This poem by Mark Waldron is a favourite of mine for capturing the almost-impossible-to-describe state of mind which we sometimes refer to as anxiety.
THE WAREHOUSE
This is not a false alarm. This is not a drill.
This is an emergency. It’s not just about an emergency.
It’s not just on the subject of an emergency,
it doesn’t merely refer to some emergency
that’s taking place elsewhere. Neither is it
a metaphor for an emergency, or an exclamation
drawing attention to an emergency.
It is actually the emergency, and it requires attention.
It’s not so much like a fire in a warehouse
where paper is stored, ordered by colour and weight
and finish and size, ordered by shape and age;
it’s more like a fire in a warehouse built for the storage of fire.
The fire can make nothing of its heat inside its burning home.
This poem can be found in Mark’s wonderful book The Itchy Sea (2011).
I recently read a little allegory written by Michael Singer which felt like the perfect distillation of how we all suffer as human beings, as well as suggesting in the story some of the roots of that suffering. It also explains, according to Singer, how we might suffer less, or maybe not at all (the removal of our thorns!).
Poetry, as much as religion and politics, calls up strong emotions of love and hate. “I, too, dislike it,” poet Marianne Moore 
Did not Caedmon, the first English poet, learn the art of poetry/song in a dream? Is not the “lesson” of poetry always a lesson in frustration, a frustrating paradox, riddle or koan, a kind of Emptiness (Mu): 
Another etymological reading of koan is that of place rather than case, a place where the “truth” might reside. A poet or teacher or journal editor presents the poem/koan as a potential site for this truth or at least for something of personal worth. The reader is then encouraged to excavate. She digs, and digs, and digs. At some point perhaps she plants seeds or thoughts in the body-shaped space she’s dug for herself into the poem. Maybe she begins writing poetry herself, or making drawings, or a podcast where she talks with other people about their koans in the form of poems. She does whatever she needs to do in order to understand more about this place where she digs this place she also calls her life.
The koan/poem, writes James Ishmael Ford often feels like “a nagging something in the back of your head…a small pebble in your shoe…the longing inhabiting your dreams”, but it can also be encountered “like a blueberry found on a bush. You can just reach out, pick it, and throw it into your mouth.”
My primary way of interacting with my poetry koans (see 
Do I contradict myself?
I DREAMT THAT I woke up. It’s the oldest dream of all, and I’ve just had it. I dreamt that I woke up.
This old chestnut, right?
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.
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.
“…and here’s a secret for you – everything beautiful is sad…gilded with impermanence…” 
The main way language traps us is by cementing, consolidating, and solidifying a mood, emotional state, thought, or body sensation. For example, while writing this, I notice that I am feeling tired and a little bit queasy. If I put this into words (“I’m feeling tired and a little bit queasy”), until I update that “reading” of my interoceptive environment, it acts like a dualistic off-on switch. What I mean by this is that my mind starts believing that I am either “tired” or “not tired”, “queasy” or “not queasy”. It loses all sense of gradation and perspective. As far as my mind is concerned, tired and queasy become the “last word” on my experience. That inner-reading, delivered through language should really come with a time and date stamp attached to it (“Hey Steve, two seconds ago you registered tired and queasy feelings in your body, but how about now?”), but it doesn’t. The mind gives us these readings as if they were timeless truths about ourselves and the world.
My tiredness and queasiness, like all phenomena, is continually changing, even in the space of the time it took me to write this paragraph: sometimes strong, sometimes weak, sometimes noticeable and even oppressive, other times practically unnoticeable, negligible. But the mind, and language freezes or suspends these states in whatever reading was made at the point of noticing the sensation at first, and unless we factor into our reading the notion of impermanence, we might make a prison for ourselves of this thought, especially if the thing we’re focused on (thought, feeling, sensation) has some suffering attached to it.
Maybe it would be good, like the king in the Sufi fable, to have a magic spell of sorts, a talisman, something that unhooks or unchains us from the inflexibility of our own, and others’ linguistic formulations, returning us to the light-and-shade flux of our lived experience?
On the merry-go-round of the mind there is a problem with speed as much as anything else: the whirring thoughts and feelings, the jarring, jangling music. So first of all, cut the power switch the merry go round off for a moment. Stop it. Imagine all the lights expunged, the music silenced, the painted wooden horses in shadow.
Again, see if you can identify your bundle of feelings and thoughts that have got you “locked into” the seat or cage of the ferris wheel: “Oh, there’s shame, and hurt, and frustration. Oh there’s why-can’t-they-respond-as-I-wish-them-too?” etc.
Unlike merry-go-rounds and ferris wheels, tubes and trains usually have destinations associated with them. Consider where the cluster of thoughts and feelings and sensations you are currently experiencing may lead if you hop on the bus, or train, or plane and fly with them. Maybe even imagine that destination written on the front of the train or the plane.
Thanks for reading. Oh, and if you’re struggling with thoughts, feelings, body sensations, or situations that seem to your mind particularly oppressive and imprisoning, other than some of the suggestions presented above, you might also want to consider 
Why is it that Pastor Rick Warren’s (2002) book 
Tim Smith writes in his book 
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. 
