Posted on by

Clear land and construct….

“I imagine myself as a builder constructing houses….. But I reply, the nature of building – of creativity – is to clear land and construct.”  Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning

“And isn’t it true that our psyches merge and incorporate everyone we encounter anyway?”   Natalie Goldberg

“By cultivating the mental functions of attention, intention, and awareness, we strengthen our ability to identify the source of anxiety and then harness our capacity to promote integration, transforming the energy of threat into the drive towards resilience and equanimity.” Dan J. Siegel, MD

Today’s post is reminiscent of adolescent stories, it includes a few new drawings, a reference to Natalie Goldberg’s book, Thunder and Lightning, which I’ve just finished reading, and also, a link to the most recent episode of the Being Well podcast: https://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast-releasing-obsessive-thoughts-rumination-ocd-and-dealing-with-fear/ , in which Dr Rick and Forrest Hanson discuss the brain’s attempt to problem solve through rumination, the negative effects of too much rumination, some of the reasons we might get stuck in certain thoughts and how we can release obsessive or other anxiety inducing recurring thoughts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Towards the end of the book Natalie Goldberg [writer, painter, writing teacher and Zen practitioner] talks about how we are often silenced very early on through her own stories of school experiences. The book is sort of structured around questions she encourages people to ask themselves as part of the writing practice.  In the epilogue she talks about a week long writing retreat she had created for herself away from home.  In relation to this carving out time to write she says: “…. Out alone on a lonesome cliff hanging onto a craggy rock, your hands bleeding. The same wrestling, openings, surrender, the same scraping against yourself, same humbling, final broken weary acceptance…” During this time she explored the question: Who do you write for? She writes:  “… And yet that evening I reconnected with my one true lineage before all the others: myself. I’d bypassed her, tried to put her to flames when I left home at eighteen….  Now the orphaned one was rising before me. Whom do you write for? I write for you, I answered. To record how you saw and felt before you were silenced. Whom do you write for? I asked again. I write for myself – and through myself I write for everyone…… Remember her. Stay with her. You have uncovered a true root. Stand with her and you’ll be steady on your own feet. You won’t wobble. A veil had been lifted. I’d found a home beyond home.”

Reading the book reminded me of many subtle and more intense moments of being silenced across time. A couple of my own high school experiences inevitably arose. You don’t really forget them, but you put them aside, after all, we are not designed to have all our experiences in the foreground of our mind, we’d be unable to function, we’d collapse, if all our living was constantly salient, vying for our attention. We have also mainly been discouraged from talking about them. Instead we are taught to not make a fuss or toughen up.  I’m resurrecting them here because I think it is essential for everyone to feel safe to talk about these topics.  Talking melts the numbness, the forgetting, it creates a thread of understanding and a seeing of the patterns of our experiences. It is through attention, awareness and conversation that some things can change. Being open about things that have hurt us can awaken others to their own experiences, and to systemic and often systematic unfair or disempowering practices that we may take for granted or resign to.

During the last two years of school our Greek language teacher was married to our Religious Education teacher. They had different personalities, but the same underlying beliefs around, who gets to speak and what is acceptable and who doesn’t, who gets to get an education and who doesn’t. They used the strategy of suffering negative consequences for no reason, or otherwise put, inflicted injustices as a way to discourage and silence. In retrospect, it is easier to see that they were encouraging certain students into pursuing further education while discouraging others. Of course, at the time the broader context which sustained all this was elusive; however, what was available to me were my observations and my emotions.

On one occasion, we were assigned to write about some topic of a socio-economic nature. At the time I was preparing to sit exams for Economic schools, so I found myself looking forward to engaging with the paper. When the teacher finally handed it back to me her commentary was that it was very good, but it could not be mine. An a priori assumption … with no room for further discussion The irony was that she immediately turned to praise the student sitting behind me, who had copied the whole assignment from a book, and whom I had advised to change the wording, in case the teacher had read it or understood that it wasn’t her own voice. …  In class I had felt embarrassed and on the verge of tears. Later at home I was able to get in touch with other feelings like anger and fear, but I pushed it all down so that I could keep returning to classes. We probably all received different lessons that day, but the residue of the embodied emotions is what is still left as an imprint after so many decades.

About the same time, during an RE class, her husband, out of the blue, asked about our opinion on abortions. This was totally out of the ordinary, because these were not the kind of topics discussed in class then, especially, in an RE class with a male teacher. Actually, there usually was not much discussion at all. It was the kind of class where the lesson could put you into deep sleep. He was probably bored himself most of the time and often told jokes that we had to make an effort to find funny. We often did our homework or read other things. As long as we kept quiet we were fine. He’d usually ask one of us to read out aloud the day’s lesson from our school book. We were then expected to learn this by heart and either recite it or answer questions during the next lesson. I had not raised my hand because I didn’t think it was a safe topic to discuss with him, and because I was not sure I even had an informed opinion around the matter at the time. And lo and behold, from all the hands raised in the air [there were about fifty girls in the class] he thought it best to ask me. What could I say? I hesitated and then I replied that it depended on the situation and it probably was a choice that women should make….

His reply came down on me like Damocles’ sword. He casually said “Great, you’ve earned yourself a 14/ 20 grade for the rest of the year”. Nobody got that grade in RE or PE or Art during the last year of school because grades mattered for those sitting university entry exams. No matter what effort I put in or how well I wrote in tests he never raised the grade. Lessons learnt: school is not necessarily a safe place, teachers do not always have our best interest in mind, it’s OK to punish others if we don’t like their views and those older or with authority can be mean and unjust deliberately. Above all, we learnt that it’s not safe to speak our mind.

I will end with an extract from the book, in which Goldberg writes about an old school teacher:

“What is the humming in my brain, the need to talk, this ineffable world I carry inside my physical body that I’m sure communicates out beyond my life and your death, that is held like a dust mote in the air, a swarm of bees, a drifting cloud? Mrs. Post, I’m not angry anymore – or afraid of you.  I think you understand this now.”

Extracts from the Being Well episode mentioned above:

“Ruminating …….could be focused on thoughts, it could be going back over and over again to rehashing a conversation, or revisiting some traumatic memory or period in your time, or worrying about the same thing over and over with a combination of thoughts, and feelings, and sensations. So the word comes from the ruminants [cows, sheep, goats, giraffes] who chew their cud productively to somehow extract nutrition from grass, separating out the cellulose from the nutrients…”

This human capacity [dogs and gorillas probably don’t ruminate] is the result of our neurological development as a species:

“… developments, neurologically, arguably, in the last couple 3 million years has been twofold, number one, our profoundly social brain, and our capacities for relationships of various kinds, and also our capacities to ruminate, in effect, our capacities to do what’s called mental time travel, to go into the future or the past, and be kind of lost in internal mini movies. That second capacity has lots of advantages, it enables us to learn from our past and to make plans for our future….”

“…. one of the things that the brain is trying to do when it’s ruminating is it’s trying to problem-solve ….  it’s a coping strategy, and as we go through life, we have to figure out what to do about different kinds of situations, and this problem-solving is occurring in the background of the brain, all the time, it’s one of its most important capabilities, but when we’re faced with a situation …. [in which] the how of solving it isn’t obvious to us, or it might not exist at all, and the brain can become really fixated on it, like replaying it over, over, analyzing every aspect of it…”

Rumination might also be a defense against certain experiences:

“Rumination is about, you could say, non-experienced experience, stuff that’s pushed down, warded off, disowned, kept at bay, and a lot of the journey is about softening, including, landing, tolerating, and learning……..  the rumination process is a defense against certain experiences…… very often, that’s the way to avoid experiencing something……”

Finally, Rick and Forrest Hanson also mention the importance of balancing closeness and distance when engaging with difficult material, and the importance of agency and acting out in the world. They provide several personal and other common examples like: songs that get stuck in our mimd for weeks, closet fears and childhood fears of a monster lurking under the bed, fear of our partner dying next to us while sleeping, religion related obsessive thoughts, which is interesting to explore, imges and other material arisng during psychedelic experiences, a relentless inner critic, e.t.c.

. They explore how feeling the hypothetical outcome of a dreaded experience or completing the gestalt or how exaggerating the obsession and “surrendering to the worst” can free us from fears or obsessive thinking:

Rick Hanson says: “…. when you dramatize it, and you even deliberately exaggerate it, and intensify it….. [For instance] you imagine that there is a part of you, because often these particular obsessions relate to parts [of ourselves]……  so then if you own that part of you, you’re bringing it into the ambit of your own influence, and so you could pretend to be that part which is like a creature, or a scientific but nasty critic, or something, or an evil Disney movie character, creepy, creepy kind of creature, Gollum, ….. and it goes back to this kind of saying, maxim from the Human Potential days, that one of the fastest ways to get off a position is to fully get on it, because then you kind of help the gestalt to complete….”

Posted on by

Book related memories….    continued….   

From Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly:

“Worrying about scarcity is our culture’s version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we’ve been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we’re angry and scared and at each other’s throats.”

“We live in a world where most people still subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line. Not only is this wrong, but it’s dangerous. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying.”

“Because cynicism, criticism, cruelty, and cool are even better than armor – they can be fashioned into weapons that not only keep vulnerability at a distance but also can inflict injury on people who are being vulnerable and making us uncomfortable.…. Someone else’s daring provides an uncomfortable mirror that reflects back our own fears about showing up. creating, and letting ourselves be seen.”

The fields around where I live and the roads and paths where I go for a walk are for the time being flanked by wild flowers, so I’ve had the chance to pick daisies during my walks.

In today’s post I have included material that I did not include in the previous one because I had thought it best to keep it short.

In the part on Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate’s book I had intended to also refer to Brené Brown’s chapter with the title Wholehearted Parenting [6], in her book Daring Greatly, because it has some relevance to the topics of their book. The quotes above are from her book. Also, I had intended to further support their arguments with a short extract from  Gabor Mate’s book, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It, which I am currently reading, and hopefully, will write about in the future. The extract is related to the topic of interdependence of causal factors and how understanding issues or events requires our considering a whole range of interacting factors:

“We have seen that the individual’s brain circuits are decisively influenced by the emotional states of the parents, in the context of the multigenerational family history. Families also live in a social and economic context determined by forces beyond their control. If what happens in families affects society, to a far greater extent society shapes the nature of families, its smallest functioning units. The human brain is a product of society and culture just as it is a product of nature.”

I had also selected some more poetry by Sarah Ruhl. Below are an extract from a poem about racism and whiteness, and a poem about fear of mold and other things….

“I don’t want to fear / the life cycle anymore: / death, mold, endings.

It is absurd to fear the / blue mold on a tomato.”

And

“In places my skin is so white it’s blue.

Crayola retired the crayon called Flesh in 1962,

The same year Martin Luther King Jr. was

Arrested for leading prayer vigil.

Now that crayon is called peach and

Crayola offers apricot, black, burnt sienna, mahogany, sepia.

My skin is whiter than sepia, whiter than apricot.

The white crayon in Crayola doesn’t work on white paper.

It’s like spitting into water.

So most white kids when they draw their  /  own faces don’t color in the skin…..

White kids pretend our skin is the shade of   /  paper and leave the outline alone….”

And an extract by Margaret Renkl from her book, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (p. 218), on how she understands and has experienced grief and loss in life, and the grief that follows the death of loved ones, in particular:

“This talk of making peace with it. Of feeling it and then finding a way through.  Of closure. It’s all nonsense. Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film.

It is not a hidden hair shirt of suffering. It is only you, the thing you are, the cells that cling to each other in your shape, the muscles that are doing your work in the world. And like your other skin, your other eyes, your other muscles, it too will change in time. It will change so slowly you won’t even see it happening. No matter how you scrutinize it, no matter how you poke at it with a worried finger, you will not see it changing. Time claims you: your belly softens, your hair grays, the skin on the top of your hand goes loose as a grandmother’s, and the skin of your grief, too, will loosen, soften, forgive your sharp edges, drape your hard bones.

You are waking into a new shape. You are waking into an old self. What I mean is, time offers your old self a new shape. What I mean is, you are the old, ungrieving you, and you are also the new, ruined you. You are both, and you will always be both. There is nothing to fear. There is nothing at all to fear. Walk out into the springtime, and look: the birds welcome you with a chorus. The flowers turn their faces to your face. The last of last year’s leaves, still damp in the shadows, smell ripe and faintly of fall.”

Finally, I wanted to share a couple of links, one to an audio recording of the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8COt1n3jDqA, and one to Brené Brown’s Unlocking Us With Brené Brown podcast Be True To Yourself at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPo_r0zlcPg

In this episode she talks about trust in friendships throughout our lifespan and other relationships. She comments: “Trust is build in the smallest of moments” & “Trust is a sliding door moment”.

So, to come back to Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, I first read it when I was 21. In this 1982 Greek translated edition that I own the publisher describes it as “a revolutionary fairy tale” and claims that “some readers believed that the psyche of the free is found in Jonathan Livingston Seagull”. This edition includes some beautiful photographs of seagulls mostly in flight by Russell Munson. I had forgotten most of the story apart from the fact that it was about our inherent right to be free to be ourselves and to follow our dreams. The memory of the book would sometimes surface in my mind when flocks of seagulls flew over my house or when on certain occasions some have touched the ground probably looking for food.

