I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE

by Stanley

The 1994 BBC interview that Melvin Bragg gave to playwright and television dramatist Dennis Potter, was what Brian Edwards called ‘the finest television interview ever recorded’. Potter was the genius who wrote The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven. At the time of the interview Potter was dying of cancer and sipped morphine throughout the interview in the BBC studio. I remember the moment when he recounted how, a few days before, he looked at an apple tree in blossom from his bedroom window:

…instead of looking at the apple blossom and saying ‘Oh! Isn’t that nice’. Now, last week, it was the whitest, frostiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. The nowness of things. Everything is more trivial and more important than ever – and the difference doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of things is absolutely wonderful …

Those sort of Big Moments in life are somewhat rare – like perhaps when you come upon an opening in the forest and there is this huge roaring waterfall, the sun shining through the mists rising from the depths. It’s as though reality bursts through one’s usual way of seeing and saturates the senses. One is overwhelmed by the thereness of it all! It doesn’t have to be the Big Nature Deal, either; you can get it at the sight of someone you love when they don’t know you’re looking at them. Suddenly, they are so very there !

You absolutely get it.

When you walk from the garage into your house, you know the house is there. Of course you do – but you don’t experience the house like that. You don’t ‘get it’. Not like that. You can live in your house quite comfortably without being enraptured by it.

Then there is the other kind of overwhelming thereness. Not something too good, but something that’s too awful. Not the bountiful, life-giving Mother Nature so beloved by the eco-idealists, but the death-dealing mother, whom the ancients knew as Kali; she who wears a necklace of human skulls; she who reminds of destruction and shakes the ground that before had felt so firm.

Our usual life is lived in a bubble that filters out too much of anything, both ends of the good/bad spectrum. But when an earthquake happens it rips open not just the earth but also all those darker, more frightening aspects of the world, enough to make us shudder with dread. That’s when I really don’t want to ‘get it’ or be there in any sense.

But oh dear! There are a hundred ways of not being-there. You can move to another city; you can curl up under the blankets; you can go on a people-saving spree; you can work your butt off; you can pray; watch television.

I had my own special way when the earthquake hit. I went on a creative binge that was quite manic, writing up this wonderful idea that that had occurred to me when all the power and water was down after the earthquake. In this manic phase I was possessed by a wonderful confidence. Inflated mania is not bad in some ways. You can travel to distant places without any airfare and you can let flourish ideas you wouldn’t normally entertain! Thankfully, however, my trip got harder and harder to maintain, until finally I came down to earth. The strange thing was that my return to reality was facilitated by one of the ideas born of mania itself – which brings me back to the idea of ‘thereness’ we started with.

Try sitting a chair in your lounge and get the room as there ­– by which I mean not just knowing it is there – but actually tuning in to the full perception of the walls, floors and the objects in the room, really getting them as solid and real – and hold it. You will most likely find that you can do it for a few of seconds … and then you will flinch.

I used to think that this was just a wandering mind, unable to concentrate for too long. But I discovered this is not aimless wandering, it’s a flinch. Almost as though you’d touched a hot stove before feeling the burn – in fact, its a flinch so effective that you don’t feel anything. I think maybe it’s a millisecond of unconsciousness. But the result is that you find yourself thinking – and you are somewhere else.

I found if I insisted on getting the solid reality of the room like this, I mean really getting it and holding it for 20 minutes, I got incredibly tense. I mean holding onto my body as though there was some dreadful emergency going to happen. Ah! so that’s what I’m doing. I realised I was resisting being totally present. There could be only one reasonable answer to this: being-here was somehow dangerous. There was something I didn’t want to experience. And it was glaringly obvious that resistance to experience is closely tied to physical, I mean muscular, tension. I suddenly thought of the phrase ‘body armour’ and remembered, tucked away in my dusty shelves, a book I bought in 1975 by Alexander Lowen, a pupil of that mad genius friend of Freud, Wilhelm Reich. Lowen’s book was called ‘Bioenergetics’.

