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Silence: Outside in
Copyright 2013, David J. Bookbinder. All Rights Reserved.

About silence I am tempted to say, “I have nothing to say.” And yet I do.

I have always had an ambivalent relationship with silence. Initially, silence was a haven. As a young boy, I retreated into silence to get away from the literal and emotional noise of my family. I spent most of my non-school time either holed up in the basement, performing chemistry and electronic experiments and making model rockets, or up on my top bunk, reading science fiction and comic books.

Beginning with my senior year in high school, radicalized by sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and the War in Vietnam, I tried to break out of silence. This process of engagement with the world led me to New York City, where I became a reporter, a photographer, a teacher, largely to force myself to connect. I remember a Catholic priest with whom I had become friendly observing that I came alive in relationship. Yes, that’s right, I thought. How could I have failed to notice?

Yet even then, I often craved silence, which was in short supply in Manhattan. I relished my time in the darkroom making prints and at my 1909 L.C. Smith typewriter, grinding out newspaper articles, short stories about the street people I encountered, and a book about American folk music. It was a noisy world and I was also noisy inside. I fantasized about the silence of space and wished I could shut my ears as easily as I could my eyes.

I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn to get away from the screech of the elevated subway, yowling cats, blaring sirens. I lived on the top floor of the house, in an attic room, with a view of the brownstones stretching down the block like twin rows of cardboard boxes. But Brooklyn was no escape from noise. Dogs barked, sirens still blared, garbage trucks growled. Over time, Brooklyn also became more noisy than I could bear, and after a near-mugging incident, I retreated again.

I spent half a year travelling and living in artist colonies in New York State and Virginia, and then moved to the Boston area to attend a graduate program in writing. I first lived in Cambridge, which seemed manageable compared to New York City, but that density of people and noisy things, too, soon became too much. I drifted slowly up the coast, situating myself progressively further from urban centers. I moved to the end of a dead-end street in Medford, where the insistent barking of the neighbor’s dogs turned out to be more than I could handle. I continued on to the Salem Willows, an isolated part of the city that was quiet during the winter months, when I’d arrived, but became a bedlam in the summer, when the 1950s-style amusement park nearby opened for business again.

In 1991, I returned to graduate school and moved, deliberately, to a rural suburb of Albany, NY, still seeking solace in what I hoped, in this truly isolated location, would be true silence. But noise followed me even there, where I found myself living almost adjacent to a shooting range. When target practice was in full swing, it felt like I was in the middle of a war zone.

My relationship with noise took a completely different turn after my near-death experience, which was – and remains – the most still, silent place I have ever been, a place of true emptiness, where I was momentarily stripped even of the noise of a conscious self, and only awareness remained.
Since then, rather than exclusively seeking ways to avoid noise, I’ve also been trying to adapt to it by turning off the noise I generate inside, which is almost always much louder than the physical noise of the world. This, I have come to understand, is the silence I have always sought.

The process of becoming silent inside began in Brooklyn with a strange, burbling undercurrent I heard while I was completing my book on American folk music. The sound penetrated closed windows, snaked past ear plugs, and even the white noise of Reverend Blind Gary Davis singing “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” over and over failed to mask it. My first instinct was to take action by seeking, and hopefully silencing, its creator.

The sound that had been driving me crazy emanated from down the block. Its source was a large, dignified-looking black man, perhaps 50 years old, who stood in front of a brownstone, leaning on a cement birdbath as if it were a lectern, declaiming in a loud voice. He read from an assortment of books and from notes he scattered about his small slate-covered yard. His neighbors and passersby ignored him. I approached him, and for several days engaged him in conversation, hoping that if he became aware that someone actually heard him, he would shut up.

I had to listen with great attention, because his accent was thick and his story not easy to comprehend. Over time, I saw that the books he read from were Bible, that he was quoting passages that described both the Second Coming and the Apocalypse, and that he believed he was Jesus come a second time, letting us know, as a courtesy, that we had sinned against Him too many times, and the End of Days had arrived.

He disappeared a few days later. From neighbors I learned that he had entered his “landlord” phase, during which, as the Creator of everything, he exercised his rights of ownership by going house to house, demanding rent. Each time he entered this phase, he was locked up for a few months. These institutionalizations were, I understood, the sins of Man against God that would bring about the impending Apocalypse.

My silencing strategy was successful, but not in the way I had anticipated. Throughout the week I’d spent talking with him, and even on the days I did not pay him a visit, the sound of his preaching had not bothered me at all. Instead, I had a friendly, curious attitude toward it and when I heard his distant shouting, sometimes I would go out to see him or, more often, simply note he was out and then get back to work. That process of forming a relationship with what I had previously thought of as noise enabled me to become quiet inside. The real noise was my own irritation.

