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Being You, Being Eight

What does it mean to be you?

If I were to ask you to describe your “self”, you might come up with a series of adjectives.

Here are some adjectives that people with an Enneagram Eight personality style often identify with.

MENOT ME
independentdependent
fairunjust
assertivesubmissive
leaderfollower
own persondeferential
unlimitedbounded
no nonsensebeat around the bush
influentialnot listened to
street-wisetaken advantage of
competentunresourceful
magnanimousmean
protectorvictim
self-directedother-directed
directdouble-talk
stand up for rightswimpy
definiteiffy
risk-takeravoider
tenaciousquitter
courageousfearful

You might also recognise in reading this, that not everyone is like you. In fact, only about 6% of the population have your personality style.

This is really important to bear in mind when it comes to our dealings with other people. Because we cannot help but be ourselves, as well as see the world through the lens our own personality style, we often assume that other people might think, feel, and respond to us and their situation in a similar way to us. This is often the cause of a great deal of conflict and upset in our lives.

Other than the above adjectives, what does it really mean to be YOU.

Here are some other factors that are reported to hold true for those who identify with an Eight personality style.

Eights are…driven to avoid weakness, vulnerability, and feeling disempowered. They seek power, influence, and strength to prevent others from controlling or taking advantage of us. They sometimes employ denial to disown their vulnerabilities and weaknesses, allowing them to plow through obstacles, and even (if necessary) intimidate, and overpower those who underestimate them.
Primary Motivation: To avoid weakness, vulnerability, and being disempowered or at the mercy of injustice
Common Adjective used by Eights to describe themselves: Direct, bold, creative, intense, confident, sensitive, honest, powerful, strong, authoritative, reactive
Other People Sometimes Describe Me As: No-nonsense, intimidating, big-hearted, protective, angry, domineering, “too much”, callous, insensitive, scary
Strengths: Strategizing, truth-telling, leading, directness, creativity, no-nonsense, intimidating, effective
Weaknesses: Too much, emotional/reactive, directness, rage, cynicism
Personal Image Style: Bold, confident, interesting, tough, comfortable, striking
I Avoid People Who Are: Fake, too sensitive, manipulative, too emotional, whiny, bullies, negative
Biggest Fears: Betrayal, weakness, disempowerment, being harmed, or over-powered
It Upsets Me When Other People: Try to control me, lie, betray me, bully others, are unfair, too sensitive, act in an inconsiderate way
I Avoid Feeling: Weak, naive, used, sensitive, powerless, disempowered, sad, or controlled
I Need: Autonomy, control, power, loyalty, acceptance

[Mosley, 2023]

Here’s a simple equation which I believe has profound implications for how we understand our “selves”, also our life situation, past/present/future, and most importantly for our therapy journey together: how we deal with upset and suffering in our lives.

YOU = INSTINCTS/LIFE FORCE/ENERGY + NATURE/TEMPERAMENT/PERSONALITY  + NURTURE/CULTURE/LIFE-CIRCUMSTANCES

Let me break that down a bit for us.

INSTINCTS/LIFE FORCE/ENERGY

We often forget that we are animals. Human animals, but animals nonetheless.

What kind of animals are we? We are mammals, we are primates. And like all animals, we are “ruled” to some extent by our instincts.

Instincts are very simply our  natural, automatic behaviours and reactions that have evolved over time to help us survive and thrive. These instincts are innate and serve to guide us through various aspects of our life.

As you read about the three most important human-animal instincts below that make up (y)our “life force”, ask yourself the following all-important question as a human-animal: which of these instincts “dominates” my life as a living creature, by and large?

Even though we utilise all three instincts, generally speaking, our basic functioning relies more heavily on one instinct (our dominant instinct), followed by a secondary “assistant” instinct, while a third instinct is usually “repressed” or under-utilised in some way.

This is because our life-force isn’t limitless (both whilst alive, and clearly when dead), and so our nervous systems and innate, instinctual functioning is often forced to make automatic instinctive choices for us in terms of where we focus our energies.

When you read through the following needs and focus of each of your three instincts, have a think about where your life-force mainly gets channeled (this would be your dominant instinct), as well as which instinct isn’t being given enough energy or attention:

THE SELF-PRESERVATION INSTINCT’S NEEDS AND FOCUS:

Self-care and wellbeing:

(1) Diet, (2) exercise, (3) sleep/rest, (4) relaxation (time in solitude, walk in nature, meditation, yoga, etc.), (5) adequate stimulation (reading, listening to music, healthy sex life, watching documentaries, etc.)

Maintenance and resources:

(1) Money/finances, (2) time-management (self-management, time to self, time with others, being on time, etc.), (3) practical application and skills (being able to address practical needs, fix things, manage life, etc.), (4) work habits/persistence (the ability to follow through, finish tasks, discipline, habits around practical ventures, ways you are handy, etc.), (5) energy management ((how we use our energy, deal with stress, balance silence with activity, etc.)

Domesticity and home:

(1) Comfort/domesticity, (2) safety/security, (3) structure supports life/base of operations (home management, home as a solid launchpad), (4) beauty and holding (comfortable and inviting living/workspace, feeling held by your home, etc.), (5) recharging/restoration (home as a place to restore).

[Further exploration: Is Your Self-Preservation Instinct Balanced, Over-Dominant, or Impaired? How does the Self-Preservation Instinct function in your life and show up in your personality style?]

THE ONE-ON-ONE/SEXUL INSTINCT’S NEEDS AND FOCUS:

Broadcasting and charisma:

(1) Transmitting (initiating energy that broadcasts), (2) display (doing behaviours to get yourself noticed, (3) being attracted and following energy, (4) choosing/fitness (evaluating attraction; auditioning and being aware of being auditioned), and (5), competition/winning.

Exploration and edge:

(1) Activation and arousal, (2) taking risks and having adventures, (3) getting out of comfort zone (breaking habits and feeling soggy in routine), (4) seeking stimulation, and (5) following and honouring impulses and inspirations.

Merging:

(1) Disappearing into something or someone (which is restorative as it gets us away from the egoic self), (2) intense focus and concentration applied to an activity, (3) losing boundaries and sense of self, (4) spending energy (pouring self into something and giving self wholeheartedly), and (5) seeking fusion and at oneness.

[Further exploration: Is Your Sexual/One-on-One Instinct Balanced, Over-Dominant, or Impaired? How the Sexual/1-on-1 instinct function in your life and show up in your personality style?]

THE SOCIAL INSTINCT’S NEEDS AND FOCUS:

Reading people and situations:

(1) Reading facial expressions/body language/tone of voice/moods, (2) reading between the lines, (3) interest in others/attunement/tuning in, (4) empathy/concern, and (5) adapting to cures/adjusting behaviour.

Connecting:

(1) Creating relationships: engaging others, (2) sustaining relationships: maintaining connections and knowing when to end them, (3) communication—speaking and listening, (4) cooperation/reciprocity and (5) play/shared enjoyment/celebration.

Participation:

(1) Getting involved or not: what do I participate in? (2) need to contribute: something beyond my own needs, (3) enrolling: getting others interested and involved in what I am passionate about, (4) part of something bigger/sense of place, (5) belonging and welcoming.

[Further exploration: Is Your Social Instinct Balanced, Over-Dominant, or Impaired? How the Social Instinct function in your life and show up in your personality style?]

Instincts generally work and shows up for us subconsciously. This means that we might be thinking or feeling or behaving in certain ways that are largely governed by our instincts, even though we are unaware of them at work within us.

As we seem to be dominated by ONE of the three instincts, as well as under-utilising aspects of the other two, it can be helpful to consider ways in which we balance our instinctual drives throughout the day, as well as in our lives in general.

This is something we can discuss more when we meet and begin to reflect on your life and the situations you are dealing with at the moment.

NATURE/TEMPERAMENT/PERSONALITY

“You” were once a baby. Babies don’t have fully-formed and expressive ego-functioning styles (aka personalities) which usually only come online in mid-childhood. But even as infants, we all have a very definite temperament or “nature”.

Regardless of our environment when growing up, some babies are more social, or playful, others less so. Some babies are generally quite compliant or easy-going, others are more difficult or demanding. Again, like our instincts, this stuff is just hard-wired into us as human-animals.

As with our instincts, we often forget or downplay our “natural temperament” when it comes to assessing or thinking about our lives, which can cause a great deal of emotional pain and suffering as our expectations on ourselves (as well as others) might be completely out of whack with who we really are and how we function, for better and for worse.

Our adult personality style is really just the “flowering” or “above ground” aspect of our temperamental/instinctual roots. This style will be affected by our upbringing to some extent (see the next section: NURTURE), just as a plant will grow in a more robust way in certain environments rather than others. But it’s probably wise to understand first and foremost whether we are a rose bush, or an orchid, or a sunflower.

Unlike plants we have a nervous system wired up to a brain stem, as well as a right and left-hemisphere which allows for more complex processing of our instincts and natural inclinations.

When our dominant instinct (self-preservation, social, or one-to-one/sexual) is combined with our core personality type, we get a more nuanced understanding of our personality (i.e. a subtype).

It’s very important to understand how our instincts/life-force function at the core of our  temperament, “nature” or personality. Instincts generally work and shows up for us subconsciously. This means that we might be thinking or feeling or behaving in certain ways that are largely governed by our instincts, even though we are unaware of them at work within us.

If you would like to check out how your three “instincts” move with/against your personality type, have a read/listen to this article on Three Ways To Be Eight.

Each of the subtypes described will capture an aspect of “You” (as we have all three instincts), but you will probably also find that one subtype speaks more directly to how you identify as You.

If none of these subtypes speak to you, you may decide to look at another personality style from those I provide here, as perhaps One doesn’t “fit” the You you most identify with.

If possible, please make a note of the subtype that best identifies You and the qualities you identify with, as this will be useful for your understanding of yourself and how You function. It will also give us some useful “scaffolding” with which to explore your current life circumstances and how You are experiencing them.

If you’d prefer to watch a video, or listen to a podcast outlining the qualities of the Eight subtypes, I’d recommend the following:

NURTURE


The interplay between nature (genetics) and nurture (environmental factors) is complex and multifaceted, making it difficult to determine the precise extent to which our life-force/instincts + temperament/nature/ego functioning are influenced by upbringing and trauma. However, it is widely accepted that both nature and nurture play significant roles in shaping our personality, temperament, and ego.

Some key aspects of the nurture side of things which would be good to explore together when understanding “you” and how you show up in the world include: parenting styles, cultural influences, socio-economic status, and traumatic experiences. These factors can contribute to the formation of an individual’s temperament and ego functioning, but they don’t necessarily alter our basic instinctual and temperamental settings.

It is important to note that the influence of environmental factors can vary from person to person, depending on individual genetic predispositions and resilience. Some people may be more susceptible to the effects of upbringing and trauma, while others may be more resilient.

Understanding the complex interplay between nature and nurture is essential understanding how you function, and is built into the Five Factors that constitute my integrative way of doing psychotherapy.

This is something we will always need to bear in mind when thinking about “you”. I look forward to doing this with you soon.

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Feel Better

Being You, Being Two

What does it mean to be you?

If I were to ask you to describe your “self”, you might come up with a series of adjectives.

Here are some adjectives that people with an Enneagram Two personality style often identify with.

MENOT ME
helpfulselfish
generousstingy
supportivedestructive
thoughtfulthoughtless
friendlydetached
nurturingwithholding
soft-heartedunsentimental
caringcruel
empathicconfrontational
self-sacraficingself-centred
relationalloner
welcomingimposing
kindmean
availablealoof
warmcold
people-lovingthing-loving
other-orientedself-oriented
good-listenerjudgmental
complimentarycritical

You might also recognise in reading this, that not everyone is like you. In fact, only about 8% of the population have your personality style.

This is really important to bear in mind when it comes to our dealings with other people. Because we cannot help but be ourselves, as well as see the world through the lens our own personality style, we often assume that other people might think, feel, and respond to us and their situation in a similar way to us. This is often the cause of a great deal of conflict and upset in our lives.

Here are some other factors that are reported to hold true for those who identify with a Two personality style.

Twos are…effusive, emotionally expressive, people-oriented, wilful, but we can also be somewhat emotionally manipulative at times. We are motivated to be seen as helpful and want to be the “special person” in the lives of others. Attuned to others’ needs, we know how to present a pleasing image that can make us desirable, generally likable, and well-received. Sometimes this is done to compensate for feelings of being inconsequential.
Primary Motivation: To be seen as helpful, supportive, and special to important people
Common Adjectives: Kind, supportive, fun, ambitious, loving, nice, charismatic, generous, too nice, friendly, strong, willful
Other People Describe Me As: Caring, helpful, loving, sympathetic, kind, nice, bossy, flirtatious
Strengths: Loving, “able to see the best in others,” helpful, encouraging,
positive, giving others what they want/need, positive
Weaknesses: Too helpful, selfish, meddling, too nice, pushy, angry, resentful, people-pleasing
Personal Image Style: Cool, appealing, attractive, friendly, approachable, cute, sexy, warm
I Avoid People Who Are: Selfish, too anxious (“because it makes me anxious”), sad, angry, negative, unkind
Biggest Fears: Loneliness, being unlovable, being forgotten, depression, insignificance, rejection, valueless
It Upsets Me When Other People: Are negative and unhappy, don’t have confidence, are rude, selfish, take me for granted
I Avoid (If Possible) Feeling: Sad, unhappy, negative, angry, depressed
I Need: People, love, attention, positivity, to be cared for, appreciation

[Source: Mosley, 2023]

WHAT HAS ANY OF THIS GOT TO DO WITH WHAT I’M DEALING WITH IN MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT?

Discovering and understanding our core personality traits seems to be a crucial step towards personal growth and healing. If you resonate with the characteristics detailed above, you might be wondering how this awareness can contribute to your self-discovery or therapeutic journey.

A guiding idea of our exploration is that our personality has a “baseline” tendency, the usual manner in which it interacts with life’s happenings. These interactions often follow recognisable patterns that reflect our innate dispositions. Through a thoughtful analysis of these responses, we might understand better how we function.

This understanding can help us discern whether we are leveraging our strengths, being the best versions of ourselves (i.e. our personality configuration) or if we are inadvertently entangling ourselves in webs of self-generated misunderstanding and distress. In essence, the goal here is to cultivate a form of self-awareness that helps us navigate life’s complexities with kindness, clarity, and resilience.

Now, let’s delve into specific Functional Levels associated with your personality style, breaking this down into three categories: 

ABOVE-AVERAGE FUNCTIONING

Level 1: When we are at our best, we manifest a deep sense of unselfishness, humility, and altruism. We offer unconditional love to ourselves and others, often feeling privileged to be a part of others’ lives in this profound way.

Level 2: Our empathy and compassion flourish, leading us to genuinely care for and show concern about the needs of others. We’re thoughtful, warm-hearted, forgiving, and sincere.

Level 3: We become encouragers and appreciators, seeing the good in others and expressing it. While service remains important, we also take care of ourselves. We’re nurturing, generous, and giving – a loving human animal at heart.

AVERAGE FUNCTIONING

Level 4: To feel closer to others, we may start “people pleasing,” showing excessive friendliness, emotional demonstrativeness, and seemingly “good intentions.” Our attention can become seductive – offering approval, compliments, and flattery. Love and relationships take centre stage in this reciprocal fashion.

Level 5: At times, we may become overly intimate or intrusive. We need to be needed, leading us to hover, meddle, and exert control in the name of love. We create an environment of codependency, making others rely on us and expecting reciprocity for our actions.

Level 6: We may start feeling indispensable and overrate our contributions in others’ lives, becoming self-important and self-satisfied. We can become prone to hypochondria or adopt a martyr-like stance. At this level, we might come across as overbearing, patronising, or presumptuous.

NOT DOING THAT GREAT

Level 7: Our actions can become manipulative and self-serving. We may instil guilt in others by reminding them of their debts to us or make them suffer. Overindulgence in food or medication to suppress feelings and garner sympathy can emerge. Our remarks can become belittling and disparaging, and we may become self-deceptive about our motives and actions.

Level 8: Our behaviour can become domineering and coercive. We may feel entitled to extract anything from others – be it repayment of old debts, money, or even sexual favours.

Level 9: At these levels, we often find ways to excuse and rationalize our actions, as we perceive ourselves as victims abused by others, harbouring bitter resentment and anger. This somatisation of our aggression can result in chronic health problems. In extreme cases, we might burden others by “falling apart,” corresponding to Histrionic Personality Disorder and Factitious Disorder in psychiatric terms.

[Source: Riso & Hudson, 1996]

As you reflect upon these concepts, ask yourself where you frequently identify your position within this metaphorical ladder of perception. In which rung of your self-forged reality do you find the most comfort, and where do you feel confined at times? It’s completely natural for us to transition through these stages in the course of our day. Nevertheless, we might occasionally sense ourselves anchored on a certain rung, particularly during times of significant emotional turmoil in our lives.

This understanding can serve as a launching pad for some therapeutic dialogues, if you wish.

Unless we are comfortably situated within the most balanced areas of our personality, we might choose to delve into more exploratory conversations concerning the parts where we’re facing significant difficulties.

These challenges often arise, you might have noticed, where the personal “self” – largely dwelling in the Imaginary Realm (a Lacanian concept referring to our subjective experience of the world shaped by our desires and perceptions) as well as the Symbolic Realm (the structured world of societal norms, language, and relationships) – collides with the Reality of the world and other individuals.

The Real, according to Lacan, is “that which does not depend on my idea of it” (Ecrits, 1966)

A good definition of suffering then might be something like: the intense emotional dissonance experienced when our subjective interpretations (drawn from the Imaginary and Symbolic realms) clash with the undeniable and independent nature of the Real.

Consider the following reflective questions based on your current Overall Level of Functioning:

  1. In which of the developmental levels do you find ourselves most frequently and why do you think this is the case?
  2. Can you identify a recent situation where you felt “stuck” at a lower level? What were the circumstances, and how did it make you feel?
  3. How does oscillating between different developmental levels affect your relationships, both personal and professional?
  4. What coping mechanisms do you currently employ when you find ourselves at lower levels, and how effective are they?
  5. Are there any recurring triggers that seem to pull you towards lower levels, and how might you manage these more constructively?

EXPLORING THE DEPTHS OF OUR INSTINCTUAL IDENTITY OR “INNER ANIMAL”

Other than the above traits and personality type configurations, what does it really mean to be you?

Here’s a simple equation which we believe has profound implications for how we understand our “selves”, also our life situation, past/present/future, and most importantly for our therapy journey together, how we deal with upset and suffering in our lives.

WE = INSTINCTS/LIFE FORCE/ENERGY + NATURE/TEMPERAMENT/PERSONALITY  + NURTURE/CULTURE/LIFE-CIRCUMSTANCES

Let us break that down a bit for us.

INSTINCTS/LIFE FORCE/ENERGY

We often forget that we are animals. Human animals, but animals nonetheless.

What kind of animals are we? We are mammals, we are primates. And like all animals, we are “ruled” to some extent by our instincts.

Instincts are very simply our  natural, automatic behaviours and reactions that have evolved over time to help us survive and thrive. These instincts are innate and serve to guide us through various aspects of our life.

As you read about the three most important human-animal instincts below that make up (y)our “life force”, ask yourself the following all-important question as a human-animal: which of these instincts “dominates” my life as a living creature, by and large?

Even though we utilise all three instincts, generally speaking, our basic functioning relies more heavily on one instinct (our dominant instinct), followed by a secondary “assistant” instinct, while a third instinct is usually “repressed” or under-utilised in some way.

This is because our life-force isn’t limitless (both whilst alive, and clearly when dead), and so our nervous systems and innate, instinctual functioning is often forced to make automatic instinctive choices for us in terms of where we focus our energies.

When you read through the following needs and focus of each of your three instincts, have a think about where your life-force mainly gets channeled (this would be your dominant instinct), as well as which instinct isn’t being given enough energy or attention:

THE SELF-PRESERVATION INSTINCT’S NEEDS AND FOCUS:

Self-care and wellbeing:

(1) Diet, (2) exercise, (3) sleep/rest, (4) relaxation (time in solitude, walk in nature, meditation, yoga, etc.), (5) adequate stimulation (reading, listening to music, healthy sex life, watching documentaries, etc.)

Maintenance and resources:

(1) Money/finances, (2) time-management (self-management, time to self, time with others, being on time, etc.), (3) practical application and skills (being able to address practical needs, fix things, manage life, etc.), (4) work habits/persistence (the ability to follow through, finish tasks, discipline, habits around practical ventures, ways you are handy, etc.), (5) energy management ((how we use our energy, deal with stress, balance silence with activity, etc.)

Domesticity and home:

(1) Comfort/domesticity, (2) safety/security, (3) structure supports life/base of operations (home management, home as a solid launchpad), (4) beauty and holding (comfortable and inviting living/workspace, feeling held by your home, etc.), (5) recharging/restoration (home as a place to restore).

[Further exploration: Is Your Self-Preservation Instinct Balanced, Over-Dominant, or Impaired? How does the Self-Preservation Instinct function in your life and show up in your personality style?]

THE ONE-ON-ONE/SEXUL INSTINCT’S NEEDS AND FOCUS:

Broadcasting and charisma:

(1) Transmitting (initiating energy that broadcasts), (2) display (doing behaviours to get yourself noticed, (3) being attracted and following energy, (4) choosing/fitness (evaluating attraction; auditioning and being aware of being auditioned), and (5), competition/winning.

Exploration and edge:

(1) Activation and arousal, (2) taking risks and having adventures, (3) getting out of comfort zone (breaking habits and feeling soggy in routine), (4) seeking stimulation, and (5) following and honouring impulses and inspirations.

Merging:

(1) Disappearing into something or someone (which is restorative as it gets us away from the egoic self), (2) intense focus and concentration applied to an activity, (3) losing boundaries and sense of self, (4) spending energy (pouring self into something and giving self wholeheartedly), and (5) seeking fusion and at oneness.

[Further exploration: Is Your Sexual/One-on-One Instinct Balanced, Over-Dominant, or Impaired? How the Sexual/1-on-1 instinct function in your life and show up in your personality style?]

THE SOCIAL INSTINCT’S NEEDS AND FOCUS:

Reading people and situations:

(1) Reading facial expressions/body language/tone of voice/moods, (2) reading between the lines, (3) interest in others/attunement/tuning in, (4) empathy/concern, and (5) adapting to cures/adjusting behaviour.

Connecting:

(1) Creating relationships: engaging others, (2) sustaining relationships: maintaining connections and knowing when to end them, (3) communication—speaking and listening, (4) cooperation/reciprocity and (5) play/shared enjoyment/celebration.

Participation:

(1) Getting involved or not: what do I participate in?, (2) need to contribute: something beyond my own needs, (3) enrolling: getting others interested and involved in what I am passionate about, (4) part of something bigger/sense of place, (5), belonging and welcoming.

[Further exploration: Is Your Social Instinct Balanced, Over-Dominant, or Impaired? How the Social Instinct function in your life and show up in your personality style?]

Instincts generally work and shows up for us subconsciously. This means that we might be thinking or feeling or behaving in certain ways that are largely governed by our instincts, even though we are unaware of them at work within us.

As we seem to be dominated by ONE of the three instincts, as well as under-utilising aspects of the other two, it can be helpful to consider ways in which we balance our instinctual drives throughout the day, as well as in our lives in general.

This is something we can discuss more when we meet and begin to reflect on your life and the situations you are dealing with at the moment.

TEMPERAMENT/NATURE/PERSONALITY

“You” were once a baby. Babies don’t have fully-formed and expressive ego-functioning styles (aka personalities) which usually only come online in mid-childhood. But even as infants, we all have a very definite temperament or “nature”.

Regardless of our environment when growing up, some babies are more social, or playful, others less so. Some babies are generally quite compliant or easy-going, others are more difficult or demanding. Again, like our instincts, this stuff is just hard-wired into us as human-animals.

As with our instincts, we often forget or downplay our “natural temperament” when it comes to assessing or thinking about our lives, which can cause a great deal of emotional pain and suffering as our expectations on ourselves (as well as others) might be completely out of whack with who we really are and how we function, for better and for worse.

Our adult personality style is really just the “flowering” or “above ground” aspect of our temperamental/instinctual roots. This style will be affected by our upbringing to some extent (see the next section: NURTURE), just as a plant will grow in a more robust way in certain environments rather than others. But it’s probably wise to understand first and foremost whether we are a rose bush, or an orchid, or a sunflower.

NURTURE


The interplay between nature (genetics) and nurture (environmental factors) is complex and multifaceted, making it difficult to determine the precise extent to which our life-force/instincts + temperament/nature/ego functioning are influenced by upbringing and trauma. However, it is widely accepted that both nature and nurture play significant roles in shaping our personality, temperament, and ego.

Some key aspects of the nurture side of things which would be good to explore together when understanding “you” and how you show up in the world include: parenting styles, cultural influences, socio-economic status, and traumatic experiences. These factors can contribute to the formation of an individual’s temperament and ego functioning, but they don’t necessarily alter our basic instinctual and temperamental settings.

It is important to note that the influence of environmental factors can vary from person to person, depending on individual genetic predispositions and resilience. Some people may be more susceptible to the effects of upbringing and trauma, while others may be more resilient.

Understanding the complex interplay between nature and nurture is essential understanding how you function and this is something we will always need to bear in mind when thinking about “you”.

I look forward to doing this with you soon.

Categories
Feel Better

The Sexual/Intimate Four Personality Style

LOVE & CONNECTION: THE ESSENCE OF BEING?

At the heart of the Sexual or Intimate Four’s existence lies an insatiable desire for love and connection. We yearn to be seen, understood, and desired by another – to merge with them in a profound union of souls. This longing cues into the notion that human beings are inherently social creatures, craving connection and belonging in order to make sense of their existence, where love represents a fundamental aspect of human nature – the need to transcend our isolated existence and connect with another.

These two quotes from a pair of philosophers who were also married to each other, gets to the heart of this craving for communion:

Jean-Paul Sartre: “If I love the other, I would like them to be everything for me, and I would like to be everything for them Love is a total and mutual surrender.”

Simone de Beauvoir: “The reciprocal recognition and the reciprocal guarantee of existence demand that each should surrender himself wholly to the other.”

INTENSITY

For this personality subtype, intensity is a defining trait. We seek emotional intensity in all aspects of our lives, and without it, everything can seem dull and boring. When we want someone’s love, we can be very direct about our needs, or we might try to make ourselves seem special or attractive in some creative way so as to get attention. 

As Sexual Fours, we are often extremely  passionate, creative, and drawn to deep emotional connections. Professions that allow us to express ourselves, explore our emotions, and form meaningful relationships are likely to be a great draw for us, and we often tend to gravitate toward careers that allow us to form emotional bonds with others, all while embracing our individuality and passion. Often we are to be found working in the arts, but we also, as highly empathetic individuals, may be drawn to professions that involve helping others navigate their emotional challenges, fostering deep connections and understanding in the process.

People often mistake us for Type Eights or Sexual Twos. While we do share similarities with those types, our focus on envy and competitiveness often sets us apart. We often have a wider range of emotions than Eights, and are more likely to express anger. We also differ from Sexual Twos in that we are not as oriented towards pleasing others in a “give to get” manner.

ROMANTICISM

Sexual Fours, it might be said, are the very the epitome of romanticism and the desire to be rescued from our own complex emotions. We embrace our vulnerability and impressionability with a flair, and we’re not afraid to be assertive or bold in our self-expression. Contrary to our fellow Fours, we’re not content to let our romantic fantasies gather dust – we bring them to life with all the passion we can muster.

We might even be described as “intimacy junkies”driven by a deep desire to be the most important person in our loved one’s life. But equally, this can manifest in many of our relationships. We feel a strong need to be the one that our partner, or friend cherishes above all others, or we might (quite unconsciously) yearn to be that special client that our therapist cannot forget.

The following poem by Hafez has a very Sx4 quality to it:

Everyone you see, you say to them,
Love me.
Of course you do not do this out loud;

Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.

Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying,
With that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in this world
Is dying to Hear.

“Love,” Slavoj Žižek reminds us, is not an immediate relation between two individuals; it also involves a reference to the big Other.” For us, this relation encapsulates a complex interplay between our longing for connection and our fears of abandonment. Often our emotional tango with desire and fear demands continuous recalibration, involving  intricate footwork that might keep us in perpetual and quite tiring motion.

THE PARADOX OF DESIRE AND THE FEAR OF ABANDONMENT

At the core of the Sexual Four’s existence lies a paradox – our intense desire for connection is often accompanied by an equally strong fear of abandonment. This fear stems from our deeply rooted belief that we are somehow flawed or unworthy of love, prompting us to push away the very people we yearn to be close to.

This can often put pressure on our relationships, for we often can’t help but compare ourselves to others, always seeking ways to outshine if possible our competition and prove our worth. Our driving force it might be said,  is to be seen as worthy and desirable in the eyes of our significant others.

For us, sexual energy is not just about physical pleasure, but it is also a way to gain something from other human creatures – respect, appreciation, and approval. We may for this reason use our sexuality to compensate for feelings of inadequacy and shame that lurk deep inside of us. We often will strive to make ourselves beautiful, charming, and elegant in order to seduce, only to turn them down or withdraw in some way, in an effort to protect ourselves from the fear of abandonment. In our minds, it’s better to reject someone before they have had the chance to reject us.

As might be expected, our emotional lives are often a whirlwind, swirling around the person who has captured our hearts. Admiration, longing, and even resentment can coexist within us, as we navigate the stormy seas of our feelings. Sensual and sometimes even seductive, we can wear our hearts on our sleeves, yet jealousy and possessiveness may lurk just beneath the surface. We often question our own desirability, striving for greatness in hopes of earning the love and approval of the object of our affection.

ENVY (THE GLASS-HALF-EMPTY LENS)

Envy is the key word here: our ever-present companion, and it’s particularly noticeable in our relationships. We often fall for those who embody the qualities we admire and desire for ourselves. However, these same traits can spark envy and resentment within us, turning our adoration into a kind of rivalry. We may oscillate between idealizing and rejecting our partners, unable to reconcile their imperfections with our fantasies.

In our quest for love, we’re frequently drawn to the allure of the unattainable. We may spend countless hours pining for the attention of those who are, for one reason or another, just out of reach. Our hearts brim with jealousy and disdain for anyone who dares to share the spotlight with us in our lover’s life.

In our darker moments, envy can drive us to sabotage those we perceive as rivals. Guided by the belief that “misery loves company,” we might feel justified in causing pain to those who have disappointed or wronged us. 

When we are consumed by envy, our anger can intensify into hatred towards a competitor or a partner who seems to be drifting away. By diminishing their worth, we feel that we are making ourselves more desirable in comparison. However, when we turn our anger inward, it can lead to dark fantasies or even suicidality. 

The following poem by Rilke (a Sexual Four) captures some of the pent-up frustration of this type:

THE PANTHER

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

IDENTITY AND AUTHENTICITY

As we, the Sexual Fours pirouette and sometimes even peacock our way through the theatre of life (what is “real”, what is “true” is a profound existential question for us), the words of Friedrich “Four” Nietzsche often resonate:

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

Our dance, is often a complex choreography of desires, fears, and aspirations, underscoring our quest for identity and authenticity. This can sometimes be quite bewildering to those we are dancing for, who might struggle to comprehend its often distinct rhythms.

In this intricate choreography, we traverse the emotional landscape, seeking to know ourselves through the prism of The Extraordinary. The connections we forge, especially with those we deem interesting to us, serve as mirrors reflecting our true selves. 

“We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them, ” Elbert Hubbard tells us, perhaps highlighting one way in which Sexual/Intimate Fours seek to connect to those we desire to have deep and authentic ties to.  Our intimate interactions become the canvas upon which we paint our self-portraits. 

Navigating this often treacherous terrain of authenticity, we grapple with the challenge of staying true to ourselves in a world that needs to create conformity, congruity, and compliance in order to thrive. Our pursuit of authenticity, although noble and often heartfelt, can often expose us to a perilous abyss of self-doubt and uncertainty.

This ongoing quest for identity and authenticity, though fraught with challenges, is a testament to our resilience and determination, as we dance to a music that sometimes only we can hear.It is through this very dance however that we come to know ourselves, transforming the existential peculiarities that define us into an often artful and engaging manifestation of self-expression and growth.

GETTING OUT OF OUR EGO CAGES AS SEXUAL/INTIMATE FOURS

Our path to growth as Sexual or Intimate fours involves learning to be with our own suffering without projecting it onto others. It’s important for us to recognize the value of all of our emotions, not just our competitive impulses. Equanimity for a Four means accepting ourselves as we are, even if we aren’t the best or superior to others in terms of those qualities we desire to be seen and appreciated. By acknowledging all of our feelings and being compassionate towards ourselves and others, we can develop more meaningful relationships and a greater sense of self-worth.

FURTHER READING: 
Chestnut, B. (2013). The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths To Greater Self-Knowledge. She Writes Press.
Lubbe, J. D. (2020). The brain-based Enneagram (2nd edition). Thrive Neuro.
Mosley, S. L. (2023). The Narcissist In You (And Everyone Else): Recognizing the 27 Types of Narcissism. Rowman & Littlefield.
Naranjo, C. (1990). Ennea-Type Structures: Self-Analysis For The Seeker. Gateways/IDHHB Inc.
Riso, D. R., & Hudson, R. (1999). The Wisdom of the Enneagram. Bantam Books.
Wagner, J. P. (2010). Nine Lenses On The World: The Enneagram Perspective. NineLens Press.

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The Self-Preservation Nine Enneagram Personality Subtype


Riso & Hudson (1991) call this Personality Subtype “The Comfort Seeker” [see a general overview of the Nine personality style here]:

“In the average range, this variant is a pleasant, easygoing Nine who does not ask much from life. Self-Preservation Nines prefer simple pleasures that are readily available—eating good food, especially food that is easy and quick to prepare, watching a favourite rerun on television, or “zoning out” in a comfy chair.”

We are usually not that ambitious, although we can be quite talented. We generally deal with anxiety by getting involved in busy work—puttering and routines—and may use small tasks to avoid dealing with bigger projects. We often become increasingly attracted to minor rewards as compensation for not being able to pursue our real desires— and generally there will be some repressed underlying anxiety about not attending to our more fundamental needs.

A CONCRETE PERSONALITY STYLE

Us Self-Preservation Nines are generally very “concrete” people, oriented towards immediate experience, who don’t relate much to abstractions or metaphysical concepts (although Nines with a One wing, “The Dreamers”, will sometimes have this aspect to them).

As Self-Preservation Nines there is usually less innate “psychological mindedness” and introspection, and more focus on tangible and immediate “things to do”. We find experiences much easier to deal with than theory. We can also often struggle to put our own experiences into words, and prefer not to talk a lot about what is going on inside us in general.

Naranjo (1991) describes the meaning behind “Appetite” as a kind of excessive “creature-likeness,” characterized by an “I eat therefore I am” or an “I sleep therefore I am” attitude that erases the question of “being” in a larger sense. For us SP Nines, the ordinary facts of life get in the way of thinking about abstract things, like what might be lacking in our experience. We are people who live life in a more simple and direct way, and this is generally how we like things to remain.

More than the other two Type Nine subtypes, us Self-Preservation Nines also tend to want more time alone. Like other Nines, we too can habitually focus our attention on other people and on our environment, but we also find it much more relaxing and grounding to be by ourselves, as it allows us to more fully relax into whatever activity we are engaged with. 

Like other Nines are very loving people, but deep down we usually don’t have the sense of being loved. It’s as if we have resigned ourselves to not actively receiving love for ourselves. For us Self-Preservation Nines, the search for comfort in pleasurable activities may reflect a desire for compensation for our deeper sense of abnegation. The jolliness or fun-loving spirit of our type is very real though, and a very endearing characteristic of our personality style, as well as functioning as another kind of compensation for an early lack: we can often feel the need to substitute fun for love.

For this reason, we tend to be active and intuitive, expressing a kind of subtle strength in everything we do. We are the most “Eight-ish” of the three Nine subtypes. Our sense of inertia with regard to taking action places us more firmly in the Ninth Dimension, so we are unlikely to be mistaken for Eights who don’t do this. But in our own quiet and peaceful way, we do have a fairly forceful energy, especially in contrast to the Sexual Nine, who is often a much less assertive character. 

Us Self-Preservation Nines can thus have a stronger presence than the other two Nine subtype personalities, and for this reason, we can also be more irritable and stubborn. It can be very difficult for us to accept that another person is right or may have a point with something we are conflict with them about. 

WHAT WE STRUGGLE WITH

Nines’ inertia (the Achille’s Heel of the 9th dimension) shows up most clearly in our self-preservation variant. Apathy and self-neglect can cause us Self-Preservation Nines to have difficulty mobilising ourselves to obtain what we really want or even to take care of all our genuine self-preservation needs [read more about the Self-Preservation instinct here]. Increasingly, we might use food/drink/routines to suppress feelings of anxiety or anger and can sometimes struggle with various forms of addictive behaviour.

We generally do not want our pleasant moods to be disturbed by others and can often resist others simply by not responding to them, remaining stubbornly silent.

In the unhealthy range, we Self-Preservation Nines can fall into deep apathy about our lives and can become fatigued and ineffectual. We can even become the chronic couch potatoes, emotionally shut down and slowly wasting away our health, relationships, and possibilities. Addictions are not uncommon for us.

Wagner (2010) points out that when the personality Achilles Heel of the Nine (indolence, indecisiveness, apathy) leaks into the self-preservation instinct “appetite can get divorced from satisfaction and can become out of control, being pursued for its own sake”. Binge-eating or drinking, shopping sprees, trips to the casino, or carrying out our various self-care routines in a rigid and uncompromising fashion are conflict-resolving strategies for us SP Nines, allowing us to numb out while appearing to be active. 

We often deal with anger and anxiety through appetite, trying to either drown these feelings or stuff them away. Our egoic functioning can often focus on inconsequential things in the belief that we need these for survival, replacing true needs and desires with non-essentials. Unfortunately these wishes and routines don’t fulfil the real self, which still experiences a hunger that never was and still isn’t fulfilled.

GOING TO THE “LOW SIDE” OF OUR PERSONALITY TYPE

Sterlin Mosely (2022) with his somewhat caustic wit calls us Self-Pres Nines “Neglectful Slackers” when we go to the low side of our personality type.

Mosley notes that the less pleasant and “nice” side to us Self-Preservation Nines is often hidden (both from ourselves and others) and is more challenging to detect due to our propensity to undervalue ourselves and our importance as a feature of our overall personality structures. 

 He also notes that SP9s, especially when in a state of stress, can sometimes become “incredibly dismissive of others’ concerns, taking the the phrase don’t sweat the small stuff (and its all small stuff) to a whole new level, and stubbornly refusing to be bothered by anyone or anything.”

Mosley suggests that it can be useful for those who are in relationship with us to take the following tack when dealing with our way of being in the world:

  1. Avoid disrupting our routines too much, as this is when you’ll get the most pushback from our subtype. Instead, suggest variations or deviations from our norm and let us decide whether or not to adopt these.
  2. When ourr subtype is at its worst, we can be exceptionally neglectful and callous. Remember, this stems from our own self-neglect, and you must for this reason prioritize your own emotional needs because we are unlikely to do so for you.
  3. We SP9s can often cut corners, be reticent, or even downright miserly about putting forth more energy or effort than we need to. Getting into a conflict with us will only make us dig in our heels even more. It’s best to just leave us alone when we are upset, carry on and find ways to give yourself what you need. Silence is the best language when dealing with an SP9. If you allow us to retreat and find our stillness and composure once more, we will reconnect in time with you.
  4. If we become frustrated, dismissive or angry, it’s best to leave us alone rather than to get into conflict. We are hugely conflict-avoidant, and when pushed to engage with conflict, the depth of our rage (if it ever emerges, and it probably won’t, as we fear our own anger) can be explosive and destructive.

INNER-WORK FOR SELF-PRESERVATION NINES 

Dr. Jerome Lubbe, a Functional Neurologist summarises some general bio-psycho-spiritual steps we can take as Nines to reach our full potential.

This begins by recognising that our innate nature is directed towards PEACE, our innate motivation is that of SERENITY, and our innate gift in terms of what humanity can learn from us is that of REST

In order to promote these strengths, he suggests:

  • Meditating with the specific intention of embodiment (body scanning, somatic experiencing, focused movement, etc)
  • Engaging in weight-bearing, fine-motor, body-based exercises such as: Tai Chi, Yoga, Qi Gong, Jiu Jitsu, etc
  • Practicing focused 4-7-8 breath work (as we breathe, count to 4, hold for 7, breathe out for 8)
  • Walking 15-17,000 steps per day (Begin with 1K and increase as our body allows).
  • Prioritizing Emotional Intelligence and Mental Health.

In terms of brain-activation, he suggests the following three reflection questions which we might ask ourselves on a daily basis:

  1. What positive actions can I take in response to the serenity I experience? How can I make that serenity more of an active force? [This targets brain-stem activation which is the “source” of of our personality style]
  2. What does a healthy emotional relationship with serenity mean to me? [Right Brain – intentional activation]
  3. What are the specific moments today where have I encountered life-giving serenity? How can I pragmatically encourage more experiences like this? [Left Brain – intentional activation]

When we are overwhelmed, fatigue often expresses as panic quickly followed by a Flight/Freeze response. Consider the following:

  1. How do I respond when my sense of peace and steadiness is threatened? (Is this reaction appropriate. Am I aware of my breath in these moments?)
  2. How do I respond when conflict and neglect are present? (Is this reaction appropriate? Am I aware of my breath?)
  3. Practicing stillness externally (possibly with others) and engaging in breath awareness.

More specifically, we Self-Preservation Nines can travel the path from our Achilles’ Heel of apathy and inaction to “right” action or wisdom by making conscious contact with our anger and being more proactive in thinking through, tapping into, and acting from our own clearly-defined self-interests.

Feeling and working with our anger instead of avoiding it can help us connect more thoroughly with our passion and our power; and if we have more awareness of our anger we can then connect to an inner sense of strength and fortitude that will help us to get what we want instead of giving up on it and losing ourselves.

 If we can find a way to go for what we want in more direct ways, we can fulfil our deeper desires and bolster our inner sense of being instead of distracting ourselves from its absence.

 Being more directly in touch with our power and passion also allows us to open up more to being loved and having the kind of connections that nurtures us instead of the pseudo-connections we normally satisfy ourselves with because our “acorn-self” thinks these are all we can get. 

Instead of the “empty calories” of our comfortable activities and our enmeshed relationships, allowing ourselves to feed our appetite for love and presence by accessing our emotions, taking in real love, and making more conscious connections seems to be the path for us Nines out of our ego cages, giving us more access to happiness, health, and well-being.

FURTHER READING: 
Chestnut, B. (2013). The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths To Greater Self-Knowledge. She Writes Press.
Lubbe, J. D. (2020). The brain-based Enneagram (2nd edition). Thrive Neuro.

Mosley, S. L. (2023). The Narcissist In You (And Everyone Else): Recognizing the 27 Types of Narcissism. Rowman & Littlefield.

Naranjo, C. (1990). Ennea-Type Structures: Self-Analysis For The Seeker. Gateways/IDHHB Inc.
Riso, D. R., & Hudson, R. (1999). The Wisdom of the Enneagram. Bantam Books.
Wagner, J. P. (2010). Nine Lenses On The World: The Enneagram Perspective. NineLens Press.
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HOLY TRUTH (from Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas by A.H.Aalmas)

The awareness that the cosmos objectively exists now; that this existence is its own definition, and continues whether an individual understands it or not; and that the individual experiences the truth of Reality most completely when he views each moment fresh, without preconceptions about what should be happening.

  —Ichazo, 1972

  The Holy Idea for ennea-type Eight is Holy Truth. It refers to the unity of existence, and includes and goes beyond Essence and the Absolute. To understand what the Holy Truth is, we need to first investigate what truth is.

  Truth

The first type or level of truth that we encounter is what we call relative truth. Relative truth is the fact of what is happening, and we call it “relative” because it is specific to the person, the situation, and the time in which the experience is taking place; this means it is constantly changing. For example, the relative truth right now is that you are sitting reading this book, and a while ago the truth was that you were doing something else. The relative truth depends on the situation, and tells us the facts of what is happening now. These truths are the most obvious ones, and are the points of departure for contacting a deeper level of truth.

  If you inquire more deeply into the relative truth of a situation, you will find that the psychodynamic and existential bases of it begin to reveal themselves. Then, at some point, you might start to experience what we call the essential truth, which is the presence of Essence itself. For example, let’s say that you find yourself fantasizing about eating some ice cream. The relative truth is that this is what is going on in your mind. If you inquire into the desire for the ice cream, you might realize that you are feeling alone, and that this brings up a sense of missing a particular kind of contact. Then, as you stay with that, you see that you’re wanting a certain kind of love that reminds you of your mother. You realize that your mother’s love tastes a little like ice cream. This might lead you into experiencing a quality of love that is sweet and soft, and that makes you feel cared for and loved. As you contact this quality of love, you are in touch with the actual essential aspect that you long ago identified with your mother. This level of the truth of the situation is the essential truth. That truth is a quality of love that is present in you but is only felt on a relative level as the desire for ice cream.

  On this essential level, the facts of your situation take on a sense of meaning, of richness and of depth, because they usher you into the realm of what truly exists, beyond the surface of things. An essential truth is not a thought, an idea, a reaction, or an action; its most important characteristic is that it is an ontological presence—it has a substantive existence. Although the relative truth of a situation can take us to the essential truth of it, the essential level is not dependent upon the situation. It is self-existing; it is its own realm existing independently of who we are and what we are doing.

  The essential truth helps us understand what is really happening and what exists beneath the appearance of things. A fantasy of eating ice cream is simply an image in your mind, and even real ice cream disappears or changes form after it is eaten. The love that it may evoke or reflect, however, has an intrinsic and unchanging existence, although your awareness of it may come and go. It exists as a presence that is substantive and real; it has energy, affect, and potency.

  If we continue pursuing the truth of the situation, the essential truth will continue to expand and reveal ever-deeper dimensions of Being until, at some point, we come in contact with the formless dimensions of Being. When we first encounter Essence, we experience it in the dimension of form, contained within us, in other words, “There is love in my heart, will in my belly, clarity in my head,” and so on. At a deeper level, the presence of Essence expands and loses its boundaries, and we realize that it is actually boundless. This is the beginning of experiencing the formless or boundless dimensions. The first formless dimension that we usually encounter, as discussed in Part Two, is that of Living Daylight: a love that is not just within you, but is every-where—pervading everything, penetrating all boundaries.

  So we have moved from the fact of what is happening to what truly exists within you, and from there to what truly exists beyond your body—what exists in the whole cosmos. In the boundless dimensions, Essence still has the quality of being a presence, a fullness, and a richness. As our experience deepens, the boundless dimensions keep revealing themselves in continuing depth, one after the other, as we penetrate deeper and deeper concepts within our mind, and these dimensions will lead us eventually to the deepest, innermost truth—absolute truth. This dimension of the Absolute is beyond all concepts, including that of existence or non-existence.

  It is not that there is a formless or boundless dimension that pervades everything or is the essence or everything, since seeing it this way creates a dichotomy that does not exist. It is not as though there is me and there is my essential nature. The formless dimensions bring in another kind of perception, which is of Being as a formless, boundless, real existence, a substantial presence that is not contained by any boundary. When you experience pure, translucent, self-existing boundless presence, you see that it is not only the fundamental nature of Essence itself, but also of everything that exists. It exists in everything, and everything exists in it. We see here that the universe is ultimately pure Being, and that this pure Being not only supports us, infuses us, and is our nature, but more fundamentally, that it constitutes us. It is completely inseparable from what we are. So it not only pervades and fills the universe, but it is the universe. This understanding that there is no universe separate from this pure boundless self-existing Beingness is a more complete level of the truth.

  The perception that Being constitutes the totality of everything is what is generally called a mystical experience. Before this, you may have spiritual experiences, but when you experience the oneness and the unity of existence, you are on the level of the mystical. In the dimension of Living Daylight, you experience that everything is made out of love. When you look around you, everything might appear, for example, to be made out of a pink and sweet diamond-like taffy substance, and be pervaded with a wonder, a beauty, and a sweetness.

  So the experience of boundlessness that arises as we move into the formless dimensions becomes the deepest level of truth that we perceive. On the level of the Supreme (the dimension of Pure Presence or Pure Being), for example, you realize that everything is a translucent Beingness. You see that it is not as though translucent Beingness is in everything or that everything exists in it, but that everything is the translucence. It is inside things, outside things, and in between them. There is no place that is not translucent Beingness. On this level of the Supreme, there is no separation between what we call appearance and reality, the form and the meaning. They are all one thing; there is a unity.

  The perception of this unity arises through merely seeking to understand the truth of the situation. It is not a matter of generating a particular experience; you just open your eyes to what is here. When you experience this level of truth, you not only perceive this inherent unity, but you also see that as you stay with one boundless dimension, it reveals another, deeper one. Dimensions of formless Being reveal themselves until we come to the origin and source of all dimensions, the Absolute. Initially, you might experience the Absolute as the source of everything, but as your experience matures, you realize that everything is the Absolute—there is no separation. The full experience of the Absolute is that there is nothing but the Absolute. Just as you have seen that love constitutes everything on the dimension of Living Daylight, and Being constitutes everything on the level of the Supreme, here we see that the Absolute constitutes everything. So as our understanding of the nature of reality deepens, it becomes more and more mysterious and nonconceptual, until it arrives at this dimension of the Absolute in which the nature of reality reveals itself as a profound mystery.

  Comprehensive Unity

  However, none of the levels of truth that we have been describing is what the Holy Idea of Holy Truth refers to. Holy Truth is the perception that all these levels are actually one thing, that all the dimensions constitute a complete state of unity. In other words, all the dimensions of reality are completely inseparable from one another, and all are the same thing. This is the perception that there is absolutely no duality—either horizontally (between objects) or vertically (between dimensions). So although we experience ourselves moving progressively into deeper and deeper dimensions of reality as our inquiry becomes increasingly subtle, Holy Truth is the perception that all these dimensions exist simultaneously. They are all facets of the same reality, so the sense of a hierarchy is ultimately illusory.

  To understand how all the dimensions exist as a unity, let’s take the example of the physical body. At the level of relative truth, we first see the appearance of the body: we see its shape, we notice the limbs, the face, the expression. Penetrating beneath the surface, we realize that there are muscles, bones, organs, blood vessels, and so on. This level would correspond to the essential truth. If we investigate into the nature of these inner components, we will see that they are all made out of molecules. These molecules reveal themselves to be made out of atoms which, in turn, are made up of sub-atomic particles. These levels would correspond to the progressive truths of the formless dimensions. Investigating even more deeply, we discover that these are ultimately space, corresponding to the Absolute level. Are the sub-atomic particles or the organs separate from the outer form of the body? No. All these dimensions are present and interpenetrate each other. You couldn’t take one level away and leave the others remaining. Although the Absolute is the ultimate reality that remains unchanged if you take everything else away, all levels of reality exist as a totality all the time. They form a unity.

  Holy Truth, therefore, negates duality. It tells us that there is no such thing as discrete, separate existence. However, we know that for the consciousness of the ego-self, the sense of separateness is fundamental. So Holy Truth challenges and ultimately dissolves the ego’s sense of separateness.

  While one does experience the sense of unity when experiencing any of the formless dimensions, the perception here is of the unity of the dimensions themselves. The Buddhists call this “total completeness,” while the Sufis call it the “all-inclusive state,” or the “Divine Being,” whose all-inclusive name is Allah. Allah, then, does not refer to any particular dimension or state, but refers to all that exists—at any time, on all its levels and in all its dimensions—as a unity. So you could call the perception of Holy Truth objective truth, reality, the universe in its totality, Divine Being, unity of existence, or total completeness.

  Oscar Ichazo’s definition of Holy Truth is: “The awareness that the cosmos objectively exists now; that this existence is its own definition, and continues whether an individual understands it or not; and that the individual experiences the truth of Reality most completely when he views each moment fresh, without preconceptions about what should be happening.”

  Let’s break this down and see what we can understand. “The awareness that the cosmos objectively exists now.” He is saying that the totality of all that exists, on all its levels (which is what he means when he uses the word cosmos), is the nowness of experience and that this totality objectively exists. It is “its own definition,” meaning that it does not depend on our opinions about it; and “continues whether an individual understands it or not,” meaning that it actually exists whether or not we understand it. To experience reality fully, one must view “each moment fresh, without preconceptions about what should be happening,” meaning that if we are completely open and not filtering our experience of the moment through our subjectivity, we will see this unity existing right now, and that now does not refer to time, but to the immediately apprehended existence of the universe itself.

  So everything that is conceivable and experienceable exists right now as one. The formless dimensions, the essential states, and physical reality are not separate from each other, nor are physical objects separate from each other; there is no division anywhere—only complete unity. The alchemical concept for this is the idea of the macrocosm, the totality of the universe.

  The Sufi view of this Holy Idea is expressed in the following poem by Shabistari, from The Secret Garden:

  He whose great soul is never vexed by doubt

  Knows of a surety that there is but one

  Existence absolute. To say “I am the Lord”

  Belongs to God alone: his personality

  Is not with thee; fancy and thought lie hid.

  God’s glory may by none be shared; therein

  I, thou, and we are not, for all are one.

  The person and the existence join in one,

  For unity admits no variance.

  He who is free from self, when he obtains

  That freedom, through his echoing soul resounds

  “Verily I am God,’ and in eternity

  Is opposition overwhelmed, and then

  The pilgrim and his progress are but one.

  Concord and incarnation spring from variance,

  But unity is born of pilgrimage.

  So nature’s order from existence springs,

  Nor God his slave, nor man his God becomes.

  Concord and union here may never be,

  For to see two in one is error’s core.

  Creator and created beings are

  Alike a dream, nor is what seems to be.

  . . .

  What is that atom greater than the whole?

  . . .

  There is one atom greater than the whole—

  Existence; for behold the universe

  Is, yet that universe itself is being.

  Being is various in outward form,

  but in its being there is inward unity.

  (Shabistari, 1969, pp. 48, 71)

  Shabistari is saying that to understand and experience this unity, we have to experience Beingness. It is only in Beingness that we can perceive the unity. If we look at reality from the egoic perspective, we don’t see unity; we see discord, opposition, and duality. But if we experience Beingness and allow it to guide us, it will lead us to the formless dimensions and the experience that things don’t exist separately from each other. On this level, we see that separateness is not ultimately real, and that although objects may appear discrete, in reality all objects actually make up one thing.

  This understanding is expressed from a Buddhist perspective in the following passage by the Tibetan lama, Longchenpa. It is taken from his text on the mantrayana tantra, which is written from the state of unity itself, as though it were expressing itself. You will notice that the language is very similar to that of some of the theistic approaches.

  All experiences and life-forms cannot be proven to exist independently of their being a presence before your mind, just like a lucid dream.

  All that is has me—universal creativity, pure and total presence—as its root.

  How things appear is my being.

  How things arise is my manifestation.

  Sounds and words heard are my messages expressed in sounds and words.

  All capacities, forms, and pristine awarenesses of the buddhas;

  The bodies of sentient beings, their habituations, and so forth;

  All environments and their inhabitants, life forms, and experiences;

  Are the primordial state of pure and total presence.

  (Longchenpa, 1987, p. 32)

  Not realizing that everything we can perceive is nothing other than the manifestation of one’s mind is called samsara in Buddhism. Samsara, the delusional state, is seen from Longchenpa’s point of view as not recognizing the unity of what is.

  What follows is another section from You are the Eyes of the World, in which the nondual doctrine of Dzogchen, or total completeness, is described:

  [Because my creativity is beyond all affirmation and negation,]

  I determine all events and meanings.

  Because no objects exist which are not me,

  You are beyond perspective or meditation.

  Because there does not exist any protection other than me,

  You are beyond charismatic activity to be sought.

  Because there is no state other than me,

  You are beyond stages to cultivate.

  Because in me there are from the beginning, no obstacles,

  You are beyond all obstacles; self-arising pristine awareness just is.

  Because I am unborn reality itself,

  You are beyond concepts of reality; subtle reality just is.

  Because there is nowhere to go apart from me,

  One is beyond paths to traverse.

  [Because all buddhas, sentient beings, appearances,

  Existences, environments, inhabitants]

  Arise from the quintessential state of pure total presence,

  One is beyond duality.

  Because self-arising pristine awareness is already established,

  One is beyond justifying it; the transmission of this great teaching provides direct entry into understanding.

  Because all phenomena do not exist apart from me,

  One is beyond duality. I fashion everything.

  (Longchenpa, 1987, p. 35)

  So according to the Idea of Holy Truth, reality, when seen objectively, has no divisions in it. It exists, it is now, and it is nondual. There is no me, no you, no other, no universe separate from God; no universe separate from the Void; no you and Essence, no personality and Essence; no physical body and soul—all these distinctions are illusions and are not ultimately real. There is only one thing, and it cannot even be called “one” because if you call it one, you are comparing it to two, and it is not one in contrast to two. It is nondual, an indivisible existence, no matter how you look at it or think about it. While the different teachings may emphasize different qualities of this unity, seeing it from the perspective of love or awareness, for example, the assertion here is that fundamental to reality is the fact of unity. All the religions assert this sense of the all-inclusiveness of reality. Another way of saying it is that God is everywhere, omnipresent. Holy Truth is the way that the teaching of the Enneagram of Holy Ideas expresses this understanding.

  We must remember that the nature of the whole of reality is not expressed by Holy Truth alone. It is described by all three Holy Ideas at the top of the Enneagram. If you really experience the unity of all things, you also recognize the inherently loving quality of that unity. The existence of Holy Love is the existence of a loving, gentle, positive quality. Plato referred to the ultimate reality as the Good, indicating that he perceived the intrinsic positivity of it. We will explore this in more detail in the chapter on the Holy Idea for ennea-type Nine. If you experience the unity described by Holy Truth, you will also experience its fundamental rightness, its Holy Perfection. You will see that everything that happens is perfect because all is happening exactly as it should. You will see the beauty and harmony of whatever happens because that is what is; it is the truth of the moment seen without the interference of the perspective of the ego. We will expand on this in the chapter on the Holy Idea for ennea-type One. These three Holy Ideas are interconnected, and together they describe the nature of reality.

  In some traditions there is a debate about what the ultimate reality is: Is it the Absolute, or is it the state of total completeness? The Sufi and Kabbalistic traditions take the view that the Absolute is the ultimate reality. The Indian traditions are divided, with the Vedantists taking the Absolute to be ultimate, while some of the yogic paths take the state of total completeness to be ultimate. The Buddhists disagree: The Theravaden tradition believes the Absolute is ultimate, while the Tibetan Buddhists are divided. The Nyingmapa sect believes that the state of total completeness is ultimate, while the Gelugpa believe the Absolute is ultimate.1

  In my view, there is no need to decide, since freedom has nothing to do with what state you experience or take to be ultimate. So the question is largely a matter of how you define “ultimate truth.” If you define the ultimate truth as that which is left when everything that can be removed is removed, you are describing the Absolute. It is the state most devoid of any creation or concept, reality reduced to its simplest minimum. If you define ultimate truth as the actual state that is experienced if there is no manipulation or conceptualization of your experience, you recognize it as the state of total completeness, because there is no duality present in it. The state of total completeness is all-inclusive, with the manifest and the unmanifest existing in nonduality. Everything is present, including the Absolute, which is seen as its inner nature.

  In either case, the perception of the unity of all of existence—Holy Truth—remains the same. It is the perception that there are no divisions and no duality between things, that everything is one Beingness, one existence. This is the reality beyond egoic reality, true existence independent of the personal mind. It includes everything without any separations, and it does not matter whether you call it God, the One Mind, the state of the Buddha, the Tao, or the Divine Being.

  The most important understanding of Holy Truth is that physical reality and true existence are not separate. Physical reality is made up of objects which can be discriminated. If you perceive the world exclusively through the physical senses, you perceive only discrete objects, such as people, trees, animals, rocks, clouds, oceans, earth. If you experience this level only, which is the basis of the egoic perspective, the universe that you see is dualistic. But if your perception is unobscured by your beliefs, your inner perception becomes unblocked, and the universe looks quite different. If your perceptual capacities are clear, you recognize that other dimensions exist in addition to physical reality, such as love, Beingness, and awareness. At this level of perception, you see that there is only one existence, one homogeneous medium. This medium encompasses physical reality, which is one particularization of it. Objects are seen as objects, but they are not discrete—they are more like waves on the surface of an ocean, lacking existence without the whole of the ocean. So differentiations exist, but not ultimate divisions.

  Physical Reality and Nonduality

  Surprisingly, this perception of unity makes physical reality itself appear more concrete, not less. It appears more three-dimensional, with more sense of depth. Ordinarily, when experiencing the state of Oneness, physical reality is seen as the surface, with the boundless dimensions as the underlying depths. But when the boundless dimensions are perceived as interpenetrating the physical, the three-dimensionality is enhanced. Everything stands out, feels more real, more present, and more itself, in a sense.

  In the experience of nonduality, it is not as though physical reality were a dream emanating from it—that perception would still be dualistic. When duality is seen through, physical reality is imbued with the essential dimension, and the two become one. This gives the physical more reality, more substance, more existence, more meaning, more depth, and more dimensionality. When you look at people, they seem more substantial, and even their bodies appear more physical, in a sense. Every object and person has a concreteness and a definiteness that makes each appear more defined, more present, and more complete, because your experience of them includes the depth of the true existence. When everything is perceived as the Absolute, each atom, each form, has its depth. The Absolute not only underlies everything, but penetrates all of manifestation. Depending upon which dimension you are experiencing, everything you perceive acquires the depth and beauty of that dimension.

  Reality itself is seen as the beauty and the grace of that dimension. So the totality of the universe is the Absolute or the Supreme, for instance, manifesting as beauty. Your body, your thoughts, and your feelings, then, are not separate from the truth, but are part and parcel of it. They are the truth itself. And the truth is there in every atom, every thought, every feeling, everywhere. So it is not your inner nature; there is nothing else but the truth.

  In nonduality, the unification is complete. This is very different from one’s initial experiences of essential reality in which there is you and your body, and Essence is felt to be inside you. To understand the difference, let’s suppose that the state of Essence you are experiencing is the Pearl, the Personal Essence. In this case, you feel as though a full pearl is filling your belly or the whole of your body. Now, imagine that instead of the pearl filling your belly or your body, each one of your atoms is made out of that pearl. The sense of each atom as a pearl is still physical, but it feels like the fullness of the pearly existence. This is what I mean by unity. The physical and the essential become one. It is not that the physical is filled by the essential, but rather that the physical is the essential. In the same way that your muscles are composed of atoms, so the whole of your body is made out of Beingness.

  When this sense of unification is complete and there is no duality in your experience, physical reality itself is experienced as the ultimate reality. Then all of physical reality, including all its objects and all of its manifestations, is seen as that beautiful, substantial, and fundamental reality. It is not separate from it, it doesn’t come out of it, nor is it filled by it—it is it. Grace doesn’t happen to physical reality; physical reality itself is the grace, is the beauty, is God. This is what Buddhists refer to as the Great Seal, the Mahamudra, in which all that you feel and see are unified with true nature. It is the unity of appearance and emptiness. This is one way of understanding what I mean by unity without duality. There is no separation at all, no division at all, no distance between the surface and the depth—in fact, there is no surface and no depth. There is no inside and no outside. They are the same thing. The unity is the complete interpenetration, the complete intermixing of inner and outer. It becomes all of one quality, all of the same thing.

  Experiencing this unity reveals to us that life is beautiful. Prior to this, when you experience yourself moving from the state of the physical or of the personality to the state of the essential or of the boundless dimensions, there is the feeling that life is a problem. The best option seems to be to get away from life, and one may long to disappear or die. From the perspective of unity, there is no such thing as dying, nor of being reborn. There is no such thing as ego death, and no such thing as enlightenment either, since you are already the unity. This is the state of affairs all the time and always—before you develop an ego, when it is dissolving, and after you are dissolved. All those parts are the unity itself, and so you are not going anywhere.

  This is why Longchenpa indicates in the poem quoted above that there is no path to take, no state to attain, and no technique to use. All you need to do is recognize that the state of total completeness is the state of everything right at this moment. If you don’t interfere or manipulate things and just let them be the way they are, you will experience this state of unity, which I sometimes refer to as the natural state since it is allowing things to be as they naturally are. This is reality, this is enlightenment, this is God. You don’t need to change anything or be anywhere other than where you are. Even if you are experiencing suffering, that suffering itself is the reality, and absolutely nothing needs to be done about it.

  This understanding explains why reality is also called Holy Perfection, the Holy Idea of ennea-type One. Holy Perfection means that everything is perfect at all times because there is never anything or any experience that is not the reality of the Holy Truth. Even when you experience yourself as separate from the reality, that is again the reality. So from this perspective, there is no need for a person to do anything—you don’t need to practice, you don’t need to understand yourself, you don’t need to do any work on yourself since everything, including yourself, is already in the state of unity.

  It is from this perspective that some teachings, including the Buddhist Maha Ati teaching, say that there is no need to practice—you don’t need to meditate, to sit in any posture, or to visualize any deity. The only practice is to relax, because you are already there and nothing needs to be done. So in that tradition, whenever you see any egoic manifestation, you just relax. If you are more advanced, you don’t even need to relax, since you are already in the state of unity, so being relaxed or unrelaxed is irrelevant.

  This is the foundation for the practice of Dzogchen, which is taught by the Nyingmapa sect of Tibetan Buddhism. It is a tradition that works in the nondual only, and is said to be for people possessing superior capacity. The idea is that the state of unity, the natural state, is not something to be attained; it is the state of affairs all the time. If you think that there is something to be attained, you are creating a duality, since you are implicitly saying that there is a natural state and an unnatural state. From the Dzogchen perspective, the natural state is always the state that is occurring; you are just not always recognizing it as such. Even when you are not aware of it, you are in it. The only difference is that when there is recognition, you suddenly see the depth, the concreteness, the reality, the beauty, the harmony, and the grace of how things actually are. You see how things are already perfect, and this is why another name for total completeness is the Great Perfection.

  The perfection of reality includes even what we call imperfection from the egoic perspective. Reality is a perfection that cannot become imperfect. In the language of the Enneagram, this is the Idea of Holy Perfection. The moment you see that there is nothing but God, you recognize that everything is perfect at all times and at all points in space. If God is everything that is, how can there be imperfection? When you don’t like some manifestation and you want things to be different, all it means is that you have not surrendered to the Holy Will. You have your own prejudices and ideas about how things should be, and these could form the basis of your own personal religion!

  The Idea of Holy Truth is that nothing is excluded. The ego is not excluded, thinking is not excluded, reactivity is not excluded, neurosis is not excluded, and the physical realm is not excluded. This is because there is nothing but the One, so there is no other. Obviously, when there is one and no other, “one” is not being used in the mathematical sense. Pythagoras taught that numbers start with three: One is God, two is the Logos, and three is the beginning of creation. Since reality is one and there is no other, how could there be duality? So every time you experience a new dimension of Being, you realize that it is part of the One, which includes all numbers, so the two resulting from the new dimension is included within it. This is difficult to conceptualize, because this One is an infinite existence. Since it has no boundary and encompasses infinite space, you can’t conceive of it as the mathematical one. When you demarcate one area of physical space and then another, can you say that there is more than one space? Both are subsets of, and included in, the all-encompassing space.

  The state of unity, experiencing that everything makes up one thing, appears in all the boundless dimensions. The sense of it becomes progressively deeper, until one experiences that all the dimensions are unified. This is a progressive attainment and it doesn’t happen all at once. You might, for example, experience the unity of the dimensions of Living Daylight and the Supreme, in which case the experience of unity would have the transparency and clarity of the Supreme, as well as the whitish-yellow hue and sense of delicate love and grace of Living Daylight. Or the sense of unity might be experienced between the dimensions of the Nameless (Nonconceptual) and the Supreme. But the experience of the complete unity is a much more difficult attainment.

  Generally, most people initially experience unity while experiencing one of the formless dimensions by itself. So if one is experiencing the state of unity on the level of Living Daylight alone, it would be the sense that everything is love; or if one is experiencing it on the level of the Supreme by itself, it would be the sense that everything is pure Being, pure presence. Again, this is not the experience that everything is made out of love or of Being, which is the experience of these dimensions still infused with duality; but that the whole universe is Living Daylight or is the Supreme. This is the state of unification.

  In any case, the level at which one experiences the unity is not relevant to the Idea of Holy Truth. The most important thing about the state of unification is that there are not two. Egoic consciousness is, by its very nature, based on division. If there is no duality in your perception, the ego is non-existent. The study of the Holy Ideas is not the study of the building blocks of ego—these are elucidated when exploring the essential aspects and the formless dimensions. Here, we are studying the principles that hold the building blocks of ego together.

  Duality

  So in this study of the Enneagram of Holy Ideas, the first principle that we encounter which holds the ego together is the belief in duality. This is one of the subtlest and deepest principles, without which the ego could not exist and function in the way it does. It arises as a result of the loss of perception of Holy Truth. When a direct perception about reality is lost, which is to say that when one of the Holy Ideas is lost to our experience, what arises is not a particular state, but rather a distorted, erroneous, mistaken idea about reality, which we call a delusion. In other words, the loss of each Holy Idea leads to a specific delusion associated with that point on the Enneagram. So one of the fundamental properties of reality, as described by Holy Truth, is its nonduality. When the oneness of reality is not perceived, the delusion of duality arises. This delusion is the perception that the differences and separations between things that exist are ultimate, that this is the true state of affairs.

  Because of the way the mind functions, the loss of an Idea leads to a deluded idea about reality. You cannot just not have a principle of reality, because the mind can’t function without one. So if there is no perception of the fundamental unity of all of existence, then there is the perception of duality. If there is duality, there is the loss of unity. The loss of unity is the loss of the condition of the natural state of total completeness. Basically, it is the loss of God Consciousness.

  The belief in duality will remain in place as long as there is no understanding of Holy Truth. The ego by its very nature assumes duality: the belief that who I am is ultimately separate and discrete, and that all other manifestations are also separate and discrete. This results in divisions in our minds between ultimate truth and the world, spirit, and matter, Absolute Truth and relative truth. God and the universe, God and myself, you and I, ego and Essence. This belief in division as ultimate is a conviction so deeply ingrained in the soul that it is one of the last things we can even contemplate confronting, let alone releasing.

  Even after a long time traveling the spiritual path, we cannot conceive that this might be an assumption about reality rather than the truth. We think, “This is how reality is—everyone knows that. My parents believed it, my teachers believed it, scientists write books on how things are fundamentally divisible, and everything seems to work according to this knowledge.” This conviction is so deeply entrenched that it has become an organizing principle for the very particles of our souls. Like a magnet arranges particles of metal, this conviction arranges our souls so that we can’t even imagine that things could be otherwise. We are, metaphorically speaking, always pointing north, and so we think that this is how reality is. Letting go of the magnet would mean realizing that that orientation is not reality, and that things are actually much more free-flowing than we thought.

  The sense of duality, then, arises through the loss of the Holy Truth; and the Holy Truth, as previously discussed, has the qualities of goodness, of positivity, of being loving. In Holy Truth, the multiplicity is in unity at all levels, and everyone and everything is holy. The word holy in the language of the Enneagram is not used in the usual dualistic sense: that which is opposite to the bad, the mundane, or the human. Holy means objective, how things really are beyond the cloud of egoic experience. So here, holy means objective truth. When you are experiencing the state of Holy Truth, everything becomes hallowed, filled with a sense of wonder, beauty, and grace. There is a sense of holiness to the experience, and those who live in this state are called “holy” in the spiritual traditions.

  Original Sin

  So the experience of duality is imbued with the loss of that holiness, beauty, and harmony, and therefore, has a negative tinge to it. This loss will be experienced as the sense that something is fundamentally wrong. The closest thing to this sense is the feeling of “original sin.” You know something terrible has happened, but you don’t know exactly what it is; you don’t know it is the loss of your natural state. The term Dzogchen in Tibetan literally means the natural state of the human individual, the condition where everything is completely the way it should be—and this is what you have lost. This results in a very deep state of something that we call “sin.” It feels like a disconnection, a loss, and a falling from grace; you no longer live in Holy Truth.

  You sense that what is most true and precious has been lost and destroyed, and that someone or something is to blame. Through the filter of the delusion of duality, one thing becomes perceived as being in opposition to another, and one side is guilty. The loving and perfect truth has been lost, and so someone has committed a crime or a sin here, and must be found and punished. This is the position of the ennea-type Eight, which has been called Ego Venge. Ultimately, you blame yourself for no longer being divine, and later this blame is projected onto others in order to protect yourself from the self-hatred that would otherwise result.

  When children experience that something goes wrong, they tend to blame themselves. Regardless of whose fault it really is, the quality of self-blame in the ego leads the child to take the responsibility. Even when children are sexually or physically abused, they always believe it is their own fault. From the perspective of the Enneagram of Holy Ideas, the depth of the sense of self-blame is not dependent upon what actually happens, but is due to the absence of the perception of Holy Truth. So, universally, children blame themselves for the loss of their sense of being divine, for their fall from grace. The result is a deep anguish and sense of guilt which becomes the primary source around which other guilts later accumulate.

  The moment you place blame on yourself or others, you are not only experiencing the loss of the preciousness of the state of unity, but you are also reaffirming the sense of duality—of there being a you and an other. Blame, then, whether of self or other, indicates that the ego is already operating within the delusion of duality. If you are in touch with the inherent unity of all of existence, if it is all one thing, blame simply does not make any sense.

  Self-Blame

  Ultimately, all self-blame comes down to blaming oneself for not being enlightened. Universally, there is a core place within all ego structures where one feels guilty for not being a realized Being. The guilt, as we have seen, has to do with the fact that (in Christian terms) you have been thrown out of paradise—yet you don’t blame God for this; you blame yourself. The deeper you go into understanding the sense of guilt, the more you realize that you feel guilty for not being real. This is particularly relevant when you have realized the essential aspect of the Point, the Essential Identity (see The Point of Existence, Almaas 1996). Here you see that you have carried within you a profound sense of guilt for losing contact with your true nature. A sense of great betrayal arises, not just because your parents didn’t see your real nature, but that you stopped seeing it. You abandoned what is real in you; you abandoned yourself. Each ennea-type will experience this guilt in a slightly different way, as it is filtered through the lens of each one’s specific delusion, but this guilt and self-blame for the loss of contact with Being is universal to all egoic experience.

  The Bible tells us that Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit. From this perspective, we can see that the fruit is the experience of duality, the first departure from the state of unity, the first division. So because you are not in a state of total completeness, you feel guilty and bad, and have an attitude of punishing and hating yourself. This gets projected, and you attempt to remedy the situation by getting revenge. This is the constellation or complex that results from the loss of Holy Truth.

  Revenge is really the ego’s attempt to regain the original state of unity. It is a way of trying to get rid of the guilt and the pain through a convoluted line of reasoning that goes something like this: Someone hurts you, and the pain involves loss of the sense of unity. So you retaliate by hurting him or her in exactly the same way, in the belief that doing so will enable you to rid yourself of your own pain and restore the sense of unity. This is the rationale behind the Biblical phrase, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”

  The nine delusions arising from the loss of the nine Holy Ideas are the seeds around which the cores of the nine ennea-types develop, and while each is most dominant for the ego structures of that type, the nine are present in all ego structures. The delusions, then, form the nine principles inherent in all ego structures and lives informed by ego. We have seen how the loss of Holy Truth leads to the delusion of duality, and how out of this loss of true reality—this state of “the fall” arises the painful sense of badness, guilt, and original sin. Self-blame ensues for not being divine, which becomes self-punishment and the attempt to avenge oneself This constellation forms the core, the major psychological constellation related to this point of the Enneagram, out of which the whole ennea-type develops.

  The Holy Ideas are different forms of the perception of the soul in a completely open and transparent state, that is, the soul in touch with Living Daylight. The loss of this state of openness and wholeness—whether it results from normal egoic identification with a separate sense of self or from the contraction away from contact with experience that is involved in reacting to a sense of the loss of holding—inevitably results in the loss of the sense of unity, connection, perfection, love, flow, and so on.

  The core constellation is actually one unified process with three facets: 1) As we saw in Part One, the loss of an Idea is the same process as the loss of a sense of holding in the environment and the loss of basic trust. So the loss of Holy Truth leads to the specific delusion of duality. 2) Loss or inadequacy of the holding environment results in the painful egoic state that we call the specific difficulty. Here, the loss of holding, filtered through the delusion of duality, results in the specific difficulty of a sense of badness, guilt, and fundamental sinfulness. 3) The loss of basic trust, filtered through the delusion, results in what we call the specific reaction of each point, and just as the loss of a sense of holding results in the loss of basic trust, the specific reaction is an attempt to deal with the specific difficulty. Here, it is the reaction of self-blame, which, as we have seen, is based upon the sense of duality and opposition, and which ultimately blossoms into the attempt to get revenge that is characteristic of ennea-type Eight.

  The Holy Truth includes everything—including the guilt and self-blame. It is all-inclusive and all-encompassing; otherwise it would not be holy. The belief that some manifestations are holy and others are not, or that some people are chosen by God and others are not, is not the Holy Truth. The Holy Truth chooses all people—they are its life. This is why it is said that, “The sought becomes the seeker.” The Holy Truth itself manifests as the seeker looking for the Holy Truth. So the journey is a matter of the seeker finding out that he or she is what is sought. When we know this, we realize that there is no need for seeking.

  1. When I mention other religious or spiritual traditions and their points of view, I am not saying that my understanding of them is authoritative. I am referring to their descriptions of various states and understandings in the light of my own experience, explicating their knowledge through my own understanding. Someone of a particular tradition might say that they mean something slightly different and that I am misinterpreting what they mean. In referring to a particular tradition, I am not sanctioning it, or even agreeing with its tenets. There are distinct differences between the Diamond Approach and other traditions, although there are also many similarities in perspective. I am simply using examples from other traditions in order to facilitate understanding of things that are difficult to explain in words.

 

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The Sexual Eight Enneagram Personality Subtype

Beatrice Chestnut (2013) calls this Eight Personality Subtype “Possession” and points out  that this Eight has a strong antisocial tendency. People with this subtype are provocative people who express “lust” (the Passion of their personality type) through open rebellion. Often this is done by declaring in word and deed that their values differ from the norm. Along with being the most rebellious of the Eight subtypes, the Sexual Eight is, interestingly, also the most emotional. Eights are generally not hugely emotional or expressive creatures, but Sexual Eights often don’t hold back in terms of expressing their emotional world.

Wagner (2010) notes that when the “passion” or existential vector of type-8 (Wanting, Thirsting, Hunger, sometimes referred to as Lust) combines with the sexual (sx) instinct, the result is a strong attraction and devotion to certain forms of control, especially with regard to others.

When the vice of lust leaks into the sexual instinct, the result is the attempt to possess the earth, or at least one’s own turf, mate, children, employees, etc. Possession means intense involvement in and taking charge of others’ lives and is the EIGHTS’ substitute for genuine closeness.

Contests for control are ways of connecting with others. If others stand their ground, and remain forthright, strong, and respectful (i.e., if they respond like EIGHTS), then maybe they can be trusted and EIGHTS can surrender some control.

When Eights move to the downside of the TWO personality style, they obsess over their partner and, if they become suspicious besides, may become stalking and vengeful. Their aggressive pursuit covers an underlying dependency.

Intimate EIGHTS tend to be the delinquent kids (or adults) on the block (or in the firm). They are the rebels with or without a cause. They tend to squeeze the life out of things and use them up. “You only go through life once, so live it with all the gusto you can.” They may like some kind of version of fast cars, vast amounts of liquor, and anything else they can consume. Control and possession become ways to avoid anxiety, vulnerability, and intimacy.

The issue of who’s on top, who’s in charge, who’s ultimately in control, is a lively one for the intimate EIGHT. They find surrender an extremely difficult gesture.

As such outspoken, rebellious Eight we may even like to be seen as “bad” or a little bit rebellious in some way – or at least we don’t mind it – and we tend not to feel any guilt over the rebellious things we do. It’s almost a matter of pride for us Sexual Eights to go against the stream of convention or to disrespect rules and laws.

In childhood, many of us Eights experienced disrespect and a lack of affection and attention from one or both parents, so they decided (consciously or unconsciously) not to recognize maternal or paternal authority. This first rebellion against authority became the template for their strong rebellious tendencies.

It is perhaps for this reason that Chestnut refers to us Sexual Eights as being all about “Possession,” which refers to a kind of charismatic taking over (or dominance) of the whole environment- an energetic capture of people’s attention. Us Sx8s Eights display the idea of “Possession” in that we can often take over a whole scene energetically, becoming the centre of things. Sexual Eights like to feel their power by possessing everyone’s attention. Either consciously or unconsciously, we  sometimes hold the idea that “the world begins to run when we arrive.”

Knowingly or not, we have a need for dominance and power over others. We fear losing control of anything or anyone, and so we want to influence people with our words if we can. Everything– whether it is a person or a material thing- is an object to possess and to have some influence over. We Sexual Eights don’t seek material security per se; rather, we seek to get power over people, things, and situations. We can do this in healthy ways, but when we go unhealthy in this regard, we turn into the Putins and Trumps of this world.

In getting and maintaining our power, as Sexual/Intimate Eights, we can be fascinating and charismatic. We can draw people towards us, may even to the point where they become somewhat enthralled or “smitten” by us. Our power comes through a kind of seductiveness and intensity that differentiates us stylistically from the other two Eight subtypes. As Naranjo explains, Sexual/Intimate Eights have more colours in their feathers; they are more magnetic and more outspoken. They have great powers of seduction (hence the preponderance of Dictators and Don Juans in this Sexual Eight roll call).

Us Sexual Eights look voraciously for love, sex, and excess pleasure in life. We seek adventures, risks, challenges, and the thrill of an adrenaline rush. In line with our passionate forward movement into action, we may be particularly intolerant of weakness, dependence and slow people.

As the most emotional of the Eights, the sexual subtype displays a great deal of passion that may at time gets expressed through emotions that may seem surprising to others and atypical for the other Eights. In these very passionate, emotional Eights there’s often a detachment of the intellect. While us Sexual Eights may be very intelligent, we often express action and passion more than contemplation in the things we do and say.

As Sexual Eights, we feel things very deeply. This capacity can benefit a good relationship, but it can be a problem when a relationship isn’t going well. In romantic settings, Sexual Eights may encourage their partners to become very dependent on them or to treat them as the energetic center of their lives. We demand loyalty, but may not be faithful in return. (England’s King Henry VIII may serve as an example of this). We often tend to have possessive relationships, not only with lovers, but, also with friends, objects, places and situations.

We may at times look like Sexual fours in that both types can be angry, emotional, and demanding but us sexual eights distinguish ourselves in our deeply confident (or overconfident) manner in contrast with the Sexual Four’s’ sense of inner deficiency.

Kathy, a Sexual Eight interviewed by Chestnut for her research into this personality type gives some insight into how we as a subtype work:

As a sexual eight, I like to have a small group of trusted and trusting people around me. When my circle becomes too large, I become uncomfortable and withdraw. I like to be all things to the people in my inner circle, and when that circle becomes unmanageable, it makes me a little “crazy”. Others can definitely feel it when I start to pull away. Those who are closest to me definitely notice when I am overcome by people who “need” too much.

On the other hand, I seem to “take care” of those around me. My sexual instinct can make this look like I am dominating or controlling the people around me. Although I am usually very conscious of my power over others, it is often difficult for others to resist the temptation to indulge me. I am absolutely charismatic and can convincingly bring others toward me without appearing to want adulation. People tend to think of me as a “guru,” and for the most part I lead and others follow without question. I have been told that my power is like a narcotic to others. And it happens without my having an awareness that it’s happening.

My sexual instinct also makes me one of those rare people who can cross others’ usual boundaries without making them uncomfortable. I genuinely care about others and that translates into others feeling protected and safe in my presence. Someone close to me made this observation and it resonates with me: “People in your presence fin themselves hanging onto your every word… looking to you for approval.. seeming submissive and overcome with awe. There is the sense that you are continually looking for an equal- someone who will provide that for you.”

I have been told that I exude sexuality. I am overtly sexual; I speak open and frankly about sex. Perhaps it is partly for shock value, but it is never meant to be offensive. It is an honest and beautiful part of me and it also communicates my vulnerability. I have been told that one cannot be in a room with me without feeling my sexual presence or life force. I think it is part of what makes me so appealing. The charisma is hard to resist.

Naranjo was correct about sexual eights. Our colours are more vivid. As a sexual eight, my colours shine brightly, except for those times when my energy is zapped by my need to be both protector and protected. I feel an intense passion and zest for life. My energy is bountiful and bold. My powers of seduction can be consuming. Because I need what I give, I am not afraid to be vulnerable. I believe it is precisely this trait that makes me a gifted leader and teacher.

Inner-Work For Us Sexual Eights

Us Sexual Eights can travel the path from “lust” to “innocence” (a purer and less anti-social version of our deepest desires) by reminding ourselves that we are lovable and “good enough” as we are, and that we don’t need to be provocative, superior, or extraordinary in order to be worthy of other people’s devotion.

It may help us Sexual/Intimate Eights to explore the reasons behind our need to rebel and to possess everyone’s attention. Our sexual Eight’s pattern of being powerful and charismatic often serves to cover over a hurt child who didn’t get the love and attention he or she deserved.

As Sexual Eights, if we can allow ourselves to own and reintegrate the lonely, needy child inside us, we can take the charge of your defensive need to have control over what happens and to have our needs be the centre of all relationships.

We have so much to offer in terms of our strength and our passion, as well as our emotional energy, but we can be even more potent and present in the things we do and the relationships we build when we can allow ourselves to have an ongoing sense of the innocence and purity of our deeper feelings, needs, and intentions.

We may also need some guidance and help from our partner to express this vulnerable side of ourselves which we so often have great difficulty accessing or voicing.

This however is the true heart and the powerful potential of innocence. When we can bring that spirit into the things we do and share more of your energetic space with others in a conscious ways, we can be truly powerful.

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The Social One Enneagram Personality Subtype

The Social One, according to Beatrice Chestnut (2013) is less of a perfectionist than most Ones and focuses more on being the perfect example for others of the right way to be. This One is not an internally anxious person striving to be perfectionistic, but rather a paragon of correct conduct. Social Ones have a need to represent the perfect model of the way to be or do things through their actions- to teach others by example.

Wagner (2010) notes that when the Achille’s Heel of Enneagram One (Anger) contaminates the instinct for belonging and social/group relations, non-adaptability is sometimes the result.

Here anger gets expressed through rigid uncompromising social ideals and beliefs. Though Social ONES are more easygoing and they express their energy more moderately than the intense Intimate ONES, they can become stubborn and refuse to budge on certain issues, often in the area of morality. They can come across as very moralizing, insisting that things be done their way, taking a stand on their moral code since they believe they are in the right. They are often social reformers who want to change the system rather than conform to society’s code of ethics. They have difficulty identifying with or going along with the system if they believe it is not morally correct. For example, Abraham Lincoln wanted a united nation but risked a schism because he would not accommodate to the prevailing morality that sanctioned slavery.

Social ONES may form a group to get people to adopt their point of view, or join a group of like-minded people such as “Birthright” or “Freedom of Choice.” ONES find themselves fully convicted on either side of controversies.

Ichazo also labeled this type “Non-adaptability” and Naranjo calls this subtype “Rigidity,” describing the Social One as having a kind of “school teacher” mentality. Non-adaptability or rigidity refers to the tendency of this character to rigidly adhere to particular ways of being and doing things, as a way of expressing exclusive ownership of the “right” way to be, think and behave.

In this Social One subtype, anger is half-hidden. Where the heat of anger changes into warmth in the Self-Preservation One, in this personality there is a transformation of the heat of anger into cold. This character tends to be a cooler, more intellectual type, in which the main characteristic is control. However, the anger of the Social One is not completely repressed, because there is an equivalent of anger in their passion for being the owner of the truth. In this subtype, anger gets channeled into an overconfidence about being right or “perfect.”

The Social one has a (usually unconscious) need to feel superior or to appear superior (because a conscious desire to be superior would constitute bad behavior). It is as if they are implicitly saying, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” They have an underlying need to make others wrong to have some power over them. If I’m right and you’re wrong, then I have more right than you to control the situation. Like my Social One father always use to say: “I’ve never been wrong, except once, when I thought I was wrong, but I was mistaken.”

Social Ones learn to repress emotions from a very early age; they were usually good kids who did not cause problems. They may have been young adults who acted “older” than they really were, who often forgot that they were children.

A person of this subtype may purposely not adjust to changing times or customs. A Social One tends to persist in a particular way of doing things that she thinks is right, despite others having evolved into doing it a different way. This One displays the general attitude, “This is how it is and I’m going to tell you how it should be.”

Not surprisingly, Social Ones automatically take on the role of teacher. Social Ones have the sense that demonstrating and modeling what they are teaching is equally or more valuable than what they say. It’s the idea that a good model goes a long way toward making the point be taught. They may also be unaware of the need to appear superior, but may receive feedback from others that they are acting like a “know-it-all.”

This is the Type One who resembles Type Five in that this character can be more introverted and may seem a bit “above it all” and emotionally detached. They separate themselves from the crowd because they are perfect and therefore superior. They never feel completely comfortable in the groups they frequent; they tend to feel alienated. But while Fives focus primarily on conserving energy and resources, Ones focus more on making things perfect and their anger is closer to the surface.

In relationships, Social Ones can have high expectations. They tend to have more confidence in themselves than in others. They can seem remote at times, being self-sufficient to the point of not seeming to need others. It can also prove difficult for partners and friends to convince Social Ones that a perspective other than their own can be correct. They are great reasoners and will argue their point energetically. They dominate through making the other person wrong, and it can be hard to convince them of the validity of a competing point of view.

Here’s a Social One, interviewed by Chestnut explaining how they roll:

“In my daily life, I tend to put a lot of energy into getting things right, and then get annoyed when others don’t. For example, one thing I hate is when people park over the line of a parking space, because now the space beside it is too small for me to park my car. I therefore make a point of always parking right between the lines when I park my car (sometimes to my wife’s utter exasperation: “I can’t get out on my side!”), because that’s the right way to behave and that’s the way I would like everyone else to behave. So it’s not so much being picky as it is about setting an example for everyone else.

In my profession as an orchestra conductor, my attention to detail in preparing for a rehearsal gives me great confidence when it’s time to step in front of the orchestra at a performance. It’s like when you know you’ve prepared well for a test. I know the music well, I’ve gone over every part, and I’m confident that I can set a good example to inspire the players to make good music.”

The Path to Healthy Integration for a Social One:

Social Ones can travel the path from the “Vice” of anger to the “Virtue” of Serenity by reminding themselves that there is no ultimately right or perfect way in the world of the conditioned personality. Social Ones can relax into serenity through learning that true power comes from not doing it right or being superior in your knowledge, but from the impulse beneath the fact that you want so much to find the best way and share it with others. Your sincere desire to find the best ways to do things and show others these paths to goodness and improvement is clear proof that you are lovable as you are, and that you don’t need to prove your worth through what you can teach us. Remembering that there are many right or good ways to the truth helps you embody the humility and relaxation in the things you do that is the heart of serenity for you.

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The Self-Preservation Three Enneagram Personality Subtype

Chestnut (2013) calls this type “Security” and notes that this is a countertype to Sexual or Social Three subtypes. Often the outwardly-focused Three personality style (being efficient and productive, setting goals, marshalling resources, and accomplishing aims in a desire to attract attention, validation and recognition, aka Love) is less overt in the Self-Preservation Three with their focus on Self-Preservation Instinctual  Concerns such as Self-Care and Well-Being, Maintenance and Resources, as well as Domesticity and The Home. 

Wagner (2010) suggests that when the “passion” or “vice” of a point Three style merge with self preservation concerns, security is sought through money, material possessions, status, and success.

These THREES (erroneously?) believe they will survive because of the objects they possess. And if they possess the best brand names, they will survive more successfully. Even if you’re not doing well, at least look like you are.
Insecurity, though, never knows just how much is enough. If money can’t buy you love, maybe it can buy you identity, status, security. Worth and approval come from work and earnings. When THREES are out of work, they’ve literally lost everything, including their self. So they work hard to assure job security.
Since lasting security is found only in one’s essence or real self and in genuine I-Thou relationships, the personality may at times be on shaky ground, and feel quite insecure because it is unreal, and must continue keeping its mojo working, performing well, increasing earnings, acquiring and consuming goods, belonging to successful organizations, etc.

Following Ichazo, Naranjo calls this subtype “Security” because these Threes work hard to achieve a sense of security, both in terms of material and financial resources and knowing how to do things effectively. Self-Preservation Threes express a concern with security in that they have a need to feel autonomous and self-sufficient–to know how to take care of themselves and others.

People with this subtype often had a childhood in which they didn’t have enough protection and resources. In response to those conditions, these Threes learned to be active and efficient doers, oriented to taking care of themselves without help from others. They have developed a special focus on autonomy in the face of a jeopardized sense of security.

This preoccupation with security can also extend out to others. This person emanates a sense of security; they are solid people who you might go to for advice. They seem outwardly calm and organized, like they have it all together, but they are anxious underneath. These are assertive people who specialize in solving problems and getting things done in a high-quality way–and while they work very hard, they don’t show their stress. They are usually financially secure, highly productive, and “in control,” but they also report feeling an underlying sense of anxiety related to the effort it takes to achieve the sense of security they crave.

Self-Preservation Threes strive to be the ideal model of quality in whatever they do. They want to be the best example of how to be in whatever role they play: the best parent, the best partner, the best worker, the best at whatever they do. They feel a need not only to be seen as good, but also to actually be good. They do this both to achieve a sense of security and to inspire admiration in others without being obvious about their vanity. They want to be admired because they do things well, and they want to do the things they do in the best way possible–not just to have a good image that people will find attractive, but also to live up to that image. Their tendency to adapt to a “model” also motivates them to forget their own feelings.

Following the perfect model of how things should be done means being virtuous, and being virtuous implies a lack of vanity. In this sense, the Self-Preservation Three “has vanity for having no vanity.” This means that while this Three wants to look attractive and successful in the eyes of others, they don’t want other people to know they want this–they don’t want others to see that they have actively created an image to look good to others. They don’t want others to catch them in the act of wanting or working to look good because they have an ethic that say that “good,” or virtuous, people are not vain. Some Self-Preservation Threes are aware (and will admit) that they want people to admire them for their good image–though, generally, they want to keep this a secret–but some Self-Preservation Threes believe so firmly that it is wrong or superficial to want the approval of others that they won’t admit this desire even to themselves. These are people who want to be so perfect that it’s not in their code of honor to allow for vanity.

In denying the presence of vanity, the Self-Preservation Threes represents the countertype of the three Three subtypes–that is, this Three is the “counter-passional” type, the Three that doesn’t necessarily look like a Three. Though these Threes are motivated out of vanity, just like the other Threes, they deny their vanity to some extent, and so their character is shaped more around going against the energetic pull of vanity. And there is a natural opposition between the vain desire to attract attention and a primary instinctual drive toward security and self-preservation. Unlike Social Threes, who will more openly brag about their accomplishments, Self-Preservation Threes avoid talking about their positive characteristics and high-status credentials because they believe it’s bad form to advertise their strong points, even if they also want others to see them as successful. They may be either modest or falsely modest.

In terms of the mental habit of deception, this subtype is also anti-deception in that they try to tell the truth. The deception in this Three comes at a more unconscious level; when it comes to knowing their true motivations, Threes often confuse their image-based reasons for doing things with their real feelings and convictions.

Self-Preservation Threes display a strong workaholic tendency and are motivated to work very hard to achieve security. They have a compulsion to be self-reliant and to feel in control of their lives. They also feel responsible for making everything happen, and can even have a sense of omnipotence. Along with their need for control and their underlying anxiety, they may experience a sense of panic when they need help or lose autonomy.

The passion for security in this subtype leads them to oversimplification in life, reducing their focus and interest to what is “practical and useful.” These individuals have an imperative need to know they can handle it all and that all will be good for everyone surrounding them. They don’t show weakness. They may think things like, “I have to do everything, because I do it better.” Situations that feel beyond their control can leave them confused and lost internally, causing them to freeze up, and in an effort to reestablish control, they can become invasive. These are the most rigid of the Threes.

With so much energy focused on work and efficiency and security, there can be little mental and emotional space left for these Threes to be able to engage deeply with others. Though they may work hard to maintain relationships, they may have trouble making deep connections. When Self-Preservation Threes–especially less self-aware Self-Preservation Threes–do make connections, they can be superficial. They can view feeling their emotions as a waste of time, and this inhibits their ability to connect in intimate relationships, since a true relationship comes through each person being in touch with their feelings and their “real self.”

It can be hard for a Self-Preservation Three to be recognized as a Three. They may be easily confused with Ones or Sixes. This Three looks like a One in that the type is rigid, responsible, and self-sufficient. These Threes, like Ones, try to be a model of virtue in the things they do. The can be distinguished from Ones in that they move at a faster pace, pay attention to creating an image (even when they don’t acknowledge it), and conform to a perfect model of how to be as judged by social consensus, not according to internal standards of right and wrong (as Ones do). They differ from Sixes in that they are fundamentally image-oriented and work harder in response to insecurity, while Sixes find protection in other ways. And while Threes may question their sense of identity, they generally don’t allow their productive to get slowed down by too much doubt or questioning.

Chestnut introduces us to Virginia, a Self-Preservation Three, who explains:

“I’ve always been an achiever. In preschool I finished tasks so early that I was assigned to help others in order to say engaged. By first grade, the school counselor explained to my proud parents that my insistence on perfect homework and exemplary behavior were early predictors of later anxiety, I have worked incredibly hard throughout my career and am now an officer of a Fortune 500 company. Married and divorced twice, my pattern was three to five years of being the perfect wife, followed by emotional exhaustion and an angry husband. Vulnerability or relying on others makes me uncomfortable. I love being counted on to tackle difficult challenges and strive to be hyper-responsible, fair, and generous. Although I crave admiration for these traits, I avoid seeming to care about superficial appearances. I need to be the good traits. When I first studied the Enneagram, I rejected the idea that I could be an image-conscious Three. I made myself a Six, even “performing” once as a model Six on an Enneagram workshop panel. My goal now is balance: vulnerability (versus fierce autonomy) and stillness (versus overactive doing).”

Specific Work For The Self-Preservation Three on the Path to Healthy Integration

Self-Preservation Threes can travel the path form “Vanity” to “Hope” by slowing down and making room for experiencing more than just what’s on their “to-do list.” They aim for hope by leaving themselves more space to feel, and to express those feelings, so that they can tap into the rhythm of their own inner experience. As a Self-Preservation Three, it is important to notice when you create rationalizations for not allowing space for deeper emotions and relational needs. Allow yourself to find a security through deep connections with other people, not just by relying on yourself and working hard. Allow yourself to realize that you don’t have to be responsible for everything. Create safety through shared feelings of mutual trust, as opposed to going it alone and working so hard to be autonomous. Learn that your anxiety is a sign that you have deeper feelings and needs that aren’t’ being addressed, and instead of working harder, take care of yourself by listening to your real self, allowing yourself to rest, and taking refuge in hope, the expectancy of future bliss that you don’t have to make happen all by yourself. Allow yourself to be still, such that you can make room to have an experience of vulnerability and more of your true self.

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The Social Three Enneagram Personality Subtype

Chestnut (2013) calls this subtype: “Prestige”. The Social Three has a desire to be seen and to have influence with people. This three may at times be seen as others as showing a certain kind of vanity through the desire to shine before the whole world: Social Threes enjoy being on stage, and are often very talented performers. This subtype is for this reason, one of the more flamboyant and “showy” of the Three subtypes, and perhaps also the biggest chameleon.

Wagner (2010) notes that when this ability to “schmooze”, network and hobnob with those we deem as useful to us enters the primary social instinct, the desire for prestige may substitute or replace a deeper longing for genuine interpersonal belonging.

Personality in this case masks the real self, fabricating an image that other personas can relate to. The personality can at this point end up playing interest and even meaningful social games with other personalities rather than two genuine selves meeting in an I-Thou relationship. The result could perhaps be described as Show vs. Engagement. What matters is to perform well in social roles to get social approval. Social status and rank, with their honors and endorsements, substitute for a missing sense of inner worth and a genuine “community feeling”, Alfred Adler’s Gemeinschaftsgefuhl.

Social THREES are prone to a certain kind of social vanity. They are concerned about what others think of them and are looking for a positive audience response such as “You’re doing fantastically.” It’s important to have the right credentials, to be a member of the right club, to be mentioned in social columns, to network with promising people. THREES are experts at adopting the appearance the group wants. You’re only as good as you look.

While anonymity might be cherished by the FIVES’ paradigm, it’s tantamount to death in the THREES’ worldview. And in contrast to the TWOS’ song “You’re nobody till somebody loves you,” the THREES’ lyrics are “You’re nobody till somebody recognizes you.” I am seen, therefore I am.

We noted that the THREES’ lens helps them spot trends and movements. Social THREES, particularly, seek to become trend-setters by stepping to the forefront of popular movements and leading the bandwagon. The name given to this subtype is “Prestige,” which reflects the idea of needing everybody’s admiration and applause. This Three, more than the other two subtypes, likes and needs to be recognized, so they tend to be more out in front, basking in the spotlight. As children, it was typically important for Social Threes to “show” something, to look good and demonstrate competence in doing things, to get love. Support most likely came in the form of an approving “look” from parents.

Social Threes are socially brilliant. They know how to talk to people and how to climb the social ladder. These Threes feel a need to frame words carefully to get the maximum benefit, which is measured in terms of making the right impression, getting what they want, and reaching their goals. Their fuel is social success, though what exactly constitutes “success” can vary depending on the history and context of the individual Social Three. Some show intelligence, culture, or class; others have degrees and titles; and others have material symbols of social status – a nice house, an expensive car, designer clothes, or expensive watches.

The Social Three is very concerned with competition and winning. This is the most competitive Three. They are also focused on power, whether or not they are the one who has it. They tend to be demanding and authoritarian, though these characteristics may be hidden behind a presentation that is smooth, decorous, and humorous. Social Threes may view others in terms of how they potentially further or block the process of reaching their goals. They look at things in terms of how they can exert control over them, and they don’t allow themselves to be surprised by life.

The Social Three is also the most aggressive of the Threes, possessing a strong and assertive character. Because they are good at numbing out their feelings, they can – in the extreme – be cold.

Social Threes have a corporate mentality and a passion for doing the job in the best way it can be done- especially in terms of outward appearances. They think about what is best for the group, especially in terms of what will sell, what looks good, and what will reflect well on them. Doing what works for the group also works to further their image of success. For the Social Three, image and moneymaking may override good intentions or virtuous actions. In the current age, corporations are primarily oriented toward making money above all else, and this is reflected in the Social Three’s concern with finding an efficient way to meet corporate goals and enhance the bottom line, which may or may not take into account the destructive consequences for others in a wider sense.

This Three also has a lot of confidence in leading a group where they want to go. If a leader is not leading a group well enough, the Social Three can feel a strong desire to take over, as it can be frustrating for them to see the way forward and not be able to guide people in a more efficient or successful way. The Social Three enjoys being at the center of things.

These Threes have a highly developed talent for image-making and a strong ability to sell themselves (or whatever product they might want to promote). According to Naranjo, these Threes look so good, there’s almost a sense that they have no faults. It’s hard to see their flaws because they do such a good job at creating the right image. They look so good and seem to do things so well that any sense of there being a problem or of anything being left out is overshadowed.

However, Social Threes do feel anxiety about being overexposed. They feel vulnerable to being seen as having no worth. Because they place so much importance on making a good impression, criticism can be devastating to them, though they aren’t likely to show it. Wanting to look good also means it can be hard for them to fully reveal themselves to others, so they may feel a need to keep people at bay. They want so much to be seen positively, and so they can fear that people might see through their image if they get too close. It can be hard for them to open up and let up on managing their image. This strong need to look good can also prevent Social Threes from knowing and being connected to their real selves and their real feelings.

Social Threes aren’t likely to be confused with other types, as this Three is in many ways the most obvious Three, especially in terms of how Threes have historically been characterized in Enneagram books.

Chestnut introduces us to William, a Social Three, who says:

When I was young, I lived with my grandmother and hung out with the older guys. I wanted to be accepted by them because of the prestige that came with the image. Whenever they chose sides for football, I was one of the first players chosen. One day during an intense neighborhood game, I was playing quarterback. I called a rollout right fake double reverse pass. I was supposed to hit my cousin Robert on a post pattern but I faked the pass, put the ball down, and started to run. One guy had a good angle on me, but I was faster. As he got close to me I made a cut and went behind him and scored a touchdown. I heard one of the older guys say, “Damn, Sonny is good!” I felt drawn to the game because I knew it was something I could do well. The praise from the older guys confirmed what I needed to hear and made me feel special. After that day, socially and athletically, I knew I wanted to be at the top of the food chain.

I continued to excel at football and eventually became a professional in the NFL. As a running back people often asked me how I could take the punishment play after play. When you play football on any level, you can’t do it half-assed, you have to be all in or not at all. Some call it internal fortitude or guts, others may equate it to will… I call it heart! I learned that it took hard work to come back again and again and succeed at the game on the highest level, and I was prepared to do it. The desire for this sense of being “Somebody” that came with playing football was huge. To be a part of something bigger, to get results and achieve success on that big a stage, was the fuel that drove me. Years later, through therapy and learning the Enneagram, I’ve changed a lot. I’ve realized authentic self-acceptance doesn’t come through what I do or how I look to others; it’s an inside job.

The Path to Healthy Integration for a Social Three

Social Threes can travel the path from “Vanity” to “Hope” by making conscious use of setbacks, failures, and the experience of their own vulnerability to broaden their sense of who they really are. When Social Threes can relax their efforts to get recognition and learn to trust that people will see and appreciate their value if they just allow themselves to embrace more of who they are, they can release the need to control what happens and enter into an experience guided by hope. If you are a Social Three, aiming for hope means challenging any fears about exposure or rejection you might have and learning to see that you are much deeper and richer than your social mark permits you to be. Expressing more real feelings is an act of hope for this Three because it can be so hard to let go of an imagined or idealized self and risk that others will love who they really are. In line with this, it is important for this Three to see failures and setbacks as an invitation to a deeper experience of life – and a felt experience of the real self.

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The Social Seven Enneagram Personality Subtype

Beatrice Chestnut (2013) calls this subtype “Sacrifice” in her portrait of the personality style. Like the Social Eight, Social Sevens are often seen as the countertype of the three personality subtypes of point Seven.

That’s to say that Social Sevens also value joy, enthusiasm, and variety, trying to avoid being limited, or having to face pain or suffering by focusing on making the world a more delightful place. They do this, as do most Sevens do by putting a positive spin on things, even when that is not the most helpful thing to do for the situation at hand.  But as this Seven is also as the countertype of the Archetypal Seven in some way, they can also expresses a kind of “counter-gluttony” when it comes to pursuing their lust for life. Social Sevens go against the Seven passion of gluttony in that they consciously avoid exploiting others. Naranjo says it’s as if they can sense the tendency within themselves toward gluttony and decide to instead define themselves as anti-gluttonous.

Wagner (2010) notes that when the Seven-ish “vice” of gluttony (for joy and fun and good times) leaks into the social arena, Sevens will sacrifice their options and limit their possibilities for the sake of their family or whatever community they belong to.

This is the SEVENS’ version of the Social SIXES’ sense of duty. Their obligations to others’ welfare place limits on their personal possibilities. This also curtails their gluttony, but only temporarily. For SEVENS hope that once everyone is happy or once their children are grown, they can get on with actualizing all their possibilities.
It’s nice to be with interesting and stimulating people who share the same vision and goals. Unfortunately sometimes group meetings can be tedious martyr-making events. Social SEVENS accept these social limitations in order to work with congenial groups. They are willing to give up or sacrifice certain personal freedoms to pursue their ideals within their family, political group, or religion—somewhat reminiscent of the ONES’ idealism.
The social philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth century political philosopher and writer, informs this subtype variation. Recall Rousseau’s belief and lament that society’s restrictions are the cause of human suffering and depravity. Once we remove civilization’s limits on our free self-expression and development, we revert to being the happy, benevolent, “noble savages” we really are. Humanistic psychology shares this optimistic air.

If gluttony is a wish for more, a wish for taking advantage of all you can get from a situation, there is a hint of exploitation in gluttony. But as the countertype, the Social subtype wants to be good and pure and not act on their gluttonous impulse. This is a person who wants to avoid being excessive or excessively opportunistic, and who works against any unconscious tendency they may have to exploit others.Gluttony may thus be difficult to recognize in Social Sevens because they strive to hide it in altruistic behavior. This purifies them of the guilt of feeling an attraction toward pleasure or toward acting in their own self-interest in ways that cause them to take advantage of others.

Social Sevens avoid focusing on their own self-interest or advantage by pursuing an ideal of themselves and the world. They sacrifice their gluttony to become a better person and to work for a better world in which there is no pain or conflict. As Naranjo explains, they defer their own desires in pursuit of an ideal.

In their efforts to work against gluttony, Social Sevens can actually be too pure. Their efforts to attain purity can extend to worrying about their diet, their health, and their spirit. Interestingly, Naranjo notes, these Sevens are often vegans.

In striving for purity and anti-gluttony, they express a kind of ascetic (or Five-ish) ideal. They make a virtue of getting by on less for themselves. In trying to prove their goodness, they typically give others more, and take less for themselves, as a way of going against their gluttonous desire for more. Even though they might want the biggest pieces of cake, they go against that impulse and take the smallest one instead, leaving the larger portions for others.

Social Sevens take on a lot of responsibility in the group or the family. In doing this, they express a sacrifice of gluttony for the benefit of others. They postpone their own desires in order to enact an ideal of service. As the name of this subtype suggests, “Sacrifice” means a willingness to be of service.

But where is the ego reward in this seemingly pure, unselfish personality strategy? Part of the ego strategy of this subtype is that they want-crave-to be seen as good for their sacrifice. They have a hidden gluttony for the acknowledgment of their sacrifice-are hungry for love and recognition-and this hunger can be insatiable. These Sevens use their sacrifice to cover up defects and shortcomings and to invite recognition and admiration or love, because they don’t feel right legitimizing and acting on their desires and whims. Their sacrifice and service is the price they pay for their neurotic need for admiration.

In addition to inspiring appreciation and recognition in others, Social Sevens want to have a good image, to reduce conflicts, and to create debts in others. However, these motivations can lead these Sevens to enter into relationships that are relatively superficial.

In line with their need for recognition of their sacrifices, there is a tendency in this Social subtype to adopt the role of helper, to be of service, and to be concerned with the alleviation of pain. But while they are drawn to alleviate others’ pain, they don’t like to feel it themselves, and so helping others may also be a way for them to project their pain somewhere outside themselves and try to relieve it at a safe distance. They are always “being” for the other. This is an indulgent and generous character capable of managing projects and mobilizing energies for a particular purpose. They tend to deliver the services they provide with a lot of dedication.

Social Sevens experience an inner taboo on selfishness and want to be seen as the “good child” or the “good person.” They experience repressed guilt for hiding their self-interest in the guise of good, and they may project their disowned guilt for their unacknowledged gluttony onto others, then judge them for not being committed or dedicated enough. These Sevens may also distrust themselves because they know they mix up altruism and self-interest; they many judge their own deeper motivations as “bad” or “self-interested.”

Social Sevens are very idealistic, but their idealism is a mix of illusion, good intentions, and ingenuity that function together as an “intellectual drug” that motivates action. They’re very active, moved in an ongoing way by the ideals they want to translate into life to improve the world, but they need their idealism to help them to activate-they invest a lot in altruism, idealism, dedication, and sacrifice to make them feel more acceptable. They also tend to use the defense of rationalization to support the things they do in the name of altruism and idealism. Their idealism is in part based on rationalizing ideologies so that if any of their beliefs are proved wrong, they can simply replace it with another rationale and then explain this change as evolution. Given this, they may have an underlying sense of panic about losing their idealism, as they fear that would ultimately lead to apathy and emptiness.

Social Sevens’ focus on motivating themselves through idealism can take the form of a feeling of being on a mission-they may want to be “The Savior.” They may at times criticize themselves for being naïve and unrealistic, for wanting too much of mankind-and the Social Seven does have some youthful or adolescent qualities: they are provocative, enlightened, can be simplistic, and can get lazy when the task becomes too demanding. And in addition to this, they may not be conscious of their own laziness, love of comfort, and narcissism.

Naranjo explains that enthusiasm, idealism, and social skills are the three pillars of the Social Seven personality. These Sevens are also visionaries: they imagine a better, freer, healthier, more peaceful world. (New Age culture is a Social Seven culture.) They often express excessive enthusiasm about their visions and may have fantasies of a perfect future. They have a tendency to manipulate through enthusiasm. On the surface, they appear very joyful, and they avoid dissonance and conflict.

In relationships, Social Sevens may feel challenged when they get caught between their strong desire not to cause another person pain and their fear of commitment. In keeping with their desire to be pure and maintain their idealistic stance, they look for a kind of romantic love that is pure and perfect. They unconsciously put themselves in an arrogant position of being “better” or more pure than their partners and then expecting them to evolve toward perfection. They may also have difficulty navigating the deeper emotions that get stirred up by intimate relationships.

Because of their enthusiasm and joyfulness, as well as their prominent desire to help and be of service, Social Sevens can look like Twos-but while Twos focus primarily on others and don’t have as much of a connection with their own selves, Social Sevens are still primarily self-referencing, so they will usually know what they need, even if they decide to sacrifice it. Their desire to help is born of the need to go against a sense of self-interest, not just a desire for approval, so they have a more direct experience of their own needs and wants despite their tendency to make efforts to serve others or a higher good. These are people who are very pure-and in this way they can also look One-ish-but theirs is a goodness for applause, a desire to reach an ideal of perfection or purity that’s based on social consensus (as opposed to Ones’ internally generated sense of what is “right”).

Chestnut introduces us to Rusty, a Social Seven who says:

“The easiest thing to forget about Sevens is that fear drives us and safety is what all the options are for. We are practiced at not showing our desperation on the surface. As a Social Seven, “Sacrifice” plays out without too much trouble for me, because in the vast array of possibilities, any treasure is expendable as long as there is some other nugget to gloat over. This goes for any cause or endeavor, no matter what the seemingly altruistic reason or the secret self-reward.

Idealism and the desire to be seen as a good person rather than a greedy person has led me to join a long series of philanthropic groups. I love the feeling of safety and certainty I get in groups, even though I generally join groups in which I don’t exactly belong. No matter how committed I was to breathing life into the touring theater company, in the final analysis it was the fact of hating to perform soliloquies that allowed me to leave that safe haven for something else. While we Social Sevens can look like Twos, my deep impulse to stop nodding and agreeing (along with not having a truly deep need-anchor of my own) is what has allowed me to leave just about as many groups as I have joined, no matter how devastating the wreckage left behind. Or how still the pond without a ripple.

Grappling to own the Four-ish/Seven-ish fact of narcissism, I balked until it clicked that seeing too much of both goodness, virtue, and beauty and wickedness, evil, and inadequacy in my reflection ultimately leads down the same rabbit hole of overexamining myself. So, in many efforts to get outside myself, for my own good, serially joining and leaving has put me on many peaks and in many corners. With myriad projects, plans, and escape hatches comes that ability to illuminate and stitch together odd similarities and unique insights, always from way out of left field: for instance, I have been the only person at the logging camp carrying a dulcimer, the guy fresh from Wyoming managing an A&D showroom on Madison Avenue in NYC, the Quaker in a Presbyterian church choir, the token straight man in a gay men’s chorus, and so on. I like to sneak in the side door, stir things up, make contributions large or small, grab several magpie points for virtue, and then I’ve gotta go.”

Specific Work For The Social Seven on the Path to Healthy Integration

Social Sevens travel the path from “gluttony” to “sobriety” or moderation, by making the motives behind the things they do more conscious. If you are a Social Seven, try to be more aware of the desire to be recognized for your sacrifice or helpfulness-for being “good”-without judging yourself for being selfish or self-centered. Observe and work with the glutton/anti-glutton polarity within you, and try to be open to seeing what fears and needs might underlie that internal dynamic. Watch out for feelings and motives you might not own that drive you, and support yourself in accepting all your needs and feelings as valid and important. Allow yourself to see how you might criminalize selfishness and avoid internal conflict and darker motives. Challenge yourself to be honest about the ways in which you may confuse altruism and self-interest. Surface the truth about your deeper motives while at the same time making an effort not to judge yourself as “bad” for any self-interest you uncover. Don’t let your fear about not being seen as “good” get in the way of being more conscious of what’s really true. Recognize how you may manipulate through enthusiasm and use your idealism as an intellectual drug. And allow yourself to see how you might cling to your idealism and your ideals of service to the group as a way of staving off an inner sense of emptiness. Support yourself in feeling and being with any fears you might have about your worth or your essential goodness. Give yourself credit for your good intentions, and make room to see all your intentions and your limitations with compassion.

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The Social Eight Enneagram Personality Subtype

Beatrice Chestnut (2013) calls this Eight Personality Subtype “Solidarity” and suggests that this is the countertype of the three Eight subtypes. This is to say that some of the classic, archetypal qualities of the Eight (power, strength, independence, equity) are modulated in this subtype by their dominant Social Instinct, with its focus on reading people and situations, connecting and participating in activities with others.

Wagner (2010) notes that when the “passion” or existential vector of type-8 (Wanting, Thirsting, Hunger, sometimes referred to as Lust) combines with the social instinct, the result is a strong attraction and devotion to friendship.

In this dog eat dog world, you need to have friends you can rely on. Social EIGHTS are friends for life. They will take care of you and be there when you need them. They take great satisfaction from their relationships with their pals and cronies. Street gangs, social clubs, and cliques are frequent habitats of social EIGHTS.

You know where you stand with these tested comrades and you can let your feelings out with them, often late into the night. Being loyal to friends is a hallmark of the social EIGHT. There is occasionally an addictive overdone quality to their passionate friendships where power and control may substitute for mutual intimacy and vulnerability, but not in the realm of heaalthy EIGHTS who are more of the belief that: “I’ll protect you and you protect me and we’ll make it in this world.”

In Hemingway’s novels, which are usually peopled by EIGHTS, friendship is often the topic of conversation or the essence of the plot. Individuals who are in need of protection or strength are often attracted to social EIGHTS.

The Social Eight is therefore seen as the countertype of the three Eight subtypes. Social Eights can therefore represent a kind of contradiction: the Eight archetype rebels against social norms, but the Social Eight is also oriented toward protection and loyalty. They express “lust” and aggression in the service of life and other people.

The Social Eight can perhaps be understood as “social antisocial.” In contrast to Self-Preservation Eights, Social Eights are more loyal, more overtly friendly, and less aggressive. They are helpful Eights: people who are nurturing, protective, and concerned with the injustices that happen to people-yet they can also display an antisocial aspect with regard to the rules of society as they perceive them.

Naranjo explains that, symbolically, this character represents the child who became tough (or violent) in protecting his mother against his father. This is someone who bands together with the mother and goes against the patriarchal power and all that is associated with it: violence out of solidarity. Archetypally, this character represents the child who has given up on getting love from the father and allied with the mother against him.

Social Eights are very sensitive to detecting situations in which people are being persecuted or exploited by others that hold more power. When they detect this kind of thing, they tend to act to protect those who are less powerful. Karl Marx, the champion of worker solidarity and outspoken critic of capitalism, may have been a Social Eight.

Overall, this Eight appears more mellow and outgoing and less quick to anger than the other Eights. They tend to rebel in less obvious was. They are very active, and they may lose themselves through constantly being in action. The may display a disproportionate lust for projects or for collecting things.

Socially, Social Eights like the power a group offers, and they may have difficulty engaging in more “individualized” relationships. In extreme cases, this Eight can tend toward megalomania. In close relationships, they may display a lack of commitment to the partner that hides an unconscious fear of abandonment.

In becoming a protector at too young an age, these Eights typically lose consciousness of their own needs for love and care. While people with this Eight subtype develop a strong ability to care for and protect others, they unconsciously give up their own need for love and replace it with a compensatory movement toward power and pleasure. It’s generally hard for an Eight to make their love needs conscious, and while they can seem softer or calmer than the other Eights, Social Eights also have a blind spot where their own needs for love and protection are concerned.

This Eight often doesn’t look like an Eight, Ichazo called this subtype “Friendship,” but Naranjo uses the descriptor “complicity” or “solidarity” to distinguish the everyday, positive meaning of the word “friendship” from what he calls the “ego game” of the Social Eight’s unconscious personality pattern. According to Naranjo, this individual’s main drive is for something like loyalty. The Social Eight subtype is the most intellectual of the three, but these Eights also rebel against the dominant (patriarchal) culture. This rebellion necessarily involves a mixture of authority and intellect because the dominant authority in patriarchal societies tends to promote the intellectual control of impulses and excess. While the Sexual Eight is the most overtly anti-intellectual of the three Eight subtypes, the Social Eight goes up against the power of authority out of a desire to protect the oppressed and, unconsciously, a personal need for the nurturance associated with maternal care.

Male Social Eights can look like Type Nines, and female Social Eights may resemble Type Twos. However, these Eights can be distinguished from Nine and Twos because they act in more direct, powerful ways, engage more readily in conflict, and express more power and control in seeking to protect and support other people.

Chestnut gives us a quote from Annie, a Social Eight, to exemplify this tendency:

“I am always doing something for other people and thinking that as soon as this current activity is finished then I’ll turn to what I want to do just for me. When I first encountered the Enneagram I thought I was a Two because I didn’t identify with the anger or the need to dominate. I was phobic of anger and unaware of my own underlying aggression. I wasn’t aware of how controlling my efforts to help felt to others, and I would be hurt when people pushed back and complained.

I frequently get pulled into the leadership role in groups and then get whacked for thinking I know what’s best to accomplish the task or project. In high school, to avoid this kind of pain, I started saying, “I’m not a leader. Don’t look at me to get this done.” It didn’t work. When I see something that needs doing, especially if it benefits others, I step in and get it done.

I have always been seen as friendly and yet have not had “best” friends that I was vulnerable with until late in life. It is hard to admit that I need help or concern or comfort. While I care about people and do a lot for them, I am realizing that I don’t allow myself to have them matter that much to me. I have often left relationships without a look back. Until recently, I have not been the one who maintain friendships. I both yearn for the closeness friendship provides and feel scared of it-partly because I then feel obligated to take care of the other person no matter what.

I have been frequently hurt and puzzled by other people’s reactions to me, and I work consciously to avoid being experienced as “too much” or intrusive. When others experience me this way, I often feel misunderstood. Because of this dynamic, I feel like I have to monitor my energy and impact so others can be comfortable. But I like the amount of energy and drive and decisiveness I naturally have. It is easy for me to start in a certain direction without too much planning and then make a course correction if needed. I have always been physically active, participating in both team and individual sports.

Fortunately, I was guided toward becoming a psychotherapist. In that role I have had a lot of practice with leading back to hear the other’s experience, mirroring their truth back to theme, and offering help with an open hand. I feel my openheartedness, but it’s more difficult to receive the love and gratitude others have for me. Most importantly, I’ve learned to trust that each person has their own wisdom and ability to live their life well.”

Specific Work For The Social Eight on the Path to Healthy Integration

Social Eights can travel the path from “Lust/Craving/Hunger” to Peace and a kind of integrated psychospiritual “Innocence” by learning how to take care of themselves in the same ways they feel moved to take care of others. Social Eights focus on protecting and supporting others as a way of acting out their own denied needs for protection and support, so it’s important for them to embody innocence by being more actively and regularly aware of their own inner child and its needs for love and safety. These Eights grow in direct proportion to the degree to which they can see how they displace their need for love and support into taking action to be powerful in the world. It may be important for them to actually think about themselves as innocent children, as we all understand that all children deserve love, care, and protection-and that all children are naturally innocent. Opening up to the innocence involved in allowing themselves to be loved, taken care of, and vulnerable-which may have been impossible when they were young-allows Social Eights to reintegrate the child inside them that they had to abandon when they needed to get big fast in order to deal with the world.

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The Three Triads

IF HUMAN BEINGS were able to stay centered in their Essential unity, there would be no need for the Enneagram. But without working on ourselves, we cannot become centered. It is a universal perception of the great spiritual traditions that human nature is divided—against itself, and against the Divine. Our lack of unity is, in fact, more characteristic of our “normal” reality than our Essential unity. 

Amazingly, the Enneagram symbol accounts for both aspects of human nature in its unity (the circle) and in the way it is divided (the triangle and the hexad). Every part of the Enneagram reveals psychological and spiritual truths about who we are, deepening our understanding of our predicament while simultaneously suggesting solutions to that predicament. 

In this article, I will examine the major ways in which the original unity of the human psyche has been divided—into Triads, different groups of three. The nine types are not isolated categories but are interrelated in extremely rich and profound ways that have meanings beyond individual psychological types. 

THE TRIADS

The Triads are important for transformational work because they specify where our chief imbalance lies. The Triads represent the three main clusters of issues and defenses of the ego self, and they reveal the principal ways in which we contract our awareness and limit ourselves. 

This first grouping of the types refers to the three basic components of the human psyche: instinct, feeling, and thinking. According to Enneagram theory, these three functions are related to subtle “Centers” in the human body, and the personality fixation is associated primarily in one of these Centers. Types Eight, Nine, and One comprise the Instinctive Triad; types Two, Three, and Four make up the Feeling Triad; and types Five, Six, and Seven are the Thinking Triad. 

It is worth noting that modern medicine also divides the human brain into three basic components: the root brain, or instinctual brain; the limbic system, or emotional brain; and the cerebral cortex, or the thinking part of the brain. Some teachers of the Enneagram also refer to the three Centers as the head, heart, and gut, or as the thinking, feeling, and doing Centers respectively. 

No matter what type we are, our personality contains all three components—instinct, feeling, and thinking. All three interact with each other, and we cannot work on one without affecting the others. But for most of us, caught in the world of personality as we usually are, it is difficult to distinguish these components of ourselves. Nothing in our modern education has taught us how to do so. 

Each of these Triads represents a range of Essential capacities or functions that have become blocked or distorted. The personality then tries to fill in the gaps where our Essence has been blocked, and the Triad that our type is in indicates where the constrictions to our Essence and the artificial filler of our personality are most strongly operative. For example, if we are an Eight, we have been blocked in the Essential quality of strength; thus, our personality has stepped in and has attempted to imitate real strength by causing us to act tough and sometimes to assert ourselves in inappropriate ways. The false strength of our personality has taken over and concealed the blockage of real strength even from us. Until we understand this, we cannot recognize or recover our authentic, Essential strength. 

In a similar way, each personality type replaces other Essential qualities with imitations that we identify with and try to make the most of. 

Paradoxically, if someone’s type is in the Feeling Triad, this does not mean that they have more feelings than other people. Similarly, if someone is in the Thinking Triad, this does not mean that they are more intelligent than others are. In fact, in each Triad, the function in question (instinct, feeling, or thinking) is the function that the ego has most strongly formed around, and it is therefore the component of the psyche that is least able to function freely. 

THE MAJOR THEMES OF THE THREE TRIADS 

The Instinctive Triad

Types Eight, Nine, and One are concerned with maintaining resistance to reality (creating boundaries for the self that are based on physical tensions). These types tend to have problems with aggression and repression. Underneath their ego defenses they carry a great deal of rage. 

The Feeling Triad

Types Two, Three, and Four are concerned with self-image (attachment to the false or assumed self of personality). They believe that the stories about themselves and their assumed qualities are their actual identity. Underneath their ego defenses these types carry a great deal of shame. 

The Thinking Triad

Types Five, Six, and Seven are concerned with anxiety (they experience a lack of support and guidance). They engage in behaviors that they believe will enhance their safety and security. Underneath their ego defenses these types carry a great deal of fear. 

IN THE INSTINCTIVE/GUT/BODY TRIAD 

Types Eight, Nine, and One have formed around distortions in their instincts, the root of our life-force and vitality. The Instinctive Triad is concerned with the intelligence of the body, with basic life functioning and survival. 

CONCERNED WITH: Resistance & Control of the Environment 

HAVE ISSUES WITH: Aggression & Repression 

SEEKS: Autonomy 

UNDERLYING FEELING: RAGE

The body plays a crucial role in all forms of genuine spiritual work, because bringing awareness back to the body anchors the quality of Presence. The reason is fairly obvious: while our minds and feelings can wander to the past or the future, our body can only exist here and now, in the present moment. This is one of the fundamental reasons why virtually all meaningful spiritual work begins with coming back to the body and becoming more grounded in it. 

Moreover, the instincts of the body are the most powerful energies that we have to work with. Any real transformation must involve them, and any work that ignores them is almost certain to create problems. The body has an amazing intelligence and sensitivity, and it also has its own language and its own way of knowing. In indigenous societies, such as the aboriginal tribes of Australia, people have maintained a more open relationship with the intelligence of the body. There have been documented cases in which aborigines knew in their bodies that one of their relatives had been injured many miles away. This body-knowledge enabled them to walk directly toward the injured person to help them. 

Most of us in modern societies are almost entirely estranged from the wisdom of our bodies. The psychological term for this is dissociation, in everyday language we call this checking out. In a busy, stress-filled day, it is likely we sense our body only if it is in pain. For instance, we do not usually notice that we have feet unless our shoes are too tight. Even though our back is highly sensitive, we are usually unaware of it unless we are getting a massage, or have a sunburn or a back injury—and sometimes not even then. 

BEING PRESENT IN THE BODY 

At this moment, as you are reading the words on this page, can you feel your body? How much of it? Where is your body positioned right now? How deeply are you experiencing it? What helps you experience it more deeply? 

When we truly inhabit our Instinctive Center—fully occupying our body—it gives us a profound sense of fullness, stability, and autonomy or independence. When we lose contact with our Essence, the personality attempts to “fill in” by providing a false sense of autonomy. 

To give us this false sense of autonomy, the personality creates what psychology calls ego boundaries. With ego boundaries, we are able to say, “This is me and that is not me. That out there is not me, but this sensation (or thought, or feeling) here is me.” We usually believe that these boundaries correspond with our skin and therefore with the dimensions of our real bodies, but this is not always true. 

This is because we are usually sensing habitual tensions, not necessarily the actual contours of our bodies. We may also notice that we have almost no sensation in some parts of our bodies: they feel blank or empty. The truth is that we are always carrying around a felt sense of self that has little to do with how our body actually is, where it is positioned, or what we are doing. The set of internal tensions that create our unconscious sense of self is the foundation of the personality, the first layer. 

“When you are describing or explaining or even just inwardly feeling your ‘self,’ what you are actually doing, whether you know it or not, is drawing a mental line or boundary across the whole field of your experience, and everything on the inside of that boundary you are feeling or calling your ‘self’ while everything outside that boundary you feel to be ‘not-self.’ Your self-identity, in other words, depends entirely upon where you draw that boundary line . . .”

Ken Wilber

While all of the types employ ego boundaries, the Eight, Nine, and One do so for a particular reason—they are attempting to use their will to affect the world without being affected by it. They try to influence their environment, to remake it, control it, hold it back, without having their sense of self influenced by it. To put this differently, all three of these types resist being influenced by reality in different ways. They try to create a sense of wholeness and autonomy by building a “wall” between what they consider self and not self, although where these walls are varies from type to type and from person to person. 

Our ego boundaries fall into two categories. The first boundary is directed outward. It usually corresponds to our physical body, although not always. When we cut our fingernails or hair, or have a tooth extracted, we no longer regard them as part of ourselves. Conversely, we may subconsciously regard certain people or possessions as part of ourselves—our home, our spouse, or children—although, of course, they are not. 

The second boundary is directed inward. For example, we say that we “had a dream,” but we do not think that we are the dream. Some of our thoughts or feelings will also be seen as separate from our identity, while we definitely identify with others. Of course, different people will identify with different feelings and thoughts. One person may experience anger as part of the self while another will view anger as something alien. In all cases, however, it is important to remember that these divisions are arbitrary and are the results of habits of the mind. 

In Type Eight the ego boundary is primarily focused outward, against the environment. The focus of attention is also outward. The result is an expansiveness and an outpouring of the Eight’s vitality into the world. Eights are constantly putting out energy so that nothing can get too close and hurt them. Their whole approach to life is as if they were saying, “Nothing’s going to get the upper hand on me. No one is going to get through my defenses and hurt me. I’m going to keep my guard up.” The more wounded an Eight is from childhood, the thicker their ego boundary, and the tougher they are going to make it for others to get through to them. 

Type One individuals also hold a boundary against the outside world, but they are far more invested in maintaining their internal boundary. All of us have aspects of ourselves that we do not trust or approve of that make us feel anxious and that we want to defend ourselves from. Ones expend enormous energy trying to hold back certain unconscious impulses, trying to keep them from getting into consciousness. It is as if Ones were saying to themselves, “I don’t want that feeling! I don’t want to have that reaction or that impulse!” They create a great deal of physical tension to maintain their inner boundaries and hold aspects of their own inner nature at bay. 

Type Nine, the central type in the Triad (the type positioned on the equilateral triangle), tries to hold their ego boundaries in both areas, internal and external. In the internal realm, Nines do not want certain feelings and states to disturb their equilibrium. They put up a wall against parts of themselves just as Ones do, suppressing powerful instinctive drives and emotions. At the same time, Nines maintain a strong ego boundary against the outside world so that they will not be hurt, like Eights. They often engage in passive-aggressive behaviors and turn a blind eye to whatever threatens their peace. It is no wonder that Nines report that they often feel fatigued, because it takes a tremendous amount of energy to resist reality on both “fronts.” If Nines use most of their vitality to maintain these boundaries, it is not available for living and engaging more fully in the world. 

Each of these three types has problems with aggression. (While all nine personality types are aggressive in different ways, the energy of aggression is a key component in the Instinctive types’ ego structures.) Sometimes the aggression is directed toward the self, sometimes at others. In the course of psychological or spiritual work, this aggressive energy often emerges as a powerful sense of rage. Rage is the instinctive reaction to feeling the need to suppress ourselves—the need to close down and constrict our aliveness. Eights tend to act out rage, Nines tend to deny it, and Ones tend to repress it. 

We can understand the function of rage more clearly in the experience of a child. All of us, either consciously or unconsciously, feel that as children we did not have the space that we needed to fully develop. When we start exploring this realm of experience, we will discover that beneath our grown-up veneer, we are suppressing (or even more so, repressing) an intense anger that has resulted from this insult to our Essential integrity. (On the positive side, anger is also a way of telling others “Stay away from me so that I can have my own space! I want and need to be whole and independent.”) The problem is that if we carry these issues from our childhood, we will continue to feel as though we need to protect our “personal space” even when there is no actual threat to it. Once these issues have been worked through, the energy that drives our rage—as well as the energy that keeps it suppressed—can be released and redirected toward other, more fulfilling goals, including our transformation. 

IN THE FEELING TRIAD

In the Instinctive Triad, we saw how seldom we really occupy our bodies and are really present with our full vitality. In the same way, we seldom dare to be fully in our hearts. When we are, it is often overwhelming. We therefore substitute all kinds of reactions for the power of real feelings. This is the core dilemma of the Feeling Triad: types Two, Three, and Four. 

CONCERNED WITH: Love of False Self & Self-Image 

HAVE ISSUES WITH: Identity & Hostility 

SEEKS: Attention 

UNDERLYING FEELING: SHAME

At the deepest level, your heart qualities are the source of your identity. When your heart opens, you know who you are, and that “who you are” has nothing to do with what people think of you and nothing to do with your past history. You have a particular quality, a flavor, something that is unique and intimately you. It is through the heart that we recognize and appreciate our true nature. 

When we are in contact with the heart, we feel loved and valued. Moreover, as the great spiritual traditions teach, the heart reveals that we are love and value. Our share in the Divine nature means not only that we are loved by God, but that the presence of love resides in us—we are the conduit through which love comes into the world. When our hearts are closed off and blocked, however, not only do we lose contact with our true identity, but we do not feel valued or loved. This loss is intolerable, so the personality steps in to create a substitute identity and to find other things to give us a sense of value, usually by seeking attention and external affirmation from others. 

THE FEELING CENTER 

Right now, as you are reading these words on this page, turn your attention to the area of your heart. Take some deep, easy breaths, and actually sense into your chest. What sensations do you experience in this area? Allow yourself to relax and breathe deeply and see what you are feeling in the area of your heart. Does it feel sharp? Tender? Numb? Aching? What is the exact feeling you are experiencing? If this feeling had a color or shape or taste, what would it be? What effect does this exercise have on your sense of yourself? 

Thus, the three types of the Feeling Triad are primarily concerned with the development of a self-image. They compensate for a lack of deeper connection with the Essential qualities of the heart by erecting a false identity and becoming identified with it. They then present this image to others (as well as to themselves) in the hope that it will attract love, attention, approval, and a sense of value. 

“All we need to do is to give up our habit of regarding as real that which is unreal. All religious practices are meant solely to help us do this. When we stop regarding the unreal as real, then reality alone will remain, and we will be that.”

Joseph Goldstein

In psychological terms, Twos, Threes, and Fours are the types most concerned with their “narcissistic wounding,” that is, with not being valued for who they really were as children. Because no one graduates from childhood without some degree of narcissistic damage, as adults, we have a lot of difficulty being authentic with one another. There is always the fear that, when all is said and done, we are really empty and worthless. The tragic result is that we almost never actually see each other or allow ourselves to be seen, no matter what type we are. We substitute an image instead, as if we were saying to the world, “This is who I am—isn’t it? You like it—don’t you?” People may affirm us (that is, our image), but as long as we identify with our personality, something deeper always goes unaffirmed. 

The types of the Feeling Triad present us with three different solutions to this dilemma: going out to please others so that they will like you (Type Two); achieving things and becoming outstanding in some way so that people will admire and affirm you (Type Three); or having an elaborate story about yourself and attaching tremendous significance to all of your personal characteristics (Type Four). 

Two major themes in this Triad involve identity issues (“Who am I?”) and problems with hostility (“I hate you for not loving me in the way I want!”). Because Twos, Threes, and Fours unconsciously know that their identity is not an expression of who they really are, they respond with hostility whenever their personality-identity is not validated. Hostility serves both to deflect people who might question or devalue this identity, and to defend these types against deeper feelings of shame and humiliation. 

Type Two is looking for value in the good regard of others. Twos want to be wanted; they try to obtain favorable reactions by giving people their energy and attention. Twos look for positive responses to their overtures of friendliness, help, and goodness in order to build up their own self-esteem. The focus of their feelings is outward, on others, but as a result, they often have difficulty knowing what their own feelings are telling them. They also frequently feel unappreciated, although, as much as possible, they must conceal the hostile feelings that this generates. 

Type Four is the opposite: their energy and attention go inward to maintain a self-image based on feelings, fantasies, and stories from the past. Their personality-identity centers on being “different,” being unlike anyone else, and as a result, they often feel estranged from people. Fours tend to create and sustain moods rather than allow whatever feelings are actually present to arise. Less healthy Fours often see themselves as victims and prisoners of their pasts. They believe that there is no hope of being another way because of all the tragedies and abuses that have befallen them. This is also their way of eliciting attention and pity from others and, hence, some degree of validation. 

Type Three, the central type of this Triad (the type positioned on the equilateral triangle), directs attention and energy both inward and outward. Like Twos, Threes need the positive feedback and affirmation of others. Threes primarily seek value through accomplishment; they develop notions about what a valuable person would be like, then try to become that person. But Threes also engage in a great deal of internal “self-talk,” attempting to create and sustain a consistent internal picture of themselves, like Fours. They are always in danger of “believing their own press releases” more than the truth. 

Despite the various images presented by these types, at root they feel valueless, and many of their personality’s agendas are attempts to disguise this from themselves and others. Twos attempt to get a sense of value by saying, “I know I am valuable because others love and value me. I do good things for people, and they appreciate me.” Twos are rescuers. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Fours are rescuees. Fours tell themselves, “I know I am valuable because I am unique and unlike anyone else. I am special because someone took the trouble to rescue me. Someone is taking the trouble to attend to my distress, so I must be worthwhile.” Threes are paragons who do not need rescuing, as if to say, “I know I am valuable because I’ve got my act together—there’s nothing wrong with me. I am valuable because of my accomplishments.” Despite their individual methods for “building self-esteem,” all three of these types lack a proper love of self. 

If the types of the Instinctive Triad are trying to manage feelings of rage, in the Feeling Triad Twos, Threes, and Fours are trying to deal with feelings of shame. When our authentic, Essential qualities are not mirrored in early childhood, we come to the conclusion that something is wrong with us. The resulting feeling is shame. By attempting to feel valuable by means of their self-image, these types hope to escape feelings of shame. Twos become ultra-good, trying to be caring and of service to others so that they will not feel shame. Threes become perfect in their performance and outstanding in their achievements so they will be able to resist feeling shame. Fours avoid deeper feelings of shame by dramatizing their losses and hurts and by seeing themselves as victims. 

IN THE THINKING TRIAD

If the Instinctive Triad is about maintaining a felt sense of self and the Feeling Triad is about maintaining a personal identity, the Thinking Triad is about finding a sense of inner guidance and support. The dominant feelings in types Five, Six, and Seven are anxiety and insecurity. To put it another way, the Instinctive Triad types are concerned with resisting aspects of the present. The Feeling Triad types are all past-oriented because our self-image is built up out of memories and interpretations of the past. The Thinking Triad types are more concerned about the future, as if to ask, “What’s going to happen to me? How am I going to survive? How can I prepare myself to keep bad things from happening? How do I move forward in life? How do I cope?” 

CONCERNED WITH: Strategies & Beliefs 

HAVE ISSUES WITH: Insecurity & Anxiety 

SEEKS: Security 

UNDERLYING FEELING: FEAR

The Thinking Triad has lost touch with the aspect of our true nature that in some spiritual traditions is called the quiet mind. The quiet mind is the source of inner guidance that gives us the ability to perceive reality exactly as it is. It allows us to be receptive to an inner knowing that can guide our actions. But just as we are seldom fully in our bodies or in our hearts, we seldom have access to the quiet, spacious quality of the mind. Quite the contrary, for most of us, the mind is an inner chatterbox, which is why people spend years in monasteries or in retreats trying to quiet their restless minds. In personality, the mind is not quiet and not naturally “knowing”—it is forever trying to come up with a strategy or a formula so that it can do whatever it thinks will allow us to function in the world. 

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that’s waiting for us.”

Joseph Campbell

THE THINKING CENTER 

Right now, allow yourself to relax and get in greater contact with the sensations and impressions you are having. Actually sense what it feels like to be alive in your body at this time. Don’t visualize—let yourself experience whatever is here. As you become more grounded and calm, you may begin to notice your mind becoming less “noisy.” Continue this process for a few minutes. Stay in contact with your immediate sensations and impressions, and see what effect this has on your thinking. As your mind becomes quieter, are your perceptions clearer or fuzzier? Does your mind seem sharper or duller?

Fives, Sixes, and Sevens cannot get their minds to simmer down. This is a problem because the quiet mind allows us to feel profoundly supported; inner knowing and guidance arise in the quiet mind and give us confidence to act in the world. When these qualities are blocked, we feel fear. Their reactions to fear distinguish the three types of the Thinking Triad. 

Type Five responds by retreating from life and reducing their personal needs. Fives believe that they are too frail and insubstantial to safely survive in the world. The only safe place is in their minds, so they stockpile whatever they believe will help them survive until they are ready to rejoin the world. Fives also feel that they do not have enough to “bring to the table” to meet the demands of practical life. They retreat until they can learn something or master some skill that would allow them to feel safe enough to come out of hiding. 

Type Seven, by contrast, charges into life and appears to be afraid of nothing. It at first seems strange that Sevens are in a Triad whose types are afflicted by fear since they are so outwardly adventurous. Despite appearances, however, Sevens are full of fear, but not of the outside world: they are afraid of their inner world—of being trapped in emotional pain, grief, and especially feelings of anxiety. So they escape into activity and anticipation of activity. Sevens unconsciously attempt to keep their minds occupied so that their underlying anxieties and hurts will not surface. 

In Type Six, the central type of this Triad (the type positioned on the equilateral triangle), attention and energy are directed both inward and outward. Sixes feel anxious inside, and so launch into external action and anticipation of the future like Sevens. But having done so, they eventually become afraid that they will make mistakes and be punished or overwhelmed by demands on them, so like Fives, they “jump back inside.” They get scared by their feelings again, and the reactive cycle continues, with anxiety causing their attention to bounce around like a Ping-Pong ball. 

The types of the Thinking Triad tend to have issues related to what psychologists call the “separation phase” of ego development. This is the stage, around two to four years old, when toddlers begin to wonder, “How do I move away from the safety and nurturance of Mommy? What is safe and what is dangerous?” Under ideal circumstances, the father-figure becomes the support and the guide, the person who helps the child develop skills and independence. 

The types of this Triad represent the three ways children might attempt to negotiate the separation phase and overcome dependency. Sixes look for somebody like a father-figure, someone who is strong, trustworthy, and authoritative. Thus, Sixes deal with the loss of inner guidance by seeking guidance from others. They are looking for support to become independent, although ironically they tend to become dependent on the very person or system they use to find independence. Fives are convinced that support is unavailable or not reliable, so they attempt to compensate for the loss of inner guidance by mentally figuring everything out on their own. But because they are “going it alone,” they believe they must reduce their need for and attachment to anyone if they are going to break away and be independent. Sevens try to break away by pursuing substitutes for their mother’s nurturing. They go after whatever they believe will make them feel more satisfied and secure. At the same time, they respond to the lack of guidance by trying everything—as if by the process of elimination, they could discover the source of nurturance they are secretly looking for.

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Feel Better

The Kings of Self-Help

A few years ago, I experienced a break-up which threw me into a profound state of grief, confusion, resentment, bitterness and self-recrimination. What followed thereafter was a year of anguish, and psychological torment to a degree that I had never experienced before. No matter what I tried to do to crawl out of my self-pitying, sad, and indignant hole, nothing seemed to work. 

In that very dark and very gloomy year, I went to therapy, I spoke to others who had experienced something similar in their lives, I made various kinds of art, which is something that usually helps me to process and shift tormented states. But at the end of the year, I was very much caught up in the trauma of that sudden and somewhat callous uncoupling, as well as feeling a tad hopeless, in that my usual self-care and spiritual practices (exercise, yoga, learning and reciting poems, meditation, going for walks in nature, cuddles and playing with my doggo Max) weren’t really healing and helping me in the way that they usually did. 

More than anything, I realised that I needed to increase or add to whatever strategies I’d been employing, and maybe even try out some things that I had been resistant to doing during the previously. 

Below, you will find a handful of self-help techniques that worked for me, in that doing them on a daily basis felt soothing and in time (a great deal of time, but time is also often the secret ingredient here) I managed to re-emerge into my everyday life again with fewer and less disturbing reactions to the painful and lacerating thoughts and emotions connected to this other person and the situation that had brought about our parting of ways.

I’ve called these techniques the KINGS of Self-Help, not because I’m a fan of patriarchal privilege, or the monarchy in general for that matter, but because I needed an acronym to help me remember this handful of life-saving strategies, and also to signal to myself in an archetypal way, that this was the good stuff, the noble, benevolent, and safeguarding stuff that I needed to work on for myself to heal and become whole, in some way, again. 

If you’re struggling with a difficult relationship or any other trauma associated with a past or present figure in your life, I would recommend giving some or all of these techniques a go. Not just once or twice, but maybe for a few weeks, on a daily basis. None of these practices take longer than 5-10 minutes to carry out. You can either focus on just one practice, and do that everyday, or do them together as a combination, as I now like to do whilst walking with my dog-pal Max in our local park. 

If you’re listening to an audio version of this, you might even play for yourself the instructions and then pause to do the practice itself before moving onto the next one. I really, really hope that some of these help you as much as they have me. 

1) K: (LOVING)KINDNESS

This practice is based on a core psycho-spiritual method in Theravadan Buddhism, as well as other spiritual traditions, called metta, which translates into English as something like friendliness, or goodwill, or taking an active interest in others. I do this practice for about ten minutes a day. It has five parts, so two to three minutes for each piece of it, and here’s how to do it.

HOW TO DO IT | Part One: Someone Or Something You Love

Whilst sitting quietly or walking, call to mind someone whom you really care for, someone that it doesn’t take much energy for you to feel a level of warmth and care and affections towards in the depths of your heart. You might even want to place a hand on your heart-centre, the centre of your chest, and really feel that focused love and affection and tenderness that you are able to generate by simply dwelling on the image of, or the remembered presence, or voice, of that other person. But it could also be a pet, or a character in a fantasy or sci-fi novel, or even a deity if you like.

I like to do this first part of the practice, looking at and thinking about my dogchild Max, as well as my aging parents, but it can be really anyone or anything that opens your heart a couple of inches, or even just a few millimetres. Now, whilst holding the image or idea of the loved one in your mind and heart, start to send them some good vibes. 

Traditionally, this is done by saying or chanting a few phrases such as: may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be free from suffering. I like to chant or sing these words out loud, to the tune of a Rex Orange County Song that I like called Loving Is Easy.

So let’s say you were to do this somewhat like I do, start by focusing on your loved one and begin to chant:  MYBH, MYBH, MYBFFS, over and over again for about two to three minutes. If you’re doing this whilst out walking, as I like to do, and if another person or living creature (a bird, a squirrel) crosses your path, I find it quite nice to include them too into this sphere of lovingkindness that you are trying to generate and nurture in your heart of hearts. Also, pay attention to what your mind gets up to whilst you’re chanting, especially if it flits off elsewhere, or puts up some resistance to what you’re doing. 

“Oh my God, this is a bit naff, why’s he doing this?”

“I don’t know, so boring! I’d prefer listening to a podcast.”

“How many more minutes of this? Surely we’ve done two minutes of this already.”

“I don’t know. Let me see if so-and-so answered my WhatsApp message earlier. I can keep the chant going whilst checking for messages, right?”

Whatever resistance your mind offers to the practice, see if you can accept it with a similar sense of goodwill and friendliness that you’re pumping out of your heart-centre at this moment, and just keep on going for the full two or three minutes. 

HOW TO DO IT | Part Two: A Neutral Stranger

For the second part of this practice, we focus on someone who we have no connection to whatsoever. It could be some people in another country that you saw going about their business or suffering on the news the night before; it could be the barista who served you your coffee this morning, or the supermarket assistant who you often see working on the self-checkouts. Just someone you can picture in your mind in some way, or hold as an idea, but who doesn’t necessarily call up any emotions, positive or negative associations for you. Again, spend two to three minutes either repeating in your mind, or out loud the loving mantra: MYBHa, MYBHe, MYBFFS. And as before, notice any disruptions or reactions from your conscious mind in response to the practice. 

“Mmm. I thought I felt neutral about that person, but actually there’s something about them that I find a bit offputting.”

“God, this Rex Orange Country tune is starting to annoy me. I hope it doesn’t turn into an earworm.”

“I wonder if Aldi are still selling those biscuits I like half-price?”

HOW TO DO IT | Part Three: A Mixed Bag Relationship

Most of our relationships fall into this category. People we are really fond of but who also rile us in some shape or form. An old friend or a sibling who has lots of positive qualities, but who also manages to elude our attempt to have with them the kind of connection we might personally aspire to having. The relative we feel an attachment to, but winds us up in a way that sometimes feels uncomfortable. That’s the idea here. And, as before, three minutes or whatever amount of time you’ve set for each part, sending some well-wishing in their direction, and working with the resistant or obstructive mind in terms of its response to you dedicating three minutes of your life having some loving thoughts towards someone who doesn’t always act in a loving way towards you.

HOW TO DO IT | Part Four: The Difficult Person, or Enemy

OK, this is a bit like lifting weights. Another 20 kilos added on each time, and maybe this one might be the hardest for us to do. Here we wish health, happiness, freedom from suffering, and all those other sweet and harmonious thoughts to the people we really don’t like, including those people who we feel really don’t like us. This is great to do for any current relationship, or past relationship which has left you with a bitter or anguished taste in your mouth, for those people you might resent in some way, or even at times feel very strong and distressed emotions towards. 

Same deal. You might even try imagining these people being happy, healthy and free from suffering, just to see what your mind does with that. It might resist this visualisation. I’ve found that it helps to also bring in a bit of humour here. So whilst I’m imagining my difficult people, I also try and bear in mind the ways that I too can be a pain in the arse at times, but not in a beating myself up, just a little acknowledgement of my own Enneagram Four shaped shadow. We’re all flawed, we’re all constrained in different ways by our personalities or ego-cages, as I prefer to call them. I sometimes also imagine the people in this category doing a little cheerleading squad dance (for themselves) as I chant may you be happy, healthy and free from suffering. This is not to demean them, or make them seem foolish, but it just makes me smile, and gives me a feeling that my enemies are also putting in a little bit of effort in this human quest to live their lives, our lives as happy, healthy, and with as little suffering as possible.

HOW TO DO IT | Part Five: Ourselves

We’ve saved the best, but maybe also the hardest part of the practice for last. After pouring pint after pint of love from our sometimes resistant hearts out for the people we unconditionally care about, as well as those more conditional relationships, we are now ready to do the same for us, and also to notice what inner critics or other obstructions come up as we spend three minutes wishing ourselves well. Can we really get behind this last part, really want the best for ourselves, without our minds coming up with reasons why we don’t deserve it, or how another person or situation is somehow standing in the way of us getting our own pint of happiness, health and freedom from suffering. If this thought arises, again you can just briefly switch to that person or thing and send them another pint of happiness, health, peace and fulfilment. You get the idea. Of course it’s great if you’re able to generate this stuff wholeheartedly each time you do it, but turns out, as far as rewiring those neural networks  go, even if you fake it to some extent, say the words, but not have them connect with loving inner feelings, this practice will still work for you. In terms of the Ego and the way it gets trapped in various forms of suffering, it seems that even just alluding to a more loving, open, generative outlook can shift one’s actual outlook in time. Perhaps the Difficult Person or Enemy moves into the less emotional territory in our minds of the Mixed-Bag relationship, or The Neutral Stranger. This is possible, as well as even quite likely, if we persist with this practice on a daily basis. 

2) I = INTENTION

Intention is really where we firm up our trajectory in an area of our life or situation, or person in our life that we’re struggling with in some way. Having done our well-wishing, we now think about all those areas in our life that cause us some upset or suffering and set our intention for the day, or for the next week, or maybe even just for the next hour. Don’t text so-and-so when feeling upset, whatever your intention is. Or: I’m going to move forwards in this relationship or this situation like this rather than that. You might want to imagine yourself standing at a crossroads for each healthy intention you set, and visualise yourself heading perhaps to the right (or left) whichever direction feels like the path of suffering, which is also most likely aligned with our default self-protective fight-flight-freeze stress-reponses versus the other side which is more likely to take us closer to the well-wishing intent of the first practice: allowing us to be as happy as we can be, healthy as we can be (physically and mentally) as well as free from as much mind and heart-generated suffering as possible. So why not try that now? Call to mind an issue, situation or a person you’re struggling with, and set a wise, or skillful, or healthy intention that you are going to follow at least today (you could alter the intention tomorrow), but ideally something which when set and reinforced each day in some way, you can continue to uphold and carry out in the way that best serves you.

3) N = NO MORE SUFFERING

Perhaps it’s good to remind ourselves of the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is any emotion or thought or experience we have that feels painful either in a sensory, physical realm, or in a metaphysical realm, which is to say in our minds. If my mind wanders into thinking about certain relationships, I experience a kind of embodied (for me in the chest and stomach) pain, but also a lot of mental agitation. The mental stuff is where we’re moving more into suffering, as suffering is what the mind generally does with our pain. That is why, when someone is taking your blood or giving you an injection, they’ll often ask you a question about your plans for the days or what you had for breakfast this morning,  just as they’re about to sink in the needle. This helps us to better process the pain (ah, a shift in my sensory system which my body and mind are registering as threatening or unpleasant in some way, but not to worry as I’m having this cheery chat with the lady inflicting the pain) without our minds going into their normal reactive patterns: ouch, ouch, ouch, why is this person doing this to me; how dare you; will the pain ever stop; how long can I tolerate this for etc. We can’t control the amount of pain we experience at a raw emotional/sensory level, but we can do something to work with our suffering when it arises. 

Unfortunately, this needs to be something that isn’t just cognitive, a kind of mental processing. If simply saying the right words to our reactive and mood-driven minds would create a magical state-altering effect to occur, simply saying the words “cheer up” or “chill out” will get a depressed mind to cheer up and an anxious mind to calm down, but this is generally not how it works as suffering is also contingent on how agitated our nervous systems are. So this practice mainly targets that issue in that it provides a cognitive steer, but also works profoundly with the vagus nerve in terms of activating it’s peace-providing parasympathetic wing (the calming, soothing, you’re safe, you’re ok wing) of this important stressy nerve, allowing us to calm down and find some peace from the bottom up (which is to say from our moods, emotions and anxious suppositions first) before addressing our suffering thoughts.

There is a story I really like about King Solomon setting a challenge for his smart and sagacious advisory board, this primitive Think Tank consisting of the finest minds in the land, to source for him a truly magical piece of wisdom, a spell or linguistic elixir which might be able to do the seemingly impossible, which is, a spell that would be able to make a sad human happy, and if necessary, a happy human sad. After many months of research and exploration, his enlightened advisors presented him with the magical words, which was expressed in one of the semitic languages of the time. And what was this magical chant? 

This Too Shall Pass | גם זה יעבור

I’ve always struggled a bit to get behind this magical spell or prayer, as being a heart type, when I’m suffering, it doesn’t feel as if this will pass ever. Not in a million years. Not even after I’m dead and buried, the worms eating that delicious brain pate out of my skull, will this suffering cease. And that my friends is exactly why I need to chant, prayer or spell or This is how I do the practice, but feel free to replace the self-help spell, prayer or mantra with any form of language that works in a medicinal and soothing way for you. 

HOW TO DO IT 

So how to do this? Well, sitting comfortably, or walking, or lying in bed, take a slow, deep breath in, a breath that reaches deep into your lungs and fills your belly, and then on the outbreath you’re going to chant some words that remind you of the transience of life, the transience of its sweetness, but also its pain. such as גם זה יעבור. When you chant, you’re going to try and go as low and resonant as you can, your voice rumbling in the sides of your neck and the back of your throat which is where that all important vagus nerve travels. You want to be plucking, like someone playing a double bass, at that nerve in order to soothe and settle your upset and stressy mind, body, heart. Breathe in through your nose and then on the outbreath, let the final syllable trickle out of your mouth like a gentle stream, emptying as slowly as possible the source of your agitation until you have nothing left to give in your lungs and belly. Until you are quite empty, in a way that almost aches.  Here is what this might sound like:

G = GRATITUDE

Again, when we’re suffering a feelings of thankfulness, gratitude, appreciativeness are often almost impossible to come by. At least for me. But of course, that’s exactly the medicine we usually need. And don’t take my word for it. Three decades of research into the importance of this feeling state by yer boffin neuroscientists and clinical psychologists backs this. As does any much older (as in five, ten, twenty thousand years older) wisdom or spiritual tradition you care to mention. It’s very counterintuitive, but yes, counting your blessings, in a very simple, but conscious way, does appear to help with our own sadness, despair, or anxiety. It doesn’t have to be overblown and sentimental this counting of one’s blessings. But more like a focus on how things could be worse, of course, in some way. So I might reflect, as I walk around the park, counting my blessings, that I’m thankful that I can manoevure my body around by own volition. That’s pretty cool, if you think about it. But of course we don’t really think about it, especially when we’re feeling really upset. Other things that seem to work for me is being thankful that when I am hungry there is always food in the fridge, or a walk or a bus-ride away. That I have warm shelter for the night in the middle of a cold winter, that I get to share my life with a loving, furry creature called Max. That I live in a country and a part of this city that is relatively safe and quiet and peaceful. These are the things I focus on, but really anything that gets even a tiny bit of gratitude going for you, even at just a conceptual level. You don’t have to feel this warm sense of gratefulness in the very cockles of your heart for this kind of thing to work, but it probably will require you to focus for a few minutes on those thing we do usually take for granted, and don’t give thanks to life for having bestowed on us, also with the recognition that this could be taken away at any moment. I could have stroke right now, and not be able to walk around on a whim, maybe for the rest of my life. A dark thought, but maybe a dark thought that is worth dwelling on if it also brings with it a little bit of light into whatever gloomy and murky existential plight we find ourselves in. 