‘Children learn early in life that they can reduce painful feelings by holding their breath and tensing muscles to cut off feeling. When emotional experience is difficult (as it is for many), the holding patterns become "second nature" – built into the body as chronic muscular tensions that persist into adulthood. The tensions operate below awareness and rob the person of a fuller and more vital experience of life.’[1]

We are all, especially as children, experts on detecting toxic people and environments; we instinctively know what is death-dealing. And children solve it, if they cannot escape – which invariably they can’t – by shutting it out, pulling down the blinds, deleting the experience, pretending it’s something else. All very effective ways of not being-there, blotting out experiences; but the price is alienation from the wonderful nowness of things. Realising the connection between bodily tension and the resistance to being totally present has lead me down some interesting pathways. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

*

One wants to be open to life and wellbeing, but closed to the darker aspects of existence. But experience is experience. Close down on one aspect and you close down on them all; and when you do this, both the highs and the lows become invisible ends of the spectrum. Life can get far too narrow; and the only way is to open up the field of vision to both the highs and the lows. People come into therapy and counselling because they instinctively know they must open up to a wider bandwidth of living which they know they can’t get at on their own. They don’t want to be prised open, but allow to lift the lid and have a look.

How much to turn on and tune in is a question of psychological economics – a question of how much life do you think you can afford. That’s a very serious consideration.

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[1] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergetic_analysis

GOLDILOCKS ZONE

by Stanley

Just recently, somewhere amid TV images of the bloody struggles in the streets of Cairo, almost unnoticed at the end of the news, there was a small announcement that astronomers had confirmed the discovery of six new planets. They are known as ‘exoplanets’ because they orbit stars other than our own sun. Twenty years ago the idea of planets outside our own solar system was mere speculation – today 1235 have been found, 63 of them exist in a so-called ‘goldilocks zone’, that neither fries or freezes them by being neither too close or too far from their parent sun, a habitable zone where liquid water and therefore life could exist. Since there are from 2 to 400 billion stars in our local Milky Way alone, the probability of finding earthlike planets in the near future is, I am told, as good as certain.

All this is mind-blowing enough, but what do you suppose the psychological effect on humanity will be if extraterrestrial life is discovered. The impact will be far greater than Darwin’s discovery of evolution; maybe even greater than was the impact of Greek philosophy and science on Medievalism. Should we find only extraterrestrial bacteria it will doubt go right over the heads of the majority; and many will simply go into denial. But the long term effect will be another step in the process of humanity’s growth out of childhood, out of being, how shall I say, embedded in the local.

The Medieval Mind saw the universe as centred on ourselves, where even the animal kingdom was there to provide moral lessons on the Christian life. It was OK for everyone at the time; and we still give a respectful nod to such archaic beliefs; and even now we might say that if a Muslim woman is happy and prefers wearing a full burka with only the tiniest holes to see through and believes that women should be stoned to death for adultery, who are we to quarrel with her? To be thus thoroughly embedded in a local backwater is nothing unusual. It’s part of growing up.

When I was a child the universe was number 31 Crownfield Rd, London E15, one of the poorest parts of the East End. I emerged into life embedded in this particular cultural and family locality. There was nothing else. As I grew up there were other places with differing styles of life. I could begin compare, evaluate, imagine. But being embedded in a ‘local’ is a state I can still fall into when some event fills my horizon and I am suddenly confined – a friend has cancer; an earthquake; or, by chance, I am thrown into a narrow mood. Suddenly, my horizon becomes restricted. I am encapsulated within an experience. The is no outside.

Nobody grows up all of a piece. We all start off fairly localised as a child, a pretty much ‘together’ creature; but different aspects of the personality grow at a different rates. Some pieces are very slow moving; some pieces hardly move at all. Some pieces get left behind and are so attached to the earliest years it is as though no time had passed at all. I give as an example my moods and attitudes to close relationships. In this aspect, I have always been a ‘slow developer’, as they say. I offer no excuse since most people drag their feet here to some extent – at least, everyone I have ever known. ‘Relationships’ are a department of life that is the most difficult in the world – apart from floods, typhoons and earthquakes.