There are now a squillion books out there about mindfulness and I am tired of reading them, and even tired of the word itself.
Writing and keeping count (of money, ideas, goods and services) emerged at the same time in our history: about 5,000 years ago. Both were a response to information overload, rather than as a means for sharing stories, ideas, hopes and dreams with other human beings.
“It is telling that the first recorded name in history [Kushim] belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, presenting to us one of the first pieces of writing we know of: a receipt acknowledging that 29,086 measures of barley were received over the course of 37 months.
Last weekend, walking near Ivinghoe Beacon, trying to memorise this poem, my mind a little super-silver-hazy, it attempted to speak back to Larkin’s poetic downers with a non-deprivatory rejoinder: “Yeah, but why sweat it? Isn’t writing just moving stuff (abstractions) around? We writers are no more than data-mongers really, no more special or important than literate dung beetles.”
But no less “mad” than literary festivals where we go to worship or pay homage to our information-disseminators. There are no festivals celebrating builders, or people who sell cooked and flavoured corn on street corners. But we celebrate writers. And for this reason, for those who feel compelled to write, we also open ourselves to frustration when we are engaged in an activity where the symbolic stakes have been set so high. Hence also the peculiar, almost intimate disappointment of finding ourselves the celebrant but never the celebrated, the bridgegroom never the bride.
Phillips as ever, turns to literature (King Lear) and Freud (‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Psychic Functioning’) to make sense of this.
The process of finding a poem you want to commit to memory and recite every day for the rest of your life is often a circuitous one. I think I started learning this poem as a pro-social gesture towards a poet who I interviewed for a podcast I ran for a year or two called Poetry Pharmacy, which subsequently mutated into Poetry Koan so as not to step on William Sieghart’s toes who has ostensibly copyrighted the former title by using it for his so-so anthology.
At some level, disowned by its writer, not even available online anymore as it once was, this poem has become untethered to the self it was once a portrait of, which perhaps frees it up to become anyone’s (self) portrait in a way that Chan’s subsequent poems can’t, or won’t? I tell the poem each time I recite it that as derivative, unfledged, and sophomoric as its creator might deem it to be (whether this creator is Chan herself, or some belletristic deity) no reader has committed to memory any of its Faber & Faber-anointed brothers and sisters yet, and maybe never will. Who does this console? Me, the poem? Both or neither of us?
Start by-hearting poems and soon you’ll find yourself in a conversation with someone on Twitter wanting to know what technique you’ve been using to commit your 12,000 words of verse to memory.
Of 
Thomas’s language is pared down to the bone: it is taut, and wiry and matter-of-fact. You see this especially in “and gone my way / and forgotten it”. The discursive mind wants to add other words to these two clauses, perhaps repeating the auxiliary verb “have” in the first line alongside an adverb to make “and have gone on my way”. The mind is always doing this when learning poems: coming up with more fleshed-out, sociably padded additions (“and forgotten about it”?). The poem reminds its learner again and again, this one certainly does, that it is not a Barbie Doll or Action Man to be dressed up or prettified, but rather exists as a Hepworth or Moore, or Giacometti statue exists: with only the most necessary, elemental contours present to us. Which works especially well for this poem as so much of it is about working out what really matters in our life: those transitory but intrinsically meaningful illuminations which disturb, often serendipitously, the grinding mundanity of being alive.
This is what it feels like (from the inside) to learn by heart a poem that you love. Perhaps, not by mistake, all those ecstatic YESes start sounding like the soundtrack to a disincarnate porn film. And maybe this is not a glib analogy. For just as evolution has shaped us to feel most apropos (literally, 
This excerpt from Yuval Noah Harari’s wonderful book Sapiens manages to distil a great deal of wisdom and discernment about our quixotic quest for feeling good. I think it also points to the challenges that we face as psychotherapists in working with clients’ assumptions (which are also our own!) about striving for happiness and well-being: highlighting how these assumptions have fundamental cultural and historical foundations which we rarely question, so intrinsic are they to the symbolic worlds in which we live. 
The problem, if it is a problem, is that language requires we use it. Our minds, which run on language, won’t shut up, no matter what we do. Language is having thoughts; language is saying things about the world; language is writing poems, also writing essays about poems. At some point, surrounded by the latest “crop” of language -its literary confections, its scientific inventions, its interpersonal spinoffs- we become aware of a surplus of intelligence. And surely where there is a surplus of something, we should focus on vending or merchandising this excess in some way, so as to gain the things we want? And what is it we most want? Connection, belonging, mental and physical stimulation. 
This the myth, but also the anti-myth of our own animal selfhood that is often ignored or covered up by our facility with language. Are we not mammals: non-hoofed, non-ruminant, but as-good-as cattle? Walk into a Weatherspoons pub on a summery midweek afternoon and watch the old geezers with their pints transform into a lumbering cow herd next to a stream. If you’re a woman, see them follow your every move with their dull, stolid eyes, every man a biform Minotaur, and don’t we know it. 
To me this sounds like a post-hoc rationalisation of a drive that is fundamental to our species. “The destruction of the natural world,” writes John Gray in 
Hoagland like Young, was also feted in his lifetime (he died recently from pancreatic cancer at the age of 64) with prestigious awards and well-reviewed publications, but is still not a household name for British poetry readers. He too got “left off the list”, even if, unlike most of us he has a Wikipedia page. And even in America for those who don’t read poetry, which is almost everyone, his poems too fall like rain in the culture arena, “blurry as a mouse”. 
