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.
—
Start by-hearting poems and soon you’ll find yourself in a conversation with someone on Twitter wanting to know what technique you’ve been using to commit your 12,000 words of verse to memory.
“Have you tried the method of loci?” enquires Ian (“Poet, Artist, and Writer. @UCBerkeley alum slummin’ in Dublin”) stopping one May morning to inspect a fresh rabbit dropping otherwise known as a tweet in which I’ve mentioned my project.
The Method of Loci (MoL for all you budding cognitive neuroscientists out there) is a mnemonic device that uses visual imagery to link together a series of tangentially related bits of data in a way that the human mind can contain more information than you would expect this lump of meat we call our brains might hold. Data such as a portion of the trillion digits following a decimal place which is used to represent π is an example of this. Milton’s Paradise Lost is another.
The ardent Memory Master or Mnemonist will allocate information such as numbers or words to the loci (locations) of a familiar route or maybe the layout of rooms in a building she knows well, or even to objects and furniture in those rooms. Thereafter, by mentally retracing the route, the Mnemonist will have a series of retrieval cues for this data, “so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves” as the Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero explains in De Oratore, a text that first introduced us to this technique 2,000 years ago.
The reason Ian is asking about MoL is not because MoL is particularly useful for remembering a poem. A poem is not a series of random digits or facts, it already has a somewhat cohesive shape and music to it, and even a specifically poetic narrative which might assist us with our memorising.
But as with most exchanges on Twitter, Ian’s main purpose for enquiring about MoL is as a pretext for him to showboat his own use of MoL to memorise Merwin’s 12-line poem Rain Light, which seems to me a bit like using a jackhammer to crack a walnut. I don’t say this to Ian however because Poetry Twitter, unlike the rest of Twitter, is a predominantly supportive and benign environment, populated for the most part by time-wasting neurotics and blatherskites, myself and Ian being two lesser-known illustrations of this, all of us publicly tolerating each other whilst pro-socially backslapping our inconsequential and largely unread outputs in prose and especially in verse.
Of all the memorisation techniques out there, MoL doesn’t seem especially useful when it comes to learning poetry. Not even Akira Haraguchi, who has memorised over 100,000 digits of pi uses MoL. Instead he turns those 100,000 digits into a kind of poem! He does this by associating each number with a syllable and then creates poem-like narratives from the words produced by those syllables.
“I have created about 800 stories, whose lead characters are mostly animals and plants,” he explains. “For the first 100 digits of pi, I have crafted a story about humans. Here is how the first 50 digits, starting with 3.14, reads: “Well, I, that fragile being who left my hometown to find a peace of mind, is going to die in the dark corners; it’s easy to die, but I stay positive.”
His quest to learn as many of the pi digits is not that dissimilar to my own more diminutive challenge of memorising 100 poems. For both of us it is a spiritual practice at best, but also a time-dissipator, a wordy or digity mantra, helping us to focus our wayward minds by calling into being, if only as an echoing abstraction, the whole known and unknown universe, including that of consciousness, through a rotating prayer of atoms and spinning electrons, circumvolving planets and galaxies. Which in one way is wonderful, and in another way completely nuts. Haraguchi’s family are not interested in pi, and my family are not interested in poetry. They see his quest rather, as no doubt do mine, as “an enormously harmless hobby”.
But I think R.S. Thomas would have appreciated Haraguchi’s quixotic focus of interest, which also chimes so well with this poem.
My experience of learning poetry by heart is that the relationship between the words to be learned and the arbitrary psychogeography one might choose for those words to be associated with, functions antithetically to traditional MoL. Often when I am reciting certain poems, the landscapes I had unspooling around me whilst I learnt the poem return as confederates to the words that once inhabited them.
In my mind, Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things will always be associated with the river Chess near Latimer Park farm. Similarly James Wright’s Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota reminds me of walking on a narrow path, hedges on both sides near Leyhill Common, unaware that the route ahead was going to be closed by roadworks, resulting in half an hour of scramble with a small dog in my arms over 3 metre high temporary mesh-fencing panels in a bid to break out. I don’t know why I am telling you this. Maybe just to reiterate that I’m not at the moment using any formal system for learning the 10 or 12,000 words that will eventually make up my 100 poem Poetry Liturgy.
