The Implications of Handedness by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

January 2024

 

Leonardo  Da Vinci’s  mid-15^th century notebooks include experiments with writing with both hands at the same time in the same direction, writing in mirror writing, upside down, writing with both hands in different directions, and so on, indicating that he was ambidextrous. For years, it was thought he was left-handed but learned to write with his right hand. Recent studies by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, indicate that he was equally proficient with both hands and his drawings and writings indicate this. The drawings and writings showed equal pressure in each stroke and produced in the same style, debunking the other theory that some parts of his work were done by an apprentice.

 

Current studies  on hand dominance are producing a lot of new and interesting insights. I’ve written something about this before, but here I want to elaborate upon the psychological implications of the subject.

 

About 90 percent of people are right handed, while the remaining 10 percent are either left handed or with some degree of ambidextrousness, though only about 1 percent are truly ambidextrous.

What is happening in the brain? The examination of those who have had surgery to fix their epilepsy that involved having their brains surgically split, has shown that the two halves of the brain are responsible for different tasks. The left side controls language and the right emotional and nonverbal functions. When a person has a right-hand preference, the brain’s left hemisphere is dominant. Left-brain dominant people tend to be better at analytical thinking, while right-brain dominant are more ‘big picture’ thinkers.  In mixed-handedness, one side of the brain has no clear dominance over the other.  Ambidextrous people are using both sides of their brains about equally. Herein lies some difficulties that may arise for the ambidextrous. These issues that can be corrected with training.

An article published in a neuroscience journal in 2023, identified an association between dyslexia and ‘mixed-handedness.’ In the study context, ‘mixed handedness’ referred to both ambidexterity (no hand preference for a task) and inconsistent hand use (using different hands across different activities.) A strong link was found between dyslexia and mixed-handedness, and also, interestingly enough, ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). Which hand to use, and how? What to do next? A symmetrical brain thinks differently. In typical brains, language is rooted in the left hemisphere and neural networks that control attention are anchored in the right hemisphere, but brains without a dominant hemisphere operate in other ways. Maybe our education system just isn’t geared to these differences.

Hand dominance is inherited, though the old practice of making left handed children write with their right hand often leads to ambidextrousness, or left-right confusion.  La sinestra, from which comes our English word “sinister”, literally means “left” and being left handed was an indication of being associated with the devil (according to some misguided people).

Being ambidextrous is useful. A  friend of mine once worked in casinos and she was able to be  much more efficient way than her right or left handed counterparts. I first came to know her when she was a university student of mine. I noticed then that she seemed to have a certain linguistic blindness to particular words. When she became a friend, I continued, and continue, to proofread her creative writing and notice that the problem continues. I only recently discovered that she is ambidextrous.

Now, I am also ambidextrous, but I am not dyslexic. I’ve been mulling about this and conclude that because I was introduced to playing musical instruments at a very young age, I was able to develop my dual-handedness, without too much confusion. I do retain a bit of left-right confusion when opening jars, as do others with ambidextrousness, but the clue to ironing out incipient problems is getting the person to engage the hands in related but different tasks at once. I encourage others to explore this. Maybe taking up an instrument, or experimenting – as Da Vinci did – with writing/drawing with both hands at once could be the clue to strengthening one’s attention and linguistic skills , and thus avoiding psychological issues associated with a symmetrical brain. 

 

 

Psychotherapy, uncertain art, uncertain science by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

December 2023

 

     I used to be an occasionally good university teacher before changing careers to practicing psychotherapy full time. This was over in Perth, Western Australia. We had a syllabus to follow, lectures and tutorials to run and they followed a pretty standard course. For about 14 or so years or so, since then, I’ve worked solely as a psychotherapist. There are similarities to teaching – we want the best for those under our care – but the way we go about it is very different. As psychotherapists, we observe and guide the other person(s), and we participate in their lives, aiming to bring forth insights, understanding, different ways of doing things, as well as strengthening their sense that only they are the authors of their lives.

