PENNIES FROM HEAVEN.

Every time it rains

Pennies from heaven

Don’t you know each cloud contains

Pennies from heaven

by stanley

It’s extraordinary the way the madness of positive-thinking infects people who have not been directly exposed to its teachings. It has spread like a virus. It has mutated into a form for which we have little resistance. It has merged with spirituality. To think positively has become a secular spiritual religion, where being positive and being spiritual are the same thing: an irresistible and deadly combination.

We need to say again that this new religion flies in the face of all psychological evidence. The truth is that our thoughts do not govern our emotional life. The kind of thinking that goes on in our head most of the time is the product of our emotional life, not the cause of it.

But at last there are some brave souls who are speaking out. This week’s Listener (March 20-26) carries a front page banner: HOW POSITIVE THINKING IS FOOLING US; and inside there is a full five page article reviewing a new book by Barbara Ehrenreich ‘Smile or Die: how positive thinking has fooled America and the World’

The ChCh Public Library’s summary of the book is: ‘A sharp-witted knockdown of America's love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism, existential clarity and courage.’

‘We have, she says, been “bright-sided”. Although there is nothing more natural than the pursuit of happiness, it is now being ruthlessly enforced in a way that is most unnatural. Positiveness is now demanded of powerless employees, who in the US, can be sacked if they don’t have the “right attitude”, of Christians who are told they are letting God down if they dwell on bad things, even of invalids, who are told their negativity probably made them ill.

There is no proof, Ehrenreich says, that adopting a positive attitude will make you happier, healthier and richer – instead, says a US researcher, it could be making things worse. “Other studies suggest that mild pessimists are more resilient to life’s catastrophes and less pray to actual depression, because they may be slightly more realistic than optimists.”

Retuning to my point that the kind of thinking we do is the product of our emotional life, not its cause, I am reminded of David Hume’s famous remark (Treatise, ii. iii. 3): ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’.

What Hume meant by ‘the passions’ in his day, we would now call one’s ‘emotional life’.

‘Smile or Die’ (also published as ‘Bright-sided’) by Barbara Ehrenreich is available at the Canterbury Public Library : 155.23 EHR.

THE QUEST: ‘There is more in heaven and earth…’

by Stanley

Some people have a strong spiritual sense – backed up, not by mere belief, but personal experience that confirms the existence of a psychic domain or imaginative sphere that can penetrate to the heart of things and give a deeper kind knowledge.

Maybe they have intuitions about people that later prove correct; or perhaps predictive premonitions that are too near the mark to be co-incidence; or visions and dreams; or perhaps merely inexplicable moments of uncanny insight. They may use physical aids like cards, pendulums, runes, crystals, sticks, gemstones, divining rods etc, perhaps insisting that these are just conduits that facilitate their psychic abilities. Others eschew such physical aids and rely solely on their own deeply felt intuitive sense.

There is no denying that there is something mysterious going on in all this that we do not understand and have as yet no adequate concepts even to discuss intelligently. But I would like to pause and consider some of the psychological effects of the spiritual quest, to look at the quest from the psychological angle rather than how spirituality views itself.

The spiritual world can provide hope and solace for people to whom life has been less than kind, much as the tortured souls of the Middle Ages, burdened with original sin and harassed by the omnipresence of devils, must have looked towards redemption and relief in a life to come. And who would deny unhappy souls a spot of comfort. But from the same psychological perspective there are others for whom spirituality acts as brake on their personal development, giving them, in the long run, more struggle than reward.

Spiritual doctrines can strongly reinforce personal hang-ups. An example is the injunction to ‘to pray and act for the welfare of others’. A most commendable idea, but we have to take into account the effect such guidance has on someone who already finds it difficult to assert themselves and who is compelled to fulfil the needs of everyone except themselves, who, in fact, actively neglects their own welfare. The number of people like this is surprisingly large. The effect is to reinforce an already serious displacement that makes life even more difficult for them.

