Dance may prevent cognitive decline in the elderly

An interesting bit of science this week was a study by Kattenstroth et
al in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, which was entitled "Superior sensory, motor, and cognitive performance in elderly individuals with
multi-year dancing activities". Although this study has many problems,
I thought it was still interesting. They compared performance of
elderly with a regular involvement in ballroom dancing (average dance
experience was 16 years) with a control group in a bunch of cognitive
and sensorimotor tests. Not surprisingly, they found that the dancing
elderly did better on the motor tests. They also found that they were
better on Raven's progressive matrices, a standard test of executive
function and cognitive control. I would be quite curious to know
whether those elderly were also better on tests of memory for
sequences, because remembering sequences is what you do a lot in
dancing (although I am not sure to what extent it is required in
ballroom dancing, now I come to think of it). A major problem with
their study was that there is a good chance that we're looking at
selection effects here: the elderly are dancing exactly because they
are still in good physical and mental shape. It would be interesting
to compare this group to a group of elderly who recently had to quit
dancing because of physical problems. Maybe the cognitive effects
could still be seen in such a group. Nevertheless, I think it is
probably always good to keep dancing into old age to stay happy,
healthy and alert.

Stress in academia

This week a message not about some scientific findings but rather
about what it's like to be a scientist, which is ... stressful
sometimes. I was talking about the upcoming grant deadline and he
remarked that I was not stressed at all, hence today's topic. It was
actually true that I wasn't very stressed, and it's an interesting
question to consider why. I think two things that help with stress are
(1) regular exercise and (2) having a bigger perspective. For number
1, I do ballet, which is a great source of joy as well as
exercise-induced endorphins. During ballet class, the only thing I can
focus on is the dance, the music and the expression, because otherwise
I will lose the plot and mess up the exercise. I think it's really
good to have such mental breaks, because they allow you to reorganize
your thoughts, and you'll get back to work with a lot of new ideas and
insights. Recently I read an interesting interview with the Dutch
philosopher Joke Hermsen, who complained about the hurried culture,
and the importance of simply wasting your time so you could get ideas
and reorganize your thought. I think it is a similar idea.

In addition to dancing I have my Buddhist practice, in which I
contemplate life and death every day. In the perspective of life and
death, a simple grant deadline is not such a big deal. In the end,
that is not what life is about. What life is about is more the
intention than the goal--simply because we cannot really control the
results of our actions which are dependent upon so many other
factors. Realizing this, we can take a step back and just say "I put
all my effort in it, now let's just see what happens. Irrespective of
the outcome, may this be of benefit to the world." When we take the I
out in this way, the stress is largely gone.

Disclaimer: This is of course all theory, and in practice I do get
stressed as well, but at least a whole lot less than without these tools!

How our memory influences our eye movements

I recently read a very interesting paper in Vision Research, which
showed that even if it is not a useful thing to solve the task at
hand, your eyes will tend to go to items that you have in your short
term memory (Mannan, Kennard, Potter, Pan & Soto (2010) Early
oculomotor capture by new onsets driven by the contents of working
memory. Vision Research 50:1590). They had people perform a dual task
where they first got a color to maintain in memory, and then had to
make a saccade to a colored circle on a screen with a tilted line. It turned
out that they were often distracted by the color they held in their
memory, and saccaded to that circle instead. This study therefore
shows again how much our perception is automatic and colored (quite
literally, in this case) by the things we have in mind (in our working
memory, and I am sure in our long term memory as well). "With our
thoughts we make the world."

Tenzin Gyatso Instute: how ancient teachings on wisdom and compassion can bring happiness to the modern world

The weekend of June 17/18th marked a pretty remarkable event in Berne, NY. On a piece of land where previously there was nothing, a group of almost 500 Rigpa students, local residents from the area of Berne, and Tibetan and Himalayan people came together to attend the inauguration of the Tenzin Gyatso Institute (TGI). TGI is a new center dedicated to bringing the ancient wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism in the modern world, and to making it live on. The day was marked by celebrations, uniting three different flavors: Tibetan culture, Western science, and its connecting bridge, the Buddhist teachings.

