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.

Brain Plasticity and Continuing to Heal

July 2012

     In the bad old days, it was thought the brain grew during childhood, stopped changing in any way, then began a process of decaying, declining, and dementia-fying. In those days the brain was viewed as a bit of  beautiful meat, essentially, and incapable of forming new neural pathways. The current sport of brain gym exercises was not thought useful, even relevant. You were born with an x amount of intelligence and you could be educated, but you couldn’t change your destiny – so it was thought. If you got schizophrenia, you got something that damaged your brain and a damaged brain is what you had. If you had obsessive compulsive disorder, you had ocd. That was it. If you got post traumatic stress disorder, you could be treated with medication, but that was it. Counselling, the talking cure, was thought not to be effective in the treatment of these conditions, except for offering care and support.

     That old model of an inflexible brain has gone by the wayside. We are now seeing the brain as a plastic organ (plastic in the sense of  fluid,  flexible and changeable, not the plastic of tuppeware!) where grey  matter may shrink or thicken and neural connections are forged, refined or weakened and severed in response to new encounters or habits repeated or activities not practiced. This is a physical process that is expressed physically, functionally, and chemically throughout life.

     Brain or neuro-plasticity, as a way of viewing the brain, excitingly and finally takes account of the whole human being in body, experience, and psychological state, for functionality is seen as not only being a result of brain process but a contributer to brain physiology and its processes, as a reciprocal process.  Each time we learn a new skill, like playing an instrument, or crocheting, or plastering, or enhancing pre-existing skills, like writing, or cooking, or singing, we forge new neural pathways in our brain which changes how we do things and how we experience them, sensorially and in our thoughts, in other aspects of our lives. It is in this two-way process that effective treatments are being found for the supposed intractable conditions described above, and for slowing the rate of dementia. Individuals exercising their brain through puzzles and learning new skills is also extremely valuable. Treatments are now utilizing many of the techniques developed and found useful by psychotherapists and counselors. Techniques we developed from an interest in the interface between lived experience and story telling, as well as more hard-core symptom control.

     Acute trauma counsellors, for instance, often use the method of asking the distressed person to tell and retell, in detail, what happened to them, while sitting warmly and comfortably and supported by the counsellor.  Likewise, when the acute trauma continues to be experienced years after the first event becomes chronic (when the neural pathways in the parts of the brain iteratively repeat the course taken before), the therapist  uses the same method with their client. We ask the client to tell and retell in as much detail as possible what happened to them and what feelings arise in them as they give account of  the original traumatic event. In the process of telling the story (I use this word advisedly for I do not wish to imply a fictional account at all; this is real stuff), and retelling it, an interesting capacity arises: a sense of being a witness to the experience, which – over time – lessens its effects on the psyche and felt experience.

     It is interesting that neuroscientists have recently found that getting a person with post-traumatic stress disorder to write down and retell over and over, the traumatic event, in minute detail, and increasing, in this mindfulness exercise, what they call the impartial spectator effect (the witness) changes brain physiology.  The use of magnetic resonance imaging show a shift from neural pathways used over and over (the post-traumatic stress disorder brain) to vital new activity in the person’s brain. The shift to a capacity to look impartially upon a previous torment frees us physically, emotionally, chemically, and psychologically to experience life entirely differently. All thanks to a plastic brain.

     Healing, real healing from a psychological wound is possible  - at a deeply, neurophysiological level, at a functional level, and at the heart of lived experience.  Little, it appears, is fixed. Fluidity of being, a creativity of being, and an awareness of being, integrally intermingle in the healing that continues.

Risk

May 2012

     There was a medium-sized tree in Kings Park, Perth, in which my friends and I would play. This was a commodious cypress type of tree with thick layers of branches from the top right down to ground level. We’d climb to the top and throw ourselves over, relaxing into a controlled fall as each branch would catch us and drop us to the next branch, and so on to the bottom. It was wonderful.

     I can still smell in my mind’s nostrils the resinous quality of branch and twig and the stickiness that remained on the hands long after we’d gone home.  My body also retains the sensation of the slow supported fall. It is an incredible feeling, this body memory and one that has become something a metaphor for me as I look upon the subject of risk.

     Risk is a chosen action where the outcome is unknown.  Dropping from the top branch of the tree was an act of faith each time, because though we could do the fall over and over, we never quite knew whether we’d catch the branches in a safe way every time. Maybe we’d drop straight to the ground, maybe we’d be all right. Who could really know?

     Allowing ourselves to partake of risk, allowed us to know life exquisitely. The Brazilian mystical author, Paulo Coelho describes it this way, “You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.”

     Too often we tremble at the edge of existence, too scared to choose, too scared to do anything.  So we repeat the same tired old formulas over and over, even though the circumstances that gave rise to them years ago are no longer relevant.  I’m thinking of a man who I once saw who would not take a holiday from work even though he was completely worn out, to the degree that he was physically ill. Turned out that when he was a child his father had been injured in a war zone and was largely bedridden until death, and mother wasn’t coping. Sometimes she could help; sometimes she just took off. The only child, the boy felt he had to hold it all together. So set the pattern of never allowing himself rest – even long after that difficult childhood, even though his life situation was completely different. He now lived comfortably, with his own grown up family, and a business that employed lots of other people who could run it well without him always present. Yet he still could not let go of his anxiety, he never rested. His family were exasperated. He’d sent them on holiday regularly each year, but always stayed at home to look after the business. What if something happened when he was not there? It was ironical that he could take risks with his business, but not with this essential thing of allowing rest. It was killing him.

