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Art, art habits and processes…..                                                    Artwork added

“Because we are afraid to see the stranger in ourselves, as well as, in the other. We are not ready to feel the change, we prefer to believe that we remain the same and unchanged, so the game goes on as always. Otherwise we will have to find new rules and new games and that requires strengths we don’t have. That’s why we pretend that all changes are non-existent, that we remain who we are and that others remain who they are” From A New Homeland Outside The Window  by Thodoris Kallifatidis

“When I made my debut as Anne Frank the critics wrote that I was Anne, I don’t believe that my life or my stage interpretation or appearance had direct parallels with the heroine of the diary, but that I really borrowed Anne’s soul for those two hours on the stage. Let Anne play Anne. Many years passed before I again experienced such complete identification.” From Changing by actress Liv Ullman

“…. moment by moment, you can actually surf on the waves of your own experience. And the surfboard — I’ve never said this before, and may be overextending the metaphor — but the surfboard with you on it is actually awareness. And you can inhabit that space in a way that’s, in that moment you are already free….” Jon Kabat Zinn

“This allows happiness to become an easily commodified narrative able to potentially accommodate anyone regardless of particular circumstances.” Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz

“All the children sat looking at Pippi, who lay flat on the floor, drawing to her heart’s content. ‘But, Pippi,’ said the teacher impatiently, ‘why in the world aren’t you drawing on your paper?’…. ‘I filled that long ago. There isn’t room enough for my whole horse on that little snip of paper.” From Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren****

**** Astrid Lindgren was a writer, who was also known for her support of children’s and animal rights, as well as her opposition to any form of corporal punishment. In 1993 she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”) “for her unique written work, dedicated to the rights of children and respect for their individuality”

An art product, even a single image, can reflect a layered narrative. It might also involve a complex preparatory process of different things coming together.  It’s as if many threads come together for a little while to create that moment of art, so one could say that the process is just as important as the product….  When I’m engaging with art, books, past experience or the memory of it, recent insights, experiences, emotions and ideas can arise, mingle and interact to produce whatever is produced, influencing what I have made without necessarily leaving visible traces.  It’s as if ideas and themes sort of pour out of me, and initially I need to select a theme or series of themes to work on. I then loosely organize the material on paper or canvas.

Art making also disrupts my tendency to be tidy and relatively organized. The surface on which I might be working on gradually gets filled up with books, objects, different art material and anything else required. I sometimes need to move on to other surfaces, including the floor space.  This especially happens when I move to “flow states”.  Flow states were, initially I think, studied by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. My own experience is that of being so absorbed with what I’m doing that my attention is sort of completely held by it. I might skip eating and drinking.  One definition suggests that “psychological flow captures the positive mental state of being completely absorbed, focused, and involved in your activities at a certain point in time, as well as deriving enjoyment from being engaged in that activity.”  However, once I have finished a drawing or series of images or if I’m painting once I’m done for the day I clean up, which is important for me because it creates space  that allows me to carry on with other things, and also, opens up space to start something new, unburdened and free from the previous process and activity.

ARTWORK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In today’s’ post I’d also like to write about the gist of some of my recent insights, which actually is not new knowledge at all, but which has become more salient during moments of quiet recently.So, some of what has been salient is: a) the importance of the need to strike a balance between our attention on the past, present and future. At different times in our lives, and depending on what we are dealing with or the requirements of that phase, our attention and the emphasis we put on things are bound to shift. Also, the present moment is what we’ve got, but as human beings living on this planet, the ability or opportunity to make sense of our past and our memory are very important because often this determines the quality of our life, health, choices and agency. Being grounded in the present, returning to the present moment, being aware of our experience moment to moment, to whatever extent possible, is a path towards greater freedom and well-being. In his book, Waking Up, Sam Harris, writes: “It is always now. This might sound trite, but it is the truth. It’s not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be different. But it is true as a matter of conscious experience. The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this….  is liberating.”

However, it is also important to be able to look at the future. Part of the experience of orienting ourselves towards a future is not only being able to embrace the inherent not knowing and uncertainty of tomorrow, but also the setting of goals and the sense that there is a supportive container to achieve or to move towards. Otherwise, it can feel like one is in some sense stranded in the present  b) the need to strike a balance between exploring, healing and focusing on our interiority / inner world, and the outer world, and of being knowledgeable and aware of the social contexts and circumstances we are embedded in. Agency, for instance, is an inner and outer affair, so is health, so is safety, and most other things in life.

