Life Chooses Life by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

November 2024

 See also http://www.nimbingoodtimes.com/archive/pages2024/nov/NGT-1124-24-29.pdf

[Please note the date. It’s an old article, as are most being published here. It’s been nearly a year since I wrote it and, though, I’m still recovering from the whole thing, I am considerably better. I also note that I’ve written about it for the purpose of sharing my humanity, which is the first base for working with other people therapeutically.]

I’m told that in Mexico when you get to your 70s you are said to have reached the 7^th floor. Very bizarrely, I was recently on the 7^th floor of my third hospital where all the geriatrics were put. I’ve been rather seriously ill with a blood sepsis and near organ failure and the 7^th floor was meant to be a rehabilitation ward, but I was in a room with a woman with dementia and some of the nurses seemed to think I too had dementia (very frustrating!). One asked, after my last shower there where I’d washed my hair in preparation for going home, if I knew how to comb it.  Yes, yes, yes, I said - irritated out of my brain. I wasn’t there because I’d lost my marbles, I was there just because I needed physiotherapy to walk again, without assistance.

I walked out of there determined to get back into the swing of life and work as quickly as possible, and I’m getting there. I’ve resumed seeing clients online. Please email me on dr_mccardell@yahoo.com for further information.

 One of the medical doctors asked me at the second of the hospitals if, in the case of near death, would I want to be resuscitated. I had to think; to weigh up questions of the meaning of life; to consider what matters most to me as a living person. This is, after all, an existential question that we all must face sooner or later. I replied, after some thought, “Life chooses life.” And so it is. I guess that if I was closer to death, I may have chosen death, but I have an abundance of life, more to live, to give, to celebrate.

 Being a patient in hospital is a strange disjointed thing, a Dali-esque  thing. You are treated as both object and subject, at once. There I was using a bed pan and – at the same time – being measured up for a pressure sore prevention cushion by an occupational therapist. There I was wrapped only in a towel sitting in a wheelchair after a shower and wheeled out into the hallway filled with medical students and no-one noticing anything. Exposed, and yet, not. There I was trying to engage a young doctor in conversation (because befriending people is what I do, and doing so changes the dynamic rather wonderfully between us) while she painfully inserted a cannula into a vein on my wrist. The illness, itself, was felt subjectively, but objectified at the same time: a timely reminder that, as a dear mentor puts it, we are not our bodies. Bodies change, age, decay, but our spirit lives on, just as buoyantly as ever. And we can learn to watch all this happening. For life chooses life, even as if it feels like an energy beyond our selves (which it is).

 Learning the art of mindfulness, of witnessing without interpreting according to our problem stories (our neuroses), is the art that I try to encourage in my clients and which I tried to practice in the near month of illness and hospital experiences. I can’t say that I succeeded all the time. My tendencies towards impatience flared up pretty often, but – even these – I attempted to witness without excuses. All this isn’t easy, but I believe, it’s worth it for the sake of equanimity, as well as fairness towards other people.

 The practice of lucid dreaming is a helpful start to the art of mindful witnessing. We don’t have to get caught up in our habitual ways of responding, but can choose how to resolve our issues. The dreamscapes of our mind are not predetermined and we can wake from them consciously. I think consciousness is life’s purpose, that, and love/compassion.

 One of my greatest regrets is that I was unable to contact all my clients while hospitalized because my new phone had lost a number of contacts. To these people, I’m deeply sorry. I hope that those who were affected have found another therapist, or perhaps would like to contact me again. I do not like leaving people unsupported.

 

 

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.

Keeping the Balance by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

November 2022

I’ve been trying to practice samatva, the via media, the middle way, equanimity… call it what you will for several decades now. It is the equal consideration towards all sentient beings, the conscious awareness of the transience of reality, the not believing in and getting caught up in extremes. I came to this not from the teachings of the various religions, even though the idea of keeping the balance is implicit in all of them, but from my own life’s experiences.

 Until my thirties, I was very much thrown around by the winds of extremes and I realized one day that, unless I found a middle path, the torment of extreme feelings would destroy me and so I began a daily practice of discernment and careful listening for what matters and what doesn’t, as well as choosing not to believe in the highs and lows of my emotions (neither elation nor depression). They, after all, are endlessly subject to change and are not a measure of reality itself. This practice of equanimity, I believe, contributes well to my skills as a psychotherapist. My interest is thus less on technique, more on my capacity for staying present with whatever arises interiorily and thus allowing me to be present with whatever the other person brings into the therapeutic relationship.

