Early Alcohol Awareness

A good article in the Times about detecting problematic drinking patterns early on includes this passage:

Dr. Willenbring, who directs the institute’s Division of Treatment and Recovery Research, added: “Once they know who they are, most people at risk of becoming alcohol abusers can cut down on their alcohol consumption and reduce their risk. We know that many heavy drinkers are able to change on their own.”

For those who already drink at abusive levels, the new program can help them acknowledge their problem and seek treatment earlier, before they suffer irreversible medical and social problems like liver or brain disease, legal difficulties, job loss or divorce.

The beauty of Rethinking Drinking is that it can be used in the privacy of the home or in a doctor’s office, sparing people the embarrassment and stigma that often accompany public acknowledgment of a problem with alcohol and entering a treatment program.

This is probably something we should look at for our students at TAS.

A note: My posts have been sparse because May is a jammed packed month. My two boys have baseball four nights a week, TAS is winding up for the end of the year and the beginning of the next, and I've just started another round of classes at grad school. My apologies.

Yukon's visit

What a wonderful presence some people have. Yukon, our monk friend and embassy from the Zen Mountain Monastery was so kind to teach a meditation class and to lead a session for us. Not all his mustard seeds fell on pavement, but rather he brought an everyday dignity and clarity to a practice that some of us take for granted at times. I hope he can visit often and help us create more and more opportunities to for each student to deepen his or her capacities.

Sitting is so simple and so difficult. Climbing a hill can be difficult too. As manic May pulls each of us in a thousand directions, that hill gets steeper and steeper. If all any one of us can do is be aware of what we are doing much of the time- speaking deliberately, walking deliberately, eating deliberately, all will be fine.

It is true.

Right and Left

from Discover Magazine:

Lateralized brains are not unique to humans. Parrots prefer picking up things with their left foot. Toads tend to attack other toads from the right but go after prey from the left. Zebra fish are likely to look at new things with their right eye and familiar things with their left. Even invertebrates are biased. Pinar Letzkus, a vision researcher at Australian National University, rewarded bees with sugar whenever they extended their tongue at the sight of a yellow rectangle on a computer screen. He then fashioned tiny eye patches and put them on a new set of subjects. Bees with their left eye covered learned almost as quickly as did bees without a patch. But bees with their right eye covered did far worse.

The broken symmetry of the nervous system may thus be as old as the symmetry itself. If so, it is an ancient puzzle. Being biased to one side would seem like a serious handicap: A toad that hopped to the left whenever it was startled by a predator, for instance, would be easy prey for an attacker that could anticipate which way it would go; the same holds for any other kind of ingrained behavioral imbalance. A number of scientists have run experiments to find the benefits that might offset such costs.

One hypothesis is that a lateralized brain is more powerful than one that works like a mirror image. Instead of two matching parts of the brain performing an identical task, one can take charge, leaving the other free to do something else.

Special Guest, Special Talk

A guest meditation instructor, the monk Yukon, from the Zen Mountain Monastery, will be joining us from 9 to 10:30 tomorrow. Please join us. All are welcome. There will be instruction, meditation, and a talk.