Night journey – the way of the soul

When I came across the writings of the Swiss Psychoanalyst Carl Jung, some fifteen years ago, they caused a radical shift in my world-view. Or perhaps my world-view was changing anyway, and his ideas provided a safety net, or a supporting structure that allowed me to explore the irrational byways of the world and the psyche without the normal concerns that I was going insane questioning what I had been conditioned to accept as the true nature of reality. But plenty of others had trod this path, said Jung, many via his consulting room. You’re not losing it, the anxiety you feel is not pathological, it is more a part of the natural process to grow and develop – not physically, but psychologically, and spiritually. You’re just searching for something. You are a pilgrim on the way of the psyche. You are on the night journey of the way of the soul.

I had plenty of reasons for going off the rails, for descending into mental illness – a strongly introverted type with a track record of social maladjustment, of anxiety, and depression, stretching back to my first days at school, and the fitting of a yoke that chafed badly, and still does. And in later years there were circumstances, both professional and personal, that provided ample excuse for a return to the existential darkness I had known as a youth, and from which this time there might not have been any safe return.

My problem was not one of being unable to fit in with the world. Being passive by nature I have always been very good at that, so long as I am prepared to accept and acquiesce to the world view, and inevitably also to the will of others. But behind the mask I wear, mostly what I see in the world I do not like, or I secretly resent its demands that I change in me those things that are not negotiable. And now, knowing I can do nothing about the way I am, I come to accept myself and seek always to disconnect myself from those things that would mould me into a shape contrary to what my instinct tells me nature has intended.

The rational world holds few answers for people like me, though, like an archaeologist, I have studied its traces through many layers, and in great detail now. Yet all my life it has cold shouldered the more important questions, and it has failed even to see, let alone alleviate my underlying ills.

Around the age of thirty I consulted an overworked village doctor. I was showing clear symptoms of burn-out, of anxiety of, ugh,.. depression, and, after a consultation lasting all of two minutes, came out with a prescription for the wonder-drug of the 90’s: Prozac. But the Prozac made me ill, made me more anxious and irritable to the point of despair. I was not suited to it, clearly, but my telling the doctor so made him cross. This surprised me. I was not for ever pestering him with my ills. I had seen him twice in my life. Perhaps he was on Prozac too?

It was the first and only time I have sought pharmaceutical redress for such things. I did not blame the doctor – doctors are not gods, they are only men, and as prone to weakness as the rest of us. It’s sobering though, the realisation there are few true healers in the world, so it is as well not to rely upon one of them being around when you have need – better to seek ways of healing yourself. It’s only sensible.

Healing came first from Yoga, from which I gleaned sufficient knowledge of meditation to pass my fourth decade in a state of at least superficially high-functioning normality. But there was always something loose about me, something rebellious and suspicious of the cock-sure confidence and the de-facto authority of the rational world. Behind the mask, I still resented its stupidity writ large, ruining lives and tearing up the planet. It might be circumspect to respect authority, but it is also wise never to trust it. Indeed, it seemed to me the rational world was a fragile thing, sick at its roots, and irredeemable. The rational world of course is just an idea. It does not actually exist beyond thought, though we like to believe it does in case all else falls away, and at any rate it’s better than believing in fairies.

The path to Jung was gradual, it involved first perhaps a dangerous erosion of the rational sense, the thing that normally protects one from all manner of strange and harmful ideas; it involved an arrogant tearing at the fabric of the known world, and an equally arrogant probing at the structure of the unknown with the help of a five thousand year old oracular device, bequeathed to me by Jung, called the I Ching.

It was he who introduced the fledgling methods of studying the unconscious traces, Jung who opened a curtain onto the nature of processes hitherto unsuspected, but it was not a pretty picture. He poked about in the midst of a turd-smeared madness, like a witch doctor probing at a chicken’s giblets, for clues to the archetypal forces that underlie the world. No, madness is not a pretty thing; it is not Keira Knightley in comely distress as Jung pursues his “Dangerous Method”. Madness is uncompromising in its daemonic ugliness and its rejection of reality, and it is a thing we seek to escape, to lock away at all costs for fear of it overwhelming us. And if we really must tread that way then we had better tread lightly.

Jung’s was a world in which the dream was to be read with as much seriousness as the events of the day, and in which the events of the day were to be interpreted with the same looseness and symbolic radar as the dream, for what it might teach us of the reality underlying what we think of as reality. It was a world that spoke of the idea that reality was to be read in a non-literal way if we were to properly understand it, that if a woman were to say she lived on the moon, we could not dismiss the idea as absurd, that instead we should accept it might be true, at least in a non-literal sense, that if we accepted the validity of the psyche, as we must, then at the level of the psyche all things become potentially true, and the boundaries between what is accepted as sane and insane blur into a bewildering non-existence.

Indeed, as we explore the path of the psyche, seeking structure in non-structure, we approach a point when we realise there is actually nothing there at all, that the chaotic forces of the psychic collective and the daemonic underworld are a pullulating layer of fledgling cognition spread pitifully thin upon the eternal void, that what we are is a universe moving from that void in search of itself, that the void, being nothing, posits its own existence as a certainty, and its nothingness as an impossibility, though both sides of this equation be, on the surface at least, a self cancelling paradox.

Madness is to languish in the collective of the archetypes, sanity is to pay them homage while rising above them into the sunshine of the material world, at the same time accepting that deep down lies the great stillness that underpins reality. Jung is not for the faint of heart, and most of his writings lose me at the first paragraph because I do not have the latin, nor yet the looseness of mind to slip into the cracks of the underworld where he fears not to go.

Popular reinterpretations of his works are always lacking, while those following him with the same intellectual rigour risk inaccessibility, at least to the interested layman. And at twelve hundred words or so, I know I’ve left most of you behind me now. So I pull over to the side of road and note how the way wends for ever on.