The event was enlivended with Tibetan music provided by the lovely Tenzin Kunsel (see picture), speeches by the eminent Tibetan leaders Lodi Gyari Rinpoche, Lobsang Nyandak, and Rinchen Dharlo, who all emphasized the historic nature of this event. Very encouraging was the fact among the Tibetan and Himalayan people there were many young people, who wanted to reconnect with their religion and culture. They felt very happy that Sogyal Rinpoche was a modern lama who at the same time upheld an authentic lineage. Young people are particularly important because the group of Western students that is drawn to Buddhism tends to be quite old ;-)

On the theme of science, Daniel Goleman discussed some scientific studies about the nature of happiness, and about what it means to be a good human being. He has been instrumental in the development of the Mind & Life Institute, a research collaboration and public dialogue on the scientific study of contemplative practice, of which I also have been lucky to be a part. It turns out that those two are quite closely related, and that Tibetan Buddhism has quite some expertise in developing these skills. Finally, on the theme of Buddhist teachings, Tsoknyi Rinpoche then showed how some of this expertise develops, when
he taught in his characteristically humorous way about the difference between education of the emotions and education focused on cognition. Whereas the West has mostly focused on the latter, the ancient wisdom of Tibet has strong insights in the former. Sogyal Rinpoche gave a complete teaching about meditation and the way we can
find inner peace and contentment, which is the source of happiness. All we have to do is to remember to turn our mind inwards.

After the celebrations were over, the teachings continued for a smaller group of long-time students of Sogyal Rinpoche. To mark the importance of this event, Sogyal Rinpoche shared some of the highest teachings in the Tibetan tradition, and he was even joined by Mingyur Rinpoche on one day, who charmed us all with his phenomenal facial expressions, as was able to in a very short span of time convey us some very deep knowledge and experience. We all felt it was a remarkable and life-changing
retreat.

It was wonderful to see how, maybe for the first time, large groups of Tibetan and Himalayan people came together with dedicated Western students of Buddhism, united under the wish to preserve this "ancient wisdom for the modern world."

FENS conference days 2 & 3

Day 2 of the conference ended with an interesting symposium on
neuroethics organized by Colin Blakemore. Neuroethics is a relatively
new field that incorporates the implications of neuroscience for our
view of the self, for social policy, the ethics of conducting
neuroscience itself, and implications of neuroscience for the public
discourse. Judy Illes started out with discussing how important it is
for neuroscientists to communicate their work to the public. Barbara
Sahakian gave an example of how her fundings on cognitive enhancers
for Alzheimers' patients were increasingly being used on college
campuses and other populations. What are the ethical issues invoked by
these things? Dr. Magistretti had an interesting talk in which he
proposed that a problem with such cognitive enhancement would be that
it tends to make people value quantity (intelligence test scores) over
quality of life. And we have no idea how these drugs affect our
creativity, for example.

The next day, Stanislas Dehaene gave a fascinating talk about how our
brain implements reading. He argued that our alphabets have developed
from shapes that our brains find easy to discriminate. He also talked
about how children early in life read and write in mirror-reverse, but
then they have to unlearn that, because reading and writing is
organized such that words with letters in the opposite direction have
a different meaning. The visual word form area therefore does not show
responses to mirror reverses, whereas closeby IT areas do show
responses to mirror reversed stimuli. Pascal Fries talked about large
scale neuronal assemblies in the monkey, and how attention modulated
periodic activity in the fast gamma band and slower beta band. These
bands showed activity flowing in different directions between
different brain areas. It is very exciting how they are really to
start mapping out the networks in the brain.

FENS conference, Day 1 & 2

Right now I am in Amsterdam, participating in the FENS conference--the Federation of
European Neuroscience Societies. This is the first time I am actually
going to a conference in my home country! Interestingly, they opened
the conference with a sketch by Freek de Jonge, a famous Dutch
stand-up comedian. Very cool to once see him in real life! (I happened
to be sitting in one of the front rows). The opening was followed by a
lecture by Nobel prize winner Roger Tsien, who spoke about molecules
he developed that could stain particular types of tissues, and he
showed how they could get a tumor to fluoresce in a living mouse and
use that to aid very precise tumor removal. Very impressive!

