sarahnicholson

I found the blog post below in my email drafts. I have no idea why I didn’t post it at the time, twelve months ago, but its sentiments are deeply consonant with the current events of my  life.

As I was walking home through the park one afternoon last week I became aware of myself moving through space, in a trajectory with the rise and fall of scenery appearing and dropping away, moment by moment. This directly recalled my experience of the Dharma Yatra: a week long meditation walk through the French countryside led by Buddhist practitioners. And it struck me that this was true of my life; that I’m on the road (still); a long walk of continual arising and passing away, sometimes with companions and sometimes not.

………………………………………………………….

Fantastic quote by Father Richard Rohr who I just discovered this week (via Sounds True’s wonderful podcasts):

The most simple spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it’s the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don’t love.  Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all our loneliness comes to the surface.We won’t have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self doubt.  Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it’s not a technique at all. It’s precisely the refusal of all technique.Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 106, day 114

(Note: I have to translate God to Source or some such language to feel fully comfortable with this)

I’ve come out of a relationship recently and into direct confrontation with solitude and silence.

To make sure that I am inside my commitments: that i am meditating every morning, that I am eating well, that I am journaling every day, that I am recording my dreams, that I am eating well (organic goodness), that I am exercising (yoga or walking), that I’m going to see my wonderful therapist, that I am doing focused reading, that I am writing, that I am working on projects that are intimately related to my life goals, that I am spending immersive time in the natural world (drinking in the winter sun, the ocean breeze)

Journaling practice (alongside the meditation, and the meditative practices of walking and yoga) has been playing a very important part of learning how to play with the cycles of moods: with frustration, with loneliness, with restlessness

I’ve been learning to play with this. To feel restlessness in my body and take myself for a walk.

When I felt restlessness inside me tonight I took myself for a walk, and again felt a surge of restlessness -  “What am I doing alone? What is the purpose of my walk?”  – until I gave away the need for a goal and just let my body find its own rhythm. Let myself sink into a stride that was going nowhere but just adventuring in being, just wandering along the sand next to the waves, and it was delicious.
I keep finding these moments of just being with myself. Its so wonderful finding that center that it often bursts into an ecstacy…. from which there is then often a fall. But the actual experience of pleasure in being isn’t ecstatic. Its just very simple and good.

This year has been deeply shaped for me by committing to undergoing the process of psychoanalysis. I started wondering yesterday about how this process of diving deep into the historical well of emotions sits against the philosophies and  experiences from my years of formal training in Zen and Vipassana.

Can psychoanalysis and buddhist practice genuinely complement one other? How can the mind training of observation avoid the pitfalls of spiritual bypassing? And vice versa, how can we enter deep into our story without being swept away by its alluring siren songs?

I remembered a story my Zen teacher told once in sesshin about deeply and genuinely experiencing this swiftly passing life which seems really pertinent. It goes something like this…

A group of students come upon their Zen master weeping with grief over the death of his child.

“Master”, they ask, confused and bewildered by his behaviour, “You taught us that all of this world, including death, is an illusion. So, why do you cry?”

“Yes”, he replies, “it is so. All of samsara is a transitory illusion. And this illusion is a greatly sad one”.

“As philosopher David Hume explained, witnesses are necessary in all societies when it comes to important vows.  The reason is that it’s not possible to tell whether a person is telling the truth or lying when he speaks a promise.  The speaker may have, as Hume called it, “a secret discretion of thought” hidden behind the noble and high-flown words. The presence of the witness, though, negates any concealed intentions.  It doesn’t matter anymore whether you meant what you said; it matters merely that you said what you said, and that a third party witnessed you saying it.  It is the witness, then, who becomes the living seal of the promise, notarising the vow with real weight.” (Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed, 246)

The current edge of my very ongoing process of asking “how best to live?”  is the articulation of some of my core values. And from that place to form a set of self commitments.  I feel, along with Elizabeth Gilbert, that there is some sacred magic in making your commitments public. So, I’ve decided  to share them here …

• I commit to developing self respect by practicing consciously living in integrity. That is, by deepening my understanding of my values, and  living authenticity in alignment with them.

• I commit to the ongoing exploration of wise speech: to expressing myself (and listening to others) honestly and thoughtfully through the practice of NVC and exploration of Buddhist precepts.

• I commit to honestly encountering my fears, defensiveness and contractions with the desire and intention to move towards braveness, receptivity and openness.

• I commit to understanding relational space and to practicing loving kindness towards others and myself inside it

• I commit to consistent practice of core aspects of mind/body/spirit health:

  • meditation ( at least twenty minutes each morning)

  • self reflection (daily journal writing)

  • exercise (yoga and walking at least three times a week)

  • therapy

  • soulful creativity (projects & activities)

  • learning (targeted reading for self growth in areas where I feel a lack)

  • being in nature (hands in the earth, sun on my face…)

mural by Beth Sauerhaft

I’ve been reflecting on the experience of the Women’s Integral retreat which ran in Bali in March this year, and some of the key themes that arose between us, such as finding our voice and our passions, and being in community with other women, and how we’ll be working with these even more deeply next year.

In her beautiful work “At the root of this longing”, Carol Lee Flinders examines some of the key meditative injunctions: Be silent, “Put yourself last … Unseat the ego”, “Resist and rechannel your desires. Disidentify yourself with your body and senses,” “Enclose yourself. Turn inward”.
She observes that these instructions “cancel the basic freedoms” and “sound remarkably like the mandates young girls have always received as they approach womanhood.” They are at direct odds, she concludes, with the messages of feminism.

She proposes that the principle concerns of spiritual practice for women, an essential aspect both of women’s development and wellbeing and an important focal point for feminism must, at the present time, be quite different1. Women’s practice must acknowledge hurdles on the path that are socio-culturally specific to women at this time. Thus, women’s practice must include “finding voice, strengthening the sense of self, supportive enclosure with other women and girls … identification of desires … recognition of a historical lineage of strong women, establishment of a female community, and validation of one’s own capacity to choose”

The Women’s Integral Retreat is designed to follow these principle concerns of spiritual practice for women: we make these themes manifest by consciously creating a supportive circle with other women, by focusing on physical and writing practices that find our voice, identify our desires and passions, and we work to activate our choice of being from this place. And we place ourselves in a historical lineage of strong women who have walked that path before us by sharing and learning the stories of our female spiritual ancestors.

Footnote 1: Her conclusions are absolutely in keeping with the work of gender development theorists such as Gilligan, Debold, Belenky et al and the Stone Centre.

For more information on the 2011 Women’s Integral Retreat:

http://womensintegralretreat.eventbrite.com/

I’ve been reading Judith Pickering’s  wonderful book “Being In Love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love”.

I’ve been long interested in our ‘heroic task’ as humans, that is, how we come to understand who we are. My own relationship, alongside Dr Pickering’s very sage guidance, been clearly illuminated for me that fundamental to the task of understanding our self, is the task of understand our self-in-relationship. When you start, as I do, mired in the “malignant dowries” of personal history, its an truly arduous, painful task, but it seems without doubt, to be one of the most absolute import.

“The heroic task of the real fairytale is to overcome the phantasies, internal demons, monsters and witches of our perverse imagination.  Becoming who we are may be a relational activity.  Yet such transformations in love are obstructed by the ways we unwittingly conscript each other to play allotted roles in falsely stereotypic and unconscious psychological scenarios.  These scenes create an entangled web of projections obscuring the real situation and preventing authentic intimacy from flourishing. Such scenes involve an interpenetration of unconscious defensive, projective and traumatic material, the malignant dowries that each person brings to the new relationship.

True love may be possible, but it as difficult as it is rare. Its path does not always run smoothly, but goes off course with alarming regularity.  Its achievement is never once and for all, requires continual renewal, and is dependent upon how well any two lovers can understand, work through and disentangle the webs of mutual projections and false imputations imposed upon each other…

The word ‘pathos’ etymologically means sorrow and suffering. Love’s pathologies give rise to the sense of dis-ease and discontent in our relationships.  We do not feel at ease with each other or ourselves. In love we suffer daily irritations, not getting what we want, getting what we don’t want.  We miss the bull’s eye of true love through misinterpretations, mistimings and mismatches.  We suffer the discomforts of being on the receiving end of unwelcome feelings towards us, and the pain of having our feelings and desires not met in the way we want.  Discontent might itself be a disease.

As the Buddha, the Stoics, Augustine, Spnioza, Schopenhauer, Freud and Klein and many others have understood, from the perspective of egocentricity we feel craving for that which brings us pleasure, and antipathy for that which brings pain.  It is this egoic core that is the real enemy of true love.  Destructiveness in relationships can border on the psychopathic, fuelled by unconscious projections, envy, hostility, blaming, shaming, denigrating, demonizing or retaliation…

The sense of security, continuity and trust afforded by a mutually made commitment to journey together in a partnership can allow such a relationship to function as a space in which partners may further their psychological development, re-encounter and rework areas of developmental arrest and come to know and integrate the different parts of themselves more fully…

In committed and fulfilling adult relationships it is not so much about each partner providing a sense of security and containment for the other, but the creation of a psychological atmosphere of safety and refuge, a container, around both partners. Empathy and mind-mindedness, or the ability to see others as subjects in their own right with thoughts and feelings of their own, are also vital components of creating a secure base in close relationships.  When couples have a sense of connection they hold the relationship and the well-being of its members in mind continually.  One might call this ‘relationship-mindedness’.

[Couples in therapy often present with] unprocessed primitive anxieties which have never been worked through. Bion called such primitive bits, ‘beta elements’.  These are untransformed emotional experiences and sensory impressions of a very raw and inchoate form.

The mindless repetition and compulsive nature of many marital rows are symptomatic of the activation of interlocking systems of mutual projections of beta elements or undigested traumatic material.  Each partner has been triggered into their respective unconscious complexes and is swamped by unconscious anxieties, memories of fear, hurt and misunderstanding.  Each urgently attempts to lodge unprocessed beta material into the other in order to rid themselves of its incoherent, chaotic and anxiety-ridden nature.

The therapeutic space as a ‘borrowed container’, as well as the therapist’s capacity and willingness to stand such unprocessed material – to ponder it, experience its re-renactments, digest and reflect on it – enables the couple to feel some reassurance that it is not so unspeakably loathsome and dreadful, it can be thought about.  This enables the couple to introject a capacity to contain difficult material and gradually metabolise and modify it into alpha elements…

This transformation creates a link between preconceptions and new information from the world of others.  This gives rise to further elaborations in the process of thinking, leading to the formulation of intuition, insight and finally coherent theory-making.  All this arises gradually and thoughtfully out of a situation which began as utter confusion.  It is this capacity, however psychologically hard-won, which enables a couple to dismantle their co-constructed prisons of projections…

The therapists capacity to perceive and receive the tangles mass of material, tolerating not knowing, while seeking with every fibre of his or her being to understand, is itself part of the containing function couples are seeking.  This affords the couple the possibility of realizing that their terrible anxieties, lack of coherence and confusion might perhaps after all be something that has the possibility of clarity. To jump to a hasty conclusion or make a premature and simplistic interpretation curtails this process…

Alpha function refers here to the therapist’s capacity to sit with an incoherent mass of chaotically loaded, primitive emotional material (beta elements) emanating from both partners and creating a toxic mutually projective confusion. This is related to negative capability, the capacity to observe a mass of confusing emotional material without jumping to a hasty conclusion, to tolerate not knowing while seeking to know. This containment is modelled to the couple… Frustration and the capacity to sit with it, rather than act out primitive emotional states, generate a capacity for thoughtful consideration.   This transmutes the material under consideration into alpha elements.  Then gradually dream thoughts, dreams, myths, fantasies and narratives emerge out of a cultural unconscious.  These gradually lead to preconceptions and first inklings of what is going on.  Further seminal discussions between the analytic trio (mating of ideas) lead to conception, concept and thence theory, in fact to organised thinking… the ability to gestate such a process, to deepen one’s understanding, without jumping to premature action, leads to the ability to construct preliminary hypotheses, notation, attention, inquiry and thence to mindful, considered action and the final revelation (uncovering) of truth.  All put together, publication, as in a well-thought articulation of the emotional situation may result.  The process involves: observation, containment, reflection, incorporation, comparison, analysis, mating with other ideas, conception, gestation, and final expression of a well-thought and well-timed interpretation…

Love’s therapeutic depends on increasing our capacity to entertain, like a holy guest, presentiments of truth behind the projections and fabrications.  It is to take up an ‘as if’ stance, reception to a niggling doubt that we probably have failed to properly understand a situation, that our perception is clouded, and to factor this into our interactions and reflections.  We can then ponder, be curious and receptive to new insights that may dawn as tentative hypothesis, entertained as such.  It is the language of uncertainty coupled with enquiry, wanting to discover the truth as through a glass darkly.  We increase our psychic capacity to contain and psychically metabolise what was uncontainable: primitive anxieties, dreads, fears of falling to bits, fears of death and destruction. We begin to intuit faint glimmerings of the real person under all our obscurations….

If relational work in couple therapy can be envisioned as a process of aletheia, aiming to uncover the real situation and person behind the mass misconstructions, there is a bewildering array of ways that we misapprehended each other. Projections, identifications, mutual projective identifications, extractive introjections, miscommunications, misinterpretations, fixed ideas, illusions, delusions, idealizations, denigrations, constellations of internal object relations and impositions of relational templates all create an inter-personal mire of Maya, of illusion…

The more we can become aware of our particular unconscious complexes and object relations and how they overlay our perceptions of each other and interfere with our love lives, the more we can factor them in to our healthy scepticism about the veracity of our emotional reactions to others.  We gradually learn to identify and see through such templates and projections.  It might be like seeing through glasses that we know are scratched, dirty or rose-coloured or have distorted lenses, but it has the advantage of loosening the fixity of projective perception.  This requires arduous psychological work such as in an analysis, at the end of which we hopefully find ourselves less under the sway of such endogamous forces or have some insight into what might be going on beneath the surface.  At the very least we are able to ask ourselves difficult questions concerning the hidden factors governing our choices and perceptions.”

(from Chapters  5- 7)

As a corollary, a great quote from psychologist Heinz Kohut on love and acceptance (from How To Be An Adult in Relationships);

“The more secure a person is regarding his (sic)  own acceptability, the more certain his sense of who he is, and the more safely internalised his system of values, the more self confidently and effectively will he be able to offer his love … without undue feelings of rejection and humiliation.”