How I learn a poem is like this. I read the first line or two. I repeat it, I repeat it, I repeat it. I think about it, savour it, play with different ways of saying it, often imagine what is being presented a visual image. I repeat the line again and again. I then add another line and do the same. I go back to the first line and notice I’ve forgotten that, so I begin again: repeating, savouring, thinking, visualising, trying out different combinations of emphasis and articulation. I do this for a while until I have a few lines going. I then add a bit more, until maybe I’ve got what feels like one semantic unit. In Bright Field, that first unit might be:
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it.
I start to notice the unique physicality of each clause, as you might recognise the ways in which another human being walking alongside you uses their limbs, and how those limbs are shaped.
Thomas’s language is pared down to the bone: it is taut, and wiry and matter-of-fact. You see this especially in “and gone my way / and forgotten it”. The discursive mind wants to add other words to these two clauses, perhaps repeating the auxiliary verb “have” in the first line alongside an adverb to make “and have gone on my way”. The mind is always doing this when learning poems: coming up with more fleshed-out, sociably padded additions (“and forgotten about it”?). The poem reminds its learner again and again, this one certainly does, that it is not a Barbie Doll or Action Man to be dressed up or prettified, but rather exists as a Hepworth or Moore, or Giacometti statue exists: with only the most necessary, elemental contours present to us. Which works especially well for this poem as so much of it is about working out what really matters in our life: those transitory but intrinsically meaningful illuminations which disturb, often serendipitously, the grinding mundanity of being alive.
So I work on that initial unit until each line comfortably cues the next in my memory. Whilst doing this, my mind might wander, so that when I come back I find only a few words have remained. I might get annoyed at myself at this point, at my blob-of-meat mind and start all over again. Because I have already introduced the words before, spent some time with them, the second time around they are more swiftly retainable. I then try and work on the next semantic unit, and see if I can solder it in some way to the first.
But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it.
“OK, so there’s a contrasting preposition here,” I show myself, “remember that the next time you come to the end of the first unit. Notice also,” I tell myself, “the alliterations “pearl of great price”, also hurrying/hankering and Moses/miracle.” Alliterations are a godsend to the poetry mnemonist, as are all conjunctions, often rendering two into one.
While I am caught up with the physicality of each line, its structure and articulation, the act of repetition begins to drive the import of the words deeper and deeper in my mind and heart. These underscore key lines like an exclamatory, concordant YES!!!, a euphoric primal punctuation of core understanding.
But that was the
pearl of great price, [YES!!!]
(I decide to really stress the “that” in this line)
the one field
(ditto with “one”)
that had
treasure in it [YES!!!]
I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it.
[YES!!!]
[YES!!!]
[YES!!!]
This is what it feels like (from the inside) to learn by heart a poem that you love. Perhaps, not by mistake, all those ecstatic YESes start sounding like the soundtrack to a disincarnate porn film. And maybe this is not a glib analogy. For just as evolution has shaped us to feel most apropos (literally, to purpose) when we are feeding the animal body, fucking or being fucked with the animal body, moving it in pursuit or play, so the “treasure” of committing words to the heart, words that are closely in sync with our own experience, and maybe even numbers as in Haraguchi’s pi-quest, feels very much on par with the Peak Experiences of both transcendental religious worship and sex, as sketched out by Maslow about 50 years ago.
Peak experience, of which this poem not only seeks to give us a taste of, but also exemplifies in itself and as itself can be described through a number of different variables. Some of these include:
- a disorientation in time and space, alongside a non-comparing acceptance of everything, as if everything were equally important
- an ego-transcending, self-forgetful, unselfish vision of the natural world and our place in it
- a self-validating, self-justifying perception which carries its own intrinsic value with it lending itself to the operational definition of the statement that “life is worthwhile” or “life is meaningful.”
Pretty cool, huh? Which is why I continue to spend at last an hour, 10% of each awake-and-conscious day, “giving all that I have” to possess the 100 words or that make up poems like this one.
Specifically, what I think I give to the process is patience, or an attempt at patience (not my strongest suit), which is perhaps more about tolerating the Sisyphean frustration of forgetting, accompanied by a kind of relentlessly romantic stick-to-itiveness. Stick-to-itiveness, resilience, grit, is a virtues that I possess for only a two or three things in my life. But maybe that is enough to reconcile me to the burden of being alive.
I’m not yet sure if it is enough to take me into a consciously transcendent state akin to the utopian promise of heaven alluded to at the end of the poem. Non-theist that I am, I would prefer to perceive that illuminated eternity as available to me intermittently when I am in the flow of reciting words that have become, through thousands of repetitions, as germane to my lived experience as a glass of water when thirsty, or food/sex when hungry for it. It doesn’t always feel that way, but when it does, this reinforces my desire to keep on doing this.
