David’s Comments (group member since Dec 21, 2016)

David’s comments from the Paths to Wholeness group.

Self Love: Evolution

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

In my mid 20s, while riding the subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I had an insight: To love ourselves, we need first to experience being loved – not loved with strings attached, not intermittently loved, and not loved blindly, either, but loved for who we actually are, like Dr. Seuss loves: “You are you. Now, isn’t that pleasant?” Or Mr. Rogers: “You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you. And I like you just the way you are.” Without this loved-at-the-core experience, loving ourselves is difficult to manage.

About 10 years ago, I received a variation of the “love yourself” advice, but this time I was better equipped for it. I had just completed five days at a Buddhist retreat. While there, I had been liberally sprinkled with what the retreat leader, Thich Nhat Hanh, called “dharma rain,” and some of it had soaked in. As we were leaving, a newfound friend said to me, “David, next time you think you need something from someone, try giving it to yourself first.” My initial response was still to see “giving it to myself” as emotional masturbation, but I knew her to be a wise woman; what she was telling me, I realized, had to mean something else.

My receptivity to her advice was enhanced by finding a different kind of love in the temporary community Thich Nhat Hanh and his monks and nuns had helped us create. There, I’d felt warmth and affection from nearly everyone I had met, shared meals and meditations, spoken heart-to-heart with one of the monks on a hillside overlooking the dining hall. Feeling loved had become broader and more available than it had ever seemed before.

I understood, finally, that receiving unconditional love from one person was not the only way to water the seeds of self love. I felt, viscerally, that I was not alone; on the contrary, I was fully embedded in the universe. The sun, the clouds, the trees, many human beings, as well as most of the creatures of the earth, in some way expressed their love, and I was among their recipients.

As the weeks passed, I tried to heed my newfound friend’s advice. Although at first nothing much happened, after a while I noticed a tiny droplet of warmth each time I tried to give myself something I thought I needed from someone else. Then one day, in the midst of grieving the suicide of a close friend, the love from the “lover” part of me toward the part that was hurting changed from a trickle to a flood. I was overcome by a love unlike any I’d previously experienced, an instant transfusion of compassion and caring pouring from a deep, wise-seeming part of me into a part that had always felt bereft.

Later that year, my lover and beloved parts united. Driving home after a 14-hour day of internship work and counseling psychology classes, I reflected on a particularly moving session I’d had that afternoon with a young artist whose mother had just died. And it struck me that I, who was so long separated from self love, was becoming someone who could love unconditionally and help my clients learn to love themselves.

In the years since then, it has become increasingly easier to love myself. A key to self love has been consciously encouraging awareness and openness toward both the parts that can offer love and the parts that need loving. I can feel loneliness and then truly comfort the lonely boy who still lives inside me, as if I am developing, within me, an ever-present father figure who can help “Davey” feel understood, cared for, and accompanied. As I learn to love myself more fully, I also become further empowered to love, care for, and accompany others.

Although the first rush of self love can be dramatic in its intensity, the preparation is often gradual. At first, it may appear that nothing is happening. But just as water can hover at its boiling point for a long time while energy is still being applied, eventually a quantum change occurs. As the water is transformed into steam, the unloved places inside us can transform into something whole and beloved.

From Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas

In recent posts, I’ve talked mostly about ReBalancer, the force that kicks in when our default stabilizer, Balancer, gets thrown out of whack by the UnBalancer. ReBalancer handles out-of-the ordinary stresses, but ReBalancer alone can’t keep us on an even keel. For that, we need Balancer to be healthy and strong.

Balancer doesn’t ask us for much. Much like our immune systems, it chugs along on autopilot, making minor course corrections when needed. Only when it encounters something it can’t handle does it call on ReBalancer to provide assistance.

This Balancer/ReBalancer tag team works very well most of the time. But if Balancer is weakened through too much stress for too long, or was never very robust to begin with, we become much more vulnerable to UnBalancer. Then if Balancer gets overwhelmed by a sudden stressor (an accident, a death, a financial crisis, etc.), it may crash before ReBalancer can take over. Recovery from such crashes can take a long time, and if the crash is sufficiently severe, the damage can be permanent.

It’s always helpful to teach ReBalancer new tricks, such as Mini Self-Care, The Experiment, and other techniques described in earlier posts. But it’s equally important to deliberately strengthen Balancer itself. Just as we can help our immune systems to better handle assaults to our bodies, we can better equip Balancer for handling whatever UnBalancer throws our way.

To do that, we need to build Resilience.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back. In a physical object, it is elasticity, the tendency of an object to return to its original shape after it’s been deformed. In an ecosystem, it is the environment’s capacity to rebuild itself. In a person, it’s the ability to recover from shocks to our systems. Without sufficient resilience, we are overcome by obstacles in our path. With it, nothing can keep us down.

Resilience in materials is intrinsic, but in people it’s a dynamic quality. Like a muscle, resilience can be damaged by too much stress or can atrophy if neglected. But it also gets stronger with exercise.

Human resilience has two aspects: physical and psychological. Both are partly determined by nature, partly by nurture. Just as some people are born with greater resistance to disease, some of us show signs of greater psychological resilience even at very early ages. But the larger share of resilience is the product of our own efforts to build and maintain it.

In the Balancer/ReBalancer/UnBalancer framework, resilience is the property of Balancer that allows it to spontaneously recover from the negative effects of UnBalancer. Rather than calling in the troops for reinforcement, a resilient Balancer takes a momentary hit, adjusts to the impact, and bounces back, carrying us along with it.

When I was young, I was fascinated by the properties of natural and man-made materials. I still remember experimenting with the bounciness – the resilience – of round objects. I studied tennis balls, rubber balls, badminton balls, golf balls, glass marbles, ball bearings, always looking for something that could bounce higher than the last thing I tried. I ended this quest when I found, in the toy section of our local pharmacy, the Super Ball.

Super Balls, invented in 1964 by chemist Norman Stingly, are made from an amazingly elastic synthetic rubber called Zectron. When dropped, a Super Ball bounces nearly to the height from which it fell. When thrown down hard, it can easily bounce over a house.

In my therapy practice, I see many people whose resilience has been beaten down or in whom it was never sufficiently developed. They’re like worn-out tennis balls.

After we deal with the problems that brought them into therapy, much of our work together involves creating a more resilient approach to life, so they can transition from worn-out tennis ball to Super Ball.

These are the six main factors I’ve found that can build psychological resilience and keep Balancer on track:

1. Creating a resilience-friendly environment
2. Adopting a growth-oriented viewpoint
3. Bolstering support from individuals and systems
4. Increasing emotional adaptability
5. Practicing balance-enhancing activities
6. Monitoring for signs of imbalance

1. Create a Resilience-Friendly Environment.

Stress is one of the most insidious challenges to building resilience. It can be a constant strain on Balancer, gradually wearing down its efficacy and slowing its response time.

Basic ways to reduce stress often recommended by therapists include changing your emotional relationship to the stressor and practicing stress reduction techniques such as meditation or coloring. But the most effective method is often to remove or change the stressor itself.