This morning I gave my poster and had quite a good crowd. I talked
about my efforts to relate the drift diffusion model of decision
making (Ratcliff, 1978) to EEG and fMRI data. We believe that evidence
accumulation is instantiated by brain oscillations, primarily in the
4--9 Hz theta band, which then feeds into the motor cortex, which
actually implements crossing the decision threshold. The latter is
visible in the Lateralized Readiness Potential (LRP). I showed some data
that finds correlations between individual differences in model
parameters and features of the LRP and oscillatory activity. An
interesting talk was given by Franscesco Battaglia, who talked about
theta coherence between the hippocampus (a deep memory structure) and
frontal cortex (mainly associated with executive function). He showed
that this theta coherence is especially strong at points in a maze
where rats have to make decisions. This theta coherence might be
related to dopaminergic influences, which might implement motivational
influences.

There was also a fascinating lecture by Prof. Tomasello, who posited
that human culture is defined by not just understanding each others'
intentions (which is called theory of mind), but also sharing
intentions. As opposed to monkeys, e.g., chimps, humans will
collaborate, share information, etc., even if it is not in their own
interest. They will share food, which chimps will never do. Even if a
chimp mother shares food with her child, she only does so when almost
forced by her child. So the really human thing about us seems to be
our altruism!

Ambition with or without an 'I'

Living in America can be quite stressful, especially being the type-A
personality that I am. I feel being driven is a very good thing, it
allows one to accomplish a lot. And yet, there are always chances to
get burned out and over-exhausted. So what is it that makes the
difference? Tsoknyi Rinpoche
has given some amazing teachings that address these issues. The core
of it (from my perspective) is that what makes ambition pathological is
when it is driven by ego, and by a constant need for recognition. One can
also be ambitious by ones motivation to help beings, but not be so
dependent on whether one is recognized or not. When functioning from
that perspective, you are much more closely connected to yourself, and
there is a lot more peace. Frustration cannot get a handle on you
because there is this deep courage. The courage to keep working for
the benefit of beings, in whatever way one happens to do it, no matter
what happens. Whenever you feel this sense of rushing, this impatience
that is the sign of ego, come, you can remind yourself that it is not
about 'me', and take a few deep, slow breaths, and a sense of quiet
will arise. It is quite remarkable, really.

Of course this will be quite a learning process, but even just to
recognize that there is a way out of our learned competitiveness and
judgmentalness, while still retaining our drive and dedication is
quite an insight. It is a tool on the way to becoming more of a
modern-day bodhisattva, as Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche likes to call it.

the circle is round

Yesterday I went to see Nacho Duato's Compagnie Nacional de Danca (CND). The ballets were very beautiful and so sensual! The dancers were completely embodying the music. What was even more interesting was that about 2 years ago, I went to a ballet workshop by CND, and this is where I broke my ankle. So I never got to see the performance, but now two years ago, the circle is round. When I went to the bathroom during the first intermission, coincidentally (?) I ran into the person who gave that workshop two years ago, and he recognized me and asked me how I was doing. I told him I was back to dancing, and even back on pointe, but that it had taken a long time. He said that he thought of me as they were in Philadelphia a few days ago. I am so happy we met and now it is as if this issue has finally found its peace. What an experience!

With your mind you make the world...

Recently, I heard a lecture from Elizabeth Loftus
about false memory. She presented evidence for claims that it is
possible to implant false memory in people--in fact, it is very
easy. For example, people can be convinced very easily that they have
gotten sick of a particular food, and will subsequently avoid it. This
is an effect that persists for even months! What is quite shocking
about these studies is that what we think of as us is really a
construction, and very easily altered. On the other hand, it also
gives us hope. We are not stuck with our psychological make-up: we can
change it fairly easily. That is probably the whole ground of Buddhist
practice. We convince ourselves every day on our cushion of the
importance of caring for others, and of the relativity of our own
perspective. This can make our minds much more flexible.

A few weeks later, I heard a lecture by Michael Kane about
mindwandering. It is actually quite easy to induce mindwandering in
people: give them a boring task, and off they go. What is interesting,
is that the amount of mind-wandering people do is related to their
working memory capacity. In general, people with a higher working
memory capacity tend to mind-wander less; although on easy tasks they
sometimes mind-wander more than people with low working memory
capacity. Of course in meditation we are trying to train not to
mind-wander. This begs the question: can meditation increase our
working memory capacity? There is some very preliminary evidence that
it can, although it is not sure by how much and for how long.

