“What we perceive depends on how we direct our attention.” (Milton Erickson) by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

January 2019

     Perception is an interesting thing. Most of the time we see our world as we have become accustomed to seeing it. This is generally useful as it means we are not having to work hard at living life, but can assume a lot of things and then get on with making sense of the novel. 

     Our responses to what we perceive can largely become part of a well-oiled machine, which is not to say that this is necessarily good. In families, old patterns of behaviour in interactions between members and beyond that to interactions with other people who simply remind us of a family member, can be practically set in stone in a destructive manner. For example, a little girl is bossed around by her older sister who has been given the care of the younger one because mother is ill. The older sister has always been angry at having to be “mother” to her sister and forced, more or less, to give up her own childhood. The younger one doesn’t really know any difference. Mum is sort of there, but not as a comforter when she is hurt. “Mother-sister” is unreliable (she’s angry, after all), but who else is there? Father works away, and there is no other family nearby, and so the little one has to depend on this person who feels good/not good. When she grows up, she meets a man who is good and not good. He is familiar, but still not quite known. He behaves unpredictably and erratically, he is there and then he disappears and returns to surprise her, and then goes, and then comes.  Every time the woman meets with her older sister, she feels attacked and sort of depleted. She notices that afterward seeing her sister she eats a lot of sweets even though she isn’t hungry and even though she is now pre-diabetic. She attends psychotherapy sessions and starts to notice the patterns of behaviour in her own life as well as that in the man she’s with. She breaks up with him and at the same time, builds an understanding her sister more. She starts to notice that as her perceptions of that woman’s behaviour change, so are her reactions changing. She doesn’t feel the same imploded feelings so much and doesn’t consume massive amount of  ice cream in the way she used to.

     The process of psychotherapy interrupts not only tired old modes of interaction that are not working, but brings insights that create an ongoing capacity to change how we respond to others in the world. This, though, doesn’t mean everything is hunky-dory. As anyone who has experienced how it is to stop reacting as one has traditionally done within families and other groups, one’s non-reactions disturb the machinery of the family system and certain others can become belligerent and nasty. My suggestion when such things happen is to walk away and leave the antagonist to fight their own shadows. I’m reminded of the martial artist who, when the opponent lunges aggressively at them, simply steps aside. The opponent topples over. Neat.

     In time, the perceptions of other people in response to us change as we change and how they behave towards us changes too. Family and other social systems are not immutable, but fluid and flexible. What once was, doesn’t have to be forever. Our perceptions change according to how we direct our attention, and that changes practically everything.

A Therapeutic Conversation

December 2018

A Therapeutic Conversation by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     In September this year I travelled to Germany and then to Scotland, particularly around the Isle of Mull. In Germany I met with a couple of Facebook friends for the first time, one of whom is a psychotherapist like myself, the other an artist, like my otherwise self. We talked for hours in a little café called La Boheme in the old town of Heidelberg. This was, for me, a turning point in life and work. I remain in conversational contact with my colleague and he encourages me to new understandings and new readings and has enlivened how I work. I’m delighted by all this, and have been mulling on things ever since.

     In a non-direct way, through talking about Psychodynamic-interpersonal Psychotherapy, which both of us practice, I’ve been introduced to Conversational Psychotherapy, or simply the Conversation Model. It’s filling in my intuitive sense about how I work and how I’ve come to understand the self, and myself. This concept of self, which is a kind of consciousness, has been there all along, largely unarticulated, prompted by my early readings (in the 1970s) of William James and other relational-humanistic psychologists, but the clear statements of the Australian psychiatrist Russell Meares, b. 1936 (son of Ainslie Meares, psychiatrist, hypnotherapist and writer on meditation) has brought it into the clear light for me.

     The self, seen as a dynamical interrelational process, is not an abstract entity somehow separated from environmental encounter, nor known through the immersion of arcane texts; it is a dual process of felt bodily reaction and a dynamic play with inner events that bring about reflective awareness.  The self is ecological and relational and involves a sense of aliveness, of vitality, of well-being, positive feeling (warmth and intimacy), non-linearity, coherence, continuity, temporarily, spatiality, content beyond the immediate present (that is of the possible, the imagined, the remembered), with a sense of ownership, boundedness, agency and a that duality.