     As time goes on the old patterns of dealing with the world get encrusted like an old car battery that hasn’t been cleaned. Gunk just accumulates around the vital connections and we lose our wherewithal to act freshly and decisively. Just the thought of doing something new, to leap into the rich field of unknown possibilities feels constrained by a mounting list of imagined things that can go wrong. What if?

     “We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.” Accompanying every act of life is the possibility of annihilation. The spectre of death is always present, a figure that brings all the more shimmer to life.

     What if the leap ends in stars? Concussion, magic, entrance into an entranced state, paralysis, crippledom, surprise, wow!, feeling incredibly, vitally alive? What if the leap is beautifully supported all the way to the ground, like the cypress tree of my youth? Who knows! Life is risk. The very nature of life can hand out anything – and does.  Plunge into it.

Finding order in chaos

Feb 2011

     Does anyone remember the child’s game of fiddlesticks? You held in your hand a collection of different coloured sticks (mine were plastic), let them go, and then chose one to lift out of the small piece of chaos each stick until all were removed from the pile. If I remember correctly, you chose all sticks of the same colour, until these were removed. There might also have been a component of the game where each colour was worth more or fewer points than the others. It was a game of skill.

     I have clients who come in to see me, overwhelmed with choices: where to go now, which course to take, how to quell an all embracing anxiety about the multiplicity of things.  They’d reached a point of stuckness; a sense that no choice is possible among the many choices. At the heart of this is a knowing that there many many possibilities, an excitement that beckons, but a tremendous anxiety usually concerning the “rightness” of a decision about to be made.

     Like a game of fiddlesticks you can fiddle around putting off making a decision, or you can deliberately pick up a stick and lever off each stick one at a time methodically, noting as you do, what is more important to you, and what can be cleared away without too much thought. It is usually no more complicated than this. A life is a long time (though, of course, how long, few actually know). In a life it is possible (and happens practically always) to take many “wrong” turns before you realize what it is that really matters to you and what it is that you decide to devote the rest of your time to.

     Anxiety in the face of making a decision is a peculiar admixture of emotions. There is a surge of excitement and a sense of confusion; there is sometimes gut pain, often sweating, a tingling, a rootlessness, a feeling that your heart has dropped to your feet, and an idea that you cannot make a move, because at the edge of it all is a sense that you are near annihilation. Anxiety in bits and pieces is quite normal and a part of life. It is when you feel anxious all the time and when it gets in the way of doing what needs to be done that maybe a call to a therapist is a good idea.

     Anxiety is the “fear and trembling” before a new encounter. It comes to the fore when we challenge our old self-world relationship and doing things in the same old way. Feeling anxious, though, when identified positively as an excitement rather than negatively as a disorder, has the wonderful power of changing how we are in the world, of allowing us to embrace life more fully.

     Artists know well anxiety and a sense of being in chaos. They choose to occupy the “anxious space” for although feelings of insecurity, over sensitivity, and abandonment come with the deal, as it were, they embrace the “divine madness” for the extraordinary charge that comes with creation. Creation, as the Old Testament book of Genesis in the Bible describes it, is a process of separating from chaos (‘the earth was without form and void’), night and day, darkness and light. This process, though, cannot be forced: it is necessary to listen to the movements within. This does not mean that you wait until the spirit moves you, but that you respond to the often inchoate “voices” within, and slowly or swiftly as is required create by a process of separation, this from that, that from this till what you have made excites you.

     Anxiety is embraced by artists and can be likewise an energetic source that others can draw upon in the course of daily life.

     If I take one course of action, will I have to abandon all the others?  Yes, but just for now.

     The art and skill of fiddlesticks is to attend fully to each stick as you lever it up and add it to your pile of possibilities beside you. In sorting through the chaos an art of life that excites you becomes clearer. Sometimes this is just plain and rather dull old work; sometimes your heart soars with elation. Choosing is a skill that can be learned and anxiety can be a useful tool in getting you started.

99% of the population aren’t coping perfectly well

April  2010

     I’ve sometimes heard it said that since 99% of the population don’t need therapy, what’s wrong with the woossy 1%?  Maybe the numbers are wrong, but the gist of this idea is also missing the mark. The trouble is vast numbers of people in Australia, particularly rural Australia, aren’t coping particularly well. Many use alcohol and/or drugs to mask their emotional difficulties, while others turn to gambling, food, and sex to conceal how they actually feel about themselves.

     Underneath exhibitions of self-abuse there lies vulnerable people feeling they have no one to talk to.  Family and friends often do not have the patience nor the skills to hear someone out, so feeling bruised, grief stricken, confused, in deep emotional pain, they play dangerously with their lives.

     The trouble is, the feelings don’t go away. They may be hidden temporarily, but they pop out when a person least expects it.  These feelings are not always symptoms of a mental illness or mood disorder, like depression or anxiety, but profound distress.  Grief, for instance, can so disturb a person that it feels like there is no possibility of an end to it. Grief can be feelings of loss of a loved one through death (human or animal), loss of a relationship, loss of a job or a familiar lifestyle (experiences of prison can be absolutely devastating to a person’s equilibrium), loss of health and well being (say, through cancer or motor neuron disease), loss of competency and memory (in dementias like Alzheimer’s), feelings of loss when a parent or friend or child acquires a dementia (and this condition is not confined to the elderly) – they look familiar, but they are not ‘all there’; grief has many forms and feeling it does not describe mental illness.  Capacity to experience grief makes us intensely human, though we now know that other animals know grief well.  Movies of elephants grieving over the death of a much-loved member of an elephant clan show this. The capacity to grieve is part of the capacity to love.

     We cannot snap out of feelings we have and denying these feelings exist in our waking life, while over drinking, eating (or refusing to eat), engaging in high risk sexual activity, driving too fast, or whatever, does nothing for the distress that arises at night, alone.

