I loved New Orleans pre Katrina. A few years back i walked down Bourbon street revelling in the myriad of experiences available. The Mardi Gras was in full battle cry, a heady combination of jazz, sex, soul food and some seriously powerful Mojo which enlivened me in deep ways. I stumbled through the throng, sitting with strangers on street corners drinking neat bourbon having intense discussions, eating gumbos with thick white bread, watching madness sweep through the gathering leaving no one untouched. I felt so alive that I wrote feverishly for days, possessed by a creative spirit which left me spent like a manic lover. Once the fever had passed I awoke and examined my ink stained fingers through swollen lids, i discovered that some of the ideas I had had were good, but most were not nearly as inspiring in the cold light of day. As I returned to Cape Town, I ached for the intensity of the experience. The unbridled creative expression of Self. I can still connect with a dim feeling sense of that intensity and use it as a beacon as I search for ways to reignite my creativity.

The problem with activating creativity is that in this age of information abundance and overload, nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying. In searching for ways to release my creative constipation (yes I know I mention constipation often), I stumbled upon this…

“The way to get over creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom. Write a poem on your lunch break. Paint a painting with only one color. Start a business without any start-up capital. Shoot a movie with your iPhone and a few of your friends. Build a machine out of spare parts. Don’t make excuses for not working — make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now.”

It appears that the right constraints can lead to your very best work. My favorite example? Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 different words, so his editor bet him he couldn’t write a book with only 50 different words. Dr. Seuss came back and won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham, one of the bestselling children’s books of all time.

An exploratory model for the psychology of emotion.

We tend to think of our emotions as having laws unto themselves, but one psychological researcher has suggested that our emotions do follow certain general rules.

Professor Nico Frijda puts forward twelve laws of the emotions (Fridja, 2006). As with most laws there are exceptions, but these have been synthesised from years of psychological research and hold true much of the time.

1. The Law of Situational Meaning

The first law is simply that emotions derive from situations. Generally the same types of situation will elicit the same types of emotional response. Loss makes us grieve, gains make us happy and scary things make us fearful (mostly anyway – see all the other laws).

2. The Law of Concern

We feel because we care about something, when we have some interest in what happens, whether it’s to an object, ourselves, or another person. Emotions arise from these particular goals, motivations or concerns. When we are unconcerned we don’t feel anything.

3. The Law of Apparent Reality

Whatever seems real to us, can elicit an emotional response. In other words how we appraise or interpret a situation governs the emotion we feel (compare with laws 11 & 12). The reason poor movies, plays or books don’t engage us emotionally is because, in some sense, we fail to detect truth. Similarly it’s difficult to get emotional about things that aren’t obvious, right in front of us. For example grief may not strike when we are told about the death of loved one, but only once it becomes real to us in some way – say when we pick up the phone to call them, forgetting they are gone.

4, 5 & 6. The Laws of Change, Habituation and Comparative Feeling

The law of habituation means that in life we get used to our circumstances whatever they are (mostly true, but see laws 7 & 8). The emotions, therefore, respond most readily to change. This means that we are always comparing what is happening to a relatively steady frame of reference (what we are used to). As a result our emotions tend to respond most readily to changes that are relative to this frame of reference.

7. The Law of Hedonic Asymmetry

There are certain awful circumstances to which we can never become accustomed. If things are bad enough, it is impossible to escape negative feelings like fear or anxiety. On the other hand positive emotions always fade over time. No matter how much we are in love, how big the lottery win, or how copious the quantities of drugs consumed, positive emotions like pleasure always slip away.

8. The Law of Conservation of Emotional Momentum

Time doesn’t heal all wounds – or if it does, it only does so indirectly. Events can retain their emotional power over the years unless we re-experience and re-evaluate them. It’s this re-experiencing and consequent re-definition that reduces the emotional charge of an event. This is why events that haven’t been re-evaluated – say, failing an exam or being rejected by a potential lover – retain their emotional power across the decades.