“Last week my friend Mishka and I, out of idle curiosity and a wistful nostalgia for a popular sedative of the 1970s that neither of us ever even got the opportunity to resist the temptation to take, conducted an Internet search for “do they still make ’ludes.” Before we could finish typing the words do they the search engine autofilled: still make quaaludes. I felt a fond affinity for all depraved humanity.
This isn’t exactly schadenfreude; it’s something more complicated for which, as far as I know, there isn’t a German compound, but if there were it’d be something like Mitleidfreude, compassion-joy—compassion in the literal sense of suffering with. It’s the happiness, or at least the consolation, of knowing that things are tough all over. The other morning I heard the guy in the apartment next to mine utterly lose his shit: screaming obscenities, venting insane rage in the way that people only do when they’re yelling at inanimate objects, a tone I know well. Shortly afterward he and I both left the building at the same time, and I saw him standing on the subway platform, to all appearances just another bored commuter waiting for the L train. I alone knew that five minutes earlier he had been out of his mind with psychotic rage. Then I realized that this might well be true of everyone else on the platform. It’s heartening to know that everyone else is doing as badly as I am—all of us secretly screaming, pooping and weeping, googling ’ludes.
But, if you’re lucky, you graduate up the Maslovian pyramid to increasingly better problems, until eventually you get to confront the insoluble problem of being a person in the world. Even if we were someday to solve all our problems of economics and governance, people would still be unlucky in love, lonesome and bored, and lie awake worrying about the future and regretting stupid things they said in middle school. Utopia will still have forms to fill out, passive-aggressive bureaucrats, broken pipes and cavities, taxes, ads, assholes and bad weather. Time will pass without mercy. We will die. It will suck.
What to do when you love 
I often think about Kim learning that Seuss poem, line by line, day after day, week after week. Did she learn it to recite at a special party for a friend perhaps? Was this her 
I understand all this, and yet, I still find myself crossing the road to avoid these sections, as Willie does himself when Sam hovers into view. Can’t we just stay in the weird, heady realms of abstract language, in metaphor, and analogy where the rest of the poem resides? That lonely,” telephoneless, blue / Green crevasse” of our own heads, where we too “can’t get out”, other than through language, which lets us down with its ready-made phrases and silence in the face of ineffable suffering or joy?
What makes Malcolm Mooney’s plight so moving to me? Many things: his attempt to trail some language, slug-like, across a blank page, which still remains blank even after he has smeared his weary words over it – a literary version of 
It is this tension between risky, vulnerable connection and a safer insularity that makes this poem so moving. Graham struggled, as we all do, with the former. In a letter he wrote from the orthopedic ward of the Royal Cornwall Infirmary to Moncrieff Williamson after a drunken fall (“I walked 5 miles into St Ives to attend a birthday party and coming home I managed (don’t ask me how) to fall off a roof 30 feet and land on concrete”), he relates: “All Art is the result of trying to say to an other one exactly what you mean. Because we are all each so different from each other inside (different even from good friends we think we are extremely sympathetic to), one of the things we try again and again is to establish communication.What a stuffy pompous lecture. FINIS.” 
I like these (more hopeful?) words by Neil Corcoran in his essay on Graham in “English Poetry Since 1940” where he remarks that Graham’s “solipsism is mitigated by the sense that consciousness becomes most alive in these written exchanges between writer and reader, that the most alert self-consciousness may be created and shared within the poem’s language, so that the poem is always dialogue, community, intertext, ‘The longed-for, loved event, / To be by another aloneness loved”.” 
Perhaps the most liberating, therapeutic tool one can use when assailed by misery and miserable thoughts is to notice them, name them, and if they are getting in the way of you living your life to the full, neutralise them.
The one thing you should definitely not do is challenge the negative thought (CBT-style), which is why I left all three of the above thoughts hanging around, saying what they need to say. This is because a challenged thought might snap back churlishly with some kind of rant:
Morrisey, for a while, seemed like he might be our gladioli-waving miserabilist buddha, turned out to be a poster boy for What Goes Wrong when we take our thoughts as unarguable, gold-standard pronouncements on the state of the world and ourselves, and then act (speak) upon them.
Red please: maybe a Rioja, a Primitivo or something equally gutsy. Strip away the almost 10,000 year of vinoculture and we see the substance, like many that follow, as predominantly a time-dissolver and a pain-killer. It is also a self-cure that takes us beyond “the two worlds” of oppositional valence, such as 
The part of London where I live became very Polish in the aughts and then Romanian in the last 5 – 10 years, so we are all now connoisseurs of the East-European beers that have rapidly taken over in price and quality the usual Stella-Carlsberg-Budweiser triumvirate to be found in all cornershops. The East-European snacks that are also sold alongside the beers are not particularly good though, tasting often of sawdust and poverty, but the beer from these ex-communist countries is fantastic: Timisoreana, Tyskie, Zywiec, Lech, and others. 