Silences like the ones I sought in my younger days – of the basement workshop, the darkroom, the writing desk – are still important to me, but more essential is entering, when I can, an internal silence. Meditation, with its continual centering/distraction/noticing/centering cycle, has been helpful, but so has reminding myself to adopt a friendly curiosity about my response to noise, both inside and out: Why does that noise, that thought, that memory, that emotion draw my attention? What is it stirring?

Reminding myself that most of the noise I experience is self-created has been a powerful internal silencer. An example: Recently, someone moved into my neighborhood. His car is old and muffler bad, and he usually parks it beneath my bedroom window. At 6:20am he starts the car. I’m a light sleeper, and I wake immediately. For the next ten minutes, he idles his engine, periodically racing it, and then he tears off down the block. 6:20am is much earlier than I need to awaken, and for the first three days I lay in bed fuming helplessly and angrily, trying to figure out how to get that noise to stop. I spent two hours doing that, groggily rising from my bed at 8:30am, consumed by resentment. On the fourth day, I realized that although it was true that my new neighbor and his noisy car were keeping me up from 6:20am to 7:20am, my anger was keeping me up for the next two hours. He was gone. Since then, sometimes I wake and sometimes I sleep through it, but I no longer see it as an intrusion. It’s part of the environment, a piece of impermanence, and it, too, shall pass.

Silence has become a kind of haven again, but not an isolating one. As I increasingly find quiet within, I have also discovered that I am building a refuge from which I can pay fuller attention to the still, silent place in others, the place in which acceptance incubates and from which positive change can emerge.

Inner silence has helped me enormously in my work as a therapist. It allows me to attend carefully not only to the words and the nonverbal cues I get from clients – facial expressions, posture, ways they move their arms and legs, tone of voice – but also to an ongoing inner sense that resonates, like a tuning fork, with what my clients are feeling. While a client is talking, a sensation, an image, and a word often emerges. In a few minutes, the client begins to talk about what I was sensing, frequently using the exact word I had been thinking. At first I thought this was déjà vu, so I started to write down the word when it occurred, to make sure I’d actually thought it before the client said it. Now I understand that I have developed a way to quiet my own inner noise enough to create a silent space inside from which, sometimes, I can hear what my clients are saying without words, without even gestures, but with their hearts.

Self Love: Evolution

Copyright 2013 David J. Bookbinder

In my more troubled youth, I was often told that to truly love anyone, I needed first to love myself. This advice, though well-intentioned, set up an unhelpful dynamic. To "love myself" seemed as akin to real love as masturbation was to sexual intercourse, a solitary substitute for the real thing. Why would I want that?

A few years later, while riding the subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I had an epiphany: to love oneself, we need first to experience being loved – not loved with strings attached, not intermittently loved, and not loved blindly, either, but loved enduringly for who we actually are, at our core. Loved like Dr. Seuss loves: "You are you. Now, isn't that pleasant?" Or Mr. Rogers: "You've made this day a special day by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you. And I like you just the way you are."

Without this love-at-the-core experience, loving ourselves, as we are so often instructed, is difficult to manage.

About ten years ago, I received a variation of the "love yourself" advice, but this time I was better equipped for it. I had stumbled on love throughout my lifetime, and I had also just spent five days at a Thich Nhat Hanh retreat. While there, I had been liberally sprinkled with what Thich Nhat Hanh called "dharma rain," and some of it had sunk in. On leaving, a newfound friend said to me, "David, next time, when you think you need something from someone, first try giving it to yourself."

My first reaction was still to see "giving it to myself" as emotional masturbation, but this was a wise woman and I knew that what she was telling me meant more than that. My receptivity had been enhanced by finding a different kind of love in the temporary community Thich Nhat Hanh and his monks and nuns had built for, and with, 900 strangers. I had felt warmth and affection from nearly everyone I’d met, shared meals and meditations with them, spoken heart-to-heart with one of the monks on a hillside overlooking the lecture hall where we received the dharma. I finally understand that being loved was far broader and more available to me than it had ever seemed before. Being loved unconditionally by one person was not the only way to water the seeds of self love. I felt, viscerally, that the sun, the clouds, the trees, many human beings, as well as most of the creatures of the earth, in some way expressed their love, and that I was among their recipients.

As the months passed, I tried to heed my newfound friend’s advice. Although at first nothing much happened, eventually I felt a little droplet of warmth each time I tried to love myself. Then one day, in the midst of grieving the suicide of a close friend, the love from the "lover" part of me toward the one that was hurting changed from a trickle to a flood. It was overwhelming, unlike any love I’d experienced before, an instant transfusion of compassion and caring from a deep, wise-seeming part of me to a part that had always felt alone.