Though you would think, wouldn’t you, that becoming acquainted with worlds beyond my local origins, learning about foreign cultures, history, evolution and exoplanets, as well as all my life experience, would devalue the local? If not devalue it, at least make it less riveting, relativising its importance. Well, in a way it does; and yet, paradoxically, the wider view helps us see the local for the first time. Just as, when earth is viewed from the moon, we see it and cherish it with new eyes.

This is well demonstrated in practical psychological work. Therapy deals with areas in a person’s life where they are cornered in some local concern, past or present, some precise situation that offers no shift of horizon, no possibility of imagining otherwise. Sometimes a person is so embedded, so implicated in some such compressed, home-like zone, so localized, that they are completely in it – so, of course, they cannot see it. Then there are no qualifications or questions; and they are so accustomed to it that, no matter how deadening the style, they do not see it as a problem – there is no problem. Such people don’t come to therapy – any more than a hot Muslim or a evangelical Christian would.

To free oneself from an entrenchment one has to see that it is and how it is. Not try to change it, that only makes it persist – but to see it. Just distant enough, yet close enough to the isssue – in the goldilocks zone you might say – to be able to distinguish it and turn towards it. There’s no need to work on it – that’s all it needs.

THE ‘WHERE’S-THE-SCISSORS’ DISORDER

by Stanley

I would like to tell you about an odd personal disturbance of mine. I’ll call it the Where’s-the-Scissors disorder. It used to happen regularly with my car keys, but it can happen with anything: ‘where did I leave the scissors’; ‘where is my diary’; ‘where did I put my notes’; ‘where’s my cell phone’. The other day I had no idea where I had left my cell phone, so I rang it up on the land line – heard it ringing and searched all over the house to find where the ringing was coming from. Eventually I found it in some unlikely place.

But it’s my condition of mind that is interesting. It is based on the assumption that something is lost. When I am afflicted with this condition I know something is lost in the same instant that I turn to find it. Both go together: where is it – I’ve lost it. It’s the same as searching for a name I can’t remember. I know the name full well and I know that I know it. But in the instant I reach for it in my memory, I know I can’t remember it.

This syndrome is especially noticeable where the thing I’m looking for is right in front of my nose. ‘Where’s the scissors?’ Anyone else would see them right there on the table in front of me; but do I see them? No, I do not. I know I can’t find them because I’m looking for them. That very ‘knowing’ produces a blind spot. ‘Can’t find’ is built in to ‘looking for’.

If you think I must be getting a bit Alzheimerish I can only say that I was like this when I was 10. I can remember crying out, “Mum…Muuum where are my…..?” to which my mother would invariably reply, “Well where did you put it…?” This would infuriate me because if I knew where I’d put it I wouldn’t be asking her.

*

There are many kinds of seeking and all kinds of things we seek. But there are certain quests that are doomed to fail because they have an out-of-reach quality already built into them. They are quests with a nullifying shadow. Rather like my conviction that I can’t find the scissors. It was Plato who said, (and I somewhat paraphrased him) “we never want what we already have”. It is also true, in some perverse sense, that I never have what I want. Wanting already implies an absence. It is almost like wanting turns on the deficit; just as ‘looking-for’ turns on ‘can’t find’.

Let’s hone in on something a little more specific. Sometimes in session a person will say to me, “what am I supposed to be talking about.” Such a simple, honest question reveals a propensity for impossible quests. Maybe the thing that is important to him isn’t really the most important thing. The person has the notion that there is something he should find within himself that isn’t already there. That’s the perfect set-up for the impossible quest. The very worst reply would be to try and help him find it. Why? Because you would be playing into the ‘quest’ state of mind. You would be collaborating in the idea that there is something he is not doing which he ought to be doing. Even if he found something that he wanted to talk about it might not be the right one. It wouldn’t be, would it? Obviously – otherwise he wouldn’t be asking, would he?