S = SOMETHING THAT WORKS FOR YOU

The problem with self-help strategies, which is also why they can sometimes annoy me when transmitted in my direction, is that they often feel a bit one-size-fits-all, and I have the kind of mind that says stuff like “well, this might work for you saintly buddhist monk, spiritual teacher, professional life coach, priest, imam, rabbi, whatever” but I need something that speaks to me, to my heart and soul, but also my personality style, my way of being in the world. And this is true. I think we can only really arrive at our handful of self-help kings, our strategies for working with suffering, by trying out a whole bunch of stuff and arriving through experience, maybe bitter experience, at things that work. For us. Not as in a magic bullet, or a drug, which might work almost instantly, but something which nudges us a little bit more onto the path of peace and happiness, rather than one of misery and suffering. And I don’t what that is for you, because I’m not you. Maybe it’s learning to play a musical instrument and then picking up your ukelele or flute, or whatever it is, when you are struggling and working on a piece of music you want to master. Maybe it’s drawing, or painting, or making podcasts. Maybe it’s a particular kind of breathing practice, or movement practice, maybe it’s dancing, or doing press-ups, or going to the gym. Maybe it’s gardening, or going on a ten mile hike, or sending a voice note to a friend you haven’t spoken to for a while. Maybe it’s just becoming super-super present to your surroundings, and trying to stay with your sensory, felt body perceptions, rather than with everything that’s going on in your head and heart. Who knows. But maybe this is a journey you need to go on, in terms of finding whatever it is, that helps you get back on the path of life and a more purposeful stride, rather than the things we usually do when struggling emotionally, which is to say our default stress response strategies: fighting, fleeing, getting frozen and trapped in a suffering state, or fawning in an attempt to nudge someone else come to our rescue. Whatever it is that gets you out of your bind, I think ultimately it has to be chosen and utilised as an ongoing practice, by you and you alone. Whatever you choose to do, may you be happy, and healthy, and free (as much as possible) from your own personal suffering. 

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Feel Better

Super-quick Myers-Briggs Personality Test

The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator is a self-report inventory designed to identify a person’s personality type, strengths, and preferences. The questionnaire was developed by Isabel Myers and her mother Katherine Briggs based on their work with Carl Jung’s theory of personality types. Today, the MBTI inventory is one of the world’s most widely used psychological instruments, especially in business, but it is also used in psychological research and by clinicians and therapists.

The standard test has hundreds of questions, but in fact, it’s quite easy to get your Four MBTI letters, and also learn about what each personality function is focusing on, by simply thinking about the four questions below. If you believe yourself to be both sides of the dichotomy, try to choose the one which has the upper-hand, or is more likely to be your “default” way of doing/thinking/being in your day-to-day life, even if just by a whisker.

To get your MBTI score, simply write down one of the letters for each of the questions below.

Question 1 – How do you get your energy?

Extraverts = E

  • are generally sociable
  • are focused on the outer world
  • get energy by spending time with others
  • talk a lot & start conversations
  • speak first, then think
  • are quick to take action
  • have many friends & many interests

Introverts = I

  • are generally quiet
  • are focused on their inner world
  • get energy by spending time alone
  • mostly listen & wait for others to talk first
  • think first, then speak
  • are slow to take action
  • have a few deep friendships & refined interests

 

Question 2 – How do you see the world & gather information?

Sensors = S

  • have finely-tuned five senses
  • pay attention to the details
  • focus on what is real (in the present)
  • think in concrete terms
  • like practical things
  • like to do (make)
  • are accurate and observant
  • prefer to do things the established way

iNtuitives = N

  • use their “sixth sense”
  • see the “big picture”
  • focus on what is possible (in the future)
  • think in abstract terms
  • like theories
  • like to dream (design)
  • are creative and imaginative
  • prefer to try out new ideas

 

Question 3 – How do you make your decisions?

Thinkers = T

  • mostly use their head
  • make decisions based on logic
  • are more interested in things & ideas
  • treat everybody the same
    (emphasizing fairness)
  • are more scientific in describing the world

Feelers = F

  • mostly use their heart
  • make decisions based on their values
  • are more interested in people & emotions
  • treat people according to their situation (emphasizing compassion)
  • are more poetic in describing the world

 

Question 4 – How much do you like to plan ahead?

Judgers = J

  • are organized and structured
  • make plans in advance
  • keep to the plan
  • like to be in control of their life
  • want to finalize decisions

Perceivers = P

  • are casual and relaxed
  • prefer to “go with the flow”
  • are able to change and adapt quickly
  • like to simply let life happen
  • want to find more information

 

You should now have four letters (one for each question, e.g. INFP).  If you’d like to see a composite portrait of this type, you can just Google your 4 letters, and voila!

Or, if you’re doing this test before our consultation, please WhatsApp me your results along with your Enneagram number (quick Enneagram Personality test to be found here).

 

Categories
Feel Better

Franz Wright – Selected Poems

My favourite Franz Wright poems. All in one place 🙂

From: Earlier Poems (1982-1995)

Words

I don’t know where they come from.
I can summon them
(sometimes I can)
into my mind,
into my fingers,
I don’t know why. Or I’ll suddenly hear them
walking, sometimes
waking—
they don’t often come when I need them.
When I need them most terribly,
never.

Quandary

All day I slept
and woke and slept
again, the square
of winter sky lighting
the room,
which had grown
octaves
grayer.
What to do, if the words
disappear as you write—
what to do
if they remain,
and you disappear.

Untitled

I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn’t prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren’t dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)

Heroin

Now you’re gone
I’ll wait
for time to come
and tuck me in
a little white blank
envelope,
and mail me
on this pretty wind-lights
midnight:
I am safe
here in the darkness,
the gloating
vampire
of myself,
waiting for the sudden light
to open, its enormous hand
to sort me from the others
and raise me up
and finding me spotless, devoid of destination or origin,
transport me
to the painless fire
of permanent, oblivious
invisibility.

Observations

1

In real life
it’s the living who haunt you.
Expect, in addition
to moments of anguish,
the always-astonishing realization
of just how generic one’s most
deeply personal torments really are.
So learn how to be alone, now.
We end alone.

2

It is good to be loved but it isn’t essential.
The need to love is, infinitely.
Human beings routinely survive without love,
but we cannot survive without loving
someone or something
more than our selves.

The Weeping

He has considered weeping, only he can’t even bring himself to
take a stab at it. He just can’t cry— it is terrible to cry
when you’re by yourself, because what then?
Nothing is solved,
nobody comes;
even solitary children understand. This
apparent respite, apparent quenching
of the need to be befriended
might (much like love in later years) leave you
lonelier than when you were merely alone?

Hand

Striking the table it seems to impose
silence on all metaphysics.
Yet touching the word sun in braille
or switching on a lamp, the hand
is clearly the mind’s glove,
its sister, its ghostly machine.
You’d hardly call what I feel pity
as I watch it
light this match.
Yet it is the hand of the child
and the corpse in me—
the sleeper’s hand, buried apart
in its small grave of unconsciousness;
the hand that’s been placed in handcuffs by police;
the hand I used to touch you, once;
the cool hand on my forehead.

The Old

Their fingernails and hair continue to grow.
The bandaged eggs of their skulls
are frequently combed by the attendants
and friends no one has mentioned are dead.
A few of them wander around in the hallway,
waiting to be led off to the bathroom.
And these move as if underwater, as if
they were children in big people’s shoes,
exploring each thing in their own rooms
for the first time:
mirror, glasses, a vial of pills
with a name typed microscopically on it,
impossible to make out.
Their memories tear
beside places recently stitched.
When I get up in the morning I’m like them
for four or five minutes: I’m anyone
frightened, hungry, somnambulistic, alone.
Wind rustles the black trees once.
Then I grow young.

Night Writing

The sound of someone crying in the next apartment.
In an unfamiliar city, where I find myself once more,
unprepared for this specific situation
or any situation whatsoever, now—
frozen in the chair,
my body one big ear.
A big ear crawling up a wall.
In the room where I quietly rave and gesticulate— and no one must hear me!— alone until sleep:
my life a bombed site turning green again.
The sound of someone crying.

Forgotten in an Old Notebook

Outside the leaves are quiet
as their shade. Hidden
inside them a bird is waiting
for it to get dark
to try its goodnight voice.
I have just looked in the mirror,
and come and sat down at the table.
What happens to our faces?

Beginning of November

The light is winter light.
You’ve already felt it
before you can open your eyes,
and now it’s too late
to prepare yourself
for this gray originless
sorrow that’s filling the room.
It’s not winter.
The light
is. The light is
winter light,
and you’re alone.
At last you get up:
and suddenly notice you’re holding
your body without the heart
to curse its lonely life, it’s suffering
from cold and from the winter
light that fills the room
like fear. And all at once you hug it tight,
the way you might hug
somebody you hate,
if he came to you in tears.

The Lemon Grove

In the windless one hundred degrees of eleven,
in the faintly sweet shade
of the grove just past town,
every day I would go to my tree
and sit down
with my back to it, open the notebook
and drunk with inspiration commence
describing.
It was demonstrated to me there
that nothing in the world can be described.
All attempts at pronouncing a place you loved
will have to be abandoned, oh
the ways the bright molested child has found to pass
his eerie day. And I began to learn.
(There are hidden things waiting
to utter anyone who needs them.)
After days of frustration verging
on blackout some things I saw and felt there became,
in what was once their botched depiction of a place,
a place, and the saying of it into being
the power of loving precisely what is.

Initial

To be able to say it: rose, oak, the stars.
And not to be blind!
Just to be here
for one day, only
to breathe and know when you lie down
you will keep on breathing;
to cast a reflection—,
oh, to have hands
even if they are a little damaged,
even if the fingers
leave no prints.

Categories
Feel Better

Resignation by J.D. McClatchy


RESIGNATION

I like trees because they seem more resigned to
the way they have to live than other things do.
Willa Cather

Here the oak and silver-breasted birches
Stand in their sweet familiarity
While underground, as in a black mirror,
They have concealed their tangled grievances,
Identical to the branching calm above
But there ensnared, each with the others’ hold
On what gives life to which is brutal enough.
Still, in the air, none tries to keep company
Or change its fortune. They seem to lean
On the light, unconcerned with what the world
Makes of their decencies, and will not show
A jealous purchase on their length of days.
To never having been loved as they wanted
Or deserved, to anyone’s sudden infatuation
Gouged into their sides, to all they are forced
To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves.

It is not clear if these trees are ensnared by their branching calm or their tangled grievances. Neither, the poet would suggest. The former ensnarement is focused on agreement and compromise, the latter by conflict. These are also the two ways of dealing with the winds of life and the wounding of others (compromise versus conflict), especially when all those labile aspects of the self are being blown hither and thither: our various twiggy thoughts, and emotional branches; that thick, and mostly unyielding trunk of Ego.

The trees appear to be non-dualistic beings when we see them in their natural habitat, each tree a living part of the whole, but perhaps because they are being experienced through the inherent duality of the human mind (good/bad, right/wrong, lovable/hateful). We see at first a kind of irresolvable duality or duplicity, one which we all are familiar with. This duality is expressed in the poem as the trees “having concealed their tangled grievances, / Identical to the branching calm above”, just as I will often sit with a patient, all branching calm and compliance, but only five minutes before I had readied this branching, calm self to meet them, my entangled grievances were just as alive as theirs are for both of us now.

Money buys silence and compliance. But in every other relationship, this trick doesn’t work. What to do? Maybe we have no other option but to play the game of concealment for and with each other. Maybe its the only way to keep the peace, to get the best out of language, to get the best out of our selves, keeping our connection to “what gives life”, our relationship with the world and the human animals who inhabit it, believing we are in control of our selves and it.

The word duplicity comes from the Latin duplicitas, meaning “doubleness,” which in Medieval times takes on the meaning of “ambiguity” the ambiguity in this case being the bilateral, and so always twofold human mind. We externalise our demeanour through words in order to create a “branching calm” which appears to exist so as to make make ourselves amenable to others as well as ourselves, versus the tangled grievances of our unconscious or semi-conscious roots, which only cause pain. We have the Greeks, as usual, to thank for reminding us that this “state of being double” must perforce emerge as a schism as well as a kind of trick. The Greek version of this doubling is diploos which means, like the Latin, “twofold, double”, but also has a sense which has pushed its way through to the modern English word duplicity, suggesting something “treacherous”, untrustworthy, prone to betrayal. I love you and I will care for your fundamental well-being, as I do for mine, all lovers vow to each other after becoming “ensnared”, to use the words of this poem, “each with the other’s hold on what gives life”.

The brutality of this set-up, which seems a curious word to use after the preceding description of indivisibility, mutuality, and connection, the brutality here presumably refers to the ensnarement as it is played out by Eros or some other kind of energy. Each tree, each life form, the poem suggests, is driven to get what it needs by entering into relationship with another, and when this entanglement becomes personal, as it were, becomes a focus on what you are giving me so that I can flourish, and what I am giving you so that you can flourish, it becomes, as it does for most human relationships, this often becomes a contentious, brutal affair. Most relationships end long before death separates one partner from another. How could it otherwise if you consider all the expectations we bring to our being with others.

A black mirror cannot reflect the self back to itself. Some poems are like this, others offer us their acumen and tree-like meanings. Stand in front of a black mirror, and all you will experience is the feeling of being there in the room, in the self, in a somewhat dull, unfocused way. That slight ache in your chest. The calming familiarity of fingers finding letters on a keyboard without having to direct them. A coolness around the ankles. The toes and soul of each human foot held in a somewhat strained, non-ergonomic way against the steel feet of our swivel chairs.

How might a tree want to be loved? Are trees more lovable than we are? Do they receive more love than we do by dint of being without language and the ways that this language can demand or find fault with another? Their requirements are more simple than ours (space, light, water). What would it feel like to be a tree? I often try and imagine myself as one, I use Rilke’s seeing or feeling into practice with the trees I meet, but I can get no closer to them than J.D. Mclatchy in this poem, who in some way recognises the ways in which we are like trees, but not where it matters, which perhaps could be summarised as our wholly personal, and person-focused concern: concerned with what the world makes of us, of whether we have access to the love or not, concerned with how we perceive others or life itself gouging out bits of us, or branding our being with their concerns. This is the stuff we go to therapy to talk about. Trees don’t have therapists. We seem to be the only creatures on this planet who need them. Why is that?

“Better to be an animal than a man or woman, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on,” writes the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, making trees perhaps in this equation, the least conflicted manifestations of the life force, only second to rocks and stones. Why, we might ask, is it better to be a tree than an insect, or an animal, or one of us? To which Cioran responds with just one word: Salvation. Whatever diminishes the kingdom of egoic, self-driven consciousness and compromises its supremacy is a form of salvation, writes Emil. We are saved by becoming more like trees and less like human animals, but what does that even mean for those of us who live in our egoic, partial to this, impartial to that, operating systems.

Be more tree is how we might translate this poem into a simple Instagram meme. Cioran, I see, hasn’t made much of a splash on that platform, his most-liked post accruing only 3,630 finger taps to the screen for the message: “Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.”

Compare that to the 100,000 likes on the same platform for the next meme that comes up in my feed (“I am the Princess of my own fairy tale”), and you can see perhaps why he has failed to gain traction in 21st century social media.

Be more tree, is a good mantra to have to be sure, even if we can’t live up to it. Life teaches us, maybe even requires us to shelter and to hide almost all the aspects of self that present as psychic suffering, those twisted dark roots of our Being. For we are not fit for consumption by othrs, other than as Idealised projections which we take on board as developmental goals. But surely, you might say, a relationship with another human animal shouldn’t have to always follow the ethics of hassle-free consumerism? Indeed. But are we really much more than consumers, in every aspect of our lives? The cardinal feature of this egoic feeding or fueling, being the acquisition and absorption of pleasant or interesting experiences as a means of achieving contentment: the cult of the new; the democratisation of desire (all deserve to be fabulous, and have fairy tale lives); the acquisition of wealth, which in an emotional realm is registered through interpersonal gratification. Phenomenologically, but also in terms of motivational determinants and behaviours, this is how we (mostly) navigate our lives. Maybe it has always been this way. Maybe we have always been consumed by the very forces of life itself, whilst at the same time consuming, the lives of others, either materially or through an emotional channel.

Each of us carries within our selves a template for how we would like to be loved. Often this template is not communicated directly to others, sometimes it is. Often it comes out in the form of requests or suggestions. My last partner valued our relationship on the basis of physical as opposed to emotional acts of service. A headboard for the bed. A meal ready at a certain time. Being left alone when they were upset, even if this required days, or weeks of distance until they were ready to talk again. The word “serve” and “deserve” have an interesting relationship. Do we deserve the ways in which we expect others to serve us?

The word deserve comes from the Latin deservire “to serve well, to serve zealously”. I will serve you in the way you have stated or intuited that you deserve to be served, as long as you serve me in that way too. Is this what we mean by a romantic relationship? But what has this got to do with Love, romantic or otherwise? My love language, which is to say, what I appreciate the most from another, is not “acts of service” but so-called “words of affirmation”, especially if delivered in a way that feels authentic for both of us. In both cases though, the expectation or requirement, and the conflict or dissolution that follows when these expectations aren’t met, surely cannot help but make a mockery of all our human attempts at union with another. When I sit with a couple who are dissatisfied with each other and their relationship, it usually boils down to this. I expected you to serve me in the way I wanted, and in return I would serve you according to your preferences. That was the deal. We both deserve to be served as our egoic chambers require in some way to filled or furnished. Nothing comes of nothing. If you can’t do this, I will find someone in the supermarket of sex-and-love who can meet my needs in the way that these needs de-serve to be met. And so there they sit, in my therapy chambers, ensnared, each with the others’ hold/ On what gives life”, which they refer to as “love” or at least the presentation of it, and all three of us, feeling quite distinctly the brutality of this relationship deal based on an ideal. The display, staging and demonstration of love, which for me looking on, in my role as calm branching therapist, I experience as somewhat transactional, as it no doubt is. But perhaps it is no more brutal and transactional than the trees, and how they support each other. Perhaps they show us, that its not about the tangled roots of our being with each other, but more about maintaining that vision or even illusion if you want, of decency, calm, non-jealousy, and non-attachment that the trees purport to show, at least above ground where everyone can see them.

Today, I vow to myself that I am going to try and be more of a tree, leaning as they do on and into the light rather than on a phone call, or a text, or some attention from another. To lean on the light, is perhaps another way of connecting us to something the human animal might call God. I ask my clients who claim to be theists if they lean on the One they pray to. As we might on a partner or a friend. None of them do, which I find surprising, but maybe not. Because if they did, perhaps they would not need me, or the care and attention I give to their woes. My God-fearing clients lean on religion it would seem, more in the way that we all lean on the social constructs of work and play to provide us with a sense of meaning, but does this give them any access to God, to presence, to nondual awareness, to tree-like self-sufficiency? I can imagine that by reconfiguring their image of God, making their Gods more tree-like, they might be more inclined to seek some of the solace and shelter we are able to access when communing with trees rather than look for it in negotiating their needs with a deity, or another human being. We all might, in leaning on this Tree God, perhaps find ways to resign ourselves, as the trees appear to have in this poem, resigning themselves to inconclusiveness, to injury, and reproach, to lack and loss, and the endemic duplicity of the human heart. But these religious folk are not interested in tree Gods, otherwise they would talk of their faith as a kind of panpsychism rather than from the dualistic perspective of me and mine, thee and thine. Me and my Gods, me and my needs, me and my requirements versus yours.

Can we ever learn to be more like trees, or does there need to be something within a self that already has this capacity, which we can build on? Siddharta Gotama formed a lifestyle, which some might also call a spiritual practice around being a kind of tree: sitting, watching the self (its thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions), all its demands and expectations on us and others; sitting, watching, not getting involved in any of it. Detached. But this is also the Enneagram Five personality style, equally a Type Nine style, and so it is no surprise that almost all spiritual teachers seem to fall in line with these two ways of selfing. It comes naturally to them, we might say, as it comes naturally to the tree, and in this way of being, they are perhaps able to be hybrid in a way that other types cannot: half-human, half-tree is how Fives and Nines sometimes appear, even to themselves. Resigned in a way that other ego formations might wish to be, but struggle to attain. I would like to believe that the self-directed fruits of one’s spiritual or creative practice emerge fundamentally from the groundless substrate of presence and being. I’d like to see it in this way, but my experience of working with hundreds of egoic manifestations, all the clients who have invited me into the cage of Self in which they inhabit, these caged Selves have taught me otherwise. Some of us are trees, and some of us are the beasts who live near these trees, or shelter under them.

How might a tree want to be loved? How might a human want to be loved. I was once walking with someone who stopped in a clearing to admire the way a group of trees were moving against the autumn skyline. “It’s like they’re dancing,” they said, “maybe trying to tell us something.” And for a moment, I saw that indeed they were. What message are they broadcasting in their movements, I asked this half-human/half-tree being? They shrugged, took my hand, as if to say, all we have is this, us trees. I loved the feel of this person’s hand in mine. A hand made for holding. We stood for some time watching that flowing sway and leaf-shimmer in the sunlight before walking on

William Carlos Williams talks somewhere of wishing to draw, or perhaps write “the strange phosphorus of life, nameless under an old misappellation”. Misappelation. A word that sounds like apples, but really means calling one thing by the name of another. Like when we confer usage with care, or inspiration with auto-combustion. Or when we call someone a person (a person in the way that we understand personhood, in other words, our own personhood, our own ego) who is perhaps more like a tree than we can even fathom.

Trees invite us to sit in or under their namelessness, the green phosphorus of the tree, surrounded by impenetrable misappellations. It, this namelessness, lies beyond our science and our arts we might say because its secret is in being and seeing, not in saying. Its greatest value to us then is that it cannot be reproduced, can only be apprehended by another being. All experience of it arrives to us through surrogate and replica, through selected image, gardened words as in a poem, through other eyes and minds, betraying or banishing reality. This is the tree, as well as a poem’s consolation, its message, its own uncompromising world. For it can only really be known and entered by each, and in each now, not by you through me, or me through you, only by you through yourself, or me through myself. This is something we all are trying to learn and respect, about trees as well as each other; the inalienable otherness of each other, each object in the world: human, and non-human. In the deepest of those countless million metaphorical trees for which we cannot see the wood, maybe we find, as in this poem, a kind of justification, or redemption, two synonyms perhaps for resignation and acceptance.

Is there something inherently abject about this state of resignation, which seems to require the trees to shelter and hide from life, to accept a wholly passive response to what has been visited upon them? The poem leaves us with this feeling, I think. Abject, as with everything, is in the eye of beholder, but perhaps a better word for it might be humility. Why would a tree expect to be treated in any other way by the humans that use it for their purposes, not really caring about what the tree wants or needs. Why would we expect to be treated in any other way by the humans who use us for their purposes, putting their wants and needs first and foremost as all humans do.Perhaps this is the resignation which remains largely unmentionable in our positivist developmental space of psychotherapy and self-help. The resignation centred around a reality which is already perfect, in that spiritual sense of the word, meaning that it cannot be other than what it is. Why this refusal to live according to whatever is wholly alive and real in consciousness, rather than with our human preference for superlative experience, for utopias? Why this post-hoc resentment or pushback against the memory of “another’s sudden infatuation / Gouged into our sides”, or “of never having been loved as we wanted / Or deserved”? I have no answer for this, do you?

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Feel Better

Love Dogs by Rumi

LOVE DOGS

One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”

The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing
you express is the return message.”

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.

Give your life
to be one of them.”

― Jalal Al-Din Rumi (tr. Coleman Barks)

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Feel Better

Rilke’s Panther & The Cage of Self



  1. I, ICH, EGO

On the 1st of May 1889, the young (33 year old) psychoanalyst-on-the-make Sigismund Schlomo Freud took on the case of a “a lady of about forty years of age”, a Frau Emmy von N., who we now know to be the Swiss noblewoman Baroness Fanny Louise von Sulzer-Wart. Baroness Fanny had married 29 years previously at the tender age of 23 the 65 year-old Swiss watchmaker and industrialist Heinrich Moser, who died 4 years after the marriage from a heart attack. In the minds of Moser’s five children from his previous marriage, the idea got around that Fanny might have toe-tagged their father after having him sire her two new Moser offspring with birthright claims to his vast fortune. 

This is the first time that Freud decides to give his friend Josef Breuer’s technique of “investigation under hypnosis” a try-out as he attempts to help his new patient with her suffering somatizations (which resemble very much the symptoms of Fibromyalgia today). Freud starts using techniques which will in time become, after he has ditched the overt hypnosis angle, his own special contribution to human animal therapeutics. 

Were we to travel back in time and watch or record Sigi and Fanny’s interactions over the three-week period in which he devoted on a daily basis a great deal of his time to her, “determined” he writes in Studies in Hysteria, “to do all I could for her recovery”, we might refer to these interactions as one of the first modern examples of “the talking cure”. Or simply: “therapy” as we now like to call our pre-eminent secular religion, a psychological technology or treatment, which can be found, a century later, in 101 exciting flavours including the “original” or classic psychoanalysis. All of it, every single flavour that now contributes to this worldwide billion-dollar industry, harks back to that original recipe concocted by Freud and Breuer in the late nineteenth century, and written up in their co-authored book Studies in Hysteria.

Freud finds Fanny on their first meeting “lying on a sofa, with her head resting on a leather bolster.” He takes a moment to register her from the vantage point of what we might now call The Male Gaze. “She still looks young,” he tells us, “and has finely-cut features, full of character. Her face,” he writes, “bears a tense, pained expression; her eyes are screwed up and cast down; she has a heavy frown and deep naso-labial folds. She speaks as if it were arduous, in a quiet voice that is occasionally interrupted to the point of stuttering by spastic breaks in her speech. When she speaks she keeps her fingers, which exhibit a ceaseless agitation resembling athetosis, tightly interlaced. Numerous tic-like twitches in her face and neck muscles, some of which, in particular the right sternocleido-mastoid, protrude quite prominently. In addition, she frequently interrupts herself in order to produce a peculiar clicking noise, which I am unable to reproduce.”

So as to help his readers, Freud provides a footnote on the ‘clacking’ or ‘clicking’ sound, telling us colleagues with “sporting experience” have informed him, having heard it, that it somewhat resemble “the mating cry of the capercaillie”. Hunting for this call online, I find a youngish David Attenborough being chased around a Highland Pine Forest by a fierce-looking male capercaillie wearing red eye-liner, it’s mating cry eliciting from my memory the sound of those last few drops of a fizzy drink slurped out of a can by a late-twentieth century human child through a plastic straw. 

It also reminds me of John Burnside’s poem “First Footnote on Zoomorphism” which has these lines of anthropomorphic longing in it: 

It seems we have said too little about
the heart, per se,

how it sits in its chambered nub
of grease and echo

listening for movement in the farthest
reed beds — any feathered thing will do,

love being interspecific, here,
more often than we imagine.

If anything, I’d liken us to certain
warblers, less appealing in the wild

than how we’d look
in coloured lithographs,

yet now and then, I’m on the point of
hearing
bitterns at the far edge of the lake,

that cry across the marshes like the doom
you only get in books, where people die

so readily for love, each heart becomes
a species in itself, the sound it makes

distinctive, one more descant in the dark,
before it disappears into the marshes.

Freud and Breuer’s novel take on hysteria would of course factor these movements of the heart into the suffering human animals they treated, with their quasi-poetic linguistic flurries and strange somatizations. Which also makes this the Origin Story for psycho (psychological) therapy as we now understand the talking cure to imply. Rather than just standing to one side, like our medical doctors do and observing symptoms so as to make a diagnosis of perceived dysfunctionality or illness, the doctor now begins to listen to the patient, in the belief that they may be able to assist both the doctor and themselves in understanding what lies at the heart of their suffering. Freud perhaps implicitly or even explicitly understood that new kid on the block, science, and our “scientific” explanations are ultimately also mythological ones. 

Reading through the case study, we find that that Freud’s main tasks in helping this beleaguered young woman, is to give her lots of massages, some of which, this was common at the time would have involved stimulating the genital region until, well, until the patient felt better. Let us not forget, that the vibrator which is nowadays sold in sex shops was first and foremost a medical tool called a“percuteur”:  invented by the British physician Joseph Mortimer Granville in the 1880 in order to help physicians carry out their increasingly sought-after “pelvic massage” procedures without having to go through that tiresome manual operation requiring the physician’s fingers needing to stroke, rub and chafe against parts of the pelvic zone until the sought-after energetic release was accomplished. After carrying out these manipulations, Freud would put Fanny Moser into a trance-like state, perhaps assisted by the after-effects of an orgasm, so as to implant through various suggestions ways for her to be more skillful or functional (according to the requirements of the time) in her relationships and domestic affairs. While she was languishing on the couch, he would also encourage her to talk about past traumas in order to process or “work through” this material so that the so-called “hysterical” push-pull of her nervous system might settle down and find some peace. 

In the Strachey translation of Freud’s text into German,when discussing his ideas about the non-biological provenance of Fanny Moser’s hysterical symptoms, we find one of the first uses of the word Ego in the Freud Canon. Freud is explaining in the text how the hysterical conversion of neurotic energy into “somatic innervation” (tiredness, bodily pain and loss of perceived strength in arms and legs)) were all part of the process whereby “the ego” tries to repress troubling emotions such as anger or guilt, often triggered by painful reminiscences. And in so doing puts up “defensive measures” which according to Freud might be viewed as “acts of moral cowardice” towards the psyche’s suffering, a sort of shutting down on one’s own suffering self.

Freud never used the word Ego in any of his writings, even though we attribute this word to him. The word is used thousands of times though in our English translations of Freud, but the term that Freud himself came up with to describe our conscious or semi-conscious awareness was “ich” (I). This was set against the expression he used to describe the unconscious realm, from which all our painful emotions and thoughts mysteriously emerge, which with equal simplicity, Freud called “es” (it). This is also the title of his 1923 book Das Ich und Das Es. Which in English has the title The Ego and The Id

“The psychological processes Freud discusses are personal and internal” writes Bruno Bettleheim in The Soul of Freud. “The translation of these personal pronouns into their Latin equivalents—the “ego” and the “id”—rather than their English ones turn them into cold technical terms, which arouse no personal associations. In German, of course, the pronouns are invested with deep emotional significance, for the reader has used them all their lives; Freud’s careful and original choice of words [would have] facilitated an intuitive understanding of his meaning, for no word has greater and more intimate connotations than the pronoun “I.” It is one of the most frequently used words in spoken language—and, more important, it is the most personal word.”

To mistranslate Ich as “ego”, Bettleheim warns us,  “is to transform it into jargon that no longer conveys the personal commitment we make when we say “I” or “me”—not to mention our subconscious memories of the deep emotional experience we had when, in infancy, we discovered a Self, in the process of learning to say “I. I am hungry. I am thirsty. I want this. I don’t want that. I love you. I hate you. Etc.

Bettleheim fears that what has occurred here in this translation of the word “ich” into Ego is the creation of a concept that leaves lived reality behind us in favour of a concept. The reality of Ich, of I, this simple presence-filled container of impressions, thoughts and feelings, Freud made sure to tie down in language to our ongoing, embodied experience by using a term that made it practically impossible to leave reality behind: ich, ich,ich. 

Reading or speaking about the “I” forces one to look at oneself introspectively, to really become aware of seeing the world through two subjective eyes, forming as the I, the Ego does, a somewhat cohesive psychic entity around the disparate thoughts, feelings and narratives present in conscious. The I, the ich, denotes a unitary self, designated by a single capital letter which also stands for the first numeral. I am. I am a unit of self. 

By contrast, an “ego”  is something that can be studied from the outside, more like when observing others. “With this inappropriate and—as far as our emotional response to it is concerned—misleading translation,” Bettleheim explains “an introspective psychology is made into a behavioural one, which observes from the outside what is happening within. This, of course, is exactly how most Americans view and use psychoanalysis”

And perhaps, we could extend this critique to how we all now view and use psychotherapy, as a kind of one-stop Ego-repair shop. A place where everyone is told to go for all their major Ego workouts: our Life MOT tests, resilience checks, air conditioning (aka emotional regulation), repairs for traumatic wounding, wheel alignments, steering, suspension, clutches, anxiety brakes, engine management, and all the rest. 

And yet, even a century’s worth of naval-gazing after Freud, the profound mystery of just having an I, a conscious self, and the way this self (this Ego) is set up to help us and hinder us in the management of everything that we perceive to be “inside us” (thoughts, feelings, perceptions) hasn’t been clarified in any significant way. Did Plato and Aristotle have less of an understanding about their Egos, their conscious experiential points of I-ness than Freud did, than we do? Unlikely. The Ego, this I speaking to your You (your Ego) is anarchically heterogenous: thoughts, feelings, and reactions, as well as the suppression of behaviours originating from these thoughts, feelings, reactions all play their part. We’re all now au-fait with the notion of this I, this Ego being caught somewhat piggy-in-the-middle between the demands of a pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding “It’ or “Id, the inner Homer Simpson, and the cultural or familial super-ego, reflecting back to us, or demanding we take action to manifest as Idealised Selves, carrying out Idealized Actions. These selves and actions are often formulated through a moral and ethical language (you must, you should, you have to), which creates a kind of clash or opposition with the inner Homer Simpson. 

But would reading the complete works of Sigmund Freud, Skinner, Rogers, Erikson, Maslow, Beck, Adler, Bowlby, and all the rest reveal to us any more about these archetypal inner entities than we already know just from the experience of having them? Which is why I’m going to suggest for this episode of Poetry Koan, that Rainer Maria Rilke, rather than Freud, perhaps understood as much as needed to know about his Ego, as his contemporary Sigismund Shlomo Freud did. And maybe, as you will see, they both arrived at their understanding of what or who the Ego is, the I, the you, the they, is, am, are by engaging in an empathic form of inquiry. Rilke with an animal in a cage, a panther, who he would cage or uncage, depending on your reading of it, in a poem. And Freud, with his patients, sitting behind them, smoking his cigars, and observing as they lay spread out on the couch before him, the ways in which the Ego, the I, leads us on all a merry, which is to say, somewhat suffering, dance.

2. EMPATHY

Before we get to Rilke, let’s talk empathy.

At the end of the 19th century German Philosophers and neurologists were combining expertise to create a new science of the mind which was given the name of phenomenology. Phenomenology was established as a discipline to study the nature of consciousness. Psychoanalysis however had its target primarily set on the unconscious. All the yadda-yadda, Ich, Ich, Ich coming off the couch, let us remember, was for Freud just that, a box of psyche-content, a sort of pick-and-mix selection of received opinions and neurotic expostulations. But by furrowing around in this box of conscious Ich, Ich, Ich, Freud hoped he might break through to something more primal, or at least more meaningful, some sort of jewel of inner-awakening and insight, which would resolve the central suffering Koan or paradox of this absurd creature’s life, so that they might somewhat mournfully get on with things, without being plagued by overwhelming and undefended distress.  

Art, and the study of art known as aesthetics, became a common point of convergence for these two other disciplines. Psychologists began to see how looking at people’s emotional responses to art, and the motivations that drove some to create it, could help explain aspects of human nature that had never been fully grasped before. One of these conundrums might be conceptualised by the follow question: What is a Self, an I, a conscious and self-conscious Ego. And what universal or variable factors might lie at the heart of such a phenomenon.  

One figure who was especially interested in this new discipline of psychology was Theodor Lipps. Lipps had been taking note of the work done in the 1860s by the German doctor Wilhelm Wundt who had begun to researching neurological phenomenon like reaction time to stimuli, and in so doing, had stumbled on interesting gaps between the brain and the mind that Freud would fill in with something called The Unconscious. Lipps’ research focused on why art, painting, poetry, and music gives us pleasure, and to this required an understanding of the subjective elements at play when we look at a piece of art. Something his contemporary, the art historian Alois Riegl called ‘the beholder’s involvement’. Some essence inside us is being touched or spoken to when we behold a work of art. In some way the act of looking or reading then becomes a creative process, and the viewer in tackling the koan of an artwork, also becomes the artist. How does this happen?

Lipps found a name for his theory in an 1873 dissertation by a German aesthetics student named Robert Vischer. When people project their emotions, ideas or memories onto objects they enact a process that Vischer called einfühlung, literally “feeling into.” The British psychologist Edward Titchener translated the word into English as “empathy” in 1909, deriving his word from the Greek empatheia, or “in pathos.” For Vischer, einfühlung revealed why a work of art caused an observer to unconsciously “move in and with the forms.” He dubbed this bodily mimesis “muscular empathy,” a concept that resonated with Lipps, who once attended a dance recital and felt himself “striving and performing” with the dancers. He also linked this idea to other somatosensory imitations, like yawns and laughter. 

Paradoxically, empathy is by definition a somewhat selfish emotion: we empathize with the external in order to enjoy or appreciate something of this in ourselves. In order to, we might say, “find ourselves”, to find and see the contours of the self, the Ego, our Ego, which is alwayslooking for ways in which it might Self itself into the world and the lives of those of the people we inhabit it with. Empathy is both life-affirming, and ego-affirming: it allows us to permeate and move through the world. No ego, no go-go.

Freud certainly read Lipps’ work. In fact, we know that he wrote to a friend in 1896 that he had “immersed” himself in the teachings of Lipps, “who I suspect has the clearest mind among present-day philosophical writers.” He would later go on to argue that Lipps’s research demonstrated that empathy should be embraced by psychoanalysts as a tool for understanding patients, urging his students to observe their patients not from a place of judgement, but from a place of empathy. The empathic self ought to recede into the background like a “receptive organ” and strive toward the “putting of oneself in the other person’s place,” Freud remarked.

At the turn of the last century, as I have suggested, artist and the psychoanalysts were not entirely distinctive categories as they are now, and so it is no surprise that Freud’s initial research into the I, is exactly the kind of thing that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke found himself drawn to when in 1902, at the age of 26, he managed to get a gig shadowing the artist August Rodin (who was at that point  two generations ahead, as a man in his sixities). The ostensible reason for doing this was that Rilke wanted to write a monograph about the I (in both senses of the word) of Rodin, which he would go on to do.

“Like Joshua following Moses to the Promised Land,” writes Rachel Corbett in her book about the meeting of these two figures, “Rilke saw this journey as the beginning of a new future. A new understanding.”

The plan was to immerse himself in Rodin’s praxis and philosophy so as to write a long and potentially unique essay on the artist, and in so doing, perhaps more fully understand and develop Rilke’s own artistry, which like everything he wrote, was always intrinsically exploratory of his own Ich, the essence of his Egoic manifestation in the world as this thinking, talking, love-seeking poetry missile, Rainer Maria Rilke.

Having let Rilke trail around with him for a few days, Rodin tired of the German snoop, and decided he needed some space to himself. He would visit a friend in Italy, and perhaps Rilke could get on with something else for a while. So he suggested that Rainer maybe try out an assignment which Rodin himself had undertaken as a student many years earlier. Regardez les animaux, professor Barye had told the young Rodin. To the aspiring figurative sculptor, staring at beasts had seemed a second-rate task. But in regarding les animaux Rodin soon understood why non-human animals had been objects of reverence for artists dating back since the cave painters. Now he would impart this quasi-shamanic teaching to the young fanboy Rilke: Regardez les animaux.  

In a letter to his somewhat estranged wife Clara, Rilke describes how “Rodin has a tiny plaster cast, a tiger (antique), in his studio . . . which he values very highly . . . And from this little plaster cast I see what he means, what antiquity is and what links him to it. There, in this animal, is the same lively feeling in the modeling, this little thing (it is no higher than my hand is wide, and no longer than my hand) has hundreds of thousands of sides like a very big object, hundreds of thousands of sides which are all alive, animated, and different. And that in plaster! And with this the expression of the prowling stride is intensified to the highest degree, the powerful planting of the broad paws, and at the same time, that caution in which all strength is wrapped, that noiselessness.”

The panther Rilke will study in the Jardin des Plantes in his bid to follow Rodin’s Regardez Les Animaux injuction begins, even in this lettert to find its words. A tiny plaster tiger with a prowling stride and broad paws, the bars of his cage borrowed from the Luxembourg Gardens, and th  gaze from the poet’s own, as well as his sense of desperation. 

Rodin’s surfaces are there to suggest a reality that can only be inferred, just as fingers or a face, by gesture or expression, disclose a consciousness that would otherwise be indiscernible. Sculptures are things: they start as stuff, stuff taken from stuff like rock or clay, and they stay stuff until the artist gives them a determinate form so that, through that form, they may have life. The poet’s problem is precisely the opposite. Language is our most important sign of elevated awareness, but language has weak presence. Though often on paper, it possesses no weight. A poem is like a ghost seeking substantiality, a soul in search of a body more appealing than the bare bones mere verses rattle. It is consequently not the message in a bottle that Rilke previously thought it was, nor a young man’s feelings raised like a flag. All of us have emotions urgently seeking release, and many of us have opinions we think would do the world some good, however the poet must also be a maker, as the Greeks maintained, and, like the sculptor, like every other artist, should aim at adding real beings to the world, beings fully realized, not just things like tools and haberdashery that nature has neglected to provide, or memos and laws that society produces in abundance, but rather that Kantian idea of the ding an sich (the Thing-in-itself, as it is, independent of observation and perceptual mediation). 

To guide him on this journey, Rilke recalled the teachings of his old professor from Munich, Theodor Lipps, and devised a process of conscious observation, which he Rilke would come to call, with a nod to Lipp’s einfuhlung, einsehen, or “inseeing.” 

Inseeing describes the voyage from the surface of a thing to its heart, its essence, wherein perception leads to an emotional connection. Rilke made a point of distinguishing inseeing from inspecting, a term which he thought described only the viewer’s perspective, and thus often only results in anthropomorphic projective identification. 

Inseeing, on the other hand, takes into account the object’s point of view. It has as much to do with making things human as it does with making humans things. If faced with a rock, for instance, one might stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. We might then keep looking until our own egoic centre, our own Ich, starts to sink with the stony weight of the rock forming inside us too. It is a kind of perception that takes place within the body, and so it requires the observer to be both the seer and the seen. To observe with empathy, one sees not only with the eyes but with the skin. “Though you may laugh,” Rilke wrote to a friend, “if I tell you where my very greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss is, I must confess to you: it is, again and again, here and there, in such in-seeing in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing.” In describing his joy at experiencing the world this way, Rilke echoes Lipps’s belief that, through empathy, a person could free themselves from the solitude of their self, their Ego, their egoic minds, in order to truly see and comprehend the soul of another, or even an object. 

Although as Freud would come to recognise in his early work on transference and counter-transference: when we are looking in this deep phenomenological way into the soul of another, are we not also in some sense always seeing ourselves, our own egos in some way, or at least aspects of them. 

All of this though is mere hypothesis besides the real, thing-in-itself experience of  Rilke on an autumn morning somewhat like this one, grey, a bit mizzly seating in front of a large iron cage in the Jardin De Plantes in Paris. A cage that has been constructed, as much to attract the artists of the day for this very purpose, as the children being taken to the zoo by a parent looking to fill an afternoon of boredom in a pre-iPad era. 

There is of course good “scientific form” in this mode of Inquiry that Rilke may have even been aware of, for noot 65 years before his meeting and writing about that Panther, who is himself, at the Jardin Du Plante, we find Charles Darwin, recently having returned from his own important travels on The Beagle sitting in a zoo, admiring the first orangutan to be shown by this establishment, purchased the year before from a certain Mr Moss for £150 and named Jenny. 

£150 was quite a lot of money in those days. With the help of the internet and Ian Webster’s Composite Price Index Inflation Calculator,  I arrive at around £14,000 for the purchase of Jenny. Human slaves were being purchased for similar prices at the time according to recent research

When Darwin met Jenny the orangutan on the 28th of March 1838, he was was still two decades away from publishing The Origin of The Species, in which our longheld view of ourselves as godly humans or even human gods was swiftly dismantled to show our true status as humanoid animals who had achieved our dominion through circumstantial luck, primate guile, and all the other twists and turns of the evolution algorithm, including a devastating asteroid impact 66 million years ago which wiped out not just the dinosaurs, but most life on earth, allowing in the next few million years, much smaller mammals to diversify and thrive, some of these scurrying rat and raccoon sized mammals eventually evolving into you and me.

Darwin, who was also a young father at the time, experienced Jenny behaving just like a one of his own children when denied something they wanted. Initially getting “sulky”, then throwing a temper tantrum, and then negotiating with one of the keepers for good behaviour in return for a special treat. With this in mind, he wrote in his notebook: “Let us visit Ouranoutang in domestication, hear expressive whine, see their intelligence when spoken [to]; as if they understand every word said – see their affection. – to those they knew. – see their passion & rage, sulkiness, & very actions of despair; … and then let us boast of our proud preeminence … Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.”

Darwin visited Jenny two more times after this, and saw how “astonished beyond measure” she was when she saw her reflection in a mirror. Jenny had self-consciousness, just like us. Jenny had a sense of her self as a Jenny. Just like us. 

Back to Rilke, seated in front of the panther’s cage hour after hour, feeling himself into the non-human animal before him. The mythos is that he sat the whole day observing the panther before attempting to write his poem. Perhaps he did. At a certain point Rilke would have begun to experience the essence of this creature, an essence we share with all living things, our essential life force. But to put this essence into words, words always being, unless reduced to legalese or academic hoity-toit, the carapace of the self, the ego. So understandably, in this portrait of an Other, an I emerges, Rilke’s I, Rilke’s Ich. Which makes this kind of sound. Or rather puts this kind of meaning of itself into the world. Here’s the poem: 

THE PANTHER

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly–. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

A poem allows us to take a thousands of experiential sketches made in our minds as we interact with the world, all the thoughts, feelings and fleeting glimpses of truth and falsehood, and turn these into something that feels embodied the way we feel ourselves, which to say our own Egoic I to be embodied. The Panther becomes a living koan of the self, something which both encapsulates and can never be fully encapsulated. This process he had also learnt from Rodin, who would sit a make drawings, the way other humans shed skin cells, about 500 million a day then, if we’re going to take that analogy seriously. Here is a passage I love about this process from the monograph Rilke published about Rodin a year later: 

“Lines have never been so expressive and yet so unintentional, even in the most extraordinary Japanese drawings. For there is no representation here, no plan or purpose, and no trace of a name. And yet, what is not here? What holding on, or letting go, or no longer being able to hold on; what bending over, stretching out, and contracting; what falling or flying has ever been seen or imagined that is not to be found again here? If they had been seen somewhere once, now they were lost: for they were so fleeting and fine, so far removed from a single meaning, that no one had ever been capable of ascribing them one. And it is only now, when we see it unexpectedly in these drawings, that we understand this meaning: the extremes of love, suffering, despair, and bliss emanate from them, although we don’t know why….We see their depravity, and it is like the growth of a plant, growing in madness because it cannot do otherwise….And a touch of blue behind a falling form is enough to bring space tumbling onto the page from all sides, enveloping the figure with so much nothingness that one grows dizzy and reaches involuntarily for the hand of the master who is holding the drawing out in a delicate, generous motion.”

The Ich who reaches for this fresh new drawing, the glimpse of everything in the making of a contour to express another contour, a seen object, is attached in an embodied way to the hand of someone we now call Rilke. The hand that reaches is motivated by something essential to Rilke, essential to what it means to be Rilke, who also writes that Essence onto the page when he sees it, or rather finds it, in the shape of a panther. 

3. LONGING

What might the essence of Rilke’s Egoic soul reveal to us, if we tried to put it into words, using all our knowledge of the poems transmitted through an Ich, Rilke’s Ich, over many years, as well as the letters, and notebooks, and biographies we have of him to guide us, and our ability, now a century after Freud to also apply everything we have learnt in the last 100 years about the mechanism, or the Operating System if you like, of the Ego, of the Self? 

The word that I find best describes both the Panther’s predicament as well the predicament of Rilke’s Ego or Ich, is LONGING. Samuel Johnson in his dictionary of 1755 describes longing as “an earnest desire”. Also: “a continual wish”. The word comes from the Old English langian “to yearn after, or grieve for,” with the literal meaning of “to grow long, or lengthen”. Is this not the image that enters into the panther-mind, which for all we know, may be minded not entirely divergently to us. An image, in the panther’s case, without language for something to be yearned after or grieved for: the loss of connection to Essence, a nurturing habitat perhaps and the ways that allows us to be in flow with ourselves, the opportunity to live our animal destiny as biology has designed our particular life form to process. There is of course, perhaps for the panther too that longing expressed in blood vessels becoming engorged in the pelvic area, pressing or urging the creature who might be a panther or a human towards a kind of release, a completion of sorts which we fold into terms like: sexual desire and a romantic relationship. But longing can also be seen as a kind of extension of the self, the egoic self, through the elements of wanting. Wanting an object (a person, or a thing), or an experience, or a different situation where the ego perceives this longer-for other as offering a kind of integration, realization, or perhaps just a discharge, a wholeness that all egos sense they may not fully possess (because they don’t), some sort of beneficial transfiguration in how the world appears to us, and we to it, at least, a new way of seeing the world.

 We find this perspective, especially with regard to love throughout the life and work of Rilke, as it often is with the personality type known as Enneagram Four. Here’s another poem where the panther now wears trousers, shoes, and some sort of torso covering, wandering hither and thither in virtual and non-virtual realms in search of the Beloved.  

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me—the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods—
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house—, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,—
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening.

Again, in this poem, the image of both the painfully (too-sudden) alone poet hanging around the changing rooms of Gap or Dorothy Perkins in the hope of finding The One. Or accessing, at least in a metaphysical sense some union in the shared resonance of bird song between one longing Romeo and their Jules or Juliet.

In a well-known Rumi poem, a man is castigated by a cynic for his perpetual longing.  “So! I have heard you calling out, but have you ever gotten any response?” The man of longing is shamed for his desires, forced into recognising the emptiness of this impulse, having “never heard anything back.” Until another Friend, employing a script we often hear from modern therapist tells him: “This longing [itself] is the return message.  The grief you cry out from draws you toward union.” 

The union referred to here is perhaps that  of the bodily separate life-force to a more conglomerate Being, the mystery of Presence, to use the language of Spirit that we find in the work of Hamid Almaas who has decided to name his form of seeking The Diamond Approach. “Your pure sadness / that wants help (another word for this help might be “satisfaction”)/ is the secret cup,” the inner friend goes on  to advise the poet. “Listen to the moan of a dog for its master. / That whining is the connection.”

This is a nice idea, but it also strikes me as a kind of sophistry. I think of my own beloved Maxi Jacks who lies nestled into my legs on the bed as I type this on a Saturday morning in bed with the flu. If he were to be separated from me, or me from him, our longing for each other would connect us in our shared deprivation, but as Lear says somewhat churlishly to Cordelia who refuses to give him the response he is longing to hear from her: “nothing will come of nothing”, at least not on the material plain in which we mostly reside. 

If longing is the Ego’s passion, it must I would imagine stem from some kind of perceived lack. The Enneagram Four personality type (that of Rilke, Kafka, Plath, and a whole bunch of other funsters), could be rendered very simply by a kind of icon or emoji of the empty, or almost empty glass. Some specific context might also be required to charge that emptiness with longing. An empty glass sitting on the IKEA shelf for purchase or display is not a glass of longing. This glass needs to be held in a hand, or alongside other glasses in other hands, each waiting for some beaker of The Good (joy, connection, pleasure, meaning; whatever feels to us to be the most precious liquor of human experience) the beaker filling each glass moving around the circle and depositing an equal measure of this good thing into each receptacle. Until it gets to the Fourth glass, and alas, sorry, only just enough for a tantalising sip, but no more.

There can be no longing without a comparative notion with regard to receiving or taking in place. For longing to occur in the way it does in the Panther, and in most Fours, there needs to be the perception of others getting what we need in those realms of value, whilst we get less or nothing. We imagine our friends or ex-partners waking up today with some kind of external love, care, satisfaction in their lives that we are missing in ours. The bottle of champagne is brought around the circle, filling each glass with some pleasurable nectar until it reaches ours and gives up. Everyone else is perceived as sipping and snacking, carried along by the inclusivity and reciprocity of their individual and shared pleasures, whilst the person left holding the empty glass is alone, and probably lonely. Rilke is also the poet of loneliness, but only perhaps he craves a certain kind of company with the ardour he does. 

All of this comparative evaluation is of course absurd, relatively speaking. But the feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are or were. The sensation this poetic type comes to have of itself is of a deserted field at dusk, sad with reeds next to a river without boats, its glistening waters blackening between wide banks.Are these feelings a slow madness born of disconsolation or  reminiscences of some other world in which we’ve lived – jumbled, criss-crossing remembrances, like things seen in dreams, absurd in the form they come to us but not in their origin, if we knew what it was. 

“My longing to be whole put me into this state of useless regret,” another longing Four, Fernando Pessoa writes in his Book of Disquiet.

The focus for my current longing, a form of longing that strikes me at various times of the day with the urgency of the hysteric’s somatizations, is all quite useless, quite, quite useless, in tht there is nothing that I can do with it, other than allude to it now and again, as I am doing here, but otherwise, it serves no purpose other than as an image of a certain glass with a certain kind of content to it, rushing down through tensed, arrested muscles, plunging into the heart (as a knife, a traumatic memory, an ache, an intense craving for something or someone) and is gone. But it will return, especially if mulled over when we see or feel the internal image again, the way we might mull over a poem.

Rilke, Pessoa, Kafka, Camus, Rumi. All Fours. But not Rodin, who was an Eight. Freud, a mental type, probably a Six. The Panther Fours as we can see, are all trying to work out in their writing how to make peace with the cage of self they find themselves in, find themselves barred by, as well as ultimately, how to break out of the cage itself. 

My friend Rez has been on this Diamond Path for some years now, and claims that it has given her wings, which in our conversations, sounds like the ability to shrink or expand metaphysically at will, in order to slip out of or fly from the cage of subjective and limited egoic self. At first, she explains to me in a voice note she sends about the Rilke poem, it allowed her to pilot the cage through space and time a little more deftly, but this was then no longer needed when she was better able to experience her True Nature (I imagine these two words to be capitalised, even though in her voice note it’s hard to tell what is capitalised Special Language Usage, and what is just ordinary discourse). 

True Nature is that which is unfiltered by egoic structures. This is her interpretation of the poem. The panther and the poet-as-panther are being given inklings, little glitches in the Matrix perceived through everyday experiences of suffering, which eventually will lead me and anyone who is interested, to fully grock the five experiential dimensions of the Diamond Path: the dimension of absolute emptiness (where both inner and outer perceptions no longer seem tight and constraining, but have space, perhaps even infinite space surrounding them. The dimension of pure nonconceptual awareness, unmuddied by egoic ideation. The dimension of pure presence as I’ve attempted to described above, where being and the knowing of being are the same. And then, maybe just for us Heart types, the dimension of Pure Universal Love, where presence, in all states, becomes sweet and appreciative. She admits in her message though, that she is still struggling with this one, but then, like Almaas, she too is a Five, and no doubt that comes with both the territory and whatever remains of her Ego Cage. 

I don’t have a particularly snappy way of ending this, so let me leave you with an update on Jenny, just in case, of all the characters introduced in this little tale, you might want to know what happened to her after she and Charles Darwin got acquainted.

The Jenny who confirmed Darwin’s revolutionary evolutionary theories,  died a year after their first meeting. The zookeepers replaced her with another orangutan, perhaps also purchased from Mr Moss for another £150/14 grand, and promptly named Jenny’s replacement, Jenny too. Not Jenny Numeral Two, but just Jenny once more. 

This is not that peculiar a form of behaviour for our species. Some people, having lost a family pet, will call the next one by the same name. And sometimes humans do this to their own children. Rainer Maria Rilke’s mother, whose birth name was Sophie, though she preferred to be called by the more forthright and feisty sounding Phia, had lost a baby daughter the year before giving birth to her son. Rilke’s arrival in the world was equally premature and sickly, and she feared that she might lose him as she had lost her first child. So when it came to christening her son, she gave him two female names in the midst of all the others: Rene Karl Wilhelm Johann Joseph Maria Rilke. This was carried out much to the chagrin of her husband, Josef Rilke, a railway official with pretensions of being a Military Man. Rene and Maria were not considered cis male names, even in 1875 Prague, even in the German-speaking, Austro-Hungarian Prague of Rilke’s childhood.

For five years, until he went to school,  Rene’s mother dressed him in “long dresses,” Rilke recalled many years later. There are even photographs of the young Rene and his doggo chum posing on a large Afghan rug, his hair cut to fall below his shoulders, the dress ornately patterned with embroidery and pleated trimmings, cute ankle-length fur-lined leather booties rounding the whole outfit off in a very charming way. 

“Until I started school I went about like a little girl,” Rilke informed an interviewer. “ I think my mother played with me as though I were a big doll.”

This may be true, but I wonder if he perhaps tried to make this a special or unique part of his identity (very Four) as it would appear that lots of mothers in the late Victorian period both in England and abroad, dressed their children in this style. Only in the twentieth century would fashion start to become gendered for children’s clothing in the way that it was in the late 20th century, and somewhat still so now. 

But back to Jenny. Queen Victoria, did not see the first Jenny, but she did see Jenny’s replacement, the next Jenny, and found her to be “frightful”. Also “painfully and disagreeably human”. And so maybe doubly frightful for that reason. The Queen, not yet a Darwininan, might have also recognised something of herself in Jenny, for she too had awoken that morning as a weird, quasi-hairless primate with its bladder and small intestines full of smelly matter to be excreted, and other stuff to be cleaned and cleared and wiped away. Maybe this image, or something akin to it, presented itself to her conscious or unconscious mind on seeing Jenny, only to be repressed or dispatched, or dissociated from in some way, a momentary plunge into the heart, ouch, ouch, ouch, and then gone.

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State Change Therapy

CHANGE

Many of us will seek therapy when we are looking for some kind of change to occur in our lives. Often we are wanting to change a part of us that we’re not pleased with: maybe a part that lacks confidence in certain situations (low self-esteem). Or a part of us that is not able to connect to others, or ourselves, or to meaningful work, social outings, or other projects.

Sometimes we want to change our lives in some tangible, outward-focused way: change our career path, or the kind of relationship we are having (or want to have), or how/where we spend our time.

Many people want to change those parts of themselves that use substances (tea, coffee, sugary drinks/food, cannabis/alcohol) or people (sex, relationships, social media) to shift our moods or states. And very much connected to this: we all want to change the amount of time we spend in low-energy, low-mood, or anxious states – states where we feel unsafe and/or disconnected. These are also the states where we often end up protecting ourselves through some kind of avoidance of the thing or person that is stressing us (flight), or getting into conflict with the situation or another person (fight).

Is it any wonder then that we become annoyed or frustrated at times with our Inner Party Poopers and Sociophobes, our Inner Control Freaks, Trolls, and Inner Critics, our Inner Drama Queens, and Binge-Eater/Drinkers, our Inner Procrastinators. Naturally we all want to try to changing these tricky parts in some intrinsic way.

Our motivation to do this is always appropriate and well-intentioned. These states and modes -even though they usually function to help us survive and cope with a world that is frequently Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) – often bring with them some additional suffering, even an intolerable amount of suffering. And isn’t it at this point that we, or other people start thinking about getting some help from a therapist?

THE PROBLEM WITH TOP-DOWN CHANGE

Although it is never described this way, top-down change is what most psychotherapy consists of. The top of our heads (our minds) share information or upsets with another mind, and work through narratives/stories about ourselves and the world, trying to gain through words and thoughts some renewed anchoring or grounding in our life.

But words and thoughts, you may have already noticed, are very slippery, changeable entities. You can hold one thought about yourself, or another person in the morning, and the completely opposite thought a few seconds, hours, or days later.

Think of something or someone you truly adore, and then ask your mind to come up with a “problem” or “challenge” connected to this person or thing. Notice how quickly the mind can come up with negative feedback either on request, or spontaneously, even for those things or people it is usually quite settled on.

Is it any wonder we struggle then with this negativity bias for people and situations we are ambivalent about? And the mind is ambivalent about almost everything! If this is the case, how do we build the change we want on the slippery, changeable quicksand material of the mind?

What if a more lasting peace of mind, the kind of peace of mind I think we are all looking for (safe, grounded, and connected) might be based more on having a strong, embodied autonomic foundation rather than just being able to “think better” or differently?

What if peace of mind is more of a bottom-up process, which comes about by monitoring, regulating and shaping our states throughout the day?

We sometimes do this through words (especially self-talk, but also co-regulating talk with a friend or therapist). But equally with experiential “gear shifts”: working into or out of the states we find ourselves in, or have been knocked into (triggered) by an external or internal event (like a thought).

Just like in a car, we adjust our speed through different gear-shifts in order to keep ourselves safe and on-track. We can also do this with our own emotional-cognitive systems (our minds and autonomic nervous systems).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Think about some of the most profound moments of your life, the kinds of experiences that psychologists would call “peak experiences”. These non-ordinary states often emerge from the kind of flow to be found in creativity, athletics, or sexuality, also during religious or spiritual rituals, in submersing ourselves in nature, or in intimate, close connections with friends and family.

How many of those experiences or peak states were achieved through a certain type of cognition or thought, as opposed to a whole-body, Autonomic Nervous System shift or submersion? And how did that shift occur? Was it driven by the mind, by words, or by a more experiential process, by focusing on doing something we found meaningful or pleasurable, sometimes even assisted by substances, helped perhaps by certain kinds of rituals or habits?

Now consider the kinds of changes that have emerged for you on the back of these experiences, shifts in perspective and understanding, maybe even in behaviour. This is the power of bringing bottom-up processing (experiential state shifts) into a top-down talking and thinking.

Which is not to say that we don’t do much talking in State Change Therapy. In fact we’ll do a lot of talking, especially in the first few sessions when we explore the ways in which your mind and autonomic nervous system has become dysregulated, either due to a circumstantial change such as losing a job, or the end of a relationship. Or maybe just as part of an ongoing struggle with an anxious, depressed, or some other too-much state.

State Change Therapy is a doing therapy as well as a talking therapy. Perhaps it can be described as doing, then talking about what experience we had in the process, and if that has shifted anything for us. Much of the doing you’ll be pleased to know is quick, fun, and interesting: sampled in our sessions as you would from a tasting menu in a restaurant, and then deepened with practice through the week following.

WHAT DO STATE CHANGE SESSIONS LOOK LIKE?

I usually incorporate some State Change Therapy into any work that I do (it’s one of my Four Factors). Some people like to do it as a standalone (6-10 sessions), which is especially helpful for those with ongoing depression and anxiety issues, but it can also be incorporated into any work we’re doing together on any problem or issue.

If you’d like to see an overview of how 10 sessions of focused SCT might look like, you can find an example of a 10 session course of SCT over here.

WHERE DOES STATE CHANGE THERAPY COME FROM?

State Change Therapy, like many 21st Century models is an integrative one, a therapy “cocktail” you might say, rather than a single shot approach like psychoanalysis or CBT.

Here are it’s ingredients (quantities vary according to the needs and personality of each client):

50% Polyvagal Theory
20% IFS & Schema Therapy
10% MBCT/MBSR
10% ACT
10% DBT

If you are interested in talking more about doing some State Change Therapy, or incorporating it into a therapy approach we are already using in our sessions, please do get in touch.

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Split-Screen Minds

Being split-brain creatures, is it any surprise that our minds are almost always in two places at once, even if we’re not entirely conscious of this set-up. This can be verified by a simple piece of experiential enquiry. Take a reading right now of your inner and outer world: wherever you are in time and space, whatever tasks you’re about to carry out, or have just finished doing. Get a sense of how you’re feeling (emotionally, physically), how in tune you are at this moment with  your needs and desires. If there’s a stressful factor present in your consciousness as you read this, add that into the mix. And let’s call this baseline reading REALITY, or at least your reality in this moment. 

Now imagine a screen representing the mind, and place your Reality Snapshot either on the left or right hand side of that screen. Often when we are taking this global reading, we are utilising the Right Hemisphere, so you might feel more comfortable putting your Reality image on the left-hand-side of this imaginary screen. This is because the Right Hemisphere of the brain controls the left side of the body and so receives information from the left visual field. Having done that, now use your imagination to place another image or even a set of moving images on the other side of the screen. So on the left, you now have Reality, and on the right-hand side of your screen, you have a kind of Enhanced-Reality or Idealised Reality.

In my case, Reality (left)  is me sitting here on a Tuesday evening writing this small article on my desktop computer, Diwali fireworks going off every two seconds, and my doggo Max perched somewhat nervously under the desk as if the two of us were in a war zone. The reality-enhanced Ideal, imagined on the right-hand side of my screen, features a loving partner (a fantasy image: I don’t have a significant other in my life right now) reading quietly beside me, or in the other room, no fireworks, the two of us just about to check in and decide what we’re having for dinner and/or whether we might watch a film later, or have an early night. 

Until I consciously set the Real next to the Ideal, as I have just done, I wasn’t at all aware that this Ideal was so “close to mind” as it turned out to be – it took me literally half a second for my writing mind to come up with its preferred fantasy in juxtaposition to my perfectly adequate but un-preffered living reality.

Of course as soon as we do this, as soon as we become conscious of this experiential gap between the two versions of being (Reality and The Ideal), an additional layer of emotion or thought is  soon present and ready to rhumba. In my case: sadness, longing, and feelings of emptiness. These are not unfamiliar emotions to me, especially in the evenings, but often they arrive unbidden and as part of the seemingly baseless emotional weather patterns that I experience throughout the day, when in fact they might be better understood as an inner jarring response to the cognitive dissonance experienced in our nervous systems when the Real and the Ideal fail to coalesce. 

Spoiler alert: for most of us, these two realms fail to coalesce about 90% of the time. 

But don’t take my word for it. Run the split-screen experiment in different set-ups for yourself in the next few days (when feeling stressed, relaxed, in different modes and social configurations) and see if the left-hand side of the screen, The Real, ever gets anywhere near the right-hand side image or perception of The Ideal.

Try it out the next time you argue with your significant other. Have a 5 minute time-out from the argument and share your split-screen images, noticing no doubt some interesting differences in  (1) in your so-called “objective” perceptions of The Real (as in: what are we actually fighting about here?), and (2) giving yourselves the possibility of having a good old laugh, or a good old cry,  at how far both of you have failed each other in meeting the emotional, cognitive, and behavioural criteria of your respective Ideal wishes.

Another interesting relational aspect to think about in this enquiry is what flavour or theme often plays a part in our Idealisations. 

  • If you are a “Heart Type”, which is to say that your personality style is centred on feeling emotions and interacting with others through empathy and relationships, then your focus is most likely to reflect this bias in one or both of your split screens. My Ideal as a Four often has a relational component to it, or rather focuses on what is lacking at a relational level, either within myself, or my circumstances (see above). This can also be projected outwards at another as a form of criticism: “Why are you treating me in this way?”. Or even: Why am I suffering Life (at an emotional level) in this way?!” This is often the case for Twos, Threes, Fours, and the many (if not constant) Idealisations that pour out of our Heart Operating Systems.
  • If you are a “Head Type” (Fives, Sixes, and Sevens) some form of thinking and analysing will no doubt be at the forefront of your Idealisations, as well as your particular take on Reality, as you are currently perceiving it. Also perhaps your critique (unconscious or acknowledged) of the person or situation you might be in conflict with, as we attempt to figure things out, strategising, anticipating, often with some anxiety or fear.  
  • Body types (Eights, Nines, Ones) will lend our own embodied Operating System to whatever Ideal is floating unconsciously through your brains and nervous systems, until we attempt to haul it into consciousness in therapy, or as we have done above. Remember: the body is the centre of sensing things physically, through “gut knowing” and instinctive responses, also housing our “movement” centre, which directs action or inaction. Our Idealisations as a Body Type, but also our critiques of others will probably find some bearing in our primary Operating System, focusing on boundaries, tension or numbness, defending or maybe even dissociating in some way, often with some form of irritation present.

[Read more about your Heart/Body/Instinct Operating System]

I guess, as with all of this stuff, perhaps just knowing that we are rarely seeing the world on one screen, can give us a bit more wherewithal and clarity when we are suffering. Because even when we think we’re seeing the world through our most objective Reality lens, some sort of Personality-Focused overlay is always at work. 

Theoretically, but maybe also experientially, this ability to see and acknowledge the gap between that Ideal right-hand side of the screen compared to what’s really happening in the “reality” of our being, might then allow us to (ideally?) hold back from tormenting ourselves or others with fantasies and commentaries stemming from those alternate realities and Idealisations, filled with Idealised Selves, and no bothersome fireworks.

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MEDITATION FOR THE SILENCE OF MORNING – Adam Clay

MEDITATION FOR THE SILENCE OF MORNING

I wake myself imagining the shape
of the day and where I will find

myself within it.Language does not
often live in that shape,

but sentences survive somehow
through the islands of dark matter,

the negative space often more important
than the positive.

Imagine finding you look at the world
completely different upon waking one day

and not knowing if this version is permanent.
Anything can change, after all,

for how else would you find yourself
in this predicament or this opportunity,

depending on the frame? A single moment
can make loneliness seem frighteningly new.

We destroy the paths of rivers
to make room for the sea.

(From: To Make Room For The Sea)

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I Want To Write Something So Simply (Mary Oliver)

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize—
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your own heart
had been saying.

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The Ladder of Being for an Enneagram Two


In this podcast, I take a deep, DEEP dive into all things Two, of how the Enneagram Type Two Personality might shows up in our lives as a kind of continuum (or ladder) of psychological and spiritual health. 
I call this “The Ladder of Being”, which ranges from the upper rungs where we are at our “best” as Twos, to the the lower rungs where we suffer the most as Twos, and are also more likely to cause suffering to others.
The nine rungs of this Ladder of Being can be subdived into three sections.
On the Upper Rungs we find these Contented Twos:
  • The Disinterested Altruist Two
  • The Caring Two
  • The Nurturing Helper Two
On the Middle Rungs we find these Conflicted Twos:
  • The Effusive Friend
  • The Possessive Intimate
  • The Self-Important “Saint”
On the Lower Rungs we find these Suffering Twos:
  • The Self-Deceiver
  • The Coercive Dominator
  • The Breakdown Victim
I hope that by joining me as I climb up and down this Two Ladder with you, you will become not only familiar with the light and shade of us Twos but also get a sense of where we might wish to develop in terms of our “Life Game” or journey.
Feel free to get in touch in order discuss further your Finite and Infinite Games as a Two – I always enjoy receiving and responding to mail: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/
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Travailler, Toujours, Travailler


This injunction (“Work, always, work”) is one that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke imbibed after spending some time with that titan of modern scultpure, Auguste René Rodin.
Rilke (an Enneagram Four with Five wing) utilised this advice from Rodin (a type Eight) to pull himself out of procrastination and other forms of dilly-dallying wtih regard to his own work.
But what does it mean to “travailler, tojours, travailler” with regard to getting ourselves more embedded in the world and in those pursuits that are meaningful to us? How to get ourselves out of rut, which is often how if feels, of having a vague idea of what we should do next, but having no access to the energies that will lead us more explicitly towards our goals?
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Mary Oliver’s Ten Commandments

WHEN DEATH COMES

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

One understanding of personality, and maybe even personhood itself, is that of an embodied ego structure, as Freud believed it was, not just in our heads, the Ego. And each iteration of the Ego has its own particular way of being conflict with, or of not being able to accept its conscious and/or unconscious reality. Reality intrudes into consciousness, and is met in the human animal by egoic obstructions, fully-integrated selves in many cases, that have formed through nature and nurture to intervene and resist feeling our feelings, thinking our thoughts, seeing our selves in action, or holding ourselves back from taking certain actions. No wonder the phrase “life is a dream” is also a truism for us clever clogs. To a certain extent, it really is a dream, with all of us trapped in our little ego boxes or cages responding in a somewhat deterministic way to other living stimul who or which are doing the same: the pokes, prods and pleasures of being alive in a body run on this heart-based, or instinct based, or head-based Operating System, probably all three. 

What we need is a harmonising antidote to all of this. And is not Mary Oliver exactly that: a harmonising antidote, which is why she gets dispensed in every poetry pharmacy as far I can see? 

Her poems are often concrete examples of not just a kind of ethical framework that we might aspire to in order to achieve or maintain that elusive idea of “the good life’, but equally one that is not going to harsh our mellow: her poems acting as beautiful defence mechanisms if you like, to keep us in a kind of groovy flow state, in a good frame of mind. 

So what might Mary Oliver’s Ten Commandments for Living A Good Life sound like?

  1. Meditate on death and loss, on finitude, as often as possible. 
  2. Approach what scares or hurts you with curiosity and wonder.
  3. Look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood.
  4. Look upon time as no more than an idea.
  5. Consider eternity as another possibility.
  6. Think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular.
  7. Think of each name a comfortable music in the mouth tending, as all music does, toward silence.
  8. Think of each body as a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.
  9. Live your life in pursuit of amazement, fall in love with everyone you meet, and everything that happens to you good or bad.
  10. Don’t try and attain anything, and don’t complain. Get on with the act of living, the gift of embodying life itself while you can.

Aren’t these the gentlest of commandment or imprecations? And yet, gentle as they are, they are somewhat take-charge in their certainty. The equation is simple: if you want to feel that your life is meaningful when death comes like the hungry bear in Autumn, should we then not work really hard on manifesting a love, a kind of holy love towards others, the world and ourselves? And of course you can’t argue with that. It would be like arguing against your own creaturely existence. But I also think that Mary Oliver was or is, for she continues to live in these poems, a point nine in expressing her vision in this way. Nines are good at this kind of thing. Their egoic defence against death, depression, or some other pain or irritant, is to focus on the positive and eliminate, or go to sleep in some way, on the negative. 

Don’t harsh my mellow is how a client related a text from their Point Nine boyfriend. I’m a mellow marshmallow, and will continue to be so, but only if you don’t ever get in the way of me being mellow, doing mellow, seeing mellow. Which is a beautiful, and maybe even mystical Ego space to inhabit.

Other types do it differently. Point Ones keep reality at bay through a kind of perfectionistic striving so as to instantiate a self who is beyond criticism, who can never be condemned or blamed for anything. Twos focus all their energies on a give to get strategy for love and support. Threes achieve ambitious feats in the public eye in order to be validated before and beyond Death. Fours exempt themselves from the rules of the game, and try and make that their selling point. Fives too, without making it their selling point. They don’t give a shit. Sixes get lost in fear and paranoia. Sevens distract with fun stuff, and Eights are all about control.

Of course, all of these personality archtypes are also just our shared human arsenal and arsiness writ large. Which is why the simplicity of Mary Oliver’s How Not To Harsh Your Own and Others Mellow, that Simple Nine Vibe (Jesus was a nine let us not forget) works pretty well for most of us as a reminder on what and where to focus, when  focusing, in a positive psychological way, on the good stuff, the light rather than the shade, knowing, delusion orr not, that this does bring with it infinite rewaards. One of them being joy, the other we might call contentment or happiness.

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Little Dog’s Rhapsody in The Night (Mary Oliver)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LITTLE DOG’S RHAPSODY IN THE NIGHT

He puts his cheek against mine
and makes small, expressive sounds.
And when I’m awake, or awake enough

he turns upside down, his four paws
in the air
and his eyes dark and fervent.

Tell me you love me, he says.

Tell me again.

Could there be a sweeter arrangement?
Over and over
he gets to ask it.
I get to tell.

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The Bright Field (R.S. Thomas)

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

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What Is The Language Using Us For? (W.S. Graham)

FIRST POEM

What is the language using us for?
Said Malcolm Mooney moving away
Slowly over the white language.
Where am I going said Malcolm Mooney.

Certain experiences seem to not
Want to go in to language maybe
Because of shame or the reader’s shame.
Let us observe Malcolm Mooney.

Let us get through the suburbs and drive
Out further just for fun to see
What he will do. Reader, it does
Not matter. He is only going to be

Myself and for you slightly you
Wanting to be another. He fell
He falls (Tenses are everywhere.)
Deep down into a glass jail.

I am in a telephoneless, blue
Green crevasse and I can’t get out.
I pay well for my messages
Being hoisted up when you are about.

I suppose you open them under the light
Of midnight of The Dancing Men.
The point is would you ever want
To be down here on the freezing line

Reading the words that steam out
Against the ice? Anyhow draw
This folded message up between
The leaning prisms from me below.

Slowly over the white language
Comes Malcolm Mooney the saviour.
My left leg has no feeling.
What is the language using us for?

SECOND POEM

1

What is the language using us for?
It uses us all and in its dark
Of dark actions selections differ.

I am not making a fool of myself
For you. What I am making is
A place for language in my life

Which I want to be a real place
Seeing I have to put up with it
Anyhow. What are Communication’s

Mistakes in the magic medium doing
To us? It matters only in
So far as we want to be telling

Each other alive about each other
Alive. I want to be able to speak
And sing and make my soul occur

In front of the best and be respected
For that and even be understood
By the ones I like who are dead.

I would like to speak in front
Of myself with all my ears alive
And find out what it is I want.

2

What is the language using us for?
What shape of words shall put its arms
Round us for more than pleasure?”

“I met a man in Cartsburn Street
Thrown out of the Cartsburn Vaults.
He shouted Willie and I crossed the street

And met him at the mouth of the Close.
And this was double-breasted Sam,
A far relation on my mother’s
West-Irish side. Hello Sam how
Was it you knew me and says he
I heard your voice on The Sweet Brown Knowe.

O was I now I said and Sam said
Maggie would have liked to see you.
I’ll see you again I said and said

Sam I’ll not keep you and turned
Away over the shortcut across
The midnight railway sidings.

What is the language using us for?
From the prevailing weather or words
Each object hides in a metaphor.

This is the morning. I am out
On a kind of Vlaminck blue-rutted
Road. Willie Wagtail is about.

In from the West a fine smirr
Of rain drifts across the hedge.
I am only out here to walk or

Make this poem up. The hill is
A shining blue macadam top.
I lean my back to the telegraph pole

And the messages hum through my spine.
The beaded wires with their birds

“From the prevailing weather or words
Each object hides in a metaphor.

This is the morning. I am out
On a kind of Vlaminck blue-rutted
Road. Willie Wagtail is about.

In from the West a fine smirr
Of rain drifts across the hedge.
I am only out here to walk or

Make this poem up. The hill is
A shining blue macadam top.
I lean my back to the telegraph pole

And the messages hum through my spine.
The beaded wires with their birds
Above me are contacting London.

What is the language using us for?
It uses us all and in its dark
Of dark actions selections differ.

THIRD POEM

1

What is the language using us for?
The King of Whales dearly wanted
To have a word with me about how
I had behaved trying to crash
The Great Barrier. I could not speak
Or answer him easily in the white
Crystal of Art he set me in.

Who is the King of Whales? What is
He like? Well you may ask. He is
A kind of old uncle of mine
And yours mushing across the blind
Ice-cap between us in his furs

“Whatever it is is wanted by going
Out of my habits which is my name
To ask him how I can do better.

Tipped from a cake of ice I slid
Into the walrus-barking water
To find. I did not find another
At the end of my cold cry.

2

What is the language using us for?
The sailing men had sailing terms
Which rigged their inner-sailing thoughts
In forecastle and at home among
The kitchen of their kind. Tarry
Old Jack is taken aback at a blow
On the lubber of his domestic sea.

Sam, I had thought of going again
But it’s no life. I signed on years
Ago and it wasn’t the ship for me.
O leave ’er Johnny leave ’er.
Sam, what readers do we have aboard?
Only the one, Sir. Who is that?
Only myself, Sir, from Cartsburn Street.

3

What is the language using us for?
I don’t know. Have the words ever
Made anything of you, near a kind
Of truth you thought you were? Me
Neither. The words like albatrosses
Are only a doubtful touch towards
My going and you lifting your hand

To speak to illustrate an observed
Catastrophe. What is the weather
Using us for where we are ready”
With all our language lines aboard?
The beginning wind slaps the canvas.
Are you ready? Are you ready?

Categories
Feel Better

Working Therapeutically with an Enneagram Seven (Enthusiast) Personality Style

Hello. Perhaps you’ve landed on this page because you’ve done an Online Enneagram Personality Test which has given you a Seven as your main personality type, and now you’re scratching your head wondering what this means in terms of your self-development or therapy journey.

Are personality types no more than just a description of different traits – like a star sign? Or can the deep understanding of our type help us to play the finite game of life a little bit more skilfully? And if so, how?

[Read more about Personality-Focused Psychotherapy]

Hopefully this page and the information below will help to get you going in terms of an initial understanding of your personality type and exactly how it functions.

I have also tried to sketch out the kind of paths that Type 7 clients might want to consider travelling with me in therapy. Each personality type, as you will see, comes with its own “super-powers” as well as Achilles’ Heel which contributes to our personal suffering as well as “life-traps”. Hopefully this will become apparent the more you read into and explore this personality type.

Armed with this knowledge you will hopefully be better equipped to play the ups-and-downs, the snakes as well as ladders of the finite game (that is your individual Life), but perhaps also the Infinite Game, as I like to call it, of Happiness.

PS: If you find when reading through the descriptions below, that they don’t resonate, or that you don’t feel really “seen” and understood in a deep and maybe even sometimes slightly uncomfortable way, then you might want to consider looking at some of the other 9 Types in which you scored relatively high on when doing your personality assessment.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PLAYING THE INFINITE GAME (AS A SEVEN)

  1. Snapshot Of A Seven: How Many Of These Traits Do You Identify With?
  2. Why Am I Like This? The Psychological Development Of A Seven
  3. Core Motivations Of A Type Seven Participant: What “Drives” A Seven?
  4. Sevens At Work & In Relationships
  5. Understanding Why Sevenes Think, Feel, And Behave The Way They Do?
  6. What You’re Really Good At As A Seven
  7. Healthy Vs. Unhealthy Sevens
  8. The Three Kinds Of Sevens: How The Three Instinctual Biases Shape The Three Type Seven Sub-type Personalities
  9. How Sevens Might Struggle In Work And In Relationships: Stress-points And Triggers
  10. Self-management Challenges That Sevenes Might Want To Work On In Therapy
  11. Life-traps That Sevenes Might Want To Work On In Therapy
  12. Where To Start When Focusing On Your Own Personal “Seven-stuff”: Strengths To Leverage & Enquiry Questions That I Often Ask Type Seven Clients


1. SNAPSHOT OF A SEVEN: HOW MANY OF THESE TRAITS DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH?

If most or all of the following characteristics apply to you, you may have a Type Seven personality style:

  • Your mind emphasises the positive data or positive elements of your work. You enjoy envisioning future possibilities and learning about things that interest you—and you find many things intellectually compelling.
  • You have “bright shiny object” syndrome. You are distracted by engaging ideas to think about and other attractive things that pop into your field of vision or your head.
  • You are easily fascinated by interesting people, events, and ideas. You like learning new things, going to new places, and meeting new people—you love the thrill of new experiences and novel adventures. 
  • You tend to be interested in many different things, but may not go very deeply into any one of them. You enjoy the intellectual stimulation and fun and variety of a range of diverse activities, but you may skim along the surface of your experiences. The phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” may apply to you. 
  • You enjoy enjoyment. You are happiest being happy. You actively seek happiness. You like to feel positive emotions, and you don’t like to feel negative ones. Your motto might be: “Why would you feel bad if you could feel good?” 
  • You automatically reframe negatives into positives. For example, when you were unemployed, you called yourself a “freelance entrepreneur.” You believe it’s best to always look on the bright side, and are very good at finding silver linings, the best in people, and whatever is awesome. 
  • You rarely complain about your work. Your mind emphasizes the positive elements of your job. When work gets boring, it’s harder for you to stay engaged.
  • You don’t like to be limited or constrained in any way. If something or someone limits you, you will find a way around it or out of it. 
  • You feel uncomfortable when you have to deal with unpleasant emotions. You like to keep the mood up, so you automatically try to avoid interactions that feel thorny, uncomfortable, or painful. It can be really hard for you to have the dreaded “difficult conversation” with someone when things aren’t going well.
  • You’re good at winging it—you can “fake it ’til you make it” if you have to. You can work hard and make things happen, but you are also good at looking like you know what you’re doing (while you’re still figuring it out).
  • You like to have many options. You like to have a Plan B (and Plan C) in case Plan A doesn’t pan out. This may cause people to perceive you as flaky, but you see it as flexible and spontaneous. 
  • You don’t like hierarchies. You make friends with the people you work with—both above and below you—to flatten things out (and so no one is controlling anyone’s options). You want your boss to be your friend so she won’t control you. You want your direct reports to be your friends so you don’t need to be strict with them and manage them too formally.
  • You enjoy being in leadership positions that involve generating innovative ideas and envisioning the next big thing. You excel at brainstorming and thinking outside the box. You like to take the lead in imagining how things might be better in the future.
  1. WHY AM I LIKE THIS? THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A SEVEN

Here is a kind of Origin Story or Trauma Story that sometimes resonates with a Seven personality style.

Once upon a time, there was a person named Seven. He was born with a natural sense of curiosity and wonder. He came into this world with a beautiful capacity for higher wisdom and true joy—a deep desire to focus intently on one thing at a time and to discover and take pleasure in each thing’s essence. He loved concentrating all his attention on something he wanted to learn about and know deeply.

But one day, when Seven was paying close attention to a bee that was walking on his leg, it stung him! He burst into tears and looked around for someone to comfort him. He tried to tell his father about it and perhaps receive some comfort, but his father was angry about something and told him to “go away.” So he went to his mother, but she was busy doing something and said she “didn’t have time” to hear about something so insignificant. These responses made Seven feel even more pain—almost more than he could handle.

Seven hadn’t had much experience with pain, and he didn’t like it. So, to get away from these unpleasant sensations, he retreated into his own imagination. He started thinking about things that made him excited—watching clouds as they passed through the sky or playing with his best friend. In fact, Seven found that he was good at imagining fun and interesting things. As time went on, he became adept at diverting his attention to these thoughts whenever any kind of pain threatened him. Whenever he started feeling anything other than good or happy, he focused his attention on thinking about things that felt good or seemed happy.

Whenever he saw people who weren’t happy, he wondered why they allowed that to happen. Why would anyone choose to feel bad when they could just think of something that made them feel good?

Over time, Seven developed an ability to make himself happy no matter what was going on around him. No matter what was happening in his life, he could always think of something that made him happy, or go to somewhere better in his mind to avoid sad or unhappy feelings. Then one day, his best friend moved away and, in a very small way, Seven began to feel the pain of losing him. But before that feeling could get very far into his awareness, he started thinking of all the other friends he would now have time to meet. He would just move on. Why wouldn’t he? Thinking about his new fun future friends made him feel happy again. What Seven didn’t realize, however, was that sometimes his happiness was superficial. Sometimes, it was just an escape and not true pleasure. It was not the pure joy he had felt when he was very young.

Seven didn’t know that, sometimes, feeling pain can be important even if it doesn’t feel “good.” From his happy, pleasure-seeking perspective, he couldn’t see that some emotional experiences can be rich and satisfying because they are real, even if they don’t make us “happy.” Sometimes we know real joy because we allow for the experience of pain. For Seven, it was true that he really loved his friend and he would really miss him. And feeling that pain was an opportunity for him to acknowledge that love—and the sadness that was also connected to that love.

But because Seven automatically avoided pain, without realizing it, he also avoided feeling his love. By avoiding his pain and insisting on feeling happy all the time, he eventually became unable to acknowledge many of his true feelings. He lost the ability to experience the true joy that comes with focusing deeply on one thing at a time—including all his feelings—and to take pleasure in whatever is real.

Sevens often report having had a happy early life—they tend to put a positive spin on things, so even if they experience hardship, they tend to remember it in positive terms. However, whether they remember it or not, many Sevens experienced some sort of fearful or painful event or events in childhood that motivates them to take refuge in positive emotions. The Type Seven adaptive strategy grows out of a need to defend against pain or fear through thinking their way to happy feelings and focusing attention on whatever makes them feel good. 

This habit of taking refuge in the imagination allows Sevens to stay upbeat and avoid difficult feelings without ever having to register pain. The Enneagram’s biggest practitioners of “the power of positive thinking,” Sevens are hard-wired to focus on what makes them feel good: people they like, interesting ideas to think about, good food to eat, beautiful places to go. They don’t necessarily “try” to think positively, it just happens. They like to solve problems and tackle challenges, but to cope with what really feels problematic—unpleasant emotions and whatever stirs them up—Sevens tend to “move on,” look to what’s ahead, and do whatever it takes to generate happier emotions. They escape from an uncomfortable present to a rosier future.

While people with a Type Seven style are classified as “fear types,” most Sevens report they don’t experience much fear in their everyday life. However, their coping strategy is an unconscious response to an underlying fear of being limited and of feeling their suffering or their anxiety. Sevens often report feeling bored or anxious rather than fearful. Even Sevens who do feel fear and don’t consciously run away from fear or pain are still shaped by an adaptive strategy that employs many different ways of focusing on what’s pleasurable as a way of distancing themselves from any awareness of unpleasant emotions.

  1. CORE MOTIVATIONS OF A TYPE SEVEN PARTICIPANT: WHAT “DRIVES” A SEVEN?

The strategy of focusing on what’s positive and staying upbeat leads Sevens to pay attention to whatever feels most exciting, stimulating, and fun. If it’s not awesome or interesting or delightful, it drops off the Seven’s radar screen—so Sevens notoriously have trouble focusing on work tasks that are less than exciting. Sevens are not famous for their attention to detail and most Sevens I’ve talked to absolutely detest paperwork. It can be extremely difficult for someone who leads with the Type Seven style to not be distracted by something better when they are doing something that’s not very fun. They may even feel actual physical pain in their bodies when they have to focus on details they don’t care about for an extended period of time.

Sevens like to relate to people, engage in enjoyable activities, and think interesting thoughts. As mental types, they live a great deal of the time in their imagination, both taking refuge there from anything sticky they might want to (unconsciously) avoid and utilizing their imaginative function to do the work they do. Their inner experience is a lively, ever-changing, creative workspace where they invent new possibilities, visualize the future, and play with new ideas. It’s a mental playground where they spend much of their time entertaining themselves—in fact, some Sevens prefer living in their imaginations to living in reality. They can create optimistic visions of what could be in an idealized future in such a way that what they think and dream about seems more real than what is actually happening.

  1. SEVENS AT WORK & IN RELATIONSHIPS

Generally, individuals with a Type Seven style see the world in terms of what could be true if everything was as great as they imagine it to be. Their view of life is so deeply coloured by optimism they may have a difficult time attending to what’s right in front of them in the real world if it’s not so pleasant. The tendency to put a positive spin on things is so deeply ingrained, they may not know they are doing it and may believe that they are perceiving what’s real. 

Sevens relate to the world in terms of how great everything is. They notice all the positive things that are happening and all the reasons they have to feel good. As the saying goes, the world is their oyster, filled with exciting new experiences waiting to be had. However, they also sometimes sense forces out there that could potentially limit their freedom and their options. This is why they prefer flat organisations to hierarchies and engage in “soft rebellion” in response to authorities who might limit them by telling them what to do. They intellectually charm or manipulate people so they can keep the party going, retain their freedom, and avoid feeling trapped. 

Sevens in leadership positions are often motivated by a desire to make the world a better place, especially because they are so good at imagining how the world might be improved. They generally see life as full of exciting things to try, and endeavour to have a diverse variety of experiences and taste all the wonderful things they see. They view the world from an intellectual perspective—through the mental activity of planning for fun and thinking about all the things they want to do, participate in, and accomplish. They are the most emotional of the Enneagram’s three head-based styles, but, like Fives and Sixes, they may often think about feelings rather than sinking into their emotions. 

 The following character traits also define the Type Seven personality style. 

  • Ability to generate imaginative visions and outcomes. Sevens like to think about the future—they tend to be original, innovative thinkers who solve problems in ingenious ways. 
  • Good brainstormers. Sevens’ normal mode of thinking is very much outside the proverbial box. They love nothing more than getting together with like-minded friends or colleagues and coming up with thrilling new angles on how to do things or see the world. 
  • Synthesizing minds. Sevens have a talent for finding connections between things that might seem disconnected to other people. 
  • Positive outlook. Sevens are masters of positively reframing things and seeing the spectacular in life.
  • Preference for having many options. Sevens want to be free to take advantage of whatever opportunities may pop up, so they like to keep their noses to the wind and their options open. 
  • Tendency to rationalise doing what feels good. Most Sevens have never met a rationalisation they couldn’t get behind. Finding good reasons for doing whatever they want to do supports their ability to avoid limitation and feel okay about their choices. They may often not even realise they are rationalising their “bad” behaviour. 
  • Enthusiastic and energetic. Sevens tend to support others in powerful ways, through the sincere passion and intense positive feelings they can mobilize on behalf of a project or an idea.

5. UNDERSTANDING WHY SEVENS THINK, FEEL, AND BEHAVE THE WAY THEY DO?

Mental

Sevens are mental types who enjoy playing with ideas and thinking new thoughts. They live in their imaginations—as a place to think stimulating thoughts that generate positive emotions and (potentially) to escape from whatever is going on that might not be so positive. Sometimes described as having a “monkey-mind,” Sevens’ thinking moves from one thought to another like monkeys swinging from branch to branch. They excel at entertaining themselves and others through their mental activity, often have quick wits, and use their minds to think themselves out of uncomfortable situations, charm their way around limits or instantly recast a bad situation as a good one. By nature hedonistic and anticonventional, their mental flexibility also acts as a defence against becoming stuck in or trapped by an unpleasant experience or a limiting authority or power structure. 

 Emotional

Sevens like feeling good and dislike feeling bad, and believe that people can choose one or the other at will—they can focus on “positive” emotions, like joy or excitement, and disregard, ignore, or evade “negative” ones, like fear or pain. Although they are the most emotional of the three “head types,” they don’t see the value in feeling difficult emotions and rationalise their avoidance of pain, automatically doing whatever it takes to feel good and ignoring any negative data that might inspire a bad mood. They sometimes express an aversion to boredom, but this may be code for not wanting to slow down enough to allow the deeper, darker emotions they avoid to bubble up.

Behavioural

Sevens move rapidly—they think fast, talk fast, and do things fast, so it can be hard for others to keep up with them. Their tendency to get distracted can mean they have a difficult time maintaining their focus on what they are supposed to be doing, especially if it threatens to be boring or dull. They may have difficulty following through on commitments and finishing tasks on time, and their preference for new ideas may lead them to put more things on their own plate—one Seven I met at a training said, “A week before a deadline I have four things to do, but two days before the deadline I will have 10 things to do.” However, successful Sevens find ways to work around their tendency to lose focus, like the Seven I know who tells herself she needs to do a particular task to have the fun she wants to have later. As you might expect, Sevens are also very good at celebrating achievements and planning for next steps.

6. WHAT YOU’RE REALLY GOOD AT AS A SEVEN

  • Maintaining an optimistic, positive attitude; keeping spirits up. Sevens are good at keeping things light, focusing on what’s working, and imagining best-case scenarios. They realise that when you believe things are going to go well, they usually do. 
  • Imaginative and creative planners. Sevens bring a spirit of play to the planning process. They enjoy using their imaginations to creatively plot out innovative visions and how to get there in work and leisure. 
  • Fast-paced. Sevens can be counted on to move things along and not get bogged down, whether they are leading a meeting, planning a project, or burning through their to-do list.
  • Enthusiastic supporters. Sevens can be inspiring leaders who motivate people through their sheer enjoyment of doing the work and engaging with their colleagues.
  • Innovative and forward thinking; futuristic. Sevens automatically imagine what the future is going to be like—they are very good at creating plans and mental pictures about what could or will happen.
  • Good at reframing negatives into positives. Sevens automatically turn what sounds negative into something to feel good about. They easily point to the positive data or the silver lining in a difficult set-up. 
  • Celebrating successes. Not everyone realises how important it is to celebrate victories as a way of reinforcing what works—but Sevens do. And they may also give themselves (and their partners, or team) treats along the way to keep their spirits up. 

However, our greatest strengths, can also be at times our Achilles’ Heel. For Sevens this might show up in the following ways:

  • Maintaining an optimistic, positive attitude; keeping spirits up. Sevens can go too far in envisioning a rosy scenario when they overlook important information that might not be so good—just ask a Type Six! They may also avoid talking about conflicts out of a fear of being trapped in something uncomfortable.
  • Imaginative and creative planners. Sevens can go so far into their imagined utopian visions that they lose touch with what’s real. It’s important tie a vision to reality so you can actually make it happen. And this can be a real blind spot for them—they (especially One-to-One Sevens) just think things are way more awesome than they are.
  • Fast-paced. Sevens sometimes skim along the surface of things, when slowing down and going deeper into a task may be what’s required to get the job done well. Their attention to detail can suffer and they can be sloppy (and not necessarily care).
  • Enthusiastic supporters. At times Sevens may be too enthusiastic about something that’s not so great as a way of avoiding facing bad news. 
  • Innovative and forward thinking; futuristic. Sevens sometimes miss out on experiencing what’s happening in the present moment out of a fear that it might be hard to handle. And since the present moment is really all we can experience, they can end up depriving themselves of experiencing their life as intensely as they want to.
  • Good at reframing negatives into positives. Sometimes it’s important to understand the negatives in a situation so you can deal with them in an effective way, as opposed to just putting a positive spin on them.
  • Celebrating successes. Sevens sometimes want to get to the celebratory party before the goal is actually reached. This can create problems, like when my Seven friend and I were in a canoe and he started celebrating the fact that we’d made it through some scary rapids before we actually made it all the way through—and tipped us over. 

 Fortunately, Sevens’ sincere interest in doing whatever they can to be effective and get results can often motivate them to pay attention to how their relentless positive outlook can sometimes derail things. When they can balance what’s great about their optimism and enthusiasm with an ability to slow down and consider different points of view and all of the data, everybody wins.

7. HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY SEVENS

When stressed to the point of going to their “low side,” Type Sevens can move so fast that they create chaos and confusion in their wake. Stressed out Sevens easily become distracted, may appear manic and ungrounded, and may have a difficult time slowing down long enough to really listen to what people are saying and face difficult facts. Some may retreat into positive fantasy such that they refuse to see the truth of what’s really happening—especially if what’s happening threatens to inspire bad feelings, like disappointment, anxiety, or pain.

Sevens on the low side can become more relentlessly positive and run faster and farther away from darker emotions and potential conflicts. They may speak more rapidly and their thoughts may become erratic and unfocused. They may (unconsciously) seek to manipulate through intellectual charm, or try to force results that satisfy their personal self-interest, without regard to what’s best for others. Or, they may desperately avoid getting close to anything that pushes them into what they (unconsciously) fear most, being limited by outside authorities or feeling trapped in unpleasant emotions. They may become more removed, more aggressive, or more insistent on focusing on what brings them pleasure. 

On the “high side,” healthy Sevens can balance their preference for positivity with an ability to slow down and take in all relevant information and points of view—including what’s not so positive. They can find ways to deal with the hard stuff as a way of providing a sound foundation for making things better. More self-aware Sevens can catch themselves in the act of distracting themselves and steady their focus more and more often. They can also stick with things longer—relationships or conflicts or difficult situations—to work things out and find resolutions that bring about good feelings that go deeper and last longer. 

Emotionally intelligent Sevens learn to feel their emotions all the way to their depths, even when they are painful, understanding that feeling all their emotions leads to a richer and more satisfying experience of life. When Sevens operate from their high side, their natural positivity, humour, and lightness has an even more potent effect, because it is supported and grounded in their willingness to experience all of life, even the darker parts. When Sevens learn to make their fear of pain conscious, they can be more present, more balanced, and more powerful. Instead of just skimming along the surface of their experiences, they can risk sinking down deeper into the moment and getting more of what they want the most—a more intense taste of being alive.

8. THE THREE KINDS OF SEVENS: HOW THE THREE INSTINCTUAL BIASES SHAPE THE THREE TYPE SEVEN SUB-TYPE PERSONALITIES

According to the Enneagram model, we all have three main instinctual drives that help us survive, but in each of us, one of these three impulses tends to dominate our behaviour. The Type Seven style gets expressed differently depending on whether a person has a bias toward self-preservation, social relationships within groups, or one-to-one bonding. 

 The Self-Preservation (or Self-Focused) Seven 

Self-Preservation Sevens focus on getting what they need through taking advantage of opportunities and creating a network of friends and allies. They may experience more anxiety than the other two kinds of Sevens, and cope with this through finding creative ways to meet their needs for security and support. The most practical, materialistic, and hedonistic of the three Seven sub-personalities, Self-Preservation Sevens are very pragmatic, and good at making things happen and creating wealth to support a sense of security in the world. They tend to rely on only those they trust, and may surround themselves with a “good mafia” of friends and allies they can go to when they need something or want to feel protected. And while they can be generous in offering support, they may also fail to be fully aware of the degree to which their own self-interest drives their friendly transactions. 

Sevens with an instinctual bias toward self-preservation tend to always have their nose to the wind to sniff out good opportunities. They can be talkative, friendly, pleasure-seekers who enjoy the finest life has to offer—their self-preservation focus, combined with their Seven programming, leads to a love of indulgence and a search for security born of the need to have the freedom to do, go, work, eat, and drink as they choose. This Seven, more than the others, may be aware of their fear and even a bit paranoid at times—and their usually subtle antiauthoritarian streak may surface if someone tries to constrain their movements or control their actions. 

As leaders, Self-Preservation Sevens tend to be practical and pragmatic—they generally evaluate the business environment more realistically than the other Sevens do and base decisions on both optimism and their own self-interest. They may employ intellectual charm and an upbeat attitude to win people over and establish connections, and will energetically implement plans and projects to get where they want to go without always considering the larger impact of their pursuit of their own self-interest. Rationalizing that what’s good for them is good for everyone, they may pursue the work they want to do in the way they want to do it, and have a difficult time submitting to other authorities or being influenced by direct reports. They may try to smooth rough spots in relationships through personal appeal and humour and focus on pleasure as a way to soothe fears. At their best, Self-Preservation Seven leaders mix good business sense with careful planning and a positive outlook to get what they need, support the people they work with, and have fun doing it.

The Social (or Group-Focused) Seven 

Social Sevens are what is called the “counter-type” of the Sevens—while many Sevens are “self-referencing” and focus on their own inner experience, needs, and wants, Social Sevens (often subconsciously) focus their energy and attention on supporting others, giving to others, and alleviating pain in others as a way of avoiding experiencing pain themselves. They can even experience a kind of taboo on selfishness, as they sense their own desires for things, but deny or postpone them in support of an ideal of being of service to the group. 

Like Type Twos, Social Sevens can put a great deal of energy and enthusiasm toward supporting and giving to others. They may feel motivated to offer more to others and take less for themselves, while at the same time expect or hope that if they support the group, the group will take care of them. Social Sevens are often drawn to jobs that involve healing, holding, or easing the pain of others, perhaps in an unconscious effort to ease their own pain without having to actually feel it. The “New Age” movement is in some ways a cultural reflection of the Social Seven mentality—imagining a global environment in which people are more free and more open to new experiences that free them from the constraints of the past.

As leaders, Social Sevens can be enthusiastic visionaries who imagine a better world. They may have utopian fantasies and sunny outlooks, even while they engage with people facing illness, grief, or other real-life difficulties. Social Seven leaders may work passionately in support of causes or try to improve working conditions so people can be more effective and enjoy what they do. They may demonstrate leadership through sacrificing their own needs and desires as a way of emphasizing the wisdom of making sure others get what they need to do the work they need to do and to be happy doing it. Although they may at times use enthusiasm to inspire (or manipulate) people into following their lead, and they may have a deep desire to be recognized for their dedication to being of service, they usually express a sincere commitment to the welfare of others. At their best, they combine selfless service with a clear and enlivening vision of all that can be done to improve people’s lives. 

The One-to-One (or Relationship-Focused) Seven Leader

One-to-One Sevens are idealistic dreamers who have a very strong focus on how things could be or how they imagine them to be. In contrast to practical Self-Preservation Sevens, One-to-One Sevens have a need to idealise reality and see the world through rose-colored glasses. They are light-hearted “enjoyers” who can be extremely idealistic, to the point of being naïve. They tend to be very enthusiastic, and their enthusiasm can be infectious. And they may be highly suggestible when it comes to being affected by other people’s enthusiasm or idealism. 

These Sevens look at life and work with an extreme sense of optimism—they have a tendency to be almost too happy, and are the Sevens who have the hardest time taking in negative data. Their highly positive view of life is a way to distract themselves from what they experience as a nearly intolerable sense of reality—especially when reality is dull, boring, or difficult. They imagine how things could be and then tend to act as if the positive vision they imagine is real. They may live more in the happy world they create in their heads than the actual world, with its problems and traffic jams and struggles and pain.

As leaders, One-to-One Sevens want to know that everything is okay—I’m okay and you’re okay and we’re okay. And it can be hard for them to see and acknowledge when things are not okay. They can be high-minded visionaries who feel an intense commitment to manifesting the positive view of their work they create in their minds. Alternatively, they can cause problems when they don’t pay attention to anything bad or difficult that might be happening—and they don’t want to see that they aren’t paying attention to the bad things that are happening. When they are less self-aware, they may not recognize they are living more in their imagination than the real world. But when they understand their programming, they can balance their need to idealise with a clear-eyed sense of what’s really happening. When these leaders have the emotional intelligence to recognize their tendency to avoid negative data, they can counter-balance it by asking for support in evaluating all the data in a given situation. When One-to-One Sevens can see that their passion, optimism, and enthusiasm may cloud their vision in negative ways, they can learn to be more aware of their tendency to overcompensate for their fear. When they can do this, they can focus more energy more effectively on making some of the awesome things they imagine a reality.

9. HOW SEVENS MIGHT STRUGGLE IN WORK AND IN RELATIONSHIPS: STRESS-POINTS AND TRIGGERS

Type Sevens sometime feel like working or being in relationship with others is hard because:

  • Not everyone sees things as positively as I do. Sometimes people rain on my parade by arguing against my perspective or dwelling on the negative stuff.
  • I want to solve problems quickly and move on, but other people often want to talk about what’s going wrong longer than I think we need to.
  • I like to score quick victories I can feel good about—so it bothers me when people slow me down, especially with a lot of detailed description about why something won’t work.
  • I like to have a lot of freedom to manoeuvre, and sometimes I’m pressured to do things a certain way, according to certain rules and procedures.
  • Some people don’t enjoy work as much as I do.
  • I have a hard time if I have to deal with other people’s negative feelings or input. 
  • I don’t like to have to operate according to what authorities tell me to do. I like to do what I want to do without feeling constrained or having to take others’ opinions into account.
  • Sometimes people don’t take me seriously because I like to make work fun.

 Type Seven’ peeves may include:

  • When meetings or get-togethers aren’t well run, are boring, or drag on and on.
  • When people respond to my work or ideas with a lot of negativity.
  • When people tell me their problems and expect me to fix them.
  • When colleagues or a partner tries to place limits on my work/freedom or controls what I’m doing.
  • When people shoot down my ideas instead of letting me have space to brainstorm as much as I need to.
  • When the people I work with aren’t friendly and pleasant.
  • When people don’t understand my need to have fun at work.
  • When people are excessively serious and process-driven so there’s no room for creative thinking.
  • When people dwell on what’s not working instead of focusing on solutions.
  • When I’m forced to do a lot of paperwork or jump through bureaucratic hoops.
  • When people tell me what to do, especially if it seems ridiculous, meaningless, or unnecessarily difficult.
  • When people don’t appreciate the good job I did and instead nitpick about little details that they think aren’t right.
  • When someone says “no” or “we can’t do that.”
  • People who go into too much detail and don’t get to the point. 
  • Being micromanaged.

What’s Great About Working and Being In Relationship with Conscious Seven 

  • They are fun-loving, they are fun to be around, and they make work and life fun.
  • They focus on what’s positive as a way of lifting morale and encouraging people to envision a successful result.
  • They keep things moving.
  • They are easy to like and they will want to like you (if they possibly can).
  • They are sincerely interested in people and will want to get to know you.
  • They won’t want to dwell on what’s not working; they like to find solutions.
  • They tend to be diplomatic and friendly when conducting business or their relationships. 
  • While they have preferred ways of doing things, they are open to listening to others and will try to adjust so team members feel heard and supported.
  • They often see the best in people and encourage them to do their best.
  • They are often humorous and charming.
  • As leaders, they tend to treat direct reports more as peers than underlings.
  • They will want to give the people they work with a great deal of freedom. 

Typical Challenges for People Who Work with Sevens or Are In Relationship With Them 

  • It can be hard to talk to them about what’s not going well.
  • They may not have the patience or the emotional fortitude to do what it takes to identify problems, talk them through, and work things out.
  • They may have difficulty focusing on projects that don’t excite them.
  • They may overbook themselves, arrive late to meetings, or appointments, and forget commitments.
  • They may get so excited about new ideas that they don’t slow down to examine potential problems and develop a workable implementation plan.
  • Although they may know a great deal about diverse subject areas, their knowledge of specific topics may be shallower than you might expect.
  • Their own strong desire for freedom of movement may mean they don’t provide much structure or direction for their direct reports.
  • They may move so quickly, they inadvertently leave people behind.
  • They like to keep their options open and so may not commit to a plan of action in a timely way.

10. SELF-MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES THAT SEVENS MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY

Overdoing the preoccupation with what’s positive. Of course you know that there are many positive aspects to being so positive—but there is also a downside, like there is with everything. If you can’t rein in the need to put a positive spin on everything, you may miss something important when you avoid the negatives.

The need for speed. Sometimes the people around you may feel like your fast pace means you are running away from something. If you can slow down and smell the proverbial roses, you may be able to take in more of what’s happening and have a richer, deeper, better experience—which is usually what you are aiming for anyway.

Self-referencing and acting from self-interest. You can be a very generous, supportive person, but your attention is first and foremost on yourself. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you overdo it without knowing it, you may alienate people when you don’t pay attention to their needs and desires too. 

Excessive concern with avoiding limits. It may occasionally be beneficial to meet the challenge of having fewer options or adjusting to outside constraints. Even if it just lessens your fear around limitation, that might be good for you.

Living in your imagination (as opposed to reality). If you are a One-to-One Seven, this is your specialty. While it is a strength to be positive and enthusiastic, in some instances, bad things can happen when you believe more in the reality you create in your head than the objective reality you live in with other people. 

Fear of suffering. Chances are if you really learn to allow yourself to feel more of the bad stuff you automatically avoid feeling, it won’t be as bad as you thought it would be. And if you become more conscious of your fear, you can release yourself from being so driven by fear—often fear that you don’t even realize is driving you.

11. LIFE-TRAPS THAT SEVENS MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY

Here are some potential blind spots that Sevens might struggle to see in themselves:

  • How the quest for fun, positivity, and pleasure is driven by a need to avoid pain. When I introduce Sevens to the Enneagram types and they begin to see themselves in the Type Seven archetype, they often say, “I relate to every part of the description, except for the part about avoiding pain; I don’t do that.” Distracting themselves from uncomfortable feelings—and the way their fast pace and desire to feel good all the time is driven by a flight from pain—can be a blind spot for Sevens. 
  • The value of pain and discomfort as a way of connecting to deeper emotional truth. Sevens’ programming tells them that there’s nothing good about feeling bad. It’s hard for them to see any upside to difficult feelings and uncomfortable emotions. But our emotions represent a kind of inner guidance system, and knowing how you feel is an important part of being human and being able to access what’s real for you. 
  • The impact on others of your relentless focus on what’s positive. Sevens want very much to be taken seriously. But, if you are a Seven, you may sometimes unintentionally contribute to the perception that you are a lightweight or not very serious. And sometimes it’s hard to trust someone who only wants to look at the good stuff.
  • Your own ability to deal with uncomfortable emotions. Self-aware Sevens say that one reason they avoid feelings like anxiety, pain, discomfort, and boredom is they fear if they allow themselves to open up to these feelings, they will be trapped in them forever. But this is based on the automatic instinctual response that they can’t handle those feelings. It helps to own your capacity for emotional strength and resilience. 

The positive aspects of slowing down and being present with your experiences, no matter what you are experiencing. Sevens tend to operate at a fast pace because they are unconsciously running away from any negative emotions or hard-to-handle experiences that might happen in the present moment. But they tend to avoid being aware of the downside of moving so rapidly when they skim along the surface and focus on the future. It actually helps to slow down and allow for a deeper experience of the present moment—and to get in touch with what exactly has you moving so quickly in the first place.

All the types can learn to be less reactive and better at collaborating through first observing their habitual patterns, then thinking about the things they think, feel, and do to gain more self-insight, and then making efforts to manage or moderate their automatic reactions to key triggers. 

Sevens grow through first observing, then exploring, and then learning to moderate their habitual reactions to key triggers like feeling limited or controlled by others, having to deal with others’ negative emotions or moods, and having their options foreclosed.

When Sevens can watch what they do enough to “catch themselves in the act” of doing the things that get them in trouble, and then pause and reflect on what they are doing and why, they can gradually learn to moderate their programming and knee-jerk responses. Here are some ideas to help Sevens be more self-aware, more emotionally intelligent, and more satisfied at work (and at home).

  • Observe your desire to focus on what’s positive and pleasurable. Notice if it reflects an inability or an unwillingness to look at important negative data. 
  • Notice if you move, think, and talk at a fast pace. Experiment with slowing down a little to see what happens. 
  • Notice if you feel any anxiety or fear as you go through your day. See if you can observe it and discover what it’s about. 
  • Notice if you have an aversion to anything that threatens to limit you in any way. 
  • Observe what happens inside you when there is something happening that inspires discomfort and how you respond.
  • Study yourself to see if you can note what emotions you feel more and less often. Do you spend more time feeling emotions at the positive end of the spectrum? What happens to your more painful or negative feelings?
  • Notice what beliefs you have about feeling specific feelings. Do have any fears or beliefs about getting trapped in uncomfortable emotions?
  • Is it important to always have a lot of options? Why or why not?
  1. WHERE TO START WHEN FOCUSING ON YOUR OWN PERSONAL “SEVEN-STUFF”: STRENGTHS TO LEVERAGE & ENQUIRY QUESTIONS THAT I OFTEN ASK TYPE SEVEN CLIENTS

It might helps Sevens to be aware of, actively pay attention to, fully own, and leverage:

  • Ability to make work fun and enjoyable. This is a gift that enhances your life and the experiences of the people you work with. It doesn’t even occur to a lot of people that work can (or should) be fun—they view it as a grind or a slog. Seeing work through the lens of enjoyment is a strength of the Seven style the rest of us can learn from and that can give our work lives more meaning.
  • Intellectual charm. Sevens can really turn on the charm when they want to. Although you may sometimes use it to wriggle out of commitments and get around inconvenient authorities, this talent comes in handy for relating to everybody at work, whether they are clients or managers or the person whose parking space you parked in because you were running late.
  • The power of positive thinking. The ability to automatically and instantaneously reframe negatives into positives has many productive uses—and much of the time probably actually makes things better. And, it just seems true that if you can envision it, it’s more likely to happen.
  • Infectious enthusiasm. Feeling excited about projects and plans may give you more influence and support among more people. Sevens have a way of expressing excitement and enthusiasm that makes others want to join the party. 
  • Enjoyment of relating to people. One of the main points of this book is that most work that gets done in the world today happens through people interacting with people. Sevens sincerely enjoy engaging with people, and this makes you good at a lot of things as leaders and in business generally: selling and promoting ideas and products, schmoozing with clients and colleagues, after-work happy hours with coworkers, and just generally chatting with people at the proverbial water cooler.
  • A flexible, synthesizing mind that gives you the ability to make connections. If you are a Seven, you have a nimble mind that finds connections among things that others don’t often see. You can think through problems and find innovative solutions in creative ways that make you a valuable member of any team.

 Things for Sevens to Think About, Understand, and Explore 

  • Why is it so important for you to always focus on what’s positive and pleasurable? What do you fear will happen if you focus on other kinds of emotions and experiences?
  • Why is it so appealing to you to focus on the future? What motivates you to be so forward thinking?
  • What fuels your drive to move quickly through life? What do you value about having a fast pace? What do you think would happen if you slowed down?
  • What kinds of things do you fear most? How does it feel to think about that question?
  • Why does it feel so intolerable to be limited? What feels threatening about others putting constraints on you? 
  • Why is it so important to have options? What does having multiple options do for you? 

Sevens can also grow through consciously becoming aware of the unconscious, self-limiting habitual patterns associated with their personality style and learning to embody the “higher aspects” or more expansive and balanced capacities of the Type Seven personality:

  • Learn to become conscious of your need to avoid discomfort and pain. Becoming aware of your fears and opening up to the full range of your emotions can give you a deeper and more engaged experience of life and relationships.
  • Learn to notice when subterranean anxiety causes you to speed up and realize you have the power to stay safe, even if you engage your fears more consciously.
  • Learn to notice when you use your easy charm to intellectually manipulate to get what you want, and consciously open up to the possibility that you will get more of what you want the more you share what you have with others.
  • Learn to see when you’re positively spinning out of control and find a way to open up to facing your fears and examining what’s not so great, knowing seeing the bad part will only enhance your enjoyment of the good part.
  • Learn to recognize when you are seeing things the way you want to see them or the way you wish they were and take the risk to see them as they actually are, or as others see them, knowing you can survive reality.
  • Learn to notice when you are focusing narrowly on your own interest and pleasure, and widen your perspective to include what’s good for others, or how being more sober might serve you, knowing that many pleasures can end up being less pleasing than you thought anyway.
  • Learn to see your tendency to amp up the excitement and the enthusiasm as a sign you are avoiding something. Realize that tempering your enthusiasm doesn’t mean things still won’t turn out great—it just means that you will be more open to considering all of what’s real in the moment.

 Overall, Type Sevens can fulfill their higher potentials by observing and working against their habitual focus on forward momentum and pleasurable experiences and experiment with playing different roles on teams and widening their perspective to include more kinds of data and emotional truth. When they can combine their high energy, humor, and positive outlook with a greater openness to feeling more kinds of feelings and experiencing situations they would rather avoid, they can stop running so fast and create a more grounded approach to and internal foundation for achieving their positive visions and innovative aspirations.

If you are not a Seven, but would like to learn how to get on better with them, here are a few tips: 

  • Be upbeat and positive. Sevens appreciate people who are pleasant and fun to be around. They will enjoy working with and relating to you if you endeavour to be enjoyable to be with and keep the mood light. 
  • Work to achieve mutual respect and appreciation. Sevens will be happy to respect your preferences and your freedom if you show respect for theirs. They want to feel appreciated and will happily appreciate you if they like you and experience you as easy to be around. 
  • Avoid excessive negativity and criticism. Sevens like to focus on what’s positive, so they can be bothered—and even alienated—by people who express a large amount of negativity. They are usually open to legitimate criticism, but if it doesn’t have an obvious constructive purpose, they may feel hurt and resentful. 
  • Make some allowances for them to be exceptions to the rule if the rule is unnecessarily constraining. Although, of course, some rules need to be followed by everyone, if you can occasionally let your Seven colleagues or friends bend a rule that is particularly limiting and inconsequential, they will greatly appreciate it (and still get their work done, or stick to their commitments).
  • Allow them to work independently as much as possible, or have their own projects. Sevens like to have a lot of freedom to do the work, or carry out certain leisure activities the way they want to do it. They like having someone in relationship with them who trusts them to get the job done and doesn’t control what they do excessively. 
  • Give them space to generate and flesh out good ideas. Sevens love allowing their imaginations to run wild—they enjoy envisioning different options and possibilities. They will appreciate colleagues who give them room to brainstorm and trust that they will pare the long list of good ideas later, as the next step of the work. 
  • Understand their implicit discomfort with authority. Sevens aren’t big rebels, but, because they are friendly people who dislike being controlled by outside forces, they may engage in a kind of covert resistance to authority (both at work and in personal rrelationships) that gets expressed through charm and diplomacy. If you work or are in relationship with Sevens, it helps to understand this.
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Working Therapeutically with an Enneagram Five (Investigator) Personality Style

Hello. Perhaps you’ve landed on this page because you’ve done an Online Enneagram Personality Test which has given you a Five as your main personality type, and now you’re scratching your head wondering what this means in terms of your self-development or therapy journey.

Are personality types no more than just a description of different traits – like a star sign? Or can a deeper understanding of our personality structure, or “self”, and the way it works at a psychological level, help us to play the game of life with a little bit more grace, and less suffering?

[Read more about Personality-Focused Psychotherapy]

One way to think about the Self is that it might work as a kind of Lens or “Operating System” through which our psyche (?) mind (?) “life force” (?) or “soul” (?) flows. Whenever we express a thought, or belief, or opinion about our lives and our struggles, it is usually the Self (an “I”) that is doing the talking for us:

I feel sad about…
I feel satisfied with life when…
I don’t understand why s/he said that…
I find this [thought/feeling/situation] painful to think about or deal with.

Of course we don’t normally think about these utterances as a “Self” talking through us, because it (we) are always just sort of here in the conscious experience of “I”, of Self, with its particular filter on the world always present. Like fish, we swim in the “waters” of Self, but are usually completely oblivious to what “water” actually is.

Therapy is perhaps an opportunity for us to look at, and work through the content of our experience, the different ways we might have filled the gaps above to describe what is going on in our lives, but also to pay a slightly different kind of attention to how our struggles are often being shaped or contained in a certain ways for us through this “Self”, or Ego, or “I”. Not in the negative sense of having a “big ego”, but simply in terms of this psychological “I”. Which is to say: our personality style, character, Ego, Self.

This is not our whole Being or Consciousness. We can also step back (as we often do, especially in therapy) and look at the Self from a more detached, less conflicted perspective. Maybe from the perspective of someone who cares for us, but also knows us really well. This perspective might also become one we develop in our relationship with that person (“me” or another therapist) who would like to accompany you and assist you with your journey into understanding, healing, and developing your Self.

Most of the time though, we experience our Selves either from either the perspective of an Inner Critic who tells us how we’re failing at Life (or how Life is failing us), or from the Driver’s Seat of our Core Self.

Whoever that Core Driving Self is (pick a number!) whoever is driving the bus –driving us to do the things we do, or make the choices we make– it clearly has a special way of operating. Others can often see, for better or worse, how we tend to operate, as we can also see their Selves at work in how they talk, think, and behave. In therapy, we can try to get to know this Core Self a bit better (as well as those of the people we’re in relationship with), and hopefully find out what we’re all about.

As you read about your Five “Self” below, a portrait that reveals both the light and shade of “you”, try not to judge your Self, or feel bad about how this Self comes across when laid out in this somewhat reductive, psychological way.

If reading through this portrait makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, ashamed, or exposed, that is a good sign, it really is.

This is certainly how I felt when I first read about my own personality style“Am I really like that!?! Oh dear. Well, OK, for good or bad, that does seem to be how “I” roll… [sigh]” 

This kind of response might perhaps indicate that we are gaining new insights, or at least a bit more humility about our Selves, especially when embarking on the kind of therapeutic search that you’re engaging with for your Self right now by reading and reflecting on this.

With insight, we can hopefully learn how to handle our Self/Selves a bit better in terms of how we deals with those generic but often unpleasant realities of life: physical and emotional pain, uncertainty, as well as the various forms of constant work, both inner and outer that we seek to fulfil. The Self is always the interface through which we learn how to do this, trying as best we can to put into practice the lessons we’ve learned.

If  you find when reading about the Five “Self” described below, that it doesn’t feel like the kind of “I” you identify with, please have a quick look again at my Overview of The Nine Personality Types.

Your Core Self will make itself known to you there, as when you catch sight of yourself in the reflection of a shop-window or a mirror. Each of us holds aspects of every personality type within us (we all come from the same species,) but at a psychological level, our Core Self is usually present through our entire life journey, and shapes how we see the world, inwardly and out.

Human happiness and satisfaction seems to be strongly connected to getting the best out of our core Selves (i.e. our particular personality style, as well as following our unique threads), alongside learning how to manage with the not-so-great, and at times even “crappy” stuff that comes with each “I” or person-ality.

1. SNAPSHOT OF A FIVE: HOW MANY OF THESE TRAITS DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH?

  • I see the work I do through the lens of the information that needs to be mastered to get the job done. I enjoy doing research on whatever topics interests me or help me further clarify or do the work I need to do. 
  • I feel more comfortable with data and facts than people and emotions. I automatically tune in to the mental level of what’s going on and detach from whatever feels overly emotional. 
  • I enjoy being alone and need a great deal of private time. I don’t need to be around other people to be happy. Much of the time, I would rather be alone than with people.
  • I am skilled at looking at things objectively. I analyse things intellectually, without any emotional response or attachment. 
  • I enjoy working independently. I feel most comfortable when I am alone, and I like to work by myself.
  • I enjoy becoming an expert in things I have an intellectual interest in. Reading and researching feels so much less complicated than interacting with people and dealing with their feelings.
  • I enjoy work most when it engages me intellectually and I can study something that interests me. I feel satisfied and content when I can learn new things and gain knowledge.
  • I value my privacy (very much). Interruptions, surprises, and people who stay in the office too long talking about things I don’t care about can all feel intrusive and uncomfortable.
  • I feel uncomfortable in situations where I have to engage in small talk or share information about myself, like cocktail parties and job interviews. It’s much easier to communicate about the intellectual aspects of work than it is to convey personal information.
  • I am not very emotional, and when I am, I prefer to feel my feelings when I am alone. Some people may perceive me as aloof, but I mostly feel shy and uncomfortable in social situations because I don’t like to talk about myself with people I don’t know well enough to trust with private information (which is most people).
  • I tend to be more of an observer than a participant in the social world. I can find people interesting, but don’t necessarily want to connect with them on a deep level. 
  • I tend to disconnect from my emotions and feel much more comfortable relating to others on an intellectual level. Although I am a sensitive person and I have keen powers of observation, it feels draining to share my feelings with others or have to deal with theirs.
  • I enjoy being in leadership positions that involve developing knowledge and using information in service of furthering a larger cause or enterprise. I excel at accumulating knowledge and information, and I enjoy having an impact through pushing the boundaries on what is known about a given topic.

2. WHY AM I LIKE THIS? THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A FIVE

Here is a kind of Origen Story or Trauma Story that Fives can sometimes identify with in some way with respect to their own lives:

When she was young, Five tried to create true heartfelt connections with people. However, those people had a tendency to invade her space when she felt like being alone. And then they weren’t around when she really wanted them to be. Both intrusion and unavailability were a cause of constant concern for Five, which made it hard for her to know what to do to relate well to others, especially when she felt intruded upon or neglected. She secretly felt inadequate and different from others. Trying to find ways to connect with them just frustrated her. Again and again, people either left her when she felt she needed them or they didn’t allow her to be alone enough. As time went on, Five finally gave up and disconnected more and more from others and from her feelings.

Five found she felt calm and comfortable when she spent time by herself. And this feeling grew stronger as time went by. Eventually, Five lost her ability to connect with people when she wanted to. And because of all the time she spent alone, she forgot how to let them know when she wanted to get closer to them or when she missed them. To avoid the frustration she had felt before, she decided to wait for others to notice when she felt alone—which, unfortunately, almost never happened. As she grew older, without really realising it, Five forgot about her fundamental need for connection. She got used to being alone. She liked the comfort and safety of being by herself. It was so much easier than being with people.

Five liked learning, because it made her feel smart (and more adequate), and it was something she could do on her own. She was happy with her identity as a self-sufficient, self-contained person who knew a lot about a lot of things. She took secret pleasure in knowing things and even started feeling a little more confident because of how much she knew. She still dodged people who tried to connect with her, however, and she still wanted to avoid the pain of feeling invaded when she wanted to be alone—or of being left alone when she wanted to be with someone. She didn’t want to lose the sense of safety she got from being able to live in her mind, and she didn’t want to risk sharing more of herself. She also didn’t want to share her books or any of her other treasured possessions.

As an adult, Five’s dedication to gathering knowledge, together with her natural mental sharpness, helped her achieve a comfortable position in an area of specialisation that allowed her to feel autonomous and self-sufficient. As a self-employed professional, she managed to avoid the spotlight. Each day, after doing whatever she needed to do, she dedicated time to what she loved most— learning more, hidden away in her private space.

Then one day, Five noticed that everything she did was predictable. She didn’t have much energy; she didn’t feel alive. She usually felt tired, especially when she was around people. She felt exhausted when others asked things of her or wanted to tell her about their feelings. After some anxious reflection, Five fell asleep. And as she slept, she dreamed. In her dream, she felt alone in a way that disturbed her. She had no motivation to study or learn. She mysteriously, almost against her will, felt an extreme amount of love for the people around her. She didn’t want to be alone anymore. She wanted to be close to these people. Five felt as if her world had turned upside down, and she didn’t know what to do. Then she woke up.

Five couldn’t decide whether her dream had been a good experience or a nightmare. She spent some time thinking about this, but then forgot about it and went back to doing the same things she did every day—by herself.

Fives often report that early on in life they were either intruded upon or neglected—either their boundaries were not respected by others and so they developed a need to protect their private space, or they were not given enough of what they needed and had to learn to get by on their own with scarce resources. They sometimes have a history of having to deal with others’ drama or emotional upheaval and learning to withdraw, finding a sense of safety by detaching from feelings (and unwieldy relationships) and taking refuge in their heads. 

This habit of retreating to a place of refuge—either a private space where they can be alone or into the comfort zone of their intellect—allows Fives to find protection from intrusion, hold on to scarce resources, and engage with the world in a way that feels both safe and interesting. I sometimes hear Fives say they believed something was “wrong with them” before they found the Enneagram, because they didn’t want to be around people very much—then they realised there wasn’t anything wrong with them, they were just Fives! People with a Type Five personality style experience a kind of inner scarcity because an early need to rely on others took them into what felt like dangerous territory. The need to distance themselves from people who might suck up their time and energy means they need to find ways to get by on less, since they can only rely on what they can get or do on their own. 

While Fives may appear unemotional and unsentimental, they are actually highly sensitive; they feel and experience things acutely. To cope, they develop an inner program that tells them the best way to get through life (and work) is to maintain strong boundaries and focus on the mental level of things to protect against being depleted by the needs and feelings of others. When people can be held at a distance, things are kept in separate compartments, private space is protected, and work happens through focusing on data and intellectual interaction, Fives feel a sense of calm and well-being.

3. CORE MOTIVATIONS OF A TYPE FIVE PARTICIPANT: WHAT “DRIVES” A FIVE?

The strategy of maintaining a mental focus and protecting private space leads Fives to focus their attention on their own thought processes, obtaining and assessing information, and maintaining a sense of control around time, space, and energy. People who lead with a Type Five style automatically attend to their own strong needs for time and space so that they have the room they need to think, accomplish tasks, and do what they need to do. 

Self-sufficient and autonomous, Fives naturally guard against intrusions from the outside and are quick to read the signs of possible disruptive forces—like needy or overly emotional people—and take evasive action if necessary. They automatically sort people into mental categories according to how much (or how little) interaction they want with them, and when they interact with others, they pay attention to how to establish boundaries and how to take advantage of natural boundaries. While they may sincerely enjoy many social interactions, they may also be keenly aware of time limits, as knowing contact will end at a particular time can help them allay any worry they may feel about how long they will have to engage (and how much energy will be expended). For instance, a Five friend of mine is an A-Level English teacher, and she can fully enjoy the experience of relating to her students during class because she knows that at the appointed time the bell will ring, class will be over, and everyone will leave. And she will be, happily, alone again.

Fives are also highly attuned to their own level of energy. One Five I know put it this way: at the start of the day, he imagines he has a full tank of gas, but as the day goes on, he is aware that each specific task and interaction requires him to consume that fuel. Certain life experiences take more fuel than others—and his attention focuses on which interactions take more or less of his energy, and how he might avoid larger expenditures (and so keep more energy for himself to use as he wishes) or at least be mindful about spending his fuel where he most wants or needs to spend it. 

Generally, individuals with a Type Five style view the world in terms of interesting things to think about and get fascinated by. Fives also tend to look for causes they can support and find meaning in. They may lead at work through being the intellectual force behind making an impact related to an effort they believe in, but will do so from a safe distance. They may find deep emotions alien and daunting, but they can be passionate about ideas, fields of study, and social values they find interesting, important, and meaningful.

Fives see the world through an intellectual perspective—they think deeply about things and have a strong thirst for learning and knowledge. They typically have a greater need for information and intellectual understanding than they do for people or relationships. It’s not that they don’t want and need good, supportive relationships—they do. Fives just have less of a need to be surrounded by people all the time, they require less of the people they are in relationships with, and they prefer to be in close relationships with just a few, trusted individuals. 

People with a Type Five style also view the world with an eye toward maintaining their sense of personal space. They think in terms of how to navigate the social world while maintaining a sense of comfort and safety. At work, they may engage with people around the tasks and the mental aspects of what needs to be done, but will usually share little or no personal information about themselves. While they can develop solid relationships with coworkers, it may take a Five a while to feel comfortable enough to open up and share personal details or feelings. 

4. FIVES AT WORK & IN RELATIONSHIPS

  • Ability to access and assess information skillfully and withinterest. Fives’ hunger for knowledge and information makes them naturally oriented to the accumulation and analysis of data. They are both good at it and enjoy doing it. 
  • Objectivity.Fives automatically separate emotions from thoughts, and so they are able to be neutral when evaluating or communicating about a situation.
  • Focus on maintaining appropriate boundaries. Fives understand that people need space—because they do. They are naturally trustworthy with respect to confidences and respectful of people’s privacy. 
  • Intellectual and thoughtful. Fives operate most comfortably on the cognitive, or mental, level of things. They enjoy gathering information and thinking deeply. 
  • Detachment from emotions. This makes them very objective thinkers, but can sometimes mean they lack empathy or don’t want to deal with the emotional level of things. 
  • Private and modest. Fives do what they do without wanting to get a lot of attention for the things they do. Naturally shy and introverted, they tend to be uncomfortable in the spotlight and prefer to work from the background, or from home, or some other private space.
  • Tendency to compartmentalise. Whether they be ideas or people, Fives like to keep things in cognitive “file folders” so they can exercise a sense of control of what they know and what people know about them. (For instance, they might not invite people from different arenas of their life to the same party. Then disparate individuals could share information about them with others in a way they couldn’t control.)

Type Fives sometime feel like working or being in relationship with others is hard because: 

  • I don’t like to have to depend on other people to get work done—I like to be able to work alone and do my own thing.
  • It can be difficult to spend a lot of time around the people I need to collaborate with—especially when the team or the collaborators are not of my choosing.
  • Sometimes it’s hard for me to know how to relate to people, or to want to get to know them enough to understand how to work well with them.
  • I am uncomfortable dealing with other people’s emotions and can become irritated if people bring their personal dramas to work, or if my partner brings something up when I’m focused somewhere else. 
  • I like to have as much time as I need to review all the information necessary to support the work I do, and make decisions on matters big and small, and sometimes other people don’t have the same view of the importance of fully vetting and evaluating all the relevant data.
  • Sometimes people ask more of me than I want to give in terms of time, energy, and personal information.
  • Sometimes the work and outcomes aren’t clearly structured and communicated (and this can lead to problems with people and messy emotional issues). 
  • When work processes and expectations aren’t clear, it can lead to unintentional or accidental dependencies—and I don’t want to have to end up doing work that someone didn’t know they had to do or work with someone on something I didn’t expect I would have to (and don’t want to). 

Type Fives’ pet peeves may include:

  • When goals, roles and structure are not clearly defined (so I know where the boundaries are) both in personal and business relationships.
  • When things aren’t efficient and the leader hasn’t thought through the process. 
  • When people do sloppy work and I have to deal with their mistakes.
  • When people interrupt me when I’m in the middle of a task. 
  • When people draw me into their personal dramas or expect me to deal with their emotional reactions.
  • When people surprise me with a task at the last minute.
  • When people expect me to share personal information about myself.
  • When people don’t respect agreed upon time limits.
  • When people intrude upon my private space or private time or take up too much of my time that I would rather be spending by myself.
  • When people don’t respect my knowledge about a specific topic I have studied extensively.
  • When people waste my time talking about personal stuff at work. Talking about personal stuff is fine, but make a date for that after work. 

5. UNDERSTANDING WHY FIVES THINK, FEEL, AND BEHAVE THE WAY THEY DO?

Mental

Fives are “head-based” types who feel most at home in their mental space: thinking, learning, and accumulating knowledge. Thinking is a main focus of living and working and a way of defending against emotions for Fives—both their own, which can feel overwhelming or hard to navigate, and those of others, which can threaten to deplete their energetic resources. They identify so strongly with their thinking function that it can feel to Fives like thinking about things that interest them and developing their understanding of those things is “who they are” and what they can contribute most to the world.

 Emotional

Fives unconsciously detach from their emotions as a habitual coping strategy. This is not to say they don’t have feelings—they do, but their main adaptive strategy involves separating thoughts from emotions and living from the mental level as a way of maintaining a sense of power and control in the world. Fives tend to only be comfortable feeling their emotions when they are alone—you will almost never see a Five display big emotions in public or at work, and if Fives register feelings, they will usually wait until they are alone to fully experience them. If they do show their feelings in a work setting, it will often be some sort of excitement about an intellectual point of interest. Fives may also display anger in support of maintaining boundaries (or if a boundary has been violated or is in danger of being violated)—both for themselves and others they care about.

 Behavioural

ives may delay taking action when they think they don’t have enough information on which to act. They prioritize thinking over doing, and often believe they need to learn more before they feel comfortable taking a stand or executing on a plan. People with a Type Five personality style may struggle to feel connected to their feelings or their physical selves. They need a large amount of personal space—they may be quiet and keep their distance, they may avoid the office holiday party or after-work drinks, and they rarely share personal information with colleagues. It can be challenging for Fives to collaborate closely with others on a team—they tend to like to work alone, and may be wary of needing to rely on others or having their work depend upon other people’s contributions. 

6. WHAT YOU’RE REALLY GOOD AT AS A FIVE

  • Gathering and evaluating information. Fives excel at finding the information necessary to get the job done and finding the meaning in the data they analyse that best supports the work.
  • Intellectual understanding and vision. Fives live in their heads—and they tend to have really excellent heads. They are usually highly intelligent, deep thinkers, with quick minds.
  • Objective analysts. Fives naturally take the emotion out of whatever they are looking at or doing, so they are really good at contemplating things thoughtfully and evenhandedly.
  • Giving people the space they need to be themselves or do what they need to do. Fives like having a lot of personal space and so they naturally offer it to others. You probably won’t be micromanaged by a Five leader.
  • Self-sufficient, autonomous, independent. Fives feel comfortable working alone and can function independently, without needing a lot of support or supervision from others.
  • Humble and self-deprecating. Fives tend to be shy and so are usually uncomfortable in the public eye—they don’t seek affirmation from others or feel a need to be the centre of attention or get credit for things. Motivated by learning and knowing, they do the work for the meaning they find in it, not to prove themselves worthy in the eyes of others. 

 When Too Much of a Good Thing Becomes a Bad Thing: How Fives Can Go Wrong When They Try Too Hard to Know It All (or Go It Alone)

  • Gathering and evaluating information. Fives sometimes put off taking action when they don’t think they have enough information. They may also get lost in the data—they may be so interested in what they are learning, they don’t move quickly enough on what the data tells them.
  • Intellectual understanding and vision. Fives tend to undervalue other forms of information, like intuition or “gut knowing,” or emotions, or “reading the room.” They may overdevelop their intellect and underdevelop their emotional intelligence.
  • Objective analysts. Fives excel at separating information from emotion, but may have trouble adding the emotions back in in order to access feelings as a source of information.
  • Giving people the space they need to be themselves, do what they need to do. It may be difficult for them to engage with people and share enough about themselves to connect with them.
  • Self-sufficient, autonomous, independent. Interdependence can feel challenging for Fives. They may find it hard to connect with others to the degree that’s necessary to establish good working relationships.
  • Humble and self-deprecating. Fives’ reluctance to be the focus of attention may also mean they don’t show up when it’s appropriate to give and receive feedback, celebrate successes, and accept credit when it’s due in a way that’s good for the team.

 Fortunately, Fives’ sincere interest in drawing on their knowledge and objective vision to have a positive impact on the work they do, or the people they interact with often motivates them to overcome some of the obstacles they experience in forming easy and effective relationships. When they feel valued for the insights they bring and invited to communicate about what they are thinking, they can be active contributors despite their need for extra personal space and independence. 

7. HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY FIVES

When stressed to the point of going to the “low side” of their developmental spectrum, Type Fives can become even more remote and unreachable. Interpersonal stress, drama, or conflict can be particularly difficult experiences for the Five, who feels most comfortable working alone or with trusted others whose behaviour is predictable. Since interacting with people can be stressful enough for Fives under normal conditions, tensions among people, especially emotionally-charged tensions, may trigger Fives to withdraw even further or stop communicating altogether. Fives may also “hide out” when they experience feelings or emotions that they don’t want to express in public.

The outward signs of a Five’s stress may be relatively subtle. They may isolate themselves more and communicate less, disappear entirely and be difficult to contact, or seek refuge by working from home or being alone as much as possible. Fives dislike conflict and would usually rather leave the scene than have to deal with an emotional disagreement; however, in some cases, they may express impatience or even anger, especially if their boundaries have been violated (or threatened). Fives sometimes use anger to let you know you have encroached on their space, mistreated someone close to them, or are in danger of doing so. When a Five takes a stand like this, however, it may not be “low side” behavior—it may be a healthy reaction to the understandable stress of having someone trespass into private space. 

On the “high side,” Fives can be more open, engaging, and communicative. Especially when talking about an area of intense intellectual interest, they can express excitement and passion and be very engaged in sharing what matters to them. Fives can also be very funny, displaying a kind of lightness and humor (when at ease and relaxed) that’s reflective of their personal insights into the things and people they observe. At their best, Fives can enjoy being alone or be more welcoming of others, expressing more warmth and being more sociable and friendly. 

Emotionally-intelligent Fives learn the value of accessing and expressing some emotion to establishing good relationships with people, even when it requires an effort. They develop the ability to stretch themselves to share a bit more or communicate more regularly, even though there may be times they would rather not. They work on opening up more so that others can get to know them better, and reap the rewards of having supportive relationships—even though, for the Five, that may feel uncomfortable at first. 

8. THE THREE KINDS OF FIVES: HOW THE THREE INSTINCTUAL BIASES SHAPE THE THREE TYPE FIVE SUB-TYPE PERSONALITIES

According to the Enneagram model, we all have three main instinctual drives that help us survive, but in each of us, one of these three impulses tends to dominate our behaviour. The Type Five style gets expressed differently depending on whether a person has a dominant instinctual bias toward asserting self-preservation behaviours, positioning themselves within social groups, or establishing one-to-one bonds with specific individuals. 

 The Self-Preservation (or Self-Focused) Five 

Self-Preservation Fives focus on maintaining firm boundaries with people. They tend to feel most comfortable when they are alone at home or in some other private space, and experience a strong need to be able to withdraw to a safe space whenever they feel overwhelmed or threatened or simply want to. Self-Preservation Fives like to minimise their connections to others and tend to find safety and meaning in only a few close relationships. They may feel nervous asking others for favours because they don’t want people to feel entitled to ask them for favours in return, and focus on managing the boundaries between themselves and others in a careful way, so they don’t accidentally let someone in they’d rather keep out. These boundaries can take different forms—time limits, saying “no” to invitations, avoiding one’s neighbours, or even a friendly attitude that acts as a camouflage so people won’t push them to connect more than they want to. Much of this Five’s attention goes to finding ways to hide or withdraw if someone wants to get too close or if a working relationship threatens to become excessively interdependent. 

Self-Preservation Fives are the least communicative of the three Fives and the most warm (or seemingly warm). Despite being wary of people who might take their friendliness as an invitation (when it isn’t), these Fives can be caring people, especially when confident that their boundaries (or escape routes) are solid. Self-Preservation Fives like being alone so much they tend to be choosy about who they decide to spend time with. They can be steadfast friends to the few people they really like, but won’t necessarily want to be friends with everyone they work with. 

As leaders, Self-Preservation Fives will be motivated by a concern for getting things right and making an impact through a largely intellectual contribution, but will not need to take the credit for the work that gets done. These Fives can be good leaders in that they will want to engage at the level they need to further the work—but no more than they have to. They may be tempted to keep work in silos—to compartmentalise functions or people—but will need to work against this tendency to allow for more communication than they may feel comfortable promoting. When deeply committed to the values and ideals connected to the work they do, they can be effective, involved leaders, though they may direct things from a distance and use the natural barriers associated with roles, time, and space limitations to avoid feeling overwhelmed or exhausted by what might be required of them. They won’t have big ego needs for attention or recognition, and when they feel trusting of the people they work with, they can be more open and engaged. 

The Social (or Group-Focused) Five

In contrast to the Self-Preservation Five, the Social Five focuses less on boundaries and more on furthering values and ideals they share with others, often at a distance. While these Fives also like private space and time to themselves, the main focus of their attention is on how to know more about, become expert in, and work with others to further a cause or a system of knowledge. These Fives look to super-ideals—to overarching values that are important to them—to give their lives meaning and shape. They seek out experts in their field, may work to become experts themselves, and look to join groups that adhere to their values or ideals. They also have a strong sense of who is “in the group” and who is “out of the group.” 

For these Fives, the idea that “knowledge is power” is key. They strive to become experts about their topic or cause and feel very sensitive to being shown to “not know” something. They tend to feel more connected to the people who share their interests and values than the people they live with or near who are not part of the group—even people in their own family—even when those individuals are far away. And they may be more intellectually connected to their values than they are committed to actually living them out in their daily lives through their immediate relationships. For instance, they may be intellectually invested in ideas related to promoting greater consciousness or emotional intelligence as part of a professional group, but not actually work on becoming more conscious in daily life.

As leaders, Social Fives can be so passionately committed to a cause or a movement that they focus all their energy and attention on it—even to the detriment of their closest relationships. They may experience an underlying sense of meaninglessness because they may unknowingly deprive themselves of the nourishment and meaning that close relationships and emotional connections provide. So, Social Five leaders may become invested in a cause as a way of acting out a desire for meaning and purpose in their lives without having to feel threatened by too much intimacy or connection with other humans. When they are less aware, this focus can cause problems, as when they put all their energy into a set of ideas without letting those ideas take root in their hearts and lived experience. But at their best, these Fives work tirelessly to further causes that can have a real positive impact in the world and create a deep sense of meaning for people. 

The One-to-One (or Relationship-Focused) Five

One-to-One Fives focus more attention on feelings and relationships than the other two Fives. While they are still quite Five-ish and look like the other Fives from the outside, they tend to be more connected to their feelings and have more of a need for relationships under the right circumstances. This is why they are the “counter-type” of the three Type Five subtypes. These are the Fives who have more of an inner romantic streak, which they seek to express through some sort of artistic pursuit or creative outlet like writing, visual art, or music. 

Like Social Fives, One-to-One Fives pursue an ideal or “super-value” that gives life meaning, but in the case of this Five, the ideal they want to manifest is an ideal relationship. Although they value private space and are introverted like the other Fives, they have a stronger desire to find special relationships with people they can really trust and open up to. However, while this Five has more of a need for closeness, they may fear sharing more of themselves at the same time. And the ideal of partnership or friendship they seek may be a high ideal—this Five may have trouble finding the people they want to connect with in a deeper way because they require such a high level of trust and openness from the other person. 

As leaders, One-to-One Fives tend to be deeply committed and passionate about the work they do, even if it isn’t always obvious. They have more of a desire to connect with the people they work with, and will want to share more of themselves in a personal way, even if they don’t always find a way to do it. These Fives may make very good leaders in that they have an emotional intensity they want to express through the things they do, and so there may be a stream of passion or creativity that fuels their leadership style. In addition, they will want to create strong bonds with key people in the team or organisation as a way of furthering their goals and advancing their common mission. 

 9. HOW FIVES MIGHT STRUGGLE IN WORK AND IN RELATIONSHIPS: STRESS-POINTS AND TRIGGERS

What blind spots Fives often don’t see in themselves:

  • Engagement with emotions and the value of emotions generally. As a part of their drive to stay safe and conserve energy, Fives automatically and unconsciously detach from emotions, and can (conveniently) believe emotions are not important. Their main psychological defense mechanism is “isolation,” which allows them to deal with the anxiety associated with navigating the social world by separating feeling from knowing. Fives automatically focus on thoughts, and may at times think they are feeling when they are really just thinking about feelings. When they are not aware of this tendency, it may be difficult to re-engage with their feelings in a way that helps them to be enlivened by and connected to their relationships and their work. 
  • The value of sharing more personal information with others. Fives’ programming tells them it’s best to keep their thoughts and feelings to themselves, as getting more involved with people through communicating about their inner world will deplete them of precious resources and threaten boundaries around time and space. They don’t see that sharing more of themselves leads to stronger relationships with other humans, which leads to more nourishment and more inner abundance through accessing support from others. 
  • The supportive and energizing function of relationships. Fives tend to believe that relationships with others threaten to exhaust their energies, when really, they have the potential to replenish inner energetic resources.
  • The value of conflict. Fives usually dislike conflict because it can involve intense emotions and unexpected personal revelations, both of which seem costly energetically to Fives. But in avoiding conflict situations, they also avoid deeper engagement with people, which can end up limiting them instead of protecting them. 
  • Their own wealth of emotional strength, power, and abundant energy. Fives believe in their susceptibility to depletion and overreact by protecting their boundaries and taking refuge in the mental level of life. But in doing this, they overlook what’s really true—that the false belief that they can be easily depleted of energy limits their ability to manifest their own power, energy, and other inner capacities when it causes them to contract and cut themselves off from support. 

 10. SELF-MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES THAT FIVEES MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY

  • Distancing from emotions. If you are a Five, you prefer interacting with others on the mental level and tend to want to separate yourself from things that feel too emotional—both your own emotions and others’ emotions. Growth work for you thus usually entails getting more in touch with emotions in the moment and eventually learning to communicate more about your feelings while interacting with others.
  • Autonomy, independence, and preference for private space. As a Five, you feel safest when you can work independently and control your private space. However, if you can learn to be more flexible when it comes to wanting to work alone and maintaining your privacy, you can create more possibilities for collaboration and supportive connections.
  • Difficulty with sharing personal information. It can feel dangerous to a Five to share what feels personal with people—especially at work. So it’s a good growth stretch for you to try to share a little bit more personal information with colleagues you trust, as a way of expanding your capacity for deeper relationships and more effective teamwork.
  • Excessive concern with conserving energy. You sometimes resist growth work (especially at work) because you don’t see a problem with your defensive strategies. But many of them grow out of a false sense that you will become exhausted if you allow for more connection with others. Exercise and other somatic practices can help you get more in touch with more of your natural energy as a way of learning that you have more inner resources than you think you do.
  • Belief in scarce personal resources. Your fears of depletion motivate you to hold yourself back from life. By questioning your assumptions about how little you have to subsist on, you open yourself up to a greater experience of abundance.
  • Fear of intrusion and emotional entanglements. Recognizing, owning, and challenging the fear of intrusion and emotional demands are good first steps you can take to learn to work against your fears and open up to others. “Feel the fear and do it anyway” is a good mantra for Fives who are tired of letting fear hold them back. 

11. LIFE-TRAPS THAT FIVES MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY

  • Tune in to your relationship with your emotions generally. Are you more comfortable relating to others on the mental level? Can you feel your emotions more readily when you are by yourself? 
  • Observe your ability or inability to access feelings in the moment. Can you notice how you go directly to thinking and detach from emotion? 
  • Observe how you react if the people around you get emotional or make (what feels to you like) excessive demands on your time or energy. 
  • Notice any beliefs you have about having a limited about of energy and emotional capacity. What fears or other feelings might be behind this sense that you can be easily depleted?
  • Notice the different ways you enforce or protect your boundaries. Notice when this feels right and when it may be excessive (or isolate you). 
  • Observe how much and how often you share personal information with other people. Notice how many people you feel comfortable communicating your inner experience with and what holds you back when you decide not to. 
  • Note the consequences of not being more known to more people vs. the comfort of maintaining a sense of privacy.
  • Observe any fears you have related to sharing more of yourself with others. What do you imagine will happen if you open up more to more people?
  • What kinds of things do you do at work or as a leader to feel safe and grounded? What kinds of experiences feel challenging or risky?

12. WHERE TO START WHEN FOCUSING ON YOUR OWN PERSONAL “FIVE-STUFF”: STRENGTHS TO LEVERAGE & ENQUIRY QUESTIONS THAT I OFTEN ASK TYPE FIVE CLIENTS

It helps Fives to be aware of, actively pay attention to, fully own, and leverage:

  • Ability to make and maintain good boundaries. Fives naturally honor other people’s boundaries around private time and space. They’re attentive to the value of spelling out time limits, expectations, desired outcomes, and roles and responsibilities.
  • Intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm for knowledge and ideas. Fives have the desire and capacity to gather and analyze large amounts of information—and they usually enjoy the process. This makes them content experts who can take the lead in helping people access and learn about the most important data related to their work.
  • Objective thinking. Fives’ automatic tendency to separate out emotions from ideas helps them to analyze what’s happening from an emotional distance that can support rational, intelligent responses to difficult situations. 
  • Professional and modest. Fives’ distaste for emotional entanglements—especially at work—makes them highly sensitized to the behaviors that constitute professional conduct. They can be good role models when it comes to how to interact with others in a way that is thoughtful, humble, courteous, and respectful of people’s privacy. 
  • Content expertise. Fives’ hunger for knowledge and love of learning often leads to them accumulating large amounts of expertise about specific fields of study. They are often valuable team members because they know so much about what they do and always want to keep learning and expanding their knowledge base.

Fives can also grow through consciously becoming aware of the unconscious, self-limiting habitual patterns associated with their personality style and learning to embody the “higher aspects” or more expansive and balanced capacities of the Type Five personality: 

  • Learn to become conscious of the discomfort with working closely with others and the need to maintain strong boundaries and try to ease into opening up more and enjoying collaboration. Realise that the things you fear might happen if you allow for closer relationships probably won’t.
  • Learn to notice when you put up boundaries to keep people out and experiment with opening the boundaries more, and more often. Realise that you can maintain healthy boundaries and allow for more contact with others in measured doses and that this can make your life richer and more meaningful.
  • Learn to notice when you detach from your emotions and take the risk of staying more engaged with them. Realise that developing the ability to connect with your feelings in the present moment will help you to engage with life more deeply and make connecting with others more appealing and interesting.
  • Learn to be conscious of your fears on a more regular basis and challenge them when they seem excessive. Realise that the things we fear most have often already happened, and that you are capable of more courage than you may give yourself credit for.
  • Learn to be more aware of what compels you to shut down, contract, or hide in the face of contact with others—especially emotional connection. Realise that you have just as much capacity to connect and collaborate as anyone else, and get in touch more regularly with your desire to make contact in a meaningful way. 
  • Learn to observe the way you index safety and how seeking to stay safe actually threatens to increase your sense of inner depletion by cutting you off from the support of the people around you. Realise that others may want to support and appreciate you more than you let them. 

Overall, Type Fives can fulfil their higher potentials by observing and working against their habitual focus on protecting their boundaries and conserving energy out of a fear of depletion and exposure. When they can understand their sensitivity to external demands and take steps to safely experiment with contacting their own emotions more, they can learn to expand their capacities to be more open with others and allow for a deeper engagement with life, work, and people. When they can combine their excellent minds with greater access to their felt experiences in their bodies and through their emotions, they both open themselves up to a fuller experience of their life and work and expand the range of what they can accomplish through the work they do. They can develop into truly great leaders if they can allow themselves to build on their analytic strengths by learning to enjoy working with others and engaging more deeply in the people aspects of the work they do and the intrinsic rewards that come with personal growth.

A Few More Things for Fives to Think About, Understand, and Explore

  • Why are you more comfortable relating to others on the mental level? Why is it easier to feel your emotions when you are by yourself? 
  • How and why do you detach from emotions, and what purpose does this serve? What is it about expressions of emotion that feel messy or threatening?
  • What are you afraid will happen if you share your emotions with others? What beliefs might be behind any fears you have of being more open and emotionally connected to people?
  • How does your belief in inner scarcity keep you trapped in an experience of having scarce energetic resources? Could this belief be an illusion that actually cuts you off from generating more energy in your life in different ways?
  • What are the consequences of living so much of life from your head alone? How might it help you to develop more of a connection to your body and your heart?
  • How do different kinds of boundaries help you to feel safe and contained? What happens when you consider relaxing your boundaries a little bit to experiment with being more available for connection with others?
  • What motivates you to limit the amount of information you share with others about yourself?

And what if you’re not a Five, but would like to get on better with a Five in your life. How to do that? Here are some tips:

  • Respect space and time. Fives will appreciate you if you set appropriate time limits and stick to a clear schedule. Avoid busting in on them unannounced to talk about your weekend or a personal problem or whatever you are upset about. Have the courtesy to check they’re OK to speak and don’t use work time for personal issues. 
  • Check in, but in short bursts and measured doses. We all need to communicate on a regular basis when we work together, or even in a relationship, but when collaborating or relating with Fives, it will go well if you check in with them periodically and stick to the point.
  • Straightforward, but thoughtful communication. Fives don’t like to expend unnecessary energy when communicating—so plan ahead, focus only on what’s necessary for an optimal information exchange, be clear about your objectives, and stick to the agenda of your discussion if at all possible. 
  • Be professional. Fives appreciate coworkers (and maybe even friends and partners) who demonstrate the skill, manners and good judgment one expects from a person carrying out something to the best of their ability. They don’t like it when people get messy, emotional, or personal—and if you accidentally do, don’t expect the Five to deal with your feelings. 
  • Avoid drama and messy emotions. See above. Also, one of the things Fives like most about being at work is that there are usually norms against showing emotion at the office. If you really want your Five colleagues (or friends/partner) to hear you and respond well to what you communicate to them, try your best to take the emotion out of it. 
  • Leave your personal life out of work matters. When at work, Fives want to be at work—they want to get the job done. Some may enjoy socializing with workmates, but only after work, not during work hours. And don’t expect them to be your friend necessarily, as they only need and want a few, and those slots may be filled.
  • Make your communications clear, concise, direct, short, and efficient. Fives tend to believe they have limited energy to expend on human interaction. While this is part of the illusion of the Five personality, many Fives really buy into the idea that they have finite energetic resources and can be wary about spending too much energy on any one interaction. So, when talking with Fives, remember that less is more. 
  • Leave them alone to do what they do. Fives like to have the freedom, the space, and the time they need to do whatever work they can by themselves. It’s best not bother them with stuff they don’t find meaningful or relevant to what needs to be done.
  • No surprises. Fives want to know what the boundaries, time limits, and expectations are in advance. Plus, surprises can also stir up emotions, which Fives would rather experience when they are alone. So, try to avoid springing things on them (or planning a surprise party for their next birthday).