Similarly, a person with an oversize conscious already feels they are to blame for everything. Any failure in a relationship and they will gnaw away at the idea that if they had done something differently everything might have been OK. The kind of spirituality that will appeal to them is one stressing that one is responsible for everything that happens, suggesting perhaps that their ‘thinking’ was at fault. These are pernicious one-sided ideas that screw them down, making it impossible for them to stop hammering themselves, a habit which is really their chief problem.

Then there is the tendency of spiritual practices to elevate one’s ideal of the sort of person one should be. The notion of the spiritual life suggests that you can be better than you actually are – which of course is true. But for someone who already has an overlarge and punishing internal critic such a suggestion enhances their own accusations of not being good enough. The failure to measure up and the struggle to do so is now justified as spiritual work. They are then condemned to a life of trying.

Then there is the opposite effect it can have on the narcissistic personality, who is already the centre of the universe and who has difficulty in getting the reality that other people actually exist. Spirituality will be attractive because secretly it will imply a certain superiority. Being spiritual will inflate the ego, whose grandiosity is blown up even further by its supposed intimate connection with the ‘transcendent’.

Spiritual advice can fail to recognise that one size doesn’t fit all. Lets say person has progressed to a point where they can, at last, get angry about something, whereas all their life they have too scared to be. After a lifetime of servility they are finally able to feel annoyed about something. If you now tell them that resentment is bad for them spiritually you have effectively done them in.

Another trap: if you are pursuing a path of spirituality and you feel depressed something must be wrong with the way you are thinking. Negative thoughts are not spiritual. That idea is psychologically disastrous.

On another level there is the problem of education. There are indeed fascinating phenomena associated with what one could roughly call ‘the transpersonal’. But educationally there is a difficulty with the beliefs that arise to explain it. Because it is such a nebulous sphere it is wide open to fantastic projections of meaning and interpretation, unchecked by any kind of evidence.

It is when we look into the beliefs and explanations about spirituality that we have to face up to the possibility of error. Merely to believe something sincerely is not enough. Mere sincerity can be highly dangerous. Muslim suicide bombers believe that 12 virgins will be theirs in the next life – it has never been established what women suicide bombers hope for.

There is perhaps one more doubtful psychological service that the spiritual quest performs. I mean as a defence against the overwhelming influence of science and technology and the materialism of the modern world. Spirituality seems to provide another dimension in which the true values of the soul can be preserved. But as a purely defensive manoeuvre it suffers inevitably from a sense of isolation and irrelevance in the stream of modern life.

I would suggest that the spiritual quest as a defensive manoeuvre is no solution either to the narrowness of the modern world or to the lostness of the soul. One way to re-ensoul ‘materialism’ is by seeing the modern world as the wonderful achievement that it is in so many respects. Seeing, as Stephen Pinker said, not what we have done wrong in civilisation, but what we have done right. Perhaps we could even regain the spirit of the Romantic poets for whom the burgeoning new sciences at that time were a source of wonder and inspiration.

FELT-SENSE: the soft science

by Stanley

With every experience there is an underlying mood. Or perhaps ‘mood’ is too strong a word. Maybe I should say: there is an underlying feeling component or feeling tone to every experience. We call this the ‘felt-sense’. Every thought you have, every imagining, every encounter with others, everything you touch, every experience in life carries this feeling component with it.

To get a handle on this consider what it’s like when this feeling component is missing, what it’s like when life goes completely flat, where all meaning just drains away, where everything is one dimensional – dead. Nothing suggests anything, nothing enlivens. It is as though one has gone tone deaf. The world is all there, but it means nothing. [1] The opposite of this would be to listen to your favourite piece of music; the bodily felt sensation will likely be quite strong – and with it that non-verbal sense of meaning. In the arts we dignify this by calling it the ‘aesthetic sense’.