But like all peak experiences: as the moniker suggests, the only way to know it, is to experience it. Which is why, evangelical-like, I urge you when you’ve finished reading these words to find a poem you love and start learning it by heart.
This excerpt from Yuval Noah Harari’s wonderful book Sapiens manages to distil a great deal of wisdom and discernment about our quixotic quest for feeling good. I think it also points to the challenges that we face as psychotherapists in working with clients’ assumptions (which are also our own!) about striving for happiness and well-being: highlighting how these assumptions have fundamental cultural and historical foundations which we rarely question, so intrinsic are they to the symbolic worlds in which we live. 
“Last week my friend Mishka and I, out of idle curiosity and a wistful nostalgia for a popular sedative of the 1970s that neither of us ever even got the opportunity to resist the temptation to take, conducted an Internet search for “do they still make ’ludes.” Before we could finish typing the words do they the search engine autofilled: still make quaaludes. I felt a fond affinity for all depraved humanity.
This isn’t exactly schadenfreude; it’s something more complicated for which, as far as I know, there isn’t a German compound, but if there were it’d be something like Mitleidfreude, compassion-joy—compassion in the literal sense of suffering with. It’s the happiness, or at least the consolation, of knowing that things are tough all over. The other morning I heard the guy in the apartment next to mine utterly lose his shit: screaming obscenities, venting insane rage in the way that people only do when they’re yelling at inanimate objects, a tone I know well. Shortly afterward he and I both left the building at the same time, and I saw him standing on the subway platform, to all appearances just another bored commuter waiting for the L train. I alone knew that five minutes earlier he had been out of his mind with psychotic rage. Then I realized that this might well be true of everyone else on the platform. It’s heartening to know that everyone else is doing as badly as I am—all of us secretly screaming, pooping and weeping, googling ’ludes.
But, if you’re lucky, you graduate up the Maslovian pyramid to increasingly better problems, until eventually you get to confront the insoluble problem of being a person in the world. Even if we were someday to solve all our problems of economics and governance, people would still be unlucky in love, lonesome and bored, and lie awake worrying about the future and regretting stupid things they said in middle school. Utopia will still have forms to fill out, passive-aggressive bureaucrats, broken pipes and cavities, taxes, ads, assholes and bad weather. Time will pass without mercy. We will die. It will suck.
What to do when you love 
I often think about Kim learning that Seuss poem, line by line, day after day, week after week. Did she learn it to recite at a special party for a friend perhaps? Was this her 
I understand all this, and yet, I still find myself crossing the road to avoid these sections, as Willie does himself when Sam hovers into view. Can’t we just stay in the weird, heady realms of abstract language, in metaphor, and analogy where the rest of the poem resides? That lonely,” telephoneless, blue / Green crevasse” of our own heads, where we too “can’t get out”, other than through language, which lets us down with its ready-made phrases and silence in the face of ineffable suffering or joy?
What makes Malcolm Mooney’s plight so moving to me? Many things: his attempt to trail some language, slug-like, across a blank page, which still remains blank even after he has smeared his weary words over it – a literary version of 
It is this tension between risky, vulnerable connection and a safer insularity that makes this poem so moving. Graham struggled, as we all do, with the former. In a letter he wrote from the orthopedic ward of the Royal Cornwall Infirmary to Moncrieff Williamson after a drunken fall (“I walked 5 miles into St Ives to attend a birthday party and coming home I managed (don’t ask me how) to fall off a roof 30 feet and land on concrete”), he relates: “All Art is the result of trying to say to an other one exactly what you mean. Because we are all each so different from each other inside (different even from good friends we think we are extremely sympathetic to), one of the things we try again and again is to establish communication.What a stuffy pompous lecture. FINIS.” 
I like these (more hopeful?) words by Neil Corcoran in his essay on Graham in “English Poetry Since 1940” where he remarks that Graham’s “solipsism is mitigated by the sense that consciousness becomes most alive in these written exchanges between writer and reader, that the most alert self-consciousness may be created and shared within the poem’s language, so that the poem is always dialogue, community, intertext, ‘The longed-for, loved event, / To be by another aloneness loved”.” 
