Category Archives: Humanities

Attitudinal Healing

I was introduced to the concept of attitudinal healing in graduate school. One of my professors brought a copy of To See Differently to class. I began to peruse it and became intrigued by the principles and exercises. Attitudinal healing positions itself as a way of being that heals the mind and facilitates this healing in the world through our relationships. The focus is on changing from within; in other words, the goal is to identify the attitudes which affect us negatively, understand the source (usually fear), and create an internal shift of perspective which then creates alternate behavior.

However, the approach is not the same as cognitive therapy. In fact, these concepts are not new and have been discussed and practiced in myriad ways over thousands of years. The principles espoused are essential tenets of numerous philosophical, ethical, psychological and religious traditions, notably Mahayana Buddhism, Christian Mysticism, and cognitive therapy. Moreover, centers for attitudinal healing do not provide therapy. Their mission is to provide people the opportunity to facilitate their own transformation.

The approach, while sharing some elements of cognitive theory, is more spiritually focused. Centers offer support programs and trainings for people who may be experiencing grief, illness, loss, or relationship issues. It is yet another path toward creating community that, in this fractured age of too much information and too many distractions, certainly can only help. The exercises focus on developing relationship within oneself and with others. There are centers throughout the U.S., and one of them is located here: Austin Center for Attitudinal Healing. The national site can be found here, and from this you can find where other centers are located. There is also a documentary in the works produced by Wakan Films and the Wakan Foundation for the Arts.

The Principles of Attitudinal Healing

  1. The essence of our being is LOVE.
  2. Health is inner peace. Healing is letting go of fear.
  3. Giving and receiving are the same.
  4. We can let go of the past and of the future.
  5. Now is the only time there is and each instant is for giving.
  6. We can learn to love others and ourselves by forgiving rather than judging.
  7. We can become love finders rather than fault finders.
  8. We can choose and direct ourselves to be peaceful inside regardless of what is happening outside.
  9. We are students and teachers to each other.
  10. We can focus on the whole of life rather than the fragments.
  11. Since love is eternal, death need not be viewed as fearful.
  12. We can always perceive others and ourselves as either extending love or giving a call for help.

This Is Me, Sometimes

A Journey

When he got up that morning everything was different:
He enjoyed the bright spring day
But he did not realize it exactly, he just enjoyed it.

And walking down the street to the railroad station
Past magnolia trees with dying flowers like old socks
It was a long time since he had breathed so simply.

Tears filled his eyes and it felt good
But he held them back
Because men didn’t walk around crying in that town.

Waiting on the platform at the station
The fear came over him of something terrible about to happen:
The train was late and he recited the alphabet to keep hold.

And in its time it came screeching in
And as it went on making its usual stops,
People coming and going, telephone poles passing,

He hid his head behind a newspaper
No longer able to hold back the sobs, and willed his eyes
To follow the rational weavings of the seat fabric.

He didn’t do anything violent as he had imagined.
He cried for a long time, but when he finally quieted down
A place in him that had been closed like a fist was open,

And at the end of the ride he stood up and got off that train:
And through the streets and in all the places he lived in later on
He walked, himself at last, a man among men,
With such radiance that everyone looked up and wondered.

–Edward Field, 1924

Awesome

Here is one of the best descriptions of awe I’ve come across.

Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.

Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine,…to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.

–Abraham Joshua Heschel

I want to experience more awe in my life. This is one reason I have returned to my faith journey. Actually, I’m beginning to understand that I’ve always been on it, even during those years I was actively pursuing understanding through secular education and avoiding religion, especially Christianity. God’s imprint is on my soul. S/He has always been here, within me. I am simply re-awakening to this gnosis.

Facets of Depression

Nell Casey, Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression (New York: Perennial Harper Collins, 2002. Pp. ix, 299.)

If you are seeking a “Chicken Soup for the Depressed Soul” brimming with uplifting stories, this book is not the source.

Unholy Ghost reflects the ordeal of depression via the perspectives of those coping with it. The DSM-IV provides a skeletal structure for understanding the diagnosis. These essays add flesh to the framework. The reader is given an opportunity to intimately connect with each writer’s experience of anguish. Some might criticize these essays as self-absorbed and declare the writers to be imperfect. Well, that’s the point. This book is about personal involvement, revealing humans who try to genuinely articulate their journeys. Among many viewpoints, the reader will grapple with the issue of taking medication while pregnant, what it is like to be an African American woman who is depressed, how one person’s “failed” suicide led to a reckoning with life, trying to understand the heritability of depression, and the general strange reality of living with this heavy companion.

This book does not contain answers. It is ponderous and sometimes disconsolate reading. What it does is invite the reader to walk alongside each writer and learn vicariously what depression can be. As a person who lives with major depression and dysthymia, I was fascinated by these voices and heartened by their company. As a psychotherapist, these essays will be a valuable tool for me in educating people about the dimensions of depression.

