Categories
Control Creation Creativity David Abram Earnestness Everything Is Waiting For You Flow Nature Spell of The Sensuous

The Spell of The Sensuous (Chorleywood to Chesham Walk)

A few weeks ago I was wandering around a part of the countryside that I know very well -the Chilterns- on a route I’ve walked dozens of times (Chorleywood to Chesham), when I spotted Jesus.

Not the historical or spiritual figurehead, he of a million paintings, cards, and stained-glass windows: Jesus the Original God-Botherer (OGB), Jesus the martyr, dying on a cross purportedly for our sins (still not sure why he needed to do that). This was not a supernatural or otherworldly visitation, it was very much part of this earthly realm: 33 stones shaped into that provocative name. For it provokes something in all of us, whether positive or negative: JESUS. There he/it was on, announcing his name from the earth beneath my feet.

I paused for a moment to take it in, enjoying as much as anything else the pleasure of finding those familiar man-made letters out here in the predominantly unlettered countryside; enjoying the built-in ephemerality of this construction, and wondering about the inner life of the person who had gathered and made this modest, but possibly also agenda-led, piece of land art.

The small valley in which the work was situated has always gladdened my heart. Every time I emerge from the descent through the woods into the expanse of this space it feels like a kind of home-coming. For some reason, largely due to juxtaposition, this particular patch of ground feels grand-canyonesque when you step into it, even though it probably only stretches 600 yards in either direction. Which is also to say, using the language of psychology, that some kind of positive priming was already at work before those stones “spoke” to me.

A few minutes later, I came across another piece, presumably by the same artist, this time in slightly larger stones sunk slightly in the grass, and arranged with even greater finesse:

Please take a moment to admire the beautiful interlocking bottom of the U, as if the two stones that contribute to the formation of this letter were just waiting to be intertwined with each other in a chiasm of smooth hard flesh. And what about that knurled , almost flame-shaped stone which makes up the top of the second S? A stone that also looks a bit like the head of a wolf or one of its canine cousins?

This second betokening of Jesus was a much more chunky, shout-it-from-the-rooftops version of the first. So I stood before it, as one might stand before a piece of sculpture in a gallery, not really thinking of much, but enjoying its resonances in a slightly ambivalent way, as well as its temporary presence in the landscape that I was passing through. I took a picture of it on my phone and moved on.

Heading in the direction of Hill Farm, I came across the third Jesus. This one on a bench. One of those very simple countryside benches made of a single slab of wood held up about two feet off the ground by two blocks on either end.

Perhaps because this was the third piece of land art I’d discovered in less than half an hour, I walked around the stones this time, taking them in from a few different angles.

Seen from this vantage point, turned upside down, the stones, with a small nudge here and there, might appear quite happy to shift into a slightly different, but not wholly unrelated pattern.

Hopefully this wasn’t too deliberate a desecration of the original artist’s work. Was I not making SENSE of JESUS for myself, albeit by moving the original letters around rather than setting up my own word(s) in a separate, quasi-critical relationship to the first word?

This kind of reconfiguring comes very naturally to us human animals, entranced as we sometimes still can be by the symbolic layers of the nonhuman world around us.  Is not paint just pigment moved around: suspended by us in a binder such as acrylic, polyurethane, or oils, mobilised by further diluents, and then transferred by brush, finger, or another mark-maker onto the grey or white weave of a canvas? Similarly, but even more elementally, pencils leave their graphite trails when applied to a slightly abrasive surface like paper.

I decided to repeat this game, by placing myself on the other side of the word so that my new perspective once again shifted SENSE into a kind of dissolving non-sense (i.e. ƎSNƎS) before the stones finally settled into the next configuration (below):

No one but the stones and I were cognizant of this edgy little metamorphosis from JESUS (or S∩SƎſ) to SENSE and ƎSNƎS, and finally to DOORS. What we (myself, the stones, the landscape) bore witness to, was in some way the bony skeleton of a poem: a mythical or historical figure’s name, the SENSE we make of it, which also acts as a DOOR to a new realm of perception or understanding, through which we might pass and perhaps in some way re-embody ourselves.

I say no-one else witnessed this, but Max was of course there, taking in this curious pushing around of the material of his world (rocks, stones, grass, dirt) into configurations that were possibly as dumb to him as words themselves. Who knows what a dog hears when we try and interact with them through our symbolic language.

There was also another man, a dog-walker, who traipsed past as I was looking at the third JESUS and asked me if I had made the stone composition, the question igniting a flickering of shame, replaced quickly by relief when I was able to say no I hadn’t. Perhaps for this reason, I then somewhat akwardly tried to explain to him (just in case he was aligned to JESUS in ways I was not) that I quite liked the word, shaped as it was, but didn’t really know what to “make” of it, or “do” with it. He didn’t either, so turned his attention back to his dog and walked on.