Red please: maybe a Rioja, a Primitivo or something equally gutsy. Strip away the almost 10,000 year of vinoculture and we see the substance, like many that follow, as predominantly a time-dissolver and a pain-killer. It is also a self-cure that takes us beyond “the two worlds” of oppositional valence, such as 
The part of London where I live became very Polish in the aughts and then Romanian in the last 5 – 10 years, so we are all now connoisseurs of the East-European beers that have rapidly taken over in price and quality the usual Stella-Carlsberg-Budweiser triumvirate to be found in all cornershops. The East-European snacks that are also sold alongside the beers are not particularly good though, tasting often of sawdust and poverty, but the beer from these ex-communist countries is fantastic: Timisoreana, Tyskie, Zywiec, Lech, and others. 
For the tonic water, can I have mine with the 
I eat fewer of these than I used to. I once had a half-a-packet-a-day chocolate digestives habit. Occasionally I’ll allow myself some fig rolls, or a small pack of shortbread which I’ll devour over the course of two days, but for the most part, I dreamily walk down the biscuit aisle in a state of self-denial. It is an enchanted kingdom that I rarely visit. If I want a biscuity snack, I’ll slather sugar-flavoured-fruit (jam) onto some crackers, or honey: that magical substance transmogrified through the digestive systems of bees. Floral vomit. Honey is bee vomit. You know that, right? 
Even though I am a vegetarian and shudder at the idea (ethically, but also on a physical, disgust level) of eating a substance made from the mashed up bones of cattle then mixed with sugar and flavourings, I avoid that part of my brain when stealing from the pick-and-mix at the supermarket. To buy it would be to make official the fact that I am eating something that I morally and digestively abhor. It’s like the kosher-following Jew who only eats bacon when it’s hidden in some kind of bun and served to him by an anonymous, untraceable third party. 
The love affair is more or less over. It works now as a memory-repository, an extension for my brain, and something to fidget with. Fairly often I will sit flicking between apps, just opening and closing them down, in the hope that something, or someone will say something interesting or engaging aimed directly at me. This happens fairly rarely, but then I don’t really say anything interesting and engaging directed at a specific individual myself either. So it’s not like I’m actively inviting this sort of social engagement. Sometimes though I broadcast a thought or an essay like this one into the river of social media, so as to hear myself speak, but also for fear of not having a voice. This is a sufficient salve for the former need, and insufficient for the latter. I don’t have enough followers to have a voice – about 10,000 seems to be the point where one starts being noticed and talked about, which nowadays means retweeted.
I am telling an African-American poet about my love of Wallace Stevens when she gently wonders what my thoughts are on Stevens’ racism. At the 1952 National Book Awards banquet, Stevens seeing Gwendolyn Brooks arriving at the ceremony allegedly said, “Who let the coon in?”. He also referred to his own poetry as “like decorations at a nigger’s funeral.” And that’s just for starters.
Because that is who wrote the Bible, red-faced homophobic fundamentalist preacher man: a flawed, pint-sized human being who probably wouldn’t, orcouldn’t say boo to a ghost. A little man belonging to a small tribe of monotheistic wanderers who thought: “Because I feel so small and insignificant, what can I do to exalt myself and my tribe above all others tribes?”
I often tell the story of my exile at the age of 15 from my homeland (my childhood Garden of Eden?) as a tragic one which impacts me to this day in areas where I struggle the most, especially those to do with social confidence. But I’m also aware, and not devaluing in any way, the difficulty of that migration. Indeed my tragic story could be reconfigured as a comic one or as a hopeful, life-affirming bildungsroman. I’m working on those versions, thought my mind still gravitates towards the Tragic Version of events – minds seem to have a habit of doing that.
Poetry, perhaps like no other art form, 
And the only way I know for doing this, is to have these 62, and counting, 
I was born and received my primary education in South Africa, emigrating to the UK in 1986 at the age of 15. After University, I worked in Italy for a number of years whilst also attempting to write a number of (unpublished) novels 🙂
Also, because pain in any shape or form is so uh painful, our suffering Blinkered Minds will often try to avoid this pain in a very intuitive way.
He’s right though.
I’m also relieved to have seen and avoided my neighbour – the one I had an argument with with last week who I spotted walking down another aisle. Whew, and another dopamine hit of pleasure!
But maybe that evening I eat the whole tub of Hagen Daz as I am wont to do and drink most of the wine and feel sick and full of self-loathing.
In many ways, I love being the butt of someone’s joke, I love to be duped and fooled. Love magic tricks, especially of the Derren Brown variety that always reveal something profound to us about ourselves and others. As well as entertaining us in the process of fooling us. 
