Double Play

April 2017

Double Play  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     The  doubling up of forms and scents and sounds in the  natural world, like thyme that smells of oranges and lemons, or chocolate flavoured mint plants, or lizards that go around looking like pieces of wood, or lyre birds that sing the song of dogs, is beautiful and intriguing.

     Then there is the phenomenon of simulacra, or pareidolia (when the mind responds to a stimulus by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists) as in, for instance, seeing Jesus in a piece of toast or dragons in clouds. Again, fascinating, and a tool a sculptor might employ when gazing at a block of stone. Rodin said he could already see the figure in the stone and his job was simply to release it.

     Then there is doubling of experience that we call synchronicity. A term coined by the analytical psychologist, Carl Jung, synchronicity is used to describe meaningful coincidence; a coincidence that seems to have greater purpose than some random act.

     In recent time I have experienced many instances of this phenomenon. I shall only mention two here, though.

     Last week I attended a peer group meeting of various kinds of therapists (psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists/counsellors, social workers and nurse practitioners), something I regularly do. One of us presented a paper and in it had named one of the people in her case histories after the Greek goddess, Artemis (goddess of the moon,  of hunting, mistress of animals and wildthings,  childbirth, and the focus of the archer); an intriguing figure. Just yesterday, one of my clients speaks of Artemis, a goddess she is close to. How often does this happen? Pretty rarely, in my experience. Artemis symbolized for both women a longing for focus, for being her own person, exploring her own purpose, and not compromising herself in any way. This is a particularly feminine style of focus, not weak, not yielding, but strong and centred and one I am keen to promote among my female clients.

     Of course, in these conversation, because of the nature of me, my mind also leapt into thinking of the plant genus Artemesia, of which the silvery fronds of  mugwort, wormwood and sagebush belong. Mugwort is dried and then burnt in  moxa in Traditional Chinese Medicine, to focus heat on particular parts of the body: an arrow treatment that Artemis would be proud.

     Another piece of synchronicity happened recently.  Earlier in the year, my brother handed me a pile of stuff for the book my deceased architect father wanted published on his professional life, a book largely already written, but needing humanizing a bit. I’d been procrastinating, hugely, and then, out of the blue, I received an email from a member of a committee in Canberra responsible for naming streets and public places wanting permission to use my father’s name for a street in a new Canberra suburb. It was suggested that I write a summary of my father’s career. This meant reading his stuff, and doing some of the research I had avoided doing for ages, and getting it down in print.  I might add that my father has been dead 10 years so this coincidence of events is odd.

     The more I read of the nature of synchronicity the less I understand it. It is tempting to say that these coincidences are not random, and that they are connected somehow on some psychic plane, but to do so is to enter very murky waters. I suggest that our propensity for connecting things and making meaning of them is the key. They would be random events if we didn’t join the dots, as it were, and make an account of them that fits our psychological situation. This is a meaning making process and it is one that enriches our world, bringing understanding of our own processes, and a certain delight in the interrelatedness of living together in a world that seems to like double play.

Tacit Knowing

March 2017

 Tacit Knowing by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, BA, BA (Hons), M. Couns., PhD

     Perception is a funny thing. You can notice some things straight away but not even see other things, and we are quite different in this way.  For instance, I have a large Japanese torii painted red in my front garden. It is in plain sight, but not everyone sees it. A friend came by and had to be shown where it was, even though he’d parked his car directly in front of it. A torii is a gateway with no walls and symbolizes the passage from this world and the next. It is a very visually pleasing structure and frames my garden beautifully.

     Not seeing something doesn’t mean the object is completely out of awareness. A person encountering my torii for the first time would not attempt to walk into the wooden frame; some knowledge of its existence is present, albeit not conscious.

At some level the person has some tacit knowing of this thing, but there is nevertheless a certain blindness that needs to be addressed. What else, I wonder, in my friend’s life that is not seen? What else might he benefit from seeing?

     Tacit knowledge is defined as knowledge that isn’t explicit and cannot be easily transferred via direct language. This is the kind of knowledge we have when we have acquired the ability to ride a bicycle, or play a musical instrument, or get a sense of the geography of a town. We can speak of elements of the negotiation of these things, but a large knowledge base is known at another level. We can convey a sense of it through artwork, hypnosis, stories and poetry, and we explore it also in our dreams and reverie. It is a kind of knowing that is very rich and, when understood better, can enhance our lives through offering solutions we didn’t even know we had. In my psychotherapeutic and clinical hypnotherapeutic work I deliberately set about bringing those partly obscured knowledges into the light so they can be consciously accessed.

