonder about the ending and what Henry's choice was in the end. Because we never actually see whether he is dead or alive. Many are certain that his decision is obvious however. Watch the movie and make your own decision about that. For those of you who like rather calm soundtracks “Stay” might be one for you. It was written and played by Asche & Spencer.

Until next blog,

sarah

Multitasking is bulls-hit

Dear reader,

it's often said that we women are more capable of doing several things at once more than men can do it. Women are capable of multitasking, men aren't. Or are we all in the end incapable of multitasking really? Maybe I can write this here and at the same time have the music on and I do have a chat window open on top of that. I could certainly also do some exercises that can be done sitting, while I'm writing here. Mentally my attention is definitely divided though and not truly totally with either of these things. Without actually researching for studies on this, I think that the concentration and productivity decreases, if you do several times “at the same time” so to speak. Because you'd not give your full attention to either of them. Not to mention the question of for how long you can keep up doing several things at once, dividing your attantion between them and staying mentally and physically healthy. 

Penn Jillette of the magic duo Penn & Teller read about this once that you should not listen to music while riding your bike. Because it would limit your attention of what's going on on the street. Strictly speaking you should have your radio or music off in your car. Penn actually did that for a while. What he found out is not really surprising: he found that he was paying more attention to the road traffic and would notice more things.

There are different versions of this story of a zen master. He was asked what his secret to enlightenment was. “When I sleep, I just sleep. When I walk, I just walk. When I eat, I just eat”, the zen master said. The student was confused. He was very certain he did that, too. “No”, the zen master said. “When you wake up, you're thinking about what to eat. When you eat, you think about where to go next.”

For those knowing this story, there's a sort of follow-up story to that. The zen master is sitting at the table one morning eating his breakfast and reading the newspaper. “Master”, the student says. “Didn't you say when you eat, you just eat. When you walk, you just walk? Now you're sitting here, eating your breakfast and reading the newspaper. Doesn't that contradict your teachings?” To which the zen master said, “When I read the newspaper and eat breakfast, I just read the newspaper and eat breakfast.”

Until next blog,

sarah

Remember to just breathe

Dear reader,

there are all sorts of relaxing techniques, courses, therapies and what not, to get relaxed again, thinking more straight and/or to just calm down again. The simplest and most obvious is often overlooked: just breathe. In a stressful situation or when we're nervous, we react far too often with shallow breathing or even holding our breath all together, instead of taking a deep breath or at least keep on breathing normally.

Many starting with ventriloquism will probably notice that the way of breathing they use for that makes them aware of their belly muscles suddenly. Especially those we don't use that often usually. Often you can read about neglected diaphragmatic breathing. As if we ever really could breathe without our diaphragm. It's true that we do breathe rather shallow and not consciously deep in and out of the belly. The intestines are often called the second brain. So just like we yawn sometimes to air our brains in our head out, it feels just as well good to relax the belly by breathing consciously. It's free!

In busy times like this, we could all do with calming down more. You don't even have to meditate as such. Many in fact have difficulties not thinking for a while. I know people, who say that they work better time pressure. Some suddenly feel bored when they don't have another five things to do at least on their “to-do list”. Some day they'll have a burnout. For those who don't want to stop thinking completely in a time of quiet, they might, as an alternative, for example count from 1 to 10 and when they reached 10 start again at 1. Repeat a few times, without taking note how many times you reached 10.

Might be a good thing to “think first, then speak” in any case. Especially in conflict situations. In Noel Coward's “Privat Lives” two couples are on their honeymoon in a hotel. As luck would have it, the husband of one was once with the wife of the other. They meet now again with rooms next to each other and bicker again, too. But they don't want to bicker. They make an agreement: when one notices they start bickering again, that person is to say a catchphrase. After that they're both not to speak for two minutes. Two minutes with the option of renewal. I like that idea a lot.

Until next blog,

sarah

Sensational senses

Dear reader,

often we wish negative feelings to be gone. I already described possibilities of pain control in another post. But pain isn't the only perception we can influence in ourselves or others. We could just as well enforce positive feelings.