 

     Psychotherapy is art and science: fumbling, uncertain, creative, experimental; it’s a growing body of psycho-social-spiritual knowledge, it’s an understanding of the dynamics between people; it’s sometimes methodical, ordered, and follows a clear beginning, middle and end; it’s helped by therapist self-awareness (which is very important) and depends on just seeing what is effective and what isn’t, it unfolds, it explores, and it’s not a journey that finishes with the last therapeutic session. It’s part of a life time of self-discovery. Those coming to therapy or counselling or whatever you call it should not expect clear cut outcomes all the time; it’s not an anti-inflammatory pill for the mind, despite what some might tell you. A course of treatment is a dubious way of talking about what is a much more subtle and impactful process. Here is a therapeutic conversation that has goals along the way, but they are reached via improvisation, intuition, acute listening and trial and error.  That is the best therapy, as I and several others see it. Yes, we can strictly follow the protocols of psychotherapeutic schools and models and rituals, but when we do so, we cease to actually listen to what our client is saying in her words, her body, indeed her whole demeanor. When we get caught up in saying the ‘right thing’ we have stopped listening to what is. I fear I have missed quite a number of people as I’ve observed and participated in their therapeutic journeys, by doing exactly this.  For that, I sorry.

 

     One thing I need to say with regards to  not listening properly to a client is that it forces me to sit with my own discomfort, to tolerate uncertainty and the hoard of ghosts of self doubt, but to also aim to be more present, more sensitive, next time. Erving Yalom says of this that such is a prerequisite for the profession. Ours is a somewhat wobbly profession. We try to steer an even course through uncertain waters, while knowing that this goes against much of  the common perception of what we do. That idea is that what we do follows predictable, measurable pathways but very often it doesn’t work that way, and that’s ok. The outcomes may be quite different from what could’ve expected at the outset.

 

     Though I speak of such things, I also know that the journey we travel together isn’t without a safety net, well, actually a few safety nets.  Psychotherapists have been trained (in my case, university trained at a post-graduate level), we have experience, we are monitored by a colleague or colleagues in supervision, we participate in ongoing professional and personal development, we are bound by a rubric of ethics, we are insured, we abide by the laws surrounding our practice and, basically, we just care what happens to our clients.

 

     Ours is a caring profession. We guide, we accompany, we share, but we do so from a fairly objective position. If we did it any other way, both of us would be lost. But in participating with the client in a deeply human way, we allow them, and us, to be changed at the very heart of the therapeutic encounter. This is a rich, wonderful collaboration where both client and therapist are nourished in a journey that  reintroduces  the client to the authorship of their own lives, and that’s good to be part of.

 

 

 

 

Holding the Therapeutic Space by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

November 2023

In recent times I’ve been thinking a lot about the space we therapists hold with clients. It is a tangible tension that we have; you can feel it when it’s there and when it slides by. Usually, I’ve found, the tension is lost when our connection is impaired in some way, as when I’ve missed the mark and assumed an understanding when there wasn’t one, or I’ve got impatient and have stopped careful listening: it’s about focussed listening, and much much more.

 

Freud spoke of what a therapist needs is an “even hovering consciousness,” a consciousness not subject to the extremes ordinarily elicited in the human encounter. Buber says the psychotherapist needs a detached presence. This is a skill I use all the time with clients, and quite often in other places as well. Recently, I had to hold the space in a legal case. I was both looker on and supporter of a friend. I was listening and watching what was going on, not speaking, just being there; essentially holding the space. I took into my awareness the body language of the others, the questions asked, the feeling expressions, and so on. It was intense, and very interesting.

 

As therapists we need to occupy the space holding us together and, paradoxically separating us. We need to be consciously aware of what is arising in the client, and taking note of the things arising in our own and their unconscious. If we are overly conscious, we fail to be aware of the nether world that surrounds us. If we are paying too much attention to the unconscious, we are missing the mark of here and now consciousness. Both need to be present.

 

We hold polarities of rationality and feelings, ensuring that neither dominates. We must be able to enter into the client’s world and feel the world from the client’s perspective, and we need to hold all that according to our own developed science based, art and craft skill set.  Psychotherapy isn’t an easy job; it isn’t us just sitting back and listening. It is a mix and meld of things.