The stones continued to rattle around in my head for a few days after that, until I realised what it was about them that I found so affecting.

For I had clearly been moved by those three configurations of Jesus, even if not in the way intended by their maker. I suspect the Stone Gatherer might have wanted his or her work to prod my conscience or “soul” in the ways of rudimentary marketing, evangelizing me into rethinking my relationship with churches and biblical verse. No longer seeing them as calming, restorative places or mythopoetic literature, but rather the literal manifestation of a patriarchal deity and his specific purposes for our lives (mainly, as far as I can tell, serving Him).

On the Metropolitan line an hour earlier, a less charming, more bombastic version of this call-for-contemplation had caught my eye in a postcard that combined the usual culpability maneuver with a line from Hebrews 3:15 (see accompanying photograph).

The language of the card was very familiar. It’s message something along the lines of:

“Yo, sinners! Jesus died on the cross for us, and then instead of hanging out in heaven with his Pa, returned to earth so that we might know it was not just sleight-of-hand or mouth on his part, but THE REAL DEAL. So here’s a (Christ-ian) invitation to worship him [followed by the line from the Bible]: Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation.

Unlike the stone configurations, this was just semantic litter, a man-made imposition slotted adjacent to a view through the tube window that had, to my eyes, more “Jesus” in it, animistically speaking (trees blurring past in glorious shades of  green and burgundy), than a thousand instances of printed religious propaganda.

The reason I found the Jesus signs affecting and moving but the tube postcard mere debris, was I think due to the fact that the former held within it “the spell of the sensuous”, whereas the latter was merely another piece of human advertising.

In David Abram’s life-changing book The Spell of The Sensuous, Abram shows us in searing prose how our estrangement from the world around us, not just from each other, but from our nonhuman environment can in part be traced back to the invention of writing, and the ways in which early pictographic and ideographic writing systems were gradually replaced by an entirely abstract alphabet, by phonetic scripts that no longer held any associations for us with our natural environment.

Although we make this claim for our species, we were not the first to “write” ourselves onto our environment:

“The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. ”

By extension, “our first writing, clearly, was our own tracks, our footprints, our handprints in mud or ash pressed upon the rock. Later, perhaps, we found that by copying the distinctive prints and scratches made by other animals we could gain a new power; here was a method of identifying with the other animal, taking on its expressive magic in order to learn of its whereabouts, to draw it near, to make it appear.”

A trace of this magical thinking still remains in the Jesus Stones. But unfortunately, as our letters became untethered from the things they had first pictured, so we too lost touch with the more-than-human world, to a point where today if we get to experience the nonhuman environment, it is mainly through reading about it via our denatured alphabet, or looking at flattened versions of it on our screens.

Abrams traces this state of affairs back to Socrates’ assertion in Plato’s Phaedrus, one of the founding texts of our modern civilization that he would rather stay in the city than go for a walk in the countryside: “I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do.”

In that simple, but dualistic declaration, we as a species step away from millions of years of interconnection and profound affiliation with our natural world and all the other species living within it, to assert that we are now super-special Great Apes, with a newly-invented abstract writing system, allowing us to stand separate, as well as superior to every other natural phenomena on this planet. You want to know where our desecration and annihilation of the planet and everything nonhuman on it begins? It begins here.

“Socrates,” writes Abram, “may be recognised as the hinge on which the sensuous mimetic, profoundly embodied style of consciousness proper to orality, gave way to the more detached, abstract mode of thinking engendered by alphabetic literacy.” Plato, just like the alphabet itself, is not interested in specific rivers, rocks, trees and stones, as your or I might be when walking from Chorleywood to Chesham, but rather the pure Idea (eidos) or unchanging essence of The River, The Rock, The stone, The Truth.

Two and a half thousand years later, Big Data has a similar view of human animals and their world. We all now hover in this strangely timeless, dimensionless, virtual existence of abstract worlds, entirely mediated by letters and numbers. We are all to some extent, and often to a very great extent, profoundly estranged and alienated from the world around us, as well as ourselves. Thought, our closest ally, is perceived linguistically too, as a series of word-encoded permutations drifting through the mind like Very Important Clouds.

