Howard Dieno's Blog

The last while has been a difficult time for me.

Recently, my home was burgled and both of my computers were taken. The only other thing that was removed was a piece of musical hardware that was attached to my laptop at the time it was stolen.

Now I am very happy that my guitars and other musical instruments and equipment were not taken in this robbery, but that relief was soon eclipsed by the repercussions to unfold. I could not initially comprehend the disruption and stress I would experience from losing my computers and the connections they allow me to make all over the world.  But it was when I realised all of the information stored on the computers, and the implications of that, that my stress really mounted.

Initially I was overwhelmed by the long list of things to do: deal with the police, including the finger-printing ID crew, the insurance company negotiations, the still-not-yet complete retrieval of information from back-up drives, and now the just-beginning process of informing my patients about possible need to prevent misuse of any information I had on them.

I will deal with the latter point first:

If you have been to see me as a patient (especially if you have done so in the last two years) some basic information about you will have been in a database on my computers: Your name; address; telephone number; an email address (usually only if I have made contact with you that way); the month and year when I first saw you as a patient; and for a few people, the name of their third party insurer. No financial transaction information, nor any of your patient records were stored on the computers. If I did any medico-legal report on your behalf, however, that would potentially be lost into cyberspace. The police constable I spoke with about this problem said that the people involved in this chain of crime are not usually at all interested in the medical information about any person. They are more way more concentrated on obtaining what they can for identity theft. Fortunately, what they will find on my computers is very little more (and maybe even considerably less) than they would get by going through ones garbage or doing a 411 search online. My sincere apologies to anyone for whom this is a source of worry or concern.

As for my own security concerns, this theft has been the source of a long list of unwelcome jobs. Most importantly for anyone who feels they need to take the same precautions against identity theft I did, I contacted both the Canadian Credit agencies, Equifax and Transunion so that my credit files could be flagged. Here is a very useful webpage on the basic advice around Possible Identity Theft: http://www.canlaw.com/credit/identitytheft.htm

I would encourage everyone who reads this blog post to have a look at the link provided, just to be familiar with the basic safeguards we all need to take against this sort of crime – as well as the ones most of us never should need to take if we are mindful and have good luck on our side. I do not believe any of my patients need to go this route, but that is something everyone will have to determine for him or herself.

I also learned a fair bit about home security from all of this. Motion detecting lights around areas of your home that are more sheltered can be very important. Take precautions also to secure windows and doors – especially in areas where a prowler has cover. The person who broke into my place broke a front window but didn’t manage to get in there, so he (she?) then bent a couple of screens before finding a window to force open and climb through. I understand that the thieves are usually in and out again in a few minutes flat. That looks to have been the case here.

An alarm, or better yet in the opinion of the police, a dog can be a very significant deterrent against this invasion of one’s personal space.

I may write more on this situation later but for now I just need to get this out to people it may affect.

A few final things. Please make sure you have onsite and preferably also off-site data backup on your computer files. How would your life be affected if everything on your computer(s) disappeared overnight? Also do cycle through computer and banking passwords and keep a paper record of them. Do not store them on your computer.

Good luck!

The following is an example of my mindstream in recent days. The first video clip below is poignant, clever and a shocking testament to the insanity of excesses popping up in most parts of our lives on this planet.

[Added later: Some reading and discussions with friends after this post had me questioning whether this plastic island was simply a hoax. Unfortunately, it appears it is real, albeit somewhat different than as portrayed, perhaps. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch ]

Like everyone else, I can get paralysed by the enormity and grievous nature of human repercussions on our environment, and our future. We have all seen many, many indications of these harmful trends. Yet we need NOT to be swallowed up by helplessness, shame or despair.

So, the second video is one small but significant example of how shifting the paradigm of our thinking can make a difference – can bring solutions.

The Magnificent Plastic Bag – Mockumentary

Man invents machine to convert plastic into oil

I had seen the first YouTube clip a few days ago, and while I prepared to send it off to a few friends, I realised I would prefer to put it in a blog post. But I had inadvertently sent it before I could switch that intent. Such is the hair-trigger nature of this technology we wield so inattentively at times. Anyway, I then saw the second video last evening, in one of my following rest periods I imagined a huge factory ship gathering up the” twice-Texas-sized cache” of plastic waste out in the Pacific Ocean and compressing it into blocks for building, oil conversion and who knows what else.

More on a related topic – Lynn McTaggart’s book “The Field” – to follow

I have attached below a pdf of a mind map I just did summarizing Peter Senge’s introduction to the aforementioned book “the POWER of COLLECTIVE WISDOM”.

Here also is the last paragraph from that introduction:

For me, the promise of this work is that we learn more and more how to meet one another in our wisdom. Then our challenges will appear not as threats to our way of life but as opportunities to grow into life itself.

Why it is so important

Rod Punnett and I are asking interested people to join us in reading this life-changing book and then to engage in inquiry and the suggested practices to transform the world as we know and experience it.