For the tonic water, can I have mine with the 
I eat fewer of these than I used to. I once had a half-a-packet-a-day chocolate digestives habit. Occasionally I’ll allow myself some fig rolls, or a small pack of shortbread which I’ll devour over the course of two days, but for the most part, I dreamily walk down the biscuit aisle in a state of self-denial. It is an enchanted kingdom that I rarely visit. If I want a biscuity snack, I’ll slather sugar-flavoured-fruit (jam) onto some crackers, or honey: that magical substance transmogrified through the digestive systems of bees. Floral vomit. Honey is bee vomit. You know that, right? 
Even though I am a vegetarian and shudder at the idea (ethically, but also on a physical, disgust level) of eating a substance made from the mashed up bones of cattle then mixed with sugar and flavourings, I avoid that part of my brain when stealing from the pick-and-mix at the supermarket. To buy it would be to make official the fact that I am eating something that I morally and digestively abhor. It’s like the kosher-following Jew who only eats bacon when it’s hidden in some kind of bun and served to him by an anonymous, untraceable third party. 
The love affair is more or less over. It works now as a memory-repository, an extension for my brain, and something to fidget with. Fairly often I will sit flicking between apps, just opening and closing them down, in the hope that something, or someone will say something interesting or engaging aimed directly at me. This happens fairly rarely, but then I don’t really say anything interesting and engaging directed at a specific individual myself either. So it’s not like I’m actively inviting this sort of social engagement. Sometimes though I broadcast a thought or an essay like this one into the river of social media, so as to hear myself speak, but also for fear of not having a voice. This is a sufficient salve for the former need, and insufficient for the latter. I don’t have enough followers to have a voice – about 10,000 seems to be the point where one starts being noticed and talked about, which nowadays means retweeted.
I am telling an African-American poet about my love of Wallace Stevens when she gently wonders what my thoughts are on Stevens’ racism. At the 1952 National Book Awards banquet, Stevens seeing Gwendolyn Brooks arriving at the ceremony allegedly said, “Who let the coon in?”. He also referred to his own poetry as “like decorations at a nigger’s funeral.” And that’s just for starters.
Because that is who wrote the Bible, red-faced homophobic fundamentalist preacher man: a flawed, pint-sized human being who probably wouldn’t, orcouldn’t say boo to a ghost. A little man belonging to a small tribe of monotheistic wanderers who thought: “Because I feel so small and insignificant, what can I do to exalt myself and my tribe above all others tribes?”
I often tell the story of my exile at the age of 15 from my homeland (my childhood Garden of Eden?) as a tragic one which impacts me to this day in areas where I struggle the most, especially those to do with social confidence. But I’m also aware, and not devaluing in any way, the difficulty of that migration. Indeed my tragic story could be reconfigured as a comic one or as a hopeful, life-affirming bildungsroman. I’m working on those versions, thought my mind still gravitates towards the Tragic Version of events – minds seem to have a habit of doing that.
I am grateful though for this uncomfortable yoking of Brooks and Stevens as I probably would not have read Brooks’ poetry had Stevens not inadvertently turned me onto it. Brooks mainly writes portrait poems and social poems which are not usually my bag. 
In literary criticism circles this self-contained, self-referential reading held sway all through the first half of the 20th century, but was forcefully interrogated by the poststructuralist, feminist, anti-racist, Marxist, postcolonial, new historicist, and queer critics of the 1960s and 70s onwards. 
But 
Here’s a little thought experiment. Take anything you don’t like about yourself or your life at the moment. Now trace back the reason for why you think you are in this situation. Now imagine someone coming along and telling you that the reason you’ve given yourself is mistaken, perhaps even deluded, and the main reason why things are as they are is This New Perfectly Reasonable Truth. Now notice your own shuddering and urge to flee back into the familiar propitious haze of what you already know and have agreed upon. 
Poetry, perhaps like no other art form, 
Poetry, as much as religion and politics, calls up strong emotions of love and hate. “I, too, dislike it,” poet Marianne Moore 
The Japanese word koan translates as “public case”, or legal precedent. But this is not an ex post facto “collective body of judicially announced principles”, delivering the outcome of a contemplative process or dialogue. Instead, a koan is more of a dynamic, DIY phenomenon, just like a poem, giving us the tools to work through an existential case ourselves (big or small), with materials supplied from our own lives.
The poem/koan cannot be treated as a mathematical problem. What does this poem mean, is a meaningless question. What does it mean to you however is perhaps the most meaningful question we can ask. The koan or the poem is thus a bottomless site where we can dig for months, or years, or a lifetime; for as long as it takes until we alight on something that smells, or looks, or even more importantly feels necessary to us (Moore’s “something genuine”).
I sometimes wonder why the second poem I recite by heart each day to myself is a praise poem. To God, no less!
And here is Cumming’s poem in full with all its weird punctuation and wonky syntax – the most galling being, in my eyes, no spaces after semi-colons. Like, WTF Edward Estlin Cummings! Or if you prefer: wtf, ee!
And the only way I know for doing this, is to have these 62, and counting, 
I was born and received my primary education in South Africa, emigrating to the UK in 1986 at the age of 15. After University, I worked in Italy for a number of years whilst also attempting to write a number of (unpublished) novels 🙂
Also, because pain in any shape or form is so uh painful, our suffering Blinkered Minds will often try to avoid this pain in a very intuitive way.