“This new, seemingly autonomous, reflective awareness is called, by Socrates, the psychê, a term he thus twists from its earlier, Homeric significance as the invisible breath that animates the living body and that remains, as kind of wraith or ghost, after the body’s death. (The term psychê was derived from an older Greek term, psychein, which meant “to breathe” or “to blow”.) For Plato, as for Socrates, the psychê is now that aspect of oneself that is refined and strengthened by turning away from the ordinary sensory world in order to contemplate the intelligible Ideas, the pure and eternal forms that, alone, truly exist. The Socratic-Platonic psychê, in other words, is none other than the literate intellect, that part of the self that is born and strengthened in relation to the written letters.”

And yet.

And yet, all is not lost. For as Abram suggests, the deep history of our abstract writing systems still points, even in a very withered state, to the sensuous, embodied forms of animism that are deeply connected to our creaturely experience.

“As a Zuñi elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even “inanimate” rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the “inert” letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless—as mysterious as a talking stone.”

If you take a moment to think about it, this is utterly magical. Hence the “spell” of the sensuous. “Perhaps the most succinct evidence for the potent magic of written letters,” writes Abram, is to be found in the ambiguous meaning of that common English word:

“As the roman alphabet spread through oral Europe, the Old English word “spell,” which had meant simply to recite a story or tale, took on the new double meaning: on the one hand, it now meant to arrange, in the proper order, the written letters that constitute the name of a thing or a person; on the other, it signified a magic formula or charm. Yet these two meanings were not nearly as distinct as they have come to seem to us today. For to assemble the letters that make up the name of a thing, in the correct order, was precisely to effect a magic, to establish a new kind of influence over that entity, to summon it forth! To spell, to correctly arrange the letters to form a name or a phrase, seemed thus at the same time to cast a spell, to exert a new and lasting power over the things spelled. Yet we can now realize that to learn to spell was also, and more profoundly, to step under the influence of the written letters ourselves, to cast a spell upon our own senses. It was to exchange the wild and multiplicitous magic of an intelligent natural world for the more concentrated and refined magic of the written word.”

WOW.

This seems like incredibly rich territory for making art, but equally for learning to live again through every pore of our body as we once did, but very rarely do now. To live within and in the embrace of the natural world, as opposed to one (or a million) steps removed from it with our word-focused, abstract-making eyes and minds.

What Abram’s book makes me want to do is spell a few things out to myself, to other passing human animals, but equally to the nonhuman, animate world that surrounds us. But not on a screen as I am doing here. No one reads or cares about screenwords anymore. And not through paints or pencils, either. Rather, I think I’m going to follow in the footsteps of the Jesus Artist, and other Environmental Artists like him/her, using materials found on-site, but focusing mainly on words. Because words, for me, and for others (I’m thinking here of Hughes’ Thought Fox, but maybe poets in general) point to experience in a very real and alive way. Especially so, perhaps, when they are formed by and through living materials?

If and when I do some of this, I shall write of the walks where the spell-making occurs, including images of “spells” cast here, and in an Instagram account called @spellofthesensuous.

Categories
Acceptance Adam Phillips Contingent Self-Esteem Control Creation Existential knots Experiential avoidance Frustration Hope Life maps Narrative Identity Structure Worry

Tyrannical Narratives

Why is it that Pastor Rick Warren’s (2002) book The Purpose-Driven Life is the bestselling hardcover non-fiction book in history, apart from the Bible? In a similar vein, but from a different background, Viktor Frankl’s (1962) Man’s Search for Meaning continues to sell strongly to this day. Perhaps because books like this remind us of our aching desire to shape our lives to trajectories that seem consequential (to us, and thus to our tribe, our culture) evaluated on how fulfilled we feel with our lot.

We are story-telling creatures, and our stories need to contain some narrative arc, some cognitive structure, some “meaning”.  The psychologist Jerome Bruner argues that “it is through narrative that we create and recreate selfhood, self is a product of our telling and not some essence to be delved for in the recesses of subjectivity.”

Our sense of meaning and purpose, our values and motivations are based on the narratives we tell about ourselves and our world. Charles Taylor tells us that stories about self and society are how humans construct the “horizons of meaning” which then form the critical background for social relations and life choices. Narratives always represent a kind of movement in moral space. They are our way of constructing coherence and continuity in our lives.

The most important stories that we tell, retell, and reframe are the ones that we do not generally recognise as stories at all. We could call these “metanarratives.” These master stories are the stuff of ideologies, religions, nationalisms, and cultures. We do not recognise them as “stories” in the sense of events unfolding in a temporal frame but rather tend to take them as an unarticulated background, the taken-for-granted “truth” of the way things really are.

What is striking about these metanarratives is how closely their plots parallel and mimic the Christian chronicle. Just below the surface, we find the common threads of a secularized theology: a fall or awakening into sin, the redemptive quest, conversion and transformation, temptations to backslide, persevering in salvation, and an expectant hope for final happiness and fulfillment. 