We have learned about this felt-sense from the therapeutic technique of focusing where you give attention to a kind of bodily feeling-sense that can unwind a personal problem. But the felt-sense is a much wider phenomenon than just this. Not only does every personal problem have its unique felt-sense, but so does every experience you have in life. The difficulty is that the felt-sense is so seamlessly part of every experience that it has never before been properly differentiated. It is so subtle that it passes unnoticed as something distinguishable. Nobody notices it – until it’s missing. When people look for it, having read something about focusing, they might look for something quite distinct from the experience itself, instead of an aspect of that experience. It is a difficulty that’s understandable because people are not used to selecting or lifting it out. And for some people the feeling signal is quite weak. It’s like tuning into a radio station that’s distant – turn the tuner minutely one way or another and you loose the signal and can’t get it back.

It is often difficult to get the difference between the felt-sense and emotion. Emotion is elephantine and opaque. But emotion can be the object of the felt-sense just like any other experience. You can find out what’s underneath it. For example if you are angry with someone, the emotion is quite definite. But the anger, by itself, does not reveal what is underneath the anger. Emotions blot out the felt-sense, so you have to stand beside the emotion and tune in very carefully what is just alongside it.

Focusing in therapy has been a wonderful research area because though it we have been able to examine this component of experience closely. We emphasise the bodily aspect of the felt-sense because it is a vital and seamless part of you as a whole organism and can be more sharply sensed in the heart, chest or stomach. The body is the reference point, not ‘the mind’.

You can check out the ubiquitous presence of the felt-sense. Stop a moment and ask yourself, ‘what do I really feel drinking this cup of tea right now?’ or ‘what is the felt-sense of doing the dishes right now?’ If you do this seriously and intentionally you will find that tea drinking and dish washing is never just tea drinking and dish washing. It isn’t simply flat. Things are never ordinary. If they feel that way, just ask ‘what does this so-called‘ordinary ’really feel like? You will find that the sense of ‘just ordinary’ is a veritable portmanteau of luggage. Pull one thing out of it and it will drag out more and more: memories, intimations, feelings, wishes, longings, anxieties.

This is our sense of meaning. I don’t mean the big MEANING OF LIFE. Something much simpler. It’s the feeling of meaning attached to every small action: ‘gathering sticks and drawing water’. In Jungian psychology we sometimes call it the sense of ‘depth’. Really it is the sense of being involved, connected or interested and curious; if it’s strong we call it a fascination, even an obsession.

Some people are lucky enough to be easily interested. Things interest them. One noticeable characteristic of such people is that they don’t pre-empt surprise, they don’t ‘already know’. If you tell them something they don’t ‘already know’. They are always on the lookout for nuances that are different from what they thought was the case. They actually find out things. They are attracted to new meanings that had never occurred to them. That is precisely the characteristic of someone working the felt-sense in focusing-type therapy. There is openness to the as yet unexplored. More than anything, there is the sense that one doesn’t already know.

The felt-sense is not a source of mystic knowledge. It merely displays the unexpected connections between things that are going on for you right now. Perhaps you may tune in to your present feelings and discover that you feel guilty. For example: ‘this person expects something of me and I feel mean for not giving them what they want’. This isn’t your felt-sense telling what to do. It doesn’t give moral signals; it’s simply telling you how you are and an invitation to find out more, to see what further is implied. Are you being mean or are you simply standing up for yourself. Questions arising like this are not to be answered – they show you sharply what state you are in. Ah! That’s right. I can feel how difficult it is to say ‘no’? I didn’t realise how strong that is. And so on. When you’ve got more of what is going on the knot of guilt simply unties.

The felt-sense does not reveal great psychic truths. It’s no use asking the felt-sense about the Divinity of Christ because there is nothing more to be said. All the absolute truths about that are in the bible. There is nothing to open up. The felt-sense doesn’t work on fixed systems – except to undo them! It doesn’t work on fixed beliefs for the same reason. That’s the whole point: following the felt-sense undoes mental and emotional structures; it loosens fixities, places where we are stuck. It works best where there is uncertainty. There is room then for movement.