The very worst thing you can do is to set someone up for an impossible quest. So many religious and spiritual systems do just that. A typical example would be to suggest that there is something one must find within oneself. “The answer to your problems lies within”, you wisely suggest. That’s the trigger that sets them up. It’s only a short step to trying to find God. They’re probably already stuck on ‘trying to find themselves’. And what you suggest closes the trap that’s already waiting for them. It’s a very subtle thing. Who they are can’t be right because they are looking for themselves.

I have been guilty of unintentionally perpetrating this ploy myself. As you know I have been very keen on the technique called focusing. But it has one major snare that’s easy to fall into. In my keenness it took me a while to learn this. The technique asks people to look into the felt-sense to find what they feel. The felt-sense is a murky, uneasy physical sensation somewhere in the body; and, if you give it attention, new and important feelings will emerge. And it does work – except for people who are already inclined toward impossible quests. The first thing that hits them is “what feeling am I supposed to look for”. With that question they’re gone !! Even if they just think it.

‘Well no’, you might say, ‘just put your attention on that tightness in your chest and see what comes’. Yes, the person is willing to try it. So they wait for something that isn’t there to reveal itself. That’s the catch! If something is there, that can’t be it because I’m looking for it. You don’t search for what is there, do you?

I will go so far as to say that any instruction in how to do therapy is in danger of being counterproductive. Firstly, because the person will search for what is supposed happen and will overlook is actually happening. In doing so they become one step removed from direct involvement; and one step removed from their own experience.

The trouble is, any psychological or spiritual belief system tends to dictate what you should strive to be or to search for. They address something that is felt to be missing and therefore precipitates the search for something that ‘should be there but I can’t find it’. I can just as easily try to find Christ as my Buddha nature, or the meaning of my archetypal dreams; or the Love that the Universe is Sending me; or the Real Me; or the Meaning of Life; or just simply ‘Love’ or ‘Happiness’. Or – here’s a good one – ‘faith ’.

All harmless enough pursuits I suppose. But just be on the lookout for the various mutations of the deadly ‘I-can’t-find-the-scissors’ disorder.

DIARY OF A DABBLER

by Stanley

What’s the similarity between falling in love and a passion for collecting beetles ? The answer is that in both cases, when it happens, you give yourself over. In spite of anything you may have originally intended, you find that you’re hooked! You are dedicated, devoted! Well yes, this makes sense when you fall in love with a person - everyone knows you don’t fall in love unless, in some sense, you’re already prone to giving yourself over. You surrender and find yourself cheerfully attached. It’s not something you do, it’s something that happens to you. It’s the same with collecting beetles – but I mean more than just collecting beetles, I mean being a passionate entomologist. I mean being in love with bugs.

In his autobiography the famous writer Vladimir Nabokov speaks of his fervent love affair with butterflies, “From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender”.[1] And in an essay, Strong Opinions, he wrote “My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting”. In spite of this, Nabokov knew all about obsessive human love affairs. After all, he wrote Lolita.

An anonymous writer cries, “It was the mantra that kept repeating in my head, It hummed in my head, and seemed to be said by multiple voices, of multiple sexes, voices of women, voices of men, voices of children, and no voice at all. " I love all insects... I love all insects... I love all insects.

I knew what entomophobia means, so I wondered if there was such a thing as entomophilia; and yes, there was. It means sexual arousal involving insects – although it is never stated how this is achieved; Google and the medical dictionaries were all modestly sparse on details.

When he was at Oxford my old friend Charles Darwin spent too much time out in the countryside collecting beetles. He once surmised that “the Creator must be inordinately fond of beetles: the earth is home to some 30 million different species of them.” He was somewhat smitten with them himself. His girlfriend Fanny Owen scolded him and announced that he had to choose between her and chasing after insects. She finally broke up with poor Charles because he apparently he couldn’t break his attachment .

*

Most of the activities that engage me have a personal agenda, a purpose, a goal. There are very few things that interest me of which I can say I have no selfish interest. But my agendas are quite unreliable and change like the weather. And as my mind wanders so too do my interests.