It gives me pause, and I wonder if perhaps I’ve reached my limit too. Even a brief dip into the ideas of Jung is enough to fill several of the lives of lesser minds. But one thing I have noticed is that to explore the unconscious is also to swim against the tide of a universe of ideas all swimming the other way, that our redemption is not to seek escape inside an inner world of our own making when the will of everything that’s inside of us is to make itself conscious, to emerge wide eyed and blinking into the sunshine of a world many of us would reject as too imperfect for the perfect interpretations of our selves.

In truth we are all insane, some of us more highly functioning than others and better able to fit in with the touch-stone patterns we have collectively constructed that pass as the rational world view. But we are all subject to the ideas, the archetypes, the thought forms that seek passage into the world through us, and it is a milestone along the way to be accepting of that. Another milestone perhaps is when we no longer ask of them what they can do for us, but what we can do for them, and in so doing circle back to the beginning of things, but with a good deal less existential angst than before.

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Corporate mindfulness?

It’s with a mixture of surprise and confusion I note the term Mindfulness cropping up in the Corporate literature these days. This is rather like coming across Mary Poppins in a brothel. Originally an ancient meditative technique for releasing the mind from self destructive thinking, Mindfulness saw eventual escape into the so called new age, then a growing acceptance among mental health professionals as a way of easing stress and anxiety. But more latterly, the scientific management gurus have been hyping it as a way of rendering employees more efficient – though I’m not sure how this is supposed to work. Indeed the term Corporate Mindfulness is something of an oxymoron, each term neatly cancelling out the other.

Mindfulness, it seems, has become a highly marketable brand to the extent that even I am becoming sick of the word. Now, after your fourteen hour day of spreadsheet gazing, video-conferencing, and boardroom jousting, you can drive your showy, rented, BMW to the gym, display your expensively honed, Lycra clad body to your fellow narcissists, then drive to your mindfulness class and show off your expensively reconstructed mind. Then, come work-a-day morn, refreshed, pecks and abs hard as iron beneath your clean white shirt, mind simmering, cat-like in its predatory stillness, you become the master of all you survey, a steely eyed corporate warrior!

I wonder if we’re in danger of losing our way here. Perhaps we need to call it something else? Or perhaps it’s just that I feel myself slipping out of the world, no longer enamoured of its constructs, nor trusting of its players, that when I see Mindfulness advertised in corporate magazines, I am instinctively uneasy.

The dilemma for the corporate world is that the practice of Mindfulness will inevitably reveal the corporate world itself to be insane, indeed so sick it infects us all, has us eating each other, like a mad dog chewing at its own paws. So the idea of practising mindfulness, all the better to rape the earth and further dispossess the poor of their already meagre incomes seems the ultimate irony.

Do we even know what mindfulness is?

It’s mediation, right?

When I began to meditate it was because I had difficulty fitting in with the world. Meditation was an attempt to stop thinking, to plug the channel from which there issued an endless stream of debilitating and largely self critical thought. But you cannot stop thinking by thinking about it, nor less by hiding from one’s thoughts, nor combating them by the force of other thoughts. You need to give the mind something else to do.

Hanging it on the breath is a better approach. Listening to the breath, feeling the breath, experiencing the breath with every fibre of one’s being eventually renders thought as an observable phenomenon and from here it is but a small step to the realisation we are not our thoughts, that there is an awareness beyond our thoughts, a silent watcher that is not in itself a thought, and finally the realisation this silent watcher is actually who we really are. Carrying an awareness of this awareness, as we go about our lives, living with sufficient space in our heads for this awareness to be, is the essence of mindful living.

This is where the way becomes strange. We imagine that without our thoughts, our memories, our hopes, our dreams, we could not be said to exist at all, that without them we would have no personality, no sense of self. But this is the illusion of thinking. It is why we are vulnerable to our thoughts and so often fall into the trap of trying to think our way out of our worries, into a better, happier, more peaceful way of living. We can’t. The self constructed sense of self is an illusion, and actually the source of all our problems. The more we try to build this illusion up, the flimsier and more troublesome it becomes.

Similarly the corporate world is something we have merely thought up. It is not how the world really is. Mindfulness therefore does not prepare us for lives as a corporate raiders. Indeed quite the opposite. It should make us wish there was another way to live, another way to earn money and provide for our families, even if there isn’t. Beware then – mindfulness will seriously hamper your prospects for promotion, because it makes you all the more mindful of what it is you are doing. This is the point of departure then, where the meditative tradition reveals the unsuspected nature of the world.

The world as we have thought it is an illusion and it’s only by recognising our true nature do we perceive the world as it really is, how stunningly beautiful and alive. It is at the root of mindfulness we therefore find the ethics of life itself, at the root of mindfulness we discover peace, free from the imagined monsters of the past and the present.

Where mindfulness fits in to the structure of the man-constructed thought up world illusion I don’t know, since whichever power base we examine – be it political or corporate, I see no ethical dimension to it at all. It is a machine, not a mind, so there is a fundamental incompatibility of terminology here, and I conclude the corporate world has either changed the practice of mindfulness beyond all recognition into something faddish and useless, or nullified it by presenting it merely as a brand to be marketed and sold at a profit. Either way this is not the mindfulness I know.

Beware then where you buy your mindfulness from.

Mindfulness is free.

You don’t even have to think about it.

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Approaching the unconscious

As we age we undergo a process of emotional development. Obviously we do not possess the same outlook in our middle years as we did when we were children, but what is it that drives us to change? Is it merely that we come to inhabit a progressively older body? Is it the experience of life itself that changes us, or is it that are we subject to influences from the unconscious mind that would have us seek those experiences out as a medium for change?

Life can provide any number of varied environments enabling us to grow in all manner of positive directions, but it can just as easily arrest our development if experience of life is at odds with our aspirations. So where does the aspiration, the imperative, the drive come from? Abusive relationships, personal misfortune, global upheaval, even financial ruin, all present challenges to health and well being, subverting a life’s path and running it onto the rocks. Yet in spite of misfortune some people suffer no injury beyond the initial trauma, while others are maimed for life. To avoid lasting scars appears to require an agile frame of mind and a deep intuitive sense of one’s abiding value in the face of all rational evidence to the contrary. Where does such strength, such resilience come from?

