A few years ago I went to the dentist and wrote about meditation practice. The other morning I went again and found myself thinking about meditation in a slightly different manner. About a week ago I saw a post about Sam Harris' meditation app and downloaded it. Well over a decade ago my partners and I shot a series of...
All the Rage - Trailer from rumur on Vimeo. Our film about Dr. Sarno is called “All The Rage” because, according the doctor, the repression of rage is a primary driver of many pain issues. From Dr. Sarno’s perspective, the pain acts as a distraction or defense against feeling or experiencing “unacceptable emotions.” Many people reject the idea that our...
Last night I was driving home from dinner when I heard a discussion with Nathaniel Rich, author of a full NY Times Magazine devoted to looking at the science of Climate Change. The discussion was devastating to listen to because it painted a picture of a dire situation that was close to being solved 30 years ago. A couple of...
post by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley In the mid 18th century, before the world knew about germs, a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis worked in an Austrian hospital where the death rate of women giving birth was 13% because so many were dying of fever after birth. At a nearby midwifery, the death rate was only 2%. Semmelweis began looking...
This morning I got an email from a friend who recently read Dr. Sarno’s Book “Healing Back Pain”. He expressed appreciation for the book but he also had some relevant questions. I get asked questions like this a lot, so I thought I’d answer them in a post. His first question was, “Dr. Sarno stated that if...
Humans have a tendency to want to think of ideas, as well as scientific "facts", as solid and immutable. Unfortunately, things tend to be a lot more complex and nuanced than we want them to be. This is nowhere more evident than in health care. The disease model of medicine looks for a single cause of illness because that makes...
Suki and I got back to work on “All The Rage” yesterday after two solid weeks of having the kids at home due to snow days. Snow days are good way to practice learning to accept what comes. It was distraction from the work, but sometimes stepping away gives up renewed perspective. One of the most difficult parts of...
[caption id="attachment_17785" align="aligncenter" width="711"] a note card found on the floor at the airport[/caption] There are times that I read something that's of interest to me that don't really seem to connect until much later. Other times, I'll read just a sentence and it will hit me like lightning, connecting back to something that I have read, sparking a new understanding...
This morning, while driving my daughter to the first day of school after the holidays, I heard a story on the radio about how much our environment influences our habits, and as such, the role it plays in our addictions. The story began with the discussion of the high rate of Heroin addiction among soldiers serving in Vietnam. At the...
One of our Kickstarter backers sent us this note, "I'm a former patient of Dr. Sarno (saw him in 2007). I went from stuck in bed in agonizing pain to back to work in two weeks. I am forever grateful for this life-changing experience, and THANK YOU for making this film!" We asked her to share her story with us...
Last week I went to St. Louis to shoot an interview with Prince Ea, a hip-hop artist racking up millions of views for his spoken word pieces that merge modern concerns with spiritual matters. A couple of weeks earlier, after seeing a very powerful video that he had made about letting go of stress, I reached out to him about...
This summer I read Eckhart Tolle's book, "A New Earth". The writing helped me get a better understanding of ego and empathy. Now I understand the idea; the thinker that is observing our thoughts is our consciousness, and that the thinker of the thoughts is the ego. Tolle uses the term pain body to reference the way in which identifying...