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 17th
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.
