Descartes is the villain, said Amy Castoro of the Irimi Group, if you are having trouble getting your mind to stay in touch with your body. Castoro, in a fabulous workshop for the Association for Woman in Science yesterday at the Miele headquarters, told the fascinating history of somatic psychology, how the body affects the brain and vice versa. “The price of learning to think objectively is the separation of mind and body,” she said.

I had to leave the meeting early, but not before she had everyone up on their feet in a “centering” exercise. Emotion can happen from the outside in, she suggests. If you hold a facial expression long enough, your body and your thoughts mirror it. “All of us have a shape. The shape we hold reflects our history.”

So if we consciously change our shape (our posture, our stance, the way we hold ourselves) we not only change the way we look to others (as in a job interview), but we can also change our mood.

One of her mentors is California-based Richard Strozzi-Heckler and another is right here in Princeton, Les Fehmi, author of “The Open Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body.” (I’m also a believer in the Open Focus methods of dealing with everything from hypertension and ADD to insomnia and pain.)

Though Castoro quoted Alice Miller as saying “the body never lies,” the woman who more famously said that was Martha Graham. The body might not lie, but you can negotiate with it. If you stand up straight and tall and look like a winner – you will feel like a winner. And you’ll likely be one.

(Writing is one of the few occupations where you can hide your body language. If you are reading this on Thursday, August 13, stop by to meet a bunch of writers, at the U.S. 1 Newspaper reception for writers (and readers), 5 to 7:30 p.m. at Tre Piani in Forrestal Village. This cash bar event celebrates the U.S. 1 fiction and poetry issue but welcomes everyone. So what do poets look like, anyway?)

If you admire those who open their homes to Fresh Air kids from New York City — but have never figured out how to put that into your schedule — it”s not too late to sponsor a runner in the Fresh Air Fund half-marathon, in New York City on Sunday, August 16, says Sara Wilson.

Frankly, I was worried about Capital Health System’s building a new hospital on Scotch Road in Hopewell, while at the same time University Medical Center of Princeton is building its own new hospital in Plainsboro.

How will both have enough patients to be viable, I doubted.

Capital Health’s CEO Al Maghazehe (pronounced “MAG a see”) cleared that up today, speaking at a Princeton chamber lunch on how CHS contributes to the area’s economy. CHS will draw some patients from Princeton’s catchment area, yes. But as the southern-most high tech hospital, it can tap patients from all the smaller hospitals to the south, a rich source of revenue indeed.

Okay, now I get it.

Maghazehe also revealed some intriguing business strategies.

Yes, he promotes teamwork. Yes, he advocates employee empowerment.

But how did he walk away with the largest loan that the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development ever made?

He credits his “down year” of 1998 when, after the merger of two century-old hospitals (Helene Fuld and Mercer), he had trouble meeting payroll. “The auditor sat in my office. I had terminated just about everyone on the management team – the CFO, the two medical directors, the CIO, and many midlevel directors,” he said. “It was just me.”

With a new team he reversed the trend and doubled business. And this is what he says HUD based its nearly $800 million loan on — not on a balance sheet that shows 700,000 patients and a half million dollars in revenue — but on its confidence in CHS being able to cover its debt service.

Other strategies:

Incentives to primary care practices. “The primary care network should be large enough to fuel growth. Some hospitals have 200. We are up to 35, and adding.”

Designating Fuld as a trauma center and bringing in top-level doctors for it.

Buying technology (the cyberknife and robotic surgery) and bringing in people to run it.

Competing with Philly by hiring away entire teams (including the stroke and cerebro-vascular team from Thomas Jefferson, though he didn’t name that hospital in his talk). And setting up cutting edge (sorry for that one) equipment.

Opening satellite offices like the Hamilton walk-in surgery center, which went from 7,000 to 35,000 procedures annually.

Designating the Philadelphia Eagles as CHS’s official team (no, that’s the inside joke of the lunch today, but Maghazehe is a notorious Eagles fan).

Perhaps the most interesting revelation, that Maghazehe is a one-job man. He came to CHS as an intern and never left. That may explain why he is so famously and outspokenly loyal. On this occasion he introduced a table-full of his own doctors, but he also gave gracious nods to Skip Cimino (just named CEO of RWJ at Hamilton) and metaphorically doffed his hat to Princeton: “This region is extremely fortunate to have two brand new hospitals built at the same time.”

