Dawn and her husband recently adopted a baby; she’s been writing about her thoughts throughout the process. It was an open adoption, and she has great respect for the birth mother, J. She made a comment that struck my fancy.
It’s like J. is the noun mother and I am the verb mother.
That little sentence conveys so much. It’s beautiful.
Far from being a mystical retreat from the complexities of mental and emotional experience, the Buddhist approach requires that all of the psyche be subject to meditative awareness. It is here that the overlap with what has come to be called psychotherapy is obvious. Meditation is not world denying; the slowing down that it requires is in service of closer examination of the day-to-day mind. This examination is, by definition, psychological. Its object is to question the true nature of the self and to end the production of self-created mental suffering. It is a pursuit that various schools of psychotherapy have been approaching independently, often without benefit of the overarching methodology of the Buddhist psychologists of mind. As long as Buddhism could be seen as a mystical, or otherworldly, pursuit, as an Eastern exoticism incomprehensible to the Western mind, as a spiritual pursuit with little relevance to our complicated neurotic attachments, it could be kept isolated from the psychological mainstream, and its insights could be relegated to the esoteric shelves of “Eastern philosophy.” Yet, Buddhism has something essential to teach contemporary psychotherapists: it long ago perfected a technique of confronting and uprooting human narcissism, a goal that Western psychotherapy has only recently begun even to contemplate.
–Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective
Summertime = good weather = vacation season, and this usually means more car travel. Here are some links to sites that provide tips for saner, safer driving.
And lastly, a terrific bit of advice that I have often used, from one of my favorite essayists, Michael Ventura:
Given that you’re living in a city where driving is necessary, learn to drive. You may think you know how, but my experience of the way you drive is that you probably don’t. So here’s how: Drive for space, not for speed. Space in front of you is the safest thing you can have with a car. Darting in and out of traffic doesn’t change anything, it just makes you older. You can’t beat the average traffic flow on any given street or freeway by more than five minutes, which only makes a difference if you’re having a baby. And don’t you look like an idiot when you’ve passed six cars and they pull up beside you at the next light? They’re laughing at you. And they hate you. Which isn’t good for you. Drive for space.
If the move ain’t smooth, it ain’t right. There’s no excuse for a jerky turn, stop, or acceleration. It’s hard on the car, it’s hard on the other passengers, it confuses other drivers, it’s not aesthetic. Such moves are for emergencies only.
Ninety percent of the time you drive with your habits, not your head, so figure out what your bad habits are — gunning it through yellows? not signaling? tailgating? Your worst habit will turn into your worst accident. So stop it. Drive for space. End of lesson.
Amen, brother. I need the reminder. Be safe, folks. Drive well.
I started my private practice in August 2003, when I designed, coded, and wrote my professional website. Within a few weeks, I was receiving numerous inquiries. The practice took off at a speed I’d not anticipated, and I was greatly pleased. Since I was just starting out, I sub-leased an office a few evenings a week; soon, however, I found I was getting full, and I wanted to expand. In December I began to discuss the option of co-leasing an office with a friend, and then a series of events erected solid barriers to that prospect.
My beau’s project was cancelled and we thought he might be laid off. Although that didn’t happen, the future of his job remains dubious, and he’s resorted to searching for a new one. This raised the possiblity of relocating to another city or out of state. Then his father became seriously ill, and we felt we could not move forward on the job issues until we knew if he would survive (he is recuperating slowly). Additionally, at the end of March, the therapist from whom I sub-leased asked me to find another office, since she needed her space. Not being in a position to sign a long-term lease, I’ve had to use an executive office, consolidate my clients to one day a week, and not accept new clients. You can imagine how disheartening it feels to constrict a process that was working robustly.
I still don’t know if I’ll remain in Austin, and that will become clear in the next few months. The positive aspect of this situation is that is has challenged me to think of other ways I can practice that do not depend on my having an office. People have suggested online counseling (via email); it’s intriguing, but I’m not prepared to do that. There are security issues that concern me, and I’m not willing to set up a system of encryption, etc. at this time. In addition, email therapy works for a limited range of problems; in-person interaction, with the non-verbal gestures and immediacy of communication, is a much richer environment for therapy.
However, I have provided telephone therapy and, in my last job, would see clients at their homes. So it occurred to me this evening: what about providing home-based psychotherapy (or sessions at the client’s office), and for clients who are too far to travel to (or who can’t get to me), offering tele-counseling? For the latter, I need to set up a payment system online, so that clients can pay for sessions; then we’d arrange a time for the phone session and have it. As for at-home counseling, I’m aware of the challenges of that. First, for me there is wear-and-tear on my car (although the miles would be deductible expenses). Plus there is the aggravation of driving in increasingly zany traffic. My last job required a lot of driving and burned the pleasure of it out of me.