 Being, and staying present with the other person necessitates being mindful of them as much as myself, with awareness that they have chosen to come because they are suffering in some way. My mindful presence creates a sense of safety for the client, giving them courage to address the issues that surround their feelings of anxiety, depression, or whatever.  Successful therapy changes the client’s relationship to his/her particular form of suffering freeing them to pursue a happier life.

 So, what is mindfulness and how can we achieve equanimity? It’s interesting that despite the term ‘mindfulness’ being so integral to much modern psychotherapy, including the very popular cognitive behavioural therapy, and it is being taught in workshops and in counselling sessions all over the world, it is only now being effectively defined.

 Mindfulness is being in the moment. It is a way of relating to all experience – positive, negative and neutral – such that our suffering is reduced and our sense of well-being increases. To be mindful is to wake up, to recognize what is happening in the present moment, and not coloured by old memories, traumatic reactions, dreams, etc.

 When we are mindless, we rush from activity to activity, we drop things, break them, hurt ourselves; we fail to observe the subtle changes in our feelings, we eat and drink without awareness, and we are preoccupied with the past or the future and are not aware of what’s happening right now.

 Being mindful is being aware of the present moment; it’s paying attention to the circumstances and issues of right now and it enables us to attend to what is required now. It allows us to step out of our conditioning and see things in a fresh vibrant way. All this mindful presence allows us to develop equanimity and thus to weather the storms of unconscious conditioned behaviour with a deep calm and clarity of mind. 

 The process of the development of mindfulness enables us  to reduce vulnerability to stress and emotional distress and allows  us to keep a steady course throughout life.

 Working towards mindfulness and thus achieving a balance is, as I’ve observed before, the aim of all religions. The via media, is a Christian idea; the samatva is Hindu; equanimity is implicit in Taoism and Buddhism; and it is central also to Islam, Bahai, and the Greek philosophies, but as a life long strategy for equitable living it makes a lot of sense. We are less inclined to enter arguments and wars and, very positively, we are more able to achieve a greater simplicity of being open and loving towards the world.

 The Sufi twirling dervish achieves a simplicity and direct experience of the here and now at the core of their being despite turning round and round and round. This is my aim: a wonderful interior harmony.

 

 

 

Projections, Dispassion and Equanimity by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 August 2021

     Imagine you are watching a rather intense movie with a group of people and one of them sneezes. Immediately your attention is drawn away from the screen and you return to the present moment with someone saying, “ssshhh, or bless you”. In that moment you are aware of your surroundings: the darkness of the room, the layout of chairs, the faces of the crowd and then your attention is back with the movie. The interruption is nothing more than a brief thing that soon passes, like the upwelling of wind in the trees outside.

     Then you are with a very angry member of your household accusing you of things you know you didn’t do, but they did. You listen to them rage at you, but you take a breath and recognize that their raised temper is their issue, not yours. You recognize that they are attempting to use you as a screen for their own projections, but you feel calm and composed and let them carry on until they lose interest or you simply walk away.

     Then there is a child not doing what you want them to, but instead of screaming at them, you watch your breath and a passing surge of anger, breathe out and – creating space – become mindful of yourself and the situation and calmly choose a different strategy in being with the little one. You might decide to talk with him about what was going on when both of you are happy and calm, or not.

     When we are caught up in the drama of it all and we react with anger we risk losing friendships, burning bridges, damaging our relations with children and partners, and fuelling the fires of our own discomfort and when they get too hot, we often project our antagonisms onto other people, thus repeating the reactive process.

     In an equanimical space of calm, we can learn new ways of being. In that space, the projections of others feel like nothing more than pictures on a screen that we can respond to, or not, without automatic reaction. Here we are able to see what’s happening and why, and we can care about the other dispassionately (caring and not caring at the same time), and we become more resilient.

     Caring, but not caring is to be dispassionate. It isn’t detachment; on the contrary, it is a deep engagement, a loving that isn’t arrogant nor aloof, nor self indulgent. It is a state of being mindful, without discriminating thoughts. From a dispassionate place we can choose right actions, right words as needed by the person and the situation.