     The self, according to William James (1842-1910) is a duplex of one pole of awareness and another pole of inner events in a dance of self-reflectivity. Consciousness doesn’t always take this form. When we are alarmed or annoyed, reflective awareness is lost. Meares identifies the characteristic consciousness of those damaged by the impacts of the social environment as adualistic. It is reactive and responsive to the brain’s interplay with the environment, without self-reflectiveness. The aim of therapy is to restore, generate, and potentiate that dualistic kind of consciousness that is the self. But this pole of awareness plus a reflective pole of inner events cannot happen by itself. It has to be met, connected with, related to, for the self is part of an ecology. As a part of an ecology, any change in one part affects everything.

     Trauma plays a big part in this disturbance and interruption of the dual process, for it locks the person into reactivity, dullness, and a sense of stuckness. Psychotherapy then becomes very useful in creating a close, safe and supportive environment of reciprocity and engagement as it reconnects a person to themselves and the social environment.

  

     Conversation, as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the action of living, or having one’s being in a place or among persons”. It isn’t just about talk; it’s engagement and focus upon the shifts, the movements, the waxings, and wanings of this experience, and it is this that lies at the core of the interpersonal therapeutic approach. It is in conversation (in its style, content, context) that we come not only to express what we know but come to know what we don’t yet know.

     Conversational Psychotherapy is directed towards the restoration of a disrupted sense of personal being, or self. It’s interested in the inner life as well as emotions of reaction and building a capacity for self-awareness. An old mentor of mine used to ask me, “And how is the inner life” and such is a very good question for therapists to ask. We should not ignore a person’s perception of their inner life for herein lies tools for healing and strengthening  their capacity for self-reflection and not getting caught up in reactions and adualistic looping, that won’t go away in isolation from conversation.

   So, talking with my friends in the little café near the old bridge of the city of thinkers was not only great fun, but is bringing a greater awareness to my psychotherapeutic practice. Thank you, Jürgen and Aksel.  

An Uncommon Therapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns, Ph

November 2018

     Uncommon Therapy, the Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, is the title of a book  by Jay Haley on the strategies and practices of Erickson, the father of modern hypnotherapy.  Fundamental to how Erickson worked was just getting to know how the patient thought and interacted in their world, their potential, the things that mattered to them and then utilizing this knowledge in therapy. For him, the patient was unique, first and foremost. He said that the therapist needs to be flexible conceptually and behaviourally to respect, respond, or redirect the patient’s potential to the full benefit of themselves.

     A lot of therapeutic practices are driven by theory and preconceived classifications and notions of what good therapy should be so the perspectives of the therapist tends to dominate where the therapy goes.  I’m thinking here of certain aspects of psychoanalysis, or the medical model and increasingly the health insurance model that utilizes psychiatric classifications of mood and behavioural problems as set entities, or the idea that mere symptom control is sufficient in every situation, or that therapy needs to be swift and superficial all the times, etc. For some  practitioners of these one-size-fits-all therapies, an alternative model based on the fact that each case, each person, is unique tends to be seen as bizarre.

     Erickson (1901-1980), an American psychiatrist and psychotherapist, went elsewhere. He chose a therapeutic approach particular to the individuality of the person before him and worked that way. Unique people require unique therapeutic approaches that utilize their uniqueness and we are all unique. This took the form of traditional sessions in his consulting room, or he insisted a client climb a particular Arizonian peak or visit a botanic garden, or he invited his patient to watch television at a set time each day with his family (shock, horror), or to work in his garden, or home visits, and so on. This was very much uncommon therapy. It was flexible, it listened to the hang-ups, the foibles, the strengths, the frailties, the needs as well as the non-needs of each person and utilized them.  But before doing therapy of this kind, Erickson needed to be with the person’s experience, to listen, to question, to get a feel for the person.

     It is interesting that, in a desire to practically bottle Erickson’s presence and approach, numerous of his followers tried to pin what he did down to a formulation of his style and personality to be imitated by others, as though this was even possible. Erickson, like you, like me, was unique. He lived according to himself. He could not hear tonality in speech and music was dead to him, he was colour blind (able to see only the colour purple), he had been crippled by polio and post-polio syndrome in his 50s, he was talented, flawed, obstinate, highly intelligent, dogged, frail, methodical, practical, scientific even. What he did was listen to what people said and how they said it, he interacted with them (and the therapeutic relationship is critical to effective work), he supported, he created safety, he held back from getting in the way of good therapy and he did what was required. But not always. He sometimes missed the mark, just like all therapists.