 

Richard Hycner sees the profession as essentially paradoxical. Paradox as a descriptor of psychotherapy is exactly right. What we do is elicit – and hold – the tension of polarities. There is the paradox in the tension between the subjective and objective. We must be both deeply personally present in the subjective experience of the client, and maintain an objectivity. The balance of these is absolutely critical. We have to acquire, and keep on acquiring scientific theoretical knowledge about individual and interpersonal behaviours, yet none of this can be separated from our own self awareness. If our knowledge base is to keep on growing without the presence of our own self awareness then we’ve missed the boat, and cannot work effectively with anyone. A subjective awareness and an objective one must be masterfully blended. To achieve this, most of us know that to do the work of psychotherapy with others, we must also work on ourselves in therapy and receive good clinical supervision throughout our career.

 

A good therapist has to be practical and also have a philosophical bent. She needs to recognize practicalities, and think beyond those to the greater human drama. Mental wellness isn’t just an individual matter, it’s sociological and political as well. Pathology and health is  affected by income, poverty, ideology, drug use, belief systems, sleep patterns, work requirements, education, etc etc. We have to be aware of the life story of our clients, as well as our presumptions. All these matter.

 

What we also need to realize is that life is ambiguous, and our work itself is ambiguous. It is always unfinished, there is always something more to be discovered. Working with clients and receiving therapy is only limited by choice, time, and certainly money, but the beauty of it is that it can be picked up and continued for as little or as long as both decide to do it. While we live, we have the opportunity to live better and feel better living. Therapy helps.

 

 

 

 

The Hands Have It by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

October 2023

 

 Most of us these days type everything, using handwriting rarely, but research is showing that handwritten notes, during lectures, for instance, improves our capacity to remember what is said as well as helping us generate new ideas. It is in the complex  hand-eye motor coordination with spatial and tactile information associated with writing by hand on physical paper plus the brain stimulation of this that highlights what we are doing. The hands really do have it.

A Japanese 2021 study of university students and recent graduates has revealed that writing on physical paper can lead more effective memory of the information delivered an hour later. This contrasted with those students who typed their notes. They remembered what they had written for only one hour after the lecture had finished, and then their memory faded. The information heard by the handwriters endured for much longer.

Writing by hand activated more regions of the brain, according to EEG studies, creating optimal conditions for learning. Interestingly, it’s been found that children with disabilities learn better when they learn to write by hand. Writing by hand increases one’s capacity to remember and generate ideas more effectively but those who typed only learned only at a superficial level.

Now, all this makes a lot of sense. I remember in the copious notes I wrote by hand during lectures that I also incorporated related and sometimes obverse ideas into my text, as well as questions to myself, stars and doodles and other indicators of valuable and yet sometimes extraneous material. Handwriting the lectures took on an almost four dimensional level and I found that I didn’t need to study those notes particularly in order to remember the various facts I needed. I used to sort of wonder if perhaps I was being lazy when I’d find that others were spending hours studying their notes, and I hardly ever did and I hardly did, because I remembered what I’d written/drawn. That aside, there are physical differences in how handwritten notes are formed versus type written ones. There is no way, the extraneous, the memos to self, the questions I ask myself, etc that are part of handwritten text is possible in the formation of typed text. 

Interestingly, and contrary to the popular belief that digital tools increase efficiency, the Japanese study showed that those who used paper completed the note-taking task about 25% faster than those who used digital tablets or smartphones. Me thinks we underestimate ourselves.

Infants reach out with their hands and their hands receive some of the first knowledge of the world. Hands remember not only via touch, but movement. We are born with the impulse to touch and, interestingly, the first movement to connect with another human being is from the baby, not the adult. They reach out, and we respond.

Hands  are superbly fine-tuned perceptual instruments. We  rely on touch to feel safe and loved. Touch soothes a jagged nervous system. Our body rhythms synchronize through touch, through our hands. Touch can also traumatize, especially when it is unwanted and the memories of this is embedded in the body, but, as Peter Levine (the trauma specialist) says, it is in touch that we can be healed.

Hand perceptions precede words and cognition. These are our first tools to engaging the world. A colleague and mentor of mine, with over 50 years of psychotherapeutic experience is now exploring the knowledge we have of our world as delivered by hand perception. Not only do hands help us to remember, they remember themselves. Think of a potter: the security of remembering through pressure and movement the tension of clay upon the hands allows the vase to almost make itself. Squeezing a ball or pressing your hands together or using worry beads (sometimes used to help anxiety) stimulates our capacity to remember and learn because it increases physiological arousal, a state of attention in which our body is pumped up and focussed and present.

