SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

  Can you remember an occasion when you were totally relaxed, perhaps lounging in the garden on a fine day, doing absolutely nothing – you put the book down for a moment and just looked at the garden.

You were doing something very good for you. But because of our lifestyle, doing nothing is suspect. You put the book down; but maybe you could allow ‘just looking’ only for a brief moment.

Here’s a little meditation exercise I call Sensing. It’s a way of getting more in touch.  It’s a great little pick-me-up if you are feeling a bit caved in or if there seems to be nothing else but work.

All you do is take a few minutes off and just sense the environment like an animal. Just stay with the environment for a short while….. look at it…. Don’t think, LOOK. Look around and see things. Feel the solidness of things. Actually feel their THERENESS  – their REALNESS… their weight and solidity, colour and shape – the walls, the floor, the table, the bookshelf, the windows and so on. Look at each thing in turn and get its realness.

Then, try getting the reality of, not just parts of the room, but the whole room at once – walls, floor, ceiling, everything. Have the lot in one go.

Sensing is easier to do while going for a walk, away from home. This is because everything in the home tends to send you a message: fix me, attend to me, clean me. It’s as though every household item issues a requirement, an order.

 There is no doubt that there are abusive houses that treat their owners abominably and keep them in a condition of semi-slavery, overworked and unappreciated !

Jesting aside, the truth is that we have lost our animal sense of connection with the environment. The planet and our bodies suffer from this neglect. Animals do not function well unless they are connected with the natural world; and the natural world suffers if we are not in touch with it.

Sensing is a way of recovering our animal senses. You can do it for a few minutes in your room. Get the walls, floors and furniture as real, solid, eminently THERE in their form and colour. Consider it time out for a few minutes meditating. Particularly get things as physically solid. Get the movement of the trees outside the window, anything that moves as well the solidity of the furniture. Move your Sensing around the objects in the room and through the windows. Have what you see. Keep it up for 5, 10 or 15 minutes

As I say, Sensing is easiest to do when outside walking. The constant change of perspective alters everything as you stroll and helps keep your attention engaged. Stay with what you sense each second. Have everything you see. Keep looking around at things. Don’t’ think – look. Keep it up, no matter the temptation to drift away into thinking. As you walk notice how perspectives change. Each moment yields a completely new aspect. Keep your looking fresh. The earth, the sky, the grass, each tree. Each moment look at things freshly – the first time you look you get the THERENESS of things. Make every look the first time.

I’ve done this at times in my life when I’ve been stressed out; and believe me, it starts to make difference in a few minutes. Your surrounding take on a new body, fuller, clearer and more colourful; the grass is greener and the sky bluer, like someone cleaned the windows – it will give you energy and the pressure of stress will lift.

If going for a walk normally makes you feel better, you are probably doing sensing anyway; maybe it’s what you do naturally when you go for a walk; and why you do it. But if you are a bit stressed, or too much in your head, it may help to do sensing intentionally.

This is why holidays are so vitally important. It’s not just the change of air, but the change of scene. You do more looking. And it’s why when coming home after a holiday the house feels kind of strange. You are experiencing your home minus the ‘do-me’ signals. For a while the house seems familiar, yet unfamiliar. Everything stands there just as it is, without the command signals.

Sensing People: here’s another good exercise. Sit in a public place, a park, a square, or a mall and just sense people as they go by. (Not somewhere too crowded or where people are in a rush). Take them in one at a time – have each person.

You will have seen people doing this naturally in the park and other places. It’s what they do with their spare time. It’s good not just for loners or losers. It does something for the psyche. Whenever I have done this I have had a night of dreams with lots of people in them. It must nourish the psyche’s populousness. It’s definitely not a waste of time.

For those of you who have had some experience with focusing, try sensing the environment while at the same time getting your inner bodily felt-sense. It’s quite a novel experience.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

RESTIMULATION

RESTIMULATION

One day I will write a little piece about my early encounter with Dianetics, the forerunner of Scientology, that super psycho-religious, money-making con-game that has since grown into a monster. But for now, I just want to tell you about an idea I learned in those early days when it was just new-hit psychotherapy. It was buttressed by a clumsy, over-simplistic theory, but one of its ideas I have since refined to suit my own observations. It is the simple notion of ‘restimulation’.

