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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Anxiety By Heart Defusion Depression Feel Better Living A Valued Life Patience Refuge Ritual Self-care Self-compassion Strategies and tools Suffering Worry

April Fools?

In many ways, I love being the butt of someone’s joke, I love to be duped and fooled. Love magic tricks, especially of the Derren Brown variety that always reveal something profound to us about ourselves and others. As well as entertaining us in the process of fooling us.

I love Penn & Teller’s Fool Us. I particularly love it when those two Great Foolers themselves get fooled. And I love it when I am able to make a fool of myself (of my often-times pompous notions and ideas, at least when I’m defused enough to see the pomposity and ego-driven nature of them). And if done with love, and a kind of, hey-we’re-all-bozos-on-this-bus cameraderie, I can even enjoy it when others make a fool of me.

But I also feel uncomfortable when I see people being laughed at or mocked, especially if they are unable to defend themselves. I hate to see defenceless animals and children being treated unkindly, or made fools of.  I also don’t like the more cruel spectrum of practical jokes that shock and alarm, or even really dismay people on this day where we celebrate all things foolish and fooling. Would I eradicate the day itself if I had the power to do so? Never. Because life is a series of April Fools’ days you might say, a constant series of small and large practical jokes sent to challenge us and teach us. Here are just two of my favourites:

-We grow up in a culture that tells us romantic love is the be-all and end-all in terms of living a rich, full, and meaningful life. And then when we get into a relationship, and at some level we start to feel duped by that narrative. So we fight, bitch and moan at our other halves, because we’ve all bought into those lovely, lovely lies of Pretty Woman or Sleepless in Seattle. When instead of the happy-go-lucky romcom we get Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Her,  or Fatal Attraction, perhaps even The Shining, don’t we feel like fools? And when we’re not in relationships, we feel outcast or alienated from this Core Romantic Narrative pumped into our minds through everything we watch and read 24/7, embedded in every song we’ve ever listened to.

April Fools y’all!

-Or what about the reality slap, that wonderful term created by Russ Harris to describe the gap between what we have and what we want: of jumping through hoop after arduous hoop (academic, interviews, various forms of social ingratiation) to get that prestigious job, or car, or amazing holiday, or nice house -whatever we think might bring us happiness- only to find ourselves miserable with the glamourous trappings we’ve worked so hard to attain.

April Fools y’all!

And by y’all, I include myself first and foremost in that dupery.

THE ULTIMATE APRIL FOOL

But the ultimate April Fool is the fool our minds make of us on a daily basis. Never out of pure malice – for how can a lump of meat, the brain, sitting between our ears bear malice towards us? Rather, as a function of their problem-solving, pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding programming. Every time my mind tells me that the reason so-and-so didn’t respond to my text message is because a) they don’t care about me or what I’ve written to them, or b) they don’t fundamentally like me, or whatever other narrative they come up with, and I buy into that and suffer. Again: April Fools y’all!

Every time my mind singles out something I don’t like in someone else and then tells me that’s a reason to hold that whole person in contempt – April Fool!

Every time my mind says: that pleasurable thing you want (the extra glass of wine, the seventh chocolate digestive, the checking-of-Twitter or firing off an email ten minutes into a walk, or a yoga session, or some meditation) DO IT NOW – April Fool!

I don’t know about you, but my mind makes a fool of me dozens of times a day. 

What to do? Recently I’ve gone back to doing a particular kind of meditation practice, both formally (as in a sitting practice), but more so informally, which I’ve found really helpful with my foolish mind. It might surprise you, as it doesn’t involve trying to argue with your mind, saying to it “No mind, you’re wrong when you say that your [boss, brother-in-law, mother, father, colleague – choose where applicable] is NOT a [insert choicest, most damning criticism of that individual]”.

Arguing with our minds doesn’t work because the mind is the best barrister ON THIS PLANET! It has hundreds of files, videos, taped phone calls, enough to fill 256 gigabyte’s worth of memory on a standard laptop demonstrating the ways in which that person or situation has said or done something foolish, fallible, unfair, unreasonable, and just generally shitty in a bid to hurt or upset you. And maybe they have. This is not to downplay the foolish, fallible, unfair, unreasonable, and just generally shitty things we do and say to each other. I have been a veritable font of foolish, fallible, unfair, unreasonable, and generally shitty words and actions to other human beings in my misguided and suffering mind-states. And I have also been privy to other people doing some of that around me too.

But if you even attempt to argue with your mind about all of this, it will win. It will prove you wrong, and itself right over and over again. And you will then be left in whatever state your mind gets you into when it plays and replays those particularly juicy, particularly painful tidbits, as verifiably true. So that doesn’t work (at least in my experience – has it ever worked for you?) – that will just lead to more suffering, which is something we want to try and reduce, right? I do. 

