July/August HTU eNewsletter
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HEALING
THROUGH UNITY eNEWSLETTER
July/August 2007
A bimonthly newsletter dedicated to serving the principles of physical
and spiritual health envisioned in the Baha'i Teachings.
Volume 11, Issue No. 2
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Contents
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- Quote of the month
- From the Editor
- Key Findings from Public Health
- How to Build Community
- Six Tips for Happiness
- Seven Strategies to Reclaim Your Day
- Humor: Calling All Muses!
- Health in the News
- Frappr! Map
- Purpose of the Newsletter
- Subscription Information
- Web Site
UPCOMING THEMES
September: Humor and Health
November: Using Obstacles as Stepping Stones
January: Success and Health
March: Fasting for Spiritual & Physical Health
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QUOTE OF THE MONTH
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"We exhort you, O peoples of the world, to observe that which
will elevate your station. Hold fast to the fear of God and
firmly adhere to what is right. Verily I say, the tongue is for
mentioning what is good, defile it not with unseemly talk. God
hath forgiven what is past. Henceforward everyone should utter
that which is meet and seemly, and should refrain from slander, abuse
and whatever causeth sadness in men."
("Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 310-11)
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FROM THE EDITOR
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Dear Readers,
I have been lost in space for a few months and missed two issues of
this newsletter. Life's unexpected turns distracted me from
pursuing this project. Please accept my apologies and promises
to do better in future. I am so grateful for your patience!
We will begin again. I pledge to spend less time worrying about
perfection and more time discovering and enjoying the ways in which
the world is just discovering the sources of health and well being
that Baha'u'llah, Prophet-Founder of the Baha'i Faith, expounded more
than 100 years ago.
Important among those concepts is that we are all one, single, human
family, and that whatever is bad for some members of that family will
ultimately be bad for the whole. Many of the laws and teachings
of the Baha'i Faith support community building and mutual goals, and
the provide behavioral tools of communication necessary to achieve
those goals.
Consultation is a key in the Baha'i Faith to functioning as a
community, as a family, and for an individual to remain in good
health. The steps in consultation outlined by Baha'u'llah are
critical to providing multiple perspectives and accurate feedback to
all parties in the discussion -- across boundaries of language,
culture, gender, age, and whatever other problems can interfere with
this vital communication.
Today, the research evidence is building that health is not affected
just occasionally by the world in which an individual lives, but
outside influences may be far more important to health than genetic
makeup is.
Scientists who thought they had veered safely away from religion,
philosophy and other 'soft' sciences as too intangible to measure, are
finding that social relationships, feedback loops, and other 'squishy'
ideas that reside mostly in moral and ethical realms are indeed the
most important aspects of health and healing.
Humans (and all other life) appear to be inherently designed to
function best as part of a group, those groups being part of larger
groups, and on and on. We swim daily in endless circles of
influence. Minute changes in those inputs, multiplied over time,
will change how we feel and act, even though we can be unaware that it
is happening.
Science is discovering that no human is a completely separate entity.
Even cells cannot exist if they lose contact with surrounding cells.
No one person is all powerful, either, but by making small changes in
personal attitudes, perspectives and behaviors, we affect those around
us -- and they affect us.
Over time, lots of small iterations can wear down mountains, build
Grand Canyons, and change the face of the Earth. They can also
change hearts, minds and cultures. One person cannot achieve
this alone, because many, many small steps are needed, so we must
learn to work in groups, ever expanding our influence from those
little things we can do.
"We'll get by with a little help from our friends."
(adapted from The Beatles, "Blue Album,"
1967)
Cheryll Schuette, Michigan, USA
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KEY FINDINGS FROM PUBLIC HEALTH
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By Wade Schuette,
MBA MPH
* Healthy "people" aren't localized rocks, but are normally
well-interconnected bidirectionally into the social fabric around
them.
* Social connectivity is the most robust predictor of internal,
"physiological", "biomedical" outcomes, such as
morbidity, mortality, survival rate of surgery, resistance to
infection, level of depression, outcome of diabetes, obesity,
"mental" health.