Being a dabbler I never quite digest what I happen to be eating, for my appetites move on. I can’t seem to settle down. To give up dabbling and be really unswerving you have to be a specialist. You can’t really open your heart fully unless you hone in on the singular. Being a specialist is very hard for anyone who is afraid of missing out. It’s hard to commit oneself to one thing because something better might come along and I’ll miss out. In any case, there are so many avenues that beckon. I buy a promising book of study, intending to read it from cover to cover. But half way through some luring reference leads me elsewhere.

So I tend to be a professional dilettante, frivolously drifting from one thing to another. It is the style of an intellectual decadent; I want to know everything. So, as a consequence, I’m a Jack-of-all-Trades and master of none. I envy people who have managed to be specialists, who can devote their lives to a single study or cause. I comfort myself with the idea that if you hone in on the single grain of sand you miss the beauty of the beach. This romantic idea makes me out to have a larger vision, in touch with the mystique of the cosmos. In any case, specialist are boring and opinionated.

William Blake was a funny fellow. He was a romantic mystic who hated science. He poured scorn on the scientific aspirations of his day and demonised Newton,“ Pray God us keep From Single vision & Newton's sleep!” he wrote. In a little poem he proclaimed,

To see the universe in a grain of sand

And heaven in a wildflower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

He didn’t see the paradox. He uses the small as the window to the larger vision. I mean, if you can see the universe in a grain of sand you are a specialist like a physicist studying atomic structure; like Newton and his apple. But Blake saw the specialist as missing out.

It is precisely the single vision that the specialist has. Being a specialist in beetles or butterflies or physics can take you to the wonder at the heart of things. I think of Nabokov prancing about in shorts with his butterfly net. Of his book on butterflies, someone said that it, “…glistens like a rainforest: swarming with sap and colour, with love and death.” His speciality opened up the rainforest of the cosmos. In that he was the perfect combination of the specialist and the poet.

There are other reasons why I cannot be a specialist: the million and one things that have to be done, that have to be thought about, duties that demand my care. And the next thing to be done is always a little more important than what I am doing now.

To specialise means to neglect all other claims and possibilities. I can’t even specialise in myself – I’m too busy. I’m a multitasker. That’s a nice way to put it. But when I meditate I ask myself a crucial question: why does my mind always have to go somewhere else?

Somewhere else always calls me; and I can never make up my mind whether this is a terrible disadvantage or a gift.

[1] Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory Speak. Everyman Library, 1966

IMPLICIT NATURE

by Stanley

You must have had the experience of realising something you already knew, in a way – but didn’t know. Somehow you knew it all along – but didn’t know you knew. It’s as though you knew it at the back of your mind but paid no attention to it. Very strange how one can do this! But it’s only the tip of a vast terra incognita.

There is a whole area of mindbody which, to varying degrees, is not conscious. We are not talking about the Freudian unconscious which consists of repressed feelings, wishes and painful material. There is a wider area of knowledge that you are not conscious of because you don’t need to be. You know how to ride a bike, but you don’t have to give your body instructions to do it. Your fingers know how to type, but you are past deliberating about it. You know all the subtleties of English usage without the use of gramma. You know the intricate etiquette of the family Christmas gathering without reference to all the unspoken and highly complex rules of behavior – how to behave with each relative comes naturally, like riding a bike! But there are differences: riding a bike is only sensorimotor knowledge; the Christmas gathering implies a vast store of relational knowledge, the actual complexity of which is truly staggering. You know it all too well, but mercifully not consciously. It is what we call implicit knowledge, and we don’t have to bother our heads with it. In fact, we are much better off if we don’t. Some things are best left unexplored. You know the old story of how to ruin your golfing partner’s game: you just get him to analyse his stroke in detail when he is half way round the course.