But the ultimate April Fool is the fool our minds make of us on a daily basis. Never out of pure malice – for how can a lump of meat, the brain, sitting between our ears bear malice towards us? Rather, as a function of their problem-solving, pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding programming. Every time my mind tells me that the reason so-and-so didn’t respond to my text message is because a) they don’t care about me or what I’ve written to them, or b) they don’t fundamentally like me, or whatever other narrative they come up with, and I buy into that and suffer. Again: 
I often talk in sessions about FUSION, and how our problem-solving minds can very quickly and easily get ‘hooked’ on an extremely painful and upsetting thoughts and beliefs.
OK. I’m now going to take you through a whole stack of different defusion techniques so you can discover which ones best help you to unhook. Some of them may seem a bit weird or wacky, but please give them a go and see what happens. In each case, I’ll ask you first to fuse with the thought (i.e. buy into it, give it all your attention, believe it as much as you can), so you can get yourself well and truly hooked. Then I’ll help you to unhook again.
You’ve probably heard the quotation, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’ This saying succinctly reminds us that words can have an enormous influence over our behaviour. For example, books, scriptures and manifestos can, in certain situations, shape entire nations far more powerfully than violence, bloodshed and warfare.
Improving our lives requires committed action. That often means learning new skills or working on old ones. And obviously, if we want to become skilful at anything, we need to practise. This goes for psychological skills as well as physical ones. We can’t develop good defusion skills without practice. And we all need these skills, because the reason-giving machine is here to stay. It’s not going to suddenly transform into your own personal cheerleader or motivational guru. It’s going to keep on telling you multiple versions of the ‘I can’t do it’ story. So are you willing to practise the techniques listed above?
At the moment, I wake up to jackhammers and drills. 
We need to skilfully differentiate between what is in our power and what is not. And that very differentiation happens to be the first thing we read about in a book of collected discourses issuing from the lips and the mind of a crippled, Roman slave named Epictetus who lived 2000 years ago. I like to imagine him as a slightly more philosophical and Latin-spouting version of 
What is the human mind? Why are we different than the birds flying outside our windows? And why do we suffer so? These kinds of questions have puzzled humankind for eons. Here are a couple of ideas that might help as you work with your own suffering in therapy. 
Our minds work symbolically. The word “symbol,” comes from an ancient Greek root, “bol,” which means “to throw.” Combined with “sym” (which means “the same”), a symbol literally means “thrown as the same.” When our minds throw words at us, those words appear to be much the same as the things to which they refer. Which is why if I use the word BOLLOCKS in my punning title, your mind can’t help but see me throwing a slur on something, as well as maybe finding a pair of crude graffiti testicles surfacing in your imagination, or some other form of other mental chatter. Whatever your mind is telling you about the above title is just a story about a word that doesn’t even exist. Maybe the person writing this (me), just wanted to grab your attention through his dense exposition. But once our minds get hold of language and start relating it to other things, who knows where they might go!
As best we can tell, the ability to derive relations like this is probably only about 75,000 to 100,000 years old, and in highly elaborated forms it is much younger than that. Written language marks a real transition in the ability to relate events in this way and it is only five- to ten-thousand-years old, depending on what you count as written symbols. By animal standards, humans are frail, slow-moving creatures. We do not have the strength of gorillas, the teeth of tigers, the speed of cheetahs, or the venom of snakes. Nevertheless, over the last 10,000 years we have taken over the planet. Why is that? There’s a strong chance that it’s got something to do with our abilities to use language.
In normal problem-solving situations, when there is something we don’t like, we figure out how to get rid of it and we take actions to do that. If we don’t like dirt on the floor, we get out the vacuum cleaner. If we don’t like a leaky roof, we fix it. The human approach to solving problems can be stated as, 
This same process applies to emotions. If you try not to feel a bad feeling, such as pain, not only do you tend to feel it more intensely, but previously neutral events also become irritating. Any parent knows this. If the kids are irritating you by making too much noise and you are trying to ignore it, the noise just becomes more and more irritating and, eventually, even little annoyances can cause you to explode.
It’s likely you’ve been using a verbally guided “fix-it” mentality to find a solution for the causes of your suffering. If you’re reading this pages, it’s also likely that your attempts haven’t been entirely successful. The coping techniques you’ve developed to fix or counteract the pain you struggle with belong to the same class of language-based, problem-solving behaviours described in the exercises above.