With bad experiences, what usually happens is we push the memories out of range of our emotional radar and get on with things as best we can. We are all good at this, at removing from conscious awareness those things that are most painful to us, and anyway we cannot always react to hurt in the way we would like, and in which our instincts are urging us – like punching the other guy on the nose. In the course of life, there is a lot we simply have to swallow, but the unconscious never forgets a slight. It remembers everything.

It even knows what I was doing at half past three on Wednesday afternoon, December 28th 1978. I can no longer consciously recall this moment of course – it is lost to my every day awareness but well documented cases of spontaneous and total recall suggest the memory of this moment still exists, somewhere, and if, during that moment, I was experiencing an emotional upset that was never healed, my unconscious will offer it back. And it will keep offering it back, until I deal with it.

It does this through the dreaming process, using a symbolic language in which the objects, the people, the situations we encounter in the dream world are emotionally charged in ways reflective of our life experience, including the things we’d rather not acknowledge. And the dream is saying, here, look, take this back this and then we can move on. But if we have fallen foul of a culture that devalues the dreaming process, if we never take notice of our dreams, the process of “dealing with it” can be a problem. And stuff mounts up. Some of us incubate hidden, forgotten traumas, combine them, allow them to breed, then hatch them into inexplicable and stupendously debilitating neuroses. At such times as these it seems our unconscious is overrun with demons out to do us harm. We might feel that to go poking around in there is the very last thing we should be doing, but paying attention to our dreams helps defuse things. It puts the unconscious mind in a better mood for dealing with us, if it realises we are receptive.

We all dream, every night, though some people dispute this, claiming never to have dreamed at all. But the thing with dreams is they play out in a part of the mind that bypasses the way we normally acquire memory. If we want to remember our dreams we have to make a conscious effort to do so. We have to remind ourselves, when we lay down to sleep, we would like to remember our dreams. Then, on waking, in the first seconds of awareness, we have a fleeting opportunity to drink the dream down whole, sufficient at least to recall it well enough to record it later on. But even then we must make haste, or the memory will fade to nothing like an imperfectly processed photograph. Reading my dream journal now, accounts of many dreams I had years ago are like reading the fantasies of a complete stranger.

So we have our dream. What now? Well, the best we can do is sit down and ponder upon it. What might it be showing us? What emotions does it provoke? It does not matter if we cannot understand the dream. It seems to be the conversation with the unconscious that’s the important thing. If we fail in the first dreams, to understand what it’s showing us, it will try other ways of illustrating the same thing, until we finally get it.

We can forget those dream dictionaries. What they fail to point out is that the dream is a personal thing and that, for example, a rabbit in my dream might mean something entirely different in yours. You can forget also asking advice from others because they may react to your symbols differently. Thus, slowly, respectfully, and with an attitude of genuine enquiry, we approach the unconscious, preferably on bended knee.

I worry about self-help dream techniques that sound more assertive, like a battering down of a door into unconsciousness in order to plunder its contents, in an effort to turn us into mega-star celebrities with millions in the bank, and perfect teeth. The lesson of a century of psychoanalysis tells us we are only a small part of who we think we are, that we are not entirely in charge. We can be part of the solution to the mystery of our lives, which involves being a good listener and a willing partner in the adventure, or we can remain for ever a part of the problem.

I suppose the bottom line is we do not need to be ill to take an interest in our personal development, in the rounding out and the maturation of our soul. True there are grown men and women as emotionally well developed as four year olds, or for that matter wildebeest, and for whom all talk of the dreaming process will sound ridiculous. But for those who seek meaning beyond the normal watering and rutting of the species, the dream is nature’s own gift to aid us on the path to a greater self awareness.

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Beating and Breathing

To deal with daily stress, we have to be like a cork, buoyant, always floating to the top of life. Events swirl, they jostle, they jam and jar, and to be healthy and happy we must find a way to keep ourselves bobbing along, always rising above, transcending that which might harm us. Indeed most people, I think, are robust enough when it comes to resisting the abrasions of daily life, and they float very well. They are adaptable, resilient and eternally balanced, no matter what life holds in store. Others though, perhaps those caught more in the Gaussian tails of a so called mental normality – the introspective introverts (like me), the fiery extroverts, the worriers and the warriors both – we fellow shadow-landers all need to be more careful.

Stress is a sneak thief, creeping in at dead of night, stealing our self worth grain by grain, and covering up the fact that actually we have not been floating at all, that we have been sinking, and perhaps for a long time. We carry on, at first oblivious, then wake up one morning to find life has taken on a paler hue, taken on a strange and an unsettled quality. The pleasures become fewer, and of those few remaining, we deny ourselves the pleasure of them, because they no longer suit our moods, or we say we no longer have the time. And as the world becomes alien to us, we become alienated within it.

Cynicism and grumpiness are my usual warnings. Take heed they say, take refuge from this. But I have not been listening, and the last few weeks have yielded that unwelcome sense of alienation. It came upon me suddenly while conversing with a friend, a quite unrelated feeling of tension, of oddness. An innocuous statement then became like a trigger, and it filled me with an abrasive tingling, like broken glass in my veins. Suddenly, I was running out of beat.

So,…

Another old watch arrived today, courtesy of a successful bid on Ebay. It’s a vintage Favre-Leuba, Swiss made, circa 1963. It’s had some work, and it’s showing wear here and there, but seems to be running all right and will at the very least tidy up to a slightly better condition than that in which I found it.

But like me, this little Favre-Leuba is out of beat. There is a lopsidedness to its tickings, a bias to its balance. I have dismantled it, cleaned it, examined it, assessed the bits I can replace, identified the bits I must accept more as the unavoidable scars of its life’s history.

With any timepiece, indeed any oscillating thing, we must deal with both the rate and the beat. The rate determines accuracy, determines the authenticity of one’s life’s direction. But the beat is also important, the degree of swing from left to right, from in to out, up to down, yin to yang. Any excess in either direction and we encounter problems, we deviate, we get lost, we stop, or a friend says something innocuous, inoffensive, and a wave of weirdness washes over us as if at the rising memory of a bad dream.

The yin and the yang of the Favre-Leuba is dealt with by a small adjustment of the balance. Provided we have no excessive wear, the rate should then be reliable under any number of positions and circumstances. The beat of a human life is a little more mysterious, the causes of its imbalance harder to pin down, but as a rule the danger lies in excess of Yang.

Yang is hot. It will burn us up, dry us out, render our gut acid, and make our blood boil. While the balance of a watch is contained in the oscillation of a wheel and a spring, the balance of a life is held in the elasticity of the nerves, therefore also partly in the mind. And it is in the mind we must make the necessary adjustment. Reaction and relaxation. These are the clues.

Reaction is tension, it is the preparedness for flight, for aggression, for action. Many of us live in this state all the time. It becomes habitual, and what is habitual over time we accept as normal, unchangeable, even if it is a normality that will harm us. Blood pressure. Heart. Anxiety. Panic. These are the symptoms.

Relaxation on the other hand is the letting go. It is the unfreezing of tension. It is the softening that allows a body’s natural, inner self to reassert itself. It is soothing, healing, calming. And it can be willed.

When we are ill, we are not cured by drugs. They can help, but ultimately it is the body itself that returns us to wellness, to neutrality. This is how the healing arts work. They create space, create the room within us for the miracle that is the human life to work more as it should.

Another thing that strikes me about this Favre-Leuba is its size. It is barely an inch in diameter, and as such flies in the face of the brutality of design and the sheer weight of many a modern man’s watch. It weighs just 25 grams.

The modern man must carry so much weight around these days, much of it imaginary, though we imagine it to be real, purposeful, with all the dials and clickers to prove it. But open up a modern watch and it is mostly space, like the space inside an atom, which renders an atom mostly nothing, but apparently real, at least for all practical purposes. But its solidity is never-the-less an illusion.

The vintage watch is more a cutting back. For all of its antiquity, it’s simplicity, it will still carry the time, the purpose, the direction of a life, but with less weight, less fuss and bother, and there is no more worthy an example of this than this old Favre-Leuba, plagued as it is with the aches and pains of its long journey.

While I tinker and explore its workings, nudge back its beat, fine tune its rate, I feel a slow returning to myself, the palms less tingly, the heart less frozen by unseen terrors, the broken glass melting back to blood. It needs a new strap, the tiniest dab of paint on the dial to hide the bit silver showing through. And I shall wear it, take pleasure in it for a while.

To see the signs of imbalance in ones self is an important step, for then we might stop and wonder what it is we are missing. Better that than not to stop at all and plough on into sickness and oblivion. But what it is is usually to be found not in the details. These are the distractions, and shall all be transcended once we have remembered the single vital thing, the thing we have forgotten.

And what we have forgotten is often simply how to breathe.

 

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Don’t Panic

Come Friday my flexi-time balance is usually in credit, so I finish at lunch-time, then head up to Rivington Barn for an egg and bacon butty. It’s a popular spot, and you’ll probably have to queue. I was there last Friday, and I was about half way down that queue before realising what I was doing would once have been impossible. When was that? Ten, fifteen years ago? It wasn’t just queues either – the cinema was out of bounds too, and music concerts, and the theatre – anywhere with lots of people in a captive environment, so to speak. Some things you can avoid, of course, while some you can’t, and the ones you can’t are a nightmare. You live in dread of them.

We do not always realise the distance we have travelled; nowadays, I’m pretty much functioning with a level(ish) head, and grateful for it because living like that was awkward. Panic and anxiety, these are manifestations of the psyche, a storm of sorts, and therefore a reaction to living in a way we find somehow threatening. But when we watch the news bulletins, we see so many have died now on the long migration routes to the west, gambolling their lives on a chance at sharing even a little bit of what I take for granted, it seems immoral I should even question it. After all, mine is an ordinary life, secure in the bosom of the west, and it’s irrational to panic, when my life is clearly not threatened. But I never said it was my life I felt was threatened, more my sense of being.

I worry now if even writing about it will open a door on the past, that the next time I stand in a queue, I will have cause to regret it. A panic attic is like being turned inside out. We focus obsessively on our own mental noise and we imagine the eyes of others upon us, imagine ourselves seen through their eyes, this person, wobbling, perhaps looking strange, perhaps about to faint. The fear feeds upon itself, reaches a terrifying resonance in which we simply must flee the scene. Anyone who has suffered this will tell you it’s deadly serious. It’s also becoming commoner in the general population.

The cure? Well, obviously there is a cure, or I could not have waited the five minutes for my bacon butty, and received it in the same calm mental state as when I had joined that queue, nor even sat and enjoyed it. Medication? No, I don’t take medication. I have nothing against it these days, though I’ve been guilty of an anti-med zealotry in the past. Medication can save lives, so I accept it has its role to play. But medication is never without risk or side effect, and it’s true to say I have also felt uncomfortable with the psyche that remains, after medication, a psyche that is, in a way, still imprisoned, and prevented its desired freedoms, only this time, apparently, for its own good.

But for all the cherished values of the west, the way we live is the cause. If you want to get philosophical about it, it’s the feeling that in our guts we are more than the material world gives us credit for, that we are not machines, yet are being squeezed at every turn so we might fit into a machine-like world, a machine driven in such a way that even a dollar profit will outweigh the most basic, uncosted, intangible human need.

Happiness? Who needs it? Purpose? So what? Love? Buy it. A sense that things can never be any better than this, that we have killed God, and even the priesthood seems not to have noticed? Who cares? Well, we all care, but we feel powerless to bring about change, so we do nothing. And some of us panic.

But standing in that queue, I was no longer aware of my own mental noise. My thoughts were few, my head was quiet. I was aware of my body, my breath, and I was aware of others, but not in the sense of morbidly and self consciously wondering how they saw me. I was more the observer, observing them – snippets of conversation, body language, their choices, demeanours. I had become the watcher, rather than the watched, but not in the sense of judging others – just watching, and I was no longer inside-out of myself. I was simply more my self. It is a state that allows one to become quietly curious of the world and all that’s in it. We become more grounded.

But one should never take these things for granted, hence my abiding interest in the secrets of the psyche, and its various palliatives. Meditation is perhaps the most powerful of these, but also methods that reconnect the mind with the sensations of the physical body, both in motion and at rest – things like Tai Chi and Qigong. Notably these are not western techniques, but things we borrow from the east.

As I sit now, I am aware of my energy body. This will already sound unpalatable to many who are steeped in the materialist tradition. But there’s nothing spooky about the term “energy body”. If you close your eyes, how do you know your hands are still there? Obviously, you can feel them, but what you are feeling is the mind created sense of your physical being, the energy body, for want of another term. If you wiggle your fingers you can feel it more strongly. If you take an inward breath, and let it out slowly, the feeling becomes stronger. You can play with it.

Once you show the mind a way back inside the body, it will crave a deeper exploration: arms, legs, chest; there is no part of the body that cannot be felt this way, and in feeling it we ground ourselves, root ourselves back in our selves, and in the world. The feeling is one of great calmness, and allows an alert resting awareness in which the world seems all the more alive for the undivided attention we can now give it.

There is no single reliable method of attaining this state. You have to experiment and find the one that works for you. This is part of the journey into the inside of yourself and worth undertaking. Although it takes years to de-program the stress response entirely, meaningful results should come within months or even just weeks of daily practise. That said, I find having been once been prone to panic and anxiety, it is something one needs to keep working at.

I have not suffered much hardship in my life, but it’s an unfortunate fact that the mind can create hardship where there is none. Our quiet backwaters then become personal warzones, and the most innocuous activity fraught with imagined danger. Returning to our selves then, we are also reminded that, compared with the actual physical suffering of so many others in the world today, how lucky we really are.

And yes, that egg and bacon butty was well worth the wait.

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Movember and Men’s Mental Health: finding the creative self

Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher, and a successful author. His books “The Power of Now” and “A New Earth” have been devoured by a worldwide audience in search of that intangible “something” that is missing from our lives. Tolle brings together insights from all the world’s religious traditions and, for me at least, his success lies in his non-religious, transcendental approach to matters of mind, body and spirit, also to his humility and his engaging sense of humour. It’s no secret that Tolle has suffered from depression and anxiety, no secret either that his success is due also in part to the way he has dealt with his own mental illness.

In a society built on rationalism, determinism, and materialism, people who are mentally ill are not seen as reliable witnesses to the facts of life, at least not usually by those who control the gateways to employment, and financial remuneration. But if we think about it for a moment, the statistics suggest one in five of us have or will suffer from a mental illness. Then, since 80% of mental illness goes undiagnosed, this suggests very nearly one in five of us doing valuable work right now is already mentally ill, yet managing to hold the place together somehow – so we can’t be that unreliable either, can we? What’s even more interesting is that by implication, statistically, probably one in five of those people who hold mental illness low regard, are themselves mentally ill.

As a student in England, Tolle, suffered terribly from feelings of anxiety and depression. One night he lay down so overcome, he told himself he could not live with himself any longer. Sadly, this is the fate of many – an illness held in secret, ending suddenly with a tragedy that leaves others shocked by its unexpectedness. But what happened to Tolle was not what usually happens. He experienced an inner separation and an insight that was to be the catalyst of his life’s work. I’m paraphrasing here but he asked himself something to the effect of: who is the self that cannot live with my self any longer? The self he could not live with, he concluded, was the bit he associated with the pain, the egoic self. And he reasoned that the essential part of “Tolle”, indeed of all of us, was something else, something above, and not part of the pain.

He went on from this potentially fatal moment to become a teacher, counsellor, and an engaging life coach to millions. His teachings are all over the place – on Youtube, in books, DVD’s, lecture tours. I find in them much that explains the highs and lows of the lives of human beings, but the story of Tolle is itself an inspiration, demonstrating that mental illness does not invalidate anyone from playing a constructive or even a leading role in society.

Yes, we’ll sometimes have a hard time from ignorants and materialists who think the brain is a computer made of meat, and that a part of our brains have gone rotten. But our brains are not rotten. You cannot diagnose mental illness from a brain scan. Our brains are like everyone else’s. There are no bits missing. What mental illness does, however, is it puts us on the edge of something, thrusts us into the depths of an unknown, even at times a frightening inner realm, but the stories we bring back from that place are important – not only for our own healing, but the healing of others like us. So tell the Internet your stories. Use your creative faculties.Get a blog, get a Flikr account, and get busy.

I spoke last time about the three vessels of being – the physical, the mental and the spiritual – and how attention to any one of them can help maintain the others and restore us to ourselves. Creative expression is very much concerned with the mental life, and is the most natural channel for the otherwise jagged and ferocious energies of mental illness. So many artists and larger than life celebrities are mentally ill, yet they are also possessed of the most remarkable abilities. So, write it, journal it, paint it, doodle it, tell it in poetry, sculpt it, and learn by it. Through creative expression we turn something negative into something positive and, as we give external shape to what has up ’till now been only an internal, mental thought form, we realise it is not who we really are at all, that pain. It dwells within us, yes, and it looks like that, but it is not who we are.