     Counselling, or its longer duration counterpart, psychotherapy, can help restore  a sense of balance within ourselves. It can introduce a sense that we have the capacity to choose from many options in life, rather than go with the stuff we formerly thought was our boring old lot in life. It can invigorate us; bring excitement, even joy to our lives.  Counselling can break through procrastination and artistic blocks, so writing, painting, dancing and music making become not only possible but wonderfully accessible. Counselling is a very useful tool in bringing mindfulness to whatever we do, think, and feel, so that we are not seemingly controlled by other people, habits, and old self stories that get in the way of living authentically.

     Counselling is good, but a holistic approach to working through emotional pain, depression, anxiety, confusion, loss, etc. is best of all. I actively encourage my clients to exercise: walk, swim, run, play sport; to eat a balanced diet (and not over indulge); to take their medicine (as prescribed by their doctor, or alternative health specialist) and cut down the use of alcohol and non-prescribed drugs; to explore ideas in books, talks, the internet, and meetings; to take time out with walks in the forests, massages, spa baths, for instance; and to keep a journal, writing down (or drawing) their dreams, and observations of their encounters in everyday life. Counselling is most effective when it is part of a whole self health plan. When viewed in this way, there is nothing woosy about it. If   1% of the population get to enjoy it, then how lucky are they! The alternative for many people is  a small, ugly, and repetitious life  alleviated (controlled?) by substance abuse and dangerous behaviour. Life is too short for that. How much lovelier to be able to accept what is inevitable, celebrate what is choiceful, and manifest a richer, more abundant presence in the world.

At the Edge

Dec 2010

     When the tears of a lost relationship, or any significant loss at all, exposes the ancient edge of existence, the place of unanswerable questions, we know the edge of meaning/meaninglessness has been reached. It is like teetering on the last rock before the yawning black abyss. We look down and feel engulfed in the inexplicable. What is the meaning of life? Where do we go from here?

     I know this edge very well, and know when my clients are there too. This is the edge of existence as we know it; the familiar is no more.

     What now? We cannot go back, and going forward is stepping off the edge into the unknown. I cannot write, “unknown vastness” for I do not know its size, or if it even can be measured. It’s “possibility,” it’s “potential,” yes, but how, why, what?

     When the edge is known, and I suspect we have all experienced this at various times, we can certainly draw back, grab a beer, turn up the radio, or follow each excruciating filament of our own fear to apprehend the nature of our own despair and see what possibilities arise.  This is a scary place. Is this apprehension a stepping off into space? Yes, I believe it is.

     Some people have faith, some have trust, some have other philosophical beliefs or religious stories about this walking into abyss. For myself, this is the time not to take refuge in ideas, nor engage in fabricating happy endings before the work is actually done.  It is too easy to imagine the fulfilment of a hero’s journey, but such imaginings have a hollow ring, like when you tap a plastic version of a grail cup. The actual work must take place, and I value working with people as they begin or continue that profound work.

     The trouble with our over enriched cultural environs is that we know much about happy endings, and heroic journeys, and mythical places, but don’t well know the hard work that is required for even for the stories to exist.  It is ultimately ineffective to half-heartedly do a bit of this abyss apprehension work, keeping in mind all the while a vision of finding the grail. No, the work is in facing full on the gaping horrifying mouth of the abyss: going in there, terror-filled, and not knowing what next. Grail quests are mere stories; the unknowing is real.

     I have seen among my clients those who have short circuited the actual work. A tell-tale sign  is a tendency to verbalize a fantasy place, or to draw a happy fantasy situation where opposites are miraculously cojoined – all the while demonstrating an out-of-sortness with their immediate experience of being here, now and in relationship with me. The journey, or dark night  of the soul, or leaping the abyss cannot be fabricated.

     The risk, as I write this, is that the language and imagery of the Grail quest and that of St. John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul,” or even the “abyss” will be substituted for what actual encounters of the edge a person has. This is an existential place essential unique for each person who finds themselves there, when the familiar veils of  life are wrenched down.

     The fear of falling is great and it is natural to want to cling to anything, anybody, any activity that is around, and yet, such are distractions to the work of apprehension.  St John of the Cross, Spanish mystic and monk of the 16^th century, writes of detaching oneself from the things of the world, but he also writes that doing this aligns oneself closer to God. I suggest, instead, to take the  psychic plunge (not physically) without religious or ideological support and enter into unknowing; experience that and see what happens for you. There is potential, possibility, excitement, discovery, a new way of being (or not at all); there is the unknown.

On Knowing the Essence of the Other

Jan 2011

     Call it empathy, called it emotional compassion, call it ‘putting yourself in the other person’s shoes,’ call it what you will; at the heart of the matter it is knowing the essence of the other. It is  recognizing the realness of the humanity, in its complexity, of the other person in their flesh and blood.

     We are not born having empathy, for it is something we usually grow into.  As little children we start to recognize what another person is feeling from cues such as facial expressions, laughter, or crying, and how they might be responding from various contexts or situations, like cutting a finger. At first we may experience the distress of the other person as our own distress  (their tears are our own) – which can be overwhelming, but then we develop something called reflective empathy where we gradually learn how to helpfully deal with the suffering of others. This reflective empathy may eventually develop into altruistic behaviour. Altruistic behaviour is where you act for the benefit of another person, without necessarily seeing their discomfort first.

     So what does this word empathy actually mean, and is it adequate in its present form? Does it actually connote a much deeper interrelational process?