     We have choices. We can react in irritation, return anger with anger, or we can let that all pass. This doesn’t mean that we become passive and let things just happen to us, nor allow others to continue to abuse us. We can choose to speak up, and do whatever is actually required of us, or not. Our words and actions then come from a place of deeper understanding than mere reactivity.

     Reactivity often comes from a place of feeling out of control, but sometimes it is habitual and a habit that developed within our family system: all the members of the family operated this way. We can choose to continue to behave like this, or break the cycle and do and be something different, something kinder to our own and others mental health.  Rage doesn’t do us any good if that’s all we do.

     We can learn to maintain mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in difficult situations. This is what equanimity is.  Equanimity brings us the pause to recognize we are wanting things to go a certain way and highlights our resistance to feeling out of control.  Knowing when and what to let go of gives us peace as well as a better capacity to speak with other gently, firmly and caringly.

     Mindfulness is key to all this. When we learn to monitor our reactions, slow them down through watching the breath, we have a means to the gift of equanimity.

 

 

 

Doing God and Adam: contact and mindfulness by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

Dec 2009

     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.

Listening to the Call of the Little. by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

Mar 2013 

     The tables have turned. For the past month I’ve been the one on the couch, as it were.  I’ve seen my clients, and they have seen me, from the perspective of me half lying on the sofa in my living room, rather than the more professional space downstairs.  I think we have liked this turnaround a bit. I know the shift in my position has made the relationship that I share in this therapeutic space much more horizontal (excuse the pun) and quite useful overall. 

     I’ve been ill and uncomfortable in my body this last month. I’m healing, though, and with my growing strength I am appreciating the subtleties of small things. 

      In deprivation of a capacity to perform big dramatic acts, when “doing” something has actually been difficult and time consuming, when you have to think about its completion a long time before actually getting down to doing it, then you have to deal with exactly what is at hand. I am somewhat slow to appreciate this, and yet in coming to know it in my own bones I also get a better sense of the value of  being gentle with time, of being patient with very little. I am realizing in myself what I’ve said to others, that it is in incremental shifts that brings change of an enduring kind, not the big sudden changes that perhaps we all hope for.

      There is a walking meditation I like to do, and which sometimes I suggest my clients do, that consists of nothing more than bringing focal awareness to the act of walking slowly. Each foot carefully placed on the ground, rocking this way and that, of finding the centre point, of rolling and twisting slightly, of regaining equilibrium, and the urge to place the other foot down, and slowly lifting the first foot, and feeling the shift in balance, and so on, brings challenge to something usually taken for granted. The mindfulness achieved in this meditation can be expanded to every other act a person might engage in, in the course of her life.  Nothing ever needs to feels as though it just happens; that things are being done to oneself that one has not agreed to. The act of mindfulness restores a sense of agency as well as an awareness of the interconnectedness, and rhythm, of all things.

     Each movement in this walking meditation brings to awareness its reliance upon all that has gone before and what is about to be achieved next. Without this proper consideration you are liable to fall.

In the rhythm of nature there is a flux and flow and a counterpoint to big acts are the gentler small ones. It’s when we try to do the big stuff, without balancing it with the little bits, that we come unstuck. I realize that my recent illness was probably promoted by my lack of listening to the call of the little, for I was caught up in the grand designs of life-changing restructuring, of new directions planned for but confined to tight pieces of time. I have been like an actor trying to perform Cats, playing all the parts, on a stage the size of a shoebox.

     It is in the attention to the little that, paradoxically, a sense of expansiveness arises; a timelessness that emerges from the concentration upon the minutiae of attending to the little things in this small moment.

     It is in this attention to the small ordinary acts of everyday life that healing takes place. The poisonous excesses of big acts unrelieved by gentleness literally do poison the soul, and the body (in my case). So after the big stuff, I urge you to enjoy the small, to savour every drop of its sweetness, its ordinariness, and delight in not what this little piece of life can bring to you, but what inventiveness and creativity you can deliver into this small space of gentle – and exceptional – littleness.  Therein lies healing  for us wounded ones, therapist and client alike.

 Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell