1.    Opposites Attract

After having the privilege of working with Jamie this year I have become increasingly aware of the value of simplicity. In the murky dark world of personal and relationship therapy, I have found much strength and solace in the opposite of complex relationships and resolution possibilities. A womb of refuge and sanity, allowing moments of clarity and hope. Simplicity.

Against the chattering of all my “inner advisors”, I have decided to write this for two reasons;
– In respect ,recognition and support of Jamie, who has selflessly gone ” above and beyond”  for many of us.
– And secondly someone who has achieved what few have previously done, doggedly prodding me on to acts of uncomfortable courage and understanding the strange truth and value of “never not broken”.

The picture chosen as an invitation to participate in ” The Emperor’s New Clothes ” in my mind is inspiration sufficient.

Simplicity is the state or quality of being simple. It usually relates to the burden which a thing puts on someone trying to explain or understand it. Something which is easy to understand or explain is simple, in contrast to something complicated. Alternatively, as Herbert A. Simon suggested, something is simple or complex depending on the way we choose to describe it. In the context of human lifestyle, simplicity can denote freedom from hardship, effort or confusion.

Definitions of complexity often depend on the concept of a “system”, a set of parts or elements that have relationships among them differentiated from relationships with other elements outside the relational regime. Many definitions tend to postulate or assume that complexity expresses a condition of numerous elements in a system and numerous forms of relationships among the elements. However, what one sees as complex and what one sees as simple is relative and changes with time

Nothing could be truer in the context of the work that I have covered with Jamie concerning my marriage. I often find myself during the day or lying awake at night with my head spinning, fuzzy and coated in a thick fog of complexity, re-living the days events. Couple therapy, individual therapy, what is right and what is wrong , what is the truth, and what do I really want ? . Struggling to understand and make sense of all this complexity.

And then I force myself to journey deep inside myself, taking time to try over and over again, as I still my racing mind, to discipline the many dissenting inner voices. Slowly and painfully I gradually arrive at an inner sanctuary where I can listen to the quiet inner voice of “self” and “truth”, and things start to become simple and clearer again. I breathe.

I have resolved a fierce inner debate on whether to write this blog or not. The tipping point came when I read Jamie’s post about ” Never Not Broken” and the more personal piece of “learning To Love with everything I have”. Life and healing requires courage, personal courage.

In keeping with the offering of simplicity I wanted to balance serious reflection with two small things that have inspired me. I hope they do the same in some strange way for one or more of you out there.

William Blake – ” To See A World ”

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Hannes Coetzee – Teaspoon Slide

Definition of Ditty

“A short simple song”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uULS2HnC-a0

With Apologies to Thelma and Louise….

Love, Courage and Simplicity

Steve

Taken from Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears by Pema Chödrön:

“The sad part is that all we’re trying to do is not feel that underlying uneasiness. The sadder part is that we proceed in such a way that the uneasiness only gets worse. The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don’t keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by. Someone once sent me a bone-shaped dog tag that you could wear on a cord around your neck. Instead of a dog’s name, it said, ‘Sit. Stay. Heal.’ We can heal ourselves and the world by training in this way.

Shrinkrap has new threads! Hooray! In order to celebrate, send us anything you may want to contribute. Everything welcome (well, almost anything). Articles, short stories, poems, quotes, images, anything that made you stop and think is welcome. If you’re a fledgling writer and want to remain anonymous, or use a nom de plume, go ahead, be brave.

with love

Jamie

jamie.elkon@gmail.com

Its been a while since I’ve sent a part of my self out there to the silence.

The following post is a montage of some of the clinical material that has walked into my office over the past couple of months, it is also semi-autobiographical. I never fail to marvel at the external manifestation in my practice of an internal space I am wrestling with. If I happen to be slogging through a particularly difficult time in my relationships, or with a mid-life hurdle, a cluster of souls stumble through the door with similar issues. We’re all in this together. In keeping with the theme of learning to fall apart, I offer the following (part of this was inspired by something I read which resonated profoundly with me).

I sit amongst the carnage of a part of my life as it was, witnessing its gasping last moments. I trip over the blood, guts and bones of my broken dreams and illusions as I walk through this old house, deciding what needs to go and what I will take with me.

My breathing is laboured and I can feel that the end is near—rather than avert my eyes away from those parts of me that are dying, I stay fixated, my heart grounded in place, allowing myself to fall apart, over and over again, until it is time to drop into a dead sleep each night.

Each time death knocks at my door, my resistance to the darkness falls (a little); each time, I get stronger and I know that if I can stay with my breath, in the hardest of moments, in the thickness of pain and sorrow, I will wake up to a new day, each day.