Second is the possibility of no-shows, i.e., driving to the home and finding the client gone. This happens in the office too, but being in-office provides opportunities to catch up on paperwork, email, research the Internet, and so on. Also, I need to think about the billing. If I’m stuck in traffic and arrive late, do I deduct from the fee a pro-rated amount, or if our schedules allow, have the entire session?
Third, I need to research more articles (e.g., in The Journal of the American Medical Association) that cover the efficacy of home-based psychotherapy. I also need to be thorough in developing a client explanation form that defines the boundaries of therapy, since being in someone’s home (mine or theirs) does blur them somewhat. It will require greater vigilance.
Concerned parties might ask me about safety, and whether it’s a good idea to go to a client’s home. This doesn’t faze me. For several years I went into homes all over the city, in wealthy and poor neighborhoods, to provide at-home counseling to people diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and a host of other mental ailments. One of my clients lived in a housing project in which a policeman shot a mentally ill client (who attacked a city housing employee with a knife) and her neighbor in the next apartment was murdered by a knife to the throat. They did not find the assailant. So I’ve learned to be mindful and observant; have discovered that places which carry fear-inspiring reputations are often not as scary as the stories would suggest; and have developed an attitude of acceptance that if something bad is going to befall me, then it will do so, and I’ll deal with it. I was once assaulted in my own home, so I know that danger lurks everywhere. I try to use good judgment but don’t fret.
Despite all these issues, which I view as solvable problems, the idea of providing service in these two ways to private-pay clients reanimates my spirit.
Anyhow, I could have one office day a week, and perhaps one or two days seeing clients at home or in their office. Hmmm. Need to think on this more.
Ten years ago, I never would have envisioned being connected by computer to the lives of millions of people. As a librarian accustomed to ferreting out information manually and laboriously, I would have been agog at the concept of Google. To have the world of information at one’s fingertips and at an unbelieveable speed! Granted, there is about as much dross on the web as there is gold, but it’s possible to concatenate information from a much broader base. Information is a power, and the more we can access and sift through in efficient ways, the greater our personal power.
The community of blogging manifests in more than online connection. I have a tribe, so to speak, of bloggers in Austin who are available as friends and resources. It’s a new form of neighboring. I have also discovered blogging minefields; it is a revolutionary form of communicating and publishing, and I’ve learned the hard way on a few occasions just how this affects people in my personal life. Yet it’s been exciting nonetheless, and I’ve learned from my errors. Such are the risks inherent in new ventures.
Google offers several new services, still in beta mode, that intrigue me. One is the web alert, where one can ask that Google send email whenever a particular phrase is mentioned on the web. Since I’m curious about where my name may be linked, I set it up to search “Kathryn Petro.” I’m not the only person name thusly, so I’ve received notification about other Kathryn Petros. Yet tonight I learned that I had been selected — along with Real Live Preacher and Hoarded Ordinaries — for review by a new blogger, Betty Tew, as she joins the community of blogophiles. She’s taking a class and the assignment has been to assess three weblogs for their accessibility, style, and content.
Like me when I began blogging, she is still in the process of developing her voice and style, as well as deciding what themes she may focus on. Many of us find that blogging provides a venue for personal expression and exploration that is more satisfying than writing in a private journal. Betty mentioned that it’s akin to writing a letter to the world, something I’ve often said. She later wrote about missing her father on his birthday. He passed away last year, and she is learning to live without him; various holidays come and go, and one observes them, feeling the gap left by the beloved’s absence. This post was especially poignant for me, given that my partner’s father is battling a rare form of lymphoma at a relatively young age (61); this cancer does not respond well to treatment, and it has impressed upon us the urgency and heightened awareness that comes with confronting a deadline (no pun intended). It’s a destiny we all face, and the fact that we manage to get up daily, pocket that awareness, and pursue life amazes me. Yet awareness of death — to a certain degree — enhances living.
In any case, I am grateful for the technological developments that have afforded me this new community. I welcome Betty to the world of blogging and hope that she finds great satisfaction in it.