Of course, if you are hanging on to a fixed belief for dear life then you won’t want anything that will loosen it.

It is a mistake to look for the causes of a personal problem. When using the felt-sense on any personal problem you are not looking for causes – what is the cause of the problem or what to call it. You are not on a diagnostic mission. Once you get into such speculation the head will take over and run the show. There are many ways to diagnose you, most of them completely useless.

The felt-sense moves things, it carries a problem further, it opens out a problem. It does this progressively as a process, not as simplistic and interpretive one-off revelation. After the process has taken place, looking back, you can see what contributed to the problem. But you can never get that first. To start with you never know where the felt-sense will lead.

---

[1] Feeling and loss of feeling are complex issues in psychiatric and psychoanalytical literature.
Here we are coming at it from the phenomenological point of view, how these
appears directly to consciousness.

REALITY AND IMAGINATION

by Stanley

Some say imagination is King. We are basically ‘homo imaginalis’; our true nature, so it is said, lies in our creative imagination. Reality, of course, cannot be ignored; but to neglect creative imagination is to lose all that is rich, vibrant and alive in us. Quite naturally we react against the dehumanising world of technology and the dead hand of scepticism where the highest of spiritual truths are reduced to mere mythical fables; where our deepest concerns are merely a disorder in some psychiatric textbook and where education is condensed to rote learning. There is such a thing as a ‘higher knowledge’ and the road to it is through a greater faith in our imaginative and intuitive sensibilities.

Yet, scientific research does everything in its power to guard against wishful thinking intruding into the search for truth. Imagination is OK in its place, but it can deceive us like the very devil. That you can predict the future by the stars or by reading signs in the entrails of dead animals is simply not on. Neither is fundamentalist religion, Ouija boards, Iridology, bleeding statutes, witchcraft, and channelling, alien abduction and crop circles. These and their like just do not pass muster as secure forms of knowledge, however much they may gratify a colourful imagination.

Imaginism and scientism seem to be opposing forces that grind against each other like two tectonic plates pushing in opposite directions – and psychology finds itself right on the fault-line. Nowhere is the opposition so strong as between behaviourists on one side and the archetypal and Jungian psychologists on the other. They glare at each other like enemies across the Great New Age divide. But the same conflict is seen among educational theorists. Now, after a decade or more stressing the importance of creativity, the government has decided that too many children are leaving school unable to read and write.

‘In Dreams Memories and Reflections Carl Jung describes his own struggle to honour the autonomy of the soul and its artist’s voice. In the chapter entitled “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Jung asks “what am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it? He then heard a voice that said “It is art.”’ (Glenyse Hyland 2006)

Marie-Louise von Franz was 18 when she first met Jung and was quite overawed at meeting the great man. 30 years earlier Jung had been working at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zürich and mentioned a patient who lived on the moon. Finding her courage, Von Franz said: ‘surely you mean that the woman acted as if she lived on the moon’. ‘No’, said Jung ‘it was not as if – the girl really did live on the moon.’ Von Franz later became a great disciple of Jung, but at the time she came away thinking ‘either he is crazy or I am’.

When I was young I was in the first class in England taught by the since notorious L. Ron Hubbard. There were no Hollywood stars in the class at that time. I remember at one point we touch on the tension between imagination and reality. I piped up: ‘if imagination conflicts with reality, so much the worse for reality.’ It was a clever remark because I picked up on the sort of thing Hubbard would want to hear. And he did – he liked it. Had Jung been there he would have smiled too.

The whole swag of ideas and sentiments that comprise what we call New Age is a sort of modern Romanticism. It is the same sort of ‘spiritual’ reaction as happened in the 19^th century revolt against scientific mechanisation. William Blake thought Newton’s influence was ‘Satanic’. He said, ‘God keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep’. He was referring to what he thought was the narrowness of Newtonian physics, a cornerstone of the Age of Reason and a prime initiator of the scientific and the industrial revolution.