9. The Law of Closure

The way we respond to our emotions tends to be absolute. They often lead immediately to actions of one kind or another, and they will brook no discussion (but see laws 10, 11 & 12). In other words emotional responses are closed to goals other than their own or judgements that can mitigate the response. An emotion seizes us and send us resolutely down one path, until later that is, when a different emotion sends us down the opposite path.

10. The Law of Care for Consequences

People naturally consider the consequences of their emotions and modify them accordingly. For example anger may provoke violent feelings towards another, but generally people refrain from stabbing each other willy-nilly. Instead they will shout, hit their head on the wall or just silently fume. Emotions may absolutely dictate a type of response, but people do modulate the size of that response (usually!).

11 & 12. Laws of the Lightest Load and the Greatest Gain

The emotional impact of an event or situation depends on its interpretation. Putting a different ‘spin’ on a situation can change the feeling. The law of the lightest load means people are particularly motivated to use re-interpretations to reduce negative emotions. For example we might reduce the fear of the credit crunch by generating the illusion we won’t be affected. The exact reverse is also true: whenever a situation can be reinterpreted for a positive emotional gain, it will be. For example anger can be used to make others back down, grief attracts help and fear may stop us rashly attempting difficult or dangerous

You may not agree with all of these ‘laws’ as this is quite an individually based account of emotion and tends to downplay the social aspects of emotion. Nevertheless, it is an excellent starting point which provides a useful way of thinking about emotions, and helps to shed light on an initial conceptual framework for examining individual emotions.

Article from Time circa 2009

Talk. Share. Cry. Stretch? Psychotherapy has historically been an exercise of the mind, but in the offices of more and more modern-day mental-health providers, emotional healing is taking place not just on the couch but on the yoga mat.

The burgeoning field is called yoga therapy, and its practitioners include psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers who incorporate yoga poses and meditative breathing into their sessions, as well as yoga teachers who want to learn how to address the emotions that bubble up in students during class or in private sessions. The idea, say yoga therapists, is to allow yoga to empower people while priming them to access their deepest emotions.

A typical yoga-therapy session with Dr. Elizabeth Visceglia, a psychiatrist and yoga therapist based in New York City, often starts with some kind of breath work — energizing breaths for people who are depressed, balancing breaths for those with anxiety. Then patients practice yoga poses geared to their specific needs. People with severe posttraumatic stress disorder, for example, are prone to losing their sense of being in the room when they experience a vivid reliving of their trauma. So Visceglia has them hold simple grounding positions, like the warrior or chair pose, before transitioning into talk therapy.

“Emotional memories are stored in your body,” Visceglia says. “A group yoga class, is not structured to enable you to process that. Ideally one would want to work with someone who is paying attention to both the physical and emotional experiences.”

That’s the philosophy behind yoga therapy instruction at Phoenix Rising in West Stockbridge, Mass., where yoga therapists, who do not need to be mental-health practitioners, learn to address both the mind and body in one-on-one sessions and group classes. A Phoenix Rising yoga therapist puts clients in assisted yoga postures and does a kind of “verbal exploration” of the present moment. The yoga therapist acts as a witness to clients’ exploration, with empathy and positive regard for their experience.

The concept of healing the mind via the body, and vice versa, has been around for decades. “Freud used to work with hysterical women with unconscious conflicts that they couldn’t express through words,” says Visceglia. “Only through looking at the symptoms of their body [like phantom pregnancies] could they even get to what was psychologically needed for healing.”

Since the days of Freud, research into the mind-body relationship has come a long way. Studies show that not only are your mental health and mood dependent in large part on physical factors like exercise, but also unchecked stress, anxiety and depression can affect physical health, increasing blood pressure, heart disease and even risk of death. So it was perhaps inevitable that patients would start bringing their yoga mats into therapy.