The word empathy is a relatively recent concoction combining two Greek roots, pathetos referring to “suffering” and the prefix em referring to “in”. As such, the whole word means “in-suffering”.  The dictionary defines it as ‘mental entering into the feeling or spirit of a person or thing’ as well as an ‘appreciative perception or understanding’.  But is it merely mental? It is useful to dig deeper into the origins of the word.

     The term empathy was coined by Titchener in 1909 to serve as a translation to the German word einfühlung, which had been appropriated by a man named Lipps in 1903, to be applied in a psychological context. Einfühlung was originally used in the study of aesthetics to describe the way in which observers are able to project themselves into a work of art or a thing of beauty. To know the grain of the art work within the body of the perceiver. The Greek word aisthetikos meaning "sensitive, perceptive," from aisthanesthai "to perceive (by the senses or by the mind) is origin of aesthetics. So the origins of both words, empathy and aesthetics, are far from being understood as arising from wholly mental processes.

     Unfortunately, as with the drift of the study of aesthetics to an elitist value-driven critical study of the beautiful, so the word empathy has moved from the realm of sense-perception, of knowing in your bones, to a moral cognitive one. No longer concerned with our participation in another’s sufferance as part of a matter of knowing the essence of the other, the term has come to mean anything from an imagined feeling with the other person to a communicated by parallel-felt distress. Thus a group I’ve come across known as “Laws of Attraction” adherents can say that as empathy is a mental activity,  taking on the negative emotions of others is a harmful practice because you are attracting those same negative circumstances into your own life. Better, they say, to empathize with people who have what you want!!! There goes any consideration of the needs of others and any reason whatsoever for working towards a more equable world, and here comes a totally selfish way of being, where all work is for the satisfaction of ourselves. The spiritual dimension of empathy, which is what I know as “knowing the essence of another”, has been abandoned by these “Law of Attraction” crowd, for the pursuit of self gratification.

     Choosing not to be empathic and not knowing how to be are two different things. It is possible to learn how another person feels. In my clinical practice when something of this nature comes up, I might get them (M.) to “put on the shoes” of the other person they are not “getting” and speak the words the other person might say, using “I” words (swapping roles around).  For example, “I can’t seem to make sense of M.,” “I feel M. is missing me; she’s not feeling my pain.” “M. just wants things all her way…”  Something often happens, a sparkle of recognition occurs. A small bit of awareness of the other person twinkles into being and broadens and shifts the whole feeling situation and changes the way they interact with this other person.

     Knowing the essence of the other is a deep process. It is much more lovely than a mere cognitive acknowledgement of another’s being. It is a whole body, mind, spirit, sharing that allows us to not only acknowledge the rights of others to their unique experiences, but puts us firmly into being here on earth ourselves in inter-relationship with them. Knowing the essence of another is being with them in a vital, sensitive way; it is being here-now with zing and being in community with the capacity for interactive sharing.

Attracting Abundance and Intentionality

July 2010

     I read an extraordinary book  called Creating Money, Attracting Abundance by Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer (2008). I am struck by the wisdom of the content and also how closely it follows the intention of counselling and psychotherapy, at least how I practice it.

     One of the key affirmations in this book is this: ‘To manifest what you want, intend to create it.’ Roman and Packer continue, ‘…make up your mind that having what you want is important to you and that you are willing to put a certain amount of thought and energy into getting it. Your intent to have something directs your energy and focuses it on your goals.’ These words have an energy similar to that required in a successful batch of counselling and psychotherapeutic sessions.

     Too often we wait for good things to happen to us, without realizing that we actually need to know more precisely what we want out of life. We need more information in order to even know what a good life means to us individually. Then we actively need to seek how we choose to live. Unless we do this with intention, we simply exist at rather “blah” level of being: unfulfilled, anxious about the future, co-habiting with people that don’t inspire us, working in jobs that may pay the rent but fail to stimulate us much, and just plain bored with life.

     It is easy to get into a rut and not know how to move onwards. Counselling is useful in helping break the knots that seem to bind us. It helps in identifying what excites us and how we might explore a new, innovative and sparkly way of being. Counselling also aids in confronting our fears and those emotions that get in the way of seeking changes in our lives.

     Seeking ways to fulfil our potential requires us to let go of wishful thinking that bears little relationship to our actual talents, skills, and inborn capabilities. For instance, though I might have an interest in neurosurgery, I do not have the fine eye-hand co-ordination required to perform it. Though I might be interested in acting on the stage, I do not have the capacity for pretending to be someone else. Even though I love cartooning, I cannot draw well enough. These are dreams that can have no reality. My potential and my capacity to fulfil that lies elsewhere.

     It can help to explore ideas about what changes we want to make in our lives with a counsellor. It helps also to come to know the reluctance and resistance, and the cause of those, in exploring other ways of living our lives.  I am currently of the opinion that reluctance, resistance, and recalcitrance identifies the human being more than any other characteristic suggested to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world. We procrastinate to the nth degree so that either a decision is made for us or the whole thing fizzles out.  Knowing what is going on for us thus becomes very useful in a bid to live an abundant life.

     Attracting abundance to our individual life requires  daily acts of trust. Trust is the intentional bridge between our mental state and the physical world. It connects us in the space between the conception of an idea and its manifestation.      Trust requires listening within to a deeper knowing of ourselves and also a capacity to suspend judgement of what happens in the external world and then acting purposefully and clearly on what presents itself. Interestingly, and this is described beautifully in the book above, when we begin actively focussing on what it is we want in life, opportunities come to greet us. Counselling, in helping us to think outside our habitual square and identifying through experienced awareness those resistances to leaving that safe but boring square and in assisting the building of trust, accelerates change and opens us to a more abundant life. The abundance discovered then becomes an abundance shared. This is the beauty of it.