He’s right though.
I’m also relieved to have seen and avoided my neighbour – the one I had an argument with with last week who I spotted walking down another aisle. Whew, and another dopamine hit of pleasure!
But maybe that evening I eat the whole tub of Hagen Daz as I am wont to do and drink most of the wine and feel sick and full of self-loathing.
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. 
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: 
I often talk in sessions about FUSION, and how our problem-solving minds can very quickly and easily get ‘hooked’ on an extremely painful and upsetting thoughts and beliefs.
OK. I’m now going to take you through a whole stack of different defusion techniques so you can discover which ones best help you to unhook. Some of them may seem a bit weird or wacky, but please give them a go and see what happens. In each case, I’ll ask you first to fuse with the thought (i.e. buy into it, give it all your attention, believe it as much as you can), so you can get yourself well and truly hooked. Then I’ll help you to unhook again.
You’ve probably heard the quotation, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’ This saying succinctly reminds us that words can have an enormous influence over our behaviour. For example, books, scriptures and manifestos can, in certain situations, shape entire nations far more powerfully than violence, bloodshed and warfare.
Improving our lives requires committed action. That often means learning new skills or working on old ones. And obviously, if we want to become skilful at anything, we need to practise. This goes for psychological skills as well as physical ones. We can’t develop good defusion skills without practice. And we all need these skills, because the reason-giving machine is here to stay. It’s not going to suddenly transform into your own personal cheerleader or motivational guru. It’s going to keep on telling you multiple versions of the ‘I can’t do it’ story. So are you willing to practise the techniques listed above?
At the moment, I wake up to jackhammers and drills. 
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 
What is the human mind? Why are we different than the birds flying outside our windows? And why do we suffer so? These kinds of questions have puzzled humankind for eons. Here are a couple of ideas that might help as you work with your own suffering in therapy. 
Our minds work symbolically. The word “symbol,” comes from an ancient Greek root, “bol,” which means “to throw.” Combined with “sym” (which means “the same”), a symbol literally means “thrown as the same.” When our minds throw words at us, those words appear to be much the same as the things to which they refer. Which is why if I use the word BOLLOCKS in my punning title, your mind can’t help but see me throwing a slur on something, as well as maybe finding a pair of crude graffiti testicles surfacing in your imagination, or some other form of other mental chatter. Whatever your mind is telling you about the above title is just a story about a word that doesn’t even exist. Maybe the person writing this (me), just wanted to grab your attention through his dense exposition. But once our minds get hold of language and start relating it to other things, who knows where they might go!
As best we can tell, the ability to derive relations like this is probably only about 75,000 to 100,000 years old, and in highly elaborated forms it is much younger than that. Written language marks a real transition in the ability to relate events in this way and it is only five- to ten-thousand-years old, depending on what you count as written symbols. By animal standards, humans are frail, slow-moving creatures. We do not have the strength of gorillas, the teeth of tigers, the speed of cheetahs, or the venom of snakes. Nevertheless, over the last 10,000 years we have taken over the planet. Why is that? There’s a strong chance that it’s got something to do with our abilities to use language.
In normal problem-solving situations, when there is something we don’t like, we figure out how to get rid of it and we take actions to do that. If we don’t like dirt on the floor, we get out the vacuum cleaner. If we don’t like a leaky roof, we fix it. The human approach to solving problems can be stated as, 
This same process applies to emotions. If you try not to feel a bad feeling, such as pain, not only do you tend to feel it more intensely, but previously neutral events also become irritating. Any parent knows this. If the kids are irritating you by making too much noise and you are trying to ignore it, the noise just becomes more and more irritating and, eventually, even little annoyances can cause you to explode.
It’s likely you’ve been using a verbally guided “fix-it” mentality to find a solution for the causes of your suffering. If you’re reading this pages, it’s also likely that your attempts haven’t been entirely successful. The coping techniques you’ve developed to fix or counteract the pain you struggle with belong to the same class of language-based, problem-solving behaviours described in the exercises above.
Language creates suffering in part because it leads to experiential avoidance.Experiential avoidance is the process of trying to avoid your own experiences (thoughts, feelings, memories, bodily sensations, behavioral predispositions) even when doing so causes long-term behavioral difficulties (like not going to a party because you’re a social phobic, or not exercising because you feel too depressed to get out of bed). Of all the psychological processes known to science, experiential avoidance is one of the worst.
In your review of your worksheet, you may have found that your scores in the “Short-term effectiveness” column are relatively high, while your scores in the “Long-term effectiveness” column are relatively low. This is a dangerous trap because short-term effects are far more reinforcing than long-term effects, and these problem-solving strategies do work in most areas of life for a short time. The coping techniques you’ve developed to combat your anger, anxiety, or depression probably do cause these feelings to go away for a short while; otherwise, you wouldn’t engage in them. But how powerful is the long-term effect? How much do your coping strategies really change your condition in the long run?