It occurs when a present-time event triggers a past moment of trauma so that the person reacts physically and emotionally as they did in the original incident. The memory of the past trauma can be fused and identified with present-time in such a way that there is little awareness that the emotion and physical reaction is coming from the past.

It can happen on a quite small scale. Let’s say some years ago you were going through a bad time – say a marriage breakup. There was an awful moment when it hit you just how bad it was. You were waiting at a cross-walk of a busy intersection in town – that’s when utter disaster of the loss struck you. Suddenly you felt a deadly fear. Years later, without really knowing it, every time you approach that same cross-walk in town, a bad mood overtakes you or a pessimistic dread drifts in – without knowing why. That exact geographical place is the trigger.

Another example would be how I always put off going to bed. It is eleven-o-clock and I feel tired, but I lie on the couch watching television until I drop off. At three-o-clock I’m still on the couch, reluctant to go to bed. If I ask myself, ‘what is it I am avoiding’. I remember as a little boy. I don’t want to go to bed. I’m afraid of the dark bedroom and the shadows in which I can see faces; or I might have my repeated nightmare of being buried alive in a coffin. I have learned since that this nightmare itself was the restimulation of an earlier incident: the terror of being trapped in the no-exit just before birth.

You can see from this that restimulations can occur in chains. In this last example, birth is the first no-exit, trapped situation. But throughout life there are many other instances of a similar nature. Some have only a remote similarity, but just enough to act as a trigger. Crowded buses, lifts, the compacted crowds at Concerts in the Park make me slightly uncomfortably closed in. But it’s really surprising how worked up I get when I’m trapped in a social situation and I can’t get out of it. I hate it.

There is one interesting device that that psyche uses to avoid restimulation. It’s a strange one. It is a maneuver I only cottoned onto recently. It has to do with comfort zones.  It’s about going back before an original trauma. That’s where it was most comfortable – before it happened. To move forward in time is to move into the trauma. So it is that one can get stuck at a level of mental and emotional development.

Let us say that the biggest trauma in this person’s life was the separation from mother at an early age because of the mother’s illness after the birth. For some reason the child never really recovered from this blow and grows up shy and withdrawn. Her only comfort zone is the warmth and protection before the mother’s illness. The child grows up but doesn’t develop. She stays at home, is never really present at school and avoids engagement with the world. Later, she has the most god-awful conflict between launching into life and staying at home, remaining in the comfort zone prior to the first trauma; but launching into life equals launching into what comes next. She knows what come next. After the comfort zone is the shock of losing your mother. After her warmth, loss and isolation comes next. The idea of moving forward is too much. The result is a breakdown. Her libido, her life force, is pressuring her to risk it and it precipitates her forward into the trauma that is waiting. The breakdown is her way forward.

 It is very easy to tell people that they should move out of their comfort zone, but if they are ensconced in a place prior to a trauma, only they know what comes next if they start to move forward. When they even think of leaving home or leaving a marriage, all they get is a subliminal terror they try not to notice.

Life is a minefield and comfort zones are scarce. So, hey, when you do find a safe and comfy patch – what’s the hurry !

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

WHAT NOW

I kept a personal diary during some of my difficult life transitions – like a breakup or divorce. Later, in calmer times, reading it back to myself I had one glaring impression: the incredible variations of mood I went through: everything from euphoria to the blackest despair of loss and all shades between; and how endlessly I rummaged around trying to identify the problem; and also trying to decide whose problem it was. Endlessly reevaluating.

As mine did, a diary of this kind will evidence a vast panorama of change, sudden twists and turns of opposite solutions, as each one successively presents itself as final. Each solution lasting only a few minutes. All this goes on in the shadowy backroom of the mind without any perception that the continual succession of ideas contradicts each other, because as each idea takes centre stage, it seems to be the right one – a moment later everything changes and the whole affair is reevaluated.

A rough journey like this highlights the kind of process that goes on in ordinary life, only less dramatically. All difficult problems, great and small, go through the same process of change. It all seems to happen in that unknown realm we call the imagination. Like a psychic incubator it gives birth to a constant stream of possibilities. Feed a problem in and it begins to ferment a wealth of responses.

But new ideas and feelings, new attitudes, don’t suddenly pop up fully clothed; they have a dormant period; and not all novel ideas that lie simmering in the twilight will see the light of day. They are potentially emerging, but may never make it. It is as though there is a selection process taking place below consciousness, ideas and feelings vying with each other to see which will take centre stage, a contest to decide which attitude is ‘fittest’ to survive, which one will serve one’s overall needs and purposes.