I’d like to ask everyone to pause for a moment, take a deep breath, and look around at the suffering and cruelty and horror that exists within your sphere of influence. Then I want you to take that fury, that outrage, that wrath, that energy that was created when you heard the story about the poor dog, and I want you to point it at a target you can actually hit. I want you to take that hatred of evil, that love of justice, that compassion, and I want you to do something with it. One thing. Just one. Do something about the evil in the world. Do something about the suffering in the world. Instead of reading, watching, or hearing about some scumbag making the world a little bit worse, click off the media bombardment and take a few minutes and do something that will make the world better.
Seton Cove offers a day retreat comprising a drive through Hill Country back roads to enjoy Texas wildflowers and walk three different outdoor labyrinths. From the announcement:
While today people don’t use labyrinths to complete a specific symbolic pilgrimage per se, the experience of walking the labyrinth helps to clear one’s thoughts, detach from the daily grind and really focus on issues in life that need to be addressed.
The retreat will begin at 9:00 am in South Austin at Seton Southwest Hospital on FM 1826. After walking their 7-circuit labyrinth, participants will board a bus and travel back roads to St. StephensÂ’ Episcopal church in Wimberley. St. Stephen’s is blessed with a beautiful 51-acre campus that is home to a Spanish mission-style church and chapel, a nature trail, outdoor chapel, and labyrinth, as well as an abundance of Texas Hill Country flora and fauna. The next stop is Red Corral Ranch where retreatants will enjoy lunch prepared by their chef. The afternoon will be spent savoring the beauty of Red Corral Ranch including peacocks, flowers and hummingbirds. The group will walk their labyrinth before boarding the bus to return to Austin.
Take pleasure in a day that will include nature, community with others, and an afternoon of silence and reflection.
My heart is tuned to the quietness that the stillness of nature inspires.
— Hazrat Inayat Khan
The event is Saturday, April 17, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Cost is $80, including transportation and lunch. Pre-registration is required. Contact 512-451-0272.
Kat has written another post about the healing process she’s experiencing for her vaginismus. The fact that this is a rare dysfunction (less than 2% of the female population) is what makes Kat’s blog posts so important. More information is needed, and blogging is a remarkable way to disseminate it. I also found the quote at the beginning of this entry compelling:
St. Francis called the body “Brother Donkey” for the way it patiently carries the overload of our psychic baggage, our unprocessed pain, and our unfelt emotions. Incorruptibly truthful and innocent, the body is a great spiritual teacher and a powerful catalyst for transformation. As an agent of the soul it may insist that we heal our wounded psyche, even when the conscious mind resists with all its might.
–From Aphrodite’s Daughters
Help me to know that
age is not a chasm wide,
but a bridge across.
When the soul comes into the physical world it receives an offering from the whole universe, and that offering is the body in which to function. It is not offered to the soul only by the parents, but by the ancestors, by the nation and race into which the soul is born, and by the whole human race. This body is not only an offering of the human race, but is an outcome of something that the whole world has produced for ages, a clay that has been kneaded a thousand times over, a clay that has been prepared so that in its very development it has become more intelligent, more radiant, and more living; a clay that appeared first in the mineral kingdom, that developed in the vegetable kingdom, that then appeared as the animal, and that was finished in the making of that body that is offered to the new-coming human soul.
–Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
From: A Meditation Theme for Each Day
Selected and arranged by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
In the writings which preface the Law that particular delusion is described thus: before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed, then, to enter later. “It is possible,” answered the doorkeeper, “but not at this moment.” Since the door leading into the Law stands open as usual and the doorkeeper sees that, he laughs and says: “If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note that I am powerful. And, I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall, keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other. And the sight of the third man is already more than even I can stand.”
These are difficulties which a man from the country has not expected to meet. The Law, he thinks, should be asccessible to every man and at all times, but when he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his furred robe, with his huge pointed nose and long thin Tarter beard, he decides that he had better wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. There he sits waiting for days and years. He makes many attempts to be allowed in and wearies the doorkeeper with his importunity. The doorkeeper often engages him in brief conversations, asking him about his home and about other matters, but the questions are put quite impersonally, as great men put questions, and always conclude with the statement that the man cannot be allowed to enter yet.
The man, who has equipped himself with many things for this journey, parts with all he has, however valuable, in the hope of bribing the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts it all, saying, however, as he takes each gift: “I take this only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone.” During all these long years, the man watches the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets about the other doorkeepers, and this one seems to him the only barrier between himself and the Law. In the first years he curses his evil fate aloud. Later, as he grows old, he only mutters to himself. He grows childish, and since in his prolonged study of the doorkeeper he has learned to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the very fleas to help him to persuade the doorkeeper to change his mind.