Apart from defusion, when our minds start getting Practical Joker/Tormentor on us, what else can we do? A clue might lie in one of my favourite poems of all time, one I know by heart:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

Man! (Also: woman!) Isn’t that the reality-gap/slap encapsulated in one small stanza?! This bears repeating:

What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

Also:

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

PRACTISING KINDNESS

My cynical/judgemental/critical brain sometimes can be a bit hard on kindness. “Hallmark card sentimentality,” it sneers. And I don’t argue with it when it says that. Yes, Dave, I say (I call that part of my brain, Dave), yes, that’s one way of looking at it, thank you.

You could say, not that I’d get Dave to agree with me on this, that a kindness practice rather than the word itself or a nice Instagram quote on kindness (the word/quote lasts a millisecond, hardly registers in the mind at all) is a “medicine” for all those inadvertently unkind parts of ourselves.

Inadvertently unkind because they are trying to be helpful in their sometimes heavy-handed suggestions, comparisons, judgements, lectures and sermons. They don’t realise that, just like our parents and teachers and political figures (at times), they only further torment or make fools of us rather than being useful or helpful. Their comparisons, judgements, lectures and sermons only make us suffer more not less.

A kindness practice, ideally done on a daily basis, in the same way we might take some vitamins or brush our teeth daily, works at the very roots of our mind’s magic tricks, the illusions and delusions it feeds us to keep us safe, but which also separate us from the world, other people, and often times our own deeply held values and beliefs. When I remember to do some of the kindness practices below, it often feels like an almost selfish pleasure, in that the gain for me is huge (over time) but also doesn’t hurt anyone else. In fact might make their challenging, suffering lives a tad lighter too.

A win-win is always great. Bingo! Or “Yahtzee” as one of my kindness gurus, Dan Savage, will sometimes exclaim when he suggests a win-win outlook for his suffering callers. Dan Savage is also a great example of how you don’t need to be all whispery and quiet, all holier-than-thou to practice kindness. His Savage Love podcast is the kindest advice show on the planet, even though Dan is often scabrously blunt and pragmatic, but his advice and wisdom and good humour is always delivered with kindness and a desire to be helpful.That’s the kind of kindness I aspire to.

So here’s a challenge for us in our bid to become kind in a way that some of your Kindness Warriors* are kind.

  1. If you’d like to do a formal practice (I’m aiming to do this once a day for the whole of April) I’d recommend this 15 minute guided meditation from Russ Harris. I think it’s structured in a way to really get us into a kinder space towards ourselves and others, without being sentimental or “spiritual” in a cloying/annoying way (although finding our mind’s response to sentimentality and spirituality annoying, would also give us another way to be kind to ourselves): https://www.dropbox.com/s/xndq9j00b8zpoqa/Kindness%20Practice.mp3?dl=0

2.  Informally, the next time you go for a walk with your whirring, chattering mind, focus your attention on random strangers passing you on the pavement, and then instead of the usual stuff our minds do (commenting, ignoring other people, feeling intimidated by their “otherness”) silently direct some of these well-wishing phrases to them in a mantra-like loop:

“May you be peaceful, healthy, content.”

“May you experience love and kindness.”

“May your life be rich, and full, and meaningful.”

It may feel a bit weird when you start doing it, but notice what happens to the mind if you push past the cynicism and boredom of your Inner-Dave.

3.  Start learning by heart the whole of, or a part of the poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye, or some poem that has a similar kind vibe that speaks to you. Maybe Hopkins’ “My own heart let me more have pity on”, or Pat Schneider’s “The Patience of Ordinary Things”, or Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”. Recite these poems by heart when you feel low or anxious.

4. Think of something you’re struggling with at the moment. Close your eyes, maybe even place a hand on your head or chest, and imagine someone kind that you know, or even a pet, saying some simple but kind words to you in sympathy. Whilst writing this today I’m strugging with a stonking head cold and am feeling fairly grotty. I had my kind person, and Max, say to me: “I’m sorry you’re feeling so crap today. Go easy on yourself, give yourself a bit of cosseting, Steve.”

If you try out any of these, please do tell me how they go in our next session together.

