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"Fabulous Storytelling" Mick Herron

I have been writing and publishing books on a variety of topics since my bestselling Angry White Pyjamas came out in 1997. Other bestsellers include Red Nile, a biography of the River Nile. In total I have written 15 mainstream books translated into 16 languages. The include creative non-fiction, novels, memoir, travel and self-help. My publishers include Harper Collins, Picador, Penguin and Hachette. I have won several awards including two top national prizes- the Somerset Maugham literary award and the William Hill sportsbook of the Year Award. I have also won the Newdigate Prize for poetry- one of the oldest poetry prizes in the world; past winners include Oscar Wilde, James Fenton and Fiona Sampson.

A more recent success was Micromastery, published by Penguin in the US and the UK as well as selling in eight other countries.

Micromastery is a way of learning new skills more efficiently. I include these methods when I coach people who want to improve as writers. If that's you, go to the section of this site titled I CAN HELP YOU WRITE. I have taught creative writing in schools and universities but I now find coaching and editing is where I can deliver the most value. In the past I have taught courses in both fiction and memoir at Moniack Mhor, the former Arvon teaching centre in Scotland.

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Entries in learning (18)

Thursday
Mar192015

the simple and the subtle

Broadly speaking, formal, ‘public’, or, if you like, ‘modern’, life presents things as significant the louder more shocking and in your face they are; it also presents things that are super complicated as being more significant than that which is very simple. 

But I wonder if the opposite is true: that life is better appreciated by looking for, and showing a preference for, the simple and by being better attuned to the subtle.

When people start aikido they quickly get into very complicated discussions about foot placement and angles and such like. The real masters tend to say the same things again and again: it’s all about stance, for example. After a while you realise it isn’t the actual words that matter so much as the importance you attach to them (if that makes sense). The better you get at aikido the more importance you attach to something seemingly very simple that is ignored by a beginner who prefers more complicated (an by implication, truer) explanations.

Becoming more aware, building awareness builds an appreciation of subtleties. All wine tasters know this. Having the courage to stick with the simple also helps. I wonder if a preference for over-complication is a dry intellectual substitute for subtlety.

Tuesday
Mar102015

Tibetan monks raise body temperature

 

In Magic and Mystery in Tibet Alexandra David-Neel talks about the incredible ability of certain Tibetan monks. They are reputedly able to raise their body temperature at will. She writes of monks draped in wet sheets at -35 degrees C and great gouts of steam rising from the wet cloths as their superheated bare torsos turned the icy garment into something like a steaming pudding cloth. Other travellers have also made passing mention of this technique but it wasn’t until the 1980s that Western science was able to catch up with Eastern expertise.

Greater knowledge of Tibet and her monks- whether they live on the Indian side or the Tibetan side of the border, indicated that the monks involved were practitioners of gtum-mo- (pronouced ‘dumo’) a form of breathing found in the teachings of the Tibetan Vajrayana. This was derived originally from the Indian Buddhist Vajrayana tradition.

Gtum-mo is a combination of breathing exercises and meditative concentration. The basic form involves performing ‘the vase’- this is a breathing technique where air is brought deep into the lower abdominal region and held there, making a pot belly or ‘vase’ of the stomach. There is a forceful version of this where the air is sucked in, held and then expelled with great vigour. There is a also a gentler version where the transitions are far less marked and the intake and exhalation of breath, though deep, is gentle.

Accompanying the breathing are two varieties of meditation. For the forceful breathing (which is used to ramp up body temperature quickly from ‘cold’ so to speak) the meditation is to picture internally an inner flame, something like a Bunsen burner flame, roaring hot, that starts at the navel and shoots up to the crown of the head. You have to imagine that flame in all its heat, roaring noise and light burning up through the core of the body.

For the more gentle variant of body temperature manipulation the mental image is of a surging sensation of bliss and rising warmth throughout the body.