     I know, however, that the level of abundance is proportional to our capacity for handling it.  I liken this fact to what occurs in pond life. The pond fish, koi, only grows in body length to a size proportional to the size of the pond. The greater the capacity for handling (without anxiety and resistance) abundance (including money), the more we can allow into our lives. This is not mysterious nor magical in any way; it is eminently sensible. What we say “yes” to is what we agree to allow into our lives and when we focus on achieving that, we create an environment  where such things can occur with consciousness and acceptance.

     Actively accepting abundance depends on valuing, honouring, and knowing ourselves. It cannot be any other way. Counselling helps in building a sense of self value, esteem and awareness of interests, skills, talents, as well as hopes, dreams, and a sense of excitement in pursuing them into the life beyond. Joy can begin here.

Meaning

May 2010

     I went into a bookshop the other day and a display consisting of discounted tarot cards caught my eye. I am rather fond of beautiful objects and these were definitely attractive. Just as I was about to pick a deck up, a man I didn’t know asked me whether I believed in these things. I replied I don’t believe in the cards per se, but am intrigued by the stories they tell and the meanings I make of them. I don’t believe in newspapers or telephone directories or street signs, for that matter. All these are merely means of communication.

     The man then asked me was it true that people commit suicide after using tarot cards. I replied, people who try to commit suicide are just as likely to do so after assuming a voice on the radio is telling them this is what they must do; in other words it is the psychosis that makes the difference, not what the person blames for suggesting they act in this way. A person who hears voices coming from a toaster cannot convince me that toasters are intrinsically evil.

    The fellow understood my drift, for he then spoke about the Tom Hanks movie, The Castaway. Hanks portrays a fictional FedEx employee, Chuck, who is stranded alone on a deserted island after the plane he was in crashes over the South Pacific. He manages to survive using remnants of the plane’s cargo. He finds a volleyball  on which he marks a face, gives it the name Wilson and talks to as a friend. Though this is “crazy” stuff to those of us thinking about it now, the making meaning by making “alive” an inanimate object kept Chuck sane and allowed him eventually to get off the island. The making of meaning is essential for human life, but the medium for it is only a stimulus to this process.

     The capacity to make not only sense of something, but to allow this to enliven and empower us is essential for human life itself. Viktor Frankl, a remarkable Jewish psychiatrist who has deeply influenced me, developed a branch of psychotherapy known as logotherapy in response to his experiences in Nazi death camps. There he noticed that those who used the experience of being there as an opportunity for self growth as well as discovering how to be present for others (see Man’s Search for Meaning), lived, while those who found it all meaningless and closed their eyes and lived in the past, weakened and died. The attitude of nihilism is already a death and a disconnection from life.

     We are much more than our biology, social and psychological conditions, heredity and upbringing. We are selves in relation to other selves and in relation to our time and place and the meanings we make are carried in some form across generations, yet all these enable us to interpret something. Subject to time, space and place, and coming from our particular psychological and bodily state (alert, tired, moody, psychotic, grief stricken, buoyant, sick, hunger, satiation, etc), as well as our belief systems, family conditioning, education, and how influenced we are by our peers also shapes how meaning is made. Every meaning we attach to something is in a process of becoming something more and is always open to interpretation.  Interpretations that are especially nurturing and full of meaning for us personally inspire choice-full behaviour. Inspired by the meaning we have made about something we can then choose to live in creative and empowering ways. This is one very important purpose of psychotherapy and counselling. Such therapy opens up, client and therapist together, innovative, soul consoling, self-nurturing ways of understanding present circumstances and enables the client to move in directions that really matter to him/her.

     The symbols represented in the tarot deck allow for creative meaning making and are neither intrinsically evil nor good (whatever these terms mean), nor can be blamed as an inspiration to suicide – despite what some religious groups claim. The outright rejection of tarot cards on the grounds of hokus pokus, also, misses the point. The cards are a stimulus to self-examination and awareness of inner processes. As such a trigger, the cards are very useful as much as any book that touches, challengers, and inspires us. And, of course, they are often very beautiful items to look at.

Doing therapy with awareness

Nov  2010  (Note, this is an old article of mine)

     I’m sitting on a balcony overlooking the ocean up in the Tweed shire and watching the sun rise. There is a meringue of clouds on the horizon with bands of coral orange breaking through. The sea is low today, a crinkle of waves.    A bush turkey hurries by. I should be content, but I am only partly. I want to be home with my beloved cat; the home I haven’t been in for nearly 4 weeks. I’ve been travelling overseas, attending a conference in that old city of Heidelberg in Germany, and then enjoying Amsterdam and Iceland on a much needed holiday.

     Here I am on the coast, north of home. Why? I am attending a Gestalt training residential, to deepen and expand my psychotherapeutic skills, and bring to more awareness my own processes.  To be effective as a therapist, it is necessary to understand – and keep up to date – knowledge of the field and understanding of oneself. To do therapy effectively is to be able to separate out the issues that belong to the client and those that come from the therapist, otherwise the actual needs of the client are not heard.

     “Doing therapy with awareness” is a double-meaning-ed title I’ve thought of for me as therapist, and the kind of therapy  work I do with clients. My  work is essentially an existential-phenomenological therapy (of which Gestalt is a part) that aims to bring the client to awareness of how and what they do in their daily experience of life that isn’t nurturing to the uniqueness of who they are, to bring to a closure half-finished emotional business (stuff that gets in the way of change), and to allow them greater access to their capacity to make choices for themselves. What is true for clients, is also true for me as a fellow human being and me as therapist. To be an effective therapist is to practice awareness.