Begin resilience-building by evaluating your environment – your home, your car, your job, your relationships. Focus specifically on ways to reduce unnecessary stress. Jobs, schedules, or aspects of your home, neighborhood, relationships, or weekly routines that interfere with living a peaceful life are all candidates for stress-reducing changes.

Removable stressors can range from simple things, such as sharpening dull kitchen knives, creating a system so you don’t misplace your keys, or replacing a cell phone that keeps losing its charge, to more challenging ones like ending a toxic relationship or transitioning from the wrong job. Regardless of the source, though, the first question to ask yourself is, “Can this change?” and if the answer is “yes,” change it!

I encountered a striking example of the efficiency and effectiveness of removing the stressor several years ago. I was working with a bright, affable 12-year-old boy who, despite an obvious interest in learning, was always getting suspended from school. When I asked him about the events that led to his suspensions, I noticed that he always smiled when he talked about getting his teachers angry. I visited his home and discovered that he had an angry and imposing stepfather. Provoking his teachers was my young client’s way of dealing with his resentment toward his stepfather – he could provoke his teachers and they wouldn’t hit him, but his stepfather might.

A typical intervention in cases like this is family therapy, so with the family’s permission I returned a week later. My client lived in a house adjacent to his mother’s business, and there was a constant interchange between the two locations, affecting all members of the family in some way. During the session, I asked each family member to imagine what their lives would be like if they woke up the next day and all their problems were solved. The first thing each one said – even the five-year-old – was that they’d be living somewhere else. A month later, they moved, and very soon afterward, my 12-year-old client stopped acting out in school.

A related aspect of creating a safe, resilience-friendly environment involves “cat hairs.” When you find yourself overreacting to a comment, a tone of voice, or a situation, or you inexplicably feel sad, angry, jealous, or some other difficult emotion, you might have a problem with cat hairs.

Of course I don’t mean literal cat hairs.

The term “cat hair,” in this context, comes from an experiment with lab rats. Researchers wanted to see if rats are genetically programmed to fear cats. They placed several rat pups who had been exposed only to people and other rats – never to a cat – in a cage and monitored their playfulness for several days. The rats played together freely until the researchers took the smallest cat stimulus they could think of, a single cat hair, and dropped it into the center of the cage. Soon, the pups stopped playing and ran to the edges of the cage, trembling with fear.

After 24 hours, the researchers removed the cat hair. They continued monitoring the rat pups, but days later, the rats had not returned to their baseline playfulness. Where there had been a cat hair, the pups seemed to feel, there might still be a cat.

Fear and trauma can leave an indelible imprint on us, too. Our automatic fear-handling mechanism makes us prone to reacting to our “cat hairs” with fight/flight/freeze responses. Such triggered reactions can negatively affect our jobs, relationships, and many other aspects of our lives, cheating us out of a more full version of ourselves. Fortunately, we have more options than rats do for dealing with our “cat hairs.”

Reminders of traumatic experiences that trigger strong emotions can often be removed. Sometimes these are physical objects, but more often they are habitual actions. For example, if a certain phrase or tone spoken by a friend, relative, or romantic partner reminds you of a bad relationship or a difficult childhood, you can ask him or her to change it. Most people will comply with a request like this when it’s presented in context.

When cat hairs can’t be removed, we can learn to see them merely as hairs. If your emotional response seems stronger than the situation merits, ask yourself what triggered it. Did the triggering object, words, tone, or action really mean what you felt it did, or did it just stir something inside? Over time, triggers that we understand to be only triggers – not cats but merely cat hairs – they gradually become less threatening. Then we can use our fight/flight/freeze mechanism as designed, to protect ourselves from actual threats rather than reacting to cat hairs.

What to do:

1. Notice what is causing increased stress or a triggered response. Simply paying attention to the feeling and looking at what caused it often provides some relief.

2. Remove the stressor, when possible.

3. Change your relationship to stressors that can’t be removed. For most of us, our attitudes toward stressors and the emotional responses they generate are more than half of the stress. Even triggered responses can be detoxified by changing our relationship to them.

4. Accompany the stress or triggered response. Feelings that are pushed aside tend to stay stuck, frozen within us like an ant in amber. Feelings that are fully experienced soon become different feelings. Sadness can turn into acceptance. Anger can turn into understanding. Envy can become motivation.

5. Develop self-soothing skills. When we are able to self-soothe, sometimes even the cat becomes just a kitten, purring on our laps. (More on self-soothing in Part 5.)

Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder

Balance: The Experiment

“We’ve never seen anything like this!” shouts the general to his cadre in the crowded Situation Room.

An alien menace has humanity at its mercy. Nothing in our mighty arsenal has any effect against it. We will be dominated or destroyed within days … unless we apply Yankee ingenuity, create experiments that reveal our nemesis’s vulnerabilities, and find a way to exploit them.

The unknown enemy and the heroic victory against it has appeared in countless science fiction stories. The plot’s turning point is always an Experiment. The Experiment is also, often, the key to our own victories against the depredations of UnBalancer, the collection of forces that collude to prey upon our sense of equilibrium.

We all started out as experimenters. Beginning in infancy, Experiments are how we learn about ourselves, the world, and the way things work. What happens if I close my hand around my foot and pull? What if I tug on my mother’s hair? What if I put that in my mouth?

Unfortunately, like the hapless generals in science fiction stories, we often lose track of our experimental attitude as social conditioning insidiously snuffs it out.

Many of us learned to stop experimenting before we left elementary school. Instead of continuing our own explorations, we were taught to look to others and to existing methodologies for ways to deal with our problems. Sometimes this tactic works fine – it’s not always necessary to reinvent the wheel! But when existing solutions fail us and we can’t maintain equilibrium, we need to learn how to experiment again.

ReBalancer and The Experiment

Most of the time, a semi-automatic response system I call Balancer monitors our thoughts, feelings, and actions so we can maintain equilibrium. When this semi-automatic system can’t deal with a situation, Balancer starts to tilt, and we tilt along with it. Then ReBalancer, an auxiliary system, kicks in.

ReBalancer is Balancer’s Chief of Staff. When UnBalancer rages and Balancer tilts, klaxons sound – ReBalancer’s cue to take over the helm. But before ReBalancer can act, it has to determine what the problem is and whether it has the means to resolve it. The need for an Experiment arises either when the problem is unfamiliar, or when there is no existing method to solve it.

ReBalancer goes through a decision tree algorithm:

QUESTION: Have I seen this problem before?
IF YES, THEN: Do I have a method to handle it?
IF YES, THEN: Use that method to beat back UnBalancer.
OTHERWISE: Gather data and conduct an Experiment.

The goals of ReBalancer’s Experiments are similar to those of scientists and the heroes of science fiction movies. An Experiment provides new data that generates insights into the nature of a problem, and from those insights come new potential solutions. How long this takes to solve a problem depends on the problem itself and on ReBalancer’s skill in designing and implementing Experiments.

The Power of The Experiment

Without Experiments, ReBalancer (and we) are stuck in a loop, trying to solve new problems with old solutions, a formula for failure.