Bypassing socio-economic and political reality serves particular purposes. After all, to a great extent it is socio-economic realities, for instance, that to a great extent keep millions of people in developing countries poor, to provide one glaring example, and so on.  In their book Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives, Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz discuss how by centering on happiness through only individualized means we stop questioning how socio-economic inequity causes individuals to suffer or how political decisions impact peoples’ emotional well-being. They argue that “if happiness has come to be so prominent in neoliberal societies, it is because it has proven a very useful concept for rekindling, legitimizing and re-institutionalizing individualism in seemingly non-ideological terms through science’s neutral and authoritative discourse…… Allegedly, it is not society that needs reform, but individuals who need to adapt, change and improve…”

Of course, it’s by no means to say that psychological growth and the development of strengths and resilience or the reckoning with our traumas are not recommendable and necessary, especially, when things get tough, but simply resting on the belief that the root of peoples’ problems is to be found only in individuals themselves, rather than in a socio-political and economic reality is not only false, but also problematic. As always, viewing situations and realities from different perspectives allows a bigger picture to emerge. Being eclectic and appreciative of wisdom and knowledge from different sources or people can also be useful.

Finally, today I’ll end this post by referring to some basic ideas and values in relation to our one and precious life that resonate with me. Anyone reading my posts will probably be aware of them already. I’ve often thought that in order to clarify and test the sincerity of our values we need to feel and bring to mind what we deeply wish not only for ourselves, but our children or someone we care about and wish good no matter what, and then ask: what would we truly want and what kind of stories, mythologies, value systems and societies would foster and support this for everyone?

People should have the freedom to shape their own lives and find meaning and happiness in the one life we know for certain we have, focusing our attention on creating good lives in the here and now, while supporting other people to do the same. We can make our lives meaningful by creating our own meaning and purpose as we go along. There is no one-size-fits-all best way to live and we should be tolerant of diverse approaches to life, as long as they do not cause harm. To lead fulfilling lives we need a sense of positive freedom, which is not just the absence of restriction on our choices and undermining of our efforts, but the opportunity to consciously create and choose our own purposes and actions to whatever extent possible, We should support our own and others’ flourishing, a wider sense of happiness and wellbeing, which does not focus only on the sense of feeling content in the moment [although this is also important], but describes a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction with our lives as a whole through making the most of life and our potential and through creating a better world. Democratizing and opening up knowledge to the masses would support this. We need to prioritize and support at a societal level the importance of healthy interconnectedness with other people, our ancestors and descendants, and the natural world. Finally, connecting to emotions of wonder, awe and delight at life with all its pain and joy, human achievements, knowledge, creativity, the evolution of our human history, our miraculously complex body, which is not simply a sack of bones and organs, as some seem to believe, the beauty of the natural world, including us humans, our planet, the Universe….

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                                                                                                     Edited  May 1st, 2023

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” THICH NHAT HANH

“The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.” Sarah Ruhl

“I’ve never understood organizing world religions around the concept of guilt rather than around the concept of kindness.” Sarah Ruhl

“Be stone no more … She stirs …   I thought: someday I will melt. Someday I will wake up.” Sarah Ruhl

Today’s post is about a book I’ve been reading, which I heard about on a podcast with Sharon Salzberg and Sarah Ruhl, and also, includes two new drawings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The book I’ll be presenting today with the title smile: a memoir, is by Sarah Ruhl, playwright and writer of other things, as she herself notes, and is dedicated to the many doctors and health practitioners that helped her during a decade of health related upheaval. She writes: “This is a story of how I learned to make my way when my body stopped obeying my heart.” Although the book follows the thread of her journey from childbirth to Bell’s palsy, and finally, to the discovery of undiagnosed autoimmune conditions, it inevitably brings together multiple threads of her life.