The practice is quickly gaining popularity. There are now close to 50 schools of yoga offering yoga-therapy training in the U.S. And the International Association of Yoga Therapists has more than tripled its membership from 2003 to 2009, to about 2,500 members. “Now we have more licensed health-care providers, including psychologists, coming in who are interested in using yoga in their work,” says Kelly McGonigal, the editor in chief of the International Journal of Yoga Therapy.

In fact, yoga therapy may even offer some aid to psychiatry’s most intractable patients. Visceglia is in the process of analyzing data from a recent study she conducted at Bronx State Psychiatric Center on the effects of yoga therapy in people with chronic schizophrenia, some of whom have been hospitalized for 15 to 20 years. Her study suggests a decrease in negative symptoms and an increase in quality of life. The endocrine system and parasympathetic nervous system are out of whack in schizophrenia patients; yoga affects these systems, Visceglia says, leading to an increased overall feeling of calm.

That sense of peace is what Joan Stenzler, a licensed clinical social worker and a yoga teacher in Fresh Meadows, N.Y., tries to create in her sessions. In addition to using physical yoga poses, Stenzler teaches her clients about the five koshas, or layers of consciousness, in yoga: physical, energetic, mental-emotional, wisdom and bliss. “Each kosha represents one aspect of our existence or consciousness and can potentially be open and accessible to the individual, or blocked,” says Stenzler, who helps patients identify and free themselves from their areas of blockage.

“When I first came [to therapy] I was having a lot of anxiety and physical symptoms that made me feel trapped,” says Rachel W., a special-education teacher. “Through yoga, Joan helped me witness what I was experiencing and train myself to think past my body.”

But some experts are cautious about the combo therapy. Their main concern is safety: Are psychotherapists really equipped to teach yoga? “Yes, but only with extensive yoga training,” says Bo Forbes, a clinical psychologist, yoga teacher, and founder and director of the Center for Integrative Yoga Therapeutics in Boston. She believes that psychotherapists should have in-depth study of yoga and a strong background in anatomy and alignment to limit client injuries. Currently, there are no official licenses or standards of practice for yoga therapy.

Further, says Forbes, many mental-health experts who try yoga therapy may have a difficult time overcoming the mores of their profession. “As psychologists, we have been schooled against touch. For example, it can take work for the clinicians who go through our teacher-training programs to overcome that prohibition.”

Already, however, many therapists are guiding downward-dog poses in the office. Stenzler says yoga and psychotherapy make a perfect union — which is what yoga actually translates to in Sanskrit. “The goal and intention in psychotherapy is to support a patient to be who they always were. And that’s yoga! I’ve been doing it all along and didn’t realize…”

I refuse to become a ‘Dead Man Walking’

Sometimes the reflection I see in the mirror as I shave before work is alien to me and when the man I see, is a pale reflection of the man I want to be, it is time for change.

I have always been a Seeker, a restless spirit, someone who enjoys searching, learning and growing. Whenever my life grows stale and cold due to the entropy of awareness, I seek out a transformative process that will bring me to the precipice of myself and be a rigorous catalyst for change.

The thing is, I too enjoy comfort, stability, structure, (not to mention good red wine and rich comforting foods), but I am also aware of how the creative, intellectual, and spiritual parts of my life are prone to atrophy over a period of time if new wellsprings are not actively sought out. I don’t think it is possible to have a ‘safe’ life, to cling to comfort like a small child and to evolve at the same time. So, in order to rekindle the light behind my eyes, I am embarking on another transformative process.

I did various martial arts for over a decade, I enjoyed the cardiovascular aspects, the discipline, the strength I could feel in my body and the moment by moment awareness necessary when sparring with an opponent. But, with time my opponents grew younger (or I older) and my relationship with Kung-Fu ended with three cracked ribs and a month of painful insomnia.

I am a kinetic being and if I do not exercise, my mind becomes cloudy and filled with dangerous crackling static. My partner’s suggestion that I start Yoga was met with derision, I heaped scorn upon something I knew very little about and it was only when my ferocious mind threateningly tightened its noose that I capitulated and found myself on a yoga mat, surrounded by women, feeling quite emasculated and self conscious. Slowly, very slowly I lowered my defenses, my martial power based practice, my expectations, I massaged my ego when I fell out of poses, I began to find my balance and concentrate on what was happening on my mat as opposed to the attractive woman two rows down.

Over the past five years it has become less important as to whether or not I can do a handstand, but whether I can be present throughout a strong flowing practice. Can I drop beneath the ceaseless fluctuations of the mind, the preening ego, into the quiet depths below? It is in these depths that I have begun to understand the potency of this practice and its very clear links  to my healing vocation.

I know it may all sound a wee bit evangelical… but bare with me while I explore and plot the topography of these depths over the next five month teacher training cycle, there is something in here which we can all use to understand ourselves. It may take courage for a Spirit to grow, but I’ve got a feeling its going to take bloody hard work too!

 

Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges

By TARA PARKER-POPE/ New York Times 2012

 

If you consider marriage a lifelong romance, you are certain to be disillusioned. The shallowest of complaints is that marriage destroys romance…of course it does! Marriage appears to be designed to allow two people to fall out of love and into reality. Love may blossom in romance, but in marriage we return to our deep psychic roots that are mysteriously alive no matter how many times they have been put under a therapeutic lens. Many of us separated and alienated from our families of origin, divorced, veterans of many love affairs are surprised when we approach intimacy and commitment to find infantile needs, feelings and expectations we had exiled or repressed come flooding back.

Why does marriage and the threat-promise of intimacy put our souls in a pressure cooker?

Romance is all “yes”and heavy breathing, an affair built around the illusion of unbroken affirmation. Marriage is “yes” and “no” and “maybe”, a relationship of trust that is steeped in the primal ambivalence of love and sometimes hate.

Sam Keen wrote a letter to his wife that embodies the dance.

“Dear Jananne. I love and hate you: find you desirable and terrible, satisfying and maddening, a helpmate and a saboteur. I was rich and wounded in history long before I knew you. In you I taste generations of women who have nurtured and injured me-my ex-wife, past lovers, my mother, my grandmother. One moment I am encompassed in your earth-mothering arms, tendered and warmed. A moment later I look into your face and see bloody Kali ready to devour me. I know you as a woman who can take up a flute and improve on the music of the spheres and an hour later play the shrill fury. Light-bringer and shadow monster, creator and destroyer. You delight me, except for those times I could wring your neck and dance a jig on your grave”.

Perhaps a bit harsh, especially the part about dancing a jig on her grave, but marriage may provide the best hospital for our ancient wounds. The alchemy of unconditional love that heals us only takes place when a man and a woman, knowing the best and worst of each other, finally accept what is unacceptable in the other, burn the bridges and close off their escape routes.

It’s a bloody difficult equation…

 

 

Sometimes I get tired of the chaos, crying, snot, teething, temperatures, tantrums, tactile sensitivity, irritation, expectations, constipation, suffocation, alliteration and aggravation!

I cannot remember the last time I read something uninterrupted besides Winnie the Pooh’s birthday party or Enid Blyton. I wake up with feet in my face, crumbs in the bed, a stray half eaten regurgitated chicken sausage under my pillow. Sometimes I want to go to the shops for ‘milk’ and get on a plane to Chile and hike without seeing any small folk, or wives for a very long time.

And then I stare at my daughter’s tight curls at the back of her head wondering at their miraculous symmetry, I hear her soft snores and wonder what she’s dreaming about. I wipe tomato sauce from the corner of her mouth as she smiles in her sleep. I get up and my wife puts her arms around me while I make a cup of tea, she rests her cheek between my shoulder blades and tells me she loves me and appreciates me before she goes to the spare room to put her ear plugs in. I sit on the stoep as the warm wind soothes my ruffled spirits and slowly, very slowly I realize that I have everything that I need.

 

How many of us know who we really are?

Who amongst us can honestly claim to have never felt the presence of the darker emotions that prowl the periphery of our idealized selves. Rage, greed, desire, jealousy, hatred… these are but alienated, unexamined  aspects of the self that are denied access from conscious awareness, relegated to the wastelands where they are doomed to wander until called.

At some stage in the distant past I worked in the criminal wards at Valkenberg psychiatric hospital where men who were accused of the most heinous crimes (rape, murder, incest etc) were sent for observation and evaluation. At one point I was conducting between five to eight evaluations a day. It was both fascinating and traumatizing work. Many of the men I evaluated had committed crimes not because they were ‘evil’ (I have yet to meet an Evil man), but because they were either- under the influence of a substance, mentally handicapped (including head trauma),  psychiatrically ill (e.g. paranoid schizophrenia) or prone to acting out their repressed feelings of chronic powerlessness violently upon others. In hindsight I’m sure I saw evidence of the Shadow stalking the dimly lit passages of Valkenberg, but at the time I didn’t recognize it.

After working with many men for many years it has become painfully evident that within each man’s psyche lurks a Shadow. The Shadow can be defined as all those aspects of ourselves that make us uncomfortable with ourselves, the split off, denied, rejected parts of Self that are exiled to the unconscious.   Our“complexes” – those historically charged clusters of energy, organized around particular personal experience in our past — aid in protecting our Shadow’s territory. These energies form our first and deeply entrenched anxiety management strategies (projection, denial, avoidance, repression) to assist us in avoiding knowing what we don’t want to know about ourselves. We then project onto others aspects of ourselves that make us uncomfortable with or about ourselves. These energies and strategies feed the Shadow, often with terrifying results. Jung probed these darker recesses of the psyche with exquisite precision. He wrote:

“There can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected”.

“Psychology and Religion” (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.131

“We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women who pass by without exciting attention, and who betray to the world nothing of the conflicts that rage within them. What is so difficult for the layman to grasp is the fact that in most cases people have no suspicion whatever of the internecine war raging in their unconscious. If we remember that there are many people who understand nothing at all about themselves, we shall be less surprised at the realization that there are also people who are utterly unaware of their actual conflicts”.

“New Paths in Psychology” (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.425

At times it appears that we are all recovering children, stumbling about in big bodies, in big roles with big consequences. The only variance between us appears to be our tensile strength, our resilience, our will to become. The challenge then is to begin to reclaim our personal authority, to realize that we are not our history, not only what happened to us and how it all got internalized. We are also our aspirations. We are what wishes to come into the world through us.

The Shadow is not something to defend against, but to be met head-on, explored, eventually integrated into the whole of us, for when we meet our Shadow, there we are most fully in the game, most completely in the arena in which meaning is won or lost, and life more fully lived.

(3:51 am)…hmm, perhaps Erikson was talking rubbish.

4:15am

I have made a contract with myself that if I wake up in the middle of the night, I then have to write at least 500 vaguely cogent words as penance. I borrowed the slightly adapted idea from the psychologist Milton Erikson who had interesting ways of treating chronic insomnia. He told one man to polish his wooden floors upon waking, night after night the man woke up, got down on his hands and knees with a small cloth and polished the wooden floors in his home (an onerous task indeed as it took well over an hour to complete). After developing a particular distaste for the task, Erikson claimed the man ‘slept like a baby’ (although in my home, the words ‘sleep’ and  ‘baby’ are certainly not  commensurate).

After reviewing my recent entries it is painfully evident to me that at times I am prone to feeling too much. Although I do feeling well and my emotional landscape is well traversed, it can become rather a bother. Not only have I charted rather obscure areas of my own emotional terrain, but I wade around in other peoples feelings all day (images of subterranean Paris in wellington boots and a head-torch comes to mind). On occasion, the result of this is that I become incredibly sensitized to my environment and when shock waves roll through the collective psyche of the broader system (e.g. Marikana, Bredasdorp etc) I can short circuit. A short circuit is essentially when I begin to drown in feeling without titrating it with rational thinking, this can lead me into the unlit areas of mind called despair and hopelessness. I’ve been in these neighbourhoods before and  know the kind of characters who hang around the street corners peddling woe and self recrimination. I’m not currently in the market for any of their wares.