The search for who we are is the same as the search for our life’s meaning, whether we are suffering from a mental illness or not. But that you suffer can be interpreted as a sign you sense there is something vital missing from the world, that your inability to fit in with it is more a reluctance to dance with a partner who is not of your choosing. Again, one in five of us will at some point suffer from a mental illness. It is not our fault if society has difficulty in accommodating that fact, or in facing up to the question it begs regarding the nature of society, and the direction it is moving in. But neither can we blame society for its ignorance if we do not tell it how we feel.

Do not say how can I live with myself? but say instead who is the self that cannot live with my self. And in separating yourself from the pain, go seek instead the self you want to be.

I leave the last word on this to Eckhart Tolle:

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Movember and Men’s Mental Health: the three vessels

Reactions to suicide say much about society’s attitudes to mental health. In Victorian times, suicides were often explained away in order to avoid a social stain on the family. There was also the unhelpful religious belief that those who died by their own hand went straight to hell. So we got things like: he accidentally fell into the pond and drowned, or he accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun.

There’s still an air of evasiveness when discussing mental illness, but there is at least a recognition now that it is a real illness rather than a weakness of character. When someone known to us takes their life, the reaction is one of shock that anyone so well liked/loved/respected could ever feel that way and we be unaware of it. But there’s guilt too that we did not see it coming, that we did not do more to help. We feel complicit, guilty in our silence at holding to the secret of others’ despair. But what can one do? Not everyone suffering from mental illness wants to talk about it. And when you realise how little others understand your feelings, you can hardly be blamed for not wanting to share them.

There are no easy answers.

It’s an unfortunate fact that high-profile celebrity suicides raise awareness more than any well meaning mental health campaign. They launch tragedy squarely onto the front pages, but even here amid the collective shock, “normal” people can still be dismissive, telling us celebrities are notorious libertines, usually off their heads on drugs and it should be no surprise they kill themselves now and then. But this is to ignore the despair and the sheer existential emptiness that underlies mental illness, an illness bullet-pointed with unshakable, negative self beliefs:

* My life is a mess;
* I am ill adjusted to the place I find myself in, yet cannot escape it;
* I am unequal to my responsibilities;
* People expect more from me than I am capable of delivering;
*I am letting everyone down;
*It’s all out of control;
*I cannot move another step;
*I am useless;
*I am a bad person;
*My life has no meaning;

Do any of the above ring true for you?

Of course people in the forefront of public life are no more likely to suffer mental illness than the ordinary and the poor. Indeed being poor, being unable to make ends meet is a very dangerous place to be in the mental health stakes, more so as you are less likely to have the money to access competent people who can help you. But we all worry, and even when we have nothing to worry about, like having no money and no job, we invent other worries – seemingly trivial things – and inflate them to apocalyptic proportions. If we are susceptible, these worries will plant the seeds that blossom into hideous mental blooms of distorted self image.

We need to talk about it. Even just sharing the secret with someone can help. I spoke of mental health services last time – admittedly in less than glowing terms. Lack of funding means the gap between aspiration and reality is now unbridgeable, at least for 90% of the population, but the important thing here is that we make the effort. We admit our fears by sharing them with as many healthcare professionals who will listen. Even if the person we’re sharing them with has one eye on the clock, and can never get our name right, the process of sharing can be helpful. But there are other things we can do too, things that are even more effective in returning control of our selves back to our selves.

With a little imagination we can think of the human being, metaphysically, as comprising three vessels – the physical, the mental and the spiritual. We need to keep all three topped up. If one of those vessels is leaking, it can be replenished by the others. If all the others are leaking too, then we’re in trouble, but the good news is paying attention to any one of them can help the entire system to restore its balance.

The easiest to fix is the physical.

Among my memories of the darkest of my hours there shine radiant beacons of days simply walking in the Lake District Mountains. I have never felt ill on a mountain. It was when I came back down to earth the problems recurred. Physical exercise of any kind is good for us, good for circulation of the blood and the lymphatic system – getting the good stuff in and the bad stuff out, and you don’t need to do it on a mountain; a walk in the park is good too, or take up dancing, jogging, tennis, Tai Chi,… whatever interests you and suits your abilities. The after-effects of even gentle physical exercise dribble through into the mental vessel, surprising the most depressed of moods with little revelations of relaxation and calm.

It sounds too good to be true, that merely exercising the body can make a real difference the problem is, getting up off your arse when the black dog comes calling takes a monumental effort. We resist it, even though we know it’s good for us. This is another of the mysteries of mental illness; it is as if the pain is itself an intelligent entity dwelling within us and fears for its existence; it sees where we’re going with this and holds us back; it would much rather we vegetate in front of the telly, drink alcohol every night, and drop fatty treats into our mouths. I know, I’ve done it. But we must resist the resistance.

And keep moving.

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Movember and Men’s Mental Health: I am not that

Men are not alone in suffering from mental illness, but the fact they do suffer is effectively suppressed by everyone in society, including the men who suffer. There is a stigma about it, the result being men deny the facts and are afraid to seek help. There are of course many forms and degree of mental illness, not all of which end in tragedy. But all mental illness, especially if borne in silence, will not only thwart the life chances others take for granted, but it will deny us even the basics of a happy life, one lived without the daily fear of some imagined calamity.

When we suffer from mental illness we become emotionally useless to those around us, also angry with ourselves for being “weak”. There is also a mysterious energy about it, and if we don’t take steps towards healing, it will form itself into a powerful vortex, sucking us down into an ever decreasing spiral, diminishing our chances of ever getting on with a normal life. We may begin to self medicate with alcohol or other drugs, self harm, manifest irrational, compulsive behaviours, and in the worst of cases begin to think suicidal thoughts.

It’s a remarkable fact that throughout all of this we will appear to be functioning well, turning up for work, doing a decent job, smiling, being nice, and bringing home the bacon. But it’s a mask. We are skilful at evasive tactics that get us through the day, avoiding the trigger situations we associate with our anxieties. All of this comes before we seek help, if we ever do – and 80% of us don’t. When we eventually stop functioning, we do so suddenly, catastrophically, and no one, including us, sees it coming. The really sobering fact here is that mental illness is not rare. It’s very common. One in five of us is suffering, right now. It’s just that nobody ever talks about it. How crazy is that?