In January 1982 Professor Herbert Benson[1] reported in the august pages on Nature on his studies into what he termed gTum-mo yoga. Conducted in the Dharamsala monastery of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, three monks were able to raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by a creditable 8.3 degrees C. This is rather impressive- certainly it would make the difference between frost bite and frost nip or merely coldness. If climbers and others who venture into highly refrigerated environs could learn these techniques many digits might be saved.

In 2002 Harvard Gazette reported 2 monks- of Western origin and living in Normandy- who were able to raise their body temperature using gtum-mo techiniques.

But it wasn’t until 2013 that a more comprehensive set of tests and a general survey of previous attempts  was made. In the previous thirty years it had been found that raising peripheral temperatures- of hands and feet- could be made quite easily through various easily taught meditations, and, in fact, by training people to use simple biofeedback techniques. Typically a digital thermometer would be connected to sensors on the subject’s hands and feet. By sensing a greater awareness of the temperature of the hand or foot, whilst avoiding trying to force it up, the temperature could be made to rise as long raising temperatures was what was on the agenda.

But complications entered the field when it was found that raising core body temperature did not accompany raising peripheral temperatures. One theory suggested that various forms of muscular contraction served to raise hand temperature.

In the 2013 tests Dr Maria Kozhevnikov and her colleagues[2] showed that unlike biofeedback results, gtum-mo genuinely raised core body temperatures- so much so that the wet sheet dried by body heat alone was shown to be fact not fiction.

Kohevnikov located one of the very few nunneries where a body temperature raising ceremony exists. This was at the 4200 metre high Gebchak convent close to Nangchen in Qinghai province. The ceremony was held annually and the nuns participating would wear only a short skirt, shoes or sandals with a wet cotton sheet draping the rest of their body. It would be performed in winter when air temperatures would be dry but -25 to -30 degrees C. Anyone who has dipped their hand in water at these temperatures will know the extreme discomfort involved, and how hard it is to regain skin warmth after drastic colling like this has happened. Ranulph Fiennes dipped his hand in icy sea water to release a sunken sledge and did not dry and warm the hand immediately. He later remarked that these two minutes of carelessness cost him the finger tips of that hand. I’ve swept a frosty tent surface with a bare hand at -15 degrees C and found the hand still cold even ten minutes later after wearing a mitten. Such anecdotal evidence makes even the existences of the sheet ceremony all the more impressive.

The nuns were aged between 25 and 52 years old and some performed the forceful variety of gtum-mo and some the more gentle kind. It was reported that the forceful kind could not be sustained for very long, so it was used to warm the body up, after which the gentle type would be used when walking and wearing the wet sheet.

Nuns raised their peripheral temperatures easily by 1.2 to 6.8 degrees C. More importantly the forceful type of gtum-mo raised core body temperature by over a degree. One woman was able to get it higher and only stopped because she felt uncomfortable. Another stopped because she was developing fever symptoms.

If peripheral temperature raising results in a lowering of core body temperature then using techniques to merely warm the hands might actually hasten hypothermia. However, if, as the gtum-mo tests show, you can raise core body temperature and peripheral temperature you have the means to withstand great cold- as the nuns show during their freezing sheet ceremony.

As a control a group of westerners who had some experience of yoga or meditation or kung fu, were taught the gtum-mo technique. Very quickly they were able to show similar effects of raised body temperature as the much more experienced Tibetan nuns. Something that appears mysterious and oriental turns out to be rather ordinary after all. I for one will certainly be using it when I next find myself shaking with cold in some Himalayan fastness.

 

 



[1] Herbert Benson “Body Temperature changes during the practice of gTum-mo yoga” Nature 295 21 Jan 1982

[2] Maria Kozhevnikov March 29 2013 PLoS ONE “Neurocognitive and somatic components of Temperature Increase during g-Tummo meditation”.

 

Monday
Sep222014

time 

Time has become the ultimate luxury.

Learning how to transcend time is a good way to use that luxury, if you have it.