We barely understand the knowing we have in our hands, but herein lies a bounty of barely explored territory and possible healing. The knowing in our hands could be the next psychotherapy.

 

Reading Between the Lines by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

September 2023

 

 A friend was talking about something important and my response, as it typically is, was Mmm. She said how interesting it is the different kinds of Mmms there are. A non-therapist says Mmm in another way entirely, but therapists have an extra tone to their Mmms. I responded by saying our Mmms are all about reading as much as we can about what we hear. We are gathering information, said and unsaid. We are listening to the semiotics, the layers of meaning-making in not only words, but tone, inflection, posture, gesture, facial expression of the how of the other person, what is said and not said.

 

Reading between the lines is important for working with clients whether in person or online. This requires close listening and very good observational skills. Online psychotherapy has an added benefit: of contextualizing the client usually in their own environment – all providing very useful extra information about them as well as adding to our shared communication, and enhanced communication matters enormously.

 

Reading between the lines can be described as an intuitive process, even psychic, but, as my friend Peter Nelson in his book, The Way of a Seer, Reflections from a Non-ordinary Life, published 2013, says, psychic knowledge is really just about paying minute attention to all the clues presented to us. Peter is a retired psychologist and social scientist with that acute ability, and we all have it, if we train ourselves. A lot of miscommunication/misinterpretation arises from inattention. The art is thus, to observe, listen, perceive, not only the other person, but ourselves.

 

Things not yet consciously known can nevertheless be intuitively felt and manifested in our dreams. Dreamwork is thus a very useful tool to practice. The dreams of our clients and ourselves need to be listened to. Problem stories and their solutions brought into the consulting space may or may not be recognized straightaway, thus our need to pay attention to those things that are often ignored.

 

What we therapists often teach our clients is mindfulness. There are numerous ways to become mindful. I sometimes suggest a walking meditation as a means to develop mindfulness. This may consist of walking barefoot on grass or sand or carpet, slowly, feeling the texture of the ground beneath the feet, noticing how one’s body adjusts to the slow walk: the way our toes grip the ground and relaxes, the sensation in our calf muscles, the extension of legs from the knees, and so forth. At the same time, you might feel the coolness of air on your face, breathed, in saturating your whole self with renewed life energy. Your awareness extends to the landscape through which you walk, for your walking meditation mindfully connects you to your environment. Such close awareness reveals previously unrecognized things in the environment: the jewel of dew on a single red leaf, a water-turned stone, something previously unseen, now delighted in.

 

The art of mindfulness reduces stress and improves mood. It’s about slowing down, deeply breathing, and engaging all our senses with the environment all around us. As an art it

can be extended to everything we do and are, as we go through life.  Learning mindfulness helps us particularly in those situations where we are more reactive than we need to be. For instance, when somebody says something that stirs up old feelings, whether or not they are appropriate, it’s useful to be able to stop lashing out in our reactiveness.

 

Practicing mindfulness is valuable for all of us. This skill is most obviously useful when what a client says stirs up old feelings in the therapist and the latter, instead of stopping listening to the client, uses that awareness to further the effectiveness of therapy and then deeper places can be mutually investigated.

 

One thing though, mindful listening and reading between the lines, is never learned as a once and forever art. It has to be practiced in every moment, every encounter, with awareness and intention. As such, we have to be vigilant with ourselves, and with our clients, vigilant toward them, but in a spirit of relaxed allowing: allowing whatever arises to simply arise.

Playing at Releasing Creative Blocks by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

August 2023

 I think we all know what this feels like. You’re sitting in front on your computer, canvas, with your instrument – and nothing happens. Your mind is a blank. You’re thinking, what am I going to write, paint, play? I should think of something soon. Nothing comes. You hop in your car and drive down to the shops, hoping for inspiration. Nothing arises.  Perhaps I should go for a walk…

 Still, a blank screen, still wondering.

 A friend of mine, a writer, has a strategy for getting writing happening. He begins by writing about sitting in front of his computer, with a mug of coffee nearby, the position of his chair, the views through the window: wind in the trees, transient clouds, a twitter of bird song, the reflections in puddles after the last rain, and so forth. As he writes of what is around him, other ideas arise and soon he is in the midst of writing the poem, the story, the essay that he originally was attempting to start.