*My kindness warriors, also my ideal dinner party guests, just off the top of my head: Dan Savage, The Obamas, David Mitchell, K D Lang, Stephen Fry, the Queer Eye dudes, Russell Brand,  Adam Phillips, Caroline Lucas, Steven Hayes, Stevie Wonder, Penn & Teller, Mary Oliver, Ajahn Sucitto, and many many folk from various spiritual traditions. Also, even more so, all those people you wouldn’t recognise if I named them. My clients, each and every one of them: all sensitive bods, and all incredibly kind people. My parents and other relatives, even with all their flaws, their sometimes foolish, fallible, unfair, unreasonable, and maybe even shitty and unkind ways at times. And what about that guy who stopped his car when he saw little Max, my dogchild, running in the middle of a busy road after he went AWOL in Fryent Park a few years back? Or the kind elderly lady and her husband who always stop to say a few kind words about my garden when they see me outside weeding over the weekend. The list goes on and on. As does this one]

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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Anxiety Control Living A Valued Life Ritual Structure Values

WHY RITUAL?

We need to talk about ritual. The anthropologist Roy Rappaport writes: “Humanity is a species that lives and can only live in terms of meanings it itself must invent.” If this is so, ritual is fertile ground for creating meaning in our lives.

For meaning, we often substitute the word philosophy, but a distinction needs to be made here a la Foucault’s discrimination between philosophy and spirituality. Philosophy, says Foucault, attempts to articulate the conditions and limits that circumscribe a subject’s access to truth. Spirituality, in contrast, consists in a set of practices through which “the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth.”

Embedded in the word “spirituality” is, of course, the word “ritual.” Ritual knowledge, the knowledge gained from spiritual practices, postulates that in order to know there must be a transformation of the subject. Although the S-word is not bandied around that much in psychotherapy anymore (Freud’s atheism enduring to this day_, I think the cogntive-behavioural transformations we’re seeking in our lives are sometimes better understood as spiritual ones. Ritual gives us access to these spiritual truths.

CREATURES OF HABIT

Ethology explains how animals adopt rituals in order to smooth over the conflicts inherent in our inner emotional states. Animal ceremonies evolve, so the reasoning goes, in response to having to manage emotional discord created by ambivalence inherent in the conflict created by two or more behavioral tendencies that may lead to trouble. Sexual attraction, for example, draws a pair close together, but proximity also produces fear and the desire to flee, on one hand, and hostility and aggression on the other. A balanced attitude from the extremes of flight or fight is required for successful mating, and the ritualization of appeasing gestures and displays is the route to establishing such attitudes.

Certain psychotherapeutic schools, especially those designed to work with trauma (Schema Therapy, EMDR, Internal Family Systems) are all alive to the ritual possibilities of healing. Trauma and ritual have always in some way been linked, chicken-and-egg like. So how do we create in our highly abstract and technology-infused culture the space for abreaction that might be found in Traditional cultures like the Inuit and which we as human animals might still require for our well-being.

The Inuits, as do many tribal societies, employ drumming matches and singing duels to deal with conflict situations within the tribe. Someone who believes himself wronged by insult, theft, or injury may challenge his opponent to a singing duel, which takes place publicly, in the enclosed confines of the igloo. Jokes, insults, and derision, delivered with a sarcastic and mocking tone, are staples of the match, accompanied by dramatic enactments, such as pretending to sew the opponent’s mouth shut, sticking out one’s buttocks, or breathing in the face of the opponent. The opponent, for his part, is to take in the performance with reserve and equanimity, until his turn comes to sing complaints and insults. In this way, mistakes, misdeeds, faults of character, and perceived wrongs are freely and publically aired, a process that relieves such wrongs of their potency to generate violence. Typically, the contest ends with a reconciling feast. Such duels can last for days, even years, and are conducted both within and across communities.

I think we can learn a great deal from the ways in which these tribal conflicts have been solved for millenia while trying to understanding how our inner conflicts can be managed.

WHAT IS RITUAL?

Frazer in his Golden Bough suggested three things about ritual. First, the original and primary ritual form is that of blood sacrifice. The word sacrifice literally means to do (facere) a sacred thing (sacra). Metaphorically speaking, the blood element indicates that this “sacrifice” needs to feel deeply meaningful and valuable. We sacrifice something in the short term (money, time, effort) for a long term goal.

Second, ritual represents natural process or mythic-historical events or narratives, the stories of our lives and those of our tribes.

Third, ritual is inherently an act of magic, informed by the idea that “you can produce any desired effect by merely imitating it.” I think this is true for the enactment processes of experiential psychotherapy models like Schema Therapy and Internal Family Systems where we attempt to “enact” a change by visualising or re-enacting new ways of being. It’s that old Gandhi line: Be the change you wish to see. Ritual, to use Don Handelman’s term might also be seen as “events that re-present.” Ritual in this view is like a piece of society, or the socialised psyche, which society or client-therapist cut out and offer to themselves for inspection, reflection, and possibly criticism.

