Deepening Perceptions

 Deepening Perceptions  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     In recent times I’ve found myself embedded in stories of unusual perception and sensitivity. I re-watched Tous les Matins du Monde  (All the Mornings of the World),  directed by Alain Corneau, 1991,  on the life of a 17^th century viol da gamba player, Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, who, on the death of his beloved wife retreats from his daughters and fine house to a hut in the garden to practice his instrument seventeen hours a day. His musicality increases to the level that he is sought out for his extraordinary skill by a brazen young man who wants to learn everything from him, but the master says, “No, you have skill but no musicality.” Time passes, with tragedies, and the man returns after a life of glitter and fame and requests his first lesson. The old master asks him what music is; is it this, is it that? What music is, says Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, is that which wakens the dead, and thus the lesson begins.

     This is a film, for me, of the extraordinary translucence of music, that strips away the extraneous useless matters of gestures and habituations of daily life, to the raw essence of being.  It is here, at least for me, where deepening perceptions begin.

     A few days after watching All the Mornings of the World,  I  saw Perfume, The Story of a Murderer, directed by Tom Tykwer, 2006. Here is a story of a fictional Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an eighteenth century man born with an extraordinarily heightened sense of smell (hyperosmia) who is obsessed with capturing the essential scent of young women, along with perfumes of flowers and fruits. He experiments with scent capturing techniques by murdering women and trying to urge off their pheromones into an unguent. Pheromones are those chemicals exuded by the body that affect the behaviour and physiology of other animals, including us.

     And then I’m reading Like Water for Chocolate, A Novel in Monthly Instalments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies, by Laura Esquivel (1989). This about a woman who, forbidden to marry her lover, sheds tears that enter the meringue for the cake she makes for her sister’s wedding to her own lover that alters the perceptions of all those that ate it. From then, everything she cooks transforms its partakers.

    And then there is my work with clients. Much is about expanding perceptual awareness so that stuck patterns of living are freed up.

      It is very easy to get stuck. Taking up smoking or drinking or endless computer game playing or any other nerve calming activities  in times of stress makes sense. What doesn’t make a lot of sense is when these activities start to rule us. This is when tapping, once again, into doing things that naturally lead to expanded perceptual experiences can free us up, free us from the mouse-wheel of the same old, same old. The freeing up and the deepening of perceptual knowing in one individual has the capacity to change how we relate to other people and how they relate to us.

     Making music, perfume making (I’m not advocating murder!), and cooking, are activities that can help expand perceptual awareness and enjoyment and change lives. There is dance, running, swimming, painting, gardening, and so on, as well. All are active and require embodied engagement, and not just sitting back and entering fantasy realms. The point, though, is that just doing these activities  may be not enough to release a fixed mind-set that leads to harmful and habitual practices, we still have to know how to let go of them (even after we have stopped puffing), we still have to learn mindfulness  techniques that deepen perceptual awareness, so that the symptoms don’t return. This is where counselling and clinical hypnotherapy are  most valuable, but meditation or anything else that focuses on mindful participation helps. The talking cure of therapy is a very valuable one, though, for takes the exercise into an interpersonal realm and that helps release us from the things that bind us, releasing us into a fuller participation in the world.

Nothing is the Same

Nothing is the Same by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I recently went West back to my home town to look at wildflowers and catch up with friends. It’s a funny thing to try to do really, for going  back can never be achieved. One might return to a place, but the place, like everything shaped by the flux and flow of time and change, is not the same place.

     This was particularly poignant for me in two ways: some old friendships, it became clear, just don’t work anymore and the characteristics that I was once attracted to, are now just irritating. Some old friendships, on the other hand, remain buoyant and are a sheer pleasure to share in. These ones have moved with the times and we have grown to another level together.

     The other way was discovered in walking around the streets of my childhood and youth. The last time I visited, this place was all spick and span with new buildings and pavements and an atmosphere of get up and go. This time, I had a sense of a decaying ghetto. The block of units  now occupying the land on which my father designed and built our house now looked run down (and all in a remarkably short time). All the buildings in the street looked tired. The buildings that used to be an eclectic mix of Federation, Californian, and modernist designs, held together by loquat trees and rambling vines, are now boring units interspersed with sad houses with weeds of wood sorrel and daisies, gone to wrack and ruin. It seems the dreams of developers have somehow missed the mark, or else the population is transient and not the sturdy suburban stalwarts of old.

     Heraclitus (535- 475 BC)  said, “You cannot step into the same bit of river twice.” The water is different, the sand has changed and rocks worn down, the flush of new growth has grown old, and the old has grown new and interesting slimes and young fungi; there is nothing the same with this river that is life.

     I inevitably wonder whenever I go back to the landscape of my youth whether I should return there to live.  Every time, though, I cannot see why. I have made my home and my clinical practice in the northern rivers and I like it here. There are almost far too many memories back in the West for me to see the landscape afresh without its archaeological digs of personal history, and I rather  like only visiting those memories when I wish. Yes, I know, it seems I am contradicting myself here. I recognize that all is change, and that I cannot return to a time before the present, but that place is redolent with memories and it is my mind that try to hold the place in place.

    I’m not any different from anybody else here.  We all do it, but however much we try to keep our place safe from change, it doesn’t work. The mutability of living is just like water: impossible to keep in an unchanged form, forever.

     It interests me that a symptom of depression and obsessive compulsive disorder is the iteration, the doing or thinking of the same thing over and  over in a stuck way.  Seeking to find sanctuary in the repeated now doesn’t work. There is no peace here; iteration is just irritation and a place of anxiety. How nice it is to let go into flow, to not hold back nor try to hold still a pattern that, perhaps, used to be useful in times of stress. How good it feels not to have to regurgitate those old things that do not improve with time.

     The substance of  moving from this moment to the next to the next to the next is the substance of  the blood, flesh, bone and breath of life. Nothing is the same. All is change and I rather like it.