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 musical 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.

 

 

Making Connections by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 April 2023

Making Connections by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

I’ve just returned from overseas. A break between the old bit of life and what’s to come, this was meant to be a holiday, but it seemed to consist of mostly galloping from one place to the next with nice restful bits in between.

The last haul was a flight from Dublin, Ireland to Istanbul Airport (the largest in the world, and it felt like that) to Kuala Lumpur to Perth.  Yikes. About a day plus of travelling in tight sardine cans tearing through the sky and racing what seemed like kilometres to new gates in airports and I got to wondering how many people simply don’t make it, and die inside terminals to maybe be found and maybe scraped up and declared finished.. They’re not called terminals for nothing.

In amongst it all, some lovely highlights: connection with old friends in Germany and the making of new friends in The Shetland Islands. There was one day, just one, when the rain stopped, the fog lifted, and it was sunny and my two new friends and I took the plunge and swam in the freezing Atlantic. The water was crystal clear, smooth and lovely to look at, but God it was cold, very cold. All this was helped along by the fact that these two women are English medicos and, if anything untoward happened, we would look after one another. These sorts of connections are like that. They link us together gently in our humanity.

Our swim was followed by a warm car journey back to the Lerwick guest house, a shower, breakfast and laughter.

Then they went their way and I went on a minibus tour with a very knowledgeable tour operator, on my own, as in no other passengers. As I say, it was a perfect day: sunny, clear and amazingly beautiful. On that journey, I learned some of the history of the place, that the Shetlands were part of  Denmark until 1472 after they, and the Orkneys,  had been used as security for the wedding dowry of Margaret of Denmark, the future wife of King James III. As with most royal marriages, this was a political act. This was meant to be seen as a way of  uniting Denmark and Scotland, following years of disagreements about taxation of the Hebrides Islands. The reasoning was that Margaret's father Christian of Denmark had agreed to a large dowry for his daughter's wedding and pledged the islands of Orkney and Shetland as security until the dowry was paid, as he lacked the funds to pay the dowry up front. It was meant as a temporary thing, but King James refused to let go of these islands, and so they remained part of Scotland. So, there was connection of a different kind, and driven by economics rather than friendship.

It's useful to remember that The Shetlands are just under 300 kms from Scandinavia (half the distance between Lismore and Sydney). The closeness of the islands to that part of the world is reflected in the old language (a seafaring mix of Old Norse and Celtic), and now again, in the architecture, with houses painted in the gorgeous colours of red, blue, yellow, and green.

Connections, in other words, can have different meanings for different people, and not all are those that nurture gentle friendship. Some are driven by power and money and these can get conflated for many people resulting in ideas that all connections between people are driven by self interest. Such cynicism comes up with statements like, friendships between men and women can’t exist, because both are only interested in sex and reproduction, something patently silly when you come to consider other deeper connections.

No, human connection is so much more than biological or economic drives. We all need a safe foundation for exploring our own worlds and being able to share our experiences in getting to know other worldviews. This is, after all, the first base to empathic caring for others as one cares for one’s own self being. This is the glue that unites us across the world, this is the common ground for a one world life.