Intimacy With God

I recently wrote about the pursuit of happiness and centering prayer. Andy then asked me to elaborate on where my search has taken me. I read a book by the same man whom I referenced in that post, Father Thomas Keating; here are some thoughts on it.

It’s a book titled Intimacy With God, in which he quotes (very briefly) Carlos Castaneda.

I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined a Roman Catholic priest finding anything Castaneda said worthy. I’m impressed.

The book is an excellent introduction to the concept of contemplative prayer in the Christian tradition, and its emergence to meet the needs of disaffected Catholics (and later, Protestants) seeking a more meaningful, deeper connection with the divine. Keating explains the practice in clear terms and in the context of Christian doctrine. For someone like myself, it has introduced a way of praying that combines my core beliefs and spiritual roots in Christianity with the meditative aspects that the Eastern religions foster (and to which I am drawn).

I also find appealing his use of Centering Prayer as a relationship with God, the “Divine Therapist,” which implies the friendship, trust, and intimacy inherent in psychotherapy. The process of contemplative prayer is to consent to God healing us, by resting in Its presence while the Holy Spirit manifests Herself in us. In the state of deep rest, undigested emotional material arises (due to relaxed defenses) from the unconscious and is evacuated, bringing one a step closer to intimacy — union in love — with God. Keating remarks that this is a lifelong process and practice. He clarifies the distinction between clinical depression and the periods of “dark nights of the soul” which imply that the transformation is occurring. He also recognizes that while psychology and spirituality overlap, each “has a distinct emphasis and integrity that needs to be respected.”

Many of Keating’s words enlightened me, but this statement is one I want to note, because it presents a simple truth:

All spiritual exercises are designed to reduce the monumental illusion that God is absent. Not so. We just think so. Since the way we think is the way we usually act, we live as if God were absent. Whatever we can do to contribute to the dissolution of that confusion furthers our spiritual journey.

For those curious to learn more about Christian prayer, for their own journey or simply to learn more about what Christians believe and live, I highly recommend this book.

The Mission of Marriage

In marriage there is no escape from the dark corners of another human being. There is no escape from the mirror another casts on my own sorry state. However exalted my intentions — however ready I am to quote some spiritual wisdom from some great author or text — marriage, by design, offers me a context in which to see through the mirage of my own defenses. It summons into awareness the fears, the resentments, the disillusion, the sheer difficulty that comes with the fact of being human. …marriage calls us to abandon our longing for the perfect; for our partner’s perfection, and also for our own. As we open to our own imperfections we can begin to have mercy on those of others. Our imperfections, after all, are what join us to the human race. In letting our frailty be part of our experience of ourselves without judgment or criticism — it’s the way things are, after all — we may begin to know compassion, both for ourselves and the world. The willingness to live with eyes open, fearing neither what you will see in the other nor what they will see in you — this is part of the savage grace that is marriage.

–Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart

A Comfort

I have always felt a tenderness in this poem. When I’ve lost my way, or when I’ve been humbled by the vastness of existence — made aware of my great insignificance — this poem helps me to feel connected again. Less lonely.

People Like Us

There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can’t remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and
     people
Who love God but can’t remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It’s
All right. The worlds cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,
And greatness has a defender, and even in death
     you’re safe.

–Robert Bly

Wondrous Words

In addition to the opposable thumb, another trait that makes us human is that our anatomy separates the trachea and esophagus, which is what enables speech. Other animals have only one passage for food and air.

All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety — and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up throught the larynx — or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it — and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.

–Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue

The Search for Happiness

This post is a piece I wrote in my journal several months ago, and I thought it would be useful for reflection here.

Here’s an excerpt of an email from my brother. With his permission I post it here, because I’m thinking along the same lines.

Me: I swear, I get so exasperated with my own dissatisfaction.

Bro: I know what you mean. We are all very used to defining ourselves in terms of what we want or think we want (and often characterize as “need”). Then we get attached to those wants as who we are. Our fundamental mode of operation seems to be in terms of “I am X” — which in the process of distinguishing creates separation, distance — instead of simply “I am” or “It is.” Separation then creates desire, craving, anxiety.

More and more, I think “I” is pretty much a fiction, a story we tell ourselves and others. Given that our whole system of society and law is grounded in individual rights and values, I’m not sure what the consequences are.

Seems like half of psychotherapy is directed towards getting people in touch with what they truly want/feel, and the other half is directed towards recognizing the illusion of the constructed/conditioned self (including the part that wants/feels).

(I’ve been reading Krishnamurti lately…)

Note to self: Pull the copy of Krishnamurti’s On Freedom off the shelf and start reading.
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