Category Archives: Humanities

Birthing the Crone

From Helen Redman’s introduction to her series of paintings called Birthing the Crone:

This presentation is about bringing to life my Wise Woman Crone, birthing it, so to speak, through my art. Today, those of us who choose to name ourselves CRONES do so to raise consciousness around issues of aging. Paradoxically, as we enter a new century, the ancient Crone archetype is emerging within women all over the world. We are beginning to realize that this third and crowning stage of female life (the one our culture throws away) is more authentic, creative, outrageous, powerful, funny, healing and profound than we ever imagined.

The series presents strong images integrating the cycle of life and death as experienced by women. Moreover, it celebrates the process of aging.

Redman is a widely exhibited painter, as well as a teacher, feminist commentator, and grandmother who has worked for four decades to illuminate the process of life. She also served as the president of The Women’s Caucus for Art in San Diego.

[via Dreaming Witch]

Just a Few Words

The chill sidles up to me, slips me into its embrace.
I lean into it stiffly, my flesh dotted, all attention;
sensation becomes acute, my body aware of
its discomfort, generating shivers of response
to ward off numbness.

This is how I want to live — at the apex of awareness,
not overly comfortable, thus complacent,
not anesthetized, thus unconscious,
but focused and alive.

Open Up

There is no defense against an open heart and a supple body in dialogue with wildness. Internal strength is an absorption of external landscape. We are informed by beauty, raw and sensual. Through an erotics of place our sensitivity becomes our sensibility.

–Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: The Erotics of Place,” from An Unspoken Hunger

The basic creative energy of life — life force — bubbles up and courses through all of existence. It can be experienced as open, free, unburdened, full of possibility, energizing. Or this very same energy can be experienced as petty, narrow, stuck, caught. Even though there are so many teachings, so many meditations, so many instructions, the basic point of it all is just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind — thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, the whole thing that adds up to what we call “me” or “I.”

–Pema Chodron, “The Wisdom of No Escape,” from The Wisdom of No Escape

How to Pray for Peace

Applying [the] ancient science of prayer to living in peace, for example, peace would not be created by praying for peace, in the sense of praying for something that we do not have, and wishing it was different. Peace is created by holding those thoughts, feelings, and emotions firmly within us that we would have if we lived in peace. It is the creating of the experience of peace in our inner world that causes it to appear in our outer world.

—Healing and Symbolism Research

I Second This

Paul Pearsall, a psychoneuroimmunologist, says that no real therapy can begin until the therapist understands how the client will answer three ultimate questions. These three questions are, why was I born, what is the purpose of my life, and what will happen to me when I die?

Pearsall’s argument, as I understand it, is that a therapist must know the answers to these questions in order to enter into the client’s world view. And until the therapist can enter into the client’s world view, the therapist can’t really understand where the client is coming from.

—Markham’s Behavioral Health

More Loving

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

–W. H. Auden

Buddhist Psychotherapy

The following was an email response on a topical group mailing list I’m on. There is a connection between spirituality and therapy that I am trying to learn within myself. I find it interesting that so many of my clients ascribe the label “Buddhist” to me when I am not formally a practitioner.

As you are seeking to practice psychotherapy from a buddhist perspective, you may want to consider what a “buddhist psychotherapist” is. There are as many ways to practice buddhist psychotherapy as there are — well — ways to practice Buddhism. How you and your client/patient experience therapy may vary depending on the approach you follow. There are Buddhist therapists from firmly psychodynamic and analytic camps (e.g., Mark Epstein; Barry Magid), and from cognitive behavioral schools (e.g., Tara Bennett-Goleman), as well as from every other therapeutic perspective I’m sure. Likewise, if your own meditation practice is rooted in Vipassana or in Zen traditions,for example, your therapeutic foci may differ. I mention all of this (which may be obvious) because I think a necessary foundation for practicing Dharma informed therapy, is to establish your own practice and to observe your experiences first. In fact, I’ve always understood that that was the Buddha’s instruction: “Don’t accept my teachings on faith. See for yourself.”

I think what triggered this commentary from me, was my reaction to your questioning how to label character types based on grasping, aversion, and delusion. One Buddhist tradition may view this typology as critical, but the Soto Zen practice I follow, for example, suggests to me that such classification is both dualistic and unnecessary — greed, greed hate and delusion have the same root. As with using other psychological labels (consider the DSM-IV-R), there is a risk of assuming too much about the human sitting before you, and in possibly relying too heavily on “prescriptive” treatments.

Let me very humbly offer that you allow your Buddhist practice to aid you in understanding yourself first, then in understanding your client, and PERHAPS later in knowing what to prescribe, if anything.

Merely another opinion.

Because Sometimes You Need to Hear This

This is an excerpt from a journal that Henri Nouwen kept during a period of deep depression. It has become a pivotal book in my life.

