HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO LOSE YOURSELF ?

by Stanley

‘I am trying to find out who I am’. When I hear someone say this I believe it’s not just a figure of speech. It means something quite real and taking it seriously says something of profound importance: it is possible to lose yourself. Let me tell you a story of how it can happen.

I came into this world naked - not just physically naked, but my needs were naked too. They were raw and totally unmediated by any sense of proper behaviour – they were undiluted, with no notion or care about the style of the family game or its problems.

The baby, you can say, is totally itself, driven to assert instincts that have evolved to serve its needs. Hopefully, its mother is driven by complimentary instincts too.

But growing up, as we know, is to become socialised. This means adapting to whatever style of family you find yourself in. Adaptation means, to some extent, giving up that instinctive, naked drive with which you were born. This can be painful. I can remember vividly the terrible dread and darkness whenever I was a bad boy – and this as a very small child. I know how it is to adjust myself and avoid the black hole of disapproval.

Very early, if something goes terribly wrong, the first thing the child concludes is: ‘there’s something wrong with me. I’m bad.’

This is how you begin to lose yourself. It depends on just how much and what kind of adaptation you have to do as you become increasingly aware of expectations.

There are certain equations I still have in my childlike mind: being Good = adaptated. Being Bad = being myself. Let’s stick with these simplistic equations because somewhere deep in my mind this is how I understand life works. Being Good is doing it right: being the way I’m expected to be – the reward is approval and love; the price is loss of self assertion. Being Bad is doing it wrong, deviating or being different – the reward is being true to myself; the price is disapproval, abandonment and guilt. I hide as much as I can, but if they find out who I really am they certainly won’t want me. Deep down I still believe this.

Granted, this is a naive scenario, but my child mind is like this, seeing everything in black and white.

Having successfully adapted myself and put away my childish tantrums and frustrations I become a reasonably good child – not all of the time, but most of the time. Things settle down after my initial training. That is, until adolescence when biology again kicks in with an avalanche of sex hormones; nature once again forcing a self assertion that wakes up all the old conflicts between being how I am expected to be and how I actually find myself.

Well, I get over that and things settle down again. My youth is a great time of doing what I please, joining with my peers, all of us trying hard not to be how we were taught to be, all of us similarly revolting, all of us wearing the same kind of hat and digging the same kind of revolting music. I’m OK except that I smoke and drink too much; and I’m not quite sure how to handle my freedom.

If I am a woman and get married the problem of too much freedom disappears. Suddenly I find myself confronted with the old choice: adapt or lose the person who means everything to me. It’s the same old situation. Again I become increasingly aware of expectations. I find myself anxiously trying to meet them; always understanding and doing everything to be helpful. I’m a good girl, adapting to the whims and vicissitudes of his character – giving him all he needs. But the old price has to be paid: the gradual loss of myself. Without my being aware of it, he is probably doing exactly the same. But the time will come when I will utter the words that will upset him so much: “I need some space – I think we should separate for a while”.

I do this not because I want to, but to save my life. It began to seem as though I was drowning in the relationship, which is how people will often describe it. You see, in this latest version of the drama I am not just dealing with the present situation. The original one I first went through as a child is there in full force, but entirely projected onto the marriage relationship; but I have no grasp of this. The problem seems entirely in the now. If it were only about now it would all be reasonable and solvable. But it isn’t like that. My overwhelming emotions run deep, deeper than I can comprehend; and they are so conflicted that it seems as though I don’t know what I want. As the saying goes, ‘I can’t live with him and I can’t live without him. To be with him is to drown and lose myself. To be without him is to face life on my own.

Emotions and feelings are temporal, always echoing and powered by the past. The temptation is always to give up myself in order to have someone. This is hardest thing is to grasp and most of therapy can be a gradual realisation of it.

I know this too: in spite of all the battles and heartache, I really did love my Mum and Dad so long ago – so much that I would give myself away, give them what they want of me, to make them happy. Then we could all live.

CULTURE AND HUMAN NATURE

by Stanley

It is possible to educate people in ways that are harmful to them. Some cultural traditions are fundamentally pathological: an education in religious fundamentalism is an extreme example.