     To be attuned to what is important for a client, I need to be finely attuned to what is important for me. I need to look after myself as much as I encourage my clients to look after themselves. A stressed-out-of-her brain therapist is not able to do her job; she’s ceased to be a therapist, in fact.

     I enjoy the sea, the flux and flow of water and sand turned up and around and wind in all its moods matches my energetic process exactly. Qi gong practice, which I learnt some years ago, also employs this flux and flow. Here there is a strong movement outward followed by a gentle one inward, followed by a strong movement, followed by a gentle one, and so on. Qi gong is an exercise and meditation practice akin to tai chi. The pattern of strong-gentle-strong-gentle is the pattern I follow when working with  clients. It is a rhythm that nurtures and challenges in turn, centering and bringing awareness as it goes on. The Chinese may be wrong in many things, but in this fundamental Taoist truth, I believe they are right. Tao observes the rhythms of nature; a rhythm as natural and as complex as life itself.

Psychotherapy and counselling, in my book, should not be viewed as peculiar goings-on for the unstable, but accessed by anybody wanting aid, support and challenge in order to go about life more fluidly, with greater awareness, astuteness and grit.

    

    

Coming Together

Oct 2010

     The boat slid through satiny water to an infinite edge of sea to the breakers beyond. Overhead ospreys circled; whales glimpsed through laid back leapings and turtles mated far from shore. I wondered about the name “Whitsundays” (for this is where I and a colleague and friend was  last week) and I remembered:  Whitsunday is the other name for the day of Pentecost (the 49^th day after Easter Sunday), the Christian feast when the Holy Spirit descended upon the people and gave them capacity to understand and speak many tongues, join in community, and celebrate the new church. Whitsunday, or White Sunday, is thus called,  for the white ceremonial robes of the celebrants of this feast - appropriate for the white beaches of these islands. Central to the idea of the feast is an ability of people to share things together, to talk and to have a sense of community.

     The Whitsundays are a scattering of approximately 150 handsome islands peeking through the sea between approximately 20° and 21° south latitude off the subtropical central Queensland coast. Captain James Cook found these islands in 1770 and named them ‘the Cumberland Islands’ and their passage, the

‘Whitsunday’s Passage,’ because it was the feast of Pentecost when he sailed among them. The Aboriginal tribe, the Ngaro, however, knew and explored the richness of these islands for 8,000 years, paddling in boats made from saplings, bark and fern fronds. I imagine the Ngaro talked of many things.

     Though somewhat a culturally biased account of things, and I do this in deference to other cultural experiences, I am moved to write of the  elegance of this wondrous place as itself a Whitsunday experience: of a place where strangers come together, sharing their disparate experiences in the making contact with one another, and conflating this with what I experience in my clinical practice.

     It always strikes me as something of a miracle when people from diverse backgrounds can come together and get on so well. I often find myself really enjoying the presence of others so very different to me. Listening deeply, a tool of psychotherapy, isn’t just what makes contact possible, but it is part of it. Such listening situates the practitioner in a place of present-centredness as well as an exquisite awareness of  self in relation to the other person. The co-createdness of the relationship is also heeded and responded to, even played with. There is a dance-like quality to the sharing and with it, a sense of togetherness and  separateness; feeling states that are like the tense and loose states of a boat riding Whitsunday waves.

     On the boat up north, my American psychotherapeutic friend and I encountered many people who showed a delight in talking of their lives to us. These were contacts with people we’ll probably never see again, and yet – in that short time – we came to know quite well. It felt to me that the islands were like a net thrown out, gathering people in  shared experience, yet each maintaining their unique perspective and eager to speak of this to us: a magic of commitment to conversation, a magic of community.

     I imagine that the first Christians felt their commitment to dialogue (listening, receiving, and sharing) as a palpable energy and as a means to generate and hold safe a sense of community. I feel my commitment to dialogue is likewise a means to create a safe therapeutic place where diversity of experience can be expressed without anxiety, held and released when the time is ripe; a place that is the relationship of selves who do not need to agree with each other in order to get on with the work of increasing awareness and discovering in themselves healthy freedom and new ways of being.

     People talking together are like the Whitsunday islands strung together like individual pearls in a necklace of great beauty, and like a necklace, the elements of communication are not glued, but linked by likeness and difference. So, let’s talk!

Medication and Counselling

Sept 2010

     I often hear about people who have been advised to go and get counselling and medication for depression; who go on antidepressants and then decide not to have counselling or psychotherapy as well because they feel better. What they don’t realize is that their problems aren’t going to go away; feeling “better” through medication wont change fundamental things much. The ideal situation involves looking after the whole self, and not just the chemicals in the brain.    

     Antidepressants certainly level a person’s mood, but the highs go as well as the lows. When they are deeply distressed this levelling can be very welcome. Over time, though, not being able to feel much can be quite disturbing. Because we are expressive  responsive beings, the sense of being disengaged can impact greatly on special relationships and even just in everyday encounters. A loved one can feel left out, in some subtle way and the depressed one is not even aware of this happening.  By expressive responsive beings, I am describing the beautiful  lively interplay that occurs in every face to face encounter where each person responds to the other, back and forth. When one person isn’t so engaged – as when their affect is flattened – the other person can feel excluded. This partially  blocked interplay is even more clearly evident when one person has had a stroke and their face is immobilized (as literature on face recognition describes it).

     Another aspect of this is the diminishment of a sense of being able to regulate one’s moods, and not recognizing what moods are within the normal range and what is outside the normal range.