* Prevention is a thousand times more cost effective than repair. (A
lesson from software engineering and many other fields as well.)
* The caring, human, loving touch of another individual is very
important to human health and healing. Infants who aren't touched do
poorly or simply die.
* All interesting social phenomena (such as relationships, jobs,
teams, family, stress, love, sex, the economy, depression) involve
intimately bidirectional feedback loops.
THE CURRENT CHALLENGE FOR SCIENCE, PUBLIC HEALTH, AND MANKIND IN
GENERAL
Classical statistical measures and attitudes, based on prediction of
crop yields, assume critically that causality is defined in one
direction only, and that all phenomena of interest can be
"isolated" from context and one part of it varied by the
experimenter while other parts of it are "held constant."
None of that applies to "complex adaptive systems,"
including social systems, which are inextricably interconnected,
context-dependent, interdependent, and riddled with bidirectional
feedback loops.
Since the tools and expertise breakdown when applied to these areas,
rather than admit that the tools and expertise are inadequate, the
problem space is instead defined as "non-scientific" or
"soft-science" and demeaned as unimportant or
"non-scientific."
Possibly due to such schizophrenia, the US "healthcare"
system behaves as if none of the above solid empirical facts were
known. There is no focus on social connectivity, less than 2% of the
budget is spent on prevention, and machines and processes have
replaced people at the bedside. People are treated like machines, and
diseases are treated as if they were independent of each other and the
rest of people's lives. "People" are reduced to
"patients". "Caregivers" are too busy to stay and
chat for a while with "patients" and are increasingly
renamed "providers" which is ironic, since mostly they
consume resources, particularly money, while being forced by "the
system" to be too busy to stick around and observe the actual
outcomes of their "treatments" on the people they serve.
Perhaps, not surprisingly then, the outcomes of the US Healthcare
system are terrible, compared to peer countries. Infant mortality is
something like 19th in the world. Costs are huge but a recent study
showed that the BEST quartile of US citizens (the rich) have health
outcomes worse than the WORST quartile of British citizens in the UK.
Depression, obesity, diabetes are widespread and rampant epidemics in
the US.
But, efforts to build healthcare interventions that are designed
around social connectivity and whole persons are demeaned and
ridiculed as being "non-scientific", or avoided because the
feedback loops make computing statistical "p-values"
problematic for academic researchers, for whom such mathematical bases
for certainty are held with a sort of blind obsession despite the fact
that the assumptions of the theory (General Linear Model) don't fit
the problem they're trying to address.
The result is that although the most effective interventions are
known, and involve teams of people assisting individual humans to
modify or control their behavior and life style, the advocates of
these interventions are academically shunned and have to present their
work in embarrassment in back rooms. The Office of Behavioral and
Social Science Research (OBSSR) within National Institutes of Health
is treated like an awkward in-law.
Probably the single best book that summarizes interventions in health
care that actually work is "Health Program Planning: An
Educational and Ecological Approach," by Lawrence W. Green and
Marshall W. Kreuter, now in it's fourth edition. (c) 2005 McGraw
Hill. The initial version written in 1961-- about when
non-communicable diseases began to replace communicable diseases in
the US as the leading causes of death, disability, and impaired
quality of life -- but the older, biomedical model had a very tightly
held death-grip on the "health care industry."
WHAT CAN BE DONE TO MEET THE CHALLENGE?
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being
self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer
So, this pretty much summarizes the state of affairs today. Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has started a new department
of Health Behavior along the lines of the new theory, but most health
and public health people are famously non-quantitative, and so they
are attempting to think through such problems mentally, unassisted by
available systems dynamics tools used in other industries for over 50
years now.
And, the biomedical establishment has a strong lock on most thinking
and peer-review journals, and alternates denial and violent opposition
to the "new paradigm" which it perceives as a throwback to
mystical soft thinking instead of a more general version of the
scientific method that can embrace feedback loops and complex adaptive
systems without distortion of the tools or violation of the
assumptions behind the models and statistics.