FURTHER RESOURCES FOR FIVES & THOSE WHO LOVE THEM:

This is a great, easy-to-follow overview by Russ Hudson of the Five personality style, which also offers some practices which Fives (or all of us) might find helpful when struggling with “Five-Stuff” in our lives.

 

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The Enneagram Model of Personality

As a Personality-Focused Psychotherapist, I use a number of Psychology Models or Systems in my work. One of my favourites is the Enneagram Model.

How Does The Model Work?

The “Enneagram of Personality” details nine personality descriptions or categories and the interconnections among them. Each of the nine personality “types,” or “styles,” represents a distinct way of operating in the world based on a specific “focus of attention”: what you pay attention to and what you don’t pay attention to.

For instance, what do you typically pay attention to when you first wake up in the morning? Different people with different personality types tend to start the day with different moods and different thoughts. Some types wake up angry, some immediately start thinking about their mental list of “things to do,” and others feel happy and excited at the possibilities of the new day.

This idea that different people pay attention to different things in different ways plays a central role in defining the distinct Enneagram styles. The nine styles or types can be differentiated in terms of their focus of attention or “perceptual bias”—what occupies the central place in what they think about, see, and prioritise in their experience.

To determine a person’s Enneagram style, you might ask yourself the question: What is on your “view screen” (i.e. mind) and what isn’t? This is both the method for figuring out what your main Enneagram type is and a key strength of the Enneagram as a personality model: it highlights how individuals differ in specific ways and it shows how the nine types differ on several levels. It shows what they think about (and don’t think about), what emotions they tend to feel (and not feel), what behaviours are typical of their style, and what actions they rarely take.

For example, a group of people could enter into the same situation—say a birthday party—and they might all focus on different aspects of the gathering, depending on what their personality programming directs them to pay attention to. One person might focus on finding particular people they know, another person might be drawn to the food table, someone else might worry that they forgot to bring the host a gift, and yet another person might gravitate toward whomever seems to be having the most fun. The Enneagram thus reveals a basic truth that often surprises people: other people don’t all view the world the way we do; different people can look at the same situation and see completely different things.

Each of the Enneagram’s nine types’ of specific focus of attention grows out of a central “coping strategy”—the go-to method for getting around, adapting to the environment, and surviving in the world. This primary coping strategy and attentional bias gives rise to a matching worldview and corresponding habitual patterns of thought, emotion, and behaviour. At its core, each of these nine personality styles is basically a “defensive” structure—an inner program that operates automatically to protect us from being hurt or feeling uncomfortable. In addition, the patterns that make up the personality also represent our particular strengths, specialties, and super powers.

Oriented around a nine-pointed figure (“ennea” meaning nine and “gram” meaning something drawn) that serves as a graphic framework for these nine personalities, the Enneagram helps solve much of the mystery behind why different people see the world in totally different ways. (And no, this isn’t some sort of sinister sign or cultish emblem!—it’s a perfectly innocent nine-pointed star inscribed in a circle that is also intended to convey a symbolic meaning about the way natural processes get created and unfold in particular patterns or sequences.)

This model, which stretches back into antiquity, as well as more recent roots in modern psychology borrows some of its central understanding both from psychoanalytic/psychodynamic models and Object Relations theory, but also from Attachment and Trauma theory, Developmental Neurobiology, and a host of other creative interfaces which have enriched the model in its last 50 years of active use in both business, coaching, psychotherapy, as well as multi-faith spiritual communities.

Each of the nine personality styles can be identified by its distinct adaptive strategy, and matching strengths, habits, challenges, and blind spots that grow out of whatever strategic way they have adopted to get what they need in life.

We Are “Three-Brained” Beings: The Enneagram’s Three “Centres of Intelligence”

The nine types, or styles, come grouped in three sets of three, according to three “centres of intelligence”—the idea that we humans process information from the outside through three modes, or forms, of intelligence. The easiest way to begin to understand the content of the Enneagram system’s nine personality types is to see how (and why) these nine types are grouped into three buckets of three types each.

According to the Enneagram map, every person has not one, but three “brains” or “centres of intelligence”: the head, the heart, and the body. The head is the centres of thinking and analyzing, the heart is the centre of feeling emotions and relating to others through empathy, and the body is the centre of sensing things physically, through “gut knowing” and instinctive responses. The body also houses the “movement” centre, which directs action or inaction.

Although we all use all three of these centres all the time, three of the nine Enneagram styles (8, 9, and 1) “live in” or “overuse” the body centre, three of the styles (2, 3, and 4) operate primarily from the heart center, and three of the styles (5, 6, and 7) are based in or biased toward the head centre. These three “centres of intelligence” also have a direct relationship to the three parts of the human brain: the brain stem and amygdala (the reptilian or instinctual brain), the limbic (or emotional) brain, and the neo-cortex (the mental brain). We all call upon all three brain functions all the time, but one of these centres plays a dominant role in the expression of our personality.

In this way, the Enneagram model embodies the idea that while we all have the potential for “wholeness,” that is, we all potentially have access to all nine strategies for making our way in the world, we tend to get “out of balance” by learning to rely on one mode of relating to the world more than others. Working with the Enneagram involves noticing how we tend to be biased toward one centre of intelligence over the others and intentionally trying to achieve a more conscious balance among the three modes of functioning.

In fact, the whole point of the Enneagram is about growth and balance—by seeing how we resort to one point of focus among nine possibilities, we can begin to see how we fixate on a narrow slice of 360 degrees of reality and learn to expand our perspective.

Each of the nine types describes a set of habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, based on a specific view of what strategy works best for getting what you need. For instance, there’s one type (Type Five) that automatically assumes it’s best to focus on gaining knowledge and protecting boundaries to find the sense of safety they need. So they prioritize thinking above feeling and maintaining a strong sense of privacy. Fives have the most introverted style of relating, which underscores their view that to feel safe they need to guard their inner resources. Another type (Type Nine) believes that the best strategy to gain the sense of well-being they need is to be in harmony with other people. So, Nines tend to be preoccupied with maintaining peaceful relations with others, “going along to get along,” and mediating among different points of view to create harmony and consensus. Still another kind of personality (Type Three) focuses like a laser beam on goals and tasks as a way of achieving success and looking good in the eyes of others to get the approval and admiration they need.

All of these personality styles have strengths and corresponding challenges—an upside and a downside. As the different Enneagram styles show, when we approach the world through a specific lens or filter, it allows us to develop particular areas of clarity and strength based on becoming a specialist at what that lens brings most into focus. However, on the downside, each style can overfocus on a relatively narrow set of strengths, such that they overdo those strengths to the point where they become liabilities. Unconsciously focusing too much of your attention on too narrow a set of strengths can cause you to develop and maintain certain blind spots.

This is where the Enneagram is invaluable—it shows us how, in leaning into our most developed capacities, we develop blind spots when it comes to other abilities. The Enneagram highlights our strengths, so we can appreciate and mobilize our assets, and it helps us see our weak points, so we can work to grow aspects of ourselves that we have neglected or overlooked or avoided.

For instance, when I learned my Enneagram type (Type Four), I realized that while I was good at making friends, being generally likable, and supporting others, I continually avoided conflicts (fearing that such problems would cause people to dislike me) and often focused on other people’s needs and feelings (as a strategy for being liked) at the expense of my own. This caused problems in my relationships when the needs and feelings I avoided being aware of caused me to be resentful when people didn’t give me what I needed. The Enneagram helped me see the problem in my basic life strategy: by trying to get along with people by not burdening them with my needs, and then getting mad when they didn’t read my mind and respond to the needs I hadn’t expressed, I ended up driving people away and ensuring the rejection I was trying to avoid in the first place!

Every person can benefit through learning the strengths and blind spots associated with their personality style. For instance, Type Eights are very good at asserting themselves in a strong way, confronting people with hard truths, and holding their ground in a conflict. But they have a blind spot when it comes to the value of being vulnerable or understanding their weak points: they tend to be out of touch with their more vulnerable feelings, which can lead them to overcompensate for the unconscious fear of being weak through expressing too much strength. Seeing this blind spot around vulnerability and consciously getting in touch with their softer feelings balances Eights out, so they can be both strong and approachable, powerful and empathetic.

As another example, Type Sixes make excellent troubleshooters, as they are great at seeing what can go wrong ahead of time and preparing to fix it, but they have a blind spot around the impact and consequences of always looking for trouble. Type Sixes often don’t see that they can become overly “problem-seeking” instead of constructively solution-focused, can appear paranoid, and can get caught in “analysis-paralysis,” when their fear of potential threats causes them to avoid taking action. Sixes can be more effective and easier to work with when they consciously take account of the blind spot around their fear and its effects and blend their talent for careful analysis with bold action.

What Number Are You? A Brief Sketch of the Enneagram’s Nine Personality Styles

I first became fascinated with the Enneagram when I learned that I was a Type Four a few years ago. Most people want to know more about why they do the things they do, and when I read a description of my type, it was a profound revelation. I felt shocked and surprised that any personality typology could paint such a clear, straightforward, and accurate picture of how I operate in the world: both in terms of what I knew to be true about myself and (embarrassing) aspects of myself I didn’t really want to admit to.

Learning about my personality style as mapped out by the Enneagram changed my life. It helped me see things about myself I hadn’t wanted to see before—things that created obstacles in my life because I didn’t want to acknowledge them. For example, as a Type Four, I would (and still often do) spend a lot of time having conversations in my head about the wrongs or losses I had experienced in the past, resenting and feeling angry about ways in which I had been treated. But when I came to see why I, as a Type Four, became emotional, and understood the reasons behind my sensitivity, I could more easily value (or at least better tolerate) my emotional nature, recognise the strength in it, have a wee bit more compassion for myself, and start doing the hard (and not always successful) work of keeping my reactive temperament in check. Especially with regard to family and romantic relationships. The Enneagram helped me see—in a gentle way—that sometimes I was oversensitive and overly emotional. But it also helped me see that I could both value my emotional capacity and empathic ability and consciously rein in some related tendencies to be more effective and happy in my life and work. Learning about myself through the Enneagram has made me much happier, much easier to be around, and hopefully a better future partner.

Here is a brief sketch of the Enneagram’s nine types. It may take a bit of study to find your correct type, because some of the types can look alike, and we sometimes don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do. However, many people immediately recognise their own style—or the style of people they know—in even the shortest descriptions.

Click on the Header of each type below for a full description, as well as for examples of what areas might be useful to focus on in therapy with this type of personality style.

Individuals with a Type One style tend to view the world in terms of how it matches (or doesn’t match) what they view as perfect or ideal. They focus attention on whether things are “right or wrong” or “good or bad.” Their central concerns include doing the right thing and/or making sure others do the right thing, noticing and correcting errors, and working hard to improve things. They can be very self-critical and usually conform to the rules.

Individuals with a Type Two style tend to be friendly, upbeat, emotional, and generous (to a fault). They focus their attention on relationships and what other people think and feel about them. A central concern is making other people like them, and they may be giving, helpful, or self-sacrificing to strategically gain others’ approval. They “shape-shift” to present themselves in whatever ways they think will help them create positive rapport with others. They empathise (or overempathise) with others, and they automatically sense the moods, needs, and preferences of the people around them, but may be out of touch with their own feelings and needs.

Individuals with a Type Three style view the world in terms of tasks, goals, image, achievement, and success. They focus their attention on being perceived as successful and getting a lot done. They excel at matching the ideal model of material success and cultural signs of achievement (having a nice car, attaining high status, having impressive credentials). They usually focus on doing at the expense of feeling (emotions) and being. They can be workaholics who have difficulty slowing down and knowing what they are feeling, but they accomplish a great deal in the most efficient way.

Individuals with a Type Four style value authenticity and tend to be comfortable with a wide range of emotions, including pain. They focus their attention on their own internal world, connection and disconnection with others, what’s missing in a given situation, and the aesthetic aspects of their environment.  Because they live more in their feelings than other types, they can at times overidentify with their emotions. They value depth and the genuine expression of feeling in relationships. Idealistic and creative, they regularly experience longing and melancholy and may at times be preoccupied with the past.

Individuals with a Type Five style tend to be introverted and shy and less emotionally expressive than other types. They focus their attention on thinking, gaining knowledge, interesting intellectual pursuits, and creating boundaries to maintain privacy. They often have the sense that they have a limited amount of energy and so are sensitive to others potentially draining them of their finite stores of time or resources. Because they value personal space, they may have a hard time sharing themselves with others in relationships.

Individuals with a Type Six style focus attention on detecting threats to their safety and preparing to meet danger or trouble. They tend to be loyal, analytical, contrarian, and suspicious of authority. Naturally vigilant, they can be either actively fearful (phobic) or strong and intimidating as a proactive move against fear (counterphobic).  Their natural tendency to assess threats and risks makes them good trouble-shooters, but they can also struggle with paranoia, indecision, and catastrophic or “worst-case scenario” thinking. Most Sixes have authority issues—they both want a good authority and may test or rebel against authority figures.

Individuals with a Type Seven style tend to be energetic, fast-paced, and optimistic. They focus their attention on fun and stimulating things to think about and do, on creating many options, and planning. They are usually enthusiastic, future-oriented, fun-loving people who dislike feeling uncomfortable feelings including sadness, anxiety, boredom, or pain. They are good at reframing negatives into positives, have quick minds, and usually have many interests and enjoy engaging socially with others.

Individuals with a Type Eight style tend to be attuned to strength and power—who has it and how they wield it. They usually have more access to their anger and a higher tolerance for conflict and confrontation than other types. Eights focus their attention on creating order, seeing the big picture, and noticing whether things are fair and just. They are assertive, direct, and strong. They have a large energetic presence, can be intimidating, and may underestimate their impact on others. They can be excessive, impulsive, generous, and protective of others.

Individuals with a Type Nine style make good mediators because they can naturally see all sides of an issue and feel motivated to reduce conflict and create harmony. Affable and easy-going, they “go with the flow,” focusing attention on blending with and over-adapting to others as a way of staying comfortable and avoiding separation and conflict. Because they value harmony and dislike conflict, they tend to be distractible and out of touch with their own anger and personal agenda. The lack of a connection with their own priorities makes it difficult to make decisions, so they often remain on the fence or procrastinate.

Breaking It Down Again: The Additional Information Provided by the 27 Subtypes

At the risk of overwhelming you completely, I now need to tell you that there is another level to the Enneagram types beyond the nine personality styles.

Just as the three centres of intelligence (head, heart, and body) “house” three types each, each of the nine types breaks down into three versions again. So, there are actually 27 types, or “sub-types.” This additional level of “sub-types” adds yet another degree of specificity to the personalities we find in the world that the Enneagram describes.9 While adding another layer of types may seem like too much information, the 27 subtypes are crucially important to understand, because the additional, more nuanced information they provide helps with finding your correct type and understanding the nine types with greater clarity.

The three subtypes of the nine main types are defined by which of three “instincts” or “instinctual biases” is dominant. We all have all three animal instincts—for self-preservation, establishing social relationships and positioning in relation to groups, and the instinct for one-to-one bonding—that help us function in the world and keep us safe. And just as each person favours one centre and one type within that centre , we each favour one of these three instincts as kind of a “first line of defence.”

Type Ones

Type Ones focus on making things more perfect, and they do it in three ways:

• Self-Preservation Ones focus on making everything they do more perfect. They are the true perfectionists of the Enneagram. They see themselves as highly flawed and try to improve themselves and make every detail of what they do right. These people are the most anxious and worried Ones, but also the most friendly and warm.
• Social Ones focus on doing things perfectly in a larger sense—knowing the right way to do things—and modeling how to do things right for others. An intellectual type of person, these Ones have a teacher mentality in that they see their role as helping others see what they already know: how to be perfect.
• One-to-One Ones focus on making other people—and society as a whole—more perfect. More reformers than perfectionists, they tend to display more anger and zeal than the other Ones. These Ones focus less attention on perfecting their own behavior and pay more attention to whether others are doing things right.
Type Twos

Type Twos focus on gaining approval and creating positive rapport with others, and they do it in three ways:

• Self-Preservation Twos seek to gain approval through being charming and youthful. Less oriented to giving and more burdened by helping, they charm others into liking them as a way of getting people to take care of them. More self-indulgent, playful, and irresponsible than the other two Twos, they are more fearful and ambivalent about connecting with others.
• Social Twos seek to gain approval from others through being powerful, competent, and influential. More of a powerful, leader type of person, they take charge of things and play to a larger audience as a way of proving their value.
• One-to-One Twos gain approval through being generous and attractive. They emphasize their personal appeal and promises of support to make others like them and do things for them—this is a more emotional, passionate Two.
Type Threes

Type Threes focus on looking good and working hard to get things done and do this in three ways:

• Self-Preservation Threes work hard to assure material security for themselves and the people around them. Oriented to being good (as well as looking good) according to social consensus, they want to appear successful to others, but they don’t want to brag or self-promote in an obvious way (because that wouldn’t be good). SP Threes are self-sufficient, extremely hard-working, results-oriented, and modest.
• Social Threes work hard to look flawless in the eyes of others. Oriented to competing to win and attaining the material and status symbols of success, they focus on getting things done and always having the right image for every social context. Social Threes enjoy being onstage, have a corporate mentality, and know how to climb the social ladder.
• One-to-One Threes focus on creating an image that is appealing to others and supporting and pleasing the people around them—especially partners, coworkers, and family members. They have a relationship or team mentality and can work very hard to support the success of others (rather than their own).
Type Fours

Type Fours focus on expressing themselves creatively and authentically to build meaningful connections, and make themselves understood in three ways:

Self-Preservation Fours are stoic and strong—emotionally sensitive by nature, they hold their feelings in to prove themselves and connect with others. While they feel things deeply, they often have a sunny, upbeat exterior. They may feel anxious inside, but they tough things out and have a high tolerance for frustration.
Social Fours focus on their own emotions and the underlying emotional tone of whatever situation they are in. They compare themselves to others and tend to see themselves as less worthy or lacking in some way. They are more emotionally sensitive than most other types and connect to themselves through the authenticity of their emotional truth.
One-to-One Fours are more assertive and competitive. These Fours are not afraid to ask for what they need or complain when they don’t get it. They can appear aggressive to others, and strive to be the best.
Type Fives

Type Fives focus on attaining knowledge and maintaining boundaries with others to protect their private space and avoid having their energy and inner resources depleted by others. They do this in three ways:

• Self-Preservation Fives focus mainly on maintaining good boundaries with others. Friendly and warm, SP Fives like to have a private space they can withdraw to if they want to be alone.
• Social Fives enjoy becoming experts in the specific subject areas that interest them. They like acquiring knowledge and connecting with others with common intellectual interests and causes.
• One-to-One Fives have more of a need for connecting with other individuals under the right conditions. These Fives are more in touch with their emotions inside, though they may not show it on the outside.
Type Sixes

Type Sixes focus on detecting threats and preparing to meet them. They seek safety and certainty, are slow to trust, try to manage risk, and are sensitive to power dynamics. These traits manifest in three ways:
 
• Self-Preservation Sixes are the more actively fearful (the phobic or “flight”) Six. They doubt and question things in an effort to find a sense of certainty and safety (that often eludes them). They seek to be warm and friendly to attract allies as a form of outside support or protection in a dangerous world.
• Social Sixes are more intellectual types who find a sense of safety in following the guidelines of a system or way of thinking to feel protected by a kind of impersonal outside authority. They tend to be logical, rational, and concerned with reference points and benchmarks.
• One-to-One Sixes cope with underlying fear (that they may not be aware of) by appearing strong and intimidating to others. Of the “fight” or “flight” reactions to fear, they choose “fight,” and tend to be risk-takers, contrarians, or rebels. They have an inner program that tells them that the best defense is a good offense.
Type Sevens

Type Sevens focus on whatever feels pleasurable and like to think about stimulating ideas and positive visions of the future as a way of unconsciously moving away from whatever might feel uncomfortable or painful. They do this in three ways:

• Self-Preservation Sevens are very practical. Good at getting what they want, they readily recognize opportunities and know how to make things happen, whether through pragmatic planning or a network of allies. They tend to have a talkative, amiable, hedonistic style.
• Social Sevens want to avoid being seen as excessively opportunistic and self-interested, so they focus on sacrificing their immediate desires to pursue an ideal of being of service to others. They take responsibility for the group or family and want to be seen as good by easing others’ suffering.
• One-to-One Sevens are idealistic dreamers, who have a need to imagine something better than what might be true in their everyday reality. Extremely enthusiastic and optimistic, they have a passion for seeing things as they could be or as they imagine them to be (as opposed to how they really are).
Type Eights

Type Eights focus on power, control, justice, and fairness—who has the power, and will they be competent and fair. Assertive and direct, they are good at seeing the big picture and like to exert strength to make things happen. These traits manifest in three ways:

• Self-Preservation Eights focus on getting what they need to survive in a direct, no-nonsense way. They have a low tolerance for frustration and a strong desire for the timely satisfaction of their material needs. They know how to do business and get things done and don’t need to talk about it very much.
• Social Eights focus on protecting and mentoring others they are connected to or anyone they view as needing their support. While they can be rebellious and assertive, they appear less aggressive as they have a softer side when it comes to taking care of others.
• One-to-One Eights have a strong rebellious tendency and like to be the center of things. More provocative and passionate than the other Eights, they like to have power over people and situations.

 

Type Nines

Type Nines focus on creating harmony and mediating potential conflicts when they arise to maintain a sense of peacefulness and get to consensus. Often out of touch with their own desires or opinions, they like to go with the flow and adapt to others as a way of maintaining positive feelings and avoiding conflict. This happens in three ways:

• Self-Preservation Nines focus on finding comfort in familiar routines and the satisfaction of their physical needs. Whether through eating, sleeping, reading, or doing crossword puzzles, SP Nines tend to lose themselves in whatever activities help them feel grounded and comfortable.
• Social Nines focus on working hard to support the groups they are a part of as a way of seeking a sense of comfort in belonging. Congenial people who like to feel a part of things, Social Nines tend to be lighthearted and fun, and expend a lot of effort in doing what it takes to be admitted to and supportive of the group or community.
• One-to-One Nines tend to merge with the agenda and attitudes of important others in their lives. Sweet, gentle, and less assertive than other types, this relationship-oriented Nine may take on the feelings and opinions of the people they are close to without realizing it.

If you can see how this Enneagram model as a framework for understanding both the complexity and the unifying patterns of our human personalities might be of help to you in dealing with whatever situation has brought you to my site, please feel free to get in touch to discuss the matter further with me.

If you’d like to arrange an initial consultation session to talk more about whatever it is you’re going through, we can organise that via email or telephone (07804197605). Also please feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions regarding the therapy I offer.

Also, you might want to have a look at my How I Work page, as the Personality Focus described above is only one of  five factors I consider to be important for any form of good therapy.

I look forward to hearing from you.

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Working Therapeutically with an Enneagram Three (Achiever) Personality Style


Hello. Perhaps you’ve landed on this page because you’ve done an Online Enneagram Personality Test which has given you a Three as your main personality type, and now you’re scratching your head wondering what this means in terms of your self-development or therapy journey.

Are personality types no more than just a description of different traits – like a star sign? Or can the deep understanding of our type help us to play the finite game of life a little bit more skilfully? And if so, how?

[Read more about Personality-Focused Psychotherapy]

Hopefully this page and the information below will help to get you going in terms of an initial understanding of your personality type and exactly how it functions.

I have also tried to sketch out the kind of paths that Type 3 clients might want to consider travelling with me in therapy. Each personality type, as you will see, comes with its own “super-powers” as well as Achilles’ Heel which contributes to our personal suffering as well as “life-traps”. Hopefully this will become apparent the more you read into and explore this personality type.

Armed with this knowledge you will hopefully be better equipped to play the ups-and-downs, the snakes as well as ladders of the finite game (that is your individual Life), but perhaps also the Infinite Game, as I like to call it, of Happiness.

PS: If you find when reading through the descriptions below, that they don’t resonate, or that you don’t feel really “seen” and understood in a deep and maybe even sometimes slightly uncomfortable way, then you might want to consider looking at some of the other 9 Types in which you scored relatively high on when doing your personality assessment.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PLAYING THE INFINITE GAME (AS A THREE)

  1. Snapshot Of A Three: How Many Of These Traits Do You Identify With?
  2. Why Am I Like This? The Psychological Development Of A Three
  3. Core Motivations Of A Type Three Participant: What “Drives” Us?
  4. Threes At Work & In Relationships
  5. Understanding Why Threes Think, Feel, And Behave The Way We Do?
  6. What We’re Really Good At As A Three
  7. Healthy Vs. Unhealthy Threes
  8. The Three Kinds Of Threes: How The Three Instinctual Biases Shape Our Three Type Three Sub-type Personalities
  9. How We Might Struggle In Work And In Relationships: Stress-points And Triggers
  10. Self-management Challenges That We Might Want To Work On In Therapy
  11. Life-traps That We Might Want To Work On In Therapy
  12. Where To Start When Focusing On Our Own Personal “Three-stuff”: Strengths To Leverage & Enquiry Questions That I Often Ask Type Three Clients

1. SNAPSHOT OF A THREE: HOW MANY OF THESE TRAITS DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH?


If most or all of the following characteristics apply to you, you may have a Type Three personality style:

  • I see the work I do through the lens of how to do the best job possible in the most efficient way. I strive to be productive, effective, fast, and efficient. I am generally driven to work hard to achieve success in whatever I do.
  • I focus like a laser beam on my goals—I always think in terms of “what is the goal and how can we get there in the most direct way?” I naturally see work, but also many aspects of my life, in terms of specific goals to be achieved and the steps and tasks that need to be accomplished to get to the goal. And if someone or something gets in the way I endeavour to work around them or it (no matter what the cost).
  • I am good at reading an audience. I tune in to what the people around me see as admirable, effective, and attractive, and automatically assess what others view as the best way to be or appear or do things. 
  • I am skilled at discerning what people in different contexts view as successful and then becoming that. I have a talent for matching any image I decide to turn myself to or into. One of the ways I strive to be successful is by looking the part. I can sometimes be a bit like a chameleon in that I can shift my image to suit my surroundings.
  • I am motivated in the work I do and in relationships by wanting to appear successful to others, according to how others measure success. I automatically sense what the people around me view as successful in all the different contexts in my life, and (often automatically) seek to match that ideal if I can.
  • I want to win and be the best. Second place is unacceptable. If I can’t succeed at what I do, I probably won’t do it.
  • I identify with my work and my cherished goals—they provide me with a sense of myself. I find value in getting things done and achieving the rewards and status that go along with having the power to get so many things done.
  • I work really hard and have a hard time slowing down. I tell myself that I enjoy my work (and mostly I really do), so when I work 24/7 there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with this. 
  • I get impatient with people who slow my progress toward my goal. I have a hard time dealing with people who I see as incompetent, indecisive, or untrustworthy when it comes to delivering on their commitments on time.
  • I am a high-achiever or an overachiever. I have a crazy long résumé of huge accomplishments, but I may still worry about someone who has done more than me looking better than I do.
  • I love checking things off my “to-do list” as done. I keep lists, and one of the reasons I move so fast is that it feels so good to complete tasks and revel in how productive I’ve been. 
  • I can sometimes be a little bit out of touch with my emotions or might even (at times) consider them a waste of time. I sometimes believe that it’s “not productive” to feel all those feelings, don’t they just slow us down, so I might try to avoid them if possible.
  • I may enjoy being in leadership positions and having a say in how work gets done. I excel at meeting goals, doing work quickly and well, and aligning with a company’s culture and vision—so I naturally gravitate toward leadership roles. I like being in charge of how the work gets done and making sure the work gets done, and since I am on the whole so good at this, people are happy for me to be in charge.

 2. WHY AM I LIKE THIS? THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A THREE


Here is a kind of Origin Story (also Trauma Story) for a Three: 

“Once upon a time, there was a person named Three. She came into this world as a naturally emotional child and she was always completely true to her sweet, emotional nature. Everybody could see that she had a very pure and authentic heart.

But early in life, Three saw that she was praised for what she did, not for who she was. Everyone around her got very excited and happy when she successfully completed her homework, or did a trick in gymnastics, or won a game. But when she expressed her true emotions, when she felt sad or disappointed or hurt, no one paid any attention to her at all. She felt lonely and scared when no one recognized her or cared about what she expressed from her heart. People seemed to like her when she accomplished things; but they acted as if she didn’t exist when she was just being herself.

Three found a way to make sure that she wouldn’t feel alone or fearful anymore. She discovered that she had the ability to sense what people valued and then magically turn herself into exactly that. She was a shape-shifter. When she was around different groups of people, she could become the perfect example of whatever they viewed as admirable or successful. Like a chameleon, she could change her outward appearance depending on whom she was with and the situation she was in. This ability helped her to get attention, which felt good. And it also helped her to avoid being overlooked, which felt bad.

As she grew, Three came to see that others admired those who were successful—who achieved whatever goal they set for themselves. When she earned a lot of money, or won at sports, or looked more attractive than everyone else, people paid attention to her. So Three found that her ability to shape-shift could bring her many rewards in life. By succeeding at being successful, she could attract positive attention, especially because she was willing to do whatever it took to create a really convincing image of whatever others valued.

In fact, Three was so good at being successful that she couldn’t stop working and couldn’t stop shifting her appearance to promote her success. And she feared that, if she stopped, she wouldn’t get the attention and praise she needed. As time went on, she totally lost sight of who she really was beneath all the different images of success she invented, until, eventually, she could no longer feel her real emotions or recognize her real self. She just had to keep moving and working hard to maintain the image of success that made her feel valued. It was a lot of work. But, fortunately, Three was really good at doing a lot of work.

Three’s survival strategies worked so well that she never even had time to wonder about who she really was. Every once in a while, she felt a momentary wish to be more authentic—to have real contact with the people around her— but this wasn’t possible. She had to keep working to make sure that everyone admired her. She couldn’t imagine what would happen if she stopped. Unfortunately for Three, her survival strategies brought her too many rewards—money, titles, applause, and attention—for her to give them up.

One morning, Three couldn’t get out of bed. She was so weighed down by stress and depression that she remained in bed for two weeks. And that was when she realized, much to her surprise, that she was totally exhausted by all the hard work she did to maintain her image. She finally acknowledged that, deep inside, she was actually very sad and lonely. When Three recovered, however, she forgot all about her sadness and her loneliness, and thought about all the things she had to do at work and all the people she needed to impress. So, with a feeling of relief that she was back in the game—but not many other feelings—she returned to her busy schedule.”

Early on in life, we Threes often receive the message that we are appreciated or loved for what we do, not for who we are. Perhaps well-intentioned parents who praise us for our accomplishments teach us that “doing” and performing gets rewarded. Or, we may have an absent or ineffectual parent and so must learn to be a “doer” to survive. In a Capitalist culture we Threes may also get reinforced for our habit of seeking to prove our value through doing because “achieving” and “looking good” are behaviours that are encouraged by the norms and values of our Productivity cultural mindset.

Motivated by a need to be seen as successful, appealing, and competent, we Threes cn come to believe that we can accomplish whatever goal we set and win whatever contest we enter. We are good getting things done and achieving “success” as defined by our culture: owning a house, having resources, and being attractive to others. And since performance, status, and looking good seem to assure both material security and recognition from others, we develop the ability to work hard to achieve any goal we set our sights on. Without even thinking about it, we identify with (and become) the image of a person who will impress most people most of the time. This just comes naturally to us.

Since we have come to understand and believe that being the best is the way to gain acceptance, positive regard, and respect from others, failure is perceived as something to be avoided at all costs—to the point where we might even say that if we think we might not succeed at something, we just won’t do it. Failure means you didn’t win and don’t look good, so we might quickly move away from any whiff of defeat by either reframing it as a success or switching our focus to something we do well. It’s as if our essential value as a person rides on our ability to achieve, so we feel compelled to prove we are worthwhile by excelling and performing flawlessly in whatever we do. 

3. CORE MOTIVATIONS OF A TYPE THREE PARTICIPANT: WHAT “DRIVES” A THREE?

The strategy of presenting ourselves and the things we do in a way that assures others perceive us as successful leads us Threes to focus our attention on reading people. Like Twos, we pay a great deal of attention to other people; however, when we read other people, we often index success rather than likability, conforming to what others find attractive in terms of achievements, presentation, and social or professional status. 

We might look for clues about what others see as proof of “success,“ and are highly skilled at calibrating our presentation to match that image. We might turn ourselves into whatever we intuit the people in our specific social context view as successful as a way of being recognised in a positive light by others. We are especially skilled at determining what kind of look to have in specific settings, how to behave, and what to do and not do to fit in and look good in whatever environment we find ourselves in. 

After we are able to detect what people value, we often seek to meet that value that through a laser-like focus on tasks, goals, and doing, working relentlessly to realize the achievements that will fulfill the image of success we want to create. This powerful and overarching focus on doing allows us to successfully accomplish whatever goal we set for ourselves, even if this means avoiding the emotions and deeper personal needs and desires that might get in the way of all the doing we have to do to look the way we want to look in the eyes of others, and by extension, ourselves.

4. THREES AT WORK & IN RELATIONSHIPS

Generally, us individuals with a Type Three style view the world in terms of tasks to be done, goals to be achieved, and the appearances of things. We automatically align ourselves with external markers of success, including the material possessions and signs of status that signify prosperity. We often excel at shifting our presentation to look appropriate and “together” and competent at all times and in all cultural realities. Like chameleons, we are able to adapt our outer skin to blend in (in a positive way) in all social settings and work environments.

Us Threes also often see life through the lens of our “to do” lists. we  love (!) the feeling we  get when we  can check a task off as finished, so our everyday experience is shaped by what needs to be done and our perception is structured by tasks to be accomplished (in order of priority) and what we  need to do to operate at maximum productivity. We’re sometimes more like “human doings” instead of “human beings,” because we can get so caught up in “doing” (at times) that we  hardly leave room for just “being” (or feeling/reflecting). 

Believing the world loves a winner (and this is certainly backed up by our Culture), we work to ensure we  are perceived as people who can achieve any goal, always coming out on top, and always looking good whatever we  do. While some Threes are extremely competitive and driven to win, many of us prefer to measure ourselves against our own past levels of productivity. In either case, our perspective is fundamentally shaped by a keen understanding of what needs to be done—and how we  need to look—to create an image of being the best we can be at whatever we  do in whichever arena we  are in. We might seek to attain whatever degree, title, clothes, car, vacation home, or achievement we  require to let the world know we  embody the definition of success in whatever milieu we  live or work in. We are extremely driven individuals.

 5. UNDERSTANDING WHY WE THINK, FEEL, AND BEHAVE THE WAY WE DO?

Mental

Unsurprisingly, our thinking focuses mostly on doing and working. We think about our lists of “things to do” and how to be productive and efficient in getting things done. We usually enjoy our work and find a sense of identity in what we do, and often much of our mind space is filled with thoughts of work and how to get work done in the quickest way possible. We may also think about the people around us, especially in terms of how to appeal to or support those people, or how others can support us in doing our work or getting the best out of ourselves. However, we tend to may at times also tend to prioritize work over people, which can get us into trouble when we fail to listen and take others’ feelings into account on the way to getting things done. 

 Emotional

Since We don’t like to slow down or stop, we don’t usually dwell a great deal on our emotions. We use our emotional intelligence, as heart types, to read people and create relationships based on identifying with and becoming what others feel good about or admire (this is our great skill), but tend to avoid feeling our deeper emotions, especially pain or sadness (although this is not uncommon in our culture for everyone to some extent). The most frequent emotions we do experience are impatience and frustration, often as a result of getting slowed down by others on our way to getting things done. Underneath, however, we do occasionally feel sadness, if we let ourselves, especially when we think we have to be someone other than who we really are to ensure people value or admire us. 

Behavioural

As you may have gathered by now, we do a lot. we work very hard and usually like our work—or can suspend our need to like it enough to get the job done anyway. Motivated by the desire to earn others’ (and our own internal) admiration, we accumulate accomplishments and climb the social ladder to be recognized as a super-competent, can-do people. We like to move fast, and can get bored or impatient if we can’t move on to the next thing. We try to avoid failure as much as possible, can smell it a mile away and will change course if necessary to make sure it doesn’t happen. In organizations, we Threes often rise to high levels (Jeff Bezos is an archetypal Three) and frequently occupy top leadership roles because our ability to set goals and get results fits well in a corporate environment that prizes productivity, hard work, and the drive to accomplish.

6. WHAT WE’RE REALLY GOOD AT AS THREES

  • Setting and meeting goals. We excel at making things happen and producing results.
  • Working hard to get the job done/Execution. We generally like to work long hours, and put work at the centre of our life.
  • Marketing orientation. We know how to sell—we understand what it means to tune in to an audience and shape our message to suit the interests and preferences of our “target market,” which could mean our friends, family, and colleagues. We excel at marketing, both ourselves, and our products or projects.
  • Projecting an image of success and competence/Looking good in every context. We are experts at looking like we know what we are doing, and put a considerable amount of attention and energy into fitting the part and presenting an image that people will admire. This may often require us to adopt a persona—or social mask—to look appropriate in the social world. 
  • Competing to win/Striving to be the best. We tend to want to be the best at whatever we do, and we work so hard that we tend to become the best at whatever we seek to become really good at. 
  • Inspiring others to drive for results. Both through modeling an ethic of hard work and encouraging people to do what it takes to execute on a plan, we usually make inspiring and effective leaders.

7. HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY THREES

Like all people of all types, when we overuse our biggest strengths (and don’t consciously develop a wider range of specialties), these strengths can also turn out to be our Achilles’ heel. 

  • Setting and meeting goals. We can sometimes become a tad aggressive and run over people on the way to a goal if we become overly focused on reaching our destination no matter what the cost. 
  • Working hard to get the job done/Execution. We may also get so work-focused and so driven to be executing all the time that we overwork to the point of physical or psychological breakdown. 
  • Our marketing orientation. Because we are so focused on skilfully reading our audience and packaging the product (including ourselves!) to make the sale or be the person that others want us to be, we may sometimes stretch the truth, cut corners, or craft a false presentation in the process. 
  • Projecting an image of success and competence/Looking good in every context. Our talent for adjusting our image in every circumstance can sometimes lead us to prioritise style over substance (or getting in touch with our core consciousness or Being).
  • Competing to win/Striving to be the best. We may get so focused on winning that we could be drawn into engaging in unethical or aggressive practices, or exhaust ourselves, to prevail in the competition. We may get so focused on being the best that we will do anything to avoid failure, even when accepting and learning from failure can actually help us grow. 
  • Inspiring others to drive for results. We also may get so caught up in the pursuit of the goal that we may not be able to take in valuable input from others about potential problems, and may damage relationships by pushing others too hard in some way. 

Fortunately, our sincere interest in collaborating with others (when possible and desirable) to accomplish tasks motivates us to evaluate how we are doing. When we can slow down and check in with our colleagues and loved ones about our plans and goals, we are often able to combine our effectiveness with a more reasoned and broad-minded assessment of how things are really going. By learning to moderate our desire for success with an openness to the lessons of failure (or at least some healthy self-doubt or self-examination), we can often put our natural focus on getting the job done, or things “sorted” in that full-on Three way to work in support of achieving a worthwhile personal or organisational vision. 

When stressed to the point of going to our “low side,” we might become a little bit pushy, impatient, and perhaps even (vocally) intolerant of (what we view as) incompetence. We may withdraw and believe we need to work alone because no one can do the job as well or as quickly as we can. When we operate from the low or stressed side of our personality style, our addiction to work can get even more intense and hard to manage. We may not allow ourselves time to rest or relax or recharge, which can lead to an inability to manage stress, and ultimately some kind of physical or emotional crisis. Many of us Threes have stories of working ourselves to the point of becoming sick or injured—which is sometimes the only way we can be forced to stop working.

Visiting the low side of our personality style in this way, we may feel increasingly emotional, as sadness, pain, or other feelings we habitually tend to push away begin to surface as our normally strong “just work harder” coping mechanism begins to weaken. The discomfort of feeling our emotions may drive us at times to work even harder, which can make us insensitive to both our own feelings and the emotions of others. We may double-down and strive even more aggressively toward our goals, or to put on an “appropriate” or happy professional face to hide our stress and not look bad, which adds to our stress and anxiety. When living on the low/stressy side of our personality style, we are prone to developing a kind of tunnel vision, focusing so intently on our goals that we might find it hard to listen to anyone or accept support from others. 

On the “high side,” when we are more self-aware and conscious of our habitual patterns, we make time to slow down, reflect on how we are feeling, and engage more deeply with the people around us. Consciously balancing our work efforts with intentional self-inquiry (the kind of stuff we do in therapy) can take the edge off of our single-minded focus on “doing”, allowing us to not have have to work so hard to avoid our feelings. We might in so doing become more empathetic with others, more compassionate with ourselves, and (ironically) much more effective in our work.

When we are working our Emotional Intelligence, which we have a great deal of, we are able to feel good about themselves for who we really are instead of who we think we need to be to impress others. We can work productively by focusing on tasks and deepen our insight into the work we do by consulting our feelings. This also allows us to collaborate skillfully with others because we know when to lead people forward in meeting goals and when to focus more deeply on communicating with our team (or family, or partner) and listening to someone else’s input.


8. THE THREE KINDS OF THREES: HOW THE THREE INSTINCTUAL BIASES SHAPE THE THREE TYPE THREE SUB-TYPE PERSONALITIES


According to the Enneagram model, we all have three main instinctual drives that help us survive, but in each of us, one of the three tends to dominate our behaviour. The Type Three style gets expressed differently depending on whether a person has a dominant bias toward self-preservation, social relationships and positioning within groups, or One-to-One bonding. 

 The Self-Preservation (or Self-Focused) Three

Us Self-Preservation Threes want to be both productive and quality-oriented; we care about being both effective and deeply good at what we do. This makes us the hardest workers of the notoriously hard-working Type Threes, because we feel driven to do the job and do it well in the service of security. Self-Preservation subtypes are generally concerned with getting the resources that support survival, so an anxiety about material security turbocharges our personality-focused workaholic tendency. Us Self-Preservation Threes also believe we need to be a good model of doing things well in a moral sense—in addition to the already high Three standard of getting a lot done—and that this must happen to ensure our survival. 

Wanting to be good in addition to looking good means that as Self-Preservation Threes we are generally more modest than the other Threes, especially the Social Threes. We have “vanity for having no vanity”—that is, we want to be seen positively by others, but we don’t want to appear to want to be seen positively by others. We want to be recognized for our accomplishments, but we don’t want to be caught bragging or engaging in blatant self-promotion. 

In addition, SP Threes can often be much more self-sufficient than the other Threes—we sometimes might even have a hard time depending on others and may work more independently to provide a sense of security for ourselves and the people who depend on us. We may often tend to look very put together while feeling anxious underneath, as we put so much pressure on ourselves to do so much by ourselves to take care of ourselves and others. 

As leaders, SP Threes will set an example by working harder than anyone else and being humble when it comes to taking credit for things. We will likely be the first person at the office in the morning and the last one to leave. We tend to be solid, self-assured, good people that others seek out for advice. However, we may also work so hard and feel so much pressure to do a good job, that we may deprive ourselves of the support that relationships can provide when we “go it alone.” In this way, we might avoid the vulnerability could feel if we asked for help and overfocus on what needs to get done all by ourselves. When we learn to slow down, go easier on ourselves, and receive more support from others, we can be particularly powerful leaders and partners, who seek to do a good job, or have a great relationship in the best way possible without having a big ego or needing to be the centre of attention.

The Social (or Group-Focused) Three

In contrast to the Self-Preservation Three, us Social Three enjoys being on stage and receiving recognition and applause for the work we do. We care a great deal about “winning” and are the most aggressively competitive of the Threes, although often we don’t compete with others as much as we do with our own past performance. Us Social Threes are also more comfortable displaying signs of status and success like wearing high-end clothes and driving an expensive car. (Compare this to a SP Three who might feel embarrassed about being seen in some swanky car and might even trade it in for something a little less flashy.)

Social Threes shine in all kinds of public situations and we know how to ascend the corporate ladder if that’s where our focus lies. We have a keen sense for how to get the job done and often look flawless doing it, even if we occasionally cut a corner here or there. We make excellent salespeople and communicators, and enjoy having power and influence. We like to be recognized for our achievements, and know how to frame the things we say for maximum benefit.

Social Threes are commonly found in the highest leadership positions. Consider: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Condoleeza Rice, both Social Threes. This is because we are natural leaders in the sense that we relish having a prestigious title, directing work processes, and wielding power. We often have a corporate mentality in that it’s easy for us to represent the interests of the company in getting things done in the most effective and efficient way to compete to be the best and maximise profit—both for ourselves and the organisation. We intuitively align with what’s best for the company or the team and feel strongly motivated to move things forward decisively and successfully so that everyone ends up looking good and getting rewarded—both with acknowledgements for their work and wealth. We Social Three may have a hard time showing vulnerability though, because it’s so important to look good and not show any faults, but at our best we are strong leaders who will want to find a way to master any job and create results.

The One-to-One/Sexual (or Relationship-Focused) Three

Us One-to-One Threes can be strong leaders and productive workers like the other two Threes, but we often also prioritise relationships with others more. We One-to-One/Sexual Threes want to look good to others more in terms of personal appeal than morality like the Self-Preservation Three, or by winning like the Social Three. As One-to-One Threes, we also strives to achieve more in service to other people, and often focus on attracting others and then energetically supporting their success too (instead of just our own). We feel like we’ve won when the people we support win. Consider the following One-to-One Threes: Oprah, Tony Robbins, and Bill Wilson (the founder of AA). We can often feel frustrated when the people we support fail, as we might even feel those failures as our own.

One-to-One Threes are generally somewhat competitive and hard-working, but we are shyer about being the centre of attention and getting recognized for the work we do. We would rather promote the people we like and work with and feel close to. We have a team mentality and can be enthusiastic cheerleaders for the people we work to support, whether at work or at home. One-to-One Threes want to look good and are very aware of our image, but for us it’s more about being attractive to our significant other or being appealing and charismatic so we can easily establish bonds of support with people we seek to please. We can bring a large amount of energy and work very hard for the causes or people we support. As One-to-One Threes, we can also be more emotional than the other Threes, although like the other Threes, we often tend to turn down the volume on our emotions generally.

At work and at home, One-to-One Threes tend to be attractive, likeable, and helpful. We try to put the focus on others rather than have the spotlight on ourselves, and tend to express a great deal of concern about the welfare of the people we work with and are in contact with. One-to-One Threes tirelessly promote and support people on our team, or in our family, or in our organization who we believe deserve credit. With a softer presence than the other two Threes,  a One-to-One Three style will move things forward more through the force of our personal relationships and bonds with teammates and loved ones. Content to take a backseat when prizes are handed out for a job well done (like Self-Pres Threes) you could say that we enjoy working hard to make others look good—and seeing the people we like and support succeed can sometimes be the biggest reward of all.

9. HOW WE MIGHT STRUGGLE IN WORK AND IN RELATIONSHIPS:  STRESS-POINTS AND TRIGGERS


Type Threes sometime feel like working or being in relationships with others is hard because:

  • We like to move fast, and sometimes others can’t keep up. It can be very difficult for me if I have to slow down and wait for them to catch up.
  • We can get bored and stop listening (in meetings and in conversation) if people talk too long or take too long to get to the point or the discussion gets repetitive or bogged down.
  • We know it’s important to do research before we decide the best course of action, but we can sometimes get irritated if we get caught up in “analysis paralysis.” 
  • When we’re working toward a goal, we can become impatient when people ask a lot of questions, offer objections, or disagree with us. 
  • It can sometimes be hard for us if the goal we are working toward isn’t spelled out clearly.
  • It’s important for us that we look good and that the team (or our family, or relationship) looks good, and so we really dislike it when someone does something that makes me (or us) look bad.
  • We can become angry if people don’t deliver on their commitments, especially if it reflects poorly on us or they aren’t held accountable for their incompetence. 
  • We hate to fail, so if someone on the team or a person we’re in relationship with thwarts our efforts and we fail, that can be difficult for us to handle. We like being in control of achieving success—for ourselves and the team/our partnership. It’s frustrating when we don’t have enough autonomy to control things and get the win we want.

We can sometimes get triggered by:

  • Inefficiently run meetings and discussions.
  • Meetings or discussions that drag on and on and don’t get anywhere.
  • When people block our path to our goals. 
  • People who don’t deliver on what they said they’d do.
  • When people move slowly (especially if they are in my way or we need something from them before we can move forward).
  • Dead weight: people who are incompetent or not on board to help us move forward and execute on our plan.
  • When people waste ourtime.
  • When people don’t recognize our efforts and hard work.
  • When people go on and on and don’t communicate effectively – preferably in bullet points 🙂
  • When people take credit for someone else’s work.
  • People who engage in conversations about trivial, inconsequential bullshit when they should be getting on with things and working.
  • People who distract me when I am working.
  • People who miss deadlines (especially if it affects my work).
  • People who do shoddy work.
  • Having to manage people’s feelings instead of focusing on the task at hand (especially as a Self-Pres or Social Three).
  • People who we have to explain things to over and over.

But we are also often loved and admired by those around us because: 

  • We actually like working, we like to get stuck-in with stuff (including friendships and relationships) and our enthusiasm can be infectious.
  • We always feel confident they know how to reach the goal and achieve success (which makes us feel more confident).
  • We will always do more than our share of the work.
  • We move things along and speed up the pace when slowdowns occur.
  • We help keep everyone on-task and focused.
  • We communicate in a way that is concise, efficient, and succinct.
  • We don’t waste your time.
  • We know how to read an audience (or even just one person) and can help clarify what will “sell” or land well with that audience or person, and what won’t. We often have a great deal of Emotional Intelligence.
  • When we can slow down and make the time to connect, we are really good at engaging with people.
  • We will easily step in when needed and take the lead to provide direction.
  • We stay engaged with our work as a key focal point of our lives, so this means that we usually stay available and accessible if you need us.

We can be challenging at times to others because: 

  • We might (at times) seem impatient when you are talking with other people—like we would rather be doing something else (and truth be told: we probably would!).
  • We can become frustrated and dismissive in meetings if we think our time is being wasted.
  • We can struggle at times to stop working or slow down, which may lead to mistakes when we overwork and can’t take time to relax or destress.
  • We can become so competitive that the drive to win may cloud our judgement.
  • We may leave or quit a project if we think we can’t do it well or achieve enough of a success (this can also happen in relationships).
  • We may do things to protect our image that isn’t good for the team or the project or the person we’re trying to relate to. 
  • We may not be open to learning from failures because we need to move on so quickly (perahps because it’s so hard for us to experience failure?). 

10. SELF-MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES THAT THREES MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY

    • Fast pace. Part of what drives us Threes to move so fast and do so much is (from a psychological perspective) an unconscious desire to avoid feeling inadequate or unloved. We Threes may subconsciously fear that if we stop or slow down, feelings like these will arise that we don’t want to feel. But it’s crucial for us when falling into this pattern to learn to moderate the pace so we can be more present to our lives and who we are.
    • Drive to compete. The need to win at all costs often comes with a large price tag. One part of our development may occur through learning that we don’t always have to win to have value. Balancing the desire to succeed with a conscious effort to embrace lessons in failure can help us to grow and accept all of ourselves.
    • Doing. Similarly, we Threes benefit when we can moderate our compulsion to always be doing. we become more whole and happy through balancing doing with a greater openness to feeling and just being.
    • Image management. At a deeper level, we may believe that it’s our image (what we present to others) that people love and not who we are as unique individuals. The more we do to become someone others will admire, the more we potentially become less of ourselves. 
    • Overworking/staying busy. At some point, when we can’t slow down or stop working ever—even on holiday—it may dawn on us that this is a problem. Developing the ability to moderate our workaholic tendencies is important so that an illness or some other sort of breakdown doesn’t have to do it for us. 
    • Overidentifying with our work or our image. As Threes, we may think that we are what we do—but we are also so much more than that! If we have the idea that we would be no one without our job (I often feel this way), it’s time to get to know ourselves a bit more! We are so much more than our image or the work we do, although living in an Instagram Culture doesn’t especially help with this. In many ways, we are all Threes now!

11. LIFE-TRAPS THAT WE MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY


All of us can learn to be less reactive and better at collaborating with others through first observing our habitual patterns, then thinking about the things we think, feel, and do to gain more self-insight, and then making efforts to manage or moderate our automatic reactions to key triggers. 

Us Threes grow through first observing and then learning to moderate our habitual reactions to key triggers like being slowed down by others’ “incompetence,” or having to deal with others’ emotions, or having our efforts thwarted by other people’s agendas or needs.

When we can watch what we do enough to “catch ourselves in the act” of doing the things that get us in trouble, and then pause and reflect on what we are doing and why, we can gradually learn to moderate our programming and knee-jerk responses. Here are some ideas to help us be more self-aware, more emotionally intelligent, and more satisfied at work (and at home).

What blind spots us Threes often don’t see in ourselves (even though others might see these in us)

  • Our emotions and the value of emotions generally. As a part of our drive to get things done, we can often avoid or ignore or minimize our emotions (less so for One-to-One threes). Yet, as heart-based types we do also use our sometimes neglected emotional capacity to read people to determine in part how to present ourselves. It could help us to develop if we can connect more with our unacknowledged feelings, only because our emotions can often help us to know who we really are, what we really want, and what things are really worth doing. 
  • The value of slowing down (and occasionally stopping). As Threes we can sometimes risk our health, our psychological well-being, and our relationships if we don’t look at how and why we move so fast and do so much. It might help us to recognize the value of consciously slowing down and taking better care of ourselves.
  • Our core self—who we really are apart from our image. What usually gets lost for us as Threes in doing and achieving is ourselves. We can’t help (being our personality default) to focus on the image we want to create and the accomplishments that help us look good, and this can sometimes mean that we often don’t really know who we are, what we really want, and how we want to live. Discovering who we are in this deeper way can help us to live in a more integrated way.
  • The importance of relationships. Often without meaning to, we can  sacrifice our relationships—or the quality of our relationships—by putting all our energy into our work. It can be hard for us to be present with people, and it can be difficult for them to be present enough to see that we are not present. When we work to become self-aware, it is important for us to examine the state of our relationships and create enough room to consciously choose prioritizing being present with people instead of unconsciously sacrificing our personal life.
  • The need for love—what’s behind the image management and the need for recognition. Ofen, us Threes do all we do to be loved and appreciated for who we really are. So, it’s kind of ironic that we strive to be recognized and valued, but then we get so busy and so focused on living from an image that we lose touch with our home-base inside ourselves, which might allow us to receive real warmth and positive regard from others. When we are on a growth path though, we can benefit from realising that what really drives us is the need for affection and doing what it takes to open up to actually getting it. 

 12. WHERE TO START WHEN FOCUSING ON YOUR OWN PERSONAL “THREE-STUFF”: STRENGTHS TO LEVERAGE & ENQUIRY QUESTIONS THAT I OFTEN ASK TYPE THREE CLIENTS

    • Observing our need to move quickly in getting things done. What happens when we get slowed down? Notice how we resist slowing down or stopping. What’s behind our need for speed?
    • Notice how much we love to check things off our “to do” list. Why do we get such extreme satisfaction from getting stuff done? What kinds of things do we do to prioritize checking something off our list?
    • Notice how we keep ourself busy all the time. Observe what motivates our need to stay in motion and work so hard. Notice especially what we might be avoiding.
    • Observe how we relate to our own emotions. What is going on when we do so much we don’t leave room for them? Under what conditions do we feel more and less? 
    • Observe our desire for recognition. To what extent does this motivate us to perform and succeed? What is this about for us? When we receive recognition, can we take it in? 
    • Notice how we read the people around us and the social context for clues to how to present ourselves for maximum benefit. Becoming conscious of how we shift our presentation (at work, but perhaps in other settings too) to fit our audience and what’s behind that.
    • Observe what we do to avoid failure. Why is failure such a bad thing? 
    • Notice what happens when something gets in the way of our path to our goal. What feelings arise? What is this about?
    • Notice how we tend to prioritize work above relationships. Why? What are the consequences of doing this?

Strengths to Leverage

It can help us Threes in this process to be aware of and even actively leverage:

  • Our ability to get the job done well and quickly. The world already rewards us for this, and it gives us a lot of power. Growth doesn’t mean we have to change what works, it just means being able to moderate when appropriate.
  • Our confidence and determination when working toward a goal. Other types (like Nines) suffer because they can’t take action to make things happen—so celebrate this as a big strength and find creative and interesting ways to put it to work to make the world a better place.
  • Our ability to read people/ability to relate to people. We may not be giving ourselves enough credit for how well we relate to people. Asking people for feedback about how our relationship is going—and what they value about us, and vice-versa—and noticing if we find any clues to what’s extraordinary about this real connection, as well as how to build on it.
  • Our resourcefulness and tenacity. One of the perks associated with being someone who gets shit done is that we can almost always find a way to make important things happen. The world needs this quality—so let’s own it and teach others how to do it!
  • Emotional sensitivity. we probably don’t give ourselves enough credit for how sensitive we can be to people’s emotional struggles when we want to be. We may then want to allow ourselves to be touched by people more often and see how it opens us up to the beauty and richness of our emotional capacities. Getting past our fear in this area will indubitably enhance our lives.

 Some questions I might ask a Three in therapy:

  • How and why do we resist slowing down so much? What might we be afraid will happen if we slow down or stop?
  • Why are we so driven to do tasks and realize goals? What motivates this drive and what would happen if we resisted it?
  • Why do we avoid feeling our emotions? What feels threatening about opening up to a more conscious awareness of what we are feeling?
  • In what ways do we create an image that differs from who we really are? Perhaps we can reflect on instances in which we presented ourselves in a way that misrepresented how we really feel or what we really think or who we really are. How and why does this happen? Let’s explore the differences between the image(s) we create and who we really are.
  • What gets in the way of being present with the people in our life? What feels difficult about engaging more deeply more often with the people we are in relationships with? Is there something we are missing out on when we are working so hard?

Us Threes can also grow through consciously becoming aware of the self-limiting habits and patterns associated with our personality style and learning to embody the higher aspects or more expansive and balanced capacities of the Type Three personality:

  • Learning to become conscious of the need to look good to impress others and try to present ourselves more as we are (from the inside out). Realising that often this more real version of us  is better and certainly more lovable than any image we might create could ever be.
  • Learning to be aware of why we drive ourselves so hard and do so much work and consider that we don’t have to do it all or be successful to be the valuable, lovable, competent people we already are.
  • Learning to be conscious of not being present and learning to take our attention off our to-do list and put it on what’s happening in the moment.
  • Learning to be more aware of what compels us to do, do, do, and work so hard and then trying (at times) to interrupt that compulsion by slowing down, relaxing more, and luxuriating in feeling and being.
  • Learning to observe the way we index (or overindex) success as the measure of who we are and develop the ability to index other yardsticks, like how we feel, what we desire, what has meaning, and how people react to us when we are being honest about who we are.
  • Learning to notice when we are overidentifying with our work or our image and do what it takes to get in touch with our core subjectivity—who we really are, how we really feel, and what we really want.

Overall, we Threes can fulfill our higher potential by observing and working against our habitual focus on doing and performing to create an image of being a winner and learn to focus more deeply on how we feel, what we really want, and who we really are. When we can moderate our tendency to drive forward in the fastest way possible to get to the goal and do the hard work of slowing down, we can access more support from our inner being as well as the people around us. When we can lean into our large and often untapped capacity for feeling the richness of our inner experience, we can often enhance the things we do and produce in a way we may never have imagined by putting more of the unique gifts and emotional truth of our real self into the mix. We can then combine our amazing ability to take action with the depth of who we are as individuals, becoming the powerful leaders, friends, family members, and partners we know we are capable of becoming, who do meaningful things well in a way that benefits everyone.

If you are not a Three, but have a relationship with a Three, here are some tips for getting on better with the Threes in your life:

 

Be competent and get shit done. We Threes like coworkers who we can trust to do a competent job and do what they say they are going to do. Meet your deadlines, do quality work in a timely fashion, and be accountable when your work is not up to par. 

Leave us alone to do what we do. We like to have the freedom to get things done quickly on their schedule. It’s best not to bother us with stuff we don’t find meaningful or relevant to the work that needs to be done.

Be mindful of our preferred pace. We often like to move fast. Your work pace may not be as rapid as ours, and sometimes there will be unavoidable slowdowns, but it will help you to help us if you understand how very much we like things to move along quickly.

Don’t waste our time. Be on time to meetings, don’t make meetings longer than they have to be, don’t engage in too much small talk, and don’t spend a lot of time explaining stuff to us that we don’t need to know to do our work.

Recognize that relationships may need be secondary to work. Relationships are important to us but we are more open to relating to others when we don’t have a lot of work to do. If you befriend us Threes as your colleague, don’t be too offended if we sometimes need to prioritize work above our relationship (or have a hard time listening to what you did last weekend).

If you want our attention, get on their calendar. We often have our whole day and week planned out and scheduled, down to our morning workout and the mid-week socials. If you want our undivided attention, make sure you’ve blocked out some time in our schedule so we can make our best effort to be present.

Don’t expect us to spend a lot of time dealing with your feelings. Although we are heart-types, we can sometimes avoid feeling and managing our own emotions, so we may not always want to deal with yours. If you feel hurt or angry or disappointed by something at work, we might expect you (to a certain extent) to suck it up, as we often do, and get on with getting things done.

Help us to avoid “the f-word.” We Threes have a very difficult time with failure. (Some of us will have a hard time even considering the possibility of it.) So, we will appreciate it if you do everything in your power to help us succeed—or be kind when things don’t go well and help us slow down long enough to learn from it.

• Recognise our efforts and achievements. Although some Threes may show it more than others, we Threes are genuinely doing all we can do to gain the respect and admiration of others. So we will feel supported and appreciated if you make a point of acknowledging key wins and all the hard work we do.

FURTHER RESOURCES FOR THREES & THOSE WHO LOVE THEM:

This is a great, easy-to-follow overview by Russ Hudson of the Three personality style, which also offers some experiential practices which Three (or all of us) might find helpful when struggling with “Three-Stuff” in our lives.

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The Type Four Personality Style

Hello. Perhaps you’ve landed on this page because you’ve done an Online Enneagram Personality Test which has given you a Four as your main personality type, and now you’re scratching your head wondering what this means in terms of your self-development or therapy journey.

Are personality types no more than just a description of different traits – like a star sign? Or can a deeper understanding of our personality structure, or “self”, and the way it works at a psychological level, help us to play the game of life with a little bit more grace, and less suffering?

[Read more about Personality-Focused Psychotherapy]

One way to think about the Self is that it might work as a kind of Lens or “Operating System” through which our psyche (?) mind (?) “life force” (?) or “soul” (?) flows. Whenever we express a thought, or belief, or opinion about our lives and our struggles, it is usually the Self (an “I”) that is doing the talking for us:

I feel sad about…
I feel satisfied with life when…
I don’t understand why s/he said that…
I find this [thought/feeling/situation] painful to think about or deal with.

Of course we don’t normally think about these utterances as a “Self” talking through us, because it (we) are always just sort of here in the conscious experience of “I”, of Self, with its particular filter on the world always present. Like fish, we swim in the “waters” of Self, but are usually completely oblivious to what “water” actually is.

Therapy is perhaps an opportunity for us to look at, and work through the content of our experience, the different ways we might have filled the gaps above to describe what is going on in our lives, but also to pay a slightly different kind of attention to how our struggles are often being shaped or contained in a certain ways for us through this “Self”, or Ego, or “I”. Not in the negative sense of having a “big ego”, but simply in terms of this psychological “I”. Which is to say: our personality style, character, Ego, Self.

This is not our whole Being or Consciousness. We can also step back (as we often do, especially in therapy) and look at the Self from a more detached, less conflicted perspective. Maybe from the perspective of someone who cares for us, but also knows us really well. This perspective might also become one we develop in our relationship with that person (“me” or another therapist) who would like to accompany you and assist you with your journey into understanding, healing, and developing your Self.

Most of the time though, we experience our Selves either from either the perspective of an Inner Critic who tells us how we’re failing at Life (or how Life is failing us), or from the Driver’s Seat of our Core Self.

Whoever that Core Driving Self is (pick a number!) whoever is driving the bus –driving us to do the things we do, or make the choices we make– it clearly has a special way of operating. Others can often see, for better or worse, how we tend to operate, as we can also see their Selves at work in how they talk, think, and behave. In therapy, we can try to get to know this Core Self a bit better (as well as those of the people we’re in relationship with), and hopefully find out what we’re all about.

As you read about your Four “Self” below, a portrait that reveals both the light and shade of “you”, try not to judge your Self, or feel bad about how this Self comes across when laid out in this somewhat reductive, psychological way.

If reading through this portrait makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, ashamed, or exposed, that is a good sign, it really is.

This is certainly how I felt when I first read about my own personality style. “Am I really like that!?! Oh dear. Well, OK, for good or bad, that does seem to be how “I” roll… [sigh]” 

This kind of response might perhaps indicate that we are gaining new insights, or at least a bit more humility about our Selves, especially when embarking on the kind of therapeutic search that you’re engaging with for your Self right now by reading and reflecting on this.

With insight, we can hopefully learn how to handle our Self/Selves a bit better in terms of how we deals with those generic but often unpleasant realities of life: physical and emotional pain, uncertainty, as well as the various forms of constant work, both inner and outer that we seek to fulfil. The Self is always the interface through which we learn how to do this, trying as best we can to put into practice the lessons we’ve learned.

If  you find when reading about the Four “Self” described below, that it doesn’t feel like the kind of “I” you identify with, please have a quick look again at my Overview of The Nine Personality Types.

Your Core Self will make itself known to you there, as when you catch sight of yourself in the reflection of a shop-window or a mirror. Each of us holds aspects of every personality type within us (we all come from the same species,) but at a psychological level, our Core Self is usually present through our entire life journey, and shapes how we see the world, inwardly and out.

Human happiness and satisfaction seems to be strongly connected to getting the best out of our core Selves (i.e. our particular personality style, as well as following our unique threads), alongside learning how to manage with the not-so-great, and at times even “crappy” stuff that comes with each “I” or person-ality.

1. SNAPSHOT OF A FOUR: HOW MANY OF THESE TRAITS DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH?

If you identify with most or all of the following characteristics, you may have a Type Four personality style:

  • I see the work I do, as well as all my relationships through the lens of my internal experience. My sense and meaning of life is strongly connected to my emotional world and inner experiences. This is especially the case when interacting and reacting to others.  My Operating System is largely emotionally-driven. I am a “Heart” type.
  • I want to be seen and understood for who I am. It’s crucial for me to be appreciated by others as who I understand myself to be on the inside, not as who others might perceive (or misperceive) me to be.
  • I seek to connect with others in meaningful ways and don’t like superficiality. I have a hard time doing small talk because I seek depth and meaning.
  • I can’t help comparing myself to others and dwelling on how I am lacking or how I am different, or “particular” in relation to other people. I may feel envious of people who appear to have something I don’t have. Or, I may work hard to get what I want so I don’t have to ward off envious feelings.
  • I am sensitive to the experience of not being connected (to the world/other people) when I’d like to be. Sometimes, or even often, I may feel like I don’t fit in—like I am on the outside looking in. 
  • I find satisfaction in expressing myself in a way that communicates my somewhat different experience of the world. Self-expression is very important to me; I enjoy the richness of the challenge of translating my inner experience into art or other creative work projects.
  • I place a high value on being authentic. While some people avoid expressing emotions, I believe that as long as the emotion is an authentic one, there’s nothing wrong with me having my feelings, and ideally being allowed to express them to others. 
  • I can sometimes be emotional, oversensitive, or moody, and strong emotions have at times caused problems for me in relationships. While I may feel self-conscious about expressing my emotions, feeling my feelings is one of the primary ways I connect to myself and understand my experience. But others may struggle to make space for the intensity of these feelings when relating to me. 
  • I enjoy connecting with people on the basis of shared authentic thoughts and emotions—so it’s really important for me to feel understood. I consider it necessary to express myself authentically and I hope others will too. I may have a hard time faking it, and if someone fails to understand me, I may then have a difficult time moving forwards in relating to them. 
  • I can sometimes feel inadequate or deficient because I can’t help comparing myself to others and noticing what I am lacking. I may at times feel “less than” when I believe other people have things I don’t have, or are somehow in a better position than me. 
  • It’s easy for me to see what’s missing in a given situation. My attention naturally goes to what is lacking, what is non-ideal. But when I point this out to people, they can sometimes perceive this as a criticism or as me being unnecessarily negative, even though that is not necessarily my intention.
  • I have a talent for sensing what’s going on at the emotional level among people, whether it’s in my family, partner, or my work environment. I often play the role of truth teller, which can lead to people feeling supported by me when I name something important that may be happening under the surface, but can also lead to people discounting me when they don’t want to face what is really going on. I can usually see what’s going on (or at least I think so), and want to make this known. I can often struggle to keep my truths on the back-burner, or just for me to reflect on and process.
  • My comfort with deep and sometimes difficult emotions means people seek me out when they need to talk about how they feel or when they are in pain. My ability to feel a range of emotions and my familiarity and comfort with painful thoughts and feelings means that I can be present when people are feeling their feelings and expressing them too. And yet, I can also feel quite often that people aren’t able or willing to do that for me in the same way that I can do this for them. And this breeds resentment. Resentment (i.e. returning to a painful feeling again and again, until we feel angry and upset about it) is a core emotion for us Fours.

2. WHY AM I LIKE THIS? THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A FOUR

Have a read of this “Origin Story” or Trauma Story which resonates for a lot of Fours.

“Once upon a time, there was a person named Four. When she was young, she thought she had a total connection to the world—with nature and the people around her. She felt cherished by her parents, as all children should. But then something happened that changed everything. A baby was born, or perhaps some other childhood event. And at this point, it was as if Four’s perfect world ended. No longer was she the centre of her parents’ attention. No longer was she the most special child in the world. When she wanted someone to play with or a hug, everyone was busy taking care of the baby or their own problems. She felt unimportant, alone, and ordinary.

Four made sense of this terrible new situation by believing that she must have done something wrong to cause the loss of connection with her parents. After all, they didn’t seem to care about her the way they did before. It must have been her fault. They must have discovered there was something wrong with her. What other explanation could there be?

Four’s new way of thinking caused her some pain and distress, but gradually she got used to feeling bad, and feeling sad. And, she reasoned, if it was her fault that she had lost the connection she had once felt—maybe that meant she could do something to make things right. Maybe she could somehow make a connection with others and the world again by showing everyone how special she was— or by making them see how much she was suffering by acknowledging that she wasn’t as special as she had thought. In the meantime, her sadness became a familiar friend that kept her company when she was lonely.

Over time, Four tried different ways to rebuild the connection she had lost. She tried to get people to see her as special again. She showed them how extraordinary and unique she was by drawing beautiful pictures, saying authentic things, and expressing her emotional depth by singing sad songs. But no one seemed to notice her specialness. They just said she was being “too sensitive” or “too dramatic.” She tried telling people all the intricate details of her pain and loss, in hopes that they would do something to ease her suffering. She tried to show how strong she was by withstanding her suffering without complaining. She tried getting angry and competing with others to prove her superiority. But no one ever gave her the understanding and deep connection she longed for.

None of her efforts made Four feel understood or special, but eventually these ways of feeling, thinking, and acting became habits. She couldn’t stop longing for love, understanding, and deep connection. But at a certain level, she also couldn’t stop believing that she was totally unworthy of those things. Driven by the need to feel connected again, she continued to focus on and experience the emotions she felt about the love she had lost. She couldn’t stop seeing all her flaws. She couldn’t stop noticing all the good things that others had that were missing in her life— and yearning for someone or something to help her feel worthy.

Without realizing it, the strategies Four had adopted to cope with her feeling of loss came to rule her life. A lot of people thought it odd that she tried to get love and understanding by focusing on being unworthy of it. But every once in a while, her strategy did work to get her some attention, even if it was negative attention. And perhaps that just reinforced her habits.

Occasionally, someone would see that Four was special and try to give her the love she longed for. But she struggled at times to receive the love they offered.  Frustratingly, she couldn’t stop creating situations that confirmed her belief in her own inadequacy, or caused conflict with others. She couldn’t stop pushing people away to make sure that they wouldn’t abandon her. Perhaps because deep inside her Self she knew they would. She would always be disappointed, disappointed, sad and alone. Trying to believe anything else only increased her pain. Maybe it was better to be sad all the time to protect herself from the hope of something good.  This is how Four can become trapped in “the cage” of her psyche. How might she suffer less with a personality type like this? 

Fours often report having experienced some sort of loss of connection early in life that shapes their style of coping in the world. Often, they have a memory of being loved by or enjoying meaningful contact with a parent or caregiver, and then something happened to change that important connection. A younger sibling came along, or a life event made the parent unavailable or less available, and the Four child felt this as a loss of love or a painful shift in a life-supporting relationship. 

Motivated to try to regain what was lost, Fours strive to prove themselves worthy, or communicate their suffering, or assert their specialness. They develop an adaptive strategy of engaging with the feelings of loss and longing as a way of managing what happens in their connections, expressing themselves in unique ways to invite connection with the right people, and identifying with a deficient or superior sense of themselves as a way of protecting themselves from re-experiencing the early sense of abandonment. 

This focus on feeling and emotion makes Fours’ coping style less suited to the conventions of the western workplace than other types, which is why a lot of Fours end up working for themselves. It may be difficult for Fours to get the understanding they crave from coworkers with other styles, and it can be hard for non-Fours to see how feeling “bad” feelings or identifying with darker emotions like pain and sadness can serve as a self-protective strategy. But people who persist in non-Four environments and lead or serve with a Type Four style do bring much-needed qualities and strengths to others—they naturally see what is lacking and needed to make things more whole, more beautiful, more functional, or more balanced. Plus, their ability to attune to others and empathize with their emotional experiences makes them uniquely suited to understanding key elements of work and working relationships, including what people need to relate to each other in productive ways and how authentic self-expression can lead to visionary and innovative creation.

3. CORE MOTIVATIONS OF A TYPE FOUR PARTICIPANT: WHAT “DRIVES” A FOUR?

The strategy of presenting themselves and the things they do in a way that allows them to express themselves, connect with others and be understood focuses Fours’ attention on what is going on inside them. Fours seek to connect to themselves (and others) through an ongoing experience of their inner emotional territory. They automatically see what is missing—including what they lack that makes them feel unworthy or inadequate—and automatically focus people’s attention on what is necessary that is being left out.

At work, but also in relationships, Fours tend to focus on human interaction and the creative aspects of their situation. They will usually have an opinion about how something works aesthetically and how to improve it, and will offer insights on how people are getting along and what’s happening (especially emotionally) at a deeper level among colleagues or with family, friends and their partners. Their perceptual bias prioritizes meaning, depth, and authenticity—so they may be preoccupied with addressing or fixing people or relationships that don’t feel sufficiently connected, effective, or meaningful.

People with a Type Four personality style are “self-referencing,” meaning their attention goes immediately to their own inner experience rather than what other people are feeling and doing and needing. They may be more aware of what’s going on in their internal landscape than what’s happening to you. It’s not that they aren’t interested in others—they pay a great deal of attention to their relationships and can be very attuned to others when they want to be. It’s more that their primary focus is on what they are experiencing.

4. FOURS AT WORK & IN RELATIONSHIPS

Generally, individuals with a Type Four style view what’s happening in terms of how it measures up against an Ideal. Like Type Ones, they make automatic mental comparisons about themselves and their circumstances, but while Ones focus on detecting and correcting errors in a matter-of-fact way, Fours tend to make value judgments based on how meaningful (or not) something feels. They are attracted to the extraordinary and disdain the mundane, which can give them a “the grass is always greener…” outlook. To Fours, what’s distant and unavailable is often more interesting and worthwhile than what’s present in the here-and-now. 

Fours want the world to see and affirm their worth as unique individuals. However, their lived experience often shows them that people misunderstand them (and each other) or fail to validate their value. Fours sometimes feel like their sensitivity to the emotions most people would rather not feel, like pain and sadness, makes them misfits, especially in the working world, where emotions are not valued as a meaningful source of data. Fours understand that the information emotions bring has great value, especially when it comes to assessing what works and what doesn’t or what has meaning or doesn’t or who is connected to whom (or isn’t). 

Type Fours can’t help being open and sensitive to the emotional level of things, even at work, which can sometimes lead them to feel devalued or undervalued. When naturally emotionally intuitive Fours get the message that their sense of things is not appreciated—perhaps because others want to ward off the threat of their own emotional awareness. This can confirm the Four’s inner sense of inadequacy. While many Fours develop an inner strength around standing up for their emotional truth, they may also feel sensitive to the judgments and assessments of the people around them, and may doubt their worth in work settings dominated by people who believe emotions have no place in business. Conversely, where this kind of meaning is part of the work, Fours may feel comfortable in the knowledge that they contribute in meaningful ways and their contribution is valued.

5. UNDERSTANDING WHY FOURS THINK, FEEL, AND BEHAVE THE WAY THEY DO?

Mental

Fours think in terms of comparisons and relationships; how others will evaluate what they are producing, how they stack up against others, and how to infuse the things they do with meaning. Deeply connected to their own inner life, Fours fantasize a lot about what could or might happen and ideal scenarios they’d like to manifest, and may focus on the disparity between what they imagine and what is actually happening. They think deeply about what goes on among people and how to communicate with others to express what they are thinking and who they are. Fours can be insightful and intellectually creative, and when they balance their emotional sensitivity with clear and objective thinking, they can be particularly effective in the things they do.

 Emotional

Fours are more comfortable with emotion than any of the Enneagram types—they live more in their emotions, have more emotional ups and downs, and believe in the value of emotions and emotional connections. They typically have access to a wide range of feelings, which they feel intensely, and can dwell in darker feelings like melancholy and longing, shame and inadequacy, fear (of abandonment) and anxiety, and anger and frustration. However, they may also avoid certain feelings, sometimes by focusing on other feelings that are more comfortable or familiar. For instance, Fours sometimes take refuge in feelings of sadness or melancholy (or false happiness) as a way of defending against the pain of shame or the fear of failure. Fours may also “hang out” in some emotions more than others, because they are more habitual, more aligned with their preferred self-image, or more useful as a protection against other emotions. Fours are especially attuned to the beauty that can be found in pain and the poetry and richness of deep emotional experience, and can readily feel the flipside of difficult feelings, as they deeply experience a full range of emotions, including excitement, joy, and happiness. 

 Behavioural

A Four’s behavior varies to a large degree according to which of the three kinds of Fours (described below) we are talking about. Some Fours tend to be hard-working and focused on being tough and accomplishing tasks to prove their worth. Other Fours can overidentify with their emotions and may have a difficult time moving out of feeling and into action—they may dwell on what they don’t have or a sense of inferiority that can be paralyzing. Still other Fours may actively compete to win or prove themselves superior as a way of asserting and communicating their value. Generally, some Fours can be more depressed and withdrawn, and others can be more active, or even hyperactive. When overly attached to feelings of inadequacy and low self-worth, they may have trouble taking action, but when they feel good about themselves, they can be motivated to achieve high levels of excellence. 

6. WHAT YOU’RE REALLY GOOD AT AS A FOUR

  • Artistic impulse/Aesthetic sensibility. Fours see and seek to highlight what’s beautiful or poetic in everyday reality. They naturally tune in to aesthetics and what can be done to make things more pleasing.
  • Emotional intuition. Fours automatically sense how people are feeling, what tensions and conflicts may exist among them, and the status of their invisible emotional connections.
  • Large capacity for depth of feeling. Fours make good counselors, sounding boards, and friends in that they aren’t afraid to empathize with you, even if it means joining you in a painful or upsetting emotional space.
  • The courage to be authentic. Fours value being real, and tend to be truth tellers who would rather displease someone than communicate in a way that feels false.
  • Sensitivity to the status of human connections. Fours have an ability to see and understand how well (or not) people are connected to each other, the obstacles and challenges in the way of relationships, and how open or not people are to relating authentically. 

However, as for all of us, our greatest strengths can also trip us up at times. If Type Fours overuse their biggest strengths (and don’t consciously develop a wider range of skills), they can also turn out to be their Achilles’ heel. Let’s see how this can happen.

  • Artistic impulse/Aesthetic sensibility. Fours can get hung up on getting the aesthetics just right, which can slow down the process of completing something. They may become frustrated when the reality of what they create doesn’t live up to the ideal they imagine. 
  • Emotional intuition. Fours can overwhelm people who aren’t as comfortable navigating emotional territory when they insist on surfacing feelings others aren’t ready to face.
  • Large capacity for depth of feeling. Fours may express too much emotion for others to process, may hold up work processes when they insist on their feelings being validated and understood, and may judge others who can’t access their emotions in the same way they can.
  • The courage to be authentic. Fours can push others to be honest in ways they may not be ready for, and may express more authentic emotion than a situation requires. They may judge those who are unable to adhere to their high standards of emotional truth as inauthentic.
  • Sensitivity to the status of human connections. When Fours focus too much on how people are relating, they can get stuck in wanting to fix relationship issues and neglect work  or relationship-regulating priorities. They may have trouble accepting the real limitations of some connections or individuals. 

Fortunately, Fours’ sincere interest in people and forging meaningful connections means that they can often learn that in order to work well together, they may need to temper some of their requirements for mutual emotional understanding. When they can balance their own needs and feelings with a realistic understanding of what’s possible in their work and relationship settings, they are able to offer their gifts and talents in a way others can appreciate.

 7. HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY FOURS

When stressed to the point of going to their “low side,” Type Fours can become moody and temperamental, and tend to make everything about them and what they are feeling, thinking, and needing. Some Fours get more self-punishing under stress, while others will (often unconsciously) punish other people. They may complain more openly or angrily about what’s not working for them and how they aren’t getting what they need; or they may sulk and stop cooperating as a way of signaling that something is wrong and they need more attention.

Some Fours on the low side may act more withdrawn and melancholy, becoming depressed or shut down, while others may speed up and work harder in an anxious way. They may appear more reactive and respond more emotionally to things, and they may have a difficult time moderating the emotions they express. Some may try to control themselves, knowing their emotional reactivity may alienate people, others will let go of any concern about impression management and just get mad, and still others will control their feelings initially, but then explode if they get angry or hurt enough. At their worst, they can be like Eeyore, the Type Four donkey from Winnie the Pooh—big downers who focus only on what’s negative or not working to the point where others see them as pessimistic or obstructionist. 

On the “high side,” when Type Fours become more self-aware and conscious of their programming, they can be wise, creative, and compassionate. They draw on their deep capacity for empathy to create a bold vision of the work that needs to be accomplished in a way that can inspire their people. At their healthiest, Fours balance clear contact with their inner experience—a conscious sense of their needs and emotions—with a sense of generosity and gratitude in understanding and supporting others. They learn to engage their feelings, receive the information they bring, process them or communicate them with self-awareness, and let them go. 

Healthy Fours demonstrate how emotional intelligence and sensitivity can be a great strength in the workplace and with friends and family. They use the wisdom they develop learning to navigate their own emotional terrain to guide and mentor others, and can bring people together, sensitively mediate conflicts, and name emotional issues that need to be faced so teams can become more cohesive. Unafraid of intense feeling or interpersonal stress, they support others in communicating more honestly as a way of welcoming more of people’s “real selves” at work, creating an atmosphere of authenticity and support where individuals can thrive and enjoy what they do. 

8. THE THREE KINDS OF FOURS: HOW THE THREE INSTINCTUAL BIASES SHAPE THE THREE TYPE FOUR SUB-TYPE PERSONALITIES

According to the Enneagram model, we all have three main instinctual drives that help us survive, but in each of us, one tends to dominate our behavior. The Type Four style is expressed differently depending on whether a person has a bias toward self-preservation, social relationships within groups, or one-to-one bonding. 

The Self-Preservation (or Self-Focused) Four

Self-Preservation Fours are the least outwardly emotional Fours. Having received the message that their emotions were too much for people (usually a parent early on), they try to keep a lid on darker feelings like sadness, disappointment, hurt, and anger, leading some people to think they can’t possibly be Fours at all. In reality, these Fours connect deeply to their emotions; they just keep their negative feelings to themselves so they don’t alienate the people they want to be connected to. Instead, they lead with friendliness and an upbeat, happy exterior presentation.

Self-preservation Fours tend to be more anxious than the other two Fours, although they are typically stoic and strong, and learn to endure pain without showing it. Outwardly, they are more “sunny” and helpful and work hard to prove their worth. Instead of dwelling in envy or dissatisfaction at not having enough or being good enough, Self-Preservation Fours strive to get what they want, and hope to earn others’ respect and affection through doing for others and not burdening people with their pain. They can be tenacious in working toward a goal, but also reckless, throwing themselves into an effort to achieve or help others by sacrificing themselves or disregarding their own safety. They seek to earn others’ admiration by showing how much they can do, sometimes silently taking on more than their share of the work and shouldering more of the burden.

As leaders or work colleagues (but sometimes also as friends and romantic partners), Self-Preservation Fours provide others with a heroic model of how to work hard in support of a cause or to improve conditions for others. They may resemble Threes in their dedication to their work, but they will also be attuned to what’s happening at the emotional level of the group. Self-Preservation Fours tend to be humanitarians, committed to alleviating the pain of others, and will typically throw themselves into whatever they do. As one Self-Preservation Four leader told me, “If someone tells me I can’t do something, I don’t stop until I do it.” This reflects the determination and tenacity that drives the overall Four-at-work style, which blends a deep concern with and compassion for emotional experience with a work style motivated by a desire to prove they can do whatever they decide to do. Self-Preservation Fours temper this intensity with a lightness and sense of fun that helps them transcend their pain and connect with others. 

The Social (or Group-Focused) Four

In contrast to the Self-Preservation Four, the Social Four is more emotionally expressive and more melancholy. Social Fours wear their emotions on their sleeves, hoping to gain attention and support through communicating their difficult feelings. Social Fours are sensitive people who feel deeply connected to their emotions—and connect to themselves at a deep level through experiencing those emotions. 

More than the other two Fours, Social Fours have a habit of comparing themselves to others and winding up on the bottom, viewing themselves as in some way inferior or inadequate. This can seem puzzling to people close to them because they are often (objectively) competent, attractive, successful people. Yet they can be so stubborn in their insistence that there is something wrong with them that you want to ask, “What’s wrong with you that you think there’s something wrong with you?”17 As explained above, this can be understood as Social Fours’ way of hiding out in a negative self-image as a way to protect themselves from the even worse feeling they might have if they go to all the trouble of taking action to get what they want—and ultimately fail.

As leaders, Social Fours have a talent for reminding people of the need to be more authentic and effective by tapping into deep feelings—even if that means facing some pain. They don’t shy away from taking a strong stand for the value of emotions and emotional intelligence in informing the work people do, and their own fearlessness in the face of pain and grief allows them to be courageous and bold when they take action to express themselves creatively. Although at times they may focus too much attention on what feels challenging, at their best they make it safe for others to face their vulnerabilities as a way to develop greater strength as individuals or within teams. 

The One-to-One or Relationship-Focused Four (aka The Sexual Four)

One-to-One Fours are the most competitive of the three Type Four sub-types. They automatically compare themselves to others and want to come out on top, and can become so focused on getting what they need and proving their superiority that they leave impression management behind. And while they adopt this superior attitude as compensation for an underlying sense of inadequacy (that they may not be consciously aware of), others may perceive the One-to-One Four as arrogant or difficult. These Fours may project their pain outward, acting out envy through competing or by expressing anger that others aren’t meeting their needs. They tend to believe “the squeaky wheel gets the oil,” which can result in a vicious cycle, as the One-to-One Four gets demanding, people react negatively, and the Four becomes more assertive or insistent, which intensifies others’ reactions. 

One-to-One Fours’ deeper motivation is a refusal to suffer the pain at feeling less than other people. They may focus on how the outside world doesn’t measure up or affirm their worth, and may try to minimize others’ accomplishments to elevate their own. More shameless than shameful, One-to-One Fours don’t have a problem expressing anger, which is why they sometimes get mistaken for Type Eights, who also aren’t afraid to confront someone if they need to. They may express an elitist attitude, and can have an all-or-nothing view of success—if they don’t win decisively, they will be left with nothing. 

As leaders, One-to-One Fours can be bold visionaries who are willing to fight to be heard and do whatever it takes to achieve success. They tend to have an upbeat, active energy that fuels them to work hard to prove their worth and demonstrate their superior abilities. When they are less self-aware, they can be hard to work with—they will complain when they don’t like what others are doing, protest when they don’t get what they need, and, when they feel inferior, may express anger as a way to assert power and manipulate situations. However, when they are more conscious and aware, they can be interesting and attractive, deeply engaged in their work and their relationships, and passionately committed to doing what it takes to achieve success in whatever they do. They can be innovative and artistic visionaries (like Steve Jobs) who energetically work with others to do great things.

9. HOW FOURS MIGHT STRUGGLE IN WORK AND IN RELATIONSHIPS: STRESS-POINTS AND TRIGGERS

Type Fours sometime feel like being in relationship and/or working with others is hard because: 

  • I often don’t feel understood by the people I’m in relationship with.
  • It can be hard to know how to collaborate, or be around people who don’t share my vision/way of seeing things.
  • My coworkers/friends/family/partner don’t place the same value on emotional expression as I do. 
  • I feel dismissed when others won’t take the time to listen to me and make an effort to understand how I am feeling.
  • I sometimes compare myself with others and can get stuck in the emotions that are stirred up by feeling less than (or more than) other people. 
  • My bosses or coworkers won’t deal with the underlying tensions within the team—and don’t want to hear it when I try to surface them to urge people to address them.
  • It’s hard for me to work well or be in a relationship with someone if they haven’t taken the time to connect with me and understand who I am on a personal level.
  • I can have a difficult time relating to people I perceive as fake or inauthentic.
  • It’s hard for me to engage in small talk or superficial conversations, so I sometimes feel awkward and uncomfortable communicating with coworkers, or in other social interactions which I don’t know well or with people whom I perceive as shallow.

 Type Four Personalities Can Become Triggered…

  • When people can’t slow down long enough to get to know me, or put in the time and effort to do so.
  • When people don’t value my contribution or appreciate the work I do.
  • When people perceive me as negative or pessimistic when I am trying to help by bringing attention to what is missing or not working.
  • When people don’t understand what I am saying or how I am feeling but keep insisting that they do.
  • When others prioritize speed and efficiency over getting the aesthetics/framework right.
  • When my bosses make me spend a lot of time working on mundane tasks that don’t have meaning to me.
  • When I don’t get rewarded or compensated in a way that feels commensurate with my talent or abilities.
  • When people tell me to “just get over it” or “look on the bright side” when I am having difficult feelings about what’s going on.
  • When I’m not heard, or people don’t value my feelings or intuition.
  • When other people don’t care about the aesthetics of the physical environment, or create a negative atmosphere around me.

What people often love and maybe even admire about Fours in work and in relationships:

  • We bring a lot of passion and dedication to the work and the people we find meaningful or important in our lives.
  • We are great people to talk with if you are having difficult or painful emotions (which can be hard to find at work).
  • We make you feel deeply supported when you are going through something that’s hard to know how to handle.
  • We love the creative process, offer a lot of innovative ideas, and help you to access your creativity.
  • We are really good at tasks that require an artistic eye or design talent or an aesthetic sensibility.
  • We have a lot of depth and intensity and so can be fun to talk to, especially about more substantive and meaningful topics.
  • We make an effort to understand you and connect with you.
  • We can be great collaborators when you are aligned with them around a common creative vision.
  • We care about what’s happening among people and have the courage to speak up when something needs to be addressed to enhance team cohesiveness.
  • We aren’t afraid of tough conversations or giving honest feedback.

Challenges for People Who Work with (or are in some kind of relationship, especially a romantic one) with Fours

  • When something isn’t perceived/felt to be working, we will likely confront people about it and express our displeasure openly.
  • We can seem moody in a way that’s hard to know how to deal with, and may slow down work processes or put pressure on the integrity of the relationship when we are upset by something.
  • We can get upset when we don’t feel understood or supported. (And it can be hard to know how to make us feel understood and supported.)
  • We may resent you if you have had some success that we haven’t achieved.
  • We may dismiss people because we judge them as too superficial or as emotional lightweights.
  • We may harbour grudges, or at least feel quite resentful for a time,  if we feel wronged by someone.
  • We may appear self-centred and self-absorbed.
  • We may insist on surfacing issues people don’t want to deal with. 
  • We may get upset or angry if we think our contribution isn’t valued enough.

10. SELF-MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES THAT FOURS MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY

  • Welcome but also moderate emotions. Accept your emotional nature as a strength, but also learn what you need to do for yourself to have your feelings, process them, channel them with awareness, rein them in when necessary, express them in conscious ways, and rise above them or let them go when appropriate. For Fours, this last piece is particularly important. 
  • Build confidence in a positive sense of yourself. Learn to value yourself more from the inside so you don’t need so much validation, understanding, and affirmation from the outside to know you are valuable and good.
  • Temper your emotional reactions to things. Although your emotional intuitiveness is a great strength, learn to give yourself the space you need to be with your emotional responses for a while before you express them in the work environment or a personal relationship. Consciously combining your feeling responses with intellectual insight and an awareness of the context and the other people involved (and their capacity for emotional understanding) will help you to be more effective when you express both your thoughts and your emotions.

All the types can learn to be less reactive and better at collaborating with others through first observing their habitual tendencies, then thinking about the things they think, feel, and do to gain more self-insight, and then making efforts to manage or moderate their automatic reactions to key triggers. 

Fours grow through first observing and then learning to moderate their habitual reactions to key triggers like feeling misunderstood, being dismissed for being moody or difficult, or not feeling valued for who they are and what they contribute. 

When Fours can watch what they do enough to “catch themselves in the act” of doing the things that get them in trouble, and then pause and reflect on what they are doing and why, they can gradually learn to moderate their programming and knee-jerk responses. Here are some ideas to help Fours be more self-aware, more emotionally intelligent, and more satisfied at work (and at home).

  • The problem with noticing what’s missing. While it’s a strength to be able to discern what is needed and lacking, putting too much attention on this too often can lead to others perceiving you as overly negative or unsupportive. 
  • Going for depth, meaning, and intensity. People who lead with a Type Four style value what feels meaningful and can disdain what feels superficial or lightweight. If they overdo this tendency, they may judge others for not being as deep and intense as they are. While meaning is important, it may also be vital to allow for levity—and for the reality that different people have different capacities for engagement and there is a value in a diversity of approaches and tones. 
  • Notice the difference between thinking with your feelings and just thinking in a more objective way.
  • Develop an ongoing awareness of your relationship to your emotions: do you suppress them? Overindulge them? Amp them up to create drama as a way of avoiding something or defending against the emptiness of the mundane? Get stuck holding onto them? Use them to impact or influence others?
  • Be aware of any tendency you might have to hold on to feelings past their expiration date and have a hard time rising above your emotions or moving on.
  • Notice how you compare yourself to others. What is your thought process like when you do this? How does this make you feel? What motivates it? What are the consequences?
  • Observe your tendency to focus on what’s missing or what isn’t working. Notice what motivates that and how it impacts others. 
  • Notice if you have a hard time focusing on what’s positive in the work you are doing or the relationships you have. Be aware of ways you may devalue what’s happening that’s actually good or great through longing for something better—something you may be idealizing because it’s unavailable or distant.
  • Observe any tendency you might have to compete with others as a way of proving your worth or combatting underlying feelings of unworthiness.
  • Notice any desire you might have to need to have others see you as special or extraordinary to defend against a fear of being ordinary or inadequate. See if you can detect what’s underneath that—what motivates that?
  • Observe your tendency to focus on the past or old hurts or disappointments.

11. LIFE-TRAPS THAT FOURS MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY

Here are some of the existential blind spots that us Fours often don’t see in ourselves, but others see in us:

  • Ignoring what’s working well or positive in the here-and-now current situation. People who lead or engage with us with a Type Four style often display what Carl Jung called “positive shadow.” That is, they focus more consciously on what isn’t working or feels bad so that their “shadow,” or the “dark side” elements they don’t want to acknowledge, relate to positive aspects of who they are or what they do. 
  • What’s great about you—your gifts, strengths and positive qualities. Fours tend to focus their attention on what they are lacking, so their strengths and positive capacities—what they do really well—may be blind spots. If they don’t see what’s good about what they do, they risk undermining their efforts or sabotaging themselves by not seeing the good in themselves.
  • Your tendency to be overly “self-referencing”—making things about you and your feelings (when it may not be about you). Fours automatically tune in to their feelings and thoughts—their own inner experience—as a primary focus. Sometimes they may not realize that others see them as overly self-focused, that they make things all about them when they aren’t. 
  • The deeper feelings of pain, fear, and inadequacy beneath the emotions you’d rather focus on as a diversion. Fours have more comfort and fortitude when it comes to difficult emotions, like melancholy or pain, than other types. For this reason, they may not always see how they take refuge in a specific feeling (like sadness or pain) as a way of distracting themselves from a deeper, more painful feeling, like fear of failure or rejection. 
  • All the things you have to be grateful for—and the power of actively remembering to feel gratitude for specific things. Gratitude can be a relatively easy way for Fours to remind themselves to see what’s good in their lives. When they don’t own their positive qualities (see above), they may also forget to think about how rejuvenating and uplifting something like intentionally expressing gratitude can be.

12. WHERE TO START WHEN FOCUSING ON YOUR OWN PERSONAL “FOUR-STUFF”: STRENGTHS TO LEVERAGE & ENQUIRY QUESTIONS THAT I OFTEN ASK TYPE FOUR CLIENTS

It helps Fours to be aware of, actively pay attention to, fully own, and leverage:

  • Their natural ability to understand the emotional level of interactions. Like Deanna, the “empath” (psychic) ship’s counselor on the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation, Fours’ ability to understand what’s going on among people at a deeper, more emotional level can provide useful insights that can help people understand what’s really going on in relationships and within teams. Instead of devaluing this attentiveness to emotions, draw on this wisdom to enhance team dynamics.
  • Their dedication to creating a pleasing and comfortable working environment. People with a Four style place a high value on how things look and feel—they understand that the aesthetics of their physical environment can have a positive impact on people. Fours also naturally tune into people and feel motivated to make sure they have what they need to feel supported in doing their work. By focusing on the emotional tenor of things, they try to remove any emotional obstacles to people doing what they need to do to do their work. 
  • Valuing and championing the importance of forming connections. Fours understand that people who feel connected to each other are likely to work better together, and that people who share meaningful experiences will have an easier time producing meaningful work. 
  • Their fearlessness in the face of emotions many people don’t want to face. Fours tend to express a greater willingness to deal with whatever emotions might arise. A great strength of people with this style is a real willingness to meet difficult situations—and their attendant emotions—head on, and work through them.
  • Their intensity, passion, and the courage of their convictions. Naturally passionate people, Fours bring a real depth to whatever they do. When heartfelt feelings and a desire for deep meaning can be channeled into the work being done, it bodes well for the quality of the results.

 Some Enquiry Questions for Myself (Steve) and my Fellow Fours:

  • Why is it sometimes difficult to let go of specific emotions and rise above your emotional reactions and move on?
  • What do you get out of focusing on what’s missing? What are the consequences on dwelling on your feelings relative to what’s missing or lacking?
  • Notice your tendency to compare yourself to others and feel “less than” or “more than” other people and try to understand what motivates that.
  • How and why do you focus on feelings of melancholy or anger? What’s behind your focus on those feelings?
  • What is happening when you focus a great deal of attention on needing to be understood and affirmed by others?
  • What is happening when you amp up your feelings to create drama, or alternatively (if you are a Self-Preservation Four) if you get masochistic and focused on toughing things out alone or needing to prove yourself?

Fours can also grow through consciously becoming aware of the self-limiting habits and patterns associated with their personality style and learning to embody the higher aspects or more expansive capacities of the Type Four personality:

  • Learn to become conscious of comparing yourself to (or competing with) others and aim at rising above the mind-set of measurement. Allow yourself to feel good about exactly who you are without regard to how you stack up against someone else and remember that everyone has talents and challenges.
  • Learn to become conscious of when you are overidentified or over-involved with a particular emotional state and intentionally rise above it. Aim for equanimity as a higher state in which all feelings are equally important, but all feelings come and go. As the saying goes, if emotions are like clouds that pass by and pass away, identify with the sky, not the clouds.
  • Learn to recognize when you are getting overfocused on what’s missing or what feels disappointing and consciously pay attention to what is going well and what feels good.
  • Learn to be aware of any fear of loss or rejection or misunderstanding you might experience and try not to take things so personally. Learn to let things (or people) go when they don’t serve you.
  • Learn to be aware of avoiding certain emotions through focusing on other emotions. Notice when dwelling on a specific pain or sadness or frustration may be a way for you to distract yourself from something deeper, and allow yourself to welcome whatever is true, knowing you will find a way to cope.
  • Learn to be more conscious of any negative beliefs you hold onto as a way of avoiding any fears you have of what it will mean to embrace your goodness and your competence. Question old automatic thoughts about lack and substitute a belief in your own abundance.

 Overall, Type Fours can fulfil their higher potentials by observing and working against their habit of overfocusing on their own interior sense of how they might be lacking or what their environment might be missing, and by learning to balance their need for deep connection and emotional expression with a sense of what is right or appropriate for the situation or the relationship/team/family set-up. When they can value themselves and their own contributions more consciously, they will need less understanding and affirmation from the outside. When they can have compassion for themselves and learn to value their real strengths, they can communicate more of who they really are and have a greater impact without needing to be validated by others or evaluated according to other people’s achievements. And when they can combine their dedication to meaning and creativity with an acceptance of their own and others’ real capacities, without needing to see them as more or less, they can lead and engage with others by inspiring them through a kind of deep appreciation, respect, and openheartedness.

And what if you’re not a Four, but would like to get on better with a Four in your life. How to do that? Here are some tips:

  • Understand us. Fours are sensitive to feeling misunderstood, so if you make a sincere effort to understand us, you will take a giant step toward getting along with us. (However, it bears repeating: us Fours will often be the judge of whether you understand us or not, not you, which can make understanding us a sometime tricky thing to do.)
  • Let us express our emotions without reacting or “fixing” us. If you let us vent our emotions and make a sincere effort to hear us out, those emotions may subside and the underlying issue may resolve itself. If you don’t let us express ourselves, we probably won’t “shut up”, and the issue probably won’t be resolved either.
  • Let us know you value us and our unique contribution to the team, or family, or the relationship. We Fours long to be seen and recognized for what we do, especially when we are doing something that expresses our singular gifts. Take the time to tell us you appreciate us, and if possible, be specific about why you appreciate us.
  • When we have a problem, don’t tell us to “look on the bright side.” If your Four friend, partner, family member or co-worker takes issue with something or highlights what’s missing in their lives or a situation, either seriously address the nub of what we are pointing to, or let us know in clear, kind terms why you aren’t going to be able to help us with this problem.
  • Be authentic. Affirm our desire for authenticity.  Fours have a sixth sense when it comes to detecting inauthenticity and insincerity. Be real and honest in the same way that we are and it will strengthen our working and intimate relationship with you.
  • Connect with us in a meaningful, and personal way. Show us you care about knowing who we are and forming a meaningful connection to us, by listening to us and taking the risk of sharing a bit of your own personal information and vulnerability.
  • Help us to see beyond the emotional level of our upset without devaluing our emotions. You can support us Fours in your life by validating our expressions of emotion, but also telling us when you think we may be overdoing it (even if we blow up when you do so!). And remember: we will generally hear you more clearly (and not get as defensive) if you honour our feelings as “heart types” first.

FURTHER RESOURCES FOR FOURS & THOSE WHO LOVE THEM:

This is a great, easy-to-follow overview by Russ Hudson of the Four personality style, which also offers some practices which Fours (or all of us) might find helpful when struggling with “Four-Stuff” in our lives.

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Feel Better

Working Therapeutically with an Enneagram One (Reformer) Personality Style

Hello. Perhaps you’ve landed on this page because you’ve done an Online Enneagram Personality Test which has given you a One as your main personality type, and now you’re scratching your head wondering what this means in terms of your self-development or therapy journey.

Are personality types no more than just a description of different traits – like a star sign? Or can a deeper understanding of our personality structure, or “self”, and the way it works at a psychological level, help us to play the game of life with a little bit more grace, and less suffering?

[Read more about Personality-Focused Psychotherapy]

One way to think about the Self is that it might work as a kind of Lens or “Operating System” through which our psyche (?) mind (?) “life force” (?) or “soul” (?) flows. Whenever we express a thought, or belief, or opinion about our lives and our struggles, it is usually the Self (an “I”) that is doing the talking for us:

I feel sad about…
I feel satisfied with life when…
I don’t understand why s/he said that…
I find this [thought/feeling/situation] painful to think about or deal with.

Of course we don’t normally think about these utterances as a “Self” talking through us, because it (we) are always just sort of here in the conscious experience of “I”, of Self, with its particular filter on the world always present. Like fish, we swim in the “waters” of Self, but are usually completely oblivious to what “water” actually is.

Therapy is perhaps an opportunity for us to look at, and work through the content of our experience, the different ways we might have filled the gaps above to describe what is going on in our lives, but also to pay a slightly different kind of attention to how our struggles are often being shaped or contained in a certain ways for us through this “Self”, or Ego, or “I”. Not in the negative sense of having a “big ego”, but simply in terms of this psychological “I”. Which is to say: our personality style, character, Ego, Self.

This is not our whole Being or Consciousness. We can also step back (as we often do, especially in therapy) and look at the Self from a more detached, less conflicted perspective. Maybe from the perspective of someone who cares for us, but also knows us really well. This perspective might also become one we develop in our relationship with that person (“me” or another therapist) who would like to accompany you and assist you with your journey into understanding, healing, and developing your Self.

Most of the time though, we experience our Selves either from either the perspective of an Inner Critic who tells us how we’re failing at Life (or how Life is failing us), or from the Driver’s Seat of our Core Self.

Whoever that Core Driving Self is (pick a number!) whoever is driving the bus –driving us to do the things we do, or make the choices we make– it clearly has a special way of operating. Others can often see, for better or worse, how we tend to operate, as we can also see their Selves at work in how they talk, think, and behave. In therapy, we can try to get to know this Core Self a bit better (as well as those of the people we’re in relationship with), and hopefully find out what we’re all about.

As you read about your One “Self” below, a portrait that reveals both the light and shade of “you”, try not to judge your Self, or feel bad about how this Self comes across when laid out in this somewhat reductive, psychological way.

If reading through this portrait makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, ashamed, or exposed, that is a good sign, it really is.

This is certainly how I felt when I first read about my own personality style“Am I really like that!?! Oh dear. Well, OK, for good or bad, that does seem to be how “I” roll… [sigh]” 

This kind of response might perhaps indicate that we are gaining new insights, or at least a bit more humility about our Selves, especially when embarking on the kind of therapeutic search that you’re engaging with for your Self right now by reading and reflecting on this.

With insight, we can hopefully learn how to handle our Self/Selves a bit better in terms of how we deals with those generic but often unpleasant realities of life: physical and emotional pain, uncertainty, as well as the various forms of constant work, both inner and outer that we seek to fulfil. The Self is always the interface through which we learn how to do this, trying as best we can to put into practice the lessons we’ve learned.

If  you find when reading about the One “Self” described below, that it doesn’t feel like the kind of “I” you identify with, please have a quick look again at my Overview of The Nine Personality Types.

Your Core Self will make itself known to you there, as when you catch sight of yourself in the reflection of a shop-window or a mirror. Each of us holds aspects of every personality type within us (we all come from the same species,) but at a psychological level, our Core Self is usually present through our entire life journey, and shapes how we see the world, inwardly and out.

Human happiness and satisfaction seems to be strongly connected to getting the best out of our core Selves (i.e. our particular personality style, as well as following our unique threads), alongside learning how to manage with the not-so-great, and at times even “crappy” stuff that comes with each “I” or person-ality.

1. SNAPSHOT OF A ONE: HOW MANY OF THESE TRAITS DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH?


If most or all of the following characteristics apply to you, you may have a predominantly
Type One personality style:

  • I have an inner-critic or “coach” that operates most of the time. This inner voice (or sense) continually monitors what I do and provides ongoing feedback about how well I did or how I missed the mark and could have done better.
  • I am sensitive to criticism. While I welcome honest feedback (because I place a high value on constant attention to improvement), I feel sensitive to criticism from the outside because I am already my own harshest critic.
  • I naturally think in terms of “good and bad” and “right and wrong.” I try hard to be “good” and place a high value on doing the right thing. I often can’t help seeing things in black and white, though I may have learned through time and experience to see more shades of grey.
  • I notice errors and want to correct them. I easily spot typos and spelling errors and crooked pictures and other such misalignments and feel driven to fix them.
  • I follow the rules all or most of the time. I believe rules support the well-ordered functioning of social and work life and therefore should be respected.
  • I live my life with a lot of “shoulds” and “musts” in mind. This provides me with a clear set of principles and ideals to guide my choices and actions (and helps me to avoid making mistakes).
  • I place a high value on being ethical, honest, and reliable. Integrity is very important to me, and I strive to always do my best in everything I do. I may secretly judge others who do not aspire to the same level of quality or good behaviour, even though I may also judge myself for judging them.
  • I overcontrol my emotions and impulses. Perhaps out of a desire to be responsible and appropriate, I control myself a lot. I strive to engage in “good” behaviour and (perhaps unconsciously) fear spontaneously unleashing my emotions and impulses would lead me to engage in bad behaviour.
  • I can sometimes appear opinionated or self-righteous. When I feel strongly about something, I tend to express myself in ways that others may view as inflexible or dogmatic, but I can’t help thinking that I am just telling the truth or voicing what I know is right.
  • Work has to come before play. It feels hard to relax and allow myself to have fun if I haven’t fulfilled all my duties and responsibilities.
  • I believe in self-improvement. I consider it important to always try to do my best and make things (and potentially myself) more perfect.
  • I often believe there is one right way to do something, which is my way. I enjoy the challenge of finding the best way to do something. Once I find the right way, I want to do it my way, since it is the best way, and I may become irritated if others don’t agree.
  • It feels amazing when it’s perfect. I feel the loveliest sense of peace and well-being inside—more viscerally than emotionally—on those rare occasions when something I do or see feels absolutely perfect.

2. WHY AM I LIKE THIS? THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A ONE


Here is a kind of “Origin Story” (or Trauma Story for how the psyche of a One was formed):

“Once upon a time, there was a person named One: “me”. You could say that I came into this world as a spontaneous and curious child, ready to appreciate the inherent perfection of life. Completely serene and accepting, I felt free to experience joy and fun in everything I did. I took things lightly and flowed flexibly with life, with myself, and with everyone around me.

But early in life, I may have had a painful experience of feeling criticised. When this happened, I felt pressured to conform to others’ standards of good behaviour. So I unconsciously tried to cope with the pain of feeling judged and punished by proactively monitoring and criticising myself before others even had the chance to. You might say that I internalised the standards others applied to me and then tried to be “good” and do the right thing all the time. I began to feel that I had to be almost perfect to be seen as worthy, and that I had to work hard to control myself in order to be “good.”

In his quest to be good, I developed an ability to notice and correct my own errors, to see how everything I did could be more perfect, and to determine what needed to be improved in the world around me. I worked really hard to uphold the highest standards of good behaviour and may have even judged people harshly who didn’t follow the rules. I became excellent at making things excellent— including myself. I began to evaluate everything I saw in terms of how bad or wrong it was—most of all (unfortunately) myself.

Over time, I became very good at being virtuous and avoiding mistakes. I found the best ways to do things and adhered to all the rules of good behaviour all the time. In fact, I criticised myself whenever something turned out imperfectly (which was often, if not all the time) and tried to do better the next time. But in the process of getting better and being better, I kind of lost touch with many aspects of myself. I may have stopped feeling or doing anything that might have even the smallest chance of being considered wrong. I lost most my awareness of my instinctual impulses, my feelings, my creativity, my spontaneity. I even began to lose touch with my own inner sense of what feels right for me, especially if it might be judged as wrong. You could say that I lost touch with my own inner intuition or instincts.

By imposing strict limits on myself, I guess I learned to avoid anything that could possibly be wrong, including my own deepest rhythms, wishes, and dreams. I began to get very angry when others didn’t follow the rules, but, instead of expressing my anger, I hid my feelings and, like my Type Nine friend/colleague/family member, tried to be nice. I prioritised being ethical, reliable, and responsible in everything I did. I also felt compelled to control everything I possibly could to make sure that I got things right every time. And I might have even punished myself when I didn’t. My survival strategy you could say wouldn’t let me do anything else. And in fact I felt irritated about that too—but I generally couldn’t let anyone know that I felt irritated.

What I didn’t realise was that everyone around me did know I was angry because, when I enforced what was right, I often stomped around or might have even banged my fists on the table or talked in a sarcastic tone of voice. It became part of the way I operated when in survival mode. I didn’t necessarily like being like this either—in fact, it was very hard on me—but I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t acknowledge my anger, because being angry is not “good”. Sometimes I felt tired and sad as a result—almost letting myself feel, for feelings do come out in the end But what could I do?

Eventually I became completely deadened to any real sense of my self. I “fell asleep” you might say to my own inherent goodness—a goodness that clearly reveals itself to me and others in my good intentions and my genuine desire to be a good person. But I can only keep following the rules and working hard to meet the highest standards in everything I do, even if at times it almost kills me to do so. I sometimes think that I have also completely lost awareness of my deeper human need for fun and relaxation, as well as my basic human wish (don’t tell anyone!) to be “bad” once in a while.”

Early in life, many of us Ones experience pressure to be good or responsible or to do things the “right way” according to an outside authority, followed by criticism when we aren’t “good enough” or don’t do it “right.” In response, we unconsciously adopt a coping strategy that internalises that external critical voice, and then monitor and criticise ourselves to enforce good behaviour. People with our personality style are people who genuinely tried (and still do try) to be “good” boys and girls, who mostly follow the rules, who want things to be done really, really well, if not perfectly, and who always make an effort to “do the right thing.”

We generally adapt to our environment by making sure that we are working hard to do things “the right way,” being good (in a moral sense), and often trying to be perfect (to reduce the possibility of further criticism). In this way we can preemptively defuse potential critics on the outside by proactively criticising ourselves on the inside. By “beating others to the punch” when it comes to finding fault in our own behaviour, we can then relax a little, because we genuinely believe that our proactive self-control will protect us from the (potentially painful) surprise attack of criticism from others, or of things going wrong.

On a really good day, we get to experience the deep sensation of well-being when something we do really does meet our high standards of quality or perfection. Though it often eludes us, we understandably continue to seek this deep sense of inner satisfaction by constantly striving to be “perfect.” When that high target can’t be reached, we at least need to know we did our best and tried as hard as possible. Because of this relentless focus on perfection, it is often hard for us to appreciate the good that we actually are able to do, to understand that few things are ever perfect, and see our considerable efforts as “good enough.”

3. CORE MOTIVATIONS OF A TYPE ONE PARTICIPANT: WHAT “DRIVES” A ONE?


The strategy of monitoring ourselves to be responsible, do the “right” thing, and improve things focuses our attention on determining what the right thing is and how we can do that right thing. Ones naturally envision the “perfect” and notice how what is happening measures up to our ideal of quality (or not). Thus, our attention typically goes to detecting errors and correcting them, knowing the rules and following guidelines of proper behaviour, and avoiding bad behaviour and mistakes. Us ones focus a lot of attention on judging how well or poorly we are doing whatever we do, as well as whether the people around us are doing the right things, and how those things could be refined or improved.

At work, but also often in our personal lives too, we Type Ones are very results-oriented, rational, and logical. We focus on working hard to do a good job and making sure others are doing their part. We may be concerned with how others are falling short and holding people accountable to make sure they are following the proper guidelines and doing the work they are responsible for.

We often also focus attention on the details and processes that structure work, or our lives in general, so that all the little things get done well and according to the right procedures. We generally appreciate rules and structure because rules and structure provide information about how things work, and how work should be done, as well as how people are held accountable. As leaders we have a great talent for seeing what structures are needed and knowing how to provide structure to help things go more smoothly. Nelson Mandela had a One personality style, as did Queen Elizabeth II, Thoreau, and even Plato.

4. ONES AT WORK & IN RELATIONSHIPS


Generally, individuals with a Type One style want very much to make the world a better place and often dedicate ourselves to social causes or movements. We can often be like “moral white knights,” unselfishly working to improve life in different ways, often getting involved in efforts like curing diseases, protecting the environment, or educating the poor. We notice what’s wrong in the world and feel driven to fix it—both as a natural consequence of automatically seeing the flaws in how things are and because we usually feel responsible for (and satisfied by) doing good.

We believe in the social compact: thinking that if everyone would just follow the rules of civilised society, everything would run smoothly. When we perceive that others are not doing the right thing—not doing their jobs the way they should, or failing to follow the rules or proper procedures—we can often be critical and even punitive. This is because for Ones, if I am not doing what I am supposed to, it goes without saying (for me) that I am doing something “wrong”. And if I am doing something wrong, I should admit it or be called out and censured so I can reform my bad behaviour. However, when people admit to their failings, I can often be very forgiving, believing that people who are willing to admit their mistakes deserve compassion. Unfortunately, I can go less easy on myself though.

My clear inner sense of right and wrong, and good and bad, may mean that I often see things in terms of absolute, black and white categories. I generally tend to think something is good or bad, right or wrong—and try my best to be good. While many of us Ones can learn over time to see shades of grey and forgive people’s moral failings, we do often tend to focus on whether someone has integrity and may judge people who are more “morally flexible” as failing in some way.

5. UNDERSTANDING WHY ONES THINK, FEEL, AND BEHAVE THE WAY THEY DO?

Mental

Because the Type One outlook is based on our need to be good or right or perfect, we also believe that it’s our job to make the world a better place through striving for perfection and engaging in virtuous behaviour. Although we are “body-based” types whose personality is shaped by an important connection to our kinesthetic sense or “gut knowing,” we can often come across as quite “in our heads”. This is because we often automatically apply our own high standards to others and the way they conduct themselves, often thinking in terms of “shoulds” and “musts” and may have some rigidly held ideas about what constitutes good and bad behaviour. Work must come before pleasure, so it is often hard for us to relax before all our work is done.

Emotional

The One personality is fundamentally shaped by the experience of anger, both as a result of our early, natural response to outside pressure to “be good” and our perception that the rest of the world doesn’t act from that same pressure. But because we think expressing anger (and other emotions) is not a good thing to do, we tend to hold back and overcontrol our angry feelings. In so doing, we might experience an inner conflict with regard to our anger, or other strong emotions. As a result, sometimes these feelings leak out in pressurised forms like irritation, frustration, resentment, or self-righteousness. At other times, our belief in the virtue of “right behaviour” may lead us to express emotions that are the opposite of what we are actually feeling—so if I am really angry with you, I might even come across as excessively polite. In psychological terms, this is called “reaction formation,” a defence mechanism that automatically helps someone avoid feeling one emotion by magically turning it into its opposite. This tendency to repress or overcontrol our feelings also means we may inadvertently avoid good feelings when repressing the “negative” feelings that we fear.

Behavioural

The endless quest to make things right or perfect can lead to work habits that make us Ones effective and successful. However, it can also result in procrastination, as we may put off finishing or turning in work because it’s not perfect enough. We may also engage in passive-aggressive behaviours that reflect the fact that we feel angry inside, but don’t want to acknowledge or express it. We may, when this happens, appear rigid and inflexible, go silent, or withdraw but implicitly communicate a mood of tension, resentment, or irritation. While we may think we are successfully containing and hiding our annoyance, it often shows up in our non-verbal behaviour, as tightness in our face and body or a frustrated tone of voice.

  1. WHAT I’M REALLY GOOD AT AS A ONE

    • Doing the right thing. We almost always focus on doing what’s correct. We generally take the high road. This makes us responsible, reliable, trustworthy, and dependable.
    • Being ethical and responsible. We believe everyone should act according to socially agreed upon standards.
    • Working hard and being improvement- and detail-oriented. We are motivated by a deep desire to achieve an ideal of perfection in ourselves and everything we do.
    • Quality control. It is a baseline assumption and a core value for us that the things we do should be done right. We are very good at providing a roadmap for achieving excellence.
    • Creating processes and structures (that support work and productivity). We are good at providing clarity. We are clear thinkers who see when there is a need for structure and we excel at providing it. This quality helps assure that things will be done in the right way, according to clear expectations and precise plans.
    • Making significant, well-intentioned efforts. A close friend of mine is a One, and while his wife may have some complaints about some of his behaviours, she often says, with great affection, “No one tries harder than he does.”

    However, as for all of us, our greatest strengths can also trip us up at times. If we overuse our strengths (and don’t consciously develop a wider range of skills), these strengths can also turn out to be our Achilles’ heel. Let’s see how this can happen.

    • Doing the right thing. We can sometimes become rigid and unyielding about our way being the only right way, and may not see that there may be other ways of doing things that are equally good or better.
    • Being ethical and responsible. We can stress ourselves out by working too hard and become resentful of coworkers we perceive as not working hard enough.
    • Working hard through being improvement- and detail-oriented. We may think we need to keep the pressure going to improve—that if we aren’t constantly criticising ourselves or others, or the system, everything will fall apart—but our unrelenting criticism can sometimes create a negative work or home environment in which people might feel micromanaged.
    • Quality control. We can focus on an ideal of perfection that is not realistic and push for impossible or undesirable standards, which can result in missing deadlines, overstressing ourselves (and others), and pressuring colleagues and loved ones in unreasonable ways.
    • Creating processes and structures (that support work and productivity). However helpful those guidelines may be, they may also lead us to prioritise routine over spontaneity and inadvertently stifle innovation, enthusiasm, and creativity.
    • Making significant, well-intentioned efforts. While my Type One friend almost always operates from a genuine intention to help others and do the right thing, he can sometimes get pushy, argumentative, impatient, or judgmental when he puts too much pressure on himself to get everything right or enlighten others about our errors and imperfections.

    Fortunately, our sincere interest in self-improvement can mean we are open to seeing the downside of some of our personality tendencies. We will often make good use of constructive feedback to correct ourselves, even when the needed course correction means recognizing when the problem is being too focused on what is correct.

    7. HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY ONES


When stressed to the point of going to our “low side,” we Type Ones are less able to manage our habitual reactions and can seem critical, harsh, and judgmental. We may be unaware of our anger and the impact of our angry feelings, and are sometimes rigid and inflexible. Since we are naturally detail-oriented and perfectionistic, when we are under pressure we may worry that other people can’t be trusted to do things right. We may have a hard time collaborating, delegating, and trusting that our others are capable of matching our high standards. And then we can become resentful that we take more responsibility than others for doing whatever is needed in the right way. Meanwhile, our coworkers, friends, and family may experience us as control freaks who want to micromanage every little thing.

Type Ones acting from our lower side of the consciousness spectrum may become self-righteous, insisting that others conform to our view of good behaviour and assuming that everyone “should” be judged (or punished) for their bad or ill-conceived behaviour. In line with this, stressed-out, overly defensive position, we may understandably end up focusing a great deal of attention on whether other people are doing what they should be doing, and can blame others excessively for what we see as wrong or imperfect behaviour.

On the “high side,” when we work on being self-aware and conscious, we can be supportive, admirable, inspiring, funny, and even heroic. Us Ones strive to be virtuous, and we are often deeply good people with the best intentions and little “ego”—we want to do a good job for the sake of doing a good job and don’t care if we get the credit or “look good.” (Though it would be nice if people acknowledged uswhen we are right or do something really well.)

As emotionally intelligent Ones, we are able to temper our seriousness about quality and standards with humour and levity. We dedicate ourselves to the things we do fully and display a strong commitment to hard work and the success of the team or organisation, but we can moderate our need to be right and listen to others deeply. Personal growth work helps us to be in touch with our anger, not judge ourselves for it, but to channel it constructively. When we are more aware of our tendencies and live from the high side of our personality style, we can laugh at ourselves, soothe our inner-critic, and also have compassion for ourselves and others.

8. THE THREE KINDS OF ONES: HOW OUR THREE INSTINCTUAL BIASES SHAPE OUR PERSONALITY STYLE

Type One Subtype Personalities

According to the Enneagram model, we all have three main instinctual drives that help us survive, but in each of us, one style tends to dominate our behaviour. The Type One style is expressed differently depending on whether a person has a dominant bias toward self-preservation, establishing social relationships and how we fit into groups, or one-to-one bonding.

The Self-Preservation (or Self-Focused) One

While the Type One style is often described as “perfectionistic,” we Self-Preservation Ones are the true perfectionist among the three kinds of Ones. Motivated by fear about stability and security, we’re the type of One that frets and worries the most. Us SP Ones are often the most responsible person in our family, even from a young age, and develop a habit of wanting to control everything, usually because we feel like our survival or well-being is at stake. We can be ultra-responsible and super-competent, but also tend to feel anxious about things going right. We may work too hard, pay too much attention to every little detail of everything we do, and try to fix things that don’t need fixing.

While Self-Preservation Ones are the most self-critical of the three Ones, we also tend to be warm, friendly, and kind to others. We hold back our anger the most of the three Ones and may not be very conscious of feeling it at all. However, we tend to be angry underneath, and that anger may leak out as resentment, irritation, or self-righteousness, or be held as tension in our bodies. Us Self-Preservation Ones see ourselves as often being exceedingly imperfect and in need of improvement and are less critical and more forgiving of others’ faults and mistakes.

As leaders or parents, we SP Ones tend to be gentle, benevolent, funny, and appreciative of others’ efforts. When less self-aware, we may want to micromanage everything and wear ourselves down from the inside through our harsh and relentless self-criticism. We may also criticise others excessively and believe that people are intentionally doing things wrong and should therefore be punished (after all, don’t we really know better?). When healthy, us SP Ones lead through modelling a high ideal of hard work and dedication. We tend to be tireless in our efforts to produce the best possible outcomes, do the best job we possibly can on everything we do, and support others in thoughtful ways.

The Social (or Group-Focused) One

In contrast to the Self-Preservation One, who feels very not-perfect and so actively strives to be more perfect, us Social Ones act as if we are perfect already, as if we have studied how to do things the right way and can relax a bit because we may indeed have found the best, or “right-est” way to do the things we do.

Social Ones not only try to learn and do things the right or perfect way, we automatically take on the role of showing others what we have learned. This gives us Social Ones a teacher mentality, and while this can lead the people around us to perceive us as taking a superior position to others (and in some ways we are), this motive usually remains unconscious, as we just want to be seen as good and wouldn’t want to intentionally assert that we are better than other people.

We can often be intellectual types and are usually very knowledgeable. We also hold back our anger, but instead of appearing warm, like the Self-Preservation One, we can sometimes be a bit cool or cold, in line with our more intellectual way of relating. While most Social Ones try not to express anger, we do express a kind of anger in needing to be the “Owner of the Truth” (as in knowing the right or perfect way), and we can explode periodically when triggered.

As leaders or parents, we can enjoy and take pride in helping others (for example: our children) through modelling good behaviour and the best way to do things. We tend to like researching the perfect way to do something and teaching others how to perform at our best. However, when we are less self-aware, we may become angry or frustrated if people aren’t doing things “the right way,” or ignoring or rejecting our efforts to enlighten them. Others may perceive us more unaware Social Ones as acting superior, viewing us as “know-it-alls” who patronise or argue with others who don’t acknowledge our expertise. When in a healthy frame of mind though, us Social Ones can be humble, thoughtful, responsible, and intelligent. We typically serve as inspiring mentors and supporters who guide others with the best of intentions to do our best work in the best way possible.

The One-to-One (or Relationship-Focused) One

One-to-One Ones focus energy and attention on perfecting other people—we are less critical of ourselves and more critical of others. More reformers than perfectionists, we often zealously try to improve society and the people around us, from our community to our colleagues to our significant others.

We are also the most openly angry of the Type Ones, although our anger can often be expressed as passion or zeal or energetic support of a cause. Us Relationship-Focused Ones can be more demanding of others than the other types of Ones—we may insist on our needs being met, as if we are entitled to special treatment because we are aligned with a higher moral calling or position. We can also be good at lobbying or evangelising for the things we believe in.

As leaders or parents, we bring lots of energy to a cause or professional effort, or to managing our children’s lives. We can work tirelessly to enact reforms or create change or engage in a campaign we think will improve others or the social environment. When less self-aware, we can be somewhat entitled, heavy-handed, and harsh. While claiming the moral high ground, we can also sometimes blame others for what’s wrong, while (unconsciously) absolving ourselves of fault and ignoring our own mistakes. Sometimes we may actually focus so much on what others need to do to reform their behaviour that we may engage in bad behaviour on the sly—as a way to get our needs met while releasing ourselves from the burden of our own excessive (internal) moral pressure. 

When healthy, however, we can energise others with our strong beliefs, endless zeal, and moral ambitions. Like Gandhi, we can quite literally change the world through our vision, our principles, and our efforts. We can push an agenda and empower others in the strongest possible way behind a cause we believe in or to meet a societal need.

9. HOW ONES MIGHT STRUGGLE IN WORK AND IN RELATIONSHIPS: STRESS-POINTS AND TRIGGERS

Type Ones sometime feel like working with, and being in relationship with others is hard because:

  • Other people might not do things as well as I want them to. They may not share my high standards. It can be hard to trust others to do the job the right way.
  • Sometimes I assume somebody else won’t do the job the right way, so it’s easier to do it myself. This can lead to me working harder (and longer hours) than others, and then feeling resentful.
  • Others may not like structure or respect the rules and routines and processes as much as I do. When this happens, others may engage in what I see as “bad behaviour,” which can lead to me judging them.
  • It’s hard not to judge my colleagues, or family members, when I can see so clearly that everything would be better for all of us if we all followed the rules and strived harder.
  • Sometimes when I try to help others by giving them constructive feedback, they perceive it as criticism. My intention is only to help, but my input sometimes gets experienced as harsh and judgmental.
  • I tend to believe we should approach problems in a logical, rational way, and that it’s unproductive to share my feelings. But this can sometimes lead to my intentions being misunderstood.

Type One Personalities Can Become Triggered…

  • When people break the rules.
  • When people litter or don’t clean up after themselves.
  • When people violate what I view as courteous behaviour, such as arriving late to meetings (consistently) or turning work in after the deadline, or not saying please, thank you, or sorry.
  • When people behave in a way that is inconsiderate of others.
  • When people don’t follow established processes and procedures.
  • When people make excuses instead of taking responsibility for their mistakes.
  • When mistakes are not corrected and therefore get repeated over and over again
  • When people act unethically or irresponsibly
  • When people don’t park right between the lines—when they behave in ways that have a negative impact on others and don’t realise what they are doing and correct their behaviour
  • When people don’t acknowledge my competence or capacities

Others can sometimes find it difficult to work with or be in relationship with us Ones for these reasons:

  • I can sometimes seem to be upset or angry, even when I’m not saying anything.
  • When I do get angry or upset, I can at times be self-righteous and unbending.
  • I can sometimes withdraw and stop communicating— giving others the silent treatment.
  • I can get tense and seem stressed when discussing a point of disagreement.
  • I might criticise or judge other people, their work, or behaviour.
  • I might struggle to allow for the possibility that others may at times be more right than I am. 
  • I might insist that something gets done my way and give the impression that I am not open to multiple or better options.
  • I might not trust others to do as good a job as I think would be the case if left to me.
  • I can sometimes be super-rigid and inflexible when it comes to following rules and adhering to proper procedures.
  • I can take the moral high ground in debates and so give the impression that I am always right.

10. SELF-MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES THAT ONES MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY

  • Needing to be right. It might be vital for us to really question if it’s always so important to be right. It may help to remember this question: “Is it more important for me to be right or to be happy?” This can begin with us noticing when we choose being right over being happy.
  • Seeing things in terms of black and white. Many Ones know intellectually reality is more about shades of grey. But in practice, and in the heat of the moment, sometimes we forget this. It can be good to keep this in mind in order to help us reduce our rigidity and impatience.
  • Being overly critical of myself or others. This involves noticing when the inner or outer critic is out of control. It can be painful to watch people punishing themselves when they are trying so hard and doing so well. When we can consciously ease up on ourselves and show ourselves compassion, we can free up a lot of energy for good-enough work and pleasure.
  • Working too hard to make things perfect. The reality is, most things are imperfect, and “good enough” is often exactly that. It can be liberating for us to learn through experience that we don’t have to drive ourselves (and others) crazy chasing impossible standards when we don’t really have to.
  • Rigidity around rules and processes. We often tend to think that everyone knows the rules and sees them the same way we do. It helps us Ones if we remember that people really don’t see rules and procedures the same way as we do, and so aren’t misbehaving when they don’t follow them—they just have a different perspective and are likely focusing on something else.
  • Righteous anger and resentment. This involves allowing ourselves to feel, understand, and work with our anger more. Anger doesn’t go away just because I don’t acknowledge it—and unacknowledged anger has an impact. It helps us Ones to learn to befriend our anger as a sign that something important is getting triggered that needs our attention.

11. LIFE-TRAPS THAT ONES MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN IN THERAPY

Becoming conscious and aware of our “blind spots” can help all of us to be less defensive, more open to feedback from others, and more peaceful and content through being more fully aware of all that we think, feel, and do.

The kinds of “blind spots” that Ones often don’t see in themselves, but may be picked up by our loved ones or colleagues are things like:

  • The presence and impact of anger. Us Ones often think, “I’m not angry” at the same time we are talking with a clenched jaw, or tightening every muscle in our body, or using a tone of voice that drips with annoyance. By noticing how we defend against feeling our anger, we can learn to be more open to understanding it and consciously channel it in productive ways that don’t undermine our effectiveness or our happiness.
  • Overdoing criticism and the impact it has on others. Becoming aware of and moderating our inner critic helps us to be less sensitive to criticism from other people and to recognize and adjust how much we focus on the negative (what we see as needing improvement) while avoiding taking in what’s positive. When we offer criticism to others, we usually intend only to help and support them through our feedback, we sometimes fail to realise how much anger we are also transmitting, or that we sometimes hurt and undermine the very people we aim to help.
  • The downside of self-criticism. Ones often believe we need to be tough on ourselves to make sure we engage in good behaviour and avoid mistakes or blame. However, we may not see how much damage our self-criticism does to our own self-confidence. Instead of “keeping ourselves in line,” we may be undermining our sense of our own inherent goodness.
  • The repression of feelings and impulses. People with a One style often claim they don’t experience a lot of emotion—we tend to be practical and pragmatic and sensible. However, the degree to which we stifle our naturally occurring emotions and impulses may prevent us from drawing important information from what we feel and want.
  • Rigidity and “one-right-way” thinking. Ones may not notice that other people perceive our insistence on adhering to certain “right ways” of doing things as rigid. It is important for us to remember that different people view rules and procedures differently, that there can be more than one “right” way to complete a task, and that being open to adapting to others can create more positive and fruitful working relationships.
  • The need for relaxation, pleasure, play, fun. The habit of not acknowledging the value of rest and relaxation can be very dangerous for us. Our drive to be good and prove our worth through hard work can lead to working too hard and putting too much pressure on ourselves.

12. WHERE TO START WHEN FOCUSING ON MY “ONE-STUFF”: STRENGTHS TO LEVERAGE & ENQUIRY QUESTIONS TO START PONDERING

It may help me to…

  • Try noticing when I am being way too hard on myself. Noticing when the costs outweigh the benefits of self-criticism.
  • Try to own my anger. Notice if my anger rises but if I judge it or push it down or rationalise why I shouldn’t be angry. Notice what happens to my angry feelings if I try to suppress them or talk myself out of them.
  • Notice if I rationalise my anger as “virtuous anger.” Under what conditions do I get self-righteous or hold onto my angry feelings because I feel or think myself to be right?
  • Observe how I react in the face of positive feedback. Is it hard to take in? How do I handle compliments?
  • Notice how I deal with things not being perfect. How do I put pressure on myself and others to do everything right all the time—even when it’s clear that achieving perfection is impossible?
  • Notice what gets in the way of me delegating. Do I trust others to meet my high standards? Can I allow for things to be done in a way that doesn’t perfectly match up to my ideals?
  • Think about how I relate to rules, processes and structure? Can I break the rules? What happens when other people break the rules or operate outside established procedures? How do I react? Can I lighten up?

Strengths to Leverage

Here are some strengths that we as Ones already possess that can help us leverage and manage these suffering aspects of our personality style:

  • My dedication to working hard to do good in the world. Sometimes we might be seen as the quintessential “do-gooder.” While we have a tendency to be self-critical, we also feel motivated and confident when we can consciously own the positive effects of the good we do in the world and the good people we are.
  • My high level of personal integrity. Ones are people others can count on to do the right thing and who often contribute to an enterprise by being the conscience of that organisation, family unit, or partnership.
  • My high standards of quality. This can help us realise that we play an important role in advocating for excellence.
  • My strong sense of responsibility. Ones will seldom leave early, shirk our duties, or try to get away with doing less than a very good job on something we care about.
  • My good intentions and extreme efforts. We can hopefully begin to defend against our inner-critics by remembering that we tend to give our best effort in nearly everything we do.
  • I am a clear thinker who often provides clarity and supportive structures. Us Ones are very good at communicating complex ideas in simple language and seeing where structure is needed, and then building it in.

Enquiry Questions to start reflecting on:

  • Why do I go overboard in criticising myself or others? What drives that?
  • What kinds of things cause me to feel angry? Why do I react the way I do? Are there times when I am angry but I don’t know I’m angry?
  • Why do I value structure and processes? How does this benefit me and others?
  • Where do my high standards come from? Why they so high?
  • Why does work have to come before play? Where does my sense of responsibility come from? Can I relax it?
  • Why is it so important for me to be right? Why is it equally important to avoid making mistakes? What happens when I am wrong? Can I accept my fallibility without beating myself up for it?
  • What feels challenging when it comes to things like delegating and handing over power to someone else? Why?
  • How can I develop more compassion for myself?

Ones can also grow through consciously becoming aware of the self-limiting habits and patterns associated with our personality style and learning to embody the higher aspects or more expansive capacities of the Type One personality:

  • Learning to accept and work through angry emotions so that we can find more peace and serenity in our everyday experience.
  • Observing how we can limit ourselves by focusing too narrowly on one right way or “the perfect” outcome and practice opening up to many right ways, and the potential for beauty in the imperfect or the unexpected.
  • Notice if I am viewing things in a “black and white” way and allow for more shades of grey.
  • Observe when the defence mechanism of reaction formation is happening—notice when I act and speak in a way that’s contrary to how I really feel. Then practice getting in touch with the truth of my emotion and finding ways to express it honestly.
  • Notice how I can slip into a very serious mood when I am driven to criticise what is happening, and consciously open up to more levity and playfulness. Find ways to use humour more to rise above whatever’s bothering me.
  • Recognize what kinds of experiences make me tense and practice relaxing (physically) and finding opportunities for pleasure and fun.
  • Notice how I can get rigid around routines, structure, and processes and practice being more spontaneous and creative.

Overall, Type Ones can fulfil our higher potentials by observing and working against our habit of focusing on how we are failing to meet an ideal standard of perfection. We can learn to be more comfortable with the perfection of our imperfections, have more compassion for ourselves, and allow for our sense of lightness and humour to play a larger role in our everyday experience. When we can then lean into our higher capacity for fun and relax the need to “be good”. In this way we can infuse our personal life and our work-life with confidence, creativity, and the deep sense of integrity that is so natural to us, and also acts as our strongest suit.

If I are not a One, but have a relationship with a One, here are some tips for getting on better with the Ones in my life:

  • Be clear and precise. Us Ones believe that working together, or being in a relationship with us, requires us to “get things right”, as much as possible, which usually means being clear about goals, processes, and who’s responsible for what and how we will be held accountable in each case.
  • If you make a mistake, admit it and take responsibility. This inspires trust and assures us that you will come forward and own and fix whatever you do wrong. As you can see, we don’t like mistakes, but we can forgive people who take responsibility for them.
  • Demonstrate that you value quality. Us Ones will feel more comfortable collaborating with you if you are aligned around this central goal.
  • Have compassion for our drive for perfection. Understanding our need to get things right and the pressure we put on ourselves to be perfect can help us recognise what motivates us to hold ourselves and others to high standards. It may also help us to be more patient with you if/when we get tense or resentful (which we probably will at some point, being human just like you, even if not always admitting to our human frailties and weaknesses).
  • Understand our tendency to criticise and empathise with how hard we can be on themselves. If you need to deliver critical feedback to a One, remember how much we want to do quality work, or give you what you need, and that we are already very tough on ourselves internally.
  • Emphasise positive feedback (and deliver constructive criticism very gently). Us Ones will feel supported if you can help us really hear it when you want to communicate how well we did something. When offering constructive criticism, it will lessen the blow if you also mention our strengths.

FURTHER RESOURCES FOR ONES & THOSE WHO LOVE THEM:

This is a great, easy-to-follow overview by Russ Hudson of the One personality style, which also offers some practices which Ones (or all of us) might find helpful when struggling with “One-Stuff” in our lives.

In the episode below, I take a deep dive into all things One, trying to give an overview of how the Enneagram Type One Personality might shows up in our lives as a kind of continuum (or ladder) of psychological and spiritual health.

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Feel Better

Working Therapeutically with an Enneagram Eight (Challenger) Personality Style

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PLAYING THE INFINITE GAME (AS AN EIGHT)

  1. Snapshot Of A Eight: How Many Of These Traits Do You Identify With?
  2. Why Am I Like This? The Psychological Development Of A Eight
  3. Core Motivations Of A Type Eight Participant: What “Drives” A Eight?
  4. Eights At Work & In Relationships
  5. Understanding Why Eights Think, Feel, And Behave The Way They Do?
  6. What You’re Really Good At As A Eight
  7. Healthy Vs. Unhealthy Eights
  8. The Three Kinds Of Eights: How The Three Instinctual Biases Shape The Three Type Eight Sub-type Personalities
  9. How Eights Might Struggle In Work And In Relationships: Stress-points And Triggers
  10. Self-management Challenges That Eights Might Want To Work On In Therapy
  11. Life-traps That Eights Might Want To Work On In Therapy
  12. Where To Start When Focusing On Your Own Personal “Eight-stuff”: Strengths To Leverage & Enquiry Questions That I Often Ask Type Eight Clients

1. SNAPSHOT OF A EIGHT: HOW MANY OF THESE TRAITS DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH?

If most or all of the following characteristics apply to you, you may have a Type Eight personality style:   

You see the work you do through the lens of how you can assert your power to get what you want done. You naturally read what’s happening in terms of who has the power and how they wield it. It’s so natural for you to be powerful, you sometimes have to hold yourself back from expressing your strength so you don’t overpower people or situations.

People tell you that you intimidate them, which surprises you, since you aren’t doing anything to intentionally intimidate anyone. Others sometimes perceive you as a bully, even though you are just doing what you normally do.

You don’t have to be the leader, but it’s easy for you to take charge. You often get drawn into taking the lead—it feels easy and natural for you, and people often look to you for direction, even when you aren’t the actual leader.

You want people to tell you the truth and be direct. You like to be in control and know what’s going on, which is why you value honesty and directness.

You make your own rules and can feel like you are above the law. You often don’t see a reason to follow rules, especially if they don’t make sense or go against what you want to do. You don’t readily acknowledge anyone’s power as greater than your own.

You will rebel against authorities if you need or want to. You will stand up to people with power if they don’t use their power wisely or justly.

You work very hard. You may work so hard and so long that you hurt or injure yourself because you tend to deny or ignore your physical limitations. You can “forget yourself” and overload your normal capacity, and you may not pay much attention to taking care of yourself.

You are fearless—unafraid of taking bold action and acting decisively. You typically don’t register fear—you feel like you can handle anything and never shy from a challenge.

You aren’t afraid to voice your (strong) opinion or push for what you want. You have a great deal of confidence in your views and don’t hesitate to push for what you think is right. You may even confuse your truth with the objective Truth.

It’s important to you to be powerful, strong, and in control. You automatically take your own strength and power for granted.

If someone wrongs you, you can marshal a great deal of energy to right the wrong or get back at the person if you choose to. Although you may not want to think that you like to get revenge on people who have done bad things to you, you kind of do want to get back at those who cross you.

Although you don’t always need to get angry, you experience anger as energy flowing through your body, and you can feel it and express it fairly easily. Eights sometimes get stereotyped as “angry,” but it’s not really true. It’s more that they have easier access to anger and usually don’t have a problem expressing it.

You don’t always know your own strength; it can be hard for you to judge your impact on people and situations. You may sometimes apply more effort or power than is really required.

 2. WHY AM I LIKE THIS? THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A EIGHT 

Here is a kind of Origin Story for a lot of Eights.

“Once upon a time, there was a person named Eight. She came into this world as a sensitive and sweet child. She was completely innocent, as all children are. She had a lot of energy, always saw the best in people, and was eager to learn all she could about the world.

But early in life, Eight had an experience in which she needed protection and there was no one there to take care of her. Sometimes there were things she just couldn’t do by herself, even though she was bright and capable for someone so young. The people in her life that were bigger than she was didn’t seem to notice when she needed to be cared for, listened to, or fed. And a few times, when one of the older kids hurt her, no one saw that she was little and needed protection.

So Eight learned—the hard way—that she had to take care of herself. If no one else was going to do it, it would have to be her job. She would have to get big—fast! (Too fast.) She would have to be strong. She would have to be powerful, even though she was still small. Sometimes people around her fought, and they didn’t notice she was scared. So she would have to be fearless, in addition to being big, and strong, and powerful.

Eight had a lot of natural energy, so in time she became fully able to protect herself. She became strong and learned how to take care of herself by herself— and sometimes other people as well. She learned to be scary instead of being scared. And she was good at it! One thing that helped her to be as strong as she needed to be was her ability to get angry. Sometimes, when someone did something she didn’t like, she could get very angry very quickly. Anger felt like energy rushing through her body and, although she didn’t always plan to get angry (or even want to), it helped her a lot. Her anger helped her to be even more fearless— and even more scary. And appearing large, angry, and scary made it possible for her to feel fully capable of taking care of herself.

Eventually, Eight didn’t even notice when she wasn’t protected by the people from whom she expected protection, because she didn’t feel so helpless any more. The only problem was that now many things made her angry. And, in a way, she liked being angry—or at least didn’t mind it. It just happened, especially when she needed someone and there was no one there for her, or when older girls bullied her at school because they sensed her power and didn’t like it.

Soon, Eight didn’t even notice when no one supported her, because she could support herself so well. She didn’t need anyone. She was strong enough. And everyone else seemed much weaker than she was. She was told that sometimes she scared people even when she wasn’t trying to. Sometimes people left when she entered a room or stopped talking after she spoke loudly. She wasn’t sure what was wrong with them. Why weren’t others as strong as she was? Weak people made her angry, and her anger made her feel strong and full of energy. But sometimes she saw that weak people were treated badly or unfairly, and then she used her strength to help them if they needed it.

Every once in a while, Eight felt a little bit lonely. She discovered that sometimes, when she was the most powerful person around, others didn’t want to be close to her. She didn’t really understand it, but that’s the way it was. And she was mostly okay with that, because she could usually get what she wanted. All she had to do was become angry and scare a few people. She didn’t really care if anyone liked her. She had lost the sensitivity she was born with. It didn’t really work to be sensitive and strong and powerful, and she needed to be powerful to take care of herself.

Soon Eight noticed that she couldn’t stop getting angry; she couldn’t stop being strong and powerful. And why should she? She wasn’t sensitive and innocent anymore. Being that way reminded her too much of when she was too small and weak to protect herself. It was much better to be strong and powerful. She always knew how to take care of everything. Why would she give that up to feel like a scared little girl again? Occasionally, she felt a little bit alone because almost no one was as strong as she was. She sometimes got a tiny bit sad because there was never anyone there to take care of her. She had to take care of everyone. But then she would sense her own energy and strength, and she would feel glad that she was so powerful. Nothing and no one could hurt her. That seemed like a good thing, even though it was sometimes really, really hard on her.”

Eights’ adaptive strategy of acting powerfully grows out of an early experience of feeling powerless. Self-aware Eights tell stories of not getting their needs met in childhood, often in ways that felt traumatic and caused them to feel they must “get strong” to survive. They often have a history of having to take care of themselves (or others) when they were too young to be able to do so, or being the youngest child in a large family—a small person among bigger people—in a combative environment. From this experience of feeling vulnerable and alone, the Eight resolves to never be powerless again, and adapts by becoming super strong and capable.

 Eights often see the world as divided into “the strong” and “the weak,” and so decide to be strong as a way of never being weak again, to the point where they deny their vulnerability altogether. Many Eights eliminate any memory or experience of being vulnerable or weak in order to experience themselves as strong and invincible. Their central coping strategy of being powerful and strong shapes their personality style in a way that makes them truly fearless and forceful in their interactions, able to take on any challenge and do big things in the world.”

As is clear from the above story, Eights adaptive strategy of acting powerfully grows out of an early experience of feeling powerless. Self-aware Eights tell stories of not getting their needs met in childhood, often in ways that felt traumatic and caused them to feel they must “get strong” to survive. They often have a history of having to take care of themselves (or others) when they were too young to be able to do so, or being the youngest child in a large family—a small person among bigger people—in a combative environment. From this experience of feeling vulnerable and alone, the Eight resolves to never be powerless again, and adapts by becoming super strong and capable.

 Eights often see the world as divided into “the strong” and “the weak,” and so decide to be strong as a way of never being weak again, to the point where they deny their vulnerability altogether. Many Eights eliminate any memory or experience of being vulnerable or weak in order to experience themselves as strong and invincible. Their central coping strategy of being powerful and strong shapes their personality style in a way that makes them truly fearless and forceful in their interactions, able to take on any challenge and do big things in the world.

3. CORE MOTIVATIONS OF A TYPE EIGHT PARTICIPANT: WHAT “DRIVES” A EIGHT?

The strategy of being strong and invulnerable leads Eights to focus on power and control. They don’t like to be controlled or told what to do, and don’t pay much attention to rules or limits, including their own physical limitations. They do pay attention to who holds power and how they express it, who is competent and who isn’t, who can be trusted and who can’t, and who might need their protection and support. They also attend to the big picture—what the larger goal is, what work needs to be done and the right way to it.

People who lead with a Type Eight style focus on creating a power base, extending their influence, working hard, and playing hard. They see what problems need to be solved and who can be counted on to help move things forward in effective ways. Eights take things at face value unless they have a reason not to, can see through bullshit and have no patience for bull-shitters. They don’t let anything stop them when they have something to accomplish, including their own physical needs or weak points, and tend to be attuned to all the ways they can fulfill their appetites for stimulating physical experiences.

Eights notice when others are being treated badly and need to be defended—they are highly tuned in to social or human injustice, and when they see someone who needs protection, they often move into action. I once heard an Eight tell an incredibly moving story of sleeping in a pen with a frightened, newly rescued pit bull all night to comfort him. Whether it’s supporting those in need or achieving a difficult goal within an organization, Eights deploy a great amount of energy and power to take action, assert control, and make sure things get done.

4. EIGHTS AT WORK & IN RELATIONSHIPS

Generally, individuals with a Type Eight style view the world in terms of how power is being used or misused, and how it can be drawn upon to make things happen. They believe that if you’re not strong, you’re weak, that it’s good to be strong and bad to be weak, and that they are strong. They don’t hesitate to use their strength to get what they need, take charge of situations, and protect those they care about. They unconsciously deny their own weakness and focus on how to exercise power in the world to dominate whoever might go against them or the causes they support.

Eights also see the world in terms of justice and fairness. They can be rebels or revolutionaries who want to assure that they and those they seek to protect are treated justly, and will take action to correct injustice. Type Eights are sensitive to being controlled by others and tend to believe that they are above the law, making their own rules often and disregarding or breaking rules they judge as wrong or simply decide don’t apply to them. If they see a need—something important that they decide needs to be done to help someone or balance the scales of justice—they will move into action to do it, regardless of the rules.

 In line with their big, energetic presence and action-oriented temperament, Type Eights have a big appetite for stimulation and typically experience a strong need to indulge in physical pleasures of all kinds. Eights are body-based types who seek to satisfy their powerful desires in the world, whether those desires are for good food, a good time, or a good challenge.

If you identify with this type, you hide a soft, vulnerable, deep, warm, defenceless, caring, beautiful, and very human person underneath your “armour”—the real you. But you will need help from people you trust to shed that armor. This will be difficult and you will need to be reassured that you are “okay.” Remember that, by intentionally accessing vulnerable emotions, you demonstrate the true level of your bravery. Here are some of the painful feelings you might experience in this process.

  • Fear that people will take advantage of you. Fully feeling this fear has the power to bring you more in touch with your heart so you can access your vulnerability.
  • Pain and hurt that you resist. When you lower your defenses, you can welcome back your sensitivity and feel the stored-up pain that has always been there, but that you have denied. When you acknowledge pain connected to feeling unprotected, unsupported, disregarded, hurt, or wounded, you can move past your need to be strong. Stay in touch with the truth of this and talk about it with a therapist or a close friend. Take in the care and love you deserve. Have compassion for yourself for all you did to protect your sensitivity when you didn’t even know it existed. Protect yourself from people who won’t understand or respect the shift they see in you when you open up to your sensitivity.
  • Exhaustion from overextending your physical and emotional capacities when you try to do more than is humanly possible. It takes a toll on your body when you act as if you are indestructible and express strength without awareness of your limits.
  • Confusion about your identity when you no longer feel as strong as you did before, even though you don’t want to put your old armor back on.
  • Insecurity because of doubts about what to do. This can be a healthy thing. While it may sound bad, this helps you to grow in the right direction. Your old survival strategies made you believe you could always do more for everyone. Now, you need to tell others that you are not made of iron.

5. UNDERSTANDING WHY EIGHTS THINK, FEEL, AND BEHAVE THE WAY THEY DO?

Mental

Eights are “body-based” types who tend to favour action over analysis. While they can be very intellectual, they typically engage in more doing than thinking or feeling, and their thinking tends to be strategic, focusing on assessing situations in terms of the power dynamics, the strengths and weaknesses of the people involved, and the necessary actions to make something happen. An Eight’s thinking also centres around control: how to establish and maintain it, how not to be controlled by others, and how to exert it to motivate people. However, the Eight outlook may be most noteworthy for what Eights avoid thinking about—their own weaknesses. The habit of denying any vulnerable feelings fuels their focus on action, which often means not pausing to think about what they are doing (and why) before they take action to do something.

Emotional

Type Eights tend to be intense, passionate people who have the capacity to feel things deeply if they let themselves. The “body-based” types (Eights, Nines, and Ones) are associated with the “core emotion” of anger, and Eights tend to overdo theirs, easily accessing the emotion when it gets triggered by a desire to correct an injustice or express displeasure. Many Eights describe anger as a sensation of energy that moves through their bodies, reflecting both the connection they feel to their physical selves and the forceful, physical way they experience the emotion. In fact, whatever emotion they feel—whether it’s love or happiness or disappointment—Eights feel it strongly and deeply, although they usually don’t feel emotions on the vulnerable end of the spectrum like sadness, pain, or shame.

 Behavioural

 Eights are people of action—they lead with their “gut knowing,” often act without thinking, and tend to misjudge how much force to apply to a given action. One Eight leader described it as having a propensity for “ready, fire, aim.” Because of their powerful, energetic presence and their desire to do big things in a big way, Eights often have a huge impact on the people around them, but don’t always recognize exactly what their impact is or how to moderate their energy when interacting with others. They habitually take bold actions to make things happen, sometimes as a way of discharging all the energy that courses through them, or to express the passion and intense desire they feel to make an impact. Eights have big appetites for stimulating experiences and tend to work hard and play hard, resulting in a lifestyle that has been described as “too long, too loud, too late.”Secure in their omnipotence, they often “forget themselves” and deny their vulnerability as they take on every challenge and maintain a high level of intensity in the things they do—both at work and in their personal lives.

6. WHAT YOU’RE REALLY GOOD AT AS A EIGHT

  •  Ability to see the “Big Picture.” Eights look at all the elements of a situation as a way of determining how to make big things happen and keep things moving in the right direction.
  • Confidence in tackling tough challenges. Eights don’t doubt themselves. Their default mode is to feel very self-confident (whether that’s warranted or not) and enjoy demonstrating their power and abilities by taking on difficult tasks and achieving successful results.
  • Ability to take bold action and maintain control of whatever’s happening. Eights don’t experience fear of failure or fear that people won’t like them—they automatically move things forward and make things happen, even when the outcome is uncertain or movement seems risky.
  • Good at mentoring and empowering people. Naturally protective of those they like, Eights easily and generously lend their strength to others as a way of helping them grow stronger and more competent.
  • Confident in approaching conflict. One of the perks of not being in touch with vulnerability is the ability to do conflict with less fear and self-doubt than others. Since leadership often involves dealing with conflicts, this is a useful superpower to have.

However, as for all of us, our greatest strengths can also trip us up at times. If Type Eights overuse their biggest strengths (and don’t consciously develop a wider range of skills), they can also turn out to be their Achilles’ heel. Let’s see how this can happen.

  • Ability to see the “Big Picture.” Eights can be so preoccupied with making a big impact that they may not have the patience for dealing with small details. They prefer ambitiously aiming for the horizon to making sure every little thing goes right—sometimes to their detriment.
  • Confidence in tackling tough challenges. Sometimes, a little self-doubt can be a good thing. Plus, Eights may be so used to taking on big challenges that they can’t rein in the intensity of the effort they put toward everything—and they sometimes apply too much pressure.
  • Ability to take bold action and maintain control of whatever’s happening. Sometimes Eights forget to moderate their intensity or slow down their impulse to act. They can overcontrol things to the point where either they are doing everything themselves or inadvertently squelching spontaneity and creativity.
  • Good at mentoring and empowering people. Eights may miss some opportunities to mentor others because they can intimidate people without knowing it—their lack of awareness of their own vulnerability can make them seem unapproachable or scary, so they may not be as connected to their direct reports as they might like to be.
  • Confident in approaching conflict. Eights’ ability to do conflict can lead to an over-readiness to confront points of disagreement that can actually cause or initiate a conflict, when it might be better to solve the problem through diplomacy or other methods.

 7. HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY EIGHTS

When stressed to the point of going to their “low side,” Type Eights can be harsh, blunt, aggressive, and controlling. They can be loudly intolerant of what they view as incompetence, and express the belief that they are the only ones capable to do what needs to be done or explode at anyone who crosses them. They may have a heightened “us against them” attitude and rage at people who make mistakes. Under pressure, Eights may come down on people who aren’t following the rules and then break them openly themselves. They may act on impulse and make obvious mistakes, and they may take revenge on people they think have wronged them, but view their own behaviour as justified as opposed to vengeful.

Less self-aware Eights can steamroll people and confuse their truth with the objective truth, believing they are always right and sometimes imposing a “my way or the highway” approach. They may say they are open to listening to others, while simultaneously acting in ways that discourage honest communication. They may be completely unable to share power or trust that anyone can do anything as well as they can. And the more vulnerable they feel deep down, the more unwilling they will be to experience it, and the worse they may act. They may abuse their power and undermine their own success by acting from unexamined anger, being excessive, and taking action impulsively without considering the consequences.

On the “high side,” conscious Type Eights motivate and inspire people with their confidence and dedication. They model a quiet, solid sense of strength and help people feel safe to take risks and accomplish big goals. They exercise appropriate control, but check in with people and listen to the input of team members, and trusted friends or loved ones, and are able to check themselves and slow down so that they have time to think more deeply about the actions they want to take. Self-aware Eights understand that they can intimidate people without meaning to, and they work to be more mindful of their own vulnerabilities and share them with others as a way of ensuring people feel comfortable approaching them, confiding in them, and collaborating with them.