Sunday
Sep142014

Haughty and Generous

Idries Shah famously reintroduced the idea that traditionally it was often considered the ideal, or near ideal, character to be both haughty and generous. I was talking about this today with author and friend Jason Webster. I suggested that, like much of Idries Shah's apparently simple statements, it would reward further thinking. One could superficially understand being 'haughty and generous' to mean one should be snotty and snobbish yet also generous. But think back to those previous eras when the idea was first promulgated. Then there was a more rigid set of behaviours for each class. You didn’t really need to be snobbish- there was such an obvious difference between you and the next level. Snobbery only becomes necessary when you actual rub shoulders with the hoi poloi. In Egypt the upper classes can be snobbish, but I often found the real aristocrats weren’t- they were kind and considerate to all people they came into contact with because it was so obvious they were from another zone. And many were also generous.

Jason suggested being haughty in this context meant refusing to be flattered when people noticed your generosity; an antidote to ‘using up’ whatever accrues when one is generous. I think, though, that, in addition to this there is also the fact that a haughty person does not rely on others for sustenance, does not ‘consume’. He or she is a producer- and yet they pass on things of value to others- they are generous. They aren’t looking to take, they are looking to give. Being snotty has nothing to do with it- the real deal is about aiming to reach a place where you can help others without needing or seeking help yourself, which includes, of course, the ‘help’ of being praised.

 

Friday
Sep052014

marx, opium, cocaine and attention

 

Marx is endlessly requoted as saying religion is the opiate of the people. In light of recent history a modern Marx might say religion is more akin to the cocaine or meth amphetamine of the people. Has religion changed so much it has gone from being a pacifying drug to an exciter of drama? 

We take drugs to make up for something lacking in our lives: happiness, calm, excitement, meaning. People know they are missing something in life. They look to balance themselves on the evidence presented, they look to stabilise using publicly available information. They try to become exoterically stable. But it’s impossible. The exoteric is composed of families, tribes, states, corporations- all of which give voice to ‘their’ own need for survival through people who have been sucked in to become inadvertent mouthpieces for these supra-human entities. Ever had a cause ‘take you over’? I have, briefly, it’s a delicious feeling of empowerment without guilt, doubt or confusion. But we are human individuals, linked with everything at an invisible, esoteric, level, not through the gross alliances of family and nation. Not that these aren’t important, they are, they provide the nutritional framework for life- what they can’t do is supply a real sense of ultimate purpose. Because what is most real (in many senses) is also hidden, then its concepts and ideas – when they become publicised- always run the risk of becoming traduced and cheapened, turned from being gold coins into metal discs good as a washer or a weight of some sort. The real meaning is lost and the esoteric concept becomes yet another item used by the exoteric world. The other day I was looking at a 19th century travel book about Iraq- it showed a drawing of the copper peacock of the Yezidis- a religious cult that still exists. Four of these copper birds were used to rally the people and were only revealed on special occasions. But from the drawing it was obvious that this was a sculptural representation of the path to personal enlightenment- the decorated handle indicating the different stages of growing awareness. Yet this item had become a kind of political device- rather like the mace wielded by western monarchs. It has been watered down to help the exoteric- the tribe- to survive. It happens with symbols- look how the yinyang symbol has become the flag of Korea, reduced from a meditation object to an emotional rallying point.

The esoteric is always having to reinvent itself, find new untainted ways to preserve and represent the kind of truths we need to make personal progress in this and future lives.

The exoteric world’s failure to supply meaning is further complicated because the same groups that fail to supply meaning distort things in order to appear as ‘supplying meaning’. In the current world a lack of involvement (caused by the disintegration of ‘traditional’ structures) means there are widespread feelings of worthlessness. Involvement supplies ‘A’ grade attention. If you have children compare the effect playing a board game has on them with merely asking to see their latest painting or lego toy. Involvement, as my friend Ramsay Wood informed me, is indeed the higher form of attention. 