What often gets in the way of this happening in sessions, is that we can struggle to step out of a more superficial “play frame” in order to enter the deeper healing frame of ritual. In the play frame messages and gestures are understood to be fictive, if not actually false: the child waving a wand is not Harry Potter, and that child knows it. Within the ritual frame, in contrast, messages are conceived and understood to be somehow true and real; another way to put this is that the ritual frame articulates that which is taken to be of ultimate, foundational, and fundamental value. The difference lies in the metamessage associated with each. The metamessage of ritual is that everything within the ritual frame is sanctified, true, real, and believed.

We see this very powerfully in the documentary The Work, my favourite doc of this year where the prison in which certain dramaturgical and body-centered rituals take place, becomes a kind of transformative “cave” of the soul, maybe like the Chauvet caves explored by Werner Herzog in his equally wonderful Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Imagine: small numbers of our Paleolithic ancestors descending into the dangerous territory of the caves. Perhaps a charismatic individual leads them, revealing and inducting new members into the mysteries of the underworld. There, in the shadows and light cast by torches, they drum, sing, and reach out to the textured surface of the walls, with their cracks, folds, and hidden recesses. The skulls and bones of animals are handled and enshrined in niches or on rocks, which serve as our earliest altars. Images of animals are painted; earlier paintings are revered as icons of the intimate relation between human and animal worlds, and as links to the group’s ancestors. The impulse to leave the daily world of light and safety for the dangers of the caves suggest an urge to seek out a distinct place for extraordinary (ritualised) acts, a place that by virtue of its very separation from ordinary life was perhaps thought to offer knowledge and experience of the world in its totality.

DAY-TO-DAY RITUALS

Ritual can also be seen as a way of structuring our lives. Most religious communities are structured on an hourly, if not even minute-by-minute basis. We can learn a great deal from the ritualised structuring of these communities. Let’s look at a passage from the “Testamentary Admonitions”, written by the statesman and courtier Fujiwara no Morosuke over a thousand years ago:

Upon arising, first of all repeat seven times in a low voice the name of the star of the year. Take up a mirror and look at your face, to scrutinize changes in your appearance. Then look at the calendar and see whether the day is one of good or evil omen. Next use your toothbrush and then, facing West, wash your hands. Chant the name of the Buddha and invoke those gods and divinities whom we ought always to revere and worship. Next make a record of the events of the previous day. Now break your fast with rice gruel. Comb your hair once every three days, not every day. Cut your ngernails on a day of the Ox, your toenails on a day of the Tiger. If the day is auspicious, now bathe, but only once every fifth day.

We have here a template you might say for ritualized living:

  • Repeating an action (perform each morning; repeat seven times)
  • Prescribing and regularizing the details (next do this; next do that)
  • Linking and elevating the action by associating it with sacred values, narratives, or gures (chant the name of the Buddha)
  • Framing an action temporally, in terms of symbolic or historical time (in the name of the star of the year; look at the calendar)
  • Invoking powers or gurus to whom reverence, respect, honor is due (divinities whom we ought always to revere and worship)
  • Performing the action with a special attitude (look at your face; reflect)

Sometimes when we are struggling in the welter of experience, it can be useful to think of how we can ritualize our lives according to these guidelines.

One of my daily rituals is to to learn and recite poems. Taking the dog for a walk each day I recite an ee cumming’s poem which has these lines in it:

i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Every time I recited these lines, no matter what has been going on in my head up to this point, I notice that I am able to become more present to the world around me, especially the natural world. My ears really do wake up (even to the roar of traffic, but also bird-song), and my eyes open to the diversity of nature’s forms. Ritual brings us back into the rhythms of our bodies, our culture, and our species. Through ritual we become fully alive once again to the present moment.

 

FURTHER EXPLORATION

Aldous, G., & McLeary, J. (2017). The Work. Dogwoof.

Eliade, M., & Doniger, W. (2004). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. (W. R. Trask, Trans.) (With a New foreword by Wendy Doniger edition). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth. New York: Harper, 1958.

Frazer, S. J. G. (2009). The Golden Bough A Study in Magic and Religion. (R. Fraser, Ed.) (Reissue edition). Oxford: OUP Oxford.
Handelman, Don, and Galina Lindquist, eds. Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005.

Handelman, D. (n.d.). Framing. Theorizing Ritual, Eds., J. Kreinath, J. Snoek & M. Stausberg. Leiden: Brill. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/3531356/Framing

Herzog, W. (2011). Cave Of Forgotten Dreams. Revolver Entertainment.

Markman, K. D., Proulx, T., & Lindberg, M. J. (Eds.). (2013). The Psychology of Meaning (1 edition). Washington, DC: American Psychological Assoc.

Rappaport, Roy. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.