Charles Tart, an American psychologist said: ‘...the current popularity of ‘New Age’ ideas is a reaction against the dehumanising, despiritualising, effect of scientism, the philosophical belief...that we are nothing but material beings’.

But this idea of ‘scientism’ is a New Age romantic and mythical view of science. Isaac Newton actually wrote religious tracts, biblical hermeneutics and deeply studied the occult and alchemy. The idea that science is ‘materialistic’ comes about because it finds out what causes what. And when we find out exactly what causes what we call it a ‘mechanism’. For some minds it is a great achievement to be freed from illusion and bullshit; others feel trapped and spiritually deprived because they are no longer free to imagine what they like. Darwinian evolution by natural selection may take more getting used to than mythical Creation Stories that abound in every culture; but it is much simpler and also more awe-inspiring.

Because you are a therapist dealing with all that human stuff you may think you are on the spiritual side of the great divide, with the world of science on the other. But that’s not the way it is. If you are a good therapist you are a good scientist. Why? Because if you are a good therapist you wait upon phenomena; like Galileo, with his new toy telescope, you wait night after night, patiently observing Jupiter’s moons orbiting the planet that no one had ever noticed before.

You do not impose upon phenomena, you wait upon phenomena. Hippocrates of Cos was the Greek father of medicine. He urged meticulous and careful observation. ‘Leave nothing to chance’, he said. ‘Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time.’

The term ‘psychotherapy’ has become a misnomer; there really is no adequate name yet for what we do. The client in the consulting room is like nature. You ask questions of this living world we call a person. But what is most important: you listen to the answers as though nature itself was speaking. You wait upon phenomena. You do not contradict or try to fashion nature. You do not tell nature anything – you let it tell you. You know that this person has her own ways; there will be a precise way her nature will unfold. Your fantasies have no place. You are not there to mold a human being; you are not a teacher, but a pupil. You are there to learn and to let nature show you what it does naturally: natura naturans. This is no different from a true scientific attitude. It takes the same creative imagination and respectful sense of wonder. Ours is not a highly disciplined science, and who knows if it ever will be. But we have more in common with Galileo, Newton and Darwin than we think.

BODYMINDING 2

...................................by Stanley

Bodyminding is not a replacement for focusing. It is certainly a useful exercise in itself, but it is also an essential as part of focusing. Without the ability to stay with the body, focusing is much more difficult. Time and effort is used up in therapy because the person simply has no idea how to stay unhurriedly with their body – metaphorically they have lost touch with the heart.

The first learning step in a focusing session is: “Make yourself comfortable in the chair, feel your body and get yourself in the room”. Gendlin has said that this step is often treated as a mere introduction, a preliminary; but it is probably the most important step of all. In bodyminding I am simply taking this advice very seriously.

There is one observation that makes bodyminding worth considering. With focusing, a person gives attention to the non-verbal felt-sense of a problem. In doing this, a process goes on out of sight that eventually produces a valuable change of viewpoint about the problem. Prior to this conscious shift such a hidden process must have been going on to make this shift possible.

Let me put this another way: when the focuser gives attention to the felt-sense of a problem, all she is aware of is the murky, body-feel of the problem. After a few moments of getting the body-feel of it, something will emerge that carries the problem further, producing a valuable shift of viewpoint. What I am stressing is that some process must be occurring out of sight during that moment of silent attention to the body sensation; it is certainly nothing that the focuser is doing. The subsequent shift of conscious viewpoint is the result of that unseen body process.

We have no idea what is going on in that unseen process. All we can say is that the conscious shift arising from it indicates that something is going on; and it happens only when the person gives a certain kind of attention to what the body is manifesting as a sensation.

But the question immediately arises: why should the body need my attention to do this unseen work? Remember, though, in focusing we are giving the body a certain kind of attention. Perhaps we do not always give it conditions favourable for it to do its work – just as pathogens around a wound are unfavourable for the body to do its repair work, maybe some of our ‘infected ideas’ impede natural processes. It may be that the body needs a certain kind of attention analogous to the kind of attention the client needs to move forward in therapy. In essence this could be summed up as ‘being with’ the person – not demanding, not suggesting, not criticising – simply being with. Perhaps this is what the body needs from me to do its work effectively.