     His was an uncommon therapy. He used a more traditional hypnotic induction techniques in his work, but not always. Sometimes he just did an ordinary act differently in order to get a person out of their conditioned, trancelike way of thinking. Sometimes he just talked of ordinary things a patient loved to do, like growing tomatoes that had the effect of reconnecting the person to other parts of their lives and thus initiating their psychological healing. In other words, Erickson played with the known and the unknown and thus stimulated change.

     I like Erickson’s thinking and the freedom he has brought to me through his writing and my contact with therapists trained by him to work according to the me-ness of me, and not as a tired imitation of him, or anybody else. This is what drives me: to meet with my patients where they are and where I am in these unchartered waters of an uncommon therapy and work there effectively.

A Sociology of Gaslighting

October 2018

     In September’s issue of the Nimbin Good Times, I wrote of  why gaslighters gaslight. In this article I explore the subject a little deeper in order to understand how and why a person may acquiesce to being gaslighted.  

     Gaslighting is a popular term used to describe a co-dependent dysfunctional relationship where the gaslighter attempts to control the sense of reality of the other person so that they come to doubt their sanity. Gaslighting is abuse, plain and simple, but its existence is bound to a cultural way of thinking about male/female differences.

     A gaslighter does what he, or she wants (gaslighters can be either gender, but for the sake of simplicity, I’m using “he”) as strategy is an attempt to silence the other person, to belittle her, and thus to prove his idea of male superiority (superior, dominant, more intelligent, more rational, or whatever).

     Women are often conditioned to collaborate and empathize and this makes her want to appease her partner when he pulls the “superiority” card. She’ll embark on a sort of iterative mouse wheel of explaining, complaining, crying, begging, pleading, etc. which reinforces his belief in his supposed rational superiority.

     Gaslighting is a major obstacle to forming a healthy sexual relationship. It’s hard for women, for anyone really to maintain an interest in sex when their sense of safety is destroyed. It is not uncommon for a woman’s body to simply stop responding and, at that point, for the man to start forcing her into sex that hurts. I say to the gaslighted, listen to your body, your body knows something is wrong. Get out and find your own life again.

     Sociologically, an  examination of gaslighting reveals a lot of social conditioning and cultural beliefs about what it means to be male or female. That baggage contains ideas that have little to do with actual biological differences, a fact revealed when softer men are described in feminine terms. The language surrounding male-femaleness says a lot. You’ll hear in there the idea that women are weaker than men, that their opinions are irrelevant, that her wants are not legitimate nor should be listened to, etc.

     Gaslighting is thought control and it’s done by the gaslighter to avoid feeling vulnerable and open to emotional pain, to avoid feeling “feminine”. It is significant that with this closed-heartedness comes lack of empathy and, quite often, cruelty to self, others, and animals. Gaslighters are frequently hard-nosed, no nonsense, driven men who fight tooth and nail to get what they want. They are resistant to change, narcissistic, and often, sociopathic, and cannot bear the idea of a relationship based on mutual respect, intimacy and equality.

     Traditionally, many of us in the West are brought up to believe that women’s role is to make men happy. Again, I’m not just referring to actual women, but the idea that in a relationship of any kind there has to be a strong, rational masculine person and a weak, irrational feminine one who clings to the man of the house for her very life. Women who identify more strongly with this paradigm often stay in a gaslighting relationship because they don’t know what else to do, how else to be. He has the financial stability, she has never learned to manage her finances. He has the house, she will be homeless on her own. He says he loves her, while telling her she is worthless. Maybe it isn’t all bad, and so she stays – to risk her own sense of reality, her own sanity.

      And so the light flickers, goes out, comes back on, flickers again. Nothing is safe, nothing is predictable, and she doesn’t know herself anymore. Maybe if she gave up everything that she is, he’ll truly love her, maybe not.

     Fortunately many in this weakened position do get enough clues to see what is being done to them and how they agree to it, at some level, and they get out. This is the beauty of the power of information about gaslighting. We can now see it for what it is and reclaim our own identity, our own truth, and be gaslighted no longer.

The One Who Manipulates the Gaslight

September 2018

The One Who Manipulates the Gaslight  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

     I recently watched the 1944 remake of the mystery-thriller Gaslight about a man who tries to send his wife mad by constantly distorting her reality and suggesting that her experiences are false. Things go missing: a picture on the wall comes and goes, a cameo brooch goes missing, there are bumps and bangs, and the gaslight flickers apparently without reason. Her husband controls her, while apparently loving her, in order to keep her “safe”. As the film rolls on we see this abusive, self-centred shifty narcissist take things, hide them, cut her off from family, undermine her, while threatening her with the visitation of doctors to have her diagnosed insane, in order to find and steal some rare rubies. But, like the flickering gaslight, this woman has some awareness that something is out of kilter, but what?