It was quite interesting to listen to the story again, four decades later, at this stage of my life. This time round the story felt to a certain degree like an allegory for the life of Jesus. It also seemed to have elements of New Age spirituality. In any case, the story is about a seagull’s unbounded passion for flight and unquenchable thirst for achieving perfection in what he loves most.  Jonathan is different to other birds in his flock because “for most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating.” Jonathan believes that freedom is the very nature of one’s being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside.

One salient message is that we should not let others tell us what we can and cannot do, even if sometimes following our passions can take us away from places and people that we hold dear. Jonathan’s lack of conforming to the norms does not go down well with the other seagulls and eventually, his unwillingness to conform results in his expulsion from his flock. As an outcast but free bird nonetheless, he continues to learn about flying, coming closer and closer to his goal of achieving perfection.  After certain adventures and encounters with other gulls Jonathan feels the urge to return to earth to share what he has learned and to spread his knowledge. He soon finds himself around other outcast but passionate seagulls…

Three quotes from the book:

“Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?”

“Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.”

“We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.”

Posted on by

Book related memories….

“Every woman, or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or another of her life, being in charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid,—in other words, every woman is a nurse…..” Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing What It Is, and What It Is Not

“What has changed is the culture in which we are rearing our children. Children’s attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society.” Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate, Hold on to Your Children

“There is still plenty to go around— plenty of flowers, plenty of seeds, plenty of bugs— but the creatures in my yard are not interested in sharing. For them, scarcity is no different from fear of scarcity. A real threat and an imagined threat provoke the same response. I stand at the window and watch them, cataloging all the human conflicts their ferocity calls to mind.” Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

Walking in a spring rain   Sarah Ruhl, Love Poems in Quarantine

Sometimes bullies feel / like the weather – but they  /  are not the weather.

These last few weeks I’ve been busier and running more errands than usual, but in between I have managed to do some reading and listening to things that interest me. I will begin with a quote by Maria Shriver Kennedy from her newsletter, which is related to Easter [here in Greece tomorrow is Palm Sunday]. She writes: “So on this Palm Sunday, as we approach Holy Week, may we all regardless of our religious identity or lack thereof—think of our lives and the lives of others as holy indeed. Do you know how you would treat your life if you really viewed it as holy? Do you know how you would treat others if you saw their lives first and foremost as holy? I’ve been thinking a lot about that this week, and I believe that I would be gentler….. So this week, my hope is that we each attempt to treat each other and ourselves in a manner that is holy, that is kind, that is gentle, and that is compassionate.”This is also my wish for this Easter period and beyond.

As I wrote in a previous post I am trying to finish reading books I left halfway. One that I’ve completed is the book that Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate have co-authored, Hold on to Your Children, which discusses the negative impact of peer orientation on children’s development and their relationship with their family, the flat lining of culture and how parents and teachers can reassume their nature-appointed roles as the mentors and nurturers of the young, as the models and leaders to whom they look for guidance. They write that we need to give our children the freedom to be themselves in the context of loving acceptance— an acceptance that immature peers are unable to offer, but one that we adults can and must provide.

Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate discuss many valuable themes, but I will very briefly focus on competing attachments, which is less discussed. The authors stress the importance of children’s relationships to their adult caregivers / parents and the devastating impact in today’s society of competing attachments with peers. The book restores parents to their natural intuition and offers alternatives to today’s contrived methods of behaviour control and strategies for restoring or preserving the child-to-parent relationship. A lot of vignettes are included of cases where things have gone awry between peer oriented children and parents and teachers, and the consequences on children’s safety, development and maturation. The book explores many aspects of the main theme in detail. Additionally, two important related topics worth reading are the increase of bullying and the making of bullies and the challenges with raising children in a digital age.

The writers ask the question: If parenting skills or even loving the child are not enough, what then is needed? They go on to discuss in detail the indispensable special kind of relationship without which parenting lacks a firm foundation, which developmental psychologists or other scientists who study human development call attachment relationship.

