What I’ve been up to….
“For now she knew well that everything blooms with love. And that with love even halves become whole” Tasoula Eptakili, The Teapot that Blooms
“As the carousel repeats / goes round and round, things come from that time, only each time we are asked to process them, to reposition what was old, and not reproduce the exact same, like the horse that goes round and round endlessly and does exactly the same thing…” Savvas Savvopoulos, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, [has for thirty years worked with cancer patients as a psychoanalyst-psychotherapist]
I’ve been weathering a cold and a mild fever so I’ve been a bit sluggish recently. Some of the things I’ve pondered on and engaged with and feel might be worth sharing today are:
1. Some new drawings, one of which has been inspired by Voula Papaioannou’s work. She was an important figure in Greek photography and considered part of the “humanist photography” that was developed as an antidote to the dissolution of human values during WWWII. As I revisited her photographs that capture what the people of Greece lived through during the period between 1940 and 1960 tears welled up and I became viscerally aware of how our own historical contexts, but also those of our ancestors, define our current social realities even though we may be oblivious to it more often than not. The civil war – that tremendous loss, wound and split in the Greek psyche – lives on and even though it mostly lives underground it is reflected in our politics and our viewing of each other. The wound to some extent or other is passed down from one generation to another.
2. A “bigger picture” type of reflection exercise
A tapping exercise by Jessica Ortner I listened to this month reminded me of a kind of “all basic areas of life’ inclusive meditation-reflection practice I have engaged with at times. During the process we can reflect or meditate while considering areas of health, money, work, primary relationship, other relationships, and so on. We can also reflect on these by tapping while asking questions and processing related events, emotions and beliefs. In the tapping version mentioned above we are also invited to explore different areas of our body to see where constriction or tension is held.
We might, for instance, start by trying to remember our earliest experience with money, related incidents and feelings. Then we can move on to later experiences all the way up to the present and the future. Whatever area we focus on we will most likely discern a repetitive pattern in terms of feelings, beliefs, thoughts, and bodily responses, which often arise automatically, or a point in time when these were disrupted, hopefully for the better. Along these lines we can explore our first romantic relationship and our current one if we are in one and see patterns, similarities and dynamics across time. Likewise we can explore familial relationships, educational and work contexts, health issues or health care we have received, our prevalent coping strategies when we feel tense, tired, sad, anxious, uncertain or angry. As we do so we gain some insight around contextual factors and dynamics, and our ways of responding or reacting.
The process is quite lengthy, not necessarily easy to do, and it reflects a more holistic picture of our experience. To use a metaphor it’s like looking from the theatre balcony, where we do not only see what’s happening on the stage. Our observation capacity from the balcony is broader than from the orchestra seats. This sort of activity allows us the kind of view that comes from stepping up and back, getting a broader sense of things. To some extent there is some power in this “higher” perspective from an elevated point of observation. Dynamics, events, relationships, decisions, choices come into the foreground, our understanding shifts, deepens, Emotions also come up and possibilities might emerge or disappear. New facts and perceptions, data and paths might emerge. We understand where we have been ignorant or averting our gaze. I read somewhere that perspective shifting and broadening our lens are among the cognitive competencies that we need to develop so that we may more successfully, and safely navigate our complex world, and that actually these are skills that can be learnt and practiced starting from childhood.
Taking in the bigger picture of our life and context is not a one-time thing, it is a process we might need to return to as our understanding shifts and as we encounter more of our experience. The exercise above requires empathy and (self) compassion, as well as, acceptance. It requires a certain capacity to stay with emotions that arise, to titrate the process to avoid overwhelm and to take care of our self, to situate experiences and consider the myriads of factors that influenced events, including historical wounds that live within us even if we are often oblivious to them. It necessitates our befriending difficult emotions and defenses and appreciating their survival value. As we deepen the process we are asked to reconnect and embrace what some psychologists term as “the exiled parts of the self”.
3. A meditation I have recently enjoyed by Henry Shukman, writer and meditation teacher, involves our sort of taking a break from all our belief systems, identities, roles, even names, shedding them in our imaginations like layers of shirts and – for a little while – resting in a less encumbered sense of being, in a kind of signlessness, namelessness, as he puts it, an experience of simply being alive unhindered momentarily by all else [https://www.rickhanson.net/meditation-talk-finding-a-greater-wholeness/].
4. Over the past several years I’ve mostly been reading e-books in English, for practical mostly reasons, and have not had time to do much reading in Greek, but spending some time in bed with my recent cold I read Κέρμα στον Αέρα / Coin in the Air, a combination of fiction and memoir, by Tasoula Eptakili. Each chapter is a day in a member of a family through historical time, the war in the Albanian mountains in 1940, the civil war, the port of Pireus, where relatives set off for Australia during the years of massive emigration, the last dictatorship, the years that followed, the hope for a better future and the disappointment that came afterwards, the financial crisis. The immigration chapter, Third Class, felt familiar, my parents (and relatives) travelled from Pireus to Australia, some probably on the same ship mentioned in the book. The first to leave was my father in 1956. He invited my mother, her brother and others. I also remember their small 45 records, the same music, by the same record companies mentioned here. Eight decades. Ten people. Eptakili writes: “Moments from the history of a family. It could be mine. It could be yours.”
Α short extract from the last chapter with the title: Roses or mallow?
“How much of what I have recounted are real pieces of my own puzzle of the past and how much is invented? …. Ιs what we remember exactly as we experienced it… Is it as we heard it described to us or as we created it in our imagination?… When we stand in front of a mirror and we look at our image, the space behind us seems completely out of place and strange: the windows and doors are elsewhere, the light comes in from somewhere else, the furniture is in a different position, not where we’re used to it. We lose our orientation. It is like vertigo. The same thing often happens when we look back in time.”
5. Finally, a book for children, also written by Tasoula Eptakili. The Teapot that Blooms tells us the story of an avid teapot collector, who loves jasmine tea, and how a little girl, found one of the teapots without its lid. The book ends with these sentences: “For now she knew well that everything blooms with love. And that with love even halves become whole.”