     I’m thinking here of a woman client who was feeling bereft at how the people in her life were apparently trying to strip away everything she loved. I reminded her of how each time she settled in a place, she created great beauty, even with very little. In other words, she had unconscious skills to make spaces that are lovely. Certainly others had abused her by taking her for granted and stealing things from her as well, but her inherent knowledge of the right placement of things , the feng shui, meant that, at a tacit level, she knows (although she doubts) what should go where, and what should be left out: the very skills needed to create boundaries around herself so that she cannot be abused. By drawing attention to her tacit knowing, she begins to have the skills required to take back her life and live the life her heart desires.

     Tacit knowing can be built upon and strengthened. Regarding the woman just described, the reconnected skills of boundary making and right placement of intent in relation to certain other people that I suggested she deliberately utilize will, over time, become a second nature, a tacit knowledge. For now, though, the knowledge she has in the making of beautiful spaces needs to be explicitly utilized in the right placement of those people she can trust and those she feels are not right for her. This kind of knowledge has to be worked upon deliberately and face on and simply and with regard to ethics and the law. The explicit is not subtle. There is likely to come a time when she just knows what do, what to say, how to be in a way that nurtures her in the way she knows as the creative person she is.

     I like my torii and I like the symbol it portrays. It is a gestalt figure that is both figure and ground and explicit and implicit being in the one thing. Walking through the torii I move from space to space acknowledging the many kinds of knowing, and it is a delight. Neither matters individually, except as the whole.

Not This, Not That

February 2017

Not This, Not That   by  Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

     Some years ago I was at a dance party when the night became increasingly wild and the dancers all around me were going crazy, faster and faster. I stopped. And then I began gently swaying picking the shape of phrases, not the hammer of notes.

     In recent times, with the lunacy of American politics and our own, with the growing nuttiness of conspiracy theories, with the frantic anxieties of every day living, I stop and start to reflect, apophatically, on the silences, the absences, the cracks in the pavement.

     So what is this this? Death, perhaps, perhaps not.

     I am drawn to the spaces between, to the bardos of life and death, and to a creative presence that is being present in neither this, nor that.

     I am trying to approach something that by its nature cannot be finally approached, at least, perhaps, not yet. It is an intangible something. The 13^th century mystic, Meister Eckhart was intrigued by this “not this, not that” something. He saw it as a problem of encountering the intangibility of God, for as he said, “…therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of God”. In other words, he wanted to strip away from an encounter with the divine that was without preconception, without idolatry. In some ways, he wanted to dance to the essence, or suchness, of God, without giving way to some definition that obscures the nature of the divine, including the very idea of a divinity.

     Hinduism has a similar idea. In Sanskrit, the “not this, not that” is netti netti. There is a Vedic meditation around this and it is an analytical one that is meant to set aside, and set aside, and set aside ideas of Brahman, by beginning to understand what is not Brahman. Such an approach is like Eckhart’s apophatic theology.

     It is interesting that the via negativa (the negative way) is an approach sometimes employed in research in the sciences and humanities. When we intuit the presence of something that is, as yet, intangible; something we feel the existence of, it is useful to examine what is going on around the general area of that presence. Astronomers use the technique often. They’ll theorize a presence, even an absence, like a black hole, from the behaviour of heavenly bodies around it.

     I am aware of my inner conversations regarding what seems to be a sort of madness going around in our days. I seek the way of knowledge, logic and rationality because this is how I have been trained as a thinker. I am, however, intuiting some community shift, some groundswell that isn’t identified. I hold at arms length short circuited explanations for things. I do not buy into Nostradamus’ predictions, nor that of Mayan thought, nor new world orders, nor anything that smacks of lizard minds. I am a skeptic and anyway I rather like the tension of not knowing, for herein lies my creative spirit.

     Interspersed with these thoughts is what is arising in my psychotherapeutic work. A dominant theme is coming up among my various clients and that is the subject of death: death as a vector for change.

