The key points of this blog post can be downloaded & printed out as a helpful 6-slide-miniatures-to-a-page Powerpoint handout.
This is the sixth and final blog post about going back to my old university for a reunion dinner. I wrote three posts last month and a further couple earlier this month. In the first post of the series, I said: "I've never been back for any kind of reunion before ... not to school, not to university, not to medical college. Why not ... and why am I going back now? I'm a medical doctor, but primarily I work as a psychotherapist ... as a specialist in stress, health & wellbeing.
It's the day after our "university reunion dinner". It was weird ... and actually very lovely ... and fun and warm and moving and interesting and hugely welcoming. Gosh, I really couldn't have imagined that script if I'd tried.
"Who will prefer the jingle of jade pendants if he once has heard stone growing in a cliff?" Lao Tzu
"To stand and stare, to watch the rising sun, fills me with such calm happiness, I am sure I have
dwindled away too much time on inessentials." Diana Gault (when dying of cancer)
I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database -
"God guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone; he that sings a lasting song, thinks in a marrow bone." W. B. Yeats
"We camouflage our true being before others to protect ourselves against criticism or rejection. This protection comes at a steep price. When we are not truly known by the other people in our lives, we are misunderstood. When we are misunderstood, especially by family and friends, we join the 'lonely crowd.' Worse, when we succeed in hiding our being from others, we tend to lose touch with our real selves. This loss of self contributes to illness in its myriad forms." Sidney Jourard
Earlier this year I wrote a sequence of ten blog posts to support people working their way through Mark Williams & Danny Penman's fine book "Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world" as a self-help training in mindfulness practice. I've referred lots of people to these posts and it's a bit messy finding them as they are strung out over many weeks. Here are links to the ten posts organized into one place:
"Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives - the power to retell it, reexperience it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change - truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts" Salman Rushdie
I wrote a first post a few days ago entitled "Going back for a university reunion: stirring up memories, avoidant attachment, "puffing up" and kindness (1st post)". I mentioned psychiatry professor Irvin Yalom's suggestion that going back to reunions like this can stir up material that can be chewed over to yield helpful new insights. It's happening. And I'm encouraging it to.