Category: Methodology
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26- Drawing the Soul
The Soul lies above the Mind, Heart, Body, and Psyche in every garden I draw. And yet, despite its prominence, it often remains empty or marked only by a few sparse twigs like this one below. Today’s exploration focuses on the Soul, its sparse vegetation, and its emptiness. Can we find meaning in what is…
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24- Drawing Body
I find the Body garden section easier to describe than the Heart or Psyche sections we recently explored. Its physical nature makes it quantifiable and cause-and-effect relationships between external actions and internal states should be easy to identify and measure, right? It is with this in mind that I focused today’s drawing almost exclusively on…
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22- Drawing the Mind
My grandfather asked me once when I was a young boy what I was doing sitting still in his living room. I told him I was thinking. His reaction was: “I could never do that, thinking without doing anything else”. He was a very driven person, always active and his comment stuck with me ever…
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20- Drawing Heart
The heart section of the garden is a bit of a challenge for me. I find the emotions and activities here to be more personal and intimate than the ones in the body or mind sections for example. Maybe that is also why it took me almost two months to document this November 2024 drawing…
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18- Drawing Psyche
A few days ago, I started my daily garden by drawing in its lower right the PSYCHE corner. And I took notes about the thoughts and about the emotions I felt while drawing, not sure if they are inspiring the drawing or if it is the drawing that summons them. This image lets you drag…
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12- From occasional to regular sprints
Looking back at my “daily” sprints, it turns out they have been bi-weekly at best: Eighteen sprints in 120 days this year totaling 15 hours of work. It’s not a stellar achievement, I agree. As the very purpose of the sprints is to test things out, let’s try to find out why this is happening…
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Garden Q&A
Why do I draw gardens? I draw gardens to better understand how I feel and how events in my life influence me. It helps me clarify my thoughts and to put names on my feelings. They also provide a safe space in which I get to choose how I react to events instead of just…
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Mental Health, Sprints and Gardens
I asked myself last year what publishing meant to me and why the topic was a recurring motive for me for the past decades. It led me to pick a subject to look at which turned out to be mental health because I was attending late 2021 a seminar about how work affects it. Remember,…
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Stress management: What can the military teach us?
First posted 2 December 2021 on IMD intranet,posted 12 November 2023 on possib.li. There can be no doubt that military personnel exposed to combat face extreme forms of stress. Starting in the 14th century BC when Assyrians in Mesopotamia (1300-609 BC) recorded how their soldiers were dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD)-like symptoms. And Plutarch’s…
Serious Matters Simply 