Unfortunately, these processes are not easy to control because they are so tightly linked to our normal use of language. People tend to “live in their minds,” that is, to engage with the world on the basis of these verbal processes. Living in your mind can be likened to riding a train. A train has its own tracks and it goes where they lead. That’s fine when the tracks are going where you want to go. But if you were traveling in the direction you want to be going, you probably would never have stopped to read this page. If the life you want to live is “off the tracks,” then you have only one option: you must learn how to get off the train and onto another track…at least sometimes.
When were feeling bad and wanting to feel better, perhaps the most important distinction we can make for ourselves is in keeping clear the difference between pain and suffering. The difference can be summarised in the following adage which you may have come across at some point: 
Maybe an example will help. I hate needles. I’m probably not alone in this, but at times this aversion has verged on a kind of phobia. And like any phobia, it has often got in the way of me doing the things I need to do to take care of myself. Like going to the dentist for regular check-ups. In fact, I didn’t go to the dentist from 2010-2017, because…I hate needles! Following on from that rule I’ve set for myself (Thou shall hate needles!) I didn’t go to the dentist until the pain of toothache overcame my unwillingness to tolerate the pain of a needle being pushed into my gums. 
Let’s look at how suffering works. My problem with needles is, if I really think carefully about it, a Suffering Problem, rather than a pain one.
Here’s how I suffer, and perhaps this is how you suffer too. I take the pain of your dismissal, the pain of you not being sensitive to my anxiety, of not validating me and my issues with needles, and I add stuff to that. The stuff I add (often unconsciously) is Suffering. 
I suffer because my mind/brain is “designed” to try and solve internal problems the way it solves external ones. If your front door is jamming, you look at the problem, diagnose why the door is jamming, and then come up with a solution to fix it. The only problem is that internal, existential, emotional issues, don’t respond to our brains Jim-Will-Fix- It strategies in the same way. This is because the most sophisticated technology we have for “fixing” our internal problems or pain is with something called language! All those thoughts, beliefs, internal conversations and monologues, memories, beating ourselves up, threatening to beat others up, could not occur without language. We’re very particular in this way. 
So how do we experience as “cleanly” as possible whatever dose of psychological or physical pain that is next coming our way without getting trapped into having a double dose of suffering alongside it? Here’s a five step process which is easy to do and remember. But it does require practice, until it becomes second nature. Which is where the acronym helps. 
Think of something a situation or a conversation you had with someone, or just something ongoing in your life that is causing you pain. Make a note of your pain on a piece of paper or on your phone. 
In this step, you set the intention to allow yourself to feel some of this pain without reaching for the jar of suffering to start slathering all extra pain on top. Think for a moment how willing are you right now (out of 10) to just experience the pain as it is, without any additional thoughts, analysis, or “stories” about the pain?
In step three, you offer understanding and compassion to yourself for 
Of course your brain will probably ignore you and keep on spinning its stories. So you then make another gentle note of how the invitation to suffer is being delivered in the shape of a THOUGHT, an IMAGE/VIDEO, an INTERNAL CONVERSATION or MONOLOGUE, a MEMORY, or INTENTION, and then once again, you say: ENOUGH! STOP!
Sometimes, when my brain is really set on suffering, and I’m doing something which doesn’t require my full attention, so that my brain can focus entirely on the suffering story, I might need to note and say stop/enough again and again and again. The STOP is especially important when our Suffering Minds are trying to get us to carry out some Actions (revenge, rebuttal, rehash). A Suffering Mind is so skilled at finding ways to convince us that writing an angry email or text will really help us to suffer less, that often, before we know it, we end up doing the very thing that will only make us suffer more. In my experience, lashing out and blaming another human being for the ways they have triggered in me pain, only makes me suffer more. Because then I have to deal with either the anxiety of how they will respond, or the unpleasantness of their defensive words, or whatever their Suffering Brain spins the story to try and make it better for themselves. 
Anxiety is such a nebulous word, but worry is tangible. Take Louis*. Louis is 28 years old and in charge of a small team of people in the NHS. One of Louis’s team, let’s call him Phil, is slacking off at work. He consistently arrives late and does as little as possible. This is complicated by the fact that Phil’s previous line manager, Geoff, was also Phil’s friend, and so would turn a blind eye to Phil slacking off. Louis, the new line manager, needs to step in and have a meeting with Phil next week, setting out what’s expected of him in his role, and also warning Phil that if he isn’t able to fulfil these duties, there might be consequences. Simples, right?
The problem with the amgydala is that unlike the cortex, all of its work is largely unconscious, attaching anxiety (negative emotional valence) to situtations the way the liver aids digestion, or the pituitary gland regulates our hormones. And it happens so quickly. Like a hyper-vigilant set of all-seeing, all-hearing, all-sensing cameras, as soon as the amygdala picks through its lateral nucleus and thalamus on something that may indicate a certain level of danger or harm (and remember, doubt, which is to say anything ambivalent, ambiguous, unsettled, which are most things, signals to a mind predisposed to anxiety DANGER). Then, in less than a tenth of a second, much quicker than the danger signal takes to reach the more measured, “thinky” parts of the brain, the amygdala is already signalling to the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and hypothalamus to provide a surge of adrenaline, increase blood pressure and heart rate, create muscle tension, and get us ready to self-protectively fight, flee, freeze, or worry. 