Later that year, the two parts of the "love yourself" formula united to become a third. Driving home after a 14-hour day of internship and counseling psychology classes, I remembered a comment from a fellow student. "David," he had observed, "this is spiritual work we’re doing." I reflected on a particularly moving session I’d had that afternoon, with a young artist whose mother had just died. And it occurred to me that I was preparing for a field in which I would be paid to love people. I – all of me, the lover and the beloved – would be one source of the unconditional love that helped my clients learn to love themselves.

I’d had an inkling that this was so in my first course in counseling psychology. We watched a videotape in which the same client, a young woman code-named Gloria, had a therapy session with three of the big name psychotherapists at the time: Albert Ellis, Fritz Perls, and Carl Rogers. In the film, Rogers demonstrated what is at the heart of his approach to psychotherapy, that the therapist have "unconditional positive regard" for the client’s essential self; that we demonstrate acceptance of and appreciation for each client, regardless of what they do or do not do. He believed this therapeutic love, more than anything else, helped clients heal, opening their wounded hearts to love.

In the years since then, it has been increasingly easier to communicate with and to love my own wounded heart. A key to self love has been consciously encouraging the presence of a part of myself that is aware and open to the parts that need loving. It is as if I am developing within an ever-present father figure who can enable both "David" and "Davey" to feel cared for and accompanied, and thereby to empower me to care for and accompany others.

Although the first rush of self-love can be dramatic in its intensity, the preparation is often gradual. It may at first appear that nothing is happening. But just as water can hover at its boiling point for a long time while energy is still being applied, eventually a quantum change occurs. As the water is transformed into steam, the stuck and unloved place inside transforms into something capable of movement, growth – and love.

Text and images © 2013, David J. Bookbinder. All rights reserved.
Permission required for publication. Images available for licensing.
flowermandalas.org

Risk: Rewards

Images and text Copyright 2013 David J. Bookbinder

When they first arrive at my office, most of the people I see are in a state of comfortable uncomfortableness. Although people come to psychotherapy wanting change, most of us do so only when the risks of changing as lower than the risks of staying the same. This is not difficult to understand. Our patterns, defenses, and coping mechanisms are well-practiced and our anxieties so familiar that we often confuse them with who we really are. It is as if we are saying that without our neuroses, we would not be ourselves. Our actualized selves can seem, at times, like a dream. And yet we are more than our neuroses, much more, and something compels us to risk becoming that dream.

In the best cases, therapy is a container that functions like the ancient alchemist’s alembic, in which the base metals of a troubled self, a difficult life, are transformed into gold. In therapy, risks almost always generate rewards. More often than most of us are willing to acknowledge, the same is also true outside the therapist’s office – and sometimes crucially so.

About a year after my near-death experience, I moved from my apartment 20 miles outside Albany into the city itself. By chance, I had answered a newspaper ad from an older couple I’d met several months before. As part of my physical recovery, I participated in "hydroslimnastic" exercises offered at the Jewish Center pool. At 41, I was decades younger than the next youngest person in the class, and initially also one of its weakest members. My future landlord and landlady immediately recognized me as "that young man with the big red scar" and they also, immediately, welcomed me into their home.

Jacob and Isabel were Holocaust survivors and so, as I gradually learned, were most of their friends. Over time we became close, and Jacob shared many of the stories of his years in the concentration camps. He told me things he had never told his own children.

Most of his stories were about how he had survived when so many had died. Jacob was not a bold or physically imposing man, but his very existence attested to his willingness to take risks others had not. He’d jumped off a moving train headed for the gas chambers. Though he was eventually recaptured, he was redirected to a work camp. He stood up to an S.S. sergeant in a way that might have gotten him killed but instead gained him a grudging respect. He volunteered to build the new camp commandant a rabbit hutch, though he knew nothing about rabbits and little about building; afterward, he became the handyman for the commandant, and as a result ate what the officers ate while others starved. He stole bread from the commandant’s larder and tossed it over the fence to the female prisoners who worked as maids and servants in the house. After the Russian army liberated the camp, one of these women become his wife and, much later, my landlady.

As a therapist, I promote risk taking in sessions and also in my clients’ lives. The method I most often use to encourage risk is "the experiment." Together, my clients and I identify actions they can take between our current session and the next time they see me that have the potential to move them a step closer to where they want their lives to go. Experiments are typically actions they feel some anxiety about taking, but when they do, regardless of the outcome, they feel they are making progress. Such experiments are always a risk, but we work to ensure the risk is manageable – not so small that doing the experiment will make no real difference, but not so large that it is too intimidating to undertake.