It's believed in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) that we've got a sort of program running for every feeling. Certain programs are running and we are sad. Certain other programs are running and then we're happy. The trigger, of course, isn't always the same. Also the program for a certain feeling isn't the same with every person. For one certain person though, say, the program “laughing” is always the same. Meaning that the processes that are running, until that person laughs, are the same. In many demonstrations, Richard Bandler, one of the founders of NLP, can be seen deliberately making a person laugh. Not with jokes, but by setting what's called an “anchor” in NLP, a trigger. When used again, that person immediately has that feeling again. This may be funny in a demonstration, if you, for example, you just tap someone on the right shoulder and they are rolling with laughter.

It's more interesting though to use that knowledge and this sort of control over feelings and sense of perception deliberately in real life. Some years ago I must have set an anchor for myself to feel warm, without noticing it. Sadly this happens way too often with more negative anchors. Moments of shock lead to phobias or someone touched you in a certain rough way or maybe just tap you on the shoulder in a certain way. When someone else touches youor taps you on the shoulder in a similar way, (often) unconscious memories come up again and you tense up and you feel bad. Even touches that were meant friendly can go down very badly for that other person. I'd suggest for people, especially those working in the social field, to pay attention to those kinds of reactions and avoid the kind of touch in the future, when it's met with tension or something similar. Back to my anchor for warm feeling. I was able to touch my left shoulder with my right hand and I would feel considerably warmer. On a study trip I used that. They had a terrace outside on a floor that was several floors down from our rooms. I didn't want to get up, get a jacket or pullover and leave the interesting discussions. So once in a while I'd touch my left shoulder.

A few years ago I had an infection on my right hand, but for a week it got treated in a wrong way, my left hand got infected, too. Some nights I'd wake up deliberately to scratch. Only when I was awake, was I able to control this unbelievably strong urge to scratch most of the time. Similarily to what I described in my pain control post already, I imagined to be in a forest and my hands would be bathed in cold stream water. The colour blue helped me a lot and also the thought of cool from a flowing river. It would be like a soft massage or something and blue is a contrast to the hands red from the infection. One night I couldn't sleep for some time and my hands were itching a lot. Scratching wouldn't help, of course. So I imagined that my hands would be in a blue cast. Even if I reached over with one hand to the other, I wouldn't be able to scratch. The cast would be there to block the touch. So I just lay there with immobile hands and fell asleep eventually.

One night I came home first with the underground and had to go the rest on my bike, as usual. I only had a thin jacket. On the underground I had listened to music. But for the bike ride I turned the player off. I got on my bike and started riding. I was humming some sort of melody to myself. For no particular reason I stopped at one point and suddenly I felt distinctly cold. Strange, I thought to myself. I started humming again and got warm again. Humming made me warm? Only once I shortly stopped humming, until I decided to hum all the rest of the way home.

On cold winter nights, the yellow street lights help me to feel a bit warmer again. I won't go into detail about it now and write about it in another separate post. But music can change my way of perception of time under certain circumstances, so that it seems to go faster or slower to me than in objective reality.

We all can influence our own perception and those of others. For that we only have to know which way to influence what senses. Spiders aren't scary as such, but are made scary, when we think of them as huge with long, thin legs and probably strangely furry creatures with many eyes, ideally in colour and crawling towards us. I'm usually not afraid of spiders, although I don't necessarily want to touch them. If I imagine a spider in the described way, it does get scary and uncomfortable to me though.

A so called NLP Fast Phobia Cure, a short and fast treatment for phobias, takes an experienced person under some circumstances probably about 5 to 10 minutes only. To describe it short and simple, the representation in the head is checked, mainly the images, visual aspects and sounds. That means more senses can be change, too. The more senses are changed, the more intense the experience gets. A distinct change can also happen when things are changed in just one sense. By changing many aspects to the opposite, the thing that was so scary at first, will turn into the harmless opposite. Cold gets warm and warm gets cold. Fast gets slow and slow gets fast. And many more. I can only welcome you all to experiment with that for yourself, find what factors influence you and change them just for the fun of testing what happens then. In unlucky circumstances, you'll have just a bit of fun, at best, it'll really help. Just like I used that to not scratch or to feel less cold.

Until next blog

sarah