So what do we do? Well, like all illnesses, much falls upon the sufferer to acknowledge the problem. Everyone experiences lows in life, but they pass. Mental illness is different. It settles in. If you’ve been feeling inconsolably down or on edge for months, let alone years it’s probably a good idea to talk to your doctor. That’s the litigiously-aware, super-sensible advice – go speak to your doctor, because what the hell do I know? But the reality of state primary healthcare services is that the time, sympathy and understanding one needs to sort things out properly will most likely be lacking. If you’re lucky you’ll get a hastily scrawled prescription for anti-depressants, and a referral to psychological counselling. The waiting time to your first session will be in inverse proportion to how much you managed to frighten the crap out of your doctor with what you told him, so don’t hold back because you need that referral, and you need it fast!

But sadly, again, the cash strapped reality of public mental healthcare is that it can backfire when you feel you’re not being given the necessary face-time with a competent or at least half way human counsellor, that you’re not being listened to, that indeed you never see the same counsellor twice in a row, that you feel you’re being fobbed off with drugs that aren’t right for you, that your regular sessions are broken up by spurious cancellations on their part, when, if you miss a session yourself, no matter what your excuse, you’ll be kicked into the long grass and left there to rot.

Then, those anti-depressants become your only hope, and are not to be sniffed at as they enable one to keep going without taking time off work, and more importantly having to explain why. Me? No, I’m fine! Just a touch of flu. But they don’t work in all cases, didn’t work for me, turned me into a zombie and robbed me of sleep for weeks on end. It also gave me pause how relaxed my GP was about putting me on them for life, careless of the risk of serious side effects and little or no supervision. But if you’re in a situation where you’re thinking of taking your life, they might just save your life and you’d be unwise to reject this option. It’s just that when we’re suffering from mental illness, we don’t always act wisely. We react instead to fear and to the isolation imposed on us by that illness.

Because of my  negative experience with mental health services, I’ve always been leery of the long term medication route, also guilty of labelling mental health care professionals (unfairly) as lacking empathy and being ruled by the same tick box culture as everyone else these days, merely there to fudge you off their books as a successful intervention with the minimum of time and effort, because time and effort costs money – and there isn’t any. Instead I became a lone survivalist, hunkered down in my flimsy home-made refuge with a handful of improvised weapons to keep the demons at bay. But they they bought me time, and time and effort is what it takes. There’s a lot we can do to help ourselves, and a lot of free information online these days to demystify those demons.

So ask yourself this: do I want to get better? The answer might seem obvious, but some of us are so benighted and so closely identified with our illness, we lack the mental focus to even understand the question. Once we accept the need for healing though, then proper healing can take place, but it won’t come solely through the intervention of a healthcare professional, or from out of a blister-pack. These are merely some of the tools at our disposal, to be used wisely and mindfully – mindful of the fact that even a doctorate in psychology does not give the other person a clear window into your head.

Mental illness is different to other illnesses; it does not attack the body directly, it attacks the soul and its methods are as unique as we are. Indeed it uses us to attack ourselves. It confuses us into thinking we are nothing more than the pain we feel. Unfortunately the defences we can deploy will seem as bizarre as the illness, indeed they will require the adoption of a frame of mind as irrational as the malaise under which we labour. Therefore, again, we encounter an internal resistance, because the possession of even the knowledge of such techniques is a tacit admission of the need to deploy them in the first place.

Such is the bind we find ourselves in! But anyway,…

As a first step we must dis-identify with our illness. The pain, the fear, the debilitating isolation, the strange compulsions, the damaging thoughts. These things are not who we are, they are just thoughts. Even if they threaten to kill us, they are still merely the things we suffer from. If we can find the space within ourselves to step back and say: no, I am not that, then we’re already moving in the right direction.

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M is for Movember and Men’s Mental Health

It’s Movember again and men all over the world are growing facial hair in order to draw attention to mens’ health issues. In years past the heroic Mo Bros* have focused on raising awareness of our vulnerability to prostate and testicular cancer. But by far the biggest risk to men’s lives comes from another problem and it’s simply this:

If you’re a man you’re more likely to kill yourself than if you’re a woman. In the UK, in 2012, 5891 people are recorded as having taken their own lives, of whom 75% were men. Suicide is now the biggest killer of men under 35 in the UK, though you’re actually more likely to take your life if you’re a man in the 35 to 50 bracket – it’s just that the other major killer, coronary heart disease, begins to catch up the older we get, so skewing the statistic a bit.

What’s curious is that women are far more likely to report suicidal feelings to a friend or a counsellor. They are also more likely to attempt suicide than men. That women are less successful in killing themselves is explained by methodology, which shows distinct gender differences. Women tend to favour overdosing, which has a higher chance of medical intervention than say hanging, carbon monoxide poisoning, or gunshot – all methods which males tend to favour.

That more women than men should feel the need to take their own lives is of course an issue society needs to explain, but since this is November, and I’m writing as a man, what I’ll be focusing on is the fact that men are more likely to die by their own hand, and less likely to talk about it before they do – that in short we are more likely to become fatalities in the mental health stakes, than women.

It’s an unfortunate fact in Western society that men are not allowed to be depressed, to suffer from anxiety, let alone any of the more debilitating forms of mental illness like Bi Polar or Schizophrenia. We must simply man up and get on with the job. There is a belief among men that the mental health label is the kiss of death to one’s career, to say nothing of one’s social standing and what one must never do under any circumstances is talk about it to anyone, or even admit it to one’s self. And to be fair it probably is the kiss of death to all those things, so a man is wise to be circumspect in what he admits to. What he should perhaps be asking himself is whether where he is is where he really ought to be, but he never will – at least not until it’s too late.