I first tried "the experiment" with a young artist at Massachusetts College of Art during my a counseling internship there. His life was fraught with addiction, depression, dysfunctional relationships, and hostility from his family. He had come to MassArt with high hopes, but the strain of the life he was living was putting him on a direct path to flunking out. It soon became clear that he needed more help than counseling alone could provide, and that asking for help was something he was usually unwilling to do. So we devised an experiment. He agreed, on a particular day of the week, to ask for help in a situation where normally he would not.

A couple of days later, he stopped in a McDonalds for a hamburger and coffee. Looking around, he saw that all the tables were occupied. It was a windy, bitter cold day. He shrugged, buttoned up, and was about to eat his burger while he walked to work, but then he remembered the experiment. Instead of leaving, he asked another young man, who was sitting alone at a table for four, if he could join him. The young man said "yes," and my client and he ended up having a lively, animated conversation for half an hour.

This small experiment was a turning point. My client realized not only that he could ask for help, but also that he was entitled to do so, and more importantly, that when he asked, he was likely to get it. Over the course of the school year, with help from several sources, he was able to quit using drugs, leave a job where his coworkers expected him to be the "party boy," go back to working as an artist, and resolve major issues with his family. Even his lover quit drinking and drugging.

In the years since then, I have witnessed many clients take small, experimental risks as well as the much larger risks we often face in our lives. They have taken the risk of leaving relationships, of getting married, of quitting a job, of going back to school, of moving out of their parents’ houses, of stopping the drinking and drugging on which they have for years been dependent, and of facing fears and trauma that they have spent a lifetime erecting and maintaining barriers against.

My own life has been a series of long shots, many of which have not "paid off." But they did permanently shift me in ways I needed to shift. Leaving the safety of Cornell’s Engineering School was a risk that led to years adrift, but ultimately I landed on the shores of Manhattan Island, where I embarked on a career in writing and photography. Decades later, that risk never having fully "paid off," I took another one and left the safety of technical writing to return to grad school in English. That decision indirectly led to a near-fatal episode in an Albany hospital, but it also shifted me toward becoming a psychotherapist, which has "paid off" in ways I am still discovering. There have been many other risks. In each case, the risk of staying the same eventually exceeded that of embarking on the unknown.

Risks put us in motion. When we jump into the water and start to swim, we will eventually wind up somewhere. Not all risks are intuitive or wise, but even the foolish ones are often a step beyond stagnation.

I have come to trust risk.

Text and images © 2013, David J. Bookbinder. All rights reserved.
Permission required for publication. Images available for licensing.
flowermandalas.org

PRESENCE: NOW, BE, HERE
Copyright 2013, David J. Bookbinder. All Rights Reserved.

I was 20 when I first encountered Baba Ram Dass’s square, purple-covered Be Here Now, the book that launched many of my generation on an Eastern-inspired journey. I was walking though the student center of the University at Buffalo when I ran into a high school friend sitting on the floor outside the bookstore, guitar at his side, leafing through it. He handed it to me. Be? Here? Now?

More than 40 years later, I’m still asking what that means.

One of my most important teachers is Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk whose simple exposition of Buddhist principles has been life-changing for thousands of people worldwide. Like Ram Dass, his most compelling observation is that we are already who we are, already in the only moment actually available to us. “The past is gone, the future is not yet here,” he says, “and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.”

It seems so simple; yet being here now is not easy for most of us. We are inundated with stimuli that trigger us to live in the past, in the future, in a fantasy world – to be anything but ourselves, anywhere but here and now. And because we are not taking in all of what the here and now offers, we strive to fill our emptinesses. But what we consume often leads only to wanting more.

Sometimes we want things, and we hunger for material goods to match or exceed what others have. Sometimes we want feelings, and we seek out passion, excitement, happiness, love. Sometimes we want status, and we do whatever it takes to obtain recognition, appreciation, power. Sometimes we want even more: to be who others seem to be.

I recall my father after six weeks in Southern California, stranded there by Buffalo’s Blizzard of ’77. Exploring the West Coast with his sister, he saw how “the other half” (the 1%) live. Following his return to his much humbler life, for weeks he could speak of almost nothing but the mansions, yachts, and other signs of extreme wealth he had witnessed. The subtext of his response was, “What did I do wrong? How come I don’t have that?” Older, now, than my father was then, I also sometimes struggle with envy. And I catch myself thinking, “What did I do wrong? How come I don’t have that?”

