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Buddha’s Brain: The neuroscience of happiness
Just coming across the title of this book (full title: ‘Buddha’s Brain: The practical neuroscience of happiness, love & wisdom’) co-authored by neuropsychologist and meditation teacher Rick Hanson and neurologist Richard Mendius was enough to spark my interest. Even though I am an atheist, Buddha has fascinated me since I was eight years old and first visited Thailand. As a psychiatrist, I am interested in spirituality and the mind, as well as neuroscience and the brain, or perhaps I am a psychiatrist because of these interests. And then there’s happiness, a topic that interests me on a both personal and professional level, a topic that I’ve been reading and writing…
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Sifnos: the island of Greek gastronomy
I was born and raised in Greece, a country with a rich history, and a healthy and delicious cuisine. As a child, I would often hear the word ‘tselementes’ being used to refer to any cookbook. So, I naturally assumed that it meant ‘cookbook’. Not quite so. I later learned that Nikolaos Tselementes was a Greek chef and cookery writer born on the island of Sifnos in the late 19th century. 130 years later, this small Cycladic island is considered the capital of Greek gastronomy. Sifnos is located in the western Cyclades, northeast of Milos and south of Serifos, which I also visited last summer. Despite the island’s close proximity…
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Religion, maps & meditation
I recently watched ‘Mary Queen of Scots’. Written by Beau Willimon and directed by Josie Rourke, the film stars Irish American Saoirse Ronan as Mary Stuart, and Australian Margot Robbie as Queen Elizabeth I. It tells the story of the legendary Scottish queen whilst portraying the role that gender, politics, and religion played in British history. Religion I was born and raised in Greece, a country where religion still plays an important role in most people’s lives and is also closely intertwined with the State. This should come as no surprise: religion and politics have been entwined in the country’s history for millenia. According to the latest statistics, 90% of…
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Serifos: the Greek island where time stands still
In June 2017, Kate Lough shared her ‘10 reasons why you should visit the Greek island of Serifos’. She wrote that she ‘found a Greece that seemed to have stood still since the 1960s and where island life remains unspoiled by mass tourism’. I visited Serifos a year later, in August 2018. Oblivious to Kate’s article at the time, I came to the same realization: Serifos reminded me of a Greece of a different era: it was the Greece that starred in the 1960s movies I used to watch as a child. Again and again, during my time on this small Greek island, the phrase ‘time stands still’ came to…