Twenty years ago, phoning in sick to my boss, did I tell him I was having trouble adjusting to medication for work related stress and anxiety? No, I said I had the flu. Did I cry off a business trip, saying that for weeks beforehand I’d been feeling depressed? No, I said I had the flu. On those occasions, when I couldn’t make it to work because I was so neurotic I couldn’t drive the car on the motorway without feelings of vertigo and nausea, did I tell the boss the way my job was going had affected my mental health? No, I said I had the flu.

If any of this sounds familiar then you’re a man suffering in silence and while you may not yet be suicidal, you’re suffering more than you should be and purely on account of your gender and what you perceive as your role in society. Young men with mental health problems are picked on appallingly by other males, so if they want to fit in they must quickly fashion for themselves a mask of iron. It works for a while. Yes, in the short term it’s possible to pretend you’re as “normal” as the next guy, but mental health issues do not respond well to suppression. They gather energy, they split, morph, proliferate and come back at you ten fold, and in ways you had not imagined possible. Mental health issues need exploring, they need dealing with in the broad light of day if we are to have any hope of dissolving them.

Unfortunately mental health services are powerless to intervene at the fledgling stages of a man’s descent into mental hell if he doesn’t admit there’s a problem, and that he can no longer handle it alone. They tend only to pick up on the cases where an individual has seriously ceased to function, by which time it’s much harder to affect any real change and to turn a life around.

My own midnight of the soul came in the nineties on the downhill run to forty, a time when G.P’s were handing out Prozac like it was the answer to everything. It wasn’t. Public mental health services back then were next to useless. It’s no different now. They try hard, but they’re overwhelmed, underfunded and understaffed. I was lucky in that I’d not reached the stage where my thoughts were turning to the ultimate solution. I was, however, in a very bumpy, uncertain and unhappy place. Fortunately I still had it in me to fight for a way through to a better outlook, but I had to fight clever.

I hope to write more on the issue of mens’ mental health over the coming weeks of Movember, looking at my own path to a more stable footing in life, and what it is about society that may be causing this epidemic of mental illness. Where I am now is that my employment record shows I’m less prone to getting the flu than I was. What it does not show is that I have ever had any mental health issues, which I most certainly do. The fact that I should have been afraid to have myself written up that way is a big part of the problem, it’s also why I shall be growing as big a moustache and beard as I can over the next four weeks, to remind myself of darker times, and hopefully through my writings on the subject make others consider the possibility there could be more behind a man’s manly demeanour than meets the eye.

Mental health is a real killer. So is silence,..

So find someone and talk about it.

*I’m not a real Mo Bro; beards are banned – only moustaches qualify. But that’s okay, I was never much of a joiner anyway and shall wear my goatee with pride.

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Metablogging my unquiet heart

Seeking change: a new laptop, a new car, a new way of making notes on my ‘droid, a new ornament for my garden, a new pair of shoes, a nicer shirt, a fancier wristwatch,….  anything to satisfy this suddenly insatiable craving for change, for renewal, for improvement. I know this is not the right way of doing things. I know that all this seeking completeness in some “thing” betrays only my unquiet heart.

Yet still it gnaws at me.

I was like this when I was a child, seeking transformation in the next perfect toy. But it was a transformation that lasted only for the weekend, until the Monday morning when the same-old-same-old would rear its head, reminding me of the fragility of dreams, that no sooner sated and the thirst would return, as if the unscrupulous vending-meister had added salt to my beverage,… a salt called Ego.

One need not be consciously egotistical to be driven by one’s ego. We all do it. The ego is simply that part of ourselves that seeks to be something more than it is, something cleverer, something more satisfied, something richer, faster, bigger, more complete, more aware, more human than we think we are at present. It also works in reverse. If we seek smallness, stillness, calmness or spirituality, our ego will help us, seeking ways in which we can become smaller, stiller, calmer and more smugly spiritual than all the other poor soulless losers out there.

This is clearly not the answer either.

Ego compares, it measures, and seeks adjustment to the next level. It’s not really helpful, but even knowing this cannot overcome ego’s innate lack of wisdom when the mood is upon us. Ego is far too clever, far too slippery for that.

I know I don’t actually need any of these things. I know they’re not worth striving for.  Instead, I’ll do what I always do: sleep, let my dreams dissolve the longing over time, or I’ll talk to my private journal, flick back to hear the voice that is my own, explaining all of this to me. Again. Old lessons,… decades old.

Or,…

I might also blog it, this idea of the unquiet heart,…

Yes,… that sounds interesting!

Except there’s my ego again, living through the imagined eyes of others, attempting to recalibrate itself, measure the degree of moreness to be gained by having others read my words, when what I really need is to pull the plug on this blog, and keep my words entirely between me and my inner self, and thus, like a celibate, preserve my power. Sure, the intrusion of an imaginary third party all the time is just another symptom of the craving for moreness.

But wait!

I realise my blog now references itself. This is becoming really interesting. It’s become a metablog, which is the kind of in-speak they’d use on university courses to describe a form of words, instead of simply experiencing those words and deciding if you like them or not. Interesting! Yes indeed! I’ll blog about it, except “interest” is the bloodhound scent that ego follows in its desire for moreness. It seeks interest in the forms of the world and if it doesn’t find them interesting, labels them dull instead, then moves on to something else.

Yes. That’s interesting! Now all we need is a picture to draw the eye of the passing reader, something really interesting to interest them. Let’s see, what have we?… I lknow, how about my ‘droid. Goodness my laptop is slow tonight,… what I really, really, need is a new one. How much better, faster, bigger I could be then!

Some doggerel to finish:

Be still my heart,…
Don’t let your craving start.
Seek not your thrills in toys,
Lest we lose ourselves in noise.
Nor grasp the world so tight,
We fail to see the light.
The world be found in its embrace,
An endless, fruitless, uphill race.
But if it’s ourself we seek to know,
Then chase it not,…
Just let it go.

Enjoy yourselves, and stay safe.

Graeme out.

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