Finally, his eyes grow dim and he does not know whether the world is really darkening around him or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. But in the darkness he can now perceive a radiance that streams inextinguishable from the door of the Law. Now his life is drawing to a close. Before he dies, all that he has experienced during the whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one question, which he has never put to the doorkeeper. He beckons the doorkeeper, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend far down to hear him, for the difference in size between them has increased very much to the man’s disadvantage. “What to you want to know now?” asks the doorkeeper, “you are insatiable.” “Everyone strives to attain the Law,” answered the man, “how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?” The doorkeeper perceives the man is nearing his end and his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it.”
–Franz Kafka, The Trial
A book that had significant influence on my perceptions of reality was required for a graduate management class: Leadership and the New Science: Learning About Organization from an Orderly Universe by Margaret Wheatley. It utilized the scientific discoveries and concepts of quantum physics, self-organizing systems, and chaos theory and applied them to management — written in clear, brain-expanding terms. She wrote about how information needs to flow freely, and that what appears chaotic at a micro level really does, on a macro level, have a pattern. We need to learn to see from that perspective. She also spoke of space fields — space as not being empty, but comprising invisible, non-material structures that are the substance of the universe. I know, it’s esoteric for 1:09 a.m., but it’s really cool stuff. Trust me.
From the book:
Self-organizing systems do not simply take in information; they change their environment as well.
Stasis, balance, equilibrium — these are temporary states. What endures is process — dynamic, adaptive, creative.
who else but you
please tell me who else
can ever take your placenow give yourself a smile
what is the worth of a diamond
if it doesn’t smilehow can i ever put a price
on the diamond that you are
you are the entire treasure of the house–Rumi
[from Ghazal 2148, from the Diwan-e Shams Poetic translation by Nader Khalili “Rumi, Fountain of Fire” Cal-Earth Press, 1994]
Rhizome: a lateral underground root system, sending up above-ground shoots to form a vast network. Difficult to uproot.
So I’ve made a bit of a discovery (it’s interesting to live in a large city). I have found out about The Rhizome Collective. It’s a group of people living long-term in a rent-free 9,400 square foot warehouse in East Austin. Their goal is to build a community which supports the values of cooperation, autonomy, creativity, mutual aid, openness, and self-empowerment. Some of their projects:
The collective also hosts several events. First there is a dinner theater; for $20 one can enjoy an elegant four-course meal and performance. Proceeds are given to the Center for Community Organizing with 20% donated to RAINN (Rape Abuse and Incest National Network). Then there is the Thursday dinner, where participants collect food, cook, prepare the space and clean-up, and also share the meal. One can RSVP and contribute $3-$8 per dinner, RSVP and volunteer, or bring a dish. This event’s objectives are to come together as friends and have fun, to build trust among different groups in the community, for activists to learn from each other and network, and to gear up for the Local Empowerment Conference to be held in March, 2004. Lastly, the collective is host to the members of the Inside Books Project. Volunteers gather twice a month to improve the reading and educational opportunities of people incarcerated in state prison. They receive donated books and send them to prisoners.
Another aspect of the collective is a Free Skool, which offers free classes on glass etching, portraits, tile mosaics, theater improv, poi, drawing & stencil, seed bead techniques, breakdancing  and poetry. The aim of the school is to provide an opportunity for self-expression, community growth, and autonomy in a non-intimidating atmosphere that breaks tradition with the usual student-administration hierarchy.
I admit to living a more bourgeois life, though in my mind and heart I support the idea of the collective. I assume the majority of people involved are very outside-the-mainstream in many ways–i.e., the 21st century hippie. Does one need to become like them to participate? Would they accept the assistance of someone who isn’t likely to grow her own food, or who is very attached to his car, or who tries to be conscientious about recycling but doesn’t always succeed? I wonder.
In any case, their site is very intriguing.
Below is an excerpt from an article by Ken Wilber that focuses on what tenets most of the world’s religions share.
- Spirit, by whatever name, exists.
- Spirit, although existing “out there,” is found “in here,” or revealed within to the open heart and mind.
- Most of us don’t realize this Spirit within, however, because we are living in a world of sin, separation, or duality — that is, we are living in a fallen, illusory, or fragmented state.
- There is a way out of this fallen state (of sin or illusion or disharmony), there is a Path to our liberation.
- If we follow this Path to its conclusion, the result is a Rebirth or Enlightenment, a direct experience of Spirit within and without, a Supreme Liberation, which
- marks the end of sin and suffering, and
- manifests in social action of mercy and compassion on behalf of all sentient beings.
[via Joe Perez at The Soulful Blogger]