     As I’m listening to what my clients tell me of their experiences with death, I am reminded of that 1999 movie, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. It’s about an assassin who studies in depth a book called Hagakure, or The Book of the Samurai. He seeks to live as though he is already dead, for the way of the warrior is death. What comes with this is fearlessness and detachment, but not a lack of compassion. And thus the way of netti netti, as I see it, is standing in the spaces of not this, not that, staying present with what is. This situated presence is what my job requires of me. Psychotherapy is a therapy of the apophatic (not this, not that); it is the holding of the space between and such a holding gives rise to deep and fundamental change.

“… all things are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase, “Emptiness is form.” One should not think that these are two separate things.” From Hagakure.

 

Critiquing and Sorting

 January 2017

     It’s the time of  the year when old beliefs, old paint, old everything, and some new things, needs to be reassessed.  Some are still good, but some just have to go.  In the midst of this sorting activity I am mulling over the practice of NLP that is used by some hypnotists, therapists, police interviewers, and salespeople, because it sounds like it has substance. But does it?

     I feel waves of irritation and I wonder why. At the heart is the realization that NLP is a technique that resists critiquing itself and its trainers seem happy promoting it and collecting good money doing so.  Putting aside the ethics of this, that fact that it does not examine its fundamental philosophies, core beliefs, and presuppositions is, to me,  unconscionable. Everything, I think, should be examined and critiqued.

     I am aware that there is a popular anti-critique movement afoot; a movement that resists examination; thinking that “if it feels good, that’s sufficient”.  We have, though, both a heart and a mind and should use both. The “feel good” crowd often draw on an aspect of Phenomenology, the “lived experience” bit to support this uncritical thinking, but Phenomenology, on the contrary, has a very rigorous side to it. It is in fact a tool for deep critique and as such is a really good place to begin the examinations of ideas. Thus feeling irritated by something is useful.

     Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), sounds decent enough. I mean there’s the classy words of “neuro” and “programming” (we’re like computers, aren’t we), with “linguistic” thrown in to make an apparently convincing package. But take it apart, aided by what its founders Bandler and Grinder say of it, and one can discover that it lacks substance. They describe  the triad of neurology, language and programming as its basis and very broadly note the following: neurology regulates how our bodies function, language determines how we communicate with one another and our programming describes the models we have of the world and which we work by; models which can easily be changed. The programming bit suggests that we model ourselves on successful people to change how we are (a problematic subject I may explore in another article).

     Many NLP practitioners rather arrogantly suggest that everything, from Parkinsons Disease to Depression, can be treated with NLP, that is, with changing the story of a person’s perceptions, but this is wrong. Not merely wrong, but logically upside down: human conditions are not caused by the stories we tell ourselves, there is a more complex physiology involved.

     The stories we tell of our particular problems do not have the power to make us ill (they can exacerbate things), and so the stories we change are unlikely, in themselves, to make us well again. A staphylococcus infection isn’t the result of negative self-talk; it’s an invasion of  bacteria.   Further, the stories we tell are a bit after the event of  problems, or recovery, not because of the stories themselves. Our capacity for story telling is strong, but it is, after all, a meaning making process, an explanation.

     I’m reminded again of the work of  Zaporozhets and Leont’ev in their book Rehabilitation of Hand Function  (1960) which is based on their research in Russia during WWII. What these neurophysiologists found was that the stories their patients told themselves aided their recovery, but the need to recover preceded the stories they told of their recovery.  In other words, non-conscious processes  plus desire were at work before an explanation for their recovery was manifested.

     Good therapy, whatever form it takes, needs to take a more holistic account of the problems at hand and this is why I recommend to my clients that they get themselves checked for physical problems (blood, hormone levels, etc) if their psychological issues are affecting their lives in more ways than self talk would suggest.

     The critical eye is paramount. A simplistic explanation for a problem is often  not enough and I am critical of NLP for this reason. Good counselling requires a deeper examination of things than merely the stories we tell ourselves.

The Resonant Voice

 The Resonant Voice by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, BA, BA (Hons), M. Couns., PhD.

