Just when you thought it was safe...

I saw Jaws on TV this weekend. Not strictly connected to the well-being movement, but a wonderful film, and a psychologically acute one. I think the film traumatized an entire generation with its connection of the sea with danger and predators.

What I really love about the film, what makes it one of my top ten movies, is the narrative structure. I can't think of a film that is better paced as a narrative - the film never lets up, from the first discovery of a dead body, to the final destruction of the shark. It's like the great Hitchcock movies in its artistry and the economy of each shot adding to the overall power of the narrative.

Like other great horror movies - Alien, Predator - Jaws emphasizes what John Gray called the contingency of humanity. Humans build up their civilizations which protect us from nature, which gives us the illusion that we are the masters of nature. But there, out in nature, is a beast that is deadlier than we are, that makes us look impotent and powerless (emphasized in the underwater shots of the pathetic human legs flailing around in the water). Horror movies are, like Greek tragedies, about the revenge of nature upon civilization.

However, while the film is about human impotence in the face of nature, it is also about the main character's journey from powerlessness to power. At the beginning of the film, Chief Brodie is crippled by his fear of nature - he is scared to go into the water or into boats. He has a sort of generalized anxiety, manifested in sea-phobia, but also in a concern about accidents happening to himself or his family (he's worried about his son falling off the swing at the beginning of the film).

It is not just his fears and anxieties that disempower him. His authority is also checked within the institutional framework of civilization, by the mayor, by the forces of commerce, by family life, all of which to some extent compromise his authority. This is what makes it rather poignant when Hooper asks him if he has the authority to cut open a dead shark. 'Of course I can' he replies. 'I'm the chief of police'. In fact, his authority has, up to this point, been consistently undermined.

Rather than continuing to suffer from these petty phobias and discontents of civilization, he leaves civilization, journeying beyond its boundaries like an archetypal hero, and faces the daimonic creature at its fringes. He finally confronts the beast alone, as he is sinking into the water, and blows it up. By the end of the film, he has the new-found confidence to say 'I used to hate the water' as he is swimming in to the coast. He has confronted the brutality of nature, and conquered it. So in a way, the film is a final triumph of humanism.

Weird dreams (1)

I had a weird dream last night. I was standing on a beach looking out to sea, and I saw a large plane crash into the waves. Then another. Then another. I wondered if I was asleep or dreaming, but my eyes were open, and there it was happening in front of me. 'The system must be broken', I thought to myself. I looked out onto the sea, and saw it was foaming with shapes - hundreds of whales moved about in the sea, raising their tails majestically.

Then, in the dream, I dreamt I was discussing the dream with a therapist. 'It's kind of cut-and-dry Freudian, isn't it? The high-flying aspirations of the ego thwarted, and the deep mysteries of the unconscious churned up...Or Jungian. Maybe it's more Jungian.' So I was analyzing my dream in my dream.

Weird dream. Not as weird as the dream I had in the middle of the night, which woke me up, about a cannibal psychopath who had killed, and eaten, 15,000 people, and still not been caught. Why 15,000?

Well-being is...a vibrating chair

Recently returned from Egypt, where I've been on a business trip for the last few days. I'll write my thoughts on it shortly. In the meantime, I was struck by how the rhetoric of well-being has infiltrated the flying experience.

In addition to the traditional onboard safety video, British Airways now has a 'well-being video', showing soothing images of healthy-looking individuals strolling over hills, and giving advice for 'onboard pilates' exercises to maximize your eudaimonia while onboard.

BA's magazine, High Life, also had an intriguing advert for something called the OSIM uSpace, which boldly claims to be 'the world's first well-being chair'. You may have thought other chairs granted well-being - rocking chairs, comfy sofas, swings, even perhaps a warm toilet seat - but they are as nothing compared to the cutting edge eudaimonic technology of the uSpace.

The advert reads: 'Inspired by Nature, the OSIM uSpace is your personal cocoon of Well-Being. A private space of retreat combined with clinically-proven Music, Mood Light and Massage to deliver a revolutionary trio of multi-sensory stimulation. A true metamorphosis unfolds each time you indulge in the holistic and sensorial pampering of your Well-Being with the OSIM uSpace.'

2,000 years ago, the Greeks suggested that well-being meant following a path of austere self-denial. Now, it means being pampered in a vibrating chair. Progress, my friends, progress.

The neuroscience of mysticism

If you walk down Las Ramblas in Barcelona, there's a section of the boulevard, in between the bird-sellers and the flower-stalls, that is filled with mimes. There's usually five or ten of them, standing there like statues, waiting for someone to drop a coin.

I remember one of them, on my last visit there, was a man standing on a pedestal. The left half of him was dressed in a suit, holding a suitcase in his left hand, with a ball and chain around his left ankle. And the right side of him was dressed like a hippy, with flip-flops, bermuda shorts, thai-dye shirt and long, hippy hair.

If you put a coin in this man's cup, he did a little dance and shook his right hand as if in liberation. Then he bent forward and handed you a note, which said something like 'Free your mind from the tyranny of the left hemisphere'. And that was it. I found his little dance so amusing I put three or four coins in his cup.

I always thought he was just an amusing crank. But it seems like there might be more wisdom to his folly than first appeared.

I have been reading about a new book called A Stroke of Insight, by the neuro-anatomist Jill Bolte-Taylor. Jill had a stroke eight years ago, caused by a blood clot in the left hemisphere of her brain. Showing amazing awareness and courage, she used the opportunity to observe as a scientist what was happening to her.

She observed that the blood clot seemed to silence the chatter of her left hemisphere, and liberated the activity of her right hemisphere. And she found it wonderful and, dare I say it, mystical.

What do these two hemispheres do? She says: "If you look at the brain, you can see that the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere are physically almost completely separate. They process information differently, they think about different things, they care about different things and have different personalities."

"The right hemisphere is focused on the moment, on right here, right now. It learns through sensory information - how the moment feels and tastes, through imagery and movement. It is connected to the energy all around us. In the moment, we are all brothers and sisters."

"The left hemisphere thinks methodically. It is about taking information from the present moment, picking out details and categorizing them. It sorts information from the past, and projects it into the future. It thinks in language. It is the little voice that says to me 'I am', and 'I need to do this and that'. As soon as it says that, I'm separate from the energy flow of the moment, and separate from others."