     Gaslighting is a popular term of a co-dependent dysfunctional relationship, not a diagnostic one. It is a relationship that may occur in partnerships, cults, even countries, where the gaslighter attempts to control the sense of reality of the other person, or people.

     Quite a lot has now been identified regarding the cues to look for in a gaslighting scenario and how it feels to  be gaslighted, but little is known about those who gaslight. This is what I intend to explore here. In the next month’s article, I’ll explore the gaslighters strategies for keeping the gaslighted under thumb.

     The gaslighted is anxious regarding the shifting realities, she doesn’t know if she’s loved or not because her abuser turns assurances on an off (I’m using “she” even though anyone can be the victim), she feels unsafe, yet told things to the contrary. She may experience digestive problems (something in the relationship  cannot be swallowed), her skin becomes itchy and dry almost like a protective layer to the turmoil of un-understood occurrences, she cramps up, she can’t sleep, etc.

     We all need safety and security, and somewhere we can be accepted as we are. The gaslighter disrupts all this. Why, though, does he do it?  The more insecure the gaslighted becomes, the more she clings to him, and that is his gain. He likes it that his partner needs him because he needs her to need him to feel validated. In this most vulnerable place, he (this is not gender specific) plays with her neediness: treating her occasionally with mildness and even superficial kindness or remorse, to give the gaslighted false hope. In these circumstances, the victim might think: “Maybe he’s really not that bad,” “Maybe things are going to get better,” or “Maybe I’ll stay, things are looking up,” but the gaslighted should not believe any of it.

     Gaslighters have an insatiable need to control others because of a deep-seated anxiety of abandonment. Maybe one of his parents used their child as a weapon against the other parent, all the while saying something like, “If you love me, you’ll hate your other father/mother,” where love is endlessly conditional. For an protected child growing up, there are few options but to go along with this.

     Things are 100% right or 100% wrong, for authoritarian gaslighters. They seek to control, dominate, and take advantage of another individual, or a group, or even an entire society. By maintaining and intensifying an incessant stream of lies and coercions, the gaslighter keeps the gaslighted in a constant state of insecurity, doubt, and fear. The gaslighter can then exploit their victims at will, for the augmentation of their power and personal esteem.

   All gaslighters think they are not the problem and everyone else is. Gaslighters are practically impossible to get into therapy. If they do attend, it is to tell the therapist that their partner is the problem and if the therapist insists, then, apparently, the therapist is incompetent. In other words, they have no capacity for self-reflection, and if that relationship finishes, the gaslighter will move on to someone new. For the gaslighted, their only real option is to be free and find their own feet in the world and for potential partners to be vigilant about what’s happening from the start.

I am Elizabeth of Estonia

February 2014

      Snow drifted up, sideways, down, through bare birch branches, drifted to ground, thickening there. An explosion of seagulls burst upwards,  a fountain of birds: an indelible evocative sight, numinous really.

     This is the landscape of the park opposite the Soviet built flats in which my aunt and uncle live in Tallinn, Estonia. This could have been the landscape of my mother’s early life. This could have been the landscape … but for the location. My mother was born in Pskov in Russia, of Estonian father and Russian mother. She was schooled in St Petersberg, Russia and then Tartu, not Tallinn, and then only a short time. My mother  and her brother came to Australia on a ship in the mid-1920s. They were immigrants, boat people.

     It was Australia Day recently: when Australians celebrate with the welcoming of new Australians and the drinking of beer and explosions of fireworks. My heart was heavy and the Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie refrain just left me cold. I had only been back a week from Estonia, this land of my mother’s.  The memories and rememberings somehow didn’t sit well in barbecues, and so I stayed at home.