The body has work of its own that has nothing to do, at least directly, with my conscious activity: it has its own processes that can’t be influenced by thought, any more than cognitive meddling can assist the body’s fight against a virus. The body has its own methods, as when it induces a feverish high temperature to inhibit invading bugs. The body knows how to do all this – I don’t.

But there are many ways to make it difficult for the body to do its work. Smoking, drugs and drinking are the most obvious. But also some of our health prescriptions are counter-productive. For example, one is supposed to breathe properly right? – right!

But also wrong if you try to impose correct breathing.

In not breathing properly you will notice a sensation of physical restriction. Now, when you find your chest tight and your breathing constricted it is not a good idea to impose ‘positive breathing’. Tightening and constriction is where you are stuck – maybe from a time when you inhibited breathing to hold down emotion. The body wants to unfreeze, to move on, but it has to go down its own track to do so. You interfere with such a process in trying to get the body to do what it should do. But the trick is to tune in to the sense of tightness and be with the body in its tightness. Let it do what it wants to do – not what you think it should do – what it wants to do. Maybe it wants to experience the tightness even further. Find out!

Look at the analogy of going through the grieving process. When a person is in grief they have to fully experience it before they get through it. When a person is in grief and just about to cry, one way to freeze them in grief is to tell them to look on the positive side. In therapy you don’t tell people how or what they should feel. You stay with them as they go through their own process. In the same way, you don’t tell the body how to process itself by trying to make it breath properly.

Another difficult condition to impose on the body is the attempt to relax. ‘Relaxation’ exercises are said to be a way to help oneself mentally and physically. There are all kinds of prescriptions to progressively promote physical relaxation. Now, it is quite true that relaxed states can be achieved this way. It can also be done with various altered states using drugs or hypnosis or booze; their fatal attraction is that they do give temporary relaxation.

In some relaxation exercises you are told first to tense and then relax each part of the body in turn. This is nearer to what we are advocating and has some workability by all accounts. But the induced tensions and relaxations in these exercises are coming as commands – they are not originating from within the body, from body’s own processes; moreover, the order in which each limb is addressed comes as an imposed routine and so the body does not pick it up with its own steps to carry it forward. This system would be rather like telling a client in therapy: “Well, in today’s session we are first going to work on your problem with women; then we’ll move on to the eating; and then to your job. We’ll spend five minutes on each topic, first looking at the problem and then the solution....OK!”

The same difficulty is inherent in all forms of ‘exercises’ attempting to train the body. Many of these methods treat the body as a thing that can be conditioned, an object that can be manipulated. It’s our favourite western mode where the body is regarded a mechanism. So often though, as soon as you come out of the relaxed state, the stiff neck or tense shoulders return. There really has been no movement, and for good reason – the body has not been allowed to go through it’s own process. It has been given more commands on top of all the other ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ and ‘directives’ that put a strain on natural homeostasis – one more thing it has to cope with. Look at it this way: how much does your body have to cope with you? We underestimate the enormous stress we ‘normal neurotics’ place on our biological system with our curative methods and demands for improvement.

Returning to the point I made at the beginning: a common error for beginners in focusing is not staying long enough with the felt-sense: being in a hurry for meaning, impatient for ‘what is supposed to happen’. One misses then what is actually happening. Bodyminding slides easily into focusing because it is an essential part of it. But try it as a simple exercise in itself.

Remember that little number I wrote called Pausing to Focus. Bodyminding is good training in pausing.

Doing nothing is something you have to be able to do! How’s that for a Zen paradox ?

BODY MINDING

................................................. by Stanley

For most civilised people there seems to be a gap between the thinking awareness level and the physicality of the body. Sometimes, on a thought level, a problem or concern can seem trivial; but on a physical level it can have quite a big effect. My boss was rude to me yesterday. I think about it, sure. But it’s not a heavy deal. I am not consumed by it – it’s just life! I didn’t like it, but it didn’t worry me.