The Bill Murray film Groundhog Day is a textbook example of the power of The Experiment. When the movie starts, Murray’s arrogant weatherman character, Phil Connors, is eager to get together with his producer, Rita Hanson, played by Andie MacDowell, but he’s far too much of a jerk for her to respond. After a day of filming together in Punxsutawney, PA, on February 2nd, Phil inexplicably wakes up to an exact repetition of the previous day. He’s trapped in a time loop, living Groundhog Day again and again.

Phil’s fate seems sealed until, after many iterations of that day, he decides to Experiment. By applying what he’s learned from previous repetitions and seeing what changes, he learns to grow emotionally, becomes more aware of the needs of others, and work to improve the lives of the townspeople. After many repetitions, he’s become someone worthy of Rita’s attention. The next morning, he awakens on February 3rd, freed from his time loop, a transformed and more authentic version of himself. Score: ReBalancer 1, UnBalancer 0.

Another example comes from the annals of medicine. For decades, the medical establishment maintained that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much stomach acid, and they were treated – ineffectively – with bland diets, antacids, and acid reducers. In 1982, two Australian doctors hypothesized that ulcers were actually caused by the bacterium H. pylori. Because an entrenched ulcer-medication industry was invested in the ineffective treatments of the day, these doctors (who years later were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery) couldn’t get permission to test their hypothesis on patients. So one of them, Barry Marshall, conducted his own Experiment: He drank the contents of a Petri dish infected with H. pylori.

Within two weeks, Marshall developed severe gastritis, a precursor to ulcers. Then he quickly cured himself with antibiotics known to be effective against H. pylori. Marshall’s Experiment completely transformed ulcer management. Marshall commented, “Everyone was against me, but I knew I was right.” Score: ReBalancer 1, UnBalancer 0.

My own life has been a series of Experiments that shifted me in ways I needed to shift. Sometimes an Experiment started something new. The Flower Mandalas that accompany my book Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas, for instance, began as an Experiment. For several months I’d been using a photo editor to transform photos of clouds, rocks, wood, and other subjects into mandala-like images. Then one day I spotted a dandelion seedhead and photographed it. A few days later, looking at it on my computer monitor, I wondered what would happen if I “mandalized” something that was already mandala-like. From this Experiment came my first Flower Mandala, the Flower Mandalas book, and the blossoming of a new way for me to see.

Experiments have also helped me overcome fear and expand my abilities. Sometimes these expansions have been specific to a particular situation, but often they have led to a more general, permanent change. Here’s the “before” and “after” of a recent Experiment in motorcycle maintenance:

Before The Experiment: Back in the ’70s, motorcycle maintenance was an integral part of motorcycling for me. When I returned to riding a few years ago, after a 33-year hiatus, I wanted to recapture that aspect of the experience. My skills, however, were as rusty as my 1972 Yamaha Twin. Simple tasks like changing the oil or cleaning the carburetor were scary, and when I encountered an unfamiliar problem, I often panicked. If something didn’t work the first time, I’d repeat it with increasing force and a feeling of urgency, hoping against hope that what hadn’t worked the first time would do the trick the second, third, or fourth. The net effect was broken parts, expensive repairs, and deepening discouragement. Score: UnBalancer 1, ReBalancer 0.

The Experiment: Though I didn’t know it at the time, what I needed to restore emotional balance (and maintain my bike) was an experimental attitude. A valve-adjustment Experiment turned that around.

My bike’s four valves need adjusting every 5,000 miles. When I looked up the procedure in the repair manual, manipulating a feeler gauge, a wrench, and a screw driver in the cramped space available seemed daunting. So on a family visit to Syracuse, ReBalancer kicked in and I asked my brother Mark for help. Mark is a mechanical engineer and motorcycle instructor with more than 40 years experience, and he has an engineer’s confidence that if one man can design a piece of machinery, another can maintain it.

On his first try, Mark couldn’t get the feeler gauge in place. My body tensed up, ready to panic again, but Mark just paused, thought about what he’d learned from this attempt, and conducted an Experiment, bending the feeler gauge so it more easily reached the gap. This got him closer, but there was still a problem with the adjustment nut. So he stepped back again and designed a new Experiment, switching to an angled wrench. By the third Experiment, he got it, and he quickly adjusted the remaining valves.

After the Experiment: Since then, I’ve incorporated The Experiment into my own motorcycle maintenance practice, regaining not only the mechanical agility I left behind in 1979 but also a deeper sense of self-confidence. Score: ReBalancer 1, UnBalancer 0.

The psychotherapy treatment room is a laboratory for Experiments. I have witnessed many clients make Experiments that empower them to tackle the much larger challenges they face. Clients ask: What if I were to test this limit, take steps down that path, plunge into these waters? Over time, they become emboldened to do what their parents, teachers, or peers had convinced them was impossible.

One young client detested writing assignments. He hated school and believed that his teacher wanted him to write essays that showed how much he liked it. To redirect his helpless rage, we experimented with using irony and sarcasm. He was thrilled to discover that his teacher had no idea that the conventional-seeming sentiments he was expressing were the opposite of what he actually believed.

The idea for this Experiment had come from one I’d inadvertently conducted in college. By the time I got to James Joyce, I had started to hate literary criticism. In a paper on Joyce’s Ulysses, I imitated the critics I was reading by homing in on a trivial point in the book and exhaustively supporting it with obscure footnotes from the text. Unlike my client’s fourth-grade teacher, my professor saw through me. He said that what he most enjoyed about the paper was my relentlessly negative attitude toward the assignment – but he gave it an A+ anyway and suggested I clean it up and send it to the James Joyce Quarterly. Score: ReBalancer 1, UnBalancer 0.

A more striking Experiment was executed by an art student I worked with several years ago. His life was a mess, fraught with addiction, depression, dysfunctional relationships, and a hostile and unsupportive family. He needed more help than he could get from counseling alone, but he’d learned from childhood experience not to ask for it. So we devised an Experiment: He would, at least once in the next week, ask for help in a situation where normally he would remain silent.

On a windy, bitterly cold afternoon a couple of days later, he stopped at a McDonald’s for a hamburger and coffee. Looking around, he saw that all the tables were occupied. He buttoned up and was about to eat his burger outside in the biting wind when he remembered The Experiment. Instead of leaving with his food, he asked a young man sitting alone at a table for four if he could join him. The young man said “yes,” and my client and he had a lively, animated lunch together.

This small Experiment was a turning point. My client realized not only that he could ask for help, but also that when he did, he was likely to get it. Over the course of the school year, he received assistance and advice from several sources and was able to quit using drugs, leave a job where his coworkers expected him to be the “party boy,” return to making art, and resolve major issues with his family. Even his lover quit drinking and drugging. Score: ReBalancer 1, UnBalancer 0.

Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder

Download a free copy of Paths to Wholeness: Selections http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N1NV2MA

Hanging in the Balance

There once was a Zen monk who, while walking across a field, encountered a ferocious tiger. The tiger chased the monk across the field until he reached the edge of a high cliff. The monk’s only chance was to grab a vine that grew at the cliff’s edge and lower himself out of the tiger’s reach. As the monk hung from the vine, he saw that below him, another tiger was waiting. He also noticed two mice starting to gnaw on the vine.