As babies we don’t worry about wanting more, and we don’t desire to be anyone but who, where, and when we are. Then we grow older and widen our view: “Now” includes memories of the past and plans for the future, “here” extends to where we have been and where we might be heading, and “being” contains all our previous selves and the seeds of who we are becoming. This is not a bad thing. Without that broader view, we could not learn from history or plan for either our personal futures or the welfare of subsequent generations. The problem occurs, as John Lennon put it, when our lives become what happens while we’re making other plans.

One impediment to being-here-now is carrying our past experiences into the present. Many of us move through our lives unconsciously replicating old relationships, repeating unhealed shame, regret, fear, sadness, anger. Or we continue to obey the limitations our earlier circumstances imposed on us, screening out opportunities for something new to occur. “That’s just how I am,” we say. We learned these lessons well; we grow older, but some parts of us stay frozen in time. I see this most clearly in PTSD sufferers, whose traumatic memories and woundedness are endlessly recycled. But the same process occurs more subtly with other old hurts. Much of what I do as a therapist is to help clients break the connection between what happened to them in the past and what they believe is happening now.

Living in the future is equally problematic. An archetypal example is the protagonist of Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle, who believes his destiny will be shaped by a momentous event that lies in wait like a “beast in the jungle” and spends most of his life waiting for this to happen. Only when it is far too late does he recognize the anguishing cost of this strategy. On a less dramatic scale, many of us fritter away our limited time on the planet fretting about situations over which we have no control, trading what is here, now, for a fictional future. Or we calculate ways to control our fate. One man I knew, who was extraordinarily gifted at recognizing patterns, was equally skilled at influencing other people. He combined these talents to try to make things go as he planned, and he often succeeded. But his “success” did not make him happy. Instead, he longed for unpredictability and freedom from what he came to call his “secret hidden agendas.”

Presence – being fully oneself, in the present, responding authentically – is pivotal to successful therapeutic relationships. Toward the end of his life, Carl Rogers, pioneer of modern psychotherapy, wrote, “I find that when I am the closest to my inner, intuitive self – when perhaps I am somehow in touch with the unknown in me – when perhaps I am in a slightly altered state of consciousness in the relationship, then whatever I do seems to be full of healing. Then simply my presence is releasing and helpful.” In the best case, presence goes both ways. When clients are also fully present and responding authentically, each session functions as a laboratory in which what they bring in from their lives metamorphoses, and then is brought out again into the world, transformed. It is hard to overstate the power of presence.

A moment like Rogers described launched me on the therapist path. In the midst of a chaotic phase of my life, I took a class in Rogers’s form of therapy. Early in the semester, I asked the professor if she could show, in a demo session, how it worked. When nobody else volunteered for the job, she suggested I be the client.

At first I was self-conscious, but within minutes I had forgotten about the other students; I was fully engaged in my interaction with the professor/therapist, and also with something deep within. At one point the professor responded to something I said with an anecdote about a parallel experience. I found myself responding to her in the empathic way she had been using with me. In that moment I knew not only that I might learn to do Rogerian therapy, but that I was already doing it. The rest followed.

Presence is seldom “perfect.” Minds wander. Feelings intrude. Confusion… confuses. But usually, all that’s needed to reestablish a more present state is to become aware of the distraction and come back into contact.

Practice helps. The key to presence is mindfulness. Specific mindfulness practices such as meditation, mindful walking, and mindful eating encourage moment-to-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, actions, surroundings, and interactions. But many other activities can also exercise and strengthen the “presence muscle” if done with a mindful intention. Body-and-mind-centric activities such as yoga, tai chi, martial arts, and dance, or expressive arts that require close attention, such as drawing from life or improvisational music, promote presence. For me, photography and motorcycling have been helpful. Each in its own way forces me to pay full attention to what is going on right here, right now, with all of who I am.

Even simple actions such as walking, driving, and household chores are opportunities to practice presence. Standing still in traffic, waiting for a bus, being confined to a boring meeting or a hospital bed can all, with the mindfulness mindset, become experiments in being present. Unpleasant sensations and experiences can also be converted to practices in being here, now. An unexpected gift of the injuries I have sustained was discovering that pain can enhance presence, and that presence makes pain more bearable.

Presence comes naturally for many of us in moments of extremity. The sensation of time slowing down when something dangerous is happening is, I believe, because in those intense moments we are entirely present. Unlike our more repetitive periods, these moments are packed together tightly, and each one registers.