I will soon be sharing other resources that further support this process, but for now I just want to add this: As I have said previously in this blog, I am returning to more musical exploration and sharing. A song I have liked for a long time is “Across the Universe”.  After working out how I would play it I found myself singing the chorus repeatedly:

Jai Guru Deva, Om,

Nothing gonna change my world,

Nothing gonna change my world,

Nothing gonna change my world

Nothing gonna change my world

At this point, I realised that in singing the song as Lennon originally wrote it, I was putting out a phrase that was limiting rather than one which was in keeping with all that I am passionately wishing to express in the world.

So, I originally changed the repeating line to “I am gonna change my world”. After reflecting further, however, even that was putting the emphasis on some future action, and I want to acknowledge both what I am presently doing, and what I have already committed to doing. The final phrase I will use when singing the song now is this:

Jai Guru Deva, Om,

I have already changed my world,

I have already changed my world,

I have already changed my world,

I’ll go on changing my world

So, how about you? Are you wanting to join in this initiative?

I am now back in Victoria, and have had a busy practice day, followed by a two meetings. The first meeting was with other practitioner members of the Victoria Community Health Co-operative, and the latter was with an osteopathic practitioner colleague, and fellow co-op member, Cameron Moffatt, from whom I will be renting a room one day per week beginning the second week of August. The new health co-op primary care and integrative health clinic will be in the James Bay Community Project at 547 Michigan Street, in Victoria. Cameron’s Osteopathic Clinic will be upstairs in that same building.

My participation in both meetings was informed and enhanced by the principles and practice I am reading about in the Collective Wisdom book by Briskin, et al. By being scrupulously honest and authentic with myself and other co-op member colleagues, it felt like respectful listening and collaborative decision-making simply and naturally unfolded in the group. Now I am only one of several members in the larger meeting, yet I am certain that my familiarity with the collective wisdom initiative work helped me contribute to the process in more constructive ways, and it seemed that I was able to implicitly support others to show up in a similar way. I suspect that some joint exploration of the collective wisdom work could foster and deepen this trend within the co-operative. That manner of collaboration is something I want to commit to; be in service to.

I began reading a wonderful book today: The Power of COLLECTIVE WISDOM and the trap of collective folly – by Briskin, Erikson, Ott and Callanan.

My dear friend, Rod Punnett, has been urging me to read this book for several months now. I am presently on a few days break at Yellow Point Lodge (YPL), which happens to be one my favourite places to spend time. Yesterday, while out in a kayak paddling north-west along the shore, I realised how crucial it is for me to have breaks from my usual routine – to create the space for my creative and curious mind to go on excursions of its own, but doing so without leaving a very present state of attention.

Then last night I had the incredible good fortune to play  music with several other YPL guests and with the regular members of the YPL band. Richard Hill, the owner here, is a great bass player and singer, and over the last few years he has gathered around him two great guitarists (John and Colin), a young drummer that usually plays with the band on Saturday nights and Richard’s nephew, Gary, who made a surprise visit part way through the session to join us last night. Being Friday, the band usually just does an informal acoustic set in the Lodge’s lobby area, and they save the plugged in set for the dance hall / lounge area for Saturday night. But there were more of the gathered guests than usual who offered to join the jam session. So some of the guitars got plugged into small amps, the piano was rocking and we had 3 or 4 people on various percussion instruments. As I began reading about collective wisdom then this morning I realised what a perfect example that music jam was of this paragraph from the aforementioned book:

Collective wisdom is reflected in group behaviours that show  human decency, social justice and spiritual awareness. The effects of such behaviours result in surprising and positive outcomes that often can not be ascribed to a simple or singular cause. Sometimes quite ordinary, other times quite profound, collective wisdom is what can happen when people find themselves in situations that invite new perspectives and evoke higher aspirations. Often its emergence is grounded in a different way of listening and bringing attention to the immediacy of the moment. (pp. 19)

Now the regular members of the YPL band are seasoned and gifted musicians, as are some of the guest players. But, I only play with a band infrequently, and I have nowhere near the experience or virtuosity of most of the other players. And, a few of the players (including myself) didn’t know all of the songs being played, and not only had some of us not played those songs before at all, a couple of people had never played with the other people. So we took a set list that Johnny (one of the two excellent lead guitarists) had put together, and we launched into playing. The most magical part was that the band made such generous and kindly accommodations to players like me (like quieting the back beat rhythm section when I took a rare foray into playing lead on my unplugged acoustic guitar). Or, when the piano and percussion sections simply carried on, at what “should” have been the end, of one of the band’s standard tunes. And yet, not just despite these accommodations, but I think partly because of them, the overall quality of creative expression from the group was so much more than the simple sum of its (highly variable) parts.

Richard commented as the last of us departed the lodge late last night that this was the best jamming from a large group of musicians,  when there were so many unknowns in the mix. Colin had also commented earlier about how much one gets to see and feel another person’s character when playing music with them. As an example, he said that he looked over at one of the other players doing a solo, and thought, “wow, I never realised there was such warmth in that person”.

I now have the electric set to enjoy being a part of tonight. I can’t quite fathom my good fortune.

By the way, stay tuned for an event coming a little later this summer in which Rod and I will invite some people to join us in an investigation of putting the principles and methods of this book into embodied, empathic action.