What could the monk do now?

Although few of us are literally pursued by tigers above and tigers below, most of us have to deal with one of UnBalancer’s chief confederates, Uncertainty. And if we haven’t yet, we will soon enough.

NOTE: “Confederate” is the term I’m using for the accomplices of UnBalancer. Besides Uncertainty, these include unbalancers such as Entropy, Chance, Illness, Accident, Loss, Misfortune, Obliviousness, Fear, Greed, Distrust, Anger, Hatred, Doubt, Jealousy, or any of the myriad external and internal forces that can knock us out of alignment.

We’re uncertain about what will happen in our relationships, the economy, the climate; how people see us; how an undertaking will go; how our children will do in school, and in life; what will become of us as we age. And no matter who we are and what we have accomplished, we are uncertain about our own end – when it will occur, what will cause it, whether we will suffer, how we will be remembered, what will happen afterward. The only thing we can really be certain of is Uncertainty.

For many of us, Uncertainty is the biggest threat to Balance of all UnBalancer’s confederates. Unlike the more acute unbalancers, Uncertainty isn’t a sudden blow to our internal gyroscopes that makes us tilt, after which we go through a recovery process and move on. Instead, it can feel like a constant pressure, pushing us steadily down; one that, if it goes on long enough, with enough force, grinds our bearings into grit.

Some years ago, I moved a several hundred books and vinyl records from Buffalo to Boston, filling not only the trunk but also the front and back seats of my car with heavy boxes. By the time I got close to home, I could hear a low whine from the left rear of my car, near where the heaviest box, my record collection, sat. Within days, the car began to rumble. Then it screamed. The constant weight had worn out that wheel bearing. Uncertainty can be like that.

Many of us try to combat Uncertainty by creating an illusion of certainty. We anticipate a worst-case or best-case scenario and pretend it’s real, though it’s only a shadow on a wall. When we cling to the best case, we may fail to strive for the best outcome. When we dread the worst case, we become hypervigilant, seeing only signs of catastrophe. Our projections enable us to sidestep Uncertainty, but at a sometimes terrible cost in ignorance and anxiety.

Others follow the adage, “Hope for the best but expect the worst.” We keep up a positive attitude, but we also steel ourselves for disaster. We keep our spare tires inflated, save for a rainy day, buy bread and bottled water when the forecast calls for snow, back up our computers, purchase long-term care insurance, and in this way hope to keep Uncertainty at bay.

Some of us go one better and create multiple backup plans. Like good Boy Scouts, our motto is “Be prepared.” My father, a Boy Scout leader for many years, lived by this credo. He had duplicates, and in some cases triplicates, of all the vital parts of the devices in our house … just in case. Stacked beside his workbench were two or three replacement motors for the washing machine and the dryer. Shelves in a nearby closet overflowed with duplicate faucets, belts, hoses, clamps, fasteners, and other spare parts. We could have stocked a small hardware store with all that stuff. Yet none of these backups were a bulwark against his failing heart.

These typical Balancer strategies for getting us through the anxiety of Uncertainty are sometimes effective. But often, optimism, hypervigilance, platitudes, and even backup plans aren’t enough.

That’s when the gleam appears in UnBalancer’s eyes.

Fortunately, we have more than Balancer’s standard operating procedures to help us handle Uncertainty. Just as UnBalancer has its Confederates, so Balancer has its Allies.

I introduced ReBalancer in a previous post. When Balancer starts to tilt, its first line of defense is ReBalancer, its Chief of Staff. Sometimes ReBalancer, drawing on its storehouse of tools, techniques, and strategies, is equal to the task. But in the face of a powerful combatant like Uncertainty, it may also need to call in other members of Balancer’s cadre.

Balancer’s Allies include Acceptance, Logic, Intuition, Common Sense, Gratitude, Moderation, Patience, Perseverance, Support, and the many other internal and external resources that can help restore equilibrium.

I’ve written elsewhere about using Acceptance and also about what the Romantic poet John Keats called Negative Capability. These are among Balancer’s more powerful Allies. But when the tigers are above and the tigers are below, and the mice are gnawing on your vine, you need to pull out all the stops and call in UnBalancer’s ultimate Ally.

That Ally is Presence.

Let’s return to the monk hanging from his cliff:

As the vine began to give way, with death imminent, the monk also saw a ripe wild strawberry growing on the cliff wall. Clutching the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. He put it in his mouth. “This lovely strawberry,” he thought. “How sweet it tastes.”

In my own life, I’ve faced uncertainties small and large, and so have my friends, family members, and therapy clients. Those who deal most effectively with potentially paralyzing Uncertainty respond very differently than those who succumb. Instead of catastrophizing, exhausting their energy on worry and backup plans, or escaping from their fears with alcohol, drugs, or distraction, they turn their focus to the present. They remain alert to whatever they must do to try to ensure a desired outcome, but they are also fully engaged in everything else in their lives.

Rather than putting their lives on hold when faced with uncertain health, an uncertain relationship, or an uncertain political or economic time, those who vanquish Uncertainty savor the life they have, in each moment. They know that whatever they are uncertain of will, in time, become a certainty, but they are in no hurry to get there. They eat the wild strawberry growing on the cliff wall. They are fully present, and Uncertainty has no power over Presence.

There are everyday examples of this practice, and there are dramatic ones. One particularly striking example comes to mind: the case of Jean-Dominique Bauby.

Bauby, a Parisian journalist and magazine editor, was stricken, at age 43, with a massive stroke that put him into a coma for 20 days. When he awoke, he was completely aware and alert but also nearly paralyzed, able only to swivel his head slightly and to blink his left eye. He was locked in a body with almost no way to communicate his thoughts, feelings, and needs to the outside world. Miraculously, we know what happened to him because he wrote a book about his experiences, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death, from inside this locked-in state.

He wrote his book literally one letter at a time, blinking his left eye while a transcriber recited the French alphabet in order of letter frequency, recording a character when Bauby blinked to indicate his choice. Each word took about two minutes to write and the entire book took 200,000 blinks.

It’s been almost 20 years since I read Bauby’s book, but the contrast between his external and inner worlds is still vivid. I remember, for example, his experience of food. Bauby had been something of a connoisseur and he’d enjoyed many fine meals. After his stroke, he was fed through tubes, perhaps never to eat again. The tiger above and the tiger below. So instead, he “ate” like a king by recalling past meals and rearranging them in his mind.

Although Bauby remained completely aware of his surroundings, he lived mainly in his imagination. He found ways to have a full and meaningful life in what most of us would consider unendurable conditions. “My diving bell becomes less oppressive,” he wrote, “and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions.” Like the Zen monk in our story, he found the strawberry and savored it, dealing with the terror and Uncertainty of his fate by seizing each moment.

Bauby died from pneumonia two days after his book was published. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly sold 25,000 copies on the first day, became the number one bestseller in Europe, and was later made into a well-received film.