There are networking groups, and then there are workshops. Lately, combos of those two are proving successful.

Communications coach Eileen Sinett (www.speakingthatconnects.com) has begun to hold breakfast meetings on “last Fridays,” and I fetched up at her door, on Plainsboro Road, on July 31. So did nearly two dozen other people, eager to network but also ready to sponge up wisdom from Eileen on how to present themselves better. Scott Melzer, an Ameriprise financial advisor, was the co-host and Biz4NJ the co-sponsor of this Speaking For Biz program.

After chatting with an unusually diverse group of people, ranging from my colleague, Bart Jackson, and Warren Pick, a TV producer – to Cindy Urken, a realtor, and Sherry Waryasz, a certified laughter leader – we settled down to introduce ourselves. Eileen suggested an intriguing departure from the typical “elevator” speech. Instead of “my name is and here is what I do,” we were to begin with “Clients say…” or “People tell me….” or even just “When….”

If you think of the typical introduction as like a news story, with the Who, What, When and Where at the top, this kind of “alternative introduction” is like a mini-feature story, a nifty little narrative. We learned a lot about each other in a very short time.

Then we puzzled over the difference between providing information and persuading. Having just returned from Italy, and my first visit to Pisa, I was intrigued by the answer from Prakash Rao, a time management coach. It seems that Galileo proved the theory of gravity by dropping things from the Tower of Pisa, but for 100 years the faculty at the University of Pisa did not teach his theory. Galileo had failed to persuade.

Here is a snippet from Eileen’s mini-lesson on persuasion, memorable with the rubric Smart Individuals Head Big Companies. Setup or frame your context with three irrefutable statements, that no one can contest. Then and only then present your Idea, followed by How it would work, and then by telling the Benefits. Or just tell the benefits and wait for your target to ask how he can get it.

Sinett runs some other low-cost opportunities to pick up speaking tips, but the next Biz4NJ breakfast is Friday, August 28, at 8:30 a.m. at 610 Plainsboro Road, on the topic “Tweaking Pitches for a Different Audience.” Cost: $10. Please RSVP at 609-799-1400 because space is limited. Photo: From left, Nicolette Datri, an intern, and Eileen.

If Fort Monmouth does pull up its drawbridge, as it’s slated to do, thousands of specialized tech workers would have to uproot their families and move to Maryland.

But maybe not. In the federal defense budget, two U.S. Representatives (Rush Holt and Frank Pallone), have inserted $3 million for a new New Jersey Technology Center, where the specialized techies could continue to provide intelligence and communications support to the U.S. military.

Don’t confuse the to-be-created New Jersey Technology Center with the Technology Centre of New Jersey, the tech park owned by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority. (When checking on TCNJ I found that Chubb Institute has changed its name, which slipped by me. Chubb’s education arm went deep into the red, was bought by private equity, separated from the insurance company, and is now called Anthem Institute. It’s across the street from what must be its arch rival, DeVry Institute.)

The bill passed the House on July 30 and still needed Senate approval, as of Friday, July 31.

“The men and women of Fort Monmouth — the scientists, engineers, and acquisition specialists who make the IED jammers and related devices — have acquired their skills over decades of service,” said Holt in a press release. “You can’t buy this kind of talent off the street and certainly not fresh out of grad school, which is why funding the Center and utilizing those workers who will stay in New Jersey is so important.”

Here’s an idle, obstreperous idea: Could those defense techies have found another home in Einstein’s Alley, for instance at the Sarnoff Center, which is busy with defense contracts as well? From the New Jersey shore to Maryland is too long a commute, but from the shore to Princeton is doable. And Sarnoff has extra space and like minds.

The subject of jet lag came up when Esther Dyson addressed the Princeton Chamber on July 9. Dyson had just returned from Russia, and she was working on almost no sleep, but gave a wow of a talk.

In the ever perplexing discussion about whether readers will pay for news content, here is an apt summary from Editor & Publisher’s Steve Outing, quoting former Trenton publisher Dean Singleton. My previous entry featured commentary from Richard Bilotti, another former publisher at The Times of Trenton.