When we try to explain something we have a feel for, but only know implicitly, we run into an unfathomable chaos. In focusing we refer to it as the murkiness of the felt-sense. But this chaos is more ungovernable and ominous than this suggests. ‘Go on, explain what you really feel’ is a monstrous and impossible challenge. Even in the act of explaining, it changes; something else occurs to us, some slightly different perspective. We struggle on, trying to maintain our original flash of certainty. But we falter. Our original feeling isn’t so simple. When we really look at it, it’s a mess of confusion. Our exposition gets dangerously weaker until we’ve lost all sense of what we started to explain. New feelings about the whole thing crowd in on us. Lost! Unless, of course, we are one of those dogged souls who can rave on having quite lost the theme, just managing to keep up the appearance of certainty; or, at the very least, still running the worthy effort to show others who and what we are.

Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco expresses something similar:

‘Here's the trouble. ...When you express an (implicit) idea you give it a coherence that it did not originally possess. Somehow you have to give it a form that is organized and concise, and comprehensible to others. As long as you limit yourself to thinking it, the idea can remain the marvellous mess that it is. But when you decide to express it (in words) you begin to discard one thing, to summarize something else, to simplify this and cut that, to put it in order by imposing a certain logic: you work on it a bit, and in the end you have something that people can understand ... At first you try to do this in a responsible way: you try not to throw too much away, you'd like to preserve the whole infinity of the idea you had in your head. You try. But they don't give you time, they are on you, they want to know.’ [1]

I suppose this is the reason why other people’s understanding of you is seldom what you feel about yourself. Unless it be in one of those beautiful moments when two people mutually recognise each other in a way that is beyond speech – that, in fact, can’t be spoken about, but which is clearly known implicitly by both. Such are moments of meeting, moments of wordless compassion and empathic implicit understanding, moments of true intimacy. Some people will tell you that even this is a delusion, like falling in love.

But this kind of implicit understanding is what you had before you learned language, where you learned all those lessons that will be a baseline for the rest of life, where your instincts were moulded. It is the very search for intimacy that required you to learn what others wanted of you. And you learn it all before ever you can speak or understand cognitively what is being said. It becomes your particular version of human nature. There never was a time when you learned so much so quickly; learning, too, how to be intimate, and just how much and what kind of intimacy, was allowed.

From the point of view of tidiness, your implicit nature is a shambolic mess. Like nature itself it is a vast conglomeration of make-do adaptations to circumstances and to a culture that is itself a shambolic mess. No intelligent design anywhere in sight. But from another point of view it is a miracle of spontaneity. It’s like the difference between a wildflower meadow and a cultivated suburban garden.

The tidy mind despairs, but the child in us whoops with delight.

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[1] Quoted in: Stern, D.N. The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, Norton, NY, 2004 pp.117

PRESENCE OF MIND

by Stanley

In the 60s, carried along with the spirit of the times, I was very taken by Zen. Eastern Ways of Liberation were all the thing – Aldous Huxley, the Beatles, Alan Watts and Timothy Leary: “Turn on, Tune in and Drop out.” I loved the outrageous anti- intellectualism of the old Zen Masters who ask the monks questions like: “Does a dog have a Buddha nature? If you say it has I’ll give you thirty blows; if you say it hasn’t I’ll give you thirty blows.” For me, at the time, was all such a relief from Aristotle. As far as I could see, Zen was the only religion (can you call it that?) that perfectly understood how words and systems are not the things themselves. They had no holy book and were even disrespectful of their own traditional origins: “What is the Buddha.” Answer, “A lump of dung.” But along with this apparent bravado they had the keenest perception of what it is to have presence of mind.

Something I learned all those years ago from Zen and the Art of the Motor Cycle Maintenance – a wonderful little book: when a machine goes wrong you can rush in to try and fix it; or you can spend time just looking before you do anything. The first way usually generates more trouble; with the second way you almost don’t have to do anything – after a moment the fault just stares you in the face. Fixing it is now a piece of cake. You could call it the art of pausing.

You could almost claim that simple presence of mind fixes the machine. And when you think about it, pausing like this can fix a lot of other things too. Isn’t what we do in therapy and meditation just giving ourselves an extended pause? Isn’t that too what Darwin did on the Galapagos Islands: “Hey, Wait a minute. How come these finches have different shape beaks on different islands?” But first he had to notice it. Before he even asked this, what turned out to be a world shaking question, was noticing that it was so.