Often, we think we are on one path only to find, somewhere down the line, that we have actually been on another without knowing it. We are rattled, and until we become present to the life we are now in, we can dwell in a branch of purgatory managed by Uncertainty. But once we see that this path is, simply, another path, we are free to take in everything that we find along its way. We hold onto the vine and reach for the strawberry and see how sweet it tastes.

More anon,
- David
David J. Bookbinder

Books:
Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)

Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder
http://www.transformationspress.org
http://www.davidbookbinder.com
http://www.flowermandalas.org

"Crazy" $14.66 Amazon price drop.

I recently set up my imprint, Transformations Press, as an Amazon seller, and it seems to have triggered a little price war on Amazon.

Amazon.com itself is now selling the print version of Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas for $25.34 and it's available for Amazon Prime free shipping! Normally, Amazon sells it for $40.

I don't know how long they will keep it at that price, but if you have been holding off buying the book because of the cost and would like a copy, this is probably as low as it will go.

Here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0984699406

Thanks!
David

The Balancer/ReBalancer Tag Team

As powerful as UnBalancer is, and as insidious as it can be, each of us has two powerful allies to help us counteract it. One of them is Balancer.

Like UnBalancer, Balancer has been difficult to define. I’m only beginning to understand its totality. It’s not only Awareness, though Awareness is certainly one of its components. It’s not just Mindfulness, either, though Mindfulness can be a powerful aid in maintaining balance. Nor is it fully defined by Logic, Intuition, Common Sense, Moderation, Resilience, or any of the other functions that help us maintain equilibrium most of the time.

Balancer is, I believe, much like the immune system, which automatically monitors our internal and external environments and correctly sorts out, most of the time, what’s us and what’s not, what’s good for us and what isn’t. Or like the pancreas, which in a healthy body automatically regulates, most of the time, the balance of sugar and insulin that is essential for survival.

For many of us, Balancer does a pretty good job handling routine stress levels. It deals with assaults such as minor illnesses, disappointments, bad weather, a too-short night or a too-long day. When these events occur, Balancer automatically compensates, much as a gyroscope can right itself when it’s nudged one way or another.

But if the stress is too much or too long, Balancer can be overpowered, and we start to tilt. That’s when the other ally, Balancer’s more deliberate partner, ReBalancer, fires its retro rockets.

Unlike Balancer, ReBalancer doesn’t automatically engage. It’s a consciously activated composite of the tools, techniques, actions, and supports we’ve acquired so we can restabilize when UnBalancer pushes us too hard, too suddenly, or for too long.

When Balancer fails to maintain equilibrium, ReBalancer can save the day. But ReBalancer can come to the rescue if, and only if, three factors are in place:

1. We let ReBalancer know we need its help
2. ReBalancer is ready to be called into action
3. ReBalancer has the skills needed to handle the situation

The stakes are high for maintaining balance. In my own life, I see numerous examples of UnBalancer getting the better of Balancer. Sometimes ReBalancer came to my aid, but when I was too slow in calling on it, or it wasn’t up to the task, things went south, sometimes permanently.

A couple of examples:

On a physical level, UnBalancer got the upper hand with Type II diabetes. I was diagnosed with the disease ten years ago, but it began as a reversible pre-diabetes a decade earlier, when I started to display the early warning signs: high cholesterol and triglycerides, high blood pressure, episodes of low blood sugar, and a bit of fat around the middle. My body was already out of balance. Calling on ReBalancer would have been a good move, but neither I nor my doctor took my symptoms seriously enough until I was past the point of no return.

Type II diabetes is typical of the Balancer/UnBalancer duel. Because of a combination of genetic and lifestyle factors, the body becomes resistant to the effects of insulin, which normally transports glucose into fat and muscle cells. The pancreas compensates by creating enough insulin to overpower the resistance, but the high insulin levels make the body more insulin-resistant. In a self-destructive cycle that continues for years, the body grows increasingly insulin-resistant and the pancreas pushes itself harder to compensate. By the time pre-diabetes symptoms begin to show, the glucose/insulin metabolism is already close to a tipping point, but nothing clearly screams “Look out! Diabetes on the way!” until it is too late to prevent it. Score one for UnBalancer!

Had I or my doctors been more astute, we would have put ReBalancer into action, creating an exercise and diet program to reverse my symptoms. If I had then incorporated ReBalancer’s program into Balancer’s repertoire, I may have prevented the insulin-producing cells from wearing out.

Another, more recent example is, like diabetes, common in the United States: too much work, not enough downtime, leading to burnout.

As a psychotherapist in private practice, I try to maintain a consistent number of clients. When people leave therapy, I take on new clients until my case load is where I want it. Then I stop until I have more openings. Balancer monitors my schedule and makes sure I don’t see too few clients or add too many.

Sometimes, though, a major world or local event shakes people up and brings many former clients back into therapy. Balancer can usually accommodate a few extra clients, but if I continue to add more, the work/downtime balance tips too far in the work direction. I love my work; it has felt like a calling, and one I gladly answered. But too much of a good thing is still … too much.

The brutal 2014-2015 winter, which broke Boston’s all-time seasonal snowfall record, took its toll not only on the local economy, but also the local psyche. Every week for 14 weeks, former clients, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years, called, emailed, and texted, asking to resume therapy. And because I had a policy of never turning away a former client, I accepted them. All of them.

Balancer’s scheduling arm tried to compensate. It filled gaps in my day normally devoted to paperwork with clients and pushed the paperwork off to the weekend. It added appointment hours first to the end and then to the beginning of one workday, and eventually added extra hours to all five.

While the scheduling arm handled those arrangements, another Balancer arm adjusted the rest of my life. First, it made more efficient use of non-work time. Then, as the clients kept coming, it cut out downtime, eliminating recreational activities, time with friends, and finally basic activities such as meal preparation, house cleaning, car maintenance, and sleep.

You can see where this is going, but I couldn’t. Balancer was too busy balancing, doing its valiant best to let me carry on.

Weeks turned into months, and clients I thought had come for a brief tune-up stayed for a new therapy run, while others continued to arrive. By the time the buds were on the trees I drove past on the way to my office, I was too tired and too wired on caffeine to notice.

UnBalancer was in charge and, to paraphrase William Butler Yeats, things fell apart, the center did not hold.

The slip toward burnout was gradual at first. I’d occasionally forget an appointment, or schedule two people for the same time slot. I procrastinated on billing and missed the payment window for several sessions. I put aside continuing education trainings until the last few months of the year, then had to cram them all in at once, further adding to my stress.

I slept poorly, drinking more coffee to stay alert and needing brief naps between sessions. Though I didn’t know it until my annual physical, my blood pressure had risen to dangerous levels. Only when a capillary in my retina leaked, causing a permanent blind spot, did Balancer pause from its frantic efforts and cry out, “Help!”

ReBalancer tried to come to the rescue, but it was sluggish, out of practice, and short on the skills needed to right the ship again. Over the next few months, I learned to take mini-breaks, add back short-term versions of restorative activities, practice new techniques for overcoming insomnia. I reduced my caffeine intake, shortened sessions, and – hardest of all – learned to say “Sorry, I can’t see you right now” to clients who wanted to return to therapy.

