Hello. My name is Andrew Morrice I'm a GP in the West of England and I've also
done the HG Diploma training, and I'm recording this video for you to help you
find out whether you're interested in coming along to this day on the
mind-body connection. I've always been interested in the holistic or whole
person perspective in health, and I think that was the reason why I was so excited
by the human Givens approach when I first encountered it, which was actually
about 15 years ago now: a day on depression taught by Joe Griffin. I was
struck by how powerful it was to understand depression in a way that kept
everything in metaphor, meaning, right the way down to brain physiology and
chemistry. And this appealed to me as somebody that's interested in the whole
person. It's also informed my approach to teaching at Bristol University where
I've been involved for many years in a course on 'whole person care'. And so back
in about 2013 / 2014, Human Givens College asked me to put together a day on the
mind-body connection. Now here's an interesting point the mind and the body
are not actually separate. It's the connection is essentially a process of
remembering that human beings are integrated wholes; biopsychosocial beings.
But the day is really a way of looking at the human givens model as it applies
to human well-being in the broadest possible sense when we talk about the
human givens approach we often say 'well we know how to meet our physical
needs such as getting enough water and food' but actually as a GP what I've
found is that we collectively, and many individuals that are helped, actually
have a very shaky or unhelpful understanding of how to meet their basic
physical needs. And it struck me that the human givens approach
in fact gives us lots of powerful tools for understanding exactly how and why
this confusion arises. It also gives us a brilliant way of understanding quite how
powerful good psychological therapy is for promoting health. It opens up all
sorts of interesting new avenues for understanding such things as depression
and anxiety. So during the day we will cover a whole range of topics. Broadly we
will look at how and why our thinking gets in a model about health, we look at
exercise and how that as a concept is a little bit of a trick that we play on
ourselves and how understanding what we call exercise from them more human
givens perspective can really help us to get the best out of the resources
that we have to move and exert ourselves in the world. We'll look at emotions how
these exist as altered physiological states look in detail at how 7:11
breathing helps and how that links in with systems such as oxytocin and the
fight and flight response. We'll look at exactly how and why we've managed to get
ourselves in a muddle about food, how we can clear away those sources of
confusion and how that can help us to see much more clearly what scientific
research is actually telling us about the impact of diet on not just physical
health problems like diabetes and heart disease but also important problems such
as anxiety and depression. And lastly we'll look at what we can see, from
various examples, happening when we meet all of the needs – which we're now
understanding fully is including things like diet and exercise and so forth – when
we meet all of our needs in balanced emotional and physical and when we
develop our resources in balance, we'll look at the outcome of that which is
health. So the day has lots to offer almost anyone that's interested in human
health and well-being whether you're coming at this primarily as somebody
who's training has been mainly in what we've got physical
healthcare, a doctor or a nurse or so forth, or if you're coming at this as a
psychological therapist or somebody that works in various aspects of a social and
community work there's something here for everyone because this is an overview
of human health and well-being in a truly integrated way. The day is always a
lot of fun it's always nice to meet people, have conversations, and join the
dots together. So I hope that we will meet at some point soon.