     Several years ago, I knew a woman who had been on antidepressants so long that she no longer knew which of her thoughts and moods were reasonable and which were outside the experience of most of her friends. Any feelings of anger  were attributed by her as requiring increased doses of her medication. This is so topsy turvy and fundamentally wrong.  Psychotherapy would have given her a more accurate sense of what is real and what is imagined. It would have put her in touch with her inner world, giving her awareness of anger as a useful emotion with its own energy for changing the dysfunctional in her world. Instead she felt eruptions of anger as if these feelings came from somewhere else and increasing the medication had the unfortunate effect of deadening her creative encounters with her world even more.

     Antidepressant medication can be useful in cases of prolonged grief, such as sometimes occurs after the death of a beloved, but here again, it should accompany counselling of some kind. Just the chance of talking about the death with someone who will listen deeply is nurturing. A counsellor generally will not shrink away from meeting a person at such a profound place.

     Loss of career, of hope in relationships, of despair, loneliness, and a sense of powerlessness can contribute to feeling depressed. Maybe such depression merits going on medication, but more is needed.  The chance to develop other ways of seeing and instituting fundamental change is an important part of counselling and psychotherapy.  Counselling and psychotherapy moves one’s internal dialogue from societal and family ideas of loss equals failure and all the introjects of “get a grip on yourself,” “put on a stiff upper lip and you’ll get through this,” and “think of the starving millions with greater problems than you”, and so on, to actually finding new and creative ways of being really here in this place, now, with your integrity intact.

     Some, but not all depression serves a purpose: it tells us when we are out of kilter with our uniqueness; when we are not fulfilling our individual lives in ways truer to ourselves. Some depression is actually more chemical than psychological (endogenous depression), but here again, just going on medication is insufficient.  Dialogue in counselling is very useful, in bringing awareness to feelings and thoughts about feelings, as well as interactive communication with others.

Ghost Catching with a Dress

Nov 2013.

     I'd watched a video of a very beautiful conversation among therapists and others talking on the death of mothers. The phrase ‘ghost catching with a dress’ came up in relation to finding clothing, letters, and treasured objects belonging to mothers who had died. I was very moved by the image, for I have such items from my own mother. Indeed, most of the crockery and utensils I use on a daily basis were from the cupboards of my mother. Hanging in my wardrobe is a red coat my mother made herself of the lining of officer’s coats during the war, there are gloves she made,  and there is a dress she fashioned from silk that I only very vaguely remember her wearing to a party once or twice. She was an extraordinary seamstress; a skill I entirely lack.

     Ghost catching with a dress is, for me, the catching of glimpses of my mother’s life and story and those others I have known and loved. Glimpses sewn into the gossamer of memory – sometimes poignant and painful, sometimes sweet and tender. 

     Life, death. What are these? When people talk of death, premature or after a long rich life, like my mother’s, I wonder yet again, what it all means.

     The taking of one’s own life, throws another angle into the mix. There are many therapists who express deep concern for those who contemplate their own death, and while I too am disturbed by this, I am brought yet again to the existential place that I face on a daily basis: What of life, what of death?  I cannot see those who contemplate taking their own life as a sign of mental illness. I cannot, for the same reason that I acknowledge death as intrinsic to life and life intrinsic to death. What gets thrown up into the air like wind in fallen leaves, is the integral mystery of existence itself. I cannot sweep this knowledge, this subtle awareness I have, into a neat pile to be put discretely into the rubbish bin. This is the greatest mystery I know of. Death is not a medical problem and suicide is not a medical condition. Death is, as life is, and relationships are.

     What is caught in suicide are ghost catchers of clothes, of toys, bric a brac, books and letters; of the tears in memories, of  hearts broken, of anger, resentment, bewilderment, lots of questions unanswered. These are perhaps more poignant than even the caught ghosts of those who died a normal death.

     I have had friends who have died by their own hand and know something of the strangeness of this. One man, I had shared a meal with only a fortnight before he gassed himself.  Was I partly to blame? I could not think so, for as the ghosts in cloth unravelled after the funeral, the threads emerged of a life of disconnect, of  feelings of alienation and lostness.  This poor friend could not speak of what he suffered and it is here that my feelings are stirred, and it is now here that I offer myself as a therapist to hear and share the burden of pain.

     Death, and life, are touched by the living in a fluid process and grief and loss are felt as those we’ve loved move into another dimension. It is not so much the death bit that shakes me, but the threads of life that are not always seen and understood; threads that need, somehow, to be shaped into a dress to catch the ghosts of real flesh and blood people in our stories, recollections, and a need for some kind of farewell. We living need to let go and yet to remember and to let go and yet to recollect. Our grief is not to be discarded mindlessly, but to be brought into the fabric of our life to enrich us and also, mysteriously, give us the courage to let go, let be that majesty that is  life.

Therapy as Magic Realism

August 2018

I had a friend, Tom, who I met at university when both of us were doing our PhD. He being far more organized than I. finished writing his thesis a couple of years before me. The locus of his work was on the magic realism in the early writings of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the Argentinian author.

Tom’s PhD thesis was examined and passed with flying colours. We spoke once, at the completion of it, and then he disappeared, literally. I couldn’t find any information about where he went; even his  parents and brother had no clue. No death notices, no life notices, nothing.

In a fantastical effort to discern where he went, I scattered, upside down, a set of animal druid cards. In that set are two blank cards, there to encourage its users to create a couple of animal narratives of their own. The two blank cards came up. I picked up a third, and it was “the fox”. The fox is an elusive being, known for hiding among grasses, and disappearing when he wants. I felt then that Tom just didn’t want to be found, and no online searches could unearth anything. There are, it seems, three men with the same name, but none of them living in our time frame.

How extraordinary, really, that his fox-like disappearance fits so well with the nature of his academic work!  He, or rather I, made a myth from him simply being/not being there.

