‘The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive’ Bessel van der Kolk
We don’t live in a vacuum. All our experience is situated within social and historical contexts.
THE TRIPOD OF REFLECTION: OPENNESS, OBSERVATION, OBJECTIVITY (FROM DAN. J. SIEGEL’S BOOK MINDSIGHT, Pages 31, 32)
Mindsight emerges as our communication – with others and ourselves – helps us reflect on who we really are and what is going on inside us. Here I’ll explore three very specific components of reflection that are at the heart of our mindsight abilities: openness, observation and objectivity.
I like to think of these fundamental components as the three legs of a tripod that stabilizes our mindsight lens. Without the tripod, our mind may be visible to us only in a blurry, busy hive of activity whose fine details are lost in jumping images and fleeting feelings. But when the lens of our mindsight camera is stabilized the details come to focus. We see with more depth and precision. From this stabilization we gain all the gifts of acuity, keenness, insight, perception and ultimately wisdom.
Openness implies that we are receptive to whatever comes to our awareness and don’t cling to preconceived ideas about how things ‘should’ be. We let go of expectations and receive things as they are, rather than trying to make them what we want them to be. Openness enables us to sense things clearly. It gives us the power to recognize restrictive judgments and release our minds from their grip.
Observation is the ability to perceive the self even as we are experiencing the event. It places us in a larger frame of reference and broadens our perceptive moment to moment. Put another way, self observation allows us to see the fuller context in which we are living. Observation offers a powerful way to disengage from automatic behaviours and habitual responses; we can sense our role in these patterns and begin ways to alter them.
Objectivity permits us to have a thought or feeling and not to become swept away by it. It recruits the ability of the mind to be aware that its present activities – our thoughts, feelings, memories, beliefs, and intentions – are temporary and, moreover, that they are not the totality of who we are. They are not our identity. Objectivity allows us to develop what is sometimes called discernment. With discernment we can see that a thought or feeling is just mental activity, not absolute reality. Later in this book we’ll explore this ability in more detail, but here let me just mention that one part of the discernment is the ability to be aware of how we are being aware – as opposed to becoming lost in the target of our attention. This ‘meta-awareness,’ or awareness, is a powerful skill that can liberate us from the prison of automatic reactions.
Briefly….. July 28th, 2016
In Greece, civil marriage was legislated in 1982 and up until the new century most people chose religious ceremonies. However, this has greatly changed and in 2013 civil marriages surpassed religious ones (51, 8 – 48, 2 respectively). This is certainly a great change since 1983 when I got married at the Town Hall. We had opted for a civil marriage a short period after its legislation while still at university despite facing a certain amount of objection and pressure from others at the time. I did not really think much about it over the years nor did I fully realize until recently when acquaintances and relatives, commented on this or hinted that part of the harassment and discriminations we have been suffering might also stem from this decision, that this might be another underlying reason for the oppression and targeting we have suffered because of our views and opinions by groups of people who adhere to different beliefs, have a different outlook and do not respect others’ rights to be and act according to their own values. So, I engaged in a brief search on the Net to better understand this source of prejudice and the views held by people not only condemning choices like getting married in the Town Hall, but also feeling entitled to disrespect us, act against us, to inflict suffering and losses, to interfere and violate constitutional rights! Of course, I had suffered injustices and abuse since childhood, way before I got married or had any views on politics or other matters, but still it brought home to me how cultural beliefs, social discourse and ideologies impact our experience and that often racism, sexism, religious and political discrimination, marginalisation, censorship, etc, are hidden and may not be overt. In any case I was relatively shocked by what I read. For instance, I found out that according to the Church people who get married at the Town Hall do not deserve a religious burial when they die, that a civil marriage constitutes prostitution, that family, relatives and friends are not to take part in the ceremony, etc (references below). As a result, I was better able to understand familial reactions in the past, but also reactions from various people in various contexts across time and hurtful comments and narratives about illegitimate children and their place in society and so on. Often it is easy for people or groups to use their different political views or values as an excuse for their illegal or unfair and cruel activities or their engaging in discriminatory practices. It is definitely more comfortable than to have to discern or accept the true motives and reasons of these often self-serving behaviours and attitudes. It also reminded me of a comment a neighbour made after two of our pets had been poisoned. I was terribly upset and he remarked that we had not built a fence around our house, indirectly placing the blame on us and not those responsible for these acts.
New learning and deeper understanding of the underlying dynamics, as well as, the interconnectedness of experiences across time, take place each day as I work on healing, restoring and understanding.
Read more…. Referenced material on church’s views on civil marriage