Here’s your proverbial AHA! moment in dealing with worry. This is an acronym you can use to help you remember a couple of steps to take when you’re being bothered by worrisome thoughts.
There’s a wonderful poem by Mary Oliver where she talks about pain, suffering, and our relation to it.
If you kick a dog, it will yelp and run away. If you kick it regularly, any sign of your arrival eventually will produce fear and avoidance behavior in the dog by means of the process called “conditioning.” But so long as you are out of the picture and are not likely to arrive, the dog is unlikely to feel or show significant anxiety. People are quite different. As young as sixteen months or even earlier, human infants learn that if an object has a name, the name refers to the object. So what, you might say?
Psychological pain hurts, by definition. But it does more than that. Often pain holds you back from living the kind of life you want to live. There is no question that a person with a panic disorder would rather not experience the feeling of extreme fear, because it is so unpleasant. But that discomfort is compounded by the fact that the panic seemingly gets in the way of living itself.
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.
I am an Enid Blyton baby. I don’t know if children read Enid Blyton these days, their parents having perhaps seen the less than hagiographic biopics (Enid, with Helena Bonham Carter: an especially acidulous Blyton). Or maybe they’ve read the “nightmare mother” exposés online [1]. But for me, Noddy and Big Ears, The Secret Seven, Famous Five, and perhaps above all The Magic Faraway Tree shaped the contours of my childhood. 
As soon as Charlie sits down, I can tell that he’s feeling a little bit “off” today. 
I am listening to 
“There is no reason to be miserable in one’s free time when the possibility of matching challenges and skills is under one’s own control and is not limited by the obligatory parameters of work. Yet, at present, most leisure time is filled with activities that do not make people feel happy or strong.”
I have for many years been haunted by a Zen parable about a man being chased by a tiger. Here it is in full:
The character in this Zen fable models different forms of acceptance. There is the 
Recently I’ve been thinking about the word “grant” in the Serenity Prayer. “God, 
What Gail is struggling to accept, and she is not alone in this, is desire and longing: for a partner, for more light in a day, for consumer goods that don’t come with an environmental price tag. “From the urgent way lovers want each other to the seeker’s search for truth, all moving is from the mover,” writes Rumi. “Every pull draws us to the ocean.” And what does the ocean desire, other than to be, and to be fully itself, expressive of itself, inhabiting the space it needs to inhabit? This is a primal desire, and one which moves everything in existence, including us. The same universal force of attraction that gathers atoms into molecules and holds solar systems spinning in galaxies also joins sperm with eggs and makes us swipe left and right on each other on our dating apps.
The Latin root of the word desire, “desidus,” means “away from a star.” One way to interpret this is that stars are the energetic source of all life and an expression of pure awareness. This aliveness and wakefulness is what we long for most deeply—we long to belong to our star, to realize our own true nature. Yet because our desires habitually narrow and fixate on what by nature passes away, we feel “away from our star,” away from the life, awareness and love that is the essence of who we are. Feeling apart from the source of our being, we identify ourselves with our wants and with the ways that we try to satisfy them.
Willa Cather tells us, “There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.” We can honour desire as a life force, but still see how it causes suffering when it takes over our life. Our natural hunger for food can become an ungovernable craving for food—ice cream, sweets, potato chips—comfort food or food to numb our feelings. Our longing for sex and affection can become an anguished dependency on another human being to define and please us. Our need for shelter and clothing can turn into insatiable greed, compelling us to possess three houses and closets full of unworn shoes. Our fundamental longing to belong and feel loved becomes an insistent craving for substitutes.
Hadley and Hayley, both in their late-40s, met on a dating app. They chatted on the phone about beets and their shared appreciation of Dan Savage, and soon were spending as much time as they could together. They would speak on the phone almost every night, text each other throughout the day. Both of them would often announce to the other how fortunate they felt for having met. 
One way of understanding what happened between Hadley and Hayley is to return to the psychoanalytic concept of 
What we see happening with Hadley and Hayley, and indeed with all couples, are times when one or both experience some serious bumping of V-spots. This is Lachkar’s term for our most sensitive area of emotional vulnerability, tantamount to an archaic injury that becomes aroused when one’s partner hits an emotional raw spot.
I often prescribe Derek Walcott’s “
There is a well known poem by James Wright with a title so long it sounds almost silly at first: Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota. The poem, I think, gets to the heart of what I’m trying to understand here. It shares the experiences of a human creature, Wright (?) having a series of devotional, almost otherwordly moments, and yet the poems also stays profoundly embedded in this world, the world of nature. It also ends on a real humdinger of a last line. If poems had ‘plot twists’ a la The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects, this would be it.
Because we are pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding creatures, for most of us, there is going to be something in our lives, maybe even a series of things that we develop a somewhat addictive relationship with.
The next time you are assailed by an addictive thought, or urge (“If I don’t go and get a glass of wine in me as soon as I finish work today, I’m done for!”) here’s something you might like to try.