As one’s perception of the environment changes, so what seems allowable to surface will change. In a receptive environment feelings can emerge that would normally be censored. Some environments facilitate change, others do not. It is undoubtedly true that in the presence of certain people it is impossible for you to move with imaginative freedom. They give you no space in which to do it, they interrupt the sequences by invading the process. They never allow a silence to think, not do they acknowledge your clarifying moments.

Suppose you just said, ‘I really don’t know what to think about this – I’m confused’. Paradoxically, this is a moment of clarity. You said it, didn’t you? In that moment it became clear to you that you were confused and you expressed it very clearly. Now, instead of letting that stand in its own space, allowing the next moment to emerge from it, they make some suggestion. They might try to solve your confusion. It is then that you struggle to hold on to yourself. Their input disrupts the sequence that was developing. For whatever they suggest, it will not be what is emerging for you in the next moment. You can disagree with them or not, but whatever you do, once you have engaged, your own process is lost – you’ve forgotten that precise feeling of confusion. That’s where you were cut off. That precise feeling was the necessary jumping off point into what would have been about to emerge.

Our inner life, our psychological life, has been described as a ‘stream of consciousness’, an uninterrupted flow of images, ideas and feelings. But in fact it is not at all like the smooth flow of a river. It has episodes. The initial phase is what is just about emerging into consciousness; the second phase is what has become fully present.

The first phase has all the feelings and ideas etc that are hovering in the back of the mind.  It’s like a holding room of possibilities.  When one possibility has moved fully forward it clarifies consciousness (second phase) and has become, clear and sharp. Suddenly, one knows what one is feeling, what one wants to say. One can now express it emphatically and definitely.

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There are some interesting aspects to the transition from internal feeling into expression. For example, you will have noticed that some people’s flow of consciousness is like an open book. When they do stop talking it is only to find some idea that is emerging. They may pause to feel into it because they are not quite sure; or they may pause to find the right word, but once they have it, they say it – then their flow moves on. Listening to them, one is never at a loss to know what is going on; their feelings also, as part of the episodic stream of consciousness, are equally expressed. Their process of change is visible.

 At the opposite end, there are those of whom one rarely knows what is going on. They have a flow of consciousness, but it is never revealed – only perhaps the conclusions they draw from it. This gives no indication of how they arrived there. Mostly, their inner thoughts are concealed; only occasionally they will speak with minimal reference to their internal experience. Emotion too is hidden and muted, so you have to make an educated guess as to what they are feeling. How a person arrives at a certain conclusion tells you more than conclusion itself. Conclusions are tidied up versions of the emotional flow with all the guts edited out. This state is not their fault. It usually comes about because their early life has been one where it was dangerous to reveal oneself. It is very similar to folk who are aware of their flow of consciousness when they are alone. But when other people are present it is as though they go blank. Asked about what they are thinking, their answer is usually ‘nothing in particular’.

Some people need a lot of time in the ‘emerging phase’. When they are searching for what they feel it takes a while. It is as though they have bad eyesight in the dark. Feelings are dim and fuzzy. They can’t recognise them. They need time, a lot of space and patience. It may sound strange, but recognising what you feel is far from a universal ability.

Of course, some people look for deeper feelings and need more time for them to emerge.

Space is perhaps the greatest gift you can give another. Your accurate understanding is vital, but it is useless unless followed by the gift of space where the person can look within. What will follow when they do is their next moment. Not yours, THEIRS.

In therapy each moment of consciousness is a moment of choice and transition: what to relate, where to go next, what idea to follow up, which emotion to ignore, what is too much for me to remember, and if remembered, what is too much to reveal? What’s important and what not? Where do I go from here? Should I say that I don’t know what I am supposed to say?

This is the selection process I spoke of. It must be allowed to take its own time without interference.

In our work it is a profound truism that nothing can replace your own process. Right or wrong. Wherever your own imagination leads you, it has to be acknowledged. You must be allowed to go there. We are not talking about acting out. What you actually do about things is secondary. Of primary importance is being in touch with the flow of your internal life and being able to reveal it how and when you choose. That’s how you move forward. If you are in touch like this, what you actually do about things will take care of itself.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264