When Jill had her stroke, the chatter of her left brain was silenced, and she had what was clearly a mystical experience: "I found Nirvana. I was totally disconnected from the usual brain chatter, I felt free of 37 years of emotional baggage, I was filled with wonder at the energy all around me, and felt a profound sense of peacefulness. I felt like a genie let out of the bottle, and I thought there was no way I could squeeze the enormousness of myself back into my body."

What convinced her to come back, to get better, was the thought that she could help explain our brains to us, and explain to us how we could all choose, at any moment, to leave the egotistic chatter of the left brain and step into that great cathedral of the right brain.

Inspiring stuff. As some journalists have pointed out, her experience sounds very much like others' accounts of near-death experiences - the sense of oneness, of expanse, the desire to come back and tell others. I had a similar experience myself, when I fell off a mountain, knocked myself unconscious and broke my leg. When I came to, I spoke gobbledeegook (the left hemisphere was perhaps suspended), and felt filled with peace and oneness with the universe.

Jill's ideas remind me William James' attempt to find a scientific explanation for religious emotions, and also of the work of neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who took brain scans of Buddhist novices and of monks as they were meditating. He discovered significantly more 'gamma waves' in the advanced monks' left pre-frontal cortex (supposedly the site of happiness) than in the right pre-frontal cortex (supposedly the site of anxiety). So is the left side the baddie or the goodie?

Well, in any case, I think Jill is certainly right that we can train ourselves to step out of the ego-chatter, and remind ourselves of the simple wonder and beauty of existence, which is far more amazing than our career or whatever. We can bring ourselves back to a sense of wonder and oneness, and we can develop this sense, and broaden it.

Here's a talk Jill gave about her experience at TED:

Fit to rule?

There's a great article in the Guardian's Comment Is Free today by Jonathan Naess, the head of the mental health lobby Stand To Reason. He points out that although one in five MPs say they've experienced mental illness, hardly any are prepared to openly admit it for fear of damaging their electability.

He quotes one MP who , in an email explaining why he felt he couldn't appear on TV talking about mental illness, wrote: ""I would love as an established MP to talk openly of the serious depressive illness I endured long before I became or even thought of being a MP. It might serve as some small encouragement to those few young people currently shrouded in despair feeling their life is hopeless. A thread of real cruelty though runs through the modern media and I am sufficiently politically aware to acknowledge it and for now let the head rule the heart."

Naess even points out that, according to arcane English law, 'lunatics' and 'idiots' are forbidden to run from office. What is a lunatic? If you define it as anyone who has experienced mental illness, then that would rule out many MPs, including Winston Churchill, who famously suffered from depression. It would also rule out Abraham Lincoln, another depressive.

There is still serious stigma regarding mental illness. I remember when I was interviewed by The Guardian talking about my experience with social anxiety, some friends contacted me, not to offer support, but to express surprise and trepidation that I had spoken about it openly. Presumably they thought it was damaging to my image, and therefore potentially damaging to them, as associates of mine...

Spiritual healing

Here's an article I wrote on spiritual healing, which is in today's Times 2 magazine.

Spiritual healing looks to go mainstream

As the government considers statutory regulation for Chinese complementary medicine, spiritual healing is also looking for a greater role within the NHS, writes Jules Evans.

If you see Angie Buxton-King at work in the University College Hospital (UCH) cancer treatment wards in central London, she looks like any other hard-working member of the NHS - on-the-ball, down-to-earth, somewhat over-worked. But Angie's talents are slightly different from those of the other staff around her. She is a spiritual healer, one of very few working on the NHS pay-roll.

Patients who come to UCH's pioneering cancer wards are offered, in addition to the chemotherapy and radiotherapy that forms the backbone of their treatment, a range of complementary medicine treatments, provided by a four-person team managed by Angie. There's a counsellor, a massage therapist, and two healers - her husband Graham and herself. And their services are in great demand. This isn't surprising - statistics suggest that around 90% of cancer patients use complementary medicine such as massage, aromatherapy and spiritual healing.

The healers have an office very like any other NHS office - computers, filing cabinets, NHS paperwork. In the back of the office, however, is a small room, where patients lie down on a couch. There, Angie turns on a CD of relaxing music, puts her hands on and over the body of the sick patient, and channels healing energy. Patients often report feeling a heat emanating from the hands, as well as a profound feeling of relaxation and peace. Then, after fifteen minutes or so, it's time for the next patient.

How did a practitioner of spiritual healing, which some would call a throw-back to an earlier age of medicine, come to be practicing amid the high-tech treatments of UCH? It started in the late 1990s, when Angie's son, Sam, was battling leukemia. Angie says: 'His diagnosis came with the mind-set that he would not live longer than about three months. So we looked at alternative ways of helping him, and over the following three years that he lived, it became very obvious that his quality of life was improved by healing.'

Angie became very motivated to offer her services as a healer to other patients battling cancer within the NHS. She first offered her services to Great Ormond Street hospital, where Sam had been treated. They were sceptical, so she went round the corner to UCH, known for its pioneering work in treating cancer. Stephen Rowley, clinical director of haemotology at UCH, says: 'Angie came to us and asked for an opportunity to prove the need for her services.'

UCH took her on for one day a week for a trial month. Angie says: 'After one month, they said they were very interested in the results. The whole ward benefitted - not just the patients, but the staff as well. The results are very tangible.' The hospital took Angie on for two days a week, then eventually as a the manager of the four-person complementary team. Four other healers also work at UCLH, paid for by a charity that Angie and Graham set up.

Her team is now very accepted and integrated into the cancer wards of UCH. Dr Maria Michelagnoli, paediatric and adolescent consultant oncologist at UCH, says: 'I'd call myself quite a sceptic at the beginning, but you see the results and you can't question the results. I'd be absolutely devastated if we lost these professionals. They're an essential part of the team.' Dr Rowley says: 'I see experienced doctors call for the healer to help support a child having a cannula put into a vein. We see patients benefit physically and psychologically in many ways. We'd like to see complementary medicine as a mandatory part of any cancer team.'

Other experts in cancer treatment also believe spiritual healing has a place in NHS treatment. Derryn Borley, the head of cancer support services at Macmillan Cancer Support, says: 'We think it certainly has a place. It's very accepted by most people who treat cancer. There's evidence that it improves patients' moods, that it can help with physical symptoms. And it helps people go through the process of chemotherapy more easily.'