We can think of such cultural ideas as ‘memes’ or viruses that infect the human mind. We can say that although such cultural memes are successful at replicating themselves, passing from one mind to another, they do so at the expense of their hosts. Many harmful religious doctrines are of this kind. This phenomenon is not unusual in the story of evolution. An example is the aids virus which uses a host, a living human cell, to replicate itself in order to infect other cells. You are also host to millions of bacteria in your body. Some are benign and actually assist certain necessary functions of your body. Some are pathological and harmful.

Ideas behave in the same way. You are host to many that are damaging to human wellbeing. They are transmitted from one host to another, not as organisms, but as packets of information we call ‘memes’. Their sole purpose is replication. A successful religion is an example successful memetic replication. Many religious practices (memes) are unquestionably harmful. For example, the idea of going to hell for your sins - no one today, except those infected with the meme, can possibly pretend that this idea is in any way helpful.

Let’s take the vivid example of Muslim women who wear the burka. A burka is a head to toe costume worn by some traditionally devout Muslim women designed to conceal every part of their bodies, except for the eyes.

In looking at this cultural practice, we can do a post-modernist move by saying that all cultural values are relative. We can say that when a Muslim woman says she is quite happy being enclosed in a burka we should take this at face value. Who are we to say that she is wrong? In saying this we are also agreeing that there is no basic human nature that this practice offends. A human beings, so the post-modernist doctrine goes, is a blank slate upon which anything can be written; human beings are infinitely malleable and there are no objective values by which we can judge. This is a very late western view in which we deny there is anything like a universal human nature. Every human being is nothing more than the product of their society. Any judgement we make is simply the one-sided product of our own culture and therefore without any universal justification.

However, biological science is showing us what we already know from common sense observation: that there is such a thing as human nature and that we are indeed born with predispositions, some are universal to all humanity. Not only this, but each individual is born with slight but important variations – a fact obvious to any mother. We do not come into the world as a blank slate upon which any whacky idea can run the show without fear of harm.

What we call our human nature can adequately be accounted for by our biological makeup. Cultural memes are a different class of events. Harmful cultural memes use our natural biological makeup as hosts for their own purposes, just as other parasitic organisms can.

It is impossible to imagine that a child who has not been infected with the burka meme, that is to say educated as a devoted Muslim girl, would freely choose to wear a burka. There is nothing in our biological make up that would instinctively incline a child toward that kind of choice.

Of course, once infected, the meme virus induces a certain kind of typical behaviour and reinforces it with instructions from a, in this case, divine source. The idea is that a woman will be happier and safer protected from the lascivious gaze of men. This meme is supported by the whole information package of the Islamic religion. So of course, in wearing a burka the woman may well feel happy and contented. But this fact does not make it any the less an offence against her nature than it would if she felt she deserved to be murdered by her father as punishment for being raped by a stranger – another Islamic meme.

‘The moment we admit that there is anything to know about human wellbeing, we must admit that certain individuals or cultures might not know it.’ [1] Some cultural practices and ideas are obviously inimical to human nature; there are universal truths about what conditions are bad for human wellbeing. Would anyone like to argue that celibacy for catholic priests is good for them or for the sexually abused children under their institutional care?

The moment we reject the post-modern idea of the relativity of what is good for people the whole ground of our discourse is changed. We realise that people can be hypnotised into believing that they are happy or that adverse circumstances are good for them. A principle survival mechanism of a successful meme is the hypnotic instruction that you are happier and better off, or will be, for willingly embracing its instructions, (e.g. sacrificing yourself as a suicide bomber or giving yourself to Jesus).

The desire to be happy is part of our genetic makeup and the meme mobilises this for its own use; just as the aids virus mobilises the ribosomes, enzymes and cellular reproductive machinery of the cell to reproduce itself and spread itself to other hosts.

There is a level, then, at which we have to say that people can lose their sense of what is good for them. People hypnotised into a religion, for example, are obviously not responsible for their judgements. It is well known how notoriously difficult it is to debrief someone who has been infected by a cult-church. We should not submissively tolerate this kind of human abuse in the name of cultural and religious tolerance.

The view expressed here may seem dangerous in that it looks as though it runs counter to human rights and our belief in democracy and self-determination. But it is a primary requisite for judgements that are consistent with the needs of human nature that there is a genuine freedom of choice. Once we admit this we throw into doubt many questionable practices that have gained immunity to debate.

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[1] Harris, Sam. Moral Confusion in the Name of Science: http://www.project-reason.org/newsfeed/item/moral_confusion_in_the_name_of_science3/

Also: http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html

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.

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[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 ?