When living more from the high side, Type Eights mindfully moderate their forcefulness and their boldness, blending their ability to express power in useful ways with an ability to stand in the background and allow others to be powerful. They balance their natural assertiveness with an ongoing awareness of their humanness and their weaknesses and challenges, and connect with people more easily through sharing more of their personal story and revealing more of their tender side. Healthy Eights take care of themselves more actively and don’t forget themselves by working too hard without limits. They have a healthy awareness of their own limitations as well as their strengths and their natural power to lead.

8. THE THREE KINDS OF EIGHTS: HOW THE THREE INSTINCTUAL BIASES SHAPE THE THREE TYPE EIGHT SUB-TYPE PERSONALITIES

According to the Enneagram model, we all have three main instinctual drives that help us survive, but in each of us, one tends to dominate our behaviour. The Type Eight style is expressed differently depending on whether a person has a bias toward self-preservation, establishing social relationships and positioning themselves in relation to groups, or one-to-one bonding.

The Self-Preservation (or Self-Focused) Eight

 While they are strong, bold, and relatively fearless, Self-Preservation Eights also have a concern with material security. This can make them more focused on creating wealth and maintaining a sense of having enough resources than the other two Eights, and they may feel financially insecure, even when they have plenty of money in the bank. Self-Preservation Eights know how to get what they want—they know how to barter or bargain, and are good at getting the upper hand in negotiations or finding ways to satisfy their desires for things.

This is a more reserved, introverted, “Five-ish” Eight who doesn’t need as much power over people or a large sphere of influence. They usually feel protective of others, but over a smaller group—perhaps only their immediate family and a few people they are closest to. These Eights are the most defended or “armed” Eights. They will rarely, if ever, show their emotions—especially vulnerable emotions, and tend to have a difficult time asking others for what they need, even though they can be effective in getting their needs met themselves. While they can be friendly and warm (especially female Self-Preservation Eights), they may be less communicative than the other two Eights. They will want to make things happen, but may feel no need to discuss what they are doing with others or explain themselves to anybody.

At work, but also in their relationships, Self-Preservation Eights will make decisions and take action quickly, without necessarily pausing to get buy-in from others. Their greater need for security will likely make them more strategic and self-interested, but they may also do what it takes to enlist support for their plans and projects—albeit in a minimalist way. They tend to possess a quiet strength, and in their need to be strong, may devalue the world of feelings as another way to avoid experiencing vulnerability. When moving forward to accomplish something or fulfill a need, they tend to avoid sharing information about themselves, and they won’t show much tolerance for weakness or incompetence.

 The Social (or Group-Focused) Eight

 The Social Eight is the “counter-type” of the three Eights. Eights tend to be somewhat “anti-social,” in that they don’t always observe the norms of society and aren’t afraid to go against authorities or convention. But the Social Eight is also oriented toward protecting others and establishing friendships. So, this is a “social-anti-social” Eight, a person who easily rebels against established rules and authority, but also feels motivated to protect and support others. Archetypally, this is the child who stepped in to protect the mother against the father—this Eight becomes tough through going against the patriarchy out of a need to support people who may not be able to defend themselves. They take action out of solidarity.

This Eight’s stronger orientation toward protecting people makes them more mellow, more friendly, and less obviously aggressive. They still tend to be direct, assertive, and strong, but they may also appear more Two-ish—more inclined toward offering support and doing for others. Interestingly, they may also take refuge in the group, or in leading groups, as a way to avoid the vulnerability they may feel in more intimate, one-to-one relationships. They may feel safer in positions of leadership, where they can control what’s happening and get lost in the crowd.

Social Eights can fiercely defend their team or colleagues, and focus a great deal of energy on mentoring people, coaching direct reports, and taking individuals under their wing. They won’t always need to be the leader, but will get drawn into leadership roles if the group needs guidance. And when they see someone being oppressed or abused by someone with more power, they tend to step in quickly to offer protection. Social Eights say that they hardly ever express emotion in front of other people, though they can be compassionate with others who feel vulnerable. In this way Social Eights may take care of others as a way of addressing their own vulnerability without having to go there themselves. And while Social Eights can offer love and care to others who need their support, they don’t tend to be very open to receiving that same love and care themselves.

 The One-to-One (or Relationship-Focused) Eight

 One-to-One Eights are the most rebellious Eights, with the strongest anti-social tendency. They like to be at the centre of things—to “possess” everyone’s attention—and they like the power that comes from being outspoken and going against rules and norms. These Eights express a great deal of intensity and passion and are the most emotional of the three Eight subtypes, and are more likely to feel things passionately to the point of showing their emotions. One-to-One Eights are provocative people, who may take pride in being “bad” or rebelling against traditional authorities and conventional ways of doing things.

In contrast to the other two Eights, One-to-One Eights are more colourful, more power-loving, and more magnetic. They express a need for dominance and want people to surrender completely to their will, desiring to be in control of everything and everyone. They have great powers of seduction, look for pleasure in life wherever they can find it, and may indulge their appetites without limit. One-to-One Eights love feeling an adrenaline rush, which they can get from winning the game or taking over a company, and seek adventures, intense experiences, and risk.

At work, One-to-One Eights like the feeling of being in charge. They may fill up a room with their big energy and dominate the scene by talking louder and longer than everyone else. They move passionately and quickly into action, usually not taking time to think things through or find out what others think. They tend to be intolerant of weak, incompetent, or slow people. And while One-to-One Eight leaders can be very clever, they may demonstrate a certain detachment of the intellect, as they have a strong preference for acting and feeling over thinking. They will focus a great deal of attention on one-to-one relationships and lead through getting people to submit to their power or their vision of what needs to happen. They may inspire people with their passion and confidence, but it may be hard for them to observe appropriate limits, understand the potential negative consequences of their actions, share power, or submit to others’ leadership.

9. HOW EIGHTS MIGHT STRUGGLE IN WORK AND IN RELATIONSHIPS: STRESS-POINTS AND TRIGGERS

Type Eights sometime feel like working with others, or being in relationship with others is hard because:

  • They aren’t always as competent as I am.
  • It can be hard for me to collaborate or be in relationship with people I regard as weak or don’t fully trust.
  • I can get incredibly impatient when people take a long time to make a decision.
  • Sometimes people don’t keep me in the loop when I want to be informed about what’s happening.
  • I like to take action, and sometimes people slow me down or get in my way by getting bogged down by details or trying to reach a consensus first.
  • People tell me I’m intimidating, when I’m just trying to do my job (and I’m not trying to scare anyone).
  • They focus a lot of time and energy on details I don’t view as important.
  • They don’t tell me the truth.
  • They aren’t direct—they bury a request at the bottom of an e-mail that includes a lot of irrelevant information.
  • They don’t see the big picture as clearly as I do.

 Type Eight Personalities Can Become Triggered…

  • When people are weak and don’t step up to the plate to just do what needs to be done.
  • When people go behind my back or say things indirectly.
  • When people perceive me as controlling when I’m just trying to move things forward.
  • When people get caught up in indecision or analyzing something forever and don’t take action.
  • Slow people.
  • People who whine about what’s happening but don’t do anything to solve the problem.
  • People who don’t say what they really think.
  • When people beat around the bush instead of just telling the truth.
  • When people try to limit me or get in my way.
  • When people try to micromanage me.
  • When people misperceive my passion and energy as hostility or intolerance.
  • When people in power mistreat people.
  • When other managers mess with my team.

 10. SELF-MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES THAT EIGHTS MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY

  • Tendency to intimidate others (even though you don’t mean to). It will be easier for you to work with others if they aren’t scared of you. If you can understand that this tends to happen—even though you don’t try to do it—you can consciously temper the behavior some find unsettling and forge better connections with people.
  • Seeing your truth as The Truth. Given your natural personal power, it makes sense that you sometimes (often) assume you are right about the way things are. But, the truth is, sometimes you’re not. It will help you achieve better outcomes when working with others if you listen to their opinions and open up to the possibility that they might be right.
  • Not always listening to others. Similarly, things may go better for you if you can slow down and make a point of taking in the feedback and input of others. They may have more to offer than you think they do.
  • Tendency to need to be invincible. Although it may not seem like it at first, moderating your need to be invincible and softening up and sharing more will help you to relate more to others and collaborate more closely and effectively with them. Allowing yourself to be more known will probably lead to you being more liked, which could feel awkward and uncomfortable—but it will be good for you to get used to that.
  • Tendency to rebel against rules and limitations. It will be good for you to acknowledge that you aren’t always above the law—that some restrictions, when appropriate, do apply to you. As a leader, there may be times when it’s good to model an acceptance of limitation.
  • Tendency to “put it all out there.” As an Eight, you have a huge amount of energy—it can help you a great deal to consciously rein it in at times, realizing you can moderate how much energy you apply when you choose to.

How we might start to focus on this in our sessions

  • Observe your tendency to want to move into action. What is behind that? What might happen if you don’t get to move forward in the way you want? How difficult is it to slow down?
  • Notice your tendency to be impulsive. Notice any impatience that comes up that fuels your impulsivity. Note what causes you to be impatient and how you react.
  • Observe any anger or aggression that arises. Allow yourself to learn to observe it more—what causes it, how quickly it arises, and how you deal with it.
  • What is behind your desire to control everything and have a say in everything? What happens when things are beyond your power to control? How do you react?
  • Notice your tendency to be excessive in the things you do—or feel or consume. How easy or difficult is it for you to modulate your intensity and excess?
  • Can you usually judge the impact you have on others correctly? Why or why not? Do you always have the impact you intend? If not, what happens?
  • Are you ever aware of feeling vulnerable? If not, what’s up with that? If so, under what circumstances? Can you communicate with others about any vulnerable feelings you might have?

 11. LIFE-TRAPS THAT EIGHTS MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY

  • Your vulnerability (and weaknesses and limitations and vulnerable emotions). Type Eights often deny their vulnerable feelings completely and focus on being strong and powerful as a way of further keeping any vulnerable emotions at bay. It’s crucial for Eights to become aware of their weaknesses, for so many reasons: 1) they’re part of the truth of how you feel and who you are; 2) they balance out your strength; 3) they make you feel more approachable to others; 4) they allow you to connect more and more deeply with others.
  • The value of slowing down and thinking things through. Eights can cause big trouble when they aren’t able to identify instances in which it’s better to take time to think about taking action before actually taking it
  • Your impact on others. Eights can improve their ability to work with people by being open to learning more about how they affect them. They often misjudge their impact because they focus their attention on doing what they want to do, as opposed to how it might affect people.
  • How much force is really necessary for a specific task. Eights sometimes apply more force than matches what might need to be done. It can be good to learn when a light touch is actually more effective.
  • How their impulse to protect others is about projecting their vulnerability onto other people as a way of addressing it at a distance. While the desire to protect others can be a highly positive quality in Eights, it also often serves to help them mask their own vulnerability. This happens when they project any subterranean feelings of weakness they may have (but not be aware of) onto others (instead of seeing it inside themselves) and then go into action to support others they view as needing protection. So, it’s good for Eights to realize that the urge to protect others can be a sign of needing to attend to their own hidden vulnerabilities.

 12. WHERE TO START WHEN FOCUSING ON YOUR OWN PERSONAL “EIGHT-STUFF”: STRENGTHS TO LEVERAGE & ENQUIRY QUESTIONS THAT I OFTEN ASK TYPE EIGHT CLIENTS

It helps Eights to be aware of, actively pay attention to, fully own, and leverage:

  • Confidence, power, and strength. It may be more challenging for you not to leverage this obvious strength. Being confident and strong may be like breathing for you—and others likely count on you to be as confident as you tend to be in everyday life. And, perhaps paradoxically, if you develop your ability to be in touch with your vulnerability regularly, you can leverage the strength of your strength even more powerfully.
  • Fearlessness in the face of conflict and big challenges. Your ability to tune out fear allows you to do many things without being hampered by the anxieties that can hold people back.
  • Ability to support and protect others. Chances are, the people you work with count on you to lend your strength to others in different ways. This can make you a key part of any team, whether you are the leader or not.
  • Big-hearted and generous. At your best, the soft side you don’t always show to others shines through anyway in the way you put so much heart into work you feel passionately about—or the generosity you show to others when you care about them. The more you own this consciously, the better for everyone.
  • Ability to see the big picture and move big things forward decisively. Every team and organization needs people who can develop and maintain a grand vision of what’s possible. You not only hold this in mind, but it motivates you to take people there—meaning you likely play a crucial role in providing the inspiration and the fuel to help people do great things.

Questions I might ask a type Eight client in therapy:

  • Why is it so important to be so strong and powerful? What will happen if you aren’t? (Can you even imagine that?)
  • What is your anger really all about? What is it really expressing, at a deeper level? What does it do for you? How might it hold you back or thwart you?
  • Is your sense of being able to control things really just a defensive illusion? (In the psychology business we call this defense “omnipotent control,” a form of “magical thinking” in which you tell yourself you can control everything, when the reality is, you really can’t.)
  • Why might it be difficult for you to show a softer side of yourself to others? What happens to your tender feelings? What might be hard about letting yourself feel them or communicate them?
  • What feels hard about letting other people support and take care of you? What do you actively do to discourage people from showing you affection?
  • What’s going on in you when you behave in ways that other people find intimidating?
  • What are the upsides and the downsides to not being in touch with your vulnerability?

Eights can also grow through consciously becoming aware of the self-limiting habits and patterns associated with their personality style and learning to embody the higher aspects or more expansive capacities of the Type Eight personality:

  • Learn how anger may run you at times, and challenge yourself to learn what’s underneath it, instead of just acting it out. Allow yourself to learn to understand and regulate your aggression, balancing anger with a greater awareness of any hurt or pain or fear that might be beneath it—and learn to communicate that with strength as well.
  • Notice how difficult it is to have an ongoing awareness of your weaknesses and this important truth: it takes a great deal of inner strength to be truly vulnerable. The best leaders are able to selectively disclose vulnerability. The more you can do this, the more you will be loved and appreciated, not just for your leadership ability, but for who you really are under the armor.
  • Learn how asserting yourself so strongly can merely give you the illusion of control, rather than the real thing. Learn to balance your need to take action to assert your power with a more thoughtful assessment of just how much is the right amount of oversight. (Call it “the Goldilocks principle.”)
  • Become conscious of how you may dismiss people as incompetent or weak when you haven’t really given them a chance. Allow yourself to slow down, reveal more of yourself and tune in to a deeper level with others, so you can create a more solid foundation for your working relationships. Not everyone will be competent, but some may be more skilled than you thought.
  • Learn to recognize when you are overfocusing on the big picture and missing important details. Allow yourself to moderate any impatience you feel to move things forward and let yourself work with others to drill down into the small stuff, to make sure you ground your plans in the best ways possible.
  • Learn to recognize when you are all about taking action and learn to balance acting with more feeling and thinking. Become more aware of how the actions you take can be wiser and more effective if you take emotions and a deeper investigation of the facts of the situation into account.

Overall, Type Eights can fulfill their higher potential by observing and working against their habit of denying their vulnerability and overcompensating through exercising power and control. When they can understand that real strength is about balancing action and force with vulnerability and softness, they can show more of who they really are to others, be even more powerful in the things they do, and draw on emotional and intellectual power rather than just their ability to take action. When they can consciously contain their energy and balance their boldness with mildness, they can create better working relationships and express their passionate nature in more fulfilling ways. 

If you are not an Eight, but are trying to work out how to get on better with someone who is, here are a few tips: 

Don’t beat around the bush. Tell the truth and don’t sugarcoat it. When you send them an e-mail asking for something, put the request in simple terms up at the top—don’t bury it at the end of the fourth paragraph.

Don’t give them a book when they want bullet points. Be brief, direct, and to the point. 

Be competent and be able to work independently. Your Eight coworkers, friends, and lovers, will be very happy if they can trust that you will do your part in the project or the relationship and do it well and in a timely fashion—without them having to follow up with you or end up doing it for you. 

Support them in taking action. Try not to slow them down or interrupt what they are doing, unless it’s really important. Understand how action-oriented they are and do what you can to support their forward momentum. If you need to ask them to pause before they act, make sure to do it in a direct way and point to good evidence

Keep them informed—don’t hide things or undermine their authority. Eights will want to know what’s going on, so they can control the workflow, or their situation. If you make this easy for them, everything will be easier. 

Try not to be afraid of conflict with them. It may be wise to look at working with an Eight as an opportunity to learn to manage conflict with more comfort and skill. They will trust you if you can stand up to them and not back down if you disagree.

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Working Therapeutically with an Enneagram Nine (Peacemaker) Personality Style

Hello. Perhaps you’ve landed on this page because you’ve done an Online Enneagram Personality Test which has given you a Nine as your main personality type, and now you’re scratching your head wondering what this means in terms of your self-development or therapy journey.

Are personality types no more than just a description of different traits – like a star sign? Or can a deeper understanding of our personality structure, or “self”, and the way it works at a psychological level, help us to play the game of life with a little bit more grace, and less suffering?

[Read more about Personality-Focused Psychotherapy]

One way to think about the Self is that it might work as a kind of Lens or “Operating System” through which our psyche (?) mind (?) “life force” (?) or “soul” (?) flows. Whenever we express a thought, or belief, or opinion about our lives and our struggles, it is usually the Self (an “I”) that is doing the talking for us:

I feel sad about…
I feel satisfied with life when…
I don’t understand why s/he said that…
I find this [thought/feeling/situation] painful to think about or deal with.

Of course we don’t normally think about these utterances as a “Self” talking through us, because it (we) are always just sort of here in the conscious experience of “I”, of Self, with its particular filter on the world always present. Like fish, we swim in the “waters” of Self, but are usually completely oblivious to what “water” actually is.

Therapy is perhaps an opportunity for us to look at, and work through the content of our experience, the different ways we might have filled the gaps above to describe what is going on in our lives, but also to pay a slightly different kind of attention to how our struggles are often being shaped or contained in a certain ways for us through this “Self”, or Ego, or “I”. Not in the negative sense of having a “big ego”, but simply in terms of this psychological “I”. Which is to say: our personality style, character, Ego, Self.

This is not our whole Being or Consciousness. We can also step back (as we often do, especially in therapy) and look at the Self from a more detached, less conflicted perspective. Maybe from the perspective of someone who cares for us, but also knows us really well. This perspective might also become one we develop in our relationship with that person (“me” or another therapist) who would like to accompany you and assist you with your journey into understanding, healing, and developing your Self.

Most of the time though, we experience our Selves either from either the perspective of an Inner Critic who tells us how we’re failing at Life (or how Life is failing us), or from the Driver’s Seat of our Core Self.

Whoever that Core Driving Self is (pick a number!) whoever is driving the bus –driving us to do the things we do, or make the choices we make– it clearly has a special way of operating. Others can often see, for better or worse, how we tend to operate, as we can also see their Selves at work in how they talk, think, and behave. In therapy, we can try to get to know this Core Self a bit better (as well as those of the people we’re in relationship with), and hopefully find out what we’re all about.

As you read about your Nine “Self” below, a portrait that reveals both the light and shade of “you”, try not to judge your Self, or feel bad about how this Self comes across when laid out in this somewhat reductive, psychological way.

If reading through this portrait makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, ashamed, or exposed, that is a good sign, it really is.

This is certainly how I felt when I first read about my own personality style“Am I really like that!?! Oh dear. Well, OK, for good or bad, that does seem to be how “I” roll… [sigh]” 

This kind of response might perhaps indicate that we are gaining new insights, or at least a bit more humility about our Selves, especially when embarking on the kind of therapeutic search that you’re engaging with for your Self right now by reading and reflecting on this.

With insight, we can hopefully learn how to handle our Self/Selves a bit better in terms of how we deals with those generic but often unpleasant realities of life: physical and emotional pain, uncertainty, as well as the various forms of constant work, both inner and outer that we seek to fulfil. The Self is always the interface through which we learn how to do this, trying as best we can to put into practice the lessons we’ve learned.

If  you find when reading about the Nine “Self” described below, that it doesn’t feel like the kind of “I” you identify with, please have a quick look again at my Overview of The Nine Personality Types.

Your Core Self will make itself known to you there, as when you catch sight of yourself in the reflection of a shop-window or a mirror. Each of us holds aspects of every personality type within us (we all come from the same species,) but at a psychological level, our Core Self is usually present through our entire life journey, and shapes how we see the world, inwardly and out.

Human happiness and satisfaction seems to be strongly connected to getting the best out of our core Selves (i.e. our particular personality style, as well as following our unique threads), alongside learning how to manage with the not-so-great, and at times even “crappy” stuff that comes with each “I” or person-ality.

1. SNAPSHOT OF A NINE: HOW MANY OF THESE TRAITS DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH?

  • I rarely get angry. It’s uncomfortable for me to feel and express anger. Although us Nines are “anger types” (part of the “body-based” triad of Enneagram types) indicating that we do carry a lot of anger and frustration inside us, we will often, unconsciously, turn down the volume on our anger, so it doesn’t rise up at an inconvenient moment and create disharmony with others. 
  • As a leader, or in my relationships, I will want to make sure everyone is fully heard and that decisions can be made by consensus whenever possible. My experience of sometimes not being heard motivates me to try to make sure others don’t feel that same pain. So, I work to make sure everyone has a chance to say what they think and that they all know their contributions matter.
  • My desire for harmony motivates me to “go with the flow” and avoid “rocking the boat.” I am good at “going along to get along.” If maintaining harmony in my relationships means sometimes automatically erasing myself or leaving myself out of the picture, that’s what I do.
  • I am good at mediating disagreements because I naturally see all points of view and want to help people hear each other and find common ground. I enjoy the challenge of helping people understand each other such that everyone feels heard and disputes can be resolved.
  • I see the work I do, or myself in relationships, through the lens of what works best for the most people. I genuinely want people to get along and enjoy working and being together, and will do everything I can to ensure we both collaborate in positive ways and feel supported.
  • I sometimes say “yes” because it feels hard to say no, but I may not follow through on what I said “yes” to (because I didn’t really want to do it). I want to say “yes” so no one feels bad or displeased (or unpeaceful), even if I am aware of not wanting to actually do the thing I said “yes” to. So “yes” can sometimes mean, “Well, actually I’m probably not going to do that, or I’m going to ignore it, or forget about it in some way if I can.” 
  • I like harmony and dislike conflict. I feel good when my environment is free of tension. I avoid tension and conflict because I believe conflict leads to a feeling of separation, and separation is painful.
  • I try to avoid conflict situations by helping mediate disputes and being diplomatic in the way I state my views (if I state them at all). Often without even thinking about it, I say or do things—or avoid saying or doing things—to restore or maintain a feeling of peace in my environment or with friends, family, and my partner. 
  • I tend to be more attuned to the agendas of others than I am to my own. I naturally pay more attention to what others want than what I want. (What makes this particularly easy is that I often don’t really know what “I” want.)
  • While I may have clear opinions on some things, I can at times have trouble knowing what I want for dinner. Us Nine may feel relatively comfortable voicing views about things like politics or current events, but when it’s more a personal or work-related matter, it’s sometimes much harder to speak up. So for a Nine, the answer to the question, “Where do I want to go for dinner?” might often be: “Mmmm, I don’t really know. Where do I want to go for dinner?”
  • Emotionally, I tend to be pretty even-keeled and steady. I don’t typically experience a lot of emotional ups and downs.
  • Although I may work hard, I don’t like being the centre of attention. When something is important to me (or important to other people who are important to me), I can dedicate a great deal of time and energy to it. But I can get very uncomfortable if the focus is on me. 

 2. WHY AM I LIKE THIS? THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A NINE

Here is a kind of Origin Story that someone with a Nine personality style might resonate with:

“Once upon a time, there was a person named Nine. Early in life, he felt connected to everyone and everything, as if there were no such thing as separation. In this state of unity, Nine felt a deep sense of peace, joy, and love that was wonderful and deeply comforting.

But then something happened. Nine woke up one day feeling alone and disconnected. He felt frustrated at having been left by himself and wanted to register a protest against whoever had pushed him out on his own. But this made him even more uncomfortable. There were others nearby, but they seemed somehow distant. This new sense of being separate felt lonely and scary. If he was no longer connected to the world around him, how could he feel any sense of belonging?

When Nine tried to complain about this new and disturbing situation in order to re-establish his connection with others, no one would listen. Those around him spoke louder and had more important things to say. They knew what they wanted and argued to get it. They didn’t seem bothered by the fact that they were separate—and that their arguing made them more so. They didn’t seem to care what Nine was saying. He tried speaking louder and protesting more, but no one paid attention. After a while, he simply gave up. If they weren’t going to listen, he might as well go back to sleep. At least there was comfort in sleep.

Nine kept sleeping and trying to find comfort. But this sensation of not being connected stayed with him, and he grew concerned that he would never be included again. He wondered what his feelings of separation said about him.

Others didn’t seem as bothered by it as he did. Then he found that, when he stopped trying to get people’s attention—when he distracted himself somehow—he felt more comfortable.

Nine tried different ways to approximate the sense of connection he had lost, hoping to recover some of his feelings of belonging. He made friends and did whatever they wanted him to do. He tried to blend in. He tried to forget the distance he felt by focusing on what others wanted and forgetting about his own desires. He stopped confronting people with whom he disagreed, because he found it was easier just to go along with whatever they said. And after a while, he found he didn’t really care that much anyway. It didn’t really seem that important. He didn’t really seem that important.

Over time, Nine’s survival strategy of staying quiet and comfortable to avoid the pain of his separate existence caused him to forget all about his own feelings, his own opinions, and his own voice. He would rather get along with people. Staying comfortable was just so much more—well, comfortable. And being in harmony with others brought him a vague memory of the connection he had lost. After a while, it even seemed as if, even though he “woke up” each day, he was really sleep-walking through life.

Every once in a while, Nine tried sharing an opinion or a desire with the people around him so they could get to know him better and connect with him. But no one seemed to listen, which just made him feel separate again. Eventually, he realized that he no longer knew exactly what his opinions were or what he wanted. And that made him feel uncomfortable as well. Sometimes he felt bothered by the fact that everyone expected him to go along with whatever they wanted. And he worried that he no longer knew what he wanted. He even felt a little anger at not being heard or considered important. He tried expressing this anger once, but that just made people move even farther away. Apparently no one liked to connect with angry people. And that made him feel even more disconnected and alone. So Nine’s survival strategy of staying quiet and unaware of his own inner experience took over, and he just went back to sleep, even though this brought another form of suffering alongside the comfort of switching off. What to do?”

Nines often report feeling overlooked when they were young—perhaps they were a middle or younger child, or there were louder voices in their environment, leading them to adopt a strategy of blending in and going along with people who seem more powerful. Instead of fighting to be heard, the Nine child (unconsciously) gives up and decides it’s easier to “merge” with others—to adopt their wishes and pay less attention to their own feelings. This enables young Nines to ward off a scary sense of separation and find safety feeling connected to the important others in their world.

People with a Type Nine personality style experience a deep sense of discomfort if their important relationships are disturbed or threatened, so they automatically adapt in the face of any hint of potential estrangement. If they are super easygoing and “don’t care” what happens, it’s easier for them to harmonize with others such that tension or disconnection doesn’t occur. This means Nines experience a lessening of consciousness of what they really want, who they really are, and what actions might be important for them to take to meet their own core needs and desires. While we all “fall asleep” to ourselves to some degree, Nines are the prototype of this habit of proactively separating from one’s self to avoid having to experience conflict and separation from people. 

At work, but also in relationships, this makes Nines good at unselfishly working on behalf of others, their teams, or the organization, or family, friends, a partner. Nines will tend to be alert to what others need them to do to be of service or achieve goals, and will defer to others’ agendas instead of pushing their own. 

 3. CORE MOTIVATIONS OF A TYPE NINE PARTICIPANT: WHAT “DRIVES” A NINE?

The strategy of supporting others to avoid division and maintain harmony causes Nines to pay attention to other people and their environment. They sense what’s going on around them, attuned to the relative peacefulness of the atmosphere and any small signs of hostility or unease, and focus on other people’s agendas while they may struggle to define their own. Going along with others’ plans seems easier for Nines, both because they don’t have to come up with their own and because they feel comfortable structuring their experience around doing things to help others. 

People with a Type Nine style pay a great deal of attention to keeping everyone happy, making people feel supported and cared about, and giving everyone a role in the work or play that gets done. Whenever possible, Nines like to lead by consensus, and think about how to bring people together and defuse any conflicts that might arise. At work, Nines may expend large amounts of energy working to further other people’s projects or putting time into programs that improve the quality of life at work for the organization as a whole. 

As part of not attending very much to what’s most important to themselves, Nines’ attention also gets pulled toward less important tasks as opposed to more significant ones. For example, if Nines have a report due that’s central to their success, or an email they need to write to someone, they may put off working on it and instead spend time cleaning out their desk drawers. Nines habitually distract themselves with inessential work as a way of not paying attention to what’s most vital to them. Just as it can be hard for them to tune in to their own personal agenda, it can be hard for them to take action on their own behalf—it can seem threatening to focus on their own well-being, both because it’s unfamiliar and because it, by definition, puts more focus on them potentially being out on their own, separated from the crowd. 

Generally, individuals with a Type Nine style view the world as an interconnected place, where everything is happier and more peaceful when people are united in a common purpose and no one is left behind or left out. They tend to question their worth or importance in the world, and may have a default assumption that they don’t matter. Because they weren’t heard or their opinions were overlooked when they were young, they may (unconsciously) believe their import comes from aiding others and ensuring that no one gets overlooked the way they did. 

Nines often feel called to serve the world through helping create peace and forging stronger unions among people. They tend to believe that accord comes through working toward a kind of seamless interdependence or greater connectedness, and often gravitate toward work roles in which they can work to reduce friction and increase mutual understanding within relationships or groups. Without necessarily thinking much about it, they often feel driven to help organizations and individuals think more inclusively and take practical actions that lead to more harmony in the world. They usually embrace difference, but want to help people overcome the disruptions that sometimes arise when differences aren’t fully understood and accepted. Wherever Nines find themselves, they tend to see the world as better off when everybody’s getting along and they find a sense of purpose in somehow helping that to happen. 

 4. NINES AT WORK & IN RELATIONSHIPS

Good mediators and facilitators. Nine can often excel at facilitating meetings and groups, making sure things follow a solid structure and everyone gets heard. They naturally listen to different points of view, see the points of agreement, and hear the truth and legitimacy of different perspectives. 

Easygoing and affable. Accommodating and friendly, flexible and supportive, Nines specialize in being easy to be around.

Indecisive. When you can easily see all sides of any issue and you have a difficult time locating your own preferences, deciding what to do can be challenging. Whether because they don’t know what they want or they’re motivated to avoid the conflicts that might ensue, Nines sometimes get stuck “sitting on the fence.” 

Tendency to “merge” and overadjust. Nines adapt to what others want as a way of staying in harmony with them, but they can overdo the adjustment to the point of erasing themselves entirely.

Passive resistance instead of active aggression. Nines tune out their anger because getting angry brings the threat of separation and other unpleasantness. But when we avoid an emotion, it doesn’t go away. So, Nines’ anger often leaks out as passive resistance, like saying “yes” but not doing it.

Lovers of comfort. Nine can do great things at work and home, but one of the main things that drives them is the desire to stay comfortable. This underlies their preference for peace, their dislike of change, and their awkwardness around getting recognition. 

5. UNDERSTANDING WHY NINES THINK, FEEL, AND BEHAVE THE WAY THEY DO?

 Mental

Nines like routine and structure and may think about the processes involved in getting work done. However, their mental activity is primarily focused on the people around them: “Are they feeling good? Is everybody getting along? What do others want? What do they want or need me to do? How can I behave in a way that keeps them from being displeased? How can I best ‘go with the program’ and support people?” All that merging and supporting and blending with others’ agendas can sometimes create an inner backlash, and while their first line of defense is “go along to get along,” Nines may reach a point where they feel their backbone stiffen as they realize they didn’t actually want to go along with that other person’s agenda. They must then devote a fair amount of mental energy to resisting or thinking about how to get out of doing something they didn’t want to do in the first place without raising alarms (though this may be less conscious). 

 Emotional

As “body types,” Nines live from an energetic rootedness in their physical bodies, and are therefore more oriented toward taking or not taking action than to thinking or feeling emotions. They tend to be evenhanded and steady, and while they readily feel a range of feelings, including sadness, pain, and (more often) happiness or contentedness, their “highs” aren’t that high and their “lows” aren’t very low. Nines often need time to figure out how they feel, especially if they’re angry and don’t know it or don’t want to admit it—their (unconscious) resistance to anger shapes their personality in a significant way. While they belong to the Enneagram’s “anger triad” with Eights and Ones, Nines tend to under-do anger by ignoring it to avoid the conflicts it might cause. Often, Nines won’t register their anger at all, and can push it down to the point where it leaks out as passive-aggressive versions of anger like stubbornness, passive resistance, and mild frustration, which may get expressed in a Nine’s behaviour.

 Behavioural

Nines like to stay comfortable, and many of their behaviour patterns relate to this central Nine need to maintain a sense of personal comfort. These include avoiding conflict and other interpersonal disruptions, resisting change, not deciding, and merging with others’ agendas. Nines can become so focused on another person or agenda that normal boundaries between them disappear, and become so absorbed in an important person’s attitudes and plans that they lose or forget themselves. Even a slight disruption in the relationship—including a close working relationship—can then feel highly threatening and disruptive. As mentioned, Nines may also express unacknowledged anger through behavior like passive-aggressively resisting doing what others want them to do (without saying anything). Like Eights, Nines don’t like to be told what to do, but they are quieter about it, and if they feel overly controlled or disrespected by someone, they can covertly stop cooperating as a way of asserting themselves without creating open conflict. 

 6. WHAT YOU’RE REALLY GOOD AT AS A NINE

Unselfishly Supporting Others. Nines focus on helping others succeed, making sure their ideas are considered, and working to further their goals, often without asking for anything in return.

Diplomacy. Nines excel at seeing all sides of an issue or problem and communicating carefully to create alignment around shared agreements. They know just how to frame things to influence people while not offending them.

Being Democratic. Nines are by nature very egalitarian—they don’t play favourites or think anyone is more important than anyone else. 

Building Consensus. Nines easily see the common truth in differing opinions, which makes them very good at finding a way to achieve consensus, even when people strongly disagree.

Being Affable and Friendly. Nines are almost always very easy to work with or be around because they are really nice and considerate. They go out of their way not to cause trouble, to be kind and thoughtful, and they don’t need to take credit for things.

 However, as for all of us, our greatest strengths can also trip us up at times. If Type Nines overuse their biggest strengths (and don’t consciously develop a wider range of skills), they can also turn out to be their Achilles’ heel. Let’s see how this can happen.

Unselfishly Supporting Others. Nines often pay more attention to others’ agendas than they do to their own, which can cause problems for them and others when they don’t attend to what they need to do.

Diplomacy. Nines may frame the things they say so delicately or be so afraid of stirring up conflict that they don’t communicate clearly enough about what’s really true. 

Being Democratic. In certain environment, some voices may be more important than others. Nines may want to avoid this reality to prevent conflicts or unfairness, but they can end up causing problems when they don’t take differences in status into account. 

Building Consensus. Nines may stop the momentum of a project by taking the time to get everyone on board, even when that may not be possible or desirable.

Being Affable and Friendly. Nines may have trouble being confrontational when they need to get something done or make changes in their lives.

7. HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY NINES

Fortunately, Nines’ sincere interest in working harmoniously with others to get things done means they will likely be motivated to be more aware of how their desire for agreement and consensus can get taken too far. When they can focus on recognizing the limits of trying to please everyone and acknowledge that conflict can’t always be avoided—and can even be useful—they can usually more effectively leverage their strengths in a way that allows for both interpersonal comfort and a thriving enterprise. 

 When stressed to the point of going to their “low side,” Type Nines can get angry, and may act out their anger in passive-aggressive ways. They may be stubborn and resistant or get stuck in inertia and procrastinate, and may silently fume because they don’t want to express their anger for fear of getting into a conflict. Nines avoid their own anger in part because they fear what they might do if they really let themselves blow up. On rare occasions, they do lose control and explode, but more often they tend to avoid communicating their anger, which can lead them to passively resist others in different ways, including problematic behaviours like ignoring requests (from friends, loved ones, or at colleagues) or taking a long time to finish a task.

Less self-aware Nines under pressure may withdraw or appear sullen or irritated. They may agree to do tasks, have necessary conversations, and then not do them, put things off or avoid making decisions, thus holding up the work of others or withdrawing from relationships. When less conscious, Nines are extra sensitive to being overlooked or told what to do. If someone doesn’t explicitly ask for their opinion, they may silently refuse to participate in a work project or a personal situation. They may avoid discussing conflicts or resentments openly while covertly and passively acting out their anger toward others they feel wronged by—usually by seeming to go along, but failing to take action.

On the “high side,” when Type Nine become more self-aware and conscious of their programming, they can be consummate team players, friends, and partners. Easy-going and adaptable, they will work very hard to co-operate and get along, without complaining or needing to be recognized for their contributions. Emotionally intelligent Nines put their team, and finding consensus in relationship ahead of their own needs and wants. They are congenial and often funny. They don’t take themselves too seriously and will surface difficult feelings or problems with sensitivity and grace (after pausing to reflect on their emotions and reactions). They will give others the benefit of the doubt, take the high road, and stay focused on what’s most important for the greater good of the work, or their relationships. 

When living from the “high side,” Nines learn to sense, understand, and deal with their anger in constructive ways. They communicate about what they don’t like before it festers and becomes a problem, and maintain an awareness of their tendency to avoid conflict and learn to raise issues in an open, responsive way. Healthy Nines ask for time to sort out their feelings if they need it, and they understand that it may sometimes take some time for them to get clear on what they want and share their emotions and desires with others. When Nines do the work of becoming more conscious of their habits and tendencies, they realize it’s important to tolerate some discomfort, so they can engage more fully with others based on a stronger connection to themselves. 

 8. THE THREE KINDS OF NINES: HOW THE THREE INSTINCTUAL BIASES SHAPE THE THREE TYPE NINE SUB-TYPE PERSONALITIES

According to the Enneagram model, we all have three main instinctual drives that help us survive, but in each of us, one of the three tends to dominate our behaviour. The Type Nine style is expressed differently depending on whether a person has a bias toward self-preservation, establishing social relationships and positioning themselves in relation to groups, or one-to-one bonding. 

The Self-Preservation (or Self-Focused) Nine

All Nines suffer from a kind of “self-forgetting”—they go to sleep to their own deeper sense of “being” who they essentially are, and then distract themselves from the pain of being disconnected from themselves. Self-Preservation Nines distract themselves from their deeper desires and emotions (like anger) through focusing on physical comfort and activities. Nines tune out their agenda, their wishes, and their feelings and tune in to experiences of physical satisfaction, like eating, sleeping, reading, watching TV, or being on social media. These activities distract them from an awareness of their own being and all that goes with it.

Self-Preservation Nines tend to be practical people with a strong presence who may seem more irritable or stubborn than the other two Nine subtypes. They often rely on familiar routines, like reading in the morning while having coffee or having a beer while watching TV at the end of the day, to structure their life and help them feel settled and peaceful. When their routines and habits get disturbed by others, they may react by getting grumpy and silently retreating to resume their activity uninterrupted. This Nine likes being alone more than the other two Nines and may display a dry or self-deprecating sense of humour. 

Self-Preservation Nines can be capable and forceful, but also humble and generous. When engaged and healthy, they can work very hard to move big efforts forward, and have a special talent for seeing how all the pieces fit together to make things work both in their relationships and their careers—they see the larger context and how the parts fit into the larger whole. If pushed or controlled by others, they may dig their heels in and refuse to move, usually without talking about it. They may also feel uncomfortable with the confrontational aspects of exercising power, and prefer inspiring people through fun, humour, and a positive focus on the goal and its connection to the well-being of others. At their best, Self-Preservation Nines know how to take practical steps to get everyone on board with a plan or project to get things done. The more they can connect with their anger in healthy ways, the more they will feel comfortable exercising power in constructive ways that benefit both themselves and others. 

The Social (or Group-Focused) Nine

Social Nines distract themselves from the pain of disconnection through merging with groups. The “counter-type” of the three Nine subtypes, the Social Nine is a very hard-working person who often takes on leadership roles. Congenial and fun-loving, they are often pulled into positions of leadership to satisfy the responsibilities others want to put on them. They tend to be workaholics who put a great deal of effort into supporting their teams, groups or communities, while at the same time continually neglecting, or forgetting, their own needs. As Enneagram author Claudio Naranjo says of Social Nines, “They have full lives, full of everything but themselves.” 

Deep down, Social Nines often have a feeling of not belonging to the groups they are nominally in. So, they work hard to gain the sense of belonging they yearn to experience, but often don’t seem to feel, even when they give a group all their time and energy. While Social Nines benefit from getting in touch with their anger, they also grow through getting in touch with an underlying sense of sadness at not belonging. When they can become more conscious of their deeper feelings and focus more of their efforts on what they want and need, they can begin to take in the appreciation of others more, and finally feel more a part of things. 

Social Nines make excellent leaders—they want to work in support of the team, and they don’t complain or let others see the effort it takes them. Social Nines give very generously to the groups they support, but don’t ask for recognition or rewards. Humble and modest, they dislike being the centre of attention and often work much harder than anyone realizes behind the scenes. While Social Nines tell stories of getting “drafted” into leadership roles, they usually enjoy leading and doing whatever it takes to further the interests of the group. And although they can be indecisive or unsure, at their best, they work tirelessly to make things happen and unselfishly and unflaggingly support the larger aims of the group or team. 

The One-to-One (or Relationship-Focused) Nine

One-to-One Nines are sweet, gentle, and kind—and the least assertive of the three Nine subtypes. They merge with other individuals to distract themselves from themselves, looking for a sense of purpose that they cannot locate internally and unconsciously taking on the opinions, attitudes, and feelings of the important people in their lives—whether it is a spouse, a parent, a best friend, or a manager or close colleague. They become so focused on the feelings and desires of others that they may have a difficult time knowing what they want or think, and may not know the difference between what they feel and what another person feels. And when they do know what they want or what they think, they may have a hard time expressing it, especially if it differs from what the other people they are close to think or want.

One-to-One Nines unconsciously deny the existence of boundaries among people, taking refuge in their close relationships as a way of avoiding the separation they may feel on their own. Because they rely on others for internal support, they may not have a sense of who they are and may not feel very self-confident. And when they do act to support themselves, they may do it in secret, surreptitiously rebelling against the other person, who may dominate the Nine’s experience in a way neither person is fully aware of. The most emotional of the three Nines, One-to-One Nines may not realize how completely they’ve merged with someone until they experience some kind of physical separation, which allows them to find themselves as an independent individual. Real relationships require both people to show up fully as themselves, but One-to-One Nines may not be standing on their own two feet—and may not know they are not standing on their own two feet. 

At work, One-to-One Nines can be both sensitive and competent. They have a special talent for understanding others’ perspectives in a deep way, and blend a light touch with an ability to listen to others and empathize with their emotions. While they may at times be indecisive and insecure, when they are able to find ways to assert who they are as a unique individual, these Nines can bring great care, dedication, and personal creativity to their work. When they can work through any fear they might have of acting independently and expressing their authority, they can make thoughtful, sensitive leaders who have a great way with people. The more they do the work to discover who they are and what their particular strengths are, they more they can put their individual stamp on the work they do and the way they lead. At their best, they have a humble and gentle way of being with people. 

 9. HOW NINES MIGHT STRUGGLE IN WORK AND IN RELATIONSHIPS: STRESS-POINTS AND TRIGGERS

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAType Nines sometime feel like working with others, or being in relationship in general is hard because: 

People pressure me to produce results or take actions when the task or plan for what we’re meant to be doing hasn’t been explained in a clear way.

I sometimes assume people know more than they do, so I go along with them and find out later they don’t know what they’re doing, and then I get taken down with them.

The people I’m working with, or in relationship with, don’t understand the larger context the way I do, which can lead to differences in the way we see what we’re supposed to be doing.

It can be hard to be the centre of attention when I’m singled out for some reason.

I worry about doing something wrong and standing out as doing a bad job.

I worry about doing something well and standing out because I was successful.

I don’t like any kind of conflict, and working with people sometimes leads to conflict. Even receiving critical feedback can feel like conflict.

I can feel insulted when people don’t make a point of asking for my opinion or listening to what I think.

I can have a hard time getting into the conversation when everyone is talking a lot and expressing strong opinions.

People sometimes expect me to make quick decisions, but I need time to decide.

People sometimes act in authoritarian ways and don’t make sure everyone is on board and aligned.

 Type Nine Personalities Can Become Triggered…

When people go way outside of the general direction we’re going in (and decided on together) and aren’t considerate of the needs of the whole.

When expectations aren’t clear and I do something wrong that gets me in trouble (because the expectations weren’t clear).

When people expect me to take action, but I don’t understand how the action serves the larger goals of the project. 

When I’m set up to fail because the agreed-upon direction isn’t clear and I’m asked to take action without knowing what we’re trying to do.

When people get into conflicts that could have been avoided.

When I’m overlooked and not consulted about projects and plans I’m involved in and should have a say in. 

When I’m not informed about important decisions that affect me that I should be a part of.

When people make it hard for me to say “no” to something I don’t want to do. 

When people autocratically tell me what to do (instead of asking nicely or finding out what I want to do).

When people take my easygoing nature for granted by pushing me around or assuming I’ll cooperate with whatever they want to do or neglecting to ask me what I want and need.

What’s great about working with, or being in a relationship with a Nine:

• They make others feel accepted and included.
• They know how to listen to people and make them feel like they were heard.
• They let people know that their opinions are valued.
• They focus more on solutions than blame when things go wrong.
• They blame the system and not the people if things don’t go well.
• They look for ways to improve the system and processes (meetings, discussions etc.) so that people can have a better experience.
• They are funny. They make jokes and bring levity to serious situations, which makes it easier to focus on tasks and work well together.
• They are easy to talk to.
• They give credit to others and model humility and generosity.
• They are very accepting—they focus on the best in people and rarely criticize others behind their backs.
• They help people find common ground when they have widely divergent ideas about how to get something done.
• They automatically find ways to defuse tension by being witty, gentle, and kind.
• They don’t have big egos and easily share power with others.
• They work very hard (also with regard to relationships)—out of a sincere desire to further the aims of the relational or work team, not out of self-interest or a need for attention or power.

Typical challenges for people who work with (or are in relationship with) Nines:

• They may be unwilling to take a stand or make a decision if there’s not enough alignment or consensus.
• They may hold back stating what they really think—they don’t always share their complete perspective (as conflict avoidance strategy).
• They tend to procrastinate.
• They may say “yes” to doing something but really mean “no” (which you find out eventually when it never gets done).
• They can passively resist what’s happening but not say what’s going on for them—why they are against it or what they are angry about.
• They may avoid “showing up” and offering an opinion—they may defer to what others want and then (silently) not go along with it because it wasn’t what they wanted to do.
• They may be problematically passive when they need to take action.
• They may not take the initiative to do things, even when there is an expectation that they do so.
• They may seem angry, but not say anything about what’s going on.
• They may want people to ask them questions and draw them out instead of just offering their thoughts and opinions proactively.

10. SELF-MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES THAT NINES MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY  

Observe the way you tend to pay more attention to others (and their agendas) than you do to yourself (and your agenda). Notice if you put others ahead of yourself and any feelings you have about putting yourself last. 

Pay attention to your experience of anger. What kinds of things piss you off and what do you do in response? When do you not register anger (when it might be a legitimate response)? When do you express it or not express it? 

Notice any behaviours you might engage in that might be passive-aggressive. See if you can make your anger more conscious so that you can see the kinds of things you do out of anger that you don’t want to express directly.

Observe your tendency to assume your thoughts will be overlooked. Notice if you hold back from offering input  or speaking up because you proactively believe you won’t be heard. Notice any consequences connected to this kind of holding back. 

Observe how easy or difficult it is to make a decision. What happens for you when you struggle to decide? Are some kinds of decisions easier than others? Under what conditions might you sit on the fence? 

Under what conditions is it difficult for you to know what you want? How do you react when you don’t know what you want?

Notice if your discomfort with attracting attention leads to you not fully owning your power. Pay attention to any consequences of your potentially excessive modesty on your ability to lead. 

Avoidance of conflict. Sometimes conflict is healthy and necessary. So, it’s important to understand why you dislike conflict and moderate your desire to avoid it so you can incorporate it in conscious and productive ways.

Avoidance of anger. Because you avoid conflict, you (often unconsciously) tend to go to sleep to your own anger. But your anger can be an important signal that something needs your attention. Anger is also connected to power—so you can more effectively show up in the world as a leader and own your power in conscious ways if you can moderate your habit of turning the volume down on your anger.

Tendency to act in passive-aggressive ways. When you are more able to feel, own, and express your anger, you will naturally channel it less into passive-aggressive behaviours, like slowing the pace of your work, “forgetting” about things, and quietly avoiding adhering to rules and procedures. Becoming more active and more proactive in the things you do will make you more direct and more powerful. 

Putting others first. It will be important for you to notice how you pay more attention to others than you do to yourself. If you can right the balance by taking care of yourself more and prioritizing others less, you can take stronger action in support of what you really need. Taking care of yourself is one of the best ways to serve others—they will get the best of you when you make yourself more of a priority in your own life.

Sensitivity to not being heard and included. Often the way you react to your sensitivity to being unheard or excluded or overlooked is to further overlook or exclude yourself. This can lead to a vicious cycle in which you forget to include yourself, making it easier for others to regard you as unimportant, and so on. When you put yourself in the mix, you increase the likelihood that you will not be taken lightly or forgotten.

11. LIFE-TRAPS THAT NINES MIGHT WANT TO WORK ON IN THERAPY

Thinking about your own agenda—what you want (and why that’s important). If you are a Nine, it may not occur to you that you have desires and priorities just like everyone else—and you may not register what you want and so give way to what others want on a regular basis. When this leads to you feeling resentful later, that’s not good for anyone. It will help you to learn to ask yourself what you want, and keep asking with compassion even when the answer is “I don’t know.” You will eventually learn to connect with the desires you’ve gone to sleep to as a strategy for getting along with others.

Your own anger (and passive-aggressive behaviours). Nines tend to be blind to their own anger, which often leads them to act out the anger they don’t feel or acknowledge in indirect, covert ways. The more you can be aware of and welcome your anger, the less you will create problems for yourself by passively resisting others as a way of discharging your angry feelings. 

Your own need for recognition and support from others. Nines discomfort with getting attention—whether positive or negative—can mean they underappreciate their own need to be recognized for their contributions and achievements. If you don’t learn to take in others’ appreciation, you may get stuck in a bind in which you deflect positive feedback. Nines need to know they are valued, both at work and in relationships, to keep their morale up. 

How the desire for harmony actually leads to conflict. When you don’t take a firm stand or express a clear opinion, you can actually create disharmony because you can’t work through the natural disagreements that occur when people work together in a conscious, direct way. When people don’t know what you think, it’s hard for others to get the clarity you all need to move forward.

Your lack of clarity in communicating with others. Your desire to keep the peace and stay positive may lead you to hold back important information or not be clear when giving instructions or feedback. Your desire to avoid conflict and tension may lead you to think it’s better to stay positive, even when you need to be clear about constructive criticism to improve things. 

Your own stress. If you are a Nine, you may tell yourself, “I’m okay,” when you aren’t. You may believe you need to be “okay” for others. But not acknowledging when you are not okay doesn’t help you or others—and can lead to big problems at work.

12. WHERE TO START WHEN FOCUSING ON YOUR OWN PERSONAL “NINE-STUFF”: STRENGTHS TO LEVERAGE & ENQUIRY QUESTIONS THAT I OFTEN ASK TYPE NINE CLIENTS

Ability to see the big picture and how all the pieces fit together. If you are a Nine it will be important for you to give yourself credit for your capacity to understand the larger context of the work you do and see how the different parts fit into the whole. The more you own this strength, the more power you may own around being able to direct the work to make things happen.

Ability to work with others to move big projects forward. You have many ways of motivating people to work harmoniously to get significant things done. The fact that you value everyone’s contribution and want to hear everyone’s input empowers people and allows your team or loved ones to achieve solutions to important social, work, and personal problems without worrying about who gets the credit. 

Ability to mediate disputes and handle difficult situations diplomatically. The upside of your discomfort with conflict is that you have an easy way of seeing the way forward when people are far apart. When difficulties arise, you rise to the occasion, with the great strength of being able to know exactly how to frame things such that people can increase their understanding of people they initially disagreed with.

Sensitivity to inclusion and ability to create alignment amidst diversity. Your sincere desire to make sure all are listened to and decisions are made by consensus when possible helps you to appreciate and accept differences, but also unify people. 

Tendency to unselfishly put greater good ahead of self-interest. You gravitate toward goals that will benefit others, you inspire people with your selfless approach at work and in relationships, and you model a way of being that shows how people co-operating peacefully are more than the sum of their parts. It will help if you remember this.

Questions I might ask a type Nine client in therapy:

Why is it difficult for you to know what you want? What problems would it create for you to know what you want more of the time?

What might be hard about focusing on your own priorities, as opposed to the priorities of others? In what way do you actively avoid attending to what’s most important to you and why?

Why do you turn down the volume on your anger? What fears might be connected to feeling your anger more fully?

Why is it important that everyone be heard? What feelings do you have about being overlooked or unheard? Where do they come from?

What feels hard or uncomfortable about being the centre of attention? 

What feels difficult or scary about conflict? What kinds of things feel like conflict? What kinds of things do you do to avoid conflict of any kind? What are the consequences?

How might you hold yourself back from being as powerful as you are capable of being? What kinds of habits are you in that detract from owning and expressing your power? 

Nines can also grow through consciously becoming aware of the self-limiting habits and patterns associated with their personality style and learning to embody the higher aspects or more expansive capacities of the Type Nine personality: 

Learn how you go to sleep to yourself and your priorities and challenge yourself to be present to yourself more and more often. Allow yourself to enjoy putting yourself out there in the world more, enjoying the challenge of any discomfort that entails as part of the process of being alive and awake.

Learn more about what happens to your anger and why and experiment with turning the volume up and expressing it more. Allow yourself to experience exactly how your anger is connected to your power—and how good it can feel to be more powerful in the world, even if it means getting mad. 

Learn to notice how you often know more about what you don’t want than what you do want, and how that can lead to getting trapped in passive resistance. Allow yourself to become more conscious of how your anger leaks out in passive forms and channel it into finding your purpose and taking action, even if it creates some healthy tension with others.

Learn about why it’s so hard for you to know what you want and allow yourself to gradually get more in touch with your desires. Trust that communicating your desires more benefits everyone. Your clarity and ability to include yourself leads to you feeling a deeper sense of belonging. 

Become more aware of how you effectively erase yourself when you don’t say what you think or proactively assert your opinion. Figure out what it takes to speak up without having to be asked or invited.

Learn that sometimes achieving consensus isn’t possible or desirable and try going more for alignment—or being okay if some people don’t like what you or a few people decide is best. In achieving alignment, you acknowledge the limitations that come with consensus but still use your talent for finding commonalities to create balance and get people on board.

Overall, Type Nines can fulfil their higher potential by observing and working against their habit of diminishing their awareness of their own desires and priorities and emotions—especially their anger. When they can become more conscious of their tendency to fall asleep to themselves and wake up to their own experience, they can learn to value and support themselves as much as they value and support others. When they can consciously overcome their own inner barriers to expressing their anger and their power and their opinions—no matter what the consequence to their relationships—they may find that putting themselves in the picture actually improves their own life and work and that of others.

Getting Along with Nines: Some Tips for How To Get On Better With The Nines In Your Life

  • Be peaceful and kind and make an effort to make a personal connection with them. Nines usually don’t see a reason not to be nice. They lead with friendliness and warmth and will assume people are trustworthy until they prove otherwise. The Nines you work with, and are in relationship with, will appreciate your efforts to get to know them on a personal level and create a positive atmosphere where the two of you predominantly get along. 

Value everyone’s opinion, including the Nine’s. When at all possible, Nines like to lead by consensus. They tend to be democratic diplomats who believe everyone’s input is valuable. If you demonstrate clear respect for everyone’s point of view, including theirs, the Nines in your life will probably admire you and want to work with you.

Understand their sensitivity to conflict and criticism. Try not to stir up trouble or initiate a conflict unless it’s absolutely necessary. When Nines perceive that someone is venting or indulging their anger in a way that threatens to create conflict, they may feel uncomfortable and withdraw or get angry with the angry person. They can at times express the fury of a peacemaker—they will become upset if someone is making others or themselves upset. And—if you have a conflict that’s even slightly heated, make sure to circle back with them and make an effort to repair things.

Ask the Nine for input, even if it’s not being offered. Working and being in relationship with Nines can be tricky because they often don’t proactively offer their opinion—or their full opinion—during conversations. They can be quiet in work meeting, or personal discussions, not speak up for themselves, and then feel irritated that the other person didn’t ask them what they think. So make sure to ask if they don’t tell. And it may be especially important to solicit and support their feedback if they express an opinion that goes against you or the direction of a group.

Enlist their cooperation directly to get them on board. Coaches and leaders often ask, “How do you get a Nine to do something—especially if they have shown a resistance to doing it?” The answer is, you don’t “get” a Nine to do anything. Nines can be tough and strong when resisting doing something someone is pressuring them to do, and in a silent power struggle, they will most probably outlast you. So, instead of trying to move a Nine when you perceive them stubbornly resisting your will, talk to them openly, ask them what they think and how they feel, and be direct about wanting their buy-in to a decision or situation, and give them the freedom to say yes or no for their own reasons. 

Explicitly recognise their contributions to your friendship, relationship, or team. In a way that’s not too public or embarrassing, make a point of acknowledging them when they do something that helps the relationship, team or the larger organisation. 

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Nine Participants in The Game of Life

Hello, fellow Participants in the Game of Life!

How does it feel to be participating in Life from your perspective?

How does it feel to be YOU, at an archetypal level?

Have a look at each of these Life Players or Participants below and see if you can find your core/archetypal self or “role” in Life, as well as those of everyone else you know.

Each type also has a self-development follow-through (if you click on the title of the name of the Type) which will help you to understand how viewing your self at times through this archetypal lens will also help you with the nitty-gritty specifics of your suffering or frustration that you might be experiencing in your life at the moment.

NINE ARCHETYPAL PARTICIPANTS OR PLAYERS IN THE GAME OF LIFE:

patterns of instinctual behaviour

Archetypes resemble the beds of rivers: dried up because the water has deserted them, though it may return at any time. An archetype is something like an old watercourse along which the water of life flowed for a time, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it flowed the deeper the channel, and the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return.

I like Jung’s framing of this idea. He refers to archetypes, including personality archetypes, using three metaphors:

  1. as river beds or channels for our life-force/instincts to work through
  2. as mirrors or echoes of different trauma/cultural/developmental energies
  3. as (primarily unconscious) patterns or schema/parts of the psyche

He writes in a 1936 essay: “An archetype is something like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for some time, digging a deep channel for itself.”

Of course the geography surrounding this watercourse (family, culture, life circumstances, personal trauma) will all affect the river and how it flows, but each watercourse (each personality/ego-structure) will have its own shape and space that it takes up in the world, and so it would seem do we.

Aersonality type might also be seen as a kind of human inheritance, each of us born with a predisposition to experiencing and flowing through life in a certain way. When we see this river of personality flowing through us, it can sometimes feel like looking in a mirror both on a “good hair” day, and a bad one:

“The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor.”

But maybe we are also led to hiding or feeling ashamed about our archetypal personalities due to the mask that society and other people often require us to wear? Connecting to our own archetype is thus always an attempt to discover what it is that flows within us that goes beyond our family/social roles and requirements. What is the essence of your personality, your personhood, your self: what are its elemental fears and anxieties, and how do these often drive us into action.

Another way to describe this is our “unconscious motivations” for doing stuff – not the reasons we tell ourselves in our minds, but the nervous-system-wired responses to Life as it presents itself to us with all of its triggers and challenging circumstances.

 

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Snapshot of An Enneagram Type Two

Here’s a snapshot of you, Participant Two. If you are a True Two, you should be able to identify with a lot of these features. 

As a Type Two Participant… 

  • You focuses a great deal of your attention on relationships and how others respond to you.
  • You worry about whether others like you or approve of you.
  • You tune in to the people around you to sense how they feel and what they like, and then might feel the need to shape-shift in order to align with them and create positive rapport.
  • You habitually anticipate what others may need, especially those who are important to you.
  • You sometimes have a difficult time knowing what you need however and find it hard to ask for help.
  • You want to be liked by others and to be important to the people who are central in your life.
  • You make positive connections with others, but are often quite selective when choosing those you want to be close to. Although you want everyone to like you, some people are more important to you than others.
  • You believe you can make others like you through being charming (as you often are) or generous or supportive/helpful in some way.
  • You specialize in being friendly, upbeat, and positive (even though you might not feel that way inside), and you take pride in being someone on whom people can count.
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Playing The Infinite Game

There are two types of games, according to James Carse: finite games, and the infinite games. Finite games have winners and losers; Infinite games don’t.

Equally, there might be two kinds of Players (or Partcipants) in Life: Finite-Seekers and those seeking something of the Infinite. 

Happiness, true Happiness to make some kind of distinction, is an Infinite Game. 

Finite Happiness v. True Happiness

We know all too well how the fleeting variety of happiness works by now, don’t we? 

We feel great for a few days after a promotion, or getting our book published, or that period in a relationship when the two of you are doing  ‘You’re-so-perfect’/’No-you’re-so-perfect!” exchange: that sweet and lovely phase which we romantically believe will last for ever. That’s the kind of finite pleasure I’m referring to here.

We may even feel hedonically satisfied for a good while, perhaps even for a couple of years, but what goes up must come down, and some form of suffering is always going to rain on our little parade. Little because: finite. Our little finite parade of happiness. 

The parade that goes: “I was winning when I had that, and now that I don’t have that, I’m not winning.” Or: “I’ll be winning when I have that. And until then: I’m losing.”

Compare this to:

-I’m Happy.
-Why?
-Well, why not! I’m perfectly fine with just being this human creature – experiencing life’s ups and downs. It’s all fine, it’s all groovy.
-Really?!

Oh, and if you’re thinking I’m that person. No, I am not that person. At least not in an  enduring way, are you?

I think we might call this person something like enlightened or awakened if you are of a mystical bent. Or if you’re of a psychological one, we might say: self-realised, a functional, healthy adult Ego, individuated in that Jungian sense of having “gone through the wearisome but indispensable business of coming to terms with the unconscious components of ones personality”.

Another way of saying this that we have found, and gracefully or gracelessly engaged with our “shitty” shadow selves and given them a big soppy hug, in a bid to be kinder to them (i,e. ourselves) and all the other people who have dealings with us. 

That’s the kind of happiness we’re looking for, aren’t we? That Infinite Variety that comes from playing an Infinite Game where there are no winners and no losers. 

The Challenge of Trying To Access Happiness Through A Human Personality

To get this place of True Happiness, at least as far as psychotherapy is concerned, we need to come to terms with who we are, and a large component of who we are is our personality, to use that simple term that says so much without saying anything. 

So what is personality you might ask a so-called Integrative Personality Focused Psychotherapist? 

Well, at a very simple level, maybe it’s a kind of living, organic, narrative-based, psyche-containing entity or core self, a conscious self – perhaps like the one writing these words here to you now. Just like you, from your psyche-containing personality are taking in whatever you can into your conscious being from the screen in front of you.

In both cases, of you and me, these are selves which cannot help but see the world from a certain perspective and thus move with and into the world in certain kind way. Even when feeling uncertain or struggling with our mental health, we will all be moving uncertainly in our lives in slightly different ways. Not all human animals are certain and uncertain in the same manner. 

Personality As Open and Free v. Personality As A Cage

If personality is the primary “tupperware container” of the self, I guess the question is whether you experience this container of your personality, your personhood, as being a free and expansive one. Right now, are you experiencing your conscious self and all the feelings and thoughts it contains as an infinitely happy place to participate in?  Or is this things we call self, or my person-ality, or just simply “me” not always happy with its self-containment? Might you even experience that self as somewhat imprisoning or obstructive at times, getting in the way of you attaining a form of “true” contentment and being at ease in the world? 

We might, in fact we often do, suffer ourselves: suffer the experience of being a certain kind of self, a certain kind of person. Or we might suffer the life that this type of person is having, which is most likely a typical kind of experience for that type. A certain kind of life, based on the personality which contains that portion of life we came into at birth. 

If we’re wanting to play an Infinite Game, the game of True Happiness rather than that quick fix variety, which is the game I want to play (actually I want to play both, and there is space for both), then how do we accomplish that with a Finite Personality or Ego? 

This for me is the million dollar question. 

Creating Enduring Happiness Through A Focus on Personality

Creating enduring happiness in a finite game where there is always a winner and a loser seems like a bit of a paradox. For surely Finite Games will never give us the Infinite Prizes of non-circumscribed Peace Joy and Happiness. Finite Games give us winners and losers. Those conscious of winning in the stakes of life are generally happy and those conscious of losing or losing out in some are generally not.

Let’s say someone cuts in front of you on the road, or someone dumps you, or you experience (as we all will) sickness, ageing, emotional and physical pain, as well as the certainty of our own demise. This is loss, this is losing in no uncertain terms in that finite game of life and personhood. 

So let’s explore together in therapy, or you by reading some of the articles on my site, how a certain kind of personality, a certain kind of person (like you or me) might get the most out of our selves and by dint of that, our finite Life

How to learn about and then start playing as well as possible within the finite dimensions of our personality types? But let’s also give some time to think about how we, as “souls”, or language-wielding thinking-speaking creatures might also being be moving, as we all are, I believe, moving towards becoming participants in that Infinite Of Game of Happiness (or whatever other word gestures towards something sweet and good and satisfying for you, I like to use that simple H-word).

Psychotherapy in our very secular age is perhaps no longer considered in this light, but I often find that there are times in a good session, in a really meaningful and exploratory conversation for both parties, where we will at least rub up against or graze in some small way the hem of that Infinite garment, that table cloth on which this Infinite non-binary Game rests. The game that we all want to be playing, I believe, in the time we’ve got left to play our part, rather than the winning-losing finite game which more often than not is what we end up being drawn into.

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Type 9 Blindspots

It can be tricky even to look at our blindspots as Nines because discomfort is something we are very sensitive and averse to at all levels Unfortunately, you may have already experienced this in therapy, facing what we habitually avoid being aware of tends to feel really uncomfortable. (This is why we avoid doing so in the first place!)

So why do it? Well, the specific ways Type 9s function to create peace, avoid conflict, and maintain friendly relations with people can sometimes lead them to deaden themselves to important aspects of their experience—like their anger and their desires.

The need for comfort dominates their experience and keeps them from being motivated to gain access to deeper forms of connection—both with their own depths and with others. But here’s the good news. If they can look at your blind spots and deal with any pain or discomfort that arises around them, you can eventually start to feel more powerful in your life and enjoy your gifts and strengths.

For this type has a great deal of energy, which sometimes they tend to give away to others. You may even feel depressed because of how your Type 9 survival strategies have led you to “fall asleep” to your inherent sense of aliveness. You may have even cut yourself off in some way from a deeper, more intense experience of life when you disconnect from any emotions that might create tensions with others.

The good news is that if you can tolerate the fear of your own power and energy—and the fear that you might hurt someone if you express how angry and disappointed you actually feel—you will then, if done in a pro-social way, be able to redirect your energy more consciously for your own benefit towards activities and pursuits that are meaningful to you and may even make a difference in the world for other people.

If you identify with Type 9, here are some of the blind spots we might want to become more aware of and talk about in our sessions, blindspots which you might decide to start integrating into your sense of self, in order to move forward on life path.

Avoiding Anger

Do you rarely get angry? Have you have actually “gone to sleep” to your anger? Do you avoid becoming aware of your anger because expressing it might lead to conflict? Have you considered the costs of this? Here are some actions you can take to integrate this blind spot:

  • Notice when you feel small signs of anger or tamped-down forms of anger, like frustration, irritation, or stubbornness. Turn up the volume on all forms of anger, no matter how subtle.
  • Realize that, when you don’t consciously feel and express your anger, it doesn’t go away; it leaks out as passive aggression. Learn to recognize when you are leaking.
  • Become more aware of how and when you express aggression passively. Make lists of things you can do to be more active and direct in these situations, even if you are not ready to take these actions.
  • Explore all the reasons why you don’t want to feel or express anger— both generally and because of experiences in your past. Talk about this with a friend or therapist.
  • Ask the people in your life to help you learn to express anger. Tell them about any fears you may have connected with being angry. Take the risk to start expressing your anger in small ways, being careful at the beginning. Learn how to express your frustration or disagreement as soon as it happens, so that it doesn’t build up.
  • Reframe anger as a good thing. When it’s channeled consciously, it can help you establish boundaries, assert your needs, know what’s most important, and access power.

Not Knowing What You Want

Do you often have no idea what you want? Do you go along with the agendas of others because you don’t know or can’t express your own desires or opinions? Do you tend not to have an agenda? Do you have trouble communicating what you want? Here are some actions you can take to integrate this blind spot:

  • Ask yourself what you want more often. Keep asking, even if you don’t yet have an answer. And remember to ask this of your heart, not just your head. The heart knows more than the head about wishes and desires.
  • Remind yourself that it’s okay not to know what you want. With time and consistent effort, you can learn to access your preferences.
  • Don’t judge yourself for not yet knowing what you want.
  • Ask the people in your life to inquire about what you want, to express interest in knowing what you want, and to give you time to figure out what you want.
  • Express opinions more often, even if you don’t feel that strongly about what you say. Work against your tendency to see every perspective as equally valid. Push yourself to choose a side.
  • Next time you say that you don’t really care what happens, question whether this is how you rationalize not knowing what you want, not feeling the pain of not knowing what you want, and not doing the work of figuring out what you want. This is a potential manifestation of your passion of sloth.

Avoiding Conflict

Do you find many ways to avoid conflict? Do you make excuses for avoiding conflict? Does your avoidance of conflict limit you and the people around you? Here are some things you can do to integrate this blind spot:

  • Explore your beliefs about conflict. Explore all your fears related to conflict. What do you fear will happen if you engage in conflict?
  • Notice if you fear conflict because you believe it will inevitably lead to (potentially permanent) separation. Challenge this belief. Stay open to evidence that conflict can bring you closer to people. Learn to tell the difference between lack of conflict and true harmony. Deep and lasting peace is usually achieved through positive confrontation.
  • Learn about and explore all the positive uses of conflict—supporting healthy boundaries, deepening relationships, and letting people know where you stand.
  • Practice “leaning into” conflict to express disagreement and make yourself more known, more important, and more included as who you really are.
  • Engage in conflict in small ways by saying “no” and establishing healthy boundaries.
  • Allow yourself to “go against” people or what’s happening as a way of expressing your power. Allow yourself to feel bothered, upset, or angry about situations you don’t like.

REFLECTION: How do you suffer as a Nine in having these blindspots function in your life. Which of these would you like to work on in terms of getting more out of your relationships with others or your self?

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Facing Your Type 9 Shadow

The Type 9 shadow can perhaps be formulated through the idea of passive-aggression.

Passive-aggressive behaviour is a pattern of indirectly expressing negative feelings instead of openly addressing them. This can sometimes emerge in the following ways:

  • Resentment and opposition to the demands of others, especially the demands of people in positions of authority, or who are perceived as having some “power” over us (including loved ones)
  • Resistance to cooperation, procrastination and intentional mistakes in response to others’ demands or needs.
  • Showing up in communication (either virtual or face-to-face), in a sullen or hostile way, but without actually voicing why you are feeling this way openly and directly.
  • Frequent complaints about feeling under-appreciated or cheated, or let-down by others.

Part of your Type 9 growth journey might involve acknowledging, accepting, and integrating this tendency of your personality type to be passive-aggressive. By making their anger more conscious, 9s can learn that true connection happens only when we take the risk to know and express ourselves even if that means learning to tolerate the fear of separation and rupture.

We may even start to realize that the Type 9 focus on adapting to and supporting others (which we’ve always thought was a good thing) also comes with certain drawbacks. When we lack self-awareness of how we are functioning within our personality type, we can become indecisive, overly passive, and passive-aggressive, even while we consciously believe that we are being nice, friendly, and inoffensive.

When they fail to see our blind spots in this way, this can often lead a Type 9 personality to becoming stubborn and disengaged. When a Type 9 doesn’t like what’s happening, they tend to avoid expressing their dissatisfaction directly. But this leads them to engage in passive-aggressive behaviour, as our emotions will surface in some way, usually as  unacknowledged anger leaking out in passive forms. For instance, we may disappear from a situation, or another person’s life, when we are most needed and not do what we said or intimated that we were willing to do in order to show up in the world in a way that is true to our values.

MEETING YOUR TYPE 9 SHADOW

If you identify as a Type 9, here are some actions we might want to talk about in session that could help you to bring to the surface your frustrations and disappointments, becoming more aware of, and starting to counteract the key unconscious patterns, blind spots, and pain points of your personality type:

  • Bring your attention to what feels uncomfortable. Do things that bring discomfort, knowing that this is your path of growth. Notice how you tend to resist leaving your comfort zone. Start to step outside it in small ways, then in larger ways.
  • Allow yourself to get more in touch with anger. Be more aware of whatever makes you upset and how you put your anger to sleep. Start noticing repressed or passive forms of anger like irritation, frustration, and stubbornness. Welcome anger as a way to reconnect to what is important to you. Take the risk to communicate anger more directly.
  • Notice all the ways you are passive, passively resistant, and passive- aggressive (including being stubborn). Ask for feedback from people you trust about any ways they experience these tendencies in you.
  • Recall an incident in which you felt dissatisfied, upset, or unhappy. Take notes about how you felt; consider what you said and what you didn’t say but might have said.
  • Use your capacity to sense your body to increase your energy level. Move more—walk, do yoga, or engage in any form of exercise. Let your increased body awareness help you become more active and invigorated.
  • Think about and sense all the energy that you have given away and reclaim it by inhaling, focusing inside yourself, and feeling your strength.
  • Take action to establish boundaries with others. Say “no” more. Stop saying “yes” when you mean “no.” Be less nice, friendly, and smiley.

REFLECTION: In what way might you start doing some of the following, in small but significant ways in your life? Which people or situations in your life might you want to start practising with when it comes to acknowledging and being more authentic with regard to your Type 9 shadow?

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Type 9 Pitfalls

Inertia or passivity is one of the pitfalls of a having a Type 9 personality. As the core emotional motivation of this type, inertia could be seen as a kind of laziness—not in the usual sense of not wanting to do things, but rather a reluctance to take important actions for ourselves that are needed in the moment. This is usually an action that should be taken to support our own needs, but it can also be any first step that can change the reality around us. Through inertia and passivity, 9s consistently and unconsciously neglect themselves and their potential role in making a difference in the world, or in their relationships.

This happens because Nines have the tendency to pay attention mainly to things outside of themselves and to forget about their own inner experience, to the point that they have a hard time knowing what they think, feel, and want. When you ask them what they want, they often don’t know. They may have difficulty even knowing basic things about themselves, like what they want to eat for dinner. They can be very active in supporting others, but get caught in inertia and lose energy when it comes to acting in support of themselves. Their tendency to operate on autopilot and “forget” about their own priorities leads them to disconnect from their own needs, desires, feelings, opinions, and preferences, as well as their power to make change in the world. Under the influence of inertia, they deaden themselves—put themselves to sleep—to avoid having to “show up” and ask for attention in a world they believe sees them as unimportant. This drive to put the focus on others causes an unwillingness to have any kind of agenda at all. It expresses a kind of “giving up” on the effort to tune in to themselves.

Type 9s often take “the path of least resistance” when it comes to their own agendas—a reflection of inertia’s tendency to put out minimal effort. They “go with the flow” rather than assert their own priorities, often to the point of losing awareness of what their own priorities might be. They focus on making things comfortable and easy for others as well as themselves, which includes avoiding conflict as well as deeper engagements with people.

If you identify with this type, you might want to observe and make conscious these typical manifestations of inertia to move forward on your path to greater peace and contentment:

  • An inability or unwillingness to attend to your inner world—a kind of laziness about being aware of what’s going on inside. A lack of interest in tapping into your moment-to-moment experience.
  • Self-neglect and “self-forgetting” in all forms, including emotional, psychological, and physical.
  • Doing more of the same and resisting any change when it comes to courses of action that are already in motion.
  • Feeling unimportant and not putting yourself in the picture; not considering what you want and need as a consequence.
  • Procrastination when it comes to big priorities, including those most important to you personally.
  • Not knowing what you want; not having or expressing opinions or desires. Putting out a lot of energy to support others, but not having much for yourself.
  • Resignation about getting what you need and want. Proactively giving up on receiving anything, while going along with others and helping them get what they want.
  • A lack of emotional experience in your connection with yourself and others that is usually perceived only by people who are truly close to you.
  • Discomfort with being the center of attention or drawing attention to yourself by asking for anything or expressing preferences.

REFLECTION:

To what extent do you do any of the above? In what ways does this work for you (how is it useful, at times, to allow your Type 9 inertia to be in the driver’s seat) and what ways does it cause stress and strain in your life?

 

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Key Type 9 Patterns

If you identify as a Type 9, our journey together starts by recognizing how much energy you devote to maintaining a sense of harmony and connection with the world around you, and how little attention you will sometimes give to focusing on your own being and agenda. You may need to become more conscious of all the ways you try to avoid any kind of discomfort, as well as becoming more aware of what exactly feels comfortable and uncomfortable to you.

To launch your journey of awakening, let’s focus on making more conscious these five habitual Type 9 patterns.

Neglecting What Is Important to You

You tend to support others and pay attention to all sorts of external demands, but neglect your own needs and priorities. It will be important for you to notice if you prioritize other people’s agendas over your own. It may be hard for you to act on your own personal priorities, rather than work on tasks connected to others, routines and processes, and other less important activities in life. You may habitually minimize your own importance. Even when you don’t like the way life seems to make you unimportant, it may be hard for you to assert yourself. Your tendency to avoid conflict might also lead you to minimize your own preferences and perspectives. It will help you to see if it is difficult for you to know what you want, and if this makes you feel disappointed and frustrated.

Difficulty Mobilizing Your Energy on Your Own Behalf

You may find that you can easily mobilize your energy when you are helping others, but you have a hard time sustaining your focus and energy when acting on your own behalf. You may find it difficult to take action in support of (or even know) what you need and want. You benefit from noticing if it is hard for you to clarify your own agenda and sustain your efforts to pursue it. You may get distracted when you try to make a conscious effort to do what you need to do for yourself. You probably prioritize less essential tasks, rather then paying attention to and acting on what is really meaningful to you.

Difficulty Establishing Boundaries

You may notice that you have difficulty saying “no” to people when they want you to do something for them. This may be another way in which you put others before yourself or over-adapt to what others want. It will be good for you to notice if it is hard for you to go against people or speak up when you don’t agree. You may have trouble setting limits when people take too much of your attention and energy. And all of these tendencies may highlight the fact that you have a difficult time seeing your need for boundaries and establishing them in your relationships with others.

Avoiding Conflict and Disharmony

You may notice you have a natural ability to be energetically attuned to the level of harmony or disharmony in your world. You tend to try to create harmony with the people around you and you work against conflict, disharmony, or tension of any kind. In fact, you may feel bothered by people who inject tension into the environment by creating problems or disturbing the peace. You typically work to avoid conflicts you might have with others or mediate conflicts among the people in your immediate environment. Your gift for helping people understand each other is motivated by a desire to help everyone get along. It will be important to notice if you you feel driven to fulfill the wishes of others as a way to keep things peaceful and stay connected to the important people in your life. And it will be important for you to notice if your need to avoid conflict ends up keeping you asleep to yourself.

Avoiding Discomfort

You may notice you have a tendency always to try to stay comfortable and avoid what feels uncomfortable. You may establish routines to stay comfortable, and try to avoid threats to your comfort, including disruptions, disagreements with others, or change of any kind. You tend to avoid uncomfortable feelings and sensations— and also avoid conflict and an awareness of your own anger as part of the effort to prevent discomfort. When you observe yourself in an intentional, ongoing way, you will likely discover that you prioritize staying in your comfort zone.

REFLECTION PIECE:

Have a think about the ways in which these patterns are prevalent in your life at the moment, and how they get in the way of you living the kind of life you most yearn for.

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Instinct Stacking and Scoring

According to the Enneagram model of personality, each archetype is “ruled” or steered (mostly unconsciously) by one of three human instincts: the Self-Preservation instinct, the Sexual (Focusing/Targeting/Merging) instinct, as well as the Social Instinct.

These instincts, part of our human-animal evolutionary legacy, are present within our ego consciousness in different ratios, but generally speaking we function with one instinct taking the lion’s share of our time and energies. This instinct is also the one that can cause most problems for us as we often don’t even question its dominance in our egoic functioning. It can also, paradoxically, give us the greatest amount of joy and well-being when the instinct’s demands or needs are fulfilled or met.

So for example, for me as an Sx-type Four, I am happiest when having a super-meaningful, deep, and authentic conversation with someone else (so lucky to be able to do this every day as a therapist!) or engaged in some type of creative expression or study which also engages with my dominant instinct.

Our secondary instinct is the stack is the one that asserts itself in a more functional way. It doesn’t rule us (for good or bad) as much as our dominant instinct, but just hums along in the background, helping us to live our lives in harmonious and happy ways.

Our least manifested instinct (sometimes called our “blind” instinct) is the one we give much less energy to -again, not consciously, these are instinctive drives- which sometimes still serves us, but can also make our lives more tricky, as ideally, a life well-lived is one in which we can (consciously) balance and integrate all three of our instincts, as we also try to balance and integrate all three of our Intelligence Operating Systems (head, heart, gut) in a bid to get the best out of our selves and others.

There are a couple of ways you can use the scoring system below. Primarily just to reflect on these three instincts and how they move through you and drive you (sometimes to drink and despair, other times not), but also, if you like to work out how your instincts stack up, which will also give you more insight into your ego-functioning and personality style/subtype.

SCORING THE STRENGTH OF YOUR SELF-PRESERVATION INSTINCT

3 points for something you put a lot of time and energy into
2 points for something you do now and then
1 point for something that needs more attention

Zone 1: Self care and wellbeing 

_____Diet
_____Exercise
_____Sleep/Rest
_____Relaxation (time in solitude, walk in nature, meditation, yoga, etc.)
_____Adequate Stimulation (reading, listening to music, healthy sex life, watching documentaries, etc.)

Zone 2: Maintenance and resources 

_____Money/Finances
_____Time management (self-management, time to self, time with others, being on time, etc.)
_____Practical application and skills (being able to address practical needs, fix things, manage life, etc.)
_____Work habits/Persistence (the ability to follow through, finish tasks, discipline, habits around
practical ventures, ways you are handy, etc.)
_____Energy management (how we use our energy, deal with stress, balance silence with activity, etc.)

Zone 3: Domesticity and home 

_____Comfort/Domesticity
_____Safety/Security
_____Structure supports life/Base of operations (home management, home as a solid launchpad)
_____Beauty and Holding (comfortable and inviting living/work space, feeling held by your home, etc.)
_____Re-charging/Restoration (home as a place to restore)

TOTAL _____

 

SCORING THE STRENGTH OF YOUR SEXUAL INSTINCT

1 point for when you’re not sure or don’t engage in this area.
2 points for when you do this sometimes.
3 points for when you engage a lot and maybe even too much in this area.

Zone 1: Attraction (and Attracting) 

_____Broadcasting and Charisma
_____Display/Doing things to get noticed
_____Being Attracted/Following energy
_____Choosing/ Fitness
_____Competition/Winning

Zone 2: Exploration and Edge

_____Activation/Arousal/Getting Turned On (by sb/sthing)
_____Taking risks/adventure
_____Getting out of habits/leaving your comfort zone
_____Stimulation/new experience
_____Following/honouring impulses and inspirations

Zone 3: Merging

_____Focus/Intense involvement in a pursuit or a person
_____Losing boundaries and sense of self/surrender
_____Concentration vs. Distraction
_____Pouring and spending energy rather than conserving it
_____Seeking fusion/At-Oneness with someone or a certain kind of experience

TOTAL _____

 

SCORING THE STRENGTH/DOMINANCE OF YOUR SOCIAL INSTINCT

3 points for something you put a great deal of time and energy into – you actually
do this a lot
2 points for something you do now and then
1 point for something that needs more attention

Zone 1: Reading People and Situations 

____Reading Facial Expressions/Body Language/Tone of Voice/Moods
____“Reading Between the Lines”
____Interest in others/Attunement/“Tuning in”
____Empathy/Concern
____Adapting to “Clues”/Adjusting Behavior

Zone 2: Connecting

____Creating Relationships: Engaging others
____Sustaining Relationships: maintaining connections AND knowing when to
end them
____Communication—speaking and listening
____Cooperation/Reciprocity
____Play/Shared Enjoyment/Celebration

Zone 3: Participation 
____Getting involved or not: what do I participate in?
____Need to Contribute: something beyond my own needs
____Enrolling: getting others interested and involved in what I am passionate
about
____“Part of Something Bigger”/Sense of Place
____Belonging and Welcoming

 

TOTAL _____

A Few More Human-Animal Cartoons That Amuse Me

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The Self-Preservation Instinct

This is the first post in a three part series examining the Three Ruling Instincts that modulate our personality: the self-preservation instinct, the sexual instinct, and the social instinct.

Our personalities are usually “ruled” by one dominant instinct which functions as our primary energy source in terms of how we live our lives and where we put our time and attention. If you are interested in discovering your dominant instinct, I would suggest reading all three overviews of the instincts, by clicking on the links above and asking yourself two simple questions:

  1. Does this feel like the kind of energy/instinct which “decides” for me (consciously as well as unconsciously) where I might put the focus of my attention at any given moment?
  2. Is this instinct where I find my primary joy and sense of purpose, but also the place where I can suffer at times? A dominant instinct, like a dominant or needy partner, child, or family member, might function as our most “beloved” relationship with ourselves, but because it “rules” our person-ality, it also has the potential to cause us worry and distress. If Self-Preservations is your dominant instinct, it is very likely that when it feels like it is being threatened in some way, or not allowed to manifest in the world as we (or it?) might want and need, we can begin to experience physical or mental health issues.

If you would like to work out your the dominant instinct for your personality type, here’s a quick and easy way to do that.

OVERVIEW OF THE SELF-PRESERVATION INSTINCT

This instinct is less easy to confuse than the other two instincts (the social and sexual instinct), as its priorities and preoccupations revolve around very pragmatic and grounded concerns: the physical and emotional wellbeing of ‘me and my world’.

The Self-Preservation instinct thus has us pay attention to all things earthly, practical and sensual: health, money, home, family, lifestyle. Sustainability is a big theme, as is the material and emotional quality of life, and how to optimise it.

Self-preservation continually monitors and gauges our immediate physical state. It is the drive that motivates us to test and express our physical capacities and aggression, rest and relax.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF TYPES WHO ARE RULED BY SELF-PRESERVATION

  • Self-Pres types end to seek experiences that contribute to a healthy and full life. Their attention naturally lands on what encourages and sustains growth and what allows themselves and others to thrive.
  • They most focus on the body’s direct feedback and state, and can easily become preoccupied with it. When healthy, they are skilled in balancing activation with relaxation, value and make time for themselves, and give themselves permission to just be. When not so healthy (see below).
  • They value personal autonomy and self-reliance. Self-preservation types typically have carved out living and working situations where they won’t have to rely on other people to meet their basic needs.
  • They are sensitive to levels of comfort, sensual pleasure, and the emotional associations and impact of food, environments and material things.
  • They often live the struggle in the polarity between indulgence versus abstinence.
  • They value consistency and stability, but commonly have an athletic or adventurous streak. Self-preservation types often have an outlet that provides a consistent way of engaging the body’s aliveness directly that enhances physical capacity and health.
  • They enjoy challenging and testing aliveness through acts of endurance.
  • They usually have a strong capacity for working and for putting effort in a focussed direction. Ambition is a major theme for Self-Pres types, although it means different things for each of the nine personality archetypes.
  • One of their great challenges is finding a creative direction to apply their drive. Self-preservation types can struggle to find a meaningful focus for their tenacity.

ZONES OF THE SELF-PRESERVATION INSTINCT

Russ Hudson has identified three zones (or sub-domains) to the self-preservation instinct:

  1. Self-care and wellbeing
  2. Maintenance and resources
  3. Domesticity and home

Let us look at each of these in turn.

Zone 1: Self-care and wellbeing

  • Diet
  • Exercise
  • Sleep/rest
  • Relaxation (time in solitude, walk in nature, meditation, yoga, etc.)
  • Adequate stimulation (reading, listening to music, healthy sex life, watching documentaries, etc.)

Zone 2: Maintenance and resources

  • Money/finances
  • Time-management (self-management, time to self, time with others, being on time, etc.)
  • Practical application and skills (being able to address practical needs, fix things, manage life, etc.)
  • Work habits/persistence (the ability to follow through, finish tasks, discipline, habits around practical ventures, ways you are handy, etc.)
  • Energy management ((how we use our energy, deal with stress, balance silence with activity, etc.)

Zone 3: Domesticity and home

  • Comfort/domesticity
  • Safety/security
  • Structure supports life/base of operations (home management, home as a solid launchpad).
  • Beauty and holding (comfortable and inviting living/workspace, feeling held by your home, etc.)
  • Recharging/restoration (home as a place to restore).

HEALTHY/UNHEALTHY/REPRESSED (BLIND) VERSIONS OF THIS INSTINCT

Each of our instincts can manifest in a healthy (i.e. somewhat uncomplicated, non-neurotic way) or as a more unhealthy focus.  Usually if the instinct is our dominant instinct, there is a greater chance for it to “take over” our lives and create an imbalance in our personalities which will add to our suffering as human animals. Instincts can also be repressed (i.e. we consciously, or unconsciously don’t allow much space in our lives for the instinct to express itself). Here is a way for you to see how this instinct manifests in your personality.

Healthy/Functional Version of the Self-Preservation Instinct:

  • Self-care and health: Listening to body awareness. Genuine self-care. Getting real nutrition and exercise.
  • Practicality/Resources: Having a practical streak. Maintaining a sense of persistence and going for long-range goals. Working to maintain the foundations of life
  • Domesticity and home: Grounded, stable domestic life. Prefer to be at home than to travel or go out. Develops skills for making the home comfortable and practical, sometimes even beautiful.

Less Healthy/Functional Versions of The Self-Preservation Instinct:

  • Self-care and health: Overeating or starves. No exercise or over exercise.
  • Practicality and resources: Constant worry about resources and a grasping approach to life, never feel relaxed or sufficiently secure.
  • Domesticity and home: Talent for domestic order can become a pattern of lethargy and becoming stuck in ruts. Fears of stepping outside of familiar tracks.

Repressed or ‘Blind’ Versions of the Self-Preservation Instinct:

  • Self-care and health: Avoiding medical and dental check ups. Having haphazard relationships with exercise, rest and diet.
  • Practicality and resources: Lacking focus on resources, hoping others will handle this part of life. Overall, having a life that lacks structure and regularity. We do things more randomly and our schedule tends to be more changeable.
  • Domesticity and home: Avoid focus on domesticity. Our home may be more of a ‘crash pad’. May fear getting trapped by domestic life, seeing it as drudgery and heaviness.

A few more points to note when considering how the Self-Preservation Instinct functions for you:

  • Being present in the self-preservation instinct means attending to these life areas in healthy, non-neurotic, relaxed ways. It is knowing there is a need and meeting it without excessive thought and struggle.
  • Being neurotically over-concerned or fearful about self-preservation is a pointer towards the self-preservation instinct being on overdrive.
  • Being apathetic, negative or judgmental towards others who honour this instinct may indicate a repressed relationship with this instinct.
  • Rarely are we effective across all three of the areas – even when the instinct is dominant or secondary.

HOW TO KNOW IF THIS INSTINCT HAS BECOME REPRESSED OR BLIND IN YOUR PERSONALITY TYPE?

Here are some factors that might arise if this instinct is not allowed to find a place to contribute to our personality structures.

  • We may struggle to undertake sustained efforts that are supportive and beneficial for our own wellbeing. If we are blind in Self-Pres, we may pay too much attention to relationships, and not enough to our selves.
  • Something about working on our own self-interest might feel selfish and boring, and it can be hard for us to anticipate the benefits of doing so. We may rationalise this as selflessness when it’s actually about not wanting to take energy away from our usual instinctual agendas.
  • We may struggle to muster the force for moving ourselves in an independent direction unless there is significant sexual or social interest there. We might fail to cultivate self-reliance in a number of areas. Typically, we might struggle with creating foundations and sustainable pathways towards aims and goals.
  • We may fear that time spent cultivating our foundations and supporting our wellbeing only takes away time and energy from social and sexual pursuits. We may even fear that focusing on Self-Preservation areas in our lives ( boring and unavailable for connection.
  • Resist individuation.
  • Unconsciously outsource facets of care for their wellbeing onto loved ones, friends and acquaintances. They can therefore become a burden on others. Unaware of the full scope of what is outsourced, they tend to underestimate the toll it takes on others and can feel entitled to others’ support.
  • Attempts others make to help the self-preservation blind person may actually evoke a feeling of deficiency. This may reinforce a tendency to want to seek out novel connections whilst downplaying the ones they already have as intimates have an ‘inside look’.
  • Often in the position of waiting for others to initiate new directions and endeavours that lead to growth or sustainable changes.
  • Often don’t give the task at hand the necessary complete attention for it to unlock, nor do they trust in their own resourcefulness.
  • They can lack discernment around relationships. There is a lack of input of the self-preservation’s eye to whether a specific connection might be a divergence from one’s own path, a waste of time, or dangerous.
  • Can stay locked into relationships that seem to support the self-preservation needs they don’t feel prepared to address themselves. Their time tends to be given away to other people rather than treated as something precious.
  • Can easily become scattered and depleted of energy because they are typically poor at cultivating habits that are restorative or authentically restful.
  • Frequently mistake ignoring the body as a form of physical resilience and strength, blind to the cost.
  • Pattern of living can be a consequence of the interpersonal circumstances they find themselves in rather than by intention.
  • Susceptible to fostering grandiose fantasies about themselves due to a lack of groundedness. They grow from learning to tolerate loneliness by attending to present state.

HOW TO SEE THE INSTINCT AT WORK WITH OUR PERSONALITY TYPE:

Each Enneagram personality archetype has its own Achilles Heel, or Lifetrap: a way in which our personality leads us towards a kind of intrinsic “vice”. As a Type Four, for example, my Achille’s Heel is “envy and resentment”. So if Self-Pres were my ruling or dominant instinct, this Lifetrap would manifest through the seeking out of satisfaction in the three Zones of Self-Pres (see above):

  1. Self-care and wellbeing
  2. Maintenance and resources
  3. Domesticity and home

If you know your type and suspect you may be dominant in Self-Pres, here are the ways in which the seeking and striving parts of your personality structures will be inflected by the instinct:

Type One: Seek to experience essential integrity through lifestyle and wellbeing. This may at times result in the Lifetrap of Resentment.

Type Two: Look to experience essential love through attending to wellbeing, comfort and health of others. This may at times result in the Lifetrap of Pride.

Type Three: Strive to experience essential value in their accomplishments, lifestyle and careers. This may at times result in the Lifetrap of Vanity.

Type Four: Seek to experience essential depth through their lifestyle, creativity and self-expression. This may at times result in the Lifetrap of Envy.

Type Five: Seeking essential quality of insight through lifestyles and interests. This may at times result in the Lifetrap of Avarice.

Type Six: Seek to experience essential truth in their lifestyle, path of personal growth and resources. This may at times result in the Lifetrap of Angst.

Type Seven: Seek to experience essential freedom through experiences and sensual pleasure. This may at times result in the Lifetrap of Gluttony.

Type Eight: Seek essential power through lifestyle and resources. This may at times result in the Lifetrap of Lust.

Type Nine: Seek essential harmony through lifestyle and interests. This may at times result in the Lifetrap of Sloth.

HOW TO WORK ON MAKING THIS INSTINCT (ESPECIALLY IF DOMINANT IN YOUR PERSONALITY) THE HEALTHIEST IT CAN BE?

 

 

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Thank You Friends

I’m making a podcast at the moment called Save Us, Jeff Bezos!

Unlike other projects I’ve made in the past, it requires a fair amount of  creative  input from a number highly skilled individuals.

I am very aware that every ounce of energy they give me in support of this wee project is done out of Love. I have no other word for why someone would give their time, energy and attention to someone else when it doesn’t benefit them directly in any way.

What I’m wanting to do on this page is simply express my Love and thanks to these people who have given some of their care and love to me and SUJB.

In Order of Appearance:

Joss Rossiter (Enneagram 4) is my mother (different surname). It feels a bit weird calling her Joss, even on here, as I usually refer to her as “Ma”. She is a retired primary school teacher who started painting in her 60s after a major back operation, and has continued to do so, selling prints and paintings, as well as exhibiting on a GLOBAL SCALE. I am very proud of her. I love her a lot.

Angus Baigrie (Enneagram 4w5) is a Consultant Creator at LifeSearch, as well as a Self Employed Actor, Filmmaker and Podcaster. He is also a Radical Revolutionary Optimist, who does raised-eyebrow archness better than anyone else I know. He is currently working on a project about Boarding School Syndrome which I am really looking forward to seeing.

Yvette Keller (Enneagram 3w2) is a force of nature (type 3, innit). She writes and edits, she narrates audiobooks. She is also a fantastic actor/improviser as well as being just a superbly caring and generous-hearted human creature. I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of Forty-Two Places: A Guide to Douglas Adams’s London for Literary Touristsa book that’s wending its way towards us very, very soon!

Fran Lindsay (Enneagram 4) is a nursery school teacher and a very loving person. Fran’s dominant instinct is Social. I think Social Fours are the Nicest Fours, they just are.

🙏🏼  ❤️‍🔥  ❤️‍🔥 Thank you, friends  ❤️‍🔥  ❤️‍🔥  🙏🏼

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What Has Personality Got To Do With Psychotherapy?

WHAT IS PERSONALITY?

Personality is a word we often use in describing ourselves or others, but what exactly is it?

I like this description from psychotherapist, Beatrice Chestnut:

“The term personality generally refers to the part of our character that develops to interface with the outside world. Our personalities are shaped through the intersection of our innate qualities and our early experiences with parents, caregivers, family, and friends, as well as other influences in our physical, social, and cultural environments.”

When working with clients, as well as in understanding my own inner world, I have always found it useful to hold in mind some person-ality distinctions. Therapy, it might be said, consists of one person paying close (and hopefully caring) attention to another person’s personhood. Factoring in the person’s personality, or ‘blueprint’, can enable both therapist and client to toggle switch from the specific contents of the suffering, to more big picture thinking. Or to use different language: holding the personality in the background can support the move from the left hemisphere part of our brain (Suffering Radio 24/7), to the right hemisphere – a quieter, more peaceful and connected place.

Personality isn’t the only ‘big picture’ force in our lives. We are each operating within specific socioeconomic conditions, have access (or non access) to certain relationships, not to mention the different ways that we each have experienced trauma. However, our personality blueprints are the lens through which we experience life. Having a notion of what our blueprint is, also helps us to see what we are not, and can act as a doorway back to our essential experience. 

This is why, following an initial consultation, I usually ask clients to complete a personality test. Although landing in/on our personal blueprint is not always an entirely happy affair, knowing what kind of “animal” we truly are, as opposed to the animal we believe we should be, can alone be generative of more self-acceptance and understanding.

HELLO, MY NAME’S STEVE, AND I’M A SQUIRREL

Imagine a squirrel goes to see a therapist and talks about all the areas in their life where they perceive themselves to be failing.

It turns out they’re totally useless at catching balls, scaring off cats, and cuddling up to humans.

“But hang on,” says the therapist. “Isn’t that ‘dog’ behaviour you’re describing, rather than squirrel stuff.”

“Squirrel-shmirrel,” the frustrated squirrel replies, “Let’s do dog!”

Well of course a squirrel can be trained how to be more like a dog (there are videos on YouTube for this sort of pursuit). The therapist might help the squirrel to interact with the world in a more “doggy” fashion. But wouldn’t it be kinder to the squirrel, more interesting, self-compassionate, as well as a lot less bloody (inner) work to help this squirrel become the very best squirrel they possibly can be? Shouldn’t therapy be about helping us to grow and flourish in our own imperfect squirrel-tude, rather than everyone becoming dogs? I think so.

To do this however, three factors need to be in place:

  1. The squirrel needs to have some understanding of their squirrel-nature, as opposed to say, the nature of a dog. Both are mammals, but also different in many important ways.
  2. Certain conditions and support for this squirrel to truly excel in their squirrely ways needs to be in place.
  3. Some desire to be a “great squirrel”, as opposed to becoming a so-so dog.

Anther quote which speaks to this, is from psychoanalyst Karen Horney: 

“You need not, and in fact cannot, teach an acorn to grow into an oak tree; but when given a chance, its intrinsic potentialities will develop. Similarly, the human individual, given a chance, tends to develop their particular human potentialities without a great deal of forcing. Favourable conditions are needed though. She needs an atmosphere of warmth to give her both a feeling of inner security and inner freedom, enabling her to have her own feelings and thoughts and to express herself. She also needs healthy friction with the wishes and wills of others. If she can thus grow with others, in love and in friction, she will also grow in accordance with her real self.”

And in so doing, become a magnificent oak tree. Or squirrel. Or snail. 

HOW TO FIND OUT IF YOU’RE A SQUIRREL, A DOG, OR A MEERKAT

If what you are reading is resonating with you, perhaps you are curious to know which kind of animal you are. 

I find the Enneagram personality typology to be an excellent way of doing this. Here is an overview of the Enneagram personality model: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/how-the-enneagram-system-works

In my years working as a psychotherapist, I have studied and used all the main personality-focused typologies: Myers-Briggs/MBTI (which is often used, and perhaps even targeted at business environments), the Five-Factor Model of Personality, or Big Five (mainly used in clinical research and academic work), and even the Thematic Apperception Test, which nobody seems interested in anymore other than me. 

All of these personality tests will, in different ways, alert our troubled squirrel to her squirrelhood. However, one thing that is often lacking in these models is a developmental path. Approached the right way, the Enneagram can really help to guide us in terms of our development.

Psychotherapy seeks to explore and inquire into these person-al, existential questions in many ways. Typologies like the Enneagram can be a useful resource to run in the background of that process, helping us to becoming our best squirrely, doggy, wormy, spidery, wildebeest-y selves.

If you’re interested in getting a bit of a ball-park sense of your personality typology through an Ennea lens, I would recommend the Truity Online Enneagram test. It takes about five minutes to do on your phone (I’m a lazy squirrel) and then spits out something that looks like this, my personality snapshot, below. As you can see I am predominantly a four.

After doing the test, Truity.com will of course then ask you to give them some money for the full low-down on your type.

There is, however, no need for that, as the internet/YouTube/Steve are also available for great explorations and delvings into these personality “typologies”. These explorations can become even more nuanced, as well as tailored and focused to “you” and your self-development path once we also have an idea about which of the three instinctual/hardwired capacities most drives you. 

If you would be interested in bringing some more of this exploration into our work together, do Truity’s 5-minute typology assessment, and WhatsApp over to me a screenshot of your Enneagram snapshot like the one above. We can then talk a bit more about your typology and how it factors into your life and relationships with others in our next session.

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How The Jungian Idea of Anima and Animus Complexes Helps Us Understand Conflict In Our Relationships

Note: I wrote the text below to be listened to as a podcast, which is the most fun way to engage with this material. Here are the links to those three episodes, and their transcripts:

How has the self who has got over someone we’ve lost, someone we didn’t want to lose, but have, how is that self different to the self who hasn’t got over, who hasn’t recovered from whatever relational or existential blow that’s paining them, from whatever it was that severed the once interdependent, interconnected self from its beloved? Does that self, that self who has got over, walk  in their new unattached (detached?) state, in a way that is different to how this self moves, this somewhat heavy and ponderous self that pushes its boulder of loss, like Sisyphus “in heavy boots, heading uphill”.

“This man Sisyphus,” writes Alice Oswald in her poem in tribute to the “spirit of repetition” (whether in ascendancy or fall) ”he, has to push!”

But push what, you might ask, and why? Why can’t he just chill? Chill, Sisyphus, chill. Detachment is chilly, attachment warm, but boy does detachment feel good when we are chilled right to the core of us. Numb. Indifferent. Desensitized. 

Not this for the Sisyphus who has to push, asserts Alice Oswald, his “dense unthinkable rock /through bogs woods crops glittering / optical rivers and / hoof-sucked holes, / as high as starlight as low as granite, / and every inch of it he feels…”

What does he feel though, Sisyphus’s therapist, might ask were he to submit to that enquiry:

Again from Oswald:

There is not a soft or feeling part to this loss,
the rock’s heart is only another bone of the loss.
Now he knows he will not get back home, 
his whole outlook becomes this black rock;
like a foetus, undistractedly listening,
to the clashing and whistling and tapping of another world 
a world before the loss, before this having to push. 

Oh chill, Sisyphus, chill! Why can’t you just chill!

But he has to endure his object [Oswald reveals]
he has to oppose his patience to his perceptions,
and there is neither mouth 
nor eye to the loss, there is not anything
so closed, so abstract as this loss
[play: in the middle of the road there was a stone] 
except innumerable other forms of undoing
that lie down under the shady trees
or chafe slowly in the seas.

“You remember too much, / my mother said to me recently. // Why hold onto all that?” 

This is the poet Anne Carson’s mother who is berating her daughter from within Carson’s poem (The Glass Essay) about not getting over someone from the inside out, or the outside in, about getting too Sisyphean you might say with regard to her loss.

“That psychotherapy’s not doing you much good is it? / You aren’t getting over him.”

“Black open water comes / curdling up like anger.”

“You remember too much, / my mother said to me recently. // Why hold onto all that?” 

“Why hold onto all that? And I said,  / Where can I put it down? / She shifted to a question about airports.”

Airports are places where we take our selves to be released. They deliver “take off” options for bored, breakout, and sometimes bereaved selves, perhaps as another way of getting over someone or something, a way of getting higher than this earthbound animal being with its yearning for attachment, for finding a home, a secure base in another. The take-off, the journey and subsequent arrival at somewhere or someone distant and new is what we dream of from the place where we are bereft and bogged down in loss, particularly when we feel some loss in our lives curdling and choking out joy, cadaverous dark matter in an already sombre system. 

This is why we might decide to actually work quite hard on getting over someone, once our seven days of sitting shiva have been observed (little grooming or washing, the body grounded as much as possible, to the floor or a low stool). From this state we face head-on, head-down the unwieldy rock, that physically tangible void which only reminds us, when we engage with it at a psychic level or a representational one, that we are now addressing ghosts and ghostly memories of some dear departed once was or could have been. For they will not hear these words.

“Why hold onto all that? And I said,  / Where can I put it down?

But let’s say there is a way to put our loss “down” for a while, to get over someone in the manner we might wish for ourselves, the selves that need to continue living with and through our ongoing privations. What might this process look like? Or sound like? And where, as well as why, would a Tarot card come into play, especially the one I draw again and again in my sitting-shiva state: a card showing two lovers (but they could also be siblings or friends) exchanging oversized golden cups in some sort of bucolic setting. What has this got to do with getting over someone, getting over the loss of another?

[I wrote the above  about a month ago, but  even now, it is already sounding hugely overblown and overdone and somewhat melodramatic forward slash anima-suffused. Might the gaucheness of this earlier expression compared to how I’d write it now signal at least some getting over-ness for me? Perhaps. Anyway, continue with the lugubrious narration please, me of a month ago.] 

Well, thank you, ever-so-slightly more chilled future-self. 

So loss, and how to get over it. Well, Instead of the usual Ted/TedX bish bash bosh approach (although Antonio Pascual-Leone’s 3-step How To Get Over The End of A Relationship is really worth checking out on that front) what if the getting-over process were to be imagined as a kind of diatonic scale [Play diatonic scale of C ]. You may recognise that one as the diatonic on C, also known as the scale of C-Major: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. 

I don’t think though that this is what getting over someone sounds like. Or at least not in the felt experience of it, in the day-to-day, hour-to-hour living with our losing. Maybe as a sort of there-there though, the scale through which others sometimes try to console us. 

Yes-That’s-Sad-But-Is-What-It-Is!

You-Will-Find-A-No-Ther-To-Love!

Just-Keep-Calm-And-Carry-On-Dear!

But surely getting over someone is less of a major, more of a minor-scale affair? 

So here’s C-minor: C, D, E♭, F, G, A♭,  B♭, C. That’s better. Plenty of flat notes in that one (B♭A♭E♭).

Oh what now?

We’re no more?

What to do?


To which C-minor goes:

This is going to hurt I’m afraid.

Missing someone every day.

WIshing we had found a way to stay [together].  

I don’t hear much hope in C-minor though, and when we are getting, or not getting, over someone we need hope, and faith, and all of those other minor but harmony-supporting factors. 

So let’s try and do this process in the key of C-harmonic minor which sounds like this: C, D, Eb, F, G, Ab, B, C. 

Can you hear that little lift on the B-note, the one just before the top-C. In C-minor the B is flat. In C harmonic minor, the B, the note of being you might say, still finds a way to sing, to shine, clean, pure, and hopeful-ish.

Yes its shit but you’ll get through it.

Show me how to get over you. 

Here are a few things you can do. 

OK, so if that’s the case, let’s do it. I offer you, my fellow lovelorn creatures, 3 spells channeling the Magician Archetype (shazam!) for getting over someone.

 

⚡ SPELL ONE: A Spell for Connection & Centering ⚡

So let’s start with the first note of recovery, a C-note spell, this is the spell of C, this is the spell of C, this is the spell of C [Farewell OK, riff from Elvis Costello]

COSTELLO QUOTE: “What better than to open with a song that says farewell ok. Or farewell…ok?

Loss by its very nature is profoundly de-centering. 

We come into existence as interdependent, even codependent creatures (although this is an idea or term that is often stigmatised these days). Perhaps a less loaded way to refer to this is through a word I’ve picked up from the novelist Ruth Ozeki, which is that we are inter-being creatures. Maybe that’s a less loaded way to refer to what parents are to their children, but equally the inter-being of friends, romantic partners, colleagues, and also therapists and their clients. The way my consciousness is and responds to the world, is inextricably bound up with yours, yes yours (hello) and everyone else’s. This is inter-being. You and me are not separate entities from an inter-perspective, we shape each other’s being, and are crucial to the lives we interact with.

Two forces of being create something we call a relationship and this relationship, if we are lucky, is able to centre and hold and ground us in the constant, ever-changing flux of existence.

After the FO however,  the farewell ok – which is perhaps a nicer way of saying that other FO expression that gets shot like a poison arrow into the backs of the retreating troops- we stumble and fall, as if our beloved’s departing words truly consist of something ruinous and deadly for the psyche. Which perhaps they do, provoking a kind of magnificent….hurt. 

ELVIS COSTELLO QUOTE – see/hear audio.

After the hurt of a breakup or some other loss, we fall once more back into that amorphous sea of existence, a decentred place which maybe had been kept at bay for a while, as relationships often help to structure and fortify ourselves against the dark sea of existential unease, aging, sickness, death etc. 

At this moment we need practices that help centre us as much as possible so that our lives don’t become a litany of curses against the self who couldn’t hold onto or keep a relationship going in the way it needed to kept going, or against the other who didn’t want us in the ways we wanted to be wanted, wanted or accepted or tolerated, or whatever our needs might have been.

In The Glass Essay, Anne Carson centres her self by going to visit her mother who “lives on a moor in the north… Alone.” She also centres herself in writing and reading through “the collected Works of Emily Brontë / this is my favourite author…“

Another important aspect of centring is to find a practice that also feeds us with some of the love and affection that has been withdrawn from our relational table. In the classic Stephen Stills song, Love the One You’re With he counsels us to to not “be angry or sad”, or at least not become engulfed with that inevitable anger and sadness of being dropped, “don’t start crying over the good times you’ve had, there’s a girl… “

I read hear the spell that Sills is trying to cast in different ways. One of them is a rebound spell.

Get back on the swipe left swipe right horse, the Hinge horse the bumble horse the plenty of fish in the seahorse and find your next love who like you now “is just waiting for something to do“.

This may work for Stephen with a p, but it doesn’t seem to work for Steven with a v. Flirtation and novelty don’t necessarily furnish us with that  relational energy we need, nor the love we hope will one day fill that void of loss. Perhaps all it does is cover up the magnificent Sisyphean hurt which we push around in our heads all day, and especially at night. Instead, maybe the spell is that of continuing to love those other beings who make up our world, who are still with us, to love them with with a fierce passion, as fierce as anything we ever brought to that space of interbeing which is now no longer accessible in the way it was before, the interbeing now a fortress with some Leave Me Alone mote encircling it, heavily guarded.

For me, centering myself in the love of those i’m with, means reconnecting as well as continuing to connect in some deep human animal to animal human way with for example this creature I call Max, who shares my life consistently, an inter-being entity who lives and breathes the same air that I do, who I sometimes take for granted. We forget when lovelorn about all the other creatures out there who we can love with focused tenderness. Just placing my hand on Max’s furry back or drinking in deeply of the love that shines from his eyes works as a magical balm. It is a very pure love, the love that shines from Max’s eyes, a Love with a capital L, that often leads me to confuse dog with god. I am happy to be confused in this way.  The love of a creature like Max is a form of profound centering. Maybe because it brings us back to some core relationship, to that life-affirming love within ourselves if you like, a stablising, settling force in the sometimes vast and empty seas of undoing and abandonment.

Talking is a deeply centering practice for me too. Talking to my friend Charlie, my brother, my mother and one of my fathers (the one who engages in those kinds of conversations), but even more my clients center me on a daily basis in our inter-being, in sharing and hopefully halving the burden of their magnificent hurts. 

As is connecting with this, with you, my primary higher power, this love (I have no other word for it) that I have always channelled into creative projects in order to both understand and be understood: projects that are often foolishly magical, or magically foolish, therapeutic creativity as opposed  to creative therapy. 

Indeed any practice that brings us back from our wide-eyed, aghast, despairing selves is helpful, that centers us away or within the thoughts that circle around the carrion of loss like buzzards waiting to sweep down on the corpse and pick at the remaining flesh, attempting to denude the tender beautiful and bountiful specificity of what was, the living flesh of our relationship that once was, in order to reveal the archetypal anima/animus bones we often picked with each other, or that were picked out of us, in that magical interbeing of a loving relationship that once held two weird and wonderful human animals together for a while.

I took up the practice of meditation.
Each morning I sat on the floor in front of my sofa
and chanted bits of old Latin prayers.

De profundis clamavi ad te Domine.
Each morning a vision came to me.
Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul.

I called them Nudes.
Nude #1. Woman alone on a hill.
She stands into the wind.

It is a hard wind slanting from the north.
Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift
and blow away on the wind, leaving

an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle
calling mutely through lipless mouth.
It pains me to record this,

I am not a melodramatic person.
But soul is “hewn in a wild workshop”
as Charlotte Brontë says of Wuthering Heights.

This is true. Soul is hewn in a wild workshop. To put this in a Jungian frame we might say that we step into the wild workshop of a relationship in the hope (although we may not frame it in this way in the early stages of our union) of making contact with our own relational soul, our own inner anima or animus, to guide us through further transitions and growth. Jung often refers to these archetypal forces as our “soul images,“ but also as the “not-I“, which is to say: the stranger, the human animal you take a punt on, swipe right on on a dating app for example. Hence this complimentary but also at times oppositional quality of Eros.

The Jungs, both Emma and Carl, I am reading Emma’s book called Anima and Animus at the moment, believed that the various conflicts which occur within a relationship can be likened to a kind of possession, as if by a  demon. The demon in this case is an image, an Imago of a part of our own psyche or soul which we may have pushed down into the depths of us, until it resurfaces in the lake of interbeing as a shark or killer whale. Moby Dick, eat your briny heart out. For Jungians, these anima-animus conflicts can only be worked through and find their full realisation and integration within the partnership itself, within the watery realms of our interbeing.

This is perhaps borne out in Carsons exchanges with her psychotherapist HAW (HAW as opposed to WHORE) throughout the Glass Essay which sound a bit like this:

I began telling Dr. Haw

about the Nudes. She said,
When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not

go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.
This still seems to me a good question..

I love the fact that the psychotherapist in this poem is called Haw (HAW, not WHORE) which rhymes with LAW (LAW, not LORE) the name of the Carson’s former beloved. 

At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking

of the man who
left in September.
His name was Law.

My face in the bathroom mirror
has white streaks down it.
I rinse the face and return to bed.

Sometimes we need to centre ourselves with a HAW (HAW etc.) after the loss of a LAW. The centering, guiding, stabilising law of love. Psychotherapists can sometimes return us to ourselves by getting together for a 50 minute “date” once or twice a week, and caring for us, as we were cared for before. And so in some way keeping going that law of love which states, you are lovable even now, don’t forget that. Haw centres the lost soul, from the decentering after-effects of Law expressed though another’s wants and wishes. Carson wrote a whole book about the weird laws of love called Eros: The Bittersweet, which amongst other things is a riff on that famous epigram from Catullus:

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior

(Forgive my pronunciation, as pretentious as I sometimes sound, I never studied Latin]

I hate and I love. Why? you might ask. I don’t know. But I feel it happening and I hurt. 

In Eros: The Bittersweet Carson writes of this dialectic of Magnificent Hurt that we often refer to when we think of Love as a process: 

“A simultaneity of pleasure and pain is at issue….Love and hate construct between them the machinery of human contact. Does it make sense to locate both poles of this affect within the single emotional event of eros? Presumably, yes, if friend [the beloved who we miss] and enemy [that hurtful part of the beloved we don’t miss] converge in the being who is its occasion.”

I think that’s worth hearing again: “A simultaneity of pleasure and pain is at issue….Love and hate construct between them the machinery of human contact. Does it make sense to locate both poles of this affect within the single emotional event of eros? Presumably, yes, if friend [the beloved who we miss] and enemy [that hurtful part of the beloved we don’t miss] converge in the being who is its occasion.”

When anima/Animus possession  occurs, according to the Jungs,  this machinery of human contact grinds to a halt. Both parties are desperate to get some attention for their magnificent hurt, but not really willing to give attention to the other’s Magnificent Hurt, perhaps even viewing the other hurt as self-serving or inconsistent in some way. 

One soul in the lake of interbeing we call a relationship (the anima, in this case) tries to get attention by melancholically philosophising about the conflict that has arisen as if trying out for an Arthur Schopenhauer biopic or the lead role in a television adaptation of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Whilst the soul (the animus) manifests oppositionally to the one who is trying to get their attention. 

The animus gets attention by downplaying, and if possible, not giving attention to a perceived form of neediness expressed between the lines of a WhatsApp message from their Schopenhauerian lover. As you can see, this  becomes a very tight existential knot, because naturally this animus-infused FO factor often just incites the anima driven mansplaining and boo-hooing even further. An anima possession, according to Emma and Carl Jung, shows itself through the female soul image in the male psyche, which in conflict becomes plaintive and gloomy, and maybe even downright melodramatic (this man Sisyphus he has to push!) whilst the male soul image in the female psyche, shows up to the party as Judge, Emperor, and Battle-Scarred Warrior: ready to call out each neurosis in her beloved as a tragic character flaw, which indeed it may very well be. 

I use the words female and male here as the Jungs did, but this phenomenon is not at all gendered. We might equally call these not-I soul images yin and yang, or too-much, too-soft and gloopy (that would be the anima) versus too little and too hard (animus). And yet, even here, the machinery of human contact continues. Anima becomes the moany, sappy struggling sisyphus, and Animus  the rock. 

I have called this an existential knot, but it is also, I realise in relating it to you an almighty getting of our interbeing knickers in a twist: the twist of destabilising, unconscious complexes without giving anyone any time off for the flex and fun of reconnecting and relating to each other.  

The idea of anima and animus possession, is for me right now the best description of how conflict and decentring occurs in any romantic relationships, which is why we try to center ourselves once more, in the emptiness that feels as hard as rock to embrace or push forwards in our lives. Whatever form of  centering we choose needs to feel completely antithetical to that Farewell OK. Instead like Chubby Checker’s jovial chug-a-lug of a song, the spell we require in these moments needs to be 100% welcoming and embracing, like a sort of loving broom which might in time sweep away all that relationship-upsetting anima and animus knackering, knicker-twisting hoo-ha, so that it might in time once more dissolve into the fleeting, precious wave-like emptiness of consciousness itself. 

“Emptiness really refers to reality as it is. That everything in the world is empty of a fixed permanent abiding self. In other words everything is impermanent. Everything changes. And at the same time, everything is also completely interconnected. And coexist with everything else. And cannot exist without everything else. And so, it’s just simply describing the nature of things to materialise, to constellated, to come into being, to come into form, and then to fall apart again. One metaphor that I tend to like is the metaphor of a wave,. So if you imagine the ocean has this vast expanse of emptiness. Just as fast still ocean. And then the planet shift, and the tide pool, and the moon waxes and wanes, and suddenly from this emptiness, a wave starts to form.”

And it begins to poke it little head up from the ocean, and it looks around, and it’s sort of like, wow look at me I’m a wave!

I’m pretty great, I’m really something! And then of course the planet continues to turn, the tides continue to pull, and then the wave starts to recede, and it’s like, oh no help!

And it disappears back into the ocean again. So this is kind of the relationship I see between form and emptiness. Do you know the wave is this temporary form that pops up, and thinks it’s really something, just like us, but then time works on us, and the form which we’re in now, starts to recede again, and the wave becomes part of the ocean, and we become part of the planet, and it’s this constant flux, this ebon flow, which is completely about impermanence, and it’s also completely about interbeing, or in Buddhism we call it dependent co-arising that we are entirely dependent on our context, and within the context, we arise and then we fall.

So it’s this notion of interbeing, I think which is really at the heart of the word emptiness.”

MUSIC

 

⚡ SPELL TWO: A Spell for Connection & Centering ⚡

When we are trying to get over someone we are often open to advice. Do this, do that. Try not to fall into this trap, or that one. Don’t even think about doing that! Etcetera. All of it offered to the brokenhearted as a panacea, as well as a kind of spell, an exorcism if you like, to hurry the anima/animus possession of Eros from our hearts so that we can get back on track with our single lives again.  [Audio pep up song]

Sometimes advice comes from unexpected directions, like an Internet Pal from across the ocean who WhatsApps me their 11 year old daughter outlining her advice for my Recovery Plan

[audio: Try A New Food]

I can see how trying some new food on a daily basis might work well as a pick me up spell, but having put on some weight in the settling down stage of my relationship (about 350 g of take-it-easy, Shared Oral Gratification for each month we were together) I worry that trying new food might continue this trajectory. Now that I am single again, I need to be slim and single in order to be more desirable/lovable for whoever next picks me off the carefully planogramed Hinge or Bumble shelves.

But I like this Try-A-New Thing Idea, and for me that turns out to be a new dance, or rather finding a new place to dance, and making myself move in the way on a daily basis, no matter how leaden I feel in the run up to the practice. In order to do this, for the first month after our separation, I take myself off between the hours of three and five with Max and we go some place where we might create together a kind of silent disco, ideally somewhere where we won’t be spotted: in the basketball courts at the local park after nightfall, or in a small clearing of trees on Stanmore Common. Although dancing is always a tonic, this practice cuts in different ways, as this is the kind of thing the three of us would often do. Somewhere in the wilds of our being and the natural world.  Which makes me realise that the dancing has to be combined with another kind of exercising, or exorcising with an O rather than an E. 

What is it I want to exorcise? I guess I want to drive out in some way all the attribution and castigation and animadversion, all the admonishing and finger-pointing blame and fault-finding within me. At the end of the relationship, we are often filled with a kind of impeachment mindset which does us no good whatsoever. Blame fueled by the anima of a male-identified creature, often centres on misattunement and neglect by our beloved, whist the animus residing in the heart of a female-identified creatures, calls into question the very cohesion and coherence of the other’s being, pointing out character flaws and defects which, like a car with dents and bumps and slightly worn out braking pads, might be issued with an order to take itself off to a mechanic so as to be “fixed” or revamped in some way. The mechanics who offer this kind of reinvention or renewal are now predominantly, for our culture,  psychotherapists and life coaches, the HAWs (HAW) of this world. So it is no surprise, that a psychotherapist in training (my beloved) would turn to another psychotherapist no longer in training (me) and sing to him a few lines from that brilliantly funny Loudon Wainwright song Therapy: “I think you’re just a little crazy, you need some therapy that’s all.”

Wainwright’s song was written in the 80s, but has become more and more of a cri-de-coeur for the Gen Y’s and Gen Zs of our time. For is not therapy our new secular religion? Considered to be the answer, perhaps the only answer, for everything, and everyone. 

 

 

 

For me as a therapist, this is good for business, but for me as a flawed human being I struggle with the therapy-will-fix-the-things-I-don’t-like-about-you fantasty, perhaps because I have already had plenty of therapy (hundreds and hundreds of hours of the stuff) with the notion that this might be a relational magic bullet that releases us for evermore from anima or animus possession, but I don’t think it works like that. Or if it does, it can only work with both parties taking responsibility for their anima/animus constellations and unfortunately that’s not how it panned out for us.

I’m full of fear and paranoia (that would be the animus)
You are hysterical and sad (anima)
Let’s do it, babe, you know I love you (really?)
It costs so much, it can’t be bad.
I don’t know why you love me, baby
I hardly love myself at all
I think we’re both a little crazy
We need some therapy that’s all.

“There are no simple solutions to love problems in life,” writes the analytical psychologist John E. Sanford in his book on anima/animus entanglement The Invisible Partners, “and every love relationship requires a price from us, as well as a special kind of creative response to our conflicts” he concludes. 

Emma Jung was often deranged by Carl’s Anima. Carl admits as much in his Two Essays on Analytical Psychology where he writes: “I recognize that there is some psychic factor (the anima) active in me which eludes my conscious will in the most incredible manner. It can put extraordinary ideas into my head, induce in me unwanted and unwelcome moods and emotions, lead me to astonishing actions for which I can accept no responsibility, and upsets my relations with other people in a very irritating way, etc. [I wonder what that etc. is about!]” 

He continues with the hand-wringing about his own Anima: “I feel powerless against my Anima and, what is worse, I am in love with it, so that all I can do is marvel.”  

Emma, in a talk to the Psychological society in 1934 which became the basis for her short book Anima and Animus, refers to her struggles with Carl’s Anima in the following passage: 

“We become aware, to our great confusion and disappointment, that the man who seemed to embody our image of the Animus does not correspond to it in the least, but continually behaves quite differently from the way we think he should. At first, perhaps, we try to deceive ourselves about this and often succeed relatively easily, thanks to an aptitude for effacing differences, which we owe to blurred powers of discrimination. Often we try with real cunning to make the man be what we think he ought to represent. Not only do we consciously exert force or pressure; far more frequently we quite unconsciously force our partner, by our behavior, into archetypal or anima reactions. Naturally, the same holds good for the man in his attitude toward the woman. He, too, would like to see in her the image that floats before him, and by this wish, which works like a suggestion, he may bring it about that she does not live her real self but becomes an anima figure. This, and the fact that the anima and animus mutually constellate each other (since an anima manifestation calls forth the animus, and vice versa, producing a vicious circle very difficult to break), forms one of the worst complications in the relations between men and women.”

““Everyone in the audience at the Psychological Club must have known whose animus and anima Emma was talking about,” writes Catrine Clay in her book about Emma Jung and her marriage to Carl, which is called Labyrinths (a wonderful book, I’d recommend it).

But what is the answer to this viscous circle of anima-animus possession that Emma refers to in her talk. Is it really just that: “You need some more therapy that’s all.” Emma suggests that we need to withdraw blame and law-making injunctions as much as possible, and instead reconnect outside the realm of Anima and Animus to other parts of our selves as well as each other. This exorcism is not that of erasing or eliminating the other person from consciousness, but rather in neutralising to some extent our connection to the part of us that resides and also torments our minds, from within the other’s psyche. For me, this exorcism requires me to stop sending I-miss-you emails written from the Anima, which predominantly receive terse Animus response: “Farewell OK, Steve. Yours Sincerely, Animus”

The word animosity, which is now a synonym for hostility wends its way through our language via the 15th century meaning of the word denoting vigour and bravery, (from the old French animosité referring to boldness of spirit). This boldness gets its powe from the Latin animus (of the non-hostile kind) meaning life or breath. I find it interesting that this word starts from a place denoting openness, or at least some kind of inhale/exhale balance and lands up as we human animals often do, in the offensive, in the boxing ring of animosity, which perhaps is really just an overdose of that boldness and vigour through which love, the connective (not too much, not too little, just enough) version and vision of interbeing, takes wing.

Exorcism of these oppressive, overstated versions of anima and animus, require more than words to rid us of them. As with other types of exorcism, an embodied response is usually more effective than an email or a WhatsApp message. What we need is a smile or a look of sympathy delivered from one human animal face to another; an embrace, a swim, dancing or a walk together are worth a million terse exchanges. At some core level, I think this is what the HAWs of this world (HAW) give their clients or patients, reconnecting them back to the sweet interbeing of human care and attention. But if this embodied togetherness is not accessible or affordable to us, we can at least dance, and stretch, and walk, and sing, and draw, and paint, and garden our way back to some kind of inner-integration which perhaps also leads us to my next and final spell. 

 

⚡ SPELL THREE: A Spell for Beholding, Beholding, Beholding ⚡

This is a B spell where the B stands for BEHOLD. BEHOLD is the spell we cast for our selves every time we draw a tarot card in response to a burning question, or chat to a psychotherapist or someone who focuses on us in a caring way. Sometimes,  when that card is drawn again and again, we might be able to behold and acknowledge aspects of ourselves and that other participant in the relationship that we hadn’t acknowledged before.

Which is how it is for me and the Two of Cups, a card that has steadfastly accompanied my Anima through its getting overness, a card I keep on drawing in relation to the koan of  relationship, and maybe, perhaps so that I can behold, once, twice, thrice (for three is the magic number, right) something that is core to all relationships?

What is it we behold when we first meet the Two of Cups? If you don’t know the card, have a quick Google of it online as you listen. The Two of Cups shows us a fool, maybe even that Archetypal fool who we find at the start of the Tarot pack: gaily traipsing off some unseen ledge with his faithful doggy daemon prancing by his side. It certainly looks like the same character who I recently devoted some early episodes to on this podcast. He is wearing the same clothes as that Archetypal Fool, the same flowery tunic and yellow stockings. His beloved is dressed in flowing robes the colour of sky and snow, clothing that we associate with the High Priestess of the Major Arcana. If they are lovers, we might ask: how are they so, and why? A Fool with a High Priestess? Surely that can’t work! But maybe it can? High Priestesses sometimes have a soft spot for Foolish Magicians or Magical Fools: especially those Fools who have something in them that yearns intensely for the numinous. The Holy Fool, we sometimes call this creature. So these two might look or sound like an odd couple, but on this card, the Two of Cups, they make sense in some way, balancing each other out. 

The Two of Cups echoes the sixth card in the major arcana, that of the Lovers who stand somewhat gormlessly waiting for an angel with its hair on fire to weld Anima to Animus. The angel’s hairdo reminds us of that burning bush which once spoke it’s “I Am What I Am” revelatory message to one of my forefathers, Moses. On the lover’s card, the card of Eros, it is this fiery angel that is supposedly going to unite the often-aligned, but also sometimes misaligned energies, of Adam and Eve as they reiterate themselves through time. The tree of life stands behind the Archetypal Adam; the tree of knowledge entwined with the serpent of unconscious wisdom can be seen behind Eve. 

The man looks at the women as if to say here I am, I am yours if you want me! I offer my focus, my devotion, my life-force including some of its lava-like, Anima outpourings (there is a volcano in the background). I offer this as a complement to your leafy and fructifying knowledge of birth and death, beginnings and endings. And maybe if we both work at it, we shall in time be brought into the sanctified embrace of that Higher Power we call Love (brief glance to the Angel of Eros with its hair on fire). 

The two trees on the Lovers’ card also map onto the Anima and Animus polarities of our intertwined souls. The Anima, in its life giving state, is all about Love, Sacrifice, and Emotion with a capital (but also sometimes melodramatic) L E S.  Which is lovely when delivered in the quantities we like, but sometimes it is delivered in quantities we don’t particularly want or need, and then we become Too Much. My Anima is often Too-Much in the realm of Eros. Like Carl, I feel powerless against my Anima and, what is worse, I too am in love with it, so that all I can do at times is marvel but also mope at its fuck-uppery energies. The Animus, as you may have understood by now, doesn’t have this sloppy emotionality to it in the slightest. For it is about Logos, about shaping experience and relationships, as well as other people. 

This is why the High Priestess, when possessed by her Animus, can sometimes manifest in the guise of a Manager, even Emperor, or a sort of Chairman of The Board, Logan Roy eat your heart out, who suffers no fools and takes no shit. Communications sent through the Animus are often very formal and clipped, terse and businesslike. “If the anima is the Master of Moods as well as moodiness in the male-identified psyche,” writes John Sanford, “the Animus is Master of Opinion, Conjecture, and Presumption”. To counter the Anima’s characteristic neuroticism, the Animus typically expresses itself in judgements, generalisations, critical statements and apodictic assertions.” 

I had to look up that word “apodictic” which means something like “clearly established,  and beyond dispute”. As in: is what it is, dude, take it or leave it! When an Animus communicates a problem as it sees it, any alternative framing is viewed as childish, or foolish nonsense. Shut up Anima, shut up Anima, shut up Anima.

But of course the Anima is just as blind and wilful and pigheaded as its Animus counterpart. When emotions are running high, it bombards the Chairman of The Board with its elaborate, labyrinthine ideas and fears which unsurprisingly the Animus finds beyond its paygrade to even acknowledge for the most part. The histrionic Anima (this is how the Animus often views Anima expression) will often be subjected to a form of gaslighting, and ordered to get itself rectified or fixed by third party, such as a shrink or some other moral authority. There is no space or time in the relationship for passions running high. The only way to express disagreement is through muted deliberation and consultation.  

Unlike the Lovers Card, the two of cups shows us a post-honeymoon couple, negotiating remittances and recompense in order to vouchsafe the continuance of their love-bond. Sex and the excitement of that once shiny new relationship, represented by the phallic mountain in the background of the Lovers’ card, is no longer sufficient reward for staying together. Instead of the Tree of Life and Knowledge, the shared goal is more domestic, a shared abode in the countryside, which see in the distance on the Two of Cups card. No longer does a wish fulfilling Angel with its hair on fire hover over the lovers’ heads but rather a winged lion who brings to this negotiation a caduceus, which is to say a short, blunt staff entwined by serpents which has existed in our culture for anything up to 6000 years.

The caduceus is often carried by the Greek God Hermes the Messenger God, protector of travellers, thieves, merchants, and orators. Hermes moves quickly and freely between the world of mortal, conditional love, represented here by the Cups, proffered when each beloved contractually delivers, and withheld when they don’t.

In Roman mythology, Hermes is known as Mercury the name derived from the Latin merx, connected to  merchants, merchandise, and commerce. In this Two of Cups relationship, the exchange becomes a list of desires to be met, and love turns into a logistical arbitration or transaction: I will continue to pour care and concern from my cup into yours but only if certain key criteria are met. If not, farewell OK. 

“The key word in coming to terms with the anima and the animus is relationship”, writes John Sarno. “Anima and animus are archetypal figures, which means they do not simply go away and disappear from one’s life, but act like permanent partners with whom we must find some way of relating no matter how difficult they may be. But relationship makes all the difference. When a figure of the unconscious is denied, rejected, or ignored, it turns against us and shows its negative side. When it is accepted, understood, and related to, its positive side tends to appear.” 

That’s right, in time we can come to not only tolerate, but even love our lover’s anima or animus. But only if we make space for these parts of ourselves in the relationship, rather than exiling them from our interbeing.  

The second time I draw the card, I see things slightly differently. This time the Fool is not only holding onto his precious cup but also reaching for the cup of his beloved. This is the anima-led, emotionally greedy fool, the fool as addict who can never get enough of his favourite drug. We all, I believe, become somewhat addicted or dependent on our partners, no matter how boundaried we start out. Managing this dependency is of course one of the skills of a good relationship. My Anima, as is often the case,  is sometimes a very needy creature, which unfortunately, particularly if you identify as a man in our culture, is considered a terribly unattractive trait. 

The Two of Cups I now behold as an indictment of my sometimes over-needy neediness. And yet, as Jung admitted over a hundred years ago, about his over-needy and annoying neediness, I am also drawn to it, as I am drawn to the neediness of my Anima as she manifests in the not-I, in the You of my beloved. I love to be needed, and I’d like in turn, to be able to need. I also like (to some extent) my anima’s wholly un-macho vulnerability, excitability, earnestness, sentimentality and unadulterated shmaltz. And like Jung, I can sometimes only marvel at the extent of it bullshit and blarney which it often spouts in pursuit of insight. Oh for fucksake, Anima, chill, why can’t you chill. Well, at times, it can’t. Even now, can’t you hear it? What is a podcast I ask you, if not an anima-driven project? 

The third time I draw the card, I behold once more a very different picture to my early dealings with this card: the fool, once again, is just about to grasp for the cup of the High Priestess, but seeing the resistance in her eyes, that apodictic resolution in her bearing, withdraws his hand, and steps back. There is no requirement now for us to share anymore the contents of our cup, why should there be, and she is not willing to let him see into the vulnerable depths of her being either. A kind of self individuation, which can sometimes get confused with an impenetrable self-validation has now occurred. The interbeing of the relationship that was is now sundered. 

There is a kind of hapless magic to this moment too. One large, foam ball of Unity is pushed into the clenched fist of a magician, and when the hand unclenches, palm up, two smaller but wholly single foam balls roll out of it, and disperse in separate directions. As they were before they met, unknown to each other, strangers once more, they will soon be swallowed up by the emptiness of time and distance. 

It is at this point I guess that we might truly declare the spell to have worked. We might at this moment, even believe ourselves to have finally got over the other person who we once thought or hoped we would never get over, wanting to both live and die in their embrace. We see the trick, if that is what it is, that has been played on us by Eros, this sad and strange game of lovers leapfrog, choreographed by a god that doesn’t know our names, nor cares one bit for our enduring contentment, congeniality or composure.

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What Does It Mean To Be Khmer, Anyway?

Sothy finished arranging the donuts in the display case, then glanced at the man and said, “Of course he is Khmer.” And that of course compelled Tevy to raise her head from her book. Of course, her mother’s condescending voice echoed, the words ping-ponging through Tevy’s head, as she stared at the man. Of course, of course. Throughout her sixteen years of life, her parents’ ability to intuit all aspects of being Khmer, or emphatically not being Khmer, has always amazed and frustrated Tevy. She’d do something as simple as drink a glass of ice water, and her father, from across the room, would bellow, “There were no ice cubes in the genocide!” Then he’d lament, “How did my kids become so not Khmer?” before bursting into rueful laughter. Other times, she’d eat a piece of dried fish or scratch her scalp or walk with a certain gait, and her father would smile and say, “Now I know you are Khmer.” What does it mean to be Khmer, anyway? How does one know what is and is not Khmer? Have most Khmer people always known, deep down, that they’re Khmer? Are there feelings Khmer people experience that others don’t? Variations of these questions used to flash through Tevy’s mind whenever her father visited them at Chuck’s Donuts, back before the divorce. Carrying a container of papaya salad, he’d step into the middle of the room, and, ignoring any customers, he’d sniff his papaya salad and shout, “Nothing makes me feel more Khmer than the smell of fish sauce and fried dough!” Being Khmer, as far as Tevy can tell, can’t be reduced to the brown skin, black hair, and prominent cheekbones that she shares with her mother and sister. Khmer-ness can manifest as anything, from the color of your cuticles to the particular way your butt goes numb when you sit in a chair too long, and even so, Tevy has recognized nothing she has ever done as being notably Khmer. And now that she’s old enough to disavow her lying cheater of a father, Tevy feels completely detached from what she was apparently born as. Unable to imagine what her father felt as he stood in Chuck’s Donuts sniffing fish sauce, she can only laugh. Even now, when she can no longer stomach seeing him, she laughs when she thinks about her father. Tevy carries little guilt about her detachment from her culture. At times, though, she feels overwhelmed, as if her thoughts are coiling through her brain, as if her head will explode. This is what drives her to join Kayley in the pursuit of discovering all there is to know about the man.

ANTHONY VEASNA SO

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The Magician (i): It Is Sad, But It Is What It Is

The archetype of the Magician, at least how it is presented in the Rider-Waite deck is a beguiling and seductive figure, as well as a potentially hopeful one. I think this is because the archetype encapsulates or drives in some way our fantasy notions around change, transformation, transfiguration, and renewal. 

The magician stands between us and the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, the law of Failure, that states that everything which exists in a somewhat closed system (which if you think about it, includes literally everything, for it is also the nature of our universe) is, whether we like it or not, on course to becoming over-evolved, over-complex, disordered, irreversibly damaged, and finally ceasing to exist. Our human animal species is currently in the throes of a catastrophic reckoning with entropy. It is sad, deeply sad (for us) but it is what it is. 

Our biology is an entropic system: we are worn away by life and die from it, but this is also the case with our mental states, with buildings, cities, civilisations, and most crushingly for the human animal, relationships. These too shall pass. Which is to say: these too, no matter how sturdy and inviolable they once appeared in our eyes, may find themselves wrecked by the kind of change we would prefer to avoid: that of disagreement, disunity, friction and strife. 

The magician stands confident and upright in front of a Golden Yellow background, the symbol for boundless, indeed infinite possibility. The infinity symbol, that loopy, horizontal eight which hangs suspended over their head like a pretzelled halo. This one means business! 

Human animal progressivism, technology, competency, gumption, ambition and our fierce will to power are all displayed in this pose, one that I associate with John Travolta on the famous poster of Saturday Night Fever (1977), an important childhood film me, where Travolta twists his lithe body – attired in a white polyester two-button single-breasted suit, with 28-inch flared trousers, and 4 inch disco platform boots- into a shape suggestive of someone offering themselves as a conductor for lightening or some other numinous exchange: be it the lightening of electrostatic discharge, metaphysical en-light-enment, or just the magic of strutting your stuff on a dancefloor that lights up in red, yellow, and blue in rhythmic responsiveness to whatever music is being played. Where do you go when the record is over…is printed on the top of this iconic poster. Where, fellow human animals, do we go at this point in our history where the needle of entropy is now spinning round and around the run-off groove, that part of the LP where which spins endlessly, playing nothing but static. 

The magician archetype, wherever it is to be found, appears to be channeling the transformative powers of nature itself (that which as if by magic turns caterpillars into butterflies, seeds into plants and trees, as well as gametes, our owns organism’s reproductive cells transformed through sexual fusion into new living beings). 

In trying to describe the shade of yellow that suffuses this card, I discover that it is known as Safety Yellow, or Schoolbus yellow, for it was in 1939, that this colour was alighted upon as being the most noticeable to the human brain, even more so than our own red blood when it spills from our veins into the world. This is because the wavelength of this colour lies exactly between two other wavelengths (red and green) that have evolved to stimulate the greatest number of photoreceptor cells in our eyes. This hue of golden yellow, or schoolbus yellow sits equidistant to these other wavelengths, resulting in double the amount of transmission to the brain. 

It is perhaps no surprise that this is the colour that calls to my eyes this morning when I look into the sun inching its way up over the rooftops, a golden yellow that has been absent, both literally and metaphorically, from my spot on the globe for some weeks now, this place where I reside in my concrete suburban box that I call home, surrounded by other homogenous grey dwellings, everyone’s front garden (apart from mine) torn up to make a driveway for their cars. 

I walk. And blend no doubt, into all my nameless neighbours, the grey, gloomy-faced suburban folk, traipsing disconsolately off to work in their get-by jobs, trudging back home with supermarket shopping or a take-away, everyone staring at the pavement as they walk from work back to this this no-place, this backend suburb of a once-great, now dying city. 

George Bradley, in his poem, The Sound of The Sun, one of the poems I recite on my exercise bike, asks me to “listen closely some morning” (maybe a morning like today) “when the sun swells /  Over the horizon and the world is still and still asleep”, to listen for that  

faint noise so far inside your mind
That it must come from somewhere, from light rushing to darkness,
Energy burning towards entropy, towards a peaceful solution,
Burning brilliantly, spontaneously, in the middle of nowhere

How much use to us is the magician archetype in the winter of our seasonal discontents, both inner and outer? On the tarot card, we see a midsummer figure, surrounded by roses and lilies of the valley, all in bloom. The sorcerer is equipped with the “tools” of their trade, the pentacle of materialism, the cup of emotion, the sword of reason, and the wand of creativity – standing before us as if offering these up to the viewer as tools for transformation, magic objects, for bettering our selves and the world. 

But what of that energy burning towards entropy? Is the magician making a promise in flagrant opposition to our so-called “laws” of nature, of physics, of what we call reality, of entropy. Does the magician face down entropy by saying: I can transform anything, any substance, any human animal trait, any struggle, any dissolution you might experience in yourself or the world, into a “peaceful solution”? 

Well of course that’s what they’re offering, and because it is such a sublime gesture, we tend to call this transformation “magic”, which arrives in our modern dictionaries as a word with proto-indo european roots denoting: “to have ability, to have power.” The power to produce a “peaceful solution” with the wave of a wand, or some poetic utterance (a spell) perhaps? 

It is no wonder that we seek magic (from ourselves and from others) when we feel dis-abled in some way and powerless. In these wintry months, I have felt in the consciousness I call myself dis-abled to some extent, and certainly disempowered, by low mood, by what I guess we could refer to as a kind of psychological entropy, which was once called melancholy, but now we refer to as depression. I wake up with no great desire to see the day through. But of course see it through I do. Maybe reciting to myself those line I love from Frank O’Hara’s Lunch poem Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul which goes: 

the only thing to do is simply continue
is that simple
yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do
can you do it
yes, you can because it is the only thing to do

Perhaps my mood and how it shapes the way I see the world at present is no surprise in these gloomy days of winter and hysterical geosociopolitical upheaval. The Extended Mind Thesis which has got some traction in psychology and neuroscience of late, suggests that consciousness and cognition is not just a closed, shut-off process happening in our individual brains but that mental as well as emotional processes are part of the fabric of the world in which we inhabit. Extended Mind theorists explain this through four E-words: embodied, embedded, enacted and extended. 

Who we are is an EMBODIED process, as much as a cognitive one,taking in the whole nervous system and all our viscera attached to this. Consciousness is also EMBEDDED: shaped and adapted to external environments, and our relationships. It is ENACTED not just through our neural processes, but also through those things an organism does, like sharing dark thoughts on social media, or blamey texts with someone we are out of sync with. But most of all, consciousness is EXTENDED into our environment. When we are in nature with our beloveds, we see, think, and feel differently than when trapped in a messy flat with a sick child and the rain coating our vision in dark wet streaks of disruption and collapse, in entropy. 

I think what I’d like to explore in the next few episodes is the kind of magic that we are called upon to do every moment of the day. The magic (the power, the ability) to deal with this strange perverse experience of human consciousness, one that is riven by conflicting drives, by all sorts of unconscious processes (both neurological and biological) that we have almost no way of steering towards a comprehensively enduring “peaceful solution”, no matter how hard we try. For that would entail becoming different creatures would it not, and how does one do that if other than through magic? Which of course our minds tell us is possible, we the creature who has spent a few thousand years doing an amazing PR job on ourselves as a species. We can do no wrong because we see no wrong in what we do, in how we respond to the world around us. 

There is an incredible image which I discovered in a 2016 paper in the journal Nature on the evolutionary roots of human grumpiness, peevishness, and aggressive reactivity, our often hidden but no less present fight-flight natures. It shows a sun-like circle, its rim made up by the names of 1,024 of our fellow mammals, with all their accompanying phylogenetic entanglements measured from time immemorial to now. Light grey lines extend from each species towards the centre of the circle. The colour grey indicates an absence of lethal aggression, whereas yellow to dark red shows the opposite. It is probably no surprise that of our 1,024 fellow mammals, it is our category, the Primates, where this violent, often times lethal yellow and red cuts through the grey announcing our combative will to power, our need for dominance over others, especially non-human creatures, and even over certain parts of ourselves. The majority of mammals on this circular chart, display no, or very little, phylogenetic lethal aggression. The writers of the paper suggest that primates, especially us Homo Sapiens are such an outlier, because of our inherent sociability as well as territoriality. When was the last time someone annoyed you, frustrated you, triggered some fight-flight response in you, after their attempts to maladroitly connect or reveal something through language, to exercise their social connection in a way that was picked up by your nervous system as a threat to your well-being? I suspect you may have instances of this on a weekly or even daily basis. How to find a peaceful solution when we carry a nervy, often warring  system, put together over millions of years of evolution, and now carried deep within our largely unconscious being? 

And how is a professional magician, or wizard, or shaman, a role I too play for my fellow human animals, that of therapist or counsellor, how is this fool with a magic wand, a sword, a cup, and a pentacle shape printed onto a beer mat supposed to assist the modern human mind, manifested from a primordial mammalian brain, to reach all of its culturally-set and sanctioned goals? Most of my clients want to be better versions of themselves, in ways that often strike me as a ring-tailed lemur telling anoter Lemur, a therapist lemur, about how they would like to become an antelope. The latter is of course a biologically peaceful creature. The former, being a primate, isn’t. This from a National Geographic article: 

“Lemur females are dominant and aggressive,” says Christine Drea, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University. Males fight each other, females fight one another for control, and females fight males “because they can. They’re pissy little gals,” Drea says. 

How does someone working as a therapist assist modern humans, including oneself, to cope with the fact that we are creatures who are not as sweet and lovely as the PR for our species (written of course by us) would like us to believe. That we are fundamentally, it would seem, conflicted and conflicting entities. That we carry around minds which can produce states of consciousness in which webs of symbolic meaning (mostly born through language in packages of thought) might be stripped away simply because the weather is grey outside, or we ate too much pasta last night, or someone said something we didn’t like in a text message, or in a state of face-to-face agitation. How does the magician, both that archetype which we carry within ourselves, and seek out in others for assistance, manifest the transformations that our minds expect, sometimes even demand of those selves, inner and outer? 

And maybe at an even more essential level, what kind of magic might be required to transform our conscious perceptions of suffering our conscious selves, suffering the occasional bouts of meaninglessness in our mortal animal lives, transforming these into states of enduring positivity and meaningfulness, without it seeming like a temporary patch-up job, or a magic trick, also known as an illusion? 

Abracadabra, let’s see where this takes us.

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Jean-Paul Sartre Tries To Give Up Smoking

I love this quote from Being and Nothingness where JP psychanalyses himself and comes to a profound realisation of what “spell” is required in order for him to finally give up smoking. He’s got it all worked out. Psychologically/philosophically, this really does read like a watertight solution.

Some years ago I brought myself to the decision not to smoke any more. The struggle was hard, and in truth, I did not care so much for the taste of the tobacco which I was going to lose, as for the meaning of the act of smoking. A complete crystallization had been formed. I used to smoke at the theater, in the morning while working, in the evening after dinner, and it seemed to me that in giving up smoking I was going to strip the theater of its interest, the evening meal of its savor, the morning work of its fresh animation.

Whatever unexpected happening was going to meet my eye, it seemed to me that it was fundamentally impoverished from the moment that I could not welcome it while smoking. To-be-capable-of-being-met-by-me-smoking: such was the concrete quality which had been spread over everything. It seemed to me that I was going to snatch it away from everything and that in the midst of this universal impoverishment, life was scarcely worth the effort.

But to smoke is an appropriative, destructive action. Tobacco is a symbol of “appropriated” being, since it is destroyed in the rhythm of my breathing, in a mode of “continuous destruction,” since it passes into me and its change in myself is manifested symbolically by the transformation of the consumed solid into smoke. The connection between the landscape seen while I was smoking and this little crematory sacrifice was such that as we have just seen, the tobacco symbolized the landscape. This means then that the act of destructively appropriating the tobacco was the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world. Across the tobacco which I was smoking was the world which was burning, which was going up in smoke, which was being reabsorbed into vapor so as to reenter into me.

In order to maintain my decision not to smoke, I had to realize a sort of decrystallization; that is, without exactly accounting to myself for what I was doing, I reduced the tobacco to being nothing but itself—an herb which burns. [This is the spell!] I cut its symbolic ties with the world; I persuaded myself that I was not taking anything away from the play at the theater, from the landscape, from the book which I was reading, if I considered them without my pipe; that is, I rebuilt my possession of these objects in modes other than that sacrificial ceremony.

As soon as I was persuaded of this, my regret was reduced to a very small matter; I deplored the thought of not perceiving the odor of the smoke, the warmth of the bowl between my fingers and so forth. But suddenly my regret was disarmed and became quite bearable.

Needless to say, after writing this he continued to smoke for the next 40 years of his life and died of a pulmonary edema. brought on, no doubt by his favourite substance.

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Using Tarot To Address The Burning Questions Of Our Lives

When we turn to our suffering selves, listening very carefully to what they have to say, in the way that another caring human animal might listen to us, we often find 🔥Burning Questions🔥 in the vicinity of our enquiries.

Something we really care about, something central to our lives which feels 🔥🔥enflamed🔥🔥 at this moment of time in our often 🔥🔥enflamed🔥🔥 minds.

-Will I ever get the relationship I want or need?
– Will the people I want to impress or gain affection from, meet my desires?  
– If I get Covid, even though I am vaccinated, how much will I suffer?
-Should I move towards this new work or life project, or another?
-Will I succeed in what I set out to do or fail?

If we were to write down all the questions that keep us up at night, or down during the day, we might notice that a lot of them are formed out of the very bedrock of our mind’s anxious, self-protective algorithms. Two algorithms that seem to generate most of our nervy questions in some form or another are ⚡️Fear⚡️ and ⚡️Desire⚡️.

🔥Burning Questions🔥 fuelled by ⚡️Fear⚡️ usually have the feel of: “How will I cope if this experience that I don’t want to happen actually occurs in my Now, as opposed to the fearful mind-space of a Future-Now?”

🔥Burning Questions🔥 Fuelled by ⚡️Desire⚡️ may feel like: “How will I cope if I don’t get the things I want, or even worse: I end up getting the thing I don’t want?”

Framed in this way, it becomes easier to see that ⚡️Fear⚡️ and ⚡️Desire⚡️ are also inextricably connected: that as soon as one arises, the other is invariably present. The more I want or need someone or something, the greater my fear that they or it, will be lost to me. When formed in the shape of questions,  ⚡️Fear⚡️ and ⚡️Desire⚡️are often scrambling in a somewhat futile way for a defining or definitive YES or NO. A binary answer.

But even if some wacky Fortune Teller were to give us a definitive-sounding YES or NO in response to our mind’s questions,  would our Future-Now-Focussed minds ever believe them, and thus allow us to chill out in the Life-Lived Present? Let’s see.

Seeker: Will I be happier in the future than I was in the past? [You can replace this question with any 🔥Burning Questions🔥 that is currently on your mind]
Fortune Teller: Yes.

Does that solve the matter for us?

How about this version:

Seeker: Will I be happier in the future than I was in the past?
Fortune Teller: Yes.

There you go, feeling happier? Not me. Not for a second. As soon as I hear an external Yes, my mind goes binary with why it won’t happen, and vice-versa. That’s how minds work alas, every mental coin will always have those proverbial two sides to it. This seems to indicate that any YES/NO binary answer we could supply for ourselves or get from someone else with regard to a 🔥Burning Question🔥 in our lives, probably won’t bring us the peace of mind we seek.

So what will?

SEEKING CERTAINTY IN OUR LIVES

All the questions above are asking the universe/life/ourselves for some kind of certainty or knowledge with regard to our Future-Now.

We all seek certainty and knowledge about the Future-Now. And perhaps, sitting as we do in the midst of a cataclysmic, global climate crisis and the potential extinction of every human on this planet apart from a few billionaires, our Future-Now-Focussed minds, may be going a tad doolally, for not even the ground beneath our feet, or the weather over our heads, feels that sure or known anymore. It’s not our minds’ fault to seek this control/certainty. It’s how we try and make sense of the experiences we ⚡️Fear⚡️ and ⚡️Desire⚡️, prompted  in the here- and-now by our problem-solving/solution-seeking minds.

This wanting Life to be otherwise than it is, seems programmed into us, and has driven us forward along a certain kind of human animal evolution to all the comforts we now benefit from on a daily basis. These are the material fruits of our YES/NO binary minds, turning everything around us into zeros and ones, life into maths.

The Questioning Mind (and is there a mind that does anything else?) demands a certain kind of experience from Life: “Please put my mind at ease, put me out of my misery, mind, and do this by giving me some kind of Answer to everything that doesn’t make sense to me in my life, or that give me pain.”

But even if a wholly distinct and unblurry YES or NO binary answer were to suddenly drop from the skies, carrying with it all the certainties and reassurances of an all-seeing, all-knowing deity, would we not, as intelligent creatures find this Answer to be  to sufficiently encompass for how we actually experience ourselves and others? Wouldn’t we just start tearing the black and white stripes of this Yes/No Binary into little bits of wordy confetti, knowing that everything ultimately manifests as a mixture of both yes/no, as well as all the other colours of the rainbow?

THE PROBLEM WITH BINARY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Take the eternal question of any relationship: Will I ever get what I want or need (emotionally, physically, spiritually) from the person I am currently having this relationship with?

This is not just a question for lovers and romantic partners, it also manifests between parents and children, clients and therapists, as well as everyone else we interact with in a meaningful way. 

If the Deity of Answers say YES to our 🔥Burning Questions🔥, would not your mind or mine immediately come up with all the reasons why this is probably only a partial response.

A vulnerable, almost child-like part of our mind might desperately wants that reassurance of a Definitive Yes or No (“YES Santa and The Tooth Fairy are real, honey, and NO you won’t die like Grandpa did last year”), but a wiser part us, knows that this is a sop, a fleeting panacea for our worried minds, and probably won’t let them rest, or give us the peace we seek.

And yet the Mind, designed to safeguard our security, to feel more in control, continues to ask the (binary) questions that more often just lead us round and around in circles, arguing with ourselves, others, and the world of our experience.

HOW TO ESCAPE THE TRAP OF BINARY-SEEKING QUESTIONS?

So what to do with these 🔥Burning Questions🔥 of our lives when they are tearing through us like a  forest fire? And how, in the process, do we protect our most precious Inner Trees (our hearts? our souls?), our General Shermans, from the fires of Fear and Desire and Anger, as well as all our other distressing states?

To be consumed in self-immolating flames like the buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, as noble and as this might appear to us, doesn’t look like much fun to me.

When I look at the non-human animal (those that aren’t imprisoned by human animals for food and other necessities) they seem to be having much more fun, getting more Joy with a capital J out of their existence – what’s their secret?

Joyful, uncomplicated living seems tied in with a lack of language, no ability to “think” through signifiers as we do. Hence the reduction or complete eradication for non-human animals pf soul-searching, life-scrutinising 🔥Burning Questions🔥

Physical pain and hardship, as in the human animal realm, is unavoidable, and non-humans undoutedly experience that.  But they don’t suffer in the way that we do.

But I like my 🔥Burning Questions🔥, they fuel my creativity and seeking, and so even as a life-forms who is sometimes plagued by the binary questions of ⚡️Fear⚡️ and ⚡️Desire⚡️, I wouldn’t ever choose, even if I could to live without language.

But to do so, perhaps a certain special kinds of technology (or magic) is required to help us suffer a little bit less.

And maybe this process begins with how our 🔥Burning Questions🔥 are framed as well as how they are answered.