So what happens during spiritual healing? There are different varieties - hands-on healing, hands-off healing, and even distant healing. Healers themselves believe they are channelling healing energy from a higher source. It is different, however from faith healing - it is non-denominational and doesn't necessarily require the patient to share the religious beliefs of the practitioner. Indeed, one study showed spiritual healing having a positive effect on plants. Some scientists believe that, if it does work, it is a result of the 'healing intention' of the healer's mind. There's growing evidence, for example, that praying for the sick helps them recover.

One study by the Rabin Medical Center in Israel, published in the British Medical Journal in 2001, conducted a trial on two groups of people with bloodstream infections, one of which were prayed for, the other of which weren't. The study found that the prayed-for patients had shorter hospital stays, shorter duration of fever, and lower chances of mortality.

A study in 2000 supported by the Wellcome Trust, carried out by professor Edzard Ernst, who is the UK's leading professor of complementary medicine, carried out a systematic review of 23 randomized, controlled trials of distant healing. The report found: '57% of the trials showed a positive treatment effect.' Ernst has since carried out his own trial of 110 patients with chronic pain. Half of them were treated by professional spiritual healers. The other half were treated by actors pretending to be spiritual healers.

Ernst writes: 'The results were staggering. Improvements were so remarkable that several patients practically abandoned their wheelchairs during the study. But there were no differences between the groups. If anything, the control patients fared slightly better than those receiving 'real' healing. Even the often-quoted tingling sensation and feeling of warmth during healing sessions were also experienced by patients who received no healing at all. Results such as these strongly suggest that spiritual healing is a powerful placebo, but not much more.'

It's possible, then, that the healing comes about through the patient's own mind. 'The patient lies down, their muscles relax, and they think that something good will happen. It's about being comfortable and having a good relationship with the healer', says Borley of the Macmillan Trust. Other doctors believe that the benefits are mainly psychological. Dr Beatrice Seddon, consultant clinical oncologist at UCH, says: 'Conventional medicine is good at dealing with the physical side of illness, though probably less well-equipped at dealing with the psychological aspects.'

However, healers themselves dispute the idea that the benefits their work brings are just the result of the placebo effect. Angie says: 'I wanted to see if that was true, so for a while I just practiced on animals, and still saw positive results.' The Harry Edwards Healing Sanctuary in Surrey, which provides healing free of charge, also often treats animals. Toni Jode, senior healer there, says: 'We've treated dogs, cats, even a horse. And I don't agree with these studies where you have a 'real' healer and a 'sham' healer. Everyone has the potential to heal.'

Certainly, patients themselves say something more profound than the placebo effect took place during spiritual healing. Dr Anil Wijetunge, a tutor at the North West London NHS Trust, became sick with bone marrow cancer in 2005, and received spiritual healing at UCH. He says: 'Something was going on with the energy. The healers know which part of me was suffering the most, like my right leg, during the treatment. I can't explain why that happened, but it did. Seeing these healers, who I hadn't met before, they took me somewhere else, out of that isolation room. And that's what I really needed.'

Angie would like to bring spiritual healing to other NHS cancer wards, as would other doctors at UCH. She says: 'Many hospitals would love to have these services, the problem is funding.' Angie set up a charity, the Sam Buxton Sunflower Healing Trust, which funds four spiritual healers at UCH. They have raised thousands of pounds through two 'Sunflower Jam' concerts in 2006 and 2007, where acts included Robert Plant, Paul Weller and Jon Lord of Deep Purple. The next jam is set to take place in London in September, with a re-formed Deep Purple headlining.

But could the NHS provide more support for spiritual healing? Baroness Finlay, a professor of palliative medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine, says: “The NHS needs to think carefully about how to allocate its scarce resources. It's not enough to say spiritual healing makes patients feel better. Having a hair-cut might make them feel better as well, that doesn't mean the NHS should provide it. We haven’t yet seen any studies that have demonstrated that it works. If you expect the NHS to pay for it, you need the evidence.”

The reports from patients, in fact, suggest they get more benefit from it than a haircut. Connor Devine, a young boy who received healing for leukemia at UCH, says: '[Without the healing sessions] I don't think I would have made it. It meant so much to me.' Ryan Palmer-Fenny, another boy who received healing for leukemia at UCH, says: 'If I hadn't had the healing sessions, I might have fallen behind with the chemo, and I might not be here today.'

Still, healers themselves accept that more research needs to be done to try and give the practice the hard evidential support it needs. One study about to be published, by Fiona Barlow, a PhD student at Bournemouth University, conducted a trial of 12 women recovering from breast cancer, who received healing from Toni Jode and another healer at the Harry Edwards Sanctuary. Fiona says that all the 12 women felt positive results and said they would recommend spiritual healing to others.

One of the participants, Joanna Mountevans, a nurse with 30 years' experience, says: 'I went into the trial with an open mind. I neither believed in it nor disbelieved in it. To my surprise, I felt a great effect from the sessions of healing with Toni. I felt serene afterwards. I was going through a hectic period of my life, and it was like whatever life threw at me, I could cope with. I would say it's a healing of the spirit. I found the experience tremendously uplifting and would recommend it to anyone.'

Angie Buxton-King is also carrying out a major trial into the effects of Reiki, a form of spiritual healing that came from Japan, later this year. The trial will include 200 patients and will be funded by UCH.

She says the other aspect of spiritual healing that needs to be improved to make it more institutionalized and mainstream is the regulation. This is the way other complementary therapies are heading - a government working group chaired by professor Mike Pittilo recently recommended statutory regulation for Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Writing in The Times in June, Pittilo said: 'There is honest recognition that the evidence base for many [complementary] therapies is thin, but given the public demand for treatment, this should be addressed alongside the introduction of statutory regulation rather than as a pre-requisite.'

Graham King, who also works as a healer at the oncology ward of UCH, says: “ Regulation of spiritual healing needs to be improved. There are too many organizations, and many different healers who don’t belong to any organizations. There are no proper complaints procedures. There are some organizations where as soon as a healer signs up to them, they refer people to them, without any proper training.” Angie agrees: 'Some healers also want to provide spiritual counselling to people. “But that’s not our job. A healer's spiritual beliefs are their own private affair. Spiritual healing has to fit into a box, to some extent, if it’s going to be integrated into the NHS.”

Regulating the industry could be a challenge. There are 15,000 healers at work in the UK, and several different governing bodies. But Angie says: 'It's the only way it's going to go forward.'