Language creates suffering in part because it leads to experiential avoidance.Experiential avoidance is the process of trying to avoid your own experiences (thoughts, feelings, memories, bodily sensations, behavioral predispositions) even when doing so causes long-term behavioral difficulties (like not going to a party because you’re a social phobic, or not exercising because you feel too depressed to get out of bed). Of all the psychological processes known to science, experiential avoidance is one of the worst.
In your review of your worksheet, you may have found that your scores in the “Short-term effectiveness” column are relatively high, while your scores in the “Long-term effectiveness” column are relatively low. This is a dangerous trap because short-term effects are far more reinforcing than long-term effects, and these problem-solving strategies do work in most areas of life for a short time. The coping techniques you’ve developed to combat your anger, anxiety, or depression probably do cause these feelings to go away for a short while; otherwise, you wouldn’t engage in them. But how powerful is the long-term effect? How much do your coping strategies really change your condition in the long run?
Unfortunately, these processes are not easy to control because they are so tightly linked to our normal use of language. People tend to “live in their minds,” that is, to engage with the world on the basis of these verbal processes. Living in your mind can be likened to riding a train. A train has its own tracks and it goes where they lead. That’s fine when the tracks are going where you want to go. But if you were traveling in the direction you want to be going, you probably would never have stopped to read this page. If the life you want to live is “off the tracks,” then you have only one option: you must learn how to get off the train and onto another track…at least sometimes.
When were feeling bad and wanting to feel better, perhaps the most important distinction we can make for ourselves is in keeping clear the difference between pain and suffering. The difference can be summarised in the following adage which you may have come across at some point: 
Maybe an example will help. I hate needles. I’m probably not alone in this, but at times this aversion has verged on a kind of phobia. And like any phobia, it has often got in the way of me doing the things I need to do to take care of myself. Like going to the dentist for regular check-ups. In fact, I didn’t go to the dentist from 2010-2017, because…I hate needles! Following on from that rule I’ve set for myself (Thou shall hate needles!) I didn’t go to the dentist until the pain of toothache overcame my unwillingness to tolerate the pain of a needle being pushed into my gums. 
Let’s look at how suffering works. My problem with needles is, if I really think carefully about it, a Suffering Problem, rather than a pain one.
Here’s how I suffer, and perhaps this is how you suffer too. I take the pain of your dismissal, the pain of you not being sensitive to my anxiety, of not validating me and my issues with needles, and I add stuff to that. The stuff I add (often unconsciously) is Suffering. 
I suffer because my mind/brain is “designed” to try and solve internal problems the way it solves external ones. If your front door is jamming, you look at the problem, diagnose why the door is jamming, and then come up with a solution to fix it. The only problem is that internal, existential, emotional issues, don’t respond to our brains Jim-Will-Fix- It strategies in the same way. This is because the most sophisticated technology we have for “fixing” our internal problems or pain is with something called language! All those thoughts, beliefs, internal conversations and monologues, memories, beating ourselves up, threatening to beat others up, could not occur without language. We’re very particular in this way. 
So how do we experience as “cleanly” as possible whatever dose of psychological or physical pain that is next coming our way without getting trapped into having a double dose of suffering alongside it? Here’s a five step process which is easy to do and remember. But it does require practice, until it becomes second nature. Which is where the acronym helps. 
Think of something a situation or a conversation you had with someone, or just something ongoing in your life that is causing you pain. Make a note of your pain on a piece of paper or on your phone. 
In this step, you set the intention to allow yourself to feel some of this pain without reaching for the jar of suffering to start slathering all extra pain on top. Think for a moment how willing are you right now (out of 10) to just experience the pain as it is, without any additional thoughts, analysis, or “stories” about the pain?
In step three, you offer understanding and compassion to yourself for 
Of course your brain will probably ignore you and keep on spinning its stories. So you then make another gentle note of how the invitation to suffer is being delivered in the shape of a THOUGHT, an IMAGE/VIDEO, an INTERNAL CONVERSATION or MONOLOGUE, a MEMORY, or INTENTION, and then once again, you say: ENOUGH! STOP!