The days and weeks immediately following my near-death experience were like that. Everything was new, as if I were apprehending the world from the perspective of a child. So are all the moments that divide everything into “before” and “after”: the moment you find out your husband or wife is having an affair, your boss tells you you’re fired, your car slides out of control, your doctor tells you you have cancer. Or, conversely, the moment a child is born, a lottery won, a love relationship consummated. These moments, too, contain more presence in them than a month of ordinary and predictable experience, and they hold a key to incorporating more presence, and perhaps also more passion, into those in-between times.

At the end of our days, if we are not content with the present moment, then it won’t matter much what happened in the past because that will all be over. Nor will we be able to count on a “better” future. So it behooves us to learn, now, to fully take in our present moments, else, like Henry James’s protagonist, we realize only too late that we have been waiting for the beast in the jungle that never comes.

PURPOSE: ARCS
Copyright 2013, David J. Bookbinder. All Rights Reserved.

More than things, more than work, more, even, than love, having a sense of purpose can not only help us withstand the turbulence in our lives, it can also guide us through fortune’s sometimes outrageous slings and arrows.

The necessity of purpose underlies every hero story ever created. A recent, and poignant, example of this is the movie Hugo, by Martin Scorcese, in which each character in the film ultimately finds his or her purpose. “I'd imagine the whole world was one big machine,” young Hugo Cabret says. “Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn't be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.”

Sometimes purpose seems inborn. My youngest brother, Paul, had a sense of purpose when he was 5. My mother had left him at a petting zoo at the local mall and when she came back, all the animals were gathered around him like St. Francis of Assisi. From that time on, he knew he wanted to be an “animal doctor.” His sense of his purpose drove him to finish first in his class at Cornell University’s vet school and later to become a successful and sought-after small animal surgeon.

For others, a sense of purpose evolves and refines itself over time. Or it can be revealed suddenly and lucidly at any point. In my own case, purpose has shifted at each stage of my life.

When I was 8, my purpose was to help the United States beat the Russians in the newly declared Space Race, an impetus that carried me all the way to Cornell University’s engineering school ten years later, where the immediacy of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll – and more importantly, the War in Vietnam – displaced it.

At 22, I left the University at Buffalo, where I had transferred three years earlier, with a degree in English Literature. I had planned to move to Canada to sidestep the draft, but shortly before graduation, the draft ended. I was free but also aimless. I moved back to Ithaca, where I rejoined my old Cornell friends in a farmhouse they were renting outside town. I looked in vain for steady work. At one point, I helped set up a circus and considered joining them when they left town, but they wouldn’t permit me to take my motorcycle, and I was unwilling to part with it.

As the well of my small savings was running dry, on a visit home I ran into an acquaintance from the University at Buffalo. He had been a social work professor the last time I’d seen him, but in the interim he’d quit academia to become a maker of wooden toys. He showed me around his basement workshop and told me about another UB professor who had bought a small farm on which he planned to build prototypes of alternative houses. I’d put myself through college as a carpenter and studied environmental design. Alternative methods to build houses caught my interest.

I stopped to talk with the UB professor on my ride back to Ithaca. A week later I moved to the remote town of Warsaw, New York, where I lived with the professor, his wife, and a young family. Alternative housing again gave me a sense of purpose. I would help the homeless and the poor, adapting the ways people in other cultures sheltered themselves, my Bible The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Meanwhile, in exchange for room and board I began renovations of the farmhouse itself. Months passed. Eventually, I understood that the professor’s alternative housing project was a fantasy and that what he really wanted me for was cheap labor.

The toy maker came to visit one day while I was in the throes of dismay and indecision, purposeless once again. The social worker in him rose to the occasion. “I think you’re drifting, David,” he said, “and that’s okay.”

Drifting (which I would later call “seeking”) propelled me on a long motorcycle trip through the Northeast that terminated in Manhattan. I arrived there with no clear idea what I would do or how to support myself. Chaos reigned in New York. Services such as trash collection and “luxuries” such as libraries were gradually shutting down, and the unemployment rate was rising to heights not seen since the Great Depression. The fifth-floor walkup I shared with four others was infested with cockroaches. Stray cats yowled all night outside my bedroom window. The city was in crisis, and so was I.

After fruitless weeks combing the Help Wanted section of the New York Times, it occurred to me that I couldn’t find a job if I didn’t know what I was looking for. One night I stayed up nearly to dawn writing in a frenzy about my talents, experience, goals, and aspirations. I had an epiphany: Writing, itself, was something I could do for the rest of my life without ever coming to the end of it.

Again, I had identified a purpose. During the next few years I developed a mix of memoir and journalism I called “slow journalism,” modeled on books such Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans. My hope was to give voice to the outcasts of the city I had landed in, much as Agee and Evans had done for Southern sharecropper families a generation earlier.