The 2008 Sunflower Jam is taking place on Thursday 25 September in London. For more information go to www.thesunflowerjam.com

Vertigo

What a joy, Sunday afternoon watching one of my favourite movies, Hitchcock's Vertigo. I don't like it quite as much as Rear Window, but perhaps it's a more intriguing and bizarre film. It explores a similar idea - at what point does a fascination, an obsession, become a perversion?

I find Vertigo so brilliant because I don't think any other work of art has so successfully explored the way that we project our fantasies and desires onto other people. I mean, we are often drawn to people, or repelled by people, because they remind us of someone else, and we turn them into characters in our own inner psycho-dramas. We are haunted by the ghosts of previous relationships, and often these ghosts will, in our mind, possess new people we meet, so that we seem, in our minds, to be conversing with, even embracing, the past.

In the film, James Stewart plays Scott, a retired detective who becomes bewitched by a mysterious woman, a blonde called Madeline, who is in turn obsessed with the idea she is the reincarnation of an eighteenth century lady whose painting she goes to see every day in the San Francisco Gallery. The eighteenth century lady tragically went mad and threw herself from a tower, and the blonde is morbidly convinced the same fate will befall her.

She and Scott fall in love, but she becomes increasingly obsessed with her fate. One evening, they drive to the tower where the eighteenth century lady killed herself two centuries before. Madeline suddenly runs up the tower. Scott tries to stop her, but he gets vertigo walking up the tower steps, and can't go on. Madeline falls to her death.

A year later, Scott can't get over the death and the feeling that it was his fault. Everywhere he looks, he seems to see Madeline He is haunted by her. Then, one evening, he sees a woman in the street who looks exactly like her, except this lady is a secretary called Judy, and she is a brunette. He follows her, and explains how she looks just like a former love of his who killed herself.

He begins to court Judy, and she falls in love with him. But he insists on turning her into Madeline - making her dress like her, even making her dye her hair blonde and pinning it back like Madeline did. It becomes uncomfortable watching the relationship, as you realize how obsessed Scott is, even to the point of being cruel to Judy, denying her identity, forcing her to play a role to gratify his erotic fantasy. As she sobs to him, 'If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?'

She is forced to be someone else to try and win his affection, to play a role. How often that happens in real life, that people have to lie about themselves, have to perform a part, to try and win the love of the people they love. Civilization forces us all to do that, really, to play a role, to lie, in order to try and win the love of others.

In this scene below, Scott finally persuades Judy to die her hair and pin it back like Madeline did. She emerges from the bathroom, and Hitchcock uses a camera technique so that she looks blurred and like a ghost. She walks forward, and it's like an eighteenth century phatasmagoria, where a showman would move a slide on a magic lantern to make a ghost appear to move towards the audience. Except this is a ghost that Scott can embrace, like Doctor Faustus embracing the ghost of Helen of Troy.


There's an added twistedness to the film, in that Hitchcock himself was famously obsessed with a certain type of icy blonde, which appears in so many of his films - in Rear Window, played by Grace Kelly; in North by Northwest, played by Eve Marie Saint; in The Birds, played by Tippi Hedren. He was obsessed by this figure, erotically obsessed, and made his actresses act it out for him over and over in his films. So really, Vertigo is an exploration of his own perversion.

There's another fantastic moment at the end of the clip above, when Scott finally embraces the blonde Judy, and for a moment he starts to hallucinate, and to imagine he is in the tower kissing Madeline, as he did a year ago.

That's a very psychologically real moment. I remember, many years ago, when I had broken up with my girlfriend and was feeling haunted by guilt, I kissed another girl, who was slightly similar, and I looked up from the kissing, and the girl suddenly looked exactly like my ex-girlfriend. For a few seconds, it really seemed to be her.

We are haunted by ghosts. What is the original, the prototype, that we are chasing? Freud would say it was our mother. Hitchcock would probably agree. Or is it a relationship from a past life, some centuries-old relationship that we are doomed to repeat over and over until we get it right?

Perhaps the vertigo of the title refers to those moments, when we seem to view down the centuries, through past life after past life, the same relationships endlessly repeated, endlessly repeated, endlessly repeated...

A little less Converse-ation?

The iconic Converse Chuck Taylor gym-shoe is a hundred years old this year. Converse has commissioned a special centenary advert, starring Pharrell Williams, Santogold and Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, singing, dancing, and celebrating this wonderful, incredible, amazing shoe.

You can also watch a hilarious video of Pharrell talking, with an admirable lack of irony, about what the Chuck Taylor means to him. 'Chuck Taylor's have come into my life on at least two different occasions', he says, as if talking about the arrival of some kind of spiritual force.

Perhaps Chuck Taylor's really are some kind of spirit force. Marx talked about the fetishization of commodities, how in capitalist societies we imbue commodities with a sort of aura or spiritual power, make them objects of worship and collective identity.

Another Chuck Taylor, this one the Canadian philosopher also known as Charles, makes a similar point in his recent book, A Secular Age, where he says: "Commodities become vehicles of individual expression, even the self-definition of identity. But however this may be ideologically presented, this doesn't amount to some declaration of real individual autonomy..."

He continues: "My buying Nike running shoes [or Converse Chuck Taylor boots] may say something about how I want to be / appear, the kind of empowered agent who can take 'Just Do It!' as my motto. And in doing this, I identify with those heroes of sport and the great leagues they play in. In so doing, I join millions of others in expressing my 'individuality'. Moreover, I express it by linking myself to some higher world, the locus of stars and heroes, which is largely a construct of fantasy....Of course, it goes without saying that a more genuine search for authenticity begins only where one can break out of the Logo-centric language generated by trans-national corporations."

Converse's Chuck Taylor's are undeniably very strong brands. They were the epitome of Fifties youth culture, worn by jocks and T-Birds alike. They went with the skin-pipe jeans to make up the punk look of the Ramones. All the male members of Blondie wore them on the cover of Parallel Lines.

And my generation, and the generation beneath me, seem to love them and identify with them just as much. In my attempts to find dates on the Guardian's dating website, I noticed that one of the most common features by which girls in their mid-twenties or early thirties described themselves was their love of Converse shoes. It cropped up an amazing number of times. Loves: long walks in the country, evenings by the fire in a pub, Converse shoes.