But the nights are long and there are wolves…and fear rattles in my bones and pushes, pushes his ferocious way to the surface, trying to force love out of the way because fear is a hungry, greedy bastard.

My mind scatters in his presence, days run into each other, I lose time and can’t think straight, I have to catch myself before I spiral into hopelessness, its hard, very hard.

Yet, the only thing I can be right now is alone, because I must hold space for what is unfolding (which is me; my heart and a whole string of heartbreak moments that need to rise up before they can die the true death).

I am afraid.

I am afraid to be alone.

I am afraid that I will be alone, forever.

And so…alone I stay.

I know that soon, one day, being alone will become a dance and something to embrace; I will unfurl my wings and let them spread wide in my new space, tattered and torn, yet stronger then ever before.

I speak openly and honestly no matter how shameful or embarrassed I feel because I know there is freedom in truth and I know that some things must die in order to evolve.

And a message is whispered into my ear by the spirits and avatars that surround me, reminding me that the only way is through —and that there is one thing to do when a heart breaks and that is to love with everything that I have.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about noise and silence. Maybe it’s because I live in a city, within a vortex of Sound. Walking within the CBD yesterday it felt
like the world was a bell and I the clapper. By the end of the day, I feel quite jangled. My guess is that you sometimes do too, whether you live in a city or not.

One reason we feel jangled is high-intensity physical noise. There’s a lot of it around, and the cacophony continues to increase. In the city, sirens scream and taxi horns honk, people shout and mumble into their handsets. Sound is everywhere.

But another kind of noise is more pervasive and insidious: the lower-intensity sounds of phones ringing, email arriving, songs playing, and televisions blaring. It’s a continual assault on not only our eardrums, but on our souls as well. Too much noise may deafen you, but it can also demoralize you.

Maybe we should unplug. Some time ago in the technology section of The New York Times, Matt Richtel wrote about several neuroscientists who spent a week on a camping trip in remote southern Utah. The trip was an effort to understand how heavy use of technology and digital devices changes how we think and behave—and how a retreat into nature might reverse the effects. With cell phones silent, email inaccessible, and laptops left behind, it was a week-long journey into the heart of silence.

As background, the article mentions a seminal study at the University of Michigan, which showed that people don’t learn as well after walking down a busy street as they do after a walk in the woods. The neuroscientists on the trip theorized that the difference has to do with the central role that attention plays in memory and learning. If you have several things in your environment that demand your attention, you can’t fully focus on any one of them. And the process of switching from one to the other takes time, further reducing the attention you have available.

And there’s one more factor that is especially relevant to heavy users of technology. If you are in a situation where you could potentially be interrupted by an email, or a text, or a phone call, or a knock at the door, a small but significant portion of your attention will be focused on anticipating what might happen, even if it never does. The upshot is that your attention, already divided among multiple tasks, is further abridged by the costs of switching and anticipating additional switches. In the end, you’re not really paying attention at all. But you are completely exhausted by the experience.

What’s the solution to this state of jangle? In his book In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, George Prochnik says that we shouldn’t think of the noise surrounding us as only a pollution issue. Rather, he says, we should think of it also as a dietary issue: “Our aural diet is miserable. It’s full of over-rich, non-nutritious sounds served in inflated portions—and we don’t consume nearly enough silence. A poor diet kills; but it kills as much because of what it does not contain as from what it includes.”

Truth be told, we’re not likely to stop using our smart phones and headphones. Instead, our goal should be to consume more silence. It will help keep the noise from deafening us. And it will certainly help keep it from demoralizing us. Besides, silence is what makes sound meaningful in the first place.

The composer Claude Debussy once remarked that music is the stuff between the notes. He seemed to be saying that almost anyone can eventually get the notes right, more or less. The notes only become music, however, when you also get the silences on either side of them right. The margins around the notes matter: the silence is what gives meaning to everything else.

Neuroscientists at Stanford recently corroborated Debussy’s assertion. They have shown that when we listen to music, it’s the silent intervals that trigger the most intense, positive brain activity. As George Prochnik reports, “The peak of positive brain activity actually occurs in the silent pauses between sounds, when the brain is striving to anticipate what the next note will be. The burst of neural firing that takes place in the absence of sound enables the mind to perform some of its most vital work of maintaining attention and encoding memories.”

In other words, in order for the sounds of life to have meaning, we need to consume our minimum daily requirement of Golden Silence.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The most bitter tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. -Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist and novelist (1811-1896)