This sense of purpose held strong for a long time, carrying me first to artist colonies in New York and Virginia, then to the creative writing program at Boston University, and eventually to a Ph.D. program in English at the University at Albany, where purpose took another turn when a medical error nearly killed me.

During my long convalescence, what emerged was the desire to make what I still think of as my “extra” years meaningful, so that when death finally did catch up with me, I would not regret what was left undone. Twenty years later, I’m still riding that train, but lately I can see another turn coming ‘round the bend.


Finding a purpose gives us a mission, a reason for putting one foot in front of the other and for making the effort to overcome internal and external forces that threaten to drag us down. Purpose has led many of my clients out of terrifying struggles: A heroin addict and former sports hero whose life was dominated by wanting to “make a mark on the world” discovers his affinity for working with mentally retarded adults. Another becomes a counselor herself, paying forward what she learned in recovery. A severely depressed client is freed from a cycle of repeated suicide attempts by finding purpose in helping abused women. Many others with similar arcs to their stories, the arc of the Hero’s Journey, create lives with purpose.

For some, purpose is linked to career, but purpose can be found in many other places: families, communities, spiritual pursuits, creative activities, to name a few. Purpose can be as simple as deciding to act with kindness and generosity wherever you go. The thing is to find it, embrace it, and then to carry it out.

Ultimately, purpose is an internal affair. Its external manifestations can appear very different over the course of a lifetime, but they often have a common core. Like any living thing, human beings are oriented toward self-actualization, and what we are outwardly showing at any given stage may be no more indicative of our final form than a caterpillar’s form presages the butterfly it will become.

Now, with the number of years in front of me far fewer than those behind, I sense an inward turning, an integration of all these apparently separate purposes into one, and a drive to become, before I die, what is the birthright of us all: a fully realized part of the Big Machine that is everything.

RESILIENCE: MODALITIES
Copyright 2013, David J. Bookbinder. All Rights Reserved.

Along with perseverance and a sense of purpose, an essential capacity for successfully traversing the Hero’s Journey that describes our lives is resilience.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back. In a physical object, it is elasticity: the property a material has to return to its original shape or position after being bent, stretched, or compressed. In an ecosystem, it is the system's capacity to withstand shocks and to rebuild itself when disturbed. In a person, it is recovering quickly from adversity.

Resilience is what lets us rebound from failure and come back from heartbreak, illness, financial disaster, and tragedy. Those who lack resilience are overcome by obstacles and tend to give up in the face of hardship. Resilient people may feel the pain of defeat, but they don’t let it keep them down.

Resilience in materials is intrinsic, but in people it is a dynamic quality. Like a muscle, it can be damaged by stressors greater than the "system" can withstand and it can atrophy if neglected. But it can also be strengthened by exercise.

In my therapy practice, I see many people whose resilience has been beaten down, or in whom it was never developed. Once we deal with the problems that brought them into therapy, much of our work together is about creating a more resilient approach to life.

Loss of resilience is especially evident in addiction and depression. By the time most people with addictions or depression seek therapy, their lives have become unmanageable. Important relationships have ended or are strained to the breaking point, they are cut off from systems of support, and their self-esteem has dropped to nil. They feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of what they have lost and daunted by the seemingly impossible task of recovering their lives.

As a therapist, I have learned to listen for “overwhelmed.” Overwhelmed says “This is too much for you. Give it up.” But overwhelmed is also, often, the starting point for building resilience.

Sometimes “overwhelmed” leads to recounting stories of others who faced apparently insurmountable obstacles and overcame them. We talk about their heroes. Regardless of whether the people my clients admire are friends or family members, sports figures, historical personages, or even fictional characters from books, comics, movies, or television, we look closely at what enables these heroes to deal with their nemeses and their personal demons. Therein lie clues to my clients’ own heroic qualities.

In my own struggles, I have sought inspiration from movies. Watching comeback films like Cinderella Man and epic science fiction sagas like the Matrix, Terminator, and Aliens series has helped me activate the energy it takes to rise from injury and defeat, phoenix-like, and move on. Sometimes I share with my clients what it took to help me recover my life and let them know that they can do it, too.

For several years I’ve been developing a program for building resilience. Central to it are skills that help us adapt to change. These skills fit into four categories: (1) Creating an environment conducive to building resilience, (2) Finding support from systems and individuals, (3) Enhancing problem solving ability, and (4) Increasing emotional adaptability.