Even at Hopkins in the department of Epidemiology, the ratio of new
thinkers to old-paradigm thinkers is essentially 3 to 70, and this new
paradigm is ridiculed, rejected, opposed, despised by most old-school
thinkers who wish the answer to health had stayed down the microscope,
under control, where they had strong muscles and good intuition -
instead of showing up increasingly outside the window of the lab, in
the social fabric of society, in all the places the scientists grew up
despising and where their tools and muscles and intuition all
fail.
So, where does that leave us?
Apparently, we can't expect either academics or health care
workers to take the lead in fixing this terrible mess, and business is
going to have to get down to business and do something about it.
(This is not without precedent - the center of innovation in the USA
has increasingly moved out of universities and into businesses,
despite the very strong marketing campaign with the opposite
message.)
Business today is much more cybernetic on a real-time basis than
academia, and utilizes "good enough" models which, with
cybernetic feedback control, get the job done and produce the desired
outcomes - - while driving academics crazy because the underlying
models are "so bad." The National Institutes of Health
is still heavily dominated as well by biomedically oriented
researchers of the old school, who resist the new paradigm.
So, with a few exceptions, industry money may be the only way to
advance health care in serious ways, and address the findings at the
top of this article sometime this century, when we're still alive to
care about it.
We have, as in so many of M.C. Escher's paintings, (see this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Escher_Waterfall.jpg) created a
world that is locally-sensible and globally nonsense, but few people
working locally are motivated to address the global wrongness, and no
Masters or PhD student or young researcher would be encouraged to
tackle a "large" problem.
So it sits there, unaddressed by academia and a thorn in the side of
everyone: patients, doctors, nurses, payers, industry.
Like Escher's paintings, one is hard pressed to see or point to
exactly "where" the wrongness is, and yet, standing back,
it's clearly wrong.
That's where things are today.
(from the blog, Perspectives in Public Health,
http://newbricks.blogspot.com )
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HOW TO BUILD COMMUNITY
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Given the
concepts in the previous article, what are some small steps that many
individuals could take, and repeat for many iterations, thus changing
the world?
How about talking to each other?
"The Great Being saith: The heaven of divine wisdom is illumined
with the two luminaries of consultation and compassion. Take ye
counsel together in all matters, inasmuch as consultation is the lamp
of guidance which leadeth the way, and is the bestower of
understanding." ("Tablets of Baha'u'llah,"
p. 168)
"The purpose of consultation is to show that the views of several
individuals are assuredly preferable to one man, even as the power of
a number of men is of course greater than the power of one man."
('Abdu'l-Baha, quoted by Shoghi Effendi in "Consultation, A
Compilation," #182)
The following list is all over the 'Net, but no original source was
easy to find. It has been adopted by cities, clubs, and little
old ladies bent on cleaning up the neighborhood. People of all
ages have been involved, from designing and hanging posters to
distributing and wearing buttons. It is on note cards, post
cards, letterhead, t-shirts, coffee cups, the Good-Year blimp...
The word is out, so let's try acting on it!
* Turn off your TV
* Leave your house
* Know your neighbors
* Greet people
* Look up when you're walking
* Sit on your stoop
* Plant flowers
* Use your library
* Play together
* Buy from local merchants
* Share what you have
* Help a lost dog
* Take children to the park
* Honor elders
* Support neighborhood schools
* Fix it even if you didn't break it
* Have pot lucks
* Garden together
* Pick up litter
* Read stories aloud
* Dance in the street
* Talk to the mail carrier
* Listen to the birds
* Put up a swing
* Help carry something heavy
* Barter for your goods
* Start a tradition
* Ask a question
* Hire young people for odd jobs
* Organize a block party
* Bake extra and share
* Ask for help when you need it
* Open your shades
* Sing together
* Share your skills
* Take back the night
* Turn up the music
* Turn down the music
* Listen before you react to anger
* Mediate a conflict
* Seek to understand
* Learn from new and uncomfortable angles
* Know that no one is silent though many are not heard
* Work to change this
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"We must not only be patient with others, infinitely patient!,
but also with our own poor selves, remembering that even the Prophets
of God sometimes got tired and cried out in
despair!" ("Fire and Gold:
Benefiting from Life's Tests," p. 223)
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SIX TIPS FOR HAPPINESS
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Advice from Tal Ben-Shahar
1. Give yourself permission to be human. When we accept emotions --
such as fear, sadness, or anxiety -- as natural, we are more likely to
overcome them. Rejecting our emotions, positive or negative, leads to
frustration and unhappiness.
2. Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning.
Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that
are both personally significant and enjoyable. When this is not
feasible, make sure you have happiness boosters, moments throughout
the week that provide you with both pleasure and meaning.
3. Keep in mind that happiness is mostly dependent on our state of
mind, not on our status or the state of our bank account. Barring
extreme circumstances, our level of well being is determined by what
we choose to focus on (the full or the empty part of the glass) and by
our interpretation of external events. For example, do we view failure
as catastrophic, or do we see it as a learning opportunity?
4. Simplify! We are, generally, too busy, trying to squeeze in more
and more activities into less and less time. Quantity influences
quality, and we compromise on our happiness by trying to do too
much.
5. Remember the mind-body connection. What we do -- or don't do --
with our bodies influences our mind. Regular exercise, adequate sleep,
and healthy eating habits lead to both physical and mental health.
6. Express gratitude, whenever possible. We too often take our lives
for granted. Learn to appreciate and savor the wonderful things in
life, from people to food, from nature to a smile.
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SEVEN STRATEGIES TO RECLAIM YOUR DAY
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"Simplifying your schedule is a matter of living in a way that
reflects your life's natural rhythm," says Edward Hallowell,
M.D. A former instructor at Harvard Medical School, he is the
author of "CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and about to
Snap: Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD."
* Don't multitask. Splitting focus does not improve outcomes.
Concentrate on the moment.
* Keep to-do lists short. And stop for the day when the list is
completed. Rest is important, too.
*Delegate. Rather than trying to do everything, ask for help,
make a trade, give away tasks that don't energize. Maybe hire
professionals for things like plumbing, taxes or tree felling.
There will be someone out there who does get energy from these
tasks!
* Be positive. Fear and anxiety hinder capability and make the
task take longer. And both are bad for health.
* Limit interruptions. This is a matter of both scheduling and
setting personal boundaries.
* See organization as a means, not an end. "Organizing is
like dieting," says Dr. Hallowell. "Everyone wants to
do it, few actually do, and those who succeed often revert to their
former ways." Do just enough to keep order and save time
wasted by trying to find things.
* Don't lose sleep over it. Staying up late does not get more
done. Sleep deprivation lowers peak brain performance and won't
make up for an overly optimistic to-do list. Bottom line: sleep
isn't optional, and you can't get ahead by skimping on it.
For more information, drop by his website:
http://www.drhallowell.com/ "The medical professionals at the Hallowell Center are
committed to helping people lead happier, more productive lives
through a balanced treatment approach; integrating brain, body and
heart."
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HUMOR: Calling All Muses!
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Joe Rhatigan, from his action packed book, "In Print! 40 Cool
Publishing Projects for Kids" (Lark Books) is only partly teasing
his readers with this reference to the source of inspiration.
Addressing the most common question asked of those who are considered
artists, Rhatigan uses some models from the past, and adds a few new
ones to meet today's tasks:
In Greek mythology, the Muses were nine sisters whose sole purpose in
life was to inspire artists and help them create. They were:
Terpsichorie -- dance
Thalia -- comedy
Clio -- history
Erato -- love poetry
Calliope -- epic poetry
Euterpe -- music
Urania -- astronomy
Melpomene -- tragedy
Polyhymnia -- sacred poetry
Rhatigan suggests some modern muses might be:
Headhurtsalotta -- homework and taxes
Spamiopia -- e-mail
Thanksomuchope -- thank you notes
Sweetootheroia -- creative snacking
Perhaps the author is only partly joking about this process.