To give you an example, could you perhaps think of a 🔥Burning Questions🔥 that you have right now and write it down.

(Let’s take one of mine as a Here-Now example: Will the reader of this short piece find it useful or just some silly, woo-hoo [insert further critical adjectives] fodder from the internet?)

Your Burning Question: …This can be be about anything in your life, big or small, that doesn’t feel settled, or that you are not at peace with in some fundamental way.

Now let’s check to see if the question your mind has formed is indeed a binary question.

In other words, is the question formulated in a way that can only receive a YES or a NO answer, that somewhat useless binary fork that often presents itself without too much effort from any 🔥Burning Questions🔥, even though our minds really struggle to see just how useless this binary burn might be. If your mind has come up with a Binary 🔥Burning Questions🔥 (which it probably well, this being the default setting) imagine receiving the answer you want, and then see if the binary pushes harder for attention or some kind of “space” in the other way, thus negating all the peace and control/security you were searching for in the first place.

So if your question is formulated to generate a Yes/No (somewhat useless) answer, see if you can reformulate it, but without changing the part of the question that is truly burning you alive at the moment, the question that is using your Life Force to zero in on a troubling situation, or thought, or Future Now worry. What would that question look like in its Non-Binary form?

I find a good way to reach a Non-Binary question is to use other question words that don’t require a yes or no answer such as WHY, HOW, TO WHAT EXTENT et cetera

So for example my 🔥Burning Question🔥, the question above, might be reformulated as:

WHY would a reader not see the good in my piece of writing?
HOW can I best cope with this outcome?
HOW can I make this piece better/clearer so that it speaks to a reader with more clarity/force/interest?

Let’s try this now on that bigger, more existential question:  Will I ever get what I want I need from X  (a person that I am in relationship with)?

Some Wise, Non-Binary Reformulations might look like this:

Why do I want or need [whatever it is you want] from this person? 
What is it that I want or need from this person? 
How can I get more of what I want or need from this person? 
How can I get less of what I don’t want or need from this person? 
What is this person about, what’s going on for them now? 
What am I about, what’s going on for me in this relationship at the moment? 
What is our relationship about? 
Why is our relationship not working? 
What makes our relationship work when it does so that I can focus more on that?

Now that we have a 🦉Wise Question🦉, which still carries the charge of a 🔥Burning Questions🔥 (the charge of something we really care about), we can use it to find some peace of mind for our selves. Not a yes/no “fix” for the mind which will often find this overly-simplistic and rebel, but rather greater peace of mind, and less inner-conflict. But that will take some work, and some reformulations to begin with, such as those done above.

What can help with this process is to bring in expressions or technologies (here’s the magic part) of a kind of Wisdom that lie beyond us. A form of Wisdom that still speaks to the problem-setting mind in a mind-settling way, but without fobbing us off  with just more binary stuff 

GETTING A WISE ANSWER TO A BURNING QUESTION

There are many ways to go beyond the mind in pursuit of truth. One method I have been experimenting with recently is Tarot. 

In some way, a Tarot deck, designed as it is to hold and all the wisdom of our human experience embedded in ancient symbols and stories, is the perfect self-help and therapy tool for 🔥Burning Questions🔥, questions that implicitly recognise that a yes/no binary answer isn’t really what we want or need.

But at the same time, being nervy/desiring human animals, the answer-seeking part of us still hungers for some kind of food. But instead of giving it fast food (YES/NO burgers and chips prompted by the demanding, impatient Binary Mind) Tarot works to get us closer to the answers that are fundamentally embedded in the uncertain but awe-some/awe-full experience of Life Itself.

If this sounds like what you are after, why not try a very simple 🔥Burning Question Practice🔥.

Or if you like we can do something like this in our next session together, working on one of your 🔥Burning Questions🔥.

  1. Write down your 🔥Burning Question🔥, and check to see that it isn’t limited by a yes/no binary seeking frame (I have a little notebook for this where I write my burning questions when my mind gets stuck on something that it can’t unstick itself from)
  2. If you have a tarot pack (I often use the classic Rider-Waite pack, but I also really like the Thoth pack, Tarot Del Fuego, The Field Pack, and The Wild Unknown), pick it up and shuffle the cards facedown. If you don’t have a Tarot Pack to hand, google Tarot Card Generator, which will probably lead you to the website of the Spanish architect Bryan Galera, who has provided us with a very cool, online Tarot pack to work with. This will generate a card for you randomly and then you can proceed in the same way. I do find  though with a process like this, which deliberately employs some of the soothing, self-regulating aspects of any healing ritual, that it’s nice to have the analogue cards to hand.
  3. Now focus on your 🔥Burning Question🔥 again, as if your life truly depended on it (which of course it does in some way). See if you can also touch into the pain and yearning that lies behind every 🔥Burning Question🔥. For the moment, unlike in therapy, try not to think or talk to yourself about this pain and yearning, but just let it fuel your desire to find an answer that doesn’t leave you with a somewhat worthless YES/NO/MAYBE response. As you focus on the question, begin to deal the cards onto a surface slowly and mindfully, facedown, waiting for a moment where you feel that the card that is in your hand, that is just about to be dealt, is “the one“. If you get through the whole deck without having this feeling, probably your card is the very last card in the pack, so wait until you reach the very last card, and then flip that one over. Having experienced your “inner tug” then maybe your card is the last one in the pack, or maybe you need to meditate on your question while you do the process again. DON’T RUSH THIS PART OF THIS PROCESS. See if you can breathe deeply, with extra-long outbreaths, following the out-breath to the very limit of its lung-emptiness, till you almost feel a painful need to take a new breath, which will also help put you in the right headspace to receive an Answer for your 🔥Burning Question🔥
  4. When you eventually feel that inner tug from the Universe, turn over the card and maybe even take a picture of it for future reference. Don’t jump online just yet to look up the symbolism of the card. Instead, imagine you are describing this card to a blind person, or as if it were a dream you had last night, and listen to how your mind makes up a story for this card. When I’m doing this process with a client, I pay particular attention the framing of these initial impressions. You may even want to record your musings as you make them on your phone as a voice note. Or write them down, preferably by hand, as there is often Unconscious Gold in these initial perspective. Because this response comes directly from the wisest part of your mind (the Right Hemisphere, that works more from visual stimuli than words) your initial impressions of the card will be very very important for what follows. Of course the mind will immediately want to start drawing inferences from this card towards your question, making language of it, but for a moment just let your imagination create a “world”, or a kind of “map” within the card itself.
  5. Now go back to your 🔥Burning Question🔥 and familiarise yourself with it again. Look over to the card and start to imagine that the question and the card are in conversation with each other, and that the card is giving you some kind of “answer“ to your 🔥Burning/Soul-Searching Question🔥. Write down anything that you feel you are getting from the card in your hand, noticing any and all associations that your mind finds within that card. Project yourself and your situation onto the card. Which part of the image is You, and which part is the Problem, or the Other. Don’t censor yourself at this point. Let your mind be wild and free in its initial responses to the image on the card.
  6. After doing this, you might like to google the card and just read in a very general way about some of the archetypal symbols therein, and the various interpretations that have been given of these symbols over the last 5000 years. Unlike our more modern forms of technology (such as the psychotherapeutic and pschological tools, such as CBT, devised in the last century) this particular form of technology has been used and developed by healers and other lovely people for a great deal longer than that. A human technology that has been around for thousands of years to help us with our “special” language-shaped suffering, surely must have something of worth to offer us?
  7. Read through the information on the webpage which will probably be framed in a somewhat naff, generic way (less naff and generic when we do this process together, I promise), but for now, put aside your prejudices if you have any, and look for a a few words or phrases that perhaps jump out at you and speak in some way to the 🔥Core Burning Question🔥 that you have asked, almost like in a prayer, to be helped with. Ignore all the other bumf coming from the culture or your mind. The “noise” of an online reading can be filtered out with practice, or by doing this process with someone who knows your life and history to some extent, like a therapist or a friend.
  8. After doing the above, especially if you’re feeling a bit more settled, you can maybe let things percolate a little bit, or you might try and synthesise in one or two sentences what the message/answer that Life, The Universe, Your Innate Wisdom is trying to tell you.  
  9. If the answer to this 🔥Burning Question🔥 settles the suffering of that burn, but only to open up another 🔥Burning Question🔥 (this can often happen, remember we are dealing with burning thoughts which literally spread like wildfire) then simply draw another card!
  10. Continue doing this until you feel a greater peace of mind and understanding of your situation. 

At some very core level, I believe the process above is what occurs in any form of good counselling or psychotherapy. But perhaps in a slightly more focussed, less “going-around-the-houses” way  (even though I really like all of that going-around-the-houses with two Answer-Seeking Minds process too!)

Any discussion which helps to guide us out of the confines and the limitations of our problem-solving minds (fired by 🔥Burning Questions🔥) into a space in where multiple potentialities are available and are framed in a way that don’t provoke just another round of Fear and Desire, can only be a good thing I believe, as well as a useful addition to our Mental/Spiritual Health toolkits.

I look forward to us sitting down and working with your 🔥Burning Questions🔥 (with or without Tarot) the next time we meet.

**

THE JOURNEY

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life that you could save.

-Mary Oliver

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I Have Eaten Up The World And I Need Not Think About It Anymore

You say: Some say the universe was created. Others say that it always existed and is for ever undergoing transformation. Some say it is subject to eternal laws. Others deny even causality. Some say the world is real. Others — that it has no being whatsoever. 

Life answers: Which world are you enquiring about? 

You say: The world of my perceptions, of course. 

Life says: The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private. Take it to be a dream and be done with it. 

You say: How can I take it to be a dream? A dream does not last. 

Life says: How long will your own world last? 

You say: After all, my little world is but a part of the total. 

Life says: Is not the idea of a total world a part of your personal world? The universe does not come to tell you that you are a part of it. It is you who have invented a totality to contain you as a part. In fact all you know is your own private world, however well you have furnished it with your imaginations and expectations. 

You say: Surely, perception is not imagination! 

Life says: What else? Perception is recognition, is it not? Something entirely unfamiliar can be sensed, but cannot be perceived. Perception involves memory. 

You say: Granted, but memory does not make it illusion. 

Life says: Perception, imagination, expectation, anticipation, illusion — all are based on memory. There are hardly any border lines between them. They just merge into each other. All are responses of memory. 

You say: Still, memory is there to prove the reality of my world. 

Life says: How much do you remember? Try to write down from memory what you were thinking, saying and doing on the 30th of the last month. 

You say: Yes, there is a blank. 

Life says: It is not so bad. You do remember a lot — unconscious memory makes the world in which you live so familiar. 

You say: Admitted that the world in which I live is subjective and partial. What about you? In what kind of world do you live? 

Life answers: My world is just like yours. I see, I hear, I feel, I think, I speak and act in a world I perceive, just like you. But with you it is all, with me it is nothing. Knowing the world to be a part of myself, I pay it no more attention than you pay to the food you have eaten. While being prepared and eaten, the food is separate from you and your mind is on it; once swallowed, you become totally unconscious of it. I have eaten up the world and I need not think of it any more. 

You ask: Don’t you become completely irresponsible? 

Life answers: How could I? How can I hurt something which is one with me. On the contrary, without thinking of the world, whatever I do will be of benefit to it. Just as the body sets itself right unconsciously, so am I ceaselessly active in setting the world right. 

You say: Nevertheless, you are aware of the immense suffering of the world? 

Life says: Of course I am, much more than you. 

You say: Then what do you do? 

Life says: I look at it through the eyes of Everything and find that all is well. 

You say: How can you say that all is well? Look at the wars, the exploitation, the cruel strife between the citizen and the state. 

Life says: All these sufferings are man-made and it is somewhat within our human animal power to put an end to them. The experience of life helps by holding up to us the results of our actions and demanding that the balance should be restored. Karma may be one way of  describing this, this propensity towards righteousness; it is the healing hand of our experience. 

The above text comes from Sri Nisargadatta’s I Am That.

Hear/read more: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/life-answers-a-complete-audiobook-reading-of-sri-nisargadatta-maharajahs-i-am-that/

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Self Stands Beyond Mind

You say: As a child fairly often I experienced states of complete happiness, verging on ecstasy: later, they ceased, but since I came to India they reappeared, particularly after I met you. Yet these states, however wonderful, are not lasting. They come and go and there is no knowing when they will come back.

Life asks: How can anything be steady in a mind which itself is not steady? 

You say: How can I make my mind steady? 

Life asks: How can an unsteady mind make itself steady? Of course it cannot. It is the nature of the mind to roam about. All you can do is to shift the focus of consciousness beyond the mind. 

You say: How is it done? 

Life says: Refuse all thoughts except one: the thought ‘I am here now, I am consciously present now’. The mind will rebel in the beginning, but with patience and perseverance it will yield and keep quiet. Once you are quiet, things will begin to happen spontaneously and quite naturally without any interference on your part. 

You say: Can I avoid this protracted battle with my mind? 

Life answers: Yes, you can. Just live your life as it comes, but alertly, watchfully, allowing everything to happen as it happens, doing the natural things the natural way, suffering, rejoicing — as life brings. This also is a way. 

You say: Well, then I can as well marry, have children, run a business… be happy. 

Life says: Sure. You may or may not be happy, take it in your stride. 

You say: Yet I want happiness. 

Life says: True happiness cannot be found in things that change and pass away. Pleasure and pain alternate inexorably. Happiness comes from core engagement with the world and can be found in this only. Find your self in the real and all else will come with it. 

You say: If my real self is peace and love, why is it so restless? 

Life answers: It is not your self in the real that is restless, but its reflection in the mind appears restless because the mind is restless. It is just like the reflection of the moon in the water stirred by the wind. The wind of desire stirs the mind and the ‘me’, which is but a reflection of the Self in the mind, so appearing changeful. But these ideas of movement, of restlessness, of pleasure and pain are all in the mind. The Self (capital S) stands beyond the mind, aware, but unconcerned. 

You ask: How to reach it? 

Life anwer: You are the Self, here and now leave the mind alone, stand aware and unconcerned and you will realise that to stand alert but detached, watching events come and go, is an aspect of your real nature. 

You ask: What are the other aspects? 

Life answers: The aspects are infinite in number. Realise one, and you will realise all. 

You say: Tell me some thing that would help me. 

Life says: You know best what you need! 

You say: I am restless. How can I gain peace? 

Life ask: For what do you need peace? 

You say: To be happy. 

Life says: Are you not happy now? 

You say: No, I am not. 

Life says: What makes you unhappy? 

You say: I have what I don’t want, and want what I don’t have. 

Life says: Why don’t you invert it: want what you have and care not for what you don’t have? 

You say: I want what is pleasant and don’t want what is painful. 

Life says: How do you know what is pleasant and what is not? 

You say: From past experience, of course. 

Life says: Guided by memory you have been pursuing the pleasant and shunning the unpleasant. Have you succeeded? 

You say: No, I have not. The pleasant does not last. Pain sets in again. 

Life ask: Which pain? 

You say: The desire for pleasure, the fear of pain, both are states of distress. Is there a state of unalloyed pleasure? 

Life answers: Every pleasure, physical or mental, needs an instrument. Both the physical and mental instruments are material, they get tired and worn out. The pleasure they yield is necessarily limited in intensity and duration. Pain is the background of all your pleasures. You want them because you suffer. On the other hand, the very search for pleasure is the cause of pain. It is a vicious circle. 

You say: I can see the mechanism of my confusion, but I do not see my way out of it. 

Life says: The very examination of the mechanism shows the way. After all, your confusion is only in your mind, which never rebelled so far against confusion and never got to grips with it. It rebelled only against pain. 

You say: So, all I can do is to stay confused? 

Life answers: Be alert. Question, observe, investigate, learn all you can about confusion, how it operates, what it does to you and others. By being clear about confusion you become clear of confusion. 

You say: When I look into myself, I find my strongest desire is to create a monument, to build something which will outlast me. Even when I think of a home, wife and child, it is because it is a lasting, solid, testimony to myself. 

Life says: Right, build yourself a monument. How do you propose to do it? 

You say: It matters little what I build, as long as it is permanent. 

Life says: Surely, you can see for yourself that nothing is permanent. All wears out, breaks down, dissolves. The very ground on which you build gives way. What can you build that will outlast all? 

You say: Intellectually, verbally, I am aware that all is transient. Yet, somehow my heart wants permanency. I want to create something that lasts. 

Life says: Then you must build it of something lasting. What have you that is lasting? Neither your body nor mind will last. You must look elsewhere. 

You say: I long for permanency, but I find it nowhere. 

Life asks: Are you, yourself, not permanent? 

You say: I was born, I shall die. 

Life says: Can you truly say you were not before you were born and can you possibly say when dead: ‘Now I am no more’? You cannot say from your own experience that you are not. You can only say ‘I am’. Others too cannot tell you ‘you are not’. 

You say: There is no ‘I am’ in sleep. 

Life says: Before you make such sweeping statements, examine carefully your waking state. You will soon discover that it is full of gaps, when the mind blanks out. Notice how little you remember even when fully awake. You just don’t remember. A gap in memory is not necessarily a gap in consciousness. 

You say: Can I make myself remember my state of deep sleep? 

Life says: Of course! By eliminating the intervals of inattention and distraction during your waking hours you will gradually eliminate the long interval of absent-mindedness, which you call sleep. You will be aware that you are asleep. 

You say: Yet, the problem of permanency, of continuity of being, is not solved. 

Life says: Permanency is a mere idea, born of the action of time. Time again depends of memory. By permanency you mean unfailing memory through endless time. You want to eternalise the mind, which is not possible. 

You say: Then what is eternal? 

Life says: That which does not change with time. You cannot eternalise a transient thing — only the changeless is eternal. 

You say: I am familiar with the general sense of what you say. I do not crave for more knowledge. All I want is peace. 

Life says: You can have for the asking all the peace you want. 

You say: I am asking. 

Life says: You must ask with an undivided heart and live an integrated life. 

You say: How? 

Life says: Detach yourself from all that makes your mind restless. Renounce all that disturbs its peace. If you want peace, deserve it. 

You say: Surely everybody deserves peace. 

Life says: Those only deserve it, who don’t disturb it. 

You say: In what way do I disturb peace? 

Life says: By being a slave to your desires and fears. 

You say: Even when they are justified? 

Life says: Emotional reactions, born of ignorance or oversight, can never entirely be justified. So we seek a clear mind and a clean heart. All you need is to keep quietly alert, enquiring into the real nature of yourself. This is the only way to peace. 

The above text comes from Sri Nisargadatta’s I Am That.

Hear/read more: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/life-answers-a-complete-audiobook-reading-of-sri-nisargadatta-maharajahs-i-am-that/

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What Is Born Must Die

You ask: Is the Witness Consciousness, which is to say: standing to one side of experience, noticing what is occurring in thoughts, feelings, sensations and so on, permanent or not? 

Life answers: It is not permanent. The knower rises and sets with the known. That in which both the knower and the known arise and set, is beyond time. The words permanent or eternal do not apply. 

You say: In sleep there is neither the known, nor the knower. What keeps the body sensitive and receptive? 

Life answers: Surely you cannot say the knower was absent. The experience of things and thoughts was not there, that is all. But the absence of experience too is experience. It is like entering a dark room and saying: ‘I see nothing’. A man blind from birth knows not what darkness means. Similarly, only the knower knows that he does not know. Sleep is merely a lapse in memory. Life goes on. 

You say: And what is death? 

Life says: It is the change in the living process of a particular body. Integration ends and disintegration sets in. 

You say: But what about the knower. With the disappearance of the body, does the knower disappear? 

Life says: Just as the knower of the body appears at birth, so he disappears at death. 

You say: And nothing remains? 

Life says: Life remains. Consciousness needs a vehicle and an instrument for its manifestation. When life produces another body, another knower comes into being.

You say: Is there a causal link between the successive body-knowers, or body-minds? 

Life says: Yes, there is something that may be called the memory body, or causal body, a record of all that was thought, wanted and done. It is like a cloud of images held together

You say: What is this sense of a separate existence? 

Life says: It is a reflection in a separate body of the one reality. In this reflection the unlimited and the limited are confused and taken to be the same. To undo this confusion is the purpose of spiritual enquiry. 

You say: Does not death undo this confusion? 

Life says: In death only the body dies. Life does not, consciousness does not, reality does not. And life is never so alive as after death. 

You say: But does one get reborn? 

Life answers: What was born must die. Only the unborn is deathless. Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of ‘I’. 

You say: How am I to go about this finding out? 

Life answers: How do you go about finding anything? By keeping your mind and heart in it. Interest there must be and steady remembrance. To remember what needs to be remembered is the secret of success. You come to it through earnestness. 

You say: Do you mean to say that mere wanting to find out is enough? Surely, both qualifications and opportunities are needed. 

Life says: These will come with earnestness. What is supremely important is to be free from contradictions: the goal and the way must not be on different levels; life and light must not quarrel; behaviour must not betray belief. Call it honesty, integrity, wholeness; you must not go back, undo, uproot, abandon the conquered ground. Tenacity of purpose and honesty in pursuit will bring you to your goal. 

You say: Tenacity and honesty are endowments, surely! Not a trace of them do I have. 

Life says: All will come as you go on. Take the first step first. All blessings come from within. Turn within. This ‘I am’ consciousness you already know. Be with it all the time you can spare, until you revert to it spontaneously. There is no simpler and easier way. 

The above text comes from Sri Nisargadatta’s I Am That.

Hear/read more: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/life-answers-a-complete-audiobook-reading-of-sri-nisargadatta-maharajahs-i-am-that/

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A Thing As As It Is, Because The Universe Is As It Is

You say: On several occasions the question was raised as to whether the universe is subject to the law of causation, or does it exist and function outside the law. You seem to hold the view that it is uncaused, that everything, however small, is uncaused, arising and disappearing for no known reason whatsoever. 

Life answers: Causation means succession in time of events in space, the space being physical or mental. Time, space, causation are mental categories, arising and subsiding with the mind. 

You say: As long as the mind operates, causation is a valid law. 

Life says: Like everything mental, the so-called law of causation contradicts itself. No thing in existence has a particular cause; the entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing; nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When the source and ground of everything is the only cause of everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is wrong. The universe is not bound by its content, because its potentialities are infinite; besides it is a manifestation, or expression of a principle fundamentally and totally free. 

You say: Yes, one can see that ultimately to speak of one thing being the only cause of another thing is altogether wrong. Yet, in actual life we invariably initiate action with a view to a result. 

Life says: Yes, there is a lot of such activity going on, because of ignorance. Would people know that nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen, they would achieve much more with less expenditure of energy. 

You say: If everything is an expression of the totality of causes, how can we talk of a purposeful action towards an achievement? 

Life says: The very urge to achieve is also an expression of the total universe. It merely shows that the energy potential has risen at a particular point. It is the illusion of time that makes you talk of causality. When the past and the future are seen in the timeless now, as parts of a common pattern, the idea of cause-effect loses its validity and creative freedom takes its place. 

You say: Yet, I cannot see how can anything come to be without a cause. 

Life says: When I say a thing is without a cause, I mean it can be without a particular cause. Your own mother was needed to give you birth; but you could not have been born without the sun and the earth. Even these could not have caused your birth without your own desire to be born. It is desire that gives birth, that gives name and form. The desirable is imagined and wanted and manifests itself as something tangible or conceivable. Thus is created the world in which we live, our personal world. The real world is beyond the mind’s ken; we see it through the net of our desires, divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes. 

You say: What do you mean by holes? And how to find them? 

Life says: Look at the net and its many contradictions. You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love, happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them — your very seeing them will make them go. 

You say: Since my seeing the contradiction makes it go, is there no causal link between my seeing and its going? 

Life says: Causality, even as a concept, does not apply to chaos. 

You say: To what extent is desire a causal factor? 

Life says: One of the many. For everything there are innumerable causal factors. But the source of all that is, is the Infinite Possibility, the Supreme Reality, which is in you and which throws its power and light and love on every experience. But, this source is not a cause and no cause is a source. Because of that, I say everything is uncaused. You may try to trace how a thing happens, but you cannot find out why a thing is as it is. A thing is as it is, because the universe is as it is. 

The above text comes from Sri Nisargadatta’s I Am That.

Hear/read more: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/life-answers-a-complete-audiobook-reading-of-sri-nisargadatta-maharajahs-i-am-that/

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Mind Creates The Abyss, The Heart Crosses It: Being Present

You say: As I can see, there is nothing wrong with my body nor with my real being. Both are not of my making and need not be improved upon. What has gone wrong is the ‘inner body’, call it mind, consciousness, whatever the name. 

Life asks: What do you consider to be wrong with your mind? 

You say: It is restless, greedy for the pleasant and afraid of the unpleasant. 

Life asks: What is wrong with its seeking the pleasant and shirking the unpleasant? Between the banks of pain and pleasure the river of life flows. It is only when the mind refuses to flow with life, and gets stuck at the banks, that it becomes a problem. By flowing with life, we experience a kind of acceptance — letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, you are to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not. You are the ultimate potentiality of which the all-embracing consciousness is the manifestation and expression. 

You say: Yet, between the body and the self there lies a cloud of thoughts and feelings, which neither serves the body nor the self. These thoughts and feelings are flimsy, transient and meaningless, mere mental dust that blinds and chokes, yet they are there, obscuring and destroying. 

Life says: Surely, the memory of an event cannot pass for the event itself. Nor can the anticipation. There is something exceptional, unique, about the present event, which the previous, or the coming do not have. There is a livingness about it, an actuality; it stands out as if illuminated. There is the ‘stamp of reality’ on the actual, which the past and the future do not have. 

You say: What gives the present that ‘stamp of reality’? 

Life answers: There is nothing peculiar in the present event to make it different from the past and future. For a moment the past was actual and the future will become so. What makes the present so different? Obviously, my presence. I am real for I am always now, in the present, and what is with me now shares in my reality. The past is in memory, the future — in imagination. There is nothing in the present event itself that makes it stand out as real. It may be some simple, periodical occurrence, like the striking of the clock. In spite of our knowing that the successive strokes are identical, the present stroke is quite different from the previous one and the next — as remembered, or expected. A thing focussed in the now is with me, for I am ever present; it is my own reality that I impart to the present event. 

You say: But we deal with things remembered as if they were real. 

Life says: We consider memories, only when they come into the present. The forgotten is not counted until one is reminded — which implies, bringing into the now

You say: Yes, I can see there is in the now some unknown factor that gives momentary reality to the transient actuality. 

Life says: You need not say it is unknown, for you see it in constant operation. Since you were born, has it ever changed? Things and thoughts have been changing all the time. But the feeling that what is now is real has never changed, even in dream. 

You say: In deep sleep there is no experience of the present reality. 

Life says: The blankness of deep sleep is due entirely to the lack of specific memories. But a general memory of well-being is there. There is a difference in feeling when we say ‘I was deeply asleep’ from ‘I was absent’. 

You say: We shall repeat the question we began with: between life’s source and life’s expression (which is the body), there is the mind and its ever-changeful states. The stream of mental states is endless, meaningless and painful. Pain is the constant factor. What we call pleasure is but a gap, an interval between two painful states. Desire and fear are the weft and warp of living, and both are made of pain. Our question is: can there be a happy mind? 

Life answers: Desire is the memory of pleasure and fear is the memory of pain. Both make the mind restless. Moments of pleasure are merely gaps in the stream of pain. How can the mind be happy? 

You say: That is true when we desire pleasure or expect pain. But there are moments of unexpected, unanticipated joy. Pure joy, uncontaminated by desire — unsought, undeserved, God-given. 

Life says: Still, joy is joy only against a background of pain. 

You say: Is pain a cosmic fact, or purely mental? 

Life answers: The universe is complete and where there is completeness, where nothing lacks, what can give pain? 

You say: The Universe may be complete as a whole, but incomplete in details. 

Life says: A part of the whole seen in relation to the whole is also complete. Only when seen in isolation it becomes deficient and thus a seat of pain. What makes for isolation? 

You say: Limitations of the mind, of course. The mind cannot see the whole for the part. 

Life says: Good enough. The mind, by its very nature, divides and opposes. Can there be some other mind, which unites and harmonises, which sees the whole in the part and the part as totally related to the whole? 

You say: The other mind — where to look for it? 

Life says: In the going beyond the limiting, dividing and opposing mind. In ending the mental process as we know it. When this comes to an end, that mind is born. 

You say: In that mind, the problem of joy and sorrow exist no longer? 

Life says: Not as we know them, as desirable or repugnant. It becomes rather a question of love seeking expression and meeting with obstacles. The inclusive mind is love in action, battling against circumstances, initially frustrated, ultimately victorious. 

You say: Between the spirit and the body, is it love that provides the bridge? 

Life says: What else? Mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.

The above text comes from Sri Nisargadatta’s I Am That.

Hear/read more: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/life-answers-a-complete-audiobook-reading-of-sri-nisargadatta-maharajahs-i-am-that/

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The Obsession With Being Someone 

You say: Teacher, you are sitting in front of me and I am here at your feet. What is the basic difference between us? 

Life answers: There is no basic difference. 

You say: Still there must be some real difference, I come to you, you do not come to me. 

Life says: Because you imagine differences, you go here and there in search of ‘superior’ people, texts and ideas. 

You say: You too are a superior person. You claim to know the real, while I do not. 

Life says: Did I ever tell you that you do not know and, therefore, you are inferior? Let those who invented such distinctions prove them. I do not claim to know what you do not. In fact, I know much less than you do. 

You say: Your words are wise, your behaviour noble, your grace all-powerful. 

Life says: I know nothing about it all and see no difference between you and me. My life is a succession of events, just like yours. Only I am detached and see the passing show as a passing show, while you stick to things and move along with them. 

You say: What made you so dispassionate? 

Life answers: Nothing in particular. It so happened that I trusted my teacher. They told me I am nothing but my conscious self and I believed them. Trusting them, I behaved accordingly and ceased caring for what was not me, nor mine. 

You say: Why were you lucky to trust your teacher fully, while our trust is nominal and verbal? 

Life answers: Who can say? It happened so. Things happen without cause and reason and, after all, what does it matter, who is who? Your high opinion of me is your opinion only. Any moment you may change it. Why attach importance to opinions, even your own? 

You say: Still, you are different. Your mind seems to be always quiet and happy. And miracles happen round you. 

Life says: I know nothing about miracles, and I wonder whether nature admits exceptions to her laws, unless we agree that everything is a miracle. As to my mind, there is no such thing. There is consciousness in which everything happens. It is quite obvious and within the experience of everybody. You just do not look carefully enough. Look well, and see what I see. 

You say: What do you see? 

Life answers: I see what you too could see, here and now, but for the wrong focus of your attention. You give no attention to being fully conscious. Your mind is all with things, people and ideas, never with your conscious self. Bring your self into focus, become aware of your own existence. See how you function, watch the motives and the results of your actions. Study the prison you have built around yourself by indifference and apathy. By knowing what you are not, you come to know your self. The way back to your self is through refusal and rejection. One thing is certain: the real is not imaginary, it is not a product of the mind. Even the sense of ‘I am conscious’ is not continuous, though it is a useful pointer; it shows where to seek, but not what to seek. Just have a good look at it. Once you are convinced that you cannot say truthfully about your self anything except ‘I am conscious’, and that nothing that can be pointed at, can be your self, the need for the ‘I am some “thing” or some-concept’ is over — you are no longer intent on verbalising what you are. All you need is to get rid of the tendency to define your self. All definitions apply to your body only and to its expressions. Once this obsession with the body goes, you will revert to your natural state, spontaneously and effortlessly. The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, my core consciousness, while you are distracted, and often absent. Just like gold made into ornaments has no advantage over gold dust, except when the mind makes it so, so are we one in being — we differ only in appearance. We discover this by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving our lives to this discovery. 

The above text comes from Sri Nisargadatta’s I Am That.

Hear/read more: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/life-answers-a-complete-audiobook-reading-of-sri-nisargadatta-maharajahs-i-am-that/

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The Sense of ‘I am’: Consciousness

You say: It is a matter of daily experience that on waking up the world suddenly appears. Where does it come from? 

Life answers: Before anything can come into being there must be somebody to whom it comes. All appearance and disappearance presupposes a change against some changeless background. 

You say: Before waking up I was unconscious. 

Life says: In what sense? Having forgotten, or not having experienced? Don’t you experience even when unconscious? Can you exist without knowing? A lapse in memory: is it a proof of non-existence? And can you validly talk about your own non-existence as an actual experience? You cannot even say that your mind did not exist. Did you not wake up on being called? And on waking up, was it not the sense ‘I am conscious’ that came first? Some seed consciousness must be existing even during sleep, or swoon. On waking up the experience runs: ‘I am — the body — in the world.’ It may appear to arise in succession but in fact it is all simultaneous, a single idea of having a body in a world. Can there be the sense of ‘I am’ without being somebody or other? 

You say: I am always somebody with its memories and habits. I know no other ‘I am’. 

Life says: Maybe something prevents you from knowing? When you do not know something which others know, what do you do? 

You say: I seek the source of their knowledge under their instruction. 

Life says: Is it not important to you to know whether you are a mere body, or something else? Or, maybe nothing at all? Don’t you see that all your problems are your body’s problems — food, clothing, shelter, family, friends, name, fame, security, survival — all these lose their meaning the moment you realise that you may not be a mere body. 

You say: What benefit is there in knowing that I am not the body? 

Life answers: Even to say that you are not the body is not quite true. In a way you are all the bodies, hearts and minds and much more. Go deep into the sense of consciousness itself, of ‘I am’ and you will find. How do you find a thing you have mislaid or forgotten? You keep it in your mind until you recall it. The sense of being, of  ‘I am’ is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes, or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the ‘I am’ state, the state of being conscious and present, right now, without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalised but can be experienced. All you need to do is try and try again. After all the sense of consciousness, of ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it — body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not. 

You say: Then what am I? 

Life answers: It is enough to know what you are not. You need not know what you are. For as long as knowledge means description in terms of what is already known, perceptual, or conceptual, there can be no such thing as self-knowledge, for what you are cannot be described, except as except as total negation. All you can say is: ‘I am not this, I am not that’. You cannot meaningfully say ‘this is what I am’. It just makes no sense. What you can point out as ‘this’ or ‘that’ cannot be yourself. Surely, you can not be ‘something’ else. You are nothing perceivable, or imaginable. Yet, without you there can be neither perception nor imagination. You observe the heart feeling, the mind thinking, the body acting; the very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. Can there be perception, experience without you? An experience must ‘belong’. Somebody must come and declare it as his own. Without an experiencer the experience is not real. It is the experiencer that imparts reality to experience. An experience which you cannot have, of what value is it to you? 

You say: The sense of being an experiencer, the sense of ‘I am’, is it not also an experience? 

Life answers: Obviously, every thing experienced is an experience. And in every experience there arises the experiencer of it. Memory creates the illusion of continuity. In reality each experience has its own experiencer and the sense of identity is due to the common factor at the root of all experiencer-experience relations. Identity and continuity are not the same. Just as each flower has its own colour, but all colours are caused by the same light, so do many experiences appear in the undivided and indivisible awareness, each separate in memory, identical in essence. This essence is the root, the foundation, the timeless and spaceless ‘possibility’ of all experience. 

You say: How do I get at it? 

Life answers: You need not get at it, for you are it. It will get at you, if you give it a chance. Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realisation that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you. With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and lovable. 

The above text comes from Sri Nisargadatta’s I Am That.

Hear/read more: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/life-answers-a-complete-audiobook-reading-of-sri-nisargadatta-maharajahs-i-am-that/

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Life Answers: A Complete Audiobook Reading of Sri Nisargadatta Maharajah’s “I Am That”

He was born Maruthi Shivrampant Kambli in 1897 and died as Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj in 1981. He worked as a shopkeeper for much of his life in what used to be called Bombay (now Mumbai), selling children’s clothes and Beedies, those aromatic hand-made cigarettes consisting of a dried tobacco wrapped in a golden temburni leaf and tied with a piece of string. 

He would also have people gather in his living room in the evenings after work and engage them in conversations that would have given Socrates a serious run for his money.  

For these were Soul-Searching conversations, Serious Existential Conversations, the kind of conversations that a lot of us desperately want or even need to have (I know I do), but very rarely are we given the opportunity to do so face to face with other human animals,  especially in our adult years. 

Perhaps because our culture often tosses these conversations into the box designated for “Teenage Angst” rather than Profound Reflection – the latter being given over to matters scientific or therapeutic in our increasingly atomised and digitised times. 

The questions however don’t go away. 

What is consciousness (nobody can really give us a definitive answer to this one yet, though many suppositions abound)?

How does “the mind” work?

Why do we suffer?

How can we suffer less?

What is the “purpose” of life in general?

And maybe even more so, “our” lives (mine, yours) specifically. 

I guess you could call him a reluctant guru. He never benefited monetarily or sexually (as far as I know) from sharing his wisdom – something a lot of other male gurus, particularly in the 20th century, struggled to do. But even as a reluctant guru at some point he saw the need to change his name to the single moniker: Nisargadatta. A bit like the unreluctant pop stars, and Influencers after him (Madonna, Prince, Lorde, Bono, Gaga) – no more a person, but a brand or signifier. Hopefully his wife was still allowed to call him Maruthi. When I address him in my head, I like to call him Nis. 

The reason I keep on returning to Nis’s words, as I know many do, is in order to remind myself again and again of there being a world, a reality outside the self-limited and self-limiting confines of our occasionally tyrannical minds. 

I don’t know about your mind, but mine is often inflexible, overly-attached to my own partisan and biased opinions, needlessly reactive, and also just plain “stupid” or “silly” at times. Our minds are so full of “stuff”: from the culture in which swim, our past experiences, or whatever signal is just randomly firing in our neurons at any given time. Is it any surprise then that not all of this “stuff” is genuinely useful or life affirming in any understandable way? Is it any surprise that most of us are not tortured at a psychological level occasionally? Or at the very least uncomfortably inconvenienced, by other human creatures, but also by our own thoughts and emotions?

There are many practices that offer to help us with this, especially meditation. But when we are suffering acutely, some of us human animals (I know I am one of these) might also require words of consolation delivered to us through the voice of another suffering creature so that we might hear in these words, the warmth, the vulnerability, the humanity of our crazy little species. 

This is also why I like to call him Nis. Because Nis, like you, me, Bono and Prince, was just a bloke, a human animal whose mind worked in a particular way, a deeply therapeutic way I would say, even though the medicine is often quite strong and maybe not always delivered in the polite, touchy-feely language we are now used to and maybe even expect from therapists and self-help books. 

This morning, I wondered to myself what it might be like to record such a cherished book of wisdom in my own voice, mainly for myself to listen to when I need it, but thanks to the Internet also shareable, and so available to you if you need or want it.  

So for the next 100 days I plan to read aloud for myself, and for you, the whole of Nisargadatta’s classic text I Am That, and see where that takes us.

The text reads as a series of questions and answers, as this is how it emerged: in the form of a conversation. His words, and the questions directed at him from interested friends, fellow seekers, and all the other Bombay folk who participated in these weekly discussions, were then transcribed and translated into English by one of his admirers: a Polish engineer and businessman called Maurice Frydman, who came to India in the late 1930s as a Jewish refugee from Warsaw and fell in love with Hindu non-dualistic philosophy, especially when expressed through the mouth and mind of his friend, Nis. Frydman thus began to act as a kind of Plato to Nis’s Socrates, a Boswell to his Johnson, a Holmes to his Sherlock.  

Because the text exists as a series of questions and answers, it can sometimes be confusing when read aloud through just one voice. For this reason when a question is asked I will use the phrase “You say” or “You ask” and for Nis’s response I will preface these utterances with the words “Life says“. Or “Life answers”. I do this so as not to be continually referring to Nis himself, or to get too bogged down in how the text came about. For what you are about to hear is something we might think of as timeless wisdom, and for that reason, could have been spoken by any human animal in the last 150,000 years possessing a symbolic language: you, me, Jesus, Freud, whoever.

I also don’t want to get caught in the trap of using the sometimes distancing, (because culturally and temporally specific) language of obedience and power differentials which are inherent in words like Maharaja, and Guru (at least to our Western ears). These words don’t really have any meaningful place my vocabulary or worldview. As far as I am concerned, this was a bloke from Bombay who had some pretty cool things to say (sounds like a limerick, doesn’t it?), couched in the language of non-dualism (also known as Advaita Vedanta if you want to Google that) which offers a kind of pathway to What-Is as opposed to the mind’s continual What-Could-Be or even more frustratingly, What-Should-Be. 

But it also feels as if approaching the reading in this manner is keeping with the spirit of the text itself. Nis counsels us again and again to not get too caught up with words and concepts, the packaging if you like, in our pursuit of understanding what it means to be alive, to be fully conscious, and to know that one is so. This is even more the case when it comes to the hard, human part of this, which we might describe as “being OK” with the reality of our lives as we experience them, maybe even finding a way to “fall in love” (?) with this human animal consciousness, even if it often feels torn and tattered by thoughts and emotions.

If you are a fan of Nis’s book and/or enjoy these readings, please do get in touch (stevewasserman@gmail.com) and tell me a little bit about your relationship to I AM THAT or Nis.

I know for a fact that all of our current 21st Century “gurus” (people like Sam Harris, Tolle, Helen “Course in Miracles’ Shucman, Katie Byron, and the like) really anyone at all who has a keen interest in spirituality and the psyche, refers to this book in interviews as a one-of-a-kind entity, a deeply precious and nurturing gateway to the lives we all want to lead. 

I myself though have yet to meet or talk to anyone who even knows about”I Am That”, so do please get in touch if  it holds a special place on the shelf for you, and especially if you are reading or listening to it now, for the first time. It would be fun to engage with someone else who is equally taken by Nis’s words. 

As you might gather, it is more than just a book for me, perhaps better thought of as a kind of thread, or path, or Way. I recognise now that this path, this “cure for the soul”, is also a kind of medicine, a very strong medicine for our crazy-making minds, but one that psychotherapy manuals ( I’ve read many of these as a psychotherapist) hardly ever go near, perhaps because it is seen as being too strong for our somewhat fragile 21st Century Ego?

Freud “discovered” (if that’s the right word, though it seems pretty obvious if you think about it now) that we all have a profound need to sit or lie down with another human animal in a non-judgemental way and talk about what most troubles us, or shames us, or perplexes us; to share the struggle of being conscious in these bodies, these minds, this world as it is, rather than the mind, or body, or world we would like to have, or feel we should be living up to, or beyond. And in this way, Sigmund declared that our neurotic suffering and misery, the relentless form of it that seizes our minds like bear-trap at times, might be transformed into “ordinary human unhappiness”. At which point you’re “cooked” as far as the psychoanalysts  are concerned, job done.

Nisargadatta’s therapy, if you want to call it that, starts from this place of “ordinary human unhappiness”, digging away at the roots of consciousness itself, the source of everything we perceive and experience, rather than working (as most psychotherapists do, including me) on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and other people, our situation, the events happening around us.

Freud, deep reader and cogitator as he was, who treated his patients as texts to be read and theorised about, led us to believe that this is the only way to address human suffering. Just get interested in the stories, and ordinary human unhappiness will soon be well within your grasp. And he was  right. But maybe psychology and psychotherapy, as we know them in their current guises, can only take us so far. By digging at the roots of consciousness itself, Nis challenges this preconception.

I have said his words are strong medicine, the strongest I know of. I also get the sense that he wasn’t always the easiest person to hang out with. He is often, as you will see, blunt and somewhat obstreporous, even though it doesn’t seem to be coming from a place of ego. But maybe this is a projection on my part: me projecting a kind of authoritarian patriarch onto the shoulders of this Bombay shopkeeper. So perhaps it is wise if we consume medicine with as much kindess and compassion (that is certainly the tonal frame for my reading of the work), and let the medicine wash over us to some extent, rather than approaching it like a puzzle to be solved.

I think if we do so, we might discover here something that our psychotherapeutic culture has forgotten, or wasn’t really that interested in in the first place, focused as it often is on a bid to fix and improve our flaws and foibles, to make our stories better or bigger, or more successful, rather than to make us more sophisticated, or just less neurotic participants in the flow of life as it occurs around and through us. 

I would like to think that these two modes that I have described (life as a story, and life as an experience) might co-exist, and that also that one needs the other as a counter-balance. That is certainly how I try to practice when doing this thing we call therapy. 

But as usual, I am talking too much, saying more than is required, so I’m going to shut up now, and let you taste the medicine, which once tasted, I believe, can never be forgotten. To my palate, Nis’s remedies are truly delicious, as well as comforting: platitude-free, full of crunchy thoughts and ideas that if you let them work on you, may quite literally blow your mind. As in: demolish the whole higgledy-piggledy, Tower of Babel structure, like a crane or a stick of dynamite, taking down a conceptual edifice that can’t in its current guise hold the joy, peace, inner freedom and diminished suffering that we all seek. Applying his words therapeutically, I think they suggest that we might need to “construct” in our minds different conceptual structures and ways of being present with our experience, ones that are more able to contain these sought-after states. 

If so what are they? Nis covers all the bases when it comes to the fundamental human questions previously mentioned, as well as all the others, so stick around if this has whetted  your appetite.

Let’s see, shall we, if see if spending some time in the company of Nis and his interlocutors significantly adds value to your existence, maybe even completely reshaping the way you and I currently experience our selves and our minds, which is also to say our lives, as these are often a direct extension of what is going on in our thoughts and feelings. 

If you’re up for having that experience with me, this is how it begins. 

EPISODES 

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Enjoy The Journey – The Importance of Savouring (And How To Enhance It)

One of my clients bought for herself a few years ago a bracelet which had the following reminder stamped on it which she hoped to follow: Enjoy The Journey.

If one is going to live one’s life by any mantra, this is most certainly a good one. And yet, when we are struggling (and even when we’re not) how does one actually put this enjoyment into practice?

Some of us might do this naturally, but certain personality types, let’s say more anxious ones, or those who might be described as Type-A personalities often struggle to “stop and smell the roses” even though they have the have the best intentions for doing so.

For this reason, I’ve recently been reading a wonderful book by psychologists Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff called Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience. Apart from providing a fascinating psychological overview to this often overlooked dimension to human experience, Veroff and Bryant also give us some very clear and easy-to-follow ideas with regard to how we might practice savouring.

And after reading the book, it is very clear to me, that savouring is a skill, and like all skills needs to be practised. For some it might come naturally, but for most of us, it actually requires a little bit of conscious effort to Enjoy the Journey.

For this reason, I thought I might share with you their final chapter (edited a tad so as to make it a bit more readable – it was originally written for an academic audience), as I think there’s lots in here which can be applied in our lives without having to do a mindfulness course or give up on our most valued obligations and  life goals. I’ll hand you over now to Joseph and Fred.

ENHANCING SAVOURING

How can people promote savouring experiences in their lives, as so many would like to do? How can people cultivate the capacity to appreciate the wonders of life, to cherish precious memories from the past, to anticipate good things the future may hold, to capture the joy of the moment?

Are there simply people who can or cannot savour—that is, “savourers” and “nonsavourers,” the way we speak of extraverts and introverts, or optimists and pessimists? Or is it possible for people to learn to think and act in ways that enhance the quality of the savouring experiences in their lives? If it is possible to become more adept at savouring, then what specific approaches or orientations should people adopt if they want to enhance savouring? And how can people learn these approaches to savouring?

Let’s sets out some guiding principles that could enhance savouring for everyone, regardless of whether or not they easily or customarily savour positive experiences. Our deeply ingrained training as social psychologists makes us believe that under carefully crafted conditions, it would be possible to elicit savouring experiences in almost anyone, regardless of the individuals starting point. Accordingly, we consider this primer a sort of Beginner’s Guide To Savouring.

To add to our hubris, from time to time we suggest exercises one can do that embody some of the generalizations we make. These exercises are based on our earlier discussions of savouring, as well as on techniques borrowed from the literature on meditation, psychotherapy, and emotional regulation. We close by suggesting that true happiness lies not just in knowing how to savour, but also having the wisdom to savour in ways that provide meaning and purpose.

THREE ESSENTIAL PRECONDITIONS FOR SAVOURING

In our general definition of savouring, we contend that three critical preconditions must exist in order for savouring to occur.

First, people must be relatively free of pressing social and esteem needs.

Second, people must be focused on attending to their present experience.

And third, people must have some degree of awareness of the positive feelings they are experiencing.

For people who savour their lives easily, these preconditions arise quite automatically. But what about people who find it hard to savour, who have trouble breaking free of distracting thoughts, staying present-focused, or being mindfully aware of positive feelings? What can we do to foster these three preconditions for savouring if they don’t always come naturally to us?

We now suggest some basic aids to set the stage for savouring.

1/ Putting Brakes on Our Worrying Minds

With the demands and rewards of most peoples everyday life, it may be a tall order to forego thinking about the responsibilities and social incentives that compose the world we inhabit. It is not as if people have internal switches that allow them to turn off their ordinary pursuits. Nor is it necessarily easy to stop oneself from worrying about problems and concerns in ones life. But if we all have a finite amount of attentional resources (we do!) then we might like to optimize our emotional experience whenever we can. Worrying and thinking about pressing problems deplete these attentional resources and reduce peoples ability to give their time and attention to savouring. If savouring experiences are the “flowers” of our lives, we might need to find ways to make sure that the “flower beds” of our minds are regularly weeded!

How to cutback or cutdown on worrying is a huge area of research and experimentation that each individual will need to try out different strategies on and see what works for them.

Most of the research done on this topic suggests that the particular set of “stopping rules” people adopt when worrying can determine how long they persist in ruminating. Individuals who worry until they no longer feel like continuing stop worrying sooner than those who worry until they feel they have generated as many potential solutions as possible.

One implication of this finding is that the more strongly one believes worrying can help solve problems, the harder it may be to savour. 

If however, after perhaps considering the extent to which worrying about the future or regretting the past is recognised by us as a hinderance to enjoying the journey of our lives, we may choose to make “Worrying” itself the problem for our minds to solve, as much as the various existential issues we get stuck on or in. If we want to savour more, then we need to find and practice ways to check our worries at the door. A therapist can be really helpful when working on strategies for doing this. 

2/ Focusing on the Present

It might be worth utilising for this task “intentional mindfulness qualities” that  Jon Kabat- Zinn lists as being conducive to meditation. We particularly highlight the qualities of: (a) nonjudgmental orientation (i.e., “impartial witnessing” or not getting too stuck in the mind’s predisposition to evaluate and judge); (b) openness (i.e., seeing things as if for the first time); and (c) acceptance (i.e., being focused on things as they are in the present).

How people become nonjudgmental, open to novelty, and present-focused will probably require a lot of experiential tweaking. The practical results of this will possibly look different for everyone who engages in this pursuit. For example, becoming nonjudgmental might require consciously reminding oneself not to evaluate ones ongoing experience. Becoming open to novelty might require purposefully doing or trying something different for a change. Becoming more present-focused might require putting away ones appointment book and removing ones wristwatch. Shortly, we will present a few exercises aimed at helping people foster these critical qualities during positive experiences.

 

3/ Enhancing Our Focus on Positive Experience

The third condition necessary to establish a savouring context is the capacity to enhance attentional focus on pleasurable aspects of ones ongoing experience.

We have suggested from the very beginning that savouring is not simply experiencing pleasure or enjoyment. On the contrary, savouring involves taking the perspective of an inquiring journalist toward ones own pleasurable experiences and then reporting these inquiries to oneself.

One suggestion that can help people focus more intensely on the present is to avoid multitasking, or what has been termed polyphasic activity. Polyphasic activities involve “trying to think about or to do two or more things simultaneously”.

A hallmark of Type A behaviour, these frenetic, time-urgent pursuits divide ones attention among multiple targets, thereby making it harder to attend to the joy of a happy moment as it is unfolding. It is hard for people to focus closely on the joy they feel if they are also thinking about or trying to do other things at the same time. Thus, people can enhance savouring by devoting their attentional resources more exclusively to those aspects of ongoing positive experience that they find enjoyable.

The Time Management Guru, Alan Lakein suggests that people ask themselves, “If I knew I would be struck dead by lightning six months from today, how would I live until then? (This means you would have only six months to live and would have to squeeze whatever you consider important into your dramatically reduced time on earth …)” 

Slightly modifying this perspective, we suggest that when people encounter a positive experience, they imagine that this is the last time they will ever go through the particular experience, be it a beautiful sunset, a conversation with a friend, sipping a warm cup of tea, or a stroll on the beach.

Imagining the positive moment to be a last-of-a-lifetime experience produces an extremely intense bittersweetness, making the present much more vivid and salient; and imagining one will never again experience the particular moment (i.e., downward counterfactual thinking) dramatically accentuates the positive features and feelings involved through this contrast, making it easier to notice and appreciate those aspects of the moment that are most readily savoured.

Another strategy to enhance savouring is to become more aware of ones positive feelings. Just as people vary in their baseline levels or ranges of positive affect, people also vary in the degree to which they are consciously aware of their own feelings. Along these lines, we suggest that people practice noticing and explicitly labeling their positive moods, so as to enhance their ability to savour. 

For example, the next time you find yourself going through a positive experience, take a moment to try to identify the specific positive feelings you are experiencing. First, find words to describe your pleasant feelings. Are they affectionate, mellow, awesome, energizing, uplifting, exciting, or empowering? Are they fun, fulfilling, comforting, inspiring, heartwarming, prideful, or grateful? Are they happy, pleased, satisfied, content, glad, relieved, or elated? Try first to put your finger on exactly what it is you are feeling. You may well be experiencing more than one positive feeling. Once you have put your positive feelings in words, tell yourself explicitly at that moment that you are feeling this way right now. Then return your attentional focus to the stimuli or event from which you are deriving these feelings in the first place. Practicing this process of attending mindfully to positive feelings, and explicitly labeling them, can help one become more aware of positive feelings and thereby enhance ones ability to savour.

THREE GENERAL SUGGESTIONS FOR ENHANCING SAVOURING

Next we offer three general suggestions drawn from our research on savouring that people often find helpful to enhance the situational conditions that are ripe for savouring experiences, and for each of these suggestions, we provide specific exercises designed to induce savouring.

The three areas we focus on here are:1)  taking time out from everyday activity, 2) becoming more open to experience, and 3) deliberately narrowing one’s focus on something pleasurable.

Each of these exercises are designed to give you an idea of how you might include more savouring in your life. But please feel free to adapt them to your interests. Be creative and make up your own exercise if you can, using the principles described above.

1/ Taking Time Out From Everyday Activity

A basic strategy that enhances opportunities to savour is to purposely take “time outs” from ordinary ongoing life. The momentum American men and women establish for accomplishing what needs to be done for their lives often requires a 48-hour day. By and large, if you are reading this, you are probably an “earnest worker”, trying hard to earn enough for a  comfortable standard of living.

And the time you spend doing nonwork tasks such as shopping, cooking, cleaning, and fulfilling required social functions is endless. There are no siestas for us (we tell ourselves). Indeed, we often indulge in recreation with the same earnestness. We get tired, and sometimes find that collapsing in front of the TV set is the most satisfying respite from the pace. Mindless TV viewing — for what else is there to savour, if people work, play, and carry out their routines so earnestly and so breathlessly that time does not stop long enough for them to appreciate the good things around them?

A remedy for this pace of existence clearly is to take some time off to let life pass more slowly. Anything that makes people step off life’s daily treadmill without discomfiting them or arousing their guilt or concern about falling behind in their work could be part of such a remedy.

Vacations sometimes are meant to do just that. And yet there are people who pursue vacations in the same pell-mell pace that characterizes their daily schedules. For these people, the pursuit of leisure becomes a job rather than a joy. However, if vacations really bring a shift in the pace of life, then vacation time might be an ideal time for savouring, or a time to try out some of the other exercises we propose to invigorate savouring. In fact, the word “vacation” comes from the Latin word vacare, which means to be free or exempt, as from stress, burdens, or obligations. For most people, however, vacations come but once or twice a year. A remedy for these people is to build daily or weekly “minivacations” into their lives or regular routines.

Indeed, minivacations are sometimes easier to arrange than longer holidays. A weekend getaway, a day off from work, time away from having to cook, or freedom from other types of everyday responsibilities in one way or another—at these moments of escape from the daily grind, deliberate strategies for savouring can be applied, if savouring processes are not automatically activated.

One tip for enhancing savouring is to become more proactive rather than purely reactive in finding enjoyment. Note that there is a natural asymmetry between coping and savouring. On one hand, the sorrows in life inevitably find us and force us to feel them despite our best efforts to avoid them, and they require us to actively cope to reduce their negative emotional impact. On the other hand, the pleasures in life more often require us to hunt for them or else they will not happen despite our best hopes, and they require us to actively savour to enhance their positive emotional impact. These facts suggest that people should make savouring a priority if they wish to enjoy themselves.

Along these lines, it is important to recognize that the frequency and intensity of positive affect are largely independent, and the frequency of one’s positive affect is a stronger predictor of overall level of happiness than is the intensity of one’s positive affect. These findings would suggest that increasing the total number of savouring episodes you have will boost overall happiness more than simply intensifying enjoyment while you are savouring just one episode.

Indeed, increasing the number of pleasurable activities in which people engage has been shown to increase subjective well-being and decrease subjective distress. Here we present a semistructured activity, Daily Vacation Exercise, that helps people practice savouring proactively in the context of everyday life.

The Daily Vacation Exercise

  • Each day for one week, plan and participate in a formal “daily vacation” during which you spend time doing something you find enjoyable for at least 20 minutes. This activity might be going for a walk, sitting quietly in a garden, reading a book, treating yourself to a cup of coffee, going out to eat, visiting a museum or art gallery, taking a shower or soaking in a bathtub, spending time with a friend, or watching a sunset. Be creative in finding sources of enjoyment that you can look forward to and savour. This exercise works best if you do not use the same activity every day, but instead seek a variety of experiences in your daily vacations.
  • Before starting each daily vacation, make sure to set aside worries and concerns, pressing responsibilities, and sources of stress for at least 20 minutes, and do your best to structure the situation so as to prevent distractions while you are savouring. Remind yourself not to be judgmental, but rather to see things as if for the first or last time, and to focus on what is happening and what you are feeling as it unfolds in the present.
  • While you are on your daily vacation, try to notice and explicitly acknowledge to yourself each stimulus or sensation that you find pleasurable. Identify your positive feelings and explicitly label them in your mind. Actively build a memory of the feeling and the stimuli associated with it, close your eyes, swish the feeling around in your mind, and outwardly express the positive feeling in some way.
  • At the end of your daily vacation, plan your daily vacation for tomorrow and begin to look forward to it. At the end of the day, look back on your daily vacation, and recall and rekindle the positive feelings you savoured.
  • At the end of the week, take a few minutes to recall all seven of your daily vacations. Look back at the activities you enjoyed doing and try to reexperience the positive feelings you felt during each daily vacation. Compare the way you have felt over the past week and the way you feel right now to the way you usually feel during a typical week. People typically report having felt happier a greater percentage of the time during their week of daily vacations and report feeling happier at the end of the week, compared to the way they usually feel.

The purpose of The Daily Vacation Exercise is to give people direct experience with proactive savouring, to give them the opportunity to bring savouring into their lives on a regular basis, and to help them practice the art of savouring daily life. After engaging in this exercise, some people may want to make daily vacations part of their everyday routine.

2/Becoming More Open to Experience

Once there is time to experience life in a savouring mode, it is most helpful for us if we are open to and aware of the varieties of experience that are there to be savoured. We all need to relax sufficiently to undo the restraints on our views of the world and our various selves if we are to let savourable stimulation enter. We have described earlier a general way of extending the duration of savouring as chaining together ones positive experiences. One kind of chaining is a set of free-associative linkages that one creates, sometimes haphazardly, other times intentionally.

Next is an exercise, The Life Review Exercise, that can facilitate this kind of associative chaining in contemplating ones life.

One Way To Do This: The Life Review Exercise

  • Identify an activity or experience that you currently savour in the way we have defined savouring so far.
  • Think of the last time you had such a savouring experience, and write down in as much detail as you can the situation you were in, the people who were there, the place you were, the time of day, the time of year, and so on.
  • Do the same for one other time that is similar to what you report in Step 2, including all the accompanying data.
  • Do the same as in Step 3 for the very first time you remember savouring something in the way we have defined savouring in this book.

You might want to share these descriptions with someone who would enjoy reading them, or talk about these with your therapist.

3/Narrowing One’s Focus.

In the next exercise, The Camera Exercise, we recommend what appear to be two paradoxical processes that always seem to be involved in savouring. The exercise requires people to narrow their focus of attention on a small, given target, and yet be wide open to any stimuli that may come their way when attending to the target with this narrow focus. We know of no better way to practice this orientation than to take photographs without an explicit goal concerning the subject or target.

One Way To Do This: The Camera Exercise

  • This exercise can be done with the camera function on your mobile phone.
  • Select a sunny day, if you can. Having an active play of light on your visual field enhances this exercise. Go to a relatively quiet location near where you live. It could be nearby, if you live in the country or on a quiet street in a town or city. It could be in a park, if you live in a noisy town or city. Find a comfortable place to sit or stand for a period of time, and simply wait there while you scan what is in your immediate field of vision.
  • Find an object close by. It could be a building or part of a building. It could be a tree, or other vegetation. It could be a machine or parked vehicle. It could be anything that will remain relatively still while you gaze at it. Now take the mind-set of seeing the abstract patterns in the object that you have selected. These could be contrasts in colour, light, or shading. Or these could be variations in texture.
  • Start taking pictures from different angles that represent alternative perspectives you can take in relationship to the object. Move a bit in one direction, then in another; hold the camera higher, then lower; tilt the camera to one side, then the other. Vary your stance and the angle with which you hold the camera in relation to the object. Snap an} shot that appeals to you. Don’t worry about a shot being totally balanced and symmetrical. Just shoot those images you find interesting or pleasing. Remember, the exercise is not a photo contest. Rather, it is designed to help you develop your savouring skills.
  • Find another object, and repeat the procedures in Steps 3 and 4 until you have taken 30 to 40 digital shots.
  • Now carefully study the pictures for patterns that please you.
  • Repeat Steps 2 through 6 another day as soon as you can, photographing the same or similar objects.

The Camera Exercise forces one to attend closely and mindfully to ways in which an ordinary object can have pleasant visual effects. The photographer scrutinizes the object in the field of vision and takes time to compose an image. Often the photographic results are illuminating and reinforce the experience of enjoyment in examining objects and taking pictures. Reviewing the photos returns ones eyes to images that hold memory traces of what had previously been felt in the initial visual scanning. Of course this can also be done on the hop without a camera, but using your mind to look at a view around you, as if you were searching for a particularly striking or beautiful view or perspective which you might want to savour.

Some Final Thoughts: Savouring, Wisdom, and the Good Life

In his classic treatise on ethics, Aristotle argued that there are two distinct forms of happiness: hedonia, or the pleasures inherent in life, as when one fully savours a positive experience; and eudaimonia, or the life well-lived, as when one lives a virtuous, meaningful, or purpose-driven life.

Aristotle considered this latter form of happiness to be “the highest of all goods achievable by human action”. Others have suggested eudaimonia is more accurately defined as “the feelings accompanying behavior in the direction of, and consistent with, ones true potential”. In any event, it is important not to confuse these two different positive subjective states.

Whereas hedonia is the “life of pleasure,” eudaimonia is the “life of purpose.” Explicating the latter term, Seligman has cogently argued:

“The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power, or goodness. A life that does this is pregnant with meaning, and pleasure.”

In encouraging people to find ways to enhance savouring in their lives, it is not our intention to promote selfish hedonism or to suggest that pursuing the joy of the moment should be ones primary goal in life. On the contrary, the single-minded pursuit of hedonia and nothing else would be a vacuous existence aimed solely at maximizing personal hedonic gain with no higher purpose. The life of pleasure devoid of eudaimonia would be empty and meaningless indeed. Yet, the “good life’’ filled with virtue and meaning would be stolid and sterile, if it achieved eudaimonia at the price of never being able to savour ones life. The Greek philosopher Epicurus made precisely this point in arguing, “It is impossible to live pleasantly without living prudently, well, and justly, nor is it possible to live prudently, well, and justly, without living pleasantly”.

We suggest that true wisdom lies in learning to savour in ways that achieve both hedonia and eudaimonia, without trading one form of happiness for the other. Indiscriminate savouring pursues the empty pleasures to be gained in satisfying “unhelpful desires”. Along these lines, Adler argues that there are three basic types of unhelpful desires:

(a) the desire is for something that, while really good and needed, is only a partial good, yet is desired inordinately as if it were the only good, the whole good; or (b) something that, while good as a means, is a limitless good for those who desire it as an ultimate end; or (c) something that, though it may appear to be good when actually desired, is an apparent good that is noxious rather than innocuous. The prime examples of this threefold classification of the objects of unhelpful desire are (a) pleasure, (b) money, and (c) fame and power … pleasure, much more frequently than these other partial goods, is the object of unhelpful desire when it is desired as the only good, and as the ultimate goal of ones striving, (Adler 1991, pp. 37-38)

This gives us a clue to the fact that wisdom, pleasure, and virtue go hand in hand to guide one toward pursuing those things that provide meaning and fulfill purpose in life, which include those positive experiences that are truly worth savouring for the right reasons. These “moral” traits help insure that people savour their lives in ways that bring joy, awe, gratitude, pride, and pleasure, without harming oneself or others and without sacrificing eudaimonia in the process.

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Feel Better

Amor Fati

THE THING IS

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

ELLEN BASS

When I was going through a painful break-up some years back, a friend of mine suggested prayer. Not to a deity per se, but rather the idea was to take a few tunes I liked, that touched on how I was feeling, create a playlist with these on Spotify, and then to use the “Recommended Songs” algorithym to listen to other songs that had been accessed prior to me in my woebegone iteration by hundreds of thousands of other lovelorn fools who had turned to the collective, folk wisdom of popular music for the seeking of their solace and consolation.

“You know in the Bible when Moses is out grazing his father-in-law’s sheep?” the friend who made this suggestion explained. “And he comes across this plant or bush that’s on fire and then, hey presto, an angel suddenly appears to to him out of the flames, and gives him a little pep talk.”

“Yes,” I say, although I’ve never though of this angelic intervention as a pep talk.”

“But it is,” he asserts. “It’s like: Moses, dude, I feel for you. I feel for the sheer misery of your enslavement. Enslaved to a thought, or a belief, enslaved to a person, or a substance. Enslaved to the Egyptians, or any other self-defined nationality for that matter. Enslaved, most painful of all, to a certain sense of yourself.
Dude, the angel says-”

“Why does he talk like a surfer?” I ask my friend, interrupting the monologue.

“I don’t know, that’s just the language of angels, isn’t it? So anyway, you know the story, him going onto say that there are different ways to spin this whole enslaved-suffering thing: a sort of “milk plus honey” option.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you,” I say to my friend. “What has the Biblical land of milk and honey got to do with the emotional pain of a break-up?”

“Well, that Angel, existing in the timeless realm of Now,” my friend goes onto explain, “knows that in a few years, some Greeks are going to come along who will state that this this serene and peaceful place without any unnecessary worry tormenting us, this almost-Paradise, Eden-reclaimed, heaven on earth that the Palestinians and Israelis are still fighting historical battles over, might be better discovered in the non-material realm of the mind. In consciousness: that weird sense you have, that Moses has, that we all have, of being under the desert’s merciless midday sun (aka LIFE), listening to me, or the Angel, or whoever is uttering these words. But watch out Moses! The Greeks, are soon going to turn this whole burning bush bible story into a kind of metaphysical cure for the soul, just you wait! But until that happens, dude, you might have to do something PHYSICAL and SOCIAL to manage your suffering, using your words, going to the Elders of the tribe and saying, Hey, listen up! There’s this I-AM who spoke to me from a burning bush in the desert, this I-AM force who got it into my head that instead of fucking around on a hillside with a herd of sheep, I’m going to go and ask for a meeting with Pharoah, yes me the shy one, friend of quadrapeds, ungulates, and feathered creatures, watch me demand that Pharoah grant our freedom: a physical freedom, but one which also points to a metaphysical one: free from our thoughts, beliefs, magical potions, cultural indoctrinations, free from our selves.”

Well, who knows. Perhaps something did happen to Moses out there in the dessert. Either through meditative trance, or by consuming some green goodness, he managed somehow to tune into something, something rough-hewn, flame-fed, but transcendent, out there in the desert; something bigger than himself; some kind of fate-accepting Born To Be Moses part of the creature he is or was. For it was true what they said about Moses, not a natural politician or leader: the shy one, the one with a speech impediment; by nature a listener, rather than a rhetorician. Which is maybe why only Moses could hear voices, inner voices we might now attribute to the psyche, which in his time, was thought of as “God”. The Inner God that gives him guidance, or might offer a new kind of momentum to his life, propelling him towards a kind of striving that the early philosophers believed all human striving should ultimately partake, a striving we moderns are equally obsessed with: the striving for well-being, serenity, the good life.

I was going to make this episode mainly about how the Spotify algorithm did indeed provide me with healing songs, each of which had a message in it that I really needed to hear at the time, a message from God, or a Higher Power, if we’re going to use some kind of word to denote a force or energy that feels large enough to encapsulate the Everything of consciousness, of the not-I, not-you, not-the-human-race in all its demanding, clamoring, broken-hearted neediness.

But I am lazy in certain ways, and the thought of having to comb through that playlist of 150 songs again and weed out the good stuff, or the God stuff, felt like an interminable chore which would probably get me into trouble with the Copyright Cops to boot. Instead I thought I’d focus on just one track that came up, not a musical one. Perhaps this is also why it caught my attention and led me on a little quest of sorts. For imagine you’re listening to some sad-eyed song by Nina, or Carole, or Joni, thoroughly enmeshed in your own misery, and suddenly a German-inflected voice that sounds like it is coming from a small pointy-faced gnome, starts speaking these words into your ears much like that voice from the burning bush two thousand years ago or more:

The word Yes takes you through the gateway of this moment. Say Yes to this moment, and immediately you can sense an increased aliveness in the body. Accept this moment the way it is. Why? Because when you argue with What Is, you suffer you are not at peace. With a Yes to this moment, no matter what this moment brings, you are out of the prison of the mind which lives in and through denial of this moment. The thinking mind lives through No to the moment. So this is the gateway of the Yes to Now.

I wasn’t sure how the algorithym had landed on these words. Perhaps because one of the songs I’d put initially into the break-up equation was Elliot Smith’s Say Yes, which has in it this wonderful Beatle-esque moment reminiscent of A Day In The Life, heaving itself tenderly through the painful, conditional binary of Eros (“They want you or they don’t”), a knife-edge binary, which would eventually kill him. But there again, in that song, the invocation to say Yes, not in this case counseling us to to accept the moment as it is, but rather to live through the approval or compliance of another:

I’m in love with the world
Through the eyes of a girl
Who’s still around the morning after

As you are probably aware when someone suggests Acceptance as a route out of suffering, this can sometimes sound to human animal undergoing profound physical and mental distress as a bid silence us. Stop crying, accept what life is currently offering you, and get on with it.

And don’t we all struggle with that invitation, which can sometimes be given by someone close to us who is tired or bored or overwhelmed in some way with our suffering, who is looking, as are we, for a magic make-it-go-away bullet. And if it doesn’t go away, well then put an acceptance plaster over the wound and focus on something else!

Of course this is not what the more gracious forms of “acceptance” we admire in others might look like. You might even find a version of this in yourself Think of the things about yourself or others, about the world and your relationship to it, that you struggled with a great deal in the past, but have fundamentally (in some almost-magical way) accepted as being your fate, your destiny, of sorts, and maybe no bad thing about that either. I’m thinking here, as someone who recently hit 50, about all the FOMO-ing I did as a younger person about not dancing the night away in outdoor raves and other bacchanalian blowouts. Did we not come to our yes-saying with regard to the lack or deprivation of certain thing (or at least a no-to-No saying) by a continual process of relating to this conflicted material, and ultimately trying to make peace with it? And was this not a fairly drawn-out process (weeks, months, years, maybe even a lifetime) in order to come to terms with some wounding, or loss? Ideally this hard, long acceptance route might be sped up in some way, made more available to us when we most need it, but maybe not.

There’s a poem by Ellen Bass called The Thing Is that speaks of this process, underlining the almost humdrum, low-key switch that occurs within us when we stop fighting the pain that is clamouring to be felt so that it might play itself out in us like a series of sad chimes, allowing the unwanted experience to be taken in (that’s all that “accept” actually means: to receive something, as you would a gift) without the mind getting coralled into using most, if not all of its energies, to fight whatever it’s decided can’t be accepted for now, or ever.

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Thinking what it might mean to love this bedraggled, obese, plain, uncharming experience and say Yes to it, a loving-Yes, as opposed to a resigned one, is ultimately what led me to another German voice, a more strident one, who came up with an “experimental philosophy” which he called Amor Fati, a Latin term which translates as “love of one’s fate”.

I’m talking here of course about Friedrich Nietzche, someone who struggled all his life with chronic physical and mental health conditions (“blinding headaches, suppurating ears, ‘stomach catarrh’ – whatever that is – vomiting, and nausea”, cf. Prideaux), who spent many an hour lying in a darkened room with leeches fastened to his earlobes to suck the “bad blood” from out of his head. ‘I am neither body nor spirit, but rather a third element. I suffer everywhere and for everything,’ he wrote.

“He exists like Gulliver in Lilliput,” writes Stefan Zweig of Nietzsche, “constantly assailed by the swarming little people of his sufferings. His nerves are always on the alert, he is continually on the lookout, keeping watch, his full attention monopolized by the debilitating and all-engrossing needs of self-defence”.

He tries every conceivable method and cure for his suffering: electric massages, dietary regimes, water therapies and medicinal baths; “sometimes he blunts his excitability with bromide, then he stimulates it again with other potions” (Zweig). As with all external forms of assistance (substances, medicinal or therapeutic procedures) their efficacy is somewhat erratic if not negligible.

Loving this sickly, suffering fate is undeniably a counter-intuitive stance to take. For generally speaking, as the philosopher in question understood, we often get stuck in a place of suffering, and when we do, our natural defences often cause us to “halt at a negation, a No, a will to negation”. This also creates a kind of layer of suffering on top of the physical or emotional pain we are already dealing with, the experiential-avoidance we feel, this not-wanting to “receive” the experience we don’t like, is a kind of a cul de sac into which we enter to escape the pain (physical or mental) even if the escape tactics or default stress response to discomfort, often makes our lives feel more conflicted, confined, or cramped than offering a bona fide route to freedom.

We are not to blame for doing this. The human organism, just like any other organism, including even single-cell entities, moves towards things that feel good, or are perceived as pleasant and life-enhancing, whilst moving away from (experiential avoidance) the things, thoughts, body sensations, memories, people -especially people- that feel threatening or upsetting, or “bad” in some way. Often, this serves us well, keeps us out of harm’s way, in the clear.

But as the psychologist Steve Hayes reminds us, we can get trapped in this binary set-up (pleasant feelings good, unpleasant feelings bad) without recognising that from the mixed bag of pleasant-neutral-unpleasant, we are hardwired to some extent to find pleasure (if we seek it, or frame it thus) in all three. Think about all the other animals who don’t put their experience into categories of valence (good, bad, neutral) but somehow seem to find a way of dealing with lifes many ups and downs, even with all the pain that being alive often occasions for them.

We come into the world wanting to feel. You can certainly see that if you watch babies. Babies will feel, sense, lick smell everything to the point where you’re going: “No, no! Don’t put that in your mouth!

They just want to experience what’s in their world. And not just objects and putting them in their mouth, or something. You toss a baby in the air, as long as it’s not done in a way that shows an obvious indication of danger, they’re laughing. Swinging them around, or tickling them, or hugging them, or giving them pats – babies yearn to feel. Not just human babies, but other species too. But we’re darn good at it.

As you get a little older, that continues. Is there any emotion that you can name that you don’t pay good money to produce?

“Ooh, embarrassment I hate that!”

No, that’s not true. We watch silly comedies that are based on embarrassment humour.

“Sadness, I don’t like that.”

We buy tear-jerker novels, come on!

“Fear, I don’t like it.”

You ride rollercoasters…

There isn’t any emotion that you can name that you don’t occasionally pay good money to produce. And there are artists, book writers, and songwriters who fully know that, because they will give us a diet of almost all of them. And they’re helpful to us as human beings.

But it’s really easy in that problem-solving mode of mind to sort them into good and bad, that’s what we do.

So here’s what happens: we have a yearning to feel. We naturally use it to explore and sense our world. We metaphorically want to reach out and feel the table in front of us, which means we have to have the fingertips all set up so that we can feel what’s rough and what’s smooth. But then the mind says:

“Uh, I only want to feel what’s smooth.”

“Well how are we going to do that.”

“Well, let’s just distort the world so that we can only feel the good stuff. We want to feel good, don’t we?”

We have a name for that process, it’s called “experiential avoidance” which can be seen as the effort to eliminate the form, frequency, or situational intensity of thoughts, feelings, memories and bodily sensations – even when they cause behavioural harm to do that. Even when you know that only having the “good ones”, the “good feelings” is harmful for us, we still keep doing it. That’s called experiential avoidance. What we’re going to do instead is what we call “acceptance”, from the root that means “to receive”, as if to receive a gift, and it’s the process of actually augmenting our “feelers” and then metaphorically it’s right reaching out and feeling the table or desk that might be nearby you right now, or the chair you’re sitting in.

Let’s reach out and feel. So instead of “I get to feel when I feel good”, it’ll be more like: “I get to feel, when I feel good”.

Might it really be possible to “cross over to the opposite of this protective [No to Life] response to our suffering? Not just as a head-hanging, world-weary, resigned acceptance of our fate, but rather to what I am going to call in this episode AcceptancePlus, my version of the more high-falutin Latin of amor fati.

Here’s what the usual form of Acceptance, let’s call it Resigned (also Schopenhaurian) Acceptance might sound like:

When he attempted, after a period of renewed misery, to grow a beard, the stubble, to his horror, was sprinkled with gray, so he abandoned it.
Q. “What have I done to deserve my fate?”
A. “I am worthy of no other.”
He saw in the strewn garbage of his life, errors, mishaps, ignorance, experience from which he had learned nothing. He was as a man inadequate, in the sense of being powerless to achieve the most meager happiness. He had been left far behind by Purpose—those chances for self-fulfillment that spring up around the man who is not fortune’s fool. Whatever strayed into Levin’s orbit wrecked it. He could not make happen to him what happened to all but the poor bastards of the world, a use of the better choices of life; with, sooner or later, some sense of accomplishment—however slow if visible.

(Bernard Malamud, A New Life)

Nietszche’s response to being fortune’s fool (aren’t we all?) rest of a “Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, (which is to say: an affirmation that appeals to the emotions and instincts, as opposed to the rational, “Apollonian” mind) without subtraction, exception or selection.”

“This discipline [of yes-saying]”, he writes, includes understanding that the previously negated aspects of existence are not only necessary, but desirable; and not only desirable in terms of the previously affirmed aspects (perhaps as their concomitants or preconditions), but for their own sake, as the more powerful, more fruitful, truer aspects of existence….”

Little soul,
you have wandered
lost a long time.

The woods all dark now,
birded and eyed.

Then a light, a cabin, a fire, a door standing open.

The fairy tales warn you:
Do not go in,
you who would eat will be eaten.

You go in. You quicken.

You want to have feet.
You want to have eyes.
You want to have fears.

(Jane Hirshfield)

You’re on an aeroplane. Someone comes along and says do you want fish meat or vegetarian. You say I’m vegan, they say oh that’s okay it’s also vegan.

Your vegan platter arrives, it doesn’t taste very good.
Your vegan platter arrives, it tastes wonderful.
Your vegan platter arrives, it tastes so-so.

Excuse me you say to the air hostess, this vegan platter tastes so-so. Why have you served me this?
Excuse me, you say to the air steward, this vegan platter really doesn’t taste very good at all, why have you served me this?
(We never ask the cabin crew or flight attendants why a platter of experience tastes wonderful. We usually just get on with enjoying it.)

Why this? Why me? Why?

Everything Nietzche ever wrote on Amor Fati could probably be read out loud in in a couple of minutes.

He first writes about the idea in the early-1880s. These years were especially painful for him—distinguished by a number of breaks with previously important relationships and friendships as well as “the little fusillade” (as he likes to call it) of ongoing health issues: the headaches“which for days leave him prostrate on a couch or a bed in a state of fruitless delirium; the stomach cramps, along with vomiting of blood, migraines, fevers, loss of appetite, dejected mood, haemorrhoids, intestinal stagnation, fever shakes, and night sweats” (Zweig)

The Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig in a wonderful chapter on Nietzche’s torments and his audacious amor fati cure, calls him a “martyr in reverse”, for like the rest of us lily-livered creatures, “he does not at first possess the faith to endure his torments; it is only from experiencing the torments themselves that he acquires this faith.”

First though, he does what we all do, look for a kind of magic-bullet remedy or corrective for his migraines, insomnia, gastric spasms, hip pains, cattarh, ulcers, hypersensitivity to light, fits, faints, and all the other expressions of the Pain Body that torment him. Even leeches, the trendy panacea of the 1800s are tried, as well as rectal flushing every morning with cold water.

From the embers of these losses and traumas, the embers of his often pain-ridden “fate”, the idea of amor fati, phoenix like from the flames of suffering, presents itself to him, and he relays this to us initially in his book The Joyful Wisdom or Joyful Science, which is often translated in English as The Gay Science. I like to imagine the Queer Eye guys (Jonathan, Antoni, Bobby, Karamo, and Tan) in stylish lab coats and spectacles doing Nietzchian makovers on the Sy Levins of this world.

To-day everyone takes the liberty of expressing his wish and his favorite thought: well, I also mean to tell what I have wished for myself today, and what thought first crossed my mind this year,—a thought which ought to be the basis, the pledge and the sweetening of all my future life! I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful:—I shall thus be one of those who beautify things. Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation! And all in all, to sum up: I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!

Already in this initial formulation, we get a sense of what this might involve. It’s not necessarily, as it may first appear, simple a language move (becoming a Yes-sayer) but rather a perspective shift towards seeing “what is beautiful and necessary in things”. As if by finding some beauty or grace in the unchosen, circumstantial Is-What-It-Isness of our lives, we might arrive at or maintain, even when in a little bit of pain (or a lot) a certain level of serenity and joy. And who doesn’t want that, right?

There seems to be some kind of link here between finding beauty, or wonder, orienting ourselves towards the subjectively repellant object in an uncovering or unearthing frame of mind that offers more freedom and mental flexibility when thought, emotion, or physical sensation that seems to be pulling us into its orbit becomes Pharoah-like in its tyranny. “Making [the thought, feeling, memory, or body sensation] beautiful” suggests a radically alternative route once our defensive, default fight or flight has kicked in, and been acknowledged for what it is.

Again, that quote: “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things, then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But is there not a suggestion here thta there may be livable and augmentably livable consequences to this fate-loving stance, as opposed to just heady ideals?

The philosopher Beatrice Han-Pile refers to the crucial “then” that knits together Nietzcsche’s crucial sentence as an unconditional form of love (the kind some parents might model for their children, or therapists for their clients) versus the more conditional form of love that we might have for a girlfriend or boyfriend.

The main difference seems to hinge on the relation between loving and valuing. Both forms of love involve a valuation of the love-object, but they part ways when it comes the source and nature of such valuation. For the more conditional, friends and lovers’ “love”, our acceptance is motivated by the perceived value of the object itself: “I love you because I value you. In this moment, and (hopefully) going forwards.

By contrast, the more unconditional form of love bestows value on its object “regardless of the value previously attributed to it : we value someone or something because we love them”, Han-Pile writes, and not only for the ways in which we personally benefit due to their being-in-the-world.

Han-Pile sees Nietzsche’s amor fati stance to life as an attempt to love something which is difficult, if not impossible, to value in relation to our own needs or wants, to love something in ourselves, or others, or our circumstances, that resembles the unconditional love or acceptance of the world that we maintain for natural phenomena or non-human creatures.

We are familiar with this love from our religious traditions, but also from our day-to-day experience (think how unconditionally we love certain social goods like the NHS, warts and all, or certain key western liberal values such as individual freedom of movement, thought, and speech, alongside the removal of socioeconomic obstacles that hinder this such as disease, poverty, discriminationa and ignorance ). Han-Pile distinguishes four main features of this love:

1) it is modelled on more spiritual or transcendent values than out grabby-grubby human animal appetites, even if we never fully reach these more lofty aims
(2) it is spontaneous: in the sense of not being wholly externally motivated – but rather an undeserved gift which we receive or give
(3) it is not motivated by the value of the object (Christ came for sinners and the righteous alike, our Western spiritual tradition tells us); and finally
(4) it creates value by transfiguring its object. The “sinner” or physically/mentally “unwell”, “unworthy”, or “broken” person becomes worthy by virtue of being loved by God, or The World, or Our Selves, including Them Selves).

Any idiot can become a genius if she wants it badly enough.
One must study how the crow flies.
One must say to oneself as the crow flies so fly I.
In the dream I am an empty tree.  One by one my branches fill with silent crows who have travelled great distances to reach me.  Each crow contains a golden seed of knowledge locked in its craw and by containing them all in my humble crown I contain all knowledge of the kingdom.
My attempts to remember are proof in themselves.
At times one must accompany a shadow like the moon above a field of bitter greens.
In this wretched spirit the pilgrim applies herself and is rewarded.
I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, she explains, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.
I can’t help what I want.
There is no such thing as a dream that comes true.
Every dream is already true the moment it is dreamed.

(Susan Buffam)

Imagine yourself driving in a car, and everybody who slightly annoys you, slightly gets in your way, cuts you off, you have a little dialogue in your head about, or maybe even some kind of outburst. Not everyone is like this in a car, but I think we are often like this when it comes to the journey of our lives.

Reality bites, we cry ouch and then we go into some kind of Experiential Avoidance Dance, some kind of negotiation with reality. Anything resembling acceptance usually falls way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way down on the list.

And yet, as with the tricky drivers, when we ask ourselves to accept something that is happening to us, that we are experiencing in a certain way (usually, in this case, aversive), what we are really asking ourselves to do is to let whatever aversiveness, abrasiveness, avoidance in ourselves that we experience at the same time in meeting the world, to subside, fall or drop away, to become a Past Now, or even a Now-Now, but without the struggle. Why can’t we just let it slide, let it slip a bit? And focus instead on what is rich and good and worth celebrating in each moment?

Your guess is as good as mine.

But what is clear, I’m sure we’d all agree, that we are missing out in some way, on some kind of life-giving experience, by not accepting (taking) this moment as it is?

What is lost by being, more often than not, lost in thoughts about things, events or people, or thoughts about thoughts. We know we are missing out, but to stay on track takes energy and focus, and we are in the final reckoning but animals, programmed to survive our lives, even if that means a constant struggle, mortal (which is to say fallible) in every which way you can imagine.

TOLLE QUOTE: loss always happens in one’s life

Every morning for the last two weeks I have gone into the garden to check on the robins’ nest. The Ruskin Garden Robins, as I like to think of them, had built their nest underneath a green seedling tray, within a plastic plant pot.

Six eggs had been in this nest, but this morning there were none.

I suspect that the baby robins had hatched last night or the night before, and whilst making cheeping noises in expectation of food, had signalled to a squirrel or some other animal their presence, and had been eaten.

For some reason, staring in shock and sadness at the nest, emptied of its treasures this morning, I think of that 2018 film The Quiet Place where a family living in a post-apocalyptic world are stalked by a group of monstrous aliens who aren’t able to see their prey, but have ultra-sensitive hearing to make up for this, creating a cat-and-mouse set-up where even the tiniest noise can give one away. If they HEAR you, they HUNT you reads the tagline on the poster.

I imagine a world where human animals don’t have the consolation of therapy, but birds do. Bereaved Mama and Papa Robin relating to their bereavement counsellor the awfulness of having painstakingly built their nest into which eggs would be laid, a young family raised until they were able to fend for themselves. Now all destroyed, decimated, in a matter of seconds. The added layer of protection, the seedling tray that covered the entrance to the nest, torn aside by the squirrel or cat, or rat, the little chicks, just-hatched out of their protective shells, gobbled up like we human animals might eat other birds out of a box (or bucket) of KFC.

I imagine their therapist lost for words at the telling of this tragedy: six infants, eaten by a Monstrous Squirrel or Cat.

Because robins don’t have language to shape and share their trauma, I can only imagine what it must feel like to have everything one has built taken away from you in a moment.

“Before you know what kindness really is,” writes the American-Palestinian poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, “you must lose things”:

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

Maybe it is a kind of kindness not to have this thing we call language which insists on telling us our stories of loss and despair over and over again? Maybe it is a kind of kindness, that after a day or two (or maybe even a week or two of helpless, hopeless searching for their lost infants) the robins will start laying eggs again, start creating new life forms, even if there is the almost inevitable possibility -due to where there nest has been built, and the predators that patrol this space- that they will lose their next brood too.

We accept (if that is the right word for it) the suffering of others. We shake our heads in upset, and throw out mantras like “nature, red in tooth and claw!” and yet we are hardly ever as sanguine about our own lives. Why do we take everything that happens to us so personally. Only because we experience it as happening to us, I guess, rather than us happening as part of every other happening in this moment.

TOLLE quote: Before you are able to accept

Two teenagers are walking ahead of me towards Stanmore Common. One of them it’s practically shuffling along, self-disabled by fashion, their trousers hanging about halfway down their emaciated butt-cheeks. At any moment now, it seems as they will fall. The wearer of these low-hanging trousers is struggling to walk freely. The waistband of their trousers has created a kind of cloth-manacle, restricting the normal scissor-like separation of limbs required for unencumbered striding. It is the hottest day of the year, and this shuffling, sausage of person is struggling to reach their destination. They don’t seem to be emotionally affected by the impediment at all: remaining cheerful and animated for the ten minutes I’m behind them. For me, continously prevaricating over whether a pair of trousers or shorts feels “right” (comfortable, not unattractive), but also light and easy to walk in, this deliberate attempt to impair one’s ease of movement seems self-denying or fussy in some way, but for this young person it is a price worth paying to be “cool” – which is to say, accepted, maybe even respected, by those whose acceptance and admiration they seek. And maybe, being the hyper-social as well as hyper-solitary (funny that) species we are, we seek this from everyone who crosses our path, in some way, whether we know it or not. “Admit something,” writes the 14th Century Persian poet, Hafez: “Everyone you see, you say to them, / Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud;

Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.

Presumably the need to challenge a certain category of Adult Propriety and Practicality is more important to this human animal in this moment than being able to walk comfortably up a hill, and for this reason they have accepted the way in which their fashion choice has disabled them. And not only have they accepted this, they seem to be loving it too. In some way, amor fati, is no more or less than this.

ROVELLI: How does my observing of reality…

My father, who I haven’t seen for some decades, sends me via DHL my grandfather Solly’s sketch book for my 50th birthday. There is a moment of discombobulation when I open this book, almost a hundred years old now, and see my own name (S.Wasserman) and a place I’ve never been to (Bloemfontein) written on the first page.

This is how a certain kind of haunting feels. I never met my grandfather. He got fired from a factory job he had worked in for all his life, got depressed, lost the plot, committed to a mental hospital where he probably received some kind of psychoanalytic treatment from a man or a woman who had read lots of books; left the hospital with a bag full of pills, went home and took an overdose.

My father says in a WhatsApp message that he regrets never having asked his Dad more about his life, never having got to know him as an adult.

I see this as an opportunity for the next generation (him and me) to connect a little bit more than he was able to do with his own Dad. I have been trying to convince him that it might be enjoyable or stimulating in some way to have the odd Zoom dinner together, or a call.

I turn psychotherapist (a tad) on him and say something like: “Well, I have this feeling of regret with regard to you too, funnily enough. Wouldn’t it be great if I’m not left with these kinds of losses when you go?”

He doesn’t address this point in his WhatsApp message back to me.

Instead it is all about his conflicted relationship with Judaism (I’d suggested, mainly tongue-in-cheek, that we do a kind of secular Friday Night Dinner, with a nod to our tribal affiliations) and how the time difference with me in the UK, him in South Africa would make things tricky. It is a classic Leon fob-off.

After fifty years of relating to this man, I still have the notion that one day he will surprise me, that he will become a slightly different version of himself, that he will become someone who wants to engage in a way he says he does, but never does. I have not yet fully accepted that my father is not this man.

I have more work to do on the A-front, I guess.

“Though he preached equanimitas and amor fati,” writes Will Durant of Nietzche, “he never practised them; the serenity of the sage and the calm of the balanced mind were never his.”

TOLLE: The origin of suffering

A painting by my grandfather (Solly Wasserman) of Bloemfontein (South Africa) in 1900. He arrived in the country, a refugee from Lithuania in his early teens.

So what might the search for this peace that knows no understanding look like, in a very practical way. Well for me, a couple of things I’m trying at the moment. One of them is deliberating bringing to mind, as often as I can my conflicted, sometimes suffering life in the grand scheme of things. Were it not for a random asteroid storm 65 million years ago which wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs (birds are considered to be the great-great nephews and nieces of Pterosaurs and Pterodactyls), we’d still be scurrying around as rat-shaped early mammals to this day.

Here’s Neil De Grasse Tyson explaining just how contingent and random our whole species is, let alone us as single living versions of that, selected through one feisty fast-swimming spermatazoa who made its way to a viable egg ahead of its 100 million other buddies contained in an average man’s ejaculate:

DE GRASSE TYSON QUOTE

On my Casio watchstrap, I have painted a white A in Tippex so that I have, out of the corner of my eye, a contstant injunction to love my fate, in the Nietzschian sense, even whilst some part of my psyche might be loathing it too.

How do I further encourage myself? Part of it is by noticing my No, my resitance to what-is (it’s often there): and sprinkling on top of that resistance a few colorful cognitive sprinkles:

“Is there any way Steve, for you to disentangle your mind’s reactive commentary to this painful physical or emotional state (i.e. the suffering) from the pain itself? To suffer the pain, but jettison the suffering?”

To help me do this, I might attempt certain creative responses to the pain (I do this quite often with clients too), seeing if I can re-describe it to myself via an experiential simile (what colour is this pain? what size? what kind of animal is it? what sound might it make? how might it move?) – anything to drag the pain and suffering out of the realm of language where it reigns in a wholly binary (painful/pleasurable, good/bad), word-fixed stuckness into something that has a more evolving, unfolding, open-ended relationship to it. Something I can have a kind of relationship with, write a poem about, sing to, rant about, put into perspective vis-a-vis other pain, as well as other’s pain, something shareable.

Self-acceptance and self-compassion are important too, acknowledging that when the mind and body kicks in with some kind of thinky, experience-avoidant response to pain and suffering, this is not my (or its) fault. I am just made this way, hyper-evolved roden that I am. Anything I can do, I guess, to bring myself to that moment, where I might again be able to receive the experience, like my own face, or that of another, held between the palms of my hands:

a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and I say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Audio used in the podcast version of this piece (in order of occurence):

-Jon & the Nightriders – Rumble at Waikiki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41YvSrk5paQ&t=81s
-Can’t Stop The Feeling (Justin Timberlake) – Original Piano Arrangement by Maucoli: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MpOfn4rDcU
-ET: https://open.spotify.com/album/1Wcggztq9SspsBeXcrnHZo?highlight=spotify:track:3VVilIGlUJ6tIirr7GGCHs
-Night Flight – Say Yes (Elliot Smith Cover): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnQ0ac8A8hk
-A Day In The Life (Orchestra Overdub): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecybFp71bnc
-Reading of The Thing Is (Ellen Bass): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JONWgsZ6vm8
-Steven C. Hayes talking about Feeling & Experiential Avoidance: https://www.soundstrue.com/collections/authors-steven-c-hayes/products/acceptance-and-commitment-therapy
-Extract from Bernard Malamud’s A New Life: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Penguin-Twentieth-Century-Classics/dp/0140186816/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=a+new+life+malamud&qid=1624180687&sr=8-1
-Jane Hirshfield reading her poem Amor Fati: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92039/amor-fati
-Extract from The Gay Science: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Gay-Science-The-Joyful-Wisdom-Audiobook/B01EWAXDI4?qid=1624180836&sr=1-1&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=c6e316b8-14da-418d-8f91-b3cad83c5183&pf_rd_r=ZN7BMAJ44S0DHR5PPNXE
-Susan Buffam reading her poem Amor Fati: https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/amor-fati-4435
-“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye, A Poetry Film by Ana Pérez López: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFLQOOiAqxQ&t=15s
-Elliott Smith ~ Say Yes (Live in Stockholm): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOnHEApbjV0
-Itzhak Perlman plays Fiddler on the Roof (John Williams Los Angeles Philharmonic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h745la-Lo1I
-Neil De Grasse Tyson giving an overview of our 65 million year-old hominid evolutionary history: https://samharris.org/podcasts/252-alone-universe/
-Can’t Stop The Feeling by Justin Timberlake Live (Downbeat LA Cover): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGz7Nbaavgg&ab_channel=DownbeatDownbeat
-Hakeem Oluseyi waxing lyrical about astrophysics: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/a-quantum-life-with-hakeem-oluseyi/

Categories
Feel Better

To Love Life, To Love It (Even When You Have No Stomach For It)

Kiki Smith, “Untitled,” 1990. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

When we are suffering (from thoughts, feelings, body sensations, or memories) it can sometimes be useful to chart the journey of others who have struggled in similar ways.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who I came to quite late in my reading life, never having studied philosophy as a subject, experiencing it for the most part a somewhat intimidating domain, struggled with health issues, both physical and mental, for much of the time he was on this planet.

If he were alive today, I suspect he might have been diagnosed with having fibromyalgia, or another issue that highly sensitive folk often struggle with.

What I find inspiring about his life is that he seems to have landed on a way, at least for a while, of finding value, meaning, and joy at the same time as being ill on a constant basis.

I think this short chapter from the novelist Stefan Zweig’s recent book on Nietzsche gets to the heart of a paradox that often arises in psychotherapy, but also in our lives in general: how to “love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it,” as the poet Ellen Bass laments, “and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands”?

APOLOGIA FOR ILLNESS
(from Nietszche by Stefan Zweig, 2020)

Countless are the cries of suffering issuing from the martyred body. It is an index with a hundred entries for every conceivable physical crisis, proceeding to this horrifying final statement. ‘At all stages of life, the surplus of pain has in my case been immense.’ Indeed no diabolic martyrdom is absent from this nightmarish pandemonium of malady: headaches, pounding and dizzying headaches, which for days leave him prostrate on a couch or a bed in a state of fruitless delirium; stomach cramps, along with vomiting of blood, migraines, fevers, loss of appetite, dejected mood, haemorrhoids, intestinal stagnation, fever shakes, night sweats – a gruesome vicious circle. Add to that ‘eyes three quarters lost to darkness’ which swell at the least effort or begin to weep and which allow him to enjoy the light for no more than ‘an hour and a half a day’.

But Nietzsche scorns a healthy body and remains at his writing table for ten hours at a stretch. The overheated brain takes revenge with raging headaches, nervous tension, for in the evening, when the body is exhausted the brain cannot switch off, but continues to pour forth visions and thoughts, until a narcotic must be sought in order to sleep.

But he requires ever-greater quantities (in two months, Nietzsche absorbs fifty ounces of Chloral Hydrate, just to snatch a little sleep). Then it’s the stomach’s turn to refuse to pay such a high price and it revolts. It’s a real circulus vitiosus – vomiting spasms, fresh headaches, new remedies demanded, the relentless voracious, fervid opposition of overtaxed organs in a mutual exchange with the spiky ball of sufferings.

And no respite from this play back and forth! Not the lowest margin of contentment, not the briefest month of pleasure and forgetting of the self; in twenty years, one can count only a dozen letters where a groan does not rise from one line or another. And always more furious, always more violent, becoming the wailings of one who is needled by over-sensitive nerves, too delicate and already overinflamed. ‘So make your lot more easeful; Die!’ he cries to himself; or ‘For me a pistol is now a source of the most pleasurable thoughts.’ Or ‘This horrible and unremitting martyrdom has me thirst for the end and all portents suggest, the redemptive apoplexy is close at hand.’

For a long time now he has lacked superlatives to express his sufferings; already they seem monotonous in their incessant and exasperating repetition, these wretched cries, which no longer have anything human about them, but which still ring out shrilly towards men, from the depths of this ‘dog kennel existence’. Then suddenly flames – and one can only tremble before such a monstrous contradiction – in Ecce Homo that vigorous, proud, rigid confession of faith that appears to put the lie to every lament that preceded it: ‘All in all, I have been (he speaks of the last fifteen years) in a state of quite excellent health.’

What then to believe? The thousand fold cries, or the lofty revelation? Both! Nietzsche’s body was organically strong and capable of resistance. His inner trunk was broad and stable, supporting him like a tower, his roots were sunk deep in the soil of a long line of German parsons. All in all, ‘summa summarum’, with regard to the plant, the organism, the fundamental nature of the spiritual body, Nietzsche was in truth a healthy man. Only his nerves were too delicate to withstand the violence and extreme sensations they endured and so they remained perpetually inflamed and were apt to revolt. (But a revolt that could never quite undermine his mind’s steel grip on self-domination.)

Nietzsche himself found the most charming image to paint that intermediary state between danger and security, when he speaks of ‘the little fusillade’ of his sufferings. Indeed, during this conflict, the inner walls of his life force are never breached. He exists like Gulliver in Lilliput, constantly assailed by the swarming little people of his sufferings. His nerves are always on the alert, he is continually on the lookout, keeping watch, his full attention monopolized by the debilitating and all-engrossing needs of self-defence.

But never does a genuine illness manage to break him or render him vanquished (save perhaps for that unique sickness which for twenty years sunk mineshafts beneath the citadel of his spirit and then at a particular moment blew it into the air), for a monumental spirit like that of Nietzsche cannot be felled by a brief volley of shots, only an explosion can shatter the granite of such a mind.

So, an enormous capacity for suffering opposes an enormous resistance to suffering, or rather an over-charged violence of feeling opposes an over-charged sensitive nerve in the motor system. For each nerve of the stomach, along with the heart and senses constituted for Nietzsche a highly accurate manometer, a delicate filigree-like instrument registering with tremendous amplitude the shifts and tension at the outbreak of the most painful stimulations.

Nothing remained unconscious for his body (as for his mind). The most delicate fibre which in others stays muted, in him signals immediately with a quivering and a tearing and that ‘raging irritability’ shatters, into a thousand splinters, hazardous and piercing, his naturally energetic vitality. From this come the terrible cries, when at the slightest movement, with each sudden step of his life, he happens to touch one of these open twitching nerves.

This uncanny, almost demonic, hypersensitivity of Nietzsche’s nerves, fugitive nuances that would never even cross the threshold of another’s consciousness, and which undermined him so cruelly, is the sole root of his sufferings, but equally forms the primordial cell of his genial capacity for the appreciation of values.

If his blood chances to register some physiological reaction, there does not have to be any tangible or affective cause: the atmosphere alone, with its meteorological adjustments hour by hour, is for him already the cause of infinite torments. Perhaps there has never existed a man of intellect so acutely sensitive to atmospheric conditions, so terrifyingly exposed to all the tensions and oscillations of meteorological phenomena, like a manometer, or mercury in the barometer: between his pulse and the atmospheric pressure, between his nerves and the degree of humidity, secret electrical contacts seem to exist; his nerves immediately register every metre of altitude, every change in pressure, in temperature, through a sense of discomfort in his organs, which react in accordance with each corresponding fluctuation in nature.

Rain or an overcast sky depresses his vitality: ‘A cloudy sky plunges me into a deep depression.’ He feels in his very vitals the influence of a sky heavily charged with cloud; the rain reduces his ‘potential’, humidity weakens it, dry spells enliven it, the sun brings life, but winter is for him a kind of catalepsy and death. The quivering needle of his nerve barometer swings back and forth like an April temperature which never remains constant: what he must do then is to relocate himself within a cloudless landscape, upon the high plateau of the Engadine that no wind may disturb.

And, just like the effect of the least change in cloud cover or pressure in the actual sky, his enflamed organs immediately sense the effect of all these pressure changes and atmospheric liberations upon the interior sky of the spirit. For each time a thought quivers in him, it shoots like a lightning fork across the strained knots of his nerves: the very act of thought is accomplished in Nietzsche’s case, with passionate intoxication, with a rush of electricity so that it passes over his body like a storm and at each ‘explosion of feeling, the mere blink of an eye is enough to modify the blood’s circulation’. Body and mind in the most vital of all thinkers are so intimately linked to the atmosphere that for Nietzsche interior and exterior reactions are identical. ‘I am neither body nor spirit, but rather a third element. I suffer everywhere and for everything.’

This singular disposition to discern so precisely the least stimulus was brutally exacerbated by the inactive incubating air of his life, through the fifteen years he spent in solitude.

For three hundred and sixty five days of the year, no one else comes into physical contact with his own body, neither woman nor friend, for twenty-four hours of the day are spent in discourse with his own blood, pursuing a kind of uninterrupted dialogue with his nerves. Perpetually, at the centre of this tremendous silence, he rests on his palm the compass of his sensations and, in the manner of hermits, solitary men, bachelors and eccentrics; he observes in hypochondriac excess the slightest changes that occur in the function of his body.

Others can forget because conversations and other day-to-day matters deflect their attention, as do games and general lassitude, or others may drown their feelings in wine and apathy. But Nietzsche, that genius for the diagnostic, continuously experiences the temptation to offer up himself for his own sufferings, seeking that curious pleasure of the psychologist choosing himself as subject, to be ‘his own experiment and laboratory animal’.

Again and again, with fine tweezers (at once surgeon and invalid), he dissects the suffering of his nerves and by doing so, like all natures overloaded with anxiety and imagination; he only serves to inflame his sensibility still further. Mistrusting the opinions of doctors, he takes on the role of his own doctor and ‘medicates himself’ through all stages of his life. He tries every conceivable method and cure, electric massages, dietary regimes, water therapies and medicinal baths; sometimes he blunts his excitability with bromide, then he stimulates it again with other potions.

His meteorological like sensibility forces him to search unremittingly for a particular atmosphere, a location which could be for him ‘the climate of his soul’. It might be Lugano, due to the lake air and an absence of wind, or Pfäfers and Sorrento; then he imagines the baths of Ragaz might deliver him from his malaise and that the health-giving area of St Moritz, the springs in the spa towns of Baden-Baden or Marienbad might afford him some well-being. For a whole Spring he finds the Engadine accords best with his own nature, with its ‘invigorating and ozone rich air’; then it’s a town of the south, Nice, with its ‘dry’ air, then Venice or Genoa.

Now he wants to be in the forests, now he wants to be at the coast, now on the shore of a lake, now in quiet little towns ‘with a simple and nourishing meal’. God knows how many thousands of kilometres this ‘wandering fugitive’ covers by rail, all to discover this fabled place where his nerves might be relieved of the burning and tearing and where his organs can cease being on permanent vigil.

Little by little, he distills from his pathological experiences a kind of sanitary cartography for his own personal use, studying the great works of geology to discover the region that he seeks, like an Aladdin’s ring, to finally master his body and bring peace to his soul.

No journey is too long for him: Barcelona is in his sights and he dreams too of the high mountains of Mexico, of Argentina and even Japan. Geographic position, the dietary science of the climate and food gradually become second knowledge to him. At each location he notes the temperature, the air pressure; he measures to the millimetre, with a hydroscope and hydrostatic equipment, the atmospheric rainfall and ambient humidity, so much so that his body acts like a retort or the column of mercury in a thermometer.

The same exaggeration is found in his dietary regime. There too, this ‘recording’ is to be found, a veritable medical tablature of precautions. The tea must be of a certain brand and served at a stipulated dosage so as to not do injury; a meat dish may be harmful, vegetables must be prepared in the correct manner. Little by little, this mania of medicalization, of diagnosing, becomes a pathological and egotistical trait, a tension, a hyper-awareness of the self. Nothing caused Nietzsche to suffer more than this eternal vivisection. As always, the psychologist suffers twice as much as anyone else, because he experiences the agony twice over: first in reality and then by observing himself.

But Nietzsche is a genius of violent opposites. In contrast to Goethe, who had a knack for knowing how to avoid danger, Nietzsche advances audaciously and takes the bull by the horns. The psychology, the spiritual effort  pushes the deeply impressionable man towards profound suffering and into the abyss of despair; but it is precisely the psychology, precisely the spirit which restore him to health. Like his sickness, Nietzsche’s recovery comes only from the inspired knowledge he acquires of himself.

Psychology, in a magic way, here becomes something therapeutic, a peerless application of that ‘art of alchemy’, which manages to ‘extract value from something which has no value’.

After ten years of relentless torment, he is ‘at the lowest ebb of his vitality’; already they think him lost, ruined by his nerves, by an irremediable depression, given up to pessimistic self-abandonment. Then suddenly the spiritual attitude of Nietzsche takes an about-turn through one of those meteoric and inspired recoveries, both recognition and salvation of the self, that lend the history of the spirit such intensity and drama. Suddenly he draws from himself the very malady that saps his soul and presses it hard against his heart.

Then comes the truly mysterious moment (whose date we cannot pinpoint precisely), one of those dazzling inspirations at the heart of his work, where Nietzsche ‘discovers’ his own sickness; where – surprised to find himself still breathing and to see that from the deepest depression, through the most griefstricken periods of his existence, his productivity is growing – he proclaims with the most intimate conviction that his sufferings, his privations are merely a part, for him, ‘of the cause’, the sacred cause of his existence, the only cause that is sacred to him.

At the hour when his mind has no more pity for his body and no longer participates in its trials, he sees his life for the first time with a new perspective and observes his sickness through a more profound intellect. With open arms, he knowingly accepts his destiny as a necessity, and as a fanatical ‘advocate of life’, he loves everything in his existence, even launching a hymn to his suffering in affirmation of Zarathustra, the jubilant ‘Once more! Once more, for all eternity!’

For him simple knowledge becomes a recognition and recognition a gratitude; for in this superior contemplation which lifts his gaze above his suffering and sees his own life only as a path to himself, he discovers (with that excessive joy conjured by the magic of extremes) that he owed all to his sickness and to no earthly power, that it was the mind tortures themselves that proved the greatest blessing: freedom, freedom of external existence, freedom of the spirit; for whenever he has risked settling down, delivered himself up to lassitude, released himself from the burden and abandoned his originality by becoming prematurely fossilized in some official post, a profession or a static spiritual form, it was the sickness that chased him out of it with its ruthless goad. It was the sickness that saved him from military service and returned him to science, that prevented him from being ossified in science and philology, that extricated him from the academic circles of Basel university, to enter ‘retirement’ and hence encounter the world, returning him as it were to his real self. He owed it to his afflicted eyes to have been ‘liberated from the book’, ‘the greatest service I ever did myself’.

Suffering tore him (painfully but helpfully) from all the husks that threatened to form around him, from all the relationships that began to enclose him. ‘Sickness itself liberated me’, he says of himself: it was midwife to his inwardness and the sufferings it inflicted were not unlike those of childbirth. Thanks to it, life had become in his case, not a routine, but a renewal, a discovery: ‘I discovered life, in some sense, like a novelty, myself included.’

For – and this is how the pained man now gratefully exalts his dolors in a grandiose hymn to the saint torment – only suffering leads to knowledge. Rude health is hollow and unsuspecting. It desires nothing and poses no questions and this is why there is no psychology among the healthy. All knowledge comes from suffering, ‘pain always searches to know the causes, whilst pleasure remains in a fixed position and does not look backwards’. We become ‘refined through pain’. Suffering, burrowing and scoring, breaks up the terrain of the soul and the tortuous labour of delving inwards, like the plough, turns the soil, enabling a new spiritual harvest. ‘Mighty pain is the last liberator of the spirit; she alone forces us to descend into our ultimate depths’, and he for whom it has been almost fatal has surely the right to proudly declaim these words: ‘I know life better, because I have so often been at the point of losing it.’

It is not by artifice, by a negation, by palliatives and in idealizing his bodily distress that Nietzsche manages to surmount all these sufferings, but through the primitive force of his nature, through knowledge: the sovereign ‘creator’ of values discovers himself the true value of his illness.

Martyr in reverse, he does not at first possess the faith to endure his torments; it is only from experiencing the torments themselves that he acquires this faith. But his knowledge chemistry not only discovers the value of sickness, but also its opposing pole: the value of health. Only their union can bear the accomplishment of life, that permanent tension of ordeal and ecstasy, thanks to which man rushes on into the infinite.

Both are necessary: sickness, as the means, and health as the end; sickness as the path and health as the destination. For suffering, in Nietzsche’s mind, is only the dark shore of sickness; the opposite shore is bathed in an inexpressible light: it is called recovery and only from the shore of suffering can it be reached.

Now to heal, to recover one’s health, signifies more than simply achieving a state of normal functioning life; it is not only a transformation, but something infinitely greater, an ascension, an elevation and a growth of perception: one emerges from sickness ‘with a new skin, more sensitive, with a refined taste for pleasure, with a language more appreciative of all fine things, with a more joyful sensibility and a second more dangerous innocence at the heart of happiness’, childlike and a hundred times more refined than formerly; and that second health following on the heels of illness, that health which is not blindly received, but is a treasure, sought out with great pain, bought with a hundred sighs and cries, this health ‘re-conquered with heavy losses’ is a thousand times more vital than the cursory well-being of those who are always in fine fettle.

Those who have tasted just once the quivering softness, the sparkling intoxication of this recovery, yearn always to experience the same sensation; to launch themselves again and again into the sulfurous fiery wave of burning torments, only in order to relocate that ‘captivating sensation of health’, that gilded drunkenness which, for Nietzsche, replaces and surpasses a thousand times over, all the vulgar stimulants of alcohol and nicotine.

But hardly does Nietzsche perceive the meaning of sickness and enjoys the rapturous recovery, than he wants to make of it an apostolate through the sense of the world. Like all those in the grip of the demon, he is the slave of his own passions and is unable to draw back from that dazzling interplay between pleasure and pain. He desires that the torments martyrize him ever more intensely, so as to launch himself ever higher in the jubilant sphere of recovery, where all is clarity and vigour. In this shimmering and fervent drunkenness, he gradually confuses his vehement will for recovery with the thing itself, his fever with vitality and the vertigo of his downfall with an increase in power.

Health! Health! This man so intoxicated with words brandishes them above him like a standard: it must be there the meaning of the universe, the purpose to life, the sole gauge of all values. And he who has for a dozen years groped in the shadows, from affliction to affliction, stifles his lament now in a hymn to life, the brute strength drunk on itself. With blazing colours, he unfurls the flag of the will to power, the will to live, the will to be hard and cruel and ecstatically presents this flag to coming humanity, not realizing that the strength which animates him and which allows him to raise his standard so high, is the same that will stretch the bow that sends the arrow which will kill him.

For Nietzsche, this final moment of health, which in exaltation rouses him to the dithyramb, is an autosuggestion, a ‘contrived’ health; precisely at the moment where he joyfully raises his hands to the heavens, in an outpouring of strength, vaunts (in Ecce Homo) his perfect health and swears that he has never been sick or decadent, already lightning quivers in his blood.

What sings in him and triumphs, is not his life, but already his death, this is no longer the mind informed by science, but the demon snatching its victim. What he takes for light, for the red warmth of his blood conceals the fatal germ of his malaise, and what the clinical regard of each diagnosing doctor observes so clearly in this marvellous feeling of wellbeing enveloping him during those last hours, is what is commonly known as euphoria, that peculiar moment of bliss which heralds the end.

Already the silver clarity which spreads over these last hours only projects before him the quivering sheen of another sphere, that of the demon, that of the beyond: but lost in his drunkenness he is no longer aware. He feels himself uniquely illuminated by all the splendour and gratitude of the earth.

Ideas shoot out from him like flames; language trembles with a primordial power through all the pores of his discourse, and music suffuses his soul: everywhere he turns his gaze, he sees peace reign supreme. Ordinary people in the street smile at him. Each letter is a divine message and sparkling with happiness, he writes in a final letter to his friend Peter Gast: ‘Sing me a new song. The world is transfigured and all the heavens rejoice.’ It is from this transfigured sky that the fiery ray reaches him, confusing his beatitude and suffering into one indissoluble second. The two polarities of sentiment enter his swollen breast at the same moment and on his temples the veins throb with both life and death in a single apocalyptic music.”

From Nietszche by Stefan Zweig (2020)

Please feel free to get in touch either by email or telephone (07804197605) if anything in this piece has spoken to you in some way, or to book a consultation.

Categories
Feel Better

Setbacks

It is the end of spring lockdown 2021. I am sitting with a friend who has recently, very suddenly, been “let go of”, cancelled, Taylor Swifted, by someone he’d been seeing. No, that’s not the right word. By someone he had been betrothed to in some way.

We are drinking tea: him builder’s decaf, me some Pukka (Natalia insists on calling it Pooka), Feel New. 

We are both taking precautions even in post-lockdown times. Even though I’ve now had my two shots of Astro, and he, ten years younger than me, has had one.

Talking to depressed people about their love lives can be quite refreshing at times. Research has shown that a depressed, somewhat pessimistic outlook on life cleaves more closely to the hard-knocks frame of our vulnerable human condition. Much more so in fact than the more buoyant energies of confidence, certainty, and those other Utopian dreams and even expectations of the mind. 

Putting any lens to the world (biological, psychological, social, or spiritual) reveals to us the systems and the part we play in those systems as being pretty weird, and messy, and pretty unpredictable – “quantum” if you get my drift. Not half as orgnised and well-thought-through as we might have hoped for, or wished for. 

DEPRESSIVE REALISM

Depressive Realism as the name suggests, particularly when it comes to love, that most Disneyfied and RomComified of all our positive emotions, makes the broken-up-with person a valuable perspective on an existential quandry that none of us are too keen to have deconstructed.  

They are the sad-eyed, backward-looking philosophers banished for a time from Plato’s cave, and now retuning to tell all of us that Love, in its conditional form (I love you when you do things I like / I don’t love you when you do things I don’t like) is a losing game.

My friend’s cancellation had followed the course of a by-now classic online romance and break up algorithm. He and his beloved had had a text-tiff the week before over WhatsApp. She had retreated thereafter, whilst he had continued to send messages trying to reconnect in some way. 

She then broke up with him over email, a day or two later. “Compatibility differences” was the official reason given. No further information or explanation given. No dialogue or discussion entered into. 

My friend, let’s call him Charlie, now reels off a long list of all the ways in which he and his beloved had in fact been deeply deeply compatible: a list I’d heard many times before, a list that he had celebrated with her and with others in a kind of “aren’t we so lucky to have found each other” way.

It was incredibly OTT, but we forgive the newly-beloveds for their enthusiasms. One massive plus about the relationship, he had told the rest of his envious single friends, is that had told him right from the start that she was just serious and as committed as he was to creating a great relationship through great communication and great sex and great first aid when setbacks and obstacles presented themselves to this Loving Couple Team. They were certainly aiming for the stars, before one of them fell.

He asks me how myself and my current partner stay together. I wonder if it’s maybe just luck as much as anything else, I say. We too squabble. What couples don’t at times? “Yes,” I reiterate, “I think I’ve just been lucky in that we’ve found another who doesn’t expect the othert to be a saint, to be a paragon of virtue, someone who is happy to look for a pragmatic workaround when a setback occurs. And then happy to look for another workaround when either the same setback or a different one crops up again. Is that not just good luck, good fortunek, to find someone who is willing to do that with you?” I ask him. 

My friend had met his girlfriend at the beginning of the year. I had seen him in the months that had followed become the best version of himself: his best caring self, his most creative self, his most loving self.

But this is what he now believes to be true about love.

He tells me that love is just a word. It might as well be called VOLE, or VEOL, or EVOL, “which sounds a bit like EVIL,” he says. 

He tells me that when my partner says that she loves me, what she really means is that she is experiencing a very positive reaction towards me at that moment. Sell-By-Date for this kind of love? The very next moment.

“Notice,” he says, “how you say “I love you” in the good times. After sex or during sex. After a really intimate discussion. After you have been incredibly helpful in some way or they have been incredibly helpful or kind to you. 

Love is never, or very rarely expressed when people are in conflict, when they in fact most need at that juncture the foundations of love (compassion, acceptance, commitment) to be reiterated. To come back to those principles. To hold them, to guide them through their disagreement, their differences, which are inevitable. 

“Some couples are able to do that,” I say, which sounds like I am bragging. And I in a way, I am bragging. Although I have no reason to at all.

He tells me that most of the couples he knows, people like us (sensitive/reactive, thinky people) need something more than that word “love“ to keep them together. They need to be either living close so that they can walk over and repair arguments in the form of an embodied human animal face-to-face hug, rather than through flat and hollow online avatars.

We are the hollow men, I intone:

We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar…

“Or,” he says, ignoring me, “the couple in question who don’t want to break up are living together. Or they need to have children, but of course children kill most relationships anyway. Certainly in the bedroom. Most modern relationships aren’t resilient in any way whatsoever, he reminds himself. You might say it’s a kind of miracle when they work at all with the way that they’re set up and resourced nowadays in a big city, mainly via text messages, the odd photo taken out of a window at the rain. 

I argue that relationships have always been this way, that they are like flowers which need to be tended and nurtured and treated very delicately until they grow into more robust plants.

He tells me that this is no longer possible in the terrain of online dating in which we all find ourselves. 

“When we live in a world in which dissatisfaction is considered to be something that can be eradicated, that never has to be tolerated, or accepted – an Amazon world, where if you don’t get the thing you want you send it back, or if you don’t get the person you want, you go on swiping – “Well,” he says, “how can relationships grow into strong and resilient entities in this world of psychotherapeutic brokenness, where nobody is good until they’re “fixed” or “changed” or “improved upon” in some way. 

He looks out into my garden. We are sitting with the doors open so as to circulate air between our cautious selves. It has been raining fiercely and my half dug up lawn which I’m planning to reseed has turned into a pond or even a lake of sorts. A blue tit hops around on its edges, waiting for the waters to recede so that it might retrieve some worms. I remind myself that I need to fill the birdfeeder with bonemeal and hang it on the apple tree for all my feathered friends to have a little feast. 

We talk for a while about the robins’ nest that I had found built into a plant pot in the mess strewn around the greenhouse. How tidying up, I had almost destroyed it. The tiny nest with its single luminescent egg. The size of an infant’s eyeball.

Thankfully, the robin has returned to its nest and continues to lay eggs there. The last time I looked, there were six of them. I think for a moment about my own partner who has five siblings, who once was inside one of those eggs, or something similar.

My friend is now talking about his birthday. His mind, is a mind (at the moment), of a suffering person. It is therefore mainly lost in the past: reliving the months they had together of love and friendship, mixed in with lots and lots of regret and self-recrimination too (“If only I’d said this at the time. If only I hadn’t said this or done that”). It’s a swine to have a mind laying this kind of stuff on your serenity mat. No fun. The mind of a discomforted or suffering person is also lost in the future. Especially the near future. My friend is going to turn 40 in a few weeks time.

He hadn’t been planning to do much on the day, but was very excited about the fact that after three years or more of being single, of looking for someone he could really build the next decade of his life with, he had found this person right in the nick of time. As if the universe had sent him this wonderful dream of a woman as a gift for clocking up 40 years of time on planet earth.

I ask him what he’s going to do now on the day and he shrugs. I ask if he would like some company. He says that he will probably just go for a walk in the countryside somewhere, reconnect to nature, and maybe have a cup of tea with his parents. I offer that if he would like to hang out in the evening, maybe I can cook him a meal and we can sit around and get stoned and continue to talk about love and it’s many infelicities and inconsistencies.

RECOVERING FROM SETBACKS

We are both psychotherapists so I ask him what he has in his “therapy toolbox” to staunch the wounds. 

He shrugs.

I tell him that I’ve been reading a book by William Irvine about the Stoics, and this notion of a Stoic Test which had really caught my imagination. He grunts again, noncomitally, lost in thought. But after a few seconds: “Go on.” 

“OK, well, let me play for you these clips from a conversation between Bill Irvine and Sam Harris that I’d taken some recordings from in order to send to Natalia. I think these might speak to you too.”

VOICE OF SAM HARRIS: Victim culture is running a very particular algorithm, and it’s the algorithm of blame. But blaming others for your state of mind is one of the first obstacles and ultimately illusions that you have to cut through in order to actually practice stoicism. So let’s just be very practical here and talk about specific cases. Give me an example of a setback in life that you would turn around in a stoical way. 

VOICE OF BILL IRVINE: Life is full of setbacks. In any day you will experience multiple setbacks. Some of them are tiny setbacks, like you stub your toe, or you run out of toothpaste. Those are micro-setbacks. A bigger thing: you might turn your ankle, you might slip and and fall. And then of course we get to the other end of the spectrum and you have some semi-catastrophic setbacks: you break a leg, your partner leaves you, you become homeless. When we get into the list of bad things that can happen to you, the list is quite long. And of course at the extreme, the endpoint of this Scale of Setbacks is death itself. 

I pause the audio, look over to my friend to my friend to see if he wants me to run one of these Stoic Challenges past him. 

“Go on,” he says. “I’m liking this guy’s vibe.” 

SAM HARRIS: You discuss a variety of techniques here, let’s just run through a few of them. What is The Stoic Test Strategy? 

IRVINE: The stoic test strategy: when you’re setback, you conceive it to be a kind of a game. A game played between you and the Stoic Gods. Now at this point, people might roll their eyeballs. What do I mean. Stoic Gods! Do I actually believe there are actually Stoic Gods. It’s a psychological devices psychological ploy. And if you don’t want to talk about Stoic Gods, you can instead talk about an imaginary coach, or an imaginary teacher and what these beings (in my case, Stoic Gods do) is they are responsible for setting me back when I have a setback. They’re giving me a kind test to test my character. It’s a test of my ingenuity. Can I find a workaround for the setback? And another key thing is they’re not doing it to punish me! They’re doing it because they want me to be strong and resilient. So actually I should be flattered that they would consider me worthy of their attention. Other people who never experience setbacks, they’re in tough shape because they will at some point in their life experience setbacks and they won’t be ready for them. But by experiencing setbacks and successfully dealing with them (success means actually finding a workaround, and keeping your negative emotions in check at the same time) by doing that you can have a much better life than would otherwise be the case. So they’re training you. It’s a kind of training it’s to to build up your ability to bounce when when life gives you a difficult task.

HARRIS:  The analogy I have often used is to a videogame. We all have these experiences of repeated setbacks and with it the same sorts of setbacks keep coming around and we have our habitual negative reaction to them. Traffic being the most frequent and obvious to me. Everyone knows what it’s like to be stuck in traffic – it’s happened to you recently and will happen to you soon after hearing this. This is a repeated experience and so it’s a bit like a videogame with predictable levels. And if you imagine that life is a game where the measure of success -in the place we are getting points- is in maintaining a positive, tranquil, resilient, flexible state of mind, right? And your failure to do that is really the only failure. In that you can’t successfully avoid traffic, but you can successfully avoid being deranged by it, psychologically. And so if you’re playing that game then when you hit these various snags, part of you is inwardly smiling at the opportunity to navigate this particular obstacle 

IRVINE: Yeah, playing this game turns setbacks upside down, turns them on their head. Because then when a setback occurs to you, instead of just grumbling and cursing and saying “Oh, this is great!”, you can say: “Oh, this is actually an interesting setback, you can sort of become a setback connoisseur. You might think about other setbacks you’ve experienced and how this current setback relates to them. So you can actually perk up on being setback! And here’s the interesting thing: it’s a self graded test. The Stoic Gods will never descend to earth and say “You got a B+ on that.”

HARRIS: Actually, to be honest, my wife is actually grading most of my test as well. And I still fail many of them. 

IRVINE: OK, but failure is part of it. I still get angry 

“So what do you think,” I say, turning to my friend? “What if you were to reframe the break-up in this way? I tell you Charlie, The Stoic Gods Video Game is going to be my new go-to if (or should I say when) Natalia eventually tire of my imperfections!”

“Yes,” he says, ‘it does chime in with the stuff I’ve been thinking about in terms of shifting my mourning misery and blaming mindset to something more creative or generative. Think about it: the relationship itself was a generative, and creative project. That was the energy for us right from the start. Here was this person who who we were beginning to build a slightly different version of ourselves and our lives around after some years of that life being just filled with…well…life: the wants and desires of the self, friends, clients, projects, family. So of course after three years when this incredible creative project comes along called A Serious Relationship, one where you feel you have a teammate who has the exact same values as you have, there is so much to celebrate. Maybe that is part of the Love Quest as well. And when suddenly the whole project that we’re calling The Relationship gets cancelled overnight. Destroyed. Shot down out of the sky one day, any half-open doors slammed definitively shut on a cloudy Friday morning, that’s a good setback to wrestle with. Ground Zero. An empty chasm of gone-ness. And so I go: how to invite  the elements of one’s life back into that void? How do you start planting new seeds again in that bombed, barren, blasted out terrain. Maybe even start growing a few flowers, even if just for your own eyes to get some delight from them.”

That’s great I say. 

“Yes, it is, and then, a second later into these ethereal consolations come painful thoughts, thoughts like “Wow, here is someone who stained my mattress with her vaginal juices, so desirous was she to have me close to her, inside her, one with her physically and emotionally. That’s what I thought yesterday when changing the sheets.  I thought about our marriage proposals to each other, half-ironic, but half-not, and the suddenness of the break-up (she was someone who had always told me, promised me, that if we broke up it would have to be done with love and care and discussion, never a ghosting or a cancellation.  

“All fine words but no certainty. Of anything. For anything. One moment here, the next gone. Nothing left behind. Just a mattress with some of that person’s beloved DNA deposited onto it. Am I a lovesick moron,” he wonders, looking into the water of the muddy swimming pool that my garden has turned into, “a lovesick fool for having these thoughts? Am I the chef who stands crying, holding the stained tablecloth of a beloved (and generous) client who used to eat there every Friday but now comes no more? As if this residuum of the human animal might still have some meaning even now, because it once meant something of value then, something meaningful, valuable, even if purely relational, and so formed nothing but words and good intentions?”

I am tiring of my friend’s talk. Other people’s break-up breakdowns can be tiring to listen to after a while. The language of the freshly-traumatised is threaded through with razor-sharp SUDDENLIES and screeching IF-ONLIES, and these can be grinding to their listener’s nervous systems if applied without let-up.

Hard enough for the person who is suffering these Suddenly-If-Only Earworms of blame and shame and regret, the freshly broken-hearted. But also an uncomfortable reminder for their listeners that a few lemony razor-blades  created by the Sky Gods might of course soon be plopping out of the grey and raining sky out there, delivered to me, to you, from the inner recesses of a pigeon’s bottom, plop plop plop onto our best laid plans, that lie ever-vulnerable, spread out below like a freshly-laundered linen suit. The one you’d had dry-cleaned for your 40th birthday.

“Let me show you the bird’s nest I say to him,” putting my hand on his shoulder, but also because we are two cis het men of a certain age, I also feel the need to turn this gesture into something more blokey, as if I were about to remove all that metaphorical birdshit or bullshit, all the razorblades that are still cutting into his shoulders.

You’re not going to quote a poem at me again, are you, he asks. 

Ha, I was, actually. 

(I wasn’t.) 

Here we go: 

You’re having a bad day.
Chased by a tiger to the edge of a cliff,
you scramble over and grab hold of a vine.

But now there’s another one prowling below,
and two hungry mice heading for your lifeline.

You take a deep breath,
adjusting to how things are,
and notice some wild strawberries
growing nearby,
dotted with flowers
and tiny red fruit.

What else can you do now but reach for a berry?
What else can you do now?

“Now, let’s go and have a look at that Robins’ nest shall we?”

We stand up, he makes some nice comments about my new garden chairs. I tell him that Natalia had bought them for us the week before, best garden chairs I’d ever sat on, and he tells me to hold onto her, that she’s a keeper. I tell him I shall.

A few months ago, I had placed a seedling tray for a moment on top of some overturned planting pots, and then forgotten about it. The robins had built their nest directly underneath this tray, affording them some extra protection from the elements, as well as predators. 

We approach hesitantly, not sure if Mama or Papa Robin are in the nest. The other day, removing the seedling tray, one of the parents had flown out like a missile, and had continued to watch me with a nervous eye and loud, insisten alarm calls from the branch of a nearby apple tree. 

Today, it’s just the nest and its neonatal treasures. Six precious containers of new life, six new tiny robins, who all have a slim chance of living beyond a year, particularly with their predilection to be so sociable and trusting towards other animals – but if they do make it to that age, some robins can live longer than dogs. I love the common-or-garden robin. They exemplify a cross-species version of default to truth, which I find to be very humbling, and also makes us (well, me, anyway) even more protective and caring around them. 

I look over to my friend who is as entranced by this vision of potential life as I am. I can see that in this moment, just for a few seconds, he  is completely reconnected back to the world, to his world, my world, our world again. But most of all he has come back to himself. The suffering will return as we turn away from the robin’s nest and pick up on the triggers of language again. But for a moment, the setbacks aren’t a burden to his life at all. If anything, they have become a kind of birthday gift. 

Please feel free to get in touch either by email or telephone (07804197605) if you would like to talk about some of the setbacks that are troubling you at the moment in your life.

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Feel Better wise blood

Trauma


Listen for a moment to this sound (if you are reading this, you will need to press play on the audio version of this article).

To my ears, it is the sweetest sound in the world. My dog-child Max drinking water after 30 minutes of frantically chasing after balls. I could listen to this sound all day long. 

I imagine this to be a largely parental joy (more than money, more than fame, even more than your self): the joy of hearing someone you love , manifesting some form of being-OK-with-the-world.

For Max, this is easy. He just needs: food, water, exercise in natural environments, and love. For the rest of us, us ambivalent, conflicted human animals, this peace of mind is not always so simply available.

Two days ago, Max bit me. Quite badly. I was taking off his little brown vest, the harness that he wears when we go out for a walk so as not to put any pressure around his neck from the lead. He growled because I was struggling to undo the clasp that had slipped around near his belly. I was distracted and said something perfunctory, even though said in a soothing way. He may have even growled again (I can’t remember), and then he bit me.

I screamed, lashed out in defence, he shrunk back in terror, whilst at the same time trying to also get some solace from me, his protector, his carer. I knew immediately what was occurring, both within myself and him, so I snapped out of my fearful-angry stress response and calmed him down, before calming myself down and attending to my wounds. 

I have had Max since he was a puppy. As he was the first non-human animal I have ever taken full responsibility for, I wanted to start out with a creature that I could pour lots of love and good “training” into, a dog that would grow up stable and secure, who could handle with ease the knocks that life placed in his way, just like it places in all our paths, no matter how fortunate our circumstance are.

I wanted, in short, a dog with “grit”, good emotional regulation, equanimity.

Does not every parent want this for their child? Does not every human want (maybe even demand) this from the other humans they are in relationship with? Do we not demand this from ourselves?

For five years, with my patient training and socialisation, Max became this “ideal” creature through and through. You could touch any part of his body, in any way, as long as you weren’t causing him physical pain, and he would quite happily submit to this manhandling whether it was coming from a small child, me, the vet, his groomer, or anyone else. But in his fifth year, Maxie swallowed a pine cone and needed to spend a week in hospital, with lots of tests being done on him, so lots of needles being pushed into his paws at various times of the day by kind vets and nurses who were only trying to help him get better. 

When he came back from hospital, I noticed that he wasn’t the same dog as he was before. Max was now struggling with trauma, something he had never encountered before in his almost-perfect doggy life. 

Trauma (from the Greek word for wound) is now mainly used psychologically in our culture, although we do still talk about a body being traumatised after a bad accident. Simply put: any time in our lives where we feel that we don’t have the capacities to deal with a situation that is scary or painful to us, we experience trauma. We know we are experiencing trauma when we exit our day-to-day loving, caring, bonding personalities and are thrown instead into our default Stress-response Selves: some combo of fight, flight, or freeze. 

Max in Hospital with a friendly vet who kindly sent me this pic

Pretty much anything can trigger a traumatic reaction. For Max, it is a certain careful, probling touch anywhere near his belly, or legs, a certain kind of careful/hesitant approach (the way someone might gingerly approach you if they were just about to sink a needle into a delicate part of your body) and equally a quiet, softly-spoken voice saying his name as if attempting to calm him down before delivering some pain to his extremities. Understandably, even if those words are coming from someone he loves, Max now goes into an aggressive (Fight) stress response.

If any of trauma triggers are present, Max will get antsy, start growling: his warning that he is about to have a traumatic response to something that is really no “biggie” in the grand scheme of things. Just like most of the stuff we get reactive to is really no “biggie” in the grand scheme of things (think about the last time you “lost it” in some stressy way: was it really the end of the world?). And finally, if the traumatic stimulus doesn’t back away, he will attack. 

We, as human animals, are no different to Max. We all carry some sort of trauma within us, either the trauma of just being thrown into consciousness and survival in environments that are not always hospitable to our human animal requirements, physically or emotionally. Or maybe we’re just unlucky, as most of us are in some way, in the events of our lives. 

We may have a tragic, life-changing accident, or someone close to us may be hurt in this way, or maybe it’s just another human animal, interacting with us, trying to do their best, that causes us overwhelming pain. Our minds being learning machines (stay away from the “bad stuff”, get as much as possible of the “good stuff”) will embed this trauma into our neural circuits, and hey presto, we suddenly find ourselves hurt and upset (Fight), blaming, angry, or shut-down/avoidant (Flight), or just frozen, unable to respond in any reasonable way to the life challenges we are facing.

And this can happen at any time: in a WhatsApp text argument with your partner on a rainy Thursday morning, in certain social situations (even some really friendly and potentially nice ones), or when your loving Dog Dad is unfastening your harness after a glorious walk in the park with many a wonderful glow-in-the-dark ball being thrown. 

Because Freud and subsequent psychotherapists have yoked trauma so thoroughly with insufficient or mis-attuned parenting, or with more extreme forms of abuse such as physical or sexual abuse, we often associate the word with these more dramatic sources.

But trauma is also as humdrum as going to the doctor or a vet and finding yourself poked with a painful needle without sufficient preparation or the chance afterwards to recover fully. Trauma is that feeling of the rug being pulled out from under your feet, even if nobody around you would necessarily recognise or understand the triggers that suddenly throw you into your habitual stress response. 

My habitual stress response is a form of “fight”. 

As I am quite a communicative person on the whole, following an upset or some kind of trauma-trigger, I can become an “ultra-communicative” (aka Pain-In-The-Arse) kind of person.

Clients never get to see this part of me, but in my personal life when feeling upset I will sometimes bombard another person (my partner, family members) with multiple attempts to re-engage or engage, often with cutting little asides in my mind’s fighty “analysis” of what is going on between us. This usually happens on the heels of some kind of disagreement or argument. It is not the most enjoyable form of communication to receive. Too much, and often clunky or overbearing in its sentiments.

This  “difficult” or over-communicative behaviour (the human version of growling?) has sometimes worked for me (especially as a man, men can sometimes get away with this kind of behaviour), but mostly it doesn’t. 

I have learnt to modulate it over the years (my Fighting Part is never abusive or cruel, even though it can be quite sharp-tongued) but I completely understand that this is not the best way to deal with arguments. In fact, it’s one of the worst ways.

Does this mean we can just cut this responses out of our lives wholesale? Unfortunately not. Stress responses are by and large automatic, instinctive. They have to be that way to protect us, even if the thing they are protecting us from, is often not a real threat to our well-being, usually not in the slightest.  

Trauma responses are not in any way cognitive, which is why when talking about them afterwards in our own minds, or with someone else like a therapist, we often feel ashamed by our behaviour: we don’t recognise our kind, and somewhat well-balanced Selves, in these Fighty-Flighty manifestations.

Ideally trauma requires, at least interpersonally, someone to work with us when we are having an emotional or physical flare-up, and not meet our flare-ups with one of their own. Couples often need to do this for each other. When one person is having a flare-up, the other needs to find a way to adapt and work around or with it.

Stress responses can be physical as much as anything else; emotions are embodied expressions of pain; words being just a way to signal to another that we are in pain, even if those words sound like they contain within them a perceived threat of some kind.

 My partner’s habitual stress response is a form of “flight”. They will disappear for days if they feel slighted, and will perceive every attempt I make to engage with them as an attack. In their unwillingness to talk or fight back, I experience their silence as withholding and unloving (another kind of threat), and they experience my barbed comments as knives and daggers rather than an attempt to reconnect.

And so before long, some kind of painful bite might occur on either side.

A lot of couples, as well as families, experience these kinds of dynamics, and unfortunately, this is where trauma takes its greatest toll. It destroys relationships. It pushes people away who might not understand our trauma-led responses, people who might not have the time, the  inclination, or interest in helping us to be the best, least stressy version of ourselves that we can be.

But trauma also impinges on our relationship to ourselves and the world. Either as a physical manifestation (non-medical aches and pains, and/or lots of emotional pain that we find difficult to assimilate and make space for). Also a great deal of mental pain: all the various thought loops that torment our minds like earworms when we are having a traumatic stress-response. 

The good news is that where there is love (loving and accepting our flawed human-animal selves, and the flawed human-animals we know and interact with) as well as some kind of “wisdom”, there can be freedom, peace, and connection, even in our trauma-assailed bodies and minds. 

Max is not traumatised all the time. Nor am I. And nor are you, no matter how traumatised you experience yourself to be.

Sometimes the trauma-rug-pull occurs daily, but for the most part, it might be a weekly or monthly occurrence.

Now that I have an understanding of Max’s trauma, how it happened, and what we can do to find workarounds, we continue to have a loving relationship.

I am able to make space for his perceptions of threat even when there aren’t any there (for example heeding his initial growls, and not pushing him past his comfort zone); as well as encouraging him with patience and support to do the things I need him to do (teeth brushing, grooming etc.).

And most importantly not expecting him at this moment to act in relation to me like a non-traumatized creature. If there is a trauma trigger around, he will act as if in trauma, as if he is just about to be deeply deeply wounded, even though I might only be wanting to wash the mud off his paws.

Of course I am using all the right psychological interventions with him as well: trying to dial down his traumatic response so that he doesn’t flip into Fight Mode every time I take off his harness.

But I don’t expect him to be the Max he was before his terrible trauma. He is the Max of Now, and fundamentally, I accept this Max. I accept where Max is Now, and we work with, around, and through his traumatic responses with love, patience and kindness.

I also make sure to protect myself (putting a muzzle on him when I have to bathe his paws, whilst all the time talking to him with love and appreciation) so that I don’t get flipped into a trauma-response or stress-response myself following on from his blameless aggression.

And it is blameless if coming from a flight-fight place. We do not wake up in the morning and decide to say or do something nasty to the people or creatures we care for the most. Or to live the day, ourselves, tormented. We do not wake up and decide that if somebody says something we don’t like, we will run away and not engage in conversation with them in order to sort out our differences. 

I think this is also the best way to work with our human trauma. Some of this might require us to go back into the past and do some visualisation work (Schema Therapy), or some EMDR work with the sources of our trauma – this can be helpful. These kinds of interventions which also include creative and often quite stimulating ways into (and out) of our traumas, as well as calming/anchoring/grounding tools, can help us come to terms with our past and our futures selves, and with the painful narratives that have formed around them in our minds. 

But let’s also work together (if need be) to find a way to keep us safe-for-ourselves when we are triggered by an event or another person, as well as safe for others. 

If you are in a relationship (but this might also be true for friends and family) you will ideally need a partner who is willing to work with your stress responses, your traumas, be they emotional or physical, setting boundaries, but ideally not punishing you every time you flip out. 

But there is also a lot of good and satisfying work, if you are willing to go there, that can be done for yourself in order to understand, get to know better your triggers and responses, and eventually to learn how to live with your traumas as they continue to arise in your life and your interactions on a daily basis.

As traumatized creatures we might find ourselves lying on our backs, the rug once more pulled out from under our feet, wondering (often with huge amounts of shame and self-criticism) how we got here again?

“Why did we “fuck up” again in this way?!” we might rail against ourselves or others.

Why does life, other people, certain situations suddenly seem so dreadfully unbearable to us?

Trauma, and traumatic responses (fight, flight, freeze) are never able to be eradicated entirely. It is incredibly important that Max does growl (a “Fight” Stress Response) before he bites. When Max growls, what he is really saying is: “I’m scared, please treat me kindly.”

I am learning that when my partner goes into Flight Mode, they are saying this too, and that they will bite me quite severely if I don’t honour their wishes in some way, even though these wishes are starkly in contrast with my own at that moment.

There are always kind, and non-painful workarounds to try out with our traumatic responses and those of others. We just need the patience, energy and goodwill to give them a go. And then give them another go, and another go, and another go.

Max’s trauma was created in a week, but I know that it will take months of rehabilitation work, maybe even years to regain some of his 24/7 good cheer and equanimity. Max has now joined us human animals: in that he now moves through life at times, as a triggered and traumatised creature.  

Similarly, we may need to work on lots of different strategies to help ourselves cope when trauma triggers your emotional-physical stress responses: to build up our self-acceptance, as well as some kind of acceptance (which is not to say a free-for-all) of those who are in contact with us, so that you too can make space for your own less-than-perfect stress responses, as well as theirs.

This takes quite a lot of work, and practice, and it needs to be done consistently, especially with a partner or family member who gets hurt by our stress response. But most of all, it needs to be done, over and over and over again by ourselves. Every time we get triggered. Especially when we get triggered by smallish stuff, before our default (BIG) “mindless” stress responses kick in.

We don’t live in an ideal world, and so it is not always possible to ask somebody else to make allowances for our growls, our bites, our hiding away under the bed for days. We need to do this work on ourselves and in conjunction with others; and in some way, this is the work of our lives which commences with a trauma (birth) and ends with a number of painful experiences (sickness, old age, the loss of those we care about, our own demise). 

Trauma is often associated with therapy for a good reason, for it is here that you should find a person (me, your therapist) who is always willing to do that work with you. And with my encouragement and your practice, the next time you feel overwhelmed (or maybe in a hundred times from now: practice makes perfect remember, do not expect yourself to achieve this stress-response modulation instantaneously, these are powerful instinctive forces you’re playing around with), you might end up growling, you might even snarl, but you won’t bite anyone, or hurt yourself either. 

I know that this practice I can offer you with your triggers and stress responses is not a perfect solution, but life, as you may have realised by now, does not cohere to the idealised expectations we have of ourselves and others. Like Max, we are all creatures of circumstance. We are all just trying to do our best with the sometimes traumatic hand dealt to us. 

Please feel free to get in touch either by email or telephone (07804197605) if you would like to find out anything else about EMDR or other trauma treatments, or to book a consultation.

Categories
Feel Better

Love Is A Losing Game

Seventeen year old me was friends with a guy called Guy.

Guy Rogers was his name, and probably still is.

It’s hard to remember Guy at seventeen, as he seemed already to be maturing towards inscrutability, and by that I mean aloofly adult to another young person’s eyes: an almost-Man of few words, but maybe more a man-boy prone to beard-scratching deliberation and slightly aureate sermonics. Not in a grandstanding way – Guy’s word-draped thoughts were always searching for the gnomic, the epigrammatic, the sententious even, but weren’t so many of us doing some version of that then?

Guy, I surmised, saw himself as a deep thinker, and even then, wrote poetry, which got turned into song lyrics for his younger brother’s band (hello Keith!) which was called Fever 103° after a Sylvia Plath poem, which has in it the wonderfully enflamed line: “Does not my heat astound you! And my light! / All by myself I am a huge camellia / Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush…”

Many of Guy’s lofty lyrics I can still remember now, word-for-word, note-for-note 34 years later. For example: “The old man / kisses the baby  / and then he rapes the child / The child she runs, she runs away / Into the twilight, twilight child.“ I can remember and even sing those words to Keith’s tune, as I did whilst writing Guy’s lyrics from my head to the screen, 34 years later. Don’t worry I’ll spare you the ditty. But I could sing it if you really wanted me to, for I was the vocalist of Fever 103° for a while, as strange as that now seems to me. And it does.

Guy wasn’t a particularly tortured soul, although I think he wanted to be. His song Twilight Child was clearly a homage as well as a mash-up of the lyricists he was probably in thrall to at the time: Robert Smith perhaps, Ian Curtis, and definitely, without a shadow, Bono.

Everyone in Fever 103°, apart from me, were all massive U2 fans, fanatical about the group,  pietistic even, always referencing musical ideas from The Joshua Tree which had just come out to great acclaim in that year (1987), transporting four boys who’d met in Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Clontarf near Dublin into the preening, bombastic stadium-rock-god poseurs that still flit across our screens from time to time.

And for this reason, I could always hear as a foil to my voice, Bono’s grave and keening tones doing, as they would have done, much fuller justice to Guy’s tortured lyrics, than I could. Guy even admitted to me once, that when he and Keith had written Twilight Child, they had imagined Bono delivering the anthem, elevating their words and music to Empyrean Heights, as opposed to this bloke Steve who unfortunately for Guy and Keith, sang the Fever 103  oeuvre according to his own pop ideas and Dionysian ideals; my touchstones in 1987 being Prince (Sign O’ The Times), Terence Trent D’Arby’s glorious first album (Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby. – D’Arby at the Bournemouth Pavilion, 1988, epic), and Michael Jackson’s Bad, which also came out in that year.

Guy got together with Jackie, who in my memory also seems much older now: a clever, grounded, already-her-own-person person (unlike Guy who was no doubt doing what the rest of us were doing which was trying on certain identity kits or costumes to see if they suited us).

At a certain point the romance ended, and various sixth-formers, including myself, became Jackie’s counsellors, as she was at this point suffering to a suicidal degree all of the crazy-making feelings of abandonment and despair, the sort of pain and anguish which usually follows after one human animal puts his penis into another and then talks in the patois of romantic love until theyre boyfriend and girlfriend, holding hands on that coach trip into London for everyone studying A-Level English to go and see Shakespeare’s Macbeth at The Barbican. Until, until, for whatever reason this purportedly unconditional, eternally-fused connection, like all the other phenomena of the universe suddenly became subject to the Laws of Impermanence.

Jackie was also, like Guy, writing lots of poetry then, and showed me a whole sheaf of her A4 fountain-pen scrawlings. Hundreds of pages torn out of exercise books, some of them stained with blood, the bloodied pages no doubt written in the aftermath of the breakup when self-harm sometimes pokes its way into the Bouncy Castle of love and sex, further hastening its expiration.

I remember a conversation with Jackie, the two of us traversing the Ferndown Upper School parking lot: Jackie talking incessantly about Guy, eyes blotched by teary mascara, trying to persuade me to hold onto her dog-eared wedge of tortured outpourings that was clearly the entire, gory focus of her young life at that moment.

I’m not sure why I was supposed to take care of her poems. It was all part of that perverse logic: the psycho-logic (i.e. psycho-illogical logic) of Eros.

I don’t think I ever became a fully-signed up Max Brod to her Kafka though, because I can’t remember any of the content of the poems, not a single line. Although, between you and me, ou est le meaningful “content” of ze love poem, a category primarily constructed out of longing,, lust, loss, and a whole bunch of other L-words? Or maybe I had taken the poems away with me, as she’d wanted, and read a handful, and found them insufferably one-note and dull, as other people’s love affairs sometimes are to the friends or family or therapists who are privy to each blow-by-blow account.

All those misunderstood messages and mismatched expectations, the incongruities between the demands of the body and the stories or fantasies in our minds, the whole fucking shambolic fandangled relational mess of it all. That was Jackie and Guy. And every other shambolic love story since Romeo and Juliet, and all the other lovesick, wannabe pairings that preceded them.

At that point in my life, I had yet to experience sex, love, romance, to play the “game” of love as Jackie and Guy were playing it – though God forbid you might communicate that to romantics of any stripe, it being a game, this take-home being transmitted to me about romantic love, which I had no interest then in listening to. But if I had listened, I would have heard an older version  of myself going: “Yes, you’re right, it’s a lovely, sweet, delicious, but fundamentally silly and often stupid game, for the most part, driven by the energies of the libido. But Bono-sized histrionics and melodrama at its core.”

And what a serious game we often turn it into, with every adult in every film we ever watch playing the game, as if it were the only game in town. And maybe for the human animal, as well as all our non-human animal pals, once fed and watered, and given a way to continue surviving, what else is there in this world for us to do but “hunt” for love, the giving and receiving of. Which for some is children: the quick or sometimes delayed offspring of these so-called love-pairings. Is this not fundamentally our “lot” as animal humans: to “love”? Which is to say: to be done by or with, maybe to even be “used” in regard to sex and romance, and all those other forms of animal-human attachment not described herein. And after a bit of that, well: presumably some combo of sickness, old-age, and death.  Surely it’s better to be used by love than the terrible triumvirate we all received a personal visit from eventually?

Seventeen year-old me, Jackie and Guy’s friend, their “third”, their confidante, was still wandering around the moats of Eros then, eyeing up the turrets and the parapets, the drawbridge with its heavy chains, the impossible amount of time it took for that fucking drawbridge to be lowered, if it ever was. It never was.

But at that moment, surely I say to my younger self, it must have been evident to your yet-to-be-blinded eyes that love, in the words of Amy Winehouse, is my friend, a losing game? A bit like roulette or any of those other addictive, resource-draining flutters, where we all know that The House, the Gambling Den is the only real winner. Similarly perhaps, in romantic love, the Life Force, embodied in sex and it’s  purported “reason” for sexual congress, is mainly what drives the Eros Charabanc. Often over a cliff. Though sometimes not. Fingers crossed etc.

Would this stop me from playing this game for the next thirty years as if I too were on a Bono-like mission (we’re all Bono’s in love,  I’d say, bonobos also). Is that not what love offers us, cheesy as it sounds, karaoke-cheesy even: to stand on a stage in leather trousers and sunglasses, ecstatically self-involved like some of kind of love-seeking missile, the one-pointed focus and frenzy of Eros and its love bombs, as the crowds (real ones for Bono, fake ones for us) go wild in support and affiliation of this ineffably important union?

Falling in love seems to dislocate our sense of what is significant. Aberrant behaviour ensues. Rules of decorum go by the wayside. Almost as if we were being used by Eros, as if we had no choice in the matter, which I believe now to be the case.

I find a picture of Amy Whitehouse online, who in 1987 was a striking looking infant of 4 years old: porcelain skin, brunette curls. She’s staring quizzically at the last mouthful of a banana, still enclosed in it’s skin – the least satisfying part as we all know . Most satisfying, the first bite: least satisfying the last, right?

Sappho invented a word for this, both the eating of bananas and being consumed by them: glukupikron is the word, which translates from the Ancient Greek as sweet (gluku) + bitter (pikron), although in English we often swap those two terms around, agreeing as we get wiser that much of love, and everything else, has a more paradoxical, bittersweet character to it, even the best of our relationships. But sweet-bitterness is how I now like to think of Eros, or romantic love. That first mouthful, so intoxicating and pleasurable, then the main bananarama (highs, lows, lows, lows, highs, lows, lows etc.), and then the drop, the splatter, the kerplunk.

“Pleasure and pain,” writes Anne Carson, “at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover.”

“If we follow the trajectory of eros,” she goes onto explain, “we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole. When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me.”

When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me.

The antithesis of this is that dutiful and responsible love, the love between some parents and their children, between some couples, especially couples with human or non-human animal children perhaps, once the fizz and the sparkle has, for the most part, waned or even fizzed itself out.

That’s the kind of bond I’m thinking of when I use the L-word these days. I love Max, with all my heart. I would do almost anything for him: clean his shit off the floor or the sheets when he has explosive diarrhoea, go out in the freezing cold and rain so that he can exercise. That’s what I now choose to think of as love, that’s the bond, the joy, the devotional sacrafice if you want, that deserves the word love to be used as a descriptor for it. But a human animal in a strop about what was said or not said at some point in a series of WhatsApp text messages? That’s not love for this iteration of myself, that’s Eros folks.

Again, from Anne Carson: “Eros is expropriation. He robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity and leaves the lover, essentially, less. This attitude toward love is grounded for the Greeks in oldest mythical tradition: Hesiod describes in his Theogony how castration gave birth to the goddess of love, Aphrodite, born from the foam around Ouranos’s severed genitals. Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser.”

So the next time we swipe right on Bumble, or Tinder, or Hinge and it’s all wey-hey for a while, this is us enjoying some of the blood-flecked foam from that magnificent Sky God (Ouranos, husband to Gaia) who got his dick lopped off with a adamantine sickle, equipped with jagged teeth, and wielded in this case by his own son (Cronos) the dick-chopping sickle gifted to the boy by Ouranos’s beloved wife, Gaia.

But let’s give the last word to Jackie and Amy:

Over futile odds,
And laughed at by the gods,
And now the final frame
Love is a losing game.

Categories
Feel Better

What’s Your Thread?

Ask a squirrel what’s its thang? Go on, ask it. The answer will probably be something along the line of: acorns.

Now ask a Dung Beetle (the name is a bit of a give-away here).

“I’m a roller, baby,” is surely what it would say. “I’m a Beetle Sisyphus! Pushing a huge sphere of elephant crap ten times the size of me up a hill using only my hind legs.”

And what does the front part do while the back legs roll, you might ask, sensing the need for a follow-up question?

Social media of course. Dung beetles do a lot of social media.
.
When someone once asked the poet William Stafford what his thang is, or was (he’s dead now), he’d say: “Oh you mean the way it is”, and pull out one of his poems.

This one:

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Last week I let go of my thread for three or four days. By day three I was staring out the window mournfully, nursing a coffee, and thinking about that Schopenhauer quote from his essay Studies in Pessimism, which goes: “Of how many people may it not be said that hope made a fool of them until they danced into the arms of death!”

Three days it took for me to be almost ready to rumba my way to Eternal Rest. The thread I let go of? Writing stuff: consistently, even if just a few paragraphs a day,  and in so doing, creating “a thing”, contributing to “a  project”.

I usually have some kind of writing project on the go. A project being something more conceptually contained than jotting down a poem or a few thoughts in a notebook or on my phone when the mood takes me. Sometimes it’s a book project, or an art project, most recently podcast popcorn. In the last few Covid Months I have started three of these podcast project, did a couple of episodes for each one, and then foundered. This iteration might be the fourth foundering for all I know. But at least it feels like the thread is back in my shaky paw.

What that means for me, but maybe for you too, is that whatever else is going on in our lives, good and bad, suffering-suffused or not, we’re more or less “on track” with whatever it is that holds the most intrinsic value for us.

In the “doing” of our threads,  as well as holding onto them (reminding ourselves that this is what we’re fundamentally about in some way) life jogs along in an OK fashion, or maybe even at a fairly nice trot occasionally.

Schopenhauer had lots of flow, lots of joy in his life. Yes it was a somewhat eccentric one, highly so, but even for this Morrissey of 18th Century philosophical pessimism, life rocked, dents and all, otherwise why would he have written so much about it from that deliciously morbid gaze?

LOSING OUR THREAD

So how do we lose for a while, or longer, our thang, our thread, our life-force? I was talking about this with someone yesterday who told me that when she was about six or seven years old, and answering the usual barrage of What Do You Want To Be When You Become One of Us questions, she would usually respond with “ballerina” because it rhymed with her name: Nina. Nina The Ballerina! Of course!

And in this way, Nina The Ballerina, showed not only a precocious grasp of the workings of nominative determinism, but also the ways in which our culture requires us to fit our multiple selves into one or two overriding Identity Categories, preferably ones that have high social status for our society and so for the ears in which that young human animal grew up in.

In 1989, the National Opinion Research Centre in the US released their first list of NORC scores, showing 800 occupations ranked by prestige. Brain surgeons and other physicians scored 86.05, leading other professions by a long shot. No surprise there. Presumably this was all scored out of 100, with George Herbert Walker Bush (being second to God, of course), emerging with a perfect ten.

