Author Archives: DrKeith

Happiness Is L-Brain Rather Surprisingly

Posted on by
2

Experiments at the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin used MRI to map the brain of monk Matthieu Ricard while he was engaged in what Buddhists call compassion meditation. The pictures showed activity mainly in the left prefrontal cortex (just inside the forehead) of Ricard’s brain.

Generally people with happy temperaments exhibit a high ratio of activity in the left prefrontal cortex, an area associated with happiness, joy and enthusiasm. Those who are prone to anxiety, fear and depression exhibit a higher ratio of activity in the right prefrontal cortex.

But the degree to which the left side of Ricard’s brain lit up far surpassed 150 other subjects studied in this trial. He had 30 years of experience at meditation but, unfortunately, we don’t have the control knowledge of whether Ricard might have exhibited the same results before he became a monk. His off-the-chart results may the result of his meditation skills or because he is an exceptional individual.

Buddhists have long maintained that meditation offers great benefits to their minds and bodies, but science demands measurements. Continue reading →

Rejoicing In Your Self

Posted on by
Reply

The guru says:

Don’t forget to think of all the good things about your life while you are working for improvements. We don’t want the search for a better life to mean only focusing on what needs to be changed. Some things about yourself are cause for rejoicing. Do it, for goodness’ sake.

Before embarking on a mission to extend the values of your life, why not take stock of what you have got? Even in its poorest phase, life has many blessings. The soldiers in the Hell of mud and slaughter in the trenches of World War 1 were still able to find poetry about poppies, courage and memories of home. Do not worry that this course is about merely distracting you from the problems that need solving; we intend to show you how to deal with the difficulties. But by the same rationale, it would be wrong to draw your attention away from the good things in your life. That would be equally false and misleading.

As soon as is convenient after reading this section, get yourself some paper or a note book and start writing:

Write down all the good things you can think of in your life right now. You don’t have to do the New Agey thing of telling yourself that horrible things are really good for you (“All miseries are just lessons” and that stuff). List genuine pleasures, quiet satisfactions and the many many things that you surely have achieved in your life. Count your blessings, as the Christians say. Well, why not?

It’s a god idea to take inventory in this way. Because it helps to balance your life and sanity is mainly about being balanced: right brain-left brain; positive and negative; male-female; yin and yang. There are things you want to change; we’ll talk about that in other sections. But write down the things that you wouldn’t want to change. Continue reading →

Re-Formatting Your Life to a Clean Hard Drive

Posted on by
Reply

Keith Scott-Mumby MD, PhD

You are tired of the existing conditions. You want more out of life—MUCH MUCH MORE, for yourself, your family and loved ones—and better things for everyone around you. In short a better world.

You want to be happy.

You want your dreams to start coming true. You want an end to economic slavery and money to start to flow in your life— not a trickle that dried up every time you feel you are getting somewhere— a real torrent, a healing river of money that enables you to be, do and have all the things that you promised yourself.

You haven’t given up; that’s the key. You are still in the game. There is always the hope of a brighter future. You know it’s out there somewhere, if only you can find the right strategies to move forwards to your dream.

Not true? Well then, you are reading the wrong blog! Switch to another. May I suggest something from the psychology shelf at the bookstore, a book that explains the pathetic inadequacy of depressed and negative people, how it isn’t really their fault but the world is somehow against them…

If it is true, congratulations! You have separated from the vast herd of people who live average and unrewarding lives–with unreal hope, no dreams and little drive. For them, existence is a matter of being tossed around by Fate and circumstances, until on some dim and distant day in the future they quietly sink out of sight, a mere ripple on the surface of life’s ocean that soon vanishes.

You couldn’t even call that living. That’s existing.

If finding your dreams, living your bliss, is what you want, then you are reading what could be the most influential manual of your life. In fact it isn’t just a manual. It’s a tool— to be exact, a collection of tools, researched, developed and in some cases rewritten in a newer context by a medical doctor. Is that relevant? Well doctors are supposed to heal lives.

There is nothing quite so healing as effective knowledge which will overcome the canker of failures and loss. But there is another, more important, point to this. You may think that the only people who can uncover issues of success are those at the top. In fact the person you want to listen to is not a saint or a celebrity but someone who has walked the talk, made all the mistakes and gained the knowledge first hand, by trial and error.

If he or she can write or teach it well, so much the better.

The real issue is not about getting rich or famous, or even living to a hundred. It’s about personal achievement–and that means different things to different people. You

These tools are to enable you to gain the certainty and knowledge to fulfill all aspects of attaining success, whether you want fame, fortune or happiness (or all three, if you’ve a mind for it). With its avalanche of inviting and razor-sharp strategies, you will be able to identify your REAL dream from amongst all the illusions and capture it into concrete steps which will transform your future from an endless vague horizon to a sharply focused map, with everything you need to succeed marked along the way.

It isn’t a “universal plan”. You are too singular and individual for that. It shows you how to capture your future, neatly and uniquely, take control of your life and start moving forwards to that dream. It tells you what you MUST DO, what is merely accessory, what you MUST NOT DO and finally how to recognize what is unimportant, irrelevant and distracting.