But involvement is hard to conjure out of thin air. And the modern westernised world undermines structures that served very effectively to involve people in the past. These can’t be revived, alternatives are appearing all the time, but slowly and quietly. Meanwhile vast numbers of people do not get enough attention and drama in their everyday lives. So, if, in the past, when there was enough drama and attention in life, exoteric religion could function as something encouraging contemplation and patience, now more pressing concerns are forced upon its malleable form. In the exoteric world ‘religion’ is the first and most famous tourist destination for ‘meaning’. It’s the Tower of London. But now the ‘meaning’ people require includes this undigested need for involvement. Involvement that will generate high levels of attention and drama. Until we find a way of integrating that into the modern westernised version of life currently sweeping the globe, then expect religion to supply it in various grotesque and distorted ways. If the people need cocaine to get attention and involvement, they’ll find it.

 

Wednesday
Jul162014

The Fifth Law of Adventure

 

The Fifth Law of Adventure: Adventures cluster together

I have been on trips where the adventures were all in the getting there and then in the getting out. The event itself was a little sparse, a few days when it was almost boring, if a day in the Sahara desert 200km from anywhere can be called boring.

The destination, as we know, is less important than the journey. Indeed the destination can be a veritable McGuffin, laughable even. I know of someone who would drive eight hours to look at the Caspian sea, stay half an hour and drive eight hours back again. The journey is everything, especially since it is on the journey, during movement, that adventure clusters are more likely to happen.

Adventures cluster together, they come in runs, like poker hands, then there may be a blank patch. But when you’re on a roll, keep going. I suppose all this means is that they do not obey systematic and mindless rules (or laws like these) there is an element of vitality, of living process about any adventure.

An adventure is as much in your head as anywhere else. An adventure is a way of categorizing a new experience as something valuable, enabling growth in some form or another. Categorizing the same experience as a ‘nightmare’ is also possible.

Searching for adventure looks childish on the surface. A serious person would surely leave this to grown up boyscouts and slightly deranged exSAS men? But though many adventurers are people with slight, how to say, ‘adjustment issues’, the notion that adventuring is for kids is sheer baloney. Modern life has the capacity to be rather more boring than most previous eras in history. We live in an era which requires one to ‘opt in’ to everything interesting. If you don’t and rely on what the culture offers to everyone (TV, mass events, jobs, politics) you will be short changed.

Adventure seeking – in whatever guise – is a form of opting in to growth experiences. Or call them learning experiences. But they are also a form of nutrition that have no other utility than to keep us interested in life and all its possibilities. Have I sold it enough?

1.   It’s all in the people

My best friend as a lad was a boy my own age called Stuart. Together we always had amazing adventures. We took canoes down impassable rivers, dug lengthy underground tunnels, halted a forest fire, and on one memorable occasion detected aliens from Mars on a crystal set. Well, maybe. The point was- we both believed adventures would happen, we had a naïve faith in them happening and by golly they did.

I had another pal, a good pal, called Shorty. Nothing ever happened with Shorty. We hung about, watched TV, built a den that fell down. There was no spark, no synergy, nothing came out of…nothing, which is what we ask an adventure to be: something coming out of nothing, a creative act. Oh, of course, there are the countless adventures when stuff goes wrong, but there is good going wrong and bad going wrong. Getting seriously injured is a very bad form of going wrong. Anyway, nothing went wrong wrong, good or bad with Shorty, it was just plain uneventful. Somehow we managed to earth each other’s vitality; we became ordinary. Ordinary as in bad ordinary rather than good ordinary.

Some combinations of people are better than others. People you get on with should work better, but don’t always. People who like risk taking- well, that sometimes works, but not always. People up for ‘a laugh’ are usually good. People who are good at talking to strangers are also very useful. Awkward customers and inventive types are often a good bet, but by far the most important ingredient is enthusiasm and an ability to roll with the punches and ride the snake, not to suddenly dig your heels in because you got cold feet. 

2.   Cluster in terrain/equipment

Some places are better than others. I’ve mentioned places before, the more varied the challenge the more adventures will tend to cluster.