Psychotherapy as a profession had a score of around 62, similar to Purchasing Managers and Police Supervisers. It feels as if in the interim period society has awarded a few more social kudos points to the shrinks, but so what?

My current role as a therapist is definitely one of my threads. I love (almost) everything about it. And if I didn’t need to do it to earn a living, I would do something like it in an unpaid capacity. Why? Because it gives me a kick, it makes me feel more alive and connected to other human animals who are trying to work some of this stuff out for themselves too. I think we’re talking here about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which is also key to this thready topic.

BEING AND BECOMING VERSUS HOLDING ONTO OUR THREADS

We often start with a Being or Becoming focus. The Being and Becoming path is incredibly fruitful and seems to be a necessary stage in human development. The downside of this though is that it relies on a form of extrinsic motivation to keep us going (some Super-Ego Dreamer line such as:  “Wouldn’t it be cool if you were a BLAH, or became a BLAH.)

The downside of becoming a BLAH though on purely extrinsic motivation alone (“Wouldn’t it be cool if…”, the Future Now equation) can often make us miserable. For this is also a mode that accentuates our deeply hardwired habit of social comparison.

Psychological research now shows that both downward and upward comparing of our lives, aspirations, achievements to those of others doesn’t seem like it’s very good for our mental health. It may even be utterly disasterous for our mental health, which is a pity as all of our social media is now driven by FOMO and up/down social comparisons. None of which seems to be working out for us in terms of our general well being it’s fair to say

Equally so in real-life relationships.

So you feel good because you and a friend both entered a poem into a competition, and yours got commended? Or bad because they got a book-deal a year later which obviously craps all over your one commended poem? Neither comparison if grown and tended in the mind seems to engender well-being. And unfortunately the seeds (thoughts for the most part, but also images tweeted, posted on Instagram or Facebook) are always going to be there as potentially destabilising entities. The only thing we have any control or choice over is to how much watering and tending of certain seeds we want to be involved with. And what we expect will come from that.

Watering and tending toxic seeds happens to a much larger extent when we lose sight of our threads, I believe.

FINDING YOUR THREAD

Imagine an older, twinkly-eyed Grandma Lionness saying to her grandcubs: “So kids, what you gonna be when you grow up?

“Lions!” would be the only possible response to this ridiculous question. Just like a six year old Nina, might equally have said: “I’m going to find a way to utilise my innate and native skills as well as whatever bits of shiny paper I’ve accumulated through reading books and writing essays, to survive and ideally thrive in the hyper-capitalist, winner-takes-all, Fame-Money Game we like to call a “career” or “job”.

Career: from the Latin carrus (wheeled vehicle), which in the 16th century starts to take on the meaning of a road or racecourse. And that is what it has becomes for most of us now: a road, a racecourse, a human hamster wheel or maze, which ejects us at a certain age for thumb-twiddling retirement if you’re lucky, and then death. Always death. Which unfortunately we tend to forget when we’re on the hamster-wheel, answering an email from our line-manager at 10 o’clock at night.

But that’s different to your threads, to your thang, whatever that is. Had young Nina been asked instead what it was that made her feel most alive, most included in this truly magical, living ecosystem of human animal culture and the greater world, the “real” world (which we try to dominate with our conceptual finagling and manipulation but will have the last word one day, caring nothing for us), she would have known what to say:

“I like running, and jumping, and being athletic. Reading. I love to read. Acting, dancing. Playing, and making plays. And thinking up new games for my friends. Also play-fighting or even more fraught versions of that in the playground. This is what it means to “do” rather than “be” or “become” me, now, in the fullest way possible.”

But this is not the only way to find your thread if you’re not sure what yours might be.

Here are some other ways that work for me:

1/ What is it you most regret not having done yet, or not having given enough attention to, at this point in your life?

2/ Imagine two friends at your funeral talking about you and the stuff they loved about you. How you lived your one wild and precious life to the full? What would you like them to say of you as they speak with love and maybe even a certain amount of rose-coloured, backward-casting admiration?

3/ Let’s stay with death for a moment (Schopenhauer would approve). To what extent is your vision of a life well-lived similar or different to Mary Oliver’s in her poem When Death Comes? For fun, you might like to try writing your own version of this poem. (And if you do, please share it with me, I’d love to read it.)

4/ Bringing in some social energies, but without turning it into a Win-Lose Game or another zero sum equation such as They’re Every-thing But I’m No-thing . Ask yourself: who do I really admire? A person who seems to be “working their threads” in a way that is appealing to you? How might you do some version of that if you weren’t so caught up in the Being and Becoming game, as we all are to  some extent? You  might even want to think about that itchy binary a bit more (They’re Every-Thing | I’m No-Thing) accompanied by Mary Ruefle’s ruefulness.

BROKEN SPOKE

You grow old.
You love everybody.
You forgive everyone.
You think: we are all leaves
dragged along by the wind.
Then comes a splendid spotted
yellow one—ah, distinction!
And in that moment
you are dragged under.

Or if the above don’t appeal, here’s  a whole bunch more, courtesy of Russ Harris.

CAREER THREADS | DEVOTIONAL THREADS

One of my threads, my need to “make stuff” (drawings, essays, poems, novels, songs) has never been my career. I turned it into a career for a year or two pitching and writing some articles for magazines and newspapers, but apart from the writing and research itself, the rest of the Freelance Writer Game was just so damn hard, such a slog, that it didn’t really add up for me in terms of the Being and Becoming game, getting my name at the top of a screen or a page.

But this is only because, I now realise, that my writing thread has always been fundamentally about connecting to myself and maybe one or two other “real” people (like you here, listening to or reading this, hello!) rather than trying to feed and make money from The Culture Machine.

This realisation took about thirty years of angst and self-recrimination to come to fruition. I wish it had come sooner, but it didn’t. Sometimes our threads will only reveal themselves fully to us over a lifetime of finding them, then losing them, then finding them again, and so on, until the end. So I guess we need to be patient with our threads (not one of my strengths). And while we’re working on our patience, plugging away at the things that matter to us. To do this, two things need to be in place, I think.

1/ Knowing what your core value-driven threads are (mine being: (1) making stuff, especially creative stuff;  (2) therapy, the mind, consciousness; and (3) having a meaningful and sincere relationship with Nature, including human animals, but even more so – those of other species).

AND

2/ A willingness, but also a kind of logistical strategising and concerted effort-ing (of sorts) to give our value-driven activities Time, Energy, and Attention (TEA). How much TEA have you drunk with your thready-domains recently?

The tricky thing about TEA (good TEA that is) is that it’s costly.

I am writing this article on a Monday morning. I could instead be doing more financially remunerative work (more clients, or writing paid “copy” for someone), or sitting in the garden scrolling through Twitter – which would be easier, much more fun, and maybe I’ll do some of that too – but either way, our threads do seem to require a certain amount of devotion. Otherwise how to differentiate what really matters (to us) that require good, quality TEA from us, as opposed to the stuff that passes the time in some fun or interesting way?

Devotion is the right word for our threads, I think, a word that that has a somewhat sacred air to it. From the Latin devovere: “to dedicate by a vow, to sacrifice oneself, to promise solemnly”. If this is the case,  how could devotion not require our best TEA?

I doubt the majority of people getting out of bed on a Sunday morning to go to their weekly church service “feel like it” to any extent. Nor the mother (hopefully more fathers doing this too now) who has to change her baby’s nappy at three in the morning, and then is woken up again an hour later for a feeding, so sleep-deprived  that she walks around like a zombie with demented, raving thoughts.

We’re talking about devotion here. Which you might say is our most precious resource because it gets stuff done (eventually!) even when a part of us is really not in the mood for doing it. That “lazy”, can’t-be-arsed part (in my experience) is with us, and deeply involved in our thinking and impulses about 95.6% of the time. Maybe even 95.7%.

Which is a shame, but perhaps it also gives us a clue as to how we might follow our threads, carving out a 4.3% or maybe even 5% space for ourselves in which to drink some thread-suffused TEA. For devotion, I believe, calls not as much to our strengths, but let’s call them our “weaknesses”.

WORKING WITH YOUR CHARACTER WEAKNESSES TO HOLD ONTO YOUR THREAD

I ask everyone I engage with as a psychotherapist to do a Character Strengths Survey, because I think it’s useful to “play to our strengths”, if and when we can. But our so-called weaknesses (here are mine), are perhaps more key to this whole topic as these underdeveloped muscles, these alignments or misalignments of our personalities can often get in the way of us doing some of the slightly “heavier lifting” that certain life trajectories require, whether we like this or not.

One of my weaknesses is Perseverance (I think it is for many of us). Finishing what one starts; persevering in a course of action in spite of obstacles; “getting it out the door”; taking pleasure in completing tasks. But when it comes to my threads, I do actually persevere, even if in a somewhat wonky fashion. And in certain cases, with tremendous resilience. But always in fairly small, well-chosen amounts.

So maybe this could be a path for Nina who is thinking about all of this at the moment. The path being: play to your weaker strengths if you can (i.e. develop them, but don’t overtax them), as well as your stronger ones. 

Let’s imagine that those character traits are actually set. I believe they are in some way, which is not to say we can’t develop those weaker muscles too, but maybe that’s not the most fulfilling or interesting path to take per se. Let’s imagine that Perseverance, Self-Regulation (i.e. state-change/gear-stuff: how we settle ourselves when we get all flustered), and Big Picture/Right-Brain “Spirituality” are not your strongest character muscles. But let’s they’re needed, to some extent, for what you want to achieve or have in your life, how you want to hold onto your thread.

Now imagine you had long term Covid, as unfortunately you may one day have, or some variant, and you’re too weak and tired to do anything much other than a few hours of your paying-job, and maybe just twenty to thirty minutes each day of “doing” (holding onto) your threads? Devotedly.

Which thread(s) would you give your precious, fleeting, tired and somewhat bedraggled Now-TEA to?

Also: how would you “hold yourself” accountable in some way to your devotion, without having let’s say all the scaffolding and support of a more formal religion or a boss sending you emails at 7am in the morning, demanding those reports that should have been done yesterday?

Our “Bosses” are an important part of this.

What’s your relationship like with your Inner Boss(es), what Freud called The Super-Ego, cultural and family dictates or core beliefs stamped like a Trademark logo into our souls?

There are usually two or three bosses on board when it comes to our lives, and they’re often in conflict.  Maybe one is an Intrinsically Motivated Boss who is deeply congruent and in sync with your most important life values. This Boss is a pretty cool, laid back lady, has her office in the Right Hemisphere of your brain for the most part, driving you and what you do with awe, and curiosity, as well as the hunt for a certain kind of “magic” that makes you feel most alive.

But there’s also the other (Left Brain) Boss that thinks s/he can make things happen by berating, critiquing, and finding fault with us. Left Brain = Language, so this is a very thinky/language-y boss. This bloke is also a tad deluded. Deluded, because not really in touch with The Big Picture of whatever domain he’s working in. This Boss, who often becomes a kind of Inner Slave Driver, a tyrant, really does believe that there’s a simple (or complicated) system that you have to follow (goddamnit!) , and if you just “follow the rules!” and stop procrastinating (“You lazy sack of shit!”) All Will Be Good.

When our Inner Bosses play fair and play kind with us, we get our best work done, and everyone is happy. Unfortunately this is somewhat rare with regard to Inner Managers. The good new is that they can be sent on a Management Training Course (psychotherapy?) to learn how to be more of a mensch, and less of a Mussolini, or Milosevic.

THE WAY IT IS

I love the fact that Stafford wrote his poem (The Way It Is) 26 days before he died at the age of 79 in 1993. That he was still living so fully, and meaningfully right up until the very end of his life!

And he didn’t stop writing poems as death approached. Here’s one he wrote on the very day he died.

You can’t tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. “You don’t have to
prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.

Well, it was yesterday. And the sun came,
Why
It came.

Categories
Feel Better

Friendship As A Template For All Relationships?


I was listening to a discussion between David Whyte and Sam Harris  recently, where Whyte read his mini-essay (300 words) from his book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday  Words. The piece read and discussed on the podcast was “Friendship” (reprinted below).

His words, to my ears, contained a lot of wisdom. It also made me wonder if maybe one of the ways we can get a bit more “chill” and “right-brain” with regard to the often stormy relationships in our life (lovers, partners, family and whatnot) is if we use some kind of Friendship Template with these more ambivalent connections?

Not necessarily Whyte’s Template though, please feel free create your own!

If we do decide take his ideas on board though, what might be required of us and our often fraught thought and language knotted minds in order to sustain such a vision through ongoing Love-Hate and Indifference Modes that we feel with respect to our nearest and dearest?

Maybe we can ask ourselves this question to begin with:

Are you a true “friend” to your partner, your children, your parents, or sibs? What would that even “mean”,  for you?

But even more importantly than the above question (which often triggers an Inner Critic saying just how shit a friend/partner/sibling we are – be careful of that, it’s just more binary language):

What kind of behaviour (especially when we are triggered and upset by something someone has said or done) would be most conducive to repairing those bonds? For disrupted they will get. Again, and again, and again.

Especially as (mis)communication is such a prevalent part of human animal interacting.

How could it be otherwise? We can’t read each other’s minds! All we can go on is their in-the-moment languaging (often done through one-dimensional text on a screen, with no context as to where the language is coming from). But even with some context, with facial expressions, and tone of voice it can be tricky. Someone’s sour mood or dejected tones might reflect stuff that has nothing to do with us, and yet we get pulled into their inner storms, and they into ours.

Mostly though, the problem as I see it is language. Yep, words. Just like these silly things on your screen right now. No more “real” in essence than all the zeros and ones that make up the internet. How easily language breaks down, or isn’t in any way sufficient in terms of expressing the multidimensionality of us, us creatures who contain so many different parts and personas in our psyches.

I often fall short of this skill with people who haven’t been assigned the category of “friend” in my mind. I also often fall short even with those I do see as friends.

Relationships are such fragile entities. They’re more like butterflies and Daddy Long Legs than the more robust cockroach or Dung Beetle (one of my favourite insects). Which means that they need to be treated with care and attention – especially if we or the other person is quite a sensitive creature. We do this quite often with and for friends, but not always for those people who have become “part of the furniture” in some way to our lives (a partner, or lover, a family member).

The David Whyte vision of Friendship as a template for all relationships, tiny and large, is a Big Ask.

It asks of us time, energy, and a great number of self-regulation resources. But maybe it’s do-able if framed in the right way. Or maybe not?

WHAT’S THE SECRET INGREDIENT?

For Whyte, and others who have written on this topic, it’s forgiveness – for slights big and small, and is often the case: miniscule. This seems to be really key to the whole shebang.

As we know the left-hemispheric Language Mind (s/he-said, s/he-said stuff – usually with a focus on the Past Now) doesn’t really “Do” Forgiveness or Letting Go of Past Hurt very well. That’s more Right-Brain stuff. So if you feel unforgiving towards someone, you’re probably not firing (brain-wise) on both cylinders!

Interestingly, receiving an apology seems to activate the language zones in the Left Hemisphere, especially the left middle temporal gyrus. Whereas forgiveness seems to be more highly correlated with right temporo parietal junction (TPJ) activation. Which corresponds with what we know overall with regard to hemispheric differences: i.e. we do more relating and engagement with the Actual World As It Is through our right-hemispheres, whereas the left just plays around and rearranges stuff we already know, or as is more often the case: think we know.

Right Hemisphere equates to some extent as a fluffy, cuddly mammalian-relating brain bulge, which collaborates with language areas like Wernicke and Broca, located in the Left Hemisphere, to get those relational energies heard and felt.

The Right Hemisphere is also larger in mammals than in other creatures – take that, reptiles! But size doesn’t seem to matter to the Left Hemisphere, which is now the dominant hemisphere for our species and its culture (hello Social Media!). This is a pity because this hemisphere of the brain is also The Shit-Stirrer, through and through.

Apart from strirring shit, Left Brain is really good at problem-solving (and making!) which it does largely through thought and language. Whereas our Right Hemispheres seem to engage with the world more holistically and less linguistically. So if you want connection and cuddles, make sure you’re in Right Hemisphere when relating to someone else. If you want strife, stick with the problem-solving/making language stuff. And of course, as with everything, lots of other factors come into play too.

Forgiveness seems to require our language-making left brains to let go (just a little) of some of the chatter and analysis we do when hurt or triggered in some way.

This seems to require a settling of our nervous systems, changing our current state (i.e. our embodied nervous systems) rather than our minds through language. There are many ways to do this. Most helpful I’ve found is to become super-present to the Here and Now for a while, or maybe distracting ourselves with something meaningful. Or if necessary doing some unhooking/defusion practices,

Only then, in a settled ventral-vagal third gear, can we go back to valuing and loving other people and ourselves in a way that we might like to be loved: as flawed human animals. Isn’t that person who has just annoyed you, You In Another Guise, or You On A Different Day, or You-Triggered?

Which is to say: someone doing their best with the hand(s) dealt to them. And often screwing up, to some extent, in the process.

FRIENDSHIP | David Whyte

is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

Through the eyes of a real friendship an individual is larger than their everyday actions, and through the eyes of another we receive a greater sense of our own personhood, one we can aspire to, the one in whom they have most faith. Friendship is a moving frontier of understanding not only of the self and the other but also, of a possible and as yet unlived, future.

Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationship: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honorable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent-child relationship.

The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence.

Through the eyes of a friend we especially learn to remain at least a little interesting to others. When we flatten our personalities and lose our curiosity in the life of the world or of another, friendship loses spirit and animation; boredom is the second great killer of friendship. Through the natural surprises of a relationship held through the passage of years we recognize the greater surprising circles of which we are a part and the faithfulness that leads to a wider sense of revelation independent of human relationship: to learn to be friends with the earth and the sky, with the horizon and with the seasons, even with the disappearances of winter and in that faithfulness, take the difficult path of becoming a good friend to our own going.

Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way even after one half of the bond has passed on.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

Please feel free to get in touch either by email or telephone (07804197605) if you are struggling to find some friendship in your heart for someone you would still like to be close to in some way.

Oh, and if you made it to the end of this page.

Here are some of my favourite Dung Beetle Cartoons. Gotta love this dude!

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NOTES FROM SLINGERLAND’S “DRUNK” (2021)

EVERBODY WANTS TO GET STONED?:Current estimates place the number of active consumers at over 2.4 billion people worldwide (or roughly one third of the Earth’s population).

GETTING HIGH, A HUMAN OBSESSION? Wherever you find people, you find ridiculous amounts of time, wealth, and effort dedicated to the sole purpose of getting high. In ancient Sumer, it is estimated that the production of beer, a cornerstone of ritual and everyday life, sucked up almost half of overall grain production. When it comes to market economies, contemporary households around the world officially report spending on alcohol and cigarettes at least a third of what they spend on food; in some countries (Ireland, Czech Republic) this rises to a half or more.

FRIEND OR FOE? Why do we voluntarily poison our bodies and minds? Because of what they do to us? THC, the ingredient in cannabis that gets you high, is actually a bitter neurotoxin produced by the plant to avoid getting eaten. All plant drugs, including caffeine, nicotine, and cocaine, are bitter for a reason. The astringent taste is a message to herbivores: Back off, if you eat this it’s going to hurt your stomach or mess with your brain and probably both. Most herbivores, being sensible, give plants like this a wide berth. However, some particularly stubborn ones—or those with a powerful taste for coke—develop countermeasures, evolving to produce enzymes that detoxify the toxicants. It is significant that humans appear to have inherited these ancient mammalian defenses to plant toxins, suggesting that plant-based drugs, like alcohol, are not an evolutionarily novel scourge, but rather a longtime friend.

WHY HAVEN’T WE EVOLVED OUT OF IT? It is theoretically possible, then, that our taste for alcohol is like our achy lower backs, an unfortunate example of how genetic evolution is so constrained by previous decisions that it effectively has its hands tied. Evolutionary biologists call this “path dependence.” It is also the case that selection cannot act on a mutation that doesn’t exist. So, another possibility is that a cure for our taste for intoxication is biologically possible, but the spinning of the genetic mutation roulette wheel has yet to land upon it.

VIKING ALCOHOLICS: The Vikings were seriously into alcohol. The name of their chief god, Odin, means “the ecstatic one” or “the drunken one,” and he was said to subsist on nothing but wine. Mark Forsyth points out the significance of this: “While many cultures have a god of alcohol or drunkenness, in order to give alcohol some recognized role within society, when it comes to the Vikings the chief god and the god of alcohol are one and the same. That’s because alcohol and drunkenness didn’t need to find their place within Viking society, they were Viking society. Alcohol was authority, alcohol was family, alcohol was wisdom, alcohol was poetry, alcohol was military service, and alcohol was fate.”

The highest praise accorded to the legendary Viking/Anglo-Saxon hero Beowulf was that “he never killed his friends when he was drunk.” As Forsyth observes, “This was clearly something of an achievement—a thing so extraordinary that you’d mention it in a poem.”

The booze-sodden Vikings, dismissed by the abstinent Ibn Fadlan as dirty drunkards, were also wildly successful as a cultural group. They dominated and terrified huge swaths of Europe, discovered and colonized Iceland and Greenland, became the first Europeans to reach the New World, and ended up siring a good proportion of modern Northern Europeans. A loose attitude toward alcohol consumption doesn’t seem to slow cultural groups down very much.

A TAXONOMY OF DRUNKENNESS: One early playwright puts advice concerning the virtues of moderation and sobriety into the mouth of the god of wine, Dionysus, himself: 

“Three cups only do I propose for sensible men, one for health, the second for love and pleasure and the third for sleep; when this has been drunk up, wise guests make for home. The fourth cup is mine no longer, but belongs to hubris; the fifth to shouting; the sixth to revel; the seventh to black eyes; the eighth to summonses; the ninth to bile; and the tenth to madness and people tossing the furniture about.”

ALCOHOL AND RITUAL: Throughout history and across the world, alcohol and other intoxicants—kava, cannabis, magic mushrooms, hallucinogen-laced tobacco—tend to be the prime offering in sacrifices to the ancestors and gods, as well as the central focus of both everyday and formal communal rituals. intoxicating essence. “With ‘To your health!’ we have the most everyday and pervasive example of a drinking ritual with a whiff of magic.” He further observes that “the necessity of alcohol for this ritual is a widespread and ancient assumption,” quoting the Victorian journalist and author Edward Spencer Mott: “Do we express our unfeigned joy and thankfulness for having a great and good Queen to reign over us by toasting her in flat soda water? Forbid the deed!”

Many who are more serious about banning intoxication, such as Pentecostals or Sufis, replace the joys of drunkenness with some form of non-chemical ecstasy, such as speaking in tongues or ecstatic dance. This all suggests that intoxication is performing a crucial functional role in society.

ALCOHOL HELPS US TO BE MORE COMMUNAL (ALSO CREATIVE AND CULTURAL): Early hominids lived in caves. One feature of the “cave” to which humans have adapted is that it provides fire, among other basic cultural technologies. It also provides language and incredibly valuable cultural information, which explains the multiple human adaptations to mastering languages and learning from others. Compared with the environment to which our line of primates originally adapted, our cave is crowded and full of strangers, non-relatives with whom we need to somehow cooperate. Living there is cognitively demanding, requiring not only the ability to master a slew of artificial cultural technologies and norms, but also a capacity for producing novel ones. Living in this niche therefore requires both individual and collective creativity, intensive cooperation, a tolerance for strangers and crowds, and a degree of openness and trust that is entirely unmatched among our closest primate relatives.

Compared to fiercely individualistic and relentlessly competitive chimpanzees, for instance, we are like goofy, tail-wagging puppies. We are almost painfully docile, desperately in need of affection and social contact, and wildly vulnerable to exploitation. As Sarah Blaffer Hardy, an anthropologist and primatologist, notes, it is remarkable that hundreds of people will cram themselves shoulder to shoulder into a tiny airplane, obediently fasten their seat belts, eat their packets of stale crackers, watch movies and read magazines and chat politely with their neighbors, and then file peacefully off at the other end. If you packed a similar number of chimpanzees onto a plane, what you’d end up with at the other end is a long metal tube full of blood and dismembered body parts. Humans are powerful in groups precisely because we are weak as individuals, pathetically eager to connect with one another, and utterly dependent on the group for survival.

The main demands imposed upon us by the odd, crowded cave to which we have adapted can be summed up with what I’ll call the Three Cs: we are required to be creative, cultural, and communal

We get drunk because we are a weird species, the awkward losers of the animal world, and need all of the help we can get. Compared to other primates, we are like goofy dogs: bizarrely tolerant of strangers, open to new experiences, ready to play. This openness to others, while necessary for our success, also creates vulnerability. 

ALCOHOL TAKES THE PFC OFFLINE: There is a body of evidence showing that already-acquired complex, skilled behavior is run by implicit, automatic systems, and that bringing the PFC and executive control online (it is offline when we are drunk) really screws things up. The best way to sabotage a professional tennis player’s serve is to ask them to think about how they are doing it as they do it. Asking a group of people engaged in effortless, pleasurable banter to reflect on their social dynamics is guaranteed to ruin the party. This is why having a fully developed PFC makes you relatively impervious to new knowledge and skills. And this is why the PFC takes so long to mature and childhood extends so long in humans: We have an enormous laundry list of things to learn from the people around us, so we need to remain flexible and receptive for as long as possible. This is also why anything that knocks out the monitoring prefrontal cortex (like alcohol) also offers us certain advantages

ALCOHOL CAN BLUNT ANTI-SOCIAL TENDENCIES: The degree to which we depend on, and cooperate with, one another to achieve things completely beyond our individual abilities looks a bit like bees or ants, with their impressive hives and complicated divisions of labor. But our primate biology leaves us with an evolutionary problem—at a deep level, we nonetheless remain selfish, backstabbing apes. A queen bee never has to worry about insubordination on the part of her subjects. Human rulers get poisoned or decapitated or simply voted out of office all the time, as our set of personal desires, our chimpanzee DNA, rears its individualistic head.

THE ULYSSES PACT (Advanced Directives) One of the many dangers that confront the hero Odysseus in his wide-ranging travels is a passage near the island of the sirens. All sensible sailors steer well clear of these dangerous creatures, who use their seductive song to lure vessels into the shoals and then feast upon the helpless, shipwrecked sailors. Odysseus, however, is never one to shrink from an adventure. A consummate hedonist, he is keen to hear the siren song, which is said to be unimaginably beautiful. He is also well aware of the dangers. In his typically clever fashion, he comes up with a work-around, a trick to prevent his future self from “defection,” from getting itself into trouble. He instructs his sailors to plug up their ears with wax so they cannot hear the dangerous temptation at all, and then to firmly tie him to the mast. In this manner, Odysseus is thus able to hear the sirens while being physically restrained from leaping to his death—which, in the moment of hearing the song, he dearly wishes to do.

Like the ropes binding Odysseus, emotions are only able to function as commitment devices because we can’t simply will ourselves free of them. By falling in love or pledging sincere loyalty to a group, we are effectively tying ourselves to the mast, binding ourselves into emotional commitments that will restrain us from betraying others when temptation inevitably calls.

ALCOHOL TURNS US ALL INTO FOOLS: Significantly, a common theme in cultures from across the world and throughout history is the idea of spiritual or moral perfection as somehow involving regaining the child’s mind, or The Fool’s mind. The Gospel of Matthew declares, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” An early Chinese Daoist text, the Daodejing or Laozi, compares the perfected sage to an infant or small child, perfectly open and receptive to the world. In response to this need, humans sometimes require powerfully enhancing childlike creativity and receptiveness in otherwise fully functional adults. Spiritual practices of various sorts, such as meditation and prayer, can be effective ways to do it. Faster, simpler, and vastly more popular, however, is turning to chemical substances that can temporarily put development and cognitive maturation into reverse.

A QUICK ROUTE TO PFC DE-ACTIVATION: If we want to re-create the cognitive flexibility of a child, a transcranial magnet would do the trick: We can just zap the PFC into submission. Such devices, however, have only become available recently. They are also expensive, not very portable, and typically not welcome at parties. What we need is something really low tech. Something that effectively takes the PFC offline and makes us happy and relaxed, but only for a few hours or so. Something that can be made anywhere, out of almost anything, by anyone, and produced reasonably cheaply. Bonus points if it tastes good, can be easily paired with food, and leads to dancing and other forms of communal sociality.Various religious traditions have availed themselves of this trick. Sufi dancing, group singing and chanting, extended meditation in painful poses (cross-legged; kneeling in prayer), personal mortification (self-flagellation; piercing), or extreme breathing exercises can all provide a similar sort of high, boosting dopamine and endorphins while diverting energy away from the PFC.

The PFC is the most evolutionarily novel part of the brain and the last to mature in development. It is also arguably what makes us human. It is difficult to imagine what life would be like without the ability to control impulses, focus on long-term tasks, reason abstractly, delay gratification, monitor our own functioning, and correct errors. We have also seen, however, that when it comes to successfully responding to the demands of the Three Cs (Community, Culture, Creativity), to the particular challenges of occupying the human ecological niche, the PFC is the enemy. Intoxication is an antidote to cognitive control, a way to temporarily hamstring that opponent to creativity, cultural openness, and communal bonding.

— 

PFC AS APOLLO: Dionysus appeals to the more ancient, primitive regions of our brains, those dedicated to sex, emotions, movement, touch. Apollo finds his natural home in the prefrontal cortex. The PFC is what makes adult humans typically function more like grim wolves than playful Labradors.

Caffeine and nicotine are the wolf’s friends, helping her to focus, wiping away her fatigue, sharpening her attention. These substances are the friends and natural allies of the PFC. They are the tools of Apollo.

Dionysus’ alternative names in Latin was Liber, “The Free.” We need something that will allow us to enjoy all of the wonderful qualities of the childlike mind as adults, to have our Apollonian order and discipline leavened with a bit of Dionysian chaos or relaxation.

ALCOHOL LIBERATES THE INNER CHILD/FOOL: Allowing childlike Dionysus to take over, at least for a spell, is how we have responded to the challenges inherent to being human. Intoxication helps us with the demands of our ecological niche, making it easier for us to be creative, coexist in close quarters with others, keep up our spirits in collective undertakings, and be more open to connecting and learning from others. Even Plato, an almost monomaniacal devotee of Apollo, recognized the need for the kind of mental and spiritual rejuvenation provided by alcohol: “The souls of the drinkers get red-hot, like glowing iron, and thus turn softer and more youthful, so that anyone who has the ability and skill to mold and educate them finds them as easy to handle as when they were young.” And getting drunk also helps us with the communal demands of being human, making us simultaneously more trusting and more trustworthy.

Whether literally or spiritually, from time to time, we need to get drunk. Apollo must be subordinated to Dionysus; the wolf needs to give way to the Labrador; the adult needs to cede her place to the child. In his seminal work on chemical intoxication, The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley wisely observes that “systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born.” As Iain McGilchrist’s work on the divided/bilateral brain has shown us, our Apollonian functioning arises more from our Left Hemisphere, and the Dionysian Communal, Cultural, Creative manifestations from the Right Hemisphere.

ALCOHOLIC INSPIRATION: Apollo, the sober grown-up, can’t be in charge all of the time. Dionysus, like a hapless toddler, may have trouble getting his shoes on, but he sometimes manages to stumble on novel solutions that Apollo would never see. Intoxication technologies, alcohol paramount among them, have historically been one way we have managed to leave the door open for Dionysus. And it is sipping, dancing, wildly ecstatic Dionysus who freed us from our selfish ape selves long enough to drag us, stumbling and laughing, into civilization.

BEER BEFORE BREAD: Archaeologists working in the Fertile Crescent have noted that at the earliest known sites the particular tools being used and varieties of grain being grown were more suited to making beer than bread. One recent discovery found evidence of bread and/or beer making at a site in northeastern Jordan dated to 14,400 years ago, predating the emergence of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. Given that bread was still millennia away from becoming a dietary staple, the most likely motivation for these hunter-gatherers to hunker down and get to work was to produce the starring liquid ingredient of communal feasts and ecstatic religious rituals.3 It is also worth noting that the world’s oldest extant recipe is for beer—part of an early Sumerian myth—and that our earliest representations of group feasting include obvious depictions of alcohol swilling. The human mastery of fermentation into alcohol is so ancient that certain yeast strains associated with wine and sake show evidence of having been domesticated 12,000 years ago or more.

 Similarly, it is possible that the cultivation of tobacco in North and South America, especially in regions outside its native range, inspired the manipulation of other plant species and thereby the beginnings of agriculture.

Our modern word “bridal, comes from the Old English bryd ealu or “bride ale,” which was exchanged between bride and groom to seal their marriage, and crucially the new bond between their families.

All of this suggests that it is quite likely that the desire to get drunk or high gave rise to agriculture, rather than the other way around. Agriculture, of course, is the foundation of civilization. This means that our taste for liquid or smokable neurotoxins, the most convenient means for taking the PFC offline, may have been the catalyst for settled agricultural life. 

Moreover, intoxicants not only lured us into civilization but also helped make it possible for us to become civilized. By causing humans to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal—to live like social insects, despite our ape nature—intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups, domesticate increasing numbers of plants and animals, accumulate new technologies, and thereby create the sprawling civilizations that have made us the dominant mega-fauna on the planet. In other words, it is Dionysus, with his skinful of wine and his seductive panpipes, who is the founder of civilization; Apollo just came along for the ride.

ALCOHOL’S “MAGIC”: One of the many gifts attributed to Dionysus by the Greeks was the power of transformation. He was not just an inebriate, but something of a magician. He could turn himself into an animal, and he was the god who granted the unfortunate King Midas the power to turn anything he touched into gold. As the god of intoxication, he could turn sane people mad. Or, even more impressively, he could transform task-focused, suspicious, aggressive, and fiercely independent primates into relaxed, creative, and trusting social beings. 

ALCOHOL AS MUSE: A familiar trope in cultures around the world and throughout history is alcohol as muse. As Da’an Pan notes, “In traditional Chinese culture…wine plays the paradoxical role of intoxicator and facilitator of artistic imagination, ‘awakening’ drinkers to their optimum creative moments…to be intoxicated is to be inspired.” It is not uncommon for ancient Chinese poets to have entire series of poems under the rubric, “Written While Drunk,” including this one from the Zhang Yue (667 to 730): Once drunk, my delight knows no limits—Even better than before I’m drunk. My movements, my expressions, all turn into dance, And every word out of my mouth turns into a poem! This recalls an ancient Greek saying: If with water you fill up your glasses You’ll never write anything wise But wine is the horse of Parnassus That carries a bard to the skies.

LOST WEEKEND QUOTE: “It shrinks my liver, doesn’t it, Nat? It pickles my kidneys. Yes. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I’m above the ordinary. I’m competent, supremely competent. I’m walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I’m one of the great ones. I’m Michelangelo moulding the beard of Moses. I’m Van Gogh, painting pure sunlight. I’m Horowitz playing the Emperor Concerto. I’m John Barrymore before the movies got him by the throat. I’m a holdup man. I’m Jesse James and his two brothers, all three of them. I’m W. Shakespeare. And out there it’s not Third Avenue any longer. It’s the Nile. The Nile, Nat, and down it moves the barge of Cleopatra. Listen: 

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description: she did lie”

 

 —

 

SHAMANS AND INTOXICANTS: So ancient are shamanistic religions that some claim they can be found even among other, extinct hominid lines. The so-called “flower burial” in a cave in northern Iraq, from approximately 60,000 years ago, contains the remains of a Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) male who was described in early reports as a possible shaman, based on pollen traces suggesting that he had been laid to rest on a bed of flowers that included a wide range of medicinal and intoxicating drugs.

 

PFC OFFLINE, BETTER LATERAL THINKING: As we have seen earlier, it is the PFC, the seat of Apollo, that is the problem here. We noted that adults with PFC damage, or those who have their PFCs temporarily taken offline by a nice zap from a transcranial magnet, do better on creativity tasks. Similarly helpful is an overall passive or relaxed state of mind, indicated by a high level of alpha-wave activity in the brain, which reflects a downregulation of goal-oriented and top-down control regions like the PFC. In one study, experimenters used biofeedback to increase alpha-wave activity in a group of subjects. The participants were wired up to EEG monitors, shown a screen with a green bar indicating their level of alpha activity, and instructed to raise the bar as high as possible. To help them, they were given hints that would be familiar to anyone who has tried meditation: Relax your mind, breathe deeply and regularly, let all thoughts and feelings come and go freely, feel your body relaxing into your posture. Shortly thereafter, the subjects who successfully raised their alpha activity outperformed their peers on a lateral thinking task.

 —

 

ALCOHOL PROMOTES LATERAL THINKING: As the creative primate, humans are crucially dependent on lateral thinking. We require a continuous stream of novel insights and a constant reorganization of existing knowledge. Children, with their underdeveloped PFCs, are superstars in this regard. But as we’ve seen, the very thing that makes them so creative renders most of their creations useless, at least from the pragmatic perspective of goal-oriented adults. Bizarrely distorted Lego worlds featuring post-apocalyptic, scavenged-parts vehicles driven by Lego people with Barbie-doll heads, or menageries of superhero figurines and stuffies organized into formal English tea parties, reflect impressive out-of-the-box thinking. But what society really needs right now is new vaccines and more efficient lithium-ion batteries. If your goal is to maximize implementable cultural innovation, your ideal person would be someone with the body of an adult but, for a brief period, the mind of a child. Someone with downregulated cognitive control, heightened openness to experience, and a mind prone to wander off in unpredictable directions. In other words, a drunk, stoned, or tripping adult. Societies have come to associate intoxication with creativity because chemical intoxication has been a crucial and widely used technology to effect this transition from adult to mental childhood in a relatively controlled manner.

 

EARLY AGRICULTURAL ALCOHOLICS: Greg Wadley and Brian Hayden, recent and prominent proponents of the beer before bread hypothesis, argue that the Neolithic transition to agriculture seriously increased both crowding and inequality. Hunter-gatherer bands likely consisted of twenty to forty people roaming across a broad landscape in search of game and plants. Those who lived through the lifestyle revolution that first occurred in the Fertile Crescent, when mobile hunter-gatherers began to settle into much larger and more sedentary communities, must have felt like rats thrown into a too-small cage with pretty crummy provisions. It certainly involved a marked decrease in quality and variety of food, from a diverse mix of wild meats, plants, and fruits to a diet based on filling but dull and vitamin-poor bread or other starches. There was also a steady and dramatic increase in both crowding and inequality. Even 12,000 years ago, as Wadley and Hayden note, villages in the Fertile Crescent contained 200 to 300 people and already showed signs of private property, wealth inequality, and social stratification. After that, things got much worse, very quickly.

ALL-DAY DRINKING: Nowadays we tend to reserve chemical stress alleviation for the end of the workday, relaxing with a drink or two at home or at the pub. Our ancestors, on the other hand, generally took the edge off with beers that were quite weak by contemporary standards, and spaced out their self-medication over the entire course of the workday. In any case, if the beer before bread advocates are correct, alcohol not only drove the creation of civilization by motivating early farmers to settle down and produce grain to ferment, but also by providing them with an invaluable tool to manage the psychological stress that came with this dramatic change in lifestyle.

ALCOHOL HELPS US TO ASSESS TRUSTWORTHINESS: Research shows that we size up and evaluate the trustworthiness of others almost immediately upon meeting them. One study found that subjects judged the trustworthiness of faces within 100 milliseconds, and that these judgments did not change even when people were given more information or time. This tendency to instantly peg people as likely cooperators or not appears quite early in development, with children above the age of three quickly and readily classing faces as “mean” or “nice.”42 These gut-level assessments are consistent across cultures, and play a surprisingly outsized role even in formal contexts, like court cases or political elections, where you would expect people to be guided by more abstract and rational criteria.

Formulating a lie or faking an emotion requires effort and attention. If you want to make it harder for liars to lie, one promising approach would be to exploit this weakness by downregulating their cognitive control. Ideally, you’d want to do this in any important social situation where cheating might be a concern, and in an unobtrusive manner. No transcranial magnets allowed. Bonus points if you can do it in a way that is actually pleasurable and also makes people happy and more focused on those around them. You see where I am going with this. I’ve spent so much time here on the evolutionary dynamics of commitment and cheater detection because the threat presented by the hypocrite, the false friend, is an existential one for any community. This is why helping to unmask fakers, and thereby solidify interpersonal trust, is a crucial function that intoxicants have played in human civilization. There is a very good reason that, in societies as different as those in ancient Greece, ancient China, medieval Europe, and the prehistoric Pacific Islands, no gathering of potentially hostile individuals occurred without the inclusion of staggering quantities of intoxicants.

ALCOHOL FACILITATES POLITICAL CONSENSUS: A recently discovered ancient Chinese text, dating to the fourth or third century BCE and written on bamboo strips, contains the evocative declaration, “Harmony between states brought about through the drinking of wine.”

In ancient China no political agreement was reached without the participants first voluntarily impairing their brains with carefully timed and calibrated shots of liquid neurotoxin. The Roman historian Tacitus noted that, among the barbarian tribes of Germany, every political or military decision had to be run through the gauntlet of drunken communal opinion: “It is at their feasts that they generally consult on the reconciliation of enemies, on the forming of matrimonial alliances, on the choice of chiefs, finally even on peace and war, for they think that at no time is the mind more open to simplicity of purpose or more warmed to noble aspirations. A race without either natural or acquired cunning, they disclose their hidden thoughts in the freedom of the festivity. Thus the sentiments of all having been discovered and laid bare, the discussion is renewed on the following day…They deliberate when they have no power to dissemble; they resolve when error is impossible.”

ALCOHOL FACILITATES POLITICAL CONSENSUS:Just as we shake hands to show that we are not carrying a physical weapon, communal intoxication allows us to cognitively disarm in the presence of others. By the tenth toast of sorghum liquor at a Chinese banquet, or the final round of wine at a Greek symposium, or the end of Purim, the attendees have all effectively laid their PFCs on the table, exposing themselves as cognitively defenseless. This is the social function that Henry Kissinger had in mind when he supposedly told the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, “I think if we drink enough mao-tai we can solve anything.” Intoxication has therefore played a critical role helping humans get past the cooperation dilemmas that pervade social life, especially in large-scale societies. For groups to move past suspicion and second-guessing, our sneaky conscious mind needs to be at least temporarily paralyzed, and a healthy dose of chemical intoxicant is the quickest, most effective, and most pleasant way to accomplish this goal.

BOOZE AND UNITY AT WORK: The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was a union in the early twentieth century that needed to solve a serious public goods problem: getting ethnically diverse, mutually suspicious workers with different trades and backgrounds to put aside their narrow personal interests and present a unified front in high-stakes collective bargaining against capital owners. The degree to which they relied upon heavy drinking, combined with music and singing, is reflected in the nickname by which they are best known today, the Wobblies, most likely a reference to their manner of stumbling from saloon to saloon.   

These drunken, singing Wobblies, with their motto “an injury to one is an injury to all,” were quite successful in bringing together up to 150,000 workers across a wide variety of industries and winning important concessions from employers.

Note:

Would they have been able to do this without alcohol we might ask, as we may ask lots of questions when we remove morality, and idealised view of ourselves, transmitted via genes as well as memes, from our human equations. Maybe our species are only able to do certain things that require some form of vulnerability when they are to some extent, high.

OLD SKOOL IDEAS ABOUT ALCOHOL: Frederick the Great of Prussia, in 1777, issued a diatribe against the novel, and in his view dangerous, habit of drinking coffee instead of beer: “It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the amount of money that goes out of the country as a consequence. Everybody is using coffee; this must be prevented. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were both his ancestors and officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war.”

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THOSE WHO PUKE TOGETHER, STAY TOGETHER: Classic anthropological work by Dwight Heath, on the remote Camba people of the Bolivian Amazon, documented the manner in which Camba men use alcoholic binges, often drinking to the point of unconsciousness, to enhance their social solidarity and overcome interpersonal conflicts. Those who puke together stay together. 

In ancient China, “It could often be seen as an insult not to get drunk, but on the other hand, one was also not supposed to get sloppy, as it were, because that would impact the maintenance of deferential relationships.” 

“When early in fieldwork I asked a group of longshoremen why someone who was married, young, fit and hardworking—all well regarded qualities in a workmate—was nonetheless an outside man, the answer given was that he was a ‘loner.’ When I queried what form this took I was told, ‘He doesn’t drink—that’s what I mean by a loner.’”

ALCOHOLIC ECSTASY AS A COMMUNAL GLUE: Robin Osborne’s musings on the ancient Greek symposium:

Intoxication was not something merely tolerated in others because of the pleasures it gave to the self. Intoxication also both revealed the true individual, and bonded the group. The intoxicated…faced up to how they ordered the world and where they belonged in that world; those who would fight, and die, together established their trust in each other by daring to let wine reveal who they were and what they valued.

“Ecstasy” comes from the Greek ek-stasis, or literally “standing outside oneself.” Beyond allowing potentially hostile individuals to better trust and like one another, extreme levels of intoxication—especially when combined with music and dance—can be a tool for effectively erasing the distinctions between self and other. Surrendering to the abandonment that comes with drunkenness thus often serves as a cultural signal that one has become fully identified with, or absorbed into, the group.

Emily Pitek, found that, of the 140 cultures where “ecstatic religious practices” are mentioned, 100 (71 percent) also note the presence of “alcoholic beverages,” “drinking (social),” “drunkenness (prevalence),” “recreational and non-therapeutic drugs,” and/or “hallucinogenic drugs.

“Ecstasy!” wrote Gordon Wasson, an amateur mushroom enthusiast who is best known for championing the case that ancient Vedic soma was derived from the Amanita muscaria, or “fly agaric,” toadstool. “In common parlance ecstasy is fun. But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles. After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe? The unknowing vulgar abuse the word; we must recapture its full and terrifying sense.”

“Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the YES function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth.”

—William James

CODIFIED DRUNKENNESS: Writing of the use of chicha among traditional cultures in the Andes, Guy Duke observes: “In the Andes, public drunkenness was a central aspect to religious and social life…Intoxication was seen as a means of gaining a deeper connection to the spiritual realm and no ritual took place without inducement of intoxication among the participants…The purpose was to get as drunk as possible and show one’s inebriation publicly as a sign of immersing oneself in the ceremony…Not only was ritual public drunkenness sought, in many cases it was mandatory.”

LIFE, DEATH, ALCOHOL: The efficiency with which alcohol and other substances decenter the self is the reason that intoxicant-fueled ecstasy is as ancient as human ritual itself. Jars containing our earliest documented alcoholic beverage—a “Neolithic grog,” made of honey mead, rice beer, and fruit wine—from the Jiahu tomb (7000 to 6000 BCE) in the Yellow River Valley, were “carefully placed near the mouths of the deceased, perhaps for easier drinking in the hereafter,” and the contents were no doubt also imbibed by those performing and attending the funeral.The most dramatic archaeological remains from Bronze Age China are enormous, elaborate ritual vessels designed for serving and drinking alcohol. Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age tombs are packed with drinking paraphernalia, musical instruments, and food remains, suggesting that, from the beginning of documented Chinese history, the dead were sent off in wild bacchanalia that culminated with the attendees, drunk as skunks, tossing their cups into the grave.

NEUROCHEMICAL GLUE: Dunbar and his colleagues see the physiological effects of alcohol, in particular, as a crucial component in social rituals. Specifically, they point to the endorphin release triggered by booze, especially when drinking is combined with music, dance, and ritual, as a crucial factor allowing humans to cooperate on a scale unattainable by our monkey or ape relatives. Endorphins and other opioids are stimulated naturally in most mammals by sexual intercourse, pregnancy, birth, and breast-feeding, and all play a strong role in both mate pair bonding and mother-infant bonding. What humans have figured out, however, is that a tasty liquid can be consumed to expand the reach of this “neurochemical glue.” One would expect that an increase in serotonin, another effect of alcohol and other intoxicants, would add to the bonding mix. In addition to enhancing individual mood, increased serotonin has been shown to reduce selfish behavior in Prisoner’s Dilemma games, while depleting serotonin through blockers, such as tryptophan, has the opposite effect. This synergy has perhaps found its perfected form in modern rave culture, where the powerful boost in serotonin created by MDMA intoxication is combined with driving, repetitive beats and group synchrony.

INTOXICATION TO CIVILISATION: By enhancing creativity, dampening stress, facilitating social contact, enhancing trust and bonding, forging group identity, and reinforcing social roles and hierarchy, intoxicants have played a crucial role in allowing hunting and gathering humans to enter into the hive life of agricultural villages, towns, and cities. This process has gradually scaled up the scope of human cooperation, eventually creating modern civilization as we know it. 

DECISIVE DRINKING: Iain Gately notes that in ancient Persia no important decision was made without being discussed over alcohol, although it would not actually be implemented until reviewed sober the next day. Conversely, no sober decision would be put into practice until it could be considered, by the group, while drunk.

  —

COMMUNISM’S FOUNDING STATUS: People say a lot of stupid things when drunk. But novel or innovative ones tend to rise to the surface of the torrent of ideas that flows back and forth in a group when everyone is relaxed and happy, defenses down and open to insight. One of the most significant political ideologies of modern times, communism, was forged by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx over “ten beer-soaked days”10 in Paris in 1844;

This is precisely why, in Oxford colleges, evenings of discussion and debate formally begin with the Latin declaration, nunc est bidendum (“Now is the time for drinking”).17

With gently downregulated PFCs,students speak out more freely, make intellectual connections with one another, and get to witness their mentors working things out on the fly, partially and temporarily free from the fetters of academic hierarchies. Colleagues float ideas that would otherwise never bubble up into consciousness and recklessly venture out of their intellectual safe zones, blundering across disciplinary boundaries that often desperately need to be crossed.

GETTING HIGH ON THE NEW: Aldous Huxley, reflecting on an unusual flower arrangement seen during a mescaline trip, felt that he had been given the glimpse of “what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.20

GETTING HIGH FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: LSD was instrumental in the creative design process that gave rise to circuit chips, and Apple founder Steve Jobs claimed that his experiments with LSD ranked as some of his most important life experiences. The synergy between San Francisco drug-based hippy culture and Silicon Valley innovation has been replayed in other places around the globe, from Berlin to Beijing, where intoxicant-heavy underground or bohemian cultures have rubbed shoulders with new industries dependent on creative insight rather than manufacturing muscle. A modern twist in hallucinogen use—a trend pioneered, as one might expect, in Silicon Valley—is making psychedelics easier to integrate into everyday life through the practice of “microdosing.”Microdosing involves taking frequent but small amounts of purified LSD or psilocybin, on the order of one-tenth of the normal dose, to induce mild, but sustainable, highs. The journalist Emma Hogan has documented widespread microdosing among knowledge workers in the San Francisco Bay Area. One interviewee, “Nathan,” credits microdosed LSD with increasing his productivity, giving him a creative edge, and magnifying his impact at investor-pitch meetings. “I view it as my little treat. My secret vitamin,” he told her. “It’s like taking spinach and you’re Popeye.” Hogan quotes an observation by Tim Ferriss, an angel investor and author, that “the billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis.”

WHICH SUBSTANCES ARE MORE DANGEROUS: Despite lurid reports in the 1960s about LSD-induced insanity or tripping teenagers leaping off roofs, psychedelics are considerably safer, in most regards, than alcohol or cannabis. They are non-addictive, selectively target certain parts of the brain rather than playing havoc with the entire brain-body system, and cause no known side effects. In a 2009 briefing30 the U.K.’s top drug adviser, Dr. David Nutt, ranked LSD (along with cannabis and MDMA) as less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, although he was later forced to resign because of the resulting controversy.

DEPATTERNING: Pollan’s popular account of psychedelics was inspired in part by the work of Giorgio Samorini, who has similarly argued that chemical intoxicants have played a crucial role, especially in times of rapid change, as a “depatterning factor” that increases cognitive and behavioral diversity in many animal populations, including humans.32

BUILDING TRUST VIA INTOXICATION: One of the most effective mechanisms human beings have invented for assessing the trustworthiness of a new potential cooperator is the long, drunken banquet. As we have seen, from ancient China to ancient Greece to Oceania, no negotiation was ever concluded, no treaty ever signed, without copious quantities of chemical intoxicants. In the modern world, with all of the remote communication technologies at our disposal, it should genuinely surprise us how often we need a good, old-fashioned, in-person drinking session before we feel comfortable about signing our name on the dotted line.This is not a foolish desire: As we’ve seen, a PFC-impaired person is a more trustworthy one.

SOCIAL CONTAGION: The results were clear. “Alcohol consumption,” the authors concluded, “enhanced individual and group-level behaviors associated with positive affect, reduced individual-level behaviors associated with negative affect, and elevated self-reported bonding.” A later analysis of the social dynamics reflected in the videos found that intoxication enhanced the “contagion” of smiling and positive affect: genuine smiles that popped up in drinking groups were more likely to spread to everyone, rather than simply being ignored. This contagion effect was particularly dramatic in male-dominated groups, where smiles in the placebo and control conditions tended to go unreciprocated. Crucially, these positive effects on group bonding were driven by the pharmacological effects of the alcohol: The placebo group resembled the control group, and both differed significantly from the alcohol group on all measures. One recent summary of research on the effect of alcohol on social cohesion and intimacy concludes that it “can increase self-disclosure, can decrease social anxiety, and consistently increases extraversion, including a gregariousness facet subscale. In addition, research has found that alcohol can increase happiness and sociability, helping behaviors, generosity, and social bonding, and decrease negative emotional responses to social stressors.”

THE LOCAL PUB: Researchers found that people who had a neighborhood pub that they frequented regularly had more close friends, felt happier, were more satisfied with their lives, more embedded into their local communities, and more trusting of those around them. Those who never drank did consistently worse on all these criteria, while those who frequented a local did better than regular drinkers who had no local that they visited regularly. A more detailed analysis suggested that it was the frequency of pub visits that lay at the heart of this: it seemed that those who visited the same pub more often were more engaged with, and trusting of, their local community, and as a result they had more friends.

ALCOHOLIC BONDING: Tao Yuanming, has a line describing a reunion with a dear friend he hasn’t seen in a long time: “Without saying a word, our hearts were drunk; and not from sharing a cup of wine.” As Michael Ing observes, “For Tao, friendship is intoxicating, and true friends understand each other without having to say a word. Friendship, like [wine], nullifies the limitations of self and time. It encourages the loss of oneself in another, and heightens an awareness of this other, more communal, self.”82 Although Tao himself attributes his intoxication to friendship, not wine, it is important to realize that this explicit disclaimer is a poetic trick directing our attention to the substance that actually facilitated this meeting of the hearts.

ALCOHOL AND INTROVERSION: Some research suggests that the instrumental use of alcohol might be especially important for introverts or those with social phobias, who strategically use alcohol to effect “a self-induced, time-restricted personality change,” temporarily transforming themselves into extroverts for long enough to make it through a cocktail reception or dinner party.86 (Introverted readers may well recognize this particular mind hack.)

THE BURNING MAN EFFECT: Although chemical intoxicant use is an assumed ingredient in these events, the degree to which the drugs themselves are responsible for producing Durkheimian effervescence and group bonding remains an open question. A recent study of multiday mass gathering events in the U.S. and the U.K.—specifically outdoor festivals and concerts that mingled music, dancing, synchrony, and lots of drugs—took an initial step in the direction of untangling these factors. The researchers went on-site and interviewed over 1,200 attendees about the nature and quality of their experiences, as well as their recent psychoactive drug use. They found that drug use—particularly the use of psychedelics and benzos, such as Valium—correlated with an increased likelihood to report that the event was accompanied by positive mood, involved social connection, and was a transformative experience.98 Dancing and listening to music was fine, but drugs appeared to provide the catalyst for transformation and bonding. This study thus provides some very preliminary evidence that chemical intoxicants play a crucial, and too often unmentioned, role in satisfying a basic human need for ecstasy.

THE FOURTH DRIVE: Ronald Siegel believes that “intoxication is the fourth drive,” after food, sex, and sleep.

ALCOHOL’S ABOLISHMENT OF THE CURSE OF SELF: As Albert Camus once observed, in his reflections on the Sisyphean nature of human existence, “If I were a cat among animals, this life would have meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I would be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness.” One of the primary functions of alcohol and other chemical intoxicants is to, at least temporarily, abolish what the social psychologist Mark Leary has called the “curse of the self,” our goal-oriented, anxiety-prone inner color commentator who is always getting in the way of our ability to simply be and enjoy the world. “Had the human self been installed with a mute button or off switch,” Leary writes, “the self would not be the curse to happiness that it often is.” Human selves do not, in fact, come pre-installed with a mute button, which is precisely why we reach for the bottle or joint. “We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education,” Aldous Huxley observes, because “the urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone all the time.”This urge finds its outlet in spiritual practices, like prayer, meditation, or yoga, and also in our drive to drink and get high.

JUMP OUT OF YOUR MIND: Getting the afflicted person to “jump out” of their conscious mind is one way to describe the effect of dialing down the PFC. Like the rats in the experiments with overcrowded cages, humans in civilization live squeezed together, constantly rubbing shoulders with strangers, in a way that goes fundamentally against our chimpanzee nature. We delay gratification, accept complex suboptimal compromises, work long days at boring jobs, and endure tedious meetings. We are particularly in need of having our unconscious “opened like a flower”—at least on occasion.

ALCOHOL AND SOCIALITY: Sitting in of an evening, meditating on the Bible, whittling away at a piece of wood or spinning yarn for knitting, was preferable to taking alcohol in groups. In this way, the campaign against intoxication succeeded in atomizing individuals, a move that many of the mass leisure pursuits of the twentieth century would reinforce by encouraging them to combine only in order to stare in ordered passivity at some entertainment spectacle, whether in the cinema, concert-hall, football ground or in virtual reality, whereas intoxication had brought them together in interacting, dynamic gatherings.

 

VICTORIAN MORALISING MEETS 20TH C. MEDICAL SCIENCE: 2018 Lancet article that has haunted our discussion, a terrible document that concluded definitively that the only safe level of alcohol consumption was zero.

 As Stuart Walton observes in his brilliant, wickedly funny cultural history of intoxication, Out of It, “There is a sedimentary layer of apologetics, of bashful, tittering euphemism, at the bottom of all talk about alcohol as an intoxicant that was laid down in the nineteenth century, which not even the liberal revolution of the 1960s quite managed to dislodge.” It is worth quoting at length his diatribe against the whiff of Victorian hypocrisy that seems to invariably accompany any discussion of alcohol: A hysterical editorial in a tabloid newspaper calling for drinks companies to be made to pay the medical expenses of cirrhosis patients may simply be called the mood-music of the new repression, but how to react to this introductory comment in a monumental history of winemaking by one of its most elegant chroniclers, Hugh Johnson? “It was not the subtle bouquet of wine, or a lingering aftertaste of violets and raspberries, that first caught the attention of our ancestors. It was, I’m afraid, its effect.” Quite so, but why the deprecatory mumble? What is there to be “afraid” of in acknowledging that wine’s parentage lies in alcohol, that our ancestors were attracted to it because the first experience of inebriation was like nothing else in the phenomenal world? And what else in it attracts the oenophile of tomorrow in the first place, if not the fact that she found it a pleasant way of getting intoxicated today? Can we not say these things out loud, as if we were adults whose lives were already chock-full of sensory experience?

It is in many ways easier to be frank today about one’s sexual habits than it is to talk about what intoxicants one uses…rendering us all shame-faced inarticulates on the subject.”

 —

THE MORALITY OF GETTING HIGH: We work from home, collaborate online, network over meals and at receptions, wedge exercise or a stolen moment with our children in between a conference call and a team brainstorming session. Psychoactives—not only pure stimulants like coffee and nicotine, but intoxicants like alcohol and cannabis—might therefore be even more important for us today than they have been historically. Chemical intoxicants may have lured early hunter-gatherers into the agricultural life, and then served as a crucial tool for allowing them to adapt to it. Despite the other tools we currently have at our disposal, we descendants of those first domesticated apes may require chemical support now more than ever. I would submit that one reason we have trouble properly valuing the benefits derived from chemical intoxicants is because of a false, but deeply seated, dualism between mind and body that colors our judgment. We have no problem with people altering their mood by watching fluff TV or going for a jog, but grow uncomfortable when their psychoactive hack involves a corkscrew and chilled bottle of Chardonnay. A person who meditates for an hour and achieves x percent reduction in stress and experiences a y percent rise in mood is viewed in a much more positive light than one who spent that hour achieving precisely the same results by downing a couple pints of beer. Some of the variance here can be explained by the potential negatives that accompany alcohol consumption—potential for addiction, truckload of calories, damage to the liver—but this is only part of the story.

UNACKNOWLEDGED EFFECTS OF SUBSTANCES: Mircea Eliade, in his landmark comparative study of shamanism, famously dismissed drug-induced shamanistic experiences as a “mechanical and corrupt method of reproducing ‘ecstasy,’” a “vulgar substitute for ‘pure’ trance.”

  —

NATURAL/UNNATURAL: A FALSE DISTINCTION? Those who are offended by the idea that the swallowing of a pill may contribute to a genuinely religious experience should remember that all the standard mortifications—fasting, voluntary sleeplessness and self-torture—inflicted upon themselves by the ascetics of every religion for the purpose of acquiring merit, are also, like the mind-changing drugs, powerful devices for altering the chemistry of the body in general and nervous system in particular.… God, [one might insist], is a spirit and is to be worshiped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in some way or another, all of our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely “spiritual,” purely “intellectual,” purely “aesthetic,” it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence.

ALCOHOL AND VIOLENCE: Alcohol is the only drug, besides pure stimulants like meth, that is known to increase physical aggression and violence. Cannabis, kava, MDMA, and psychedelics all produce either mellow or introverted highs. Alcohol’s stimulating effect, when combined with cognitive myopia and loss of executive function, can induce aggressive or violent behavior, especially in people with already low levels of cognitive control.

Intoxicated, heterosexual men are more likely to misread female behavior as sexually suggestive.54 Significantly, there was a clear specificity to this bias: Men in one study showed reduced ability to distinguish between generic friendliness and sexual interest while remaining capable of accurately processing other relevant cues, such as how provocatively the women were dressed.

A probably related, and particularly disturbing, finding comes from studies where men are shown pornographic clips depicting (fictionally) either consensual sex or rape and have their physiological arousal measured. Sober male subjects are more aroused by portrayals of consensual sex, whereas intoxicated men are aroused by both.

COUPLES WHO DRINK TOGETHER: Alcohol may play a similarly double-edged role when it comes to personal relationships in industrialized societies. Survey data suggests that married couples who drink together, and in similar amounts, report higher levels of marital satisfaction and have lower rates of divorce. Studies have also shown that drinking together, as opposed to drinking apart, has positive effects on couples’ interactions the following day.67 One way that we would expect modest amounts of alcohol to be helpful to couples would be in resolving conflicts or tensions, with the combination of enhanced honesty, focus on the moment, and elevated mood making it easier to raise and process difficult emotions or deep concerns.

GETTING THERE BY OTHER MEANS: The chanting of the curandero, the medicine man, the shaman; the endless psalm singing and sutra intoning of Christian and Buddhist monks; the shouting and howling, hour after hour, of revivalists—under all the diversities of theological belief and aesthetic convention, the psychochemico-physiological intention remains constant. To increase the concentration of CO2 in the lungs and blood and so to lower the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve, until it will admit biologically useless material from Mind-at-Large—this, though the shouters, singers and mutterers did not know it, has been at all times the real purpose and point of magic spells, of mantrams, litanies, psalms and sutras. The “cerebral reducing valve” of which Huxley speaks is, of course, the PFC, the center of cognitive control and rational focus. His argument is that, despite the diversity of theological views that inform them, the goal of all of these religious practices is physiologically identical: to reduce the activity of the PFC and boost endorphins and other “feel good” hormones, allowing the narrow individual self to be open to the “Mind-at-Large.”

Pentecostal christians seem to be able to use prayer-induced glossolalia to knock out their PFC as effectively as having downed a few glasses of Chardonnay. Pentecostal services involve intense and extended singing and dancing that can lead to speaking in tongues and other expressions of having been possessed by the Holy Spirit. For as we have discussed, there is more than one way to skin a prefrontal cortex: Intense physical activity can have similar effects as one or two shots of whiskey.

GETTING THERE BY OTHER MEANS: In the 1970s, the psychiatrist and spiritualist guru Stanislav Grof developed a technique dubbed “holotropic breathwork,” whereby intense hyperventilation is used to starve the brain of oxygen and induce LSD-like experiences. In a review of non-chemically induced “hypnagogic states,” or episodes of dreamlike disassociation from waking reality, the psychologist Dieter Vaitl and colleagues list a variety of techniques by which such states can be induced, including extreme temperatures, starvation and fasting, sexual activity and orgasm, breathing exercises, sensory deprivation or overload, rhythm-induced trance (drumming and dancing), relaxation and meditation, hypnosis and biofeedback.

THE FIRST MIRACLE? Jesus performed many impressive miracles, including walking on water and raising Lazarus from the dead. But it is worth noting that the water into wine feat was his first.

IN A NUTSHELL: As we have seen, besides its immediate hedonic value, the cognitive and behavioral effects of alcohol intoxication represent, from a cultural evolutionary perspective, a robust and elegant response to the challenges of getting a selfish, suspicious, narrowly goal-oriented primate to loosen up and connect with strangers.

 

FURTHER READING:

Brown, Stewart (2009). Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Penguin.

  5241

Henrich, Joseph. (2015). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

 

Siegel, Ronald. (2005). Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.

  Walton 2001, Intoxicology: A Cultural History of Drink and Drugs (2016).

Categories
Feel Better

My SPLGE-R sign off (explained)

For many, many years now, I have signed off all my emails to the people I care about with the word “warmly”.

I can’t remember where I picked this up from. It was not my own invention. But at some point, I must have received an email from someone with a “warmly” preceding their name, and felt with great pleasure some of the genuine warmth baked into that salutation. Being a human monkey, in true monkey-see, monkey-do spirit, I wanted to pass those warm vibes onto you! Hopefully I have in some way.

For me, “warmly”, is akin to saying “with love”. And why would we not end all our communications in that way, including our professional ones? Warmly has worked well for me up till now, and I still prefer it to the common (and to my ears, less warm and less loving) sign-offs such as “cheers” or “best” or “regards”, as well as the many different forms of “yours” (sincerely, faithfully, truly etc.).

The problems with off-the-peg sign-offs though, including “warmly”, is that through usage they somehow lose their presence and emotional charge, becoming a kind of empty placeholder, a nothing.

So just for fun, I thought I might come up with a few new sign-offs, starting with this one: SPLGE-R.

WTF IS SPLGE-R?!?

SPLGE(R) is an acronym for a set of mind-prompts (re-MIND-ers?) which have helped me to get through 2020.

Twenty-twenty, I need not tell you, has been a very very difficult year for all of us human animals, and also our collective cultures (political, financial, sociocultural, and psychological). However you’ve experienced it in your personal realm, I think it’s fair to say, that 2020 has been an ongoing nappy rash of a year: raw, painful, and legitimately distressing.

As well as relying on the support and care of others (strangers and people close to me), I have mainly used different parts of SPLGE-R to keep myself sane. Well, sane-ish.

As you will see, there are no high-falutin’ concepts in SPLGE-R, and that is why they work! When I’m freaking out, the collected works of Sigmund Freud, or any other psychotherapist or psychologist since him, are of no use to me.

But rather as a moment-by-moment way of keeping myself from flying off into unconscious suffering SPLGE-R is for me, at the end of 2020, the best synthesis of psychological and spiritual wisdom I can find to help keep myself on track.

SPLGE-R! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

You know when your mind takes you off into painful thoughts or emotions – maybe something connected to recent or far-past concerns?

You know when your mind  rushes forwards into worried and anxious future pain-states, which it does pretty much on a constant basis, this being one of the its main functions?

SPLGE-R brings you back to your sane self.

By “sane” I just mean “healthy: from the Latin sanitas (health), but extending beyond physical health into well-being.

Sanity, cannot be found in the mind as far as I can tell.

I can only tell you this after surviving five decades my own mind (which has been a joy, as well as a trial), and working quite closely with other minds for a decade or two. But of course I only primarily have experience of my own mind and those of others who open their minds and hearts to me, so maybe my experiential knowledge is not a universal truth. Maybe you have found enduring sanity in your mind? Have you? If so, I’d love to know how you did it 🙂

I do think we can find sanity through the mind though, through working with the mind in certain specific ways. I think psychotherapy is mainly about this, although often the SPLGE stuff gets left out when the mind goes into overdrive. 

SPLGE-R is therefore a sanity-seeking path, which in its simplest form, as an email sign-off, might be read as: may you, the recipient of this message have access in your here-and-now to peace, love and joy (aka sanity, or well-being).

The route to that well-being, imho, is probably some version of the following:

Stay Present (SP): I tell myself to stay present when external or internal circumstances are becoming a bit kray-kray.

I know this is occuring when my internal pain body (the internally felt emotional, physical, psychological sense of ouch) starts to break through into consciousness with (unavoidable) pain and (frustratingly avoidable) suffering.

Please ask me in one of our future sessions if it would be good to do some specific practice around the art of staying present. It will take some conscious practice, but it’s totally worth it!

Good news: the practice only takes a second or two. Ideally repeated a number of times each day, but even once or twice is better than nothing. 

Let Go (LG): I tell myself to let go about a thousand times a day. And on a good day, I do let go (of painful thoughts, compulsive behaviours, expectations and demands on others, and lots of other crappy things that invade the peace of my mind).

When I’m on track, I do this specific form of letting go about 10-20% of the time. On a bad day, I let go about 1% of the time.

Suffice to say: I suffer a great deal more on those days in which my Letting Go doesn’t happen.

Please ask me if you would like to learn more about the art of Letting Go. It requires a good deal of of practice, but it’s worth it! Good news: the practice only takes a second or two, but may require ongoing repetition for certain hook-y thoughts. 

Enjoy (E): I tell myself to enjoy even when I am unconsciously, without any effort on my part, enjoying something I love: like food, or sex, or walking in nature, talking to you in our deep and meaningful exchanges, reading/watching, or listening to something mindblowing. I am a pleasure junkie. I want every drop of it, so I need to remind myself to enjoy it, and then enjoy it even more.

What I mean by even more is: slow-down, take it all in, and consciously enjoy the journey, enjoy it with “presence” you might say. Another word for this is: savour, savour, savour! I also endeavour, when I am present enough to do so, to help myself find some small forms of enjoyment whilst struggling or suffering.

I mainly do this by getting even more present, if possible, but I also find that taking the piss out of myself in a kind and accepting way can help with this process. Also reminding myself again and again that I’m just a silly but lovable animal who can walk upright and talk. And that’s not really the basis for getting anything completely “right”, is it?

Please ask me if you would like to explore ways of getting more enjoyment out of your life, without necessarily having to change your circumstances or your selves in order to do so. It will require some practice, but of all the practices I’ve mentioned so far, it is truly the most fun and enjoyable. 

[Sidenote: I think the E here could also stand for EN-LOVE. Enlove is a made-up word. But I think what I mean when I tell this to myself as a mantra, is to try and get the impatient, angry, sad, non-loving self to switch its defensive or stress-response tactics to something more open and allowing. Enloving requires us love our selves other people, and the world, including all the shitty aspects  of our selves, other people, and the world in a genuine, and unconditional way. This seems to make the ride a little less fraught for me and for others too. Please ask me if you would like to learn more about the skill of Enloving. Practice, yada yada, etc. But it’s worth it, and won’t our inner-smiling-emojis-avec-halos shine even more resplendently if we do this more often?]

Repeat (R): I need this re-MIND-er the most.

Only because my silly mind seems to think that all of the above is just a once-a-day job, and if it doesn’t do it “right” or “well” (which more often than not, it doesn’t) well then that’s Game Over as far as my mind is concerned.

When in fact, we are all given about 50,000 opportunities to do some of the above on any given day, 50,000 moments lasting a second or two (aka 16-18 hours of “awake”, conscious experience). Writing this late on a Saturday afternoon, I reckon I’ve still got about 25,000 opportunities to practice SPLGE before bedtime. If I’m perfectly honest, I’ll probably only use about 0.1% of that conscious potential. But maybe in the next year,  I’ll get that up to 0.2%.

But only with practice, alas.

Alas, because I am lazy, I would prefer not to practice. I would prefer to suffer. But suffering feels crap, so I sometimes do some practice.

In this spirit of gentle reminders to practice, in order to double not just my own sanity, but yours, wouldn’t it be great to re-mind our selves whenever we send or receive an email to do some of the above. Especially if done in a simple, t-shirt slogan way.

So that’s why, I’m going to end each email for now, with SPLGE-R, my friends.

SPLGE-R! SPLGE-R! 

Warmly,

Steve

PS: If 2021 feels like a good year for throwing yourself a bit more into SPLGE-R as part of your sanity-drive, one of my Covid projects has been devising and trialling a new modality which I’m really enjoying working on with client-friends at the moment. It’s called: TPON Therapy!

Not everyone’s cup of tea, but the few people who have been kind enough in the last six months to let me guinea-pig the process on them, have given thumbs up to TPON-T, and also some really useful thumbs-down-ish feedback 😉

Check it out if this might be of interest. I’d also really apprciate you forwarding this on if you know someone who could benefit from this kind of approach: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/therapy/the-power-of-now-therapy/

Many thanks.

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Today is full of things, so many…

Here is a poem by A.R. Ammons that I’m learning by heart at the moment. It goes like this:

 THE WAY

the way I could tell
today
that yesterday is dead
is that
the little gray bird
that sat
in the empty
tree
yesterday is gone:
yesterday and
bird are gone:

I know there’s no use
looking
for either
Of them, bird
running from winter,
yesterday
running downstream
to some ocean-pocket of
rest
whence it may sometime
come again (changed), new
as tomorrow:

how like a gift
the memory
of bird and empty tree!
how
precious
since we may not have
that configuration
again:
today is full of things,
so many,
how can they be managed,
received and loved
in their passing?

As I was learning the last stanza this morning, I could hear Archie setting up for us a kind of reflection piece, which I thought would be nice to share. Let’s call it the Managed-Received-Loved Reflection. Which might go something like this.

What is presenting itself to you today that needs to be MANAGED? (I think by this I mean: what are the worries, issues, problems, and dilemmas in your life that require some form of problem-solving, or breaking down into more workable chunks?)

What is presenting itself to you that needs to be RECEIVED? (I think by “receive” I mean “accepted”, a deliberate attempt to not “fight” or get into conflict – within yourself, or another person, with something you have no control over. I’m thinking here especially of the form of acceptance set out in The Serenity Prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change”…)

And most importantly: what needs to be LOVED? (What is it that you might have been neglecting recently in terms of savouring, enjoying, basking in, feeling gratitude for, and ultimately, loving? What space can you carve out in your day for appreciation, celebration, or just some unadulterated, mindful pleasure?)

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State/Mood Tracking using the ANS Gearbox or the Autonomic Ladder

It can be really helpful when we our lives are unsettled or disrupted by states or moods that feel unsafe or unwanted to do some tracking of these states throughout the day.

These unhappy states can be seen as a kind of inner protest: a protective, shut-down or closed-down reaction on the part of our nervous systems to what’s going on around us (i.e. the dorsal vagal collapse of depression). Or alternatively a more flurried reaction to the perceived too-muchness of our environment in the form of hyper-mobilised anxiety, worry, or panic states (a sympathetic nervous system response).

Autonomic Ladder

Ideally, we want to spend as much time as possible in that “Goldilocks Zone” of our autonomic nervous systems, which is to say in a Ventral Vagal state: safe-&-connected (3rd gear, see below) , or in the more mobilised, activated sympathetic-flow state of our 4th gear.

ANS (Autonomic Nervous System) Gearbox

HOW TO TRACK YOUR STATES ON A DAILY BASIS

There are of course apps that do this kind of thing. Here’s a few screenshots from Moodily, for example.

If you’d prefer to use an app, go for it, but I quite like doing this in a more analogue way. I also think it’s easier for you to see when and how you move into, out of and through different states by using some old-fashioned paper and colouring in pencils or markers.

This also helps us when it comes to looking back at the week just past and assessing what we can do to help you move you out of anxious/depressed states more quickly, as well as cultivating and nurturing those safe and connected glimmer-and-glow ventral vagal states so that you benefit from having more of these in your life.

Instructions for Basic State/Mood tracking (with examples)

At the end of each day, take a couple of minutes to write down as a list everything you did on that day (from the moment you woke up to when you plan to go to sleep). Then take some coloured pencils or pens, and show through colour the state(s) you were in whilst travelling through (or stuck in) these experiences.

You don’t need to write this up in an exhaustive way. Just the main “beats” of the day. Here are a couple of examples from a client who has allowed me to share (anonymously) her state tracking over a period of four days.

As you can see from the above example, using this method can help us to spot a number of factors that are really useful when understanding yourself and your states/moods/emotions :

-Activities that promote, shape, or nudge us into welcome states (usually green/3rd gear, or blue/4th gear/FLOW states).

-Activities or situations that promote, shape, or nudge us into unwelcome states (usually yellow/depressive gears, or orange-red/F-gear). Examining these together, we can start to understand better what “danger cues” your nervous system might be picking up on, either from your external environment (work, relationships, living conditions) or internal environment (thoughts, internal dialogues, substance or diet-influenced nudges, or body state feedback due to exercise or lack of).

-The extent to which a somewhat positive/welcome state (green, blue) will often have little tendrils of unsafe (orange/red) energies mixed in with the pleasant stuff, which is good to be aware of, and monitor, just in case that danger cue takes us deeper into a protective survival state (full-blown yellow, orange, or red).

-The extent to which unwelcome states (yellow, orange, red) will also often have little little glimmers of safety (blue, green) in them, even if they last only a second or two. This can be really useful for us to see, albeit retrospectively, as those glimmers are often cues of safety which we might want to deepen and use as a kind of “handhold” to climb back up the ladder into our OK, or “home” state of ventral vagal.

(In Schema Therapy, this “home” state is called “Healthy Adult Mode”, in IFS it’s called “Self”, and in psychodynamic or psychoanalytic language, we might refer to Functional Ego States).

So you could say that these daily state-tracking records are also a kind of snapshot or map of how your mind and nervous system are taking you through the merry-go-round of your life. How much time your system is being knocked (triggered) into a too-much reaction (sympathetic nervous energy), that rollercoaster of anxiety, anger, avoidance and frustration; as well as the amount of time in dorsal vagal, that collapsed too-little carousel of depression and stagnation.

If you’re artistically inclined, you might decide to do something a little more funky. Here’s an example of a day rendered in watercolour pencils, paying homage to the loopy-nature of our experience!

If you don’t like the idea of using colours or listing/looping your day as I’ve shown above, here are a couple of other ways to do it. The more creative you can be with this, the more interesting or fun you can make it, the easier it will be to keep up the tracking for a period of time (minimum of a week). Tracking needs to be done for a while in order to give us enough data to start understanding better how and why you move into and through different states/moods/emotions.

But even if just track a couple of days, especially some difficult or challenging days, this can really help us to understand what’s going on for you “under the hood” in the deepest recesses of your unconscious/autopilot mind and autonomic nervous system.

FOUR OTHER WAYS OF TRACKING

All of the following methods are taken from Deb Dana and can be found in her excellent courses and books.

The first, The Goldilocks Graph, builds on the Goldilocks premise mentioned above: that sense of our minds and autonomic nervous systems are always looking for that just-right sweet spot in terms of gears/states travelled.

Another variation of this is the Time & Tone Tracking Graph:

Or if you like, you can divide your day into four main parts (morning, afternoon, early-evening, evening?) and mark your states on the Autonomic Ladder, like so, which Deb calls Four Map Tracking:

If you prefer, think of each day as a kind of meal which has one or two main ingredients (states) to it, but also lots of little “tastes” of other states throughout the time you’re awake, rendered as a Soup of The Day Tracking:

Again, the important thing here is to go with the tracking method that captures your imagination, or gets your creative juices flowing, as well as something that you feel you could do on a daily basis without too much effort.

All of the above methods, once you get into the swing of tracking, should take you no more than 15 minutes or so to do.

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STC MAP EXAMPLE

STC MAP (10 Sessions)

SESSION 1 – EXPLORING THE AUTONOMIC PATHWAYS: in this session we will begin to look at the part played by your Autonomic Nervous System and mind in both the flow or non-flow (anxious/depressed states) that fill our days. We will do an experiential exercise reconnecting you to your ventral vagal, safe and connected “home” state, as well as explore how our systems get knocked out of this state by danger-cues in our environment or ourselves which trigger us into dorsal or sympathetic survival states (fight, flight, freeze).

SESSION 2 – LEARNING TO LISTEN: in this session, you will gain a better understanding of our different autonomic states, as well as the parts of us connected to those states (the Inner Critic, Slave Driver, People Pleasing parts, Frustrated and Fighty parts, or whatever Parts show up for you). We will look at how your nervous system and mind influences the decisions you make, and how we can get better at listening to its messages.

SESSION 3 – THE LONGING FOR CONNECTION: in this session we will look at elements of our social engagement system and how that affects our functioning when we are struggling. We will think about your connection to self, world, and spirit (creativity, sport, or other projects that bring you into flow or peak states). We will also think about how you can better nourish your autonomic nervous system, making it easier for you to return to your ventral vagal, safe-and-connected “home” state.

SESSION 4 – AUTONOMIC INTUITION: in this session we will focus on our neuroception of states and state shifts. Through experiential exercises related to things you are struggling with at the moment in your life, we will explore how your system attends to cues of safety and danger, as well as working further to building a perception of connection and safety in your ventral vagal “home”.

SESSION FIVE – PATTERNS OF PROTECTION AND CONNECTION: In this session we will look at how your system protects you, as well as the different states in which you are able to connect (both to yourself and others). We will focus mainly here on the shift in which you’re taken out of connection into some kind of protected (sympathetic or dorsal vagal state) and how to reverse this shift through various embodies practices.

SESSION SIX – GENTLE SHAPING: in this session we will continue to look at how you can “shape” your autonomic nervous system and the “ride” it provides for you on a daily using, looking at how to titrate the right kind of challenge for our nervous systems so that they don’t get overwhelmed, also thinking about shaping with touch, breath, and sound.

SESSION SEVEN – RESTORYING: in this session, with you hopefully by now feeling like you’re more in the “driver’s seat” when it comes to travelling through/with, as well as shaping your nervous system and its various response (especially to cues of danger), we will now focus more on the mind and the part it plays in interpreting sensations from our system and encoding them into language (painful or triggering thoughts, self or other blame, worries, and all the other distressful stories that our minds often torment us with). We will explore ways of restorying, if that feels useful, through movement, image, music, or words.

SESSION EIGHT – TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCES: at this point, you should be more able to find your way back “home” to safe and connected ventral vagal states, which means that we can now focus on tweaking those safe states in a way that is optimum for you: either to create greater productivity (but without the accompanying erosion of stress), creativity, or connection to ourselves and others.

SESSION NINE – CARING FOR OUR NERVOUS SYSTEM: in this session we will focus on building resilience through sustainable self-care practices.

SESSION TEN – THIS BEING HUMAN IS A GUEST HOUSE: in this session we will review and recap on key learnings from our time together, and how these can be deepened or expanded in future sessions, or if you would like to put therapy on pause at this point, ways in which you can keep on developing your ability to create for yourself and others a welcoming, safe presence of well-being.

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The STER That Emerges In 3rd and 4th Gear

There are lots of ways to think about Flow States, but Steve Kotler and Jamie Wheale give a really good breakdown of Flow/4th gear states in their book Catching Fire. To help us know when we’re in, or getting some of the flavour of a flow state, we can ask ourselves afterwards (a true flow state is not one where the mind is busy with self-referential questions!) whether we experienced some STER? Selflessness, Timelessness, Effortlessness (not initially, usually it takes a good bit of effort to get into a Flow state, unless it has been thoroughly habitualised) and Richness.

Here’s a bit more info about each of these different facets.

Selflessness

Despite all the recent talk about supercomputers and artificial intelligence, the human brain remains the most complex machine on the planet. At the center of this complexity lies the prefrontal cortex, our most sophisticated piece of neuronal hardware. With this relatively recent evolutionary adaptation came a heightened degree of self-awareness, an ability to delay gratification, plan for the long term, reason through complex logic, and think about our thinking. This hopped-up cogitation promoted us from slow, weak, hairless apes into tool-wielding apex predators, turning a life that was once nasty, brutish, and short into something decidedly more civilized.

But all of this ingenuity came at a cost. No one built an off switch for the potent self-awareness that made it all possible. “[T]he self is not an unmitigated blessing,” writes Duke University psychologist Mark Leary in his aptly titled book, The Curse of the Self. “It is single-handedly responsible for many, if not most of the problems that human beings face as individuals and as a species . . . [and] conjures up a great deal of personal suffering in the form of depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions.” When you think about the billion-dollar industries that underpin the Altered States Economy (cannabis, alcohol, food, movies, music, sports, gyms), isn’t this what they’re built for? To shut off the self. To give us a few moments of relief from the voice in our heads.

So, when we do experience a non-ordinary state that gives us access to something more, we feel it first as something less—and that something missing is us. Or, more specifically, the inner critic we all come with: our inner Woody Allen, that nagging, defeatist, always-on voice in our heads. You’re too fat. Too skinny. Too smart to be working this job. Too scared to do anything about it. A relentless drumbeat that rings in our ears.

Altered states can of course silence the nag. They act as an off switch. In these states, we’re no longer trapped by our neurotic selves because the prefrontal cortex, the very part of the brain generating that self, is no longer open for business.

Scientists call this shutdown “transient hypofrontality.” Transient means temporary. “Hypo,” the opposite of “hyper,” means “less than normal.” And frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that generates our sense of self. During transient hypofrontality, because large swatches of the prefrontal cortex turn off, that inner critic comes offline. Woody goes quiet.

Without all the badgering, we get a real sense of peace. “This peacefulness may result from the fact,” continues Leary, that “without self-talk to stir up negative emotions, the mystical experience is free of tension.” And with tension out of the way, we often discover a better version of ourselves, more confident and clear.

And the benefits of selflessness go beyond silencing our Inner Critic or inner Punitive Parent. When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles—parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor—but, by then, we know they’re just costumes with zippers.

Psychologist Robert Kegan, chair of adult development at Harvard, has a term for unzipping those costumes. He calls it “the subject-object shift” and argues that it’s the single most important move we can make to accelerate personal growth. For Kegan, our subjective selves are, quite simply, who we think we are. On the other hand, the “objects” are things we can look at, name, and talk about with some degree of objective distance. And when we can move from being subject to our identity to having some objective distance from it, we gain flexibility in how we respond to life and its challenges.

That’s Kegan’s point. When we are reliably able to make the subject-object shift, as he points out in his book In Over Our Heads, “You start . . . constructing a world that is much more friendly to contradiction, to oppositeness, to being able to hold onto multiple systems of thinking. . . . This means that the self is more about movement through different forms of consciousness than about defending and identifying with any one form.”

By stepping outside ourselves, we gain perspective. We become objectively aware of our costumes rather than subjectively fused with them. We realize we can take them off, discard those that are worn out or no longer fit, and even create new ones. That’s the paradox of selflessness—by periodically losing our minds we stand a better chance of finding ourselves.

Timelessness

A quick search on Google yields over 11.5 billion hits for the word “time.” In comparison, more obvious topics of interest like sex and money rank a paltry 2.75 billion and 2 billion, respectively. Time and how to make the most of it, appears to be about five times more important to us than making love or money.

And there’s good reason for this obsession. According to a 2015 Gallup survey, 48 percent of working adults feel rushed for time, and 52 percent report significant stress as a result. Bosses, colleagues, kids, and spouses all expect instant response to emails and texts. We never really get free of our digital leashes, even in bed or on vacation. Americans are now working longer hours with less vacations than any industrialized country in the world.

“Time poverty,” as this shortage is known, comes with consequences. “When [you] are juggling time,” Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan recently told the New York Times, “. . . you borrow from tomorrow, and tomorrow you have less time than you have today. . . . It’s a very costly loan.”

Non-ordinary states provide some relief from this rising debt, and they do it in much the same way as they quiet our inner critic. Our sense of time isn’t localized in the brain. It’s not like vision, which is the sole responsibility of the occipital lobes. Instead, time is a distributed perception, calculated all over the brain, calculated, more specifically, all over the prefrontal cortex. During transient hypofrontality, when the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we can no longer perform this calculation.

Without the ability to separate past from present from future, we’re plunged into an elongated present, what researchers describe as “the deep now.” Energy normally used for temporal processing gets reallocated for focus and attention. We take in more data per second, and process it more quickly. When we’re processing more information faster, the moment seems to last longer—which explains why the “now” often elongates in altered states.

When our attention is focused on the present, we stop scanning yesterday for painful experiences we want to avoid repeating. We quit daydreaming about a tomorrow that’s better than today. With our prefrontal cortex offline, we can’t run those scenarios. We lose access to the most complex and neurotic part of our brains, and the most primitive and reactive part of our brains, the amygdala, the seat of that fight-or-flight response, calms down, too.

In his book The Time Paradox, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, one of the pioneers in the field of time perception, describes it this way: “When you are . . . fully aware of your surroundings and of yourself in the present, [this] increases the time that you swim with your head above water, when you can see both potential dangers and pleasures. . . . You are aware of your position and your destination. You can make corrections to your path.”

In a recent study published in Psychological Science, Zimbardo’s Stanford colleagues Jennifer Aaker and Melanie Rudd found that an experience of timelessness is so powerful it shapes behavior. In a series of experiments, subjects who tasted even a brief moment of timelessness “felt they had more time available, were less impatient, more willing to volunteer to help others, more strongly preferred experiences over material products, and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.”

And when we do slow life down, we find the present is the only place in the timescape we get reliable data anyway. Our memories of the past are unstable and constantly subject to revision—like a picture-book honeymoon overwritten by a bitter divorce. “[M]emory distortions are basic and widespread in humans,” acknowledges cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, “and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune.” The past is less an archived library of what really happened, and more a fluid director’s commentary we’re constantly updating.

Future forecasts aren’t much better. When we try to predict what’s around the bend, we rarely get it right. We tend to assume the near future will look much like the recent past. That’s why events like the toppling of the Berlin Wall and the 2008 financial collapse caught so many analysts flatfooted. What looks inevitable in hindsight is often invisible with foresight. Nobody at the end of 2019 foresaw Covid!

But when non-ordinary states trigger timelessness, they deliver us to the perpetual present—where we have undistracted access to the most reliable data. We find ourselves at full strength.

Effortlessness

These days, we’re drowning in information, but starving for motivation. Despite a chirpy self-improvement market peppering us with endless tips and tricks on how to live better, healthier, wealthier lives, we’re struggling to put these techniques into action. Two out of three adult Brits, for example, are overweight or obese, even though we have access to better nutrition at lower cost than at any time in history. Eight out of ten of us are disengaged or actively disengaged at work, despite the HR circus of incentive plans, team-building off-sites, and casual Fridays. Big-box health clubs oversell memberships by 400 percent in the certain knowledge that, other than the first two weeks in January and a brief blip before spring break, fewer than one in ten members will ever show up. And when a Harvard Medical School study confronted patients with lifestyle-related diseases that would kill them if they didn’t alter their behaviour (type 2 diabetes, smoking, atherosclerosis, etc.), 87 percent couldn’t avoid this sentence. Turns out, we’d rather die than change.

But just as the selflessness of an altered state can quiet our inner critic, and the timelessness lets us pause our hectic lives, a sense of effortlessness can propel us past the limits of our normal motivation.

And we’re beginning to understand where this added drive comes from. In flow, as in most of the states we’re examining, six powerful neurotransmitters—norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, anandamide, and oxytocin—come online in varying sequences and concentrations. They are all pleasure chemicals. In fact, they’re the six most pleasurable chemicals the brain can produce and these states are one of the only times we get access to many of them at once. That’s the biological underpinning of effortlessness: “I did it, it felt awesome, I’d like to do it again as soon as possible.”

When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did his initial research into flow, his subjects frequently called the state “addictive,” and admitted to going to exceptional lengths to get another fix. “The [experience] lifts the course of life to another level,” he writes in his book Flow. “Alienation gives way to involvement, enjoyment replaces boredom, helplessness turns into a feeling of control. . . . When experience is intrinsically rewarding life is justified.”

So, unlike the slog of our to-do lists, once an experience starts producing these neurochemicals, we don’t need a calendar reminder or an accountability coach to make sure we keep doing it. The intrinsically rewarding nature of the experience compels us. “So many people find this so great and high an experience,” wrote psychologist Abraham Maslow in his book Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences, “that it justifies not only itself, but living itself.”

This explains why action and adventure athletes routinely risk life and limb for their sports and why spiritual ascetics willingly trade creature comforts for a chance to glimpse God. “In a culture supposedly ruled by the pursuit of money, power, prestige, and pleasure,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, “it is surprising to find certain people who sacrifice all those goals for no apparent reason. . . . By finding out why they are willing to give up material rewards for the elusive experience of performing enjoyable acts we . . . learn something that will allow us to make everyday life more meaningful.”

But you don’t have to take extreme risk or give up material reward to experience this benefit. It shows up wherever people are deeply committed to a compelling goal. When John Hagel, the cofounder of Deloitte consulting’s Center for the Edge, made a global study of the world’s most innovative, high-performing business teams—meaning the most motivated teams on the planet—he too found that “the individuals and organizations who went the farthest the fastest were always the ones tapping into passion and finding flow.”

This ability to unlock motivation has widespread implications. Across the board, from education to health care to business, motivational gaps cost us trillions of dollars a year. We know better; we just can’t seem to do better. But we can do better. Effortlessness upends the “suffer now, redemption later” of the Protestant work ethic and replaces it with a far more powerful and enjoyable drive.

Richness

The final characteristic of the ecstasis of flow is “richness,” a reference to the vivid, detailed, and revealing nature of non-ordinary states.

The Greeks called that sudden understanding anamnesis. Literally, “the forgetting of the forgetting.” A powerful sense of remembering. Nineteenth century psychologist William James experienced this during his Harvard experiments with nitrous oxide and mescaline, noting it’s “the extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling . . . which sometimes sweeps over us, having “been here before” as if at some indefinite past time, in just this place . . . we were already saying just these things.” And that feeling, of waking up to some ineffable truth that’s been in us all along, can feel deeply significant.

In non-ordinary states, the information we receive can be so novel and intense that it feels like it’s coming from a source outside ourselves. But, by breaking down what’s going on in the brain, we start to see that what feels supernatural might just be super-natural: beyond our normal experience, for sure, but not beyond our actual capabilities.

Often, an ecstatic experience or an experience where we touch into flow in our day-to-day begins when the brain releases norepinephrine and dopamine into our system. These neurochemicals raise heart rates,  tighten focus, and help us sit up and pay attention. We notice more of what’s going on around us, so information normally tuned out or ignored becomes more readily available. And besides simply increasing focus, these chemicals amp up the brain’s pattern recognition abilities, helping us find new links between all this incoming information.

As these changes are taking place, our brainwaves slow from agitated beta to calmer alpha, shifting us into daydreaming mode: relaxed, alert, and able to flit from idea to idea without as much internal resistance. Then parts of the prefrontal cortex begin shutting down. We experience the selflessness, timelessness, and effortlessness of transient hypofrontality. This quiets the “already know that, move along” voice of our inner critic, or inner coach and dampens the distractions of the past and future. All these changes knock out filters we normally apply to incoming data, giving us access to a fresh perspectives and more potential combinations of ideas.

As we move even deeper into flow, the brain can release endorphins and anandamide. They both decrease pain, removing the diversion of physical distress from the equation, letting us pay even more attention to what’s going on. Anandamide also plays another important role here, boosting “lateral thinking,” which is our ability to make far-flung connections between disparate ideas, as well as solve life-problems or frustrations. Post-its, Slinkys, Silly Putty, Super Glue, and a host of other breakthroughs all came when an inventor made a sideways leap, applying an overlooked tool in a novel way. In part, that’s anandamide at work.

And, if we go really deep, our brainwaves shift once again, pushing us toward quasi-hypnotic theta, a wave we normally produce only during REM sleep that enhances both relaxation and intuition. To wrap it all up, we can experience an afterglow of serotonin and oxytocin, prompting feelings of peace, well-being, trust, and sociability, as we start to integrate the information that has just been revealed.

And revealed is the right word. Conscious processing can only handle about 120 bits of information at once. This isn’t much. Listening to another person speak can take almost 60 bits. If two people are talking, that’s it. We’ve maxed out our bandwidth. But if we remember that our unconscious processing can handle billions of bits at once, we don’t need to search outside ourselves to find a credible source for all that miraculous insight. We have terabytes of information available to us; we just can’t tap into it in our normal state.

Umwelt is the technical term for the sliver of the data stream that we normally apprehend. It’s the reality our senses can perceive. And all umwelts are not the same. Dogs hear whistles we cannot, sharks detect electromagnetic pulses, bees see ultraviolet light—while we remain oblivious. It’s the same physical world, same bits and bytes, just different perception and processing. But the cascade of neurobiological change that occurs in a non-ordinary state lets us perceive and process more of what’s going on around us and with greater accuracy.

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The Importance of Your Vagus Nerve for Health and Well-Being + 10 Ways To Activate It

What exactly is the vagus nerve? The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in your body. It connects your brain to many important organs throughout the body, including the gut (intestines, stomach), heart and lungs. The word “vagus” means “wanderer” in Latin, which does also describes how the nerve wanders all over the body, connecting all our major organs together, and contributing a great deal to body sensations, which are one factor we assess when we think about how we’re feeling, either physically or mentally.

The vagus nerve is also a key part of your parasympathetic “rest and digest” nervous system. It influences our breathing, digestive function and heart rate, all of which can have a huge impact on our mental health. When activated, we usually feel calm, safe, and connected (to ourselves and other people). When disactivated our sympathetic (fight-flight) nervous system rules the show in terms of survival responses which can often leave us feeling either over-stimulated (with thoughts, feelings, body sensations: i.e. anxiety) or shut-down in some way which is more often associated with depressive states.

What we need to pay special attention to is the “tone” of our vagus nerve. Vagal tone is an internal biological process that represents the activity of the vagus nerve. Increasing our vagal tone activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and having higher vagal tone means that our body can relax faster after stress or upset. This part of our nervous system is a key factor in mental health and well-being.

In 2010, researchers discovered a positive feedback loop between high vagal tone and well-being in terms of mental and physical health. In other words, the more you increase your vagal tone, the more your physical and mental health will improve, and vice versa.

Your vagal tone can be measured by tracking certain biological processes such as your heart rate, your breathing rate, and your heart rate variability (HRV). When your heart rate variability (HRV) is high, vagal tone is also high.

If your vagal tone is low, don’t worry – you can take steps to increase it by stimulating your vagus nerve. This will allow you to more effectively respond to the emotional and physiological symptoms of stress and upset.

For people with treatment-resistant depression, the FDA in America has even approved a surgically-implanted device that periodically stimulates the vagus nerve.  But you don’t need to go down that route. You can enjoy the benefits of vagus nerve stimulation naturally by doing some of the following.

1. Cold Exposure

Acute cold exposure has been shown to activate the vagus nerve and activate cholinergic neurons through vagus nerve pathways. Researchers have also found that exposing yourself to cold on a regular basis can lower your sympathetic “fight or flight” response and increase parasympathetic activity through the vagus nerve. Try finishing your next shower with at least 30 seconds of cold water and see how you feel. Then work your way up to longer periods of time. You can also ease yourself into it by simply sticking your face in ice-cold water. I usually have a cold-water wash (splashing cold water on my face and torso), or a quick cold shower in the morning and then later on have a hot bath followed by a freezing cold shower which seems to do the trick (for me).

2. Deep and Slow Breathing

Deep and slow breathing is another way to stimulate your vagus nerve. Especially when done through your nostrils. In fact, even if you were to just switch to breathing through your nose when you’re feeling anxious or low and not alter the pace of your breathing at all, you will already be stimulating your vagus nerve and regulating your too-high (anxious) or too-low (depressed) energy states.

Paced breathing, or deep and slow breathing with a focus on the exhale has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to manage anxiety and trigger the parasympathetic system through the activation of the vagus nerve. Most people take about 10 to 14 breaths each minute. Taking about 6 breaths over the course of a minute is what you need to aim for if you’re thinking about getting some stress out of your system. Try also to breathe in deeply from your diaphragm, as anxious, sympathetic nerve states are often associated with shallow (chest) breathing.

When you breath slowly and deeply through your nose, taking the breath all the way down to your stomach, you should notice it expanding outward on the in-breath, and deflating on the out-breath. Make sure the exhale is super-long and extended. This is key to stimulating the vagus nerve and reaching a state of relaxation. I prefer to do a more full-body version of this, which I find kicks in more quickly (i.e. after 30 seconds to a few minutes, as opposed to maybe 5-10 minutes, or more, of just doing paced breathing):

3. Singing, Humming, Chanting and Gargling

The vagus nerve is connected to your vocal cords and the muscles at the back of your throat.
Singing, humming, chanting and gargling can activate these muscles and stimulate your vagus nerve. This has been shown to increase heart-rate variability and vagal tone. Try gargling the first few sips of water before swallowing it. Or when you’re doing the breathing exercises suggested above, make a gentle “Darth Vader” sound in the back of your throat. Or a kind of sigh or hum. Play around with bringing more “voice” into your breathing and see how this affects your nervous system.

If you’re reading something, try reading it aloud for ten minutes. I start my day with a whole series of poems (currently, about a 100) which I chant aloud from memory while I’m washing the dishes and doing some housework. I’ve realised over the years experimenting with different ways to access my “Poetry Liturgy” that apart from the benefit of hearing all the wisdom contained in these poems on a daily basis, every time I recite the liturgy from start to finish, which takes about an hour, I feel calm, and grounded. And I think this is mainly to do with the fact that my recital uses a lot of out-breath -one poem can almost be recited on one long out-breath, as if I were playing a melody on a saxophone. All this adds up to hardcore activation of the vagus nerve with all the benefits attainable for health and well-being with that. I’m not suggesting you follow suit per se (although if you do, happy to be a guide on this journey), but maybe you can create your own singing/whistling/chanting rituals with material that speaks to you.

4. Probiotics
It’s becoming increasingly clear to researchers that gut bacteria improve brain function by affecting the vagus nerve. A recent (2020) article rounding up the research from the last ten years shows how the gut microbiota affect depression and anxiety symptoms, as well as other psychological and neurological effects.  This microbiota can also be tweaked by supplements to boost our regulatory systems. The vagus nerve, again, appears to be key to this.

In one study, animals were given the probiotic Lactobacillus Rhamnosus, and researchers found positive changes to the GABA receptors in their brain, a reduction in stress hormones, and less depression and anxiety-like behaviour. The researchers also concluded that these beneficial changes between the gut and the brain were facilitated by the vagus nerve. When the vagus nerve was removed in other mice, the addition of Lactobacillus Rhamnosus to their digestive systems failed to reduce anxiety, stress, and improve mood.

5. Meditation

Meditation can be used as a relaxation technique, as well as a tool for “feeling” into what “gear” our Autonomic Nervous System is currently set at (this is a form of proprioception called neuroception and is something that gets taught on most meditation courses as “the body scan”).

Meditation, especially when used with a breath-practice done entirely through the nose, emphasising long, slow out-breaths (as in Pranayama or Paced Breathing, see above video) can stimulate the vagus nerve and increase vagal tone.

There is now a vast series of studies showing that meditation increases vagal tone and positive emotions, promoting feelings of goodwill (towards oneself and others), emotional grounding,  and a more fluid ability to regulate our own Autonomic Nervous System “gearbox” when it gets stuck in anxious or depressed states, often due to “fight or flight” activity from the sympathetic nervous system, and low vagal tone.

6. Omega-3 Fatty Acids

Omega-3 fatty acids are essential fats that your body cannot produce itself. They are found primarily in fish, although I take a non-animal version of this made from flax, and are necessary for the normal electrical functioning of your brain and nervous system.

They’ve also been shown to help people overcome addiction, and even reverse cognitive decline. They also increase vagal tone and vagal activity. Studies show that they reduce heart rate and increase heart rate variability, which means they likely stimulate the vagus nerve. High fish consumption is also associated with “enhanced vagal activity and parasympathetic predominance”.

7. Exercise

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how crucial exercise is to both our physical and mental well-being. Other than psychotherapeutic strategies, exercise has been my number one ally in navigating depressed and anxious states. Little and often is better than a lot infrequently. This is especially the case with cardiovascular exercise. Play around with what works for you. I find that I only need to do about 15 minutes of cardio (spin bike in the shed) 5-6 times a week, plus a daily walk to keep me on an even keel. When I miss a couple of days, I can feel the effect in terms of tension and dysregulation in my autonomic nervous system.

8. Massage
Research shows that massages can stimulate the vagus nerve, and increase vagal activity and vagal tone. The vagus nerve can also be stimulated by massaging several specific areas of the body.Foot massages (reflexology) have been shown to increase vagal modulation and heart rate variability, and decrease the “fight or flight” sympathetic response. Because we are such a social, “touchy-feely” species touch in general is an important part of autonomic regulation. Our primate cousins do most of their day-to-day socialising through touching (physically grooming each other is the equivalent of our small talk). If there isn’t much touch in your life either from friends, or a partner, or your children, you may want to consider inviting a domestic animal into your home. A few minutes of physical interaction with my dog-pal Max is one of the quickest and most powerful ways of settling my nervous system when it goes into a tense, stressed fight-flight mode.

9. Socializing and Laughing
Like touch, this may sound like stating the obvious, but it’s worth noting on this list because it’s an unavoidable truth that socializing and laughing does wonders for the tone of our vagus nerve, and our nervous system as a whole. Researchers have discovered that even reflecting on or visualising positive social connections improves vagal tone and increases positive emotions. The challenge then becomes how to get this social/laughter medicine, especially when we’re feeling low or anxious, which unfortunately is also when we least want to go out and socialise or feel inclined to laugh at the world and ourselves. Again, you will need to be creative here, but comedy specials and other laughter-inducing programs or podcasts come into their own here. We can engage with these somewhat passively which allows us to some extent to get the benefits of the medicine without too much energy output.

10. Medicinal Substances

I believe that psycho-active substances, including medicines, if judiciously and carefully used, can be of great benefit to us. Especially in terms of settling and grounding us for a time in order for us to find our footing again and reconnect to ourselves and the world. I am not just thinking about anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication like SSRIs (Prozac, Sertraline, Citalopram), but all the substances we use as human beings that have psychoactive qualities to them, including: alcohol, cannabis, sugar, coffee, herbal substances like valerian and chamomile, and many more. Let’s talk more about this and the other suggestions mentioned in the article if you are considering using an over-the-counter or non-regulated substance to help you manage your mental health.

The take-home:

We don’t have to be controlled (entirely) by ours mind and nervous system. We do have a certain amount of power to shift gears and send “nudges” to our nervous system in order to guide ourselves into more settled, connected, and safe-feeling states.

By stimulating the vagus nerve, you can send a message to your body that it’s time to relax and de-stress. Even if your mind is telling you that this is not the case, a consciously relaxed/energised/exercised body will eventually bring the mind round to its vibe. But an anxious mind will always (at least in my experience) take a body into depression or anxiety, or some other form of dysregulation.

So it’s really worth thinking about bottom-up regulation (regulating your Autonomic Nervous System through body and breath channels) as much as top-down work with the mind which is what we more often than not focus on in talking-therapy sessions. Ideally, one is doing a combination of the two, creating a mind-body therapy cocktail which you can use and benefit from every day and ultimately thrive.

Categories
ANS Consolidations Feel Better Polyvagal theory

How Our Autonomic Nervous Systems Pull Us Out of Connection and Into Protection

Have you been in a situation recently where you were feeling close, or just OK in the presence of a friend/acquaintance/family member, and then suddenly, out of the blue, you aren’t feeling close and OK? Instead you find yourself feeling irritated, or bored, or upset in some way with this person?

Perhaps they said something that made you feel unsafe (not physically per se, but emotionally), which then led to a form of irritation towards them, or even a desire to cut off contact, briefly, or for some time?

In this article we’re going to look at how our autonomic nervous systems create patterns that bring us into deep CONNECTION. Or alternatively, move us out of connection into PROTECTION.

This can happen when cues of danger are perceived, either consciously or not, that pull us away from feeling safe and anchored in our lives. Also when the cues of safety that help us to feel connected in our world are hidden or not accessible to our nervous systems.

Our autonomic nervous systems are shaped through the experiences of the environment in which we inhabit and the people we are in relationship with. These interactions shape the nervous system into patterns of connection and patterns of protection. Depending on the ways we’ve been met, and how we move through the world, our systems have been shaped over the years towards connection or away from connection towards protection.

REFLECTION:

How were you met when you came into the world?

How have you been met since then?

Do you have a sense of how you move through the world?

Take a moment and consider your personal profile of connection and protection.

Do you tend to lean more towards connection or protection?

Do you usually meet the world and the people in it with curiosity and readiness to engage? Or do you find that you’re more often on guard?

Remember as with all these practices, we want to bring curiosity and self compassion or kindness into our exploration.

In addition to leaning more towards either protection or connection, we also tend to carry our own personal autonomic protection profiles.

We all have a “home” in our Ventral Vagal Complex, especially in he VAGUS NERVE, the tenth cranial nerve, and primary nerve in the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system which we use to down-regulate (come back into peace and harmony when we feel out-of-sorts (dysregulated) in the world.

The Ventral Vagal Complex is where our patterns of connection bring us physical as well as psychological well-being (see picture below). When we get triggered in some way, we tend to protect ourselves either through a sympathetic/mobilised fight-flight response, or a dorsal vagal collapse (see picture below). If not a full-on collapse, there is often some flavour of disappearing involved in this process. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OUR HOME-AWAY-FROM-HOMES

Habitual patterns of protection bring us to places which we call our “home away from home“. 

My home away from home is a pattern of protection rooted in sympathetic fight-flight. More the fight than the flight part for me, but my nervous system uses both these modes of protection quite regularly. Sometimes in helpful, necessary ways. Often not.

When I am in this place, I am either fighting with myself in some way, in conflict with the various parts of my psyche, or I’m fighting against my circumstances, or other people. In this state, I experience myself as irritated or frustrated, out-of-sorts and disconnected.

Thanks to therapy and emotional regulation work, this is no longer an extreme response in the way it used to be, and often it goes unnoticed by other people, but it nevertheless takes me out of the ability for deep connection. And I feel that loss.

REFLECTION:

Take a moment and consider where your home away from home is. When you leave connection, and your nervous system activates a pattern of protection, where do you go?

Can you look up at your home away from home and see how their place of sheltered you? Protected you?

Can you send a message of gratitude to the ways you have been protected there?

ADAPTIVE SURVIVAL RESPONSE

Understanding the biology of connection and protection, brings us hope. Our earliest experiences shape our systems, but our ongoing experiences continue to shape us. We can discover what present-day experiences shapes our system towards connection, we can do more of that, and we can deepen into that pattern

When we think about moving into protection, into a survival response, it might be helpful to add the word “adaptive”. It might be good to remind ourselves that this is an adaptive survival response. As crazy, or incongruous, or inexplicable as an action may seem, every autonomic action is enacted to ensure our survival.

Whether it makes a cognitive sense or not, our nervous systems sense a need and take action, often without asking us whether the action is useful or helpful to our lives and relationships. These are adaptive survival responses, and when we can look through that lens, at our own responses, and at the responses of the people around us, we can stay in curiosity, out of criticism, and in compassion.

REFLECTION:

Think of a recent response you felt, a moment of protection that brought the mobilisation of your sympathetic nervous system, or or the disappearing/collapse of your dorsal system. See if you can bring some curiosity to that reflection. Curiosity is our starting point. It’s much easier to find curiosity and feel that, than compassion. Curiosity can also open the door to compassion.

So now, from a place of curiosity, can you look with the eyes of compassion at the same memory.

Spend a moment and notice the adaptive survival response.

And now think of a recent response of someone around you, and do the same.

Bring some curiosity about what was going on for them.

And now try to see them with a bit of compassion.

Compassion is often the more challenging experience to invite. This may be one of the experiences that benefits from the word YET.

Can you see them with compassion now? No? That’s OK, maybe not…yet

Can you bring curiosity to what is happening for you? No? OK, maybe not…yet.

When we can see actions as based on our biology, it helps us to remember that the only motivation is an autonomic intention for survival. We humans make moral meaning and assign motivation, but the autonomic nervous system doesn’t think good or bad. It’s simply acts in  service of survival.

CURIOSITY AS A WAY TO CONNECT TO OURSELVES AND OTHERS

Think of how different it feels to know that the person you want to be in connection with, and who has just stopped listening to you, has been taken away by their dorsal vagal system into a state of numbing.

It’s not that they don’t want to be there listening and connecting, it’s that their biology makes it impossible in this moment to do that.

Think about the times your child doesn’t listen, and see if you can look at them not as being defiant, but rather as struggling to regulate. When we look at people through the lens of their nervous system, we can be moved, in time, to offer connection rather than responding from our own pattern of protection.

REFLECTION:

Take a moment, think about a person in your life, who you struggle to be in connection with. See if you can look at them through the eyes of their nervous system, first with curiosity, and then maybe with a little bit of compassion.

Categories
Feel Better

Am I Wasting My Life? Are You Wasting Your Life? (James Wright’s Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota)

LYING IN A HAMMOCK AT WILLIAM DUFFY’S FARM IN PINE ISLAND, MINNESOTA

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

-James Wright

What are days for? Philip Larkin, once asked, giving himself and us an equally unadorned, straightforward answer:

Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

The question might equally be phrased as “What is a life for?”, a life being in essence a collection of days filled in various ways. If days are envisaged almost as containers, like bottles holding wine or vinegar, or websites containing articles, or stomachs or intestines holding respectively food and waste matter, then our lives are, in some sense, an agglomeration or repository of these contained-experiences: the wine-store, the url, the digestive system with all their quirks and peculiarities.

If we are to weigh in and comment on whether a man in his 40s, lying in a hammock at a friend’s farm, watching the day go by is “wasting” his life, we probably need to have some kind of notion of what he should be doing instead. If waste is a kind of misuse, a dissipation, or misapplication of energy, the energy that courses through our bodies while we are alive, that get-up-and-go we herald with our first piercing, post-partum scream and finally let go of with a death rattle, then presumably we also need to have some idea of what it means to not-waste a life. If Wright’s exclamation at the end of the poem (“I have wasted my life”) stands for more than just a rhetorical flourish, if it in fact undercuts and in some way lays waste to everything presented before and after it, then the poet, and by extension the reader, might want to spend some time figuring out what we mean when we say that someone has “wasted their life”. Waste here implies a mind that has been distracted from valued and meaningful activities towards something less valued, less meaningful. But if that’s the case, where is the traction in all this? What might the speaker of this poem have been focusing his attention on other than the natural world around him as he lies in his hammock? This in turn requires us to consider the metrics we might use for assessing a life lived non-wastefully, constructively, creatively, which is to say, a flourishing life, whatever that means for you in the human context.

NAKED

In a key scene from Mike Leigh’s film Naked, the ne’er -do-well drifter Johnny played by David Thewlis whose life is unspooling from one misjudged interaction to the next, spends some time with a security guard called Brian played by Peter Wight. The ten minutes we see in the film reputedly came from hours and hours of improvised method acting between Thewlis and Wight, as is Mike Leigh’s creed. Of all the interactions that Johnny has on his lopsided Odyssey through the streets of Dalston in the late 1990s, this one stands out for us, maybe because Johnny has met someone who at least, or at last is willing to engage with him and his unceasing logorrhoea, made up of hot-takes, and piss-takes, pontifications and provocations. Johnny is like a social media feed 20 years before the phenomenon became prevalent: helter-skelter, vaunting, erratic, and at times utterly deranged. Especially when taken out of context – which pretty much everything he does and says, is; his whole existence unfurling in the space of the film as a desultory and context-less entropic slide into self-destructive debauchery and oblivion.   

He is not someone who would ever seek therapy, but I think his conversation with Brian is as close to therapeutic as any conversation gets in this film where lost souls engage with, beguile, seduce and exploit other lost souls in aimless and arbitrary ways. There’s a line from Kim Addonizio’s poem The Singing that captures Johnny’s plight, which of course is ours too in some way, otherwise we would not be as moved by it as we are:

All I can do is listen to the way it keeps on, as if it’s enough just to launch a voice
against stillness, even a voice that says so little, that no one is likely to answer
with anything but sorrow, and their own confusion. I, I, I, isn’t it the sweetest
sound, the beautiful, arrogant ego refusing to disappear?

Johnny and Brian’s conversation feels like one of the few “sane” conversations in a film freighted with exchanges that are more readily played out through the dynamics of co-dependence, narcissism, predation and even sado-masochism. Brian’s willingness to listen and ask searching questions, his relatively quiet, accepting manner offers Johnny a much needed, but all-too brief moment of respite and sanctuary in the middle of his chaotic freefall that we are witness to in this film.

“So what is it that you’re guarding?” he interrogates Brian.

BRIAN: Space.
JOHNNY: You guarding space? That’s stupid, isn’t it, because someone could
break in there and steal all the fucking space…and you wouldn’t know it had gone,
would you?
BRIAN: Good point.

Brian doesn’t rise to Johnny’s challenges in the way that other people do. The other people in the film are either intimidated, irked, or frustrated with him, or are pulled into Johnny’s Power Games, as matter might be pulled into a black hole, becoming embroiled in his passing fancies, which usually involve sexual designs if one is female, or a zero-sum version of The Prisoner’s Dilemma played out via intellectual oneupmanship, with Johnny vaunting how much he knows or has read, or can refer to, versus the meagreness of his interlocutor’s supramundane gleanings.

Brian, very much like a therapist here, tries to listen as patiently as he can, attentively engaging with the stray soul he’s found shivering on the steps of his workplace, perhaps in the hope of imparting some balance and cohesion to Johnny’s life, or perhaps because it’s a welcome respite from monitoring an empty building. Although in the process I think he discovers that Johnny too is a kind of empty building, filled and galvanized by any fleeting thought, feeling, or emotion that passes through him. In this way, Johnny is a kind of Everyman, for we, you and me, dear listener, are not especially different to Johnny in this regard.

At the beginning of their meeting, Johnny tests his new conversation partner with a little metaphysical jig:

JOHNNY: It’s funny being inside, innit? ‘Cause when you are inside, you’re still actually outside, aren’t ya? And then you can say, when you’re outside, you’re inside…because you’re always inside your head. Do you follow that?
BRIAN: Yes. Sometimes when I’m sitting here, I turn the lights off, sit in the dark. That always makes me feel like I’m sitting outside.
JOHNNY: So, what do you do with yourself here every nighttime?
BRIAN: I read, and I think.
JOHNNY: What do you think about?
BRIAN: I think about my life.
JOHNNY: And is that horrendous for you?
BRIAN: No, certainly not.
JOHNNY: Is it horrendous for your wife? Are you married, mate?
BRIAN: Well, technically I’m married…although my wife is 5, 919 miles away
and I haven’t seen her for 13 years.
JOHNNY: It’s all going very well then? Where is she?
BRIAN: She’s in Bangkok.
JOHNNY: Saucy. They’re not worth it, are they? Whores and harlots. When was the last time you had a fuck? Is that an embarrassing question for you?
BRIAN: It is, rather. Yes.
JOHNNY: I’m sorry.

Brian is one of the few people in the film Johnny is unable to get a rise out of. Not because Brian is attempting to evade him or police him. Ironically, even though wearing a uniform, the trappings of a security guard, he is the least on-guard, guarded, and guard-like of anyone in the film, either in terms of guarding his authentic self (what he says, thinks, and believes in his heart of hearts), but also in terms of what he does, how he conducts himself with others and in his role as warden and watchperson.

He is, an irony not lost on him, literally taking care of (guarding) an empty building, a building you might say that doesn’t need anyone to take care of it. And yet like all the self-care actions that we undertake for our own empty buildings, our intrinsically empty selves, the ritualistic habits of caregiving create a kind of carapace which we identify with. Psychotherapist, podcaster, gardener. All of these formalized in some way or officiated, role that sometimes require capital letters to give them their full weight: Security Guard, Human Being, Citizen (the identity list goes on and on).

Every two hours, Brian is required to make his way to one of 23 electronic sensors dotted around the building and log-in using a special device. “My existence at this moment, on this spot, is now trapped and recorded,” he explains to Johnny, “Twenty-three moments, 23 sites, every two hours.”  Brian both sees and also presents himself as a quiet, deliberate, indoors- Sisyphus, someone who has made his peace with the meaninglessness of inner-city, late-capitalist employment, versus Johnny’s more scattershot version of nihilism, debauchery, and psychosexual power-plays.

Johnny could be doing this job too, but he would rather ad-lib his way through the time allotted to him. Or maybe this is his destiny, determined by his genes and his developmental background, perhaps also by economic and social deprivation, determined to wing his way through life in a fraying flap of of entropy and happenstance. Both men live lives of alienation and detachment, but on very different sides of the moral and ethical track.

Johnny half-jokingly, half-mockingly comments after Brian has explained his role: “Congratulations.You’ve succeeded in convincing me that you do have the most tedious fucking job in England.” But at least Brian has some kind of a job, something to think about other than his next drink, or smoke, or fuck, which for Brian translates into a short-term (day-to-day) purpose of sorts, as well as a means to an end, a more-distant goal which he formulates as the desire to one day purchase a cabin somewhere in the woods, somewhere he can retreat for a quiet, reflective retirement. At least that’s the dream. Johnny, as far as we can tell, doesn’t have any dreams, any aspirations beyond the present moment’s fight and flight scurry.

Brian listens patiently to Johnny’s conspiracy-theory rants about Nostradamus, and how the three markers on our bar codes correspond to “the number of the beast” as prophesied in the apocalypse, how the upcoming total solar eclipse on August 11 and the interplanetary shifts that will follow this suggest end of world portents: “On August the 18th, 1999,” he blusters, “the planets of our solar system are gonna line up into the shape of a cross. which just happen to correspond to the four beasts of the Apocalypse…as mentioned in the Book of Daniel. Another fucking fact! Another fucking fact! Do you want me to go on? The end of the world is nigh, Bri.The game is up!”

Interestingly, these portents only seem to apply to Johnny, who with the assistance of alcohol and whatever drugs he can lay his hands on, whatever woman he can inveigle or force into having sex with him, is, at least in this snapshot of his life, ecstatically unravelling.

I am reminded by Robert Kane, whose affable and and lucid lecture series The Quest for Meaning I am listening to at the moment with much pleasure, that Thales of Miletus, who might be considered as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, structured his whole cosmology around one of the more unstable elements: water. I talked in my last episode of Poetry Koan about entropy and chaos, how the word chaos itself is etymologically rooted in the idea of a chasm, a gaping void, and is as Hesiod and the later biblical writers reminds us, the place where we all start from. And no doubt finish. No matter what lives we’ve lived, wasteful or otherwise.

ENTROPY REVISITED

Chaos and entropy are our birthright, and perhaps even our birthmark, the foil against which all our classifying and codifying, our building, expansion, and evolution uneasily finds itself reflected or more likely fragmented. Our lives often endure in the way that a building constructed on sand or a swamp might endure, at first self-importantly erect, “seeking the bubble reputation”, but ever-so slowly sinking over time until and we reach that seventh age envisaged by Shakespeare and all who came before him, the age “that ends this strange eventful (or uneventful) history: second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

It is this watery, swampy terrain that western philosophy starts constructing its ideas around ethics, which is to say, how one might waste or alternately not-waste one’s life. Another way to put this might be: how to make best use of our lives. The last words that Brian leaves Johnny with are “Don’t waste your life!”. He has to repeat this message as Johnny is distracted at the time, but the message does catch up with him for a second or two. However, just like all the wisdom we read and that is passed onto us, as in the odd line of a poem, or a piece of prose, or a podcast droning in the ears while we go about our day, most of it washes over. I think this is why I’m really passionate about learning poems like Wright’s Lying In A Hammock by heart, repeating like this over and over again, until the wisdom it contains, sticks in some way. Even if for an hour, or a day at most.

This imperative, “Don’t Waste Your Life” runs all the way through our so-called modernity, from Rilke’s You must change your life, which closes his poem the Archaic Torso of Apollo, to Wright’s I have wasted my life (no doubt directly echoing the Rilke), onto Mary Oliver’s determined to do / the only thing you could do — / determined to save / the only life that you could save which rounds off her Rilkean and Wrightean influenced poem The Journey.

Once you start looking for it, you see this waste-not imperative embedded in so many works of film and literature. Take a recent film, Vivarium, which turns the standard human life-cycle into a kind of horror story, but without altering the contours of its protagonist’s lives in any way from the norm. Two people fall in love, they move (or are moved) into one of the umpteen, samey suburbs that most of us now live in, a place where every house and every garden looks pretty much like the next. They raise a child, who grows into a man, who eventually buries his parents. And so the cycle of life continues. The couple are so busy trying to escape their condition, their life-condition, the life-condition of post-capitalist human animals, that they forget for the most part to live, forget to reach for a berry, to seize the day, and make of their lives the best they can. All their focus is on escaping the life that doesn’t measure up to the life they wanted, expected, had talked and dreamed about. They waste their lives by fighting against the life they have been given. We all do this to some extent.

The first major Greek philosopher, Aristotle, perhaps recognising that imperatives don’t make for great conversation (patriarchs and law-makers of the world take note) offers us some causal challenges as honey for the self-conscious human mind, always tangled up in their existential koans of like and dislike, worth and value.

If you are unsure about whether you are wasting your life, Aristotle would say, ask of yourself, or rather ask of your experience of life, the following four questions (which I try and remember in case I want to ask myself or a client these questions, with the acronym FAME):

1. FORM: What form does your life take? What is its arrangment, shape or appearance? The form of a table harks back to its design. Is your life a simple, scandi-fashioned IKEA form or something more rococo?

2. AGENT: What influences or affects your life and guides you to choose different paths or projects? Is it culture, is it another person, a system of ethical guidelines? The agent for a table might be someone building the IKEA flatpack, or applying a coat of sealant to its untreated wood.

3. MATTER: What does it consist of? What is it you’re doing (saying, thinking, eating, writing, producing) from day to day in this and for this thing you call “your life”? The material cause of a table is wood, screws, and fixings. What do we consist of, other than human meat. The most problematic aspect here being: what is this thing we call mind, or consciousness, how does this matter?

4. END: What is the purpose or good that this thing, or this life seeks? For a table, its purpose is that of being a flat surface on which we can work or dine. But what is the final cause of Brian or Johnny’s life, or of James Wright’s life, on this day in which he sways back and forth in the sun and breeze at William Duffey’s farm?

I find it intriguing that this wheel of wisdom-loving investigation which we call western philosophy (philia being the love part, and sophia the wisdom part) commences with chaos, the chasm, the void, but why should this surprise me. We start from that place of entropy and emptiness too, and no matter what we end up doing with our lives, it is to chaos -plans gone awry, trauma, ageing, sickness and death (the void)- to which we return.

Is it no wonder then, that we should be drawn to different forms of purpose-seeking,  teleological forms you could say if you want to sound clever: telos meaning the end, aim, or goal and logos the explanation or reason. Part of this must work as a defence mechanism, a response to the anxiety generated, often unconsciously, by our lives, like everything else in the universe unravelled and unravelling. To read the history of philosophy is to read of how a culture was formed through a value-seeking quest, a quest we have been plugged into for the last two to three thousand years at the very least. Which is not to say human beings didn’t ask themselves this question beforehand, but maybe not in the same way as the more modern, cosmopolitan animals of ancient Athens and Rome did.

When Brian says to Johnny “Don’t waste your life”, when James Wright exclaims, “I have wasted my life”, another way of putting this might be: beware of living a life with no telos or logos; no aim or goal, no explanation or reason. This is the life Johnny is quite patently engaged with, an anti-teleological one, ruled by bodily drives, and entropy. Perhaps a fancier way of saying this is that Johnny’s life, and perhaps also that of James Wright in this poem is more phenomenological than teleological, a life lived instrumentally, in the way of a puppet but without a puppeteer (I don’t think Johnny believes in God); or as a pawn on a giant chessboard called Dalston, but without any chess-players. He is a victim to his own experiences, as many of us feel ourselves to be: cut loose and disoriented, not guided by any organising principles we can simply and coherently articulate. Maybe this is why there are more than 30 million podcast episodes floating around on the internet. Maybe this, including the one you’re listening to now, is part of that quest.

Or maybe there are two different dimensions of value being explicated in this poem. For most of the poem we are in the phenomenological or experiential dimension, especially in the first few lines which offer us an incredibly evocative visual palette of bronze and black and green, before moving into the more abstract realms of empty spaces: the ravine, the empty house, the sound of cowbells seemingly unattached to any cows.

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.

Notice the use of those definite articles in the first two lines (“the bronze butterfly…the black trunk”), as if this was the only bronze butterfly and the only black trunk in existence. Such is the anchor and ballast of focused attention: anything we give that attention to blooms, as if by magic, into a more than sufficient significance. As if it were the only one, or at least, the only thing filling up our lives completely at this moment. Which of course, given the right kind of attention, it does.

But then at the end of the poem we cross over into another dimension that seems to be less about the moment-by-moment pleasures and stimulations of our lives (part of which involves our minds distractedly pursuing one thought, image, sound, or taste after another) but rather something more holisitic, that encompasses other dimensions, other ripples, or rungs of value.

To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life

THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF VALUE

I am tempted here to use the analogy of a ladder when describing these different dimensions of value, but that would indicate a hierarchy of values, which I don’t necessarily subscribe to. I remember once going to have some therapy with a well-known, well-respected Grand Old Man of British existential psychotherapy, who lectured me for half of our 50 minutes on his Ken Wilberesque hierarchy of self-actualizing paradigms, implying of course that he was on one of the upper rungs, whereas poor old suffering me was stuck on or in a lower, more poky-minded place. I resented him and his explanatory frameworks at the time, but maybe he was right.

Ethical systems often stress social goods and values as their more elevated, aspirational goals: how we treat each other, and what we owe to each other. When ethics talks ladders, and it often does, the bottom rungs of the ethical ladder seem to be about giving ourselves pleasure and avoiding pain. But the higher up we go, so our standard ethical narrative  suggests that the more we put our own needs to one side, and begin focusing on what’s happening around us, as well as our deepest, wisest selves, the closer we too might paradoxically get to flourishing as individuals as well as a species. We see this in a small way with Brian, and other characters in the film, trying to care for Johnny, even though he offers neither gratitude or reciprocity. But maybe it is enough to give oneself to another even in this small way, which no doubt renders some ineffable value back to us, even if that value is something we cannot easily quantify.

Perhaps this stems from our biological story. Parents often talk about how having children reframed or even completely upturned the self-focused, self-centred lives they’d been living up till then as predominantly pleasure and fame-seeking creatures. W.H. Auden reflecting on the idea that we’re put on this Earth to help other people, commented somewhat archly “but what are those other people put here for, i don’t know.” Perhaps he’d forgotten that on the morning in question, in which he wrote this, he had eaten toast, and butter, and marmalade, and drunk a cup of tea with milk. All of this came from the skills, talent and labour of other people, not through his own efforts. The corona virus pandemic has shown us that if it’s a throw-up between another poem being written and published, or bread, pasta, rice being harvested, packaged, and delivered to a supermarket, then even Wystan Hugh Auden might opt for something he can put in his mouth rather than his eyes.

So let’s look a little bit more closely at these dimensions of action, or behaviour, considering each dimension of value in our lives as holding within it, like a Russian doll, like our spatial dimensions, every dimension preceding it. There is no higher or lower here, and yet each more ample, less binary dimension tells us something about what might be lacking in the dimension preceding it, as well as the inner freedom and expansiveness afforded by a second or third dimension as opposed to a first.

Without going back to ladders, think of this in other spatial terms. For is there not more elbow room in a two-dimensional rectangle than in a one-dimensional line segment. Even more so when we bring in the 3-dimensional cube. Perhaps one way to not get waylaid by hierarchical ethics and blame-games against those whose lives exist more on the “lower rungs”, we need rather to think of the inner-spaciousness that virtue ethics affords us. Given the choice, wouldn’t any human animal prefer to live in a large, bright, airy room rather than a tiny little cubbyhole of concerns, the cubbyhole you could say of binary liking and disliking. This being the first dimension.

THE FIRST DIMENSION: LIKE/DISLIKE

The first dimension, as I’ve suggested, might be envisaged as a line that stretches between two poles of good and bad, liking and disliking. It is also the first dimension in our creaturely lives. As soon as we exit from the womb, we experience this dimension, as well as starting to build up a repertoire of behaviours to cope with it. We scream and sob when we feel discomfort or pain. Even before language, our most basic values and disvalues, are established in the body: as feelings or sensations we like or don’t like. We learn to smile, and babble, to move about freely when we are experiencing the good. And we learn to scream, and cry, and moan, and fall into frozen states of apathy and forebearance, or to fight, to clamp our teeth even around the nourishing nipple, when we experience things that feel bad to us and in us. Over time, these things become fixed concepts of good and bad, and so we become moral beings.

In the poem, the butterfly on the black trunk, the sonic but also spatial arena of distant cowbells, the alchemical horse-droppings “blazing up into golden stones” are all presented to us as positive, valued experiences, or entities in awareness; entities that in and of themselves appear to have some intrinsic value. But towards the end of the poem, these start to shade into disvalue, with darkness and homelessness hovering, followed by that possibly forlorn final interjection: I have wasted my life! Although in contrast to all that has followed, the final line of the poem seems to sit in the ear more ambivalently than the face-value assertion of its words would suggest. Perhaps this is because at the end of the poem we are moving into the second  and third dimensions of value.

THE SECOND DIMENSION OF VALUE: MEANS TO AN END

If the first dimension is a single plane extending from good to bad, from like to not-like, from joy to suffering, then the second dimension is perhaps more like a square or rectangle, as in a map or one of those instruction leaflets that comes with your IKEA flatpack; or some other object requiring construction. In this second dimension, value expands from the subjective, binary like/don’t-like experience into the realm of action and practical engagement with the world, into things we call activities, pursuits, purposes, projects, as well as attachments and relationships with others.

Instead of the subjective good and bad of the first dimension, the liking or not liking of a particular shade of butterfly, the almost magical play of light on horse-droppings, or the comfort of a hammock compared to a mattress, we are now able to consider the success or failure, the feasibility and workability of our plans and intentions, our actions in various spheres, as well as all relationships that we engage in with others. This second dimension of value is more likely to be measured by the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of a valued pursuit. The first dimension is simply about feeling and valence, the second is rooted in a kind of what’s-in-it-for-me, or maybe what’s-in-it-for-us pragmatism. Did this valued action I was planning to carry out happen, or didn’t it. Did it work? Did it meet a need? Are tweaks required to get it to work more effectively?

We may also, when we are in the second dimension be willing to override primary, first-dimensional values (especially discomfort and pain) in order to achieve our secondary gains. Keeping our bodies fit and healthy takes a good deal of effort, which is experienced by the mind as unpleasurable at times: our heart-rate speeding up in exercise, as well as sweat, shortness of breath, and muscle-ache. The mind soon begins to complain when the body is put under stress or strain. Writing these words, as I am doing now, sometimes there is flow, and they emerge quite easily, but often sentences proceed in fits and starts. Writing, as with many creative projects, can often feel like stumbling from one sentence, or thought to the next, attempting to capture those inchoate, and sometimes inaccessible ideas in prose or poetry.

The second dimension of value is really useful in that it is always focusing us on means and ends. To what purpose is James Wright lying in a hammock on William Duffy’s farm writing this poem? Indeed, what may be the “purpose” of any creative act, especially when there are always more concrete, practical tasks to be getting on with?

This is especially true for the biographical context of the poem. Having read bits and pieces of James Blunk’s biography of Wright, I discover that in August 1960, Wright (alcoholic and philanderer, as Blunk paints him) brings his family to Robert Bly’s farm in Minnesota to be near to his friend and mentor. On the day in question, Bly and Wright drive over to Bill Duffy’s farm on Pine Island. Duffy had gone off to Tangier to teach, which is perhaps why the house in the poem stands empty. Bly had been asked by Duffy to do some maintenance work on the farm, and so explains Blunk, “while [Bly] and a carpenter drained the plumbing and built a new cellar door, among other chores, Wright retreated to a green hammock that hung between two maple trees at a distance from the house” and began to capture the perceptions that became this expansively titled series of short lines called “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”.

In the circumstances, and perhaps thinking from the second dimension of value, that cellar door sounds like a more useful activity to be getting on with than writing a poem, especially to William Duffy, the owner of the farmhouse. But maybe if you’re born with the name Wright, a certain kind of nominative determinism kicks in which overrides such concerns? What can a Wright do but write, right?

THE THIRD DIMENSION OF VALUE: ASPIRATIONS AND IDEA(L)S

We can now in retrospect say that Wright’s time was, at least in the light of his literary output, better spent writing his poem than building and installing cellar doors. Especially this poem, which of all the poems he wrote, is perhaps the one he will be remembered by. Which is to say: the name James Wright will be remembered as an attachment, or a reference to this poem. If he had been called Jeremiah Finkelstein, that name would be remembered alongside the poem. Just as we remember the name of a park in which we found a fossil that now sits on our bookshelf. For the poem has over the years become a touchstone to many, and will continue to give pleasure and provoke thought long after that particular cellar door crumbles.

It’s usually the other way round. Poems, as is the case with most works of art, have the life-cycle of mayflies, generated and then gone in less than 24 hours. Very few poems, an infinitesimally small percentage of those written, go on to be published. And of those published, an even smaller percentage, perhaps as small as 0.000000000000(keep on saying zeros for a minute or two)1 of that cohort get to be anthologised, or shared to the extent that they become familiar to many. Poems that are not just read briefly and soon forgotten, but cherished, imitated, learnt by heart, and talked about in essays, podcasts, and radio programmes.

This poem was probably generated from a first dimension value (“I would rather lie in a hammock and write poetry, than do maintenance work on my friend’s farm”), but we are also perhaps moving here into the third dimensions, which is that of aspirations, and a more wisdom-loving, experiential focus, a telos, a purpose, which is to say an ethical aspiration, expressed by Ideals, Ideas, and also notions about Identity. Wright sees his purpose, his identity, as that of a poet, not a handyman, and so he uses his “god-given” energy to write a poem rather than sorting out the plumbing in William Duffy’s home.

I sometimes like to bracket the L in the word IDEAL, just to remind my self that this Ideal Self, or Day, or Partner, or meal, is like all ideals, a kind of mirage, a fantasty, a dream. The ideal is 99% idea and only 1%, or less, active or action-focused. Yet the ideal often feels tantalisingly close, as close as most of the things that surface in our minds, that virtual space between our ears. But let us not foget, other than the part of that space filled by brain-meat, it is, we are intrinsically empty. We are empty buildings through which thoughts, emotions, body sensations, aspirations and all our ideal ideas pass.

Our minds struggle to see their ideas and ideals in that way. Instead they either draw us towards action with hope of fulfilment, or torment us by holding up a mirror to our insufficiencies and lack of progress towards the idea(l). “The man who first saw nothing / drew a line around it,” writes Alan Dugan in his poem On Zero, that zero line, also a shape, encompasses all our ideas and ideals, becoming “the mouth of the horn of agony,/ the womb all matter tumbled out of in the first / meaningless avalanche of the concrete…”. Perhaps it is this Ideal James Wright that haunts this poem, a poem written by the more slovenly, indolent James Wright, which then through a self-critical back-and-forth results in that last searing line about dissipation and waste.

In the third dimension we are in a of space transcendental experience, where there is always a sense of the utter rightness and revelatory significance in an impression or a thought, accompanied by an ineffable slipperiness in how to communicate this understanding to anyone else, even a future self who is no longer in that state anymore.

There is also a kind of alchemy at work here too, of turning shit (“the droppings of last year’s horses”) into gold. Surely whatever we do with our lives, no matter how productive they are, we are always going to be comparatively lacking in respect to the numinous perfection of this pastoral scene, the kind of scene, even when not a pastoral one, that is often conjured up, or fleetingly glimpsed in our own minds. Which is also the reason why we both cherish as well as guard our Idea(l) Selves in the very depths of our minds and hearts, lest they be tarnished or become faded and illegible, as they often do, through the chafing and chastening of our less-than-ideal circumstances.

NO ONE ON THEIR DEATHBED EVER SAID: I WISH I’D SPENT MORE TIME AT THE OFFICE

Let me introduce to you another wastrel, Wiley Silenowicz, the alter-ego, and protagonist of many of the stories and novels of Harold Brodkey. I am listening for the third or fourth time to Michael Cunningham reading Brodkey’s story “Dumbness is Everything” on the New Yorker Fiction podcast, marvelling at the line-by-line fecundity of the piece. The story has no plot per se, encapsulated in the space of an hour or less, in which Wiley and his girlfriend Orra, both drunk, drive home, stop the car so that she can pee, and end up having sex on a lawn behind a suburban house.

“I have to pee,” she said. “And I don’t know if I can walk.”

I put my arms under hers and kind of pulled-shifted her until her thighs were spread, until her legs were mostly in a sexual posture. She was usually verbally forward, the aggressor in speech, but physically she was passive and full of waiting—perhaps that was a style back then. Her heavy head, her marvelous skin, her hair pressed against my cheek. I lifted her skirt and got her panties off—over the one high heel. The night air, the bright albino watchface moon with its blurred random wholeness, the stiffly assaulting breeze, and my head ringing with drunkenness, of course—it is all a lost world now, those farms so near New York City and my youth and drunkenness.

The relief at not being dead and the social immensities of the time, the nearness-and-distance in the view of that vast, restless rural, semi-rural district and its local yeomanry, and the strangeness of the hour and of being in love.… Farming was merely part of what locals did; they worked, had businesses. Our escape, our elevation on this high ridge which was not fashionable—which was for outsiders (but it was beautiful, this land set so high) everything was fictional and touched with brevity and with a greatly skewed, faintly Gatsbyoid romance.”

Just like Wright’s poem, the story exists as a kind of double-helix, in that its sentence-by-sentence DNA can be elaborated into a whole life, a world, a universe. Brodkey famously or infamously took 40 years to write his novel The Runaway Soul, which turned out to be a bit of a bloated, damp squib, though I report this from reviews and hearsay, not having read it myself. But then neither has Michael Cunningham, a lifelong fan and friend of Brodkey. It is Brodkey’s stories that are perhaps his true legacy, maybe because each one of them packs in a novel’s worth of reflection and sensory explication, written in a style that is half crushed velvet, half glittering quartz, embedded occasionally with the odd, stray razor blade.

This story was one of the last Brodkey wrote when he was dying of AIDS, and perhaps it is for this reason I am thinking about it in relation to this idea of wasting or not-wasting a life. There is a notion that at the end of our lives, we look back and are better able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, the “real” gold from the fool’s gold: even if that happens to be glorious foolish sunlight reflected off horse droppings – that which enraptures us in the moment, but perhaps doesn’t endure. Is Brodkey’s gold, as he perceives it on his death bed, or at least his near-death-writing-desk a drunken fuck from four decades back? If so, then Wiley is perhaps no wiser than Mike Leigh’s Johnny, who like Brodkey, is worldly, witty, linguistically dextrous and sharp. But not wise. Perhaps they both lack wisdom? Pulled from one liaison to the next by the first dimension of being (like and dislike), Johnny is ruled or at least hauled along by sexual desires, and oneupmanship. Is this what Brodkey’s character Wiley is also about?

Cunningham reminds us of Oscar Wilde’s idea that “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” Another word for power could also be control, one of the most compelling of self-cures for anxiety, a state which often feels like a loss of control, which is why it upsets us to the extent it does. Johnny, perhaps because he feels so out of control, needs to control others, especially women. He does this in ways that are predatory and utterly dismissive of the golden rule, whereas Wiley, it seems, is more about reciprocity and mutual advancement. The women in Johnny’s life are treated as means to an end, the end being sex, but this is not the case for Wiley, at least I think not, having listened to this story a few times.

I think this is because this story shows us that the worth of a life is never really what the narrative we shape to convey our lives is “about”, although we often present our lives to others this way. Rather, the worth of a life, seems to be more about the richness, the freedom, the fecundity and flexibility, the multi-facetedness of different perspectives and experiences. Johnny’s debauchery has a 2-dimensional quality to it, perhaps because it is always an escape from feelings, thoughts, and circumstances. Wiley’s debauchery is much more three-dimensional, encompassing as the third dimension of value encompasses, ideas and ideals, as well as sentence after sentence of exquisite inscape, that word created by Gerard Manley Hopkins to describe landscape of our own inner being.

“The capstone of third-dimensional value,” a set of values pertaining to our ideals and aspirations for ourselves and the kind of lives we want to lead, writes Kane, “is excellence of action or achievement in various practices and forms of life.” Brodkey’s sentences again and again express this value. It is Brodkey’s sentences, his facility with language and ideas, and the inclusivity of where he opens himself in the story to memory, perception, and insight that for my ears reside wholly in the third dimension. At one point in the story, Wiley says, maybe somewhat glibly that “in a way, a life’s story would be A Book of Fucks—wouldn’t it?” Well, it might, and perhaps Brodkey has written an important chapter in that book of fucks. Perhaps on his deathbed. And remember this story was written close to that moment. Do we see here Brodkey re-reading his Book of Fucks captured in memory, in order to find in it the solace that we are all seeking, both whilst living life and towards the end: the kind of solace which provides answers to those eternal value-driven questions:

Am I wasting my life?

In what ways have I wasted it recently or in the past?

And does any of this, even these questions themselves, matter?

I am starting to think more and more that they do. I also don’t believe that Brodkey spent his last moments on this earth leafing through the book of fucks in his mind.

Although both Brodkey’s alterego Wiley, as well as Johnny exemplify lives marked by vast quantities of intoxication of one sort or another, braggadacio and sex, Brodkey’s sex and intoxication has what I can only call a more expansive, wisdom-seeking, self-conscious, and multivalent quality to it, one that situates his intoxicated mind and body within a whole world, or universe of potential. Whereas Johnny, who is also wanting some of this epiphanic transcendence, marked as it often is by a glorious escape from the bounds of limited and suffering, self-focused entrapment, is left grasping at  .

The Third Dimension of value has some of this expansiveness baked into it. Robert Kane notes that the Third Dimension often asks us to think about Virtues, Excellences, Ideals, and aspirations. By “mastery, he means the experience of doing something as-well-as-we-can, and by “contribution,” orienting some of our actions so that play a valued and indispensable role in the community or form of life with which one identifies. I think this is particularly exemplified by the virtue we refer to as Humility. Mary Oliver writers in her essay “Upstream”:

Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

I think Hopkins would have liked this passage. The Indian-American psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar in his wonderful book Silent Virtues summarises in a helpful way the attitude of a virtue like humility, which he extrapolates from readings in theology, psychology, as well as literature as enmbodying five key traits:

(i) a self-view of being ‘nothing special’ without a masochistic disavowal of one’s own assets. Which is to say: the humble person might recognise and be grateful for the talents they have, but also recognise that they are, in the grand sweep of human history as well as the present milieu, one of many, many people who have something akin to these talents. And that often the recognition of talent is separate from its modes of practice

(ii) an emotional state of gratitude and tenderness

(iii) an attitude of openness to learning and considering one’s state of knowledge as non-exhaustive

(iv) a behavioural style of interacting with others comprising attention, respect, and politeness

(v) an experiential capacity for surrender and awe

I guess one way of assessing what aspects of our lives cleave to this virtue is by seeing what we do through its lens, and that of other values. To what extent are our meaningful projects, practices and rituals about trying to master a certain way of doing or being, as well as about contributing something to others as part of our personal quest? This too is a kind of bid for power, but you could argue, a relatively benign one.

One can develop or aim for a certain kind of mastery in architecture, physics, medicine, law, music, painting, chess, teaching, but equally Kane reminds us “in being a good accountant, or auto mechanic, a fine police officer, carpenter, nurse or engineer, a loyal employee, caring parent, courageous soldier, generous donor, fair judge, honest shopkeeper, patient arbitrator, grateful friend or responsible citizen.”

Whatever Wiley or Brodkey’s failings are, and there are many, Wiley seems to know what he’s about and what he’s aiming for in his one wild and sickness-curtailed life. Johnny does not have that moral compass, or any kind of compass for that matter. He is, as far as I can tell, but please tell me otherwise if you have other thoughts on this, simply carried along by life. Which is to say: carried along by chaos and entropy. And maybe that’s true for all of us to some extent.

And yet, and yet, here I am going to pull the rug out from under my own pseudo-philosophizing feet, for I do hold a kind of wild, unreasonable hope for Johnny, which I think is largely suggested by the closing seconds of this film, where we see him, having just stolen some money from one of his good samaritans, painfully hobbling down the road with an almost beatific smile on his face. It is in this moment that we perhaps witness in him the eternal trickster, whose harum-scarum, anarchic and often anti-social attitudes and actions, are incendiary but necessary interventions in a world grown aloof and phlegmatic through the unqualified, uncritical assimilating of whatever received beliefs and values happen to be trending on our social media platforms. Lewis Hyde is really good on this quality, and it makes me want to reread his book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art. Let’s read it together.

I think another way of understanding the closing moments of this film is to watch Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning, which although it was made in 1932, still feels incredibly fresh, funny, relevant, and anarchic. It is also one of Mike Leigh’s favourite films, and I have no doubt he had the Fred-Flinstonesque, Homer-Simpsonesque character of Boudu in mind when he and Thewlis were creating the character of Johnny together. I’m not going to go into all of this now, as I think I’ve pontificated enough for today, but I would urge you to watch this film, which is a delight from start to finish. The final scene of Boudu Saved From Drowning works in a similar way to the final scene of Naked, in that I think it encapsulates the spirit of these trickster figures who I’ve been musing on in this podcast today: James Wright in his hammock wondering if he’s wasted his life; the lost-to-himself, and the chatter of his own mind Johnny in Mike Leigh’s Naked; the irrepresible Wiley in the short story Dumbness is All; and finally the holy fool Boudu in Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning, embodying a kind of primal entitlement.

You’ll also find there a link to something I do in my professional capacity which I call The Life MOT, which tries to encapsulate in a handful of one-to-one sessions with me, an experiential and wisdom-seeking quest,  designed to ensure that you are using your life in a way that might create in time for you a greater sense of fulfilment, contentment and flourishing. If that sounds good, check it out, and give me a shout if you’d like to explore more of this with me.

REFERENCES:

Watch Naked online: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vyX7Mx3y0idvlXvuVRaDCdb2n0bbrzb6/view?usp=sharing
Watch Boudu Saved from Drowning online: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vyX7Mx3y0idvlXvuVRaDCdb2n0bbrzb6/view?usp=sharing
Listen to Michael Cunningham read Brodkey’s “Dumbness is Everything”: https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/michael-cunningham-reads-harold-brodkey/id256945396?i=1000373199681

All the world’s a stage. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=All_the_world%27s_a_stage&oldid=952775628
Brodkey, H. (1997). The World is the Home of Love and Death (First Edition edition). Metropolitan Books.
Dijk, S. V. (2009). The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder: Using DBT to Regain Control of Your Emotions and Your Life. New Harbinger  Publications.
Dobson, G. (2016). A Chaos of Delight: Science, Religion and Myth and the Shaping of Western Thought. Routledge.
James Wright ‘Lying In A Hammock At William Duffys Farm’ Poem Animation. (n.d.). Retrieved 29 May 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpQU79sda3Q
Kane, R. (2010). Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom (1 edition). Cambridge University Press.
LeJeune, J., & Luoma, J. B. (2019). Values in Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide to Helping Clients Explore Values, Increase Psychological Flexibility, and Live a More Meaningful Life. New Harbinger Publications.
McHugh, L., & Stewart, I. (2012). The Self and Perspective Taking: Contributions and Applications from Modern Behavioral Science. New Harbinger  Publications.
Naked Script—Transcript from the screenplay and/or Mike Leigh movie. (n.d.). Retrieved 21 May 2020, from http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/n/naked-script-transcript-mike-leigh.html
Neff, K. (2011). Self Compassion. Hachette UK.
Owens, J. (2019, February 13). In Retrospect: Naked. TAKE ONE. http://takeonecinema.net/2019/in-retrospect-naked/
Quest for Meaning: Values, Ethics, and the Modern Experience. (n.d.). English. Retrieved 11 June 2020, from https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/quest-for-meaning-values-ethics-and-the-modern-experience.html
The Classification of Character Strengths and Virtues. (2016, August 30). PositivePsychology.Com. https://positivepsychology.com/classification-character-strengths-virtues/
The Wayward, Enormous, Preposterous Self of Wiley Silenowicz, A.K.A. Harold Brodkey | Jeff Staiger | download. (n.d.). Retrieved 28 May 2020, from https://booksc.xyz/book/47998963/9d0cac
Upstream: Selected Essays: Amazon.co.uk: Oliver, Mary: 9781594206702: Books. (n.d.). Retrieved 11 June 2020, from https://www.amazon.co.uk/Upstream-Selected-Essays-Mary-Oliver/dp/1594206708/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=mary+oliver+upstream&qid=1591871026&s=books&sr=1-1

 

Categories
Feel Better

What Kind of Commitment Do I Need to Make to Therapy?

To a certain extent, therapy works -like lots of other projects in our lives- as a get-what-you-give experience.

I think this is true for both people involved. I get a lot more out of the work I do with people when both of us are deeply invested in the process, both of us committed to a meaningful, shared understanding of what we’re focusing on in each session, as well as the desire to put a certain amount of our valuable time and energy into working on this together.

For this reason, when considering what you want to get out of your therapeutic journey, it can sometimes be useful to think about what you’re willing to put in.

The key thing here is your willingness to make a commitment, even a small one to yourself, and this process. Even a very small commitment to a valued activity (e.g. committing to doing some cardiovascular exercise for 15 minutes 3-5 times a week) can make a massive difference to our well-being, as well as our self-esteem. Our minds, being such highly-distractable and energy-saving “devices” often struggle to commit – even to the things they know are good for us. So this is why it’s often good to get some kind of commitment from your “heart” (or whatever part of you that you feels holds the best intentions and aspirations for you) before we get going.

Below, I’ve outlined three ways of working together which I call Focused Therapy, Pick & Mix Therapy, and Free-Range Therapy.

I think it’s important to point out before deciding which commitment model works for you, that there is no hierarchy here (at least for me). I enjoy and find stimulating working with clients at any level of commitment. This is because each structure, as you shall see, comes with potential benefits and costs for both of us. As with most things in life: swings and roundabouts!

So feel free, when choosing a model for us to work in to choose something that is appropriate for YOUR time-constraints and interest in this process.

But equally, don’t undersell yourself! Certain issues do seem require some kind of Focused/Structured work on both sides (therapist and client) in order to make headway with them. Others less so. 

If you’re not sure which version of therapy would work best for you, let’s have a chat about what you’re looking to get out of this process, and then see if that realistically might be achieved with a these different ways of working.

FREE-RANGE THERAPY:

My Commitment to You & The Process:

-I commit to being wholly focused and present in our sessions, approaching each session as best I can in a Ventral Vagal state (authentic, accepting, caring, flexible, sincere, kind), with the willingness to take stock both in supervision, but also with you, if I don’t live up to these aspirations and ideals.

-I commit to taking brief notes in our sessions of topics talked about, themes, as well as interesting things you have said in passing that I think would be good to follow up on at some point.

-I commit to spending some time after each session writing up my notes and discussing our work together in supervision to ensure that I am working in a way that is safe and helpful for you and the challenges you’re facing.

Your Commitment to Me & The Process:

-You commit to speaking about yourself and your life in our sessions in an authentic and focused way, giving yourself (and us) time in the session to pay attention to those areas of your life you are most interested in talking about.

-If you are not sure as to what to talk about in our sessions, you are committed to having some time and patience for periods of silence between us in which you can follow your thoughts and see what pops up next that you might want to explore.

Potential Costs:

For YOU: at times feeling a little bit off-track in a session as we follow the many highways and byways of your life and mind, but otherwise no real downsides to this model.

For ME: no real costs for me; I really enjoy doing Free-Range Therapy, as in many ways it is a very “pure” form of therapy. We both arrive each week, open and willing to explore, and see what arrives. Sometimes, really interesting or stimulating things do arrive, sometimes not. But in either case, a connection is made once a week, that over time amounts to (hopefully) a good, warm affiliation.

Potential Benefits:

For YOU: this level of commitment allows you to keep our sessions pinned down to a single time and place. There is no expectation on you to do any “homework” or other forms of consolidation, although people who use this method often find themselves having interesting follow-up insights out of the blue, whilst doing other things not related to therapy, which can be very gratifying.

For ME: I often find that Free-Range Therapy can produce some really interesting conversations and insights for us. This is often because Free-Range Therapy allows for more free-association, which can sometimes create interesting new perspectives and ways of seeing the world and ourselves.

FOCUSED THERAPY

My Commitment to You & The Process:

-I commit to being wholly focused and present in our sessions, approaching each session as best I can in Wise Mind (authentic, accepting, caring, flexible, sincere, kind), with the willingness to take stock both in supervision, but also with you, if I don’t live up to these aspirations and ideals.

-I commit to taking brief notes in our sessions of topics talked about, themes, as well as interesting things you have said in passing that I think would be good to follow up on at some point.

-I commit to spending some time after each session writing up my notes, as well as reflecting on one or two “practices” which you might want to try out in the week between each session that are specifically targeted at whatever we focused on (primarily) in our session together. I commit to sharing these with you, probably via an email or WhatsApp after our session so that you have something to focus on during the week.

-I may also look for and make suggestions for some reading, or some reflection questions for you to think about, something to add some grist to journalling or whatever form  of processing (see below) you’re engaged with which can then be discussed in our next session.

-I commit to discussing our work together in supervision to ensure that I am working in a way that is safe and helpful for you and the challenges you’re facing.

Your Commitment to Me & The Process:

-You commit to having a specific focus that you would like to concentrate on in each session (based primarily on the document which we’ve created together outlining some of the issues you’d like to tackle in therapy, as well as the outcomes you’re hoping to see some movement in. If we have not done this yet for whatever reason, let’s!).

-You commit to having a document on your computer or a journal where you write up for each session your focus for the session (before the session) as well as any insights or future directions you might want to explore (after the session). Sometimes it can be more interesting to write these up as creative pieces: poems, drawings/paintings/photos, comics, essays, or short stories. If you have an interest in doing this, please tell me.

-You are committed to trying out (probably on a daily basis) new behaviours, or practices, or different forms of focus/attention. These may include: making a note of a particular behaviour you are trying to notice and work with each day; or filling out sentence stems connected with an issue we’ve discussed; or doing a brief (5-10 minute) guided meditation or reflection exercise on a daily basis connected to a character strength or value you are trying to develop or strengthen. Or doing some targeted visualisations on a daily basis; keeping track of certain parts of your personality on a daily basis (noticing and noting down their thoughts/emotions/bodily sensations).

-If the practices/strategies shared with you don’t feel appropriate or feasible, you are committed to sharing why this might be the case with me, and then offering an alternative focus for the week which serves the same purpose, using your creativity and resources to suggest some alternatives.

-You are committed to reading articles and occasionally the odd chapter of a book that may be helpful for you to think more deeply or from different perspectives about the issues that you find challenging in your life.

-You are committed to sending me (if required) updates about certain agreed practices or exercises on a (sometimes) daily basis. You are committed to keeping me “in the loop” in some way.

Potential Costs:

For YOU: time and energy; conscientiousness (i.e. doing the consolidation work/reading even when you’re not always feeling like it); maybe a bit more emotional turbulence during the week if dealing with emotionally difficult/challenging issues – though we will always try and make sure you’re equipped to deal with this before you embark on this focused/high-commitment route.