But, seemingly unconnected with it, I was tense and sleepless that night and felt unwell in the morning. I say to myself, “I often feel crap after a night like that”. That’s how I pass it off. The two phenomena: the minor incident with my boss and my physical body events – don’t seem to be connected. They are completely different orders of magnitude. The stress of my sleepless night does not match the trivial episode with my boss. If I were asked if there was a connection, I would probably laugh and say, “Oh yes, probably”, and pass it off.

But the truth is that my unpleasant physical experience was quite definitely a reaction to the incident with my boss the previous day. Something instantly happened in my body when my boss was rude to me. But I don’t live in my body; I live in my head where I by-pass bodily events, dismissing them so as to get on with the business of living. Thus, there appears to be completely no connection. My sleeplessness and headache come as though out of the blue. My physical bouts of unwellness seem completely random.

But there’s more to it: the incident with my boss is really only a trigger. My physical reactions have a deeper origin. Most likely as a child the original experience was a physically felt impact that the body has carried ever since. It triggers whenever someone treats me badly.

Real emotional impact is physical – felt by the total organism. In the engulfing physicality of the early incidents there is no split between mind and body. That comes later when we learn, as they say, not to let things effect us. But unknown to us the body goes on carrying the trauma.

Later, it only takes the merest reminder to jog the body’s memory where some small event can cause a massive physical reaction, giving us perhaps little indication of the trigger in present time. Like the incident with my boss I described above.

But even if we suspect the trigger, it still may not lessen the physical disturbance. Cognitively suspecting the connection is not enough.

Some time ago I started a small experiment. I thought to myself: ‘I wonder what it would be like to live in my body instead of in my head’. This led, in the course of time, to a little sideshow I called ‘Body Minding’.

Unlike focusing, I didn’t use interaction between the felt-sense and symbolising; in other words, I didn’t try to name what I felt. Instead, I paid attention to bodily sensations only. To put it another way, I made a space for the body to do its own thing, to carry forward its own needed processes without inquiring or probing, simply recognising non-cognitively what is happening physically. Not trying to solve any problem or difficulty. Not trying to do anything, in fact. It could be described as a time where one just lives in the body, rather than merely having a body. They were like little meditation sessions, except that my orientation was different to that of meditation. I was not watching my body, I was being my body.

What I called ‘Body Minding’ is like, ‘joining in’ with one’s physical sensations rather than merely observing them. You could say ‘being in’ sensations rather then ‘looking at’ them. Quite a trick until you get the idea. To begin with each session took me a little while to get there, but when I did it was quite noticeably different: being alive in my body instead of my head – the locus of myself ‘lower down’.

I have found that just a little practice in Body Minding has made me much more aware of my immediate physical reaction to present time situations. That gap I spoke of at the beginning – the gap between the thought level and the physical reactions of the body – is not so wide. I catch a physical reaction sooner and so I am much more aware of what turned it on. I seem to be more immediately responsive.

It’s not at all that I am practicing body minding all the time. It’s just that a little practice has made a difference to life when I’m not practicing it. Quite small physical sensations are more perceptible and their connection to events of the moment is sharper.

For example – and this is a true one – it’s nine in the evening; I’ve had my meal and washed up – and I think, ‘what shall I do now?’ Instantly I get the slightest empty feeling in my chest – almost unnoticeable. I nearly overlook it.

Ah, I know what that is. It’s the dread of nothing. I’ve known that one all my life. As a child one of the most awful feelings was: ‘there’s nothing to do’. It was more than just boredom, it was more like an anguished dread of nothingness – death’. And I got it too whenever it was time to go to bed which I would put off as long as possible, driving my parents crazy.

And interestingly, that little scene as an adult was at 9.0pm. Nearly bedtime !