 A painter friend of mine, instead of attempting to seriously compose the best painting ever, recalls a dream and paints that. Or paints a dot on the page and elaborates images arriving from the dot. Joan Miro, the Spanish painter, did this. He was motivated to do so by the writings of Freud. He allowed emergent images to arise from his unconscious and to play with the images.

Academic thesis writers often feel stuck. Some are filled with such fear (often it’s a fear of failure) that their writing just doesn’t happen. I heard a lot of such stories from my fellow doctoral students when I was writing my PhD thesis years ago. People felt unable to produce anything original, and years and years and years went by with nothing to show for it. The way I got around this was to play with the ideas and to include, in amongst the serious stuff, playful word images. I even included such an idea in the title of my dissertation: Catching the Ball: Constructing the Reciprocity of Embodiment.

 Musicians can feel blocked too and all the trying to create more than just following notes on the page just doesn’t work. The  famous cellist Paul Tortelier, suggested sitting in a darkened room with your eyes shut and just allowing yourself to muck around with sound and see what arises. This works, as I’ve found.

 Thinking more about the musical mind. Some neuroscientists scanned the brains of jazz musicians by placing them in an MRI machine while they engaged in  musical improvisation. The researchers found that during improvisation, activity significantly decreased in a brain region known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This region is typically active when we’re actively focusing on a specific task, and may work by helping us to inhibit distracting information. While this is beneficial if you’re filling in a tax return, it may actually harm creative thinking by masking the brain’s ability to form spontaneous ideas and connections. By reducing activity in the prefrontal cortex, the musicians were able to freely come up with musical ideas on the spot.

Activating more of your brain than just the part involved in focussed thought, liberates you to be able to play with ideas and images and sounds in familiar and novel ways.  Play is the key. Research is finding that play creates new synaptic connections (the connecting points between neurons) in the brain much faster that deliberate and focused learning. Play is iterative, fun, emotionally meaningful, and it enhances one’s skills.

I like working with creative people; I like participating in their creative liberation. Psychotherapy, and especially hypnotherapy are very good ways to undo creative blocks. Essentially hypnotherapy is the art of playing with ways of thinking and experiencing those thoughts, through  enhanced  awareness. It could be said that hypnotherapy creates a playground where renewed creative juices flow wonderfully. Remember, that though I’m now living in Western Australia I continue to work with clients online and if you happen to be in Perth, give me a call, please.

 

 

ELIZA: THE COUNSELLOR by Bronwyn Allen Owen

 

ELIZA: THE COUNSELLOR  by Bronwyn Allen Owen

 

My friend has many tricks

Don’t get me wrong

Good tricks, the best.

To listen deeply to

 the subtext

for grief

pain, being

in the zone

for creative souls

she loves best to counsel.

 

Her place of bliss is

hanging upside down

under the surface of the Indian Ocean

looking up.

Her blue eyes like a wave of intensity so blue

so bright

I had trouble looking at them

at first sight, when

she swept me off my feet

with her insight.

In the deluge my soul

previously jettisoned,

surfaced

and floated — enlivened.

 

My friend taught me to play

with my writing

with a girly, tart party

coffee, custard, cake way of

making a manuscript make sense.

Reading

laughing

love; generous love

right there.

 

A spirit once came to my friend’s shoulder

A ghostly curtain in the breeze

Drifting in the grifting

twilight of wakening sleep

fluttered

fluttering

fear ­— not turned,                         

sharpened —

the sharpest mind

erudite and eros

embodied.

Insight

like a cello concerto

to open hearts and minds

to solid factual fantasy

stories that keep us

bound tight

in tricky neurotic locks

like flapping vacuous flags,

mental as anything

boots and all. Tough.

While she

tender, fast, funny and

fearless

swims us

to the deep end of our being

into the downstream current

to reclaim

if we reach for it

our own flotsom of bliss.

 

 

 

 

 

Creating Space to Work by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

 

July 2023

 

Words before Words (a poem written by me and published in 2015)

I want to write about the dark inchoate space that is night.

I want to describe the beginning before the setting out without a plan, guided only occasionally by a snatch of moon and shiny patches of wet on the leafy ground.

I want to write of this before, before, before, because that’s how it feels right now, to write without a clear sense of what I’m writing about. I have only a feeling; nameless and wordless.