Sometimes, when my brain is really set on suffering, and I’m doing something which doesn’t require my full attention, so that my brain can focus entirely on the suffering story, I might need to note and say stop/enough again and again and again. The STOP is especially important when our Suffering Minds are trying to get us to carry out some Actions (revenge, rebuttal, rehash). A Suffering Mind is so skilled at finding ways to convince us that writing an angry email or text will really help us to suffer less, that often, before we know it, we end up doing the very thing that will only make us suffer more. In my experience, lashing out and blaming another human being for the ways they have triggered in me pain, only makes me suffer more. Because then I have to deal with either the anxiety of how they will respond, or the unpleasantness of their defensive words, or whatever their Suffering Brain spins the story to try and make it better for themselves. 
There’s a wonderful poem by Mary Oliver where she talks about pain, suffering, and our relation to it.
If you kick a dog, it will yelp and run away. If you kick it regularly, any sign of your arrival eventually will produce fear and avoidance behavior in the dog by means of the process called “conditioning.” But so long as you are out of the picture and are not likely to arrive, the dog is unlikely to feel or show significant anxiety. People are quite different. As young as sixteen months or even earlier, human infants learn that if an object has a name, the name refers to the object. So what, you might say?
Psychological pain hurts, by definition. But it does more than that. Often pain holds you back from living the kind of life you want to live. There is no question that a person with a panic disorder would rather not experience the feeling of extreme fear, because it is so unpleasant. But that discomfort is compounded by the fact that the panic seemingly gets in the way of living itself.
As soon as Charlie sits down, I can tell that he’s feeling a little bit “off” today. 
I am listening to 
“There is no reason to be miserable in one’s free time when the possibility of matching challenges and skills is under one’s own control and is not limited by the obligatory parameters of work. Yet, at present, most leisure time is filled with activities that do not make people feel happy or strong.”
I have for many years been haunted by a Zen parable about a man being chased by a tiger. Here it is in full:
The character in this Zen fable models different forms of acceptance. There is the 
Recently I’ve been thinking about the word “grant” in the Serenity Prayer. “God, 
What Gail is struggling to accept, and she is not alone in this, is desire and longing: for a partner, for more light in a day, for consumer goods that don’t come with an environmental price tag. “From the urgent way lovers want each other to the seeker’s search for truth, all moving is from the mover,” writes Rumi. “Every pull draws us to the ocean.” And what does the ocean desire, other than to be, and to be fully itself, expressive of itself, inhabiting the space it needs to inhabit? This is a primal desire, and one which moves everything in existence, including us. The same universal force of attraction that gathers atoms into molecules and holds solar systems spinning in galaxies also joins sperm with eggs and makes us swipe left and right on each other on our dating apps.
The Latin root of the word desire, “desidus,” means “away from a star.” One way to interpret this is that stars are the energetic source of all life and an expression of pure awareness. This aliveness and wakefulness is what we long for most deeply—we long to belong to our star, to realize our own true nature. Yet because our desires habitually narrow and fixate on what by nature passes away, we feel “away from our star,” away from the life, awareness and love that is the essence of who we are. Feeling apart from the source of our being, we identify ourselves with our wants and with the ways that we try to satisfy them.
Willa Cather tells us, “There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.” We can honour desire as a life force, but still see how it causes suffering when it takes over our life. Our natural hunger for food can become an ungovernable craving for food—ice cream, sweets, potato chips—comfort food or food to numb our feelings. Our longing for sex and affection can become an anguished dependency on another human being to define and please us. Our need for shelter and clothing can turn into insatiable greed, compelling us to possess three houses and closets full of unworn shoes. Our fundamental longing to belong and feel loved becomes an insistent craving for substitutes.
Hadley and Hayley, both in their late-40s, met on a dating app. They chatted on the phone about beets and their shared appreciation of Dan Savage, and soon were spending as much time as they could together. They would speak on the phone almost every night, text each other throughout the day. Both of them would often announce to the other how fortunate they felt for having met. 
One way of understanding what happened between Hadley and Hayley is to return to the psychoanalytic concept of 
What we see happening with Hadley and Hayley, and indeed with all couples, are times when one or both experience some serious bumping of V-spots. This is Lachkar’s term for our most sensitive area of emotional vulnerability, tantamount to an archaic injury that becomes aroused when one’s partner hits an emotional raw spot.
I often prescribe Derek Walcott’s “
What I’m calling the blahs may be the blues, or maybe a cousin of the blues. It presents itself as a general abatement of interest, gratification, and faith in the offerings of the world. It is a state in which the monotony of equivalence holds sway. Roethke 
Because we are pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding creatures, for most of us, there is going to be something in our lives, maybe even a series of things that we develop a somewhat addictive relationship with.