The final example comes from my own research, which shows that
intensive shamatha meditation training might actually change how you
perceive the world, and make it more precise. In a paper presented at
the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco, I argued that
after a month-long intensive shamatha retreat, participants were able
to remember face stimuli with less mental noise than before. There are
surely problems with my study, for example that the first time they
were tested, some participants had just had a long journey to get
there with a lot of stress. Nevertheless, all of these research
studies seem to point in the direction that we can change our mind,
and we can affect how we perceive the world.

Distraction

I think the essence of samsara, the vicious cycle of suffering that
Buddhists try to liberate themselves from, is our habitual searching
for distractions. The root of this is really feeling that we do not
have enough, that we need something else. Our economy has been very
much built to support and reinforce this tendency. But eventually this
is also the cause of a lot of harm on ourselves, others, and on the
environment. That is why href="http://www.mangalashribhuti.org">Dzigar Kongtrul's teaching
this summer about practicing little needs and much contentment was so
poignant. I very much believe this is what we need, now more than
ever. But how often do I not find myself working, and then this
feeling arises of "oh, I really need to check this website", or "I
need to really eat or drink something." This is exactly that: the
feeling that we need something more, all the time. And not only do
these feelings make one unhappy, but they also very much impede
getting work done.

What helps me a lot to regain my focus is first, to make a list every
day of what I want to accomplish and what my priorities are, and
second, to contemplate how all these things that I feel I need are
really impermanent and changing. Actually, when I do go after these
feelings they will not satify me, or only for a short time. Because
the only productive satisfaction is when I am simply content with what
is. And that is again the practice of little needs and much
contentment. How beautiful, yet how difficult!

A new perspective

As I am writing this, I am sitting at London Heathrow, on my way back
to Princeton. I have spent about three months in Europe, for the most
part in Lerab Ling. Taking the time out to go on retreat really gave
me a new perspective on my life and on the possibilities of the
mind. Because really, we tend to be so much stuck in the normal and
subnormal levels of mental functioning, and we have no idea what is
possible if we spend some time looking at our own minds and training
it.



On retreat, I divided my time basically between various meditational
practices and studying Buddhist teachings. These teachings in large
part concerned the nature of our minds, which according to the
Buddhist philosophy is our Buddha nature, and how we can start to
recognize it. Recognizing the nature of mind is best done in retreat
with a qualified teacher who can show you, and who can clarify what
the nature of mind is and what are just experiences. To even get a
taste of the nature of mind can be really transformative, and I really
started to appreciate the depth of knowledge in the Tibetan
tradition. Now the big challenge is to try to integrate some of that
experience as I go back into my hectic life. I really feel that
especially this hectic world of today needs so badly the enormous
space that is really there in your mind, at any moment, if you could
only recognize it!

Another great contribution that my practice of Dharma has made to my
life is the teachings about egolessness. Egolessness might sound
strange and scary but for me it really has to do with losing fear and
gaining self-confidence. Because if there is no I in the way I
conventionally think about it, then who is there to get hurt? Or get
criticized? Egolessness however, is quite subtle, and to really
understand it, you need to contemplate it over and over again. To be
surrounded by an environment that very much supports these
contemplations is again, very helpful!

The culmination of the retreat was a visit by His Holiness the Dalai
Lama, during which he inaugurated the beautiful temple of Lerab
Ling. This temple is built on the model of Samye, probably the first
temple in Tibet. It is an amazing place, full of holy statues and
beautiful thangkas. Just to walk around there makes you feel like in a
different world. During the inauguration, Lerab Ling was a buzz of
activity, especially when the inauguration was attended by Mme Sarkozy
and many other VIPs! This was really not quite an ordinary retreat!

Becoming the dance

(picture kindly provided by my cousin hakim)

I defended my thesis just over a week ago. Of course I freaked out on
the days before that and had all kinds of nightmares about things
going wrong. But it worked out well. I managed to figure out a way to
squeeze some ballet in there, used in this case to illustrate the
concept of similarity. The magical thing was that as I was doing the
ballet, I forgot about all my nerves, and really got into it. It was
kind of like when I have a good performance, and I really forget
everything. At that point, there is no 'I', there is only the dance or
the story and the audience. It is quite a magical and beautiful
moment. When I did the dancing this time during my thesis defense, I
too did forget my nerves, and just became the story I wanted to
tell. That is the magic of the performer.