For ME: a lot more time and energy between sessions in keeping track of things we’ve agreed you might send to me or that you are working on (for example: exercises, updates on mood or thought-patterns etc.). Sometimes if this requires more than a couple of extra hours, I might need to factor this into my fee, but generally speaking I am happy to put in the extra time and energy if I can see that you are equally committed and focused on the process.

Potential Benefits:

For YOU: getting as much bang for your buck out of the process! A sense of pride and purpose in putting your mental and physical health first and foremost (the YOU dimension of the LIFE MOT) which hopefully will also render benefits in other dimensions that you value: work, relationships, creative/spiritual pursuits.

For ME: a sense of purpose and achievement, knowing that we are both “giving our all” to the process. I find this deeply satisfying and meaningful.

PICK-&-MIX THERAPY

As this is a good halfway house in terms of commitment, I would encourage YOU to write the terms down for us. Maybe you can combine the bits and pieces you like from the High Commitment and Low Commitment aspirations expressed above.

My Commitment to You & The Process: [write down what kind of commitment you would expect of me]

Your Commitment to Me & The Process: [write down what kind of commitment you’d expect of yourself on a weekly basis]

Potential Costs: [what do you imagine the potential costs to be for you?]

Potential Benefits: [what do you imagine the potential benefits to be for you?]

Categories
Feel Better

The Singing by Kim Addonizio

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE SINGING

There’s a bird crying outside, or maybe calling, anyway it goes on and on
without stopping, so I begin to think it’s my bird, my insistent
I, I, I that today is so trapped by some nameless but still relentless longing
that I can’t get any further than this, one note clicking metronomically
in the afternoon silence, measuring out some possible melody
I can’t begin to learn. I could say it’s the bird of my loneliness
asking, as usual, for love, for more anyway than I have; I could as easily call it
grief, ambition, knot of self that won’t untangle, fear of my own heart. All
I can do is listen to the way it keeps on, as if it’s enough just to launch a voice
against stillness, even a voice that says so little, that no one is likely to answer
with anything but sorrow, and their own confusion. I, I, I, isn’t it the sweetest
sound, the beautiful, arrogant ego refusing to disappear? I don’t know
what I want, only that I’m desperate for it, that I can’t stop asking.
That when the bird finally quiets I need to say it doesn’t, that all afternoon
I hear it, and into the evening; that even now, in the darkness, it goes on.

-Kim Addonizio

Categories
Feel Better

Psychological Flexibility for Well-Being and Happiness

FLEXIBLE PERSPECTIVE TAKING

Ever since you were an infant, you have almost certainly been trained to tell stories about who you and others are and why you do what you do. What’s your name? What do you like? What do you feel? What are they like? Why did you do that?

These are questions you have been asked and have answered countless times since acquiring language. We get reinforced for telling consistent stories that explain and justify our behaviour, and we get corrected if we tell stories that are inconsistent or don’t make sense to the people around us. For example, a child who repeatedly says they like trucks, but then one day says they hate trucks, will likely get some correction such as, “No, Emma, remember, you like trucks!” Over time we learn to tell more and more consistent stories that seem to describe ourselves, others, the world, and how all these things work.

The stories that others tell about us and those that we tell about ourselves are interwoven to form an interlocking tapestry of meaning that is very robust and slow to change. We learn that we are an “angry person” or a “girl” or a “Brit” or “good at writing.” Without our awareness, we strive to act in line with our self-concept and avoid acting against it.

When the consistency that is fostered is helpful, then these stories work great. But these stories can also be like glue that binds us to old ways of being when what we really need is change. For example, consider how a person who tends to think poorly of themself (i.e., has “low self-esteem”) typically responds when someone else tries to tell them that they are actually a “good person.” Do they think, “Really? Wow, I never thought of that!” and from then on believe they are a worthwhile person? That outcome is so unlikely as to seem absurd. No, instead their mind will probably generate arguments (either out loud or privately) about their worthlessness. We all do this in some way, fighting to maintain consistency in our explanations or stories. This thinking, this defense of one’s story about oneself, might be called our “self-concept”, and it’s often a fairly fixed and inflexible entity.

Rather than being able to observe these stories as what they are—attempts to explain and understand ourselves and the world that are necessarily incomplete and limited—we see ourselves and others from the perspective of these stories and thereby can become controlled and constricted by them. Let me give you a recent example from my own life to illustrate this.

OUR DEFAULT EXPLANATORY MINDS ARE LIMITED AND SOMEWHAT RIGID

A few days ago I got an email from a client that I had worked with about five years ago. It was a lovely email. This individual had moved back to their country of origin in the interim (which had been the reason for us breaking off our sessions), achieved some goals and success in his valued life directions (in his case: a creative field), as well as getting married to his long-term partner. It ended on a complimentary note, and the request for us to continue working together:

“You’re the best therapist I’ve ever had, by far, and I was wondering these days, since everyone is doing everything online, if there’s any way you’d be willing to pick up our sessions virtually.”

I was happy to do so, and wrote back accordingly, also mentioning my pleasure in the fact that he had had five good and productive years since we had last spoken.

I didn’t receive a reply to my email, which I found puzzling as this person had seemed really eager to renew our acquaintance, and continue the work we’d started five years previously.

WHY DEFAULT/RIGID THINKING ONLY LEADS TO SUFFERING

I mention this personal anecdote just to underline something that is pretty prevalent for most of us in one form or another. Something (an email exchange, a phone call, a relationship, a work project) seems to be going one way, and then suddenly it changes direction and goes another way. When this happens, we are alerted to this fact by either confusion (as was the case with me) or some other “negative” emotion (anxiety, disappointment, frustration). Another thing that often happens when these big or small changes occur in our lives is that our minds often go into diagnosis, analysis, and problem-solving mode. The two main ways in which the mind does this is either through criticism or blame, both of ourselves, or someone else.

Think about something that’s gone “wrong” in your life recently, something big or small. Now ask your mind to supply a reason for why this happened. I would imagine that whatever your mind comes up with, it’s reason, explanation, or story for why this happened will either translate as some form of self-criticism, or will attempt to blame something or someone else.

I would be very surprised if your mind responded in a dispassionate, relaxed way (especially if this event was unexpected and unwanted), but sometimes the mind does go: “Hey, that’s just how it goes” or “You win some, you lose some” without giving you any explanation for the irksome event or situation. If it does that, lucky you! And in that case, especially if it does this frequently, you probably do not need to read on. But if your mind often gets critical, either towards others or yourself, you might the following reflections and suggestions useful. 

WHAT OUR MINDS DO WHEN THEY’RE TRYING TO FIGURE SOMETHING OUT

My mind was not disinterested or dispassionate about this non-reply. Instead, it went into default explanation-seeking mode, and started worrying that perhaps I hadn’t responded effusively enough to my client’s good news, or perhaps I’d responded too effusively.

Either way, my mind was resolved initially to criticise me. And in a similar vein: maybe something else in the email, something uttered in a friendly and hopefully engaging way had triggered some sort of antipathy that hadn’t been there before? Again, another form of self-criticism veiled as an objective explanation.

My mind also helpfully reminded me that this person was or had-been quite indecisive when we had worked together, as many of us are, and perhaps they had simply changed their mind (i.e. other-focused criticism/analysis). But that didn’t sufficiently explain why this person hadn’t written back, even to acknowledge my reply.

After a week of occasionally thinking about this riddle, my mind, always the problem-solver, suggested I perhaps send a brief follow-up email just checking to see if my reply hadn’t perhaps gone astray and landed in a Spam folder, as well as reassuring the other person that if they had changed their mind, that was fine too. Again, no reply.

Although I found this very puzzling which is perhaps easier to deal with than something we find more aversive, this low-level discomfort reminded me of two important things:

a) when something happens to us that we don’t like, or is unexpected, our minds usually turn on us (it’s your fault) or turn on another person or system or situation (it’s their fault) – none of which is necessarily helpful

b) whichever way our mind has “understood” the situation (even though it is working here purely on hypothesis and abstract thinking, as there would be no way for me to verify the above thoughts) the mind usually sticks quite rigidly to the explanations it’s come up with, and if someone else offers an alternative explanation, the mind will usually disagree with the alternative explanation, even if the alternative is no more founded on objective FACT than the mind’s own explanation

Once I had decided that either this person was being a bit flakey (other-focused blame) or that maybe I had responded inappropriately or insufficiently (self-blame), any other equally viable explanation for why I hadn’t received a reply (of which there are many – see below) was not taken into consideration, or even hypothesized about at that point.

And yet of the two explanations my mind had chosen for me to hold onto as the-probable-reason for the non-reply, neither of them were particularly useful to me. If I hadn’t responded appropriately, I would never know what phrasing in my response caused the other person to cut off communication. And to decide that they were “flakey” in some way as a reason to explain their actions, may have been an unfair estimation of my former client, and also quite untrue for their particular circumstances or situation at the time.

Whatever this person’s reason was, and I shall probably never know now, what I do know is that thinking about all the other reasons why they might have acted in this way, rather than just the two “default” explanations from my mind (you’re to blame, he’s to blame) allowed me to feel more at ease with what had happened, as well as give my brain a bit of a rest in terms of trying to shore up and “prove” to me that its default self-blame/other-blame was in fact the Authorised, Unvarnished Truth with a capital T.

Rigid thinking can only imprison the mind in a binary box of self-blame or other-blame (neither of which are especially helpful or pleasant to dwell on), whereas more flexible thinking can make the space for thoughts about this person/topic feel less restricted and claustrophobic.

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICAL FLEXIBILITY?

Many of you are probably familiar with the saying, often attributed to Albert Einstein, that psychopathology is “doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”

While perhaps overly simplified, inside this saying is an important truth that has been borne out now by thousands of studies—inflexibility and rigidity are at the heart of suffering and pretty much all mental health issues (Chawla & Ostafin, 2007; Spinhoven, Drost, de Rooij, van Hemert, & Penninx, 2014).

In most situations like the one described above, we really need to be able to be flexible and responsive in order to adapt to life’s changing demands, and also to give ourselves and others a break, rather than break ourselves or others in trying to understand the reason for why we or they do the things we do.

Psychological flexibility is a way of talking about the capacity to respond adaptively to the challenges that life presents in ways that fit with our values. Have a look at the following picture which illustrates this concept of psychological flexibility and how it fits into what we know about the processes that promote psychological well-being, flourishing, or happiness.

As depicted in the diagram above, there are four main processes involved in psychological flexibility that contribute to our well-being and happiness:

1. Willingness: Allowing what is to be

2. Defusion: seeing thoughts as thoughts, and as our core selves being separate in awareness, and possibly in behaviour from our mind’s thoughts, urges, suggestions, responses

3. Present Moment: ability to be in the now, rather than lost in a hypothetical future or the past

4. Flexible Perspective Taking: “transcending our stories” is how this is summarised in the diagram above, which is taken from a book by LeJeune and Luoma (2019). I prefer to think of this less about “transcending” (which suggests escaping, or abandoning, or leaving behind our own thoughts and explanations, which I’m not sure the mind is in fact capable of doing) and more about becoming more expansive or pluralistic in the stories or explanations we give ourselves, making sure to include our default self/other-blame narratives, but giving them equal weighting in terms of all the other stories our minds spin us. 

WHY MIGHT WE DECIDE TO DO THIS?

The ability to notice the presence of the stories we have about our- selves, others, and the world, and subsequently take on various perspectives, is what allows us to transcend or at least recognise the numerous and diverse options that are available to our minds in order to understand something, beyond the couple of explanations/ stories our minds seem to come bundled with.

Doing this gives us more space to create lives based on our values rather than following a predetermined mind-explanation or plot. Perhaps the ultimate perspective shift is to be able to contact perspective itself— that is, the perspective of oneself as observer.

Writings about mindfulness from many traditions have described this sense of perspective using terms like “pure awareness,” “the silent witness,” “original nature,” “pure consciousness,” or “the observing self.” As I write this, my stomach feels somewhat bloated from something I ate the night before. I feel uncomfortable, and my mind is already doing its self-blame thing (why did you eat so much X!?!), but there is also part of me (and you) that is just noticing the responsive or reactive side of me tussling with thoughts and feelings in reaction to my bodily discomfort. That is the observing self, or the place of awareness, simply put.

There is also another, more commonsense way in which flexible perspective taking can be helpful. We can learn to see ourselves and our experiences from different vantage points, whether in space, in time, or even from the perspective of other people. Being able to shift perspective in this way can help free us up to see new possibilities for how to respond in our lives. It can open up a space for new choices for what we might value in our lives that is unconstrained by the stories we tell.

HOW TO DO THIS?

There are lots and lots of ways of doing this, and if this is something that interests you, let’s have a chat in our sessions where we can find some practices that might work for you. Also see the bibliography below for some books/articles. But here’s a really simple practice you can try which is one I used on my confused, perplexed mind after it was still churning around thoughts about the unreceived email. I call this process perspective-amplification, and this is how it works:

PERSPECTIVE AMPLIFICATION INSTRUCTIONS

1) Think of something that’s worrying you, or that you’re concerned about.

2) See where your mind takes you, in default mode on this: does it blame you, or blame another person or thing, or something else. Write down your mind’s default “hot-take” using a phrase that begins something like this: My mind is telling me that this happened because…

3) Now, without fighting or disagreeing with your mind, or telling it to think differently, use the same phrase to write down a handful (5) other perspectives. And you can make these as reasonable or unreasonable as you like, the only rule is that the other perspectives need to be a) non-blaming, either of yourself or another person, and b) kind or respectful in some way

So for the situation above, I wrote:

DEFAULT RESPONSES (THE BLAME GAME)

My mind is telling me that I wrote something inappropriate or too-effusive/not-effusive-enough in reply to X’s email.

My mind is telling me that X is being flakey.

OTHER PERSPECTIVES

My mind is telling me that X might have looked at their bank balance after sending me the email and realised that in fact they didn’t have enough money for therapy.

My mind is telling me that maybe they fell ill, or their partner became ill, and so therapy plans were going to have to be shelved until they had the time and mental space to take on this project again.

My mind is telling me that maybe they had found, or had had a recommendation of a therapist closer to them the day after writing but felt bad about saying they were going to use the local therapist, especially after praising my services.

My mind is telling me that perhaps X is depressed or stuck in some way, and wrote this email when they were feeling in a more hopeful, pragmatic headspace; however the day after they maybe sunk back again into lethargy and passivity that often accompanies low mood.

4) Now simply read all the pluralistic perspectives as well as reminding your mind that all of them are equally feasible, plausible, and possible.

And for that reason the mind might try to practice (willingness required here) resting in that very uncomfortable place of Not Knowing, alongside the practice of having patience with ourselves to hold all the explanations and not just favour our first-born thoughts – which is to say the place our minds go to almost without having to even reflect on the matter (our default, knee-jerk or mind-jerk responses).

If your mind struggles to do this, and either pushes you to come up with further explanations or stick religiously and dogmatically to the self-blame, other-blame ones, ask your mind what’s in it for you (in terms of your well-being and peace of mind) and see if you can negotiate and persuade your mind to take a more flexible, open, not-knowing approach, which may in time help it (you) to feel better by not tying you down to something hurtful, upsetting, and possibly unfounded.

Bibliography

Chawla, N., & Ostafin, B. (2007). Experiential avoidance as a functional dimensional approach to psychopathology: An empirical review. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 63(9), 871–890.

Dijk, S. V. (2009). The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder: Using DBT to Regain Control of Your Emotions and Your Life. New Harbinger Publications.

LeJeune, J., & Luoma, J. B. (2019). Values in Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide to Helping Clients Explore Values, Increase Psychological Flexibility, and Live a More Meaningful Life. New Harbinger Publications.

McHugh, L., & Stewart, I. (2012). The Self and Perspective Taking: Contributions and Applications from Modern Behavioral Science. New Harbinger Publications.

Neff, K. (2011). Self Compassion. Hachette UK.

Spinhoven, P., Drost, J., de Rooij, M., van Hemert, A. M., & Penninx, B. W. (2014). A
longitudinal study of experiential avoidance in emotional disorders. Behavior Therapy,
45(6), 840–850.

Categories
Feel Better

The Journey by Mary Oliver

THE JOURNEY

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around
and inside you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Categories
Feel Better

Every Day Something More Important Calls For My Attention (Marie Howe’s Prayer)

PRAYER

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention – the Google search, the downloads, the collapsible
dog bowl I need to buy on Amazon.
Even now I can hardly sit here
among the notifications and updates, the garbage trucks outside
screeching and banging.
The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?
My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.
Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to switch again as soon as I finish this sentence.

-Marie Howe

Yesterday, whilst doing something on my scheduled list of activities, perhaps some housework, or reciting my poetry liturgy as I call it, the various poems I try and keep alive in memory by repeating them over and again each day, I felt an overwhelming urge to drop that chosen/assigned activity, and instead walk over to my computer and start writing these words you are hearing now. I held back, because I am trying at the moment to practice the art of indistractability, as Nir Eyal calls it, whose book Indistractable I’ve been reading recently.

Today however, with a scheduled 50 minutes for musing and writing, the time I have finally given myself the to do the thing I was hankering and hungering for yesterday, I am now assailed by the opposite urge: the urge to do anything but write. I am perplexed by this. As perplexed by Marie Howe in her poem “Prayer”, as perplexed as the narrator of Herman Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener, who becomes increasingly exasperated with his new employee answering every request put to him with the words: “I would prefer not to”.

My mind, and I suspect yours too, is full of I-would-prefer-not-to’s. Exercise? I would prefer not to. Meditation? I would prefer not to. Writing an essay for school or University? I would prefer not to. Phoning a relative to see how they’re doing? I would prefer not to. You get the idea.

I find this incredibly frustrating. As it seems does Marie Howe. Every day we want to do something productive and valuable with our time, and every day “something [seemingly] more important calls for our attention.” What’s the deal here? Why when doing Valued Activity B, does my mind tell me it would be more fun or stimulating to be doing Activity C? And then when you switch to doing Activity C, why do activities X, Y, Z now beckon like some always-better, always-more-tantalising Shangri La?

For this is how it goes in the economy of the mind, driven by the continual desire to get an upgrade on experience. Forget what you’re doing now, the mind says, what’s coming next will always be better. This new, preferred activity presents itself to the mind like a particularly tasty piece of bait. As in: “Hey look: an opportunity to sate your curiosity with Google, or make a cup of tea, or check your social media feeds to see if something more interesting is happening out there than in here, in the forum internum of the psyche. But we usually fail to see the hook buried in the bait, for each time we shift our focus, shift our activity, we invariably trade in a potentially finishable, potentially satisfyingly enterprise (at least if had we stuck with it) for one that has yet to be started, and even less-so to be completed.

Why is this? Why do we flee from those activities we once inaugurated with hope and expectation, the hope and expectation of pleasure to come? Why give these up so quickly for ever-new thoughts, ever-new activities, equally auspicious, and no doubt equally primed to tarnish or lose lustre in our experience of them?

Eyal deftly puts his finger on the essential problem by pitting two philosophies of motivation against each other. He agrees that there is some truth to Jeremy Bentham’s commonsensical notion that “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure”: we move towards the hoped-for pleasure, and away from the present pain,  always in the anticipation of increasing our hedonic gains.

However we also need to factor in Epicurus who perhaps gets us closer to the heart of the matter. Rather than suggesting that our behaviour is equally, or even alternately prompted by carrots and sticks, the seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain, Epicurus aligns the two categories, or rather folds them into each other. By pleasure, what we really mean, says Epicurus, is the “absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul”.

Pleasure, according to Epicurus, is not, as we may intuitively believe, about experiencing or having something we want (although occasionally that is the case). Rather, it is about experiencing or having (even more so: not-having) something we don’t want: pain.

And let’s not forget, to slightly warp that Troggs or Wet Wet Wet song: “We feel it in our fingers / We feel it in our toes / The pain that’s all around us / And so the feeling grows.” By pain, I don’t necessarily mean the excruciating, tragic pain of a bullet wound, or a break up, just common-a-garden pain: painful thoughts, painful feelings, painful or uncomfortable sensations in the body and mind.

“Simply put,” writes Eyal, ‘the drive to relieve discomfort is the root cause of all our behaviour, while everything else is a proximate cause.” Perhaps to put that even more succinctly in order to let this somewhat devastating (I think) recognition sink in, here’s another way of saying that: everything we do, or nearly everything, at least every unplanned action, begins with the desire to get away from something we don’t want to do, or feel, or think about, or experience. As the eighteenth-century essayist Samuel Johnson once wrote, “My life is one long escape from myself.”

And yet, even when attempting to escape ourselves by doing fundamentally meaningful and at times pleasurable activities (for me: reciting poetry, gardening, writing/reading, hanging out with my dog pal Max) this still entails different forms of discomfort, discomfort which the mind perceives as a signal to shift my energy towards something else, something that conceptually (for this is happening purely in the domain of the conceptual, the mind) appears at that moment to be easier, or more pleasurable, and thus qualitatively “better” for us and our lives, a “better” use of our time.

That betterness however, presented like catnip to our minds, is like a lot of mind-stuff, a somewhat slippery-buttery illusion. The illusion being that this “absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul” is in essence achievable. What invariably happens however is that as soon as we swap one focus of attention to another, the same unravelling process starts once more within the new domain, along with the same attendant, thought-scrambling discomforts, the same triggering push or pull, taking us off track. And on we go, round and round in a vicious circle of entrapment and escape, of bait and switch. At least this is how most neuroscientists and psychologists now think this cognitive mechanism works when we focus on something that requires a little or a lot of effort for us to do. We know this because it doesn’t seem to occur as frequently when doing effortless, or more passive activites like watching tv, or engaging with social media, or surfing online: activities that require very little of us, other than to be present whilst they tell us what to focus on and think about.

The problem with this relentless search-engendered focusing and refocusing in our minds as a ploy to attain the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul, is that it is in no way commensurate with the actual pain-informed bodies and minds we inhabit. When do we ever entirely, for a protracted period of time, experience the absolute absence of pain, or at least some form of niggling discomfort?

We do occasionally of course, especially in trance-like distracted states, or in activities where we find FLOW (more on that later). But usually some form of discomfort is always present within us, and around us. “We feel it in our fingers / We feel it in our toes / The pain that’s all around us / And so the feeling grows.” And it has to be this way, to some extent, as pain is an incredibly useful feedback mechanism. Pain can sometimes, but not always, alert us to the fact that’s something’s amiss, that we really do need to shift our attention either to the thing giving us pain, or away from it. Often we miscalculate, applying blanket rules (pain bad, no pain good), and that can get in the way of us doing things that are inherently painful, but in important and necessary ways.

Even as I type these words standing in front of my laptop, I am aware of sweat pooling under my arms (not an especially pleasurable feeling) and blood pooling in my feet, which then after 10 minutes results in shins and thighs beginning to complain. And that’s just the body. Every sentence I write, my mind more often than not finds fault with, or finds the ideas or words insubstantial, not possessing enough heft and weight for what I want to convey.

Each of these thoughts or feelings is a kind of stone in the road of our planned and valued activity. I’m thinking here of that Carlos Andrade Drummond poem “In The Middle of The Road”, translated by Elizabeth Bishop, which goes:

In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Never should I forget this event
in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Howe, in her poem feels guilty because she has aspirations to become or to follow the path of a spiritual being, a seeker, a thinker, a deep-listener, a creative, heir-apparent to poetry or prayer. She is attracted to these states of being (which also require a good amount of doing) because she no doubt recognises that to give ourselves to an activity such as poems or prayers, or anything that codifies, regulates, or puts in some kind of order our experience, anything that requires us to surrender our selves, those “beautiful, arrogant egos refusing to disappear” (Kim Addonizio) anything that requires us consciously, willingly, attentively to step outside of our body-mind complexes, our teleological time packaged calendars and to-do lists, to commune with our deepest depths of being, with God (if that’s a word that encompasses this experience for you) or with the unconscious, or with joy; any time we do this, our minds will fight us in some way.

I would prefer not to, they say.

Why, we ask.

No answer.

I’d like to suggest that our minds can’t answer this question, because the answer often stems from our deepest, default, unconscious motivations. And the deepest of those, is to put a halt to any activity that engenders some form of discomfort or pain. Even if it’s the pain of a muscle being stretched deeply in a yoga pose, or a mind being stretched in meditation, a pain that is not only necessary to our well-being, but essential.

We see Howe’s mind doing this without conscious knowledge in the poem: every time she gears herself for some necessary, meaningful intercourse in the shape of a valued activity, she begins to experience some form of discomfort: an emotion like boredom, or emptiness, or frustration; a troubling, or distracting thought; a physical urge such as hunger or tiredness. In a bid to get away from that discomfort, that chaotic state which feels grim, life-depleting (because it is!), she, like we, shifts her energies to another activity in the hope that this one, this one will deliver the absence of pain and trouble we fantasise about. Maybe this activity will allow her, or us, to ride the wave of a new-improved, bigger, better experience in a joyous burst of becoming; the way a surfer rides a wave, or a singer rides the crests of a melody, or a dancer the rhythms of a beat. .

Howe understand all too well what it is she needs to cultivate well-being (prayer, meditation, deep inner-listening), as perhaps a number of us now do. The internet, self-help books, psychotherapy are all awash with good advice. But due to the mind’s compulsive itchiness in the presence of discomfort, less cognitively-demanding claims on her or our attention are usually given precedence: “the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip”. If you know the poem well, or look it up, you will notice that I have changed her distractions to things that often distract me when I’m trying my best to stay on-track with a chosen task. If you ever choose to learn this poem by heart, as I have, I suggest putting in your own bugbear distractions to make the poem truly yours.

I am ashamed to admit how much time I spend stocking up on films and tv shows I will never watch, or books that I will probably never read, or “researching” future purchases online like Jiffy pellets for growing seeds (that was at least an hour yesterday), or different kinds of collapsible, portable dog bowls (a good chunk of time the day before). Both of these time-spent-online intervals, because they were unplanned, no doubt interrupted a valued, but more effortful activity I had chosen to do at the time, and wanted to do (at least conceptually), a meaningful/valued/planned task, as opposed to a serendipitous, pain-avoiding distraction.

At this point we might might feel inclined to blame both our distractions, and the distraction-fabricator which we call our minds, blame the downloads, the books-bought-to-read-but-never-opened, Candy Crush, or the hours spent browsing on Amazon, the boxset binges. But these are all proximate causes for our distracted wandering, our inattentive slippages. “These proximate causes,” writes Eyal, ”have something in common—they help us deflect responsibility onto something or someone else.” This may bring some temporary relief, absolution, or amnesty when we face our inner managers, or inner critics who are frequently annoyed by this behaviour (“What’s your problem! Why can’t you stick to your bloody routine!”), but unfortunately, “without understanding and tackling root causes,” writes Mr Indistractable, “we’re stuck being helpless victims in a tragedy of our own creation.”

“Why do I flee from you?” Marie Howe incredulously asks herself, seeking a root cause as opposed to a proximate cause. “Help me,” she says to us at the end of the poem. “Even as I write these words I am planning / to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence,” intent, as we all are, to do the valued, meaningful thing, but probably waylaid on the way to doing it by that cup of tea, or a WhatsApp notification that’s just popped up on our phones, or the thought of something more immediately gratifying.

Our brains, which account for only 2% of our bodyweight, use up 20% of available energy. In order for them to work as efficiently as possible, they are always trying to save energy, going into the equivalent of Low-Power mode on your phone, shutting down all but the most essential processes in order to conserve juice. The word we colloquially use to describe this is “laziness”, but this is perhaps not a fair description. Our brains are by default chronically lazy when it comes to anything that takes a sizeable amount of effort or energy to. “I would prefer not to,” is the mind’s default response to these activities when the activity actually needs to be done.

When we’re in the realm of “I might do this” however, or “I’d like to do this” our beckoning future activities seem inordinately, even indisputably possible. This is because to have an idea, or a thought, costs us nothing. Thoughts are like air, completely free and accessible to the brain at all times, which is why the brain, the mind, often splurges on them. Click, click, click, I’ll-do-that, I’ll-do-that, I’ll-do-that. Yes, yes, yes. Hurrah-me, hurrah-me, hurrah. But the carrying-out of those actions exist in a different realm. Which is why gettings thoughts, plans and actions to correspond is often, as you may have noticed, fiendishly difficult.

It seems that our minds confuse thinking or planning with doing. Planning is the necessary architect for doing, but rarely the begetter of action. Even commencing an activity, Marie or we have planned to do, need to do, want to do, would like to do (prayer, housework, writing, checking in with a loved one, marking essays, weeding, exercise, whatever), often exists in its purely conceptual state and never comes into being. This is because it is a plan, a thought, it is a nothing, other than a pointing our bodies and minds in a certain direction. In order to get closer to doing, to actually walking in the direction we’ve pointed, perhaps we need some kind of defocusing process, something that leaches all possibility out of all the other activities, in all the other quantum universes in our mind, so that can we stay focused on just this one thing, for five minutes, or half an hour, or more.

Perhaps this is a task our minds are not particularly well suited for? Or rather, the discomfort we feel when we shift from making some effort at a planned activity to one designed to alleviate the effort of that activity by doing something less effortful (tv, playing with our phones, snacking) often just replaces that acute discomfort (the discomfort of effort) with a dulled version of another form of pain: torpor, indolence, inaction.

ENTROPY

Another word for all of this is entropy. Entropy is a word that comes from the realm of physics, statistical mechanics to be more precise, foundational to our knowledge of thermodynamic systems, a cornerstone of our so-called modernity, not only generative of the industrial revolution and our current technological culture, but at some level of everything material and immaterial in the known universe. At least as much as we can tell for now.

Let me play for you the physicist Jim Al-Khalili introducing this topic in his 1995 documentary Order and Disorder: What is Energy? which you can watch in full on YouTube if you like. He starts off by setting the scene in terms of recognising the importance of Energy in our lives and in that of our planet, the energy that moves us and everything else, that does things that matter, to matter, or as we might say “gets things done”:

“Energy is vital to us all. We use it to build the structures that surround and protect us. We use it to power our transport and light our homes.  And even more crucially, energy is essential for life itself. Without the energy we get from the food we eat, we die. But what exactly is energy, and what makes it so useful to us?

In attempting to answer these questions, scientists would come up with a strange set of laws (the laws of thermodynamics) that would link together everything from engines, to humans, to stars. It turns out that energy, so crucial to our daily lives, also helps us makes sense of the entire universe.”

He then goes onto explain how all forms of energy are “destined to degrade and fall apart”, to move from order to disorder. This universal law of things moving from order (low entropy) to disorder (high entropy) is a fundamental law of the universe, and of all matter contained within it. It is rarely discussed though outside of physic, perhaps because it has only been named and comprehended in the last 150 years or so.

Before this the idea of disorder, of degradation, of things moving inexorably from “good” (i.e. ordered) to bad (i.e. disordered) was conceived of in a moral or ethical realm, in terms of religion or karma. But the law of entropy goes deeper than our cultural or philosophical musings, for it affects not only the kinetic energy of a moving object, the chemical energy released when a fuel burns, or when the neurons in our mind are fired up by collisions with the world of our own internal states, but also the radiant energy conveyed by light, as well the energy of an emotion, of all emotions, such as love or sadness which we carry in our bodies, our minds, as well as in our metaphorical hearts.

Before the discovery of entropy, we and the other phenomena of our world, appeared at times to be inefficient or janky in some way, but now it turns out we’re not inefficient, or lazy, or disordered in the sense of both physical and mental disorders (sorry DSM-V), but rather we, like everything else, are lumps of matter, contingent as all the other lumps of matter are, to the physical laws of the universe, which means to the laws of entropy. And indeed, if it hadn’t gone this way, we would not be here. That which we call evolution is also powered by this chaotic, disordered law of energy; it’s nature’s way (if you like) of mixing things up, creating new possibilities through and entropy and chaos, new connections, shapes and forms.

Here’s Al-Khalili on entropy as a driving force of evolution:

“If everything degrades, if everything becomes disordered, you might be wondering how it is that we exist? How exactly did the universe manage to create the exquisite complexity and structure of life on earth? Contrary to what you might think, it’s precisely because of the second law that all this exists.  The great disordering of the cosmos gives rise to its complexity.”

““The first cell felt no call to divide,” the poet Sarah Lindsay reminds us in her poem “Origin”:

Fed on abundant salts and sun,
still thin, it simply spread,
rocking on water, clinging to stone,
a film of obliging strength.
Its endoplasmic reticulum
was a thing of incomparable curvaceous length;
its nucleus, Golgi apparatus, RNA
magnificent. With no incidence
of loneliness, inner conflict, or deceit,
no predator or prey,
it had little to do but thrive,
draw back from any sharp heat
or bitterness, and change its pastel
colors in a kind of song.
We are descendants of the second cell.

And that second cell, you might argue emerged as a glitch, a fuck-up, an entropic “mistake” in the closed system of unicellular life. The thermodynamic laws of energy, of which entropy is the spanner (both benign and malign) in the works, is we now know a universal law, which every particle of matter is beholden to, including every cell in our body, along with every thought and feeling generated by those mamallian cells. Energy and entropy are the ultimate is-what-it-is of our existence, the bedrock of everything we experience in awareness.

An older word for the phenomenon we now call entropy is chaos. Here’s Lulu Miller reading the first paragraph of her book Why Fish Don’t Exist:

“Picture the person you love the most. Picture them sitting on the couch, eating cereal, ranting about something totally charming. Like how it bothers them when people sign their emails with a single initial instead of just taking those four extra keystrokes to finish the job. Chaos will get them. Chaos will crack them from the outside with a falling branch, a speeding car, a bullet. Or unravel them from the inside with the mutiny of their very own cells. Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck any sanctuary you can ever build. It’s not if, it’s when. Chaos is the only sure thing in this world. The master that rules us all. My scientist father taught me early that there is no escaping the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is only growing, it can never be diminished, no matter what we do. A smart human accepts this truth. A smart human does not try to fight it.”

But of course, even smart humans do try and fight it. At some level, everyone who comes and talks to me about whatever is going wrong with their lives, as they perceive it, or I perceive it, is having a discussion about entropy, even though we rarely call it that. We call it anxiety. We call it depression. We call it existential pain and suffering. But at its heart, in the most fundamental way, it is chaos, it is entropy. It is the state of all being. And we are all fighting it, fighting it as if our lives depended on winning. Spoiler altert: there is no winning over entropy, but there is perhaps something to be gained in certain psychological strategies designed to immunise us for discrete periods of time (maybe only an hour or two) against entropy’s chaotic force. These strategies are, I believe, what we should focus on when entropy, as it must, takes over.

ENTROPY IN THE MIND

Never having studied basic physics, an educational glitch borne out of emigration and the non-mandatory study of science in the British high-school system, the first time I heard about entropy was through my readings in psychology, especially the work of the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his book Flow, where he describes both the psychology underpinning flourishing, and well-being, those upbeat, “happy” states of activity (flow) versus the less happy, more turbulent states which he categorises as psychic entropy.

Csikszentmihalyi’s genius was to recognise that our attention is a form of psychic energy, not the kind connected to tarot cards, crystal balls and tie-die clothing, but rather the way in which this thing we call “our attention” selects the relevant bits of information from potentially millions of external and internal stimuli (everything happening outside our skin parcels, as well as within them: thoughts, feelings, sounds, visuals, bodily sensations) making of them a kind of    , or structure, or story, which we then tell ourselves and other people about what it means to be alive, to be us living our lives here and now.

One might also say that attention’s job is to retrieve appropriate references from memory in order to evaluate the inner or outer event, and then choose the “right” thing to do. Not for anyone else, but for us, the vessel that experiences our experience of being alive and conscious. The fact that our attention can be captured so quickly and sometimes so painfully by a thought or a feeling is often because the mind struggles to run these processing states simultaneously. It’s like when you drop a new album into iTunes, and all the other programmes you’re trying to run at the same time slow down considerably, or even drag to a halt.

“Retrieving information from memory storage and bringing it into the focus of awareness,” explains Csikszentmihalyi, “comparing information, evaluating, deciding—all make demands on the mind’s limited processing capacity.” Which is why when we’re on-track with an activity, in flow, staying with that activity, even if it takes some effort, often renders the best results, and is also in the long-term energy-conserving. It takes less effort to stay with something we’ve already started (even if our minds complain like fidgety urchins made to finish off their homework before they can watch cartoons on telly) than to switch our attention to something else.

William James, the father of modern psychology, was also aware of this in 1890, where in his Principles of Psychology he quotes the physicist  Hermann von Helmholtz, an important figure in our understanding of entropy and thermodynamics, who writes:

“The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.”

Jenny Odell in her book “How To Do Nothing” agrees that what passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency. “Furthermore, if attention attaches to what is new, we must be finding ever newer angles on the object of our sustained attention—no small task.” She also quotes James echoing Helmholtz:

“Though the spontaneous drift of thought is all the other way, the attention must be kept strained on that one object until at last it grows, so as to maintain itself before the kind with ease. This strain of attention is the fundamental act of will…The whole drama is a mental drama. The whole difficulty is a mental difficulty, a difficulty with an object of our thought.”

The composer John Cage was perhaps revisiting this fifty years later when he said: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” In other words, if we can pass through the dips and falls of entropy in our energy systems, our bodies and minds, dips and falls that reveal themselves through pain and discomfort, if we can do this and come out the other side, we might discover that every activity is perfectly satisfying and generative in some circular, almost mystical manner. I think this is what the naturalist John Muir is talking about when he writes that: “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.” When we give entropy the slip, even for just 15 minutes of focused work, it is like we give time and all her demands on us the slip too.

Unfortunately we are not well placed at the moment for doing this. Everytime I switch tabs on my computer away from the forward momentum of this piece of writing to check something on google or in a book, I’m having to collapse and then rebuild the whole infrastructure anew in my space of attention, a bit like walking out of one building, it partially collapsing as we stroll into another, and so having to rebuild the previous building when we we return to it. What a slog. “Each person allocates his or her limited attention either by focusing it intentionally like a beam of energy,” writes Csikszentmihalyi, a beam we might refer to as an ordered or low-entropy state. Or alternatively, we “diffuse” our energy in “desultory, random movements”,  aligned with disorder and entropy. “The shape and content of a life,” he explains, ‘depend on how attention is used.” This, like all great truths sounds remarkably, even forgettably simple, but holds in it perhaps the key to mental and physical well-being as we know it.

And here’s James again, saying pretty much the same thing at the end of the 19th Century as Csikszentmihalyi was at the end of the 20th:

“Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest [or attention] alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.”

Without careful, focused attention, we are simply adrift, lost in entropy, lost in pain and discomfort. Another word for this is suffering.

Framed in this way, we can now start to see how entropy unravels the best laid of plans of mice and men (and women), which more often than not, go awry. In fact that saying -the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry- comes from another poem, one by the Scots poet Robert Burns writing in the no-less tumultuous 18th Century. In his poem, “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough”, he addresses the poor homeless mouse in his lovely Scots dialect as “wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! (in modern English: “Little, cunning, cowering, timorous beast, / Oh, what a panic is in your breast!” – better in Scots, isn’t it?).

Here’s Alastair Turnbull giving the background to this poem:

“It was actually based on a true incident. Robert was out ploughing the field on his father’s rented farm and he went through a mouse’s nest. He was really upset by this. In fact, in an interview many years later with his brother Gilbert, Gilbert said that Robert came into the hourse really upset that he’d done this, and immediately started writing the poem “To A Mouse” which he finished on the same day.”

I find this story, and the whole poem incredibly touching. You can hear Alastair reciting the poem in Scots as well as modern English on the link I give in my shownotes. The poem is especially moving for me today also because it serendipitiously chimes in with an experience I myself had with a “wee sleekit cowring timrous beastie”.

Whilst walking Mr Max around the block in order for him to do his business, I spotted in the middle of the pavement a baby mouse, no bigger than a 50 pence coin that at first looked like it was dead, but then on closer inspection revealed that it was just lost, or confused, or abandoned in some way. I stood watching it from a distance for a few minutes, but its  stress response (Freeze!) had immobilised the poor little thing, and I feared that it was easy prey for a cat. So I gently pushed it into an empty biscuit box I found in a recycling bin and walked around the block looking for somewhere safe to put it. More on that mousie in a bit.

The Robert Burns poem ends thus (in the translation from the Scottish dialect to modern English):

But Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

Still you are blessed, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,
I guess and fear!

The question then, at least in terms of seeking well-being might be: how to not have a life entirely shaped by entropy, even whilst recognising its unavoidable presence?

AN ANTIDOTE TO ENTROPY?

The first step of this process is perhaps to recognise just how much entropy is actually there in our psychic systems.

A very easy way to discover this is to do some simple breathing meditation. Sit down somewhere, close your eyes, focus on your breath, and watch how your mind, which you maybe thought runs in nice straight lines, starts to reveal itself as something more akin to a labyrinth, a tangled and snarled jumble of wool or string, a series of multiple forking paths, a chaotic jumble of thoughts and dreams, or repetitive monologues or inner-dialogues, fantasies and more. Here’s John Cleese giving us a glimpse into his mind rendered not in tidy sentences, created by our brains Broca Area, but rather the raw material of thought, which when aired sounds a bit like this:

Of course this is a tweaked-and-amplified-for-comedy version of what goes on in our own minds, often below the conscious threshold, but perhaps not amplified to the extent we might like to believe. Our minds are unravelling in this kind of freely-associative way all the time, and just knowing this at an experiential level, can help us, I think to have a little bit of compassion towards ourselves when beset with a particularly virulent seam of entropy.

The next step might be to create a simple routine where we consciously set for ourselves some “best” or at least good (as in valuable or meaningful to us) laid-plans, focusing on activities that we care about. And then, the hard part: taking one of those planned hours or even half an hour, setting a timer and ignoring our minds every time they chime in with an attention-switching command. This process, from the inside of the psyche, might sound something like this.

Someone Is Doing An Activity

MIND: I think you should Google that question I’ve just asked you.

PERSON: No.

MIND: Stop writing, just open a tab and do some research. You can’t write until you’ve done more research.

PERSON: No, let me finish this first.

MIND: But I’m bored, this is taking too long! And besides your feet are  hurting. The dog needs walking. You don’t have time for this.

PERSON: I have time because I have planned to do this, and given myself some time to do this, and so that’s what we’re now going to do.

MIND: Well, I would prefer not to.

PERSON: I know. That’s because you’re a mind.

These are the kinds of dialogues we might want to start having with our own minds. You start your activity, notice each time mind interrupts you with a “stop-doing-this-start-doing-that-command” and then instead of succumbing to entropy, switching tack midstream to the proffered new activity, we note the interruption (I sometimes do this by writing down every time my mind interrupts me), promising our Entropic, Pain-Fleeing Mind that we will return to the suggestion later. But for now, because we really care about our writing, or gardening, or spending some time doing a jigsaw with our kids, we are not going to be dictated to by Entropy and her Favourite Adviser (our minds), dictated to by The Discomfort Shifter, the Inner-Bartleby, and instead see out, as best we can, even begrudgingly whatever it was we’d committed our selves to doing.

I find this entropy-reversing process really tricky to pull off. Again, writing this paragraph on another day, a day in which I’ve given myself 50 minutes of uninterrupted writing time to finish off the episode, every cell in my body, for reasons I know not why (other than entropy, impatience, distraction, a sunny day outside etc), every cell is telling me to stop after just fifteen minutes and head out into the sunny afternoon to do some weeding. And often, for I am no more conscientious than you, I relent.

Occasionally I don’t. It seems to help if you are able to strike a deal with your Entropic/Distracted mind, saying to it something like: “I know you have my best interests at heart, the maximisation of pleasure and minimisation of pain, and most of all the conservation of energy, but this is something I really need to or want to do, mind, even if at this point you’re not fully behind it. If that’s the case, I promise you, I will write your activity-shifting suggestion down, and then together we can re-evaluate that suggestion at [and then you pick a time]. But until then, let us try and screw our all-too-wobbly courage, our effortful attention to the sticking place; let us forges on ahead, as this sentence forges to the close of another paragraph.

Entropy, like all downers, can at times also be a friend, a refuge, teaching us lessons that we perhaps struggle in our impatient, productivity-focused world to grasp, or are wary to learn. We’re back to the mouse here, and me carrying that wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie of a mouse around as I did today   in search of shelter close to where I’d found it, but also hopefully safe from cats and other predators. I finally decided to leave her or him in the overgrown, rubbish strewn front yard of an empty, somewhat derelict house, a house ravaged by entropy you could say. And yet amongst that debris, there was everything that I think this little mouse needed: various forms of refuge and sanctuary, food, and maybe even once she had settled down and found her bearings, a way to get back home, back to her loved ones.

I hope that is what happened after I had left her there. Hope being one of our most reliable resources against the ravages of entropy, even when it works more as a consoling placebo than an active constituent of peace and calm, of sustaining and stabilizing control, of reassuring law and order in a universe ruled by chaos and entropy.

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PREPPING FOR THE LIFE MOT: THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF VALUE

Here’s another way you might want to jump into thinking about what is most meaningful to you in your life, and how you can use that to stabilize and anchor yourself when you are being tossed about in the storms (and even occasional hurricanes) of life. I call it THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF VALUE*.

If you haven’t read my initial post on this, you might want to do that before you jump in. Otherwise, please have a look at the guidelines below.

THE FIRST DIMENSION OF VALUE: LIKE/DISLIKE

The first dimension of value is the default dimension, which is to say our mind’s default approach to life. This value is based on liking and not liking. One of the fundamental tasks of our mind is to process experiences and decide which of those experiences are enjoyable, painful, or neutral. Our minds do this because it makes sense from an adaptive, evolutionary perspective to guide us towards doing things that we enjoy and may benefit from, as opposed to those thing that may not contribute to our success. The way our minds do this is by either assigning the experience of “good“, “bad“, or “neutral” to anything we do. Anything and everything. Every emotion we have, every bodily sensation we experience, every possible action that presents itself in the mind as a plan.

You can test this out by asking yourself at this very moment what your mind thinks about this article so far? Is it finding it stimulating or enjoyable (i.e. interesting enough, rewarding enough for your mind)? Or maybe, at this point, it’s finding it a tad dull, or not-so-enjoyable (your mind is not learning anything new, not having its interest piqued enough in order to continue reading)? Or does your mind feel neutral towards reading these words? See if, just until you get to the bottom of this page, no matter what your mind is telling you about the article, either good or bad, you are able to override its thumbs-up/down guidance for 5 or 10 minutes and continue reading. Just in case, there might be something further down of some worth!

As complex as our minds are, on this point they actually very, very simple. Consider this: our mind is only capable of having one of three responses to anything, including this article. Any situation, any perception, any life event. Of course it may be a little bit more of a mixed bag in the experiencing of this: our minds may enjoy some parts of our experience and not enjoy other parts, but I would be very surprised if your mind had no liking or disliking about this article at all, or anything else for that matter. Particularly as that would then just be an example of neutrality!

The “good” experience, or perception, or thought (as in “This feels good, I like this”), usually corresponds to things we like or find pleasurable and rewarding in some way. The “bad” usually corresponds to those things we don’t like or find unpleasant or unrewarding. Neutral is for when we’re not sure, or feel dispassionate about something. For example:

I like clouds.
I don’t like rain.
I am completely neutral towards frost.

The quickest way to get a sense of this for yourself is to bring your mind to bear on those three core aspects of your life (work, relationships, you) and make a list of ALL the things you like doing (or experiencing) in those areas, as well as those things you don’t like doing/experiencing in those three areas.

You might also want to pair your likes and dislikes. So when considering the stuff you like, see if there is a “dislike” or a series of dislikes connected to the like. For example:

I LIKE eating healthy, home-cooked food.
I DISLIKE the preparation time required for preparing healthy, homemade food, as well as clearing up afterwards.

I suspect, due to the abundance nowadays of meal-kit food delivery services such as Blue Apron, Mindful Chef, Hello Fresh and a host of others, this is a fairly common dilemma for most of us. Which is not surprising as we all have minds, and this is what minds are like.

Your final like/dislike list may look something like this:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DHvUqSTwborTZ36RZan9YjTd4xsvkCWMVE_yvJqhdEY/edit?usp=sharing

THE SECOND DIMENSION OF VALUE: BENEFITS AND ENDS

Now let’s go into the second dimension of value which is the dimension of Benefits or Ends.

In this dimension, we focus on those things that benefit us in some way or that we might consider to be a means to an end, even if we don’t necessarily enjoy doing them that much.

Certain forms of exercise I think are a good example of this. Taking oneself off to the gym, or going for a run, or doing some HIIT or yoga at home takes effort, both in the preparation and execution of the valued activity.

Sometimes we are only willing to do these effortful activities because the thing we don’t like benefits us in some essential way (we like the ends, but not the means to that end). Doing the activity then becomes a classic example of a means to an end: we can see how our effort benefits us in terms of mood, general life-satisfaction, finances, or physical health, even though we really don’t enjoy doing the thing that results in these gains.

People often put work-related activities into this category. But if you think about it, there are a number of things in our lives that are not especially enjoyable, but we try and make sense of them, tolerate and accept them, only because we are able to remind our complaining minds that they are a means to an end. Go to the dentist, get a lollipop (and cavity-free teeth).

In order to explore this dimension, I would suggest placing some of the things from your list of things that you don’t like (in work, relationships, and your experience of yourself) into this value dimension where you might be able to both recognise and eventually experience these phenomena as “necessary evils”.

You may also want to make a note of how you benefit from doing those things you don’t like.

If you’ve set up your lifestyle LIKES and DISLIKES list as I have done here to show how everything we like has both costs and benefits (like the benefits, don’t like the costs), the necessary evils should at this point be quite clear to you.  If so, you may want to ask yourself: do I value this thing I like enough in my life to put in the effort to have it? This would also be a good thing for us to look at and talk about in one of our sessions.

THE THIRD DIMENSION OF VALUE: IDEA(L)S & ASPIRATIONS

The third dimension, is the dimension of aspirations, of Ideas and Ideals.

This is where you write down all the ways you would like to be, and sometimes are, but maybe not as much as you would like to be. We all have an idea(l) self who is usually acting in our minds, or in projected futures, in ways that we often fail to match.

My reason for bracketing off the L in the word IDEA(L) is to remind us that our IDEALS are also, always, IDEAS. That is to say: when we think about an IDEAL, it seems to tangible to our minds, which is of course where the IDEAL resides (there and nowhere else), both in how it beckons as an alluring possibility, as well as taunts us as an impossibility, even we feel that its attainment might take a lot of work.

Consider this: any idea we have of ourselves framed as an IDEAL (“I’d really like to be this way, but alas I’m more than often not!”) is also an IDEA, a concept in our heads until it gets realised. We may for example have an IDEAL idea of the job we might do (less meetings and reports, more creative projects et cetera) even whilst recognising that our wiggle room in this sphere is quite limited. Ideals motivate us, but they can also crush us by pointing out the gap between our rosy possible lives and our sometimes less-than-rosy, but more down-to-earth ways of being and living.

Again, in exploring this third dimension, I would focus here on all three areas of your life:

1. YOU: the kind of person you want to be, both in terms of how you speak and act towards yourself and your own internal world.
2. WORK: the kind of job you’d like to have, or the ideal version of the job you already have.
3. RELATIONSHIPS: the kind of person you want to be with your family, your partner, your friends, your colleagues, and your boss -not an ideal boss, perhaps a very real, pain in the arse boss- and maybe even here as a citizen, and inhabitant of the place where you live.

To get you going on this, I would suggest filling out the following sentence stems.

Ideally, as a person, I would be more… (list all the ways in which you would like to be, ideally more of something (for example kinder, more patient with challenging people et cetera)

Ideally, as a person I would like to be less…(list all the ways in which you would like to be, ideally less of something, for example less grumpy when things aren’t going my way, less intense and sensitive about stuff et cetera)

Ideally, with my partner, I would like to… (List all the things you would like to do more of as well as all the things you would like to do less of; perhaps also list some general qualities you would like to embody in your day-to-day interactions with this person)

Ideally, when it comes to myself and how I am towards myself when I am feeling either anxious, or depressed, or upset about something I’d like to be more…and less…I’d like to do these things when I feel this way [LIST], rather than these things [LIST],

Ideally, in my work environment I would like to be more… And less…. I would like to do more… And less…

You can add other IDEA(L)S to the list above using the same sentence construction. I would do this just to re-mind your mind each time (for it often forgets this) that the IDEA(L) is just as intangible as the LIKE/DISLIKE dimension, in that they are all mental constructs and words, until we actually put them into action in some way.

The reason our minds don’t focus on putting things into action, but prefer to focus on mental constructs, is that putting stuff into action takes time, energy, effort, and maybe other resources as well and the human mind is by its very nature an energy-conserving entity. Your mind and my mind would far prefer to have some interesting, motivating, why-don’t-you-do-this, why-don’t-you-do-that thought than actually do anything. We’re all dreamers in this way. Don’t be hard on your mind though, it’s not being lazy, it’s just that having thoughts and plans, and even beating ourselves up for not accomplishing those thoughts and plans, costs us nothing in terms of energy. Doing stuff however, especially stuff that may (as all stuff) either succeed in some way or fail in some way, and usually both at the same time, always costs us something. Doing stuff costs us time/energy/attention, and it also involves sacrifice, because in doing stuff we often lose out on the potential gains of doing-something-else.

IDEA(L)S can be so alluring however, and are always worth exploring. If they can be adequately harnessed, they can become incredibly powerful forces in our lives, both in how they contribute to our physical and mental well-being, but also in how they torment us.

IDEA(L)S give us hope for something better or more interesting/stimulating/pleasurable to come. But they also assail us and harangue us when we’re falling short of our IDEA(L)S. And mark my word: we are always falling short of our ideals, all of the time. How could it be otherwise?

*I am very grateful to Robert Kane, whose excellent lecture series Quest for Meaning: Values, Ethics, and the Modern Experience, as well as his book Ethics and The Quest for Wisdom conceptualised for me the three dimensions of value, which I’ve tried to utilize for therapeutic purposes above. 

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What Else Can You Do Now But Reach For A Berry? (Chio Nakamura’s Wild Strawberries)

WILD STRAWBERRIES

You’re having a bad day.
Chased by a tiger to the edge of a cliff,
you scramble over and grab hold of a vine.

But now there’s another one prowling below,
and two hungry mice heading for your lifeline.

You take a deep breath,
adjusting to how things are,
and notice some wild strawberries
growing nearby,
dotted with flowers
and tiny red fruit.

What else can you do now but reach for a berry?
What else can you do now?

-Chio Nakamura

Fragaria Natural Perfume Spray Mist Woodland Strawberry All | EtsyYou may recognise this parable or koan. I think I first came across it in the collection Zen Flesh, Zen Bones many moons ago. And it has always stayed with me. Like any good story, it seems to have a way of becoming a touchstone to difficult life events as they crash down upon us. This version of the fable was turned into a poem in the middle of the last century by Chio Nakamura, who I discovered in Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi’s anthology Women Poets of Japan. It’s a great poem to have around when our minds go, as they often do: Blimey, I thought I was struggling before, but now this?!

Consider the biblical Job turning his face to the heavens, after all his servants and livestock have been slaughtered by the Sabeans, his camels stolen and “the great wind from the wilderness” blowing down his eldest son’s house where all his children had gathered for dinner. Now imagine yourself covered with boils from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head. What to do when tragedy strikes. Who to blame, who to call on for consolation? At the beginning of The Book of Job, after all of this has befallen him, we hear in his anguish, our anguish had this happened as it might to us:

“Let the day perish wherein I was born and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.

For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.
I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.”

I open Twitter with these words still on the screen, looking for content I can escape the discomfort of this slightly too on-the-nose Biblical passage.

“I am 22 and tested positive for COVID-19,” tweets Amy in Madison Wisconsin. “The first couple of days of symptoms were manageable. I had a fever, a mild cough, chills, headache, runny nose….By the third day, I couldn’t keep anything down. I was vomiting constantly. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat….4th day, things got worse. I developed shortness of breath. It’s scary, it feels like your lungs are shallow and you can’t take a proper breath. I was weak and had a 102 degree fever and rising. 5th day. Things go worse and worse. I had neer this ill in my entire life. I was genuinely afraid that I would die. By the 6th day of symptoms, I was so weak I couldn’t even walk. I crawled to the bathroom to vomit. I became so dehydrated I called 911 and they took me in an ambulance to the emergency room. 7th-11th day of symptoms: ER again. I had never been that weak or fatigued by fever in my life. I either violently shivered in bed all day, or would wake up in a literal puddle of my own sweat. I couldn’t eat for 9 days. I was completely miserable. Right now, I am on my 12th day of symptoms, and I have my appetite back, but the end is nowhere in sight. I still have all my major symptoms. Please vote Democrat. We need medicare for all more than ever.”

I think we can all relate to these searing monologues of misery, even if they lie thousands of years apart. Whether we have lost what Job has lost, or have been taken by Covid-19, as has Amy to the very brink of death’s door there is something in us that responds with sympathy as well as horror to these reports from the frontline of human sickness, aging and death. Because at some level we recognise in their cries of desperation, something which there but for the grace of God (?) go I, go we? And maybe sooner than we might have imagined. 

And yet of course, we try not to imagine, this being our most reliable defence against the terror of sickness and death. Fighting against the imagination is sometimes called repression, or denial. The mind releasing subconscious antibodies against the part of itself that fears.

Which is why lots of people, of all sorts of ages, will tell you that they don’t have a problem contemplating their own mortality (the tiger in this poem). When someone tells me they don’t fear death, don’t fear the extinction of their consciousness, their selves, I take this with a pinch of salt. I also wonder why they/we end up working ourselves to the bone for our children, or maybe for our “legacy”, trying to build a portfolio of creative work or something which we hope might outlive us in some way.

If we were to truly assimilate at a bodily level our impermanence, our fundamental insignificance, would the head-trip that stands for so much of what we call our lives wind us up in its coiling to the extent that it does? Would we continue to get uptight, as we do, about someone cutting into a line in front of us, or our partners not saying the right words in response to something we’ve said? Or all the other stuff we suffer through and sweat over. Perhaps this koan is asking us: if we really take on board the existential given that our lives are always, at all times, literally hanging from a thread, what else can we do now but reach for that berry?

The berry being here perhaps those things, in any given moment, we continue to find meaningful and enriching. With the world seemingly crumbling around us, what use to write another poem, or sit talking into a microphone so as to create a podcast? In fact, what’s the point of any of these things, unless, unless, they offer themselves to us as berries?

Fairy tales often have in them scenarios where young defenceless children like Hansel and Gretel get abandoned in the wilderness by a guardian and are suddenly exposed to creatures, not just animals, but other humans who literally want to eat them alive. This is the way we tell the youngest beings entering our world, and through them remind ourselves, that for all our social and cultural mollifications, we are and continue to be intensely vulnerable creatures. Just like Freud and Darwin respectively and with equal unpopularity made clear in both the 19th and 20th century. We are as vulnerable as the blue-tit or robin cheerily hopping around our gardens at the moment before one of them gets pounced on by someone’s cat. Or the mouse that ventures out for a nibble of peanut butter or cheese and gets her neck snapped in two (if she’s lucky) by some other animal’s trap. Her body thrown in the trash. Her presence an inconvenience to us.

If mice could understand poetry, they would perhaps appreciate this koan, as I have no doubt they too bear some awareness, wordless, conceptless, but written into their nervous systems as it is written into ours the fact of their inherent fallibility and vulnerability. And yet a mouse, indeed any other animal lives out the “message” of this koan in every second of its 12-month life. “Everything except language knows the meaning of existence” writes Les Murray in the poem of that title. “Trees, planets, rivers, time,” he tells us, “know nothing else”.

They express it
moment by moment as the universe.
Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

For they are alive, and not having language, manage we might surmise to live in the very depths of their being alive. Most animals are always alternating between running from tigers, or other mouse-appropriate predators, whilst at the same time trying not to forsake the good stuff, the berry-nibbling good stuff. Without language, they are blessed with languageless worries, doubts, and perhaps even intimations of mortality, which perhaps flicker through their consciousness like we might feel a momentary itchiness in an ear canal or the fold of skin just above your left nostril. God bless the other animals, who are always in the process of extending a beak or a paw towards that berry, even as their killer swoops in. This is the payoff for not having language, not having what we might call thoughts. Imagine the bliss of that. Or the terror. No one knows. And yet the robin doesn’t seem terrified as it hops around in the sunlight. At least not to me.

Charles Tomlinson in his poem How Still The Hawk sees the bird hanging “innocently” above its native wood, “intent with beauty”, but recognises in this immaculate vision, a purity distilled through a perspective filter. For when “the doom drops”, it can only be perceived as a “plummet of peace”:

To him who does not share,
The nearness and the need,
The shrivelled circle
Of magnetic fear.

The magnetic fear perhaps that which draws together death and the living creature soon to be clawed up into its talons.

Even when we are more directly implicated in this, there is a still a part absent from painful reality, a kind of inner-god, with a mind, or a soul, that can “soar out to speculate about atoms and infinity, that can place ourselves imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly our own planet” and maybe even our own bodies (Becker). And yet, we are not Gods, for we carry at all times, as much as we try not to think about it, the body-mind duality within us.

The richest man on earth, Jeff Bezos, has done very well out of Covid-19. Not only does he own one of the few businesses that hasn’t and will never close down, but he recently made a few billion dollars selling off some shares from his own company after the stock markets had tanked, and then buying them back again when another rich man, who also happens to be the President of the United States,  bailed out the economy out with his $2 trillion stimulus package.

But even Jeff (Bezos) and Donald, and all the other multi-millionaires quarantined on their yachts and islands, will find themselves at some point in the earth as inert material, a few minerals released from what’s left of their ashes, a few shreds of flesh eaten by worms, making way for the next iteration of our species who too will be gifted or burdened with this thing we call “life”. 

This fable about a man hanging from a vine on the edge of a cliff, with a hungry tiger above him, and one below, and two mice nibbling away at his only hold, may seem like an extreme scenario, one dreamt up for a horror film, but [whispers] don’t let onto your mind, that this is how we always find ourselves if we take a moment even to consider the substructures of our existence. Which is to say: this is how our bodies are always living their here-and-nowness. They know the score, even when the mind is off on one of its flights of fancy. Which is perhaps why spiritual traditions, especially buddhism, have always asked us to contemplate life through our bodies rather than through our minds. Our minds are immensely entertaining and sometimes scary, but our bodies know the score in ways that the mind never will.

Every day, although our minds work hard to cover this up, there is a tiger licking its lips a few feet away in the shape of disease, conflict, unemployment, and all the other uncertainties of our environment. Every day, another predator called foreclosure, or interpersonal conflict, or sexual difficulties, or mortgage payments, or changes in working hours or conditions either chases us to a cliff or prowls at a distance waiting. And the list continues. Some of the above calamities were taken off the website of The American Institute for Stress which offers the opportunity to assess how close the the tiger of torment is in your life at the moment through what’s known as the Rahe Holmes Stress Inventory.

Our greatly appreciated self-awareness, reason and imagination, Erich Fromm reminds us in his book The Sane Society, also makes us a bizarre anomaly in the animal kingdom, a “freak of the universe”. This is due to this inherent duality as perceived by our minds:

“We are part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet we [believe that we also] transcend the rest of nature. We are set apart while being a part; we are homeless, yet chained to the home we share with all creatures. Cast into this world at an accidental place and time, we are forced out of it, again accidentally. Being aware of ourselves, we realize our powerlessness and the limitations of our existence. We visualizes our own end: death. Never are we free from the dichotomy of our existence: we cannot rid ourselves of our minds, even if we should want to; we cannot rid ourselves of our bodies as long as we are alive – and our bodies also make us want to be alive….Human existence is in a state of constant and unavoidable disequilibrium. Our lives cannot “be lived” by repeating the pattern of our species as other animals do; we as individuals must to some extent work out what it means for us to “live” everyday. Man is the only animal that can be bored, that can feel evicted from paradise. Man is the only animal who finds his own existence a problem which his mind tells him has to solve and from which he cannot escape.”

Fun, eh? So is it any wonder that our minds spend most of their time avoiding this truth, and choose, although that is not the right words because this mechanism is largely unconscious, largely outside free-will, to focus on more mundane issues: someone speaking badly of us, not getting a thank you text after offering some help with a friend’s dilemma, or whatever it is you’ve got your knickers in a twist about right now.

Is it any wonder that we turn all the imperfect, uncertain stuff of our lives into tigers when there are actual tigers, not giant catlike predators, but viruses and organ failures and mortal accidents, and starvation (especially if we live in a developing country) at all times ready to flower into our worst nightmares. And is it any surprise that those people, perhaps the very people we feel most sad for, those individuals who are always aware of death knocking at their door in some way, are also paradoxically happier, which is to say, living whatever span of life they do live with fewer neuroses?

There is a wonderful scene in Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece The Seventh Seal that plays out this zen tale in its own unique way. It comes exactly half-way into the film, and so hangs, as does this figure from his vine, as we all do, right in the eye of the lifedeathstorm. The Knight, played by Max von Sydow, who is returning home from the crusades through a plague-ravaged and apocalyptically-devastated Europe meets a young couple, Jof and Mia as well as their young child. Jof and Mia are a two-person travelling minstrel show, literally living on their wits and faith or trust in freedom and creativity that seems to straddle both holiness and foolhardiness. But what can they do now but reach for a berry, what can we do now?

At this point in the film, the tigers that these individuals are facing are acutely apparent: a precarious career path, no state-administered welfare or health care system, and the plague, the vaccineless-flu, the Covid-19 of their day, nipping at their heels.

And yet, they are happy. Happier than most. And this happiness seems to be based on three factors. Their personalities: both have a sunny and hopeful disposition. Also: no matter how brief or uncertain their lives, they are using their minds and the language bequeathed to our species to express themselves in ways that feel meaningful and stimulating. For Jof and Mia are artists. Creatives. The third important factor is that they are givers not takers. Although they have little or no food, they share their bowl of wild strawberries and fresh milk with the knight, and soon another two guests who pass by.

“I will remember this moment,” the Knight says to Mia, “the stillness and the dusk. The bowl of wild strawberries, of milk. Your faces in the evening light. The baby Mikael lying asleep, Jof with his lute. And I will carry this memory between my hands, as carefully as if it were a bowl brimming with freshly milked milk.”

He then pauses to drink with slow mindful pleasure and gratitude.

“And this will be a sign for me”, he then says, passing the bowl to another member of the group, “immeasurably fulfilling”.

“Man’s evolution,” writes Erich Fromm, “is based on the fact that he has lost his original home, nature-and that he can never return to it, can never become an animal again. There is only one way he can take: to emerge fully from his natural home, to find a new home-one which he creates, by making the world a human one and by becoming truly human himself.”

What is this becoming truly human?

Is it about living through and out of the narratives of the mind? Which are often focused on lack, and loss, and blame towards ourselves or others for this. It would be natural for Job to blame. Blame his country, blame fate, blame God, but incredibly he doesn’t do that. He is not even sure if his Creator, nature as I understand it for I am not a deist, can even hear or sees what he is struggling with:

“Hast thou eyes of flesh?” he asks his God, “or seest thou as man seeth?
Are thy days as the days of man? are thy years as man’s days,
That thou enquirest after mine iniquity, and searchest after my sin?
Thou knowest that I am not wicked; and there is none that can deliver out of thine hand.
Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me.

I am full of confusion; therefore see thou mine affliction;
For it increaseth. Thou huntest me as a fierce lion: and again thou shewest thyself marvellous upon me.”

It is this ability to see “the marvellous” that strikes me when I read this passage again. This is the wild strawberry growing in the darkest depths of Job’s suffering, and this is the mythical wisdom of Job which is able to fully comprehend the truth, to see it, and be grateful for it, even in the midst of his most profound suffering. I marvel at this, I am utterly humbled by this. As I am of that person reaching out to take a berry from the plant and put it in his mouth before plummeting to a quick death, or worse.

Interesting, Job has glimpses of his salvation in a more pagan reckoning, which his religion doesn’t perhaps allow him to fully acknowledge:

“For there is hope of a tree,” he recognises at one point deep inside his mourning, “if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.”

Job does not believe that this is available as salvation to man. He focuses on how different we are to trees, failing to recognise, that the life he talks about residing in the tree, we carry as a community together, and if one tree falls, others continue to grow.

But this is a deep challenge to our self-focused egos. In the midst of despair, or suffering, especially after the death of a loved one, if someone were to tell me that at least life in other quarters, in other bodies, lives on, I’d very likely feel murderous intentions toward this person. So we don’t say this kind of thing, at least not aloud, to those who are struggling, even if at some level this is true. If one of my parents is carried away by the “great wind” of the coronavirus, I doubt that I would find much consolation in knowing your parents were spared. These parables ask a lot of us.

Perhaps what we are talking about here is the ultimate reckoning with what-is:

“One dieth in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet,” marvels Job.
“His breasts are full of milk, and his bones are moistened with marrow.
And another dieth in the bitterness of his soul, and never eateth with pleasure.
They shall lie down alike in the dust, and the worms shall cover them.”

So basically: damned if you do (which is to say struggling to surrender, to accept our lot, and so acquire some peace of mind even in the midst of pain and suffering). But also damned if you don’t. So you might as well take the damned-if-you-do option? What else can you do now but reach for a berry, what else can you do now?

I started writing the script for this episode almost a month ago. Coming up to the end of April, I am eager to get it recorded and move onto something else. In the last 24 hours I have been coughing and headachey and profoundly hypochondriacal. I’m sure it’s just a cold, but perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps you too are feeling your mortality today, the mortality you very rarely feel, insulated as we usually are by the indemnity of antiobiotics and all the other privileges of living in an economically developed-country. Taking Mr Max, my canine companion, for a walk around the block an hour ago, I recited the poem to myself over and over, testing it out against today’s mortal fears.

That did the trick: soothing and edifying me in a way that is hard to put into words. Especially those final lines “What else can you do now but reach for a berry / What else can you do now?” These have become a constant background mantra in the last few weeks. I take them to mean: when your mind takes you on a rollercoaster ride, come back, come back, to this here and now, and refocus on whatever or whoever it is you want to give your heart, mind, and voice to. And then, like the Knight, Jof and Mia, and all the doomed souls in The Seventh Seal, holding hands whilst singing and dancing their way to death, do try and savour your next breath, your next worthwhile sentence or action or thought. Enjoy your self. Even now, especially now.

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The Joys & Delights of Being Nobody & Everybody: Caedmon’s Hymn

CAEDMON’S HYMN

Nu sculon herigean          heofonrices weard,
meotodes meahte             and his modgeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder,         swa he wundra gehwæs,
ece drihten,                        or onstealde.

He ærest sceop                  eorðan bearnum
heofon to hrofe,                halig scyppend;
þa middangeard               moncynnes weard,
ece drihten,                       æfter teode
firum foldan,                    frea ælmihtig.

CAEDMON (translation)

“Someone speaks, someone hears: no need to go any further. It is not he, it is not she, it’s I. (Or another, or others – what does it matter?) The case is clear: it is not he, she, they who I know I am (that’s all I know), who I cannot say I am. (I can’t say anything – I’ve tried, I’m trying.) We know nothing, know of nothing: neither what it is to speak, nor what it is to hear.”

SAMUEL BECKETT (from The Unnameable)

The above poem by Caedmon, sometime’s known as Caedmon’s Hymn, is one I recite everyday as part of my Poetry Liturgy. Caedmon, who like Madonna and Prince, is only known to us by this single name is often referred to as the creator of the first poem in the English – Old English that is. He (?) lived approximately 1,500 years ago in Whitby Abbey, which can still be found on the East Cliffs above Whitby in Yorkshire, overlooking the North Sea. When corona is over, I for one am planning to make a pilgrimage!

Bram Stoker set Dracula in Whitby, and the ruins of the monastery feature in Mina Murray’s Journal in Chapter 8 where she wakes up concerned and alarmed in the middle of the night to find her friend Lucy Westenra has vanished. Lucy is prone to sleepwalking, and so is eventually spied by her friend across the harbour, in the grounds of the Abbey, lying in a “narrow band of light as sharp as a sword-cut” whilst next to her a dark figure (Dracula) feasts on her blood.

1400 years before this grisly fictional event, a less grisly, but still quite possibly fictional event occurred in the moonlit grounds of the Abbey in question, although like a lot of fiction, it has come down to us in the guise of history. Which is to say Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica in which he recounts how the lay brother, the quasi-illiterate Caedmon, stole away one evening to sleep with the animals because he felt ashamed by his inability to join in with the freestyle rapping and bantering over some groovy harp music that all the other monks were enjoying, primed by food and drink.

While Caedmon was asleep he had what we might recognise now as a kind of anxiety dream in which someone approached him and asked him to sing a principium creaturarum, the phrase translates as ”the beginning of created things”, a kind of creation myth,  According to Bede, Caedmon on awaking, shared this hymn with his foreman, who then got the abbess, St Hilda of Whitby, to vouch for the authenticity of this dream as a divine vision, and voila: the first “poem” in English was born!

That’s the official non-fictional account. But as Martin Irvine explains in his essay “Medieval Textuality and the Archaeology of Textual Culture”, the poem is “totally formulaic”, and that “rather than providing an origin for poetry, [Caedmon’s hymn] is composed of a number of “anonymous, intertextual and transtextual units, drawn from a word-hoard, the poetic lexicon, a metrical and syntactical model, whose very mode of being is that which is always already said before”. Another way of putting it is that it is a kind of “mosaic of textual citations”, hardly revealing the identity of the poet, but rather the intrinsic anonymity of Old English poetry: “Caedmon is a poet finally anonymous.”

And maybe even finely anonymous. With both the aesthetic bearings of that word (rich, valuable, costly), as well as a moral etymology suggesting “true, genuine; faithful, constant.”

For those pre-moderns, anonymity, intertextuality, and transtextuality -to clothe these moves with highfalutin academic terminology- was a given when it came to notions of authorship. This would drastically change in the 18th and 19th centuries, as we shall see below. But it was in the mid to late 20th century, that literary critics like Barthes and Foucault would return to  questions about authorship and anonymity again. Barthes most famously in his essay “The Death of The Author” where he writes how for Mallarme, “as for us, it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality…that point where language alone acts, “performs,” and not “oneself”: Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author for the sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to restore the status of the reader.)”

Foucault also reminds us in his essay “What Is An Author” that our ideas about authorship, and the sense of author’s “owning” their texts, is an inherently modern form of “appropriation”, harking back to the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century when our current system of droit d’auteur and the various copyright rules we associate with this were first established.

So when it comes to asking the question “Who wrote that?” and replying with someone’s name, we are dealing with an essentially modern phenomenon, encompassing just a couple of centuries. “There was a time,” Foucault reminds us “when all the texts which we now call ‘literary’ (stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author.” The author’s “job” or function before the 1800s was much more in line with that of a ideas disseminator, in the way that a baker disseminates bread. To echo Beckett again, this time from Texts For Nothing, which Foucault quotes in the above essay: “’What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking.”

Now you or I, or indeed Caedmon, whoever he or she was, probably don’t have much of a problem with this. But quite a few people on Twitter do. And when I say Twitter, I don’t necessarily mean the platform or any individuals on that platform, I mean the Twitter hive-mind which works its way out in highly circumscribed rules and regulations which are enforced largely via a kind of uninterrogated, and perhaps largely unconscious series of diktats.

One of these unwritten rules is around authorship and attribution, conveyed thus: Thou shalt not leave off the name of an author when tweeting someone’s poem or a page from a book. Even if a tweet (let us not forget), is by and large the equivalent of walking down the road and overhearing a few words from a stranger’s mouth, before you walk on. It is not a published, or edited, or fact-checked article or book. It is not even a more extensive personal blog, or article, like this one. It is, for most people, including me, a kind of digital commonplace, where we post things we’ve seen or read or heard or thought, either because we want to remember them for ourselves, or in the hope that someone else might feel compelled to comment in some way. Tweets for me are conversation starters. (With this in mind, I’m hoping to have even more conversations on Twitter than I normally do -not that many, not for want of trying- prompted perhaps by someone replying to a poem with “who wrote that”? I would love that.)

My experience of Twitter is largely through the lens of the poetry community. I joined Twitter in 2017 after discovering the account of an Iranian-American poet called Kaveh Akbar, who everyday, without fail, would tweet a few poems from whatever book he was reading at the time. For a few years, I took Kaveh as my model, and would hunt for exciting new and old poets and poems to tweet and retweet, following no other guidelines for doing so other than what delighted my sensibilities.

But after a while I began to notice something about both the poems I was tweeting as well as those being tweeted by others. I noticed that we were all being guided or “policed” by an invisible hand, one which took me a few years to identify. The way this hand worked was not only through precedent and imitation, but also via Twitter’s own insidious form of carrots and sticks. These are very simple. If you tweet something, and this appeals to the hive mind, residing in Twitter’s hive brain with its own obscure algorithm for how information is distributed, then you as tweeter are “rewarded” for your efforts by lots of likes and retweets.

But fall foul of the hive mind, and one is “punished” with scant or even no likes and retweets. It’s as simple as that. This see-saw motion of carrots and sticks becomes particularly evident when you only tweet about one thing. I know this because for over two years, I exclusively tweeted and retweeted photographs of poems I’d read and loved and wanted to keep/share for myself or others. Along with the names of their writers. And even though my main purpose for doing so was to have a personal online digital commonplace, I noticed that one couldn’t help but after a while to be affected by the social feedback one got to ones tweets.

I use the word insidious because it took me a while to fully understand how I was being influenced not only by other people’s tweets but their feedback through likes and RTs. Eventually I came to understand that there are certain poets that the Twitter hive mind adores, and others that it really doesn’t care for. If you tweet a poem by one of the adored poets, or the flavour-of-the-month, whoever is currently occupying that spot, you are “rewarded” for doing so by lots of retweets and likes.

Some of these poems would get up to a hundred retweets, which is diddly-squat in terms of modern social-media virality, but for something that so few people are interested in anyway (poetry), this can feel like winning the dopamine-jackpot as far as our socially-attuned minds are concerned. It appears that our minds “translate” likes and RTs into affirmations of our own wobbly egos, which then keeps us tweeting, which then keeps making money for Twitter, which then Capitalism.

Some poets that I tweeted, even though I felt their work was of equal value and interest, even though their poems were largely similar to the kosher poets who got all the tweets, were not tweeted, liked or Retweeted that much, and sometimes not at all. I found this very interesting, especially as my initial impression of Twitter through Kaveh, was that it supported a very diverse and wide-ranging array of tastes. I no longer believe this to be the case. 

Tweeting is a very selective process. Today, apart from a bunch of poems that had caught my eye, I tweeted about having watched Leonard Bernstein on YouTube lecturing on The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity, as well as about my doggy pal Max. Having revisited my YouTube history from yesterday though, I can see that I also watched on March the 31st 2020, a stand-up set on Comedy Central channel, Angela Merkel’s 12 minute address to her country about the Coronavirus (after hearing Dan Savage singing its praise on his podcast). Scrolling down further, I also see that I partially watched a few minutes of a Hania Rani concert,  as well as half a video of some guy explaining the secret to a Derren Brown illusion. And finally, just because I was checking the spelling of the title for a silly comment I made in a text to someone, Chatanooga Choo-Choo played by the Glenn Miller orchestra.

And yet, of all of those things, I only shared the Lenny Bernstein Harvard lecture. Mainly because, of all those things, this is the video I most wanted to remember having enjoyed on the 31st of March in the middle of the coronavirus. But it would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge other forces at work.

We all have some notion of how we’d like others to see us, which is connected of course to how we’d most like to see ourselves. And I think it’s fair to say, that I’d like to see myself, and also give the impression to others, as being predominantly a deep-thinking, cultured, even somewhat genuine/”nice”/sincere human being. And so naturally my online avatar tries to reflect that.

Those aspects of me that don’t fit into this socially-mediated profile, I don’t share on public platforms. We all do this. The sociologist Irving Goffman in his book The Presentation of Self  likened this to a kind of theatrical performance. There is the stage, in this case our social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram, where we present highly curated versions of ourselves in an attempt to shape and influence the impressions others have of us, as well as to bolster our own self-esteem. And then there’s the “back region” where we put aside those roles and do things that might be in conflict with our presented selves. None of the largely woke folk I follow on Twitter ever post about what kind of porn they watch, or the shitty things they sometimes say or text to their loved ones, or indeed anything that might in some way call into question their/our avowed and important allegiance to Western, liberal values.

In order to strengthen those shared values, Goffman explains how performers (in this case Twitter avatars) will work together in regulated as well as unregulated ”teams”, forming bonds of collegiality based on their common commitment to the performance they are mutually engaged in and want to continue experiencing.

Welcome to the echo chamber filter bubble. You see this a good deal on Twitter where everyone is both performer (of their idealised selves), an audience to others, as well as a kind of Director, who as Goffman explains “may be given the special duty of bringing back into line any member of the team whose performance becomes unsuitable. Soothing and sanctioning are the corrective processes ordinarily involved.” Soothing and sanctioning on Twitter works by and large through Likes and Retweets, or lack of. But also through tut-tut comments, and sometimes even open berating.

So what happens when we stop attributing human names to pieces of text, and go back to an expressive system that existed for about 1000 years, stretching from Caedmon all the way to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe? I don’t really know. Currently I’m trying this out as a personal experiment on Twitter. And so far, I feel “lighter” and “freer” since I started leaving off authors’ names in my tweets. The words therein now seem to function more as riddles and koans (for me, and maybe for others too, I hope). As my handle on Twitter is @poetrykoan I guess I’m finally arriving at the place I’d unknowingly been aiming for right from the start? I am also losing Followers.

The other wonderful thing about tweeting as Nobody/Everybody is that I no longer have to listen to my Superego or Inner Critic playing whatever version of Identity Politics Radio is currently playing – moaning at me because I’m not tweeting enough poems from a certain ethnic group, or sexuality, or nation. Or alternately moaning that I’m tweeting too many poems from a certain ethnic group, sexuality, or nation.

For me personally, this feels a bit like being able to both listen to as well as “play” (through poetry and other texts) from a blind-auditions perspective. Does a poem work, or move me/you as a poem, rather than as a confirmation of whatever bias (positive or negative) we may or may not have towards a particular author? Surely removing the author’s name, and thus all associations we have with that name might enable this to happen more than it usually does when the poet’s existential CV (their nationality, sex, race, publishing history, political persuasions, class, and so much more) arrives alongside a poem, baked into their name?

Does a Lucille Clifton poem read as a great poem, even if the name Lucille Clifton isn’t attached to it? Yes it does! Does a Thurston Moore poem rightfully bomb when someone tweets his latest efforts from the March issue of Poetry (sorry, not me)? Yep. And that’s exactly how it should be.

One thing that being on this planet for almost fifty years has taught me: if we try and keep our culturally-predicated Superegos happy, we might as well try and keep the wind happy. For they change all the time, and can never be entirely appeased.

Of course if someone DMs me saying they googled a poem and couldn’t find it, and they really want to buy/read the whole collection from which it comes, I won’t hesitate (if I can remember) to share those details. But for the most part, I don’t think people are needing this information when they grumble about a name being left off a poem. I think having an author’s name is largely just an unquestioned custom/praxis/rule on Twitter now. 

So from now on, if people ask me the author of a poem I’ve just tweeted, I will tell them Caedmon. Not to be facetious or withholding, but because in some way this is true. You might be able to attest to this yourself if you’ve ever made a poem. The initial draft isn’t really composed at all, it’s more like transcribed, amuensis-like from some impulse, urge, or felt-idea deep within you. Who knows where it comes from. God? The collective unconscious? Caedmon? I don’t know, do you?

I for one wouldn’t be able to tell you what that impulse is or represents. I’d like to believe it’s a common well from which we all dip our individual buckets and retrieve some sustenance, joy, and solace in our all-too brief and contingent lives. In which case, please enjoy the water from my tweet buckets, as I enjoy the water from yours. But if you ask me where that water comes from, I will first of all point to the sky, and then to our hearts which were touched in some way by words of this poem, enough to tweet it or read it, enough to even start a human conversation about it. And finally to the blood that beats in all our loopy veins. It comes from me, it comes from you, it comes from no-one, which is also to say: everyone.

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The Fire That Can Make Nothing of Itself

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.

-Mark Waldron

If you’re reading this sometime in Spring 2020, you will probably be aware that almost overnight, the sun and the earth seem to have swapped places. Which is to say that the sun, “the fire that can make nothing of the heat inside its burning ” seems to have morphed into the planet on which we all reside.

The shock of it, was that we were expecting this to happen through a climate crisis: for the summers to keep on getting hotter and hotter (don’t worry, they will), the winters more unpredictable, and for other extreme weather events to knock segments of our species into oblivion. The rains and floods that killed 150 people in Brazil last week, a piece of news lost in the deluge of corona reporting. Myanmar which was devastated by Cyclone Nargis in 2008, 140,000 people dead and 2.4 million more getting displaced. Most of this of course is happening in developing countries, who don’t have the public and private wealth and infrastructure and wealth to deal with these events. But even France has had 20,000 deaths linked to storms and heatwaves over the past two decades. Uncertainty, death, and destruction, are always with us. 

And now we have this global fire, a fire that when I look outside my window, I cannot see. A fire that when I turn on the television or radio, apart from wall-to-wall talk of it, only the empty supermarket shelves are currently showing its devastation. The fire is as much about the power of symbolic language, our chief form of communication, which also works as a kind of virus, spreading ideas good and not so good or helpful at the speed of sound or in social media even faster. At the moment, our shared language is spreading anxiety’s mantra in a million different ways, a mantra which mainly sounds like some version of WHAT IF. And that WHAT IF, or THIS MIGHT HAPPEN, is currently driving us into hysteria, driving us into stockpiling food and essentials, most of which will probably sit in kitchen cupboards while we go out shopping for more, but the WHAT IF anxious mind doesn’t care about food rotting in personal storage. It’s role is to protect us, to try and give us a sense of control and competence, even if it drives us all a little bit doolally in the process.

A few nights ago, I walked into my local supermarket, a medium-sized Morrison’s store, to buy a handful of potatoes to have with some quorn sausages and frozen peas. The shelves were bare. Not just the toilet paper, the soap, the flour, the canned vegetables and fruit, the rice, the pasta, the eggs, the olive oil, about half of the biscuits and sweets. That had already become the norm, even after a few days. No, we’re talking here about a dearth of potatos in a British supermarket. That’s like no pasta anywhere to be found in Italy, no rice in China.

There was something about seeing fresh produce completely sold out, fresh produce that usually takes up about a 1/5th of the store’s total sundries: hundreds of kilos of it, frenziedly cleared from the shelves in a single day, that was truly alarming. Fresh produce that will not keep for longer than a week at most. It all felt incredibly eerie and uncanny, as if we’ve all suddenly stepped into an apocalyptic zombie movie, or one of Derren Brown’s ingenious stunts. I phoned my Mother whilst in the store and bleated to her “now they’re stockpiling fruit and veg!”. And she bleated back, in her wavery, cough-ridden voice, being ill with something chesty, headachey, fluey, possibly corona-y, about how Pa had gone out to find some more paracetamol for her, and come back with a single pack that someone in a pharmacy had produced from under the counter, in a gesture more of goodwill than commerce.

When I said they are stockpiling, of course I mean we are stockpiling. I’ve been trying really hard to not act on my own apocalyptic and self-centred anxiety, but I cannot lie. When I saw that my local Sri Lankan store still had brown rice on its shelves, which is my staple starch, a product which I have been unable to find anywhere for the last two weeks, I bought 8 kilo-sized bags of it, which will probably only last me for a couple of months, though I plan to eke it out as best I can. It is not a particularly tasty brown rice I discovered cooking up my first batch, hence the reason for it probably being on the shelves, but I will enjoy and appreciate it nonetheless.

Enjoyment unfortunately is the last emotion anxiety afford us. The purpose of anxiety is to focus the mind on what it (the anxiety) thinks we should focus on, and even more importantly what it thinks we need to do something about. And the way it focuses us and propels us into doing is through a kind of inner-alarm “This is an emergency! This is an emergency! This is an emergency!” which if we ignore or try and do something else whilst the alarm is sounding, the inner-alarm just screams louder and louder. And if we continue to ignore it, it may show up in painful or sickly bodily states, or it may drag us down into the depths of depression or a kind of anxious mania:

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!

But what to do when that attention we give our anxiety is not especially helpful. What to do when our anxiety demands that we go and buy up half a supermarket, much of which, will no doubt just join the 10 billion tons of food we in the UK throw away every year. I suspect in 2020/21, that figure of wasted food will double. Shame on me, and shame on us.

But what to do when anxiety paradoxically wrestles away from us what might actually be our last few days, or weeks, or years of a meaningful and healthy life? What to do when anxiety demands that instead of writing, or seeing clients, or spending some time out in nature (all my most valued and treasured activities), I sit inside instead scrolling through social media feeds which are currently showing us what the hive mind looks like when it’s having a panic attack. Twitter, my main go-to, is largely millions of tweets which are all doing some version of:

THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT AN EMERGENCY.
IT’S NOT JUST ON THE SUBJECT OF AN EMERGENCY…etc.

And at some level, this is how it should be. This is what anxiety is “designed for”. Anxiety says: take notice, take stock, and see if there is something useful and helpful that you can do either for yourself or for another sentient being that you care about.

Actually, the last part of that sentence is unfortunately not a common line from anxiety’s megaphone. It’s job is just to sound the alarm: RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! SHOP FOR YOUR LIVES! TWEET FOR YOUR LIVES! For it is predominantly a survival mechanism. Our job then, you might say, is to interpret and act wisely on its always urgent and alarming message.

Sometimes when I talk to clients I compare anxiety to the fire alarm in my kitchen. This particular fire alarm used to go off when the toaster sent out a tiny wisp of smoke, or sometimes even when the kettle boiled. I’m not saying Covid-19 is the equivalent of burnt toast or hot air. Rather it is more like that little boy who cried out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. Because here’s the thing: we’re always living cheek-by-jowl with sickness and death, on an hourly and daily basis. At some level we know this, but our minds work very hard from keeping that truth from us because it’s not one we enjoy reflecting on.

Even if there wasn’t a coronavirus sitting on handrails or the shiny surfaces of fruit just waiting to be transferred to our inquisitive, tactile paws and then into our eyes or mouths in a moment of absent-minded fidgeting, there are still hundreds and thousands of other illnesses around, many of which kill us each year in the droves. But we’ve got very good at not-thinking about these, and for the most part, other than the odd person we hear about having cancer, or influenza, or Dengue, or Ebola, or SARS, or HIV, we’re mostly able to get through a day or a week, or even a year, in our by-and-large cushy, privileged lives, feeling pretty invincible.

And in this way, we are able to focus our anxiety on other matters, less life-and-death matters you might say, though they can often feel like life-and-death to us and our anxious minds. This is not an apocalyptic, end-of-the-world poem, this is a poem about what happens when the mind freaks out, particularly in a way, that doesn’t really help us or others to any great extent: the warehouse built for the storage of fire, the brain built for the storage of anxiety, where the fire, the anxiety, can make nothing useful or helpful of the heat inside its burning home. This is often our situation, whether we know it or not.

Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of Death, which I have returned to recently as a way of understanding this moment, reminds us of how we channel all our largely unconscious death terrors into “heroic activities”: politics, commerce, creative pursuits, even something as small and modest as a podcast, listened to by a dozen ears. We pour our heroic relationship building into friends and family, in the hope that when we are gone, something of us will live on. For some of us, this is a genetic project: handing down our values and customs to our children, or to others we believe we might have some influence over. We also do this through our cultural platforms, now largely the domain of the internet. Even the most frivolous tweet on Twitter, or the billionth photograph of a delicious plate of food or a sunset on Instagram holds in it at some level a very fragile, very mortal message: don’t you, forget about me.

That’s right, don’t you forget about me, a billion young and not so young men and woman, recording videos to upload to YouTube, or writing novels, or flirting with someone on a dating app that maybe at some point in the future will become a significant other, someone perhaps even to have children with. All of this is heroic stuff, is driven, Becker and other psychoanalysts would argue, by our deep-seated fear that we will be forgotten, or overlooked, or left to die without solace and comfort. And at some level, the 178,390 views of this particular video I’m watching are each saying to this young woman and her piano, to our so-easily forgotten egos, don’t worry, we won’t forget you. Even though history tells us that this is a lie. But that’s OK, we won’t be around for history’s summations and picky remembering.

“An animal who gets her feeling of worth symbolically,” writes Becker, “has to minutely compare herself to those around her, to make sure she doesn’t come off second-best. Sibling rivalry is a critical problem that reflects the basic human condition: it is not that children are vicious, selfish, or domineering. It is that they so openly express our tragic destiny: we feel the need more often than not, to desperately justify ourselves as an object of primary value in the universe; we must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that we count more than anything or anyone else.”

It starts of course with the magical thinking of a child’s mind. As children, we live in a situation of utter dependence. When our needs are met it probably seems to us that we have special powers, real omnipotence. As children, if we’re lucky, when we experiences pain, hunger, or discomfort, all we have to do is scream and sometimes, enough to matter, we will be relieved and lulled by gentle, loving sounds from our parents, or another caregiver.

We are all, as children, magicians and a telepaths, Becker reminds us, who only have to mumble, or sing, or draw, ardently waiting for the world to notice us, to turn to our desires and fulfil them in some way. When we start to experience the inevitable and real frustration of having imperfect and ambivalent parents who cannot meet all our needs all the time, we direct hate and destructive feelings toward them. This is a natural and necessary part of our development too, and often continues into therapy as adults where we need to work through perhaps some of this unforgiving frustration that we still might have against our early caregivers. Even if they’re no longer around.

And when we discover, round about the age of three or four that we, like the goldfish, or the family dog, may be mortal, that life may include cataclysmic danger that we cannot be protected from entirely, not even by our parents, or politicians or celebrities, or the other Gods of our world, this is almost too overwhelming for our still-developing psyches to deal with, and so we all repress this knowledge, deny it, for as long as we can, perhaps all of our lives.

When we meet this fear again, is it usually not through consciousness of our utter mortality, our utter interconnected dependency, and contingency, but through anxiety at how little control or say we actually have in the world, over our careers, our partners, family and friends, even our own minds which are continually shifting to thoughts and notions we perhaps didn’t ask for or need. Whatever control or agency we do have is as much a gift as anything else. It is not our birthright, alas: old-age, sickness, and death can take it all away in an instant. And this is pretty terrifying if you even allow your mind to dwell on this for moment without its usual reasoning and denial strategies. So we don’t allow our minds to do this for the most part. We focus on heroics, and on other things.And for the most part, that works really well. It works really well for me.

A few nights ago, I watched John Cassavetes 1970 film Husbands. I don’t know why. I think I was curious to see a young Peter Falk in action. Well, youngish. At least from my perspective. I am 48. Falk in 1970 was 43. The film starts with 3 married, middle-aged men attending the funeral of a close friend, and each of them, in a way that is largely unconscious, is clearly having their first adult intimation of their own mortality, and perhaps even of the vacuousness of their middle-class, blue-collar worker heroics, brought into focus by the vacuous, impersonal eulogy delivered by the priest at the service. This is how the first two minutes of the film unfolds, so I’m hopefully not spoiling it for you if you ever decide to download and watch it. The rest of the film is about what these three men do to avoid, or deny, or just block out in some way their absolutely valid mortal terror. Which basically involves them going on a bit of a bender. Not a Netflix binge, no such options in the 70s, no they binge on good old-fashioned alcohol and each other’s fear-inducing as well as consoling company. They do what we all do in some shape or form to avoid thinking about the big questions like: Who are we? What values do we want to live our lives by? How are we going to get the best out of our nervous and reactive minds.

Well here’s an idea if you have such an anxious fire burning at the moment -I know I do. Rather than thinking you can put it out, which is going to be tricky if the warehouse itself is built for the storage of fire, you might want to consider some ways of using all this panicky energy to good effect. Here are maybe two ways to do this.

1) Fighting fire with fire: which is to say, channeling the DO-SOMETHING mind into doing something that will be helpful or useful for yourself, or for someone else. Making yourself available to help out in whatever way you feel comfortable. But also consider using that energy to write a poem or a mini essay, or some other creative act focusing on something that has amazed or delighted you today, especially something beautiful or awe-inspiring, something if possible outside your own head, your own troubled thoughts. Today I wrote a little poemy thing in my notebook about the burgundy-colored wallflower growing just outside my window where I’m recording this, and how it seems to be in conversation with the budding spirae bush and the photinia floribunda with its mohican “haircut” of red on green leaves shooting up towards the heavens, I swear it might grow taller than a house if I don’t prune it, and at this point in the game, I might just let it grow. I felt better after writing my ode to the wallflower, and I feel better writing this now.

2)  But you also might want to do some kind of formal, anxiety-settling practice, something designed to bring your mind out of its panicky survivalist mode, which for the most part is the equivalent of Rambo running amok, armed with guns and knives, and a fuck-you glint in his terrified eyes. In the last few months, one of my main grounding or emotional-regulation practices, has become a version of Tara Brach’s RAIN (Recognise, Allow, Investigate, Nurture). My version of this is called RAF (Recognise, Allow, Focus) maybe because I’ve managed to smoosh two of the categories together in a way that pleases me, and also because when I’m feeling crappy or anxious, I like the idea of calling on the RAF, rather than RAIN. Rain, I could do less of at this point in the year, thank you very much British Winter.

But basically, RAF is Tara’s RAIN. And I find it incredibly helpful. If you’d like to try it out, here’s a ten minute version of it that I’ve uploaded to Google Docs:

Right now though, as good old Virgil says, which is also the first poem of the day that I like to recite:

Death whispers in my ear, live now for I am coming.

And even before the rona, before Covid-19 became a word on all our lips, this was fundamentally true. And reminding ourselves of this truth, even on a daily basis, is, I believe, not a bad thing at all. In fact, it may even allow us, to truly appreciate the things we so want to be able to appreciate and enjoy. And as long as we can stay in the driver’s seat when it comes to our minds which even at the moment might be telling you to go and buy ten kilos of potatoes from your local supermarket, we will still be able to enjoy life even if 1% of our species dies in the next few months (these are current predictions), and even if we’re part of that 1%. Whatever your mind is hollering at you to do right now, be kind and gentle with it, as you would a child screaming for a favourite toy when it feels scared and defenceless. Be kind to your self, and try, as much as possible to enjoy your self too. Even now. Especially now.

REFERENCES:

Derren Brown’s The Apocalypse Part One—FULL EPISODE. (n.d.). Retrieved 23 March 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CUrMJOxqs
Derren Brown’s The Apocalypse Part Two—FULL EPISODE. (n.d.). Retrieved 23 March 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgvk1pj_Eto
Don’t You (Forget About Me)- Simple Minds Live Piano Improv/Cover. (n.d.). Retrieved 23 March 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_1CWZBQka0
John Cassavetes and the making of Husbands (1970). (n.d.). Retrieved 23 March 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjlKVjRrk0Q
Categories
Feel Better

Mary Ruefle’s Sadness

Here’s a piece of writing from Mary Ruefle’s book My Private Property. In this collection, amongst other things, Ruefle attempts to get a grip on the emotion of sadness through a series of short colour-themed passages: there’s a piece on blue sadness, purple sadness, pink sadness, and red sadness. The one I’m going to read for you here is Gray Sadness. And it goes like this.

Gray sadness is the sadness of paper clips and rubber bands, of rain and squirrels and chewing gum, ointments and unguents and movie theaters. Gray sadness is the most common of all sadnesses, it is the sadness of sand in the desert and sand on the beach, the sadness of keys in a pocket, cans on a shelf, hair in a comb, dry-cleaning, and raisins. Gray sadness is beautiful, but not to be confused with the beauty of blue sadness, which is irreplaceable. Sad to say, gray sadness is replaceable, it can be replaced daily, it is the sadness of a melting snowman in a snowstorm.

I want to write here a few words about that Mary Ruefle piece, and I hope you’ll stick around for them if you’re reading this. Or even skip-ahead if you like through my introductory spiel about what I’m planning to do with a new podcast project I’ve given myself. Part of what I want to say about Ruefle is connected to something Ruefle reveals to us right at the end of her book. And I really don’t think I’m overselling this when I tell you that when you find out that single sentence in which she later frames her colour poems, or whatever they are, it will blow your mind. It’s almost like a plot twist, although in this case, more a mind-twist that is up there with the surprise endings of films like The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, and The Usual Suspects. Seriously though, it’s a really great brain-discombobulator. So stick around for that if you can, or feel free to scroll ahead to the Big Reveal further down. I really don’t mind if your mind suggests at this point you skim read. Especially because, this just me writing/talking to myself here. Nothing more. Nothing less. 🙂

In future episodes I’ll probably go straight to the nitty gritty on whatever piece of writing I’ve selected for that session, that’s the plan. But for this one, seeing as it’s the first, I wanted to talk to myself a little bit about why I, or anybody else for that matter, might want to do this, which is to say: talking to oneself in front of a microphone. And by extension, writing or painting for oneself. For even when we tell ourselves we’re doing it to communicate with others, it starts as a conversation with ourselves. And what’s that about? It’s obviously about something.

At the time of recording this, spring 2020, Google tells me that there are 800,000 active podcasts on the internet for us to listen to. Which amounts to 54 million episodes and rapidly expanding, especially now that thanks to companies like Anchor, owned by Spotify, you can now make and host a podcast for free. No hidden charges. It’s wonderful.

But let’s come back to that number: 800,000 people, very few of them professional broadcasters, i.e. paid to talk to themselves and others. No, these people, people like me, are all just babbling away in their bedrooms or offices on a weekly basis. And then uploading those thoughts in the form of a podcast onto the internet. And that doesn’t include everyone else who talks to themselves but doesn’t upload their thoughts in the form of a podcast, perhaps preferring a good old-fashioned blog, or Twitter, or Instagram (thoughts can also be pictures, right?), or Facebook.

What’s going on here? Why aren’t we happy with just having our thoughts and keeping them to ourselves?

I guess what we need to consider is what we actually mean when we talk about having a thought. What I mean is a kind of inner speech act which can then be voiced aloud, or remain in that more inchoate form as a thought. If you think about it, thoughts are kind of weird entities. Nicholson Baker in his essay “The Size of Thoughts” captures this quality with humour, but also a kind of deadpan nous:

“Each thought has a size,” he writes, “and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product.”

Thoughts start to bubble out of us as a form of inner and outer speech at a very, very young age. I don’t have children, but I have watched infants at play, and was of course once an infant myself, and what becomes very clear, even at the age of two or three, is that these young human creatures are talking to themselves all the time. Listen to them as they play, which often involves chattering to each other, or if not another, to themselves.

If you watch a child talking to herself, you will notice that there is often a teller and a doer. The kinds of “conversations” that these tellers and doers have, might involve the following considerations: planning, problem solving, self-reflection, self-image, critical thinking, and emotions. The Polish psychologist Małgorzata (pron: Mao-gore-jata) Puchalska-Wasyl (pu-halska-vasill) has done some really interesting work recently on Inner Speech – also known as Self Talk, or Internal Dialogue or Intrapersonal Communication. In a 2015 study, Puchalska-Wasyl got a bunch of people to tune into their inner speech at various times of the day (smartphone app notifications are a godsend to psychologists for this kind of study) and then what she did was categorise the various forms of self-talk she unearthed. About four or five distinct categories emerged from this:

First off, the Faithful Friend, which represents an internal dialogue associated with personal strength, close relationships and positive feelings. Equally, if not more present: The Ambivalent Parent. Ambivalent because sometimes one experiences this inner speech or thought as being similar to a caring form of parental feedback (“Hey Steve, it’s cold outside, you might want to wear some thick socks so that you don’t get chillblains!”). And sometimes that parental voice, which is also the case for “real” parents can shift into a more critical, even somewhat harsh inflection: “Ah, so your toes and fingers are numb and achey now are they. Did I tell you to wear warm socks and your gloves. Yes, I did, you stupid idiot. And now you’re cold! Well, serves you right.”

Let’s also clarify that these inner voices don’t usually talk in the fully formed sentences that I’m describing above. That would be me translating my inner speech into outer speech. Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist who did most of the groundbreaking work on inner speech in the early decades of the last century, poetically makes the following distinction between internal and external communications:

“In external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings. It is a dynamic, shifting, unstable thing, fluttering between word and thought, the two more or less stable, more or less firmly delineated components of [verbal] thought.” (Lev Vygotsky, Thought, and Language, 1934)

I love that description. “In inner speech words die as they bring forth thought”! Aah, can you “hear” or maybe feel those tiny little deaths going on in your head? Maybe at this very moment? Those little petit morts, to use the French expression, which also means an orgasm.

But to finish off the categorizing bit: other than Faithful Friend, which I sometimes call The Inner Cheerleader, and Ambivalent Parent, it seems that most of us, but not all of us, have a few other parts of the psyche to contend with.

There’s that Inner Helpless or Anxious Child who may at times feel very distraught and overwhelmed by life-events, or her own perceptions. Interestingly, this is one category that some people recognise as having in quite a substantial way, maybe corresponding to that 25% of us who are ultra-sensitive or highly-sensitive people, to use Elaine Aron’s expression. Those of us who feel things profoundly. Which means that at times this form of amplified feeling can get a bit too much, and maybe even become crippling to some extent.

Because we are fundamentally social beings, you can also find inside all of us what Puchalska-Wasyl calls The Inner Rival: this is the part of us that’s always comparing our lives to others, and often finding us lacking. It’s a very driven, pushy part of the mind, very success-oriented. Sometimes people refer to this part as an Inner Perfectionist or an Unrelenting Standards schema. It often has a kind of ego-driven flavour to it: checking to see, and then feeling anxious, if it perceives us as failing or falling behind with a task. It might even bring in that Ambivalent Parent in the form of The Inner Critic to give us a good telling off if it thinks we’re not up to scratch. Or if you’re lucky, the Faithful Friend or Inner Cheerleader might give you a pep talk. Unfortunately, with the mind’s negativity bias, we’re more likely to hear our Inner Rivals and Ambivalent Parent than our Inner Cheerleaders.

The final category is what Puchalska-Wasyl calls The Calm Optimist: a more relaxed interlocutor associated with positive, pragmatic, self-sufficient emotions. Or maybe the Calm Optimist is just one more configuration of the Faithful Friend?

From my own inner-talk experience, I recognise having a good deal of Ambivalent Parent who is either supportive of what I’m doing, but more often than not critical. Likewise: the Helpless Child can sometimes rear its doleful or panicky brow. And the Rival, big time, telling me how everyone else is succeeding in ways I can only dream of. I think the Rival has got even worse in the last few years with social media. But when I’m in a good mood, I get to hang out with that calm, more optimistic Faithful Friend, who is probably my favourite inner broadcaster.

And at this point if you’re going: what are you on about, I don’t experience those inner dialogues or monologues in any way whatsoever. Well, I’d invite you then to pause your reading for a minute or so and bring your attention to your inner world. See if your mind is able to focus completely on the sensations of breathing, or of some other bodily perception. Now notice if your mind after a few seconds, or more, starts “talking”. Maybe not in complete sentences, but certainly in ways that for the observing mind are quite noticeable. One moment you’re focused on the breath, or on the sensation of your feet on the floor, and the next moment, you’re thinking. Which is to say: talking to yourself.

You might also want to ask yourself when you hear these parts of your mind in action, when you become aware of these thoughts, who is doing the noticing. This is why psychologists will often call this a dialogue rather than a monologue. Even if the thoughts are going on and on like a stuck record, or a sort of thought-earworm as they often feel to me, the fact that we can perceive them and engage with them, must mean that there is somehow one part of the mind getting up on its soapbox, or little stage, and another part that is listening or sometimes talking back. And now with fMRI imaging, that is exactly what’s going on: with the left part of the brain, especially the inferior frontal gyrus, which you can actually touch through your skin and your skull if you place a fingertip on the slight indentation, just above and front of your left ear. That’s the part generating speech, both inner and outer, and when this part is activated, we also can see activation in the right hemisphere, especially the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction, which is a more social part of our brains, used to think about other people’s minds. When I’m listening to someone talk to me in a therapy session, my Right Temporo-Parietal Junction is working overtime. But even when we’re talking to ourselves (i.e. thinking), it’s like the left-hemisphere is broadcasting through the inferior frontal gyrus sound-system, or language-system messages to the temporo-parietal junction. It’s pretty much a dialogue, as is therapy, even if one person (the therapist) is maybe talking less than the other person: the client or patient.

The listening part of the psyche may also have its own agenda, which would of course make it another part of the mind: the Inner Critic or Ambivalent Parent getting snappy and frustrated with the Helpless or Vulnerable Child. The Inner Rival perhaps ganging up with the Inner Critic to point out how useless we are at fulfilling our ambitions. But if you pay really close attention, you might also be able to notice that there is a part in there, that doesn’t have any kind of agenda. Sometimes psychologists and others who are interested in how the mind works, might call this dimension of experience The Observing Self, or Witnessing Self, or Consciousness, or Awareness. It’s not a talking part, it’s a watching part, it’s like an audience member rather than a performer. If moods are like the climate and thoughts are more distinct weather phenomena such as blizzards, or clouds, or rain, then Awareness is often likened to the open sky, or the Universe, that contains all of this atmospheric activity, without being affected by it per se.

So here’s what happens when I tune into my mind at this point in the proceedings, yammering on in the background as it always is. I’m going to speed up my delivery a bit here to give you a flavour of how my mind often sounds or feels when it’s “talking” to me.

“Are you sure you want to do all this explanatory stuff right at the beginning of the podcast? I mean, isn’t this a little bit boring. People don’t want to listen to you spewing out mind-stuff without it being shaped first into an interesting and convincing narrative. What’s that Reith line about the BBC: educate, entertain, something something. Stop typing and google it. Stop typing, google it. Google: REITH EDUCATE ENTERTAIN. Why aren’t you listening to me. Stop typing. I need you to google this. I can never remember that bloody quote. My memory’s awful. Why can some people remember stuff and you can never remember stuff. That’s not fair. They’ve got an advantage. Imagine having a photographic memory and being able to remember everything you read. Uh, why can’t I have that. That’s not fair. Maybe I’d be more successful in my field if I had a photographic memory.”

And on and on and bloody well on it goes. Sometimes that inner dialogue is a joy. But often I find it a tad tiresome, don’t you. Also did you notice some of the different parts of the psyche in there, doing their thing? There was definitely some Ambivalent Parent in my thought-splurge and maybe the Rival?

Often when I talk to the fellow-travellers that I’m obliged to call patients or clients about meditation or doing some kind of centering practice in order to help them get a bit of distance on their more painful mind states, they say to me stuff like: “I’m a really bad meditator. I can never stick to the breath, or quieten down my mind.”

And I always go: SNAP!

Because I’ve been meditating off and on for decades now, and sometimes the mind can quieten down a fair amount, maybe for a few seconds or even longer, but that’s not meditation as far as I understand it. That’s being stoned, or drunk, which is also why those mind states often feel so good. But it’s not meditation.

Meditation, as far as I understand it, at least in its current most-recognisable guise as Mindfulness, is more about finding a way to come back to ourselves: to a breath, to the page of a book, to a voice talking to us in a podcast, especially when the mind does what the mind always does: which is chatter, lecture, muse, worry, analyse, pontificate, moan, groan and sigh. 

Meditation is more about trying to find a way to co-exist with the minds we have than beat them into submission like a disobedient nag. It’s about trying to understand the mind, to learn how to tolerate or maybe just put up with the entity that it is. Perhaps even learning in time how to cherish and love that inner shock-jock of the mind, that sometimes irritating, hectoring, griping, moaning, soap-box-standing thought-spewing entity we very proudly refer to as The Human Mind.

When we look at other people, I think it’s easier to spot these different parts of the mind than it is for ourselves. In some way, being a psychotherapist is really just about having that healthy distance on someone else’s mind, a distance that I like you, don’t always have on my own mind.

Take a look at other people’s Twitter or Facebook feeds, and you’ll immediately see examples of all the categories I mentioned above, and also a whole of host more extreme social versions of that inner talk: the troll mind, the egotistical mind, the narcissistic mind. But it’s hard to see these in ourselves. Though I’m sure that if you’re in a relationship, and past the honeymoon stage of things, your partner will recognise these parts of your mind for you, and you probably won’t have too much of a problem recognising in them that utterly self-serving, self-focused Donald Trump kind of mind that we all have in some shape or form. I don’t know about you, but when I read or listen to Trump, I often recognise in the bilge that flows from his mouth something disturbingly familiar: a wild, chattering, knee-jerk reacting, impulsive, self-centred, paranoid, and often just plain loopy part of the human psyche. Yours and mine, and his. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if it was only a part of that psycho’s psyche, but unfortunately it’s not. We’ve all got some version of this mind. I really do believe that.

Trumps biggest problem, and let us pray that this is what eventually upends his disastrous and malignant reign is that he has no filter between his inner speech and external speech. Which is kind of scary when you’re exposed to it in this unfiltered way. And perhaps this also explains why most of us don’t actively choose to sit down and quietly listen with care and attention to what’s going on in our own minds. Which is not to say that that we’re not compulsively hooked or fused more often than not with the contents of our inner speech. But that’s different to a kind quiet, defused, or detached listening to our inner worlds.

One of my favourite psychological experiments is the one carried out by the social psychologist Timothy Wilson in 2014, where he got hundreds of student volunteers and community members to sit alone, so not together, in an empty room with nothing but their own thoughts to keep them company. And just in case they got bored, or found their thoughts disturbing, or anxiety provoking in some way, Wilson allowed these people to press a little button next to them which would deliver a sizeable shock to their gonads. Actually, I don’t know where the shock got delivered, but it was not a fun, buzzy little vibration. It was a painful jolt of electricity. And rather than sit quietly in a room alone with their thoughts, 67% of the men in the study, and 25% of the women, chose to self-harm.

Which of course is where I now quote Blaise Pascal’s “All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone” And that was written in 1654. A very long time before smart phones. 

But this piece (and my wee podcast) is not about meditation, it’s about other stuff, stuff to be found in stories, and poems, and paragraphs of books that light up and amaze my mind, that make me go WOW. And because my mind, like your mind, is a deeply socialised mind, even if you live off the grid, hermit-like, in the middle of nowhere, with no other human minds around you, when your or my mind is amazed by something beautiful or interesting or awful or tragic, it’s first impulse (see if this is not the case for you too) is to want to share that amazement with other human minds.

Perhaps with the hope that they too will also go WOW, yes, that is amazing, or “Ah, no, so sorry to hear you’re struggling”. And then these two minds might start talking about why they find this thing amazing or awful, and in doing so share something meaningful and important with each other. I think this is what we’re referring to when we use words like intimacy and connection. At least that’s what I’m referring to, and also why I do the job I do. I really love this kind of sharing. Can you maybe hear that in my voice? For me, it’s the richest and most profoundly meaningful way that we can interact with each other.

I’d even go so far as to say that it’s on par with, maybe even better than food, and wine, and cannabis, and sex. And I love all the aforementioned too. Because unless you’re Sting and Trudi (my mind of course goes: “Google that, just to check that it’s not actually an old wive’s tale”), which is to say a couple that once claimed to spend hours and hours doing cosmically meaningful things with each other’s bodies, for most people the pleasure and connection of sex can not, nor will ever adequately fill a life, or even an evening, in the way that deep, and connecting conversation can.

And yet, how few of us are having pleasurable conversations in the way I’ve just described? I’m getting a good share of them through the work I do as a psychotherapist, which although it has lots of challenging conversations too, there is also much pleasure and interest for me in talking to people about these big, meaningful questions.  But outside therapy, and I don’t think I’m alone in this, particularly in our current age, we don’t get to have so many face-to-face conversations anymore, do we? If this is not the case for you, I think you’re very very fortunate. Privilege is a word that is thrown around a lot these days, but I think having access to interesting and pleasurable conversation IS a great, great privilege. If you are able to engage in this way with other people, or your own mind, even if only for 50 minutes a week, which is how long this podcast as well as my therapy sessions last, then this is still a very fortunate position to be in.

Being a GenXer, although some Boomers share this too, I’m in the strange position of having lived approximately half of my life in an analogue capacity, and the other half of it digital. Right up until my first blog in 2005, if there was anything that excited me and I wanted to share with someone else, I’d need to step out of my house and go and find another human being to be or get excited with. And because I’m an introvert, I didn’t do that to a great extent either, but looking back I probably did it a good deal more than I do now. I think we all did back then, rose-tinted spectacles, and reminsence bumps (as I believe they’re now called) acknowledged.

But look at do we go about sharing and engaging with each other in 2020. We mainly do so through social media. Because here’s the other thing about human minds: yours, mine and pretty much everyone else’s. They’re lazy, which is to say: energy conserving. In analogue times, if I wanted to share these thoughts, I’d need to go out and find a group of people who might be interested in the same things as me. And because these IRL ties took time, sometimes years to build, co-existing and interacting with other people until they were able to trust us and let down their defences with us, and us with them, we had no choice choice but to enter into this often quite laborious but ultimately fruitful exchange.

Compare that to posting something on social media, sitting back and watching all those dopamine-bestowing likes and even the odd electric comment coming back at us. Surely this is much more of a quick fix, a fast food form of social nutrients. It might smell the same, look the same from a certain perspective, but it’s really not the same thing as sitting down to eat a dish you’ve made from scratch with healthy ingredients you can see, touch, taste and most importantly trust.

I don’t know about you, but it feels to me that social Media has become our Cheers, as in the sitcom Cheers: that bar in Boston overseen by Ted Danson and Shelley Long, and Rhea Perlman, you know, the place where everybody knows your name? Or at least that’s what we think we’re getting. But even there, a bar, where its regulars never spent time at each other’s houses, and used that space as we now use social media, as a kind hang out when we want company, or to share the meaningful mundanities of our lives with each other, or when we’re bored and need a little social pick-me-up, even there in the utterly fictitious drinker’s utopia of Cheers, people formed caring, sincere, and genuine connections with each other. So if Norm or Cliff didn’t show up for a week, somebody would probably have phoned them to see if they were OK. Or gone round to their house to check that this person wasn’t ill or worse.

Do your social media ties provide that kind of elemental human care and interaction for you? I suspect not, and that’s worrying. I have at this moment 4,523 friends on Twitter (Twitter calls them Followers for some bizarre reason, as if each of us were a little mini-Jesus, and people reading our tweets, were our disciples). Of these 4,523 friends, who in the last five years I have had some lovely little interactions, do you know how many of them would get in touch if I stopped using Twitter for six months, or forever, without any warning? I know, because I’ve done this. And I can tell you, that of my 4,523 friends on Twitter, all 4,523 of them don’t really care if I’m dead or alive.

Not because they’re bad or selfish people. It’s just that Twitter and Instagram and the like, aren’t really about making or having deep and intimate social connections. It’s really just 145 million daily active users (on Twitter), and 500 million on Instagram Twitter, talking to themselves in pictures and words. And occasionally interacting through a Like button with others. Imagine if in your next face to face conversation you had, anything meaningful or beautiful or relatable that you shared, was met by your interlocutor with just a grunt or a GIF or a platitude.

Hey, my mother’s just died.

Grunt. Gif. Soz.

Hey, I’ve just read this book and it’s completely changed the way I think about myself, the world, and everyone in it.

Grunt. Exploding Star GIF. Platitude.

We have all in some shape or form willingly entered into this pact with each other, a pact in which we use other people instrumentally for social nourishment, and for the purposes of getting that sharing and being seen gestalt satisfied, but with all the depth and intimacy of a child’s paddling pool. That is the Faustian pact which we have all signed with social media. And as that’s becoming the only game in town, driven by minds that like their gains to be as easily and non-laboriously gotten as possible, that’s what conversation in the 21st century is now all about my dear friends and followers.

And if we choose not to play that game, then we’re probably going to be talking to ourselves a good deal more, because everyone else is now doing it through their screens. And maybe that’s OK, even if a tad lonely at times. Jenny Bainbridge, who hosts The Lonely Hour podcast, always ends her dispatches with the following sentence: “Until next time, please enjoy your [and then she pauses] self.”

I love this.

Because of the inherently dualistic minds that we have, we’re more often than not in conflict with ourselves, or down on ourselves, or bored with our selves, or frustrated with our selves. But hey, we can also can enjoy our selves. So why not have a wee conversation with yourself about something that’s woken you up recently to beauty or hilarity or amazement. Why not join me in the deep and enlightening pleasure of talking to our selves. That’s my plan with this podcast, which isn’t to say that I don’t want to talk to you too. Of course I’d be very thrilled and honoured if you decided to eavesdrop while I do this. But the journey does need to start with us listening very carefully to what’s coming out of our own minds, fingers mouths.

Gary Portnoy who wrote the Cheers theme song with Judy Hart Angelo, captures this vibe in those sentimental, but deeply touching, at least for me, lyrics.

Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name.
And they’re always glad you came.
You want to be where you can see
The troubles are all the same
You want to be where everybody knows your name.

I know somebody who knows your name. You do! Have you ever tried talking to yourself with kindness and compassion, like a supportive friend or parent, rather than the usual Punitive or Demanding Parent Mode, or the Inner Critic? Maybe as soon as my mind stops talking, and I stop taking taking dictation as I am doing now for it, you might even decide to write something for your self, or record your self talking and put it online as a podcast. However you do it, as Jenny would say, please enjoy your self.

And if you’ve skipped ahead from the introduction to hear about this mind-blowing twist in the Mary Ruefle colour poem. Well, here it is. Are you ready?

When you get to the end of My Private Property, the book in which Ruefle includes this Benetton array of colour-sadness poems, you will find buried deep in the acknowledgements section, a one-sentence Author’s note. Like a hidden message or easter eggs as they’re known in video games. This is what the note says: “In each of the colour pieces, if you substitute the word happiness for the word sadness, nothing changes.”

Let me repeat that.

“In each of the colour pieces, if you substitute the word happiness for the word sadness, nothing changes.”

Really?! Well, let’s see. Here’s the piece I read at the beginning:

“Gray sadness is the sadness of paper clips and rubber bands, of rain and squirrels and chewing gum, ointments and unguents and movie theaters. Gray sadness is the most common of all sadnesses, it is the sadness of sand in the desert and sand on the beach, the sadness of keys in a pocket, cans on a shelf, hair in a comb, dry-cleaning, and raisins. Gray sadness is beautiful, but not to be confused with the beauty of blue sadness, which is irreplaceable. Sad to say, gray sadness is replaceable, it can be replaced daily, it is the sadness of a melting snowman in a snowstorm.”

And here’s gray with happiness:

“Gray happiness is the happiness of paper clips and rubber bands, of rain and squirrels and chewing gum, ointments and unguents and movie theaters. Gray happiness is the most common of all happinesses, it is the happiness of sand in the desert and sand on the beach, the happiness of keys in a pocket, cans on a shelf, hair in a comb, dry-cleaning, and raisins. Gray happiness is beautiful, but not to be confused with the beauty of blue happiness, which is irreplaceable. Happy to say, gray happiness is replaceable, it can be replaced daily, it is the happiness of a melting snowman in a snowstorm.”

Just think for a moment of those two snowmen. They’re both melting. Which is to say: they’re both dying, like you and me. Sorry to break the news to you in this way, but in the very depths of living we are also dying. Or as Da Vinci wrote in his notebooks, another form of talking to ourselves: “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”

I find this utterly mind-blowing. If you do, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this too. But here’s one of mine.

The mind often seems to get caught in a kind of dualistic corner, or trap. If things aren’t going well for us in some way, then the mind often will tell us that we’re up shit creek without a paddle, or some other mephitic metaphor. If I don’t have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and occasionally feel a bit lonely, then my mind might tell me I’m a loser. Partnered up, good. Not partnered up, bad. Even if we know at an abstract rational that this is not the case. All our partnered up friends are not having the time of their lives. And many singletons enjoy many aspects of their loner lives.

So that’s what the mind does. Either/or stuff. But the heart, or whatever you choose to call that part of your consciousness which is separate, beyond, or maybe just different to the mind, doesn’t play by the same dualistic rules.

The heart seems knows implicitly that everything is kind of bittersweet: that happy is always couched within sad, or vice-versa, like a Russian doll; that there is no black and white, right/wrong distinction for any topic. Including politics. That’s much more about context and what actually works for us. Your goodness and generosity can only exist with your not-so-lovely human traits and vice versa. The heart seems to apprehend this deeply and experientially in a way that the mind struggles to do. Or rather, the mind understand conceptually, but not in the same way as the heart when it’s listening to a theme song from an 80s television show and wants to cry and laugh at the same time. The heart can do this kind of cry-laughter. The heart can do happy/sad, right and wrong. The mind however seems to believe that we’re only good for one thing or another. We’re either living, or dying. We’re either in love with our partners, or we’re not. We either care, or we don’t. And if we purport to be doing both, a part of the mind calls us out on this. There’s even a term for it: cognitive dissonance, that slightly weirded out feeling you get when two sides of the same coin don’t entirely add up. But the heart doesn’t have a problem with any of this, because the heart is all about feeling.

So what might we say to ourselves about the things we’re devoted to, the things that are really important and meaningful to us, if we completely remove our communication from the Like, RT, Sharing-Is-Caring digital economy? What if the pleasure of sharing was predominantly between the various entities that reside within us? The mind and the heart sharing their perspectives on books and ideas. The Left Interior Frontal Gyrus talking to the right Temporo-Parietal Junction. The philosophical big-picture mind, talking to the psychological human-sized mind. And the heart making sure that these minds are not just talking in the abstract, that they’re still connecting to our embodied experience of being here now.

What if we found a way to talk to the world (to books, to trees, to clouds, and all the various living creatures inhabiting this wondrous realm with us and within us) without expecting any answers? No RTs, no likes, no pleasing but also inherently fatuous comments from strangers who we’ll never meet, who will never care for us in the way we all want to be cared for, in the way we want to care for others. What if we started talking to the world around us as people talk to their Gods, and have done so since the beginning of language as we know it, as people talk to their animal companions, as people talk to themselves?

Well, let’s see, shall we?

REFERENCES:

Baker, N. (1996). The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. Random House.

Brinthaupt, T. M. (2019). Individual Differences in Self-Talk Frequency: Social Isolation and Cognitive Disruption. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1088. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01088

Fernyhough, C. (2016). The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. Profile Books.

Fernyhough, C., Watson, A., Bernini, M., Moseley, P., & Alderson-Day, B. (2019). Imaginary Companions, Inner Speech, and Auditory Verbal Hallucinations: What Are the Relations? Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1665. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01665

Geva, S., & Fernyhough, C. (2019). A Penny for Your Thoughts: Children’s Inner Speech and Its Neuro-Development. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1708. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01708

Grandchamp, R., Rapin, L., Perrone-Bertolotti, M., Pichat, C., Haldin, C., Cousin, E., Lachaux, J.-P., Dohen, M., Perrier, P., Garnier, M., Baciu, M., & Lœvenbruck, H. (2019). The ConDialInt Model: Condensation, Dialogality, and Intentionality Dimensions of Inner Speech Within a Hierarchical Predictive Control Framework. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2019. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02019

Heavey, C. L., Moynihan, S. A., Brouwers, V. P., Lapping-Carr, L., Krumm, A. E., Kelsey, J. M., Turner, D. K., & Hurlburt, R. T. (2019). Measuring the Frequency of Inner-Experience Characteristics by Self-Report: The Nevada Inner Experience Questionnaire. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2615. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02615

Johnston, W. M., & Davey, G. C. (1997). The psychological impact of negative TV news bulletins: The catastrophizing of personal worries. British Journal of Psychology (London, England: 1953), 88 ( Pt 1), 85–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1997.tb02622.x

Latinjak, A. T., Hernando-Gimeno, C., Lorido-Méndez, L., & Hardy, J. (2019). Endorsement and Constructive Criticism of an Innovative Online Reflexive Self-Talk Intervention. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1819. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01819

Lichtenstein, S., Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., Layman, M., & Combs, B. (1978). Judged Frequency of Lethal Events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4, 551–578. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.4.6.551

Łysiak, M. (2019). Inner Dialogical Communication and Pathological Personality Traits. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1663. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01663

Oleś, P. K., Brinthaupt, T. M., Dier, R., & Polak, D. (2020). Types of Inner Dialogues and Functions of Self-Talk: Comparisons and Implications. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00227

Puchalska-Wasyl, M. M. (2015). Self-Talk: Conversation With Oneself? On the Types of Internal Interlocutors. The Journal of Psychology, 149(5), 443–460. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2014.896772

Ruefle, M. (2016). My Private Property. Wave Books.

The availability heuristic: Why your brain confuses ‘easy’ with ‘true’. (2018, June 15). Kent Hendricks. https://kenthendricks.com/availability-heuristic/

This chart shows where extreme weather is causing the most fatalities. (n.d.). World Economic Forum. Retrieved 18 March 2020, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/extreme-weather-environment-climate-change/

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9

Van Raalte, J. L., Vincent, A., & Dickens, Y. L. (2019). Dialogical Consciousness and Descriptive Experience Sampling: Implications for the Study of Intrapersonal Communication in Sport. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 653. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00653

WhiteheadJul. 3, N., 2014, & Pm, 2:00. (2014, July 3). People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts. Science | AAAS. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts

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Feel Better

The Warehouse by Mark Waldron

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).
Categories
Feel Better

When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

WHEN DEATH COMES

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

-Mary Oliver

Categories
Feel Better

The Inner Thorn Allegory

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!).

Michael Singer is not a counsellor or psychotherapist. He’s actually a former software programmer, but now makes a living from writing and teaching. I think there are very few psychotherapists however, who would disagree with the essential “truth” that lies at the heart of this allegory, so please don’t let his non-fancy credentials put your mind off, if you can.

Here below you’ll find the print version. But if you’d prefer to listen to the allegory or fable as a bedtime story, there’s also a recording I made of me reading it aloud as I know that sometimes it’s easier to get past the judging or analytical mind when we hear a story told in the voice of someone we like or know: [LINK TO RECORDING – not yet recorded]

THE INNER THORN

“Imagine that you have a thorn in your arm that directly touches a nerve. When the thorn is touched, it’s very painful. Because it hurts so much, the thorn is a serious problem. It’s difficult to sleep because you roll over on it. It sometimes makes it hard to get close to people because they might touch it. It makes your daily life very difficult. You can’t even go for a walk in the woods because you might brush the thorn against the branches. This thorn is a constant source of disturbance, and to solve the problem you only have two choices.

The first choice is to look at your situation and decide that since it’s so disturbing, when things touch the thorn, you need to make sure nothing touches it.

The second choice is to decide that since it’s so disturbing when things touch the thorn, you need to take it out.

Believe it or not, the effects of the choice you make will determine the course of the rest of your life.

THE FIRST CHOICE

Let’s begin with the first choice and explore how it will affect your life. If you decide you have to keep things from touching the thorn, then that becomes the work of a lifetime. If you want to go for a walk in the woods, you’ll have to thin out the branches to make sure you don’t brush against them. Since you often roll over and touch the thorn when you sleep, you’ll have to find a solution for that as well. Perhaps you could design an apparatus that acts as a protective device. If you really put a lot of energy into it and your solution seemed to work, you would think that you had solved your problem. You might even catch your mind saying, “Now I have inner peace. And if I want to, I can set myself up as a psychotherapist, or a healer, or a life-coach, or a writer of self-help books, and anybody who has the thorn problem can get my protective device! I even get to make a living from selling it to others in some way.”

So now you’ve got a whole life built around this thorn, and you’re proud of it. You keep the woods thinned out, and you wear the apparatus to bed at night. But now you have a new problem—you fall in love, or you embark on a project that is meaningful or important to you. This is a problem because in your situation, it’s hard to even hug, hard to even do a little of your project without being filled with all sorts of worrying thoughts. Nobody can touch you because they might touch the thorn. Any thought can bring all our deepest dreams and desires crashing down around our ears. Your self-esteem is always on the line.

So in the first case, perhaps you design another kind of device that allows closeness amongst people without actually touching. In the second case, you maybe give up on the thing you love doing and settle for something else, something that doesn’t touch your thorns. But eventually you decide you want total mobility without having to worry about the thorn anymore. So now you (which is to say your mind) makes a full-time device that doesn’t have to be unstrapped at night or changed over for hugging and other daily activities. But it’s heavy. So you put wheels on it, control it with hydraulics, and install collision sensors. It’s actually quite an impressive thing.

Of course, you had to change the doors in the house so that the protective apparatus could get through. But at least now you can live your life. You can go to work, go to sleep, and get close to people. So you announce to everyone, “I have solved my problem. I am a free being. I can go anywhere I want. I can do anything I want. This thorn used to run my life. Now it doesn’t run anything.”

The truth is, the thorn still completely runs your entire life. It affects all your decisions, including where you go, whom you’re comfortable with, and who’s comfortable with you. It determines where you’re allowed to work, what house you can live in, and what kind of bed you can sleep on at night. When it’s all said and done, that thorn is running every aspect of your life.

Why is this? Well, perhaps a life protecting ourselves from our problems is in some way a perfect reflection of the problem itself? We don’t actually solve anything by doing this, not in the long-term, though short-term it can be quite a relief. But if we don’t solve the root cause of the problem, but instead, attempt to protect ourselves from the problem, it will probably end up running our lives. We end up so psychologically/mind-fully fixated on the problem that we literally can’t see the forest for the trees. And yet we feel that because we’ve minimized the pain of  it to some extent, we’ve solved the problem. But it is not solved. All we have done is devote our life to avoiding it. It is now the center of our universe. It’s all there is, and we think about it and talk about a great, great deal.

ANOTHER COMMON EXAMPLE: LONELINESS AND ALIENATION

In order to apply the analogy of the thorn to life as a whole, let’s use loneliness as an example. Let’s say you have a very deep sense of inner loneliness. It’s so deep that you have trouble sleeping at night, and during the day it makes you very sensitive. You’re susceptible to feeling sharp pangs in your heart that cause quite a disturbance. You have trouble staying focused on your job, and you have trouble with everyday interactions. What’s more, when you’re very lonely it’s often painfully difficult to get close to people.

Loneliness is a very deep, but also a very common human thorn. We are social primates, we need other people in substantial and important ways. So naturally it causes you pain and disturbance in all aspects of your life. And unfortunately, in the case of the human heart, we usually have more than one thorn. We may very likely also have sensitivities about rejection, about our physical appearance, and about our mental prowess. We are all walking around with lots of thorns touching right against the most sensitive part of our hearts, right now, even as you read this. And when this happens, we feel pain. And so our ever-helpful, ever-troubled and troubling minds at this point say: “Hey, where’s your protective device? Which may, in this case be something like books or TV, or our phones, or maybe another person (virtual or non-virtual); or a substance like food or drink or drugs. Or maybe it’s just our minds going on and on and on and on at us about how lonely we are, and what are we going to do about it, and how are we going to solve this problem that is causing us so much pain. We may even go to a therapist and talk extensively, and then we have two minds talking about our pain.

We all have the same two choices with these inner thorns as we did with the thorn in our arm. Surely it was obvious that we would have been much better off taking out that thorn. There’s no reason to spend our lives protecting the thorn from getting touched when we can just remove it. Once the thorn is removed, it might be said we become truly free of it. The same is true with our inner thorns; they can be removed. But if we choose to keep them, we must modify our lives to avoid the situations that would stir them up. If we’re lonely for example, we must avoid going to places where couples tend to be. If we’re afraid of rejection, we must avoid getting too close to people who might reject us (i.e. everyone?). If we do this, however, it is for the same reason that we thinned out the woods. We are attempting to adjust our lives, as well as the lives of others, to make allowance for our thorns. In the earlier example the thorns were outside. Now they are inside.

So now when we’re lonely, we catch the mind pondering what to “do” about this loneliness. This pondering is more often than not internal: chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. Sometimes at levels that are tolerable, but other times in ways that really feel as if we’re being driven insane by the problem-finding, and thus problem-solving mind. Of course, if we’re talking about our thorn to someone else, if the mind gets to have its pain-driven thoughts attached to a voice-box, it will use that voicebox to talk very thoroughly and extensively through its dilemma. And for some problems this can be a genuinely useful and meaningful fix. This story is not to be read as an attack on talking about our problems, or therapy, or anything else. It is a story about our inner thorns.

And about our minds. Our minds usually say something like this with regard to loneliness: “What can I do or think or read in order to not feel so bloody lonely?” 

Notice that we aren’t asking how to get rid of the problem; we’re asking how to protect ourselves from feeling it. We may do this either by avoiding situations or by using people, places, and things as protective shields. And in this way, the loneliness (but this is true of any thorn) begins to run our entire life. We marry the person who makes us feel less lonely, thinking that this is natural and normal. And for our culture, for our society, it is! But it’s exactly the same as when we’re avoiding the pain of the thorn, or talking about the pain of the thorn, instead of taking it out. We have not removed the root of loneliness. We have only attempted to protect ourselves from feeling it. Should someone die or leave us, or should something in our lives trigger the loneliness (and there are a million and one ways that a mind can get triggered) it will disturb us once more. The problem will be back. As soon as the external situation or “thing” fails to protect us from what’s inside us, our thorns and their pain, we will feel them again.

If we do not remove the thorn, we will end up responsible for both the thorn and everything we pulled around ourselves in an attempt to avoid it. Should we be fortunate enough to find someone who manages to diminish the feeling of loneliness, we will then begin worrying about keeping our relationship with this person. And of course, we’ve just managed to compound the issue by avoiding the problem.

This is exactly the same as using the apparatus to compensate for the thorn; we have  adjusted our lives accordingly. And more often than not, we’re not even fully aware of how we have adjusted our lives to accommodate our thorns. It doesn’t really dawn on us to just get rid of it. Maybe because the protective device often works. Or even if it works infrequently, or doesn’t work at all, that’s all we feel we have to counteract the pain of our thorns. Thorn plus protective device, that’s it.

So at this point we might avoid feeling it. Avoidance is the mind’s chief form of protection. If someone hands you a hot-potato you drop it. Why would you hold onto it? Why would you choose to feel the heat, to feel the pain of the thorn? But now we have no choice but to go out and “fix” everything and everyone (including ourselves! which is to say all the various parts of the psyche) that are continually reminding us about this bloody thorn. We may even have to let the ever-helpful mind step in and start seriously worrying and ruminating about how we dress and how we talk. We may need to let the mind do some very panicky and paranoid worrying about what people think of us because that too could affect our feelings of loneliness, which in some way is also an expression of our universal need for love and attention. Our thorns are often the painful parts of the things we most care about as human beings: belonging, meaning, competence, coherence and understanding, direction and orientation . If someone is attracted to us, and this eases our feelings of loneliness, at some level (perhaps unconscious) the mind might say, as an attempt to protect us, “How do I need to act in order to please this person? I can be, say, do whatever they want. As long as I don’t have to feel loneliness or rejection anymore, bring it on!”

So now the mind (poor mind!) takes on the burden of worrying about our relationships with other people. It does this by creating an experience of underlying tension and discomfort, which might even affect our sleep at night, or get in the way of focusing and working on things that are really meaningful and important to us. The truth is, however, the discomfort we’re experiencing isn’t actually the feeling of loneliness. It’s the never-ending thoughts of “Did I say the right thing? Does s/he really like me, or am I just kidding myself? Am I in so-and-so’s good books or not? And if not, what does that mean for my future security and well-being?”

And if the mind senses this is not the case: WOO-WOO-WOO, EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY!” The root problem is now buried under all these other issues that are all about avoiding the deeper ones. It all gets very complicated. We all end up using our relationships to hide our thorns. One of the deals our minds make with other people might go something like this: if you care enough about me, I expect you to adjust your behavior to avoid bumping into my soft spots. Because that really hurts.

This is what we all do in some way or another. We let the fear of our inner thorns being felt affect our behavior. Another way of looking at this: we end up limiting our lives just like someone living with an external thorn, in order to not feel the pain of that thorn. Ultimately, if there is something disturbing inside of us, we have to make a choice. We can either compensate for the disturbance by going outside in an attempt to avoid feeling it, or we can try to remove the thorn and not make it the be-all-and-end all of our lives.

THE SECOND CHOICE: REMOVING OUR THORNS

Let us not doubt our ability to remove the root cause of the disturbance inside of us. It really can go away. We can look deep within ourselves, in meditation or some other “uncovering” practice, or with a psychotherapist or healer, to the core of our being, and decide that we don’t want the weakest part, most pain-inducing part of us running our lives. We want to be free of this, don’t we? We want to talk to people because we find them interesting, not because we’re lonely. We want to have relationships with people because we genuinely like them, not because we need them to like us. We want to love because we truly love, not because we need to avoid our inner thorns.

So how do we free ourselves? If you ask this question to your mind, it will probably come up with a whole list of things it has already tried and which work to some extent (especially in terms of quick fixes), which is why we continue using these protective devices in the habitual ways we do: work, food/drink/substances, distractions, voicing all our thoughts to a friend or a therapist, starting a new relationship, ending a relationship that is snagging or catching in some way our inner thorn(s), and all the other millions of ways that our clever and resourceful minds come up with to accommodate our thorns (thank you mind!). The mind says: this thorn is bad, painful, wrong, unnecessary, unfair, awful (which at some level, it is) and so we’ve got to protect ourselves or avoid situations in which our thorns get disturbed.

But do these mind-tactics work in the long run? Do they stop our thorns continuing to niggle and stir the mind up, sometimes in ways that are manageable, sometimes in ways that drive it crazy? In my case, no. But maybe it’s different for you.

For in the deepest sense, we free ourselves by finding ourselves. You are not the pain you feel, nor are you the part that periodically stresses out (the mind). We all contain our thorns, and periodically or even frequently stress out about them, but we are not our thorns. I Michael, am not my loneliness. I contain my loneliness, I often feel the thorn of my loneliness, but I am not it. Regardless of what my mind tells me, I am not my loneliness. I am the one who is aware of my loneliness, and then writes it down as I have done here. I am aware of my thorns. I recognise them, I am aware of them, that’s me. Thankfully, because our consciousness is separate and aware of our thorns, we can free ourselves of them. To free ourselves of our inner thorns, we simply need to stop playing with them. The more we touch them, the more we irritate them, the more they sting. Because we are usually doing something (especially in our minds, if that can be described as “doing”) to avoid feeling our thorn, they are never given the chance to work themselves out of our systems. If we want, we can “simply” permit the disturbance created by our inner thorn come up, and then let it go. But as the mind often gets involved, we may need some kind of daily practice in doing this, because if you’ve ever said to your mind: “Notice from your Observing Self or Witnessing Self the pain of your inner thorn, now let that pain be felt, felt, felt, felt, until the energy inside it w0rks its way out and leaves you, you will have probably discover that this is much more easily said or written than done!”

But since our inner thorns are no more (and no less, let us honour them) than blocked energies from the past, from the traumas* of our past, they can be released. The problem is, we either completely avoid situations that would cause them to release, or we push them back down in the name of protecting ourselves.

Suppose we’re sitting at home watching something on Netflix. We’re enjoying the program until the two main characters fall in love. Suddenly we feel loneliness, but there’s no one around to give us attention. Interestingly, we were just fine just a few minutes ago. Have you experienced this? You’re fine, and then suddenly, BOOM, the inner thorn is felt.

This example shows that the thorn is always in our hearts; it is just not activated until something touches it. We might feel the reaction (in the case of loneliness, but loneliness is only one of a thousand different thorns) as a hollowness or a dropping sensation in our heart. It feels very uncomfortable. A sense of weakness comes over us, and our minds begin telling us about other times when we were left alone and of people who have hurt us. Stored energy from the past releases from the heart and generates thoughts. Sometimes these thoughts also dwell on the past where the original injury occurred. Now, instead of enjoying TV, we’re sitting alone caught in a wave of thoughts and emotions.

What can we do at this point to “solve” this problem other than eating something, calling somebody, or doing something else that might quiet it down? What we can do, and although this might sound small, it is actually huge, is to notice that we’ve noticed our thorn. We can then notice that our consciousness (me, Michael) was watching TV, and now it is watching this inner melodrama, and it is starting to hurt. The one who sees all of this is “me”, or “you”, the subject, the person, the observing self, whatever you want to call it. What you are looking at is an object. A feeling of emptiness is an object; it is something you feel. But who feels it? Our way out, and we may need lots and lots of practice in this, is to just notice who’s noticing. It’s really that simple. And certainly far less complex than the protective apparatus with all its ball bearings, wheels, and hydraulics. Which is perhaps also why our minds dismiss the simplicity of this solution. Minds love the ball bearings, the wheels, and hydraulics. I know my mind does.But in this moment, all we have to do is notice and then ask ourselves: who it is that feels the loneliness? At that moment, the part of us that is lonely, is loneliness (the thorn) is recognised by the awareness (you, me) that notices the loneliness. The one who notices is in some essential way “free”. If we want to be free of these energies, we need to allow them to pass through us instead of hiding them inside of us, or asking the mind to do it’s mental magic, to haul in our protective devices with all their intricate and very impressive machinery.

Ever since you were a child, you’ve had energies going on inside. You wake up every day, and realize that  “you” are in there, and that you also have a sensitive person in there with you. So let’s watch, let’s feel that sensitive part of us feel its disturbance. Watch it feel jealousy, feel need, and feel fear. Watch the mind freak out in its attempts to “fix things” when feeling the thorns of jealousy, need, and fear. These feelings are part of the nature of human being. If you pay attention, you will see that all these disturbances in the mind are not you; but they are something you’re feeling and experiencing. You are the indwelling being that is aware of all of this. If you maintain your center, and this does take practice, you can learn to appreciate and respect even the difficult experiences. At that point, we can thank the mind when it’s being helpful and tell it respectfully (or disrespectfully) that we will not listen to its ongoing monologues if it is not acting in the service of our happiness and fulfillment.

Some of the most beautiful poetry and music have come from people who were in turmoil. Great art comes from the depth of one’s being. Writers, musicians and artists show us that we can experience these very human states without getting lost in them or resisting them. We can notice that we are noticing and just watch how experiencing loneliness affects us and our minds. Does our posture change? Do we breathe slower or faster? Does the mind start getting very active with problem-solving thoughts? What goes on when loneliness (or any of our thorns) is given the space it needs to pass through us? Let’s be explorers. The thorn brings up energies trapped inside us from the trauma* our past; we witness them, we feel them, and eventually, according to all the other laws of the universe, they go. If we don’t get completely absorbed, or hooked, or fused with our experiences, if we manage to stay in the position of an audience watching a show, rather than always being the performer in that show, the disturbing energy will soon pass and something else will come up. Maybe equally disturbing. Maybe less so. Or maybe something quite lovely. Our “job” as human animals plonked down on a little ball of dirt spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere, is maybe just to enjoy the ride, as best we can?

Other animals who don’t have our incredible thought-producing and thus thought-torturing minds seem to be able to do this without too much of a problem. For aren’t we all, every living creature, every plant, every tree, all of us, just bumbling along on this random little lonely planet rotating in the gravity of a single star (“our” sun)? And let’s not forget, that our mighty sun is just one of a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. And the Milky Way is only a pinprick of significance in the universe. What does your mind do with that? If we can hold this in mind as we witness/watch/observe/notice the stage show from the perspective of the audience (you, me, a tree, a star), this too might free us up. Free us from our minds and from our thorns.”

from The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer (2007)

There you go! Interested to hear what your mind, as well as what “you” make of this. If this little allegory has spoken to you in some way, you might want to reflect on some of the following questions that I found myself asking myself (i.e. “me”, the witnessing/noticing self) after reading this allegory:

1/ Who am I?

Other than what my mind, or my culture, or my parents, or society tells me I am or should be, WHO AM I!?!

2/ What are my thorns?

I counted about three or four really, really deep ones in me. One of them is most certainly the existential loneliness that Michael talks about in this allegory, which is perhaps why it so deeply spoke to me, and I think also speaks to a lot of people (the book in which this allegory was included sold quite well). Some thorns are more common in our species than others. But we really are spoilt for choice as human beings in having or stumbling across, on an almost continual basis, lots of really good and sharp, pain-inducing thorns!

3/ What protective devices do I use to either to avoid having to feel the pain of my inner-thorns, or when those thorns get snagged, to get me out of having to allow them to be in me, and feel their suffering?

There are hundreds of ways that my mind does this for me! But I was able to list without too much reflection about five main ways that the ingenious and resourceful little fellow I call “my mind” tries to protect me from feeling pain, mainly through strategies of avoidance, distraction, use of substances, and fruitless overthinking.

4/ What does my mind do when I try to just be a witness, to notice what I’m thinking or feeling, without being drawn into Mind Agendas? In other words: what does my mind do when I ask it to experience and allow the energies of my past and present traumas* which have planted those thorns deep, deep inside me to start working their way out of my system rather than doing what it normally does (avoidance, changing the topic, getting really stuck into thinking thinking thinking and talking talking talking in order to hopefully “solve” my dilemma)?

I don’t know about you, but my mind often goes apeshit when I ask it to process stuff rather than just vent! It shouts, it pleads, it starts bargaining with me. Basically: it throws a temper-tantrum. And sometimes it throws this temper-tantrum, or some version of it at other people. What does your mind do?

5/ After answering these questions, what does my always-talking, always-on mind, super-opinionated mind tell me should be the next step on my human journey? And what about my therapeutic journey? Also: what does the quieter but maybe more experientially-wise heart feel about all this?

In my experience wisdom comes from experience rather than from books, words, thoughts, ideas, concepts – which are more the territory of the mind. So what I think I mean here is: what does the wisdom of healing or liberation that you or I have experienced even if just in glimpses so far, advise us to do in order to free ourselves of our thorns? And even more importantly, would your mind be willing to practice whatever your wise heart advises, even just for 20 minutes a day? Or even for 20 seconds, or 2 minutes, every time we get triggered. For me, my heart, perhaps thanks to the job I do,  knows the terrain of the mind by now fairly well. But my mind is still determined to resist it, and me. Sometimes the resistance gives way and I am able to feel the pain, which sometimes also leads to the release of some of that inner pain. But more often than not,  I’m more aware of my resistance in the form of thoughts or avoidance. I still treasure my mind though. Even if it sometimes drives me nuts.

I’d be interested in hearing your answers to these questions if you’d like to spend some time thinking or maybe even writing down some of your reflections.

If however this allegory hasn’t spoken to you in some way, please ignore it. There are a thousand and one really helpful (as well as really, really unhelpful) stories we can tell ourselves or tell each other, and this is only one of them. Maybe together we can find a story, a path, that will speak and guide you too? 🙂

*When I use the word trauma here, I mean any situation or life-event where my mind or coping responses felt unable to deal with the situation. This doesn’t have to necessarily be a BIG, DRAMATIC EVENT. There are everyday traumas too which our minds still get very upset about, The pain we feel when our thorns get snagged/triggered is often due to the energy of that unhealed laceration still trapped inside us.

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Poetry Koan?

Poetry, as much as religion and politics, calls up strong emotions of love and hate. “I, too, dislike it,” poet Marianne Moore candidly wrote some 50 years ago, adding an equally candid qualification: “Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.”

I too dislike poetry, and yet I spend about 70% of any given day completely immersed in it: writing poems, reading poems, tweeting poems, learning poems by heart, having conversations with people about poetry, fantasising about other poets and what they’re up to. What’s going on here?!?

My way of getting my head around this conundrum has been to frame the role poetry plays in my life as something akin (I whisper these next words very quietly out of the corner of my mouth as they have a way of triggering certain people, even me at times, into even greater paroxysms of contempt than the contempt for poetry itself) as a kind of spiritual practice, as well as a way of co-existing with my own confounding, mysterious and largely unconscious mind.

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):

Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine,” surmises Ben Lerner, channeling Allen Grossman, in The Hatred of Poetry. “You’re moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented (e.g., the creation of representation itself), but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.” (Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry)

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.

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.

I initially wrote in the last sentence “to get to the bottom of the truth”, but of course, unless we dig all the way through to China we already know there is no bottom there. There is never really any there there in poetry, as Getrude Stein once memorably said of her childhood city, Oakland.  Plenty of consolatory “there, theres” as in “There, there don’t cry”, but that’s a different kind of thing. For truths there are only provisional, fleeting glimpses of understanding, the kind which shift as our lives around the poems shift and change. But fleeting glimpses will do.

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”).

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.”

John Tarrant agrees with this, stating that koans/poems are often “confusing, irritating, mysterious, beautiful, and freeing, a gateway into the isness of life, where things are exactly what they are and have not yet become problems”. 

“You can think of koans/poems as vials full of the light that the ancestors walked through,” Tarrant proposes, “and if you can get these vials open you share that light.”

“By getting them open I mean you get at the light any way you can—you find the key and open the vials with a click, break them, drop them from a height, sing to them, step inside them, shake them so that some of the light spills out. Then that light is available to you, which might be handy if you’re ever in a dark and twisty passage.”

I don’t know about you, but I often find myself in dark and twisty passages, so I’m happy to have all the light I can get, no matter what form it it given to me. As someone who also works in the field of mental health, I am very much aware that almost everything transcendent, wondrous, contradictory and sublime gets stripped away in our so-called double-blind, peer-reviewed, scientific therapies, in many of our self-cures and so-called self-help books. There is very little poetry in a CBT worksheet, and I find that kind of sad. By “prescribing poems” for myself and other people, perhaps this is my way of putting that stuff back in.

The koans I recite each day, my “poetry liturgy” is a way for me to explore the poems I love-more-than-hate, which I often need to learn by heart in order to find out why I love-more-than-hate them so much, as well as a repository for all the wisdom of the past and present I so treasure and don’t want to forget.

Thanks for stopping by.

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My Koans

My primary way of interacting with my poetry koans (see this page and this one for more on the idea of poetry as a koan) is to learn a poem I love off by heart. It takes me a week or two to do so, spending about 30 minutes each day while walking with Mr Max (my canine companion), reciting lines from the poem over and over again like a mantra.

After about a week, I can usually recite a smallish (10-12 line) poem without too much stumbling. Then to be able to recite it for someone else (stressful) can take anything up to 3 months of daily work-outs to get it into muscle memory. As well as working on my weekly poem, I also endeavor to recite ALL the poems I know by heart every day. This is usually carried out first thing in the morning whilst washing the dishes, cleaning, and doing sun-salutations, all of which seem to lend themselves well to poetry. The alternative would probably be some form of desultory rumination, so I try and stick to the poems first thing in the morning.

Engaging with this practice on a daily basis, I manage to keep alive about 12,000 words of poetry in my heart and soul. I have an incredibly non-retentive brain when it comes to words, which is very frustrating, so I suspect this is the maximum amount of work required to keep a poem by-hearted, but I do it because I love the process (even if it takes a good amount of consistent effort which I don’t always love) and because it keeps my life on track.

I choose poems that I feel have something to teach me, something that I need to learn. They are self-prescriptions you might say. While by-hearting the poem, I start having a kind of conversation with it, and so too myself. I think the process is very akin to therapy or prayer.

If you are interested in finding out more about this practice of learning poems as a kind of medicine for the heart and mind, I’d very much recommend Kim Rosen’s book Saved By A Poem. Kim, more than anyone else, lit this fire in me, and I continue to be indebted to her for this. My Poetry Koan course channels a good amount of Kim. She is one of my heroes.

Below are all the poems I have learnt by heart so far and recite on a daily basis as a kind of Poetry Liturgy: 

1. DEATH WHISPERS

Death whispers
In my ear:
Live now,
For I am coming.

-Virgil

2. I THANK YOU

i thank You god for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

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

-E. E. Cummings

3. FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

-Wallace Stevens

4. TRUTH

And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?

Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years—
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?

Shall we not shudder?—
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

5. THE MANY WINES

Today we have been given a wine so
dark and so deep that to drink it
would take us beyond these two worlds.

Today we have been given a substance
so sweet that to eat it
would deliver us from self-consciousness.

Today will end once more with sleep
ending thought ending feeling
ending each and every craving.

Today Majnun’s love for Layla
is born and with it a mere
name becomes his salvation.

Every minute of the day we’ve been given
at least fifty ways to cut loose
to just slip out the back Jack.

Don’t think all ecstasies are the same
Jesus was lost in love for his God
his donkey drunk on barley.

Drink from the presence of Self
not from jars or scars or quick fixes
Every vessel is a moment of delight.

Be a connoisseur taste with caution
any wine will get you plastered
judge wisely choose the purest

The one unadulterated with fear
or the four urgent needs of the heart
drink the wine that moves you

As a camel moves when its finally
been untied from its post and
gets to just amble about freely.

-Rumi

6. FROM THE DHAMMAPADA

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a troubled mind
And trouble will follow you
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.

For we are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with an untroubled mind
And serenity will follow you
As your shadow, unshakable.

However many holy words you read,
However many you speak,
What good will they do you
If you do not act upon them?
Are you a shepherd
Counting another man’s sheep,
Never knowing the way?
Read as many words as you need,
write and speak even fewer.
Act upon them as best you can.
Forsaking the old haunts
of desire, displeasure,
despair and delusion.
Know the truth, find your peace.
Share the way.

-Siddhārtha Gautama

7. WHAT IS THE LANGUAGE USING US FOR

What is the language using us for?
Said Malcolm Mooney moving away
Slowly over the white language.
Where am I going said Malcolm Mooney.

Certain experiences seem to not
Want to go into language maybe
Because of shame or the reader’s shame.
Let us observe Malcolm Mooney.

Let us get through the suburbs and drive
Out further just for fun to see
What he will do. Reader, it does
Not matter. He is only going to be

Myself and for you slightly you
Wanting to be another. He fell.
He falls (Tenses are everywhere.)
Deep down into a glass jail.

I am in a telephoneless, blue
Green crevasse and I can’t get out.
I pay well for my messages
Being hoisted up when you are about.

I suppose you open them under the light
Of midnight of The Dancing Men.
The point is would you ever want
To be here down on the freezing line

Reading the words that steam out
Against the ice? Anyhow draw
This folded message up between
The leaning prisms from me below.

Slowly over the white language
Comes Malcolm Mooney the saviour.
My left leg has no feeling.
What is the language using us for?

-W.S. Graham

8. ANTI-AMBITION ODE

Is the idea to make a labyrinth
of the mind bigger? What’s the matter?
You still come out of the womb-dark
into the sneering court of the sun
and don’t know which turn to take.
So what? You’re made of twigs anyway.
You were on an errand but never came back,
spent too long poking something with a stick.
Was it dead or never alive?
Invisibility will slow down soon enough
for you to catch up and pull it over yourself.
No one knows what color the first hyena’s tongue
to reach you will be.
Or the vultures who are slow, careful unspellers.
So go ahead, become an expert in sleep or not,
either way you can live in a rose or smoke
only so long.
You will still be left off the list.
You will still be rain, blurry as a mouse.

-Dean Young

9. SELF-PORTRAIT

Tell me what I am, for I
cannot fathom at a glance
why this creature longs
for sunsets it has not yet seen,
or refuses the notion of home,
only to set out in search of it…

I wear skin the way the land bears
its own light. I cry rain, speak thunder,
burn at the core of this being human.
I am tellurian, tethered forever
to this sublunary sphere. Is that why
I am unable to forget you, you whose words
stain the skies at dusk, a flock of swallows
mapping their sorrows with each wing-beat?

Oh, canvas earth, we were never born
artist enough for you. You speak to us
in prophecies now. Your veins are molten
lava, torrential rain, hurricanes, glaciers
drowning in the currents of our undoing.
What do we land-locked souls know
about the ocean? We have a world of ice
frozen within us, and the waters are rising.