So struck was I by this love of British women for Converse shoes, that when I next went out buying sneakers, I decided to get a pair of black Chuck Taylor's. 'You can't go wrong with Chuck Taylor's', the bright, trendy girl in the store told me. 'I've got eight or nine pairs of them already'.

I like my Chuck Taylor's. I'm now part of the Ramones / Strokes / Pharrell / Blondie / Grease / entire female population under 30 trans-national community. I belong.

Gyms are the new churches

I finally joined a gym last week. When I did, I was struck by something. I had an epiphany on the running machine. It seems to me that gyms are gradually taking on the role of the Church.

In the past, when people were stressed or emotionally upset, when their life wasn’t going how they wanted it to, when they wanted to turn over a new leaf or expiate a sin, they went to the Church. They confessed their sins, they prayed to the Lord, they asked the priest for advice.

Few people in England, and hardly any in London, now have that sort of relationship with the Church. Most people I know never go to church. If they do, they go irregularly, and they would never share confidences with the priest there.

So we have millions of people who, if they no longer feel weighed down by sin, do at least feel stressed, uneasy, out of touch with their true selves, and weighed down by the burdens of modern life. So where can they turn?

Why, to the gym of course. They get on those running machines, and they exorcise their demons. They sweat them out. Exercise is the new exorcise. They exhaust themselves running on the spot, until they have no energy left to feel stressed or ashamed. Then they get off the machine, and they feel virtuous, because they have disciplined the flesh.

In my new gym, they even have a special room, called the ‘mind, body and spirit room’, where they give twice-daily classes in yoga. Yoga, of course, was originally a spiritual discipline that was part of Hinduism. It’s become incredibly popular in the West, because it gives you a spiritual, relaxed feeling, as well as a well-toned bum.

And, above the ‘well-being room’ is a spa and a massage parlour, which has a reception with a pretty smiling girl and a big sign saying ‘Heaven’. Yes, heaven in the 21st cenutry has become a massage parlour.

So the gym is gradually shifting, becoming less a place where you go to get in shape, and more a place you go to for ‘well-being’. Can it be long before there are also meditation classes at the gym, or whirling dervish classes? We could have Christian prayer from 3 to 4, followed by Tantric massage at 5 and shamanic drumming at 6.

Actually, I think this spiritualization of the gym is no bad thing. As I’ve written before in this column, I think it’s useful if we go beyond thinking of spirituality as a matter of faith and metaphysics, and start thinking of it as a set of exercises, habits and practices. Gymnasiums, in ancient Greece, were in fact places of both spiritual and physical education – the two were not separated. The education of the mind was intimately connected to the education of the body.

So really, what we are perhaps seeing happen is not just a spiritualization of the gym, but a physicalization of philosophy. We’ve come to realize it’s no use simply sitting cramped in a library pouring over some logical text and thinking this makes you a philosopher. Philosophy is also about how you live, how you eat and drink, how you treat your body. Indian philosophers understand far better than most Western philosophers that the way your mind works and feels is intimately connected to how well your body is functioning, and that physical exercises have a profound effect on the mind.

Perhaps the fact that we are turning to the gym, of all places, for spiritual guidance shows how abjectly the rest of society – politics, literature, the media, schools and universities – has failed us. As Darrin McMahon, a historian at Florida State University and the author of Happiness: A History, said to me in an interview last year: “We’ve arrived at this bizarre situation where the only people teaching moral values in schools anymore are sports coaches.”

But slowly, this is changing. More and more people are talking about introducing the study of well-being, both physical and mental, into schools once more. In Australia, for example, one of the top schools, Geelong Grammar School, where Prince Charles briefly studied, has built a $15 million new ‘well-being centre’, which combines sports facilities – gyms, swimming pools, tennis courts – with facilities for mental well-being, such as counsellors and meditation centres.

The school’s headmaster, Steven Meek, told me: “The School’s aim was that the centre should not just help pupils in terms of physical health, but also in terms of mental health, that if students were beginning to feel lonely, upset etc., they would be able to go to the Well-being Centre to meet others, see a Counsellor, do some exercise, which is accepted as a way of combating depression.”

Perhaps the Church will cotton on to the new trend, and start offering Pilates classes in between services. The new priests will wear tracksuits and blow a whistle between hymns. When we confess our sins to them, they’ll insist we do fifty press-ups, fifty sit-ups, and ten star jumps.

Well-being conference in September

There's a well-being conference organized by the Young Foundation in London in September, with the full crew speaking - Lord Layard, Martin Seligman, Geoff Mulgan and Ed Balls...The speeches are interspersed with 'meditation and visualization' sessions, where I guess Ed Balls closes his eyes and tries to visualize a Labour fourth term.

I'm not quite sure how much it costs, the website is rather cagey on details. I've managed to burn my bridges with the Young Foundation after I wasn't short-listed for a job on their well-being programme, and sent a rather un-philosophical email to the programme director complaining about this. Still, might try to slip in under a pseudonym...

The Socratic Method

I've written a few times about how Stoicism is a leading influence on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). However, as important an influence is Socrates, the father of western philosophy, though his influence on modern psychotherapy is less remarked upon.

The influence is clearest upon Albert Adler, the one-time student of Sigmund Freud; and upon Aaron T. Beck, the founder of CBT. Both describe their therapeutic technique with patients as 'the Socratic method'. What do they mean by this?

Beck writes, in his groundbreaking work Anxiety Disorders and Phobias:

"Cognitive Therapy uses primarily the Socratic method. The cognitive therapist strives to use the question as often as possible. This general rule applies unless there are time restraints - in which case a therapist has to provide direct information to reach closure.

"While direct suggestions and explanations may help to correct a person's anxiety-producing thoughts, they are less powerful than the Socratic method. Questions induce the patient (1) to become aware of what his thoughts are, (2) to examine them for cognitive distortions, (3) to substitute more balanced thoughts, and (4) to make plans to develop new thought patterns."

"Good questions can establish structure, develop collaboration, clarify the patient's statements, awaken the patient's interest, build the therapeutic relationship, provide the therapist with essential information, open up the patient's previously closed system of logic, develop his motivation to try out new behaviour, help him to think in a new way about his problem, and enhance the patient's observing self."

"The therapist is modeling coping strategies by asking questions that expand a patient's constricted thinking. Often a patient reports that when confronted by a new anxiety-producing situation, he will start by asking himself the same questions he heard from the therapist: 'Where is the evidence?', 'Where is the logic?', 'What do I have to lose?', 'What do I have to gain?', 'What would be the worst thing that could happen?', 'What can I learn from this experience?'"