The equipment: a mountain bike will take you places an ordinary bike won’t. A packraft promises a whole zone of possibility denied bulkier bigger craft. A wheeled pulk, used for crossing rough ground in between patches of snow gave me the idea for the wheeled canoe- a short plastic Canadian canoe with detachable wheels similar to those on an all terrain sack trolley  (you need better ground clearance than with bolt on launch wheels). With correct loading the ten foot long canoe becomes your ‘wheeled pulk’ that you drag through the wilderness. You can then canoe lakes and run rivers far more easily than with a pack raft, thus opening up a whole new range of potential adventures. I have a friend who did something similar but towed the canoe behind a bike, then put the bike in the canoe when he hit water. The advantage with the wheeled canoe is the increased load you can carry, including if you like a sail that could double as a tarp. 

3.   Be in a rush

Cross Europe by hitching all through the night. Race someone to get by train to Dogubayazit. Pedal as fast as you can along Chesil beach, if you can. Being in a rush sometimes causes lots of adventures to cluster, but only when you are travelling with another or in a group.

4.   Don’t be in a rush

And the reverse is also true, especially when one is travelling solo.

5.   Go somewhere brand new

If you have never been there before, the adventure ratio will be higher.

6.   Look out for new developments

Fat tyre bikes burst (is that the right word?) on to the scene about ten years ago. They created a whole new world of adventure around snow and sand peddling, allowing trips that just wouldn’t have been possible on a bicycle before.

7.   Go back in time

Go mountaineering in a tweed jacket, leather nailed triconi boots, a long ice axe and a woollen pair of breeches. The adventure – both in actuality and in your head, will be greater.

 

Monday
Jul142014

The Fourth Law of Adventure

 

The Fourth Law of Adventure: An adventure takes you out of your comfort zone.

1.   head comfort, psychological comfort

The adventure starts in your head. It explodes into your brain, in the boredom of your everyday life, the life you have managed to get stuck with- how? You don’t know; it just happened but then this worm got into your brain the worm of adventure. I say explodes, that happens,..sometimes, more often than not the worm makes itself known bit by bit, bubbling around under the surface; you notice things, you see its action, and then kaboom! you decide to do this thing this great adventure.

Think of that worm sunk in the bottom of a bottle of Tequila. It makes no difference to the taste I am sure, but the sight of it, the fact of it, provides a reminder of worms in the brain, that the brain can be wormed into, altered, fixed, undermined.

Sometimes you know when the worm is introduced, but it makes no difference. The idea is simply an idea at that stage, a potential adventure, nothing more. Everyone has a few of these kicking around. But it has no life, it means nothing. It needs to be fed. It needs links, coincidences, people, miracles to makes it grow- this is the nutrition of the worm of adventure.

But this worm does one thing in particular: it gnaws through your psychological comfort zones, it ignores the barriers you’ve set up in your mind, it just munches right through them. I was too wary, too cautious to even consider making a long journey by plastic or aluminium canoe across Canada, but when I switched to the more adventurous plan of using a real birchbark canoe, one that I would have a hand in building, then the worm took hold, gnawing through all the potential objections.

Objections, perfectly reasonable objections – our minds are brilliant at inventing them. These objections solidify over time to form the walls and floors and ceiling of your comfort zone, your psychological comfort zone. I’ve found there isn’t that much point in butting up against psychological comfort zones, better to ride the worm, it’s more effortless. Instead of somewhat reluctantly surfing on a winter’s day, find a way to make winter surfing a BIG adventure.

The advantage is: you’ll be stretched without being strained. When we ‘force’ ourselves to do a thing, stretching can easily turn into strain. When we see something as an ‘adventure’ anything new or weird is good; instead of freaking us out and causing stress we laugh it off, and grow instead.