A first step toward creating a safe, resilience-friendly environment involves cat hairs. In this context, the term “cat hair” refers to an experiment with lab rats conducted to determine whether rats are genetically programmed to fear cats. In this experiment, researchers placed rat pups who had never been exposed to cats in a cage and then monitored their playfulness. Initially, the rats played together freely. Then the researchers took the smallest cat stimulus they could think of, a single cat hair, and dropped it into the cage. Soon, the pups stopped playing and ran to the edges of the cage, frozen with fear. After a few hours, the researchers removed the cat hair and continued to monitor the rats. Days later, however, the rats continued to show signs of fear. They never returned to their baseline playfulness.

Fear leaves an imprint on us, too. If fear is not addressed, we will respond to our “cat hairs” with the fight/flight/freeze response common to mammals. Dramatic examples, such as the “shell shock” response of soldiers who have been in combat, are well known, but the “cat hair” phenomenon also shows up in many other ways, unconsciously dictating our responses to jobs, relationships, conflict, authority figures, and many other aspects of daily life, often subtly inhibiting self-actualization. Unlike rats trapped in their internal mazes, though, we can learn to recognize when a cat hair is a true sign of danger and when it is just a hair – a trigger, not a gun. Removing ourselves from true danger and detoxifying our responses to triggers is often a first step toward creating an environment where resilience can grow.

Another component to building resilience is close relationships. Trauma, addiction, and many forms of mental illness, as well as more common troubles like low self-esteem, loneliness, and anxiety, feed on isolation. In many cases, the therapeutic relationship begins the process of developing a deep, trusting relationship that can serve as a model for making or re-making relationships outside therapy.

In the 80s, I was fond of a science fiction TV program called Quantum Leap. Its protagonist, Sam, was caught in a temporal anomaly that transported him to various points within his lifetime, but his consciousness landed in the body of someone else. Early in the series, he discovered that his purpose for being in each place was to set something right that had gone dramatically wrong. When he succeeded, he would leap again, hoping that this leap would be the leap home.

During his quantum leaps, Sam was guided by a holographic projection of his best friend, Al, who was assisted by Ziggy, a supercomputer. As a therapist, I am often in the role played by Al and Ziggy, helping clients travel into their pasts, assisting them in finding ways to set right what once went wrong. Unlike Sam, they can’t alter what has happened, but they can do the next best thing: reverse the emotional damage, unsticking what once was stuck, promoting a more resilient, open, and flexible response to the future.

Establishing connection with a supportive community is also helpful in building resilience. We are social animals, and separation from the pack weakens our ability not only to thrive, but sometimes even to survive. Support groups, spiritual groups, and group activities that permit us to follow our curiosity and pursue our interests can create connections that steady us under stress and act as a safety net when we stumble. In addition to more traditional social groups such as families, neighborhoods, and religious organizations, the proliferation of 12-step groups and the vast assortment of Meetups available through meetup.com attest to the importance of these newer kinds of focused communities.

Perhaps the most powerful factor in developing resilience is seeing opportunities for growth in adversity – the silver lining in the cloud. Questions like "What can I learn from this?" and “How can going through this make me a better person?” foster a creative, problem-solving attitude that gives us leverage on our problems and prevents us from being consumed by them. A growth-oriented way of life broadens our perspective; from this new vantage point, we can see our limiting or self -defeating patterns. Awareness itself promotes resilience, but paying particular attention even to small windows of opportunity helps us enter new territory.

Just as adversity can disconnect us from our creative and spiritual selves, acting in ways that promote reconnection to these essential parts enhances resilience. Tapping into spiritual practices such as meditation, prayer, and meditative activities such as yoga and tai chi aids in returning to return to center when we have been dislodged. Creative activities of almost any variety bring to life latent parts. Taken together, enlivening our spiritual and creative selves enables us to move forward from adversity with greater balance and a more complete response to whatever lies ahead.

The ability to empathize with others and to give with an open heart also enhances the emotional adaptability essential to resilience. In the moments when we feel most depleted, giving in this way lets us become our best and most generous selves and, paradoxically, adds to our capacity to be fully human. This principle underlies many healing practices in indigenous cultures, where the shaman chooses a sickly boy to become his apprentice. The boy becomes strong through healing his people, but he must continue to heal others in order to stay healthy himself.

Over the course of a lifetime, my own resilience has come from a gradual incorporation of all these modalities. I have found strength in therapy and close friendships, connection in community and family, self-discovery in my artwork and writing. (The Flower Mandalas, for instance, helped me retrieve what I have come to realize was a beautiful and symmetrical inner world present since childhood.) Participating in a Buddhist sangha has become gratifying in ways I had previously associated only with intimate relationships and close friendships. And stepping into my best self each morning as I walk into my therapy office allows me to continue being the wounded healer who remains healthy by helping others to heal, and stays resilient only as long as he assists others in developing their own resilience.