Seize Full Control Of Your Life

You can dream all you like about happiness, wealth, power, prestige, success– but unless you have an integrated action plan to make it all come about, you can’t possibly succeed.

Thoughts change nothing, without being linked to action.  All the motivational books in the world won’t help you get from A to B. Travel guides describing the attractions of the place you want to go are merely rhapsodizing about being there. What you need is a map, a travel timetable, an itinerary and some means of transport. If you are a true adventurer, poring over maps and route-finding is every bit as exciting as travel.

My 10-CD project “How To Make Any Dream Come True” (re-released soon!) will show you how to turn any dream into a meaningful reality, by giving you a standardized, effective means of creating plans that work, complete with steps, prioritization and cross-feeding of stages.

Done properly, it cannot fail to turn what you want into reality.

It is a framework into which you can project all your ideas. It will give scope, order and consistency to your life from this point onwards.

But it is still a plan you have to DO, not just think about.

How Do You Know You Are Happy?

Posted on by
Reply

Keith Scott-Mumby MD, PhD

Happiness is a critical issue for Man. It touches on the subject of success. How then can we define it?

Well, it feels good; it modulates stress and fear; it seems somehow right; it brings self-worth and rationality; it has a kind of warmth and comfortableness. Beyond that, it gets increasingly hard to define. One of the questions we use in the workshops is “How do you know when you are happy?”

In other words, what does it feel like? What mental and bodily signals tell you that you are happy? Most people have never stopped to think about this. You can try and extend this description of qualities for yourself: see how many more you can come up with. Continue reading →

Shamanic soul retrieval psychotherapy style

Posted on by
Reply

Mending the Fragmented Self With Soul Retrieval

 by Dr Keith Scott-Mumby

I turn now to the shaman model of healing called soul retrieval, not merely as a curiosity, but in considerable awe and respect for a tradition as old as consciousness and twice as old as other healing arts! It has worked so well for so long among so many peoples, it is in every sense a Super Healing technique.

The fact that most of the proponents are supposedly less sophisticated than ourselves does them less than justice and probably turns our blind eye of prejudice away from what may ultimately prove to be the best of all wellness approaches.

Journey with me and see if you agree [KSM].

Soul Retrieval

Quite simply, there is no real health without true being. We are not a body; therefore to treat only the body is to miss much of the impact and purpose of the healing arts. In the words of Sandra Ingerman, US career-shaman, “For shamans the world over, illness has always been seen as a spiritual predicament”. (Ingerman S, Soul Retrieval, Harper San Francisco, 1991, p. 17). Her lovely book is subtitled “Mending the Fragmented Self”, which says it all. Mechanistic reductionist science has little currency here.

One of the most succinct models for dis-ease in this domain is the “loss of soul” or soul parts. You might prefer the term “life particles” to soul parts. The concept is that of parts of the self being torn off and getting lost. This would typically take place at times of extreme suffering. Today we often find soul loss is a result of such traumas as incest, abuse, loss of a loved one, surgery, accident, illness, miscarriage, abortion, bad drug trips and military combat. Even witnessing traumatic events, such as a crime scene or bloody death, can cause loss through shock and horror. Coma, of course, is the most extreme form of soul loss.

People will often describe feeling as if they are incomplete after the calamity; “something died inside me”, “I don’t feel myself anymore”, “I left my heart behind”, “I don’t feel all here”, “I’m aching and empty inside” and so on. The hippies used to have an expression “feeling untogether”, which is a rather poetic way of putting it, though in their case it was often self-inflicted, due to recreational drug abuse.

What seems to happen is the patient loses some of their resources when the part or parts flee. Certain skills, qualities or other desirable character traits are no longer there and so he or she cannot act out these aspects of the self. The same is true in reverse, of course, and the skills and knowledge present at the moment of schism return remarkably when the retrieval procedure is completed. But the break is very real and the homecoming particles sometimes have to be brought up to date regarding what has happened to the patient in the intervening years in order to fully integrate. Continue reading →

Knowledge As A Trade Commodity

Posted on by
Reply

I first published this piece in Dec 1993. That was the last time my first wife and I could have described ourselves as lovers. The family gathering at Christmas that year my youngest son always calls our “Shooting Party”, after a wonderful movie with James Stewart, depicting the Edwardian culture literally falling apart in the last months before WWI changed Britain and Europe forever!

Anyway, in this piece I wrote about the rise of the “Information Age”. See for yourself how close I got with some of these concepts (many from Peter Drucker, as you will see).

I was a little bit off with “Educational Entrepreneur”; these days we would probably say Infopreneur. 

Did I foresee the rise of social networking in the section of “The Human Element”? I think so 🙂

Drucker was spot on in talking about New Social Classes. He described perfectly the high wage and social status of those who live and work in Silicon Valley. 

I called my writings then Applied Philosophics™. I still have the trademark for that name in the UK. 

The promised knowledge and skills will be coming to you, via this website…

Continue reading →