Two books which have been useful to me in this consideration are Marie Kondo’s Spark Joy and a Shoukei Matsumoto’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind. As ever, cheeky John Crace has taken the mick out of both titles in his 
Remnick’s Interview with Leonard Cohen a few months before his death: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/leonard-cohen-a-final-interview
Here’s the chief problem with Mind-Dumps as far as I can tell. Often the content of what we’re sharing in therapy are thoughts that we have had a hundred, if not a thousand times before. And maybe even shared before with other therapists, or family and friends.
Perhaps before your next session, see where your mind is at with regard to what it needs from the session itself. If it needs to just wander around and do some pain-driven pirouettes and triple Lutzes in the hope of expending some of the suffering energy of your mind out into the room, into someone else’s ears, someone else’s mind, let’s do that!
A WH Smith newsagent window, Market Street, Cambridge, October 1992. Dissociated-me shoving a 
Maybe you’d be watching X-files, or Frasier, or Friends, or The Big Breakfast Show, no matter. Wherever you’d be getting your primetime fix, the motivational neurocircuitry of your brain would also be getting “connected”, dosed up every ten minutes or so with the prescient message that virtual association via mobile telephony and this thing we now call the internet was going to be the answer to your most fervent prayers and fantasies.
It soon became clear to me, even by Christmas 1989, that I was not clever enough or sophisticated enough to maintain the kind of conversational connections that fuelled the intellectual and social life of Cambridge, so I disengaged, bypassing opportunities for affiliation, tucking myself away.
Once I became a regular there, they would often give me a vegetable samosa or garlic naan for free. It was perfectly OK to sit and read my book as I ate my meal, no obligation whatsoever to engage “in wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversation, with protocols promoting maximum civility…which can be educative at the time as well as lead to further networking beyond the confines of the occasion” (notes on Formal Hall from my college prospectus).
That we seek and need to be connected goes without saying, but is connection an end in itself or is the push towards gratification through other people the means to that end?
Melanie Klein, the psychoanalytic Mama of the Connected/Disconnected fairytale goes one step further, by splitting off the connective drive and our disconnected resistance into two separate containers: good breast and bad breast. Or in the parlance of popular culture: good cop/bad cop. Or as political ideologies: Hilary and The Donald (if you’re a Trump supporter: The Donald/Hilary).
I’d now like to say something about Jeremy Prynne’s breasts. Jeremy Halvard Prynne, 
Prynne read the poems and in his somewhat mannered and formal way was very kind and generous with his comments. I asked if I could get a discount on photocopying 100 copies to give away at the performances the following month and he suggested I use his non-carded photocopier in the librarian’s office, coming down to open up for me at midnight. I also photocopied a number of A3 posters of myself as Vitruvian Man, the thought of which now fill me with horror. It was the same image used on the cover, a gaudy self-indulgent Gesamkunstwerk in a desperate bid for connection through the warped lens of indecent exposure.
Maybe for them, the shamed self is more liable to pop up like a weed from the soil of humiliation when critics lay into their follow-up efforts with the sadistic glee of Bronte’s truculent John Reed or the castigating clergyman Brocklehurst. “Generic self-help guff,” carps Reed (aka The Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey). “An uninspired stew of stale ideas and careless execution” moans Brocklehurst (aka fellow music critic/gravedigger Peter Petridis). 
The other day I asked a colleague to EMDR-me-up whilst I sat and read aloud from this text. This involved her, after each segment, waving her fingers back and forth about ten inches from my face, so generating bilateral eye movement, checking in occasionally with my humiliation appraisals via a Subjective Unit of Disturbance Scale. Visualising my naked self on that photocopied cover of 
“I asked you not to send blood but yet do—because if it means love, I like to have it. I cut the hair too close & bled much more than you need—do not do the same & pray put not scissors points near where quei capelli grow. Sooner take it from the arm or wrist—pray be careful.” 
Maybe some form of sexting? Or perhaps a podcast, such as 
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The first question my supervisor always asks me when I am discussing with her someone that I’m working with is: “What gets them out of bed in the morning?” Sometimes she rephrases this as: “What might get them out of bed in the morning?”
Thinking of therapy as a journey is a handy analogy. Imagine heading out on a ten mile hike, as I often do on the weekends. One of my favourite routes, also because it is so close to where I live is 
Life-Goals sound very grand, but I have yet to find a term that sums these up more diminutively. I do think we need to bring in the word “life” here however, denoting as it does, a whole span of living: 
Yearnings are a little bit more nebulous and maybe harder to catch hold of. These are universal, but often stem from unconscious drives that push us in a certain direction, even if the direction we choose is sometimes not the best one for us.
Most interestingly I find, though not suprising if you consider the social nature of our species, is that almost all the things we envy most come back to Connection & Belonging in one way or another. I might be writing a book (or a blog post) for myself, to get my ideas in order (Yearning for Coherence and Understanding, Yearning for Meaning & Self-Direction) but there are very few writers who don’t aspire to having at least one pair of eyes other than their own to read what they’ve written. And hopefully, in an appreciative way (Yearning for Feeling), maybe even thinking: “Blimey, this Steve, seems to know his stuff!” (Yearning for Competence).
Another reason for doing a LIFE MOT is the presence of trauma in our lives, and the recognition of how that (at times) both hinders as well as ultimately may benefit us.
So here’s how you would go about applying a happiness/well-being lens to the life you’re living at the moment.