Avoid All Forms of Self-Rejection

You must avoid not only blaming others but also blaming yourself. You are inclined to blame yourself for the difficulties you experience in relationships. But self-blame is not a form of humility. It is a form of self-rejection in which you ignore or deny your own goodness and beauty.

When a friendship does not blossom, when a word is not received, when a gesture of love is not appreciated, do not blame it on yourself. This is both untrue and hurtful. Every time you reject yourself, you idealize others. You want to be with those whom you consider better, stronger, more intelligent, more gifted than yourself. Thus you make yourself emotionally dependent, leading others to feel unable to fulfill your expectations and causing them to withdraw from you. This makes you blame yourself even more, and you enter a danger spiral of self-rejection and neediness.

Avoid all forms of self-rejection. Acknowledge your limitations, but claim your unique gifts and thereby live as an equal among equals. That will set you free from your obsessive and possessive needs and enable you to give and receive true affection and friendship.

–Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love

What He Said!

Joe Perez attempted to define his spiritual philosophy and did such an admirable job that I’m compelled to post it. I could not have put it better:

A philosophy of life should keep me grounded in being in the world and in my body and emotions, affirm the value and dignity of life, and encourage living with richness, abundance, and an ethical sensitivity towards others. A rich and abundant life, it seems to me, is one that affirms our individuality, encourages deep, affectionate, and intimate long-term relationships and friendships, and staying interconnected with the pulses and rhythms of nature in joyous and non-destructive ways.

A philosophy of life should have a realistic appraisal of the dark side of human life and the potential for humans to think and act in delusional, destructive, and death-dealing ways. The philosophy must also demand that individuals take responsibility for their own beliefs and actions, and insist that we strive to own our projections of negative attributes, rather than directing our attention to the supposed “evil” of others or directing our attention to endeavours outside of our control.

A philosophy of life should define spirituality as efforts to realize greater self-awareness with the aim of overcoming limiting beliefs and behaviors that keep us from living with inner peace and health of mind, body, and spirit. A philosophy of life should not seek to diminish, sentimentalize, or rationalize the mysterious and awe-inspiring nature of life. And it will avoid providing supposedly certain answers for understanding the mystery of death.

A philosophy of life should invite us to humbly live with an awareness that what immortality is to be found in life may be had by directing our full energy and attention to this life and this world as it presents itself to us, and by honoring with gratitude the memories of the departed and best wisdom traditions of all those on whose shoulders we stand.

The Soul is an Open Letter

To the seer every person’s soul is just like an open letter, but if he were to divulge its secrets his sight would become dimmer every day, because it is a trust given to him by God. Spiritual trust is given to those who can keep that trust and who are able to keep a secret.

–Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
From: A Meditation Theme for Each Day
Selected and arranged by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

Everything’s A-Bloom

In searching for guidance on writing book reviews, I came across the Bloom Taxonomy Book Review Questions page. I first learned of Bloom’s Taxonomy in my graduate class on diversity. I sometimes procrastinate writing book reviews, partly because my perfectionistic standards intimidate me. These guides are handy and helpful, not only for writing book reviews, but for learning and writing in general.

Connections

Last year I participated in a women’s group that focused on movement and creativity. Shortly after it began, the therapist’s new office opened, and this is what I wrote of my experience on the first night there.

We spent much of the session exploring the new therapy studio, an open, airy room with satiny wood floors. We began by being aware of our space, then turning attention inward to that space, and then returning awareness outward to connect both. Afterward, we drew or wrote whatever came to mind. This experience was so good, because I so often ignore my body’s needs for movement. My leg muscles have been stiff from lack of movement, and they radiate their discomfort. This is my meditative writing:

My thighs ached to stretch in
full frontal contact on cool wood,
extended and still, my blood pulsing,
body heat flowing into it.

My body tells me how exhausted it is,
parched for sleep’s refreshment,
neglected, pushed beyond tolerance;
yet still it serves me.

I have a home. It breathes, moves,
eats, sleeps. It belongs to me.
Amazing how much it does. I will
never be homeless in this life.

As a child, I would lie for hours
on the grass, resting, breathing.
Being.

I was friends with the earth,
the floor. I used my body. It
connected. Touching is relationship.
Contact–to move the body through space,
to manipulate the limbs, interacting,
pushing, yielding.
This is making love.

People make love to the world. Two
thousand miles away, my sister awakes
each day, feeds her dog, pads her slippered
feet through a chilly house to
prepare for work. At about the same time,
my morning ritual unfolds.

Everywhere, people are moving, being still,
breathing, having sex, dying, and living
in relationship with this dimension.
We make love with the world. We do this
constantly, in tandem with others.
So we make love, by extension, to
each other.

We are connected at all times.