She begins chapter three with the sentence “This is a chapter of boredom and entropy”. She writes about her Bed Rest period, the books she read, the bags of books her friends brought her, including many books that featured dead twins and dead mothers. Twins also represent symmetry and the idea of the lost self. She threw them out and wondered about the literary obsession with this topic. She writes about her knitting attempts, the letters she wrote to her young daughter and the yet unborn babies, the feeling of confinement and boredom, and how the idea of bed rest was influenced by John Hilton’s publication of Rest and Pain in 1863. The rest cure became very popular during Victorian times for a myriad conditions, but was finally put to rest when physicians realized that it didn’t help traumatized veterans regain their strength instead it wreaked havoc on them physically and mentally.

In chapter five, a day after giving birth, she introduces the theme of Bell’s palsy, a paralysis of the seventh cranial nerve, which the Greeks called “dog spasm”. Ruhl writes that in contemporary Western medicine there is not a lot you can do to treat Bell’s palsy; doctors generally give some steroids, and then one waits for the nerve to grow back, and often it does. However, there are often underlying causes that if taken into account can increase the chances of recovery. Ruhl writes: “I have since learned that a very attentive doctor at the onset of the illness will automatically prescribe you antivirals (many Bell’s cases are caused by a herpes virus), will also test you for Lyme disease (a large percentage of Bell’s cases…..are caused by Lyme), or treat you for Lyme disease as a precaution. This attentive doctor will also give you a script for physical therapy and tell you to eat plenty of antioxidants. My doctor did none of these things.”

The memoir also speaks of the writer’s religious faith and spiritual journey alongside her health related experiences. Ruhl was raised Catholic and in the book she narrates her doubts as she deals with her own health struggles and the uncertainty concerning her newborns, who begin their life in the NICU. She takes us to her childhood and her current refuge in certain Buddhist teachings, as she navigates this period.

A few short extracts that provide a glimpse into her experience, and also shows how things that happen to us early on, which might not be perceived as highly traumatic influence our lives nonetheless:

“In junior high school, Sister Linda was out sick and we had a substitute teacher for Sunday school named Mr. Ivancovitch. He was very tall, and looked a little how I’d imagine Ichabod Crane, with greasy black hair falling over his face and very thick spectacles. The day he took over Sunday school he decided to focus on the bodily suffering of Jesus. He talked at great length and in great detail about how the lungs would have been affected by being on the cross, how the nails would have ripped through the wrists. It made me afraid……

….. I told Sister Linda that I wasn’t ready to get confirmed. I had expected a rain of judgment from Sister Linda, but what I got was mercy, understanding, and gratitude that I had taken the vow so seriously. She smiled gently, told me I could come back to the church anytime, and let me go home……… The day after I dropped out of confirmation class, a small band of Catholic kids circled me on the playground. “What, do you think, you’re better than us?” ….  “What are you now, Jewish?”………….

It took me two decades before I would read Thomas Merton and feel an affinity with Catholicism again, a faith that could be rescued from childhood tormentors, a faith that could be combined with other belief systems….. But that moment on the porch with the Hanukkah cookies probably shaped whole swaths of my life— the search for an ecumenical faith, the mistrust of institutions, the mistrust of certain kinds of girls…”

Ruhl writes about family, origins, belonging, about her husband, her parents and sister, and about her father who passed away in his fifties from cancer, untreated for celiac disease. We get glimpses of how they loved her and how they influenced her. For instance, she writes: “My father used to allude to what he called my mother’s “quick and darting mind.” My father’s mantra was that we girls must marry our intellectual equals, a mantra I wish more fathers would tell their daughters, and onstage my mother valued her intelligence over her image.” In relation to her mother she writes something that sounds true for daughters across the globe: “It’s hard to know where my mother ends and I begin. Isn’t that the story with so many mothers and daughters? I remember when I was little she taught me what a Venn diagram was. We were on a train, from Chicago to Texas, to see my cousins. In the dining car, on a napkin, my mother carefully drew two circles, showing me the overlapping section. “What do these two circles have in common? Here …” she said, pointing. I was fascinated by the logic of that diagram. Mothers and daughters: two circles, and the all-important bounded sections where they are complete unto themselves. Daughters perhaps have a tendency to point at the differences, mothers to point at the commonalities.”