Tim Smith writes in his book Moral Believing Animals: “So deep did Christianity’s wagon wheels wear into the ground of Western culture and consciousness, that nearly every secular wagon that has followed—no matter how determined to travel a different road—has found it nearly impossible not to ride in the same tracks of the faith of old. Such is the power of moral order in deeply forming culture and story.”

What interests me in all of this is what we do when certain narratives and life-rules (often stated as small chains of narrative) start to dominate our lives in ways that cause us suffering. Here’s a narrative that dominates mine: if I am not writing everyday and publishing frequently then my life is worth naught. I might still be caring for others, and myself, learning and developing as a human being, enjoying many of the pleasures of being alive and conscious, but if this narrative is not being adhered to, even slightly, it’s all over. 

I call this a ruthless and totalitarian narrative, a tyrannical narrative, because there is no space in it for slippage or imperfection. You may not share my specific totalitarian narrative, but I bet you’ve got some version of this which you follow. Whatever its focus, it is a narratives driven by a burning desire that will only settle for complete satisfaction, and it often chooses to do this in a life sphere where complete satisfaction is unattainable. Which to be fair, is pretty much every sphere of life.

“The perfectionist,” which is perhaps another name for someone ruled by ruthless and totalitarian narratives “is always an ever-failing god, never merely a struggling animal,” writes Adam Phillips in On Balance, hinting here at the implicit narcissism of our striving. Perfection is when the satisfaction demanded by our narratives is achieved; perfection is when there is no gap between desire and consummation. The only problem with desire is that it involves frustration; and frustration, whatever else it is, is an acknowledgement of incapacity. 

So rather than the ruthless and totalitarian narratives, what we ultimately need is a capacity for incapacity, for being animals (Great Apes) rather than gods.

But how satisfying is this as a narrative? Not especially. Non-human animals lack narratives, which is why we denigrate them, and feel superior to them. And yet, they are satisfied more often than us living as they do without the pressures of narrative: no future goals to complete, no past failures to mourn. Incomplete satisfaction is our human animal fate, but this is not a project that is going to sell self-development books or make us feel any more at peace with our aspirations.

Categories
Acceptance Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Anxiety Avoidance Control Coping strategies DBT Emotion Regulation Feel Better Living A Valued Life Strategies and tools Thought Suppression Transcendence Worry

The Stoic Fork

At the moment, I wake up to jackhammers and drills.

Not just the usual jackhammers and drills of my own thought curves and mental convolutions, supplied by that sometimes-not-so-kind, maybe even Totally Loopy Word Machine we call the mind. But also “real” noise, and lots of it, from the builders next door who are probably going to be around for the next couple of months (!!), completely refurbishing and extending 109 Ruskin Gardens.

I’d been warned, I knew it was coming, and have got the owner of 109, Mr Patel to graciously agree to keep the work relatively quiet when I’m seeing clients. But at all other times,  the gloves (or in this case, the jackhammers, drills, power-saws, etc) are off. Which is to say “on”. All the time.

Already I can feel the effect of all that banging and the drilling on my nervous system, and partly in response to this, am trying to re-engage with a mindfulness practice: mindfulness being all about working on our willingness to “be with” upsetting thoughts, memories, body sensations, and external irritants. Especially those we have limited or no control over. 

I’ve also been finding a great deal of solace in a fork. A conceptual fork. Though in sessions, I’ll occasionally rush into the kitchen to grab a real fork in order to explain the concept to someone else.

This conceptual fork, sometimes called The Stoic Fork, is designed to get us to reflect on control, as well as the relinquishing of it. If you’re anything like me, control is important to you. It helps you to feel like you have agency, and choice, and most importantly “a say” in what happens in your life.  And yes, control is important. One understanding of depression is that it proceeds from a misperception that we have no control over our lives whatsoever, that whatever we’re struggling with is so difficult and burdensome and entrenched, that we will never, ever, ever get a handle on it. Understandably that can be something of a buzzkill (to say the least).

This fork that I’m going to excitedly wave in front of your face says that we do have control, we do have agency, and the ability to make choices that are value-driven and meaningful to us. It says that we do have control over choices that will impact on how we live our lives right now in the present, as well as choices moving us forwards into the kind of lives and people we want to be in the future.

But.

We need to skilfully differentiate between what is in our power and what is not. And that very differentiation happens to be the first thing we read about in a book of collected discourses issuing from the lips and the mind of a crippled, Roman slave named Epictetus who lived 2000 years ago. I like to imagine him as a slightly more philosophical and Latin-spouting version of Tim Renkow’s lovably, cheeky character in his new sitcom Jerk (if you haven’t seen it, do!).