     Re-membering, note the way I write it, is the putting together of things half imagined, half  recalled. Re-membering joins the dots. The story, my story, is situated and relational. This story is situated in place and it is relational to circumstance, place, time, people and the teller herself. This story of my mother, and thus me – to a degree – starts in 1909 with her birth into a disputed land. Of interest to everyone, wedged between the Baltic Sea to the north and west, Latvia to the South and Russia to the East, Finland, across the bay, and Sweden, over the Baltic to the North-West; sometimes claimed by Germans, sometimes Finns, the Russians, the Swedes; Estonia, of interest because of her precious port in  the capital, Tallinn. This port is remarkable. It doesn’t freeze over, because of warm currents. It opens frozen northern Europe to the world. So this little country, with its rich cultural history, its opera, ballet, and theatre companies, its artistic and musical history, its unique language (related not to Russian, but to Finnish and Hungarian), is attractive to larger countries that want to expand their borders. In 1909, Estonia was annexed by Russia. She gained a short lived independence in 1918, but soon she was gobbled again, this time into the Soviet regime, gaining independence again in 1989. Now she is dirt poor and propped up by the economy of Sweden (a dominance of another kind). She is poor but not down and out, despite a minuscule population of only 1.42 million people and a workforce that moves beyond her boundaries into Scandinavia.

     I am always interested in clear boundaries and I now compare this with Estonia’s fight for independent and clear boundaries from others surrounding her. I feel keenly the pressing in of others desires and needs and I know – in my bones – the richness of my own space. As one of my friends describes me, I am Elizabeth of Estonia. I know  the sinews and bones, and the cries of the children, of an ancient land, as if they were my own. This  land, strewn with the moss and snow covered ice boulders of Finnish granite that twisted and turned and travelled across the frozen Baltic Sea, is unique. Granite is from the Finnish landscape; Estonia is all wetlands and sandstone – and so much of it unsettled countryside. I know  it in the very marrow of my bones, the presence of others and my own unique integrity. It is in this knowing  that the personal and the professional meld together, for this is my gift (received, lived, and given again).

     I am, via my mother, a new Australian.  Via her, I know what I give and receive and give again, in my life and my therapeutic work. This being in me, this land of my mother’s ancestry, is me being Australian and me being present for the presence of others and present for myself. I don’t think I am all that different from others who cross the oceans to this place.

     My story is like  snow flakes dropping, rising, drifting and bursts of birds in silent crofts of trees. My story is merely musing, really. A seeking for sense; a joining of the dots.

It’s not all in the mind

Sept 2013

     Here I am wondering how to write this article and wondering what and how it is I am able to wonder anything at all. I know I want to write about the mind and the body, somehow, but how do I proceed? In common language “the mind” is usually used to refer to the thinking-feeling “I”,  that which allows us to be aware of the world and our experiences, the agent of oneself that is apparently separable from the body.   I’m not satisfied with that, because it doesn’t actually say anything. It’s sort like saying, as I read recently, that experiences, including near death experiences, are just experiences. What are experiences? What is the mind? I’m particularly unsatisfied with the idea that the mind is separable from the body. Who has a mind without the agency to produce it? A human mind cannot be conflated to divine consciousness, even if we think of  the human mind as a part of divine consciousness.

I am also unable to concede the popular notion that everything is all in the mind, because this feels inherently unsatisfactory. It feels to me like I would have to agree that my mind “cooks up” all existence, and I cannot buy that. Fortunately, I’m in good company.

     In Buddhism, all phenomena (subjective and objective) are  said to be dependent upon causes and conditions where nothing arises uncaused.  Every cause has a previous cause, a previous context, and situation, so that every phenomenon arises from previous phenomenon. It is interesting that such a perspective sits well with modern Western psychological thought and that it contrasts with our earlier philosophic tradition. The latter had a far more mystical idea about the nature of mind, the psyche. The psyche was seen as a sort of conflation of the soul and thought that was  somehow independent of everything material,  a sort of spiritual ether. Contemporary psychology, and Buddhism, sees the mind as inherently relational, and thus not independent of anything, nor ethereal.

     The mind, seen relationally, arises in a dependent way upon both internal and external things. Pain, for example, is thus not all in the mind as much  mind itself is not a creation of itself. We are responsive, relational beings.  There really is an outside world, and there is a relationship we have with it. This relationship is incredibly complex and entwined. If this was not so, we would not be able to share our experiences with one another, nor with other sentient beings. I note here that there is certainly a school of Buddhist thought that declares the material world as nothing but a projection of our minds, but this is not shared by other schools of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama, for one, considers it more ‘coherent’ (in his words) that there is a reality that consists of both the subjective mind and objective objects in the material world.