Magic realism is a genre of literary fiction characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of the richness of a  psychological imaginary into an otherwise realistic and ordinary framework. Tom’s life had that quality: he  showed me how to use a computer by playing with it, we ate meals together, we walked the campus together, and he tripped while walking downhill, somersaulted mid-air, and landed on his feet like a finely tuned cat, while I, on a different evening fell and broke both hands. We got on well and once he celebrated passing his PhD, he disappeared.

Magic realism situates itself neatly in the discourse of psychotherapy. I note here that I am not talking of magical thinking. Magical thinking is defined as believing that one event happens as a result of another without a plausible link of causation. This is unconscious thinking.  Magic realism, on the contrary, is an actual  and conscious tool in literature and, I suggest, in psychotherapy in order to engage a person more richly in a life not fully lived.

Active imagination, as practiced by Jungians and others, including me, could be said to be a  magic realism tool, and  is used as a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind. It is  a method for visualizing and fleshing out unconscious issues  by drawing upon the imagination. This is a very useful tool and has the capacity to build meaning, new memories and connection in the field in which the client lives.

Much of what we do, as psychotherapists, is pragmatic and here and now, and yet it merges the ordinary subtly into landscapes of the imagination and dreams, for a purpose. The mind, decorated with elaborations of enriched memory, becomes a luminous space of possibilities and our exploration of these, transforms ordinary reality.  This is why I ask my clients what they love to do, and whether they paint, play music, write, dance. I want to know what magic they engage in and how can we use that for their healing.

There can be a danger in the making myth of life events, but properly and ethically handled, it is a very powerful tool.  I think once more of Borges’ writing and his emphasis on containment and playful control of words and sentences. Nothing is wasted and nothing slops over into a messy unconsciousness, and yet …   And so, with Borges I say, “I know what the Greeks do not know, incertitude”  for the bridge between this world and the world of the imagination is always open and what is learned in this here-and-now world and the imaginary is always magical and very real.

Dispelling Dream Clouds

July 2018.

     Most of us, most of the time, are caught up in clouds of anxiety, thoughts, memories, feelings of shame… general inner noise. These clouds whirr around us in a vortex of “what ifs”, “should I”, “and then”… making us increasingly confused. A lot of my work is about sorting through these clouds and making real what needs to be real, and releasing what is inessential, and thus freeing my clients from much unnecessary anxiety.

     The making real is grounding the something into a tangible form; something that can be worked with, and something rich with actual possibilities.

     In my own life in recent times I spent months of wanting, of craving, to travel again to Europe, mulling, thinking, planning, changing those plans, mulling, dwelling on, dispelling: essentially caught up in swirling clouds of possibilities. And then, a mid-September conference in Heidelberg, Germany beckoned (a time of Autumnal cooling and dancing red-bronze leaves and ripened berries), and I thought maybe I will/maybe I wont go, and so the churning continued. Then in the middle of one night, clarity came: go to the conference, and then work the rest of the journey out from that point. I registered with the conference people and booked my accommodation, and then a few days later, booked my plane flights.

     In this time of observing my own inner processes and noticing with clearer insight the processes of my clients, I began again thinking of the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology, or three planes of existence (trailokya): the desire realm (Kāmaloka), the form realm  (Rūpaloka), and the formless realm  (Arūpaloka). Of particular interest in so far as this article is concerned is the desire realm. Here, is populated with lurid hell beings, of demons, ravenously hungry ghosts who can never be satisfied, demi-gods, animals and humans, all in a state of suffering.

     I can see elements of Kāmaloka in the horribly confusing and tormenting psychological states some clients bring to our sessions together; states dominated by anxiety, fear, self doubt, shame, and longing.  I certainly can identify aspects of it in myself.  Until they are identified, spoken about, even written about, they just undermine our capacity to move on in our relationships, our jobs, our life.

     This work has parallels in the Buddhist practice of dream yoga, or Milam. Dream yoga  is, in essence, the art of bringing consciousness into the dream state and learning to observe and control the dream, and then be free of it. Working with the unconscious (from where dreams arise) is a fundamental tool of psychodynamic psychotherapy and that work is about bring consciousness to ordinary and unordinary life. I’ve certainly noticed this in my own personal work, begun decades ago. I used to write my dreams down in journals and over the years collected dozens of them (big handwriting). I notice the quality of my dreams changed as I brought the light of conscious awareness to them. I also noticed that I was becoming aware that I was dreaming while asleep, and that I could change the course of dreams.  And then came an awareness that I didn’t need to dream quite as much as previously and also that I understood the meaning of the dreams I had with greater clarity.

   What I’ve found is the bringing concrete reality, through clearer insight, and tangible actions like keeping notes, or requesting actual documents, or preparing an action, dispels the dream clouds.

   Developing consciousness in dreaming begins with the learning to know that we are dreaming, and then, gradually working towards shaping what we dream, and then the art of lucid dreaming and travelling via the dream horse to anywhere we wish, or nowhere at all.

     The dream state in Buddhism refers not only to rapid eye movement dreaming in sleep, but to the arising of phenomena itself in every day life. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the account of the stages we pass through from life to death, from this moment to that moment, is the exploration of the bardo state (the “in-between”). The bardo describes the transitional, liminal state. This is a rich place of engagement, whether conscious or not, not an empty space. It is in here, however, that the silence of awareness is possible.

     The progression of sleep and dream yoga is something like this: first you learn how to remember your dreams; then you learn how to wake up in them; then you train your mind in the dream; then you learn how to stay awake in dreamless sleep.  All the while you are taking the insights from the night and transposing them into the day.  Not only are you transforming the night into meditation, but you begin to transform your life.  You start to wake up, in the spiritual sense.