Here’s a little experiment for you to try out before I explain the fork.

Think of something that’s getting you down at the moment. It could be anything: a physical ailment, a relationship issue, a problem at work, a crass comment someone made recently in your presence, something unsettling you’ve seen or read, or even six dudes banging and hammering and drilling all day long right next to where you’re sitting trying to capture the evergreen wisdom of Epictetus 😉

Make a mental or actual note of this thing, this thing that’s irking you. Now imagine me whipping out my IKEA fork (see drawing below) and asking you, as Epictetus might have done to another slave as they laboured from dusk to dawn on a Roman building site: “How much control do you have over this person/thing/situation/noise that’s upsetting or worrying you?”

Be warned! This is a trick-question. If you’re anything like me, you might say this in response: “Well not much, not as much as I’d like, but….”

Or.

“Don’t lecture me on control. Control has got nothing to do with this. Or if it does, it’s because that person/thing/situation is out of control and they’re driving me craaaaaaazy.”

To which I imagine Epictetus using his walking stick to draw a line in the sand showing the following “fork”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, on the right he’s written the kind of things we sometimes believe or think (maybe not always consciously) that we can control, especially with regard to other people: what other people think what they say, how they act around us. But equally this works with any phenomenon in the outside world, or the inside world (our thoughts, feelings, body sensations, urges, memories). I have no control over whether my stomach might decide to translate my anxieties and worries into an unpleasant, nauseous sensation, or if my head might suddenly begin to ache, or feel tired and woozy.

Epictetus believed that the only thing we have any control over are thoughts/feeling, and our actions. As you can see in the picture above, I’ve gone and crossed out THOUGHTS & FEELINGS because although he was an incredibly wise man, and although many of his thoughts and theories have formed the bedrock of our modern psychotherapy and psychology practices, we also know now, that thoughts and feelings, just like body sensations, memories, and urges cannot be controlled!

I can no longer control what thought is going to flit into my mind in the next minute than I can control what tweet Donald Trump is going to send out to his 60 million followers in the next hour. In fact, modern psychology has shown that the more we try and control our thoughts, feelings, urges, and memories, the more persistently they surface to assail us. It’s a bit like a government trying to ban a “naughty” or “insiduous” book or film (Lady Chatterley’s anyone, A Clockwork Orange?): as soon as people catch wind that now they’re not “allowed” to read that book, or watch that film, that’s the only thing you then want to do. Our minds seem to work according to similar dynamics.

If this is so, then we need to keep on reminding ourselves in some way, that the one and only thing we have any control over whatsoever, is our behaviour: our actions, our words, the things we write and say, and do. That’s it. That’s all we have. And that’s a lot!

Want to feel more in control? Control, in a healthy-ish, skillful-ish way your actions. As we know, there are lots of unhealthy ways to control our actions: starving ourselves (eating disorders) or overeating; exerting or harming our bodies so as to distract or focus our attention away from our pain; limiting our interactions with people we might enjoy being with in order to keep ourselves safe. So as with anything, a mindful approach is best when it comes to our actions. But always with the notion that, apart from what we say and do and write, we’re not in the driver’s seat of any shared inter-action (with another person or the world), and never will be.

How does one then apply this wisdom? I find it helpful to use the fork as a kind of reminder or mantra when I find myself getting irked by someone else’s behaviour. Let’s say a friend or a loved one does or says something that triggers me in some way, so that my knee-jerk response is one of the following:

  1. “I wish they hadn’t said/done that!”
  2. “Why couldn’t they have responded to me with X, rather than Y”
  3. “I bet they’re now thinking this about me!” etc. etc.

This list might stretch to infinity, as infinite are the ways in which our minds proliferate suffering on the back of a perceived threat or hurt. At this point, if I’m quick enough to catch the panicky or angry thought, I might inwardly try and shrug my shoulders, call to my mind the image of that stoic fork and go:

“Can’t control her/him/it. Let it go.”

or

“ I have no control over this person/situation/thing. Let it go.”

or

“Not my circus, not my monkeys!” (or if you prefer the original Polish version of this expression  “nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy” [pronunciation here])

I might follow this with an attempt at a kind of rueful smile here, which can also sometimes help, particularly if it replaces the expression on my face at that moment which is likely to be a glowering or grimacing one.

It’s a simple practice, but I find it quite a powerful, especially when used in the midst of interacting with other human beings who are invariably going to be saying or doing things we wish we could control, but acknowledge we can’t. And even it allows us to be a little bit more flexible and kind with ourselves as well as with each other, we’re onto a winner.  

Categories
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.