     The relational dependence of the mind upon inner and outer realities is what Buddhists call the philosophy of ‘dependent origination’ in which there is a continuum and complexity of attributions. We are thus able to say, we are made of star dust; we are continuous in substance with the rain and the oceans; we join with our ancestors as we tread this earth – mystical phrases that house actualities. The basic elements that make the universe make our bodies and our brain, that give form and language to our minds (the archetypes of divine potters that contrive bodies and give them breath, has something essentially true to say here).

     Our intentions, our will, our activities in the world thus matters incredibly, for these have a real bearing on all else in our subjective and objective lives. This how, what, and whether: the how we live our lives, what thoughts we think, how we manifest those thoughts, whether we are generous towards others and ourselves, and so on, is where  psychotherapy and clinical hypnotherapy comes to their own. The changes and choices we make really do change our relationships with ourselves, one another and our physical environment, and the matter of our own brains (brain plasticity). The mind truly is a relational state of being. A change at the level of mind, changes fundamentally everything because the mind is not separate. Life really isn’t all in the mind, for the mind is merely an integral part of  it.

Doing God and Adam: contact and mindfulness

Dec 2009

Contact and Mindfulness     by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     A few years ago I spontaneously devised a game where a friend and I, with fingers extended, reach across to touch the other’s finger, reminiscent of God and Adam in Michaelangelo’s famous painting found in the Vatican. An electric contact is made with an accompanying zzzzzzz.  We then break into much laughter.

     I like this game greatly (known among my friends as “doing a God and Adam”). To me it sums up the exciting quality of contact, and not just human contact. There is electricity in the contact between humans and other animals and humans and plants and the rest of the earth, when excitement and interest is there. 

     Recently friends and I swam with seals off Carnac Island in Cockburn Sound off Rockingham in Western Australia – an incredibly beautiful place with pristine waters and white sands. Though there we did not actual touch the seals in a physical sense, we were wonderfully energized in meeting the other.

     I also met a shell as I dived down through surging water, my fingers not quite close enough at first, but with an extra kick, I touched, grasped, and plucked it from the sea floor. This was a gift for a friend.  The shell’s sharp salty smell a sweet reminder of her days on the West Coast’s beaches.

     It is likewise wonderful dropping down the streets of cities, like Sydney, meeting a surge of people as they come up the other way; of making contact with a smile with people I don’t know; of chance meetings with the like minded in book shops or cafés.

      Or the contact of meeting eye to eye with a green tree frog found under a tarpaulin in my backyard, or hearing a bird reiterating my laughter, or the deep swish of the wind in the trees as I, too, realize something new. Or the touching of an ancient melody caught for a moment on my lips.

     Contact is extraordinary.  Here we are, entities apparently separate, coming together in maybe a short time, and meeting and sharing and parting. It is this rich encounter that excites me when I greet each client. Indeed, it is the promise of such rich encounter that I look forward to when I wake up each day.

     In contact, though, there is something even more powerful than the delight of connecting. In contact we can move into new levels of consciousness with ourselves, one  another and the deep ecology of the environment. This requires mindfully being  present and watching without attachment to what arises for us in our bodies, our breath, and the passing parade of our thoughts.  When we are  profoundly present for another person our presence  shifts the other’s conscious experience from their pain-body (as Eckhart Tolle describes it) to a gentler state of being.

     Staying in contact within ourselves is much harder. When we are afraid we want to escape from it; when we are angry we want to lash out; when we are embarrassed we want to end our embarrassment, and so on.  These inner feelings generally have deleterious effects on our ways with others and our world. Dumping onto others what we experience as   suffering within ourselves is no solution (wars are made of this). We do need to acknowledge and   make full contact with it within ourselves: to know its edges, the stories that arise and the habitual responses that surround it, as well as all those grumbly reactions and irritations that we feel in response to it. In staying in contact with the feelings we normally try to dispel we actually have new capacities, new insights, and new ways of responding. The intensity lifts. It doesn’t generally happen quickly, though.  I have found that this method of mindful contact with the suffering I’ve known throughout my life is often intensely uncomfortable, interesting in a curious way, but difficult nonetheless. I also know, at least for myself, it is necessary in order that I be truly who I am. It is a method of mindfulness I encourage my clients to explore.

     Contact is electric and when combined with mindfulness practice fundamental shifts in awareness and new insights and ways of engaging with others becomes real and alive. We become alive, playful and ready to engage  wholly with those about us, even the small green tree frog in our garden and the swish of the wind in the trees.