So this is how Beck defines the Socratic method. But is it one that Socrates himself used?

At a simple level, yes, because Socrates (or rather, the Socrates who we meet in Plato's dialogues) did indeed use questioning and dialogue between himself and his 'patients', as a way of helping them come to realize how their beliefs and ideas may be irrational and nonsensical.

Thus, in Plato's early dialogue, Euthyphro, we see Socrates meeting Euthypro, a worthy of Athens, on his way to bring a law case against someone. Socrates asks him how he can be so sure that he is acting justly or virtuously, and the two proceed to go into a dialogue, or dialectic, in which Euthypro puts forward his idea of virtue and tries to defend it, while Socrates questions him about it, draws him out, and gets him to dig down and examine how logical or rational his ideas about virtue are.

We discover that Euthypro's ideas aren't that rational or consistent at all. So we end up, by the end of the dialogue, in a state of ethical uncertainty as to what virtue really is. We realize, at least, that we can't be so sure about the things we thought we knew. We proceed with a new humility and willingness to examine our beliefs and ideas, and thus to 'know ourselves'.

Socrates' dialogues invariably pursue the question of 'what is the good?' How can we know whether our actions are virtuous or not? Are external factors such as wealth, fame or political power part of virtue or not? How can we come as close to virtue as possible.

Often, Socrates is busier in destroying bad or lazy thinking than he is in putting forward positive doctrines. However, in some of Plato's later dialogues, when Plato was developing his ideas, we see Socrates putting forward more positive doctrines. One can summarize them as follows:

Humans are possessed of reason. Our psyche, or soul, is rational. This rational psyche is given by God, who is also rational. God made the universe a rational, ordered whole. When the rational soul frees itself from bad or irrational ideas, it becomes more ordered and more aware of its own divinity. It recollects its own divinity. Philosophy is the work of taking care of the soul. The philosopher reminds people to worry less about conventional goods such as wealth or sex, and more about their souls, or psyches. He is thus a sort of 'psycho-therapist'. The best way to take care of the soul is to free it from the influence of the body, from the influence of the passions, and from the influence of bad ideas. We can do this through philosophy, that is, by thinking about our thinking, by examining our ideas, by knowing ourselves.

There are some important differences, then, between Socrates' method and goals and the method and goals of CBT. Socrates' aim, unlike the aim of Stoic or Epicurean philosophers, is not principally the elimination of anxiety. His philosophy is not as overtly therapeutic as Stoic philosophy. His aim instead is knowledge of the good.

CBT takes no real ethical positions. It is more Socratic in the early sense, of exploding obviously false and negative ideas, rather than Socratic in the later sence, of putting forward positive doctrines about the soul and its mission on Earth.

Thus a patient says to their therapist, 'I'm a loser, I'll always be a loser, I'll never be happy', and the therapist drills down to find the beliefs behind these statements and to see if they are rational or defensible:

'Why are you a loser?'

'Because I always fail to pull women.'

'Have you failed every single time?'

'Well, not every time.'

'So what is that?'

'A generalization, I guess.'

'And just because you've failed a few times, does that mean you are somehow 'a loser', in some total and essential way?'

'I guess it just means that I've failed in trying to pull a few times. I suppose I'm fairly competent in other areas of my life.'

'And you agree that it's possible to acquire new skills, including acquiring new skills at meeting women?'

'I guess so'.

'So it may be possible for you to acquire new skills, and to become more successful in the future, so then in the future you would fail less?'

'I suppose'.

'Do you think your self-esteem should depend solely on how you do with women?'

And so on.

The therapist plays the role of rational interrogator, and the idea, as Beck says, is that the patient will from these conversations learn the habit of rationally interrogating his beliefs, so that he no longer simply takes them on faith, or because they 'feel true', but starts to examine them more critically.

The therapist is not, as the later Socrates did, telling the patient what the goal of human existence is. He is not urging him to 'seek the good'. But he or she is pointing out that our self-acceptance and self-esteem doesn't have to rest on external success or failure. So there is a wariness of becoming overly attached to externals, which in some sense emerges from its roots in Socratic philosophy.

Above all, what CBT takes from Socrates is the idea that what imprisons us, what makes us miserable, is our ideas and beliefs; as well as the idea that we can free ourselves from these prisons by rationally examining our ideas and beliefs and if necessary discarding the bad or irrational ideas and replacing them with ideas that seem to make more sense.

CBT also takes from Socrates the idea that this process of mental liberation can be guided by a mentor figure - the philosopher, or therapist.

The idea that our suffering came from beliefs and ideas, and that our minds could rationally free themselves from this suffering by mental examination and philosophy, was hugely out of favour until very recently, mainly because of Sigmund Freud.

Freud argued that it didn't matter what we consciously thought or believed. We were ruled by unconscious motivations, by the 'Oedipus Complex' or the 'Death Instinct', and other irrational phenomena that escaped our rational awareness. The way to mitigate suffering was to go to a psychoanalyst, who would open up your unconscious via hypnosis, dream interpretation, word association, and years and years of therapy where you would lie on the couch and pick over your childhood or your dreams, while the therapist sat quietly listening and saying little.

Somehow or other, Freud's ideas convinced a huge amount of very clever people. I still find this remarkable. And because of his profound influence on our idea of knowledge and human free will, the idea of 'Socratic therapy' through rational self-questioning became very discredited.

Socrates, we should say in passing, did believe in messages hidden in dreams. He speaks of how sometimes our bestial nature expresses itself in dreams while our rationality sleeps, so that we dream of sleeping with our mother, for example. He also believed the gods spoke to us through dreams. But he still thought the real work of therapeutic philosophy existed in our conscious examination of our beliefs and ideas.

In the last 20 years, this idea of the importance of rationally examining our ideas and beliefs has come back to the centre of western therapy, via CBT. It aims to uncover the ideas by which we are guided. These ideas may be unconscious in so far as we don't fully examine them. We take them for granted. They are so taken for granted as to be automatic. They constitute the accepted perameters of our experience.

And yet, through the process of therapy, we can start to hold them up to the light, to examine them, their rationality and their usefulness. Why should my self-esteem depend on external success or failure? How do I know that such-and-such hates me? Does it matter so much if they do? Why should I let my unhappy childhood continue to make me miserable today and in the future?