     Some years ago over in Perth I attended a four day voice workshop where we explored many of the possibilities of voice: we sang in groups, in duos, alone, in large enclosed and open spaces, stainless steel cupboards,  narrow hallways, against wooden fences and brick walls, all the while experimenting with depth, pitch, resonance, and tone. It changed my life. It also brought a consciousness that I don’t think I had previously regarding the relationship between health and voice.  Since then I listen more to the quality of a person’s voice, including my own. I notice, for instance, that when I am being insincere, my voice pitch is higher and more hollow sounding. When I am concerned, my voice drops sometimes to a barely audible whisper, and down a couple of tones. There is nothing unique about this observation except that most of the time this kind of awareness is mostly unconscious. What I’m noticing more and more is that I’m noticing it more and more. I am interested in it and am starting to make a study of it, in order to enhance my counselling practice and possibly contribute further to the literature.

     I remember a fellow attendee at the workshop  whose voice was distinctly flat and one-dimensional.  It sounded as though she was deaf, in a way.  She wasn’t actually physiologically deaf, as she told us, but, effectively functionally deaf.   She was clinically depressed. Her whole demeanour was heavy, insular, passive, and lacking in reciprocity. In essence we didn’t get a sense of give and take with her, nor she with us.

     She and I partnered a few times, and it seemed she couldn’t hear me sing, nor could she tune her voice to my voice. What was more strange, she couldn’t, somehow, hear herself.  The quality of her voice was flat and colourless, and lacked resonance. It was like a dead thing; a clunk, not a ring.

     Over the course of the four days, it was apparent that her ears were opening. She was starting to sing in tune and as this was happening, her whole posture changed as well as a liveliness coming to her step. Her face started lightening and becoming mobile.  It seemed also that her skin was clearing. Before she had a sort of bluish-grey dull complexion; but now, breath and blood was clearing it away.  

     There was a profound change in the way she sang with us. Her voice increasingly became responsive to us, and stronger. From being flat as well as lifeless, her voice was entraining itself to be in tune with us.  The transformation was extraordinary and a revelation to me.

     This woman became a model for me of the possibilities of voice training, or just regular singing for the fun of it, as a therapeutic tool.  In my counselling practice, I’ll sometimes recommend particular clients join a choir, have singing lessons, or just make a regular practice of singing around the home, or even on the way to work to music on the radio. Those that have are becoming less distant from their engagement with other people and themselves; a revelation that they notice very quickly.

     In singing,  it is as though our  ears are opened up and a playfulness of encounter begins to happen. Importantly also, with the reciprocity of encounter comes a fearlessness and assertiveness and an ability to choose which behaviours of others should be agreed to, and which rejected.

     To use the voice consciously is the beginning, as  Alfred Tomatis (1920-2001), an ear, nose and throat physician, psychologist and educator  has said, of hearing oneself, and thus, hearing others.  It is the beginning of actively being in the world as a participator, and not just an observer.

Deepening Perceptions

 Deepening Perceptions  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     In recent times I’ve found myself embedded in stories of unusual perception and sensitivity. I re-watched Tous les Matins du Monde  (All the Mornings of the World),  directed by Alain Corneau, 1991,  on the life of a 17^th century viol da gamba player, Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, who, on the death of his beloved wife retreats from his daughters and fine house to a hut in the garden to practice his instrument seventeen hours a day. His musicality increases to the level that he is sought out for his extraordinary skill by a brazen young man who wants to learn everything from him, but the master says, “No, you have skill but no musicality.” Time passes, with tragedies, and the man returns after a life of glitter and fame and requests his first lesson. The old master asks him what music is; is it this, is it that? What music is, says Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, is that which wakens the dead, and thus the lesson begins.

     This is a film, for me, of the extraordinary translucence of music, that strips away the extraneous useless matters of gestures and habituations of daily life, to the raw essence of being.  It is here, at least for me, where deepening perceptions begin.

     A few days after watching All the Mornings of the World,  I  saw Perfume, The Story of a Murderer, directed by Tom Tykwer, 2006. Here is a story of a fictional Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an eighteenth century man born with an extraordinarily heightened sense of smell (hyperosmia) who is obsessed with capturing the essential scent of young women, along with perfumes of flowers and fruits. He experiments with scent capturing techniques by murdering women and trying to urge off their pheromones into an unguent. Pheromones are those chemicals exuded by the body that affect the behaviour and physiology of other animals, including us.

