Issue 1025
This week's practice


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Dear All,

‘Dear All’, I just jot that down at the beginning of any letter, but when you come to consider it’s meaning it’s quite significant.  It is both a sign of deep affection - for that’s what dear means - and given that it's extended to all it’s an expression of unity.  It was these two essential ingredients that were at the heart of the inspiring speech delivered by Prince Harry at the beginning of the Invictus Games in Vancouver, love and unity.  The name Invictus means unconquered and these games are founded on the idea of using the power of sport to inspire recovery, and  support rehabilitation.  It's all about healing in every sense. 

Harry’s life has had it’s fair share of conflict, but in speaking of unity it was more than evident that this was not only a carefully considered speech but one delivered from the heart.

In this moment of difficulty and division in many parts of the world, we gather here in Vancouver in a spirit of unity.  Beyond any differences, here at the Invictus Games we are grounded in mutual respect, competing fiercely, but believing in one another. Supporting one another.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9CoK4DzPKo

In the Circle of Virtue on which both these Wisdom Works emails and the Stoic Philosophy As a Way of Life course are based is the idea of working from unity to establish unity, something that is desperately needed in a world that is being torn apart by divisions of all sorts, and the games are a perfect example of just this.  

As you can see from the poster below, we’re putting together a series of free online presentations on this theme.  The first is in a couple of weeks on the 26th Feb. 7pm GMT  They are all based on living examples of this one idea, of how we might work from unity to establish unity.  To attend all you need do is to register.   I look forward to see you there.

Best wishes, William
 

This week's reflection

Mind Healing

So where does the idea of beauty healing come in? It’s not a new idea. The Greeks entertained the simple idea that beauty heals. They believed that beauty has the power to bring the discordant elements of the mind and body into a loving accord, and this principle of love they called ‘Eros’.


 

Under the authority of Asklepios, the Greek god of healing, whose wand remains the symbol of the healing arts, his followers conducted a form of health-care called ‘Nootherapia’, or mind healing, which sought to bring the mind and body under the health-giving power of harmony.
 

One of the great sites of classical culture, Epidauros, was entirely devoted to this idea. It was a centre of athletics, art and medicine. People went there to find harmony of body and soul. They sought to be cured by doctors such as Hippocrates, formulator of the Hippocratic oath. They would meet the likes of him and also artists and poets, amongst whom was Sophocles, one of the greatest of all the classical dramatists.

With the practice of Nootherapia, art and medicine went hand in glove.
The changing view of what constitutes healthcare finds its support in the classical world, where poets, philosophers and doctors combined to establish good health. With the growing recognition that the state of the mind has its inevitable effect upon the state of the body, the notion of Nootherapia and the important part it has to play is returning to the fore. As far as the ancient Greeks were concerned, changing somebody’s state of mind was achieved by bringing them back to their natural state of harmony, the unity within. They considered that the ‘Eros’ principle, the power of love, was the most effective way of achieving this.    

In Plato’s Symposium, the physician-philosopher Eryximachos, declares:

Medicine must indeed be able to make the most hostile elements in the body loving and friendly towards one another. It was by means of knowing how to introduce ‘Eros’ and harmony in these that, as the poets say, and I also believe, our forefather Asklepios established this art of ours.

Eryximachos is stating that, as far as myth is concerned, love was at the centre of the medicine practised in the spirit of Asklepios.

Practice

Consider your own health. Look to your own state of mind and body.
Observe what it is in your own way of thinking that creates discord.

Observe the tensions in the body that are generated by this discord.  Let it all go, the physical and the mental. Find harmony of mind and wholeness of body, unity at every level.

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Expand Your World INNOVATION/COMMUNICATION/CREATIVE THINKING Sunday March 2nd 10am-5pm understand what life is asking of you. Tickets including tea and coffee available in advance from the office - £15

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