But it may even be what is
meant by egolessness in a Buddhist sense: where the I is suddenly not
important anymore, and it is all about giving your life, your actions,
and your possessions to others, so that they may be happy. And then
when you stop worrying about yourself, magically happiness ensues. So
too when you become the dance, happiness ensues. The pain in my toes
is forgotten, and I bring both myself and the audience to a different
world.

A little bit every day

Sometimes people admire me for my flexibility in ballet class. Pretty
much invariably I tell them that that is nothing really amazing. It's
just a matter of a little bit every day. When you do some stretches
every day, you will most surely progress. In fact, that is true for
almost everything. Simple, sustained effort is that what will pay off
in the long run. One thing that made me even more aware of that is my
impending thesis defense. Suddenly 4.5 years of hard work will by
culminated by a thesis defense. Writing a thesis is pretty much like
running a marathon--it requires sustained effort. It also requires
making sure that you are healthy and happy, because otherwise it will
not happen. That reminds me of the definition of the Buddhist precept
of "diligence": to find joy in what is virtuous and wholesome. The joy
is very important too. There is something about being joyous at what
you do, in every little bit of effort, that will make it all in the
end work out into something much larger. But it is the simple joy that
will allow you to keep going, every day. Also to focus on just that
one day prevents you from having too much fear about whether you can
do it or not. Instead you can just trust that some day, it will
happen, and it will. So really, a little bit of effort every day is
what does miracles.

This picture shows me on campus, in front of the famous LOVE
sculpture, together with a friend who shares my name (her first name
is also Marieke). It also shows the beauty of spring.

The Network

Now reaching the end of my PhD work, I am starting to become more and
more conscious of networking. Initially I felt very hesitant about
these kinds of "business-like" behaviors, but in fact my experiences
with networking have turned out to be very positive. For a (budding)
scientist, networking is simply about sharing your data and ideas with
other people, going to visit them, talk to them at conferences, and
more recently, interacting with them through Facebook. I really enjoy
being part of this social enterprise that is called science, meeting
really amazing people and sharing thoughts with them. And then the joy
and enthusiasm that is transferred during these interactions is in
fact one reason why they are so enjoyable. In the documentary href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boWnCX8spFs">Monte Grande,
Francisco Varela says that he feels like the troubadours in mediaeval
times, who would go to a place, sing their song, get food and lodging,
and move on. That's what scientists do when they go to conferences,
where they give their talk, and then go their way.

But in a deeper way, a network is also the way we interact with
people. According to my teacher Sogyal Rinpoche, one should ideally
see other beings as another "you", and interact with them according to
this deep sense of connectedness. After all, how do we really know
where we end and where the other begins? And we are so dependent upon
one another. Magically, this way of seeing dramatically changes how
you interact with the world; it makes it much more relaxed and
compassionate. Moreover, networking in the business-sense becomes way
easier, because you do not have to worry as much about you, and
whether you are doing it right, and what your impression is going to
be, etc., etc. Instead, you can focus on the other and be much more
connected. So seeing ourselves as part of a network really helps
us to network!



This picture is from a DVD that my brother Floris and I made this
winter, a dance that illustrates a song about the 10 Oxherding
Pictures (a famous Zen story).

change

In my Buddhist studies, the current topic is change and
impermanence. In fact impermanence is quite a profound topic of
reflection, because if you really understand it, Sogyal Rinpoche will
say, you will let go of all grasping. On a more basal level, I have
been dealing with quite a lot of change in my life lately: physically,
in being suddenly handicapped, and now learning to dance again, but
also mentally, in realizing that I am starting to reach the end of my
graduate studies. It is as if I have to think about flying out
again. But obviously, both the flying out on the level of my life, as
well as the flying away in dancing (learning to wear pointe shoes
again!), require a tremendous amount of hard work. Yet on the other
hand, doesn't everything in life that's worth it require hard work?
And yet all the while realizing that the outcomes of all that work
can, and most often will, be different than you ever envisioned. So
accepting change is also realizing that circumstances will change
beyond your control, so you have to try hard but expect nothing.