Eventually, clients completed their work and moved on. Slowly, I, too, returned to homeostasis, the skills developed by ReBalancer now incorporated into Balancer’s routines.

In my profession, I typically see people when UnBalancer has had its way for a long time. I’ve built a toolkit for supporting my clients’ ReBalancers and Balancers, equipping them to recover from the subtle mischief UnBalancer carries out.

I’ll cover some of those tools and techniques in future posts.


Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder

Books:
Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)
52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief

Balance: A Mini-Lesson on Mini Self-Care

This post is about how to take care of yourself when you’re too pressed for time for normal self-care. But first, some back story.

In the summer of 1979, after two of my roommates were mugged and I narrowly escaped the knife myself, I left Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant for parts unknown.

I’d arrived in New York five years earlier with two books, two cameras, and a knapsack full of clothes, but by the time I left Brooklyn I’d accumulated a small U-Haul truck’s worth of possessions. With two Parisian friends, I loaded up my collection of books, tools, photography equipment, random bits of furniture, and a Yamaha 200 motorcycle into a rental truck. We drove across New York State to Buffalo, where I dropped everything off at my mother’s house – including the Parisians, who were continuing their trek across America.

A few days later, I flew to London to begin a two-month trip through the UK and Europe, to be followed by a three-month residence at an artist colony in Virginia, where I hoped to figure out where I’d settle next.

Two days before my return flight from Brussels, Belgium, the airline I had planned to take home went out of business. The next flight I could get a seat on was a week away, and I was short of enough American Express Travelers Cheques to buy another ticket.

But fear not! I’d worked my way through college and supported myself in New York City by doing a variety of construction jobs, and one of the trades I’d learned was roofing. And as it luck would have it – or so I thought – the brother of the friend I was staying with was a roofer.

When I left New York, I had sworn off construction work, figuring that if I continued I’d end up missing a thumb or walking with a limp. But this job was low stress, and actually fun. Although the Belgian materials and techniques were a little different from what I’d used, the work itself was essentially the same and within a day I was keeping up with the rest of the crew. I made more than enough that week to pay for the flight home.

Toward the end of my stay at the Virginia artist colony three months later, I was still without a next destination. An opportunity arose to extend my stay by helping to build new artist residences. “Why not?” I thought. Nothing bad had happened during my brief job in Belgium, and this job, too, looked like fun.

Three weeks into it, I had my answer in the form of two ruptured disks. The days of supporting myself with construction work were now behind me and I had to find another way to keep bread on the table and my writing and photography habit alive.

I’d spent my childhood as a kid scientist and my first year of college as a Cornell engineer. I knew that if push ever came to shove, I could work with computers. When I recovered from the back injury enough to become mobile again, I enrolled in a crash course in computer programming at Boston University.

And this is where mini self-care comes in.

The B.U. program packed a minor in Computer Science into one summer school session. Material for each course that would normally would have taken a semester to cover was squeezed into seven days. It was a brutal academic experience unlike any I’d experienced. Every day packed in two weeks’ worth of coursework: Each evening was our “weekend,” and each weekend a virtual semester break.

However, the program came with unintended benefits. Besides learning the fundamentals of everything from hardware architecture to LISP (the original language of artificial intelligence), I stumbled, inadvertently, on mini self-care.

Inside my maelstrom of computer intensity, in order to stay sane I looked for small, quiet spaces in which to recover. I took short walks from the computer buildings to the main campus, where for a few minutes I’d gaze out at the boats and ducks on the Charles River. I took five-minute coffee breaks. I brought a paperback novel with me and read a few pages during lunch. Unlike my classmates who lived nearby and spent most of the night toiling at computer terminals in the lab, each evening I walked back to Cambridge for a return to normality and a few hours of sleep.

Of the 24 men and women who began the program, I was one of only eight who completed it. I believe my improvised mini self-care had something to do with it.

Mini self-care is the abridged version of full-sized self-care.

Many of us have evolved a set of activities that help us feel balanced and relaxed and that allow us to recuperate from stress. We might have a hobby, take trips or vacations, practice yoga, meditate, binge-watch a television series, hike or take walks, swim, play a sport, garden, go for a ride, and so on. We do these things regardless of whatever else is going on in our lives, and they help to restore equilibrium when the tensions of work, health or family problems – or even a bad winter – wear us down.

But what can we do when we don’t have time for any of that? When even half an hour of yoga or a 15-minute walk seems like yet another burden in an already overburdened day, and a week-long vacation feels like an impossible dream?

We’re wired to handle short-term stress, but when stress is continuous for too long, the constant flow of the stress hormones adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine takes a toll. When we reach a point where there’s nothing left to give, we “burn out.”

Burnout leads to feelings of hopelessness, depression, apathy, and physical and emotional exhaustion. It hampers work, home life, health, and undermines most of what we find satisfying in our lives.

The optimal way to avoid burnout is to reduce the stress and weave back into our lives what we find restorative. However, when time pressures won’t allow that strategy, an almost-as-good alternative is mini self-care. Although mini self-care may not be as reinvigorating as the longer forms, it will help to withstand the stress.

Some examples:

Self-care: You do yoga for self-restoration. Mini self-care: Pick one pose and do it for a couple of minutes two or three times a day.

Self-care: You like to walk or run. Mini self-care: Take a five-minute walk around the block.

Self-care: You like spending an hour at the end of the day reading. Mini self-care: Carry a book with you and read a couple of pages at regular intervals two or three times throughout the day.

Self-care: You like to talk with friends on the phone. Mini self-care: Exchange short texts throughout the day.

Self-care: You take two-week vacation trips. Mini self-care: Spend a night away on the weekend. If you can’t take a night, walk downtown and pretend you’re a tourist.

And so on.

Mini self-care isn’t a permanent replacement for the full version, but many find it helpful not only in warding off burnout, but in feeling more balanced in times of stress.

To create your own mini self-care plan:

1. Make a list of the things you do that feel restorative

2. Figure out the shortest version that still feels meaningful. The 80/20 rule often applies: you can get 80% of the benefit from self-care activities by spending 20% of the time you’d really like to spend.

3. Decide when to do your mini self-care. Mini self-care is more effective if it’s incorporated into a routine. Schedule some activities for morning, do some at lunch, and do others in the evening.

4. Add randomized mini self-care. Do one self-care activity randomly throughout the day. For instance, several of my clients who meditate use an app that makes a gong tone or buzzes to signal them to stop what they’re doing and take three long, slow breaths. The slow breaths interrupt what they are doing just long enough for them to get a fresh perspective. But you could instead stretch, go for a quick walk, drink a glass of water, or just zone out for a minute — whatever feels like self-care for you.

It’s been decades since I last nailed down a shingle or wrote a line of code, but mini self-care continues to be helpful in burnout prevention, which is common in my profession. Although I’m not as diligent as I could be about my morning, lunchtime, and evening mini self-care routines, when I practice them, body, mind, and spirit all hum along much more smoothly, regardless of the level or duration of stress.


Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder

Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas

‘The Under Toad,’ Walt said. ‘I’m trying to see it. How big is it?

And Garp and Helen and Duncan held their breath; they realized that all these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.

Garp tried to imagine it with him. Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.

In John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp, the Under Toad is a monster created in the mind of young Walt Garp when he misunderstands a warning to beware of the undertow. For Walt’s parents, T. S. and Helen Garp, it becomes a code word for anxiety. “When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy – when depression had moved in overnight – they said to each other, ‘The Under Toad is strong today.’"

Lately I’ve been contemplating balance and what disrupts it. A cousin of the Under Toad I’m dubbing the UnBalancer comes to mind.

In physical objects, things go out of balance when there’s a design flaw, when something breaks, when unequal forces press on an object. Unbalance typically worsens over time, gradually compromising the whole structure. An unbalanced tire rattles the car. A leak in a roof leads to a ceiling falling in. When winds vibrated the Tacoma Narrows bridge to its resonant frequency in 1940, the whole structure danced briefly and then catastrophically collapsed. When an O-ring failed in the Space Shuttle Challenger, the spacecraft exploded.

The same thing happens to us, individually and collectively, when the myriad forces that throw us out of balance are at play. We begin to wear and to ripple, sometimes to the point of collapse, sometimes to explosion.

These myriad forces have a common source in the UnBalancer. It’s not yet clear to me what the UnBalancer is, but I do know what it is not, or more accurately, not only.

The UnBalancer is not only Chaos, though Chaos can be its ally, nor is it only Entropy, Chance, Accident, Misfortune, Obliviousness, Fear, Greed, Distrust, Anger, Hatred, Passion, Illness, or any of the other internal and external forces that sometimes knock us out of alignment. It’s all of these things, and it’s also more.

The UnBalancer is subtle, a magician that draws our attention to whatever’s in the foreground so it can work its mischief unseen.

When the teeter-totter of work and leisure gets too heavily weighted toward one or the other, things go awry. When our diet gets out of sync with the balance our bodies need to function, the system starts to break down in a multitude of ways. The same goes for waking and sleeping, time to connect and time to be alone, thinking and doing, yin and yang.

The UnBalancer revels in our unawareness, and it loves to spread the joy.

Like the frog (or toad) contentedly sitting in gradually heating water, the path to a multitude of forms of imbalance is almost imperceptible at first. When the books are out of balance, for example, the road to ruin has already been paved but nobody notices. The sh*t hits the fan when there’s nothing left to borrow. Witness the financial collapse of 2008. Or 1929.

The UnBalancer is also patient. On the global scale, the inventions first of agriculture and then of manufacturing have, over thousands of years, unbalanced the Earth itself.

The UnBalancer is strong today. So how do we reckon with it?

That’s the question I’ll be exploring in future installments.

Stay tuned!


Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder

Balancing the Books

From late spring to early autumn, 1971, I hitchhiked across the United States, following a meandering loop west from Buffalo to Berkeley, south past L.A., up the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington, and back east through Canada. I was on a mission not only to see the country, but also to find out who I was.

I hitchhiked to force myself to connect, if only for a lift to the next town or to find somewhere to crash for the night. On the journey, a new goal emerged: to develop the parts of myself I knew must be there, because they resonated when I encountered them in others, but to which I had no access. In the largest sense of the term, I took that trip to achieve balance.

Balance is a word with many meanings, in many contexts. But in May, 1971, to me it meant to bring out the latent parts of myself and mate them with what was already there and, in so doing, to become someone whole and complete.

I discovered that I had an incomplete view of who I was during my freshman year as an engineering student at Cornell University. I had grown up a kid scientist, obsessed with the workings of the natural and technical worlds, and my hope was that I'd graduate with a degree in Electrical Engineering and work for NASA. In an Introduction to English Literature course, I read the long poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake.

Though by then I had witnessed Woodstock and dabbled in sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, I was vaguely aware that I spent most of my time in my head and lived hardly at all in the realms of emotion and the body. Blake's poem reached out forcefully, over hundreds of years and thousands of miles, with the message that, if I continued on my present course, I would live out my days as a shadow. His potent words and vivid images not only prompted me to drop out of engineering, but set me on a lifelong journey of self-actualization.

The next summer, I began my cross-country trip with $400 and a sense of longing and adventure. I returned with 25 cents in my pocket and an expanded outlook. My travels had included many adventures I still vividly recall, but more important, they also more clearly revealed the unrealized facets of myself I wanted to develop.

Within days of my return, I made a literal list of new activities to undertake. On it were writing, photography, learning a trade, practicing a sport, pursuing a spiritual activity, and, to carry on the traveler’s sense of adventure, motorcycling. This list became the curriculum for a program to rebalance myself that, in a more nuanced way, I'm still following today.

That semester, I began to carry out my curriculum, setting aside physics and calculus courses and exchanging them for the humanities, and seeking out activities that would, I hoped, enhance the physical, emotional, spiritual, and creative sides. I took all the literature, philosophy, psychology, and creative writing courses I could fit into my schedule. I read novels not only for the stories, but for what the authors could teach me about how to be human. I volunteered at a mental hospital and at a faculty-run free school for elementary-age children. I learned the carpentry trade and used it to put myself through school and, for several years after graduation, to support my new writing and photography habits. I taught myself metalworking and began making knives as a hobby. I started to learn tennis, bought a motorcycle, practiced Transcendental Meditation.

Other books followed Blake's. I began to read seriously in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and the works of the Armenian-Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. Within the field of my new major, English Literature, I doubled down on literature classes with a psychoanalytic focus, which led to my first foray into psychotherapy, where I delved into a childhood I had unwittingly pushed aside by forgetting everything that had happened to me before age 10.

Books, my refuge as a child, have often been the first step into activities that have extended me. Before I looked for a job as an apprentice carpenter, I read books on carpentry and woodworking. Before I volunteered at a state mental hospital, I read seminal writings of psychologists from Sigmund Freud to Fritz Perls. Before I put torch to carbon steel to make my first knife, I read a book on metallurgy. Before I taught my first class, I read books on pedagogy. Even after a near-death experience in 1993 permanently altered the way I think and feel, books were what I went to in order to begin to understand who I had become, and it was a book by Carl Rogers that convinced me I could become a therapist.

The cycle of reading/acting/reading/acting has continued to this day.

I have almost no sense of direction, but I'm very good at reading maps, and books are, for me, the most elaborate and detailed maps to just about everything. In my travels through time since my trip across the United States, they have guided me into places I would never have ventured without their gentle prodding.

- David

http://www.davidbookbinder.com/photob...
http://transformationspress.org
http://davidbookbinder.com
http://flowermandalas.org

For anyone interested in having a copy of my book Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas, now is a good time to buy one.

I'm doing a short-term price promotion that ends Wednesday, 2/8/17. For $2.99 - the price of a cup of coffee - you can get the eBook version on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NAAFU3S

Needs: Demons, allies, shadows

From Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas . Copyright 2016, David J. Bookbinder

Sometimes the things that plague us seem demonic. Helplessly, we watch as we act in ways we know are not good for us. But no matter how hard we try to stop, our demons keep egging us on. If only we could exorcise them….

