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….”