So, although I am awake at some ungodly hour, I’ll try to reconstruct Hope with some sticky tape, wood glue and some good ‘ol fashioned Tennessee bourbon (a pity the latter is a compensatory fantasy as I head into a full day of work, but never mind) so instead I’ll have to return to reading my suitably soporifically titled book  ‘Changing Men in South Africa’ and hope it has a happy ending.

386 words, I’m going to have to get more wax.

It’s 3 a.m.

I recently joined a Dream Analysis group in order to expand my knowledge about what Freud called “the royal road to the unconscious”. During last night’s group I offered two dreams I had had the previous night in an effort to explore what had left me feeling anxious throughout the day.

A bit of context may be useful before I describe the dreams. I live in an area that has been plagued of late by numerous burglaries, while I am not particularly attached to my material goods, I am worried about leaving my daughter and her caregiver in the house during the day. This worry is only vaguely ameliorated by panic buttons, armed response, security gates and two particularly docile basset hounds.

On my way to work I had listened to yet another report of a violent sexual attack on a young woman who had passed away as a result of her injuries. I was filled with deep despair and a now familiar helpless rage as I contemplated the violence and ignorance which ravages much of our collective psyche. The powerful feelings built rapidly and I wept as I thought about the horror she must have endured, about my own daughters and how vulnerable and blissfully unaware they are in what feels  to be a country drowning in violence, greed, poverty, apathy and ignorance.

I parked my own swirling fear and anger  as I sat down with my first client and gently helped them unpack their own. I have been a midwife for others trauma for many thousands of hours and have become proficient at separating out my own internal struggles from those of my clients (which does not exclude the ability to resonate deeply with their experience). At the conclusion of my work day, I have to shift gears once again in order to accommodate  the duties and concerns of householder, father and husband, to separate the sometimes traumatic content of my work from my gentle family… but as my conscious mind dims and surrenders to sleep, my defenses wink out and a whole new landscape unfolds.

I am asleep but awake in a dream. I am in my bed asleep when I become conscious of a noise. It is a very specific noise. It is the sound of a carjack wedged between burglar bars stretching them open. I’ve never heard the sound before but I have never been more certain of anything. My eyes snap open into darkness and I am immediately flooded with terror, not for myself, but for my family. I realize that I have woken up exactly as I did in the dream, I can still hear the sound in my mind.

I am asleep again. I awake in the middle of a choppy ocean. The sky is a dispassionate grey, I am perched precariously on a very small surfboard struggling to hold my balance. I am cold. Beneath me lurk large dark, prehistoric shapes that some part recognizes as being sharks. I can taste the fear in my mouth. It is mixed with blood. I hear my daughter cry out, I paddle about furiously seeking her out before realizing that she cannot possibly be in this landscape and that I must be dreaming. I awake terrified she will be devoured.

Now without launching into an exhaustive Jungian archetypal deconstruction of the dreams, is it not possible that I, like many millions of other people in this country am afraid? Each day the fear we feel on both a conscious and unconscious level  is repressed and denied by our ego.  The sacred spaces of this country are being plundered and defiled on an hourly basis and my heart is heavy with grief and fear. What I repress during the  day will visit me in some other way and it falls to me to  acknowledge honestly the powerful feelings that are moving within me, to take responsibility for what I feel instead of projecting my helpless rage and fear onto those who will never know, nor care what I feel and to  empower myself and those I serve. My family, my community and myself. I am still confused as to how to make a meaningful contribution to the healing of this country, even if I never live long enough to see a change.

The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing.