Blog

Child psychologists observe that children are most creative when they're at play. The same principle also applies to most adults. With "52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief" (http://www.amazon.com/52-Flower-Mandalas-Coloring-Inspiration/dp/1682302016/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8) , you can return to your inner child ... and play.

Coloring relaxes and renews, sparks ideas, relieves stress, helps work through emotions -- and it's fun! The stunning Flower Mandala illustrations in this just-released coloring book were created by artist Emily Sper from 52 of my Flower Mandala images (http://www.flowermandalas.org) . In her designs, Emily has captured the essence of the Flower Mandalas and translated them into a family of illustrations that invite you to create your own unique works of art, experimenting with form, pattern, shading, and layering in a deeply personal way.

"52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief" was a collaboration. Now, we invite you to collaborate with us, adding to these illustrations your own unique interpretations.

* Buy the book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/52-Flower-Mandalas-Coloring-Inspiration/dp/1682302016/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

* Subscribe to the Flower Mandalas mailing list and get a free digital sampler: http://flowermandalas.us11.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=0030e6f1ad6f724c6287e8d34&id=2f2d81bd93

* Visit the 52 Flower Mandalas coloring book website, where you can upload your creations and check out what other colorists have done: http://www.davidbookbinder.com/books

* Discuss the illustrations and Flower Mandalas on the Facebook fan page: http://www.facebook.com/flowermandalas

I've recently completed my book "Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas," a distillation of what I've learned so far from psychotherapy, Buddhism, surviving a near-death experience, and 60+ years on the planet. The book is a compilation of my Flower Mandala images paired with meditative quotations and accompanying essays on a broad range of topics. Some examples: Acceptance, Courage, Love, Stillness, Trust, and Will. I did the book as a Kickstarter.com project. I’m now looking for a publisher.

Here’s a PDF preview of the book: http://www.davidbookbinder.com/uploads/Fifty-Two%20Flower%20Mandalas%20Preview.pdf

Thanks,
- David
David J. Bookbinder, LMHC
978-395-1292
http://www.davidbookbinder.com
http://www.flowermandalas.org
http://www.facebook.com/flowermandalas

Will: Break on through
Copyright 2014 David J. Bookbinder

There are many ways psychotherapists can help people. We can provide validation, emotional support, help formulate goals, encourage, motivate, identify dysfunctional patterns, devise strategies for overcoming them, and sometimes even inspire. But often, to fully surmount difficulties, there is a decisive moment when will comes into play.

Will is what enables us to get up and do it again, raises the apparently defeated fighter from the mat, enables the runner to move out from behind when at the brink of total exhaustion. Will is what keeps us going when everything in us says we can’t. Will is the difference between the triumphant and the failed hero, not only in myth also in our own personal struggles.

Will is the key to breaking through what one of my mentors, psychologist Jim Grant, called the "Spell ceiling." Our collections of past injuries, and the mistaken beliefs and patterns we have created to protect ourselves from them, can be regarded as a trance-like Spell. This Spell subconsciously controls much of what we think, feel, and do. Until we awaken from it, it commands us to repeat our patterns. When we increase awareness and act in ways that defy our Spells, they weaken and we get stronger.

The Spell ceiling occurs just as the Spell is about to yield. At that point, the Spell – which doesn’t know we don’t need its protection anymore – puffs itself up and, like the Wizard at the end of The Wizard of Oz, tries to persuade us that there’s yet another job for us to undertake. Though we have killed our Wicked Witches, the Wizard tries to scare us into going on another mission anyway because that’s all he knows how to do.

But by then we have changed. Just as the characters in the movie have worked through their illusions – the "heartless" Tin Man has shown compassion, the "brainless" Scarecrow has demonstrated his intelligence, the "cowardly" Lion has led the charge, and "homeless" Dorothy now wants nothing more than to return to Auntie Em and Kansas – we have reached the threshold of our true selves without realizing it.

It’s not difficult to spot the Spell ceiling if you know it’s there. Old patterns reemerge. In therapy sessions, I hear clients suddenly using words like "overwhelmed," "lazy," and "just": "I just couldn’t make myself do it. I was overwhelmed. Maybe I’m just lazy." People who rarely have problems focusing space out in sessions. Those who have been on time for months forget their appointments. "It feels like I’m going backwards," some of them say.

At this critical moment, will must come into play. If we succumb to the Spell now, we lose ground and it resumes its role of puppeteer. If, instead, we muster up our will to resist returning to old patterns, the curtain is soon pulled aside and the Wizard revealed to be merely an old man shouting desperately into a megaphone to bolster the illusion that he still has power. When the hold of the Spell is broken, we are free to redirect the energy we have been supplying to it, fueling our own growth.

We have broken through the Spell ceiling, but unlike the Wizard in the film, the Spell has not thrown in the towel. To continue to stay ahead of it, we need to continue to do what got us to the other side. Will is again the tool we need, coupled with awareness.

In 12-step recovery programs, the phrase "fake it till you make it" expresses the idea of using will to assume new, more self-actualizing behaviors and attitudes. By willing ourselves to act as if we are already living a sober life, we live the sober life, and its benefits become clear. Similarly, the socially anxious person who acts as if he or she is not anxious often becomes calmer and more outgoing in social situations; the depressed person who acts as if he or she is not depressed behaves in ways that can dispel depression; and so on. Faking it till you make it applies even on the bodily level. Willing ourselves to smile even when it seems as if everything inside wants to frown creates the same physiological response as spontaneous smiling, and that physiological response can improve our mood and our outlook. (Try it now!)

A tool I use with therapy clients to counteract the Spell is the Personal Craziness Index (PCI). Borrowed from the book A Gentle Path Through the Twelve Steps, by Patrick J. Carnes, the PCI provides a way to catalog, in each of ten major life areas, three indicators that remind us how we act when we are Spell-free. Then we track the most significant seven every day. If we are seven-out-of-seven, all is well. If we notice we are slipping back into Spell-influenced behaviors, chances are good our Spell is setting us up for another assault.

The preventive is built into the PCI. For instance, suppose that in the "Health" category we wrote that when we are doing well, we go to the gym three times a week, cook our own meals, and sleep at least seven hours per night. When we notice we are skipping the gym, or picking up junk food, or skimping on sleep, we become aware we are drifting out of the behaviors that helped us break our Spells. At this point, we’ve given up only a little ground, and getting back on track is easy: we will ourselves to go back to the gym, cook our meals, make sure we get enough sleep, and the downward slide reverses. By themselves, each of these neglectful acts may mean very little, but as early warning signs, they invaluable.

Catching the Spell before it gathers enough strength to pull us under is much easier than breaking through again once we have dipped below the Spell ceiling. The Personal Craziness Index lets us "fake it till we make it" at a fine level of granularity, where the amount of will needed to get back on track is minimal, and the results are evident, often within minutes.

As the old saying goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Use your will. Take the way.

Text and images © 2014, David J. Bookbinder. All rights reserved.
Permission required for publication. Images available for licensing.
flowermandalas.org

Uniqueness: Blooming

Copyright 2014 David J. Bookbinder

Recently, I had the relatively rare experience of having a movie introduce me to a new way of looking at things. The central idea of Martin Scorcese’s Hugo explicitly emerges midway through the film, but it’s implicit in every frame: Just as, in a machine, there are no "extra" parts, parts without a function, so in the world there are no "extra" people, with no purpose. Each person, like machine component, has a unique place. The trick – because with people it is not as obvious as it is with machines – is to discover it.

In my own life, discovering who I uniquely am has been a long and circumambulating journey. I started out feeling as if I were a misfit, the Ugly Duckling who was different from, and therefore inferior to, those around me. I was the shy and introverted one surrounded by extraverts, the would-be intellectual surrounded by would-be athletes, the Jew among Christians. As a boy I avidly read science fiction, and chief among the stories I sought were the ones about mutants. In these fanciful tales, mutants were always persecuted by those around them, but ultimately they turned out to be the next step in human evolution. I hid out in that world, preoccupying myself with fictional explorations of the universe and private science studies, first of rocks, bugs, magnets, and electricity, then later of chemistry, electronics, and rocketry. By 12, I was doing high school science on my own. By high school, I was researching personal projects in the science and engineering library of the University at Buffalo. I knew I was smart in that way, and like the mutants, I vacillated between devastatingly low self-esteem and a fragile grandiosity.

Thankfully, beginning at the end of high school, the humanist in me began to emerge, and my focus shifted to the realms of people, literature, and visual art. My adult life has been a gradual and uneven unfolding of talents that were mostly disregarded during childhood.

During my late 20s, I lived in a house on the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant, near Pratt Institute, a school for the arts and architecture. Rick, one of my housemates, was a few years older than I was. He’d been self-sufficient since he was 17 and had walked many walks in his 35 years – the Navy, business, construction, short-order cook, and an assortment of other jobs. When we lived together, he was an architecture student at Pratt. One day, as we sat at the kitchen table, I lamented how disconnected my career seemed. I was a kid scientist turned English major. I was writing, taking pictures, teaching kids art and carpentry, and helping to renovate the house we lived in. It all seemed makeshift and fragmented. Rick had been showing me an architectural model of a conference center he had designed. It was a beautifully executed architectural sculpture. He tapped one of the wooden panels into place. "I felt the same way you did until I found architecture," he said. "Then, everything came together." He smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. "You’ll figure it out," he said.

Rick found architecture at 35, and decades later he’s still practicing. It took me an additional 15 years to find my way into psychotherapy, at 50. But in this profession, like Rick, I have found that the meandering threads of my varied careers have come together into a tapestry. Now I see that I’m not the Ugly Duckling, not the mutant, and that my history is not a series of false starts. Instead, I am a late bloomer.

In his New Yorker article "Late Bloomers," Malcolm Gladwell contrasts artists such as Pablo Picasso, whose genius was acknowledged early in his career, with those like Cézanne, who did his best work late in life and only then received widespread recognition. "On the road to great achievement," Gladstone wrote, "the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all." Early bloomers hit the ground running, but late bloomers seem to need support as, through trial and error, they discover how to realize their talent. Gladwell describes assistance Cézanne received from other artists and from his father, without which he could never have succeeded. "Prodigies are easy," he explains. "They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith."

Late blooming is a phenomenon that occurs not only with artists, but with anyone whose nature is to discover their purpose through trial and error. As a therapist I often encounter late bloomers. They are men and women who have the potential to achieve much more in their lives than they have been able to, not because they lack the ability, but because their potential was not seen and encouraged. Societal and familial conditions squeeze many of us into shapes convenient for shipping and packaging, but not for optimal growth. Without support, these late bloomers, too, may never bloom.

Providing support for blooming, late or early, is one of the chief missions of psychotherapy. Because I have also bloomed late, I turn out to have a set of experiences that is well-suited to fostering the uniqueness of others and to finding the right soil and set of conditions for them not only to blossom, but to thrive.

In Scorcese’s film, young Hugo Cabret is the catalyst who helps each of the other main characters find, or re-find, their way. In doing so, he discovers his unique talent. Like Hugo, my lifelong trial-and-error struggle to find the right vocation has equipped me to recognize the uniqueness of others and to help them find their place in the cosmic machine. Although I know little about botany (I resorted to a plant-identification forum in British Columbia to learn the names of the common flowers I made into mandalas), in another sense I have found my vocation as a gardener.

Text and images © 2014, David J. Bookbinder. All rights reserved.
Permission required for publication. Images available for licensing.
flowermandalas.org

Uncertainty: Negative capability
Copyright 2014 David J. Bookbinder

Perhaps the greatest fear I run across as a therapist is fear of uncertainty.

This fear is great because it is so vague and encompassing. We are uncertain about how people see us; what will happen next in our relationships, the economy, the climate; how a meeting with our boss will go; how our children will do in school, and in life; what will become of us as we age; and many other things, all of them unknowable until they actually occur. And no matter who we are, how we have been raised, how rich we have become, how healthy we seem to be, how good our genes are, how much we know, or how much power we have, we are all uncertain about our own end – when it will occur, what will cause it, whether we will suffer, what will happen afterward, how we will be remembered.

The only thing we can really be certain of is uncertainty. As Bob Dylan once put it, "There is nothing so stable as change."

Some of us manage uncertainty by replacing it with certainties. We are like Boy Scouts, whose motto is "Be prepared." In the worst case, we are catastrophizing, always on yellow alert, apprehensively anticipating negative outcomes, hoping to avoid being blindsided, should one of them occur, unable to fully enjoy what is happening now.

Often, however, this approach makes good sense. My father, a former Boy Scout leader, lived by this credo. For him, it took the form of having duplicates, and in some cases triplicates, to make sure the devices in our house kept running. We had a sump pump to keep the basement dry in the event of a flood, a backup sump pump in case that one failed, and a backup of the backup … just in case. Stacked beside the workbench were two or three extra motors for the washing machine and the dryer, and shelves overflowed with duplicate faucets, belts, hoses, clamps, fasteners, TV and radio tubes, and a plethora of other spare parts. We could have stocked a small hardware store with the backups and the backups of the backups, few of which ever actually saw any use.

Or maybe we follow the popular proverb, "Hope for the best but expect the worst." We have a positive attitude, but we also try, as best we can, to be ready should disaster strike. We save for a rainy day and for our retirement, tape our windows in anticipation of hurricanes, back up our computers, put our valuable documents in safe deposit boxes, buy batteries and bottled water when the forecast calls for snow, invest for our retirement, get long-term care insurance, keep our spare tires inflated. In the 60s, we built fallout shelters, stocked school basements with C rations, and learned to duck under our desks and cover our heads, when the air raid sirens sounded.

But what do we do about the things we can’t prepare for? Or the "worsts" we could never anticipate?

One approach comes from the Romantic poet John Keats, who described what he called Negative Capability, "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Negative Capability neither assumes nor anticipates the best or the worst, but instead recognizes that most things cannot be known in advance and sees them, as one friend puts it, as "don’t knows."

Since I first ran across the concept as a college sophomore, Negative Capability has played out in many arenas. My most vivid experience of Negative Capability occurred during a near-death experience in 1993. I found myself in a condition of becalmed waiting – to live, to die, or to move on, accepting each possibility with equanimity. This equanimity occurred without any effort on my part; it seems to be how we are programmed, biologically, to deal with the possibility of imminent death.

Getting to Negative Capability on a daily basis, however, has been a more difficult endeavor. What has helped most is taking a different spin on the Boy Scout motto: To be prepared not by attempting to anticipate all possibilities, or by having multiple contingency plans, or by hoping or expecting any particular outcome, but by learning to trust that whatever happens, I can handle it.

In my work as a therapist, Negative Capability is a way to consciously open to, and counteract, the fear that I might be unable to deal with what clients bring into the room. A key, for me, has been to persuade myself that I like surprises.

Liking surprises began when I was a client myself. I had recently returned to the Boston area from Albany, NY, and had started seeing a therapist to sort out the many bewildering changes I’d been through following the near-death experience. My girlfriend, who was still living in Albany, came to visit on a day I was scheduled for therapy. I asked the therapist if I should let him know if she’d be accompanying me to our session. "It doesn’t matter," he said. "I like surprises." In that moment, I realized how much I didn’t like being surprised, how hard I worked, still, to be a good Boy Scout – and how liberating liking surprises must be. "I like surprises" became a new set of clothes I wanted to grow into.

My first counseling internship was at MassArt, a college for artists. I had only one counseling psychology class under my belt when I started, but I had assumed I’d mainly be dealing with familiar problems, such as roommate conflicts, creative blocks, relationship issues, academic troubles, drugs and alcohol. But I quickly discovered that my young artist clients were far more complicated and that it was impossible to predict what they might bring to a session. Although these simpler problems did show up, I also encountered suicidality, psychosis, the aftermath of a murder, personality disorders, and many other serious problems I was not trained to work with. "I like surprises" helped me – and continues to help, today – to remain in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts" without pushing the panic button, and to confidently assure clients that "we can sort this out," even when how to do so was completely unclear.

Over time, Negative Capability has fostered a sense of competence in dealing with the unknowable, an increasing adaptability that accompanies my fearful self into uncertainty like a wise and trusted friend. I still don’t always like surprises, but I have grown more at ease with the knowledge that everything is a "don’t know" until it happens.

So far, so good.

Text and images © 2014, David J. Bookbinder. All rights reserved.
Permission required for publication.
Images available for licensing.
flowermandalas.org

Trust: Experienced Innocence
Copyright 2014 David J. Bookbinder

When I was in Boy Scouts, we all had to memorize the Scout Law: "A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent." Even back then, it seemed significant that "trustworthy" was first on the list.

Trust, as an admirable quality, shows up all over the place. When I ask clients to name the five characteristics they most want in a relationship, trust appears on their lists more often than anything else. We want to trust our lovers, our leaders, our judgement, our gut and, says an inscription on each coin of the realm, our God.

We come out of the womb trusting implicitly, but according to pioneering developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, we begin to question trust as early as our first year of life.

Violations of trust teach us to distrust. When our trust has been betrayed, we often feel great pain, and we set up guardians to protect us. If the drive to reconnect is strong enough, we can sometimes overpower our guardians, especially when those who have betrayed us apologize, make amends, and reassure us that it is safe to open our hearts to them again. But these guardians are difficult to retire. Many of us keep them in our employ for the rest of our lives. And if we have allowed ourselves to reconcile, and then trust is violated again, future trust is jeopardized, perhaps permanently. "Fool me once," the guardians say, "shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!"

For example, when an addiction or an extramarital affair finally comes to light, those most deeply affected feel betrayed and deceived: "How could he/she have lied to me for so long?" Trust is lost. Sometimes it can be regained, but if the betrayal – a relapse, resumption of an affair – resurfaces, it may no longer be possible to repair the ruptured relationship.

However, that’s not the worst of it. When we have been betrayed multiple times, we come to distrust not only our betrayers, but also our own judgement: "How could I have been that blind?" And with our truth-detecting algorithms offline, trust itself becomes problematic.

Distrust learned in one situation is often paid forward to many others and we can become locked into self-fulfilling patterns that convince us of the ever-present need for these guardians. Our wound becomes a shield around the heart, complete with a defense system that strives to keep out threats, often at the cost of real connection. Worse, the guardians are not always efficient. We may continue to attract new relationships with untrustworthy people, or we may project untrustworthy qualities onto those who might actually deserve our trust. Each time our patterns recreate experiences of distrust, our guardians grow stronger. We can reach a point where we so identify with our guardians that distrust becomes the norm. We can find ourselves hiding our hearts from everyone.

Nearly two centuries before Erik Erikson’s observations on trust in human development, the radical Romantic poet and illustrator William Blake depicted the passage from an innocent child-like trust into embittered distrust in his books of poems Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.

In Songs of Innocence, published in 1789, we hear the mostly joyous cries of England’s citizenry:

Laughing Song
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;

When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene;
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing "Ha ha he!"

When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of "Ha ha he!"

The mood of Songs of Experience, published five years later, is much darker:


A Divine Image
Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge.

In his later works, Blake portrays a synthesis of Innocence and Experience that reclaims Innocence, transcending the effects of disappointment, mistreatment, and betrayal. Blake scholars call this state "Organized Innocence." Organized Innocence cannot be shattered by Experience. In Organized Innocence, we can feel the joy of "Ha ha he" even in the face of the darkness inherent in the human heart.

Blake was an early influence on me. Little did I know, when I read him as a college freshman, that I would traverse the path from Innocence through Experience not only once, as most of us do, but also a second time.

One effect of a 1993 near-death experience was that I was not only resuscitated but also, effectively, re-conceived.

On a physical level, the conditions during major surgery echo conditions preceding birth. In the operating theater, as in the womb, I was hooked up to apparatuses that circumvented built-in mechanisms: one tube supplied oxygen, another nourishment, and another removed waste. In the ICU, and later in the hospital room, I increasingly gained independence from these supports, a mobilizing trend that continued after I was released from the hospital, where, as in infancy, I again was put into my mother’s care.

More important, however, was the repetition of psychological stages of development that seemed, in my case, to have been a direct consequence of the near-death experience. Though I still retained the memories of my former self, in many ways I felt like a completely new, unscripted person, one for whom none of the rules learned in my prior life necessarily applied. As I progressed from second infancy to second adulthood, I fast-forwarded through many of the emotional conflicts I had experienced the first time around: needing my mother, competing with my father for her attention, struggling for his respect and, later, searching for what to do with my life when I "grew up."

For the first two or three years following my near-death experience, I re-inhabited an Innocent state. I was much more open than I had been before, but in a childlike way. Whatever filtering mechanisms I had developed in my previous incarnation were dissolved; I could not lie or hold back my feelings. As a result, everything seemed fresh and new – "Ha ha he!"

But Innocence reincarnated also removed self-protection and discernment, and I allowed dangerous people into my life. Some examples: I was easily seduced into a relationship with a pathological liar; befriended a man who turned out to have a 30-year history of sociopathic behavior; and trusted my medical malpractice trial attorney as he was setting me up for robbery.

In the years since then, I have gradually reached what feels like my chronological age, and things are different this time around. Although I have experienced betrayals and disappointments, a resilient optimism – a "Ha ha he!" – has arisen in me, and I don’t see it leaving. As my scope of understanding broadens and deepens, I increasingly see light in the darkness and darkness in the light, the union of opposites Blake believed was essential to attaining Organized Innocence.

Going through emotional infancy, childhood, adolescence, and on to late middle age has provided an unusual perspective to my work as a therapist. The process of rapidly and consciously transitioning through Innocence, Experience, and into the early stages of Organized Innocence has made it possible to recognize these stages in my clients, and sometimes also to shepherd them along the path toward their own Organized Innocence.

T.S. Eliot once wrote, "What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?" When I ask people who seem isolated by their distrust how they determine who is trustworthy, they can’t give me an answer. They’ve been burned so many times they have given up trying. Sometimes, the first trusting relationship they have as adults is with me.

Attaining a healed, resilient state akin to Organized Innocence is one of the main goals of psychotherapy, and it can only occur in the presence of trust. Trust! Trust! Trust! is my fundamental therapeutic motto: Trust myself, trust the client, trust the process. Establishing this three-way trust is the first directive of psychotherapy. Without it, healing in relationship is unlikely to occur.

In therapy, clients experience what it is like to have a truly collaborative and authentic relationship, where each side honors the true nature of the other, and where a container is built by client and therapist inside which conflict can safely occur without jeopardizing the relationship.

In my first meeting with a client, I let him or her know that I view therapy as a collaborative process, and that it is important to tell me if I’ve done something that angers or disappoints them. Either I have actually done or said something potentially harmful, in which case a corrective response from me is essential, or the client has inaccurately perceived what I did or said as intending harm, in which case clarifying what is real from what is projection or misunderstanding is equally essential. In either case, I let them know I will take responsibility both for my part in any conflict between us and for staying with the process until we can work it through.

Over time, clients begin to extend trust to other relationships. As they come to recognize the signs of a trustworthy person, they form more durable connections with those worthy of trust and build stronger boundaries to protect them from those who are not. Clients, too, learn to Trust! Trust! Trust: Trust themselves, their own processes of discernment, and those they care about.

Thus, the shell of distrust born of Experience can be remodeled. Instead of a monolithic defense that continually strengthens its protection against relationship, it can morph into a semi-permeable membrane, allowing in those who are trustworthy, filtering out those who are not. When that capacity is realized, Organized Innocence can follow.

Text and images © 2014, David J. Bookbinder. All rights reserved.
Permission required for publication. Images available for licensing.
flowermandalas.org

Suffering: So it goes
Copyright 2013 David J. Bookbinder. All Rights Reserved.

Helen Keller once said that the world is full of suffering, but also of the overcoming of it. But it is also full of suffering that is unrelieved.

I have thought about suffering most of my life. When I was much younger, I wanted to be a psychotherapist, but I didn’t think I could bear the suffering of 20 to 30 people each week. So instead I became a writer and teacher. By the time I reached my 50s, however, I’d had my fair share of suffering, both situational and self-inflicted. Because of what I had endured, I was no longer afraid to bear the suffering of others, and I began my training.

In this profession, I see, and empathically experience, a wide variety of misfortunes and maladies. In any given week, the forms of suffering I might witness include anxiety, depression, abuse, neglect, illness, financial collapse, addiction, poverty, loss, death, relationship struggles, shame, jealousy, rage, loneliness, disappointment, despair, hopelessness, and, potentially, suicide, as well as an equally wide range of self-inflicted pain that replicates problems from the past. Sometimes I am able to help transform this suffering. Sometimes, all I can do is feel and accompany it.

There are many kinds of suffering that I cannot relieve. I cannot undo the traumatic events of the past, much as I might wish I could. I cannot remove the anguish caused by loss. I cannot alter biology. I cannot erase the recognition that everything we love, everything we know, will ultimately crumble to dust, and that dust will be dispersed, and even the dust will eventually disappear without a trace.

Although all of this is obvious, what may not be as apparent is that my helplessness is itself a source of pain. As an antidote, I remember a quote by Gandhi that my first internship supervisor posted on his door: "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." I think of suffering I have endured, and how the difference between bearable and unbearable was almost always the presence of someone who cared, who I knew was willing to ride along with me no matter where my suffering led us. I think, too, of great humanitarians such as Mother Theresa, who would pass through crowds of thousands whose suffering she could not hope to alleviate, but whose bearing witness to it still made a difference.

During my first counseling psychology internship, my own therapist suggested that I create a name for my future private practice and write the first paragraph of a brochure. Although we both knew it would be years before I would have such a practice, I did the exercise anyway. My working title was "True Companion," after a love song by Marc Cohn. The first paragraph of my hypothetical brochure read:

"I am a deep listener, committed to following my clients as they ride the sometimes smooth, sometimes roller-coaster-like pathways of their lives. I sit beside them, a true companion on their trip for as long as they wish me to be their therapist. I feel – and hope to generate – a sense of deep acceptance, as if I am extending a force field around them, providing a taste of what it is like to be loved, seen, protected, and empowered."

The idea of accompanying is still central to my approach. I have also, however, tried to clarify the kinds of suffering that I might actually be able to allay. These are the broad categories of suffering I have observed:

1. Physical suffering caused by congenital infirmities, injury, disease, and aging.
2. Suffering caused by difficult circumstances.
3. Self-inflicted suffering caused by our reactions to the conditions of our lives.
4. Suffering caused by sensing that things are seldom fully as we hope them to be, that even those that are cannot stay that way, and that ultimately all of it ends when we die.

I find I can only occasionally help with the first two forms of suffering, physical and circumstantial. Sometimes I can sense when a psychological problem might have a physical origin and can persuade a client to get medical help. Sometimes I can help a client strategize a way around or out of difficult circumstances. But with the third type of suffering, however, I can often have more sway.

I can help people cope with things they cannot change, either in their pasts or in the present. I can help them learn to accept whatever limitations and losses they have experienced. I can help them develop new skills for managing their emotional states, for responding differently in relationships, and for actualizing potentials that have lain dormant within them. I can help them find allies, separate from detractors, and break out of dysfunctional patterns that heretofore imprisoned them. Through all of this, I can also help them become more resilient, so that when the next blow comes, though they may not be able to avert it, the impact is more easily endured and its suffering, eventually, overcome.

Compared to the magnitude of the world’s suffering, what I do may be insignificant, but in the lives of the people I am able to touch, I can see that it is important that I do it. At the end of most days I feel I have fostered some good that might not otherwise have occurred. This gives both an easement of, and a meaning to, my own suffering, without which I may never have attempted this work.

I know that understanding suffering will be a lifelong endeavor, but these are some things I have learned that will, I think, stay true for me until the end.

I’ve come to see that self-inflicted suffering is the most persistent. I have witnessed amazing triumphs over many kinds and degrees of physical and circumstantial suffering. As a species, we seem well equipped to bear pain, poverty, adversity, illness, injury, and losses. Paradoxically, the less tangible suffering is what many of us find most difficult to endure, the suffering created within our hearts and minds.

A decade ago, I lost to suicide a close friend who, like me, had nearly died about ten years earlier. Left for dead on a cot in a small hospital in a remote area of Thailand, he suddenly showed signs of life and was airlifted to a major hospital in Bangkok, where he slowly recovered. His spinal cord, however, was seriously damaged, and the accident left him quadriplegic. Unwilling to accept paralysis as his fate, he demonstrated heroic resilience, eventually regaining most of the use of first his hands and arms, and then later his legs. By the time we met, although he walked with the aid of a cane, he had regained most of his ability to function. But when he reached the limits of his physical recovery, he began to relapse into old patterns of addiction, hopelessness, and despair, and ultimately took his own life. His despair seemed rooted not in the physical pain and limitations of his unhealable injuries, but in his realization that this was all he was going to get back. He saw his injured self as fallen, bereft of the qualities he valued most in himself – his appearance, his agility, his ability to make beautiful things with his hands. These would not return, and he could not bear the thought of continuing without them.

In my own life, the most trying forms of suffering have not been life-threatening illnesses or being a crime victim, but rather emotional and psychological ones: recurrent feelings of loneliness, fear, depression, shame, and anxiety, among others, often dating back to early childhood wounds.

I have come to see that hoping for a time of no more suffering causes more suffering. We often think: If only we had this or didn’t have that, then we would be happy. If only I had a girlfriend. If only I had a job. If only I didn’t have this illness. If only my husband would... my children would... I could...

I don’t mean that we can never be happy. Far from it. Or that much of our suffering cannot be avoided or mitigated. Far from that, too. But it seems important to remember that none of us is likely to be spared the suffering of illness or the loss of a loved one or a difficult turn of fortune, and that nobody escapes death. Attempts to avoid all suffering often add to anxiety about potential loss, or frantic efforts to make things that are already changing stay the same, or to striving for "perfection" when "good enough" is something to be grateful for.

The most startling example is denial of death. As a people, we seem increasingly preoccupied not only with looking and feeling younger than we are, but also with extending health and life indefinitely. Google, for example, recently announced a new medical company called Calico whose aim is to take on aging itself. Ray Kurzweil, pioneer inventor in the fields of optical character recognition, text-to-speech machines, speech recognition, and music synthesizers, is now devoting his life to extending it. By taking advantage of a series of existing and projected advances in technology, he hopes to live long enough to be successfully frozen, and then, ultimately, to "upload" his mind into a non-biological brain, outrunning death itself.

But is "more" life actually "better"? I have often pondered this question. One outcome of my 1993 near-death experience was the visceral understanding, just before I blacked out, that all lives, regardless of their lengths, are lives, just as all books in a bookstore are books, and all of them are complete. Had I died at 41, my life would have been a shorter but still complete one. If I live to twice that age, my life will still be, only a single completed life. Despite 50 years of reading science fiction, the notion of living forever appeals only to my sense of curiosity: I want to know what happens next. But I can let that one go. There is a purposefulness to entering this final stretch of my life that is enhanced by a growing awareness that I will not return from my next experience of death. The low-level sense of dissatisfaction that comes from awareness of mortality, I believe, can be alleviated not by striving for immortality, but by accepting that this is how things are.

Some cultures teach that we should be grateful to suffering because of what we can learn from it. I am not yet there. But I do not believe that suffering imprisons us. We are all suffering somehow, but there is nothing unfair about that. As the Buddhists say, this is the nature of samsara, the endless cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth. So it goes.

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

Choice: Repatterning

Copyright 2013 David J. Bookbinder. All Rights Reserved.

NOTE: The opinions expressed in the following joke do not represent those held by The Management.

So, there is this joke about two lawyers. One of them is walking out of a bank when he sees an old lady a little ways ahead of him, fumbling with her purse while trying to stay balanced on her cane. Eventually she gets herself together and goes on her way. As the lawyer reaches the place the old lady was standing, he spots a $100 bill on the sidewalk. He’s sure she dropped it. He picks up the money and then realizes he’s faced with a moral dilemma:

(Beat.)

Should he tell his partner?

Each action we take, or don’t take, says something about who we are and who we are becoming. And yet, though most of us understand this even as children (Santa Claus "knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!), making the right choice can sometimes be elusive despite our best intentions.

Conscious choice is toughest when we are acting out our patterns. Truisms seek to guide us. "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result," we are told by helpful friends and family, "is insanity." Or our buddies may remind us, sagely, that "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it." I find myself often borrowing this one from Solution-Focused therapy: "If something’s working, do more of it. If it’s not, do something else."

These are all useful reminders that we have choices, and we utter them to try to help each other deal with the frustrations and difficulties of making wise ones. Sometimes, a reminder is all we need to shake things up and change what needs to change or to hold back from tinkering with what’s been working fine. More often, though, a simple reminder, no matter how well-intended, is insufficient.

Our patterns strive diligently to limit our choices to those they already know. They can’t help it – they’re just patterns, and that's what patterns do. When our patterns are working well for us, that’s great. But when we are stuck in a dysfunctional loop, our patterns still tirelessly reassert themselves despite our best efforts to circumvent them.

Some of our patterns are instilled early in life by the surrounding culture, others we create out of our experience in our families, neighborhoods, and schools. These cultural and personal patterns are deeply inscribed, and they usually take more than awareness to release. According to a recent study, changing even a simple habit takes about nine months of consistent effort. Altering the more complex patterns we develop over a lifetime is harder. The magnitude of change is similar to an operating system upgrade on a computer; a lot of old code needs to be debugged or rewritten.

Inherited cultural patterns, such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of prejudice, often resist change for a lifetime. Though it may help us alter our behavior, telling ourselves not to think poorly of those we were raised to believe are "other" is seldom enough to unseat deep-rooted beliefs and emotions. Often, we have to examine the roots themselves, find support for changing our feelings, ideas, and attitudes, and act repeatedly in an unbiased fashion, sometimes for a very long time, before the prejudice itself dissipates.

Patterns we have learned in childhood about ourselves and our relationships with others are also surprisingly durable. These patterns typically become embodied in an internal critic that rigorously enforces its rules, relentlessly setting obstacles in our path to prevent us from deviating from the pattern’s instructions even when our conscious minds tell us they serve no useful purpose or, even, are harmful. Here, too, awareness is a necessary first step, but we also need to sense deeply into our established programming and to consistently reinforce new thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and beliefs.

Although we often have little or no say in the cards we are dealt – we cannot control the circumstances of our birth, and good and bad fortune happens to us all – we do have a say in how we play those cards.

When I look at my own life, I still see patterned repetitions that reach back decades, despite diligent efforts to alter them. I react to triggers knowing that they are triggers, make questionable choices knowing that they are questionable. As a therapist, it’s galling to see my own patterns continue to unfold, internal/infernal machines that seem to run as efficiently and effortlessly as the day they came off the production floor. "I should be able to do better than this!" I moan.

But I also see consistent progress in altering previously intransigent patterns, and I note with pleased surprise that I have even completely replaced old, dysfunctional patterns with new, much-improved models. In itself, that’s gratifying, and it also reminds me that the remaining dysfunctional patterns can also yield, if only I persist.

Psychotherapy is a marvelous laboratory for repatterning. Over time, I see my clients acting out some patterns, breaking others, vacillating between repeating and reinventing just like I do. Sometimes they feel as if the struggle to make different choices will never end, and then there is a breakthrough followed by consistent change. More often, I see a slow accretion of better choices, interrupted by ever briefer relapses into old ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving. That’s how lasting change seems to occur: a little here, a little there, a little forward, sometimes a little back. One choice at a time.

The good news is that even when we feel trapped in our old patterns, helplessly watching ourselves play them out, we still have choice. We can remain unaware, or we can adopt practices and attitudes that raise our awareness. We can go it alone, automaton-like, or we can seek the help we need to move into more alive territory. We can choose to remain asleep or to gradually awaken and, once awake, to resist hitting the snooze button and stay out of bed as long as we can manage.

Even when we appear to be locked into difficult circumstances, we can choose how we respond to them. Do we sink into depression or despair? Do we become entrapped in victimhood? Do we struggle (valiantly!) against truly impossible odds, only to fall into despair when we inevitably fail? Or do we find a way to re-center ourselves, reassess, accept our situation for what it is, and select the best options available to us?

Momentary choices – "Should I tell my partner?" – may define us in that moment, but breaking our patterns, and thereby freeing up our deepest blocks and releasing our fundamental sources of empowerment, helps us make choices that reflect our core selves – and not only in that particular moment, but also, with increasing reliability, in each succeeding one.

This process is often slow and unsteady. Now in my early 60s, I still sometimes hover at the threshold of change, uncertain in which direction to turn. Yet at the same time, I also continue to more deeply sense parts of myself that have been waiting for a lifetime to be consulted, heard, and acted upon. And when these parts awaken from their lengthy slumber, the effect is as breathlessly stunning as the sun rising on a brand new day.

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

Stillness: Bells and watches
Copyright 2013 David J. Bookbinder. All Rights Reserved.

At a meditation retreat I attended years ago, I was introduced to the concept of the Mindfulness Bell. At apparently random times throughout each day, a monk or nun would sound a bell, and we all had to halt what we were doing and take three slow, deep, abdominal breaths. We stopped in mid-sentence, mid-stride, mid-chew, as if we were in an enormous game of freeze tag.

At first I found this annoying: I was in the midst of spiritual evolution, damn it. Stop interrupting me! But before the retreat came to an end, I learned to value and to embrace these "interruptions."

In my first counseling internship a few months later, I worked with a young college student whose list of mental health and life problems was long and troubling. She heavily abused alcohol, moved from one destructive relationship to another, was grieving her parents’ ugly divorce and her own traumatizing childhood, and was coming to grips with her father’s alcoholism. Also, because she had no financial support, she worked long hours at a restaurant where drinking and drugging on the job was the norm. She was depressed, angry, anxious, lonely, and uncertain of her future.

Her tendency was to bring up as many as 10 problems in any given session, and to comment critically on nearly every therapeutic intervention I tried. She often spoke negatively of her four previous therapists, and I realized I was on the road to becoming idiot therapist number five. In a moment of new-therapist desperation, I handed her my watch at the start of a session and asked her to be still for one full minute. Only after the second hand completed its appointed round could she begin the session.

What ensued was very different. She spoke more slowly, stayed with one topic, and dug deeper. We were, we both realized, actually doing therapy! After that, we started each session with my handing her my watch. A couple of weeks later, she brought her own watch. A few weeks after that, she didn’t need it.

To replicate the watch effect in her outside life, I taught her the three-breath-meditation I had learned at the retreat, instructing her to treat any bell, beep, or other sharp sound she happened to hear as if it were the Mindfulness Bell.

Over the next few months, we worked through many of her issues. By year’s end, she had quit her waitress job, stopped using drugs and alcohol, was starting to set better boundaries with her parents, and was finding other adults to mentor her. She was back on track academically and exploring new veins of artistic creativity.

In our parting session, I asked her what, of all we had done together, had been helpful. I was expecting, I suppose, to be thanked for my brilliant insights and clever use of the Gestalt and Solution-Focused therapeutic techniques I had been trying out, and I had prepared myself to deliver a falsely modest, "Oh, I just helped a little. You did the work." So I was surprised when she replied, "That thing with the watch. And the meditation thing. That’s what really helped me."

Learning to be still in the midst of the chaos of her life had permitted her to re-evaluate her choices. Each time she paused for three slow breaths, she had a chance to feel her feelings, check in with her intuition, and rethink what she was about to do. Stopped at a street corner on the way to work, hearing the Mindfulness Bell of a car horn, she could think, "I don’t really want to waste my time partying tonight." On the first ring of her cell phone, about to leave for a bar, she could see how the evening would play out and decide, "Not this time." Hearing the "bell" of a fire engine siren in the midst of pangs of guilt about her past, she could choose to forgive herself.

When the school year came to an end, along with my internship, she asked if she could continue to see me as her therapist. My supervisor had no objections, so I sublet an office in neighboring Brookline on Sunday afternoons, where she – and, eventually, several of her friends and their friends – became my first private clients.

I continue to suggest to clients practices that create stillness and also to use them myself. When I step into my office, I stop for a moment and imagine myself putting on an invisible jacket worn only by my best self. Brief meditations throughout the day help me shift gears between clients, return to center when I’m knocked around emotionally, and reinhabit that best self. I recommend ways for clients to find stillness, even if only for a minute, so they, too, can interrupt their habitual thoughts, feelings, and actions, and consider other options.

In some ways, the brief stillnesses that happen throughout the day, in media res, seems more powerful than daily sitting meditation. They are meditations with eyes wide open, fully in the world, yet at the same time rooted, and each provides a touchstone wherever we are, whatever we are doing.

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

Solitude: Shiftings
Copyright 2013, David J. Bookbinder. All Rights Reserved.

In solitude, we can inhabit our deepest selves, feel intense spiritual connection, and experience self love. Or we can dwell in their contraries, finding only disconnection, despair, and self-hatred.

Solitude, my refuge as a boy, felt like imprisonment for much of my later life. From my last year in high school and through my 20s, I struggled ceaselessly to avoid it.

I structured my life to reinforce connection. I hitch-hiked across the United States and Canada to force myself to ask strangers for rides and places to stay. I lived with roommates so that I was seldom really alone. I made arrangements to meet friends for meals and a movie even when I could afford neither and was living mainly on brown rice and omelets. I found work as a reporter to force myself to interview strangers, and as a teacher to push myself out of solitude and into connection with my students.

E. M. Forster’s “Only connect!” became my motto, and without frequent connection, particularly intimate connection, I often collapsed into despondency. Solitude became a necessary evil. The time I spent writing, although absorbing, was time subtracted from connection. I became one of the pioneer users of telephone answering machines (in those days, bulky reel-to-reel tape recorders) because I did not want to risk missing a call, an opportunity for connection, while I was out researching a story. My fear was that if I spent too much time by myself, I would revert to an isolated child again, not only alone but also lonely. I had found connection, and I didn’t want solitude to take it away.

Through my 30s and beyond, I became more tolerant of literal time alone, but I still dreaded periods between intimate relationships and tended to stay in them even when it was apparent that the center did not hold. I couldn’t bear the thought of spending weekends only in my own company or scrambling to make plans with friends, each hour of contact like an oasis in a desert of disconnection. Worse, still, was the ever-present sense of having nobody to share my life with, day by day.

I noticed, however, that a different paradigm seemed to apply when I traveled. Although I was not, strictly speaking, “alone” on my hitch-hiking and motorcycling trips, I was only rarely accompanied by a traveling companion, yet only rarely did I feel lonely. In my late 20s and 30s, I took solo train treks through Europe. Most of that time, though when I did encounter people I could seldom even speak their language, I seldom experienced loneliness. Why, I wondered, was solitude not an issue when I was on the road?

More puzzling still was my most extreme period of aloneness, the near-death experience I had in 1993. In the experience itself, though I was isolated even from memories, sensations, and my own identity, I felt more connected than ever before and – beyond any meditation or psychedelic experience, beyond even passionate love – completely whole and at peace. Some of this sense of connection carried through in the months of recovery, when I was often physically isolated but never, somehow, really alone.

Theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich wrote: “Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.” For the last 20 years, I have been attempting to solve the mystery of these exceptions to the loneliness of solitude and thereby, I hope, to achieve connectedness in solitude and in the world outside.

I see now that my fear of solitude was that I’d never be connected again. When I traveled, I knew that I’d eventually meet someone on the road, or I’d stop to visit briefly with a friend along the way. These points of contact were places from which I could launch myself into the unknown with excitement, much as a child with a secure attachment experiences his caregiver as a “home base” from which he can venture forth, knowing there will always be someone to welcome him when he returns.

Over time, the insecure child in me has come to understand that he, too, has places that will always welcome him. Most recently, the Buddhist sangha has become a home base – a place where I know I will always be warmly accepted, and that I can count on when I return from the week’s adventures. I'm also finding activities that combine solitude with connection increasingly appealing: group motorcycle rides, meditating in the sangha, watching movies with friends, being with a partner while each of us does our own activity, occasionally sharing a glance, a comment, a smile, a touch.

Inside each of us is the seed of an empathic connection with everything. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this ever-present interconnectedness “interbeing” and talks about how everything “inter-is” with everything else. Understanding how connection transcends physical separation alters the nature of solitude. Fully embracing interbeing is still a work in progress for me, but as I’ve become increasingly comfortable in my own skin, solitude has become a more quiescent place to be, and “alone” a condition that is no longer lonely.

My friend Susan once remarked, “David, at least when you’re alone, you’re with a good person.” In the near-death experience and its immediate aftermath, I was strongly linked to a Self that was never far away. When I remember Susan’s statement, I smile inwardly to that Self, accept solitude, and feel my heart shift.

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.