Of course, we’re not really possessed. Most of us engage in negative behaviors because we have unmet, and often unconscious, needs. These unmet needs turn into “wants.” We “want” to put things off, get drunk, get mad. Our true needs, however, are only indirectly met by satisfying these wants.

Our wants are often motivated by what therapists call “secondary gains,” hidden benefits of self-defeating or self-destructive behaviors. Secondary gains can show up very early – for example, in children who “act out” in school because they have an unmet need for positive attention, and negative attention is better than none. Other examples include underachieving, when we don’t try our hardest because we fear the shame of failing to meet expectations; some forms of disability, when patients ignore the advice of their doctors because being injured protects them from the stresses of their previous lives; and addiction, when, even as their lives fall apart, addicts continue to get high to achieve temporary respite from trauma, regret, guilt, or shame.

When we recognize the negative impact of pursuing our wants, we usually try to reform. We resolve to stop drinking, be on time, control our anger, get things done. But stories such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde demonstrate what is evident in our own lives: Our shadow sides can’t simply be controlled, suppressed, or eliminated. Denying our wants only makes our demons more determined. They persist not because they are trying to destroy us, but to try to help us meet our needs. Although their methods are ineffective, their intentions are usually positive. To meet our true needs, we can embrace our demons instead of trying to defeat them.

An ancient Tibetan practice called chöd can uncover the needs beneath our demons’ wants and convert our demons into allies. The practice, as taught by author and teacher Lama Tsultrim Allione, can be performed in about half an hour. (Adapted from Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict by Tsultrim Allione.)

Begin by arranging two chairs so they face each other and you can move easily from one to the other. Then perform these steps:

1. Find the demon. Close your eyes and scan your body. Become aware of sensations and feelings you associate with your demon. Imagine them as colors, shapes, textures, temperatures, smells, and sounds.

2. Personify the demon. With your eyes still closed, envision the sensations you are recalling as a demon sitting opposite you. Notice how it looks. Pay special attention to the expression in its eyes. Ask it a) what it wants from you, b) what it needs from you, and c) how it will feel when it gets what it needs.

3. Become the demon. Eyes still closed, change places with the demon by moving to the opposite chair. Settle into your demon’s identity and visualize your normal self sitting in the other chair. As the demon, answer the three questions you asked it. In your answers, distinguish carefully between “wants” and “needs.” For instance, an addict demon may want drugs, but may need relief. When it gets this relief, it may feel calm and peaceful.

4. Feed the demon, meet the ally. Change places again, eyes closed. Imagine separating your consciousness from your body, then let your body melt into a nectar consisting of what the demon will feel when it gets what it needs. Feed this nectar to the demon and watch as the demon transforms.

When it has absorbed all it can, the demon may change to another form or disappear. If it transforms, ask the transformed demon if it is an ally. If it is, ask the ally a) how it will serve you, b) what commitment it will make to you, c) how it will protect you, and d) how you can access to it. If it isn’t an ally, or if the demon has disappeared, then call an ally to appear and ask the ally the same four questions.

Change places. Become the ally and answer the questions. Change places for the last time and, in your original chair, settle back into yourself. Imagine you are getting the help the ally has offered. Feel the ally and you become one, then let yourself dissolve into emptiness.

5. Rest in awareness. Rest, taking a break from the thinking mind, experiencing open awareness.

Chöd incorporates into one exercise several techniques modern psychotherapy has rediscovered. My clients have often felt liberated by it, and practicing chöd has been an important component of my own reintegration and healing.

Wow. What an experience, and what a powerful piece of writing, too. It has stirred me deeply and brought back memories and feelings of times when I, too, felt completely shattered, and it has also filled me with admiration.

It's hard to find words, right now, with which to respond.

Thank you, Barrie, for this piece.

- David

Hi, Erin. Thanks, and sure, happy to take a look. Email me the link at david@davidbookbinder.com or message me here.

And let me know what you think about my book!

David

Indeed it does. Several years ago, I was in a writing group, and in addition to reviewing three or four works by our members, we began with a 15-minute freewriting exercise. Mine were always brief explorations of dialog or character, but two of the members produced complete stories in 15 minutes. We did this for several years and met every two weeks. At the time, they were called "short short stories." I don't know when the term "flash fiction" came in.

Just ran across this inspiring story of Lisa Bettany, former figure skater crippled by a broken back for eight years, and her triumphant new life as a landscape photographer.

http://travel.resourcemagonline.com/2...

I have found that many of us have powerful stories we carry with us that can, if they find an audience, help inspire and effect positive change. The trick is, first, being willing to tell the tale, and then to get it out there through all the noise.

It's fascinating to me that Jon created a very large audience who knew nothing about his personal story and only now has started to tell it.

Welcome to the group. (And congratulations on the book!) I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your family members. Just this morning, I was talking about the limitations of the U.S. approach to medicine that I have also both experienced and witnessed. I appreciate what you have written here and look forward to our future discussions. Perhaps we can even find a way, collectively, to reverse some part of the current trend.

- David

This folder is for discussions of teachers and mentors who have been important to your development and growth.

NOTE: Comments to this thread are closed. If you want to post something about a teacher or mentor, please click "Teachers and Mentors" and then "new topic" to start a new discussion in this folder.

One writing prompt I've successfully used in many contexts is called the Miracle Question. It's a question I've used with therapy clients, online when I was blogging for Beliefnet.com, and in a process-oriented artist group I've been co-leading for the past three years.

The Miracle Question is part of Solution-Focused therapy, which is based on the belief that all of us have the means to solve our own problems. The question helps people to envision what their lives can be when all their current concerns have been addressed and issues resolved. It goes like this:

Imagine that after you finish this message you do whatever you would normally do with the rest of today. But tonight, while you’re asleep, a strange thing happens: A miracle occurs. This miracle is just for you, and it’s that all your problems and concerns are solved. Wonderful, right? However, there’s a catch. Because the miracle happened while you were asleep, when you wake up tomorrow, you’re in the world of the miracle from here on out, but you don’t know it. So the question is: What do you notice, from the moment you wake up and as you step through your day, that eventually gets you thinking, “Something’s different about today. A miracle must have happened!”

You are looking for a shift in awareness like Dorothy’s after the tornado deposited her in Oz. She steps out of her house, looks around, and, as the film itself shifts into Technicolor, she sees the yellow brick road, the horse of many colors, the munchkins. She turns to her little dog and exclaims, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore!” You are looking for what leads you to your I’m-not-in-Kansas-anymore moment.

Some prompts for working through the Miracle Question: How do you feel when you open your eyes? Are you in the same bedroom? The same house? With the same people? What’s different as you get ready for the day? What’s different as you step through it, hour by hour? What do other people in your life notice about you that’s different? What do you notice about them?

Gradually, as you walk through your miracle day, a detailed vision of that different life emerges. Then it’s just a matter of working toward the miracle, one doable step at a time.

What topics would you like us to write about as a group?