They write: “Only the attachment relationship can provide the proper context for child-rearing. The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child. When a child seeks contact and closeness with us, we become empowered as a nurturer, a comforter, a guide, a model, a teacher, or a coach. For a child well attached to us, we are her home base from which to venture into the world, her retreat to fall back to, her fountainhead of inspiration. All the parenting skills in the world cannot compensate for a lack of attachment relationship. All the love in the world cannot get through without the psychological umbilical cord created by the child’s attachment. The attachment relationship of child to parent needs to last at least as long as a child needs to be parented. That is what is becoming more difficult in today’s world. Parents haven’t changed— they haven’t become less competent or less devoted. The fundamental nature of children has also not changed— they haven’t become less dependent or more resistant. What has changed is the culture in which we are rearing our children. Children’s attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society. Even parent-child relationships that at the beginning are powerful and fully nurturing can become undermined as our children move out into a world that no longer appreciates or reinforces the attachment bond. Children are increasingly forming attachments that compete with their parents, with the result that the proper context for parenting is less and less available to us. It is not a lack of love or of parenting know-how but the erosion of the attachment context that makes our parenting ineffective.”

They add: “In adult-oriented cultures, where the guiding principles and values are those of the more mature generations, kids attach to each other without losing their bearings or rejecting the guidance of their parents. In our society that is no longer the case. Peer bonds have come to replace relationships with adults as children’s primary sources of orientation. What is unnatural is not peer contact, but that children should have become the dominant influence on one another’s development…… Culture, until recently, was always handed down vertically, from generation to generation. For millennia, wrote Joseph Campbell, “the youth have been educated and the aged rendered wise” through the study, experience, and understanding of traditional cultural forms. Adults played a critical role in the transmission of culture, taking what they received from their own parents and passing it down to their children. However, the culture our children are being introduced to is much more likely to be the culture of their peers than that of their parents. Children are generating their own culture, very distinct from that of their parents and, in some ways, also very alien. Instead of culture being passed down vertically, it is being transmitted horizontally within the younger generation….”

Another book I’ve recently completed is Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, a memoir by Margaret Renkl.

It contains short chapters with introductory illustrations by her brother.  Renkl’s narrative left a sense of familiarity. Her descriptions of the natural world, mostly the world of her back yard and street, and her awe and empathic connection to the creatures and plants in it resonated with my own thoughts and feelings in relation to nature and creatures that cross my path; however, unlike her I don’t know the names of all the different species of birds, insects and plants. This experience of awe and empathic connection that has in my case resulted in my feeding and taking care of almost a dozen cats in my garden, something I had never planned on doing, but happened gradually after the passing away of our dogs, as the garden became a free zone for stray cats.

This is a photo of the ladder from which my husband fell off as he was trying to screw the new polycarbonate glass sheet on the pergola, which is too heavy for me to move and has now become a playground for our female cats.

Below are some excerpts from Renkl’s book:

“….. there is another game I play in church with Mother Ollie’s hand. I take it in my own and pat it smooth, running my finger across its impossible softness, marveling at the way it ripples under my finger, as yielding as water. My great-grandmother’s skin is an echo of her old Bible, the pages tissue-thin, the corners worn to soft felt. I gently pinch the skin above her middle knuckle, and then I let it go. I count to myself, checking to see how many seconds it can stand upright, like a mountain ridge made by a glacier in an age long before mine. Slowly, slowly it disappears. Slowly, slowly it throws itself into the sea.”

“Safe, Trapped: Inside the nest box, the baby birds are safe from hawks, sheltered from the wind, protected from the sharp eye of the crow and the terrible tongue of the red-bellied woodpecker. Inside the nest box, the baby birds are powerless, vulnerable to the fury of the pitched summer sun, of the house sparrow’s beak. Bounded on all sides by their sheltering home, they are a meal the rat snake eats at its leisure.”

“Flowers that bloom in the garden are called flowers, and flowers that bloom in the vacant lot are called weeds.”

“I like the idea of mist as much as I enjoy the lovely mist itself. Aren’t transitions always marked by tumult and confusion? How comforting it would be to say, as a matter of unremarkable fact, “I’m wandering in the mist just now. It will blow off in a bit.”

Finally,  poems from Love Poems in Quarantine by Sarah Ruhl, playwright, essayist and poet.

On homesickness, back when I travelled

….. And I thought:  / at home in the world  /  The endless desire to be / at home in the world……

Differences between me and my dog

 …. She eats from a bowl on the floor;  /  I eat from a bowl on the table.

She always bears small irritations with grace;  /  I sometimes bear small irritations with grace……

Crossing

The water rushes / and it doesn’t stop rushing.  /   We help each other cross.

Shelter

To love a house not  /  because it’s perfect, but  /  because  / it shelters you

To love a body  /  not because it’s perfect but  /  because it shelters you

Books as food

 Change the body by / what you fill it with; and so   /   too the mind – with books.

 Freedom

I will interrupt   /  my own mind. Instead of others   /   interrupting me.