The next time you are assailed by an addictive thought, or urge (“If I don’t go and get a glass of wine in me as soon as I finish work today, I’m done for!”) here’s something you might like to try.
Two books which have been useful to me in this consideration are Marie Kondo’s Spark Joy and a Shoukei Matsumoto’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind. As ever, cheeky John Crace has taken the mick out of both titles in his 
Remnick’s Interview with Leonard Cohen a few months before his death: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/leonard-cohen-a-final-interview
My own heart let me more have pity on; let
How does this work? Building on the research of Richard Davidson, and Jaak Panksepp, key to understanding the power of De Profundis prayers or poems lies in grasping the basic emotional circuitry shared by every mammal from humans to rats.
What comes out of this poem is the necessity for what our current healing practitioners, aka science-ratified psychologists, might call Dialogue Based Mindfulness, which is also a key aspect to many therapeutic practices like Schema Therapy or Internal Family Systems.
Here’s the chief problem with Mind-Dumps as far as I can tell. Often the content of what we’re sharing in therapy are thoughts that we have had a hundred, if not a thousand times before. And maybe even shared before with other therapists, or family and friends.
Perhaps before your next session, see where your mind is at with regard to what it needs from the session itself. If it needs to just wander around and do some pain-driven pirouettes and triple Lutzes in the hope of expending some of the suffering energy of your mind out into the room, into someone else’s ears, someone else’s mind, let’s do that!
The shadow-side of patience is procrastination. A form of forestalment, with all the discomfort of inertia, torpidity, but none of the dopamine-fuelled incentivizers. As Hesiod, one of the earliest writers on the subject gravely remarks: “a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin”. Yes, sometimes, it really does feel like that.
All things come to he who waits, is not entirely true. Even the Victorian poet Violet Fane who coined the phrase feels the need to qualify it in the next line of her poem:
Why did I ever doubt I’d get flowers from Jenny?
If you don’t water your plants carefully and consistently, especially those not embedded in earth, but exiled in pots and planters, they’ll soon let you know, becoming pallid, etiolated husks of their former selves. Take this poor wilty tomatillo plant on the left that greeted me a few mornings back: not a happy camper.
If you’re a Gardener’s World fan, you probably tune in as much to see what a Golden Retriever called Nigel is up to at Longmeadow (mostly activities involving tennis balls) as what his owner Monty Don might be planting that week.
The 
Every day, the hundreds of fronds that make up the lettuce in my raised beds launch into a Lactuca Sativa version of that 80s stadium anthem by Simple Minds:
Having done a bit of a U-turn recently on the Cottage Garden ethos of ornamentals and edibles cheek by jowl, I’ve been clearing some sunny 3ft x 5 ft beds in the front garden with the express purpose of filling them with plants that’ll give me dizzying, eye-popping, heart-pumping highs.
Anxiety is a complex emotional response that’s similar to fear. Both arise from similar brain processes and cause similar physiological and behavioral reactions; both originate in portions of the brain designed to help all animals deal with danger.
You do not have to be good.
The first question my supervisor always asks me when I am discussing with her someone that I’m working with is: “What gets them out of bed in the morning?” Sometimes she rephrases this as: “What might get them out of bed in the morning?”
Thinking of therapy as a journey is a handy analogy. Imagine heading out on a ten mile hike, as I often do on the weekends. One of my favourite routes, also because it is so close to where I live is 
Life-Goals sound very grand, but I have yet to find a term that sums these up more diminutively. I do think we need to bring in the word “life” here however, denoting as it does, a whole span of living: 
Yearnings are a little bit more nebulous and maybe harder to catch hold of. These are universal, but often stem from unconscious drives that push us in a certain direction, even if the direction we choose is sometimes not the best one for us.
Most interestingly I find, though not suprising if you consider the social nature of our species, is that almost all the things we envy most come back to Connection & Belonging in one way or another. I might be writing a book (or a blog post) for myself, to get my ideas in order (Yearning for Coherence and Understanding, Yearning for Meaning & Self-Direction) but there are very few writers who don’t aspire to having at least one pair of eyes other than their own to read what they’ve written. And hopefully, in an appreciative way (Yearning for Feeling), maybe even thinking: “Blimey, this Steve, seems to know his stuff!” (Yearning for Competence).
Another reason for doing a LIFE MOT is the presence of trauma in our lives, and the recognition of how that (at times) both hinders as well as ultimately may benefit us.
So here’s how you would go about applying a happiness/well-being lens to the life you’re living at the moment.