That’s the big trick isn’t it – noticing that it is so !

But it takes time. You have to give things time to show themselves; and time for them to cut through all one’s ready made assumptions of how things are. And don’t say how they are too quickly.

And don’t say you don’t know how they are too quickly either.

VITAL CONNECTIONS

by Stanley

With careless overuse some modes of expression become tired and worn out. I once knew a man who said of every emotional experience: ‘It pisses me off!’ So much was the phrase used to describe everything that it had become meaningless. The cliché no longer revived the freshness of a feeling. It was, in fact, an escape from feeling.

The purpose of psychological refection is to revivify an experience. Not to relive it – that’s a different thing – but to tune into all the subtleties of it that are waiting in the wings. And the way we use language has a lot to do with this process of connection.

Have you ever noticed that the closer you get to the precision of a feeling the harder it is to name it? When I say ‘precision of a feeling’ I mean the sharpness and freshness of it. It’s much like the sensation a colour. A colour is precisely what it is; when I try to accurately name it, I fumble around saying things like: ‘it’s a sort of a bluey-greeny-greyish.’ Then, realising the hopelessness of such a description, I look around the room searching for a colour that will match – usually unsuccessfully. What this means is that the precision of the colour is like nothing else – no word-symbol is accurate enough and no other colour is quite the same.

When you really tune into a feeling it’s the same kind of thing. ‘How do I feel about Aunt Amelia?’ No word symbol is accurate enough to say it exactly and no other feeling is the same; and the closer you tune into how I feel about her, the harder it gets to name it. To give up and say ‘I really don’t know how to describe it’ is honestly true; and moreover, it honours the uniqueness of your perception.

How is it then, in focusing, after fumbling around, a person will suddenly hit on the most ordinary word imaginable and light up as though they have really hit it? Let’s say I have been scratching around, trying to describe how I feel about Aunt Amelia who is coming to stay. ‘Apprehensive? Well, yes, I suppose so’. ‘Scared she’ll dominate me? No, I’m not scared of her any more’. ‘Will I be able to cope with her? I suppose so’. Pause…….. ‘Fact is … she SUFFOCATES me – the whole thing SUFFOCATES me.’ That word seems to absolutely clinch it. I can feel the energy release as I say it. I take a deep breath.

How can this happen? Here we have been talking about how the precision of a feeling is basically indescribable. And now this very ordinary word somehow says it exactly right. No long, meandering description, no elaborate poetic metaphors. How come a commonplace cliché like ‘she suffocates me’ is precisely right?

My theory is that we don’t actually choose words that fit like that; what happens is a deep ‘knowing’ suddenly infuses an ordinary word with its own energy. A word gets close enough to the bodily feeling for a spark to leap across the gap like a flash of lightening, changing a cliché into an experience. How I really experience my Aunt comes alive and the word is its bearer. The word now sounds utterly right. This ordinary word gets a jolt and is electrified into a life that it normally doesn’t have. It isn’t ordinary word any longer. The reality of the experience has burst through. The words and the energy fused together into a single meaning. The words don’t describe the feeling, the word has ignited and has become the feeling – the words have been enlivened by an authentic force; words and felt-sense become a single meaning releasing my blockage and bringing me to a full awareness.

‘She SUFFOCATES me’ now gives me the full physical experience I’m referring to. Now I remember it clearly. Now I absolutely know what I’m talking about. It releases me.

*

From the therapist’s point of view it is vitally important to understand the mechanism I have described above. You won’t interfere with the working of it if you understand it. The moment when the energy of the felt-sense makes contact with the word is of paramount importance. Such a word or phrase can be reflected back to the client exactly, giving it the weight of significance it deserves, seriously acknowledge the moment. It is a moment of self-discovery. In our example, I really didn’t know that my Aunt suffocated me until then. Now I know what happens to me; I can even feel my breathing constricting – and now releasing.