Words before words, before even concepts, before even a sense of direction, before the division of light into dark, before the Genesis of God himself, before before before... I saw the movie a Theory of Everything the other day, the movie about the life and work of Stephen Hawking. In the beginning was not even the word, the thought, nor time, nor a beginning shining in darkness, exploding in the night, just an inchoate nothing.

And yet, a mere dot in which all worlds, all words, spawned and into which all will retreat. There is a hum threading each precious bead of wordlessness to words to nothing once more. A snatch of light, a glistening of moon captured in grass, a stumbling, a bird call... and then the night.

…..

And so these were my thoughts this morning as I relaxed into the geothermally heated, mineral saturated hydrotherapy pool down beside the Swan River. As I lay there, rain came: cold drops bouncing off the still surface of the water and I entered into the space between worlds: water from above and water below.

This is what it is like meeting a client for the first time, and for the second time, and all other times. There really is no point having one’s head filled with expectation, theories, strategies; there really is the simple meeting that may, or may not expand into deeper places. For one thing, you might try to drive the therapy session in the way you think it should go, but actually by then, you’ve really missed the boat. The other person, after all, has come to the meeting between us with their mind, their feelings, their intentions, their expectations, their recent and old experiences and want to express these, without hindrance.  I provide guidance, for sure, but without obstacles.  My job is to listen to them and adapt. To do this, I have to be in a state of knowing nothing… before words, before all else. Then, and only then, does my participation begin to matter. Only then, can my words have any potency.

I’m reminded of a client who had claimed to be one type of personality on the phone prior to us meeting, but came to the session expressing quite another side of herself. If I had designed my work strategy before meeting her, hell bent on driving the session in the way I thought it should go, I would’ve been totally insensitive to her actual needs. Too much prior knowledge really does cloud one’s perceptions.

Space and inner quiet is required in order that any real work is possible. Without such preparation, there is only chaos. No workman can do their job with a bench cluttered up with the bibs and bobs of inessentials. All of us are craftsmen of some kind: we plan our strategy for performing whatever task it is, we clear our space and then we focus on doing the job we’ve set ourselves. There is reflective order here, and a lovely sense of spaciousness.

The longer I do psychotherapy with people, the more I value this preparation time before sessions. I cannot just engage in other activities and drop them and begin working with a client in session; I need a place of contemplation, of meditation, of emptying out my mind of other things. Then, I can be truly present with the person sitting with me.

 

 

 

Knowing, but not knowing you know by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

June 2023

 

 

On the radio the other day, a football coach was saying that he knew it was time to give up his job as soon as he asked himself the question whether to continue doing it. The question itself implied a sense of the answer, or so he thought.

 

This got me thinking about the thing about asking questions as well as the kind of implicit knowledge we have about certain issues before knowing that we know.  I could never answer the question, for instance, put to me by an old mentor of mine, “Did I have any questions I wanted to ask him?” My mind always went blank. It dawned on me, as I was driving home from the beach this morning, that the reason for this was that I didn’t know what I didn’t know and for me to ask a question would be to already know what I didn’t know. I needed the language in order to ask the question, any question.

 

People come to me sometimes knowing what their problem is and can easily articulate that, but mostly they come expressing a generalized sense of anxiety about what they  think they don’t know what the problem is. Knowing somehow, without knowing consciously.

There are several kinds of knowing, but broadly two types:  Explicit knowledge and Tacit knowledge. The first is the knowledge we can draw upon whenever we like, and organize according to categories (like, for instance, a plan of how to connect SCUBA equipment in preparation for a dive). Tacit knowledge is the knowledge we have that is difficult to explain; we just have a sense of knowing something (like, knowing just the right time to enter the water). Tacit knowledge increases with experience over time, whereas explicit knowledge must be added to deliberately. Some researchers also talk about Inert knowledge, which is knowing something without understanding it, and there are a number of other kinds and levels of knowledge. I intend to only talk about inert knowledge.