Quite a different dimension of change comes from a book I am currently
reading, which is called "All
is change". The book is about the contacts between Buddhism and
Christianity over the course of history. It contains some tantalizing
ideas. For example, there should have been a lot of cross-talk between
Christians and Buddhists in the 10th century, and in fact Christian
heretics, like the Cathars might have incorporated some Buddhist
teachings through the Manicheans. Isn't it tantalizing that where the
Cathars used to live, in the Languedoc in France, there is now a dense
population of Buddhist monasteries and temples? Another interesting
hypothesis was that the development of Mahayana Buddhism with its
emphasis on giving your own life as a kind of ransom for others' was
accelerated through contact with the Christian gospels. Maybe there
were a whole lot more connections than we thought, indeed, interdependence...

summer - travel season

Summer always is the travel season, and it seems to get worse and worse. This summer I was hardly in my house in Philadelphia! Most recently, I went on a trip to Europe, which was a delightful combination of work, dharma and vacation. I started out very well with a retreat in Lerab Ling, Rigpa's retreat center in France. It has become quite a remarkable place, with a very large temple, constructed authentically according to Tibetan temple. It features a copper roof, as if it were the copper-colored mountain of Guru Rinpoche, with which it is compared. The inside is decorated quite extensively, with two shrines with 500 buddhas each (the Thousand Buddha Shrine), a large statue of the Buddha Shakyamuni like the one in Bodhgaya, and then finally a statue of Guru Rinpoche Look LIke Me, identical to the one that has been destroyed in Samye Monastery in Tibet. For this temple to be filled with dharma students from all over the world, engaged in a deep and extensive program of study and practice is quite remarkable. It really creates an atmosphere that instantly transforms ones mind. Moreover, it is possible to take such strong feelings associated with a place home and use it in ones visualisation practice. We already know from Free Recall studies that time-traveling to the situation or context of study helps greatly to recall words, but it also can transform ones mind. But of course during a retreat, one also transforms ones mind more directly through study and practice, and applying that directly in daily life by the way one interacts with other people and animals around.

After the retreat had transformed my mind at least a little bit, I was ready to do some work in Germany, where my lab collaborates, and then visit the wonderful cities of Paris and Lyon to talk to other colleagues. This was also the time when I went back into ballet dancing (I have slowly learnt to dance again over the past few months, progressing through beginner ballet into intermediate and slowly even pointe). The class I was able to do in Paris was quite wonderful--imagine taking a ballet class with only three people, very close to Montparnasse, and where the teacher even tries to throw in a few words of English every now and then (Studio Amana). In addition to ballet, I still keep doing some yoga, which I took up during my recovery period from my broken ankle. On the picture below you'll see me practising some yoga on the camping site during my retreat, which I really loved to do in the mornings. My favorite is power yoga, which is nicely challenging but still calms the mind. Having said that: time to go back to work, and analyze some of that data that I collected this summer at Shambhala Mountain Center this summer...

the gift of broken ankle

It's been a long time since I've last written and many things have happened, including papers being published, travels to various places and so on. Probably the most significant event was that, as the title says, I managed to break my ankle in ballet class, about three months ago. Interestingly enough, this was not only a bad event, but also a tremendous lesson. Something as invasive as breaking your ankle requires you to complete rethink your life, because all the things you used to take for granted, climbing stairs, cooking, carrying a cup of tea, and so on, are suddenly difficult or impossible. Moreover, you have to remove the words hurry and haste from your dictionary. Yet, a broken ankle can also be a gift. I realised how lucky I was to not only have dancing but lots of other nourishing activities that I could do, no matter what: my science and my spiritual practice. During my time in the hospital I was especially grateful to have both a stack of papers to read to distract me and my spiritual practice to calm my mind and feel supported by the buddhas and bodhisattvas (visualising them can be a tremendous source of refuge and potentially also help recovery--see the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn). The people around me were amazing and helped me with everything, from grocery shopping to doing my laundry. It is wonderful to see how a handicap can bring the best out of people. Even complete strangers would sometimes come up to me to help me by opening a door, or asking what had happened to me.

Now, about 3 months later, I am still recovering and trying to get back into ballet. There were two tools that I found incredibly helpful: during the whole time of my injury, especially during the no-weightbearing portion of it (first six weeks), I practiced floor barre, ballet exercises that are performed lying down on the floor, or sitting down. They help tremendously in maintaining and strengthening your turnout and flexibility in general. They also help to acquire a good posture in ballet, with the back very straight. Later in my recovery period, i.e., now, I am practicing the New York City Ballet workout, which consists of floor exercises to strengthen abdominals and upper body, floor barre, as well as elementary ballet exercises like tendus, plies and simple jumps. Because these exercises are very simple, they are a good transition into actual ballet class. Now let's hope that I will be back on pointe soon!

dare to dream!