As I mentioned, the major thread of the story, as the title itself denotes, is Bell’s palsy and all that is connected to that, which is every aspect of her life, the various underlying and undiagnosed health issues and reality. Ruhl begins by explaining that the Duchenne smile is considered the gold standard for a smile and it indicates a smile echoed by the eyes crinkling in response, Duchenne called the muscle that creates movement in the eyes during this smile the “muscle of kindness.” She tells us of her discomfort at being photographed, especially, once her smile became crooked. She writes: “At any rate, my general impatience and discomfort with being photographed pre-Bell’s turned, post-Bell’s, to fear and loathing.” She refers to the societal expectations for women to smile in public. She explores Bell’s palsy through the lens of vanity and asymmetry and wonders about what we do with life,which is asymmetrical and where we put all asymmetrical people with one leg, lazy eyes and crooked smiles….

I pondered how we take for granted many of our automatic responses like smiling. I smile frequently. It is something I don’t often think about. So, it was interesting to follow the unfolding of the smile narrative.  She further wonders about Mona Lisa. Many people have wondered about her smile, too. Was Mona Lisa genuinely happy or sad? What did her smile reflect? Ruhl says that neurologists have observed that her smile is asymmetrical, expressing happiness on one side only and her eyes are not engaged in the smile. Who was she anyway? Was she a self portrait of Leonardo da Vinci or his lover? While I was drawing his portrait [see previous post] while i was looking at portraits of him it was apparent that there were similarities between his facial features and expression and that of Mona Lisa. Did she have a secret? She also writes about her pain at not being able to smile back at her three children and her concerns about the “still face” effect on them during these formative years. She wonders if babies can read the warmth of intention from a thwarted smile and of how to experience joy when you cannot physically express it. She worries that she might traumatize them or stifle their empathy development by not being able to sufficiently mirror them.

Ruhl explores the smile through multiple lenses. Scientists for instance, have found that we show more emotion on the left side, which is controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, which regulates emotion. She makes reference to the findings of neuroscientists around brain neuroplasticity.  She considers whether we can experience joy when we cannot express joy on our face. She asks: Does the smile itself create the happiness? Or does happiness create the smile? She writes: “This was not only a neurological question, and a Buddhist question, it was also a question for actors…” She explains how in the 1970s Ken Campbell developed an approach to acting using the two sides of the faces separately, which he called the enantiodromic approach. … The theory of enantiodromia is that the left and right sides of your face represent different personalities…  Enantiodromia, according to the ancient Greeks, is a study of how opposites become each other ……  I once bought a two -faced wooden puppet from a gift shop here on the island, which had a smiling expression on one side and a mean expression on the other, a kind of Dr Jekyll and Hyde persona. She explains how portrait painters create life and interest in the face through some kind of asymmetry and through dark and light. The sketches by Rembrandt that I have framed on my wall, souvenirs from a trip of long ago to Holland, with my sister and husband, remind me of this. A student of mine liked to draw faces dramatically split in two, very light on one side and very dark on the other.

She writes about the many health care practitioners she sought help from, the more and less inspiring ones. She tells us of one good doctor, who asked for details, was concerned about her health and her losing weight for no apparent reason, screened her for celiac disease, which is an autoimmune condition and can often go undiagnosed your whole life with dire long term consequences. She writes: “It strikes me that the difference between a good doctor and a less-than-good doctor is one part expertise and three parts quality of listening.” The last diagnosis of Lyme disease, which might have additionally triggered Bell’s palsy, comes from an unexpected source, a retired doctor, who offers his insight after reading about her experience online.

Finally, Ruhl ponders on the overuse of illness as a metaphor because we want to give our illness meaning, like we often want to give our suffering meaning, and says that  if we give our illness too much meaning, we become the agent of our own decline. She quotes Susan Sontag, who has written that “Illness is not a metaphor, and … the most truthful way of regarding illness— and the healthiest way of being ill— is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.” Towards the end of the book Ruhl evaluates her experience of Bell’s palsy and writes: “…that paralysis ended up revealing a potentially life saving diagnosis that affected my whole family…. Maybe Bell’s palsy was a tremendous gift.”

Ultimately, as she engages with living, bringing up children, writing, visiting doctors and trying different healing modalities, she seems to also awaken more to her life and reality. After she watches The Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare she writes:

“I wondered, as I watched The Winter’s Tale: Is Hermione meant to be a real woman or just a metaphor for art? …. ..It is not the husband who wakes the wife, but the woman’s friend…… Be stone no more … She stirs … I thought: someday I will melt. Someday I will wake up.”

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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….”