 

2.   physical comfort, pain

No pain, no gain. Sad but true. Get comfortable with pain, physical discomfort. Doesn’t have to be masochistic stubbing cigarettes out on your tongue pain, but it has to be painful without being damaging, in a long term way. Blisters, muscular aches and pains, lumpen sleeping sites, damp sleeping bags, nasty tasting food…from time to time. We live in comfortable times, it makes us soft, in a global historical sense, meaning, most of humankind’s history has been spent in more pain than we are now experiencing. I suggest that a certain level of pain is necessary to achieve most things worthwhile- including unadventurous seeming activities such as writing where sitting on your arse for hours on end produces so much accumulated un-ease. Somerset Maugham always enquired of would-be writers: “are you strong?” Because few things gnaw at your sense of physical wellbeing more than being indoors, craning for hours over a keyboard.

But, again, the worm of adventure will carry you through pain like nothing else.

3.   a difficult dangerous journey

What is difficult travel in your mind? Physically difficult, lots of geographical obstacles to surmount? Or politically difficult- a lot of red tape to overcome to visit the place? Adventures tend to coalesce around difficult journeys. The challenge is greater, it calls forth more from you. But dangerous? Well a bit. Life after all, is terminal- at least in this dimension- so anything you do is laced with potential danger. My question is- am I driving or is someone else? If you are driving across ice, through floods or down dunes that’s one kind of danger experienced. If however you are trusting another to do it that’s another kind.  Both provide adventure. But the kind you control is likely to have less costly consequences in the long run.

There is a paradox in danger. Some of the most risky activities are pursued by people who have an acute sense of what is and isn’t ‘really dangerous’. Launching a kayak off a waterfall to dive 20 metres into a not very deep pool is dangerous in a general sense, but not if you have visualised doing it and have a good feeling about it, and know how and when to trust such feelings. If you go ahead when you have a bad feeling then it is, by contrast, very dangerous indeed.

 

4.   a safe easy journey achieved by a shift of perspective

Ah, the Punnine Way. Yes, the relatively easy and well known hike along the Pennines becomes utterly transformed into a thing of strangeness and beauty when it becomes…the Punnine Way. The object being to walk the 180 odd miles making as many puns- good, bad and indifferent, along the way. All should be encouraged to join in. Puns should be recorded and maybe tweeted, who knows where it may end? The Punnine Way is a form of Experimental Adventure, where the object is to combine creativity with adventure in interesting, enlightening but also (for some) amusing ways.

 

5.   change perspective to make a new type of journey because of changing conditions

The first route is usually a single track path. Then horses come and carts and roads and cars…and the original and oldest and most traditional way across a place may be down the high street and along a main highway. So to preserve the sense of moving through the same landscape as the people of the past, do it by using a different mode of travel. Skateboard, in line skates, recumbent bike, stilts, all come to mind.

 

6.   copy an old journey, do it old style- travel back in time

I copied German desert explorer Gerhard Rohlf’s old way across the Sahara. It had been done before- in a car- but very very few had done it using camels, just as he did. You proceed at his pace, and see what he saw, using his notes and maps as a guide. You get into his head, and when you find a side comment you can investigate further, when he was in too much of a hurry to do so. Lots of discoveries are made this way.

 

7.   Get a uniform for wearing when you leave your comfort zone, your flash Gordon kit, Stanley’s explorer’s uniform…

The worm is helped by a uniform. The uniform of adventure. Today I bought some rather long olive and red socks. They just feel made for walking distances, longer than the plain red ones I have for instance. Uniforms have a positive effect, call it ritual clothing. H.M. Stanley was the first explorer to design his own uniform. We may laugh but it carried him far. He knew that on a day when everything looks grim, when turning back seems infinitely preferable to pressing on, when illness and despair have their nasty claws deep in your flesh, a uniform can cause that one bit of dissociation to enable you to carry on. You ‘become’ the uniform and your ‘self’ just has no choice but to tag along. I have hats that spur me on, trouser/gaiter combinations that literally gird my loins, belts that inspire confidence, pocket knives that spell ‘nothing will defeat me’. Foolish? Not a bit of it. Anything that makes the boat go faster is welcome.