-Mary Jean Chan

10. THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
They may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door with kindness,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi

11. SONG OF A MAN WHO HAS COME THROUGH

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the
chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall
find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

-D.H. Lawrence

12. UNBURNABLE THE COLD IS FLOODING OUR LIVES

the prophets are alive but unrecognizable to us
as calligraphy to a mouse for a time they dragged

long oar strokes across the sky now they sit
in graveyards drinking coffee forking soapy cottage cheese

into their mouths my hungry is different than their hungry
I envy their discipline but not enough to do anything about it

I blame my culture I blame everyone but myself
intent arrives like a call to prayer and is as easy to dismiss

Rumi said the two most important things in life were beauty
and bewilderment this is likely a mistranslation

after thirty years in America my father now dreams in English
says he misses the dead relatives he used to be able to visit in sleep

how many times are you allowed to lose the same beloveds
before you stop believing they’re gone

some migrant birds build their nests over rivers
to push them into the water when they leave this seems

almost warm a good harm the addictions
that were killing me fastest were the ones I loved best

turning the chisel toward myself I found my body
was still the size of my body still unarmored as wet bread

one way to live a life is to spend each moment asking
forgiveness for the last it seems to me the significance

of remorse would deflate with each performance better
to sink a little into the earth and quietly watch life unfold

violent as a bullring the carpenter’s house will always be
the last to be built sometimes a mind is ready to leave

the world before its body sometimes paradise happens
too early and leaves us shuddering in its wake

I am glad I still exist glad for cats and moss
and Turkish indigo and yet to be light upon the earth

to be steel bent around an endless black to once again
be God’s own tuning fork and yet and yet

-Kaveh Akbar

13. THE PANTHER

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly–.
An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

14. DREAM SONG #14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

-John Berryman

15. PRIMARY WONDER

Hours pass where I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; caps and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that
moment by moment it continues to be
sustained.

-Denise Levertov

16. THE PATIENCE OF ORDINARY THINGS

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

-Pat Schneider

17. THE DOOR

Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.

Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye,
or the picture
of a picture.

Go and open the door.
If there’s a fog
it will clear.

Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing
is there,
go and open the door.

At least
there’ll be
a draught.

-Miroslav Holub

18. THE TREES

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

-John Ashbery

19. A HINDU TO HIS BODY

Dear pursuing presence,
dear body: you brought me
curled in womb and memory.

Gave me fingers to clutch
at grace, at malice; and ruffle
someone else’s hair; to fold a man’s
shadow back on his world;
to hold in the dark of the eye
through a winter and a fear
the poise, the shape of a breast;
a pear’s silence, in the calyx
and the noise of a childish fist.

You brought me: do not leave me
behind. When you leave all else,
my garrulous face, my unkissed
alien mind, when you muffle
and put away my pulse

to rise in the sap of trees
let me go with you and feel the weight
of honey-hives in my branching
and the burlap weave of weaver-birds
in my hair.

-A. K. Ramanujan

20. AFTERNOON

When I was about to die
my body lit up
like when I leave my house
without my wallet.

What am I missing? I ask
patting my chest
pocket.

And I am missing everything living
that won’t come with me
into this sunny afternoon

—my body lights up for life
like all the wishes being granted in a fountain
at the same instant—
all the coins burning the fountain dry—

and I give my breath
to a small bird-shaped pipe.

In the distance, behind several voices
haggling, I hear a sound like heads
clicking together. Like a game of pool,
played with people by machines.

-Max Ritvo

21. WHEN I HAVE FEARS THAT I MAY CEASE TO BE

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

-John Keats

22. THE WELL OF GRIEF

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,
turning down through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe,
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.

-David Whyte

23. HARD TO FACE

Death is hard to face
birth too
in between
decomposition.

Lousy to say the least.

Ill health anxiety & frustration all suck
as does despair disappointment humiliation.

Each and every hard to face moment is by
definition difficult including this one where
something pleasant is coming to an end and that
one where the unpleasant is starting up again.

Not getting what we want or need or had or hope
to have or hold onto & keep is hard to face.

In fact whichever way we get to inhabit
this being human takes us closer to the truth

our bodies sensations feelings
thoughts moods beliefs

are doors through which we cannot help but pass
leading into rooms where once again we find ourselves
bearing all of this with a sometimes heavy heart
whatever it is we feel right now that feels so very hard.

-Siddhārtha Gautama

24. ALL IS ARDOUR

All is ardour burning & blaze
Eye is ardour ear is ardour
nose lips tongue ardour
mind ardour body ardour
burning burning burning away.

Sound burning scent burning
taste burning touch burning
incandescent bone fires burning
burning pleasure burning pain
either neither burning away.

Feel the fire that burns through
this hour passion fire aversion
fire delusion fire all ablaze
birth and death & aging fires
burning burning burning away.

Contact feeling craving takes us
calls to the awakened soul
know then free your self from ardour
find some peace
while burning away.

-Siddhārtha Gautama

25. GO DEEPER THAN LOVE

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,
love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock
molten, yet dense and permanent.
Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.
And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently love/d.
Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.
For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths
out of sight, in the deep living heart.

-D. H. Lawrence

26. ONE ART

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Say it!) like a disaster

-Elizabeth Bishop

27. A MAN SAID TO THE UNIVERSE

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

-Stephen Crane

28. ONCE THERE WAS A MAN

Once there was a man,
So sensitive, so wise,
In all drink
He detected the bitter,
And in all touch
He found the sting.
At last he cried thus:
“There is nothing,
“No life,
“No joy,
“No pain,
“There is nothing save opinion,
“And opinion be damned.”

-Stephen Crane

29. I SAW A MAN PURSUING THE HORIZON

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never”
“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.

-Stephen Crane

30. CHANGE

Change is the new,
improved
word for god,
lovely enough
to raise a song
or implicate
a sea of wrongs,
mighty enough,
like other gods,
to shelter,
bring together,
and estrange us.
Please, god,
we seem to say,
change us.

-Wendy Videlock

31. THE DAY YOU STOP

One day will be tomorrow. The day of truce
and socket and beaten. The day
you shrink into stopping, the day threadbare and pain-
shamed and limit. Until then,
you might be continuing
because that is what you do until the last moment
when you must stop.
Still everywhere the shiver
is slow on the tongue, insistent. You will stop
for some weeks,
your body taking body
from your blood
and the back of the throat,
and those weeks will be thank-you-God acres
of erasure and resurrection and the clabber of other small prayers
you stoop to collect. You will be diligent
because you have paid good money
to be taught how to stop, slanting off
from queasy transgressions, those
clutches and source. Even so,
we shouldn’t fool ourselves;
resolve cannot liquefy need.
You will probably start again soon after
you have completed the stopping,
the unwashed swell of rapture
taking your face through teeth to heartbeat,
every beaten moment on the couch.
Every relief: have hereafter and clamor.
Have nothing worse.
You’ll follow the mumble through
that ache that is tincture. Is rule
and bundle. Is famished inside you
and thrumming. You understand
there are two types, and you are
the type to release. If you had to choose
between settle and suture, you know what you’re after.
You’d pour yourself hitches
and battery. Pour yourself each subsequent time.
It will become impossible to believe
you will ever stop for good.
Stopping is not counter or suspect,
but easing back is all that is left,
the impulse has got you, it’s all that survives.

-Lauren Camp

32. IN THE DESERT

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.

-Stephen Crane

33. I WALKED IN A DESERT

I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
“Ah, God, take me from this place!”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”
I cried, “Well, but
“The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”

-Stephen Crane

34. IF I SHOULD CAST OFF THIS TATTERED COAT

If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant,
What then?

-Stephen Crane

35. KING OF THE RIVER

If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly’s blood:
Finned Ego,
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.

If the knowledge were given you,
but it is not given,
for the membrane is clouded
with self-deceptions
and the iridescent image swims
through a mirror that flows,
you would surprise yourself
in that other flesh
heavy with milt,
bruised, battering toward the dam
that lips the orgiastic pool.

Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die.

If the power were granted you
to break out of your cells,
but the imagination fails
and the doors of the senses close
on the child within,
you would dare to be changed,
as you are changing now,
into the shape you dread
beyond the merely human.
A dry fire eats you.
Fat drips from your bones.
The flutes of your gills discolor.
You have become a ship for parasites.
The great clock of your life
is slowing down,
and the small clocks run wild.
For this you were born.
You have cried to the wind
and heard the wind’s reply:
“I did not choose the way,
the way chose me.”
You have tasted the fire on your tongue
till it is swollen black
with a prophetic joy:
“Burn with me!
The only music is time,
the only dance is love.”

If the heart were pure enough,
but it is not pure,
you would admit
that nothing compels you
any more, nothing
at all abides,
but nostalgia and desire,
the two-way ladder
between heaven and hell.
On the threshold
of the last mystery,
at the brute absolute hour,
you have looked into the eyes
of your creature self,
which are glazed with madness,
and you say
he is not broken but endures,
limber and firm
in the state of his shining,
forever inheriting his salt kingdom,
from which he is banished
forever.

-Stanley Kunitz

36. TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the sun:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck;
A time to hurt, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to scatter stones,
and a time to gather them together;
A time to embrace, and a time to hold back;
A time to gain, and a time to lose;
a time to save, and a time to use;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silent, and a time to speak;
A time of love, and a time of hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.

-Kohelet/Solomon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes#Title,_date_and_author)

37. THE PLAIN SENSE OF THINGS

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

-Wallace Stevens

38. LATE ECHO

Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

-John Ashbery

39. MY OWN HEART LET ME MORE HAVE PITY ON

My own heart let me have more have pity on; let Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

40. WILD GEESE

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, Awfulrepenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-Mary Oliver

41. WE HAVE NO CHOICE IN THE BODIES THAT HOLD US

Thing of dirt and water and oxygen marked by thinking
and reacting and a couch
one may or may not be permitted
to sleep on. He may not permit me
to touch him or to take the bone
from his mouth, but he does, and that’s a choice
based on many factors, not the least of which
is his own desire to let me
do these things. How I could ever
think or feel myself more
deserving of a single thing than
this being, whom I call by a name the same way
my parents chose a name for me. The same way my genes
went expressing themselves to make my face exactly
my face. This isn’t special. Or this is special. But it’s one
answer, the same, for us both.

-Holly Amos

42. WHAT IS THE LANGUAGE USING US FOR? (2)

What is the language using us for?
It uses us all and in its dark
Of dark actions selections differ.

I am not making a fool of myself
For you. What I am making is
A place for language in my life

Which I want to be a real place
Seeing I have to put up with it
Anyhow. What are Communication’s

Mistakes in the magic medium doing
To us? It matters only in
So far as we want to be telling

Each other alive about each other
Alive. I want to be able to speak
And sing and make my soul occur

In front of the best and be respected
For that and even be understood
By the ones I like who are dead.

I would like to speak in front
Of myself with all my ears alive
And find out what it is I want.

-W.S. Graham

43. POETRY

And it was at that age, Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when.
No they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
but something kicked in my soul,
a fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I learnt the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And me, miniscule being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

-Pablo Neruda

44.ORIGIN

The first cell felt no call to divide.
Fed on abundant salts and sun,
still thin, it simply spread,
rocking on water, clinging to stone,
a film of obliging strength.
Its endoplasmic reticulum
was a thing of incomparable curvaceous length;
its nucleus, Golgi apparatus, RNA
magnificent. With no incidence
of loneliness, inner conflict, or deceit,
no predator or prey,
it had little to do but thrive,
draw back from any sharp heat
or bitterness, and change its pastel
colors in a kind of song.
We are descendants of the second cell.

-Sarah Lindsay

45. WHAT IF YOU SLEPT

What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

46. SONG

I wait each night for a self.
I say the mist, I say the strange
tumble of leaves, I say a motor
in the distance, but I mean
a self and a self and a self.
A small cold wind
coils and uncoils in the corner
of every room. A vagrant.
In the dream
I gather my life in bundles
and stand at the edge of a field
of snow. It is a field I know
but have never seen. It is
nowhere and always new:
What about the lives
I might have lived?
As who? And who
will be accountable
for this regret I see
no way to avoid? A core,
or a husk, I need to learn
not how to speak, but from where.
Do you understand? I say
name, but I mean a conduit
from me to me, I mean a net,
I mean an awning of stars.

-Charif Shanahan

47. THE WAY IT IS

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

-William Stafford

48. WHAT IS THE LANGUAGE USING US FOR? (3)

I don’t know. Have the words ever
Made anything of you, near a kind
Of truth you thought you were? Me
Neither. The words like albatrosses
Are only a doubtful touch towards
You going and me lifting my hand
To speak to illustrate an observed
Catastrophe. What is the weather
Using us for where we are ready
With all our language lines aboard?
The beginning wind slaps the canvas.
Are you ready? Are you ready?

-W.S. Graham

49. KINDNESS

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

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

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

50. THE PLANET ON THE TABLE

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

-Wallace Steven

51. POETRY

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect
contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.

-Marianne Moore

52. LYING IN A HAMMOCK AT WILLIAM DUFFY’S FARM IN PINE ISLAND, MINNESOTA

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

-James Wright

53. FIRST FOOTNOTE ON ZOOMORPHISM

It seems we have said too little about
the heart, per se,

how it sits in its chambered nub
of grease and echo

listening for movement in the farthest
reed beds — any feathered thing will do,

love being interspecific, here,
more often than we imagine.

If anything, I’d liken us to certain
warblers, less appealing in the wild

than how we’d look
in coloured lithographs,

yet now and then, I’m on the point of
hearing
bitterns at the far edge of the lake,

that cry across the marshes like the doom
you only get in books, where people die

so readily for love, each heart becomes
a species in itself, the sound it makes

distinctive, one more descant in the dark,
before it disappears into the marshes.

-John Burnside

54. YOU WHO NEVER ARRIVED

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me — the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods–
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house– , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,–
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening…

-Rainer Maria Rilke

55. EXPOSED ON THE CLIFFS OF THE HEART

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and, higher,
(but how tiny) still one last
farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground
Under your hands. Even here, though,
something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.
But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know
and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass
or linger. And the great sheltered bird flies, slowly
circling, around the peak’s pure denial. – But
without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart…

-Rainer Maria Rilke

56. WITH THAT MOON LANGUAGE

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not say this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

-Hafiz

57. REQUEST

Please love me
and I will play for you
this poem
upon the guitar
I myself made
out of cardboard and black threads
when I was ten years old.
Love me or else.

Franz Wright

58. RELATION-SHIPS?

You do your thing, and I do my thing.
You are not in this world to live up to
my expectations, and nor am I.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find
each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.

– Fritz Perls

59. LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

-Derek Walcott

60. THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life or my loved ones’
lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry

61. ENCOUNTER

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

-Csezlaw Milosz

62. DIRT IN THE GROUND

What does it matter,
A dream of love, or a dream of lies?
We’re all gonna be in the same place when we die.
Your spirit don’t leave knowing
Your face or your name,
The wind through our bones is all that remains.
And we’re all gonna be, yeah, yeah,
I said we’re all gonna be, yeah, yeah,
I said we’re all gonna be, yeah, yeah,
I said we’re all going to be just dirt in the ground.

The quill from a buzzard,
The blood writes the word,
I want to know am I the sky or a bird?
‘Cause hell is boiling over,
And heaven is full,
We’re chained to the world,
And we all gotta pull.
And we’re all gonna be, yeah, yeah,
I said we’re all gonna be, yeah, yeah,
I said we’re all gonna be, yeah, yeah,
I said we’re all going to be just dirt in the ground.

Now, Cain slew Abel,
He killed him with a stone,
The sky cracked open,
And the thunder groaned.
Along a river of flesh
Can these dry bones live?
Take a king or a beggar
And the answer they’ll give
Is we’re all gonna be yeah, yeah,
I said we’re all gonna be, yeah, yeah,
I said we’re all gonna be, yeah, yeah,
I said we’re all going to be just dirt in the ground.

-Tom Waits

63. THE JOURNEY

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around
and inside you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

-Mary Oliver

64. WHEN DEATH COMES

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

-Mary Oliver

65. WE SHALL NOT CEASE FROM EXPLORATION

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

-T.S. Eliot

66. THE MANGER OF INCIDENTALS

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe.
By meaningless bulk, vastness without size,
power without consequence. The stubborn iteration
that is present without being felt.
Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon
and its physics. An endless, endless of going on.
No habitat where the brain can recognize itself.
No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.
The horror of none of it being alive.
No red squirrels, no flowers, not even weed.
Nothing that knows what season it is.
The stars uninflected by awareness.
Miming without implication. We alone see the iris
in front of the cabin reach its perfection
and quickly perish. The lamb is born into happiness
and is eaten for Easter. We are blessed
with powerful love and it goes away. We can mourn.
We live the strangeness of being momentary,
and still we are exalted by being temporary.
The grand Italy of meanwhile. It is the fact of being brief,
being small and slight that is the source of our beauty.
We are a singularity that makes music out of noise
because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness
and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

-Jack Gilbert

67. THE BRIGHT FIELD

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

-R.S. Thomas

68. DREAM

In the dream
I gave the bird
freedom. In real life
I told it my dream
in its cage. It

sang then notes
of gold hotter
than my tears punishing
itself for my dream.

-R.S. Thomas

69. STATIONS

It is an old story:
the ship that was here last night
gone this morning; love
here one moment not here
any more. Time with a reputation
for transience permanent
as the ring in the rock
on beaches that would persuade
us we are the first comers.
We have been here before
and failed, bringing creation
about our ears. Why
can we not be taught
there is no hill beyond this one
we roll our minds to the top
of, not to take off into
empty space, nor to be cast back down
where we began, but to hold the position
assigned to us, long as time
lasts, somewhere half-way
up between earth and heaven.”

-R.S. Thomas

70. WRITING

Quarterly, is it, writing reproaches me:
‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of attention and good looks,
You could get them still by writing a few books.’

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.
By now they’ve a publisher, good friends, and a wife:
Clearly writing has something to do with life

—In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can’t expect writing carefree with all you desire,
And however you bank your scrawl, the writing you save
Won’t in the end make you less of a slave to them.

I listen to my writing singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

-Phillip Larkin (ish)

71. MEASURE

Recurrences.
Coppery light hesitates
again in the small-leaved

Japanese plum. Summer
and sunset, the peace
of the writing desk

and the habitual peace
of writing, these things
form an order I only

belong to in the idleness
of attention. Last light
rims the blue mountain

and I almost glimpse
what I was born to,
not so much in the sunlight

or the plum tree
as in the pulse
that forms these lines.

-Robert Hass

72. HOME IS SO SAD

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

-Philip Larkin

73. LESS AND LESS HUMAN, O SAVAGE SPIRIT

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let her move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let her hang out
Her stars on the wall. She must dwell quietly.

She must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands its speech
From other beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let her be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.

-Wallace Stevens

74. THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

-Les Murray

75. I AM THE SONG

I am the song that sings the bird.
I am the leaf that grows the land.
I am the tide that moves the moon.
I am the stream that halts the sand.
I am the cloud that drives the storm.
I am the earth that lights the sun.
I am the fire that strikes the stone.
I am the clay that shapes the hand.
I am the word that speaks this man.

-Charles Causley

76. THE HOUSE OF BELONGING

This the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I care for
another
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.

-David Whyte

77. CHEERS

Making your way in the world today
Takes everything you got
Taking a break from all your worries
It sure would help a lot
Wouldn’t you like to get away?
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name
And they’re always glad you came
You want to be where you can see
The troubles are all the same
You want to be where everybody knows your name
You want to go where people know
The people are all the same
You want to go where everybody knows your name.

-Gary Portnoy

78. PLACE

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

what for
not the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time

with the sun already
going down

and the water
touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing

one by one
over its leaves

-W.S. Merwin

79. HARD NIGHT

What words or harder gift
does the light require of me
carving from the dark
this difficult tree?

What place or farther peace
do I almost see
emerging from the night
and heart of me?

The sky whitens, goes on and on.
Fields wrinkle into rows
of cotton, go on and on.
Night like a fling of crows
disperses and is gone.

What song, what home,
what calm or one clarity
can I not quite come to,
never quite see:
this field, this sky, this tree.

-Christian Wiman

80. THE HEAVEN OF ANIMALS

Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.

For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without suffering

At the cycle’s center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

-James Dickey

81. THANKS

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

-W.S. Merwin

82. AT THE BEND

I look for you my curl of sleep
my breathing wave on the night shore
my star in the fog of morning
I think you can always find me

I call to you under my breath
I whisper to you through the hours
all your names my ear of shadow
I think you can always hear me

I wait for you my promised day
my time again my homecoming
my being where you wait for me
I think always of you waiting

-W.S. Merwin

83. LITTLE SOUL

Little soul little stray
little drifter
now where will you stay
all pale and all alone
after the way
you used to make fun of things.

-Hadrian (tr. Merwin)

84. I’M NOBODY! WHO ARE YOU?

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary–to be–Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

-Emily Dickinson

85. COULD I

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.

-Anne Carson

86. VOW

To get by
on awe alone
in an early hour.
The first hour.
The new life.
Poetry—
the condition
within which
all rises and falls.
To allow it
to overcome you.

-Joseph Massey

87. CAEDMON’S HYMN

Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard,
meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs,
ece drihten, or onstealde.

He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum
heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend;
þa middangeard moncynnes weard,
ece drihten, æfter teode
firum foldan, frea ælmihtig.

-Caedmon (translation)

88. THE LORD’S PRAYER

Our Father, which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name;
Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done
in earth, as it is in heaven:
Give us this day our daily bread;
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive them that trespass against us;
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil:
For thine is the kingdom,
the power, and the glory,
For ever and ever.
Amen.

-Jesus of Nazareth

89. SHORT LECTURE ON YOUR OWN HAPPINESS

You know how to write poetry.
It is all you need to be happy.
But you will not be happy,
you will be miserable, thinking
about all the other things you need.
After years and years of misery
one thing as a poet you can look forward to
the day you give up wanting what you haven’t got
to focus on the thing you have got which is poetry.
Let nothing cheat, steal, or deflect you from it,
Not even poetry itself. Why are you standing there?
You should have fled before I finished the first sentence.

-Mary Ruefle

90. SISYPHUS

This man Sisyphus, he has to push
his dense unthinkable rock
through bogs woods crops glittering
optical rivers and hoof-sucked holes,
as high as starlight as low as granite,
and every inch of it he feels
the vertical stress of the sky
draws trees narrow, wears water round
and the lithe, cold-blooded grasses
weighed so down they have to hang their tips like cats’ tails;
and it rains it blows but the mad delicate world
will not let will not let him out
and when he prays, he hears God passing with a
swish at this, a knock at that.

There is not a soft or feeling part,
the rock’s heart is only another bone;
now he knows he will not get back home,
his whole outlook is a black rock;
like a foetus, undistractedly listening
to the clashing and whistling and tapping of another world,
he has to endure his object,
he has to oppose his patience to his perceptions…
and there is neither mouth
nor eye, there is not anything
so closed, so abstract as this rock
except innumerable other rocks
that lie down under the shady trees
or chafe slowly in the seas.

The secret is to walk evading nothing
through rain sleet darkness wind,
not to abandon the spirit of repetition:
there are the green and yellow trees, the dog,
the dark barrier of water,
there goes the thundercloud shaking its blue wolf’s head;
and the real effort is to stare
unreconciled at how the same things are,
but he is half aware he is
lost or at any rate straining
out of the earth into a lifted sphere
(dust in his hair, a dark blood thread from his ear)
and jumps at shapes, like on a country road,
in heavy boots, heading uphill in silence.

-Alice Oswald

91. OPTICKS

My life, Maharaj,
is a series of events,
just like yours

You are disentangled
and watch the passing show
While I stick to my perceptions
driven by whatever grabs me.

My problems are
Body-mind problems
thoughts, feelings
family, friends,
name, shame,
security.

You say: I AM THAT!
All hearts all souls
all bodies all minds,
all life all death all eternity.

This sometimes loosens
what needs to be lost
my beliefs,
my perceptions,
my terrible beautiful fantasies..

All come to rest in awareness
where two is less than one,
where you take this flower
so singular in colour

Though mind asks how
and why and what for,
the lucky ones, the blessed ones
learn to live with and in this truth.

-Nisargadatta

92. WILD STRAWBERRIES

You’re having a bad day.
Chased by a tiger to the edge of a cliff,
you scramble over and grab hold of a vine.

But now there’s another one prowling below,
and two hungry mice heading for your lifeline.

You take a deep breath,
adjusting to how things are,
and notice some wild strawberries
growing nearby,
dotted with flowers
and tiny red fruit.

What else can you do now but reach for a berry.
What else can you do now?

93. STILL ANOTHER DAY

The days aren’t discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys come and go between honey and pain.

No, the net of the years doesn’t unravel: there is no net.
The days don’t fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn’t divide life into halves, or action, or silence, or honour.

Life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in our bones.

We, the mortals, touch this metal,
the wind, the rain, trees, plants, and stone,
knowing they will remain, inert or burning,
as we go on discovering, writing things down:
for it is our destiny to love and say goodbye.

-Pablo Neruda

94. THE SINGING

There’s a bird crying outside, or maybe calling, anyway it goes on and on
without stopping, so I begin to think it’s my bird, my insistent
I, I, I that today is so trapped by some nameless but still relentless longing
that I can’t get any further than this, one note clicking metronomically
in the afternoon silence, measuring out some possible melody
I can’t begin to learn. I could say it’s the bird of my loneliness
asking, as usual, for love, for more anyway than I have; I could as easily call it
grief, ambition, knot of self that won’t untangle, fear of my own heart. All
I can do is listen to the way it keeps on, as if it’s enough just to launch a voice
against stillness, even a voice that says so little, that no one is likely to answer
with anything but sorrow, and their own confusion. I, I, I, isn’t it the sweetest
sound, the beautiful, arrogant ego refusing to disappear? I don’t know
what I want, only that I’m desperate for it, that I can’t stop asking.
That when the bird finally quiets I need to say it doesn’t, that all afternoon
I hear it, and into the evening; that even now, in the darkness, it goes on.

-Kim Addonizio

TO LEARN:

95. PRAYER

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention—the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage
I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here
among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.
The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?
My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.
Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.

-Marie Howe

96. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD

In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
a stone
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Never should I forget this
in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Carlos Andrade Drummond (tr. Elizabeth Bishop)

97. DANCING IN THE WAITING ROOM

All our living
is in waiting.
In these moments
we find our myriad selves
anxious, hopeful, trembling,
wishful, fearful, impatient.
All our dancing shadows
are there
flitting in the half light
of unreason
crowding together
in fevers of movement
never still, never one.

Then a voice says ‘Next’
and a new dance
begins.

-Angus Macmillan

99. THE STILL TIME

I know there is still time –
time for the hands
to open, for the bones of them
to be filled
by those failed harvests of want,
the bread imagined of the days of not having.

Now that the fear
has been rummaged down to its husk,
and the wind blowing
the flesh away translates itself
into flesh and the flesh
gives itself in its reveries to the wind.

I remember those summer nights
when I was young and empty,
when I lay through the darkness
wanting, wanting,
knowing
I would have nothing of anything I wanted –
that total craving
that hollows the heart out irreversibly.

So it surprises me now to hear
the steps of my life following me –
so much of it gone
it returns, everything that drove me crazy
comes back, blessing the misery
of each step it took me into the world;
as though a prayer had ended
and the bit of changed air
between the palms goes free
to become the glitter
on some common thing that inexplicably shines.

And the old voice,
which once made its broken-off, choked, parrot-incoherences,
speaks again,
this time on the palatum cordis
this time saying there is time, still time,
for one who can groan
to sing,
for one who can sing to be healed.

-Galway Kinnell

100. BROKEN SPOKE

You grow old.
You love everybody.
You forgive everyone.
You think: we are all leaves
dragged along by the wind.
Then comes a splendid spotted
yellow one—ah, distinction!
And in that moment
you are dragged under.

-Mary Ruefle

101. THE SOUND OF THE SUN

It makes one all right, though you hadn’t thought of it,
A sound like the sound of the sky on fire, like Armageddon,
Whistling and crackling, the explosions of sunlight booming
As the huge mass of gas rages into the emptiness around it.
It isn’t a sound you are often aware of, though the light speeds
To us in seconds, each dawn leaping easily across a chasm
Of space that swallows the sound of that sphere, but
If you listen closely some morning, when the sun swells
Over the horizon and the world is still and still asleep,
You might hear it, a faint noise so far inside your mind
That it must come from somewhere, from light rushing to darkness,
Energy burning towards entropy, towards a peaceful solution,
Burning brilliantly, spontaneously, in the middle of nowhere,
And you, too, must make a sound that is somewhat like it,
Though that, of course, you have no way of hearing at all.

-George Bradley

Categories
Acceptance Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Feel Better

Conceptualised Selves

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

WALT WHITMAN

Sometimes it can be helpful when we start to feel very trapped in a mind-state that is causing us a great deal of suffering to do a practice that pushes us (a little uncomfortably, but hopefully not too uncomfortably) at examining the very perspective from which our thoughts and feelings emanate.

These two exercises come from Steven C. Haye’s book A Liberated Mind. I have found them both interesting and helpful at times for myself and when used with clients.

PRACTICE ONE: I AM?

Take a sheet of paper and write down the following.

I am ________________.
I am ________________.
I am ________________.

Now complete the top two with one-word answers that represent positive psychological attributes of yours. Don’t put in mere descriptive attributes (e.g., I am male). Use terms that refer to your most prized personal qualities. Reserve the last for the exact opposite. There, list in a single word a personal attribute that you fear you have or think you have that is negative.

Let’s begin by reviewing the top two “positive” answers. A couple of simple questions: Is this true all the time? Everywhere? Toward everyone? Without exception?  What about the bottom one. Is it totally true, everywhere? Would someone else say the same thing if they could watch you 24/7?

Now another question: how many of these statements can you turn into a comparison with others? Try to do it with each one. If you wrote down I am smart or I am kind, see if these statements link to the idea that you are smart-ER or kind-ER (or dumb-ER and so on) than at least some other people. This isn’t just your story—it’s your story in comparison to others. No wonder we begin to feel alone inside our own “content”-focused selves.

The beginning of a solution is to notice our fusion with these statements. Beginning with the first one and continuing through all three, change the full-stop at the end of each sentence to a comma, and then write down these two words: OR NOT. For example, I am intelligent, or not.

Now read each sentence again, slowly. Watch what happens. Take your time. If you find your mind filling with negative thoughts as you do this, use your defusion skills on them, saying to yourself, “I’m having the thought that . . .” and see if that helps to loosen the grip on the thought that’s threatening to hijack your mind.

You may be able to sense something opening slightly—as if a little bit of air is coming into a room. You may feel that you somehow have more options about how you think about yourself. Don’t try to hang on to that feeling—it will come and go—and don’t get into an argument with yourself about which version is more accurate. The mental process we are cultivating here is reminding ourselves that we can refuse to buy one version of a story as compared to another. We’re opening our minds to possibilities. See if you can notice that this sense of opening happens with both the “positive” statements and the negative one.

Now take the first sentence and cross out all of what you’ve written after I am. Who would you be without that content? Pause to consider the answer. Then do the same with each of the other sentences. What would it be like just to let go of that content?

This process raises the question: Who are we without all of our stories and defenses? Who or what are we trying to protect? If we woke up one day and all sentences like this were just sentences—they all had that open sense of “_______ or not!”—would we still be our selves? If your mind replies, “Hell no!” take just a moment to notice who is noticing that mind of yours. Aren’t you noticing that mental reaction? Isn’t the you that is noticing a deeper sense of “you”?

As the final act in this little exercise, circle the two words repeated three times—I am—and consider them. What if the deeper sense of self we seek is closer to these two words alone? In crafting the story of our lives, we lose sight of this powerful alternative: just being.

There is one more step in this exercise, which helps us become more aware of when we tend to fall under the spell of our self-telling. Ego-based stories are not just distorted, they also tend to be too general. In actuality, we focus on different aspects of our self-story in different circumstances. For example, when at home with our loved ones, we may focus on our view of ourselves as being caring; while at work, we might focus on our thoughts about being inept. Becoming aware of how our self-story changes according to different situations helps us stay better connected with our transcendent self, and therefore with our ability to choose among possibilities about how we will be.

So now, we’re going to transform the “I am _______” statements by rewriting each. First, instead of I am, write I feel or I think. For example, if you wrote I am loving, replace it with I feel loving. If you wrote I am intelligent, make it I think of myself as intelligent.

Next, qualify each statement by describing the situation in which you think or feel that way, including how your own behaviour is involved, using this phrasing:

“When [the situation] and I [your behavior] then [how you think or feel].” For example, “When my wife is disagreeing with me, and I take her perspective seriously, I feel loving,” or “When I have a lot to do, and I take time for self-care, I think of myself as intelligent.” You can also write descriptions of the situations in which you do not feel loving or intelligent. For example, “When I have a lot of work to do and I ignore my twelve-year-old son, I do not feel loving.”

PRACTICE TWO: DIFFERENTIATING BETWEEN WHAT WE’RE AWARE OF AND WHO WE ARE

Take a breath or two, notice who is noticing that sensation, and then note your experience. Whatever your mind settles on—an external object, an internal sensation, a thought, a feeling, a memory, or so on—get clear on it.

Then restate the experience in three forms:

  1. “I am aware of [state the content]”
  2. “I am not [state the content]”
  3. “I contain awareness of [state the content].”

For example, “I am aware of the television. [PAUSE] I am not the television. [PAUSE] I contain awareness of the television”

Or “I am remembering a memory of being five. [PAUSE] I am not a memory. [PAUSE] My awareness contains a memory of being five.[PAUSE]”

Five or ten minutes is plenty of time for this exercise, and after the first engagement with it, you should practice it regularly for several days. Then, for ongoing practice, you can simplify the task. Just notice the experience and then state “I’m not that; my awareness contains that.”

Don’t get drawn into an argument—instead see if you can touch a deeper awareness that your attachment to any content is distinct from awareness itself.

Categories
Feel Better

The Dream by Julian Barnes

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.

I was in my own bed. That seemed a bit of a surprise, but after a moment’s thought it made sense. Who else’s bed should I wake up in? I looked around and I said to myself, Well, well, well. Not much of a thought, I admit. Still, do we ever find the right words for the big occasions?

There was a knock on the door and a woman came in, sideways and backwards at the same time. It should have looked awkward but it didn’t; no, it was all smooth and stylish. She was carrying a tray, which was why she’d come in like that. As she turned, I saw she was wearing a uniform of sorts. A nurse? No, she looked more like a stewardess on some airline you’ve never heard of. ‘Room service,’ she said with a bit of a smile, as if she wasn’t used to providing it, or I wasn’t used to expecting it; or both.

‘Room service?’ I repeated. Where I come from something like that only happens in films. I sat up in bed, and found I didn’t have any clothes on. Where’d my pyjamas gone? That was a change. It was also a change that when I sat up in bed and realized she could see me bollock-naked to the waist, if you understand me, I didn’t feel at all embarrassed. That was good.

‘Your clothes are in the cupboard,’ she said. ‘Take your time. You’ve got all day. And,’ she added with more of a smile, ‘all tomorrow as well.’

I looked down at my tray. Let me tell you about that breakfast. It was the breakfast of my life and no mistake. The grapefruit, for a start. Now, you know what a grapefruit’s like: the way it spurts juice down your shirt and keeps slipping out of your hand unless you hold it down with a fork or something, the way the flesh always sticks to those opaque membranes and then suddenly comes loose with half the pith attached, the way it always tastes sour yet makes you feel bad about piling sugar on the top of it. That’s what a grapefruit’s like, right? Now let me tell you about this grapefruit. Its flesh was pink for a start, not yellow, and each segment had already been carefully freed from its clinging membrane. The fruit itself was anchored to the dish by some prong or fork through its bottom, so that I didn’t need to hold it down or even touch it. I looked around for the sugar, but that was just out of habit. The taste seemed to come in two parts – a sort of awakening sharpness followed quickly by a wash of sweetness; and each of those little globules (which were about the size of tadpoles) seemed to burst separately in my mouth. That was the grapefruit of my dreams, I don’t mind telling you.

Like an emperor, I pushed aside the gutted hull and lifted a silver dome from a crested plate. Of course I knew what would be underneath. Three slices of grilled streaky bacon with the gristle and rind removed, the crispy fat all glowing like a bonfire. Two eggs, fried, the yolk looking milky because the fat had been properly spooned over it in the cooking, and the outer edges of the white trailing off into filigree gold braid. A grilled tomato I can only describe in terms of what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a collapsing cup of stalk, pips, fibre and red water, it was something compact, sliceable, cooked equally all the way through and tasting – yes, this is the thing I remember – tasting of tomato. The sausage: again, not a tube of lukewarm horsemeat stuffed into a French letter, but dark umber and succulent … a … a sausage, that’s the only word for it. All the others, the ones I’d thought I’d enjoyed in my previous life, were merely practising to be like this; they’d been auditioning – and they wouldn’t get the part, either. There was a little crescent-shaped side-plate with a crescent-shaped silver lid. I raised it: yes, there were my bacon rinds, separately grilled, waiting to be nibbled.

The toast, the marmalade – well, you can imagine those, you can dream what they were like for yourselves. But I must tell you about the teapot. The tea, of course, was the real thing, tasting as if it had been picked by some rajah’s personal entourage. As for the teapot … Once, years ago, I went to Paris on a package holiday. I wandered off from the others and walked around where the smart people live. Where they shop and eat, anyway. On a corner I passed a café. It didn’t look particularly grand, and just for a minute I thought of sitting down there. But I didn’t, because at one of the tables I saw a man having tea. As he poured himself a fresh cup, I spotted a little gadget which seemed to me almost a definition of luxury: attached to the teapot’s spout, and dangling by three delicate silver chains, was a strainer. As the man raised the pot to its pouring angle, this strainer swung outwards to catch the leaves. I couldn’t believe that serious thought had once gone into the matter of how to relieve this tea-drinking gentleman of the incredible burden of picking up a normal strainer with his free hand. I walked away from that café feeling a bit self-righteous. Now, on my tray, I had a teapot bearing the insignia of some chic Parisian café. A strainer was attached to its spout by three silver chains. Suddenly, I could see the point of it.

After breakfast, I put the tray down on my bedside table, and went to the cupboard. Here they all were, my favourite clothes. That sports jacket I still liked even after people started saying, how unusual, did you buy it secondhand, another twenty years and it’ll be back in fashion. That pair of corduroy trousers my wife threw out because the seat was beyond repair; but someone had managed to repair it, and the trousers looked almost new, though not so new you weren’t fond of them. My shirts held out their arms to me, and why not, as they’d never been pampered like this in their lives before – all in ranks on velvet-covered hangers. There were shoes whose deaths I’d regretted; socks now deholed again; ties I’d seen in shop windows. It wasn’t a collection of clothes you’d envy, but that wasn’t the point. I was reassured. I would be myself again. I would be more than myself.

By the side of the bed was a tasselled bell-pull I hadn’t previously noticed. I tugged it, then felt a bit embarrassed, and climbed under the sheets again. When the nurse-stewardess came in, I slapped my stomach and said, ‘You know, I could eat that all over again.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ she replied. ‘I was half expecting you to say so.’

I didn’t get up all day. I had breakfast for breakfast, breakfast for lunch, and breakfast for dinner. It seemed like a good system. I would worry about lunch tomorrow. Or rather, I wouldn’t worry about lunch tomorrow. I wouldn’t worry about anything tomorrow. Between my breakfast-lunch and my breakfast-dinner (I was really beginning to appreciate that strainer system – you can carry on eating a croissant with your free hand while you pour) I had a long sleep. Then I took a shower. I could have had a bath, but I seem to have spent decades in the bath, so instead I took a shower. I found a quilted dressing-gown with my initials in gilt cord on the breast pocket. It fitted well, but I thought those initials were farting higher than my arse-hole. I hadn’t come here to swank around like a film star. As I was staring at these golden squiggles, they disappeared from before my eyes. I blinked and they were gone. The dressing-gown felt more comfortable with just a normal pocket.

The next day I woke up – and had another breakfast. It was as good as the previous three. Clearly the problem of breakfast had now been solved.

When Brigitta came to clear the tray, she murmured, ‘Shopping?’

Of course.’ It was exactly what had been on my mind.

‘Do you want to go shopping or stay shopping?’

‘Go shopping,’ I said, not really understanding the difference.

‘Sure.’

My wife’s brother once came back from ten days in Florida and said, ‘When I die, I don’t want to go to Heaven, I want to go shopping in America.’ That second morning I began to understand what he meant.

When we got to the supermarket Brigitta asked me if I wanted to walk or drive. I said let’s drive, that sounds fun – a reply which she seemed to expect. On reflection, some parts of her job must be quite boring – I mean, we probably all react in much the same way, don’t we? Anyway, we drove. The shopping-carts are motorized wire-mesh trolleys that whizz around like dodgems, except that they never crash into one another because of some electric-eye device. Just when you think you’re going to have a prang, you find yourself swerving round the oncoming cart. It’s fun, that, trying to crash.

The system’s easily mastered. You have a plastic card which you push into a slot next to the goods you want to buy, then punch in the quantity you want. After a second or two, your card is returned. Then the stuff is automatically delivered and credited.

I had a good time in my wire cart. I remember when I used to go shopping in the old days, the previous days, I’d sometimes see small kids sitting inside a trolley as if it were a cage and being pushed round by their parents; and I’d be envious. I wasn’t any more. And boy, did I buy some stuff that morning! I practically cleaned them out of those pink grapefruit. That’s what it felt like, anyway. I bought breakfast, I bought lunch, I bought dinner, I bought mid-morning snacks, afternoon teas, apéritif munchies, midnight feasts. I bought fruit I couldn’t name, vegetables I’d never seen before, strange new cuts of meat from familiar animals, and familiar-looking cuts from animals I’d never eaten before. In the Australian section I found crocodile tail-steak, fillet of water-buffalo, terrine de kangarou. I bought them all. I plundered the gourmet cabinet. Freeze-dried lobster soufflé with cherry-chip topping: how could I resist something like that?

As for the drinks counter … I had no idea so many different means of intoxification had been devised. I’m mainly a beer-and-spirits man myself, but I didn’t want to seem prejudiced so I bought quite a few crates of wine and cocktails as well. The labels on the bottles were very helpful: they gave detailed instructions about how drunk the contents would make you, taking into consideration factors like sex, weight and body-fat.

There was one brand of transparent alcohol with a very scruffy label. It was called Stinko-Paralytiko (made in Yugoslavia) and said on it: ‘This bottle will make you drunker than you’ve ever been before.’ Well, I had to take a case of that home, didn’t I?

It was a good morning’s work. It might have been the best morning’s work there ever was. And don’t look down your nose at me, by the way. You’d have done much the same yourself. I mean, say you didn’t go shopping, what would you have done instead? Met some famous people, had sex, played golf? There aren’t an infinite number of possibilities – that’s one of the points to remember about it all, about this place and that place. And if I went shopping first, well, that’s what people like me would do. I’m not looking down my nose if you’d have met famous people first, or had sex, or played golf. Anyway, I got round to all that in due course. As I say, we’re not so very different.

When we got home I was … not exactly tired – you don’t get tired – just kind of sated. Those shopping carts were fun; I didn’t think I’d ever bother to walk – in fact, come to think of it, I didn’t see anyone walking at the supermarket. Then it was lunchtime, and Brigitta arrived with breakfast. Afterwards, I took a nap. I expected to dream, because I always dream if I go to sleep in the afternoon. I didn’t. I wondered why not.

Brigitta woke me with tea and the biscuits I’d chosen. They were currant biscuits especially designed for people like me. Now I don’t know where you stand on this one, but all my life it’s been a matter of complaint that they don’t put enough currants in the currant biscuits. Obviously you don’t want too many currants in a biscuit, otherwise you’d have just a wodge of currants rather than a biscuit, but I’ve always believed that the proportion of ingredients could be adjusted. Upwards, in favour of the currants, naturally – say, to about fifty-fifty. And that’s what these biscuits were called, come to think of it: Fifty-Fifties. I bought three thousand packets of them.

I opened the newspaper which Brigitta had thoughtfully placed on the tray and almost spilt my tea. No, I did spill my tea – only you don’t worry about things like that any more. It was front-page news. Well, it would have been, wouldn’t it? Leicester City had won the FA Cup. No kidding, Leicester City had bloody well won the FA Cup! You wouldn’t have believed it, would you? Well, maybe you would, if you didn’t know anything about football. But I know a thing or two about football, and I’ve supported Leicester City all my life, and I wouldn’t have believed it, that’s the point. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not running my team down. They’re a good team, a very good team sometimes, yet they never seem to win the big ones. Second Division champions, as many times as you like to count, oh yes, but they’ve never won the First Division. Runners-up, once, sure, no problem. And as for the Cup … it’s a fact, an undeniable fact that in all the time I’ve supported Leicester City (and for all the time before that, too), they’ve never won the FA Cup. They’ve had a very good post-war record in reaching the Final – and just as good a one at not capturing the trophy. 1949, 1961, 1963, 1969, those are the black years, and one or two of those defeats were in my opinion particularly unlucky, indeed I’d single out … OK, I can see you’re not that interested in football. It doesn’t matter, as long as you grasp the central fact that Leicester City had never won anything but peanuts before and now they had secured the FA Cup for the first time in the club’s history. The match was a real thriller, too, according to the newspaper: City won 5-4 in extra time after coming from behind on no fewer than four occasions. What a performance! What a blend of skill and sheer character! I was proud of the lads. Brigitta would get me the video tomorrow, I was sure she could. In the meantime, I took a little champagne with the breakfast I had for dinner.

The newspapers were great. In a way, it’s the newspapers I remember best. Leicester City won the FA Cup, as I may have mentioned. They found a cure for cancer. My party won the General Election every single time until everyone saw its ideas were right and most of the opposition came over and joined us. Little old ladies got rich on the pools every week. Sex offenders repented and were released back into society and led blameless lives. Airline pilots learned how to save planes from mid-air collisions. Everyone got rid of nuclear weapons. The England manager chose the whole Leicester City team en bloc to represent England in the World Cup and they came back with the Jules Rimet trophy (memorably beating Brazil 4-1 in the Final). When you read the paper, the newsprint didn’t come off on your hands, and the stories didn’t come off on your mind. Children were innocent creatures once more; men and women were nice to one another; nobody’s teeth had to be filled; and women’s tights never laddered.

What else did I do that first week? As I said, I played golf and had sex and met famous people and didn’t feel bad once. Let me start with the golf. Now, I’ve never been much good at the game, but I used to enjoy hacking round a municipal course where the grass is like coconut matting and no-one bothers to replace their divots because there are so many holes in the fairway you can’t work out where your divot has come from anyway. Still, I’d seen most of the famous courses on television and I was curious to play – well, the golf of my dreams. And as soon as I felt the contact my driver made on that first tee and watched the ball howling off a couple of hundred yards, I knew I was in seventh heaven. My clubs seemed perfectly weighted to the touch; the fairways had a lush springiness and held the ball up for you like a waiter with a drinks tray; and my caddy (I’d never had a caddy before, but he treated me like Arnold Palmer) was full of useful advice, never pushy. The course seemed to have everything – streams and lakes and antique bridges, bits of seaside links like in Scotland, patches of flowering dogwood and azalea from Augusta, beechwood, pine, bracken and gorse. It was a difficult course, but one that gave you chances. I went round that sunny morning in 67, which was five under par, and twenty shots better than I’d ever done on the municipal course.

I was so pleased with my round that when I got back I asked Brigitta if she’d have sex with me. She said of course she’d love to, and found me very attractive, and though she’d only seen the top half she was pretty sure the rest would be in good working order too; there were a few slight problems like she was deeply in love with someone else, and her conditions of work stated that employees were fired for having sexual relations with new arrivals, and she had a slight heart condition which meant that any extra strain could be dangerous, but if I’d give her a couple of minutes she’d slip off and get into some sexy underwear right away. Well, I debated with myself for a while about the rights and wrongs of what I’d been proposing, and when she came back, all perfume and cleavage, I told her that on balance I thought we probably shouldn’t go ahead. She was pretty disappointed and sat down opposite me and crossed her legs which was a pretty sight I can tell you, but I was adamant. It was only later – the next morning, in fact – that I realized she had been turning me down. I’d never been turned down in such a nice way before. They even make the bad things good here.

I had a magnum of champagne with my sturgeon and chips that night (you don’t get hangovers here, either), and was slipping off to sleep with the memory of that crafty back-spin I’d achieved with my wedge at the sixteenth to hold the ball on the upper level of that two-tier green, when I felt the covers of the bed being lifted. At first I thought it was Brigitta and felt a bit bad what with her heart condition and losing her job and being in love with someone else, but when I put my arm around her and whispered ‘Brigitta?’ a voice whispered back, ‘No, is not Brigitta’ and the accent was different, all husky and foreign, and then other things made me realize it was not Brigitta, attractive lady in many ways though Brigitta was. What happened next – and by ‘next’ I do not imply a brief period of time – is, well, hard to describe. The best I can do is say that in the morning I had gone round in 67, which was five under par and twenty shots ahead of my previous best, and what followed that night was a comparable achievement. I am you understand reluctant to criticize my dear wife in this department; it’s just that after some years, you know, and the kids, and being tired, well, you can’t help dragging one another down. It’s still nice, but you sort of do what’s necessary, don’t you? What I hadn’t realized was that if a couple can drag one another down, another couple can drag one another up. Wow! I didn’t know I could! I didn’t know anyone could! Each of us seemed to know instinctively what the other one wanted. I’d never really come across that before. Not, you understand, that I wish to sound as if I’m criticizing my dear wife.

I expected to wake up feeling tired, but again it was more that sense of being pleasantly full, like after the shopping. Had I dreamt what had happened? No: there were two long red hairs on my pillow to confirm the reality. Their colour also proved that my visitor had definitely not been Brigitta.

‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked with a bit of a cheeky smile as she brought my breakfast.

‘It was altogether a good day,’ I replied, perhaps a bit pompously, because I sort of guessed she knew. ‘Except,’ I added quickly, ‘for hearing about your heart condition. I’m really sorry about that.’

‘Oh, I’ll muddle through,’ she said. ‘The engine’s good for another few thousand years.’

We went shopping (I wasn’t yet so lazy I wanted to stay shopping), I read the newspaper, had lunch, played golf, tried to catch up on some reading with one of those Dickens videos, had sturgeon and chips, turned out the light and not long afterwards had sex. It was a good way to spend the day, almost perfect, it seemed to me, and I’d gone round in 67 again. If only I hadn’t driven into the dogwoods on the eighteenth – I think I was just too pumped up – I could have marked a 66, or even a 65, on my card.

And so life continued, as the saying goes. For months, certainly – maybe longer; after a while you stop looking at the date on the newspaper. I realized it had been the right decision not to have sex with Brigitta. We became good friends.

‘What happens,’ I asked her one day, ‘when my wife arrives?’ My dear wife, I should explain, was not with me at the time.

‘I thought you might be worrying about that.’

‘Oh, I’m not worrying about that,’ I said, referring to my nightly visitor, because the whole thing was a bit like being a businessman on a foreign trip, I suppose, wasn’t it? ‘I meant, sort of generally.’

‘There isn’t any generally. It’s up to you. And her.’

‘Will she mind?’ I asked, this time referring more definitely to my visitor.

‘Will she know?’

‘I think there are going to be problems,’ I said, once again talking more generally.

‘This is where problems are solved,’ she replied.

‘If you say so.’ I was beginning to be convinced that it might all turn out as I hoped.

For instance, I’d always had this dream. Well, I don’t mean dream exactly, I mean something I wanted a lot. A dream of being judged. No, that doesn’t sound right, it sounds like I wanted to have my head chopped off by a guillotine or be whipped or something. Not like that. No, I wanted to be judged, do you see? It’s what we all want, isn’t it? I wanted, oh, some kind of summing-up, I wanted my life looked at. We don’t get that, not unless we appear in court or are given the once-over by a psychiatrist, neither of which had come my way and I wasn’t exactly disappointed, seeing as I wasn’t a criminal or a nutter. No, I’m a normal person, and I just wanted what a lot of normal people want. I wanted my life looked at. Do you see?

I began to explain this one day to my friend Brigitta, not being sure I could put it any better than the above, but she immediately understood. She said it was a very popular request, it wouldn’t be hard to fix. So a couple of days later I went along. I asked her to come with me for moral support, and she agreed.

It was just what I’d expected at first. There was a fancy old building with columns and lots of words in Latin or Greek or something carved along the top, and flunkeys in uniform, which made me glad I’d insisted on a new suit for the occasion. Inside, there was a huge staircase, one of those that divides in two and does a big circle in opposite directions and then meets itself again at the top. There was marble everywhere and freshly polished brass and great stretches of mahogany that you knew would never get woodworm.

It wasn’t a huge room, but that didn’t matter. More to the point, it had the right sort of feel, formal but not too off-putting. It was almost cosy, with bits of old velvet looking rather tatty, except that serious things happened here. And he was a nice old gent, the one who did me. A bit like my dad – no, more like an uncle, I’d say. Sort of friendly eyes, looked you straight in the face; and you could tell he stood no nonsense. He’d read all my papers, he said. And there they were, at his elbow, the history of my life, everything I’d done and thought and said and felt, the whole bloody caboodle, the good bits and the bad. It made quite a pile, as you’d imagine. I wasn’t sure I was allowed to address him but anyway I did. I said you’re a quick reader and no mistake. He said he’d had a lot of training and we had a bit of a laugh at that. Then he took a squint at his watch – no, he did it quite politely – and asked me if I wanted my verdict. I found myself squaring my shoulders and putting my hands into fists at my side with the thumbs down the trouser seams. Then I nodded and said ‘Yes, sir,’ and felt a bit nervous I don’t mind telling you.

He said I was OK. No, I’m not kidding, that’s exactly what he said:’ ‘You’re OK.’ I sort of waited for him to go on but he dropped his eyes and I could see his hand moving to the top document on another file. Then he looked up, gave a little smile and said, ‘No, really, you’re OK.’ I nodded again, and this time he really was going back to his work so I turned and left. When we got out I confessed to Brigitta I’d been a bit disappointed, and she said most people were but I wasn’t to take it as any reflection on me, so I didn’t.

It was about this time that I took to meeting famous people. At first I was a bit shy and only asked for film stars and sportsmen I admired. I met Steve McQueen, for instance, and Judy Garland; John Wayne, Maureen O’Sullivan, Humphrey Bogart, Gene Tierney (I always had this thing about Gene Tierney) and Bing Crosby. I met Duncan Edwards and the rest of the Man Utd players from the Munich air-crash. I met quite a few Leicester City lads from the early days, most of whose names would probably be unfamiliar to you.

After a while I realized I could meet anyone I liked. I met John F. Kennedy and Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, President Eisenhower, Pope John XXIII, Winston Churchill, Rommel, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Roosevelt, General de Gaulle, Lindbergh, Shakespeare, Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, Karl Marx, John Lennon and Queen Victoria. Most of them were very nice, on the whole, sort of natural, not at all grand or condescending. They were just like real people. I asked to meet Jesus Christ but they said they weren’t sure about that so I didn’t push it. I met Noah, but not surprisingly there was a bit of a language problem. Some people I just wanted to look at. Hitler, for instance, now there’s a man I wouldn’t shake the hand of, but they arranged that I could hide behind some bushes while he just walked past, in his nasty uniform, large as life.

Guess what happened next? I started worrying. I worried about the most ridiculous things. Like my health, for instance. Isn’t that crazy? Maybe it was something to do with Brigitta telling me about her heart condition, but I suddenly began to imagine things going wrong with me. Who’d have credited it? I came over all faddy and diet-conscious; I got a rowing machine and an exercise bicycle, I worked out with weights; I kept off salt and sugar, animal fats and cream cakes; I even cut down my intake of Fifty-Fifties to half a packet a day. I also had spells of worrying about my hairline, my supermarket driving (were the trolleys that safe?), my sexual performance and my bank balance. Why was I worrying about my bank balance when I didn’t even have a bank? I imagined my card not working at the supermarket, I felt guilty at the amount of credit I seemed to be given. What had I done to deserve it?

Most of the time, of course, I was fine, what with the shopping, the golf, the sex and the meeting famous people. But every so often I’d think, what if I can’t make it round the 18 holes? What if I can’t really afford my Fifty-Fifties? Finally, I confessed these thoughts to Brigitta. She thought it time I was passed on to other hands. Brigitta’s work was done, she indicated. I felt sad, and asked what I could buy her to show my gratitude. She said she had everything she needed. I tried writing a poem, because Brigitta rhymes with sweeter, but after that I could only find neater and eat her, so I sort of gave up, and in any case I thought she’d probably been given poems like that before.

Margaret was to look after me next. She looked more serious than Brigitta, all smart suits and not a hair out of place – the sort of person who’s a finalist in those Businesswomen of the Year competitions. I was a bit scared of her – I certainly couldn’t imagine myself suggesting sex like I did to Brigitta – and I half expected her to disapprove of the way of life I’d been leading. But she didn’t, of course. No, she just said that she assumed I was pretty familiar by now with the amenities, and that she would be there if I needed more than mere practical assistance.

‘Tell me something,’ I asked her on our first meeting. ‘It’s silly to be worrying about my health, isn’t it?’

‘Quite unnecessary.’

‘And it’s silly to worry about money?’

‘Quite unnecessary,’ she replied.

Something in her tone implied that if I cared to look, I could probably find things that were worth worrying about; I didn’t pursue this. I had plenty of time ahead of me. Time was something I would never be short of.

Now, I’m probably not the quickest thinker in the world, and in my previous life I tended to just get on with the things I had to do, or wanted to do, and not brood too much about them. That’s normal, isn’t it? But give anyone enough time and they’ll get somewhere with their thoughts and start asking a few of the bigger questions. For instance, who actually ran this place, and why had I seen so little of them? I’d assumed there might be a sort of entrance examination, or perhaps continual assessment; yet apart from that frankly rather disappointing bit of judging by the old codger who said I was OK, I hadn’t been bothered. They let me bunk off every day and improve my golf. Was I allowed to take everything for granted? Did they expect something from me?

Then there was that Hitler business. You waited behind a bush and he strolled past, a stocky figure in a nasty uniform with a false smile on his face. Fair enough, I’d seen him now, and my curiosity was satisfied, but, well, I had to ask myself, what was he doing here in the first place? Did he order breakfast like everybody else? I’d already observed that he was allowed to wear his own clothes. Did this mean he could also play golf and have sex if he wanted to? How did this thing operate?

Then there was me worrying about my health and money and the supermarket driving. I wasn’t worrying about them in themselves any more, I was worrying about the fact that I’d been worrying. What was all that about? Was it more than a routine adjustment problem as Brigitta had suggested?

I think it was the golf that finally made me turn to Margaret for some explanations. There was no doubt about it, over the months and years I played that lovely, lush course with its little tricks and temptations (how many times I put the ball in the water at the short eleventh!), my game improved no end. I said as much one day to Severiano, my regular caddy: ‘My game has improved no end.’ He agreed, and it was not until later, between dinner and sex, that I began to reflect on what I’d said. I had opened up on the course with a 67, and gradually my score was coming down. A while ago I was shooting a regular 59, and now, under cloudless skies, I was inching down to the low 50s. I could drive 350 yards without trouble, my pitching was transformed, my putts rattled into the hole as if drawn by a magnet. I could see my target score coming down through the 40s, then – a key psychological moment this – breaking the barrier of 36, that’s to say two strokes a hole average, then coming down through the 20s. My game has improved no end, I thought, and repeated the words no end to myself. But that’s, of course, exactly what it couldn’t do: there had to be an end to my improvement. One day I would play a round of golf in 18 shots, I’d buy Severiano a couple of drinks, celebrate later with sturgeon and chips and sex – and then what? Had anyone, even here, ever played a golf course in 17 shots?

Margaret didn’t answer a tasselled bell-pull like the blonde Brigitta; in fact, you had to apply by videophone for an interview.

‘I’m worried about the golf,’ I began.

‘That’s not really my speciality.’

‘No. You see, when I first arrived I shot a 67. Now I’m down to the low 50s.’

‘That doesn’t sound like a problem.’

‘And I’m going to go on getting better.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘And then one day I’ll finally do the course in 18 shots.’

‘Your ambition is admirable.’ She sounded as if she was making fun of me.

‘But then what do I do?’

She paused. ‘Try going round every time in 18 shots?’

‘It doesn’t work like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘It just doesn’t.’

‘I’m sure there are many other courses …’

‘Same problem,’ I said, interrupting her, a bit rudely I suppose.

‘Well, you could switch to another sport, couldn’t you? Then come back to golf when you’re tired of the other one?’

‘But the problem’s the same. I’d have done the course in 18 shots. Golf would be used up.’

‘There are lots of other sports.’

‘They’d get used up too.’

‘What do you have for breakfast every morning?’ I’m sure she knew the answer already from the way she nodded when I told her. ‘You see. You have the same every morning. You don’t get tired of breakfast.’

‘No.’

‘Well, think about golf as you do about breakfast. Perhaps you’ll never get tired of going round in 18 shots.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said dubiously. ‘It sounds to me as if you haven’t ever played golf. And anyway, that’s another thing.’

‘What is?’

‘The getting tired. You don’t get tired here.’

‘Is that a complaint?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Tiredness can be arranged.’

‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘But I bet it’d be a sort of pleasant tiredness. Not one of those knackering tirednesses which just make you want to die.’

‘Don’t you think you’re being perverse?’ She was crisp, almost impatient. ‘What did you want? What did you hope for?’

I nodded to myself, and we called it a day. My life continued. That was another phrase that made me grin a bit. My life continued, and my golf improved no end. I did all sorts of other things:

– I went on several cruises;

– I learned canoeing, mountaineering, ballooning;

– I got into all sorts of danger and escaped;

– I explored the jungle;

– I watched a court case (didn’t agree with the verdict);

– I tried being a painter (not as bad as I thought!) and a surgeon;

– I fell in love, of course, lots of times;

– I pretended I was the last person on earth (and the first).

None of this meant that I stopped doing what I’d always done since I got here. I had sex with an increasing number of women, sometimes simultaneously; I ate rarer and stranger foods; I met famous people all the way to the edges of my memory. For instance, I met every footballer there ever was. I started with the famous ones, then the ones I admired but weren’t particularly famous, then the average ones, then the ones whose names I remembered without remembering what they looked like or played like; finally I asked for the only ones I hadn’t met, the nasty, boring, violent players that I didn’t admire at all. I didn’t enjoy meeting them – they were just as nasty, boring and violent off the pitch as on – but I didn’t want to run out of footballers. Then I ran out of footballers. I asked to see Margaret again.

‘I’ve met all the footballers,’ I said.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about football, either.’

‘And I don’t have any dreams,’ I added, in a tone of complaint.

‘What would they be for,’ she replied. ‘What would they be for?’

I sensed that in a way she was testing me, seeing how serious I was. Did it all add up to more than a mere adjustment problem?

‘I think I’m owed an explanation,’ I announced – a little pompously, I have to admit.

‘Ask anything you like.’ She settled back in her office chair.

‘Look, I want to get things straight.’

‘An admirable ambition.’ She talked a bit posh, like that.

I thought I’d better start at the beginning. ‘Look, this is Heaven, isn’t it?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Well, what about Sundays?’

‘I don’t follow you.’

On Sundays,’ I said, ‘as far as I can work out, because I don’t follow the days too closely any more, I play golf, go shopping, eat dinner, have sex and don’t feel bad.’

‘Isn’t that … perfect?’

‘I don’t want to sound ungrateful,’ I said cautiously, ‘but where’s God?’

‘God. Do you want God? Is that what you want?’

‘Is it a question of what I want?’

‘That’s exactly what it’s a question of. Do you want God?’

‘I suppose I thought it wasn’t that way round. I suppose I thought either there would be one or there wouldn’t be one. I’d find out what the case was. I didn’t think it depended on me in any way.’

‘Of course it does.’

‘Oh.’

‘Heaven is democratic these days,’ she said. Then added, ‘Or at least, it is if you want it to be.’

‘What do you mean, democratic?’

‘We don’t impose Heaven on people any more,’ she said. ‘We listen to their needs. If they want it, they can have it; if not, not. And then of course they get the sort of Heaven they want.’

‘And what sort do they want on the whole?’

‘Well, they want a continuation of life, that’s what we find. But … better, needless to say.’

‘Sex, golf, shopping, dinner, meeting famous people and not feeling bad?’ I asked, a bit defensively.

‘It varies. But if I were being honest, I’d say that it doesn’t vary all that much.’

‘Not like the old days.’

‘Ah, the old days.’ She smiled. ‘That was before my time, of course, but yes, dreams of Heaven used to be a lot more ambitious.’

‘And Hell?’ I asked.

‘What about it?’

‘Is there Hell?’

‘Oh no,’ she replied. ‘That was just necessary propaganda.’

‘I was wondering, you see. Because I met Hitler.’

‘Lots of people do. He’s a sort of … tourist site, really. What did you make of him?’

‘Oh, I didn’t meet him,’ I said firmly. ‘He’s a man I wouldn’t shake the hand of. I watched him go by from behind the bushes.’

‘Ah, yes. Quite a lot of people prefer to do it that way.’

‘So I thought, if he’s here, there can’t be Hell.’

‘A reasonable deduction.’

‘Just out of interest,’ I said, ‘what does he do all day?’ I imagined him going to the 1936 Berlin Olympics every afternoon, watching the Germans win everything while Jesse Owens fell over, then back for some sauerkraut, Wagner and a romp with a busty blonde of pure Aryan blood.

‘I’m afraid we do respect people’s confidentiality.’

‘Naturally.’ That was right. I wouldn’t want everyone knowing what I got up to, come to think of it.

‘So there isn’t any Hell?’

‘Well, there’s something we call Hell. But it’s more like a theme park. You know, skeletons popping out and frightening you, branches in your face, stink bombs, that sort of thing. Just to give you a good scare.’

‘A good scare,’ I remarked, ‘as opposed to a bad scare?’

‘Exactly. We find that’s all people want nowadays.’

‘Do you know about Heaven in the old days?’

‘What, Old Heaven? Yes, we know about Old Heaven. It’s in the records.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘Oh, it sort of closed down. People didn’t want it any more. People didn’t need it any more.’

‘But I knew a few people who went to church, had their babies christened, didn’t use rude words. What about them?’

‘Oh, we get those,’ she said. ‘They’re catered for. They pray and give thanks rather as you play golf and have sex. They seem to enjoy themselves, to have got what they wanted. We’ve built them some very nice churches.’

‘Does God exist for them?’ I asked.

‘Oh, surely.’

‘But not for me?’

‘It doesn’t seem so. Unless you want to change your requirements of Heaven. I can’t deal with that myself. I could refer you.’

‘I’ve probably got enough to think about for the moment.’

‘Fine. Well, until the next time.’

I slept badly that night. My mind wasn’t on the sex, even though they all did their very best. Was it indigestion? Had I bolted my sturgeon? There I was, worrying about my health again.

The next morning I shot a 67 on the golf course. My caddy Severiano reacted as if it was the best round he’d seen me play, as if he didn’t know I could do 20 shots better. Afterwards, I asked for certain directions, and drove towards the only visible patch of bad weather. As I’d expected, Hell was a great disappointment: the thunderstorm in the car-park was probably the best bit. There were out-of-work actors prodding other out-of-work actors with long forks, pushing them into vats labelled ‘Boiling Oil’. Phoney animals with strap-on plastic beaks pecked at foam-rubber corpses. I saw Hitler riding on the Ghost Train with his arm round a Mädchen with pigtails. There were bats and creaking coffin lids and a smell of rotting floorboards. Is that what people wanted?

Tell me about Old Heaven,’ I said to Margaret the following week.

‘It was much like your accounts of it. I mean, that’s the principle of Heaven, that you get what you want, what you expect. I know some people imagine it’s different, that you get what you deserve, but that’s never been the case. We have to disabuse them.’

‘Are they annoyed?’

‘Mostly not. People prefer to get what they want rather than what they deserve. Though some of them did get a little irritated that others weren’t sufficiently maltreated. Part of their expectation of Heaven seemed to be that other people would go to Hell. Not very Christian.’

‘And were they … disembodied? Was it all spirit life and so on?’

‘Yes indeed. That’s what they wanted. Or at any rate, in certain epochs. There has been a lot of fluctuation over the centuries about decorporealization. At the moment, for instance, there’s quite an emphasis on retaining your own body and your own personality. This may just prove a phase, like any other.’

‘What are you smiling for?’ I asked. I was rather surprised. I thought Margaret was there just to give information, like Brigitta. Yet she obviously had her own opinions, and didn’t mind telling you them.

‘Only because it sometimes seems odd how tenaciously people want to stick with their own bodies. Of course, they occasionally ask for minor surgery. But it’s as if, say, a different nose or a tuck in the cheek or a handful of silicone is all that stands between them and their perfect idea of themselves.’

‘What happened to Old Heaven?’

‘Oh, it survived for a while, after the new Heavens were built. But there was increasingly little call for it. People seemed keener on the new Heavens. It wasn’t all that surprising. We take the long view here.’

‘What happened to the Old Heaveners?’

Margaret shrugged, rather complacently, like some corporate planner whose predictions had been borne out to the tiniest decimal point. ‘They died off.’

‘Just like that? You mean, you closed down their Heaven and so they died off?’

‘No, not at all, on the contrary. That’s not how it works. Constitutionally, there would have been an Old Heaven for as long as the Old Heaveners wanted it.’

‘Are there any Old Heaveners around?’

‘I think there are a few left.’

‘Can I meet one?’

‘They don’t take visits, I’m afraid. They used to. But the New Heaveners tended to behave as if they were at a freak-show, kept pointing and asking silly questions. So the Old Heaveners declined to meet them any more. They gave up speaking to anyone but other Old Heaveners. Then they began to die off. Now there aren’t many left. We have them tagged, of course.’

‘Are they disembodied?’

‘Some of them are, some of them aren’t. It depends on the sect. Of course the ones that are disembodied don’t have much trouble avoiding the New Heaveners.’

Well, that made sense. In fact, it all made sense except for the main thing. ‘And what do you mean, the others died off?’

‘Everyone has the option to die off if they want to.’

‘I never knew that.’

‘No. There are bound to be a few surprises. Did you really want to be able to predict it all?’

‘And how do they die? Do they kill themselves? Do you kill them?’

Margaret looked a bit shocked at the crassness of my idea. ‘Goodness, no. As I said, it’s democratic nowadays. If you want to die off, you do. You just have to want to for long enough and that’s it, it happens. Death isn’t a matter of hazard or gloomy inevitability, the way it is the first time round. We’ve got free will sorted out here, as you may have noticed.’

I wasn’t sure I was taking all this in. I’d have to go away and think about it. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘these problems I’ve been having with the golf and the worrying. Do other people react like that?’

‘Oh yes. We often get people asking for bad weather, for instance, or for something to go wrong. They miss things going wrong. Some of them ask for pain.’

‘For pain?’

‘Certainly. Well, you were complaining the other day about not feeling so tired that – as I think you put it – you just want to die. I thought that was an interesting phrase. People ask for pain, it’s not so extraordinary. We’ve had them requesting operations, as well. I mean, not just cosmetic ones, real ones.’

‘Do they get them?’

‘Only if they really insist. We try to suggest that wanting an operation is really a sign of something else. Normally they agree with us.’

‘And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’

She looked at me levelly, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. Over many thousands of years, calculated by old time, of course. But yes, everyone takes the option, sooner or later.’

‘So it’s just like the first time round? You always die in the end?’

‘Yes, except don’t forget the quality of life here is much better. People die when they decide they’ve had enough, not before. The second time round it’s altogether more satisfying because it’s willed.’ She paused, then added, ‘As I say, we cater for what people want.’

I hadn’t been blaming her. I’m not that sort. I just wanted to find out how the system worked. ‘So … even people, religious people, who come here to worship God throughout eternity … they end up throwing in the towel after a few years, hundred years, thousand years?’

‘Certainly. As I said, there are still a few Old Heaveners around, but their numbers are diminishing all the time.’

‘And who asks for death soonest?’

‘I think ask is the wrong word. It’s something you want. There aren’t any mistakes here. If you want it enough, you die, that’s always been the ruling principle.’

‘So?’

‘So. Well, I’m afraid – to answer your question – that the people who ask for death earliest are a bit like you. People who want an eternity of sex, beer, drugs, fast cars – that sort of thing. They can’t believe their good luck at first, and then, a few hundred years later, they can’t believe their bad luck. That’s the sort of people they are, they realize. They’re stuck with being themselves. Millennium after millennium of being themselves. They tend to die off soonest.’

‘I never take drugs,’ I said firmly. I was rather miffed. ‘And I’ve only got seven cars. That’s not very many around here. And I don’t even drive them fast.’

‘No, of course not. I was just thinking in general categories of gratification, you understand.’

‘And who lasts longest?’

‘Well, some of those Old Heaveners were fairly tenacious customers. Worship kept them going for ages and ages. Nowadays … lawyers last quite well. They love going over their old cases, and then going over everybody else’s. That can take for ever. Metaphorically speaking,’ she added quickly. ‘And scholarly people, they tend to last as long as anyone. They like sitting around reading all the books there are. And then they love arguing about them. Some of those arguments’ – she cast an eye to the heavens – ‘go on for millennium after millennium. It just seems to keep them young, for some reason, arguing about books.’

‘What about the people who write the books?’

‘Oh, they don’t last half as long as the people who argue about them. It’s the same with painters and composers. They somehow know when they’ve done their best work, and then they sort of fade away.’

I thought I should be feeling depressed, but I wasn’t. ‘Shouldn’t I be feeling depressed?’

‘Of course not. You’re here to enjoy yourself. You’ve got what you wanted.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. Maybe I can’t get used to the idea that at some point I’ll want to die.’

‘Give it time,’ she said, brisk but friendly. ‘Give it time.’

‘By the way, one last question.’ I could see her fiddling with her pencils, straightening them into a row. ‘Who exactly are you?’

‘Us? Oh, we’re remarkably like you. We could be you, in fact. Perhaps we are you.’

‘I’ll come back again if I may,’ I said.

For the next few centuries – it may have been longer, I stopped counting in old time – I worked seriously on my golf. After a while I was going round in 18 shots every time and my caddy’s astonishment became routine. I gave up golf and took up tennis. Pretty soon I’d beaten all the greats from the Hall of Fame on shale, clay, grass, wood, concrete, carpet – any surface they chose. I gave up tennis. I played for Leicester City in the Cup Final and came away with a winner’s medal (my third goal, a power header from twelve yards out, clinched the match). I flattened Rocky Marciano in the fourth round at Madison Square Garden (and I carried him a bit the last round or two), got the marathon record down to 28 minutes, won the world darts; my innings of 750 runs in the one-day international against Australia at Lords won’t be surpassed for some time. After a while, Olympic gold medals began to feel like small change. I gave up sport.

I went shopping seriously. I ate more creatures than had ever sailed on Noah’s Ark. I drank every beer in the world and then some, became a wine connoisseur and despatched the finest vintages ever harvested; they ran out too soon. I met loads of famous people. I had sex with an increasing variety of partners in an increasing variety of ways, but there are only so many partners and so many ways. Don’t get me wrong, incidentally: I’m not complaining. I enjoyed every bloody minute of it. All I’m saying is, I knew what I was doing while I was doing it. I was looking for a way out.

I tried combining pleasures and started having sex with famous people (no, I won’t tell you who – they asked me to respect their privacy). I even took up reading. I remembered what Margaret said and tried – oh, for a few centuries or so – arguing about books with other people who’d read the same books. But it seemed a pretty arid life, at least compared to life itself, and not one worth prolonging. I even tried joining the people who sang and prayed in church, but that wasn’t really my thing. I only did it because I wanted to cover all the angles before I had what I knew would be my final talk with Margaret. She looked much as she had done several millennia earlier when we’d first met; but then, so did I.

‘I’ve had an idea,’ I said. Well, you’re bound to come up with something after all that time, aren’t you? ‘Listen, if you get what you want in Heaven, then what about wanting to be someone who never gets tired of eternity?’ I sat back, feeling a touch smug. To my surprise she nodded, almost encouragingly.

‘You’re welcome to have a go,’ she said. ‘I could get you the transfer.’

‘But …?’ I asked, knowing that there would be a but.

‘I’ll get you the transfer,’ she repeated. ‘It’s just a formality.’

‘Tell me the but first.’ I didn’t want to sound rude. On the other hand I didn’t want to spend several millennia pissing about if I could be saved the time.

‘People have tried it already,’ Margaret said, in a clearly sympathetic tone, as if she really didn’t want to hurt me.

‘And what’s the problem? What’s the but?’

‘Well, there seems to be a logical difficulty. You can’t become someone else without stopping being who you are. Nobody can bear that. It’s what we find, anyway,’ she added, half implying that I might be the first person to crack this problem. ‘Someone – someone who must have been keen on sports, like you, said that it was changing from being a runner to being a perpetual motion machine. After a while you simply want to run again. Does that make sense?’

I nodded. ‘And everyone who’s tried it has asked for a transfer back?’

‘Yes.’

‘And afterwards they all took the option to die off?’

‘They did. And sooner rather than later. There might still be a few of them around. I could call them in if you want to ask them about it.’

‘I’ll take your word for it. I thought there must be a snag in my idea.’

‘Sorry.’

‘No, please don’t apologize.’ I certainly couldn’t complain about the way I’d been treated. Everyone had been level with me from the start. I took a deep breath. ‘It seems to me,’ I went on, ‘that Heaven’s a very good idea, it’s a perfect idea you could say, but not for us. Not given the way we are.’

‘We don’t like to influence conclusions,’ she said. ‘However, I can certainly see your point of view.’

‘So what’s it all for? Why do we have Heaven? Why do we have these dreams of Heaven?’ She didn’t seem willing to answer, perhaps she was being professional; but I pressed her. ‘Go on, give me some ideas.’

‘Perhaps because you need them,’ she suggested. ‘Because you can’t get by without the dream. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It seems quite normal to me. Though I suppose if you knew about Heaven beforehand, you might not ask for it.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ It had all been very pleasant: the shopping, the golf, the sex, the meeting famous people, the not feeling bad, the not being dead.

‘After a while, getting what you want all the time is very close to not getting what you want all the time.’

The next day, for old times’ sake, I played another round of golf. I wasn’t at all rusty: eighteen holes, eighteen strokes. I hadn’t lost my touch. Then I had breakfast for lunch and breakfast for dinner. I watched my video of Leicester City’s 5-4 victory in the Cup Final, though it wasn’t the same, knowing what happened. I had a cup of hot chocolate with Brigitta, who kindly looked in to see me; later I had sex, though only with one woman. Afterwards, I sighed and rolled over, knowing that the next morning I would begin to make my decision.

I dreamt that I woke up. It’s the oldest dream of all, and I’ve just had it.

-From The History of The World in 10 1/2 Chapters

Categories
Coping strategies Feel Better Intensity Meaning Mystery Overexcitability Poetry Koan Poetry Koan (By Heart) Refuge Revelation Spell of The Sensuous Waste and welter

On Living Intensely (via DH Lawrence’s Song of A Man Who Has Come Through)

A school age D.H. Lawrence (‘Bert’ at home, ‘Herbert’ at school, David for no-one) is sitting one day next to a neighbour’s child. Both of them are looking across the fields and the remnants of Sherwood Forest lying just north of Eastwood, the coal mining town where Bert lives and where his father works in the colliery. 

Turning to his playmate, Bert opens his mouth and these words fall out: “Everywhere is blue and gold.”

There is a pause while the comment blows her mind. “Now you say a line,” he goes.

“Of course I could not,” she admits in an interview many years later. 

Bert is considered something of a loner by the other children, a sickly child, preferring the company of girls to boys (‘Dicky Dicky Denches plays with the Wenches,’ the boys jeer at him). But he finds in language a protective ally: 

“Those years at home, talking to his mother and listening to her, paid off: a schoolmate remembered ruefully how Lawrence started ‘hittin’ back wi’ his tongue an’ he could get at us wheer it hurt’. His brother George remembered ‘that very sharp tongue’ too: ‘it was as our old dad used to say: “to take the skin off your back”.’ Vituperation was a skill Lawrence developed early, to cope with the world.” (Worthen, 2006)

In a very different city, and a different social class, young Sigmund Freud is beginning his work with Josef Breuer on those human animals who experiences life with an at times debilitating intensity. This will  be published a few years later as Studies in Hysteria.

Lawrence’s gimlet-eyed focus would also flower into something intense and hyper-elaborated: a preternatural sensitivity to other human beings and the natural environment, as well as the use of angry, and critical language as a defence mechanism.

Nowadays a psychiatrist might give him, and indeed many creatives, a Borderline Personality Diagnosis, sometimes also referred to as Emotional Intensity Disorder.  But at that fin-de-siecle moment in the history of our species, amplified and exalted emotional intensity would still be categorised as a personality trait, perhaps akin to being very “passionate” about a certain cause (poetry for example), or as a religious narrative, or an imbalance of bodily humours. 

What strikes me when reading John Worthen’s biography, but especially when reading Lawrence himself is Bert’s pedal-to-the-metal ferocity:  the nought-to-sixty acceleration of his writing, and by extension, his inner world.

Intensity: a word that has buried within its origins both a sense of an urgent focal point (Latin intentus an aim, a purpose), but also a desire to extend ourselves and that which we interact with, to become more than just ambulatory meat machines. Intensity as a kind of magnification or elongation of our animal selves, an overreaching of the mundane space that our bodies take up. 

**

Exhibit A: this poem, which I recite to myself on an almost daily basis, revelling in the hurricane-like force of its language and rhythms, but still not entirely sure from which direction to come at it, or where it might be coming at me.  

SONG OF A MAN WHO HAS COME THROUGH

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them

You might decide to stop reading here. Because Lawrence is a marmite writer. You either enjoy and even revel in the ferocious, earnest, salty gusto of David Herbert Lawrence. Or you don’t. If not, you might prefer the cucumber and cream cheese poets of his generation (Lewis, Spender, MacNiece, Frost?) as more palatable existential sandwiches. You might even decide to politely look away when Bert starts huffing and puffing. Most poetry critics in this century now do, responding to Lawrence’s verse like a parent to a child having a temper tantrum: “You’ll need more than hot air to move that, or me, Bert.” If instead you continue reading, it’s probably because the malty, yeasty, umami smear of this poem speaks to your own encounter with the world. It certainly does mine.

 **

I am sometimes surprised by the poems I choose to learn by heart. I have come to realise that they often fall into the category of work that is not entirely arcane and unknowable, and yet they often hold within them some deep, tantalising enigma, some koan that pulls me into their world in the same way that one is mysteriously attracted to a certain individual, or painting, or song, but not another. There is a mystery to this attraction, and to the attraction we have to certain poems. But also not, for can the attraction often be explained as a form of identification, the poet speaking for us in ways we can’t?  

I think this is very much the case with Lawrence’s “Song of A Man Who Come Through”, which even though I have now recited it hundreds of times, even though it lives within me like the bacteria, archaea, protozoa and fungi that reside within my own body, making up as much as 3% of the entity I refer to as “me”, I still have no clear idea of what it’s really “about”. 

What attracted me to the poem though was I think some kind of personal identification with the blazing pulse of the verse, it’s frenetic excitability. 

“Not I, not I,” it begins, with that most elemental of iambs: da DUM da DUM. I love the fact that on the Wikipedia page explaining iambic pentameter, you can listen to a human heartbeat as an illustration of this deep, embodied affiliation we have to the most common meter in English poetry. 

I equally love the way the almost martial, combative negation of the first four beats disperses into a more open, aerated release following the conjuctive ‘but’: “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!” (da DUM da DUM, dada DUM dada DUM DUM!)

On first hearing those ‘nots’ we might think that Lawrence is setting himself up in opposition to something (being oppositional is very Lawrentian): “Not I for Brexit! Not I for Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Inconclusive-Cocaine-Event Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Turds Johnson (as Stewart Lee memorably full-named Johnson after he connived his way, Richard III-like, into taking on the mantle of Prime Minister). That sort of thing.

Instead, this is an inner battle that Lawrence is exemplifying, perhaps the greatest inner battle we can “fight” as language-making and marking, linguistically-conscious animals. Let’s call this “the battle” that between my-ego/my-self (i.e. that part of me that desires and plots and attempts to manipulate other people and my environment into giving me what I want) versus a more contingent sense of self, here represented by the wind. Wind-carried-self is in the world of this poem everything else (other poems, songs, sunlight, my neighbour’s child wailing on the landing) that “blows through me”, shaping my lived experience and narrative about that experience as it does. But it’s a not-me, or rather not-unless-I-make-it-so (perhaps by learning the poem by heart?). We might call this part of us: the contingent self.  

In buddhist literature, this is sometimes referred to as no-self, or non-self, but my understanding of this is that although we see ourselves as separate, self-determined entities, our experience of the world is inextricably, at every moment of the day, shaped and circumscribed by our environment, as well as our life course up to this point. This is the context in which we live and are “made”: the weather, the words we read or listen to, the people who populate our existence, and a million other factors that are not even a conscious part of our awareness. It’s not necessarily more more complicated than that.

In Robert Hass’s poem, Measure, Hass catches a glimpse of himself, which seems to stand for an almost phenomenological signature of his life, not in the denizens of his environment (a plum tree, sunlight, a mountain, his writing desk), but in “the pulse / that forms these lines”. Similarly, we find Lawrence embodied in the pulse of this poem, and it’s a ferocious embodiment, an intense life-sucking or broadcasting phenomenon, a yearning, an insistent, ecstatic, turbulent, hopeful, alarmed, importunate Lawrentian pulse. 

**

I start reading a feted biography of Lawrence to experience some of that intensity, and there are glimpses of that therein, but of course to really “be inside” DH Lawrence, one needs to read him. You get that intensity in spades as soon as you enter this poem, or read a few pages of his prose. 

To give you a sense of the prose outside that of the novels, let’s turn to Exhibit B, an essay from the vast opus of Lawrentian excitability: “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine”. 

This starts as a piquantly observed and participative portrait of a neighbourhood porcupine, words wedged as is often the case with Lawrence into the pungent, clammy cleft of love-and-hate (“He slithered podgily down again, and waddled away with the same bestial, stupid motion of that white-spiky repulsive spoon-tail….He was repugnant.”). It then transmutes into another deeply conflicted (compassion vs. frustration? care vs. rage?) report of his attempt to remove porcupine quills from the muzzle of a neighbour’s dog, which thereafter hardens into the resolve to chastisingly kill one of those local porcupines, with all the mixed feelings that follow the murder. 

In the hands of any other writer, here the essay might wind to a close. But not for Lawrence. This is only 1/5th of the way into a 6000 word essay. He still has in store for us a wonderful cat-chase-chipmunk tale summation of evolutionary pecking orders (“Life moves in circles of power and of vividness, and each circle of life only maintains its orbit upon the subjection of some lower circle. If the lower cycles of life are not mastered, there can be no higher cycle.”), as well as a kind of metaphysics of vivacity (“The ant is more vividly alive than the pine-tree. We know it, there is no trying to refute it.”) 

And before you know it, he’s taken us into “the fourth dimension, of being” (!) spelt out in five inexorable laws, followed by an ecstatic, extended grappling and grasping through language, much as I am perhaps doing here, often veering off into a kind of literary version of speaking in tongues, where he tries to pull us into the very nucleus of his intense vision. The short, representational or figurative paragraphs early on in the essay extend and amplify into long, flowing shudders and judders of mystical poesis, similar in energy to the above poem. 

We start reading his essay in a place we might recognise as prose, in which meaningful and somewhat measured (for Lawrence) points about the natural world and our response to it are made, but like a rocketship passing swiftly through the lower layers of the stratosphere only to emerge into the cosmos, we are soon blasted along by his fervour into imaginings which all at once slice the tops of our heads off and plunge us into the very yolk of our animate and animal existence, the very existential glue that binds us to every other life form. 

We are now in that Lawrentian realm of blood-consciousness, which is to say ““an organic, bodily intentionality that operates outside the realm of intellect, cognition, or mental consciousness and outside of the self-reflective, self-conscious object”. 

Ulrike Maud in her essay on Lawrence and Merleau Ponty, shows us how Lawrence’s notion of the unconscious was different to Freud’s in being a bodily modality rather than an attribute of the mind. And perhaps when one lives in a body that from a very young age functions only intermittently, the life of the mind will invariably take anchor in the flesh rather than in the purely abstract realm of language. Although for Lawrence I think it pendulates between the two, as it does for most of us.

“My great religion is a belief in the blood,” he writes in a letter to Ernest Collings, “the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.” 

Song of A Man Who Has Come Through is a clarion call for this kind of embodied thinking. All the sensations, all the content of the poem (the chisel-like winds of change, the rock-splitting and bubbling-up wonder, the knocking of anxiety), are experienced in the body, or rather the natural-world in which the body resonates as just one element, even though it is the mind chronicling the phenomena of consciousness. 

“Before thought takes place, before the brain is awake in the small infant, the body is awake and alive, and in the body the great nerve centres are active, active both in knowing and in asserting. This knowledge is not mental, it is what we may call first-consciousness. Now our first consciousness is seated, not in the brain, but in the great nerve centres of the breast and the bowels, the cardiac plexus and the solar plexus. Here life first seethes into active impulse and consciousness, the mental understanding comes later.” 

Although this was written in a 1919 essay on Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur in The English Review, it might happily sit in a 2019 Neuroscience journal (presented in slightly different language) under the title The biological and psychological basis of neuroticism. For to read the latter, which I do, is to recognise the shared quest between Lawrence and the neuropsychologists or psychoananalysts to understand the embodied, inner chaos of our emotional lives that Lawrence writes about again and again

**

Another word for intensity is overexcitablity, with its associations of children getting carried away with an idea or an emotion, or my canine companion Max with a stick. To say that someone is “intense” is maybe the more mature/adult (?) version of saying that a child is “overexcitable”, or to put it in our current medicalised parenting parlance: ADHD. We see this in a child who can’t sleep the night before Christmas due to overexcitability, or gets carried away by a game to the extent of hurting or frightening other children away. An adult on a dating app responds to another person’s humdrum questions with long, encumbered screeds because s/he is “intense”, and equally scares them away. The “problem” of intensity is as much about behaviour that falls short of socially established norms, behaviour that works in a dramatic frame (films, songs, books) but is sometimes too ornamental for prosaic living. Those who are considered to be attractively intense-but also worryingly or wearily de trop at times- in their responses are often the outliers, falling short of standard narratives of what it means to be or perform “human”. In nature, we often call this supererogatory quality a weed. 

Some weeds, the bindweed that is taking over my garden at present, have incredibly beautiful flowers and foliage, but are just too damn intense. Bindweed wants to write itself into every flowerbed, but I don’t want it everywhere. I sometimes get this feeling when reading Lawrence, also Whitman. Their deftness with language makes them delicious in small quantities, but we soon tire of their intensity.  

When we bring in a century of psychological scrutiny to this state, we find many terms accompanied by capitalised acronyms, most of them denoting the diagnostic equivalent of “Houston, we have a problem” but with no indication of an etiology or prognosis. There’s classic neuroticism for example (N), which morphs mid-century into borderline personality disorder (BPD), and later in a bid to destigmatise the implicit censure of the label Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD), or Emotional Intensity Disorder (EID). 

Even less harsh sounding versions of these terms now exist: Elaine Aron’s Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), and Dabrowski’s “Tragic Gift” of  Overexcitability. But all still boils down to pretty much the same thing: a human organism that feels things (emotions, thoughts, its own perceptions) very very intensely, which at times can almost feel too much for the container of that body-mind to hold. And when it spills out, it is usually too much for others to hold too. 

**

I remember at University sometimes being so excited by the potential of reading and writing that I might not even be able to sit down and focus on actually reading something (anything!) and writing something (anything!). We usually had a week to do all our reading for a particular topic and then submit an essay for the following week’s tutorial. We were very rarely given an essay title. More often than not, it was just: “Next week, Dickens. Go!” I would head off with intense excitement to the library and start checking out primary and secondary sources, my head spinning with possibilities and potential. So many possibilities, so much excitement. It was wearying. No wonder I burnt myself out pretty quickly. And this was in relation to by-and-large positive stimuli. Usually when we pathologise intensity, we focus on negative reactivity which is where most intense people come a cropper, but also become conscious of having a “problem”. But I think it’s important to highlight that intensity in any realm is something of a mixed blessing. 

Excitability and Intensity, like all personality traits, represent a continuum, which is often represented as a normally distributed bell curve. Most people lie somewhere in the middle of this. Lawrence, as do many other writers and artists, would probably fall on the downward slope where intensity can become unworkable at times in how it manifests in our lives. But Intensity (or Neuroticism) is only one of five key traits recognised by psychologists, and understandably, how we “score” on other traits will affect our overall engagement with our environment. Someone who is very intense, but also conscientious and agreeable, may have an easier time fitting into society than someone who is intense but scores low on pro-social traits like Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion. Worthen’s biography shows that Lawrence has enough of these other traits to balance his neuroticism.

**

In Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through, we see Lawrence, as with most people who recognise their intensity as signalling and singling themselves out at as personae non gratae, trying on different modes in an attempt to find a more comfortable or amenable way of existing in the world. These are the if-onlys of the poem, pointing to ways in which the speaker recognises his falling short of socially-established and rewarded norms, and techniques. The vision here is one that wouldn’t be out of place in a modern mindfulness class:

If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world

Children who are deemed problematic due to their intensity and overexcitability are often encouraged or goaded into towing the line through sticks or “prizes” (the naughty step) and carrots (rewards for being “good”). 

There are three “prizes” envisaged in this poem: 

1/ something which is challenging to us gets resolved (the rock splits);
2/ we find transcendent meaning and purpose for our lives (we shall come at the wonder)
3/ we get to experience  immense peace and pleasure (finding the Hesperides).

The Hesperides is a stand-in here for the good life, eudaimonia, or happiness, the Greek version of The Garden of Eden, with similarly tempting apples. Golden apples, guarded by a dragon (Ladon) who doesn’t require any sleep to function. Hesperides is a place, like heaven, like any of our idealised versions of happiness, which lie beyond the reach of us human animals, a place where we dream about the lives we might have lived, or the people we might be, if we were not so frustratingly living as the people we are. These are also spaces where, as the chorus members of Euripides’ Hippolytus tell us, the Blessed live. In “happiness” of course, feeding upon ambrosia. Or as David Byrne memorably sang: “Everyone is trying to get into the bar. The name of the bar is called heaven.” And even though nothing ever happens in heaven, or the hesperides other than one’s favourite band playing one’s favourite song over and over again, this doesn’t seem to dissuade us. 

Heracles was set the task by Eurystheus of stealing some of these apples. We are all, in different ways, trying to steal the apples of happiness. In the Freudian worldview, the golden apples of peace and happiness are only stolen or temporarily savoured in our ordinary human unhappiness via a series of short cuts or “techniques”. But the apples don’t turn us into angels, or our lives into heaven. 

Interestingly, this apple-scrumping task was Heracles’ eleventh labour. It was given to him by Eurystheus in addition to the initial ten as it was deemed he cut corners of the others. Even here, the acquiring of the apples involved a ruse: tricking Atlas into doing the job for him while Heracles held up the heavens for a while.

Attic pottery often shows a happy Heracles sitting in the garden attended by the maidens. Perhaps, befitting myths written by men, the virginal Hesperides share some mythological resonance with Islamic houris, those almond-eyed, but “modest gazing” maidens who await the faithful male follower of Mohammed in heaven as a reward for carrying out their religious duties on earth. Heracles is not shown having sex with the maidens though. Perhaps because, returning to that David Byrne song (but also thinking about our own cultural moment where virtual sex is now available 24/7) the tropes of happiness are more about accessing pleasure than a narrative about transfiguration: 

Heaven is a place
A place where nothing
Nothing ever happens
When this kiss is over
It will start again
It will not be any different
It will be exactly the same
It’s hard to imagine
That nothing at all
Could be so exciting
Could be this much fun.

*

Post-Eysenck we now know that intensity/overexcitability reflects excessive physiological responsiveness (or arousability) of certain brain systems, especially the amygdala, and how it responds to negative or threatening stimuli (that knocking on the door). Again and again, we find in academic papers about emotional reactivity, glimpses of Lawrence, but also of all us neurotics: the exquisite, but at times damning sensitivity of physiological processes (blood consciousness) leading to negative emotion. But equally, and relevant to this poem: information-processing routines (aka mental perceptions) that assign “codes” for threat to certain kinds of triggers, as well as a greater likelihood to experience self-perceptions “characterized by themes of personal inadequacy and insecurity…and social fears such as being criticized or rejected”.

This is all very well and good, but having ever more refined psychosociobiological descriptors for our neurotic states, still leaves us, like Lawrence, exercised by the various “winds” (thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations) that blow through us. Other than drugs to mute our intense selves, or psychological strategies, also known as emotion regulation strategies, which add all sorts of knobs and buttons to our inner amplifiers (many of them impressive to look at, but hardly ever used), what to do if you too experience very intense feelings and reactions to those feelings? 

My suggestion would be to learn this poem, and then recite it when you’re feeling tossed about by life, because Lawrence’s injunction in the final verse is still one that underpins any and every helpful psychological therapy currently known to us. Which is that the mind is designed to avoid, fix, or control the winds of change, as well as our at-times overwhelming wonder and anxiety at being contingent human animals in a world that encompasses, but also challenges us. Avoiding, fixing and controlling, quite often do the job. But for certain times and states, they don’t work. Instead we might choose in an extremely counter-intuitive fashion, to at times open ourselves to and “admit” those things which every cell of our being wants to close the door on. 

Dabrowski has a wonderful term for this process: positive disintegration. 

Overexcitability is a temperamental quality (a tragic gift he would call it) possessed by individuals which enables them to experience life at a deeper level. There are five of these “gifts”: sensual overexcitability, psychomotor, imaginational, intellectual, and emotional. 

Endowed with these gifts, an individual reacts much more profoundly to a great number of stimuli, but with mixed results.  Experience affects these individuals significantly more and often to a much greater depth. Someone who doesn’t have this quality, might read a poem, smile and go about their day. Another might read it, and feel compelled to write or talk about it. This is great when it comes to essays on the internet, but sometimes can wrongfoot us or others.

The key it seems, as much as anything else, is finding personal meaning in meaningless suffering. As Marjorie M. Kaminski Battaglia explains: the concept of expiative suffering is essential to Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration. “Dabrowski appreciates and attaches value to human suffering and crisis. Instead of suffering viewed as a meaningless burden (Why me?), it becomes an opportunity for an individual to develop and grow. Suffering offers the chance to choose to become.”

Expiation. This is most certainy a poem about expiation: as in EX (out of, from within, think of the word “exhale”) + piare (propitiate, appease). 

The word in its current usage appears to date back to the Late 16th century where it was used to signify a kind of ending (of rage, sorrow, or some other unsettling emotions) by feeling into that emotion (suffering it mindfully in attempt to appease the emotional “gods” within). Or as Dan Savage often memorably puts it: allowing ourselves to “feel the fuck out of our feelings”, but without becoming enslaved to them. There is an art to this, as well as a skill. Is this not the art or skill all of us intense folk are working with at any given time? I think it is. 

But consider also another etymological link to expiation: ‘to appease by sacrifice’. The sacrafice here being perhaps our own rigid and inflexible notions and reactions to what’s going on inside us, or around us, which Lawrence challenges himself and us to make space for.

**

What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door of our sensitive nervous systems in response to a trigger? If it is somebody/something wanting to do us harm, let us protect ourselves. But more often than not, the harm we perceive is a phantasm or projection of our intensely imaginative minds.

I used to think that the three strange angels referred to at the end of the poems was another reference to the nymphs in the garden, but I’ve discovered that it may also be a biblical allusion from Genesis 18-19 where God and two angels appear to Abraham announcing that they’re going to decimate Sodom. Two of them (Lawrence makes it three) go on to Sodom to lead Lot and his family out of the city before its destruction. 

Sometimes, when we get overexcited by a thought or an emotion, it might function like those three angels bearing some news we really do need to take on board and “do something” about. 

-We are destroying our planet!
-This relationship/friendship is no longer working for you!
-You are bored with your job and need to find something more meaningful to do with the rest of your life.

Those messages are always worth taking heed of. 

But more often than not, our overexcitable stories probably shouldn’t be acted on. Instead, hard as this may be at times (or even always), we might choose to sit or walk quietly for a few minutes, just breathing and feeling into our wounded selves, admitting (literally: giving entrance, allowing to enter; but also metaphorically admitting) our own uninvited guests. 

Which might take us to another poem about (literally) making room for uncomfortable feelings: Rumi’s Guest House

Categories
Existential knots Feel Better Meaning

Finding Meaning in An Absurd World

To what extent would you say you are “open” the following ideas. You may even want to give them a rating from 1-10 as you read through them in terms of how open you feel to each one at the moment. 

  1. I am open to the idea that I am free to choose my attitude toward everything that happens to me. 
  2. I am open to the idea that I can manifest meaning in my life by making a conscious, authentic commitment to meaningful values and goals.
  3. I am open to the idea that I can find meaning in all of my life’s moments and events. 
  4. I am open to the idea that I can learn to see how I work against myself and can learn to avoid thwarting my best intentions. 
  5. I am open to the idea that I can learn to look at myself from a distance to gain insight and perspective as well as to laugh at myself. 
  6. I am open to the idea that I can shifty my focus of attention when we I am facing difficult situations in order to help me cope with what I’m going through. 
  7. I am open to the idea that I can reach out beyond myself and find meaning not just in my own accomplishments and pleasures, but in the not-me-ness of others and the world.

These principles lie at the heart of an existential form of therapy created by Victor Frankl which asserts that finding and making meaning in our lives trumps our focus on and desire for power or pleasure (which we sometimes refer to as “happiness”). 

The latter two “drives” (power and pleasure) were postulated by Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud respectively, but let’s not be essentialists here, it’s probably a combination of all three that drives us. Frankl might argue however that we often lose sight of meaning when we are either trying to avoid pain and discomfort in our lives, or gain some traction with other people and our environment. In a sense we supplant meaning with power-pleasure goals and then wonder why we feel unfulfilled even after experiencing the rewards of those pursuits. 

I don’t think anyone would argue with this realisation, but as with any insight, how do we shift into more meaning-focused ways of doing and being? 

Here’s one radical exercise/thought-experiments you might want to try. As you read through it though, be aware of the kind of resistance your mind puts up to giving it a go. When I am struggling with an experience inside myself (painful thoughts or emotions) or one outside of myself (a difficult situation) I find my mind becoming even more resistant than usual to this stuff – you too?. But maybe that’s a sign of needing to do something different, like the practice described below? Maybe the medicine needs to taste just a tad bitter for us to know it has the potential to do any good?

So see if you can, just for a minute or two, put that resistant/closed part of the mind (a part that often fears having some of its provisional meanings and beliefs shaken, even if those beliefs are no longer serving us as they once did) to one side, and try out each experiment as just that: a try-on or tryout, a little fling with doing something different or other than the norm.

CREATING MEANING PRACTICE 

To begin with, think of a situation in your personal life or at work that is or was especially stressful, negative, or challenging for you. Now take a deep breath, and write down ten positive things that could result – or did result – from this situation.

Again, even as you embark on the exercise, notice any resistance you might have to doing this. (Sometimes it’s more interesting or even “meaningful” to some extent, to stay angry, self-righteous, or “right”.) But just let your mind loosen and entertain the possibilities. Write down whatever comes to mind first. Continue to stretch your imagination and suspend judgment, listing whatever comes into consciousness, no matter how silly, far out, or unrealistic your thoughts appear to be. Feel completely free to determine or define what positive means to you.

Frankl might give as a reason for trying this experiment is that  the way we accept our fate – those things beyond our control – and start trying to make some sense or meaning from it, the easier it will be for us to recover from situations that didn’t go well for us. 

Writing in Psychotherapy and Existentialism Frankl reminds us that we are condition-dependent creatures, which means that our freedom is a finite one. 

“We are not free from conditions. But we are free to take a stand in regard to them. The conditions do not completely condition us. Within limits it is up to us whether or not we succumb and surrenders to the conditions. We may as well rise above them and by so doing open up and enter the human dimension. . . . [We are] not subject to the conditions that confront us; rather, these conditions are subject to our decision. Wittingly or unwittingly, we decides whether we will face up or give in, whether or not we will let ourself be determined by these conditions.” 

So this is not to say that our reactions to these events (confusion, and some form of dismay) are not valid, but rather once we have “felt the fuck out of our feelings”, as Dan Savage often memorably puts it in his podcast and advice column, how do we pivot and get a handle on what we’re struggling with? 

I like Frankl’s somewhat long-suffering use of “we may as well” in the above quote. We may as well choose to make some meaning of our often absurd human animal conditions. Or even: until you can come up with a better plan for how to tackle this painful stuff other than feeling crushed and tyrannised by it, let’s walk the path of meaning! 

 

Categories
Feel Better

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine by D.H. Lawrence

The following is an essay by D.H. Lawrence. I refer to it in my Poetry Koan piece on Intensity. As the essay in full doesn’t seem to be available on the net, just in case you fancy reading it, I share it here with you below.

**

“There are many bare places on the little pine trees, towards the top, where the porcupines have gnawed the bark away and left the white flesh showing. And some trees are dying from the top.

Everyone says porcupines should be killed; the Indians, Mexicans, Americans all say the same.

At full moon a month ago, when I went down the long clearing in the brilliant moonlight, through the poor dry herbage a big porcupine began to waddle away from me, towards the trees and the darkness. The animal had raised all its hairs and bristles, so that by the light of the moon it seemed to have a tall, swaying, moonlit aureole arching its back as it went. That seemed curiously fearsome, as if the animal were emitting itself demon-like on the air.

It waddled very slowly, with its white spiky spoon-tail steering flat, behind the round bear-like mound of its back. It had a lumbering, beetle’s, squalid motion, unpleasant. I followed it into the darkness of the timber, and there, squat like a great tick, it began scrapily to creep up a pine-trunk. It was very like a great aureoled tick, a bug, struggling up.

I stood near and watched, disliking the presence of the creature. It is a duty to kill the things. But the dislike of killing him was greater than the dislike of him. So I watched him climb.

And he watched me. When he had got nearly the height of a man, all his long hairs swaying with a bristling gleam like an aureole, he hesitated, and slithered down. Evidently he had decided, either that I was harmless, or else that it was risky to go up any further, when I could knock him off so easily with a pole. So he slithered podgily down again, and waddled away with the same bestial, stupid motion of that white-spiky repulsive spoon-tail. He was as big as a middle-sized pig: or more like a bear.

I let him go. He was repugnant. He made a certain squalor in the moonlight of the Rocky Mountains. As all savagery has a touch of squalor, that makes one a little sick at the stomach. And anyhow, it seemed almost more squalid to pick up a pine-bough and push him over, hit him and kill him.

A few days later, on a hot, motionless morning when the pine-trees put out their bristles in stealthy, hard assertion; and I was not in a good temper, because Black-eyed Susan, the cow, had disappeared into the timber, and I had had to ride hunting her, so it was nearly nine o’clock before she was milked: Madame came in suddenly out of the sunlight, saying: ‘I got such a shock! There are two strange dogs, and one of them has got the most awful beard, all round his nose.’

She was frightened, like a child, at something unnatural.

‘Beard! Porcupine quills, probably! He’s been after a porcupine.’

‘Ah!’ she cried in relief. ‘Very likely! Very likely!’ – then with a change of tone; ‘Poor thing, will they hurt him?’

‘They will. I wonder when he came.’

‘I heard dogs bark in the night.’

‘Did you? Why didn’t you say so? I should have known Susan was hiding –’

The ranch is lonely, there is no sound in the night, save the innumerable noises of the night, that you can’t put your finger on; cosmic noises in the far deeps of the sky, and of the earth.

I went out. And in the full blaze of sunlight in the field, stood two dogs, a black-and-white, and a big, bushy, rather handsome sandy-red dog, of the collie type. And sure enough, this latter did look queer and a bit horrifying, his whole muzzle set round with white spines, like some ghastly growth; like an unnatural beard.

The black-and-white dog made off as I went through the fence. But the red dog whimpered and hesitated, and moved on hot bricks. He was fat and in good condition. I thought he might belong to some shepherds herding sheep in the forest ranges, among the mountains.

He waited while I went up to him, wagging his tail and whimpering, and ducking his head, and dancing. He daren’t rub his nose with his paws any more: it hurt too much. I patted his head and looked at his nose, and he whimpered loudly.

He must have had thirty quills, or more, sticking out of his nose, all the way round: the white, ugly ends of the quills protruding an inch, sometimes more, sometimes less, from his already swollen, blood-puffed muzzle.

The porcupines here have quills only two or three inches long. But they are devilish; and a dog will die if he does not get them pulled out. Because they work further and further in, and will sometimes emerge through the skin away in some unexpected place.

Then the fun began. I got him in the yard: and he drank up the whole half-gallon of the chickens’ sour milk. Then I started pulling out the quills. He was a big, bushy, handsome dog, but his nerve was gone, and every time I got a quill out, he gave a yelp. Some long quills were fairly easy. But the shorter ones, near his lips, were deep in, and hard to get hold of, and hard to pull out when you did get hold of them. And with every one that came out, came a little spurt of blood and another yelp and writhe.

The dog wanted the quills out: but his nerve was gone. Every time he saw my hand coming to his nose, he jerked his head away. I quieted him, and stealthily managed to jerk out another quill, with the blood all over my fingers. But with every one that came out, he grew more tiresome. I tried and tried and tried to get hold of another quill, and he jerked and jerked, and writhed and whimpered, and ran under the porch floor.

It was a curiously unpleasant, nerve-trying job. The day was blazing hot. The dog came out and I struggled with him again for an hour or more. Then we blindfolded him. But either he smelled my hand approaching his nose, or some weird instinct told him. He jerked his head, this way, that way, up, down, sideways, roundwise, as one’s fingers came slowly, slowly, to seize a quill.

The quills on his lips and chin were deep in, only about a quarter of an inch of white stub protruding from the swollen, blood-oozed, festering black skin. It was very difficult to jerk them out.

We let him lie for an interval, hidden in the quiet cool place under the porch floor. After half an hour, he crept out again. We got a rope round his nose, behind the bristles, and one held while the other got the stubs with the pliers. But it was too trying. If a quill came out, the dog’s yelp startled every nerve. And he was frightened of the pain, it was impossible to hold his head still any longer.

After struggling for two hours, and extracting some twenty quills, I gave up. It was impossible to quiet the creature, and I had had enough. His nose on the top was clear: a punctured, puffy, blood-darkened mess; and his lips were clear. But just on his round little chin, where the few white hairs are, was still a bunch of white quills, eight or nine, deep in.

We let him go, and he dived under the porch, and there he lay invisible: save for the end of his bushy, foxy tail, which moved when we came near. Towards noon he emerged, ate up the chicken-food, and stood with that doggish look of dejection, and fear, and friendliness, and greediness, wagging his tail.

But I had had enough.

‘Go home!’ I said. ‘Go home! Go home to your master, and let him finish for you.’

He would not go. So I led him across the blazing hot clearing, in the way I thought he should go. He followed a hundred yards, then stood motionless in the blazing sun. He was not going to leave the place.

And I! I simply did not want him.

So I picked up a stone. He dropped his tail, and swerved towards the house. I knew what he was going to do. He was going to dive under the porch, and there stick, haunting the place.

I dropped my stone, and found a good stick under the cedar tree. Already in the heat was that sting-like biting of electricity, the thunder gathering in the sheer sunshine, without a cloud, and making one’s whole body feel dislocated.

I could not bear to have that dog around any more. Going quietly to him, I suddenly gave him one hard hit with the stick, crying: ‘Go home!’ He turned quickly, and the end of the stick caught him on his sore nose. With a fierce yelp, he went off like a wolf, downhill, like a flash, gone. And I stood in the field full of pangs of regret, at having hit him, unintentionally, on his sore nose.

But he was gone.

And then the present moon came, and again the night was clear. But in the interval there had been heavy thunder-rains, the ditch was running with bright water across the field, and the night, so fair, had not the terrific, mirror-like brilliancy, touched with terror, so startling bright, of the moon in the last days of June.

We were alone on the ranch. Madame went out into the clear night, just before retiring. The stream ran in a cord of silver across the field, in the straight line where I had taken the irrigation ditch. The pine tree in front of the house threw a black shadow. The mountain slope came down to the fence, wild and alert.

‘Come!’ said she excitedly. ‘There is a big porcupine drinking at the ditch. I thought at first it was a bear.’

When I got out he had gone. But among the grasses and the coming wild sunflowers, under the moon, I saw his greyish halo, like a pallid living bush, moving over the field, in the distance, in the moonlit clair-obscur.

We got through the fence, and following, soon caught him up. There he lumbered, with his white spoon-tail spiked with bristles, steering behind almost as if he were moving backwards, and this was his head. His long, long hairs above the quills quivering with a dim grey gleam, like a bush.

And again I disliked him.

‘Should one kill him?’

She hesitated. Then with a sort of disgust:

‘Yes!’

I went back to the house, and got the little twenty-two rifle. Now never in my life had I shot at any live thing: I never wanted to. I always felt guns very repugnant: sinister, mean. With difficulty I had fired once or twice at a target: but resented doing even so much. Other people could shoot if they wanted to. Myself, individually, it was repugnant to me even to try.

But something slowly hardens in a man’s soul. And I knew now it had hardened in mine. I found the gun, and with rather trembling hands got it loaded. Then I pulled back the trigger and followed the porcupine. It was still lumbering through the grass. Coming near, I aimed.

The trigger stuck. I pressed the little catch with a safety-pin I found in my pocket, and released the trigger. Then we followed the porcupine. He was still lumbering towards the trees. I went sideways on, stood quite near to him, and fired, in the clear-dark of the moonlight.

And as usual I aimed too high. He turned, went scuttling back whence he had come.

I got another shell in place, and followed. This time I fired full into the mound of his round back, below the glistening grey halo. He seemed to stumble on to his hidden nose, and struggled a few strides, ducking his head under like a hedgehog.

‘He’s not dead yet! Oh, fire again!’ cried Madame.

I fired, but the gun was empty.

So I ran quickly, for a cedar pole. The porcupine was lying still, with subsiding halo. He stirred faintly. So I turned him and hit him hard over the nose; or where, in the dark, his nose should have been. And it was done. He was dead.

And in the moonlight, I looked down on the first creature I had ever shot.

‘Does it seem mean?’ I asked aloud, doubtful.

Again Madame hesitated. Then: ‘No!’ she said resentfully.

And I felt she was right. Things like the porcupine, one must be able to shoot them, if they get in one’s way.

One must be able to shoot. I, myself, must be able to shoot, and to kill.

For me, this is a volta face. I have always preferred to walk round my porcupine, rather than kill it.

Now, I know it’s no good walking round. One must kill.

I buried him in the adobe hole. But some animal dug down and ate him; for two days later there lay the spines and bones spread out, with the long skeletons of the porcupine-hands.

The only nice thing about him – or her, for I believe it was a female, by the dugs on her belly – were the feet. They were like longish, alert black hands, paw-hands. That is why a porcupine’s tracks in the snow look almost as if a child had gone by, leaving naked little human foot-prints, like a little boy.

So, he is gone: or she is gone. But there is another one, bigger and blacker-looking, among the west timber. That too is to be shot. It is part of the business of ranching: even when it’s only a little half-abandoned ranch like this one.

Wherever man establishes himself, upon the earth, he has to fight for his place against the lower orders of life. Food, the basis of existence, has to be fought for even by the most idyllic of farmers. You plant, and you protect your growing crop with a gun. Food, food, how strangely it relates man with the animal and vegetable world! How important it is! And how fierce is the fight that goes on around it.

The same when one skins a rabbit, and takes out the inside, one realizes what an enormous part of the animal, comparatively, is intestinal, what a big part of him is just for food-apparatus; for living on other organisms.

And when one watches the horses in the big field, their noses to the ground, bite-bite-biting at the grass, and stepping absorbedly on, and bite-bite-biting without ever lifting their noses, cropping off the grass, the young shoots of alfalfa, the dandelions, with a blind, relentless, unwearied persistence, one’s whole life pauses. One suddenly realizes again how all creatures devour, and must devour the lower forms of life.

  So Susan, swinging across the field, snatches off the tops of the little wild sunflowers as if she were mowing. And down they go, down her black throat. And when she stands in her cowy oblivion chewing her cud, with her lower jaw swinging peacefully, and I am milking her, suddenly the camomiley smell of her breath, as she glances round with glaring, smoke-blue eyes, makes me realize it is the sunflowers that are her ball of cud. Sunflowers! And they will go to making her glistening black hide, and the thick cream on her milk.

And the chickens, when they see a great black beetle, that the Mexicans call a toro, floating past, they are after it in a rush. And if it settles, instantly the brown hen stabs it with her beak. It is a great beetle two or three inches long: but in a second it is in the crop of the chicken. Gone!

And Timsy, the cat, as she spies on the chipmunks, crouches in another sort of oblivion, soft, and still. The chipmunks come to drink the milk from the chickens’ bowl. Two of them met at the bowl. They were little squirrely things with stripes down their backs. They sat up in front of one another, lifting their inquisitive little noses and humping their backs. Then each put its two little hands on the other’s shoulders, they reared up, gazing into each other’s faces; and finally they put their two little noses together, in a sort of kiss.

But Miss Timsy can’t stand this. In a soft, white-and-yellow leap she is after them. They skip, with the darting jerks of chipmunks, to the wood-heap, and with one soft, high-leaping sideways bound Timsy goes through the air. Her snow-flake of a paw comes down on one of the chipmunks. She looks at it for a second. It squirms. Swiftly and triumphantly she puts her two flowery little white paws on it, legs straight out in front of her, back arched, gazing concentratedly yet whimsically. Chipmunk does not stir. She takes it softly in her mouth, where it dangles softly, like a lady’s tippet. And with a proud, prancing motion the Timsy sets off towards the house, her white little feet hardly touching the ground.

But she gets shooed away. We refuse to loan her the sitting-room any more, for her gladiatorial displays. If the chippy must be ‘butchered to make a Timsy holiday’, it shall be outside. Disappointed, but still high-stepping, the Timsy sets off towards the clay oven by the shed.

There she lays the chippy gently down, and soft as a little white cloud lays one small paw on its striped back. Chippy does not move. Soft as thistle-down she raises her paw a tiny, tiny bit, to release him.

And all of a sudden, with an elastic jerk, he darts from under the white release of her paw. And instantly, she is up in the air and down she comes on him, with the forward thrusting bolts of her white paws. Both creatures are motionless.

Then she takes him softly in her mouth again, and looks round, to see if she can slip into the house. She cannot. So she trots towards the wood-pile.

It is a game, and it is pretty. Chippy escapes into the wood-pile, and she softly, softly reconnoitres among the faggots.

Of all the animals, there is no denying it, the Timsy is the most pretty, the most fine. It is not her mere corpus that is beautiful; it is her bloom of aliveness. Her ‘infinite variety’; the soft, snow-flakey lightness of her, and at the same time her lean, heavy ferocity. I had never realized the latter, till I was lying in bed one day moving my toe, unconsciously, under the bedclothes. Suddenly a terrific blow struck my foot. The Timsy had sprung out of nowhere, with a hurling, steely force, thud upon the bedclothes where the toe was moving. It was as if someone had aimed a sudden blow, vindictive and unerring.

‘Timsy!’

She looked at me with the vacant, feline glare of her hunting eyes. It is not even ferocity. It is the dilation of the strange, vacant arrogance of power. The power is in her.

And so it is. Life moves in circles of power and of vividness, and each circle of life only maintains its orbit upon the subjection of some lower circle. If the lower cycles of life are not mastered, there can be no higher cycle.

In nature, one creature devours another, and this is an essential part of all existence and of all being. It is not something to lament over, nor something to try to reform. The Buddhist who refuses to take life is really ridiculous, since if he eats only two grains of rice per day, it is two grains of life. We did not make creation, we are not the authors of the universe. And if we see that the whole of creation is established upon the fact that one life devours another life, one cycle of existence can only come into existence through the subjugating of another cycle of existence, then what is the good of trying to pretend that it is not so? The only thing to do is to realize what is higher, and what is lower, in the cycles of existence.

It is nonsense to declare that there is no higher and lower. We know full well that the dandelion belongs to a higher cycle of existence than the hartstongue fern, that the ant’s is a higher form of existence than the dandelion’s, that the thrush is higher than the ant, that Timsy the cat is higher than the thrush, and that I, a man, am higher than Timsy.

What do we mean by higher? Strictly, we mean more alive. More vividly alive. The ant is more vividly alive than the pine-tree. We know it, there is no trying to refute it. It is all very well saying that they are both alive in two different ways, and therefore they are incomparable, incommensurable. This is also true.

But one truth does not displace another. Even apparently contradictory truths do not displace one another. Logic is far too coarse to make the subtle distinctions life demands.

Truly, it is futile to compare an ant with a great pine-tree, in the absolute. Yet as far as existence is concerned, they are not only placed in comparison to one another, they are occasionally pitted against one another. And if it comes to a contest, the little ant will devour the life of the huge tree. If it comes to a contest.

And, in the cycles of existence, this is the test. From the lowest form of existence to the highest, the test question is: Can thy neighbour finally overcome thee?

If he can, then he belongs to a higher cycle of existence.

This is the truth behind the survival of the fittest. Every cycle of existence is established upon the overcoming of the lower cycles of existence. The real question is, wherein does fitness lie? Fitness for what? Fit merely to survive? That which is only fit to survive will survive only to supply food or contribute in some way to the existence of a higher form of life, which is able to do more than survive, which can really vive, live.

Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern, or than in a palm tree.

Life is more vivid in a snake than in a butterfly.

Life is more vivid in a wren than in an alligator.

Life is more vivid in a cat than in an ostrich.

Life is more vivid in the Mexican who drives the wagon than in the two horses in the wagon.

Life is more vivid in me than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me.

We are speaking in terms of existence: that is, in terms of species, race, or type.

The dandelion can take hold of the land, the palm tree is driven into a corner, with the fern.

The snake can devour the fiercest insect.

The fierce bird can destroy the greatest reptile.

The great cat can destroy the greatest bird.

The man can destroy the horse, or any animal.

One race of man can subjugate and rule another race.

All this in terms of existence. As far as existence goes, that life-species is the highest which can devour, or destroy, or subjugate every other life-species against which it is pitted in contest.

This is a law. There is no escaping this law. Anyone, or any race, trying to escape it will fall a victim: will fall into subjugation.

But let us insist and insist again, we are talking now of existence, of species, of types, of races, of nations, not of single individuals, nor of beings. The dandelion in full flower, a little sun bristling with sun-rays on the green earth, is a nonpareil, a nonsuch. Foolish, foolish, foolish to compare it to anything else on earth. It is itself incomparable and unique.

But that is the fourth dimension, of being. It is in the fourth dimension, nowhere else.

Because, in the time-space dimension, any man may tread on the yellow sun-mirror, and it is gone. Any cow may swallow it. Any bunch of ants may annihilate it.

This brings us to the inexorable law of life.

  1. Any creature that attains to its own fullness of being, its own living self, becomes unique, a nonpareil. It has its place in the fourth dimension, the heaven of existence, and there it is perfect, it is beyond comparison.

  2. At the same time, every creature exists in time and space. And in time and space it exists relatively to all other existence, and can never be absolved. Its existence impinges on other existences, and is itself impinged upon. And in the struggle for existence, if an effort on the part of any one type or species or order of life can finally destroy the other species, then the destroyer is of a more vital cycle of existence than the one destroyed. (When speaking of existence we always speak in types, species, not individuals. Species exist. But even an individual dandelion has being.)

  3. The force which we call vitality, and which is the determining factor in the struggle for existence, is, however, derived also from the fourth dimension. That is to say, the ultimate source of all vitality is in that other dimension, or region, where the dandelion blooms, and which men have called heaven, and which now they call the fourth dimension: which is only a way of saying that it is not to be reckoned in terms of space and time.

  4. The primary way, in our existence, to get vitality, is to absorb it from living creatures lower than ourselves. It is thus transformed into a new and higher creation. (There are many ways of absorbing: devouring food is one way, love is often another. The best way is a pure relationship, which includes the being on each side, and which allows the transfer to take place in a living flow, enhancing the life in both beings.)

  5. No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.

So we still find ourselves in the tangle of existence and being, a tangle which man has never been able to get out of, except by sacrificing the one to the other.

Sacrifice is useless.

The clue to all existence is being. But you can’t have being without existence, any more than you can have the dandelion flower without the leaves and the long tap root.

Being is not ideal, as Plato would have it: nor spiritual. It is a transcendent form of existence, and as much material as existence is. Only the matter suddenly enters the fourth dimension.

All existence is dual, and surging towards a consummation into being. In the seed of the dandelion, as it floats with its little umbrella of hairs, sits the Holy Ghost in tiny compass. The Holy Ghost is that which holds the light and the dark, the day and the night, the wet and the sunny, united in one little clue. There it sits, in the seed of the dandelion.

The seed falls to earth. The Holy Ghost rouses, saying: ‘Come!’ And out of the sky come the rays of the sun, and out of earth come dampness and dark and the death-stuff. They are called in, like those bidden to a feast. The sun sits down at the hearth, inside the seed; and the dark, damp death-returner sits on the opposite side, with the host between. And the host says to them: ‘Come! Be merry together!’ So the sun looks with desirous curiosity on the dark face of the earth, and the dark damp one looks with wonder on the bright face of the other, who comes from the sun. And the host says: ‘Here you are at home! Lift me up, between you, that I may cease to be a Ghost. For it longs me to look out, it longs me to dance with the dancers.’

So the sun in the seed, and the earthy one in the seed take hands, and laugh, and begin to dance. And their dancing is like a fire kindled, a bonfire with leaping flame. And the treading of their feet is like the running of little streams, down into the earth. So from the dance of the sun-in-the-seed with the earthy death-returner, green little flames of leaves shoot up, and hard little trickles of roots strike down. And the host laughs, and says: ‘I am being lifted up! Dance harder! Oh wrestle, you two, like wonderful wrestlers, neither of which can win.’ So sun-in-the-seed and the death-returner, who is earthy, dance faster and faster and the leaves rising greener begin to dance in a ring above-ground, fiercely overwhelming any outsider, in a whirl of swords and lions’ teeth. And the earthy one wrestles, wrestles with the sun-in-the-seed, so the long roots reach down like arms of a fighter gripping the power of earth, and strangles all intruders, strangling any intruder mercilessly. Till the two fall in one strange embrace, and from the centre the long flower-stem lifts like a phallus, budded with a bud. And out of the bud the voice of the Holy Ghost is heard crying: ‘I am lifted up! Lo! I am lifted up! I am here!’ So the bud opens, and there is the flower poised in the very middle of the universe, with a ring of green swords below, to guard it, and the octopus, arms deep in earth, drinking and threatening. So the Holy Ghost, being a dandelion flower, looks round, and says: ‘Lo! I am yellow! I believe the sun has lent me his body! Lo! I am sappy with golden, bitter blood! I believe death out of the damp black earth has lent me his blood! I am incarnate! I like my incarnation! But this is not all. I will keep this incarnation. It is good! But oh! if I can win to another incarnation, who knows how wonderful it will be! This one will have to give place. This one can help to create the next.’

So the Holy Ghost leaves the clue of himself behind, in the seed, and wanders forth in the comparative chaos of our universe, seeking another incarnation.

And this will go on for ever. Man, as yet, is less than half grown. Even his flower-stem has not appeared yet. He is all leaves and roots, without any clue put forth. No sign of bud anywhere.

Either he will have to start budding, or he will be forsaken of the Holy Ghost: abandoned as a failure in creation, as the ichthyosaurus was abandoned. Being abandoned means losing his vitality. The sun and the earth-dark will cease rushing together in him. Already it is ceasing. To men, the sun is becoming stale, and the earth sterile. But the sun itself will never become stale, nor the earth barren. It is only that the clue is missing inside men. They are like flowerless, seedless fat cabbages, nothing inside.

Vitality depends upon the clue of the Holy Ghost inside a creature, a man, a nation, a race. When the clue goes, the vitality goes. And the Holy Ghost seeks for ever a new incarnation, and subordinates the old to the new. You will know that any creature or race is still alive with the Holy Ghost, when it can subordinate the lower creatures or races, and assimilate them into a new incarnation.

No man, or creature, or race can have vivid vitality unless it be moving towards a blossoming: and the most powerful is that which moves towards the as-yet-unknown blossom.

Blossoming means the establishing of a pure, new relationship with all the cosmos. This is the state of heaven. And it is the state of a flower, a cobra, a jenny-wren in spring, a man when he knows himself royal and crowned with the sun, with his feet gripping the core of the earth.

This too is the fourth dimension: this state, this mysterious other reality of things in a perfected relationship. It is into this perfected relationship that every straight line curves, as if to some core, passing out of the time-space dimension.

But any man, creature, or race moving towards blossoming will have to draw immense supplies of vitality from men, or creatures below, passionate strength. And he will have to accomplish a perfected relation with all things.

There will be conquest, always. But the aim of conquest is a perfect relation of conquerors with conquered, for a new blossoming. Freedom is illusory. Sacrifice is illusory. Almightiness is illusory. Freedom, sacrifice, almightiness, these are all human side-tracks, cul-de-sacs, bunk. All that is real is the overwhelmingness of a new inspirational command, a new relationship with all things.

Heaven is always there. No achieved consummation is lost. Procreation goes on for ever, to support the achieved revelation. But the torch of revelation itself is handed on. And this is all important.

Everything living wants to procreate more living things.

But more important than this is the fact that every revelation is a torch held out, to kindle new revelations. As the dandelion holds out the sun to me, saying: ‘Can you take it!

Every gleam of heaven that is shown – like a dandelion flower, or a green beetle – quivers with strange passion to kindle a new gleam, never yet beheld. This is not self-sacrifice: it is self-contribution: in which the highest happiness lies.

The torch of existence is handed on, in the womb of procreation.

And the torch of revelation is handed on, by every living thing, from the protococcus to a brave man or a beautiful woman, handed to whomsoever can take it. He who can take it has power beyond all the rest.

The cycle of procreation exists purely for the keeping alight of the torch of perfection, in any species: the torch being the dandelion in blossom, the tree in full leaf, the peacock in all his plumage, the cobra in all his colour, the frog at full leap, woman in all the mystery of her fathomless desirableness, man in the fulness of his power: every creature become its pure self.

One cycle of perfection urges to kindle another cycle, as yet unknown.

And with the kindling from the torch of revelation comes the inrush of vitality, and the need to consume and consummate the lower cycles of existence, into a new thing. This consuming and this consummating means conquest, and fearless mastery. Freedom lies in the honourable yielding towards the new flame, and the honourable mastery of that which shall be new, over that which must yield. As I must master my horses, which are in a lower cycle of existence. And they, they are relieved and happy to serve. If I turn them loose into the mountain ranges, to run wild till they die, the thrill of real happiness is gone out of their lives.

Every lower order seeks in some measure to serve a higher order: and rebels against being conquered.

It is always conquest, and it always will be conquest. If the conquered be an old, declining race, they will have handed on their torch to the conqueror: who will burn his fingers badly, if he is too flippant. And if the conquered be a barbaric race, they will consume the fire of the conqueror, and leave him flameless, unless he watch it. But it is always conquest, conquered and conqueror, for ever. The Kingdom of heaven is the Kingdom of conquerors, who can serve the conquest for ever, after their own conquest is made.

In heaven, in the perfected relation, is peace: in the fourth dimension. But there is getting there. And that, for ever, is the process of conquest.

When the rose blossomed, then the great Conquest was made by the Vegetable Kingdom. But even this conqueror of conquerors, the rose, had to lend himself towards the caterpillar and the butterfly of a later conquest. A conqueror, but tributary to the later conquest.

There is no such thing as equality. In the kingdom of heaven, in the fourth dimension, each soul that achieves a perfect relationship with the cosmos, from its own centre, is perfect, and incomparable. It has no superior. It is a conqueror, and incomparable.

But every man, in the struggle of conquest towards his own consummation, must master the inferior cycles of life, and never relinquish his mastery. Also, if there be men beyond him, moving on to a newer consummation than his own, he must yield to their greater demand, and serve their greater mystery, and so be faithful to the kingdom of heaven which is within him, which is gained by conquest and by loyal service.

Any man who achieves his own being will, like the dandelion or the butterfly, pass into that other dimension which we call the fourth, and the old people called heaven. It is the state of perfected relationship. And here a man will have his peace for ever: whether he serve or command, in the process of living.

But even this entails his faithful allegiance to the kingdom of heaven, which must be for ever and for ever extended, as creation conquers chaos. So that my perfection will but serve a perfection which still lies ahead, unrevealed and unconceived, and beyond my own.

We have tried to build walls round the kingdom of heaven: but it’s no good. It’s only the cabbage rotting inside.

Our last wall is the golden wall of money. This is a fatal wall. It cuts us off from life, from vitality, from the alive sun and the alive earth, as nothing can. Nothing, not even the most fanatical dogmas of an iron-bound religion, can insulate us from the inrush of life and inspiration, as money can.

We are losing vitality: losing it rapidly. Unless we seize the torch of inspiration, and drop our moneybags, the moneyless will be kindled by the flame of flames, and they will consume us like old rags.

We are losing vitality, owing to money and money-standards. The torch in the hands of the moneyless will set our house on fire, and burn us to death, like sheep in a flaming corral.”

Categories
Acceptance Avoidance contingency Coping strategies Feel Better Impermanence Meaning Suffering Transcendence Worry

The Three Characteristics/Marks/Seals of Existence: A Practice

I’ve been thinking recently about a buddhist notion that all beings (including us), and in fact all phenomena, are marked by three characteristics. These are sometimes called the three marks of existence, or three seals: suffering (or some kind of “shortfall”), impermanence, and contingency

Here’s an acronym to remember them by: SIC! 

I’ve deliberately chosen SIC as it sounds a bit like “sick” when said aloud (as in debilitated, disordered, down in body and mind), but it’s also the word we use in a text to indicate a phrase or quote that looks dodgy but is in fact is exactly what was printed or said. As in when The Donald comments on Boris becoming PM:

“Good man. He’s tough and he’s smart. They’re saying ‘Britain Trump’ (sic). They call him ‘Britain Trump,’ (sic) and there’s people saying that’s a good thing.” 

The idea, as with all buddhist ideas, is that if we can really explore and understand on an experiential level these three characteristics, learn how to recognise them as they arise in our moment to moment perceptions rather than just as conceptual symbols on a screen or in a book, this exploration can greatly help us to live our lives in a more unencumbered way, with more peace and grace. So are you willing to do a bit of exploring? 

If so, here’s a quick overview of the three characteristics and then the simple, no-fuss practice. 

SUFFERING

Dukkha, the pali word for this concept, is often translated as “suffering” or “discomfort”, but I’ve always liked the notion that its etymology can be traced back to something like “a painful, bumpy ride due to a poorly-fitting axle hole in the centre of a wagon wheel”. This is the buddhist version of “life’s a bitch…”. 

Perhaps a better translation might be something along the lines of shortfall or insufficiency: that unsatisfactory or peevish disgruntlement we experience, whenever anything in our experience falls short of our expectations. Once you start noticing the extent to which there is a shortfall between what we expect or desire, and what we actually get, you start to see this phenomenon everywhere, and in everything, a true mark of existence.

It pops up even in ostensibly good times. Let’s say I’m on a beautiful country walk, as I was yesterday alongside my trusty doggy companion Max, and for the most part having a great time. Yet even woven into that walk there were countless example of dukkha. Here are just a few:

  1. On my way to my destination, I find a quiet part of the train carriage to sit in so that I can read. At the next stop, a noisy family gets on the train, sits next to me and yaps away for the next 40 minutes.
  2. The weather app forecasts clear skies, no rain. So I don’t take any rain gear with me. For the five hours I’m out, it’s overcast for three quarters of the time, and rains off-and-on for an hour.
  3. I find a mobile phone in the middle of a forest which someone appears to have dropped. Even though the screen is locked, I manage to text a friend of the phone’s owner, and then agree to walk back to a pub I’d passed earlier, to return the phone. Twenty minutes later, the phone’s owner thanks me in brief, somewhat tepid fashion, the kind of thank you you might expect if you’d just told someone their shoelaces were untied. Effulgent, enthusiastic appreciation was what I’d expected for my do-goodery, thinking how I’d feel if someone reunited me with the expensive handheld computer on which all my unbacked-up photos, as well as the rest of my life was stored. A damp squib thank you was not what I’d planned for, but it’s what I got. My mind of course immediately stepped in to tell me that next time I should just leave the bloody phone in the forest, and let them find it themselves.
  4. I stop halfway through my walk to feast on a few handfuls of delicious wild blackberries, picked straight from the bush. Half an hour later, my stomach is distended and tight, and for the rest of the walk, I feel queasy and uncomfortable. Either the rain (see point 2) didn’t sufficiently wash off the bugs and bacteria, or maybe the high levels of salicylate in the fruit are causing me a few hours of stomach cramps. Either way, dukkha
  5. After 12 miles of walking, I get into the station at Cowden, only to find that the 8 o’clock train has been cancelled, and the next train into London is an hour away. The stomach cramps are just starting to abate and I am feeling hungry. At this rate, I will now have to wait until 10:30 for dinner. 

And on it goes. These are not huge traumatic forms of suffering, just the usual, everyday-dukkha, the niggles, the jolts, the stuff that might easily be generated if you just stop reading this sentence and sit quietly for a moment. 

Try it. It won’t take long before your mind points out some kind of shortfall, some kind of gap between how you’d like things to be, and how they are, whether it’s in relation to your mood, or body, or relationships, or surroundings, or the tasks you’ve taken on today. Non-stop dukkha is how it goes, I’m afraid. But keep on reading for some suggestions of what to do with that. 

IMPERMANENCE

I’ve written more fully about impermanence here, but let’s stay with that walk and notice a few marks of impermanence along the way: 

  1. My energy levels wax and wane, as do my levels of bodily discomfort throughout the walk. There is not a single emotion, or sensation held within my body or mind that endures for the length of this 5-hour ramble. The majority of my perceptions lasts for seconds at a time, some like the blackberry-reaction endure for over an hour. But even there, the amount of physical discomfort and the ways in which it manifests (queasiness, stomach cramps, trapped wind) shifts every few seconds from noticeably uncomfortable, to background “noise”.
  2. The walk itself is impermanent, as is everything I come into contact with on the walk. While I am on it, I am fully engaged with the totality of the experience flooding into my senses: sights, sounds, interoceptive responses. But writing about it a day later, it may well have been a dream. Apart from a handful of memories, I cannot bring anything of the walk back with me into this moment. None of it lasts, neither good nor bad. 
  3.  My disgruntlement at the phone-person lasts, but only due to the words above re-awakening and re-minding me of the gap in what I expected and what I got. But in a few days time, I will have forgotten this incident too. And at some point, there’s a good chance that it will entirely disappear from my memory. 

CONTINGENCY

In buddhist literature, this is sometimes referred to as no-self, or non-self, but my understanding of this is that although we see ourselves as separate, self-determined entitites, our experience of the world is inextricably, at every moment of the day, shaped and circumscribed by our environment and life-context, as well as our life course up to this point, the weather, the people who populate our existence, and a million other factors that are not even a conscious part of our awareness. 

If you start to think about yourself in this contingent way, you soon realise that the story-of-me that we tell ourselves (here I am, going on a walk, on a Saturday afternoon, learning a poem, listening to an audiobook, enjoying the sights, sounds, and smells around “me”) is actually something much more mysterious and shaped-by-everything-that-is-not-me, which is to say shaped by my circumstances and surroundings rather than emerging directly out of my body and mind. 

Perceptually, a good analogy for this might be something like the Escheresque Rubin’s vase, where figure and ground get muddled the more we pay attention to the image: are the faces made possible by the vase, or the vase by the faces? 

Of course each shapes the other. Our environment impacts us in ways that we are often hardly aware of. After walking in drizzle and overcast weather for a while, when the rain abates and the sun comes out, I become a different person: lighter, more joyful, if only for a few paces before Impermanence sets in again, and I shift into another way of being. 

And this doesn’t just happen for us. Yesterday, I noticed that even the birds are “moved” or shaped by something as simple as sunlight. A moment before the sun came out, all was quiet. But as soon as sunshine broke through the clouds, rapturous birdsong rang out of the forest that I’d just passed through, sonically matching the uplift in mood that I’d been feeling, and who is to say we didn’t all feel a very similar buoyancy. Maybe even the trees, grass, and insects therein. For a few seconds, bathed in sunlight, we all became slightly different entities. 

WORKING WITH ALL OF THIS: A NOTING PRACTICE

So if you’re broadly speaking in agreement with this theory that all existence can be usefully understood as marked by three interlinked characteristics or seals, which we can either fight against or try to work with as best we can, how to make this happen? 

Here’s the practice, a very simple one that I’ve been trying out recently. Every time you notice some form of psychological or physical suffering, see if you can “seal it” with one of the above characteristics of existence: SUFFERING (aka distress/deficiency/disappointment), IMPERMANENCE, and CONTINGENCY. Often, all three are present, in which case you can designate what you’re experiencing with the SIC triple whammy. “Yeah, that’s some serious SIC there, dude” (or however you choose to acknowledge the presence of SIC).

Whichever of the three you notice, just label it, using one of three characteristics, and then see if that allows you to live more in accord with your environment and circumstance or not.

The three characteristics of existence in the order  I’ve presented them also perhaps adhere to the most frequent ways in which the mind becomes aware of them in consciousness. 

Some form of distress or unsatisfactoriness is usually picked up very quickly by the problem-finding/problem-solving mind as a form of SUFFERING  (irritation, disappointment, deficiency), or SHORTFALL: whether it’s having to stand in a long queue at Sainsbury’s, or not getting the response we might feel we need from a loved one. 

We notice this first characteristic right away, because that’s usually the part that hurts. And it hurts for a good reason: our minds are saying “Pay attention to this. This is not in sync with your wishes or needs. Maybe we can make it better or easier for you in some way?”

And yes, sometimes this problem-finding/problem-solving stance of the mind is genuinely helpful. Maybe I can find a quieter carriage of the train to read in, maybe I can find shelter under a tree when it begins to rain. But what to do when that suffering or shortfall cannot be eradicated, or avoided, or controlled in some way? What to do when your stomach is cramping and you’ve still got 6 miles to walk before you reach the train station – other than acknowledge what’s going on, and that there is  clearly a gap between what we want or were expecting, and what we actually get. Just acknowledge that, no more, no less, maybe with a simple word like “suffering” or “unsatisfactory” or “shortfall” – whatever works for you. 

I quite like using the pali word dukkha, just because it’s short and a tad brutal: the DU might as well be doo-doo, the KHA a stone in your shoe, or something worse (a scorpion?). Every time I say that word, it’s like acknowledging that life is often this way: you’re tramping along, just trying to get by, or get on with your environment or other people, and suddenly you step in a pile of shit that also harbours a scorpion’s nest. Welcome to the human condition.

Often, the recognition of SUFFERING, requires an accompanying recognition of the other three marks of existence, which are usually to be found somewhere in the mix. At times IMPERMANENCE is what we perceive first, either with or without DUKKHA. When my stomach gripes finally abated, I noted the  impermanence even of that painful phenomenon, and this was accompanied by the opposite of DUKKHA: SUKKHA (happiness, pleasure, ease)! Which of course only lasted for a few seconds before my mind went on to find fault with something else in my surroundings. 

Simply noting all of this and trying not to take it all so personally (CONTINGENCY noting helps a lot with this) can ease things a bit, or even substantially. Why not give it a go – you’ve got nothing to lose – and tell me what you think if you give this a try.

Categories
Feel Better Impermanence

This-Too-Shall-Pass Poems

Here are a few poems connected to this post on impermanence which I offer in the hope that one of these will speak to you, perhaps even to the point where you decide to learn it by heart and use it as a kind of prayer when feeling lost or upset.

DEATH WHISPERS

Death whispers
In my ear:
Live now,
For I am coming.

-Virgil

 

ANTI-AMBITION ODE

Is the idea to make a labyrinth
of the mind bigger? What’s the matter?
You still come out of the womb-dark
into the sneering court of the sun
and don’t know which turn to take.
So what? You’re made of twigs anyway.
You were on an errand but never came back,
spent too long poking something with a stick.
Was it dead or never alive?
Invisibility will slow down soon enough
for you to catch up and pull it over yourself.
No one knows what color the first hyena’s tongue
to reach you will be.
Or the vultures who are slow, careful unspellers.
So go ahead, become an expert in sleep or not,
either way you can live in a rose or smoke
only so long.
You will still be left off the list.
You will still be rain, blurry as a mouse.

-Dean Young

 

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
They may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door with kindness,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi

 

PRIMARY WONDER

Hours pass where I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; caps and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that
moment by moment it continues to be
sustained.

-Denise Levertov

 

A HINDU TO HIS BODY

Dear pursuing presence,
dear body: you brought me
curled in womb and memory.

Gave me fingers to clutch
at grace, at malice; and ruffle
someone else’s hair; to fold a man’s
shadow back on his world;
to hold in the dark of the eye
through a winter and a fear
the poise, the shape of a breast;
a pear’s silence, in the calyx
and the noise of a childish fist.

You brought me: do not leave me
behind. When you leave all else,
my garrulous face, my unkissed
alien mind, when you muffle
and put away my pulse

to rise in the sap of trees
let me go with you and feel the weight
of honey-hives in my branching
and the burlap weave of weaver-birds
in my hair.

-A. K. Ramanujan

 

AFTERNOON

When I was about to die
my body lit up
like when I leave my house
without my wallet.

What am I missing? I ask
patting my chest
pocket.

And I am missing everything living
that won’t come with me
into this sunny afternoon

—my body lights up for life
like all the wishes being granted in a fountain
at the same instant—
all the coins burning the fountain dry—

and I give my breath
to a small bird-shaped pipe.

In the distance, behind several voices
haggling, I hear a sound like heads
clicking together. Like a game of pool,
played with people by machines.

-Max Ritvo

 

HARD TO FACE

Death is hard to face
birth too
in between
decomposition.

Lousy to say the least.

Ill health anxiety & frustration all suck
as does despair disappointment humiliation.

Each and every hard to face moment is by
definition difficult including this one where
something pleasant is coming to an end and that
one where the unpleasant is starting up again.

Not getting what we want or need or had or hope
to have or hold onto & keep is hard to face.

In fact whichever way we get to inhabit
this being human takes us closer to the truth

our bodies sensations feelings
thoughts moods beliefs

are doors through which we cannot help but pass
leading into rooms where once again we find ourselves
bearing all of this with a sometimes heavy heart
whatever it is we feel right now that feels so very hard.

-Siddhārtha Gautama

 

ALL IS ARDOUR

All is ardour burning & blaze
Eye is ardour ear is ardour
nose lips tongue ardour
mind ardour body ardour
burning burning burning away.

Sound burning scent burning
taste burning touch burning
incandescent bone fires burning
burning pleasure burning pain
either neither burning away.

Feel the fire that burns through
this hour passion fire aversion
fire delusion fire all ablaze
birth and death & aging fires
burning burning burning away.

Contact feeling craving takes us
calls to the awakened soul
know then free your self from ardour
find some peace
while burning away.

-Siddhārtha Gautama

 

ONE ART

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Say it!) like a disaster

-Elizabeth Bishop

 

A MAN SAID TO THE UNIVERSE

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

-Stephen Crane

CHANGE

Change is the new,
improved
word for god,
lovely enough
to raise a song
or implicate
a sea of wrongs,
mighty enough,
like other gods,
to shelter,
bring together,
and estrange us.
Please, god,
we seem to say,
change us.

-Wendy Videlock

 

TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the sun:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck;
A time to hurt, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to scatter stones,
and a time to gather them together;
A time to embrace, and a time to hold back;
A time to gain, and a time to lose;
a time to save, and a time to use;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silent, and a time to speak;
A time of love, and a time of hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.

-Kohelet/Solomon

 

ENCOUNTER

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

-Csezlaw Milosz (Wilno, 1936)

 

WHEN DEATH COMES

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

-Mary Oliver

 

THE MANGER OF INCIDENTALS

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe.
By meaningless bulk, vastness without size,
power without consequence. The stubborn iteration
that is present without being felt.
Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon
and its physics. An endless, endless of going on.
No habitat where the brain can recognize itself.
No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.
The horror of none of it being alive.
No red squirrels, no flowers, not even weed.
Nothing that knows what season it is.
The stars uninflected by awareness.
Miming without implication. We alone see the iris
in front of the cabin reach its perfection
and quickly perish. The lamb is born into happiness
and is eaten for Easter. We are blessed
with powerful love and it goes away. We can mourn.
We live the strangeness of being momentary,
and still we are exalted by being temporary.
The grand Italy of meanwhile. It is the fact of being brief,
being small and slight that is the source of our beauty.
We are a singularity that makes music out of noise
because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness
and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

-Jack Gilbert

 

THE BRIGHT FIELD

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

-R.S. Thomas

 

STATIONS

It is an old story:
the ship that was here last night
gone this morning; love
here one moment not here
any more. Time with a reputation
for transience permanent
as the ring in the rock
on beaches that would persuade
us we are the first comers.
We have been here before
and failed, bringing creation
about our ears. Why
can we not be taught
there is no hill beyond this one
we roll our minds to the top
of, not to take off into
empty space, nor to be cast back down
where we began, but to hold the position
assigned to us, long as time
lasts, somewhere half-way
up between earth and heaven.”

-R.S. Thomas

 

MEASURE

Recurrences.
Coppery light hesitates
again in the small-leaved

Japanese plum. Summer
and sunset, the peace
of the writing desk

and the habitual peace
of writing, these things
form an order I only

belong to in the idleness
of attention. Last light
rims the blue mountain

and I almost glimpse
what I was born to,
not so much in the sunlight

or the plum tree
as in the pulse
that forms these lines.

-Robert Hass

 

PLACE

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

what for
not the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time

with the sun already
going down

and the water
touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing

one by one
over its leaves

WS Merwin

Categories
Buddhism Coping strategies Defusion Emotion Regulation Existential knots Feel Better Impermanence Mindfulness Obsessive thinking worry Worry

This Too Shall Pass?

“…and here’s a secret for you – everything beautiful is sad…gilded with impermanence…”
John Geddes

The Sufi tradition tells the story of a king who was surrounded by wise men. One morning, as they talked, the king was quieter than usual.
“What is wrong, Your Highness?” – asked one of the wise men.
“I’m confused,” replied the king. “At times I am overcome by melancholy, and feel powerless to fulfill my duties. At others, I am dizzy with all power I have. I’d like a talisman to help me be at peace with myself.”
The wise men – surprised by such a request – spent long months in discussion. In the end, they went to the king with a gift.
“We have engraved magic words on the talisman. Read them out loud whenever you are too confident, or very sad,” they said.
The king looked at the object he had ordered. It was a simple silver and gold ring, but with an inscription. Can you guess what was written on that silver and gold ring?

Sometimes, the most irritating thing we can hear from another person when we share our mental or physical distress with them is some variant on the intrinsic impermanence of all phenomena.

Although we all understand this concept philosophically, having it spelt out to us by another person can sometimes feel invalidating. As if to indicate that the genuine here-and-now feelings, body sensations, or thoughts I’m having are somehow illusory or inconsequential by dint of their transience. Sometimes with a client, but also with myself, I feel like the coach who shouts out to the boxer in the ring getting painfully pummelled: “Hang in there, Rocky! You may be having the stuffing knocked out of you now, but once you’re patched up and healed, you’ll be as good as new!”

It’s a different matter however when we bring this way of thinking to our own internal world with the hope of liberating us from some of the less helpful forms of suffering and entrapment that our language-facilitated psyches often land us with.

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.

When we get an email or text message from someone else however, we take into account the potential for change in that person between the act of committing a reading of their body sensations, thoughts, emotions to that written communication, and how they might be feeling now. Reading it a few hours later, we may recognise that this person could be in a different place altogether, either due to some form of self-care they embarked on (a nap, a walk, some peppermint tea), or just as a natural outcome of the fundamental impermanence of all phenomena, including tiredness and queasiness as bodily states.

Unfortunately, when the above reading gets served up by our minds, rather than a transient text message, it can sometimes appear in a way that a printed sign on a solid wooden post might catch our attention with its seemingly unarguable entreaty : “PATH HAZARDOUS DUE TO ICE – TAKE ALTERNATE ROUTE”.

The sign is maybe only appropriate for the day on which the suggestion was made, maybe even the month, or the whole winter of that year. But at some point, it will no longer act as a helpful indicator because the path will no longer be slippery and icy. And yet the sign doesn’t reflect when this happens, in the same way that our minds often fail to keep track of the moment-by-moment changes within us, noticing only significant peaks and troughs.

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.

GUILDENSTERN
Prison, my lord!

HAMLET
Denmark’s a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ
Then is the world one.

HAMLET
A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.

ROSENCRANTZ
We think not so, my lord.

HAMLET
Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.

We are all Hamlets in this regard. I get imprisoned by my thoughts a dozen times a day, how about you? Whenever I lose sight of the fact that thoughts are just thoughts, I’m cast into a bleak and airless cell. A kind of living death perhaps?

“To Taoism,” writes Alan Watts, “that which is absolutely still or absolutely perfect [i.e. rendered in language as a permanent fact] is absolutely dead. For without the possibility of growth and change there can be no Tao [i.e. the unconditional and unknowable source and guiding principle of all reality]. For there is nothing in the universe which is completely perfect or completely still; it is only in our minds that such concepts exist.”

I think when we take this on board in an experiential, “lived” way, this impermanence, this ever-changing, fluctuating nature of all phenomena inside us and outside us, can be incredibly liberating.

Let’s say someone you were counting on lets you down? Or it could be an experience you enjoyed the last time you had it, but not this time. Of course we’re disappointed. But if every phenomenon in our experience, material and immaterial, is fundamentally inconstant, impermanent, transient, why are we holding out for our fool’s paradise?

Well, that goes without saying: because the illusion of permanence and stability feels safer and more comforting. But it can also be devitalizing, ensnaring, and rife with suffering.

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?

Sometimes it might be enough to just use this reflection of transience in something like a this-too-shall pass mantra. Or if those words have lost their power by becoming over-memified and commodified (another good example of this: keep calm, and carry on) we may need to recite a small poem or prayer, like this verse recited at buddhist funerals, but also by monastics on a daily basis:

All things are impermanent.
They arise and then they pass away.
Having arisen they come to an end.
May we find peace by remembering this.

I also like these doleful lines from Dogen:

Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass,
your life is as brief as a flash of lightning.
Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment.

I find it interesting that Siddhartha’s last words according to the Mahāparinibbāna sutra are reported to be a variant of this teaching: “”Disciples, I tell you this: All conditioned things are subject to disintegration – strive on untiringly for your liberation.” This is not an encouragement to withdraw to a timeless, mystical now, but rather, as Stephen Batchelor explains “an unflinching encounter with the contingent world as it unravels moment to moment” and so “embark on a new relationship with the impermanence and temporality of life.”

In our Western tradition, we find a very similar message in Pyrrho’s Aristocles Passage. Wise men and women in all our recorded culture have focused on impermanence as being a very important door through which we need to pass to find peace in ourselves and the world. If we can only, even for a moment, take on the fact of our own impermanent sojourn in the timeframe of this one life allotted to us, take this on viscerally, as a lived experience, rather than as an idea (“Death whispers in my ear,”  Virgil reminds us, “Live now, for I am coming.”) then who knows what kind of living we might be able to squeeze out of the lives we’ve won in the sperm-egg lottery.

The poet Ron Padgett comes at this truth from a Christian perspective in his poem The Joke:

THE JOKE

When Jesus found himself
nailed to the cross,
crushed with despair,
crying out
“Why hast thou forsaken me?”
he enacted the story
of every person who suddenly realizes
not that he or she has been forsaken
but that there never was
a forsaker,
for the idea of immortality
that is the birthright of every human being
gradually vanishes
until it is gone
and we cry out.

Sometimes though, this self-imposed reflection isn’t enough, and we might need to do some more intensive defusing and unhooking.

Here are a couple of visualisations to play around with, using fairground rides to help us unhook from impermanent/conditional thoughts-emotions-sensations that entrap us through language, language rendering them as unconditional, immutable and imperishable. Don’t feel you have to do them exactly as I’ve envisaged. Once you’ve got the idea, make one of them work in a way that suits your imagination.

1/ This Too Shall Pass as a MERRY-GO-ROUND:

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.

Now walk around it and see if you can find the one that’s tormenting you. It might be horse-shaped, or it might look like something else. See if it can reveal itself to you.

When you find it, notice it’s colour, shape, texture, how large or small it is. Notice where you might position yourself on it or next to it if you were to go on this ride.

Now deliberately imagine yourself stepping off the platform.

Find a place a good 10 or 15 metres away where you can still see the merry-go-round or carousel, but it doesn’t take up your whole view. Notice what else is there in the park, see if maybe there’s a ride you might even want to go on.

Take a few deep breaths and get your bearings.

When you’re ready, throw the switch and let the carousel begin to spin again, you may even imagine it spinning really fast so that it becomes a kind of spinning top and takes off into space.

Or you may start feeling queasy just at the spin on it right now, and so after glimpsing your bugbear every few seconds whirling around and around and around. See if you can watch it until you start to feel a little bored with the sight, and are ready for a refreshment or some other distraction.

2/ This Too Shall Pass as a FERRIS WHEEL:

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.

Get a sense of how fast the wheel is turning. It may be moving very, v…e…r…y slowly. You may want to join yourself for a moment on the ride and let your shamed/hurt/frustrated self hear some words it needs to hear from a more soothing, reassuring part of you.

Breathe. See if you can surrender to the pod, or seat, something that symbolises your upset: a photograph, a screenshot of a text message, an object.

Then claiming your hurt and upset self, perhaps holding its hand the way you might a scared or sad child or small animal, watch as the wheel begins to inch its way upwards and the pain inside “your” seat or pod, like everyone else’s pain in their seats, begins to “pass”.

Not disappearing but slowly, maybe v…e…r…y slowly increasing its distance between you and this thought-feeling-situation bundled up as a vexing hurt.

When the wheel reaches its apex, a hundred metres up or more, invite a bird or some other winged creature to fly into the pod and take the item you’ve left there away with it.

Imagine what the bird might do with this object. Perhaps line its nest, or bury it, or eat it (birds like text messages and photographs, they feed off them like sunflower seeds). Maybe even imagine the item passing through the bird’s intestines, this hurt of yours transformed into excrement and eradicated over trees and hills and fields full of wheat ready for harvest.

3) This Too Shall Pass as a BUS, TUBE, TRAIN or AIRPLANE:

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.

Perhaps today’s train is destined for a place of ABANDONMENT or NON-RECIPROCATION (either receiving or giving). Often the destination, the final stop on the line is one of too-much or too-little.

Too much of a certain type of interaction with another human animal, or our environment, and thus a feeling of overwhelm, or too little which then results in a feeling of deprivation, a foresaken emptiness, loneliness and alienation.

Take a moment to consider whether you want to ride this train all the way to its final stop. If not, especially if you’ve made this journey before and found it a fruitless one, you may decide to let the train pull into the station, load it up with all your hurt thoughts and feelings, and then let it depart.

Watch it go, check the platform, are there still thoughts and feelings amassing in quantities that threaten to arrest your next meaningful action? You may have to stay on the platform and let those passengers fill the carriage of the next train into the station.

Identify each one as they climb aboard, like Noah counting and tagging every creature that climbed aboard the ark. “OK, here’s a thought that [this person/situation] is X. Here the feeling of […] again. Here’s the desire to do x, y, z, which probably wouldn’t help matters but…” Repeat until the platform has a bunch of hangers-on who don’t want to pass, don’t want to go. Let them if need be accompany you as you step away from the platform and focus on something meaningful and interesting calling for your attention.

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 learning by heart one of these poems and reciting it as a more extended mantra when feeling trapped. That’s something I do, and I find it helps.