CBT therapists have found that the mind does in fact respond to this sort of rational self-questioning, if it is done repeatedly, so that it becomes a habit to interrogate oneself and one's ideas, to play the Socrates to your own negative thinking. Our minds are rational, and we are capable of freeing ourselves from mental suffering. This idea was discredited and unfashionable for a century, thanks to Freud, Hitler, Nietzsche, DH Lawrence, Derrida, Dostoevsky, and all the other late 19th and 20th century irrationalists. I'm very happy to see it return to the mainstream of our culture.

Seeing things in black and white

There's a certain amount of fear and loathing in the UK media at the moment about the young underclass...and mainly the black underclass. There have been 17 young people killed in knife attacks in London this year, which the government says is actually normal, but the media are now making a big deal out of each attack, and a massive deal if the kid who died was white, particularly if he was white, middle class and connected to showbusiness, because then they can say 'he had such a glittering future ahead of him', which is harder to say if they were working class or black.

There has been a racial subtext to some of the media coverage. Here, for example, is a video by a BNP guy who's a member of the London assembly, calling the killing of Ben Kinsella (a white boy) by four black boys a 'race crime'. He says if he was elected MP, he would 'eradicate' this sort of attack in 'one swift move'. How, by introducing apartheid?




Race is the great unmentionable in our multicultural society. We are, as animals, evolutionarily disposed to distrust outsiders. And, at some stupid primitive level, we tend to distrust outsiders with different colour skins.

And then, the white racist mentality goes, we are particularly suspicious of people who have come to our society from less developed countries, and who seem unable to follow the rules of our society, who seem incapable of adapting to a more civilized existence, in which violence is outlawed and people are expected to control their behaviour and be polite to strangers.

The racist white person looks at the societies where immigrants came from, and looks with fear and loathing at the values of those societies, at Zimbabwe, for example, where mobs go from house to house beating up anyone who doesn't vote for Mugabe.

The white racist might then conclude 'black people come from a continent where highly socially complex societies have not developed after millions of years. Their societies remain smaller, more tribal, more prone to violence, corruption and instability. This may be a product of the climate and environment, which is not so conducive to socially complex societies. But still, the indigeneous humans grew out of that environment and learnt their values and typical ways of behaving from it, so perhaps have difficulty adapting to societies with other climates, and other value systems. Whether this is genetic or cultural, their difficulty at evolving stable and more socially complex societies is clear. And when they come to our society, they often struggle to adapt
to the tough behavioural demands of it, and end up violent or mentally ill.'


What does one say in reply to this racist statement? Obviously it's an inhumane statement, because there is a clear subtext of racial determinism to it. An educated black person may read it, and feel deeply offended and hurt, because the white racist is saying, just because of the colour of their skin, that they are, basically, primitive, wild, savage, incapable of socially integrating. It disregards every black person who's ever made different choices, who's chosen not to follow that path, who's chosen to work hard and improve their situation, against the odds. It disregards human choice and free will, in other words, because it's racially determinist.


That educated black person might say 'first of all, crime and instability happen in poor white neighbourhoods too. Look at the gang wars in Liverpool, for example, or Glasgow. Are Scousers and Scots also genetically incapable of adapting to civilization? The fact that knife crime and gang crime is also a big problem in these communities clearly suggests that these issues are more connected to cultural and socio-economic factors that to anything racially or genetically determined.'

'As to instability in Africa...democracy in Zimbabwe is very young...only 28 years old. Up to that time, the country was ruled (and exploited, some might say) by the British Empire, which kept the country in a state of infantile development, not giving it the opportunity to develop its own social institutions at its own rate. Instead, it imposed the nation state upon tribes who were perhaps not ready to progress to that form of social organization. Violence and instability happen all over the world. The worst violence we saw last century happened in...western Europe. Nothing committed in Zimbabwe compares to the atrocities of Nazi Germany, despite all their white civilization.'

The educated black person might continue: 'Yes, some young black people have difficulty integrating into society. So do some white people. So do some Asians. So do some middle class people. If it's not the working class fighting in the streets, its the middle class starving themselves to death or developing emotional disorders. It's the same thing - emotional difficulty in adapting to civilization. Everyone gets it. It just expresses itself in different forms.'

To which the white racist might reply: 'Yes, but the depressed middle class person doesn't stab anyone else. It's a victimless condition.'

'But they might very well kill themselves. Which is still a loss to society and a waste of human life. Anyway, the difficulties some young people have in integrating is made far, far more difficult by the belief that society is somehow automatically against them because of the colour of their skin, so that nothing they can do will change this negative attitude to them, this primitive suspicion of them, so they will always be second class citizens. If that's the case, then they might as well go off the rails, because what it waiting for them in the future?'

'So it's about changing beliefs?'

'Yeah, it's about changing beliefs. The young black person's belief that nothing good will ever happen to them, that they are second class citizens, that everyone is judging them and putting them down and not giving them respect. Take Alexandra, the young black Londoner who was on Big Brother. Look how brittle she is, how quick to take offence, how quick to fly off the handle. It's because she has very low self-esteem and thinks any criticism of her is a deep personal insult which must be revenged. Look how quickly she gets extremely offensive and aggressive, to the pointof actually threatening to shoot someone, despite the fact that, paradoxically, she says she feels there's 'a lack of courtesy and respect in the house':




So young people like Alexandra need to learn to respect and value themselves, even when or if others put them down. At the moment, on the street, it seems like a more medieval view of honour - if someone disrespects you, that is a blot on your honour until you revenge yourself somehow, by disrespecting or attacking them. This is how, for example, the Spanish aristocracy thought in the Renaissance, which is why they were constantly duelling and stabbing each other.

And this sort of extra-judicial violence had to be banned as civilization progressed. You had to move to a higher value system, where people can say 'just because that person insulted me, it doesn't really hurt me unless I think their judgment is valid or important. True strength lies in controlling myself rather than revenging myself. If I get angry and revenge myself, that is implying that their judgement of me is somehow important, or even accurate. I am a warrior if I remain in control of myself, not if I lose it.'

'OK fine, that's how the young person thinks. But what about the rest of society. Must we just wait while our young people struggle to adapt and kill themselves in the process?'

'No, white racist society has to change its beliefs as well.'

'Why, we did nothing wrong?'

'Your beliefs, your primitive suspicion of and prejudice against other ethnicities are a barrier to their successful integration into society, as much as their anger and resentment.'

'So how do I change my beliefs?'

'Learn to value human beings as individuals. How would you feel if someone, when they looked at you, saw you as just a white man, or just a middle class person, or just an Englishman or whatever? If they automatically judged you, before you opened your mouth, and put you in a box? They would be denying your individuality. Denying you, in fact. You'd be indignant, outraged. So don't do the same to others. Grant them the same respect, as free individuals, as you expect yourself.'

'But we're not just individuals, are we? We're also products of particular cultures. So in this sense, I am a white, middle class Englishman, part of that culture.'

'Then get to know black culture. Understand the socio-economic forces that shape it, and how the individual and group spirit tries to cope with these forces. Face your fears. Overcome your ignorance. Have the courage to treat other humans as humans, rather than as categories or stereotypes.'

'How do I do that?"

'Meet some, fool!'

'I don't know any black people.'

'Well how come you seem so sure in your opinion of them?!'

'Er...'

'If you don't know any, then at least get to know their culture.'

'Yeah, but it's all bling bling and gangster rap, isn't it? All 'I'm the best, I'm going to kill you, I'm going to fuck that bitch'.

'Yeah, gangster rap has got pretty big in the last 15 years, you're right. Mainly because it has stopped being a music made for black communities, and started being a global phenomenon mainly bought by white middle class kids who want to slum it and imagine they're a gangster, like playing Grand Theft Auto. Go out and listen to some proper hip-hop, some Kanye West, or Common, some Naz or KRS One.'

'I'm not really into rap.'

'OK, go and watch some black comedy.'

'Not Lenny Henry, please...'

'Forget Lenny Henry, go watch some Dave Chappelle. Here's some.'



'Yeah, maybe'

'And watch The Wire. Watch that shit right now. That'll make you understand what it was like if destiny decided to make you born in a ghetto rather than some nice rich neighbourhood.'



'Everyone is always telling me to watch The Wire.'

'Then watch it! And go to the NFT, and watch a film called Killer of Sheep. Greatest African-American film ever made. If that doesn't make you capable of empathizing what it's like to grow up in the ghetto, nothing will. Because that's what racism is. A failure of imagination, a failure of empathy, and a failure of sympathy. Which means you're less of a human.'

'OK, OK, I get it.'

Happy birthday, natural selection

Yesterday, 150 years ago, two papers were read out at the Linnean Society in London, one by Alfred Russell Wallace and the other by Charles Darwin, which first laid out to the world Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Darwin's theory continues to have a profound influence on psychology, via the increasingly dominant theory of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) which, like a particularly aggressive turtle on the Galapagos Islands, is busy fighting off all competition and establishing itself as the alpha male of psychological theories.

Still, I have four main reservations about EP. Firstly, its tendency towards biological determinism. 'Men naturally do this...it's how men have behaved for thousands of years. Men hunt. Women stay at home. Men are polygamous. Women flirt and gossip'. Etc. Yes, our 200,000 year history may give us a predisposition to behave in a certain way, and I find it very interesting to explore our evolutionary history, but evolution has not yet finished. We are making it up as we go along. So examining how humans behaved in the past may not be as enlightening as thinking how we would like to, or should, behave today.

Secondly, how useful is EP for people suffering from mental illnesses? If someone goes to an evolutionary psychologist, say, with social anxiety, the psychologist may well say 'social anxiety is adaptive. That's why it's survived for so long. So it's not entirely a bad thing.' Great! So the socially anxious person goes back to their flat and remains a bitterly unhappy recluse. Or the psychologist says 'social anxiety comes about because there's a mismatch between our primitive past, when we lived in groups of around 150, and our industrialized present, when we live in sprawling anonymous cities'. Great! So we'll have to join a tribe in the Amazon jungle to be happy.

Thirdly, virtue for followers of EP really comes down to social skills. Thus Matt Ridley, a leading EP popularizer, writes in his book The Origins of Virtue: 'What counts is not strength but social skills...The well-connected inherit the earth.' The EPers tend to emphasize that humans have evolved incredible abilities to team up, network, make pacts, persuade, schmooze, back-scratch, and arse-lick. And this, to them, is the height of virtue.

They note that monkeys, also, possess these sorts of cooperative and social skills, only we possess them to a much greater degree. So really, we are simply clever monkeys.

But I think human virtue and wisdom are actually much greater than this, and that the EP account of virtue leaves a great deal out. It leaves out our ability to conceive of our own death. It leaves out our ability to imagine the whole stretch of time and space, and our tiny selves in relation to it. It leaves out the struggle, which has happened throughout human existence, to find some sort of common identity and unity with the universe, to find some principle or idea which does not die.

Monkeys don't, as far as I know, go through this sort of long, hard struggle to find some unity with the cosmos. Humans do however, and this struggle is a crucial part of what it means for many people to be human. It has been right at the centre of what it means to be human for 200,000 years. But followers of EP leave it out.

Fourthly, and finally, followers of EP, like Herbert Spencer and the social scientists who followed Charles Darwin, love to use evolutionary theory to support their own right-wing, laissez faire politics and economics. Thus Matt Ridley, who wrote for the Telegraph, looks on the animal kingdom, and sees only little Thatcherites - struggling for status, making deals, learning to exchange and reciprocate.

At the end of The Origins of Virtue, he rises to a moving vision of a world free of state interference: "If we are to recover social harmony and virtue, if we are to build back into society the virtues that made it work for us, it is vital that we reduce the power and scope of the state...Let international and national states wither...Let everybody rise and fall by the strengths of their reputation."

And what did Matt do next? He became chairman of a Yorkshire bank called Northern Rock, which borrowed excessively, then became the first victim of a bank run in Britain for a century, and had to be bailed out by the government, in the largest involvement of the state in the banking sector since the 1940s.

How fitting.

You too can join the Positive Psychology global revolution

The newly-established International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) announced yesterday it is now signing up new members. Yes, for a mere $90, you receive all the great benefits of being a member.

Including:

* FREE quarterly calls with leading positive psychologists (Martin Seligman, Ed Diener, and others)
* FREE IPPA Newsletter
* REDUCED registration for World Congress
* OPTIONAL Positive Psychology News Daily subscription

What a deal, hey? A mere $90 to sit at the feet of the happiest people in the world, once a quarter, and learn their secrets...I feel happier just thinking about it.