Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR For most of us being calm in the face of difficulty is tantamount to emotional maturity, or serenity. Emotional maturity, however, is more than what meets the eye and mind. It relates to a state that exemplifies being in control, or animated, being responsive, or receptive to others, and being protected
Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR Stress is a blurred response to the demands that life places on us. This is also how it builds up. In the course of time, it leads to stressful frustration — an indivisible component of modern life. Our day-to-day life too has its allocation of stresses: peer pressure, marital, financial and workplace
Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR Homeopathy, to paraphrase one of its cardinal tenets, looks at symptoms as being the idiom, dialect, or language, in which the body, in illness, speaks to us. The body’s response, thus, gives us the cue that a struggle to externalise is on. This provides us with the ‘prompt’ that potential damage
Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR One had always thought of shyness as a behavioural anomaly. It may not be so, after all. According to Dr Ward K Swallow, PhD, a noted paediatric psychiatrist, shyness is not a disorder. It is also not a disability, or the cause for parental despair and societal intolerance. His raison d’etre?
Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR You don’t have to be a meditation buff to learn mindfulness. All you’d need to do is choose what you’d most likely fulfil in a given situation and learn by responding in the most ‘mindful’ manner. This would, thereafter, be your ‘cue’ to turn dull routines into rich experiences and identify
Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR Headaches are as old as civilisation. Our ancients, perhaps, believed that certain spirits were to blame for headaches, including insanity and epilepsy [fits]. It is contended that William Harvey — the first physician to discover the function of the heart and circulation of blood — recommended trepanation, or the process of
Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR You know that, don’t you? That language, like all living things, is continually in a state of flux, where the old rings in the new, not vice versa. Yes — you got it right. This is precisely the premise, a vocation like no other, for Jeffrey Kacirk, a research aficionado, with
Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR So you’d often thought that good parenting wasn’t a magic potion, DIY tool-kit, or how-to: something that could be obtained as an OTC item? You are right. Good parenting, in real terms, is not only a matter of practicality, common sense, sensitivity, and a few acquired skills, but also the modicum
Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR Most parents resort to using superlatives at the proverbial drop of a hat. “You’re great. The next Albert Einstein, ‘King’ Pele, Margaret Atwood, or Bill Gates,” as the case maybe. Or, it could just be the reverse, something parents often indulge in — to save time. Like helping your kid get
Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR Don’t sweat the small stuff is a common adage. Well, the fact is — small, or little, things upset us greatly. They also disturb our life’s tempo. This is, indeed, the cause of stress. Studies show that your heart reacts strongly to small, unexpected trifles of daily life. When you don’t