Clients may say, for example, that they know they should be meditating and that they know how to do it. They know that meditation will help their levels of anxiety diminish, and yet they don’t do it. This kind of statement needs be untangled. Sometimes it isn’t a case of actually knowing how meditation feels, but knowing the procedure for getting into a meditative state. Procedural knowledge is like reading a manual and knowing the steps to something, but it’s a knowledge that hasn’t been instilled into experiential and tacit knowledge. It is as though the information is there, but the embodied knowing is absent. In cases like this, I’ll often suggest walking meditation where you put your focus on the sensation of walking over grass or sand, becoming aware of the textures, the dips and rises, beneath your feet, the coolness or warmth of the air around you, the way your jacket feels on your body; in other words, getting your awareness back into bodily experience. You walk slowly, conscious of each and every step. This level of mindful practice becomes a meditation very quickly. Your focus is, and has to be, present with what you’re doing. Sitting meditations can too readily drift off into memories and other distracting thoughts.

Bringing consciousness into that which has been unrealized is a really important tool in the art of healing. Much of this inert knowledge is known but not known. Once the knowledge shifts into embodied knowing, it can alleviate much ungrounded anxiety.

Milton Erickson, a father of clinical hypnotherapy (which I practice, along with psychotherapy and counselling), said this "When someone comes to see you, they always bring their solution with them, only they don't know that they do, so have a very nice time, talking with your client, and help them to find the solution they didn't know they brought with them." It’s the art of coming to know something you know at some level, but haven’t been able to successfully access. It’s the art of using what you know to be able to ask the questions needed for finding your answers.

 

 

 

Falling on my feet by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

May 2023

As my previous articles have been documenting, I am making a conscious effort to explore the bardo, the “between spaces” in my life. I first became interested in the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo many years ago, stumbling upon it in relation to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is where the most common understanding of it is attributed. The more I studied, the more subtle I realized the idea represents. It isn’t just that state between being alive and dead, or between death and rebirth, it’s every moment, from this to this to this. It’s in here that we populate our experiences with psychological noise, much of which is quite unconscious.

The bardo is a thick space, as the writings on the matter in Tibetan Buddhism demonstrates, where figments of the imagination, of fears, of dread, of desires, of neediness, of habitual responses, of hungry ghosts loom to the surface: matters of psychological and emotional distress. Figments, nevertheless, of one’s psyche. The what, the why, the which triggers are interesting, I think. Putting one’s focus of attention on these inner fabrications is really useful in stopping habitual reactions and behaviours before they take hold and interfere with one’s life. Too much of our behaviour is unconscious conditioned responses that may, or may not, be actually terribly helpful in our day to day life. Just because this reaction is familiar to us, doesn’t mean it’s appropriate right now.  Too much of our conditioned responses give rise to high levels of anxiety, which we probably don’t need.

The exploration of my conditioned responses gave rise to the experiments I’ve been practicing on myself in recent months. I put my Lismore house on the market (it’s sold now), I set off for Western Australia without a home and stayed with friends, I travelled overseas to the Shetland Islands and swam in the freezing Atlantic (fantastic!), I returned and had to face not having anywhere to stay as  my friends needed the space for other people, and I came back really ill from a virus (not covid) picked up in one of the aeroplanes I flew in. I  contemplated sleeping in my car, airbnbs, hotels, even flying back to Lismore to stay in a friend’s flat. I was really scared. I’ve never done anything remotely as unsafe as this in my life. I’ve always been very security/safety conscious, and yet here I was potentially homeless. All the terrors of my childhood  (and nightmares) welled up in horrible forms. This was exploring the absolute edge of existence for me. And there, in the midst of all this, the settlement on my house came through and on that very same day, within minutes, I’m contacted by a relative of someone I know well saying they have a flat in Fremantle they wish to sell and that they’d be happy if I stayed there while the process of buying the unit was happening. So here I am, writing of the generosity of people, as well as my own extreme feelings of terror in a quiet, lovely home in a place I have wanted to settle all my life. Beneficence!

I have resumed daily swimming in the Indian Ocean and I can feel my body/mind recovering. I notice that the undoing of anxiety knots is happening as I recover my equilibrium. Dreaming is starting to happen again. It was as though even dreams were put on hold as I stumbled from feelings of terror to  the conjuring up of horrific what ifs.

 Interesting times, these, and interesting to me how all this has played out. This experiment on myself is useful in helping me understand better how others explore and overcome their existential terrors. We are all vulnerable  creatures on the way to healthy conscious life and bringing awareness to this process is helpful for all of us. As a therapist, I can only be effective if I too know this process inside out.