Though I grew up in a culturally Jewish household I don’t think that we ever went to a Synagogue while I was growing up, except for a single Bar Mitzvah. We didn't really discuss much about the ins and outs of religious holidays or rituals, but we did have the big book of Jewish Humor and the Woody Allen collection...
The link for this post was broken so we have re-posted Last week I heard on BBC radio that the National Health Service in England is instructing doctors to prescribe self-help books. The radio presenter seemed a little aghast at this idea and pressed a doctor by asking something along the lines of, “So you’re saying that you think that people...
Just before sitting down to meditate the other morning I read a couple of sentences about the truly evil actions that ISIS is taking in Syria and Iraq. We’re talking about torturing children, and holding up severed heads while smiling. As I lay on the floor I couldn’t help but think about the disconnect between the calmness that...
We have written about the relevance of Dr. Nadine Burke Harris' work a number of times on Rumur. She's the San Francisco-based doctor who realized that a good deal of the time, she was treating the symptoms of stress in her high poverty patients. When she began to practice with an understanding that her patients' stress was a causative factor...
**** I have updated this several times. I kind of dashed it off originally, and wanted to expand it. **** For many people the idea that their emotions are causative in terms of their pain or illness is unfathomable. However to me it's crystal clear that this is the case. This is not to say that all pain is emotional pain. ...
This is my Master Cleanse Journal. Master Cleanse is a 10 day fast in which you cut out all food but drink 60 oz of lemonade each day. The lemonade is ¾ cup of fresh organic lemon juice, ¾ of a cup of grade b organic syrup, a half teaspoon of cayenne pepper and 60 oz of water. You are...
This morning, on the way to day camp, my daughter asked how many words there are in the world. I replied that there are millions of words and they're all in dictionaries. I offered to sit down with her and go through one. She asked why there are so many words and I explained that words help us get more specific...
One of the key elements of Dr. John E. Sarno’s work is an understanding of the basic context of Dr. Sigmund Freud’s work. In an early interview that we did with Dr. Sarno he pointed out that in the 19th century mental illness was seen as a disease of the brain. It was only when Freud came along, and postulated...
Imagine for a moment that you move to a place where you don’t know the customs, or speak the language. It feels like you are living in a dream most of the time, and things don’t make sense in ways that you can’t put into words. While you can quietly observe what’s going on, when you try to speak or...
When I was in college I started a band with some friends. We played noisy chaotic music. When we were putting out our first 7 inch single we added the phrase “confusing the body to exploit the mind” to the cover art. The idea of getting lost in music to access some part of the mind that one was normally...
As we work on Story of Pain, we struggle to figure out how best to make use of the flood of amazing and inspirational materials that we are assembling. First and foremost, we want to make a film that tells the story of Dr. John Sarno. This will form the backbone and the heart of the film. In the process of...
I think a lot about science, but not the way most people do. I believe that there is a lot of knowledge to be gained through the scientific method, just as there is a lot of knowledge to be gained from the Bible. That is to say that both tell us important stories about life, but neither of them tell...