Lately I've been thinking a lot about dreams in all kinds of
contexts. The most literal one is that I've been reading this book by
Stephen LaBerge about lucid dreaming, a very interesting technique to
explore your consciousness and gain awareness over what happens during
sleep. In less literal contexts, dreaming refers to your aspirations
and goals in your life. In fact I believe that those are the most
important for all of us if we want to go beyond our ordinary,
day-to-day events. It can be extremely helpful to figure out what the
goals of your life are such that you will be able to set priorities,
since we live in such a complex and busy world. In order to figure out
our aspirations, it often helps to dream of how we would want to live
our lives, if everything were possible (this was also suggested in a
recent exercise in Karen
Knowler's eZine ). This allows you to go beyond your limitations
and imagine something bigger. The amazing thing is then then when you
make the aspirations, they will actually often materialize often in
unexpected ways. In a book I read years ago by Marion Bradley ("the
Mists of Avalon"), the magician Merlin said: be careful with what you
wish, because it will be given to you.

And after all, how can you follow a path, when you have no idea what
the path is? I believe that one of the highest priorities in life is
finding what the path is and then following it with every bit of
determination you have.

vancouver and raw food experiments

I recently went to Vancouver for the annual meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology. It was quite an adventure: even upon flying in there, we could see the snowy Mount Reinier from the airplane. Then flying in Vancouver Bay is absolutely stunning. Vancouver is a quite dramatic city: beaches, mountains and a big city all in one. It has lots of Japanese immigrants, hence sushi is a very popular food and I ended up eating sushi pretty much every day! The conference itself was also quite wonderful - I enjoy these conferences with relatively few attendees. There were some good talks about mathematical psychology and the brain, including great talks by Greg Ashby and Mike Shadlen who come from two opposite directions: Mike Shadlen starts from single neuron firing in monkeys during a decision making task, Greg Ashby starts from box models of the human brain about categorization and works his way down to the neural level, using fMRI. The brain is just so hard!

In the recent days I have been experimenting quite a bit with raw food, and one example of those things are some nice raw lunchboxes I created, of which I have pasted a picture here as well. It's quite an adventure. One extremely helpful resource is Karen Knowler's weekly eZine with lots of good articles and tips. What I like about it is that it's a very fast and also quite healthy way of eating, even though I do not think at this point that eating 100 % raw is a great idea. But more raw and unprocessed food is definitely good, and especially because it seems to reduce my cravings for sugar-heavy foods, which is really the main goal.

teachers

"Who is the outer teacher? None other than the embodiment and voice and
representative of our inner teacher. The master whose human shape and
human voice and wisdom we come to love with a love deeper than any
other in our lives is none other than the external manifestation of
the mystery of our own inner truth. What else could explain why we
feel so strongly connected to him or her?"

I decided to write a little about teachers, since teachers of all
kinds play such an important part in my life. I think it is essential
to find good teachers to teach you the art of life. In the beautiful
quote above that comes from Sogyal Rinpoche's book "Glimpse after
Glimpse" (July 27) it is shown how sometimes a teacher we meet can be a
manifestation of what we really need and want to develop. I think good
teachers are very challenging to work with, because they want only the
best you can give them, nothing less. Yet also the interactions with
them are extremely rewarding because not only do they show you the
path, but they are often also great examples. In fact I feel this
applies to not only my spiritual teacher, but also to my ballet
teachers and my thesis advisor, and many of the teachers I have had in
the past. These days, the role of the teacher often gets devaluated
and there is not a lot of respect for them, which greatly diminishes
their ability to actually confer their experience to the
students. This is quite contrary to the way it still works in ballet,
where a teacher is usually not gone against and is curtsied at the end
of every class (to just give some examples). Of course it is also
important to develop critical thinking, and not to take everything the
teacher says at face value, but this can be done after the knowledge
is tested out (this is interestingly enough also what the Buddha seems
to have said to his students: do not believe things I say just because
I say them, test them for yourself). To be pushed by a teacher and to
work very hard can in the end be a joy because it allows you to
transcend your own boundaries. This is why I believe it is so
important to meet good teachers.