Religious writers have for centuries sited Spirit (by many names) as
the source of all knowledge and creative ideas.
Using that source, however, requires setting the mood, opening the
heart and mind, and developing both the skills and the discipline to
keep at the work. These steps are universally acknowledged as the road
to success. Faith in the process is also a requirement.
The composer, Mozart, had the reputation for writing a sonata in one
sitting, without further changes or corrections. In later life,
author Isaac Asimov could turn out a speech or a magazine article
complete in first draft. But both of these 'geniuses' had done
extensive developmental work, immersed in their disciplines and their
art for a lifetime.
Ernest Hemingway, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, was once asked if
he wrote regularly, or just when he felt inspired. He is said to
have replied, "Only when inspired. But I'm inspired every
morning at 9 o'clock!"
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JOIN THE HEALING THROUGH UNITY FRAPPR! MAP
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We have a Frappr! map for this newsletter. This is a great way
to see how many places our subscribers live around the world.
Interesting to note that most of those who have joined the map so far
are female.
To sign on and join the group, (it's free) access the Healing Through
Unity map and at:
http://www.frappr.com/healingthroughunityreaders
Check back every so often to see how many more have signed on; watch
our world map blossom!
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PURPOSE OF THE NEWSLETTER
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"Healing Through Unity" is published for the purpose of
sharing thoughts, comments and experiences on how the teachings of the
Baha'i Faith are being applied to physical and spiritual health.
Other than the quoted Holy Writings, the material in this newsletter
represents the thoughts and opinions of the writers and has no
authority. None of the material published in this newsletter is
intended to be a substitute for the advice of a physician.
You are free to copy articles, provided you indicate the source of the
article. There are 6 issues per year. The newsletter is produced in
Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION
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Distribution of this newsletter is free by email. To subscribe to the
newsletter, and receive it by email before it's posted on the web,
- send an email to newsletter-request@healingthroughunity.org with the
word "Subscribe" in the subject line
- or just click on that link on the webpage, and it should be done
automatically.
If you're a current subscriber and want to change your address, do the
same -- send an email to newsletter-request@healingthroughunity.org
with the word "subscribe" in the subject line -- and then
send an email from your old address (if you still have access to it)
to newsletter-request@healingthroughunity.org with the word
"unsubscribe" in the subject line. Or again, just
click on the links on the webpage to have it all done
automatically.
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WEB SITE
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You can visit our Web site, obtain back issues, subscribe/unsubscribe,
and download the Healing Through Unity Course at:
http://www.healingthroughunity.org
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PLEASE SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
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All of us have had healing experiences, as well as climbed out of low
points along life's way - physical, emotional, psychological and
spiritual. Please share your stories, tips, useful links, and
quotes from the Baha'i Writings about staying healthy in a stressful
world. Your articles do not have to be long - even a few
paragraphs in length are fine. Baha'u'llah gave us each other as
a big part of a healthy lifestyle, and sharing stories and ideas that
work for you brings encouragement to others. Asking for
information and support from others can bring encouragement to
you!
WHERE TO SEND STORIES AND CORRESPONDENCE:
Many thanks to all of you who share helpful ideas for the Healing
Through Unity eNewsletter. The decision to select and edit
material submitted for publication is determined by the editor.
We welcome submissions from everyone.
Please e-mail your stories, comments, suggestions or "Question
for the Month" ideas to the newsletter editor, Cheryll Schuette,
at: cheryll@gotypist.com.
DISCLAIMER:
Please specify if you do not want your full name, or any part of it,
used in this newsletter, particularly for the Question of the Month.
Once published in email and in the archives on the website, it is
difficult if not impossible to remove with any certainty.
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HEALING THROUGH UNITY NEWSLETTER
Editor - Cheryll Schuette
Contributing Editors - Wade Schuette
Founding Editor - Frances Mezei
Web Master - Jonah Winters
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