     And then I’m reading Like Water for Chocolate, A Novel in Monthly Instalments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies, by Laura Esquivel (1989). This about a woman who, forbidden to marry her lover, sheds tears that enter the meringue for the cake she makes for her sister’s wedding to her own lover that alters the perceptions of all those that ate it. From then, everything she cooks transforms its partakers.

    And then there is my work with clients. Much is about expanding perceptual awareness so that stuck patterns of living are freed up.

      It is very easy to get stuck. Taking up smoking or drinking or endless computer game playing or any other nerve calming activities  in times of stress makes sense. What doesn’t make a lot of sense is when these activities start to rule us. This is when tapping, once again, into doing things that naturally lead to expanded perceptual experiences can free us up, free us from the mouse-wheel of the same old, same old. The freeing up and the deepening of perceptual knowing in one individual has the capacity to change how we relate to other people and how they relate to us.

     Making music, perfume making (I’m not advocating murder!), and cooking, are activities that can help expand perceptual awareness and enjoyment and change lives. There is dance, running, swimming, painting, gardening, and so on, as well. All are active and require embodied engagement, and not just sitting back and entering fantasy realms. The point, though, is that just doing these activities  may be not enough to release a fixed mind-set that leads to harmful and habitual practices, we still have to know how to let go of them (even after we have stopped puffing), we still have to learn mindfulness  techniques that deepen perceptual awareness, so that the symptoms don’t return. This is where counselling and clinical hypnotherapy are  most valuable, but meditation or anything else that focuses on mindful participation helps. The talking cure of therapy is a very valuable one, though, for takes the exercise into an interpersonal realm and that helps release us from the things that bind us, releasing us into a fuller participation in the world.

Nothing is the Same

Nothing is the Same by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I recently went West back to my home town to look at wildflowers and catch up with friends. It’s a funny thing to try to do really, for going  back can never be achieved. One might return to a place, but the place, like everything shaped by the flux and flow of time and change, is not the same place.

     This was particularly poignant for me in two ways: some old friendships, it became clear, just don’t work anymore and the characteristics that I was once attracted to, are now just irritating. Some old friendships, on the other hand, remain buoyant and are a sheer pleasure to share in. These ones have moved with the times and we have grown to another level together.

     The other way was discovered in walking around the streets of my childhood and youth. The last time I visited, this place was all spick and span with new buildings and pavements and an atmosphere of get up and go. This time, I had a sense of a decaying ghetto. The block of units  now occupying the land on which my father designed and built our house now looked run down (and all in a remarkably short time). All the buildings in the street looked tired. The buildings that used to be an eclectic mix of Federation, Californian, and modernist designs, held together by loquat trees and rambling vines, are now boring units interspersed with sad houses with weeds of wood sorrel and daisies, gone to wrack and ruin. It seems the dreams of developers have somehow missed the mark, or else the population is transient and not the sturdy suburban stalwarts of old.

     Heraclitus (535- 475 BC)  said, “You cannot step into the same bit of river twice.” The water is different, the sand has changed and rocks worn down, the flush of new growth has grown old, and the old has grown new and interesting slimes and young fungi; there is nothing the same with this river that is life.

     I inevitably wonder whenever I go back to the landscape of my youth whether I should return there to live.  Every time, though, I cannot see why. I have made my home and my clinical practice in the northern rivers and I like it here. There are almost far too many memories back in the West for me to see the landscape afresh without its archaeological digs of personal history, and I rather  like only visiting those memories when I wish. Yes, I know, it seems I am contradicting myself here. I recognize that all is change, and that I cannot return to a time before the present, but that place is redolent with memories and it is my mind that try to hold the place in place.

    I’m not any different from anybody else here.  We all do it, but however much we try to keep our place safe from change, it doesn’t work. The mutability of living is just like water: impossible to keep in an unchanged form, forever.

     It interests me that a symptom of depression and obsessive compulsive disorder is the iteration, the doing or thinking of the same thing over and  over in a stuck way.  Seeking to find sanctuary in the repeated now doesn’t work. There is no peace here; iteration is just irritation and a place of anxiety. How nice it is to let go into flow, to not hold back nor try to hold still a pattern that, perhaps, used to be useful in times of stress. How good it feels not to have to regurgitate those old things that do not improve with time.

     The substance of  moving from this moment to the next to the next to the next is the substance of  the blood, flesh, bone and breath of life. Nothing is the same. All is change and I rather like it.