But at least that evening I got just what was happening to me. A small thing? Yes, I suppose so. Not exactly life threatening or dramatic. Not the sort of thing they’d give you medication for.

But a win is a win. And a small win leads to others.

DEAR COMPUTER

............................by Stanley

......I live with my computer. We’re not married or anything, we just live together.

......It’s not a question of whether my computer has a life of its own, whether objectively it has a sentient consciousness – the point is, I behave as though it has. At a very deep level I’ve discovered I regard my computer as alive.

......I’ll be truthful: It is a she : a woman.

......Our interaction with each other has all the qualities of a serious ongoing relationship. After all, the true meaning of ‘relationship’ is interaction. We certainly have that; and, like all intimate relationships, it isn’t always easy. I have to say, sometimes she is difficult; she has unpredictable moods; and sometimes I can be quite selfish and thoughtless, using her without in the least acknowledging my dependency. Recently we have been in serious trouble. Suddenly, without warning, she stopped talking to me.

.....All this might seem most amusing, except for the fact that I was terribly upset. I’m not being funny now. I really mean this. When she stopped talking to me I was dreadfully upset. Looking back in hindsight I didn’t realise what was going on. My computer was just a machine and it was improperly telling me that my Vista was an illegal copy. I was so upset I knew something else was going on; and this is where it gets interesting.

.....I decided it was time I sat down and did some focusing. I cleared a space for myself and looked into my body. There was something vaguely there in my chest. The words ‘fluttery and nervous’ came. Overall, I actually felt worse than this but I stayed with this slight sensation of fluttery and nervous. It was barely discernable but I stayed with it. I remembered that focusing is the next step after you get in touch with your feelings.

......Then a surprising phrase floated by: ‘but I was a good boy’.

......What’s that got to do with it ?

......But I was a good boy’....what on earth does that mean...!

......No, get out of your head – stay with that phrase and the fluttery nervous sensation.

......Then I got: ‘something has been taken away from me’.

......I know what it is: My mum’s not speaking to me.

......That’s it ! There’s an unmistakable relief when you get it right.

......That’s what she used to do. It was her way of punishing.

.......I recognised the feeling of overwhelming anxiety. As a kid I wouldn’t know what it was. But I knew I must have done something wrong and I was a bad boy – often I was a bad boy when I thought I was a good boy.

......I’m not blaming my mum, but when she withdrew like that it was a catastrophic emergency. I remembered how all my attention was focused on getting her back. In this state I had no time or space to have myself.

......I can’t play.

......I lose me.

......I can’t play when my survival is at stake. I lose all capacity to follow myself, to have fun. I lose the immediacy of playing, of my own imaginative world, my curiosity, my childlike ability to learn, discover, unpack, delve, probe, fiddle and follow wherever my fancy leads.

......I lose me.

......That’s exactly the state I was in when my computer crashed.

......There were interesting discoveries to follow. As a child, when I have her, when she is functioning, when she is being mum, I can forget her and have myself and my playing life. Quite literally, I can ignore her and get on with my interesting little word.

......My computer is a sort of combination of these two aspects. I can play with my computer. It’s my window on the world. It lets me follow wherever my fancy leads. But when I am playing I can forget its functioning, I can ignore how it is silently working for me in the background. Didn’t I say: ‘I can be quite selfish and thoughtless, using her without in the least acknowledging my dependency? Isn’t that just like the life of the child?

......One interesting aspect of this little session with myself is worth mentioning. During focusing I could fully get how anxious I was as a child by tuning into my present anxiety. My anxiety over my computer and my childhood anxiety weren’t two feelings – they were exactly the same. It was as though my present anxiety gave me vivid access to my childhood state. I just knew how lost and scared I was back then.

......I usually put the computer into ‘sleep’ mode before going to bed. Not long after I had fixed all that trouble I woke early one morning. It was about 3:30. I wandered out into the lounge and saw that the computer had switched itself on. I said out loud: ‘You’re not supposed to be awake dear!’

......I smiled and laughed at myself.