Not every therapeutic encounter follows this blueprint as precisely as my example. Often it does, but more often it is woven into the fabric of the session. But if you understand the underlying mechanism you will see the way the vivid power of an experience, when it happens, coalesces with a certain precise way of putting it - no matter how simple the expression. What matters is that it connects. This moment is very valuable and easily invalidated. Don’t modify it. Let it stand and it will act like a launching pad for further exploration and carry the person to another important step.

NATURAL OPPORTUNISM

by Stanley

There are some things in life of which we like to say: ‘It was meant to be.’ This idea comes from ancient philosophical and religious thought avowing that there is some kind of guiding hand that pulls events the way they are suppose go. ‘It was meant to be’ can be a celebration when thing turn out well; or a resigned acceptance when things go wrong. But we only use the expression to indicate some higher or transcendent intention. We never say, ‘This cup of tea was meant to be’. We say simply ‘I made a cup of tea’. ‘Meant to be’ indicates an influence outside human intention. We call it ‘God’, Fate, Necessity, The Spirit or The Unconscious’. But whatever this agency is, it supposedly has things worked out in advance. It many ways, it relieves us of burdensome responsibilities; we hand things over to a higher power, as they say.

In contrast to this idea, consider that life’s events can be opportune, that we are, like the rest of life, simply opportunists; if there is a niche somewhere, we exploit it. New circumstances give us new possibilities – some work, some don’t. Whenever we sense an opening for enhancement we instinctively move to exploit the opportunity. The word ‘niche’ comes from the Latin which means ‘to make a nest’. In biology it has come to mean that wherever there is an ecological gap, a species will evolve to exploit it, to ‘make a nest’ for itself.

Someone once said that the dust mites in a bed mattress must feel like children let loose in a chocolate factory – only they feed on flakes of human skin. Each person sheds about half a kilo of skin flakes annually – more than enough for a thriving colony of dust mites in any decent mattress. Mites are opportunists, filling every imaginable niche in the world. There are over 50,000 species exploiting an array of habitats too numerous to mention.

Opportunism is a characteristic of life everywhere. I don’t suppose God or any Higher Power had a hand in fashioning dust mites to exploit the comforts of the conjugal bed; so it is hardly possible to say in any meaningful sense that dust mites were meant to be.

The word ‘opportunism’ has come to mean amoral self-seeking; but it means much more to us than it does to dust mites; and being opportunists doesn’t mean that we are fundamentally selfish. A nest is made for more than one. We don’t only want a prosperous niche in life for ourselves, but for our children and those we love. We want them to be able to seize what life has to offer; and not just material prosperity, but all the possibilities of human wellbeing. For us humans a worthwhile niche is simply a good life.

Opportunities happen when there is a space for them to happen. For us humans it’s not an ‘ecological gap’ we seek, but more like ‘psychological gap’ – a psychological space where new things can happen. For many people opportunities don’t happen because their psychological space is already too crowded. A new species of ideas cannot evolve because the psychological space is already teeming with pre-existing necessities that preclude any creativity. There is so much mental overcrowding there is no air to breathe.

What has this got to do with therapy and counselling? Everything!! Actually ‘counselling’ is a terrible word. Good counselling is where one does no ‘counselling’ at all. Good therapy is where you do that unimaginably rare thing – just giving a person space.

Giving someome space means that you never imply a necessity: something that has to be done, something that must be dealt with, a program that should be followed, a conclusion they should reach, a way they should behave, a gaol they should strive for, a way they should think, a problem they must face, an attitude they should take. This only multiplies the over-crowding.

Given space, a person will invariably make the right move – but not a predictable one. Someone is tired and apathetic. Give them the right space and they start crying. That is exactly the right move, exactly what needs to happen. Someone strongly feels the necessity to make difficult relationship work. No advice; just give them the right kind of space and suddenly they get that it’s impossible. That’s exactly the right move. Now there is a way forward, making room for what comes next. Someone is energetically trying to work out a problem. Give them space and they suddenly realise they are dog-tired. To realise that you are dog-tired is to seize an opportunity that was right there in a hidden space. You sit with someone who doesn’t talk and neither do you. Finally, they tell you they can’t talk. But they’ve just told you.